I have a thick beard. I also have sensitive skin. Blades give me rashes.
I tried shaving on dry, and got rashes. With water, rashes. After bath, rashes. With soap, rashes. With common shaving cream, rashes.
I ended up using those expensive creams with moisturizers and stuff. Other than electric razors, this is the only way I can shave without my skin turning into Mars' surface. For when I'm broke, I found out my wife's women shaving cream works well:)
(in Japanese, but Babelfish at Altavista handles it well).
Yeah, that worked so well for Zero Wing.
Must... resist... temptation... aargh!
Western calendar 2101 fight started. Captain: Just that how it did, word you bore! Engineer: No person it seems that it could set up the explosive according to. Communication operator: Captain! Communication entered! Captain: No! Communication operator: Vision comes to the main screen. Captain: As for you! CATS: Don't you think? busily so is, the ladies and gentlemen. CATS: With the cooperation of the Federal Government troop, everything CATS received your base. CATS: Also your warship, gradually probably is end. Captain: foolish...! CATS: You appreciate in your cooperation. CATS: Before making the life which at the very most remains and is little, important.... CATS: Hahahahaha... communication operator: Captain.... Captain: In ZIG all machine takeoff order! ! Captain: Already, only you entrust to them. Captain: Our future desires... captain: It is the mu. ZIG! !
Babelfish-breaking kana transliterated by me, as slashdot seems to not like them. Overall I think the Mega Drive translation crew did better than Babelfish.
I just now noticed that the original Japanese has five 'ha's, unlike the Engrish (four) or the Flash animation (three). Learn a new thing every day.
Your argument is effectively saying that it wouldn't.
Er, that's not what he said at all. What you described is a specific algorithm, something already covered by copyright law. The OP never said algorithms are useless. Instead, he said you shouldn't incentive algorithm research specifically with patents, which are one of several ways of funding research. A patent would not only "protect" the specific key sequence you're talking of, it would also protect a lot of related sequences trying to solve the same problem. That's very bad because, being math, they may well be discovered independently by unrelated people. That's why the OP means when he talks about math not being patentable. Protect the specific key sequence (copyright); don't lock up whole sets of key sequences at the same domain (patent).
And, as I've pointed out elsewhere, Newton's "locking up of calculus" also has nothing to do with patents whatsoever. Newton never said "you cannot solve problems with calculus or anything resembling it unless you pay me a fee", and the OP is right in pointing out we'd be in trouble if he did. Not sharing work, having fear of criticism or fighting for attribution are all orthogonal to patenting.
However the concept embodied in those words and letters cannot, in general, be patented or otherwise protected.
Correct, and to extend on the analogy: to patent software is like patenting, say, "detective novels where the protagonist is bitter but easen up near the end" or "adventure fiction involving controversial references to Christianism". Software patents don't protect specific pieces of software (which is the job of copyright law); they lock up entire classes of software, even if still unwritten, which happens to have the same underlying math principles.
But that has nothing to do with patents. Being "sensitive to criticism" or stubbornly require attribution is very different than not letting people use your math unless they pay you.
You know, a few years ago I used to talk exactly like you, in the same bitter tone. I was of course pissed of that people kept picking on me for my habits, but the hole was deeper than I thought; later I realized I was struggling too much to be accepted by myself.
Because I think it's stupid to discriminate against people based on tastes, I convinced myself that I shouldn't care about what the other, stupider people think about me. Problem is, I cannot help but caring. The fish live with the fish, humans live with humans. It feels bad to be rejected; it feels bad to be flamed on the net, to have derogatory signs pasted to your back, to feel your acquintances slowly distancing themselves from you thanks to hearsay. For I long time I struggled with the problem of how to avoid feeling bad, but it was the wrong problem. I was, in fact, being exactly like them; I was giving myself a moral commandment against human nature, a "shouldn't", "thou shall not care about other people's opinions", a commandment as logically flawed as religious people trying to not like sex, and then blaming myself for failing to fulfill it.
As soon as I figured this out, I stopped trying to pretend I don't care. Yes, I do care about what others think about me, I care a lot and I always did. Only I will not let that be a source of self-censorship. After all, it's not like being hated by some jerk is the end of the world, especially if you're not in denial about your emotional hit. Do your things and, if you feel bad due to the backlash, go listen some blues, drink vodka, party heavily, stare at the lonely sky writing emo poetry or whatever fits your bill. I think of social sadness as a physical, bodily function. Sooner or later the hormones go away and you go on with your life.
