... that digg is the site which claims to be user-driven. Slashdot never has. Slashdot may do slimy moderating behind the scenes, but they don't claim to be pure as the driven snow. Digg does, and digg isn't, and digg got well and truly caught and called out on it, and retaliated, and the story goes on. Evil is one thing, but evil claiming to be good is another kettle of fish altogether.
Essential Japanese Grammar by Everett F. Bleiler, Dover, 486-21027-8. However, Amazon only lists a Basic Japanese Grammar by the same author, different press, different ISBN.
I learned some Japanese 30 years ago while stationed in Japan in the Navy. I was mostly self taught originally and took some courses after I got out, and have been back for several month long vacations since. My biggest problem as a tourist is that it takes several days to get my accent back and remember the body language, and then somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd week, I remember them too well, and the locals assume I know more than I do about social norms in general.
There's a book which I unfortunately do not have with me now, Tuttle Press I think, possibly called Basic Japanese Grammar. Looking around the Amazon web site, I found a book, ISBN 0804819408, which looks close, but I won't swear it to be what I have at home. If you respond to this and leave a request, I can look it up this weekend and post it. It is not perfect, but it is an excellent cheat sheet. It is almost like a tech sheet for hardware, a basic summary of grammar rules with simple explanations of how to use them, when, and why.
OK, the good. Japanese grammer is incredibly regular, almost mathematical. I believe there are only three irregular verbs in the entire language, and then only in how they form their root for further conjugation. The verb you find in the dictionary is the familiar present tense. There is no distinction between singular or plural, first second or third person. Purists will cringe, but the dictionary form is perfectly acceptable for starters. Natives will be so surprised that you are even making an attempt at their language that the lack of politeness will not matter a whit.
I believe that anyone wanting to get along as a tourist can learn real Japanese, not pidgin, in a week of nightly study with this book. You will have crap pronunciation and almost no vocabulary, but you will be able to speak complete sentences, slowly.
I recommend this as the initial course, a week, a month, not to master it, but to see if you can grok it. The grammer may be very regular, but it is different, and you will have to think differently to make any headway. If you persist in thinking in your native language patterns, you will make no headway and had best give it up. This book will give you an excellent background in seeing if you can rewarp your mindset. You will not learn any useful reading or writing. Forget those for now. The purpose here is to introduce you to the thought patterns behind Japanese. Nothing else matters at first. If you can't get your brain into the Japanese mode, there is no point going any further.
If you want to continue, take college courses, community college courses, private school courses, or whatever you can. Here you will learn reading and writing, complete grammar including politeness levels, etc.
Reading and writing is both easy and hard. There is a pattern to the kanji, and there are only (I think) 212 basic kanji. All other kanji are built from those, and dictionaries are organized around them also. This will help considerably in memorizing them and in possibly (possibly!) understanding the meaning of kanji you have never seen before. Pronouncing kanji is another matter. There is almost no clue in the characters themselves as to their pronunciation. Here you rely on dictionaries and rote memorization.
I got to the point of around 500 kanji before I stopped trying to learn more. I was only going to class twice a week, it took me an hour to read a single page in a book (including waga hai wa neko de aru for you who snicker:-), and I got so used to my dictionary that I could open it to within 5 or ten pages of the kanji in question. But I was forgetting kanji as fast as I was learning them, and evetually gave it up. 500 kanji is probably around 4th or 5th grade level. Not very impressive.
On the other hand, once you get into the pattern of kanji, you can draw them in your hand for natives, and you can make a lot more sense of maps and bus signs. Traveling is a lot easier when you can memorize kanji long enough to find
The best NASA can manage is four flights a year, if they are lucky with tiles and other refurbishing. If they had no shuttle, they could lop off 5-10 billion dollars a year from their budget. Whether you bill that money to one flight, all flights, or the first flight, it's still way too damned much money for so little functionality. The most expensive expendable rockets are, I think, around $200M.
And NASA is now talking of mothballing the space station as soon as it is complete. This all belongs in Alice in Wonderland. They will spend $25-50B building something they intend to stop using as soon as it is built. They could send 100 probes for the same amount of money.
A shuttle launch costs $1B in new costs. That's not including any share of past, paid-for, R&D. That's staff, expendable tank, refurbishing the solid boosters and shuttle engines, fuel, etc.
The Deep Impact mission (which smacked into a comet so we could analyze the dust) and the Stardust mission (which return fabulous samples of comet dust) together cost $600M or $700M complete. You could no doubt find a similar mission to bring it to an even $1B.
This is not counting any share of the cost of failed probes or failed shuttles.
Which do you think returned more bang for the buck?
Why spend all that time and treasure putting telescopes so far from humans and then spend even more time and treasure putting humans RIGHT NEXT to the damned things?
If you think having telescopes on the far side is good because it is out of the way of human pollution, then why for heaven's sake do you want to throw human pollution back into the mix as close as that?
The vibrations from human equipment, outgassing, dust raised... sure, vibrations and dust are natural events there, but humans add more.
Good god almighty.
Robots would have to do 99.999% of the work anyway. What would humans add to either the construction or maintenance?
