LaTeX itself is WYSIWYM. Indeed, it was among the first of the semantic markup languages.
I've never used LyX. I tend to use TeXShop (probably the best OS X TeX IDE) or vim if I really have to. TeXShop has all the facilities you mentioned, but I never really use them. That's not to say I don't see their value. As a related aside, I've used vim for basic text editing for years. But I never really got "into it". I only knew the basic commands (:e,:w,:x, ESC, i) until I started using gvim. Before then, doing complicated edits was a chore. With gvim, I could go to a menu and select what I wanted to do. But if I found myself repeatedly using a function, I would learn how to do it manually. I basically used gvim as a guide to in depth knowledge. Similarly, I relied on TeXShop's tex related features at first, but now I just use it to avoid typing "pdflatex foo.tex" over and over again.
As another aside, perhaps less related, I have a friend whose laptop is slowly dying. I suggested she get a MacBook, and although she was interested, she resisted because she was attached to MS Word and didn't want to buy another license. I suggested she use LaTeX, but she was reluctant... scared, I suppose. A few weeks ago, she was working on a paper in Word. So I cut and pasted her text into a suitable tex file (just the preamble and \begin{document}-\end{document} pair) and typeset it. There were a few quirks (footnotes, a bibliography, \emph{} instead of italicizing), but she was immediately interested. So I sorted the quirks out as a tutorial intro. She loved it and decided to use LaTeX for all her papers from now on. She became a confident LaTeX user in less than a week. She doesn't know it all, but she knows enough to get most of her work done. And she knows where to get help for any special typesetting needs. (comp.text.tex, me)
Why bother? You can learn the basics of LaTeX in 10 minutes. Documentation for non-trivial features are available all over, and the non-trivial features tend to use similar syntax as the easy ones anyway.
My happy LaTeX document -- it compiles and is instructive!:
\documentclass[10pt, twoside]{article}
% This is a comment. This will not appear in the typeset output.
% Note that \LaTeX\ typesets the LaTeX symbol.
% The trailing backslash is used to give the parser a clue about spacing.
This is my happy \LaTeX\ document. Sentences are separated by punctuation and any number of spaces. Paragraphs are simply separated by at least two newlines.
So this won't start a new paragraph.
But this block of text will be typeset as a new paragraph. So will the next block.
% The \verbatim command is used in the following to % escape the \ref and \label commands. That is, to % typeset the literal characters `\', `r', `e', `f', and so % on. \verbatim also does some formatting changes,
% such as using a fixed-width font.
Cross references are trivial using the \verbatim{\label} and \verbatim{\ref} commands. Citations are a little more complicated, but still very easy. You basically create a text based database of citations and use the BibTeX ancillary program to compile them into files \LaTeX\ processes. It sounds hard, but it's much easier than trying to maintain a bibliography using traditional WYSIWYG tools. Especially since \LaTeX\ takes care of formatting and ordering the references. No more worrying about APA style! (Or MLA, or ACM, or Harvard, etc.)
Inserting figures can be a little tricky, but that's only if you have very particular needs. Few of my papers have required figures, so I can't be of much help. But the kind people at \verbatim{comp.text.tex} are very helpful!
All states permit citizen arrests if a felony crime is witnessed by the citizen carrying out the arrest, or when a citizen is asked to help apprehend a suspect by the police. The application of state laws varies widely with respect to misdemeanor crimes, breaches of the peace, and felonies not witnessed by the arresting party. Note particularly that American citizens do not have the authorities or the legal protections of the police, and are liable before both the civil law and criminal law for any violation of the rights of another. In the United States, the police do not have to determine the legality of the citizens arrest and this practice has been greatly criticized.
Emphasis mine. Seems like you got several details wrong. Oopsies! Since you value accuracy so much, maybe you should try to be accurate. Indeed, from the same article:
"A citizen's arrest is an arrest performed by a person acting as a civilian, as opposed to a sworn law enforcement officer."
