First, can you prove that man made greenhouse gases are the sole reason behind global temp. increases...
Second, what temp. is the correct temp. for the Earth?
These seem like particularly stupid questions to me, even for an obvious troll.
Questions worthy of asking:
Is global warming happening?
Yep. Arguments supporting this assertion are all over; no need to repeat them here. I'm satisfied that any non-biased weighing of the evidence will show global warming; you can make your own judgment.
How dangerous is global warming?
That depends mostly on what you value.
For those who believe that the world was created in 6 days, that Man was given the special privilege of having dominion over it, that every creature other than Man is a lesser creature without a soul, and that there will be a better world in the afterlife for all the good people, then global warming is not going to be very threatening. They can feel like they should process all the oil, ore, and lumber that they can to live their mundane lives for greater glory of the creator, and trust to their Lord God Almighty for their salvation. Rapture Rulz and all that jazz.
To those who believe that there is something sacred in each life, that a person who learns he has the power to destroy a relationship also takes on an obligation of stewardship to that relationship, and that all of the sacred beings on this earth are in relationships with each other, then global warming is a very threatening thing. They feel that anything they can do that might limit such destruction should be done.
So it really comes down to basic religion. Do you think you have an obligation to the world that supports you, or do you believe you are special in the eyes of the intelligent designer?
This kind of basic religious difference of opinion has often led to the bloodiest of wars. There is no reason to think that human nature has changed significantly since the last round of Crusades.
How much time do we have?
That is what TFA adresses.
Simplistic global warming models suggested for example that sea levels would rise about a meter over the next 6 or 10 decades; but the information in this article shows that water vapor has a multiplier effect so that this change will happen within 20 years or less (the effect of a unit increase in CO2 is about 230% of the simple prediction due to the multiplier effect of water vapor-- assuming my back-of-the-envelope extrapolation is good: I think it is conservative).
Is there anything that can be done about it?
Obviously any decrease in the rate of human CO2 emissions will slow the process and buy more time. Move us away from innundation in 15 years and toward innundation in 50 years. That seems like a reasonable thing to do. Even though these efforts might be dwarfed by the release of CO2 from melted tundra or volcanos, the prudent course is to do all that can be done to limit CO2 releases. This is using "prudent" in the established legal and economic sense: what is "prudent" in religious terms will not be consistent with this for many of transcendant faiths (believers in heaven). (The opposite in this context is the immanent faiths-- believers in the sacred residing within the world).
Beyond that, it is hard to say. The impact of severe global warming, when you are 10 to 15 years older than you are right now, is impossible to predict; it is part of a chaotic system, you see. What will be the impact on Europe and global trade when the sea reclaims the Nederlands? Our attention is probably going to be there, and we will not have the resources to deal with the refugees from the concurrent Bangladesh floods, nor cope with the resulting pandemic of pneumonic plague that is a likely result of the collapse of India's public health system. Especially if the USA and other first world nations are locked into the kind of civil religious wars that seem to be shaping up (witness as early m
while simplifying, standardizing, and securing is an excellent mantra, I don't think it addresses Microsoft's core problem.
Microsoft is arguably the most successful entrepreneural endeavor, ever. But it's stuck in that mode when it should have grown beyond it years ago.
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The normal development for a successful entrepreneur business is to either break into an existing market or develop a new market and exploit it until rich. Microsoft has certainly done both, and shown itself to be really good at these things. But then the next step is to move from the entrepreneural behaviors to the behaviors of a capitalist, using the newly acquired wealth to secure solid, long term positions across a broad range of economic activities. Microsoft has not done that; instead it sits on this massive war chest of liquid assets. At this point MS labels should be showing up on bakery products, in the credits of movies and tv shows, on clothing and fashion accessories, and at the very least on computer hardware and data storage and conversion service providers. But we don't see that. Instead we see massive amounts of money poured into gambles that often don't pay off.
Instead of broad-based long term investments, MS has this huge pile of liquid assets (and that is an excellent way of visualizing the absurdity of managing a multi billion dollar war chest-- as a pile of liquids). And it has only two serious revenue generators: the Windows OS and MS Office. There should be dozens of revenue streams from a broad range of sources feeding the MS monolith at this point; that huge corporate structure should not be supported by only these two legs. But that is the way it is. Microsoft's vision of the future may be more acute than anyone else's, but it is certainly too narrow, too tightly focused, to be economically healthy.
Microsoft is in danger of falling apart. Not because Linux is beginning to cut into Windows sales or because the expense of meeting Vista's hardware requirements are going to cause a lot of MS's repeat business to go to other OSs. Nor is Microsoft at risk because OO.o offers an increasingly attractive alternative to MS Office. These things are true but if it wasn't Linux and OO.o, there would be other contenders in their place.
Microsoft is in danger of falling apart because its upper management has insisted on keeping it in the entrepreneural mind set long after it should have grown out of that childhood and taken on the responsibilities of a mature company. To give you a visual, MS is going to lose it because the mentality that has given us monkey dances and chair-throwing antics is still the mentality that MS top management tolerates and encourages. MS is going to lose it because the people that run the company think that adolescent risk taking is a lot of fun and they would rather do that than spend their time doing the boring things that executives in mature companies like IBM, General Motors, or Starbucks do.
This should not have been rated off topic. The difference between immanent and imminent is always significant in cosmology, for religious reasons:
There are those who believe that the second coming of Christ is imminent, and they also believe that He is transcendant which in this context is the opposite of being immanent*. OTOH, there are practitioners of the Old Religions who believe that the Creatrix is immanent and inseparably a part of Her on-going creation-- never separated from or transcendant above the world She births. When "immanence" and "imminence" are confused, aspects of fundamentalist beliefs are ascribed to witches, and aspects of witchcraft are ascribed to fundamentalists; both groups get pissed off; and the Sacred Xao moos her discontent in a most distressing manner. Fnord**.
Since cosmology shares borders with religion in most people's mindspace, it is vital that "immanent" and "imminent" be used correctly in cosmological discussions.
-----
*Claiming that God or Christ is immanent in the world (and therefore transcendent) is recognized as a heresy even by the Roman Catholic Church. This is not a historic thing-- at least one priest in the last 50 years has been defrocked as a heretic on this basis. And we're talking RCC here, who are a very moderate church (and not even regarded as christians by the more rabid fundies).
**The Discordians got one thing right: you've got to be able to laugh at this stuff or your head will explode when you think about it.
Most home and office scanners offer only 256 gradations in gray scale mode. Scanning the xray image under these conditions is going to seriously compress the midrange values and some of the subtle distinctions are going to be lost. Since the concern is with arithritic changes in bone density, this would be a very serious problem. Scanning in 24 bit color mode could get around this, but it would probably introduce color artifacts that could mislead a diagnostician even when the scan looked good. (A pixel that is 50% "gray" because it is a mix of RGB values is neither as stable across all viewing conditions nor as accurate as a BW pixel at 50% brightness.)
