Another thing you could do would be to put all the coins in a stack, slice the stack in half, and match the top coin in the left half with the bottom coin in the right half, followed by #50 from the left stack with #2 from the right, gluing/welding them together until you get to #25 from the left and #25 from the right.
You'll end up with quite a few mismatched coins, but the number of pure head coins and pure tail coins will be the same.
Of course, that assumes all the coins are aligned correctly to begin with. Wouldn't want to weld Washington's forehead to another forehead and call that "heads"...
...Rome is broadcast for free by the BBC. I forgot to tape it and was going to download it (I mainly use p2p as a post-hoc VCR).
The BBC? Free? I suppose "pay us even if you don't watch our station or our radar-equipped tanks will roll through your neighborhood and scan your TV waves and hit you with a 2000-pound fine" must be some new meaning of the word "free" that I wasn't aware of.
If you speak any foreign languages, make use of all of them. Then, only people who know all the languages you know will be able to crack your password.
Here in Japan everyone knows Japanese characters plus the Roman alphabet, so you need to be creative. Right now I've got a post-it note on my desk containing very sloppily-written Cyrillic for the letters and Arabic and Gujarati for the numbers. When the times comes to change the password again, I'll use Tibetan for the letters and then the surnames of various baseball players for the numbers (just remember what position they play).
Just make sure to write messy enough so that people can't identify what language it is unless they can actually read it. And if some of these foreign alphabet characters look like different characters (for example, Latin "R" looks like a P in Russian), you can lead hackers on the wrong trail. All respect to the OP, but with this system, even if someone steals your card with this stuff written on it, they'll never figure it out.
Football on the other hand welcomed the changes and reveled in the exposure it gained by being broadcast on television. I can't think of a better analog for this debate.
A similar thing happened in baseball in the 1950s and 1960s. Many teams feared television broadcasts and thought that showing their games on TV would keep people away from the park, but the Wrigleys (owners of the Chicago Cubs) embraced TV, seeing it as free advertising for the beautiful ballpark. Having their games broadcast nationally on WGN brought in legions of fans and worked so well that the team was rolling in money and didn't feel the need to get an actual winner on the field unil several decades later!
There's an analogy here with the garbage that the music industry foists on us here, I just know it.
... it was stolen? Did someone leave it laying around?
Doesn't seem like it, and I find it appalling that so many posters are going back and forth about whether or not this reseller is a criminal because he acceped an abnormally low price for the computer, and almost completely ignoring the woman who actually stole the thing from the university.
There's only one person who completely, unambiguously, without-a-doubt knew that this laptop was stolen goods, and that's the woman who actually stole the thing. Why isn't she getting the ire she so rightfully deserves?
But of course that logical, sensible solution doesn't jive with today's vengeful, zero-tolerance, conform-or-face-punishment society.
This is the equivalent of writing in a library book, except that re-imaging the hard disk on a laptop is actually easier than removing writing from a library book.
Anyone recall the scene in "Ender's Game" where the kids are virtually encouraged to mess around with their computers, in part so that the school can keep an eye on who's got creativity and daring and who's just a boring by-the-rules follower?
We won't be raising the kind of smart kids we need to be defeating aliens and saving humanity with the Kutztown school district's attitude.
OP: I don't know about you, but the complicated vocabulary in cryptography articles has given me more word power. Admit it, you couldn't use the phrase "squeamish ossifrage" with confidence before you began studying cryptography!
England is a monarchy still, so they can take a page from Japan's book and call the year "Elizabeth 61".
With corporations and the like restricting the use of "AD" years (the Christian Pope, I imagine, has no legal authority in England), people will increasingly have to resort to using the years in the current monarch's reign.
I can only imagine what those newfangled British Identity Cards will look like. "McDOUGAL, JOHN, DOB 23.12.2005 (Elizabeth 55; AH 1426; Heisei 16; insert in National ID Reader for more options...)
The real problem is that despite the recent wave of right-hander-only mice, makers don't make much of an effort to specifically mention that their product is unusable by left-handers. It's not always obvious from the pictures, and these days when looking at mice it's one of the first things I think about. I must have spent five minutes just looking for photos with enough detail to see whether or not I shuold stop considering this mouse before reading any further.
Right handers can safely buy just about any product knowing that either it favors them or it's neutral, and that if it were for lefties, it would be so labeled.
