they don't have to be any worse than any other document type. even setting aside fall-back measures like on-screen OCR (which i agree is a pretty abysmal fall-back), most currently-produced PDFs have the text in them, rather than just vector instructions (which is why you can copy/paste from them). if a screen reader can read a Word file better than a PDF (in the general case), it's a design or implementation failure in the screen reader.
So if you think libraries are an important part of our culture, you should also be thinking about ways to preserve public access to their content.
...
(Of course, here in the US, most of the population hasn't been inside a library in years.;-)
If you think libraries are an important part of our culture go use them! stories like this - and the British Library generally - make me wish i still lived in London so i could go support them. i now live just outside DC and while the Library of Congress doesn't emphasize its "public service" role as much as it's British counterpart, it's still an astoundingly important cultural resource; not just for Americans (or Brits, in the case of the British Library), but for the entire world. these institutions are the modern Libraries of Alexandria. many large Universities also support damn impressive libraries.
i actually decided earlier this week to go get a LoC Reader Card. if you've got one of these high-profile libraries locally, go sign up; if not, go use your local public library. you'll be doing the world a favor.
there's plenty of other ways that don't even involve facts, too. about a decade and a half ago, some bank somewhere in one of the Carolinas (i forget which) transposed some digits in some woman's social security number - making it match mine, instead. then they sent something with that on it to the credit agencies. spent about five years cleaning that up.
or so i thought. went into a bank about two years ago (after mine got bought by another) to update my address and get a new card (required by the buyout). bank manager asks for my information and pokes at a terminal for a bit. after about a minute, he gets this funny worried expression on his face and says "who's [woman's name]?" 'course, i'd forgotten her name by now, so i said i had no idea, at which point he informed me that she was some woman in the Carolinas that had some tie to my account information that he couldn't figure out.
i've still not gotten this round sorted out. thankfully, this woman's never had any credit issues, so it's not been a problem for me, but i'm wondering what's going to happen when she dies.
Only MS's office is 100% compatible with MS.doc format. And not even that is complitely true, because of different versions.
you have no idea. our operations staff is almost entirely on a mix of Win32 platforms - NT 4, 2000, and XP Pro (god help us). our entire engineering staff and most of our management are on Macs, some using MS Office, some using NeoOffice, and some using Pages/Keynote. we've run into several situations where one Microsoft product can't read the files produced by another, for reasons we've been unable to predict (we assume it's particular formatting elements). i'm not saying it gets certain elements wrong, rather that it just won't open the document. and this happens between just the windows systems. standard practice in these cases is to send the document to someone using either NeoOffice or Pages and have them open and resave the document. NeoOffice and Pages almost always have individual bits of formatting not quite right, but they've allowed me to read every.doc i've come across in my job.
this is why the MA initiative makes sense..doc files are difficult to read, can't be freely implemented properly, and you can't even rely on the commercial vendor to produce a reliable reader and encoder. with the exception of included fonts, however, PDFs always look the same.
...what would happen to all these wifi solutions if say it was found to cause cancer...
probably pretty much the same thing as happens in the face of evidence that mobile phone networks do: we get vendors and industry associations to sponsor studies that find the opposite to be true. we thereby ensure that the entire question gets so tired and muddled well before finding anything resembling a scientifically useful answer that folks interested in digging deeper are either discouraged or labeled cranks.
it became (in part) about rape when the parent described it as being kind appealing.
things which are against the law don't happen? that's news to me. it may be illegal to pay women less, but the comparative salary statistics still support the fact that it happens anyway. law does not make fact. i just thought i'd remind you of that.
amusingly (to me, anyway), i had no idea who Maureen Dowd is until you mentioned her. i was concerned that i'd missed some significant member of the feminist literary or philosophical tradition that you were referring to; i have a moderate background in those areas. i was relieved to find she's "just" a newspaper columnist (although a Pulitzer-prize winning one). thanks for the recommendation; i'll try to check out her stuff.;-)
no, you sick bastard, that is not any version of the truth.
