We actually saw a little wooden walkway on the side of the road going over some (protected) marsh land. The size of the plaque thanking the Senator for his work in securing financing for the walkway was comparable in size to the structure itself... Who knows, how much that little piece cost the federal government, and how much the grateful contractors have contributed to the guy's campaign, him personally, and those he loves.
I must admit, he played the dimwits "protecting the wilderness" (without ever setting foot there) very well.
LyX will do the "behind-the-scenes" work creating the file(s) and use a viewer to show you the document. It can show DVI, PostScript, or PDF files using the viewer of your choice.
It seems one has to export the.tex from LyX and convert manually with xetex.
No, LyX does all the exporting for you. It is, actually, quite awesome for book-publishing — I've converted a number of plain-text files into publishable PDFs by simple scripts and subsequent touching-up in LyX GUI.
gee, if I had known that you were already aware that your stated belief that market success was a good metric for saying what the best product was was flagrant non-factual bullshit
Market success is not "bullshit". I'll repeat, that it is the best method available. It surely has flaws, but it is still the best available.
Consumer Reports is very nice (and I am a subscriber) for things one has no clue about. However, whenever I read it on a subject of computers, I want to flush it down the toilet — I suspect, professionals in other fields have similar feelings. So, Consumer Reports is not without flaws either.
It's nonsense because nobody was asking for an enforcement arm to prevent a bad product from being sold in the first place.
You expressed a clear dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. Considering, that we already have hundreds (thousands?) of experts professionally evaluating products for a living, the only thing currently missing is the "enforcement arm" of some sort. It was therefor perfectly natural for me to suspect you of desiring one.
It's a stand-in for a good metric used by the apathetic. [...] But at least we both agree it was wrong.
Two words:
Reading
Comprehension
.
Market success, however imperfect, is the best known criteria. Because it shows, what actual live people have given their money for. Not a handful of experts
The sales totals for that car, or the Consumer Reports review of that car. I say the latter, without hesitation.
Those two are, actually, quite correlated — people aren't dumb. And when CR's evaluation differs far from the sales figures, it is because of CR's failure to consider a car's looks and other "irrational" aspects. As one automotive-executive said recently, making a decent car is not a trick any more — creating an appealing style is. In our luxurious times a car is more and more like clothing.
Now you just have to convince Consumer Reports to evaluate movies...
I don't know that I'm any more right than the people who think the piracy control is so important, but my point is
To me that control is important in principle. The creators must be allowed to keep control of their creations, regardless of whether it is profitable or detrimental to anybody.
The movie belongs to Warner Brothers — discarding their concerns over piracy of it, because they failed to prove, they've lost anything is the wrong approach. Ethically...
Because, as I quoted once already, "injustice somewhere is the threat to justice everywhere". We should not ignore one asshole with a camera pirating a movie any more than we can ignore an established industry selling millions of DVDs with somebody else's content.
The point is that the business people are driven by money, and they are well aware of the obvious fact that making money doesn't necessarily mean making the best product by any metric. It means making money. That's all.
Do you want a cookie for this? Marx (you read him, have not you?) has "condemned" businessmen long ago by exposing the simple fact (quoting by memory): they make nice things not out of benevolence, but out of the desire for profit. If it were profitable for them to make shredded glass, they would've been making shredded glass.
What he — and you — didn't realize (or choose not to say), is that this system works far better on balance, than anything else. Especially the alternative forced forward by Marx' followers.
Only because of that "decide whether or not to let them be sold" nonsense.
"Nonsense"? Very well, then — we already have the system, you want: various organizations try to test/evaluate new products and issue their opinions. The "enforcement arm", banning "schlock" from the market, is the only "missing part".
If more people actually read independent reviews of products, and used that to decide whether or not to buy a product, then yes this system would be much better.
Yes, of course. But, at the end, a product's success will still be measured by its market success — among "the masses".
If the movie's a stinker, the word will travel at the speed of a mouse click, ruining chances of making back money.
Are implying, that the makers of a good movie should be inviting pirates with video-cameras as means of promotion? Heck, they should give-out the ready-made DVDs themselves (or sell them at the pirate's prices).
Right? That will drive soo many people away from their TVs into movie-theaters, that the movie-makers will make more money, than ever before!
You know what else helps have a big opening weekend? Making a good movie.
Somebody has forgotten the difference between required and sufficient.
