While cooking dinner, my dog threw up on the carpet.
It's a correct, grammar wise, but nearly everyone who reads it sees what's wrong right away.
(hehe..."a correct, grammar wise"...but I digress.)
A) What's wrong? Oh, are you making an assumption that dogs can't cook dinner? How do you know I'm not writing a childrens' story about magic dogs? And no, I'm not being pedantic. How do you know that a participle is indeed dangling without having massive amounts of context (so much that you end up with a comprehender rather than just a grammar checker)? Your example assumes that everyone knows dogs can't cook dinner and people can. Syntactically, "While cooking dinner, my wife threw up on the carpet" has exactly the same structure, but it's more correct. And I won't even start to analyze "While throwing up on my dog, dinner cooked the carpet."
And what of the sentence "The price of a pound of pork has risen higher than a Euro?" Does it mean that pork has increased its cost by more than a Euro? That the change in pork's price (in USD, say) has been greater than the change in the Euro's exchange rate? That the pork price on a certain graph has physically risen by more than the diameter of a Euro coin? And of those possibilities, which ones make the sentence wrong? (I think that with sense 1 it requires "more" instead of "higher", and that with sense 2 it lacks the verb "has"/"has risen" at the end, and that sense 3 is barely acceptable. But that's still my opinion.)
B) How do you fix it? Most people would change it to "While cooking....", but what's the basis for that? The only hint is that it's my dog, but logically there's no reason for me to also be cooking dinner. It's just a convenient assumption - given the existence of no other cooking-capable entities in the sentence. But who restricts it to the sentence?
The point is that we're looking for a grammar checker - something that can figure out, with some small comprehension, where one phrase ends and the next begins. And it should be of sufficient quality that if it can't figure out something, chances are that most people won't parse it, either. We are not looking for a sense checker or a comprehender.
Of course. That's because a wildcard response doesn't mean that it overrides existing entries. Is it worth mentioning that stuff.uk.com doesn't redirect to uk.com?
(In this case it's because the two sites you mentioned have been blocked off - they've been registered by uk.com themselves but don't point anywhere. That's why you get a "cannot be found" error, whereas real sites have a webpage and nonexistent sites trigger the wildcard.)
I know you're joking, but I'm going to repeat that point seriously.
What's with the inflammatory headlines? It's not Windows per se that's causing the incompatibilities, just that the system's too heterogeneous. If they went with a regular Windows + Windows Server domain + IIS +.NET solution, they would've had fewer problems than they do now. Same with using an all-*NIX solution as they plan to be looking at.
I'm not suggesting that an MS solution would be better. And I'm definitely not suggesting that monoculture is the answer. All I'm suggesting is that when two things are incompatible, Slashdot has a nasty habit of jumping to the conclusion that the MS side is the problem and we need to switch to an open-source utopia. Of course, MS may very well be the problem, but you can't make such a conclusion without enough evidence - which there wasn't.
And what's with the color scheme in apache./..org? Is this Mardi Gras Slashdot or something?
It's cow-orkers, not cow-workers! Apart from the fact that you added a letter to coworkers, you're implying that people who work cows (milk them? slaughter them?) have advice for UMAX scanners.
Black Panther Ah, a hero named after a hyper-racist group. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Are you posting this from the 1950's? Did someone invent timetravel:// and not tell me? Please, that argument isn't even worth responding to.
No, but there are still racists and similar idiots. in our society. Someone will complain about having a movie called Black Panther, the ACLU will get involved on who-knows-which side (the free-speechers or the minorities, flip a coin), the FCC will censor it, the White House will refuse to make a comment, the fundies will say something, the NAACP will be kinda embarrassed, David Duke will issue a statement, Howard Stern will announce Black Panther Day and get into trouble, and Osama will use the whole incident in his next propaganda tape.
It doesn't matter that the Black Panthers are gone. You just can't touch some things.
It's like the story of the university that had a problem with a "picnic" because some black guy heard an urban legend that the word comes from white plantation owners "pick"ing a "nig"ger to lynch for amusement, while they were eating. Even after proving the urban legend false, the university ran into trouble and renamed it an "outing." Whereupon the local gays took offense with that name (who knows if they did it honestly or as a joke) and the university had to leave the event unnamed.
