Great idea! Now we all only need to agree on which language to standardize on. I'm sure that worldwide discussion will be calm, focused and productive. Please post the results here in the thread once it's been decided.

I suggest Swedish. It's just about equally well known by almost everybody in the world, so nobody is starting out with an unfair advantage. I get a lifetime gig teaching Swedish to everybody. And you get umlauts! Win-win.

Oh, and by "suggest" I of course mean "absolutely demand or I will refuse any part of this scheme".

This is cool for a project I am working on. I plan to see if I can create a .com that will do business transactions. I need no latency but at the same time require ACID to ensure each transaction will be written to disk :-(

My Idea is to have no sql and sql databases where something like this will do the transactions to ACID.

And in 1...2...3...

Cue all the math junkies who claim that there is "proof" you can't hear the difference between 44.1/16 bit audio streams and higher quality rates like 192/24 or analogue. Because the math "prooves" that thousands upon thousands of people who claim to hear a difference are "delusional liars."

I am neither delusional nor a liar. I hear the difference. It's clear as night and day.

I disagree completely. Good science fiction has never been about the technology, but about human and alien personalities and moral questions brought about by the technology. Good science fiction explores interpersonal relationships, character traits, philosophical stances, and other such subject matter.

The science fiction of the mid-late '80s made good movies because the directors and script writers were selecting stories with deep connotations, instead of viewing them with an eye towards turning them into CGI action flicks emphasizing trivia like "the technology" instead of the plot.

There is still a tremendous amount of good science fiction written over the years that would make terrific movies. But hollywood won't back those "risks" -- they're too busy investing in action movies pretending to be science fiction. There are exceptions to that, but for the most part you know it's true: hollywood doesn't want to discuss morality, philosophy, and personal interactions in a script. They want a nice "safe" piece of pablum that will make audiences go "ooh" and "aah" over the mindless special F/X, not cause them to think for themselves.

I still use an Ipod Gen5 with RockBox, because a) it works and b) I get to use an open source firmware, which means I don't have to worry about whether $BIG_VENDOR has bothered to support OGG/FLAC/etc files.

Admittedly technology is moving on, but from the standpoint of a device that does one thing and does it well the older Ipods with RockBox do just fine. Why upgrade just for the heck of it?

Heck, i've still got an old iRiver T30 tucked away somewhere that takes AA batteries, which I'm not inclined to get rid of either... small, functional, and does the job.

As computer technology matures, hopefully we'll start to see at least some boutique shops crop up whose goal is to make the IBM Model M keyboard equivalent of things like music players - I'd gladly pay a premium for a device engineered to last 30 years instead of 3.

The problem has been the same since the PC first came out: users can "do things" with a PC/laptop/smartphone/tablet and think that "doing things" makes them an expert on IT. So when they come up with a "great idea for a new application", they can not and will not fathom the fact that it can take months or years to implement, is going to cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, and will be obsolete before it ever hits production due to changing business needs.

There is no cure for the "wisdom" of people who tell you how to do your job, or how their 14 year old nephew could write the application in a few weeks. They've made up their mind that you're just a lazy SOB trying to milk the company for money and a cushy job, and will never, ever, ever understand just how much effort goes into security, design, testing, porting, etc. To them, everything is "easy."

The real problem is that companies let such users and managers make business decisions based on "their gut instinct" instead of properly planned and projected schedules. Because heaven forbid you should ever tell the marketting manager that he can't have his shiny Sharepoint solution because it doesn't provide anything useful to the company that can't be accomplished with a properly organized set of folders on a shared drive/server somewhere.

No, they're the ones who sign for the budgets, and they're the ones who like the "shiny", so you're the one who gets stuck trying to make the shiny work with all the line of business systems that are actually important to the operation of the business.

And if you even hint that you can't do it, well, there's a company overseas that's promising to do it in a month as an offshore service, so you're fired.

Which, in a nutshell, is how the bean counters and their ilk get away with their bad business decisions: they constantly hold the threat of offshoring and termination over your head to beat Mr. IT into submission.

I play D&D and plan to get one to print custom game pieces / figures. Maybe even dice.

