Martin Sutherland #92: So THAT's why "Don't make me type this all again" didn't work for me! Progressive - I guess so, but ungracefully documented.
Rob Rusick #141: Yes, those things are two sides of the same coin.
Typically, I come across a comment starting "Joe Fan #(20 comments back)." To recall / find out what it responds to, I then have to scroll (or use the browser's Find function for the given number/name) to the earlier post, and after reading it find again where exactly I was so I can continue downthread.
Now, a script button to automagically add a link to the replied-to comment's anchor (only a few kind souls even more obsessive than I am bother with coding them manually) means that I can click at the link, getting there instantly, AND when I'm done I just use the browser's Back function, which returns me to the reply. No wandering around, LOTS of time (and mental clarity) saved.
Thirding David Harmon #117 - I've been saying that for a long time: No threading has its merits, but with typical comment number in hundreds one badly needs a way to follow/refresh individual overlapping conversations where replies are separated by 10-20 other comments.
Xopher #193 (or anybody else): What is "...and horns" ending? It sounds interesting, but I haven't been able to google it.
I think even Asimov's plots (by and large, with some exceptions) aren't fine, but far-fetched, artificial and clunky in a way similar to his prose.
Keir #163: If you read Wells out of SF, you don't have SF, you have American engineer literature.
But that's exactly it: When in the mood, I develop the argument that science fiction, certainly the genre SF, is quintessentially American (as founded by the engineer Gernsback and established by JWC) and the social speculations written until 1930es by respected European literary writers were something quite different - certainly in their origin and tradition. However I'm not sure how fruitful such splitting would be.
With all due respect, I don't find 3 that convincing. Brief googling suggests (Wikipedia apparently quoting the Warren Commission Report; I didn't bother to check ad fontes) that the bullet from Oswald's rifle was only 60% faster than sound, and traveling over so short a route that the lag was ca 0.08 s. Any proper conspiracy is able to account for the distance difference from the knoll and synchronize the triggers by radio :-)
Hanlon's razor: Google is a Big Corporation, and thus full of Stupid; Usenet is a marginal issue for them which they don't know how to monetize. The result is an interface which is getting worse by season (and user support that I'm sure will be a large part of my stay in Hell).
Non sequitur dept: After 2 months of Wikipedia holidays (and over four years of activity before that), I was blocked as a part of some "giant sockfarm" sweep. Not being even allowed edit my Talk: page which is the recommended way of "appealing", I had to do with emailing to an address which they say is swamped and not "likely to get a quick response". Good for me for being an obsessive correcter, I guess.
Is that not a hyphen instead of a dash? I'm used to Amazon messing them up, but would not expect it copied at ML.
BTW, what are proper English rules for spacing dashes? And em-, or en-?
A technical note: the "John McCain Detested in Arizona" post at Daily Kos by one AxmxZ (I don't know DK's structure; is that just a reader's blog, or somebody closer to the homepage?) offered as a summary of Amy Silverman's article is - admittedly, of course - "ganked" from "Top Ten Crooked Things About McCain From This Phoenix Alt-Weekly Article" by Wonkette, losing several supplementary links she had inserted, with the only added value being "some people from Arizona whose family is close to the McCains [...] have only this to say about him". Wouldn't it be better, both netiquette- and usability-wise, to link to the original?
Also, let me say I am not impressed by Wonkette's summarizing skills. (Oh well; isn't this kind of implicit in the difference between the two sites?)
(OT technical whining dept: I'd love to have the textarea for comments wide enough for an URL of average length to fit in.)
Chris #77: You're right of course. My seizures of Stupid are getting worse by day (just last week I mistook James T. Farrell for James G. Farrell...). Apologies to all.
Debbie #59: Only, German for eagle is Engel; apparently Egel is just leech in general - no idea where the coincidence comes from.
Fragano Ledgister #3: I am all for annoying Herr Direktor, but was not aware how the diphthong/ligature works to that effect; does he find them isufficiently all-American, or what?
Gabriele #68: I don't think this is peculiar to Russians; it will probably be so with each language that lacks articles - even I still have problems with them.
