I'd like to point out that the absolute exchange rate ofa currency means exactly diddly. Take the Japanese Yen for instance. 1 USD = 111 JPY Does that mean its a weak currency?
The strength of a currency is related to the price stability relative to average prices in the zones it is most heavily used in. As the Euro currency has maintained excellent parity with the price of goods and services globally, it is considered a strong currency.
Really, the word "strong" is a misnomer. The correct word for describing a currency's merit relative to others is "stable". One could say that the Euro is taking over from the US currency not because it is becoming stronger, but because it is becoming more stable.
It is for this reason that the strongest currency and the only truly stable currency, is gold. Well sort of. After all, you can't eat the stuff. Nonetheless, it is about the only thing that has carried value throughout the ages and survived the rise and fall of empires. So, if you're worried about your piggy bank being made worthless by economic collapse associated with runaway inflation, buy gold. Not some high markup crappy necklace or ring, but bullion. Buy it at the market price, about $660US / ounce at the moment. 1 ounce is about 31g, with a small 1% or so margin for casting and your savings will be, well, worth their weight in gold.
Perhaps I'm just an old fart, but I remember the days before Athlon, when the K6 competed with the Pentium 2 and was the laughing stock of the CPU game. I remember a time when I thought AMD were going to go belly up at any moment. I remember a time when the only way you'd get an AMD CPU into a PC was by selling the PC to a gullible twit who didn't know a CPU from a pound of grapes.
No, Mr Insomniac, it is not the first time Intel made anything better than AMD, it'd just be the first time you can remember, son.
Islam does not "have" the word "infidel". Infidel is an english word, and just because a language has a word for a person who believes something else doesn't make that religion xenophobic or belligerent. I find your reasoning to be non-sensical at best.
On a few points, Islams does not preach that "everyone else is going to hell", in the Koran it states that only God can judge people worth of either heaven or hell.
Islam does preach tolerance, in fact the only time in history that Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together peacefully was under an Islamic state, the former Ottoman Empire (which was finally toppled by the onset of World War 1). Since then no real Islamic state has existed.
Saudi Arabia, Iran and other states that call themselves Islamic are really autocratic regimes that "cherry pick" the Islamic rules that suit them (such as the need for strong leadership and authority) while discarding others that don't (such as the governmental responsibility of complete transparency and perpetual subjection of leaders to the will of the people).
Do you actually know any Muslims personally? I think you'd find them to be surprisingly, well, normal.
To date around 35,000 Iraqi civillians have been killed in the Iraq war. That says nothing of the deaths due to lack of medical care, poor sanitation, food shortages, water distribution problems and the general shattered infrastructure.
Oh but now they're free of Saddam you cry!
Tell that to the 35,000 families now minus members. The US has killed more Iraqis in 2 years than Saddam could have in 10 of his lifetimes. The Iraqi people would have been all the happier without Wal-Mart brand democracy.
When conjugating "to be" for plural or singular you take the plurality of the subject. As the subject in this case is a collective noun, "group", it may seem that "are" is the appropriate form. But "group" is a singular collective noun, as dinstinct from "groups" for multiple groups. Because the noun "group" is singular, the singular conjugation of the "to be" verb is used, that being "is".
Here are some examples:
RIGHT: The group is stupid. WRONG: The group are stupid.
RIGHT: The bunch of grapes is rotten. WRONG: The bunch of grapes are rotten.
RIGHT: The Slashdot crowd is bad at grammar. WRONG: The Slashdot crowd are bad at grammar.
There are cases that may *appear* to be exceptions, and the one that comes to mind is that of the noun "people". People is plural for "person" and appears to be a singular collective noun just like group. However "people", as well as being a singular collective noun, (with plural form being "peoples", often used when referring to multiple distinct groups of people) is also a true plural of "person" ("persons" is not accepted as the correct word, although its use is becoming accepted into contemporary English):
RIGHT: "The group is screwed." WRONG: "The people is screwed."
RIGHT: "The people are screwed." WRONG: "The group are screwed."
Very possibly, I was merely stating the test's formulation, not the result that would be achieved were it applied to the facts of this case. I am not familiar with the minutia of the case and so cannot say whether the loan company's employee acted as a reasonable man in his circumstances with his information and experience would.
This actually makes sense, as the tort of negligence is a civil matter and where a defendant's (in this case the loan company) actions are being assessed, the law requires the standards of "the reasonable man" to be used..
Generally in cases such as this, the court will use the reasonable man test in a formulation which would likely sound like this: "would a reasonable man, in the position of the defendant with the same information and experience that the defendant can reasonably be expected to possess, have behaved in the same way".
