All of your examples are noun-noun noun phrases. You wouldn't say "This rain is a bit November", would you? November is not an adjective.
21st, however, is an adjective. If I say "Today is a 21st" you'll probably ask "A 21st what?" When you use it as a noun it can be thought of as modifying an elided "day", as the AC indicated with square brackets.
It's quite simple. A punt is a flat-bottomed boat which is propelled by pushing a pole against the river bed (similar to a gondola). A punter is to Oxford and Cambridge as a gondolier is to Venice. (Don't worry if you've never heard of Oxford, Cambridge, or Venice: they're in Europe).
I'm not saying that you should. I'm saying that the reason that many Chinese speak English and few USians speak Mandarin isn't that English is easier to learn than Mandarin, which is what the GGP appears to me to be claiming.
Your perception of Europe is about as accurate as the stereotype of the US which says that everyone is the size of a baby elephant and has more empty beer cans in their car than brain cells in their head.
So Tom Lehrer's lyrics (Pollution) are still applicable?
Lots of things there that you can drink, But stay away from the kitchen sink! The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay They drink at lunch in San Jose. So go to the city, See the crazy people there: Like lambs to the slaughter They're drinking the water And breathing (*coughs*) the air!
The situation however is much *better* than my memories of holidaying in various parts of the European mediterranean as recently as the 80s.
I live on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, and I wouldn't drink tap water. I'm sure it's perfectly free of bacteria, but the chlorine which they use to kill them is still in it in sufficient quantities to affect the taste. Some days, when I run the water to wash up it makes my kitchen smell like a swimming pool.
After all, it's a lot easier to come to the US than it is to go to any other country from the US.
Really? That doesn't exactly jive with the reputation for treating all would-be tourists (let alone immigrants) as terrorists until proven otherwise for which the DHS has worked so hard over the past few years.
This includes language.
English isn't an intrinsically easy language to learn. The difference is that other people make the effort to learn it, whereas few Americans make an effort to learn Mandarin.
In Sydney, Australia it is illegal in most apartment blocks also because of the danger of something falling
What do you make your clothes from? I would expect the risk of injury due to falling clothes-pegs to be only very slightly greater than that due to falling dropbears. (I regularly have clothes-pegs from the five floors above me land in my verandah, but I'm not concerned about my safety. And since no-one ever comes to claim them I never need to buy clothes-pegs.)
People write like this to show off, yes, but it also takes a lot of effort to be so precisely complex.
Precise writing looks a bit like this. People who don't have the ability to write precisely but want to look intellectual also write like this. I think this article falls into the category of "trying to appear intellectual" rather than "writing with precision". To illustrate, consider the definition of "avataritis":
the video game industry’s highly emotional, pandemic response to finding the easiest, most efficient solution to the very unique dilemma presented by its ever-widening player base.
So we get from this:
The player base of video games is ever-widening. Simple, plausible.
This presents a very unique dilemma. "Very unique" isn't really a hallmark of precise writing, but more to the point he doesn't tell us what this dilemma is.
The industry is responding to finding the easiest, most efficient solution to this unspecified dilemma. He doesn't tell us what the solution is either.
The industry's response to finding this unspecified solution to an unspecified dilemma is predominantly driven by emotion on the part of the industry and is a widespread infection.
We are left to infer the precise nature of this response from the etymology of his neologism*. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "definition" earlier, because while he tells us what he's using "avataritis" as a short-hand for, he doesn't spell out what it actually consists of.
I'll grant that "pandemic" isn't an inappropriate word given that he's painting avatar usage ("utilization" in the summary is pure pomposity), but the rest makes me far more strongly inclined to believe he's being pretentious than precise. The use of similar language and of self-reference as "the author" in the summary reinforces that view.
* Yes, I'm being pretentious too, but at least what I'm writing makes sense.
In other words, set up these two bodies, and they'd chase each other across the universe at ever increasing speeds, forever. Which would appear to violate conservation of energy.
Would it? The negative mass will also have negative kinetic energy.
