> So, I spent a lot of money to keep it from showing up on my credit history as a negative mark.
I believe the money you spent was worth more than the good credit history. The only time you need a good credit history is if you're trying to borrow more than you can actually afford to borrow (e.g., subprime mortgage), which is inherently a bad idea anyway, fiscally speaking. The credit industry has sold most Americans on the idea that your credit score is an important asset that you need to protect or else your life will be ruined, but IMO that's just so much self-serving nonsense.
On the other hand, if they'd sent you to collections, there are potentially other hassles associated with that beyond just the impact on your credit report. I don't think they can legally confiscate anything not related to the bill, which in the case of a phone bill makes the repo man pretty much a non-issue, but a collection agency can sure annoy you in other ways, not least by incessant phone calls. (They don't just call you at home, either. They call you at work and annoy your employer. This happened to a coworker of mine once...)
That makes even less sense. The difference between murder and manslaughter is that murder is deliberate; whereas, manslaughter is inadvertent. The case we have here is clearly deliberate. But in both murder and manslaughter the death is directly caused by the actions of the perpetrator, which is not the case here. I believe there is a crime that basically boils down to allowing someone to die by *inaction* when you knew them to be in danger, but I don't happen to know what it's called.
> If you are willing to give up your privacy in an airport simply because someone > used that as a point of terrorism in the past, you're pretty narrow minded.
Actually, that doesn't follow. Narrow mindedness is a reticence to entertain or consider other people's viewpoints if they differ from one's own. As far as I can tell, there's really no reason to assume that someone willing to give up privacy at an airport in the name of security is narrow-minded.
If anything, *you* are being narrow minded in considering his viewpoint invalid. You're also right, of course. His viewpoint is in fact nonsense. Obviously he doesn't understand security at all. Sometimes the narrow-minded position is also the correct one. But being wrong and being narrow-minded are not the same thing at all.
I always do rot13 first, then xor it twice with my secret password, then a final pass of rot13 for good measure, just because, you know, you can't be too careful.
nathan@groundhog:~$ ifconfig bash: ifconfig: command not found nathan@groundhog:~$ lynx -dump http://www.ipchicken.com/ bash: lynx: command not found nathan@groundhog:~$
> Don't blame Nader, blame your lousy voting system that discourages a third party from forming.
It's not the voting system that prevents there being three viable parties; it's the demographic properties of the population. The US for its entire history as a nation has always been politically divided, more or less evenly, along substantially geographic boundaries, into two basic categories: more or less conservative, and more or less liberal. The two-party system is a direct result of this.
Incidentally, the US Civil War was another result of the same phenomenon, and we barely managed to hold the nation together. And you may have heard, if you had simple-minded history teachers, that the US Civil War was about slavery. But it's actually more complex than that. Slavery was an important trigger issue, but the war was about much more. There were economic issues (tariffs and protectionism versus free trade), and there were political issues (states' rights versus federalism), but ultimately the war was about whether a people politically divided along mostly geographic boundaries could remain a single nation. It was inevitable that we would have to fight a war to determine this. Even before the revolution, there were strong indications (well, at least in hindsight you can see them now, looking back) that a civil war would eventually have to be fought in some fashion.
There have been a couple of times when a third party (or, indeed, a fourth) became viable (the most famous example being the formation of the Republican party and the election of Lincoln), but the system always collapses back to two main parties, conservative and liberal, within eight years (two presidential elections). This is not mainly because of the voting system. It's because there are two main categories of political worldview in this country.
What the voting system (and specifically the electoral college) does is to force compromise. Specifically, it moves the focus of political campaigns toward the middle ground of the swing states (the areas with a mixed population, conservatives and liberals living together, where people on average are a bit more moderate, perhaps as a result of knowing more people who see things the other way). On the one hand this makes everyone feel like their party doesn't represent them as well as might be: conservatives feel that the Republican party is not conservative enough, and many liberals feel that the Democratic party is too conservative. Put another way, it encourages compromise and allows us to find a middle ground we can all sort of live with, in a pinch. I believe the electoral college is the reason we've only had one civil war in our whole history (two if you count the revolution), rather than one every thirty years or so. IMO, countries that suffer from frequent civil wars due to demographic splits similar to ours (yes, Balkan countries, I'm looking at you) would do well to take a good hard look at our electoral college system.
We are a nation divided, but we stand together anyway.
I've been known to unzip an OpenOffice document, edit the XML by hand, and rezip it, to get around limitations in the GUI (e.g., I've never found any way in the GUI to insert or delete the only paragraph directly before or after a table). Does that count?
> What you are describing is WordPerfect's Reveal Codes functionality.
Yes, but Word Perfect was designed before WYSIWYG was an expected feature, did not do things in the typical fashion that most WYSIWYG word processors do, and when WordPerfect *did* start doing WYSIWYG (around version 6.0), it was a pretty poor fit at first, until they started changing how various things were handled to be more like other software and less like earlier versions of WordPerfect.
