Honestly, no, it's not a serious issue. *wry grin* And I guess I shouldn't have been so quick to comment on something which seemed related, given how far my rating seems to have declined here. {shakes head in amusement} Anyhow, it's not serious, but I'd wager that many companies would prefer to be able to express their name without having to mush all the letters together. To me, at least reading a URL off of a sheet of paper, all those letters bunched together makes it hard to read. With hyphens, people can delineate it and a few companies actually are bright enough to use mixed case, but otherwise, it makes the address harder to read and more apt to get little spelling errors that instead send one to any number of cyberaquatter pages.
In response to the comments about delineation of URLs, you do have a point. While I think it would be possible to create a decent way to aprse out whether something's a URL, it would require a bit of effort and older software would have trouble.
I could probably post this anonymously and cowardly, but I'll keep my name on it. *shrug* What use is only expressing your opinion when you think it's safe to do so?
What I'm waiting for is for them to change the specifications on web addresses to allow spaces in them. Honestly, how many years have companies been forced to advertise their business as http://www.surfboardsandmore.com rather than http://www.surboards and more.com? Not to mention the ugliness which occurs when someone uses spaces in the path... if they name their folder "Help for Database Conflicts" you're likely to get that rendered as "Help%20for%20Database%20Conflicts." I realize that the first issue is one of how the WWW and related services is set up. The issue of rendering URLs in the address bar is something they can fix.
I read an anecdote by one of those people who teaches the systems to easily memorize long strings of numbers or unrelated words about the one time he missed a speaking appointment. Yes, he remembered where and when it was. Unfortunately, he was relying on someone else's directions and the 15-minute trip became an hour-long one. Of course, the local newspapers had a ball with the incident...
Nice. How can we get back to that kind of farming? That's a question I've had for a long time.
Be willing to pay higher prices. The reason factory farms are so successful is that they lower costs. Most people aren't willing to pay a little extra for ideological reasons, so the "old-style" farms are driven out of business.
My uncle's cattle have it even better -- he raises them only as prized studs, not food. What a great job (being the stud)!:)
Um, what do you think they do with bulls too old to put out to stud? Same as with milk cows too old to provide milk... it's not the tenderest meat, but it's meat.
Same thing with your cat. It's not impressive that your cat can jump 10 times his height, because he weighs very little and his legs were made for jumping like that.
More impressive was a friend of mine who had a dauschand that seemed to think he was a cat, complete down to jumping 3 feet vertically to window sills. Here we have a foot-and-a-half weiner dog with legs barely enough to keep his belly off the floor... he'd look up at the sill, rear back a little, then leap up like an over-sized slinky.
Indeed. A word problem must be stated very clearly. Pay an English major to proofreead it for you. Goodness only knows they won't get paying work once they graduate. Also, if it's a broader word problem "You have these three pieces of equipment. Find the potential of the bowl" versus a narrow formula-turned-into-word-problem "The bowl is composed of stainless steel with a conductivity of 0.7. Given a 5-volt battery attached to one side and a 50-ohm resistor soldered onto the other side and assuming ideal wires, what is the potential?", you must be ready to accept different methods of finding the solution and moreover correct (or mostly correct even) answers that don't agree with your own. Maybe the student used the instruments in a different manner, using a different formula. Maybe they accounted for a factor you didn't think of. In my opinion, a student should receive at least half credit for showing on a word problem that they understand what the problem was and how to approach solving it. At that, I think that a wrong answer reached in a logical manner with documented work should net them 3/4 of the grade. Even a blatantly wrong answer should get some credit if the student notes that they know the answer can't be right and why.
I think what he doesn't comprehend is that the government is using advanced techniques like Information Hiding. Isn't that how your organize good class system?
Personally, I would say that most of the government is as open source as Linux. In other words, the information is there if you bother to look for it and are willing to go through the trouble of interpretting it. The only part that really isn't open is the closed-door meetings and the like. Aren't there any black-box modules in Linux where you only know something goes in and something else goes out? Anyhow, I think the issue is less whether the information is available as it is the complexity of the system. The average politician is unlikely to be able to look at the sourcecode to Linux and understand how it works. The average programmer is unlikely to be able to look at the internal workings of the government and understand how it works.
