First G. W. Bush is legislating morality from his bully pulpit in the White House, and now some creep wants to implement morality into our very IP stack? When I want to download images from alt.sex.bugger.with.sailors, I don't want my packets dropping due to someone else's "morality" being implemented on my ISP's router.
of how the English language evolves. I agree with you that "spim" is a stupid, ugly word, and I myself plan to never use it, except in discussion about the word itself. I'm guessing that most other people will also find it to be a klunky word (is there a French equivalent of "klunky"?) and "spim" will eventually die.
I find this to be a much, much more natural and efficient process than the French version whereby a bunch of pointy-headed academics decide which words are and are not "real". By letting each of the individual users make a decision, (call it a vote if you like,) and then documenting the consensus in a book like the Oxford English Dictionary, you get a language that manages itself.
Evolution is a natural process whereby entities that are more fit are selected for survival. In the case of language, a word is more fit if it's easier to use, and a word survives if people continue to use it. This is evolution.
What the Academie Francaise participates in is called intelligent design, or creationism.
Finally, let me clear up the illusions you seem to have about the difficulties that Brits and Merkans have in communicating with one another. I recently traveled to England, and had no problem whatsoever in communicating with anyone I met there. Yes, there were a few words that had different meanings, but there was not a single instance where I wasn't able to infer from the context of the conversation what the person meant.
The "degeneration" of the English language that you're going on about exists only in your imagination.
The English language absorbs and adopts new words with ease. It lends itself well to what basically amounts to word hacking. If you don't have a word for something, you can just make one up on the spot. As long as people "get it", then it's perfectly cromulent English.
English is a bazaar; French is a cathedral. I don't think that anyone will try to take the position that English is as beautiful as French, just as a cathedral is more beautiful than a bazaar. But English is much more user friendly, and this utility is reflected in its' widespread adoption. Even the French use words borrowed from English like "frigo", "okay", and "email", much to the frustration of the Academie Francaise.
The members of the Academie Francaise are free to sit in their ivory tower and make up rules about their language all they want, but the Francophones of the world are nearly unanimously voting with their active vocabularies for the English way of doing things.
The last sentence is "I think people aren't trained very well to use the search engines."
I'm stuck between going "No duh?" and "bull!#*&".
No duh because, take a look around and see who's online - pretty much anyone who wants to be. You think they're going to bother learning how to optimize search results so that Google will pull 100 records instead of 15,000? As long as they get what they want, the answer is a vehement "No."
"Bull!$#%" because, on the flip side, maybe people shouldn't be required to take training in order to search effectively. Maybe someone should write a search engine that Just Works. Oh, wait...
How long will it take for a hack to come out that fixes this?
I should learn not to try reading comments to make sure I'm not posting something that's already been said. There's no way I can possibly keep up with them:(
The posting of this article on slashdot has little to do with informing us (this time, anyway) and everything to do with an attempt at slashdotting microsoft.com.
Click, click, and click again. Send your friends. Bring down microsoft.com, if only for a day!
I think what he meant is not that the Internet is bad, but that the always-connected, up-all-night-chatting, caffeine-consuming, 4 hours of sleep a night lifestyle is bad. Obviously the benefits that the Net brings us are great, but if all you do with your time is sit online (and I know a lot of people who do that, myself among them) then that's just not good for you. Only the way he said it was more eloquent.
While I definitely agree with you, I feel the need to point something out here.
Whenever I catch myself thinking about the "good old days" when everything that was put out was good quality and worthwhile, I have to remind myself that things only seem that way in retrospect because I've forgotten about all of the drivel that was produced back then, and have remembered all of the high quality stuff. Take music, for example - the only reason "classical" music has a reputation as being high quality is because nobody plays the crap that was written in the 1800's. Only the very best of what was written then is still around.
The lifespan of craptacular movies is shorter than that of bad quality arts in other genres, I think, so it doesn't need to take several hundred years for the quality to be separated from the crap.
Anyway, just my two cents on the issue of "Why is there so much crap coming out these days?"
"But, with all of the terrorist threats lately, bringing passport documents into the digital world is sure to increase security."
