All the Nordic countries have libraries like this, and only Norway has significant amounts of oil. As I posted above, in Finland, where the only natural resource is wood (and Brazil is beating us out on wood exports these days) and there isn't much to the economy besides Nokia, the libraries are just as good. It's simply a different use of citizen's taxes than in other countries.
One of the three almost stereotypical low carb breakfast foods is bacon. And it goes well as a lunch or dinner side item. Trust me, after a week of that you'll be repulsed by bacon.
In Eastern Europe, salo (UK, RU)/szalonna (HU)/slanina (RO), which is bacon with everything except the pure fat skimmed off and then smoked, is eaten daily by many people and they don't tire of it. There, there isn't any maple syrup or pancakes to blame its popularity on. Pure lard is indeed highly appealing to people.
Sugar was never banned. The only reason that it is not used in the US as in other countries is that the US simply grows so much corn, HFCS is the cheaper option. Now, it is true that this bounty of corn is due to government subsidies, and it may be preferable to end them so that sugar is economical, but there is no ban on using sugar. You can even buy drinks like Coke with real sugar in select US markets.
I'm an American living in Finland and am similarly amazed at what is on offer in the public libraries here. Heck, here the library even has real musical instruments you can reserve. Very rarely do I not find a CD I'm looking for in the libraries here, and I like some pretty obscure music. Yes, Nordic libraries are just one of the reasons I've decided I'm here to stay.
Words can change to refer to new things. It's called semantic shift. It's a normal, everyday phenomenon of human language. The vast. vast majority of people are completely unaware of the etymology and have no problem in understanding libraries as fundamentally places where information is stored.
And now that I think of it, can you source your etymology of liber? In Latin the word was used not only for writings written into wax tablets, papyrus and vellum, as well as for literary creations that hadn't even been written down. Martial refers to his body of epigrams, which he delivered at recitals (and only then were written down and preserved by the audience) as libri. Paper produced from wood pulp was unknown to the Romans.
In my travel experience, Third World countries that maintain the taboo of eating with the left hand do so because they have mastered the art of wiping their asses, but not washing their hands. At most they would just quickly run water over the hand, but the idea of using soup and scrubbing their hands good just doesn't seem to occur to the masses.
While I don't subscribe to this, I've often heard it claimed on Slashdot and other forums that since the West has given up its manufacturing base to the developing world, all its economy has left is creative works like Hollywood and the music industry. Countries like China and India can accept massive pirating because their economy has another basis, but if the West allows free distribution of media, then it undermines all that is keeping it afloat.
However, just as with fission, it's likely nothing will be built without massive amounts of subsidy, and it will pay off only in a span of decades. Unless the public and officials are willing to think longterm, fusion is going to be delayed regardless of whether the technical hurdles are overcome.
In the class of ungovernable hell holes Haiti is right up there with Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a bad idea to go there.
Both Afghanistan and Iraq are much safer than you might imagine. The Kurdistan region of Iraq, basically a separate country with its own visa regime, attracts quite a few tourists. In Afghanistan, plenty of people visit; some get around in special convoys or fly, but the Eastern European hitchhiking community has maintained a heavy presence there with only good stories about their interactions with the local people. Yes, there are parts of both countries that are dangerous, but both have small tourist industries.
It's interesting that ReiserFS wasn't even an option here. I myself even ended up using Ext4 when I set up a new box not too long ago. It's a real shame that just because the creator of the filesystem committed a crime, people are drawn to treat the technology itself are somehow dishonored.
Since it doesn't allow you to distinguish between "work friends" and "party friends" and "closet friends"
It does if you set it. You can assign your friends to various lists, and then hide content from certain lists, making it visible only to those you wish to show it to. It's the most intuitive and flexible system sometimes, but it can still be used to ensure privacy. The problem is that people simply don't use these tools are much as you think. While corporate greed is an issue here, there's much truth to the idea that people nowadays are just natural attention whores, even when it's against their own best interest.
I was recently reflecting on Simmons' Hyperion myself, as I read it several times in my teens. I know there's long been talk of making a film or television adaptation of it, but I now see a number of obstacles to trying to bring this book to a more mainstream audience. One is that it's just a bit too nerdy. I mean, one of the major structural points of the book is the life of the early Romantic poet John Keats, and people want explosions instead of sensitive young men who write verse. Also, the subplot of the cruciform or the Jewish man drawn to sacrifice his daughter might offend religious sensibilities.
Hyperion is a decent work of science-fiction (though I think of it more as a young-adult choice than a universal classic), but it might just not be right for Hollywood.