Interesting. I've read up a bit on yoga, not really gotten into the practice of it outside of some of the stretches and exercises. Did you follow a specific set of therapy and/or exercises or was this something that happened as a kind of a side effect of the general enlightenment?
^_^ I'll skip any jokes about how opening the third eye would obviously imply being able to open the second one as well... Heck, that might even be too close to the truth.
I was not trying to attack your use of stem cells in therapy. I was merely trying to clarify. While I have an opinion, it didn't seem relative to the discussion. And yes, this reply is off-topic, but I wanted to assure you that you were not being attacked, as your post seemed to indicate you thought you were.
You're referring to Amblyopia, commonly called "lazy eye." I had a friend in kindergarten who suffered from it. Luckily, they detected it early enough for him to go on the patch, specifically, an eyepatch to force him to use the other eye. Sadly, it is indeed one of those disorders which is not fixable after a certain age.
In tandem with this research there has also been progress made in retinal transplants using stem cell growth mediums to allow the cells to function normally.
Just for the sake of curiousity, are these adult stem cells or fetal stem cells they're working with? You know, that being one of the hot-button targets in stem cell research...
As usual, I tried plugging in two routes, one from my home here to my hometown, usually about a 3 hour trip due to the highways requiring 30-minute jaunt west, followed by traveling south, then taking a 30-minute drive east to get there and then my route from home to work. The first (approximated by "Newark, OH to Ashland, KY") showed me an interesting route that takes more of a straight-line approach (albeit taking me through some city streets in the middle) that shaves about 15 miles off of the trip, but the software apparently doesn't deal well with sections of highways, as I was told to turn onto or continue on US-23 S 7 times in a row. Definitely promising though, and I'll be submitting feedback for that bug. The trip from home to work seems almost kosher, only taking me a few miles out of the way to keep me on the "state route" that goes through town (Around here in Newark, state routes and highways frequently drop to 35 MPH or lower, so they're not worth going out of your way for) and taking me through one road that doesn't exist. Overall, pretty respectable. They may wish to add in some tolerance for spelling and geography errors though. Misspelling a road name by one letter meant they couldn't find it and it took me a bit of fiddling around with surrounding city names to find one street which is near the constantly shifting border.
Except for the rather massive restriction of having USA only (I'm European) its impressive.
I know what you mean. I wanted to see what they thought of the Norway route...
I'll have to reread their policy when I'm not somewhere that filters out any URL with "ebay" in it, but when I first signed up, they advertised themselves as being more of an intermediary. Yes, they made amends for cheated buyers because they'd in turn take legal action with the fraudulent seller. Because they hold that middle position, they can charge a percentage fee for the transaction rather than just charging to put up a listing. They're not a newspaper classifieds service. They're an auction house.
The problem here is that IIRC, eBay doesn't position themselves as being an intermediary. They position themselves as the medium. (I'm probably mangling the vocabulary here. I'll explain) GamesTradingZone essentially acted as an intermediary, much the same of as a newspaper's classified ads. All they're in the business for is presenting the ad. In contrast, eBay involves themselves in the tracking of the sellers and buyers and handles the transations (to the point of having bought up PayPal, the company which was most popular for shuttling payments around).
^_^ Well, you can set the number of searches displayed to an upper limit of around 100. It's not infinite, but it's enough that you usually either find what you want or get tired of looking within the first page.
Specifically, you need people to have heard of you. Remember that many of the companies who employ these SEOs are selling products which would normally be sold through spam emails. They're not depending on some intelligent person to buy their products. They want the 8-year-old grandmother who every year pays those nice boys to apply sealant to her roof and always gets the special anti-rust coating for her car. They want the kind of guy who would actually click on a penile enlargement ad. They can afford to have a thousand surfers breeze right past their page for every person who buys something because, well, on the front page, you're being seen by millions of people each day. (Figures pulled out of my ass. Not sure what the actual amount of viewers of a particular search page would be, but I figure it's high) And even if you don't sell a product, you've left an impression on the person's mind. Unconsciously, they see "PHARMAKEIOS" and it's associated with their search for sleeping pills. Days later, someone will ask them about who offers sleeping pills, and the name will pop into their head.
