The 'rule' I'm talking about is that (my phrasing) "less goes with a number, fewer is with an uncounted quantity". Is it that there IS a number, BEFORE the word "less"?
BTW, I wanted to quickly try to find a citation either way (I couldn't), and searching Wikipedia, I found far more pages using "one fewer" than "one less". At least the top results for "one less" were song references, actually.
Actually, you have it backwards. "Fewer" is for countable, indivisible items, where "less" is for uncounted or divisible items.
"There are fewer people in Room 1 than Room 2, which means there's less of a crowd in Room 1."
"There are fewer cars in Lot A than Lot B, but the cars in Lot B each have less gasoline."
"You must correctly answer no fewer than 70 questions to pass this test, and you must complete it in 3 hours or less."
Or maybe this is easier for the Slashdot crowd...if you'd count it with an integer, use 'fewer"; if you'd count it with a float or a decimal, use "less".
But all that said...I'd still probably say "one less company" in most cases, just because "one fewer company", though technically correct, just doesn't feel natural in speech. It's like the word "whom"; many people know its correct usage but how often do you ever hear anyone say "To whom should I send this email?" It feels like reciting Shakespeare when you say it out loud.
Remember at school, you learned "I before the E except after C". Then you discovered the exceptions.
beige, cleidoic, codeine, conscience, deify, deity, deign,
dreidel, eider, eight, either, feign, feint, feisty,
foreign, forfeit, freight, gleization, gneiss, greige,
greisen, heifer, heigh-ho, height, heinous, heir, heist,
leitmotiv, neigh, neighbor, neither, peignoir, prescient,
rein, science, seiche, seidel, seine, seismic, seize, sheik,
society, sovereign, surfeit, teiid, veil, vein, weight,
weir, weird
Sorry, but learning English is more than just learning a grammar rule, it's also learning the exceptions. It's "one less", not "one fewer", despite what the rule you're thinking of might have led you to believe.
You forgot the second part of the rule: "I before E except after C or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh. That strikes a few off your exception list, and I would would also question the inclusion of the many words on that list that are directly taken from other languages.
That's not to say that English doesn't probably have the most rule exceptions of any language...but then again once I discovered the exception of "codeine", I stopped caring about it so much.;-)
I'm all for drug legalization. But to think that it (legalization) will somehow make shitty murderous people better is pretty naive.
It's not that legalization would make "shitty murderous people" better, it would make "shitty murderous" behavior less profitable. Unless you want to believe that such behavior is entirely genetic and only is committed by "bad" people, and that no one gets enticed into such bad behavior because it is the most lucrative opportunity available to them, then it is entirely reasonable to assume that policy which makes bad behavior less lucrative will over time will lead to less of that behavior.
You might want to read that article again before calling anyone else confused, and pay some attention to the 9th amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." In other words, you can't simply deny something is a right by saying "I don't see anything about [it] in there". That's not at all to say that HFT should be construed as a right, but your logic in reply to the GP is faulty.
Things took a turn for the worse one day when I picked up an 288 tuning fork and a 320 tuning fork. I struck them both against my leg and held one up near either ear. It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me.
That's only the beginning. I tried it with a 398 tuning fork and a 440 tuning fork and discovered the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.
After a decade of studying english and using it practically daily, I still always need to think a few seconds before writing either "its" or "it's".
One way that was taught to me...think of you're (contraction) vs. your (possessive), which is easier to distinguish due to the 'e' in the former. It's/its follows the same rule...the apostrophe is the contraction, not the possessive.
So by "Must" you are referring to "the unfermented or fermenting juice expressed from fruit, especially grapes" and by "Reading" you are referring to a city in England or Pennsylvania? News flash: many words have multiple definitions.
They stole my idea! I am so calling the President of the Internet.
I claim prior art, even if I shamefully misspelled 'Theremin'. Hmmm...I'd better file my patent on Ondes Martenot Hero right away.
Re:You mean THAT'S what the game is all about?
on
Theremin Guitar Hero
·
· Score: 1
There really needs to be another rule of the internet: As a discussion forum thread goes on, the chances of an XKCD comic becoming relevant increases to 1 (I'm not a math nerd, I think that's how they say 100% likely, isnt' it?)
