Assuming copyright infringement is illegal, then if your intent is to give me the full copy, does it really matter how you give it to me?
I think the point here is that the intent of any single user is to not give the full copy. The fully copy is only obtained through many, many different users, not from a single source.
That said, I doubt that this argument is going to fly. And surely there's no way they can argue that the recipient of the full copy wasn't participating in copyright infringement! But iiNet are in serious difficulty: they either stop all p2p services -- in which case, they lose almost all of their customers; or else they fight it and get sued.
And the really scary aspect is that if they lose, then all file sharing in Australia is essentially dead. Once the precedent is set, every other ISP will fold like a house of cards. I'm not sure if there's a way out of this mess.
killall -9 -r firefox is much easier:) (The -r option makes the name argument a regexp search, and is very, very powerful...)
As for *nix directories, whether you use/usr or/usr/local or/opt it really doesn't matter, provided the relevant directories with executables in them are in your path. That's the beauty of the system, and that's why these analogies between Windows and *nix are meaningless.
When weighed against a possible loss of lives, the cost of an hour's business at a Windmill is insignificant.
To take that argument to its logical absurdity, the safest way for us to live our lives would be for us all to stay in our houses and never go anywhere. Not only would that stop the terrorists, but it would eliminate the road toll, prevent mass murders and the worst anyone would ever have to fear would be cutting themselves on the cheese grater.
But we don't do that, because we accept that there will always be an element of risk in our lives, and that the compensation is a life that's happy, interesting and entertaining. Yes, it sucks if you're the one knocked down by a bus as you cross the road; but the chances of that happening are so small that we just accept the remote possibility and move on, safe in the knowledge that it's highly unlikely to happen to us. Considering that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are even less than being hit by a bus, why should we view it in any other way than as an incredibly remote, and therefore acceptable, risk? If we start jumping at shadows for things such as the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, then we've got problems...
(Thankfully, the global financial crisis has pretty much shoved terrorism into the background where it belongs. Nobody cares about Osama anymore, when they've got more immediate worries like mortgages to deal with...)
Hey, I wasn't judging anyone by my own standards, just putting the alternative out there...
But I would say to you that life has its ups and downs, and whilst the downs can seem permanent they're generally temporary. Don't give up; things will turn around, and often when you least expect them to.
(I fully agree with you that everyone has the right to leave on their own terms and with their dignity; but please don't shorten your own life prematurely! As for religion -- well, I'm not religious, but I do fear death... which is a sucky position to be in, I can tell you!)
But surely that only works if you pick and choose, in which case you're really just operating according to your own conscience? After all, moral behaviour in Christianity is tied into love of God and neighbour. Rejection of God renders the morals pointless and baseless.
I'm not sure if it renders the morals pointless and baseless. "Love they neighbour" makes sense irrespective of religion, after all, and it stands as its own separate commandment. Irrespective of whether or not there's a god, that rule will stand you in good stead to lead a good and happy life. (Your comments raise the incidental question as to whether our conscience is innate or learned... and of that I'm not sure. I suspect there's an element of both; or at least, that early guidance causes no harm and may well help.)
I have to say that out of all religions I've looked at, New Testament Christianity is the least concerned with mindless following of rules and the most concerned with laying down basic moral guidelines. It's impressive in its lack of regulations, and also in its humility (which almost turns religion on its head at times -- it's breathtaking.) So I admire the ideal a lot, and I wasn't blaming Christianity for the abuses carried out in its name. I just think that religion in the hands of man is a very powerful and potentially abusive tool (witness, for example, Christianity in the Middle Ages, or Islam in modern times). Fundamentalism is a very scary thing.
As far as the faith vs. reason argument goes, I'm simply too much of a scientist -- I'll always want to disprove the null hypothesis. And based on the available evidence, Occam's Razor dictates that there is no god. But I'm envious of those who like yourself have faith -- I think it would lead to a much happier life, safe in the knowledge that consciousness doesn't end with death. After all, an atheist can only know that he's wrong -- it's not a position that gives much comfort!
So you're saying he'll be aware of it after he's dead?