That math is pretty simple. 0% of anything is nothing, but.1% of a huge number is still a fairly large number.
Sexy data tango (http://www.voltaire.net/music/BannedOnVulc an.html )
If while you're out in space, love You're horney as a tart Take a tip from a security chief, love That fat slut Tasha Yar She discovered the pleasures of Data He became her sexual pet
Cause
He's fully functional and anatomically correct He's fully functional and anatomically correct
He's defiant with his thrusters will explode in your wormhole and he'll rub his trusty spangler wrench on your warpcore manifold his multiphasic torpedo will penetrate your rift and cause a quantum singularity in your transwarp conduit
So if you're a filthy horta Data's your bestest bet He's fully functional and anatomically correct He's fully functional and anatomically correct
He gently massages your gel packs while he replicates some lube then he shoves his throbbing razor beast into your Jeffery's tube so lower your shields spread your nacelles to make room for his craft as he thrusts his delta flyer to your big fat juicy aft
So if you're a filthy horta Data's your bestest bet He's fully functional and anatomically correct He's fully functional and anatomically correct
His pelvis a tireless engine he shakes it when he struts He's full of dilithium crystals in his bulbs and in his nuts He too likes to be pleasured He will put you on your knees And if you're into disgrace He'll cover your face with his andriod anti-freeze
so if you're a filthy horta Data's your bestest bet He's fully functional and anatomically correct He's fully functional and anatomically correct
"Viewing this evening on FOX when you get home..."
"Local sushi shops filled with E-Coli bacteria? News at 11..."
^_^ And, of course the perreniel favorite, slightly modified, "Help! I'm a prisoner of the sushi chef in the kitchen!"
Seriously though, anyone else think fortune sushi might not be far off?
"Evaluation versions" are the software equivalent of "trying the shoes on"
Ah, but you're leaving out that the current shoes will attach suckers to your feet and start stealing your precious fluids. Often, the suckers remain even long after you remove the shoes.
I don't understand how you can say they'd see "lower sales" when everyone claims fansubbing takes place because there are no sales, hence the need. Now that the company is making the move to sell subtitled media, fansubbers should stop illegally pirated material and *support* what they watch by buying it.
Which is, theoretically, what happens. Once a piece is licensed in the US, the anime-fansubbers stop distributing it. Many pieces also have a disclaimer at the beginning to this effect. *wry grin* Whether it actually happens or not is debatable. Also, whether the people who'd downloaded it buy the official edition when it comes out is debatable too, although there's really no evidence either way, just claims by either side.
One of the problems I've heard of with digital fansubbing versus the old VHS-way is the same problem shown by software. Electronic copies are perfect (or at least close enough to perfect for me), which means that when a piece is fansubbed, the 50th person in line to get it still has a fairly pristine copy. In comparison, VHS tapes generally came with a "generation" number which told you how many times it had been copied from a copy. By definition, fansubs were second-generation at least, as the tape had to be copied to get the subtitles in. By the 3rd generation, the image quality was muddy. 5th generation was practically unwatchable. Because fansubs were generally lower-quality by this copy-of-a-copy, there was a strong reason to buy official versions when they came out. Now, the only real reason is for one's conscience, and for the little extras that come with the product. (If nothing else, most DVD cases have original artwork by the animators which are rather stunning)
Now the other issue which I've yet to see confronted is what happens when the official release comes out and it's crap. Take, for example, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind. A badly translated and heavily editted version labeled "Warriors of the Wind" was released in the US which had muddy quality, bad translation, and about half the movie missing. Most people I know salved their conscience by buying the US release, then using their fansub, at least until they could get a Jpanese import, but it is an interesting dilemna.
While you're technically correct in what you're saying, I'd respectfully disagree with your point. Had I not been exposed to fansubs of anime, I probably would still be among those people who see it as all tentacle monsters, giant robots, and crappy animation. Fansubs allow for a wider dissemination of the work and traditionally, the companies have not had a problem with it. Still, it does employ the copyrighted work being distributed. What would be better, in my opinion, would be to have some way of being able to load "extension subtitles" or the like into a DVD. If you start looking into the fan translations of manga, you'll find that the better groups don't publish scanned pages of the work, but rather listed the dialogue by page number and panel. The reader uses them side-by-side to read the work. In many ways, this is even better than the usual translation job, as it keeps the right-to-left scheme intact (ever run into one of those mangas where the characters are all left-handed? That's sloppy page-flipping for you) as well as preserving the original background art where there's writing.
