I'm sure the first time fonts were available at a printing press authors and publishers massively overused the feature, and did more harm than good to their books by overdosing people on fonts.
Uh, no. One didn't see such an explosion of typefaces within a single book during the era of printing presses, because the process required a lot of effort. It wasn't until word processors came about and made it easy that amateurs went crazy and sadly some of the results made it onto bookstore shelves.
And then people started thinking about how fonts could convey meaning, or style, and how fonts effect readability, and suddenly the choice of font(s) can help better convey the story and characters, and sometimes to a wider audience.
Calligraphic scripts and then typefaces developed quite slowly in antiquity and the early modern era and with much attention to aesthetics. It was my no means a free-for-all. I really encourage you to read a history of the field like Simon Loxley's Type, because you have things all mixed up.
This is really dangerous for Nokia. Non-compete clauses have no effect here as these guys don't "compete" in the strictest sense.
Demanding promises not to compete are not a feature of Finnish business life. In fact, it's the opposite: when laying off workers, Nokia has always pledged to help set them up with another firm doing something similar to what they were working on at Nokia. The idea is that since Nokia has decided some project no longer makes sense for its bottom line, it can't do any harm if people keep pursuing it at another firm.
This is what is playing out now with Jolla and has happened numerous times before with other Nokia spinoffs.
Add a maps app with better (and more up-to-date) maps and better features (e.g. easy way to search for specific streets/landmarks/etc and get walking directions to that location)
Not an official app, but the popular Mappero application for N900 does address searching and car/bicycle/foot routing.
And the usb charging port has given me no troubles and never come out while plugged in.
Then you are lucky. Many thousands of people have had issues with the USB port breaking, just take a look across the blogging world or talk.maemo.org. Your USB port might still come undone no matter how gentle you use the device, though even if the product is no longer under warranty it may still be fairly cheap to send it into Nokia for servicing (I paid 30 euro here in Romania last year).
There's a fine line between "Flamebait" and "saying what a lot of people think, and delivering it very bluntly". "Me go plop plop" is in fact a very common phrase on the alt.tasteless newsgroup, for example.
Who cares about traditions on alt.tasteless? Usenet isn't even followed by most nerds anymore, let alone the general public.
The rest could be readily re-done, possibly thinner and better (see the N950.)
The N950 isn't better. One of the reasons Nokia choose not to market it directly to the public is that it is flimsy enough that carriers would be turned off by something guaranteed to raise a lot of support problems with customers.
Yet supposedly the data-mining aspect was the primary reason the CueCat [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat] failed.
The article notes that the company's product did not seem to fill any real need. That is the primary reason it failed. Only a niche of users got upset at the privacy implications.
I meant that "droves" is not an appropriate word for the amount of people one can expect such a company to attract, not that "droves" is not a word at all.
Someday some genius is going to have the bright idea of being the sole content provider who does not mine users' personal data for targeted ads. And people will sign up in droves for all the pent-up demand.
Most users are not conscious that their data is being mined. And even of those who are and have a problem with it, a majority of those who voice their displeasure will go ahead and continue using the product nonetheless. The result is that users who really insist on privacy are such a small group that it is hard to build a business from them. "Droves" is not a word.
But if it's made up of a bunch of ex-navy seals, can you really trust that it's going to be secure against american intelligence access?
No, you can't completely trust that it's going to be secure. On the other hand, there's a remarkable amount of ex-SEALs who have become embittered about the government they once served, and Mike Janke is a privacy advocate. So, the involvement of SEALs isn't a guarantee that this company is in bed with the US government.
There is no Soviet Finland. The Finns took a bigger bite out of the Soviet Bear's arse than any other country (except Germany), and survived to tell about it.
So much about the Winter War is mythologizing. The Finns fought hard and should be praised for that, yes, but their ability to inflict such heavy losses on the Soviet army was due mainly to confused leadership on the Russian side -- if Stalin hadn't purged so many competent generals throughout the 1930s, the Soviets would certainly have overrun Finland completely, regardless of the Finns' bravery.
