I can only assume that your posting is a LeTeX/MS-Word troll attempt. I have responded to other points of your posting, but will not rise to that particular bait.
I stopped reading when I hit this:
Word produces probably the worst output
and much later...
and advocate Latex (for gods sake, Latex over Word - are you kidding?)
Well for someone who stopped reading in
section 1.8, you do seem to have things to say about section 4, which has the only mention of LaTeX in the document.
Furthermore that mention of LaTeX is not advocacy of it, but illustrating the fact that one can use a document preperation system which is used by a small minority, but still distribute documents to all (via PDF).
The only section which really recommands against using MS-Word for document preparation explicitly says
The focus of this document has been on the misuse of Word for document
exchange. It is geared toward MS-Word users to encourage them to send
documents in other formats, even if they continue to use Word for
document production.
The arguments I've presented stand even if MS-Word were a good tool
for document preparation. However, I'd also like to point to some
documents which argue (correctly in my view) why MS-Word is a bad
choice of document preparation system and not just a bad choice of
document exchange format
So, I've labelled the "personal opinion" as personal opinion, I have not seriously advocated LaTeX (one off-hand comment in a footnote praises LaTeX users), and I have seperated any comments about why MS-Word is bad for document exchange (the main point) from links to comments about why MS-Word may not be the best choice for document preperation (an aside).
Had I blurred my argument for why MS-Word is not for document exchange with a rant about why MS-Word is a bad choice for document preparation, you would have a valid point. But I didn't blur that.
If you've got some substantive criticism of my document, please mail me or post it. But criticism of something you only imagine the document to be is something I, for one, can do without.
From what I see, this is what the book's author meant by "obsolete" and I agree. Most websites, if locked down and not changed for 3 years, would no longer render in the browsers that are new in 3 years.
I completely concur with this post. And would like to add the practice that I've followed almost since the days when Mosaic and Lynx were the only browsers.
To achive some backwards compatibility of my HTML, I've chosen to be conservative in the features that I use or use features that degrade well. The achive forward compatility, I've stuck to standards.
This works in most cases, but not all. Netscape 4.* treatement of CSS is so awful, and degrades so poorly, that I simply had to make a choice knowing that my stuff would be ugly for NS4 users. But for the most part, Conservative and Standard works.
I guess that this makes my site (shameless plug) one of the 0.1% of sites with old content that isn't "obsolete" (well, the content may be).
Indeed, while freeserve wasn't the first to use this model, they were the first to do it in a big way. Within a few months they became the largest ISP in the UK.
One big advantage was that they didn't need to have a billing operation at all. Abuse was prevented by severely limiting what you could do if you withheld caller line ID. And they hijacked all outgoing SMTP.
They didn't "officially" support Linux, but informally they did.
It did seem to work well, and they were profitable within a year of starting up. Ultimately, their customers demanded "flat fee, toll-free numbers". Also freeserve got swallowed up by something that got swallowed up, and the people I knew who worked there said it no longer was fun to do so.
My vanity site is reported as inaccessible. I'm not sure why, but here are some guesses
It's vhosted, and there is something interesting I share that IP address with.
For a while, I reported all spam involving unresponsive Chinese network operators to the Chinese embassy in the US, telling them that this was a image problem for China.
After never having a response to those either, I started including in my LARTs to China text like "thank you for your support of a Free and Independent Tibet", hoping that that might get someone to pay attention.
In all fairness, have you ever thrown a rock from any real height?
Well, I once got hit in the head by a piece of plastster about 10cm in diameter. That might help explain some of my postings.
From what little we see of the rock, it looks flat and pitted. I don't think it would hurt if hit your shoe. Interestingly, she reported it as feeling warm, so at one point it must have been moving fast.
If it's small (as it is), then the surface area to volumn ratio will be large enough so that it has a slow terminal velocity. No crater, no holes in feet. Drop a rock like that from a high building, and you are unlikely to harm anyone unless you get them in the eye.
Instant run-off voting is a step in the right direction
Real run-off voting has value in focusing a campaign and weeding out certain options, but
IRV has all of the
tactical voting problems as plurality ("first past the post") voting.