as a seriously dismayed representative of the world's male hetero population, i'd like to announce as loudly as possible that this colossal jackass does not in any way speak for anything approaching the majority of "us". most guys i know recognize that rape isn't about casual sex but an exercise of power over the victim, that oppression in the forms of salary differences, employment opportunities, and the like have nothing to do with the fact that the average life expectancy is a few years longer for women, that being "hit on" constantly isn't an expression of affection but a (generally subconscious) attempt at subordination, that comments along these lines are part of a larger historical social effort to keep women in defined roles.
back to the parent: how 'bout if it was random people of mixed gender raping you with plungers up your ass? oh, that part's not as attractive? oh, you want control over who you're having sex with and how? well that's not what rape's about, dumbass. how 'bout taking the salary cut that tends (statistically) with being a woman to go along with that? or the equally real statistical cap in your upward mobility? how 'bout having your entire culture tell you every day how much extra protection you need?
oh, i should note that there is at least one possible "grander" explanation that seems to fit with the evidence at hand, including the effects we've had on the region, BushCo's stated belief system, where their base comes from, his social policies, and so on. i tend to discount that one, however, because it involves Bush intentionally trying to make things in the middle east worse in the hopes of speeding up the coming of the Apocalypse. even though the evidence seems to support this, i refuse to believe it because it scares the hell out of me.
(bad form, replying to myself and all, i know. sorry.)
and here i am reading your comment and left thinking:
well, yup, it sure worked on you.
i'm an intelligent person. i'm good at understanding complex and abstract things, and even at explaining them to people who're less good at it (that's what i spend most of my professional time doing). if the government had a case to make, i'm quite certain i could "follow it". yet the government has shown absolutely nothing to justify our activities in Iraq except a Bush clan vendetta. the CIA told us ahead of time that invading Iraq would up terrorism, and it did. it was widely assumed in the intelligence (and historically literate) community that Iranian-backed Islamic fundamentalists would make a power grab in a shaken-up Iraq, and they did. since the fall of Baghdad, we've seen a massive uniform regression in women's rights, a very uneven net decrease in religious freedoms (things are much better for the Kurds, somewhat better for Shi'ite Muslims, marginally worse for the Sunni Muslims, and much worse for everyone else), and a uniform dramatic increase in disease and corresponding decrease in quality of life as we destroyed critical infrastructure. none of this supports world, regional, or Iraqi stability, near or long term. quite the opposite.
the "sheep", in my mind, are divided in two classes: those who buy the drivel Fox and friends spit out about Iraq having anything at all to do with 9/11, and those that just assume the government knows best. you, sir, fall firmly into the second class. it is our job as citizens to question our government and hold them accountable. that's the only way this form of government of ours works. please do your friggin' job.
salaries fall into either "exempt" or "non-exempt" from various worker protection laws. get above a certain level, like most management positions, and you're exempt from such laws. this is standard practice, and starts much lower than you'd think (most computer engineers are "exempt").
Will this dissuade news sites from blogging in the future?
Yes! It will! People, please. The Post is trying to do a good thing here, and other mainstream media are watching carefully. Is it really too much to ask that people behave in a civil manner? It's one thing to find it on/., but the Post is an entirely different manner.
how the fsck is it "Insightful" to say that you'd rather get cancer in your groin (or, what, hip?) than you brain?!? i mean, look, i'm as attached to my genitals as anyone, but come on, that's just stupid!
and that's to say nothing of the likelihood of the brain being more susceptible.
