Less likely to be legal residents of the US, and even when they are, they come from a hiding culture, from a social background where they cannot trust the country they live in (even if they were born US citizens), so they don't trust the health institutions to go search help there. Latinos are much less likely to go to the public hospitals in case of any kind of illness, so they go only when the illness is advanced or critical, or with major fractures etc.
This also comes because in our countries (I live in Mexico) the healthcare systems have been pauperized. I know I have to sit for a couple of hours before getting urgency attention (of course, not if I am on critical situation, but for most cases I have been to the public system). I know I must go through several appointments probably months apart to get to see a specialist if I have a non-urgent condition. So, I seldom go to any doctor. It is a cultural, not racial, issue. (FWIW, I am culturally Mexican, racially Jewish/Slavic; my family migrated in the 1920s)
So many people are drug users, and are just careful to do it right. And if you have to bribe, it is always a small bribe to pay.
I am a Mexican, yes. And I am a Mexican who has chosen (and adhered to, for a decade already!) never to bribe. So yes, it would work for me â" I would much rather be arrested for 36 hours (or whatever small) than paying a 5 dollar bribe (after all, the policeman is doing his job on catching me were he to get me!).
I am not a drug user, though, although I have ocassionally (two, three times over the last five years) smoked with friends who have some. This will not make me rush out to buy. But I have some friends who are frequent users, and have some who are sadly real addicts to other drugs (which I expect never to get familiar with). A small bribe or a small hassle with the police for small-scale posession has never been likely to deter them from buying.
You should have rather written, the dominant cartels hurt the military just enough to splinter them, not the other way around.
Really, one of the most feared groups are called the Zetas, and they are basically (or rather, they originated as) a group of SWAT members who deflected the forced armies, as the cartels pay immensely better. They have mostly (AFAIK) joined the Gulf cartels â" But I might be mistaken on this last point.
Our (de-facto, remember he took power fraudulently) president insists we are winning the war, and the spots quote the names of many captured drug dealers. They don't mention the governnment seems to be aiding some cartels and being selective in their targets against their competitors. The number of casualties has escalated tremendously in the last three years... and it does not seem to be getting any better.
I really hope that decriminalizing being an addict helps show the way. Of course, what follows (and is even harder) is to decriminalize providing such small doses, regulating the market. Addicts are sick, they are not criminal.
Re:Academic does not necessarily mean Computer Sci
on
MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Sure, you need some training to be proficient, but if you just want to add a note or make some corrections anyone should be able to figure it out.
They have got their training. Learning to write in Word usually takes several mini-courses for a computer-negated professor. They get the basics in the end (and the Editorial Department will just have to suffer to get it all in a decent shape, but that's their job and they are getting paid for it)... They don't want your training on jurassic technology which needs to be compiled, thankyou.
Second, who makes their PDFs unmodifiable
The fact that it is possible (and yes, annotations are a great use for it) does not mean it is practical. It is not, in FSF terms, the preferred form for modification. If I take a professor's Word document, and do a beautiful typsesetting job for it in TeX, and hand him back the resulting PDF... He will end up giving me the printouts with red ink showing the corrections to make. That is going back in time several decades, and will hurt workflow. So, if he wants to write in Word, so be it, write in Word. The Editorial Department will... do their best to turn that crap into something publishable.
And yes, it sucks. But you get tired of swimming upstream.
As I said in my post, people use Word using the stupid WYSIWYG mindset. And yes, what you see is what you get -- No less, no more. If you try to explain to a non-computer-savvy person how they should work with styles instead of font sizes... Most of the time they will just stare into the void. That means, OpenOffice will not have any structure with which to export to a meaningful TeX file. So you will end up with the worst of both worlds: A non-WYSIWYGy system which does the formating somewhat uh-similar to what you had intended, and with no clue on what you really wanted to achieve. LyX's approach is IMHO great - WYSIWYM. What You See Is What You Mean. Forget about how it is rendered, I want only to see the approximate structure.
