Aiglet: "That" is restrictive, "which" is not. Or, explained more fully: the construct "A that is B" is distinguishing a subset of A that is B from a subset of A that is not B, and referring specifically to the former subset. The construct "A, which is B" (note the comma difference as well) is merely noting that the A being referred to is B.
Thus, "Use the car, which is green" means that the context has already limited things to one car, and I'm telling you it's green. "Use the car that is green" means that there are many cars you could use, and I'm telling use to use the green one.
Or, at least, that's how it was taught to me.
P.S. Teresa: the second-to-last word in your post should be "doing", or possibly "doin'", not "doin".
Jules: Eric's not talking about an error in the total as stored as the "single figure stored for each location". He's talking about errors between the stored number and what was in the provisional, non-official, state tally (and on the "election results" pages) for that location.
(For the details on what actually happened, see Dana's comment, ninth from the top -- we don't need to speculate.)
In other words, the voting machine's data cartridge was sitting there with "115" on it, and somehow that mutated into "4008" when the cartridge was first read. The recount would involve going back to all the voting machines (including that one), rereading the data cartridges, comparing them to the records on the machine itself -- and that one did provide reasonable numbers that matched the machine's "memory banks" when reread -- and retallying them. According to the article, that sort of doublechecking is a standard part of the process of producing the official tally; it doesn't only happen when something obviously strange shows up.
I think that the twenty-stars idea is ... well, quite frankly, atrocious.
I voted in Virginia. I, and a very substantial fraction (though sadly not a majority) of my fellow citizens of that commonwealth, voted for John Kerry.
I would appreciate not being excluded from your brave newly-divided view of the country. While the geographic line may appear fierce and hard in the electoral college, it is not such a thing on the ground.
I think having been a Red Sox fan is good training for this sort of waiting and watching. There are things that one learns must be kept in mind:
Maybe this will finally be the year it works. It could happen.
But it's not over until it's over, and even then you have to ask, "There's no way the Sox could be up 4-0 and still lose the Series, is there?" They might could.
For whatever it's worth, I couldn't get online this evening until I'd cleared out a couple of messages on my voicemail (this is the usual thing; the dial tone "flashes" when there are new messages, and the modem doesn't like it) from the Republican Party. This is also as usual -- we've received quite a number of phone messages from the Republican party, or otherwise urging us to vote Republican. (Can they really think that urging me to vote my conscience or for family values will cause me to vote the way they'd like?)
The ones tonight were both were emphasizing that they desperately needed my vote. I certainly do hope that they're right.
Argh. Sorry. I didn't realize that had double-posted.
I shall now, however, stop acknowledging the possiblity of defeat.
Oh, fudge; the announcers are starting to take it for granted.
I, like Teresa, acknowledge the possiblity of Red Sox defeat. I would like this noted by whatever deities are relevant.
Oh, fudge; the announcers are starting to take it for granted.
I, like Teresa, acknowledge the possiblity of Red Sox defeat. I would like this noted by whatever dieties are relevant.
Steve Taylor -
Since this has become a thread about grammar peeve-pets and suchlike, I must put in my Stock Rant #41. The name is E. E. Cummings. As per not only his usual signature, but his instructions to editors on how he wanted things done. The "e. e. cummings" silliness is an absurdity largely promulgated by a posthumous editor who should have known better.
(Detailed reference here and followup here)
JvP - That's why it's a good idea for programs like that to dump state-files every so often, so that you can restart from the last file rather than the beginning.
Also, things like that don't have to slow down your computer. I'm sure you know about "nice" in Unix/Linux machines (and probably in OS/X as well), but you may not know you can do the same in Windows -- you can set the priority of processes deep in the task manager (specifically, by right-clicking on the process in the process list -- not the application list), and if you give your process a "below normal" priority, it only uses the CPU's free time -- not time it would otherwise be using for "normal" things like the browser.
I'm with Tracina here, technological arguments notwithstanding.
