English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

10:56 AM

> 50% of the voters in the USA are willing to sell it down the river in the name of free stuff

What does it mean?

11:34 AM

@crl Good question.

Probably you don't know "sell it down the river" meaning a kind of giving in or betrayal.

panem et circenses

Their votes can be bought.

@crl It's really not the aptest metaphor for what I think the poster is trying to express. I think he wants something more like "selling out" (abandoning principles).

I'm watching the Tour right now. These climbs in the Alps are absolutely inconceivable to me.

12:00 PM

thank you both I see now

@Robusto Ride the Rockies is similarly incredible.

even more sloping

Any of them would leave me puking by the side of the road.

Alps is a more recent mountain chain than Rockies though

@Robusto I really like climbing seriously :)

Some good place for holidays

But I wouldn't like to climb with all that crowd, hitting or spitting at you (reference to Froome's incident)

I endure the climbs. I have a more muscular frame than these Tour riders. 85 kg is too heavy to do a lot of climbing.

Did the Tour go through your area?

12:12 PM

Last year, they went close, (And Paris-Nice often does too)

But this year letour.fr/le-tour/2015/img/map_route.jpg they stay in the 'high' Alps

I don't understand why Froome is targeted like that, that guy seems trustworthy

I guess Armstrong fucked it for everybody.

Johan Larsson

the bike guy?

Yes

Lance Armstrong

12:28 PM

So many fucking commercials. The coverage is practically unwatchable.

I have to make a choice between 2 jobs: I'm currently testing job1 (as part of a short internship)

What kind of work?

job1 is something that deals with Tourism webservices (SOAP), (Hotel room searches, activities search, car rental....), they are using tomcat, Java (6 :(..), and other old libraries versions (link)

I like Tomcat. It's uncomplicated. Mature.

yep, they have some performance issues though, I mean just requests peeks, and there responses are big

12:35 PM

Yeah. Not my problem, though. I do the front end.

Must be nice to have a home.

Cómo?

job2 is an e-commerce, they sell sound speakers, backend in .NET MVC, It's maybe a bit more fun because they use JS frameworks (I tend to like it) (link‌)

But they are several who smoke in job2 (and I'm a bit paranoiac with that), so I think I'll prefer job1

@Robusto Being at a place where everyone has to do absolutely everything. I’m not comfortable with SQL or the insanities of the current browser world.

Several to smoke? What does that man?

12:39 PM

He doesn’t want to be around smoke.

*who are smoking I mean

Oh.

Which is perfectly reasonable.

Yeah.

Even if they assure me they never smoked inside (which is anyway hard to ask) I'll have doubts

12:41 PM

Smoking inside is legal?

That's awful.

no, but when it's your own offices, and you're alone some day, people can do it

@crl That would be my ticket to a going-postal incident.

@tchrist I hate when I have to do SQL. Feels like swimming in shark-infested waters. I never know what's lurking beneath the surface.

Exactly.

Now, what the hell is going on with IE dropping control characters in form fields instead of leaving them alone or URI-encoding them?

I can’t understand how it can do that and Unicode still work. They must work at it.

What? What version?

12:45 PM

Something between 8 and 11.

c'mon use Chrome :)

Not up to me.

but you'll gain in productivity

I have a device that stuffs a card-swipe into a form field. Under a certain scenario, track3 has 0x1E and 0x1D characters in it. When you do that in Firefox or Chrome, you get those as %1E and %1D. Under IE, you don’t get them at all: it drops them.

That means I have to hack the fricking Java to pre-URI-encode the swipe. Damn it.

It's that true for hidden fields as well?

12:49 PM

What is the code that does it?

@Robusto That’s a very interesting question. I haven’t checked. I certainly have had browser-related oddities with hidden fields in this project though.

What kind of oddities?

@crl There’s a Java applet that runs in privileged mode linked against some proprietary Windows device drivers. The Javascript reads fields from the applet object and sticks them in form fields with simple Jquery assignments, like $('#some_field')val(applet_object.data_member). When IE does that, it drops the control characters.

@Robusto You can’t just stuff something in a hidden field that has a trigger action associated with it from the Firefox Javascript console command line and have it actually trigger the action. You must assign to the hidden field and manually invoke the action.

But when the loaded Javascript does that same assignment, the action fires just fine.

Do you post the form via AJAX? If so, there's an easy fix.

Yes.

For the console hacking or the control characters?

12:57 PM

Then store the values in a hash table and submit that as your payload.

