It's not nothing when you pull up two feet from the car in front on the motorway when it suddenly brakes. Ten feet further and you'd have an engine block on your lap.
You know those LED brake lights some cars have now? They light up much faster than conventional bulbs. You're only talking fractions of a second, but at 70mph it's equivalent to two metres more warning that it's time to hit the brakes. That could come in pretty handy.
Re:Article is way off base... such as...
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Amateur Revolution?
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· Score: 1
You don't really think that's where hip-hop first reared its head, do you?
Walk This Way might be when white folk started paying attention to hip-hop, but it was around an awfully long time before that. The video's highly symbolic - you've got the white rocker guys playing away, only for these young upstart rappers to break the wall down and come in and take over the show. It's really clever stuff.
White acts were sitting up and paying attention long before that, anyway. Look at Blondie's "Rapture", where Debbie Harry namechecks lots of scene-setters who she'd been hanging out with.
Call me crazy, but if you're going to be dropping a load of soldiers into an exercise like this, shouldn't you a) check the conditions before you kick off and b) train them to deal with it?
Clearly you don't know what goes into making a text-to-speech voice. The process involves taking a poor unsuspecting voice artist, putting them in a studio and getting them to recite enormous amounts of carefully chosen text. I'm talking many dozens of hours of recordings here. Then these recordings are used to build a model of that person's voice, the idea being that there's sufficient data to capture just about every nuance of how that person speaks. There are some very good systems out there - just yesterday I was listnening to a Spanish voice from Loquendo and I really was quite hard pressed to tell it from a human being - when I overheard it coming out of my colleague's speakers, I thought he was listening to the news. Rhetorical make some of the best English TTS voices. Have a play with them. You might be surprised how good they actually are.
Well, you could always legalise them. Yes, all of them. Then you can control the supply and the quality, and take the gangsterism out of the market. Who'd buy stuff of dubious quality from the local dodgy dealer when you can get stuff of a guaranteed level of quality from the pharmacist, and potentially cheaper too, since they won't have to factor in the cost of losses to customs inspections?
And of course, they could be taxed...
(Yes, I KNOW it's offtopic. But can you really think of nothing better to use your mod points on?)
1 It's a bad habit to get into, depending on a spell checker. You're much better off learning to spell and proofread things properly. And I don't mean that to sound like I'm trying to belittle your intelligence - I don't know whether you're any good at spelling or not. I'm just saying that spellcheckers are bad. I never, ever use them, mostly because I can spell, but partly because I don't trust them, since they can't spot correctly spelled words used in the wrong context.
2 MS Word's grammar checker is useless. It's just plain wrong most of the time. I accept that a spellchecker can perform a useful function, namely making a first pass over a document to pick out obvious bloopers for those too lazy to take the time to type and read it properly. But if you follow your grammar checker's instructions to the letter, you'll end up producing stilted, formulaic prose, devoid of any kind of individual flair. There's absolutely no substitute for learning how to do it yourself, by simply reading a lot.
If they didn't include spelling and grammar checkers, I wouldn't miss them a bit. And personally I think the grammar checker's a false friend which we'd all be better off without.
But that's not how an election works, is it? It's not "Candidate A got X votes, plus or minus two percent". When they read out how many votes you got, that's how many votes you got. You're entitled to a recount if you feel it's tight enough to be worth a try, and this may alter the result, but there's no such thing as a statistical tie in an election.
Indeed. As long as we have a BBC, we'll never have a Fox News (leaving aside the fact that Fox News is available on satellite - what I mean is there'll never be a local version). They'd never get away with it. It'd just look ridiculous.
It's all part of the BBC's remit. It was the BBC that developed NICAM, for instance. The BBC took it upon themselves to encourage the takeup of home computing by coming up with the spec for their own machine and recruiting Acorn to make it. Their Internet presence has been a major factor in getting the British population online - the BBC's websites are now among the most popular in the world. And they're currently at the forefront of the push to get digital TV into every home in the country through their Freeview set-top boxes.
This reminds me of a couple of short stories by J.G Ballard. One of them, Prima Belladonna, is about a guy who runs a shop selling plants specially bred to be able to "sing". I thought it was quite a cool premise, the idea of your house being filled with music produced by plants, sitting there humming to themselves all day long. Now, this isn't quite as cool as that, but still...
Wasn't The Great Giana Sisters sued off the shelves by Nintendo because it was basically the original Super Mario Brothers with the characters changed into spiky-haired girls?
What you're advocating isn't punishment, it's revenge. The court's job is to punish him appropriately for what he did wrong, and discourage other people from wanting to follow in his footsteps. That's it. Thankfully, Europe's moved on a fair way from the eye-for-an-eye school of thought often prevalent the other side of the pond.
What difference does it make when they go and let the fuckers out as part of the farcical "peace process" which has left Northern Ireland more divided, bitter and fucked-up than ever? Peace settlement my backside - these bastards are murderers, plain and simple.
