Phlogiston was the mysterious fluid in substances which fire was composed of. While incorrect, it's not that ignorant of an idea, as fire does flow a bit like water (supposedly even more so without gravity) and the fire had to come from somewhere in the material right? Besides which most items were lighter afterwards because all the phlogiston was gone...
Anyhow, magic smoke is the air elemental let out of computer chips when they fry. See? Alchemy did prove something scientifical!
That's a really dangerous road to go down... when you establish a link to a site, you have no guarentee that its content won't change. If I link to a friend's site because I think her poetry is touching, then she starts posting her MP3 collection, am I really expected to be liable? Furthermore, in cases where the link and the site it's linked to are in different jursidictions, the legality gets confusing. Even more so if the person clicking the link is in yet another jurisdiction.
The fact that, since the DeCSS trials, they consider it to be the same, is scary. Fortunately, they're largely being sensible and giving warnings first to people who aren't repeat offenders.
That said, people like SuprNova and LokiTorrents are on shakier ground. Part of the basis of torrents is the veracity of the link. I do not believe it is possible for me to post a bittorrent to a file and then have someone change the file type, as may happen with web links. I would actually say that the case here is closer to, say, providing your office building's security plans to burglars. You know damn well that they're up to no good and therefore you're in collusion. You're not technically stealing anything but you're also not innocent of complicity. That said, I see it as a lesser crime and therefore deserving of a lesser penalty, much like how "aiding and abetting" tends to be less severe than the actual crime.
Since when is police brutality funny?
I agree that police brutality is not funny. But in the next paragraph, we learn that both people involved were subsequently hired. I know it's not ironic because nothing on Slashdot is allowed to be, but it is incongruous.
*WHAM* *THUD* *pained groan*
"So, we'd like to tender an offer for employment. The physical abuse was just some playful hazing and the people ordering it have been sacked, drawn and quartered."
My wife and I don't plan on having kids, and getting married was the best thing we ever did for our relationship.
{nods} I can definitely see that. For all my Judeo-Christian bias about marriage being about offspring, I'm also big on pointing out the benefits of knowing that this one person will stay with you forever and ever, that they will be there to love you and to support you. Besides which, it's been proven that married people have better sex.
No, i was a complete outcast ( still am, and proud of it ).. so I have no doubts. i wasnt 'conformed'..
^_^ I thought I was an outcast for most of high school, shunned by the social caste and generally not well thought of. I was proud of it, aloof even. You can imagine what a blow to my self-image it was when I found out my senior year that most of the popular people actually liked me and thought of me as a friend... nobody they'd invite to a party, but then again, I wasn't really into parties back then.
Then again, I had a weird graduating class... our valedictorian was also the star soccer player, a big social mover, and an all-around nice guy (he went to the seminary to become a minister, actually). From what I understand, there was an abnormal lack of castes in my school. At the very least few people were outcast except by choice. *half smile* Well, unless you were a Mansonite, a druggie, gay, or black. It was, after all, a southern high school...
^_^ Honestly, I think self-learners are awesome. My older brother will sit down and learn a computer language just because he feels like it, usually doing so by developing some computer game he's interested in. I have a friend who taught himself to play a guitar by picking it up and plucking at the strings until he figured out the chords. I wish I could do that kind of thing, but I really don't have the self-drive to do so. Most of what I know is either due to inherent ability (music), rote training (grammar and spelling), or a combination thereof (mathematics and computers). I have grand ideas, but I don't follow through on them unless poked and prodded. I think there's room for both types in this world. And yes, I think there's a balance there. Self-learning people tend to learn to do what interests them and may get bored when faced with having to learn or do something they're not interested in. Those of us who need to be formally taught have often learned to learn even when we don't particularly want to. Both kinds of people are needed in this world. As to why college education is considered so important for jobs, my personal opinion is that a lot of it has to do with the easy hiring metric (Someone with a Bachelor's has theoretically reached a certain threshold of knowledge and testing) and partly because the people hiring had to pay out to get a degree so by golly their employees will have to pay their dues too. *shrug* And honestly, graduating within 4 years of college with a decent GPA does show some degree of perserverence and ability to put one's mind to a task.
And again... if two parents are better than one, why not three or four... or an entire community? Christian morality is the only thing trying to argue for two heterosexual parents from where I'm standing.