It then comes down to the court hearing evidence from members of industry and other witnesses or even amici curi (meaning "friend of the court", which is a person who offers evidence but is not called officially by the plaintiff or defendant, and excuse me but my latin spelling is not that good). The judge then decides if the defendant acted the way a reasonable man should.
P.S., Yes i know the formulation of "reasonable man" is sexist, but hey, it's the law:P
Yes, but Gaim2 is utter tripe. It offers nothing over version 1.5 (except a veritable bucketload of new bugs), has a really ugly and non-intuitive interface and I have a pet hate in it's file browse dialog box.
There is no real good quality end to end VOIP solution in open source yet, which is surprising given that open source communities have done some really good work in audio and video compression (Vorbis, XviD) technologies as well as distributed networking (BitTorrent).
These technologies could be used, albeit with some adaptation, to form a completely open source VOIP/Video system that displaces traditional PSTN carriers as data networks become more and more robust and the SLAs on internet service providers approach those of PSTN operators.
My main arguments were (and I point out again I wrote that when I was 15) regarding the photos, I didn't really put much stock in 3rd and 4th hand information such as the stars argument (I knew of the dynamic range rebuttal) and I didn't even bother mentioning the ridiculous "flapping flag" argument.
There's one photo in particular that looks very, very faked. I'd tell you which it is but that'd require me opening a new browser and I can't be bothered:P I believe I highlighted it in my little rant.
I wonder what would happen if the software was used to process photos from the original Apollo moon landing. I am of the belief that there is a great possibility that at least the original Apollo landing was faked. Subsequent missions I am not too sure about, but I believe at least the first one was a fraud. I wrote this page up many years ago when I was in 10th grade at school. After reading it again just now, however, I really think I need to update it for new facts I've discovered and general maturity of presentation:)
I've read that document, many years ago when it was published. A millennia ago in web time. I also get referred to it regularly, as though it's some kind of brand new idea instead of the tired old elitist piece of trash that it is.
"Correctly" does not mean "only to a few private users". It means "correctly". One can send XHTML as text/html to IE and correctly to other browsers. Even that hopelessly outdated document you referred to says that IE's ability to read tag soup applied to a semantically and syntactically correct XHTML document will result in a perfectly acceptible rendering. I refer you to Appendix B in said document.
All the given reasons for not using XHTML are due to the chance of inadvertently breaking something with invalid code. So what you're really saying is:
Don't use XHTML coz you're not smart enough.
Sorry, I don't swallow this. If people are taught how and guided away from the carelessness with which web development is currently approached, XHTML can become what it was supposed to become: a stepping stone to more functional and powerful XML based markups.
Given that the market at the moment is trying to squeeze as much functionality out of existing technologies and the increasing use of new markup languages such as SVG and MathML, I would have thought that more and more books would start teaching XHTML/CSS.
XHTML will allow far better flexibility when adding in new functionality provided by new markup languages as well as better machine readability for the purposes of migrating pages at a later date. Tools to assist in developing syntactically valid XHTML pages are easily available and easy to use (such as Firefox's Validator tool as well as the old trusty http://validator.w3.org/), so the argument that novices may break XHTML pages by not writing valid code is not as potent as it once was.
The challenge now lies in teaching students to write semantically correct markup. This cannot be checked by a validator or any other machine tool, as semantically incorrect markup may still follow the rules of syntax. However, it can break a braille browser or a mobile device that degrades pages' layout for the purposes of displaying it on a small screen, rendering the information inaccessible to users of these devices.
XHTML's stricter syntax far more strongly encourages users to think in terms of content/presentation rather than just writing a blob of HTML to show a nicely formatted essay/blog/gallery. The more information is both syntactically and semantically correct, the more the web will be a friendly place for users of devices other than PCs, or users who are accessing the web from a device designed to aid a disability.
It is for these reasons, forward compatibility and accessibility, that I think that XHTML should start being taught. I always hear it argued, when I recommend XHTML to a would-be developer, that "XHTML is not understood" and "it breaks pages if used incorrectly". Well, help users to understand, and teach them to use it correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely offtopic, but meh:
I'd like to point out that the absolute exchange rate ofa currency means exactly diddly. Take the Japanese Yen for instance. 1 USD = 111 JPY Does that mean its a weak currency?
The strength of a currency is related to the price stability relative to average prices in the zones it is most heavily used in. As the Euro currency has maintained excellent parity with the price of goods and services globally, it is considered a strong currency.
