If you want fiscally responsible policies, vote Democrat.
Right... that'll help. Social Security, Welfare, Medicare and Medicaid exceed the entire military AND discretional budget (not just the Iraq war) and all are horribly broken.
Social Security: 1935, FDR... democrat
Welfare: 1935, FDR... democrat, reformed in 1996 by Bill Clinton... democrat AGAINST the democratic party's wishes for longer terms and more funds. (thank the universe for little miracles.)
Medicare and medicaid: 1945 proposed by Harry Truman... democrat, signed 1965 by Lyndon Johnson also... democrat.
Get your ignorant head out of your knee-jerk, liberally biased ass, do some actual fact finding/checking and come to the realization that ALL big government is wasteful, inefficient, deceitful and corrupt.
By the way... the interest on our national debt alone matches half of the figure you spew for the Iraq war. This expenditure is 100% waste every year that buys us *nothing* and it's all the result of f*ucked up presidential/congressional/senate decisions for the past eighty years. During which time no party other than democrat or republican has been in power.
if you really want fiscally responsible policies... vote them all out of office and start taking care of yourself for a change.
Buying a special piece of hardware whose primary purpose is book reading... definitely a niche market
Yeah, but... I've been on Holiday in London for the past month. I take the tube (when it's actually running) everywhere and I've got to say the US$700 I spent on my iRex iLiad and about US$100 worth of novels has been a godsend on the train. The batteries last all day, bright light only improves the readability and much more portable than a laptop.
It may be a niche market but it has potential. Unfortunately, the only way this potential is going to be achieved is if the corporate players get their collective heads out of their ass and standardize on one, decent, open, portable format.
They also have to port previous works into an electronic format. Try to find Robert Ludlum's books on mobipocket format. You can't, at least not the pre-death publications. Dale Brown? "Oh yeah, let's pick every other book to publish." What idiot does that. If I'm going paperless then I'm going paperless.
DRM is tolerable but there's no reason you can't have an open format that supports DRM.
The people that dreamed up these different formats have done such a poor job it's not funny. PDB don't support different typefaces. PDF's don't reflow. HTML isn't going to support DRM and you need to zip to capture multiple files. Kindle isn't compatible with anybody else, lit is closed. While I find mobipocket tolerable try accurately converting any of the others to mobipocket. They're all just a kludge. Concepts of "paragraph", "chapter", "lists" and "Table" all are meaningless in these formats and essential concepts for reflowable layout. Basically, a quick experience in trying to convert formats and you will quickly understand that the people who designed these "formats" know nothing about capturing and encoding information.
Until they get a clue eBooks are dead in the water. (And I like mine, that should tell you something.)
A lot of us have been disappointed in the Segway. However, having my PhD in robotics, I've been downright frustrated.
While I would agree that Dean Kamen is "inventive" and very good at marketing, his products are not at all ground breaking in terms of technology. To add insult to injury his products are way over priced.
Robotics has been able to do his Segway balance trick for many decades. "Gee, sense where center of mass has moved and move the support position under it." In fact, we've been able to do a two link version of this problem as well (Think one Segway on top of another except the top segway has no power.)
However, Kamen burns through $150M duplicating the already known and is heralded as the most visionary man on the planet. Puuhleeeease.
His iBot wheelchair is the better of his products (It, by the way only requires the same basic robotics principle as the Segway.) It is slightly more "visionary" on its application and appreciably more sophisticated in its control loops to provide stair climbing abilities. But again... the cost of this beast is $26K. Placing it quite out of reach of most people who need it.
I'm sure somebody who is a better manager at actually manufacturing a product at reasonable costs could knock these off at half the price or less and provide a greater good to the world than Kamen does by having his face plastered all over magazines. But, sadly, they can't can't because of Kamen's patents.
I hope Toyota teaches him a lesson about how to really manufacture and sell a product. But, personally, I think the the entire Segway concept is flawed. A "trick" that is cute to behold but the luster wears off fast enough that people come to their senses before actually buying something they don't really need.
First, A court (the judicial branch of the United States) has defined these searches to be reasonable. Thus the fourth amendment doesn't apply.
Second, while rights are inalienable (another person cannot remove your rights) they are waivable (you can willingly give up your own rights.) you agreed to the search. There are signs all over the place at border entry indicating that all persons entering are subject to search and seizure. You may opt out of entering and therefore search and maintain your right (though in this case it doesn't apply because as I pointed out, the search is reasonable) but as soon as you enter you have agreed to be searched. Thus you have waived your fourth ammendment right.
summary: You're screwed for two reasons. The search is reasonable and you agreed to be searched. I'm tired of hearing this argument come up on/. every month because somebody was inconvenienced and had their fantasy of a "right to privacy" challenged. This is a cut and dry situation. It would lose 0-9 if ever seen by the supreme court.
Umm... yeah that gets you AmsLatex *maybe* how about lstlistings? or fancyheaders? CTAN exists for a reason and apt-get isn't the same. (Also, we are not all Debian/Ubuntu adopters.)
compatibility issues are everywhere
Compatibility between what and what?
How about between any spreadsheet? pdflatex and pstopdf for instance. How about htlatex problems? MikTeX doesn't process all the files that LaTeX does and vice-versa.
you need to know commands for everything
Not if you use a GUI like Kile.
Yeah. Try to get Kile to implement a new type of list, or define a new bibliographic format. Try to use it to typeset an IEEE acceptable paper sometime.
table composition is torture
\begin{tabular}{ll} col & col \\ col & col \end{tabular}
Now try to get paragraph wrap in cells, or have it break across pages, How about multicolumn or multirow entries. The original person is talking about *real* work. Not your first week LaTeX introductory stuff.
image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format
\includegraphics{foo.png}
Use \DeclareGraphicsRule to convert
You know I've heard that works but it never does for me. I also recall as soon as you switch to PDFLaTeX or htlatex they don't honor those. (Though this I could be wrong about.)
and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class
You can thank Don for that; the underlying language (TeX) is indeed about the most user-hostile language ever devised. Fortunately, LaTeX hides it pretty well.
However, designing new document classes is hard: there are dozens of parameters and rules that go into one. LaTeX actually makes it fairly simply by reducing it to a bunch of parameters.
We mostly agree on this, though I have written thousands of lines of class code in LaTeX and I don't think LaTeX makes it any easier than writing it direct for TeX.
but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology.
Trust me, it's not the 80's. The 80's was the decade of graphical user interfaces and object oriented programming. TeX is more like the 1960's: machine language and macro processing. LaTeX is trying to bring it into the 1980's.
I was in college from 1986 through 1991 and didn't see a graphical workstation until 1989. I learned Fortran, Pascal, Modula-2, LISP and C. Maybe you were more privileged or I slept through a lot of classes but the post is right; it's 1980's technology. Tex can't be 1960's it was developed mid-70's and was darn cutting edge for text processing at the time. LaTeX bootstraps it to the 1980's at best.
An application with visual interface and so on
Well, if you want a WYSIWYG version of LaTeX... you can't have it. People thought 20 years ago that TeX/LaTeX wouldn't last long because of GUIs. But nobody has figured out how to combine the power of something like LaTeX with a WYSIWYG interface. Microsoft Word tried, and you can see the result for yourself.
Microsoft tried no such thing. Microsoft lays out text the way microsoft *thought* text should layout and ignored real typesetting. PageMaker was the last thing I saw that did relatively decent typesetting in a graphical environment.
There are several LaTeX editing environments with live preview; those are quite neat and help a lot.
But they never get the preview quite right and rob you of abilities to specify a specific layout. You quickly find yourself in a constraining and limited subset of LaTeX's abilities.
Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?
LaTeX is pretty good at what it does, that's why it's still the de-facto standard for scientific publishing. It's also a
The OP's comments are all valid criticisms of TeX/LaTeX in the 21st century. I'll add my own in a moment but I will start by saying that I love TeX/LaTeX, all my research is published in it, I do all my documentation in it and I've written thousand line class files for it. I am the LaTeX Jedi for my university. I also HATE TeX/LaTeX for everything the OP said and more.
The fundamental problem is the paradigm. TeX was developed in the mid 1970's. NOTHING had graphical front ends. Hell, lots of things didn't even have a monitor or keyboard. Everything was ASCII edited, command line based or punchcards. So it was natural and efficient that D. Knuth wrote a compiled/markup language to describe how a document was laid out. Nroff and troff are mark-up languages and an efficient expression implementation for the time but they didn't understand typesetting thus the need for TeX. The typesetting is necessary but this implementation paradigm is woefully outdated.
Heck TeX was so difficult and outdated by the mid 80's that Lamport had to create LaTeX which is just a set of macros that make TeX sufferable.
But there are two paradigms at play: The first as I described is how you go about expressing an intention, the implementation. The second is the purpose. TeX is designed to capture the world of typesetting which is a very complicated and standardized discipline that dates back hundreds of years. There are strong rules about what makes something well typeset or just junk. TeX understands and performs this purpose better than anything before it or following it. That's why it is unbeatable for typesetting math. D. Knuth learned how to typeset before he wrote TeX.
So you are faced with a tool that excels at its purpose but its implementation is now terrible compared to modern interfaces.
It also suffers from coming from an age when the concept and benefits of object oriented design and inheritance weren't well known and understood. One of my big pet peeves with LaTeX is sometimes I want a list and I want it formatted similar to another list. Why can't I extend that previous list. Like... same format only I want a different font for \begin{emphlist}. Why can't I have different paragraph types that inherit the indent, spacing or font from some other description. Why does \itemsep get reset for every single list?? Microsoft has this right in their styles. But in LaTeX you have to go and basically write a whole new list and all the code for it. And if you change the spacing for the original list it doesn't change for the new list.
The other peeve is yes, I understand the jokes about WYSIAYG. This is a stupid bias heldover from a time when computers weren't fast enough to reformat a paragraph in real time. There's no reason in this day and age that a program could not be created that fully understands and implements typesetting while graphically formatting the results in real time and allow the user to specify any typesetting criteria they want that TeX can perform. None. period. In other words you can have a program that understands typesetting, can be told what to do and yet graphically displays exactly what the output will look like.
Lastly, while TeX is a Turing complete language, it's garbage compared to what we could design. It has a cryptic syntax and horribly complicated paradigm for processing and evaluating "tokens". Do you need to \protect in any other compiled language? And what *exactly* does \protect do... no fair Googling, that's just cheating and a waste of time. It's terrible at representing and manipulating information. Retaining information in memory when your mainframes memory is only 16MB is something that needs to be avoided if you are to process large documents (one of TeX's "classic" advantages). But today when a laptop has 2Gig there isn't a textual document large enough that you can't retain and manipulate it entirely in memory. ODF is just a markup language as well. Why couldn't OO have it's layout engine rewritten to properly understand and implement typesetting? Whe
Same items in different countries do not cost the same amount when taking into account only the exchange rates.
