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Messages - jax

2478
DnD Central / Re: The Weird, the Wacky and the Wonderful
Quote from: string on
On Russian toilet design; in one venue I visited I saw another weird toilet system. Look at one of those pedestals, and imagine not a seat, but two foot holds on other side of the bowl; all this in a cubicle where the top of the cubical was about 1m above the height of the toilet. It was all very puzzling to me and somewhat of a relief when I had worked it through.
Squat toilets. It would have made more sense to have one cubicle each for using both in parallel, but at least there was a choice.
2479
Forum Administration / Re: Questions to the Administrator
From a user perspective, probably something as close to:
Code: [Select]
[video user-params]URL[/video]

as possible, it makes it easy to do by hand, copy/paste URL, wrap it in video markup and done (user parametres should be optional, possibly disallowed).

The problem is on the server side. Before I joined Opera (and in the first years thereafter), I was a great fan of the object element, it slices, it dices. Now, not so much. It easily becomes a headache. If you allow a user to insert an object, it could be anything, especially if the parser is lax.

The SkyscraperCity approach (above) is user unfriendly in that the video tag is hidden and it only allows the poster to enter a Youtube ID, which I haven't checked, but seems to match [a-zA-Z0-9_-] with a typical length of 10 characters (would be reasonable to assume 6-16 characters). Anything else wouldn't be a Youtube ID. However they have several different URL syntaxes for the same ID. A script could be friendly to allow URL syntaxes, but only if they explicitly follow those syntaxes. As you may remember My Opera only allows one (the old v=...), and not the one that Google promotes for sharing.

So I would either recommend to use an existing script that is regularly checked for exploits by competent people, or use one which allows as little as possible (and only safe strings).
2481
Forum Administration / Re: Questions to the Administrator
If limiting yourself to Youtube (a significant limit, admittedly) you could do something like Skyscrapercity, where code like this

Code: [Select]
[youtube]KZFiEhStum[/youtube]

turns into this HTML snippet:
Code: [Select]
<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/KZFiEhStum8&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/KZFiEhStum8&amp;fs=1&amp;rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>

That is, just put in the Youtube video in an object (with embed fallback), adding a couple Youtube parametres, fs=1 and rel=0, fixed size and done.

The My Opera approach is more elaborate and safer (everything redirected to an iframe with domain embed.myopera.com), but as long as the script whitelists the Youtube ids (KZFiEhStum in this case), it should be safe enough. There has to be something like that around.

Whether this is a path worth taking is a different question, but food is delicious.
2482
DnD Central / Re: Neologically speaking
Some new words from across the world.

Words of the Year from Around the World. Can You Say Gubbploga?   [sure I can]

Quote from: Slate
You've heard about selfie, science, and because. But we aren't the only ones who like to try to capture the spirit of the year in a word. Here are some Words of the Year chosen by 13 other countries.

1. SAKTE-TV, NORWAY
The Language Council in Norway chose sakte-tv (slow-TV), reflecting the popularity of shows like "National Wood Fire Night," a four-hour discussion of firewood followed by an eight-hour broadcast of a crackling fire. Some of the good competitors were rekkeviddeangst (range anxiety)—the fear that the battery of your electric car will run out before you can get to a charging station—and revelyd (fox sound) because, of course, Ylvis.

2. GUBBPLOGA, SWEDEN
The Swedish Language Council takes an egalitarian, Swedish approach to the word of the year, releasing a list of the year's new Swedish words without declaring a winner. I like the sound of gubbploga (old man plowing), which refers to criticism of snow plowing priorities that put male-dominated workplace routes over bus and bike lanes and schools. Another good one was nagelprotest (nail protest) for the practice of painting your nails in the name of a cause—for instance, getting a rainbow manicure as a statement against Russian anti-gay laws.

3. UNDSKYLD, DENMARK
A member of the Danish Language Council, along with the hosts of the "Language Laboratory" radio show, chose undskyld (sorry) as Word of the Year, making specific reference to the apology a politician had to make after his luxury travel expenses were revealed. It won out over some familiar choices like twerk, selfie, and lårhul (thigh gap), but also gastroseksuel (gastrosexual, for food lovers) and kønskrans ("gender wreath"), a proposed substitute for jomfruhinde (hymen, or "virgin barrier").

4. GROKO, GERMANY
GroKo is short for [...]
2486
DnD Central / Re: Do Something
Not to Josh you, but you did mean 'than', didn't you? Otherwise, there have been consultants paid by that scheme.
2487
DnD Central / Re: Do Something
If the expected outcome of doing something is worse than not doing anything, I'll cheerfully do nothing. The best answer to "You gotta do something!" is probably "no".

In the sense of the best being the enemy of good, or even mediocre, sure.
2488
DnD Central / Re: wait , what ? ... Create a Star in Earth ?
While the link was no good, it seems that you have taken technology marketing speech a tad too literally. People can speak of creating conditions like in the Sun (temperature, pressure, matter...), that doesn't mean they are creating a sun. For one thing that would require far more material than the whole planet could provide.
2489
The Lounge / Re: What is your weather now?
Wind chill makes some sense in warmer temperatures, where people may be in various states of undress, but it is my argument it doesn't for temperatures below freezing when people are dressed for the occasion. Not many people walk through a blizzard in swimwear.
2490
DnD Central / Re: Today's Good News
In Romanian, and I think in a couple more languages, the word for carp is crap. Rather fitting, especially based on the way that bottom feeder is usually cooked in Europe.

