If the end of the technological world means the end of first posts, Natalie Portman's whatever, gleeps, and all the other debris that keeps Slashdot from being as great as it should be, maybe it'll be worthwhile after all.
I'll miss the Simpsons though.
Oh well, c'est la guerre.
Goodbye technological era, we hardly knew ye. heh heh
I'm glad to see that an average guy, not much older than myself (right Robert? I forget) can have such a positive impact on things. Let this be an object lesson folks. The activism of the sixties ain't dead -- it's dormant, but we can wake it up, and the 'net can be a great alarm clock do wake it up with. Go to it kids. Make a difference. Save the world. Pirate DVDs. Whatever. I'm all for it.
Robert Jones is God. So speaketh the (void), so shall it be done. Hahaha I think I'm gonna get in trouble for this. No really, what would you call him -- "a member of the community?" He's a swell guy who has helped do a Good Thing. What else do you need to know? Read his web page or send him an email if you want to know more. Tell him Chris sent ya, and that the slabsters say hello.
Yeah I'm definitely going to get in trouble for this hahaha
Ok, fair point, no run-off -- I'd forgotten about that. But that doesn't undermine the point, does it? What kind of majority is needed -- a simple >50% of the electoral votes or it goes to the House? Or would it be enough to simply have more than all other candidates? I knew this stuff at one time but can't remember it now. All this notwithstanding, I still don't think this is enough to discourage voting for third party candidates on the executive level, and it's *definitely* an incentive to inject some more variety into Congress on the federal legislative level. And the lower down the chain you go, the greater the impact could be; all the more reason to pay attention to (and run for!) local elections.
Here's an agenda I'd like to suggest: strongly consider supporting and voting for third party candidates. There has been a mentality in this country that you have exactly two choices on that first Tuesday in November (where year % 4 == 0 (heh)). Not so. The emergence of the Reform party has cracked that wall a little bit, but I'd like to see it crumble completely.
People assume that one of the Big Two parties is going to win anyway, and voting for a third party is a waste of a vote. But what if everyone stood back for a second and voted *not* for the most likely candidate, but for the candidate that seemed most likely to be the right person for the job? What if we voted as individuals, not as a pack? Maybe we'd end up with 40 candidates and none get over 10% of the vote. Maybe we'll need a runoff election every four years. But would that be such a bad thing? Maybe it would give a suitable underdog a shot for once.
Myself, I really like Ralph Nader and the Green Party -- he got my vote in 1996 and he'll get it again this year. But a lot of the hackers I know are Libertarians or Free Marketeers or Socialists or whatever, and that's fine. I'm sure there are great candidates in all these camps, really. Why not give them a shot. "Gee Dubya" is pretty obviously an imbecile and a stuffed shirt for his corporate backers -- do you really want to see him win? Is Al Gore, proud internet innovator, any better? Fuck no he's not. The survey at Select Smart isn't a bad place to find a candidate that comes close to your ideology, whatever it may be. And Project Vote Smart is also a pretty good place to learn more. And don't forget about local elections either -- they're less glamorous, but they have far more impact over your day to day life than the high profile CNN elections. Be an informed and active voter above all else. It's worth it.
Ever seen the math on the game of Go? Game board is 19x19, black & white players can go more or less anywhere. That gives 350+ possible moves for the first dozen rounds or so. Games tend to last many times longer than that of course. You can do the math yourself.
As fast as the chess possiblities rise, they are constrained by the possible movements of the pieces, the smaller board size, etc. Go rises orders of magnitude faster, and no computer program has to date (to my knowledge, mostly parrotting things I've skimmed here) been able to play even on a beginner's level. Fascinating stuff.
Not that this helps solve the Fermat's theorem of chess or anything.
1. They wish to port various tools (Office, Encarta, FrontPage) to Linux or BSD. This is most definetly not a bad thing, and is, IMHO, good. The plethora of tools for LInux/BSD can only be a good thing.
Hmm. My first thought was "Fat chance. Read the Halloween Documents." But then I thought about it a bit longer. Maybe this is MS looking to the post-trial world, and trying to be ready for it. If the final decision forces them to open up their OS, then under their current corporate architecture, they've lost their revenue base. Or have they?
If they can manoeuver themselves to be a supplier of desktop applications under a "commodity O/S market" or whatever, then...well, what then? Is that a bad thing, a good thing? Would they matter? Show of hands -- who here is willing to drop vi or emacs for Word2K? Nobody? I didn't think so. Though most people might be happy with Office, I'm not sure the Linux crowd would be all that interested. Hmm.
