Slashdot Mirror

'Virii' is actually the correct plural of 'virus'.

Nope. You're making two assumptions, both false. The first is that the "correct" English plural must always be the same as the Latin one, if a word is a loan from Latin. That is often the case, but it isn't a law of nature or of any other kind. Like speakers of other languages, English speakers can and do adapt foreign words. The great majority of English speakers, including well-educated people and scientists who work with viruses, say viruses.

The second false assumption is that the Latin plural of virus is virii. It isn't. That would be true if virus were a second declension masculine noun, but it isn't. It is a neuter noun of the second declension and has no Latin plural. Here is a summary of Latin plural formation that includes this fact about virus. For further discussion of Latin pseudo-plurals in English, I suggest this Language Log post.

'Virii' is actually the correct plural of 'virus'.

Nope. You're making two assumptions, both false. The first is that the "correct" English plural must always be the same as the Latin one, if a word is a loan from Latin. That is often the case, but it isn't a law of nature or of any other kind. Like speakers of other languages, English speakers can and do adapt foreign words. The great majority of English speakers, including well-educated people and scientists who work with viruses, say viruses.

The second false assumption is that the Latin plural of virus is virii. It isn't. That would be true if virus were a second declension masculine noun, but it isn't. It is a neuter noun of the second declension and has no Latin plural. Here is a summary of Latin plural formation that includes this fact about virus. For further discussion of Latin pseudo-plurals in English, I suggest this Language Log post.

Yes, there's a difference between sound pressure level and sound power, but the relationship is not such as to make 55 bels a plausible level. That has to be an error for decibels. Sound power is proportional to the square of the pressure. Since these are logarithmic measures, the result is to introduce a factor of two. Here is a handout that explains the relationship.

William A. Arbaugh, David J. Farber, Jonathan M. Smith: A Secure and Reliable Bootstrap Architecture.

See: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/VC.html
http://www.research.smu.edu.sg/faculty/edge/entrep _fin/papers/SER-VCandGrowth_WP_dec_2002.pdf
http://lrrc3.sas.upenn.edu/chinese/business/textbo ok/TransU4L2.htm

the reason WAV has been around for so long is that it's just doing a direct read of the bits on the audio CD, and dumping them to a file.

Not exactly. WAV is a FILE format, not an audio representation format. The audio data can be in any of dozens of formats, many of them involving lossy compression. One of the registered audio data formats (with ID 1) is straight PCM data, that is, uncompressed audio in the usual format. WAV files often contain straight PCM data, but they don't have to. (I've got some lecture notes on audio data and file formats here.)

I made some comparisons of lossless compression techniques a while back. This web page contains the results of my own tests (for speech data) and links to the tests I found (for music). I use FLAC.

You must have a fascinating moral paradigm, in some sense of the word ``fascinating''.

``... corporate agendas that seek to enrich their investors at the expense of unwitting customers.''? That sounds like fraud, which we have laws against. If those laws are twisted (MPAA, RIAA), or aren't being enforced (maybe MS is an example?), it's largely because of ``political agendas that aim to benefit people at large'', people like shareholders and employees, who are also consumers, just as most consumers are also shareholders, directly or indirectly.

The political process is about stealing from the productive (since they're the only ones who have anything to take), and giving to the many or to the powerful. Some contries which have carried that to its logical conclusion include present-day Zimbabwe, the Soviet Union, Germany during the 1930s and '40s, and most of Africa and South America during most of the last century.

There are two variants of the political process: the one I mention above, and the one in which you wise, benevolent ubermensch straighten out all of us untermensch, who would otherwise waste our lives on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This also involves stealing from the productive, and giving to some favored group. Since the rhetoric here involves ``helping the dear peepul'' (have you read Babbit?), they usually get away with murder, sometimes literally. The most dangerous people aren't the ones with the guns and the knives and the napalm, they're the ones with the suits, who are here to help you. I think you were talking about the second kind of ``political agenda''. If that wasn't what you meant, you may substitute ``those'' for ``you'' in ``you wise, benevolent ubermensch''.

If we have fair, constitutional laws, corporations will be able to enrich their shareholders only by making their customers better off. If anyone, corporate, government or private, is able to prosper by fraud or force, the problem doesn't lie with the crooks, but with the laws that allow them to do so, and the political process, in either of the senses I used the term above, is where those laws come from.

• Harvard doesn't list it in the admission requirements.
  
• But, U Penn does require a completed secondary education program in their requirements.
  