Control chars.

Sorry, I'm on a tablet, so slow.

What actually happens is that there’s an AJAX action for assigning to the swipe field that fires right away.

And when it fires, it sends it off to the server sans control characters.

But only on IE.

I’m not sure where the URI-encoding of the contents is happening in the AJAX submission, but I imagine that form contents have to be encoded.

It doesn't if you don't use GET.

It’s a POST.

I thought POSTs also URI-encoded.

It seems to on Firefox, although maybe that's happening in some other magic place.

Hmm, I can't test that at the moment, but I thought there was a way to do that.

A: Does ajax post data need to be URI encoded?

11

It all depends on the content type. Normally when a <form> uses the HTTP method POST then the form values are URL Encoded and placed in the body of the reqeust. The content type header looks like this: content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Most AJAX libraries will do this by default...

> then the form values are URL-encoded and placed in the body of the request

By whom, I wonder.

Firefox does that, IE does not.

1:05 PM

Yes, that's it.

IE is always the fly in the ointment.

A: Does ajax post data need to be URI encoded?

0

Josh's answer is good, but I think it's missing something. Traditionally form data was posted using the same format as querystrings. eg: param1=value1&param2=value2 and the only difference between a GET and POST is that POST puts these parameters in the message body whereas a GET puts them in the...

> Using Javascript's encodeURIComponent() function on each parameter value will escape all these characters for you.

@tchrist It would be interesting to put a breakpoint at that Javascript line, to see the value (yes you can set breakpoints in IE, by pressing F12)

@tchrist that's what I was going to suggest.

I'm not sure the data from the applet is ok in IE

@crl It appears not to be, and I don’t understand why not.

1:08 PM

Is there a public url where I could test it? Oh ok

No.

And it wouldn't do you any good if there were: you don’t have the device.

you can certainly isolate that problem, good luck debugging applets though

Tell me about it. It needs to be fricking signed.

But the applet is doing the same thing with both browsers; it's just the browsers' own behaviors which differ.

Where you populate applet_object.data_member try adding a line of JS: console.log( encodeURIComponent( applet_object.data_member) ); and then read it in the console and see if everything is there.

Hmm, yes they need a certificate

1:11 PM

@Robusto good idea, thanks.

The applet is weird because you have all these async events happening populating the applet object. Fricking POS (point of sales) terminals. Not my world.

I did the backend work stuffing stuff in little fixed-format packets of abstruse formats and sending it to payment processors, then getting their responses in kind. But testers found a frontend bug and it's so far from my comfort zone I wanna kick something.

What was the bug?

The one I'm describing.

Oh.

That IE is not URI-encoding POST data that has control characters from the applet.

I never tested it myself with IE because Firebug was easier. Normally we work in Chrome but it has applet issues.

My fault for sending it to the testers this way, really.

Blind spot.

And some fool wrote the POS terminal so that it needs to use IE?

1:16 PM

Either IE or Firefox, yes.

Problem is some government sites using this are only allowed to use IE.

Yes.

Not my POS code at almost any level. I did hack the Java, but that was 100x easier than this browser crap.

I see that and it's a shame.

The backend is 100% Perl, which in an MVC world is a bit tricky to debug but still easy. The applet is Java, which is annoying as hell but at least not insane. But the stuff between there is a shitty world I am as familiar with as the pope is.

That's my world.

1:20 PM

This is what I mean about having to do everything sucking.

Man that has a lot of parses.

The good news is that with JavaScript, there is almost always a workaround for any problem. Might not be elegant, but at that point you're just happy to have something.

2:44 PM

Ok, sent a mail to job2's man to tell him I'm going with job1

I'll be dealing with some old Java code :) (Spring 2, Hibernate 3, ant, jdk6, ...)

Well they have a websites division, I might try to get there also

(bit sad, because I would have been happy to learn how to set an e-commerce, who knows for profit later)

3:02 PM

@MattE.Эллен The Way is funny because if you speak of it it is not the true Way

@FaheemMitha These are meta-jokes

@Cerberus You are questionably assuming I'm trying to make sense, or, if trying, am competent in doing so.

@Mitch Assumptions are fun!

@Cerberus sometimes you don't even need that to have fun.

but I recommend it.

A random observance: does a computer's battery speed up in loss towards the end, or is that just psychological, noticing the change more as you second guess how long you have to 'live'?

I think they design them to scare you into recharging towards the end.

