While I realize that 'begging the question' is supposed to be a logical fallacy, I have never heard it used any other way than to mean 'raises the question.' And while I realize that my experiences and its use on TV and in movies are not the gold standard of the English language, at some point the language evolves.
Just think of all those English teachers in school that railed against ending sentences with prepositions. This particular 'grammatical error' was actually common to some of English's greatest writers, then went out of fashion in the 17th century, only to become accepted again more recently. Some people make it a point of pride to be uber-conscious of grammar, and cling to these little arbitrary rules to make themselves feel cultured or intelligent or something, but the point of language is to communicate something. If the person understands a phrase to mean X, and everyone generally understands that phrase to mean X as well, then the phrase means X. The fact that you understood 'begs the question' to mean what the submitter intended just shows what it really has come to mean. You can pretend that you are part of an exclusive group in the know ("Most of us won't say anything"), but the fact is that you are wasting valuable time nitpicking a grammatical non-issue to demonstrate your supposed superior intellect instead of doing something useful like selling your WoW character or compiling something for Gentoo.
For those that are curious, you can read more about ending your sentences with prepositions here and here. Also, a very interesting compilation of english grammatical issues can be found here.
As someone who has worked for State Government... I can empathize with the guy. He was just trying to get some happy pr0n in to deal with the soul-crushing-depressing-meaninglessness that is working in the public sector. I mean, without internet pr0n, I bet the number of state workers going beserk and killing everyone would skyrocket. I say 2000 SSNs is a small price to pay... after all, they aren't exactly making a killing on the salary.
I will admit that I somehow pulled the piles of debt out of my ass... ATI only has ~$25 million in debt, which is more than covered by the ~$185 million in cash on hand. All figures are from SmartMoney.com, taken from 2/28/06 quarterly report.
So maybe my argument based on financials isn't as strong, but I think it stands on the other merits.
ATI... (ATYT)
Total Net Income
2005 - 16,929,000
2004 - 204,799,000
2003 - 35,229,000
2002 - -47,465,000
2001 - -54,205,000
Fully Diluted EPS
2005 - 0.07
2004 - 0.80
2003 - 0.14
2002 - -0.20
2001 - -0.23
Operating Margin = -3.82%
Net Margin = -3.04%
Return on Common Equity = -6.41%
Return on Invested Capital = -6.24%
Return on Assets = -3.77%
I will admit that I somehow pulled the piles of debt out of my ass... ATI only has ~$25 million in debt, which is more than covered by the ~$185 million in cash on hand. All figures are from SmartMoney.com, taken from 2/28/06 quarterly report.
So maybe my argument based on financials isn't as strong, but I think it stands on the other merits.
AMD and Nvidia do a lot of mutual back scratching now, by creating good products that play well with others. Why would AMD want to ruin that by trying to create a company that competes at every level, and hence has no real allies? This works fine for Intel, since it is by far the biggest dog in the pack, but it would kill a company like AMD.
If nothing else, this would just drive Nvidia into the arms of Intel, or maybe even provoke it to make it's own foray into CPUs. It's not like Nvidia isn't already making very complex microchips to drive it's video cards. It wouldn't be a big leap, and not necessarily a bad one from the standpoint of consumers, but from AMD's view, this would be terrible.
I just cannot see any real longterm upside to AMD acquiring ATI, and lots of potential downsides exist. ATI is only profitable every few years, and carries a big pile of debt. And their products seem to always lag behind Nvidia. Maybe I am just biased against ATI, but it just seems like a really poor business move.
... obviously Facebook.com... when your site becomes as important to your target audience as their lifeblood (alcohol in this case), you have achieved success.
I bet Mark Zuckerberg is glad he turned down that $750 million now... News Corp or Viacom is going to pay billions for a dedicated advertise-to-college kids website that might as well be coded in Crack++. If they can keep opening the facebook up to mobile phones, they might have truly created an advertiser's wet dream... because at that point, college kids everywhere will reach social networking nirvana.
First, the rewrite limit on flash nowdays is in the low millions... so even if you could only rewrite a million times, and you did it 100 times a day (about once every minute and a half)... the drive would last over 27 years...
Not sure why everyone keeps bringing up this longevity issue. Sure, don't put temp files or virtual memory on it... every time Windows pulled a thrash maneuver you'd lose 8% of your HD lifespan;)... but for storing OS boot files and commonly used system files, the lifespan thing isn't a problem...
That said, I think they should put a flash socket on the mobo so the stuff is upgradable if you want larger capacity. That way, you wouldn't have to buy a new HD to get more flash memory or vice versa...