There are several reasons for this. A couple that are easy to explain are:
The price of a good is what the market will bear. If the people are willing to pay more in the UK then you can expect the price to be more in the UK. (And as an American living in Britain for the past month... man can I tell you the Brits are willing to bend over and take it.)
The prices of products are affected by taxes. The prices you quote for the UK have something like a 17% "Value added tax" reflected in the price. The US prices you quote do not reflect possible sales tax which can be as high as 9.4%. While those two don't account for the entire price difference for Dreamweaver there are other corporate taxes and trade tariffs that remain unaccounted for.
Do you think national healthcare is free?? Where do you think these countries get the money for that and other social[ist] programs? They tax the hell out of companies, imports (and individuals)
Don't worry. With the current US economy suffering from too much spending, already high corporate taxes, soon to be way higher taxes, mismanaged and over-promised social[ist] programs, a falling dollar and interest rates designed to trick people into thinking everything is ok while causing inflation to skyrocket it won't be long before the prices you mention even out for us. Maybe even compared to Zimbabwe.
And yet, HP's market cap is 106Billion compared to Apple's 139Billion. While you may say "HA! I was right, apple is better!" they're pretty similar in my opinion. You might also want to take a look at HP's price to earnings ratio which is KILLING compared to apple (14 vs 30).
Do a little research before assuming a company isn't doing well.
The more I have to say that presidents and CEO's should have to divulge their medical records.
In California it is a felony to knowingly have sex with a partner without disclosing that you are HIV positive (and with the intent to harm the partner). In other words you can be sued if your medical status puts another at risk and you don't inform them of the risk (and you want to hurt them).
One can draw a parallel that the welfare of citizens and shareholders is affected by the medical status of presidents and CEOs. Therefore it should either be the case that the pres/CEO be legally required to disclose their medical records, or be able to be held liable for damages caused as a result of their condition.
Of course in this Calfornia law parallel one could argue that they be liable only if they intended to inflict harm with their medical condition. But quite frankly I think the HIV law is too lenient. If you don't disclose your HIV then I think you are knowlingly putting somebody at risk for your own gain and I think that is just as deserving of liability as intent to harm. Same for the CEOs and presidents.
And quite frankly... It was consistently better than the crap you are fed. See, we got to watch Star Wars (and Han shot first!) you were sold the sanitized and commercialized after-births. We got Tron, you haven't had anything like it. (No, the matrix is not nearly as innovative, visually inspiring or thought provoking.) We got Blade Runner too and Alien. You got nothing or poor sequels.
The fact that you don't "get it", Mr. Burton speaks volumes of your generation. Yes, Tron 2 will probably be a disappointment to those of us that chose jobs, hobbies and careers because of the magic we experienced with Tron. But at least we had that magic once.
And that's just talking about movies. I can mention literature, music and art examples too. All going back thousands of years. Your generation is culturally bankrupt.
Why don't you put down the console controller and iPod long enough to get out and experience some of the things that occurred prior to your birth (which, by the way, was also clearly another entirely un-noteworthy event in the history of your generation.)
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
(That's Hamlet by the way written by another imaginative fellow long before your time.)
Or you can include edits in your presentation "How [does a] girl get [pregnant]?" You can use it to add, delete or modify the original quote to convey clarity to the reader.
Both ways are common and accepted by the editing world. Personally with the number of mistakes that a seven year old would be reasonably expected to make the first is preferred over the second and it would be even better to paraphase.
I think it's a no brainer to go with a Sun Fire X4500 Server.
Scalable: 12TB to 48TB.
Inexpensive: $1.30/Gb. 12TB=$24K, 48TB=$62K
Neutral: Runs Solaris, linux or windows.
Small: 4U of rack space.
Supports Raids 0-6
When running Solaris, supports ZFS filesystem.
Multiple network interfaces.
Your specs are unspecified. >1.5TB doesn't really say anything since that can be provided by only two drives these days. As a result the X4500 might be overkill. But it's a great product.
why is the use of this type of privacy technologies still so limited?
Several reasons:
Education. Most people that use email don't know what RSA, GPG or PGP is. Let alone the dozens of possible other ciphers available. These people also blissfully wandering around thinking their government is an effective, benevolent provider that keeps them safe so they don't even need encryption or privacy laws. (see: Nanny State). (Instead of the wasteful, corrupt, abusive, ignorant farce that it is.) Polls show that less than 1/4 of Americans know that there is no right to privacy (constitutionaly. The fourth amendment does not provide a right TO privacy; it only provides a right FROM search and seizure under certain conditions.) The rest of them think they have some such right and the government is upholding it, they don't need to encrypt their stuff. Besides [encryption is only for people breaking the law; if you aren't then you have nothing to hide.] lemma: People will not use something if they don't know they have a need for it or if it exists.
Ease of use. Have you ever tried to figured out how to be your own SSL Certificate Authority? or what that even means? I mean Christ, the openssl tool couldn't be any more complicated. Very few people can figure out and feel comfortable with creating, signing and maintaining keys and certificates correctly. Lemma: People will not use something that is confusing.
Guidance. Ever have a certificate/key fail to authenticate? Was the error/info helpful to somebody who doesn't understand the implementation details? No. When your VPN fails to connect or your message fails to decrypt is when I've seen some of the worst feedback presented to a user ever. We need to start practicing an intelligent feedback, one that diagnosis the problem and tells the user specifically what must be changed to solve the problem, not what the problem was. Tell people solutions, they already know a problem exists. Lemma: People will not use something that they cannot correct malfunctions with.
