"Encyclopedia" is a 'non-englishy' spelling (in fact, my auto spell checker is underlining it in red right now)... It's an American spelling, and while I've certainly seen it, I really don't like it. I don't think I've ever seen "façade" spelled as "facade" though.
Do you also write "cafe" instead of "café"? Or how about naïve?
I agree about Unicode being important, but it's not so much because "Umlauts rock", but rather that it's just handy to be able to spell things the way they should be spelled! I have no problem writing "Copenhagen", "Cologne" and "Munich" if I'm writing something specifically in English such as a travel guide, but if I were to talk about the place names "in general" (as I would do here on Slashdot for example), I'd write "Købnhavn", "Köln" and "München".
While typing this email, I also wanted to give an example of the word, "Foetus" with the ligatured oe, and the degree sign, but even after typing œ and °, they don't display... it's even worse than I'd thought!
BTW, what is it with/. and the rendering of apostrophes? Is it just me, or Firefox, or what?
If you type on a non QWERTY keyboard, such as most of those in Europe, there's a good chance you're using the "wrong" apostrophe. On my German keyboard here for example, there's the "real" apostrophe on shift # (just left of the enter key), as well as the backtick/foretick key beside ß (which also doesn't display correctly, like this - ÃY). Slashdot doesn't handle a great deal of characters that aren't standard ASCII, which includes the foretick (renders as Â). Oddly enough, the backtick renders fine - `. It's pretty common for people in Europe to type the foretick rather than an apostrophe character, because it's easier to reach and you don't have to press shift on most layouts, whereas for an apostrophe you do. It's still wrong though, and looks hideous in a lot of fonts, even when it does display correctly, so I'd advise training yourself against it. In the case of copy/paste (I noticed it happens for you when quoting), be careful that the characters you're pasting in are correct, as the simple act of copying from a webpage may mess things up depending on the clipboard system in use (I seem to have no problems here using English language MacOS X 10.4 with Firefox 3.0.3, but potentially different combinations may be an issue)
I notice the foretick I've typed here doesn't render the same as your "apostrophe" however, so I wonder if you're typing yet another different character. As you can see from this post, I've used a fair few "real" apostrophes and they all show fine.
Despite my claims about the foretick/whatever-else not looking right and that you shouldn't use them as apostrophe, I ALSO think Slashdot needs to hurry up and actually support all of these characters (I mean come on... Unicode is NOT hard), because it's REALLY annoying to have to type things like Köln, when I'd rather just type Köln (which renders here as as KÃln). There's a LOT of characters that don't show correctly:
(note that some of these characters are required to correctly spell ENGLISH words also... æ in Encyclopædia or loanwords that we don't really have any alternative for, such as façade... so it's not even a decent excuse for them to say that Slashdot is primarily English speaking.)
You're absolutely right that John McCain has not, uh, talked about my muslim faith
Then, after being "corrected" to say "christian faith", he STARTED to say:
Well, what I'm saying is he hasn't suggested about... [interruption] that... [interruption] that I'm a muslim
The only interpretation I can get out of that is that he is not muslim, but could have been made out to be one (but wasn't)
Personally, I'd prefer if he were neither muslim nor christian, but at least he seems relatively moderate in his religious views (regardless of all of the hype about his pastor - it doesn't appear he believes in the radical viewpoints espoused by that guy, simply that he was with the church because overall, the message was fairly positive (and I'd agree from watching some of the stuff from them))
For the record, in case you haven't already seen my posting history on it, I'm very strongly atheist and against religion in general. I do realise that there are some good morals given by the majority of religions of course, just strongly disagree with the method in which they're given.
I was baptised christian, according to the doctrines of the church I was baptised in, that means I am still a christian.
This is irrespective of the fact that I do not believe (and have NEVER believed) in a higher power, consider religion to be a dangerous kind of mental disorder, and actively argue the point with people if they bring it up. Somehow, I'm still a christian. If somewhere in Obama's past, someone with the "authority" to do so declared him a muslim (whether that did or did not happen, I neither know nor care), then he's probably as much as muslim now as I am a christian now.
Personally, I'd love to see him get elected and then come out with, "Oh, by the way, I'm actually an atheist - I attended a christian church, because their morals are good, and the muslim teachings I saw in my younger years were also pretty interesting, but really, I think it's all crap". I can't see it happening, but it'd be wonderful if it did.
As an atheist who considers all religion to be a dangerous form of delusion, and that rationality is the only sensible way to improve the state of the world, this is quite saddening.
Note the poll results are from 1999... since 2001, I'm sure the percentage of those willing to vote for a muslim have decreased, but sadly, with the state of religious fervour coming from that continent, the percentage of those willing to vote for an atheist has probably also decreased.
I read the Wikipedia article you linked to, and I think it backs up my claims more than yours!
The people didn't stand up to the government with weapons - they stood up to the government by small acts of terrorism (that didn't require guns) such as doing nasty things to tax collectors, and people who complied with the tax. When the government showed up with a large military force to stop them, they were nowhere to be found.
