Sure, but I think it would be hilarious if the "voice recognition" was just a bunch of people sitting in a call center with headphones.
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JimFive

So, I imagine the 3rd party is like a big call center with a bunch of people in it. When you say the activation phrase, "OK TV" it connects your tv to somebody's terminal and they hear you say your commands "Channel 20, volume medium" and they push the remote control buttons on their terminal for you. (You're call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes, and general hilarity).
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JimFive

Did you know that the US Treasury knowingly creates a mechanism for [criminals] to anonymously exchange goods for value? Should all of their employees be convicted?

Ok, so that's a bit silly, but my point is that creating a system that can be used to facilitate crime isn't necessarily the same thing as committing a crime. In this case it appears that he also used his service to commit crimes which makes it less ambiguous.
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JimFive

You are concerned about your wife's ability to teach your child. Well, what has she taught so far? Can your child read? Add? If not, why does your wife think she's going to be able to teach those things now? If so, then what are you worried about?
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JimFive

Actually, standard English is fine with that because the "." character inside your quote is not a period. A period is a specific mark used to indicate the end of a sentence. the dot inside your quote, while it looks like a period is actually a symbol representing the current directory and is not a punctuation mark. Likewise, in your previous example, the period is not part of the quote so it goes outside the quote marks.

The point of punctuation is to reduce ambiguity and usage that achieves that is generally correct. I almost always punctuate outside the quotes when quoting and inside the quotes when writing dialog.
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JimFive

I'm going to slightly disagree about the motivation of drive-by wiki editing. If I'm reading a wikipedia entry and notice a problem (awkward phrasing, incorrect usage, comma usage, etc.) I might fix it, that's kind of the point of a wiki. It isn't, at least in my case, meant to be condescending; it's meant to be helpful.

Also, I've never thought of neither...nor... as archaic it just sounds better to me, so I might fix neither..or if I saw it.
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JimFive

I find it humorous that you think a jar of pasta sauce is anything other than "preprocessed crap".
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JimFive

This is true, but I suspect that there is some sort of money involved in being classified as "broadband" by the FCC and that money is the reason that Verizon and Cable companies don't want to be defined as not broadband. If that's true, then this is the mechanism that the FCC has to encourage companies to improve their network speeds.
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JimFive

No, "Innocent until proven guilty" also applies in civil trials. "Preponderance of evidence" vs. "Reasonable Doubt" is a statement of what certainty is required to establish that guilt.
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JimFive

Great post and thanks for the explanation. I do have one nitpick, though

The equation does not govern the expansion, the equation describes or models the expansion. In the same way that the map is not the territory, the math is not the universe.

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JimFive

Eliminate, no. But they could do a lot to alleviate it if they would actually investigate incidents instead of falling back on "zero tolerance" rhetoric that punishes the victim of bullying when they finally lose it and fight back. Additionally, these are minors in a school, they're supposed to monitored most of the time. If long term bullying is happening at the school and the school doesn't know about it then it is probably because they don't want to know. Online bullying within the school could be monitored just as all network communication can be monitored. However, off-site, including off-network, bullying isn't really within the purview of the school and the school can't and shouldn't be trying to get in the middle of it, that's up to the parents and, ultimately, the police depending on the escalation of events.
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JimFive

You realise that leaving all your lights off and letting your neighbors know you're gone is more secure, right? If a light comes on then your neighbors know there is something wrong. With automatic lights your neighbors just ignore it.

(This, of course, assumes that you trust your neighbors.)
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JimFive

I think this is where the problem lies. In the US, if you are not within a city then there is no "local council" that deals with these issues. These HOAs are basically built on subdivided farm land that isn't under the jurisdiction of a city. Hence the HOA is the "solution" to dealing with unruly neighbors.

That said, HOAs are de facto local governments and should be held to the same standards as other local governments, including incorporation of Constitutional Rights. Any civil rights lawyers up for a long, drawn out, unpaid, fight?
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JimFive

Sorry, $200,000 still not enough to pay for content (that's about 3 full time people).

2 cents per page view for 10 million views is a whopping $100,000. That is not anywhere near enough to pay for a year of content.
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JimFive