While it doesn't really cover the heterosexual part, I would say that the number of two may have more to do with most people not being up to polyamory. I'm not going to even go into the debate quagmire about whether it is possible to love more than one person at once in the manner of a lifelong relationship, but given what I've seen of people, I suspect most couldn't share like that. Romantic love, to me, is an inherently selfish thing. It's wanting that one person all to yourself. With two people, they can be fixated on each other. With three or more... well, I guess you could set up a circular relationship (reminds me of that old joke about how many people it takes to make a mating circle. One, but he has to be very flexible), I would suspect that eventually people would be feeling left out. Yes, multiple marriages have existed in many cultures, but my understanding is that almost all of them were one man to many women, and seemed to have more to do with possession than a romantic love to all of them. Yes, there was probably romance; you can romance a different girl every night without a problem. Yes, there was probably love; my parents had six children and the number of us didn't decrease the love they held for each of us. However, as I said before, romantic love always seems to wind up being selfish in the end. ^_^ Then again, that may be my Western Judeo-Christian male biases at work.
*grumble* That will teach me to post links without doing a preview...
Yes, there are homographs. But in all of your examples, they're pronounced differently. For that matter, there are words in English which are pronounced and spelled the same with different meanings such as "cleave" which can mean "cut apart" or "stick together" for an example of opposites and "fluke" meaning "a type of worm," "a chance occurence," or "a whale's tail" as an example of simply the same word meaning different things. What I'm looking for is a word which differs only in accentuation. The closest I can think of are Initial-stress-derived nouns but even those tend to seperate into the noun and the verbed noun.
I told a colleague at work that I was planning on learning French. He ERUPTED at me and told me how useless anything French was...
While the number of people speaking French as a primary language aren't really all that huge, I understand that the number of people speaking French as a second language is second only to those speaking English as a second language. If this is true (I've had it quoted at me a few times, but I've never found a cite), I suspect it's a lingering effect from the days when French was the language for the royal and the intellectual elite in Europe. From my experience travelling through Russia, almost everyone I met either spoke English or French, so I was able to get by without an extensive Russian vocabulary.
Try looking up nTracker. Our company was considering it after we had a laptop stolen. Basically, like you said, it makes the laptop phone home periodically, in this case doing so via Email. As always, a sophisticated thief will get by it, but with proper protections (turning off booting from anything but the harddrive), no one should be able to get in to change anything without a proper password. Sure, they can dyke the harddrive, but that's always a risk with computer thefts. Meh, our company dropped the idea after looking at the costs involved, but it seems a reasonable enough investment for a private individual.
try for example to write vietnamese without accent and you will end up completely incomprehensible. letters with accent may be a completely different letter/meaning.
More amusing to me was the example I once ran into in a Japanese tutorial book mentioning that the words for "escalator" and "handcuffs" are the same, only differing in which syllable you put stress on. Although I'm sure there's some word in English that behaves in a similar manner, althogh I can't currently think of one off the top of my head.
"Liberal Arts" College Education
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 1
My experience as a manager has been the latter approach produces people who are better employees in the long run. Maybe it's just the type of people who prefer each type of education that is the difference.
The University of Dayton is one of the colleges which requires non-engineering classes for an engineering degree, from intro classes in Philosophy and Religion to requiring a 300-400 level course in each of the five disciplines. While I enjoyed those courses, I don't think the actual content counted so much as that I was forced to deal with non-engineers on a daily basis. Heck, I even had close friends who weren't engineers! In comparison, going to some place like MIT, I would have probably gone through 4 years within my safe and secure bubble of people who spoke geekspeak. In CMU's defense, they do require computer people to take a minor, although I believe there are no restrictions saying that it must be a non-technical one.
In our defense, jokes were popping up in the wake of September 11th too. Not a day later, I received a joke involving a businessman answering his cell phone from his mistress's house on September 11th afternoon, assuring his wife that he was fine, just working at his office late as usual...
This is why it's so important for encyclopaedia (and Wikipedia) articles to give references. Treat them as brief introductions and overviews of particular areas, and then do your own reading and work from the references. An encyclopaedia should never be the primary source of a particular piece of information.
This is one of the reasons why I love the Snopes Urban Legends site. Not only do the stories tend to be well-researched, they list references at the bottom and the writers tend to admit when they're unsure about their sources of information and/or conclusions. ^_^ The wacky humor and illustrations are nice too.
Personally, I still would. The movie screen is of a much larger size and quality than my puny TV or computer monitor. Even if I had a better display, DVDs are stored at a low resolution with lossy compression. Now the point may be more relevant when comparing DVDs and some of the dollar theaters... last dollar theater I went to (Ok, actually $2 for matinees and $3 otherwise. Damn inflation...), the screen was only a bit larger than some flatscreen TVs and the sound quality was pretty lousy.
