Very good... That's still not quite 40,000, but I'm impressed enough. Whether all the highly specialized martial arts terms of which you speak can be considered English words is debatable. The vast majority of those words, were they to appear in mainstream literature, would likely be printed italicized to flag them as foreign. This is true even of many of the words you listed, such as hara-kiri, fugu, and even sayonara.
Interestingly, nearly all the words you listed also are used exclusively in a Japanese context. This cultural binding is not the case with other, more entrenched loan words, such as the Malay compound, the Slavic robot, or the Spanish cafeteria. When I see the word balcony, I do not immediately associate it with Italians; despite the obviously French ending, I do not associate cigarette with the French. Yet the mental connection to Japanese culture with samurai, sushi, sensei, and nearly all your other words is simply unavoidable. Even when the word's semantics are broad enough to adapt them to English concepts, it rarely happens. You would never refer to your professor as your sensei, for instance. And I don't recall seeing the term kamikaze applied to suicide terrorist bombers in the Middle East.
English, in parrticular, seems to thrive on loanwords. Last I checked, it had over 40,000 from
Japanese alone.
I'd like to know where you do your checking. English has only a few hundred thousand words; it's ridiculous to believe that somewhere on the order of 10% of them are Japanese. English is almost entirely comprised of words of Germanic (through Old English) and Latin (through French) origin, with a small bit of Greek. For virtually every other language or language group, the proportion of English loan words is far below even 1%.
Perhaps you meant 40 instead of 40,000 Japanese words? I challenge you to come up with even that many.
It turns out that the Electoral College is a fabulous method of electing a president, for a couple of reasons:
* Small states and areas with low population density are not ignored
And why shouldn't they be? Exactly why should the vote of someone in one place count more or less than the vote of someone in another place?
* In the case that something awful happens (the president-elect turns out to be psycho after the election, we've
elected the Anti-Christ, or god forbid they die in a plane crash, etc...) the electors don't HAVE to go with the
people's vote... they can break ranks and vote whichever way they want to.
Yes... what if -- Zeus forbid -- some third party candidate were elected by the people? The electors could exercise their supremacy over the people by overturning this obviously deviant result.
And good point about that insanity thing, but what happens if the president goes psycho after both the popular and electoral voting process? Maybe you guys better get a post-electoral college to ratify the electoral college's votes. And maybe a post-post-electoral college, too, just in case.
* It turns out that each person's vote is more powerful that way.
Oh? So a vote from Californian is more powerful than a vote from a Rhode Islander?
* Finally, it's the only thing that prevents the presidential election from being a full-blown popularity contest.
Hear, hear! Zeus forbid the chosen candidate of the people at large become their leader.
If you're serious (saying you're outside the USA), the reason is that we have a constitutional
limit of two terms for the president (made during FDR's 4th term in office!), and Clinton has
just served twice in a row...
Not quite true... your constitution prohibits more than two terms for an elected president. Someone could theoretically be president for as many terms as possible in their natural life. Two of those terms they could be elected in, and for the others they could assume the office upon the death of the president. (They would have to be vice president first for this.) Of course, it would get kind of fishy if you kept running for veep and then the president kept dying...;)
In other words, this whole exercise was futile. The prohibitions
on actually circumventing access controls will never be
enforced, or at least rarely.
This is exactly what they want, and no, it's not futile. This law is tantamount to saying, "Everything is illegal, and we're just going to selectively prosecute those violators who we don't like." The DMCA effectively makes it very easy for anyone with money (i.e. content publishers) to lock up anyone they see as a threat to their interests.
Use.ZIP files. I have also found it helpful to use PKZIP (or one of its
relatives) to copy the file to the removable media. There are command line
versions, at least, which have options to check the integrity of a.ZIP file, as
well as try to recover a damaged.ZIP file.
Actually, using anything with straight LZW compression, like PKZIP, is a bad idea. The compression algorithm is such that any error partway through the compressed file renders the remainder of it completely unrecoverable. PKZIPFIX, which "recovers" a damaged archive, in fact only recovers that portion of the archive before the error.
A far better solution is to use ARJ. The latest versions include a switch, -hk, for making a separate redundancy file. The type of redundancy used is sector-based, making it particularly suited to typical disk problems like bad sectors, cross links, and virus damage. Unlike PKZIP, ARJ can recover files that occur after an error in the archive. Archives that span multiple disks are treated as separate archives, so if it turns out disk 1 of 200 was completely unreadable, at least you can recover the other 199 sections. I don't believe this is possible with PKZIP.
I'm suprised McReynolds replied here to Slashdot. If he's paid any attention he's got to know that
it has a very large Anarcho-Libertarian user base.
So what, you'd rather he saved his preaching for the converted? No one is going to get very far spreading their beliefs unless they discuss them with people who aren't already aligned with them.
Here's some trivia for ya: Back in the 1981 The Pope declared the Big Bang did happen,
but God is the one who initiated it and we should search back no further than that.
So what? The pope can declare anything he wants and that does make it true, not even in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church. The doctrine of papal infallibility applies only when the pope specifically invokes it while speaking ex cathedra, and even then it applies only to faith and morals, not scientific facts. The pope could assert, ex cathedra or otherwise, that Al Gore is really a purple alien from Alpha Centauri, and no Catholic would be obliged to believe that.
Papal infallibility has been invoked very, very few times. Since the time the doctrine was established at Vatican I in 1870, I believe the only infallible proclamation has been the Assumption of Mary in 1950.
Supposedly, (just hypothatically) I find the magical holy grail of factoring primes... is that hacking? Can I
publish this?
Uh, buddy... I hate to detract from your argument, but the method of factoring primes has been well-known since antiquity. Namely, for any prime p, its sole factors are 1 and p. It's really not all that difficult.
So those interested in sharing what they believe in, please
feel free. I'm sure others may find it interesting. The one thing I do ask is
that you not judge people based on the information that is shared here, as
all that is bound to do is cause problems.
Eh? What's this? If we can't judge people based on their beliefs (and/or actions arising from those beliefs), what are we supposed to judge them according to? Superficial things, like their appearance?
Keep in mind - it's your choice to live in a National Security State... There are other nations that handle things differently. You do have the choice to leave.
How? Most countries will not readily accept immigrants who are not highly skilled and experienced in certain "in-demand" professions. Some countries -- such as France -- currently have imposed a zero-immigration policy.
While many health care and IT professionals enjoy a comfortable degree of international mobility, the average Joe, regardless of his political persuasion, is stuck where he's born.
Stenography is, by definition, the study of doing this. For the most secure stenography, the bits that you are replacing must seem random before you start and after you finish. A good stenography package would check for this; I don't know if any do.
Actually, stenography is defined as "the making of shorthand notes and subsequent transcription of them".
Everyone here who's been advising you to use steganography is well-intentioned, but missing the point.... Another naieve way to handle things is to encrypt your steganography.
Go back and read the posts here again -- I don't believe anyone has seriously suggested encrypting steganography. What would be the point of that? The whole idea of steganography is to hide a coded message in otherwise intelligible data, whereas the point of encryption is to turn intelligble data into something statistically indistinguishable from random noise. Performing encryption on steganography would simply negate its purpose.
If the secret police suspect your target of receiving subversive information, then they'll likely look for steganography. It's not hard to flip the low-order bit in an image file. In fact, it's trivial. They'll be expecting that and they'll intercept it. Don't try it.
Yes, and this is why encryption should be performed before steganography. That way, if the authorities apply in reverse the means of stenography to the data, they end up with seemingly random data -- that is, much the same result they'd get if there had been no stenography performed in the first place.
One possibility... [i]nclude a big ol' table of random numbers... your friend knows that it's a one-time pad... Of course, the secret police will know that it's an encrypted message...
What you are proposing is an extremely weak form of steganography, and it is even more obvious than the methods that others have previously set forth. If the secret police know that you're transmitting encrypted data, what was the point in sending it to begin with? For the purposes given by the original posters, the data needs to be innocuous-looking, not suspicion-arousing. Steganography is certainly the best way of ensuring this.
Think about a spacecraft without air conditioning. "Houston, it's 120 degrees in here" "Roger, can you open a window?"
Maybe I's just ignert, but does a spacecraft really need air conditioning? Think about it -- the temperature outside the orbiting craft is somewhere around absolute zero. Would any heat from the ship not be radiated away à la laws of entropy? Or does that require a medium?
With this, he is falling right into the most dangerous of socialist ideas: that that we, who know better, should by law protect the common man from his own stupidity. I find such thinking arrogant, disgusting, and a much bigger threat to freedom (witness what past implementation of socialism accomplished) then anything Doubleclick does with my cookies.
