Does this affect the status of software patents in Europe? Is patent
legislation dependent on the constitution?
[Karl-Heinz]
Af far as I can overview the connections between all this:
The Software patents are most successfully lobbied with the European
commission and the Comission is the instance that waved them through.
The EU Parliament was opposed and even in the Comission a recent poll
would not have been in favour of the latest SP draft. The constitution
would strengthen the parliament in comparison to the comission.
Election stuff
From Sluggo
Looks like we have our governor for a few more months at least.
Translation: I urgently need to scam lots of easy money. PLEASE HELP ME!
If you needed proof that Microsoft was evil...
From Benjamin A. Okopnik
I'm usually not much for Micr0s0ft bashing; I figure, live and let live,
let the better product win... anyway, not my point. Now, however,
there's _this:_
(from RISKS Digest 23.90)
...............
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 11:23:03 PDT
From: "Peter G. Neumann" <neumann@csl.sri.com>
Subject: Microsoft censoring blogs in China
Microsoft is cooperating with China's government to censor MSN's Spaces
Chinese-language Web portal. Bloggers are prevented from posting words such
words as democracy, human rights, and Taiwan independence. 5 million
blogs have been created since the service started on 26 May 2005. China
reportedly has 87 million online users. [Source: AP item by Curt Woodward,
14 Jun 2005, seen in the San Francisco Chronicle.]
[I wonder whether this issue of RISKS will be blocked because of those
OFFENSIVE words? (And I thought democracy and human rights were
DEFENSIVE words?) PGN]
...............
If they want to talk about OFFENSIVE, truly offensive... wow. I guess
that's Micr0s0ft's version of bringing democracy to the world. Yeah,
that must be it.
[Ben]
Accepted, or just applied? I didn't see an acceptance list anywhere,
although I wish him the best of luck.
[Jimmy] Accepted. It was on one of the Google blogs, in a list of those who had
been accepted and who keep blogs
Linux-pixies
From Benjamin A. Okopnik
Kat just sent me this whimsical little expostulation (or possibly
expository, or maybe even exegesis); I figure it's worth sharing with
our readers. [grin] Progress is happening all over.
----- Forwarded message from Trinker LiveJournal <trinker_journal@yahoo.com> -----
It was a perfect setup for Linux-pixies.
You know. Those Little Annoying Things about Windows that make you think that
this time, maybe you just will switch OSes. Or rather, in the rhetoric of the
*nix cadre, "start using a real OS". You didn't think those things about
Windows were inherent, did you? Oh, no, it's clearly a conspiracy where the
*nix cadre sneak onto the machines of the Windows faithful to infect our
machines with Linux-pixies.
Like the one that made my Windows box refuse to connect to the hotel's wireless
connection. There's my beloved, editor of Linux Gazette and a longtime *nix
whiz, happily toodling around the 'net, grabbing his e-mail, doing who knows
what else while I'm poking and prodding at panel after panel of interfaces for
the wireless card and the web browser and the net connection wizard. I've done
everything I can do based on the little standup info card the hotel has
helpfully left on the desk. Calling tech support will be next. I've already
asked Mr. *Nix Whiz to see what he can do, and his first few passes haven't
fixed much.
Tech support wants me to go down the hallway, disable my wireless card and then
re-enable it, so that it'll connect to the proper channel. It seems that either
Windows or my network card or both are too stupid to configure themselves
properly through any less drastic measure.
My in-house Linux wizard did something that made all the obstacles vanish,
finally.
Clearly, it had to do with removing the Linux-pixies. I mean, really, do you
expect me to believe that there's something wrong with Windows?!
I'm sure there's some reason why I'm clinging to my Windows box. Yep. If I
don't figure it out soon, though, I think it's curtains for Microsoft on my machine.
Interesting spam
From Sluggo
Here's an interesting spam. It's HTML followed immediately by a
(presumably) base64 blob. (I added spaces and __ in the tags to get it
past the filters.) Note how the image is a "cid:" URL, whatever that is.
Also, the skiddie seems to disapprove of WebCrawler and has ghastly
punctuation. Or else it's a code to reassemble. I wonder if the
ylonchaez is the skiddie giving himself away or an innocent victim.
< __html >< head >< meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" >< /head >< body bgcolor="#FFFFFD" text="#421527" >< p
>< IMG SRC="cid:part1.02070609.01000008@ylonchaez@yahoo.com" border="0"
ALT="" >< /p >< p >< font color="#FFFFF1" >WebCrawler in 1846 engine I'm
against it < /font >< /p >< p >< font color="#FFFFF7" >What's your
viewpoint Let me< /font >< /p >< /body ></ __html >
R0lGODlhjgLuAfDZAAkGAP///yH5BAQAABAALAAAAAB/AuMBAAL/jI+py+0Po5y
[Ben]
It's a URL that, along with "mid:", allows you to reference body parts
of messages; see RFC1738, where they're reserved but not defined.
Micr0s0ft, of course, is using them full-blast (is anyone surprised?)
and praying that others will pick up their implementation. [Yawn] Have
we seen this before, or have we seen this before?
[Kapil]
<puts on victorian-age persona>
How positively vulgar! No polite person should be allowed to
refer to the body or for that matter internal organs like the stomach
and liver.
[Rick]
Oddly enough, Newsforge seems to have spiked the story -- but evidently
it was a slightly tongue-in-cheek description of
http://mirrors.playboy.com , a public mirror site (http, ftp, rsync)
for several open source projects kindly sponsored by Playboy
Enterprises, Inc. and administered by Tim Yocum.
[Ben]
Jimmy, that was mean - like showing somebody one of those cards that
says "GREEN" in red and "RED" in green. I spent several seconds trying
to realize that the word "for" is actually not in that sentence...
[Brian]
Damn, damn, damn. You made me laugh out loud, Ben, and that hurts.
One extraction, four implant placements and a bone graft yesterday in a
single three hour session in the chair. Moving my face hurts and you
made me laugh!
[Ben]
Ouch. Sorry, pal... but you should know better than to read TAG when
you're holding a beverage, eating anything, or - well, you can
extrapolate - have had bits of you chopped off, grafted on, or otherwise
shifted around.
[Brian]
I'm just waiting to see what happens to you next year on the Sixth day
of the Sixth month of the Sixth year of the current millenium.
[Ben]
[blink] What, my Day of Assumption of Full Powers? [scratching head]
Can't think of anything special...
If you get a dog that day, make sure you call it something suitably
evil, and not simply "Dog".
[Ben]
People would know that I was truly evil if I named him something
normal-sounding, so I'm going to indulge in a little reverse psychology.
"HellBeast, Destroyer of The Universe and Chewer of Expensive Furniture"
ought to be just about right. Especially if it's one of those
microscopic leg-humping chihuahuas.
Aw... you haven't read "Good Omens"?
[Ben]
Oh, I got the reference; I figured that you'd take it for granted that I
did, since I didn't react with confusion. Gaiman is brilliant and
weird, but for whatever reason, Good Omens didn't work for me - I'm
not even sure why. The two of them writing together should have been
terrific. [shrug]
[Rick]
It helps to have read Richmal Crompton's "Just William" British boys'
novels as a sprog, and to have read Paradise Lost as a teenager. I
thought Good Omens was a hoot even though I never saw the dreadful
Gregory Peck / Lee Remick occult movie that it also parodied.
And I always did think there must be something demonic about Queen.
Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a
technique in which subject's veins are drained of blood and filled with
an ice-cold salt solution.
The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing
and have no heartbeat or brain activity.
But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are
brought back to life with an electric shock.
Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year,
according to the Safar Centre.
...............
Woohoo! Freeze-dried soldiers coming to an army near you. And no, the
article doesn't mention whether or not the dogs have developed a craving
for human brains.
[Jay]
Ok, see, cause, coming from Jimmy, "Zombie Dogs" is a real message, not
spam.
[Sluggo]
It's a good title for a movie too.
Probably already is... How about "Night of the Wagging Dead"?
That story came at the right time for me, just as I was stumped -- I
mean, even if I could get a high-powered rifle, how would I ever get
it to the top of the clock tower?
[Jay]
And, as I just noted somewhere else, It Would Be A Great Name For A
Rock Band.
Cheers,
jr 'since "Dingoes Ate My Baby" is already taken' a
[Brian]
Hmmm. This was actually June's cover story in Scientific American.
There's quite a bit more to it than "zombie dogs". They were trying to
replicate some of the effects of extreme de-oxygenation that allow
multi-year "hibernation" or dormancy (think sea monkey (brine shrimp)
embryos) and some "ice-water" drowning victims to be recuscitated an
hour or more after clinical death.
Interesting stuff, and closely related to the sorts of
hibernation/anti-g stuff that Joe Haldeman used in the Forever War.
Additionally, of interest in the SA article, there were experiments with
inflicting injuries on hibernating and non-hibernating arctic ground
squirrels. Upon autopsy three days later (after euthanizing), it was
found that the level of cellular damage other than the immediate injury
was minimial in the hibernating animal, by contrast with a wide area of
damage caused by inflammation in the non-hibernating animal.
Interesting stuff, and closely related to the sorts of
hibernation/anti-g stuff that Joe Haldeman used in the Forever War.
OB Linux, I don't think any of the Zombie Dogs are running linux (yet).
But that's just a port away.
And yes, Zombie Dogs makes a great band name. But think Quentin
Tarantino and "Zombie Reservoir Dogs" Wooo.
Yeah, sure, point out the real story whydontcha? "Multi-year
hibernation" doesn't make a good band name though, (well, maybe for emo,
or whatever the latest whiney teenager genre is) and that's what counts!
As it happens, as I first opened this mail "Shaun of the Dead" came on.
Good comedy horror -- not as good as Evil Dead 2, but still amusing.
[Sluggo]
I told you to watch for those come-ons, but you didn't listen....
"Multi-Year Hibernation" wouldn't be the worst band name ever. Although
in Jimmy's case it would be Hibernian Hibernation.
[Rick]
With Caledonian Cacophany as the opening act?
