so how many DVD-audios, and SCD's do you have? How about Minidisc's?
what don't you remember those formats. Of them all the only good one was minidisc, but since Sony did weird shit with formatting on them they never took off.
Not every new format gains acceptance, even good ones. I guess you never studied history or reality.
There's just so much wrong with this post, it's hard to know where to start.
First of all, let's get the grammar Nazi stuff out of the way. Plurals are not made in English by simply adding 's to any word you feel like. In fact, ZERO English plurals are made in this way.
It's SACD, not SCD.
I have no idea what you think the problem with minidisc was, but it sure wasn't formatting. Minidisc was meant to replace audio cassettes and nothing more. It was never, ever intended to replace audio CDs. Their small space (remember, minidiscs pre-date MP3 players) was, at the beginning, a selling point. At first, minidiscs only stored data in ATRAC format, which limited their storage capacity to something similar to CD-Rs. I have some 74 and some 80 minute minidiscs. Minidisc never took off because Sony didn't explain very well that it wasn't supposed to replace audio CDs.
As far as DVD-Audio and SACD discs go, you do have a point. Both are great formats. However, Sony botched SACD by failing to make hybrid discs which would play in regular CD audio players. In fact, they at one time insisted that such discs couldn't be made, while classical music and jazz labels were actually producing hybrid discs with no problems. DVD-Audio isn't compatible with CD audio players, although the Dolby tracks can be ripped and converted to CD audio pretty easily. In fact, yesterday I listened on my way to work to an audio CD I made from a DVD-Audio of Nena (remember "99 Luftballons"?) in concert that I picked up in Germany. SACD is still alive in Europe for pop music, although it's pretty much dead for that in the USA. DVD-Audio and SACD both survive for classical labels in the USA. Next Tuesday, the Beatles are relasing a limited edition of their _Love_ soundtrack with an audio CD and a DVD-Audio disc and the Doors are also releasing a box set with a bunch of DVD-Audio discs, so both formats are still alive.
For every user who connects to HealthConnect, they connect via Citrix, and we're running into monumental problems in scaling the Citrix servers.
I'm not surprised at all. I don't want to give details, but my former employer had as a customer a very large European hotel chain who insisted on using Citrix in its architecture. I saw trouble tickets almost every day related to the Citrix servers, which were always falling down and causing one sort of problem or another. I was really glad I didn't have to work on those problems and the only thing it taught me was that any business that relies on Citrix is foolish.
So Lucas could have made it sensible to watch them in order, 1=>6, without destroying the plots of the original trilogy. The fact is, he simply chose not to, which is just baffling.
You're giving Lucas way too much credit. It's not baffling at all. He is considered by many to be a very poor writer and especially weak at dialogue. Episode 5 is considered by many to be the best written of the 6 films and guess what? Someone co-wrote the script with him for that one. I'm amazed that episode 3 fit as well into the sequence as it did given Lucas' shortcomings as a writer.
There are other things that don't add up in the series, like when you mentioned Leia remembering her mother yet episode 3 would contradict that. That's what happens when you have to force fit the beginning of your story because you wrote (and filmed) the end first. Lucas' instincts have always been odd and money driven. Hence the completely unnecessary appearance of the Ewoks in episode 6 and the infamous Jar Jar Binks in episode 1. Both were creations to try to appeal to kids and sell toy tie-ins. I'm sure Lucas was shocked at the backlash Jar Jar Binks generated as he no doubt believed he would sell millions of Jar Jar toys to the tots at Christmas.
QUERTY was originally designed not to increase typing efficiency--in fact, the opposite is true. Typists were getting so fast with ABCDE layouts that the keys were jamming. QUERTY was designed in part to slow typists down.
Actually, QWERTY was designed to keep the typebars from sticking together, which was happening too much with an alphabetic layout. It wasn't to slow typists down, but that might have been a side effect.
When people escaped the DDR (East Germany), specifically over the Berlin Wall - the West Germans helped them in any way possible with open arms, short of provoking war.
Now we shoot them?
Sigh. It seems that you don't understand that DDR != DPRK The border between South Korea and North Korea is not only heavily armed and manned, the South Korean side, if not both sides, is filled with landmines. Trust me when I tell you that nobody who defects from North Korea crosses that border by land. There's so much fear and disinformation on the North Korean side that there aren't a lot of defectors anyway. Any would-be defectors from North Korea would certainly be killed or imprisoned by North Korean soldiers if they tried to cross by land, so a robot sentry would really make no difference. I don't think there's anywhere on the border that isn't manned by soldiers and filled with landmines. If there was, North Korea probably would have used that place as an invasion route years ago.
It's returning a 404 error that the article can't be found. Either Micro$oft got to 'em before Slashdot could or they moved the article to avoid killing their server.
So, lets get this straight. The local government pays for team stadia in the US? That's insane. In the UK not only is it private money, often the teams will have to bribe the local council with roads, housing etc. to be allowed to build in the first place.
