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The First Photograph of a Human 138

Posted by samzenpus
from the fist-cheese dept.

Real Reason Why the White iPhone 4 Is Delayed 182

Posted by samzenpus
from the no-phone-for-you dept.

Comment: Re:Wrong (Score 1) 1268

by Dephex Twin (#33246624) Attached to: US Students Struggle With Understanding of the 'Equal' Sign

The rule isn't fuzzy, actually, it's just that in US English the noun and verb are agreeing on a purely grammatical level, without caring about semantics at all. So, since "The Beatles" is a term that is grammatically plural, the verb agrees with the plural; vice-versa for Aerosmith, Radiohead, Apple, Toyota, etc.

Comment: Re:Am I the only... (Score 1) 602

by Dephex Twin (#32589108) Attached to: Digitally Filtering Out the Drone of the World Cup

Violent football hooliganism is primarily an English rather than specifically a German tradition.

It doesn't matter if it is primarily an English phenomenon because it is absolutely a German phenomenon. Or, if you can't wrap your mind around the idea of it being of any significance in Germany then replace "Germany 2006" with "England in other football events and some World Cup in the future" in your mind.

In any case, "hindering" any "traditions" of Nazism, neo- or otherwise, is a constitutional obligation in Germany (imposed by the Allies), not something exclusive to the World Cup or something which would be left to FIFA to decide. Try selling Nazi memorabilia on eBay in Germany.

Okay. Well, you had better tell the German neo-nazis and the German hooligans (nazi or otherwise) that nazism is illegal and hooliganism actually belongs to the English, so that they know that they don't exist.

And what does it matter in my example whether FIFA decides it or a government? Also, do you think FIFA has no official stance on hooligans?

Look I agree "it's a Sth African tradition" is a terrible argument to justify this DoS attack on the World Cup, but pick a better counter example next time.

Good god, man, my point was that just because some people do a thing associated with soccer doesn't mean it is a good thing that must be preserved. So the whole point was to give an example where the need to disallow the thing is completely obvious.

Comment: Re:Ack, the misconceptions... (Score 1) 284

by Dephex Twin (#32526270) Attached to: Official Kanji Count Increasing Due To Electronics

No language can really be considered "hard" or "easy" to learn anyway. Children who grow up in any language environment learn the language as easily as any other language. For someone acquiring a non-native language, the difficulty of that second language is entirely dependent on that person's first language. For example, Arabic is considered one of the most difficult languages that is offered by the US Dept. of Defense language institute, but... if you happen to be a native speaker of Hebrew, then learning Arabic will be extremely easy compared to almost all other languages.

However, we can also see from the DoD institute that Japanese *is*, in fact, a difficult language for native English speakers to acquire in comparison to other, more closely-related languages. Not every single aspect of Japanese is more difficult than every aspect of English, but a person who puts 4 solid years towards Spanish is going to, on average, acquire a lot more than someone who puts 4 solid years towards Japanese.

Comment: Re:Funny, I heard that one differently. (Score 1) 253

by Dephex Twin (#32083886) Attached to: BlackBerry Predicted a Century Ago By Nikola Tesla

Well, considering the fact that when you read Popular Science articles from that era and that claim things like "in the future no-one will drink water unless it has been infused with the life-giving properties of radium", it's still a pretty good prediction, even if it is fairly general.

God doesn't play dice. -- Albert Einstein