I also (like John, not yourself) have a problem with the ACLU's stance on gun control. In my opinion, they ought to be protecting all civil liberties. It has been shown numerous times that gun control sets the stage for genocide. I stumbled upon an interesting book written by
Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership
which convinced at least two of my friends to revise their stances on gun control. Their mission statement:
Those are the twin goals of Wisconsin-based Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO). Founded by Jews and initially aimed at educating the Jewish community about the historical evils that Jews have suffered when they have been disarmed, JPFO has always welcomed persons of all religious beliefs who share a common goal of opposing and reversing victim disarmament policies while advancing liberty for all.
That said, the ACLU is fighting a front of the war to protect our civil liberties. We have the NRA (among others) to worry about gun ownership rights. I haven't heard of any cases where the ACLU tried to promote gun control--they just don't protect 2nd Amendment rights. The good the ACLU does outweighs their lack of support on the gun issue, for me.
I'm glad someone is working on this problem. I'm just a card-carrying ACLU member, but if I had Gilmore's resources I'd love to challenge a few laws. Like the right to not be annexed. Isn't that taxation without representation? Reagan blew so many holes in the Bill of Rights, someone has to reverse those precedents. We now have almost no protection against illegal search and seizure. States' rights are practically non-existent (especially here in Oregon, where Ashcroft has swooped down multiple times--to threaten physicians re. the state's assisted suicide law, and also to rattle a saber about medical marijuana issues).
Arrgh. Now I'm all riled up.
Join the ACLU. It's safer than direct action against "the Man."
The limit of human vision on the ultraviolet end is ~400nm. This link http://www.4colorvision.com/files/tetrachromat.htm has some interesting info about human vision in general. It's certainly controversial where the precise limit is (or what the statistical curve looks like, if it varies dramatically from person to person) but I usually see 400nm. If I had said 400nm +/- 10nm, would that have been better? It seems unnecessary to me.
Temperature measured in F or C is an interval scale and thus percentage differences are not meaningful. But temperature measured in K is a ratio scale that is nice and linear and so it is entirely reasonable to measure percentage differences.
Is that right? So there's less than a percent difference between 273K and 275K, but that's a difference between ice and water. In thermodynamics equations you can take ratios of temperatures (in Kelvin or Rankine), and you often use differences in temperature, but I have never heard someone say that x is 10% hotter than y.
Similary, wavelegnth is also a ratio scale, simply distance per cycle. In other words, if it makes sense to talk about percentage difference between two distances then it makes just as much sense to talk about percentage difference between two wavelengths.
I disagree. I think it doesn't make sense to talk about percent differences on non-linear scales. What about sound? Decibels are a logarithmic scale, but we perceive sound more or less linearly on that scale. So (and I'm making up numbers here) if a car horn is 60dB and the stereo is 50dB, the horn will sound about 20% louder, when in fact it's 1000% louder.
We use everything from radio waves to x-rays in appliances these days. With a dynamic range spanning so many orders of magnitude, how could it possibly make sense to talk about a percent difference? How about orders of magnitude different? I'm not saying it's mathematically impossible to have a percentage of a wavelength, but it's pointless.
Comparing the effects on life is just as meaningless, since anyone can pick any life, any range of wavelengths and any effects. Way too arbitrary for ~ to have any useful meaning either.
All right. I pick wavelengths 350nm-750nm. And we'd be looking at the damage done to human skin cells over that range. There is a threshold, and it is significant. Just like if I hike 10km on a trail to the top of a cliff--one more meter would be a very small percentage of the hike, but with significant consequences. Somewhere between 350nm and 420nm is a cutoff for normal human skin: lower wavelengths cause damage, higher wavelengths are harmless. Just like a body temperature of 37C is normal, but only a couple of degrees difference can cause brain damage / death.
I don't think you understand how light works . . .