The key word, of course, is "arrest". Now, consider what might happen if a person detains someone for littering -- a misdemeanor. (Assume even that this is a state that allows citizen's arrests for misdemeanors). The Constitution demands that the detainee get due process. The detainer has two choices. 1) Call the police and let them arrest the detainee, or 2) haul the detainee off to a police station for processing.
Only in the latter case does a legitimate citizen's arrest occur. The first case is mere detainment. Either way, the detainer faces criminal and civil liabilities -- in the first case, they could be charged with false imprisonment. In the latter, they could be charged with kidnapping.
But of course, you're also wrong about security guards vis a vis detaining shoplifters:
"A store owner holds the common law shopkeep's privilege, under which he is allowed to detain a suspected shoplifter on store property for a reasonable period of time, with cause to believe that the person detained in fact committed, or attempted to commit theft of store property. The shopkeep's privilege, although recognized in most jurisdictions, is not as broad a privilege as that of a police officer's, and therefore one must pay special attention to the temporal element -- that is, the shopkeep may only detain the suspected criminal for a relatively short period of time."
Your post was informative. I did not realize that these were state authorized law enforcement agents. However, regarding point two, "Citizen's Arrest" varies state-by-state. At any rate, a citizen would be foolish to try to arrest someone simply because of the liabilities involved -- wrongful "arrest" by a common citizen is kidnapping, a capital crime in most (all?) states.
Your third point seems to suggest that we are in agreement with regards to excessive force. Police or not, they assaulted the guy.
Your last point seems to suggest that you are a huge dick. Take your condescension and shove it right up your ass.
But... these are "Campus Police." Security Guards. Rent A Cops. They don't have the legal authority to arrest anyone. I doubt they have the authority to tase anyone unless they're trying to defend themselves or others.
Maybe you would hear it that way. People who speak Romance languages -- especially Spanish -- would tend to hear it as "Shitake" as its Romanization implies. No tok's. No kay's. Those are artifacts of the use of different phonemes in Japanese, Spanish, and English. If a Spanish speaker were asked to spell it, he would probably say "Shitaque", and pronounce it as suggested by the spelling, though probably with idiomatic Spanish rhythm. Stress patterns tend to be similar across the two languages as well. A rough approximation of what this would sound like to an English speaker is "shitakeh" or "sh'takeh", following your convention. But this isn't due to rhythm but the lack of a suitable vowel sound in English. A short "short i-leaning" schwa would be a reasonable transliteration for informal use. I don't recall how the sound would be transcribed in the IPA alphabet.
There's no a priori reason why the US couldn't have an energy surplus with enough nuclear power. Heck, we could sell energy on the free market to subsidize the next silly war we get into. (Or just help lower our taxes. Or even create machinery to take care of our food production, using the very same nuclear power. You know, actually solving problems and helping the country grow concretely)
AMD vs. Intel vs. Intel. nVidia vs. ATI vs. whatever Apple chooses to use. Tyan vs. ASUS vs. whatever Apple chooses to use. Corsair vs. Kingston vs. Crucial vs. whatever Apple chooses to use. WD vs Seagate vs. whatever Apple chooses to use. XP vs Fedora vs BSD vs SUSE vs. OS X.
Looks to me like you get to make more choices by including Apple's PC's in your considerations.
Indeed, you get even more choice if you include POWER5, MIPS, Opteron, Itanium, etc. architectures.
The point is: this isn't a dichotomy. Limiting yourself to choices from a particular quadrant is ultimately, duh, limiting. Just use what you want or need. Easy.
(I have two Macs at home and use 4 Linux boxes at work. One is an old iMac running Debian. The other is an older PowerBook running OS X. My workstation runs Ubuntu, and the cluster, made up of UltraSparcs and Pentium D's, runs Gentoo)
Modems could only use 53kbps (or whatever it was) because the modems were actually using the telephone line to communicate. That is, they were making noises for other modems to listen to. The phone system wasn't set up for high fidelity audio transmissions. If I remember right, the high end cut off frequency was 8 kHz. (For a bandwidth that amounts to about 7 kHz). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist-Shannon_sampl ing_theoremNyquist's Theorem explains the low data rate.
