Dak

You got off lightly: i was told it was a supository

i tried the sieve of arthurmitsit after the last time i heard you mention it, and thought it was quite fun. the other stuff, i'll remember for when i learn C, but for now i'm quite up for actually getting stuck in and doing something useful. i've got the basics of my proggy going, and it's (sortof) working from the CLI: dak@dak-xubuntu:~/Desktop/Dev/disloxic/code$ python disloxic.py wether weaver whether weather wether|castrated sheep or goat weaver|someone who weaves whether|whether or not weather|rain dak@dak-xubuntu:~/Desktop/Dev/disloxic/code$ twas quite easy, main problem's getting it to work as a module, as a stand-alone from the CLI, or as a stand alone 'service' (i.e., another program calls it repeatedly during a spell-check, and keeps passing it words, and getting the strings returned). the latter, i haven't done yet... am i right in thinking i'll have to research pipes? :-/ then, i guess, i'll have another look at some spell-checker programs, and try to modify them to use my program... (tho i'd still be interested in any easy-to-modify programs for practice, tho i think i'm going to go for what dave said and choose what interests me, and just grit my teath and wade through the confusion)

hello, try putting your questions in general medicine, or possibly anatomy, physiology and neuroscience, wherever you think they'd fit best.

are you using the naturalistic fallicy or not? is wether or not homosexuality is natural relevent or not? don't forget, nature is non-sentient: it doesn't 'intend' to do anything. could allways be complex gene interactions (as opposed to strait-foward mendilian), or otherwize could be agenetic (random chance, perhaps, or environmental cues) if it were simple genetics, it could allways be recessive and multi-gene, tho i'm not aware of any evidence for this. as you touched upon earlyer, not throwing faceis is a social construct. our lack of tail and body hair, and, when you get right down to it, our brains, all started out as 'malfunctioning mechanisms' that were 'intended' to do somthing else. and our adaptability relies on repeated malfunctions. as i said earlyer, homosexuality is only bad if enough people are gay (which is overlooking the fact that some gays descide to reproduce anyway, just refrain from recreational sex with the opposite sex). as has allready been said, it's possible homosexuality is a natural population controll mechanism. iirc, certain social cues can alter the frequency of male/female births to maintain the ratio at roughly 1:1, stress can cause miscarrages, and the more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to be gay. they could, arguably, all be population regulation mechanism. none of this relates to wether we should reccomend a cure or not, barring the unlikely event that we start to approach such a level of gayness that we stopp breading en-mass (which isn't neccesarily bad per se, over a short period).

technically, if you're talking about linux, you're talking about the kernel and nothing else. the OS sans kernel is GNU. a GNU OS running on a linux kernel is linux/GNU, whilst a GNU OS running on hurd (the GNU kernel) is just GNU, i think. having said that, most people reffer to the OS as linux, and i say go with common usage. http://www.gnu.org/

I'm not arguing against any of that, per se. i'd point out that it was a strait line that was going up... i.e., it was steadily increasing. i admit that fact. what i don't admit, based on the evidence that you've provided, is that sunspot activity caused temperature fluctuations, what with them coming after the temperature changes they correlate with. oh? quantify 'minor and quite unexceptional'. the CO2 had, after all, been steadily increasing for decades by 1910. as for sunspots increase to their highest level in 8,000 years, the graph shows a higher frequency in 1850-1910, and 1940-2000. iow, the period we're talking about has the lowest frequency of the dates represented on the graph. it's not really that important, but a simple citation supporting your claim that sunspot activity was the main contributer to global temperature in that period would suffice. and, forgive me, but you ain't half bad at even cursory examination of data for someone who want's to ignore the science and analyse the data for himself. not to mention that proper statistical significance testing would be beyond either of us. no need for ad-homs. tho i will point out that your the one insinuating that sunspot activity reached back in time and caused temperature changes before the sunspots themselves had happened. doh!

