Try looking at these English pronunciation rules. They will cover about an 85% solution with the rest of the words largely being ones we borrowed from other languages and kept their pronunciation. Admittedly, 56 rules may seem a bit excessive but if you read through it, most don't actually apply for a particular word. *wry grin* At that, dialect will change things greatly. Technically speaking, "bother," "father," and "caught" should all have distinct pronunciations in the US. In actuality, they seldom are.
It would also tie in nicely given that one of the Ultimate Spiderman storylines had Sam Raimi using footage of Spiderman while filming his movie which used Toby MaGuire and Kirtsen Dunst. Obviously, Raimi is just lifting the storylines from real-life events. They're not movies; they're documentaries!
Venom = Eddie Brock = Psycho ex journalist, built like a linebacker, competition-level power-lifter.
Venom wasn't just some evil version of spiderman, he was better than spiderman - stronger, faster, able to beat his spidey-sense.
That's only if you're talking about the classic character. In the Ultimate series, Eddie was about Peter's age, son of a colleague of Peter's father. And really, I think that's going to be closer to how we're going to get this because we don't really have enough time to explain "new costume from alien machine during massive crossover" as happened in the original series.
While in the past, there have been times when I have been guilty of downloading items, the takedown notice I received involved them noticing I was sharing my collection of Harry Potter fanfiction. No actual books were in their list. Still, your point is well received that most people out there indignant over their "persecution" are actually guilty. I view it as being like speeding. Most people drive a bit over the limit. *wry grin* And most are most indignant when they're caught at it. Me, the one time I've been caught speeding, I paid the ticket. I was stupid enough to get caught, so I feel it's only right that I pay the fine. I was still a bit indignant since it was Christmas day, there were no other cars on the road that morning, and that he was camping right inside a zone where it went from 65 to 55. *shrug* Nonetheless, I earned it and I will live with it.
I felt about the same way about the original Sims. I don't get virtual pets either, maybe for the same reasons. What drew me into The Sims 2 was the "genetics" model. I actually get kind of a kick messing around with the variables and seeing how the progeny turn out. For the most part, the game is a breeding simulator for me. *rolls eyes* And yes, I know, if I spent as much time working on my RL breeding skills, I could go about it in regular life...
Really, I kind of wish they modeled more parameters than just a few facial parameters, and body pigmentation. Admittedly, if they started adding things like height and breast size, most Slashdotters would probably have 7-foot balloon-festooned amazons walking about paying tribute to their geek avatars.
"He's not only a fan of the blog, he's the author!"
Most likely, he's trying to link-spam his website. Google checks Slashdot and actually gives it a pretty decently high pagerank. Unfortunately, he's linked it as "fanatsy", so the only people he'll be getting are bad spellers.
IIRC, reviews of that game complained about how little there was to see in it. Perhaps "7 Sins" would be more to your taste? It's still barbie-doll sex (generally with almost all clothes still on), but it's there. Or "Virtual Girl 2" or such Japanese games... Personally, I don't really see how satisfying that type of thing would be, but then again, people in general alternately mystify and horrify me with their life choices.
The third party hack to remove the censor effect/pixelation that appears over nude sims reveals Barbie/Ken doll nudity with no female nipples/pubic hair/genitalia whatsoever....
Third party hacks? It's an in-game console command, something along the lines of "intprop SetCensorSize 0" or so.
As for the claims of pedophelia, I know there are third-party mods for teenagers (which would technically be ephebophilia IIRC) to WooHoo, including teen pregnancy patches, but again, that's third-party and it only works because there isn't anything shown in these scenes.
I agree that this fellow is silly, although I know some parents are simply annoyed at the availability of "woohoo" in-game although personally I think most are annoyed at not having noticed until 6 months after buying the game for their teenage daughter.
Personally, I find it a bit disturbing when you get the people who spend hours getting the sim to look just like the other person, then have them burn to death. ^_^ It does lead to the occasional amusing incident, like the time a girl I knew in high school rang me up, and accused me of knocking her up. Seems she built Sims resembling various people in her life. For some reason, the sims representing me and her kept hooking up and suddenly there's spawnage.