*laughs*... no! But he might have been aware of it later on in life. Personally, having experienced the delights of consciousness, I know I'm going to hang on to it as long as I possibly can...
You were the one with a quote saying that devoutness (i.e. adherence to God) was something God wouldn't care about, which I disagreed with.
Er, that wasn't me -- I just jumped into the conversation right in the middle:)
I agree that God gave us minds in order that we might use them (though I also disagree that his precepts are irrelevant). How is that at all relevant to what I posted? Surely a intelligent mind, upon discovering an infinitely worthy being, would worship it?
If you really have irrefutable evidence in the scientific sense of the word for the existence of God, please share it with us.
Although I have to admit that if I discovered an infinitely worthy being, I'd much rather debate and argue with it, rather than worship it. Nobody wants a doormat, after all, and I'm sure the divine creator gets seriously sick of sycophants queuing up to grovel...:)
(I was -- and still am -- stirring, just a little, and I'm sorry if I caused offense... I have nothing against religion per se, and I do think Christianity (in the New Testament, at least) sets down some pretty sensible guidelines for living a good life. What concerns me about religion is the way it has the power to influence stupid people -- for example, the Pope's latest edict (that condoms are bad and increase the spread of HIV) will probably cause millions of people who can't think for themselves to stop using condoms. That's both nutty and dangerous...)
The quote has fairly massive flaws If God is by his nature, supremely worthy of worship, then not worshipping him is a terrible wrong, making any human virtues somewhat irrelevant. And if God's moral standard is at a certain level, then human definitions of virtue will always fall short.
So you're saying it's more important to show respect to God, than to actually follow his/her/its teachings?
I would have thought that if God made man in his own image, then she made a man that was innately curious, enquiring and sceptical. In which case, a lack of blind faith would be rewarded in the afterlife, since it showed you actually had some intelligence, whereas a senseless following of irrelevant precepts would see you chucked in the "try again" bin.
To give humans reason and intelligence, and then tell them not to follow it, is just ludicrous.
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions of years before I was born and had not suffered the slightest of inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens).
That's as maybe... but in those billions of years previously, young Mr Twain wasn't aware of what he was missing.
They modeled and controlled for potential confounds due to (a) sampling bias in cross-sectional comparisons (point raised by grandparent)
I'm sorry -- and maybe I'm just getting too old for this! -- but where in that abstract was there any indication that they used an unbiased cross-sectional sample? There's nothing in the text you quoted that supports your conclusion.
From the abstract, they seem to be suggesting that they can offer an explanation for the conflicting results of longitudinal studies by deliberately trying to measure retest effects. But that in itself doesn't prove that previous cross-sectional studies were based on unbiased sampling, as the sampling that they used to pick subjects for their longitudinal tests may also have been biased...
(Just to make this point particularly clear, consider the possibility that a subgroup in the population undergoes slower neurodegeneration with a later onset than the average, and also (perhaps because of being high achievers with little spare time) rarely participates in research studies. Neither cross-sectional nor longitudinal studies will include a representative sample of this group in their studies, nor will they be able to identify that there is a subgroup that behaves differently to the norm. Bias is still an issue in these studies, although I personally doubt it would really make much of a difference...)
If the portrait is 500 years old, and it was painted 6 years before his death, I believe I'm being told that Shakespeare died in AD 2009 - 500 + 6 = 1515. This page says that Shakespeare was born 1564. How could Shakespeare have died before he was born?
You believe it's the year 2009, when in fact it's closer to 2109. I can't tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don't know...
Whatever the end result is on the authenticity of either of these portraits, it seems every portrait shares the basic physical traits that we collectively think of as "Shakespeare".
Except that the argument for this portrait being genuine is simply that the others are copies of it! So of course they all look alike! (for example, the painting that brought this most recent discovery to light was the Janssen portrait of Shakespeare, which is accepted to be an Elizabethan portrait of an unknown sitter deliberately doctored about a hundred years after it was painted to look more like Shakespeare (see this article by the curator of the Folger library...)
