(lower-casing/deprecation of "I" and "I'm" intentional; many other languages do not arrogantly case-place the self of the speaker above the listener or observer-- even though other languages tend to have separate words (honorific and plain/familiar) for the western/Latin "I"). So, it is my mission to start a movement to deprecate the importance of "I" and force it to "i"...
Join me: i will try to lead the way...
Because in English we never capitalize the words we use to refer to other people, and there are no cases where we use uncapitalized words to refer to ourselves...
Your Ubuntu-related paranoia ('"My own actions" are not the cause of this problem'), and your Slashdot-related paranoia ('the people that are stalking me') don't exactly inspire me to take seriously your global warming paranoia ('The purpose, for most such alarmists, is to shut down activity they don't like')...
When you're persecuted, when people are out to get you, and when you're the only one who can see what's really going on, it's time to start taking your meds again...
You bring up a fact that just struck me as odd. Why aren't we doing something to store electricity?
Energy storage is one of the keys to a modern energy infrastructure. Currently, we (typically) use fossil fuels for this purpose--it just sits there until it's needed. According to David Sanborn Scott's book, hydrogen is the only viable large-scale energy storage medium (or, in his words, "energy currency"). This is because, in a general way, it can be used more or less as we now use fossil fuels.
I don't know if he thinks of hydrogen as a means of storing energy generated off-peak for use during peak hours (I do know he sees a larger role for nuclear power--something I'm a little ambivalent about), but his ideas are very interesting in that he insists that this problem be approached as a problem with the energy system. In other words, it's necessary to understand the role fossil fuels play in the production, distribution and use of energy in order to decide how best to replace them.
He's appeared on two episodes of the CBC program Ideas--look for the podcast titled "The Hydrogen Solution."
Drupal theming is still pretty hokey in a lot of ways (for example, the whole way it deals with external CSS files is very poorly thought-out), but this:
I used to use Postnuke for one of my sites. I designed my own theme for it, and it was pretty nice
...strains my credibility:-) I've customized themes for most of the bigger open source CMS packages, and Postnuke was one of the very, very worst. Simply no flexibility at all--and this was during the.7xx phase.
In terms of relative simplicity, Drupal theming is to Postnuke theming as plugging a 9 volt battery into a portable radio is to building a nuclear power plant...and even though it's much simpler, you wind up with a far better result.
The page you've linked to, while depressingly bad, should not have any blinking thing on it for the simple reason that it contains no <blink> element--just a lonely, closing blink tag (i.e. "</blink>"). As far as I can tell (I will not do a thorough investigation...) nothing on that site blinks in any browser...
kant invented epistemiology? i think the buddhist abhidharma (science of the mind) schools beat him on that, and there are even earlier examples.
Did I say that? No, I said "essentially invented epistemology as a separate area of study," which is quite a different thing. Philosophers of one stripe or another have been asking epistemological questions at least since we lived in caves...
Hume--and Kant--are also a lot 'smarterer' than me;-)
However, Kant did come up with quite a plausible theory for why Hume was not quite right about that (and in doing so, essentially invented epistemology as a separate area of study). Whether or not he successfully demonstrated that his theory was correct is (still) an open question.
Very briefly what he supposed was that any experience whatsoever of the 'world' is only accessible through certain features of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus. Chief among these are time and space, but in addition, there are twelve a priori categories, including "causality and dependence" according to which experiences are ordered.
To put it in plainer language, time and space have to do not with reality as such, but with how we perceive reality, while the categories (including causality) and reason allow us to systematize our experiences. It's possible to think of time and space as analogous to being stuck in a space suit with a yellow-tinted visor. You can look through the visor, but everything will look yellow. You can't really be sure that everything--or anything--is yellow, but the only way you can see anything at all is to see it as something yellow.
The practical upshot of this is that according to Kant, while (contra Hume) genuine scientific inquiry is possible without recourse to faith in causation etc, and while our experience is of a real world, there are definite limits to human knowledge:
because time and space are properties of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus, it is absolutely impossible to discover what the world might be 'like' without reference to them, and
the answers to most of the traditional metaphysical questions--such as questions of the existence of god or the immortality of the soul--cannot be determined scientifically.
For more information, you can go to the Stanford Encyclopedia, or to the source, but when reading Kant, always be sure to take the proper precautions: take adequate food and water, allow plenty of time to get back before dark, and always let somebody know where you're going...
"Doing your PhD" is still school, which is an artificially protected environment for the student in some ways. In school, the problems you are asked to solve in your classes are almost always problems someone else has solved, and you can -research- the solution.
What total nonsense. I'm only at the MA level at the moment, but I can tell you that if my thesis only contains other people's solutions to problems, I'll never be allowed to get to the PhD level. This is the rule, not the exception, in the humanities.