Although I'm not certain they could use that particular transfer to attack you (given, as others have said, it's not only a useless file, but they're the ones putting their material out), they could keep the IP address for watching for further activity. Also, quite frankly, this gives them the chance to say, "This is actual non-bogus data on how prevalent movie pirating is." Currently, the RIAA is under fire (although bizarrely non-publically) for having basically made up numbers for piracy based on not selling as many CDs as they expected to. Here, the MPAA can pulls out this list of access and say, "This many IP addresses were involved. The transfers went to 99.5%, so we can pretty much rule out someone mistakenly clicking on it. A grand total of 56.789 terabytes, or 2000 movies, was transferred out, just from our server. Clearly, there this pirating is a serious issue and you need to support initiatives to stop these criminals so our poor stuntmen can eat." It's hard data, folks, and damned clever of them to get it this way.
Lastly, well, all they have to do is contact the ISPs involved with those IP addresses and show the filename. The average ISP folds like a cheap rug and will terminate the account with that lack of proof. Sure, you may have downloaded a file which has nothing to do with the movie, but do you think the ISP is going to bother to check that?
Ironcially enough, it's this multitude of languages that causes a lot of the strife in religion. I mean, just look at the debates over how to interpret the "Thou shalt not kill" commandment. The word does not directly translate out to "kill," closer to "murder," which leaves the path open for self-defense and defense of others. Or heck, just look at the parables. "You must love each other as brothers." "But Lord, who is my brother?" It kind of reminds me of a sci-fi story I read years ago where a writer was approached by aliens and offered the gift of an entirely clear language. The metaphor they use is that the average word is like a closed box. You can weigh it. You can shake it to hear if it rattles. But in the end, you don't really know what's in it. What the aliens proposed was opening that box (presumably through some form of mass granted telepathy) to everyone. The writer refused the gift and drove off the aliens by writing up the story as a piece of science fiction. Basically, his reasoning was that without the lie of language, writers would be out of business.
That's a mighty good explanation of mythology and its shifts. I commend you on your scholarship as well as your amusing presentation. I'm going to use my mod points to mod you up right after posting this.
The major sections have their own slogans. I can only assume that the top-left corner is now being updated under the new CSS-etc code they added. To be honest, I never really paid attention to it before.
While venting in a blog entry can be a good way to let off tension, and it's gratifying to have friends and even total strangers commiserate with you, it's important to remember that a blog is generally a public medium. Your friends and family can read it. Complete strangers can read it. Your boss can also read it. Text from it might be brought up years later as evidence in a criminal case. *wry grin* I've been bit by this in the past. Not the legal aspects, although a friend of mine had that problem. Just always remember that they're out there...
The entire Houston area was all out of plywood by Monday night, according to a friend of mine there.
Ah, plywood, truly an effective measure against hurricanes.
The game support (and isn't Games why most people running Linux maintain a Windows partition) in XP was better than in 2000, which was supposed to be more of a work OS. And, as useless as they usually are, the "compatibility mode" option for running programs occasionally comes in very handy.
Maybe they want to identify themselves as being part of a group, for instance. (A guy named Labov has made a significant impact on the linguistic community as a proponent of this line of thought.) People, as it turns out, are excellent at using linguistic markers to identify members of their in-group and out-group, regardless of their educational or socioeconomic background.
Personally, the use of "axe" instead of "ask" is still one of those things that make me shudder (along with people talk about how something "runs the full gambit of possibilities." Try as I might, I cannot help but associate such pronunciations with bad education and ignorance. *shrug* And that's even admitting that I am also prone to the occasional misuse there. The difference, to me, is that when such an incident occurs, I will actively work to correct my speech so that I'm using the correct word.
I do like your explanation of why so many people pronounce "nuclear" incorrectly. I personally think that in some ways it's the same situation that occurred with "aluminium" changing to "aluminum" due to pronunciation. And how many people spell "laboratory" correctly these days? I accept that language will chance over time, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it.
