In Alfred Bester's novel The Stars, My Destination, there was a colony in which everyone used special symbols in their names to represent groups of letters, such as $ (Buck), S&4d, Br+, Gr/, N8, <ter, C>, W@son, _bara, etc.
English grammar does not have genders, which is why most people don't realize how screwed up this sounds (because they don't know what the word gender means). In many (most?) other languages words have geneders, e.g. in French a table is of feminine gender and in Russian it's masculine. Gender is purely a grammar term. Confusing the words "gender" and "sex" is equivalent to using "it" when referring to a person.
Actually, English does have gender, at least vestigal forms of it. I once got into hot water when an e-mail system I wrote spat out the error message "Judy... has security locked his mailbox".
Imagine having a commonly used pr0n word in your name.
Years ago, I had a friend who grew up in Harlem. He said that he had classmates whose mothers gave them names like Chlamydia and Gonhorrea, because they sounded cool (and they didn't know what they really meant).
If he was really observant, he might have noticed that rebooting the machine would have shown the BIOS POST messages upside down as well, indicating a hardware problem right from the start.
This is obviously aimed at companies. I'm sure IBM, GM, Ford, Microsoft, etc. have no intentions of going anywhere and $1000-$3000 for 100 years of domain registration comes out of petty cash for them.
And it's good insurance; some bureaucrat forgets to mail an annual $10 checque, and a squatter grabs www.microsoft.com for the next century...
Looks like he didn't read Google's terms of service...
IANAL, but this seems to be saying that they are not liable for anything Google serves up.
Not at all. All the TOS means is that if HE looks something up on Google, they aren't responsible for the accuracy of what they serve HIM. But that isn't what he's complaining about. He's complaining that if ANYONE ELSE googles him, Google is libeling him to THEM. This would happen even if he never went to the Google site, and never saw the TOS. Terms of service cannot possibly be binding on a third party.
Isaac Asimov wrote a story called 'A Feeling of Power' (also reprinted as 'A Long Forgotten Technique') that takes place in an advanced society in which all calculations are performed by machines. One day, a bored technician figures out how to add without a calculator. He theorizes that long ago, man must have had to perform calculations without machines, so he goes about trying to re-invent other machine-free calculating techniques. The ability to compute without relying on machines gives him a great feeling of power.
He also writes: The best examples of RPG improvements are seen in Freedom Force and Star Wars: KOTOR. In both of these games, if one of your party members reaches zero health, he is just knocked out of the fight, not killed outright. This unrealistic but wonderful improvement results in better gameplay, because now the battles are more evenly matched, and you can keep fighting, even if you are down to just one man, instead of reloading every time the weakest member of your party gets killed. Perhaps he should go back a decade and play the Final Fantasy games for SNES before lauding these as modern 'improvments'. I just hope this guy doesn't work for the U.S. Patent Office.
Slashdot Mirror
"Bioware releases free community expansion pack"
Well, this part at least is true; it was announced for quite a while beforehand, and finally released on March 24, 2004.
In Alfred Bester's novel The Stars, My Destination, there was a colony in which everyone used special symbols in their names to represent groups of letters, such as $ (Buck), S&4d, Br+, Gr/, N8, <ter, C>, W@son, _bara, etc.
English grammar does not have genders, which is why most people don't realize how screwed up this sounds (because they don't know what the word gender means). In many (most?) other languages words have geneders, e.g. in French a table is of feminine gender and in Russian it's masculine. Gender is purely a grammar term. Confusing the words "gender" and "sex" is equivalent to using "it" when referring to a person.
... has security locked his mailbox".
Actually, English does have gender, at least vestigal forms of it. I once got into hot water when an e-mail system I wrote spat out the error message "Judy
unless you expect your first-born to be either masculine or feminine. :)
Well I was kind of hoping for one or the other.
I think he meant that he was hoping for male or female rather than masculine or feminine
Imagine having a commonly used pr0n word in your name.
Years ago, I had a friend who grew up in Harlem. He said that he had classmates whose mothers gave them names like Chlamydia and Gonhorrea, because they sounded cool (and they didn't know what they really meant).
If he was really observant, he might have noticed that rebooting the machine would have shown the BIOS POST messages upside down as well, indicating a hardware problem right from the start.
I could just never figure it out... Why on earth would a frog want to cross the road?
Because he was nailed to a chicken?
The site forbids image linking of images; you can see it here.
This is obviously aimed at companies. I'm sure IBM, GM, Ford, Microsoft, etc. have no intentions of going anywhere and $1000-$3000 for 100 years of domain registration comes out of petty cash for them.
And it's good insurance; some bureaucrat forgets to mail an annual $10 checque, and a squatter grabs www.microsoft.com for the next century...
Looks like he didn't read Google's terms of service...
IANAL, but this seems to be saying that they are not liable for anything Google serves up.
Not at all. All the TOS means is that if HE looks something up on Google, they aren't responsible for the accuracy of what they serve HIM. But that isn't what he's complaining about. He's complaining that if ANYONE ELSE googles him, Google is libeling him to THEM. This would happen even if he never went to the Google site, and never saw the TOS. Terms of service cannot possibly be binding on a third party.
Isaac Asimov wrote a story called 'A Feeling of Power' (also reprinted as 'A Long Forgotten Technique') that takes place in an advanced society in which all calculations are performed by machines. One day, a bored technician figures out how to add without a calculator. He theorizes that long ago, man must have had to perform calculations without machines, so he goes about trying to re-invent other machine-free calculating techniques. The ability to compute without relying on machines gives him a great feeling of power.
You don't watch the same movie for 12+ hours a day every day...
You obviously don't have young children.
He also writes: The best examples of RPG improvements are seen in Freedom Force and Star Wars: KOTOR. In both of these games, if one of your party members reaches zero health, he is just knocked out of the fight, not killed outright. This unrealistic but wonderful improvement results in better gameplay, because now the battles are more evenly matched, and you can keep fighting, even if you are down to just one man, instead of reloading every time the weakest member of your party gets killed. Perhaps he should go back a decade and play the Final Fantasy games for SNES before lauding these as modern 'improvments'. I just hope this guy doesn't work for the U.S. Patent Office.