Part of this is that the message headers are constrained by technical formality and displayed in a format that's at the whim of the email program; the usage of names within the message body is considerably more personal and immutable. And the use of names in the message body is also an assurance that the sender didn't accidentally click on the wrong item and address the email to the wrong person.
Beyond that, if it's business email, it may well get forwarded on to someone else, and in that case putting the names in the email is much more likely to ensure that they remain attached once things get forwarded a bit.
Finally, I'd argue that the technological arguments aren't particularly accurate anyhow. The email "envelope" that gets discarded is not something that either the sender or recipient sees; it's irrelevant. On the other hand, when someone is reading a letter for the first time -- and how many emails are akin to the sort of letter one would reread, anyhow? -- they do in fact see the paper envelope before reading the letter proper.
Does anyone have really nifty shelving/bookcase/storage system ideas for serious book lovers? I live in a wood framed house with drywall (the bane of my not-so-handyman existence) and wooden floors, and have always wanted to install some serious shelving but am intimidated by the prospect of completely ruining my home.
Oooh! Wooden floors!
All our books are on standalone bookshelves, and the padded carpeted floors are the bane of their existence. Made worse by the fact that the carpet is attached to tack-strips around the edges, which means that the shelves are effectively sitting on hard wood strip at the back and soft padding at the front, and need all sorts of shims to avoid tipping over. With wood floors, you'll avoid that sort of problem.
Anyhow, the best bookshelves I've found for reasonable prices are, of course, ones I've made myself. The pattern was fairly simple; three sheets of 3/4" oak plywood, to make a pair of 49"-wide 75"-tall bookshelves. The store cut two of them into 9.5"-wide shelves (or something like that), took another couple of shelves off the top of the third, and cut the rest of the third into uprights for the sides. I then cut grooves into the sides of the uprights to put the shelves in, stuck it all together with finishing nails and glue, put a back of 1/4" oak plywood on it, a face-frame on it with 1"x2" oak boards, and used some thin strips to finish off the fronts of the plywood shelves. Total cost was probably about $70 for the materials and labor at the store.
(Actually, now that I think about it, I had nearly enough left over to make a third, 36"-high, bookshelf. If you're doing more than a pair of bookshelves, this can almost certainly be rearranged to get five full-height bookshelves out of six sheets, though you might need an extra half-sheet to have enough shelves.)
If I'd done all the work at once -- rather than doing half on it on one side of the country where I had access to tools, and then the other half a month later where I live -- it would probably have taken a weekend to assemble the pair. Add another weekend or so for sanding them and finishing them, which (four years later) I still haven't gotten around to, because they got occupied with books too quickly!
It turns out that 48" is just a touch long for 3/4" plywood bookshelves that are supported at the ends and along the back; they do dip very slightly in the front when double-stacked with particularly dense books. Still, since I haven't come up with any way to efficiently make 36"-wide bookshelves out of 4'x8' plywood, I'd still probably do them that width again.
Anyhow ... ah, right. The point of all this. It's not substantially more difficult to make freestanding bookshelves than to make built-in ones, and the advantage is that if you decide you don't like how the quick-and-simple ones look, they're easy to move. And they'll work fine on hardwood floors, particularly if you put a sheet of felt under the front to tip them back against the wall a little.
I haven't priced decent-quality finish carpetry lately, and I'm sure it's more than I'd expect, but I also suspect that it would be cost-effective to pay someone to build these (you only need a good household finish carpenter; not a cabinetmaker) compared to buying bookshelves that are sufficiently sturdy to put books on. Particularly if you can find a cabinetmaker who'll let you do all the sanding, rather than charging you for his time doing it.