Furthermore, accounts of the Winter War tend to downplay the fact that Finland lost territory. It wasn't a victory: Finland didn't ward off the Soviet threat. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes and had to flee, and Finnish identity has now been erased from parts of Karelia.
Yes, the Finnish people have been courageous and have maintained one of the stronger armies in Europe. Nonetheless, they aren't sisu-fueled supermen and there's a reason that during the Cold War they made serious compromises with Moscow.
Lets face it, it's just too expensive to keep puny humans alive in orbit, the advent of highly advanced space faring robotics will see the end of long endurance human spaceflight.
20 years ago, I was all rah-rah for human spaceflight. Then I started reading more speculations of technological singularities and the integration of man and machine. I now see two futures as much more likely than manned spaceflight with life support systems as traditionally conceived.
If wacky AI prophets like Kurzweil are right, the human race that expands to the stars and robotic unmanned exploration might be one and the same. If humans transcend biology, there is no longer a need for packing oxygen, radiation shielding and water into a spacecraft.
Another possibility, proposed by Vernor Vinge in Marooned in Realtime is that an intelligent race like ours might simply move into a virtual reality, populating and exploring that inner world of infinite possibilities instead of the cold, hard reality of outer space. Yeah, yeah, there's the possibilities of a catastrophic asteroid strike etc., but the human face is not especially adept at planning for the very longterm future, and simply moving towards the core of the planet might prove an attractive solution for the shorter term.
Incidentally, the AC who also responded to you is a well-known troll (easily distinguished by his use of the term "space nutter"). While I agree with him that manned space exploration is not a likely future, his purpose here is more to mock and tear down than to contribute to meaningful discussion. Avoid his trap.
Finland almost equals Iceland when it comes to being a go-to country for genetic research on homogenous populations.
The issue with the poster above is that he suggested that Finns are pure-blooded vis-a-vis Hungarians. However, the only thing that ties Finns and Hungarians together is their languages, and not anything genetic. The Finns are an example of a genetically distinct population adopting an Uralic language from a different population. Thus, they are mixed in much the same way that the Hungarians are.
If you want to find a population approaching a full blooded Hungarian, I suggest you go to Finland.
There are no "full-blooded" Uralic peoples. Uralic/Finno-Ugrian is a linguistic appelation, not a genetic one. The Uralic languages have spread across a wide swath of genetically unrelated peoples, and the Finns have just as much a varied background as Hungarians.
The truth is, part of that 2 billion a day you lament the US military is spending goes in part towards providing military security to countries like Canada that don't spend enough on their own defense.
Finland, the subject of this Slashdot post, offers some evidence against this common claim. For decades Finland refused to joined NATO, managing its own defense. Nonetheless, it has built a welfare state comparable to its Nordic neighbours while at the same time maintaining one of the stronger armies in the world.
You can proofread documentation. so you don get the following. Insert batteries in the proper way, happy fun is achieved! Do not go!
I've worked as a translator and proofreader for some years and I know where there is a market and where there is not. If companies were willing to pay for better English, you wouldn't see such instructions. But profit margins are low enough, and the cost of hiring a native speaker high enough, that companies are generally not willing to invest in proofreading for such low-value items. Your advice is, I'm sorry to say, completely unrealistic.
There's a whole solar system full of resources to utilise and SPACE to EXPAND since we hate the idea of state regulated birth control>
Even with multiple space elevators, you can't move more people off the planet than are being born on it at any given moment. Expansion into space is not a realistic solution for overpopulation.
You also present a false dichotomy between space colonization and extinction somewhere in the short term. Instead of expanding into space, a quite possible future for sentient races is to move into a virtual reality. Merged with machines and living underground, the human race could withstand catastrophic asteroid strikes and last until the sun expands to a red giant. Voluntary extinction may even be a possibility at some point after the human races has transcended biology. Your fanatical dreams of immortality and exploration of the universe are not the way it has to be.