Of course "picnic" has nothing to do with lynchings, and "outing" has nothing to do with the closet. But the general populace is statistically dumber than Slashdot (which is really scary when you think about it).
over the age of 18, apparently. I have an account with them but I couldn't figure out what to do with it since a bunch of the activities require you to be 18 or older.
Normally I wouldn't complain (TopCoder sounds great, why else would I have registered?), but the article was about high school programming competitions. In fact, the SEARCC that he mentioned has a requirement of being under 18.
The restrictions in the HESSLA prohibit specific activities that are inexcusable: violations of human rights, and introduction of features that spy on the user. People might ask why we do not declare an exception for these particular restrictions--why do we stick to the general policy of rejecting all restrictions on use and on the functionality of modified versions? (emphasis mine)
If we were ever going to make an exception to our principles of free software, here would be the place to do it. But it would be a mistake to do so: it would weaken our general stand, and would achieve nothing.... Also, at least under US law, a copyright-based source license can't restrict use of the program; such a restriction is not enforcible anyway.
The article doesn't say how they're going to enforce this, but either they can just rant about it in classic FSF style and get ignored, or they can restrict the license to people who don't patent, cause a great controversy, and make people stick with GPLv2 out of safety - while violating their own principles in the act.
By the way, this isn't Stallman that said this, it's the president of FSF Europe who's somehow even more radical than Stallman (I didn't think that was possible).
but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts,
Yeah--good luck with that. metafont->ttf conversion is very tricky. Furthermore, the journals don't really like weird fonts (once they get the DOCs, they often strip ALL formatting). You can go metafont->postscript image->wmf/emf. It is far from ideal
Let me ask...why do you need (or even have) custom fonts if you're publishing in a journal which will want its own house style anyway? If you're using them for text (in any language) or common symbols, use the journal's font, not yours. If you're using them for obscure symbols or non-text hacks with fonts, just render it into a picture and be done with it.
And by saying TeX but not LaTeX, are you implying you're doing something in pure TeX? What can you do in there that can't be done in LaTeX and won't make an editor want to reformat it and can be reasonably exported to Word without losing the reason for it being in TeX?
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same.
Oh really. Then I suppose there's no need for multiple Bible translations. We can all make do with the King James Version, because that's completely infallible, right? And there's no controversy, is there?
And there's no need for the study of theology. Because whatever they decided back in the council of Nicaea or Trent or wherever, remains valid. And there's no such thing as Protestants, because the Bible never changes and all Christians believe the same thing.
At least with science we have mainstream science, the researchers who have strange theories because they're at the cutting edge of science, and the crackpots. With religion we have all these schisms with no obvious way to rejoin them.
The staticness of the Bible cannot in any sense be used to imply its inerrancy; neither can the evolution (no pun intended) of science be interpreted to mean that it is inaccurate. Science has the ability to adapt, and we would think that it's improving itself. A belief in Biblical inerrancy (notwithstanding that the Bible is self-contradictory at points and updates itself) would force one to refuse cheeseburgers. And I can't believe that you've never eaten a cheeseburger.
Why not live in a happy moral time, with good families, and worthwhile occupations.
Hahahaha. You want to live in a theocracy? Very well then, spend some time in Iran and tell me how you liked it. And if you object to Iran, name any theocracy that's ever existed that you like. I guarantee Iran's better.
You're right that it says it's in Seoul, so it would be in South Korea.
(You're completely mistaken if you think that North and South Korea would want anything to do with each other. Here's a hint: there's troops on each side of the border between them.)
Copyright law is unjust? Very well. I'll go take a copy of Linux, rebrand it, make some improvements, and sell it without releasing the source.
Sorry, copyright law is not unjust. It's fair. What's unfair is laws like the DMCA (which isn't really a copyright law, it's a law about breaking encoding and making things that could be used to break copyright) and, moreover, DRM and other stupid measures people take to enforce their copyright (often preventing users from exercising some rights) and the inability of many industries to accept the market instead of asking the government to, in effect, mandate higher prices than the market would support.
TG should've written "The Associated Press has an article about a recent study (English PDF) released by a Chinese Internet research group that shows Google losing market share to their Chinese rival, Baidu.com. From the article: 'The survey, conducted by the Beijing-based China Internet Network Information Center, reported that Baidu.com Inc. boosted its market share in Beijing by 10.8 percentage points to 52 percent. Google Inc.'s share was at 33 percent, as the American Internet search engine kept its customer base steady while the overall market grew, said the survey, seen Tuesday on CNNIC's Web site.'" Factual analysis or results driven by self interest? Or just another interesting article posted to Slashdot with editorial opinions but no editorial checking?