Come on, mouse makers. Surely the benefit gained from RH users with your RH-only designs is outweighed by the grousing, boycotts, and bad publicity that also come with them.
Electronic version = better index
on
Textbooks With EULAs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I was about to post a snide comment about how anyone smart enough to get into Princeton will also eb smart enough to buy a used copy for a discount and then sell it back after it's not needed and save much more than 33%, but then it occurred to me...
If I were filthy rich, I might consider buying one of these things in addition to a real paper version. Some of those 800-page physics and biology texts don't have the best indices in the world, and frequently your mind recalls an interesting turn of phrase from the section you need to look at, but you can't remember what page it's on. A searchable electronic version would put you in the right place instantly.
There is absolutely nothing to be gained by use of an implanted chip that you can't gain through less intrusive methods, such as an RFID national ID card or a wristband or lapel pin with the same technology in it. Not that I'd wear or carry any of those things either, of course.
And this is what the governments are banking on. Scare people with implants, and then nobody minds a few years down the road when it's "good thing they're only instituting mandatory RFID cards instead of those horrible chips!"
Threaten to someone with unjust execution and suddenly an equally unjust prison sentence is looking downright palatable.
The 1024x768 screens, while certainly nothing to look down on, really need to be upgraded. Is it 96 pixels per inch now? Would increasing that be too expensive? (Not rhetorical; I'd like to know.)
Microsoft's font smoothing works only in the horizontal dimension and makes even small text look smooth and pleasing to the eye. Apple, on the other hand, tries to smooth things both vertically and horizontally. This looks fantastic at really big sizes, but at a normal size such as 12 point, horizontal bars (such as in "H" and "E" become gray and cause eyestrain.
I love Macs and hate to see Gates trumping them in something. But a higher-resolution, or better-smoothed, portable (iBook/PowerBook)screen would do wonders for readability.
Could be worse. Daylight is 4:30 AM to 6:30 PM on June 21 in central Japan -- worse up in Hokkaido where kids are waking home from school in the dark at 3 PM in winter.
Japan's time zone is perfect if you live in Kyushu or Okinawa, but the government's stubborn insistence on not using DST (either it reminds them of the war, or it's a conspiracy to make us consume more electricity and prop up the energy companies) and on only having one time zone despite stretching over roughly 25 degrees of longitude.
There can't be too many other places in the world who have "daylight losing" time zones, can there?
This site is a classic, and looking at it again, I can't find any link to his baseball stats, which I once saw.
They guy may not be much good at English, but his walks-to-innings-pitched ratio was (if I recall correctly, and the fact that I do is pathetic) excellent!
One thing that Windowx now handles much better than Apple:
Sub-pixel font smoothing
Windows font smoothing is really easy ont he eyes, whereas Apple attempts to smooth the fonts in two dimensions, something that comes off looking clumsy. (Because the red, green, and blue parts of the pixel are arranged horizontally, one can simulate a white line that's 5/3 of a pixel wide by lighting up all of one pixel and then R and G of the next, but the height has to be a whole number of pixels.)
It's supposedly a licensing issue, but I'd really like to see Apple make some kinds of deal and adopt something closer to ClearType. It really is a joy to look at.
MSOffice will always assume the paste in Enhanced mode, which will take longer, as it's looking for formatting.
IF the source text is formatted. If it's copied from Notepad, then it's plain text. Read the article. What took so long is that it spent 22 minutes spellchecking.
Forgive the off-topic post, but how does one change this default? I almost never want to retain formatting when pasting text from Word into an Lotus Notes e-mail, or from a web oage into a Word document, etc., but the computer insists on keeping all that time-consuming formatting unless I specifically choose to paste it as "text only" or the like in the Edit menu. How can you change the default setting to paste plain text? It looks like a minor feature, but if MS won't let you change the default, it would be a point in OOo's favor.
The fun-packed grammar and spelling nazi show can be followed by the Useless Japanese Trivia show:
Ken Kutaragi -- in Japanese, v'½--Ç-Ø OE', is one of those lucky fellows with a four-character surname. You can go for years among Japanese people and never meet such a person; it's like having a European-language surname that starts with "X". There are even web sites devoted to listing up all the 4+ character surnames.
And that was Useless Japanese Name Trivia for today!