@Mitch That is absolutely possible.

I expect it to depend on the type of battery.

And on the software calibration: the battery normally doesn't tell your computer what percentage it is at; your computer merely guesses the percentage based on the calibration file.

On my phone, the first couple of percents(?) always go very, very slowly. The lower 50% certainly go faster than the upper 50%; I have measured all this.

And all that despite resetting the calibration etc.

3:20 PM

Just like the fuel tank of your car.

@Cerberus Guessing? How dare they! It's a machine goddamit, the manufacturers should figure it out already, since they have the resources, rather than zillions of varyingly competent no-publishing users.

Where's my refund!

@tchrist Oh. That's not a floater measuring that? and the slightly conical shape at the bottom of the tank makes it actually really seem to go faster at the end?

What happens when you're driving upside down? The whole floater thing will not work! Engineers, solve this problem!

It's a beautiful day, I'm going to ruin it by going outside.

BBL

3:35 PM

@Mitch Yes, well, it is an educated guess, which is adjusted as you use the battery.

Good luck with the beautiful day, it sounds horrid but I hope you make it through.

5:11 PM

@Cerberus I'll survive... sigh

@Janus: you would need a scalpel if you wanted to get to the prostate. Women have stuff that is not on the "outside," but is nevertheless accessible outside of a hospital. — Misha Rosnach 27 mins ago

Oh boy, can’t wait for the anatomy lesson.

Which brings up an important point. If, say, literature or history are in the humanities, is one of them a humanity? In the same way that watching a zeppelin explode is a very particular humanity?

@tchrist it's hard to separate the situation when someone is curious about obscure situations and when they're just being dumb.

he's asking as though pairs must always be cognate, and as though there are no gaps ever.

which isn't a terrible assumption, just happen to be, by experience, wrong.

5:46 PM

@Mitch In that case, meta-explanation please.

@FaheemMitha @Mitch never metan explanation he didn’t take to on the spot.

@tchrist As play on words go, it could be played better.

Feel free.

Has anyone here ever read any David Lodge? I mentioned him the other day.

Just ordered one of his books online. I'd read it a while back - not recently. I'm too lazy to try to go to a library and get it from there, assuming I could find such a library in the first place.

Not familiar to me.

6:00 PM

Men don't have a male equivalent of a vulva just as women don't have a female version of a penis. They're different things, folks. You might just as easily ask what is a catcher's mitt's version of a baseball bat. — Robusto 8 mins ago

6:24 PM

@Mitch You could say history is a "humanity", but in reality the singular is never so used.

Just as "trousers" is plural, but but you don't say "there is a hole in my left trouser".

Or do people say that?

No: left trouser-leg.

Something like that.

Yes, exactly.

Apparently, they have kept white peacocks in Staverden since the Middle Ages.

6:40 PM

Pretty birdies.

House Staverden.

I didn't even know they had white peacocks.

Though ordinary ones are nice too.

Q: a word used to describe a person who is smart funny loyal humble brave compassionate strong willed

This is ridiculous:

-1

A single word to describe an individual with tbese character traits. Loving smart witty loyal brave sttkng willed

synonyms

@Cerberus White animals draw a lot of attention to themselves in the wild.

Well, except for the arctic versions.

6:57 PM

Sure.

But so do blue peacocks...

7:16 PM

@tchrist Robusto fits.

Fucking asshole in a pickup truck just about hit me while I was on my bike today. And he did it on purpose.

You know, we make jokes about women drivers, but no woman ever endangered my life just for shits and giggles.

Seriously? That is horrible.

Yeah. Welcome to blue-collar America.

Did you memorise his licence plate?

No. I wish I had thought of it, but I was so mad I didn't. By the time it occurred to me he was too far away.

Reason I know it was on purpose is he waved out the window as if to say "Fuck you."

I tried to catch up to him but he took off. Coward.

Whenever I have issues with drivers while I'm riding my bike, invariably it's someone in a pickup truck.

SmokeDetector

7:50 PM

[ SmokeDetector ] Offensive answer detected: Why is karma a bitch? by Anupam Chopra on english.stackexchange.com

8:11 PM

@Robusto Hmm and what kind of people drive pick-up trucks?

Labourers?

@Robusto Are you sure he wasn't waving "sorry" or something?

8:22 PM

1 hour ago, by Robusto

Yeah. Welcome to blue-collar America.

@Cerberus I know the difference.

OK.