Academic does not necessarily mean Computer Scienc
on
MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
...I work at the Economics Research Institute at UNAM, Mexico's (and Latin America's) largest university. Researchers here are social scientists â" Their texts do include the ocassional formula, yes, but they mainly deal with straight text. Even so, I am painfully aware on how inconvenient a word-processor-minded program can be for them (i.e. try to get them to distinguish between cosmetic and semantic tagging â" No way). They literally use the computer as a fancy typewriter. I have shown LyX to a couple of people, and are initially interested, even more looking at the quality of the results... But after I mention it cannot import (with formatting) Word documents, and that they won't be able to share their works (except as an unmodifiable PDF) with other colleagues, they go back to what they already know.
So, no, TeX is not necessarily widely used in all of academia. Just in the portion we, the computer-minded geeks, like looking at.
The big threat regarding cache poisoning is not just having root users subvert their own systems - It allows breaking free of the hypervisor and attacking other virtual hosts running on the same hardware.
Ok, granted, 10 miles is not exactly a piece of cake (and is also close to the top I have run - yes, using running shoes). However, it's not yet the exhaustion limit for most fit people - Once you get closer to that limit (i.e. the famous "30Km wall" that haunts marathonists) you are not that careful anymore with where your feet are landing. FWIW, I finished the longest bike trip I had (~90Km out of a 95Km planned route) so close to the end point because I felt I was no longer paying attention, and going on a highway does require better awareness than what I had by then. I prefered to stay on the safe side and drop out almost reaching the goal.
I took up first fast-walking and then running after many (MANY) years of near-zero activity, grossly overweight (almost 140Kg). Of course, my body was quite over what evolution anticipated - I have a weak ankle which bended from time to time (now, 40Kg slimmer, much less often and much less painfully). Of course, I didn't buy top-of-the-line running shoes, only a pair of decently resistant, well-formed jogging shoes. I would not have done it without them.
On the other extreme, we have high-performance runners - Be it my marathonist/ultramarathonists friends, be it the speed runners. Once again, evolution provided us with strong skin soles, but not strong enough to endure a 100m race in ~10 seconds (I still cannot believe a human can do that). It provided us with strong skin, but not strong enough to endure 40Km. And there are humans doing it - Take away their shoes, and they will really suffer.
Hell, same goes for regular shoes for moving in a city at a calm pace... I like wearing sandals, but I really don't like somebody stepping over me barefooted. And as I often go into people-crammed places (think of, say, the subway), I prefer wearing regular shoes. Odds are I will suffer less, even if I don't really really need them for my day-to-day activities.
If peer-review is done only at the top of each discipline, you might know who reviewed you. However, people write at all levels of the academic scale. Having a broad peer review process, where even people from a different specialization level than yours, can comment (and the opinions are weighed, of course, according to their respective ranking) can further improve this. Sometimes even lead you to understanding several points you didn't even consider originally, as they are outside your usual radar.
Usually, when you review an article, it is under the double-blind method - You don't know either who the reviewee is. You must judge based only on the merits of the paper, without taking care on whether the author was a student of Einstein himself.
If this gets enough traction/critical mass, this problem will be solved - Crackpots can mutually sign as being topz 1337, but they will be inevitably signed as being below the mark for most other, serious (and better punctuated) users. The site linked describes the process in too low detail to make sense of what they are proposing, but I have thought through a very similar process with some colelagues of mine - This problem is solved when not only each article, but each reviewer gets scored according to both their contributions' (i.e. their articles') and their reviews' value - in a way possibly akin to/.'s metamoderation. And, of course, a very well reviewed article should raise your "karma" more than a great review. That can even lead the system towards being interesting for some people usually regarded as semi-sacred inside their academic communities: Anybody can submit a paper for review. The paper will be initially ranked at a value based on the author's karma - and will be presented for review initially to people at this person's own level. If the paper gets "modded up" (again, using/. terminology), it will enter the radar of possible things to review for higher-ranked people. The influence can go on a semi-logarithmic scale - If my/. karma is 2, then each review I make can weigh the same as (say) 3 people with karma 1. 3 reviews of people in my rank will be equivalent to one review from a higher rank. Yes, I am describing a system somewhat different than the linked article's, but still, it might be an interesting system - And it does solve (at least to a certain degree) the problem you describe - of course, after playing a bit with the factors. And, yes, 100 crackpot buddies can still push the paper up quite a bit. Still, a couple of well-ranked people will sink it back.
