Actually, coffee beans contain one the most cholesterol-raising chemicals known to man. It is a fatty substance which is normally trapped in the
paper filter. Unfiltered coffee, especially hose made under pressure (espresso)
contains these chemicals raising
cholesterol levels.
See here for example.
Everybody is talking about the need to pay them to encourage development of new drugs. This is certainly true for new treatments, but what incentive do they have to produce a cure?
I actually talked to someone working for a pharmaceutical company a few months ago, and he
could confirm what you are saying: their R&D was
targetted at producing medicines that could be sold over and over, because they generate much more revenue.
(going a little off topic)
I guess lots of pharmaceutical companies were a bit peeved when some Australian guy found out the cause of stomach ulcers 10 years ago. It turns out they are caused by a bacteria (Helicobacter Pylori), and can easily be treated with specific antibiotics.
Before that time, you either had to use expensive
anti-acid medicine like Zantac, which didn't cure anything, or have a part of your stomach surgically removed.
that it is wrong to steal, even if it saves someone's life.
So, explain that to the 3-year kid that got AIDS from his mom.
Being right or wrong doesn't get you anywhere, especially if you've got AIDS. I for one would applaud my government if they gave me the medicine I can't afford.
I live in Holland, and really the rising sea levels don't worry me that much. We have lots of dikes, and we can build lots more of them.
What's more troubling is a potential disruption of the gulf-stream.
IANACS (I Am Not A Climate Scientist), but as far as I know, our climate is kept moderate by warm water coming from the mid-atlantic. One of the predicted effects of global warming is a disruption of this water stream, leading to
severe climate changes.
The north-sea is on the same height as Alaska.
Without the gulf-stream, we'd have Alaskan climate in Western Europe.
I would rather that the judges ban the use of "comparison devices" and
"emotion devices" in legal arguments. I mean, come on: DeCSS is a
digital crowbar, a bank-vault code. CSS is putting a painting in your
room. Distributing DeCSS is an "intent of piracy". It's all just
bending bad metaphors past their breaking point.
DeCSS is a computer program that reverses the Content Scrambling
System. The program is also a precise expression of the DeCSS
algorithm. In fact, an exact expression of an algorithm is none other
than an executable computer program. If you express an algorithm
exactly, you can execute it automatically. If you have executable
code, then that code (together with the machine description) is the
specification of its algorithm.
Computer science is impossible without specification of algorithms,
which makes imo. a computer program a valuable form of free
speech. However, the four-letter acronyms want to make us believe that
a computer program is more than a computer program. They want us to
believe that it is a "digital crowbar", a "promotion to violate
copyright law". These are just insinuations, and a bad ones too,
because crowbars, vault codes and promotions are not illegal.
Regarding access to the original form: there is no reason why fair use
needs the unfettered modern original. In fact, normal use also doesn't
need most modern, digital, uncorrupted, un-macrovisioned form. Going
one step further, who needs movies in any form? We
could all forget about them, go sit in the grass and enjoy the
sun. After all, movies are `just' entertainment.
However, this argument cuts both ways: the work is `just'
entertainment, and i.m.o. entertainment does not warrant any of the
draconian (free speech) measures that DMCA proposes. The four-letter
acronyms want us to believe that they have a right to own a living
(more accurately: to get insanely rich) with movies, but that is not
their basic right. If they can not get insanely rich by selling
expensive shiny frisbees then they should consider another business
model.
I noticed that you left our beloved country and went to the US.
I was
wondering: why did you do it? How do The Netherlands (or Europe for
that matter) and the US compare? Don't you miss the good bakeries,
cannabis and licquorice? Do you experience Americans as being shallow
(I've heard that comment more than once)? Or is this just a case of
"Cherchez la femme?"
That's a lot questions together, but I'm not so much interested in
specific answers. I'd like to hear your general experience of US
vs. Europe.
Still, I can't help making the point that it doesn't take a genius to realize that any 3 independant lines in two-space are bound to meet in a point. Just call me cynical, I guess.