Oh, and there was something else too: a thinly-veiled pressure to conform to the elite herd, which means a moral pressure to avoid anything stereotyped into being lowly and herdy. For example, friends from youth couldn't understand my taste for cult European and Asian movies, but when I finally involved myself with fellow movie bluffs they despised me for liking the things I watched earlier (say, kung-fu flicks or cartoons). The movies accepted as "good" in one circle would be taken as "guilty pleasures" in another. Countless situations like this convinced me that those who brag about going against the masses often are just swimming along with a "better", lesser-known current, and are as hostile to different ideas than those in mainstream.
Some friends ask me why I'm so attracted to Net. To me, it's main feature isn't portability or network stack, it's minimalism. Current Linux distros doesn't seem to care about old hardware users (if you ever used aptitude in a machine with less than 64MiB RAM you know what I'm talking about). NetBSD is small, clean and ordered, like a carefully crafted piece of jewelry./usr/bin from install fits in a screenful. And unlike linux, its source is intelligible to a curious student; they even got a whole man section devoted to kernel internals.
I used Net casually in old machines and was always satisifed.
Unfortunately the RTFA factor in NetBSD community is too strong. You're expected to know everything and if you don't, you're simply ignored. I've tried really hard to install Net in my Powerbook 3400c; I spent days burning CDs, studying manuals, fiddling with Open Firmware and reading mailing lists. I finally gave up and sent a detailed email about what I tried and what errors I received. The message was unanimously ignored in netbsd-users. I ended up installing good ol' Debian --- Debian MLs are not exactly forgiving, but at least people help you.
Yeah, wpedia is really amazing for pop culture. Traditional encyclopedias choose to ignore pop culture out of cultural bias, but the large amount of pop-related articles on wpedia reflect how much people enjoy the stuff.
However, I'm now eager to know how were the "Ferengui manners" Nog dealt with the test, and all I can find are those shameful wpedia clones...
If you were to win the argument that people should be free to share their connections with the world, you would kill ISPs as a business.
This is not evilness on the part of people, it's a weakeness of the ISP model. If we could give net access to everyone managing networks ourselves, it means the market has outdated ISPs (much like old-style telephony and elevator operators). I'd go as far as guess that wireless mesh networks will be the key to breaking telecoms monopolies over Internet access.
As for the open network controversy, I disagree with your conclusions. I've used a bunch of open nets and all of them were open to public; some called themselves "freenet" or "openap", etc. For good manners, I've always got in touch with the admin to warn about my intentions, and never once I found one who had his net open unintentionally. Maybe we live in different places.
I respect and understand you if you disagree with me and don't want anyone using your network. I can't respect you if you think this give you the right of playing childish pranks on them. If you don't want others to use the net then simply be polite and close/encrypt it.
Lots of nethack love/fear in this thread, it seems. And the usual nightmares. It seems that tetris and nethack often appear in people's dreams.
I've had nightmares with a yellow lowercase 'c' when I was a beginner. The funny thing is, it was a giant threedimensional lowercase yellow 'c' chasing me.
I'd said you could copy a computer file umpteen million times and you'd still get exactly the same file as the original - they argued that it would decay with each copy and obviously had no comprehension of...
Maybe they just generalized some experience they had with lossy formats, such as jpeg or mp3.
Actually, he can talk with them as much as he like, and he doesn't even need a special device or anything. He just won't have any answers, true, but he can talk.
The first city for BSD, Jakarta, Indonesia, has almost double the second place. Can anyone guess why? Indonesia is the first BSD country too.
Interestingly, this tool confirms the old "BSD is popular in Japan" meme. Tokyo, Chiyoda and Osaka all figure in the top 10, Japan is number 4 and Japanese number 3.
leoboiko's law of proposed scientific revolutions:
on
One Big Bang, Or Many?
·
· Score: 1
Almost all revolutionary scientific theories reported mainstream
1) were already proposed and discredited a long time ago, and
2) are nothing more than blatant attention whorism.
What was the last amount Real paid Ilgaz for astroturfing? Not much, I guess, since this pro-DRM provider of buggy software keen on spyware and shady EULAs do not matter anymore.
This is an additional reason to learn proper (X)HTML, CSS et al. They have very interesting accessibility features which cannot be matched by ad-hoc MSIE HTML.
BTW, while I'm evangelizing standards, every web developer, *especially* framework developers (Rails guys, I'm looking at you), should be required by law to read the damn HTTP RFC. Content-negotiation is so underrated; it could be very useful for accessibility. HTTP rulez, it's a shame that so few reconize it.