Getting the white balance right would be critical. Lead (Pb) markers are used to provide a reference "black" value (as well as usually to show which is the left or right side of the image). Usually there is a portion of the image that has been fully exposed that will be used as reference "white" value. These will not be absolute black and absolute white-- and it is important that they be captured as they are.
Another difficulty is with the size of the xrays: some spinal films are going to be too large to fit on the typical flatbed scanner. Scanning in sections and stitching together is not a good idea: you would have to be a radiologist to know whether significant distortions were introduced in the stitching process.
Using a high end digital camera on a reverse tripod or large copystand and using.raw or.tif images could get around many of these problems. But it would introduce problems with precision geometry (to avoid distortions) that such equipment isn't designed for.
I wouldn't trust xray duplication to the people at Kinko's-- they are good at what they do, but this work demands calibration techniques that they are not trained in and which might be beyond the capabilities of their equipment.
I think it would be a good idea to have the copies prepared by a radiology service. They have the equipment and the skills to make accurate copies. You might want to contact some radiology service providers to see if you can get the copies made without hospital and doctor overhead costs.
I have worked beside physicians reading xrays in ER and ICU settings, and a couple of pieces of knowledge rubbed off on me after a few years. I have been using digital imaging in technical work such as recovery of damaged historical photographs for three years.
And why is this "just how it works".... I do not understand why it is "just how it works" to ship with real, creating-problems-for-users bugs that are known.
The short answer is that there will always be one more bug, because software is a simplified digital model of a very complex analog world.
Part of the longer answer is that by the time the software ships, the only bugs that are left are the really tough ones. In fact, there comes a point in any non-trivial programming effort where the risk of introducing a new (and possibly worse) bug while fixing a known one is a very real risk, and the amount of testing to assure that you haven't just done this really slows down the process. And isn't really foolproof yet, anyway.
When the bugs have been reduced to where many users will be able to get a reasonable amount of work done without an unreasonable amount of frustration from the remaining bugs, the software is ready for shipping. Determining how many users, what is reasonable, and what is unreasonable is sometimes considered part of the art of programming. But sometimes these determinations are turned over to the marketdroids. Which one is most likely depends a lot on whether you are talking about FOSS or about market-driven companies, like maybe, oh I don't know-- MICROSOFT??;^)
the question isn't really weather life begins at conception, but rather moral personhood.
Excellent point!
And I'm glad you qualified "personhood", since any reasoned discussion on these subjects has to be able to distinquish between "moral personhood" and "legal personhood".
To my mind, the most critical issue from a pragmatic point of view is when does "legal personhood" begin under US law? Unfortunately, a strict constructionist view of the US Constitution doesn't help here, because the Framers didn't have the foresight to define who, exactly, was a legal person (or "man", in the parlance of that day). I think this was a cop-out: I think under the pressing immediate need to get some kind of governance established, the founding fathers decided to avoid any phrasing that would bring up questions about the status of women, blacks, and children, and whether they were chattel or not. This was probably a wise decision at the time-- history shows that finding the answers to some of these questions had a terrible blood cost that the US would not have been able to pay in the late 1700s.
It is clear that US rights extend beyond US citizens to anyone with legal personhood who is in a US jurisdiction no matter what their citizenship. So is a given fetus within an area of US jurisdiction? Superficially that might seem easy to determine, but then there are embassies of foreign nations that are within US boundaries but are not within US jurisdictions.
I think for a variety of reasons, we need to regard the fetus as similar to the foreign employee of a foreign embassy-- not subject to US justice even though physically surrounded by US territory. I think trying to handle this in any other way would destroy some critical foundations of US law. I think it would quickly lead to a situation where a US President would be able to justify a war against China because China fails to provide its citizens with the rights delineated in the US Constitution. We already see that kind of reasoning being offered by some citizens who are rather ignorant of Constitutional rights and obligations; there is no question that if it was possible to phrase such a justification in legitimate terms, we would see it put forth by some politicians, and we would have to deal with the consequences.
Ok, now consider this: MS Access is a strong contender for the Worst Ever Forward Compatibility Prize, no matter what criteria any panel of judges might decide to use. It doesn't look like Jet improves the situation at all-- it appears that the Jet technology is just extending the compatibility issues to the other MS Office applications that have now begun to rely on it for some functions.
The basic problem seems to go back to some of the earliest issues in software design. If I remember my studies correctly, one of von Neumann's contributions in the 1940s was the concept that the program and its data should be separated. If you don't maintain a clear separation between data and procedure, you are going to end up with a system that is impossible to maintain or improve without breaking compatibility, among other problems.
It seems to me that Microsoft has been violating this basic principle of computing for at least 10 years now. MS likes to tightly cross-couple its data with its programming, apparently for marketing reasons (there certainly is no engineering benefit to this practice). Whether you look at Microsoft office products through historical practice or through the rosey lenses of computing theory, you see that they are deficient in providing for long term compatibility.
Point One: wrt to archival access, the "standard of the industry" and good corporate practices do not apply to some institutions, such as governments.
The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was ratified in 1780; it is of course still in active use. There is a large body of documents written before 1780 that might be called up on any discussion of MA law or procedure, as well as a yearly addition to this that has grown exponentially. This is not just the legislative and judicial records; it includes agency policy memos and even invoices and purchase orders since these might indicate how MA actually did its daily work at any time.
This is a "living archive" situation-- any of these old documents of the last 300 years could become relevant again today in a variety of different settings ranging from courtroom fights over MA's stewardship of public lands to the responsibilities that anyone selling goods or services to MA residents must meet.
I agree with the current govenrment of MA that it is important to make these materials as accessable as possible for as long as MA continues to exist. And it makes sense to look for the most efficient way to do this-- which in the eyes of those who have assessed the numerous studies, means moving to OpenDocument.
Point Two: Some other institutions have similar needs. Hospitals are one example that I know fairly well.
Malpractice litigation is one of a hospital's biggest expenses. In its collective wisdom, US courts have determined that a hospital should not be held to today's standard of care for an incident that happened years ago; the hospital should be held to the standard of care that existed at the the time of the incident. It is the hospital's responsibility to prove what its standard of care at that time was, and whether it exercised due diligence in developing and enforcing that standard. That means that all old policy and procedure statements, the research that informed these decisions, attendance records for training sessions in the new procedures, and some indication of compliance with the changed standard, all need to be part of a living archive. Obviously storing all this material digitally has advantages over paper storage. Just as clearly, it makes sense to go to a format that promises easy access into the future.
I worked for a hospital when MS Office 2000 was released. Our IT department thought this was a big deal when the first machines came in, and handed them out like candy to the Most Very Important Persons. IT got slapped hard alongside the head when the hospital Administrator found that the memo he had written on his new computer looked like crap on the computers of the clinical staff who were still using Office 97. IT got slapped hard again, when a Quality Control nurse found that MS Office 2000 mangled old policy statements that had been written in Word 97 and made them unusable. In the end, IT had to go through the expense of ripping out MS Office 2000 on every newly purchased machine, and replacing it with MS Office 97, and living in an uncomfortably ambiguous legal situation since Microsoft wouldn't give a straight answer to whether such a change was actually covered under the blanket contract. Instead of being acclaimed as the white knight heroes that the IT staff thought would be their due, the whole department acquired an odor reminiscent of the unclean shoes of a swineherd.