The only thing which I really need fixed for movies is to reduce the amount of commercials before the show starts and (although I know it's really not feasible) some way of allowing me to watch at my own convenience rather than picking from a small set of times which don't start until well after work is over and largely conflict with other things I have to do during the day. *wry grin* Again, the amount of commercials is a factor. Theoretically, I can watch a 2-hour movie (when you can find one that long anymore) starting at 4:45 and still get to 7:00 play practice. Then the previews start, followed by commercials, followed by more previews. I know many people who don't even bother showing up for movies until 10 minutes in because they know the movie won't start until then. It says something that The Passion of Christ actually had to advertise that there were no previews or commercials before the movie. (Which was nice, particularly as this was one of the longer films)
I have fond memories of playing Downfall (Super-Mario variant basically), Dunegons of Daggorath, Enchanter, Rad Warrior... of course almsot all of the games were pirated, but I didn't know any better back then. *sigh* Those were the days my friend.
They do sell phones which basically boil down to making and receiving calls. Heck, most of the places will practically give them away, even without a contract. As for the regular size, well, one of the purposes of cell phones is that they be easily carriable. Do you normally stuff your wireless phone down the front of your pants? {turns slightly green} Never mind... don't answer that.
I do wonder why "You never looked lovelier" is considered a compliment while the logical equivalent "At all times prior to now you were uglier" seems to be taken negatively.
^_^ For that matter, one might ask why telling a girl she "looks nice today" sometimes results in her taking offense, insinuating you mean it didn't look nice before.
Personally, I don't find your second comment as really being offensive. Maybe it's just mentioning ugliness? Use of certain words can definitely tint (taint) the rest of the sentence.
Sign language is nice in that it is easy to teach to anyone, but it's not as efficient as spoken language, and it has drawbacks, such as requiring a line of sight to the speaker.
Actually, I'd disagree there... True sign language involves multiple conventions involving time and place. They also cut out a lot of the unnecessary words in the language. On the other hand, the sign language you get from the average college course or regular elementary school is likely to be the highly inefficient English-to-ASL direct translation.
Actually, either phrase, "I could care less" or "I couldn't care less" is valid in US English and are considered to be one and the same. It's just one of those fun contradictions like "fat chance" and "slim chance" meaning the same thing. Or "flammable" and "inflammable" being equivalent.
And don't even get me started on "cleave" meaning both "to seperate" and "to put together"...
I think the argument is often that you wind up with the disabled people relying on devices that approximate "regular people"'s senses but do so badly, versus them using established methods that work better when present. For instance, there are legally blind children relying on magnifying devices for reading rather than learning braille. You have children with cochlear implants who never learn sign language or lip-reading. I agree that we should use technology to help the disabled, but not to the exclusion of tried-and-true methods.
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Anyhow, magic smoke is the air elemental let out of computer chips when they fry. See? Alchemy did prove something scientifical!
The fact that, since the DeCSS trials, they consider it to be the same, is scary. Fortunately, they're largely being sensible and giving warnings first to people who aren't repeat offenders.
That said, people like SuprNova and LokiTorrents are on shakier ground. Part of the basis of torrents is the veracity of the link. I do not believe it is possible for me to post a bittorrent to a file and then have someone change the file type, as may happen with web links. I would actually say that the case here is closer to, say, providing your office building's security plans to burglars. You know damn well that they're up to no good and therefore you're in collusion. You're not technically stealing anything but you're also not innocent of complicity. That said, I see it as a lesser crime and therefore deserving of a lesser penalty, much like how "aiding and abetting" tends to be less severe than the actual crime.
I agree that police brutality is not funny. But in the next paragraph, we learn that both people involved were subsequently hired. I know it's not ironic because nothing on Slashdot is allowed to be, but it is incongruous.
*WHAM* *THUD* *pained groan*
"So, we'd like to tender an offer for employment. The physical abuse was just some playful hazing and the people ordering it have been sacked, drawn and quartered."
My wife and I don't plan on having kids, and getting married was the best thing we ever did for our relationship.
{nods} I can definitely see that. For all my Judeo-Christian bias about marriage being about offspring, I'm also big on pointing out the benefits of knowing that this one person will stay with you forever and ever, that they will be there to love you and to support you. Besides which, it's been proven that married people have better sex.
^_^ I thought I was an outcast for most of high school, shunned by the social caste and generally not well thought of. I was proud of it, aloof even. You can imagine what a blow to my self-image it was when I found out my senior year that most of the popular people actually liked me and thought of me as a friend... nobody they'd invite to a party, but then again, I wasn't really into parties back then.