My first instinct was just to dismiss your comment out of hand (my guess is they simply want people to administer Hotmail, which entails no strategic scheme -- they just want the damn thing to work). But maybe there is something to your point.
As things are right now, Microsoft really has nothing to gain by embracing Linux or anything about Linux -- they're in the dominant position, after all. But tomorrow, after the court case is over with, maybe the playing field will be different, and MS will have to embrace the current opposition. In that light, this could be their move in that direction. I'm sure they wouldn't be doing anything to support Linux if there was no anti-trust issue in the background...
I'm sure this comment is going to be hopeless lost in the maelstrom, but Miller was quickly and interesting superceded. Around the same time as his lightning -> amino acids experiment, a UCLA biologist named Sidney Fox ran experiment in which amino acids are created from simpler chemicals (formaldehyde, ammonia, carbon dioxide), using a simpler setup (hotplate only, and given enough time it would work at room temperature), and to better results.
Fox' experiment produced not only amino acids, but simple proteins and basic cellular structures. That's right -- cells. Were they alive? Who knows. But I've done the experiment myself, in his lab, with his help, and it's dirt easy, and it produces great results.
He called the cells "proteinoid microspheres", and they followed some parameters for living things -- metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, etc. That might or might not mean anything -- fire has the same properties after all -- but it certainly felt like Fox was on the right track. So much so in fact that he had the opportunity to present his results before the Pope on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, Dr Fox died a couple of years ago and no one ever really learned about his work. Too bad.
For more on Dr Fox, take a look here (an article) and here (a thumbnail biography).
Anyhow, the point of bringing all this up is that this research really isn't anything new -- just the synthesis of several modern trends that would have happened sooner or later regardless, like cloning.
Well yeah, I realize that -- there are many countries with strong socialist tendencies, but I don't think there are any big examples of what I'd consider a 'purely' socialist state -- just as there are few/no examples of a 'purely' capitalist one. There is a wide spectrum, with the US on the capitalist side (without being 100%) and others on the socialist side (but again, not 100%). The only society I can think of offhand that's 100% socialistic would probably be some of the Native American tribes, and that counts only a few thousand people anymore, many/most of whom probably don't even live as their ancestors did.
So yeah, I was aware of your point, but it wasn't what I was getting at. I'm not sure it's even possible to have a purely social or capital based large country, just as it isn't possible to have a purely democratic country -- you need buffers in the form of representatives and governing organizations and such. Rather than having people on the left and right bickering over being on the left and right, what we need to do is acknowledge that the liberals and conservatives are both wrong, but that they also both have a grain of truth that needs to be teased out of them. That grain, like the sand in the oyster's jaw, can maybe be used to create the perl[1] of a new economic model, one that is fair to all while enrichening as many as possible and by as much as possible. Only then can we make true progress. Not by kowtowing before international trading organizations like this, that have every intention of trampling over the rights of man and the earth. And also not by binding people and prohibiting them from earning a fair compensation for their workmanship. A third way[2], a middle way. It's out there somewhere; perhaps someone in our generation will find it. I hope so.
[1] heh sorry couldn't resist that one [2] Isn't this what Clinton & Blair have been preaching these days? I don't want to follow their model either -- they just beat me to the term. Keep trying...
These protesters, aside from going about things the wrong way, have the right motivation. I'm not by any means one of those New World Order fearing right wing wackos, but the wackos do have some good points: organizations like the WTO and World Bank transfer authority from the hands of governments like the United States to private corporations to do with as they please. Is that a good thing?
Say what you will about the government, but at least in theory it exists to serve the common good. Corporations don't even pay lip service to that ideal -- they just want to maximize their bottom line for themselves and for their shareholders. Nowhere does it say that they have to do the rest of the world a shred of good, and if they absolutely don't have to, they won't. Take a look at the campaign to revoke Phillip Morris' corporate charter, and while you're at it, poke around the rest of the Adbusters site.
I'm also sympathetic with the laissez faire Libertarians who point out that government can't step in and tell the corporations what to do or who to serve. That is rightly their own business to manage. But at the same time, a government that allows one group to exploit the rest of the population is bankrupt and needs an overhaul. Revolution lies down that path.