Sounds like someone is missing a trick
Indeed. As an American, I can tell you exactly how this happens. Team A announces that it will leave unless it gets a new stadium paid for by the city where the team plays. Other greedy cities, fooled by nebulous studies that tout the "economic benefit" of professional sports teams on city revenues and "job creation", offer to build a stadium for team A if its current city refuses. Fanatical supporters of the team (we have just as many here in the US for our teams as you do in the UK for your football/soccer clubs) unite and say that the city must pay any cost necessary to build the stadium so the team won't leave. A few times a city will decide that it just isn't willing to pay the cost to get a professional sports team. Portland, Oregon had a very good chance at getting the Montreal Expos (baseball) when it was announced that the team would move from Montreal to another city, but the city government decided that it couldn't afford to build a stadium for the team when they were having problems funding the local schools. The only benefit that a city gets out of a stadium is that if they have to pay for it, usually they can get the concession money, which can be quite substantial. Over 20 years ago, the Atlanta Flames (hockey) moved to Calgary, Canada because the city of Atlanta received 100% of the concession money since they paid for the arena where the team played. The team's owners foolishly agreed to this deal and eventually the team had to be sold and moved because the team was unable to turn a profit without the concession money. The owners said that even if every game sold out, they would still lose money without the concession money.
It's rare, but a few times owners will pay some or all of the costs for a stadium and in exchange, they get some or all of the conession money. However, with so many cities desperate to have a professional sports team from our highest leagues, there's always going to be some city who will make any deal just to get the team. I don't know of any examples where this has happened, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a team or two somewhere in the US who got a stadium for free and managed to get a large portion or all of the concession money too.
All this despite the shameless way we treated him [slashdot.org] when they answered questions we had about RIAA suits.
Shameless?!? Please share with us which one of the many "I don't know" answers they gave us in their responses will be helpful to anyone facing RIAA litigation in the future. For the record, my best friend of the past 22 years is a college buddy who is also an attorney, so I'm very familiar with the evasive "I don't know", "That depends", etc. language lawyers use and I do understand why they say those things, but asking them questions and just getting "I don't know" in response didn't make them any friends here. It was just a waste of time to ask them questions to begin with and their responses were just as pointless.
This story seems to be legit, though it reads like an Onion piece. It's only being reported in the Mainichi Daily News via MSN.
This sounds too much like a joke. In theory, this is supposed to be impossible. In the USA, and one would presume Japan as well, bars/nightclubs are responsible for paying fees to composer societies (this includes ASCAP and BMI in the USA) to cover exactly this sort of thing - a performer performing copywritten material. In the USA I've heard of ASCAP and BMI going after bars and nightclubs who didn't pay them money, but never performers. Again, I can't speak for Japanese law, but in the USA it is clear that it is the owner of the performance venue, not the artist, who has to pay this fee.
Now is this a difference between the English and American languages, or can TFA not spell?
It's American ignorance, plain and simple. I'm American (sigh) and this happens all the time over here, although I do see this kind of thing more than you might think from the UK from time to time. My best friend says "phantom" when he means "fathom". I've decided it's not worth trying to correct him. It could offend him, so I just keep quiet when he says stuff like "I can't phantom why...".
.. How the hell can you afford to stand in a line for over a week?? Are you taking vacation time from work? Are you unemployed?
Guess some of you didn't watch the recent episode of South Park where they had a WoW player who had no life and did nothing but play the game. Based on the photos, I don't think it's much of a stretch to guess that "Fat Boy" is probably living in Momma's basement, so no need for rent money there. It probably wasn't that hard to get 2 weeks off from Domino's or to just quit outright and then apply for a delivery job with a competitor after he picks up the PS3.
Eitherway, this had to happen though and probably would have happened if the Democrats hadn't won the house.
I don't agree. I am convinced it happened only because the Democrats won control of the House (and maybe the Senate, but we don't know as I write this). I think Bush cut a secret deal with the Democratic leadership that in exchange for Rumsfield's resignation, the Democrats won't persue impeachment charges against Bush and Cheney over Iraq. Rumsfield's resignation a few days ago could have made a difference in the election and I can't believe that Rove and company didn't know that. No, this was done only after the election results were in as a way to get something from the incoming Democratic leadership.
Seriously though, I just don't believe it. I've worked on a number of DARPA robot projects, and have heard a lot of their babble. They claim to be funding all these fantastic ideas, but none of them ever work except in a limited capacity.
This is a big pipe dream that is extremely unlikely to work any time soon. How do I know that? Right now, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that computer technology today is good enough to do accurate text translation. Can it? Well, it depends on how picky you are. There are always mistakes, sometimes glaring ones, in text to text translation programs. I can speak Russian and for convenience (to get quick rough translations) at one time I owned what is probably the best Russian-English text translation program. It's much more accurate than Babelfish. It still left a lot to be desired. It would be about 80-90% accurate, but no more. I remember one time when it took a statement in Russian that said "I absolutely would not mind to tell you about..." and translated it as "I absolutely would mind to tell you about..." which is the exact opposite. Many languages, such as Russian, Spanish and Portuguese (and no doubt others) use double negatives to express negation. "I don't know nobody" is quite correct in Russian, Spanish and Portuguese although it is quite grammatically incorrect in English if your intention was to say "I don't know anybody". Programs that translate into English from languages that use double negatives often fail to correctly translate the negation. Maybe there are some that get it right, but I've never seen any. Text translation programs are very poor at distinguishing between words that have uses as different parts of speech. Here's an example:
She sings like an angel.
In this sentence, "like" is an adverb, but it can also be a verb ("She likes to go shopping."). A text translation program might fail to correctly understand that "like" is an adverb here and say something like:
She sings and angel is pleasing to her.
I could give a lot more examples, but these are enough. If we can't even do a better job right now at text translation, how on earth is DARPA going to get speech translation right? This is the kind of project that gets funded by idiots who have never studied foreign languages and believe that the Star Trek idea of a Universal Translator is only a few years away.
