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Messages - Frenzie

3
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
Quote from: ersi on
Really? Is there a difference? I consider the difference as imaginary (or rather unnecessary) as between Internet and internet. (As to "the", Estonian - and Finnish and Russian - don't have it and I'd rather we never did.)
Perhaps it's because we live in a Christian (Dutch: christian) nation. The distinction is somewhat imaginary when talking about bibles that contain the Bible but there are also bibles in the sense of authoritative works in general.

"The Bible, that's how it's written in the Bible, Biblestudy"
"biblepaper, a bible seller"
"an Italian food bible"

The general rule is that proper names are capitalized and type names aren't. So the Bible/Quran/New Testament is considered the same as something like the Guardian or the New York Times, albeit under a special "holy books" category. But an individual bible is a type name. The Bible is a bible and the New York Times is a newspaper. Or something like that. But yeah, it's certainly odd for the bible seller.
4
DnD Central / Re: Grammatical Mutterings
In Dutch, the Bible is the holy text of Christians and a bible is a printed specimen. Grammatically some Dutch spelling norms can be a bit weird and sometimes straight up absurd, but uppercase-wise it's mostly reasonably sane and consistent.
8
Browsers & Technology / Re: What's the best kind of interface for writing and typing?
Quote from: ersi on
From another video of his it appears that he is brother of Tech Lead (as a millionaire) who is probably familiar to you.
Somewhat. Insofar as I am I definitely don't want to watch him.

Quote from: ersi on
I have thought about the controversy that Emacs does not adhere to "Unix philosophy" that programs should be small, do just one thing and do it well.
Since you mentioned Xah. ;)
http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/_fastfood_dir/fastfood.html
16
DnD Central / Re: DnD entropy
I've always found the term tiresome and don't mind its demise in that sense. But the fact that Twitter took over a lot of it is a bit of a pity. Incidentally, traditional newspapers have finally started linking sometime in the last five, some as early as ten years. They've effectively all become blogs.
20
DnD Central / Re: What's going on in Italy?
Indeed, conflicts of interest may very well not be legal. Here's an opinion piece about how to change the rules in relation to some semi-recent affairs:

Quote from: https://www.lecho.be/opinions/analyse/le-lobbying-est-il-nuisible-ou-necessaire-a-notre-democratie/10022371.html


There are countless front pages of newspapers, books and documentaries devoted to the troubled relationship between political and economic power. Diamonds, pesticides, oil, agri-food, automobile, public works, pharma... all of them are entitled to the dilatory strategies of the shadowy influencers.

And in doing so, the trust of citizens in our political system is eroded a little more. Ecolo can thus condemn Maggie de Block as "Minister of Lobbies" rather than Minister of Health.

[…]

To date, there is no direct regulation of the activity of lobbyists in Belgium. Parliamentary commissions and codes of ethics have been put in place, without however recognizing lobbying in the strict sense.

The Belgian Association of Public Relations Consultants (BAPRC) has therefore been given the task of drafting ethical codes for its members. This is a welcome self-regulation, but it does not replace the legitimacy of the law.

The Federal Parliament has therefore decided to move forward on the subject. Overshadowed by other issues such as pension reform or the migration crisis, the work of the "Political Renewal" group and a first bill to create a register of lobbies have begun to recognize the activity.

However, citizens are likely to be disappointed. The proposed register of lobbies contains little information (name, telephone, company number). More surprisingly, the federal executive, the main instigator of the laws, would not be subject to this register and would continue to consult lobbies in the shadows.
22
Forum Administration / Re: Questions to the Administrator
I'm at the new much much better place, but apparently setting up the internet is really complicated. They hooked up the fiber on 23 September, at which date it was supposed to be activated. Unfortunately they still haven't managed to fix some underlying street issue…

Luckily I could borrow a 4g modem from work[1] so I can still work from home three days a week as usual.
1 70 GB volume, not a lot, but my phone only has 12 GB↵
25
Hobbies & Entertainment / Re: Bicycling
Quote from: ersi on
Traffic lights for pedestrians over here are still not halfway as bad as in USA though.
Oh yes, in the US they're completely absurd. Here's a video about it, but I've experienced it firsthand. They had a sign saying something like "wait for cars to turn right before crossing." The first time I did that… and never was able to cross. The second time, I stepped in front of the cars as if I was in Italy.[1]

I determined that the made up nonsense of "jaywalking" (what we call "walking") was probably the safest method of crossing the street, because you can simply do it when there are no cars, whereas the traffic light where you're supposed to cross is:

a. horribly far
b. significantly less safe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ByEBjf9ktY
1 Meaning ready to jump back but pretending not to.↵