One supposes that fixed nitrogen embedded in plant tissue might be slightly less likely to run straight off into the downstream water supply than loose nitrogen from fertilizer (especially if the fertilizer is sprayed on rather than tilled in; I'm not sure how common that is in practice).
I'm not entirely convinced that the other poster's conclusion (that wider use of genetically modified crops would therefore reduce the incidence of harmful algal bloom) is necessarily correct, but I think I understand, at least partly, how he could have arrived at such a conclusion.
> And, just like how England is in the United Kingdom, > but the United Kingdom isn't England
I suppose too that The United States of America is in the Americas but the United States thereof is not the same thing as America? And we dursn't call it just "the States" either because that's ambiguous because there might be other countries with the word "States" in their name at some point? Shall we stop calling China just "China" and start spelling out "The People's Democratic Socialist Republic of Maoist China" or whatever it's called in the formal diplomatic papers, every single time we refer to it, and similarly for the other one across the strait? And we should say "The Republic of the Netherlands" instead of Holland?
Phooey. Life's too short, and all that gratuitous verbiage takes too long to say every single time. I'm going to keep on calling them England and America and China and Taiwan. Every single person on the planet knows exactly which country I mean, *including* the sadly misguided people who insist I should call them by their ridiculously long official names all the time. Stuff that.
It's a little different with the web, because "the web" doesn't actually take longer to say than "the internet" or even just "the net". So, okay, we can call it "the web". I can live with that one.
> So you don't own a TV, watch DVDs, bluerays, use a cellphone,
What would I want any of that junk for? I've got internet access.
> or drive a car?
This would be the sticking point for most Americans. In terms of transportation, you can do just fine without a motor vehicle, if you live in a sufficiently small community that you can just walk everywhere, or if you get into bicycling in a major way. The main problem is not a practical matter but a social one: many Americans refuse to accept you as a full-fledged member of society if you do not drive a car on a regular basis. It's worse than living with your parents. People treat you like a (particularly tall) child, even if you're forty years old. Some us can live with that, but if you base your self-image on what other people think of you, it's not recommended.
There is one thing that's even worse: be single and celibate and openly admit that you intend to remain that way. People will tell you *to your face* that you aren't an adult. It's a fascinating aspect of American culture. In contrast, failure to take responsibility for providing your own financial needs will barely get noticed. Apparently that's not really expected.
Most of what typical Americans know about London comes from fiction set in the Victorian era, of which Doyle's writings, and the many horribly-derivative works based on them, are probably the most important. You may now commence cringing, if you are so inclined.
Oh, we also know about Trafalgar square, for whatever that's worth.
Prior to the mid-twentieth century, wars were frequently fought between opposing powers and even superpowers, with one or more of the top five or so most powerful nations in the world on each side of the conflict. This kind of war is devastating not just to the individual countries involved but to the entire world, not just economically but in other ways as well. Conscription was taken for granted as necessary for the survival of any free state. Entire generations were decimated and their educations cut short. Huge amounts of infrastructure were destroyed.
There are *very* few fifty-year periods in history when this sort of thing didn't happen. Assyria versus Egypt. Assyria versus Elam. Babylon versus Assyria. Babylon versus Egypt. Persia versus Media. Persia versus Assyria. Persia versus Greece. Greece versus any major power (of the day) that you care to name, including each other (the Seleucids versus the Ptolemies especially). Rome versus Greece. Rome versus Carthage. Civil war within the Roman empire. Rome versus Parthia. Rome versus Sassanid Persia. Western Rome versus the Byzantine Empire. Internal civil war within the Western Roman empire. The Byzantine Empire versus Sassanid Persia. Western Rome versus several of the most powerful groups of their former subjects (the Franks, the Gauls, the Hunns, etc.). The Byzantines versus the Caliphate. Western Rome (what was left of it) versus the Caliphate. The Mongols versus any major power of the day you care to name. The Holy Roman Empire versus any European power of the day you care to name. France versus Prussia. Spain versus Portugal. Spain versus England. England versus France. France versus Germany. France versus England. Several Revolutions in the British Empire. Revolution in France. France versus the rest of Europe. England versus the United States in The Stupidest War Ever. The Ottomans versus Russia, France, and England. Germany versus Everybody. Germany versus Everybody, Take 2.
And then suddenly it stopped -- mostly. The second half of the twentieth century (assuming you don't count the almost-entirely-non-military "Cold War" as a war -- I think there were a couple of military aircraft shot down) is one of those rare periods where none of the world's major powers were in active combat against one another -- at least, not directly. There have been conflicts between some of the major powers and one another's loosely-allied quasi-puppet associates, but since about 1950 the major powers have all avoided directly fighting one another.
It's not perfect world peace, obviously. But it's an improvement.
Perfect world peace can of course only be achieved through a single worldwide absolutely tyrannical militarily-enforced dictatorship. Which would be great, if the dictator were [long list of characteristics that are uncommon among humans in general, several of which are ridiculously uncommon among dictators in particular].
Oh, it cools down a little at night, but we're talking about maybe a twenty degree difference, and it's still about as humid as the inside of a lake.
> That said, you should look into opening more windows, > directing natural airflow towards bedrooms
Yeah, unfortunately, the idiot who designed this house managed to rig it so that no two windows of any significant size are directly across from one another without turning *multiple* corners in between; and then a subsequent owner decided to paint shut the frames of the windows that face into the prevailing wind on the main floor in such a way as to prevent them from ever being opened again.
Older homes. You gotta love 'em.
