I just replaced my old Canon with a new i550 two weeks ago. The deciding factor was ink cost. Despite good reviews on both HPs and Lexmarks (along with the Canons), throwing in the cost of refills priced everything else out of the market. And not only is Canon ink cheap, the printers make very economical use of it. HPs and Lexmarks are real guzzlers by comparison.
Until their inks become affordable, I won't even consider other brands.
When will the feds learn that raising penalties isn't going to deter this type of crime?
Or, from Mitnik:
"The person who's carrying out the act doesn't think about the consequences.... I really can't see people researching what the penalties are before they do something."
In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that sentence length does provide a deterrent effect for crime. There is an easily demonstrable inverse relationship between increased penalties and crime rate.
However, it also seems to be the case that certainty of punishment provides a greater deterrent than severity of punishment. E.g., 20-years-to-life for jaywalking will have little effect on jaywalking rates if the chances of getting caught are near zero. Conversely, raise the chances of getting caught to 50% and even a more modest punishment will have a greater impact.
In short, both statements are wrong. Raising penalties does deter crime and, contrary to Mitnik's assertion, most criminals do consider consequences. This was recently argued, for example, by Morgan Reynolds before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, a transcript of which can be found here.
"Though" still works... in a normal sentence structure, or in a fmailiar phrase
I'd like to see some speed reading tests done on this. Like most folks, I had little trouble making out the examples provided, but certainly not as easily or comfortably as normal text. My own understanding, coupled with years of experience as an ESL educator, suggests proficient English readers tend to recognize letter groupings (not necessarily complete words) as they scan text.
For example, complex combinations such as 'ight'; vowel combinations such as 'ai', 'oa', 'oo', 'er'; digraphs such as 'th', 'ph' 'sh', 'ck' and consonant doublings such as 'll', 'ff' 'tt'; word components (e.g., prefixes and suffixes) such as 'ing', 'ed', 'able' and so forth.
So, while it may be possible to recognize 'nhgit', I'm willing to be it doesn't scan as fast as 'night'.
Further, I'm willing to bet (as you suggested) context plays a larger role is helping identify rearranged spellings than the research (or at least the reports) acknowledged. Try, e.g., to recognize the following individual words:
cainnetnel
Fcsicnaro
ekauqhtrae
crutney
psergors
hdrazas
rnicudeg
Acnaille
sifitneicc
ctaromemmoe
carutlul
rsnopsee
hirotsic
Any luck? Probably not. Now, try the same words in context:
The cainnetnel of the 1906 San Fcsicnaro ekauqhtrae will mark a crutney of psergors in understanding earthquake hdrazas and rnicudeg risks. The Acnaille plans to highlight sifitneicc achievements and ctaromemmoe the carutlul and social rsnopsee to this hirotsic event.
Better? Probably a little. I bet you managed to pick out a few of the words (albeit with considerably greater effort than the correct spelling would have required), though most of them probably remained elusive.
The above example illustrates two things: first, context helps; and second, that it works better for shorter, familiar (i.e., frequently-used) words than it does for longer, less familiar ones.
Further, based on the original report's claim that the order of the internal letters didn't matter, my example followed a slightly different approach. Rather than randomizing the internal letters, I simply reversed them. Does that improve or reduce readability as compared with a truly random ordering?
There are all sorts of other tests that might be conducted to test the validity of the claim. For example, try introducing an extraneous letter into a word before randomizing the internal letters. What happens to recognizability? E.g., while the typo in 'newspapper" is quickly identified, it would be much less apparent in 'npwsepepar'.
OR TRY USING ALL-CAPS. DEOS TAHT MKAE A DNEFIFERCE?
What about unfamiliar words? English spelling and phonetic rules, inconsistent as they may be, are a great aid in helping us to sound out and draw meaning from words we've never seen before.
Word components. English employs a broad system of prefixes and suffixes, which are quickly recognized when they occur in their proper word-initial or word-final positions, but become much less obvious when combined with the main body of the word. E.g., compare 'udonlabe' with 'undoable'; 'swolsy' with 'slowly'. What if we scramble the root while leaving suffixes intact. Does recognizability improve? Compare 'wimsming' vs. 'wnimimsg'.
Finally, if the internal order truly is irrelavent, then all reorderings ought to be equally recognizable. But are they? Try the following reorderings; are some more recognizable than others?
dnefirefce
dffrieicne
dinfferece
differecne
For all of us, I suspect the last is the most easily recognizable, as it is closest to the correct spelling. The first is probably the least
recognizable, in part because it breaks apart the double f and the 'er' combinations with which we're so familiar. Variants that retain these combinations are more recogniz
He was being sarcastic at the Hyperphase guys for throwing a hissy fit
Good lawyers all, the Hyperphase legal staff was just making sure they left no stone unthrown.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan
Re:Sounds Fantastic -- Now Why Not Hemp
on
Corn-Based Plastic
·
· Score: 1
I wish we were as forward looking on legal products from hemp
But here's where the hemp lobby shoots itself in the foot. The hemp evangelist who isn't in it with ulterior motives doesn't seem to exist.
