Comment old? (Score 2) 157
Why "Good-old Gregorian" when it's actually the newest of the specific options?
Why "Good-old Gregorian" when it's actually the newest of the specific options?
From the article:
Most drivers were forced to read their owner's manual to learn how to access their manual key, Camara said.
Is it possible the problem was not simply unlocking the door, but starting the car? My car has a physical key. That physical key contains an RFID or something. I have a duplicate of the metal portion of the key. This duplicate can unlock the door just fine, but when placed in the ignition, the car refuses to start. If the RFID portion of my key were to fail, I would have no idea how to start my car.
Not getting into the car is only one issue. The second issue is the problem with the chip in the key for anti theft immobolization.
It would be hilarious if the tow trucks used to remove the stranded cars had the same type of anti-theft system.
But lacking that, "he" is still the correct word because in the English language "he" is both a third-person pronoun referring to "a particular person who is a man" and a third-person pronoun referring to "a person of unknown gender". This is why people who use the pronoun "she" to demonstrate their "cultural sensitivity" are just confusing, because they have forced a gender specificity on the antecedent when none really exists.
I suspect we have this problem because of how gender-neutral English is. Only our pronouns express gender, and then, only when talking about people. In many languages, all nouns have (arbitrary) gender. And pronouns tend to take the gender of the noun they replace. In some languages, even the verb conjugation changes, depending upon the gender of the subject. I suspect that a speaker of a highly-gendered language would take less concern over which gender-pronoun is used when describing an indeterminate person.
Of course, by the same logic, a metal key is easily defeated with a small (but strong) highly adhesive sticker over the keyhole (or just some crap shoved into the lock if you're feeling really mean), whereas a remote entry device has no such limitation. Or a minor physical imperfection in the key itself, of course. Silly arguments work both ways, you know. This isn't a problem in the real world because most people are good most of the time.
My current car has one physical external keyhole. I find this very annoying. Sure, it's quite rare I need to use the key in an keyhole besides the driver's side door, but it's nice to have a backup just in case.
In my previous car, in the winter, my driver's side lock would sometimes freeze up. So I'd just walk over to the passenger side door, and unlock that. Once both locks were frozen, but I still managed to get in thanks to the hatchback.
Novice programmers are simply overwhelmed by vast amounts of code, and have no idea how to do large-scale software development.
When you teach them about tools that allow you to find your way through the code, they're all impressed.
Universities simply aren't teaching these boys right.
This!!!
In my first job out of college, I was introduced to Eclipse for the first time. In college, I did all my developing in vi. Seriously, why did not a single professor even mention an IDE to me?
Is there a way to limit the number of backers allowed to back a project? If not, there should be.
Let's say I'm an inventor. I can easily build 1,000 of my widgets in a month. The only problem is I don't have enough funds to buy the components. So I get a bunch of packers, problem solved. But then I get so many backers that I need to produce 10,000 widgets in a month. That means I need to hire help to assemble them. My skill is in inventing -- I don't know how to find the best workers. I don't know how to train them well.
Ideally, funding should stop after I've reached the 1,000 widgets in a month. After a month of successfully making widgets, I should have enough profit to invest in making more (assuming demand exists). Then I can start looking into what I need to do in order to grow my production facility. I should not have to deal with these huge growing pains at the very start of it all. That can easily lead to a premature failure.
Communication is challenging because Chinese and English are completely different. Why do we expect him to do a better job learning Chinese than the Chinese developers did of learning English, even though they had a lot more incentive to do so?
Think of it this way -- imagine you're working with Chinese developers. You communicate entirely in English. Occasionally, they make grammatical mistakes, or form awkward sentences that are hard to understand. If you know some Chinese, you'll at least have an idea of how their grammar works. This will give you surprising insight into the nature of their English mistakes, and will actually help you to understand them better, even though nobody has uttered a single word in Chinese.
If he communicates something very clearly in English, they're at fault if they mess up. If he tries to speak Chinese, there's a good chance that he'll eventually get blamed. [...] That being said, learning another language can be a valuable experience. Just don't expect it to be useful on the job.
Here's a small example of where a second language was useful to me. I was writing a program to interface with a particular device. Getting the specs was a ridiculously challenging task, and when I finally got them, they were in German. I was dealing with an American company, but apparently, their office in Germany had designed this particular device.
Fortunately, I'd taken a few German classes in college. Even though I was far from fluent, it was enough that I could understand the spec well enough to decode its RS-232 messages.
Sure, if I didn't have any German experience, I could have paid a translator. Or (had it been available at the time) could have gotten by with something like translate.google.com. But, at least for one single day, my foreign language experience paid off.
"miles" (totally unrelated to any scientific measurement and varying wildly from county to county)
The international pound and mile treaty defines the yard as exactly 0.9144 meter.
One mile is defined as 1760 yards.
Crude? Perhaps. But this does give the mile a precise scientific definition.
1. Find a museum willing to house this collection
2. Start a fund raiser on the museum's behalf to raise the asking price of the collection.
3. Win: the original collector gets compensated for his collection, the and the collection gets preserved in a museum.
I don't know what it is that makes people hold on to outdated ideas, even when the new idea has clear superiority. (Actually, I have no strong opinion on the dollar issue, but that's probably because nearly all of my purcahses are with a credit card.)
Unless slashdot is using a different definition of "news" than I am, something that happened 90 years ago isn't news.
"Originally, that was intended to be destroyed. But I think this (shelter) will be so impressive that even in 100 years people will come to look at it,"
Yeah, sure:
"Honey, let's go take the kids near that radioactive site that was they covered by a shelter some guys build a 100 years ago"
Seriously...?
I agree, that the shelter itself won't be nearly that exciting as a piece of architecture. But people will continue to visit it. Heck, I vacationed in Kiev not long ago, and made a point to also visit Chernobyl / Prypiat.
My sister has a BS and MS. I have a BS... but I took the same amount of time to earn that BS as she did her BS and MS. So we spent the same amount of time in school.... which one of us has more education?
"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry
