A quick browse round the website that supposedly shows Iran to be completely offline, also (at the moment) shows Germany, Florida and Colombia to be offline too. What conspiracy theory can be used to link these disparate regions?
I wasn't actually proposing or advocating a tourism industry up there (though I'd buy a ticket if I had the cash!), merely pointing out that ideals of beauty change. The previous poster was comparing the scenery of the moon to an ugly strip mine; I was saying that that won't be everyone's opinion. If NASA do manage to get a base up there, the images and movies coming back are going to be much higher quality than the Apollo films, and at least some of the people on Earth are going to see those landscapes as beautiful and pristine and genuinely untouched by humanity. People are quite capable of campaigning against the destruction of landscapes on Earth just from seeing them on TV, I'm sure the same will be true of lunar landscapes, once the serious mining starts.
But of course, all those old abandoned copper mines in the Lake District are considered picturesque too now. People are funny that way:-)
Think of the worst strip mine you have ever seen. Now think about the moon's surface, and you will quickly realize there is no way that mining could make the moon look worse (but in fact might actually improve what it looks like). That's subjective and subject to change. People used to think the Alps and England's Lake District were wild and ugly and unpleasant, and now they're major tourist attractions, the epitome of beauty. I imagine a lunar aesthetic could well grow up with increased visits. I can't remember which astronaut described the moon as "magnificent desolation" but I doubt he'd have said that about a strip mine.
My first discovery on installing OOo 2.3 (for linux) is that Open Document files created in KWord no longer load into Writer correctly -- the default text style turns to Times New Roman, no matter what it was in the original document. Since I work on an old Thinkpad T21 (which takes 30 seconds to load OOo), I tend to use KWord for most of my writing, and only load up OOo if I need to do more complex things like tracking changes or printing A5 booklets. I've filed a bug report, reinstalled 2.2, and now wait to see whether it will be fixed before KWord 2.0 comes out, possibly with the features I'm currently missing.
Well, it works from the UK, but the system requirements include a US locale and 1Gb of memory, so it doesn't look like I'll be using it any time soon. Interesting screen shots though -- definitely not the same interface as OpenOffice.
The guy was behaving like many politicians behave. They drone on beyond their alloted time, trying to get their point across. It happens at political rallies, it happens in the senate, it happens in the UK parliament, it happens when politicians are interviewed on TV and radio. Usually, there are no police present to taser them into silence. Presumably, the only reason police were present on this occasion is because John Kerry is "important". If the police hadn't been there, the guy would have blathered on for a while, the audience would have gotten restive and possibly started booing and hissing, the guy would eventually have shut up, Kerry would have answered the question, and everyone would have gone home saying what an idiot that guy was. End of story.
If being self-important and opinionated is an arrestable offence these days, better get the police round to the White House immediately.
Equally, a student could just use google (or one of those essay-for-hire sites) and crib what someone else has written about them. I'm not implying that you would, of course. Our university has recently started using plagiarism-detecting software(!), and sometimes asks us to hand in essays in electronic form for testing. And at least some of our seminar tutors are very sharp at spotting if students have actually done the set reading or just looked the subject up on Wikipedia.
I think we have a lot less students taking laptops into lectures here than in the US -- possibly because hardware's more expensive here, so less students have laptops, and those who *do* have them in lectures are seen as showing off rather than being practical.
But I do find it a bit worrying when I get email from other students; they all seem to write as though they're texting, and obviously don't consider spelling and punctuation a necessary part of communication. Maybe it isn't, since I can understand their emails, so maybe I'm just an old fogey, but I do hope their English is better when writing essays!
I'm a mature student doing an undergraduate history degree at a UK university, and the lecturers say that historical research has been completely revolutionised in the last five years by the internet. As an example, take Early English Books Online (EEBO), which has scans and transcriptions of every book published in English between the invention of the printing press 1750. Instead of having to travel to obscure academic libraries to find rare books (or manage without them), I can read all the source material I need for my dissertation from home via a VPN connection to my university. With a tool like Zotero for Firefox I can download the books to my laptop and make notes all over them -- try doing that with a 17th century manuscript:-)
You would think that a data company would have a more efficient billing process.