If there is a moral to this longish Sunday morning writing exercise, it is that youngsters who are entering the IT professions need to keep an eye on issues of long term storage and broad access.
So space sex should be thoroughly studied before we do any Mars trips.
Sounds like maybe we've finally got a justification for the ISS.
I suppose this will probably be rated "funny", but I'm kind of serious. Considering all the limitations imposed on the ISS by the Space Shuttle, behavioral studies are one of the few fields where ISS research can be justified. (I'm not talking about just the Shuttle problems of the last few years; the ISS potential was badly reduced from the beginning, with the decision to go with the Shuttle but not to build the Space Tug.
Superficial resemblances? You're overlooking the fact that English, though ultimately Germanic, has great Latin lineage.
No, I am not overlooking latin's direct and indirect influences on english. Quite a bit of vocabulary is directly descended from latin through the centuries of Roman settlements, and quite a bit more has been imported either directly or through other romance languages. But very little of english syntax or grammar can be traced to latin influences. English doesn't work anything like latin.
After the conquest of England almost a thousand years ago, many Latinate concepts and words were grafted into English by the Norman French, not by those of us living today.
The Normans came to England several hundred years after the Romans; the first latin influence on the proto-english tongues was already well established by then. BTW, the Normans were of northern stock, hence their name. You can't call them French, since the earliest French identity was still 200 - 400 years in the future-- the Normans were one of the ancestral sources of the French in the same way they were an ancestor of the English.
The Normans imposed a strong class hierarchy on England. A big part of the differential between upper and lower class was in literacy, which at that time meant reading and writing in latin. An early part of class snobbery was to use latin words instead of english ones: hence the serfs raised "pigs" but the meat that came to the nobles' tables was called "pork". The periodic attempts to inflict latin grammar upon english are rooted in this class snobbery.
But a language like the english language does not grow from the upper crust downward; it rises up from the streets and the servants' quarters where people negotiate trades and agreements, where the language is used daily in its most fundamental ways. A language grows from people having to interact with each other, and because of its very success, the Normanic upper crust was relatively insulated from the kinds of activities that built english syntax and grammar.
Though that still doesn't it make it perfectly comparable to Latin, it can be easily seen that these terms often are applicable to English grammar.
Well, you could apply the terminology of object oriented programming to HTML, and if you were careful about it, you'd have a way of teaching noobies how to build some types of web sites. But that doesn't mean that OOP is the best way to analyze or design web pages. We've got the same thing happening in english with imposed concepts of latin grammar. Better to go with Noam Chomsky, reduce all of english to the basic NV, NVN, NVNN patterns. Then work out from there what the inherent patterns of the grammar are.
If you are in a situation where it is important to you to be identified with the british upper crust, then by all means limit your use of english to that subset that fits the latin grammar imposed all so long ago by the early class snobs. But if your goal is to communicate to the huge english speaking audience that is out there now, then perhaps it would make sense to use english to its full advantage. After all, there are more Chinese now learning english as a second tongue than there are native english speakers in North America-- and I'm pretty sure that the chinese are more interested in talking about technological ideas than in trying to sound like they belong in the House of Lords.
I should stay with english english and not mess with polysyllabic latin imports. And besides, there's a very good english term I could have used: the "pie hole".
When you can work out that a clause containing a transitive verb requires an object...you can criticise other people.
Sigh.
For about 250 years now, eddykatid idjits have been trying to convince the world that correct english grammar is the grammar of the dead latin language. They would try to surgically insert a skeleton into an octopus, then when the poor dead thing can't be posed in some natural way, they would assert that such a pose is in poor taste, and simply not done by the better octopusses. Gack.
English is not latin. True, there are some superficial resemblances, like the indisputable fact that in both, the spoken words are emitted from the caudal orifices of the speakers. But the concepts of "transitive verbs", "objects", "indirect objects", "clauses", and the like are ideas of latin that have been imposed upon english by people with small minds who can't accept that english grammar is a fuzzy thing. When they see other languages that have crystalline grammars with smashing hard facets and oh so sharp edges, they want english to be the same way.
Ya wanna larn to speke english right? Then realize that the game of english is the Calvin Ball of languages.
"Don't criticize what you can't understand" --B.D.
[about slashdot's 'failure' to treat MS and FOSS screw-ups with equal equanimity] Why not offer equal critiques, and understanding, for any product regardless.
It has taken more than a decade of loathsome business practices, corrupt corporate ethics, and abusively bad coding practices for Microsoft to earn the unique status it holds on Slashdot and other fora where people who've been in the business for a while congregate. Would you deny Microsoft the community recognition it has strived so hard for so long to achieve?
Somebody is speaking like a true zealot, that's for sure!
I would like to see the spell checker in OpenOffice flag doubled words, just like the spell checker in my copy of MS Word 97 does. I believe that is on the wish list for OpenOffice. But I don't think that function belongs in a grammar checker: it works well as a spell check feature and would be available to those of us who would never run a grammar checker even if one were available. For me it isn't a critical feature, but I think it is low hanging fruit.
If you like grammar checkers, good for you. I used them for a few years when Word was new and Microsoft was our savior from the evils of Big Blue domination, and then I gave them up, about when MS transmogrified into the Evil Empire. In my experience, grammar checkers create more work than any value they add. If the paper is worth running through a grammar checker, then it needs to be taken through a review and revise cycle at least once, and that cycle is going to show up any grammatical deficiencies anyway.
If writing is an important part of the job, then rewriting is critical. Word processors make the review and revise cycle so easy-- there is really no excuse for not taking the time to do it. If there is something worth saying, then it is worth taking the time to think outside of the stale cliches. And if errors in grammar don't just pop out as sore spots while doing this kind of rewriting, then the solution is to take some classes in composition or technical writing or creative writing. Because anyone who can't see these kinds of goofs during the review and revise phase needs more guided experience in using english.
For the many for whom english is a second language-- try to get it right but don't fret over it so long as your message is as clear as you can make it. We are all learning to tolerate a greater variety of expression. But for the sake of the gods, don't think that you can rely on spell checkers and grammar checkers to make your writing better-- the spell checkers fail miserably on all of english's homonyms, and the grammar checkers are worse than that in a variety of ways.
I have a gnu spell checker; it came with my pea see.
It plane lee marks four my review miss steaks aye dew knot sea...
An english grammar checker in OpenOffice will be useful when the english language acquires a good grammar. I don't see that happening for quite a while. In over 400 years of "modern english", it hasn't happened yet.
In fact, since the number of people who now speak english as a second language greatly exceeds the number of native english speakers, the diversity of acceptable english expression is increasing. English has always been very open to importing new sentence structures as well as vocabulary from other sources. English is a healthy growing language, that is changing almost from year to year as it absorbs and transmogrifies what these new english speakers bring to the party.