[Breen]
And a guest set from Cambrian Chaos?
[Sluggo]
It's not cacophony!! It's the Scottish Symphony.
[grumble] No respect, no respect. We try to showcase our original talent
-- "It's not your father's Bartok"-- and he calls it "cacophony". Mogwai,
now there's cacophony.
Transcoding UTF to ISO8859-1
From Sluggo
Jimmy O'Regan said:
> $aogonek = "\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH OGONEK}";
$a_okopnik ?
[Jimmy]
Y'know, I'd considered changing the variable names to $a_z_ogonkiem,
$s_z_kreka, $z_z_kropka etc., but I don't know what the L character is
called (I'd guess L z przezem, but I'm more than likely way off) and I
thought "Nah, nobody would stoop to that level". Oh well, I've been
wrong before
[Ben]
With an ogonek ("small flame/spark"), of course. You know me too well,
Mike.
I didn't even catch the ogon' in ogonek! I just thought it looked vaguely
like a Russian word.
[Jimmy]
Eh?
/me thumbs the polsko-angielski sl/ownik
...............
ogonek m 1. zdr od ogon 2. BIO (li`scia, owocu) stalk 3. inf
(kolejka) queue
ogon m ZOOL, ASTRON tail
...............
Tail makes more sense to me (an ogonek is like a backwards cedilla).
[Ben]
Hm, strange. I expected it to be like Russian - in fact, I'm surprised
that it's not.
ogon' - fire
ogonyok - small fire/light, spark
[Jimmy]
A quick trip back to the dictionary later: fire is ogien'. I bought a
Russian phrase book a while back (there's a lot of Central and Eastern
Europeans moving to Ireland these days), and the difference between
Russian and Polish seems about the same as that between Irish and Welsh:
mostly the same words, but with different spellings and pronunciation
The best example I saw is 'stol'. In Polish, that has an o acute and an
l slash. When you're just using the nominative, it's pronounced 'stoo',
but in the genetive the o acute becomes an o, and the l slash becomes an
l before adding the genetive ending ('em' in this case).
I suppose khvostok or khvostka would be little tail in Russian? But
Babelfish says "men'shii kabel'".
[Ben]
Heh. Babelfish is... odd, and amusing. Yeah, you're pretty close -
"khvostik" would be a little tail. I don't know what the Russian term is
for the diacrit above, say, the Russian "i-short" letter is, but I could
definitely see 'ogonyok' as being a candidate. When I was taught Proper
Cursive back in first grade (yeah, yeah, I had a trilobite for a pet and
Chicxulub had just happened the week before), we were taught to actually
form that mark as a sort of a short vertical tilde.
It's called a breve in English, or informally a cup. I wouldn't think
of it as fire-like. But I suppose to a hotheaded secret agent....
My Russian teacher used to ding people for not using the cup, saying
"it's not a diacrit, it's part of the letter". Unlike the e-umlaut,
which was OK to leave off because most Russians do.
[Ben]
That's not how I was taught to write it. I've seen it that way, yeah,
but your teacher's preference isn't necessarily the One True way - just
a preference. A quick review of the fonts on my system shows a fairly
random mix: a couple of the 10646 fonts have it as a breve, but many
others - e.g., "-ttf-tl help
cyrillic-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1", use an accent
mark (the "forward slash" type) over it, while yet others use a short
horizontal bar. (You really don't want to know what Kirillica and Lavra
do to the poor thing. Old Slavonic - on a computer
- is just... WRONG.)
It wasn't the shape of the mark she was talking about, it was the
presence.
[Ben]
Ah, OK. My argument was with your calling it a breve - I'd always
thought of it as more of an accent-shaped diacrit. Yeah, there's a big
difference in using it vs. not; almost exactly like using an 'i' instead
of a 'j'.
I've always seen it as a cup in books. So I assumed that was its proper
shape.
I tend to write it as a horizontal bar; most Russian
handwriting I've seen uses an acute accent.
[Ben]
[Nod]
The students were miffed because she never told us there was a
difference in importance between the breve and the umlaut, she just
dinged people for it on the test.
[Ben]
Yep - that would be totally wrong. Those diacrits are indeed a part of
the letter itself, and omitting it can lead to [grin] "interesting"
results.
Not me coz I always write accent
marks, but others left them off thinking they were optional. (I write
accent marks. I don't type them on the computer. I can't be bothered
to go find a list of keycodes every time an accented letter comes up.)
[Ben]
That's one of the reasons I like Vim. ":dig" shows you the list of
available digraphs (I'm using UTF8, so I've got the whole kit); Russian
letters are almost all encoded as '<sensible_transliteration>=', so that
the Cyrillic 'n', for example, is 'n='. Oh yeah - you have to hit
'Ctrl-K' to insert a digraph.
For a chunk of test, I just write a transliterated text file and run my
little 'tsl2koi' converter over it (a Perl script, natch.) If you want a
copy, you can ask nicely.
As for "-ttf-tl help
cyrillic-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1", what? Is
that a command that starts with -ttf or a font foundary with a typo in
the middle?
[Ben]
[blink] There have been font names with spaces in them in Unix as long
as I can remember. Parsing that crazy shit was one of my very first
scripting challenges (a damn nasty one for a beginning scripter, I'll
tell you.)
As to what and where -
ben@Fenrir:~$ xlsfonts|grep 'ttf-tl'
-ttf-tl help cyrillic-medium-r-normal-regular-0-0-0-0-p-0-iso8859-1
ben@Fenrir:~$ grep -ib 'tl help cyr' /usr/share/fonts/truetype/*ttf
Binary file /usr/share/fonts/truetype/TT_Tlhlpcyr.ttf matches
And how can Cyrillic and iso8859-1 be compatible?
[Ben]
What is this, a philosophy class? I don't have any answers to those
existential questions.
[Breen]
[digression]
My mother worked at the US Embassies in Warsaw and Moscow just after
the war. Years later, my parents visited Poland again -- by that time
an old friend had become the Ambassador. Somebody told them during that
trip that "all Poles understand Russian, but none speak it."
[/digression]
[Jimmy]
Erm... that's kinda true. Russian was mandatory in Polish schools, so
all Poles speak Russian. Just not in Poland
(Well, unless you've made
some attempt at Polish first. The Polish know how difficult their
language is to learn, and will bend over backwards to help a foreigner
who has made some attempt to learn Polish). Outside of Poland, the
Polish will happily converse in Russian.
[Ben]
[laugh] True. At least until they get to the States, at which point they
magically recover it (money speaks louder than politics, in many cases.
Similar to what Brits say about Americans, although they doubts that we
understand it either.
[Ben]
I've never heard a Brit say that all Americans understand Russian -
much less speak it. You must have hung around with some very strange
Brits when you were over there.
English. They think we don't understand English. I don't know how
they ever got that idea.
[Ben]
[shrug] No idea. It could be because they read your last post and
said, "hmm, highly ambiguous referent. Those American blighters don't
seem to speak English, what?"
[Ben]
(Thomas, please keep a tighter grip on him the next time he shows up. As
you can see, he tends to... wander, which results in problems. Did I
ever mention that incident where I had to rescue him from six very upset
midgets, a highly annoyed giraffe, and a bunch of enraged phlebotomists?
It seems he used several miles of rubber tubing, a very precise amount
of steel shavings, and a couple of drums of industrial grease, and...
well, it's not a story for public consumption, but I assure you that
even hiring a large, muscular nursemaid for him would be quite worth
your while. All of Britain would certainly be in your debt.)
[ NOTE: This has NOTHING to do with Linux, except that I composed and
sent this message using Mozilla Thunderbird version 1.0, commenting on a
Linux Gazette article I'm viewing in Mozilla Firefox version 1.0.4 on a
Debian Unstable system. ]
From the inaugural "Ponders Corner" article, Rick writes:
"Pretty soon, having a mail server available for redelivery of mail to
and from everyone came to be seen as a public menace, like having an
unfenced swimming pool in a neighbourhood full of children."
I either missed that, or let it pass unscathed as it traversed my inbox.
Most likely I'm so absorbed in making sure I learn the lesson that Rick
so effectively teaches that I neglected to pay attention to the humorous
(but in a deadly serious sense) possibilities in that line.
This problem first came to my attention when we were living at the
corner of Mary and Remington in Sunnyvale, some years back. The building
maintenance people had been tasked with blocking off every opening
larger than 4" wide from "outside" to the pool area in each of the
buildings. The people whose doors opened into the pool area were to look
out for themselves, one presumes.
I watched them doing this work, and commented on their contravention of
the positive application of Darwin and Wallace's discoveries to the
improvement of the human species. When they prevent children that are
inquisitive enough to crawl through spaces smaller than their skull in
order to jump in some water and drown, they remove opportunities for
genetic improvement in the species.
Floyd looked at me and remarked, "You don't have kids, do you?"
"Nope. But that doesn't matter. All kids do stupid things. You did, I
did. But we survived, which is the very first qualifier for reproductive
excellence. If a being doesn't survive until reproductive age, then
something which might have been passed on to future generations has been
nipped in the bud."
Now I'm not suggesting that people actually send their children out to
play in traffic. Well, some people probably should, but that's another
topic, I guess.
Anyway, I consider an unfenced swimming pool in a neighborhood full of
children as a fun thing for children who manage to enjoy themselves
without drowning, and a complete public good for those children who do
manage to drown themselves.
Besides, more children, in an urban environment, is counter-productive.
In an agrarian society, children are the ultimate unpaid labor -- the
more kids you have, the more land/animals you can handle. In an urban
setting, children are only assets if you're welfare farming.
[Jason]
Doesn't matter either way. Expediency has no relation to morality. I'm
not saying you're wrong. People often give away safety in favor of
other things. For instace: motor vehicles. 42,065 people[1] died in
1996 in car accidents. Fourty two thousand people who would probably
still be here today, fourty two thousand souls who would still be
laughing at books that say "Complete works. Volume I" on them, fourty
two thousands people going to work, buying food, running fast and
jumping high. All that, gone.