I'm wondering why it is that the old "Soviet Bloc" countries produce so many hackers/scammers/malware authors?
A culture that valued intellectual pursuits probably helped. That culture has largely dried up when it comes to other pursuits like chess or poetry, but being interested in computers doesn't result in the same categorization as a nerd as in some other countries.
Couldn't these people use their - considerable - coding skills to do something constructive? Like starting a software or IT services company?
There are in fact an enormous number of legitimate software businesses in Russia, which the Slashdot crowd seems largely unaware of. However, not everyone feels that they have the savvy of starting a formal business, which involves navigating bureaucracy and in some regions brings one up against bribe-expecting officials. Crime just seems easier to some set of people.
Surely these people wouldn't want their own systems compromised by malicious software? So why do it to others?
If the Golden Rule were really common sense, we wouldn't have to be reminded of it by every religious teacher or moral philosopher that has come along in history.
Might be better to say "kudos to the publisher for following Baen's lead and not using DRM". Do keep in mind that Baen's ebooks have NEVER had DRM.
No one except the lamest of anoraks gives a shit about Baen. That publisher put out some of the pulpiest and forgettable writing in the business.
Tor, on the other hand, is a big deal because it has put out or reissued through its Orb line some science fiction works which truly belong in the general canon of English literature.
The problem is that you keep going the same places that everybody else goes. There is no "Lonely Planet Effect" is Madagascar.
Lonely Planet has published for six editions now a guide for Madagascar, and even if that island nation draws fewer tourists than some other countries, I've no doubt that that the specific lodgings recommended in the guide are now patronized by a steady stream of LP-toting backpackers -- and the proprietors have jacked up the prices once they've noticed that they've a guaranteed source of customers.
I only see people taking shots at inconsistent christianity - the ones that forgot not to judge others... and nothing to do with the love of Jesus.
You've read the life of Jesus and you think you have his teachings figured out. But a text (not just the Bible, or the Qu'ran or the Bhagavad Gita, but in fact any written representation of human language) is meaningless in itself due to l'arbitraire du signe, and when you are looking at it two thousand years removed, the danger of an interpretation that departs from the original meaning is quite high. Since a text will inevitably be accompanied by an interpretation, a continual tradition of interpretation carries more weight than someone in 2012 picking quotes out of any context.
So your best argument here is it is bad because it is a tradition (i,e. some other people said it is).
The majority of Christians worldwide believe that Tradition is something endowed by the Holy Spirit, not just something that people say. (Now, you might not believe in a Holy Spirit, but in that case, why do you bother citing Jesus's teachings? That man did speak of such a thing.)
Slavery used to be a tradition like homophobia too you know.
While the Church condoned slavery, it was never a matter of Holy Tradition. There is no canon that obliges men to hold slaves, and manumission was looked on as a righteous thing. It is not at all comparable to the restrictions placed on sexual behaviour.
For the majority of the world's Christians, the Bible is not the sole authority. If something is not expressly condemned in Scripture, it may be condemned by Tradition, and indeed it has been consistently for two millennia.
The people here who want to take shots at Christianity seem to think that American Fundamentalists with their sola Scriptura principle are especially representative of global Christianity, but "It's not in the Bible!" isn't much of an argument for tolerating homosexual behaviour outside of that subset.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no. One didn't see such an explosion of typefaces within a single book during the era of printing presses, because the process required a lot of effort. It wasn't until word processors came about and made it easy that amateurs went crazy and sadly some of the results made it onto bookstore shelves.
Calligraphic scripts and then typefaces developed quite slowly in antiquity and the early modern era and with much attention to aesthetics. It was my no means a free-for-all. I really encourage you to read a history of the field like Simon Loxley's Type , because you have things all mixed up.
Demanding promises not to compete are not a feature of Finnish business life. In fact, it's the opposite: when laying off workers, Nokia has always pledged to help set them up with another firm doing something similar to what they were working on at Nokia. The idea is that since Nokia has decided some project no longer makes sense for its bottom line, it can't do any harm if people keep pursuing it at another firm.