Personally, I think the greatest benefit of these fan translations is that it keeps the companies relatively honest. Fans already know the dialogue can be competently translated, so there's less excuse for poor dictionary-switch translatings or covering up harder dialogue with protected laughter that has nothing to do with the movement of character mouths. Heck, a few companies have made use of fan translations when doing their subtitling.
That said, with the company's request, they should immediately shut down translations of that company's work. *wry grin* It will likely mean lower sales due to decreased publicity, but that's that company's perogative. We must respect that.
Slashdot Mirror
In response to the comments about delineation of URLs, you do have a point. While I think it would be possible to create a decent way to aprse out whether something's a URL, it would require a bit of effort and older software would have trouble.
I could probably post this anonymously and cowardly, but I'll keep my name on it. *shrug* What use is only expressing your opinion when you think it's safe to do so?
What I'm waiting for is for them to change the specifications on web addresses to allow spaces in them. Honestly, how many years have companies been forced to advertise their business as http://www.surfboardsandmore.com rather than http://www.surboards and more.com? Not to mention the ugliness which occurs when someone uses spaces in the path... if they name their folder "Help for Database Conflicts" you're likely to get that rendered as "Help%20for%20Database%20Conflicts." I realize that the first issue is one of how the WWW and related services is set up. The issue of rendering URLs in the address bar is something they can fix.
I read an anecdote by one of those people who teaches the systems to easily memorize long strings of numbers or unrelated words about the one time he missed a speaking appointment. Yes, he remembered where and when it was. Unfortunately, he was relying on someone else's directions and the 15-minute trip became an hour-long one. Of course, the local newspapers had a ball with the incident...
Be willing to pay higher prices. The reason factory farms are so successful is that they lower costs. Most people aren't willing to pay a little extra for ideological reasons, so the "old-style" farms are driven out of business.
My uncle's cattle have it even better -- he raises them only as prized studs, not food. What a great job (being the stud)! :)
Um, what do you think they do with bulls too old to put out to stud? Same as with milk cows too old to provide milk... it's not the tenderest meat, but it's meat.
Same thing with your cat. It's not impressive that your cat can jump 10 times his height, because he weighs very little and his legs were made for jumping like that.
More impressive was a friend of mine who had a dauschand that seemed to think he was a cat, complete down to jumping 3 feet vertically to window sills. Here we have a foot-and-a-half weiner dog with legs barely enough to keep his belly off the floor... he'd look up at the sill, rear back a little, then leap up like an over-sized slinky.
Indeed. A word problem must be stated very clearly. Pay an English major to proofreead it for you. Goodness only knows they won't get paying work once they graduate. Also, if it's a broader word problem "You have these three pieces of equipment. Find the potential of the bowl" versus a narrow formula-turned-into-word-problem "The bowl is composed of stainless steel with a conductivity of 0.7. Given a 5-volt battery attached to one side and a 50-ohm resistor soldered onto the other side and assuming ideal wires, what is the potential?", you must be ready to accept different methods of finding the solution and moreover correct (or mostly correct even) answers that don't agree with your own. Maybe the student used the instruments in a different manner, using a different formula. Maybe they accounted for a factor you didn't think of. In my opinion, a student should receive at least half credit for showing on a word problem that they understand what the problem was and how to approach solving it. At that, I think that a wrong answer reached in a logical manner with documented work should net them 3/4 of the grade. Even a blatantly wrong answer should get some credit if the student notes that they know the answer can't be right and why.
Personally, I would say that most of the government is as open source as Linux. In other words, the information is there if you bother to look for it and are willing to go through the trouble of interpretting it. The only part that really isn't open is the closed-door meetings and the like. Aren't there any black-box modules in Linux where you only know something goes in and something else goes out? Anyhow, I think the issue is less whether the information is available as it is the complexity of the system. The average politician is unlikely to be able to look at the sourcecode to Linux and understand how it works. The average programmer is unlikely to be able to look at the internal workings of the government and understand how it works.