It makes no sense to talk about 4% variation of a wavelength. That's like talking about percent differences of temperature. You can't have a wavelength of 0nm and you can't have a temperature of absolute zero. You can only approach them asymptotically. A difference of 1nm can be extremely significant. For example, 1.0001nm - 1nm = 0.0001nm = x-rays. But that's not the reason it's significant in this case. The visible spectrum is very narrow, but encompasses all the colors of the rainbow. And the way biological molecules (like those that compose our bodies) interact with photons of different frequencies varies incredibly from one nanometer to the next. UV light is in a different regime from visible light, in that it damages our tissues much more. But people with certain genetic disorders can't even tolerate visible light. I've never heard people claim to be able to see light below 400nm. That's generally quoted as the lower threshold of visible light. And that's why there's a big difference between 400nm and 385nm. Ask a tree if you don't believe me.
Sorry, but slide and movie film are all RGB, whereas print film is CMY, used to create an RGB image on white paper when developed.
I wasn't talking about the developing process--I was talking about the depth of color. Televisions and monitors do use RGB, but not overlaid. The three colors are side-by-side, which is why you see all three colors when you magnify the screen (and you probably know that already). Film uses the three colors overlapping, so you get the whole spectrum. And if you want to be precise about it, print film doesn't need cyan at all; adjusting the magenta and yellow levels is sufficient. Also, movies are filmed on regular old camera film, and the projectible prints are made from those negatives. Since you like to nitpick, I'll add that digitally "filmed" movies are shot in RGB, since those are the colors of the CCDs.
True color is fairly well replicated with film. Adding more colors to the medium will always get you closer to the true color, in the side-by-side scheme used in monitors. R+G+B=white, and C+M+Y=white also. It doesn't matter which combination you use, unless the three colors aren't overlaid.
Far violet (~400nm) and far red (~700) are both visible. They might make the viewing experience much richer, and light at those wavelengths won't damage skin / eyes or cook your dinner.
Oh yes they will. I have an itty-bitty (uses 2 AA cells) 385nm UV flashlight (LED based) and just ten minutes of use in a dark area is enough to make my eyeballs feel sunburned, similar to spending an entire day out on a boat without sunglasses. And no, I'm not shining the light in my face, just using it like a regular flashlight, shining it around on other stuff to see what glows.
Well, there's a 15nm difference between 385nm and 400nm, so I don't know what makes you think 400nm light would cause a burn. UVAI is 340-400nm. Even green light can damage your skin with long enough exposure, but the photon energy decreases as frequency decreases (remember E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is frequency, because I don't know how to make a Greek nu character in html).
If you still aren't comfortable, then fine. Make it 420nm violet to be safe. All non-visually impaired people can see 420nm light, too.
I know you're being sarcastic but . . .
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Far violet (~400nm) and far red (~700) are both visible. They might make the viewing experience much richer, and light at those wavelengths won't damage skin / eyes or cook your dinner.
has broken the RGB barrier by adding one to three primary colors such as yellow, cyan and magenta
Even if the color space were smaller (though I see no reason why it would be; RGB and CMY are equivalent--one is just shifted by a few nanometers from the other), by adding more colors to the palette, the picture will look more like film.
Oh, and so far, I don't think anyone has been able to project blackness (the K in CMYK).
Are "ain't" or "ya'll" grammatically incorrect, or a grammatically legitimate part of a non-standard dialect of English?
Well, "ya'll" is most certainly incorrect by any standard--it's a contraction for "you all" and is spelled "y'all."
But that's a spelling problem, not grammatical. My own pet peeves about modern spelling: "its" should always have an apostrophe, even in the possessive form (not just "it is"). And people need to learn that plurals DON'T take an apostrophe. I can't even count the number of times I've seen something like "Ham and egg's--$4.00."
I completely agree with you about "they" being used as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun. It's what I generally use, even though I know the grammarians don't like it.
And to pry the lid off another can of worms, there are striking differences between American English and English in the rest of the world. In the US, we use the word "gotten" but in the UK it no longer exists--instead of saying "Network TV has gotten pretty bad" it's "Network TV has got pretty bad." (As an aside, try to translate "get" into any other language. The word will usually have ten different translations, depending on context.)
First, I'm glad you have a civil tone to what you wrote, even though I disagree. Civility allows us to have a discussion, rather than an argument.
Who did I vote for in the last election? What makes you think I'm a democrat or support them?
Unless you're completely playing devil's advocate, you voted for Gore. A few things you've said indicate this: And when Bush's thugs trample all over you civil liberties nobody's gonna give a shit about your protest vote. and Thanks to the likes of folks like you, that's where we are [hell, that is].