Because consoles are sold at razor-thin profit margins, with profits being made on the games.
Video card makers presumably have more room to gouge the buyer, especially if they've already locked themselves into a specific computer which requires it.
(Feel free to correct me on that second point as I have no idea about video card profit margins. But they have to be bigger than those of consoles.)
Fbjon, they've been calling them this since Win98 (the earliest Japanese Windoes I've used), but I wouldn't be surprised if they've always been this way.
For 'documents', I might have preferred 'shorui', which implies paper documents, as does the English word, but can be used for electronic documents and files too.
It's the "mai" part that's silly. It sounds silly in English, it isn't Japanese to begin with, and though Japanese has adopted this word, it's usually used to mean "someone's own --", not "[the speaker's] --". I've met Japanese people who ask, in English, "Do you have my car?" to mean "Do you have your own car?" (You've probably heard things like this before if you're at the U. of Osaka, as your URL indicates.)
And getting Japanese people to stop misusing garbled English words is a whole different proposition; something that probably won't go away any time soon!
It gives me great embarrassment to inform the uninitiated that in Japan, all of these icons are named with phonetic katakana approximations of the English words, which unfortunately don't even come the least bit close to how actual English speakers say them:
mai konpyuutaa mai dokyumento mai pikucha mai nettowaaku
There are prefectly good Japanese words for all of these items, except for "computer" and perhaps "network", so whoever made up this nonsense really ought to be slapped around a little. The "My" stuff sounds silly enough in *native* English.
Not for citizens, but non-citizens must carry such cards on their persons at all times. And the police most certainly stop people who look foreign and find excuses to ask for their ID cards. Not carrying one can lead to anything from a "well, carry it next time, OK" if the cops are in a good mood, to a trip to the police station and a lecture in a waiting room while they contact the Ministry of Justice to verify your details. Woe betide you should this occur outside the Ministry's regular operating hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Another thing you could do would be to put all the coins in a stack, slice the stack in half, and match the top coin in the left half with the bottom coin in the right half, followed by #50 from the left stack with #2 from the right, gluing/welding them together until you get to #25 from the left and #25 from the right.
You'll end up with quite a few mismatched coins, but the number of pure head coins and pure tail coins will be the same.
Of course, that assumes all the coins are aligned correctly to begin with. Wouldn't want to weld Washington's forehead to another forehead and call that "heads"...
...Rome is broadcast for free by the BBC. I forgot to tape it and was going to download it (I mainly use p2p as a post-hoc VCR).
The BBC? Free? I suppose "pay us even if you don't watch our station or our radar-equipped tanks will roll through your neighborhood and scan your TV waves and hit you with a 2000-pound fine" must be some new meaning of the word "free" that I wasn't aware of.
^_^;
If you speak any foreign languages, make use of all of them. Then, only people who know all the languages you know will be able to crack your password.
Here in Japan everyone knows Japanese characters plus the Roman alphabet, so you need to be creative. Right now I've got a post-it note on my desk containing very sloppily-written Cyrillic for the letters and Arabic and Gujarati for the numbers. When the times comes to change the password again, I'll use Tibetan for the letters and then the surnames of various baseball players for the numbers (just remember what position they play).
Just make sure to write messy enough so that people can't identify what language it is unless they can actually read it. And if some of these foreign alphabet characters look like different characters (for example, Latin "R" looks like a P in Russian), you can lead hackers on the wrong trail. All respect to the OP, but with this system, even if someone steals your card with this stuff written on it, they'll never figure it out.
Football on the other hand welcomed the changes and reveled in the exposure it gained by being broadcast on television. I can't think of a better analog for this debate.
A similar thing happened in baseball in the 1950s and 1960s. Many teams feared television broadcasts and thought that showing their games on TV would keep people away from the park, but the Wrigleys (owners of the Chicago Cubs) embraced TV, seeing it as free advertising for the beautiful ballpark. Having their games broadcast nationally on WGN brought in legions of fans and worked so well that the team was rolling in money and didn't feel the need to get an actual winner on the field unil several decades later!
There's an analogy here with the garbage that the music industry foists on us here, I just know it.
Doesn't seem like it, and I find it appalling that so many posters are going back and forth about whether or not this reseller is a criminal because he acceped an abnormally low price for the computer, and almost completely ignoring the woman who actually stole the thing from the university.