Even the "Consequences" section of the article says:
The military suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion set a precedent that U.S. citizens who wished to change the law had to do so peacefully through constitutional means; otherwise, the government would meet any threats to disturb the status quo with force.
Yes, the tax was repealed, and the actions taken by the men who were against it probably helped a great deal (although, it also says it was largely unenforceable outside of Western Pennsylvania anyway), but it was definitely NOT a case of them using guns to do it. In fact, the ONLY mention of guns being used by them in the whole Wikipedia article is:
You might find a note posted on a tree outside your house, requiring you to publish in the Gazette your hatred of the whiskey tax and your commitment to the cause; otherwise, the note promised, your still would be mended. Tom had a wicked sense of humor and a literary bent: "mended" meant shot full of holes or burned.
Even without guns, they still could have done any number of nasty things to the people's stills.
The problem is that that reasoning can easily be overturned by anyone with a silver-tongue (hell, a bronze tongue would do it)
"All Australians are guaranteed a right to vote in elections". This is true. However, the second point is where things come undone - "To vote in an election you need to be able to inform yourself". This SHOULD be true, but technically isn't. There's no requirement outlined anywhere that says Australians must make an informed choice in their elections, only that they have the right to vote (and by a stupid law, also are "required" to vote).
So, break down the second point, and the next two go tumbling down. Now, I don't agree with this - I strongly believe of course that in any democracy, everyone should have the right to an informed decision about their vote, but as it stands, no such requirement exists.
No, a US states citizens would be protected by the bill of rights. Howard would have done anything to stop that, you don't think he was a 2nd amendment fan do you?
And you think US politicians aren't doing their best to chip away at these protections bit by bit themselves? AU is descending in the same direction as the US, just a bit quicker since there's no pesky bill of rights to get in the way (actually, there is an Australian constitution of course, but not much in the way of rights to the people outlined therein). Once the US politicians finally erode whatever is left of their constitution, the US will do the same freefall that AU is doing.
The second amendment specifically is now useless for the purposes of a civilian uprising against an oppressive government anyway. It's always a hotly argued one, but the main points of argument generally now centre around things like home defence and so on.
It's better to not focus on any one experiment but to actually get a feel for it first.
I don't disagree - hence my recommendation for taking it at least twice.
It's really a personal experience and that's why science has failed it because the one using it needs to freedom to do what they please without a third party trying to control the experience.
I agree with the premise that it's a personal experience, but not the remainder of this sentence. I don't think science has "failed it" at all - government got in the way of science, so the good work that was going towards getting an understanding of it was stopped far far too early. It's very complex on the human mind, and so there's a lot that would need to be understood. We were just taking baby steps towards the research at the time it got banned.
Also, I really quite strongly disagree about not having a third party there. You NEED someone looking out for you until you are very experienced with it (and even then, it's nice to have someone around to bounce thoughts off, and if you can convince them beforehand to do so, take a log). Having someone "controlling" you would be bad, but that's not what science is about - it's about understanding things, not controlling them.
Also it takes more than a couple of uses to get the feel for it.
That depends on the person's mind. The guy I replied to said he was 44, and seems quite "worldly wise" and intelligent in general from looking at his posting history (although I strongly disagree with him on a number of things, he never trolls about it and always has interesting posts). I'd say he's more than mature enough to be able to get a good feel for it after his first trip (if the set and setting are right), so he'd be ready by his second to do some personal experimentation on thought process control. And, if he wasn't, then he could always just wait to the third, or fourth, or however many it takes should he so choose (of course, if the set and setting are wrong for his first trip, he may never want to try it again, which is always a shame)
Mine tastes like blue and sounds like the smell of rose petals...
Although, in honesty, unless I take very large doses (greater than 400 micrograms), I find the only synaesthesia I get is seeing sounds. I love "watching" Halcyon and On and On towards the end of a good trip... There's some really nice wavy bits there and the colours in the vocal sounds are quite incredible. With increased dosage, I've experienced almost every other kind of synaesthesia, but I'm not sure I've seen "happy" (although I may have tasted it...)
Bah - look at my posting history and you'll get my full name, the company I work for, the fact that I've taken a lot of LSD, admissions of criminal activity relating to computer fraud (for large sums of money) that I was never charged for and a LOT more. Thankfully, there's absolutely nothing anyone can realistically do to me with all of this information that would bother me in the slightest.
Live life without secrets, and there's nothing that can be stolen from you.
(note: I do not live in, or ever intend on living in, the United States of America)
When I think about something, irrelevant associations will pop in with much greater frequency, distracting me from "pure" concentration.
I've actually wondered if there are mental exercises such as meditation that might help to quiet all the noise.
I know the kind of noise you're talking about, and I would recommend a different approach - rather than learning a technique to "block it out", instead learn techniques for effective brain "multi-tasking". You can keep a very strong focus on the topic at hand, as well as let the useless dreck wander through without interrupting you (but if something useful floats by, you can grab it and run with it).