(And from TFA: "Professor Wells said today: '... it could certainly be the basis for the engraving seen in the First Folio.'")
Speak for yourself. The user base for LaTeX is minuscule compared to Word's.
I was replying to a poster who suggested that LaTeX output was inferior to published, typeset books from the 1930s -- my comment specifically related to the aesthetics of the printed output. I'm not sure how that led to a diatribe about LaTeX usability!
I agree with you that LaTeX usage is declining. But the sad thing is that with LyX, I can write with the speed and ease-of-use of MS Word (although I'd argue LyX is in fact easier to use), I can track changes on a collaborative document, use a far superior reference manager than Endnote and produce output that is beautiful to read. And it's all done (at work) on a Windows XP machine, installed from an installer exe, with no need to resort to different OSes or anything like that.
who said Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote everything, despite the inconvenient fact that de Vere died about nine years before Shakespeare's last recorded play was written.
Hmmm... as you might know, the dates of composition for Shakespeare's plays are somewhat in dispute (including, of course, "The Tempest", conventionally dated six or seven years after Oxford died in 1604). And if Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon's died in 1616, how was he "Our ever-living poet" (i.e. dead) in 1609?
Personally, though, I'm a Marlovian -- any theory that involves a secret agent writing plays in his spare time, faking his own death to escape execution, and then writing plays of Shakespeare from his exile in Italy gets my vote:)
(1) You can customise all the layout elements of LaTeX to suit your own style. That includes margins, fonts, heading styles, line spacings, widow/orphan control, headers/footers and kerning. I agree that the default settings are pretty ugly, although I'd argue that the output still looks incomparably better than MS Word!
(2) Do you really want to spend the time and money using professional typesetting software on every document you produce? If you're writing a book, a publishing house will take care of all that for you in any case.
LaTeX output looks better than anything else available to the home user that I've ever seen. It's not perfect, but it's close enough for most of us.
Ditto for chemistry. In fact proposals and manuscripts had to be submitted in MS Word format until fairly recently; ACS, Wiley, RSC, AAAS, and Nature all accept manuscripts as MS Word + EndNote.
You mean MS Word alone. No journal that I've ever submitted to (including Nature) would ask for an Endnote library attached to the submission!
And it's a simple and easy thing to convert your manuscript from LaTeX to MS Word. I do it all the time, and it takes me about a minute (Convert to HTML with htlatex, open the HTML in MS Word, load styles from the template of your choice... done!)
Biomedicine falls in between, into the raping the souls of the sick for money gap.
Actually, us researchers get raped by soulless governments, who underpay us, hate funding our research and yet still expect instant, observable and immediate heath outcomes.
In 10 years of research in the biomedical field I have never actually seen anyone use LaTex.
I'm a postdoc working in the fields of cell biology/molecular biology, and I use LyX/LaTeX for every single paper I write. I can't think properly in MS Word, and the combination of JabRef/BibTeX wins hands down over Endnote.
Unfortunately, very few biological science journals (with the PLoS journals being a notable exception) accept LaTeX; but the conversion from LyX to MS Word via HTML is quick, simple and straightforward. You just get used to doing it before you submit the final revision. (And most journals take initial MS submissions in PDFs, so you don't need to worry about doing any conversions before the final revision).
So it does happen, although I agree it's pretty rare.
Actually, you can type the equation in Lyx more or less exactly as in latex, without touching the mouse. Lyx is great because it allows one to see the structure of a big complex equation, which can sometime be difficult in latex.
Just to add to that: you can at any point insert LaTeX code directly into LyX. It's simple and easy to do (for example, I do it for figures all the time, since LyX doesn't support the more esoteric LaTeX packages like sidecap). In fact, I'd argue that to really benefit from using LyX, you need to be fluent in LaTeX.
But there's many advantages to using LyX over pure LaTeX. For a start, there's a nice semi-WYSIWYG interface, which makes your document easier to read whilst editing. Then there's a table of contents box, making it easier to jump from section to section (a life-saver when writing a thesis!). And finally, there's the speed: it's so much faster to type Ctrl-E (or Ctrl-I, as I've remapped it to) for emphasis, than writing "\emph{}".
