I wrote a bash script a few months back which, in a little over 130 lines (it has a few command line options), can convert any old PDF to a text searcheable PDF. I really wonder whether a distro is a bit overkill for this? But it is such an important tool to have that I commend the authors for making it available... I just wish they'd put up the actual script that they used so I could compare it to my own!
Just this morning I was listening to an interview with a Jefferson historian who explained that Jefferson was unable to find a solution to the slavery issue. He realised that his lack of opposition to slavery would be a negative part of his legacy. For the interested: New Books in History.
Julia Gillard has been elected unopposed to the Labor leadership, seizing power in a bloodless Parliament House coup after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decided not to contest this morning's leadership ballot.
Oh come on. Did you really need to tell us that the parliamentary "coup" in Australia was bloodless?
I don't know about that. With a default install, logging into KDE 4.4 (with preloaded Konqueror, compositing, file indexing, etc) clocks in at a shade under 400mb. That's 400mb, not just for KDE, but for the whole system which runs apache, mysql and so on. Obviously Fluxbox is much less resource hungry, but calling KDE a "massive" memory user is not all that accurate.
Dr. Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center and her colleagues administered half-hour acupuncture treatments to a group of mice with paw discomfort.
Family-friendly euphemism for "with their paws hacked off by the grad students".
I really wonder if this has more to do with 'certifying' Copernicus as being of Polish ethnicity than rehabilitating him as a Catholic. There is a lot of dispute over whether he was a Pole or a German and this kind of stunt may just be the kind of salvo that modern nationalists might fire.
What the law says is that your user level password should not be disclosed. This was not a user level password. The law says "All production system-level passwords must be part of the security administered global password management database." He should not be the only person with access to the network. That is why he was asked for the password and should have handed it over. It was not his user level password, but a password to access the network that he built.
Drug cartel members are not afraid of law enforcement with fully automatic weapons so of course they are even less afraid of US citizens who are mostly only allowed to possess semi-auto firearms.
snip
I don't think these drug cartel members will run the other way if I try and spray them with pepperspray or hit them with a bat, a gun will make them think twice though.
snip
So if they aren't afraid of fully automatic weapons, what do you have that makes them think twice?
When thinking of whether we humans would be able to detect the arrival of an alien probe, we should all mediate on the parable of the G'Gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs:
... [t]he two opposing battle fleets decided to settle their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our galaxy, now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands of years the mighty starships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth - where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time.
so why not just go with "they"? I know it's not grammatically correct (according to an English teacher I had) but at least it works, and it should be correct.
NO! Stop! Singluar "they" is good English grammar. It has been in our language for hundreds of years (it passes the Shakespeare test, i.e. he used it), and it is well-established today. Use it!
There is a big difference between being pulled over in your car randomly or asked to show ID as a pedestrian occassionally and having computerized cameras survey an entire district of the city 24/7 for faces entered into a database of "wanted" people.
If the system becomes widespread enough you could enter the face of anyone you don't particularly like (like a pesky journalist/writer critical of your policies) and keep constant track of where they go, and when, who they meet, where they eat, et cetera.
Also, a system of this kind ID's people CONSTANTLY, whether there is probable reason to do so or not. Its like being asked to walk around with your ID card taped to your forehead.
I realise this. I don't want to live in a surveillance society either and video cameras on Istiklal certainly are surveillance. My post, however, takes issue with 1) the notion that these are steps by an Islamist government to silence its critics 2) that the electronic bus tickets and automatic toll booth cards are part of the government's surveillance measures.
The ruling "moderate Islamist" AKP party appears to frame these and other e-government initiatives as "keeping step with the times," "keeping step with other major world cities," and "making living safer, easier and more efficient through the targeted use of electronic technology." Its secular critics, on the other hand, argue that everything and everyone under the sun is rapidly becoming electronically trackable thanks to the omnipresence of mobile phones and gratuitous overuse of these installed electronic systems, and that these systems will, eventually, form a dense surveillance grid that could turn daily life for Turks (and secular Turks critical of the current government in particular) into living in a veritable Big Brother House.
Where to begin? Yes the AKP is "moderate Islamist", but to make the invasion of privacy in Turkey to be the work of scary Muslims is disingenuous at best.
People who follow the country know that the AKP is currently involved in a existential struggle with the old order in Turkey (military, police, security services, parts of the judiciary, paramilitary organisations, etc). But it has been the entrenched forces which have been behind Turkey's record of terrible human rights abuses. Under the AKP these are being brought to light -- see the Ergenekon trials -- and institutions like the military are experiencing scrutiny which was until now considered unthinkable. The old parties, like the CHP, have been shown for what they really are: corrupt and unable to do anything outside their 1930s Kemalist mindset. Instead, under the "Islamists", Turkey has made the greatest strides towards EU membership, has began to give the Kurds something that approaches minority rights and has started to address some of the lingering international concflicts, such as with Armenia and Cyprus. In each of these cases, there is a long, and unquestionably painful, way to go, but none of these things have ever happened before.