Now, what should we, who supposedly care about innocents dying, do
about this? There's a couple things that could be done, none of which
will ever be seriously proposed or acted upon because it's not
"practical" for Americans.
One would be just to stop driving and just go to public transit,
biking and walking. Americans wouldn't do this. We love our cars
literally more than life itself.
Or harsher penalties for reckless driving. If you're at fault, and you
killed somebody, while drunk or not, would the death penalty be too
far out of line? No, seriously?
But nobody thinks about it, and nobody talks about it, because those
deaths are nessesary to live life that way we want to. It sounds harsh
to say it that way, but that's the way it is.
Now, is it really wrong? You could make the counter-argument, and
claim that emergency services saved at least that number of people in
that year.
I'm not proposing that any of those things actually be done. I'm just
saying, it's worth considering the questions, "Is this worth it?". And
nobody asks, or cares, because in America (and most other places as
well), we have plenty of means, but few ends. Drive to work, drive
back, don't ask why.
So, that takes an already-OT discussion even further off the Linux path.
Do you want bright kids responsible for you when it's time to go the
nursing home, or ones that wouldn't have survived to puberty without
kiddie leashes, having bullies ejected from school, and making them
still wear water wings at 13?
grumpily,
.brian
[Rick]
Brian gets this month's Friends of Papa Darwin award!
I found myself in agreement with the general sentiment of your mail
until I hit the above paragraph, the word "crawl" in
particular--children still at crawling age are not generally familiar
with the fact that a swimming pool is not a solid surface, hence the
need for fences. You could, of course, argue that these children have no
business near a swimming pool in the first place (and I could possibly
resist the urge to be trite and say "Exactly! Put a fence around it"),
but you'd be surprised how far a toddler can crawl in the blink of an eye.
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."
-Benjamin Franklin
I am so aware, but there's only so much that can be done in the name
of protecting children from themselves, and they were closing up 8" wide
openings at a height of 4' off the ground. But if I lived in a complex
with [un|under]protected swimming pools, then I'd be responsible for a
toddler gate at MY door. So, once the little rascal got out of the
burlap sack, through the triple-bolted bedroom door, and into the front
room, well then, by golly, if she could pick the Ilco brass lock, then
she's fit to drown herself, walking or crawling.
You see, at this particular complex, families with babies were
permitted to rent units that opened onto the pool area directly. This
fencing kept non-resident and other-resident children from drowning
inappropriately.
Hmmm. Since it comes down to the parent wanting to protect the children,
then it's up to the parent. Good parenting skills will propogate, too,
neh? Bad parenting skills could (should???) be "punished" by both
removing the child from the shallow end of the gene pool, and training
the parents to be more careful in the future.
Of course, I was raised by a good Catholic mom, who still was capable of
making jokes about post-natal abortion when I would especially try her
nerves...
Back to the pain.
[Kapil]
I thought such "social Darwinism" ideas were thrown out by ... well
Darwin!
Having recently been to the USA and seen paranoia (which has taken
the place of normal caution) up close, I can perhaps guess where such
an attitude may spring from. But, I must disagree with the premise that
"the fittest human beings survive".
Ah. But I wasn't going to go there. The moment someone says "fittest",
it becomes a judgement call. Just because I don't think that hemophilia
is a long-term survival trait, doesn't mean that I don't think that a
person with hemophilia isn't fit to survive. But if I were that person
with hemophilia, I'd do my darndest to ensure that I didn't pass that
gene on to any kids of mine.
Same thing if I lived in a double-wide in the Texas panhandle. It's just
not survival-oriented. It may be genetic, one just can't always tell...
Grin.
[Kapil]
Firstly, I don't think evolution happens on such short time scales. This
confusion about time scales is something that the above POV shares with
the opposition to the theory of evolution (which seems to be unable to
understand how vast changes can happen on non-human time scales).
What sort of time scale were you thinking of? Greg Cochran's article [1]
is looking at round-about 1000 years making perhaps up to 1 standard
deviation upward bump in "IQ" for Askenazi Jews. I call that natural
selection (aka evolution).
[Kapil]
The above POV ignores the enormous effect that "plain ol' luck" (*)
plays in the grand scheme of things. And luck is not inherited(+)---only
money is!
Of course I went to the same place you did: Pierson's Puppeteers and the
Birthright Lotteries from Niven's Known Space series (where they didn't
use Linux, either).
[Kapil]
That said, normal caution says "RTFM before using your brand new
stereo" system while paranoia says that "if the decibel level may be
enough to give you permanent hearing damage then this should be put
on a big red warning on the box".
Cheers,
Kapil.
(*) People often confuse luck and probability. If you have more money
than me, then you will probably win against me in the long run (if we
play a fair game)---"but with a little bit of luck" I'll wipe out
your pile of gold first!
(+) ... ass far as we know. There is a Larry Niven story based on the
idea that luck is inherited.
If that means that I don't have to listen to Weasel, a DJ for whom it
could be said that "He has a voice for mime.", then it might be worth it
anyway.
They would leave the doors unlocked, and it would be the car's (or
perhaps the mechanic's) fault that the somebody broke in and wrecked the
interior - or that the car had been stolen and used in a bank robbery.
They would occasionally, just for experimentation's sake, pour a 10-lb.
bag of cement into the oil fill and a gallon of molasses into the gas
tank. The result would, of course, be the car's fault - because they
Didn't Do Anything Different (or, better yet, Couldn't Be Expected To
Know.)
They would rip off the carburetor "because it was making that annoying
noise". They would smash the low-oil and alternator lights "because
the red glow was distracting". They would hacksaw the airconditioning
pump out of the engine compartment (letting out all the refrigerant as
well as cutting the fuel line and the electrical harness in the process)
"because I'd read that Freon was harmful to children." The result would
be towed to the garage and blamed on the mechanic because he had
replaced a fuse six months before.
They would let the village idiot - as long as he spouted
automotive-sounding gibberish - do anything he wanted to the car,
including using it as a toilet. When the mechanic hinted that this was
not the wisest thing to do, they would get huffy and tell him it was
"only his opinion".
I could go on for a while. I've done tech support and field repair.
Slashdot commentators suggest some help text for Clippy, wonder what HAL
would do, and debate which moment the Blue Screen of Death will appear.
LWN links
From Sluggo
http://lwn.net/Articles/133421
FSF attorney Eben Moglen discusses the state of the GPL and software
patents in 2006 at linux.conf.au, in a keynote LWN's editor calls one of
the best talks he's seen in some time.
[Brian]
Albatross! Get your bleedin' _ALBATROSS_! No, it don't come with chips!
[Pete]
What flavour is it?
[Rick]
"Rat-onna-stick! Rat-in-a-bun! Get them while they're dead!"
Cheers,
Rick ("C-M-O-T") Moen "vi is my shepherd; I shall not font."
Platypus
From Jimmy
Platypus
is a Firefox extension that lets you edit a web page as you view it.
Your edits can then be saved as a
Greasemonkey
script so your changes are applied each time you view the page.
(Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to write custom
javascripts to add custom DHTML to web pages -- to learn how to write
them manually, there's a free book online at
http://www.diveintogreasemonkey.org)
GANGS
From GANGSMEANTROBLE
DEAR ANSWER GANG
HI MY NAME IS CAITLIN IM A 13 YEAR OLD GIRL CAN U PLEASE TELL ME WHY PEPOLE
JOIN GANGS AND DO DRUGS BECAUSE THEY SHOULD KNOW THAT IT CAN KILL THEM AND IT
WILL IF THEY DON'T STOP USING DRUGS AND IF PEPOLE JOIN A GANG IF THEY TRY TO
GET OUT THEY WILL KILL THEM OR BEAT THEM BADLY SO CAN U PLEASE TELL ME WHY
PEPOLE WOULD WANT TO BE IN A GANG OR USE DRUGS U CAN SEND ME AN EMAIL WITH THE
ANSWERS TO MY OUESTION ( S )
[Sluggo]
WE'VE COVERED THIS BEFORE. WHY DON'T YOU ASK THEM?
Open Solaris
From Jimmy O'Regan
Not Linux, but important because we'll probably be using some of this
software in a few weeks/months time: the source code of Open Solaris has
been released (http://www.opensolaris.org/os).
[Thomas]
Woooo.
Sun aren't finished releasing code, but this release has most of the
kernel and userland tools. (No Thomas, nothing CDE related, but X stuff
isn't scheduled for release for another few months yet--the X community
is here http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/x_win)
[Ben]
I'm teaching a Sun class right now, and the response from my students
was uniformly sceptical: "They're just trying to stay in the game." I'm
just going to note that Apple has been playing exactly the same game -
kinda-sorta release some-but-not-all of the source, maybe - and it
hasn't done very much for them.
Heh. Their FAQ has a nod to Apple:
...............
Do I need to register the OpenSolaris source code I have downloaded from
the site?
No. There is no registration. There is no click-to-accept license. Enjoy!
...............
Sun look to be more sincere about what they're doing than Apple--they're
using a licence that's already accepted (the CDDL is just the MPL
rebranded),
[Rick]
And improved, in my view. You may already have seen my related post to
the Irish Linux User Group mailing list,
Alas, no. Too many bounces in my last great disconnect, and my current
connection isn't reliable enough to justify resubscribing.
[Rick]
but here it is:
Quoting Niall Walsh (linux@esatclear.ie):
> From there how long from there until we have a Debian GNU/OpenSolaris?
> Or is CDDL even DFSG Free (the patenting clauses anyway makes me
> wonder)?
CDDL does strike me as being every bit as DFSG as its MPL predecessor.[1]
From what I remember of the debian-legal discussion, the gist of it was
"the licence may or may not be free, depending on how the licensor chooses
to act".
[Rick]
Ah, debian-legal. {sigh} A fellow on ILUG raised that, too, and here
was my response
> Checking the debian legal lists it seems it may be DFSG compliant...