'course Google isn't responding to Bell South's proposal. Google reads at +3; Bell South's proposal was modded at troll and flamebait so fast, Google never had a chance.
depends what you mean by "free software". if you mean software covered by GPL?2, you're wrong. nothing there prevents a program from having DRM or spyware attached (it'd just be removed quickly, by virtue of the benefit of open source, as you noted). stallman is attempting to extend the definition of "open source" via GPL 3 to fit your expectations.
maybe "just about" everywhere, but, thankfully, not everywhere. i know schools that will retroactively rescind your degree years after you've graduated if they find out you cheated, or at least non-trivially. and not just empty threats: they've done so.
i've been responsible for hiring rounds in several different organizations, looking for IT support, engineers for web-based financial systems, embedded OS developers, and the like. in absolutely every case, seeing a PDP-11 on someone's resumé would've been a big win for that candidate.
when i need to hire a developer for a perl-based system, i don't look for just perl or, really, care how many dozen perl projects they've worked on. i want to see something that tells me this person has a broader understanding of engineering, not just coding. perl monkeys are a dime a dozen. really, really good ones are two for a buck fifty. depending on the project, i might need a perl monkey or two; sometimes we need to generate a lot of functional code quickly, and quality and other future-looking concerns take a back seat. but generally, i want engineers.
the last project i hired for was a perl front end to a C/C++ database with awk, perl, sh, and rc glue connecting various bits together (the project's still ongoing). the most insightful member of staff, at least in certain areas, was the one who was most vocal about hating perl and had the least experience with it. he loves python and is trying to get into ruby. he's worked on PDP-11s and VAXes. his broader understanding of engineering helped us recognize problems in the existing design and, even though the system continued to be perl based, we were able to dramatically improve it based on his concrete suggestions. that experience was not an exception, in my experience. i wouldn't have traded him for any number of more vanilla grads.
picking at random is a fine solution. nobody's being "punished". education is not meant to be an adversarial affair. the students who're called on are simply the vehicles of informing the rest of the class - mistakes, clever bits, and so on in their code can certainly still teach the rest of the class. i've learned very nearly everything i know about programming from reading other people's code, especially with commentary. the Lions Book was the most important learning tool for decades for exactly this reason.
True story: I lived in London for a little over a year. Towards the beginning of my stay, I was the butt of quite a few "dumb american" jokes. That's okay, I was a good sport; besides, most of what they were saying was both true and funny, so whatever. But the following, about two months into my stay, is when i realized the British are the only people on the planet more blissfully, ignorantly parochial than Americans.
On a whim, a co-worker asked me in front of about a half dozen or so others, how many states there are in the US. I laughed, responded 50, and turned to go back to work. And then the fun started. "Ah! He doesn't even know how many states there are!" Beg your pardon? We had to look it up online to convince them that there were, in fact, 50 states, not 52 as half those in attendance were claiming (the other half abstained from the discussion).
Once that was settled, the conversation moved on to defense and justification: "Well, you don't know how many counties there are in England!" That's right, I don't. But if you were to tell me there were, say, 17, I'd believe you. 'Cause it's your friggin' country! Never mind the fact that counties are much smaller than states, about the size and power of counties in most US states. But my favorite was the ending of the argument:
"Okay, so which two don't you consider states?"
For a good time, try to get a brit to explain to you the relationship between Great Britain, the United Kingdom, and England, or ask them which one issues their passport. Good times all around.
i think you're working under the (very) false assumption that the kind of "data analysis" you care about is the only kind there is. i've done lots of data analysis using simple spreadsheets (seldom Excel specifically, generally open source alternatives). it's a great tool for that job. but the kind of data analysis i care about rarely exceeds one data point a day, averages lower than that, and we're rarely looking at more than a few years. for doing data analysis against that, it's great.
besides, Matlab prices itself right out of the water for any data analysis project i've ever had to work on.
none of which is intended to dispute the fact that Excel is frequently misused. i've seen whole businesses run by chains of inter-linked excel workbooks, any one of which would make a grown man cry.