What is a good middle ground? I don't know -- no one has come up with it yet. Socialism atrophied and went nowhere; capitalism has become a festering tumor that is strangling the people and the planet. There has to be some happy medium. Any suggestions? Maybe some of these protesters (who came from all the world, fon't forget -- it isn't just Seattle's ex-hippie population) could come up with something. We're overdue for a nice purging riot -- maybe some good will come of it. I sure hope so -- the current system, booming economy here in the US notwithstanding, is headed down the wrong path fast...
Take a look at the source of the Transmeta page -- there's a message hidden in the comments. I'd cut & paste but it's easier to just look for yourself...
There is a rule of thumb that states that, on average, one person must die for every billion dollars a company earns in revenue. Considering how large certain corporations have become, how strong the economy has been, and how much of that strength and wealth has come directly from the application of technology...
Interesting -- I didn't know that virus had no Latin plural. What does the word mean in Latin anyhow? I think it's safe to assume that the Romans had never heard of microscopic organisms, so that can't be it. This site says it means mucus or phlegm, while this one defines it as slime, poison. Somehow I can see where these words aren't quite pluralizable -- one slime plus one more slime equals not two slimes, but one big slime.
Obviously, that isn't what we're talking about here -- one virus and another virus makes for...more than one virus, not one big one. I think extending the latin word beyond the usage Caesar would have regognized is fair here -- it may be a dead language, but it has evolved over the past couple of thousand years. (Sorry, can't cite examples, but certain Latin words originated in the middle ages, and even today new words are being coined in the language, as per recent Vatican dictionaries and such.)
I'm going to stand by virii. You're right that it should be viri, but my half remembered high school Latin makes me want to translate that as "men" instead of "viruses", whereas the -ii spelling is unambiguous, and rolls off the tongue more easily than "viruses" besides.
(Footnote to historical footnote: don't German and other germanic languages still use the -en ending on plural nouns?
The MS specific stuff doesn't help at all, but I'm not at all convinced that HTML or Javascript belong in mail either. I'm not sure if open standards are more secure by design per se, but the opportunity to test them by independent sources tends to make them more robust than proprietary standards. In any event, something malicious could be embedded within HTML and Javascript, at least in principle, and just the chance of that makes me wary -- especially when plain ascii email is virtually guaranteed to be harmless.
I'm not saying HTML isn't useful, though it might not be the best tool for layout in many cases. If all you want to do is bulleted lists, you can simulate that with asterisks and plus signs and whatever else you please. Certain conventions work well for conveying emphasis in your text, that can do a reasonable job of simulating *boldface*,/italics/, and _underlined text_. If you *really* want colors, you're out of luck; if you *really* need to make a table, it might be better to put the document on a web page and send your colleague the address for it. This makes it easy for others to look at it too, when useful.
I see a spectrum of suitable tools for presentation purposes, ranging from ascii for email, to html for web documents, to say postscript for documents that need to be carefully laid out &/or printed. Mixing the formats up creates problems -- *.txt files make lousy web pages just as *.ps files are a pain in the butt in the email inbox. Use the Right Tool For Each Job, and everything will come out OK in the end...
Well actually, it was a sort of foresight -- ascii mail can't carry virii (correct me if I'm wrong, but I know of no examples, ever), so I trust it and won't use anything with any kind of markup. If it matters, I use Pine, usually on Windows, sometimes on Linux, telnetting via xterm to my account's Solaris server.
I'd also make the point that 90% of the market may be using the MS client, but how many of them deliberately chose to do so? I'll grant, maybe many slash most slash all of them just might have chosen to go with it anyhow. But they didn't choose, they were coerced.
Anyway, I know I'm not invulnerable, I know the hardware, o/s, and applications I use are not without flaws. But I also know that some of these flaws are avoidable, I know that some are exploitable, and I tend to avoid letting people take advantage of that when there are other options. In this case, there clearly are.
First off, don't use HTML mail. Problem solved. This will mean having to type or cute & paste URLs, but hey -- life's rough.
Now, how do you turn off HTML? Lemme see here, I'll show you...
Hang on, this is the first time I've ever opened up Outlook.
*rummage*
*rummage, rummage*
*dead end*
*thwack!*
Well how about that, the boneheads won't let you turn off mail formatting. Slick guys, good thinking.
Well I'm sorry folks, it looks like you're going to have to switch to a more sensible mail client. Try Eudora or Pine, both of which have Windows ports, or Mutt or Elm or something if they're available (not sure if they exist on Windows -- don't see why not but don't really want to bother verifying that at the moment).