With that said...
> There are very few places where the nighttime outside temperatures aren't comfortable.
Your definition of "comfortable" and mine obviously differ.
Yes, it cools down outside a bit at night -- cooler than in the day, certainly -- but there's no way I would describe the temperature outside as "comfortable". I live in Ohio, which is not noted for being particularly unusual or extreme in terms of summer weather, and our nighttime outdoor conditions for the past few weeks have been... Is "saunaesque" a word?
> The question is not whether or not it is possible but whether or not it is realistic and practical.
Using Python for data analysis is realistic, assuming you know Python (or have enough background in computer science to pick it up quickly -- it's not a particularly difficult language, as languages go: I've seen accounting software packages that would be much harder to learn).
Python is perhaps not quite as practical as some other choices. In particular, object-oriented programming is not an especially good fit for many data analysis tasks; a multiparadigmatic language would often be better, because it lets you use functional techniques, which is often very handy for working with data sets. (It's no coincidence that SQL bears a striking resemblance to the data-filtering portions of a typical impure functional language.) OTOH, it's good that not everyone uses exactly the same thing. The right tool for the specific job you're doing and all that -- all data analysis is not created identical.
> 1) Dump a bucket of water over your head. This will DRASTICALLY > and almost instantly reduce your temperature considerably.
Drastically? Almost instantly? Really? Where do you live, Nunavut?
I've found taking a cold shower cools me down, but it takes about ten minutes.
> 2) Reduce your physical activity level
Yes, and also, reduce your metabolism, by eating a *lot* less than you normally do the rest of the year. I'm talking, a glass of cold milk for breakfast, a glass of cold milk for lunch, and maybe a cucumber and some cold milk for supper. It takes a few days, but your metabolism *will* slow down -- so much so that mundane activities like showering will take up to half again as long as usual and you won't notice if you aren't staring at a clock, so pay attention that you don't make yourself late for work.
> 3) Drink plenty of cold water
Indeed.
> You'll feel a little cold when going to sleep [without heavy blankets]
In this weather, are you kidding? I can "sleep" nude without sheets in front of a thirty-inch box fan set on high and not feel even remotely cold. I put the word "sleep" in quotation marks because what actually happens in this weather is I lay there all night drenched in sweat wishing sleep were possible, or maybe death.
> 7) Make a conscious effort to stay in the shade.
Yeah. I have to walk through open sunshine for about eight minutes a day on my way to work, and again on the way home, and in this weather that trip like to kills me.
Fortunately there's air conditioning at work, so at least I don't have to try to be productive in the heat. Now if only I could get some sleep at night, I might almost feel human.
> It would be nice if the use of "near miss" would stop on the grounds that it's ambiguous
It's not ambiguous. In the entire history of the English language the phrase "near miss" has only ever been used with one meaning. The fact that a small handful of misguided pedants think it should mean something different from what it obviously does mean does not make it ambiguous. The pedants are just wrong -- and even they clearly understand what the writer intended to say.
> You scare me, btw. I now wonder what other things you consider to be trivial knowledge.
Oh, come on. If the radius of the earth in flipping kilometers isn't trivial, I'm sure I have no idea what would be. I suppose you also think everyone should memorize fifty digits of e (I only know thirteen digits), what month the Battle of Carchemish took place (I only know the year), the complete list of sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (I only know about a third of them), which of the three ideal gas laws is named after which person (Boyle, Charles, and whoever the other one was named after, for when volume is held constant, I forget his name), the full list of Roman emperors (I only know the major ones), the names of all 92 Johnson solids (most days I only remember the Platonic solids and some of the Archimedean ones), the number of verses in each chapter of the Bible, and the full lists of which cast members appear and do not appear in each episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Do you have room left in your brain for anything that's, you know, useful?
Umm, no. English only imports plural forms from the source language when the singular form retains the singular markings from the source language (e.g., "alumni" because the singular form "alumnus" has that very recognizable Latin -us singular ending). The plural would only be "octopodes" if the singular were "octopous" (which would rhyme with "papoose"). The root may come from Greek, but the inflectional ending does not.
> My first idea is to start off with a few good TNG episodes, > and then let them watch First Contact.
I would have said a few good TNG episodes and then Insurrection, but sure, whatever.
> Which particular episodes would you recommend watching > for someone who is completely new to all this?"
Start with these four exceptionally good ones, in any order: Time's Arrow The Best of Both Worlds The Inner Light Soldiers of the Empire (DS9, but it's the best Klingon episode ever)
Then go through these, in order by air date: Who Watches the Watchers Darmok Ensign Ro A Fistful of Datas Ship in a Bottle Face of the Enemy Gambit Lower Decks Masks
Then do the four good TOS movies (STII:TWOK, STIII:TSFS, STIV:TVH, and STVI:TUC). Don't show ST:TMP until they've seen most or all of the TOS episodes. You have to be seriously nostalgic for TOS to sit through that one. (What? I have no idea what you're on about. Don't be absurd. There is no Star Trek Five. They crash the Bird of Prey in San Fransisco at the end of IV and take the new Enterprise A from earth at the beginning of VI. Nothing of interest happens in between -- nothing that would've been worth filming, certainly.)
After the four good TOS movies, if they're still with you, you can start going through whole seasons of TNG, but stay *away* from seasons 1 and 2. After seasons 3-7, show the TNG movies and then start in on DS9 and after that maybe Voyager.