My recommendation for this would be to overly excite your brain for a bit with LOTS of useless extra information flooding through your mind. A strong dose of LSD (250 micrograms or so) combined with a lot of sensory input would do the trick (although, if you've not used LSD before, I'd recommend first taking that dose WITHOUT strong sensory input, then doing it with the sensory input a few weeks later). Once you get your head straight from that experience, you should find yourself better able to concentrate on a topic without the other things distracting you as much, despite them still actually being there.
Note: LSD is illegal pretty much everywhere, and this is only my own personal recommendation based on both personal experience and anecdotal evidence from associates. If you've got any problems with either the idea of taking a controlled substance, or the idea of self-medicating with a very potent psychedelic that (unfortunately) has not had the opportunity for much more than limited psychiatric testing, then this advise may not be suitable for you. (of course, with the name "Reality Master", I really do recommend it if you haven't tried it - you might then get to understand your chosen name on many new and unexpected levels)
Another issue is that MS Word also formats the file according to the printer settings. So if your printer is very different from the recipient's printer, then a.doc file will also look funny.
Dear god, how horribly correct you are on this... I work for Konica Minolta, a company that makes imaging devices - that includes, by definition, print output devices (MFPs to be precise (and yes, I am the main editor of that Wikipedia page)). Because I have about 30 to 50 drivers installed on my laptop at any given time (and a good 20 or so different device models to actually print to), I can NEVER rely on Word to save documents in a reliable way. If I'm sending someone a document from my office laptop that was at one point in Word format, I'm always certain to make sure it isn't at the time I send it.
Most companies only accept MS Word files for resumes.
I've recently been involved with helping my boss find a co-worker for me (yes, lots of people from Slashdot have already sent CVs, and we're narrowing it down now, so sorry, but you're too late). About 50% of people sent CVs in.doc format, which I glanced through very quickly only, and if they weren't stunningly interesting, dropped from the list. The remainder sent in PDF (including one guy who sent his in both PDF and.doc), which I read more thoroughly. Now, that may sound a little harsh, but we're an imaging company, and I specifically said that before anyone sent their CV. Even though the job doesn't really require knowing anything about the imaging business (it's a development job, for non imaging related software and software supports that's tangental to the imaging business), it's simply very bad form to send a crappy format like.doc to an imaging company, and I don't rate highly the critical thinking skills of anyone who would do so...
(P.S. to the people who haven't heard back from me about the job: Don't worry - I WILL send you an email once we've made a shortlist, had some interviews with the people we've shortlisted (phone interviews in the cases of you international folk) and made our final decision. I don't just leave people with no answer like some companies. Sorry about the delay though - this process is taking forever!)
I haven't met a single person in my company that hasn't been as productive (if not more) with the ribbon interface than
with MSO2003
My experience is totally different to yours - most Windows users in my office are sticking with Office 2003, because they don't like the Ribbon in Office 2007. Personally, I do have Office 2007 installed, but I ALSO have OpenOffice 3.0 installed, and it gets far more use. The only thing I use Microsoft Office for is PowerPoint (which I loathe, but mainly because I loathe all "presentation" software I've seen to date, and also hate giving presentations)
we could just turn it off. You can do that, you know.
Ummm... no, I didn't realise that... and a few Google searches and I still can't see how. You can show/hide the ribbon, but it doesn't give you back the menus you had in previous versions of Office, which is what anyone really means/wants when they talk about turning off the Ribbon.
Who has been "bitten" by DOC again? People who don't use Office, I presume.
A few of my co-workers have been bitten by.docx, always asking me to open/re-save it for them since they're not running anything that can handle it. Since the new version of Open Office, I've been pushing them towards that now. (Yes, I'm aware of the "Compatibility Pack" from Microsoft, but many of my co-workers aren't, and I'd rather push them towards OpenOffice than that)
More directly on being bitten by.doc, I assume the GP was referring to some of the odd behaviour it can display across different systems - there have been cases I've seen in the past, where a document saved on one computer will look different when opened on another (usually alignment and end-of-page issues where a page break hasn't been forced). I put this down to compatibility between versions (honestly, it's less of an issue than the differences opening Word documents in OpenOffice, but I've never seen the issue when opening OpenOffice native documents with other versions of OpenOffice, which is a fairer comparison)
Looks about the same as NeoOffice to me (minor differences here and there, but overall VERY similar). OO.o 2.x was crap on OS X, but that's because it didn't support Aqua. OO.o 3.0 does...
So Mr AC, can you give elaboration to your "crap" statement? Especially in comparison to NeoOffce, which is what the thread was about?
Like many other posters, I made the change from NeoOffice to OO.o 3.0 when it was released, so I think the percentage of MacOS X downloaders is probably higher than the GGP assumes.