^_^ I'll skip any jokes about how opening the third eye would obviously imply being able to open the second one as well... Heck, that might even be too close to the truth.
I was not trying to attack your use of stem cells in therapy. I was merely trying to clarify. While I have an opinion, it didn't seem relative to the discussion. And yes, this reply is off-topic, but I wanted to assure you that you were not being attacked, as your post seemed to indicate you thought you were.
You're referring to Amblyopia, commonly called "lazy eye." I had a friend in kindergarten who suffered from it. Luckily, they detected it early enough for him to go on the patch, specifically, an eyepatch to force him to use the other eye. Sadly, it is indeed one of those disorders which is not fixable after a certain age.
In tandem with this research there has also been progress made in retinal transplants using stem cell growth mediums to allow the cells to function normally.
Just for the sake of curiousity, are these adult stem cells or fetal stem cells they're working with? You know, that being one of the hot-button targets in stem cell research...
As usual, I tried plugging in two routes, one from my home here to my hometown, usually about a 3 hour trip due to the highways requiring 30-minute jaunt west, followed by traveling south, then taking a 30-minute drive east to get there and then my route from home to work. The first (approximated by "Newark, OH to Ashland, KY") showed me an interesting route that takes more of a straight-line approach (albeit taking me through some city streets in the middle) that shaves about 15 miles off of the trip, but the software apparently doesn't deal well with sections of highways, as I was told to turn onto or continue on US-23 S 7 times in a row. Definitely promising though, and I'll be submitting feedback for that bug. The trip from home to work seems almost kosher, only taking me a few miles out of the way to keep me on the "state route" that goes through town (Around here in Newark, state routes and highways frequently drop to 35 MPH or lower, so they're not worth going out of your way for) and taking me through one road that doesn't exist. Overall, pretty respectable. They may wish to add in some tolerance for spelling and geography errors though. Misspelling a road name by one letter meant they couldn't find it and it took me a bit of fiddling around with surrounding city names to find one street which is near the constantly shifting border.
Except for the rather massive restriction of having USA only (I'm European) its impressive.
I know what you mean. I wanted to see what they thought of the Norway route...
Just witness the famous "Joint Army and Navy Basic War Plan--Red" to invade Canada...
I'll have to reread their policy when I'm not somewhere that filters out any URL with "ebay" in it, but when I first signed up, they advertised themselves as being more of an intermediary. Yes, they made amends for cheated buyers because they'd in turn take legal action with the fraudulent seller. Because they hold that middle position, they can charge a percentage fee for the transaction rather than just charging to put up a listing. They're not a newspaper classifieds service. They're an auction house.
The problem here is that IIRC, eBay doesn't position themselves as being an intermediary. They position themselves as the medium. (I'm probably mangling the vocabulary here. I'll explain) GamesTradingZone essentially acted as an intermediary, much the same of as a newspaper's classified ads. All they're in the business for is presenting the ad. In contrast, eBay involves themselves in the tracking of the sellers and buyers and handles the transations (to the point of having bought up PayPal, the company which was most popular for shuttling payments around).
^_^ Well, you can set the number of searches displayed to an upper limit of around 100. It's not infinite, but it's enough that you usually either find what you want or get tired of looking within the first page.
Specifically, you need people to have heard of you. Remember that many of the companies who employ these SEOs are selling products which would normally be sold through spam emails. They're not depending on some intelligent person to buy their products. They want the 8-year-old grandmother who every year pays those nice boys to apply sealant to her roof and always gets the special anti-rust coating for her car. They want the kind of guy who would actually click on a penile enlargement ad. They can afford to have a thousand surfers breeze right past their page for every person who buys something because, well, on the front page, you're being seen by millions of people each day. (Figures pulled out of my ass. Not sure what the actual amount of viewers of a particular search page would be, but I figure it's high) And even if you don't sell a product, you've left an impression on the person's mind. Unconsciously, they see "PHARMAKEIOS" and it's associated with their search for sleeping pills. Days later, someone will ask them about who offers sleeping pills, and the name will pop into their head.