I've just successfully installed Debian sid in my Thinkpad 560 (Pentium 100, ~900MiB HD, 80MiB RAM) through a PLIP cable. With some work I managed to get everything I wanted (X, Emacs, Ruby, and text processing tools (fonts, dictionaries, input methods) for three languages) in less than 400MiB. I'll cut and paste my notes below.
--
Always install and remove software using aptitude install and aptitude remove instead of apt-get. Aptitude keeps a log of what packages are desired by the user and what were installed just to fill dependencies, and remove the later whenever possible. This helped me to remove a lot of perl and library cruft. Be sure to add Aptitude::Recommends-Important "false"; to/etc/apt/apt.conf.
Install localepurge.
To run X you need xfonts-base. xfonts-base need xutils, which contains some font handling tools. xutils also contains that stupid imake thing which nobody uses, and that depends on cpp. Thus my system wants to install cpp in order to have fonts! I forced the installation of xutils without cpp, which broke imake. As if I cared. Imake should be in a separate package.
Grok the X package dependencies. With a careful selection of only the necessary ones you can reduce disk usage a lot. Don't install any "task" packages.
Don't install, use or get near anything with xft in it.
Depending on your tastes, it's possible to not install a full perl distribution and save tens of megabytes. As an user of the "stow" perl program, I was glad to find xstow, a stow rewrite in C++.
A good and fast X terminal emulator with proper i18n is rxvt-unicode, which I've been using for a long time and heartfully recommend. But don't install the perl-enabled weirdly-patched debian version, compile your own and configure it to your taste.
Compile a reduced kernel as soon as possible, remove the generic one and purge anything related to initrds. My initrdless kernel boots up more than 2x faster than linux-2.6-486 with yaird. Remember to not enable the trident framebuffer. Oh, and don't confuse yaird with yard like I did =)
To this day I'm yet to find a CMS (or even a blog system) with good multilingual support. By "good multilingual support" I mean:
* UTF-8 everywhere.
* Templates/autogenerated strings are i18nable.
* Able to i18n all user-created content. System understands the relationship between alternative versions of posts, etc.
* Able to choose default language through HTTP content negotiation (get the browser's default).
* Able to override browser default with cookies.
* System use nice, strict XHTML and mark all multilingual content with the proper xml:lang attribute.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a thick beard. I also have sensitive skin. Blades give me rashes.
:)
I tried shaving on dry, and got rashes. With water, rashes. After bath, rashes. With soap, rashes. With common shaving cream, rashes.
I ended up using those expensive creams with moisturizers and stuff. Other than electric razors, this is the only way I can shave without my skin turning into Mars' surface. For when I'm broke, I found out my wife's women shaving cream works well
Must... resist... temptation... aargh!
Western calendar 2101
fight started.
Captain: Just that how it did, word you bore!
Engineer: No person it seems that it could set up the explosive according to.
Communication operator: Captain! Communication entered!
Captain: No!
Communication operator: Vision comes to the main screen.
Captain: As for you!
CATS: Don't you think? busily so is, the ladies and gentlemen.
CATS: With the cooperation of the Federal Government troop, everything CATS received your base.
CATS: Also your warship, gradually probably is end.
Captain: foolish
CATS: You appreciate in your cooperation.
CATS: Before making the life which at the very most remains and is little, important....
CATS: Hahahahaha...
communication operator: Captain....
Captain: In ZIG all machine takeoff order! !
Captain: Already, only you entrust to them.
Captain: Our future desires...
captain: It is the mu. ZIG! !
Babelfish-breaking kana transliterated by me, as slashdot seems to not like them. Overall I think the Mega Drive translation crew did better than Babelfish.
I just now noticed that the original Japanese has five 'ha's, unlike the Engrish (four) or the Flash animation (three). Learn a new thing every day.
Er, that's not what he said at all. What you described is a specific algorithm, something already covered by copyright law. The OP never said algorithms are useless. Instead, he said you shouldn't incentive algorithm research specifically with patents, which are one of several ways of funding research. A patent would not only "protect" the specific key sequence you're talking of, it would also protect a lot of related sequences trying to solve the same problem. That's very bad because, being math, they may well be discovered independently by unrelated people. That's why the OP means when he talks about math not being patentable. Protect the specific key sequence (copyright); don't lock up whole sets of key sequences at the same domain (patent).
And, as I've pointed out elsewhere, Newton's "locking up of calculus" also has nothing to do with patents whatsoever. Newton never said "you cannot solve problems with calculus or anything resembling it unless you pay me a fee", and the OP is right in pointing out we'd be in trouble if he did. Not sharing work, having fear of criticism or fighting for attribution are all orthogonal to patenting.
