(The US has been doing this with it's own version of english spellings for years). We don't have an organisation to petition
For example, with the word "organization" it's pronounced with a "zee" (or "zed" if you prefer) so why not spell it with one instead of a softer "s" that doesn't accurately record the sound.
One common hacker trait is an utter disdain for things that are deliberately illogical. The problem is that the standards of language often are illogical and yet enforced anyway. It's clear that the intent of English was to have a langauge where the letters record the sound of the word. But it failed miserably at it due to merging in words from different languages and now spelling in English is an utterly illogical mess. So it's not surprising that hackers wouldn't really care to spell things by the standard. To do so you have to fight against what is logical.
Then there's the grammar standards of where punctuation marks are used. The comma was invented to just indicate an audio pause in speech. Then later on anal people changed it to only being usable under specific circumstances - Again, For, No, Reason.
Then there's the confusion over whether or not the quote marks are supposed to accurately quote what is inside them or not. I'd say that only things that are part of what is being quoted belong inside the quotes. Punctuation that is an artifact of the fact that the quote got pasted into another sentence are part of that external sentence, NOT part of the quoted material - so they logically belong outside the quote marks. For example: Logical, but incorrect according to standard:
"Hello", John said.
Did John say, "Hello"? Illogical, but correct according to standard:
"Hello," John said. (The comma isn't part of the quote dammit)
Did John say, "Hello?" (The question mark is there because of the sentence the "Hello" is pasted inside of, NOT because it is part of the "Hello" that John might have said. This allegedly correct way looks, to me, like the question is aksing whether John spoke "Hello" in a questioning tone, because the question mark ended up inside the quoted part.
According to standard, a question asked in the negative isn't really asked in the negative. "Aren't you coming with us", should logically be answerable by saying "Yes I am not coming with you". But the expected interpretation is the inverse of that. Again, the standard is at odds with logic.
Most people look at stuff like that and don't care. People who think logically get fed up with crap like that and rebell.
One possible outcome of this is that it means the rule that your ISP is not resposible for filtering content might not apply to cablemodem service anymore.
One consequence of being a "common carrier" is that the common carrier company is not legally responsible for having to know what kind of content they are sending around. If someone uses their service to speak a slanderous comment, the communication provider can't be held legally responsible for spreading that slander. If someone uses a telephone to make a prank call, you can't sue the phone company for the offensiveness of that call. These are all consequences of being called a common carrier. The definition includes an absolution of all blame for the content being carried - the blame lays only with the people at the ends of the connection, not the people carrying the connection.
Now, if that goes away for cable ISPs, that could mean they have to start censoring to cover their own ass, legally.
Both are true. The illusion of it looking bigger by being near other things is a factor, but it's a factor that exists EVERY DAY when the moon is near the horizon. That not the factor that makes it special this time around. That's an explanation for why the moon looks bigger at, say, 4:00 am than midnight, but it's not an explanation for why the moon looks bigger on June 24, 2005 than on June 24, 1995.
But the chief problem that spreads far beyond the detonation site is fallout. The exploded land becomes dust, which carries up, and rains down later. I suspect the problem would be just as bad if not worse with water - which would turn into a fine mist and be sent up into the air and rain down later.
But I'll admit I don't know much about what goes on in a nuclear explosion.
The only people who give a damn about Linux != Unix are lawyers watching over the trademark name. In all the ways that actually matter, it's a unix and is just as similar with unixes as, say, SysV is similar with BSD.
(although it might be a great platform for giant telescopes) Actually, I don't think so. Look at the classic picture of earthrise as seen from the moon. Note the sky is pitch black with no stars.
Conspiracy theory lunatics have said that this is another piece of evidence that the landings were a hoax. Of course, the more logical explanation is that the moon is very bright. It tends to reflect a lot of white light. When you're standing right on its surface, that light drowns out the stars. Now, on the darker side, it would be excellent, probably, but then the problem is that the lunar day is so slow that you'd have half a month of downtime while it's day, and it would take a month to rotate around to the same section of sky again if you want to observe the same patch of sky several nights in a row.
I'd much rather be riding the Orion than be part of the ground crew when it's launched.
The biggest problem with launching an orion from the ground is that you have to launch it from someplace you don't mind making uninhabitable. And you can't re-use the same launch facility twice. That makes it kind of hard to do repeated Orion liftoffs as part of a regular space program.
Orion would be an excellent way to get around once you're out of the atmosphere, but for use from the ground up it's not practical for anything other than a one-off special case use.