Then again, I had a weird graduating class... our valedictorian was also the star soccer player, a big social mover, and an all-around nice guy (he went to the seminary to become a minister, actually). From what I understand, there was an abnormal lack of castes in my school. At the very least few people were outcast except by choice. *half smile* Well, unless you were a Mansonite, a druggie, gay, or black. It was, after all, a southern high school...
King Luca!
^_^ Honestly, I think self-learners are awesome. My older brother will sit down and learn a computer language just because he feels like it, usually doing so by developing some computer game he's interested in. I have a friend who taught himself to play a guitar by picking it up and plucking at the strings until he figured out the chords. I wish I could do that kind of thing, but I really don't have the self-drive to do so. Most of what I know is either due to inherent ability (music), rote training (grammar and spelling), or a combination thereof (mathematics and computers). I have grand ideas, but I don't follow through on them unless poked and prodded. I think there's room for both types in this world. And yes, I think there's a balance there. Self-learning people tend to learn to do what interests them and may get bored when faced with having to learn or do something they're not interested in. Those of us who need to be formally taught have often learned to learn even when we don't particularly want to. Both kinds of people are needed in this world. As to why college education is considered so important for jobs, my personal opinion is that a lot of it has to do with the easy hiring metric (Someone with a Bachelor's has theoretically reached a certain threshold of knowledge and testing) and partly because the people hiring had to pay out to get a degree so by golly their employees will have to pay their dues too. *shrug* And honestly, graduating within 4 years of college with a decent GPA does show some degree of perserverence and ability to put one's mind to a task.
And again ... if two parents are better than one, why not three or four ... or an entire community? Christian morality is the only thing trying to argue for two heterosexual parents from where I'm standing.
While it doesn't really cover the heterosexual part, I would say that the number of two may have more to do with most people not being up to polyamory. I'm not going to even go into the debate quagmire about whether it is possible to love more than one person at once in the manner of a lifelong relationship, but given what I've seen of people, I suspect most couldn't share like that. Romantic love, to me, is an inherently selfish thing. It's wanting that one person all to yourself. With two people, they can be fixated on each other. With three or more... well, I guess you could set up a circular relationship (reminds me of that old joke about how many people it takes to make a mating circle. One, but he has to be very flexible), I would suspect that eventually people would be feeling left out. Yes, multiple marriages have existed in many cultures, but my understanding is that almost all of them were one man to many women, and seemed to have more to do with possession than a romantic love to all of them. Yes, there was probably romance; you can romance a different girl every night without a problem. Yes, there was probably love; my parents had six children and the number of us didn't decrease the love they held for each of us. However, as I said before, romantic love always seems to wind up being selfish in the end. ^_^ Then again, that may be my Western Judeo-Christian male biases at work.
I can't count the number of times I've seen a link on Wikipedia that made me say "ooh, I'd like to know more about that" and clicked it, just to find out that it only points to a simple definition of whatever term I clicked. That's not what I wanted, dammit!
^_^ And you're absolutely right. Wikipedia is not a dictionary as they repeatedly state. Doesn't keep people from treating it that way, but eh... reminds me of that old wooden spoon about how an early encyclopaedia went through 16 pages on horse breeding and the entry on "woman" was "The female counterpart to Man."
*grumble* That will teach me to post links without doing a preview...
Yes, there are homographs. But in all of your examples, they're pronounced differently. For that matter, there are words in English which are pronounced and spelled the same with different meanings such as "cleave" which can mean "cut apart" or "stick together" for an example of opposites and "fluke" meaning "a type of worm," "a chance occurence," or "a whale's tail" as an example of simply the same word meaning different things. What I'm looking for is a word which differs only in accentuation. The closest I can think of are Initial-stress-derived nouns but even those tend to seperate into the noun and the verbed noun.
Yes, there are . But in all of your examples, they're pronounced differently. For that matter, there are words in English which are pronounced and spelled the same with different meanings such as "cleave" which can mean "cut apart" or "stick together" for an example of opposites and "fluke" meaning "a type of worm," "a chance occurence," or "a whale's tail" as an example of simply the same word meaning different things. What I'm looking for is a word which differs only in accentuation. The closest I can think of are Initial-stress-derived nouns but even those tend to seperate into the noun and the verbed noun.
I told a colleague at work that I was planning on learning French. He ERUPTED at me and told me how useless anything French was...
While the number of people speaking French as a primary language aren't really all that huge, I understand that the number of people speaking French as a second language is second only to those speaking English as a second language. If this is true (I've had it quoted at me a few times, but I've never found a cite), I suspect it's a lingering effect from the days when French was the language for the royal and the intellectual elite in Europe. From my experience travelling through Russia, almost everyone I met either spoke English or French, so I was able to get by without an extensive Russian vocabulary.