Somewhere in the back of my mind there's a nagging suspicion that somewhere out there there's still a college department that uses WordPerfect 5.1 for everything. Probably a teacher's ed department.
The thing about TeX is, it's not a one-trick pony. It does *everything* you might ever possibly want to do in typography. And it has the learning curve to match, yeah. But, it does everything. Word processing software is simpler and easier to use, but it only does the more common things.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that word processors can do things now that *used* to only be possible with more advanced software. This has been going on for a long time. I can remember when normal word processing software didn't have scalable fonts. If you wanted scalable fonts, you needed desktop publishing software. More and more advanced features have made their way into word processing over the years: frames, tables, columns, expanded and condensed spacing, superscripts and subscripts, different styles of underlining, contour wrapping around non-rectangular images, these are all useful things that word processing software didn't used to be able to do, and now it can. Adding ligatures and alternates into the mix is just one more step along that path.
But it doesn't turn Word into TeX. Fundamentally, Word is still word processing software. It may be word processing software with a lot of features, but we're talking here about a finite discreet set of specific features designed to do particular things, things that the designers of the software think people will want to do.
TeX is designed so that everything is flexible enough to handle even the most esoteric situations. If you're typesetting a higher-math text in Hebrew, and you really need to typeset the letter gimmel *inside* the letter heth, you can do that. If you need to typeset cyrillic characters, with diacritical marks, upside-down and backwards, you can do that. If you need to typeset a double-strike, you can. If you need to double-strike characters upside-down and backwards inside the open space in another character, you can. It doesn't even have to be something that the people who designed the software had *thought* of doing, much less made special provisions for in the form of a feature. If you have a special typesetting need, you can construct your own TeX macro for the situation. The system is flexible. You can do whatever you want.
That kind of flexibility comes at a cost: there's always going to be a learning curve, the kind of learning curve that deters most people from learning how to use it. But if your needs are unusual, so unusual that the software designers didn't think to account for them... then you need the software with the flexibility to let you do whatever you need to do, and that's the niche that TeX fills.
Word will never be TeX. It's not *supposed* to be TeX. But that doesn't mean Word can't do ligatures. And if Word does them, one supposes other word processing software will soon do them too.
> I equate the working of drugs for the brain much like our current understanding of gravity. > We know it works. We can reproduce it in exacting detail
Occasionally it works the way we think it should. Most of the time it doesn't quite. The equivalent with gravity would be if our best understanding was at Aristotlean level (heavier objects fall faster) with no comprehension of the relevance of surface area, distance, density, shape, or environment.
We understand the brain just about well enough to find ways to screw it up, but we don't know nearly enough to fix it.
As for the mind, we know approximately nothing. 99.78% of psychology is nonsense, and nobody knows how to identify the other 0.21%. (These numbers do not quite add up to 100% due to a combination of rounding errors and the fact that 78.43% of statistics are made up on the spot.)
Frankly, if I were picking out stocks, drug discovery is probably the field I'd be most eager to avoid anyway. The risks they take (economic risks, I mean) are just too large, worse than venture capital if that's possible. Almost every drug candidate they put forward fails at some point along the line before making it to market, and the ones that do make it to market carry a high risk of subsequent discovery of previously unknown long-term side effects leading to extreme lawsuit hazards. In the rush to push the drug to market in time to get some serious money out of it (not just to cover development of that drug, but also all the others that failed before reaching the point of FDA approval) while they still *can* get some money out of it, before the twenty-year patent clock runs out, they push new drugs out to millions of people before there's time to see how the first test subjects do long-term. They have to operate this way. Nature of the business. But, given how much we don't know about new drugs when they first go to market, the law of averages suggests that sooner or later every single drug development company (well, every single one that doesn't just fail from lack of profitable marketable drug discoveries) is eventually going to get hit with a multi-gazillion-dollar class-action lawsuit of shattering ruination.
Okay, so if I'm holding a mutual fund that happens to have some pharma stock mixed in as part of a suitably diverse portfolio, I'm probably not going to sweat that.
But I would not select a pharma stock directly. I would view it as a bad risk.
> (Another surprising finding: There's absolutely no evidence that guaifenesin helps > clear the lungs. It makes your coughs productive, but it could just as easily have > caused all that extra production; nobody's ever measured the actual effect on your lungs.)
This isn't a properly controlled and blinded study or anything, and I suppose it could be at least partly placebo effect, but, anecdotally, when I had the worst cough I've ever had (so bad that I was afraid to take a cough suppressant, because I could feel the stuff sliding down into my lungs and worried that if I ran out of energy to keep coughing it up I might die from drowning in it), I took some of that guaifenesin stuff and a few minutes later experienced a *significant* reduction in coughing, as well as a significant reduction in the feeling that stuff was sliding down into my lungs.