The problem is that since "his party" was the majority, they were expected to pass whatever he proposed.
Except Congress pretty much just does what it wants. You have a very short memory, like most Americans, as you have forgotten how little opposition it took from the AARP and even Congress itself for Bush to cave in a like a coward on his plan to "fix" Social Security and nothing was done. I am not in any way advocating a position for or against his plan, but I am simply pointing out that even a Republican controlled Congress doesn't just rubber stamp whatever Bush wants. You may be too young to remember this, but when Jimmy Carter was president Congress was controlled by the Democrats and they absolutely despised him and worked openly against a lot of things he wanted done. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 was passed by a Democratic Congress in reaction to Jimmy Carter's apparent decision to abandon Taiwan to the whims of China and it made it a law to obligate the US to defend Taiwan in case of Chinese attack.
I do agree with you that in this case a Democratic Congress might be very helpful for the nation to counterbalance the White House, but I want to point out that just because Congress and the White House are members of the same party, that doesn't mean that Congress just rubber stamps what the president wants. In fact, my impression of this Congress is that they are "do nothing" Congress not interested in passing any legislation of merit.
And even if America and Europe don't play ball (which is depressingly likely on past form), I'm sure the Russians will be willing to hand over as much technology as the Indians don't feel like reinventing.
You really don't keep up with current events, do you? The Russians won't hand over anything. Everything has a price when it comes from Mother Russia and nothing is free. However, I am sure that they will offer favorable terms to their Indian friends (they've been nominal allies for a very long time), but it certainly won't be "given away".
Uh, no. They are saying that they've seen the report, not that they're referencing it in an academic sense, which wouldn't make sense as they're not.
You tell me which makes more sense. 1) Use of the word "sighted" instead of "seen" when "seen" is shorter, more common in English and more easily understood by readers. In other words, your contention is that we have to believe that the writer deliberately chose an unusual verb in English to describe something rather simple. 2) Another ignorant writer who doesn't know that the word he wants is really "cited". The use of this word makes perfect sense to me in the sentence, but then again, I don't think that choice number 1 here makes good sense.
You have a rather interesting view of the English language.
and the cheapest panel is $800 for some 24" display
I followed the link to newegg for this panel and it has a response time of 16ms. Anything above 8ms is generally considered inferior for watching TV or movies - the screen won't update fast enough. The Westinghouse does have an 8ms response time.
this campaign worked to only use non-partisan media reports. No talking points. No opinion columns. A bare minimum use of alternative media. In other words, this campaign works solely to push news reports made by trusted, mainstream news outlets into the foreground during the final two weeks of the campaign season.
Chris Bowers may find it hard to believe, but plenty of Americans would no doubt view his "non-partisan" sources as being extremely partisan. For example, Liberals tend to view the New York Times as "non-partisan" and Fox News as "partisan" while Conservatives would hold the exact opposite opinions on both. I tend to distrust anyone who thinks that any political report is "non-partisan".
I'm not going to argue whether the conclusion come to by the U Cal professor was right or wrong. But I do have 3 things that I throw out for consideration by those who do believe it.
1) Why is there only suspected fraud on the part of the Republican Party? I'm totally serious here - are the Democrats too stupid to cheat themselves? 2) If the Democratic Party seriously believed cheating had occured, why didn't they make a really big deal of it? Wouldn't they stand to gain by convincing people that the election was rigged? 3) Why isn't the Democratic Party pushing harder for an end to Diebold voting machines? Who'd want to use them if they thought that doing so was in their worst interests?
It just seems to me that in this day and age, it's getting harder to keep secrets. If there was vote fraud already, why hasn't someone confessed or been caught? Surely everyone at Diebold can't honestly favor the Republican Party. If the Democrats win the House and/or Senate in a few weeks, will you think that THOSE elections are fraudulent? Or is it only fraudulent when Republicans win?
Montgomery C. Gates: Look at them stuffing their faces, never knowing they're getting closer to the poisoned part of the cake... There IS poison in the cake, right? Smithers Balmer: Uh, no sir, our lawyers said that's considered murder. Montgomery C. Gates: Damn their oily hides!