The difference is that the library (or someone donating to the library) paid for the printed matierials. In other words, some money was given to the author (supposedly).
You know, outside of those works where no one knows who owns it (which the publishers seemed to be complaining about in the article... "We can't prove we own that book, but we want the profits from it!"), I suspect Google could afford to buy a copy of every single book in its library with what amounts to their budget for snackfoods for the month. That is, assuming the authors, wanting more publicity, don't donate a copy of their books to Google much as they do with regular libraries.
The simultaneous access bit is a bit more troubling, although one might ask if it's really something intentionally built into libraries.
Our university did that with a few textbooks which had gone out of print. The company charged them a small fee for printing out the text of the book and selling it in a binder. It was a good sight cheaper than the rest of my college textbooks ($5 for a 200-page textbook? Unbelievable...), although unfortunately, the printing quality was along the lines of a 2nd-generation xerox.
As per the article, there are restrictions on how many lines of text you can see in a single search, as well as how much (20%) of the book you can achieve by multiple searches. Presumably, the latter is being checked by the Google cookie. I too am curious as to how it will bear out. I'm sure that some dedicated person (possibly under **AA pay) will figure out a way to game the system and it will be declared illegal.
*shrug* I've found few good contemporary radio stations, not that I really go searching for them. *wry grin* In my opinion, it has more to do with contemporary music than the stations themselves. Contemporary music these days is more marketed than made, so for the most part, contemporary stations play the same 15 songs over and over again. Me, I listen to classics, both country and rock. Not only do I feel that the music back then had something which contemporary music lacks, but you've also had a few decades to weed out the crap. Lastly, I find that the people who DJ it and the people who listen to it care about it. If you're staying on the bleeding edge of music, bands come and go.
That said, I have two radio presets in my car because I listen to either the classic rock station in our town or the classic country station. Both stations are good enough that I don't feel the idea to wander around unless both of them are broadcasting local sports games, or I'm out of town. ^_^ Admittedly, I've run into the situation where I flip from one station to the other and hear the same song, but that's because there was a fair amount of cross-over back then. Honestly, which way do you categorize Elvis? Or Jimmy Buffet? Heck, the Bellamy Brothers?
On one hand, I'd like to agree with you, as I've always been about 6 months behind the technology curve (on the plus side, $10 Bargain Bin games!), but sometimes those little touches really add something to the game. Ever tried to go back to playing a game without lipsync or blinking on the character models? Quite frankly, it's rather eerie. The gliding pace of some of the characters is also very jarring. And going back to something like Doom, it just all feels flat and unrealistic now. To sum it up, I think some graphical whatsits grow on us without us noticing. *shrug* Personally, I hold back the 6 months or so and enjoy them that way, but I'm thankful for the gamers who keep on the bleeding edge so that the game companies put out games that I'll buy at a much cheaper price in 6 months, when my price for upgrading my technology is a tenth of what it would have been.
He's aggressive. She's pushy
He's good on details. She's pushy
He follows through. She doesn't know when to quit.
He is furm. She's impossible to work for.
He's a man of the world. She's been around.
He's not afraid to say what he thinks. She's a bitch.
He climbed the ladder of success. She slept her way to the top.
What's funny is that you read that and it almost reads true. That's scary to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Try looking at these English pronunciation rules. They will cover about an 85% solution with the rest of the words largely being ones we borrowed from other languages and kept their pronunciation. Admittedly, 56 rules may seem a bit excessive but if you read through it, most don't actually apply for a particular word. *wry grin* At that, dialect will change things greatly. Technically speaking, "bother," "father," and "caught" should all have distinct pronunciations in the US. In actuality, they seldom are.
very well said. you should run for senate
Naw... he sounds too honest and straightforward.
It would also tie in nicely given that one of the Ultimate Spiderman storylines had Sam Raimi using footage of Spiderman while filming his movie which used Toby MaGuire and Kirtsen Dunst. Obviously, Raimi is just lifting the storylines from real-life events. They're not movies; they're documentaries!
Venom wasn't just some evil version of spiderman, he was better than spiderman - stronger, faster, able to beat his spidey-sense.