What utter fucking bullshit. Motown was a fucking production line. Songwriters churning out lyrics, which were assigned to their roster of artists in rotation, backed by the house band. A procession of hopefuls picked up from church choirs and the like, given a couple of hits, and usually disposed of thereafter. Berry Gordy playing the songs through crappy sound systems rather than fancy studio monitors to see what it would sound like when Tha Kidz got to hear it. A factory producing carefully designed and targeted products - hit singles. Dozens and dozens of them.
Manufactured or not, you're not going to tell me that the people involved were anything other than geniuses. The've produced a huge body of timeless music, and they were only trying to make three-minute throway pop songs.
They're the Darkness of hip-hop. Not manufactured so much as kinda cynical and self-consciously taking the piss. And rumour has it they're actually Scousers pretending to be from South Wales, which makes you wonder how "real" they are.
Yes, they are. And they're analysed pretty carefully to spot evidence of unusual buying patterns (they make allowances for things like the band having played a recent gig in the area, or local popularity, and the like). But those sales figures are so pitifully low that 20-30,000 sales in a week will get you number one, so rigging it is only a matter of a few sales in the right places. And the difference in sales between the top five and the rest of the chart is enormous, so literally a couple of hundred copies could move you from nowhere to top twenty.
To push their records up the charts, some record companies employ people to go out and buy singles when things aren't going according to plan, as well as long-established scams like "formatting" (releasing different versions of singles with different B-sides, which will count as multiple sales), discounting (the charts only recognise sales of singles with a wholesale price above a certain level, so they might give the shops one, two or even three copies free for every one they buy, the idea being that the shop then discounts the single in the hope that people will think "well, it's only a quid, what the hell"), or deleting the record after a week, forcing everybody to buy it at the same time, thus ensuring a high chart placing. Of course, the song drops straight out of the chart after, but this doesn't really matter, since it will have been played on the radio for maybe six weeks before release, in order to build up demand - songs don't get airplay because they're in the charts nowadays, they get in the charts because they get airplay.
Ah, but play it in the plural (syzygys? Syzygies?) and you'll be looking at 50 bonus points for playing your full hand in a single turn. Well, if it's spelt the first way, you'll have to play it on your first turn or you won't clear your hand, but on the other hand you've a guaranteed double word, so that'll be 100 points. That'll do me for an opener.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not nothing when you pull up two feet from the car in front on the motorway when it suddenly brakes. Ten feet further and you'd have an engine block on your lap.
You know those LED brake lights some cars have now? They light up much faster than conventional bulbs. You're only talking fractions of a second, but at 70mph it's equivalent to two metres more warning that it's time to hit the brakes. That could come in pretty handy.
You don't really think that's where hip-hop first reared its head, do you?
Walk This Way might be when white folk started paying attention to hip-hop, but it was around an awfully long time before that. The video's highly symbolic - you've got the white rocker guys playing away, only for these young upstart rappers to break the wall down and come in and take over the show. It's really clever stuff.
White acts were sitting up and paying attention long before that, anyway. Look at Blondie's "Rapture", where Debbie Harry namechecks lots of scene-setters who she'd been hanging out with.
Erm, it was an exercise, which is about putting what you've been trained to do to the test.
Call me crazy, but if you're going to be dropping a load of soldiers into an exercise like this, shouldn't you a) check the conditions before you kick off and b) train them to deal with it?
Clearly you don't know what goes into making a text-to-speech voice. The process involves taking a poor unsuspecting voice artist, putting them in a studio and getting them to recite enormous amounts of carefully chosen text. I'm talking many dozens of hours of recordings here. Then these recordings are used to build a model of that person's voice, the idea being that there's sufficient data to capture just about every nuance of how that person speaks. There are some very good systems out there - just yesterday I was listnening to a Spanish voice from Loquendo and I really was quite hard pressed to tell it from a human being - when I overheard it coming out of my colleague's speakers, I thought he was listening to the news. Rhetorical make some of the best English TTS voices. Have a play with them. You might be surprised how good they actually are.
Well, you could always legalise them. Yes, all of them. Then you can control the supply and the quality, and take the gangsterism out of the market. Who'd buy stuff of dubious quality from the local dodgy dealer when you can get stuff of a guaranteed level of quality from the pharmacist, and potentially cheaper too, since they won't have to factor in the cost of losses to customs inspections?
And of course, they could be taxed...
(Yes, I KNOW it's offtopic. But can you really think of nothing better to use your mod points on?)
1 It's a bad habit to get into, depending on a spell checker. You're much better off learning to spell and proofread things properly. And I don't mean that to sound like I'm trying to belittle your intelligence - I don't know whether you're any good at spelling or not. I'm just saying that spellcheckers are bad. I never, ever use them, mostly because I can spell, but partly because I don't trust them, since they can't spot correctly spelled words used in the wrong context.
2 MS Word's grammar checker is useless. It's just plain wrong most of the time. I accept that a spellchecker can perform a useful function, namely making a first pass over a document to pick out obvious bloopers for those too lazy to take the time to type and read it properly. But if you follow your grammar checker's instructions to the letter, you'll end up producing stilted, formulaic prose, devoid of any kind of individual flair. There's absolutely no substitute for learning how to do it yourself, by simply reading a lot.