I wonder what IBM's exact response was to Bill Gates showing them Windows?
"Thanks Bill, we'll call you, don't call us. In the mean time, have fun with your little program."
Uh, Microsoft developed Windows under contract to IBM, writing to IBM's performance specifications. Windows was originally intended to be the front end for OS/2 and not a standalone product. Microsoft doesn't seem to want to emphasize that part of its history. MS also doesn't emphasize that it developed its first big success, DOS, in the same way, under contract to IBM where IBM specified the feature set and a lot of the internals. I worked on and sold PCs in the late 1980s; we had a copy of Windows v2.x on one of the machines (it was a real dog).
Were it not for the funding from IBM's contracts and the work IBM did in design specification, the first two of Microsoft's successes would never have made it to the sales room.
IBM invented the first 'PC' called Acorn.
Really? I'm pretty sure that the Acorn was a different product from a different company. I'm pretty sure the IBM machine was just called the "IBM Personal Computer".
Maybe. I don't know. It seems like discussions about MS products always generate more heat and smoke than light, but I'll give it a go anyway.
If your company plans a migration to MSO.v12, then everyone involved in the decision can pat themselves on the back because nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. Yet.
When your company is running MSO.v12, it will be able to take advantage of any future tools that MS develops for MSO.v12; these will become seamless parts of your MSO package. And you can bet that MS will develop tools to meet the common needs of businesses like your own whenever MS sees a marketing advantage for itself.
If your company plans a migration to OOo.v2, then everyone involved in the decision can expect to have to defend their choice everywhere from the boardroom to the watercooler, and have to do so again and again, every time MS marketers come up with another cool sounding fiction like "Total Cost of Operations". Make no mistake: this is a marketdroid term, not an accounting term. Make no mistake: MS has a number of highly paid clever people on staff whose job is to come up with words of great portent that signify... well, nothing, usually. They are intended only to provoke those questions in the boardroom and around the watercooler; they don't need to have any substance so long as they have an important sound.
When your company is running OOo.v2, it will be able to take advantage of any future tools that any 3rd party developer working with OpenDocuments comes up with; these can become seamless parts of your OOo.v2 package. And you can bet that if your suppliers and your distributors are using OpenDocument software, somebody will find a better way of doing business within your niche. And your company will be able to take advantage of that.
Since neither MSO.v12 nor OOo.v2 is going to give your company any immediate advantage, it makes sense to look at which of these is most likely to offer future opportunities. With MSO.v12, those opportunities are limited to whatever MS might produce or software houses that buy MS licenses might produce. With OOo.v2 there is no such limit; any 3rd party developer can make use of the OpenDocument standard. That means that niche software is more likely to be produced for OOo. It also means that OOo and SOAP are more likely to intertwine than MSO and SOAP.
Most importantly, is it practical for (big) business?
Most definitely!
A web-based office suite could be a successful thin client approach to reducing software maintenance costs and improving data security, integrity and back-ups. This is very exciting stuff for admins of intranets and extranets.
If Sun - Google can do this over the internet, then they can offer it to any corporation or institution for the doing of it over a private intranet. That would provide terrific advantages and cost savings in document security, integrity, software maintenance, and more.
This would be a highly marketable product, and a direct threat to Microsoft's enterprise markets.
Has anyone ever sat through a "100 slide powerpoint file with zillions of pictures" that wasn't a torture session? Wouldn't it be good if all those two hour presentations that were put together by weekend Cecil B. Demille wannabees had to be edited down to a length fits within the normal human attention span for such things, and pared down to a handful of truly useful images?
And wouldn't it be great if those byzantine Word documents with complicated tables had to be edited into simpler structures that actually conveyed their information in a useable way?
We don't need an MS Office replacement that will do everything that MS Office has let people do-- an awful lot of those features trash the document's information and are avoided by people who know how to communicate (and really want to say something). All we really need is an office suite that supports the techniques that actually further the exchange of information.
And I for one think the world might be a better place if it was a little harder for Ambitious Andy to generate the kinds of dazzling bullsh*t that he pumps out of MS Office.
Don't take this wrong-- while I'm obviously not a Redmond fanboi I do think MS Office has been a wonderful thing that has made the world a better and richer place. It has shown us what can be done. And now it is time to recognize that of all the things that can be done, there are some things that just shouldn't be done, and if those things become harder to do, then we haven't lost anything.
Dane Rudhyar has a 13 page section titled "The unconscious planets" in the 4th edition (1991) of The astrology of personality, first published in 1936. Discussions of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are common threads throughout much of the rest of this work, too.
Sakoian and Acker devote about 70 pages to transits of Ura, Nep and Plu in Predictive astrology (1989 printing). This work was first published in 1977 and is still in print.
As early as 1952, McCaffery in Graphic astrology had fully integrated Ura and Nep into the patterns of dignity, exaltation, fall and detriment of classic western astrology, and she was describing a proposed integration of Plu into that schema which has since gained credence if not full acceptance. McCaffery's work is derivative and is a good reflection of common astrological practice of the late pre-computer era.
These works are good representatives of contemporary western astrological thought. There are usually three to six important new books on astrology published each decade (and dozens of derivatives that sometimes rework the old ground in interesting or useful new ways), and since the 1950s all of them provide some instruction on Ura, Nep and Plu.
The general practice is to regard any relationships between any of these three distant planets and any of the visible planets as indicators of the individual's social context: not his personality but his situation with regard to institutions, societal structures, and so forth.
As I understand it, what you've got to work with is the bass portion of the musical score, and what you want is to hear it played. Based on this, you've got the following sequence of problems to deal with:
digitize the information on the hardcopy musical score
convert that file to a sound file of some kind
play the result through the computer's speakers
Without a very good, specialized OCR (think big $$$), the initial digitizing is going to have to be by hand. I recall looking at a plain text notation system developed maybe in 1930s or 1950s for guitarists who didn't know musical notation. Notes were entered as A-G with sharp and flat symbols and a number for duration. Since bass lines tend not to have a lot of trills and complexities, it would probably be easy to transcribe from the music sheet into a text file using this system. I cannot recall the name of the system or even think of a good search term, sorry.
I do recall that there was at least one freeware music editor from the early 1990s that could read these text files and would generate a simple MIDI file as output. Again I don't recall any names, sorry. Also it was DOS software so I doubt that it would be relevant today.
There are any number of freeware MIDI handlers out there that would take care of actually playing the result.
Have you given any thought to looking for a free library of music that would have the pieces you are singing? It might be easier to locate mpgs or whatever and use the playback software to filter out everything but the bass portion.
In any event, probably the easiest approach is the low tech one: ask someone in your music group if they would mind playing the bass line for you on a piano or organ. That could also give your director a chance to clarify what *he* wants from you, which might well be a bit different from the original score.
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First, can you prove that man made greenhouse gases are the sole reason behind global temp. increases...
Second, what temp. is the correct temp. for the Earth?
These seem like particularly stupid questions to me, even for an obvious troll.
