deadbeeves

Ah, my bad. I thought you were saying there were words where the "th" digraph stands for an "s" sound.

Fun fact: That scientist does that instead of simply using a neural interface like the Major and other cyborgs because he's an old-fashioned computer scientist and doesn't trust his brain to computers. Seeing as they live in a world where remote servers can fry your brain if you fail to hack into them, it doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

Source: the manga.

The thing is, everyone who has ever said or done anything stupid can say the same, that they were only doing it to troll people. Pretending to be stupid isn't trolling, it's making yourself look stupid.

Dogs are already mandated to be leashed. That doesn't mean they will be leashed. That's my point.

"With correct pronunciation" and "without an accent" are not equivalent qualifiers. There's no such thing as the null accent. Obviously I will have an accent relative to any speaker, since I don't live in an English-speaking community and so I'm not copying the exact pronunciation of any single community, but rather approximately averaging the pronunciations of all the speakers I hear.

Like I said, I have no interest in convincing you. If you can't accept what I say for what it is, continue as you were.

Interference doesn't matter if all you're doing is copying what people do with their mouths. You might have more or less trouble performing the movement at the mechanical level (for example a lot of people have trouble doing the French R) or listening for the precise positions of the tongue etc., but just copying what you can hear is trivial.

>Feel free to post a voice recording, so we can check.

Nah. I have no interest in convincing you; honestly accepting to be tested at all is probably more than I should have done. I'm merely relaying a personal experience for your edification. If you can't accept it for what it is then continue as you were.

Not that I can remember. Therefore...? What's your point?

I struggle to understand how an adult does not realize that leading a normal life requires taking in some amount of risk, unless the person has some kind of learning difficulty. If you want to go outside, there is a non-zero chance that you'll be mauled by a dog without a leash. There's a much greater chance that you'll be involved in a car accident, and cars are policed much more strictly than dog leashes, not to mention that violations are punished much more severely.

>Maybe take a step back and realize that it's perfectly ok when people disagree with you about stuff on the internet.

Exactly what of what I said implies that I have a problem with disagreeing with people? All I said was "if you do these two things, your behavior is incongruous". That's as politely as I can disagree with someone. Maybe your problem is that I said anything at all, in which case I think you're the one who has a problem with disagreement.

"Quid" is longer.

>You can't copy something you're not aware of.

If that was the case, babies would not be able to learn how to speak.

That's not true. I use stress timing without even realizing that I'm using it nor understanding what it means, but I can realize when someone doesn't use it. I learned it purely by ear, by mimicking the sounds other people make. More specifically, by copying their cadence.

I'm not saying they shouldn't live, I'm saying that if off-leash dogs scare you and you don't want to be scared, you shouldn't be outside. Even if every last dog owner kept their dog on a leash at all times, there would still be some dogs without a leash, and all of them would be outside your house. I assume any person would understand that by the time they reach adulthood and either learn to deal with the fact that some dogs they run into won't have a leash, or they stop going outside if they can't deal with it. Stubbornly refusing to accept reality is childish.

"Sociopathic" is not just another word for "selfish".

If just seeing a dog without a leash is enough for you to feel in danger you probably shouldn't leave your home, let alone go to the park. That aside, you don't have a right to not feel in danger. You don't even have a right to not be in danger, though you do have a right to not be put in danger deliberately or by negligence.

I think what the GP means is that if you speak in grammatically correct sentences and are intelligible, people are less likely to complain or look down on you. I.e. that's a deliberate choice on the listener. If your pronunciation is so off that your listener can't understand you then that's something that's outside of their control; either they pretend to understand and go "uh-huh", or they have to ask you to repeat yourself.

>My understanding is that everyone's brain is wired to expect a word in a certain way and unless you have encountered other accents, the speaker has to repeat what they have been saying.

Nah. People get used to understand certain sequences of sounds and eventually get used to your particular accent, even if initially they had no idea what you were saying. One time I had to work with a Vietnamese woman (let's call her Anna) who said "transaction" like "trunsun" or something; definitely one syllable too few. After several months I was quite able to understand most of what she said, although occasionally I needed her teammate (Barbara) to translate for us. To restate GP's point, both Anna and Barbara spoke grammatically correct English and had definite East Asian accents, but Barbara pronounced things correctly and Anna didn't, so Barbara was easier to speak with, while when speaking with Anna I often had to ask her to repeat herself.

I believe it's supposed to be like "erasure" without the "er".

Such as in?

It's actually not apple seeds by themselves. Apple seeds will pass through the digestive tract intact. However, the seeds contain amygdalin inside them, which will react into cyanide in the stomach. So what's toxic is chewing and then swallowing apple seeds. Peach seeds also contain amygdalin, although you're much less likely to try to eat one of those.

