The god of the old testament is always testing people, burning them up, inflicting them with horrible & fatal diseases, drowning them, etc. Even if you don't think the Judaeo-Christian god is so vengeful and jealous, you still have the problem of theodicy, the theoretical achilles heel of monotheism. It's much easier to deal with evil if you go with more than one deity.
Anyway, you may be right that god wouldn't test people with fossils. That would be way too easy on us humans.
If you're burning oil or coal, you're definitely getting a dose of pollution, just not where you're using the electricity. Given the inefficiencies in generation and transmission, you're actually getting more pollution, only in a (perhaps) less visible and more centralised fashion.
The same holds true for nuclear energy, but if you're catching lightning in a bottle or using interns or hamsters to power your generators, you're probably OK.
Although the article doesn't say, I think these will be used for trains that run in remote or mountainous areas (e.g., the Koumi Line) which aren't so easy to electrify.
The reason they go after the small fry is not convenience, but principle. They take money from the little guys and funnel it to Halliburton, Bechtel, Enron and all those nice folks. The idea is that it's the government's job to assist the People Who Really Matter and put the screws to those who don't. Lots of big corporations pay nothing and that's somehow acceptable, but someone has to pay for the Debacle in Mesopotamia.
It takes one hour to get to either Chicago or Milwaukee from your seignoral estate? On private roads? Or perhaps you're taking I-90 or 94, US12 or 14, state and/or county roads? And please refrain from using the courts and police to enforce your contracts. Finally, please don't hire anyone who isn't an auto-didact. Don't want any of your serfs tainted by state ideology.
Seriously, though, what's the difference between the state providing basic infrastructure such as roads and informational infrastructure such as literacy and internet access?
pine can use alternate editors
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
Pico is the default, but you can configure pine to use another editor, vi, emacs, ed or whatever. Just say yes to the enable-alternate-editor option in.pinerec.
You are paying for the privilege of learning from an expert in a subject.
Precisely. But I learn my way, not my professor's way.
That's why students are generally allowed to drop classes. If you don't like his/her teaching style, take another course. Or don't come to class and learn on your own. Anything else would be a waste of your time -- not to mention the prof's and the other students'.
Googling "the people's cube" at google.ca, google.co.jp, and google.com yield pretty the same result: the satire site with a persecution complex is listed second.
Her remark about how "helping out with the war on terrorism" gives her the warm fuzzies suggests to me that she has either absorbed the ambient paranoia or that she is cynically exploiting it. Considering that AQ is a very loose network of Anti-Western religious fanatics, some of them in hiding off the grid, and not a monolithic, top-down organisation of Super-Baddies, I'd guess the latter. Even if she's only saying it gives her the warm fuzzies because she thinks she has to say that to maintain her status with the CIA, it doesn't say a whole lot for her. After all, there are plenty of US soldiers in Iraq who aren't afraid to speak their minds.
Yes, she's clever. But perhaps not much more than that. Colour me unimpressed.
I wonder if there's a gene, extremely common in NYT editors, that inclines the organism towards theories of genetic determinism.
This article is built on a foundation of sand. To begin with what's a "nation"? In what sense are distinct populations like the Basques part of the modern nation state that rules over them? Are my Alsatian ancestors "French" or "German"? Or, how do you explain the genetics of places like Poland, which went extinct and then came back?
The category of the nation is relatively recent, and itself a product of history. You can't simply take it as a given.
I'm a little skeptical about blogging myself, and like you say, much/most of it isn't terribly original. However, I think that if there is some value to blogging, it probably comes from the selection and arrangement of the texts that bloggers choose.
It's like a collage. The material within a collage comes from elsewhere and is "simply" pasted in, yet the overall effect is something greater than the mechanically reproduced parts. The problem here seems to be that Walmart are choosing the texts more than the bloggers, and with the bloggers slapping in great slabs of Walmart PR copy, there isn't a whole lot to differentiate these blogs from Walmart propaganda.
Unfortunately, there isn't any magic formula that can give us a 100% definitive answer about whether a blog is just propaganda or an interesting collation of texts gleaned from elsewhere. You have to look at them, read them, and decide for yourself.
Using pTex is not a bad idea, but if you mainly use Western languages, regular latex is probably more suited to you. Unfortunately, it's kind of a pain to use both ptex and plain latex on the same account. That being the case, I'd say texlive is your best bet.
I don't know what OS you use, but texlive supports the big ones (Windows, x86 Linux, OS X, OS/2, Irix...) and the CJK package works out of the box. I just installed it on an x86 slackware box and pdflatexed one of my work files. Even the wadalab fonts came out right.