The report itself has a pie chart with the following breakdown: Baidu 51.5%, Google 32.9%, Sohu 4.6%, Sino 4.0%, Yahoo 3.7%, and 3.3% other in Beijing; 43.9% Baidu vs. 38.2% in Shanghai; and 48.0% Baidu vs. 28.7% Google in Guangzhou.
However, the next page breaks down searches by category, and Baidu is only in the lead (55% vs. 15% Google) in downloadable music. In all other categories, Google is in the lead. Indeed, 60% of users who use Google primary and Baidu secondary say that the reason is Baidu's music search.
This confirms that Google is a better (more popular at least) search engine, of course, but Baidu is either better at searching Chinese music or, as another poster said, Baidu can link to MP3s without the RIAA being able to do anything about it.
Yes, violating the warranty is a crime. If the customer finds a problem with the equipment and the manufacturer does not uphold the warranty, that's a contract violation.
What you probably meant was voiding the warranty, which simply invalidates the contract (not breaks it). The contract goes something like this: "If you don't modify the unit and it breaks, then we have to replace it." By modifying the unit, you haven't violated anything, you've just made the warranty irrelevant.
What happened here, by the way, is that Lexmark marked the box with a similar contract, except in reverse: "If you buy this cartridge at a reduced price, you have to return it to us for refilling." Similarly, there's no problem with buying the cartridge at full price, only with failing to bring it back to Lexmark's refillers.
It doesn't matter who's the evil corporation or who's the innocent consumer. It only matters which side promised to do something provided the other side did something else. Then the first side is the one capable of violating the contract.
Galaxies seem to behave as there were more matter in them than is actually visible.
Uh...galaxies have been doing this for years (or more accurately, we've known about this phenomenon for years). There's plenty of theories from Dark matter (there actually is matter there, it just isn't the type our equipment sees directly) to Modified Newtonian dynamics (force is proportional to acceleration^2 at low acceleration, thereby changing a couple of important formulas, and we haven't noticed this on Earth because Earth's gravity is too big of an acceleration). Adding multiple dimensions and string theory is just another theory, that seems as valid as the rest given the data. Until one has convincing proof or disproof of one over and above the others, we can't really say "evidence of 6 dimensions" or "evidence of dark matter" or whatever.
But who am I kidding, most of you dont like Pat Robertson anyway
What reason is there to like him?
I'm speaking as a Christian here. Is this guy any different from a subversive hellbent on libeling the term "Christian"?
There is no anti-Christian rhetoric here except yours. If Mr. Robertson gets off the air, he will do a great service for Christianity. The religion is not about killing some people and condemning the rest. It's about loving your enemies.
No, he said he was going to bury Eric Schmidt. And I don't suppose he was using it in the sense that Khrushchev reportedly used it (i.e., We will outlast you and be present at your funeral). The American sense implies killing the person in order to bury him.
If you're going to give to a religious organization, give to an established church's relief effort (shoutout to UMCOR, since I go to a Methodist church). A lot of these strange organizations like Operation Blessing that you mentioned take a percentage off for "administrative expenses" - which in this case appears to be the Robertson family.
Not that I know that Operation Blessing is necessarily corrupt, just that Pat Robertson isn't exactly the most trustworthy guy (seriously, what "Christian" goes around asking to killauthorities? but I digress), and this type of organizational structure is also not that trustworthy. UMCOR, on the other hand, is volunteer run, and all its administrative expenses come from the regular offering plate in Methodist churches. Donations to UMCOR go 100% to the people who need them.
Slashdot Mirror
While cooking dinner, my dog threw up on the carpet.
It's a correct, grammar wise, but nearly everyone who reads it sees what's wrong right away.
(hehe..."a correct, grammar wise"...but I digress.)
A) What's wrong? Oh, are you making an assumption that dogs can't cook dinner? How do you know I'm not writing a childrens' story about magic dogs? And no, I'm not being pedantic. How do you know that a participle is indeed dangling without having massive amounts of context (so much that you end up with a comprehender rather than just a grammar checker)? Your example assumes that everyone knows dogs can't cook dinner and people can. Syntactically, "While cooking dinner, my wife threw up on the carpet" has exactly the same structure, but it's more correct. And I won't even start to analyze "While throwing up on my dog, dinner cooked the carpet."
