Well, I do sympathise with your principle of making sure to annoy whomever you're talking to; but since I am neither British nor American, but a New Zealander, I'm unable to share your tactic:-( We're not great fans of either the UK or the US these days, but for an NZer it would be almost criminal to use US English!
Absolutely right. The story's finished, already. Another IE game set in the planes, I could see (and be interested in), but not about the same character.
On a similar note, what this nonsense about wanting a Baldur's Gate 3? We already had the third part of the trilogy; it was called "Throne of Bhaal". It wasn't as good or as long as the first two parts, but it certainly finished the story too.
In fact, I can't think of any games I'm longing to see a sequel -- or prequel -- to. I guess I'd be interested in a prequel to Undying, or a sequel to Full Throttle, but I'm scratching my head for ideas here.
I've seen hundreds, nay thousands, of far, far, far right-wing loonies on Slashdot.
I've seen -- what, maybe half a dozen? -- communists, that is to say people advocating the abolition of the nuclear family and of personal property,* and absolute state centralisation of absolutely everything.
Now, that's not a thorough argument, but if you'll excuse me for glossing over steps 3 to 59 for the sake of space, I reckon Slashdot is pretty centrist. I think your sense of a changing position is mainly due to a Great Shifting of Global Ideological Goalposts.
* Unless you count advocating FLOSS as being communist, that is (and some would)
Foxit is faster to load than Acrobat in Windows -- if you disable the Acrobat Speed Launch, that is -- but I find Acrobat much, much, much faster at rendering complex layouts. (At the moment, I'm mainly thinking of music scores.)
Tee-hee. Sorry, I misunderstood, then. I think you're right; but I also think it'll take quite a looooong time. Even if Sun don't screw it up, I think 5 years might be optimistic.
If only those retards at SUN got their licensing house in order, we'd all have our preferred 'Linux'-distro running on a Solaris kernel. At the end of 2007. And ZDNet's Paul Murphy http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/31/018 218 could be proven right.
I think that the end of 2007 is unlikely, but I think that if GPL3 does ultimately materialise, then Linux's days are numbered. Seems to me, the omission of the "or any later version" clause from parts of Linux does in effect set an upper bound on its lifespan. If/when GPL3 appears, I can see migration from Linux towards OpenSolaris, but I can't see migration the other way round.
I think Paul Murphy's right (though not about the year), but it sounds like I don't agree with you about why -- from your post it sounds like you think GPL3 is vapourware.
No, it would mean they'd be wholly incompatible. Some Linux code is released only under GPL2 (because parts of it omit the "or any later version" clause), and Solaris, if your scenario were to pan out, would be released only under GPL3. You wouldn't be able to take GPL2-only code from Linux (which mostly means the kernel) and re-license it under GPL3 for Solaris, and you wouldn't be able to take GPL3 code from Solaris and re-license it under an earlier version of the GPL to go into Linux.
No, he's right. English is certainly the most widely-spoken foreign language there, and it's rarely difficult to find someone who speaks a bit of English, but it's nowhere near as universal as in Scandinavia or the low countries. If someone walks up to you in Germany and asks you for a light, or for directions, 90% of the time it's better to respond in poor German than in fluent English.
In the spirit of your sig, I shall point out the following very minor quirks in the language of your post (partly to put off marking tests):
(60/80 millions people)
Terms like "million" ("thousand", "hundred", etc.) are only pluralised when there is an indefinite number of millions; they're not pluralised when used in a cardinal number.
Danemark
It's actually "Denmark", even though the people are referred to as "Danes".
In some Eastern Europe countries exi[s]t a cheap version of dubbing
"A cheap version of dubbing" is the subject of this sentence, so the verb should be third person singular, "exists" rather than "exist".
our educational system needs to seriously improve
Probably just a slip of the mind, but it's clear that you mean "seriously" to be modifying the verb "needs". Hence "seriously needs to improve" would be better.
As for clinging to our language with zeal, it is resistance of a once-powerful country
"Resistance" needs a definite article "the" here. Though a native speaker, I do not pretend to have a complete understanding of the reasons behind all the rules concerning articles in English, so don't ask me why, it'd probably take me hours to work it out.:-)
and the American influence in many ways and areas, which goes with it.