The 72 hour exemption means that unless the FISA Court could provide a warrant within that time period, the government would have to stop at hour 73 even if that means losing valuable intelligence.
um, exactly. and thank god for that. if you've got probable cause, as the law requires, get the friggin' warrant! 72 hours is forever in this sort of thing. for comparison, cops get no such exemption; they simply must have a warrant before a search. and if they need one, they go get one - waking a judge up, if needed.
there may or may not be anything unreasonable about these intercepts. the problem is that the body who's supposed to make that determination - the courts - was never consulted. no law prohibits wiretapping, either before or after Sept. 11; the laws just make sure the government actually does have probable cause.
yes, there is a very real threat out there. and yes, our government and law enforcement agencies need to proper tools to go after that threat. no argument. but we already had them. before Sept. 11, our government already had the power to wiretap, even in advance of getting a warrant; all the relevant crimes were already crimes. biometric passports wouldn't have helped; the attackers had valid IDs. arguably more permissive restrictions on inter-agency information sharing would've helped, but that's not what's being discussed here. the government is collecting powers which are illegal and, in almost every case, would've done nothing to prevent any past attack.
because somehow stallman and friends have managed to convince themselves that software licenses - legal documents - are an appropriate place for extended polemics and lectures on philosophy. folks saying "it's hard to read because it's for lawyers" are missing the point. licenses don't have to be hard to read. there's plenty of examples. the GPL rewrite is an ego stroking project for those leading it. they've very nearly said as much: read this, particularly the section about the four purposes of the GPLv3. it starts out well - "The GPL is a Worldwide Copyright License" - but deteriorates rapidly. a "Code of Conduct"? the "Constitution of the Free Software Movement"? WTF? that's kinda grandiose, no, Mr. Stallman? and then it comes together with the final one: "The GPL is the Literary Work of Richard M. Stallman".
licenses don't have to be hard. Stallman has decided his should be literature instead. he's decided it should explicitly discuss his principles and philosophy, rather than be a legal reflection of the same. and i guess he's doing a good job of showing those principles, actually: a disregard for elegance, love of needless complexity, failure to modularize, and deference to form over function.
Slashdot Mirror
they don't have to be any worse than any other document type. even setting aside fall-back measures like on-screen OCR (which i agree is a pretty abysmal fall-back), most currently-produced PDFs have the text in them, rather than just vector instructions (which is why you can copy/paste from them). if a screen reader can read a Word file better than a PDF (in the general case), it's a design or implementation failure in the screen reader.
i actually decided earlier this week to go get a LoC Reader Card. if you've got one of these high-profile libraries locally, go sign up; if not, go use your local public library. you'll be doing the world a favor.
where's my -1 Tragic mod?
DRM: Doesn't Really Matter.
(as in, generally easy to get around. certainly the larger effects on society, culture, and technology matter a great deal.)
there's plenty of other ways that don't even involve facts, too. about a decade and a half ago, some bank somewhere in one of the Carolinas (i forget which) transposed some digits in some woman's social security number - making it match mine, instead. then they sent something with that on it to the credit agencies. spent about five years cleaning that up.
or so i thought. went into a bank about two years ago (after mine got bought by another) to update my address and get a new card (required by the buyout). bank manager asks for my information and pokes at a terminal for a bit. after about a minute, he gets this funny worried expression on his face and says "who's [woman's name]?" 'course, i'd forgotten her name by now, so i said i had no idea, at which point he informed me that she was some woman in the Carolinas that had some tie to my account information that he couldn't figure out.
i've still not gotten this round sorted out. thankfully, this woman's never had any credit issues, so it's not been a problem for me, but i'm wondering what's going to happen when she dies.
this is why the MA initiative makes sense.
much more than the parent gets told he's a nice guy, i'm betting.
i'm sorry, was that supposed to be a bad thing?
it became (in part) about rape when the parent described it as being kind appealing.
;-)
things which are against the law don't happen? that's news to me. it may be illegal to pay women less, but the comparative salary statistics still support the fact that it happens anyway. law does not make fact. i just thought i'd remind you of that.
amusingly (to me, anyway), i had no idea who Maureen Dowd is until you mentioned her. i was concerned that i'd missed some significant member of the feminist literary or philosophical tradition that you were referring to; i have a moderate background in those areas. i was relieved to find she's "just" a newspaper columnist (although a Pulitzer-prize winning one). thanks for the recommendation; i'll try to check out her stuff.
no, you sick bastard, that is not any version of the truth.