Which also explains why you're not a math hero. Three independant lines in 2 space typically do not meet in a point.
P.S. I can't recall any non-believers being killed by Bhuddists or other non-deistic religions. Care to
back that up?
Sadly, this is not entirely true. The Zen establishment in Japan did a lot of nasty things during the second World War, although it might not have been done in the name of Buddhism. I think it is documented in the book Zen at War.
I also heard reports that the Maglev trains make
lots of noise than normal `high-speed trains', because of the high-speeds involved. The sound is probably much worse for wildlife than the magnetic fields). Does anyone know the fine points of this?
I'll believe in the viability of this project when I see something that actually has a significant number of notes. Say, a Rossini or Wagner opera
We don't have any operas, but you can find a 50 page orchestral score done in LilyPond at
GMD. I'm not sure why Mats didn't put it up at mutopia, though. We also have the full ouverture Coriolan (by Van Beethoven), included in the lilypond package--unfortunately, there is no rendered version on the web right now.
Why would anyone waste time entering stuff into Lilypond's clumsy 1960's-era notation when they could use something like Finale, which at least approaches the efficiency of Mozart and Rossini's scratchings with a quill pen?
I am not really qualified to judge (never used Finale), but from what I've heard it is quite tedious to use, and finetuning formatting is at least as big a nightmare as tweaking a.ly file. Moreover, one could enter music in finale, and then convert it to.ly.
The way I see it, the two big barriers are:
gathering enough people that want to spend time entering music
The speeding up lilypond. The program is --i'm sorry to say-- rather slow, which hampers efficient debugging of scores.
On the downside, why is everything an FTP link? I'd really like to click on a MIDI or PNG link and have it just play/show--as it is I have to download the MIDI or score and view it "manually".
Did you set up your browser to view.ps and.MIDI automatically? If yes, please file a bugreport to the bug-gnu-music@gnu.org
Finally got it all installed and lilypond just crashes.
Again, please submit a bugreport. Your description is too vague to be useful.
Actually, it was the other way around: the format was there before the site was there.
When I started LilyPond, I felt that there had to be a good justification for the existence of LilyPond, so I wrote a little document about a PD sheet-music archive to be called "Mutopia". Some years later, we had gathered too many test-scores in the lilypond package, and decided to host them in a separate archive.
I called for volunteers to set this up. Chris Sawer (to whom I owe a big thanks!) made the site that's featured in this article.
Of course, I wanted the files to be usable with free-software, so using Sibelius or Finale was out of the question. There are some other options, like the ABC format, but they have more technical limitations.
Anyway, LilyPond format is flexible (I wrote several convertors to it, among others a Finale to.ly convertor) and Lily also dumps the output as a nicely quantized MIDI file, which is rather easy to import into other programs.
When it comes to music representation there aren't any good published standards: the problem with NIFF is not that it is binary per se, but rather that it is quite limited, and has a tendency to glue together musical and graphical information into a big blob. Also, there aren't any free score editors that support NIFF.
As for SMDL, I don't think that there exists any software that can meaningfully handle SMDL.
It still doesnt escape the fact that they are humans,
Heck, we dont have the power to say with great accuracy that tomorrow will be sunny, much less predicting a 5.8 degree climate change over the next few years
So what do you suggest we do? Wear hats against UV, turn up the A/C, and return to our energy guzzling slumber?
Maybe the Cease-and-desist notes were just a way to attract attention, and hype up the cube. Writing a C&D doesn't cost and it gets you a lot of publicity.
Sorry to break your bubble, FP is nice, but most Higher Mathematics (Partial Differential Equations, Number Theory, etc.) are about properties of sets that can be proved by mathematicians. It is not about properties thatcan be verified by computers.
A mathematical proof is like a LISP program. If you are clever, and the program is correct, you might be understand and be able to prove that it works. A program that analyses LISP usually cannot.
Strongly typed systems are about systems where it the type-proving algorithm is designed by a clever human, who proved that the type-checking algorithm is correct.