Why would people prefer the distorted sound produced my MP3-128???
Well, some of us can't tell the difference, for starters. With a good quality (i.e. compressed using LAME) 128kbps MP3 file, I doubt many could tell the difference between the mp3 and its source. The "sizzles" the article talks about result from poorly encoded material which I haven't heard in years (the Xing encoder, for example, was notorious in producing those artefacts). After all, a good psychoacoustic model in the encoding process should eliminate any artefacts which are audible.
Add to that the context in which people are listening to their music (bud earphones, lots of external white noise) and I doubt that *anyone* could tell the difference. MP3 is a clear example of near-enough-is-good-enough.
Is there a proper alternative to Picasa for Linux? f-spot is horribly unstable and not very usable imho
This is a discussion about Picasa the photo-sharing website, not Picasa the application. They're your photos; you can chose to upload them to some other site if you like. Or just not upload them at all:)
(I haven't found anything better than Picasa for linux, incidentally -- but then I don't really mind, since I'm predominantly a landscape photographer. Photos with faces in them get automatically binned:)
What gives you the right to tell Microsoft "I've decided that your network isn't going to be family friendly"?
Sorry, but why does someone listing themselves as a lesbian make Microsoft's network family unfriendly? Is it now wrong for kids to learn about sexual orientation?
I was just happy to see IceWm in a slashdot headline. It's a great little WM that doesn't always get the attention from users it deserves.
I'll second that. IceWM was my main WM from 2001 until last year (when I finally gave in and allowed my GPU to worry about window management cycles...)
It can't match it with the compositing giants these days, but IceWM ran super-smoothly on a P120 laptop -- and that's gotta be worth something. The code base was small, straightforward and easy to hack, too. I still miss using it from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming copyright infringement is illegal, then if your intent is to give me the full copy, does it really matter how you give it to me?
I think the point here is that the intent of any single user is to not give the full copy. The fully copy is only obtained through many, many different users, not from a single source.
That said, I doubt that this argument is going to fly. And surely there's no way they can argue that the recipient of the full copy wasn't participating in copyright infringement! But iiNet are in serious difficulty: they either stop all p2p services -- in which case, they lose almost all of their customers; or else they fight it and get sued.
And the really scary aspect is that if they lose, then all file sharing in Australia is essentially dead. Once the precedent is set, every other ISP will fold like a house of cards. I'm not sure if there's a way out of this mess.
like kill -9 `pidof firefox.exe`
killall -9 -r firefox is much easier :) (The -r option makes the name argument a regexp search, and is very, very powerful ...)
As for *nix directories, whether you use /usr or /usr/local or /opt it really doesn't matter, provided the relevant directories with executables in them are in your path. That's the beauty of the system, and that's why these analogies between Windows and *nix are meaningless.
When weighed against a possible loss of lives, the cost of an hour's business at a Windmill is insignificant.
To take that argument to its logical absurdity, the safest way for us to live our lives would be for us all to stay in our houses and never go anywhere. Not only would that stop the terrorists, but it would eliminate the road toll, prevent mass murders and the worst anyone would ever have to fear would be cutting themselves on the cheese grater.
But we don't do that, because we accept that there will always be an element of risk in our lives, and that the compensation is a life that's happy, interesting and entertaining. Yes, it sucks if you're the one knocked down by a bus as you cross the road; but the chances of that happening are so small that we just accept the remote possibility and move on, safe in the knowledge that it's highly unlikely to happen to us. Considering that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack are even less than being hit by a bus, why should we view it in any other way than as an incredibly remote, and therefore acceptable, risk? If we start jumping at shadows for things such as the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, then we've got problems ...
(Thankfully, the global financial crisis has pretty much shoved terrorism into the background where it belongs. Nobody cares about Osama anymore, when they've got more immediate worries like mortgages to deal with ...)
Hey, I wasn't judging anyone by my own standards, just putting the alternative out there ...
But I would say to you that life has its ups and downs, and whilst the downs can seem permanent they're generally temporary. Don't give up; things will turn around, and often when you least expect them to.