Later, when they consider themselves big fans of the franchise, you can go back and show them some TOS episodes, to be immediately followed by TNG seasons 1 and 2. A good way to introduce TOS is to watch the DS9 and VOY episodes that re-use old TOS footage, then go back and watch the originals of those episodes, then branch out to other halfway decent TOS episodes.
> The number of times 'Big company sues little man' is tiny compared > to the number of times 'Little man sues big company'. And the number > of times Big company files a suit that is doesn't have a very good > chance of winning is even smaller than that.
So are we calling the RIAA a "little man" now, or what?
The really correct solution is to make it illegal to solicit or provide legal services for payment (i.e., lawyers become illegal). Each person must stand before the court and make his own case and be judged. A private company would be represented by the owner, and any publicly traded company would be represented by the largest individual shareholder (if said person holds at least some fixed percentage of the stock -- perhaps 5% or so) or a court-appointed advocate (otherwise).
We could argue about whether it should be legal to sell some or all of your stock in order to duck the responsibility of representing the company in court. I tend to think yes, but I'm potentially willing to be persuaded otherwise, if someone can come up with good reasons.
> I was hoping that "Power Over the Internet" was analogous to "Power Over Ethernet"
That's how I initially read it too, but my reaction was somewhat different from your "Cool".
My thinking would be, we've had a Power over Ethernet spec for years and years, and hardly anybody actually uses it for anything. We've got a functional (albeit somewhat old and less robust than we could wish) power grid, and a while back there was some noise about a company wanting to provide internet-over-powerlines, and nothing substantial ever came of that. It seems to me that running power and network signals over the same cables has been tried from both ends and found largely impractical each time. I don't see any point in investing further resources along those lines at this time. (Also, I finished typing that sentence before I realized it had a really bad pun on the word "lines". That was totally inadvertent. Sorry.)
The important difference between marijuana and alcohol isn't potency or side effects, but practical controllability.
A random third grader of mediocre intelligence is exceptionally unlikely to accidentally discover how to make his own marijuana using nothing but common food and a piece of Tupperware. Producing it in any substantial quantity at all either has to be done outdoors in plain sight where it can be spotted from airplanes, or else it requires special equipment and draws an unusual amount of power. Either way, people who grow it in any developed area, in any quantity suitable for distribution, invariably get caught. That makes it effectively an import, which makes it theoretically controllable (not absolutely, but to a great extent).
Attempting to prevent people from getting alcohol, on the other hand, is like attempting to prevent teenagers from making rude comments. You can make basic alcohol (beer, wine, etc) in a six-foot-square shed using nothing but food and some containers. Add basic household kitchen equipment and you can make exceptionally strong distilled liquors. The only people who were sober during prohibition were sober before and after prohibition too (unless they weren't around yet when prohibition started and/or had died before it ended). A law against alcohol is like a law against being a jerk -- possibly well intentioned, but totally unenforceable. That doesn't really apply to marijuana -- certainly not to anything like the same extent.
No, if you want to argue that marijuana should be legal because something else that's at least as bad is legal, alcohol is the wrong substance to compare against.
Tobacco would be a better comparison. The only reason tobacco is legal is because it always has been. If it were a new product, the FDA would make it go away so fast you'd never even know it existed (unless you're in the habit of reading obscure research journals, and maybe not even then). I have doubts it could even make it into clinical trials, and if it did the effects it has on the heart and nervous system would kill it before the conclusion of phase I.
Nonetheless, tobacco is theoretically not significantly harder to control than marijuana, substantially more addictive, and WAY too medically harmful to ever be approved for prescription use under the current standards[1] even if it weren't addictive. Yet, it remains legal. If you want to compare marijuana against a legal drug, in order to argue that it should be legal, tobacco is your best option.
--- [1] Technically, something with side effects like tobacco has could be approved, if it were an effective treatment, for extremely intractable and unpleasant targets, like ALS or forms of metastatic cancer for which no good chemotherapy exists. But the drugs we're talking about aren't useful for treating those kinds of conditions.
> the author was able to find some feature that wasn't in MS Word
There are a lot of features that aren't in word. Even such basic things as grouping-symbol matching and sexp-based navigation, which Emacs users have taken for granted since the days before WYSIWYG, are completely absent.
However, the author is obviously a rank amateur when it comes to customizing a computer, and it would have been possible for him to continue using Word (or OpenOffice.org for that matter) if he'd had a better idea what he was doing. What he actually wanted was to turn Aero Glass the everliving badword off and set his system colors to something he could actually live with. Most modern word processors will adhere to the system colors as long as you don't specifically tell them to make the text (or background) another color. Thus, it can be #FFE6BC on #294D4A (or whatever you like) on your screen, but when you hit print it still comes out black on white. I do this with OpenOffice.org all the time, and I imagine Word is very similar.
Web browsers can also be configured to behave in this way, although for some reason I can't fathom it's not the default. In Firefox, for example, Edit->Preferences->Content->Colors, make sure "Use system colors" is checked and "Allow pages to choose their own colors" is unchecked. Most browsers have this option, although finding it in the preferences is of course different for each. Quite frankly, I can't imagine browsing the web any other way. So many sites have such appallingly bad taste in colors, even for a person with normal vision, browsing with page-specified colors turned on is categorically unthinkable, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, really, the most popular combination by far is... black text on a white background? Seriously? No fooling, the most popular colors are black on white? Can you say "eyestrain"? Why would anyone ever want that? Do they think we want to pretend we're back in the twentieth century using a sheet of paper instead of a screen, or what? I've never been willing to put up with page-specified colors and have always turned them off most of the time, even back in the days of Netscape 4.