In a better world, it would be possible to consult debian-legal (or
the various related "summary" Web pages) to reliably determine whether a
licence is DFSG-compliant. That fictional alternate debian-legal
wouldn't be populated by context-challenged monomaniacs woefully
ignorant of applicable law.
Ah well.
Suffice it to say that I draw a distinction between the concepts of
"DFSG compliant" and "approved by certain net.random wankers posting to
a rather painful-to-read public mailing list".
...............
[Ben]
[laugh] A critical distinction in the world of Open Source, and one that
needs to be drawn far, far more often than it actually is.
The "patents" comments are tautologically true -- but would be so
regardless of licence. That is, any codebase adversely encumbered
by patents is non-free/proprietary, irrespective of what licence
provisions would otherwise apply.
That other bit about fixed attributions making a work
non-free/proprietary is one reason why, although I'm a long-time
subscriber to debian-legal, I only rarely read it, in order to safeguard
my blood pressure: Author attributions may not be stripped in
derivative works by default action of copyright law , so it is utter
lunacy to assert, as poster Garrett and numerous others do, that clauses
to that same effect make the work non-free through it "failing the
Chinese Dissident Test".
That is a perfect example of the aforementioned problem of certain
posters being context-challenged and ignorant of the law.
Quoting Niall Walsh (linux@esatclear.ie):
> You must include a notice in each of Your Modifications that
> identifies You as the Contributor of the Modification."
>
> So that the theoretical dissident programmer could distribute a
> modification without having to admit to ownership.
That licence requirement could be met by "Module foo.c was contributed
2005-06-14 by Anon Y. Mouse of the Fugitive Coders Group". The cited
clause's intent is not to require the equivalent of biometrics and a
mugshot from any contributor, but rather to distinguish cleanly between
original code and subsequent contributions.
And that is an example of what I mean by "context-challenged".
Licences are not code for a Turing machine: They're designed to be
interpreted by judges, who (being modestly optimistic, for a moment)
have brains and are supposed to apply them to such things.
...............
[Rick]
However, of course, the OpenSolaris codebase apparently (as everyone
suspected) includes quite a lot of binary-only, proprietary "secret sauce"
components.[2] How useful the CDDL (and other open source / free-software)
portions would be without them is an open question. My own expectation
would be "Not very; probably even substantially less than the
corresponding case with Apple Darwin."
The only thing I remember seeing mentioned specifically is drivers, which
is understandable--too many NDAs. IIRC, Sun has a compiler that recompiles
Linux drivers for Solaris--device support isn't one of great plusses of
Solaris that Sun have been cheerleading in any of the blog entries I've
seen (DTrace this, DTrace that
[Rick]
Quite. Third-party rights. I remember seeing some other things, too,
but cannot remember specifics.
I don't mean to derogate the benefits to some of Sun's move -- just to
remind people that OpenSolaris's carve-outs mean it's doomed to be
crippled as an open-source operating system, e.g., for purposes of porting
performed by anyone but Sun themselves.
[Ben]
I tend to take an optimistic view of these things that look like naivete
from a certain perspective - any move in the direction of Open Source by
the historically-proprietary software companies is good for us. One of
the many underlying reasons for that is what I like to call "time in
grade": the longer these people spend using Open Source methods - to
whatever degree - the more these get embedded in their culture and the
environment around them. After a while, they're impossible to eradicate.
As for "the abyss looking back at you", I rely on the GPL and its ilk to
keep the resulting influence on the world of Open Source to a tolerable
minimum.
(Yes, the sum total of all the influences and issues here is far more
complex than this. However, abstracting this bit and staring at it for a
while contains its own lessons, and they're interesting ones.)
[Rick]
> Of course whether it's worth it or not is another matter. I
> guess both will be projects like rebuilding a Freely redistributable
> Suse/Novell Professional image, a test of just how many people care.
I think the latter would be a great deal easier -- and more useful.
Heh. I think there will be a lot of public contributions to the code, if
only to clean it up. I never really understood why so much research goes
into code comprehension (well, aside from the fact that C lecturers write
some of the worst C around): open source projects need to have code that's
as clear as possible, otherwise noone can contribute. Heck, even Wine,
which (of necessity) has some of the most cryptic code I've ever seen
(self-modifying blobs of x86 binary code, C emulations of C++ exceptions
and classes, etc), is a model of clarity, as far as it can be.
Not so Open Solaris. Their tar implementation is one 182k .c file; their
nroff implementation uses the original Unix naming convention for files
(n1.c etc). I'm sure they'll get plenty of clean-up patches from people
cringing on Sun's behalf
[Rick]
[1] Sun Microsystems solicited my feedback on the licence before its
publc release. Unfortunately, I did not have sufficient time in to help
them during the very short comment period available -- but my impression
of the licence is overwhelmingly favourable.
instead of writing their own just barely open source by just
enough people's definition, but oh-so obnoxious licence for the purpose
(I suppose they've already done that enough times), and have put all the
released code in CVS from the start.
[Ben]
I didn't have much time to really look into this yesterday (but I did
get some really good coding done, and had the very satisfying experience
of solving a thorny problem that's been bugging me for a couple of
years!); today is a new day, and I'm wasting^Wspending my morning
checking out the buzz on this. Fascinating - it looks and smells real.
In fact, reading Tim Bray's blog and the link tree that branches out
from it - thanks, Raj! - I'm slowly growing convinced that Sun has
finally clued in, bought the stock, drank the Koolaid. All I can say, in
stunned admiration, is "Bravo" - I had not expected it, and was actually
rather cynical about it, having built my expectations based on what I
saw from my little corner of the Sun culture. It seems I was wrong.
The interesting bit about this is that the Solaris kernel has been a
strictly "hands-off" affair since time immemorial; you could tweak some
user-space settings to influence its operation in some mild ways, but
that was about all (and learning to do even that required a three-day
class and using ADB [shudder].) As well, some of the operational
algorithms - e.g., the exact process of deciding how to accept/reject
TCP connections - were generally hinted at but the details were
intentionally shrouded in mystery (security through obscurity, even
though Sun showed itself to be totally aware, in other places, that this
is not a useful approach.)
There's also the fact - and I'm not snarking at Sun in the least, but
applauding their moving with the times - that Solaris installations are
growing far fewer percentage-wise; this latest change may just be a
simple recognition of fact and adaptation to it. I've spoken to many
people in the large corporate culture, in many places and many different
companies, and have heard the story/complaint/simple fact repeated many
times: "so this new guy comes into IT, and before anybody knows it, he's
got 30 Linux boxes up in one day..." Cost of software: zero. Cost of
machines: hauled out of a closet where it was stored due to being old
and unusable. That's a hard combination for a commercial machine+OS to
beat, stony hard - and companies that _aren't_ having to spend a million
bucks a year on buying new are starting to notice. Many of them -
including banks, the traditional stronghold of conservatism - are
quietly dropping their "no non-commercial OSes" policy.
Sun is an excellent hardware company; the cost of their gadgets is
quite high as compared to the commodity PC, but the quality and the
reliability that you get from the stuff can be absolutely stunning to
someone who's never experienced them. I've never had Sun stuff "fight"
me the way, e.g., a PC SCSI card has; the documentations was always
available, and the relevant setup was as obvious as it could be made and
robust. Solaris, seen in that light, has always been a house divided
against itself - and Sun appears to have finally resolved the ambiguity.
Bravo; bravo indeed. The Open Source world has grown - and it's quite
the growth spurt. Not that we needed validation, but this is an
unlooked-for bit of big-leagues legitimacy that does not hurt at all.
Well, though Sun want to hype up the release by saying "Solaris is open
source now", their own roadmap says otherwise.
Another tried his hand at predicting the future of system speeds. "As of
this writing (1996) a clock rate of more than about 10 kHz seems utterly
ridiculous, although this observation will no doubt seem quaintly
amusing one day," he wrote.
Religion was a common theme in the code. "Oops, did not find this
signature, so we must advance on the next signature in the SUA and hope
to God that it is in the susp format, or we get hosed," said one developer.
"God help us all if someone changes how lex works," wrote another. "Oh
God, what an ugly pile of architecture," moaned a third.
One of the big things in Open Solaris is that services can start in
parallel at boot time. Finito (http://web.isteve.bofh.cz/finito) does
something similar for Linux.
[Ben]
Your message has nothing to do with Linux, The Answer Gang, good food,
or interesting times -
[Brian]
If I may interject, I finally got around to Pratchett's Interesting
Times. That was fun - I dig Rincewind. And Hex appears to be somewhat of
an Open Sourcery project of his own...
[Ben]
[ Now that I'm back home, and more-or-less settling back into the
insanity that I jokingly refer to as "my life"... ]
[grin] pTerry draws unforgettable characters, doesn't he? What an
amazing talent. I especially love how he slips in those little messages
that take a bit of time to come home; bits on religion and philosophy
and just plain good skull sweat about life.
[Jimmy]
I started to catch up with my reading last week, after I noticed a new
pTerry -- "Science of Discworld 3: Darwin's Watch":
"It is always useful for a university to have a Very Big Thing. It
occupies the younger members, to the relief of their elders (especially
if the VBT is based at some distance from the seat of learning itself)
and it uses up a lot of money which would otherwise only lie around
causing trouble or be spent by the sociology department or, probably,
both. It also helps in pushing back boundaries, and it doesn't much
matter what boundaries these are, since as any researcher will tell you
it's the pushing that matters, not the boundary."
[Ben]
...and, moreover, smells strongly of elderberries
that have been passed through a hamster.
[Brian]
Does that also make for a special coffee flavour? Is it garnished
delicately with Lark's Vomit? Is it, in a word, Good?
[Ben]
Redolent with the rare scent of Cockroach Puke with a subtle nuance of
Moorish Macaque Faeces, this product will NOT be available at your
neighborhood supermarket...
[Jimmy]
So... it's an instant coffee?
[Jimmy]
Hmm. A coworker, who is dating one of my Polish friends[1], arrived home
Sunday morning to find that he had discovered the joys of Irish whiskey,
but not the joys of watering it down, and decided to eat a basket of
plums. The resulting scene strongly reminded her of several horror films.