As for the GP post, it makes me pretty nervous to hear that there might be PhD programs where it's possible to get by without having to use other tools than Google Scholar. Maybe some fields are different, but there're thousands upon thousands of journal articles in humanities subjects that will never show up there...
You sure about that? This laptop (Macbook Pro) always runs on the two-pronged plug (wall socket is only 20 cm away), and I've never felt anything like a tingle. I don't have a meter here to check, and I know you say it's only a tingle, but if there's 110 V in this case (220 V in the socket), I'd think I should be able to feel it a little bit--at least when I'm supporting it in my hands and it has no other path to ground...
I think you guys are talking about different parts of the book.
'Naughty Bob' seems to be talking about the actual appendix titled Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak, while 'dazedNconfuzed' seems ( slightly confuzedly:-) ) to be talking about Chapter XVII The Principles of Oligarchical Collectivism.
This is theoretically possible too, though there are problems with the spec (i.e. you access the given stylesheet rule by a numerical index) and (especially) the implementation (since it is apparently different for every browser in existence).
I'm with you on the HTML 5 skepticism, but this is not true.
HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 are parallel, current standards--the two specs were originally released just over a month apart. But given that IE does not support application/xhtml+xml, there are almost no real-world advantages to using XHTML 1.0 instead HTML 4.01.
Surely it must be either one bee or zero bees? Good god, I've just invented Beenary!
This will go nicely with my upcoming suite of organic IT products that already includes the bean array (which can double as an alternate fuel source, but which is not well suited to use in cubicles...)
I have no idea where all that came from. Sorry. Please move on to the next comment.
First of all, I should say that I think you've got it about right that the US has done a generally good job with the internet. However, I think you might be wrong about this:
It's not "people" who don't like US control, it's "people who run oppressive governments"
I think there may be many more 'people' than you realize who worry about the degree of control the US currently exercises over the internet. It's not strictly relevant to this topic, but you may remember this poll from last year where majorities in several countries traditionally allied with the US rated the country as a serious threat to world peace.
Rightly or wrongly, I don't think you can deny that there are a lot of people on the planet who have recently become a lot less likely to simply assume US' benevolence and good intentions, and I don't see that there's any reason to think that that attitude does not apply to this subject.
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy explains the function of the Identi-Ease Card like this:
There are so many different ways in which you are required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life can easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone. Never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cashpoint machines for instance; queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant genetic analysis. Hence the Identi-Ease; this encodes every single piece of information about you--your body and your life--into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you can then carry around in your wallet, thereby representing technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
Historically, two spaces after a sentence is very much the exception, not the rule.
Check out any professionally printed material--newspapers, magazines or books, and you will rarely or never find a double space after sentences. Here's a little about the why.
Slashdot Mirror
...welcome our new high-capacity, solid-state overlords.
No doubt the concept can be extended to Pizzas and Chinese takeout as well...
How about "I, for one, welcome our new self-mending, prophylactic overlords"?
Your Ubuntu-related paranoia ('"My own actions" are not the cause of this problem'), and your Slashdot-related paranoia ('the people that are stalking me') don't exactly inspire me to take seriously your global warming paranoia ('The purpose, for most such alarmists, is to shut down activity they don't like')...
When you're persecuted, when people are out to get you, and when you're the only one who can see what's really going on, it's time to start taking your meds again...
Energy storage is one of the keys to a modern energy infrastructure. Currently, we (typically) use fossil fuels for this purpose--it just sits there until it's needed. According to David Sanborn Scott's book, hydrogen is the only viable large-scale energy storage medium (or, in his words, "energy currency"). This is because, in a general way, it can be used more or less as we now use fossil fuels.
I don't know if he thinks of hydrogen as a means of storing energy generated off-peak for use during peak hours (I do know he sees a larger role for nuclear power--something I'm a little ambivalent about), but his ideas are very interesting in that he insists that this problem be approached as a problem with the energy system. In other words, it's necessary to understand the role fossil fuels play in the production, distribution and use of energy in order to decide how best to replace them.
He's appeared on two episodes of the CBC program Ideas--look for the podcast titled "The Hydrogen Solution."
Sure. And there's already a working prototype. To carry passengers or mail, we'd just need to build a bigger burrito...
Drupal theming is still pretty hokey in a lot of ways (for example, the whole way it deals with external CSS files is very poorly thought-out), but this:
...strains my credibility :-) I've customized themes for most of the bigger open source CMS packages, and Postnuke was one of the very, very worst. Simply no flexibility at all--and this was during the .7xx phase.
In terms of relative simplicity, Drupal theming is to Postnuke theming as plugging a 9 volt battery into a portable radio is to building a nuclear power plant...and even though it's much simpler, you wind up with a far better result.
For all those dissing the humanities in this thread:
Discuss.