That's only if you're talking about the classic character. In the Ultimate series, Eddie was about Peter's age, son of a colleague of Peter's father. And really, I think that's going to be closer to how we're going to get this because we don't really have enough time to explain "new costume from alien machine during massive crossover" as happened in the original series.
While in the past, there have been times when I have been guilty of downloading items, the takedown notice I received involved them noticing I was sharing my collection of Harry Potter fanfiction. No actual books were in their list. Still, your point is well received that most people out there indignant over their "persecution" are actually guilty. I view it as being like speeding. Most people drive a bit over the limit. *wry grin* And most are most indignant when they're caught at it. Me, the one time I've been caught speeding, I paid the ticket. I was stupid enough to get caught, so I feel it's only right that I pay the fine. I was still a bit indignant since it was Christmas day, there were no other cars on the road that morning, and that he was camping right inside a zone where it went from 65 to 55. *shrug* Nonetheless, I earned it and I will live with it.
Really, I kind of wish they modeled more parameters than just a few facial parameters, and body pigmentation. Admittedly, if they started adding things like height and breast size, most Slashdotters would probably have 7-foot balloon-festooned amazons walking about paying tribute to their geek avatars.
Most likely, he's trying to link-spam his website. Google checks Slashdot and actually gives it a pretty decently high pagerank. Unfortunately, he's linked it as "fanatsy", so the only people he'll be getting are bad spellers.
IIRC, reviews of that game complained about how little there was to see in it. Perhaps "7 Sins" would be more to your taste? It's still barbie-doll sex (generally with almost all clothes still on), but it's there. Or "Virtual Girl 2" or such Japanese games... Personally, I don't really see how satisfying that type of thing would be, but then again, people in general alternately mystify and horrify me with their life choices.
Third party hacks? It's an in-game console command, something along the lines of "intprop SetCensorSize 0" or so.
As for the claims of pedophelia, I know there are third-party mods for teenagers (which would technically be ephebophilia IIRC) to WooHoo, including teen pregnancy patches, but again, that's third-party and it only works because there isn't anything shown in these scenes.
I agree that this fellow is silly, although I know some parents are simply annoyed at the availability of "woohoo" in-game although personally I think most are annoyed at not having noticed until 6 months after buying the game for their teenage daughter.
Personally, I find it a bit disturbing when you get the people who spend hours getting the sim to look just like the other person, then have them burn to death. ^_^ It does lead to the occasional amusing incident, like the time a girl I knew in high school rang me up, and accused me of knocking her up. Seems she built Sims resembling various people in her life. For some reason, the sims representing me and her kept hooking up and suddenly there's spawnage.
Lastly, well, all they have to do is contact the ISPs involved with those IP addresses and show the filename. The average ISP folds like a cheap rug and will terminate the account with that lack of proof. Sure, you may have downloaded a file which has nothing to do with the movie, but do you think the ISP is going to bother to check that?
Ironcially enough, it's this multitude of languages that causes a lot of the strife in religion. I mean, just look at the debates over how to interpret the "Thou shalt not kill" commandment. The word does not directly translate out to "kill," closer to "murder," which leaves the path open for self-defense and defense of others. Or heck, just look at the parables. "You must love each other as brothers." "But Lord, who is my brother?" It kind of reminds me of a sci-fi story I read years ago where a writer was approached by aliens and offered the gift of an entirely clear language. The metaphor they use is that the average word is like a closed box. You can weigh it. You can shake it to hear if it rattles. But in the end, you don't really know what's in it. What the aliens proposed was opening that box (presumably through some form of mass granted telepathy) to everyone. The writer refused the gift and drove off the aliens by writing up the story as a piece of science fiction. Basically, his reasoning was that without the lie of language, writers would be out of business.
Er... Oops. Never mind.
The major sections have their own slogans. I can only assume that the top-left corner is now being updated under the new CSS-etc code they added. To be honest, I never really paid attention to it before.
