> What else has he done to seriously promote world peace?
He has killed the F-22, the next-generation nuclear warhead program, and the Eastern European missile program. Relations with Brazil and the rest of Latin America, and with Europe, are much improved (just think about the state of those relations a year ago). The nuclear disarmament process is now, arguably, no longer moribund. And there is now a much reduced possibility of armed conflict with Iran.
I don't know whether the prize should have been awarded to him at this point in time (it would have been better to give it to, say, the Indonesian government and the Aceh rebels for their successful peace process). But I also think that it's easy to overlook the difference Obama has made.
Peace is a bumpy process. Those you named did make serious contributions towards peace, which in no way negates later setbacks. Aung San Suu Kyi has not brought about a democratic Burma, and the Dalai Lama has not brought a peaceful co-existence between Tibet and China.
Kissinger is rightly vilified for brutal American tactics in Vietnam, but he did begin the troop drawdown that eventually led to the end of the Vietnam war (which is exactly what the anti-war movement is demanding for Iraq and Afghanistan today). And Arafat did make serious efforts towards a peace deal during the 90s, even though it eventually fell through (as did his co-recipients Peres and Rabin, who equally deserve the recognition for the effort and the blame for its eventual failure).
So I'm going to go out on a limb here, and be a contrarian: in the past year, I don't think anyone has done more to advance the cause of peace than Barack Obama. So, politically problematic though it may be, I think the prize is warranted on its merits.
Read the technical discussion from the Nobel committee. It was Kao who showed that purified glass fibers had the required properties for replacing and eventually replacing coaxial fibers. He didn't invent the concept of glass fibers or fiber waveguides (that actually goes back more than a hundred years); but before his work, few believed that they would ever be practical for telecommunications.
Kirby did get shafted, but these claims about how "Jack did 90% of the work", casting Stan Lee as some kind of pointy-haired boss slash con artist, don't really stand up to scrutiny.
For instance, Kirby played no role in the creation of Spider-man, Marvel's most iconic character. Yes, you could say that Stan Lee found someone else to rip off that one time, i.e. Steve Ditko. But the Spider-man comic's "canonical" period actually occurred after Ditko left (the Stan Lee/John Romita Sr era). So at some point you're left arguing that Stan Lee was incredibly lucky to find talent after talent after talent to rip off. It seems rather more likely that he made his own luck.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 1
I have a fully graphical calendar, it contains no text, not even numbers.
Without numbers or letters, how does your calendar represent the date? Does it draw, say, the 3rd of August as three pictures of Augustus Caesar, or can it only show you the current season (i.e., what you can see from looking out the window), or what? No sarcasm, I'm actually curious.
Re:But that's exactly the strength of Emacs
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There's also the point by Debian's vim maintainer, who switched to Emacs earlier this year: that Emacs makes it very easy to interact with more specialized tools, such as ispell. Contrast with vim, which implemented its own spell checker. Now, let's see... which approach is more consistent with the Unix philosophy?
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually, it might. For instance, Emacs 23 includes support for SVG, and SVG code consists of human-readable text. So if you need to change some parameters in an SVG image, such as its width or height, you can open it in Emacs, type C-c C-c to switch to text representation, perform your edits, and type C-c C-c again to instantly view the result.
The point is that a graphical Emacs session can now connect to a client on a tty. (And in answer to your question: yes, Emacs can now be started in daemon mode.)
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Correct: Emacs is a text editor. And guess what: a calendar consists of text. Plans consist of text. So are emails and newsgroup contents. Source code, XML data files, patches, changelogs, directory listings, version control messages, compilation messages, are all text.
The behavior of Emacs seems reasonable. When the SIGCHLD handler is called, Emacs tries to read from the child's PTY, and when it receives EAGAIN, it assumes that there's no further data incoming (because the child is dead!). I'd be surprised if there weren't other applications that behave similarly.
> Watch me burn some karma here, but this is the truth... Stallman is a zealot who hurts the image of free software, making it difficult to sell the concept of free software to suits.
And what an original, devastating insight.
Actually, no. People have been criticizing Stallman on these grounds since at least the 1980s, even after he's been proven right on issue after issue.
> Isn't Stallman the one who insists that open source software is inevitably better,
No, you have Stallman confused with open source evangelists. Stallman has always maintained that whether or not free software is "better" is irrelevant; that its being freer is which matters.