DSL modems use much higher frequency ranges, and proportionally larger band widths (probably on the order of megahertz) so Nyquist yields more throughput.
FYI, Nyquist's theorem is what links (the conceptually different) bandwidth and throughput.
Ask yourself this: if you had a computer with a particular OS installed, and somebody gave you a new computer with identical specs but a different OS installed, which would you use on a regular basis?
I think most people would use their old computer, since they're presumably used to the environment they've worked with before. They probably don't want to learn how to do everything all over again.
All in all, a pretty crappy gift, even though it cost money. Now here's the kicker. The gift the Ask Slashdotter is contemplating is even crappier.
I mean, obviously, M.D./Ph.D's working towards making next year's flu vaccine worry about it. But the general public worries about any variety of the flu?
I'm curious. Why would you ever want to write an interpreter for an XML-based programming language? It seems like re-inventing the wheel, very poorly, unless there were very strong domain-related reasons to do so. (I admit the question is vague. I guess I'm asking why your choice was appropriate given the domain you work in. Any additional insight would be appreciated.)
Indeed. Usenet is an invaluable resource in all sorts of fields. The comp.lang.* hierarchy is fantastic, as are the sci.math.* and sci.logic hierarchies. (I actually acknowledge some members of sci.logic and sci.math in my thesis because of their insight, knowledge, and kindness to share) But it is important to know how to ask smart questions, or people won't put in the effort to decipher your post and formulate an answer.
I have also had good experiences on IRC. I'm sure it depends on the channel. But in my experience, it helps if you identify yourself as a newb, ask smart questions, and help people with what you've learned. It takes a bit of commitment (though keeping a bitchx window open isn't much work). People constantly pop into irc channels and ask the same inane questions. The same ones you had when you first came in. If you help answer them, you show the "community" that you're willing to help too. (This goes for usenet too, but be very careful about only answering questions you absolutely, positively know the answers to.)
There's a difference between secrecy and obscurity. Secrets are what you're trying to protect. Relying on obscurity to do that is what is referred to as security through obscurity.
They presumably mapped the ELF input to musical tones, not just changed the sampling rate. That represents significant data squashing or smoothing, which is a good thing for several reasons.
In any event, they're doing predictive time-domain analysis. The state of the art in that field is wavelet analysis, though the Kalman filter seems quite a bit of use in applications. These guys are surely aware of what a Fourier analysis is, what it isn't, and why this is different.
The problem is that most pattern analysis algorithms are computationally expensive. Usually on the order of 2^n computations, unless the researcher is particularly clever and managed to use domain specific knowledge to speed the algorithm up. Reducing your data set by a few orders of magnitude can be the difference between running an algorithm in a day and running it until you're dead.
The up-shot is that instead of making the scientist interpret musical patterns for insights into volcanos (or whatever the researcher is studying), the pattern analysis algorithm will do it for him by correllating patterns to physical phenomena. Indeed, even if it were computationally feasible to perform the calculation on the original data set, data smoothing (say, by lumping subsets into discrete classes as in the article or approximating by statistical analysis) is a good idea to help avoid over-fitting the data. This improves predictive robustness, especially for time-series algorithms.
No, it comes down to essentially making a dub of a tape, or a photocopy of a page of a book. The Xerox machine at my local library charges 10 cents per copied page. The actual making of a photocopy costs less than that. According to your argument, my library is breaking copyright law by profiting (albeit very little) each time somebody makes a photocopy of a copyrighted work.
Well, one interesting effect of this theory being true might be that you can force a particle to spontaneously change its intrinsic 'position' property.
Yes, you can apply a force to it.
His theory has little scientific value. It is (at best) just an idiosyncratic interpretation of standard physics. A "visualization". A way to gain intuition. Not a predictive theory. I don't mean to belittle him -- he's asking interesting and insightful questions.
Slashdot Mirror
As a native Swedish speaker, I am disgusted by your post. The correct way to phrase this is "Bork bork snorf bogley coobical borken".