Questions worthy of asking:
Yep. Arguments supporting this assertion are all over; no need to repeat them here. I'm satisfied that any non-biased weighing of the evidence will show global warming; you can make your own judgment.
That depends mostly on what you value.
For those who believe that the world was created in 6 days, that Man was given the special privilege of having dominion over it, that every creature other than Man is a lesser creature without a soul, and that there will be a better world in the afterlife for all the good people, then global warming is not going to be very threatening. They can feel like they should process all the oil, ore, and lumber that they can to live their mundane lives for greater glory of the creator, and trust to their Lord God Almighty for their salvation. Rapture Rulz and all that jazz.
To those who believe that there is something sacred in each life, that a person who learns he has the power to destroy a relationship also takes on an obligation of stewardship to that relationship, and that all of the sacred beings on this earth are in relationships with each other, then global warming is a very threatening thing. They feel that anything they can do that might limit such destruction should be done.
So it really comes down to basic religion. Do you think you have an obligation to the world that supports you, or do you believe you are special in the eyes of the intelligent designer?
This kind of basic religious difference of opinion has often led to the bloodiest of wars. There is no reason to think that human nature has changed significantly since the last round of Crusades.
That is what TFA adresses.
Simplistic global warming models suggested for example that sea levels would rise about a meter over the next 6 or 10 decades; but the information in this article shows that water vapor has a multiplier effect so that this change will happen within 20 years or less (the effect of a unit increase in CO2 is about 230% of the simple prediction due to the multiplier effect of water vapor-- assuming my back-of-the-envelope extrapolation is good: I think it is conservative).
Obviously any decrease in the rate of human CO2 emissions will slow the process and buy more time. Move us away from innundation in 15 years and toward innundation in 50 years. That seems like a reasonable thing to do. Even though these efforts might be dwarfed by the release of CO2 from melted tundra or volcanos, the prudent course is to do all that can be done to limit CO2 releases. This is using "prudent" in the established legal and economic sense: what is "prudent" in religious terms will not be consistent with this for many of transcendant faiths (believers in heaven). (The opposite in this context is the immanent faiths-- believers in the sacred residing within the world).
Beyond that, it is hard to say. The impact of severe global warming, when you are 10 to 15 years older than you are right now, is impossible to predict; it is part of a chaotic system, you see. What will be the impact on Europe and global trade when the sea reclaims the Nederlands? Our attention is probably going to be there, and we will not have the resources to deal with the refugees from the concurrent Bangladesh floods, nor cope with the resulting pandemic of pneumonic plague that is a likely result of the collapse of India's public health system. Especially if the USA and other first world nations are locked into the kind of civil religious wars that seem to be shaping up (witness as early m
while simplifying, standardizing, and securing is an excellent mantra, I don't think it addresses Microsoft's core problem.
Microsoft is arguably the most successful entrepreneural endeavor, ever. But it's stuck in that mode when it should have grown beyond it years ago.
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The normal development for a successful entrepreneur business is to either break into an existing market or develop a new market and exploit it until rich. Microsoft has certainly done both, and shown itself to be really good at these things. But then the next step is to move from the entrepreneural behaviors to the behaviors of a capitalist, using the newly acquired wealth to secure solid, long term positions across a broad range of economic activities. Microsoft has not done that; instead it sits on this massive war chest of liquid assets. At this point MS labels should be showing up on bakery products, in the credits of movies and tv shows, on clothing and fashion accessories, and at the very least on computer hardware and data storage and conversion service providers. But we don't see that. Instead we see massive amounts of money poured into gambles that often don't pay off.
Instead of broad-based long term investments, MS has this huge pile of liquid assets (and that is an excellent way of visualizing the absurdity of managing a multi billion dollar war chest-- as a pile of liquids). And it has only two serious revenue generators: the Windows OS and MS Office. There should be dozens of revenue streams from a broad range of sources feeding the MS monolith at this point; that huge corporate structure should not be supported by only these two legs. But that is the way it is. Microsoft's vision of the future may be more acute than anyone else's, but it is certainly too narrow, too tightly focused, to be economically healthy.
Microsoft is in danger of falling apart. Not because Linux is beginning to cut into Windows sales or because the expense of meeting Vista's hardware requirements are going to cause a lot of MS's repeat business to go to other OSs. Nor is Microsoft at risk because OO.o offers an increasingly attractive alternative to MS Office. These things are true but if it wasn't Linux and OO.o, there would be other contenders in their place.
Microsoft is in danger of falling apart because its upper management has insisted on keeping it in the entrepreneural mind set long after it should have grown out of that childhood and taken on the responsibilities of a mature company. To give you a visual, MS is going to lose it because the mentality that has given us monkey dances and chair-throwing antics is still the mentality that MS top management tolerates and encourages. MS is going to lose it because the people that run the company think that adolescent risk taking is a lot of fun and they would rather do that than spend their time doing the boring things that executives in mature companies like IBM, General Motors, or Starbucks do.
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This should not have been rated off topic. The difference between immanent and imminent is always significant in cosmology, for religious reasons:
There are those who believe that the second coming of Christ is imminent, and they also believe that He is transcendant which in this context is the opposite of being immanent*. OTOH, there are practitioners of the Old Religions who believe that the Creatrix is immanent and inseparably a part of Her on-going creation-- never separated from or transcendant above the world She births. When "immanence" and "imminence" are confused, aspects of fundamentalist beliefs are ascribed to witches, and aspects of witchcraft are ascribed to fundamentalists; both groups get pissed off; and the Sacred Xao moos her discontent in a most distressing manner. Fnord**.
Since cosmology shares borders with religion in most people's mindspace, it is vital that "immanent" and "imminent" be used correctly in cosmological discussions.
-----
*Claiming that God or Christ is immanent in the world (and therefore transcendent) is recognized as a heresy even by the Roman Catholic Church. This is not a historic thing-- at least one priest in the last 50 years has been defrocked as a heretic on this basis. And we're talking RCC here, who are a very moderate church (and not even regarded as christians by the more rabid fundies).
**The Discordians got one thing right: you've got to be able to laugh at this stuff or your head will explode when you think about it.
Can anyone identify the artist and/or supply a pointer to the original image?
I'm interested in what ray tracer was used (POV-Ray?, what modeller (looks like maybe Blender?, and time and details about the rendering.
I also think the artist should get some credit.
Most home and office scanners offer only 256 gradations in gray scale mode. Scanning the xray image under these conditions is going to seriously compress the midrange values and some of the subtle distinctions are going to be lost. Since the concern is with arithritic changes in bone density, this would be a very serious problem. Scanning in 24 bit color mode could get around this, but it would probably introduce color artifacts that could mislead a diagnostician even when the scan looked good. (A pixel that is 50% "gray" because it is a mix of RGB values is neither as stable across all viewing conditions nor as accurate as a BW pixel at 50% brightness.)
Getting the white balance right would be critical. Lead (Pb) markers are used to provide a reference "black" value (as well as usually to show which is the left or right side of the image). Usually there is a portion of the image that has been fully exposed that will be used as reference "white" value. These will not be absolute black and absolute white-- and it is important that they be captured as they are.