Making a good movie, for example, is required. It is not, unfortunately, sufficient — many more steps, from marketing, to, indeed, piracy prevention/reduction, are required...
If they were truly buisinesspeople they would make the best product possible
As determined by who? The criteria: "how many people have gone to see it," — is not at all a bad one... Heck, I think, it is the best one.
[...] like businesspeople used to do.
Market success is what has always driven business people. There is simply no better criteria known today — the only alternative is having some sort of committee, that would review products (from toothpicks to movies) and decide, whether or not to let them be sold. I assure you, that system would suck much more...
The above use of word "means" is unclear. For an established writer, such as yourself, your chosen communication method sucks.
Does competition (quickly) lead to to (or result in) unfettered pipes? Yes, it probably would — certainly a better bet, than government's regulation.
Or did you mean, competition needs unfettered pipes? That's a statement, that requires substantiation — something you chose not to do today.
Or, perhaps, you meant, competition is the same as unfettered pipes? That would be the closest meaning to the word "means", but makes no sense at all.
And I haven't been called kid in over 40 years!
Oh, well, take it as a compliment then. What can I say?.. You are remarkably well preserved — they, likely, still ask you for an ID at the bar... Be careful, though — you've used only one exclamation point in the above-quoted sentence. At this rate you'll age up in no time — may even qualify for a Creative Writing class soon.
You're entitled to your opinion, but not your facts.
I certainly appreciate your high standards in this regard, but you may need to lower it down a notch — it seems to have prevented you from posting any... Better to use somebody else's facts, than to make completely unfounded statements.
Controversial no doubt; a good one this time, IMHO.
Thus begin most terrible trends...
FCC should be working harder to allow more competition — and to prevent the existing ISPs from colluding with each other: "We'll do this, if all of you do too — let's not compete on it.")
The meting out punishment for a particular practice the government is rather micro-managing.
By the same logic you use to claim that there are no Palestinians, there are no Americans.
There were not. There are now. New nations can form, but the "Palestinians" aren't one — they pretend to be one, because that helps them legitimize their claims to the land of Israel. Here is, what a prominent "Palestinian" said in 1977, in an apparent "off-guard" moment. From the camel's mouth:
The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.
For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.
That was a Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, talking to a Dutch newspaper...
They are simply Arabs. Israel's entire landmass is less than one promille (one tenth of one percent), than that of the Arab lands, and is hardly the best part of Middle East either (not a drop of oil!). The "Arab brothers" certainly could've absorbed all of the refugees, if they wanted to — like Germans did, for example. Instead, they continue to fight Israel's existence and had to invent the "Palestinian nation" for the purpose (among other inventions)...
This assertion is patently silly at best, and offensive at worst. You don't think a single member of the Arab race is a Zionist?
Even if there is a thousand of them — that's not enough to justify a qualifier.
Say "Palestinian sympathizers" if that's what you mean.
Golda Meir called herself "a Palestinian". There is no such people — it is not a tribe or a state, it is a piece of land. Of all Palestinians (Jewish, Arabic, and others) and their sympathizers a far bigger percentage reject the discussed meaning of the term "occupation", than that of Arabs world-wide.
I'm open to suggestion for a better term.
Maybe then your rhetoric will sound less like thinly-veiled racism.
It really is not racism... Nope. I don't mind Arabs at all — but this point is where every one of them are wrong...
Harvey Dent attempts to torture a captured underling to get information out of him, Batman stops this, pointing out he's not going to get anything useful out of him.
That's foolish. Throughout history torture (or a mere threat thereof) proved itself as a useful tool, depending on circumstances (such as the ease, with which the obtained information can be verified). We frown upon it only because of the risk, however small, that an innocent may be subjected to a permanently disfiguring procedure by mistake...
If, however, that small risk, what multiplied by the magnitude of the possible damage, dwarfs the cost of even the innocent's entire life, or when the procedure is not, in fact, disfiguring in any way (such as waterboarding), to continue to reject the torture is to show the weakness, that has already lead a number of advanced civilizations to collapse at the hands of less sensitive ones.
While Batman does operate outside the law to get things done, he doesn't make that excuse to duck punishment. At the end, he actually takes on blame that shouldn't be his.
But the citizens might want to ask for lenience or forgiveness for someone, who "got things done" — the good things.
Batman uses his own money to fund his fight against the joker, whereas Bush spends my tax money and gives his friends tax breaks.