This is what is playing out now with Jolla and has happened numerous times before with other Nokia spinoffs.
Not an official app, but the popular Mappero application for N900 does address searching and car/bicycle/foot routing.
Then you are lucky. Many thousands of people have had issues with the USB port breaking, just take a look across the blogging world or talk.maemo.org. Your USB port might still come undone no matter how gentle you use the device, though even if the product is no longer under warranty it may still be fairly cheap to send it into Nokia for servicing (I paid 30 euro here in Romania last year).
Who cares about traditions on alt.tasteless? Usenet isn't even followed by most nerds anymore, let alone the general public.
The N950 isn't better. One of the reasons Nokia choose not to market it directly to the public is that it is flimsy enough that carriers would be turned off by something guaranteed to raise a lot of support problems with customers.
The article notes that the company's product did not seem to fill any real need. That is the primary reason it failed. Only a niche of users got upset at the privacy implications.
I meant that "droves" is not an appropriate word for the amount of people one can expect such a company to attract, not that "droves" is not a word at all.
Most users are not conscious that their data is being mined. And even of those who are and have a problem with it, a majority of those who voice their displeasure will go ahead and continue using the product nonetheless. The result is that users who really insist on privacy are such a small group that it is hard to build a business from them. "Droves" is not a word.
No, you can't completely trust that it's going to be secure. On the other hand, there's a remarkable amount of ex-SEALs who have become embittered about the government they once served, and Mike Janke is a privacy advocate. So, the involvement of SEALs isn't a guarantee that this company is in bed with the US government.
Only if ratified by Congress as law. The US signing of the UDHR was, as I said, a merely feel-good measure. It was not meant to be legally binding.
The OP mentions "Northern America", which calls for representing the role of the UDHR in at least one of the countries involved there.
So much about the Winter War is mythologizing. The Finns fought hard and should be praised for that, yes, but their ability to inflict such heavy losses on the Soviet army was due mainly to confused leadership on the Russian side -- if Stalin hadn't purged so many competent generals throughout the 1930s, the Soviets would certainly have overrun Finland completely, regardless of the Finns' bravery.
Furthermore, accounts of the Winter War tend to downplay the fact that Finland lost territory. It wasn't a victory: Finland didn't ward off the Soviet threat. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes and had to flee, and Finnish identity has now been erased from parts of Karelia.
Yes, the Finnish people have been courageous and have maintained one of the stronger armies in Europe. Nonetheless, they aren't sisu-fueled supermen and there's a reason that during the Cold War they made serious compromises with Moscow.
Signing the UN UDHR is a feel-good measure. It has no legal force in the United States.
20 years ago, I was all rah-rah for human spaceflight. Then I started reading more speculations of technological singularities and the integration of man and machine. I now see two futures as much more likely than manned spaceflight with life support systems as traditionally conceived.
If wacky AI prophets like Kurzweil are right, the human race that expands to the stars and robotic unmanned exploration might be one and the same. If humans transcend biology, there is no longer a need for packing oxygen, radiation shielding and water into a spacecraft.
Another possibility, proposed by Vernor Vinge in Marooned in Realtime is that an intelligent race like ours might simply move into a virtual reality, populating and exploring that inner world of infinite possibilities instead of the cold, hard reality of outer space. Yeah, yeah, there's the possibilities of a catastrophic asteroid strike etc., but the human face is not especially adept at planning for the very longterm future, and simply moving towards the core of the planet might prove an attractive solution for the shorter term.
Incidentally, the AC who also responded to you is a well-known troll (easily distinguished by his use of the term "space nutter"). While I agree with him that manned space exploration is not a likely future, his purpose here is more to mock and tear down than to contribute to meaningful discussion. Avoid his trap.
The issue with the poster above is that he suggested that Finns are pure-blooded vis-a-vis Hungarians. However, the only thing that ties Finns and Hungarians together is their languages, and not anything genetic. The Finns are an example of a genetically distinct population adopting an Uralic language from a different population. Thus, they are mixed in much the same way that the Hungarians are.