It's funny how a scare like this comes along every few weeks...and I find myself completely immune to it. "The Humdinger virus abuses your Outlook addressbook, eh? How tragic. Good thing I don't have one nor ever will. Keep safe though, try not to accept any infected mails there, pal!". heh heh
In the immortal words of the venerable Montgomery Burns, "Look at all these idiots!" Hahahaha
Oh it isn't just me? Slashdot has really gone from all puke green to a medley of puke green, shit brown, and piss yellow? How charming. I wonder what this says about the demographics of Slashdot's. An inclination towards scatological humor perhaps, or fecalphilia? Yay. Sounds good to me.
I'm sure this is way past the point where anyone will see it, but Google is relatively immune to this sort of thing. The beautiful thing about their engine is that, in the background, it's all extremely mathematical and immune to interference.
One of several strategies is to place a value on each page in accordance with how important the page is to other users. One way of determining this criteris is by analyzing the links between pages. It is assumed that important ones are linked to more often than the non-important ones. In turn, documents that important pages point to are deemed as being more significant than ones linked to by, say, my home page.
As time goes on and the engine develops a more accurate representation of the networks, it is able to evaluate these kinds of interrelationships in useful ways. All the end user sees is that the page at the top of the search list was the one they were looking for, but in the background there are a lot of powerful mechanisms to make that happen.
I've spent the last year or so working on a search engine as an academic project, and have come to really admire what Google does for the users. Take a look at some of the research that went into it some time, it's quite impressive. These people thought of everything and much more besides.
I could go on but am a little too tired right now to be more coherent. Rambling and asskissing aside, the point I've so studiously skipped around is that there aren't really artificial mechanisms to insert results anywhere in Google. It does a lot of work to make sure that doesn't happen (no cheating on <META> tags, or adding "sex sex sex sex" 1001 times in white on white text in order to fool the engine -- Google sees right through that nonsense). And it doesn't rework this information for each search: the data creates it all in the background, and you perform the query on the database as it exists at a snapshot in time. Very elegant design, all around.
Maybe I can talk them into hiring me after this...
You unfortunately have it exactly right -- the treaties signed with the Soviet Union were inherited by Russia and the CIS. These treaties specifically prohibit these kinds of missile defense systems. The Russians could (and probably will) make the argument that our actions have nullified the treaty, and they will have no choice but to respond in kind.
And that's a Really Bad Thing for us to be encouraging. The Russian military has been in decline for decades, and the decline has accelerated rapidly in the nineties. The conventional military is getting live training now in Chechnya, but is all the same not seen as a threat to the American forces -- now or at any point in the forseeable future.
The nuclear forces on the other hand are still a viable threat to the US, and our recent actions encourage the Russians to rely more heavily upon them. This is just plain moronic on our part. Almost as bad as the sanctions against Pakistan, which have surely led to a lot of good in that country.
The moves to strengthen our missile defense program are just plain stupid, no other way to put it. They violate the treaty that does most to ensure bilateral stability, and do so in an effort to counter one of the least likely threats to our territory. (Why use an ICBM when you can get the same or better results out of a suitcase?). What we're doing is wrong, wrong, wrong, and it can only lead to a renewed arms race.
We cannot let that happen. The vestiges of representative democracy may be a farce at this point, but all the same we have to keep trying. If ever there was a time to write to your congressmen, this is one of those times. If you don't know who your congressmen are, try looking here. Write to them, tell them what a colossal mistake they are making, find out what side they have taken on the matter (most support it), and make your stance & voting intentions clear to them. If enough people contact them, they'll listen. Hopefully. If living in a 'free' and 'peaceful' country means anything to you, then you must at least try.
PCs without windows is good news, but I'm still waiting for a PC with no doors. When is the last time you used the door on yor PC? Pretty much never, right? I'll be glad when we get rid of this kind of bloat once and for all....
Of course they have other resources (chocolate & swatches mainly haha), but they already do the anonymous banking thing, right?
Many countries are doing this already -- Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is trying to move away from dependence on oil reserves towards, as here, banking and finance, to cite an example off the top of my head. Can this kind of thing work everywhere? Bleed the land dry, then run the economy by skimming cash off other lands?
Slashdot Mirror
I'll miss the Simpsons though.
Oh well, c'est la guerre.