...I do have a firewall at my workplace. We were bitten hard - Quite probably, thanks to a USB key, careless email or to one of the three machines I had to leave with SMB access to dependencies outside my own. And yes, the computers are configured to auto-update the OS, and they all have an up-to-date antivirus. Still, an overly fertile virus will defeat those updates.
Yes, under the current patent infrastructure, he might have a legally sound case. And he might even win. This only proves (further) that the current scheme has gone nuts. I hope some people take note on this, and push towards reforming the patent system. In my book, this would clearly sound as an obvious thing, not even an invention... Still, a patent was granted. However, I do not hold very high hopes on it. I think this will be silently ignored. If anything, many media people will say, "oh, I didn't know I had to check for my ideas first". They will proceed on checking each of their ideas with costly patent-oriented lawfirms - It is not like they have ideas very often!
Granted: Users do not need a bazillion Linux distributions. However, _we_ the developers do. It makes a huge difference to _me_ the general philosophy of my distribution, as well as the decision process in it. I have been a Debian Developer for five years, after living several compulsory try-this-distro years, and finally finding the distro _I_ like and _I_ want to share my work with. Same goes for desktop environments: Castrate me to KDE or to Gnome, and you will have an unhappy developer turning away towards horizons where I can work as I want. So, yes, Linux development is still quite developer-centric. Of course, many developers have needs and likes similar to many users (or get paid to think the way specific groups of users do). But this choice, although possibly harming for the Great Project as a whole, possibly stopping World Domination, allows our ecosystem to be rich and allows us its main inhabitants to be happy.
When you comment out a big chunk of code with M-;, you want to be able to un-comment it. And if that big chunk of code had comments in it, you don't want the comments to be uncommented;-) You can comment a chunk containing a chunk, and the boundary between the regions still shows. This even happens in a recursive-friendly way - If I M-x it again (adding some not-yet-commented thing - Remember it's a DWIM, so it attempts to achieve intelligence, and there is nothing as stupd as artificial intelligence), it works correctly (/. "junk character" filter won't allow me to post it - but it adds a level of backslashes). Comments get nicely nested. And de-commentable, step by step.
My country -Mexico- has many traits in which it is comparable to Brazil - About half of the population, about the same divide between rural and metropolitan areas. We have stuck with paper-based voting - Many of you will recognize the Mexican fraudocracy as not exactly clean. Still, we do have the electoral results "in time for the evening news" - with a certain error margin, of course. If the election is too close, the result is delayed by a couple of days. That does not require e-voting machines. And greatly enhances confidence - Many of us (polls say ~30% today) still believe the 2006 elections were a scam. The paper trail is there - there are legal locks preventing a recount, but the paper trail is there. It's not just bits inside the computer.
in Mexico City we have had Wimax since 2002, with a smallish ISP now called E-go. I used it in 2003-2004 at work, and this year it was my main access for several months. Quite comparable to broadband, if you are in well covered areas.
As I understand it, Microsoft has deliberately restricted the systems that can be licensed with OEM WinXP by mandating that devices having screens smaller than something like 10" or 11", and no more than 1GB of RAM, a HDD no larger than 80GB, and a processor slower than 1.8GHz. (Someone feel free to correct me on the exact WinXP OEM Netbook licensing hardware restrictions, but I have read about there somewhere recently...)
I just bought an Acer Aspire One. Around US$420 (in Mexico, I understand it's cheaper in the US). It came with a 120GB HD, 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz Atom 270 CPU, and WinXP.
I am a Debian Developer. Depending on the package, I sometimes work quite close with the upstream developer, sometimes quite far. But the main work I do is:
to ensure it correctly fits in with our policies - All files are in their place, no conflicts, etc.
Check the bugs reported by our users, try to fix them, and coordinate with the authors about any fixes that "touch" their code
Keep often track of their code, new versions, fixes, etc.