First of all, the sections of pipe are joined mechanically, and sealed with O-rings. The O-rings are specified for shallow water pressures (and temperatures), and rather than use adequate deep water parts, the shallow water parts were continued to avoid mandatory Federal oversight and testing.
On top of that, deadlines for completion were already tight, as no schedule variability was provided for unforeseen events, such as severe weather, that might hamper drilling and well conversion efforts. The conversion from an exploratory/research structure into a production well was a hard deadline, and pressure was on internally from the otherwise stagnant middle managers clamoring for achievement. There was no room for failure with a project named Deepwater Horizon.
As engineers' warnings flowed up the chain of command, the wording changed from "grave concern" to "concern" to "noted comment" to eventually "thumbs up!". Inter-hierarchical presentations followed a strict time schedule, so power point mentality and "no bad news up" reigned.
/satire
That reminds me of this old classic:
In the beginning was the Plan.
And then came the Assumptions.
And the Assumptions were without form.
And the Plan was without substance.
And darkness was upon the face of the workers.
And they spoke among themselves, saying, "It is a crock of shit, and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pail of dung, and we can't live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors, saying "It is a vessel of fertilizer and none may abide its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves, saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents, saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor of the company with powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan and saw that it was good.
Just as a side note, I live on Vancouver Island, and I participated in my local community's earthquake preparedness program, which was a good experience for anyone living in earthquake country. As part of program, they showed a video produced by seismologists that showed some computer modeling of the likely scenarios if a major earthquake occurred in the Cascadia zone off the west coast of the island. It seems that the biggest issue would probably not be the earthquake itself as most of the main population centers are pretty far away as the west coast of Vancouver Island is pretty sparsely populated. However, Victoria (and especially Esquimalt) looked especially vulnerable to the resultant tsunami. I don't personally worry so much as I live "up island" and by the modeling the tsunami would not travel far up the Strait of Georgia (nor down into Puget Sound for those around Seattle). Anything along the Strait of Juan de Fuca could be in world of hurt, though.
Basically, once you start measuring something as a proxy for what you really want to know, people start to take the proxy into account when making decisions, to the point where it becomes useless as a measure for whatever it was intended.
A few years back I was working for a major corporation that was pushing Six Sigma as the holy grail for all problems, and I was forced to attend some seminars. (Afterwards I christened the program Six Sigmoidoscopies, which may have even underestimated the pain involved.) One of the presenters talked about the difficulty of applying hard statistical quality analysis to something as abstract as software development, but more or less proceeded to say that the solution was to find whatever metrics could be easily measured, however flawed, and use those, and then try to perfect better metrics as time progressed. My gut reaction was that what would happen in practice is that people would simply focus their work on meeting the flawed metric, then be rewarded based on the flawed metric whether or not it actually made your product any better, and then make decisions based on the metric and thus establish a culture based on that flawed metric. I left before I ever saw if any Sig Sigma initiative was implemented, successfully or not, so I never found out if my reaction was correct or not.
I was unaware until reading this post that my gut reaction had essentially been formally recognized. Good to know if I'm ever in that situation again.
No large company is anchored too heavily to its country of origin.
Tell me about it. A few weeks ago, I was posting on another forum about banking, and was recounting how a bank account that I've had for years started out as a regional S&L, and through about 4 or 5 mergers finally ended up being with Bank of America. While researching Bank of America's history in order to get my facts straight, I saw this gem on the Bank of America wiki page.
Bank of America's history dates to 1904, when Amadeo Giannini founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco....
Somehow I don't see them playing that bit of their history up what with their Stars and Stripes logo and all.
If you ever wonder why a job posting seems to have insane requirements, it's just to discourage casual applicants and drive away people who even *think* they aren't qualified.
Actually, quite often insane requirements are designed to discourage *any* applicants other than the H1B they want to fill the position. See here.
Except in America every child is special and deserves to go to college, and no matter what system you list above, nearly everyone somehow ends up in college.
A big part of what they do is essentially a kind of journalism. Perhaps the solution to their problems AND the death of quality investigative journalism in America is to transform CIA into something akin to BBC News.
I think your suggestion for the CIA to get into the "journalism" business is about 50 years too late. Google "Operation Mockingbird".