Goodbye technological era, we hardly knew ye. heh heh
I'm glad to see that an average guy, not much older than myself (right Robert? I forget) can have such a positive impact on things. Let this be an object lesson folks. The activism of the sixties ain't dead -- it's dormant, but we can wake it up, and the 'net can be a great alarm clock do wake it up with. Go to it kids. Make a difference. Save the world. Pirate DVDs. Whatever. I'm all for it.
Yeah I'm definitely going to get in trouble for this hahaha
Ok, fair point, no run-off -- I'd forgotten about that. But that doesn't undermine the point, does it? What kind of majority is needed -- a simple >50% of the electoral votes or it goes to the House? Or would it be enough to simply have more than all other candidates? I knew this stuff at one time but can't remember it now. All this notwithstanding, I still don't think this is enough to discourage voting for third party candidates on the executive level, and it's *definitely* an incentive to inject some more variety into Congress on the federal legislative level. And the lower down the chain you go, the greater the impact could be; all the more reason to pay attention to (and run for!) local elections.
People assume that one of the Big Two parties is going to win anyway, and voting for a third party is a waste of a vote. But what if everyone stood back for a second and voted *not* for the most likely candidate, but for the candidate that seemed most likely to be the right person for the job? What if we voted as individuals, not as a pack? Maybe we'd end up with 40 candidates and none get over 10% of the vote. Maybe we'll need a runoff election every four years. But would that be such a bad thing? Maybe it would give a suitable underdog a shot for once.
Myself, I really like Ralph Nader and the Green Party -- he got my vote in 1996 and he'll get it again this year. But a lot of the hackers I know are Libertarians or Free Marketeers or Socialists or whatever, and that's fine. I'm sure there are great candidates in all these camps, really. Why not give them a shot. "Gee Dubya" is pretty obviously an imbecile and a stuffed shirt for his corporate backers -- do you really want to see him win? Is Al Gore, proud internet innovator, any better? Fuck no he's not. The survey at Select Smart isn't a bad place to find a candidate that comes close to your ideology, whatever it may be. And Project Vote Smart is also a pretty good place to learn more. And don't forget about local elections either -- they're less glamorous, but they have far more impact over your day to day life than the high profile CNN elections. Be an informed and active voter above all else. It's worth it.
I instead received The Power of a Praying Wife.
All things being equal, this sounds like a much funnier book. I might just keep it. heh
As fast as the chess possiblities rise, they are constrained by the possible movements of the pieces, the smaller board size, etc. Go rises orders of magnitude faster, and no computer program has to date (to my knowledge, mostly parrotting things I've skimmed here) been able to play even on a beginner's level. Fascinating stuff.
Not that this helps solve the Fermat's theorem of chess or anything.
Hmm. My first thought was "Fat chance. Read the Halloween Documents." But then I thought about it a bit longer. Maybe this is MS looking to the post-trial world, and trying to be ready for it. If the final decision forces them to open up their OS, then under their current corporate architecture, they've lost their revenue base. Or have they?
If they can manoeuver themselves to be a supplier of desktop applications under a "commodity O/S market" or whatever, then ...well, what then? Is that a bad thing, a good thing? Would they matter? Show of hands -- who here is willing to drop vi or emacs for Word2K? Nobody? I didn't think so. Though most people might be happy with Office, I'm not sure the Linux crowd would be all that interested. Hmm.
My first instinct was just to dismiss your comment out of hand (my guess is they simply want people to administer Hotmail, which entails no strategic scheme -- they just want the damn thing to work). But maybe there is something to your point.
As things are right now, Microsoft really has nothing to gain by embracing Linux or anything about Linux -- they're in the dominant position, after all. But tomorrow, after the court case is over with, maybe the playing field will be different, and MS will have to embrace the current opposition. In that light, this could be their move in that direction. I'm sure they wouldn't be doing anything to support Linux if there was no anti-trust issue in the background...
Fox' experiment produced not only amino acids, but simple proteins and basic cellular structures. That's right -- cells. Were they alive? Who knows. But I've done the experiment myself, in his lab, with his help, and it's dirt easy, and it produces great results.
He called the cells "proteinoid microspheres", and they followed some parameters for living things -- metabolism, growth, adaptation, response to stimuli, etc. That might or might not mean anything -- fire has the same properties after all -- but it certainly felt like Fox was on the right track. So much so in fact that he had the opportunity to present his results before the Pope on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, Dr Fox died a couple of years ago and no one ever really learned about his work. Too bad.
For more on Dr Fox, take a look here (an article) and here (a thumbnail biography).
