Americans are just used to seeing fractional dollars specified to the cent rather than the dime (i.e. two significant digits after the decimal), and variations upon that custom are grounds for assuming an error. Otherwise, $0.4 could be +/- a nickel, whereas $0.40 is +/- a ha'penny, which no longer exists in our currency.
Exceptions are gas prices where three digits after the decimal are used (and the last digit is always a 9), the cash value of a coupon (1/100 of one cent), and overage fees for cellular data plans (0.015 cents/KB or $15/MB as if they were equivalent).
I like the one about "dream compilation" CDs. It's like they're acknowledging that they're making you buy 19 crap songs with each good one in an album.
I did buy a "dream compilation" CD. It was all the James Bond title themes. I bought it from Best Buy. The track for "From Russia With Love" has an audible audio watermark sounding like a sped-up sample of someone saying something I can't make out. I haven't been able to isolate it and slow it down to figure out what it's saying yet.
And it's much better than some other services where instead of 99 cents getting you unlimited access for a month, 99 cents gets you only 100 KB of additional transfer, automatically accruing (i.e. at 10 Mb/s, racking up $742.50 a minute).
Serious question, would we ever know if the cat did go back in the bag?
If you truly understood the metaphor, it wouldn't matter if it did.
There's a bag. You don't know what's in it.
What was in it gets out and you see it is a cat.
The cat is put back in the bag.
There's a bag. You know what's in it: a cat.
The bag is secrecy, the cat is the secret. Once the secret is out, it is known and can never again be unknown. Even if a shell game was performed with identical bags, you'd still know about the cat.
If you can see the cat being put back in the bag and not know what's in the bag, you (a) are a child without a sense of object permanence, (b) have a damaged hippocampus, and/or (c) you're ripe for living in Orwell's 1984 as you won't believe your own memories without external corroboration.
It's the internet -- the cat never goes back in the bag.
That's... really not the right use of the metaphor. My cat likes to play inside bags and needs very little inducement to go inside one. Sometimes he does it spontaneously.
I think you've confused "letting the cat out of the bag" with "putting the genie back in the bottle".
If that happens, I'd say the vow of silence will come back into vogue very quickly.
Too late. 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence is copyright 1952 by John Cage (deceased 1992), and infringing derivative works of it of varying lengths have been successfully prosecuted by his estate on more than one occasion, and you can expect them still to be until 2047 (1952 + 95 because 1952 1978).
But in any civilized society the rule of law must hold. Yes, even when the law is stupid. This is why we have courts that can strike down bad laws.
Yet the courts can't do that until someone challenges the law, and the only practical way to do that is to violate it.
So, by your standards, reform of stupid, bad laws only comes from those who refuse to be civilized. Perhaps you should be more gracious to those barbarians who would take up that fight for the betterment of society at their own risk and expense.
Is why no good deed goes unpunished because the best-laid schemes of mice an' men gang oft a-gley an' la'e us nought but grief and pain for promis'd joy?
(Which is a phrase I never understood. If two things are different in the same way, aren't they not different but instead similar?)
It's an oxymoron pun (often shortened to "same diff"), derived from "same thing". It's generally understood to mean "any differences are inconsequential", applying a loosening to the meaning of "same". See also: "agree to disagree".
It's not a bug, it's legacy code. Italics were the standard way of quoting in the past. When/. got styled, a rule of the contest was that legacy posts still render properly without requiring the archives to be edited. So italics were given block-quotation treatment and we get emphasis tags being used improperly for strictly italic purposes.
Alas, not even a selector of P > I:only-child (or equivalently P > I:first-child:last-child) would constrain the block-quoting style only to paragraphs entirely containing only one block of italic text as that child could have anonymous-inline-text siblings (for which there is no selector, such as P >:anonymous ~ I:only-child rule to override a block-quoting-style rule, and I've tried combinations involing the:not() selector). Still, using:only-child could reduce the number of false positives and give an editing choice for new articles by including a second empty set of tags in any paragraph containing italics not intended to be rendered as a quoted block.
That's not so bad. From the way the headline read, my first though was that they would actually do product placement within the story.
So instead of King Arthur drinking a a glass of wine he'd be drinking a can of Coke.
Product placement in books is already established. Here's an example from page 65 of the paperback of WarGames, end of Chapter 3, by David Bischoff:
Automatically the computer dialed the first number.
From the receiver David could hear a faint ring. An irate voice answered, "Hello."
No go. The computer was searching for the tones used by another modem to answer calls. Immediately the computer disconnected the call.
It rang the next number.
From previous experience David knew that the process could take hours. These computer folks weren't dumb. They didn't exactly hand out their special modem numbers on a silver platter. With a nation full of hackers, that would be tantamount to suicide.
The monitor screen began to fill up with numbers. Good job, David thought. Good job.
After turning down the monitor speaker, he grabbed a new science fiction paperback he'd shoplifted—a novel called Day of the Dragonstar—and began to read.
"Day of the Dragonstar" was also written by David Bischoff.