Sure, but they're making things difficult for everybody. That alone is a good thing.
But not in a femtosecond.
LaTeX itself is WYSIWYM. Indeed, it was among the first of the semantic markup languages.
:w, :x, ESC, i) until I started using gvim. Before then, doing complicated edits was a chore. With gvim, I could go to a menu and select what I wanted to do. But if I found myself repeatedly using a function, I would learn how to do it manually. I basically used gvim as a guide to in depth knowledge. Similarly, I relied on TeXShop's tex related features at first, but now I just use it to avoid typing "pdflatex foo.tex" over and over again.
:-)
I've never used LyX. I tend to use TeXShop (probably the best OS X TeX IDE) or vim if I really have to. TeXShop has all the facilities you mentioned, but I never really use them. That's not to say I don't see their value. As a related aside, I've used vim for basic text editing for years. But I never really got "into it". I only knew the basic commands (:e,
As another aside, perhaps less related, I have a friend whose laptop is slowly dying. I suggested she get a MacBook, and although she was interested, she resisted because she was attached to MS Word and didn't want to buy another license. I suggested she use LaTeX, but she was reluctant... scared, I suppose. A few weeks ago, she was working on a paper in Word. So I cut and pasted her text into a suitable tex file (just the preamble and \begin{document}-\end{document} pair) and typeset it. There were a few quirks (footnotes, a bibliography, \emph{} instead of italicizing), but she was immediately interested. So I sorted the quirks out as a tutorial intro. She loved it and decided to use LaTeX for all her papers from now on. She became a confident LaTeX user in less than a week. She doesn't know it all, but she knows enough to get most of her work done. And she knows where to get help for any special typesetting needs. (comp.text.tex, me)
LaTeX is sweet.
Come to think of it, don't mind me. I suppose the instructive LaTeX code is still suitable for the person who first brought LaTeX up in the thread.
Why bother? You can learn the basics of LaTeX in 10 minutes. Documentation for non-trivial features are available all over, and the non-trivial features tend to use similar syntax as the easy ones anyway.
My happy LaTeX document -- it compiles and is instructive!:
\documentclass[10pt, twoside]{article}
% This is a comment. This will not appear in the typeset output.
\auhor{poopdeville}
\title{My Happy \LaTeX\ Document}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
% Note that \LaTeX\ typesets the LaTeX symbol.
% The trailing backslash is used to give the parser a clue about spacing.
This is my happy \LaTeX\ document. Sentences are separated by punctuation and any number of spaces. Paragraphs are simply separated by at least two newlines.
So this won't start a new paragraph.
But this block of text will be typeset as a new paragraph. So will the next block.
% The \verbatim command is used in the following to
% escape the \ref and \label commands. That is, to
% typeset the literal characters `\', `r', `e', `f', and so
% on. \verbatim also does some formatting changes,
% such as using a fixed-width font.
Cross references are trivial using the \verbatim{\label} and \verbatim{\ref} commands. Citations are a little more complicated, but still very easy. You basically create a text based database of citations and use the BibTeX ancillary program to compile them into files \LaTeX\ processes. It sounds hard, but it's much easier than trying to maintain a bibliography using traditional WYSIWYG tools. Especially since \LaTeX\ takes care of formatting and ordering the references. No more worrying about APA style! (Or MLA, or ACM, or Harvard, etc.)
Inserting figures can be a little tricky, but that's only if you have very particular needs. Few of my papers have required figures, so I can't be of much help. But the kind people at \verbatim{comp.text.tex} are very helpful!
\end{document}
From Citizen's Arrest on Wikipedia:
All states permit citizen arrests if a felony crime is witnessed by the citizen carrying out the arrest, or when a citizen is asked to help apprehend a suspect by the police. The application of state laws varies widely with respect to misdemeanor crimes, breaches of the peace, and felonies not witnessed by the arresting party. Note particularly that American citizens do not have the authorities or the legal protections of the police, and are liable before both the civil law and criminal law for any violation of the rights of another. In the United States, the police do not have to determine the legality of the citizens arrest and this practice has been greatly criticized.