I hope TorrentSpy saved a lot of money to fight what is sure to be a loooooonnnnnnggggggggg drawn out court battle. I can't imagine the ad revenue of every torrent site on the planet since the beginning of torrenting even approaches the yearly legal budget of the MPAA.
Of course, the brilliant and slap-in-the-face method of winning this would be to take it far enough to get a nice huge settlement out of the MPAA, and then use that money to defend TorrentSpy users in future court cases. Or fund a trip or two to the Supreme Court.
Besides, it is Yahoo and eBay teaming up... Microsoft is doing their own thing as usual, since Yahoo rejected their offer to partner up a while back. So the new word in the dictionary will either be Yahbay or eHoo... I'm voting on eHoo... that could totally be a verb. Go eHoo it!
Actually I am from Kansas... the kids with the shiny new Hummers were always the new kids, recently moved to our tiny little town by parents buying big ranches and attending Walmart Churches.
Yeah, somehow I think Congress would manage to get out of their collective golf carts and pass some law making the use of encrypted voice communication illegal, punishable as if it were treason.
After all, they don't want anyone rocking the boat. They spent a lot of other people's money to get into and stay in that oh-so-lucrative club.
You, my friend, have obviously never seen what American parents spend on their kids.
I knew people at my high school that showed up after their 16th birthday with brand new Hummer H1s that their parents had bought them. The monthly payment on something like that is more than a 42 inch plasma nowdays. $2000 on video games and an HDTV would be a drop in the bucket.
Besides, the 18-30 single male demographic is the most sought after market niche in the country. Young guys tend to make way more money than they really need, and tend to spend it all anyway. Whether this means daily $100 visits to a strip club or some 360 action on a 50 inch HDTV just depends on the individual.
... the UK outlaws hammers (citing their use to commit vandalism and murder), pliers (citing their use for sabotage and torture via fingernail removal), and cell phones (citing their use to coordinate groups of people without government knowledge and approval). From now on, all houses will be built by government agents, all wiring will be done by government spooks, and all interpersonal communication will happen by calling the new Worldwide Home Office Relay Exchange (WHORE) and giving a government agent the name of the person you wish to talk to and the message to relay that person. The government agent will then check the recipient, and either send agents to detain you on terrorism charges or deliver your message with a smile...
... U.S. said to be considering similiar, if not more draconian, measures...
Amusing you attribute the proof-by-volume method of argument to liberals. While they now excel at this method of debate, it was Rush Limbaugh and Fox News that perfected this technique.
Both sides employ it so much now that people think politics without yelling is boring. What a sad state of affairs we are in.
What happens when a bunch of planes are sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off? Are they all going to confuse each other (wirelessly)? Or is there some fancy signal hopping that the internal components do to avoid interference? That would be annoying if plane #8's jets reacted to plane #1's take-off, rammed plane #7 from the rear, and plane #1's engines mistakenly shut down due to plane #7's collision alarms... could be a chain reaction of yuckiness and fire...
Of course, it would be killer fun for a terrorist to bring some kind of jamming device onboard to disable the whole plane.
Sadly, the worst part would be waiting for the TSA to verify that your electric shaver wasn't said jamming device... they already treat laptops like dirty bombs...
Congress, having solved all other problems both internal and external, turns it's superbrilliance to protecting our children from doing something that any selfrespecting teacher worth his salt would prevent anyway, in the name of... I dunno... TEACHING SOMETHING.
Security deposit (normally $400) is what they ask for if you refuse to give your SSN and submit to the credit check. The problem is that most people scoff at this.... especially the ones that would've failed the credit check anyway, and just hand over their SSN.
Phone companies never want to terminate service... even to a nonpaying customer... they are competing for market share after all... and with your SSN, they can hunt you down for the rest of your days and demand payment, or garnish your checks. Much more profitable for them.
Usually they use it to run credit checks. The people that pick dumb plans and have $150 bills every month tend to not be able to afford it... and tend to go bankrupt or never pay.
But yeah, I agree, they don't need it. Have them look me up some other way.
Slashdot Mirror
While I realize that 'begging the question' is supposed to be a logical fallacy, I have never heard it used any other way than to mean 'raises the question.' And while I realize that my experiences and its use on TV and in movies are not the gold standard of the English language, at some point the language evolves.