What surprised me was that this ad, including the mention of the act of shoplifting, was also intact in the expurgated version of the story as published by the Science Fiction Book Club, which replaced all the drug references in the book with sanitized copy (even adding that Jennifer Mack "got good grades", even after it was established she'd failed Biology and got a D in Home Economics).
And M&M's are so tightly wound into the novelization of "E.T.: The Extraterrestrial" that whoever it was that rejected the opportunity of product placement in the movie should have been fired immediately. It even tied into the Speak & Spell with "M" being the first button E.T. presses due to recognizing it from the candy.
"You Can't Do That On Television" even touched on advertising in books where a parent was reading aloud to the kids (probably considered an illegal performance today, re: Kindle) and reached the printed commercial, whereupon the kids begged off to use the bathroom while the parent continued to read the ad aloud in their absence.
What is the expected effect of giving the vaccine to HIV positive test subjects?
They expect to see whether it makes them worse or not worse (i.e. if the vaccine is toxic). That's Phase I.
Whether it improves their condition by producing white blood cells that are immune to the infection (without hindering their ability to respond to other infections) which could eventually outnumber the vulnerable white blood cells as HIV burns through the latter isn't part of this phase.
Asteroids all over me, don't know where to run, I'm somewhere between the moon and the sun I'm in command of three ships and there's more on the way I'm a space cadet, I can really play!
Hyperspace, Push on the button and I'm back in the race, Hyperspace, Shootin' my rockets all over the place,
I'm invisible now, but I'll be back again, Gonna kick in the thrust, 'cause I just gotta win, I just gotta win,
There's a ship on the rise and he's shootin' at me, I rotate my ship on the count of three I fire and shoot and blow him out of the sky Push on the button and wave bye-bye
Hyperspace, Push on the button and I'm back in the race, Hyperspace, Shootin' my rockets all over the place,
I'm invisible now, but I'll be back again, Gonna kick in the thrust, 'cause I just gotta win, I just gotta win...
Other than that, they'll need to license the theme from Jaws.
Slashdotters would be lucky to get once a month, much less daily...
Comic Book Guy: Inspired by the most logical race in the galaxy, the Vulcans, breeding will be permitted once every seven years. For many of you, this will be much less breeding. For me, much, much more.
Slashdot Mirror
Americans are just used to seeing fractional dollars specified to the cent rather than the dime (i.e. two significant digits after the decimal), and variations upon that custom are grounds for assuming an error. Otherwise, $0.4 could be +/- a nickel, whereas $0.40 is +/- a ha'penny, which no longer exists in our currency.
Exceptions are gas prices where three digits after the decimal are used (and the last digit is always a 9), the cash value of a coupon (1/100 of one cent), and overage fees for cellular data plans (0.015 cents/KB or $15/MB as if they were equivalent).
I like the one about "dream compilation" CDs. It's like they're acknowledging that they're making you buy 19 crap songs with each good one in an album.
I did buy a "dream compilation" CD. It was all the James Bond title themes. I bought it from Best Buy. The track for "From Russia With Love" has an audible audio watermark sounding like a sped-up sample of someone saying something I can't make out. I haven't been able to isolate it and slow it down to figure out what it's saying yet.
And it's much better than some other services where instead of 99 cents getting you unlimited access for a month, 99 cents gets you only 100 KB of additional transfer, automatically accruing (i.e. at 10 Mb/s, racking up $742.50 a minute).
Well, I believe they've made a mistake. Data shouldn't care where you are geographically, in almost every instance.
Licensing contracts however do care, because they can.
For the good of all of us except for those who are dead.
Jinks, you owe me a coke.
Adjudication: improper invocation by invalid spelling. Debt canceled.
Serious question, would we ever know if the cat did go back in the bag?
If you truly understood the metaphor, it wouldn't matter if it did.
The bag is secrecy, the cat is the secret. Once the secret is out, it is known and can never again be unknown. Even if a shell game was performed with identical bags, you'd still know about the cat.
If you can see the cat being put back in the bag and not know what's in the bag, you (a) are a child without a sense of object permanence, (b) have a damaged hippocampus, and/or (c) you're ripe for living in Orwell's 1984 as you won't believe your own memories without external corroboration.
It's the internet -- the cat never goes back in the bag.
That's... really not the right use of the metaphor. My cat likes to play inside bags and needs very little inducement to go inside one. Sometimes he does it spontaneously.
I think you've confused "letting the cat out of the bag" with "putting the genie back in the bottle".
and you can expect them still to be until 2047 (1952 + 95 because 1952 < 1978).
I fixed that for me: I forgot to entify the less-than sign.
If that happens, I'd say the vow of silence will come back into vogue very quickly.
Too late. 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence is copyright 1952 by John Cage (deceased 1992), and infringing derivative works of it of varying lengths have been successfully prosecuted by his estate on more than one occasion, and you can expect them still to be until 2047 (1952 + 95 because 1952 1978).
But in any civilized society the rule of law must hold. Yes, even when the law is stupid. This is why we have courts that can strike down bad laws.
Yet the courts can't do that until someone challenges the law, and the only practical way to do that is to violate it.