Socialism oppressing freedom? You must mean Stalinism. Socialism is an egalitarian, democratic system, and has never been implemented. Next time, get your terminology straight.
(for instance, without any diphtongs - 'tsip' vs 'tip')
Actually, the difference between the two has nothing to do with diphthongs. In Québecois, [ts] is an affricate allophone of/t/ which is substituted for the predominant allophone, [t], when it occurs before/i/ (and possibly other vowels; it's been a long time since I've watched the French CBC). At the same time,/i/ is lowered to/I/ (a transformation I had neglected to mention in my original post but which, thankfully, another gentleman corrected in a reply). How's that for nitpicking?;)
Regarding your main point, though, yes, I do believe it is ridiculous that some dialects among many of a language must be looked down upon as vulgar. This goes double for Quebec; if the sovereigntists are so adamant that they are special and unique because they have their own language, why are they so reluctant to speak it? Language is not immutable; even if the powers that be were successful in forcing everyone in Quebec to use Parisian French, it wouldn't stay that way for long. Besides, Parisian French, I'm led to believe, has a lot more English loan words than does Québecois. Lucien Bouchard and the language police probably wouldn't be too happy. "Monsieur, you are under arrest for using English too prominently on your storefront sign." "That's not English; it's Parisian French!:P"
Vowel raising is common in Ontario and throughout the prairies - I hear it everytime I visit my family in Winnipeg. Most Canadians only hear it when speaking to people from the Maritimes because their accent is pronounced in other ways as well. Most Canadians do have a perceptibily different accent, but are much easier for most Americans to understand than people from other regions of their own country.
It's interesting you mention this, because all the sources I have read, plus personal observation, indicate that there is very little that would allow a casual English speaker to differentiate the standard western Canadian dialect(s) from SAE. Personally, as a native of the prairies, I find it difficult to notice any phonological differences (register excepted) between my dialect and that preferred of American television anchors. The only thing that comes to mind is that most SAE speakers I've heard tend to pronounce "catch" as/k&tS/, whereas most (though not all) speakers from Regina say/kEtS/. Perhaps, as someone with a background in dialectology, you are able to more readily pick up on such differences; I still maintain that the average American speaker would not be able to identify most Canadians from west of Ottawa based on their speech patterns alone.
There's a whole debate about Québecois slang. Is it a true language? Or is it a deformation brought about by lack of rigor and education?
Speaking as a theoretical linguist, Québecois is not a language, but a dialect of French. Parisian French is also a dialect of French. The two dialects, while they have somewhat different pronunciation and vocabulary, are still mutually intelligible.
The origin of Québecois has absolutely no bearing on whether or not it is a "true" language, whatever you mean by that. The next time some Parisian language snob tries to tell you otherwise, perhaps you'd like to counter with the argument that European French dialects are obiously bastardized versions of Latin born of lack of rigor and education. (Ditto for Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and a host of lesser-known languages.)
All this talk of language prestige, though, has me wondering why the elementary schools in Canada teach the children Parisian French rather than Québecois. (At least, it happened to me... I distinctly remember being told that "type" was pronounced as/tip/, as it is in France, and not/tsip/, as in Quebec.) Even if Québecois is less dignified, wouldn't it be more advantageous to the children to teach them to speak as the locals rather than the foreigners? In English, England's RP dialect ("received pronunciation" or Queen's English) generally carries more prestige than Canada's SAE ("standard American English"), yet the Canadian schools never taught me to speak with an English accent.
Note to South Park fans: By and large, English-speaking Canadians don't have accents which are perceptably different from the common dialect of Americans (SAE). The vowel raising ("aboat" or "aboot" instead of "about") is a phenomenon unique to the east coast, and is indicative of that region's Scottish origins.
My man of the year might be Linus Torvalds, who - unlike Bezos - really did change the world, liberating computer software and the information it carries from one company's tyrannical grip for many millions of people.
Linus Torvalds liberated computer software for the masses? Uh, don't you mean RMS? Last I checked, Linus did not invent "liberated" (free) software.
It is currently so bad that there is no point in trusting the summaries.
Amen, brother. It seems that the proportion of downright incorrect summaries has been growing steadily lately -- do Malda & Co. simply post anything that strikes their fancy without bothering to read it first? Honestly, how long can clicking a link and reading through an article actually take?