Hey! I must be a Bush's friend. Even the people, who paid no taxes at all, got their "refunds"... We must all be Bush's friends!
Batman refuses to kill villians and instead turns them over to the justice system. Bush attempts to kill terrorist sympathizers, and refuses to give terror suspects due process.
Well, not-killing (anyone) is part of the idealized hero's credo — can't demand it of a real-life persons. You are dead-wrong about "terror suspects" — they did receive (what Bush believes to be) due process. You just disagree with him, on what is these guys' due...
"What Arabs mean", without any further group quantifiers
Quantifiers (a.k.a. "small print") would not fit into Slashdot's limits on signature's overall length. At least, you aren't demanding, I quantify the words "mean" or "occupation"...
That said, I doubt (although don't completely rule out) there exists an Arab in the world, who means anything else by the term "occupation" in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Not exactly "on-topic", but related. There is a convincing argument, that Batman is a paean to Bush — a right-wing movie, that's immensely popular, while the left-wing ones ("Stoploss," "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted") bombed (pun intended by the blogger):
Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
Really? Is that why no one showed up for the hearing?
No.
But that's irrelevant. Even if you don't have a permanent lawyer, if you have a legal problem, you hire one. It sucks, but that's the best known alternative to having to have private armies and/or hire a champion.
What did this guy ever do for them? Craig's not making any money off his posting.
What did Yahoo! ever get from that blogger, that the Chinese wanted to arrest? 75 cents in ad-revenue?.. A dollar-fifty?
But nobody brought this revenue vs. expenses argument in defense of Yahoo! And if anyone had, he would've been blasted as a "sociopath", with plenty of (high-moderated) postings on the subjects of morality and lack thereof among CEOs and in corporate boardrooms.
Do we really want Craig to have to start putting ads everywhere so he can protect users that do stupid stuff?
The same argument can be used to defend Google and Yahoo! For example: do you really want us to put even more ads, so we can afford a private army to defend our data-centers in China?
At least, Yahoo tried, and gave up only after exhausting all legal options. CraigsList did not even show up in court — much less filed an appeal!..
I expected the "We do this for the common good" people to get the same earful for not defending their users from the American movie-people, as Yahoo! and Google (the "Do no evil" people) have gotten for yielding to Chinese government.
Because to continue holding CraigsList in the same regard as before after this is quite hypocritical...
Sounds like Wiki may be the best... It is easy enough to split the document into sections, which can be edited concurrently. It keeps the history available. And the format is (almost) text.
Pick MediaWiki (the same software, that powers WikiPedia) or any other implementation (some may be easier to operate on a small LAN, and/or be able to export pure text, etc.)
So what does this statement say about the majority of CEOs in corporate America. Keep in mind, several studies have show CEOs sociopathic behaviors in regard to their decisions.
It says the same thing, the GP was saying about spammers: if a CEO is convicted, escapes prison, and is about to commit suicide, he is more likely to (try to) take his family with him. I'm not sure, that's true, but that's what GP was saying.
On behalf of CEOs across America (I'm not just a CEO — I also own my company), however, I'm quite outraged of your attempts to equate us with spammers and other criminals.
Something tells me, you never met a regional First (or Second) Secretary of Communist Party...
Slashdot Mirror
We actually saw a little wooden walkway on the side of the road going over some (protected) marsh land. The size of the plaque thanking the Senator for his work in securing financing for the walkway was comparable in size to the structure itself... Who knows, how much that little piece cost the federal government, and how much the grateful contractors have contributed to the guy's campaign, him personally, and those he loves.
I must admit, he played the dimwits "protecting the wilderness" (without ever setting foot there) very well.
LyX will do the "behind-the-scenes" work creating the file(s) and use a viewer to show you the document. It can show DVI, PostScript, or PDF files using the viewer of your choice.
No, LyX does all the exporting for you. It is, actually, quite awesome for book-publishing — I've converted a number of plain-text files into publishable PDFs by simple scripts and subsequent touching-up in LyX GUI.
Market success is not "bullshit". I'll repeat, that it is the best method available. It surely has flaws, but it is still the best available.
Consumer Reports is very nice (and I am a subscriber) for things one has no clue about. However, whenever I read it on a subject of computers, I want to flush it down the toilet — I suspect, professionals in other fields have similar feelings. So, Consumer Reports is not without flaws either.