Secondly, there is no way that Nader could win. So what did a vote for Nader accomplish? A win for Bush. Plain and simple, that's it.
I agree there's no way Nader could have won this past election, but I don't just think of the short term. Brazil's president, Lula, ran unsuccessfully against estabilished politicians several times, but once the populace got sick enough of the corruption, they knew Lula was an alternative. Voting for Nader is not just about a single term, but about building a third-party so in the future we have more choices. And on the local level, the Green party has made some big inroads.
Life isn't clear cut. There are no candidates that I agree with on everything. Thus I make my voting decisons based on both who best supports what is important to me and who has a realistic chance of being able to do so (that is, win the election).
I know this has been said before, but the lesser of two evils is still evil. If you can stomach that, then good for you. But my conscience would bother me too much. It's a slippery slope when you make those kind of compromises. Why do you think so many clean politicians turn dirty? It doesn't happen overnight, but over years of not being able to get anything done unless you do a few favors. So they do a few favors. And the favors get bigger and bigger until they start cutting deals with Enron or Halliburton or whoever else has deep pockets. You think I vote too idealistically; I think that by lowering your standards you're heading into questionable moral territory. Keep that in mind next time you vote.
I wrote him in in 1996, and all you democrats blaming Bush's presidency on Nader can go to hell).
Thanks to the likes of folks like you, that's where we are. Happy are you?
Folks like me, eh? I think it's folks like you who are to blame, because you seem to think the only valid vote is one cast for one of the two major parties. And somehow, even though the democrats have slid further and further from their populist past, that's acceptable to you, so long as they support your one or two issues.
I'm a civil libertarian--that's my issue. I won't vote for anyone who supports the USAPATRIOTACT, or banning abortion, or locking up people for drug possession, or limiting free speech in any way, or allowing unreasonable search and seizure, etc. I would never have voted for either of the major party candidates because neither of them adequately defend our civil liberties.
But in fact, there is a bright side to having Bush as our president: it's the first time in memory that liberals (and libertarians) have such an obviously corrupt enemy to rally against. It energizes people. That Bush's first election was so questionable further fans the flames. People who didn't vote in the last election might go to the polls this time.
What I'd really like to see this November is Bush winning 100% of the vote on Diebold's electronic voting machine. That might actually piss people off enough to band together and reclaim our Bill of Rights.
"If you are not voting, what does are you saying?" I'm saying plenty by not voting. "Americas 2 party electoral system is a sham, and I won't participate. Choosing between the lesser of 2 evils is not liberty or freedom."
You may be saying something, but no one is listening. I agree totally with your sentiment, but I also voted for Nader in the last TWO elections (I wrote him in in 1996, and all you democrats blaming Bush's presidency on Nader can go to hell). Even if you don't vote, you can make your voice heard in more meaningful ways. Try to engage people in conversation (not argument). Most Republicans hate big government, and are pretty pissed about all the spending Bush is doing. A lot of people choose their candidates based on issues, not on parties, so a lot of those who voted pro-Bush were actually voting anti-abortion, or anti-gun control. But you know what? Russ Feingold is a democratic senator from Wisconsin who opposes gun control too. Bush, however, expressed support for an "assault weapon" ban even though he's a Republican.
I don't know what, if anything, you're doing to help enact change; but regardless of what statement you're trying to make, neglecting/choosing not to vote won't send a message to the authorities.
Maybe the "good-ol'-fashion power-to-the-people" democrats believed in something different but that isn't what the party is about now. Hell Kerry could become the richest president ever.
Yeah, I think Truman was the last of that school of democrats. I can't imagine Bush with a "The Buck Stops Here" plaque on his desk. No accountability on his part whatsoever.
I think campaign finance reform would help a lot, and I'd gladly vote for McCain over a democrat who had received hefty sums of cash from corporations (or unions, or PACs, or any other organization not representative of the US citizenry). There are two driving forces in Washington: $$ and votes. If you don't have money, you'd better have votes. Unfortunately, poor people are less likely to vote.
I guess the conclusion is, if you want change in copyright law, it has to be grassroots. I don't have enough money to buy votes, but I could be persuasive enough to get an apathetic citizen to vote. All it costs is my time.
