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Posted: Wed May 21, 2003 7:38 pm
by Twilkitri
How is 'could care less' memorable ?!?
And the thing about 'couldn't care less' is that it's meaning _can_ be obtained just by looking at the words in the sentence. NYARGH.

Posted: Wed May 21, 2003 8:09 pm
by Phred
its best not to think about the enigma that is the english language. how does flammable and inflammable mean the same thing?

Posted: Wed May 21, 2003 8:32 pm
by Twilkitri
*gasp* what about unflammable ? and non-flammable ?

Do these terms also mean the same as flammable&inflammable ?

This question will be answered by chromus, within a few short months. Maybe.

Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 12:12 am
by Kamui
Well.... I asked my mom and she thinks that inflammable can include the possibility of the item exploding.... I have no idea for sure ^^;; I had always thought that Inflammable was something that didn't burn or didn't burn as good ^^;; *looked it up on dictionary.com and was proven wrong* ^^;;

Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 9:58 am
by Pez-Man
Why the pez is "huggle-muggle" a word?

Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 12:31 pm
by chromus
"could care less" is an idiom, meaning that you cannot get it's true meaning just by looking at it's words. "coudn't care less" is not an idiom, as it means exactly what it says.

Actually, the "in" in inflammable is not a negation. It just looks that way and confuses a lot of people. It actually comes from the word "inflame", which means to set on fire. It then evolved into inflammable, which means capable of being set on fire.

Unflammable and non-flammable aren't real words.

Huggle-muggle isn't a real word.

Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 3:59 pm
by Zornak
Usage Note: Historically, flammable and inflammable mean the same thing. However, the presence of the prefix in- has misled many people into assuming that inflammable means “not flammable” or “noncombustible.” The prefix -in in inflammable is not, however, the Latin negative prefix -in, which is related to the English -un and appears in such words as indecent and inglorious. Rather, this -in is an intensive prefix derived from the Latin preposition in. This prefix also appears in the word enflame. But many people are not aware of this derivation, and for clarity's sake it is advisable to use only flammable to give warnings.

source: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=flammable

Posted: Thu May 22, 2003 10:02 pm
by Zornak
why does college cost more for people from out of state than in state?

Posted: Mon May 26, 2003 11:34 pm
by chromus
Actually, the only colleges which make a difference are public colleges, or those which are run by the state. The reason for this difference is that the college gets a tax break by admitting students from within the state. The extra cost of admitting a student from out of state is passed on to the student's tuition.

Posted: Tue May 27, 2003 11:24 pm
by Twilkitri
What is a general protection fault ?

Posted: Sat May 31, 2003 4:16 am
by chromus
A general protection fault is a bit of a cryptic error because it seems to be the default error for basically everything that goes wrong. Exactly, it means that some program tried to access memory that it didn't have and caused another program to execute an invalid command and crash. Windows raises this error almost everytime a program crashes, even though this isn't always the right reason for the crash.

Posted: Sat May 31, 2003 3:32 pm
by Phred
so whats up with blue screens? woulnt a popup alert-thingy work just as well?

Posted: Sat May 31, 2003 5:31 pm
by ayana
Popup of death doesn't sound as cool.

Posted: Sat May 31, 2003 7:34 pm
by Zornak
how is artificial gravity produced and/or created?

Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2003 11:26 pm
by chromus
Well, generally a general protection fault caused an error so bad that the operating system can't recover, which means that it can't display a pop-up. The blue screen is a sure way to display the error.

First of all, we have no idea what actually causes gravity, though we know it has something to do with the amount of mass something has. The theory is that a special particle called the graviton causes gravity, and according to super-symmetry theory, every particle has an opposite, so an anti-graviton would cause anti-gravity. Now, this is all theory, so we don't know if any of it really works.