Fortunately, now that Slashdot is owned by Andover.Net, there is a solution -- e-mail Andover.Net to complain about the careless reporting. Tell them you think it's ridiculous that a site that styles itself as a news centre is so lazy as to never verify the stories it runs. Hell, name names if you'd like -- CmdrTaco, Hemos, et alia are employees just like everyone else, and are easily replaced. Perhaps if the current Slashdot crew can't scrape together a few threads of journalistic integrity, Andover.Net will find some people who can.
I've heard that this is the method they are considering using for mammoth birthing - using an African or Indian female elephant to implant a woolly mammoth embryo.
A couple weeks back, the London Times ran t his story which reports that so far, all attempts at extracting mammoth DNA from preserved specimens have failed. Furthermore, it's unlikely that a usable sample will ever be obtained, though they haven't given up hope and are continuing their search for more frozen carcasses.
For now, though, it looks like mammoth cloning has gone... well, the way of the mammoths.;)
For once, I agree with the CAP review... I also walked out of American Pie, and a lot sooner than 44 minutes in. That movie has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I think it was desperately trying to outdo the outrageously funny Something About Mary, but the filmmakers just didn't quite get the point. Gross != funny. Vulgar != funny. Predictable most certainly != funny. Mary's "where'd the semen go?" joke was hilarious because of the frenetic buildup and completely unexpected result. Pie's semen joke was simply in bad taste -- it was pretty easy to see from the beginning that it would end up in the mouth of some careless jock.
Slashdot Mirror
Very good... That's still not quite 40,000, but I'm impressed enough. Whether all the highly specialized martial arts terms of which you speak can be considered English words is debatable. The vast majority of those words, were they to appear in mainstream literature, would likely be printed italicized to flag them as foreign. This is true even of many of the words you listed, such as hara-kiri, fugu, and even sayonara.
Interestingly, nearly all the words you listed also are used exclusively in a Japanese context. This cultural binding is not the case with other, more entrenched loan words, such as the Malay compound, the Slavic robot, or the Spanish cafeteria. When I see the word balcony, I do not immediately associate it with Italians; despite the obviously French ending, I do not associate cigarette with the French. Yet the mental connection to Japanese culture with samurai, sushi, sensei, and nearly all your other words is simply unavoidable. Even when the word's semantics are broad enough to adapt them to English concepts, it rarely happens. You would never refer to your professor as your sensei, for instance. And I don't recall seeing the term kamikaze applied to suicide terrorist bombers in the Middle East.
Regards,
I'd like to know where you do your checking. English has only a few hundred thousand words; it's ridiculous to believe that somewhere on the order of 10% of them are Japanese. English is almost entirely comprised of words of Germanic (through Old English) and Latin (through French) origin, with a small bit of Greek. For virtually every other language or language group, the proportion of English loan words is far below even 1%.
Perhaps you meant 40 instead of 40,000 Japanese words? I challenge you to come up with even that many.
Regards,
And why shouldn't they be? Exactly why should the vote of someone in one place count more or less than the vote of someone in another place?
Yes... what if -- Zeus forbid -- some third party candidate were elected by the people? The electors could exercise their supremacy over the people by overturning this obviously deviant result.
And good point about that insanity thing, but what happens if the president goes psycho after both the popular and electoral voting process? Maybe you guys better get a post-electoral college to ratify the electoral college's votes. And maybe a post-post-electoral college, too, just in case.
Oh? So a vote from Californian is more powerful than a vote from a Rhode Islander?
Hear, hear! Zeus forbid the chosen candidate of the people at large become their leader.
Regards,
Not quite true... your constitution prohibits more than two terms for an elected president. Someone could theoretically be president for as many terms as possible in their natural life. Two of those terms they could be elected in, and for the others they could assume the office upon the death of the president. (They would have to be vice president first for this.) Of course, it would get kind of fishy if you kept running for veep and then the president kept dying... ;)
Regards,
Really? Are you sure you don't you mean the ICANNanites? ;)
Regards,
This is exactly what they want, and no, it's not futile. This law is tantamount to saying, "Everything is illegal, and we're just going to selectively prosecute those violators who we don't like." The DMCA effectively makes it very easy for anyone with money (i.e. content publishers) to lock up anyone they see as a threat to their interests.