One more tip: the article talks a lot about switching settings, so I guess I should mention that if you get the Web Developer toolbar, there's a convenient option to enable and disable page colors on the fly (plus options for enabling and disabling various other things), without needing to dig through the preferences each time. Although, the situations in which you want to turn page colors on are pretty rare in my experience, so maybe that's not a big deal.
Players who are not cheating should be allowed to voluntarily play in the pool where cheating is allowed, for the extra challenge. Of course, if you're not cheating it would be voluntary, and you could go back out into the regular game world any time. But for really advanced players, the extra challenge of playing against stacked odds and unconstrained opponents could be compelling.
> every time there is a new version it is much improved
There was one exception, actually: IE4 was a great deal worse than IE3. It tried to introduce some primitive CSS support, but it was so broken that it ended up making websites completely unusable where in IE3 they would have been usable (albeit not beautifully styled). Also, IE4 introduced the nightmarish "integration" fiasco that resulted in junk like not being able to open multimedia content in your usual media player because IE was in bed with the new and horrible Windows Media Player. There were also issues related to Windows Explorer. Oh, yeah, and wasn't IE4 also the release that introduced "friendly error messages"? Gah.
Hello, welcome to our universe. You may be interested in knowing that our history here is different in some ways from the history where you come from. Among other things, in our universe, 5.0 was the first version of IE that was usable for even basic purposes, and it wasn't until 5.5 that IE finally reached feature parity with Navigator 4.08. (However, Netscape took so ridiculously long to come out with the next major version after 4.0 that IE6 eventually achieved greater than 95% usage share, which probably brings things back into closer sync with the timeline in your universe.)
> held back by the awesome ie that has catched up to where browsers were 4 years ago
That's a substantial improvement. IE7 was more than twice that far behind.
Even better, IE now gets upgrades by default, so the percentage of users who are multiple major versions behind has been rapidly dwindling as the last of the pre-SP2 Windows XP systems finally give up the ghost. There will always be a few systems out there (due to low bandwidth connections that are never on for long enough to complete the download, plus periodic OS reinstalls, not to mention the few users who deliberately turn updates off), but it's a much smaller number now than it was even three years ago.
Consequently, it's becoming much easier now for a web developer to credibly argue that it's acceptable to relegate antediluvian versions of IE to "tier 2" support (where the site only has to be usable and is allowed to "look wrong" and be missing a few features). In other words, we're getting back the useful concept of "graceful degradation" that we used to take for granted in the early days of the web. We're allowed to take advantage of (relatively) new features again. Which is kind of nice.
> if the complete abandoning of the linux version wasn't enough
Honestly, speaking as someone who has used Linux since 1998 and used it pretty much exclusively for about half of that time (and a couple of years of the non-exclusivity was because I was using BSD), if it had been my decision, I'd probably have abandoned the Linux version of Skype too.
The Linux version of Skype was basically a steaming pile of rabbit droppings. It felt totally out of place on a Linux desktop (due mostly to completely ignoring the user's various system settings), seldom worked entirely correctly, had to be reinstalled a lot (e.g., sometimes it broke if you installed unrelated security updates to other components of the system), frequently didn't work at all (e.g., in some cases it would refuse to play sound if anything else on your computer had played sound since the last reboot -- you can guess how well THAT went over with Linux users), and didn't have anything resembling feature parity with the versions for other platforms. Don't even think about features that *nix software is generally expected to have that wouldn't be relevant on other platforms (e.g., an extensive set of command-line options).
We're better off without Skype. Hopefully Microsoft will run it completely into the ground in a way that transcends platform issues, and then the whole world will move on.
> The double edged sword of the BSD License. I'm sure they will probably > contribute back but unlike the GPL there is nothing legally to compel them to.
In practice, this only matters if the project is so stagnant that it doesn't actually matter any more after all.
If the project is active, the work of maintaining your changes (either by constantly updating your patches every time an upstream change breaks them or, if you prefer to go the clean fork route, porting over or reimplementing upstream changes that you specifically want) is so burdensome that any reasonably competent developer will WANT to get his changes incorporated upstream just so he can get off the maintenance treadmill for a bit and maybe have time to implement something else.
Actually, TRAMP is relatively new as Emacs capabilities go. I remember when it was introduced, around the time ssh started to become really pervasive (especially on Linux systems). I think Emacs was either version 20 or maybe 21 at the time. Previously, however, there was ange-ftp, which was pretty much exactly the same idea, modulo encryption.
> If you need to change one line in/etc/puppet/modules/apache/files/http.conf > or whatever, its silly to light up emacs and make sure you had originally > SSH'ed into the puppetmaster with -X for X forwarding blah blah blah.
You shouldn't have to leave your text editor and start an ssh session only to get back into your text editor again on the other system, just because the file you want to edit happens to be on another computer. It shouldn't matter where the file is stored, physically. If your text editor can't open remote files via ssh (or ftp or whatever protocol they're accessible via) and edit and save them just the same as local files, then it is not worthy to be called a text editor.
> whether there's still an ongoing debate about "emacs vs vi".
No, that debate was settled back in the eighties. Everybody knows the answer except for a few total noobs like you.
However, you're not allowed to ask what the answer is. You have to figure it out for yourself. If you do ask, some people will be nice and answer correctly, but other people will try to tell you the wrong answer, as punishment for asking the question.