Anyhow, the point of bringing all this up is that this research really isn't anything new -- just the synthesis of several modern trends that would have happened sooner or later regardless, like cloning.
So yeah, I was aware of your point, but it wasn't what I was getting at. I'm not sure it's even possible to have a purely social or capital based large country, just as it isn't possible to have a purely democratic country -- you need buffers in the form of representatives and governing organizations and such. Rather than having people on the left and right bickering over being on the left and right, what we need to do is acknowledge that the liberals and conservatives are both wrong, but that they also both have a grain of truth that needs to be teased out of them. That grain, like the sand in the oyster's jaw, can maybe be used to create the perl[1] of a new economic model, one that is fair to all while enrichening as many as possible and by as much as possible. Only then can we make true progress. Not by kowtowing before international trading organizations like this, that have every intention of trampling over the rights of man and the earth. And also not by binding people and prohibiting them from earning a fair compensation for their workmanship. A third way[2], a middle way. It's out there somewhere; perhaps someone in our generation will find it. I hope so.
[1] heh sorry couldn't resist that one
[2] Isn't this what Clinton & Blair have been preaching these days? I don't want to follow their model either -- they just beat me to the term. Keep trying...
Say what you will about the government, but at least in theory it exists to serve the common good. Corporations don't even pay lip service to that ideal -- they just want to maximize their bottom line for themselves and for their shareholders. Nowhere does it say that they have to do the rest of the world a shred of good, and if they absolutely don't have to, they won't. Take a look at the campaign to revoke Phillip Morris' corporate charter, and while you're at it, poke around the rest of the Adbusters site.
I'm also sympathetic with the laissez faire Libertarians who point out that government can't step in and tell the corporations what to do or who to serve. That is rightly their own business to manage. But at the same time, a government that allows one group to exploit the rest of the population is bankrupt and needs an overhaul. Revolution lies down that path.
What is a good middle ground? I don't know -- no one has come up with it yet. Socialism atrophied and went nowhere; capitalism has become a festering tumor that is strangling the people and the planet. There has to be some happy medium. Any suggestions? Maybe some of these protesters (who came from all the world, fon't forget -- it isn't just Seattle's ex-hippie population) could come up with something. We're overdue for a nice purging riot -- maybe some good will come of it. I sure hope so -- the current system, booming economy here in the US notwithstanding, is headed down the wrong path fast...
Doh! My bad. heh
Take a look at the source of the Transmeta page -- there's a message hidden in the comments. I'd cut & paste but it's easier to just look for yourself...
Another thing; compared to the amount of money spent on corporate welfare, the amount used on (regular citizen's) welfare is peanuts. Ergo
which, to me at least, sounds exactly the opposite of fair. But then, I'm not the one making all the rules around here...
well...
...you can do the math for yourself.
Obviously, that isn't what we're talking about here -- one virus and another virus makes for ...more than one virus, not one big one. I think extending the latin word beyond the usage Caesar would have regognized is fair here -- it may be a dead language, but it has evolved over the past couple of thousand years. (Sorry, can't cite examples, but certain Latin words originated in the middle ages, and even today new words are being coined in the language, as per recent Vatican dictionaries and such.)
I'm going to stand by virii. You're right that it should be viri, but my half remembered high school Latin makes me want to translate that as "men" instead of "viruses", whereas the -ii spelling is unambiguous, and rolls off the tongue more easily than "viruses" besides.
(Footnote to historical footnote: don't German and other germanic languages still use the -en ending on plural nouns?
I'm not saying HTML isn't useful, though it might not be the best tool for layout in many cases. If all you want to do is bulleted lists, you can simulate that with asterisks and plus signs and whatever else you please. Certain conventions work well for conveying emphasis in your text, that can do a reasonable job of simulating *boldface*, /italics/, and _underlined text_. If you *really* want colors, you're out of luck; if you *really* need to make a table, it might be better to put the document on a web page and send your colleague the address for it. This makes it easy for others to look at it too, when useful.
I see a spectrum of suitable tools for presentation purposes, ranging from ascii for email, to html for web documents, to say postscript for documents that need to be carefully laid out &/or printed. Mixing the formats up creates problems -- *.txt files make lousy web pages just as *.ps files are a pain in the butt in the email inbox. Use the Right Tool For Each Job, and everything will come out OK in the end...