Approval voting has some nice properties, but doesn't take into account something voters can easily express, the ranking of their preferences. Thus approval voting loses very useful information.
The best option for many kinds of elections is
Condorcet
voting. It's used by the uk.* Usenet hierarchy and, I've been told, by debian, but I've seen no confirmation of that.
I have my own rant about voting systems. (It's a bit rambling, but does anticipate and respond to some objections to Condorcet voting).
Thanks for the correction. I had looked that the linked page, but appearently didn't read the details.
Sorry for the clueless post. And again, thanks for the correction.
Diesel is worse than so-called "clean coal" when it comes to important pollutants (particularly particulate matter under 2.5 microns). I doubt that it will pass the new CARB
limits on particulate matter.
This whole scheme smells of an "I can therefore I ought" sort of deal. It has got to be one of the worst ways of generating and transporting electricity that I can imagine.
Reading this over, I see how I will get -100 Flamebait. Troll.
Almost certainly, but I do largely agree with you.
But this is how I feel, and if you disagree with me, feel free to e-mail me.
You don't make that easy. No email address that I could find.
Anyway, just to put something on-topic here, we have the problem that extracting H is almost always more
expensive than the value of the H extracted. Your point about fission run electrolysis is interesting (but you still want it catalyized somehow since electrolysis is enormously inefficient) is a very interesting idea. Hydrogen can be transported and stored easily, and it can be used by remarkably small engines. So we use the efficiency of fission (only uranium is consumed, no greenhouse emissions [but nastly political problems with waste])
to get the transportability and small scale use (particularly with fuel cells) of hydrogen.
PS: I used to be one of those moron's protesting nuclear power.
Unfortunately, I don't think this will reduce dependence on petroleum. If the hydrogen was not bound up in some molecules (like water), then it would be great. But at the moment there is no cheap way of getting hydrogen out common compounds.
I haven't read the linked article yet, as it appears to be/.-ed. So my comments are made in more than just the usual bit of ignorance.
Others have alreadypointed out the bloat. (I want an emailer that includes a doctor/Eliza function!), but there is a terrible amont of stuff missing from the list. Making it hard to compose messages which violate standards should be close to the top of anybody's list.
As for autoresponders, they shouldn't be in the client unless that client (a) has access to envelope information, and (b) can send things as error messages (null envelope from). I also have rant
about broken autoresponders.
While the challenge of adapting LotR/FR to a movie may
have been greater than adapting A Beautiful Mind, one could take length of LotR as a failure to adapt it for the screen, which is probably why ABM deserved to win in that catagory. Maybe a bigger (ie, shorter) adaptation would have been possible if it weren't for all of us fans.
ABM departed wildly in every detail from the book, but that didn't bother me (with one exception below).
It didn't bother me because they kept the essence of the one aspect of the story that was of interest to the film makers: The "becoming human through human interection as a cure" theme. Nash learned very late in life to value people whom he previously would have dismissed as idiots. And that was done well.
I also enjoyed that the movie was interesting, even suspensful, for someone who'd read the book.
The one departure from the book that bothered me was
the bar scene where they described
something that is almost, but not entirely, unlike the Nash Equalibrium.
Anyway, that is why I believe that ABM deserved to win best adapeted screenplay even if LotR may have faced more of a challenge.
I'd say the most blatant lie I've been told (by several salesman) is a form of
It would be better if I discussed these matters directly with your boss.
Considering that I thought that an essential part of my job was to never let the boss alone with a sales rep, my response was invariably, "better for whom?".
As a runner up, I guess I'd list, "You can't move into the 21st century without video conferencing".
It's fucks like Enron that exploit things like the California Power Crisis who make electricity expensive. Most energy in the US comes from Hydro, at least in the West, from plants and dams built 50+ years ago. They are a sunk cost, long ago paid for. The reason power costs a lot is that the market is fucked up. There are monopolies involved, corrupt (read: Enron) "distributors", ancient transmission methods, etc. ad nauseam.
