This has been able to handle any unicode I've thrown at it, although that has primarily been some greek and math characters. But if you look through the data files for the ucs package, it is clear that the unicode support is quite extensive. Whether or not it is perfectly complete, I don't know.
Or, you can use XeTeX, which I understand has full unicode support entirely built in.
TeXinfo, which is still TeX based, AFAIK, but is not LaTeX, is commonly used in GNU projects to produce several forms of documentation, including info, HTML, and PDF. It produces all three more than adequately.
Flowing to fit the screen is a bad thing for readability, in my experience. If I'm reading a significant amount of text on a web page that allows that text to take up the whole width of the browser window, I find that I read it much much more quickly if I horizontally shrink the browser so that there are about (surprise!) 70 characters on a line. Many news sites and some blogs understand this and restrict the text width accordingly. PDFs are formatted for print, and as long as they are, as you describe, two-column 10pt, they are usually right in the sweet spot for easy reading.
"It is not a place of suppressed ideas, incompetent people, publish or perish, and faked results to get more funding."... like the animal "cloning" scam, for example ?
"Plano, Texas is not a place of violent crime."... like the murder in 2007, for example? The fact that there are faked results does not mean that academia can be characterized as a place of faked results etc. Actually, the fact that faked results result in such high profile stories and such serious career-ending consequences for those involved indicates that that sort of thing is absolutely not tolerated.
Now, I'm not far enough along to have refereed any papers yet, but my impression from talking to those who have is that anonymity restrictions mean that the referees don't know who wrote the papers and certainly don't know whether or not they have even a high school diploma. So, how you get a bunch of PhDs to review something seriously is to write a good, thorough description in clear, concise, proofread prose of well done research, and not throw in any unsubtantiated or irrelevant crank-agenda drivel.
Who upgrades to a new version of Windows on the same machine? When you want the new software, in Microsoft's world, you buy new hardware to support it. Microsoft is much much worse on this point than
Violating causality is fine provided you don't mind breaking Lorentz symmetry (at high energies). While we know from experiment that Lorentz symmetry holds up at low energies, we have no experiments at energies higher than TeV scale, so lots of things are imaginable at high energies. Moreover, many people expect that a quantum gravity would break Lorentz symmetry at the Planck scale at least.
I actually know this guy (he was a grad student where/when I was an undergrad). He's not crazy and at least mostly not a crank (I only say mostly because it's never possible to judge that sort of thing perfectly). The article, like most crappy science journalism, doesn't really go into details, so I'll try to recall for you all the contents of a talk I heard him give to a small group once.
The basic idea, which you can probably get from the article, is to construct an Alcubierre bubble or Alcubierre warp drive. The Alcubierre bubble is a genuine solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity; it is a spacetime metric which could conceivably exist. Part of the trouble with making one is that you (at least naively) need exotic matter of some sort (tachyons, negative mass, etc) in order to do it, but we obviously don't know of any exotic matter at all presently. What you really want is to make spacetime contract ahead of you and expand behind you. Well, we do know of something that makes spacetime expand: dark energy! So, if we had some way of manipulating the local strength of dark energy, then we could make spacetime expand behind us faster than normal and expand in front of us slower than normal (or maybe contract, I can't remember exactly how far that side of things went). There are apparently some suggestive features of superstring theory that indicate that we might be able to use the Casimir effect and/or cause an expansion or contraction of string theory's predicted extra compact dimensions to affect the local strength of dark energy. Here's another failure in memory, as I remember that the Casimir effect and extra dimensions were both involved, but don't remember which one was supposed to affect the other and which was supposed to affect dark energy. This is about all I can remember. My apologies that it is not more complete.
Now, all this is of course very speculative. It depends on some things being true which might or might not be true. The existence of dark energy is at least strongly indicated by astrophysical data, whether or not it has a local strength is not known at all. The Casimir effect is quite well established. Compact extra dimensions and the rest of string theory remain a very good candidate for physics, but are of course notoriously difficult to test. If all of these things eventually work out, then Richard's ideas should work quite nicely. If any of them don't, then all bets are off; I don't know how his analysis would change then.
Of course, even a few years ago when I heard all this presented, it was much more thoroughly developed. You have my poor memory to blame for a very incomplete and fuzzy account. I have no doubt he's been developing it further in the last couple of years.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. The host went on to say that he died of a rare and malignant form of copyright, after it spread to his liver. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to culture. Truly an American icon.
This was a bit inane. Clearly, if we are speculating that China's government is building a huge botnet, we might extrapolate that in the near future, the condition you state will change dramatically. In that case, it might well be worthwhile for many transit providers and/or hosts in the rest of the world to start dropping all packets from China IPs into the bitbucket.
If the CEO can't get his funny cat pictures anymore because the website says it doesn't work in IE6, then he'll get something else installed on his computer. If the CEO has IE8 or whatever, then it is likely that the rest of the company will be migrated a little bit sooner than otherwise.
The accelerator takes months to warm up and begin the experiments and it needs to cool down after running them.