So, yeah, if I have a really bad cough like that again, I'm going to go looking for that stuff.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced phenylephrine (ostensibly a decongestant) does anything whatsoever. This caught me by surprise a couple of years back, when the local pharmacy just sort of silently switched over to it without saying anything and next time I had a cold I went and picked up some decongestant, which I just assumed was the same stuff I'd been using, but I found that it didn't work, at all. At first I figured I just had a different, harder-to-decongest sort of cold, but next time I had a cold (a few months later), same thing. Come to find out, the decongestant I'd previously been using was based on pseudoephedrine, which actually works, but if you want to buy that now you have to actually go to the pharmacy counter and ask for it. (Apparently somebody decided to use it as a starting point for production of illegal recreational drugs, and so now the powers that be want to be able to notice when somebody buys unusually large quantities of it, so they need to keep a list of names. Or something like that. So it's still over the counter in the sense of not needing a prescription, but you can't just pick it up off the shelf and go to the checkout with it.) What do you know, I bought some of the pseudoephedrine, and thirty minutes later I was breathing through my nose again. Again, this is anecdotal and not properly controlled (though I did go into it blind to the initial change), but it's enough to convince *me* that I'd rather buy the pseudoephedrine than the phenylephrine.
> You should see them when I send them an email, to them, from them, through their own mail server.
Don't forget to Cc their boss, just for the extra fun of it.
And yeah, I had to telnet into port 80 just a few weeks ago to verify that the proxy was returning an HTTP/1.0 response whereas the site itself was returning an HTTP/1.1 response. (Eventually Symantec issued a fix, presumably because upgrading every proxy on the planet isn't feasible on the right kind of timescale and people needed to get LiveUpdate working right away.)
> "How do you gain access to a MySQL database, if all of the passwords have been forgotten?"
Seriously?
Okay, I guess the first thing you do is fire the database administrator and his boss...
> People stopped using NN because it started to suck. It would crash on me multiple times a day.
I noticed that too. Pegasus Mail suddenly started crashing a lot too, seemingly at random. And then I uninstalled ICQ, and suddenly Pegasus stopped crashing, and Netscape went back to its former crash rate of a couple of times a day. (This was on Windows 95 OSR2, so, no memory protection.)
And I know the browser crashing a couple of times a day sounds like excruciating pain now, but this was 1998; there was no such thing as a browser that could go all day without crashing.
> I have *never* had a textbook cost more than about $160, and most cost about $100 when > purchased new, putting my textbook costs at a maximum of $500 per quarter, typically much less.
It depends on your major.
One of the worst cases is when a class just requires you to buy half a dozen books or more. This is usually legitimate -- you can't expect to take a literature class and not buy some books, and if you take a dead language you need at *least* a grammar text, a lexicon, and a workbook, and probably at least one sample text as well. And the lexicon won't be cheap. Two of the languages I've had you really needed two of the things -- a traditional lexicon, and a reader's lexicon. You technically could complete the course without the reader's lexicon, but your homework exercises would take 5-6 times as long.
The really expensive individual textbooks are the ones that include lots of high-color glossy photographs and/or lots of up-to-date information from a fast-changing field. Biomed majors get soaked pretty hard, for instance.
There are also textbooks that are expensive precisely because they're a specialty item that only a very small number of students need. If you major in ancient near-eastern archaeology, for instance, you're going to shell out a bit extra for the textbooks for certain classes.
Personally, I only had one course where we used a book written by the prof, and he sold it to us at his cost (about $5 in the nineties; it would be more like $10 now). Well, okay, a couple of my other classes had syllabi that were thick enough to qualify as books, but I'm pretty sure the profs didn't get any royalties on the syllabi; the campus bookstore sold those for the cost of printing. They seemed expensive for what you got, but I'm pretty sure that's because low-volume print jobs cost more.
But I went to a small school with a relatively low student-to-teacher ratio. YMMV.
> You basically demand that an author of a work has to make his profit/living shortly > after he did his work. So... in other words he can not place it into his basement > and sell it later
I would have assumed he meant a reasonable time after the start of protection. In the case of copyright this was traditionally the date of first publication. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to make the work in your basement and get it ready for publication. We're talking about the duration of copyright once you have done that and start to sell the thing.
> If I make wine, I can store it in my cellar and sell it when I want
Yeah, but you can't sue the guy down the road and bar him from selling wine as well. In fact, if he buys a bottle of your wine, analyzes it, and manages to figure out how to make wine that tastes the same as yours... he's allowed to do that. You can patent some aspect of your wine-making process, but the patent only lasts for twenty years.
> Given how easy it is to publish, market, and distribute works these days, > copyright should be shorter than it initially was, not longer.
I think it should be the same as it was. Distribution may have gotten easier over the years, but it's not much easier to get a publisher to take on your work than it ever was, and the (average) human lifespan hasn't gotten shorter either.