There was also no theoretical reason for monopoles _to_ exist.
Maybe not, but I can't help thinking of the positron. No-one knew they existed, but Dirac's equation allowed for the possibility. The Standard Model said that various particles should exist for symmetry reasons and they were discovered. Symmetry is no proof of existence, but I wouldn't say it's wise to bet against it.
I don't recall seeing any commercial games written in Java ever.
Have you never heard of browser games? Mobile phone games? There are thousands of commercial Java games, and some of them have made profits in the hundreds of millions.
When I took statistics exams 10 years ago we had a choice of using the exam board's printed tables or our calculators for values of the normal, Student t and chi-squared distributions. It's tricky. In "real life" you're going to use the calculator: it's easier than the table and gives more significant figures. On the other hand, if you used the full accuracy of the value provided by the calculator and then rounded to the specified number of significant figures at the end then sometimes you would differ by 1 ulp from the figure obtained with the less precise value in the tables (which was also the figure specified in the marking scheme, at least for the mock exams we took).
I know MD5 collisions wasn't my point - that's why I made that a PS - but you still haven't got what my point is. Ignoring insecurities in the PKI and TLS implementations, TLS can prevent eavesdroppers from knowing what data you're sending and receiving, but it can't prevent them from knowing with what server you're communicating. The eavesdropper can still sniff the IP address in the IP packets, and the DNS request which is necessary before you even send your SYN packet, which itself precedes certificate exchange. TLS is cryptography, not steganography.
You haven't yet been modded overrated for not understanding DNS, but maybe someone with mod points will stop by...
Before you exchange certificates you need the IP address of the other end. If Anonymous Coward doesn't want anyone to know that he reads the "idle" section then he needs to get the IP address of idle.slashdot.org without doing an unencrypted DNS lookup for it. How common is encrypted DNS?
PS You forgot to mention c) get a MITM-attacked connection which your browser thinks is fine because it appears to be signed with MD5 by Thawte.
Slashdot Mirror
So? The ECHR entered into effect in 1953, 4 years before the Treaty of Rome. It doesn't depend on the EU Constitution.
All of your examples are noun-noun noun phrases. You wouldn't say "This rain is a bit November", would you? November is not an adjective.
21st, however, is an adjective. If I say "Today is a 21st" you'll probably ask "A 21st what?" When you use it as a noun it can be thought of as modifying an elided "day", as the AC indicated with square brackets.
No, he's talking about length, not girth.
It's quite simple. A punt is a flat-bottomed boat which is propelled by pushing a pole against the river bed (similar to a gondola). A punter is to Oxford and Cambridge as a gondolier is to Venice. (Don't worry if you've never heard of Oxford, Cambridge, or Venice: they're in Europe).
Is that the Russell Brand version?
How would that be more convincing than comparing breeds of dog?
I'm not saying that you should. I'm saying that the reason that many Chinese speak English and few USians speak Mandarin isn't that English is easier to learn than Mandarin, which is what the GGP appears to me to be claiming.
Your perception of Europe is about as accurate as the stereotype of the US which says that everyone is the size of a baby elephant and has more empty beer cans in their car than brain cells in their head.
So Tom Lehrer's lyrics (Pollution) are still applicable?
Lots of things there that you can drink,
But stay away from the kitchen sink!
The breakfast garbage that you throw into the Bay
They drink at lunch in San Jose.
So go to the city,
See the crazy people there:
Like lambs to the slaughter
They're drinking the water
And breathing (*coughs*) the air!
The situation however is much *better* than my memories of holidaying in various parts of the European mediterranean as recently as the 80s.
I live on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, and I wouldn't drink tap water. I'm sure it's perfectly free of bacteria, but the chlorine which they use to kill them is still in it in sufficient quantities to affect the taste. Some days, when I run the water to wash up it makes my kitchen smell like a swimming pool.
After all, it's a lot easier to come to the US than it is to go to any other country from the US.
Really? That doesn't exactly jive with the reputation for treating all would-be tourists (let alone immigrants) as terrorists until proven otherwise for which the DHS has worked so hard over the past few years.