the linux kernel iteself is licenced under GNU v2. if linus controls the linux-kernel progect, the good thing about GNU is that someone could just fork the linux kernel into a non-linus dominated project if there was a need. anyway, linux runs on hurd too (using linux in it's common meaning, i.e. GNU OS)

the problem is, tho, that your not. by arguing that we should 'reccomend' teatment you're implying that theres something wrong with gayness, like only having one hand. surely, if you want to abstain from passing judgement, you shouldn't reccomend that gay people do or do not get cured, and rather leave it up to them? i was just making the point that wether something is 'natural' or 'intentional' or the result of chemicals/whatever doesn't make it good or bad. 100% homosexuality would be bad, but we could tolerate much higher rates than current without humanity crashing.

why?

without any significance testing and just from that graph: yeah, i'll agree that it looks like the C and sunspot activity correlate well. however, this: is 100% absolutely wrong. the cause cannot come after the effect. after 1910ish, all correlation indicates that, if there's a causal relationship, earths mean temperature causes sunspot activity changes (which we know is not true)

i'm assuming you mean this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Temp-sunspot-co2.svg yet its not that simple. sorry, but the temperature from 1910 - 1940 seems to correlate quite closely to the sunspot activity ~1920 - 1960. note how the morphology of the two graphs 1910 - 1980 are quite similar, barring the fact that the sunspot activity lags behind temperature changes by 10 years. iow, if this indicates a direct causal relationship, it would indicate that increases in temperature on the earth increase sunspot activities. which is silly.

is it? btw, when did this become open source v proprietry, rather than 'is google being hypocritical'? don't particularly mind, just curious. hmm... i guess i see your point. i'm still going to say that, unless there was an actual deal between google and apple that google be the only app thats allowed to be non-browser, then google aren't to blame for apples desision to 'unfairly' promote google. apple benifit by more efficiently suporting a popular (non-apple) service + google benifit as they are that popular service = market forses and competition, imo. ms, otoh, are promoting themselves, and not because ms-indexer is more demanded than google-indexer. that's unfair abuse of position to hobble competition, intentional or otherwize. but the practices are different imo. some egs: proprietry software is at a natural disadvantage on linux, due to the way things are done and the commoness of GNU licencing. is this 'unfair'; somewhat, but it's an unavoidable concequence of the (hippy) way things are done in linux. google are (afaik) the only company given an app on apple iphone; is this 'unfair'; somewhat, but it's an unavoidable concequence of the (proprietry) way things are done in apple. windows comes with lots of microsoft products. is this 'unfair'; somewhat, but it's an unavoidable concequence of the (proprietry and one-company) way things are done in windows. microsoft products are usually hard to impossible to remove from the windows OS, and often conflict with competetors products; is this 'unfair'; yes, because it's not a neccesary concequence of OS design or modus-operandi, for any reason other than to squish competition imo. otoh, if either microsoft or apple don't fully disclose their APIs etc, yet use them themselves, then i can see the argument that their eliminating competition from the outset, in which case both ms and apple are huge offenders? but it brings us back to the fact that it's not googles fault. if anyone's to blame, barring any dodgy deals, it's apple for only letting one app onboard.

if you haven't allready done so, go to whichever IDE you're using and type in 5/2; it's not fun to find that out the hard way i found naughts-and-crosses a good program to write as a practice, but i'm just a beginner so there's no doubt better ideas.

baaa! people should not be required to follow arbritrary decisions about what is/isn't acceptable. that's encluded in most 'fundamental human rights' declarations, iirc (EU, world, african, etc) this is closesly related to paranoia's argument that people aren't 'supposed' to be gay; which is essentially a natralistic fallicy, whilst ignoring the fact that homosexuality is completely natural. it's doubly invalid: things aren't 'ok' becuase they're natural and 'bad' because they arent, and even if they were, this argument would be imply that homosexuality is ok as it's natural; or did you mean something else by implying we're all 'supposed' to be strait? umm... good?

