Annoying printers

On 06/10/18 09:13, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

Everyone should speak the same language on the entire planet, for
ease of communication. English is the most widespread, and one of
the more sensible ones (no genderised nouns for a start). Is it true
that in French a female cat is male, as it's "le chat" no matter if
it's male or female? Preposterous!

French has "le chat" for a male cat and "la chatte" for a female one,
but in practice not many people bother checking the sex of the cat
before talking about it.

It's not like English, where everyone knows that every cat is "she".

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

On 10/6/2018 2:36 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

My last Epson inkjet actually couldn't take one sheet. If I put in one, it refused to take it. If I put in any number greater than one, it used all but the last, then failed.


I suspect you were using the wrong method to feed that single piece of
paper into it. You had to think like a printer!

--
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/( _ )\ May the Force and farces be with you!
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(CSSA):
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In message Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 00:06:37 +0100, Char Jackson wrote:

On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 12:24:23 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote:

On 10/05/2018 08:08 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

[snip]

If they can't speak English that's their problem.

I think that knowing English should be a requirement for things like
registering a vehicle (in an English-speaking country). Some people don't.

I'm in the "some people don't" category, although I'm not militant or
hardcore about it. I've spent quite a bit of my adult life in other
countries and was always rather amazed at how I and my fellow travelers
just assumed that everyone we encountered would know English - because
mostly they did, to varying degrees. So in this country, (USA), I'm
willing to do my best to talk to anyone. Today, for example, there's a
crew at the house putting on a new roof. Out of the 7 people, only one
apparently speaks English. For the others, I use my High School Spanish
plus what little I picked up during my frequent visits to Spain back in
the 1980's.

When my grandparents came to this country, none of them spoke English.
They each learned, but I imagine that that took a while. To be fair, the
person who became my paternal grandmother didn't know any languages at
all when she arrived, since she was born aboard ship during the trip.

I think people should learn the language of the country they're in only
to make their own lives easier, not to make my life easier. My life is
already easy enough.

Everyone should speak the same language on the entire planet, for ease
of communication. English is the most widespread, and one of the more
sensible ones (no genderised nouns for a start). Is it true that in
French a female cat is male, as it's "le chat" no matter if it's male
or female? Preposterous!

French can't even count. The French for "84" is "four twenties and four"
It's a miracle there were any French mathematicians at all.

Stupid language.

I was talking to a native French speakers this week it's he said "French
is a dead language that doesn't know it's dead yet."

I said "any language that needs a government committee to try to
preserve it is terrified of being irrelevant." He agreed.

It's pretty though, there is that.

--
"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened." Linus Torvalds

On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 14:13:42 +1000, Peter Moron, another brain damaged,
troll-feeding senile idiot blathered:

French has "le chat" for a male cat and "la chatte" for a female one,
but in practice not many people bother checking the sex of the cat
before talking about it.

It's not like English, where everyone knows that every cat is "she".

And senile idiot no.1 appeared to swallow the abnormal sociopathic attention
whore's latest idiotic troll bait, hook, line and sinker again! tsk

On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 06:47:15 -0000 (UTC), Lewis, yet another mentally
deficient, troll-feeding, senile idiot, driveled:

I said "any language that needs a government committee to try to
preserve it is terrified of being irrelevant." He agreed.

It's pretty though, there is that.

And blathering senile idiot no.2 appeared to swallow that abnormal
sociopathic attention whore's latest idiotic troll bait, hook, line and
sinker! tsk

On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 07:47:15 +0100, Lewis wrote:

In message Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 00:06:37 +0100, Char Jackson wrote:

On Fri, 5 Oct 2018 12:24:23 -0500, Mark Lloyd wrote:

On 10/05/2018 08:08 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

[snip]

If they can't speak English that's their problem.

I think that knowing English should be a requirement for things like
registering a vehicle (in an English-speaking country). Some people don't.

I'm in the "some people don't" category, although I'm not militant or
hardcore about it. I've spent quite a bit of my adult life in other
countries and was always rather amazed at how I and my fellow travelers
just assumed that everyone we encountered would know English - because
mostly they did, to varying degrees. So in this country, (USA), I'm
willing to do my best to talk to anyone. Today, for example, there's a
crew at the house putting on a new roof. Out of the 7 people, only one
apparently speaks English. For the others, I use my High School Spanish
plus what little I picked up during my frequent visits to Spain back in
the 1980's.

When my grandparents came to this country, none of them spoke English.
They each learned, but I imagine that that took a while. To be fair, the
person who became my paternal grandmother didn't know any languages at
all when she arrived, since she was born aboard ship during the trip..

