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"You just don't give up, do ya?"<br><br>LOL Well, if I did, I wouldn't be *me*, now would I? :-)<br><br>"That being said, I think an expo thread would be a good idea. As it gets a bit closer to the show we'll set one up so everyone can coordinate their activities in New York."<br><br>Thanks! Don't forget, early registration discounts end June 18th!<br><br>Listen to The Mac Show!<br>http://www.macshowlive.com
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This link might be interesting to some of you. I'll admit that the issues raised are way beyond me, and I'll also say that what I do understand about it doesn't convince me that Apple and IBM are dancing together towards an announcement that will make all Mac users ecstatic--but it doesn't hurt to hope. I mean, I thought the cube would sell like hotcakes <br><br>Great wits are sure to madness near allied.--John Dryden, "Absalom and Achitophel"
MACTECH ubi dolor ibi digitus
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AutoCAD Plant 3D General DIscussion
Posts: 3
Registered: 04-04-2012
Message 1 of 5 (408 Views)
Accepted Solution
Basics of Plant 3D
408 Views, 4 Replies
05-04-2012 10:09 AM
Hello everybody!
I'm a software developer and i don't know anything about Plant3D, but i have a project and i need to conect with plant3D!!
I would be appreciated if anyone could explain to me the next doubts:
How are the files organised in Plant3D? Is there a root file and dependencies of this root when you do a project?
As far as I know plant3D only works with *.dwg files, but do the files connect with each other?
And what is the difference between sheets and projects? are they connected somehow?
The main question is, is there any root file and dependencies when you do a project with Plant3D?
This questions might be strange for a plant 3D developer, but i realy need help on this..Thanks
Posts: 313
Registered: 08-15-2007
Message 2 of 5 (399 Views)
Re: Basics of Plant 3D
05-04-2012 11:29 AM in reply to: MarcoDaniel
Even though these are meant for users and not developers, you might start with the Getting Started videos on Plant Exchange:
Peter Quinn
Senior Product Manager
Autodesk, Inc.
Posts: 3
Registered: 04-04-2012
Message 3 of 5 (391 Views)
Re: Basics of Plant 3D
05-04-2012 12:40 PM in reply to: PeterQuinn
Thank you, it helped me to understand the basics.
*Expert Elite*
Posts: 659
Registered: 12-04-2009
Message 4 of 5 (344 Views)
Re: Basics of Plant 3D
05-07-2012 05:13 AM in reply to: MarcoDaniel
Go to here:
and download the sdk's. They show how to get a current project's information.
Because of the newness of Plant, I STRONGLY recommend being on ADN to ask them questions. They are very timely with getting samples and getting an idea of where to head. If you can't get on ADN, head over to here: They have posted several examples of questions I've asked on the ADN site which pertain to Plant.
The root file in the structure is the project.xml which is stored in the main folder of the project. Plant has an entire directory structure to support project information. The databases are sqlite by default, but SQL Server can be used as well.
You can connect to the databases via the api, the api handles retrieving structure information and forming the queries necessary. A snapshot of the project data is stored within the drawing file, I'm not sure if the data is available via the api or not.
Sheets refer to paperspace layout tabs (standard AutoCAD definition). The project is the organization of files and folders required for the design. Projects can include related files of any type. The sdk includes the related files you'll need, make sure you follow standard AutoCAD api procedure and do not try to copy the dlls locally when building. Plant uses a lot of other .Net dlls, you can use methods and functions found in them, but they are not supported and may be subject to change in the future.
Please mark my post as the answer if it answers your question. Marking answers helps other find solutions faster. Thanks!
Dave Wolfe
Isaiah 57:15
ECAD, Inc.
A P3D Authorized Reseller
Posts: 3
Registered: 04-04-2012
Message 5 of 5 (323 Views)
Re: Basics of Plant 3D
05-07-2012 09:54 AM in reply to: dave.wolfe
Thanks for the information dave!!
You are not logged in.
Need installation help?
New AutoCAD Plant 3D Category!
Ask the Community
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In an effort to help our SAN team admins, Windows Servers admins, and DBA's, I am trying to build a web page that will allow them to correlate what SAN attached server disks are being used by what applications. I have a way of quering the SAN which gives me a list of disks presented to the server. Included in this output is a "PHYSICALDISK_n" where n represents a number corresponding to a disk number (0, 1, 2, .... n). This number directly correlates to the "disk number" one sees if they look at disk manager on a windows server.
From the Windows side I need to be able to query the disks seen by the bios including the disk_number, and label. Other than using the disk manager gui, I have not been able to find any way to query this data from the command line.
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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Click here to go to the first staff post in this thread. Thread: An in depth look into Jester - Mechanics, secrets and cheap tricks
1. #1
2 Not allowed!
I notice that Jester is considered a weird class - most people dislike the class, or think it's the worst thing ever.
I've been reading a while, but I figured I'd just bite the bullet and write this - this is more or less what happens when you spend FAR too much time playing the game, I guess.
This will go into stupid amounts of in depth, and may be subject to change by Trendy Entertainment via patching. I suspect that a lot of stuff that will be noted in this document may end up forcing a significant rebalance, or downright banning Jester, or at the very least, demands for the nerf bat.
But that would be spoilers, wouldn't it?
Before you read on:
What you shouldn't be playing a Jester for:
- Straightforward defense construction.
If you don't like the idea of taking your time to construct a defense, seriously, don't play Jester. To tap the full power of the class, you have to actually (gasp) spend time to do it. This means if you've already got a 100% working defense using the other classes, then scratching out the 25%-50% more power via Jestering up defenses will not get you anywhere (You'll still win, so what are you fussed over?).
If you really want to build an entire defense once, done and dusted, you won't like a Jestering approach either.
- Straightforward defensive combat.
If you don't like the idea of stalling, or you don't believe that defenses will ever break after you set them, once again, Jester isn't for you. You won't like the idea that you have to construct a defense with what you have, or knowing that in a lot of cases you don't actually need ALL the pieces there until wave 20, and for most part, can operate without some of them on a temporary basis.
- Straightforward offensive combat
To get the stupidly most out of Jester, you'll have to get used to the idea of rolling a lot. This means practicing the Wheel o' Fortuna.
If you want pure DPS smashing fun though, go play a barbarian or a monk. Seriously. It's simpler.
Got that out of the way? Good.
Now let's get to discussing why Jester should be banned from DD- er sorry, I mean, what makes Jester virtually better than all the base classes and their alts for defense building in the long run- ... um...
... How about we get on with it, before I get us in a lot of trouble?
Tower building:
The basics:
There's a defense construction list for each of the 3 present types. You drop a present, and there's a chance any one of them (or an ogre, mana, or an item) will show up.
If set during the build phase, they will hatch during the combat phase.
If set during combat phase, you either get to convince a monster to crack it open for you, or you wait until the end of the next build phase.
If you get a defense, the DU cost of it will be the cost of the present. Depending, you will see a 20-50% discount (barring a couple of exceptions) on the regular cost of the defense. Further notes will proceed below.
If you don't get a defense, the DU cost of the present will be refunded, allowing you to try again.
MYTH: No, it does not screw with DU totals in a negative manner. If a Jester based defense is destroyed, you only lose the DU that was invested in the defense or the present itself.
It's pretty straight forward... well sort of.
... Actually, even this can get sort of complicated.
- The cravats.
The standard rules of spawning apply as if you were dropping a defense of its type. In short, you're not allowed to have two overlapping Auras, traps (or if you somehow managed to get shark charged - it doesn't happen very often) or two towers.
This means if you drop a whole stack of Extravagant presents (4DU) in a line or a cluster, and your radius is over a good number (just say 1000 radius?), do NOT be surprised if you only ever get 1 Strength Aura in that line.
Also, do not be surprised if another Strength Aura is anywhere nearby it that you won't get one to show up at ALL.
Actually, you can use this to your advantage, but we'll get to that later.
This above note explains why sometimes you simply 'can't' magic up the defense of your choice, if the defense of choice just happens to be an aura or trap.
This also means if you want to force certain things to not show up, plant the present in places which would cause it to skip certain defenses.
Also bear in mind when presents open, if you sell the defense, your refund is half the cost of the result, not the present itself.
Now the detailed stuff. Some of this may surprise you. The results can be repeatable in a lot of ways, and the notes will also include my experiences as an incredibly well armoured Tower Jester (85% resists, across the board)
This goes through each defense on a play by play basis.
Defense: DU cost normally/ DU cost Jester (% saving)
Effects and notes
Small present:
Magic Barrier: 1DU/2DU (-100%)
The only truly shortchanging roll - They are identical to an Apprentice type summoning one on identical stats. Unless you direly need one (unlikely) sell up or let it get wiped out, and move on.
Spiked Barrier: 3DU/2DU (33%)
They are identical to a Squire type summoning one, on identical stats. This one's a little more useful, since they DO have a stack of HP - If you're holding off an ogre rush solo, one of those spawning will buy lots of time. It's slightly cheaper, but it's not a commonly used option.
Magic Missile: 3DU/2DU (33%)
Magic missile towers are, for most part, not used that often and are identical to an Apprentice type summoning one, on identical stats. If you have a reason to stick down magic missile towers, well, all the more power to you.
Slow Aura: 3DU/2DU (33%)
Slow Auras are a staple, and are identical to a Monk type summoning one, on identical stats. If you need DU and have the time, here's a good saving point.
Prox Trap: 3DU/2DU (33%)
Now this is where things get fun. A Jester summoning a proximity trap will have it fire about 25-33% faster than a trap summoned by a Hunter type. To be precise, the reset time is shorter on a Jester summoning a proximity trap.
Here, it may not be to your advantage, although if a Jester is active, rolling 'heal allies' will do a mapwide ALL DEFENSES heal. Traps and auras included. This may offset it, although if you ever wondered what a trap going off at 0.08 seconds looks like, here's your chance.
Darkness Trap: 3DU/2DU (33%)
A Jester summoning a darkness trap will have it fire about 25-33% faster than a trap summoned by a Hunter type. To be precise, the reset time is shorter on a Jester summoning a Darkness trap.
See the notes concerning the Proximity trap, although fortunately, darkness traps don't fire that fast, so if you want DU, here's a good place to collect it.
Etheral Spike Trap: 3DU/2DU (33%)
A Jester summoning a Etheral Spike trap will have it fire about 25-33% faster than a trap summoned by a Hunter type on identical stats. To be precise, the reset time is shorter on a Jester summoning a Etheral Spike trap.
You'll also learn that at high enough numbers, the Prox trap actually does more damage than the Etheral, it's just the Etheral always channels full damage to a single target, and a Prox trap will calculate a percentage based on range. With a Jester, if you can find 1DU, you can instead of just having a prox trap, get both a prox and a etheral. Double the damage anyone?
It's probably a good thing the reset timer is shortened here - all the more to fry with.
Gas Trap: 3DU/2DU (33%)
A Jester summoning a Gas trap will have it fire about 25-33% faster than a trap summoned by a Hunter type. To be precise, the reset time is shorter on a Jester summoning a Gas trap.
This doesn't shorten the gassing period, just the timing between resets, which is a good thing. All in all, another 1DU saved.
Deluxe Presents:
Fireball Tower 5DU/3DU (40%)
A Jester summoning a Fireball Tower will be identical to a Apprentice type summoning one, assuming same stats.
The only difference is the 40% discount. Or the better way to look at it is this: If you use two fireball towers, you can get 2 of them AND a buff beam for the same price. Or just 3 of them and a DU point to spend elsewhere.
If you use fireball towers in your defense, well, it's something to consider. (And just how much more Overpowered were you hoping for anyway? ... Actually, we'll get to stupidly overpowered in a bit.)
Lightning Aura 5DU/3DU (40%)
A Jester summoning a Lightning Aura will have the aura inflict damage 25-33% faster than if a Monk type summons one on identical stats.
I'll let you digest that bit of information. On similar stats, (in the 2700 tower attack speed range) an initiate's lightning aura attack speed is 0.13.
The Jester clocked 0.09. No, the aura doesn't sap any faster due to the improved attack speed. Besides, you want them to die faster, right?
The bad news is due to the cravats noted above, getting them all out in the right spots may require some trickery - During build phases, reduce your tower range to zero, then shuffle it into place using move tower, then put everything back on again.
Remember, if you want an Aura to show, you need it to be placed validly in present form. Given what I said it's a REALLY juicy option to abuse, but you need to plan for this.
Fortunately, due to the difficulties, Monks won't need to be too worried about their Job security just yet...
Healing Aura 4DU/3DU (25%)
A Jester summoning a Healing Aura will have the aura Heal 25-33% faster than if a Monk type summons one on identical stats.
It's not such a big deal (although can be nice), but there IS another secret in this. It will be disclosed at a later date.
Inferno Trap 4DU/3DU (25%)
A Jester summoning a Inferno trap will have the trap reset 25-33% faster than a Huntress type summoning an Inferno trap on identical stats.
Not such a big deal, the DU saved can be used elsewhere, and the reset time just means more time to lay down the barbeque.
Enrage Aura 5DU/3DU (40%)
A Jester summoning an Enrage Aura is identical to a Monk type summoning one, on identical stats.
If you use Enrage Auras (Although they're not that common), 2DU is nice to have.
Bouncer Barricade 4DU/3DU (25%)
A Jester summoning a bouncer barricade will have the bouncer have a 25-33% faster reset speed than if a Squire type summons one on identical stats.
(There's a pattern to this. You figured out what it is yet?)
Not many people use bouncers. It's mostly a footnote, but it can have uses.
Extravagent Presents:
Harpoon Turrets 6DU/4DU (33%)
A Jester summoning a Harpoon Turret will have the Harpoon have a 25-33% faster attack speed than if a Squire type summons one on identical stats.
For an idea of what this means in real terms, on identical stats assuming about 2-3k builder with a 3.7k attack stat spike, A jester NOT as active builder (namely, drop and run prior to wave start) will do as much damage (or close enough to it) as a squire type when they are out and about. Or in short, you gain about 30% in damage in DPS due to the attack speed.
And it probably doesn't help that the Jester can hold an extra weapon, does it?
For some hard numbers - we got bored, threw both turrets out and aimed them at different dummies in the tavern (See the present opening trick using an EV) then threw them both on the same buff beam, and buffed them all up to maximum level (3 star)
At this, our Squire one was clocking 0.09, and the Jester one was doing 0.06. Not bad. I then get bored, then pop a character on with a 120 buff huntress guardian that can buff up the beam, and both harpoons at the same time.
The difference went down to 0.06 for the Squire harpoon (Respectable for a harpoon) to 0.03 for the Jester one. I'll let you get your jaws off the floor. (The damage difference is what you'd expect, by the way. When we threw in a tower monk on top, we managed to get a harpoon turret that did 5.5-6m damage per second in the tavern. Let's see you get THAT out of your squire.)
Between this and the simple fact that the 33% discount means that if a squire wants 2 harpoons, the Jester can get two harpoons... AND the buff beam to power it up, as part of the bundle for the same DU cost.
I believe that a group of concerned players will form the 'Ban Jester to protect Squire Jobs' Steam group about... now.
Strength Aura 5DU/4DU (20%)
Sadly, after the above revelation, there's not much to gain here - 1DU, as for all intents and purposes, the Str Aura is identical for the Jester and Monk types, assuming identical stats.
If you want that 1 DU though, it may get fidgety to summon it, due to the crevats concerning auras above.
Lightning Tower 7DU/4DU (42%)
A Jester summoned Lightning Tower is identical to an Apprentice type summoning one, assuming identical stats. The real benefit is simply the fact that the lightning tower is actually DU cost effective at 4DU. (How much cheaper did you want it, REALLY?)
Due to this, you can build a 4 lightning tower battery and a supporting buff beam for 20 DU. It might take a bit of practice to shove 4 lightning towers onto a single buff beam. An apprentice version will cost you about 32DU (Yikes)
This doesn't sound too effective until you consider this - On good enough stats, you can turn the entire MAP into one electrified christmas tree due to the huge chain and the massive chain range. How much damage did we crank up on it? Well, about 60-70k per second on 59 targets per tower, assuming 3kish stats. Get a tower monk to power it , and the question you should be asking is 'Did you want all those small fry crispy or just well done?'
It'll also go through floors too, so Talay is a prime target for this trick, and it's always nice to use as an anti-chopper measure.
I think we'll be seeing a group forming to protect Apprentice jobs... well, if people used apprentices for builds anymore, anyway.
Deadly Strike Tower 8DU/4DU (50%)
A Jester summoned Deadly Strike tower is identical to one summoned by an Apprentice type, assuming identical stats.
Well apart from the fact you get a 50% discount anyway.
At 8DU, they're sort of cost prohibitive. At 4DU, they're actually pretty useful, particularly if you want to try to cover an area with a few walls in the way.
That, and nothing else quite says 'Get lost' like a battery of DSTs doing a million or two damage each every 0.23 seconds (or faster) through 3 walls, or in Talay, from two floors under.
Slice 'n Dice Barricade 8DU/4DU (50%)
A Jester summoned Slicer will inflict damage 25-33% faster than a squire's counterpart, assuming identical statistics.
They're not that popular anymore sadly since they take such a battering against ogres, but there's some fun you can have with them - If you have a really large move tower skill, you can constantly pick it up and drop it, and basically have your own remote arm of death. Not that it's useful, but it's fun at least.
Bowling Ball Turret 7DU/4DU (42%)
A Jester summoned Bowling Ball turret will shoot balls 25-33% faster than a squire's counterpart, assuming identical statistics.
They're not that popular anymore either, mostly cause of flying threats, but well, the above says it all. Given the discount, you can diversify. If you don't want to kill your friends via lag with 30 fireball towers, bowling ball turrets are considered a safe choice.
That should do it for now.
Later on I will cover the conventional stuff (Fortuna rolls) as well as some fun stuff which I fully expect Trendy to patch.
... Actually, this alone would probably justify Jester get hit with a stupidly powerful nerf bat. About the only thing less broken than the Jester is the Summoner, and that's actually debatable.
2. #2
1 Not allowed!
so much testing, last 3 weeks have been so much fun
edit: Harpoon proof (180 to attack rate, range and damage for both characters, my Countess has slightly lower HP cause she was only 90 at the time, Jester is lvl 93)
Squire -
Jester -
3. #3
2 Not allowed!
An in depth look into Jester part 2 - Wheel o' Fortuna
In the second part of this series, we'll touch upon the Wheel o' Fortuna, and more importantly, the little things that most people always seem to neglect to tell you about it.
The Basics:
It's pretty simple really. Hit the skill button you assigned it to, then watch as the slot machine pops up. You then stop each reel from left to right by hitting the left mouse button (or the fire button on control pads) when it reaches the symbol you want it to stop at.
If you want to stop the remainder of the reel all at once, hit right click (or reload) or the skill button again. This will lock the entire reel in place.
It'll cost you 150 mana per attempt which is taken when you start up the skill, and under MOST cases, after a completed roll, you must wait 30 seconds before you can roll again.
All combinations are only by the number, not their position. Not that it matters if you need 3x of something, but there is no functional difference between Potion, Potion, Mana Crystal and Mana Crystal, Potion, Potion, or Potion, Mana Crystal, Potion. They will all give the exact same effect.
Nothing too weird right?
People swear it's the stupidest thing ever, and consequently think that Jester is broken in a bad way and needs to be patched to give the skill (and the class) more oomph.
Spoiler: You'd be so wrong on that statement it isn't funny.
UPDATE: This trick no longer applies, due to the 7.46c patch. This has been kept to explain why the patch happened as is, and to explain what was meant by a 'continuous roll'.
This list's shorter. In fact, this is a cheap trick.
You will note that if you get hit, you will have your skill cancelled. This is useful if you miss a setup halfway through and need a reset without waiting 30 seconds.
The cheap trick is this - it takes the game about a second or so to register a completed roll.
If you're fast enough (and I mean really fast enough) you can in fact roll immediately after you make a previous one. All you need to do is get hit just after you get declared a winner (or loser).
Immediately activate the skill again, and the reel will show up. The results of this reel will count. You can keep doing this as long as you have the mana to pay the cost each time (and get kicked out of your animation every time)
It's easier in theory than in practice though, but if you already have 30 ogres breathing down your neck, rolling a stun followed by a debuff enemies is a REALLY nice way to turn the tables.
However, you'll most likely be constantly smacked in the meantime (Did I menton being armoured to the teeth is a really good idea?) so it means you'd be spam locking your rolls... and that means that there's an equal opportunity things can go wrong, well, for at least fifteen seconds.
Once again, we'll go through a play by play.
Format goes:
Skill (Combination)
Effects and notes.
Now, shall we get to it?
Heal Players (Potion x3)
This one seems deceptively underpowered. It just heals players right? Why on earth would you need to heal other PLAYERS? It's the most useless skill ever! It should be-
... Who am I kidding? It's actually so stupidly powerful, that this entry alone makes Jester arguably more overpowered than the Summoner.
Why is that?
The skill description is really inaccurate, for one. When they say 'Heal Players' Trendy neglected to mention that it also does other stuff.
Like heal towers for instance. Auras. Traps, Minions.
That sounds good right?