Emphasis mine. Seems like you got several details wrong. Oopsies! Since you value accuracy so much, maybe you should try to be accurate. Indeed, from the same article:
"A citizen's arrest is an arrest performed by a person acting as a civilian, as opposed to a sworn law enforcement officer."
The key word, of course, is "arrest". Now, consider what might happen if a person detains someone for littering -- a misdemeanor. (Assume even that this is a state that allows citizen's arrests for misdemeanors). The Constitution demands that the detainee get due process. The detainer has two choices. 1) Call the police and let them arrest the detainee, or 2) haul the detainee off to a police station for processing.
Only in the latter case does a legitimate citizen's arrest occur. The first case is mere detainment. Either way, the detainer faces criminal and civil liabilities -- in the first case, they could be charged with false imprisonment. In the latter, they could be charged with kidnapping.
But of course, you're also wrong about security guards vis a vis detaining shoplifters: "A store owner holds the common law shopkeep's privilege, under which he is allowed to detain a suspected shoplifter on store property for a reasonable period of time, with cause to believe that the person detained in fact committed, or attempted to commit theft of store property. The shopkeep's privilege, although recognized in most jurisdictions, is not as broad a privilege as that of a police officer's, and therefore one must pay special attention to the temporal element -- that is, the shopkeep may only detain the suspected criminal for a relatively short period of time."
Are you done yet?
Your post was informative. I did not realize that these were state authorized law enforcement agents. However, regarding point two, "Citizen's Arrest" varies state-by-state. At any rate, a citizen would be foolish to try to arrest someone simply because of the liabilities involved -- wrongful "arrest" by a common citizen is kidnapping, a capital crime in most (all?) states.
Your third point seems to suggest that we are in agreement with regards to excessive force. Police or not, they assaulted the guy.
Your last point seems to suggest that you are a huge dick. Take your condescension and shove it right up your ass.
Bye bye!
But... these are "Campus Police." Security Guards. Rent A Cops. They don't have the legal authority to arrest anyone. I doubt they have the authority to tase anyone unless they're trying to defend themselves or others.
Maybe you would hear it that way. People who speak Romance languages -- especially Spanish -- would tend to hear it as "Shitake" as its Romanization implies. No tok's. No kay's. Those are artifacts of the use of different phonemes in Japanese, Spanish, and English. If a Spanish speaker were asked to spell it, he would probably say "Shitaque", and pronounce it as suggested by the spelling, though probably with idiomatic Spanish rhythm. Stress patterns tend to be similar across the two languages as well. A rough approximation of what this would sound like to an English speaker is "shitakeh" or "sh'takeh", following your convention. But this isn't due to rhythm but the lack of a suitable vowel sound in English. A short "short i-leaning" schwa would be a reasonable transliteration for informal use. I don't recall how the sound would be transcribed in the IPA alphabet.
Fuck off you fascist. We don't need your Chicago values in Portland.
There's no a priori reason why the US couldn't have an energy surplus with enough nuclear power. Heck, we could sell energy on the free market to subsidize the next silly war we get into. (Or just help lower our taxes. Or even create machinery to take care of our food production, using the very same nuclear power. You know, actually solving problems and helping the country grow concretely)
Only... you still have a choice.
AMD vs. Intel vs. Intel.
nVidia vs. ATI vs. whatever Apple chooses to use.
Tyan vs. ASUS vs. whatever Apple chooses to use.
Corsair vs. Kingston vs. Crucial vs. whatever Apple chooses to use.
WD vs Seagate vs. whatever Apple chooses to use.
XP vs Fedora vs BSD vs SUSE vs. OS X.
Looks to me like you get to make more choices by including Apple's PC's in your considerations.
Indeed, you get even more choice if you include POWER5, MIPS, Opteron, Itanium, etc. architectures.
The point is: this isn't a dichotomy. Limiting yourself to choices from a particular quadrant is ultimately, duh, limiting. Just use what you want or need. Easy.