Erm. No. You've got it backwards. The bending and focusing magnets on the ring are superconducting, and as such, need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures. So, the accelerator takes about a month (IIRC) to warm up to go into the tunnels and do maintenance, and then has to be (very expensively) cooled back down to liquid nitrogen temperatures in order to function. Credentials: IAAPP, working on CDF.
You forget about compilers. LISP gets compiled (by most implementations), too. All the "nifty high level programming shit" can, and sometimes does, if you have a good enough compiler, get compiled away. Furthermore, the "nifty high level programming shit" provides a whole lot more information to the compiler, allowing it to do much more aggressive optimizations because it can prove that they are safe. If somebody comes up with a slick new optimization technique, I don't have to rewrite my LISP code, I just implement it in the compiler. You'd have to go back through every line of C code you've ever written in order to implement it. If somebody gives you a radically different CPU architecture, the C code that is so wonderfully optimized for one CPU will run dog slow. You can reoptimize it for the new arch, but then it will run slow on the old one. With a good LISP compiler, the same code gets optimizations that are appropriate for each arch.
What you describe (building relationships, interacting socially) seems like normal, healthy human interaction. However, I think the problem is akin to one of the problems with talking on the phone while driving. The people on the phone don't see the road and don't quiet down, or even act as an extra pair of eyes, when needed. The people on MMOs don't see your level of (real physical) health or have much care for any aspects of your life external to the game.
So they would have to get a warrant for any place they wanted to search before they went to search it and tipped off the operators, yeah? Why is that such a problem? They shouldn't even be attempting a search without a warrant in the first place. The fire marshal could similarly get a warrant first, and I expect that there would be no problem and no appreciable delay in getting the warrants anyway.
Just about anything that hampers the ability of the government to interfere with the everyday lives of the citizens is a good thing, IMO.
In other news: millions of damned souls are displaced by advancing glaciers.
So what you're saying is that the disappearing ice caps are caused by the TSA, and that if we get rid of them, we won't have to worry about Global Warming (TM) anymore? Somebody call Al Gore, quick!
Slashdot Mirror
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
This has been able to handle any unicode I've thrown at it, although that has primarily been some greek and math characters. But if you look through the data files for the ucs package, it is clear that the unicode support is quite extensive. Whether or not it is perfectly complete, I don't know.
Or, you can use XeTeX, which I understand has full unicode support entirely built in.
TeXinfo, which is still TeX based, AFAIK, but is not LaTeX, is commonly used in GNU projects to produce several forms of documentation, including info, HTML, and PDF. It produces all three more than adequately.
Flowing to fit the screen is a bad thing for readability, in my experience. If I'm reading a significant amount of text on a web page that allows that text to take up the whole width of the browser window, I find that I read it much much more quickly if I horizontally shrink the browser so that there are about (surprise!) 70 characters on a line. Many news sites and some blogs understand this and restrict the text width accordingly. PDFs are formatted for print, and as long as they are, as you describe, two-column 10pt, they are usually right in the sweet spot for easy reading.
"It is not a place of suppressed ideas, incompetent people, publish or perish, and faked results to get more funding." ... like the animal "cloning" scam, for example ?
"Plano, Texas is not a place of violent crime." ... like the murder in 2007, for example? The fact that there are faked results does not mean that academia can be characterized as a place of faked results etc. Actually, the fact that faked results result in such high profile stories and such serious career-ending consequences for those involved indicates that that sort of thing is absolutely not tolerated.
There are standard practices for safety and such, but these aren't government regulated
OSHA et al?
Now, I'm not far enough along to have refereed any papers yet, but my impression from talking to those who have is that anonymity restrictions mean that the referees don't know who wrote the papers and certainly don't know whether or not they have even a high school diploma. So, how you get a bunch of PhDs to review something seriously is to write a good, thorough description in clear, concise, proofread prose of well done research, and not throw in any unsubtantiated or irrelevant crank-agenda drivel.
Who upgrades to a new version of Windows on the same machine? When you want the new software, in Microsoft's world, you buy new hardware to support it. Microsoft is much much worse on this point than
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers
Contempt of court carries jail time.
I've got an SSD in my netbook. I like it for two reasons (ordered by significance): silence and power draw.
a cow-orkers laptop
This post brought to you by explicit.slashdot.org. Let's keep it SFW, guys. None of this backwoods paraphilia.
Violating causality is fine provided you don't mind breaking Lorentz symmetry (at high energies). While we know from experiment that Lorentz symmetry holds up at low energies, we have no experiments at energies higher than TeV scale, so lots of things are imaginable at high energies. Moreover, many people expect that a quantum gravity would break Lorentz symmetry at the Planck scale at least.
I actually know this guy (he was a grad student where/when I was an undergrad). He's not crazy and at least mostly not a crank (I only say mostly because it's never possible to judge that sort of thing perfectly). The article, like most crappy science journalism, doesn't really go into details, so I'll try to recall for you all the contents of a talk I heard him give to a small group once.
