JoelFan

@JMS, the judge in that case was only basing his statements on the jury's findings... his own opinions were not relevant, and he never revealed them. And all the jury found was that it was at least 51% likely that it happened.

@JMS on the other hand, there's a pretty strong case against Biden being involved in corruption through Hunter. He's already been caught in lies about the case.

@JMS absolutely none of that is objectively true. Trump has never been charged criminally with insurrection, much less found guilty of it, in any court. He has stated none of the things you claim. Meanwhile Biden actually has suspended the constitution with illegal mask and vaccine mandates, targeting those whose speech he doesn't like, and illegally expanding mail-in voting. Also there's the undeniable fact that Trump leads Biden in the polls. As for the statute of limitations, there's zero evidence that would have affected him being convicted of rape. The case is laughably weak.

@JMS, no judge stated anything of the sort. The trial was about civil liability not guilt of any crime. The standard in a civil case is "more likely than not" which is far inferior of a standard than a criminal trial. Trump's accuser is a psychologically unstable woman who keeps changing her story and waited several decades to tell a soul. The laptop story has been proven true, and no one has even dared to deny it.

@jms there is far more compelling evidence of Biden being a rapist than either Kavanagh or Trump. There is also more compelling evidence of Harris being guilty of "sedition" than Trump, when she raised money to bail out people who set government buildings on fire. And there's more evidence of Biden being a "felon" then Trump due to his open corruption with Hunter and foreign countries.

Every one of your bullet points make Trump more appealing, not less, for many voters. They are spun as evidence of Democrat election-stealing tactics, which makes voters more motivated to "fight back".

Why not simply store strings in classfiles as UCS-2 (and later, UTF-16)? Why introduce UTF-8 (in any flavor) into any internal string representations?

this way it comes across not as a "correction" but as a "restatement". They will still get the idea (hopefully) that if they had written it clearer in the first place, you would not have had to clarify, and it also gives them an example of a clearer version, which they can learn from.

So in your position, I would focus only on the emails that you had to spend extra time on to figure out what they were trying to say. By writing in this way, the student is unnecessarily taking up your time. If you get an unclear email, either ask them to clarify (explaining what you could not understand) or summarize the unclear part with a clearer version (e.g. "what I undestand you are asking is....")

I have had to read MANY communications that were perfect grammatically, yet impossible to understand, without a lot of re-reading, thinking and guessing the writer's uncommunicated assumptions. I would much rather read an email starting "me and her" that is clear and concise, and doesn't waste my time trying to understand, than a grammatically perfect email that is unclear.

It's very important in any field, mathematics included, for students to learn that the person that reads their writing, whether formal or informal, is not them. While the student knows all about what they want to communicate, the reader knows nothing aside from the words that were written. They need to put themselves in the reader's place and ask themselves if what they wrote is clear.

I think we're missing the point by arguing over particular grammar rules and "prescriptive" vs "descriptive". If I were allowed to write an answer, I would say: "focus on the effectiveness of the communication". This is the goal of grammar rules. When someone asks, "what's the point of grammar, as long as they understand what I mean?" that's a good question. The answer is: "by using standard grammar, you are making sure that you are communicating effectively".

The main problem I noticed was asking a "yes/no" question if everything was clear. From my experience, that is a pretty useless question. It should definitely be asked, just to get it out of the way, but you should by no means believe them if they say "yes". It is especially suspicious if everyone in the class says they have no questions. You need to call on people and ask them questions to make sure they understand.

@StayOnTarget, yes! I actually experienced that. I was able to get my state rep to introduce a bill to the state legislature to solve an issue that I brought to his attention. I was surprised that my little bill had language like: "Maryland consolidated code is hereby repealed and replaced to include the following section" :O Unfortunately my bill was immediately killed by lobbyists immediately after it was introduced and assigned to a committee. :(

@MrMineHeads, think of it as a financial ledger. In its pure form, a ledger can only have transactions added to it. Once a transaction is entered, it can never be removed, nor can it be re-ordered. If a mistaken transaction is entered, a new transaction is entered to correct it, but the mistaken one is left alone. (For example, a mistaken debit of $50 is corrected by a credit of $50). Laws are the same. They can not be removed, but a new one can be entered to repeal it.

@MrMineHeads, if you want an example, I found the following simply by googling "is hereby repealed".... delcode.delaware.gov/sessionlaws/ga126/chp194.shtml But I'm having trouble understanding why you need an example. It's a simple matter of legislative mechanics. Basically the only way to make changes is to pass new laws. There is no direct way to "unpass" a law. To repeal a law, you make a new law that repeals the old law.

@lvd for starters, UTF-16 has 2 different byte orders, requiring a byte order mark, which may or may not be present. UTF-8 does not have this issue. But the main problem with UTF-16 is that hardly any developers understand it completely. Many of them think it's always a 16-byte character. And that assumption is not immediately challenged, because code that makes that assumption will kind of work. That's a recipe for disaster.

@VGR, then maybe UTF-8 would have been a much better alternative for Java, since it would have had no storage effect at all on ASCII characters

I guess I'm thinking of some very forward-thinking designs from long ago, such as the Unix timekeeping system, which fully supported time zones from the very beginning, unlike every other timekeeping system, even ones invented decades later.

@fadden, I actually think UTF-32 does have some valid use cases. That's why my alternate history includes it :)

The problems most certainly do exist with UTF-16, maybe not in an ideal world but very much in the real world. Much software is only tested with lower-valued (BMP) characters and either doesn't work at all or works badly with higher-valued characters. I specifically mentioned the double-backspace bug. The byte order issue most certainly also exists with UTF-16, unless the software is written perfectly to account for it. In general, UTF-16 is a vastly more complex design than UTF-8 which ensures that it will be poorly understood by developers and thus implemented incorrectly.

I love this question so hard

In my opinion, it is also acceptable to ask for things to be removed from the room, within reason. For example, I once stayed at a hotel that had an old-school large tube TV taking up a lot of space on a table. I wanted to use that table as a workspace and asked the hotel to remove the TV. They cheerfully complied.

Are you kidding? I ate lunch at home EVERY DAY when I lived really close to work

@DanRoss, well if you're in a place, such as a home, where all the devices belong to you, or in a small office with not that many devices, it could be useful

Could it perhaps be a security feature... alert you that someone is using your computer who should not be?

Or "hey everybody, I came in 20 minutes late today!"