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One supposes that fixed nitrogen embedded in plant tissue might be slightly less likely to run straight off into the downstream water supply than loose nitrogen from fertilizer (especially if the fertilizer is sprayed on rather than tilled in; I'm not sure how common that is in practice).
I'm not entirely convinced that the other poster's conclusion (that wider use of genetically modified crops would therefore reduce the incidence of harmful algal bloom) is necessarily correct, but I think I understand, at least partly, how he could have arrived at such a conclusion.
> And, just like how England is in the United Kingdom,
> but the United Kingdom isn't England
I suppose too that The United States of America is in the Americas but the United States thereof is not the same thing as America? And we dursn't call it just "the States" either because that's ambiguous because there might be other countries with the word "States" in their name at some point? Shall we stop calling China just "China" and start spelling out "The People's Democratic Socialist Republic of Maoist China" or whatever it's called in the formal diplomatic papers, every single time we refer to it, and similarly for the other one across the strait? And we should say "The Republic of the Netherlands" instead of Holland?
Phooey. Life's too short, and all that gratuitous verbiage takes too long to say every single time. I'm going to keep on calling them England and America and China and Taiwan. Every single person on the planet knows exactly which country I mean, *including* the sadly misguided people who insist I should call them by their ridiculously long official names all the time. Stuff that.
It's a little different with the web, because "the web" doesn't actually take longer to say than "the internet" or even just "the net". So, okay, we can call it "the web". I can live with that one.
> So you don't own a TV, watch DVDs, bluerays, use a cellphone,
What would I want any of that junk for? I've got internet access.
> or drive a car?
This would be the sticking point for most Americans. In terms of transportation, you can do just fine without a motor vehicle, if you live in a sufficiently small community that you can just walk everywhere, or if you get into bicycling in a major way. The main problem is not a practical matter but a social one: many Americans refuse to accept you as a full-fledged member of society if you do not drive a car on a regular basis. It's worse than living with your parents. People treat you like a (particularly tall) child, even if you're forty years old. Some us can live with that, but if you base your self-image on what other people think of you, it's not recommended.
There is one thing that's even worse: be single and celibate and openly admit that you intend to remain that way. People will tell you *to your face* that you aren't an adult. It's a fascinating aspect of American culture. In contrast, failure to take responsibility for providing your own financial needs will barely get noticed. Apparently that's not really expected.
Most of what typical Americans know about London comes from fiction set in the Victorian era, of which Doyle's writings, and the many horribly-derivative works based on them, are probably the most important. You may now commence cringing, if you are so inclined.
Oh, we also know about Trafalgar square, for whatever that's worth.
That's not the same kind of war.
Prior to the mid-twentieth century, wars were frequently fought between opposing powers and even superpowers, with one or more of the top five or so most powerful nations in the world on each side of the conflict. This kind of war is devastating not just to the individual countries involved but to the entire world, not just economically but in other ways as well. Conscription was taken for granted as necessary for the survival of any free state. Entire generations were decimated and their educations cut short. Huge amounts of infrastructure were destroyed.
There are *very* few fifty-year periods in history when this sort of thing didn't happen. Assyria versus Egypt. Assyria versus Elam. Babylon versus Assyria. Babylon versus Egypt. Persia versus Media. Persia versus Assyria. Persia versus Greece. Greece versus any major power (of the day) that you care to name, including each other (the Seleucids versus the Ptolemies especially). Rome versus Greece. Rome versus Carthage. Civil war within the Roman empire. Rome versus Parthia. Rome versus Sassanid Persia. Western Rome versus the Byzantine Empire. Internal civil war within the Western Roman empire. The Byzantine Empire versus Sassanid Persia. Western Rome versus several of the most powerful groups of their former subjects (the Franks, the Gauls, the Hunns, etc.). The Byzantines versus the Caliphate. Western Rome (what was left of it) versus the Caliphate. The Mongols versus any major power of the day you care to name. The Holy Roman Empire versus any European power of the day you care to name. France versus Prussia. Spain versus Portugal. Spain versus England. England versus France. France versus Germany. France versus England. Several Revolutions in the British Empire. Revolution in France. France versus the rest of Europe. England versus the United States in The Stupidest War Ever. The Ottomans versus Russia, France, and England. Germany versus Everybody. Germany versus Everybody, Take 2.
And then suddenly it stopped -- mostly. The second half of the twentieth century (assuming you don't count the almost-entirely-non-military "Cold War" as a war -- I think there were a couple of military aircraft shot down) is one of those rare periods where none of the world's major powers were in active combat against one another -- at least, not directly. There have been conflicts between some of the major powers and one another's loosely-allied quasi-puppet associates, but since about 1950 the major powers have all avoided directly fighting one another.
It's not perfect world peace, obviously. But it's an improvement.
Perfect world peace can of course only be achieved through a single worldwide absolutely tyrannical militarily-enforced dictatorship. Which would be great, if the dictator were [long list of characteristics that are uncommon among humans in general, several of which are ridiculously uncommon among dictators in particular].
Oh, it cools down a little at night, but we're talking about maybe a twenty degree difference, and it's still about as humid as the inside of a lake.
> That said, you should look into opening more windows,
> directing natural airflow towards bedrooms
Yeah, unfortunately, the idiot who designed this house managed to rig it so that no two windows of any significant size are directly across from one another without turning *multiple* corners in between; and then a subsequent owner decided to paint shut the frames of the windows that face into the prevailing wind on the main floor in such a way as to prevent them from ever being opened again.
Older homes. You gotta love 'em.
With that said...
> There are very few places where the nighttime outside temperatures aren't comfortable.