oh guess my info is maybe a tad out of date. incidentally, i've rememberd a more up-to-date issue: the winVista kernel has something called something like 'secure kernel blahblahblah', which restricts access to parts of the kernel... parts of the kernel that anti-virus vendors need access to, putting any anti-virus vendor (other than, surprise, microsoft) at a competetive disadvantage. most anti-virus vendors point out that the secure kernel layer thing will not, actually, prevent low-level rootkits, malitious serveses, and other kernel-hijacks (which is the official intent), and the only thing it'll actually prevent is effective non-MS anti-viruses. apple don't have a monopoly in the multimedia phone thingy market, so i don't see how any monopoly abuse could be happening. if writing an app to access youtube, whilst forsing other online video sites to use browser applications (presumably slower) gives google an unfair advantage, i'd be inclined to blame apple for not opening up their OS core to developers, not google for taking the advantage they were given; either way, i think the insinuation that apple is abusing its position to unfairly promote google is a bit odd ('course, if the deal was 'dont do this for anyone else and we won't offer youtube to any non-apple multimedia phone', then i'd change my mind). people can choose to use iphones with non-youtube video sites, or they can choose to use a non-apple multimedia phone. people seemingly can't (easily) choose to use a non-ms file indexing service, and -- due to ms's dominance and various other factors -- it's inconvienient to use a non-ms OS. hence, ms's handling of the indexing service is 'misuse of dominant position to reduce competition', whereas apple's iphone/google deal is 'annoying', as non-google video sites will probably run a bit slower, and arguably 'a reason to use a non apple multimedia phone', which is easy enough to do. "The iPhone's YouTube program was built by Apple, not Google, signifying the company's intentions to limit access to the phone's operating system" blame apple

'should not reccomend a treatment' != 'should reccomend no treatment'. your argument above actually supports sayo's stance; rather than implying that gays should/should not get treated, you should abstain from reccomendations and let them make up their own mind. just to stir up the hornets nest -- if that's the case, then what about paedo, besiality, incest etc? are they not medical conditions, otherwize heterosexuality would be too? does that mean they can't/shouldn't be cured?

yes, i was after something somewhat higher-level :-/ thanks to everyone for their suggestions (aswell as the noob v newb, tho i thought it was n00b that was offensive). tbh, i'm going to just learn some more first, then try again to find a simple program to alter. I do actually have something in mind: a program that gets passed words, and returns short (1 centance) strings that either define the word or put in in context, so that spell checkers can go 'did you mean weather (rain) or whether (whether or not)', as oposed to their current behaviour -- 'did you mean weather or whether' -- which is of little use to a dislexic I'll probably just wright that with a small database of words (whether|rain, etc) as a 'demo', then try to alter something like Aspel to use it... kinda like: program: hey aspel, what could wever mean? aspel figures out wever could mean whether, weather, or weaver, and asks my program what they mean my program returns whether|rain, weather|weather or not, weaver|someone who weaves, which aspel then returns to asking program. dysloxic is happy at actually useful spell-checker so yeah, hopefully after doing that i'll be a bit better at coding, so should maybe be able to make heads and tails of big programs...

true. what's a car-lane? is it a facetious name for a 'road', or do you have no-bike lanes in the us? obviously we can't ride bikes on the motorway in the uk, but we don't have any car-only lanes afaik. btw, i know bikes can be arseholes. i've never been hit by a car, but i have been hit by two cyclists oh, and i hit a parked car once, but i don't want to talk about it

oh yeah, i've had prats pull out in front of me because they didn't look or my favorite: opening the road-side door without checking the blindspot but so-far no near-accidents when they were aware that i was there. oh, apart from pillocks who don't know that cyclists can keep to the outside lane in round-abouts, and can't figure out that i'm going to do this from the fact i'm indicating. i'm just saying i wouldn't have swerved in bascules position, and they'd have probably stopped (in the uk atleast). then, a mutual giving-of-the-finger when you pull aside at the next convienient location, and it's all over -- no need to go pavement diving ahem... excuse me: British people: cyclists can stay in the outside lane of a roundabout at all times, just like lorries can.

hmm, maybe an attetude difference between the uk and us? i've been cycling all my life (since about 13), and i've never been hit by a car... they can beep all they want, but i aint swerving out their way, and they do stop

meh. i take a somewhat suicidal approach in those situations: i'm the one who's going to die if they don't slow down, so they're the one's who will get sent to jail for manslaughter if they don't slow down; hence, if i just carry on as normal, they'll have to slow down. worked so far

how is it the cars fault that you hit the curb?