(I fully agree with you that everyone has the right to leave on their own terms and with their dignity; but please don't shorten your own life prematurely! As for religion -- well, I'm not religious, but I do fear death ... which is a sucky position to be in, I can tell you!)
But surely that only works if you pick and choose, in which case you're really just operating according to your own conscience? After all, moral behaviour in Christianity is tied into love of God and neighbour. Rejection of God renders the morals pointless and baseless.
I'm not sure if it renders the morals pointless and baseless. "Love they neighbour" makes sense irrespective of religion, after all, and it stands as its own separate commandment. Irrespective of whether or not there's a god, that rule will stand you in good stead to lead a good and happy life. (Your comments raise the incidental question as to whether our conscience is innate or learned ... and of that I'm not sure. I suspect there's an element of both; or at least, that early guidance causes no harm and may well help.)
I have to say that out of all religions I've looked at, New Testament Christianity is the least concerned with mindless following of rules and the most concerned with laying down basic moral guidelines. It's impressive in its lack of regulations, and also in its humility (which almost turns religion on its head at times -- it's breathtaking.) So I admire the ideal a lot, and I wasn't blaming Christianity for the abuses carried out in its name. I just think that religion in the hands of man is a very powerful and potentially abusive tool (witness, for example, Christianity in the Middle Ages, or Islam in modern times). Fundamentalism is a very scary thing.
As far as the faith vs. reason argument goes, I'm simply too much of a scientist -- I'll always want to disprove the null hypothesis. And based on the available evidence, Occam's Razor dictates that there is no god. But I'm envious of those who like yourself have faith -- I think it would lead to a much happier life, safe in the knowledge that consciousness doesn't end with death. After all, an atheist can only know that he's wrong -- it's not a position that gives much comfort!
So you're saying he'll be aware of it after he's dead?
*laughs* ... no! But he might have been aware of it later on in life. Personally, having experienced the delights of consciousness, I know I'm going to hang on to it as long as I possibly can ...
You were the one with a quote saying that devoutness (i.e. adherence to God) was something God wouldn't care about, which I disagreed with.
Er, that wasn't me -- I just jumped into the conversation right in the middle :)
I agree that God gave us minds in order that we might use them (though I also disagree that his precepts are irrelevant). How is that at all relevant to what I posted? Surely a intelligent mind, upon discovering an infinitely worthy being, would worship it?
If you really have irrefutable evidence in the scientific sense of the word for the existence of God, please share it with us.
Although I have to admit that if I discovered an infinitely worthy being, I'd much rather debate and argue with it, rather than worship it. Nobody wants a doormat, after all, and I'm sure the divine creator gets seriously sick of sycophants queuing up to grovel ... :)
(I was -- and still am -- stirring, just a little, and I'm sorry if I caused offense ... I have nothing against religion per se, and I do think Christianity (in the New Testament, at least) sets down some pretty sensible guidelines for living a good life. What concerns me about religion is the way it has the power to influence stupid people -- for example, the Pope's latest edict (that condoms are bad and increase the spread of HIV) will probably cause millions of people who can't think for themselves to stop using condoms. That's both nutty and dangerous ...)
The quote has fairly massive flaws If God is by his nature, supremely worthy of worship, then not worshipping him is a terrible wrong, making any human virtues somewhat irrelevant. And if God's moral standard is at a certain level, then human definitions of virtue will always fall short.
So you're saying it's more important to show respect to God, than to actually follow his/her/its teachings?
I would have thought that if God made man in his own image, then she made a man that was innately curious, enquiring and sceptical. In which case, a lack of blind faith would be rewarded in the afterlife, since it showed you actually had some intelligence, whereas a senseless following of irrelevant precepts would see you chucked in the "try again" bin.
To give humans reason and intelligence, and then tell them not to follow it, is just ludicrous.
"I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions of years before I was born and
had not suffered the slightest of inconvenience from it." -- Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens).
That's as maybe ... but in those billions of years previously, young Mr Twain wasn't aware of what he was missing.