Correct, and to extend on the analogy: to patent software is like patenting, say, "detective novels where the protagonist is bitter but easen up near the end" or "adventure fiction involving controversial references to Christianism". Software patents don't protect specific pieces of software (which is the job of copyright law); they lock up entire classes of software, even if still unwritten, which happens to have the same underlying math principles.
But that has nothing to do with patents. Being "sensitive to criticism" or stubbornly require attribution is very different than not letting people use your math unless they pay you.
You know, a few years ago I used to talk exactly like you, in the same bitter tone. I was of course pissed of that people kept picking on me for my habits, but the hole was deeper than I thought; later I realized I was struggling too much to be accepted by myself.
Because I think it's stupid to discriminate against people based on tastes, I convinced myself that I shouldn't care about what the other, stupider people think about me. Problem is, I cannot help but caring. The fish live with the fish, humans live with humans. It feels bad to be rejected; it feels bad to be flamed on the net, to have derogatory signs pasted to your back, to feel your acquintances slowly distancing themselves from you thanks to hearsay. For I long time I struggled with the problem of how to avoid feeling bad, but it was the wrong problem. I was, in fact, being exactly like them; I was giving myself a moral commandment against human nature, a "shouldn't", "thou shall not care about other people's opinions", a commandment as logically flawed as religious people trying to not like sex, and then blaming myself for failing to fulfill it.
As soon as I figured this out, I stopped trying to pretend I don't care. Yes, I do care about what others think about me, I care a lot and I always did. Only I will not let that be a source of self-censorship. After all, it's not like being hated by some jerk is the end of the world, especially if you're not in denial about your emotional hit. Do your things and, if you feel bad due to the backlash, go listen some blues, drink vodka, party heavily, stare at the lonely sky writing emo poetry or whatever fits your bill. I think of social sadness as a physical, bodily function. Sooner or later the hormones go away and you go on with your life.
Oh, and there was something else too: a thinly-veiled pressure to conform to the elite herd, which means a moral pressure to avoid anything stereotyped into being lowly and herdy. For example, friends from youth couldn't understand my taste for cult European and Asian movies, but when I finally involved myself with fellow movie bluffs they despised me for liking the things I watched earlier (say, kung-fu flicks or cartoons). The movies accepted as "good" in one circle would be taken as "guilty pleasures" in another. Countless situations like this convinced me that those who brag about going against the masses often are just swimming along with a "better", lesser-known current, and are as hostile to different ideas than those in mainstream.
Some friends ask me why I'm so attracted to Net. To me, it's main feature isn't portability or network stack, it's minimalism. Current Linux distros doesn't seem to care about old hardware users (if you ever used aptitude in a machine with less than 64MiB RAM you know what I'm talking about). NetBSD is small, clean and ordered, like a carefully crafted piece of jewelry. /usr/bin from install fits in a screenful. And unlike linux, its source is intelligible to a curious student; they even got a whole man section devoted to kernel internals.
I used Net casually in old machines and was always satisifed.
Unfortunately the RTFA factor in NetBSD community is too strong. You're expected to know everything and if you don't, you're simply ignored. I've tried really hard to install Net in my Powerbook 3400c; I spent days burning CDs, studying manuals, fiddling with Open Firmware and reading mailing lists. I finally gave up and sent a detailed email about what I tried and what errors I received. The message was unanimously ignored in netbsd-users. I ended up installing good ol' Debian --- Debian MLs are not exactly forgiving, but at least people help you.
Yeah, wpedia is really amazing for pop culture. Traditional encyclopedias choose to ignore pop culture out of cultural bias, but the large amount of pop-related articles on wpedia reflect how much people enjoy the stuff.
However, I'm now eager to know how were the "Ferengui manners" Nog dealt with the test, and all I can find are those shameful wpedia clones...
This is not evilness on the part of people, it's a weakeness of the ISP model. If we could give net access to everyone managing networks ourselves, it means the market has outdated ISPs (much like old-style telephony and elevator operators). I'd go as far as guess that wireless mesh networks will be the key to breaking telecoms monopolies over Internet access.
As for the open network controversy, I disagree with your conclusions. I've used a bunch of open nets and all of them were open to public; some called themselves "freenet" or "openap", etc. For good manners, I've always got in touch with the admin to warn about my intentions, and never once I found one who had his net open unintentionally. Maybe we live in different places.