I don't doubt that you could get an OK or even good script by committee, but I think to get a great movie, you need one mind unhindered by others. (But you also get A LOT more junk that way)
I wish them luck, but this seems like an incredibly bad idea to me for a variety of reasons. 1) Most of the public will never hear about this. This means that those who do know about it and participate are unlikely to have what for lack of a better term I will call "common tastes". I can just imagine one faction pushing to make this "gay friendly", another wanting to take potshots at religious people, and so on. 2) The quality of the acting may be low. Cheap films don't necessarily have to have bad actors. The first Phantasm movie was made in the 1970s on a fairly cheap budget, yet if you watch it, the special effects look good for the time and the acting is fine. The Blair Witch Project is another example of a cheap movie with decent acting. Examples of cheap movies AND bad acting would be to watch most of the fan produced Star Wars or Star Trek shows. Go to http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/ and pick any episode, especially in season 1 or 2, and watch it and tell me if you would pay to see that kind of work at a cinema. The special effects are fine, but the acting? That's another story. I just have visions of this kind of project being doomed by the producers casting their buddies who can't act in the movie. 3) Just because people on Slashdot think it's a great idea, that doesn't mean the general public will concur. Serenity didn't even make back its production cost with US and international box office sales put together, yet Slashdot was filled with postings from people who could barely keep from masturbating as they wrote about how great the movie was going to be. According to the reviews it was a great film (I never saw it so I can't say), but nobody wanted to see it. Snakes On A Plane was another movie that nobody went to see, yet it might have life on home video. Army Of Darkness is one of my all time favorite movies, yet as actor Bruce Campbell has said, while the people who love AOD really really love it with all their hearts, the fact is that there aren't enough of them to justify the costs of making another one in the series. Bruce will release a movie where some people mistake him (the actor) for the Ash character and get him to help them fight some monsters and that's probably as close as we'll ever get to a real sequel to the Evil Dead/Army Of Darkness series. 4) As a general rule in Hollywood, the more people who touch the script, the more problems there are. What's to keep a sufficiently organized faction from controlling the wiki process? Suppose instead of my examples in point #1 that a group of Christian zealots organized (and believe it or not, dedicated Christians often do organize very well) themselves and could control the wiki and wanted to put in religious themes that would doom the movie financially. Would the producers then overrule the majority? Why have a wiki process if you're just going to ignore it? Would they go ahead and put stuff in the movie that they know will keep it from making a profit just because the majority of participants want it? 5) Suppose the producers/director/people running the show are idiots? Do you not know that studies have shown that the most incompetent people are the most confident in their own abilities? Take a look at the film Ed Wood from Tim Burton for an idea of how an extremely untalented man could believe very strongly in his own talent, despite all the negative pressure (poor sales, poor reviews) he got while making films. He convinced himself that he was a genius and nobody else really understood him, so he ignored all the negative reinforcement he got while making films.
To me, this just smacks of the idealistic "Hey kids! Let's go make a movie!" idea that is not grounded in reality. Again, I wish them luck, but I don't see how this is going to work.
Millions of people find they aren't addicted to things that a small percentage of other people have addictions to.
True, but don't almost all addicts say "I'm not addicted. I have it under control."? I really don't care whether the guy offering an alternative view of WoW really does have it under control or not because it's not my problem either way, but he could be just another person living in denial.
I don't know what Shonky means, but I think that's bad.
I also don't know what "shonky" means, but I do have some comments about Australian English. It's no secret that the Australian slang, which I think they call "strine", is just about impossible for non-Aussies to understand. Until about a month ago, I used to work for an international company that had offices in Australia and other countries around the world. As part of my job, I talked with a lot of people in different offices around the globe and customers around the world as well. Aussies will complain like nobody else in the English speaking world about the quality of someone else's English. You think Americans complain about talking to call centers in India? You haven't heard anything until you've heard an Aussie bitch about it. I have always been greatly amused by this considering that the Australian accent is arguably the harshest of all the native English speaker accents and considering how impossible to understand "strine" can be if you're not a native. A former co-worker who was a Brit expat living in Sydney told me that they also have a weird habit of chopping words in half, putting an "o" at the end, and just assuming everyone knows what they are talking about. For example, the Carleton Hotel became simply the Carlo. So don't feel bad that you don't know what "shonky" means because that means you're normal.
I'm too lazy to look it up, but some months ago Slashdot had a story about how an internet rumor in China just about destroyed the lives of 2 people. An angry husband posted that his wife was having an affair with another man he had a grudge against. None of it was true, but the good Chinese netizens who read it didn't bother to question it. After all, if someone said it on the internet, it must be true! They found out where the man and woman worked who were accused of having an affair and people showed up to harass them for an affair that they weren't even having. The husband eventually admitted it was all a lie, but only after a lot of harassment was done towards his wife and the other guy. Similar stories have been reported in other Asian countries where angry netizens decided to start harassing people over articles they read about online that they had no way of knowing whether or not they were even true.
I don't know why so many people believe everything they read online. It's not just in Asia. Some years ago I worked as a civilian computer programmer for the US Air Force. Roughly around 1995 or so, at my former base basically everyone got an internet connection on their PC and they believed every rumor that came out. If someone said it in email, it must be true because nobody would ever lie in email, right? One of my former co-workers used to send me copies of emails he got where I would see over 100 people on the CC: line about some wild rumor or another that they were aboslutely convinced was true. My favorite was the story about some guy waking up in a bathtub full of ice minus his kidneys. All of these emails would say to send the message to everyone you knew to warn them about whatever the rumor was. After a year or so, it got so out of hand that senior management basically had to pass an edict forbidding people from sending this stuff out to massive distribution lists on the base and they finally got it under control. Even today, my retired uncle believes every single negative rumor he reads. I used to reply to his emails and send him links to snopes.com refuting his emails, but I just gave up when he told me that it wasn't his job to verify the truth of what he passed on. He was just passing on potentially "helpful" information and it was up to recipient to determine if there was anything to it or not.
The last time I voted it said right at the top of the ballot that if I voted for candidates from multiple parties, my ballot would be invalid and discarded. That means I could vote for the the better of two candidates for congress (democrat), or I could vote for the libertarian candidate for mayor, but not both.
Actually what that means is that you can't vote for candidates from multiple parties for the exact same office in a general election. Rules are different for primaries and you can be restricted to voting for only one party. What you read means that, for example, you can't vote for 2 candidates for mayor. You certainly can vote for a Democratic congresscritter and a Libertarian mayor if you want in a general election. Feel free not to vote in the future because if you don't understand how it works, and it's obvious you don't, you're not really doing anybody any good by voting anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
so how many DVD-audios, and SCD's do you have? How about Minidisc's?
what don't you remember those formats. Of them all the only good one was minidisc, but since Sony did weird shit with formatting on them they never took off.