You don't just pay a fee, but you actually help. It's like working in the soup kitchen versus giving money to the homeless shelter.
People with two strong hands to work are a dime a dozen. People with the skills to generate capital are sadly not so common. The person paying money to a charity so that it can hire employees to carry out charitable activities is just as important as those employees themselves. In today's European welfare states, governments carefully manage the economy to ensure that people can still make a lot of money and thus continue to pay high taxes to maintain services.
Working in certain jobs is helpful, but it's more self-help as you learn values like humility and patience. In you are talking about actual results, professionals are more effective than simple volunteers (notice the most productive kernel hackers are salaried now).
Mars has frozen water at its north pole and possibly subterranean aquifers that can be brought to the surface with shaped nukes. Diverting comets is a way to add water to the atmosphere. Again, read KSR's trilogy, it's well-researched.
Don't think so. But maybe the Earth will be like Mars once we have completed our "pollute-everything-you-can" task.
Or Mars will become more like the Earth once terraforming is initiated, even if it's just local changes under domes instead of the complete transformation of the planet portrayed in science-fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. Now we can present to environmentalist-minding people a conundrum: what's better, an arid lifeless planet, or a planet that's polluted but life-sustaining?
Starting in the late 1940s, there were summer courses in new music composition held in Darmstadt, generously subsidized by the West German state. Most of the mid-20th century avant-garde met there and exchanged ideas, and "Darmstadt" is a common term in musical scholarship to review to that certain scene. See Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Wikipedia.
A claim that the classical music world was somehow taken over by atonalists is just an urban myth. See Joseph N. Straus's famous article "The myth of serial 'tyranny' in the 1950s and 1960s" in The Musical Times Vol. 83, No. 3. (Autumn, 1999), pp. 301-343. He carefully examines the statistics and finds that not only was twelve-tone music not prevalent among music in concert halls (tonal composers like Britten and Copland consistently holding sway), but even in academic ivory towers only a minority of instructors were pushing twelve-tone music.
Consequently, the idea of minimalism coming in and saving the scene from itself just isn't how things were.
Maybe we need to go back to art's roots - a patron system. Except instead of a single rich guy to be your patron, you could have a legion of adoring fans who are all willing to give you $1 to finance your next album. Once it's finished, the music is released into the public domain.
Most European films and art music recordings are made with a boatload of state funding (which is essentially a modern-day patronage system), and there's still quite a few productions that are financed mainly by some nice old man like in traditional patronage. Americans might not accept that -- remember the polemics about the NEA funding "pornography"? -- but it's just how things work in the EU. And yes, a lot of productions are made that have a small audience, but voters in many countries support heavy funding for the whole range of the arts. In Finland where I reside, a poll earlier this year showed overwhelming support among the people for subsidizing orchestral concerts and the like even if only a couple of hundred people attend.
Incidentally, I've always wondered how the Hong Kong film industry not only survives but outright flourishes when it's really difficult to find authentic copies of anything in Hong Kong. How do films generate revenue there?
Seriously, I love classical music, but the turn of the century(ish) atonal stuff is barely music.
Application of the twelve-tone method appeared well into the 20th century. Mahler is "turn of the century", Romantic-era Schoenberg is "turn of the century", but twelve-tone music really gets its start two decades in.
And the twelve tone technique is barely theory. It's more of an algorithm to churn out annoying random sounding music.
Schoenberg turned to twelve-tone rows to impose discipline on his music after some years writing freely atonal music. He felt that what he was doing up to that point was "random-sounding music", while twelve-tone rows make it less arbitrary. I for one find great gestalt in twelve-tone music, even the 1950s Darmstadt bleep-bloop stuff. The only truly random-sounding music in the modern-classical world I've encountered is some Ferneyhough, but at least his scores offer some pleasure for reading.
It's funny that conservative music lovers think the Second Viennese School were hacks, yet they don't rage against the Japanese and Detroit noise music scenes, which arguably have a larger popular following and influence and are spreading widely. I've ever been to a couple of sold-out concerts in Beijing where it was just two hours of feedback. Compared to this stuff, Schoenberg's twelve-tone period might as well be late Romanticism.
I'd be wary of making blanket condemnations of twelve-tone music as something that universally repels people. That may be true for audiences in some places, but where I live in Finland, there's a 5-year Schoenberg project going on that draws the same subscriber audience that likes their Brahms and Beethoven. Furthermore, twelve-tone rows have popped up in a number of pieces considered crowd-pleasers, like Rautavaara's Third and Seventh Symphonies (a recording of the last having become a European best-seller and Grammy winner).
