You are mistaking biotech with OGMs. [sic] The things I read Cuba was great about had nothing to do with OGM food. It was biotech for medical stuff, vaccines and the like.
However, Castro is on record as being ambivalent towards GMO's (Genetically Modified Organisms), expressing the overall government's policy of wait-and-see, i.e. field testing and risk assessment. They are, for sure, producing GE tilapia, but no news about crops in production. This is unlike the 'no-GMO' attitude in other pro-organic production jurisdictions around the world, and perhaps this reflects the embargo.
You see, in the absence of the megacorporate agro-evil transnational life sciences companies like Monsanto, genetic engineering loses some of its bite as a threat to society. This highlights the fact that many who are opposed to GMOs may mistrust the technology, but they mistrust its owners even more. In other words, they're more worried about Frankencompany than Frankenfood. Cuba doesn't have that issue under the embargo.
Sure, it's a dictatorship but the social indicators for Cuba are among the best in the World. Even in the human rights issue, Cuba ranks better than many american countries, including... cough, cough, the USA. If it wasn't for this dumb embargo, Cuba would have gone democratic many years ago.
The embargo isn't as dumb as you think it is. Hard-liner american cubans don't want democracy as most people think of it, they want Bush-style strong rule backed by corporatism and diplomatic links to DC, with the restoration of the elite property system that existed under Batista.
Pushing Cuba into a political extreme by placing it under perpetual war alert and deprivation probably strengthens their long-term righteousness.
they are becoming great at biotech and registering patents like crazy.
This is one of the problems for the credibility of their organic certification process: GMO's aren't currently certifiably organic, however productive they may be.
You bet! Cuban rum is great, that Bacardi shit they sell us everywhere sucks.
Here's a perk of living in (even rural) Canada: I go down to the garage/general/liquor store, and there on the shelf is Havana Club, "Ron puro Cubano," mmm, great is right. And cuban coffee in the cupboard, it's only pretty good but it's organic.
There may be long-term competitive benefits accruing to Cuba out of the blockade and its hardships.
The whole island has pretty much gone organic, as part of the austerity produced by the embargo, and they're trying to turn that constraint into a strength. When the embargo finally drops in the US, watch for cuban specialty products showing up in the organic food stores.
They need an internationally credible domestic certification system to really flourish, however the embargo has forced them to look hard at their local food security, so they'd be okay if international trade was interrupted. They have international trade in things like organic fruits and coffee, and they've made interesting innovations with domestic distribution in mind, like the Organopónicos.
The embargo has created constraints that make it an interesting testbed for development without the overwhelming influence of large transnationals. It's a race between the international organic sector to help establish Cuba as an entrenched organic ag system and the influx of Life Sciences transnationals that might happen if there's regime change.
Cuba's ripe turf for donated linux-ready systems, so support that goal in some way. There's enough real zeal for independence and common interests to make it a interesting test bed for a society running on open-source software.
I am all for terraforming Mars, after we've studied it in a relatively pristine state for a while. The idea of moving many people there, however, is silly, until we've actually settled the marginal areas down here first. The oceans are full of opportunity and cover most of the planet, we hardly know them, yet we're planning a move to an airless dessicated ball millions of miles away. WTF? The frontier is still here.
Problem with KSR's plan is that it involves rerouting comets and sending them through Mars' atmosphere. Basically the whole thing is based on technologies that don't yet exist.
You're talking about self-replicating factories landing on an icy asteroid and building relatively simple mass drivers that spiral it in towards Mars... about a century from now. Think about a victorian era gentleman pooh-poohing the notion of walking on the moon--nyehh, what a maroon!
The only real obstacle to moving asteroids around a century from now will be the will, not the means.
I hate this soft culture we are brining up [sic] who don't learn about our travesties done to us and against us. What's next? 50 years from now we learn about how America brutally attacked the germans in World War 2 and Pearl harbor never happened? Operation: Desert Storm was about Americans getting oil, and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait never happened?