I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which happens to be about six blocks from the state capitol. Annually, hemp evangelists would descend on the capitol building to hold what they themselves called a "smoke-in" (great marketing move, that), during which they would sit around smoking pot while extolling the virtues of hemp rope, hemp paper and hemp toothpaste. All the years I browsed these hemp fairs, I never found a hemp evangelist who wasn't also a pothead. Or a card-carrying member of NORML (which always seemed to be the main sponsor of these smoke-ins). The result was these folks had zero credibility.
the top two on my list are: 1) the character degredation of Farimir....
While I also found the changes to Faramir disturbing, they only rank third on my TTT peeve list. 2) is the camp "What are we fighting for?" speech Sam is saddled with at the end of the movie; as much as I enjoyed TTT, I cringe every time I see this scene.
For my money, however, by far the most egregious alteration was -- excuse me? -- elves at Helm's Deep. Pointless as it was even within the context of the movie, it was grossly out of character for the elves who, like the Ents, were invested by their immortality with an ageless wisdom that prevented them from understanding, let alone concerning themselves with the affairs of, short-lived men (indeed, one of the elves' many names for men was the Inscrutable). Of all the problems on the elvish plate at the end of the Third Age, yet another war of men was of little consequence.
The only reason the elves were concerned with the War of the Ring at all was because it was the final battle of the Long Defeat they had been fighting since the First Age, when Sauron was but the lieutenant of Morgoth.
Jackson's attempted cover -- "An alliance once existed between elves and men.... We come to honor that allegiance." -- is revisionist. The alliance was not between elves and men, but between the elves and the Edain, the First House of men, from whom the Numenoreans are descended. The Rohirrimï who are not Edain, have no part in that alliance; thus any elven army sent to honor the alliance would have gone to Gondor, not Rohan.
Despite that flaw, I remain in utter awe of the Helm's Deep battle scenes. As a piece of movie crafting it is absolutely superb. Not since Akira Kurosawa's gave us "Ran" has cinema seen the likes of Jackson's fair. Theodon's ominous soliloquy ("Where is the horse and the rider?") as the orc hordes approach is one of the great cinematic moments; my hat's off to Bernard Hill's performance. It is a testimony to the vapidity of Hollywood that such a cinematic master-work was so roundly snubbed.
This tax makes no sense at all, the cost of retrofitting cars with the GPS systems will be horrendous
Hey, I just had a really stupid idea. Instead of a $400 GPS system, let's retrofit every car with a $0.10 pencil. Then every year around, oh, say, April 14, you could run out to the car, copy off the odometer reading onto special schedule 1040-GT, subtract last year's reading, look up the result on the tax table on the back of the form and then -- presto! -- fill in your gas tax on line 23.
Or, for politicians who are suspicious of any scheme that lacks bureaucratic overhead (and what politician isn't?), you could add an extra line for odometer readings to the annual emissions check most states already require vehicles to undergo, and let the state calculate the tax.
1/3 of power requirements in china is, ahem, what, insignificant in your book?
Because no one can predict with any certainty what China's energy needs will be ten to twenty years out, any predictions of this sort are guesswork at best -- pure marketing at worst. The fact is, over the last decade power availability throughout the area to be served by the Three Gorges dam has consistently outstripped demand, meaning there is currently a power glut. This may well change in the future, but no one can say for sure.
I had a final chance to visit the Three Gorges last August, with a tour guide who was an unabashed mouthpiece for government propaganda. Coincidentally, there was a Canadian hydro-electric engineer in our group who had worked on dam projects around the world. He asked some very pointed questions, making the tour guide very uncomfortable.
One of the biggest potential problems with the dam project is silting. All dams eventually silt up -- all the detritus normally washed down river kept afloat by the currents settles out as the currents slow, eventually building up behind dams and other obstructions, rendering all dams eventually unusable.
The Three Gorges dam is different only in the unprecendented scale of the problem. The fact that the Yangtze is both one of the largest and one of the most silt-heavy rivers in the world makes conventional de- and anti-silting methodologies utterly inadequate and makes the the success of the project heavily dependent on experimental and largely untested (Gezhouba Dam notwithstanding) methods. Should these methods fail to perform as projected, the dam -- more than twenty years in the making -- could silt in in as little as ten years, making it one of the most costly debacles in human history.
Amazingly, the project has not even attempted to address the other silting problem. As the mighty Yangtze rushes into the upper end of the reservoir near Baidicheng -- 360 miles southwest of the Dam -- the sudden slowing will deposit by some estimates thousands of tons of silt per day, eventually resulting in massive flooding problems along the entire riverway from Chongqing to Yunyang.
There are no plausible alternatives currently, you see.
This is simply not true. In the years since the Three Gorges project was begun any number of alternative technologies have appeared. Gas-fueled combined cycle plants and co-generators, for example, produce virtually no pollution or greenhouse gases, are smaller, safer, cheaper, more reliable, less sociologically or environmentally disruptive, and more adaptable -- meaning they can be constructed relatively quickly to meet demand and can be located near the need. This last point is not insignificant, as transmission leakage will consume a large percentage of the power generated by the dam. By some estimates, transmission losses from the dam to Beijing could run as high as 70%. As natural gas becomes more prevelant, combined cycle plants will become even more economically attractive.