Not every new format gains acceptance, even good ones. I guess you never studied history or reality.
There's just so much wrong with this post, it's hard to know where to start.
First of all, let's get the grammar Nazi stuff out of the way. Plurals are not made in English by simply adding 's to any word you feel like. In fact, ZERO English plurals are made in this way.
It's SACD, not SCD.
I have no idea what you think the problem with minidisc was, but it sure wasn't formatting. Minidisc was meant to replace audio cassettes and nothing more. It was never, ever intended to replace audio CDs. Their small space (remember, minidiscs pre-date MP3 players) was, at the beginning, a selling point. At first, minidiscs only stored data in ATRAC format, which limited their storage capacity to something similar to CD-Rs. I have some 74 and some 80 minute minidiscs. Minidisc never took off because Sony didn't explain very well that it wasn't supposed to replace audio CDs.
As far as DVD-Audio and SACD discs go, you do have a point. Both are great formats. However, Sony botched SACD by failing to make hybrid discs which would play in regular CD audio players. In fact, they at one time insisted that such discs couldn't be made, while classical music and jazz labels were actually producing hybrid discs with no problems. DVD-Audio isn't compatible with CD audio players, although the Dolby tracks can be ripped and converted to CD audio pretty easily. In fact, yesterday I listened on my way to work to an audio CD I made from a DVD-Audio of Nena (remember "99 Luftballons"?) in concert that I picked up in Germany. SACD is still alive in Europe for pop music, although it's pretty much dead for that in the USA. DVD-Audio and SACD both survive for classical labels in the USA. Next Tuesday, the Beatles are relasing a limited edition of their _Love_ soundtrack with an audio CD and a DVD-Audio disc and the Doors are also releasing a box set with a bunch of DVD-Audio discs, so both formats are still alive.
For every user who connects to HealthConnect, they connect via Citrix, and we're running into monumental problems in scaling the Citrix servers.
I'm not surprised at all. I don't want to give details, but my former employer had as a customer a very large European hotel chain who insisted on using Citrix in its architecture. I saw trouble tickets almost every day related to the Citrix servers, which were always falling down and causing one sort of problem or another. I was really glad I didn't have to work on those problems and the only thing it taught me was that any business that relies on Citrix is foolish.
So Lucas could have made it sensible to watch them in order, 1=>6, without destroying the plots of the original trilogy. The fact is, he simply chose not to, which is just baffling.
You're giving Lucas way too much credit. It's not baffling at all. He is considered by many to be a very poor writer and especially weak at dialogue. Episode 5 is considered by many to be the best written of the 6 films and guess what? Someone co-wrote the script with him for that one. I'm amazed that episode 3 fit as well into the sequence as it did given Lucas' shortcomings as a writer.
There are other things that don't add up in the series, like when you mentioned Leia remembering her mother yet episode 3 would contradict that. That's what happens when you have to force fit the beginning of your story because you wrote (and filmed) the end first. Lucas' instincts have always been odd and money driven. Hence the completely unnecessary appearance of the Ewoks in episode 6 and the infamous Jar Jar Binks in episode 1. Both were creations to try to appeal to kids and sell toy tie-ins. I'm sure Lucas was shocked at the backlash Jar Jar Binks generated as he no doubt believed he would sell millions of Jar Jar toys to the tots at Christmas.
QUERTY was originally designed not to increase typing efficiency--in fact, the opposite is true. Typists were getting so fast with ABCDE layouts that the keys were jamming. QUERTY was designed in part to slow typists down.
Actually, QWERTY was designed to keep the typebars from sticking together, which was happening too much with an alphabetic layout. It wasn't to slow typists down, but that might have been a side effect.
When people escaped the DDR (East Germany), specifically over the Berlin Wall - the West Germans helped them in any way possible with open arms, short of provoking war.
Now we shoot them?
Sigh. It seems that you don't understand that
DDR != DPRK
The border between South Korea and North Korea is not only heavily armed and manned, the South Korean side, if not both sides, is filled with landmines. Trust me when I tell you that nobody who defects from North Korea crosses that border by land. There's so much fear and disinformation on the North Korean side that there aren't a lot of defectors anyway. Any would-be defectors from North Korea would certainly be killed or imprisoned by North Korean soldiers if they tried to cross by land, so a robot sentry would really make no difference. I don't think there's anywhere on the border that isn't manned by soldiers and filled with landmines. If there was, North Korea probably would have used that place as an invasion route years ago.
It's returning a 404 error that the article can't be found. Either Micro$oft got to 'em before Slashdot could or they moved the article to avoid killing their server.
