Your ad hominem argument is inadequate, and would get you marked down in the lowest level logic class. The pages are pretty good.
Yeah, fake grassroots campaigns suck. That doesn't make everything they say a lie, and when they use easily validated facts it's pretty simple to evaluate them. I'm impressed with how much good information they have, and how little idle speculation there is on the site, considering that it is produced by a fundamentally dishonest (crypto-lobbyist) organization.
Are the quoted news articles real? I know that the quote "A cow is a pig is a dog is a boy" is real. I also know that the PETA-philes do market aggressively to children. Their involvement (at the highest levels, as well as financially) with arsonists is a matter of police record. The organization does value all animal life equally with human life, and proudly does very real damage to important medical research (I have personal knowledge of this.) Meanwhile they pretend that they just want to improve the conditions of our animals and eliminate "needless" cruelty. What is not said often is that any use of animals is needless cruelty. PETA's dishonesty is exploitative and contemptible.
As an organization, they are despicable, but most of their members are kind people who recognize that a child is more important than a rat. Ironically, children are the easiest to sway because can be frightened with gore. The adults are offered gruesome pictures of apparently pointless research. Vegetarians are told they are morally superior. PETA appeals to all sorts.
In this case, it's fortunate that somebody stands to lose money from PETA's actions, because PETA is a scary organization.
People are more important than animals. The moral sense that makes this so also means that we must not abuse our power over animals.
Further regarding morality and humanness: It is sociopathic to equate a rat's life with a child's. Anyone who truly feels no more anguish over the death of a rat than a child is fundamentally broken as a person.
I'm not exaggerating: It's sociopathic to equate animal life with human life. I don't mean that it isn't important to question humanity's relationship to animals. It isn't wrong to wonder if or why we should not eat animals, but if a person does not intuitively feel that a person matters more than an animal, I certainly wouldn't want them around anyone I care about.
Imagine hearing this: "There was a fire in the classroom, but fortunately I got the rat out of there in time. It was awful that my student burned to death, but I could only get one out, rat or child. I chose the rat because I know him better."
PETA is run by sociopaths, while most of PETA's members are simply opposed to needless cruelty.
Two anecdotes:
I remember a conversation with a man who came from a logging family. In what seemed to be a repentant reaction, he had concluded that trees were more important than people. I find that easier to swallow somehow.
Perhaps I am prejudiced by my experiences. Long ago, I uprooted my life and moved to a new city for a girl. I loaded a 24' moving truck with her stuff and drove it 500 miles. At the end of that very long day (or rather the beginning of the next) I arrived at our new home. We'd been apart for a few weeks, and when she opened the door and saw me standing there with a cat carrier in each hand she exclaimed with joy-
"My Kitties!"
and took the carriers from me.
Nah, that's not why I hate PETA, its just a silly story now. My relationship with that girl was doomed anyway, and they were really nice cats.
I suspect that any truly significant quantum computing is unworkable. Just as Bell's Inequality & the EPR paradox allow for action at a distance, but not for any meaningful transmission of information across time, I suspect that the apparently magical results from quantum computing will evaporate as we approach. My bet is that the problems of implementation will turn out to be fundamental and insurmountable.
Mostly one learns to spell by reading. I didn't explicitly try to learn to spell most of my vocabulary any more than I looked up definitions for all those words. Misspelled words look wrong to me. They interrupt my flow of reading, and once that doesn't happen anymore, I've internalized the alternate spelling of the word. It doesn't seem like a matter of ambiguity, but in fact this helps me to recognize novel words and understand the language. I want things that don't make sense to jump out at me. That way I can learn. Spelling badly in public teaches bad spelling.
One assumption of the original query is flawed. Who says most geeks care about technical accuracy? Often "geeks" fake it, figuring things out as they go along or making a quick study of a subject because they're sharp enough to pull it off. Not that there isn't anything wrong with that. Besides, people tend to polarize their worldview around two alternatives: Stuff I care about vs. unimportant trivia. Spelling seems to fall very much into the latter group for most people. By definition geeks are poorly socialized with little respect for convention. How dare you correct my spelling! Acting out of respect for the feelings of others in spite of our own, and graciously accepting criticism, are social skills.
Misspellings bother me, but I don't correct errors that don't have direct impact on the subject at hand. With close friends I might trust that they'd like to know, and hope they can forgive me for correcting them. It's like a lot of manners. Spelling badly is a faux pas, or minor social error, but correcting it is just rude.
It's odd, but we're talking about the converse of the problem when people mispronounce a word that they know from reading but have never heard. It's fun, because it almost always means that person reads a lot, but suddenly I'm thinking about something besides the subject.
In fact action at a distance has been apparently demonstrated. Strange, but what I find beautiful is that while the particles are linked instantaneously regardless of the speed of light, the QM nature of the problem, prevents communicating backwards in time or violating causality with this. I regard that as a nice confirmation of the Novikov Self-Consistency princinple.
Here's the vastly oversimplified version of how this works. You have two particles whose characteristics are linked, say photons in a singlet state. You measure the x axis spin of one, and the y axis spin of the other. Since each is undefined when the other is known according to QM, you either have violated QM, or else measuring one has to instantaneously (as in faster than the speed of light) change the position of the other.
Well, it appears that it's the latter- measuring particle A makes particle B change its values, and faster than the speed of light.
Best part: You get action at a distance, but no possible communication back in time, because measuring A makes the complementary values of B 100% unknown, so while there is action at a distance, you can't use it to send messages back in time.
I remember when I was visited by my future self. I gave myself some investing tips and reminded myself that in the future I must go back in time to provide those investing tips, even if I am rich.
To me, time travel reeks of paradox or getting something for nothing, or both. I faintly hope that I can eventually describe that paradox.
The Futurist (Future-ologist? Seer? Scryer? Confidence man?) must attract enough attention to be relevant (or rather paid) but must avoid appearing to be a total idiot to remain relevant.
Couple'o little difficulties:
The butterfly effect would make it very likely that an error would cascade out of sync with the original. Chaos theory is actually relevant here. I suppose we don't care about errors as long as we make sure the original isn't still alive.
The entire brain would have to be read instantaneously, or else you'd have to collect and integrate a few (even in a somnolent state) diffs, where few approximates each neural impulse both within the brain and the entire nervous system. Note that neither of these problems is the same as constructing a computer of greater complexity than the brain.
Brain without body would be insane. We simulate the body? Solve that and the other issues of cellular mechanics that plague this sophomoric idea and we've arrived at teleportation.