Well, at a fortuna skill of zero, it'll hit you for about 30% of the total, and it goes up from there as you load points. This is bad enough to get demands for the nerf bat, since Summoners might feel upset about how flash heal might get redundant as it is.
... So just how many things does this affect?
Everything. On the map. Period.
It doesn't matter where you stand. You could be in a cubby hole on the other end of the Crystaline Dimension, it'll heal every single last one of these defenses on that entire map.
All for 150 mana. Every 30 seconds, if you can get it down right.
For the ultra lazy, roll it at the end of a phase, or at the beginning of a new one, and don't ever have to worry about defenses ever again. Heck, get some low level Jester to do it, and you can AFK and sip a martini at the Club Tavern while the Jester maintains a survival for you completely solo (until he or she gets killed anyway) and talk about how you're part of the 1% or something.
I imagine a lot of summoners will start forming a steam group, demanding the nerf bat, about now.
Upgrade Nearby Tower (Mana Crystal x3)
This is a sort of okay skill to save up to 1070 mana (1220 - 150 for using the skill) if done correctly or if you're under level 60, to sneak in a level 5 defense without being able to actually be able to hold enough mana to actually do it manually.
The only time this is a bad thing is if the resulting upgrade goes from base to level 1, making you a net loss in mana.
It'll pick the nearest one to you, so get up right up nice and tight to the one you want to boost.
It pales in larger games (did you read what I just said above?), but if you're an up and aspiring Jester, well, here's an early game breaker.
Damage All Enemies (Sword x3)
This skill damages all enemies from a starting point of about 25% and it goes up from there depending on your skill points invested (at least from what I can tell).
It seems a bit silly, only because of another entry, except of course a few things which make it a combination to remember.
The first is that unlike its sister skill Kill Percentage of Enemies, it hits everyone barring bosses (It used to do that though) and when you have 30 100 million HP ogres breathing down your neck, cutting them all down to 75m or less will make your life a lot easier, and may arguably be better than just knocking down 3-6 of them.
The second is that it counts as enough damage to cause a disruption. If you think an army of Dijinn are trying to unsummon your defenses in squadrons, this is a good way to stop them from trying, even if you're at the other end of the Crystalline Dimension when using the skill. When disrupted, they need 30 seconds to start the process again, assuming they're all alive at this point.
... You can probably see what your next move is probably going to be at this point, right?
Golden Enemies (Goblin x3)
This one isn't used commonly, only because this is normally a bad effect. You don't want an army of golden ogres coming at you. It used to be worse too - bosses used to be able to be goldened, and if you want an ultimate challenge, that's where you want to be.
Two notes. If you have a second Jester around, they're still subject to any other roll on this list, so it's not so bad.
The second is more interesting - For some odd reason, a golden enemy has this tendency to drop stuff, and it tends to be good stuff too. It might just be my luck though.
You feel lucky? Roll this and see if something good shows up. Just hope your defenses can handle the extra set of hammering.
Buff Players (Eternia Crystal x3)
It lasts for 15 seconds, and increases all hero damage from a starting 30% up, depending on skill points invested.
Eh, so you say, it's only 15 seconds. The monk Hero boost is far better than that, so why the heck should I care?
Well, only one minor thing. It's just the fact during those 15 seconds, it stacks WITH Hero Boost and all those other nice skills and effects. Yes, it affects pets as well, just like Hero Boost, and more importantly, it's applied AFTER all the effects are resolved, meaning that's a 30%+ boost from what your Hero Boost with a Propeller Cat was already doing.
... So who wants Golden Demon tonight?
I suspect that everyone's going to get together, form a steam group and start demanding the nerf bat, just on principle now.
Slow down time (Potion x2, Mana Crystal)
This does what it says on the tin - you'll get slow motion time for the duration.
It's also considered the most annoying effect in the game (although not exactly harmful) and inexperienced hosts will kick Jesters out on principle if they make this roll once.
First things first:
This is the most likely 'Missed roll' you'll make, if mapwide repairs are your thing. In terms of the reel, the Mana Crystal is the slot right AFTER the potion, so a click a quarter of a second too slow will get you this combination. So cut your Jester some slack, everyone makes mistakes occasionally.
Secondly, it affects everything. This means if you have a second Jester around, their roll becomes VERY easy to land. It's actually a useful safety net for this reason, and if nothing else, it could serve as a wakeup call that defenses aren't getting their regular heal and that all hands should, you know, start repairing if they really need it.
Kill Percent of Enemies (Sword x2, Eternia Crystal)
This one's the better known of the kill line - when rolled, it'll kill a percentage of enemies outright, and it is unknown if the skill points invested alter the power of this skill.
The skill used to work against the old one and other bosses, but that boat sailed a long time ago. It IS satisfying to one shot a 600 mill HP demon though, but Trendy Entertainment in its wisdom decided to take away this trivia point.
Of course, you don't get to pick... or do you?
You DO get to pick the very first target that the skill will hit. It will ALWAYS be the closest enemy. So if you have a 100 million HP ogre breathing down your neck and you roll this, well, you'll have a 0 million HP ogre taking a nap after the roll.
Secondly, it will ALWAYS kill a minimum of 3 targets, and from experience, will on a full map kill between 8 and 15. This is useful, because if there's only ogres on the map, well, there they'll go.
It also is useful for clearing out stuck enemies at the end of the wave simply for this reason.
This gets suitably absurd when you get 4 Jesters on a map - have one roll heals and have 3 roll kill percents. You'll be making record times since a lot of monsters will mysteriously start dropping dead.
Buff Enemies (Eternia Crystal x2, Goblin)
This is as you can guess, a dangerous roll to make - it'll increase all damage by about 2-2.5x from enemies and reduce their damage taken by about a third for about 15 seconds. Good thing is, this roll doesn't affect bosses (thankfully) although it used to.
Then again, back when it used to, it used to add a 30x damage multiplier, and reduce their damage to 1/10 for about 5 seconds.
The problem is that on the reel, the goblin is one before the Eternia crystal, and consequently can be considered a 'miss' of the buff players. Needless to say, if you want to use buff players, be sure to aim late, not early, that way if you miss, you will roll a dud, as opposed to making life a little dangerous.
Debuff Enemies (Goblin x2, Eternia Crystal)
This one's pretty useful, although it no longer works on bosses. It effectively reduces their damage by 50%, and increases damage taken by about 33%. It lasts about 15 seconds and supposedly, more skill points in the skill improves these numbers in your favour.
If you sync two jesters rolling this, you can more or less keep this effect up virtually all the time - this in turn makes some crushing waves a heck of a lot easier, and if you add a third to roll a heal every 30 seconds, should be considered easy mode.
This of course, assumes people play with other people, and it actually requires effort to keep up, both which are something I'm not that convinced actually happens in Dungeon Defenders.
This frankly should have players demanding that Jester be called the 'I win' character on its OWN. Combined with the rest of these notes, you have a really, REALLY good case arguing that Jester is the most overpowered class in Dungeon Defenders, and should be promptly banned from all play.
The sad part is of course, we're not done yet.
Stun Enemies (Goblin x2, Potion)
This is the last very useful fun and (I dare say) overpowered roll.
When rolled, you stop everyone in their tracks. Depending on how many skill points you invested in this, the duration increases. You normally get at least three seconds.
This is undeniably useful. You have the ability to jam up ogre trains from halfway across the Crystalline Dimension and buy time to repair, upgrade, or just to carve them up.
Seriously, we gave Jester the keys to the entire game from top to bottom. How much more overpowered did you actually WANT?
Players Unable to Repair (Mana Crystal x2, Sword)
Not good as it locks the repair command, lasts 10-15 seconds. There's no reason you'd want this roll other than to annoy people, or perhaps, in a poor attempt to be funny.
You're most likely to roll this by accident if you try to hit Upgrade Tower.
On the flip side, it's not the end of the world either - it doesn't stop a second Jester just rolling heal all defenses. Or flash heal for that matter. Heck, it doesn't stop you upgrading the defense to repair it, or even using instant upgrade for those few that uses the Female apprentice, so stop your panicking.
Downgrade Nearby Tower (Mana Crystal x2, Goblin)
Another 'Slightly not good' one. It'll knock off a level off a nearby defense. Just one.
It's mostly done when you're bored and want to be funny, but otherwise a waste of a perfectly good roll. It's also a possible miss of 'Upgrade tower'.
Needless to say, it's very easily fixed, unless you're under level 60 and it's a defense higher level than anyone can actually get the mana for - I dunno, just upgrade the defense again?
If you're over upgrading your towers in a low level game, you could just wait the 30 seconds and just reupgrade it again with the Upgrade Nearby Tower roll, like you did in the first place.
Needless to say, we're in a position where we can safely say that Jester is the most overpowered class of all, barring the Summoner, maybe only cause getting your own MU count that doubles defenses is REALLY, REALLY nice, and even THAT is debatable.
... The sad part is, of course this.
We're not done yet.
Please stand by as we reveal some of the stuff that Trendy Entertainment really, REALLY need to fix. Or the really cheap tricks most people aren't aware of.
4. #4
0 Not allowed!
Wow nice tutorial/topic man!
I read the whole thing and i can only make up for maybe 1 little small mistake perhaps... I can be totally wrong here but correct me if i am.
It's at this part:
Upgrade Nearby Tower (Mana Crystal x3)
This is a sort of okay skill to save 1220 mana if done correctly or if you're under level 60, to sneak in a level 5 defense without being able to actually be able to hold enough mana to actually do it manually.
I think it's better to say you save 1220 - 150 = 1070 (wheel of fortune costs) ?
Besides that.. you actually convinced me Jester is very usefull in a build. (wheel of fortune wise) Some of those details you talk about and advises really helped me understand the usefullnes of the Jester. And for that i thank you!
5. #5
0 Not allowed!
Yeah, that's a mistake on my half - The math you pointed out is correct, I just never really thought about it much.
I don't use Upgrade Nearby Tower much - It's mostly due to the fact that 99.99% of the time, I have a genie in use, and get mana very, very quickly. Due to the naturally rapid speed that Jester upgrades in, if you have the mana, you'll have your upgrades, unless you're being ogre rushed.
Thanks for letting me know, it's been fixed accordingly.
6. #6
0 Not allowed!
Quote Originally Posted by Setsuna View Post
Thanks for letting me know, it's been fixed accordingly.
Ah no problem, it's a tiny itsy bitsy spidery mistake :P , especcially considering the whole article which is pretty huge =P
7. #7
2 Not allowed!
An in depth look into Jester part 3 - Move Tower, and Jester character setups.
In part three, we will look at Move Tower, as well as look at Jester equipment setups to get the most out of the class.
As with Wheel o' Fortuna, there's stuff no one bothered to mention (Although not quite as much as Fortuna though) so we'll walk through it.
The Basics:
This is pretty simple. You use the skill, and as long as you're in the mode and paid up the 80 mana to activate it, you can move as many towers as you like within your radius, setting both the placement, as well as the rotation of the towers.
Select the defense with left click. Select a valid position with left click again after selecting the defense, and if it is a tower, you will need to set its initial facing.
If you want to exit the mode, right click or press reload.
Remember, you can move multiple towers with one use of move tower, and the moment you use the skill it costs 80 mana.
Sounds simple right? Well, as always...
The Cravats:
- You can't use this in Pure Strategy mode at all (Does anyone play this?) meaning that the only class that has mobile towers is the summoner.
- You are not allowed to move Buff Beams, Proton Beams, or minions (although why on earth you wouldn't just walk your minions across is anyone's guess, short of a trip in Sky City)
- You cannot rotate Physical Beams or Reflect barriers although they can be moved. The edge you select will be the edge that will be placed back down. If you're lucky, the rotation will be what it was originally, but don't always bet on it.
- 80 mana is docked when you activate the skill, not when you move a defense - don't hit it by accident when you have no intention of moving any defense, because you'll have to cancel to exit the mode, wasting 80 mana.
- The skill will NOT cancel if you get hit unlike Wheel o' Fortuna. This is a good thing, when you're fishing out some harpoons or other desirable defenses you intend to use that just hatched, since you can't be interrupted when using the skill, short of death, or being webbed (as being webbed will lock all skills for a short period).
This can also a bad thing if what's trying to interrupt you is 30 ogres, since you have to manually exit the mode before you become a pancake.
-You are subject to ALL placement rules as if you're constructing a new defense when attempting to move a defense - this means you may not be able to move an aura (particularly if it's buffed with a buff beam), due to the fact all your placement positions are considered invalid. See the next point though.
- If you cancel BEFORE you set the rotation on the defense (or in the case of traps or auras, before you put the defense back down), the defense will not move. This is a failsafe - sometimes you'll find that you can't move things in a valid location within your range - this means you can cancel without actually moving it. It's a waste of 80 mana, but at least it's not in limbo or something.
Cheap tricks:
If you're having trouble selecting or putting down a defense, remember you can zoom in and out with the mouse scroll button. This in turn may make some defenses more selectable, and some previously unavailable spots that you couldn't dump a defense somehow available, such as huge distances above or below (Talay and King's Game are two good examples). It's a fine art, and best conducted during the build phase.
Auras are particularly difficult to select, but also remember there's one surefire way to make them small enough to select - reduce your tower range! You can always do this by simply just adjusting your equipment (or if you're moving someone else's auras, get them to adjust theirs)
Make them small, then port them over to exactly where you want to drop it. This allows for placements that would be considered impossible otherwise, like say a set of auras that overlap into a dark portal.
You can move traps (and auras too, although it's very difficult) forward if a buff beam is in place and have just the edge of the trap touching the beam. This is because for move trap, it doesn't shrink the size of the trap UNLESS the game detects the trap is no longer touching the beam. However, it will use the enlarged buffed size to determine this.
This can be useful if you want to power inferno traps with your gas traps, while giving more room for gas traps to do their work - you know, to prevent shark charges.
Remember you can rotate the towers by just placing them on the spot and redoing their rotation - this is surprisingly useful if you want to have a 'All towers on deck' situation, need to tweak a covering angle, or if you want to see what happens when a boss lands right in front of 8 or more fully upgraded and buffed Deadly Strike Towers and Harpoons. (Spoiler - it dies very, very quickly)
The absolute most number of skill points you will ever need for move tower for all practical purposes is about 1750 - If you get the skill this high (or higher) you will be able to move a defense from the main island in Sky City to the south island, where the only way across is the hover pads. You can't place a defense on the hover pads, but with that skill figure, you will be able to jump it (if you're standing at the right place) from one side to the other.
Needless to say, Move tower has a huge utility value, and is not a skill that should be ignored.
Now, for some general Jestering advice, particularly when it comes down to character outfitting and statistics.
Advantages of Jester DPS types-
Speed and HP - For some weird reason, the Jester is the fastest running of all the character types, and yet Jester gets a stupid amount of HP, it's not funny.
Heal speed - They have a fast upgrade and heal speed (They go nearly as fast as an apprentice on overdrive, yikes!) so they're good for taking care of themselves given the mana, even with low hero repair speeds.
Versatility - Two weapons, meaning twice the spread. It also means you can keep utility items up your sleeve, like say a portal gun, for intangible benefits (like say getting off the Sky City boss without having to jump).
Wheel o' Fortuna - You did read part 2, right? Map wide control abilities are useful, and if you practice enough, Buff Players is just nice.
Disadvantages of Jester DPS types-
Damage - If you want raw damage, you're in the wrong place. Seriously, Monk and Barbarian are where you want to be, or if you like ranged, a Huntress. Monk has the stupidly powerful Hero Boost. Hiuntress has the ranged shot, and so does the Barbarian with its point blank skill. The Jester has nothing.
Wheel o' Fortuna - You better be practicing, cause rolling Buff Enemies can hurt.
General Distrust - No one likes Jesters, didn't you know?
Statistics priority:
Hero Damage, Hero HP, Wheel o' Fortuna.
If you can, try to have good Tower HP and Tower attack and a half decent Tower firing speed, since even 2k stats will actually serve fairly well for defensive presenting in the case of a major defense break.
Maximum resists, to make that stupid amount of HP go further, and the usual stat loading on hero attack and hero HP.
Bring a pet of choice, depending who's there with you. Propeller Cats are nice, and so is a Fairy, Cupid or Monkey. If in doubt, bring a seahorse, or default to a Genie or Dijinn, since having mana to roll is always a good thing.
Decide if you're smacking people with a stick, or shooting them, and arm accordingly.
Play Style:
Just learn to roll what you need (Buff Players, Debuff Enemies, and probably Heal Players on the side and the odd Kill percent of Enemies) while beating up stuff. It can't be that hard, can it? Just remember, Fortuna rolls do not work well in PvP, before you try.
Advantages of Tower Jester Types-
Speed and HP - For some weird reason, the Jester is the fastest running of all the character types, and yet Jester gets a stupid amount of HP, it's not funny. It means you can survive as an active builder and get places fast. Jester is designed and excels as an active builder.
Build speed - Presents are VERY quick to drop. You can drop a line of presents and tie up an ogre rush for days if you can keep up. You can also upgrade all defenses as fast as humanly possible, if you have the mana to keep up.
Tower Power - All your towers compared to the other 4 types have some sort of inbult advantage in them. The fact you can hold another weapon ALSO means that you can compensate for the 300-500 upgrade levels you need to spend on armour to clear a good armouring percentage (say 70% to start), so you can benefit from the 30% damage gain for being active.
For a bit of math, if you have 4000 attack tower attack, and you leave the game, your towers will effectively attack as if they're only at 2800 tower attack. Considering you only need to spend about 300-500 upgrade levels, converting the same set to a 70%+ NM resist set will net you about 3200-3500 looks like a bargain now, particularly after the 30% or so attack speed boost, effectively adding another 30% damage again.
Then there's the simple fact you can lever a significant defensive advantage - Getting 20 DU out of nowhere to then construct a massive lightning battery is a massive game changer, for instance.
Wheel o' Fortuna - You did read part 2, right? For the tower Jester type, this is what justifies keeping them in the game as a utility/support, even if their direct damage capabilities are minimal. Having the ability to command the field of play to your will every 30 seconds is worth the character slot in its own right, particularly if they're in command of a significant number of defenses. Don't you DARE let anyone tell you otherwise.
Disadvantages of Jester Tower types-
Time - If you intend to build seriously as a Jester, be aware that you HAVE to keep bending those laws of probability to get you what you want. This means you have to keep rolling, and keep rolling until you get what you want. You better get used to waves of presents.
Second wave builder - It's good practice to not roll presents first wave, due to the fact that there's no safety net. it's also not a bad idea to partly build a defense, and let the other classes build initially. This means the Jester doesn't QUITE put everyone out of business (at least the monk and Huntress) until such time as the Jester can build the defenses to replace what's there.
Survival build slant - Jestering up defenses are a long term thing, so if you're running short wave maps (Namely, most Campaign) your mileage may vary. You CAN however, make it all the way through to Sky city on a pure Jester build, although this depends on what your first wave presents end up like. Jester is the OTHER class that can solo all the way up on NMHC Campaign (With Summoner being the other), but they didn't give an achievement for that one, sadly.
Wheel o' Fortuna - You better be practicing, cause rolling Buff Enemies can hurt, and missing your rolls generally can cause issues.
General Confusion - How many people actually understand Jester build theory? It confuses people, and people don't like things that aren't certain.
Statistics Priority:
Tower Damage, Tower Attack Speed, Tower HP. Tower range doesn't need to be beyond about 1500-2000 really.
This is because, even with the Jester's accelerated attack speed on most defenses, a point invested in tower damage does about 5-7% more than a point invested in tower attack speed, at high levels.
The margin is VERY low though, so if you can somehow generate about 10% more tower attack speed points over tower attack due to armour setups, take the extra 10% speed.
Remember to keep around a method to reduce your tower range to 0 if you can, to massively abuse move tower. If you can simultaneously boost move tower, do it, for a two for one deal.
Your Fortuna skill can be outright zero, and still be effective defensively, so don't worry too much on it.
Good resists. The more the better, but at least gun for 80% resists across the board particularly in Nightmare. You will find yourself under fire while moving towers, making presents, and Fortuna rolling, and you REALLY want to make sure you live long enough to make your tricks connect.
Yes, you will lose at least 400-600 stats on the armours, but you will gain the tower attack speed (which will negate that stat loss) AND active builder (Which just gives you 30% damage outright) AND you still will be permitted to affect the entire map via Fortuna, so you tell me.
Pet of choice is Genie until such time you don't need copious amounts of mana anymore, then switch to your tower boosting pet of choice - Even if it's a Pet Rock. A Jester with a pet rock can almost keep up with an unencumbered Barbarian not using a skill, so although you run slow, you'll at least be able to get places on a reasonable timeframe.
You'll need it to upgrade, massively lay down presents and generally be a walking god with lots of HP via Wheel o' Fortuna, your resists and your good natural HP. A Dijinn is a decent choice, but if you carry a big gun with decent tower stats that has its damage cranked up, you'll kill all the small fry, and generate lots of mana faster anyway.
Let the presents do the tanking, and on good tower attack, they'll do a lot of talking, with a side dish of pain.