If they didn't include spelling and grammar checkers, I wouldn't miss them a bit. And personally I think the grammar checker's a false friend which we'd all be better off without.
But that's not how an election works, is it? It's not "Candidate A got X votes, plus or minus two percent". When they read out how many votes you got, that's how many votes you got. You're entitled to a recount if you feel it's tight enough to be worth a try, and this may alter the result, but there's no such thing as a statistical tie in an election.
Indeed. As long as we have a BBC, we'll never have a Fox News (leaving aside the fact that Fox News is available on satellite - what I mean is there'll never be a local version). They'd never get away with it. It'd just look ridiculous.
It's all part of the BBC's remit. It was the BBC that developed NICAM, for instance. The BBC took it upon themselves to encourage the takeup of home computing by coming up with the spec for their own machine and recruiting Acorn to make it. Their Internet presence has been a major factor in getting the British population online - the BBC's websites are now among the most popular in the world. And they're currently at the forefront of the push to get digital TV into every home in the country through their Freeview set-top boxes.
Well, it's no wonder - she'll follow you around like a bad smell for years after as soon as you do...
This reminds me of a couple of short stories by J.G Ballard. One of them, Prima Belladonna, is about a guy who runs a shop selling plants specially bred to be able to "sing". I thought it was quite a cool premise, the idea of your house being filled with music produced by plants, sitting there humming to themselves all day long. Now, this isn't quite as cool as that, but still...
Wasn't The Great Giana Sisters sued off the shelves by Nintendo because it was basically the original Super Mario Brothers with the characters changed into spiky-haired girls?
Yeah. I mean, Sweden's just hell on earth.
What you're advocating isn't punishment, it's revenge. The court's job is to punish him appropriately for what he did wrong, and discourage other people from wanting to follow in his footsteps. That's it. Thankfully, Europe's moved on a fair way from the eye-for-an-eye school of thought often prevalent the other side of the pond.
Ah, so that's why George didn't go through the UN over Iraq...
What difference does it make when they go and let the fuckers out as part of the farcical "peace process" which has left Northern Ireland more divided, bitter and fucked-up than ever? Peace settlement my backside - these bastards are murderers, plain and simple.
What utter fucking bullshit. Motown was a fucking production line. Songwriters churning out lyrics, which were assigned to their roster of artists in rotation, backed by the house band. A procession of hopefuls picked up from church choirs and the like, given a couple of hits, and usually disposed of thereafter. Berry Gordy playing the songs through crappy sound systems rather than fancy studio monitors to see what it would sound like when Tha Kidz got to hear it. A factory producing carefully designed and targeted products - hit singles. Dozens and dozens of them.
Manufactured or not, you're not going to tell me that the people involved were anything other than geniuses. The've produced a huge body of timeless music, and they were only trying to make three-minute throway pop songs.
They're the Darkness of hip-hop. Not manufactured so much as kinda cynical and self-consciously taking the piss. And rumour has it they're actually Scousers pretending to be from South Wales, which makes you wonder how "real" they are.
Yes, they are. And they're analysed pretty carefully to spot evidence of unusual buying patterns (they make allowances for things like the band having played a recent gig in the area, or local popularity, and the like). But those sales figures are so pitifully low that 20-30,000 sales in a week will get you number one, so rigging it is only a matter of a few sales in the right places. And the difference in sales between the top five and the rest of the chart is enormous, so literally a couple of hundred copies could move you from nowhere to top twenty.
To push their records up the charts, some record companies employ people to go out and buy singles when things aren't going according to plan, as well as long-established scams like "formatting" (releasing different versions of singles with different B-sides, which will count as multiple sales), discounting (the charts only recognise sales of singles with a wholesale price above a certain level, so they might give the shops one, two or even three copies free for every one they buy, the idea being that the shop then discounts the single in the hope that people will think "well, it's only a quid, what the hell"), or deleting the record after a week, forcing everybody to buy it at the same time, thus ensuring a high chart placing. Of course, the song drops straight out of the chart after, but this doesn't really matter, since it will have been played on the radio for maybe six weeks before release, in order to build up demand - songs don't get airplay because they're in the charts nowadays, they get in the charts because they get airplay.
Right. Now what about cities apart from Bristol?
Thing is, you could do this all day. I mean, Detroit gave us Motown, Derrick May, and the MC5, for instance.
I don't care. It'll be in my pocket. I buy it to listen to it, not look at it.
Or English as a first language people. Know them, by their inappropriate, overuse of commas, to break up sentences, which Word deems too long.
Ideology in this sense is like how the all the **AA's think that the world owes them everytime soembody hums a tune.
Does that include the GNAA?
Ah, but play it in the plural (syzygys? Syzygies?) and you'll be looking at 50 bonus points for playing your full hand in a single turn. Well, if it's spelt the first way, you'll have to play it on your first turn or you won't clear your hand, but on the other hand you've a guaranteed double word, so that'll be 100 points. That'll do me for an opener.
*Ahem*