The many questions-not-worth-their-own-thread question thread XIX

[madviking]

I think there should be a prison sentence assigned to anyone who calls Virgina 'normal'....

Yea, it's called living in Virginia.

 

[Ajidica]

NoVa can't be that bad. It isn't like you are living deep in the Appalachians in West Virginia.

 

[Cutlass]

NoVa can't be that bad. It isn't like you are living deep in the Appalachians in West Virginia.

But you're still surrounded by Virginians.

 

[Dachs]

NoVa can't be that bad. It isn't like you are living deep in the Appalachians in West Virginia.

Traffic.

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

How come some members don't have a space for visitor messages, social groups, who has viewed profile, friends etc?

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

How long have they been here for? How many posts do they have so far?

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

Oh more than enough. Sometimes over a thousand and often been here for years. I figured it must be some of setting that could be chosen.

 

[salty mud]

Is there a privacy setting or something?

 

[Verarde]

Ba-bam.

 

[rugbyLEAGUEfan]

Nice one. That's fairly definitive.

Next?

 

[Cutlass]

It's also true that some of those features are disabled when a person is banned.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

How expensive is it to enable unmanned spacecraft to take color pictures?

Because greyscales put through artificial coloring during processing irritate the hell out of me.

 

[Cutlass]

It's probably mostly a question of bandwidth in radioing the picture back to Earth.

 

[Mango Elephant]

I have a question.

I'm learning French and there are two verb forms I find confusing (passe compese and past imperfect, I think they're called). In English their two forms would translate as -

I did rake the leaves.
I was raking the leaves.

In English I know which one to use, but in French it's much harder. Does anyone see a difference between the two that could make it easier for me to know which to use? Thanks.

 

[salty mud]

The imperfect tense is used to signify something that used to happen sometime in the past, but doesn't happen anymore. So for example, "I used to take the bus to work" is imperfect implies you did take the bus before, but not now. "I did take the bus to work" simply means you took the bus at one point, be it this morning or last year. There is no indication of not doing it now.

Does that make sense? Tenses are a pain to learn, I know.

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

If one loses their drive or passion for PC or console gaming, is it gone for good? Like, they used to play games heavily, but after a while, they just can't be motivated to play games anymore, if at all, and the motivation is just gone, is it permanent?

 

[cardgame]

You don't stop playing because you get old, you get old because you stop playing.

 

[Flying Pig]

The imperfect tense is used to signify something that used to happen sometime in the past, but doesn't happen anymore. So for example, "I used to take the bus to work" is imperfect implies you did take the bus before, but not now. "I did take the bus to work" simply means you took the bus at one point, be it this morning or last year. There is no indication of not doing it now.

Does that make sense? Tenses are a pain to learn, I know.

It's subtly different. I learned French back when we learned grammar properly, so hark, young ones, to the Old Ways:

The perfect tense (la passé composéé) is used to signify that an action happened, then it stopped, then the next thing happened. For example: 'I woke up and walked the dog' would translate to 'je me suis reveillé et j'ai promené le chien', because you woke up - and then that was done - and then you walked the dog.

The imperfect is also known as the past continuous because it signifies that an action happened and then carried on happening. This means that it can translate to 'I used to...', for example 'j'habitais en France' would mean 'I used to live in France', while 'j'ai habité en France' would mean 'I [have] lived in France'. It is also used when something happened as a backdrop to another event, in which case it translates to 'I was ...ing' - 'je promenais le chien quand j'ai vu un policier' would mean 'I was walking the dog when I saw a policeman'. At the time of seeing the policeman, the walking of the dog had not yet finished; the action was continuous. It doesn't neccessarily mean that you no longer walk the dog - 'j'habitais ici en Angleterre il y a trois ans' means 'I was living here in England three years ago', and clearly allows for you to still live in England.

 

[salty mud]

That's a slightly more long-winded way of saying what I said.

 

[Flying Pig]

The imperfect tense is used to signify something that used to happen sometime in the past, but doesn't happen anymore.

That's plain wrong, in French.