Standardization. PGP is not GPG. Not all mail agents support the same set of encryption capabilities. When sending a message you cannot be sure the recipient can read it no matter what you choose. As the receiver you are going to receive items that are incompatible with you. The result is pressure on ALL users not to use any encryption so that everybody is known to be using the same standard. Lemma: People will not use something [that interacts with all others] unless everybody else is using it.
Transparency. Install this, configure that, click this button, enter your password... People do not want to put this much effort into reading a piece of mail. I'm a security nut and I still hate typing my passwords the fifty times a day that I do. We need to make systems that are as transparent as possible. The user either has to never know they're using it, or they have to be expected to configure it only once and then never have to worry about it. Lemma: People will not use something that annoys them, especially repeatedly.
Too many choices. Which cipher do you want? Do you know why? Would you like RSA or DSA? How many bits? Would you like that in binary or ASCII armor? This detracts from a user's ability to be comfortable with a choice and as such they won't make one. Lemma: People will not use something if they aren't comfortable picking it.
Distribution. For PGP/GPG you need to distribute keys effectively (and transparently). This has not been solved adequately. Lemma: People will not use something that isn't available.
Economy. People do not want to pay for keys and certificates. While Verisign and others provide trusted stores where keys could be distributed the finance changes they enact are prohibitive for normal people. Yes, I know there exists free ones. But they aren't included in the root certificate databases of applications. You can add them but as I said earlier: you just crossed the line of ease of use that a user isn't going to cross
The 4th applies but you waive this right when you agree to enter past the signs that say "All persons entering are subject to search." For the exact same (yet verbal) reason that a police officer can ask you "May I look in your trunk." If you say yes and he finds something you're screwed. The search was legal and anything found is admissible for ANY trial even if he didn't have reasonable cause or a warrant simply because you permitted him to search. You can refuse, either the cop or at the border. At the border they don't have to let you in.
No, they haven't. By proceeding past the signs that say all entering persons are subject to search he has given them his permission. the agents were fully in their bounds.
Knowingly lying to an officer of the law is committing the crime of obstruction of justice. So unless you yourself have the necessary clearance to be carrying the documents and the documents are actually classified appropriately then good luck with that.
By the way there are special channels and procedures to go through customs with particularly sensitive materials. If you are given this task then you are educated in this procedure. By standing in the normal line and going through the routine procedures the agent is going to know you're lying. Again, good luck with that.
Huh. I don't remember reading that in the Constitution. Guess I just missed it, then.
The constitution is not comprehensive law. It defines the structure of US government and defines certain limits of power on the structure's components. The bill of rights are amendments to the original constitution designed to prohibit laws from being made that would remove certain inalienable rights.
The constitution doesn't specifically mention that murder is against the law yet it is because laws in the states were passed saying it is and there is no higher authority saying you can't make such a law. Sorry, "I didn't read that in the constitution" doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You are probably raising the issue with the fourth amendment which prohibits unreasonable search or seizure. Which, unlike murder laws, appears at first glance to be something the constitution does prohibit making a law for allowance. However, this doesn't hold at the border for two simple reasons.
First it prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. The constitution is words, the meaning of which is interpreted by the judicial branch; judges. All that has to happen is that a judge has to describe border searches as reasonable, and not be overturned by a higher court. Once this is done, the enforcement officers of the judicial branch may search and seize anything they want at the border without a warrant. I do not know if this interpretation has been officially made. But it doesn't matter because...
Second, for the privilege of entering our country you willing submit to a search and seizure of your property. This is why there are signs that say "all persons and belongings entering are subject to search." This eliminates the need for a warrant in any case just as saying "yes" to a cop who asks "May I look in your trunk." You have given permission either verbally or through your continued action. You can say no in either case. At the border they don't have to let you in. Heck you give this permission every time you enter an airport secure area now, When you enter federal and state buildings and even when you shop at some stores.
So if you are a businessperson, traveling for business purposes, you shouldn't be able to take information across the border that will clench the deal? Or maybe, once you arrive at your destination, you should hook up to your hotel's ultra-secure public internet connection and download the gigs of data at the cheapest fricking broadband speed the hotel could buy from the local ISP -- which, incidentally, is shared among all 200 guests in the hotel. And God forbid that the hotel's internet connection should be down when you arrive. I'm sure your business rival would be more than happy to give you a second chance to make your sales pitch to the prospective client before they make their sales pitch. </sarc>
He never said you shouldn't be allowed. What he said is that if you choose to do so then you are going to have to live with certain consequences of your actions. You either suffer bandwidth limitations, inconvenience or a decrease in your security. You can still bring that information with you.
Nack. The Bill of Rights gives us freedom from search and seizure without due process of law.
Horse hockey. why don't you go read it. There is no "due process of law" clause in the fourth amendment. You are mixing it up with the fifth amendment which describes legal proceedings not acquisition of evidence used in such. As long as they give our laptop owner a speedy and proper trial if they arrest him based on the pictures found then everything is legal.
If agents of the government have no reason to suspect I have committed a crime -- and by definition, crossing the border in compliance with the laws of the countries involved cannot possibly be interpreted as "committing a crime" -- then by a strict interpretation of the Bill of Rights, they have no probable cause to
I am a deep admirer of humanity at its finest and deepest and most powerful â" of great people such as Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Ella Fitzgerald, Albert Schweitzer, Frederic Chopin, Raoul Wallenberg, Fats Waller, and on and on.