While venting in a blog entry can be a good way to let off tension, and it's gratifying to have friends and even total strangers commiserate with you, it's important to remember that a blog is generally a public medium. Your friends and family can read it. Complete strangers can read it. Your boss can also read it. Text from it might be brought up years later as evidence in a criminal case. *wry grin* I've been bit by this in the past. Not the legal aspects, although a friend of mine had that problem. Just always remember that they're out there...
The entire Houston area was all out of plywood by Monday night, according to a friend of mine there.
Ah, plywood, truly an effective measure against hurricanes.
As far as I'n concerned, iPods and cranks are entirely inseperable...
The game support (and isn't Games why most people running Linux maintain a Windows partition) in XP was better than in 2000, which was supposed to be more of a work OS. And, as useless as they usually are, the "compatibility mode" option for running programs occasionally comes in very handy.
Ah yes, the traditional shibboleth...
Personally, the use of "axe" instead of "ask" is still one of those things that make me shudder (along with people talk about how something "runs the full gambit of possibilities." Try as I might, I cannot help but associate such pronunciations with bad education and ignorance. *shrug* And that's even admitting that I am also prone to the occasional misuse there. The difference, to me, is that when such an incident occurs, I will actively work to correct my speech so that I'm using the correct word.
I do like your explanation of why so many people pronounce "nuclear" incorrectly. I personally think that in some ways it's the same situation that occurred with "aluminium" changing to "aluminum" due to pronunciation. And how many people spell "laboratory" correctly these days? I accept that language will chance over time, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it.
You know, outside of those works where no one knows who owns it (which the publishers seemed to be complaining about in the article... "We can't prove we own that book, but we want the profits from it!"), I suspect Google could afford to buy a copy of every single book in its library with what amounts to their budget for snackfoods for the month. That is, assuming the authors, wanting more publicity, don't donate a copy of their books to Google much as they do with regular libraries.
The simultaneous access bit is a bit more troubling, although one might ask if it's really something intentionally built into libraries.
Our university did that with a few textbooks which had gone out of print. The company charged them a small fee for printing out the text of the book and selling it in a binder. It was a good sight cheaper than the rest of my college textbooks ($5 for a 200-page textbook? Unbelievable...), although unfortunately, the printing quality was along the lines of a 2nd-generation xerox.
As per the article, there are restrictions on how many lines of text you can see in a single search, as well as how much (20%) of the book you can achieve by multiple searches. Presumably, the latter is being checked by the Google cookie. I too am curious as to how it will bear out. I'm sure that some dedicated person (possibly under **AA pay) will figure out a way to game the system and it will be declared illegal.
That said, I have two radio presets in my car because I listen to either the classic rock station in our town or the classic country station. Both stations are good enough that I don't feel the idea to wander around unless both of them are broadcasting local sports games, or I'm out of town. ^_^ Admittedly, I've run into the situation where I flip from one station to the other and hear the same song, but that's because there was a fair amount of cross-over back then. Honestly, which way do you categorize Elvis? Or Jimmy Buffet? Heck, the Bellamy Brothers?
On one hand, I'd like to agree with you, as I've always been about 6 months behind the technology curve (on the plus side, $10 Bargain Bin games!), but sometimes those little touches really add something to the game. Ever tried to go back to playing a game without lipsync or blinking on the character models? Quite frankly, it's rather eerie. The gliding pace of some of the characters is also very jarring. And going back to something like Doom, it just all feels flat and unrealistic now. To sum it up, I think some graphical whatsits grow on us without us noticing. *shrug* Personally, I hold back the 6 months or so and enjoy them that way, but I'm thankful for the gamers who keep on the bleeding edge so that the game companies put out games that I'll buy at a much cheaper price in 6 months, when my price for upgrading my technology is a tenth of what it would have been.
He's aggressive. She's pushy
He's good on details. She's pushy
He follows through. She doesn't know when to quit.
He is furm. She's impossible to work for.
He's a man of the world. She's been around.
He's not afraid to say what he thinks. She's a bitch.
He climbed the ladder of success. She slept her way to the top.
What's funny is that you read that and it almost reads true. That's scary to me.