Apologies to the weak of stomach, it's just that 'berries' and 'passed
through' brought up (sorry!) the story in my mind.
[Ben]
Even more importantly, it never
made it to any list to which you sent it, so all your striving was in
vain. You may retire, sobbing bitterly, in the knowledge that it is all
useless.
[Brian]
I never saw that message either. But then I didn't get around to
following Rick's edict until this evening.
[Ben]
Yes, but what's important is that you intended to. Those darn mail
servers should have known and forwarded it automatically!
I blame all this on the lack of moral fiber in our country. We need more
fiber, dammit! [1]
[Brian]
The results: All lists subscribed to, show properly in the Mailman
interface as such, set translators@ to no-mail for the time being, as I
can only translate to gibberish, or Perl, whichever comes first.
[Ben]
Visualize the power of 'and'. Intelligent thought filtered through Perl
results in excellent code; idiocy filtered through it results in a
variety of moronic drool that is otherwise inaccessible to mere mortals.
(Under Python, it results in well-structured, object-oriented, neatly
laid-out moronic drool.)
Gibberish is.
[Jimmy]
Are you sure you didn't mean: "Three slices of ham and a pocket of
petrol. *Flithers*"?
[Brian]
My own
TAG message came through to me fine, and I got HELD replies from the
other three lists. Looks all good to me.
[Ben]
Think nothing of it; it was simply an evil plot in which we all colluded
to make it look like everything was working fine. But then, when you
least expect it...
[Jimmy]
Ooh! Another quote opportunity:
"The thing about best laid plans is that they *don't* ofter go wrong.
They sometimes go wrong, but not often, because of having been, as
aforesaid, the best laid. The kind of plans laid by wizards, who barge
in, shout a lot, try to sort it all out by lunchtime and hope for the
best, on the other hand... well, they go wrong almost instantly."
[Brian]
Thanks, Rick!!!
[Ben]
Chinese word for rain: or-yu Your lucky number for today: 3.141592653
[Jimmy]
Aw. I just finished reading "The Science of Discworld 3", and would
greatly prefer the lucky number to be umptyplex.
[1] He has promised to never drink a whole bottle of straight whiskey
again, if only because he's not a rock star, and is therefore not
permitted to die by choking on his own vomit.
[Brian]
Tonight's listening List, from the front end of the tunes.pls:
Acantus: Acantus
and
AC/DC: Who Made Who
The contrast is ... disturbing, yet somehow fulfilling.
And I got a $1 CD from a thrift shop this weekend that looked like punk
from the cover but was metal, ugh. A black-and-white cartoon of a chick
with boxing gloves punching out a dude. But I can't complain; I got nine
CDs for $9, so the two that I liked cost $4.50 each. One is Global
Communication's ambient album, which I already have but I got a second
copy for when the first one breaks. I had this album originally when it
came out in 1994, but all my CDs were stolen in 1998. Then I forgot about
it until a roommate moved in who was an electronic DJ, and I started
remembering all the ambient stuff I used to like. But GC vanished without
a trace after putting out one album, which wasn't popular but to me is the
best ambient album ever. So I looked for two years for a copy, then
finally found one last year at a used record store. But I really distrust
CDs, you never know when they'll self-destruct for no visible reason.
I've gone back to vinyl for everything that's available on it, because if
it skips you can see what the problem is, and if it has no visible
scratches it'll play on any record player, period. Contrary to my CD
player which sometimes plays certain disks and sometimes won't, and won't
play disks my computer plays perfectly, and won't play CD-R's at all.
The other CD I got was Buck O'Nine. I remembered the name but couldn't
remember what they sounded like. But it was from Taang Records (a little
oi label in LA) so I figured it must be at least passable. Turned out to
be a third-wave ska group. Mediocre but OK.
[Ben]
My listening choices today:
"Junkanoo" by Geno D (Bahamian party music)
"I'd Rather Kill You In Your Sleep" and "The Whore" by Dead Dog
The combination worked well, carrying us through scraping barnacles and
making minor repairs on a 15-horse outboard engine and well into an
amusing interlude of damn nearly strangling over the lyrics of the
latter:
...............
I used to think your legs were so long
But last night I slept with a whore
And her legs were longer than "Dances with Wolves"
So I don't like your legs anymore
...............
Sheesh. What's with all that intellectual music I've been listening to
lately?...
[Jimmy]
My current listening:
"Mezmerize" by System of a Down
"(With Teeth)" by Nine Inch Nails
"Videos 86>98" by Depeche Mode (erm... does that count, being a DVD
rather than a CD?)
"Deliverance" by Opeth
I'm waiting impatiently for the new Nile album to come out. Death metal
with an Egypt obsession! (Their lyricist does so much research that he
gets graduate students writing to him to ask for his sources
[Ben]
[1] This ad brought to you by the American Prune Council and the
Committee For The Promotion Of Non-Artificial Wood Shavings.
[Jimmy]
American Prune Council? I thought you were only joking about your 'old
fart' status.
[Rick]
Quoting Benjamin A. Okopnik:
> I used to think your legs were so long
> But last night I slept with a whore
> And her legs were longer than "Dances with Wolves"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> So I don't like your legs anymore
A propos of nothing in particular, though I've never seen the flick in
question, I did hasten to read the Pauline Kael New Yorker review, at
the time: I figured seeing Kael apply the bladeless sword without a
hilt to Mr. Costner's hapless (if likeable) directoral effort would be
popcorn-worthy, and was not disappointed.
I believe this was the opening paragraph:
"This is a nature-boy movie, a kid's daydream of being an Indian. When
Dunbar has become a Sioux named Dances with Wolves, he writes in his
journal that he knows for the first time who he really is. Costner has
feathers in his hair and feathers in his head."
But the true highlight was where she said Costner's character's Lakota
name actually should have been "Plays with Camera".
[Jimmy]
Hee hee hee. I like it. IIRC the director's cut version of "Dances..."
was almost 4 hours long. The story wasn't worth sitting through, but the
scenery and camera work was.
[Rick]
Other great lines from pan movie reviews (courtesy of a discussion thread
inviting same on "Improv Message Boards"):
Keith Phipps, about Kim Basinger's "I Dreamed of Africa":
"In the opening segment of 'I Dreamed Of Africa', Kim Basinger breaks
her leg. The rest of the film is so dull, you can almost hear the bone
heal."
Almost any review of the two "Matrix" sequels:
"Take the blue pill."
A.O. Scott, about "House of D":
"The reasons to avoid David Duchovny's unwatchable coming-of-age
drama can best be summarized in a simple declarative sentence: Robin
Williams plays a retarded janitor."
The Onion , about "A Man Apart":
"A violent, simplistic revenge thriller, the film casts [Vin] Diesel as a
dedicated and efficient DEA agent who shares with his beautiful,
loving wife the sort of comically overwrought wedded bliss that exists
in action movies solely for the sake of being destroyed."
Eric D. Snider about "Battlefield Earth":
"Forest Whitaker's Ker looks like the love child of Della Reese and a
Klingon."
NY Times TV listings, about "Beneath the Planet of the Apes":
"Indeed." (that being the entire review)
News
From Sluggo
News from the United States, where truth is stranger than fiction....
"What started out as an election contest between Democrat Christine
Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi may be turning into a fight between
Democratic felons and Republican felons.
In the ongoing dispute over Gregoire's 129-vote victory over Rossi in
the governor's race, the state Democratic Party said yesterday it has
sent the GOP a list of 428 felons who apparently cast illegal votes in
the election.
Eventually, state Democratic Party Chairman Paul Berendt said, his side
expects to meet or beat the total of 946 felon voters the GOP has
claimed in its legal challenge to the election, set for trial May 23 in
Chelan County Superior Court."
[Brian]
If Washington State is lucky, this fight will drag out until the next
election, when the voters can throw BOTH bums out, and vote in a new set
of bums.
After all, felons are just nascent politicians who got caught...
If the GOP gets its way, they'll have a chance in November (or sooner).
People here have a low opinion of parties, but I doubt that can overcome
the recent red-blue polarization, especially since each side thinks
"their" governor deserves a term for having to go through this attack.
[Heather]
Maybe they should forced to both be governor, the way conventions sometimes
have a co-chair setup. With items only considered signed by the governor
if both sign.
On the other hand, the vast majority of people are seething mad the
parties got the courts to overturn the blanket primary system (where
people could vote for any candidate regardless of party). The parties
(R, D, and Libertarian) claim they have the right to choose candidates
without interference from non-members. The people say they have the
right to ignore whatever the parties want, and view it as a power grab
by the parties to gain influence. Curiously, the parties can't prevent
self-proclaimed Rs and Ds from getting on the ballot even if the party
disapproves, haha.
I have to say, Gregoire was fully ready to concede if she lost. Rossi
(and moreso the GOP chairman) are acting like elections are only
legitimate if they win. One side takes pains to enfranchise all
qualified voters; the other side worries about felons voting. (Hint:
the side that's more concerned about felons than enfranchisement is the
same party Jeb Bush belongs to.) And they wonder why we question their
commitment to democracy....
[Heather]
And let's make a few more things so illegal that more people are felons,
too.
[Jason]
I think both parties have about the same level of disrespect for
democracy/rule of law. I hate the concept of a recount. We're going to
count the votes over, using the exact method we used the first time, and
the results are somehow going to be more accurate. It would probably
work better if we said "no recounts, coin flip in case of ties".
Seriously. If you have a tie, what's a fair way to break it? Flipping a
coin is as good as any other way I can think of.
Nobody has dared touch the issue of why are felons prevented from voting
anyway? Are people afraid they'll vote for candidates who'll overturn
the laws they were convicted on? Puh-lease, there aren't enough felons
to make a difference in that. I suppose a more likely scenario is a
governor courting the "felon vote" and then pardoning them all, but even
that's ridiculous. One "Politician for the Cons" headline and they'd be
creamed at the polls. As for arbitrarily restricting felons' rights to
make life uncomfortable for them, there are rights and there's the
fundamental characteristic of democracy. Which part of
d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y don't they understand? Have they not heard of
taxation without representation?