An intelligent BIOS should store your current "system profile" in flash or similar. When booting, it just reads this and takes it as gospel unless the user specifies otherwise (hardware changes are rare enough in most systems). That'd knock a couple of seconds off at least. For the next step, there should be further flash designated as belonging to the OS on the system - for a start, most systems could just put their boot loaders here, but as operating systems evolve in the future, they could use it for all kinds of clever tricks to aid in booting more quickly.
Storing "current state" of a "fresh boot" on the HDD as you suggest is also of course a good way to drastically improve boot times, but you do need to be a little more careful with that, as quite a lot can change there (unlike hardware), such as newly installed programs that should be executed on startup and so on. Definitely not impossible of course, as it would only require that any time a new piece of software is installed that inserts itself in to startup, it adds a flag to start up "normally" once, and then re-write the "current state". It'd make boots a LITTLE longer than current any time you install new things that insert themselves in to startup, but MUCH faster any time you don't.
Also, this could probably be hacked on to existing OSs with a minimal of effort - it would preferably be added more elegantly for future systems, but for current things, a hack would suffice.
I do agree with you, however for the particular point you raise, I do think the "nicest" way to do it would be to tag the file with "Alice". That tag is meta-tagged with "friend", and then after the change in relationship, you only alter the meta-tag, automatically allowing the files tagged "Alice" to be found with "significant other" or later, "ex". In the same way, the tag "birthday" has the meta-tags "celebration" and "events", so those searches will also work, but will find other non-birthday related things as well.
Of course, since you're spot on about people not actually taking the time to tag their files, making the whole thing pointless. The only way tags could reasonably work is if they were somehow semi-automated. I've been considering doing something for my (rather excessive) movie collection, whereby it directly talks to IMDB and lets me do things like "search my movie collection for anything with Simon Pegg in it" based purely on the filename (which is the name of the movie).
It's not a case of "nothing to do", but instead "downtime between things to do". I don't work helpdesk, but I do know the sort of thing the GP is talking about. I spend most of my days writing code. Sometimes, I have to attend meetings. Sometimes, these meetings are scheduled for stupid times like 1pm. If I finish eating lunch at 12:30, there's NO WAY I'm going to try to get in to the coding mindset just to write a couple of lines and then get out of it again for a meeting, so instead I'll just "play around" for 30 minutes. Also, being a programmer, I sometimes need to "step back" from what I'm doing, clear my head and relax in order to move on to the next bit of code. Generally, I'll just go for a smoke in these cases, but sometimes I'll post to Slashdot, reply to personal emails, or just get lost following semi-random Wikipedia links for awhile. My boss has no problem with any of this - I write good code, deliver on time (or often WELL before) and fulfil all aspects of my job to a very high standard. Why should it matter if I "waste" some time during office hours?
I agree that Australians, in general and on average, seem to be a little "slower" than those of us in more civilised countries (I lived there for 6 years, and was constantly astounded by it), but I think there's two things wrong with your post:
1) There are smart people and dumb people pretty much everywhere - I've met some very smart Aussies - they just happen to be a bit rarer than elsewhere. I know you didn't say there aren't any or that they're extremely rare, but it did appear there was an implication of such (from "vast majority", when really just "majority" would have been a better term).
2) I can NOT believe the map you linked to. ALL those averages seem FAR too low. If the AVERAGE (be it Mean, Median or Mode) in Australia was 60, they'd barely have a functioning society, but they quite clearly do. New Zealand seems to be on par with the US according to that map, which I'd also contend, as New Zealand prides itself on having a very smart and well educated populace (easier to do in a country with such a low population and relatively high tech)
Totally different box (mine), so the results aren't relevant at all to compare to his, but I decided to do a quick test myself with the two browsers I have installed on my Mac:
Firefox 3.0.3: 3562ms
Safari 3.1.2 (4525.22): 5496ms
I generally prefer Firefox, but actually was expecting Safari to have the edge here - it actually gave me a pleasant surprise to see these results.
Ja... ik geloof dat dat een goeie idee is. Helaas is mijn Nederlands echt niet goed (ik woonde in Nederland rond tien jaar geleden ofzo, maar alleen voor een jaar. Mijn ex-vriendin daar heeft me een beetje geleerd)... Ich wohne jetzt in Deutschland, aber mein Deutsch ist auch noch nicht so gut - ich bin jetzt hier nur ein und halb Jahre. Je peux peut-etre essayer parler le francais, mais mon francais est encore pire que mon neerlandais et allemandais. J'ai etudie le francais a l'ecole pour six ans, mais, c'etait l'ecole - je n'appris rien! It's sometimes tough being a native English speaker - no-one ever wants to help teach you their language if they already speak English themselves. But at least I try!
Slashdot Mirror
"Encyclopedia" is a 'non-englishy' spelling (in fact, my auto spell checker is underlining it in red right now)... It's an American spelling, and while I've certainly seen it, I really don't like it. I don't think I've ever seen "façade" spelled as "facade" though.
Do you also write "cafe" instead of "café"? Or how about naïve?