There's an optimist for you... 6.6+ billion humans and he can name but a dozen he admires (less than 0.0000002% of the population, all of whom are dead by the way) and then draws the conclusion that humanity as a whole is worthy of deep admiration.
I would argue that is not a very scientifically accurate conclusion based on the evidence available.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want fiscally responsible policies, vote Democrat.
Right... that'll help. Social Security, Welfare, Medicare and Medicaid exceed the entire military AND discretional budget (not just the Iraq war) and all are horribly broken.
Get your ignorant head out of your knee-jerk, liberally biased ass, do some actual fact finding/checking and come to the realization that ALL big government is wasteful, inefficient, deceitful and corrupt.
By the way... the interest on our national debt alone matches half of the figure you spew for the Iraq war. This expenditure is 100% waste every year that buys us *nothing* and it's all the result of f*ucked up presidential/congressional/senate decisions for the past eighty years. During which time no party other than democrat or republican has been in power.
if you really want fiscally responsible policies... vote them all out of office and start taking care of yourself for a change.
Buying a special piece of hardware whose primary purpose is book reading... definitely a niche market
Yeah, but... I've been on Holiday in London for the past month. I take the tube (when it's actually running) everywhere and I've got to say the US$700 I spent on my iRex iLiad and about US$100 worth of novels has been a godsend on the train. The batteries last all day, bright light only improves the readability and much more portable than a laptop.
It may be a niche market but it has potential. Unfortunately, the only way this potential is going to be achieved is if the corporate players get their collective heads out of their ass and standardize on one, decent, open, portable format.
They also have to port previous works into an electronic format. Try to find Robert Ludlum's books on mobipocket format. You can't, at least not the pre-death publications. Dale Brown? "Oh yeah, let's pick every other book to publish." What idiot does that. If I'm going paperless then I'm going paperless.
DRM is tolerable but there's no reason you can't have an open format that supports DRM.
The people that dreamed up these different formats have done such a poor job it's not funny. PDB don't support different typefaces. PDF's don't reflow. HTML isn't going to support DRM and you need to zip to capture multiple files. Kindle isn't compatible with anybody else, lit is closed. While I find mobipocket tolerable try accurately converting any of the others to mobipocket. They're all just a kludge. Concepts of "paragraph", "chapter", "lists" and "Table" all are meaningless in these formats and essential concepts for reflowable layout. Basically, a quick experience in trying to convert formats and you will quickly understand that the people who designed these "formats" know nothing about capturing and encoding information.
Until they get a clue eBooks are dead in the water. (And I like mine, that should tell you something.)
A lot of us have been disappointed in the Segway. However, having my PhD in robotics, I've been downright frustrated.
While I would agree that Dean Kamen is "inventive" and very good at marketing, his products are not at all ground breaking in terms of technology. To add insult to injury his products are way over priced.
Robotics has been able to do his Segway balance trick for many decades. "Gee, sense where center of mass has moved and move the support position under it." In fact, we've been able to do a two link version of this problem as well (Think one Segway on top of another except the top segway has no power.)
However, Kamen burns through $150M duplicating the already known and is heralded as the most visionary man on the planet. Puuhleeeease.
His iBot wheelchair is the better of his products (It, by the way only requires the same basic robotics principle as the Segway.) It is slightly more "visionary" on its application and appreciably more sophisticated in its control loops to provide stair climbing abilities. But again... the cost of this beast is $26K. Placing it quite out of reach of most people who need it.
I'm sure somebody who is a better manager at actually manufacturing a product at reasonable costs could knock these off at half the price or less and provide a greater good to the world than Kamen does by having his face plastered all over magazines. But, sadly, they can't can't because of Kamen's patents.
I hope Toyota teaches him a lesson about how to really manufacture and sell a product. But, personally, I think the the entire Segway concept is flawed. A "trick" that is cute to behold but the luster wears off fast enough that people come to their senses before actually buying something they don't really need.
Lesson here is... Get coked out and famous FIRST. then your thesis will be worth $70 a copy and sells on Amazon.
If you skip the coke/fame thing then you get my deal... I can't give away copies of mine.
So QUICK! suspend your defense, join a band, get famous and then finish. It's too late for me but for you there is still hope.
Read past posts regarding the fourth amendment...
First, A court (the judicial branch of the United States) has defined these searches to be reasonable. Thus the fourth amendment doesn't apply.
Second, while rights are inalienable (another person cannot remove your rights) they are waivable (you can willingly give up your own rights.) you agreed to the search. There are signs all over the place at border entry indicating that all persons entering are subject to search and seizure. You may opt out of entering and therefore search and maintain your right (though in this case it doesn't apply because as I pointed out, the search is reasonable) but as soon as you enter you have agreed to be searched. Thus you have waived your fourth ammendment right.
summary: You're screwed for two reasons. The search is reasonable and you agreed to be searched. I'm tired of hearing this argument come up on /. every month because somebody was inconvenienced and had their fantasy of a "right to privacy" challenged. This is a cut and dry situation. It would lose 0-9 if ever seen by the supreme court.
You have to install new packages for new features
apt-get install
Umm... yeah that gets you AmsLatex *maybe* how about lstlistings? or fancyheaders? CTAN exists for a reason and apt-get isn't the same. (Also, we are not all Debian/Ubuntu adopters.)
compatibility issues are everywhere
Compatibility between what and what?
How about between any spreadsheet? pdflatex and pstopdf for instance. How about htlatex problems? MikTeX doesn't process all the files that LaTeX does and vice-versa.
you need to know commands for everything
Not if you use a GUI like Kile.