@Robusto A well-to-do landowner wouldn't use a pick-up truck?

Jez

8:42 PM

hmm

best take-away?

i've been sampling Indian ones since my favourite local closed

8:54 PM

Indian is the best!

Although mine might be a bit far for you.

9:09 PM

@Cerberus This was no landowner. Trust me.

Hehe.

I don't care for Indian food.

Was his neck of a ruborous appearance?

But Indian is the best cheap take-away food!

I don't like Chinese take-away.

Yes. A Massachusetts red neck.

I like Mediterranean food.

Maybe there is Chinese food that I would like, but I have not yet encountered it. Dim sum is all right.

I like Mediterranean food very much.

But cheap take-away Mediterranean?

9:12 PM

Or Japanese. Bowl of ramen? Yum.

I like some Japanese things, like sushi. But I don't like the general esprit behind it, as opposed to Indian.

Thai is good too.

I do like Thai.

I love lemon grass, coconut, basil.

How do you feel about Chinese? I find it very meh.

I like all Asian cuisines, except the biggest one.

Not a fan of Chinese. Too greasy. Too fatty.

Too 'I've had it before. Forever"

9:18 PM

@Robusto I agree. And it is often faintly sweet, too.

@Cerberus What do you mean esprit? The comparative ebullience of the chefs?

@Cerberus YOu don't need to be a redneck to be a dick.

@Mitch But it helps.

@Mitch The vertu, the nous behind it.

@Mitch Sure, but I was imagining only rural people drive pick-up trucks, and the only other kind of rural person besides landowner that I could think of is redneck.

The pickup truck is emblematic of blue collar America.

But industrial workers also wear blue collars, at least metaphorically, don't they?

9:21 PM

Yes.

My point exactly.

But do they drive pick-up trucks?

@Cerberus that's an old-fashioned word that I wouldn't use in plural or singular.

If they live in the city?

Yes.

It's a class thing.

@Mitch But many people use it in plural.

@Robusto I see; so there is no relation to having to carry big, heavy stuff around.

One does not see those cars here.

9:23 PM

Tradesmen too.

Or perhaps in the country, but I have never noticed them much.

Funny.

@Cerberus The je ne sais quoi? The elan? The dasein? The.. oh shit, you just prefer Indian food cause it's spicy.

@Mitch Exactly; the ataraxy, the Geist.

@Robusto some of my relatives are rednecks. I, if I weren't illuminated for years by fluorescent lights, could easily be one.

My brother is blue collar, and drives a pickup.

9:26 PM

@Cerberus the transcendental overlord? The Dao that is not spoken of? The chakra? The spinning maelstrom of existence? God I'm so hungry now! Lamb vindaloo!!

The takeout that dare not speak it's name.

@Robusto lots of people have pickup trucks for no utilitarian purpose whatsoever. wannabe rednecks.

Yes.

It is a class marker.

and lots of tradesmen have pickup trucks are not 'redstate leaning rednecks', or at least are polite enough not to be open about it.

Every one wears a cowboy hat in Texas. Even CEOs.

@Robusto McD's?

@Cerberus it's an easy generalization to make from media, but is not really true. Yes, a lot of rednecks drive pickup trucks, but a lot do not, and a lot of pickup truck drivers are not rednecks. Ifn by redneck we mean men who are rural conservative jerks

But BBQ is really good.

@Mitch The lights didn't burn your neck red?

@Mitch Exactly! Yay!

@Robusto Apostrophitis?

9:33 PM

pfft. not even the CRT before CRTs were cool (or rather the entire population had them)

@Cerberus Apostrophelia

You know, Who's album.

@Mitch Right, it is always thus with generalizations. But do rednecks really have to be jerks and conservative? Can't they be just apolitical small farmers?

@Cerberus hey, don't you guys have the more common alternative of rijstaffeel?

We have rijsttafel, sure.

That's Indonesian, as you no doubt know.

@Cerberus well, do you want the literal or metaphorical usage?

Or Indisch, as we say (from India is Indiaas).

9:35 PM

@Cerberus and don't you have more of those restaurants than Indian?

@Mitch I should rather like an overview of possible mainstream usages.

@Mitch Mmm probably. But we also have tons of Indian restaurants.

The no. 1 is "Chinees-Indisch", so Chinese-Indonesian.

They sell stuff from both cuisines.

@Cerberus my 300 page precis on the nuances is forthcoming. Wait for it!

That is only the précis?