Which leads to the next problem: the project is already facing severe financial difficulties. Nearly every original investor has fled, and the few that haven't already pulled out are in the process of doing so, leaving the government to foot nearly the entire bill. While Beijing has attempted to put a bright face on this, the fact remains that few investors expect the dam will ever turn a profit, both because of the immense (and growing) construction costs -- not helped by the massive corruption which has dogged the project -- and because newer, cheaper alternatives threaten to undercut the dam's market before construction is even completed. The fact is, hydro-electric dams are outdated both technologically and economically.
Most of the sociological impact of the dam will takes years to manifest. To date, the government has relocated less than half the two million people who are being displaced. Our tour guide gushed with pride as he showed us the shin
Sheesh! This gets a +4 Insightful when it should be -1 Troll.
Tell me how you including a few Asian URLs in your blocked list has anything to do with the number of IP addresses in Asia, please. Strikes me like saying, "The telcos are running out of phone numbers. Want proof? Look at all the blocked names I've got in my Caller-ID box!"
The reason Asia is running out of IP addresses should be obvious to anyone what actually RTFA'd -- some short-sighted American git assigned a paltry 22 million IP addresses for a billion and a half people while hogging 70 percent of the rest for himself.
I had no problem accessing most of the URLs you mentioned. If you want a few hundred more working Asian URLs, let me know; I'll be happy to provide them.
You can reduce risk by buying several different stocks carrying the same risk.
"Even a little diversification can provide a substantial reduction in variability.
Hmm... Maybe the problem is my poor grasp of investment vocabulary, but this sounds pretty much like what I meant to say: diversifying one's portfolio minimizes the risk of wild, unpredictable swings in the portfolio's value (is that what "variability" means?). Not that MS stock is riskier than any other single stock, but that averaging risk across a portfolio of stocks is less risky than tossing all one's eggs into the Microsoft basket.
Doesn't that work out to about the same thing? While Ballmer may not be admitting that MS is not a sure thing when compared to any other single stock (as my original comments suggested), still, it would seem to suggest a lack of confidence in MS performance vs. the average of a diversified portfolio. Even put this way, it still seems to me in stark contrast to the prevailing attitude toward MS stocks say ten years ago.
But again, I am no financial guru, and admit to having little grasp of the subtleties of investment strategies.
OK, now I'm no financial genius, but isn't the purpose of diversification to reduce risk? If Ballmer is selling his MS stock simply in order to buy other stock, is this not tantemount to admitting that a) there are better investments than MS, or b) there are less risky investments, or both?
Lee Kaiwen
Taiwan, ROC
so, yeah, I guess it could be a two hour drive on a bad day.
Trust me, it was, especially at the I-365 interchange. I understand they've rebuilt it and widened 75 since I moved away, so it sounds like things have improved a lot.
Please don't refer to her as a "bitch"
It wasn't intended in a derogatory fashion. In fact, the Allen girls I knew used to take it as a compliment -- a strong woman who could hold her own against the boys. Antonym: prissie.
Not sure what you mean by "just" (I used to commute between Dallas and Allen -- 45 min. to 2 hours, give or take rush hour on US75), but I know what you mean. If that skinny bitch was chawin' Red Man's and hocking on the pavement, I think I know her. That gal could plug a Big Buck's can at thirty paces - and that was just spitting. I'd hate to get caught staring at the business end of her Red Label.
The problem I have with the products I've tried (GNUCash, Quicken, MS Money) is that they're both checkbook- and US-centric. While Quicken has loosened up in recent versions, it is still, fundamentally, a check register program, and all its tax categories and advice are, of course, applicable to US tax codes.
Taiwanese, however, use neither US tax codes nor checking accounts. I personally live out of ATM machines; I've set up my central account in Quicken as a cash account, which works tolerably well, but it can be awkward at times when Quicken tries to treat it as a checking account. And I won't even mention how much time it took to purge the default category set of its US biases.
When your servers are less busy, I'll download a demo. I was a bit surprised, however, to discover that, despite the cross-platform support, the installer is still platform specific, forcing me to download separate Windows and Linux versions of what is essentially.
Speaking of which, can I share databases between Linux and Windows?
I'm also interested in the Palm-synching plugin. What does it require on the Palm?
Per an article in the Taipei Times MS will cut prices on 13 of its products by "up to" 54 percent, but that "it remains to be seen whether Microsoft's distributors will pass the price cuts on to consumers." Office XP Pro would "in theory" drop 14%. No mention of Windows. In addition, the code-sharing agreement only stipulates "portions" of Windows' code, and leaves it entirely up to MS to decide who get to see it.
Consumers' groups don't like the decision, which the government is locked into for five years. The deal was done behind closed doors, with all details withheld. And there don't appear to be any penalties for MS if it fails to abide by the terms of the agreement.
Originally, the government had threatened to reopen an anti-trust investigation if MS didn't sit down and bargain, but there has been a lot of speculation -- particularly by the news media, who love to speculate on such things -- that MS had threatened to back out of a research park project if the investigation was re-opened. If true, it appears to mean the government caved first.
The problem is, Microsoft tries to maintain consistent prices worldwide -- unadjusted for GDP per capita, or any other numbers. In fact, price comparisons I've done recently suggest that Microsoft's SRP is actually higher in Taiwan than the US (Office XP, for example, selling for $US419 here compared to $US379).
The result is that Microsoft's prices are firmly out of reach in a country whose GDP per capita is less than half that of the US. Combined with ballpark 20 percent lower hardware prices in Taiwan makes MS's percentage of system cost -- well, unjustified is the best word I can think of.
