What can you say about installing Debian that you haven't already said here?

Well, I'm hardly a Debian expert

I've been a RedHat user, now Fedora, for years. With a brief interlude on Mandrake.

Since RedHat 4.2, actually

That's what I did too

At first I had a really aggressive posting schedule

Now if I get 12 posts/year I'm doing well

sounds like a nice place.

Is it effective in reducing drug use? I suspect not.

heheh "no proper justification sometimes"!?!?! how about "ever"

that's no way to live

like in Thailand, they are arresting bloggers who say bad things about the monarchy. Ridiculous! And in Sudan, a British teacher was nearly executed for a perceived insult to Mohamed (she didn't even insult him). Instead, after international outcry, they only deported her.

Some places are messed up. To anyone who agrees, I say, come to Canada, we try to be less messed-up than the other guy.

ugh... you had to pick the most messed up example of life here :)

rain rain, go away, Mr. Shiny wants to go out for coffee....

well, why not

But we have a children's song that goes "Rain, Rain, go away, come again another day, little Johnny wants to play"

why oh why does Firefox underline "children's" in red squiggles?

Do you know the song "down by the bay, where the watermelons grow, back to my home, I dare not go. For if I do, my mother will say, "did you ever see a bear, coming his hair?" Down by the bay"

@JasperLoy why doesn't that surprise me :)

@JasperLoy well, maybe later when @aedia or @Kit is reading the transcript, they'll get that song stuck in their heads.

wow already 4 close votes

hm I guess Kit didn't like my song

@Kit, @Cerberus — You two! keep out of my codes! And those blasted elves. If I get my hands on those pointy eared ne'er-do-wells they'll be feeling the back of my +10 to strength Battle Axe of Flaying

whistles innocently

hums tunelessly

looks with suspicion @JSBngs

puts crawling pudding into grey sack

saving it for later, eh?

@MattЭллен What! You hid some real gems in there, and I smelled them, so what was I supposed to do?

listen, just because i have pointed ears doesn't mean i'm an elf

@Cerberus so you run in, trampling over all my 0s and 1s. It takes hours to straighten them out.

ok my long-running database script is going, as is my build process. Who wants coffee?

Congrats!

@MattЭллен looks contrite

congrats?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 for getting things going I guess

@MattЭллен ah. Thanks!

Anyway, let's talk about English.

I think you guys shot down that Caring question a little carelessly.

@Cerberus that topic's played out. i can't imagine that anybody still has questions about it

@Cerberus are you joking? that's the worst question i've seen in days

@Cerberus which one be that?

@JSBᾶngs Meta-English, then.

@JSBᾶngs That is not the point.

It wasn't nice toward the OP.

He didn't feel welcome.

He felt as though he had committed some crime.

ta

I don't like the question either; but is it ethical to scare people off like that?

@Cerberus "ethical"? In what way would it be unethical?

Also, OT, I find this greek lawsuit hilarious: thestar.com/news/world/article/…

We make people feel bad about themselves?

Etiquette, if you will.

@Cerberus sure, I suppose. I did ask him to clarify, but he didn't really do that.

And "explain this joke" or "explain this sarcasm" are usually off-topic anyway

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Yeah that is pretty funny!

@Cerberus what do you think should have happened?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Yeah, but was it really unclear? He just wanted his picture explained.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Yeah but how is he supposed to know that?

Well, I tried to dialogue with him but since noobs can't go into chat, it didn't work well

@Cerberus well, sure, but OT is OT, and "explain this" is not a good question anywhere.

@MattЭллен I personally disagree with SE's intolerant policy towards new users, which probably comes from Jeff. But, given that that's not going to change, I'd be very nice to new users and try to empathize. Now he thinks people find him dumb and his question unreasonable.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Sure it may have been OT (I also have a problem with that—by the way, don't take any of this personally); but how was he supposed to know that?

@Cerberus So you'd allow the poorly asked questions from new users, especially ones who have not taken the time to get to know how this community works?

I don't think that's fair on the rest of us

I don't take it personally, I'm not opposed to questioning the status quo

I'm no good at keeping to rules, but still, a question with no effort is not fair on us.

If the users are in charge here, maybe people should just do what they want. Answer low-quality questions if you want. Answer OT questions. whatever.

The newbie wants us to take our time to help them. They should understand we do this for free (ignoring rep and badges)

@MattЭллен I personally wouldn't want to punish users for not getting to know a website before posting a question. But let's assume that we should close this question: I think it should be done as nicely as possible.

@Cerberus Yes, I agree with closing as nicely as possible.

@MattЭллен If you look at it that way, then who is required to answer bad questions?

@Cerberus No one, but bad questions are like pollution, and need to be removed.

All I'm saying is that I am very glad I never asked a question here until I had witnessed countless closing, or I wouldn't be here.

@MattЭллен The problem is the definition of "bad". I personally find the great majority of questions here bad.

Seriously.

@Cerberus You mean you think they're bad, or think that they're bad by the metrics of stack exchange?

@MattЭллен I think those "metrics" are a pink unicorn: highly arbitrary. Apparently they aren't closed, so I must assume all those single-word requests etc. are not bad, even though I personally consider them so.

@Cerberus then I think you should vote to close any that you can justify

This is a typical page on Philosophy.se.

@MattЭллен I don't want to close the majority of questions and become phil.se.

But the alternative, never closing bad questions, is each SE site becomes Yahoo Answers

In fact, I don't want to "close" questions at all unless they're really nonsense, and certainly not before we have clear rules. But that's just my personal opinion.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Is that a proven fact? I doubt that.

There is much SE aka Jeff doctrine that sounds totally unfounded to me.

@Cerberus well, if you mean, did anyone ever start two competing Stack sites, one with rules, one without, and double-blindedly assign users to one site or the other, and see if one devolved into yahoo answers, then no, nobody's done that.

Jeff says it on a blog, and everybody believes it as an untested hypothesis.

But on the other hand, the internet has performed this experiment lots of times in other ways. yahoo answers is one example.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Exactly. So it is just an hypothesis. And I don't really believe that this is the only way to prevent that. Just think about it: is there no other way to filter out the bad questions?

personally, I'm finding the whole EL&U site more and more ... purposeless.

We have no linguists anymore.

We have no linguistic questions anymore

We have almost no hard grammar questions

It has always been that way for me: a few interesting questions, and many not-so-interesting ones.

All we have are dictionary questions and reverse dictionary questions

I suppose the split with Linguistics hasn't helped.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Those and Gen Ref have always been the bulk, I think.

we disallow translation or literary discussion.

Yeah, which is totally random.

@Cerberus questions get down voted which helps to filter them - but there is a difference between "down vote bad" and "against the rules" bad

@MattЭллен I was mainly arguing against the "closed" system.

also, since coming here I've learned about coca and ngrams and now I don't even need to ask about that stuff here.

Heh.

I have only twice asked a real question here, and only got half a satisfying answer.

In fact I might have stopped visiting this site if not for the chat room, which is usually about random stuff and not e, l, or u

Same.

So does the site work?

I think the quality of the open questions on Linguistics and Philosophy is much higher than here; but those sites are barely alive.

If you want to be truly academic, there just aren't enough people to ask enough questions for the enthusiast academics to answer.

Congrats!

@Cerberus it works for the people who get what they want

@MattЭллен Sure. But that's only about one person a day.

Maybe two.

It's difficult know to whether that's the right set of people

@Cerberus I think there are more accepts per day than that!

I think the closing criteria on Philosophy are excellent, much better than here; but the result is what I showed you, page upon page of mostly closed answers.

@MattЭллен Okay, I was thinking about Linguistics and Philosophy.

@Cerberus oh! :D

@JasperLoy Liar, you're capping all the time!

@JasperLoy on your way to the second caps badge then!

Hehe.

All I'm saying is the intolerance still scares me off.

dang it

@JasperLoy Hmm but then how come you're answering so many questions? Apparently you like them.

@JasperLoy the first is a bronze badge - mortarboard

@JasperLoy yup, still the only caps badge I've got.

@JasperLoy Okay, so you didn't lose interest in the site, good for you!

I still like grammar or linguistics questions.

@Cerberus I agree that the probability that a question will get closed is off putting, especially when it's so high, but a site has to make it clear what is and isn't acceptable. Programmer.SE had a lot of turbulence, but the mods (and users to some extent) took the problem in hand, closed a ton of questions, and now the site is full of the stuff the community accepts, and the rules are clear.

I guess we (EL&U) are at the beginning of this process

@MattЭллен Well, we've been around for a year

over a year

and questions get closed FAST

@MrShinyandNew安宇 I think you need to take into account kosmogate

I think the real problem is that new users can't know what to expect and the UI doesn't really help them.

there is still a lot of turbulence in what questions should be closed

And when a question is closed they don't know what to do

@MrShinyandNew安宇 yes, that is a problem

And even the terminology is scary "closed"... they think it means "Deleted"

hit enter

It works

hit it

@JasperLoy you can go into HTML view and insert a <p></p>

and put your content in that

I'd be in favour of putting a label "good question" on new questions that are good. So people can choose to ignore all other questions. This label would require two votes by 1000k+ users, or something.

:D

@Cerberus that's what the current voting system is meant to do

@MattЭллен But it doesn't work!

We still have tons of questions that I dislike!

@Cerberus in what way? I have always been able to tell that +7 is better than -3

vote them down!

As it is, anyone can vote; secondly, voting is meant to say that a question is acceptable, not really good and interesting.

If I look at all the questions with positive votes, still meh.

@Cerberus I only vote on question I think are good

acceptable questions just don't get a down vote

Most people don't, apparently.

but, yes, the masses are a rule unto themselves

If you find a question repugnant then bring it up here or in meta - make people realise it needs down voting

Yeah, well, nobody tells you what you are supposed to vote up.

@MattЭллен I spent some time on maintaining this site's rules, and I absolutely hate it, so alas.

It is too boring.

It took me far more time even to find duplicates than to answer them.

I guess I'm just in a whiny mood.

whining is good, I think this site is actually in danger

we need some kind of improvement

sadly, most of the questions people have about their native language boil down to (the same old bunch of) rules they don't fully understand, and dictionary lookups.

