The final straw was spending an hour trying to find and then figure out how to properly paginate a document divided into sections with different page number styles (e.g., a thesis document).
A document as big and complicated as a thesis is worth writing in something like LaTeX or Docbook.
His point was that that's what his excuse would be for the presence of "too-random" data on his computer. I'm not convinced it would be all that successful though, because/dev/urandom isn't a real file: when you "read" from it the kernel just generates [pseudo-]random bits on-the-fly.
Sometimes I want to build myself a lava lamp random number generator just to have a plausible excuse for storing big "random" files.
My grocery store changes layout significantly perhaps every year or two. That's not exactly "all the damn time"...
For old people with memory loss, it is.
Decent customer service costs money. Given the choice, people generally vote (with their money) for cheaper food over better serviced food. Put another way: Would you rather pay $9 for a bottle of wine in the bag you carry to your car, or $13 for the same bottle of wine carried to your car by a checker?
I find it implausible that having a few people around to give directions would be as expensive as having baggers haul everybody's food to their car for them (which, by the way, Publix manages to do without being all that much more expensive anyway), especially if they had other tasks to perform at the same time (such as stocking shelves or sweeping the floor). Home Depot can do it (sort of); why not grocery stores?
Wouldn't it be better for the supermarket to simply not rearrange their store all the damn time? Or alternatively, provide decent customer service by having employees give the elderly people directions?
Re:Who cares about history majors...now scientists
on
Cosmetic Neurology
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· Score: 1
A neuroscientist taking a cognitive-enhancing drug is a direct example of recursive, exponential growth to the Singularity.
Heh, kind of like making a +intelligence potion in Morrowind, drinking it, using your temporary intelligence boost to make a more powerful version, and then repeating until you're making +1000 potions.
Basically, drugs like Adderall are just really powerful stimulants (in fact, they're essentially the same thing as speed). They work simply because they help you spend more time studying, in exactly the same way as if you had spent extra time studying without them. They just help you compress that time by eliminating distractions (or by allowing you to actually spend more time at it before getting tired). It's like the difference between working a normal 8-hour day, and working for 8 hours without checking your email and Slashdot every 10 minutes -- you get the full 8 hours of actual work, rather than the 4 hours you'd get otherwise.
So yes, the retention of the stuff you learned while taking the drug is the same as for stuff you learned any other time; it's only the ability to learn at that rate that wears off.
Not to be insulting, but these are not magic pills that make you do what you are supposed to. You still have to want to do what you have to do, even if you don't like it; there's a difference between lack of concentration and simple apathy.
In my experience, that's the case with amphetamines (Adderall/Vyvanse). Wellbutrin, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any effect at all at the time, but later I can see retrospectively that I chose and completed the important tasks more efficiently when I was using it. In other words, amphetamines don't help with apathy, but Wellbutrin actually does (at least for me).
My point was that a certain amount of unauthorized copying is absolutely necessary unless we're going to commit suicide as a society by restricting the flow of culture and information.
Exactly!
The question is then what to do with TPB - massive infringement of many, many works, and TPB setting up a business on top of it.
The answer is that we should do absolutely nothing, because it wasn't TPB's fault that other people posted links to infringing material and because TPB never actually committed any infringement itself. If TPB is liable, then so is the entire Internet because everything about it is practically designed to facilitate sharing of information, and essentially all of that information is copyrighted! Commercial sites, personal sites, blogs, email messages, IMs, "tweets" -- even this message (and who says I gave anybody permission to read it?)
People have been comparing TPB to Google, but it's not just Google -- hypertext itself would be considered a copyright-infringement tool, not to mention all the other technologies like Usenet, FTP, and email. If you think about the implications of the judge's ruling, what it means is that we have to completely dismantle the Internet (committing that "cultural suicide" you alluded to), because it's fundamentally incompatible with copyright law as it stands today.
And if the government were actually stupid enough to try that, the revolution would be televised (and blogged, and posted to YouTube, and...).
I looked to make sure but could not find where the constitution ever required states to select electors in any means or procedure that wasn't always left to the state's legislature to decide.
Well, that in itself would give the States relatively more power too! The gist of my argument was that the States were supposed to be in control of choosing electors; pointing out that they can additionally decide how to implement that control (rather than having a particular procedure forced upon them) only reinforces the idea.
On the other hand, it also raises the question of why the state governments were so stupid that they gave that power up (note: to the Federal government, not the People) by instituting popular votes...
Originally, the federal government or their elected officials was supposed to be accountable to their position in which the states and the people of those states could guide. Perhaps what changed this the most is when they changed the way the president and vice president was elected with party line voted instead of each elector voting for two people and the one with the most becoming president while the second most became the vice president.
That's an interesting theory, and it suggests that I ought to add the 12th Amendment to my list, up there with the 17th. However, that change happened way back in 1800, and the shift in the balance of power didn't really get going until after the Civil War. Besides, party line voting has been there from essentially the beginning (i.e., every President except Washington).