So, it was fourteen years with a fourteen year renewal, and I'm willing to grant that it makes sense for the renewal to be automatic these days. (That's consistent with other, non-problematic changes that have been introduced, such as the removal of the requirement for copyrights to be registered.) Twenty-eight years then, unless the author releases it sooner.
Although, I really don't see how most computer books could have value other than historical interest for anywhere near that long. Raise your hand if you want to buy a new copy of a book on how to use WordStar.
> Can you give me one single thing that has changed in the last 10 years regarding data compression?
I can, and it's a biggie.
Ten years ago, it actually made sense for an application to include its own built-in data compression subroutines written by the application developer. Today it does not.
> It's a book about data compression. It's TEN years old.
I have a pretty hard time imagining any reason why a ten-year-old book about data compression would still be in print. I can only think of five or six computer-related books that old that are worth buying used for cheap (much less new at full price), and the authors are all household names (well, at least among computer geeks).
Honestly, McDonald's doesn't really need the WiFi to attract customers. They have one of the most pervasive advertising campaigns known to humanity (and I don't just mean television, but everything: tv, radio, internet, local newspapers, pitchers of orange punch at little league games and family reunions, every sporting event up to and including the Olympics, billboards on every highway in North America,...) and also they somehow manage to position their restaurants so that they are almost always ON THE WAY to wherever you are going, especially if you're in a hurry. And they sign all the most lucratively popular toy and movie and tv character promotions, not to mention that periodic Monopoly thing, which *really* gets the customers coming back, for reasons I do not entirely understand.
On the other hand, I also don't see what the big deal is with people sticking around too long in the dining room. 80% of their business is drive-through anyway, and 90% is breakfast and lunch, when people are in a hurry. McDonald's does more business between 11:30 and 12:30 than they do from 2pm to closing. Their dining rooms typically sit empty in the evenings, when people would have time to sit around.
Yeah, but you have to drive an hour to get to the nearest Panera from here; whereas, predictably, there's a McDonald's within three blocks (and a Wendy's three blocks the other direction). Though, if they have an access point at the McD's, I'm not aware of it. Aside from the completely free public wireless access point at the public library, the only other publicly available access point in town that I'm aware of is at that little joint on the square called Pop's Sweet Shop or something like that -- which, come to think of it, has been there for a couple of years now, so by my reckoning it'll probably go out of business soon.
Downtown merchants don't tend to last real long around here, for whatever reason, although there are a couple of exceptions; unaccountably, KC's aquaworld, a pet store specializing in fish, hasn't budged the entire time I've lived in Galion. Wendy's could technically be considered to be in the downtown district and hasn't shown any signs of financial distress either, although they have a real parking lot, not just the on-street parking that most of the downtown merchants have to make to with, so that may be part of the difference, and of course they're a major-chain franchise also.
McDonald's is, of course, in a much better location on the west side of town. You never see a McDonald's restaurant in a bad location. In Galion, there's a grand total of five state routes, and you can see the front of McDonald's from all five of them. For bonus points, they also have great parking and are directly in front of the most popular grocery store in town, and you can't get to the second-most-popular one (from most places in town) without driving past them. Oh, yeah, and just in case that wasn't enough, the west side of town also has the higher average per-capita income, and due to a combination of Heise Park and some winding residential roads on the south side, there's only one good way over from the west side to the rest of town, or vice versa; the people who live in the three ritziest developments can't get to the rest of Galion without driving past (well, less than a block from) McDonald's.
How did we get on this subject? Oh, yeah, wireless access. To my knowledge, McD's in Galion doesn't even offer it. As for Panera Bread, you'd have to drive to Columbus (well, Westerville anyway) to find one of those.
> No ed degree (or at least serious progress toward it) means no teaching job, period.
It's actually slightly more complex than that: the *main* thing that you absolutely have to have to get a job as a primary or secondary teacher is a teacher's license in the state you want to teach in. There are additional things you may need to compete against the other applicants, particularly if there's a teacher surplus in the region (e.g., currently in central Ohio you pretty much need to be a laid-off teacher with years of experience, and there still aren't enough positions to go around), but the teaching license is the _base_ requirement. Without that, you can't even apply.
But yeah, one of the requirements for the license, at least in most states, is a degree in education. You also have to pass certain tests. If you don't major in education, you can't get the license, and the schools can't hire you to teach, except under certain special or unusual conditions.
Substitute teaching is different, though. You don't need any particular degree or license for that.
Slashdot Mirror
> So, I spent a lot of money to keep it from showing up on my credit history as a negative mark.
I believe the money you spent was worth more than the good credit history. The only time you need a good credit history is if you're trying to borrow more than you can actually afford to borrow (e.g., subprime mortgage), which is inherently a bad idea anyway, fiscally speaking. The credit industry has sold most Americans on the idea that your credit score is an important asset that you need to protect or else your life will be ruined, but IMO that's just so much self-serving nonsense.
On the other hand, if they'd sent you to collections, there are potentially other hassles associated with that beyond just the impact on your credit report. I don't think they can legally confiscate anything not related to the bill, which in the case of a phone bill makes the repo man pretty much a non-issue, but a collection agency can sure annoy you in other ways, not least by incessant phone calls. (They don't just call you at home, either. They call you at work and annoy your employer. This happened to a coworker of mine once...)
> Not murder But manslaughter.
That makes even less sense. The difference between murder and manslaughter is that murder is deliberate; whereas, manslaughter is inadvertent. The case we have here is clearly deliberate. But in both murder and manslaughter the death is directly caused by the actions of the perpetrator, which is not the case here. I believe there is a crime that basically boils down to allowing someone to die by *inaction* when you knew them to be in danger, but I don't happen to know what it's called.
> If you are willing to give up your privacy in an airport simply because someone
> used that as a point of terrorism in the past, you're pretty narrow minded.
Actually, that doesn't follow. Narrow mindedness is a reticence to entertain or consider other people's viewpoints if they differ from one's own. As far as I can tell, there's really no reason to assume that someone willing to give up privacy at an airport in the name of security is narrow-minded.
If anything, *you* are being narrow minded in considering his viewpoint invalid. You're also right, of course. His viewpoint is in fact nonsense. Obviously he doesn't understand security at all. Sometimes the narrow-minded position is also the correct one. But being wrong and being narrow-minded are not the same thing at all.
HTH.HAND.
> rot13 is good enough for anyone.
I always do rot13 first, then xor it twice with my secret password, then a final pass of rot13 for good measure, just because, you know, you can't be too careful.
Sure, no problem:
nathan@groundhog:~$ ifconfig
bash: ifconfig: command not found
nathan@groundhog:~$ lynx -dump http://www.ipchicken.com/
bash: lynx: command not found
nathan@groundhog:~$
Anything else I can do for you?
> Don't blame Nader, blame your lousy voting system that discourages a third party from forming.
It's not the voting system that prevents there being three viable parties; it's the demographic properties of the population. The US for its entire history as a nation has always been politically divided, more or less evenly, along substantially geographic boundaries, into two basic categories: more or less conservative, and more or less liberal. The two-party system is a direct result of this.
Incidentally, the US Civil War was another result of the same phenomenon, and we barely managed to hold the nation together. And you may have heard, if you had simple-minded history teachers, that the US Civil War was about slavery. But it's actually more complex than that. Slavery was an important trigger issue, but the war was about much more. There were economic issues (tariffs and protectionism versus free trade), and there were political issues (states' rights versus federalism), but ultimately the war was about whether a people politically divided along mostly geographic boundaries could remain a single nation. It was inevitable that we would have to fight a war to determine this. Even before the revolution, there were strong indications (well, at least in hindsight you can see them now, looking back) that a civil war would eventually have to be fought in some fashion.
There have been a couple of times when a third party (or, indeed, a fourth) became viable (the most famous example being the formation of the Republican party and the election of Lincoln), but the system always collapses back to two main parties, conservative and liberal, within eight years (two presidential elections). This is not mainly because of the voting system. It's because there are two main categories of political worldview in this country.
What the voting system (and specifically the electoral college) does is to force compromise. Specifically, it moves the focus of political campaigns toward the middle ground of the swing states (the areas with a mixed population, conservatives and liberals living together, where people on average are a bit more moderate, perhaps as a result of knowing more people who see things the other way). On the one hand this makes everyone feel like their party doesn't represent them as well as might be: conservatives feel that the Republican party is not conservative enough, and many liberals feel that the Democratic party is too conservative. Put another way, it encourages compromise and allows us to find a middle ground we can all sort of live with, in a pinch. I believe the electoral college is the reason we've only had one civil war in our whole history (two if you count the revolution), rather than one every thirty years or so. IMO, countries that suffer from frequent civil wars due to demographic splits similar to ours (yes, Balkan countries, I'm looking at you) would do well to take a good hard look at our electoral college system.
We are a nation divided, but we stand together anyway.
I've been known to unzip an OpenOffice document, edit the XML by hand, and rezip it, to get around limitations in the GUI (e.g., I've never found any way in the GUI to insert or delete the only paragraph directly before or after a table). Does that count?
> What you are describing is WordPerfect's Reveal Codes functionality.
Yes, but Word Perfect was designed before WYSIWYG was an expected feature, did not do things in the typical fashion that most WYSIWYG word processors do, and when WordPerfect *did* start doing WYSIWYG (around version 6.0), it was a pretty poor fit at first, until they started changing how various things were handled to be more like other software and less like earlier versions of WordPerfect.
Somewhere in the back of my mind there's a nagging suspicion that somewhere out there there's still a college department that uses WordPerfect 5.1 for everything. Probably a teacher's ed department.