Play Style:
Understand the laws of probability - If you want a strength aura to show up in a sector, drop at LEAST 4 extravagant presents at that point before combat phase as an example. Use the other builders (or other players) as cover while you summon your superior defenses, using enemies to crack open your presets, and learn to supervise one section, while maintaining the rest of the map remotely via Fortuna.
You should get your heal player roll down to reflex to remotely administer sections you're not supervising, and learn how to scrape out DU AND renovate a section safely at the same time by the use of move tower. Get both down right, and you will have a stupid statistical advantage over most builders, due to the scaling problem, and the simple fact you have a significant DU advantage.
The fact you have total map control is almost icing on the cake compared to a complete defense domination.
That should cover that section.
... But no, we're STILL not done yet. There's even MORE reasons why Jester is effectively the most overpowered and broken class in the game.
But what could be left?
Well, next in an in depth look into Jester part 4 - The really scary stuff.
8. #8
0 Not allowed!
nice part 3 , and now it's officially huge and not 'pretty huge' :P
didn't knew this was possible:
I thought they would not move with the ship :P
9. #9
0 Not allowed!
Quote Originally Posted by boyjim View Post
didn't knew this was possible:
I thought they would not move with the ship :P
You can set one end and it'll indefinitely hold, unless you die even if the weapon is not active at the time. So you set one section to say be at the crystal or somewhere else on land (say the right mouse button/reload) that will set the blue portal there.
Then you open the other side when you're ready to go, and hop through. The portal doesn't move with the ship, but you can usually make the quick dash through before the portal moves off the ship. Anyone else following will have to be quick though.
It's not exclusively a Jester trick, as the EV can do this as well. The EV also has a rocket costume, meaning they can just Jetpack to safety most of the time though.
10. #10
0 Not allowed!
Sky City - swapping out Towers, NMHCMM to completion, really needed a Tower Boosting Monk to finish though, but wow that was a lot of fun
we should totally write that up, somehow
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Easily upset stomach and problems digesting certain things
An_251686 posted:
I have always had an easily upset stomach. Sushi, spicy foods, really anything i like almost always results in diarrhea, literally sushi everytime though.
Another thing that i've noticed that is strange is that often times my body doesn't fully digest the foods i eat, for example i notice bits of salad or seeds or chives in my stool. Also whenever i drink things that contain red food coloring, my stool is red. Hawaiian punch does it and sometimes daiquiris do as well.
I've always had these problems for the most part and i'm just a little concerned. Should i talk to my doctor about this? I'm afraid he is just going to tell me to stop eating the foods that i love and i am willing to put up with the constant upset stomach if that is the case.
sheba_q responded:
It's worth doing some testing to find out if there's something that you're reacting to (food intolerance). The problem is that we don't always have an automatic reaction - it can take hours to days for it to happen. So while you feel like you're reacting to everything, it could be just one thing and if you remove it then you end up removing the problem.
I wouldn't worry about the food coloring - it's not uncommon. Green, blue and purple food coloring are usually the reason for (at times rather neon) green stool. I know if I eat a fair amount of black licorice or black jelly beans then I'm going to end up with with rather disturbing looking green-black stools - but I know it's just the food coloring and it'll pass.
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Screen-Free Week - could you do it?
Haylen_WebMD_Staff posted:
April 30 - May 6 is Screen-Free Week - an annual event in which parents, children, teachers, and others across the country turn off screen media (TV, video games, computers, cell phones, etc.) and celebrate the magic of being unplugged.
I have to say no since we use watching American Idol to threaten the kids into good behavior. I admit: we need to cut it down - but a whole week? No. Maybe if we were on vaca...
Would you? Could you?
Take the Poll
Could your kids go "screen-free" for a week?
• Sure! Not a problem...
• Would be tough but we could do it (maybe)
• I'd like to - realistically it won't happen
• NO WAY
View Poll Results
tlkittycat1968 responded:
During hockey play-offs? No way!
DH is seriously addicted to his soap (The Young and the Restless) so I really doubt he could to for a week without watching it. I probably could since we automatically record shows so I'd be able to watch them later.
VicsEandJ responded:
No way would I ever even consider it!!!! We all have our addictions and tv is mine!
I'm sure, if forced- i.e. dropped off in the jungle somhwere, etc-I could do it, but there is no way that I would willingly EVER do it!!
I think everything- even tv- is good in moderation. Doing everything in extremes is not the solution to anything!
Stephensmom1214 responded:
I wish we could, BUT, DS has a severe speech delay, and uses a communication on the iPad. If he ASKS to watch something (either on TV or youtube), we allow it for the most part, because it encourages communication (both verbal, and with his AAC). But it wouldn't hurt for us to cut back, I suppose.
seeit2 responded:
My kids could easily go screen-free. I am currently without any TV but broadcast and a rickety I'm doing a lot of reading right now. (And sometimes I browse Zulu for stuff I really wanted to see). But I need my phone and my laptop and so does DH. So we would find it very difficult, especially since we are waiting for word on another contract for DH.
iocasta responded:
We could do it, there wasn't an expectation by our respective jobs that we are contactable via e-mail. It is nice when we go on vacations to places where the internet is dicey so we can tell everyone that we may not get back to them quickly but those places are getting harder and harder to find.
iocasta responded:
I just read your question more carefully sorry I miss read it at first. Yes, Levi could easily go screen free for a week. He does it quite often.
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recherchez un mot, comme b4nny :
636 definitions by Jake
One who is only attracted to minorites.
Look at that hoon all over the black girl.
de Jake 7 février 2005
Recieving a blow job while taking a dump.
Honey, I have to take a dump. Time to give me a blop.
When Cindy was giving me a blop, she passed out from the fumes.
de Jake 28 septembre 2003
That trixy didn't get too far
de Jake 31 mars 2005
Oh yeah w00t!
de Jake 5 avril 2005
when a mystical unicorn sticks its horn up your ass
My little pony unicorned me last night!
de jake 6 août 2004
(noun) penis, cock, whang
We're friends with benefits , she comes over once a week and sits on my prong while I finger her clit.
de Jake 24 mars 2004
to hit a car in the side
i lost control on black ice and t-boned his SUV
de Jake 7 mars 2004
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46242
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ZF-2416: Documentation and Use Cases
Done as of Friday, 25 Jan 2008
Re-opening -- need to add i18n and use cases.
Documentation is updated to reflect current code, and includes sections on I18n and several advanced use cases. Cases I'd like to see, but which I have not completed and do not see as must-haves, include:
• Performing AJAX server-side validation
• Form using AutoComplete (probably should be on AutoComplete docs)
• Advanced decorator ordering
Closing, as essential (and some advanced use cases) are now done.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46296
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Red Spit Is Eating This Steel Bridge
Spitting's a gross habit. Spitting on a bridge hanger and weakening its structural integrity. Well that's just rude and really gross.
All that red you see. That's spit. Human spit that's slowly eating away at the steel structure keeping the Howrah Bridge in India from collapsing into the Hooghly River. The reason the spit is red and slowly dissolving the bridge is because locals enjoy chewing on and spitting a stimulant known as paan. The paan-laced spit has reduced the thickness of the steel from six millimeters to three millimeters.
Port authorities have decided to cover the steel with fiberglass. Maybe they should have thought of that two millimeters ago. []
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Osama bin Laden Was a Geek
The myth of Osama in the Cave pervades American terror culture. Before we found him in a house, we imagined him in a cave, as a West-hating hermit. But Osama was no luddite—tech helped shape his terror.
The New Yorker's recent profile of Bin Laden—as a child, a father, a murderous mastermind—all share a thread. The man, from tyke to terrorist, was glued to screens. Think back to his death—his rathole compound had only one link to the outside world: a satellite dish to accommodate bin Laden's obsessive TV watching. The New Yorker's Steve Coll notes that the Pakistani abode bore a striking resemblance to the Saudi two-story home Bin Laden was raised in, and spent his boyhood incessantly watching TV news. It was also a boyhood spent showered with the latest gadgets, imported by the planeload through his brother Salem, who scooped them up en masse during trips to Manhattan. He quickly understood the power of tech to spread a message.
Bin Laden, having been gripped by broadcasts of hijackings as a child, used the mass media of his adulthood to reshape the way terror terrorizes. He was an early adopter. Long before social networking was even a concept, Osama used the internet to share and bolster his cause. Videos were recorded digitally and beamed to press outlets. Recruits were wrangled and organized online. He even procured satellite phones from Long Island to ensure communications in tough conditions. His message of murder and destruction could be taken global. He demonstrated the savvy of a media executive—a vocation his son has since taken up.
Bin Laden was no Zuckerberg—not a visionary, just slightly (and effectively) beyond the curve. As his hiding continued, his influence waned, and he became more a consumer of terror media than a producer of it. Nonetheless, he changed the way his vile industry operates. As Coll puts it, Bin Laden was "Excite...to the search engine business. He lacked the unifying ideas and insights required to build a sustainable community of followers, but, in some ways, he was ahead of his time."
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Motor City Money Edit
Aired on: Wed Mar 28 2012 Edit
Vicous dogs and buried hazards hinder the dig for relics from the Motor City's historic boom and American Savage's profits. Edit
Ric Savage, Rue Shumate, Bob Buttafuso, Rita Savage, Giuseppe Savage aka "G"
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over 2 yearsReply
American Digger
“#AmericanDigger - Wow...finding those coins...I mean, WOW! And that pilgrim's cross! This show is pretty awesome. I like that it is different than the standard treasure hunting shows that are out there now!”
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Tag Archives: display settings
Changing resolution in Google Chrome browser
There are several methods by which you can change the resolution of the Google Chrome browser. If you encounter any Google Chrome problems while doing any of these methods, contact the support team for support. Using keyboard shortcuts You can change the resolution on Google Chrome with the help of simple keyboard shortcuts. To increase […]
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Mike Mills on Nowness
I get the feed to Nowness everyday. Sometimes I just go back to see what is of interest. I thought this video that Mike Mills did ( it is an excerpt from something larger ) is interesting. The kids are scared about the future of the planet. It is a quick video. Worth a watch.
Mike Mills: Kids' Wisdom on Nowness.com
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Carolina Santos-Neves
food + cooking
10 Questions for Julia Stiles
The Dexterand Bourne Ultimatum actress talks about her favorite food film, her eating habits on and off the set, and how she's come to agree with Michael Pollan...
food + cooking
10 Questions for Olympic Diet Expert Dr. Louis E. Grivetti
Learn what foods fueled the Olympians of old—and how athletes' diets have changed—in this interview with noted UC Davis nutrition historian by Gourmet Live's Carolina Santos-Neves...
food + cooking
10 Questions for Walmart's Sustainability Director, Kory Lundberg
The chief of environmental stewardship for America’s largest grocer tells Carolina Santos-Neves how far this giant has come in reducing waste, conserving resources, and stocking its shelves with...
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Thursday, 5 January 2012
Antoniotsai's Dinosaur 5-string bass with shockingly bad oil painted top
Here at Guitarz we've looked - and laughed - at Vietnamese maker Antoniotsai's guitars before (see here, here and here), and whilst this Dinosaur 5-string bass is quite tame compared to some of their other creations, it's still pretty dreadful. Not only is the dinosaur oil painting rather inexpertly realised (and let's face it, if you've absolutely got to have a Tyrannosaurus Rex on your guitar, then you'd want it as BIG and BOLD as possible, and not merely a head creeping into the bottom left-hand corner of the picture) but also look closely at the woodwork which appears irregular and wonky, as if very crudely cut out by hand.
One very strange feature is the position of the control knobs and output jack, slap bang in the middle of the body behind the bridge. One might argue that this would make the bass more readily adaptable for left-handed players, which I would understand if it didn't have Precision-esque offset body horns.
Currently listed on eBay with a starting bid of $0.99.
G L Wilson
1 comment:
1. In the interest of balance, I'd like to say that there are some rather good Antoniotsai instruments out there - I have five (three five-strings, one six-string, and one seven-string), and one of the five-strings is my most-used fretted bass. It's not quite as, um, stylistically extreme as the featured ones though - see
Related Posts with Thumbnails
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HC Deb 13 February 1976 vol 905 c451W
Mr. Stonehouse
asked the Secretary of State for Trade which sections of the inspector's report or evidence was provided to the police in the case of John Willment Automobiles Limited without the permission of the persons named or their knowledge.
Mr. Clinton Davis
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AMD Radeon Performance Preview On Linux 3.8
Comments Filter:
• by dbscoach (1993982) on Sunday December 16, 2012 @05:45PM (#42308747)
... never buy tech on a promise.
• by Billly Gates (198444) on Sunday December 16, 2012 @06:42PM (#42308997) Journal
I counter.
I love my ATI and it works with Linux fine (ati 5750), yet it is not perfect. Never buy tech on a promise? I have been burned by Nvidia for years though they have supposedly excellent Linux support. They die, blackscreen, overheat. Maybe it is the PNY brand? Who knows.
ATI has the best hardware. Nvidia has the best software. Your choice will depend on which you value most? ATI is not perfect as I had some bizaare driver bugs in Windows. I am running a beta driver now because of the erratic frame rate story posted on slashdot. So far so good in that release. I have not experienced a single BSOD, but just stuff like overscan on HDMI not working with some driver versions and youtube videos not scaling up when you click on the button.
I prefer supperior hardware as I can always revert if I have a crappy driver but do not have the cash to buy another nvidia card when it fails for some reason. I could have just had bad luck with mine and found a rare gem with my asus ati 5750 that came with my system.
Also I do not game under Linux or run 3d modelling so I do not stress it with my ATI. Just run compiz and videos. I do gaming occasionally on Windows though so I guess if you run Blender on Linux perhaps an NVidia might be worth alook?
• I'm in the market for a new desktop PC. Currently have an old nVidia card, and haven't had any serious problems.
I don't do gaming, but love my 3D desktop effects. The new machine's for Android development. My old one doesn't run eclipse very well, and the latest Android emulators are downright painfully slow on it. But other than that, the box has served me well for 8 years, and it was a cheapo AMD box back then (have since added the cheap nVidia card and some memory). So, I think I'm looking for a fai
• Flame war right here :-)
I have never had instability. But there are a few quirks. My via soundchip with my AMD board is crap so I switched to HDMI and that is where I had a few glitches where the drivers assume I own a TV and not a LCD screen. It zooms out and creates a black edge as TVs overscan and include this black edge for some strange reason that is hidden and zoomed back in when you watch TV so you never know.
One driver version did have that fps bug where if you spun around in a game the fps were goo
• by Stalks (802193) *
I too had the overscan problem on an ATi card when using HDMI.
However I found in the Catalyst Control Center options to adjust the scan and have it perfect. Went from being a problem to not a problem.
• by guises (2423402)
I just recently ordered a 650 Ti, because that's the newest thing, but if you're not planning on playing any games then yes - Intel is the way to go for cheapness and reliability and power efficiency.
• Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The AMD APU desktop combos are a fantastic deal with great results (from a happy, cheap owner).
• by Rob Y. (110975)
I assume you run Linux - otherwise, your comment isn't relevant. So do you use the closed or open source ATI driver?
• I run Windows 7, and play my games just fine with the latest Catalyst driver. I use it for coding and Diablo 3
• I have an AMD APU (E-350) on my netbook running Linux. Went with the open source driver, since the only benefit of the closed one was video acceleration. (Videos I watch on my media senter with 50" screen, not my 12"screen).
• by smash (1351)
Onboard intel GPU will do you fine. Drivers are open source too.
• by hairyfeet (841228)
Here ya go, 6 core AMD for $230 after MIR [tigerdirect.com] all you got to do is add the hard drive. the HD4350 that comes with it is far enough behind the curve that they should have the bugs worked out and if you don't like it? At this price you can just sell the card and slap an Nvidia in there no problem. I have one of the X6 CPUs and I can tell ya they are great,turbocore makes short work of jobs that only need a couple of fast cores and with 6 cores to share the load you can multitask all day long with no problem. it c
• I got an 8 core piledriver for $180, and it wasnt any particular kind of deal. Just go to newegg.
• He mentioned Linux so I am not too sure. My ati 5750 ran fine but that was Fedore 13 (2010 - March 2011 before I quit Linux again) and Ubuntu 10.4 ... I think?!
I do not know if it would run today and this user is mentioning Linux. In such a case never go with AMD/ATI as they fired their last Linux driver developer if I recall properly?! Or perhaps he was the chipset or AMD cpu driver/optimizer guy for the Linux kernel?
If you are running Windows then ATI would be a better bet. Android SDK runs on Mac, Window
• by hairyfeet (841228)
If you go to Phoronix and look up the FOSS drivers they are IIRC up to the 6xxx chips as far as support and there is of course also the Catalyst drivers so there ya go. As I said at just $230 for the whole shebang with a price that low he can always try it and if he doesn't like the AMD GPU he can sell it on CL and grab an Nvidia, he'll still have 6 cores of processing power, a nice board, 8GB of RAM and a burner all wrapped up in a nice case so at the end of the day he's still ahead of the curve.
But you a
• If you suspect it's the PNY brand, you maybe should have tried another? I've had something like 8 nVidia cards of various brands in personal machines, and supported countless more at work, and they've never had any of the problems you mention.
If the problems are related to Linux drivers, that's a software issue rather than hardware. Any card is going to die if you run at the wrong clock speeds and/or don't control the fans adequately.
• by Pubstar (2525396)
I typically stick to XFX for ATI cards. I have one of their 7970s (DD Black Edition) running at 1100mhz for about a year with no issue. Their support is amazing for customers with Black Edition cards.
• My ex bought an nvida chipset gaming laptop from Toshiba. BIG MISTAKE. It blackscreens all the time and we went through 3 boards. Sometimes a BSOD will appear and whine about some driver.
• by hairyfeet (841228)
If you want to game on a laptop the Liano quad laptops are pretty nice, its not gonna play Crysis cranked out but for most games its fine. Just remember to put the fastest memory it'll take as those APUs are more affected by fast memory then a CPU since both GPU and CPU are accessing the memory. But its really hard to even find a discrete in a laptop anymore since the APUs came out, hardly anybody puts a discrete when the APU is "good enough" for most folks.
• It may be the well known industrial failure on geforce 8/9, sometimes referred as "bumpgate". Somewhat related to switching to lead-free soldering I believe. It's terrible but there haven't been something like that since.
• Thats exactly what it was. Sound failed and teh boards are sensitive and Toshiba wont replace it as a recall. Just give anaother defective board. We became an ATI house as a result afterwards and our problems went away.
• Toshiba are hardly a great make either. I experimented with HPs and Toshibas a few years ago, and the Satellites had really flimsy cases and I think it was Bluetooth issues in Windows. After that I just went back to Dell. They build decent quality laptops and are good at fixing stuff promptly when it does go wrong.
• by LingNoi (1066278)
The 5750 is almost 4 years old. If it doesn't work fine by this point then it's a total failure of a product.
• Runs Wow and SWTOR perfectly fine. Wow can run at 30 fps almost full screen on max settings. True under medium high is more like its settings but it is fine. I bought it on sale for cheap 2 years ago and is perfectly fine. No I would not want to run the latest crysis on it but for Adobe dreamweaver, photoshop, h.264 movies, and a few games it rocks!
I do plan to upgrade it this spring if finances are in my favor to a 7770 or a 7850. My only issues are I do HDMI only and occasionally some of the drivers assum
• I've run nvidia cards on linux since before the turn of the century but recently switched to an ATI for the eyefinity capability. Trying to do triple head (or more) with Nvidia just blows. I picked up a cheap Saphire Flex 6540 for less than $70 and it runs (3) 1920x1080 screens with one card and no real issues. I even get composite support for window previews. I know gaming is out, but that's fine for my purposes. For some more bucks I could run 6 screens off one card. I would prefer nvidia, but short
• by ifrag (984323)
Maybe it is the PNY brand? Who knows.
I'll throw in my one minor data point on this, my current video card is a PNY GTX 680 and I've had no issues with this card so far. Doesn't say anything about their production as a whole, but they are capable of making at least 1 functional card. My first few NVidia cards were BFG, which I did have some minor issues with, then I moved on to ASUS before this recent PNY upgrade and those ASUS were pretty good as well.
• nice improvements. (Score:5, Insightful)
by Truekaiser (724672) on Sunday December 16, 2012 @05:56PM (#42308805)
I like how things are shaping up, without the lockups of course.
But it still stands that if you want the most out of the card, the official drivers are still the only way to go.
And Windows. Fglrx's performance isn't that great when compared to Catalyst for Windows of competing Nvidia products.
• by VortexCortex (1117377) <VortexCortexNO@S ... t-retrograde.com> on Sunday December 16, 2012 @06:00PM (#42308819) Homepage
If you are like me, the proud owner of a Radeon card...
I have several GPUs that I test with. I've never been more proud than when I've fixed my own code to work around a tricky bug in the proprietary Radeon driver, so that some folks with that card could still use my software. That's because I'm proud of myself for my dedication to end users, not because of some name brand on a piece of abandoned hardware... So, no, I'm not like you; Unless you're just proud in general, not in relation to the GPU you own.
Don't get me wrong, I've had to work around many other GPU vendor driver bugs over the years, from Voodoo to GeForce. My point is this: Who gives a damn if you own a piece of hardware, but don't have access to the full software stack required to operate and maintain it. I swear we were all much better off with software rasterizers. At least then the devs could Actually FIX BUGS, rather than tell users to upgrade a driver or that they're just SoL. Thus, as for being proud of the GPU vendors Intel is the only brand on my list that's (moderately) relevant today.
