Well it was a fair question I thought:-) My first thought when I downloaded a book was "right, how do I go about removing a password from a PDF file again?" It's just that I turned out not to need to...
If you're thinking of DRM, no. The PDF files you can download are not password-protected. They do require an extra plug-in for some PDF readers because of the image format they use (I think it's JBIG2, but not sure), though there's nothing to stop you converting them to a more widely-used format.
I have a vague memory of reading some research some years ago that indicated there was a measurable reduction in air resistance even for runners. I may be misremembering, though (perhaps playing with too many virtual cameras), or maybe it's been disproved.
The study would have been more meaningful if it hadn't conflated spam blocking with ad blocking.
It looks to me as though TFA conflates them, but without having access to the study itself I can't say whether the study itself does. I'd be inclined towards a default assumption that the people conducting the study aren't that dim. Whose confusion is this?
Netscape does still exist, but has bloated beyond all belief and no one with a shred of decency or social conscience uses it now. It's based off Firefox code (just as Mozilla came from Netscape) but also acts as a wrapper around IE 6, thereby giving you the security holes of two browsers for the price of one. It's big, it's ugly, it's slow, and it's not coming anywhere near my computer...
The one thing I remember best from the history of ancient Greece is that all of our knowledge of that culture is based on a single book and a few fragments.
I hate to disillusion you, but that is wholly inaccurate. Our knowledge of ancient Greece is based on thousands of archaeological sites, millions of archaeological finds, tens of thousands of complete texts, and hundreds of thousands of fragments. It may be that you're thinking of something like what is known of the history of a specific period (perhaps about 50 years' worth); there are some periods where that characterisation wouldn't be 100% wrong (though still a severe understatement of the evidence that is available).
There are always problems with generalisations. Just for balance --
Original, [the Romans] were not.
In many respects, no. But pick your facts selectively and you can make the same claim about any culture. "Modern USA culture has no originality about it -- they stole their governmental structure and legal system from the Romans, their educational system from Renaissance Europe, their religion from the Middle East", etc etc. OTOH the Romans were pretty damn good at innovating in areas like land surveying, architecture (aqueducts, domes, and central heating come to mind), military technology like the pilum or the innovations they introduced to the ballista, etc etc.
As a rule, Greeks were more theoretical than practical and there's no obvious sign that they had much in the way of advanced material science.
Materials science, perhaps no -- though burnt brick was an important development -- , but that doesn't cover every aspect of technology. I'd say the Greeks were very practical indeed. Think of inventions such as certain advanced gear mechanisms, the torsion ballista, the anchor, the trireme (and larger battleships), etc etc.
Sorry, I didn't mean to nit-pick, I just felt like nit-picking. Generalisations are an easy target;-)
If Egyptians (for thousands of years prior to the Romans) had experimented with or refined this process and if an Aristotelean (such as Demetrius of Phaleron) had moved this information to Alexandria, that would explain...
This really isn't the hardest step in your hypothesis, considering that Alexandria is in Egypt.
True believers already know that 12pt Time New Roman is the only "TRUE" font.
Maybe when Times New Roman acquires the Latin Extended Additional, Combining Diacritics, and Greek Extended character sets, all of which I use on a daily basis, I'll think about it, but until then...
Just out of interest, in the last month or two Microsoft has actually put a note about OpenDocument support into their Office support pages. Notice how they insist on identifying it solely with a specific product (OpenOffice.org, whose name they get wrong). Their comments about why ODF is crap and MSXML is sweetness and light are also pretty... partial, which isn't really surprising I suppose. More intriguing to me is how they basically say the whole debate is grandstanding by Sun (and not, say, something to do with public interest).
Why is Microsoft offering a new standard, rather than simply supporting the file format for the Open Office product (sometimes called ODF)?
The OpenDocument format would not meet requirements for backward compatibility, for forward compatibility, or for performance, that millions of Microsoft customers tell us that they require.
Sun submitted the OpenOffice formats to a small committee in the OASIS organization. The record shows that there were almost no material changes to the OpenOffice specification from the time it was submitted to the time it was approved by the working group at OASIS. Sun timed the release of the OpenDocument standard in conjunction with the OpenOffice 2.0 release. The OASIS committee did not focus on the requirements, constraints, and experiences of Microsoft customers.
The Microsoft OpenXML formats have had a number of unique design requirements, including the following:
Backward compatibility with billions of documents produced over decades.
Intrinsic support for integrating customer-defined XML data. This enables new levels of innovation as documents generate and transport information in unique XML styles not defined by Microsoft or the document standard, but defined by the business processes of an organization.