This includes language.
English isn't an intrinsically easy language to learn. The difference is that other people make the effort to learn it, whereas few Americans make an effort to learn Mandarin.
Missed a few words there. "He's painting avatar usage" as a disease.
In Sydney, Australia it is illegal in most apartment blocks also because of the danger of something falling
What do you make your clothes from? I would expect the risk of injury due to falling clothes-pegs to be only very slightly greater than that due to falling dropbears. (I regularly have clothes-pegs from the five floors above me land in my verandah, but I'm not concerned about my safety. And since no-one ever comes to claim them I never need to buy clothes-pegs.)
People write like this to show off, yes, but it also takes a lot of effort to be so precisely complex.
Precise writing looks a bit like this. People who don't have the ability to write precisely but want to look intellectual also write like this. I think this article falls into the category of "trying to appear intellectual" rather than "writing with precision". To illustrate, consider the definition of "avataritis":
the video game industry’s highly emotional, pandemic response to finding the easiest, most efficient solution to the very unique dilemma presented by its ever-widening player base.
So we get from this:
I'll grant that "pandemic" isn't an inappropriate word given that he's painting avatar usage ("utilization" in the summary is pure pomposity), but the rest makes me far more strongly inclined to believe he's being pretentious than precise. The use of similar language and of self-reference as "the author" in the summary reinforces that view.
* Yes, I'm being pretentious too, but at least what I'm writing makes sense.
In other words, set up these two bodies, and they'd chase each other across the universe at ever increasing speeds, forever. Which would appear to violate conservation of energy.
Would it? The negative mass will also have negative kinetic energy.
There was also no theoretical reason for monopoles _to_ exist.
Maybe not, but I can't help thinking of the positron. No-one knew they existed, but Dirac's equation allowed for the possibility. The Standard Model said that various particles should exist for symmetry reasons and they were discovered. Symmetry is no proof of existence, but I wouldn't say it's wise to bet against it.
What do you call a fat person in Amsterdam?
Anything you want. Just make sure your feet are already on the pedals.
Or you assume that protocol names never contain dots and host names always do. Simple.
I don't recall seeing any commercial games written in Java ever.
Have you never heard of browser games? Mobile phone games? There are thousands of commercial Java games, and some of them have made profits in the hundreds of millions.
When I took statistics exams 10 years ago we had a choice of using the exam board's printed tables or our calculators for values of the normal, Student t and chi-squared distributions. It's tricky. In "real life" you're going to use the calculator: it's easier than the table and gives more significant figures. On the other hand, if you used the full accuracy of the value provided by the calculator and then rounded to the specified number of significant figures at the end then sometimes you would differ by 1 ulp from the figure obtained with the less precise value in the tables (which was also the figure specified in the marking scheme, at least for the mock exams we took).
I know MD5 collisions wasn't my point - that's why I made that a PS - but you still haven't got what my point is. Ignoring insecurities in the PKI and TLS implementations, TLS can prevent eavesdroppers from knowing what data you're sending and receiving, but it can't prevent them from knowing with what server you're communicating. The eavesdropper can still sniff the IP address in the IP packets, and the DNS request which is necessary before you even send your SYN packet, which itself precedes certificate exchange. TLS is cryptography, not steganography.
You haven't yet been modded overrated for not understanding DNS, but maybe someone with mod points will stop by...
Before you exchange certificates you need the IP address of the other end. If Anonymous Coward doesn't want anyone to know that he reads the "idle" section then he needs to get the IP address of idle.slashdot.org without doing an unencrypted DNS lookup for it. How common is encrypted DNS?
PS You forgot to mention
c) get a MITM-attacked connection which your browser thinks is fine because it appears to be signed with MD5 by Thawte.
How would HTTPS help? You'll still probably do an unencrypted DNS lookup for idle.slashdot.org.
Selection, perspective, and lighting.
Care to expand that a bit? On my reading of the summary acceleration is involved, which pushes it outside the realm of special rel.