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English is spoken better by the English
I can see both sides of this Conservative vs. Labour argument.
Here in the US, it's been said that conservatism means getting mugged on Wall Street, while liberalism means getting mugged on a side street. I guess every political system has its winners and losers.
<<The McCarthy witch hunts are infamous- he ruined many a good reputation. Oh, and HOW IS THAT SUPPOSED TO COMPARE TO MURDERING YOUR OWN PEOPLE?? It doesn't. Please, make a better point.
America isn't a superior race- you can complain about the bombing all you want, it's your opinion. But my opinion is that there is nothing wrong with making a warning that isn't empty- one which saved my grandpa's lives. You don't think that far. Me- I am taking my family into account. Several members of my family were left crippled or dead. I see nothing wrong with being glad to save our troops. Truman was horrified by what he did. But I think of my parent's having the chance to have such great dads around and I am certainly grateful. I really loved my grandpas. And my great-uncles who survived. Look, I don't want us all to destroy ourselves either. In case you are reading into that- I don't feel that way. But I'm not going to sit here and blast my country for what I think President Truman really saw as a way to ending any more conflict between us and Japan. >> Well, I suppose if Stalin were my dad I would support the purges because they may have saved his life...
Gosh, I had to type a lot of papers in school, too. And it wasn't until I got to college that I had regular access to computers. Before that, I got to type my assignments on -- glad you're sitting down! -- a typewriter. It came with a pretty generic, country-neutral spellchecker. It was called White-Out. Later they came up with a fancy new upgrade called a corrector ribbon -- basically White-Out on a ribbon. But you still had to know how to spell, and recognize your your own boneheaded mistakes.....
ROFL Uriel! Being a child of the 70s, I can relate to every one of your written words. (BTW, you left out carbon paper; just try to correct a spelling error on THOSE.)
Smetimes, I think computers and calculators have made us less able-minded.
I remember typing my Master's thesis on archival 100% cotton, non-erasible bond paper with a manual typewriter. Fortunately, a typical page did not have solid words, but had many large spaces that were filled in with hand-written equations (which had to be written with a special Rapidograph pen.)
Of course we had access to computers in college (IBM 360/50, with 1MB Large Capacity (slow core) Storage, and probably 64K or 128K main core storage). We didn't have word processors. The computers were for number crunching, using Fortran programs typed into punched cards and submitted for batch runs. One other thing we didn't have were small portable calculators -- we had to use slide rules, or perhaps a shared, large Friden mechanical calculator on rare occasions.
Amazing how fuckeduply technology develops. First they invent airplanes, then fly to the moon, and then they invent pocket calculators....
Hell, yeah, J! 1972, brother.
Ah, the Rapidograph. I had to buy a set of those for a class once -- art, in my case, not math. They were like $50-$60, as I recall, and you got a bunch of them, in all different sizes. Of which you might use, maybe, two. But they had to be Rapidographs, so that the line size never varied as they might with regular pens. And of course, in the very next class they would extol the virtues of the "expressive line' -- one where the line weight DOES vary with pressure, and is used intentionally for effect. And you just sighed and put your Rapidograph set away.....
"I remember typing my Master's thesis on archival 100% cotton, non-erasible bond paper with a manual typewriter. Fortunately, a typical page did not have solid words, but had many large spaces that were filled in with hand-written equations (which had to be written with a special Rapidograph pen.)"
That sounds like a daunting task, even to me. HEY FOLKS: if you think we are all Luddite old-fogeys extolling the virtues of the past, you are missing the point, which is this: Forget about your spelling correction software! You are supposed to use your HEAD! That's what this forum is all about—learning English to the best of your potential, and that includes spelling!
I remember using old fashioned computers in college too. I was in college way back in the early part of the latter half of the first decade of the third millenium, where a lot of people were using really old, dinosaur computers. Gosh, some people were still using a really old old operating system released by Bill Gates *many* years earlier, because their computers were so primitive that running a newer operating system would have over-taxed their primitive, puny amounts of RAM. Some people even used browsers without automatic spell check.
gregorvich:
"America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and unbeatable determination to do the job at hand." 1-8-1947 Purgatory: Maybe. But if he was willing to kill his people- why stop there? Historically, lots of people in power come to resent possible heirs. Take Ivan the Great- didn't he kill his son Alexis?
<<Gosh, some people were still using a really old old operating system released by Bill Gates *many* years earlier, because their computers were so primitive that running a newer operating system would have over-taxed their primitive, puny amounts of RAM.>>
These "puny" machines actually had more RAM than the greatest supercomputers of a few decades earlier. There was a time when a state of the art core memory unit (IBM 738, for the IBM 704 and 709 vacuum tube computers) with about 144K bytes of storage weighed 4000 lbs, consumed 23.4 Kilowats of power and generated 60,500 BTU/hr of heat, requiring cooling airflow of 2760CFM. This was a big advance over the earlier CRT-based storage units. (Disclaimer -- no programs I wrote were ever loaded into an IBM 738. The earliest machines I used had 8K words (16K bytes) of core storage, that probably occupied just a few cubic feet.)
<<Purgatory:
Maybe. But if he was willing to kill his people- why stop there? Historically, lots of people in power come to resent possible heirs. Take Ivan the Great- didn't he kill his son Alexis? >> Beathag: Maybe. But if the Americans are willing to nuke Hiroshima civilians, why stop there? Historically, a lot of governments come to resent possible loss of power. Maybe they would nuke their own people too if there were a rebellion?
Is this silly thread still going?
It should have been throttled in one posting. |