Yeah. Try to get Kile to implement a new type of list, or define a new bibliographic format. Try to use it to typeset an IEEE acceptable paper sometime.
table composition is torture
\begin{tabular}{ll} col & col \\ col & col \end{tabular}
Now try to get paragraph wrap in cells, or have it break across pages, How about multicolumn or multirow entries. The original person is talking about *real* work. Not your first week LaTeX introductory stuff.
image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format
\includegraphics{foo.png}
Use \DeclareGraphicsRule to convert
You know I've heard that works but it never does for me. I also recall as soon as you switch to PDFLaTeX or htlatex they don't honor those. (Though this I could be wrong about.)
and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class
You can thank Don for that; the underlying language (TeX) is indeed about the most user-hostile language ever devised. Fortunately, LaTeX hides it pretty well.
However, designing new document classes is hard: there are dozens of parameters and rules that go into one. LaTeX actually makes it fairly simply by reducing it to a bunch of parameters.
We mostly agree on this, though I have written thousands of lines of class code in LaTeX and I don't think LaTeX makes it any easier than writing it direct for TeX.
but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology.
Trust me, it's not the 80's. The 80's was the decade of graphical user interfaces and object oriented programming. TeX is more like the 1960's: machine language and macro processing. LaTeX is trying to bring it into the 1980's.
I was in college from 1986 through 1991 and didn't see a graphical workstation until 1989. I learned Fortran, Pascal, Modula-2, LISP and C. Maybe you were more privileged or I slept through a lot of classes but the post is right; it's 1980's technology. Tex can't be 1960's it was developed mid-70's and was darn cutting edge for text processing at the time. LaTeX bootstraps it to the 1980's at best.
An application with visual interface and so on
Well, if you want a WYSIWYG version of LaTeX... you can't have it. People thought 20 years ago that TeX/LaTeX wouldn't last long because of GUIs. But nobody has figured out how to combine the power of something like LaTeX with a WYSIWYG interface. Microsoft Word tried, and you can see the result for yourself.
Microsoft tried no such thing. Microsoft lays out text the way microsoft *thought* text should layout and ignored real typesetting. PageMaker was the last thing I saw that did relatively decent typesetting in a graphical environment.
There are several LaTeX editing environments with live preview; those are quite neat and help a lot.
But they never get the preview quite right and rob you of abilities to specify a specific layout. You quickly find yourself in a constraining and limited subset of LaTeX's abilities.
Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?
LaTeX is pretty good at what it does, that's why it's still the de-facto standard for scientific publishing. It's also a
The OP's comments are all valid criticisms of TeX/LaTeX in the 21st century. I'll add my own in a moment but I will start by saying that I love TeX/LaTeX, all my research is published in it, I do all my documentation in it and I've written thousand line class files for it. I am the LaTeX Jedi for my university. I also HATE TeX/LaTeX for everything the OP said and more.
The fundamental problem is the paradigm. TeX was developed in the mid 1970's. NOTHING had graphical front ends. Hell, lots of things didn't even have a monitor or keyboard. Everything was ASCII edited, command line based or punchcards. So it was natural and efficient that D. Knuth wrote a compiled/markup language to describe how a document was laid out. Nroff and troff are mark-up languages and an efficient expression implementation for the time but they didn't understand typesetting thus the need for TeX. The typesetting is necessary but this implementation paradigm is woefully outdated.
Heck TeX was so difficult and outdated by the mid 80's that Lamport had to create LaTeX which is just a set of macros that make TeX sufferable.
But there are two paradigms at play: The first as I described is how you go about expressing an intention, the implementation. The second is the purpose. TeX is designed to capture the world of typesetting which is a very complicated and standardized discipline that dates back hundreds of years. There are strong rules about what makes something well typeset or just junk. TeX understands and performs this purpose better than anything before it or following it. That's why it is unbeatable for typesetting math. D. Knuth learned how to typeset before he wrote TeX.
So you are faced with a tool that excels at its purpose but its implementation is now terrible compared to modern interfaces.
It also suffers from coming from an age when the concept and benefits of object oriented design and inheritance weren't well known and understood. One of my big pet peeves with LaTeX is sometimes I want a list and I want it formatted similar to another list. Why can't I extend that previous list. Like... same format only I want a different font for \begin{emphlist}. Why can't I have different paragraph types that inherit the indent, spacing or font from some other description. Why does \itemsep get reset for every single list?? Microsoft has this right in their styles. But in LaTeX you have to go and basically write a whole new list and all the code for it. And if you change the spacing for the original list it doesn't change for the new list.
The other peeve is yes, I understand the jokes about WYSIAYG. This is a stupid bias heldover from a time when computers weren't fast enough to reformat a paragraph in real time. There's no reason in this day and age that a program could not be created that fully understands and implements typesetting while graphically formatting the results in real time and allow the user to specify any typesetting criteria they want that TeX can perform. None. period. In other words you can have a program that understands typesetting, can be told what to do and yet graphically displays exactly what the output will look like.
Lastly, while TeX is a Turing complete language, it's garbage compared to what we could design. It has a cryptic syntax and horribly complicated paradigm for processing and evaluating "tokens". Do you need to \protect in any other compiled language? And what *exactly* does \protect do... no fair Googling, that's just cheating and a waste of time. It's terrible at representing and manipulating information. Retaining information in memory when your mainframes memory is only 16MB is something that needs to be avoided if you are to process large documents (one of TeX's "classic" advantages). But today when a laptop has 2Gig there isn't a textual document large enough that you can't retain and manipulate it entirely in memory. ODF is just a markup language as well. Why couldn't OO have it's layout engine rewritten to properly understand and implement typesetting? Whe
I hereby invoke Godwin's law. This thread is now closed. Mhtsos loses by default.