Another difficulty is with the size of the xrays: some spinal films are going to be too large to fit on the typical flatbed scanner. Scanning in sections and stitching together is not a good idea: you would have to be a radiologist to know whether significant distortions were introduced in the stitching process.
Using a high end digital camera on a reverse tripod or large copystand and using .raw or .tif images could get around many of these problems. But it would introduce problems with precision geometry (to avoid distortions) that such equipment isn't designed for.
I wouldn't trust xray duplication to the people at Kinko's-- they are good at what they do, but this work demands calibration techniques that they are not trained in and which might be beyond the capabilities of their equipment.
I think it would be a good idea to have the copies prepared by a radiology service. They have the equipment and the skills to make accurate copies. You might want to contact some radiology service providers to see if you can get the copies made without hospital and doctor overhead costs.
I have worked beside physicians reading xrays in ER and ICU settings, and a couple of pieces of knowledge rubbed off on me after a few years. I have been using digital imaging in technical work such as recovery of damaged historical photographs for three years.
And why is this "just how it works". ... I do not understand why it is "just how it works" to ship with real, creating-problems-for-users bugs that are known.
The short answer is that there will always be one more bug, because software is a simplified digital model of a very complex analog world.
Part of the longer answer is that by the time the software ships, the only bugs that are left are the really tough ones. In fact, there comes a point in any non-trivial programming effort where the risk of introducing a new (and possibly worse) bug while fixing a known one is a very real risk, and the amount of testing to assure that you haven't just done this really slows down the process. And isn't really foolproof yet, anyway.
When the bugs have been reduced to where many users will be able to get a reasonable amount of work done without an unreasonable amount of frustration from the remaining bugs, the software is ready for shipping. Determining how many users, what is reasonable, and what is unreasonable is sometimes considered part of the art of programming. But sometimes these determinations are turned over to the marketdroids. Which one is most likely depends a lot on whether you are talking about FOSS or about market-driven companies, like maybe, oh I don't know-- MICROSOFT?? ;^)
the question isn't really weather life begins at conception, but rather moral personhood.
Excellent point!
And I'm glad you qualified "personhood", since any reasoned discussion on these subjects has to be able to distinquish between "moral personhood" and "legal personhood".
To my mind, the most critical issue from a pragmatic point of view is when does "legal personhood" begin under US law? Unfortunately, a strict constructionist view of the US Constitution doesn't help here, because the Framers didn't have the foresight to define who, exactly, was a legal person (or "man", in the parlance of that day). I think this was a cop-out: I think under the pressing immediate need to get some kind of governance established, the founding fathers decided to avoid any phrasing that would bring up questions about the status of women, blacks, and children, and whether they were chattel or not. This was probably a wise decision at the time-- history shows that finding the answers to some of these questions had a terrible blood cost that the US would not have been able to pay in the late 1700s.
It is clear that US rights extend beyond US citizens to anyone with legal personhood who is in a US jurisdiction no matter what their citizenship. So is a given fetus within an area of US jurisdiction? Superficially that might seem easy to determine, but then there are embassies of foreign nations that are within US boundaries but are not within US jurisdictions.
I think for a variety of reasons, we need to regard the fetus as similar to the foreign employee of a foreign embassy-- not subject to US justice even though physically surrounded by US territory. I think trying to handle this in any other way would destroy some critical foundations of US law. I think it would quickly lead to a situation where a US President would be able to justify a war against China because China fails to provide its citizens with the rights delineated in the US Constitution. We already see that kind of reasoning being offered by some citizens who are rather ignorant of Constitutional rights and obligations; there is no question that if it was possible to phrase such a justification in legitimate terms, we would see it put forth by some politicians, and we would have to deal with the consequences.
Ok except consider the following:...
Ok, now consider this: MS Access is a strong contender for the Worst Ever Forward Compatibility Prize , no matter what criteria any panel of judges might decide to use. It doesn't look like Jet improves the situation at all-- it appears that the Jet technology is just extending the compatibility issues to the other MS Office applications that have now begun to rely on it for some functions.
The basic problem seems to go back to some of the earliest issues in software design. If I remember my studies correctly, one of von Neumann's contributions in the 1940s was the concept that the program and its data should be separated. If you don't maintain a clear separation between data and procedure, you are going to end up with a system that is impossible to maintain or improve without breaking compatibility, among other problems.
It seems to me that Microsoft has been violating this basic principle of computing for at least 10 years now. MS likes to tightly cross-couple its data with its programming, apparently for marketing reasons (there certainly is no engineering benefit to this practice). Whether you look at Microsoft office products through historical practice or through the rosey lenses of computing theory, you see that they are deficient in providing for long term compatibility.
Point One: wrt to archival access, the "standard of the industry" and good corporate practices do not apply to some institutions, such as governments.
The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was ratified in 1780; it is of course still in active use. There is a large body of documents written before 1780 that might be called up on any discussion of MA law or procedure, as well as a yearly addition to this that has grown exponentially. This is not just the legislative and judicial records; it includes agency policy memos and even invoices and purchase orders since these might indicate how MA actually did its daily work at any time.
This is a "living archive" situation-- any of these old documents of the last 300 years could become relevant again today in a variety of different settings ranging from courtroom fights over MA's stewardship of public lands to the responsibilities that anyone selling goods or services to MA residents must meet.
I agree with the current govenrment of MA that it is important to make these materials as accessable as possible for as long as MA continues to exist. And it makes sense to look for the most efficient way to do this-- which in the eyes of those who have assessed the numerous studies, means moving to OpenDocument.
Point Two: Some other institutions have similar needs. Hospitals are one example that I know fairly well.
Malpractice litigation is one of a hospital's biggest expenses. In its collective wisdom, US courts have determined that a hospital should not be held to today's standard of care for an incident that happened years ago; the hospital should be held to the standard of care that existed at the the time of the incident. It is the hospital's responsibility to prove what its standard of care at that time was, and whether it exercised due diligence in developing and enforcing that standard. That means that all old policy and procedure statements, the research that informed these decisions, attendance records for training sessions in the new procedures, and some indication of compliance with the changed standard, all need to be part of a living archive. Obviously storing all this material digitally has advantages over paper storage. Just as clearly, it makes sense to go to a format that promises easy access into the future.
I worked for a hospital when MS Office 2000 was released. Our IT department thought this was a big deal when the first machines came in, and handed them out like candy to the Most Very Important Persons. IT got slapped hard alongside the head when the hospital Administrator found that the memo he had written on his new computer looked like crap on the computers of the clinical staff who were still using Office 97. IT got slapped hard again, when a Quality Control nurse found that MS Office 2000 mangled old policy statements that had been written in Word 97 and made them unusable. In the end, IT had to go through the expense of ripping out MS Office 2000 on every newly purchased machine, and replacing it with MS Office 97, and living in an uncomfortably ambiguous legal situation since Microsoft wouldn't give a straight answer to whether such a change was actually covered under the blanket contract. Instead of being acclaimed as the white knight heroes that the IT staff thought would be their due, the whole department acquired an odor reminiscent of the unclean shoes of a swineherd.