I think people should learn the language of the country they're in only
to make their own lives easier, not to make my life easier. My life is
already easy enough.

Everyone should speak the same language on the entire planet, for ease
of communication. English is the most widespread, and one of the more
sensible ones (no genderised nouns for a start). Is it true that in
French a female cat is male, as it's "le chat" no matter if it's male
or female? Preposterous!

French can't even count. The French for "84" is "four twenties and four"
It's a miracle there were any French mathematicians at all.

I like ¤99.99 on a radio advert: "quatre vingt dix neuf quatre vingt dix neuf" spoken very quickly.

Stupid language.

I was talking to a native French speakers this week it's he said "French
is a dead language that doesn't know it's dead yet."

I said "any language that needs a government committee to try to
preserve it is terrified of being irrelevant." He agreed.

The government is trying to preserve it? I thought all French spoke it as their primary language.

It's pretty though, there is that.

I like the accent, but English spoken with a French accent sounds just as sexy.

On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 05:43:11 +0100, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:

On 10/6/2018 2:36 AM, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

My last Epson inkjet actually couldn't take one sheet. If I put in one, it refused to take it. If I put in any number greater than one, it used all but the last, then failed.


I suspect you were using the wrong method to feed that single piece of
paper into it. You had to think like a printer!

I tried slotting it in by gravity, I tried pushing it a bit further, I even tried gently pushing while it tried to feed it. It either didn't grab it at all, or only grabbed one side and screwed it up, then continued trying to print on it, whether it was there or not.

On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 05:13:42 +0100, Peter Moylan wrote:

On 06/10/18 09:13, Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:

Everyone should speak the same language on the entire planet, for
ease of communication. English is the most widespread, and one of
the more sensible ones (no genderised nouns for a start). Is it true
that in French a female cat is male, as it's "le chat" no matter if
it's male or female? Preposterous!

French has "le chat" for a male cat and "la chatte" for a female one,
but in practice not many people bother checking the sex of the cat
before talking about it.

It's not like English, where everyone knows that every cat is "she".

I might call a ship "she", but a cat is an "it", so is a human baby.

On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 01:38:46 +0100, Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Fri, 05 Oct 2018 14:47:48 +0100, Jonathan N. Little
wrote:

Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
Anyway the postman's job is to deliver your mail to YOU, not something
200 yards away.

Obviously you have no concept of rural.

It's still their job. We have rural in Scotland, but the postman drives
to your door.

They drive to my door when I have a pickup or delivery too large for the
box. But even in "rural" UK folks tend to cluster in villages. It not
like that in USA. I'm in the county and not in an incorporated town or
village.

No, in Northern Scotland most places are farms. Houses are scattered seperately.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
French can't even count. The French for "84" is "four twenties and four"
It's a miracle there were any French mathematicians at all.

I like ¤99.99 on a radio advert: "quatre vingt dix neuf quatre vingt dix
neuf" spoken very quickly.

During WWII a spy in Belgium or Switzerland (not sure whether he was British
or German) was unmasked because he used the French counting system soixante
quarante (74) or quatre vignts dix-neuf (99), forgetting that
French-speaking Belgians and Swiss have simplified their counting system and
use septante, huitante and nonante for 70, 80 and 90, together with single
digits un to neuf.

Mind you the Germans use the four-and-twenty-blackbirds system for counting:
83 is drei-und-achtzig. The French and Germans have the habit of treating
phone numbers as strings of two-digit numbers (so they say the equivalent of
"forty-five, thirty-seven" rather than "four five three seven"). It is weird
to watch Germans writing down a phone number as someone dictates it because
they write the digits out of sequence: funf-und-vierzig [they write down a
five and then a four to the left of it] sieben-und-dreizig [they write down
a seven and then a three to the left of it]. You'd think that they'd buffer
the two digits of each pair and then write them down in normal left-to-right
order, but I've seen some Germans who don't do this.

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 01:38:46 +0100, Jonathan N. Little
wrote:

Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Fri, 05 Oct 2018 14:47:48 +0100, Jonathan N. Little
wrote:

Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
Anyway the postman's job is to deliver your mail to YOU, not something
200 yards away.

Obviously you have no concept of rural.

It's still their job. We have rural in Scotland, but the postman drives
to your door.

I've always wondered... In countries where houses have mailboxes on the
roadside, how do they solve the problem of the postman having access to the
mailbox to put mail in it, without there being a problem with theft or
vandalism of mail by people walking along the sidewalk?


They drive to my door when I have a pickup or delivery too large for the
box. But even in "rural" UK folks tend to cluster in villages. It not
like that in USA. I'm in the county and not in an incorporated town or
village.

No, in Northern Scotland most places are farms. Houses are scattered
seperately.