• by Kjella (173770) on Sunday December 16, 2012 @07:11PM (#42309169) Homepage
Who gives a damn if you own a piece of hardware, but don't have access to the full software stack required to operate and maintain it. (...) Thus, as for being proud of the GPU vendors Intel is the only brand on my list that's (moderately) relevant today.
You are aware that this article is about the radeon open source driver improvements, not the proprietary driver right? You have access to the full stack. Of course you could wish that AMD would get fully behind an open source stack, but they're one step down from Intel and a hundred steps over nVidia in open source support. I hope there's more than one company that'll have an interest in a high performance open source graphics stack on Linux. because the reasons you're in a community is mostly sharing of the work.
Of course I won't forget the people who work on these projects but affiliated with other companies or individual volunteers either, but my ideal end state would be one where Intel, AMD and nVidia all work on that stack to sell their hardware. Much like the Linux kernel isn't dominated by one single company, there's many who each contribute 15% or less. Of course much of this is driver code for their own hardware, but they all contribute to make the common parts stronger. Same with graphics cards, sure there's plenty card specific work but there's also plenty work to do on the common stack.
• by hairyfeet (841228) <bassbeast1968@@@gmail...com> on Sunday December 16, 2012 @11:29PM (#42310801) Journal
For those that aren't aware there is a REASON why AMD can't get "fully behind the Open Source Drivers" and that is because there is a section of each chip they can't legally allow access to, the HDMI HDCP decoders. Since they have integrated that into the GPU there is simply no way for them to open that up, the code isn't theirs to give. Intel has their HDMI HDCP more separate than AMD does because their chips are all about the CPU and the GPU is simply supposed to be "good enough" for basic video watching and the like. Since AMD has been more about the GPU everything is tightly coupled around that GPU so they just can't give you 100% access, not without ending up blacklisted and unable to play any content that uses HDCP.
But this should be a perfect test of the FOSS community, to see if they are worth supporting or not. AMD has done EXACTLY what you asked, and opened every bit of code that was theirs to give, so if their sales don't go up because the community goes "LOL use Nvidia proprietary drivers" then the hardware manufacturers will see how pointless it is to support FOSS, as AMD will have done all that work and not gotten any more sales as a result. At the end of the day if you don't support the companies that do as you ask then frankly nobody is gonna bother, after all it costs money to have a lawyer sign off on opening tons of code and docs and if they see no ROI for doing so why bother?
• by Anonymous Coward
So, ATI can't whole-heartedly get behind the development of the open source Radeon drivers because its hardware supports HDCP?
Why does Intel *only* ship an open source Linux driver for its hardware... much of which (the GMA 4500 and newer) supports HDCP?
• by renoX (11677)
As the Anonymous said your post is wrong about HDCP.
Plus what many would want is the access to the video decoding unit of the GPU, I don't think that this is related to HDMI..
• by hairyfeet (841228)
No it is YOU who are mistaken and here is why: 1.- Intel owns HDCP so they can allow as little or as much as they want of the code for it in their FOSS drivers, AMD doesn't have that luxury as they only license it, 2.- again Intel has their chips built in a MUCH more modular fashion, if you'll look up the design pics of the Intel chips and the AMD chips frankly even with the naked eye its quite easy to see the various components so bypassing HDCP while still having access to the entire GPU is almost trivial
• by gr8_phk (621180)
I swear we were all much better off with software rasterizers.
Yay! With many core processors and LLVM-pipe this could be a viable option soon ;-) At least for composite desktops and older 3D apps.
To be honest, I've seen some commercial CAD packages rendering high complexity models at frame rates lower than what ray tracing can do today. So yes, keep software rendering in mind.
• by AlphaWolf_HK (692722) on Sunday December 16, 2012 @06:15PM (#42308873)
Seriously, I don't know. I don't really use desktop linux, I mostly use it for servers and data forensics. Perhaps somebody could fill me in? And everybody else who doesn't know while they're at it.
• Users love their operating systems.
Cad users and artists occasionally use Linux. Shriek used Linux on Nvidia for all 3 movies with a SGI to put the animations together in one package with renderman.
Most Linux users are Windows 98 users who have a sworn allegience agaisn't the old MS and hope people will magically wake up and switch and have not touched Windows since unless forced to by work. I used to be one of these users who just wanted to code without a crippled learning edition of visual C++ when the pr
• I don't know about the rest because I'm not really a developer, but I do agree that X is showing its age badly. All of the other major OSes have eliminated the problems of yore like tearing while moving windows, among other things.
I think Wayland looks interesting. Granted, it has given up the network driven portion of X, but it is far more modern both in terms of providing modern graphics functions as well as having a clean, glitch free rendering system.
Well said about virtual machines, I use vmware avidly
• by deek (22697)
Apparently it will be possible to achieve network transparency with Wayland, through a program external to the core of the system.
I disagree that X is showing its age badly. I think it is showing its age gracefully. Through its extensible design, it has been able to step up and cope with the demands of the modern desktop. Wayland will be more efficient, of that there is no doubt. I wonder if Wayland will cope with future demands anywhere near as well as what X has.
• Mostly Wayland is an inefficient, ineffective attempt to get away from "old" stuff like X onto "modern" stuff like Windows. In the end it won't work any better; if it turns out even worse than X (probably will turn out less featureful but not actually slower; you never know how APIs will turn out, and I could see some level of eclecticism churning out something that's even harder to code for), people (Ubuntu) will push it and claim bullet-point technical superiority while avoiding real-world failings.
• Dunno, I like Gnome 3 and Windows irritates me for being so terrible and lacking the "Activities" view. Don't like Gnome 3's alt-tab behavior though, wish it was per-window instead of per-application.
• As long as I can view a video on YouTube/BBC/... I don't really care; and I have been able to do that for many years. I'm not interested in playing games and don't care about fancy desktop effects - is there something else that I should care about ?
I am annoyed that Ubuntu running in a VM (qemu-kvm under CentOS 6.3) is very slow at desktop operations like moving to a new workspace, it probably works nicely with a real graphics card but is slow running under VNC. I wish it would go for simplicity/speed rathe
• Issue is flash is outdated and filled with holes on Linux with no hardware acceleration. Even Mac was a second class citizen until last year in that regard which is shocking considering how many Adobe users are hardcore Mac users.
I have come to the conclusion that if you need to do anything with multimedia then Windows is a better solution. Or a Mac if you have more money and like Unix but want usability and more commercial apps.
Also have you tried VMWare or Virtualbox? VMWare workstation is competitively p
• Eh? What change? (Score:4, Informative)
by rueger (210566) * on Sunday December 16, 2012 @06:29PM (#42308929) Homepage
I admit to not really knowing or caring about graphics cards (not a gamer), but skimming through TFA's charts, it looks like almost every test had more or less the same performance out of 3.7 and 3.8.
Am I missing something?
• by Nutria (679911)
Am I missing something?
No, you're not.
• by gbjbaanb (229885)
you're also not missing the benchmarks comparing the performance to a Windows box running the same benchmarks (where applicable) or the benchmarks showing the proprietary driver's performance.
• It's been a long road to the current state of play with the original limited release of the specs for the older ATI cards through to the current state with near-parity with the Windows drivers. It's really good to see this right now as I am in the market again for an improvement to my current graphics card. My number one option was the Nvidia 660, but if this set of code makes things that much better then I may go for one of the AMD 79xx cards instead.
I was in college in the University of Limerick with the
• by Anonymous Coward
There has been no Nvidia "Linux graphics driver revolution" and Linux 3.7/3.8 Radeon performance is pretty much the same. Great to know!
• OK, I admit it, I read TFA. Except for one or two games, I'm not seeing any performance improvement from those graphs. In fact, as the proud owner of a HD6570, the new DRM seems to be a regression. Since I don't game I don't really care anyway, but WTF is this story about again? Slow news Sunday?
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AI Robotics The Military United States
US Navy Wants Smart Robots With Morals, Ethics 165
Posted by Soulskill
from the i'm-sorry-dave,-the-value-of-your-life-is-a-string-and-i-was-expecting-an-integer dept.
US Navy Wants Smart Robots With Morals, Ethics
Comments Filter:
• Humans Can Not (Score:5, Insightful)
by Jim Sadler (3430529) on Saturday May 17, 2014 @05:52AM (#47024329)
Imagine us trying to teach a robot morality when humans have little agreement on what is moral. For example would a moral robot have refused to function in the Vietnam War? Would a drone take out an enemy in Somalia knowing that that terrorist was a US citizen? How many innocent deaths are permissible if a valuable target can be destroyed? If a robot acts as a fair player could it use high tech weapons against an enemy that had only rifles that were made prior to WWII? If many troops are injured should a medical robot save two enemy or one US soldier who will take all of the robot's attention and time? When it comes to moral issues and behaviors there are often no points of agreement by humans so just how does one program a robot to deal with moral conflicts?
• by dmbasso (1052166) on Saturday May 17, 2014 @05:55AM (#47024341)
US armed forces should want leaders with morals and ethics, instead of the usual bunch that send them to die based on lies (I'm looking at you Chenney, you bastard).
• by kruach aum (1934852) on Saturday May 17, 2014 @05:56AM (#47024343)
Every single one comes down to "do I value rule X or rule Y more highly?" Who gives a shit. Morals are things we've created ourselves, you can't dig them up or pluck them off trees, so it all comes down to opinion, and opinions are like assholes: everyone's asshole is a product of the culture it grew up in.
This is going to come down to a committee deciding how a robot should respond in which situation, and depending on who on the committee has the most clout it's going to implement a system of ethics that already exists, whether it's utilitarianism, virtue ethics, Christianity, Taoism, whatever.
• by houghi (78078) on Saturday May 17, 2014 @05:56AM (#47024347)
If they are talking about the moral of the US government, I rather have the robots from Terminator.
And they are talking about helping wounded soldiers. Why talk about the (US) marine with the broken leg? What about the injured Al-Quaida fighter?
The question of causing pain for the better wellbeing of the patient is obvious for most people. What if it means killing 1 person to save 10? What if that one person is not an enemy?
What if it realizes that killing 5% of the US population would save the rest of the world? What if that 5% is mostly children? Even if you can answer that as a human being, would you want it enforced by robots?
• Re:Humans Can Not (Score:5, Insightful)
by MrL0G1C (867445) on Saturday May 17, 2014 @06:04AM (#47024357) Journal
Would the robot shoot a US commander that is about the bomb a village of men woman and children?
The US navy don't want robots with morals, they want robots that do as they say.
Country A makes robots with morals, Country B makes robots without morals - all else being equal the robots without morals would win. Killer robots are worse than landmines and should be banned and any country making them should be completely embargoed.
• Re:Up to 11 (Score:4, Insightful)
by CuteSteveJobs (1343851) on Saturday May 17, 2014 @07:26AM (#47024537)
Is funny because since WWII the army has worked to get the kill rates up. In WWII only 15% of soldiers shot to kill, but they the army brainwashes them so that 90% kill. Moral. Killers. Can't have both.
And Moral and Ethical for the NSA? LMAO.
• Right (Score:5, Insightful)
by HangingChad (677530) on Saturday May 17, 2014 @07:36AM (#47024573) Homepage
Just like drones were first used for intelligence gathering, search and rescue and communications relays.
• Re:Humans Can Not (Score:2, Insightful)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 17, 2014 @07:39AM (#47024585)
People in the US think too much about killing. It's as if you don't understand that killing is a savage thing to do. Maybe it's the omnipresence of guns in your society, maybe it's your defense budget, but you can't seem to stop thinking about killing. That's an influence on your way of problem-solving. Killing someone always seems to be a welcome option. So final, so definite. Who could resist?
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Harry Potter Wiki
Attack at the Black Lake
11,818pages on
this wiki
Attack at the Black LakePM1
Attack at the Black Lake
Part of Sirius Black manhunt
6 June, 1994
Black Lake, Hogwarts Castle grounds, Scotland
100+ Dementors
Harry, Hermione and Sirius passed out
Dementors defeated with Patronus Charm
Ronald Weasley: "Third year, he fought off about a hundred Dementors at once."
Dean Thomas: "Blimey, Harry, I didn't know you could do that!"
Ronald Weasley and Dean Thomas on Harry Potter's ability to produce a Patronus Charm[src]
The attack at the Black Lake took place on 6 June, 1994 when over one hundred Dementors attacked Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Sirius Black at the said lake in 1994. Harry attempted to defend them with a Patronus Charm, but failed due to the sheer amount of Dementors. However, he and the others were saved by his future self, who had travelled back in time using Hermione's Time-Turner. Catching a brief glimpse of their saviour, Harry initially mistook the mysterious figure for his father.
Harry awoke in the hospital wing, and with Hermione, he tried to convince Cornelius Fudge, Severus Snape, Poppy Pomfrey, and Albus Dumbledore that Sirius was innocent. Of them, only Dumbledore believed this. The Headmaster, then, discreetly told them to go back in time, and that they would be able to save more than one innocent life. Leaving Ron, who was injured, the two ventured three hours back in time.
Background information
"He's at Hogwarts..."
Sirius Black talking about Peter Pettigrew in summer of 1993
Sirius Black Azkaban escapee
Since the autumn of 1981, Sirius Black had been the most notorious prisoner in Azkaban. He had been wrongfully imprisoned for betraying James and Lily Potter and the murder of Pettigrew and twelve Muggles. He was also thought to be both a loyal supporter of Lord Voldemort and certifiably insane.[1] Both of these assumptions were incorrect as well. Twelve years after his incarceration, Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge made a routine visit to the prison. When he passed Black's cell, Sirius asked the Minister for his newspaper remarking that he missed doing the crossword puzzles.[1] In the newspaper, Sirius saw a picture of the Weasley family. He also saw another familiar sight in that picture. In it was Ron's rat Scabbers, but Sirius could tell that the rat was in fact Pettigrew in Animagus form.[2]
Upon seeing that picture, he realised that Pettigrew was perfectly placed to attack Harry should the Dark Lord return. Consumed with the idea of saving Harry from Pettigrew, Sirius planned to escape from Azkaban.[2] The Dementors noticed that he began muttering "He's at Hogwarts" in his sleep. One day during the summer of 1993, when the guards opened the door to his cell to bring his food, Sirius slipped past them in his Animagus form. Upon escaping, he set off for Hogwarts and Pettigrew.[2]
Consequences of escape
Dementor on the train
Dementors board the train in search of Sirius Black
Immediately, the Ministry of Magic began the arduous task of tracking Black down. The Dementors were tasked with searching the countryside, while Fudge informed the Muggle Prime Minister.[3] The Ministry published thousands of "Wanted" posters bearing Sirius' likeness. The entire populace was on edge, for they thought Sirius to be a maniac. In the climate of fear, the Ministry thought it best not to inform the public of the truth with regards to any progress. They continued to say that they were close to finding Black, when according to Arthur Weasley, they had made no visible progress.[4]
On 1 September, the Hogwarts Express was searched by Dementors. This had a disconcerting effect on many of the students. Harry, for example, collapsed in their presence when they searched his compartment.[5] That evening at the Welcoming Feast, Dumbledore informed the students that Dementors would be guarding the castle's grounds and entrances.[5] Hundreds of Dementors were positioned around the school and in Hogsmeade village. The village itself was searched many times.[1] Even with this strengthened security, however, Sirius managed to gain access to the castle at least twice.
Events of 6 June
Buckbeak Pottermore
The Buckbeak the Hippogriff set to be executed
On 6 June, Harry, Hermione and Ron left the castle just before sunset for Rubeus Hagrid's cabin. At dusk, his hippogriff Buckbeak was to be executed for an attack upon Draco Malfoy. The students knew that Buckbeak meant very much to Hagrid, and they ventured out of the castle to console him.[6] While at Hagrid's, Hermione found Scabbers, Ron's rat, who they assumed to be dead. After leaving hurriedly, Scabbers bit Ron and ran away. They chased him to the shadow of the Whomping Willow, where Sirius in his Animagus form dragged Ron and Scabbers into a tunnel underneath the tree.[7] With the aid of Hermione's cat Crookshanks, Harry and Hermione pursued Ron through the tunnel. Upon reaching its end, they emerged in the Shrieking Shack. There, they found Ron but were ambushed by Sirius who had transformed back into human form.[7] After Professor Lupin and Professor Snape, arrived, and the latter was knocked out, Scabbers was revealed to be Pettigrew.[2] The whole story of Sirius's past came to light, and Harry came to believe that his godfather was innocent. He would not, however, permit his father's best friends to become murderers. He believed that Pettigrew should be handed over to the Dementors. With that in mind, the assembled group set out for Hogwarts.[2]
Hermione Granger regarding Harry's Patronus[src]
Tumblr m6757dDrv71ro7gbao1 r1 250
A Dementors circling potential victims (click for animation)
When the group emerged from the tunnel beneath the Whomping Willow, they set off across the grounds. That evening was a full moon, and when the moon came out from behind a cloud, Lupin transformed into a Werewolf.[8] To protect Harry, Ron, and Hermione from harm, Sirius transformed into his Animagus form and fought with Lupin. He was badly injured in the fight, and Lupin ran into the forest. During Lupin's werewolf transformation, Pettigrew managed to remove himself from his restraints. He sprung for Lupin's wand, with which he stunned Ron and then transformed into his Animagus form and escaped.[8] While Ron was incapacitated, Harry and Hermione ran in search of Sirius to the shores of the Black Lake. They found him on all fours with an army of Dementors bearing down upon him. Harry told Hermione to think of something happy, and they both tried to conjure a Patronus. Hermione could not summon anything at all and soon passed out; Sirius passed out, as well. Harry had managed to produce a wispy shield, but he could not drive away the hundred Dementors.[1]
Believing that Harry was a threat, the Dementors closed on him. Once he could no longer produce a Patronus, Dementors attacked. One Dementor brought Harry's face up to an unhooded Dementor's for the Dementor's Kiss, Meanwhile, Sirius was Kissed and his soul was pulled out his mouth, but wasn't ingested by any dementors.[1] When all hope was lost and as the Dementor was going to Kiss Harry, a bright light shone out from across the lake. A blindingly white stag charged across the lake, and drove away the Dementors. As Harry was about to pass out, he saw a familiar figure welcoming the stag back across the lake. For a fleeting moment he believed it to be his father.[9]
Some time after the Dementors had been driven away, Sirius was taken to and locked in Filius Flitwick's office and Harry, Ron and Hermione were taken to the Hogwarts Hospital wing. There, Fudge and Snape discussed the implications of Sirius' capture, while Harry and Hermione tried to persuade them of his innocence. This was unsuccessful, as Snape had told Fudge that Sirius Confunded the pair, and therefore their assertions were considered null. Dumbledore then arrived and announced he had spoken to Sirius and needed to talk to Harry and Hermione in private. After Fudge, Snape and Madam Pomfrey left the wing, Harry and Hermione tried to persuade Dumbledore that Sirius was innocent, not knowing they in fact shared the same view. Dumbledore told the pair subtley to travel back in time three hours using Hermione's Time-Turner, which she had been given to be able to cope with attempting twelve O.W.Ls. Upon travelling back in time and hiding from their past selves, Harry and Hermione sprinted towards Hagrid's cabin, where they attempted to save Buckbeak, whom they worked out was one of the 'innocent lives' that Dumbledore hinted at in the hosptal wing. This turned out to be difficult, as they had to do this in the sixty second time window between the execution party entering and exiting the cabin, and also Buckbeak's reluctance to leave Hagrid. Nevertheless, they managed to lead Buckbeak into the forest. Dumbledore may have been deliberately stalling inside the cabin with the knowledge that he would send Harry and Hermione (and presumably Ron) into the past in the future, as he said 'How extraordinary' with a "note of amusement in his voice".
Stag Patronus
Harry's Patronus fends off hundreds of Dementors
After rescuing Buckbeak, the pair went the Whomping Willow where they watched Lupin and Snape enter the tree, and Hagrid making his way to the castle. Despite Harry's impatience and desire to intervene, they waited for the group to emerge from the tree after the incident in the Shrieking Shack. Upon realising that they would cross paths with Lupin in Werewolf form, they ran back to Hagrid's cabin and waited there.
After a short time, Harry realised it would be hard to tell when to leave, so we left then, alone. After arriving at the lake, he saw the Dementors emerge "out of the darkness from every direction". They then headed for the opposite bank, for Harry and Hermione's past selves and Sirius. Harry ran to the spot where he saw the mysterious figure and waited. After watching the Dementor in the process of Kissing, he realised he had actually seen himself casting his Patronus. He stepped out from the bush he was behind and shouted the incantation. He produced an blinding, dazzling stag which charged at the Dementor, saving himself, Hermione and Sirius from the Kiss.[9]
—Albus Dumbledore[src]
Pettigrew's Silver hand transfigured by Voldemort
The Harry and Hermione that had gone back in time then waited until they saw the executioner, Walden Macnair, leave the castle. Then they flew Buckbeak per Dumbledore's instructions up to Flitwick's office. They rescued Sirius and gave him Buckbeak on which to escape. The pair then retreated to the hospital wing before they created a paradox in time.