I agree about Unicode being important, but it's not so much because "Umlauts rock", but rather that it's just handy to be able to spell things the way they should be spelled! I have no problem writing "Copenhagen", "Cologne" and "Munich" if I'm writing something specifically in English such as a travel guide, but if I were to talk about the place names "in general" (as I would do here on Slashdot for example), I'd write "Købnhavn", "Köln" and "München".
Not related to your reply, but another time it'd be useful on Slashdot would be for various symbols such as © and ® - discussions requiring these symbols are definitely pretty common around here!
While typing this email, I also wanted to give an example of the word, "Foetus" with the ligatured oe, and the degree sign, but even after typing œ and °, they don't display... it's even worse than I'd thought!
BTW, what is it with /. and the rendering of apostrophes? Is it just me, or Firefox, or what?
If you type on a non QWERTY keyboard, such as most of those in Europe, there's a good chance you're using the "wrong" apostrophe. On my German keyboard here for example, there's the "real" apostrophe on shift # (just left of the enter key), as well as the backtick/foretick key beside ß (which also doesn't display correctly, like this - ÃY). Slashdot doesn't handle a great deal of characters that aren't standard ASCII, which includes the foretick (renders as Â). Oddly enough, the backtick renders fine - `. It's pretty common for people in Europe to type the foretick rather than an apostrophe character, because it's easier to reach and you don't have to press shift on most layouts, whereas for an apostrophe you do. It's still wrong though, and looks hideous in a lot of fonts, even when it does display correctly, so I'd advise training yourself against it. In the case of copy/paste (I noticed it happens for you when quoting), be careful that the characters you're pasting in are correct, as the simple act of copying from a webpage may mess things up depending on the clipboard system in use (I seem to have no problems here using English language MacOS X 10.4 with Firefox 3.0.3, but potentially different combinations may be an issue)
I notice the foretick I've typed here doesn't render the same as your "apostrophe" however, so I wonder if you're typing yet another different character. As you can see from this post, I've used a fair few "real" apostrophes and they all show fine.
Despite my claims about the foretick/whatever-else not looking right and that you shouldn't use them as apostrophe, I ALSO think Slashdot needs to hurry up and actually support all of these characters (I mean come on... Unicode is NOT hard), because it's REALLY annoying to have to type things like Köln, when I'd rather just type Köln (which renders here as as KÃln). There's a LOT of characters that don't show correctly:
And many many more...
(note that some of these characters are required to correctly spell ENGLISH words also... æ in Encyclopædia or loanwords that we don't really have any alternative for, such as façade... so it's not even a decent excuse for them to say that Slashdot is primarily English speaking.)
We can hope so...
Watching that, he said:
You're absolutely right that John McCain has not, uh, talked about my muslim faith
Then, after being "corrected" to say "christian faith", he STARTED to say:
Well, what I'm saying is he hasn't suggested about... [interruption] that... [interruption] that I'm a muslim
The only interpretation I can get out of that is that he is not muslim, but could have been made out to be one (but wasn't)
Personally, I'd prefer if he were neither muslim nor christian, but at least he seems relatively moderate in his religious views (regardless of all of the hype about his pastor - it doesn't appear he believes in the radical viewpoints espoused by that guy, simply that he was with the church because overall, the message was fairly positive (and I'd agree from watching some of the stuff from them))
For the record, in case you haven't already seen my posting history on it, I'm very strongly atheist and against religion in general. I do realise that there are some good morals given by the majority of religions of course, just strongly disagree with the method in which they're given.
I was baptised christian, according to the doctrines of the church I was baptised in, that means I am still a christian.
This is irrespective of the fact that I do not believe (and have NEVER believed) in a higher power, consider religion to be a dangerous kind of mental disorder, and actively argue the point with people if they bring it up. Somehow, I'm still a christian. If somewhere in Obama's past, someone with the "authority" to do so declared him a muslim (whether that did or did not happen, I neither know nor care), then he's probably as much as muslim now as I am a christian now.
Personally, I'd love to see him get elected and then come out with, "Oh, by the way, I'm actually an atheist - I attended a christian church, because their morals are good, and the muslim teachings I saw in my younger years were also pretty interesting, but really, I think it's all crap".
I can't see it happening, but it'd be wonderful if it did.
Leaving aside the whole muslim thing for a second, you just said:
One could tolerate a president being Christian, Buddhist, or Atheist.
You could perhaps, but the majority in the US don't agree with you...
As an atheist who considers all religion to be a dangerous form of delusion, and that rationality is the only sensible way to improve the state of the world, this is quite saddening.
Note the poll results are from 1999... since 2001, I'm sure the percentage of those willing to vote for a muslim have decreased, but sadly, with the state of religious fervour coming from that continent, the percentage of those willing to vote for an atheist has probably also decreased.
I read the Wikipedia article you linked to, and I think it backs up my claims more than yours!