Well Smidge, that's partly true, and also largely untrue, particularly with the examples you chose. Critics bring up US atrocities because they're denied or rationalized away, and yet so contrary to the patriotic claims of the Homeland. WW2 Pacific theatre: the Japanese oil supply was being choked by the Americans who wanted to protect their quasi-colonial holdings in the pacific, conflict was inevitable and invited, and their crypto is broken, so PHbr was expected. The Japanese were insanely inhuman to prisoners, but the US firebombing campaign of wooden Japanese cities is unbelievable, Americans really have no idea because the information was suppressed, and the US Secretary of Defense at the time states that if they'd lost, they'd be war criminals. The firebombing of civilians in Germany was an atrocity too, less evil than extermination camps, but evil, and questionable strategy. The invasion of Kuwait was encouraged by US diplomatic maneuvering, and capitalized on by some of the most shameless propaganda of the 20th C.
The objection people like myself have is that Americans pretend to a nobility of purpose that isn't really there, certainly not in the methods used to initiate and wage war. False flags are the order of the day.
The truism that people love Americans but despise America is becoming widespread.
Perhaps it's the influence of religious fundamentalism, but one strong current in US patriotic culture is a black/white, with-us-or-against-us view that is the groundwork of fascism and thus makes the rest of the world nervous. You live in a cheerfully belligerent society that blinds itself to its own atrocities, that takes insult easily, and arranges to be injured as a face-saving means to expansionism. Most Americans have no clue that they arrange and pay for 700 military bases on foreign soil. The genocide that is the foundation of your territory isn't some liberal namby-pamby BS: it's your own not-so-private skeleton, and it is ongoing to this day.
A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind. - George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism
It's trivial to find a PC that is vastly cheaper than the mini and provides the same performance; you could also build one very easily. Would it be as tiny? Maybe not. Is it worth it to pay $100-200 for that form factor? Probably not unless you live in a coffin or perhaps a car.
I agree that it's easier to get a lower price for similar performance, and expandability, and wish apple made a mini-atx style box. There is possibly some difference in build quality and underlying engineering between the mini and a crappo emachine, but can't prove it beyond my own observations of a nicely made unit I took apart for fun.
You're forgetting an important lack that the mini has, though: noise. Have you heard one? They're damn quiet for the price, and you can screw them to a wall or under a desk, or on a server closet wall, or slide it into a stack of AV equipment. The form factor and the acoustics are important to me, at least, as I've deployed them as heavily automated SOHO servers and as part of a media production system, and as capable low-power rural desktops, in tight quarters, where noise matters.
I live in a mainly rural school district 64 in the same province, and we're starting to undergo a similar process. The local principal is interested, and I've given him a copy of Edubuntu to evaluate the upcoming changes--though I'm not so sure the district is going that direction, I think they're emulating Kamloops (thin client etc.). The comment in the article about the staff having more time for things like a help desk and hardware support is understated, it's absolutely huge in making a difference for teachers, especially at isolated schools. It's important to me, because I want to start a computer club at my kids' (40 student rural) elementary, and I've been giving away old boxes with puppy linux on them for a while now, with some success.
Nice thing about successful changeovers like this is that they're infectious.
Psychoacoustics alone will never lead one to a "reasonable" understanding of that rather elaborate set of connections, it's fairly mechanistic and limited to subjective responses. You'd be invoking culture and society: much more elusive, chaotic, and difficult to measure. Like most psychology, it lacks sufficient inputs. I concede that psychoacoustics has made some pretty big leaps recently, but not that it understands the big "connections."
To get a handle on "the connection between music-environment-ear-mind" you'd have to be studying the more interdisciplinary "acoustic communications" which is only studied in a relatively limited way as yet, sometimes called "acoustic ecology" or soundscape studies. The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology is a good place to start getting an overview.
Why should we still have disks on the desktop? If all the physical disks are just part of one big pool, you do away with needing to see the various disk icons and instead have something maybe similar to "This computer" with a different organizational structure; you see Applications as a group (a la the original Windows Program Manager) while your home directory stays the same in the nested-folder style.
I like to have discrete disks (or arrays) because I have different tasks for them. I apportion out their use based on performance and expected reliability. Perhaps my attitude will be moot shortly as drives and busses speed up and become more reliable, but for now it's sensible.
Sending pieces of paper around the ship as a futuristic method of communication??? And you gotta love how they use that 2D table top with the little plastic models of space ships to plan out their 3D space missions. Instead of using a computer for simulation, they move the ships around with their hands!
The entire premise for the show is that this museum piece, Galactica, was built in an age when humans were extremely paranoid about infected networks, as they nearly lost the previous war due to their computers being too powerful and thus, vulnerable to intelligent machines. Galactica is the only ship that survives the Cylon attack precisely because of its low-tech configuration, and it is their major playing card in strategic engagements. In their rebuilding efforts after taking damage, they struggle with this rule to keep it dumbed-down and non-networked. I take it you've missed some key episodes, like the pilot.