Unfortunately, when I went to graduate school a few years ago in Texas, the computer labs were 100% PC, although most of these allowed you to telnet to one of the school's Unix servers (you can probably imagine how few people on the campus knew you could).
If you're talking about UT Austin (and it sounds like you are), this is not quite true. Though the IT staff did get rid of most of the Macs in the UGL computer lab, there were still a few around, especially in the School of Journalism. Additionally, in one chemistry computer lab I encountered an Alpha machine (!), and the math computer labs ran Linux.
Besides the UNIX servers (I used pine to check my email, exclusively), you could also pay for a VMS account and a few other services I found pretty handy. All the engineering schools had their own UNIX servers, and at least one class I know of made use of them; they used octave instead of Matlab to teach some analytical techniques (e.g., using Jacobian matrices to deal with differential equations, solving systems of linear equations, etc.). However, they did end up using Matlab under Windows in later years, because our Process Control class used Simulink software, not available in octave (it allows you to string together transfer functions graphically, easily adjust the gain in a feedback loop, signal processing stuff like that).
Regarding their deal with the devil--I was very unhappy to hear how much money they paid M$, but since my tuition was already subsidizing the software, I plunked down the $15 or so to get Office 2000 Pro, Office.X (Mac OS X), and Windows 2000 Pro. I think of it as insurance, since I know M$ is going to hunt down pirates in the near future (or just not let them patch security holes, which can be as bad if some Russian hacker steals your identity).
Nonsense. Brazillians are entering established communities and spamming them. It'd be much different if they set up their own communities.
Nonsense. Posts/threads in a non-English language are NOT spam. You just feel excluded since they can communicate multi-lingually, and you can't be bothered to try to learn another language.
While it's nice to think that people would have the background to understand any language, that simply isn't the case. Learning a Latin based language isn't sufficient to speak other romance languages. Where I live, we have a large contigent of spanish speakers, and they tell me that while Portugese is similar, they still have a lots of trouble with it. Those that speak Italian or French (also romance, or Latin based if you like, languages) have even more trouble with it. Those that speak German, Norwegian, Finnish, etc are totally lost, nevermind oriental languages.
Sorry, but as someone who speaks both Spanish and Portuguese non-natively, I can tell you that someone who speaks Spanish should have little trouble reading Portuguese. There are definitely grammatical differences, but the pronunciation is where Spanish-speakers get thrown off. Many aspects of Poruguese are closer to Italian than to Spanish. For example,
English: son Spanish: hijo Portuguese: filho Italian: figlio
The Portuguese and Italian are pronounced approximately the same (the -lh- and -gl- are the same sound).
But wait! We can include English too.
English:
filial = of, relating to, or befitting a son or daughter
Regarding German, Norwegian, Finnish, and oriental languages, well, since none of those are Romance/Latin-based languages, I fail to see your point. Even English, a Germanic language, has enough Latin words that an English speaker with a decent vocabulary could figure out "filho."
Quite ironic, I think that English has become the lingua franca and the de jure language. Take that, France!
Hey, more people speak Portuguese natively than speak French, and Brazil is the "country of the future," so maybe the next lingua franca could turn out to be Portuguese.
Last I heard, there were 16 official Indian languages, and scores of other languages spoken by smaller segments of the population.
But Hindi is NOT the official language, and there were massive outcries when the government attempted to make it the official language. Whereas English is a second language for all Indians (possibly learned simultaneously for a few people), Hindi is the native language for only part of the population. The southern Indian states were not at all happy with the prospect of being forced to speak Hindi, which is why English is the official language in India. However, if you want to understand a politicians speech, and he/she is speaking in Hindi, knowing English won't do any good in that situation
It's annoying to read an English thread, then someone posts a response in Portugese, because then I can no longer follow the thread.
This sounds like sour grapes to me.
I don't think the original poster has any desire to learn a language besides English. Americans (and I am one of them) are big fans of instant gratification. That's why I've never learned to play a musical instrument: too much practice is required before it starts to pay off.
Then perhaps, in the same way the Portuguese speakers have learned English, you should learn Portuguese if you want to communicate with them?