you asked, 1veedo answred. and there's nothing 'politically incorrect' about supporting/dissing ms. it's not like ms is black, or gay lacking on detail mainly as i assume you'll get what i'm talking about without me having to look up irrelivent points, if you lecture on this. in no particular order: #the case that they still owe the EU money over; failure to release source-code for certain parts of their server, which prevents inter-operability (the EU court agrees that this is unfair use of monopoly) #including impossible-to-remove applications with their OS, such as windows-mediaplayer (EU agrees this is unfair, too), IE, etc. note it's the unremovability i'm saying is unfair; merely including a default (ms) application is fair enough. #the case you linked too, where they try to prevent people choosing to ditch a microsoft product and get a google one (US court agrees this is monopoly abuse) #stubbourness over open-office standardised formats, which most (if not all) other companies have agreed to. this, of itself, is their prerogative; however, combined with continually changing the way in which ms-word stores documents forses vendor-lockin, as alternatives are less likely to be able to open documents written in ms word (ie, if you wish to recieve and understand documents, you need ms-word as most people will send .doc's, tho open-office seems to be quite good at getting reading them). #spreading FUD against linux, semi-specifically: ##novel case and threats of legal action v linux ##biased TCoO reports, in disagreement with independant ones #my personal pet-hate: forsed (i.e., unneccesary) incompatability between non-ie browsers and hotmail (open in tabs wont work due to javascript), and windows-update (even if you're using an active-x compatable one; not that active-x is required, as 62nds proves). gotta agree with this. the ubuntu specs for the next version include, iirc, 'replace adobe flash with open-source gn...something'. now, last i looked, gnsomething was crap. why replace a functional proprietry program with a half-functional open-source one? bollocks to that. i'll use the open source one to try to promote it all else being equal, but the refusal of some linux people to used closed-source does somewhat seem dumn. tho i'm aware its moreoften the other way around, with the proprietry programs not supporting linux. anyhoo, you still haven't answred my question of where the conflict actually is in googles actions.

do you know how the genes manifest themselves? is it developmental, chemical, or unknown? i thought developmental was the main suspect, even over genetic...

sort of. but, that was sort of my point: if it's not bad, then it's not bad... iow, if it aint broke, don't fix it (or reccomend that it should be). things aren't generally considered medical conditions unless they're bad. unless it can be shown that homosexuality is actually bad, then there shouldn't be a suggestion that it be fixed. pimples aren't bad, but people often care about having pimples enough to make them a problem... so, i suppose, if someone cares about being gay enough to make it a problem, then treatment should be reccomended (in both cases i'd slap 'em and tell 'em to deal with it, but that's just me). and, even if they do cause themselves to have a problem with it by caring too much, a pimply fag is not 'supposed' to be a clear-skinned heterosexual, who's been hijacked by a condition. he just is a pimply fag. untill he gets medically altered, i suppose, in which case there'd be just as little point in saying he's supposed to be a pimply fag. yes, ok good point. but when you consider, say, that peoples brains stop working after 18 hours... that's what i'd call a design flaw, but it's not a 'medical condition' (even tho it's blatantly neurological/chemical based) 'cos of how common it is. many birds don't need to rest their brains, so it's not unavoidable as such. yet, if you have to rest your brain every 10 hours, then that's a medical condition, because it's not only bad, but rare. i guess my definition of medical condition sucked. i was just trying to get across that 'medical condition' != something chemical/phisiological and abnormal. in fact, your point is quite useful: some things like cancer are quite common (1/3 people get cancer), but because they're bad, they're conditions without even being that abnormal (tho i suppose 'having cancer/heart problems' is an abnormal state for any given person). homosexuality is abnormal, but ok, so it's not a medical condition. some element of 'badness' is required to be a condition that requires treatment, although we'll overlook too common flaws as just part of being human. chemicals, psychology, neurology, etc, all contribute to one's sexuality, wether it's gay or strait. i just meant that if gayness is caused by chemicals... then so is heterosexuality. so, just being caused by the balance of chemicals you have doesn't qualify something as a medical condition; or, if it does, then heterosexuality is a condition, too.