Commas are not usually required before relative clauses in UK English. US English, however, does have a strict rule: comma before "which", no comma before "that", and the two alternatives have different meanings (which you can look up). But if you're wanting to use US English, "that" with no comma would be more appropriate here.
we won't make ourselves understood by speaking so badly foreign languages.
The adverbial phrase "so badly" should go at the end. I'm not sure what the relevant rule is, off the top of my head.
so many countries accept so easily to throw all their own identity
The infinitive can't be used as a substantive in English; use the gerund "throwing" instead.
I'm sorry I can't cite the relevant rules in all of these situations; I teach languages, but not English, and so my knowledge of English grammatical rules is not always conscious knowledge. However, I'd better compliment you on the fact that your English is better than many of my students who are native speakers.:-) And it's definitely better than my French, which I haven't had occasion to practise for a decade now.
Actually I should have added a proviso -- based purely on my own experience, the rule I cited only applies within the British Isles. Certainly the Guinness I can get where I am now, in New Zealand, is incomparably superior to the mouldy warm dishwater they serve as Guinness in pubs in England:-) I can't remember if I've tried Guinness in the USA, but I'd be surprised if they don't at least chill it there!
But English pubs always seem to forget that it's mostly just English beer that should be served at room temperature... (A few years ago they tried marketing "Guinness Extra Cold". In England that came out almost as chilled as Dublin Guinness, but about 30% more expensive than the regular warm sludge. If it was as much colder than regular Guinness in Dublin, it would no doubt turn out to be a Guinness slurpee. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing.)
its a good enough word to describe what it actually refers to.
Ah! Based on this, I shall assume it means what it looks like it means. Without reading the WP article you pointed to, I can easily tell that it obviously and unambiguously refers to the naming and identification of ethnic groups -- just as "taxonomy" refers to the naming and identification of different categories.
If that is not correct, then kindly forgive me if I join with the gp in deriding the term...:-)
As a default setting, I'd agree. However, this post, this post, this post, and perhaps this post, suggest to me that that isn't the most likely explanation, but rather that there is a cross-platform nVidia problem. (Just talking about what seems more likely, not what necessarily is the case in actuality.)
But the AC post above suggests that there may be a problem with
nvidia's platform independent core code
Now, I don't know enough about OS X or about development to know whether "the drivers are handled by Apple" excludes the use of "platform independent core code", but in my uninformed state, it looks to me like we've only heard part of the story.
The quality of Guinness varies in inverse proportion to the distance between St James' Gate and the bar it's served in. For better Guinness, go closer to Dublin.:-)
... which leads to law-makers trying to create a surveillance society like they've got in the UK, which in turn gets out of hand, and eventually someone with power realises it's no longer working and does away with it; sure. But that process can take decades or even centuries. Life's too short.
There is no second round. You download a song, burn it to cd, then rip it to whatever format you want. It starts as 128 AAC and if you rip it back to your computer as 128 MP3, it is still 128. You can do that 100 times and there will be no quality loss if you keep sampling it at 128. That's the magic of digital.
Dude, you've been misinformed. Every sentence of that is wrong. First, the data format in MP3 and AAC files created by iTunes are radically different, and the quality of the MP3 will be much, much lower than the AAC -- better to rip to non-DRMed AAC format every time.
Second, decoding and encoding are not mirrors of one another. Suppose the folks at Apple encode a music file from the original uncompressed CD, which I shall call "U0", to AAC format, "C0". C0 is different from U0 because AAC is a lossy format. You then download it and copy it to CD, turning it into an uncompressed format again, "U1". This stage is not lossy: U1 is the same as C0, but different from U0. So when you recompress, it's no longer the same data being compressed as when Apple did it. Therefore you get a different result, "C1", which has lost information from U1, which in turn has lost information from U0. This happens with every iteration, and if you're using 128 kb/s MP3 format, the quality is degrading a lot every time. It'll degrade with AAC too, though not as much at first, and you might not be able to hear the degradation after one iteration unless you've got a mid-to-high range sound system.
whereas the highly educated professional (like my English teacher, a first in English from Cambridge) with a deeper understanding of grammar, points out that the rule in use is arbitrary and you could do things either way.