There's almost never anything about the "U" of EL&U here, like why would someone say X? When you should you use X instead of Y? etc.

And when we DO have a question like that, it often gets migrated to Writers

which probably shouldn't be separate from here, except in the "I'm a professional doing X, how do I do X more profitably"

or closed as off topic looking at the caring question

well, I did think that one was very badly asked

as evidenced by my close vote

I agree

but maybe questions shouldn't be closeable right away

I think it's more that new users don't get that closing a question allows them to edit it into a better form. They think they've been punished, which is and isn't the case, depending on your point of view, and leads them to believe they shouldn't be asking it at all.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Those are often closed and migrated to Writers.

As are the stylistic question, which I liked too.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Oops jinx.

@MattЭллен Exactly.

@MattЭллен yeah, this is why I posted a feature request on our meta, asking for a better UI for closed questions

Seems to have been ignored

@MrShinyandNew安宇 As always.

@MrShinyandNew安宇 aye, I up voted it.

well, shall we create a new chat room, unlinked to EL&U, and throw in the EL&U towel?

Yeah!

I'd been hoping to reach 10k soon but a rep-recalc has me all jaded

Except that this chat interface is really good.

@Cerberus we could create it on SE, but not linked to a site...

Wouldn't that be closed?

(other than SE)

@Cerberus no, not unless we left it inactive for 17 days

Besides, why would that be better?

@MattЭллен Hmm...

I don't know. I like some new influx of people now and then.

you don!

@MattЭллен his ENTER key is too close to his ' key

or his little finger is REALLY LONG

No comment.

I really should write a script against this in Autohotkey.

don{enter}::don'

@Cerberus well then, we just need to make the new room as popular as here

Like that.

@MattЭллен But how?

That's why I don't like "enter submits chat message" interfaces.

I like "CTRL-ENTER"

same as what happened here - lots of people come people where there is a lot of chatting

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Hmm I'd rather have a single button to press!

Sure, just, make sure you don't hit it by mistake :)

@MattЭллен You mean "where there"?

@MrShinyandNew安宇 Well we have the ability to correct ourselves here, yippee!

@Cerberus balls. too late now.

hello

oh, yes I do :F

@MattЭллен I don't know!

Hehe.

Hi Jez.

hi @Jez

Shit, Jez is here... quick, everyone flee to the new room!

@MattЭллен Uhh...

oh, uh... I mean, hi Jez :)

Maybe you forgot "on" after "come". Now it still doesn't make sense.

@Jez how goes the job hunt

@MattЭллен Hehe. Well, at least you tried!

@MattЭллен Ah, that must be it.

Oh nooo Matt's playing mind games!

I know the feeling.

I try never to edit something I wrote more than a minute earlier, or I will mess it up and not see it.

@Cerberus too many peoples

@MattЭллен That's the problem with this whole world

@MattЭллен Just kill off the ones you don't like, then?

@Cerberus I tried, but I ran out of time!

Hmm...discredit them, then?

Throw them in boiling oil?

@MrShinyandNew now too bad, a few interviews

Or boil them more slowly?

@Jez Not too bad? Good.

I bought a tub of Maltesers as an impulse purchase for a Christmas present. I knew it was a mistake. Been eating them for the past few days.

Where are you looking?

@Jez Oh God...

How many calories are in that?

505kcal per 100g

and the bucket is 440g's worth

Ah.

That's not too bad.

I thought it was more like a regular bucket.

well it is like a small bucket

Put it in a box and put some things on the box that you will be too lazy to remove when the time comes?

Like a few glasses of water?

@Jez was the present for you? Otherwise, you'll give someone an empty bucket? :)

it wasnt meant to be :-)

but i had to store it in the fridge...

So...

Next time, wrap it first :)

Good idea.

Or throw some bleach on it.

Oh, wait, it was a present.

I remember when I was a kid, I always wanted to read the books I was giving my friends for Christmas/birthdays. My mom practically had to physically restrain me.

Aww.

Well, you probably did get to read them later, didn't you?

I don't recall. Probably not? I forget.

Anyway, time for me to go home. bye all

Bye!

pop

@JasperLoy Cool!

@JasperLoy Mrowr!

@JasperLoy Cool! I distributed earlier today btw...

@JasperLoy Oh okay.

I have work again today.

@JasperLoy Between 5 and 6 hours.

@JasperLoy It bothers me when people do that.

@JasperLoy I have grammatical OCD sometimes.

@JasperLoy Same here, actually! Well, the legs (drumsticks, if you like) are decent as well.

@JasperLoy That they do, that they do!

@JasperLoy Interesting.

@JasperLoy Write about life.

@JasperLoy Make sure you discuss the reasons behind your disdain for white meat.

@JasperLoy Bah.

You and your "reduplication" frivolity.

@JasperLoy Frivolity isn't that bad.

People get confused when I start throwing Schadenfreude around.

@JasperLoy I like mixing my English with Latin occasionally, and I find loan words fun.

@JasperLoy Someone else... Hmm.

@JasperLoy I would fear for my life.

@JasperLoy Goodbye. Enjoy!