Finally, it is perfectly likely that there are quantum events that are meaningful in the brain. As in processes that it is fundamentally impossible to eavesdrop on. Not demonstrated, but far from impossible or even unlikely. See Heisenberg, Penrose.
This is the sort of crap that gave SciFi a bad name for so long, and still embarrasses AI. If you're going to posit an asinine what-if, you'd better do something really interesting with it fast, or nobody will hear anything else.
Of course, I'd fight like hell even if somebody told me I had to die so that my doppelganger could live, teleporter or no.
To the metaphysical issues:
In _Total Recall_ the end of the movie appears to be a heroic and happy ending. Nonetheless, at that point it is entirely possible that our hero is imagining everything, completely insane, and slaughtered a lot of innocent people including his own devoted wife. That ambiguity is true to the book, and one of the things I love most about Philip K. Dick.
On continuity: This is the sort of metaphysical question that Jorge Luis Borges was adept at exploring concisely and eloquently. Even when he posited specious arguments, he remained a poet, and thus they could be beautiful.
I was support & system administration for a small retail chain. My boss told me when she hired me that their season was critical, and I had to be prepared to stay through the season.
After a few years of working with this great boss, I realized that I had nowhere to go, and since the boom was bubbling at the time, it would be a good time to move on. I gave her four weeks notice, and the season had not yet begun, although I knew it would soon.
She asked me to stay through the season again, and having looked at the SAGE salary survey, here is how I put it to her: I need $$$ to stay through the season. This isn't a negotiating tactic, it is just what this is worth to me, and is a low rate according to my research. In short order, they gave me a 50% raise for my last 4 months, and were happy with the results. They should have been happy, since I worked hard and it was still less than 2/3 of what my next job paid. I was happy that the boom didn't collapse until after I found my next job.
Your initial offer of a month was generous. What is the pay differential? What is the value of the job you have already found, or rather what is the cost of declining the other offer? If you accept his terms, you'll be declining that offer. What is the cost of working for this SOB?
Pick an amount that is worth it to you personally, allows you to feel that you have done the right thing, and stick to it. If I was in your shoes, it would be a large amount, since your boss sounds like an undesirable character.
Honestly, your boss sounds stupid and greedy, and like someone you should just get away from. He's trying to take advantage of you, and doing it clumsily. You might consider getting his insulting "offer" in writing, primarily to defend yourself from him potentially blackmailing you in the future. If he refuses you a good reference, you can pull out the letter and point out that his proposal, while unreasonable, hardly indicates that you were less than satisfactory.
You don't want to burn bridges, but this guy is being entirely unreasonable, and you don't want to donate that much of your life to him. Four weeks is generous.
I've used an external PCMCIA-IDE interface to externally mount laptop drives of various sizes. The 5g limit is probably just a factor of the design age of pcmcia interfaced drives.
I was doing backups with dd, gzip and netcat, and it was awfully slow. My recollection is that it was the PCMCIA interface itself that was the limiting factor.
This is the second time in the last few days that I have heard the assertion that Google did "nothing brilliant".
Then why the Scientific American article about extracting meaning from the structure of the web, when these guys were at Stanford? I remember reading that article & thinking "if this really works, it'll change everything when it comes out", and it did. Google won, in a blink. It wasn't their interface.* The meaningful rankings were the only thing that got me to move to Google.
It was brilliant. They realized that in this morass of data that is the web, the structural information could be extracted & used. At the time, I'd been thinking about using cluster analysis & similar techniques from image processing to correlate pages based on content, but their technique was far more efficient & quite effective in making the web more usable. (Now, clusty.com do a cluster analysis based search.)
It seems obvious now, but it was far from it at the time. Think Google did nothing special? Try searching the web with boolean only keyword searches for awhile.
Brilliance doesn't require uniqueness. Some brilliant soul reading this comment might have thought of doing this with the web before. Since they didn't publish or execute Google gets the credit. For an overblown analogy, neither Newton nor Leibniz made the other less brilliant when each invented differential calculus.
Paul Graham should know better.
* The interface was a smart move. It was the first demonstration that they didn't have just one good idea. It was also the first obvious instance of their choosing not to be evil. They could've foisted flash or some other self-indulgent drivel on us.
First - survival, but you might have one volatile asset to help with your rescue. Do you have a watch, and is it still running and on time? Do you know the date? If so, the sooner you take a reading of the angle of the sun & combine it with the time, the more accurately your position can be determined. Otherwise, start tracking the arc of a shadow & wait for the solstice, & take a readings then. Include these readings on the messages you toss into the sea. (Pumice, coconut husks?)
Make shoes - you won't live long if your feet give out. Any injury could kill you by way of infection. Make clothes from the cloth, and conserve it. It will deteriorate in the sun, but better it than your skin. If you can clothe yourself with feathers or anything else, you want to do that instead. Depending on how long you are on the island, you may need to make a sail from the cloth. It is also a source of fine thread. You might use it to skin a boat.
Make a prominent distress sign, visible from the air.
You can distill water from the hydrothermal vents, or at least use the heat to distill seawater.
Can you make a compass from the hematite or nails? If the hematite is specular hematite, it may be possible to polish it into a signalling mirror. Try the copper too.
With the copper & nails as a battery (voltaic pile) you could make a spark gap generator to produce radio noise. It's a little Gilligan's Island, but you could probably rig a machine (powered by wind, or gravity by way of ported water or sand) to use this to constantly transmit SOS. Depending on your ability to work the copper, you may be able to make enough wire to make a simple radio receiver & speaker. You may need to use your battery to magnetize pieces of nails.
If the wind is constant enough, you might make a kite to hoist an antenna.
Can the seeds be made edible after making into flour and treating with ashes or the acid from the berries? Acorns aren't edible either, but lot's of people have survived on them. Vary your diet to avoid scurvy, ricketts or worse.
How large is the lens? If it's a page sized fresnel lens, then you can melt concrete with those, so smelting small quantities of iron is not entirely implausible. A blind spot in the center of your vision won't improve your survival odds, so don't look at the hot spot. Hang the lens on a frame.
Prepare a signal fire, & keep coals ready to light it. Don't burn down your coconut trees.
Can the berries be fermented? Not just for entertainment, but alcohol can clean wounds, and could be useful for fuel.
Nothing gets thrown away or tossed into the sea. Make a latrine in a place that won't cause any trouble. Even your waste is a resource. Look out for birdlime. You might just be able to make a black powder flare for signalling from that, the sulfur & some charcoal. Burn as little as you must, as you don't have time to wait for fuel to grow. Besides, you've got free heat from the hydrothermal vents.
As others have said: Obsidian & flint: Knives, spear points. Coppper -fishhooks. You could probably work the nails too. Lots of other excellent suggestions here. With the copper & hematite, you should be able to make a diode, and from that a radio receiver. Good luck making a speaker or earphone. Homemade wire, nail fixed magnet, diaphragm of palm or cloth. Handy, but probably impossible: Triode amplifier.
Finally, use wax from the berries & feathers from the birds, & make wings. Fly away, but don't get too close to the sun, or the wax will melt and you'll fall into the sea, to the dismay of your father.
A related problem is how does one make accurate tools or measuring devices without already having them? One way to start is by making a flat surface by rubbing two things together.
I can't believe how many people here just don't get it. Nothing happened because of a huge effort, not because it wasn't a real problem. I'd have thought the./ crowd would have a clue about this.
This is the same promlem IT always faces. What we do is abstract enough that management can barely believe we do anything at all, but the fact that you are able to use your computer systems at work doesn't mean that you don't need any IT staff. Come on folks, just 'cause it's working doesn't mean we aren't doing something.
Is your car running? Then I guess you don't need gas, much less oil.
I know I averted a lot of problems for a lot of people. I was doing IT & POS Support, and spent a considerable amount of time dealing with Y2k issues, and my boss spent more time, including dealing with an unfixed Y2k bug in the most popular retail back-end system. But before the year end and after the bios updates & bug fixes, _our_ systems worked. I was on call that night, but I didn't get called. That certainly didn't convince me my Y2k work had been useless. Oh, and dates matter. Talk to anyone doing Sarbanes-Oxley work, or making sales projections, yadda-yadda.
I expect this kind of nincompoopery from the mainstream media, and that's where much of the panic came from. I didn't tell anyone to buy a generator. I expect better of/. (I just realized how silly that sounds.)
I started to fill out the forms. My responsibility to participate & all that, but when I saw the amount of required personal information, I was done. I realize that this is routine for a class action settlement, but I'd never trust MS with this information because they aren't trustworthy.
Look at what these people will do to ensure that they don't lose (I think forging evidence to present to a judge is pretty damned scary.) I would bet a tidy sum that all this personal data won't just be filed & forgotten. Perhaps a small army of private investigators can make some kind of profitable use of this data.
Claimed your windows rebates? You could be a candidate for an extended series of personal salescalls, (the kind that include your boss's bosses or clients) or maybe there's a list of consultants that they "cannot recommend." Simple to just pass it on to their strong-arm organization the BSA. Ready for an audit?
Although I exaggerate, one thing is certain: MS does not have more respect for me than for the law or federal judges. Thus, I will not do business with them.
Finally, and more generally: Who would _choose_ to enter into a contract with an entity that is both hostile & tremendously powerful? A friend with his own business refuses to take orders from government entities for similar reasons.
Ever heard of what it's like to do business with Wal-Mart, or better, what happens to a restaurant that becomes a hangout for mobsters? The owners think that the mob will take care of them, but it's cheaper to just drive them out of business & then find another place to go eat free.
The first giveaway was when the original poster claimed to avoid infection by avoiding "scuzzy" software. Yeah, and you don't get Syphilis from healthy looking people. In all these stories, just imagine the person is talking about unprotected sex and health, except it's even harder to tell if your computer has been compromised, and easier to compromise a computer.
So because they can't detect any problem, they have none. Lots of STDs are asymptomatic, and hard to detect.
Considering 1. The number of ongoing scans any random machine is subject to (so many that putting an unprotected machine onto the net to be patched is a path to infection itself) and
2. the rate of new Windows 'sploits,
It is pretty clear that these people are idiots. Unfortunately, they're such arrogant fools that they don't know they're full of bullshit (or infested with parasites, to be literal.)
Maybe all of us who work at this professionally are fools or idiots, and these guys know the one true way. If so, I bet the secret is how to recognize scuzzy software.
Probably this is just the way a certain percentage of the populace regards risk. Some asshole will always refuse a rubber, or avoid the vaccine or whatever the real answer is, because he's just too good to be vulnerable. Thanks to him & his buddies the rest of us have to be even more vigilant. Think disease resistant strains, and of other diseases that were wiped out, but now we rediscover. For instance, polio is making a comeback.
Or they're trolls. I think I need to pull the hook out of my lip now.
Oooh! Anger & media exposure! Gosh, what a drag. Were their churches firebombed*? No. Were others of their ilk physically attacked because of their religion? Not much backlash, but you're comparing it with murder & assault. You're whining about what a bad deal us white guys get, and it's pathetic and embarrassing.
Do you really confuse cults with non-traditional religions? Are you ignorant or dishonest? Cult has a well recognized definition that works pretty well. Most traditional religions, turn out not to be cults. Paranoia about outsiders and particular types of manipulation are some indicators. For example, pagans are about as non-traditional as you can get, but they don't get described as a cult.
I knew someone who spent some time undercover, and had personal knowledge that the militias have significant crossover with the cross burners in white sheets & pointy hats.
Are you saying that there aren't dozens of compounds of armed cultists led by religious zealots? If you think it's only dozens, and only the backwoods you're not looking around. We only hear about the ones who are so completely screwed up that they can't keep their psychotic paranoia to themselves.
Rajneesh's followers had plenty of weapons confiscated, full auto stuff you don't get to own without a license. They also experimented with food poisoning in restaurants around the town that was hostile to them. The U.S. doesn't have a monopoly, and neither does the backwoods. Aum Shinrikyo (a religious cult) poisoned the subway in Tokyo with sarin during rush hour. Then there were all those geeks in Rancho Santa Fe (expensive San Diego suburb) who confused space travel and suicide.
* Waco was awful, but unless you're prepared to defend child molestation as religion, you can't call that religious persecution.
I was living in EPA from 88-93, and they did talk about deploying a gunshot locator system like this. Since EPA had no money, it never occurred to me that it could actually happen.
With remarkable perspicacity for Slashodot, you pointed out:
"Wake up. Jobs don't magically appear when needed. A large number of you are gonna be screwed when automation and outsourcing leaves you in your 40s and 50s without a job. You'd better pray social security's still around then, but that's kind of a slim hope.... Oh no, you're saying, if you're smart you'll find a way to adapt. Not necessarily. When 100,000 jobs become 10,000, maybe 10,000 people are going to manage to get by, but what about the other 90,000? "Finding a niche" doesn't always work, and a lot of very smart people can lose out just through chance."
You're addressing a bunch of people on Slashdot, and this is the thing I find most tiresome about this place. It's like an expensive university. You have a bunch of reasonably bright, incredibly priveleged, sheltered people in one place, and they're convinced that because they're OK, the world is just, and that anyone who isn't happy doesn't really deserve it.
It's the same illusion that sells a lot of religion & low-grade self-help. Here's the gist: Don't worry that you don't deserve what you've got. Everyone deserves what they get. Don't trouble yourself about those people who don't want to be happy (or eat, or have clean drinking water, or a place to live.)
Hilariously, lots of the people you're talking to still think they're gonna be IPO millionaires. If they know it isn't happening right away, it'll happen soon because prosperity is just around the corner. Wired magazine is a good example of this sort of viewpoint. They still proclaim the "new economy" which reminds me exactly how seriously to take them.
And I got a ticket for parking my motorcycle with my rear wheel on the curb in Palo Alto, California (side street just off of the Oregon Expressway for those who'd know.) Here in CA, you are supposed to park perpendicular to the curb. There are lots of clueless cops. The law is clear, but I had the choice of spending hours on the ticket or paying it.
If they were clever, they'd do research to find out at what point most people decide the burden of paying a ticket isn't worth the trouble of fighting it.
The puzzle was popular because Sam Loyd offered a $1,000 prize for solving his sliding block puzzle, but the parity was broken because 14 & 15 were transposed. It was unsolvable. He sold lots of puzzles, and then bragged about his fraud. Those wacky victorians.
US diesel stocks are very high in sulfur content, and this causes additional problems, especially cleaning up the emissions. I've heard for years that we're supposed to be reducing the sulfur in the next few years, but I'm about to stop believing it.
The US auto industry also implemented the diesel the same way they implemented the small car and clean emissions. Their first implementations were so incompetent as to amount to sabotage.
A friend with a BMW Isetta (the little one, not the bloated 600cc version) gets tickets in San Francisco for parking perpendicular to the curb, never mind the fact that the car is designed for it. Until the cops are clued, the law doesn't matter as long as paying a parking ticket is less costly than fighting it, if your time is worth anything.
Of course we exist in the only world where it is possible for us to exist. Anything else would be silly indeed.
That's a beautiful reductio ad absurdum of that argument for "intelligent design." At first I thought you were sincere, but your argument is actually a perfect description of the anthropic principle.
You've got the makings of a chain letter there, and one that could actually make money for its participants.
"I sued the MPAA in small claims court and got a judgement against them for $$$, and you can too.
Please sue the MPAA in small claims court for your time in responding to meritless claims as its billable value. When they default, collect your money. Once you win a judgement against the MPAA, please make n copies of this letter and send them to other people you know who may have received meritless claims from the MPAA.
If you do not comply, you will be cursed with a lifetime of bad luck and abuse by media megacorporations."
When I'm kidding people think I'm serious, and when I'm serious people think I'm kidding.
I volunteer! Really, I'm an experienced admin, and I'll be happy to help you work with the MPAA. I don't have an I2 connection, but I don't really need one, since I can certainly ping addresses in your class A. I'll be your authorized investigator. Damn, too bad I finally got a real job, or I could dedicate some real time to this effort.
I hope you log their claims & the results, and make sure that documentation is accessible. Letter from _, dated _, re file _, at ip _. Result of investigation: IP does not exist, thus claim entirely meritless, bringing number of meritless claims to _ with valid claims now totaling 0.
If I2 doesn't cave, the MPAA will sue. Your documentation would doucument a strong defense against letting these people screw up your community with their incompetence. I2 is limited access for a good reason, and the MPAA is obviously unwilling to behave responsibly.
Please share your tactics with other admins on I2 as well. You will need organized resistance to these people.
For the record, I don't share music, or defend those who do, but I'm really disgusted with MPAAs tactics and strategy, and now they want permission to make even more meritless trouble. They're abusing the legal system (uninvestigated C&D letters) polluting our government with their lobbying, the extension of copyright is intolerable, and they're helping extend invasive abuse of privacy. They can't even defend themselves by claiming incompetence. They're irresponsible, not incompetent. If invalid C&Ds cost them money, they'd get competent fast.
Uninstalling user-installed software? That's unforgivable. Too bad. I used to think Flash was annoying. I guess it's not just flash that sucks, but all of Macromedia.
Here's a rule of thumb: How much can you afford to annoy your customers? That's exactly how much flash you want to inflict on visitors to your site.
What proportion of people sit through a flash movie, versus the number who click "skip intro?" I've asked that question a lot, and never gotten an answer. Web developers aren't tracking it. They aren't about to point out that an expensive feature only drives customers away. Nobody is actually looking at those statistics. These irritating time wasters are just put up without any concern for whether they are an asset or a liability.
Only a few people are so dumb that they are impressed with an online movie that they didn't choose to watch. "Ooh! Looky! Stuff on the screen is MOVING!" Maybe those people are the ideal targets for marketing.
"His confederates" doesn't refer to money. It refers to his accomplices.
Look up the word confederate. At the Cambridge International Dictionary site, you'll find this definition.
"Confederate, noun: 1. A member of a confederacy; an ally. 2. One who assists in a plot; an accomplice. See synonyms at partner. "
Confederate is also used among currency collectors for confederate banknotes, but that usage is almost as rare as confederate banknotes are.
To your final word: "Typical." Not at all. Fortunately, you aren't typical of Canadians either. My experience with Canadians is that they are friendly people with a fine command of their language. I hope you're an American troll trying to make Canadians look bad. After all, you're a prig, you defend your prejudices with your ignorance, and you can't spell or even be bothered to use a spell checker. Oops! Upon checking out you r website, you appear to be the genuine article.How embarassing for you. Apparently arrogance knows no borders. (attend to the absence of the letter "a" in that word.)
NB: that's the Cambridge Dictionary as in "the oldest printing and publishing house in the world" in a gorgeous gothic town in East Anglia. Wouldn't want to offend you with a definition from the _American Heritage Dictionary_ or it might trigger another bigoted whine.
Finally, for getting a good feel for words, I like OneLook Multi-dictionary search is my favorite place to look up words online. It's a (wait for it...) multi-dictionary search engine. I love to have several definitions of a word I'm looking up.
Slashdot Mirror
Your ad hominem argument is inadequate, and would get you marked down in the lowest level logic class. The pages are pretty good.
Yeah, fake grassroots campaigns suck. That doesn't make everything they say a lie, and when they use easily validated facts it's pretty simple to evaluate them. I'm impressed with how much good information they have, and how little idle speculation there is on the site, considering that it is produced by a fundamentally dishonest (crypto-lobbyist) organization.
Are the quoted news articles real? I know that the quote "A cow is a pig is a dog is a boy" is real. I also know that the PETA-philes do market aggressively to children. Their involvement (at the highest levels, as well as financially) with arsonists is a matter of police record. The organization does value all animal life equally with human life, and proudly does very real damage to important medical research (I have personal knowledge of this.) Meanwhile they pretend that they just want to improve the conditions of our animals and eliminate "needless" cruelty. What is not said often is that any use of animals is needless cruelty. PETA's dishonesty is exploitative and contemptible.
As an organization, they are despicable, but most of their members are kind people who recognize that a child is more important than a rat. Ironically, children are the easiest to sway because can be frightened with gore. The adults are offered gruesome pictures of apparently pointless research. Vegetarians are told they are morally superior. PETA appeals to all sorts.
In this case, it's fortunate that somebody stands to lose money from PETA's actions, because PETA is a scary organization.
People are more important than animals. The moral sense that makes this so also means that we must not abuse our power over animals.
Further regarding morality and humanness: It is sociopathic to equate a rat's life with a child's. Anyone who truly feels no more anguish over the death of a rat than a child is fundamentally broken as a person.
I'm not exaggerating: It's sociopathic to equate animal life with human life. I don't mean that it isn't important to question humanity's relationship to animals. It isn't wrong to wonder if or why we should not eat animals, but if a person does not intuitively feel that a person matters more than an animal, I certainly wouldn't want them around anyone I care about.
Imagine hearing this: "There was a fire in the classroom, but fortunately I got the rat out of there in time. It was awful that my student burned to death, but I could only get one out, rat or child. I chose the rat because I know him better."
PETA is run by sociopaths, while most of PETA's members are simply opposed to needless cruelty.
Two anecdotes:
I remember a conversation with a man who came from a logging family. In what seemed to be a repentant reaction, he had concluded that trees were more important than people. I find that easier to swallow somehow.
Perhaps I am prejudiced by my experiences. Long ago, I uprooted my life and moved to a new city for a girl. I loaded a 24' moving truck with her stuff and drove it 500 miles. At the end of that very long day (or rather the beginning of the next) I arrived at our new home. We'd been apart for a few weeks, and when she opened the door and saw me standing there with a cat carrier in each hand she exclaimed with joy-
"My Kitties!"
and took the carriers from me.
Nah, that's not why I hate PETA, its just a silly story now. My relationship with that girl was doomed anyway, and they were really nice cats.
I suspect that any truly significant quantum computing is unworkable. Just as Bell's Inequality & the EPR paradox allow for action at a distance, but not for any meaningful transmission of information across time, I suspect that the apparently magical results from quantum computing will evaporate as we approach. My bet is that the problems of implementation will turn out to be fundamental and insurmountable.
Mostly one learns to spell by reading. I didn't explicitly try to learn to spell most of my vocabulary any more than I looked up definitions for all those words. Misspelled words look wrong to me. They interrupt my flow of reading, and once that doesn't happen anymore, I've internalized the alternate spelling of the word. It doesn't seem like a matter of ambiguity, but in fact this helps me to recognize novel words and understand the language. I want things that don't make sense to jump out at me. That way I can learn. Spelling badly in public teaches bad spelling.
One assumption of the original query is flawed. Who says most geeks care about technical accuracy? Often "geeks" fake it, figuring things out as they go along or making a quick study of a subject because they're sharp enough to pull it off. Not that there isn't anything wrong with that. Besides, people tend to polarize their worldview around two alternatives: Stuff I care about vs. unimportant trivia. Spelling seems to fall very much into the latter group for most people. By definition geeks are poorly socialized with little respect for convention. How dare you correct my spelling! Acting out of respect for the feelings of others in spite of our own, and graciously accepting criticism, are social skills.
Misspellings bother me, but I don't correct errors that don't have direct impact on the subject at hand. With close friends I might trust that they'd like to know, and hope they can forgive me for correcting them. It's like a lot of manners. Spelling badly is a faux pas, or minor social error, but correcting it is just rude.
It's odd, but we're talking about the converse of the problem when people mispronounce a word that they know from reading but have never heard. It's fun, because it almost always means that person reads a lot, but suddenly I'm thinking about something besides the subject.
How do you recognize a field service engineer on the side of the road with a flat tire? ...
...
He's changing each tire to see which one is flat.
And the related problem:
How do you recognize a field service engineer on the side of the road who has run out of gas?
He's changing each tire to see which one is flat.
In fact action at a distance has been apparently demonstrated. Strange, but what I find beautiful is that while the particles are linked instantaneously regardless of the speed of light, the QM nature of the problem, prevents communicating backwards in time or violating causality with this. I regard that as a nice confirmation of the Novikov Self-Consistency princinple.
Here's the vastly oversimplified version of how this works. You have two particles whose characteristics are linked, say photons in a singlet state. You measure the x axis spin of one, and the y axis spin of the other. Since each is undefined when the other is known according to QM, you either have violated QM, or else measuring one has to instantaneously (as in faster than the speed of light) change the position of the other.
Well, it appears that it's the latter- measuring particle A makes particle B change its values, and faster than the speed of light.
Best part: You get action at a distance, but no possible communication back in time, because measuring A makes the complementary values of B 100% unknown, so while there is action at a distance, you can't use it to send messages back in time.
I remember when I was visited by my future self. I gave myself some investing tips and reminded myself that in the future I must go back in time to provide those investing tips, even if I am rich.
To me, time travel reeks of paradox or getting something for nothing, or both. I faintly hope that I can eventually describe that paradox.
Dust... Wind... Dude...
The Futurist (Future-ologist? Seer? Scryer? Confidence man?) must attract enough attention to be relevant (or rather paid) but must avoid appearing to be a total idiot to remain relevant.
Couple'o little difficulties:
The butterfly effect would make it very likely that an error would cascade out of sync with the original. Chaos theory is actually relevant here. I suppose we don't care about errors as long as we make sure the original isn't still alive.
The entire brain would have to be read instantaneously, or else you'd have to collect and integrate a few (even in a somnolent state) diffs, where few approximates each neural impulse both within the brain and the entire nervous system. Note that neither of these problems is the same as constructing a computer of greater complexity than the brain.
Brain without body would be insane. We simulate the body? Solve that and the other issues of cellular mechanics that plague this sophomoric idea and we've arrived at teleportation.
Finally, it is perfectly likely that there are quantum events that are meaningful in the brain. As in processes that it is fundamentally impossible to eavesdrop on. Not demonstrated, but far from impossible or even unlikely. See Heisenberg, Penrose.
This is the sort of crap that gave SciFi a bad name for so long, and still embarrasses AI. If you're going to posit an asinine what-if, you'd better do something really interesting with it fast, or nobody will hear anything else.
Of course, I'd fight like hell even if somebody told me I had to die so that my doppelganger could live, teleporter or no.
To the metaphysical issues:
In _Total Recall_ the end of the movie appears to be a heroic and happy ending. Nonetheless, at that point it is entirely possible that our hero is imagining everything, completely insane, and slaughtered a lot of innocent people including his own devoted wife. That ambiguity is true to the book, and one of the things I love most about Philip K. Dick.
On continuity: This is the sort of metaphysical question that Jorge Luis Borges was adept at exploring concisely and eloquently. Even when he posited specious arguments, he remained a poet, and thus they could be beautiful.
I was support & system administration for a small retail chain. My boss told me when she hired me that their season was critical, and I had to be prepared to stay through the season.
After a few years of working with this great boss, I realized that I had nowhere to go, and since the boom was bubbling at the time, it would be a good time to move on. I gave her four weeks notice, and the season had not yet begun, although I knew it would soon.
She asked me to stay through the season again, and having looked at the SAGE salary survey, here is how I put it to her:
I need $$$ to stay through the season. This isn't a negotiating tactic, it is just what this is worth to me, and is a low rate according to my research. In short order, they gave me a 50% raise for my last 4 months, and were happy with the results. They should have been happy, since I worked hard and it was still less than 2/3 of what my next job paid. I was happy that the boom didn't collapse until after I found my next job.
Your initial offer of a month was generous. What is the pay differential? What is the value of the job you have already found, or rather what is the cost of declining the other offer? If you accept his terms, you'll be declining that offer. What is the cost of working for this SOB?
Pick an amount that is worth it to you personally, allows you to feel that you have done the right thing, and stick to it. If I was in your shoes, it would be a large amount, since your boss sounds like an undesirable character.
Honestly, your boss sounds stupid and greedy, and like someone you should just get away from. He's trying to take advantage of you, and doing it clumsily. You might consider getting his insulting "offer" in writing, primarily to defend yourself from him potentially blackmailing you in the future. If he refuses you a good reference, you can pull out the letter and point out that his proposal, while unreasonable, hardly indicates that you were less than satisfactory.
You don't want to burn bridges, but this guy is being entirely unreasonable, and you don't want to donate that much of your life to him. Four weeks is generous.
I've used an external PCMCIA-IDE interface to externally mount laptop drives of various sizes. The 5g limit is probably just a factor of the design age of pcmcia interfaced drives.
I was doing backups with dd, gzip and netcat, and it was awfully slow. My recollection is that it was the PCMCIA interface itself that was the limiting factor.
This is the second time in the last few days that I have heard the assertion that Google did "nothing brilliant".
Then why the Scientific American article about extracting meaning from the structure of the web, when these guys were at Stanford? I remember reading that article & thinking "if this really works, it'll change everything when it comes out", and it did. Google won, in a blink. It wasn't their interface.* The meaningful rankings were the only thing that got me to move to Google.
It was brilliant. They realized that in this morass of data that is the web, the structural information could be extracted & used. At the time, I'd been thinking about using cluster analysis & similar techniques from image processing to correlate pages based on content, but their technique was far more efficient & quite effective in making the web more usable. (Now, clusty.com do a cluster analysis based search.)
It seems obvious now, but it was far from it at the time. Think Google did nothing special? Try searching the web with boolean only keyword searches for awhile.
Brilliance doesn't require uniqueness. Some brilliant soul reading this comment might have thought of doing this with the web before. Since they didn't publish or execute Google gets the credit. For an overblown analogy, neither Newton nor Leibniz made the other less brilliant when each invented differential calculus.
Paul Graham should know better.
* The interface was a smart move. It was the first demonstration that they didn't have just one good idea. It was also the first obvious instance of their choosing not to be evil. They could've foisted flash or some other self-indulgent drivel on us.
First - survival, but you might have one volatile asset to help with your rescue. Do you have a watch, and is it still running and on time? Do you know the date? If so, the sooner you take a reading of the angle of the sun & combine it with the time, the more accurately your position can be determined. Otherwise, start tracking the arc of a shadow & wait for the solstice, & take a readings then. Include these readings on the messages you toss into the sea. (Pumice, coconut husks?)
Make shoes - you won't live long if your feet give out. Any injury could kill you by way of infection. Make clothes from the cloth, and conserve it. It will deteriorate in the sun, but better it than your skin. If you can clothe yourself with feathers or anything else, you want to do that instead. Depending on how long you are on the island, you may need to make a sail from the cloth. It is also a source of fine thread. You might use it to skin a boat.
Make a prominent distress sign, visible from the air.
You can distill water from the hydrothermal vents, or at least use the heat to distill seawater.
Can you make a compass from the hematite or nails? If the hematite is specular hematite, it may be possible to polish it into a signalling mirror. Try the copper too.
With the copper & nails as a battery (voltaic pile) you could make a spark gap generator to produce radio noise. It's a little Gilligan's Island, but you could probably rig a machine (powered by wind, or gravity by way of ported water or sand) to use this to constantly transmit SOS. Depending on your ability to work the copper, you may be able to make enough wire to make a simple radio receiver & speaker. You may need to use your battery to magnetize pieces of nails.
If the wind is constant enough, you might make a kite to hoist an antenna.
Can the seeds be made edible after making into flour and treating with ashes or the acid from the berries? Acorns aren't edible either, but lot's of people have survived on them. Vary your diet to avoid scurvy, ricketts or worse.
How large is the lens? If it's a page sized fresnel lens, then you can melt concrete with those, so smelting small quantities of iron is not entirely implausible. A blind spot in the center of your vision won't improve your survival odds, so don't look at the hot spot. Hang the lens on a frame.
Prepare a signal fire, & keep coals ready to light it. Don't burn down your coconut trees.
Can the berries be fermented? Not just for entertainment, but alcohol can clean wounds, and could be useful for fuel.
Nothing gets thrown away or tossed into the sea. Make a latrine in a place that won't cause any trouble. Even your waste is a resource. Look out for birdlime. You might just be able to make a black powder flare for signalling from that, the sulfur & some charcoal. Burn as little as you must, as you don't have time to wait for fuel to grow. Besides, you've got free heat from the hydrothermal vents.
As others have said: Obsidian & flint: Knives, spear points. Coppper -fishhooks. You could probably work the nails too. Lots of other excellent suggestions here. With the copper & hematite, you should be able to make a diode, and from that a radio receiver. Good luck making a speaker or earphone. Homemade wire, nail fixed magnet, diaphragm of palm or cloth. Handy, but probably impossible: Triode amplifier.
Finally, use wax from the berries & feathers from the birds, & make wings. Fly away, but don't get too close to the sun, or the wax will melt and you'll fall into the sea, to the dismay of your father.
A related problem is how does one make accurate tools or measuring devices without already having them? One way to start is by making a flat surface by rubbing two things together.
I can't believe how many people here just don't get it. Nothing happened because of a huge effort, not because it wasn't a real problem. I'd have thought the ./ crowd would have a clue about this.
/. (I just realized how silly that sounds.)
This is the same promlem IT always faces. What we do is abstract enough that management can barely believe we do anything at all, but the fact that you are able to use your computer systems at work doesn't mean that you don't need any IT staff. Come on folks, just 'cause it's working doesn't mean we aren't doing something.
Is your car running? Then I guess you don't need gas, much less oil.
I know I averted a lot of problems for a lot of people. I was doing IT & POS Support, and spent a considerable amount of time dealing with Y2k issues, and my boss spent more time, including dealing with an unfixed Y2k bug in the most popular retail back-end system. But before the year end and after the bios updates & bug fixes, _our_ systems worked. I was on call that night, but I didn't get called. That certainly didn't convince me my Y2k work had been useless. Oh, and dates matter. Talk to anyone doing Sarbanes-Oxley work, or making sales projections, yadda-yadda.
I expect this kind of nincompoopery from the mainstream media, and that's where much of the panic came from. I didn't tell anyone to buy a generator. I expect better of
I started to fill out the forms. My responsibility to participate & all that, but when I saw the amount of required personal information, I was done. I realize that this is routine for a class action settlement, but I'd never trust MS with this information because they aren't trustworthy.
Look at what these people will do to ensure that they don't lose (I think forging evidence to present to a judge is pretty damned scary.) I would bet a tidy sum that all this personal data won't just be filed & forgotten. Perhaps a small army of private investigators can make some kind of profitable use of this data.
Claimed your windows rebates? You could be a candidate for an extended series of personal salescalls, (the kind that include your boss's bosses or clients) or maybe there's a list of consultants that they "cannot recommend." Simple to just pass it on to their strong-arm organization the BSA. Ready for an audit?
Although I exaggerate, one thing is certain: MS does not have more respect for me than for the law or federal judges. Thus, I will not do business with them.
Finally, and more generally: Who would _choose_ to enter into a contract with an entity that is both hostile & tremendously powerful? A friend with his own business refuses to take orders from government entities for similar reasons.
Ever heard of what it's like to do business with Wal-Mart, or better, what happens to a restaurant that becomes a hangout for mobsters? The owners think that the mob will take care of them, but it's cheaper to just drive them out of business & then find another place to go eat free.
The first giveaway was when the original poster claimed to avoid infection by avoiding "scuzzy" software. Yeah, and you don't get Syphilis from healthy looking people. In all these stories, just imagine the person is talking about unprotected sex and health, except it's even harder to tell if your computer has been compromised, and easier to compromise a computer.
So because they can't detect any problem, they have none. Lots of STDs are asymptomatic, and hard to detect.
Considering
1. The number of ongoing scans any random machine is subject to (so many that putting an unprotected machine onto the net to be patched is a path to infection itself) and
2. the rate of new Windows 'sploits,
It is pretty clear that these people are idiots. Unfortunately, they're such arrogant fools that they don't know they're full of bullshit (or infested with parasites, to be literal.)
Maybe all of us who work at this professionally are fools or idiots, and these guys know the one true way. If so, I bet the secret is how to recognize scuzzy software.
Probably this is just the way a certain percentage of the populace regards risk. Some asshole will always refuse a rubber, or avoid the vaccine or whatever the real answer is, because he's just too good to be vulnerable. Thanks to him & his buddies the rest of us have to be even more vigilant. Think disease resistant strains, and of other diseases that were wiped out, but now we rediscover. For instance, polio is making a comeback.
Or they're trolls. I think I need to pull the hook out of my lip now.
Oooh! Anger & media exposure! Gosh, what a drag. Were their churches firebombed*? No. Were others of their ilk physically attacked because of their religion? Not much backlash, but you're comparing it with murder & assault. You're whining about what a bad deal us white guys get, and it's pathetic and embarrassing.
Do you really confuse cults with non-traditional religions? Are you ignorant or dishonest? Cult has a well recognized definition that works pretty well. Most traditional religions, turn out not to be cults. Paranoia about outsiders and particular types of manipulation are some indicators. For example, pagans are about as non-traditional as you can get, but they don't get described as a cult.
I knew someone who spent some time undercover, and had personal knowledge that the militias have significant crossover with the cross burners in white sheets & pointy hats.
Are you saying that there aren't dozens of compounds of armed cultists led by religious zealots? If you think it's only dozens, and only the backwoods you're not looking around. We only hear about the ones who are so completely screwed up that they can't keep their psychotic paranoia to themselves.
Rajneesh's followers had plenty of weapons confiscated, full auto stuff you don't get to own without a license. They also experimented with food poisoning in restaurants around the town that was hostile to them. The U.S. doesn't have a monopoly, and neither does the backwoods. Aum Shinrikyo (a religious cult) poisoned the subway in Tokyo with sarin during rush hour. Then there were all those geeks in Rancho Santa Fe (expensive San Diego suburb) who confused space travel and suicide.
* Waco was awful, but unless you're prepared to defend child molestation as religion, you can't call that religious persecution.
I was living in EPA from 88-93, and they did talk about deploying a gunshot locator system like this. Since EPA had no money, it never occurred to me that it could actually happen.
With remarkable perspicacity for Slashodot, you pointed out:
...
"Wake up. Jobs don't magically appear when needed. A large number of you are gonna be screwed when automation and outsourcing leaves you in your 40s and 50s without a job. You'd better pray social security's still around then, but that's kind of a slim hope.
Oh no, you're saying, if you're smart you'll find a way to adapt. Not necessarily. When 100,000 jobs become 10,000, maybe 10,000 people are going to manage to get by, but what about the other 90,000? "Finding a niche" doesn't always work, and a lot of very smart people can lose out just through chance."
You're addressing a bunch of people on Slashdot, and this is the thing I find most tiresome about this place. It's like an expensive university. You have a bunch of reasonably bright, incredibly priveleged, sheltered people in one place, and they're convinced that because they're OK, the world is just, and that anyone who isn't happy doesn't really deserve it.
It's the same illusion that sells a lot of religion & low-grade self-help. Here's the gist: Don't worry that you don't deserve what you've got. Everyone deserves what they get. Don't trouble yourself about those people who don't want to be happy (or eat, or have clean drinking water, or a place to live.)
Hilariously, lots of the people you're talking to still think they're gonna be IPO millionaires. If they know it isn't happening right away, it'll happen soon because prosperity is just around the corner. Wired magazine is a good example of this sort of viewpoint. They still proclaim the "new economy" which reminds me exactly how seriously to take them.
And I got a ticket for parking my motorcycle with my rear wheel on the curb in Palo Alto, California (side street just off of the Oregon Expressway for those who'd know.) Here in CA, you are supposed to park perpendicular to the curb. There are lots of clueless cops. The law is clear, but I had the choice of spending hours on the ticket or paying it.
If they were clever, they'd do research to find out at what point most people decide the burden of paying a ticket isn't worth the trouble of fighting it.
The puzzle was popular because Sam Loyd offered a $1,000 prize for solving his sliding block puzzle, but the parity was broken because 14 & 15 were transposed. It was unsolvable. He sold lots of puzzles, and then bragged about his fraud. Those wacky victorians.
US diesel stocks are very high in sulfur content, and this causes additional problems, especially cleaning up the emissions. I've heard for years that we're supposed to be reducing the sulfur in the next few years, but I'm about to stop believing it.
The US auto industry also implemented the diesel the same way they implemented the small car and clean emissions. Their first implementations were so incompetent as to amount to sabotage.
A friend with a BMW Isetta (the little one, not the bloated 600cc version) gets tickets in San Francisco for parking perpendicular to the curb, never mind the fact that the car is designed for it. Until the cops are clued, the law doesn't matter as long as paying a parking ticket is less costly than fighting it, if your time is worth anything.
Of course we exist in the only world where it is possible for us to exist. Anything else would be silly indeed.
That's a beautiful reductio ad absurdum of that argument for "intelligent design." At first I thought you were sincere, but your argument is actually a perfect description of the anthropic principle.
You've got the makings of a chain letter there, and one that could actually make money for its participants.
"I sued the MPAA in small claims court and got a judgement against them for $$$, and you can too.
Please sue the MPAA in small claims court for your time in responding to meritless claims as its billable value. When they default, collect your money. Once you win a judgement against the MPAA, please make n copies of this letter and send them to other people you know who may have received meritless claims from the MPAA.
If you do not comply, you will be cursed with a lifetime of bad luck and abuse by media megacorporations."
When I'm kidding people think I'm serious, and when I'm serious people think I'm kidding.
I volunteer! Really, I'm an experienced admin, and I'll be happy to help you work with the MPAA. I don't have an I2 connection, but I don't really need one, since I can certainly ping addresses in your class A. I'll be your authorized investigator. Damn, too bad I finally got a real job, or I could dedicate some real time to this effort.
I hope you log their claims & the results, and make sure that documentation is accessible. Letter from _, dated _, re file _, at ip _. Result of investigation: IP does not exist, thus claim entirely meritless, bringing number of meritless claims to _ with valid claims now totaling 0.
If I2 doesn't cave, the MPAA will sue. Your documentation would doucument a strong defense against letting these people screw up your community with their incompetence. I2 is limited access for a good reason, and the MPAA is obviously unwilling to behave responsibly.
Please share your tactics with other admins on I2 as well. You will need organized resistance to these people.
For the record, I don't share music, or defend those who do, but I'm really disgusted with MPAAs tactics and strategy, and now they want permission to make even more meritless trouble. They're abusing the legal system (uninvestigated C&D letters) polluting our government with their lobbying, the extension of copyright is intolerable, and they're helping extend invasive abuse of privacy. They can't even defend themselves by claiming incompetence. They're irresponsible, not incompetent. If invalid C&Ds cost them money, they'd get competent fast.
Uninstalling user-installed software? That's unforgivable. Too bad. I used to think Flash was annoying. I guess it's not just flash that sucks, but all of Macromedia.
Here's a rule of thumb: How much can you afford to annoy your customers? That's exactly how much flash you want to inflict on visitors to your site.
What proportion of people sit through a flash movie, versus the number who click "skip intro?" I've asked that question a lot, and never gotten an answer. Web developers aren't tracking it. They aren't about to point out that an expensive feature only drives customers away. Nobody is actually looking at those statistics. These irritating time wasters are just put up without any concern for whether they are an asset or a liability.
Only a few people are so dumb that they are impressed with an online movie that they didn't choose to watch. "Ooh! Looky! Stuff on the screen is MOVING!" Maybe those people are the ideal targets for marketing.
"His confederates" doesn't refer to money. It refers to his accomplices.
Look up the word confederate. At the Cambridge International Dictionary site, you'll find this definition.
"Confederate, noun:
1. A member of a confederacy; an ally. 2. One who assists in a plot; an accomplice. See synonyms at partner. "
Confederate is also used among currency collectors for confederate banknotes, but that usage is almost as rare as confederate banknotes are.
To your final word: "Typical." Not at all. Fortunately, you aren't typical of Canadians either. My experience with Canadians is that they are friendly people with a fine command of their language. I hope you're an American troll trying to make Canadians look bad. After all, you're a prig, you defend your prejudices with your ignorance, and you can't spell or even be bothered to use a spell checker. Oops! Upon checking out you r website, you appear to be the genuine article.How embarassing for you. Apparently arrogance knows no borders. (attend to the absence of the letter "a" in that word.)
NB: that's the Cambridge Dictionary as in "the oldest printing and publishing house in the world" in a gorgeous gothic town in East Anglia. Wouldn't want to offend you with a definition from the _American Heritage Dictionary_ or it might trigger another bigoted whine.
Finally, for getting a good feel for words, I like OneLook Multi-dictionary search is my favorite place to look up words online. It's a (wait for it...) multi-dictionary search engine. I love to have several definitions of a word I'm looking up.