Running OO.o on OSX "just as well" as running OO.o on Linux could also be written "just as poorly".
*Grin*-- too true.
If I'm right about the OO.o cross-platform equality, thanks for clarifying. Otherwise, please help me get it.
Uh, yes, more or less, for your particular narrowly defined fairly rare situation, it's probably fine and nearly equivalent though lacking somewhat in integration with the rest of the OS (e.g. clipboard irregularities), but you posted in a public forum instead of emailing me and are presumably able to use google.com/mac, so I gave the public answer that won't lead to the mistaken assumption that they should recommend OOo on a mac to their school or Aunt Fanny.
So the original OO.o Mac port ran just as well on Mac as the Linux version ran on Linux, but it required (extra to MacOX) X11, and its GUI didn't match the rest of the Mac - but the GUI was the same as the Linux version. The NeoOffice fork looks like a Mac (and doesn't require X11), but it's not as fast or stable as OO.o itself running on Mac. Right?
"Just as well" requires the mistaken assumption that the gui is irrelevant to the functional running of the software, and that even more-skilled-than-average Mac users are willing to install and fire up X11. But, otherwise, Right.
I'm not just being a crank, or even replying to you directly, since I know that many here will read your question as signifying that OOo is useable on OS X. While you or I may be unusually willing to page through a 'man' file or install fink without including that process in the evaluation of a program's speediness, a kind of TCO exists for software that invests heavily in interfaces being discoverable. Much of what works in the Mac (and to a lesser degree Windows) GUI is its lack of a need for a manual. The functioning of a program is bundled up with its usability, and OOo on a Mac is good for, well, nerdly nerds with too much time on their hands. NeoOffice de-nerdifies OOo.
Does OpenOffice run on Mac/OSX as well as it runs on Linux?
No, it doesn't. It uses different paradigms than the Mac UI, originally required X11, the widgets don't match, the menu items differ too much. The NeoOffice fork of OOo was a quick and dirty response, giving up processing speed and stability in favour of user familiarity (user speed). Many Mac users are waiting breathlessly for OOo to have a true mac port.
The ongoing trial of Lord Conrad Black is highly instructive in regards to ownership directing media agenda. It is coming to light (as incidental information in the trial) that 'Lord' Black had a strong hand in the political framework of his papers' presentation of the issues, and had a falling out with his good friend Izzy Asper over support for conservative vs. liberal (i.e. centrist, since this is referring to Canada) politicians. Black's restrictive directives to his senior editors has been well documented and corroborated by those no longer under threat of 'black'listing. Black and Asper's paper holdings at the time pretty much amounted to a newsprint monopoly in Canada.
Now, this is in Canada where we have a national public broadcaster and, we like to think, slightly higher journalistic standards and irreverence than S. of the border (not that I agree, it's just popular opinion). You see, we can wear anarchist T-shirts or have posters on our walls demanding the arrest of our leaders, with impunity (for now). The reality is obviously different, and we have all kinds of structural restrictions on what is allowable discourse (lobbying practices, hate, libel, and CRTC regulations, for instance). Point being, a representative democracy manages propaganda as a balancing act, using definition of terms, misdirection, subtle pressures, regulation, and immense repetition to obscure uncomfortable truths.
The corporate and government media in a democracy cannot fully effectively tell you what to think, but they can and do effectively suggest what to think ABOUT.
"Free health care"? You must be thinking of that country to the north of us.
You mean Canuckistan? TANSTAAFL. I pay the provincial government for health insurance indexed to my income. Some provinces collect the health money through income tax, so there's no monthly fee, just a bundled annual tax.
The really poor have ways of not paying, but that's mainly through other support programs, and it isn't free health care so much as socialized support across the board, such as tax breaks and clinics or welfare. For my part, I'm glad they pay less to none, and I pay more, because a bunch of people not getting health care when they need it is fiscally irresponsible for society... we wind up paying way more to solve serious problems than little ones. What's the point in being relatively rich if you're surrounded by social disaster? (Not that the social net here is adequate to prevent expensive problems, like it used to be in, e.g. Finland, but it could be worse.)