The people didn't stand up to the government with weapons - they stood up to the government by small acts of terrorism (that didn't require guns) such as doing nasty things to tax collectors, and people who complied with the tax. When the government showed up with a large military force to stop them, they were nowhere to be found.
Even the "Consequences" section of the article says:
The military suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion set a precedent that U.S. citizens who wished to change the law had to do so peacefully through constitutional means; otherwise, the government would meet any threats to disturb the status quo with force.
Yes, the tax was repealed, and the actions taken by the men who were against it probably helped a great deal (although, it also says it was largely unenforceable outside of Western Pennsylvania anyway), but it was definitely NOT a case of them using guns to do it. In fact, the ONLY mention of guns being used by them in the whole Wikipedia article is:
You might find a note posted on a tree outside your house, requiring you to publish in the Gazette your hatred of the whiskey tax and your commitment to the cause; otherwise, the note promised, your still would be mended. Tom had a wicked sense of humor and a literary bent: "mended" meant shot full of holes or burned.
Even without guns, they still could have done any number of nasty things to the people's stills.
The problem is that that reasoning can easily be overturned by anyone with a silver-tongue (hell, a bronze tongue would do it)
"All Australians are guaranteed a right to vote in elections". This is true. However, the second point is where things come undone - "To vote in an election you need to be able to inform yourself". This SHOULD be true, but technically isn't. There's no requirement outlined anywhere that says Australians must make an informed choice in their elections, only that they have the right to vote (and by a stupid law, also are "required" to vote).
So, break down the second point, and the next two go tumbling down. Now, I don't agree with this - I strongly believe of course that in any democracy, everyone should have the right to an informed decision about their vote, but as it stands, no such requirement exists.
No, a US states citizens would be protected by the bill of rights. Howard would have done anything to stop that, you don't think he was a 2nd amendment fan do you?
And you think US politicians aren't doing their best to chip away at these protections bit by bit themselves? AU is descending in the same direction as the US, just a bit quicker since there's no pesky bill of rights to get in the way (actually, there is an Australian constitution of course, but not much in the way of rights to the people outlined therein). Once the US politicians finally erode whatever is left of their constitution, the US will do the same freefall that AU is doing.
The second amendment specifically is now useless for the purposes of a civilian uprising against an oppressive government anyway. It's always a hotly argued one, but the main points of argument generally now centre around things like home defence and so on.
It's better to not focus on any one experiment but to actually get a feel for it first.
I don't disagree - hence my recommendation for taking it at least twice.
It's really a personal experience and that's why science has failed it because the one using it needs to freedom to do what they please without a third party trying to control the experience.
I agree with the premise that it's a personal experience, but not the remainder of this sentence. I don't think science has "failed it" at all - government got in the way of science, so the good work that was going towards getting an understanding of it was stopped far far too early. It's very complex on the human mind, and so there's a lot that would need to be understood. We were just taking baby steps towards the research at the time it got banned.
Also, I really quite strongly disagree about not having a third party there. You NEED someone looking out for you until you are very experienced with it (and even then, it's nice to have someone around to bounce thoughts off, and if you can convince them beforehand to do so, take a log). Having someone "controlling" you would be bad, but that's not what science is about - it's about understanding things, not controlling them.
Also it takes more than a couple of uses to get the feel for it.
That depends on the person's mind. The guy I replied to said he was 44, and seems quite "worldly wise" and intelligent in general from looking at his posting history (although I strongly disagree with him on a number of things, he never trolls about it and always has interesting posts). I'd say he's more than mature enough to be able to get a good feel for it after his first trip (if the set and setting are right), so he'd be ready by his second to do some personal experimentation on thought process control. And, if he wasn't, then he could always just wait to the third, or fourth, or however many it takes should he so choose (of course, if the set and setting are wrong for his first trip, he may never want to try it again, which is always a shame)
Mine tastes like blue and sounds like the smell of rose petals...
Although, in honesty, unless I take very large doses (greater than 400 micrograms), I find the only synaesthesia I get is seeing sounds. I love "watching" Halcyon and On and On towards the end of a good trip... There's some really nice wavy bits there and the colours in the vocal sounds are quite incredible.
With increased dosage, I've experienced almost every other kind of synaesthesia, but I'm not sure I've seen "happy" (although I may have tasted it...)
Bah - look at my posting history and you'll get my full name, the company I work for, the fact that I've taken a lot of LSD, admissions of criminal activity relating to computer fraud (for large sums of money) that I was never charged for and a LOT more.
Thankfully, there's absolutely nothing anyone can realistically do to me with all of this information that would bother me in the slightest.
Live life without secrets, and there's nothing that can be stolen from you.
(note: I do not live in, or ever intend on living in, the United States of America)
They do... they really do...
When I think about something, irrelevant associations will pop in with much greater frequency, distracting me from "pure" concentration.
I've actually wondered if there are mental exercises such as meditation that might help to quiet all the noise.