You are not obliged to understand or even read their posts, in the same way that they are not obliged to read or understand your English posts - but they have chosen to educate themselves in order to communicate with English speakers - perhaps this merely reflects a lack of education and considering among the primarily English-speaking population?
I don't think this is totally acccurate. The Brazilians with internet are the more privileged portion of the population (even if they aren't rich, they can read and write and most likely don't live in shacks) whereas in the US, plenty of uneducated folks have high-speed internet. Most likely, the Brazilians on Orkut have had expensive educations are English was required at their schools. And even if it weren't required, they'd have to know how to speak enough English to communicate with Americans on ski trips to Aspen.
So I think you're both right and wrong. Americans live such insulated lives (the US is a huge country, and some people rarely encounter individuals that don't speak English) that there is less evident need for them to learn foreign languages. But even in places like Texas, where over a third of the population is Latino (and many speak no English at all), few Texans bother to learn Spanish. There is an urgency for Brazilians to learn English, but no urgency for Americans to learn Portuguese. People learn English partly because they want to communicate with English-only speakers, and partly because of the opportunities available in the extremely wealthy US, where poor people may eat Velveeta and white bread, but they don't starve (unless they're kids with negligent parents).
Things are really going to get interesting when the US Latino population gets big enough and rich enough so their presence can't be ignored, both on the web and in real life. What are all you monolinguals going to do when that happens, huh?
Guess this means I'll have to get a G5 tower when Tiger comes out.
Ahhh...The sign of a true Mac user -- one who feels the need to upgrade just for the latest whiz-bang feature, even though from his prior post it's obvious that he has little to no need for it...
Why would you say that? I said that the new Core Image feature is what I really want, and I've been informed my piddling ATI Rage M6 can't handle Core Image, so I at the very least need a new video card. It's not really possible to swap out my old one for a Tiger-compatible card. Additionally, I spent several months with no source of income other than from a guy who needed his family photos digitized and fixed up. I paid for my Powerbook (my FIRST Mac, btw, purchased Jan. 2001) from all that scanning and tweaking. If Tiger has built-in graphics filters, that speeds up those kind of jobs tremendously.
I think after using my laptop as my primary computer every day for four years, in 2005 it'll be time for a new computer. The old one will still be used all the time by my roommate, and by me when I need portability.
And anyway, upgrading to get the newest-of-the-new whistles and bells is certainly not a tactic monopolized by Mac users; hardcore gamers have to have the most expensive, newest systems, and they get new graphics cards more frequently than once every four years.
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That said, the ACLU is fighting a front of the war to protect our civil liberties. We have the NRA (among others) to worry about gun ownership rights. I haven't heard of any cases where the ACLU tried to promote gun control--they just don't protect 2nd Amendment rights. The good the ACLU does outweighs their lack of support on the gun issue, for me.
Arrgh. Now I'm all riled up.
Join the ACLU. It's safer than direct action against "the Man."
Thanks for the civilized discussion. Some folks like to resort to personal attacks and such. I'm glad you didn't.
We use everything from radio waves to x-rays in appliances these days. With a dynamic range spanning so many orders of magnitude, how could it possibly make sense to talk about a percent difference? How about orders of magnitude different? I'm not saying it's mathematically impossible to have a percentage of a wavelength, but it's pointless.
All right. I pick wavelengths 350nm-750nm. And we'd be looking at the damage done to human skin cells over that range. There is a threshold, and it is significant. Just like if I hike 10km on a trail to the top of a cliff--one more meter would be a very small percentage of the hike, but with significant consequences. Somewhere between 350nm and 420nm is a cutoff for normal human skin: lower wavelengths cause damage, higher wavelengths are harmless. Just like a body temperature of 37C is normal, but only a couple of degrees difference can cause brain damage / death.It makes no sense to talk about 4% variation of a wavelength. That's like talking about percent differences of temperature. You can't have a wavelength of 0nm and you can't have a temperature of absolute zero. You can only approach them asymptotically. A difference of 1nm can be extremely significant. For example, 1.0001nm - 1nm = 0.0001nm = x-rays. But that's not the reason it's significant in this case. The visible spectrum is very narrow, but encompasses all the colors of the rainbow. And the way biological molecules (like those that compose our bodies) interact with photons of different frequencies varies incredibly from one nanometer to the next. UV light is in a different regime from visible light, in that it damages our tissues much more. But people with certain genetic disorders can't even tolerate visible light. I've never heard people claim to be able to see light below 400nm. That's generally quoted as the lower threshold of visible light. And that's why there's a big difference between 400nm and 385nm. Ask a tree if you don't believe me.