The trick is for M$ to lower their prices to a point that the difference between buying a legit copy over a pirate copy is trivial.
After the '99 quake, the Taiwanese media kept recirculating images of the same two or three damaged Taipei buildings -- despite the fact that central Taiwan was reeling under massive devastation -- simply because they were conveniently located in their own backyard. Most foreign entities doing business in Taiwan tend to be similarly myopically focused on the Taipei market -- ignorant of the fact that Taipei's cost of living is a full 30 percent higher than most of the rest of the island -- simply because it's where most businesses -- and the government -- are HQ'ed. It's a bit like all the press China's economy has gotten in recent years, totally oblivious to the fact that all the economic development is happening in Shanghai, while 90% of China's population is still mired in stagnation and unemployment. Just as Shanghai is not China, so Taipei is not Taiwan.
In any case, I suspect the devil will be in the details. For example, the article reports:
"It said Microsoft would cut prices by an average of 26.7 percent"
The American auto industry must report fleet average MPGs on all automobiles sold. What they don't tell you is that, after averaging, the cream of the fleet is siphoned off and sold at higher profit margins to governments, businesses, etc., meaning the car you buy stands about a snowball's chance of ever achieving the reported MPG. Most of MS's "average of 26.7 percent" will find its way into government and business coffers, leaving the retail consumer out of the loop.
Also from the article:
"Consumers said they had been forced to turn to illegal copies because Microsoft had used its virtual monopoly to inflate prices."
Balderdash. While this argument might make a good stick for MS bashing, the fact is the decision to pirate MS products is almost always made at the vendor, not the consumer, level. Profit margins of less than $US200 per system don't allow most Ma and Pa vendors the luxury of legitimacy, and a 26 percent price break isn't going to change that.
My inquiries a while back elicited surprise from several vendors, simply because few consumers know enough to even ask. And of those who DO, I doubt one in ten cares. Note that none of these consumers is making an active decision to pirate, they're simply not interested in the issues.
And why would the average consumer want to go stumping around advocating for Microsoft products anyway -- especially when it means money out of their own pockets? The sound of Microsoft, of all companies, blowing the trumpet for ethical behavior lends new meaning to the term "surreal".
I'm 28, own a house and a car, have a family, have a very well paid job, and *I* can't afford MS Office.
Geez, ya bozo, no wonder you can't afford Microsoft -- you're economic priorities are all out of whack. Ditch the family, then run -- don't walk -- right down and pick up that retail copy of Office XP Pro you know you've been hankerin' for. You'll be glad you did.
Taiwan had a GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity) of 22,676 in 2001
But per capita GDP is not the same as per capita income. In 2000, workforce (that is, only those actually working) per capita income in Taiwan, excluding Taipei, was less that $15,000. I know only a small handful of folks (and because my business is education my circle of friends includes government employees, college professors, doctors and other educated elite) who bring home $US22,000 a year. Most years, even I barely clear that, I and make more money than almost anybody else I know.
What makes you think currency will be safe? Trust me -- with merchandise tracking on the horizon, tracking of cash will be right behind. Once the technology begins proving itself in consumer products, the IRS, with its eye on tax revenues, will push for RFID tags in currency as well. Being able to directly track all cash transactions will be the biggest boon to tax assessment since the invention of politicians.
But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?
Pshaw! Who cares? If they can track it to the door, they can track it beyond the door. That's what really worries me. With RFIDs woven into everything I buy, everything I wear, every piece of money in my pocket, privacy is history. Once coupled with the GPS system, everything I do, everywhere I go, every person I encounter, every book magazine and newspaper I read (and for how long), every movie I go to, when, where,and with whom I sleep, even how long it took me to shit -- it's all trackable.
Slashdotters have been bemoaning the slow erosion of our privacy. Not any more. Now, in one fell swoop it all goes out the door.
Are you suggesting MS releases new version of Windows every 6 months?
Not at all. I mean that MS's continual R&D ensures that today's codebase is vastly different than that of even 6 months ago. I'm suggesting that whatever code Russia sees (and, under the scenario we're discussing, releases into the wild) will be behind the curve of Microsoft's development efforts.
I used to work for MS in tech support, which meant that I had access not just to betas of future releases, but to nightly builds as well. I once took a call from a user trying to get help with an illegally obtained, unreleased beta (code-named "Nashville"; I've still got a copy of it around somewhere) of what was at the time to be Windows '97. When it was discovered that an unauthorized beta had gotten out, there was a big stink for about two weeks. But within a month the nightlies had moved so far beyond that particular build that it became irrelevant.
You are correct, of course, that the majority of PCs worldwide are running some form of Windows 9x (or earlier; there are still an amazing number of 3.x machines out there), but since not just the 9x series of OSes, but in fact the entire codebase, has been retired by MS, its release would have a negligible impact on MS's bottom line.
I don't know where this "subvert the democratic world" came from. I never made such a claim. If you actually do read my original post, it is asking about the impact to Microsoft
Since MS is an economic entity, any "impact to Microsoft" would be monetary, not political. Your reference to Russia's political power must intend something else, then. I was simply pursuing the political angle which you suggested.
Next time, RTFA:... Where does it say they will review it in Redmond?