The Dementors were removed from Hogwarts and Sirius Black lived in secret for another two years, the last year of his life back in his house along with Buckbeak. He was killed by Bellatrix Lestrange in the Battle of the Department of Mysteries, although after that he was exonerated posthumously, Harry was again attacked a year later and was almost expelled.[10]
Pettigrew lived for another four years, becoming one of Lord Voldemort's servants. However, due to Harry not letting Sirius Black and Remus Lupin kill him, he owed Harry a life debt. During the Skirmish at Malfoy Manor, Wormtail was killed by his own silver hand after he hesitated in killing Harry.[11]
Behind the scenes
• In the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the lake where the attack takes place appears to be a separate one to the Black Lake, which is the attack's location in the book. The Black Lake appears with a completely separate appearance to this lake earlier in the film, appearing exactly as it does in the previous two film adaptations and the following three. It is therefore unlikely that both lakes are intended to be the same by the filmmakers.
• Also, in the film adaptation, Hermione does not appear in the scene.
Notes and references
1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Chapter 10 (The Marauder's Map)
2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Chapter 19 (The Servant of Lord Voldemort)
4. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Chapter 4 (The Leaky Cauldron)
5. 5.0 5.1 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Chapter 5 (The Dementor)
6. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Chapter 16 (Professor Trelawney's Prediction)
7. 7.0 7.1 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Chapter 17 (Cat, Dog, and Rat)
9. 9.0 9.1 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Chapter 21 (Hermione's Secret)
10. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Chapter 35 (Beyond the Veil)
11. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Chapter 23 (Malfoy Manor)
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My grandfather's wand which I inherited from my father.
I am the grandson of Gellert Grindelwald. I am learned in the Dark Arts but don't use it on people. I go to Hogwarts but am known to visit Durmstrang during holidays.
Gellert Grindelwald school portrait This user is a fan of Gellert Grindelwald.
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Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti SO review - supercharged performance
by Tarinder Sandhu on 26 January 2011, 08:22 4.0
Tags: Gigabyte (TPE:2376)
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The 1GHz-clocked Beast from the East
After taking a look at NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti GPU just yesterday and noting that it was primed to be overclocked by partners with special edition models, Gigabyte duly obliged and sent in its GTX 560 Ti Super OverClock (SOC) beast.
Now, Gigabyte knows a thing or two about getting the most out of GeForce cards. The company's GTX 460 SOC was the finest NVIDIA mid-range card to pass through the HEXUS labs, and its combination of high clocks, near-silent cooling and relatively small price premium over bone-stock cards made it a winner.
So why waste what is obviously a winning formula, because Gigabyte takes very much the same grounds-up-design mentality with the GTX 560 Ti SO version.
The similarity between the two GPUs is shown by the picture, above, and, save for the model number printed on the PCB and cooler, there's no obvious indication that they're two distinct cards.
Zooming into the GTX 560 Ti, the PCB is 0.5in longer than the 9in for the reference card. Gigabyte keeps the WindForce 2X cooler found on the original. The card-enveloping heatsink's fans are angled in to reduce turbulence, according to company, and they're sat on top of four heatpipes that, in turn, are in contact with a thick copper base.
Gigabyte throws in a disarming array of SO-specific technology with the card. How does 2oz copper PCB, tier one Samsung/Hynix memory, Japanese solid capacitors, ferrite-core chokes, an NEC Tokin Proadlizer that lowers electronic noise and increases power efficiency, and a seven-phase PWM design grab you. Phew, technical overload!
A combination of the GTX 560 Ti's inherent frequency headroom - we pushed the reference card to 950MHz core and 4,412MHz memory without problem - and a mass of cooling means that Gigabyte pulls out all the stops and releases this card with default frequencies of 1,000MHz core and 4,580MHz memory, up from the default 822MHz/4,008MHz. Back-of-the-envelope calculations tell us that it should be at least 20 per cent faster than a regular 'Ti, which, if you're au fait with modern graphics cards, means it'll perform much like a GeForce GTX 570.
Interestingly, the latest build of Gigabyte's OC Guru utility provides manipulation for the GPU memory alone - from 1.35V to 1.56V - so no end-user fiddling with the GPU voltage, which is locked to 1.047V in automatic mode and 1.105V in manual mode. Both figures are higher than the 1.025V of the reference card.
All that extra power means that Gigabyte has no choice to keep two six-pin PCIe connectors, even though it claims that the SO is more power-efficient than the reference design.
While the overall card is anything but standard, the rear outputs match a reference card's twin (dual-link) DVI and mini-HDMI. Remember, too, that the GTX 560 Ti carries all the bitstreaming goodness found in the GTX 460.
Gigabyte's proven Super OverClock custom cooling makes the leap from GTX 460 to GTX 560 Ti with nary a change, but this is no bad thing in our book, because the cooler has previously proved to be adept at keeping the GTX 460 1GB well below threshold temperatures.
Priced at some £225, thereby attracting a £25 premium over reference cards - the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 560 Ti SO nicely fills the gap that currently exists between the GTX 560 and GTX 570 GPUs. Let's now see if can fill the performance gap, too.
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Thread: Injury Report: Nathan Horton takes the ice
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09-09-2011, 09:51 PM
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Originally Posted by Artemis View Post
Before he signed, frankly, I didn't think of Ben Pouliot at all. Why should I?
If Matt Cooke was a free agent and for some reason Chiarelli signed him, then, yeah, I might question his sanity, if not outright condemn him. But Ben Pouliot isn't someone I wasted time hating. So Chia took a flyer on him, and my reaction was the same as many others': OK, let's see what he's got.
Nobody was campaigning for him to be signed, obviously, but that doesn't mean once he was, we're not willing to give him a chance.
Said it much better than I.
Honestly, WhamBamCam, you're one of my favorite users here but I don't understand the seemingly blinding rage you have about this.
Now if you have examples of us condemning the guy and hating on him before the signing and then have examples of those same posters then willing to give him a chance then you'd have a point.
But as Artemis said, other than Jack Edward's rant about him in the playoffs... I don't think anyone thought anything of the kid. Certainly not enough to hate his guts (other than wearing the Habs sweater for a season.)
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Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Boy Toys
Sotheby's is teaming up with RM Auctions down in Florida to sell off a load of toys for boys, men and all cool chicks who enjoy chrome and wood (in all shapes and sizes). All of these items in the Milhous Brothers' Collection go on the block this February. There's this 1933 "Miss Florida" speedboat by Jack Kipfer (above), the 1939 Dooling 2nd Series FWD tether race car, the 1950 "Buster" Brown Rudge motorcycle, the Curley Class B Mite Racer Model and the 1924 Baby Bootlegger
a lovely being said...
Isn't it crazy to think that novelties like this were once modern? I have a mad infatuation with historic objects. New cars? Please. I'd take something like this over a brand new, say, Mercedes, any day :)
Neo Horseman said...
Great post. Love the first boat!
Jewellers Dublin said...
Love the images, Still pretty cool today too. Great collectors item. From Engagement Rings
Momographica said...
I just run into your blog and what an amazing place you have here! I am going to follow you if you don't mind:) !
Beautiful images.
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There was an error in this gadget
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
More green outlets
You've heard of etsy, but how about the Greek contender, Yiouco which features only items that have been created through upcycling, recycling, or reuse. Featured in Springwise, this site uses a similar easy storefront model. Currently, there are no fees, but they will institute a fee structure in Spring 2011.
Retail therapy is calling... What better thing to peruse on another icy, snowy day in the northeast.
--till next week, Restore, Recycle, Refresh & Renew.
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Thursday, March 24, 2011
6) In which one of the following Smritui is found the statement: “the royal charters were written on cloth or copper plate?
a) Manusmruti
b) Parasharasmruti
c) Yagnyavalkyasmruti
d) Shankhasmruti
Ans: C Yagnyavalkyasmruti.
The statement is taken from Yagnyavalkya Samruti from Book 1, page 316. It is mentioned in the book of D. C. Sircar on page 66, of the book titled Indian Epigraphy. The book was published in1965 by Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited. ISBN no 81-208-1166-6. In the chapter III titled Writing Materials, Dr. Sircar has elaborated on the epigraphy and the material used for writing.
7) The famous Dasarajna (battle of ten kings) is mentioned in
a) Rigveda
b) Yajurveda
c) Samaveda
d) None of the above
: a. Rigveda.
The battle of ten kings is mentioned in Rig Veda, Mandal 7, hymn 83. Suda of Trtsu family of Bharta Tribe fought against ten kings on the River Purushani that is present River Ravi. Bharata Tribe was assisted by Vashishta and the ten kings were assisted by Vishvamitra. The hymns in which the battle and victory is mentioned invoked Indra and Varun.
The ten tribes were Alina, Anu, Bhrigu, Bhalana, Dasa or Dasyu, Druhyu, Matsya, Parshu, Purus, Pani or Parnis.
The King Suda killed Bheda, one of the independent commander of a tribe without a king.
King Suda was grandson of Devodasa Atithigva . (Mentioned in Devadatta Ramkrishana Bhandarkar's Some Aspects of Ancient Culture' published from Madras.)
8) In which Vedic Sukta is found the reference to the orgin of the four Varnas?
a) Ushas
b) Purusha
c) Nasadiya
d) Aranyani
b, Purusha Sukta
9) Which one of the following dramas was written by Sriharsha?
a) Kundamala
b) Priyadarshika
c) Karpuramanjari
d) Malati – Madhava
Ans: Sri Harsha wrote
Priyadarshika. His other important works were Ratanvali. Both of them are plays.
In Priyadarshika, it is about the love story of Vatsaraja Udayana with princess Priyadarshika. It is written under the influence of the Kalidasa Malavikagnimitram. (Mentioned in History of Indian Theater 3 Volumes by Manohar Laxman Varadpande.)
(For further material Check Notes and Compilation (Book) by Sumir Sharma) For the notes Contact Iqbal Dua at 9814936936, AooG Enterprises, 36 E, Sarabha Nagar, Ludhiana. or write to us at cshistory at the rate of gmail dot com
10) Against which republican state did Ajatashatru fight for more than 16 years to establish Megadhan Suzerainty over Eastern India?
a) Mallas of Pava and Kushinara
b) Videhas of Mithilai
c) Lichhavis of Vaishali
d) Koliyas of Ramagrama
Ans: c
Lichchavis of Vaishali.
Ajatsatru had raised Magadha Empire by annexing 36 republican states. The major monarchies which he annexed was Kosala, and Vats. He fought the 16 years wars against the Vrijji of Vishali. Vriji was ruled by a confederacy of five tribes among which Lichchavis were one of the dominating tribe. Lichchavi Republic was at that time represented by Chetaka. (derived from multiple articles on Wikipedia).
In Jain accounts, Bimbisara, father of Ajatasatru is mentioned as Srenika and Ajatasatru as Kunika.
Mallas of Pava and Kushinara:
Mallas were one of the sixteen Mahajanapadas. These Mahanajanapadas are mentioned in Anguttara Nikaya of Tripitaka. They occupied the North Central India. It was conquered by Bhima, one of the five Pandus. Their region was divided into nine territories each held by a confederation of clans. Two of the important confederacies had their capital at Kushinara and Pava respectively. Kushinara is present modern Kasia near Gorakhpur and Pava is present modern Padrauna near Kasia. Mahatama Buddha took his last meal at Kushinara. Lord Mahavira took his last meal at Pava or Pavapuri. Mahatama Buddha fell ill at Pava and died in Kushinara. Mahavira took Nirvana at Pava Puri. At the time of the death of Lord Buddha, King Sastipal Mal was ruling at Kushinara.
Mallas are also mentioned in Manusamriti under the category of Vratya Kshatriya.
In Buddhist literature, Mahaparinirbbana Suttanta, they are called Vashista Kshatriya.
Mallas had both form of governments, monarchical as well as republican, at different times. They were also annexed to Magadhan Empire after the death of Buddha.
Videha of Mithilai:
Videha was the kingdom of Seeradwaj Janak, the father of Sita. Mithila was the capital of Videha. The rulers of the Videha were called Janak. The rulers were known for their Vedic knowledge and most of them had been established scholars. The Mithila is present Janakpur in Nepal. The agriculture seems to be the major economic activity of this kingdom. Seeradwaj himself had obtained Sita with the help of a plough from the womb of land. Sita was married to Raghava Ram, the prince of Kosala. Kosala was one of the monarchy annexed by Magadha during the reign of Ajatsatru. The sisters of Sita were also married to the brothers of Raghava Ram. Therefore, Videha was associated with Kosala.
Koliyas of Ramagrama
Koliya was a republican clan having equal status with Sakya clan. Yashodhara, wife of Prince Siddharta (Buddha) belonged to Koliya. The Chief of Koliya was Suppabuddha and father of Yashodhara. The Koliya clan had two capitals namely Ramagrama and Devadaha. A stupa of remains of Buddha stands at Ramagrama in Bhairahawa in Nepal. It is the only undisturbed stupa.
11) The Mahayana Buddhism had two philosophical schools. Which of the following belonged to Mahayana Buddhism?
a) Madhyamika and Yogachara
b) Vijnanavada and Sthaviravada
c) Mahasanghika and Theraveda
d) Acharyavada and Sarvastivada
Ans: a: Madhyamika and Yogachara
According to I-ching's report from India (A. D. 691), Mahayana Buddhism was divided into two schools, the Madhyamika and Yogacara. The main author of Madhyamika school was Nagarjuna.
Other popular name of Madhyamika is Shunyavada. In English translations, it repeatedly termed as Buddhist philosophy or Mahayana Philosophy of Emptiness.
Madhyamika originated with Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna was born around 150 AD in Guntur District of Andhra Pardesh.
Yogachara school of Mahayana developed around 4c. AD. In Sanskrit, it is also called Vigyana Vada. The main text of Yogachara Mahayana is Sandhinirmochana Sutra. The main scholars of this school of Mahayana were Vasubandhu and Asanga. Vasubandhu and Asanga were half brothers.
Vijnanavada and Sthaviravada
Vijnanavada or Vigyanavada is the other name of the theory which is given under Yogachara philosophy of Mahayana. It means Consciousness only theory.
Sthaviravada: Sthaviravada is a Sanskrit word for the Pali word Theravada. Theravada of Sthaviravada is the oldest or the traditionalist school of Buddhism. It is also known as the Teaching of the Elders school. Theravada and Mahasinghika were the schools which developed between the second and third Buddhist council. The first Buddhist council was held in the year when Buddha passed away. It took place in 486 BC. The second council took place in 350 BC. The third council took place 250 BC during the reign of Asoka. The first schism took place between second and third great councils.
Mahasanghika and Theraveda
Mahasanghika and Theravada are the two break up schools of Buddhism. The break up took place between the second and third Great Councils. The head of Mahasanghikas was Mahadeva. The origin of these two schools is mentioned in Mahavamsa.
Acharyavada and Sarvastivada
Sarvastivada is Sanskrit term. The Pali term is Sabbatthivada. It means all exist theory. It is the oldest form of Buddhism which existed along with Theravada (The sayings of the elder.)
Acharyavada is another term for Mahasanghika. The first council was held in Rajagriha. The second at Vaisali. The third at Pataliputra during the reign of Asoka. The third council of Pataliputra was held after the rise of Mahasanhika or Acharyavada. (James Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Part 13, pp 210.)
12) Who was the twenty second Tiruthankara?
a) Parsvanatha
b) Rishabha
c) Aristhanemi
d) Neminatha
Neminatha, d
According to Jain religion, there are 24 Trithankaras. The first Trithankara was Rishab. Muni Rishab is mentioned in Rig Veda also. According to Digambaras, all the 24 Trithankaras were men. However, according to Shavetambars, 19th Trithankara, Mallinath was a woman. Parsvanatha was twentry third Trithankar. Mahavira was the twenty fourth Trithankar.
Arithanemi is another name of Neminatha. Neminatha, the 22nd Trinthankara, the cousin of Shri Krishna, is also called Bhagwan Aristhanemi. His name also appears in Rig Veda as that of Adinath Rishab.
13) Directions for erecting stupas and Chaityas, and an account of the contest for
buddha’s Relics to deposit in them is found for the first time in
a) Milindapanha
b) Majjhim Nikaya
c) Mahaparinibbana Sutta
d) Jnanaprasthana Sutra
Ans: C Mahaprinibbana Sutta (Pali).
It is part of Vinay Sutta. Vinay Sutta is part of Tripitakka.
In it, the last days of Buddha and contest between the different Bhikkshu at the time of Parinirvana is given. It is a long one.
There is another Mahayana Maha Parinivana Sutta which is in Sanskrit. They are two separate books.
Milindapanha: It is also a Buddhist text written in c. 100 BC. It consists of dialogue between Menander I, the Bactrian king with Nagasena. In some of the Pali canons, it is included in the Khuddaka Nikaya.
Majjhim Nikaya: The Sutta Pittaka of Tripitaka of Theravada school, consists of five Nikayas. The second Nikaya is called Majjhim Nikaya. It consists of dialogue between Buddha and his chief disciples.
14) What is the modern name of Kundagrama Where Mahavira was born?
a) Vaishali
b) Patana
c) Basukunda
d) Paithan
C. Basukunda or Basu Kunda, a village in Vaishali district.
Vaishali was the capital of Vajjis or Virjis. The Vajjis gave name to the Vajji Janapada. This fact is mentioned in Bhagavati Sutra of Jains and Anguttra Nikaya (Part of Tripitaka) of Buddhists. It is also referred to by Panini and Kautilya. The Vajji Mahajanapada consisted of eight clans. The four leading clans were Vajjis, Lichchavis, Jnatrikass and Videhas. Lord Mahavira was born in Jnatrikass clan which is also mentioned as tribe in numerous books.
Paithan or Parishtana is a city in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra. It was capital of Satavahana Empire. It has found reference even in a Grecian book Periplus Maris Ertharaei or Periplus of Erythraean Sea written by an annonymous writer somewhere around 150 AD.
15) In Buddhism what does Patimokkha stand for ?
a) A description of Mahayana Buddhism
b) A description of Hinayana Buddhism
c) The rules of the Samgha
d) The questions of King Menander
Ans: c.
The rules of Samgha.
It is rule of discipline for the Buddhist monks included in Vinaya Pitaka. It is part of Theravada literature. There are 227 rules for Bikkhus and 311 for Bhikkhunis. It is part of Suttavibhanga included in Vinaya Pitaka got compiled by Maha Kassapa and Ananda when there arose some dispute because of monks like Subhadda.
The description of the Mahayana Buddhism is given in Mahayana Sutras. However, the Hinayana Buddhists and many scholars call them heretic sayings.
The description of the Hinayana Buddhism is generally considered to be given in the Palli cannons. The most accepted source is Sutra Pitaka, the first part of Tripitaka.
Milinda Panaho is the book on the questions of King Menander. The questions by Menander or Milind were put to Nagasena. It is part of the Khuddak Nikaya which again is the part of the Tripitaka.
16) According to Mathura pillar inscription Uditacharya consecrated two Sivalingas named
a) Gutteshwara and Kadambeshwara
b) Nageshwara and Naganatha
c) Kapileshwara and Upmiteswara
d) Nanjundeshwara and Shrishaileswara
Ans: c.
Kapileshwara and Upmiteswara.
Mathura Pillar inscription belongs to Chandragupta II. Uditacharya was follower of Pasupata Sect.(four in total). He is considered founder of the Pasupata sect, one of the oldest Shaivite Sect. The Mathura Pillar inscription was written in 380 AD.
Uditacharya declares himself to be the tenth descendent of Bhagvat Kaushika, the founder of Maheshvara sect. This fact appears in Vayu Purana and Linga Purana. Bhagvat Kaushika was the disciple of Lakuli, the real Siva Maheshvara. The two Sivalinga were attributed to the teachers of Acharya Upendra.
(This question has also appeared in UGC/NET question number of times.)
Kadambeshwara Temple is a Historical Temple of Banavasi Kadamba age. This is in the village called Heggarani (which means Hegeya Rana - The war field of Hegge, in the vicinity of Kadambas Territory in Karnataka. The temple enshrines the Lord Ganesha.
Gutteshwara or Kutteshwara is a village in Kundapura in Karnataka State. The place is more popular for the lake of that name and the temple of Lord Shiva. It is also called Kotilingeshwara temple . There are other temples dedicated to other deities also.
Nageshwara and Naganatha:
Nageshwara or Nageswara Jyotirlinga is one of the 12 Jyotirlinga mentioned in the Shiva Purana. The main temple is in Dwarka in Gujarat. The second temple, which is also called the Negeshwara Jyotirlinga and called as Nagnath temple, is in Aundha in Maharashtra. There is a third temple having the same significance and it is called Jageshwara temple at Almora in Uttrakhand state. The Jageshwara temple is considered as the first Jyotirlinga on the earth.
Nanjundeshwara and Shrishaileswara
Nanjundeshwara is a Shiva Temple at Nanjangud town, south of Mysore. It is situated on the banks of Kabini rive, a tributary of Kaveri River in Karnataka State. The town became popular during Ganga dynasty. Later Chola dynasty took over in 11th century. The temple of Nanjundeshwara Temple is an important landmark there. It is one of the biggest temple in Karnataka with numerous small temples dotted around the main temple. The Wodeyars and Tipu Sultan extended liberal patronage to the temple.