There's only one person who completely, unambiguously, without-a-doubt knew that this laptop was stolen goods, and that's the woman who actually stole the thing. Why isn't she getting the ire she so rightfully deserves?
But of course that logical, sensible solution doesn't jive with today's vengeful, zero-tolerance, conform-or-face-punishment society.
This is the equivalent of writing in a library book, except that re-imaging the hard disk on a laptop is actually easier than removing writing from a library book.
Anyone recall the scene in "Ender's Game" where the kids are virtually encouraged to mess around with their computers, in part so that the school can keep an eye on who's got creativity and daring and who's just a boring by-the-rules follower?
We won't be raising the kind of smart kids we need to be defeating aliens and saving humanity with the Kutztown school district's attitude.
Visit www.cutusabreak.org
The kids are protesting and even selling T-shirts.
A *felony* for something that, for any non-police-state-oriented mind, should result in reduced computer privileges? Outrageous.
OP: I don't know about you, but the complicated vocabulary in cryptography articles has given me more word power. Admit it, you couldn't use the phrase "squeamish ossifrage" with confidence before you began studying cryptography!
Just thought of something!
England is a monarchy still, so they can take a page from Japan's book and call the year "Elizabeth 61".
With corporations and the like restricting the use of "AD" years (the Christian Pope, I imagine, has no legal authority in England), people will increasingly have to resort to using the years in the current monarch's reign.
I can only imagine what those newfangled British Identity Cards will look like. "McDOUGAL, JOHN, DOB 23.12.2005 (Elizabeth 55; AH 1426; Heisei 16; insert in National ID Reader for more options...)
Can we refer to the year as "<i>Anno Hegirae</i> 1433" instead, or will that get us locked up with the terrorists instead of the trademark infringers?
The real problem is that despite the recent wave of right-hander-only mice, makers don't make much of an effort to specifically mention that their product is unusable by left-handers. It's not always obvious from the pictures, and these days when looking at mice it's one of the first things I think about. I must have spent five minutes just looking for photos with enough detail to see whether or not I shuold stop considering this mouse before reading any further.
Right handers can safely buy just about any product knowing that either it favors them or it's neutral, and that if it were for lefties, it would be so labeled.
Come on, mouse makers. Surely the benefit gained from RH users with your RH-only designs is outweighed by the grousing, boycotts, and bad publicity that also come with them.
I was about to post a snide comment about how anyone smart enough to get into Princeton will also eb smart enough to buy a used copy for a discount and then sell it back after it's not needed and save much more than 33%, but then it occurred to me...
If I were filthy rich, I might consider buying one of these things in addition to a real paper version. Some of those 800-page physics and biology texts don't have the best indices in the world, and frequently your mind recalls an interesting turn of phrase from the section you need to look at, but you can't remember what page it's on. A searchable electronic version would put you in the right place instantly.
There is absolutely nothing to be gained by use of an implanted chip that you can't gain through less intrusive methods, such as an RFID national ID card or a wristband or lapel pin with the same technology in it. Not that I'd wear or carry any of those things either, of course.
And this is what the governments are banking on. Scare people with implants, and then nobody minds a few years down the road when it's "good thing they're only instituting mandatory RFID cards instead of those horrible chips!"
Threaten to someone with unjust execution and suddenly an equally unjust prison sentence is looking downright palatable.
The 1024x768 screens, while certainly nothing to look down on, really need to be upgraded. Is it 96 pixels per inch now? Would increasing that be too expensive? (Not rhetorical; I'd like to know.)
Microsoft's font smoothing works only in the horizontal dimension and makes even small text look smooth and pleasing to the eye. Apple, on the other hand, tries to smooth things both vertically and horizontally. This looks fantastic at really big sizes, but at a normal size such as 12 point, horizontal bars (such as in "H" and "E" become gray and cause eyestrain.
I love Macs and hate to see Gates trumping them in something. But a higher-resolution, or better-smoothed, portable (iBook/PowerBook)screen would do wonders for readability.
Could be worse. Daylight is 4:30 AM to 6:30 PM on June 21 in central Japan -- worse up in Hokkaido where kids are waking home from school in the dark at 3 PM in winter.