I wasn't talking about the developing process--I was talking about the depth of color. Televisions and monitors do use RGB, but not overlaid. The three colors are side-by-side, which is why you see all three colors when you magnify the screen (and you probably know that already). Film uses the three colors overlapping, so you get the whole spectrum. And if you want to be precise about it, print film doesn't need cyan at all; adjusting the magenta and yellow levels is sufficient. Also, movies are filmed on regular old camera film, and the projectible prints are made from those negatives. Since you like to nitpick, I'll add that digitally "filmed" movies are shot in RGB, since those are the colors of the CCDs.
True color is fairly well replicated with film. Adding more colors to the medium will always get you closer to the true color, in the side-by-side scheme used in monitors. R+G+B=white, and C+M+Y=white also. It doesn't matter which combination you use, unless the three colors aren't overlaid.
If you still aren't comfortable, then fine. Make it 420nm violet to be safe. All non-visually impaired people can see 420nm light, too.
Far violet (~400nm) and far red (~700) are both visible. They might make the viewing experience much richer, and light at those wavelengths won't damage skin / eyes or cook your dinner.
Oh, and so far, I don't think anyone has been able to project blackness (the K in CMYK).
But that's a spelling problem, not grammatical. My own pet peeves about modern spelling: "its" should always have an apostrophe, even in the possessive form (not just "it is"). And people need to learn that plurals DON'T take an apostrophe. I can't even count the number of times I've seen something like "Ham and egg's--$4.00."
I completely agree with you about "they" being used as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun. It's what I generally use, even though I know the grammarians don't like it.
And to pry the lid off another can of worms, there are striking differences between American English and English in the rest of the world. In the US, we use the word "gotten" but in the UK it no longer exists--instead of saying "Network TV has gotten pretty bad" it's "Network TV has got pretty bad." (As an aside, try to translate "get" into any other language. The word will usually have ten different translations, depending on context.)
And when Bush's thugs trample all over you civil liberties nobody's gonna give a shit about your protest vote.
and
Thanks to the likes of folks like you, that's where we are [hell, that is]. I agree there's no way Nader could have won this past election, but I don't just think of the short term. Brazil's president, Lula, ran unsuccessfully against estabilished politicians several times, but once the populace got sick enough of the corruption, they knew Lula was an alternative. Voting for Nader is not just about a single term, but about building a third-party so in the future we have more choices. And on the local level, the Green party has made some big inroads. I know this has been said before, but the lesser of two evils is still evil. If you can stomach that, then good for you. But my conscience would bother me too much. It's a slippery slope when you make those kind of compromises. Why do you think so many clean politicians turn dirty? It doesn't happen overnight, but over years of not being able to get anything done unless you do a few favors. So they do a few favors. And the favors get bigger and bigger until they start cutting deals with Enron or Halliburton or whoever else has deep pockets. You think I vote too idealistically; I think that by lowering your standards you're heading into questionable moral territory. Keep that in mind next time you vote.
I'm a civil libertarian--that's my issue. I won't vote for anyone who supports the USAPATRIOTACT, or banning abortion, or locking up people for drug possession, or limiting free speech in any way, or allowing unreasonable search and seizure, etc. I would never have voted for either of the major party candidates because neither of them adequately defend our civil liberties.
But in fact, there is a bright side to having Bush as our president: it's the first time in memory that liberals (and libertarians) have such an obviously corrupt enemy to rally against. It energizes people. That Bush's first election was so questionable further fans the flames. People who didn't vote in the last election might go to the polls this time.
What I'd really like to see this November is Bush winning 100% of the vote on Diebold's electronic voting machine. That might actually piss people off enough to band together and reclaim our Bill of Rights.
I don't know what, if anything, you're doing to help enact change; but regardless of what statement you're trying to make, neglecting/choosing not to vote won't send a message to the authorities.