Regards,
Actually, using anything with straight LZW compression, like PKZIP, is a bad idea. The compression algorithm is such that any error partway through the compressed file renders the remainder of it completely unrecoverable. PKZIPFIX, which "recovers" a damaged archive, in fact only recovers that portion of the archive before the error.
A far better solution is to use ARJ. The latest versions include a switch, -hk, for making a separate redundancy file. The type of redundancy used is sector-based, making it particularly suited to typical disk problems like bad sectors, cross links, and virus damage. Unlike PKZIP, ARJ can recover files that occur after an error in the archive. Archives that span multiple disks are treated as separate archives, so if it turns out disk 1 of 200 was completely unreadable, at least you can recover the other 199 sections. I don't believe this is possible with PKZIP.
Regards,
So what, you'd rather he saved his preaching for the converted? No one is going to get very far spreading their beliefs unless they discuss them with people who aren't already aligned with them.
Regards,
If anyone is interested in reading more about hagfish and seeing pictures of their slimy defence mechanism, check out this page: http://oceanlink.island.net/oinfo/hagfish/hagfish. html
Regards,
So what? The pope can declare anything he wants and that does make it true, not even in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church. The doctrine of papal infallibility applies only when the pope specifically invokes it while speaking ex cathedra, and even then it applies only to faith and morals, not scientific facts. The pope could assert, ex cathedra or otherwise, that Al Gore is really a purple alien from Alpha Centauri, and no Catholic would be obliged to believe that.
Papal infallibility has been invoked very, very few times. Since the time the doctrine was established at Vatican I in 1870, I believe the only infallible proclamation has been the Assumption of Mary in 1950.
Regards,
Uh, buddy... I hate to detract from your argument, but the method of factoring primes has been well-known since antiquity. Namely, for any prime p, its sole factors are 1 and p. It's really not all that difficult.
Regards,
Eh? What's this? If we can't judge people based on their beliefs (and/or actions arising from those beliefs), what are we supposed to judge them according to? Superficial things, like their appearance?
Regards,
How? Most countries will not readily accept immigrants who are not highly skilled and experienced in certain "in-demand" professions. Some countries -- such as France -- currently have imposed a zero-immigration policy.
While many health care and IT professionals enjoy a comfortable degree of international mobility, the average Joe, regardless of his political persuasion, is stuck where he's born.
Regards,
Actually, stenography is defined as "the making of shorthand notes and subsequent transcription of them".
Regards,
Go back and read the posts here again -- I don't believe anyone has seriously suggested encrypting steganography. What would be the point of that? The whole idea of steganography is to hide a coded message in otherwise intelligible data, whereas the point of encryption is to turn intelligble data into something statistically indistinguishable from random noise. Performing encryption on steganography would simply negate its purpose.
Yes, and this is why encryption should be performed before steganography. That way, if the authorities apply in reverse the means of stenography to the data, they end up with seemingly random data -- that is, much the same result they'd get if there had been no stenography performed in the first place.
What you are proposing is an extremely weak form of steganography, and it is even more obvious than the methods that others have previously set forth. If the secret police know that you're transmitting encrypted data, what was the point in sending it to begin with? For the purposes given by the original posters, the data needs to be innocuous-looking, not suspicion-arousing. Steganography is certainly the best way of ensuring this.
Regards,
Maybe I's just ignert, but does a spacecraft really need air conditioning? Think about it -- the temperature outside the orbiting craft is somewhere around absolute zero. Would any heat from the ship not be radiated away à la laws of entropy? Or does that require a medium?
Regards,
Socialism oppressing freedom? You must mean Stalinism. Socialism is an egalitarian, democratic system, and has never been implemented. Next time, get your terminology straight.
Regards,
Ok... /au?n@bau?n@bot/. Now you say it.