Japan's time zone is perfect if you live in Kyushu or Okinawa, but the government's stubborn insistence on not using DST (either it reminds them of the war, or it's a conspiracy to make us consume more electricity and prop up the energy companies) and on only having one time zone despite stretching over roughly 25 degrees of longitude.
There can't be too many other places in the world who have "daylight losing" time zones, can there?
This site is a classic, and looking at it again, I can't find any link to his baseball stats, which I once saw.
They guy may not be much good at English, but his walks-to-innings-pitched ratio was (if I recall correctly, and the fact that I do is pathetic) excellent!
One thing that Windowx now handles much better than Apple:
Sub-pixel font smoothing
Windows font smoothing is really easy ont he eyes, whereas Apple attempts to smooth the fonts in two dimensions, something that comes off looking clumsy. (Because the red, green, and blue parts of the pixel are arranged horizontally, one can simulate a white line that's 5/3 of a pixel wide by lighting up all of one pixel and then R and G of the next, but the height has to be a whole number of pixels.)
It's supposedly a licensing issue, but I'd really like to see Apple make some kinds of deal and adopt something closer to ClearType. It really is a joy to look at.
Thank you Burpmaster; that's very helpful. I'll attempt to customize the Edit menu so that "Paste unformatted" has its own keyboard shortcut.
MSOffice will always assume the paste in Enhanced mode, which will take longer, as it's looking for formatting.
IF the source text is formatted. If it's copied from Notepad, then it's plain text. Read the article. What took so long is that it spent 22 minutes spellchecking.
Forgive the off-topic post, but how does one change this default? I almost never want to retain formatting when pasting text from Word into an Lotus Notes e-mail, or from a web oage into a Word document, etc., but the computer insists on keeping all that time-consuming formatting unless I specifically choose to paste it as "text only" or the like in the Edit menu. How can you change the default setting to paste plain text? It looks like a minor feature, but if MS won't let you change the default, it would be a point in OOo's favor.
The fun-packed grammar and spelling nazi show can be followed by the Useless Japanese Trivia show:
Ken Kutaragi -- in Japanese, v'½--Ç-Ø OE', is one of those lucky fellows with a four-character surname. You can go for years among Japanese people and never meet such a person; it's like having a European-language surname that starts with "X". There are even web sites devoted to listing up all the 4+ character surnames.
And that was Useless Japanese Name Trivia for today!
There sure are some weird peoples on this planet of ours. Are the Asu anything like these people?
Because consoles are sold at razor-thin profit margins, with profits being made on the games.
Video card makers presumably have more room to gouge the buyer, especially if they've already locked themselves into a specific computer which requires it.
(Feel free to correct me on that second point as I have no idea about video card profit margins. But they have to be bigger than those of consoles.)
Fbjon, they've been calling them this since Win98 (the earliest Japanese Windoes I've used), but I wouldn't be surprised if they've always been this way.
For 'documents', I might have preferred 'shorui', which implies paper documents, as does the English word, but can be used for electronic documents and files too.
It's the "mai" part that's silly. It sounds silly in English, it isn't Japanese to begin with, and though Japanese has adopted this word, it's usually used to mean "someone's own --", not "[the speaker's] --". I've met Japanese people who ask, in English, "Do you have my car?" to mean "Do you have your own car?" (You've probably heard things like this before if you're at the U. of Osaka, as your URL indicates.)
And getting Japanese people to stop misusing garbled English words is a whole different proposition; something that probably won't go away any time soon!
It gives me great embarrassment to inform the uninitiated that in Japan, all of these icons are named with phonetic katakana approximations of the English words, which unfortunately don't even come the least bit close to how actual English speakers say them:
mai konpyuutaa
mai dokyumento
mai pikucha
mai nettowaaku
There are prefectly good Japanese words for all of these items, except for "computer" and perhaps "network", so whoever made up this nonsense really ought to be slapped around a little. The "My" stuff sounds silly enough in *native* English.
Not for citizens, but non-citizens must carry such cards on their persons at all times. And the police most certainly stop people who look foreign and find excuses to ask for their ID cards. Not carrying one can lead to anything from a "well, carry it next time, OK" if the cops are in a good mood, to a trip to the police station and a lecture in a waiting room while they contact the Ministry of Justice to verify your details. Woe betide you should this occur outside the Ministry's regular operating hours.