A lot of programs depend on positional layout of the keys to make sense instead of lexical meaning of the keys. Vi is the big obvious one, but there's also the notion that Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V are adjacent (Take that away and their lexical abbreviations don't make any sense. Since when does "V" stand for "paste"?) And then there's the video games, using the asdw diamond, and so on.
It's not worth the hassle for me to switch when there's other ways to decrease ergonomic stress, like not using an editor that requires the use of the pinky keys. (Vi is better ergonomically because you don't have to pinky-type for the arrow keys, the ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdown keys, and you don't have to crimp your hand in the unnatural position that is needed for mouse use.) That and the speed of editing things with Vi means I don't need to type as much to achieve the same effect.
Take your own advice. The RAF did not annihalate the Luftwaffe. They merely showed them that it was too costly for them to do what they were doing, and thus got them to quit doing it. The Luftwaffe quit long before they were "annihilated". They were beaten in that battle, yes. But what they did was take enough losses that they had to retreat from their plan, not take so many losses that they got annihilated. While it's true that the Luftwaffe was in no condition to carry out a nuclear bomb attack by the end of the war, their attrition to get to that state took a long time. After the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, there was still enough luftwaffe bombing capacity left to carry out a single nuclear attack.
Wrong again. The Norden bombsight was reputed to be accurate enough to...[etc]
Both the Germans and the British, however, switched over fairly early on to doing all strategic bombing at night (Rather than trying to bomb by day and exposing themselves to fighter defense like the US did later). They were not able to see their targets well enough to use an optical sight. Night bombing accounts for the majority of bombing performed, and it was not as accurate as the day-bombing with the Norden sight.
The firebombing of Dresden, an example you yourself mentioned, was done that way.
if they were so ready to surrender, why didn't they surrender after the 1st bombing?
Because the US didn't give enough time for the leaders to see for themselves just how bad it really was. Tokyo had been bombed before that by conventional means and had been very badly damaged already. So hearing reports come in that "some big bomb hit Hiroshima and wiped out the city" isn't going to sound that out of place or new - it's going to sound like some yokel misinterpreting the extent of the damage, because bomb damage always looks worse than it is.
The people who were in a position to make the decisions hadn't gotten around yet to seeing with their own eyes the extent of the damage before the second bomb was used. Had we waited longer for the conflicting news reports to get verified and for the leaders to be able to visit the scene, I don't think the 2nd bomb would have been needed.
So it's not that simple. Using one bomb was warranted, and had nothing to do with the USSR. The second one, on the other hand, probably was a gesture of threat to the USSR - "hey look, USSR, we've proven it's not a fluke - we didn't just get lucky once - our results are reproducable and so yes, we have the secret of the atom bomb figured out. Keep that in mind for the future..."
That claim doesn't make any sense because the plans for invasion were drawn up before the atom bombs were even available. The first atom bomb test in New Mexico didn't even occur until after the victory in europe, while the alied leaders were in Germany having a conference arguing over new national borders. The plans for how to invade japan were already made before that.
Besides, there wasn't enough material to make several tactical nukes. The three atom bombs that were made (the test one in New Mexico, plus the two dropped on Japan) contained all the available weapons-grade material that was the result of running radioactive piles for quite some time. To build more nukes after that would take quite a while.
Poison Gas was NEVER used on the battlefield in European Theatre
That's nice, but not relevant, seeing as how the original statement didn't include the caveat "on the battlefield" and was therefore an entirely different claim. Your condescending tone was unwarranted.
I think the more likely explanation is not that the speaker thought Australia was a poor undeveloped country, but that the speaker didn't realize what the term "third world" actually meant, and had probably only heard it in limited contexts... exactly like how people started assumning "hacker" meant one who breaks into computers - they heard the word only in one limited context and made the wrong assumption about what aspect of that context it was talking about. They heard it in reference to clever programmers who broke into computers and didn't realize it was being used to describe the "clever programmer" part instead of the "break into computers" part. Now through the "magic" of common usage, their ignorant misinterpretation has now finally become the default meaning of the word.
No, it's becuase there really do exist actual dumb people. People dumb enough to say something that sounds sarcastic, but they really meant it. I have trouble detecting sarcasm of fundamentalists for this reason. Sarcasm doesn't look ant sillier than the real thing, when the real thing includes such stuff as Jack Chick (www.chick.com).
There isn't any difference between saying "X is greater than Y" and saying "Y is less than X". It's purely a matter of connotation. The fact is they EXPECTED these to last longer than the MINIMUM time they were built for. What the motivation was for that is secondary and irrelevant to what I said. What you expect from something you build is different from what you guarantee from something you build.