TV color isn't nearly as critical as color for print production because there's no readily discernible standard for the end product. That is to say, while there are standards, you have no control what people will see on their own TVs or monitors, which are relatively low resolution devices compared to a 2,400 dpi/175 line screen printing job.
Took me a while to figure this out, moving from print to video production. Sure, it was nice to work on a $8K well-calibrated reference video monitor doing colour correction, but after editing in the field with a laptop and a crappy portable LCD monitor, and on low-end workstations with old commodore64 thrift-shop specials for reference, I realized that having both a nice reference and a worst-case-scenario monitor is valuable. People's TV sets vary hugely; if it looks good on a crappy monitor, you're halfway there. Now I always watch a rough cut on the portable DVD player and a cheap TV before sending it off, as a reality check. Colour correcting for just the high-end isn't enough.
Yeah, I've seen some of those other loose change theories. All of them still fail the occam's razor test, they just seem too horrifically complex to pull off successfully. [...]
I just tend to discount the moustache-twirling conspiracies and find the ass-covering ones more plausible.
I agree wholeheartedly! Always assume incompetence before malice, for it is the human way.
In the same vein, talk to a commercial pilot about the flying ability of those who hit the three buildings, especially the Pentagon, then apply Occam's Razor. And, as the Northwoods document indicates (see my sig), the Joint Chiefs proposed a false flag operation to JFK in order to invade Cuba, that involved staging terrorist attacks on Americans, including deaths if necessary. So, we at least have an established willingness to commit heinous crimes for the sake of aggressive foreign and domestic policy, over 40 years ago. This highly illegal plot would have required the secrecy of hundreds, and considerable complexity. It makes one wonder what documents or plans haven't yet surfaced, and if any such plans were ever actually attempted.
Given the ramp-up of official secrecy in the last twenty years, and the CIA's admission that all major media outlets had been compromised as of 1993, it is difficult to believe anything official, OR the paranoid rants of the other conspiracy theorists. (I say "other," because the biggest conspiracy theorists are actually the spies, who think some outraged anti-globalization activists or tea-drinking Raging Grannies are somehow threateningly seditious and worthy of infiltrating and monitoring.)
Just one oberservation: Anything about 9/11 that relies mostly on eyewitness testimony of a small handful of people is utterly wrong. Eyewitnesses seeing "explosions in the basement" but yet still managing to stay alive are dubious at best. Did anybody ever ask them how they knew it was an explosion and how they knew where it was coming from? Was the answer "there was a loud noise", and "it seemed to come from underground"?
Oh, dubious, I agree, my point is that I am in no position to trust anything in regards to that event, neither the firefighters who said they heard a series of detonations nor those seeking to explain away the unprecedented and unlikely. Stating in an online forum that an eyewitness is "utterly wrong" seems like another form of disinformation.
More to the point, if you were wanting to knock those buildings down for the scare of it all, you'd just go for the structural supports in the sub-basement and let the sucker topple like a tree. Implosions are only done in a painstaking fashion when you're trying to minimize death and destruction.
"Oh, but the conspirators wanted to minimize collateral damage to the rest of NYC because this is all part of their plan."
Well shit, why not just run nerve gas through the tower AC systems? You get your thousands-plus death toll AND the buildings are still standing.
OK, full disclaimer: I'm a skeptic of both sides of the conspiracy theorists (gov and loons)--paranoia, confusion, and disinformation being the order of the day. But, you haven't been reading the 'gubm't did it' theories, so here's their view. There are claims based on seismographs and eyewitness accounts that there were huge explosions in the sub-basement, and explosions going off at various times throughout the buildings before they came down (just the towers, haven't seen the same written about WTC7, which is the freaky one). Supposedly Larry Silverman made off with 6 billion dollars profit off of those buildings coming down in a tidy pile, and didn't have to deal with the asbestos problem. The 'loose change' point of view holds that much of the operation was run from WTC7, so it destroyed much of the evidence, as well as a bunch of inconvenient Enron and SEC documents. Anyway, if you want to know what those theories are about, there are plenty of questionable but entertaining versions running around. Just don't trust your own government too much, either, their track record for honesty isn't very good.
OK, this is the half-italian style, like my heritage.
Get a Mokka pot, also known as a stovetop espresso pot (it isn't really espresso, more pressure percolated). The Italians in the know use the aluminum ones, the taste is better, the steel ones cost more. I use steel because I'm aluminum-shy. A 4-cup model does me two cups.