Having done it more times than I should have on several *nix platforms, I agree that it can be a headache to get nice Japanese output from older TeX installations. Do yourself a favour and grab the latest texlive from CTAN.
Once you've done that all you need to do is something like this:
\usepackage{CJK}
\begin{document}
\begin{CJK*}[dnp]{UTF8}{min}
[your stuff here]
\end{CJK*}
\end{document}
Of course, you don't need to use UTF8 encoding. JIS, EUC, SJIS would also work.
I don't know if it's true that Japanese spend more money on "bells and whistles". The mobile phone market seems more competitive (it's now a mature/saturated market) there than in the US or Canada, and phone features are one way to compete. An emphasis on bells and whistles would also square with the mainstream Japanese marketing philosophy of distracting consumers from price. Unfortunately for the Japanese mobile phone companies, they also have to compete on price.
This is but an anecdote, but I had much more on my 1 Yen phones from Au than my wife has on her CDN$250 phone from Bell Canada. The monthly rates were also cheaper.
Big deal. How many laptops can take enough RAM to make 64 bit CPUs meaningful? This one only holds 2GB so 64 bits wouldn't give you much.
no iTunes for Linux, *BSD, Irix, Solaris, etc.
on
Songbird Flies Today
·
· Score: 1
iTunes may be the greatest app ever, but it doesn't run on just any old platform. You might be able to run iTunes under Wine (can you?) or mol on ppc, but that's not ideal even if you can.
I like using iTunes to check out what people are listening to -- even if it's usually utter crap that makes me lose my faith in humanity. Sometimes I boot into OS X on my powerbook just to listen to other people's playlists. (There are a lot of ibook/powerbook users here in Montreal). It'd be nice not to have to use OS X for this. I'm looking forward to the linux port of Songbird.
If you try to dim a compact fluorescent bulb, it'll go off and never come back on again and you'll lose any potential savings from the electricity. Don't even think about trying it!
The free wireless internet at the local cafe was down today. The baristas do not know what do when this happens, so it stays down until the right person comes through the rotation.
The network is not always available, or using it imposes some non-trivial costs. For example, at my previous job, I used to do a lot of my most critical work in the morning at a cafe w/o wireless. Yes, I could have gone to another cafe, but this one was right above the train platform at the station where I had to transfer, and I usually really wanted the extra 10 minutes it would have taken to walk to another place. (I also wanted to avoid walking upstream against the morning commute in AM Shibuya). Anyway, I'd copy my stuff to CF and hand it to the staff when I arrived at work. Since I went in early to beat the Tokyo commuting crowds, sending it in by Internet would have meant something like 2hrs less sleep. What's more, most of the staff couldn't figure out email attachments and having an icon which they could double click was a lifesaver.
Of course, sometimes nothing works. These days, I do work for a local university. I'm not a regular employee of the Uni, and I don't have a username and password to get on their network. Usually I send in my results (~100K.doc files converted from LaTeX) by email from home or from a cafe with wireless internet, but sometimes the wireless is down at the cafe or the library is closed and I can't connect. "Aha, well, I'll just copy it to CF with the handy-dandy flash slot on my very small laptop and hand it in at the meeting." Alas, BigProf's Windows 98 can't find the right driver for the USB flash reader. Of course, if I had had an optical drive on my laptop, I could have burned a CD-R on the spot.
I think the moral of the story is that more options are a good thing.
Secrecy is the problem.
The US is ostensibly a democracy[1], but how can the people rule on a matter if they don't know anything about it? Government secrecy is a bureaucratic power grab.
[1] And don't give me the "it's a republic, not a democracy" business, either. I suppose you'd have us forget the Gettysburg address because Lincoln was all wrong about the nature of his country. If you want to talk about the here and now, the right has tried to sell the war in Iraq as a struggle to install a democracy, not a republic.
On the IIc, the control key is where Ghawd intended it to be, to the left of the A key. See it here: http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/appleiic/ These days, only the Japanese Macs have the control key in the right place. Caps lock is even less useful for a script where all characters are the same size than it is for roman scripts. The iBooks and the 12" pb still have goofy ABD kbds that send release AND press signals when you hit them, making remaps difficult. To swap control and caps lock on an iBook running linux requires a kernel patch.
To film the city of the future, Tarkovsky simply went to Tokyo, hired a taxi and had it drive down the Teito expressway. It's one of my favourite things about the film, and there are a lot of things to like about it. That said, I like his Andrei Rublev a little better.