FWIW, people tried to formally type mathematics at the beginning of the 20th century (Bertrand Russell et. al.), and they miserably failed.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, coffee beans contain one the most cholesterol-raising chemicals known to man. It is a fatty substance which is normally trapped in the paper filter. Unfiltered coffee, especially hose made under pressure (espresso) contains these chemicals raising cholesterol levels. See here for example.
bzzt. Wrong. R4000 and R4400 are 32 bit. The R5k,
R10k and R12k are 64 bit.
I actually talked to someone working for a pharmaceutical company a few months ago, and he could confirm what you are saying: their R&D was targetted at producing medicines that could be sold over and over, because they generate much more revenue.
(going a little off topic)
I guess lots of pharmaceutical companies were a bit peeved when some Australian guy found out the cause of stomach ulcers 10 years ago. It turns out they are caused by a bacteria (Helicobacter Pylori), and can easily be treated with specific antibiotics. Before that time, you either had to use expensive anti-acid medicine like Zantac, which didn't cure anything, or have a part of your stomach surgically removed.
So, explain that to the 3-year kid that got AIDS from his mom.
Being right or wrong doesn't get you anywhere, especially if you've got AIDS. I for one would applaud my government if they gave me the medicine I can't afford.
Would you not?
How can saving life be a "cover"? And what if it were?
Get back to reality; people are dying here, and this is what can save them. How can there be any argument for not helping them?
The article also talks about techniques to
"tap" CRT screens by picking up the RF radiation that they emit.
I was wondering: are LCD screens safe from this kind of tapping?
What's more troubling is a potential disruption of the gulf-stream. IANACS (I Am Not A Climate Scientist), but as far as I know, our climate is kept moderate by warm water coming from the mid-atlantic. One of the predicted effects of global warming is a disruption of this water stream, leading to severe climate changes.
The north-sea is on the same height as Alaska. Without the gulf-stream, we'd have Alaskan climate in Western Europe.
Untrue. They have been added to Python 2.1. See this document
BTW, Python 2.1 also has garbage collection for reclaiming cyclic datastructures. I'm not sure if it helps extension writers, though.
DeCSS is a computer program that reverses the Content Scrambling System. The program is also a precise expression of the DeCSS algorithm. In fact, an exact expression of an algorithm is none other than an executable computer program. If you express an algorithm exactly, you can execute it automatically. If you have executable code, then that code (together with the machine description) is the specification of its algorithm.
Computer science is impossible without specification of algorithms, which makes imo. a computer program a valuable form of free speech. However, the four-letter acronyms want to make us believe that a computer program is more than a computer program. They want us to believe that it is a "digital crowbar", a "promotion to violate copyright law". These are just insinuations, and a bad ones too, because crowbars, vault codes and promotions are not illegal.
Regarding access to the original form: there is no reason why fair use needs the unfettered modern original. In fact, normal use also doesn't need most modern, digital, uncorrupted, un-macrovisioned form. Going one step further, who needs movies in any form? We could all forget about them, go sit in the grass and enjoy the sun. After all, movies are `just' entertainment.
However, this argument cuts both ways: the work is `just' entertainment, and i.m.o. entertainment does not warrant any of the draconian (free speech) measures that DMCA proposes. The four-letter acronyms want us to believe that they have a right to own a living (more accurately: to get insanely rich) with movies, but that is not their basic right. If they can not get insanely rich by selling expensive shiny frisbees then they should consider another business model.
I was wondering: why did you do it? How do The Netherlands (or Europe for that matter) and the US compare? Don't you miss the good bakeries, cannabis and licquorice? Do you experience Americans as being shallow (I've heard that comment more than once)? Or is this just a case of "Cherchez la femme?"
That's a lot questions together, but I'm not so much interested in specific answers. I'd like to hear your general experience of US vs. Europe.
Which also explains why you're not a math hero. Three independant lines in 2 space typically do not meet in a point.
P.S. I can't recall any non-believers being killed by Bhuddists or other non-deistic religions. Care to back that up?