Buy vacuum packed whole beans, one pound bags. Make sure they're fair-trade and shade grown, so you cup doesn't have the bitter flavour of exploitation or deforestation (hey, those birds migrate through my forest in the summer). A medium roast has more complexity, but a dark roast has that espresso flavour kick. Not too dark--or you'll get that Starbucks charred flavour with hints of unlovely burlap.
Fill the pot to the level of the safety valve, no more. Grind the beans fine but not to dust. Use them immediately. Don't pack a Moka pot down firmly the way you would an espresso maker.
The trick with a Moka pot is to never ever let it boil dry, take it off when it starts making the spitting sound. Best to use a medium-high setting on the stove, not maximum. When you're done, rinse the pot out right away, don't let it sit, and don't use soap. The slight residue from the oils sticks to aluminum better, thus the flavour improvement.
If you're going for a cappucino or latte, you can heat milk in a small pot and use a small battery powered whisk to get a foam that's even better than steamed milk. That's it, ciao!
Two words: Fitt's Law. Or: Keyboard Shortcuts. Take your pick.
Plus: System Preferences > Displays, then drag and drop the menu bar in the symbolic displays to the monitor you prefer.
Oh, sure it isn't blindingly obvious, but you're a power user right? you read the documentation.;-)
Window based menus, and resize window with any side, are slow and finicky. The menu bar at the top of the (preferred) screen makes the menu items practically huge, and thus far easier and faster to hit.
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However, Castro is on record as being ambivalent towards GMO's (Genetically Modified Organisms), expressing the overall government's policy of wait-and-see, i.e. field testing and risk assessment. They are, for sure, producing GE tilapia, but no news about crops in production. This is unlike the 'no-GMO' attitude in other pro-organic production jurisdictions around the world, and perhaps this reflects the embargo.
You see, in the absence of the megacorporate agro-evil transnational life sciences companies like Monsanto, genetic engineering loses some of its bite as a threat to society. This highlights the fact that many who are opposed to GMOs may mistrust the technology, but they mistrust its owners even more. In other words, they're more worried about Frankencompany than Frankenfood. Cuba doesn't have that issue under the embargo.
The embargo isn't as dumb as you think it is. Hard-liner american cubans don't want democracy as most people think of it, they want Bush-style strong rule backed by corporatism and diplomatic links to DC, with the restoration of the elite property system that existed under Batista.
Pushing Cuba into a political extreme by placing it under perpetual war alert and deprivation probably strengthens their long-term righteousness.
they are becoming great at biotech and registering patents like crazy.This is one of the problems for the credibility of their organic certification process: GMO's aren't currently certifiably organic, however productive they may be.
Here's a perk of living in (even rural) Canada: I go down to the garage/general/liquor store, and there on the shelf is Havana Club, "Ron puro Cubano," mmm, great is right. And cuban coffee in the cupboard, it's only pretty good but it's organic.
There may be long-term competitive benefits accruing to Cuba out of the blockade and its hardships.
The whole island has pretty much gone organic, as part of the austerity produced by the embargo, and they're trying to turn that constraint into a strength. When the embargo finally drops in the US, watch for cuban specialty products showing up in the organic food stores.
They need an internationally credible domestic certification system to really flourish, however the embargo has forced them to look hard at their local food security, so they'd be okay if international trade was interrupted. They have international trade in things like organic fruits and coffee, and they've made interesting innovations with domestic distribution in mind, like the Organopónicos.
The embargo has created constraints that make it an interesting testbed for development without the overwhelming influence of large transnationals. It's a race between the international organic sector to help establish Cuba as an entrenched organic ag system and the influx of Life Sciences transnationals that might happen if there's regime change.
Cuba's ripe turf for donated linux-ready systems, so support that goal in some way. There's enough real zeal for independence and common interests to make it a interesting test bed for a society running on open-source software.
I am all for terraforming Mars, after we've studied it in a relatively pristine state for a while. The idea of moving many people there, however, is silly, until we've actually settled the marginal areas down here first. The oceans are full of opportunity and cover most of the planet, we hardly know them, yet we're planning a move to an airless dessicated ball millions of miles away. WTF? The frontier is still here.
You're talking about self-replicating factories landing on an icy asteroid and building relatively simple mass drivers that spiral it in towards Mars... about a century from now. Think about a victorian era gentleman pooh-poohing the notion of walking on the moon--nyehh, what a maroon!