I know the kind of noise you're talking about, and I would recommend a different approach - rather than learning a technique to "block it out", instead learn techniques for effective brain "multi-tasking". You can keep a very strong focus on the topic at hand, as well as let the useless dreck wander through without interrupting you (but if something useful floats by, you can grab it and run with it).
My recommendation for this would be to overly excite your brain for a bit with LOTS of useless extra information flooding through your mind. A strong dose of LSD (250 micrograms or so) combined with a lot of sensory input would do the trick (although, if you've not used LSD before, I'd recommend first taking that dose WITHOUT strong sensory input, then doing it with the sensory input a few weeks later). Once you get your head straight from that experience, you should find yourself better able to concentrate on a topic without the other things distracting you as much, despite them still actually being there.
Note: LSD is illegal pretty much everywhere, and this is only my own personal recommendation based on both personal experience and anecdotal evidence from associates. If you've got any problems with either the idea of taking a controlled substance, or the idea of self-medicating with a very potent psychedelic that (unfortunately) has not had the opportunity for much more than limited psychiatric testing, then this advise may not be suitable for you.
(of course, with the name "Reality Master", I really do recommend it if you haven't tried it - you might then get to understand your chosen name on many new and unexpected levels)
Another issue is that MS Word also formats the file according to the printer settings. So if your printer is very different from the recipient's printer, then a .doc file will also look funny.
Dear god, how horribly correct you are on this... I work for Konica Minolta, a company that makes imaging devices - that includes, by definition, print output devices (MFPs to be precise (and yes, I am the main editor of that Wikipedia page)). Because I have about 30 to 50 drivers installed on my laptop at any given time (and a good 20 or so different device models to actually print to), I can NEVER rely on Word to save documents in a reliable way. If I'm sending someone a document from my office laptop that was at one point in Word format, I'm always certain to make sure it isn't at the time I send it.
Most companies only accept MS Word files for resumes.
I've recently been involved with helping my boss find a co-worker for me (yes, lots of people from Slashdot have already sent CVs, and we're narrowing it down now, so sorry, but you're too late). About 50% of people sent CVs in .doc format, which I glanced through very quickly only, and if they weren't stunningly interesting, dropped from the list. The remainder sent in PDF (including one guy who sent his in both PDF and .doc), which I read more thoroughly. .doc to an imaging company, and I don't rate highly the critical thinking skills of anyone who would do so...
Now, that may sound a little harsh, but we're an imaging company, and I specifically said that before anyone sent their CV. Even though the job doesn't really require knowing anything about the imaging business (it's a development job, for non imaging related software and software supports that's tangental to the imaging business), it's simply very bad form to send a crappy format like
(P.S. to the people who haven't heard back from me about the job: Don't worry - I WILL send you an email once we've made a shortlist, had some interviews with the people we've shortlisted (phone interviews in the cases of you international folk) and made our final decision. I don't just leave people with no answer like some companies. Sorry about the delay though - this process is taking forever!)
I haven't met a single person in my company that hasn't been as productive (if not more) with the ribbon interface than with MSO2003
My experience is totally different to yours - most Windows users in my office are sticking with Office 2003, because they don't like the Ribbon in Office 2007. Personally, I do have Office 2007 installed, but I ALSO have OpenOffice 3.0 installed, and it gets far more use. The only thing I use Microsoft Office for is PowerPoint (which I loathe, but mainly because I loathe all "presentation" software I've seen to date, and also hate giving presentations)
we could just turn it off. You can do that, you know.
Ummm... no, I didn't realise that... and a few Google searches and I still can't see how. You can show/hide the ribbon, but it doesn't give you back the menus you had in previous versions of Office, which is what anyone really means/wants when they talk about turning off the Ribbon.
Who has been "bitten" by DOC again? People who don't use Office, I presume.
A few of my co-workers have been bitten by .docx, always asking me to open/re-save it for them since they're not running anything that can handle it. Since the new version of Open Office, I've been pushing them towards that now. (Yes, I'm aware of the "Compatibility Pack" from Microsoft, but many of my co-workers aren't, and I'd rather push them towards OpenOffice than that)
More directly on being bitten by .doc, I assume the GP was referring to some of the odd behaviour it can display across different systems - there have been cases I've seen in the past, where a document saved on one computer will look different when opened on another (usually alignment and end-of-page issues where a page break hasn't been forced). I put this down to compatibility between versions (honestly, it's less of an issue than the differences opening Word documents in OpenOffice, but I've never seen the issue when opening OpenOffice native documents with other versions of OpenOffice, which is a fairer comparison)
Looks about the same as NeoOffice to me (minor differences here and there, but overall VERY similar). OO.o 2.x was crap on OS X, but that's because it didn't support Aqua. OO.o 3.0 does...
So Mr AC, can you give elaboration to your "crap" statement? Especially in comparison to NeoOffce, which is what the thread was about?
Like many other posters, I made the change from NeoOffice to OO.o 3.0 when it was released, so I think the percentage of MacOS X downloaders is probably higher than the GGP assumes.