Just think of all those English teachers in school that railed against ending sentences with prepositions. This particular 'grammatical error' was actually common to some of English's greatest writers, then went out of fashion in the 17th century, only to become accepted again more recently. Some people make it a point of pride to be uber-conscious of grammar, and cling to these little arbitrary rules to make themselves feel cultured or intelligent or something, but the point of language is to communicate something. If the person understands a phrase to mean X, and everyone generally understands that phrase to mean X as well, then the phrase means X. The fact that you understood 'begs the question' to mean what the submitter intended just shows what it really has come to mean. You can pretend that you are part of an exclusive group in the know ("Most of us won't say anything"), but the fact is that you are wasting valuable time nitpicking a grammatical non-issue to demonstrate your supposed superior intellect instead of doing something useful like selling your WoW character or compiling something for Gentoo.
For those that are curious, you can read more about ending your sentences with prepositions here and here. Also, a very interesting compilation of english grammatical issues can be found here.
You forgot the word 'heterosexual'
jackthompsonisadouche is my new favorite /. tag.
Anybody else feel like rocket jumping off this guy's face?
As someone who has worked for State Government... I can empathize with the guy. He was just trying to get some happy pr0n in to deal with the soul-crushing-depressing-meaninglessness that is working in the public sector. I mean, without internet pr0n, I bet the number of state workers going beserk and killing everyone would skyrocket. I say 2000 SSNs is a small price to pay... after all, they aren't exactly making a killing on the salary.
Or maybe just incredibly ironic... those sneaky islands and their surrounding waters!
Bah... forgot the HTML on that...
ATI ... (ATYT)
Total Net Income
Fully Diluted EPS
Other Stats
I will admit that I somehow pulled the piles of debt out of my ass... ATI only has ~$25 million in debt, which is more than covered by the ~$185 million in cash on hand. All figures are from SmartMoney.com, taken from 2/28/06 quarterly report.
So maybe my argument based on financials isn't as strong, but I think it stands on the other merits.
ATI ... (ATYT)
Total Net Income
2005 - 16,929,000
2004 - 204,799,000
2003 - 35,229,000
2002 - -47,465,000
2001 - -54,205,000
Fully Diluted EPS
2005 - 0.07
2004 - 0.80
2003 - 0.14
2002 - -0.20
2001 - -0.23
Operating Margin = -3.82%
Net Margin = -3.04%
Return on Common Equity = -6.41%
Return on Invested Capital = -6.24%
Return on Assets = -3.77%
I will admit that I somehow pulled the piles of debt out of my ass... ATI only has ~$25 million in debt, which is more than covered by the ~$185 million in cash on hand. All figures are from SmartMoney.com, taken from 2/28/06 quarterly report.
So maybe my argument based on financials isn't as strong, but I think it stands on the other merits.
I cringe at the thought of this.
AMD and Nvidia do a lot of mutual back scratching now, by creating good products that play well with others. Why would AMD want to ruin that by trying to create a company that competes at every level, and hence has no real allies? This works fine for Intel, since it is by far the biggest dog in the pack, but it would kill a company like AMD.
If nothing else, this would just drive Nvidia into the arms of Intel, or maybe even provoke it to make it's own foray into CPUs. It's not like Nvidia isn't already making very complex microchips to drive it's video cards. It wouldn't be a big leap, and not necessarily a bad one from the standpoint of consumers, but from AMD's view, this would be terrible.
I just cannot see any real longterm upside to AMD acquiring ATI, and lots of potential downsides exist. ATI is only profitable every few years, and carries a big pile of debt. And their products seem to always lag behind Nvidia. Maybe I am just biased against ATI, but it just seems like a really poor business move.
... obviously Facebook.com ... when your site becomes as important to your target audience as their lifeblood (alcohol in this case), you have achieved success.
I bet Mark Zuckerberg is glad he turned down that $750 million now... News Corp or Viacom is going to pay billions for a dedicated advertise-to-college kids website that might as well be coded in Crack++. If they can keep opening the facebook up to mobile phones, they might have truly created an advertiser's wet dream... because at that point, college kids everywhere will reach social networking nirvana.
Yeah... uh... somehow I took 86400 (secs in a day) and divided by 100 and got 86.4 instead of 864... so uh... thanks for calling out my stupidity...
Mods, just mod me down into oblivion...
*goes and sits in time out*
My laptop doesn't have flashing lights...
... I got screwed!
First, the rewrite limit on flash nowdays is in the low millions... so even if you could only rewrite a million times, and you did it 100 times a day (about once every minute and a half)... the drive would last over 27 years... Not sure why everyone keeps bringing up this longevity issue. Sure, don't put temp files or virtual memory on it... every time Windows pulled a thrash maneuver you'd lose 8% of your HD lifespan ;) ... but for storing OS boot files and commonly used system files, the lifespan thing isn't a problem...