[Heather]
Sure they have. What they seem to lack is how to recognize it. I personally
believe parking meter tickets qualify.
[Jason]
Well, everybody pays taxes, through inflation and the higher prices they
cause. I'm 17, working (part-time), paying taxes, and I can't vote. Is
that so wrong? I don't really think so. The nation as a whole is
probably better off without the under-18 crowd voting. But it's hard to
talk like that. Would 16 be a better voting age? 21? We've essentially
said "Everybody has the right to vote, except for..." and then proceed
to exclude those who we feel would abuse the privledge. And trouble is,
we're right. Think if literally everyone could vote. Can you imagine a
6-year-old kid trying to understand the issues involved? So we take
blocs of the population and tell them they can't vote 'cause they're not
smart enough. I'm not sure if that's okay or not, but I think the
alternative is worse.
[Adam Engel]
I didn't want to inject "politics" into TAG (outside my articles for
LG), but since the subject has come up...I received the below email
(ultimate outstretched hand) from a number of news groups, if anyone is
interested. The same people going after Palast are going after
Stalllman, GNU, etc. So it is related/relevant. I think.
...............
Palast Investigations Under Attack
Iraq oil, elections story scoops generate awards and lawsuits
Our work is under attack and we need your help. Bluntly: without your
financial support, we're finished. GregPalast.com will be no more and the
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...............
Where was it where the vice presidency went to the second-top
contestant, so he was always in opposition to the president? Was it Mexico?
[Breen]
Right here in the USofA, in the early days before the parties
got organized.
In California, we can and have elected a Lt. Governor from the
opposite party to the Governor. It's proved useful in the past
when the sitting Governor had to stay in the state to prevent
the LtGov making appointments and signing things, instead of
gadding about the country running for President.
In Washington they're trying to abolish the position of Lieutenant
Governor saying it's a waste of money. His sole job is waiting around
in case the Governor becomes incapacitated. The current Lt Gov has
vowed to be Useful and has been pursuing his pet projects. Some people
say that's even worse.
No, there was a country where the vice presidency automatically went
to the second-highest vote getter, and it did have strong parties
because that's why they were in such opposition.
I kept thinking "Rome" but couldn't figure out how elections fit in since
they didn't have elections.
[Ben]
In fact, they did. You had to be at least a member of the Equestrian
class (i.e., well-off businessman) to have the franchise, but there were
lots and lots of elections in Rome. [1]
[Ben]
Erm, I forgot to satisfy that dependency.
[1] So sayeth Caius Minucius Scaevola, Diribitor (voting official) of
Nova Roma - a.k.a. Yours Truly. [2]
[2] As if I didn't have enough to do with my Copious Free Time. :p
[Jay]
[3] And the Boulder Daily Camera to the contrary notwithstanding[4], I
don't believe Tom Lehrer is "late" ('as in the 'late'
Dentarthurdent[5]').
Turns out I was thinking of the consuls in
the Roman Republic, who had to share office with mutual veto power.
Similar to what Brian suggested. That must have got mixed in with the
murky details of American history.
[Ben]
This makes a lot more sense when you come to realize that most Roman
political structures were designed so that you couldn't get ahead by
stabbing your colleague. Given some of their early (pre-Republican)
history, this is not in the least surprising.
The weakness of this system was, of course, demonstrated when you had
two consuls who hated each other (Gaius Julius Caesar, everybody's
favorite fair-haired boy-hero, was paired up with such a critter during
one of his terms, but - as usual - managed to work his way around the
obstruction); nothing would get done due to constant deadlocks.
However, most Romans - at least those who got to that exalted position -
cared enough about their prestige (/dignitas/ and /auctoritas/ both)
that they would try to at least work out some sort of compromise for the
good of Rome.
[Breen]
I recently read a newish history of the end of the Roman Republic:
Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, by Tom Holland.
A good read and relevant today.
[Ben]
[perk] If you can provide a capsule review, I know a group of people
who'd really appreciate one.
Trying Jasmine green tea pearls today. I wanted loose green tea with
Jasmine flowers but it's gotten hard to find.
[Ben]
Does Seattle have a Chinatown? I don't recall. You should be able to
find it in any sizeable market there if it does.
[Thomas]
Really? I have loads of green Jasmine tea -- it tastes like shit. I'll
send you it -- loose-leaf OK?
[Ben]
Check the label, Thomas. You might have bought some Kopi Luwak coffee by
mistake.
[Thomas]
Hehehe. Not quite.
The worst_ tea that I have tried is Lapsang
Souchon - that was just like drinking fire embers... bleh.
[Breen]
Mmm. Lapsang Souchong. Don't have any now, but I think I'll
pick some up this week...
The lady at the tea shop
insisted Dragon Phoenix Pearl was the same thing, but I was afraid to try
the pearls because it looked like the disgusting Tea of Inquiry (roasted
rice) I had the displeasure of trying once. She said the pearls would
unfold when it was steeped. Well, they did unfold, and it tastes almost
but not quite as good as loose green tea with Jasmine flowers. Actually,
it tastes kind of like root beer. Jasmine green has now beaten Earl Green
as my favorite flavor.
[Thomas]
Earl grey, English breakfast and fruit teas are fine.
[Ben]
Earl _Green?_ That's cute. I've got about a dozen different kinds of tea
on board these days, including /kombu/ (seaweed) - which, oddly enough,
tastes kinda like chicken soup - and definitely have jasmine pearls,
which I really like.
[Breen]
Genmaicha is an acquired taste, but I quite like it.
[Ben]
Ditto. I was first introduced to it in a Korean restaurant, and
immediately started looking for the stuff on the shelves. Sadly, I don't
have any now - will definitely need to remedy _that!_
[Heather]
A tea that tastes vaguely like root beer? I really must try some of this
stuff. Where did you get them?
[Rick]
Usenet thread in question (cross-posted between rec.sport.cricket and
comp.lang.python) features some amiable railery about regional accents
and cultural perception thereof, e.g., traditional jokes about
unsophisticated Kerrymen in Eire, the West Country and Yorkshire in the
UK, "Ockers" in Australia. (The latter term is not regional but denotes
a rough-hewn, rustic working man, and is taken from the name of a
character played by Aussie comedian Ron Frazer on the satire programme
"The Mavis Bramston Show", 1965-68. It's a variant form of "Oscar".)
Some of the finer points in this discussion were interesting,
especially these from Steven D'Aprano, posting from Australia:
> But don't worry, there is one thing we all agree on throughout the
> English-speaking world: you Americans don't speak English.
>
> There are a few things that you can do to help:
>
> Herb starts with H, not E. It isn't "ouse" or "ospital" or "istory".
> It isn't "erb" either. You just sound like tossers when you try to
> pronounce herb in the original French. And the same with homage.
Except when it is. (Cockney)
[Jimmy]
'ave an 'eart, mate!
[Rick]
I'd forgotten about this one, having moved back to the USA so many years
ago, and adopted Yank pronunciation in most matters: In American usage,
silent-h "herb" denotes a plant leaf used for food or medicine,
distinguishing it form hard-h "Herb" as a given name. In Commonwealth
English, the h is always pronounced.
> Taking of herbs, there is no BAY in basil.
What do Brits say instead?
[Jimmy]
I'll try this in SAMPA
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAMPA_chart_for_English). It's ["b{zl] or
["b{zIl].
(Though I'm not sure whether or not the first should be ["b{zl],
["b{z@l], or ["b{zl=]. Probably not the last).
[Rick]
Taken either from Greek "basilikon" = royal or Latin "basilisk". Either
way, the American hard-a departs further from the historic pattern.
Interesting to note that, again, Yanks use different pronuncation for
the given name "Basil", to distinguish it from the herb.
We do? I call both BAY-sill. But Basel in Switzerland is bazzle.
[Rick]
BAAH-sil, for both meanings (personal given name and plant). Which is
fairly close to the way the Greek and Latin possible origins are
pronounced.
I heard the word comes from Greek basileus (king), because it's the "king
of herbs". (Interesting, I would say "herb" there, but "it's an erb" and
"we need a 'erb".)
[Rick]
Or from Latin basiliscus (English "basilisk") because its sharpness of
flavour and aroma conjure up the fire-breathing dragons of myth. We'll
probably never know, unless some word-hunter spends time chasing it
down.
I heard it from a Greek Orthodox priest. The word basileus (now
pronounced "vossil-EFS") is used all over in the hymns and New
Testament. Vasili ("Vah-SEE-lee") is a common first name (I'm not sure
how they anglicize it: Basile?), and one of the three liturgies is named
after St Basil the Great.
[Ben]
"Vasili" is a very common Russian name, and the etymology is well known
- I knew it meant 'king' by, oh, age 10 for certain. Etymology,
history, related names, etc. here:
Against this background he said basil was
so-named because it was considered the "king" of herbs. So I guess
basil has a long and honorable history in Greek. As for basiliscus, it
seems to come from basileus too. "dict basilisk" says:
...............
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Basilisk \Bas"i*lisk\, n. [L. basiliscus, Gr. basili`skos little
king, kind of serpent, dim. of basiley`s king; -- so named
from some prominences on the head resembling a crown.]
1. A fabulous serpent, or dragon. The ancients alleged that
its hissing would drive away all other serpents, and that
its breath, and even its look, was fatal. See
{Cockatrice}.
[1913 Webster]
Make me not sighted like the basilisk. --Shak.
[1913 Webster]
...............
I don't know what it means by "basiley's king".
[Ben]
It means that "dict" sucks at being denotational. What that should
have said is something like
...............
Basilisk \Bas"i*lisk\, n. [L. "basiliscus", Gr. "basili`skos": little
king; kind of serpent; dim. of "basiley`s" (king)
...............
Conveying meta-information is clearly not their long suit.
It's no worse than the usual corruption of a (ah) to short a (cat) or long
a (bay).
[Rick]
> And oregano sounds like Ray Romano, not oh-reg-ano.