I was thinking of the article which appeared on Slashdot a couple of days ago, which talked about govts sending representatives to Redmond to view source code.
I admit I didn't read the current article because, frankly, it doesn't strike me as being worth my time. I was replying to the implied suggestion that Russia with all its "huge political power" might possibly try to subvert the democratic world by releasing the source code. My point was that, with all the really important political stuff happening in the world, the fact that some govt agency has access to Windows source is not - to put it mildly - going to merit enough attention to warrant so much as a metaphorical shrugging of the shoulders.
In any case, Windows source is a constantly evolving thing. Even if Russia decided, for some unfathomable reason, to dump the source into the wild, in six months' time it would be so outdated as to be relatively useless.
Slashdot Mirror
I just replaced my old Canon with a new i550 two weeks ago. The deciding factor was ink cost. Despite good reviews on both HPs and Lexmarks (along with the Canons), throwing in the cost of refills priced everything else out of the market. And not only is Canon ink cheap, the printers make very economical use of it. HPs and Lexmarks are real guzzlers by comparison.
Until their inks become affordable, I won't even consider other brands.
Lee Kaiwen, Taiwan
Or, from Mitnik:
"The person who's carrying out the act doesn't think about the consequences.... I really can't see people researching what the penalties are before they do something."
In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that sentence length does provide a deterrent effect for crime. There is an easily demonstrable inverse relationship between increased penalties and crime rate.
However, it also seems to be the case that certainty of punishment provides a greater deterrent than severity of punishment. E.g., 20-years-to-life for jaywalking will have little effect on jaywalking rates if the chances of getting caught are near zero. Conversely, raise the chances of getting caught to 50% and even a more modest punishment will have a greater impact.
In short, both statements are wrong. Raising penalties does deter crime and, contrary to Mitnik's assertion, most criminals do consider consequences. This was recently argued, for example, by Morgan Reynolds before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, a transcript of which can be found here.
I'd like to see some speed reading tests done on this. Like most folks, I had little trouble making out the examples provided, but certainly not as easily or comfortably as normal text. My own understanding, coupled with years of experience as an ESL educator, suggests proficient English readers tend to recognize letter groupings (not necessarily complete words) as they scan text. For example, complex combinations such as 'ight'; vowel combinations such as 'ai', 'oa', 'oo', 'er'; digraphs such as 'th', 'ph' 'sh', 'ck' and consonant doublings such as 'll', 'ff' 'tt'; word components (e.g., prefixes and suffixes) such as 'ing', 'ed', 'able' and so forth.
So, while it may be possible to recognize 'nhgit', I'm willing to be it doesn't scan as fast as 'night'.
Further, I'm willing to bet (as you suggested) context plays a larger role is helping identify rearranged spellings than the research (or at least the reports) acknowledged. Try, e.g., to recognize the following individual words:
cainnetnel
Fcsicnaro
ekauqhtrae
crutney
psergors
hdrazas
rnicudeg
Acnaille
sifitneicc
ctaromemmoe
carutlul
rsnopsee
hirotsic
Any luck? Probably not. Now, try the same words in context:
Better? Probably a little. I bet you managed to pick out a few of the words (albeit with considerably greater effort than the correct spelling would have required), though most of them probably remained elusive.
The above example illustrates two things: first, context helps; and second, that it works better for shorter, familiar (i.e., frequently-used) words than it does for longer, less familiar ones.
Further, based on the original report's claim that the order of the internal letters didn't matter, my example followed a slightly different approach. Rather than randomizing the internal letters, I simply reversed them. Does that improve or reduce readability as compared with a truly random ordering?
There are all sorts of other tests that might be conducted to test the validity of the claim. For example, try introducing an extraneous letter into a word before randomizing the internal letters. What happens to recognizability? E.g., while the typo in 'newspapper" is quickly identified, it would be much less apparent in 'npwsepepar'.
OR TRY USING ALL-CAPS. DEOS TAHT MKAE A DNEFIFERCE?
What about unfamiliar words? English spelling and phonetic rules, inconsistent as they may be, are a great aid in helping us to sound out and draw meaning from words we've never seen before.
Word components. English employs a broad system of prefixes and suffixes, which are quickly recognized when they occur in their proper word-initial or word-final positions, but become much less obvious when combined with the main body of the word. E.g., compare 'udonlabe' with 'undoable'; 'swolsy' with 'slowly'. What if we scramble the root while leaving suffixes intact. Does recognizability improve? Compare 'wimsming' vs. 'wnimimsg'.
Finally, if the internal order truly is irrelavent, then all reorderings ought to be equally recognizable. But are they? Try the following reorderings; are some more recognizable than others?
dnefirefce
dffrieicne
dinfferece
differecne
For all of us, I suspect the last is the most easily recognizable, as it is closest to the correct spelling. The first is probably the least recognizable, in part because it breaks apart the double f and the 'er' combinations with which we're so familiar. Variants that retain these combinations are more recogniz
Good lawyers all, the Hyperphase legal staff was just making sure they left no stone unthrown.
Lee Kaiwen, Taiwan
But here's where the hemp lobby shoots itself in the foot. The hemp evangelist who isn't in it with ulterior motives doesn't seem to exist.
