Besides games, and maybe some MS development stuff
For many people, those two things are reason enough to dual boot. It allows you to keep using your existing software, which makes the switch to Mac that much easier for people who have large libraries of Windows-only software.
I would also guess that the rare, deranged people who commit violent acts based on what they see in games and movies are just that: rare and deranged. These people wouldn't magically be happy, healthy, well adjusted people if there were no violent imagery in the media. Violence predates violence in the media by a couple hundred thousand years (or 5000 years, depending on who you ask). The only credence I give to the "the video game made me do it" claim is that the particular violence the person commits may be influenced by what they saw. An example of which was the kids who cut off their parents' heads after seeing something like that on The Sopranos. They might have only beat their parents to death instead of decapitating them if they hadn't seen that episode.
Amtrak lists it as a requirement, but in the past couple years of using it to commute it has never been enforced. The only time I have seen them ask for an ID was to issue a citation to somebody for riding without a ticket. I know anecdotes aren't evidence, but it's pretty clear that identity checking and security in general on trains is much more lax than at the airport. If somebody is that concerned with anonymous travel, buy a ticket in cash and rest reasonably assured that no one will ever know you were on the train.
Except in the example you gave, the line is clear. The one kid beating up the other is committing a crime. It would be a better world if more people would step in and stop this kind of violence, but it seems that most will just turn their backs and ignore it because it's "not their business." I commend you for doing the right thing, even at the expense of your own safety. However, the kid in the OP was not committing a crime--the school was. Outside of the classroom, the school has no right to limit anybody's freedom of speech. They overstepped their bounds, and given they are an educational institution, they should know better than most the limits to their authority.
I don't know how prevalent it is, but I have known at least a few H1B folks who came to the US either for college or just after. They started in the work force, then after garnering some experiencing and saving up a bunch of money, they moved back to their home country where they could live in relative wealth and comfort. If there is a large enough number of people that do this, you effectively skew the average H1B salary lower, as they have relatively more entry level positions than experienced positions compared to native workers.
But, since the plural of anecdote isn't data, this may be unfounded. It would be interesting to see a comparison of H1B salaries compared to native salaries for a given level of experience. I'm betting it's still lower, but it may not be as drastic as the OP indicates.
Animated and/or noisy ads are annoying. I AdBlock them with reckless abandon. Depending on the site, many ads may be sexual in nature, which is not so work friendly, regardless of the main content of the page (joke sites with videos or images are a good example) Many are aesthetically displeasing. If they don't blend well with the site, I generally block them to save my eyes the discomfort. Many ads are done in Flash, which require more bandwidth to download and more resources to run. They can also be used to circumvent pop-up blockers. Because of the annoyance factor, I block these on general principle, even if a particular Flash ad isn't too intrusive.
And since the OP asked, I no longer watch live TV. By using TiVo and the 30-second skip feature, I never see more than a few seconds worth of commercials in a half-hour of television. Television commercials make me feel violent in ways that the GTA series never could.
There are a couple experimental techniques useful to try to isolate behavior variation due to genetics and environment.
1) Identical twins raised together and apart. Identical genes, but variation in environment. Acts to isolate variation in behavior due to genetics.
2) Adoptive siblings raised together and apart. Genes are completely uncorrelated to other siblings, which acts to isolate variation in behavior due to environment.
Genetically speaking, fraternal twins are the same as non-twin siblings. Environment may play more of a role with non-twin siblings if there is a systematic change in how a child is treated based on age. This still yields useful information, but not as useful as the two extremes listed above. The problem with any kind of study that uses twin studies is getting a large enough sample set to be statistically meaningful. The second item above in particular requires a very large sample size, because while we know identical twins have 100% identical genes, we can't say for sure that kids raised in the same household will have 100% identical environments.
This is what always made the most sense to me as well. Not massive enough to be roughly spherical? Then it's an asteroid or comet. Planets orbit a star. Satelites/moons orbit a planet. I suppose it could get trickier if you have planetoids orbiting each other with their center of mass orbiting a star (which one is the moon and which the planet? Are they both planets? Both moons?), but I imagine a suitable name could be created to describe this seemingly rare condition.