Really, the word "strong" is a misnomer. The correct word for describing a currency's merit relative to others is "stable". One could say that the Euro is taking over from the US currency not because it is becoming stronger, but because it is becoming more stable.
It is for this reason that the strongest currency and the only truly stable currency, is gold. Well sort of. After all, you can't eat the stuff. Nonetheless, it is about the only thing that has carried value throughout the ages and survived the rise and fall of empires. So, if you're worried about your piggy bank being made worthless by economic collapse associated with runaway inflation, buy gold. Not some high markup crappy necklace or ring, but bullion. Buy it at the market price, about $660US / ounce at the moment. 1 ounce is about 31g, with a small 1% or so margin for casting and your savings will be, well, worth their weight in gold.
"as smart as anyone else, even Americans"
I'm not usually given to effusive, meaningless, knee-jerk responses, but when I read that the first thing that came to mind was:
OMGWTFLOLZ!!~!
Perhaps I'm just an old fart, but I remember the days before Athlon, when the K6 competed with the Pentium 2 and was the laughing stock of the CPU game. I remember a time when I thought AMD were going to go belly up at any moment. I remember a time when the only way you'd get an AMD CPU into a PC was by selling the PC to a gullible twit who didn't know a CPU from a pound of grapes.
No, Mr Insomniac, it is not the first time Intel made anything better than AMD, it'd just be the first time you can remember, son.
* Derisive, elitist, old-fart attitude added for theatric effect. I'm actually "only" 26.
Islam does not "have" the word "infidel". Infidel is an english word, and just because a language has a word for a person who believes something else doesn't make that religion xenophobic or belligerent. I find your reasoning to be non-sensical at best.
On a few points, Islams does not preach that "everyone else is going to hell", in the Koran it states that only God can judge people worth of either heaven or hell.
Islam does preach tolerance, in fact the only time in history that Christians, Jews and Muslims lived together peacefully was under an Islamic state, the former Ottoman Empire (which was finally toppled by the onset of World War 1). Since then no real Islamic state has existed.
Saudi Arabia, Iran and other states that call themselves Islamic are really autocratic regimes that "cherry pick" the Islamic rules that suit them (such as the need for strong leadership and authority) while discarding others that don't (such as the governmental responsibility of complete transparency and perpetual subjection of leaders to the will of the people).
Do you actually know any Muslims personally? I think you'd find them to be surprisingly, well, normal.
To date around 35,000 Iraqi civillians have been killed in the Iraq war. That says nothing of the deaths due to lack of medical care, poor sanitation, food shortages, water distribution problems and the general shattered infrastructure.
Oh but now they're free of Saddam you cry!
Tell that to the 35,000 families now minus members. The US has killed more Iraqis in 2 years than Saddam could have in 10 of his lifetimes. The Iraqi people would have been all the happier without Wal-Mart brand democracy.
I, for one, welcome out new robotic pack mule overlords.
$15G ?
When conjugating "to be" for plural or singular you take the plurality of the subject. As the subject in this case is a collective noun, "group", it may seem that "are" is the appropriate form. But "group" is a singular collective noun, as dinstinct from "groups" for multiple groups. Because the noun "group" is singular, the singular conjugation of the "to be" verb is used, that being "is".
Here are some examples:
RIGHT: The group is stupid.
WRONG: The group are stupid.
RIGHT: The bunch of grapes is rotten.
WRONG: The bunch of grapes are rotten.
RIGHT: The Slashdot crowd is bad at grammar.
WRONG: The Slashdot crowd are bad at grammar.
There are cases that may *appear* to be exceptions, and the one that comes to mind is that of the noun "people". People is plural for "person" and appears to be a singular collective noun just like group. However "people", as well as being a singular collective noun, (with plural form being "peoples", often used when referring to multiple distinct groups of people) is also a true plural of "person" ("persons" is not accepted as the correct word, although its use is becoming accepted into contemporary English):
RIGHT: "The group is screwed."
WRONG: "The people is screwed."
RIGHT: "The people are screwed."
WRONG: "The group are screwed."
Questions?
...shutting down IRC.
Very possibly, I was merely stating the test's formulation, not the result that would be achieved were it applied to the facts of this case. I am not familiar with the minutia of the case and so cannot say whether the loan company's employee acted as a reasonable man in his circumstances with his information and experience would.
"they are" contracts to "they're", not "their".
This is really starting to get to me. If you think you're smart enough to have an opnion, then learn to talk gooder before you bludgeon me with it.