I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which happens to be about six blocks from the state capitol. Annually, hemp evangelists would descend on the capitol building to hold what they themselves called a "smoke-in" (great marketing move, that), during which they would sit around smoking pot while extolling the virtues of hemp rope, hemp paper and hemp toothpaste. All the years I browsed these hemp fairs, I never found a hemp evangelist who wasn't also a pothead. Or a card-carrying member of NORML (which always seemed to be the main sponsor of these smoke-ins). The result was these folks had zero credibility.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
While I also found the changes to Faramir disturbing, they only rank third on my TTT peeve list. 2) is the camp "What are we fighting for?" speech Sam is saddled with at the end of the movie; as much as I enjoyed TTT, I cringe every time I see this scene.
For my money, however, by far the most egregious alteration was -- excuse me? -- elves at Helm's Deep. Pointless as it was even within the context of the movie, it was grossly out of character for the elves who, like the Ents, were invested by their immortality with an ageless wisdom that prevented them from understanding, let alone concerning themselves with the affairs of, short-lived men (indeed, one of the elves' many names for men was the Inscrutable). Of all the problems on the elvish plate at the end of the Third Age, yet another war of men was of little consequence.
The only reason the elves were concerned with the War of the Ring at all was because it was the final battle of the Long Defeat they had been fighting since the First Age, when Sauron was but the lieutenant of Morgoth.
Jackson's attempted cover -- "An alliance once existed between elves and men.... We come to honor that allegiance." -- is revisionist. The alliance was not between elves and men, but between the elves and the Edain, the First House of men, from whom the Numenoreans are descended. The Rohirrimï who are not Edain, have no part in that alliance; thus any elven army sent to honor the alliance would have gone to Gondor, not Rohan.
Despite that flaw, I remain in utter awe of the Helm's Deep battle scenes. As a piece of movie crafting it is absolutely superb. Not since Akira Kurosawa's gave us "Ran" has cinema seen the likes of Jackson's fair. Theodon's ominous soliloquy ("Where is the horse and the rider?") as the orc hordes approach is one of the great cinematic moments; my hat's off to Bernard Hill's performance. It is a testimony to the vapidity of Hollywood that such a cinematic master-work was so roundly snubbed.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
Hey, I just had a really stupid idea. Instead of a $400 GPS system, let's retrofit every car with a $0.10 pencil. Then every year around, oh, say, April 14, you could run out to the car, copy off the odometer reading onto special schedule 1040-GT, subtract last year's reading, look up the result on the tax table on the back of the form and then -- presto! -- fill in your gas tax on line 23.
Or, for politicians who are suspicious of any scheme that lacks bureaucratic overhead (and what politician isn't?), you could add an extra line for odometer readings to the annual emissions check most states already require vehicles to undergo, and let the state calculate the tax.
See, told you it was a stupid idea.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
Because no one can predict with any certainty what China's energy needs will be ten to twenty years out, any predictions of this sort are guesswork at best -- pure marketing at worst. The fact is, over the last decade power availability throughout the area to be served by the Three Gorges dam has consistently outstripped demand, meaning there is currently a power glut. This may well change in the future, but no one can say for sure.
I had a final chance to visit the Three Gorges last August, with a tour guide who was an unabashed mouthpiece for government propaganda. Coincidentally, there was a Canadian hydro-electric engineer in our group who had worked on dam projects around the world. He asked some very pointed questions, making the tour guide very uncomfortable.
One of the biggest potential problems with the dam project is silting. All dams eventually silt up -- all the detritus normally washed down river kept afloat by the currents settles out as the currents slow, eventually building up behind dams and other obstructions, rendering all dams eventually unusable.
The Three Gorges dam is different only in the unprecendented scale of the problem. The fact that the Yangtze is both one of the largest and one of the most silt-heavy rivers in the world makes conventional de- and anti-silting methodologies utterly inadequate and makes the the success of the project heavily dependent on experimental and largely untested (Gezhouba Dam notwithstanding) methods. Should these methods fail to perform as projected, the dam -- more than twenty years in the making -- could silt in in as little as ten years, making it one of the most costly debacles in human history.
Amazingly, the project has not even attempted to address the other silting problem. As the mighty Yangtze rushes into the upper end of the reservoir near Baidicheng -- 360 miles southwest of the Dam -- the sudden slowing will deposit by some estimates thousands of tons of silt per day, eventually resulting in massive flooding problems along the entire riverway from Chongqing to Yunyang.
There are no plausible alternatives currently, you see.
This is simply not true. In the years since the Three Gorges project was begun any number of alternative technologies have appeared. Gas-fueled combined cycle plants and co-generators, for example, produce virtually no pollution or greenhouse gases, are smaller, safer, cheaper, more reliable, less sociologically or environmentally disruptive, and more adaptable -- meaning they can be constructed relatively quickly to meet demand and can be located near the need. This last point is not insignificant, as transmission leakage will consume a large percentage of the power generated by the dam. By some estimates, transmission losses from the dam to Beijing could run as high as 70%. As natural gas becomes more prevelant, combined cycle plants will become even more economically attractive.