For example, if I run an RS323 serial cable 30 feet when the spec only guarantees it up to 25, I still *expect* it to work, more than likely, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
I say when sarcasm fails to be detected as such, it's usually the speaker's fault. Why? Becuase the thought process going through the listener's head in an instant is something like this: 1 - Hmmm - that statement seemed like a really dumb thing to say, in direct contradiction of reality. 2 - I wonder why this person would say something so at odds with the truth? 3 - It could be because he literally believes it and is just dumb or delusional, or it could be because he knows better and is trying to make a joke. 4 - If I respect the speaker's intelligence, then I realize it's not serious, and thus a joke. 5 - If I do not respect the speaker's intelligence, then I still think he seriously meant the dumb thing he said.
So the problem is that if I fail to see sarcasm, it's because I don't have reason to respect the speaker's intelligence.
This is why sarcasm doesn't work online, by the way - the speaker is a stranger to you and so you don't know he's smart enough not to believe something dumb, and so step 4 up above doesn't trigger.
Allegedly the affected customers have been notified by their banks. This leads to a question I have - with phishing being so common, when anyone receieves an e-mail from their bank, do they believe it's really from their bank anymore? Especially when it says it's about an alleged comprimise of their account?
One of the wost things about spammers is that they generate a "boy who cried wolf" problem for people sending legitimate e-mails.
Can someone out there who actually understands the stock market (that wouldn't be me) answer this: What percentage of Redhat is publicly purchasable right now in the first place? Even if they wanted to, could MS buy more than 50% of the company at all?
Despite having an iPod, I don't use iTunes for precisely that reason. I just rip my own CDs over to it using gtkpod. If you were looking for hipocracy, you missed.
Normally, yes, but under these circumstances, I don't agree. Because Google is THE premier search engine, when it returns results what it is essentially saying is "These are the best sources for what you were looking for". When that's not true, and the pages are ranked such that the propaganda ranks highest (and don't believe for a moment that won't be the case. I would be surprised if that *wasn't* a condition of letting google operate there.) Under circumstances like that, having nothing available is actually more honest. "I can't find the answer" is a better result than "I found the answer and it's this [insert propaganda here]."
Slashdot Mirror
(The US has been doing this with it's own version of english spellings for years). We don't have an organisation to petition
For example, with the word "organization" it's pronounced with a "zee" (or "zed" if you prefer) so why not spell it with one instead of a softer "s" that doesn't accurately record the sound.
One common hacker trait is an utter disdain for things that are deliberately illogical. The problem is that the standards of language often are illogical and yet enforced anyway. It's clear that the intent of English was to have a langauge where the letters record the sound of the word. But it failed miserably at it due to merging in words from different languages and now spelling in English is an utterly illogical mess. So it's not surprising that hackers wouldn't really care to spell things by the standard. To do so you have to fight against what is logical.
Then there's the grammar standards of where punctuation marks are used. The comma was invented to just indicate an audio pause in speech. Then later on anal people changed it to only being usable under specific circumstances - Again, For, No, Reason.
Then there's the confusion over whether or not the quote marks are supposed to accurately quote what is inside them or not. I'd say that only things that are part of what is being quoted belong inside the quotes. Punctuation that is an artifact of the fact that the quote got pasted into another sentence are part of that external sentence, NOT part of the quoted material - so they logically belong outside the quote marks. For example:
Logical, but incorrect according to standard:
"Hello", John said.
Did John say, "Hello"?
Illogical, but correct according to standard:
"Hello," John said. (The comma isn't part of the quote dammit)
Did John say, "Hello?" (The question mark is there because of the sentence the "Hello" is pasted inside of, NOT because it is part of the "Hello" that John might have said. This allegedly correct way looks, to me, like the question is aksing whether John spoke "Hello" in a questioning tone, because the question mark ended up inside the quoted part.
According to standard, a question asked in the negative isn't really asked in the negative. "Aren't you coming with us", should logically be answerable by saying "Yes I am not coming with you". But the expected interpretation is the inverse of that. Again, the standard is at odds with logic.
Most people look at stuff like that and don't care. People who think logically get fed up with crap like that and rebell.
One possible outcome of this is that it means the rule that your ISP is not resposible for filtering content might not apply to cablemodem service anymore.
One consequence of being a "common carrier" is that the common carrier company is not legally responsible for having to know what kind of content they are sending around. If someone uses their service to speak a slanderous comment, the communication provider can't be held legally responsible for spreading that slander. If someone uses a telephone to make a prank call, you can't sue the phone company for the offensiveness of that call. These are all consequences of being called a common carrier. The definition includes an absolution of all blame for the content being carried - the blame lays only with the people at the ends of the connection, not the people carrying the connection.