I am not by far as familiar with the code as the upstream authors, I am familiar only with certain well-known details. So, yes, there is a safety layer in there, but it's not as thick as you seem to assume
Several years ago I worked (for a couple of weeks only) at a start-up. The boss wanted to publicize it - Spammed (he came bragging about the 3 million recipients of his mail). I told him that was unethical IMHO. He did it a second time. I quit my job. I think they got the message. Did they stop it? I don't think so... But still, that's a good way to say "there are people who think you are plain evil".
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Less likely to be legal residents of the US, and even when they are, they come from a hiding culture, from a social background where they cannot trust the country they live in (even if they were born US citizens), so they don't trust the health institutions to go search help there. Latinos are much less likely to go to the public hospitals in case of any kind of illness, so they go only when the illness is advanced or critical, or with major fractures etc.
This also comes because in our countries (I live in Mexico) the healthcare systems have been pauperized. I know I have to sit for a couple of hours before getting urgency attention (of course, not if I am on critical situation, but for most cases I have been to the public system). I know I must go through several appointments probably months apart to get to see a specialist if I have a non-urgent condition. So, I seldom go to any doctor. It is a cultural, not racial, issue. (FWIW, I am culturally Mexican, racially Jewish/Slavic; my family migrated in the 1920s)
So many people are drug users, and are just careful to do it right. And if you have to bribe, it is always a small bribe to pay.
I am a Mexican, yes. And I am a Mexican who has chosen (and adhered to, for a decade already!) never to bribe. So yes, it would work for me â" I would much rather be arrested for 36 hours (or whatever small) than paying a 5 dollar bribe (after all, the policeman is doing his job on catching me were he to get me!).
I am not a drug user, though, although I have ocassionally (two, three times over the last five years) smoked with friends who have some. This will not make me rush out to buy. But I have some friends who are frequent users, and have some who are sadly real addicts to other drugs (which I expect never to get familiar with). A small bribe or a small hassle with the police for small-scale posession has never been likely to deter them from buying.
You should have rather written, the dominant cartels hurt the military just enough to splinter them, not the other way around.
Really, one of the most feared groups are called the Zetas, and they are basically (or rather, they originated as) a group of SWAT members who deflected the forced armies, as the cartels pay immensely better. They have mostly (AFAIK) joined the Gulf cartels â" But I might be mistaken on this last point.
Our (de-facto, remember he took power fraudulently) president insists we are winning the war, and the spots quote the names of many captured drug dealers. They don't mention the governnment seems to be aiding some cartels and being selective in their targets against their competitors. The number of casualties has escalated tremendously in the last three years... and it does not seem to be getting any better.
I really hope that decriminalizing being an addict helps show the way. Of course, what follows (and is even harder) is to decriminalize providing such small doses, regulating the market. Addicts are sick, they are not criminal.
They have got their training. Learning to write in Word usually takes several mini-courses for a computer-negated professor. They get the basics in the end (and the Editorial Department will just have to suffer to get it all in a decent shape, but that's their job and they are getting paid for it)... They don't want your training on jurassic technology which needs to be compiled, thankyou.
The fact that it is possible (and yes, annotations are a great use for it) does not mean it is practical. It is not, in FSF terms, the preferred form for modification. If I take a professor's Word document, and do a beautiful typsesetting job for it in TeX, and hand him back the resulting PDF... He will end up giving me the printouts with red ink showing the corrections to make. That is going back in time several decades, and will hurt workflow. So, if he wants to write in Word, so be it, write in Word. The Editorial Department will... do their best to turn that crap into something publishable.
And yes, it sucks. But you get tired of swimming upstream.
As I said in my post, people use Word using the stupid WYSIWYG mindset. And yes, what you see is what you get -- No less, no more. If you try to explain to a non-computer-savvy person how they should work with styles instead of font sizes... Most of the time they will just stare into the void. That means, OpenOffice will not have any structure with which to export to a meaningful TeX file. So you will end up with the worst of both worlds: A non-WYSIWYGy system which does the formating somewhat uh-similar to what you had intended, and with no clue on what you really wanted to achieve.
LyX's approach is IMHO great - WYSIWYM. What You See Is What You Mean. Forget about how it is rendered, I want only to see the approximate structure.