The only real obstacle to moving asteroids around a century from now will be the will, not the means.
Well Smidge, that's partly true, and also largely untrue, particularly with the examples you chose. Critics bring up US atrocities because they're denied or rationalized away, and yet so contrary to the patriotic claims of the Homeland. WW2 Pacific theatre: the Japanese oil supply was being choked by the Americans who wanted to protect their quasi-colonial holdings in the pacific, conflict was inevitable and invited, and their crypto is broken, so PHbr was expected. The Japanese were insanely inhuman to prisoners, but the US firebombing campaign of wooden Japanese cities is unbelievable, Americans really have no idea because the information was suppressed, and the US Secretary of Defense at the time states that if they'd lost, they'd be war criminals. The firebombing of civilians in Germany was an atrocity too, less evil than extermination camps, but evil, and questionable strategy. The invasion of Kuwait was encouraged by US diplomatic maneuvering, and capitalized on by some of the most shameless propaganda of the 20th C.
The objection people like myself have is that Americans pretend to a nobility of purpose that isn't really there, certainly not in the methods used to initiate and wage war. False flags are the order of the day.
The truism that people love Americans but despise America is becoming widespread.
Perhaps it's the influence of religious fundamentalism, but one strong current in US patriotic culture is a black/white, with-us-or-against-us view that is the groundwork of fascism and thus makes the rest of the world nervous. You live in a cheerfully belligerent society that blinds itself to its own atrocities, that takes insult easily, and arranges to be injured as a face-saving means to expansionism. Most Americans have no clue that they arrange and pay for 700 military bases on foreign soil. The genocide that is the foundation of your territory isn't some liberal namby-pamby BS: it's your own not-so-private skeleton, and it is ongoing to this day.
A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind. - George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism
I agree that it's easier to get a lower price for similar performance, and expandability, and wish apple made a mini-atx style box. There is possibly some difference in build quality and underlying engineering between the mini and a crappo emachine, but can't prove it beyond my own observations of a nicely made unit I took apart for fun.
You're forgetting an important lack that the mini has, though: noise. Have you heard one? They're damn quiet for the price, and you can screw them to a wall or under a desk, or on a server closet wall, or slide it into a stack of AV equipment. The form factor and the acoustics are important to me, at least, as I've deployed them as heavily automated SOHO servers and as part of a media production system, and as capable low-power rural desktops, in tight quarters, where noise matters.
I live in a mainly rural school district 64 in the same province, and we're starting to undergo a similar process. The local principal is interested, and I've given him a copy of Edubuntu to evaluate the upcoming changes--though I'm not so sure the district is going that direction, I think they're emulating Kamloops (thin client etc.). The comment in the article about the staff having more time for things like a help desk and hardware support is understated, it's absolutely huge in making a difference for teachers, especially at isolated schools. It's important to me, because I want to start a computer club at my kids' (40 student rural) elementary, and I've been giving away old boxes with puppy linux on them for a while now, with some success.
Nice thing about successful changeovers like this is that they're infectious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoacoustic_model
Psychoacoustics alone will never lead one to a "reasonable" understanding of that rather elaborate set of connections, it's fairly mechanistic and limited to subjective responses. You'd be invoking culture and society: much more elusive, chaotic, and difficult to measure. Like most psychology, it lacks sufficient inputs. I concede that psychoacoustics has made some pretty big leaps recently, but not that it understands the big "connections."
To get a handle on "the connection between music-environment-ear-mind" you'd have to be studying the more interdisciplinary "acoustic communications" which is only studied in a relatively limited way as yet, sometimes called "acoustic ecology" or soundscape studies. The World Forum for Acoustic Ecology is a good place to start getting an overview.
I like to have discrete disks (or arrays) because I have different tasks for them. I apportion out their use based on performance and expected reliability. Perhaps my attitude will be moot shortly as drives and busses speed up and become more reliable, but for now it's sensible.
The entire premise for the show is that this museum piece, Galactica, was built in an age when humans were extremely paranoid about infected networks, as they nearly lost the previous war due to their computers being too powerful and thus, vulnerable to intelligent machines. Galactica is the only ship that survives the Cylon attack precisely because of its low-tech configuration, and it is their major playing card in strategic engagements. In their rebuilding efforts after taking damage, they struggle with this rule to keep it dumbed-down and non-networked. I take it you've missed some key episodes, like the pilot.
