Viewing profile — adavies42

> If it's serious, like assault, you're out. i've seen some examples that suggest it might not be as cut-and-dry as that. i don't have the url handy, but some time ago someone in o…

i guess the new digg is the old reddit....

i went to academic summer camps basically from sixth grade on (Duke TIP-affiliated stuff), and one year i took chemistry class. one of the three weeks was "uncontrolled oxidation" …

ethanol burns relatively cool (as do (some of?) the other alcohols). the problem is that it often burns above the ignition point of its carrier substance, which itself burns much h…

"Users may be experiencing issues" is not the passive voice (not that you explicitly said it was, but IMAO you implied it), it's the continuous aspect, modified by whatever an auxi…

istr a ds9 novel (yes, i read some) where they had to replicate some machine guns to deal with invaders who had perfect shielding, but only against energy weapons. there were secur…

you ever see American Graffiti ? one thing that really stuck with me was the bit at the end where they're boarding a plane--it was just walk out onto the runway, present your ticke…

i've flown international business class on luxury airlines twice (once on singapore on the company dime, and once on qatar through a random complimentary upgrade). the service is j…

ever work on a non-gnu box? (old solaris, *bsd, stock os x, etc.) there's a decent chance they don't have -r at all.

this is traditional: they almost always undershoot the over-expectations

> But he's the paragon of the self made man, in the Ayn Rand sense [...] I was just thinking this. I'm sure Jobs hated Rand, given his politics, but he sounds an awful lot like Han…

a few years ago i moved into an apartment in NYC that somehow didn't have a phone line. at all. like there wasn't a wall jack in the entire apartment. (it was a hundred-year-old bu…

> What exactly is the "violence" that Austin would do to competitors? To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke: If you run your own cable, you'll need a permit. If you do it by negotiating with…

Rand also liked Victor Hugo and Mickey Spillane. If you're at all interested in her aesthetic principles, give The Romantic Manifesto a try--it's an essay collection, and quite sho…

> The speech reads like an English translation of an ideological Russian novel, which I suppose in some sense it is. Rand comes across as a shrill and graphomanic anti-Dostoevsky. …

it's old printers' stuff to do with physical properties of lead type, i think. as to why it won't go away, i have no idea. i happily ignore it in almost all my writing....

no, just illiterate. the original author and the commenters here all made allowances for non-native speakers of english, which apparently you couldn't be bothered to read....

> For example if you have a zero tolerance policy for it's vs its, or for commas making things confusing, the framers of the US Constitution would fail the test. that's a question …

they have their place. i saw a lovely translation recently of a french request to "tutoyer" (address in the familiar) as "i must be thee to thou".

There's also Lenin's famous line "Who? Whom?", which is a lot harder to translate without a "whom" available....

There's an Allan Sherman song ("When I Was a Lad") where one of the rhymes depends on who/whom: I learned who was going out with whom And who had the keys to the powder room

relatedly, there's a little-used rule that lets you use a semi-colon as your list separator if the individual elements contain commas: "My favorite law firms are Dewey, Cheatem & H…

is it clear that there were any such standards?

proofreading to match a style guide is completely different from grammar. learn the difference between grammar and style....

note that you can't actually make them work, no matter what the contract says (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_performance ). (you can sue them for compensation though.)…