Maybe I'm being dense, but can someone tell me how (considering that the 9/11 terrorists boarded their planes with completely valid passports) having fancy-pants digital passports is going to increase security one tiny bit? This is saying nothing at all about the other problems with biometric "security" measures - the main one being that they're easy to fake.
It seems to me that people really like the idea of more gadgets being used to give an increased perception of security, when perceived security is probably the biggest threat to actual security that exists.
What's to stop the midcap company from going out of business eventually when the 5 or 50,000 employee companies grow large enough to compete with them? The difference in server software you use may or may not have a large impact on the profitability of most businesses, but for web-related businesses, it's huge.
If you've ever seen one of the ear thermometers, it's not a hulking box, and you don't need to hook them up to it. You just stick it in their ear, push a button, and beep! there's their temperature on the readout. (It doesn't go very far in, either, so there's no risk of poking their eardrum.)
From www.medterms.com:
The ear thermometer was invented in 1964 by Dr. Theodor H. Benzinger. Dr. Benzinger worked from 1947 to 1970 at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland where he studied temperature regulation and helped create the field of biothermodynamics. He created the ear thermometer while looking for a way to take a person's temperature and get a reading as close as possible to the temperature center of the brain temperature, the hypothalamus. Because the hypothalamus and the eardrum share blood vessels, Benzinger decided to use the ear canal to take a reading. (Until that time, attaching electrodes to the hypothalamus was the only way to get a brain temperature reading.) Prior to Benzinger's invention of the ear thermometer, temperature readings were typically obtained by placing a thermometer in the mouth, rectum or under the arm. The ear temperature most closely correlates with the brain temperature and is therefore, if properly taken, the best body temperature reading. Theodor Hannes Benzinger was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1905 and died in Bethesda in 1999 at the age of 94. He was also the inventor of a device to measure calorie loss and made many other important contributions to medicine and science including the Planck-Benzinger modification of the second law of thermodynamics.
Re:The multi million dollar question...
on
In Google We Trust
·
· Score: 1
Dude, you just answered your own question.
Q: why did so many people end up using Google anyway? A: I recommended it to all my friends.
Another reason is something else you touched on - Yahoo advertises on TV. Google doesn't. If you have to advertise something to get people to use it, what does that tell you about how good it is?
Absolutely brilliant. First, you write an insightful first post, thereby gaining karma for being insightful. Then you respond to it with something funny, allowing a whole new set of mod points to be spent on a seperate post.
Twice the karma just for separating your "first post" comment into its own post.
Freezing rain is what you get when it falls as a liquid, but then freezes as soon as it touches something. I'm not sure how it happens but it makes for terrible driving conditions and usually pulls down some power lines and/or tree branches.
I grew up in St. Paul, and when I was a freshman in college tried to build my own black (or was it blue?) box. This was in 1997. I was very disappointed to discover that the phone systems had all changed and that it wouldn't work.
All of my reading did lead me to tracking down Joey Engressia, though. I thought it was indescribably cool that a cultural icon like him was living practically next door to me. I eventually got ahold of him on the phone and we talked for about an hour about his past exploits, his decision to change his name to Joybubbles (it was part of a kids' television show that he hosted, iirc,) and what he does with phones nowadays (tests the phone systems and reports problems to the phone company, for free, in case you're wondering.)
The most brilliant developer I know works in game development, and he is frequently between jobs and looking for work. This is a guy who's got the answer to any question I've ever seen asked of him off the top of his head. I wish I could give you examples of his over-the-top brilliance, but I'll have to just say that his screen name has become a synonym for "wisdom" and leave it at that.
If this guy can't hold a steady job in game development, I don't know how anyone can expect to.
Slashdot Mirror
First G. W. Bush is legislating morality from his bully pulpit in the White House, and now some creep wants to implement morality into our very IP stack? When I want to download images from alt.sex.bugger.with.sailors, I don't want my packets dropping due to someone else's "morality" being implemented on my ISP's router.
If anyone needed proof that France is evil, here it is.
of how the English language evolves. I agree with you that "spim" is a stupid, ugly word, and I myself plan to never use it, except in discussion about the word itself. I'm guessing that most other people will also find it to be a klunky word (is there a French equivalent of "klunky"?) and "spim" will eventually die.
I find this to be a much, much more natural and efficient process than the French version whereby a bunch of pointy-headed academics decide which words are and are not "real". By letting each of the individual users make a decision, (call it a vote if you like,) and then documenting the consensus in a book like the Oxford English Dictionary, you get a language that manages itself.
I'm sorry but you have your definitions wrong.
Evolution is a natural process whereby entities that are more fit are selected for survival. In the case of language, a word is more fit if it's easier to use, and a word survives if people continue to use it. This is evolution.
What the Academie Francaise participates in is called intelligent design, or creationism.
Finally, let me clear up the illusions you seem to have about the difficulties that Brits and Merkans have in communicating with one another. I recently traveled to England, and had no problem whatsoever in communicating with anyone I met there. Yes, there were a few words that had different meanings, but there was not a single instance where I wasn't able to infer from the context of the conversation what the person meant.
The "degeneration" of the English language that you're going on about exists only in your imagination.
The English language absorbs and adopts new words with ease. It lends itself well to what basically amounts to word hacking. If you don't have a word for something, you can just make one up on the spot. As long as people "get it", then it's perfectly cromulent English.
English is a bazaar; French is a cathedral. I don't think that anyone will try to take the position that English is as beautiful as French, just as a cathedral is more beautiful than a bazaar. But English is much more user friendly, and this utility is reflected in its' widespread adoption. Even the French use words borrowed from English like "frigo", "okay", and "email", much to the frustration of the Academie Francaise.
The members of the Academie Francaise are free to sit in their ivory tower and make up rules about their language all they want, but the Francophones of the world are nearly unanimously voting with their active vocabularies for the English way of doing things.
The last sentence is "I think people aren't trained very well to use the search engines."
I'm stuck between going "No duh?" and "bull!#*&".
No duh because, take a look around and see who's online - pretty much anyone who wants to be. You think they're going to bother learning how to optimize search results so that Google will pull 100 records instead of 15,000? As long as they get what they want, the answer is a vehement "No."
"Bull!$#%" because, on the flip side, maybe people shouldn't be required to take training in order to search effectively. Maybe someone should write a search engine that Just Works. Oh, wait...
I can see it now:
An executive sitting in a board room. With a goatee. "I like the lower TCO I get with Windows."
He sips his cappucino (or whatever drink is trendy in two years.) We get a different angle on him.
"I just feel safer knowing that SCO isn't going to sue me."
The camera angle changes again. "My name is Ben Dover... and I'm a CEO."
How long will it take for a hack to come out that fixes this?
:(
I should learn not to try reading comments to make sure I'm not posting something that's already been said. There's no way I can possibly keep up with them
The posting of this article on slashdot has little to do with informing us (this time, anyway) and everything to do with an attempt at slashdotting microsoft.com.
Click, click, and click again. Send your friends. Bring down microsoft.com, if only for a day!
I think what he meant is not that the Internet is bad, but that the always-connected, up-all-night-chatting, caffeine-consuming, 4 hours of sleep a night lifestyle is bad. Obviously the benefits that the Net brings us are great, but if all you do with your time is sit online (and I know a lot of people who do that, myself among them) then that's just not good for you. Only the way he said it was more eloquent.
While I definitely agree with you, I feel the need to point something out here.
Whenever I catch myself thinking about the "good old days" when everything that was put out was good quality and worthwhile, I have to remind myself that things only seem that way in retrospect because I've forgotten about all of the drivel that was produced back then, and have remembered all of the high quality stuff. Take music, for example - the only reason "classical" music has a reputation as being high quality is because nobody plays the crap that was written in the 1800's. Only the very best of what was written then is still around.
The lifespan of craptacular movies is shorter than that of bad quality arts in other genres, I think, so it doesn't need to take several hundred years for the quality to be separated from the crap.
Anyway, just my two cents on the issue of "Why is there so much crap coming out these days?"
"But, with all of the terrorist threats lately, bringing passport documents into the digital world is sure to increase security."