A pleasure-giving well-made functional product combined with an iconic design is perfect brand marketing.
Those white headphones--everywhere--outswoosh Nike.
*Grin*-- too true.
If I'm right about the OO.o cross-platform equality, thanks for clarifying. Otherwise, please help me get it.Uh, yes, more or less, for your particular narrowly defined fairly rare situation, it's probably fine and nearly equivalent though lacking somewhat in integration with the rest of the OS (e.g. clipboard irregularities), but you posted in a public forum instead of emailing me and are presumably able to use google.com/mac, so I gave the public answer that won't lead to the mistaken assumption that they should recommend OOo on a mac to their school or Aunt Fanny.
"Just as well" requires the mistaken assumption that the gui is irrelevant to the functional running of the software, and that even more-skilled-than-average Mac users are willing to install and fire up X11. But, otherwise, Right.
I'm not just being a crank, or even replying to you directly, since I know that many here will read your question as signifying that OOo is useable on OS X. While you or I may be unusually willing to page through a 'man' file or install fink without including that process in the evaluation of a program's speediness, a kind of TCO exists for software that invests heavily in interfaces being discoverable. Much of what works in the Mac (and to a lesser degree Windows) GUI is its lack of a need for a manual. The functioning of a program is bundled up with its usability, and OOo on a Mac is good for, well, nerdly nerds with too much time on their hands. NeoOffice de-nerdifies OOo.
No spreadsheet. My gr. 4 kid uses them at school, and I'm glad. Best part of the office suite.
No, it doesn't. It uses different paradigms than the Mac UI, originally required X11, the widgets don't match, the menu items differ too much. The NeoOffice fork of OOo was a quick and dirty response, giving up processing speed and stability in favour of user familiarity (user speed). Many Mac users are waiting breathlessly for OOo to have a true mac port.
The ongoing trial of Lord Conrad Black is highly instructive in regards to ownership directing media agenda. It is coming to light (as incidental information in the trial) that 'Lord' Black had a strong hand in the political framework of his papers' presentation of the issues, and had a falling out with his good friend Izzy Asper over support for conservative vs. liberal (i.e. centrist, since this is referring to Canada) politicians. Black's restrictive directives to his senior editors has been well documented and corroborated by those no longer under threat of 'black'listing. Black and Asper's paper holdings at the time pretty much amounted to a newsprint monopoly in Canada.
Now, this is in Canada where we have a national public broadcaster and, we like to think, slightly higher journalistic standards and irreverence than S. of the border (not that I agree, it's just popular opinion). You see, we can wear anarchist T-shirts or have posters on our walls demanding the arrest of our leaders, with impunity (for now). The reality is obviously different, and we have all kinds of structural restrictions on what is allowable discourse (lobbying practices, hate, libel, and CRTC regulations, for instance). Point being, a representative democracy manages propaganda as a balancing act, using definition of terms, misdirection, subtle pressures, regulation, and immense repetition to obscure uncomfortable truths.
The corporate and government media in a democracy cannot fully effectively tell you what to think, but they can and do effectively suggest what to think ABOUT.
You mean Canuckistan? TANSTAAFL. I pay the provincial government for health insurance indexed to my income. Some provinces collect the health money through income tax, so there's no monthly fee, just a bundled annual tax.
The really poor have ways of not paying, but that's mainly through other support programs, and it isn't free health care so much as socialized support across the board, such as tax breaks and clinics or welfare. For my part, I'm glad they pay less to none, and I pay more, because a bunch of people not getting health care when they need it is fiscally irresponsible for society... we wind up paying way more to solve serious problems than little ones. What's the point in being relatively rich if you're surrounded by social disaster? (Not that the social net here is adequate to prevent expensive problems, like it used to be in, e.g. Finland, but it could be worse.)
Took me a while to figure this out, moving from print to video production. Sure, it was nice to work on a $8K well-calibrated reference video monitor doing colour correction, but after editing in the field with a laptop and a crappy portable LCD monitor, and on low-end workstations with old commodore64 thrift-shop specials for reference, I realized that having both a nice reference and a worst-case-scenario monitor is valuable. People's TV sets vary hugely; if it looks good on a crappy monitor, you're halfway there. Now I always watch a rough cut on the portable DVD player and a cheap TV before sending it off, as a reality check. Colour correcting for just the high-end isn't enough.