Virtually all submissions to PRL are done in LaTeX format, so there is no cost associated with typesetting.
The average LaTeX document on arxiv.org has pretty hideous typesetting. The most egregious example (but far from the only one) is the use of < and > for quantum mechanical bras and kets, because many authors aren't aware of the \lang and \rang LaTeX commands. Also, RevTeX isn't very smart about figure and text placement, so manuscripts generally receive extensive tweaking in the production office. If you look at the typesetting of the final articles published on aps.org, it's night and day.
I don't know what the APS uses in-house for typesetting. I'm guessing they have a converter from RevTeX to some in-house typesetting format. This would be interesting to find out.
Instead, they seem to be making an effort to tell civilians to get the hell out of dodge because the bombs will soon be dropping.
Yeah, and that's working so well. Next you'll be telling me the hundreds of Lebanese civillians killed by Israeli airstrikes were killed because of their own stupidity.
Israel's modus operandi is to (a) tell the press that they always try to avoid casualties, (b) go ahead and bomb a housing district flat, and (c) when dozens or hundreds of innocent bystanders are killed, including children, tell the press that they didn't know that people were living in the housing districts and/or that militants were killed so the ends justified the means. They've been doing this stuff in Palestine for years.
So we go after them. After all, enough is enough. And, though we try to avoid it, there are inevitably civilian casualties. Does that make us terrorists?
The trouble is that Israel doesn't actually try to avoid civillian casualties. Observe their deliberate targeting of civillian infrastructure and housing districts (not to mention UN outposts). An even clearer example is their longstanding policy of collective punishment in Palestine. That can legitimately be labelled government-sponsored terrorism.
The main thing blocking the release of Emacs 22 is that RMS is bent on obsessively polishing the manuals before even starting an official pretest (which I think is not good prioritization, considering the release process has already taken three years.) But development snapshots of Emacs 22 are already widely available, and the software is in an extremely stable, usable (release-quality, really) state.
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> What else has he done to seriously promote world peace?
He has killed the F-22, the next-generation nuclear warhead program, and the Eastern European missile program. Relations with Brazil and the rest of Latin America, and with Europe, are much improved (just think about the state of those relations a year ago). The nuclear disarmament process is now, arguably, no longer moribund. And there is now a much reduced possibility of armed conflict with Iran.
I don't know whether the prize should have been awarded to him at this point in time (it would have been better to give it to, say, the Indonesian government and the Aceh rebels for their successful peace process). But I also think that it's easy to overlook the difference Obama has made.
Peace is a bumpy process. Those you named did make serious contributions towards peace, which in no way negates later setbacks. Aung San Suu Kyi has not brought about a democratic Burma, and the Dalai Lama has not brought a peaceful co-existence between Tibet and China.
Kissinger is rightly vilified for brutal American tactics in Vietnam, but he did begin the troop drawdown that eventually led to the end of the Vietnam war (which is exactly what the anti-war movement is demanding for Iraq and Afghanistan today). And Arafat did make serious efforts towards a peace deal during the 90s, even though it eventually fell through (as did his co-recipients Peres and Rabin, who equally deserve the recognition for the effort and the blame for its eventual failure).
So I'm going to go out on a limb here, and be a contrarian: in the past year, I don't think anyone has done more to advance the cause of peace than Barack Obama. So, politically problematic though it may be, I think the prize is warranted on its merits.
Read the technical discussion from the Nobel committee. It was Kao who showed that purified glass fibers had the required properties for replacing and eventually replacing coaxial fibers. He didn't invent the concept of glass fibers or fiber waveguides (that actually goes back more than a hundred years); but before his work, few believed that they would ever be practical for telecommunications.
Kirby did get shafted, but these claims about how "Jack did 90% of the work", casting Stan Lee as some kind of pointy-haired boss slash con artist, don't really stand up to scrutiny.
For instance, Kirby played no role in the creation of Spider-man, Marvel's most iconic character. Yes, you could say that Stan Lee found someone else to rip off that one time, i.e. Steve Ditko. But the Spider-man comic's "canonical" period actually occurred after Ditko left (the Stan Lee/John Romita Sr era). So at some point you're left arguing that Stan Lee was incredibly lucky to find talent after talent after talent to rip off. It seems rather more likely that he made his own luck.