And what of the sentence "The price of a pound of pork has risen higher than a Euro?" Does it mean that pork has increased its cost by more than a Euro? That the change in pork's price (in USD, say) has been greater than the change in the Euro's exchange rate? That the pork price on a certain graph has physically risen by more than the diameter of a Euro coin? And of those possibilities, which ones make the sentence wrong? (I think that with sense 1 it requires "more" instead of "higher", and that with sense 2 it lacks the verb "has"/"has risen" at the end, and that sense 3 is barely acceptable. But that's still my opinion.)
B) How do you fix it? Most people would change it to "While cooking....", but what's the basis for that? The only hint is that it's my dog, but logically there's no reason for me to also be cooking dinner. It's just a convenient assumption - given the existence of no other cooking-capable entities in the sentence. But who restricts it to the sentence?
The point is that we're looking for a grammar checker - something that can figure out, with some small comprehension, where one phrase ends and the next begins. And it should be of sufficient quality that if it can't figure out something, chances are that most people won't parse it, either. We are not looking for a sense checker or a comprehender.
Of course. That's because a wildcard response doesn't mean that it overrides existing entries. Is it worth mentioning that stuff.uk.com doesn't redirect to uk.com?
(In this case it's because the two sites you mentioned have been blocked off - they've been registered by uk.com themselves but don't point anywhere. That's why you get a "cannot be found" error, whereas real sites have a webpage and nonexistent sites trigger the wildcard.)
I know you're joking, but I'm going to repeat that point seriously.
.NET solution, they would've had fewer problems than they do now. Same with using an all-*NIX solution as they plan to be looking at.
What's with the inflammatory headlines? It's not Windows per se that's causing the incompatibilities, just that the system's too heterogeneous. If they went with a regular Windows + Windows Server domain + IIS +
I'm not suggesting that an MS solution would be better. And I'm definitely not suggesting that monoculture is the answer. All I'm suggesting is that when two things are incompatible, Slashdot has a nasty habit of jumping to the conclusion that the MS side is the problem and we need to switch to an open-source utopia. Of course, MS may very well be the problem, but you can't make such a conclusion without enough evidence - which there wasn't.
And what's with the color scheme in apache./..org? Is this Mardi Gras Slashdot or something?
cow-workers
It's cow-orkers, not cow-workers! Apart from the fact that you added a letter to coworkers, you're implying that people who work cows (milk them? slaughter them?) have advice for UMAX scanners.
UMOO scanners would be more like it.
Black Panther
Ah, a hero named after a hyper-racist group. I don't see anything wrong with that.
Are you posting this from the 1950's? Did someone invent timetravel:// and not tell me? Please, that argument isn't even worth responding to.
No, but there are still racists and similar idiots. in our society. Someone will complain about having a movie called Black Panther, the ACLU will get involved on who-knows-which side (the free-speechers or the minorities, flip a coin), the FCC will censor it, the White House will refuse to make a comment, the fundies will say something, the NAACP will be kinda embarrassed, David Duke will issue a statement, Howard Stern will announce Black Panther Day and get into trouble, and Osama will use the whole incident in his next propaganda tape.
It doesn't matter that the Black Panthers are gone. You just can't touch some things.
It's like the story of the university that had a problem with a "picnic" because some black guy heard an urban legend that the word comes from white plantation owners "pick"ing a "nig"ger to lynch for amusement, while they were eating. Even after proving the urban legend false, the university ran into trouble and renamed it an "outing." Whereupon the local gays took offense with that name (who knows if they did it honestly or as a joke) and the university had to leave the event unnamed.
Of course "picnic" has nothing to do with lynchings, and "outing" has nothing to do with the closet. But the general populace is statistically dumber than Slashdot (which is really scary when you think about it).
TopCoder is always looking for more members
over the age of 18, apparently. I have an account with them but I couldn't figure out what to do with it since a bunch of the activities require you to be 18 or older.
Normally I wouldn't complain (TopCoder sounds great, why else would I have registered?), but the article was about high school programming competitions. In fact, the SEARCC that he mentioned has a requirement of being under 18.
Dr. Strange
Who?
Well, if they said they'd make a superhero movie about Dr. Who, I'd probably say, "Dr. Who? Strange."
They rejected a moral license, so why are they making a political one?
