angus77

I would've thought it'd be the other way around. Why would you bother with a text editor if you're not motivated enough to learn how to type?

In all three systems, it is both written and spoken year-month-day, which was the point.

Kōki is not used by anyone with a straight face in this day and age.

"Mikado Heisei" is an extremely uncommon way to refer to the emperor. "帝平成" gets 724 hits on Google, and "Mikado Heisei" gets 6, in 5 different languages---the first of which is your post above. Even the Japanese-language wikipedia page on him doesn't use the word "帝" anywhere.

No, the second one would be written:

He said, "I've been outside."

That's the way it's not only written, but spoken in Japanese.

If the period is part of the quote, it would be inside the quote, as in `He said, "Hello there."' I thought the article made that pretty clear. Certainly nobody argued for two periods.

Of course it would be easy to "discover" the Pythagorean theorem if you went back in time---you already know it.

Now, go back in time and <em>take away all your knowledge</em> (and the knowledge that there was a theorom to be discovered in the first place) and see how easy it would be for you to discover that theorom.

The roomful of lawyers and lobbyists aren't the ones who get to pass the law. If you're Canadian then you likely know that a Harper/Conservative majority would love to ram this stuff through, whereas the other parties aren't so inclined. Given that we've had minority governments (a foreign concept to Americans) for the last three elections, a few votes can actually sway things quite a bit in this election.

I'd be voting against the Conservatives in this election if it weren't for the fact that my right to vote has been taken away from me since I haven't resided in Canada for longer than 5 years. So much for "citizenship". http://www.letcanadiansvote.com

Edit: Someone seems to have assumed I'm not Canadian. I am. I've got Loyalists and Quebecois for ancestors. My family's been in Canada since before there was a country called Canada. Nor do I have dual citizenship (although my children do).

Where does complicated come into it? Didn't Beethoven write his Fifth just to show that complicated was utterly beside the point?

Actually, I think you took the quote far too literally. Dylan was merely trying to say that Beethoven was the better composer, not that he would have literally written "Tambourine Man" or something similar.

Could we get a citation? This is the absolute first I've heard someone claim that Stallman's actual said such a thing (aside from people who are obviously just making things up).

"If I want to release my software under a BSD licence, it's not free software because RMS doesn't think it is."

I thought the FSF had publicly stated that BSD licenses were compatible with the GPL, and thus "Free" software. I wouldn't be surprised if rms wished the software were more free (in his sense of the word), but I don't recall him ever saying it wasn't free.

<quote>rms wants you to write code for free, give it away for free and never ask for any money if anyone uses it.</quote>

Given that Stallman used to charge $200 for tapes of Emacs, I gotta wonder how you come to this conclusion.

I don't doubt it, but if you think Stallman is interested in a product because it's "better" than another product then you really don't know what Stallman's values are at all. Stallman's not objecting to it on the grounds of it being poor software, nor is he making the claim that it is poor software.

If someone's on a diet and refuses to eat chocolate because that would be against the point of the diet, countering with "I think you should try it---it tastes so good" completely misses the point.

I pretty much agreed with everything except the ridiculous idea that Stallman should try out Google Docs so he could see how "good" it is.

If you're talking in terms of technical skill, sure. If you're talking in terms of quantity of quality output, that's not quite so indisputable. You're not suggesting we're awash in 'Fur Elise's, are you?

I hope you're not trying to suggest the community was trying to extort Oracle.

I always thought it should be the opposite---paying bribes should be illegal, but accepting them legal. It would be like collecting a reward for turning in the briber.

I couldn't believe how many hits I was getting for this from Google. I was sure it had to be the real thing...then I realized that pretty much every page was copy & pasted from Android Police...

It's the afternoon of April 2nd where I am already!

When I want emacs to be fast & light I just do emacs -Q.

I haven't heard that one, but there's a similar one in the Frank Zappa Book about the song "Montana". He wrote a song about dental floss, yet people's teeth didn't get cleaner.

Funny, I googled for it and only got hits for "Seche - The World's Finest Top Coat", "SECHE - Sioux Empire Christian Home Educators", translations of the French word sèche, seche.net blogfolio...only after googling "seche lakes" did I get any hits---two. The first of which used the spelling "seiche" 54 times and "seche" once. I do believe that qualifies as a typo.

Anyways, wikiing "seche" won't even get you a helpful pointer in the right direction. So for those, like me, who wanted to know what one of those things was, Wikipedia's got a good page on it under "seiche".

It saves a lot of headaches for people googling or wikiing for a word if you spell it correctly for them. The word is "seiche".

I've heard that a big earthquake hits the Ottawa Valley every century-and-a-half or so that the people there are totally unprepared for, but tsunamis? C'mon now, if a tsunami was big enough to hit Ontario, I think the tsunami would probably be the least of our worries---I think we'd be looking at The End Of The World.

I wonder how many people returning lost goods actually claim the 5-20% they're entitled to. I lost my bag once (with my wallet in it). I went to the police box closest to the area where I'd lost it, and of course they had it. Someone had picked it up and turned it in. The officer I talked to explained to me that the finder was entitled to a percentage, but had checked a box on the form waiving the finder's fee.

And to be honest, I don't think I'd claim anything either if I turned in someone's wallet.

Last year I left a job I had for 5 1/2 years where I had to do speeches and presentations right, left and centre. You get used to it---even "skilled" at it. People praise you for your presentation skills; sometimes they even ask for advice.

Being chummy with people afterwards didn't get one iota easier, though.

More likely the company would change him from inside.

What was that even supposed to mean?

"Shlimazl" sounds to me like it could be translated pretty easily into Japanese: 「ついていない」. The phrase uses no noun, though, so would that disqualify it?

I get sick of hearing foreigners going on about how there's no translation of the word "should" in Japanese. Well, yes, there isn't a word for "should in Japanese. The concept behind the word is conveyed through a grammatical construct, however; not having "a word" for "should" doesn't impede a Japanese from expressing "shouldness" in the least.

Piraha is a language that people love to bring up in these kinds of discussions. You should keep in mind, though, that what's been said about the language (and culture) are not without controversy.

This looks good, too. I especially like the fact that it tells which words are "Common word"s.