Your definition of "comfortable" and mine obviously differ.
Yes, it cools down outside a bit at night -- cooler than in the day, certainly -- but there's no way I would describe the temperature outside as "comfortable". I live in Ohio, which is not noted for being particularly unusual or extreme in terms of summer weather, and our nighttime outdoor conditions for the past few weeks have been... Is "saunaesque" a word?
> The question is not whether or not it is possible but whether or not it is realistic and practical.
Using Python for data analysis is realistic, assuming you know Python (or have enough background in computer science to pick it up quickly -- it's not a particularly difficult language, as languages go: I've seen accounting software packages that would be much harder to learn).
Python is perhaps not quite as practical as some other choices. In particular, object-oriented programming is not an especially good fit for many data analysis tasks; a multiparadigmatic language would often be better, because it lets you use functional techniques, which is often very handy for working with data sets. (It's no coincidence that SQL bears a striking resemblance to the data-filtering portions of a typical impure functional language.) OTOH, it's good that not everyone uses exactly the same thing. The right tool for the specific job you're doing and all that -- all data analysis is not created identical.
Personally, I use Perl.
> 1) Dump a bucket of water over your head. This will DRASTICALLY
> and almost instantly reduce your temperature considerably.
Drastically? Almost instantly? Really? Where do you live, Nunavut?
I've found taking a cold shower cools me down, but it takes about ten minutes.
> 2) Reduce your physical activity level
Yes, and also, reduce your metabolism, by eating a *lot* less than you normally do the rest of the year. I'm talking, a glass of cold milk for breakfast, a glass of cold milk for lunch, and maybe a cucumber and some cold milk for supper. It takes a few days, but your metabolism *will* slow down -- so much so that mundane activities like showering will take up to half again as long as usual and you won't notice if you aren't staring at a clock, so pay attention that you don't make yourself late for work.
> 3) Drink plenty of cold water
Indeed.
> You'll feel a little cold when going to sleep [without heavy blankets]
In this weather, are you kidding? I can "sleep" nude without sheets in front of a thirty-inch box fan set on high and not feel even remotely cold. I put the word "sleep" in quotation marks because what actually happens in this weather is I lay there all night drenched in sweat wishing sleep were possible, or maybe death.
> 7) Make a conscious effort to stay in the shade.
Yeah. I have to walk through open sunshine for about eight minutes a day on my way to work, and again on the way home, and in this weather that trip like to kills me.
Fortunately there's air conditioning at work, so at least I don't have to try to be productive in the heat. Now if only I could get some sleep at night, I might almost feel human.
> It would be nice if the use of "near miss" would stop on the grounds that it's ambiguous
It's not ambiguous. In the entire history of the English language the phrase "near miss" has only ever been used with one meaning. The fact that a small handful of misguided pedants think it should mean something different from what it obviously does mean does not make it ambiguous. The pedants are just wrong -- and even they clearly understand what the writer intended to say.
> You scare me, btw. I now wonder what other things you consider to be trivial knowledge.
Oh, come on. If the radius of the earth in flipping kilometers isn't trivial, I'm sure I have no idea what would be. I suppose you also think everyone should memorize fifty digits of e (I only know thirteen digits), what month the Battle of Carchemish took place (I only know the year), the complete list of sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic (I only know about a third of them), which of the three ideal gas laws is named after which person (Boyle, Charles, and whoever the other one was named after, for when volume is held constant, I forget his name), the full list of Roman emperors (I only know the major ones), the names of all 92 Johnson solids (most days I only remember the Platonic solids and some of the Archimedean ones), the number of verses in each chapter of the Bible, and the full lists of which cast members appear and do not appear in each episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Do you have room left in your brain for anything that's, you know, useful?
> Octopodes is acceptable in English too
Umm, no. English only imports plural forms from the source language when the singular form retains the singular markings from the source language (e.g., "alumni" because the singular form "alumnus" has that very recognizable Latin -us singular ending). The plural would only be "octopodes" if the singular were "octopous" (which would rhyme with "papoose"). The root may come from Greek, but the inflectional ending does not.
> My first idea is to start off with a few good TNG episodes,
> and then let them watch First Contact.
I would have said a few good TNG episodes and then Insurrection,
but sure, whatever.
> Which particular episodes would you recommend watching
> for someone who is completely new to all this?"
Start with these four exceptionally good ones, in any order:
Time's Arrow
The Best of Both Worlds
The Inner Light
Soldiers of the Empire (DS9, but it's the best Klingon episode ever)
Then go through these, in order by air date:
Who Watches the Watchers
Darmok
Ensign Ro
A Fistful of Datas
Ship in a Bottle
Face of the Enemy
Gambit
Lower Decks
Masks
Then do the four good TOS movies (STII:TWOK, STIII:TSFS, STIV:TVH, and STVI:TUC). Don't show ST:TMP until they've seen most or all of the TOS episodes. You have to be seriously nostalgic for TOS to sit through that one. (What? I have no idea what you're on about. Don't be absurd. There is no Star Trek Five. They crash the Bird of Prey in San Fransisco at the end of IV and take the new Enterprise A from earth at the beginning of VI. Nothing of interest happens in between -- nothing that would've been worth filming, certainly.)
After the four good TOS movies, if they're still with you, you can start going through whole seasons of TNG, but stay *away* from seasons 1 and 2. After seasons 3-7, show the TNG movies and then start in on DS9 and after that maybe Voyager.