You expressed a clear dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. Considering, that we already have hundreds (thousands?) of experts professionally evaluating products for a living, the only thing currently missing is the "enforcement arm" of some sort. It was therefor perfectly natural for me to suspect you of desiring one.
Two words:
.
Market success, however imperfect, is the best known criteria. Because it shows, what actual live people have given their money for. Not a handful of experts
Those two are, actually, quite correlated — people aren't dumb. And when CR's evaluation differs far from the sales figures, it is because of CR's failure to consider a car's looks and other "irrational" aspects. As one automotive-executive said recently, making a decent car is not a trick any more — creating an appealing style is. In our luxurious times a car is more and more like clothing.
Now you just have to convince Consumer Reports to evaluate movies...
To me that control is important in principle. The creators must be allowed to keep control of their creations, regardless of whether it is profitable or detrimental to anybody.
The movie belongs to Warner Brothers — discarding their concerns over piracy of it, because they failed to prove, they've lost anything is the wrong approach. Ethically...
Because, as I quoted once already, "injustice somewhere is the threat to justice everywhere". We should not ignore one asshole with a camera pirating a movie any more than we can ignore an established industry selling millions of DVDs with somebody else's content.
Do you want a cookie for this? Marx (you read him, have not you?) has "condemned" businessmen long ago by exposing the simple fact (quoting by memory): they make nice things not out of benevolence, but out of the desire for profit. If it were profitable for them to make shredded glass, they would've been making shredded glass.
What he — and you — didn't realize (or choose not to say), is that this system works far better on balance, than anything else. Especially the alternative forced forward by Marx' followers.
"Nonsense"? Very well, then — we already have the system, you want: various organizations try to test/evaluate new products and issue their opinions. The "enforcement arm", banning "schlock" from the market, is the only "missing part".
Yes, of course. But, at the end, a product's success will still be measured by its market success — among "the masses".
Are implying, that the makers of a good movie should be inviting pirates with video-cameras as means of promotion? Heck, they should give-out the ready-made DVDs themselves (or sell them at the pirate's prices).
Right? That will drive soo many people away from their TVs into movie-theaters, that the movie-makers will make more money, than ever before!
Somebody has forgotten the difference between required and sufficient.
Making a good movie, for example, is required. It is not, unfortunately, sufficient — many more steps, from marketing, to, indeed, piracy prevention/reduction, are required...
As determined by who? The criteria: "how many people have gone to see it," — is not at all a bad one... Heck, I think, it is the best one.
Market success is what has always driven business people. There is simply no better criteria known today — the only alternative is having some sort of committee, that would review products (from toothpicks to movies) and decide, whether or not to let them be sold. I assure you, that system would suck much more...
The above use of word "means" is unclear. For an established writer, such as yourself, your chosen communication method sucks.
Does competition (quickly) lead to to (or result in) unfettered pipes? Yes, it probably would — certainly a better bet, than government's regulation.
Or did you mean, competition needs unfettered pipes? That's a statement, that requires substantiation — something you chose not to do today.
Or, perhaps, you meant, competition is the same as unfettered pipes? That would be the closest meaning to the word "means", but makes no sense at all.
Oh, well, take it as a compliment then. What can I say?.. You are remarkably well preserved — they, likely, still ask you for an ID at the bar... Be careful, though — you've used only one exclamation point in the above-quoted sentence. At this rate you'll age up in no time — may even qualify for a Creative Writing class soon.
I certainly appreciate your high standards in this regard, but you may need to lower it down a notch — it seems to have prevented you from posting any... Better to use somebody else's facts, than to make completely unfounded statements.
Your access to Slashdot, kid, so you learn to use fewer question and exclamation marks.
That would be illegal already — using a monopoly in one market to advance in another. This is not FCC's area.
You missed my point, though — competition is the key. If you are pissed off at your ISP, what would you rather do:
?
The government's acceptable role in the market is to foster competition.
Thus begin most terrible trends...
FCC should be working harder to allow more competition — and to prevent the existing ISPs from colluding with each other: "We'll do this, if all of you do too — let's not compete on it.")
The meting out punishment for a particular practice the government is rather micro-managing.
There were not. There are now. New nations can form, but the "Palestinians" aren't one — they pretend to be one, because that helps them legitimize their claims to the land of Israel. Here is, what a prominent "Palestinian" said in 1977, in an apparent "off-guard" moment. From the camel's mouth:
That was a Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein, talking to a Dutch newspaper...