• Some like Penn State are a little fuzzy - they require four years of secondary education, but not necessarily a diploma (?).
  
• UCLA again doens't state a diploma specifically, but does require very specific secondary education credits.
  

Online Books Page From UPenn.

THE most complete listing I have seen.

Yes, this is true.

Here is an academic paper describing e-rater:
http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P98/P98-1032.pdf

Here is a site where you can try it for yourself:
http://www.ets.org/scoreitnow/

On a related note to the article, it's worth pointing out that the POPLmark Challenge aims to bring computer-verified and computer-aided proof to a wider audience, in this case programming language researchers. The challenge programs are chosen to exercise many aspects of programming languages that are known to be difficult to formalize.

The site has much more information about our particular motivations, but the basic idea is many proofs about programming languages are long, tedious, and otherwise uninteresting. However, one (small) mistake can invalidate large amounts of work, and there are indeed examples of this in the literature. We hope that theorem proving technology can help us avoid these pitfalls, but it appears that for the moment, the technology needs to improve a bit.

teh ponite es tat fi u wnate 2 talcker aboot sumethin, eu meyeght wahnt to acteuale canvey waht u gotz 2 sey affectevely.

It's like brushing your teeth, standing up with decent posture, wearing clean clothes, i.g... You can say it's big bad academics who are at fault for not listening to every malpropism-ridden sentence anyone has to say, but if you present yourself like an uneducated bum, you're going to be treated like one.

You can appeal to Chaucer all you want, but you negate the effect with your very own statement that language changes. We have dictionaries, and relatively standardized spelling now, much unlike the 15th century. Do you propose we recind the Great Vowel Shift just because it occured after Chaucer?

"I know several phrases in Latin" is a strawman argument. Nobody's saying knowing Latin is the greatest thing in the world. More important is the statement "I can communicate effectively," which is the entire point of language. In some circles it's necessary to know the (correct) Latin to communicate with other people. If this isn't your circle, then nobody's forcing you to learn the Latin, but you can't claim knowing the correct Latin is universally irrelevant or a "sign of hubris".[1]

Final point: yes, language changes. But the ultimate definition of what a word means comes from what others will understand it to mean. If I said "o.k." when I meant "No," then I would clearly be in the wrong. You can argue that "ok" is starting to be understood as "no" by some people, but the question of whether it's "right" or "wrong" lies ultimately with how people will interpret it. That's why (good) dictionaries have usage panels.[2]

[1] Cf. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/001843.html
[2] I happen to trust what these people believe to be "right": http://www.bartleby.com/64/12.html

Mike Brotherton has just released his (award-winning, actually printed by Tor) hard SF novel Stardragon under a Creative Commons license,

http://www.mikebrotherton.com/novels/index.html

Hopefully there'll be a nicer version of the .pdf, or corrected .txt version up soon.

John Mark Ockerbloom's Onlinebooks page is the best collection / search engine for free etexts I've yet found:

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

William

A quick search on KeyKOS makes one wonder: Does it have anything in common with GNU's microkernel efforts? Anyone cares to post a brief overview of KeyKOS, possibly in connection and/or comparison to Mach/HURD?

Short answer: yes it does, and it is actually one of the main reasons why I look forward to use Debian GNU/Hurd in the future. Let me quote my old post from January with some background and interesting links to more informations about KeyKOS:

Still, you can't block every hole in security. Sometimes you just have to hope, right?

Yes, you can. No you don't. Software is just an applied form of discrete mathematics. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it," as Donald Knuth once said. It is possible to present a formal proof of correctness for any algorithm. It is nearly impossible and certainly impractical when you have a big mess of spaghetti code like with most of software that is utter crap, but it is possible nonetheless when you know what are you doing and design appropriately, with very clean, small and isolated parts of your system responsible for enforcing its security policies. Take a look at such operating systems as KeyKOS and EROS. E.g. read Verifying Operating System Security paper by J. S. Shapiro and S. Weber: "This paper presents a proof of correctness of the EROS operating system architecture with respect to confinement." Read some essays by Norman Hardy, especially those on Capability Theory. This is hardly a new idea, see GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s paper by Bill Frantz, Norm Hardy, Jay Jonekait and Charlie Landau, written more than 25 years ago. The bottom line is: it is certainly possible to have a 100% secure system, but developers don't bother because users don't care.