as a seriously dismayed representative of the world's male hetero population, i'd like to announce as loudly as possible that this colossal jackass does not in any way speak for anything approaching the majority of "us". most guys i know recognize that rape isn't about casual sex but an exercise of power over the victim, that oppression in the forms of salary differences, employment opportunities, and the like have nothing to do with the fact that the average life expectancy is a few years longer for women, that being "hit on" constantly isn't an expression of affection but a (generally subconscious) attempt at subordination, that comments along these lines are part of a larger historical social effort to keep women in defined roles.
back to the parent: how 'bout if it was random people of mixed gender raping you with plungers up your ass? oh, that part's not as attractive? oh, you want control over who you're having sex with and how? well that's not what rape's about, dumbass. how 'bout taking the salary cut that tends (statistically) with being a woman to go along with that? or the equally real statistical cap in your upward mobility? how 'bout having your entire culture tell you every day how much extra protection you need?
you make me ill.
oh, i should note that there is at least one possible "grander" explanation that seems to fit with the evidence at hand, including the effects we've had on the region, BushCo's stated belief system, where their base comes from, his social policies, and so on. i tend to discount that one, however, because it involves Bush intentionally trying to make things in the middle east worse in the hopes of speeding up the coming of the Apocalypse. even though the evidence seems to support this, i refuse to believe it because it scares the hell out of me.
(bad form, replying to myself and all, i know. sorry.)
the "sheep", in my mind, are divided in two classes: those who buy the drivel Fox and friends spit out about Iraq having anything at all to do with 9/11, and those that just assume the government knows best. you, sir, fall firmly into the second class. it is our job as citizens to question our government and hold them accountable. that's the only way this form of government of ours works. please do your friggin' job.
salaries fall into either "exempt" or "non-exempt" from various worker protection laws. get above a certain level, like most management positions, and you're exempt from such laws. this is standard practice, and starts much lower than you'd think (most computer engineers are "exempt").
how the fsck is it "Insightful" to say that you'd rather get cancer in your groin (or, what, hip?) than you brain?!? i mean, look, i'm as attached to my genitals as anyone, but come on, that's just stupid!
and that's to say nothing of the likelihood of the brain being more susceptible.
'course Google isn't responding to Bell South's proposal. Google reads at +3; Bell South's proposal was modded at troll and flamebait so fast, Google never had a chance.
depends what you mean by "free software". if you mean software covered by GPL?2, you're wrong. nothing there prevents a program from having DRM or spyware attached (it'd just be removed quickly, by virtue of the benefit of open source, as you noted). stallman is attempting to extend the definition of "open source" via GPL 3 to fit your expectations.
those are my best guesses. of course, they have no idea. i turned the question "which two don't you count?" around as "which two are you making up?".
maybe "just about" everywhere, but, thankfully, not everywhere. i know schools that will retroactively rescind your degree years after you've graduated if they find out you cheated, or at least non-trivially. and not just empty threats: they've done so.
i hate this "real world" crap.
i've been responsible for hiring rounds in several different organizations, looking for IT support, engineers for web-based financial systems, embedded OS developers, and the like. in absolutely every case, seeing a PDP-11 on someone's resumé would've been a big win for that candidate.
when i need to hire a developer for a perl-based system, i don't look for just perl or, really, care how many dozen perl projects they've worked on. i want to see something that tells me this person has a broader understanding of engineering, not just coding. perl monkeys are a dime a dozen. really, really good ones are two for a buck fifty. depending on the project, i might need a perl monkey or two; sometimes we need to generate a lot of functional code quickly, and quality and other future-looking concerns take a back seat. but generally, i want engineers.
the last project i hired for was a perl front end to a C/C++ database with awk, perl, sh, and rc glue connecting various bits together (the project's still ongoing). the most insightful member of staff, at least in certain areas, was the one who was most vocal about hating perl and had the least experience with it. he loves python and is trying to get into ruby. he's worked on PDP-11s and VAXes. his broader understanding of engineering helped us recognize problems in the existing design and, even though the system continued to be perl based, we were able to dramatically improve it based on his concrete suggestions. that experience was not an exception, in my experience. i wouldn't have traded him for any number of more vanilla grads.
picking at random is a fine solution. nobody's being "punished". education is not meant to be an adversarial affair. the students who're called on are simply the vehicles of informing the rest of the class - mistakes, clever bits, and so on in their code can certainly still teach the rest of the class. i've learned very nearly everything i know about programming from reading other people's code, especially with commentary. the Lions Book was the most important learning tool for decades for exactly this reason.