That was Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
The HTC Hero is landing on Sprint in October.
Without numbers or letters, how does your calendar represent the date? Does it draw, say, the 3rd of August as three pictures of Augustus Caesar, or can it only show you the current season (i.e., what you can see from looking out the window), or what? No sarcasm, I'm actually curious.
There's also the point by Debian's vim maintainer, who switched to Emacs earlier this year: that Emacs makes it very easy to interact with more specialized tools, such as ispell. Contrast with vim, which implemented its own spell checker. Now, let's see... which approach is more consistent with the Unix philosophy?
Actually, it might. For instance, Emacs 23 includes support for SVG, and SVG code consists of human-readable text. So if you need to change some parameters in an SVG image, such as its width or height, you can open it in Emacs, type C-c C-c to switch to text representation, perform your edits, and type C-c C-c again to instantly view the result.
1. M-x visual-line-mode RET (or Options->Line Wrapping->Word Wrap)
2. Live happily ever after.
The point is that a graphical Emacs session can now connect to a client on a tty. (And in answer to your question: yes, Emacs can now be started in daemon mode.)
Correct: Emacs is a text editor. And guess what: a calendar consists of text. Plans consist of text. So are emails and newsgroup contents. Source code, XML data files, patches, changelogs, directory listings, version control messages, compilation messages, are all text.
The behavior of Emacs seems reasonable. When the SIGCHLD handler is called, Emacs tries to read from the child's PTY, and when it receives EAGAIN, it assumes that there's no further data incoming (because the child is dead!). I'd be surprised if there weren't other applications that behave similarly.
> Watch me burn some karma here, but this is the truth... Stallman is a zealot who hurts the image of free software, making it difficult to sell the concept of free software to suits.
And what an original, devastating insight.
Actually, no. People have been criticizing Stallman on these grounds since at least the 1980s, even after he's been proven right on issue after issue.
> Isn't Stallman the one who insists that open source software is inevitably better,
No, you have Stallman confused with open source evangelists. Stallman has always maintained that whether or not free software is "better" is irrelevant; that its being freer is which matters.
You are going so far off-topic it's not even funny. You're also spreading lies.
Sucks to have your BS pointed out by an anonymous coward, doesn't it?
It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.
Virtually all submissions to PRL are done in LaTeX format, so there is no cost associated with typesetting.
The average LaTeX document on arxiv.org has pretty hideous typesetting. The most egregious example (but far from the only one) is the use of < and > for quantum mechanical bras and kets, because many authors aren't aware of the \lang and \rang LaTeX commands. Also, RevTeX isn't very smart about figure and text placement, so manuscripts generally receive extensive tweaking in the production office. If you look at the typesetting of the final articles published on aps.org, it's night and day.
I don't know what the APS uses in-house for typesetting. I'm guessing they have a converter from RevTeX to some in-house typesetting format. This would be interesting to find out.
By what? (*rolls eyes*)
Yeah, and that's working so well. Next you'll be telling me the hundreds of Lebanese civillians killed by Israeli airstrikes were killed because of their own stupidity.
Israel's modus operandi is to (a) tell the press that they always try to avoid casualties, (b) go ahead and bomb a housing district flat, and (c) when dozens or hundreds of innocent bystanders are killed, including children, tell the press that they didn't know that people were living in the housing districts and/or that militants were killed so the ends justified the means. They've been doing this stuff in Palestine for years.
The trouble is that Israel doesn't actually try to avoid civillian casualties. Observe their deliberate targeting of civillian infrastructure and housing districts (not to mention UN outposts). An even clearer example is their longstanding policy of collective punishment in Palestine. That can legitimately be labelled government-sponsored terrorism.
Here's a preview of Emacs 22 from lwn.net.
Here's all the new features in Emacs since the last release (very long).
The main thing blocking the release of Emacs 22 is that RMS is bent on obsessively polishing the manuals before even starting an official pretest (which I think is not good prioritization, considering the release process has already taken three years.) But development snapshots of Emacs 22 are already widely available, and the software is in an extremely stable, usable (release-quality, really) state.
Sounds impressive, but that's only about a 10 atoms on a side.
I wasn't aware that RMS is dead...
IIRC, he quit his job at MIT around this time. He lived off sales of copies of Emacs for a while.