You are correct in that energy suppliers were involved in "market manipulation" but that is not the cause of the California Electricity crises. And they had no monopoly on power provision. The problem is why a non-monopoly was even in a position to manipulate the market. And the answer has all to do with both the inesticity of both supply and demand in electricity (particularly were end user prices are fixed).
I spent Spring and Summer 2001 studying this question and the single best analysis I've seen is
this article.
I will also risk getting modded down for off-topic flamebait by saying that I will not be voting to reelect Governor Davis. Not because of the terrible long term contracts he's signed, but because in October 2000 he declared that we would get through this without raising consumer prices. That populist stance
cost the state and its residence billions of dollars.
(And he still hasn't understood what he did wrong. He and the Public Utilities Commission is still dragging their feet with the implementation of Real Time Pricing.
People forget that just because some scheme gives you very low marginal costs it doesn't give you "free" (as in beer) electricity. Even with conventional gas fueled electricity generation, the cost of the fuel is not much of an issue. It is the cost of the building the plants in the first place that make the electricity costly.
So while I'm happy to see a range of things working out as possibly viable, 750kW is not alot to get out of the resources that appear to be going into this.
I don't think that there is an email admin around who
hasn't managed to be part of such a loop. It is remarkably hard to put together systems which will interact correctly with all of the other ways that other systems might be broken.
And for anyone who thinks that email is a "solved" problem, should read my
rant about broken autoresponders. (which is not about loops, but does cover how "solved" things can be broken).
Remember that the spamming occurred just after a poll
put Jones a distant 3rd (at 9%). So, I guess the campaign figured that they had nothing to lose.
I called the campaign when I received my copy (I actually thought it was a dirty trick against the campaign until
I read about their spamming history). The staffer I talked to seemed shocked when I described relay rape and web-bugs. I also (lied) and said that they had lost my vote. (I was already planning on voting for
Riorden).
I wonder if this exhibit has any connection to Alan Simpson who has been talking about putting together a
spy musuem or a spying themed entertainment park for several years now. The collection suggests a connection to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder whether .gov will find itself listed in
on rfc-ignorant
for this.
Furthermore that mention of LaTeX is not advocacy of it, but illustrating the fact that one can use a document preperation system which is used by a small minority, but still distribute documents to all (via PDF).
The only section which really recommands against using MS-Word for document preparation explicitly says
So, I've labelled the "personal opinion" as personal opinion, I have not seriously advocated LaTeX (one off-hand comment in a footnote praises LaTeX users), and I have seperated any comments about why MS-Word is bad for document exchange (the main point) from links to comments about why MS-Word may not be the best choice for document preperation (an aside).Had I blurred my argument for why MS-Word is not for document exchange with a rant about why MS-Word is a bad choice for document preparation, you would have a valid point. But I didn't blur that.
If you've got some substantive criticism of my document, please mail me or post it. But criticism of something you only imagine the document to be is something I, for one, can do without.
Yet another reason why MS Word is not a document exchange format. That rant is also avaible in other formats
This works in most cases, but not all. Netscape 4.* treatement of CSS is so awful, and degrades so poorly, that I simply had to make a choice knowing that my stuff would be ugly for NS4 users. But for the most part, Conservative and Standard works.
I guess that this makes my site (shameless plug) one of the 0.1% of sites with old content that isn't "obsolete" (well, the content may be).
One big advantage was that they didn't need to have a billing operation at all. Abuse was prevented by severely limiting what you could do if you withheld caller line ID. And they hijacked all outgoing SMTP. They didn't "officially" support Linux, but informally they did.
It did seem to work well, and they were profitable within a year of starting up. Ultimately, their customers demanded "flat fee, toll-free numbers". Also freeserve got swallowed up by something that got swallowed up, and the people I knew who worked there said it no longer was fun to do so.
Could you post a traceroute? It might be interesting for someone who knows the topology.
Well, I once got hit in the head by a piece of plastster about 10cm in diameter. That might help explain some of my postings.
From what little we see of the rock, it looks flat and pitted. I don't think it would hurt if hit your shoe. Interestingly, she reported it as feeling warm, so at one point it must have been moving fast.