In my opinion, the progressive decline of Federalism has several key events:
Two-party politics (~1796 -- or essentially, always) & the 12th Amendment (1800)
Civil War (leading up to 1865), in which the South destroyed States' Rights by insisting on conflating them with slavery (when really, slavery should have been abolished simply because of its offensiveness to human rights; states' rights needn't to have had anything to do with it).
The 16th Amendment (1913), which allowed the Federal government to collect income tax
The 17th Amendment (1913), which removed the states' legislatures' power to select Senators
The New Deal (1933-38), which greatly expanded the power of the Federal government to regulate the economy and created things like Social Security and the FHA (along with several other things which infringed upon Federalism so egregiously that they were ruled unconstitutional)
There are also others, such as they myriad expansions of the Interstate Commerce and Elastic Clauses over the years, but after the New Deal Federalism was essentially dead and buried anyway, so I won't bother listing them.
Hell, even Per Gessle, one of the Swedish artists that have made the most pro-copyright noise once filled eight iPods for his musical buddies so they could all get sync:ed up on what "sound" to go for. Of course, he just copied his own collection of music on those iPods. Piracy? Damn straight. Metallica? They used to tape records off each other all the time when they were kids. Piracy? Oh yeah. But if you think about it, were they (Metallica and Gessle) morally in the wrong? I don't think so.
That's an interesting opinion, since infringement for commercial benefit (e.g. using the infringed work to help him create new works of his own to sell) would generally be considered worse than consumer infringement under the law. Moreover, depending on how much the works influenced the "sound," it could also become an issue of creating derived works and perhaps even plagiarism. Certainly, if that were morally acceptable, then anything Pirate Bay or its users did must be too.
Of course, that argument is derived from the European, "moral-right-and-property-of-the-author" theory of copyright. In the traditional American, "promote progress and enrich the Public Domain" theory of copyright, as expressed by the U.S. Constitution, it would be exactly the opposite: copying for the purpose of helping to create new works would not only be allowed but also encouraged, as it would increase overall utility.
The question is: is this or isn't this simply what judges do they administer verdicts? Isn't just always inherently interpretive? Is judgment a referential or creative act?
Courts should become less referential and more creative as you go up the chain of appeals. Since this was the initial district court case, the judge overstepped his authority.
No we're not -- not since the gutting of the electoral college (i.e., states choosing electors by popular vote, instead of having the state legislatures pick them) and the 17th Amendment (direct election of U.S. Senators, who were also supposed to be picked by the state legislatures), anyway.
Before, the Federal government was accountable to the State governments, and therefore indirectly accountable to the citizenry though their state representatives. But with those changes, not only are the President and Senate less accountable to the citizenry (because everybody's votes are so diluted), but the balance of power is skewed way towards the Federal government, which severely restricts the self-determination of the individual States. For example, California can't legalize marijuana because even if they directed the local and state police to stop enforcing the prohibition, the (Federal) ATF and FBI would still be running roughshod over everybody. Similarly, Montana was forced to adopt speed limits, even though they were stupid and unnecessary, because the Feds would have withheld all the transportation funding if they didn't -- something they wouldn't be able to do if the State governments were stronger.
Slashdot Mirror
A document as big and complicated as a thesis is worth writing in something like LaTeX or Docbook.
And $150-$600, depending on whether you want anything in addition to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
First, although I don't really doubt you, do you know that Office '07 SP2 saves ODF formulas incompatibly or are you speculating?
Second, is there a mechanism to deprecate 1.1 and force Microsoft to support 1.2 if they want to continue to claim "ODF support"?
Khan wasn't a Klingon.
Not Kirk driving a 300-year-old Corvette off a cliff for no apparent reason, that's for sure!
Also, a hint of plot would have been nice.
Have the TrueCrypt people added the ability to create non-multiple-of-512-byte volumes yet?
His point was that that's what his excuse would be for the presence of "too-random" data on his computer. I'm not convinced it would be all that successful though, because /dev/urandom isn't a real file: when you "read" from it the kernel just generates [pseudo-]random bits on-the-fly.
Sometimes I want to build myself a lava lamp random number generator just to have a plausible excuse for storing big "random" files.
Apple mice have short cords because they're designed to be plugged into the keyboard, not directly into the computer.
Given that I'm actually 24 years old, I'm not sure whether that's a complement or an insult!
It's okay for Slashdot to do it, because I'm not elderly and easily confused.
For old people with memory loss, it is.
I find it implausible that having a few people around to give directions would be as expensive as having baggers haul everybody's food to their car for them (which, by the way, Publix manages to do without being all that much more expensive anyway), especially if they had other tasks to perform at the same time (such as stocking shelves or sweeping the floor). Home Depot can do it (sort of); why not grocery stores?
Wouldn't it be better for the supermarket to simply not rearrange their store all the damn time? Or alternatively, provide decent customer service by having employees give the elderly people directions?
Is the performance better than the GMA 950? If so, then it's good enough for me...