I knew he was a Nazi sympathizer, but I had no idea how much.
The link says that $5 a day was only available to white males of high morality, who had to have their homes monitored by the Ford Co., and the offer was rescinded soon after.
If they made them, then they aren't an economy that doesn't make anything. And if they didn't make them, then they got them from someone who does, and since we are talking big scary guns here, theft is unlikely, meaning they acquired them thru trade of some sort. Which means they must have had something of value to trade, but where did that come from?
Henry Ford's context for those amazing wages was that he was the first, or one of the first, mass production automobile manufacturers, had little or no competition, and could afford to not sweat the salaries in order to hire the best workers. No one ever mentions that, they make him out to be some magnanimous altruistic nice guy who liked paying his workers fairly. He was not. He was just as cold blooded as any factory owner and later proved it when he had competition.
Microsoft has a bad reputation with regard to the quality of their code. But they have a really good reputation for shipping products.
This is news to me. Maybe you mean eventually shipping product, but their general reputation is for always being years late and always dropping features to make even the late dates.
Slashdot displays its ignorance of basic legal concepts yet again...
Wrong, daddy-o. That comment came from PJ at Groklaw, not slashdot. Lookee here...
It's the Order that tells Wallace to pay the Free Software Foundation's costs. Judges do that when they'd like you to learn a good lesson. It's a signal you shouldn't have brought the case in the first place.
His license forbids distributing binaries unless they are made from his sources. You want to add any of the many well known patches? Great, you distribute his source and your patches, you do not distribute patched sources and you do not distribute binaries.
No way is DJB software public domain.
In fact, I bet a dollar you don't even know what public domain is.
Betcha they don't make the Zapruder movie available. Betcha! It's these wily Republicans in charge now, their parents and grandparents probably had a finger in assassinating JFK and won't to cover it up.
Or maybe it's just that their natural secretiveness will extend to this.
Slashdot Mirror
Or a lot of species ....
... that digg is the site which claims to be user-driven. Slashdot never has. Slashdot may do slimy moderating behind the scenes, but they don't claim to be pure as the driven snow. Digg does, and digg isn't, and digg got well and truly caught and called out on it, and retaliated, and the story goes on. Evil is one thing, but evil claiming to be good is another kettle of fish altogether.
Gynormous Profit for Lawyers
It's hard to screw up flat files enough to justify charging $$$/hour to fix things up while blaming someone else for their shitty software.
Essential Japanese Grammar by Everett F. Bleiler, Dover, 486-21027-8. However, Amazon only lists a Basic Japanese Grammar by the same author, different press, different ISBN.
I learned some Japanese 30 years ago while stationed in Japan in the Navy. I was mostly self taught originally and took some courses after I got out, and have been back for several month long vacations since. My biggest problem as a tourist is that it takes several days to get my accent back and remember the body language, and then somewhere in the 2nd or 3rd week, I remember them too well, and the locals assume I know more than I do about social norms in general.
:-), and I got so used to my dictionary that I could open it to within 5 or ten pages of the kanji in question. But I was forgetting kanji as fast as I was learning them, and evetually gave it up. 500 kanji is probably around 4th or 5th grade level. Not very impressive.
There's a book which I unfortunately do not have with me now, Tuttle Press I think, possibly called Basic Japanese Grammar. Looking around the Amazon web site, I found a book, ISBN 0804819408, which looks close, but I won't swear it to be what I have at home. If you respond to this and leave a request, I can look it up this weekend and post it. It is not perfect, but it is an excellent cheat sheet. It is almost like a tech sheet for hardware, a basic summary of grammar rules with simple explanations of how to use them, when, and why.
OK, the good. Japanese grammer is incredibly regular, almost mathematical. I believe there are only three irregular verbs in the entire language, and then only in how they form their root for further conjugation. The verb you find in the dictionary is the familiar present tense. There is no distinction between singular or plural, first second or third person. Purists will cringe, but the dictionary form is perfectly acceptable for starters. Natives will be so surprised that you are even making an attempt at their language that the lack of politeness will not matter a whit.
I believe that anyone wanting to get along as a tourist can learn real Japanese, not pidgin, in a week of nightly study with this book. You will have crap pronunciation and almost no vocabulary, but you will be able to speak complete sentences, slowly.
I recommend this as the initial course, a week, a month, not to master it, but to see if you can grok it. The grammer may be very regular, but it is different, and you will have to think differently to make any headway. If you persist in thinking in your native language patterns, you will make no headway and had best give it up. This book will give you an excellent background in seeing if you can rewarp your mindset. You will not learn any useful reading or writing. Forget those for now. The purpose here is to introduce you to the thought patterns behind Japanese. Nothing else matters at first. If you can't get your brain into the Japanese mode, there is no point going any further.
If you want to continue, take college courses, community college courses, private school courses, or whatever you can. Here you will learn reading and writing, complete grammar including politeness levels, etc.
Reading and writing is both easy and hard. There is a pattern to the kanji, and there are only (I think) 212 basic kanji. All other kanji are built from those, and dictionaries are organized around them also. This will help considerably in memorizing them and in possibly (possibly!) understanding the meaning of kanji you have never seen before. Pronouncing kanji is another matter. There is almost no clue in the characters themselves as to their pronunciation. Here you rely on dictionaries and rote memorization.