And here is a newer post of mine asking exactly your question about KeyKOS capabilities in connection to the recent development of The Hurd, in the First Program Executed on L4 Port of GNU/HURD discussion two months ago:

When the first programs run, it is just a matter of time before there is a functional L4 port of Debian GNU/Hurd (or just Debian GNU?). I really like the design of the Hurd, but what I'd like to see the most are not the "POSIX capabilities" but the real capabilities as described in the 1975 paper by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (For those who don't know what am I talking about, I recommend starting from the excellent essay What is a Capability, Anyway? by Jonathan Shapiro, and then reading the capability theory essays by Norman Hardy. As a sidenone I might add that I find it amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using TCPA/Palladium-like platforms usually quote security fe

A quick search on KeyKOS makes one wonder: Does it have anything in common with GNU's microkernel efforts? Anyone cares to post a brief overview of KeyKOS, possibly in connection and/or comparison to Mach/HURD?

Short answer: yes it does, and it is actually one of the main reasons why I look forward to use Debian GNU/Hurd in the future. Let me quote my old post from January with some background and interesting links to more informations about KeyKOS:

Still, you can't block every hole in security. Sometimes you just have to hope, right?

Yes, you can. No you don't. Software is just an applied form of discrete mathematics. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it," as Donald Knuth once said. It is possible to present a formal proof of correctness for any algorithm. It is nearly impossible and certainly impractical when you have a big mess of spaghetti code like with most of software that is utter crap, but it is possible nonetheless when you know what are you doing and design appropriately, with very clean, small and isolated parts of your system responsible for enforcing its security policies. Take a look at such operating systems as KeyKOS and EROS. E.g. read Verifying Operating System Security paper by J. S. Shapiro and S. Weber: "This paper presents a proof of correctness of the EROS operating system architecture with respect to confinement." Read some essays by Norman Hardy, especially those on Capability Theory. This is hardly a new idea, see GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s paper by Bill Frantz, Norm Hardy, Jay Jonekait and Charlie Landau, written more than 25 years ago. The bottom line is: it is certainly possible to have a 100% secure system, but developers don't bother because users don't care.

And here is a newer post of mine asking exactly your question about KeyKOS capabilities in connection to the recent development of The Hurd, in the First Program Executed on L4 Port of GNU/HURD discussion two months ago:

When the first programs run, it is just a matter of time before there is a functional L4 port of Debian GNU/Hurd (or just Debian GNU?). I really like the design of the Hurd, but what I'd like to see the most are not the "POSIX capabilities" but the real capabilities as described in the 1975 paper by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (For those who don't know what am I talking about, I recommend starting from the excellent essay What is a Capability, Anyway? by Jonathan Shapiro, and then reading the capability theory essays by Norman Hardy. As a sidenone I might add that I find it amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using TCPA/Palladium-like platforms usually quote security fe

P2P has received a bad rap because of KaZaa and the likes. But BitTorrent is a legitimate technology that has a lot of uninfringing uses. Like it, there are now numerous vendors that are now offering legitimate P2P applications, such as Skype (obviously), BeInSync synchronization/remote access software (http://www.beinsync.com/www.beinsync.com), SETI@Home and many others. Check out the following link for an extensive list: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~arib/SNIU/http://www.sas .upenn.edu/~arib/SNIU/.

Upenn does it too!

and the buses are hella fast.

You might look at Unison, which runs under Linux and Windows. It has been working great with our Linux laptops (used to sync up user home directories). It is nice because it allows work to happen in two places, and then when you sync up it copies stuff everywhere it should go (and gives you an opportunity to manage conflicts). And I agree on the whole backup deal; I am planning on another machine soon with sufficient diskspace to mirror all the data I care about, plus 2 removeable drives, the most current of which I can store at work.

I don't know anything about whether iSync will require .mac in 10.4, sorry. But I did want to bring a piece of sync software to your attention: Unison. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

It works wonderfully well. It's a little cleverer than rsync in that it will do bi-directional updates (ie syncing) and also merges conflicts if it is able.

I work on two macs and with unison I am pretty much able to work on either one without having to worry about which one is up to date.

I have .mac too and that does a nice job of syncing iCal and Address Book and my Safari bookmarks. But I think Unison would probably do a pretty decent job of that too, although I have not tested that out.

Now, spelling /luz/ as "loose" is a very likely and natural error to make: "lose" is one of only two English words, and the only verb, with /uz/ spelled "ose" (the spelling of possessive "whose" is equally surprising); the very common verb "choose" has /uz/ spelled "oose"; and anyway there's another very common word "loose" already hanging around.