Later, when they consider themselves big fans of the franchise, you can go back and show them some TOS episodes, to be immediately followed by TNG seasons 1 and 2. A good way to introduce TOS is to watch the DS9 and VOY episodes that re-use old TOS footage, then go back and watch the originals of those episodes, then branch out to other halfway decent TOS episodes.
> The number of times 'Big company sues little man' is tiny compared
> to the number of times 'Little man sues big company'. And the number
> of times Big company files a suit that is doesn't have a very good
> chance of winning is even smaller than that.
So are we calling the RIAA a "little man" now, or what?
The really correct solution is to make it illegal to solicit or provide legal services for payment (i.e., lawyers become illegal). Each person must stand before the court and make his own case and be judged. A private company would be represented by the owner, and any publicly traded company would be represented by the largest individual shareholder (if said person holds at least some fixed percentage of the stock -- perhaps 5% or so) or a court-appointed advocate (otherwise).
We could argue about whether it should be legal to sell some or all of your stock in order to duck the responsibility of representing the company in court. I tend to think yes, but I'm potentially willing to be persuaded otherwise, if someone can come up with good reasons.
> I was hoping that "Power Over the Internet" was analogous to "Power Over Ethernet"
That's how I initially read it too, but my reaction was somewhat different from your "Cool".
My thinking would be, we've had a Power over Ethernet spec for years and years, and hardly anybody actually uses it for anything. We've got a functional (albeit somewhat old and less robust than we could wish) power grid, and a while back there was some noise about a company wanting to provide internet-over-powerlines, and nothing substantial ever came of that. It seems to me that running power and network signals over the same cables has been tried from both ends and found largely impractical each time. I don't see any point in investing further resources along those lines at this time. (Also, I finished typing that sentence before I realized it had a really bad pun on the word "lines". That was totally inadvertent. Sorry.)
The important difference between marijuana and alcohol isn't potency or side effects, but practical controllability.
A random third grader of mediocre intelligence is exceptionally unlikely to accidentally discover how to make his own marijuana using nothing but common food and a piece of Tupperware. Producing it in any substantial quantity at all either has to be done outdoors in plain sight where it can be spotted from airplanes, or else it requires special equipment and draws an unusual amount of power. Either way, people who grow it in any developed area, in any quantity suitable for distribution, invariably get caught. That makes it effectively an import, which makes it theoretically controllable (not absolutely, but to a great extent).
Attempting to prevent people from getting alcohol, on the other hand, is like attempting to prevent teenagers from making rude comments. You can make basic alcohol (beer, wine, etc) in a six-foot-square shed using nothing but food and some containers. Add basic household kitchen equipment and you can make exceptionally strong distilled liquors. The only people who were sober during prohibition were sober before and after prohibition too (unless they weren't around yet when prohibition started and/or had died before it ended). A law against alcohol is like a law against being a jerk -- possibly well intentioned, but totally unenforceable. That doesn't really apply to marijuana -- certainly not to anything like the same extent.
No, if you want to argue that marijuana should be legal because something else that's at least as bad is legal, alcohol is the wrong substance to compare against.
Tobacco would be a better comparison. The only reason tobacco is legal is because it always has been. If it were a new product, the FDA would make it go away so fast you'd never even know it existed (unless you're in the habit of reading obscure research journals, and maybe not even then). I have doubts it could even make it into clinical trials, and if it did the effects it has on the heart and nervous system would kill it before the conclusion of phase I.
Nonetheless, tobacco is theoretically not significantly harder to control than marijuana, substantially more addictive, and WAY too medically harmful to ever be approved for prescription use under the current standards[1] even if it weren't addictive. Yet, it remains legal. If you want to compare marijuana against a legal drug, in order to argue that it should be legal, tobacco is your best option.
---
[1] Technically, something with side effects like tobacco has could be approved, if it were an effective treatment, for extremely intractable and unpleasant targets, like ALS or forms of metastatic cancer for which no good chemotherapy exists. But the drugs we're talking about aren't useful for treating those kinds of conditions.
> the author was able to find some feature that wasn't in MS Word
There are a lot of features that aren't in word. Even such basic things as grouping-symbol matching and sexp-based navigation, which Emacs users have taken for granted since the days before WYSIWYG, are completely absent.
However, the author is obviously a rank amateur when it comes to customizing a computer, and it would have been possible for him to continue using Word (or OpenOffice.org for that matter) if he'd had a better idea what he was doing. What he actually wanted was to turn Aero Glass the everliving badword off and set his system colors to something he could actually live with. Most modern word processors will adhere to the system colors as long as you don't specifically tell them to make the text (or background) another color. Thus, it can be #FFE6BC on #294D4A (or whatever you like) on your screen, but when you hit print it still comes out black on white. I do this with OpenOffice.org all the time, and I imagine Word is very similar.
Web browsers can also be configured to behave in this way, although for some reason I can't fathom it's not the default. In Firefox, for example, Edit->Preferences->Content->Colors, make sure "Use system colors" is checked and "Allow pages to choose their own colors" is unchecked. Most browsers have this option, although finding it in the preferences is of course different for each. Quite frankly, I can't imagine browsing the web any other way. So many sites have such appallingly bad taste in colors, even for a person with normal vision, browsing with page-specified colors turned on is categorically unthinkable, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, really, the most popular combination by far is... black text on a white background? Seriously? No fooling, the most popular colors are black on white? Can you say "eyestrain"? Why would anyone ever want that? Do they think we want to pretend we're back in the twentieth century using a sheet of paper instead of a screen, or what? I've never been willing to put up with page-specified colors and have always turned them off most of the time, even back in the days of Netscape 4.