Which leads to the next problem: the project is already facing severe financial difficulties. Nearly every original investor has fled, and the few that haven't already pulled out are in the process of doing so, leaving the government to foot nearly the entire bill. While Beijing has attempted to put a bright face on this, the fact remains that few investors expect the dam will ever turn a profit, both because of the immense (and growing) construction costs -- not helped by the massive corruption which has dogged the project -- and because newer, cheaper alternatives threaten to undercut the dam's market before construction is even completed. The fact is, hydro-electric dams are outdated both technologically and economically.
Most of the sociological impact of the dam will takes years to manifest. To date, the government has relocated less than half the two million people who are being displaced. Our tour guide gushed with pride as he showed us the shin
Tell me how you including a few Asian URLs in your blocked list has anything to do with the number of IP addresses in Asia, please. Strikes me like saying, "The telcos are running out of phone numbers. Want proof? Look at all the blocked names I've got in my Caller-ID box!"
The reason Asia is running out of IP addresses should be obvious to anyone what actually RTFA'd -- some short-sighted American git assigned a paltry 22 million IP addresses for a billion and a half people while hogging 70 percent of the rest for himself.
I had no problem accessing most of the URLs you mentioned. If you want a few hundred more working Asian URLs, let me know; I'll be happy to provide them.
Lee Kaiwen
Taiwan, ROC
"Even a little diversification can provide a substantial reduction in variability.
Hmm... Maybe the problem is my poor grasp of investment vocabulary, but this sounds pretty much like what I meant to say: diversifying one's portfolio minimizes the risk of wild, unpredictable swings in the portfolio's value (is that what "variability" means?). Not that MS stock is riskier than any other single stock, but that averaging risk across a portfolio of stocks is less risky than tossing all one's eggs into the Microsoft basket.
Doesn't that work out to about the same thing? While Ballmer may not be admitting that MS is not a sure thing when compared to any other single stock (as my original comments suggested), still, it would seem to suggest a lack of confidence in MS performance vs. the average of a diversified portfolio. Even put this way, it still seems to me in stark contrast to the prevailing attitude toward MS stocks say ten years ago.
But again, I am no financial guru, and admit to having little grasp of the subtleties of investment strategies.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
OK, now I'm no financial genius, but isn't the purpose of diversification to reduce risk? If Ballmer is selling his MS stock simply in order to buy other stock, is this not tantemount to admitting that a) there are better investments than MS, or b) there are less risky investments, or both? Lee Kaiwen Taiwan, ROC
Trust me, it was, especially at the I-365 interchange. I understand they've rebuilt it and widened 75 since I moved away, so it sounds like things have improved a lot.
Please don't refer to her as a "bitch"
It wasn't intended in a derogatory fashion. In fact, the Allen girls I knew used to take it as a compliment -- a strong woman who could hold her own against the boys. Antonym: prissie.
Lee Kaiwen
Taiwan, ROC
Not sure what you mean by "just" (I used to commute between Dallas and Allen -- 45 min. to 2 hours, give or take rush hour on US75), but I know what you mean. If that skinny bitch was chawin' Red Man's and hocking on the pavement, I think I know her. That gal could plug a Big Buck's can at thirty paces - and that was just spitting. I'd hate to get caught staring at the business end of her Red Label.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
Taiwanese, however, use neither US tax codes nor checking accounts. I personally live out of ATM machines; I've set up my central account in Quicken as a cash account, which works tolerably well, but it can be awkward at times when Quicken tries to treat it as a checking account. And I won't even mention how much time it took to purge the default category set of its US biases.
When your servers are less busy, I'll download a demo. I was a bit surprised, however, to discover that, despite the cross-platform support, the installer is still platform specific, forcing me to download separate Windows and Linux versions of what is essentially.
Speaking of which, can I share databases between Linux and Windows?
I'm also interested in the Palm-synching plugin. What does it require on the Palm?
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
If it'll run on an Apple ][, it ought be doable. Heck, my Trash-80 has 128k. Lee Kaiwen, Taiwan, ROC
Consumers' groups don't like the decision, which the government is locked into for five years. The deal was done behind closed doors, with all details withheld. And there don't appear to be any penalties for MS if it fails to abide by the terms of the agreement.
Originally, the government had threatened to reopen an anti-trust investigation if MS didn't sit down and bargain, but there has been a lot of speculation -- particularly by the news media, who love to speculate on such things -- that MS had threatened to back out of a research park project if the investigation was re-opened. If true, it appears to mean the government caved first.
The result is that Microsoft's prices are firmly out of reach in a country whose GDP per capita is less than half that of the US. Combined with ballpark 20 percent lower hardware prices in Taiwan makes MS's percentage of system cost -- well, unjustified is the best word I can think of.
So who's to blame?
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
After the '99 quake, the Taiwanese media kept recirculating images of the same two or three damaged Taipei buildings -- despite the fact that central Taiwan was reeling under massive devastation -- simply because they were conveniently located in their own backyard. Most foreign entities doing business in Taiwan tend to be similarly myopically focused on the Taipei market -- ignorant of the fact that Taipei's cost of living is a full 30 percent higher than most of the rest of the island -- simply because it's where most businesses -- and the government -- are HQ'ed. It's a bit like all the press China's economy has gotten in recent years, totally oblivious to the fact that all the economic development is happening in Shanghai, while 90% of China's population is still mired in stagnation and unemployment. Just as Shanghai is not China, so Taipei is not Taiwan.