Well, be fair, it's not arbitrary -- it's for very specific historical reasons, to wit, that many nouns in English used to form their genitive by adding on an extra syllable '-es', but as time went on it was easier to skip out the 'e' ("syncopation"), so that the apostrophe is quite regularly acting to indicate that part of the word has indeed been abbreviated, as apostrophes always do in English; while on the other hand 'it', as a pronoun, was always irregular and had 'its' (not 'ites') as its genitive.
But this is all hideously off-topic (and wouldn't be worth commenting on if not for the extraordinary self-centredness and narrow-mindedness of the sibling responses to your post that have gone up so far). To get back on-topic, India's Space Research Organisation officially rocks.
In fact, the only Apostle who might reasonably be expected to have had any reasonably detailed knowledge of pagan religion was the educated rabbi, Saul/Paul - and it utterly defies credibility that a professed and professing Pharisee, let alone a pupil of Gamaliel, would or even could have taken control of a group of Palestinian peasants and turned them into proselytising Messianic Bacchus-worshippers."
Let's see what we get if we correct the errors in that:
It is entirely credible that the very apostle that was mentioned in the gpp as the one responsible for spreading the Christian diaspora beyond the boundaries of Palestine and the Levant across the Hellenistic world (not Palestine -- where did you get that idea?), that is Saul/Paul, who spoke and wrote a fluent and highly educated Greek, was (a) well-acquainted with Hellenistic culture, (b) well-acquainted with both private and public Hellenic religious practices, and (c) someone who ranted against the evils of strict Judaism at length in his surviving written works, -- in short, it is wholly credible that he could have taken control of many widely-dispersed groups of both alienated Jews living in Gentile lands and Gentiles who were used to any old cult that happened to come along, on the one hand by making use of current events in the Judaic homeland, and on the other hand by adapting selected elements of various religions that were popular in Hellenistic culture, in exactly the same way that Christianity was to continue doing for the following centuries.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, nearly: what the policy says is, "We give ourselves the right to deny China the right to launch satellites if we feel like it."
Are they saying that the US "owns" space?Yes, that's exactly what US policy claims.
Well, I do sympathise with your principle of making sure to annoy whomever you're talking to; but since I am neither British nor American, but a New Zealander, I'm unable to share your tactic :-( We're not great fans of either the UK or the US these days, but for an NZer it would be almost criminal to use US English!
Absolutely right. The story's finished, already. Another IE game set in the planes, I could see (and be interested in), but not about the same character.
On a similar note, what this nonsense about wanting a Baldur's Gate 3? We already had the third part of the trilogy; it was called "Throne of Bhaal". It wasn't as good or as long as the first two parts, but it certainly finished the story too.
In fact, I can't think of any games I'm longing to see a sequel -- or prequel -- to. I guess I'd be interested in a prequel to Undying, or a sequel to Full Throttle, but I'm scratching my head for ideas here.
I've seen hundreds, nay thousands, of far, far, far right-wing loonies on Slashdot.
I've seen -- what, maybe half a dozen? -- communists, that is to say people advocating the abolition of the nuclear family and of personal property,* and absolute state centralisation of absolutely everything.
Now, that's not a thorough argument, but if you'll excuse me for glossing over steps 3 to 59 for the sake of space, I reckon Slashdot is pretty centrist. I think your sense of a changing position is mainly due to a Great Shifting of Global Ideological Goalposts.
* Unless you count advocating FLOSS as being communist, that is (and some would)
Foxit is faster to load than Acrobat in Windows -- if you disable the Acrobat Speed Launch, that is -- but I find Acrobat much, much, much faster at rendering complex layouts. (At the moment, I'm mainly thinking of music scores.)
Oh, c'mon, I know the copyright's expired, but giving the attribution for the proof would still be polite :-)
Tee-hee. Sorry, I misunderstood, then. I think you're right; but I also think it'll take quite a looooong time. Even if Sun don't screw it up, I think 5 years might be optimistic.
Yup, we're on the same page. It was the kernel I was referring to.