...I work at the Economics Research Institute at UNAM, Mexico's (and Latin America's) largest university. Researchers here are social scientists â" Their texts do include the ocassional formula, yes, but they mainly deal with straight text. Even so, I am painfully aware on how inconvenient a word-processor-minded program can be for them (i.e. try to get them to distinguish between cosmetic and semantic tagging â" No way). They literally use the computer as a fancy typewriter.
I have shown LyX to a couple of people, and are initially interested, even more looking at the quality of the results... But after I mention it cannot import (with formatting) Word documents, and that they won't be able to share their works (except as an unmodifiable PDF) with other colleagues, they go back to what they already know.
So, no, TeX is not necessarily widely used in all of academia. Just in the portion we, the computer-minded geeks, like looking at.
The big threat regarding cache poisoning is not just having root users subvert their own systems - It allows breaking free of the hypervisor and attacking other virtual hosts running on the same hardware.
Ok, granted, 10 miles is not exactly a piece of cake (and is also close to the top I have run - yes, using running shoes). However, it's not yet the exhaustion limit for most fit people - Once you get closer to that limit (i.e. the famous "30Km wall" that haunts marathonists) you are not that careful anymore with where your feet are landing. FWIW, I finished the longest bike trip I had (~90Km out of a 95Km planned route) so close to the end point because I felt I was no longer paying attention, and going on a highway does require better awareness than what I had by then. I prefered to stay on the safe side and drop out almost reaching the goal.
I took up first fast-walking and then running after many (MANY) years of near-zero activity, grossly overweight (almost 140Kg). Of course, my body was quite over what evolution anticipated - I have a weak ankle which bended from time to time (now, 40Kg slimmer, much less often and much less painfully). Of course, I didn't buy top-of-the-line running shoes, only a pair of decently resistant, well-formed jogging shoes. I would not have done it without them.
On the other extreme, we have high-performance runners - Be it my marathonist/ultramarathonists friends, be it the speed runners. Once again, evolution provided us with strong skin soles, but not strong enough to endure a 100m race in ~10 seconds (I still cannot believe a human can do that). It provided us with strong skin, but not strong enough to endure 40Km. And there are humans doing it - Take away their shoes, and they will really suffer.
Hell, same goes for regular shoes for moving in a city at a calm pace... I like wearing sandals, but I really don't like somebody stepping over me barefooted. And as I often go into people-crammed places (think of, say, the subway), I prefer wearing regular shoes. Odds are I will suffer less, even if I don't really really need them for my day-to-day activities.
If peer-review is done only at the top of each discipline, you might know who reviewed you. However, people write at all levels of the academic scale. Having a broad peer review process, where even people from a different specialization level than yours, can comment (and the opinions are weighed, of course, according to their respective ranking) can further improve this. Sometimes even lead you to understanding several points you didn't even consider originally, as they are outside your usual radar.
Usually, when you review an article, it is under the double-blind method - You don't know either who the reviewee is. You must judge based only on the merits of the paper, without taking care on whether the author was a student of Einstein himself.
If this gets enough traction/critical mass, this problem will be solved - Crackpots can mutually sign as being topz 1337, but they will be inevitably signed as being below the mark for most other, serious (and better punctuated) users. /.'s metamoderation. And, of course, a very well reviewed article should raise your "karma" more than a great review. /. terminology), it will enter the radar of possible things to review for higher-ranked people. /. karma is 2, then each review I make can weigh the same as (say) 3 people with karma 1. 3 reviews of people in my rank will be equivalent to one review from a higher rank.
The site linked describes the process in too low detail to make sense of what they are proposing, but I have thought through a very similar process with some colelagues of mine - This problem is solved when not only each article, but each reviewer gets scored according to both their contributions' (i.e. their articles') and their reviews' value - in a way possibly akin to
That can even lead the system towards being interesting for some people usually regarded as semi-sacred inside their academic communities: Anybody can submit a paper for review. The paper will be initially ranked at a value based on the author's karma - and will be presented for review initially to people at this person's own level. If the paper gets "modded up" (again, using
The influence can go on a semi-logarithmic scale - If my
Yes, I am describing a system somewhat different than the linked article's, but still, it might be an interesting system - And it does solve (at least to a certain degree) the problem you describe - of course, after playing a bit with the factors.