They modeled and controlled for potential confounds due to (a) sampling bias in cross-sectional comparisons (point raised by grandparent)
I'm sorry -- and maybe I'm just getting too old for this! -- but where in that abstract was there any indication that they used an unbiased cross-sectional sample? There's nothing in the text you quoted that supports your conclusion.
From the abstract, they seem to be suggesting that they can offer an explanation for the conflicting results of longitudinal studies by deliberately trying to measure retest effects. But that in itself doesn't prove that previous cross-sectional studies were based on unbiased sampling, as the sampling that they used to pick subjects for their longitudinal tests may also have been biased ...
(Just to make this point particularly clear, consider the possibility that a subgroup in the population undergoes slower neurodegeneration with a later onset than the average, and also (perhaps because of being high achievers with little spare time) rarely participates in research studies. Neither cross-sectional nor longitudinal studies will include a representative sample of this group in their studies, nor will they be able to identify that there is a subgroup that behaves differently to the norm. Bias is still an issue in these studies, although I personally doubt it would really make much of a difference ...)
If the portrait is 500 years old, and it was painted 6 years before his death, I believe I'm being told that Shakespeare died in AD 2009 - 500 + 6 = 1515. This page says that Shakespeare was born 1564. How could Shakespeare have died before he was born?
You believe it's the year 2009, when in fact it's closer to 2109. I can't tell you exactly what year it is because we honestly don't know ...
(You think that's air you're breathing now?)
What about the persons you meet in real?
Nup. They're photoshopped too ...
Whatever the end result is on the authenticity of either of these portraits, it seems every portrait shares the basic physical traits that we collectively think of as "Shakespeare".
Except that the argument for this portrait being genuine is simply that the others are copies of it! So of course they all look alike! (for example, the painting that brought this most recent discovery to light was the Janssen portrait of Shakespeare, which is accepted to be an Elizabethan portrait of an unknown sitter deliberately doctored about a hundred years after it was painted to look more like Shakespeare (see this article by the curator of the Folger library ...)
(And from TFA: "Professor Wells said today: '... it could certainly be the basis for the engraving seen in the First Folio.'")
it's close enough for most of us
Speak for yourself. The user base for LaTeX is minuscule compared to Word's.
I was replying to a poster who suggested that LaTeX output was inferior to published, typeset books from the 1930s -- my comment specifically related to the aesthetics of the printed output. I'm not sure how that led to a diatribe about LaTeX usability!
I agree with you that LaTeX usage is declining. But the sad thing is that with LyX, I can write with the speed and ease-of-use of MS Word (although I'd argue LyX is in fact easier to use), I can track changes on a collaborative document, use a far superior reference manager than Endnote and produce output that is beautiful to read. And it's all done (at work) on a Windows XP machine, installed from an installer exe, with no need to resort to different OSes or anything like that.
who said Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote everything, despite the inconvenient fact that de Vere died about nine years before Shakespeare's last recorded play was written.
Hmmm ... as you might know, the dates of composition for Shakespeare's plays are somewhat in dispute (including, of course, "The Tempest", conventionally dated six or seven years after Oxford died in 1604). And if Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon's died in 1616, how was he "Our ever-living poet" (i.e. dead) in 1609?
Personally, though, I'm a Marlovian -- any theory that involves a secret agent writing plays in his spare time, faking his own death to escape execution, and then writing plays of Shakespeare from his exile in Italy gets my vote :)
Two points.
(1) You can customise all the layout elements of LaTeX to suit your own style. That includes margins, fonts, heading styles, line spacings, widow/orphan control, headers/footers and kerning. I agree that the default settings are pretty ugly, although I'd argue that the output still looks incomparably better than MS Word!
(2) Do you really want to spend the time and money using professional typesetting software on every document you produce? If you're writing a book, a publishing house will take care of all that for you in any case.
LaTeX output looks better than anything else available to the home user that I've ever seen. It's not perfect, but it's close enough for most of us.
Ditto for chemistry. In fact proposals and manuscripts had to be submitted in MS Word format until fairly recently; ACS, Wiley, RSC, AAAS, and Nature all accept manuscripts as MS Word + EndNote.