Now to suggest that the AKP is as pure as it likes to think itself (ak='white') is just as laughable. They have proven to be nearly as corrupt as their predecessors. Some frankly outrageous laws have been passed or are still on the books. And some abuses just don't matter to the AKP because it is the poor or unimportant who suffer. I'd be the last person to ever vote for a religious party in my country, but give credit where credit is due and acknowledge the AKP for what it has actually accomplished.
On to the article, then. A few clarifications are in order.
First, the electronic pass needed for the bridges. Unless I am mistaken, you can still cross the second bridge paying by cash, but even if you can't, just could just use one of the car ferries which do the crossing around the clock. And I don't see how the electronic pass would be a necessary part of some surveillance network - it would be just as easy to mount cameras over the entrance to the bridge. And if you think about it, the only way to stop people from taking a pass from one car and putting it another car would be to mount cameras over the entrance of the bridge -- so nothing gained by using the pass, hey?
Second, the bus passes are not tied to a person. 90% are metal tabs (electronic tickets according the article) you can attach to your keychain and which can be bought (actually just a deposit) anywhere without presenting any identification. The remaining bus passes are attached to an ID card, but the office who issues the card doesn't attach the metal tab. That is done by a guy in a booth who physically stamps it in for anyone who shows up with an ID card. Watch him do it: it takes a few seconds -- and he doesn't record the details of which bus pass card gets which metal tab.
About the others, such as the ID cards with biometric data and so on. Let's be clear. Invasions of privacy are a fact of life in Turkey, but they are not part of some AKP plot to root out secular dissenters. Opposition to the AKP is so vocal and so public, they would have a
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I wrote a bash script a few months back which, in a little over 130 lines (it has a few command line options), can convert any old PDF to a text searcheable PDF. I really wonder whether a distro is a bit overkill for this? But it is such an important tool to have that I commend the authors for making it available... I just wish they'd put up the actual script that they used so I could compare it to my own!
Just this morning I was listening to an interview with a Jefferson historian who explained that Jefferson was unable to find a solution to the slavery issue. He realised that his lack of opposition to slavery would be a negative part of his legacy. For the interested: New Books in History.
Ever since the APEC summit in Australia, police have been extra careful about Canadians trying to sneak in: The Chaser APEC pranks.
Julia Gillard has been elected unopposed to the Labor leadership, seizing power in a bloodless Parliament House coup after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd decided not to contest this morning's leadership ballot.
Oh come on. Did you really need to tell us that the parliamentary "coup" in Australia was bloodless?
I don't know about that. With a default install, logging into KDE 4.4 (with preloaded Konqueror, compositing, file indexing, etc) clocks in at a shade under 400mb. That's 400mb, not just for KDE, but for the whole system which runs apache, mysql and so on. Obviously Fluxbox is much less resource hungry, but calling KDE a "massive" memory user is not all that accurate.
OH Senate Passes Bill Banning Human-Anima... ah wait, this one's still legal in Ohio. Never mind.
Dr. Maiken Nedergaard of the University of Rochester Medical Center and her colleagues administered half-hour acupuncture treatments to a group of mice with paw discomfort.
Family-friendly euphemism for "with their paws hacked off by the grad students".
I've been running current, which is now equivalent to 13.1 and it's working well.
A reminder to all: please seed the SW torrents and come to Linux Questions to discuss problems.
I really wonder if this has more to do with 'certifying' Copernicus as being of Polish ethnicity than rehabilitating him as a Catholic. There is a lot of dispute over whether he was a Pole or a German and this kind of stunt may just be the kind of salvo that modern nationalists might fire.
What the law says is that your user level password should not be disclosed. This was not a user level password. The law says "All production system-level passwords must be part of the security administered global password management database." He should not be the only person with access to the network. That is why he was asked for the password and should have handed it over. It was not his user level password, but a password to access the network that he built.
Ah, so he wasn't running Ubuntu?
We just use Polish immigrants.
We just use Polish immigrants.
As someone reading who has never used Chrome, let me tell you that you are begging the question when you write:
Something is really wrong if Chrome is so slow on your setup. For me, it's much much faster than Firefox, especially when I have a lot of tabs open.
Maybe something is wrong with your system if Firefox is running slow on it.
Drug cartel members are not afraid of law enforcement with fully automatic weapons so of course they are even less afraid of US citizens who are mostly only allowed to possess semi-auto firearms.
snip
I don't think these drug cartel members will run the other way if I try and spray them with pepperspray or hit them with a bat, a gun will make them think twice though.
snip
So if they aren't afraid of fully automatic weapons, what do you have that makes them think twice?
"Solution"...
Can't we get beyond this word?
J. Dzhugashvili writes...
Thank you Stalin.
Don't forget to get you and your computer immunized against those nasty viruses which are rampant in foreign countries like the United Kingdom.