So, by your standards, reform of stupid, bad laws only comes from those who refuse to be civilized. Perhaps you should be more gracious to those barbarians who would take up that fight for the betterment of society at their own risk and expense.
"Streisand Effect"?
Not until someone replies to, "Links, please?"
"Wait'll they get a load of me!" -- Jack Napier
Is why no good deed goes unpunished because the best-laid schemes of mice an' men gang oft a-gley an' la'e us nought but grief and pain for promis'd joy?
Same difference.
(Which is a phrase I never understood. If two things are different in the same way, aren't they not different but instead similar?)
It's an oxymoron pun (often shortened to "same diff"), derived from "same thing". It's generally understood to mean "any differences are inconsequential", applying a loosening to the meaning of "same". See also: "agree to disagree".
That's why the best time to see any satellites is near dusk or dawn.
And why it's so easy to upset a small child making a wish upon a star by telling them they're wishing on a satellite.
Like the missing space between "Anonymous Coward" and "on" that's been there fer a few weeks?
The space isn't missing for me, but the zooicon displaying an image for my relationship to non-anonymous posters is missing.
It's not a bug, it's legacy code. Italics were the standard way of quoting in the past. When /. got styled, a rule of the contest was that legacy posts still render properly without requiring the archives to be edited. So italics were given block-quotation treatment and we get emphasis tags being used improperly for strictly italic purposes.
Alas, not even a selector of P > I:only-child (or equivalently P > I:first-child:last-child) would constrain the block-quoting style only to paragraphs entirely containing only one block of italic text as that child could have anonymous-inline-text siblings (for which there is no selector, such as P > :anonymous ~ I:only-child rule to override a block-quoting-style rule, and I've tried combinations involing the :not() selector). Still, using :only-child could reduce the number of false positives and give an editing choice for new articles by including a second empty set of tags in any paragraph containing italics not intended to be rendered as a quoted block.
That's not so bad. From the way the headline read, my first though was that they would actually do product placement within the story.
So instead of King Arthur drinking a a glass of wine he'd be drinking a can of Coke.
Product placement in books is already established. Here's an example from page 65 of the paperback of WarGames, end of Chapter 3, by David Bischoff:
"Day of the Dragonstar" was also written by David Bischoff.
What surprised me was that this ad, including the mention of the act of shoplifting, was also intact in the expurgated version of the story as published by the Science Fiction Book Club, which replaced all the drug references in the book with sanitized copy (even adding that Jennifer Mack "got good grades", even after it was established she'd failed Biology and got a D in Home Economics).
And M&M's are so tightly wound into the novelization of "E.T.: The Extraterrestrial" that whoever it was that rejected the opportunity of product placement in the movie should have been fired immediately. It even tied into the Speak & Spell with "M" being the first button E.T. presses due to recognizing it from the candy.
"You Can't Do That On Television" even touched on advertising in books where a parent was reading aloud to the kids (probably considered an illegal performance today, re: Kindle) and reached the printed commercial, whereupon the kids begged off to use the bathroom while the parent continued to read the ad aloud in their absence.
What is the expected effect of giving the vaccine to HIV positive test subjects?
They expect to see whether it makes them worse or not worse (i.e. if the vaccine is toxic). That's Phase I.
Whether it improves their condition by producing white blood cells that are immune to the infection (without hindering their ability to respond to other infections) which could eventually outnumber the vulnerable white blood cells as HIV burns through the latter isn't part of this phase.
e) Realise that abstinence will not kill you, and that consequently, contrary to popular perception, sex is actually a want, rather than a need.
Colossus: HOW MANY NIGHTS A WEEK DO YOU REQUIRE SEX?
Dr. Forbin: Every night.
Colossus: NOT WANT. REQUIRE.
Dr. Forbin: [looks sheepish] Four times.
Well, Asteroids did inspire a song:
Asteroids all over me, don't know where to run,
I'm somewhere between the moon and the sun
I'm in command of three ships and there's more on the way
I'm a space cadet, I can really play!
Hyperspace,
Push on the button and I'm back in the race,
Hyperspace,
Shootin' my rockets all over the place,
I'm invisible now, but I'll be back again,
Gonna kick in the thrust, 'cause I just gotta win, I just gotta win,
There's a ship on the rise and he's shootin' at me,
I rotate my ship on the count of three
I fire and shoot and blow him out of the sky
Push on the button and wave bye-bye
Hyperspace,
Push on the button and I'm back in the race,
Hyperspace,
Shootin' my rockets all over the place,
I'm invisible now, but I'll be back again,
Gonna kick in the thrust, 'cause I just gotta win, I just gotta win...
Other than that, they'll need to license the theme from Jaws.
Slashdotters would be lucky to get once a month, much less daily...
Comic Book Guy: Inspired by the most logical race in the galaxy, the Vulcans, breeding will be permitted once every seven years. For many of you, this will be much less breeding. For me, much, much more.
Nah, Videodrome had already made its mark on me.
You should sing "Happy Birthday" loudly and clearly as a copyright protest anthem.