If the new Yahoo mail is better than Gmail, then google will have to improve their offering. Webmail service was a pretty stagnant cesspool until google stepped in. The preexisting providers (Yahoo, MSN, et al) were far too happy maintaining the status quo. A webmail provider war can only be good for us consumers. Yay capitalism.
Well, I did say "easily understood" and you probably had to parse back over it real quick to discern what I meant. I also should have said "most members" instead of "a member." I could write something completely non-sensical, and given a large enough audience, find at least one person who understands it.
Wow... that's a pretty useless metric.
Tha pretty much captures my sentiments about formal grammar in a nutshell:)
I can see your point there:) I was considering my only use of a grammar checker: MS Word's for high school and college papers. In that case, grammar checkers are all but useless, since they tend to force the writer through hoops to get those green squiggly lines to disappear, resulting in a stilted, unreadable paper.
Even so, for your case, the grammar checker could only handle very basic errors without the ability to understand context and content. Given the "Why you go there?" example you used, it would be very difficult for a program to do anything but flag the sentence as wrong without knowing something about the context it is used in. A student wouldn't likely know how to fix the statement without some insight into why it doesn't make sense and some idea of what a correct version would look like. Perhaps a more advanced student would do fine with a pull-down list of options like "Why are you going there?" and "Why do you go there?" and decide which one to use, but a beginning student wouldn't likely know the difference. Although, I suppose there would be some value in letting them know they made an error at all. I have no experience teaching a foreign language, so I'll have to defer to your experience on that one.
I understand your point. They perhaps weren't the best examples, but it can be hard to come up with simple ones on short notice:)
Part of my point was that the second example is only incomplete by the standards set forth in a textbook. There are many examples in English and other languages where leaving out or implying a piece of information is perfectly acceptable. The imperative form in many European languages is a good example ("Go to the store!" has an implied "you" at the beginning.), but no one would claim that this should be flagged for further review because it made it into the text book as "proper" grammar. In practice, people end sentences with prepositions all the time, and it is not an impediment to understanding in most cases. Also, since prescriptive grammar is largely unused in actual speech and writing, there would be enough noise in the results of a grammar checker that flagged all these instances as to render them meaningless.
I'm making the argument that the only metric that should be used for correct grammar is: "Can this be easily understood by a member of the target audience." If it passes this test, then, as far as I'm concerned, it's correct. Anything more than that and you can actually impede understanding because you are no longer writing in a form that is actually used in normal language. (Note that this is very context sensitive. Good grammar for a physics journal is very different from good grammar for the liner notes of a CD which is very different from good grammar for a web forum.)
This could probably be easily done, but it neglects the more important between prescriptive grammar (what you get in a text book with all the really weird rules about where to put commas and why your participles shouldn't dangle) and gramamr as it is actually used (I'm always one to happily split an infinitive). In my opinion, a prescriptive grammar should only be enforced to the point where the lack of it impedes understanding.
What is different syntactically between these two sentences?
I wanted to go to.
I wanted to go with.
Both end in prepositions which is "wrong", but one does make sense. Additionally, the first leaves an ambiguity: "Did they mispell 'too' or did the forget to put the place they were going to?" The second sentence does leave out the information of who or what they were going with, but that would be provided by the context.
So, until we have a grammar checker that is able to understand context and determine when and if something makes sense, any attempt to enforce some arbitrary rules will be fundamentally flawed.
I'm a physicist by degree, electrical engineer by trade, and I encounter this same thing all the time. Most people's eyes glaze over. I'll either get the "I never understood that stuff" like you, as they quickly change the subject, or occasionally I'll get the look that's a mixture of awe and mutual understanding since they are also educated and know what it's like not to be able to talk to anybody about what you are passionate about.
Slashdot Mirror
For many people, those two things are reason enough to dual boot. It allows you to keep using your existing software, which makes the switch to Mac that much easier for people who have large libraries of Windows-only software.