If there is a moral to this longish Sunday morning writing exercise, it is that youngsters who are entering the IT professions need to keep an eye on issues of long term storage and broad access.
So space sex should be thoroughly studied before we do any Mars trips.
Sounds like maybe we've finally got a justification for the ISS.
I suppose this will probably be rated "funny", but I'm kind of serious. Considering all the limitations imposed on the ISS by the Space Shuttle, behavioral studies are one of the few fields where ISS research can be justified. (I'm not talking about just the Shuttle problems of the last few years; the ISS potential was badly reduced from the beginning, with the decision to go with the Shuttle but not to build the Space Tug.
Superficial resemblances? You're overlooking the fact that English, though ultimately Germanic, has great Latin lineage.
No, I am not overlooking latin's direct and indirect influences on english. Quite a bit of vocabulary is directly descended from latin through the centuries of Roman settlements, and quite a bit more has been imported either directly or through other romance languages. But very little of english syntax or grammar can be traced to latin influences. English doesn't work anything like latin.
After the conquest of England almost a thousand years ago, many Latinate concepts and words were grafted into English by the Norman French, not by those of us living today.
The Normans came to England several hundred years after the Romans; the first latin influence on the proto-english tongues was already well established by then. BTW, the Normans were of northern stock, hence their name. You can't call them French, since the earliest French identity was still 200 - 400 years in the future-- the Normans were one of the ancestral sources of the French in the same way they were an ancestor of the English.
The Normans imposed a strong class hierarchy on England. A big part of the differential between upper and lower class was in literacy, which at that time meant reading and writing in latin. An early part of class snobbery was to use latin words instead of english ones: hence the serfs raised "pigs" but the meat that came to the nobles' tables was called "pork". The periodic attempts to inflict latin grammar upon english are rooted in this class snobbery.
But a language like the english language does not grow from the upper crust downward; it rises up from the streets and the servants' quarters where people negotiate trades and agreements, where the language is used daily in its most fundamental ways. A language grows from people having to interact with each other, and because of its very success, the Normanic upper crust was relatively insulated from the kinds of activities that built english syntax and grammar.
Though that still doesn't it make it perfectly comparable to Latin, it can be easily seen that these terms often are applicable to English grammar.
Well, you could apply the terminology of object oriented programming to HTML, and if you were careful about it, you'd have a way of teaching noobies how to build some types of web sites. But that doesn't mean that OOP is the best way to analyze or design web pages. We've got the same thing happening in english with imposed concepts of latin grammar. Better to go with Noam Chomsky, reduce all of english to the basic NV, NVN, NVNN patterns. Then work out from there what the inherent patterns of the grammar are.
If you are in a situation where it is important to you to be identified with the british upper crust, then by all means limit your use of english to that subset that fits the latin grammar imposed all so long ago by the early class snobs. But if your goal is to communicate to the huge english speaking audience that is out there now, then perhaps it would make sense to use english to its full advantage. After all, there are more Chinese now learning english as a second tongue than there are native english speakers in North America-- and I'm pretty sure that the chinese are more interested in talking about technological ideas than in trying to sound like they belong in the House of Lords.
Oooh, my bad. "Cephalic orifice", of course.
I should stay with english english and not mess with polysyllabic latin imports. And besides, there's a very good english term I could have used: the "pie hole".
When you can work out that a clause containing a transitive verb requires an object...you can criticise other people.
Sigh.
For about 250 years now, eddykatid idjits have been trying to convince the world that correct english grammar is the grammar of the dead latin language. They would try to surgically insert a skeleton into an octopus, then when the poor dead thing can't be posed in some natural way, they would assert that such a pose is in poor taste, and simply not done by the better octopusses. Gack.
English is not latin. True, there are some superficial resemblances, like the indisputable fact that in both, the spoken words are emitted from the caudal orifices of the speakers. But the concepts of "transitive verbs", "objects", "indirect objects", "clauses", and the like are ideas of latin that have been imposed upon english by people with small minds who can't accept that english grammar is a fuzzy thing. When they see other languages that have crystalline grammars with smashing hard facets and oh so sharp edges, they want english to be the same way.
Ya wanna larn to speke english right? Then realize that the game of english is the Calvin Ball of languages.
"Don't criticize what you can't understand" --B.D.
[about slashdot's 'failure' to treat MS and FOSS screw-ups with equal equanimity] Why not offer equal critiques, and understanding, for any product regardless.
It has taken more than a decade of loathsome business practices, corrupt corporate ethics, and abusively bad coding practices for Microsoft to earn the unique status it holds on Slashdot and other fora where people who've been in the business for a while congregate. Would you deny Microsoft the community recognition it has strived so hard for so long to achieve?
Somebody is speaking like a true zealot, that's for sure!
I would like to see the spell checker in OpenOffice flag doubled words, just like the spell checker in my copy of MS Word 97 does. I believe that is on the wish list for OpenOffice. But I don't think that function belongs in a grammar checker: it works well as a spell check feature and would be available to those of us who would never run a grammar checker even if one were available. For me it isn't a critical feature, but I think it is low hanging fruit.
If you like grammar checkers, good for you. I used them for a few years when Word was new and Microsoft was our savior from the evils of Big Blue domination, and then I gave them up, about when MS transmogrified into the Evil Empire. In my experience, grammar checkers create more work than any value they add. If the paper is worth running through a grammar checker, then it needs to be taken through a review and revise cycle at least once, and that cycle is going to show up any grammatical deficiencies anyway.
If writing is an important part of the job, then rewriting is critical. Word processors make the review and revise cycle so easy-- there is really no excuse for not taking the time to do it. If there is something worth saying, then it is worth taking the time to think outside of the stale cliches. And if errors in grammar don't just pop out as sore spots while doing this kind of rewriting, then the solution is to take some classes in composition or technical writing or creative writing. Because anyone who can't see these kinds of goofs during the review and revise phase needs more guided experience in using english.
For the many for whom english is a second language-- try to get it right but don't fret over it so long as your message is as clear as you can make it. We are all learning to tolerate a greater variety of expression. But for the sake of the gods, don't think that you can rely on spell checkers and grammar checkers to make your writing better-- the spell checkers fail miserably on all of english's homonyms, and the grammar checkers are worse than that in a variety of ways.
I have a gnu spell checker; it came with my pea see.
It plane lee marks four my review miss steaks aye dew knot sea...
An english grammar checker in OpenOffice will be useful when the english language acquires a good grammar. I don't see that happening for quite a while. In over 400 years of "modern english", it hasn't happened yet.
In fact, since the number of people who now speak english as a second language greatly exceeds the number of native english speakers, the diversity of acceptable english expression is increasing. English has always been very open to importing new sentence structures as well as vocabulary from other sources. English is a healthy growing language, that is changing almost from year to year as it absorbs and transmogrifies what these new english speakers bring to the party.