The thing about TeX is, it's not a one-trick pony. It does *everything* you might ever possibly want to do in typography. And it has the learning curve to match, yeah. But, it does everything. Word processing software is simpler and easier to use, but it only does the more common things.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that word processors can do things now that *used* to only be possible with more advanced software. This has been going on for a long time. I can remember when normal word processing software didn't have scalable fonts. If you wanted scalable fonts, you needed desktop publishing software. More and more advanced features have made their way into word processing over the years: frames, tables, columns, expanded and condensed spacing, superscripts and subscripts, different styles of underlining, contour wrapping around non-rectangular images, these are all useful things that word processing software didn't used to be able to do, and now it can. Adding ligatures and alternates into the mix is just one more step along that path.
But it doesn't turn Word into TeX. Fundamentally, Word is still word processing software. It may be word processing software with a lot of features, but we're talking here about a finite discreet set of specific features designed to do particular things, things that the designers of the software think people will want to do.
TeX is designed so that everything is flexible enough to handle even the most esoteric situations. If you're typesetting a higher-math text in Hebrew, and you really need to typeset the letter gimmel *inside* the letter heth, you can do that. If you need to typeset cyrillic characters, with diacritical marks, upside-down and backwards, you can do that. If you need to typeset a double-strike, you can. If you need to double-strike characters upside-down and backwards inside the open space in another character, you can. It doesn't even have to be something that the people who designed the software had *thought* of doing, much less made special provisions for in the form of a feature. If you have a special typesetting need, you can construct your own TeX macro for the situation. The system is flexible. You can do whatever you want.
That kind of flexibility comes at a cost: there's always going to be a learning curve, the kind of learning curve that deters most people from learning how to use it. But if your needs are unusual, so unusual that the software designers didn't think to account for them... then you need the software with the flexibility to let you do whatever you need to do, and that's the niche that TeX fills.
Word will never be TeX. It's not *supposed* to be TeX. But that doesn't mean Word can't do ligatures. And if Word does them, one supposes other word processing software will soon do them too.
> I equate the working of drugs for the brain much like our current understanding of gravity.
> We know it works. We can reproduce it in exacting detail
Occasionally it works the way we think it should. Most of the time it doesn't quite. The equivalent with gravity would be if our best understanding was at Aristotlean level (heavier objects fall faster) with no comprehension of the relevance of surface area, distance, density, shape, or environment.
We understand the brain just about well enough to find ways to screw it up, but we don't know nearly enough to fix it.
As for the mind, we know approximately nothing. 99.78% of psychology is nonsense, and nobody knows how to identify the other 0.21%. (These numbers do not quite add up to 100% due to a combination of rounding errors and the fact that 78.43% of statistics are made up on the spot.)
Frankly, if I were picking out stocks, drug discovery is probably the field I'd be most eager to avoid anyway. The risks they take (economic risks, I mean) are just too large, worse than venture capital if that's possible. Almost every drug candidate they put forward fails at some point along the line before making it to market, and the ones that do make it to market carry a high risk of subsequent discovery of previously unknown long-term side effects leading to extreme lawsuit hazards. In the rush to push the drug to market in time to get some serious money out of it (not just to cover development of that drug, but also all the others that failed before reaching the point of FDA approval) while they still *can* get some money out of it, before the twenty-year patent clock runs out, they push new drugs out to millions of people before there's time to see how the first test subjects do long-term. They have to operate this way. Nature of the business. But, given how much we don't know about new drugs when they first go to market, the law of averages suggests that sooner or later every single drug development company (well, every single one that doesn't just fail from lack of profitable marketable drug discoveries) is eventually going to get hit with a multi-gazillion-dollar class-action lawsuit of shattering ruination.
Okay, so if I'm holding a mutual fund that happens to have some pharma stock mixed in as part of a suitably diverse portfolio, I'm probably not going to sweat that.
But I would not select a pharma stock directly. I would view it as a bad risk.
> (Another surprising finding: There's absolutely no evidence that guaifenesin helps
> clear the lungs. It makes your coughs productive, but it could just as easily have
> caused all that extra production; nobody's ever measured the actual effect on your lungs.)
This isn't a properly controlled and blinded study or anything, and I suppose it could be at least partly placebo effect, but, anecdotally, when I had the worst cough I've ever had (so bad that I was afraid to take a cough suppressant, because I could feel the stuff sliding down into my lungs and worried that if I ran out of energy to keep coughing it up I might die from drowning in it), I took some of that guaifenesin stuff and a few minutes later experienced a *significant* reduction in coughing, as well as a significant reduction in the feeling that stuff was sliding down into my lungs.
So, yeah, if I have a really bad cough like that again, I'm going to go looking for that stuff.