I would also guess that the rare, deranged people who commit violent acts based on what they see in games and movies are just that: rare and deranged. These people wouldn't magically be happy, healthy, well adjusted people if there were no violent imagery in the media. Violence predates violence in the media by a couple hundred thousand years (or 5000 years, depending on who you ask). The only credence I give to the "the video game made me do it" claim is that the particular violence the person commits may be influenced by what they saw. An example of which was the kids who cut off their parents' heads after seeing something like that on The Sopranos. They might have only beat their parents to death instead of decapitating them if they hadn't seen that episode.
I used that in some of my physics labs ;)
Nothing more statistically meaningful than a single data point! Their powers of extrapolation are mind boggling!
It's only funny 'cause it's true.
I'm betting that taking a couple minute break every 30 minutes wasn't hurting anything either ;)
Amtrak lists it as a requirement, but in the past couple years of using it to commute it has never been enforced. The only time I have seen them ask for an ID was to issue a citation to somebody for riding without a ticket. I know anecdotes aren't evidence, but it's pretty clear that identity checking and security in general on trains is much more lax than at the airport. If somebody is that concerned with anonymous travel, buy a ticket in cash and rest reasonably assured that no one will ever know you were on the train.
I would argue that perceived anonymity is more important than whether it really exists.
People will do some crazy stuff when they think nobody is looking...
So are you trying to say it's a feature?
Except in the example you gave, the line is clear. The one kid beating up the other is committing a crime. It would be a better world if more people would step in and stop this kind of violence, but it seems that most will just turn their backs and ignore it because it's "not their business." I commend you for doing the right thing, even at the expense of your own safety. However, the kid in the OP was not committing a crime--the school was. Outside of the classroom, the school has no right to limit anybody's freedom of speech. They overstepped their bounds, and given they are an educational institution, they should know better than most the limits to their authority.
I don't know how prevalent it is, but I have known at least a few H1B folks who came to the US either for college or just after. They started in the work force, then after garnering some experiencing and saving up a bunch of money, they moved back to their home country where they could live in relative wealth and comfort. If there is a large enough number of people that do this, you effectively skew the average H1B salary lower, as they have relatively more entry level positions than experienced positions compared to native workers.
But, since the plural of anecdote isn't data, this may be unfounded. It would be interesting to see a comparison of H1B salaries compared to native salaries for a given level of experience. I'm betting it's still lower, but it may not be as drastic as the OP indicates.
Animated and/or noisy ads are annoying. I AdBlock them with reckless abandon.
Depending on the site, many ads may be sexual in nature, which is not so work friendly, regardless of the main content of the page (joke sites with videos or images are a good example)
Many are aesthetically displeasing. If they don't blend well with the site, I generally block them to save my eyes the discomfort.
Many ads are done in Flash, which require more bandwidth to download and more resources to run. They can also be used to circumvent pop-up blockers. Because of the annoyance factor, I block these on general principle, even if a particular Flash ad isn't too intrusive.
And since the OP asked, I no longer watch live TV. By using TiVo and the 30-second skip feature, I never see more than a few seconds worth of commercials in a half-hour of television. Television commercials make me feel violent in ways that the GTA series never could.
There are a couple experimental techniques useful to try to isolate behavior variation due to genetics and environment.
1) Identical twins raised together and apart. Identical genes, but variation in environment. Acts to isolate variation in behavior due to genetics.
2) Adoptive siblings raised together and apart. Genes are completely uncorrelated to other siblings, which acts to isolate variation in behavior due to environment.
Genetically speaking, fraternal twins are the same as non-twin siblings. Environment may play more of a role with non-twin siblings if there is a systematic change in how a child is treated based on age. This still yields useful information, but not as useful as the two extremes listed above. The problem with any kind of study that uses twin studies is getting a large enough sample set to be statistically meaningful. The second item above in particular requires a very large sample size, because while we know identical twins have 100% identical genes, we can't say for sure that kids raised in the same household will have 100% identical environments.