... Also, at least under US law, a copyright-based source license can't restrict use of the program; such a restriction is not enforcible anyway.
Here's the relevant parts:
The restrictions in the HESSLA prohibit specific activities that are inexcusable: violations of human rights, and introduction of features that spy on the user. People might ask why we do not declare an exception for these particular restrictions--why do we stick to the general policy of rejecting all restrictions on use and on the functionality of modified versions? (emphasis mine)
If we were ever going to make an exception to our principles of free software, here would be the place to do it. But it would be a mistake to do so: it would weaken our general stand, and would achieve nothing.
The article doesn't say how they're going to enforce this, but either they can just rant about it in classic FSF style and get ignored, or they can restrict the license to people who don't patent, cause a great controversy, and make people stick with GPLv2 out of safety - while violating their own principles in the act.
By the way, this isn't Stallman that said this, it's the president of FSF Europe who's somehow even more radical than Stallman (I didn't think that was possible).
Does anyone have any idea what someone like that should be making?
A request to hire a second IT guy. You can't do everything reliably, even if you were paid to do everything.
but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts,
Yeah--good luck with that. metafont->ttf conversion is very tricky. Furthermore, the journals don't really like weird fonts (once they get the DOCs, they often strip ALL formatting). You can go metafont->postscript image->wmf/emf. It is far from ideal
Let me ask...why do you need (or even have) custom fonts if you're publishing in a journal which will want its own house style anyway? If you're using them for text (in any language) or common symbols, use the journal's font, not yours. If you're using them for obscure symbols or non-text hacks with fonts, just render it into a picture and be done with it.
And by saying TeX but not LaTeX, are you implying you're doing something in pure TeX? What can you do in there that can't be done in LaTeX and won't make an editor want to reformat it and can be reasonably exported to Word without losing the reason for it being in TeX?
One word: Halo. Without the 2. It was a launch game, remember?
Sure, Halo 2 had a better engine and had Live, but Halo 1 was pretty successful.
Did you ever notice how science changes its anwsers so damn often. But the Bible stays the same.
Oh really. Then I suppose there's no need for multiple Bible translations. We can all make do with the King James Version, because that's completely infallible, right? And there's no controversy, is there?
And there's no need for the study of theology. Because whatever they decided back in the council of Nicaea or Trent or wherever, remains valid. And there's no such thing as Protestants, because the Bible never changes and all Christians believe the same thing.
At least with science we have mainstream science, the researchers who have strange theories because they're at the cutting edge of science, and the crackpots. With religion we have all these schisms with no obvious way to rejoin them.
The staticness of the Bible cannot in any sense be used to imply its inerrancy; neither can the evolution (no pun intended) of science be interpreted to mean that it is inaccurate. Science has the ability to adapt, and we would think that it's improving itself. A belief in Biblical inerrancy (notwithstanding that the Bible is self-contradictory at points and updates itself) would force one to refuse cheeseburgers. And I can't believe that you've never eaten a cheeseburger.
Why not live in a happy moral time, with good families, and worthwhile occupations.
Hahahaha. You want to live in a theocracy? Very well then, spend some time in Iran and tell me how you liked it. And if you object to Iran, name any theocracy that's ever existed that you like. I guarantee Iran's better.
You're right that it says it's in Seoul, so it would be in South Korea.
(You're completely mistaken if you think that North and South Korea would want anything to do with each other. Here's a hint: there's troops on each side of the border between them.)
Copyright law is unjust? Very well. I'll go take a copy of Linux, rebrand it, make some improvements, and sell it without releasing the source.
Sorry, copyright law is not unjust. It's fair. What's unfair is laws like the DMCA (which isn't really a copyright law, it's a law about breaking encoding and making things that could be used to break copyright) and, moreover, DRM and other stupid measures people take to enforce their copyright (often preventing users from exercising some rights) and the inability of many industries to accept the market instead of asking the government to, in effect, mandate higher prices than the market would support.
TG should've written "The Associated Press has an article about a recent study (English PDF) released by a Chinese Internet research group that shows Google losing market share to their Chinese rival, Baidu.com. From the article: 'The survey, conducted by the Beijing-based China Internet Network Information Center, reported that Baidu.com Inc. boosted its market share in Beijing by 10.8 percentage points to 52 percent. Google Inc.'s share was at 33 percent, as the American Internet search engine kept its customer base steady while the overall market grew, said the survey, seen Tuesday on CNNIC's Web site.'" Factual analysis or results driven by self interest? Or just another interesting article posted to Slashdot with editorial opinions but no editorial checking?