17) Pindakara under the Mauryan ruler was a tax
a) A paid in labour
b) on irrigation
c) On non – agricultural produce
d) collected jointly from a village
d. collected jointly from a village.
Pindkara was one of the four taxes which were being collected since the days of Mahajanapada. Initially it was a voluntary contribution in form of a fistful grain at a yagya. Apart from that, there were Shadbhaga that was 1/6 of the produce. Senabhaktam, the tax charged for using the services of the troops.
However, this tax has not been mentioned in the post Mauryan period or Gupta period. Hence, it was collected upto Mauryan period. But it was never imposed on the individual. It was collected from the village as a whole.
The tax on irrigation was Udakabhagam. Apart from that, the tax was levied on the irrigation from wells if the water was drawn by hand and it was called hastaparvartimam. When the water was used for irrigation by withdrawing it from well with the help of Bullocks, then Skandhaparvartimam tax was imposed. They were all irrigation taxes. They were upto ¼ of the produce. The taxes were further differentiated if the water was drawn from a river, tank or lakes.
Shulka is a common term for the tax collected on non-agricultural produce. It was also imposed on trading activity. Secondly, it was a local tax. It was not similar to toll tax which was levied on the commodities coming from outside the regions. Hence, shulka and toll were different taxes and they could be paid and collected collectively. It was tax generally paid by the merchants.
Visti and simhanaka were the two taxes which were paid in labour to the Mauryan ruler. They were basically a tax similar to income, which a person was not in a position to pay in money or other form. He was then liable to pay in form of labour to the king. All the classes and castes were liable to pay such type of labour to the ruler. It was meant to get the services of the artisans which were highly valued during the ancient period. Vishti was a cooperative contribution by all the people for the common cause. When it became a compulsion and the ruler made the artisans to work for them under command and force, then it was called Begar.
18) Consider the following places:
1. Ahiraura 2. Dhauli 3. Girnar
At which of the above place/places do Asoka’s rock edicts occur?
a) 1 only
b) 1 and 2 only
c) 2 and 3 only
d) 1, 2 and 3
Ans: 1, 2, and 3. D.
Ahriarua is Jhansi District of Uttar Pardesh.
Dhauli is in Orissa more famous of Rock Edict XiV and Kalinga war.
Girnar is in Junagarh District of Gujarat.
19) Who of the following deciphered the Brahmi script?
a) William jones
b) James prinsep
c) John Marshall
d) E.J.H.Mackay
Ans: James Prinsep: b
James Prinsep was an assay-master in Indian Government Mint, Calcutta. In addition to that he had interest in inscriptions, philology and numismatics. At Calcutta Mint, he had worked under Dr. H. H. Wilson, a known sanskrit scholar and orientalist in his times. He also remained the secretary of Asiatic Society of Bengal. He was also a qualified architecture.
He had won a place in history of India when he deciphered the Brahmi on Ashokan inscription in 1837. Later, in 1915, when it was further collaborated from finding on the inscription that the Devanam Piya Piyadasi and Asoka refers to the same person, it was well confirmed that the inscriptions belong to Asoka.
William Jones: William Jones, generally written as Sir William Jones, was founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He was an English Philologist. He knew 28 languages. The name of his father was also William Jones, who was a known mathematician of his times. He is also famous as an orientalist. He translated Kalidasa AbhigyanaShakultanam into English. He encouraged Charles Wilkins to translate Bhagvat Gita into English.
John Marshall: John Marshall was Director General of Archeological Survey of India from 1902 (Year of founding during the period of Lord Curzon as the Viceroy of India) to 1928. It was during his tenure that the sites of Harappa and Mohenjodaro were excavated and forgotten civilization of Indus Valley came into light before the world.
E. J. H. Mackay: EJH MacKay was a veteran archeologist who had earlier worked on Egypt under the supervision of Sir Flinders Petrie. He took over from Sir John Marshall for continuing the excavation at Mohenjodaro. He died on October 2, 1943 at the age of 63. He was awarded Watumull Prize in 1945 by American Historical Association posthumously.
20) In which one among the following edicts of Ashoka, his Kalinga war is mentioned?
a) Piller edict I
b) Pillar edict VII
c) Rock edict XI
d) Rock edict XIII
Ans: Rock Edit XIII ; c
The contents of the Rock Edict reads as follows:
Even the forest people, who live in Beloved-of-the-Gods' domain, are entreated and reasoned with to act properly. They are told that despite his remorse Beloved-of-the-Gods has the power to punish them if necessary, so that they should be ashamed of their wrong and not be killed. Truly, Beloved-of-the-Gods desires non-injury, restraint and impartiality to all beings, even where wrong has been done.
Now it is conquest by Dhamma that Beloved-of-the-Gods considers to be the best conquest.[27] And it (conquest by Dhamma) has been won here, on the borders, even six hundred yojanas away, where the Greek king Antiochos rules, beyond there where the four kings named Ptolemy, Antigonos, Magas and Alexander rule, likewise in the south among the Cholas, the Pandyas, and as far as Tamraparni.[28] Here in the king's domain among the Greeks, the Kambojas, the Nabhakas, the Nabhapamkits, the Bhojas, the Pitinikas, the Andhras and the Palidas, everywhere people are following Beloved-of-the-Gods' instructions in Dhamma. Even where Beloved-of-the-Gods' envoys have not been, these people too, having heard of the practice of Dhamma and the ordinances and instructions in Dhamma given by Beloved-of-the-Gods, are following it and will continue to do so. This conquest has been won everywhere, and it gives great joy -- the joy which only conquest by Dhamma can give. But even this joy is of little consequence. Beloved-of-the-Gods considers the great fruit to be experienced in the next world to be more important.
Further elaborations:
Pillar Edict I:
It is about the stopping of the animal killing during festivals and abstaining of the non-vegetarian food by the king himself.
The contents are translated as follows:
Pillar Edict VII:
It is about the religious freedom to all and peaceful co-existence among the members of the different religions:
The contents of the edict are translated as follows:
Pillar Edict XI:
In this inscription, Asoka had defined the real meaning of his dhamma. Kindly read it discreetly. No where any Buddhist instruction is given. It can be noted for short notes for main question paper.
The contents of the edict are translated as follows:
Beloved-of-the-Gods, King Piyadasi, speaks thus:[20] There is no gift like the gift of the Dhamma,[21] (no acquaintance like) acquaintance with Dhamma, (no distribution like) distribution of Dhamma, and (no kinship like) kinship through Dhamma. And it consists of this: proper behavior towards servants and employees, respect for mother and father, generosity to friends, companions, relations, Brahmans and ascetics, and not killing living beings. Therefore a father, a son, a brother, a master, a friend, a companion or a neighbor should say: "This is good, this should be done." One benefits in this world and gains great merit in the next by giving the gift of the Dhamma.
1. yes sumith sir...thaaanks will be usefull to those aspirants of UGC NET IN HISTORY...
2. Hi, Great Collection of easy history question and answers...Good questions...i also have a collection of history questions and answers visit
History questions and answers
3. i am a ba history student at nss manjeri ...... ur blog is helpful 4 my studies.......can u please crack the question papers of jnu entrance exams????/
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Browsing by Authors Scott, R.B.
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Showing results 1 to 2 of 2
Issue DateTitleAuthor(s)
1977Can the people of the world be fed? What is Canada's role?Hulse, J.H.; Scott, R.B.
1984IDRC Workshop on the Foreign Exchange and Exchange Rate Policy in Eastern and Southern Africa : opening remarksScott, R.B.
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Education:The First Machine - The Story of the Bow and Arrow
From GHN
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Title of lesson
The First Machine – The Story of the Bow and Arrow
Grades 8-12/Social Studies; US History; World History
Time Required for completed lesson
Dependent on number of materials used and length of class period. (One to four periods)
NJCCCA Social Studies:
1. 6.2.8.B.1.c
2. 6.2.8.C.1.b
3. 6.2.8.C.3.b
4. 6.2.8.B.4.c
5. 6.2.8.C.4.b
6. 6.2.8.C.4.e
7. 6.2.8.D.4.j
8. 6.2.12.B.1.a
Common Core State Standards
New Jersey - Grades 9-10
Key Ideas and Details
Craft and Structure
Integration of Knowledge and Ideas
• Compare and contrast treatments of the same topic in several primary and secondary sources.
Materials Required
White board, smart board or easel, copies of the readings, colored pencils or markers, bow and arrow, globe or map, sling shot, DVD player.
Anticipatory Set
1. Bring a bow and arrow to class.Have the students handle it and discover how it works. (Check for permission based on zero tolerance laws.
2. Discuss how a sling shot works; bring one to class. Ask the students to consider how the sling shot can be improved upon.
3. Show a movie clip from "Robin Hood", "Pocahontas" or any combination of G rated movies which have bows and arrows i the story. Discuss the use of the bow and arrow and who is using it. Compare the Native American tool and the European one.
4. Ask the students if they have ever taken archery lessons. Is it easy? hard?
1. Readings and questions based on the readings are offered at differing reading levels which will allow the teacher to differentiate within the class.
2. Pictures and diagrams to promote the understanding of the nature of the bow and arrow as a machine.
3. Timeline to be filled in by the students.
4. Map study to be completed by the students. All procedures can be offered as whole class or individually completed exercises.
1. Students can explain how the bow and arrow works
2. Students will hypothesize reasons for the invention of the bow and arrow.
3. Lists will be developed with the historical and present uses of the bow and arrow and a comparison of the lists will be created as well.
4. Students will follow the historical and geographic progression of the bow and arrow.
5. Students will contemplate the possibility of ideas for inventions developing in different cultures within the same historic period.
Students will use literacy skills throughout the lesson. Science skills will be employed to explain the technical advances in this invention.
1. Readings are offered at different lexile levels.
2. All activities can be done individually, with the instructor or in groups.
(Two closures are offered, the choice of which is based on the number of days devoted to this subject and the abilities of the students. Both closures can be used and assigned based on differentiation of abilities.)
1. Using the readings, timeline and maps, explain why the bow and arrow changed due to the needs of the people. Discuss the basic bow and arrow, the composite, the longbow and the crossbow.
2. Discuss changes you have experienced in cell phones, computers, game boxes, televisions and other electronic devices. What kinds of changes occurred? Why did the changes occur? Who made these changes? Do you like the changes? Have they improved your life?
Archery History
Bow and Arrow
History of Archery, by Tom Brissee
History of the Bow and Arrow – 1
History of the Bow and Arrow – 2
Medieval Crossbow
Medieval Short Bow and Arrow
The Bow and Arrow, a Historical Perspective
The History of the Bow and arrow by Michael Hinckley
North American Bows, Arrows and Quivers by Otis Tufton Mason
How We Got Here: From Bow and Arrow to the Space Age by C. R. Hallpike
The Third Invention: How the Bow and Arrow Changed History by Steve Hayes
Compare these changes in inventions with the changes in the bow and arrow.
Archery History Questions
Bow and Arrow Questions
History of Archery By Tom Brissee – Questions
History of the Bow and Arrow Questions – 1
History of the Bow and Arrow Questions – 2
Medieval Crossbow Questions
Medieval Short Bow and Arrow Questions
Questions for The History of the Bow and Arrow by Michael Hinckley
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A Moment of Science
Posts tagged wisdom teeth
December 22, 2010
Girl smiling warmly
Making Stem Cells From A Wise Part Of The Body: Wisdom Teeth
Scientists may soon be able to use wisdom teeth to create stem cells.
October 26, 2010
An xray of a person's mouth
The Evolution And Science Behind Wisdom Teeth
Why do humans have wisdom teeth? What is so wise about them?
June 16, 2005
How Wise Are “Wisdom Teeth”?
As we all learned in health class, human beings have 32 teeth. Twenty-eight of them come in before puberty, but the last four teeth, our “third molars,” usually come in during our late teens or early 20′s, when we’re presumably older and wiser, hence their nickname, wisdom teeth. Lean more on this Moment of Science.
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Earth Eats: Real Food, Green Living
Posts tagged bratwurst
July 4, 2012
More Than Hot Dogs
meat grill spatula
Burgers, Bratwurst And Beans: A Meat-Eater’s Fourth Of July
Veggie barbecue not your thing? Here's a taste of what can be done with your local, free-range meat this Independence Day.
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Earth Eats: Real Food, Green Living
Posts tagged mislabeling
February 26, 2013
A Fish Is A Fish?
Mislabeled Fish Found Nationwide In Largest Study To Date
According to a new study by Oceana, nearly one-third of fish sold in the United States is mislabeled.
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Field of Science
Aging Makes People Colon-Close-Parenthesis
Getting older is not a recipe for crotchetiness. Although those two cranky Muppets will always be up in their balcony, Americans in general don't become less happy with age. If anything, they get happier.
The trajectory of people's happiness over a lifetime is tricky to study, because in a given year you're capturing not only your subject's age but also the current events. You need to follow a large group of people over many years, and you need them to be all different ages when the study starts.
Angelina Sutin and her colleagues at the National Institute of Aging in Maryland had just such a dataset to work with. Called the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), this project has been running for more than five decades and has gathered data on people born everywhere between 1885 and 1980. These subjects have answered questions about their happiness on many occasions—some as many as 19 times—throughout their lives.
Want to find your own happiness score? Answer the following questions on a scale from 0 to 3, where 0 is "rarely or never" and 3 is "most or all of the time." In the past week of your life, how frequent were these feelings?
I enjoyed life
I felt I was just as good as other people
I felt hopeful about the future
I was happy
Summing the four numbers will give you your well-being score. If you were in the BLSA, that score would be your data point for today.
When the researchers put all 2,267 subjects together and looked at how their happiness changed with age, they got a decidedly downward slope. A frowny face, if you will.
age = : (
It looked like aging made people less happy. But then the researchers tried a different tactic. Instead of lumping all their subjects together, they grouped them by when they were born. That frown turned upside down:
age = : \
Within each birth year, the results now looked like a somewhat more optimistic "meh?" face. Every group's well-being slightly (but significantly) improved with age.
The first set of results had sloped downward because people who were born earlier reached lower endpoints of well-being. In the graph, you can see that someone born in 1905 or 1925 is likely to reach a 9 or a 10 later in life; someone born in the 1960s might make it nearly to 12 (a perfect score).
Sutin thinks this could have to do with the biggest national frowny-face of all: the Great Depression. People who lived through this time, she writes, may have felt lasting psychological effects. Although their well-being still improved as they aged, the cloud of the Depression may have lingered.
(Sutin notes also that younger and older adults, according to previous studies, treat this set of well-being questions and the 0-to-3 scale similarly. This suggests the results aren't just happiness inflation—say, younger people reporting a 12 for the same feelings that older people would rate a 10.)
Aside from increasing economic prosperity in the United States, there are plenty of other reasons people may have felt happier in more recent decades. Sutin cites increased life expectancy, decreased infant mortality, better nutrition, less disease, and more women in the workplace as possible factors. The twentieth century also saw faster travel, the invention of the Internet, and the eradication in America of both the polio virus and gelatin-based entrées. There's a lot to be happy about.
Now that Sutin has found that the average American seems to have an upward trajectory of well-being, she's interested in people's individual paths: what makes one person's happiness increase more or less (or decrease) over time?
In this study, subjects who were white had higher well-being scores on average, as did those with more education. Sutin hopes to pick apart the social, economic, and health factors that affect how happiness changes with age. When everyone can feel as :) as they want, we'll really be living in the future.
Sutin, A., Terracciano, A., Milaneschi, Y., An, Y., Ferrucci, L., & Zonderman, A. (2013). The Effect of Birth Cohort on Well-Being: The Legacy of Economic Hard Times Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797612459658
Image: a 102-year-old woman, by Uppy Chatterjee (Flickr)
1. It's probably worth noting that Statler and Waldorf, while dismissive and belittling of pretty much everything, are incredibly happy while doing so. They usually follow their scathing putdowns by uproarious laughter, usually at their target's expense.
By the way, for people who aren't familiar with it, the effect shown by the two graphs (the trend of an aggregate is different from the trends of subgroups) is called Simpson's paradox, and is worth knowing about for anyone doing regressions/correlations.
2. I volunteer with senior citizens and am always amazed at how unstressed they are. Besides the fear of falling down, they don't fear much. They've been there, done that, and have experienced all the ups and downs of life. And most of them live on a fixed income, which helps to know that you can pay your bills for the upcoming years, which most of us younger people fear.
Anyways, here are some secrets to a long life from the world's oldest person (formerly):
Markup Key:
- <b>bold</b> = bold
- <i>italic</i> = italic
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Fight global warming or face the wrath of the dinosaurs
Three hundred million years ago there was a period of global warming. Two hundred million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the land, wreaking havok and spreading terror. Scientists think the two events were intimately linked.
Around three hundred million years ago, the world was a very different place. North America and Europe had a firm grip on the equator, and hadn't yet slipped upwards toward the north pole. Their equatorial placement gave the two land masses a steamy, tropical climate and lush rainforests. Sadly, trouble was brewing in paradise. The world was becoming a hotter place. Rain stopped falling, and the rainforests dried up. The long, continuous rainforests split into small patches of forest, cut off from each other by dry, impassable countryside.
This countryside isolated forests as completely as an ocean separates islands. Just as islands isolation from each other cause divergent species to evolve on them, the forests isolation caused divergent evolution of certain species. The most successful species were reptiles. Cut off from each other, facing adverse conditions, they evolved in disparate and fascinating ways . . .
And 100 million years they made the earth tremble with their footsteps. That's right, the diversity bred in that first environmental collapse appears to have started a chain that led to some of the most terrifying and fearsome predators in the planet's history. Although many links in that ancient chain are not present in the modern world, the lesson is still clear: don't mess with the earth's climate or a T-Rex might eat you.
Via Physorg.
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21805: Ruling on spending zakaah to build a mosque
What is the ruling on spending zakaah on a mosque which is nearing completion but construction has stopped?
Praise be to Allaah.
What is well known among all the scholars, and is the opinion of the majority and almost reaches the point of consensus among the scholars of the righteous salaf, is that zakaah is not to be spent on building mosques or buying books etc., rather it is to be spent on the eight categories which are mentioned in the aayah of Soorat al-Tawbah [9:60], namely: the poor; the needy; those employed to collect the funds; those whose hearts are to be softened towards Islam; to release captives; for those who are in debt; for Allaah’s Cause (i.e., for the mujaahideen); and for wayfarers. The phrase fi sabeel Allaah (for Allaah’s Cause) refers exclusively to jihad. This is well known among the scholars, and this does not include spending zakaah on building mosques, schools, roads, etc. And Allaah is the Source of strength.
Majmoo’ Fataawa wa Maqaalaat Mutanawwi’ah li’l-Shaykh Ibn Baaz, vol. 14, p. 294.
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From bronze!!phylo!smith Fri May 22 12:24:20 EST 1992 Article: 2508 of Newsgroups: Path: bronze!!phylo!smith From: (Steven Smith) Subject: GDE2.0 on DECstation Message-ID: Sender: (News) Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana Date: Fri, 22 May 1992 15:30:11 GMT Lines: 19 Genetic Data Environment is Now on the DECstation GDE2.0 is now available on the DECstation (21/31/5000). A binary version compiled under MIT X11R5 and SUN XView3.0 is now on in the pub/GDE2.0 directory. This release has not been tested with DECwindows, and therefore may require the OpenLook fonts to function. The xview programs shelltool and textedit are also included, along with the OpenLook Window manager olwm. GDE is now up to revision b for both SUN and DEC versions. If you are not up to the current revision, there is an update tar file on golgi. If you have not registered your copy of GDE2.0, please do so with the registration form in the UPDATES directory on golgi. Steve Smith Harvard Genome Lab
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International Vegetarian Union (IVU)
IVU logo
38th IVU World Vegetarian Congress
Dresden, Germany
Sunday July 27 - Sunday August 3, 2008
Deutsch - English - Español - Français - Italiano
Monday Morning Speakers
Dilip Barman, USA
Biography: Dilip Barman is an IVU Councillor and North Carolina (USA) based speaker and instructor on topics ranging from vegetarianism, animal rights and cookery to peace issues, Eastern philosophy and ahimsa and Gandhian nonviolence. He is also an instructor in computer science, computer literacy, film studies, and digital photgraphy.
Lecture title: Introduction to Animal Rights Philosophy
Abstract: What are “rights“ and what kind of system bestows these rights? Do animals have rights and, if they do, in what context does this make sense? Are there ethical guidelines that suggest how people should interact with non-human animals? This presentation will introduce compassionate folk, vegetarian or not, to the concepts behind the contemporary animal rights movement.
Date: Monday 28 July 2008; Time: 09:15; Room: Festival Hall; Language: English with simultaneous translation
Dr. Eisenhart von Loeper, Germany
Biography: Eisenhart von Loeper, born 1941 in Potsdam. Lawyer for 40 years with his own office in Nagold, Germany. Articles and research on animal rights, animal protection law and the German constitution since 1966 and more intensively since 1978. Ongoing campaigns against battery systems, fur farming, and vivisection. 1987-2006 chairman of People for Animal Rights, spokesman for Lawyers for Animal Rights. 1990-2002 successful initiative to include animal protection in the German constitution. Co-author of the official commentary on the German animal protection law. Received the Federal Service Cross in 2005.