There are no "full-blooded" Uralic peoples. Uralic/Finno-Ugrian is a linguistic appelation, not a genetic one. The Uralic languages have spread across a wide swath of genetically unrelated peoples, and the Finns have just as much a varied background as Hungarians.
Finland, the subject of this Slashdot post, offers some evidence against this common claim. For decades Finland refused to joined NATO, managing its own defense. Nonetheless, it has built a welfare state comparable to its Nordic neighbours while at the same time maintaining one of the stronger armies in the world.
I've worked as a translator and proofreader for some years and I know where there is a market and where there is not. If companies were willing to pay for better English, you wouldn't see such instructions. But profit margins are low enough, and the cost of hiring a native speaker high enough, that companies are generally not willing to invest in proofreading for such low-value items. Your advice is, I'm sorry to say, completely unrealistic.
Even with multiple space elevators, you can't move more people off the planet than are being born on it at any given moment. Expansion into space is not a realistic solution for overpopulation.
You also present a false dichotomy between space colonization and extinction somewhere in the short term. Instead of expanding into space, a quite possible future for sentient races is to move into a virtual reality. Merged with machines and living underground, the human race could withstand catastrophic asteroid strikes and last until the sun expands to a red giant. Voluntary extinction may even be a possibility at some point after the human races has transcended biology. Your fanatical dreams of immortality and exploration of the universe are not the way it has to be.
A culture that valued intellectual pursuits probably helped. That culture has largely dried up when it comes to other pursuits like chess or poetry, but being interested in computers doesn't result in the same categorization as a nerd as in some other countries.
There are in fact an enormous number of legitimate software businesses in Russia, which the Slashdot crowd seems largely unaware of. However, not everyone feels that they have the savvy of starting a formal business, which involves navigating bureaucracy and in some regions brings one up against bribe-expecting officials. Crime just seems easier to some set of people.
If the Golden Rule were really common sense, we wouldn't have to be reminded of it by every religious teacher or moral philosopher that has come along in history.
No one except the lamest of anoraks gives a shit about Baen. That publisher put out some of the pulpiest and forgettable writing in the business.
Tor, on the other hand, is a big deal because it has put out or reissued through its Orb line some science fiction works which truly belong in the general canon of English literature.
Lonely Planet has published for six editions now a guide for Madagascar, and even if that island nation draws fewer tourists than some other countries, I've no doubt that that the specific lodgings recommended in the guide are now patronized by a steady stream of LP-toting backpackers -- and the proprietors have jacked up the prices once they've noticed that they've a guaranteed source of customers.
You've read the life of Jesus and you think you have his teachings figured out. But a text (not just the Bible, or the Qu'ran or the Bhagavad Gita, but in fact any written representation of human language) is meaningless in itself due to l'arbitraire du signe, and when you are looking at it two thousand years removed, the danger of an interpretation that departs from the original meaning is quite high. Since a text will inevitably be accompanied by an interpretation, a continual tradition of interpretation carries more weight than someone in 2012 picking quotes out of any context.
The majority of Christians worldwide believe that Tradition is something endowed by the Holy Spirit, not just something that people say. (Now, you might not believe in a Holy Spirit, but in that case, why do you bother citing Jesus's teachings? That man did speak of such a thing.)
While the Church condoned slavery, it was never a matter of Holy Tradition. There is no canon that obliges men to hold slaves, and manumission was looked on as a righteous thing. It is not at all comparable to the restrictions placed on sexual behaviour.
For the majority of the world's Christians, the Bible is not the sole authority. If something is not expressly condemned in Scripture, it may be condemned by Tradition, and indeed it has been consistently for two millennia.
The people here who want to take shots at Christianity seem to think that American Fundamentalists with their sola Scriptura principle are especially representative of global Christianity, but "It's not in the Bible!" isn't much of an argument for tolerating homosexual behaviour outside of that subset.