I think campaign finance reform would help a lot, and I'd gladly vote for McCain over a democrat who had received hefty sums of cash from corporations (or unions, or PACs, or any other organization not representative of the US citizenry). There are two driving forces in Washington: $$ and votes. If you don't have money, you'd better have votes. Unfortunately, poor people are less likely to vote.
I guess the conclusion is, if you want change in copyright law, it has to be grassroots. I don't have enough money to buy votes, but I could be persuasive enough to get an apathetic citizen to vote. All it costs is my time.
Am I the only one who read "DVD-A" as DVDA?
Besides the UNIX servers (I used pine to check my email, exclusively), you could also pay for a VMS account and a few other services I found pretty handy. All the engineering schools had their own UNIX servers, and at least one class I know of made use of them; they used octave instead of Matlab to teach some analytical techniques (e.g., using Jacobian matrices to deal with differential equations, solving systems of linear equations, etc.). However, they did end up using Matlab under Windows in later years, because our Process Control class used Simulink software, not available in octave (it allows you to string together transfer functions graphically, easily adjust the gain in a feedback loop, signal processing stuff like that).
Regarding their deal with the devil--I was very unhappy to hear how much money they paid M$, but since my tuition was already subsidizing the software, I plunked down the $15 or so to get Office 2000 Pro, Office.X (Mac OS X), and Windows 2000 Pro. I think of it as insurance, since I know M$ is going to hunt down pirates in the near future (or just not let them patch security holes, which can be as bad if some Russian hacker steals your identity).
English: son
Spanish: hijo
Portuguese: filho
Italian: figlio
The Portuguese and Italian are pronounced approximately the same (the -lh- and -gl- are the same sound).
But wait! We can include English too.
English: filial = of, relating to, or befitting a son or daughter
Regarding German, Norwegian, Finnish, and oriental languages, well, since none of those are Romance/Latin-based languages, I fail to see your point. Even English, a Germanic language, has enough Latin words that an English speaker with a decent vocabulary could figure out "filho."
Hey, more people speak Portuguese natively than speak French, and Brazil is the "country of the future," so maybe the next lingua franca could turn out to be Portuguese.
But Hindi is NOT the official language, and there were massive outcries when the government attempted to make it the official language. Whereas English is a second language for all Indians (possibly learned simultaneously for a few people), Hindi is the native language for only part of the population. The southern Indian states were not at all happy with the prospect of being forced to speak Hindi, which is why English is the official language in India. However, if you want to understand a politicians speech, and he/she is speaking in Hindi, knowing English won't do any good in that situation
So I think you're both right and wrong. Americans live such insulated lives (the US is a huge country, and some people rarely encounter individuals that don't speak English) that there is less evident need for them to learn foreign languages. But even in places like Texas, where over a third of the population is Latino (and many speak no English at all), few Texans bother to learn Spanish. There is an urgency for Brazilians to learn English, but no urgency for Americans to learn Portuguese. People learn English partly because they want to communicate with English-only speakers, and partly because of the opportunities available in the extremely wealthy US, where poor people may eat Velveeta and white bread, but they don't starve (unless they're kids with negligent parents).
Things are really going to get interesting when the US Latino population gets big enough and rich enough so their presence can't be ignored, both on the web and in real life. What are all you monolinguals going to do when that happens, huh?
Why would you say that? I said that the new Core Image feature is what I really want, and I've been informed my piddling ATI Rage M6 can't handle Core Image, so I at the very least need a new video card. It's not really possible to swap out my old one for a Tiger-compatible card. Additionally, I spent several months with no source of income other than from a guy who needed his family photos digitized and fixed up. I paid for my Powerbook (my FIRST Mac, btw, purchased Jan. 2001) from all that scanning and tweaking. If Tiger has built-in graphics filters, that speeds up those kind of jobs tremendously.
I think after using my laptop as my primary computer every day for four years, in 2005 it'll be time for a new computer. The old one will still be used all the time by my roommate, and by me when I need portability.
And anyway, upgrading to get the newest-of-the-new whistles and bells is certainly not a tactic monopolized by Mac users; hardcore gamers have to have the most expensive, newest systems, and they get new graphics cards more frequently than once every four years.
How hard would it have been to just put them in text format?
Guess this means I'll have to get a G5 tower when Tiger comes out. Darn ;)