This is what always made the most sense to me as well. Not massive enough to be roughly spherical? Then it's an asteroid or comet. Planets orbit a star. Satelites/moons orbit a planet. I suppose it could get trickier if you have planetoids orbiting each other with their center of mass orbiting a star (which one is the moon and which the planet? Are they both planets? Both moons?), but I imagine a suitable name could be created to describe this seemingly rare condition.
If the new Yahoo mail is better than Gmail, then google will have to improve their offering. Webmail service was a pretty stagnant cesspool until google stepped in. The preexisting providers (Yahoo, MSN, et al) were far too happy maintaining the status quo. A webmail provider war can only be good for us consumers. Yay capitalism.
I can see your point there :) I was considering my only use of a grammar checker: MS Word's for high school and college papers. In that case, grammar checkers are all but useless, since they tend to force the writer through hoops to get those green squiggly lines to disappear, resulting in a stilted, unreadable paper.
Even so, for your case, the grammar checker could only handle very basic errors without the ability to understand context and content. Given the "Why you go there?" example you used, it would be very difficult for a program to do anything but flag the sentence as wrong without knowing something about the context it is used in. A student wouldn't likely know how to fix the statement without some insight into why it doesn't make sense and some idea of what a correct version would look like. Perhaps a more advanced student would do fine with a pull-down list of options like "Why are you going there?" and "Why do you go there?" and decide which one to use, but a beginning student wouldn't likely know the difference. Although, I suppose there would be some value in letting them know they made an error at all. I have no experience teaching a foreign language, so I'll have to defer to your experience on that one.
Personal Attack
I understand your point. They perhaps weren't the best examples, but it can be hard to come up with simple ones on short notice :)
Part of my point was that the second example is only incomplete by the standards set forth in a textbook. There are many examples in English and other languages where leaving out or implying a piece of information is perfectly acceptable. The imperative form in many European languages is a good example ("Go to the store!" has an implied "you" at the beginning.), but no one would claim that this should be flagged for further review because it made it into the text book as "proper" grammar. In practice, people end sentences with prepositions all the time, and it is not an impediment to understanding in most cases. Also, since prescriptive grammar is largely unused in actual speech and writing, there would be enough noise in the results of a grammar checker that flagged all these instances as to render them meaningless.
I'm making the argument that the only metric that should be used for correct grammar is: "Can this be easily understood by a member of the target audience." If it passes this test, then, as far as I'm concerned, it's correct. Anything more than that and you can actually impede understanding because you are no longer writing in a form that is actually used in normal language. (Note that this is very context sensitive. Good grammar for a physics journal is very different from good grammar for the liner notes of a CD which is very different from good grammar for a web forum.)
more important *distinction* between
I should have been more careful in a post about grammar. *G*
This could probably be easily done, but it neglects the more important between prescriptive grammar (what you get in a text book with all the really weird rules about where to put commas and why your participles shouldn't dangle) and gramamr as it is actually used (I'm always one to happily split an infinitive). In my opinion, a prescriptive grammar should only be enforced to the point where the lack of it impedes understanding.
What is different syntactically between these two sentences?
I wanted to go to.
I wanted to go with.
Both end in prepositions which is "wrong", but one does make sense. Additionally, the first leaves an ambiguity: "Did they mispell 'too' or did the forget to put the place they were going to?" The second sentence does leave out the information of who or what they were going with, but that would be provided by the context.
So, until we have a grammar checker that is able to understand context and determine when and if something makes sense, any attempt to enforce some arbitrary rules will be fundamentally flawed.
Which menu is Ctrl-H in? I can't find it in my browser.
I'm a physicist by degree, electrical engineer by trade, and I encounter this same thing all the time. Most people's eyes glaze over. I'll either get the "I never understood that stuff" like you, as they quickly change the subject, or occasionally I'll get the look that's a mixture of awe and mutual understanding since they are also educated and know what it's like not to be able to talk to anybody about what you are passionate about.
Yeah, well us 'mericans invented the Navajo cipher, so there! /Tongue planted firmly in cheek