These color names remind me of Chrysler's "High Impact" colors of 1969-1971. They had two names for each color, one for Chrysler and one for Plymouth; here's the list:
Chrysler: Plymouth:
--------------------------------
Plum Crazy In-Violet
Sublime Lime Light
Green Go Sassy Grass
Go Mango Vitamin C
Panther Pink Moulin Rouge
Hemi Orange Tor Red
Top Banana Lemon Twist
Citron Yella Curious Yellow
Our estimable host will, I'm sure, be happy to know that Tor Red is a very orangey red, and thus currently "in".
There is also a story that when the Chrysler design team heard about the color names that had come from the marketing team, they submitted their own list of colors:
Catch-Me Copper
Unforseeable Fuschia
Statutory Grape
Gang Green
Well Red
Cost Of Living Rose
Fisher Body Rust
Hi-Ho Silver
Frank Lloyd White
One is left wondering whether the difference between Catch-Me Copper and Coppertunity is merely a difference of perspective, and whether the Fuschia is, indeed, Unforseeable.
Damien - there's no "practically" about TeX being Turing-complete; it is, full stop. In the original pure forms it has hangups with 8-bit input and that sort of thing, but it's fully-functional as a programming language.
I shall pat my copy of TeX fondly, but I do have a copy of a booklet from the 1950s containing instructions to authors regarding how to write mathematics in ways that made it easier to typeset. Most of the information about what symbols are available in what sizes (and how some of them -- such as a couple of the Greek sub-subscript-size) are available but weren't in stock when they were printing up the example rows in the booklet, and yet others can be special-ordered if its really necessary) is obsolete, but it does have some useful information about composing equations that are easy-to-read.
As for "WYSIWYG" tools -- aside from the questions about the truth or falsity of that acronym, I find that it's nearly absurd as a paradigm for creating typeset equations. There isn't any way to directly type what I want to see on screen, which means that what I'm typing is going to be commands to create the equation, and I'd rather have a tool in which I can see and edit the commands, thanks.
I don't know whether this will bring back memories for anyone, but I've recently been helping scan some of the back issues of the TeX User Group's TUGboat newsletter, including the advertisements. See, for instance, this one from 1985. (Main contents at http://www.tug.org/tugboat/contents.html; we're up to mid-1987 on the scanning.)
Andy Perrin wrote, well upstream:Sketch a hypercube looking toward a corner (isometric projection), toward an edge, and face on. The last would be a nice check-- if the person did not realize it would appear to be a square, then you know for sure they can't visualize 4d (or 3d!).
No, it wouldn't be a square.
It would be a cube -- specifically, a cube with another cube centered within it, if you have a translucent hypercube. When you "look" at something in N dimensions, you're making an N-1 dimension projection of it. And thus, "looking" at a hypercube produces three-dimensional objects. To get down to a two-dimensional object, you have to look at the three-dimensional one from a direction that's orthogonal to the direction that produced the first projection, which really starts ceasing to be meaningful in a "looking at" sense.
A couple of random thoughts....
James Nicoll commented, muchly upstream, about review copies and the limitations they claim on what one can do with them. In the US, I'd think that most of them would fall under the regulations that say that anything sent to you via the Post Office without your request is legally a gift (which ought to mean you can toss it out, sell it, whatever). I'm not sure of the details, though, or whether similar regulations apply in Canada.
On Claude Muncey's comment about the lack of market for paper documentation: I wonder if some part of that is due to the arrival of literal desktop publishing. I have a number of paper software manuals on my shelves, many of which were printed (from PDF on-disk manuals) on the office laser printer and taken up to the copy shop for a tape binding -- with a net cost probably less than what the shipping costs would be were I to buy something similar.
(Sorry for incoherence; typing quickly, need to leave momentarily)
One way of checking to see if DNS is the problem is to ping a numeric IP address from the "non-dialup" computer.
Other thing to check is what the "non-dialup" computer has set up for the IP address to use as a gateway.
The "dialup" computer should have two IP addresses; one given by the dialup connection, one on the internal network consisting of your ethernet crossover cable. The IP address that it has on the internal network should be what the other computer has set for a gateway.
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