And, yes, 100 crackpot buddies can still push the paper up quite a bit. Still, a couple of well-ranked people will sink it back.
No, it was not hacking... It was a power spike. Or something like that.
...I do have a firewall at my workplace. We were bitten hard - Quite probably, thanks to a USB key, careless email or to one of the three machines I had to leave with SMB access to dependencies outside my own.
And yes, the computers are configured to auto-update the OS, and they all have an up-to-date antivirus. Still, an overly fertile virus will defeat those updates.
Yes, under the current patent infrastructure, he might have a legally sound case. And he might even win. This only proves (further) that the current scheme has gone nuts.
I hope some people take note on this, and push towards reforming the patent system. In my book, this would clearly sound as an obvious thing, not even an invention... Still, a patent was granted.
However, I do not hold very high hopes on it. I think this will be silently ignored. If anything, many media people will say, "oh, I didn't know I had to check for my ideas first". They will proceed on checking each of their ideas with costly patent-oriented lawfirms - It is not like they have ideas very often!
Granted: Users do not need a bazillion Linux distributions. However, _we_ the developers do. It makes a huge difference to _me_ the general philosophy of my distribution, as well as the decision process in it. I have been a Debian Developer for five years, after living several compulsory try-this-distro years, and finally finding the distro _I_ like and _I_ want to share my work with.
Same goes for desktop environments: Castrate me to KDE or to Gnome, and you will have an unhappy developer turning away towards horizons where I can work as I want.
So, yes, Linux development is still quite developer-centric. Of course, many developers have needs and likes similar to many users (or get paid to think the way specific groups of users do). But this choice, although possibly harming for the Great Project as a whole, possibly stopping World Domination, allows our ecosystem to be rich and allows us its main inhabitants to be happy.
When you comment out a big chunk of code with M-;, you want to be able to un-comment it. And if that big chunk of code had comments in it, you don't want the comments to be uncommented ;-) You can comment a chunk containing a chunk, and the boundary between the regions still shows.
This even happens in a recursive-friendly way - If I M-x it again (adding some not-yet-commented thing - Remember it's a DWIM, so it attempts to achieve intelligence, and there is nothing as stupd as artificial intelligence), it works correctly (/. "junk character" filter won't allow me to post it - but it adds a level of backslashes). Comments get nicely nested. And de-commentable, step by step.
The slowest and most bloated version of Linux to date beats the slowest and most bloated version of Windows to date? Hmm...
My country -Mexico- has many traits in which it is comparable to Brazil - About half of the population, about the same divide between rural and metropolitan areas. We have stuck with paper-based voting - Many of you will recognize the Mexican fraudocracy as not exactly clean. Still, we do have the electoral results "in time for the evening news" - with a certain error margin, of course. If the election is too close, the result is delayed by a couple of days. That does not require e-voting machines. And greatly enhances confidence - Many of us (polls say ~30% today) still believe the 2006 elections were a scam. The paper trail is there - there are legal locks preventing a recount, but the paper trail is there. It's not just bits inside the computer.
Code his own routine to make sure his vote is accounted for
in Mexico City we have had Wimax since 2002, with a smallish ISP now called E-go. I used it in 2003-2004 at work, and this year it was my main access for several months. Quite comparable to broadband, if you are in well covered areas.
I just bought an Acer Aspire One. Around US$420 (in Mexico, I understand it's cheaper in the US). It came with a 120GB HD, 1GB RAM, 1.6GHz Atom 270 CPU, and WinXP.
I am a Debian Developer. Depending on the package, I sometimes work quite close with the upstream developer, sometimes quite far. But the main work I do is:
I am not by far as familiar with the code as the upstream authors, I am familiar only with certain well-known details. So, yes, there is a safety layer in there, but it's not as thick as you seem to assume
There, I just made insightful all your useless rants. And I still have 100 characters left!
Several years ago I worked (for a couple of weeks only) at a start-up. The boss wanted to publicize it - Spammed (he came bragging about the 3 million recipients of his mail). I told him that was unethical IMHO. He did it a second time. I quit my job.
I think they got the message. Did they stop it? I don't think so... But still, that's a good way to say "there are people who think you are plain evil".