When thinking of whether we humans would be able to detect the arrival of an alien probe, we should all mediate on the parable of the G'Gugvuntts and Vl'hurgs:
... [t]he two opposing battle fleets decided to settle their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our galaxy, now positively identified as the source of the offending remark. For thousands of years the mighty starships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the planet Earth - where, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time.
Buzz Aldrin's Other Radical Plan for NASA: All astronauts are to record rap songs ...
Or is that only an outer protective layer? .... I just assumed they were made to be easily replaced.
No, sadly, the knob's outer, protective layer can not be easily replaced (cf circumcision).
That said, I could install slackware, damn small linux or any number of flavors of Linux that have none of the projects being discussed.
Slackware will have KDE4 in its next release, which is no more than one or two months away.
so why not just go with "they"? I know it's not grammatically correct (according to an English teacher I had) but at least it works, and it should be correct.
NO! Stop! Singluar "they" is good English grammar. It has been in our language for hundreds of years (it passes the Shakespeare test, i.e. he used it), and it is well-established today. Use it!
There is a saying "who will guard the guards". Nobody apparently.
The Guardian guards the guards apparently.
There is a big difference between being pulled over in your car randomly or asked to show ID as a pedestrian occassionally and having computerized cameras survey an entire district of the city 24/7 for faces entered into a database of "wanted" people.
If the system becomes widespread enough you could enter the face of anyone you don't particularly like (like a pesky journalist/writer critical of your policies) and keep constant track of where they go, and when, who they meet, where they eat, et cetera.
Also, a system of this kind ID's people CONSTANTLY, whether there is probable reason to do so or not. Its like being asked to walk around with your ID card taped to your forehead.
I realise this. I don't want to live in a surveillance society either and video cameras on Istiklal certainly are surveillance. My post, however, takes issue with 1) the notion that these are steps by an Islamist government to silence its critics 2) that the electronic bus tickets and automatic toll booth cards are part of the government's surveillance measures.
The ruling "moderate Islamist" AKP party appears to frame these and other e-government initiatives as "keeping step with the times," "keeping step with other major world cities," and "making living safer, easier and more efficient through the targeted use of electronic technology." Its secular critics, on the other hand, argue that everything and everyone under the sun is rapidly becoming electronically trackable thanks to the omnipresence of mobile phones and gratuitous overuse of these installed electronic systems, and that these systems will, eventually, form a dense surveillance grid that could turn daily life for Turks (and secular Turks critical of the current government in particular) into living in a veritable Big Brother House.
Where to begin? Yes the AKP is "moderate Islamist", but to make the invasion of privacy in Turkey to be the work of scary Muslims is disingenuous at best.
People who follow the country know that the AKP is currently involved in a existential struggle with the old order in Turkey (military, police, security services, parts of the judiciary, paramilitary organisations, etc). But it has been the entrenched forces which have been behind Turkey's record of terrible human rights abuses. Under the AKP these are being brought to light -- see the Ergenekon trials -- and institutions like the military are experiencing scrutiny which was until now considered unthinkable. The old parties, like the CHP, have been shown for what they really are: corrupt and unable to do anything outside their 1930s Kemalist mindset. Instead, under the "Islamists", Turkey has made the greatest strides towards EU membership, has began to give the Kurds something that approaches minority rights and has started to address some of the lingering international concflicts, such as with Armenia and Cyprus. In each of these cases, there is a long, and unquestionably painful, way to go, but none of these things have ever happened before.
Now to suggest that the AKP is as pure as it likes to think itself (ak='white') is just as laughable. They have proven to be nearly as corrupt as their predecessors. Some frankly outrageous laws have been passed or are still on the books. And some abuses just don't matter to the AKP because it is the poor or unimportant who suffer. I'd be the last person to ever vote for a religious party in my country, but give credit where credit is due and acknowledge the AKP for what it has actually accomplished.
On to the article, then. A few clarifications are in order.
First, the electronic pass needed for the bridges. Unless I am mistaken, you can still cross the second bridge paying by cash, but even if you can't, just could just use one of the car ferries which do the crossing around the clock. And I don't see how the electronic pass would be a necessary part of some surveillance network - it would be just as easy to mount cameras over the entrance to the bridge. And if you think about it, the only way to stop people from taking a pass from one car and putting it another car would be to mount cameras over the entrance of the bridge -- so nothing gained by using the pass, hey?
Second, the bus passes are not tied to a person. 90% are metal tabs (electronic tickets according the article) you can attach to your keychain and which can be bought (actually just a deposit) anywhere without presenting any identification. The remaining bus passes are attached to an ID card, but the office who issues the card doesn't attach the metal tab. That is done by a guy in a booth who physically stamps it in for anyone who shows up with an ID card. Watch him do it: it takes a few seconds -- and he doesn't record the details of which bus pass card gets which metal tab.
About the others, such as the ID cards with biometric data and so on. Let's be clear. Invasions of privacy are a fact of life in Turkey, but they are not part of some AKP plot to root out secular dissenters. Opposition to the AKP is so vocal and so public, they would have a