So, lets get this straight. The local government pays for team stadia in the US? That's insane. In the UK not only is it private money, often the teams will have to bribe the local council with roads, housing etc. to be allowed to build in the first place. Sounds like someone is missing a trick
Indeed. As an American, I can tell you exactly how this happens. Team A announces that it will leave unless it gets a new stadium paid for by the city where the team plays. Other greedy cities, fooled by nebulous studies that tout the "economic benefit" of professional sports teams on city revenues and "job creation", offer to build a stadium for team A if its current city refuses. Fanatical supporters of the team (we have just as many here in the US for our teams as you do in the UK for your football/soccer clubs) unite and say that the city must pay any cost necessary to build the stadium so the team won't leave. A few times a city will decide that it just isn't willing to pay the cost to get a professional sports team. Portland, Oregon had a very good chance at getting the Montreal Expos (baseball) when it was announced that the team would move from Montreal to another city, but the city government decided that it couldn't afford to build a stadium for the team when they were having problems funding the local schools. The only benefit that a city gets out of a stadium is that if they have to pay for it, usually they can get the concession money, which can be quite substantial. Over 20 years ago, the Atlanta Flames (hockey) moved to Calgary, Canada because the city of Atlanta received 100% of the concession money since they paid for the arena where the team played. The team's owners foolishly agreed to this deal and eventually the team had to be sold and moved because the team was unable to turn a profit without the concession money. The owners said that even if every game sold out, they would still lose money without the concession money.
It's rare, but a few times owners will pay some or all of the costs for a stadium and in exchange, they get some or all of the conession money. However, with so many cities desperate to have a professional sports team from our highest leagues, there's always going to be some city who will make any deal just to get the team. I don't know of any examples where this has happened, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a team or two somewhere in the US who got a stadium for free and managed to get a large portion or all of the concession money too.
All this despite the shameless way we treated him [slashdot.org] when they answered questions we had about RIAA suits.
Shameless?!? Please share with us which one of the many "I don't know" answers they gave us in their responses will be helpful to anyone facing RIAA litigation in the future. For the record, my best friend of the past 22 years is a college buddy who is also an attorney, so I'm very familiar with the evasive "I don't know", "That depends", etc. language lawyers use and I do understand why they say those things, but asking them questions and just getting "I don't know" in response didn't make them any friends here. It was just a waste of time to ask them questions to begin with and their responses were just as pointless.
This story seems to be legit, though it reads like an Onion piece. It's only being reported in the Mainichi Daily News via MSN.
This sounds too much like a joke. In theory, this is supposed to be impossible. In the USA, and one would presume Japan as well, bars/nightclubs are responsible for paying fees to composer societies (this includes ASCAP and BMI in the USA) to cover exactly this sort of thing - a performer performing copywritten material. In the USA I've heard of ASCAP and BMI going after bars and nightclubs who didn't pay them money, but never performers. Again, I can't speak for Japanese law, but in the USA it is clear that it is the owner of the performance venue, not the artist, who has to pay this fee.
Now is this a difference between the English and American languages, or can TFA not spell?
...".
It's American ignorance, plain and simple. I'm American (sigh) and this happens all the time over here, although I do see this kind of thing more than you might think from the UK from time to time. My best friend says "phantom" when he means "fathom". I've decided it's not worth trying to correct him. It could offend him, so I just keep quiet when he says stuff like "I can't phantom why
Guess some of you didn't watch the recent episode of South Park where they had a WoW player who had no life and did nothing but play the game. Based on the photos, I don't think it's much of a stretch to guess that "Fat Boy" is probably living in Momma's basement, so no need for rent money there. It probably wasn't that hard to get 2 weeks off from Domino's or to just quit outright and then apply for a delivery job with a competitor after he picks up the PS3.
Eitherway, this had to happen though and probably would have happened if the Democrats hadn't won the house.
I don't agree. I am convinced it happened only because the Democrats won control of the House (and maybe the Senate, but we don't know as I write this). I think Bush cut a secret deal with the Democratic leadership that in exchange for Rumsfield's resignation, the Democrats won't persue impeachment charges against Bush and Cheney over Iraq. Rumsfield's resignation a few days ago could have made a difference in the election and I can't believe that Rove and company didn't know that. No, this was done only after the election results were in as a way to get something from the incoming Democratic leadership.
Seriously though, I just don't believe it. I've worked on a number of DARPA robot projects, and have heard a lot of their babble. They claim to be funding all these fantastic ideas, but none of them ever work except in a limited capacity.
..." and translated it as "I absolutely would mind to tell you about ..." which is the exact opposite. Many languages, such as Russian, Spanish and Portuguese (and no doubt others) use double negatives to express negation. "I don't know nobody" is quite correct in Russian, Spanish and Portuguese although it is quite grammatically incorrect in English if your intention was to say "I don't know anybody". Programs that translate into English from languages that use double negatives often fail to correctly translate the negation. Maybe there are some that get it right, but I've never seen any. Text translation programs are very poor at distinguishing between words that have uses as different parts of speech. Here's an example:
This is a big pipe dream that is extremely unlikely to work any time soon. How do I know that? Right now, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that computer technology today is good enough to do accurate text translation. Can it? Well, it depends on how picky you are. There are always mistakes, sometimes glaring ones, in text to text translation programs. I can speak Russian and for convenience (to get quick rough translations) at one time I owned what is probably the best Russian-English text translation program. It's much more accurate than Babelfish. It still left a lot to be desired. It would be about 80-90% accurate, but no more. I remember one time when it took a statement in Russian that said "I absolutely would not mind to tell you about
She sings like an angel.
In this sentence, "like" is an adverb, but it can also be a verb ("She likes to go shopping."). A text translation program might fail to correctly understand that "like" is an adverb here and say something like:
She sings and angel is pleasing to her.
I could give a lot more examples, but these are enough. If we can't even do a better job right now at text translation, how on earth is DARPA going to get speech translation right? This is the kind of project that gets funded by idiots who have never studied foreign languages and believe that the Star Trek idea of a Universal Translator is only a few years away.