Lecture title: Animal Rights, the Constitution and Humanity
Abstract: Since the inclusion of Animal Protection in the German Constitution, society as a whole faces the challenge of treating animals in a new way without immense pain and factory farming: as indicated by the Federal Constitutional Court, this means the greatest possible harmony of human and animal interests. People following a vegetarian lifestyle already practise this idea of justice towards animals. In addition, existing laws need to be strengthened by the right of associations to assert the rights of animals.
Another main topic is how human activities can be initiated worldwide and in every country to create a fundamental harmony between us humans and all creatures, including spirituality, new scientific insights, experiences with self healing, compassion for other living beings and a solution- oriented implementation of underlying conflicts. The speaker would like to stimulate, encourage and exchange views with the audience in this respect.
Date: Monday 28 July 2008; Time: 10:45; Room: Festsaal; Language: German with simultaneous translation
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From beat reporter to book author 500 words at a time
Rod McQueen
Rod McQueenPeople used to tug on my drinking arm at receptions and say, "I’ve always wanted to be an author. How do you write a book?"
I had a long-winded answer but eyes glazed over, so I found a shorter response.
"Write 500 words a day and by the end of a year you’ll have enough for a book."
It’s that simple. And that difficult.
When I started my first book I was business editor at Maclean’s. Editor Peter C. Newman told me he had his next few book topics lined up and Canada's banks were not among them. Why didn't I write a book about the Big Five chief executive officers?
Not only did I embrace his idea, I mimicked his methodology. I got up at 4 a.m., wrote until breakfast, and then went into the office, my daily quota of 500 words fulfilled. Novelist Graham Greene aimed for 350 words daily but he was a better writer. I had to throw out some of my stuff.
After several months I said to Newman, "I can’t get the first chapter stopped. I’ve written 30,000 words."
"You write the first chapter last," he said. "It’s an epilogue."
On such insights, a career as an author can be cobbled together.
For most of the time since that first book, I had a day job, but since 2001, when I was fired along with one-third of the editorial staff at the National Post, I’ve focused on my books, so my advice can apply to any working journalist who is looking for a long-term project or a former journalist looking to parlay her knowledge into an 80,000-word book.
Choose The Idea carefully. You’re going to be living with this book daily for up to two years so you need to care deeply about the topic. If you get bored, readers will, too.
I've written 12 non-fiction books in the last 25 years. Most were inspired by events. For example, I attended the news conference in February 1997, when George Eaton announced that the family firm had sought court protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangements Act. He claimed that the department stores had gotten into trouble only recently. I asked myself: How could Eaton’s, founded in 1869, slide toward bankruptcy so quickly? That question led to 200 interviews and an award-winning book 18 months later.
My latest book, published this spring, Manulife: How Dominic D’Alessandro Built a Global Giant and Fought to Save It, began with a similar curiosity. What made D'Alessandro so driven and so different from other more milquetoast Canadian business leaders? How did he take a relatively small company and create the largest insurance firm in North America?
My timing was fortuitous. A month into my research, D’Alessandro announced he was stepping down as CEO a year later, in May 2009. I not only had my publication news peg, I had a succession story. Another surprise chapter combusted last fall: the global meltdown in financial services.
Whatever your topic, start writing immediately. It helps focus your themes and identifies the holes in your research. The 500-word daily discipline is all-important. To cite Graham Greene again: "I have no talent. It’s just a question of working, being willing to put in the time."
Check out all secondary sources, do database searches and prowl libraries, but use such material sparingly. A book is no different than a news story; information from knowledgeable people is the best and most reliable source.
Make a list of everyone you can think of who might know something about your topic. Make contact with at least one person every day who can help. At the end of each interview, always ask: "Who else should I speak to?" Start at the outer edge of the information circle and work your way in. By the time you get to the principals, they’ll have heard about you and be eager to talk.
Once you know themes and timing, produce a three-page outline and a sample chapter, then seek an interested publisher. A literary agent can be helpful but they take a 15 per cent commission. And write those 500 words. I’ll be tugging on your arm to hear how you’re doing.
Rod McQueen’s latest book, Manulife: How Dominic D’Alessandro Built a Global Giant and Fought to Save It, was published in May by Penguin.
Comment Policy
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In Portugal, You Could Win A Car If You Pay Your Taxes
You're lucky if you get money back from the IRS after doing your taxes. Not like in Portugal, where they're going to give away cars to people who pay their taxes.
According to The Atlantic Cities, the Portuguese government has started a plan called "Factura da Sorte," in which people using their tax ID number when making purchases are entered into a lottery for a car drawing. Then every week people can see the drawing on TV and find out if they've won a car. This is all because Portugal has decided small-scale tax evasion is one of its biggest problems.
And it's possible it could even be a nice car, though probably not as nice as a Citroen C6. Portugal believes it can boost tax revenue by 600 to 800 million euros with this scheme, so they must be getting a surplus deal on discontinued Chevy Cruzes or something.
But hey, I wouldn't turn down a free Chevy Cruze from the IRS.
Photo: Getty Images
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A Correction about the Casey Project’s Name
April 2, 2012
In recent print and online articles, the Gazette incorrectly reported that the Casey Overpass replacement project was initially named the “Casey Parkway” and then changed to the “Casey Arborway.” In fact, the project was announced as the “Casey Arborway” and has not changed. The error was due to the Gazette’s reporter writing down the correct name, but then misremembering it and failing to check the notes when writing about the project. The Gazette regrets the error.
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They Found the G-Spot! No They Didn't! Yes They Did!
The eternal G-spot dispute — do women have one or don't they? — rivals the debate over the existence of God. Now, a doctor claims he's finally found the Holy Grail, although critics say his research is laughably inconclusive. Wait, haven't we heard this "news" approximately fifteen million times before? Why is our culture so obsessed with "cracking" the female orgasm?
The term "G-spot" was first coined in blah blah blah sorry, I'm not going to get into the history because every single G-spot article starts the same way, with a few Freud references and a vague metaphor likening the vagina to Xanadu. Here's the first sentence of today's groundbreaking Los Angeles Times story, "Doctor says he's found the actual G spot," which is over 1,000 words long:
Like so many explorers before him, Dr. Adam Ostrzenski has long dreamed of finding a piece of elusive territory with a reputation for near-mythic powers.
Are they just fucking with us at this point? Kind of, actually. Turns out this particular Marco Polo is a semi-retired Florida gynecologist who performs "G-spot plasty," an extreeeemely dubious plastic surgery procedure that purportedly enhances sexual pleasure. Conflict of interest alert? No way! This pioneer said he was simply inspired by the first principles of medicine — "first you have to establish the anatomy" — to muck around in an 83-year-old polish female cadaver for seven hours. He found small, grape-like clusters of what he believes is "erectile tissue" housed in a "a deep, deep structure" nestled between the vaginal wall's fifth layer, the endopelvic fascia, and its sixth, the dorsal perineal membrane.
Some (male) doctors are thrilled — one sexual medicine specialist believes the discovery of this "unique structure capable of boosting women's orgasmic powers" should once and for all silence believers who question the G-spot's existence — but others, such as Beverly Whipple, the Rutgers University sexologist who popularized the name "G-spot" as coauthor of a 1982 book on the subject (aka, she probably actually knows what she's talking about), is fed up with the hullabaloo:
Laying out a bundle of poorly defined tissues and calling them the G spot likens women's powers of sexual pleasure to the "on-off switch" that better describes men's sexuality, Whipple said. In suggesting he has found and characterized the exact structure that boosts the intensity of orgasm in women, Ostrzenski ignores research that suggests there is no single magical "spot" that does all that, she added.
Whipple and her colleagues, who probably have way better things to do, have already drafted a critique that faults Ostrzenski for failing to show that the "G-spot" he discovered has nerve tissue, is erectile tissue, or that it "has any role to play in female sexual arousal." Unsurprisingly, Ostreznski has admitted he knows next to nothing about the tissue he found, and "makes no claim that the G-spot he has found will be in the same place, nor that it will have the same powers, for every woman." So why is the LAT reporting his story? Why did Whipple even have to critique such a batshit-sounding study?
I'm sure I'm going to get called out for "science-shaming" (which is apparently a thing?) but I'm not mad at science; I'm frustrated that I'm still reading about the G-spot without actually learning anything about how any of the findings actually affect what we know about female sexuality. Search "G-spot" on this very site and, in less than a minute, you'll learn that G-spot orgasms:
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Your puppy or kitten might look all sweet and innocent now, but they can turn into a slutty pooch or caddy cat before you're even expecting it. As this ad shows, once you start thinking of your adorable little animals as horny teens, it changes everything and suddenly you'll want to do anything to keep them from filling your house with offspring. The clever spot was made by the Best Friends Animal Society in Utah to promote their Fix at Four campaign, which encourages people to get their animals spayed or neutered at four months old. While that's obviously a good idea, can't we also have a squee-inducing Teen Mom series starring pets?
Keep Your Kitten or Puppy From Becoming the Town Whore[AdWeek]
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Passing Julia Callback Functions to C
One of the great strengths of Julia is that it is so easy to call C code natively, with no special “glue” routines or overhead to marshal arguments and convert return values. For example, if you want to call GNU GSL to compute a special function like a Debye integral, it is as easy as:
debye_1(x) = ccall((:gsl_sf_debye_1,:libgsl), Cdouble, (Cdouble,), x)
at which point you can compute debye_1(2), debye_1(3.7), and so on. (Even easier would be to use Jiahao Chen’s GSL package for Julia, which has already created such wrappers for you.) This makes a vast array of existing C libraries accessible to you in Julia (along with Fortran libraries and other languages with C-accessible calling conventions).
In fact, you can even go the other way around, passing Julia routines to C, so that C code is calling Julia code in the form of callback functions. For example, a C library for numerical integration might expect you to pass the integrand as a function argument, which the library will then call to evaluate the integrand as many times as needed to estimate the integral. Callback functions are also natural for optimization, root-finding, and many other numerical tasks, as well as in many non-numerical problems. The purpose of this blog post is to illustrate the techniques for passing Julia functions as callbacks to C routines, which is straightforward and efficient but requires some lower-level understanding of how functions and other values are passed as arguments.
The code in this post requires Julia 0.2 (or a recent git facsimile thereof); the key features needed for callback functions (especially unsafe_pointer_to_objref) are not available in Julia 0.1.
Sorting with qsort
Perhaps the most well-known example of a callback parameter is provided by the qsort function, part of the ANSI C standard library and declared in C as:
function mycompare{T}(a_::Ptr{T}, b_::Ptr{T})
a = unsafe_load(a_)
b = unsafe_load(b_)
return a < b ? cint(-1) : a > b ? cint(+1) : cint(0)
cint(n) = convert(Cint, n)
Notice that we use the built-in function unsafe_load to fetch the values pointed to by the arguments a_ and b_ (which is “unsafe” because it will crash if these are not valid pointers, but qsort will always pass valid pointers). Also, we have to be a little careful about return values: qsort expects a function returning a C int, so we must be sure to return Cint (the corresponding type in Julia) via a call to convert.
Now, how do we pass this to C? A function pointer in C is essentially just a pointer to the memory location of the machine code implementing that function, whereas a function value mycompare (of type Function) in Julia is quite different. Thanks to Julia’s JIT compilation approach,a Julia function may not even be compiled until the first time it is called, and in general the same Julia function may be compiled into multiple machine-code instantiations, which are specialized for arguments of different types (e.g. different T in this case). So, you can imagine that mycompare must internally point to a rather complicated data structure (a jl_function_t in julia.h, if you are interested), which holds information about the argument types, the compiled versions (if any), and so on. In general, it must store a closure with information about the environment in which the function was defined; we will talk more about this below. In any case, it is a very different object than a simple pointer to machine code for one set of argument types. Fortunately, we can get the latter simply by calling a built-in Julia function called cfunction:
const mycompare_c = cfunction(mycompare, Cint, (Ptr{Cdouble}, Ptr{Cdouble}))
Here, we pass cfunction three arguments: the function mycompare, the return type Cint, and a tuple of the argument types, in this case to sort an array of Cdouble (Float64) elements. Julia compiles a version of mycompare specialized for these argument types (if it has not done so already), and returns a Ptr{Void} holding the address of the machine code, exactly what we need to pass to qsort. We are now ready to call qsort on some sample data:
A = [1.3, -2.7, 4.4, 3.1]
After this executes, A is changed to the sorted array [ -2.7, 1.3, 3.1, 4.4]. Note that Julia knows how to convert an array A::Vector{Cdouble} into a Ptr{Cdouble}, how to compute the sizeof a type in bytes (identical to C’s sizeof operator), and so on. For fun, try inserting a println("mycompare($a,$b)") line into mycompare, which will allow you to see the comparisons that qsort is performing (and to verify that it is really calling the Julia function that you passed to it).
The problem with closures
We aren’t done yet, however. If you start passing callback functions to C routines, it won’t be long before you discover that cfunction doesn’t always work. For example, suppose we tried to declare our comparison function inline, via:
mycomp = cfunction((a_,b_) -> unsafe_load(a_) < unsafe_load(b_) ?
cint(-1) : cint(+1),
Julia barfs on this, printing ERROR: function is not yet c-callable. In general, cfunction only works for “top-level” functions: named functions defined in the top-level (global or module) scope, but not anonymous (args -> value) functions and not functions defined within other functions (“nested” functions). The reason for this stems from one important concept in computer science: a closure.
To understand the need for closures, and the difficulty they pose for callback functions, suppose that we wanted to provide a nicer interface for qsort, one which permitted the user to simply pass a lessthan function returning true or false while hiding all of the low-level business with pointers, Cint, and so on. We might like to do something of the form:
function qsort!{T}(A::Vector{T}, lessthan::Function)
function mycompare(a_::Ptr{T}, b_::Ptr{T})
a = unsafe_load(a_)
b = unsafe_load(b_)
return lessthan(a, b) ? cint(-1) : cint(+1)
mycompare_c = cfunction(mycompare, Cint, (Ptr{T}, Ptr{T}))
ccall(:qsort, Void, (Ptr{T}, Csize_t, Csize_t, Ptr{Void}),
A, length(A), sizeof(T), mycompare_c)
Then we could simply call qsort!([1.3, -2.7, 4.4, 3.1], <) to sort in ascending order using the built-in < comparison, or any other comparison function we wanted. Unfortunately cfunction will again barf when you try to call qsort!, and it is no longer so difficult to understand why. Notice that the nested mycompare function is no longer self-contained: it uses the variable lessthan from the surrounding scope. This is a common pattern for nested functions and anonymous functions: often, they are parameterized by local variables in the environment where the function is defined. Technically, the ability to have this kind of dependency is provided by lexical scoping in a programming language like Julia, and is typical of any language in which functions are “first-class” objects. In order to support lexical scoping, a Julia Function object needs to internally carry around a pointer to the variables in the enclosing environment, and this encapsulation is called a closure.
In contrast, a C function pointer is not a closure. It doesn’t enclose a pointer to the environment in which the function was defined, or anything else for that matter; it is just the address of a stream of instructions. This makes it hard, in C, to write functions to transform other functions (higher-order functions) or to parameterize functions by local variables. This apparently leaves us with two options, neither of which is especially attractive:
Fortunately, there is often a third option, because C programmers long ago recognized these limitations of function pointers, and devised a workaround: most modern C callback interfaces allow arbitrary data to be passed through to the callback via a “pass-through” (or “thunk”) pointer parameter. As explained in the next section, we can exploit this technique in Julia to pass a “true” closure as a callback.
Passing closures via pass-through pointers
The qsort interface is nowadays considered rather antiquated. Years ago, it was supplemented on BSD-Unix systems, and eventually in GNU libc, by a function called qsort_r that solves the problem of passing parameters to the callback in a re-entrant way. This is how the BSD (e.g. MacOS) qsort_r function is defined:
void qsort_r(void *base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, void *thunk,
int (*compare)(void *thunk, const void *a, const void *b));
Compared to qsort, there is an extra thunk parameter, and this is passed through to the compare function as its first argument. In this way, you can pass a pointer to arbitrary data through to your callback, and we can exploit this to pass a closure through for an arbitrary Julia callback.
All we need is a way to convert a Julia Function into an opaque Ptr{Void} so that we can pass it through to our callback, and then a way to convert the opaque pointer back into a Function. The former is automatic if we simply declare the ccall argument as type Any (which passes the argument as an opaque Julia object pointer), and the latter is accomplished by the built-in function unsafe_pointer_to_objref. (Technically, we could use type Function or an explicit call to pointer_from_objref instead of Any.) Using these, we can now define a working high-level qsort! function that takes an arbitrary lessthan comparison-function argument:
function qsort!_compare{T}(lessthan_::Ptr{Void}, a_::Ptr{T}, b_::Ptr{T})
a = unsafe_load(a_)
b = unsafe_load(b_)
lessthan = unsafe_pointer_to_objref(lessthan_)::Function
function qsort!{T}(A::Vector{T}, lessthan::Function=<)
compare_c = cfunction(qsort!_compare, Cint, (Ptr{Void}, Ptr{T}, Ptr{T}))
ccall(:qsort_r, Void, (Ptr{T}, Csize_t, Csize_t, Any, Ptr{Void}),
A, length(A), sizeof(T), lessthan, compare_c)
return A
qsort!_compare is a top-level function, so cfunction has no problem with it, and it will only be compiled once per type T to be sorted (rather than once per call to qsort! or per lessthan function). We use the explicit ::Function assertion to tell the compiler that we will only pass Function pointers in lessthan_. Note that we gave the lessthan argument a default value of < (default arguments being a recent feature added to Julia).
We can now do qsort!([1.3, -2.7, 4.4, 3.1]) and it will return the array sorted in ascending order, or qsort!([1.3, -2.7, 4.4, 3.1], >) to sort in descending order.
Warning: qsort_r is not portable
The example above has one major problem that has nothing to do with Julia: the qsort_r function is not portable. The above example won’t work on Windows, since the Windows C library doesn’t define qsort_r (instead, it has a function called qsort_s, which of course uses an argument order incompatible with both the BSD and GNU qsort_r functions). Worse, it will crash on GNU/Linux systems, which do provide qsort_r but with an incompatible calling convention. And as a result it is difficult to use qsort_r in a way that does not crash either on GNU/Linux or BSD (e.g. MacOS) systems. This is how glibc’s qsort_r is defined:
int (*compare)(const void *a, const void *b, void *thunk),
void *thunk);
Note that the position of the thunk argument is moved, both in qsort_r itself and in the comparison function. So, the corresponding qsort! Julia code on GNU/Linux systems should be:
function qsort!_compare{T}(a_::Ptr{T}, b_::Ptr{T}, lessthan_::Ptr{Void})
a = unsafe_load(a_)
b = unsafe_load(b_)
lessthan = unsafe_pointer_to_objref(lessthan_)::Function
compare_c = cfunction(qsort!_compare, Cint, (Ptr{T}, Ptr{T}, Ptr{Void}))
ccall(:qsort_r, Void, (Ptr{T}, Csize_t, Csize_t, Ptr{Void}, Any),
A, length(A), sizeof(T), compare_c, lessthan)
return A
If you really needed to call qsort_r from Julia, you could use the above definitions if OS_NAME == :Linux and the BSD definitions otherwise, with a third version using qsort_s on Windows, but fortunately there is not much need as Julia comes with its own perfectly adequate sort and sort! routines.
Passing closures in data structures
As another example that is oriented more towards numerical computations, we’ll examine how we might call the numerical integration routines in the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). There is already a GSL package that handles the wrapper work below for you, but it is instructive to look at how this is implemented because GSL simulates closures in a slightly different way, with data structures.
Like most modern C libraries accepting callbacks, GSL uses a void* pass-through parameter to allow arbitrary data to be passed through to the callback routine, and we can use that to support arbitrary closures in Julia. Unlike qsort_r, however, GSL wraps both the C function pointer and the pass-through pointer in a data structure called gsl_function:
struct {
double (*function)(double x, void *params);
void *params;
} gsl_function;
Using the techniques above, we can easily declare a GSL_Function type in Julia that mirrors this C type, and with a constructor GSL_Function(f::Function) that creates a wrapper around an arbitrary Julia function f:
function gsl_function_wrap(x::Cdouble, params::Ptr{Void})
f = unsafe_pointer_to_objref(params)::Function
convert(Cdouble, f(x))::Cdouble
const gsl_function_wrap_c = cfunction(gsl_function_wrap,
Cdouble, (Cdouble, Ptr{Void}))
type GSL_Function
GSL_Function(f::Function) = new(gsl_function_wrap_c, f)
One subtlety with the above code is that we need to explicitly convert the return value of f to a Cdouble (in case the caller’s code returns some other numeric type for some x, such as an Int). Moreover, we need to explicitly assert (::Cdouble) that the result of the convert was a Cdouble. As with the qsort example, this is because cfunction only works if Julia can guarantee that gsl_function_wrap returns the specified Cdouble type, and Julia cannot infer the return type of convert since it does not know the return type of f(x).