The rest of the Americas weren't too happy with the idea of the Americans appointing themselves the stewards of the W. hemisphere. I doubt that the world will be any happier with this. On the other hand, the US was a rising power then, but is now in decline, and the world may be more annoyed or even amused than angry.
I don't know what electricity bills cost in the States, but I can tell you that rates in Quebec are also increasing. Hydro Quebec sends a lot of juice down the pike to the US, so increasing demand in the US means increasing demand for Hydro Quebec. In effect, we pay higher rates so that Hydro Quebec can export electricity to the US. Joy.
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The god of the old testament is always testing people, burning them up, inflicting them with horrible & fatal diseases, drowning them, etc. Even if you don't think the Judaeo-Christian god is so vengeful and jealous, you still have the problem of theodicy, the theoretical achilles heel of monotheism. It's much easier to deal with evil if you go with more than one deity.
Anyway, you may be right that god wouldn't test people with fossils. That would be way too easy on us humans.
If you're burning oil or coal, you're definitely getting a dose of pollution, just not where you're using the electricity. Given the inefficiencies in generation and transmission, you're actually getting more pollution, only in a (perhaps) less visible and more centralised fashion.
The same holds true for nuclear energy, but if you're catching lightning in a bottle or using interns or hamsters to power your generators, you're probably OK.
Although the article doesn't say, I think these will be used for trains that run in remote or mountainous areas (e.g., the Koumi Line) which aren't so easy to electrify.
The reason they go after the small fry is not convenience, but principle. They take money from the little guys and funnel it to Halliburton, Bechtel, Enron and all those nice folks. The idea is that it's the government's job to assist the People Who Really Matter and put the screws to those who don't. Lots of big corporations pay nothing and that's somehow acceptable, but someone has to pay for the Debacle in Mesopotamia.
It takes one hour to get to either Chicago or Milwaukee from your seignoral estate? On private roads? Or perhaps you're taking I-90 or 94, US12 or 14, state and/or county roads? And please refrain from using the courts and police to enforce your contracts. Finally, please don't hire anyone who isn't an auto-didact. Don't want any of your serfs tainted by state ideology.
Seriously, though, what's the difference between the state providing basic infrastructure such as roads and informational infrastructure such as literacy and internet access?
Pico is the default, but you can configure pine to use another editor, vi, emacs, ed or whatever. Just say yes to the enable-alternate-editor option in .pinerec.
That's why students are generally allowed to drop classes. If you don't like his/her teaching style, take another course. Or don't come to class and learn on your own. Anything else would be a waste of your time -- not to mention the prof's and the other students'.
Purged? I think not.
Yes, she's clever. But perhaps not much more than that. Colour me unimpressed.
This article is built on a foundation of sand. To begin with what's a "nation"? In what sense are distinct populations like the Basques part of the modern nation state that rules over them? Are my Alsatian ancestors "French" or "German"? Or, how do you explain the genetics of places like Poland, which went extinct and then came back?
The category of the nation is relatively recent, and itself a product of history. You can't simply take it as a given.
It's like a collage. The material within a collage comes from elsewhere and is "simply" pasted in, yet the overall effect is something greater than the mechanically reproduced parts. The problem here seems to be that Walmart are choosing the texts more than the bloggers, and with the bloggers slapping in great slabs of Walmart PR copy, there isn't a whole lot to differentiate these blogs from Walmart propaganda.
Unfortunately, there isn't any magic formula that can give us a 100% definitive answer about whether a blog is just propaganda or an interesting collation of texts gleaned from elsewhere. You have to look at them, read them, and decide for yourself.
I don't know what OS you use, but texlive supports the big ones (Windows, x86 Linux, OS X, OS/2, Irix...) and the CJK package works out of the box. I just installed it on an x86 slackware box and pdflatexed one of my work files. Even the wadalab fonts came out right.
Having done it more times than I should have on several *nix platforms, I agree that it can be a headache to get nice Japanese output from older TeX installations. Do yourself a favour and grab the latest texlive from CTAN.
Once you've done that all you need to do is something like this:
\usepackage{CJK}
\begin{document}
\begin{CJK*}[dnp]{UTF8}{min}
[your stuff here]
\end{CJK*}
\end{document}
Of course, you don't need to use UTF8 encoding. JIS, EUC, SJIS would also work.
I don't know if it's true that Japanese spend more money on "bells and whistles".