The problem is that since "his party" was the majority, they were expected to pass whatever he proposed.
Except Congress pretty much just does what it wants. You have a very short memory, like most Americans, as you have forgotten how little opposition it took from the AARP and even Congress itself for Bush to cave in a like a coward on his plan to "fix" Social Security and nothing was done. I am not in any way advocating a position for or against his plan, but I am simply pointing out that even a Republican controlled Congress doesn't just rubber stamp whatever Bush wants. You may be too young to remember this, but when Jimmy Carter was president Congress was controlled by the Democrats and they absolutely despised him and worked openly against a lot of things he wanted done. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 was passed by a Democratic Congress in reaction to Jimmy Carter's apparent decision to abandon Taiwan to the whims of China and it made it a law to obligate the US to defend Taiwan in case of Chinese attack.
I do agree with you that in this case a Democratic Congress might be very helpful for the nation to counterbalance the White House, but I want to point out that just because Congress and the White House are members of the same party, that doesn't mean that Congress just rubber stamps what the president wants. In fact, my impression of this Congress is that they are "do nothing" Congress not interested in passing any legislation of merit.
And even if America and Europe don't play ball (which is depressingly likely on past form), I'm sure the Russians will be willing to hand over as much technology as the Indians don't feel like reinventing.
You really don't keep up with current events, do you? The Russians won't hand over anything. Everything has a price when it comes from Mother Russia and nothing is free. However, I am sure that they will offer favorable terms to their Indian friends (they've been nominal allies for a very long time), but it certainly won't be "given away".
Uh, no. They are saying that they've seen the report, not that they're referencing it in an academic sense, which wouldn't make sense as they're not.
You tell me which makes more sense.
1) Use of the word "sighted" instead of "seen" when "seen" is shorter, more common in English and more easily understood by readers. In other words, your contention is that we have to believe that the writer deliberately chose an unusual verb in English to describe something rather simple.
2) Another ignorant writer who doesn't know that the word he wants is really "cited". The use of this word makes perfect sense to me in the sentence, but then again, I don't think that choice number 1 here makes good sense.
You have a rather interesting view of the English language.
and the cheapest panel is $800 for some 24" display I followed the link to newegg for this panel and it has a response time of 16ms. Anything above 8ms is generally considered inferior for watching TV or movies - the screen won't update fast enough. The Westinghouse does have an 8ms response time.
this campaign worked to only use non-partisan media reports. No talking points. No opinion columns. A bare minimum use of alternative media. In other words, this campaign works solely to push news reports made by trusted, mainstream news outlets into the foreground during the final two weeks of the campaign season.
Chris Bowers may find it hard to believe, but plenty of Americans would no doubt view his "non-partisan" sources as being extremely partisan. For example, Liberals tend to view the New York Times as "non-partisan" and Fox News as "partisan" while Conservatives would hold the exact opposite opinions on both. I tend to distrust anyone who thinks that any political report is "non-partisan".
Its already been done.
I'm not going to argue whether the conclusion come to by the U Cal professor was right or wrong. But I do have 3 things that I throw out for consideration by those who do believe it.
1) Why is there only suspected fraud on the part of the Republican Party? I'm totally serious here - are the Democrats too stupid to cheat themselves?
2) If the Democratic Party seriously believed cheating had occured, why didn't they make a really big deal of it? Wouldn't they stand to gain by convincing people that the election was rigged?
3) Why isn't the Democratic Party pushing harder for an end to Diebold voting machines? Who'd want to use them if they thought that doing so was in their worst interests?
It just seems to me that in this day and age, it's getting harder to keep secrets. If there was vote fraud already, why hasn't someone confessed or been caught? Surely everyone at Diebold can't honestly favor the Republican Party. If the Democrats win the House and/or Senate in a few weeks, will you think that THOSE elections are fraudulent? Or is it only fraudulent when Republicans win?
P.S.: No, it was not poisoned
Montgomery C. Gates: Look at them stuffing their faces, never knowing they're getting closer to the poisoned part of the cake... There IS poison in the cake, right?
Smithers Balmer: Uh, no sir, our lawyers said that's considered murder.
Montgomery C. Gates: Damn their oily hides!
Wiki-based script creation
I don't doubt that you could get an OK or even good script by committee, but I think to get a great movie, you need one mind unhindered by others. (But you also get A LOT more junk that way)
I wish them luck, but this seems like an incredibly bad idea to me for a variety of reasons.
1) Most of the public will never hear about this. This means that those who do know about it and participate are unlikely to have what for lack of a better term I will call "common tastes". I can just imagine one faction pushing to make this "gay friendly", another wanting to take potshots at religious people, and so on.
2) The quality of the acting may be low. Cheap films don't necessarily have to have bad actors. The first Phantasm movie was made in the 1970s on a fairly cheap budget, yet if you watch it, the special effects look good for the time and the acting is fine. The Blair Witch Project is another example of a cheap movie with decent acting. Examples of cheap movies AND bad acting would be to watch most of the fan produced Star Wars or Star Trek shows. Go to http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/ and pick any episode, especially in season 1 or 2, and watch it and tell me if you would pay to see that kind of work at a cinema. The special effects are fine, but the acting? That's another story. I just have visions of this kind of project being doomed by the producers casting their buddies who can't act in the movie.