I get the lame joke but Win8 has no problem doing this as well.

"except in response to events and information"

Artificial Intelligence does not imply volition. I know of no reason to expect an early AI to have a will or to come up with results expect in response to events and information it's designed to respond to. While some might try to simulate the volition of a live entity, I do not feel it's necessary to include such a component in order to qualify something as an Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence just means artificial thought about something. Sufficient understanding of the subject matter to reach conclusions and produce outputs relevant to what is known or implied. Creativity and volition are another kettle of fish entirely.

Well, I'd disagree. It certainly is a digraph, since all that means is that it's two letters that together represent a sound or sounds different from the usual sounds represented by each letter. Since 'c' rarely represents /t/ in English, and 'h' rarely represents what we usually write as 'sh', the sequence 'ch' represents a sound different from "tsh", and thus satisfies the definition of "digraph".

As for diphthong, I can see how one might stretch the term to cover it, but it's a real stretch. The term "diphthong" normally means a sequence of two sounds, typically a sequence that acts like a phoneme in the language. "ch" sorta does this, but the stretchiness comes from the fact that neither of those two sounds are usually represented by 'c' or 'h'. We accept "i" as a diphthong in words like "I" or "time", but it's partly because the phoneme /i/ is one of its two sounds; the initial /a/ is simply not written. Similarly, a "long O" in English typically means an /ou/ or /ow/ sequence, and again the main use of 'o' is included (but the second sound isn't written). The spelling "tsh" would qualify as a trigraph for the main "ch" sound in English, and with that spelling, it would represent a diphthong. But for "ch", it doesn't quite work. It's really an example of the other use of the letter 'h', meaning "a sound sorta like the previous letter's sound, but somewhat different. But this doesn't work, either, because what's the normal sound of 'c'? It's usual either /s/ or /k/, not /t/.

But my main objection is that, in a sense, we're both wrong. English spelling is insane and perverse, and no attempts to apply precise meanings to any written sequence can really be correct. If English had had spelling reforms like all the other European languages have had over the past couple of centuries, we could make meaningful statements about spelling. But this never happened, and any attempt to tie spelling to pronunciation in English is bound to merely make one look foolish. We're not only OT in this thread, but we're arguing about something that can never be analyzed sensibly in English.

My favorite suggestion re this situation (and I've forgotten who first suggested it) is that, since English has become much of the world's de facto international language, the roughly 95% who aren't native speakers should gang up on the English-speaking minority. An international conference for revising English spelling should be formed, or perhaps now it should be an organization built around a web site. That organization should work out a reasonable phonetic writing system for English. The supporting nations should declare that writing system to be their standard for English, with software to transliterate between it and the various "standard" English spellings used by native speakers in different countries. With time, they could overpower the insanity of current English spelling.

But it's clear that this ain't gonna happen any time soon.

(As a native speaker of English, I'd support such an effort. So if some victims of their English-as-a-second-language class want to organize it, I'd be willing to lend at least my moral support. But as a native speaker of English, I'm probably not qualified to organize it. ;-)

Yeah, some of us are. But it's not clear how a mere citizen can do anything effective about it without becoming one of the victims ourselves.

You are referring to the islamists you funded and trained in your war against the soviets, right ?

Of course Hitler won. He won the moment the same antihumanist ideas that formed most of his ideology were also adopted by your very own top social class and government executives back in the 1920s and 1930s.

Look at the names of the founders and forefront proponents of every "population control" organisation that arised back then, and read what they wrote, it's all the same: the focal point is about exterminating and/or sterilizing the "genetically inferior races" and the "feeble-minded", at an industrial scale, in order to "improve" the human race "stock" and preserve its natural environment from overuse and exhaustion.

Then look at the conditions enforced on third-world countries in exchange for foreign US aid and world bank aid back in the 60s and 70s: programs of mass (often forced) sterilisations for the poor populations, that were done in unsanitary conditions.

The nazis have won, and today they're in charge of most of your foreign aid programs and environmental protection programs, they have been exterminating for decades, they still are at it right now.

The oil industry wants you to burn petrochemicals instead. It is more profitable and less of it than Methane.