The mobile phone market seems more competitive (it's now a mature/saturated market) there than in the US or Canada, and phone features are one way to compete. An emphasis on bells and whistles would also square with the mainstream Japanese marketing philosophy of distracting consumers from price. Unfortunately for the Japanese mobile phone companies, they also have to compete on price.
This is but an anecdote, but I had much more on my 1 Yen phones from Au than my wife has on her CDN$250 phone from Bell Canada. The monthly rates were also cheaper.
How do you intercept and censor telegrams and telephone calls with steam? Inquiring minds want to know.
Big deal. How many laptops can take enough RAM to make 64 bit CPUs meaningful? This one only holds 2GB so 64 bits wouldn't give you much.
iTunes may be the greatest app ever, but it doesn't run on just any old platform. You might be able to run iTunes under Wine (can you?) or mol on ppc, but that's not ideal even if you can.
I like using iTunes to check out what people are listening to -- even if it's usually utter crap that makes me lose my faith in humanity. Sometimes I boot into OS X on my powerbook just to listen to other people's playlists. (There are a lot of ibook/powerbook users here in Montreal). It'd be nice not to have to use OS X for this. I'm looking forward to the linux port of Songbird.
If you try to dim a compact fluorescent bulb, it'll go off and never come back on again and you'll lose any potential savings from the electricity. Don't even think about trying it!
The free wireless internet at the local cafe was down today. The baristas do not know what do when this happens, so it stays down until the right person comes through the rotation.
The network is not always available, or using it imposes some non-trivial costs. For example, at my previous job, I used to do a lot of my most critical work in the morning at a cafe w/o wireless. Yes, I could have gone to another cafe, but this one was right above the train platform at the station where I had to transfer, and I usually really wanted the extra 10 minutes it would have taken to walk to another place. (I also wanted to avoid walking upstream against the morning commute in AM Shibuya). Anyway, I'd copy my stuff to CF and hand it to the staff when I arrived at work. Since I went in early to beat the Tokyo commuting crowds, sending it in by Internet would have meant something like 2hrs less sleep. What's more, most of the staff couldn't figure out email attachments and having an icon which they could double click was a lifesaver.
Of course, sometimes nothing works. These days, I do work for a local university. I'm not a regular employee of the Uni, and I don't have a username and password to get on their network. Usually I send in my results (~100K .doc files converted from LaTeX) by email from home or from a cafe with wireless internet, but sometimes the wireless is down at the cafe or the library is closed and I can't connect. "Aha, well, I'll just copy it to CF with the handy-dandy flash slot on my very small laptop and hand it in at the meeting." Alas, BigProf's Windows 98 can't find the right driver for the USB flash reader. Of course, if I had had an optical drive on my laptop, I could have burned a CD-R on the spot.
I think the moral of the story is that more options are a good thing.
Like the man said, you obviously don't have kids.
Secrecy is the problem. The US is ostensibly a democracy[1], but how can the people rule on a matter if they don't know anything about it? Government secrecy is a bureaucratic power grab. [1] And don't give me the "it's a republic, not a democracy" business, either. I suppose you'd have us forget the Gettysburg address because Lincoln was all wrong about the nature of his country. If you want to talk about the here and now, the right has tried to sell the war in Iraq as a struggle to install a democracy, not a republic.
On the IIc, the control key is where Ghawd intended it to be, to the left of the A key. See it here: http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/appleiic/ These days, only the Japanese Macs have the control key in the right place. Caps lock is even less useful for a script where all characters are the same size than it is for roman scripts. The iBooks and the 12" pb still have goofy ABD kbds that send release AND press signals when you hit them, making remaps difficult. To swap control and caps lock on an iBook running linux requires a kernel patch.
To film the city of the future, Tarkovsky simply went to Tokyo, hired a taxi and had it drive down the Teito expressway. It's one of my favourite things about the film, and there are a lot of things to like about it. That said, I like his Andrei Rublev a little better.
The rest of the Americas weren't too happy with the idea of the Americans appointing themselves the stewards of the W. hemisphere. I doubt that the world will be any happier with this. On the other hand, the US was a rising power then, but is now in decline, and the world may be more annoyed or even amused than angry.
I'm guessing of course, but they probably figured that their high end linux machines wouldn't be worth much without a very robust file system.
I don't know what electricity bills cost in the States, but I can tell you that rates in Quebec are also increasing. Hydro Quebec sends a lot of juice down the pike to the US, so increasing demand in the US means increasing demand for Hydro Quebec. In effect, we pay higher rates so that Hydro Quebec can export electricity to the US. Joy.