High performance. The Microsoft OpenXML formats put a high priority on the speed of opening, closing, and working with documents, to roughly reflect or improve upon the performance of the past binary formats, rather than degrade the performance due to parsing XML.
Robust Testing. The OpenXML formats for Microsoft Word and Excel have been part of Office 2003 and have undergone extensive real-world testing and usage, by customers and developers.
In conclusion, the formats are significantly different, with different design points and strengths.
2prong is nice. No clicks required: going to the site auto-generates a random e-mail address (which the web page checks as long as you're on it) and at the same time dumps the e-mail address into your clipboard, so you don't even need to copy-and-paste. I like.
Absolutely correct. Actually, as a teacher myself, the main reason I advise students against both encyclopaedias is that they're both extremely out-of-date on the areas I teach -- about 25 years out-of-date in the case of the Britannica, about 100 years out-of-date in the case of Wikipedia.
FWIW, one assignment that my group currently has is to write a bunch of new articles on a particular set of (rather obscure) topics. It might have a positive effect, it might not -- I expect about 50% of them might actually upload their articles (and then I'll have a good laugh watching the edit-wars when they find they wrote on the same topic as someone else in the same class). I don't suppose the results will be especially good, unfortunately -- well, we'll see.
Gpp is correct, you are multiply wrong. (1) "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master" is indeed the slogan under which Othello is published. (2) Othello is not computationally solved (at least according to Wikipedia, for what that's worth).
The only point on which you are correct is that Go is computationally more difficult than Othello. If you take a moment actually to read the gpp, you will see s/he was not in fact denying this.
Surveys have shown that users are willing to give out their passwords for a piece of chocolate.
Point of order: that is false. Surveys have shown that users were willing to give out things that they claimed were their passwords for a piece of chocolate.
To put it in CS language, surviving technology from the ancient world tends to be more binaries than source code. With some notable, and correspondingly important, exceptions (such as Vitruvius).
they keep the writing secret? What's up with that.
Because it's kind of hard to read, even if you know Greek. Quite a lot of work needs to be done to get the text transcribed fully, even if parts of it are easy to read. Have you looked at the third image in the slide show? Could you make an accurate transcription of the text shown?
FWIW, I can read Greek, but all I can make out is some references to a "square showing a given" something, some numbers, and something about moving some bits of the mechanism but not others. The third line's got some words in it but I can't fit them together without context.
If I were running Microsoft, I would stop all shipments of all products to Europe (which is within their rights), and vigorously prosecute all copyright infrigment.
Hell yeah! Cutting off their single biggest market would be a fantastically good idea! The shareholders would love that.
Heck, while they're at it, why don't they cut off their second-biggest market (the US) too? In fact, why don't they stop distributing their software to anyone? That'd teach the bastards not to mess with Microsoft!
Given that some societies have used non-Latin characters for thousands of years, is this a bit late in coming?
No kidding. However, how come you're making a comment like that when Slashdot still refuses to allow non-Roman characters in posts, and insists on using charset=iso-8859-1?... Pot, meet kettle.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it was a fair question I thought :-) My first thought when I downloaded a book was "right, how do I go about removing a password from a PDF file again?" It's just that I turned out not to need to ...
If you're thinking of DRM, no. The PDF files you can download are not password-protected. They do require an extra plug-in for some PDF readers because of the image format they use (I think it's JBIG2, but not sure), though there's nothing to stop you converting them to a more widely-used format.
I wouldn't either, if I were in their shoes. Formatting is kinda important, but it's antithetical to what Gutenberg does. PDF files are a Good Thing.
I have a vague memory of reading some research some years ago that indicated there was a measurable reduction in air resistance even for runners. I may be misremembering, though (perhaps playing with too many virtual cameras), or maybe it's been disproved.
It looks to me as though TFA conflates them, but without having access to the study itself I can't say whether the study itself does. I'd be inclined towards a default assumption that the people conducting the study aren't that dim. Whose confusion is this?
Netscape does still exist, but has bloated beyond all belief and no one with a shred of decency or social conscience uses it now. It's based off Firefox code (just as Mozilla came from Netscape) but also acts as a wrapper around IE 6, thereby giving you the security holes of two browsers for the price of one. It's big, it's ugly, it's slow, and it's not coming anywhere near my computer ...
Just an FYI: "-pedia" (Greek paideia) means "education".
Funny, that was in fact precisely my plan for what I'm going to do when new games being released are no longer XP-compatible.
I hate to disillusion you, but that is wholly inaccurate. Our knowledge of ancient Greece is based on thousands of archaeological sites, millions of archaeological finds, tens of thousands of complete texts, and hundreds of thousands of fragments. It may be that you're thinking of something like what is known of the history of a specific period (perhaps about 50 years' worth); there are some periods where that characterisation wouldn't be 100% wrong (though still a severe understatement of the evidence that is available).
