The same way in my state it is illegal to charge extra for a credit card transaction, but not illegal to offer a discount for using cash. Thus, the "cash price" vs "credit price" at gas stations...

As do I, though I have taken a few linguistic courses as well. In any case, 'layman interests' is exactly what Wikipedia is for. I sent you to the specific section of the page which answers your question, unlike your relativity example which is the top level page of something I did not express any interest in (to you). If you don't care enough to read the Wikipedia article, being that you're an AC, I'm not sure you're worth answering anyway.

If you must know *why* I think it is that great, The part I linked to is where it explains that the design of the letters is based on the position of the mouth when making the sound. The other reason it is that there's only a handful of "letters" but they group together to form blocks. Each block makes a complete syllable (so that it flows naturally when reading) but unlike other phonetic alphabets such as Kana, you do not need to memorize every possible block to learn to read / write, just the component letters and the positioning cues.

Or, I have better things to do than read slashdot 3 hours after posting?

In any case, here is the relevant section of the wikipedia article on Hangul, which does a far better job at explaining than I can.

Now go back under your rock, troll.

Everyone uses / used the Chinese alphabet because they were "first past the post" in the region, not because the Chinese at one point owned it all.

The Japanese learned it when they sent scholars to learn in China. They then proceeded to improve on it by making simpler alphabets (Kana) so that it did not take 10 years of dedicated study to learn enough to read/write a shopping list.

The Koreans acquired the writing system through Buddhism, and they too decided to improve on it and made Hangul (IMO the most efficient and logical alphabet in the world).

The Vietnamese also borrowed it, but managed to so badly screw the writing system up while trying to improve on it that they gave up on their version and picked up the Roman alphabet from the Portuguese instead.

You might want to learn to read usernames; I'm not the GP.

And unless you have a ", MD" after your name, you have no more qualification to discuss this than the rest of us, so why don't you take your profanity laced drivel and shove it up your ass.

Of course not, but let me put it in sysadmin terms:
System a is having a problem
System b with a slightly different configuration is avoiding the problem

When trying to solve the "problem" the normal way (Documentation, Google) fails usually you start making "a" look more like "b" until the problem goes away. Or are you saying that finding a working example of what you are trying to accomplish is not extremely valuable?

That's what we do with Oracle and we're actually doing pretty well with them. We only let them build the dev environment, train our staff, and create documentation. The other environments are built entirely by the people they trained using the documentation provided, and once we are confident we can rebuild the system even if Oracle vanished off the face of the earth, we send the consultants on their way. This approach should be done with *any* vendor though.

The config overwriting used to annoy me as well, but the universal solution is to chattr +i the file that keeps getting overwritten. There's often an added bonus that whatever keeps overwriting it generates an error logged to the console or syslog whenever it tries again, providing a nice breadcrumb to figure out what's overwriting it.

Maybe they were doing it wrong but it was easy to get freecell to run by copying the .exe into a different folder and calling it notepad.exe...

1/2: It's more expensive and behind schedule *because* of the red tape and NIMBYism.
3: Certainly feasible, considering they built highways to connect these same cities. Also, it will be popular considering the pokey slow train and megabuses that connect the same cities sell out regularly.
4: You know that the money would never go to that purpose. And in 20 years when this thing is finally done, the cost of air travel will undoubtedly have gone up. So what you are essentially arguing here is that the poor should be priced out of speedy transportation within their own state.

A *properly run* government office will use the work from home days and other perks that are not in the union contract as incentives to keep employees working at a decent pace. If they have to re-apply for those perks every quarter, and poor performance means denial, people won't slack.

Some places will use desk locations and shift hours as other motivators... to find the competent employees, look for the ones with a desk by the window or who's hours begin before 8.

I recall one small agency had an entire floor where they sent all of the problem employees, assigned to do only unrewarding repetitive work. Work that provided no useful or transferable experience. Bad managers were sent there to manage the bad employees. They even had a few nicknames for the floor, names that when spoken would immediately get a slacker back to work.

Bottom line: creativity is required on management's part but as long as there is wiggle room, what happened at the USPTO can be prevented without any drastic changes to the actual rules.

Similar anecdote here, but a DOT engineer in our state was forced out when he complimented his agency on their response to a major storm. After the (predictable) public outcry, along with some lawyers offering to take up the case as he may not have even violated the rules, they doubled-down on ruining this guy's life by revealing things from his past disciplinary record that had already been addressed in order to try and vilify him in the press.

Moral: Even if you have only nice and helpful things to say, don't say anything at all.

Your taxes will pay for a road somewhere that you are not using. Similarly, while you wouldn't use *your own* hotspot's free wifi, you could use someone else's while away from home, and they could use yours.