Nah, that's never going to happen. Rockets are inherently dangerous. Loading tons of people onto one is gambling with a 1 in 20 chance (possibly higher) that all of them die. Even if nothing goes wrong with the rocket per se, how do you land it somewhere where you don't already have infrastructure, or worse still, in a hot zone? On the best days landing a rocket is a delicate and error-prone procedure, can you imagine if there's someone actively trying to stop you?

>Suddenly, a combined arms battalion appears right behind his lines.

That "suddenly" is pretty funny. Can you imagine trying to sneak up on someone from aboard the loudest vehicle in the world as you're trying to gently guide it to the ground to avoid exploding? If the enemy has SAMs or artillery, your rocket and everyone in it is toast. Even if you successfully land, you better hope you've used all your fuel before the enemy has a chance to start shooting small arms. Even if a mostly empty rocket can't explode, it can still easily be engulfed in flames.

You don't? It's machine-readable.

It seems odd to me to arbitrarily restrict the alphabet if the only requirement is that the data has to be readable by a machine through an OCR system. They could have easily used the Latin alphabet to encode arbitrary bit strings.

What if the computer isn't binary, but it needs to talk to a binary computer? Then you definitely can't go "oh, this text is binary anyway, I can just push it on the wire as-is and let the other end figure it out".

The daylight and the contrast with the trees don't help, either.

Not solely for it, sure. But I didn't say it was solely for symbolism either.

Sure, but that doesn't make it a subjective adjective. It just tells you something about what the person who uses the word thinks about what the word is being applied to.

It seems weird to me to refer to wilderness as "underdeveloped", but more because if it really is a wilderness then it should be undeveloped. If someone starts building things in it but few enough that the zone can be called "underdeveloped" then it's no longer the wilderness. In any case, what the original person said was that the country was underdeveloped. If there's not even a single road or rail between it and its neighbor, I'd say that's a fair assessment.

I think you're being unfair.

>The volume of people making the crossing doesn’t signal that it has somehow become less treacherous. All this shows is that the reward for crossing outweighs the risk of dying along the way - both of which are preferable to not attempting the cross (which is pretty bleak when you think about it).

If people become more desperate they may attempt to do things that they believe are risky. It's perfectly possibly that they are more desperate and also that the trip is not as dangerous as they believed. It's true, the mere fact that, say, 1000 people successfully made the crossing doesn't tell you much by itself. How many attempted it? How many were in any way injured along the way?

The point of such a road is not to traverse it from one end to the other, it's to be able to get on and off it anywhere along its length. It also has symbolic meaning.

No, "under-" means "below some baseline". If that baseline is objective (e.g. "the mean development of the most developed country") then "underdeveloped" is objective, just relative.

No, that's wrong. Even if my actions are criminal unknowingly to me, what puts me in jail is those actions. That my actions had consequences that were unknown to me (in this case, breaking the law) doesn't change the fact that they were the trigger of the sequence of events that led to me being in jail. After the sequence started, there could be any number of events outside of my control that could lead either to my very quick prosecution or to it being impossible to ever catch me.

Your last sentence is a counter-argument against excuses for surveillance. "The argument 'you have nothing to worry about if you did nothing wrong' means you think you know what laws in the future will be like." It's inappropriate here because we're not talking about surveillance; we're talking about people who willingly gave out their genetic data to some company. The company did not divulge the data, so this discussion is not about privacy and ethics. Maybe don't tell Facebook everything there is to know about you? Maybe don't send genetic samples to whoever to learn random nonsense that doesn't matter about your ancestry? If you do and it leaks, TS?

Let's start over. You say that if a genetic database didn't exist you wouldn't have been made a suspect, so I reply with a random example where you could be made a suspect without the assistance of high tech. To keep the hypothetical relevant, in it they take you into custody and take a DNA sample from you to compare against one from the crime scene. Either they get a match and that makes you more of a suspect, or they don't and it doesn't. If they get a match, potentially you'll need to convince a jury that the presence of your DNA at the crime scene doesn't mean you had anything to do with the crime.

I don't see what the existence of the database changes. With or without it there are ways by which you can be linked to a crime you had nothing to do with, and it doesn't seem like it can't be used for anything other than quickly getting a list of people who might have been at a crime scene. The article you linked is not about DNA databases, it's about how DNA evidence is misused by law enforcement. All it says about DNA databases is that black people are over-represented in them.

Sorry your judicial system depends on the savviness of random idiots off the street, but it has nothing to do with whether companies like this one exist.

If only you hadn't worn that hoodie that made you look exactly like that guy that robbed that convenience store.

Honestly, some of these responses are so strange. It's like these people don't understand that they don't live completely by themselves and that the actions of other people affect them, regardless of what technology exists.