On the other hand, I'm not convinced phenylephrine (ostensibly a decongestant) does anything whatsoever. This caught me by surprise a couple of years back, when the local pharmacy just sort of silently switched over to it without saying anything and next time I had a cold I went and picked up some decongestant, which I just assumed was the same stuff I'd been using, but I found that it didn't work, at all. At first I figured I just had a different, harder-to-decongest sort of cold, but next time I had a cold (a few months later), same thing. Come to find out, the decongestant I'd previously been using was based on pseudoephedrine, which actually works, but if you want to buy that now you have to actually go to the pharmacy counter and ask for it. (Apparently somebody decided to use it as a starting point for production of illegal recreational drugs, and so now the powers that be want to be able to notice when somebody buys unusually large quantities of it, so they need to keep a list of names. Or something like that. So it's still over the counter in the sense of not needing a prescription, but you can't just pick it up off the shelf and go to the checkout with it.) What do you know, I bought some of the pseudoephedrine, and thirty minutes later I was breathing through my nose again. Again, this is anecdotal and not properly controlled (though I did go into it blind to the initial change), but it's enough to convince *me* that I'd rather buy the pseudoephedrine than the phenylephrine.
> 1. How do you explain that IE8 is the youngest of the non-beta's and the slowest.
IE8 includes IE7 Compatibility View, which is built on the old IE6 codebase. HTH.HAND.
> 2. Why is it then that IE has more problems with standards?
See previous answer.
> You should see them when I send them an email, to them, from them, through their own mail server.
Don't forget to Cc their boss, just for the extra fun of it.
And yeah, I had to telnet into port 80 just a few weeks ago to verify that the proxy was returning an HTTP/1.0 response whereas the site itself was returning an HTTP/1.1 response. (Eventually Symantec issued a fix, presumably because upgrading every proxy on the planet isn't feasible on the right kind of timescale and people needed to get LiveUpdate working right away.)
> "How do you gain access to a MySQL database, if all of the passwords have been forgotten?"
Seriously?
Okay, I guess the first thing you do is fire the database administrator and his boss...
Telnet? Bah. I control the network connection by flipping switches on the front panel.
> Sitting in front of my computer imagining webpages is even faster.
You have a computer? All I've got is a piece of dark grey slate. Works great.
What do I need a computer for? Confounded new-fangled gadgets...
> People stopped using NN because it started to suck. It would crash on me multiple times a day.
I noticed that too. Pegasus Mail suddenly started crashing a lot too, seemingly at random. And then I uninstalled ICQ, and suddenly Pegasus stopped crashing, and Netscape went back to its former crash rate of a couple of times a day. (This was on Windows 95 OSR2, so, no memory protection.)
And I know the browser crashing a couple of times a day sounds like excruciating pain now, but this was 1998; there was no such thing as a browser that could go all day without crashing.
> I have *never* had a textbook cost more than about $160, and most cost about $100 when
> purchased new, putting my textbook costs at a maximum of $500 per quarter, typically much less.
It depends on your major.
One of the worst cases is when a class just requires you to buy half a dozen books or more. This is usually legitimate -- you can't expect to take a literature class and not buy some books, and if you take a dead language you need at *least* a grammar text, a lexicon, and a workbook, and probably at least one sample text as well. And the lexicon won't be cheap. Two of the languages I've had you really needed two of the things -- a traditional lexicon, and a reader's lexicon. You technically could complete the course without the reader's lexicon, but your homework exercises would take 5-6 times as long.
The really expensive individual textbooks are the ones that include lots of high-color glossy photographs and/or lots of up-to-date information from a fast-changing field. Biomed majors get soaked pretty hard, for instance.
There are also textbooks that are expensive precisely because they're a specialty item that only a very small number of students need. If you major in ancient near-eastern archaeology, for instance, you're going to shell out a bit extra for the textbooks for certain classes.
Personally, I only had one course where we used a book written by the prof, and he sold it to us at his cost (about $5 in the nineties; it would be more like $10 now). Well, okay, a couple of my other classes had syllabi that were thick enough to qualify as books, but I'm pretty sure the profs didn't get any royalties on the syllabi; the campus bookstore sold those for the cost of printing. They seemed expensive for what you got, but I'm pretty sure that's because low-volume print jobs cost more.
But I went to a small school with a relatively low student-to-teacher ratio. YMMV.
> You basically demand that an author of a work has to make his profit/living shortly ... in other words he can not place it into his basement
> after he did his work. So
> and sell it later
I would have assumed he meant a reasonable time after the start of protection. In the case of copyright this was traditionally the date of first publication. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to make the work in your basement and get it ready for publication. We're talking about the duration of copyright once you have done that and start to sell the thing.
> If I make wine, I can store it in my cellar and sell it when I want
Yeah, but you can't sue the guy down the road and bar him from selling wine as well. In fact, if he buys a bottle of your wine, analyzes it, and manages to figure out how to make wine that tastes the same as yours... he's allowed to do that. You can patent some aspect of your wine-making process, but the patent only lasts for twenty years.