True story:
I lived in London for a little over a year. Towards the beginning of my stay, I was the butt of quite a few "dumb american" jokes. That's okay, I was a good sport; besides, most of what they were saying was both true and funny, so whatever. But the following, about two months into my stay, is when i realized the British are the only people on the planet more blissfully, ignorantly parochial than Americans.
On a whim, a co-worker asked me in front of about a half dozen or so others, how many states there are in the US. I laughed, responded 50, and turned to go back to work. And then the fun started.
"Ah! He doesn't even know how many states there are!"
Beg your pardon? We had to look it up online to convince them that there were, in fact, 50 states, not 52 as half those in attendance were claiming (the other half abstained from the discussion).
Once that was settled, the conversation moved on to defense and justification: "Well, you don't know how many counties there are in England!" That's right, I don't. But if you were to tell me there were, say, 17, I'd believe you. 'Cause it's your friggin' country! Never mind the fact that counties are much smaller than states, about the size and power of counties in most US states. But my favorite was the ending of the argument:
"Okay, so which two don't you consider states?"
For a good time, try to get a brit to explain to you the relationship between Great Britain, the United Kingdom, and England, or ask them which one issues their passport. Good times all around.
i think you're working under the (very) false assumption that the kind of "data analysis" you care about is the only kind there is. i've done lots of data analysis using simple spreadsheets (seldom Excel specifically, generally open source alternatives). it's a great tool for that job. but the kind of data analysis i care about rarely exceeds one data point a day, averages lower than that, and we're rarely looking at more than a few years. for doing data analysis against that, it's great.
besides, Matlab prices itself right out of the water for any data analysis project i've ever had to work on.
none of which is intended to dispute the fact that Excel is frequently misused. i've seen whole businesses run by chains of inter-linked excel workbooks, any one of which would make a grown man cry.
there may or may not be anything unreasonable about these intercepts. the problem is that the body who's supposed to make that determination - the courts - was never consulted. no law prohibits wiretapping, either before or after Sept. 11; the laws just make sure the government actually does have probable cause.
yes, there is a very real threat out there. and yes, our government and law enforcement agencies need to proper tools to go after that threat. no argument. but we already had them. before Sept. 11, our government already had the power to wiretap, even in advance of getting a warrant; all the relevant crimes were already crimes. biometric passports wouldn't have helped; the attackers had valid IDs. arguably more permissive restrictions on inter-agency information sharing would've helped, but that's not what's being discussed here. the government is collecting powers which are illegal and, in almost every case, would've done nothing to prevent any past attack.
because somehow stallman and friends have managed to convince themselves that software licenses - legal documents - are an appropriate place for extended polemics and lectures on philosophy. folks saying "it's hard to read because it's for lawyers" are missing the point. licenses don't have to be hard to read. there's plenty of examples. the GPL rewrite is an ego stroking project for those leading it. they've very nearly said as much: read this, particularly the section about the four purposes of the GPLv3. it starts out well - "The GPL is a Worldwide Copyright License" - but deteriorates rapidly. a "Code of Conduct"? the "Constitution of the Free Software Movement"? WTF? that's kinda grandiose, no, Mr. Stallman? and then it comes together with the final one: "The GPL is the Literary Work of Richard M. Stallman".
licenses don't have to be hard. Stallman has decided his should be literature instead. he's decided it should explicitly discuss his principles and philosophy, rather than be a legal reflection of the same. and i guess he's doing a good job of showing those principles, actually: a disregard for elegance, love of needless complexity, failure to modularize, and deference to form over function.