You raise an excellent point for a cat...
An intelligent BIOS should store your current "system profile" in flash or similar. When booting, it just reads this and takes it as gospel unless the user specifies otherwise (hardware changes are rare enough in most systems). That'd knock a couple of seconds off at least.
For the next step, there should be further flash designated as belonging to the OS on the system - for a start, most systems could just put their boot loaders here, but as operating systems evolve in the future, they could use it for all kinds of clever tricks to aid in booting more quickly.
Storing "current state" of a "fresh boot" on the HDD as you suggest is also of course a good way to drastically improve boot times, but you do need to be a little more careful with that, as quite a lot can change there (unlike hardware), such as newly installed programs that should be executed on startup and so on. Definitely not impossible of course, as it would only require that any time a new piece of software is installed that inserts itself in to startup, it adds a flag to start up "normally" once, and then re-write the "current state". It'd make boots a LITTLE longer than current any time you install new things that insert themselves in to startup, but MUCH faster any time you don't.
Also, this could probably be hacked on to existing OSs with a minimal of effort - it would preferably be added more elegantly for future systems, but for current things, a hack would suffice.
I do agree with you, however for the particular point you raise, I do think the "nicest" way to do it would be to tag the file with "Alice". That tag is meta-tagged with "friend", and then after the change in relationship, you only alter the meta-tag, automatically allowing the files tagged "Alice" to be found with "significant other" or later, "ex".
In the same way, the tag "birthday" has the meta-tags "celebration" and "events", so those searches will also work, but will find other non-birthday related things as well.
Of course, since you're spot on about people not actually taking the time to tag their files, making the whole thing pointless. The only way tags could reasonably work is if they were somehow semi-automated. I've been considering doing something for my (rather excessive) movie collection, whereby it directly talks to IMDB and lets me do things like "search my movie collection for anything with Simon Pegg in it" based purely on the filename (which is the name of the movie).
It's not a case of "nothing to do", but instead "downtime between things to do". I don't work helpdesk, but I do know the sort of thing the GP is talking about.
I spend most of my days writing code. Sometimes, I have to attend meetings. Sometimes, these meetings are scheduled for stupid times like 1pm. If I finish eating lunch at 12:30, there's NO WAY I'm going to try to get in to the coding mindset just to write a couple of lines and then get out of it again for a meeting, so instead I'll just "play around" for 30 minutes.
Also, being a programmer, I sometimes need to "step back" from what I'm doing, clear my head and relax in order to move on to the next bit of code. Generally, I'll just go for a smoke in these cases, but sometimes I'll post to Slashdot, reply to personal emails, or just get lost following semi-random Wikipedia links for awhile. My boss has no problem with any of this - I write good code, deliver on time (or often WELL before) and fulfil all aspects of my job to a very high standard. Why should it matter if I "waste" some time during office hours?
I agree that Australians, in general and on average, seem to be a little "slower" than those of us in more civilised countries (I lived there for 6 years, and was constantly astounded by it), but I think there's two things wrong with your post:
1) There are smart people and dumb people pretty much everywhere - I've met some very smart Aussies - they just happen to be a bit rarer than elsewhere. I know you didn't say there aren't any or that they're extremely rare, but it did appear there was an implication of such (from "vast majority", when really just "majority" would have been a better term).
2) I can NOT believe the map you linked to. ALL those averages seem FAR too low. If the AVERAGE (be it Mean, Median or Mode) in Australia was 60, they'd barely have a functioning society, but they quite clearly do. New Zealand seems to be on par with the US according to that map, which I'd also contend, as New Zealand prides itself on having a very smart and well educated populace (easier to do in a country with such a low population and relatively high tech)
Totally different box (mine), so the results aren't relevant at all to compare to his, but I decided to do a quick test myself with the two browsers I have installed on my Mac:
Firefox 3.0.3: 3562ms
Safari 3.1.2 (4525.22): 5496ms
I generally prefer Firefox, but actually was expecting Safari to have the edge here - it actually gave me a pleasant surprise to see these results.
Ah right... now I get what you meant.
But no, in most major cities of the world, subway stations have cell "towers" in them precisely for this reason.
Ja... ik geloof dat dat een goeie idee is. Helaas is mijn Nederlands echt niet goed (ik woonde in Nederland rond tien jaar geleden ofzo, maar alleen voor een jaar. Mijn ex-vriendin daar heeft me een beetje geleerd)...
Ich wohne jetzt in Deutschland, aber mein Deutsch ist auch noch nicht so gut - ich bin jetzt hier nur ein und halb Jahre.
Je peux peut-etre essayer parler le francais, mais mon francais est encore pire que mon neerlandais et allemandais. J'ai etudie le francais a l'ecole pour six ans, mais, c'etait l'ecole - je n'appris rien!
It's sometimes tough being a native English speaker - no-one ever wants to help teach you their language if they already speak English themselves. But at least I try!