Now, if that goes away for cable ISPs, that could mean they have to start censoring to cover their own ass, legally.
Both are true. The illusion of it looking bigger by being near other things is a factor, but it's a factor that exists EVERY DAY when the moon is near the horizon. That not the factor that makes it special this time around. That's an explanation for why the moon looks bigger at, say, 4:00 am than midnight, but it's not an explanation for why the moon looks bigger on June 24, 2005 than on June 24, 1995.
Maybe it wasn't a misspelling. Maybe he puts his kids out to stud. Sick, sick, if you ask me.
But the chief problem that spreads far beyond the detonation site is fallout. The exploded land becomes dust, which carries up, and rains down later. I suspect the problem would be just as bad if not worse with water - which would turn into a fine mist and be sent up into the air and rain down later.
But I'll admit I don't know much about what goes on in a nuclear explosion.
I'd much rather radiate a chunk of ground than a big chunk water that will travel around the world in the ocean currents.
The only people who give a damn about Linux != Unix are lawyers watching over the trademark name. In all the ways that actually matter, it's a unix and is just as similar with unixes as, say, SysV is similar with BSD.
(although it might be a great platform for giant telescopes)
Actually, I don't think so. Look at the classic picture of earthrise as seen from the moon. Note the sky is pitch black with no stars.
Conspiracy theory lunatics have said that this is another piece of evidence that the landings were a hoax. Of course, the more logical explanation is that the moon is very bright. It tends to reflect a lot of white light. When you're standing right on its surface, that light drowns out the stars. Now, on the darker side, it would be excellent, probably, but then the problem is that the lunar day is so slow that you'd have half a month of downtime while it's day, and it would take a month to rotate around to the same section of sky again if you want to observe the same patch of sky several nights in a row.
I'd much rather be riding the Orion than be part of the ground crew when it's launched.
The biggest problem with launching an orion from the ground is that you have to launch it from someplace you don't mind making uninhabitable. And you can't re-use the same launch facility twice. That makes it kind of hard to do repeated Orion liftoffs as part of a regular space program.
Orion would be an excellent way to get around once you're out of the atmosphere, but for use from the ground up it's not practical for anything other than a one-off special case use.
A lot of programs depend on positional layout of the keys to make sense instead of lexical meaning of the keys. Vi is the big obvious one, but there's also the notion that Ctrl-X,Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V are adjacent (Take that away and their lexical abbreviations don't make any sense. Since when does "V" stand for "paste"?) And then there's the video games, using the asdw diamond, and so on.
It's not worth the hassle for me to switch when there's other ways to decrease ergonomic stress, like not using an editor that requires the use of the pinky keys. (Vi is better ergonomically because you don't have to pinky-type for the arrow keys, the ins/del/home/end/pgup/pgdown keys, and you don't have to crimp your hand in the unnatural position that is needed for mouse use.) That and the speed of editing things with Vi means I don't need to type as much to achieve the same effect.
Take your own advice. The RAF did not annihalate the Luftwaffe. They merely showed them that it was too costly for them to do what they were doing, and thus got them to quit doing it. The Luftwaffe quit long before they were "annihilated". They were beaten in that battle, yes. But what they did was take enough losses that they had to retreat from their plan, not take so many losses that they got annihilated. While it's true that the Luftwaffe was in no condition to carry out a nuclear bomb attack by the end of the war, their attrition to get to that state took a long time. After the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, there was still enough luftwaffe bombing capacity left to carry out a single nuclear attack.
Both the Germans and the British, however, switched over fairly early on to doing all strategic bombing at night (Rather than trying to bomb by day and exposing themselves to fighter defense like the US did later). They were not able to see their targets well enough to use an optical sight. Night bombing accounts for the majority of bombing performed, and it was not as accurate as the day-bombing with the Norden sight.
The firebombing of Dresden, an example you yourself mentioned, was done that way.
Because the US didn't give enough time for the leaders to see for themselves just how bad it really was. Tokyo had been bombed before that by conventional means and had been very badly damaged already. So hearing reports come in that "some big bomb hit Hiroshima and wiped out the city" isn't going to sound that out of place or new - it's going to sound like some yokel misinterpreting the extent of the damage, because bomb damage always looks worse than it is.
The people who were in a position to make the decisions hadn't gotten around yet to seeing with their own eyes the extent of the damage before the second bomb was used. Had we waited longer for the conflicting news reports to get verified and for the leaders to be able to visit the scene, I don't think the 2nd bomb would have been needed.
So it's not that simple. Using one bomb was warranted, and had nothing to do with the USSR. The second one, on the other hand, probably was a gesture of threat to the USSR - "hey look, USSR, we've proven it's not a fluke - we didn't just get lucky once - our results are reproducable and so yes, we have the secret of the atom bomb figured out. Keep that in mind for the future..."
That claim doesn't make any sense because the plans for invasion were drawn up before the atom bombs were even available. The first atom bomb test in New Mexico didn't even occur until after the victory in europe, while the alied leaders were in Germany having a conference arguing over new national borders. The plans for how to invade japan were already made before that.
Besides, there wasn't enough material to make several tactical nukes. The three atom bombs that were made (the test one in New Mexico, plus the two dropped on Japan) contained all the available weapons-grade material that was the result of running radioactive piles for quite some time. To build more nukes after that would take quite a while.
That's nice, but not relevant, seeing as how the original statement didn't include the caveat "on the battlefield" and was therefore an entirely different claim. Your condescending tone was unwarranted.
I think the more likely explanation is not that the speaker thought Australia was a poor undeveloped country, but that the speaker didn't realize what the term "third world" actually meant, and had probably only heard it in limited contexts. .. exactly like how people started assumning "hacker" meant one who breaks into computers - they heard the word only in one limited context and made the wrong assumption about what aspect of that context it was talking about. They heard it in reference to clever programmers who broke into computers and didn't realize it was being used to describe the "clever programmer" part instead of the "break into computers" part. Now through the "magic" of common usage, their ignorant misinterpretation has now finally become the default meaning of the word.
No, it's becuase there really do exist actual dumb people. People dumb enough to say something that sounds sarcastic, but they really meant it. I have trouble detecting sarcasm of fundamentalists for this reason. Sarcasm doesn't look ant sillier than the real thing, when the real thing includes such stuff as Jack Chick (www.chick.com).
There isn't any difference between saying "X is greater than Y" and saying "Y is less than X". It's purely a matter of connotation. The fact is they EXPECTED these to last longer than the MINIMUM time they were built for. What the motivation was for that is secondary and irrelevant to what I said. What you expect from something you build is different from what you guarantee from something you build.
For example, if I run an RS323 serial cable 30 feet when the spec only guarantees it up to 25, I still *expect* it to work, more than likely, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
I say when sarcasm fails to be detected as such, it's usually the speaker's fault. Why? Becuase the thought process going through the listener's head in an instant is something like this:
1 - Hmmm - that statement seemed like a really dumb thing to say, in direct contradiction of reality.
2 - I wonder why this person would say something so at odds with the truth?
3 - It could be because he literally believes it and is just dumb or delusional, or it could be because he knows better and is trying to make a joke.
4 - If I respect the speaker's intelligence, then I realize it's not serious, and thus a joke.
5 - If I do not respect the speaker's intelligence, then I still think he seriously meant the dumb thing he said.
So the problem is that if I fail to see sarcasm, it's because I don't have reason to respect the speaker's intelligence.
This is why sarcasm doesn't work online, by the way - the speaker is a stranger to you and so you don't know he's smart enough not to believe something dumb, and so step 4 up above doesn't trigger.
Allegedly the affected customers have been notified by their banks. This leads to a question I have - with phishing being so common, when anyone receieves an e-mail from their bank, do they believe it's really from their bank anymore? Especially when it says it's about an alleged comprimise of their account?
One of the wost things about spammers is that they generate a "boy who cried wolf" problem for people sending legitimate e-mails.
I don't believe they exceeded expectations. I think the expectations were understated on purpose - using the worst case scenario.
Can someone out there who actually understands the stock market (that wouldn't be me) answer this: What percentage of Redhat is publicly purchasable right now in the first place? Even if they wanted to, could MS buy more than 50% of the company at all?
Despite having an iPod, I don't use iTunes for precisely that reason. I just rip my own CDs over to it using gtkpod. If you were looking for hipocracy, you missed.
Normally, yes, but under these circumstances, I don't agree. Because Google is THE premier search engine, when it returns results what it is essentially saying is "These are the best sources for what you were looking for". When that's not true, and the pages are ranked such that the propaganda ranks highest (and don't believe for a moment that won't be the case. I would be surprised if that *wasn't* a condition of letting google operate there.) Under circumstances like that, having nothing available is actually more honest. "I can't find the answer" is a better result than "I found the answer and it's this [insert propaganda here]."