I respect and understand you if you disagree with me and don't want anyone using your network. I can't respect you if you think this give you the right of playing childish pranks on them. If you don't want others to use the net then simply be polite and close/encrypt it.
Lots of nethack love/fear in this thread, it seems. And the usual nightmares. It seems that tetris and nethack often appear in people's dreams.
I've had nightmares with a yellow lowercase 'c' when I was a beginner. The funny thing is, it was a giant threedimensional lowercase yellow 'c' chasing me.
Emacs has a "big brother database", and an alternative called the "lovely sister database".
Very funny. A nice Orwellianesque joke. The topic is missing the foot icon, btw. ...what do you mean "they're serious"?
Maybe they just generalized some experience they had with lossy formats, such as jpeg or mp3.
Ok, it was kinda nice, but let's get this out of the way: Why the lucky stiff's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is funnier.
Actually, he can talk with them as much as he like, and he doesn't even need a special device or anything. He just won't have any answers, true, but he can talk.
I'm waiting for Bushido Blade 3 for Wii.
Of course, for every time light reaches some place, darkness was already there!
perl language, python language, ruby language. Witness how the rise of ruby in 2005 coincides with the ruby on rails graph.
The first city for BSD, Jakarta, Indonesia, has almost double the second place. Can anyone guess why? Indonesia is the first BSD country too.
Interestingly, this tool confirms the old "BSD is popular in Japan" meme. Tokyo, Chiyoda and Osaka all figure in the top 10, Japan is number 4 and Japanese number 3.
Almost all revolutionary scientific theories reported mainstream
1) were already proposed and discredited a long time ago, and
2) are nothing more than blatant attention whorism.
What was the last amount Real paid Ilgaz for astroturfing? Not much, I guess, since this pro-DRM provider of buggy software keen on spyware and shady EULAs do not matter anymore.
This is an additional reason to learn proper (X)HTML, CSS et al. They have very interesting accessibility features which cannot be matched by ad-hoc MSIE HTML.
BTW, while I'm evangelizing standards, every web developer, *especially* framework developers (Rails guys, I'm looking at you), should be required by law to read the damn HTTP RFC. Content-negotiation is so underrated; it could be very useful for accessibility. HTTP rulez, it's a shame that so few reconize it.
I've just successfully installed Debian sid in my Thinkpad 560 (Pentium 100, ~900MiB HD, 80MiB RAM) through a PLIP cable. With some work I managed to get everything I wanted (X, Emacs, Ruby, and text processing tools (fonts, dictionaries, input methods) for three languages) in less than 400MiB. I'll cut and paste my notes below.
--
Always install and remove software using aptitude install and aptitude remove instead of apt-get. Aptitude keeps a log of what packages are desired by the user and what were installed just to fill dependencies, and remove the later whenever possible. This helped me to remove a lot of perl and library cruft. Be sure to add Aptitude::Recommends-Important "false"; to /etc/apt/apt.conf.
Install localepurge.
To run X you need xfonts-base. xfonts-base need xutils, which contains some font handling tools. xutils also contains that stupid imake thing which nobody uses, and that depends on cpp. Thus my system wants to install cpp in order to have fonts! I forced the installation of xutils without cpp, which broke imake. As if I cared. Imake should be in a separate package.
Grok the X package dependencies. With a careful selection of only the necessary ones you can reduce disk usage a lot. Don't install any "task" packages.
Don't install, use or get near anything with xft in it.
Depending on your tastes, it's possible to not install a full perl distribution and save tens of megabytes. As an user of the "stow" perl program, I was glad to find xstow, a stow rewrite in C++.
A good and fast X terminal emulator with proper i18n is rxvt-unicode, which I've been using for a long time and heartfully recommend. But don't install the perl-enabled weirdly-patched debian version, compile your own and configure it to your taste.
Compile a reduced kernel as soon as possible, remove the generic one and purge anything related to initrds. My initrdless kernel boots up more than 2x faster than linux-2.6-486 with yaird. Remember to not enable the trident framebuffer. Oh, and don't confuse yaird with yard like I did =)
And you too, protect your software today!
To this day I'm yet to find a CMS (or even a blog system) with good multilingual support. By "good multilingual support" I mean:
* UTF-8 everywhere.
* Templates/autogenerated strings are i18nable.
* Able to i18n all user-created content. System understands the relationship between alternative versions of posts, etc.
* Able to choose default language through HTTP content negotiation (get the browser's default).
* Able to override browser default with cookies.
* System use nice, strict XHTML and mark all multilingual content with the proper xml:lang attribute.
Am I the only one who cares about that?