And ZDNet's Paul Murphy http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/31/01
I think that the end of 2007 is unlikely, but I think that if GPL3 does ultimately materialise, then Linux's days are numbered. Seems to me, the omission of the "or any later version" clause from parts of Linux does in effect set an upper bound on its lifespan. If/when GPL3 appears, I can see migration from Linux towards OpenSolaris, but I can't see migration the other way round.
I think Paul Murphy's right (though not about the year), but it sounds like I don't agree with you about why -- from your post it sounds like you think GPL3 is vapourware.
No, it would mean they'd be wholly incompatible. Some Linux code is released only under GPL2 (because parts of it omit the "or any later version" clause), and Solaris, if your scenario were to pan out, would be released only under GPL3. You wouldn't be able to take GPL2-only code from Linux (which mostly means the kernel) and re-license it under GPL3 for Solaris, and you wouldn't be able to take GPL3 code from Solaris and re-license it under an earlier version of the GPL to go into Linux.
No, he's right. English is certainly the most widely-spoken foreign language there, and it's rarely difficult to find someone who speaks a bit of English, but it's nowhere near as universal as in Scandinavia or the low countries. If someone walks up to you in Germany and asks you for a light, or for directions, 90% of the time it's better to respond in poor German than in fluent English.
In the spirit of your sig, I shall point out the following very minor quirks in the language of your post (partly to put off marking tests):
(60/80 millions people)Terms like "million" ("thousand", "hundred", etc.) are only pluralised when there is an indefinite number of millions; they're not pluralised when used in a cardinal number.
DanemarkIt's actually "Denmark", even though the people are referred to as "Danes".
In some Eastern Europe countries exi[s]t a cheap version of dubbing"A cheap version of dubbing" is the subject of this sentence, so the verb should be third person singular, "exists" rather than "exist".
our educational system needs to seriously improveProbably just a slip of the mind, but it's clear that you mean "seriously" to be modifying the verb "needs". Hence "seriously needs to improve" would be better.
As for clinging to our language with zeal, it is resistance of a once-powerful country"Resistance" needs a definite article "the" here. Though a native speaker, I do not pretend to have a complete understanding of the reasons behind all the rules concerning articles in English, so don't ask me why, it'd probably take me hours to work it out. :-)
and the American influence in many ways and areas, which goes with it.Commas are not usually required before relative clauses in UK English. US English, however, does have a strict rule: comma before "which", no comma before "that", and the two alternatives have different meanings (which you can look up). But if you're wanting to use US English, "that" with no comma would be more appropriate here.
we won't make ourselves understood by speaking so badly foreign languages.The adverbial phrase "so badly" should go at the end. I'm not sure what the relevant rule is, off the top of my head.
so many countries accept so easily to throw all their own identityThe infinitive can't be used as a substantive in English; use the gerund "throwing" instead.
I'm sorry I can't cite the relevant rules in all of these situations; I teach languages, but not English, and so my knowledge of English grammatical rules is not always conscious knowledge. However, I'd better compliment you on the fact that your English is better than many of my students who are native speakers. :-) And it's definitely better than my French, which I haven't had occasion to practise for a decade now.
Actually I should have added a proviso -- based purely on my own experience, the rule I cited only applies within the British Isles. Certainly the Guinness I can get where I am now, in New Zealand, is incomparably superior to the mouldy warm dishwater they serve as Guinness in pubs in England :-) I can't remember if I've tried Guinness in the USA, but I'd be surprised if they don't at least chill it there!
But English pubs always seem to forget that it's mostly just English beer that should be served at room temperature ... (A few years ago they tried marketing "Guinness Extra Cold". In England that came out almost as chilled as Dublin Guinness, but about 30% more expensive than the regular warm sludge. If it was as much colder than regular Guinness in Dublin, it would no doubt turn out to be a Guinness slurpee. Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing.)
Ah! Based on this, I shall assume it means what it looks like it means. Without reading the WP article you pointed to, I can easily tell that it obviously and unambiguously refers to the naming and identification of ethnic groups -- just as "taxonomy" refers to the naming and identification of different categories.