International copyright law shold be observed (see here). 28 years is a pipe dream. Try life+25 years for most countries as a minimum. Now if a 15 year old kid added code the kernel and lived to be 60. That would mean the code wouldn't be out from under the copyright for 80 years from the point of release.

Language Log refers to these constructs as "Snowclones", and cites several examples.

There are quite a few regular expression tools available, with different capabilities and purposes. For the novice who doesn't want to learn more or doesn't have time, the best is probably txt2regex, which walks you through the construction of the regexp and generates output for 20 different programs and languages. It is one of the few tools that I know of that isn't specialized for a particular language or program. My own tool, Redet, provides an interface to 29 regular expression implementations. It is aimed at people who know something about regular expressions or are willing to spend some time learning but helps out by providing palettes showing the notation for each program and a history system, so that you can first construct the pieces of a complex regexp, then assemble them. It also has features aimed at providing a search environment that may be useful for people who need no help constructing their regular expressions.

regex-coach uses PERL-style regular expressions. Its particular virtue is that it can single-step through the match and show the parse tree, so it is useful if you want to understand the matching process in detail. Similar in that it helps to understand the implementation of regular expressions is re_graph, which given a regular expression draws the corresponding finite state automaton.

A couple of nice tools aimed at Python users are Kiki and Kodos.

These and some other tools and libraries are listed on this page.

I think the original phrase is "I could care less about X", and it is meant to be sarcastic.

It's controversial. There is little doubt that "couldn't care less" was the original form, but "could care less" is now in fact commoner in the USA (though not elsewhere). The "sarcasm" interpretation of the illogical form is likely folk etymology, however. It's just a phrase that has lost its original meaning and then been corrupted.

On the basis of checking out some web sites in Dutch, I think that "windows" has become a generic term in Dutch in its computer sense. See this Language Log post for the evidence.

If you buy one for $125 you sponsor
(a) The publisher and
(b) The author
So they wouldn't save money. Right now, you can get intro books for 14.99, from noname professors. Most colleges require the $125 ones.

P.S.: There is a for example the Calculus books at UPenn which has math books for free.

Unfortunately, the search which yields Darwin's (decidedly not controversial, at least among biologists) Origin of Species claims that it is still covered under copyright. While that may be true of the edition that they used as source material, it is decidedly not true of the original work itself, which is available from a wide number of places like Project Gutengerg.

I found it interesting that the Nano/Bio Interface Center places what seems to be an equal emphasis on the development of an ethical structure applicable for these new technologies as on the research itself. Arthur Caplan, who is the director of the Center for Bioethics, used to chair the UN advisory committee on human cloning. His associate, Paul Wolpe, former Chief of Bioethics for NASA and bioethics advisor to Planned Parenthood, is another big gun in the medical ethics arena. With the heavy talent on the project and its relationship to the other projects at the center, the NBICs ethics project looks like a good bet to be a leader in shaping society's guidelines for dealing with the new developments in these emerging technologies.

Since these technologies address the basic functionality of all life in a way that will inevitably eventually become transferable, we are dealing with the real possibility of corrupting the blueprints that define biological identity. Bio engineered corn has already slipped the leash, it's only a matter of time until we start to see contamination in higher organisms. It's vital that powerful new technologies have legal and ethical guidelines in place before they are initiated. Too bad the IT community didn't see the same need 25 years ago.

billy - who uses Norton Synaptic Antivirus in the nasal inhalant form

• atmospheric1
• atmospheric2
• atmostpheric3

Actually men in that case was refering to women as well. It was refering to the race of man.

That's debateable, but it raises a good point. English could really use the following:

1) There's a lot of griping over the fact that "man" is the basis for "woman". The feminist solution of "womyn" is lousy, unless they consider themselves to be members of the humyn race (And "herstory" is just plain silly). It also neglects the confusion over whether "man" is meant in the male sense or in the general sense, etc. A much better solution is a few new words for male cases specifically. At the moment I can only think of three cases, all of which can be solved by substituting a new word or two to eliminate the bias. Here's my suggestions:
old m:f:either -> new m:f:either
man: WOman: man -> WAPman: WOman: man
men: WOmen: men -> WAPmen: WOmen: men
male: FEmale: - -> mel: fem: -

2)Gender-neutral pronouns so people aren't forced to pick one unnecessarily or use alkward him/her or he/she constructs, or abuse of the plural they/them:
male: he, him, his
female: she, her, hers
neither: it, it, its
any: ey, em, eir (Spivak pronouns)
Or we could just submit to the inevitable and officially make they/them both gender and number neutral.