Slate had an entry on kimchi in China. It seems to have missed that Han refers to both the Han river, running through Seoul, and to the Han dynasty that later gave the name to the Chinese ethnicity (particularly default non-minority Chinese). Han refers to anything and everything Chinese, except when it refers to Korea and everything Korean. That is pretty confusing.

As far as I can trace it the Han river for unknown reasons gave name to an area near Xi'an, Hanzhong (Central Han), far away from Seoul, and the first Han emperor claimed it as his origin, and hence the dynasty was named for it. During this dynasty much of what is known today as Chinese culture was disseminated and created, so Han became synonymous with Chinese culture and ethnicity. Meanwhile, back in Korea, the Han river became a metonym to refer to Korea itself.
2491
The Lounge / Re: What is your weather now?
Quote from: Frenzie on
Wikipedia has a couple for your amusement: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneeuw#Sneeuwval

Wikipedia also has for Norwegian and English.

The lists are pretty much similar.  Nysnø, new snow, is freshly fallen snow. Kram snø, wet snow, snow wet enough to make snowballs, kram and wet being adjectives, but kram is an archaic word only used for snow. Slaps and slush is the same thing, pretty onomatopoeic. Skare is snow crust, but possibly used more in Norwegian because it is a specialised word.

There are only a few words that are in Norwegian, but not in English. One of these is svulle, plural svuller, most often preceded with ice to get issvuller. The word, a cognate to the English verb swell, is the weather phenomena I complained about a page or so ago. It refers to those lumps of ice on the ground that makes you slip, fall, and break your neck, or at least perform some awkward acrobatics in the process of doing so. Ice swellings is a missing word in English.
2492
The Lounge / Re: What is your weather now?
That is pretty much the Norwegian definition as well, which after all follows from the word "snøstorm" (or more Germanic "snestorm"), a storm with snow in it. So does the Wikipedia definition.
Quote
A blizzard is a severe snowstorm caused by strong sustained winds of at least 56 km/h (35 mph) and lasting for a prolonged period of time – typically three hours or more.


This was how I used the world "blizzard", but later I realised that English have a tendency to call any form of heavy (or even not that heavy) snowfall with the barest minimum of wind.
2493
The Lounge / Re: What is your weather now?
Middle Sweden. In theory it has stopped snowing after 3-4 days of snowy weather that the English and probably the Scottish would call a blizzard. The view from my window disagrees.

Norway, especially more Northern parts have been unusually warm and dry this winter, which has led to an unusual hazard for mid-winter Norway: wildfires.

Norway fire ravages historic wood village in Laerdal was just the first village to go, there were three the following week.

Then, in China Shangri-La had burned down the week before, a fiery end to the year.
2494
DnD Central / Re: Fear of China
The anti-imperialist rhetoric was pretty thick, but sure sinophobia is real. Then again, only a couple  few decades ago Japan was the country to fear.

China, and also India will be the elephants in the room (or dragon and elephant if that image is preferred), with Indonesia, Malaysia, Indochina, Japan, Korea, and the rest.

2496
DnD Central / Re: The world in 2030
Environmentalism, and the ideal of the pristine, untouched environment, has largely grown as an urban phenomena. Environmental parties are almost universally more popular in cities than in the countryside (there must be exceptions, I don't know them), which their rural opponents rarely fail to point out.

It is not so surprising, higher density of living means that people are affected more closely by polluting/damaging activities. You wouldn't notice the pollution from a car in the countryside, but it would cause significant harm together with thousands other in a city. Urban citizen are less directly affected by the dilemma between economic activity and environmentalism. Farming is the greatest impact humanity has had on nature. City dwellers also eat, but can be blissfully unaware where the food comes from.
2498
DnD Central / Re: The world in 2030
Farmers cannot be called "nature-driven people", they are cultivating the land, causing less 'nature' rather than more. You could make the case that hunter-gatherers are nature-driven people, but they have been a tiny minority for millennia.
2499
DnD Central / Re: The world in 2030
The world employment (according to ILO) has been basically flat since 2004. 60% of people above 15 years old are employed (40% are unemployed, retired, in school, self-employed, or not looking for work). The US had an increasing employment rate up to 2007 (62%), fell through the crisis and has slowly grown since to 58% in 2012. EU hasn't shown any such recovery and is basically back at 2004 levels (51.5%).

It is much better to be wealthy or educated and unemployed than being poor, uneducated, and unemployed. Basically today's unemployed are better off than yesterday's employed, to the dismay of some economists who think the unemployed don't suffer enough and thus aren't forced into the work marked.

We still have a demographic bulge worldwide of better educated, but still basically uneducated/unskilled, workers entering the work market. A lot new jobs  have to be created, and a lot new jobs have been created.

Automation will take over as the bulge dissipates (there will be more potential employees in Africa and Afghanistan, less everywhere else), but if I should venture a guess it would be that the employment rate will stay essentially flat in the next 16 years as well, that the world employment rate in 2030 will still remain at around 60%.
2500
DnD Central / Re: Today's Good News
Quote from: Frenzie on
I have to admit that in my mind, Rwanda still lingered as one of the most war-torn countries on earth. Clearly a lot has changed and improved.

In this sense it is good news. War breaks out, frontline news. Peace breaks out, nobody notices. That gives the impression that the world is a more violent place that it is.

It isn't all yay! though, the bloody conflict in Eastern Congo is partially fuelled by spillovers from Rwanda (and other states). However, I see improvements rather than attaining perfection as good news, so this is good news (maybe not for CAR needing AU peacekeepers though).