That said, I think they should put a flash socket on the mobo so the stuff is upgradable if you want larger capacity. That way, you wouldn't have to buy a new HD to get more flash memory or vice versa...
Your sig would rock harder if it ended with a roundhouse kick to the face!
I hope TorrentSpy saved a lot of money to fight what is sure to be a loooooonnnnnnggggggggg drawn out court battle. I can't imagine the ad revenue of every torrent site on the planet since the beginning of torrenting even approaches the yearly legal budget of the MPAA.
Of course, the brilliant and slap-in-the-face method of winning this would be to take it far enough to get a nice huge settlement out of the MPAA, and then use that money to defend TorrentSpy users in future court cases. Or fund a trip or two to the Supreme Court.
Uh... shush... don't give everyone the same idea!
Besides, it is Yahoo and eBay teaming up... Microsoft is doing their own thing as usual, since Yahoo rejected their offer to partner up a while back. So the new word in the dictionary will either be Yahbay or eHoo... I'm voting on eHoo... that could totally be a verb. Go eHoo it!
Yahbay sounds like something a yak would say...
Actually I am from Kansas... the kids with the shiny new Hummers were always the new kids, recently moved to our tiny little town by parents buying big ranches and attending Walmart Churches.
Yeah, somehow I think Congress would manage to get out of their collective golf carts and pass some law making the use of encrypted voice communication illegal, punishable as if it were treason.
After all, they don't want anyone rocking the boat. They spent a lot of other people's money to get into and stay in that oh-so-lucrative club.
You, my friend, have obviously never seen what American parents spend on their kids.
I knew people at my high school that showed up after their 16th birthday with brand new Hummer H1s that their parents had bought them. The monthly payment on something like that is more than a 42 inch plasma nowdays. $2000 on video games and an HDTV would be a drop in the bucket.
Besides, the 18-30 single male demographic is the most sought after market niche in the country. Young guys tend to make way more money than they really need, and tend to spend it all anyway. Whether this means daily $100 visits to a strip club or some 360 action on a 50 inch HDTV just depends on the individual.
... the UK outlaws hammers (citing their use to commit vandalism and murder), pliers (citing their use for sabotage and torture via fingernail removal), and cell phones (citing their use to coordinate groups of people without government knowledge and approval). From now on, all houses will be built by government agents, all wiring will be done by government spooks, and all interpersonal communication will happen by calling the new Worldwide Home Office Relay Exchange (WHORE) and giving a government agent the name of the person you wish to talk to and the message to relay that person. The government agent will then check the recipient, and either send agents to detain you on terrorism charges or deliver your message with a smile...
... U.S. said to be considering similiar, if not more draconian, measures...
Amusing you attribute the proof-by-volume method of argument to liberals. While they now excel at this method of debate, it was Rush Limbaugh and Fox News that perfected this technique.
Both sides employ it so much now that people think politics without yelling is boring. What a sad state of affairs we are in.
If by 'anyone' you mean everyone on slashdot, then yes. (There was an article on Google Notebook and some other new betas a few days ago.)
What happens when a bunch of planes are sitting on the tarmac waiting to take off? Are they all going to confuse each other (wirelessly)? Or is there some fancy signal hopping that the internal components do to avoid interference? That would be annoying if plane #8's jets reacted to plane #1's take-off, rammed plane #7 from the rear, and plane #1's engines mistakenly shut down due to plane #7's collision alarms... could be a chain reaction of yuckiness and fire...
Of course, it would be killer fun for a terrorist to bring some kind of jamming device onboard to disable the whole plane.
Sadly, the worst part would be waiting for the TSA to verify that your electric shaver wasn't said jamming device... they already treat laptops like dirty bombs...
Congress, having solved all other problems both internal and external, turns it's superbrilliance to protecting our children from doing something that any selfrespecting teacher worth his salt would prevent anyway, in the name of... I dunno... TEACHING SOMETHING.
Security deposit (normally $400) is what they ask for if you refuse to give your SSN and submit to the credit check. The problem is that most people scoff at this.... especially the ones that would've failed the credit check anyway, and just hand over their SSN.
Phone companies never want to terminate service... even to a nonpaying customer... they are competing for market share after all... and with your SSN, they can hunt you down for the rest of your days and demand payment, or garnish your checks. Much more profitable for them.
Usually they use it to run credit checks. The people that pick dumb plans and have $150 bills every month tend to not be able to afford it... and tend to go bankrupt or never pay.
But yeah, I agree, they don't need it. Have them look me up some other way.