3) The re-establishment of the words "man" and "men" as a general concept inclusive of both genders. That way we can still say "fireman" or "human" or "woman" without a lot of griping over sexism. And we can dump a lot of unnecessarily gendered words.

4) Adoption of gender-neutral titles: Ser instead of sir/madam.

I think I read somewhere that the word "man" in words like "fireman" actually comes from the latin "manus", meaning not a male but "hand". Makes sense. Actually, "jack" is used in a similar way for manual laborers.

No, you're thinking of TeX, whose version number approaches Pi.

Mmmmm... pi.

Show me one example where O'Caml beats C++.

ICFP contests:

2004 (ocaml 1st); 2003 (ocaml 1st); 2000 (ocaml 3rd, C++ 5th); >2001 (ocaml tied 3rd place with C);

Others winners: 1998 C derivative, 2002 python (I think C++ actually beat OCaml this year)

If you *have* to have a hotswappable HD ready to go. Buy him a USB or Firewire external case and put a laptop HD in it, get a copy of ghost and ghost the machine to the new HD every night. This solution *sucks*. And im not sure ghost supports USB/Firewire HDs?

If your dad is likely to come home most nights, convince him he needs to keep ALL his work files in a single directory (My Documents is ideal for this). Grab a copy of Unison and sync the data back to a home machine each night over the network. Its pretty efficent as unison will only send back files that have changed. If his HD dies at some point -- goto best buy and buy a new laptop drive which you were going to have to do ANYWAYS for your hot swap plan. This plan is great if: your dad comes home often, you have enough HD space to back up his documents (delete some porn if you dont). AND e is not constnatly creating huge files (GB size).

This is what I do to backup my laptop -- I have about 5Gb of documents, and never more then 10 megs gets changed at once. I even have a 4gb virtual machine I backup now (in addition to the 5gbs), and that takes like 10 mins.

That case does not forbid discrimination on basis of intelligence. It forbids discrimination on basis of a generalized intelligence TEST , which is a very different thing. Many huge employers, such as the military and General Motors, have collected such test data on large numbers of people and tracked the subsequent careers, and I would be very interested in any data showing any correlations at all. (As far as I know, there are some weak correlations with High School GPA and with SAT scores. There are none for any large sample size that correlate general career success with much else; in particular, finishing college or college GPA.)

Even the military's vocational aptitude test are pretty much correlated with basic job performance only, and not promotion, re-upping, and a unit composed of higher scorers is not very much more likely to achieve overall goals.

These are all things that we all know anyway. Mensa style tests measure the ability to do mensa style tests. There are plenty of homeless mensa members.

Organizations staffed by career managers have a tendency to gravitate to arbitrary measures of individuals. Take the ancient Chinese empires which promoted clerks based on memorization of large amounts of poetry; the British class system with it's meaninglessly precise formulas of parentage, economic status, military rank, age, etc; and modern "professionally managed" corporations with their intelligence tests and Briggs-Meyers nonsense. Perhaps any arbitrary number that can be ascribed to a person insulates promoters from the consequences of mistakes in promotion ?

If your future is in any way intangled with a larger organization of people, such as a medium sized company or academic institute, I urge you to read The Organization Man by William Whyte. (Chapter 16, "The Fight Against Genius", will be especially interesting to hackers.) Whyte talks about the Meyer-Briggs test and intelligence tests, and how they are abused, and the book includes an appendix which is a tutorial on how to cheat on a personality test to make yourself look more attractive to a large organization.

But back to discriminating based on general intelligence. Nothing in that decision prohibits you from discriminating on the basis of tests that you can show have a correlation to success, or even on your own perception of general intelligence, with the exception that if your general perception of intelligence shows a high degree of correlation with race, sex, or religion, you may be in trouble.

As a postscript, there's a general rule of thumb here, which the legal profession in it's characterist obligueness won't directly articulate. As long as you are still running off of your own money, and unincorporated, you are fairly insulated from these issues, as long as you don't behave outrageously. As soon as you take that priviledge of the protections of incorporation, you can expect to pay for that priviledge by living up to certain community standards. It is that acceptance of the corporate priviledge that makes these regulations seem acceptable to even a radical Individualist like myself.

But, as anybody who writes in Assembler knows there are no data types, just arbitrary bytes and word in memory.

Pssst... assembly languages have got types now...

Pass it on.

I was gonna say the same thing. I'm actually about to graduate with a BS in biochemistry, with an official minor in math and a de facto minor in CS (my school doesn't offer an official minor, but I've got the first 2.5 years of the CS major on my transcript). And next year I'm going into a biophysics PhD program, and planning to carry the computational experience with me.