The report itself has a pie chart with the following breakdown: Baidu 51.5%, Google 32.9%, Sohu 4.6%, Sino 4.0%, Yahoo 3.7%, and 3.3% other in Beijing; 43.9% Baidu vs. 38.2% in Shanghai; and 48.0% Baidu vs. 28.7% Google in Guangzhou.
However, the next page breaks down searches by category, and Baidu is only in the lead (55% vs. 15% Google) in downloadable music. In all other categories, Google is in the lead. Indeed, 60% of users who use Google primary and Baidu secondary say that the reason is Baidu's music search.
This confirms that Google is a better (more popular at least) search engine, of course, but Baidu is either better at searching Chinese music or, as another poster said, Baidu can link to MP3s without the RIAA being able to do anything about it.
So violating the warrantry is a crime now?
Yes, violating the warranty is a crime. If the customer finds a problem with the equipment and the manufacturer does not uphold the warranty, that's a contract violation.
What you probably meant was voiding the warranty, which simply invalidates the contract (not breaks it). The contract goes something like this: "If you don't modify the unit and it breaks, then we have to replace it." By modifying the unit, you haven't violated anything, you've just made the warranty irrelevant.
What happened here, by the way, is that Lexmark marked the box with a similar contract, except in reverse: "If you buy this cartridge at a reduced price, you have to return it to us for refilling." Similarly, there's no problem with buying the cartridge at full price, only with failing to bring it back to Lexmark's refillers.
It doesn't matter who's the evil corporation or who's the innocent consumer. It only matters which side promised to do something provided the other side did something else. Then the first side is the one capable of violating the contract.
Galaxies seem to behave as there were more matter in them than is actually visible.
Uh...galaxies have been doing this for years (or more accurately, we've known about this phenomenon for years). There's plenty of theories from Dark matter (there actually is matter there, it just isn't the type our equipment sees directly) to Modified Newtonian dynamics (force is proportional to acceleration^2 at low acceleration, thereby changing a couple of important formulas, and we haven't noticed this on Earth because Earth's gravity is too big of an acceleration). Adding multiple dimensions and string theory is just another theory, that seems as valid as the rest given the data. Until one has convincing proof or disproof of one over and above the others, we can't really say "evidence of 6 dimensions" or "evidence of dark matter" or whatever.
But who am I kidding, most of you dont like Pat Robertson anyway
What reason is there to like him?
I'm speaking as a Christian here. Is this guy any different from a subversive hellbent on libeling the term "Christian"?
There is no anti-Christian rhetoric here except yours. If Mr. Robertson gets off the air, he will do a great service for Christianity. The religion is not about killing some people and condemning the rest. It's about loving your enemies.
No, he said he was going to bury Eric Schmidt. And I don't suppose he was using it in the sense that Khrushchev reportedly used it (i.e., We will outlast you and be present at your funeral). The American sense implies killing the person in order to bury him.
Amen. It was cute when Yahoo! had an exclamation point, but Joomla! is just kinda weird.
the Mar's missions
I'm too shocked to make a proper grammar Nazi rant here.
Heh, I read that as "Women are self-propagating, rely on security holes, and are pretty rare, even on Windows."
Why should the hash be the same every time? Even garage-door openers implement this kind of challenge-response system.
Passwords never travel the wire. Only responses to challenges travel the wire, and that only when the challenger is identified as legitimate.
If you're going to give to a religious organization, give to an established church's relief effort (shoutout to UMCOR, since I go to a Methodist church). A lot of these strange organizations like Operation Blessing that you mentioned take a percentage off for "administrative expenses" - which in this case appears to be the Robertson family.
Not that I know that Operation Blessing is necessarily corrupt, just that Pat Robertson isn't exactly the most trustworthy guy (seriously, what "Christian" goes around asking to kill authorities? but I digress), and this type of organizational structure is also not that trustworthy. UMCOR, on the other hand, is volunteer run, and all its administrative expenses come from the regular offering plate in Methodist churches. Donations to UMCOR go 100% to the people who need them.
unmarked boxes in giant wharehouses
Is that supposed to be some portmanteau of "warehouse" and "where's it housed?"?