Maybe I'm being dense, but can someone tell me how (considering that the 9/11 terrorists boarded their planes with completely valid passports) having fancy-pants digital passports is going to increase security one tiny bit? This is saying nothing at all about the other problems with biometric "security" measures - the main one being that they're easy to fake.
It seems to me that people really like the idea of more gadgets being used to give an increased perception of security, when perceived security is probably the biggest threat to actual security that exists.
What's to stop the midcap company from going out of business eventually when the 5 or 50,000 employee companies grow large enough to compete with them? The difference in server software you use may or may not have a large impact on the profitability of most businesses, but for web-related businesses, it's huge.
If you ask any pianist, they will inform you that a piano is, in fact, a percussion instrument.
What's the half life on this kind of thing? Let's say it falls back into orbit 300 years from now. How radioactive will it still be?
Moderators, be gentle...
If you've ever seen one of the ear thermometers, it's not a hulking box, and you don't need to hook them up to it. You just stick it in their ear, push a button, and beep! there's their temperature on the readout. (It doesn't go very far in, either, so there's no risk of poking their eardrum.)
From www.medterms.com:
The ear thermometer was invented in 1964 by Dr. Theodor H. Benzinger. Dr. Benzinger worked from 1947 to 1970 at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland where he studied temperature regulation and helped create the field of biothermodynamics. He created the ear thermometer while looking for a way to take a person's temperature and get a reading as close as possible to the temperature center of the brain temperature, the hypothalamus. Because the hypothalamus and the eardrum share blood vessels, Benzinger decided to use the ear canal to take a reading. (Until that time, attaching electrodes to the hypothalamus was the only way to get a brain temperature reading.) Prior to Benzinger's invention of the ear thermometer, temperature readings were typically obtained by placing a thermometer in the mouth, rectum or under the arm. The ear temperature most closely correlates with the brain temperature and is therefore, if properly taken, the best body temperature reading. Theodor Hannes Benzinger was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1905 and died in Bethesda in 1999 at the age of 94. He was also the inventor of a device to measure calorie loss and made many other important contributions to medicine and science including the Planck-Benzinger modification of the second law of thermodynamics.
Dude, you just answered your own question.
Q: why did so many people end up using Google anyway?
A: I recommended it to all my friends.
Another reason is something else you touched on - Yahoo advertises on TV. Google doesn't. If you have to advertise something to get people to use it, what does that tell you about how good it is?
Absolutely brilliant. First, you write an insightful first post, thereby gaining karma for being insightful. Then you respond to it with something funny, allowing a whole new set of mod points to be spent on a seperate post.
Twice the karma just for separating your "first post" comment into its own post.
Or turning the document sideways a bit, or moving it while it's being copied just a tad.
"No word on whether it can be user-disabled..."
Umm... it's printed on paper. Tear it off?
Freezing rain is what you get when it falls as a liquid, but then freezes as soon as it touches something. I'm not sure how it happens but it makes for terrible driving conditions and usually pulls down some power lines and/or tree branches.
This reminds me of the sheep whose minds Arthur Dent touched, who kept getting startled at the sun rising in the morning and so forth.
/. posters sheep.
Yes I just called
I grew up in St. Paul, and when I was a freshman in college tried to build my own black (or was it blue?) box. This was in 1997. I was very disappointed to discover that the phone systems had all changed and that it wouldn't work.
All of my reading did lead me to tracking down Joey Engressia, though. I thought it was indescribably cool that a cultural icon like him was living practically next door to me. I eventually got ahold of him on the phone and we talked for about an hour about his past exploits, his decision to change his name to Joybubbles (it was part of a kids' television show that he hosted, iirc,) and what he does with phones nowadays (tests the phone systems and reports problems to the phone company, for free, in case you're wondering.)
The most brilliant developer I know works in game development, and he is frequently between jobs and looking for work. This is a guy who's got the answer to any question I've ever seen asked of him off the top of his head. I wish I could give you examples of his over-the-top brilliance, but I'll have to just say that his screen name has become a synonym for "wisdom" and leave it at that. If this guy can't hold a steady job in game development, I don't know how anyone can expect to.
It's about time they got a Mars rover to land right. I was starting to think NASA was playing Gunbound with those things.