3) Just because people on Slashdot think it's a great idea, that doesn't mean the general public will concur. Serenity didn't even make back its production cost with US and international box office sales put together, yet Slashdot was filled with postings from people who could barely keep from masturbating as they wrote about how great the movie was going to be. According to the reviews it was a great film (I never saw it so I can't say), but nobody wanted to see it. Snakes On A Plane was another movie that nobody went to see, yet it might have life on home video. Army Of Darkness is one of my all time favorite movies, yet as actor Bruce Campbell has said, while the people who love AOD really really love it with all their hearts, the fact is that there aren't enough of them to justify the costs of making another one in the series. Bruce will release a movie where some people mistake him (the actor) for the Ash character and get him to help them fight some monsters and that's probably as close as we'll ever get to a real sequel to the Evil Dead/Army Of Darkness series.
4) As a general rule in Hollywood, the more people who touch the script, the more problems there are. What's to keep a sufficiently organized faction from controlling the wiki process? Suppose instead of my examples in point #1 that a group of Christian zealots organized (and believe it or not, dedicated Christians often do organize very well) themselves and could control the wiki and wanted to put in religious themes that would doom the movie financially. Would the producers then overrule the majority? Why have a wiki process if you're just going to ignore it? Would they go ahead and put stuff in the movie that they know will keep it from making a profit just because the majority of participants want it?
5) Suppose the producers/director/people running the show are idiots? Do you not know that studies have shown that the most incompetent people are the most confident in their own abilities? Take a look at the film Ed Wood from Tim Burton for an idea of how an extremely untalented man could believe very strongly in his own talent, despite all the negative pressure (poor sales, poor reviews) he got while making films. He convinced himself that he was a genius and nobody else really understood him, so he ignored all the negative reinforcement he got while making films.
To me, this just smacks of the idealistic "Hey kids! Let's go make a movie!" idea that is not grounded in reality. Again, I wish them luck, but I don't see how this is going to work.
Millions of people find they aren't addicted to things that a small percentage of other people have addictions to.
True, but don't almost all addicts say "I'm not addicted. I have it under control."? I really don't care whether the guy offering an alternative view of WoW really does have it under control or not because it's not my problem either way, but he could be just another person living in denial.
I don't know what Shonky means, but I think that's bad.
I also don't know what "shonky" means, but I do have some comments about Australian English. It's no secret that the Australian slang, which I think they call "strine", is just about impossible for non-Aussies to understand. Until about a month ago, I used to work for an international company that had offices in Australia and other countries around the world. As part of my job, I talked with a lot of people in different offices around the globe and customers around the world as well. Aussies will complain like nobody else in the English speaking world about the quality of someone else's English. You think Americans complain about talking to call centers in India? You haven't heard anything until you've heard an Aussie bitch about it. I have always been greatly amused by this considering that the Australian accent is arguably the harshest of all the native English speaker accents and considering how impossible to understand "strine" can be if you're not a native. A former co-worker who was a Brit expat living in Sydney told me that they also have a weird habit of chopping words in half, putting an "o" at the end, and just assuming everyone knows what they are talking about. For example, the Carleton Hotel became simply the Carlo. So don't feel bad that you don't know what "shonky" means because that means you're normal.
I'm too lazy to look it up, but some months ago Slashdot had a story about how an internet rumor in China just about destroyed the lives of 2 people. An angry husband posted that his wife was having an affair with another man he had a grudge against. None of it was true, but the good Chinese netizens who read it didn't bother to question it. After all, if someone said it on the internet, it must be true! They found out where the man and woman worked who were accused of having an affair and people showed up to harass them for an affair that they weren't even having. The husband eventually admitted it was all a lie, but only after a lot of harassment was done towards his wife and the other guy. Similar stories have been reported in other Asian countries where angry netizens decided to start harassing people over articles they read about online that they had no way of knowing whether or not they were even true.
I don't know why so many people believe everything they read online. It's not just in Asia. Some years ago I worked as a civilian computer programmer for the US Air Force. Roughly around 1995 or so, at my former base basically everyone got an internet connection on their PC and they believed every rumor that came out. If someone said it in email, it must be true because nobody would ever lie in email, right? One of my former co-workers used to send me copies of emails he got where I would see over 100 people on the CC: line about some wild rumor or another that they were aboslutely convinced was true. My favorite was the story about some guy waking up in a bathtub full of ice minus his kidneys. All of these emails would say to send the message to everyone you knew to warn them about whatever the rumor was. After a year or so, it got so out of hand that senior management basically had to pass an edict forbidding people from sending this stuff out to massive distribution lists on the base and they finally got it under control. Even today, my retired uncle believes every single negative rumor he reads. I used to reply to his emails and send him links to snopes.com refuting his emails, but I just gave up when he told me that it wasn't his job to verify the truth of what he passed on. He was just passing on potentially "helpful" information and it was up to recipient to determine if there was anything to it or not.
The last time I voted it said right at the top of the ballot that if I voted for candidates from multiple parties, my ballot would be invalid and discarded. That means I could vote for the the better of two candidates for congress (democrat), or I could vote for the libertarian candidate for mayor, but not both.
Actually what that means is that you can't vote for candidates from multiple parties for the exact same office in a general election. Rules are different for primaries and you can be restricted to voting for only one party. What you read means that, for example, you can't vote for 2 candidates for mayor. You certainly can vote for a Democratic congresscritter and a Libertarian mayor if you want in a general election. Feel free not to vote in the future because if you don't understand how it works, and it's obvious you don't, you're not really doing anybody any good by voting anyway.