One more tip: the article talks a lot about switching settings, so I guess I should mention that if you get the Web Developer toolbar, there's a convenient option to enable and disable page colors on the fly (plus options for enabling and disabling various other things), without needing to dig through the preferences each time. Although, the situations in which you want to turn page colors on are pretty rare in my experience, so maybe that's not a big deal.
Players who are not cheating should be allowed to voluntarily play in the pool where cheating is allowed, for the extra challenge. Of course, if you're not cheating it would be voluntary, and you could go back out into the regular game world any time. But for really advanced players, the extra challenge of playing against stacked odds and unconstrained opponents could be compelling.
> every time there is a new version it is much improved
There was one exception, actually: IE4 was a great deal worse than IE3. It tried to introduce some primitive CSS support, but it was so broken that it ended up making websites completely unusable where in IE3 they would have been usable (albeit not beautifully styled). Also, IE4 introduced the nightmarish "integration" fiasco that resulted in junk like not being able to open multimedia content in your usual media player because IE was in bed with the new and horrible Windows Media Player. There were also issues related to Windows Explorer. Oh, yeah, and wasn't IE4 also the release that introduced "friendly error messages"? Gah.
> IE4 was the best browser of its time
Hello, welcome to our universe. You may be interested in knowing that our history here is different in some ways from the history where you come from. Among other things, in our universe, 5.0 was the first version of IE that was usable for even basic purposes, and it wasn't until 5.5 that IE finally reached feature parity with Navigator 4.08. (However, Netscape took so ridiculously long to come out with the next major version after 4.0 that IE6 eventually achieved greater than 95% usage share, which probably brings things back into closer sync with the timeline in your universe.)
> held back by the awesome ie that has catched up to where browsers were 4 years ago
That's a substantial improvement. IE7 was more than twice that far behind.
Even better, IE now gets upgrades by default, so the percentage of users who are multiple major versions behind has been rapidly dwindling as the last of the pre-SP2 Windows XP systems finally give up the ghost. There will always be a few systems out there (due to low bandwidth connections that are never on for long enough to complete the download, plus periodic OS reinstalls, not to mention the few users who deliberately turn updates off), but it's a much smaller number now than it was even three years ago.
Consequently, it's becoming much easier now for a web developer to credibly argue that it's acceptable to relegate antediluvian versions of IE to "tier 2" support (where the site only has to be usable and is allowed to "look wrong" and be missing a few features). In other words, we're getting back the useful concept of "graceful degradation" that we used to take for granted in the early days of the web. We're allowed to take advantage of (relatively) new features again. Which is kind of nice.
> if the complete abandoning of the linux version wasn't enough
Honestly, speaking as someone who has used Linux since 1998 and used it pretty much exclusively for about half of that time (and a couple of years of the non-exclusivity was because I was using BSD), if it had been my decision, I'd probably have abandoned the Linux version of Skype too.
The Linux version of Skype was basically a steaming pile of rabbit droppings. It felt totally out of place on a Linux desktop (due mostly to completely ignoring the user's various system settings), seldom worked entirely correctly, had to be reinstalled a lot (e.g., sometimes it broke if you installed unrelated security updates to other components of the system), frequently didn't work at all (e.g., in some cases it would refuse to play sound if anything else on your computer had played sound since the last reboot -- you can guess how well THAT went over with Linux users), and didn't have anything resembling feature parity with the versions for other platforms. Don't even think about features that *nix software is generally expected to have that wouldn't be relevant on other platforms (e.g., an extensive set of command-line options).
We're better off without Skype. Hopefully Microsoft will run it completely into the ground in a way that transcends platform issues, and then the whole world will move on.
> The double edged sword of the BSD License. I'm sure they will probably
> contribute back but unlike the GPL there is nothing legally to compel them to.
In practice, this only matters if the project is so stagnant that it doesn't actually matter any more after all.
If the project is active, the work of maintaining your changes (either by constantly updating your patches every time an upstream change breaks them or, if you prefer to go the clean fork route, porting over or reimplementing upstream changes that you specifically want) is so burdensome that any reasonably competent developer will WANT to get his changes incorporated upstream just so he can get off the maintenance treadmill for a bit and maybe have time to implement something else.
Actually, TRAMP is relatively new as Emacs capabilities go. I remember when it was introduced, around the time ssh started to become really pervasive (especially on Linux systems). I think Emacs was either version 20 or maybe 21 at the time. Previously, however, there was ange-ftp, which was pretty much exactly the same idea, modulo encryption.
> If you need to change one line in /etc/puppet/modules/apache/files/http.conf
> or whatever, its silly to light up emacs and make sure you had originally
> SSH'ed into the puppetmaster with -X for X forwarding blah blah blah.
You shouldn't have to leave your text editor and start an ssh session only to get back into your text editor again on the other system, just because the file you want to edit happens to be on another computer. It shouldn't matter where the file is stored, physically. If your text editor can't open remote files via ssh (or ftp or whatever protocol they're accessible via) and edit and save them just the same as local files, then it is not worthy to be called a text editor.
> whether there's still an ongoing debate about "emacs vs vi".
No, that debate was settled back in the eighties. Everybody knows the answer except for a few total noobs like you.
However, you're not allowed to ask what the answer is. You have to figure it out for yourself. If you do ask, some people will be nice and answer correctly, but other people will try to tell you the wrong answer, as punishment for asking the question.
HTH.HAND.