Same items in different countries do not cost the same amount when taking into account only the exchange rates.
There are several reasons for this. A couple that are easy to explain are:
Do you think national healthcare is free?? Where do you think these countries get the money for that and other social[ist] programs? They tax the hell out of companies, imports (and individuals)
Don't worry. With the current US economy suffering from too much spending, already high corporate taxes, soon to be way higher taxes, mismanaged and over-promised social[ist] programs, a falling dollar and interest rates designed to trick people into thinking everything is ok while causing inflation to skyrocket it won't be long before the prices you mention even out for us. Maybe even compared to Zimbabwe.
And yet, HP's market cap is 106Billion compared to Apple's 139Billion. While you may say "HA! I was right, apple is better!" they're pretty similar in my opinion. You might also want to take a look at HP's price to earnings ratio which is KILLING compared to apple (14 vs 30).
Do a little research before assuming a company isn't doing well.
The more I have to say that presidents and CEO's should have to divulge their medical records.
In California it is a felony to knowingly have sex with a partner without disclosing that you are HIV positive (and with the intent to harm the partner). In other words you can be sued if your medical status puts another at risk and you don't inform them of the risk (and you want to hurt them).
One can draw a parallel that the welfare of citizens and shareholders is affected by the medical status of presidents and CEOs. Therefore it should either be the case that the pres/CEO be legally required to disclose their medical records, or be able to be held liable for damages caused as a result of their condition.
Of course in this Calfornia law parallel one could argue that they be liable only if they intended to inflict harm with their medical condition. But quite frankly I think the HIV law is too lenient. If you don't disclose your HIV then I think you are knowlingly putting somebody at risk for your own gain and I think that is just as deserving of liability as intent to harm. Same for the CEOs and presidents.
And quite frankly... It was consistently better than the crap you are fed. See, we got to watch Star Wars (and Han shot first!) you were sold the sanitized and commercialized after-births. We got Tron, you haven't had anything like it. (No, the matrix is not nearly as innovative, visually inspiring or thought provoking.) We got Blade Runner too and Alien. You got nothing or poor sequels.
The fact that you don't "get it", Mr. Burton speaks volumes of your generation. Yes, Tron 2 will probably be a disappointment to those of us that chose jobs, hobbies and careers because of the magic we experienced with Tron. But at least we had that magic once.
And that's just talking about movies. I can mention literature, music and art examples too. All going back thousands of years. Your generation is culturally bankrupt.
Why don't you put down the console controller and iPod long enough to get out and experience some of the things that occurred prior to your birth (which, by the way, was also clearly another entirely un-noteworthy event in the history of your generation.)
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
(That's Hamlet by the way written by another imaginative fellow long before your time.)
between your card and our security.
Maybe somebody can convince Emma Clarke to provide us a nice cheeky voice-over for these sort of situations?
Usage of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic, a latin word which means "just as that."
Or you can include edits in your presentation "How [does a] girl get [pregnant]?" You can use it to add, delete or modify the original quote to convey clarity to the reader.
Both ways are common and accepted by the editing world. Personally with the number of mistakes that a seven year old would be reasonably expected to make the first is preferred over the second and it would be even better to paraphase.
Thank you!
But we have already proven that global warming is caused by the historical decrease in pirates.
The G8 should be encouraging more piracy in order to stop global warming.
I think it's a no brainer to go with a Sun Fire X4500 Server.
Your specs are unspecified. >1.5TB doesn't really say anything since that can be provided by only two drives these days. As a result the X4500 might be overkill. But it's a great product.
why is the use of this type of privacy technologies still so limited?
Several reasons:
Education. Most people that use email don't know what RSA, GPG or PGP is. Let alone the dozens of possible other ciphers available. These people also blissfully wandering around thinking their government is an effective, benevolent provider that keeps them safe so they don't even need encryption or privacy laws. (see: Nanny State). (Instead of the wasteful, corrupt, abusive, ignorant farce that it is.) Polls show that less than 1/4 of Americans know that there is no right to privacy (constitutionaly. The fourth amendment does not provide a right TO privacy; it only provides a right FROM search and seizure under certain conditions.) The rest of them think they have some such right and the government is upholding it, they don't need to encrypt their stuff. Besides [encryption is only for people breaking the law; if you aren't then you have nothing to hide.] lemma: People will not use something if they don't know they have a need for it or if it exists.
Ease of use. Have you ever tried to figured out how to be your own SSL Certificate Authority? or what that even means? I mean Christ, the openssl tool couldn't be any more complicated. Very few people can figure out and feel comfortable with creating, signing and maintaining keys and certificates correctly. Lemma: People will not use something that is confusing.
Guidance. Ever have a certificate/key fail to authenticate? Was the error/info helpful to somebody who doesn't understand the implementation details? No. When your VPN fails to connect or your message fails to decrypt is when I've seen some of the worst feedback presented to a user ever. We need to start practicing an intelligent feedback, one that diagnosis the problem and tells the user specifically what must be changed to solve the problem, not what the problem was. Tell people solutions, they already know a problem exists. Lemma: People will not use something that they cannot correct malfunctions with.
Standardization. PGP is not GPG. Not all mail agents support the same set of encryption capabilities. When sending a message you cannot be sure the recipient can read it no matter what you choose. As the receiver you are going to receive items that are incompatible with you. The result is pressure on ALL users not to use any encryption so that everybody is known to be using the same standard. Lemma: People will not use something [that interacts with all others] unless everybody else is using it.