As regards the US, I can only comment about rural Massachusetts. It may be
the same in other states. Outside the big cities there are small towns of a
few thousand people, with a lot of ribbon building along the roads between
the towns. But everywhere, no matter how remote, is regarded as being "in"
one town or another. My sister and her family, who were living in a coastal
town north of Boston, had a road atlas which had its pages ordered by town
name, rather than east-to-west, north-to-south order - and the maps for
different towns were at different scales so every "town" (ie the built-up
town centre and its sparsely-populated environs) would just fit onto a
double-page spread in the map book. It made it very difficult to navigate
because when you went off one page, you had to go to a completely different
part of the book (rather than preceding or following page if you were going
east or west) and mentally adjust to a totally different scale with more or
less detail than the page you've just left. Americans have some odd ideas -
like using absurdly large numbers of feet to describe distances along a road
that we would measure in yards or fractions of a mile. "Road works 5000
feet" means very little, but "road works 1 mile" means more. I'm sure they
think just the opposite about our road signs - it's whatever you've grown up
with.

The other thing that amazed me was how few people walk anywhere, even in the
countryside. They will drive a very short distance and then go for a long
walk in a state park, rather than setting off from their house and walking
along the roadside to the start of the walk - even if it's a matter of a few
hundred yards. Likewise they will drive from one car park to another when
visiting two shops that are almost next door to each other in a shopping
mall. When they *do* walk along a road that has no sidewalk, they always
seem to walk with their back to the traffic rather than on the side where
they are facing oncoming traffic and so can see when they need to move onto
a verge.

I had a colleague who was visiting a site in rural US, and at lunchtime he
went for a walk from the site. This involved walking along a road with a
sidewalk for a short distance. On his way back, a police car pulled up and
asked whether he needed help, and why he was walking. Apparently various
people driving past him earlier had phoned 911 to report a man walking
suspiciously along a road, who was "obviously" either up to no good or else
had broken down and was going for help. Different habits...

In article , NY
wrote:

As regards the US, I can only comment about rural Massachusetts. It may be
the same in other states. Outside the big cities there are small towns of a
few thousand people, with a lot of ribbon building along the roads between
the towns. But everywhere, no matter how remote, is regarded as being "in"
one town or another. My sister and her family, who were living in a coastal
town north of Boston, had a road atlas which had its pages ordered by town
name, rather than east-to-west, north-to-south order - and the maps for
different towns were at different scales so every "town" (ie the built-up
town centre and its sparsely-populated environs) would just fit onto a
double-page spread in the map book. It made it very difficult to navigate
because when you went off one page, you had to go to a completely different
part of the book (rather than preceding or following page if you were going
east or west) and mentally adjust to a totally different scale with more or
less detail than the page you've just left. Americans have some odd ideas -
like using absurdly large numbers of feet to describe distances along a road
that we would measure in yards or fractions of a mile. "Road works 5000
feet" means very little, but "road works 1 mile" means more. I'm sure they
think just the opposite about our road signs - it's whatever you've grown up
with.

a lot of map books worked that way, not just that one, and it's *much*
better than the grid version where the same city or town can span
multiple pages.

On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 13:29:39 +0100, nospam wrote:

In article , NY
wrote:

As regards the US, I can only comment about rural Massachusetts. It may be
the same in other states. Outside the big cities there are small towns of a
few thousand people, with a lot of ribbon building along the roads between
the towns. But everywhere, no matter how remote, is regarded as being "in"
one town or another. My sister and her family, who were living in a coastal
town north of Boston, had a road atlas which had its pages ordered by town
name, rather than east-to-west, north-to-south order - and the maps for
different towns were at different scales so every "town" (ie the built-up
town centre and its sparsely-populated environs) would just fit onto a
double-page spread in the map book. It made it very difficult to navigate
because when you went off one page, you had to go to a completely different
part of the book (rather than preceding or following page if you were going
east or west) and mentally adjust to a totally different scale with more or
less detail than the page you've just left. Americans have some odd ideas -
like using absurdly large numbers of feet to describe distances along a road
that we would measure in yards or fractions of a mile. "Road works 5000
feet" means very little, but "road works 1 mile" means more. I'm sure they
think just the opposite about our road signs - it's whatever you've grown up
with.

a lot of map books worked that way, not just that one, and it's *much*
better than the grid version where the same city or town can span
multiple pages.

No it isn't. Easy to flip a page. Not so easy to change to another scale.

On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 13:12:20 +0100, NY wrote:

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 01:38:46 +0100, Jonathan N. Little
wrote:

Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
On Fri, 05 Oct 2018 14:47:48 +0100, Jonathan N. Little
wrote:

Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
Anyway the postman's job is to deliver your mail to YOU, not something
200 yards away.