Sadly, this is not entirely true. The Zen establishment in Japan did a lot of nasty things during the second World War, although it might not have been done in the name of Buddhism. I think it is documented in the book Zen at War.
Normal trains are also suspended without consuming energy. The revolutionary devices used for that are called wheels
I also heard reports that the Maglev trains make
lots of noise than normal `high-speed trains', because of the high-speeds involved. The sound is probably much worse for wildlife than the magnetic fields). Does anyone know the fine points of this?
We don't have any operas, but you can find a 50 page orchestral score done in LilyPond at GMD. I'm not sure why Mats didn't put it up at mutopia, though. We also have the full ouverture Coriolan (by Van Beethoven), included in the lilypond package--unfortunately, there is no rendered version on the web right now.
Why would anyone waste time entering stuff into Lilypond's clumsy 1960's-era notation when they could use something like Finale, which at least approaches the efficiency of Mozart and Rossini's scratchings with a quill pen?
I am not really qualified to judge (never used Finale), but from what I've heard it is quite tedious to use, and finetuning formatting is at least as big a nightmare as tweaking a .ly file. Moreover, one could enter music in finale, and then convert it to .ly.
The way I see it, the two big barriers are:
On the downside, why is everything an FTP link? I'd really like to click on a MIDI or PNG link and have it just play/show--as it is I have to download the MIDI or score and view it "manually".
Did you set up your browser to view
Finally got it all installed and lilypond just crashes.
Again, please submit a bugreport. Your description is too vague to be useful.
When I started LilyPond, I felt that there had to be a good justification for the existence of LilyPond, so I wrote a little document about a PD sheet-music archive to be called "Mutopia". Some years later, we had gathered too many test-scores in the lilypond package, and decided to host them in a separate archive. I called for volunteers to set this up. Chris Sawer (to whom I owe a big thanks!) made the site that's featured in this article.
Of course, I wanted the files to be usable with free-software, so using Sibelius or Finale was out of the question. There are some other options, like the ABC format, but they have more technical limitations.
Anyway, LilyPond format is flexible (I wrote several convertors to it, among others a Finale to .ly convertor) and Lily also dumps the output as a nicely quantized MIDI file, which is rather easy to import into other programs.
When it comes to music representation there aren't any good published standards: the problem with NIFF is not that it is binary per se, but rather that it is quite limited, and has a tendency to glue together musical and graphical information into a big blob. Also, there aren't any free score editors that support NIFF.
As for SMDL, I don't think that there exists any software that can meaningfully handle SMDL.
So what do you suggest we do? Wear hats against UV, turn up the A/C, and return to our energy guzzling slumber?
Katzu!
(whacks Nater over the head with a large clue-stick)
This comment is definitely worth a read.
Would you care to explain how?
Bzzt. wrong.
By importing os with "from os import *',
you're overwriting plain open (ANSI fopen (3)) with unix open(2), which takes an integer argument as flag.
Electrical waves travel with a speed comparable to the speed of light. There is no way your drummer could have been complaining about the timing.
Probably, the cabling and amplifiers weren't good enough, causing distortion.
On the other hand, if a signal is wrapped in packets, and bounced around between various computers, the delay easily adds up to be noticeable.
Maybe the Cease-and-desist notes were just a way
to attract attention, and hype up the cube. Writing a C&D doesn't cost and it gets you a lot of publicity.
Sorry to break your bubble, FP is nice, but
most Higher Mathematics (Partial Differential Equations, Number Theory, etc.) are about properties of sets that can be proved by mathematicians. It is not about properties thatcan be verified by computers.
A mathematical proof is like a LISP program. If you are clever, and the program is correct, you might be understand and be able to prove that it works. A program that analyses LISP usually cannot.
Strongly typed systems are about systems where it the type-proving algorithm is designed by a clever human, who proved that the type-checking algorithm is correct.
FWIW, people tried to formally type mathematics at the beginning of the 20th century (Bertrand Russell et. al.), and they miserably failed.