Blink works fine in Firefox.
The page you've linked to, while depressingly bad, should not have any blinking thing on it for the simple reason that it contains no <blink> element--just a lonely, closing blink tag (i.e. "</blink>"). As far as I can tell (I will not do a thorough investigation...) nothing on that site blinks in any browser...
Did I say that? No, I said "essentially invented epistemology as a separate area of study," which is quite a different thing. Philosophers of one stripe or another have been asking epistemological questions at least since we lived in caves...
Hume--and Kant--are also a lot 'smarterer' than me ;-)
However, Kant did come up with quite a plausible theory for why Hume was not quite right about that (and in doing so, essentially invented epistemology as a separate area of study). Whether or not he successfully demonstrated that his theory was correct is (still) an open question.
Very briefly what he supposed was that any experience whatsoever of the 'world' is only accessible through certain features of our perceptual and cognitive apparatus. Chief among these are time and space, but in addition, there are twelve a priori categories, including "causality and dependence" according to which experiences are ordered.
To put it in plainer language, time and space have to do not with reality as such, but with how we perceive reality, while the categories (including causality) and reason allow us to systematize our experiences. It's possible to think of time and space as analogous to being stuck in a space suit with a yellow-tinted visor. You can look through the visor, but everything will look yellow. You can't really be sure that everything--or anything--is yellow, but the only way you can see anything at all is to see it as something yellow.
The practical upshot of this is that according to Kant, while (contra Hume) genuine scientific inquiry is possible without recourse to faith in causation etc, and while our experience is of a real world, there are definite limits to human knowledge:
For more information, you can go to the Stanford Encyclopedia, or to the source, but when reading Kant, always be sure to take the proper precautions: take adequate food and water, allow plenty of time to get back before dark, and always let somebody know where you're going...
What total nonsense. I'm only at the MA level at the moment, but I can tell you that if my thesis only contains other people's solutions to problems, I'll never be allowed to get to the PhD level. This is the rule, not the exception, in the humanities.
As for the GP post, it makes me pretty nervous to hear that there might be PhD programs where it's possible to get by without having to use other tools than Google Scholar. Maybe some fields are different, but there're thousands upon thousands of journal articles in humanities subjects that will never show up there...
You sure about that? This laptop (Macbook Pro) always runs on the two-pronged plug (wall socket is only 20 cm away), and I've never felt anything like a tingle. I don't have a meter here to check, and I know you say it's only a tingle, but if there's 110 V in this case (220 V in the socket), I'd think I should be able to feel it a little bit--at least when I'm supporting it in my hands and it has no other path to ground...
But then again, when I read the thread more thoroughly, he specifically linked to the bit he was talking about, so I'm wrong.
Still, if you ask me if there's anything in that book that reads like an instruction manual for tyranny, I'd say it's Chapter XVII...
I think you guys are talking about different parts of the book.
'Naughty Bob' seems to be talking about the actual appendix titled Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak, while 'dazedNconfuzed' seems ( slightly confuzedly :-) ) to be talking about Chapter XVII The Principles of Oligarchical Collectivism.
1984 Full Text
No, no, that's the gadget of Legos. Sheesh.
This is theoretically possible too, though there are problems with the spec (i.e. you access the given stylesheet rule by a numerical index) and (especially) the implementation (since it is apparently different for every browser in existence).
I'm with you on the HTML 5 skepticism, but this is not true.
HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 are parallel, current standards--the two specs were originally released just over a month apart. But given that IE does not support application/xhtml+xml, there are almost no real-world advantages to using XHTML 1.0 instead HTML 4.01.
Surely it must be either one bee or zero bees? Good god, I've just invented Beenary!
This will go nicely with my upcoming suite of organic IT products that already includes the bean array (which can double as an alternate fuel source, but which is not well suited to use in cubicles...)
I have no idea where all that came from. Sorry. Please move on to the next comment.
First of all, I should say that I think you've got it about right that the US has done a generally good job with the internet. However, I think you might be wrong about this:
I think there may be many more 'people' than you realize who worry about the degree of control the US currently exercises over the internet. It's not strictly relevant to this topic, but you may remember this poll from last year where majorities in several countries traditionally allied with the US rated the country as a serious threat to world peace.
Rightly or wrongly, I don't think you can deny that there are a lot of people on the planet who have recently become a lot less likely to simply assume US' benevolence and good intentions, and I don't see that there's any reason to think that that attitude does not apply to this subject.
The atoms hate our freedoms!
Douglas Adams' views on the subject are instructive:
The moral of this story: always, always make backup copies of your money.
Historically, two spaces after a sentence is very much the exception, not the rule.
Check out any professionally printed material--newspapers, magazines or books, and you will rarely or never find a double space after sentences. Here's a little about the why.