If that is not correct, then kindly forgive me if I join with the gp in deriding the term ... :-)
As a default setting, I'd agree. However, this post, this post, this post, and perhaps this post, suggest to me that that isn't the most likely explanation, but rather that there is a cross-platform nVidia problem. (Just talking about what seems more likely, not what necessarily is the case in actuality.)
Now, I don't know enough about OS X or about development to know whether "the drivers are handled by Apple" excludes the use of "platform independent core code", but in my uninformed state, it looks to me like we've only heard part of the story.
Most interesting. This certainly seems to corroborate the anonymous post above, claiming to be from a forum admin,
that there are some serious showstopper bugs inherent to nvidia's platform independent core code that they really do not want releasing.Of course there's no guarantee that this is a genuine corroboration, as you might be the person who wrote that post as an AC :-)
Out of interest, the idea comes from much earlier:
... but what a woman says to her lover in the heat of passionshould be written in the wind and on flowing water.
-- Catullus (1st century BCE), poem 70
Keats, or whoever wrote his epitaph, would have known this poem well. (Plato uses the idea as well, but his version is even less flattering to women.)
I don't suppose they've got this inkjet printer working on gaseous media yet, have they? Oh well, I can wait.
The quality of Guinness varies in inverse proportion to the distance between St James' Gate and the bar it's served in. For better Guinness, go closer to Dublin. :-)
... which leads to law-makers trying to create a surveillance society like they've got in the UK, which in turn gets out of hand, and eventually someone with power realises it's no longer working and does away with it; sure. But that process can take decades or even centuries. Life's too short.
You have a house worth over $350,000 and you expect people to feel sorry for you because of the evil poor people next door? Diddums.
Dude, you've been misinformed. Every sentence of that is wrong. First, the data format in MP3 and AAC files created by iTunes are radically different, and the quality of the MP3 will be much, much lower than the AAC -- better to rip to non-DRMed AAC format every time.
Second, decoding and encoding are not mirrors of one another. Suppose the folks at Apple encode a music file from the original uncompressed CD, which I shall call "U0", to AAC format, "C0". C0 is different from U0 because AAC is a lossy format. You then download it and copy it to CD, turning it into an uncompressed format again, "U1". This stage is not lossy: U1 is the same as C0, but different from U0. So when you recompress, it's no longer the same data being compressed as when Apple did it. Therefore you get a different result, "C1", which has lost information from U1, which in turn has lost information from U0. This happens with every iteration, and if you're using 128 kb/s MP3 format, the quality is degrading a lot every time. It'll degrade with AAC too, though not as much at first, and you might not be able to hear the degradation after one iteration unless you've got a mid-to-high range sound system.
Many thanks for that, very useful.
Well, be fair, it's not arbitrary -- it's for very specific historical reasons, to wit, that many nouns in English used to form their genitive by adding on an extra syllable '-es', but as time went on it was easier to skip out the 'e' ("syncopation"), so that the apostrophe is quite regularly acting to indicate that part of the word has indeed been abbreviated, as apostrophes always do in English; while on the other hand 'it', as a pronoun, was always irregular and had 'its' (not 'ites') as its genitive.
But this is all hideously off-topic (and wouldn't be worth commenting on if not for the extraordinary self-centredness and narrow-mindedness of the sibling responses to your post that have gone up so far). To get back on-topic, India's Space Research Organisation officially rocks.
Let's see what we get if we correct the errors in that:
It is entirely credible that the very apostle that was mentioned in the gpp as the one responsible for spreading the Christian diaspora beyond the boundaries of Palestine and the Levant across the Hellenistic world (not Palestine -- where did you get that idea?), that is Saul/Paul, who spoke and wrote a fluent and highly educated Greek, was (a) well-acquainted with Hellenistic culture, (b) well-acquainted with both private and public Hellenic religious practices, and (c) someone who ranted against the evils of strict Judaism at length in his surviving written works, -- in short, it is wholly credible that he could have taken control of many widely-dispersed groups of both alienated Jews living in Gentile lands and Gentiles who were used to any old cult that happened to come along, on the one hand by making use of current events in the Judaic homeland, and on the other hand by adapting selected elements of various religions that were popular in Hellenistic culture, in exactly the same way that Christianity was to continue doing for the following centuries.There, I corrected it.