In any case, I suspect the devil will be in the details. For example, the article reports:
"It said Microsoft would cut prices by an average of 26.7 percent"
The American auto industry must report fleet average MPGs on all automobiles sold. What they don't tell you is that, after averaging, the cream of the fleet is siphoned off and sold at higher profit margins to governments, businesses, etc., meaning the car you buy stands about a snowball's chance of ever achieving the reported MPG. Most of MS's "average of 26.7 percent" will find its way into government and business coffers, leaving the retail consumer out of the loop.
Also from the article:
"Consumers said they had been forced to turn to illegal copies because Microsoft had used its virtual monopoly to inflate prices."
Balderdash. While this argument might make a good stick for MS bashing, the fact is the decision to pirate MS products is almost always made at the vendor, not the consumer, level. Profit margins of less than $US200 per system don't allow most Ma and Pa vendors the luxury of legitimacy, and a 26 percent price break isn't going to change that.
My inquiries a while back elicited surprise from several vendors, simply because few consumers know enough to even ask. And of those who DO, I doubt one in ten cares. Note that none of these consumers is making an active decision to pirate, they're simply not interested in the issues.
And why would the average consumer want to go stumping around advocating for Microsoft products anyway -- especially when it means money out of their own pockets? The sound of Microsoft, of all companies, blowing the trumpet for ethical behavior lends new meaning to the term "surreal".
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
[Chuckle] This guy's obviously never been to Southeast Asia.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
Umm, that would be just about everybody. But it's OK, 'cause the French don't much like anybody, either.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
Disclaimer -- the aforementioned comments are intended for comedic purposes only. Other uses prohibited. Slashdot moderators, YMMV.
Geez, ya bozo, no wonder you can't afford Microsoft -- you're economic priorities are all out of whack. Ditch the family, then run -- don't walk -- right down and pick up that retail copy of Office XP Pro you know you've been hankerin' for. You'll be glad you did.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
But per capita GDP is not the same as per capita income. In 2000, workforce (that is, only those actually working) per capita income in Taiwan, excluding Taipei, was less that $15,000. I know only a small handful of folks (and because my business is education my circle of friends includes government employees, college professors, doctors and other educated elite) who bring home $US22,000 a year. Most years, even I barely clear that, I and make more money than almost anybody else I know.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
What makes you think currency will be safe? Trust me -- with merchandise tracking on the horizon, tracking of cash will be right behind. Once the technology begins proving itself in consumer products, the IRS, with its eye on tax revenues, will push for RFID tags in currency as well. Being able to directly track all cash transactions will be the biggest boon to tax assessment since the invention of politicians.
But what happens to privacy when everything you buy can be tracked from store floor to door?
Pshaw! Who cares? If they can track it to the door, they can track it beyond the door. That's what really worries me. With RFIDs woven into everything I buy, everything I wear, every piece of money in my pocket, privacy is history. Once coupled with the GPS system, everything I do, everywhere I go, every person I encounter, every book magazine and newspaper I read (and for how long), every movie I go to, when, where,and with whom I sleep, even how long it took me to shit -- it's all trackable.
Slashdotters have been bemoaning the slow erosion of our privacy. Not any more. Now, in one fell swoop it all goes out the door.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
That, of course, is for the moderators to decide.
Are you suggesting MS releases new version of Windows every 6 months?
Not at all. I mean that MS's continual R&D ensures that today's codebase is vastly different than that of even 6 months ago. I'm suggesting that whatever code Russia sees (and, under the scenario we're discussing, releases into the wild) will be behind the curve of Microsoft's development efforts. I used to work for MS in tech support, which meant that I had access not just to betas of future releases, but to nightly builds as well. I once took a call from a user trying to get help with an illegally obtained, unreleased beta (code-named "Nashville"; I've still got a copy of it around somewhere) of what was at the time to be Windows '97. When it was discovered that an unauthorized beta had gotten out, there was a big stink for about two weeks. But within a month the nightlies had moved so far beyond that particular build that it became irrelevant.
You are correct, of course, that the majority of PCs worldwide are running some form of Windows 9x (or earlier; there are still an amazing number of 3.x machines out there), but since not just the 9x series of OSes, but in fact the entire codebase, has been retired by MS, its release would have a negligible impact on MS's bottom line.
I don't know where this "subvert the democratic world" came from. I never made such a claim. If you actually do read my original post, it is asking about the impact to Microsoft
Since MS is an economic entity, any "impact to Microsoft" would be monetary, not political. Your reference to Russia's political power must intend something else, then. I was simply pursuing the political angle which you suggested.
Lee Kaiwen,
Taiwan, ROC
I was thinking of the article which appeared on Slashdot a couple of days ago, which talked about govts sending representatives to Redmond to view source code.
I admit I didn't read the current article because, frankly, it doesn't strike me as being worth my time. I was replying to the implied suggestion that Russia with all its "huge political power" might possibly try to subvert the democratic world by releasing the source code. My point was that, with all the really important political stuff happening in the world, the fact that some govt agency has access to Windows source is not - to put it mildly - going to merit enough attention to warrant so much as a metaphorical shrugging of the shoulders.
In any case, Windows source is a constantly evolving thing. Even if Russia decided, for some unfathomable reason, to dump the source into the wild, in six months' time it would be so outdated as to be relatively useless.
Lee Kaiwen Taiwan, ROC