So this is a great field to go into, provided you're actually interested in it. If all you want to do is increase your salary, then sell out and get an MBA. But if you want to do something really exciting (even if it does entail 5 years of grad school at a salary significantly lower than where you are now) and you're at all interested in biological/chemical sciences, then bioinformatics and systems biology is the way to go. Most large universities now have a program along these lines, and many are keen to bring in CS graduates. You'll have a significant learning curve during your first year getting caught up in molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry, but you'll bring an interesting and valuable perspective to the program.

Eniac on a chip is the way to go for you then!

the only thing I've ever heard that raises violence amongst individuals is pornography, or sexually explicit material.

The evidence does not support this link. See here and here . The second article does a good job of covering both pro and con studies, with the studies indicating a link given first. And if you pay attention you will note that some of the studies that found a link did not find a link when repeated by others. And other studies showed porn was associated with significant reductions in violence.

Google has interesting suggestions sometimes.

Here's an obligatory link to the pre-print research paper and the abstract:

http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0502336

Achieving transparency with plasmonic coatings

Andrea Alu, Nader Engheta

The possibility of using plasmonic covers to drastically reduce the total scattering cross section of spherical and cylindrical objects is discussed. While it is intuitively expected that increasing the physical size of an object may lead to an increase in its overall scattering cross section, here we see how a proper design of these lossless metamaterial covers near their plasma resonance may induce a dramatic drop in the scattering cross section, making the object nearly invisible to an observer, a phenomenon with obvious applications for low observability and non invasive probe design. Physical insights into this phenomenon and some numerical results are provided.

The basic approach has been developed over 10
years ago by IBM: The Mathematics of Statistical Machine Translation. And even free software has been available for a while, see
http://www.fjoch.com/GIZA++.html.

Hmm, maybe Miller denied any connection at the time of writing to avoid getting into hotter water than necessary (maybe), but in more recent writings, he certainly makes the relationship explicit. Take this quote from a June 2000 interview with the Guardian, for example:

It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 40s and early 50s. My basic need was to respond to a phenomenon which, with only small exaggeration, one could say paralysed a whole generation and in a short time dried up the habits of trust and toleration in public discourse.

Lesson on the correct plural version of Octopus. Very interesting read.

I'm sure there is some wisdom to the idea of just sending books, but you might also consider checking out a program called FinePrint. FinePrint can print 2, 4, or 8 pages per sheet of paper and can also streamline the process of duplex printing (giving you up to 16 pages per sheet). I use it all the time just to save paper, but it might suit your purpose as well. I know that there are similar programs for processing text files under Unix, but I can't recall the name(s) at the moment.

You might also want to be aware of another good resource of free online books, The Online Books Page. It includes Gutenberg Project texts as well as lots of others.

To the contrary, it is language evolving. The change follows a pattern already recognized by historical linguists.

Essentially, you only hear the words/phrases "could" and "care less" together is in the context of negation. After hearing this enough, you don't need the negation to recognize the intended meaning, and the negation drops out.

Read what professional linguists have to say about it: here, here, here, and here.

To the contrary, it is language evolving. The change follows a pattern already recognized by historical linguists.

Essentially, you only hear the words/phrases "could" and "care less" together is in the context of negation. After hearing this enough, you don't need the negation to recognize the intended meaning, and the negation drops out.

Read what professional linguists have to say about it: here, here, here, and here.

To the contrary, it is language evolving. The change follows a pattern already recognized by historical linguists.

Essentially, you only hear the words/phrases "could" and "care less" together is in the context of negation. After hearing this enough, you don't need the negation to recognize the intended meaning, and the negation drops out.

Read what professional linguists have to say about it: here, here, here, and here.

To the contrary, it is language evolving. The change follows a pattern already recognized by historical linguists.

Essentially, you only hear the words/phrases "could" and "care less" together is in the context of negation. After hearing this enough, you don't need the negation to recognize the intended meaning, and the negation drops out.

Read what professional linguists have to say about it: here, here, here, and here.

You should try out unison which can be used for file-synchronization either locally or remote and is avaliable both for windows and unix.

I use it for synchronising my laptop and my stationary pc, and it works wonderfully for that. For a couple of years I had looked into and partly tried coda, intermezzo, openafs, etc but it always stranded on that it was complex and that the kernel had to be patched so I had more or less given up the thought until I stumbeled over unison.