Regards,
Actually, the difference between the two has nothing to do with diphthongs. In Québecois, [ts] is an affricate allophone of /t/ which is substituted for the predominant allophone, [t], when it occurs before /i/ (and possibly other vowels; it's been a long time since I've watched the French CBC). At the same time, /i/ is lowered to /I/ (a transformation I had neglected to mention in my original post but which, thankfully, another gentleman corrected in a reply). How's that for nitpicking? ;)
Regarding your main point, though, yes, I do believe it is ridiculous that some dialects among many of a language must be looked down upon as vulgar. This goes double for Quebec; if the sovereigntists are so adamant that they are special and unique because they have their own language, why are they so reluctant to speak it? Language is not immutable; even if the powers that be were successful in forcing everyone in Quebec to use Parisian French, it wouldn't stay that way for long. Besides, Parisian French, I'm led to believe, has a lot more English loan words than does Québecois. Lucien Bouchard and the language police probably wouldn't be too happy. "Monsieur, you are under arrest for using English too prominently on your storefront sign." "That's not English; it's Parisian French! :P"
Regards,
It's interesting you mention this, because all the sources I have read, plus personal observation, indicate that there is very little that would allow a casual English speaker to differentiate the standard western Canadian dialect(s) from SAE. Personally, as a native of the prairies, I find it difficult to notice any phonological differences (register excepted) between my dialect and that preferred of American television anchors. The only thing that comes to mind is that most SAE speakers I've heard tend to pronounce "catch" as /k&tS/, whereas most (though not all) speakers from Regina say /kEtS/. Perhaps, as someone with a background in dialectology, you are able to more readily pick up on such differences; I still maintain that the average American speaker would not be able to identify most Canadians from west of Ottawa based on their speech patterns alone.
Regards,
Speaking as a theoretical linguist, Québecois is not a language, but a dialect of French. Parisian French is also a dialect of French. The two dialects, while they have somewhat different pronunciation and vocabulary, are still mutually intelligible.
The origin of Québecois has absolutely no bearing on whether or not it is a "true" language, whatever you mean by that. The next time some Parisian language snob tries to tell you otherwise, perhaps you'd like to counter with the argument that European French dialects are obiously bastardized versions of Latin born of lack of rigor and education. (Ditto for Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and a host of lesser-known languages.)
All this talk of language prestige, though, has me wondering why the elementary schools in Canada teach the children Parisian French rather than Québecois. (At least, it happened to me... I distinctly remember being told that "type" was pronounced as /tip/, as it is in France, and not /tsip/, as in Quebec.) Even if Québecois is less dignified, wouldn't it be more advantageous to the children to teach them to speak as the locals rather than the foreigners? In English, England's RP dialect ("received pronunciation" or Queen's English) generally carries more prestige than Canada's SAE ("standard American English"), yet the Canadian schools never taught me to speak with an English accent.
Note to South Park fans: By and large, English-speaking Canadians don't have accents which are perceptably different from the common dialect of Americans (SAE). The vowel raising ("aboat" or "aboot" instead of "about") is a phenomenon unique to the east coast, and is indicative of that region's Scottish origins.
Regards,
Linus Torvalds liberated computer software for the masses? Uh, don't you mean RMS? Last I checked, Linus did not invent "liberated" (free) software.
Regards,
Amen, brother. It seems that the proportion of downright incorrect summaries has been growing steadily lately -- do Malda & Co. simply post anything that strikes their fancy without bothering to read it first? Honestly, how long can clicking a link and reading through an article actually take?
Fortunately, now that Slashdot is owned by Andover.Net, there is a solution -- e-mail Andover.Net to complain about the careless reporting. Tell them you think it's ridiculous that a site that styles itself as a news centre is so lazy as to never verify the stories it runs. Hell, name names if you'd like -- CmdrTaco, Hemos, et alia are employees just like everyone else, and are easily replaced. Perhaps if the current Slashdot crew can't scrape together a few threads of journalistic integrity, Andover.Net will find some people who can.
Regards,
A couple weeks back, the London Times ran t his story which reports that so far, all attempts at extracting mammoth DNA from preserved specimens have failed. Furthermore, it's unlikely that a usable sample will ever be obtained, though they haven't given up hope and are continuing their search for more frozen carcasses.
For now, though, it looks like mammoth cloning has gone... well, the way of the mammoths. ;)
Regards,
For once, I agree with the CAP review... I also walked out of American Pie, and a lot sooner than 44 minutes in. That movie has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I think it was desperately trying to outdo the outrageously funny Something About Mary, but the filmmakers just didn't quite get the point. Gross != funny. Vulgar != funny. Predictable most certainly != funny. Mary's "where'd the semen go?" joke was hilarious because of the frenetic buildup and completely unexpected result. Pie's semen joke was simply in bad taste -- it was pretty easy to see from the beginning that it would end up in the mouth of some careless jock.
Regards,