Don't know why anyone would think that. A friend of mine is still getting 6 page bills totalling £0.00 from Daisy, four months after she cancelled her account with them.
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A quick browse round the website that supposedly shows Iran to be completely offline, also (at the moment) shows Germany, Florida and Colombia to be offline too. What conspiracy theory can be used to link these disparate regions?
I wasn't actually proposing or advocating a tourism industry up there (though I'd buy a ticket if I had the cash!), merely pointing out that ideals of beauty change. The previous poster was comparing the scenery of the moon to an ugly strip mine; I was saying that that won't be everyone's opinion. If NASA do manage to get a base up there, the images and movies coming back are going to be much higher quality than the Apollo films, and at least some of the people on Earth are going to see those landscapes as beautiful and pristine and genuinely untouched by humanity. People are quite capable of campaigning against the destruction of landscapes on Earth just from seeing them on TV, I'm sure the same will be true of lunar landscapes, once the serious mining starts. But of course, all those old abandoned copper mines in the Lake District are considered picturesque too now. People are funny that way :-)
My first discovery on installing OOo 2.3 (for linux) is that Open Document files created in KWord no longer load into Writer correctly -- the default text style turns to Times New Roman, no matter what it was in the original document. Since I work on an old Thinkpad T21 (which takes 30 seconds to load OOo), I tend to use KWord for most of my writing, and only load up OOo if I need to do more complex things like tracking changes or printing A5 booklets. I've filed a bug report, reinstalled 2.2, and now wait to see whether it will be fixed before KWord 2.0 comes out, possibly with the features I'm currently missing.
Well, it works from the UK, but the system requirements include a US locale and 1Gb of memory, so it doesn't look like I'll be using it any time soon. Interesting screen shots though -- definitely not the same interface as OpenOffice.
The guy was behaving like many politicians behave. They drone on beyond their alloted time, trying to get their point across. It happens at political rallies, it happens in the senate, it happens in the UK parliament, it happens when politicians are interviewed on TV and radio. Usually, there are no police present to taser them into silence. Presumably, the only reason police were present on this occasion is because John Kerry is "important". If the police hadn't been there, the guy would have blathered on for a while, the audience would have gotten restive and possibly started booing and hissing, the guy would eventually have shut up, Kerry would have answered the question, and everyone would have gone home saying what an idiot that guy was. End of story. If being self-important and opinionated is an arrestable offence these days, better get the police round to the White House immediately.
Perhaps he'd stop repeating F=ma if you looked like you were paying attention :-)
I think we have a lot less students taking laptops into lectures here than in the US -- possibly because hardware's more expensive here, so less students have laptops, and those who *do* have them in lectures are seen as showing off rather than being practical. But I do find it a bit worrying when I get email from other students; they all seem to write as though they're texting, and obviously don't consider spelling and punctuation a necessary part of communication. Maybe it isn't, since I can understand their emails, so maybe I'm just an old fogey, but I do hope their English is better when writing essays!
I'm a mature student doing an undergraduate history degree at a UK university, and the lecturers say that historical research has been completely revolutionised in the last five years by the internet. As an example, take Early English Books Online (EEBO), which has scans and transcriptions of every book published in English between the invention of the printing press 1750. Instead of having to travel to obscure academic libraries to find rare books (or manage without them), I can read all the source material I need for my dissertation from home via a VPN connection to my university. With a tool like Zotero for Firefox I can download the books to my laptop and make notes all over them -- try doing that with a 17th century manuscript :-)
You would think that a data company would have a more efficient billing process.
Don't know why anyone would think that. A friend of mine is still getting 6 page bills totalling £0.00 from Daisy, four months after she cancelled her account with them.