IME Russians - at least on elementary level - are distinguished be leaving out copulas.
Damit: In all that rewriting, I left out 'Obviously, anything related to Tor.com except "I can't post coments on the site" is offtopic here'
Earl Cooley III #51: I'm not quite a web standards diehard, but curmudgeon enough, to be very much annoyed about those ones that are quite pointless, nonsensical and just plain Wrong - like the doubled TITLE, still not fixed after my Thursday report. I didn't even think of validating CSS; now that I think of it, Tor used to have problems with that, though the worst were fixed and then all was updated to CSS3. (Damit, I still have to write that mail to Subterranean Press; as said on tor.com, I don't see the point of that obsession with XHTML when you're not able to guarantee that, and validity boast footers, although those at least contain the seeds of their own undoing).
To get more ontopic (obviously, anything related to Tor.com "I can't post coments on the site" is offtopic here :-): Gabriele #53, I had no problem with German (except for reading the usual pokes how foolish it is to have girls be "it" etc., and problems learning the genders by heart - I prefer languages where more of the gender is preserved in the ending and not just separated to the article). Actually, the problem was caused by how normal it was for me: Having been exposed only to that, and Slavic languages, and English on the other end of the spectrum, I thought that where there are genders at all, triad is a universal state (being after all so natural, right?), and I was surprised on learning, rather late, that Romance languages miss the neuter. I accepted that - okay, another example of that vulgar simplification going on since the Golden Age and Proto-Indo-European. But when I learned that Dutch merges masculine and feminine together, leaving neuter separately, I boggled a lot.
LWE #13: Without wanting to fan the flames too much (I can agree with #12 that the subjects of vague references can shift even between consecutive sentences, though people's reading of that will vary), I'd like to say that no, "No A is B" does in fact rather strongly imply "(At least) some not-A is B", certainly in the fuzzy logic of natural language with its four maxims of relevance etc (I'm never able to find them on Wikipedia when I need them) and for most ordinary values of B; both generally and in this particular example and context. Otherwise there's no reason to connect the two at all and not to say just "there is no B".
And back to on-topic, PNH's (original) links: It is well known that Google is a service provider directory that links users to an online location. - actually, I had no idea!
Allen Varney #95: bartkid also used a wrong link, anchored to a Disch quote deep in comments at the BoingBoing post, linked here above; but in his defense I must say that their layout, here aggravated by the huge cover at the top left corner of the blockquote, doesn't make it easy to distinguish the quoted and original BB text.
sherrold #91: I've done what I could (unlike the usual flurry at the biographical articles, the only previous post-death edit was a bot; the Jonas NYT review is interesting) under a hour with a failing connection and having not read the book. You see... well, it's a long story:
M. D. apparently made it so big that it was even translated into Czech in 1993; I recall good reviews, but never read it myself.
I got hold of a battered copy of Camp Concetration some 8 years ago (when doing my military service :-) and honestly tried to like it; I remember very little (except the bit of A Litany in Time of Plague which finally explained to me where all those "Brightness Falls from the Air" come from, complete with a translation that jumped into my head full-formed), I think I was impressed by some bits but disappointed in the end. It happens often to me that I don't get literary SF that I should by all accounts like. Would it be better/different if I reread it now, I wonder?
Still, I bought a not too cheap Fundamental Disch when I had the chance to raid a good second-hand bookshop on a trip abroad; I never got around to actually reading it but came across it a few months ago looking for another title and leafed through it, thinking I really should find the time.
I saw the recent edition of 334 (plus other titles?) in an import bookshop couple of years ago; it was appropriately expensive. And yesterday, when I went to appraise for a friend and ended up buying myself (rather more expensively than I should have, oh well) the collection of a dying SF writer and translator of 1970s-80s generation, I found 334 there. I think I'll take it as an omen.
#72 May 16, 2008, 05:15 AM plus two more in "(view all by)" - that it's confused and in Cyrillic doesn't mean it isn't Evil.
JimR #19 (and partially also Bruce Baugh #28): Please tell me this was some kind of especially fine irony, or at least that you haven't read the paragraph just below Barr's picture.
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