There are always problems with generalisations. Just for balance --
Original, [the Romans] were not.In many respects, no. But pick your facts selectively and you can make the same claim about any culture. "Modern USA culture has no originality about it -- they stole their governmental structure and legal system from the Romans, their educational system from Renaissance Europe, their religion from the Middle East", etc etc. OTOH the Romans were pretty damn good at innovating in areas like land surveying, architecture (aqueducts, domes, and central heating come to mind), military technology like the pilum or the innovations they introduced to the ballista, etc etc.
As a rule, Greeks were more theoretical than practical and there's no obvious sign that they had much in the way of advanced material science.Materials science, perhaps no -- though burnt brick was an important development -- , but that doesn't cover every aspect of technology. I'd say the Greeks were very practical indeed. Think of inventions such as certain advanced gear mechanisms, the torsion ballista, the anchor, the trireme (and larger battleships), etc etc.
Sorry, I didn't mean to nit-pick, I just felt like nit-picking. Generalisations are an easy target ;-)
This really isn't the hardest step in your hypothesis, considering that Alexandria is in Egypt.
Maybe when Times New Roman acquires the Latin Extended Additional, Combining Diacritics, and Greek Extended character sets, all of which I use on a daily basis, I'll think about it, but until then ...
Hmm, 2.314x10^6 Hz would give 1.99x10^11 dupes per day, or 9.99x10^11 every five days. I don't think there are that many.
Just out of interest, in the last month or two Microsoft has actually put a note about OpenDocument support into their Office support pages. Notice how they insist on identifying it solely with a specific product (OpenOffice.org, whose name they get wrong). Their comments about why ODF is crap and MSXML is sweetness and light are also pretty ... partial, which isn't really surprising I suppose. More intriguing to me is how they basically say the whole debate is grandstanding by Sun (and not, say, something to do with public interest).
2prong is nice. No clicks required: going to the site auto-generates a random e-mail address (which the web page checks as long as you're on it) and at the same time dumps the e-mail address into your clipboard, so you don't even need to copy-and-paste. I like.
Oh, well. Back to P2P I guess. Shame. It was nice being legal.
Absolutely correct. Actually, as a teacher myself, the main reason I advise students against both encyclopaedias is that they're both extremely out-of-date on the areas I teach -- about 25 years out-of-date in the case of the Britannica, about 100 years out-of-date in the case of Wikipedia.
FWIW, one assignment that my group currently has is to write a bunch of new articles on a particular set of (rather obscure) topics. It might have a positive effect, it might not -- I expect about 50% of them might actually upload their articles (and then I'll have a good laugh watching the edit-wars when they find they wrote on the same topic as someone else in the same class). I don't suppose the results will be especially good, unfortunately -- well, we'll see.
Gpp is correct, you are multiply wrong. (1) "A minute to learn, a lifetime to master" is indeed the slogan under which Othello is published. (2) Othello is not computationally solved (at least according to Wikipedia, for what that's worth).
The only point on which you are correct is that Go is computationally more difficult than Othello. If you take a moment actually to read the gpp, you will see s/he was not in fact denying this.
Point of order: that is false. Surveys have shown that users were willing to give out things that they claimed were their passwords for a piece of chocolate.
To put it in CS language, surviving technology from the ancient world tends to be more binaries than source code. With some notable, and correspondingly important, exceptions (such as Vitruvius).
Because it's kind of hard to read, even if you know Greek. Quite a lot of work needs to be done to get the text transcribed fully, even if parts of it are easy to read. Have you looked at the third image in the slide show? Could you make an accurate transcription of the text shown?
FWIW, I can read Greek, but all I can make out is some references to a "square showing a given" something, some numbers, and something about moving some bits of the mechanism but not others. The third line's got some words in it but I can't fit them together without context.
Tools - AutoCorrect - "Word Completion" tab - uncheck the "Enable word completion" box (or else customise to suit taste).
Hell yeah! Cutting off their single biggest market would be a fantastically good idea! The shareholders would love that.
Heck, while they're at it, why don't they cut off their second-biggest market (the US) too? In fact, why don't they stop distributing their software to anyone? That'd teach the bastards not to mess with Microsoft!
Hm, does that mean that if you have an international licence you're exempt from breathalyser tests?
No kidding. However, how come you're making a comment like that when Slashdot still refuses to allow non-Roman characters in posts, and insists on using charset=iso-8859-1? ... Pot, meet kettle.