I'd also make the point that 90% of the market may be using the MS client, but how many of them deliberately chose to do so? I'll grant, maybe many slash most slash all of them just might have chosen to go with it anyhow. But they didn't choose, they were coerced.
Anyway, I know I'm not invulnerable, I know the hardware, o/s, and applications I use are not without flaws. But I also know that some of these flaws are avoidable, I know that some are exploitable, and I tend to avoid letting people take advantage of that when there are other options. In this case, there clearly are.
Now, how do you turn off HTML? Lemme see here, I'll show you...
Hang on, this is the first time I've ever opened up Outlook.
*rummage*
*rummage, rummage*
*dead end*
*thwack!*
Well how about that, the boneheads won't let you turn off mail formatting. Slick guys, good thinking.
Well I'm sorry folks, it looks like you're going to have to switch to a more sensible mail client. Try Eudora or Pine, both of which have Windows ports, or Mutt or Elm or something if they're available (not sure if they exist on Windows -- don't see why not but don't really want to bother verifying that at the moment).
It's funny how a scare like this comes along every few weeks ...and I find myself completely immune to it. "The Humdinger virus abuses your Outlook addressbook, eh? How tragic. Good thing I don't have one nor ever will. Keep safe though, try not to accept any infected mails there, pal!". heh heh
In the immortal words of the venerable Montgomery Burns, "Look at all these idiots!" Hahahaha
Ok, you've got me -- what does "merconium" mean? I can't find it, though I did find this, which might be what you meant.
heh
One of several strategies is to place a value on each page in accordance with how important the page is to other users. One way of determining this criteris is by analyzing the links between pages. It is assumed that important ones are linked to more often than the non-important ones. In turn, documents that important pages point to are deemed as being more significant than ones linked to by, say, my home page.
As time goes on and the engine develops a more accurate representation of the networks, it is able to evaluate these kinds of interrelationships in useful ways. All the end user sees is that the page at the top of the search list was the one they were looking for, but in the background there are a lot of powerful mechanisms to make that happen.
I've spent the last year or so working on a search engine as an academic project, and have come to really admire what Google does for the users. Take a look at some of the research that went into it some time, it's quite impressive. These people thought of everything and much more besides.
I could go on but am a little too tired right now to be more coherent. Rambling and asskissing aside, the point I've so studiously skipped around is that there aren't really artificial mechanisms to insert results anywhere in Google. It does a lot of work to make sure that doesn't happen (no cheating on <META> tags, or adding "sex sex sex sex" 1001 times in white on white text in order to fool the engine -- Google sees right through that nonsense). And it doesn't rework this information for each search: the data creates it all in the background, and you perform the query on the database as it exists at a snapshot in time. Very elegant design, all around.
Maybe I can talk them into hiring me after this...
And that's a Really Bad Thing for us to be encouraging. The Russian military has been in decline for decades, and the decline has accelerated rapidly in the nineties. The conventional military is getting live training now in Chechnya, but is all the same not seen as a threat to the American forces -- now or at any point in the forseeable future.
The nuclear forces on the other hand are still a viable threat to the US, and our recent actions encourage the Russians to rely more heavily upon them. This is just plain moronic on our part. Almost as bad as the sanctions against Pakistan, which have surely led to a lot of good in that country.
The moves to strengthen our missile defense program are just plain stupid, no other way to put it. They violate the treaty that does most to ensure bilateral stability, and do so in an effort to counter one of the least likely threats to our territory. (Why use an ICBM when you can get the same or better results out of a suitcase?). What we're doing is wrong, wrong, wrong, and it can only lead to a renewed arms race.
We cannot let that happen. The vestiges of representative democracy may be a farce at this point, but all the same we have to keep trying. If ever there was a time to write to your congressmen, this is one of those times. If you don't know who your congressmen are, try looking here. Write to them, tell them what a colossal mistake they are making, find out what side they have taken on the matter (most support it), and make your stance & voting intentions clear to them. If enough people contact them, they'll listen. Hopefully. If living in a 'free' and 'peaceful' country means anything to you, then you must at least try.
PCs without windows is good news, but I'm still waiting for a PC with no doors. When is the last time you used the door on yor PC? Pretty much never, right? I'll be glad when we get rid of this kind of bloat once and for all....
Many countries are doing this already -- Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is trying to move away from dependence on oil reserves towards, as here, banking and finance, to cite an example off the top of my head. Can this kind of thing work everywhere? Bleed the land dry, then run the economy by skimming cash off other lands?