> Given how easy it is to publish, market, and distribute works these days,
> copyright should be shorter than it initially was, not longer.
I think it should be the same as it was. Distribution may have gotten easier over the years, but it's not much easier to get a publisher to take on your work than it ever was, and the (average) human lifespan hasn't gotten shorter either.
So, it was fourteen years with a fourteen year renewal, and I'm willing to grant that it makes sense for the renewal to be automatic these days. (That's consistent with other, non-problematic changes that have been introduced, such as the removal of the requirement for copyrights to be registered.) Twenty-eight years then, unless the author releases it sooner.
Although, I really don't see how most computer books could have value other than historical interest for anywhere near that long. Raise your hand if you want to buy a new copy of a book on how to use WordStar.
> Can you give me one single thing that has changed in the last 10 years regarding data compression?
I can, and it's a biggie.
Ten years ago, it actually made sense for an application to include its own built-in data compression subroutines written by the application developer. Today it does not.
> It's a book about data compression. It's TEN years old.
I have a pretty hard time imagining any reason why a ten-year-old book about data compression would still be in print. I can only think of five or six computer-related books that old that are worth buying used for cheap (much less new at full price), and the authors are all household names (well, at least among computer geeks).
Honestly, McDonald's doesn't really need the WiFi to attract customers. They have one of the most pervasive advertising campaigns known to humanity (and I don't just mean television, but everything: tv, radio, internet, local newspapers, pitchers of orange punch at little league games and family reunions, every sporting event up to and including the Olympics, billboards on every highway in North America, ...) and also they somehow manage to position their restaurants so that they are almost always ON THE WAY to wherever you are going, especially if you're in a hurry. And they sign all the most lucratively popular toy and movie and tv character promotions, not to mention that periodic Monopoly thing, which *really* gets the customers coming back, for reasons I do not entirely understand.
On the other hand, I also don't see what the big deal is with people sticking around too long in the dining room. 80% of their business is drive-through anyway, and 90% is breakfast and lunch, when people are in a hurry. McDonald's does more business between 11:30 and 12:30 than they do from 2pm to closing. Their dining rooms typically sit empty in the evenings, when people would have time to sit around.
Yeah, but you have to drive an hour to get to the nearest Panera from here; whereas, predictably, there's a McDonald's within three blocks (and a Wendy's three blocks the other direction). Though, if they have an access point at the McD's, I'm not aware of it. Aside from the completely free public wireless access point at the public library, the only other publicly available access point in town that I'm aware of is at that little joint on the square called Pop's Sweet Shop or something like that -- which, come to think of it, has been there for a couple of years now, so by my reckoning it'll probably go out of business soon.
Downtown merchants don't tend to last real long around here, for whatever reason, although there are a couple of exceptions; unaccountably, KC's aquaworld, a pet store specializing in fish, hasn't budged the entire time I've lived in Galion. Wendy's could technically be considered to be in the downtown district and hasn't shown any signs of financial distress either, although they have a real parking lot, not just the on-street parking that most of the downtown merchants have to make to with, so that may be part of the difference, and of course they're a major-chain franchise also.
McDonald's is, of course, in a much better location on the west side of town. You never see a McDonald's restaurant in a bad location. In Galion, there's a grand total of five state routes, and you can see the front of McDonald's from all five of them. For bonus points, they also have great parking and are directly in front of the most popular grocery store in town, and you can't get to the second-most-popular one (from most places in town) without driving past them. Oh, yeah, and just in case that wasn't enough, the west side of town also has the higher average per-capita income, and due to a combination of Heise Park and some winding residential roads on the south side, there's only one good way over from the west side to the rest of town, or vice versa; the people who live in the three ritziest developments can't get to the rest of Galion without driving past (well, less than a block from) McDonald's.
How did we get on this subject? Oh, yeah, wireless access. To my knowledge, McD's in Galion doesn't even offer it. As for Panera Bread, you'd have to drive to Columbus (well, Westerville anyway) to find one of those.
> No ed degree (or at least serious progress toward it) means no teaching job, period.
It's actually slightly more complex than that: the *main* thing that you absolutely have to have to get a job as a primary or secondary teacher is a teacher's license in the state you want to teach in. There are additional things you may need to compete against the other applicants, particularly if there's a teacher surplus in the region (e.g., currently in central Ohio you pretty much need to be a laid-off teacher with years of experience, and there still aren't enough positions to go around), but the teaching license is the _base_ requirement. Without that, you can't even apply.
But yeah, one of the requirements for the license, at least in most states, is a degree in education. You also have to pass certain tests. If you don't major in education, you can't get the license, and the schools can't hire you to teach, except under certain special or unusual conditions.
Substitute teaching is different, though. You don't need any particular degree or license for that.