That math is pretty simple. 0% of anything is nothing, but .1% of a huge number is still a fairly large number.
Sexy data tangoc an.html )
(http://www.voltaire.net/music/BannedOnVul
If while you're out in space, love
You're horney as a tart
Take a tip from a security chief, love
That fat slut Tasha Yar
She discovered the pleasures of Data
He became her sexual pet
Cause
He's fully functional and anatomically correct
He's fully functional and anatomically correct
He's defiant with his thrusters will explode in your wormhole
and he'll rub his trusty spangler wrench on your warpcore manifold
his multiphasic torpedo will penetrate your rift
and cause a quantum singularity in your transwarp conduit
So if you're a filthy horta Data's your bestest bet
He's fully functional and anatomically correct
He's fully functional and anatomically correct
He gently massages your gel packs
while he replicates some lube
then he shoves his throbbing razor beast into your Jeffery's tube
so lower your shields spread your nacelles to make room for his craft
as he thrusts his delta flyer to your big fat juicy aft
So if you're a filthy horta Data's your bestest bet
He's fully functional and anatomically correct
He's fully functional and anatomically correct
His pelvis a tireless engine he shakes it when he struts
He's full of dilithium crystals in his bulbs and in his nuts
He too likes to be pleasured
He will put you on your knees
And if you're into disgrace
He'll cover your face with his andriod anti-freeze
so if you're a filthy horta Data's your bestest bet
He's fully functional and anatomically correct
He's fully functional and anatomically correct
No, "housework off to the right" is "le ménage à droît."
"Local sushi shops filled with E-Coli bacteria? News at 11..."
^_^ And, of course the perreniel favorite, slightly modified, "Help! I'm a prisoner of the sushi chef in the kitchen!"
Seriously though, anyone else think fortune sushi might not be far off?
Somehow, I'm seeing a sailor sporting this after way too long on the ocean without companionship...
"Evaluation versions" are the software equivalent of "trying the shoes on"
Ah, but you're leaving out that the current shoes will attach suckers to your feet and start stealing your precious fluids. Often, the suckers remain even long after you remove the shoes.
Which is, theoretically, what happens. Once a piece is licensed in the US, the anime-fansubbers stop distributing it. Many pieces also have a disclaimer at the beginning to this effect. *wry grin* Whether it actually happens or not is debatable. Also, whether the people who'd downloaded it buy the official edition when it comes out is debatable too, although there's really no evidence either way, just claims by either side.
One of the problems I've heard of with digital fansubbing versus the old VHS-way is the same problem shown by software. Electronic copies are perfect (or at least close enough to perfect for me), which means that when a piece is fansubbed, the 50th person in line to get it still has a fairly pristine copy. In comparison, VHS tapes generally came with a "generation" number which told you how many times it had been copied from a copy. By definition, fansubs were second-generation at least, as the tape had to be copied to get the subtitles in. By the 3rd generation, the image quality was muddy. 5th generation was practically unwatchable. Because fansubs were generally lower-quality by this copy-of-a-copy, there was a strong reason to buy official versions when they came out. Now, the only real reason is for one's conscience, and for the little extras that come with the product. (If nothing else, most DVD cases have original artwork by the animators which are rather stunning)
Now the other issue which I've yet to see confronted is what happens when the official release comes out and it's crap. Take, for example, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind. A badly translated and heavily editted version labeled "Warriors of the Wind" was released in the US which had muddy quality, bad translation, and about half the movie missing. Most people I know salved their conscience by buying the US release, then using their fansub, at least until they could get a Jpanese import, but it is an interesting dilemna.
Personally, I think the greatest benefit of these fan translations is that it keeps the companies relatively honest. Fans already know the dialogue can be competently translated, so there's less excuse for poor dictionary-switch translatings or covering up harder dialogue with protected laughter that has nothing to do with the movement of character mouths. Heck, a few companies have made use of fan translations when doing their subtitling.
That said, with the company's request, they should immediately shut down translations of that company's work. *wry grin* It will likely mean lower sales due to decreased publicity, but that's that company's perogative. We must respect that.
^_^ So glad you understand now.