Obviously you have no concept of rural.

It's still their job. We have rural in Scotland, but the postman drives
to your door.

I've always wondered... In countries where houses have mailboxes on the
roadside, how do they solve the problem of the postman having access to the
mailbox to put mail in it, without there being a problem with theft or
vandalism of mail by people walking along the sidewalk?

I assume it's like UK public post boxes, you slot it in the top and it drops down, but you can't fit your arm in to get it back out.

They drive to my door when I have a pickup or delivery too large for the
box. But even in "rural" UK folks tend to cluster in villages. It not
like that in USA. I'm in the county and not in an incorporated town or
village.

No, in Northern Scotland most places are farms. Houses are scattered
seperately.

As regards the US, I can only comment about rural Massachusetts. It may be
the same in other states. Outside the big cities there are small towns of a
few thousand people, with a lot of ribbon building along the roads between
the towns. But everywhere, no matter how remote, is regarded as being "in"
one town or another. My sister and her family, who were living in a coastal
town north of Boston, had a road atlas which had its pages ordered by town
name, rather than east-to-west, north-to-south order - and the maps for
different towns were at different scales so every "town" (ie the built-up
town centre and its sparsely-populated environs) would just fit onto a
double-page spread in the map book. It made it very difficult to navigate
because when you went off one page, you had to go to a completely different
part of the book (rather than preceding or following page if you were going
east or west) and mentally adjust to a totally different scale with more or
less detail than the page you've just left. Americans have some odd ideas -
like using absurdly large numbers of feet to describe distances along a road
that we would measure in yards or fractions of a mile. "Road works 5000
feet" means very little, but "road works 1 mile" means more. I'm sure they
think just the opposite about our road signs - it's whatever you've grown up
with.

The other thing that amazed me was how few people walk anywhere, even in the
countryside. They will drive a very short distance and then go for a long
walk in a state park, rather than setting off from their house and walking
along the roadside to the start of the walk - even if it's a matter of a few
hundred yards. Likewise they will drive from one car park to another when
visiting two shops that are almost next door to each other in a shopping
mall. When they *do* walk along a road that has no sidewalk, they always
seem to walk with their back to the traffic rather than on the side where
they are facing oncoming traffic and so can see when they need to move onto
a verge.

I had a colleague who was visiting a site in rural US, and at lunchtime he
went for a walk from the site. This involved walking along a road with a
sidewalk for a short distance. On his way back, a police car pulled up and
asked whether he needed help, and why he was walking. Apparently various
people driving past him earlier had phoned 911 to report a man walking
suspiciously along a road, who was "obviously" either up to no good or else
had broken down and was going for help. Different habits...

No, they're just stupid. On all the above counts.

On Sat, 06 Oct 2018 12:30:21 +0100, NY wrote:

"Jimmy Wilkinson Knife" wrote in message
news
French can't even count. The French for "84" is "four twenties and four"
It's a miracle there were any French mathematicians at all.

I like ¤99.99 on a radio advert: "quatre vingt dix neuf quatre vingt dix
neuf" spoken very quickly.

During WWII a spy in Belgium or Switzerland (not sure whether he was British
or German) was unmasked because he used the French counting system soixante
quarante (74) or quatre vignts dix-neuf (99), forgetting that
French-speaking Belgians and Swiss have simplified their counting system and
use septante, huitante and nonante for 70, 80 and 90, together with single
digits un to neuf.

Mind you the Germans use the four-and-twenty-blackbirds system for counting:
83 is drei-und-achtzig. The French and Germans have the habit of treating
phone numbers as strings of two-digit numbers (so they say the equivalent of
"forty-five, thirty-seven" rather than "four five three seven"). It is weird
to watch Germans writing down a phone number as someone dictates it because
they write the digits out of sequence: funf-und-vierzig [they write down a
five and then a four to the left of it] sieben-und-dreizig [they write down
a seven and then a three to the left of it]. You'd think that they'd buffer
the two digits of each pair and then write them down in normal left-to-right
order, but I've seen some Germans who don't do this.

The UK way is far easier. 01234, spoken as one word. Then 567890 spoken as one word, or sometimes two - 567 890. It's been worked out that most people can remember 7 digits easily, so 5 and 6 works well. It does confuse me though when someone gives me their phone number in an odd sequence, like 0123 4567 890. Mind you, we always used to have freephone numbers beginning 0800, some of which now seem to be 08000. Not sure if the size of the area codes changed or not, I do remember when I was a kid our number changed twice as they lumped exchanges together. I used to be able to phone next door with only 3 digits!