I got to the point of around 500 kanji before I stopped trying to learn more. I was only going to class twice a week, it took me an hour to read a single page in a book (including waga hai wa neko de aru for you who snicker
On the other hand, once you get into the pattern of kanji, you can draw them in your hand for natives, and you can make a lot more sense of maps and bus signs. Traveling is a lot easier when you can memorize kanji long enough to find
The best NASA can manage is four flights a year, if they are lucky with tiles and other refurbishing. If they had no shuttle, they could lop off 5-10 billion dollars a year from their budget. Whether you bill that money to one flight, all flights, or the first flight, it's still way too damned much money for so little functionality. The most expensive expendable rockets are, I think, around $200M.
And NASA is now talking of mothballing the space station as soon as it is complete. This all belongs in Alice in Wonderland. They will spend $25-50B building something they intend to stop using as soon as it is built. They could send 100 probes for the same amount of money.
Someone ought to be shot.
A hit, a very palpable hit!
it would be cheaper to hand the Iraqis a million dollars each
...
...
Interesting idea
Population 26M. Call it 25
The US has spent roughly $500B over 3 years.
That's $20K each, or, say, $50K - $100K per family.
It would have to be spread over three years, but that still seems like a pretty good sum.
A shuttle launch costs $1B in new costs. That's not including any share of past, paid-for, R&D. That's staff, expendable tank, refurbishing the solid boosters and shuttle engines, fuel, etc.
The Deep Impact mission (which smacked into a comet so we could analyze the dust) and the Stardust mission (which return fabulous samples of comet dust) together cost $600M or $700M complete. You could no doubt find a similar mission to bring it to an even $1B.
This is not counting any share of the cost of failed probes or failed shuttles.
Which do you think returned more bang for the buck?
Why spend all that time and treasure putting telescopes so far from humans and then spend even more time and treasure putting humans RIGHT NEXT to the damned things?
... sure, vibrations and dust are natural events there, but humans add more.
If you think having telescopes on the far side is good because it is out of the way of human pollution, then why for heaven's sake do you want to throw human pollution back into the mix as close as that?
The vibrations from human equipment, outgassing, dust raised
Good god almighty.
Robots would have to do 99.999% of the work anyway. What would humans add to either the construction or maintenance?
I knew he was a Nazi sympathizer, but I had no idea how much.
The link says that $5 a day was only available to white males of high morality, who had to have their homes monitored by the Ford Co., and the offer was rescinded soon after.
Incredible how blind some people are.
If they made them, then they aren't an economy that doesn't make anything. And if they didn't make them, then they got them from someone who does, and since we are talking big scary guns here, theft is unlikely, meaning they acquired them thru trade of some sort. Which means they must have had something of value to trade, but where did that come from?
This confuses me.
Henry Ford's context for those amazing wages was that he was the first, or one of the first, mass production automobile manufacturers, had little or no competition, and could afford to not sweat the salaries in order to hire the best workers. No one ever mentions that, they make him out to be some magnanimous altruistic nice guy who liked paying his workers fairly. He was not. He was just as cold blooded as any factory owner and later proved it when he had competition.
-:!)
A mohawk is the closest I can get to multicolored without resorting to ASCII escapes....
They intentionally pervert the standards. See Kerberos as an example. They have to know what the standards are to screw things up so royally.
Microsoft has a bad reputation with regard to the quality of their code. But they have a really good reputation for shipping products.
This is news to me. Maybe you mean eventually shipping product, but their general reputation is for always being years late and always dropping features to make even the late dates.
Slashdot displays its ignorance of basic legal concepts yet again...
...
Wrong, daddy-o. That comment came from PJ at Groklaw, not slashdot. Lookee here
It's the Order that tells Wallace to pay the Free Software Foundation's costs. Judges do that when they'd like you to learn a good lesson. It's a signal you shouldn't have brought the case in the first place.
His license forbids distributing binaries unless they are made from his sources. You want to add any of the many well known patches? Great, you distribute his source and your patches, you do not distribute patched sources and you do not distribute binaries.
No way is DJB software public domain.
In fact, I bet a dollar you don't even know what public domain is.
Is your political life really that empty that no matter what the topic, you still have to defend GWB?
I feel sorry for your wife/girlfriend/boyfriend whatever if you have one.
OSS is Open Source Software, the GPL is for Free Software.
However, lawyers apart, it certainly fits the standard Free Source Software definition most people use.
SCO needs a new marketing director.
... that this thing ONLY runs on soybean oil, that it is so finely tuned that other vegetable oils either don't run well or get terrible mileage.
Look. His handle is Not another doctor and the article is on the website of PC Doctor.
Obviously he's not connected with them. What are you, paranoid or something?
Betcha they don't make the Zapruder movie available. Betcha! It's these wily Republicans in charge now, their parents and grandparents probably had a finger in assassinating JFK and won't to cover it up.
Or maybe it's just that their natural secretiveness will extend to this.
But I betcha we don't get the Zapruder movie.