Sometimes you might still want a crossover cable...
See line 2.
Heh, kind of like making a +intelligence potion in Morrowind, drinking it, using your temporary intelligence boost to make a more powerful version, and then repeating until you're making +1000 potions.
Basically, drugs like Adderall are just really powerful stimulants (in fact, they're essentially the same thing as speed). They work simply because they help you spend more time studying, in exactly the same way as if you had spent extra time studying without them. They just help you compress that time by eliminating distractions (or by allowing you to actually spend more time at it before getting tired). It's like the difference between working a normal 8-hour day, and working for 8 hours without checking your email and Slashdot every 10 minutes -- you get the full 8 hours of actual work, rather than the 4 hours you'd get otherwise.
So yes, the retention of the stuff you learned while taking the drug is the same as for stuff you learned any other time; it's only the ability to learn at that rate that wears off.
In my experience, that's the case with amphetamines (Adderall/Vyvanse). Wellbutrin, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any effect at all at the time, but later I can see retrospectively that I chose and completed the important tasks more efficiently when I was using it. In other words, amphetamines don't help with apathy, but Wellbutrin actually does (at least for me).
Exactly!
The answer is that we should do absolutely nothing, because it wasn't TPB's fault that other people posted links to infringing material and because TPB never actually committed any infringement itself. If TPB is liable, then so is the entire Internet because everything about it is practically designed to facilitate sharing of information, and essentially all of that information is copyrighted! Commercial sites, personal sites, blogs, email messages, IMs, "tweets" -- even this message (and who says I gave anybody permission to read it?)
People have been comparing TPB to Google, but it's not just Google -- hypertext itself would be considered a copyright-infringement tool, not to mention all the other technologies like Usenet, FTP, and email. If you think about the implications of the judge's ruling, what it means is that we have to completely dismantle the Internet (committing that "cultural suicide" you alluded to), because it's fundamentally incompatible with copyright law as it stands today.
And if the government were actually stupid enough to try that, the revolution would be televised (and blogged, and posted to YouTube, and...).
Well, that in itself would give the States relatively more power too! The gist of my argument was that the States were supposed to be in control of choosing electors; pointing out that they can additionally decide how to implement that control (rather than having a particular procedure forced upon them) only reinforces the idea.
On the other hand, it also raises the question of why the state governments were so stupid that they gave that power up (note: to the Federal government, not the People) by instituting popular votes...
That's an interesting theory, and it suggests that I ought to add the 12th Amendment to my list, up there with the 17th. However, that change happened way back in 1800, and the shift in the balance of power didn't really get going until after the Civil War. Besides, party line voting has been there from essentially the beginning (i.e., every President except Washington).
In my opinion, the progressive decline of Federalism has several key events:
There are also others, such as they myriad expansions of the Interstate Commerce and Elastic Clauses over the years, but after the New Deal Federalism was essentially dead and buried anyway, so I won't bother listing them.
That's an interesting opinion, since infringement for commercial benefit (e.g. using the infringed work to help him create new works of his own to sell) would generally be considered worse than consumer infringement under the law. Moreover, depending on how much the works influenced the "sound," it could also become an issue of creating derived works and perhaps even plagiarism. Certainly, if that were morally acceptable, then anything Pirate Bay or its users did must be too.
Of course, that argument is derived from the European, "moral-right-and-property-of-the-author" theory of copyright. In the traditional American, "promote progress and enrich the Public Domain" theory of copyright, as expressed by the U.S. Constitution, it would be exactly the opposite: copying for the purpose of helping to create new works would not only be allowed but also encouraged, as it would increase overall utility.
The question is: is this or isn't this simply what judges do they administer verdicts? Isn't just always inherently interpretive? Is judgment a referential or creative act?
Courts should become less referential and more creative as you go up the chain of appeals. Since this was the initial district court case, the judge overstepped his authority.
No we're not -- not since the gutting of the electoral college (i.e., states choosing electors by popular vote, instead of having the state legislatures pick them) and the 17th Amendment (direct election of U.S. Senators, who were also supposed to be picked by the state legislatures), anyway.
Before, the Federal government was accountable to the State governments, and therefore indirectly accountable to the citizenry though their state representatives. But with those changes, not only are the President and Senate less accountable to the citizenry (because everybody's votes are so diluted), but the balance of power is skewed way towards the Federal government, which severely restricts the self-determination of the individual States. For example, California can't legalize marijuana because even if they directed the local and state police to stop enforcing the prohibition, the (Federal) ATF and FBI would still be running roughshod over everybody. Similarly, Montana was forced to adopt speed limits, even though they were stupid and unnecessary, because the Feds would have withheld all the transportation funding if they didn't -- something they wouldn't be able to do if the State governments were stronger.
I'm busy with school for a little while longer. But if I end up having trouble finding a job, maybe....
Exactly -- there's no good Free Software PDF reader for Windows! It shouldnt' be that hard; all you have to do is write a wrapper around Poppler.