The basic idea, which you can probably get from the article, is to construct an Alcubierre bubble or Alcubierre warp drive. The Alcubierre bubble is a genuine solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity; it is a spacetime metric which could conceivably exist. Part of the trouble with making one is that you (at least naively) need exotic matter of some sort (tachyons, negative mass, etc) in order to do it, but we obviously don't know of any exotic matter at all presently. What you really want is to make spacetime contract ahead of you and expand behind you. Well, we do know of something that makes spacetime expand: dark energy! So, if we had some way of manipulating the local strength of dark energy, then we could make spacetime expand behind us faster than normal and expand in front of us slower than normal (or maybe contract, I can't remember exactly how far that side of things went). There are apparently some suggestive features of superstring theory that indicate that we might be able to use the Casimir effect and/or cause an expansion or contraction of string theory's predicted extra compact dimensions to affect the local strength of dark energy. Here's another failure in memory, as I remember that the Casimir effect and extra dimensions were both involved, but don't remember which one was supposed to affect the other and which was supposed to affect dark energy. This is about all I can remember. My apologies that it is not more complete.
Now, all this is of course very speculative. It depends on some things being true which might or might not be true. The existence of dark energy is at least strongly indicated by astrophysical data, whether or not it has a local strength is not known at all. The Casimir effect is quite well established. Compact extra dimensions and the rest of string theory remain a very good candidate for physics, but are of course notoriously difficult to test. If all of these things eventually work out, then Richard's ideas should work quite nicely. If any of them don't, then all bets are off; I don't know how his analysis would change then.
Of course, even a few years ago when I heard all this presented, it was much more thoroughly developed. You have my poor memory to blame for a very incomplete and fuzzy account. I have no doubt he's been developing it further in the last couple of years.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. The host went on to say that he died of a rare and malignant form of copyright, after it spread to his liver. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to culture. Truly an American icon.
This was a bit inane. Clearly, if we are speculating that China's government is building a huge botnet, we might extrapolate that in the near future, the condition you state will change dramatically. In that case, it might well be worthwhile for many transit providers and/or hosts in the rest of the world to start dropping all packets from China IPs into the bitbucket.
Cut the ties that bind the C&C with the bots, and monitor what happens next.
Wait, you mean Kane is behind all this? Aw crap, we're screwed.
If the CEO can't get his funny cat pictures anymore because the website says it doesn't work in IE6, then he'll get something else installed on his computer. If the CEO has IE8 or whatever, then it is likely that the rest of the company will be migrated a little bit sooner than otherwise.
I'm glad you know more about fusion reactor design viability than people who are devoting their entire working lives to the problem.
The accelerator takes months to warm up and begin the experiments and it needs to cool down after running them.
Erm. No. You've got it backwards. The bending and focusing magnets on the ring are superconducting, and as such, need to be kept at cryogenic temperatures. So, the accelerator takes about a month (IIRC) to warm up to go into the tunnels and do maintenance, and then has to be (very expensively) cooled back down to liquid nitrogen temperatures in order to function. Credentials: IAAPP, working on CDF.
Freedom without restraint is a chimera. It just doesn't exist in a world with more than one "free" actor.
You forget about compilers. LISP gets compiled (by most implementations), too. All the "nifty high level programming shit" can, and sometimes does, if you have a good enough compiler, get compiled away. Furthermore, the "nifty high level programming shit" provides a whole lot more information to the compiler, allowing it to do much more aggressive optimizations because it can prove that they are safe. If somebody comes up with a slick new optimization technique, I don't have to rewrite my LISP code, I just implement it in the compiler. You'd have to go back through every line of C code you've ever written in order to implement it. If somebody gives you a radically different CPU architecture, the C code that is so wonderfully optimized for one CPU will run dog slow. You can reoptimize it for the new arch, but then it will run slow on the old one. With a good LISP compiler, the same code gets optimizations that are appropriate for each arch.
Check out Stalin, SBCL, and http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt. You might be surprised at what you find.
What you describe (building relationships, interacting socially) seems like normal, healthy human interaction. However, I think the problem is akin to one of the problems with talking on the phone while driving. The people on the phone don't see the road and don't quiet down, or even act as an extra pair of eyes, when needed. The people on MMOs don't see your level of (real physical) health or have much care for any aspects of your life external to the game.
So they would have to get a warrant for any place they wanted to search before they went to search it and tipped off the operators, yeah? Why is that such a problem? They shouldn't even be attempting a search without a warrant in the first place. The fire marshal could similarly get a warrant first, and I expect that there would be no problem and no appreciable delay in getting the warrants anyway.
Just about anything that hampers the ability of the government to interfere with the everyday lives of the citizens is a good thing, IMO.
In other news: millions of damned souls are displaced by advancing glaciers.
So what you're saying is that the disappearing ice caps are caused by the TSA, and that if we get rid of them, we won't have to worry about Global Warming (TM) anymore? Somebody call Al Gore, quick!
Well, it's hardly surprising, as Stephen Wolfram is a well known egomaniac who refuses to admit that anyone other than himself can possibly achieve anything. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/