If it's small (as it is), then the surface area to volumn ratio will be large enough so that it has a slow terminal velocity. No crater, no holes in feet. Drop a rock like that from a high building, and you are unlikely to harm anyone unless you get them in the eye.
Approval voting has some nice properties, but doesn't take into account something voters can easily express, the ranking of their preferences. Thus approval voting loses very useful information.
The best option for many kinds of elections is Condorcet voting. It's used by the uk.* Usenet hierarchy and, I've been told, by debian, but I've seen no confirmation of that.
I have my own rant about voting systems. (It's a bit rambling, but does anticipate and respond to some objections to Condorcet voting).
Thanks for the correction. I had looked that the linked page, but appearently didn't read the details. Sorry for the clueless post. And again, thanks for the correction.
This whole scheme smells of an "I can therefore I ought" sort of deal. It has got to be one of the worst ways of generating and transporting electricity that I can imagine.
I will honestly admit that I got caught by the hoax. Even after I noticed the name of the author as "Richard Paley" (which I took as a nom de plume.).
Anyway, just to put something on-topic here, we have the problem that extracting H is almost always more expensive than the value of the H extracted. Your point about fission run electrolysis is interesting (but you still want it catalyized somehow since electrolysis is enormously inefficient) is a very interesting idea. Hydrogen can be transported and stored easily, and it can be used by remarkably small engines. So we use the efficiency of fission (only uranium is consumed, no greenhouse emissions [but nastly political problems with waste]) to get the transportability and small scale use (particularly with fuel cells) of hydrogen.
PS: I used to be one of those moron's protesting nuclear power.
I haven't read the linked article yet, as it appears to be /.-ed. So my comments are made in more than just the usual bit of ignorance.
As for autoresponders, they shouldn't be in the client unless that client (a) has access to envelope information, and (b) can send things as error messages (null envelope from). I also have rant about broken autoresponders.
While the challenge of adapting LotR/FR to a movie may have been greater than adapting A Beautiful Mind, one could take length of LotR as a failure to adapt it for the screen, which is probably why ABM deserved to win in that catagory. Maybe a bigger (ie, shorter) adaptation would have been possible if it weren't for all of us fans.
ABM departed wildly in every detail from the book, but that didn't bother me (with one exception below). It didn't bother me because they kept the essence of the one aspect of the story that was of interest to the film makers: The "becoming human through human interection as a cure" theme. Nash learned very late in life to value people whom he previously would have dismissed as idiots. And that was done well.
I also enjoyed that the movie was interesting, even suspensful, for someone who'd read the book.
The one departure from the book that bothered me was the bar scene where they described something that is almost, but not entirely, unlike the Nash Equalibrium.
Anyway, that is why I believe that ABM deserved to win best adapeted screenplay even if LotR may have faced more of a challenge.
As a runner up, I guess I'd list, "You can't move into the 21st century without video conferencing".
I spent Spring and Summer 2001 studying this question and the single best analysis I've seen is this article.
I will also risk getting modded down for off-topic flamebait by saying that I will not be voting to reelect Governor Davis. Not because of the terrible long term contracts he's signed, but because in October 2000 he declared that we would get through this without raising consumer prices. That populist stance cost the state and its residence billions of dollars. (And he still hasn't understood what he did wrong. He and the Public Utilities Commission is still dragging their feet with the implementation of Real Time Pricing.
So while I'm happy to see a range of things working out as possibly viable, 750kW is not alot to get out of the resources that appear to be going into this.
And for anyone who thinks that email is a "solved" problem, should read my rant about broken autoresponders. (which is not about loops, but does cover how "solved" things can be broken).
I called the campaign when I received my copy (I actually thought it was a dirty trick against the campaign until I read about their spamming history). The staffer I talked to seemed shocked when I described relay rape and web-bugs. I also (lied) and said that they had lost my vote. (I was already planning on voting for Riorden).
I wonder if this exhibit has any connection to Alan Simpson who has been talking about putting together a spy musuem or a spying themed entertainment park for several years now. The collection suggests a connection to me.
I have to admit that I, the author of the comment, was as surprised as anyone by the insightful modding.