That is, it's "orr-i-GAH-no" in Commonwealth English, and "o-REG-a-no"
among Yanks. The former is close to the scientific neo-Latin species
name (oreganum vulgare), which got it from heaven's knows where. (The
usual claim of Greek origin is wrong because oros = mountain simply
doesn't fit the word's long-"i" sound.)
> And please, fillet of fish only has a silent T if you are speaking
> French.
Really? And buffet too?
[Rick]
I'm no authority on regional usage, since travel has made me hopelessly
heterodox. (Mrs. Alexander, from the Fourth Form, Peak School,
Victoria, Hong Kong Royal Crown Colony, would be dismayed to hear me
no longer say "aeroplane", and almost never pronounce "schedule"
or "zebra" correctly, any more.) But my recollection is that the noun
meaning a type of self-service meal is pronounced very close to the
original French, in all English-speaking countries.
[Dave Williams]
In aviation the 't' in buffet is always pronounced.
[Rick]
I'll just note in passing that this is an application of the second
sense of the word I mentioned, the one meaning "a blow" (noun) or "to
strike" (verb).
[Dave]
Incidentally, when I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, we lived
in several US states. Though it may have just been one of those bizarre
results of chance, it wasn't until the late 1970s that I came across
"buffet" to refer to a self-service meal. Prior to that, the only word
I'd ever encountered for that was "smorgasbord." (central California,
Florida, Tennessee) Since 1980 or so, I've seen the word "smorgasbord"
at a restaurant only once, as far as I can remember.
I've never heard "smorgasbord" used for an actual meal, only buffet. Bay
Area 1966-72, Seattle 72-onward. Half the Seattle natives are Norwegian
to some degree (as I am), so you'd think they'd have lots of smorgasbords.
But no. "Smorgasbord" seems to be more an abstract term, meaning "lots
of different food together". Buffets require a dedicated serving table,
but smorgasbords don't. A large dining table with people around it and a
wide variety of food in the middle is also a smorgasbord. But smorgasbord
also connotes "sandwich fixin's" -- little slices of bread, cold cuts,
cheese, sliced vegetables. A typical family-style dinner (meat, potatoes,
salad, cooked vegetables) is not a smorgasbord. A Thanksgiving dinner,
maybe.
"dict smorgasbord" has an amusingly precise definition (WordNet): "an
assortment of foods starting with herring or smoked eel or salmon etc with
bread and butter; then cheeses and eggs and pickled vegetables and aspics;
finally hot foods; served as a buffet meal"
Buffets, hmm. There's the hoity-toity buffet served at fancy hotels and
golf clubs. (Not that kind of golf club, Jimmy. Put that 9-iron down
before you hurt somebody.)
[Jimmy] Aw. You never let me have any fun
Pick your favorite items from fancy platters
and let a chef cut you a custom slice of prime rib. But increasingly I've
seen lunch buffets at Indian, Chinese, and vegetarian restaurants. And
Mongolian grills, which are by nature buffets.
I vote for a smorgasbord in the TAG lounge.
[Dave]
hmm... most of the definitions I'm finding on Google imply a seafood
buffet. Here's a variant one from word-detective.com:
...............
<snip>
Dear Word Detective: English is not my mother tongue, and sometimes I
find words in a dictionary which my American colleagues have never heard
before, so I simply stop using them. One of such words is "smorgasbord."
Could you please tell me something about its meaning and origin (if it
exists in English at all)? -- Ivana.
"Smorgasbord" does indeed exist in English, and I'm surprised that your
co-workers don't know it. A "smorgasbord" is an offering of food,
ranging from simple hors d'oeuvres to a full dinner, presented as a
serve-yourself spread on a sideboard or table separate from where diners
are seated. Granted, "smorgasbord" started out as a Swedish word, but it
has been used frequently in English since the late 19th century, long
enough to qualify as an English word as well.
The roots of "smorgasbord" speak to its origins as an assortment of
simple appetizers set out for dinner guests. "Smorgas" in Swedish means
"slice of bread and butter" (the "smor" is related to the English
"smear"), and "bord" simply means "board," or in this case "table."
...............
'gas' means goose. "butter goose table". I always took that literally
and assumed Scandinavians ate lots of goose. But Wikipedia claims it's
figurative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smorgasbord
Thus, "butter butter table"! (I suppose butter can have "geese" the same
way dragons can have "crowns".)
...............
[Dave]
Today, however, the term is usually taken to mean a full and often
elaborate assortment of dishes, and any host who led his guests to
expect a "smorgasbord" and presented them with naught but bread and
butter might well end up on the evening news. Since the late 1940s,
"smorgasbord" has also been used in a metaphorical sense to mean "a wide
variety or range," as in "The defendant faces a smorgasbord of charges
ranging from mopery to vote tampering."
I remember hearing and reading about "smorgasbords" fairly often during
the Scandinavian craze that swept the U.S. in the mid-1960s (the same
period during which everyone received a fondue pot for Christmas).
...............
[Rick]
And, just to clarify, fondue pots (albeit indeed a silly '60s fad) are
not Scandinavian, but rather Swiss.
...............
[Dave]
If
your friends are unfamiliar with the word, it's probably because they
know the "serve yourself" dining arrangement as a "buffet," a meal, like
a "smorgasbord," served on a sideboard or separate table. "Buffet" is an
imported French word of unknown origin for a side table, common in
English since the early 18th century. "Buffet" dining in the U.S. today,
aside from dinner parties and the wretched "breakfast buffet" offered in
many motels, is usually found in all-you-can-eat emporiums where
customers can (and, from the looks of some of them, do) graze until the
cows come home.
</snip>
...............
[Rick]
The noun / verb sense of the word meaning a blow / to strike is
pronounced differently -- again, to my knowledge on both sides of the
pond + Australia, New Zealand, India, etc. -- is pronounced somewhat
like "buff it".
[Rick]
This one, I did remember. In Commonwealth English, it sounds close to
"fill it".
> Aluminium is al-u-min-ium, not alum-i-num.
Yanks often don't even recognize the word when it's pronounced that way.
[Jimmy]
Heh. I saw an interview with an English actress once, and the
interviewer was asking about the differences she found living in
America. One of the things she mentioned was that waitresses didn't
understand her when she asked for water. ["wA:t@] vs. ["wAd@`] (vs.
["w{T@`] in Hiberno-English)
[Breen]
Which reminds me of the story about a Russian chess Grandmaster
(Bogolyubov?) who asked a page for a drink during a tournament.
The page brought a glass of clear liquid -- the GM took a swig
and nearly choked.
The page had heard "Voda" but the player had said - and expected -
"Vodka".
Breen (Se non e vero, e ben trovato.)
[Rick]
Isaac Asimov (an accomplished biochemist before he became Master
Explainer to the world) once lavished one of his very engaging essays,
entitled "The Mispronounced Metal", in _The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction_ (Oct. 1973, reprinted in Of Matters Great and Small ,
1975) on this question: He pointed out that Humphry Davy, discoverer of
the element, at first used "alumium" for the element in 1808, but soon
thereafter changed that to "aluminum" (current American usage), to match
the Latin root. As he discovered and named other elements, though,
those tended to get "ium" suffixes: potassium, sodium, magnesium,
calcium, strontium. So, he agreed in 1812 to change element 13 to
"aluminium" in the name of uniformity. Americans at first used this
form, but then went back to "aluminum" in the late 1800s.
Asimov provided a scholarly but very entertaining explanation (which I
can no longer recall) of why the chemistry and physics of the element --
even if not spelling uniformity with other Davy-discovered elements --
strongly favours "aluminum", not "aluminium". I can't find the essay
online (no surprise), but did find this citation of its opening
paragraph:
What do you call that nice, shiny white metal they use to make
sidings and airplanes out of? Aluminum, right? Aluminum, pronounced
'uh-LOO-mih-num', right? Anybody knows that! But do you know how the
British spell it? 'Aluminium', pronounced 'Al-yoo-MIH-nee-um'. Ever
hear anything so ridiculous? The French and Germans spell it
'aluminium', too, but they're foreigners who don't speak
Earth-standard. You'd think the British, however, using our
language, would be more careful.
Here's a paraphrase of Asimov's analysis, which someone posted to
sci.materials:
...............
Potassium Aluminum Sulfate was known by the Romans as "Alumen", a
word which seems to be related to the Greek for "bitter".
In 1746 Johann Heinrich Pott obtained a "simple earth" (compounds which
did not dissolve in water, melt in fire, or burn in air) from alumen.
Following the practice of the day, he called it "alumina".
By 1790 Lavoisier had established the present system of chemical
nomencalture, which was becoming internationally accepted. In
that system, metals had names ending in -um. Hence platinum,
molybdenum, and tantalum.
When Humphrey Davey believed he had isolated a metal from alumina, he
called it "aluminum". However, due to the chance vagaries of
language, many metals were prepared from compounds ending in "i", and
became therefore ----ium. The momentum of the times carried aluminum
with it.
Until 1880 no element had an English name with more than four
syllables, except aluminum in Britain. Even now, those that do are
not common.
Therefore, it is aluminum, NOT aluminium.
...............
> Scientists work in a la-bor-atory, not a lab-rat-ory, even if they
> have lab rats in the laboratory.
This usage difference is well known, thanks in part to any number of old
Peter Cushing mad-scientist movies.
> Fans of the X-Men movies and comics will remember Professor Charles
> Xavier. Unless you are Spanish (Kh-avier), the X sounds like a Z:
> Zaviour. But never never never Xecks-Aviour or Eggs-Savior.
I would speculate that the latter forms are not any form of Americanism,
but rather people struggling with an unfamiliar name. To my knowledge,
the standard pronunciation is the same between Commonwealth and US
English.
[Jay]
Nope; I've always heard the X pronounced, from Massachusetts to
Florida.
Now, granted, I don't hear the name said aloud very often, but...
'mongst 'murricans? Yeah, people tend to pronounce the X. Just took a
short poll about the office, and X won, 2 out of 3 (which, I guess,
ain't bad).