I agree wholeheartedly! Always assume incompetence before malice, for it is the human way.
In the same vein, talk to a commercial pilot about the flying ability of those who hit the three buildings, especially the Pentagon, then apply Occam's Razor. And, as the Northwoods document indicates (see my sig), the Joint Chiefs proposed a false flag operation to JFK in order to invade Cuba, that involved staging terrorist attacks on Americans, including deaths if necessary. So, we at least have an established willingness to commit heinous crimes for the sake of aggressive foreign and domestic policy, over 40 years ago. This highly illegal plot would have required the secrecy of hundreds, and considerable complexity. It makes one wonder what documents or plans haven't yet surfaced, and if any such plans were ever actually attempted.
Given the ramp-up of official secrecy in the last twenty years, and the CIA's admission that all major media outlets had been compromised as of 1993, it is difficult to believe anything official, OR the paranoid rants of the other conspiracy theorists. (I say "other," because the biggest conspiracy theorists are actually the spies, who think some outraged anti-globalization activists or tea-drinking Raging Grannies are somehow threateningly seditious and worthy of infiltrating and monitoring.)
Oh, dubious, I agree, my point is that I am in no position to trust anything in regards to that event, neither the firefighters who said they heard a series of detonations nor those seeking to explain away the unprecedented and unlikely. Stating in an online forum that an eyewitness is "utterly wrong" seems like another form of disinformation.
"Oh, but the conspirators wanted to minimize collateral damage to the rest of NYC because this is all part of their plan."
Well shit, why not just run nerve gas through the tower AC systems? You get your thousands-plus death toll AND the buildings are still standing.
OK, full disclaimer: I'm a skeptic of both sides of the conspiracy theorists (gov and loons)--paranoia, confusion, and disinformation being the order of the day. But, you haven't been reading the 'gubm't did it' theories, so here's their view. There are claims based on seismographs and eyewitness accounts that there were huge explosions in the sub-basement, and explosions going off at various times throughout the buildings before they came down (just the towers, haven't seen the same written about WTC7, which is the freaky one). Supposedly Larry Silverman made off with 6 billion dollars profit off of those buildings coming down in a tidy pile, and didn't have to deal with the asbestos problem. The 'loose change' point of view holds that much of the operation was run from WTC7, so it destroyed much of the evidence, as well as a bunch of inconvenient Enron and SEC documents. Anyway, if you want to know what those theories are about, there are plenty of questionable but entertaining versions running around. Just don't trust your own government too much, either, their track record for honesty isn't very good.
Thank you! good links, I'll have to try the phony crema technique.
I, too, failed with the line breaks...
OK, this is the half-italian style, like my heritage. Get a Mokka pot, also known as a stovetop espresso pot (it isn't really espresso, more pressure percolated). The Italians in the know use the aluminum ones, the taste is better, the steel ones cost more. I use steel because I'm aluminum-shy. A 4-cup model does me two cups. Buy vacuum packed whole beans, one pound bags. Make sure they're fair-trade and shade grown, so you cup doesn't have the bitter flavour of exploitation or deforestation (hey, those birds migrate through my forest in the summer). A medium roast has more complexity, but a dark roast has that espresso flavour kick. Not too dark--or you'll get that Starbucks charred flavour with hints of unlovely burlap. Fill the pot to the level of the safety valve, no more. Grind the beans fine but not to dust. Use them immediately. Don't pack a Moka pot down firmly the way you would an espresso maker. The trick with a Moka pot is to never ever let it boil dry, take it off when it starts making the spitting sound. Best to use a medium-high setting on the stove, not maximum. When you're done, rinse the pot out right away, don't let it sit, and don't use soap. The slight residue from the oils sticks to aluminum better, thus the flavour improvement. If you're going for a cappucino or latte, you can heat milk in a small pot and use a small battery powered whisk to get a foam that's even better than steamed milk. That's it, ciao!
Two words: Fitt's Law. Or: Keyboard Shortcuts. Take your pick.
;-)
Plus: System Preferences > Displays, then drag and drop the menu bar in the symbolic displays to the monitor you prefer.
Oh, sure it isn't blindingly obvious, but you're a power user right? you read the documentation.
Window based menus, and resize window with any side, are slow and finicky. The menu bar at the top of the (preferred) screen makes the menu items practically huge, and thus far easier and faster to hit.