Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Maybe their eagles (Score 1) 155

On first parse 'their' looked like a mistaken 'they're' and the subject of the second part remains a mystery. Who are 'they' who are going too far? The eagles?

Remember kids, whilst first post will earn you great kudos for about ten minutes, you need to be certain it's a valid sentence.

Comment Re:Fermi Paradox (Score 1) 70

Where are all the aliens? They're just like us - stuck in their gravity wells trying to find economic ways to travel vast distances quickly, as well as trying to replicate their planet's environment on a spaceship. We already know that life needs volatile chemicals to exist - otherwise space would be teeming with life.

Comment Re:The obvious questions (Score 1) 213

> Who gets to decide what is, and is not, a crime? Will anything be a crime, and under what statute? How much will the "crime patrol" cost? In other words, it's a combination of the police, the justice system and elected representatives. Just like every other act that causes enough distress amongst others to be considered a "crime".

Comment Re:why is it programmes (sic)? (Score 3, Interesting) 104

There's an interesting tale behind the word "programme" and its use to describe television or radio shows.

When TV & radio listings were first printed regularly in the (London) Times in the 1930s, the listings were headed thus: "Television and Radio Programmes". But if you read news reports on the topic you'd see that "programme" was used in its traditional sense, i.e. this is a list of the programme of events. The individual shows they struggled to give a name to, as "show" or "series" hadn't gained wide usage (new technology after all).

But eventually that heading stuck and people interpreted it to mean "programmes" as in "a list of programmes on today". So programme gradually gained traction in the UK as the term for an individual edition of a show. Well into the 60s the Times was still heading its listings in the same way, and by then the term was in widespread use.

Of course in later years, the computer program would come into being, and as much of the theory and early development came from the USA, their spelling stuck when describing a set of instructions interpreted by a computer. That almost goes back to the original meaning of a distinct set of events addressed as a whole. But it means that in the UK we are now saddled with "program" to describe a set of computer instructions and "programme" to describe a single edition of a TV or radio show (and indeed a magazine sold at music concerts or sports events, or a set of individual events combined to make a programme).

I'm not sure but I don't think "program" is used heavily in the US to describe TV shows, and it's an interesting example of how new technology can change the use of long-established words, even in just one part of the English-speaking world.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Working...