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
--William Colby, former CIA Director, quoted by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy
so when I copy all your private information that isn't theft either right?
Bad analogy. While technically it's not truly "theft" either as you are not denying me the use of my private information, the fact of the matter is that you must violate my privacy and trespass my property (in either a real or virtual sense) in order to obtain it. It's the difference between copying and distributing a published book vs. doing the same with someone's private diary. Even if you believe both acts of copying/distribution are wrong, they are wrong for very different reasons.
Do illegal immigrants count as "all other persons" for representational purposes?
No, only because the "all other persons" clause was entirely superseded by the 14th amendment. Whether illegal immigrants count for apportionment purposes, I don't know...maybe someone with an appropriate legal background could weigh in...but it is my understanding the personhood is constitutionally distinct from citizenship. See here for the best explanation I could find.
4) You contradict yourself. If Usenet is such an obscure feature used by very few, why would removing access result in a measurable reduction in traffic?
Because a Usenet server must synchronize a lot of data (over 5 TB per day at this time according to wikipedia), even if no one is downloading anything from it. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Usenet, but if an ISP truly has no one using their Usenet servers, then I can certainly see them having a rational cost benefit to discontinuing the service.
That said, with the linked graph showing the traffic on this "dark alley" increasing six-fold over the past six years, it would seem that tales of the death of Usenet are highly exaggerated.
Slashdot Mirror
Then can you explain the exception? I'm serious.
The 'rule' I'm talking about is that (my phrasing) "less goes with a number, fewer is with an uncounted quantity". Is it that there IS a number, BEFORE the word "less"?
BTW, I wanted to quickly try to find a citation either way (I couldn't), and searching Wikipedia, I found far more pages using "one fewer" than "one less". At least the top results for "one less" were song references, actually.
Actually, you have it backwards. "Fewer" is for countable, indivisible items, where "less" is for uncounted or divisible items.
"There are fewer people in Room 1 than Room 2, which means there's less of a crowd in Room 1."
"There are fewer cars in Lot A than Lot B, but the cars in Lot B each have less gasoline."
"You must correctly answer no fewer than 70 questions to pass this test, and you must complete it in 3 hours or less."
Or maybe this is easier for the Slashdot crowd...if you'd count it with an integer, use 'fewer"; if you'd count it with a float or a decimal, use "less".
But all that said...I'd still probably say "one less company" in most cases, just because "one fewer company", though technically correct, just doesn't feel natural in speech. It's like the word "whom"; many people know its correct usage but how often do you ever hear anyone say "To whom should I send this email?" It feels like reciting Shakespeare when you say it out loud.
No you didn't fix it.
Remember at school, you learned "I before the E except after C". Then you discovered the exceptions. beige, cleidoic, codeine, conscience, deify, deity, deign, dreidel, eider, eight, either, feign, feint, feisty, foreign, forfeit, freight, gleization, gneiss, greige, greisen, heifer, heigh-ho, height, heinous, heir, heist, leitmotiv, neigh, neighbor, neither, peignoir, prescient, rein, science, seiche, seidel, seine, seismic, seize, sheik, society, sovereign, surfeit, teiid, veil, vein, weight, weir, weird
Sorry, but learning English is more than just learning a grammar rule, it's also learning the exceptions. It's "one less", not "one fewer", despite what the rule you're thinking of might have led you to believe.
You forgot the second part of the rule: "I before E except after C or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh. That strikes a few off your exception list, and I would would also question the inclusion of the many words on that list that are directly taken from other languages.
That's not to say that English doesn't probably have the most rule exceptions of any language...but then again once I discovered the exception of "codeine", I stopped caring about it so much. ;-)
I'm all for drug legalization. But to think that it (legalization) will somehow make shitty murderous people better is pretty naive.
It's not that legalization would make "shitty murderous people" better, it would make "shitty murderous" behavior less profitable. Unless you want to believe that such behavior is entirely genetic and only is committed by "bad" people, and that no one gets enticed into such bad behavior because it is the most lucrative opportunity available to them, then it is entirely reasonable to assume that policy which makes bad behavior less lucrative will over time will lead to less of that behavior.
You're confused about what a right is in the united states: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights I don't see anything about high frequency trading in there.
You might want to read that article again before calling anyone else confused, and pay some attention to the 9th amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." In other words, you can't simply deny something is a right by saying "I don't see anything about [it] in there". That's not at all to say that HFT should be construed as a right, but your logic in reply to the GP is faulty.
Things took a turn for the worse one day when I picked up an 288 tuning fork and a 320 tuning fork. I struck them both against my leg and held one up near either ear. It was pure bliss. Like Jesus was just 32 hertz away from me.
That's only the beginning. I tried it with a 398 tuning fork and a 440 tuning fork and discovered the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything.
After a decade of studying english and using it practically daily, I still always need to think a few seconds before writing either "its" or "it's".
One way that was taught to me...think of you're (contraction) vs. your (possessive), which is easier to distinguish due to the 'e' in the former. It's/its follows the same rule...the apostrophe is the contraction, not the possessive.
You must not be reading the same definition I am.
So by "Must" you are referring to "the unfermented or fermenting juice expressed from fruit, especially grapes" and by "Reading" you are referring to a city in England or Pennsylvania? News flash: many words have multiple definitions.
Yes because Crocheting & Knitting RPGs would sell so well.
Grandma Theft Auto?
They stole my idea! I am so calling the President of the Internet.
I claim prior art, even if I shamefully misspelled 'Theremin'. Hmmm...I'd better file my patent on Ondes Martenot Hero right away.
There really needs to be another rule of the internet: As a discussion forum thread goes on, the chances of an XKCD comic becoming relevant increases to 1 (I'm not a math nerd, I think that's how they say 100% likely, isnt' it?)
I guess you could call it the Munroe Doctrine.
And when an error is repeated enough, it's no longer an error and becomes correct.
Which, for all intensive purposes, begs the question of weather we can take this for granite. Or maybe that's a mute point.
***ducks***
Oh, like this.
First of all, the sections of pipe are joined mechanically, and sealed with O-rings. The O-rings are specified for shallow water pressures (and temperatures), and rather than use adequate deep water parts, the shallow water parts were continued to avoid mandatory Federal oversight and testing.
On top of that, deadlines for completion were already tight, as no schedule variability was provided for unforeseen events, such as severe weather, that might hamper drilling and well conversion efforts. The conversion from an exploratory/research structure into a production well was a hard deadline, and pressure was on internally from the otherwise stagnant middle managers clamoring for achievement. There was no room for failure with a project named Deepwater Horizon.
As engineers' warnings flowed up the chain of command, the wording changed from "grave concern" to "concern" to "noted comment" to eventually "thumbs up!". Inter-hierarchical presentations followed a strict time schedule, so power point mentality and "no bad news up" reigned.
That reminds me of this old classic:
In the beginning was the Plan.
And then came the Assumptions.
And the Assumptions were without form.
And the Plan was without substance.
And darkness was upon the face of the workers.
And they spoke among themselves, saying, "It is a crock of shit, and it stinks."
And the workers went unto their Supervisors and said, "It is a pail of dung, and we can't live with the smell."
And the Supervisors went unto their Managers, saying "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it."
And the Managers went unto their Directors, saying "It is a vessel of fertilizer and none may abide its strength."
And the Directors spoke among themselves, saying to one another, "It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong."
And the Directors went to the Vice Presidents, saying unto them, "It promotes growth, and it is very powerful."
And the Vice Presidents went to the President, saying unto him, "This new plan will actively promote the growth and vigor of the company with powerful effects."
And the President looked upon the Plan and saw that it was good.
And the Plan became Policy.
And that is how shit happens.
Just as a side note, I live on Vancouver Island, and I participated in my local community's earthquake preparedness program, which was a good experience for anyone living in earthquake country. As part of program, they showed a video produced by seismologists that showed some computer modeling of the likely scenarios if a major earthquake occurred in the Cascadia zone off the west coast of the island. It seems that the biggest issue would probably not be the earthquake itself as most of the main population centers are pretty far away as the west coast of Vancouver Island is pretty sparsely populated. However, Victoria (and especially Esquimalt) looked especially vulnerable to the resultant tsunami. I don't personally worry so much as I live "up island" and by the modeling the tsunami would not travel far up the Strait of Georgia (nor down into Puget Sound for those around Seattle). Anything along the Strait of Juan de Fuca could be in world of hurt, though.