No. Only Norway has any real amount of oil. Finland is almost bereft of natural resources (its paper companies these days looking more to Brazil for wood).
Gosh... books have been free to read for a very long time. It's called a library. So if authors and publishers are worried about piracy of books why don't they cut libraries off
In many countries libraries pay a fee to authors each year in order to compensate them for the lost sales.
The introduction of the welfare state in the Nordic countries greatly boosted their economies. Blaming America's problems on a desire for some government solutions is an oversimplification that obscures more than it clarifies.
Slashdot Mirror
All the Nordic countries have libraries like this, and only Norway has significant amounts of oil. As I posted above, in Finland, where the only natural resource is wood (and Brazil is beating us out on wood exports these days) and there isn't much to the economy besides Nokia, the libraries are just as good. It's simply a different use of citizen's taxes than in other countries.
In Eastern Europe, salo (UK, RU)/szalonna (HU)/slanina (RO), which is bacon with everything except the pure fat skimmed off and then smoked, is eaten daily by many people and they don't tire of it. There, there isn't any maple syrup or pancakes to blame its popularity on. Pure lard is indeed highly appealing to people.
Sugar was never banned. The only reason that it is not used in the US as in other countries is that the US simply grows so much corn, HFCS is the cheaper option. Now, it is true that this bounty of corn is due to government subsidies, and it may be preferable to end them so that sugar is economical, but there is no ban on using sugar. You can even buy drinks like Coke with real sugar in select US markets.
I'm an American living in Finland and am similarly amazed at what is on offer in the public libraries here. Heck, here the library even has real musical instruments you can reserve. Very rarely do I not find a CD I'm looking for in the libraries here, and I like some pretty obscure music. Yes, Nordic libraries are just one of the reasons I've decided I'm here to stay.
Words can change to refer to new things. It's called semantic shift. It's a normal, everyday phenomenon of human language. The vast. vast majority of people are completely unaware of the etymology and have no problem in understanding libraries as fundamentally places where information is stored.
And now that I think of it, can you source your etymology of liber? In Latin the word was used not only for writings written into wax tablets, papyrus and vellum, as well as for literary creations that hadn't even been written down. Martial refers to his body of epigrams, which he delivered at recitals (and only then were written down and preserved by the audience) as libri. Paper produced from wood pulp was unknown to the Romans.
In my travel experience, Third World countries that maintain the taboo of eating with the left hand do so because they have mastered the art of wiping their asses, but not washing their hands. At most they would just quickly run water over the hand, but the idea of using soup and scrubbing their hands good just doesn't seem to occur to the masses.
While I don't subscribe to this, I've often heard it claimed on Slashdot and other forums that since the West has given up its manufacturing base to the developing world, all its economy has left is creative works like Hollywood and the music industry. Countries like China and India can accept massive pirating because their economy has another basis, but if the West allows free distribution of media, then it undermines all that is keeping it afloat.
However, just as with fission, it's likely nothing will be built without massive amounts of subsidy, and it will pay off only in a span of decades. Unless the public and officials are willing to think longterm, fusion is going to be delayed regardless of whether the technical hurdles are overcome.
Both Afghanistan and Iraq are much safer than you might imagine. The Kurdistan region of Iraq, basically a separate country with its own visa regime, attracts quite a few tourists. In Afghanistan, plenty of people visit; some get around in special convoys or fly, but the Eastern European hitchhiking community has maintained a heavy presence there with only good stories about their interactions with the local people. Yes, there are parts of both countries that are dangerous, but both have small tourist industries.
It's interesting that ReiserFS wasn't even an option here. I myself even ended up using Ext4 when I set up a new box not too long ago. It's a real shame that just because the creator of the filesystem committed a crime, people are drawn to treat the technology itself are somehow dishonored.
It does if you set it. You can assign your friends to various lists, and then hide content from certain lists, making it visible only to those you wish to show it to. It's the most intuitive and flexible system sometimes, but it can still be used to ensure privacy. The problem is that people simply don't use these tools are much as you think. While corporate greed is an issue here, there's much truth to the idea that people nowadays are just natural attention whores, even when it's against their own best interest.
I was recently reflecting on Simmons' Hyperion myself, as I read it several times in my teens. I know there's long been talk of making a film or television adaptation of it, but I now see a number of obstacles to trying to bring this book to a more mainstream audience. One is that it's just a bit too nerdy. I mean, one of the major structural points of the book is the life of the early Romantic poet John Keats, and people want explosions instead of sensitive young men who write verse. Also, the subplot of the cruciform or the Jewish man drawn to sacrifice his daughter might offend religious sensibilities.
Hyperion is a decent work of science-fiction (though I think of it more as a young-adult choice than a universal classic), but it might just not be right for Hollywood.
MRIs are very slow. Ever have one?
People with two strong hands to work are a dime a dozen. People with the skills to generate capital are sadly not so common. The person paying money to a charity so that it can hire employees to carry out charitable activities is just as important as those employees themselves. In today's European welfare states, governments carefully manage the economy to ensure that people can still make a lot of money and thus continue to pay high taxes to maintain services.
Working in certain jobs is helpful, but it's more self-help as you learn values like humility and patience. In you are talking about actual results, professionals are more effective than simple volunteers (notice the most productive kernel hackers are salaried now).
Mars has frozen water at its north pole and possibly subterranean aquifers that can be brought to the surface with shaped nukes. Diverting comets is a way to add water to the atmosphere. Again, read KSR's trilogy, it's well-researched.
Or Mars will become more like the Earth once terraforming is initiated, even if it's just local changes under domes instead of the complete transformation of the planet portrayed in science-fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars . Now we can present to environmentalist-minding people a conundrum: what's better, an arid lifeless planet, or a planet that's polluted but life-sustaining?
Starting in the late 1940s, there were summer courses in new music composition held in Darmstadt, generously subsidized by the West German state. Most of the mid-20th century avant-garde met there and exchanged ideas, and "Darmstadt" is a common term in musical scholarship to review to that certain scene. See Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik at Wikipedia.
A claim that the classical music world was somehow taken over by atonalists is just an urban myth. See Joseph N. Straus's famous article "The myth of serial 'tyranny' in the 1950s and 1960s" in The Musical Times Vol. 83, No. 3. (Autumn, 1999), pp. 301-343. He carefully examines the statistics and finds that not only was twelve-tone music not prevalent among music in concert halls (tonal composers like Britten and Copland consistently holding sway), but even in academic ivory towers only a minority of instructors were pushing twelve-tone music.
Consequently, the idea of minimalism coming in and saving the scene from itself just isn't how things were.
Most European films and art music recordings are made with a boatload of state funding (which is essentially a modern-day patronage system), and there's still quite a few productions that are financed mainly by some nice old man like in traditional patronage. Americans might not accept that -- remember the polemics about the NEA funding "pornography"? -- but it's just how things work in the EU. And yes, a lot of productions are made that have a small audience, but voters in many countries support heavy funding for the whole range of the arts. In Finland where I reside, a poll earlier this year showed overwhelming support among the people for subsidizing orchestral concerts and the like even if only a couple of hundred people attend.
Incidentally, I've always wondered how the Hong Kong film industry not only survives but outright flourishes when it's really difficult to find authentic copies of anything in Hong Kong. How do films generate revenue there?
Application of the twelve-tone method appeared well into the 20th century. Mahler is "turn of the century", Romantic-era Schoenberg is "turn of the century", but twelve-tone music really gets its start two decades in.
Schoenberg turned to twelve-tone rows to impose discipline on his music after some years writing freely atonal music. He felt that what he was doing up to that point was "random-sounding music", while twelve-tone rows make it less arbitrary. I for one find great gestalt in twelve-tone music, even the 1950s Darmstadt bleep-bloop stuff. The only truly random-sounding music in the modern-classical world I've encountered is some Ferneyhough, but at least his scores offer some pleasure for reading.
It's funny that conservative music lovers think the Second Viennese School were hacks, yet they don't rage against the Japanese and Detroit noise music scenes, which arguably have a larger popular following and influence and are spreading widely. I've ever been to a couple of sold-out concerts in Beijing where it was just two hours of feedback. Compared to this stuff, Schoenberg's twelve-tone period might as well be late Romanticism.
I'd be wary of making blanket condemnations of twelve-tone music as something that universally repels people. That may be true for audiences in some places, but where I live in Finland, there's a 5-year Schoenberg project going on that draws the same subscriber audience that likes their Brahms and Beethoven. Furthermore, twelve-tone rows have popped up in a number of pieces considered crowd-pleasers, like Rautavaara's Third and Seventh Symphonies (a recording of the last having become a European best-seller and Grammy winner).
No. Only Norway has any real amount of oil. Finland is almost bereft of natural resources (its paper companies these days looking more to Brazil for wood).
In many countries libraries pay a fee to authors each year in order to compensate them for the lost sales.
The introduction of the welfare state in the Nordic countries greatly boosted their economies. Blaming America's problems on a desire for some government solutions is an oversimplification that obscures more than it clarifies.
Many organizations in the US that push for policy changes are federally registered as 501c3 charities.