This actually makes sense, as the tort of negligence is a civil matter and where a defendant's (in this case the loan company) actions are being assessed, the law requires the standards of "the reasonable man" to be used..
:P
Generally in cases such as this, the court will use the reasonable man test in a formulation which would likely sound like this: "would a reasonable man, in the position of the defendant with the same information and experience that the defendant can reasonably be expected to possess, have behaved in the same way".
It then comes down to the court hearing evidence from members of industry and other witnesses or even amici curi (meaning "friend of the court", which is a person who offers evidence but is not called officially by the plaintiff or defendant, and excuse me but my latin spelling is not that good). The judge then decides if the defendant acted the way a reasonable man should.
P.S., Yes i know the formulation of "reasonable man" is sexist, but hey, it's the law
Yes, but Gaim2 is utter tripe. It offers nothing over version 1.5 (except a veritable bucketload of new bugs), has a really ugly and non-intuitive interface and I have a pet hate in it's file browse dialog box.
There is no real good quality end to end VOIP solution in open source yet, which is surprising given that open source communities have done some really good work in audio and video compression (Vorbis, XviD) technologies as well as distributed networking (BitTorrent).
These technologies could be used, albeit with some adaptation, to form a completely open source VOIP/Video system that displaces traditional PSTN carriers as data networks become more and more robust and the SLAs on internet service providers approach those of PSTN operators.
Exactly, some of them, but nobody was able to communicate with the first one, Apollo 11.
My main arguments were (and I point out again I wrote that when I was 15) regarding the photos, I didn't really put much stock in 3rd and 4th hand information such as the stars argument (I knew of the dynamic range rebuttal) and I didn't even bother mentioning the ridiculous "flapping flag" argument. There's one photo in particular that looks very, very faked. I'd tell you which it is but that'd require me opening a new browser and I can't be bothered :P I believe I highlighted it in my little rant.
I wonder what would happen if the software was used to process photos from the original Apollo moon landing. I am of the belief that there is a great possibility that at least the original Apollo landing was faked. Subsequent missions I am not too sure about, but I believe at least the first one was a fraud. I wrote this page up many years ago when I was in 10th grade at school. After reading it again just now, however, I really think I need to update it for new facts I've discovered and general maturity of presentation :)
I've read that document, many years ago when it was published. A millennia ago in web time. I also get referred to it regularly, as though it's some kind of brand new idea instead of the tired old elitist piece of trash that it is.
"Correctly" does not mean "only to a few private users". It means "correctly". One can send XHTML as text/html to IE and correctly to other browsers. Even that hopelessly outdated document you referred to says that IE's ability to read tag soup applied to a semantically and syntactically correct XHTML document will result in a perfectly acceptible rendering. I refer you to Appendix B in said document.
All the given reasons for not using XHTML are due to the chance of inadvertently breaking something with invalid code. So what you're really saying is:
Don't use XHTML coz you're not smart enough.
Sorry, I don't swallow this. If people are taught how and guided away from the carelessness with which web development is currently approached, XHTML can become what it was supposed to become: a stepping stone to more functional and powerful XML based markups.
Given that the market at the moment is trying to squeeze as much functionality out of existing technologies and the increasing use of new markup languages such as SVG and MathML, I would have thought that more and more books would start teaching XHTML/CSS.
XHTML will allow far better flexibility when adding in new functionality provided by new markup languages as well as better machine readability for the purposes of migrating pages at a later date. Tools to assist in developing syntactically valid XHTML pages are easily available and easy to use (such as Firefox's Validator tool as well as the old trusty http://validator.w3.org/), so the argument that novices may break XHTML pages by not writing valid code is not as potent as it once was.
The challenge now lies in teaching students to write semantically correct markup. This cannot be checked by a validator or any other machine tool, as semantically incorrect markup may still follow the rules of syntax. However, it can break a braille browser or a mobile device that degrades pages' layout for the purposes of displaying it on a small screen, rendering the information inaccessible to users of these devices.
XHTML's stricter syntax far more strongly encourages users to think in terms of content/presentation rather than just writing a blob of HTML to show a nicely formatted essay/blog/gallery. The more information is both syntactically and semantically correct, the more the web will be a friendly place for users of devices other than PCs, or users who are accessing the web from a device designed to aid a disability.
It is for these reasons, forward compatibility and accessibility, that I think that XHTML should start being taught. I always hear it argued, when I recommend XHTML to a would-be developer, that "XHTML is not understood" and "it breaks pages if used incorrectly". Well, help users to understand, and teach them to use it correctly.
The War on Spam has been just as effective as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror!