[mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals.
[jargon] Term of praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare geek.
The word itself appears to derive from the lines "And then, just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!" in the Dr. Seuss book If I Ran the Zoo (1950). (The spellings 'nurd' and 'gnurd' also used to be current at MIT, where 'nurd' is reported from as far back as 1957; however, knurd appears to have a separate etymology.) How it developed its mainstream meaning is unclear, but sense 1 seems to have entered mass culture in the early 1970s (there are reports that in the mid-1960s it meant roughly "annoying misfit" without the connotation of intelligence.
Hackers developed sense 2 in self-defense perhaps ten years later, and some actually wear "Nerd Pride" buttons, only half as a joke. At MIT one can find not only buttons but (what else?) pocket protectors bearing the slogan and the MIT seal.
Well, since it's capable of removing a certain caste of emails entirely how about SpamGenocide or
SpamacialCleansing?
Perhaps we should identify it with (im)famous person(s) to drive up hits like SpamHitler, SpamNazi, or SpamlobodanMilosevic?
Maybe something that has an associated coolness factor, instead of being (almost) universaly hated, like Dr. Spamibal Lecter?
Well, there's still the problem of overwhelming evil there. It's not really evil, just heartless and calculating. Hmm, heartless, calculating, killer... I got it! How about SpamAssassin? Oh, wait...
You have to love a system that requires downtime as part of uptime. How many Linux users have this problem? (Please press the Start button to shut down (stop) the computer.)
Sure,
init 6
doesn't sound like it should start (initialize) anything...
Whew, okay. After I RTFA I realized they hadn't done the impossible, just the really hard. IBM can measured the energy required to change the spin of a single atom not a single electron. (A prerequisite of this, of course, is detecting the spin of a single atom; but that's not that difficult with electron microscopes.)
Gah! How can you mention other voting methods without discussing the condorcet method. Mathematically, it's a generalization of both our current voting system and approval voting. It has many objective advantages over both, and kicks the crap out of IRV.
...which is based on the RPG of the same name produced by FASA before they went out of business.
Part of the company (FASA Interactive) had long time associations with MS. When FASA went under this became FASA Studio. I believe a Crimson Skies game is also in the works.
I forget where I read it, but it turns out that google's spell-checking isn't based on any real dictionary at all. Instead, it's based on the number of occurances of the word in their indexed pages. I assume they are using something like double metaphone to match the "misspellings" (fewer occurances) with the "correct" spelling (most occurances).
Slashdot Mirror
Save yourself some time and jump to the full review, the verdict, or the reader reviews--doesn't look like readers agree with the 9/10 rating.
Hmm, isn't the /<comment> thing a fark.com thing?
/never seen it on /.
Well, since it's capable of removing a certain caste of emails entirely how about SpamGenocide or SpamacialCleansing?
Perhaps we should identify it with (im)famous person(s) to drive up hits like SpamHitler, SpamNazi, or SpamlobodanMilosevic?
Maybe something that has an associated coolness factor, instead of being (almost) universaly hated, like Dr. Spamibal Lecter?
Well, there's still the problem of overwhelming evil there. It's not really evil, just heartless and calculating. Hmm, heartless, calculating, killer... I got it! How about SpamAssassin? Oh, wait...
You have to love a system that requires downtime as part of uptime. How many Linux users have this problem? (Please press the Start button to shut down (stop) the computer.)
Sure,
doesn't sound like it should start (initialize) anything...Whew, okay. After I RTFA I realized they hadn't done the impossible, just the really hard. IBM can measured the energy required to change the spin of a single atom not a single electron. (A prerequisite of this, of course, is detecting the spin of a single atom; but that's not that difficult with electron microscopes.)
Gah! How can you mention other voting methods without discussing the condorcet method. Mathematically, it's a generalization of both our current voting system and approval voting. It has many objective advantages over both, and kicks the crap out of IRV.
In any case, approval voting should be approved now.
...which is based on the RPG of the same name produced by FASA before they went out of business.
Part of the company (FASA Interactive) had long time associations with MS. When FASA went under this became FASA Studio. I believe a Crimson Skies game is also in the works.
I forget where I read it, but it turns out that google's spell-checking isn't based on any real dictionary at all. Instead, it's based on the number of occurances of the word in their indexed pages. I assume they are using something like double metaphone to match the "misspellings" (fewer occurances) with the "correct" spelling (most occurances).
I filled in the blank with hamster [Making it: "The boy ate a hamster"], but maybe I'm just an oddity.
but how many people here have an Xbox? /.ers, too), unless it is running linux.
Owning an XBox is unamerican (and, um, bad for international