You mean MS Word alone. No journal that I've ever submitted to (including Nature) would ask for an Endnote library attached to the submission!
And it's a simple and easy thing to convert your manuscript from LaTeX to MS Word. I do it all the time, and it takes me about a minute (Convert to HTML with htlatex, open the HTML in MS Word, load styles from the template of your choice ... done!)
Biomedicine falls in between, into the raping the souls of the sick for money gap.
Actually, us researchers get raped by soulless governments, who underpay us, hate funding our research and yet still expect instant, observable and immediate heath outcomes.
But you were close.
In 10 years of research in the biomedical field I have never actually seen anyone use LaTex.
I'm a postdoc working in the fields of cell biology/molecular biology, and I use LyX/LaTeX for every single paper I write. I can't think properly in MS Word, and the combination of JabRef/BibTeX wins hands down over Endnote.
Unfortunately, very few biological science journals (with the PLoS journals being a notable exception) accept LaTeX; but the conversion from LyX to MS Word via HTML is quick, simple and straightforward. You just get used to doing it before you submit the final revision. (And most journals take initial MS submissions in PDFs, so you don't need to worry about doing any conversions before the final revision).
So it does happen, although I agree it's pretty rare.
Actually, you can type the equation in Lyx more or less exactly as in latex, without touching the mouse. Lyx is great because it allows one to see the structure of a big complex equation, which can sometime be difficult in latex.
Just to add to that: you can at any point insert LaTeX code directly into LyX. It's simple and easy to do (for example, I do it for figures all the time, since LyX doesn't support the more esoteric LaTeX packages like sidecap). In fact, I'd argue that to really benefit from using LyX, you need to be fluent in LaTeX.
But there's many advantages to using LyX over pure LaTeX. For a start, there's a nice semi-WYSIWYG interface, which makes your document easier to read whilst editing. Then there's a table of contents box, making it easier to jump from section to section (a life-saver when writing a thesis!). And finally, there's the speed: it's so much faster to type Ctrl-E (or Ctrl-I, as I've remapped it to) for emphasis, than writing "\emph{}".
Why would people prefer the distorted sound produced my MP3-128???
Well, some of us can't tell the difference, for starters. With a good quality (i.e. compressed using LAME) 128kbps MP3 file, I doubt many could tell the difference between the mp3 and its source. The "sizzles" the article talks about result from poorly encoded material which I haven't heard in years (the Xing encoder, for example, was notorious in producing those artefacts). After all, a good psychoacoustic model in the encoding process should eliminate any artefacts which are audible.
Add to that the context in which people are listening to their music (bud earphones, lots of external white noise) and I doubt that *anyone* could tell the difference. MP3 is a clear example of near-enough-is-good-enough.
Is there a proper alternative to Picasa for Linux?
f-spot is horribly unstable and not very usable imho
This is a discussion about Picasa the photo-sharing website, not Picasa the application. They're your photos; you can chose to upload them to some other site if you like. Or just not upload them at all :)
(I haven't found anything better than Picasa for linux, incidentally -- but then I don't really mind, since I'm predominantly a landscape photographer. Photos with faces in them get automatically binned :)
What gives you the right to tell Microsoft "I've decided that your network isn't going to be family friendly"?
Sorry, but why does someone listing themselves as a lesbian make Microsoft's network family unfriendly? Is it now wrong for kids to learn about sexual orientation?
I was just happy to see IceWm in a slashdot headline. It's a great little WM that doesn't always get the attention from users it deserves.
I'll second that. IceWM was my main WM from 2001 until last year (when I finally gave in and allowed my GPU to worry about window management cycles ...)
It can't match it with the compositing giants these days, but IceWM ran super-smoothly on a P120 laptop -- and that's gotta be worth something. The code base was small, straightforward and easy to hack, too. I still miss using it from time to time.
linux fails it in every way. just put a fork in it.
Hmmm ... I think you meant to say "Windows" there. Linux handles fork() perfectly fine ...