I have no problem envisioning the up side of leaping over a 100 storey building.
However there is a down side to this that I'd rather not visualize...
I wonder what IBM's exact response was to Bill Gates showing them Windows?
"Thanks Bill, we'll call you, don't call us. In the mean time, have fun with your little program."
Uh, Microsoft developed Windows under contract to IBM, writing to IBM's performance specifications. Windows was originally intended to be the front end for OS/2 and not a standalone product. Microsoft doesn't seem to want to emphasize that part of its history. MS also doesn't emphasize that it developed its first big success, DOS, in the same way, under contract to IBM where IBM specified the feature set and a lot of the internals. I worked on and sold PCs in the late 1980s; we had a copy of Windows v2.x on one of the machines (it was a real dog).
Were it not for the funding from IBM's contracts and the work IBM did in design specification, the first two of Microsoft's successes would never have made it to the sales room.
IBM invented the first 'PC' called Acorn.
Really? I'm pretty sure that the Acorn was a different product from a different company. I'm pretty sure the IBM machine was just called the "IBM Personal Computer".
So can anyone shed some more light on that issue?
Maybe. I don't know. It seems like discussions about MS products always generate more heat and smoke than light, but I'll give it a go anyway.
If your company plans a migration to MSO.v12, then everyone involved in the decision can pat themselves on the back because nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft. Yet.
When your company is running MSO.v12, it will be able to take advantage of any future tools that MS develops for MSO.v12; these will become seamless parts of your MSO package. And you can bet that MS will develop tools to meet the common needs of businesses like your own whenever MS sees a marketing advantage for itself.
If your company plans a migration to OOo.v2, then everyone involved in the decision can expect to have to defend their choice everywhere from the boardroom to the watercooler, and have to do so again and again, every time MS marketers come up with another cool sounding fiction like "Total Cost of Operations". Make no mistake: this is a marketdroid term, not an accounting term. Make no mistake: MS has a number of highly paid clever people on staff whose job is to come up with words of great portent that signify... well, nothing, usually. They are intended only to provoke those questions in the boardroom and around the watercooler; they don't need to have any substance so long as they have an important sound.
When your company is running OOo.v2, it will be able to take advantage of any future tools that any 3rd party developer working with OpenDocuments comes up with; these can become seamless parts of your OOo.v2 package. And you can bet that if your suppliers and your distributors are using OpenDocument software, somebody will find a better way of doing business within your niche. And your company will be able to take advantage of that.
Since neither MSO.v12 nor OOo.v2 is going to give your company any immediate advantage, it makes sense to look at which of these is most likely to offer future opportunities. With MSO.v12, those opportunities are limited to whatever MS might produce or software houses that buy MS licenses might produce. With OOo.v2 there is no such limit; any 3rd party developer can make use of the OpenDocument standard. That means that niche software is more likely to be produced for OOo. It also means that OOo and SOAP are more likely to intertwine than MSO and SOAP.
Most importantly, is it practical for (big) business?
Most definitely!
A web-based office suite could be a successful thin client approach to reducing software maintenance costs and improving data security, integrity and back-ups. This is very exciting stuff for admins of intranets and extranets.
is there a business model for this?
If Sun - Google can do this over the internet, then they can offer it to any corporation or institution for the doing of it over a private intranet. That would provide terrific advantages and cost savings in document security, integrity, software maintenance, and more.
This would be a highly marketable product, and a direct threat to Microsoft's enterprise markets.
Somewhere in Redmond, a chair hits the wall...
Has anyone ever sat through a "100 slide powerpoint file with zillions of pictures" that wasn't a torture session? Wouldn't it be good if all those two hour presentations that were put together by weekend Cecil B. Demille wannabees had to be edited down to a length fits within the normal human attention span for such things, and pared down to a handful of truly useful images?
And wouldn't it be great if those byzantine Word documents with complicated tables had to be edited into simpler structures that actually conveyed their information in a useable way?
We don't need an MS Office replacement that will do everything that MS Office has let people do-- an awful lot of those features trash the document's information and are avoided by people who know how to communicate (and really want to say something). All we really need is an office suite that supports the techniques that actually further the exchange of information.
And I for one think the world might be a better place if it was a little harder for Ambitious Andy to generate the kinds of dazzling bullsh*t that he pumps out of MS Office.
Don't take this wrong-- while I'm obviously not a Redmond fanboi I do think MS Office has been a wonderful thing that has made the world a better and richer place. It has shown us what can be done. And now it is time to recognize that of all the things that can be done, there are some things that just shouldn't be done, and if those things become harder to do, then we haven't lost anything.
Is Google the harbinger of the Sigularity?
I, for one, welcome our new Googleverse!
Dane Rudhyar has a 13 page section titled "The unconscious planets" in the 4th edition (1991) of The astrology of personality, first published in 1936. Discussions of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are common threads throughout much of the rest of this work, too.
Sakoian and Acker devote about 70 pages to transits of Ura, Nep and Plu in Predictive astrology (1989 printing). This work was first published in 1977 and is still in print.
As early as 1952, McCaffery in Graphic astrology had fully integrated Ura and Nep into the patterns of dignity, exaltation, fall and detriment of classic western astrology, and she was describing a proposed integration of Plu into that schema which has since gained credence if not full acceptance. McCaffery's work is derivative and is a good reflection of common astrological practice of the late pre-computer era.
These works are good representatives of contemporary western astrological thought. There are usually three to six important new books on astrology published each decade (and dozens of derivatives that sometimes rework the old ground in interesting or useful new ways), and since the 1950s all of them provide some instruction on Ura, Nep and Plu.
The general practice is to regard any relationships between any of these three distant planets and any of the visible planets as indicators of the individual's social context: not his personality but his situation with regard to institutions, societal structures, and so forth.
As I understand it, what you've got to work with is the bass portion of the musical score, and what you want is to hear it played. Based on this, you've got the following sequence of problems to deal with:
Without a very good, specialized OCR (think big $$$), the initial digitizing is going to have to be by hand. I recall looking at a plain text notation system developed maybe in 1930s or 1950s for guitarists who didn't know musical notation. Notes were entered as A-G with sharp and flat symbols and a number for duration. Since bass lines tend not to have a lot of trills and complexities, it would probably be easy to transcribe from the music sheet into a text file using this system. I cannot recall the name of the system or even think of a good search term, sorry.
I do recall that there was at least one freeware music editor from the early 1990s that could read these text files and would generate a simple MIDI file as output. Again I don't recall any names, sorry. Also it was DOS software so I doubt that it would be relevant today.
There are any number of freeware MIDI handlers out there that would take care of actually playing the result.
Have you given any thought to looking for a free library of music that would have the pieces you are singing? It might be easier to locate mpgs or whatever and use the playback software to filter out everything but the bass portion.
In any event, probably the easiest approach is the low tech one: ask someone in your music group if they would mind playing the bass line for you on a piano or organ. That could also give your director a chance to clarify what *he* wants from you, which might well be a bit different from the original score.
HTH