They are simply Arabs. Israel's entire landmass is less than one promille (one tenth of one percent), than that of the Arab lands, and is hardly the best part of Middle East either (not a drop of oil!). The "Arab brothers" certainly could've absorbed all of the refugees, if they wanted to — like Germans did, for example. Instead, they continue to fight Israel's existence and had to invent the "Palestinian nation" for the purpose (among other inventions)...
That's not, what I'm doing, and I'm tired of your attempts to redefine a common (and loaded) term.
Even if there is a thousand of them — that's not enough to justify a qualifier.
Golda Meir called herself "a Palestinian". There is no such people — it is not a tribe or a state, it is a piece of land. Of all Palestinians (Jewish, Arabic, and others) and their sympathizers a far bigger percentage reject the discussed meaning of the term "occupation", than that of Arabs world-wide.
I'm open to suggestion for a better term.
It really is not racism... Nope. I don't mind Arabs at all — but this point is where every one of them are wrong...
That's foolish. Throughout history torture (or a mere threat thereof) proved itself as a useful tool, depending on circumstances (such as the ease, with which the obtained information can be verified). We frown upon it only because of the risk, however small, that an innocent may be subjected to a permanently disfiguring procedure by mistake...
If, however, that small risk, what multiplied by the magnitude of the possible damage, dwarfs the cost of even the innocent's entire life, or when the procedure is not, in fact, disfiguring in any way (such as waterboarding), to continue to reject the torture is to show the weakness, that has already lead a number of advanced civilizations to collapse at the hands of less sensitive ones.
But the citizens might want to ask for lenience or forgiveness for someone, who "got things done" — the good things.
Hey! I must be a Bush's friend. Even the people, who paid no taxes at all, got their "refunds"... We must all be Bush's friends!
Well, not-killing (anyone) is part of the idealized hero's credo — can't demand it of a real-life persons. You are dead-wrong about "terror suspects" — they did receive (what Bush believes to be) due process. You just disagree with him, on what is these guys' due...
Perhaps, you should've, uhm, dare I suggest it, read the article?
Quantifiers (a.k.a. "small print") would not fit into Slashdot's limits on signature's overall length. At least, you aren't demanding, I quantify the words "mean" or "occupation"...
That said, I doubt (although don't completely rule out) there exists an Arab in the world, who means anything else by the term "occupation" in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Not exactly "on-topic", but related. There is a convincing argument, that Batman is a paean to Bush — a right-wing movie, that's immensely popular, while the left-wing ones ("Stoploss," "In The Valley of Elah," "Rendition" and "Redacted") bombed (pun intended by the blogger):
No.
But that's irrelevant. Even if you don't have a permanent lawyer, if you have a legal problem, you hire one. It sucks, but that's the best known alternative to having to have private armies and/or hire a champion.
What did Yahoo! ever get from that blogger, that the Chinese wanted to arrest? 75 cents in ad-revenue?.. A dollar-fifty?
But nobody brought this revenue vs. expenses argument in defense of Yahoo! And if anyone had, he would've been blasted as a "sociopath", with plenty of (high-moderated) postings on the subjects of morality and lack thereof among CEOs and in corporate boardrooms.
They certainly have one.
The same argument can be used to defend Google and Yahoo! For example: do you really want us to put even more ads, so we can afford a private army to defend our data-centers in China?
At least, Yahoo tried, and gave up only after exhausting all legal options. CraigsList did not even show up in court — much less filed an appeal!..
I expected the "We do this for the common good" people to get the same earful for not defending their users from the American movie-people, as Yahoo! and Google (the "Do no evil" people) have gotten for yielding to Chinese government.
Because to continue holding CraigsList in the same regard as before after this is quite hypocritical...
Sounds like Wiki may be the best... It is easy enough to split the document into sections, which can be edited concurrently. It keeps the history available. And the format is (almost) text.
Pick MediaWiki (the same software, that powers WikiPedia) or any other implementation (some may be easier to operate on a small LAN, and/or be able to export pure text, etc.)
It says the same thing, the GP was saying about spammers: if a CEO is convicted, escapes prison, and is about to commit suicide, he is more likely to (try to) take his family with him. I'm not sure, that's true, but that's what GP was saying.
On behalf of CEOs across America (I'm not just a CEO — I also own my company), however, I'm quite outraged of your attempts to equate us with spammers and other criminals.
Something tells me, you never met a regional First (or Second) Secretary of Communist Party...