Sounds like a restatement of the simultaneously-discovered Goodhart's Law, Lucas critique, and Campbell's Law.
Basically, once you start measuring something as a proxy for what you really want to know, people start to take the proxy into account when making decisions, to the point where it becomes useless as a measure for whatever it was intended.
A few years back I was working for a major corporation that was pushing Six Sigma as the holy grail for all problems, and I was forced to attend some seminars. (Afterwards I christened the program Six Sigmoidoscopies , which may have even underestimated the pain involved.) One of the presenters talked about the difficulty of applying hard statistical quality analysis to something as abstract as software development, but more or less proceeded to say that the solution was to find whatever metrics could be easily measured, however flawed, and use those, and then try to perfect better metrics as time progressed. My gut reaction was that what would happen in practice is that people would simply focus their work on meeting the flawed metric, then be rewarded based on the flawed metric whether or not it actually made your product any better, and then make decisions based on the metric and thus establish a culture based on that flawed metric. I left before I ever saw if any Sig Sigma initiative was implemented, successfully or not, so I never found out if my reaction was correct or not.
I was unaware until reading this post that my gut reaction had essentially been formally recognized. Good to know if I'm ever in that situation again.
Fuck the fucking fucker for fucking not fucking writing fucking 'fuck' un-fucking-self-fucking-censored.
Fuck!
Tim Minchin, is that you?
No large company is anchored too heavily to its country of origin.
Tell me about it. A few weeks ago, I was posting on another forum about banking, and was recounting how a bank account that I've had for years started out as a regional S&L, and through about 4 or 5 mergers finally ended up being with Bank of America. While researching Bank of America's history in order to get my facts straight, I saw this gem on the Bank of America wiki page.
Bank of America's history dates to 1904, when Amadeo Giannini founded the Bank of Italy in San Francisco....
Somehow I don't see them playing that bit of their history up what with their Stars and Stripes logo and all.
If you ever wonder why a job posting seems to have insane requirements, it's just to discourage casual applicants and drive away people who even *think* they aren't qualified.
Actually, quite often insane requirements are designed to discourage *any* applicants other than the H1B they want to fill the position. See here.
Except in America every child is special and deserves to go to college, and no matter what system you list above, nearly everyone somehow ends up in college.
And to quote from The Incredibles:
"If everyone is special, then no one is."
A big part of what they do is essentially a kind of journalism. Perhaps the solution to their problems AND the death of quality investigative journalism in America is to transform CIA into something akin to BBC News.
I think your suggestion for the CIA to get into the "journalism" business is about 50 years too late. Google "Operation Mockingbird".
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
--William Colby, former CIA Director, quoted by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy
so when I copy all your private information that isn't theft either right?
Bad analogy. While technically it's not truly "theft" either as you are not denying me the use of my private information, the fact of the matter is that you must violate my privacy and trespass my property (in either a real or virtual sense) in order to obtain it. It's the difference between copying and distributing a published book vs. doing the same with someone's private diary. Even if you believe both acts of copying/distribution are wrong, they are wrong for very different reasons.
And for those who haven't been paying attention, check out Glenn Greenwald's writings on the subject. Something is rotten in the state of America.
Do illegal immigrants count as "all other persons" for representational purposes?
No, only because the "all other persons" clause was entirely superseded by the 14th amendment. Whether illegal immigrants count for apportionment purposes, I don't know...maybe someone with an appropriate legal background could weigh in...but it is my understanding the personhood is constitutionally distinct from citizenship. See here for the best explanation I could find.
...unless you have fractional people.
Well, that's not exactly unprecedented in American politics.
three fifths of all other Persons
4) You contradict yourself. If Usenet is such an obscure feature used by very few, why would removing access result in a measurable reduction in traffic?
Because a Usenet server must synchronize a lot of data (over 5 TB per day at this time according to wikipedia), even if no one is downloading anything from it. Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Usenet, but if an ISP truly has no one using their Usenet servers, then I can certainly see them having a rational cost benefit to discontinuing the service.
That said, with the linked graph showing the traffic on this "dark alley" increasing six-fold over the past six years, it would seem that tales of the death of Usenet are highly exaggerated.
I heard they're going to change their name to Webistics.