[Dave]
In high school French class in the early '70s, we were told to pronounce it "Zah-vee-eh" with a nasal "eh."
As to how accurate that was, I haven't a clue.
[Jimmy]
That would be a valid French pronunciation, AFAIR.
[Dave]
Even English names can be troublesome. I'd been aware of "Sean" for at
least fifteen years before I found out it's pronounced the same as "Shawn."
[Jimmy]
Shawn is an American spelling of Sean (which is not an English name, by the
way, it's Irish. It does appear in Scotland, but IIRC, the Gaelic version is
Ian). Caitlin is also an Irish name, pronounced the same as 'Kathleen', not
'Kate Lynn'.
[Jimmy] While I'm at it, I should say that 'Sean' is the Irish
rendering of 'John', while 'Caitlin' is the diminutive of 'Cait', the
shortened version of 'Catriona', which is the Irish version of 'Catherine'.
[Rick]
At the risk of sounding (or being) stubborn, I'd say this means you've
encountered people not familiar with the name, all the way from
Massachusetts to Florida. Label me an Eastern-Establishment elitist if
you like, but I draw a distinction between "very common bad guess" and
"standard pronunciation".
It's a Basque name, the only Basque name (to my knowledge) that gets any
kind of exposure outside that small mountain region -- and known to the
world because of the tireless -- but mostly futile -- Jesuit missionary
work of one Francis Xavier (1506-1552) in Japan.
It has also become a common Spanish name, including LG's own Javier
Malonda. Spanish pronounces x like Spanish j (kh) and sometimes spells it
that way too: Quixote/Quijote, Mexico/Mejico, Texas/Tejas.
(Interestingly, I've never seen texano, only tejano ("person from Texas").
X at the start of a word is usually pronounced z (xylophone, Xerxes), so
Xavier follows that tradition. But it can be hard not to say Ksevier when
you're reading the word (as opposed to remembering how people say it).
[Rick]
Rome canonised him in 1622, even though the man spent a huge amount of
the Society of Jesus's wealth trying to convert the Japanese, with only
about 1% success for their pains. Xavier's biggest problem, fatal to
his ambitions, was that he hadn't a clue about Japanese internal
politics, wasn't aware that the emperor he pinned all his hopes on was a
figurehead, and wasn't aware that he himself was a pawn in Japan's
ongoing civil wars.
Anyhow, the name is reasonably well known in Spanish-speaking countries,
especially among devout Catholics, but pretty darned exotic in
English-speaking ones. Two out of three people in your office tried to
tackle an impossibly difficult-looking, foreign name that they didn't
know, and missed. That doesn't tell you bupkes about "standard
pronunciation".
[Rick]
> Nuclear. Say no more.
I think English-speakers everywhere, including the USA (and yes, in
Texas), classify "nukular" as illiterate usage -- sometimes deliberately
adopted, e.g., if hypothetically a politician emerged from Andover Acadmey
and Yale University, but wanted to come across as just plain folks.
I don't know how many people would notice the difference. I prob'ly
wouldn't, not unless it was highly exaggerated. It's like when Brits say
cah you hear car even though you "know" they're not pronouncing the r.
(Unless you mistake it for caw, as sometimes happens.)
[Rick]
Really? As with "ah-thuh-lete", I wince and pity the speaker -- which
is the sort of response that makes possible the theatrical
anti-Eastern-liberal-elitism posture some people aim at, in deliberately
adopting those and similar examples of semiliterate pronunciation. Thus
my point.
I guess I'm too much of a philistine. Nook-you-lr and ath-uh-leet are
what I grew up saying coz everybody said it that way. At some point I
unconsciously switched to nook-lee-r most of the time but never 100%.
(Maybe. I don't know which one I say when I'm not consciously thinking
about it.) Certainly I've never heard "nukular is wrong" or "nucular
sounds uneducated" before.
[Ben]
[blink] Mike, are you serious? Over time, I've probably seen hundreds if
not thousands of occasions where someone lampoons that pronunciation in
order to imply ignorance. From the other direction, I don't think I've
heard even a dozen people use "nukular" in a serious fashion. As to
"ath-uh-leet" - although I don't think it gets used the same way as
"nukular", to me it implies at least a lack of linguistic
sophistication. IMO, it's a regional variant, generally in the South:
since I'm in Atlanta right now, I would not be surprised if I heard it,
especially from older black people.
Occasionally I notice the extra vowel but
just put it down to "lots of English words are pronounced differently
than they're spelled".
[Rick]
English pronunciation is a notorious basket case, for readily understood
historical reasons (being the result of a violent collision between a
dialect of lowland German aka Old English and late Gallic Latin aka
Norman French), but not generally to the point of inventing entire
imaginary syllables.
The Brits , now: They do excruciating things to words, especially
those of French extraction, but also others for which they have no
excuse (Marylebone, lieutenant, Ralph, Worchestershire, Chomondeley)
-- but their sin is generally dropping entire syllables or using odd
but barely logical sounds in them. Not dropping in extra rubbish in a
manner suggesting a whole tribe of people all aping the same dyslexic
and never bothering to check the spelling.
For your amusement, the aforementioned words, in the UK, are pronounced
as follows: Marley-bone[1], left-tenant, Rafe, Wooster-shir, Chumley.
[1] This doesn't seem quite so bad, until you realise that this
placename is a mangled version of "[St.] Mary a le burn", the name of a
chapel that once stood at that site.
Ath-leet and nook-lee-r sound a bit more
formal. But I do switch back and forth with athlete. And herb too, now
that I think about it.
I can imagine an actor playing an uneducated Texan saying, "I don't know
if that newfangled nook-you-lr ree-act-or we got in town is safe." That
sounds uneducated because of the whole sentance. But "nucular" alone
would not sound significant to me; just a variation like tomayto/tomahto
and coyotee/coyote.
[Ben]
Accepted variations tend to be listed in, e.g., Websters; note that
"nucular" is not.
Now if they said "ain't", that'd be a different matter.
[Ben]
That one, along with "an't", is listed in "gcide" and others - and
denoted as "[Colloq. & illiterate speech]".
[Jimmy]
FWIW, I say 'nuke lee ar', but that's still two syllables
('ee ar' is
a common dipthong in Irish).
New clear?
[Jimmy] Oddly enough, I don't generally say 'clear' that way. Hmph.
There's a town near Seattle called Puyallup. Everybody pronounces it
pyoo-AL-up (short a) even though some people claim it's "supposed" to be
poo-YAWL-up. But I had a college friend (from Texas) who used to say as
a joke: "pull-y'all-UP".
[Ramon]
I loved the link in the same thread to this site though:
It archives 438 different types of accents of non-native english speakers
with samples
[Jimmy]
Heh. I tried the Tagalog and Polish samples, because I work with native
speakers of both, and none of the samples sounded anything like the
people I work with. In fairness, though, the samples seem to be of
people who have been speaking English for a fairly long time - the
Polish samples had 'th' sounds (the people I know generally go with 'd'
for the 'th' in 'brother' and 't' or 'f' for the 'th' in 'things' (apart
from one girl, who manages to say 'tf' there)) and the Tagalog samples
have 'f' and 'v' sounds (most of the guys I know can't manage either,
except when they're saying 'for fuck's sake', in which case they say it
with a fairly thick Irish accent
.
From Realtime Interrupt by James Hogan, chapter 5.
[About a virtual reality experiment gone horribly wrong, but in this
scene the protagonist Corrigan is a bartender in Pittsburgh talking to
one of the waitresses Sherri about a customer Delila. Some extraneous
details removed.]
...............
"I don't know how you stand that woman the way you do," Sherri said.
"She's so gross with her 'I've got this' and 'I've got that' all the
time. But you can just stand there and say 'that's nice' like you do.
You'll have to teach me how to do it.
Corrigan smiled wryly. "Oh, that's an old Irish story," he said.
"You'd have no problem if you knew it."
"Well, tell me, then," Sherri invited....
"It's like this," he said. "Two woman are sharing a hospital room in
Dublin, you see. One is from Foxrock. That's south of the city, where
all the money is -- she'd be one of your Delilas. The other's the
complete opposite: bottom end of the social spectrum--what we'd call a
roight auld slag."
"You mean like parts of the South Bronx?"
"Maybe. Anyway, Delila wants to make sure there's no mkstake about who
she is, see. So she says to the other..." Corrigan mimicked a prim
tone: "'Ah, I hope you don't imagine I am accustomed to sharing like
this. Usually, I go to the private wing.'"
He changed to a shrill, coarser accent. "'Oh, yiss?' says the other,
who we'll say was Mary. 'Dat's noice.'
"'I'll have you know,' says Delila, 'that my husband is an extrememly
successful man and takes very good care of me. The last time I was a
patient, he took me on a Carribean cruise to recuperate.'
"'Dat's noice.'
"'And on the occasion before that, he bought me a diamond pendant to
compensate me for the discomfort.'
"'Dat's noice.'
"'Out of curiosity, does your husband show such consideration when
you are confined?'
"'Oh, yiss, o' course 'e does,' says Mary. 'When we 'ad our last one,
'e sent me fer elocution and etiquette lessons.'
"'*What!?* *Elocution?* How would somebody like you even know what
that word means?'
""E did, too. See, at one time, whenever oi 'eard people tellin' me a
load o'buillshit, oi used to tell 'em ter fuck orf. Now oi just smiles
at 'em all proper, like, and oi say, "Dat's noice."'"
...............
[Ramon]
I remember a friend telling me he met a really nice (small & frail looking)
thai lady in Thailand.
However the minute she opened her mouth it became clear she'd married a
englishman and learned her english from him.
Spiegel news
Spiegel news
[Karl-Heinz]
Af far as I can overview the connections between all this:
The Software patents are most successfully lobbied with the European
commission and the Comission is the instance that waved them through.
The EU Parliament was opposed and even in the Comission a recent poll
would not have been in favour of the latest SP draft. The constitution
would strengthen the parliament in comparison to the comission.