Try looking up nTracker. Our company was considering it after we had a laptop stolen. Basically, like you said, it makes the laptop phone home periodically, in this case doing so via Email. As always, a sophisticated thief will get by it, but with proper protections (turning off booting from anything but the harddrive), no one should be able to get in to change anything without a proper password. Sure, they can dyke the harddrive, but that's always a risk with computer thefts. Meh, our company dropped the idea after looking at the costs involved, but it seems a reasonable enough investment for a private individual.
try for example to write vietnamese without accent and you will end up completely incomprehensible. letters with accent may be a completely different letter/meaning.
More amusing to me was the example I once ran into in a Japanese tutorial book mentioning that the words for "escalator" and "handcuffs" are the same, only differing in which syllable you put stress on. Although I'm sure there's some word in English that behaves in a similar manner, althogh I can't currently think of one off the top of my head.
My experience as a manager has been the latter approach produces people who are better employees in the long run. Maybe it's just the type of people who prefer each type of education that is the difference.
The University of Dayton is one of the colleges which requires non-engineering classes for an engineering degree, from intro classes in Philosophy and Religion to requiring a 300-400 level course in each of the five disciplines. While I enjoyed those courses, I don't think the actual content counted so much as that I was forced to deal with non-engineers on a daily basis. Heck, I even had close friends who weren't engineers! In comparison, going to some place like MIT, I would have probably gone through 4 years within my safe and secure bubble of people who spoke geekspeak. In CMU's defense, they do require computer people to take a minor, although I believe there are no restrictions saying that it must be a non-technical one.
In our defense, jokes were popping up in the wake of September 11th too. Not a day later, I received a joke involving a businessman answering his cell phone from his mistress's house on September 11th afternoon, assuring his wife that he was fine, just working at his office late as usual...
*power drill whirring* I'm afraid it's going to have to come out. All of it.
This is one of the reasons why I love the Snopes Urban Legends site. Not only do the stories tend to be well-researched, they list references at the bottom and the writers tend to admit when they're unsure about their sources of information and/or conclusions. ^_^ The wacky humor and illustrations are nice too.
The only thing which I really need fixed for movies is to reduce the amount of commercials before the show starts and (although I know it's really not feasible) some way of allowing me to watch at my own convenience rather than picking from a small set of times which don't start until well after work is over and largely conflict with other things I have to do during the day. *wry grin* Again, the amount of commercials is a factor. Theoretically, I can watch a 2-hour movie (when you can find one that long anymore) starting at 4:45 and still get to 7:00 play practice. Then the previews start, followed by commercials, followed by more previews. I know many people who don't even bother showing up for movies until 10 minutes in because they know the movie won't start until then. It says something that The Passion of Christ actually had to advertise that there were no previews or commercials before the movie. (Which was nice, particularly as this was one of the longer films)
I have fond memories of playing Downfall (Super-Mario variant basically), Dunegons of Daggorath, Enchanter, Rad Warrior... of course almsot all of the games were pirated, but I didn't know any better back then. *sigh* Those were the days my friend.
They do sell phones which basically boil down to making and receiving calls. Heck, most of the places will practically give them away, even without a contract. As for the regular size, well, one of the purposes of cell phones is that they be easily carriable. Do you normally stuff your wireless phone down the front of your pants? {turns slightly green} Never mind... don't answer that.
^_^ For that matter, one might ask why telling a girl she "looks nice today" sometimes results in her taking offense, insinuating you mean it didn't look nice before.
Personally, I don't find your second comment as really being offensive. Maybe it's just mentioning ugliness? Use of certain words can definitely tint (taint) the rest of the sentence.
Sign language is nice in that it is easy to teach to anyone, but it's not as efficient as spoken language, and it has drawbacks, such as requiring a line of sight to the speaker.
Actually, I'd disagree there... True sign language involves multiple conventions involving time and place. They also cut out a lot of the unnecessary words in the language. On the other hand, the sign language you get from the average college course or regular elementary school is likely to be the highly inefficient English-to-ASL direct translation.
And don't even get me started on "cleave" meaning both "to seperate" and "to put together"...
I think the argument is often that you wind up with the disabled people relying on devices that approximate "regular people"'s senses but do so badly, versus them using established methods that work better when present. For instance, there are legally blind children relying on magnifying devices for reading rather than learning braille. You have children with cochlear implants who never learn sign language or lip-reading. I agree that we should use technology to help the disabled, but not to the exclusion of tried-and-true methods.