Transparency. Install this, configure that, click this button, enter your password... People do not want to put this much effort into reading a piece of mail. I'm a security nut and I still hate typing my passwords the fifty times a day that I do. We need to make systems that are as transparent as possible. The user either has to never know they're using it, or they have to be expected to configure it only once and then never have to worry about it. Lemma: People will not use something that annoys them, especially repeatedly.
Too many choices. Which cipher do you want? Do you know why? Would you like RSA or DSA? How many bits? Would you like that in binary or ASCII armor? This detracts from a user's ability to be comfortable with a choice and as such they won't make one. Lemma: People will not use something if they aren't comfortable picking it.
Distribution. For PGP/GPG you need to distribute keys effectively (and transparently). This has not been solved adequately. Lemma: People will not use something that isn't available.
Economy. People do not want to pay for keys and certificates. While Verisign and others provide trusted stores where keys could be distributed the finance changes they enact are prohibitive for normal people. Yes, I know there exists free ones. But they aren't included in the root certificate databases of applications. You can add them but as I said earlier: you just crossed the line of ease of use that a user isn't going to cross
"In United States, Soviet Union becomes more like United States everyday."
Umm... wait... that either didn't come out like I wanted it to or exactly like I wanted it to... I can't tell.The 4th applies but you waive this right when you agree to enter past the signs that say "All persons entering are subject to search." For the exact same (yet verbal) reason that a police officer can ask you "May I look in your trunk." If you say yes and he finds something you're screwed. The search was legal and anything found is admissible for ANY trial even if he didn't have reasonable cause or a warrant simply because you permitted him to search. You can refuse, either the cop or at the border. At the border they don't have to let you in.
No, they haven't. By proceeding past the signs that say all entering persons are subject to search he has given them his permission. the agents were fully in their bounds.
Knowingly lying to an officer of the law is committing the crime of obstruction of justice. So unless you yourself have the necessary clearance to be carrying the documents and the documents are actually classified appropriately then good luck with that.
By the way there are special channels and procedures to go through customs with particularly sensitive materials. If you are given this task then you are educated in this procedure. By standing in the normal line and going through the routine procedures the agent is going to know you're lying. Again, good luck with that.
Huh. I don't remember reading that in the Constitution. Guess I just missed it, then.
The constitution is not comprehensive law. It defines the structure of US government and defines certain limits of power on the structure's components. The bill of rights are amendments to the original constitution designed to prohibit laws from being made that would remove certain inalienable rights.
The constitution doesn't specifically mention that murder is against the law yet it is because laws in the states were passed saying it is and there is no higher authority saying you can't make such a law. Sorry, "I didn't read that in the constitution" doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You are probably raising the issue with the fourth amendment which prohibits unreasonable search or seizure. Which, unlike murder laws, appears at first glance to be something the constitution does prohibit making a law for allowance. However, this doesn't hold at the border for two simple reasons.
First it prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. The constitution is words, the meaning of which is interpreted by the judicial branch; judges. All that has to happen is that a judge has to describe border searches as reasonable, and not be overturned by a higher court. Once this is done, the enforcement officers of the judicial branch may search and seize anything they want at the border without a warrant. I do not know if this interpretation has been officially made. But it doesn't matter because...
Second, for the privilege of entering our country you willing submit to a search and seizure of your property. This is why there are signs that say "all persons and belongings entering are subject to search." This eliminates the need for a warrant in any case just as saying "yes" to a cop who asks "May I look in your trunk." You have given permission either verbally or through your continued action. You can say no in either case. At the border they don't have to let you in. Heck you give this permission every time you enter an airport secure area now, When you enter federal and state buildings and even when you shop at some stores.
So if you are a businessperson, traveling for business purposes, you shouldn't be able to take information across the border that will clench the deal? Or maybe, once you arrive at your destination, you should hook up to your hotel's ultra-secure public internet connection and download the gigs of data at the cheapest fricking broadband speed the hotel could buy from the local ISP -- which, incidentally, is shared among all 200 guests in the hotel. And God forbid that the hotel's internet connection should be down when you arrive. I'm sure your business rival would be more than happy to give you a second chance to make your sales pitch to the prospective client before they make their sales pitch. </sarc>
He never said you shouldn't be allowed. What he said is that if you choose to do so then you are going to have to live with certain consequences of your actions. You either suffer bandwidth limitations, inconvenience or a decrease in your security. You can still bring that information with you.
Nack. The Bill of Rights gives us freedom from search and seizure without due process of law.
Horse hockey. why don't you go read it. There is no "due process of law" clause in the fourth amendment. You are mixing it up with the fifth amendment which describes legal proceedings not acquisition of evidence used in such. As long as they give our laptop owner a speedy and proper trial if they arrest him based on the pictures found then everything is legal.
If agents of the government have no reason to suspect I have committed a crime -- and by definition, crossing the border in compliance with the laws of the countries involved cannot possibly be interpreted as "committing a crime" -- then by a strict interpretation of the Bill of Rights, they have no probable cause to
There's an optimist for you... 6.6+ billion humans and he can name but a dozen he admires (less than 0.0000002% of the population, all of whom are dead by the way) and then draws the conclusion that humanity as a whole is worthy of deep admiration.
I would argue that is not a very scientifically accurate conclusion based on the evidence available.As I indicated in a previous post; buying a new chair is superfluous and he shouldn't have to wait for it to be delivered.