(I have two Macs at home and use 4 Linux boxes at work. One is an old iMac running Debian. The other is an older PowerBook running OS X. My workstation runs Ubuntu, and the cluster, made up of UltraSparcs and Pentium D's, runs Gentoo)
Well, Wade and the rest of the team did. You just watched.
DSL modems use much higher frequency ranges, and proportionally larger band widths (probably on the order of megahertz) so Nyquist yields more throughput.
FYI, Nyquist's theorem is what links (the conceptually different) bandwidth and throughput.
I think most people would use their old computer, since they're presumably used to the environment they've worked with before. They probably don't want to learn how to do everything all over again.
All in all, a pretty crappy gift, even though it cost money. Now here's the kicker. The gift the Ask Slashdotter is contemplating is even crappier.
People actually worry about this stuff?
I mean, obviously, M.D./Ph.D's working towards making next year's flu vaccine worry about it. But the general public worries about any variety of the flu?
That's disheartening.
Sure, but the sleazy programmer wouldn't have to know who he was working for. Even if he talks, he'll have nothing interesting to say.
I'm curious. Why would you ever want to write an interpreter for an XML-based programming language? It seems like re-inventing the wheel, very poorly, unless there were very strong domain-related reasons to do so. (I admit the question is vague. I guess I'm asking why your choice was appropriate given the domain you work in. Any additional insight would be appreciated.)
I have also had good experiences on IRC. I'm sure it depends on the channel. But in my experience, it helps if you identify yourself as a newb, ask smart questions, and help people with what you've learned. It takes a bit of commitment (though keeping a bitchx window open isn't much work). People constantly pop into irc channels and ask the same inane questions. The same ones you had when you first came in. If you help answer them, you show the "community" that you're willing to help too. (This goes for usenet too, but be very careful about only answering questions you absolutely, positively know the answers to.)
There's a difference between secrecy and obscurity. Secrets are what you're trying to protect. Relying on obscurity to do that is what is referred to as security through obscurity.
They presumably mapped the ELF input to musical tones, not just changed the sampling rate. That represents significant data squashing or smoothing, which is a good thing for several reasons.
In any event, they're doing predictive time-domain analysis. The state of the art in that field is wavelet analysis, though the Kalman filter seems quite a bit of use in applications. These guys are surely aware of what a Fourier analysis is, what it isn't, and why this is different.
The problem is that most pattern analysis algorithms are computationally expensive. Usually on the order of 2^n computations, unless the researcher is particularly clever and managed to use domain specific knowledge to speed the algorithm up. Reducing your data set by a few orders of magnitude can be the difference between running an algorithm in a day and running it until you're dead.
The up-shot is that instead of making the scientist interpret musical patterns for insights into volcanos (or whatever the researcher is studying), the pattern analysis algorithm will do it for him by correllating patterns to physical phenomena. Indeed, even if it were computationally feasible to perform the calculation on the original data set, data smoothing (say, by lumping subsets into discrete classes as in the article or approximating by statistical analysis) is a good idea to help avoid over-fitting the data. This improves predictive robustness, especially for time-series algorithms.
No, it comes down to essentially making a dub of a tape, or a photocopy of a page of a book. The Xerox machine at my local library charges 10 cents per copied page. The actual making of a photocopy costs less than that. According to your argument, my library is breaking copyright law by profiting (albeit very little) each time somebody makes a photocopy of a copyrighted work.
Indeed they are. That's why they put those signs around the copy machines with disclaimers telling the user that it is illegal to copy copyrighted works unless some fairly specific conditions are met. http://www.loc.gov/cgi-bin/formprocessor/copyright /cfr.pl?&urlmiddle=1.0.2.6.1.0.175.14&part=201&sec tion=14&prev=13&next=17
Yes, you can apply a force to it.
His theory has little scientific value. It is (at best) just an idiosyncratic interpretation of standard physics. A "visualization". A way to gain intuition. Not a predictive theory. I don't mean to belittle him -- he's asking interesting and insightful questions.