@Cerberus the 'thing' here is 'Asian' which is usually Japanese-Korean-Thai (maybe Vietnamese thrown in) which is not the same as Pan-Asian which is fancier and fusion and not take out (unless I'm too down market to realize they're the same)

@Cerberus well, I don't want to overwhelm you with the full manuscript.

The one with the details.

Really, they just call a restaurant "Asian"?

@Mitch I'd love to see your handwriting.

The closest we have to your "Asian" would probably be a "wok restaurant".

9:39 PM

hm... not sure... it'll have some asian sounding name like 'sushi express' or 'mango love box' and just have everything on the menu.

Ah okay.

@Cerberus argh.. no one actually writes with a pen or pencil these days. manuscript is manutyped.

I'm sure some of our Japanese, Thai, etc. restaurants have some stuff from a different Asian cuisine on their menus, but it will be mostly limited to their advertised cuisine.

@Mitch Haha fair enough.

But that is a hybrid, Latin and Greek.

Chirotyped?

@Cerberus I got a takeout menu in Germany once that had Indian and American burgers, and Mexican and Chinese. Bu they didn't call themselves Pan-Earth.

Haha.

What did they call themselves?

9:42 PM

@Cerberus latin didn't borrow typo- at some point?

I think a place like that would be a café or eetcafé here.

@Cerberus Probably Athena.

They wouldn't call themselves after any region or cuisine.

Probably owned by greeks

Umm. Right.

@Mitch They did, but they wouldn't properly combine it with a Latin stem! Just as we try not to mix stems usually.

9:43 PM

@Cerberus can't remember the real name, so long ago. It wasn't very good (in my opinion)

@Cerberus Stupid Latins

@Mitch Shocking.

@Mitch Stupid everyone, then.

@Cerberus oh please. television.

if you don't know what it meant in the original, mixing stuff means nothing.

@Cerberus People are stupid.

@Mitch Abomination!

@Cerberus I have high standards. The Indian just didn't taste right. I found German restaurants not to taste that good (but grocery stores and cafeterias excellent, the opposite of the US).

@Mitch It is widely considered bad style, unless you have no other choice.

9:46 PM

@Cerberus I know!

Or should I say, awayomination?

Do you find that stylish?

@Cerberus I think new words should be anglo saxon based. that would just be weird enough to stand out.

@Cerberus I don't find that at all.

I hear a car door slamming and a front door opening. BBL

@Mitch Ah OK, well, I guess it depends on what kind of restaurant? I would expect your average fancy German restaurant to serve good French cuisine, and a decent but humble German restaurant to serve decent German cuisine. But German cuisine is not as widely known, nor as widely appreciated as French.

As to Asian restaurants in Germany, I have no idea, I trust your impression.

@Mitch That would be funny.

@Mitch That was irony.

Bye!

10:01 PM

@Cerberus Oh. I guess I never went to a nice French restaurant there, and rarely a traditional German restaurant. BUt the latter I remember being good, and also imbiss and food truck food.

@Cerberus The Germans have always done it. But English has not done it for so long that the latin greek roots are obvious and germanic is obscurantist. or sightstopping.

@Mitch It depends!

@Mitch Although I only had traditional Austrian food once in Vienna, and it was meh. The French/international restaurants were all good.

10:30 PM

@Cerberus argh...so hungry

@Mitch Eat something! I have made garden pease with bacon, parmesan, parsley, pepper, and lemon zest.

Pretty good, although next time I will add some crème fraîche or cream.

TRiG

11:29 PM

This is even worse than bad kerning:

Not that it doesn’t have bad keming too.

TRiG

Photoshopped fix from the Imgur comments:

A: In place names, do the words qualifying the place act as an adjective?

Yup.

I hate these questions. I’m sure it’s a dupe, but I couldn’t find a canonical, so I answered it anyway.

0

Nouns Modifying Other Nouns No. A noun that modifies another noun remains a noun. It does not become an adjective. Nouns can be modified by various sorts of things, and they are not all of them adjectives. Adjectives, however, can only be modified by adverbs. As Professor Lawler observes, thi...

11:57 PM

@Robusto Well, good Indian food is not easy to make. It's quite demanding.

Most Indian restaurants I have eaten at have been terrible. Home cooked Indian food is more likely to be reasonable. Though of course, there are no guarantees.

@TRiG Leona, RDS.

Sounds like a dental superhero.

Though if you really want terrible, go British. In the terrible food stakes, it's unbeatable.