Given the above definitions, it is a simple matter to pass this to the GSL adaptive-integration routines in a wrapper function gsl_integration_qag:
function gsl_integration_qag(f::Function, a::Real, b::Real, epsrel::Real=1e-12,
s = ccall((:gsl_integration_workspace_alloc,:libgsl), Ptr{Void}, (Csize_t,),
result = Array(Cdouble,1)
abserr = Array(Cdouble,1)
ccall((:gsl_integration_qag,:libgsl), Cint,
(Ptr{GSL_Function}, Cdouble,Cdouble, Cdouble, Csize_t, Cint, Ptr{Void},
Ptr{Cdouble}, Ptr{Cdouble}),
&GSL_Function(f), a, b, epsrel, maxintervals, 1, s, result, abserr)
ccall((:gsl_integration_workspace_free,:libgsl), Void, (Ptr{Void},), s)
return (result[1], abserr[1])
Note that &GSL_Function(f) passes a pointer to a GSL_Function “struct” containing a pointer to gsl_function_wrap_c and f, corresponding to the gsl_function* argument in C. The return value is a tuple of the estimated integral and an estimated error.
For example, gsl_integration_qag(cos, 0, 1) returns (0.8414709848078965,9.34220461887732e-15), which computes the correct integral sin(1) to machine precision.
Taking out the trash (or not)
In the above examples, we pass an opaque pointer (object reference) to a Julia Function into C. Whenever one passes pointers to Julia data into C code, one has to ensure that the Julia data is not garbage-collected until the C code is done with it, and functions are no exception to this rule. An anonymous function that is no longer referred to by any Julia variable may be garbage collected, at which point any C pointers to it become invalid.
This sounds scary, but in practice you don’t need to worry about it very often, because Julia guarantees that ccall arguments won’t be garbage-collected until the ccall exits. So, in all of the above examples, we are safe: the Function only needs to live as long as the ccall.
The only danger arises when you pass a function pointer to C and the C code saves the pointer in some data structure which it will use in a later ccall. In that case, you are responsible for ensuring that the Function variable lives (is referred to by some Julia variable) as long as the C code might need it.
For example, in the GSL one-dimensional minimization interface, you don’t simply pass your objective function to a minimization routine and wait until it is minimized. Instead, you call a GSL routine to create a “minimizer object”, store your function pointer in this object, call routines to iterate the minimization, and then deallocate the minimizer when you are done. The Julia function must not be garbage-collected until this process is complete. The easiest way to ensure this is to create a Julia wrapper type around the minimizer object that stores an explicit reference to the Julia function, like this:
type GSL_Minimizer
m::Ptr{Void} # the gsl_min_fminimizer pointer
f::Any # explicit reference to objective, to prevent garbage-collection
function GSL_Minimizer(t)
m = ccall((:gsl_min_fminimizer_alloc,:libgsl), Ptr{Void}, (Ptr{Void},), t)
p = new(m, nothing)
finalizer(p, p -> ccall((:gsl_min_fminimizer_free,:libgsl),
Void, (Ptr{Void},), p.m))
This wraps around a gsl_min_fminimizer object of type t, with a placeholder f to store a reference to the objective function (once it is set below), including a finalizer to deallocate the GSL object when the GSL_Minimizer is garbage-collected. The parameter t is used to specify the minimization algorithm, which could default to Brent’s algorithm via:
const gsl_brent = unsafe_load(cglobal((:gsl_min_fminimizer_brent,:libgsl), Ptr{Void}))
GSL_Minimizer() = GSL_Minimizer(gsl_brent)
(The call to cglobal yields a pointer to the gsl_min_fminimizer_brent global variable in GSL, which we then dereference to get the actual pointer via unsafe_load.)
Then, when we set the function to minimize (the “objective”), we store an extra reference to it in the GSL_Minimizer to prevent garbage-collection for the lifetime of the GSL_Minimizer, again using the GSL_Function type defined above to wrap the callback:
function gsl_minimizer_set!(m::GSL_Minimizer, f, x0, xmin, xmax)
ccall((:gsl_min_fminimizer_set,:libgsl), Cint,
(Ptr{Void}, Ptr{GSL_Function}, Cdouble, Cdouble, Cdouble),
m.m, &GSL_Function(f), x0, xmin, xmax)
m.f = f
There are then various GSL routines to iterate the minimizer and to check the current x, objective value, or bounds on the minimum, which are convenient to wrap:
gsl_minimizer_iterate!(m::GSL_Minimizer) =
ccall((:gsl_min_fminimizer_iterate,:libgsl), Cint, (Ptr{Void},), m.m)
gsl_minimizer_x(m::GSL_Minimizer) =
ccall((:gsl_min_fminimizer_x_minimum,:libgsl), Cdouble, (Ptr{Void},), m.m)
gsl_minimizer_f(m::GSL_Minimizer) =
ccall((:gsl_min_fminimizer_f_minimum,:libgsl), Cdouble, (Ptr{Void},), m.m)
gsl_minimizer_xmin(m::GSL_Minimizer) =
ccall((:gsl_min_fminimizer_x_lower,:libgsl), Cdouble, (Ptr{Void},), m.m)
gsl_minimizer_xmax(m::GSL_Minimizer) =
ccall((:gsl_min_fminimizer_x_upper,:libgsl), Cdouble, (Ptr{Void},), m.m)
Putting all of these together, we can minimize a simple function sin(x) in the interval [-3,1], with a starting guess -1, via:
m = GSL_Minimizer()
gsl_minimizer_set!(m, sin, -1, -3, 1)
while gsl_minimizer_xmax(m) - gsl_minimizer_xmin(m) > 1e-6
println("iterating at x = $(gsl_minimizer_x(m))")
println("found minimum $(gsl_minimizer_f(m)) at x = $(gsl_minimizer_x(m))")
After a few iterations, it prints found minimum -1.0 at x = -1.5707963269964016, which is the correct minimum (−π/2) to about 10 digits.
At this point, I will shamelessly plug my own NLopt package for Julia, which wraps around my free/open-source NLopt library to provide many more optimization algorithms than GSL, with perhaps a nicer interface. However, the techniques used to pass callback functions to NLopt are actually quite similar to those used for GSL.
An even more complicated version of these techniques can be found in the PyCall package to call Python from Julia. In order to pass a Julia function to Python, we again use cfunction on a wrapper function that handles the type conversions and so on, and pass the actual Julia closure through via a pass-through pointer. But in that case, the pass-through pointer consists of a Python object that has been created with a new type that allows it to wrap a Julia object, and garbage-collection is deferred by storing the Julia object in a global dictionary of saved objects (removing it via the Python destructor of the new type). That is all somewhat tricky stuff and beyond the scope of this blog post; I only mention it to illustrate the fact that it is possible to implement quite complex inter-language calling behaviors purely in Julia by building on the above techniques.
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Space Tumblr Themes
Knowing the God above god
Alien Abduction phenomenon - John Mack pt 2
These are not beings from distant planets…they know us, they’re familiar with us, they know our desires and our weaknesses. They’ve been watching us. A lot of these abductees remember these encounters from childhood onward, as if they’ve been monitored. These entities are familiar with our planet, our society, our way of life, they’re even familiar with our minds and thought patterns. They’re also rather proprietary, as if they feel they have a right to experiment on us…it’s as if they’re the rulers of our world.
Radio 3Fourteen - Tom Montalk - Alien Agendas, The Physics of Reality & Etheric Energy
Fascinating…I happen to agree…
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Metallica Debuts Guitar Hero: Metallica Trailer
Who gets the exclusive first trailer for Guitar Hero: Metallica? Well, Metallica does. The band revealed the game in motion via its official site, with a guest appearance from... Ennio Morricone?
No, we don't think the score from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly will be playable, but it sets the mood [and commenter FarmboyInJapan informs us the song is played prior to each of the band's shows - Ed.]. Perhaps it's Metallica's subtle way of saying that James Hetfield's in-game character model is downright hideous? I mean, I know the dude's not exactly oozing handsome in real life, but he looks goddamn scary in Guitar Hero: Metallica.
The rest of the trailer is all about "Master of Puppets" and self-promotion, touting 20 of the band's "fiercest songs" and guitar or full band gameplay. I'm a little excited! I just hope we can revert to Garage Days Revisited skins and that Activision nixes any plans for a Cliff Burton zombie mode.
Guitar Hero: Metallica [Metallica]
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46655
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Super Mario 3DS Headed For E3, Out This Year & A Mix Of Two Great Mario Games
The first real Mario game for Nintendo's new 3DS will indeed be out this year, according to creator Shigeru Miyamoto. And it looks like we'll get our hands on the game simple known as Super Mario at E3 in June. But wait... there's more!
Miyamoto tells Edge that Super Mario 3DS will "a combination of Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario [64]" but that, somehow, it's also "completely original." Perhaps because of the heavily hinted at inclusion of raccoon tails, a Mario ability introduced in Super Mario Bros. 3. Let's hope that means full-on Tanooki Suit action.
Super Mario 3DS was first announced at this year's Game Developers Conference in the form of one raccoon tailed logo and four adorable screen shots. Its arrival this year would be fantastic news for Nintendo 3DS owners.
Miyamoto Reveals More On Mario 3DS [Edge]
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46658
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Instant Udon!
2011-03-23 12:24
I went by 7-Eleven yesterday to buy some instant ramen (because I was really hungry and I knew I needed to eat more since I've been losing a lot of weight recently. 8D;;) and I realized that they had a new product next to the Cup Noodles: IT WAS INSTANT KITSUNE UDON!! (You have no idea how fat I feel for blogging about food right now...)
Kitsune Udon literally translates into "Fox Udon" and it is basically topped with Wakame (seaweed) and Aburaage (Japanese sweetened deep-fried tofu), which absorbs the soup and is actually quite tasty. According to various sources online, it is in Japanese belief that Japanese foxes like eating Aburaage, thus the name Kitsune Udon.
I've actually had my share of instant udon just a few months ago when I discovered and bought some bowls at the local Japanese supermarket here in Hong Kong called Jusco. I was just really surprised that 7-Eleven was beginning to sell them too. I don't recall them having them in stock previously. It makes my Japanese-food-cravings easier to soothe, I suppose. Maybe that's why I'm so happy. :D
So how exactly do you cook instant udon? Simple, really.
(This is actually a picture of my previous bowl of instant ramen from a few months ago. I didn't get to take a picture of the contents of the bowl I had yesterday.)
After opening the bowl up, you'll see the contents. Food items included are usually a pack of udon, soup base and other toppings. The bowl includes Instructions are usually included at the bottom of the cover of the bowl, which you will see after taking/peeling it off. A sort of strainer is also included and the design of this strainer differs between bowls (the two I've encountered are the one in the picture and another that basically looks like a cover that you can put on and has litle slits for the water to pass through when you tilt the bowl over).
Firstly, you're supposed to cook the udon by opening the pack up, putting it in the bowl then adding hot water. After the noodles become soft and are broken away from each other, you strain the water out completely.
You're now ready to add all the other stuff on it (soup base and toppings).
All you have to do now is add hot water and then you're done! Simple, quick and easy! This is why I love Japanese products! xD
1. blizzy | URL | -
the udon looks delicious...
2. Shizuo | URL | -
Looks deliciousss...
3. Wee Boon | URL | -
Wah! It looks tasty! So hungry after looking at the picture :)
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46665
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NPR Story
3:15 am
Tue October 29, 2013
As Olympics Near, Bobsledder Still Fighting For A Spot
Originally published on Wed October 30, 2013 5:49 am
With 100 days left before the Winter Olympic Games begin in Sochi, Russia, the U.S. Olympic Committee begins its countdown in Times Square today. they're bringing ice and snow into the middle of Manhattan where temperatures will be in the mid-50s so the athletes can show off their skills. But in these final months, there's still a lot of scrambling to figure out which athletes get to compete in the Games.
North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann went to Lake Placid, New York where high stakes contests are sorting out who will make Team USA and who will be left behind.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: In a gleaming weight room at the Olympic Training Center here, bobsledder Justin Olsen from San Antonio Texas is loading thick metal discs onto a bar.
JUSTIN OLSEN: You've built up all this strength and now you're going to direct it and you're going to become explosive.
MANN: In a single motion, he jerks the loaded barbell above his head and hurls it to the floor.
MANN: The idea, Olsen says, is to train his body to be a kind of quick-start engine, capable of launching a bobsled weighing more than a thousand pounds down that icy, winding track.
OLSEN: The first two steps, you're going from standing still to trying to crank it up to 20-plus miles an hour.
MANN: Four years ago, Olsen - who tried bobsled racing on a whim - shocked everyone by winning a place on America's top four-man team known as "Nighttrain." With his help, that crew dominated the Europeans at the Winter Games in Vancouver with lightning fast start times.
MANN: "Nighttrain" made history, capturing the first U.S. Olympic gold in the four-man bobsled since 1948.
MANN: Olsen says that moment, standing on that podium was beautiful and crazy. But here's the thing. Even with that gold medal hanging on his wall, he's not guaranteed a spot on this year's team.
OLSEN: Everybody's fighting for their spot. Everybody wants to do well. And the only route is to, you know, not pace yourself. Go hard every day.
MANN: Nancie Battaglia is a sports photographer and journalist from Lake Placid who's been covering the Winter Olympics and the build-up to the games since the 1970s.
NANCIE BATTAGLIA: This Olympics will be my 11th Olympics and it will be my 9th winter Olympics.
MANN: Battaglia says people don't realize how much uncertainty there is for these young athletes. Four years of training between Olympic Games and many like Olsen will be chewing their nails right up to the last minute.
BATTAGLIA: Right now I think they're jockeying for position, both on their team and in their mind. I'm sure they all have kind of the willies in their stomach, wondering if they're really going to make it.
MANN: Justin Olsen has struggled since that big win back in Vancouver, trying to heal a nagging muscle injury in his leg. He's also an active-duty member of the U.S. Army, which means he had to take time off from sledding to complete his basic training. Then, this fall, the partial government shutdown meant weeks of uncertainty for the Army's federally-funded soldier-athlete program.
OLSEN: It kind of happened right before we supposed to go to Utah, so it made us a little worried. I want to make the Olympic team, so I'm going to find a way even if things in Washington are having trouble.
MANN: Olsen says he's made up a lot that lost training time. He says he's healthy and focused. Now he has 100 days of time trials and races to prove to his coaches that he's the guy who can help take the U.S.A. to that medal podium in Russia.
OLSEN: Some people might be at their peak right now, but now doesn't matter. It's February - it's the guys that can be at their peak in February.
MANN: Olsen says all the down-to-the-wire uncertainty can make you crazy. But he also says it keeps athletes pushing hard, fighting to shave tiny fractions of seconds off those explosive starts. For NPR News, I'm Brian Mann in Lake Placid, New York.
MONTAGNE: This is NPR News.
Related Program
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46682
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Sessions at DrupalCamp CPH 2011 about COMPASS and Sass with slides
Your current filters are…
Sunday 25th September 2011
• Do more with {less}
by Jesper Wøldiche
Do more with less in Drupal. LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables and functions. The aim is less code, that easier and faster to maintain and reuse. The best part: If you know CSS, you already know LESS – and it works great with Drupal!
At 1:00pm to 2:00pm, Sunday 25th September
Coverage slide deck
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46683
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Sessions at RubyConf 2011 about Ruby and Test Driven Development
Your current filters are…
Thursday 29th September 2011
• Why You Don't Get Mock Objects
by Gregory Moeck
Although the Ruby community has embraced TDD like no other community ever has, we have always looked at mock objects with disdain, and perhaps even a little hatred. I've heard conference speakers call them "Wastes of time", "Scams", and even "Testing Heresies". Why would anyone have ever developed these pieces of junk?
In reality though many in the agile community have embraced mock objects within their testing cycles because they have found using these fake objects improves the design of their systems. But why not Rubyists? Most Rubyists don't get mock objects because they don't understand their history or their creators intent. They try to fit them into their current workflow without understanding them, and find them unhelpful and stupid. After all, almost all of the good literature on the subject is written in Java, and we know how frustrating it is to read Java when your used to Ruby.
As such, this talk will attempt to demonstrate in Ruby the usefulness of mock objects, and how to use them to improve the design of your system.
Specifically the following will be covered:
• Why do we need mock objects (Following the 'Tell, Don't Ask Principle')
• Why you should only mock objects you own
• Why you shouldn't use mocks to test boundary objects like external API calls
• Why you should mock roles, not Objects
• Why you should only mock your immediate neighbors
• Why listening to your unit tests will tell you about design problems in your code
At 11:15am to 12:00pm, Thursday 29th September
Friday 30th September 2011
• Test-drive the development of your command-line applications
by David Copeland
At 2:20pm to 3:00pm, Friday 30th September
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46695
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Flashback Friday: Action figure or doll?
Posted on May 20th, 2011
You know, you can learn a lot from kids. Ever since Junior was able to walk, talk and express an opinion, I have learned that I am an idiot. Oh, he hasn’t said it—well, not to my face, anyway. But as a parent, I have turned out to be quite stupid.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a family of all girls, but I’ll be honest. Before I had a boy child, I believed that boys and girls were exactly alike—with the exception of certain parts, of course.
I honestly thought that the reason boys were more aggressive was because of our culture. I knew in my heart that boys would go to tea parties if society just made it acceptable. And I also knew that boys would embrace their inner non-violent side if we adults would just allow them to do so.
I can’t believe I was so stupid.
You see, once I had a boy, I realized that little boys are like tanks. Nothing is safe once a male is ambulatory. And that aggressive thing? Trust me, that’s inbred. There is no way to make a boy less aggressive. I’ve spent years trying. And that whole tea party is just out of the question. There is absolute truth to the saying “bull in a china shop.”
But even though I began motherhood as a complete and total idiot, I have managed to learn from my mistakes. Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t still make errors. Take the time I took Junior to a toy store to pick out a present for his friend’s birthday party when Junior was somewhere around 8 or 9.
At the store, Junior picked up a doll. Okay, it was one of those “Lord of the Rings” guys, but it was a doll. So I said, “Are you sure he wants a Gollum doll and not a Gimli doll?” Well, let me tell you, there was stunned silence in that aisle. Every boy standing around admiring the swords and hobbits and fighting elves just stood and stared. And finally, my humiliated son says, “It’s an action figure, MOTHER.”
Who knew? Who, I ask you, knew that in boy world dolls are action figures? I didn’t. I mean, a doll is a doll, right? Was I wrong to assume that if it has plastic arms and legs and Velcro hair, it’s a doll?
Apparently I was wrong. And it gets worse.
It turns out that there are certain unwritten action figure rules, which are a bit difficult for me to understand. For example, GI Joe is an action figure. Gollum and Gimli are action figures. Even Buzz Lightyear is an action figure. But Ken, that misguided, dumped-by-Barbie guy, is a doll.
Poor Ken. He can’t get a break. It must be tough to survive in a world where Buzz Lightyear is an action figure and you’re just a doll. I’m sure Ken will make up for it by one day buying a huge Hummer to compensate. But in the meantime, he’s just Ken. A doll.
On the other hand, Buzz Lightyear, a guy who dresses in a purple and green space suit and is usually accompanied by Little Bo Peep, a cowboy named Woody and a dinosaur is an action figure. Please. What exactly makes him an action figure? It can’t be that he hangs out with other action figures. I mean, okay, Woody might qualify, but Peep and the dino are definitely dolls.
And what about Arwen, the female elf from “Lord of the Rings?” Is she an action figure or a doll? I mean, she’s obviously female, which seems to preclude her from action figure status—but she also was part of the “Lord of the Rings” and according to Junior, that makes her an action figure.
I swear, this is enough to boggle my mind—what’s left of it, that is. So until I can figure it out, I’ll play it safe and call the toys formerly known as dolls and action figures “plastic life-form replicas.”
Sure, that might work. Then again, maybe I’ll just stay out of the toy stores until Junior is in college. That would work even better.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46707
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Storing Data on the Arduino
From Learning
Jump to: navigation, search
Microcontrollers like the Arduino have three different kinds of memory space:
• Flash - where the program is stored (doesn't erase even when the power is off)
• SRAM - where the program's variables are stored and accessed (erases when the power is off)
• EEPROM - where programmers can store long-term information (doesn't erase even when the power is off)
If the SRAM becomes full, your program won't work properly, so you can store information in the EEPROM to free up space in the SRAM. To do so, you need to import the correct header file.
#include <avr/pgmspace.h>
To store data in the EEPROM, use the PROGMEM keyword and the EEPROM data types (found here).
dataType variableName[] PROGMEM = {};
To store an 8 sample wavetable:
prog_uchar PROGMEM wavetable[8] = {128,131,134,137,140,143,146,149};
See Also
Arduino Memory Tutorial
Arduino Playground Types of Memory
Arduino PROGMEM Reference
• This page was last modified on 10 December 2011, at 09:19.
• This page has been accessed 3,978 times.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46710
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Friday, March 2, 2012
Tushnet on American Political Development Now
Mark V. Tushnet, Harvard Law School, has published 1937 Redux?: Reflections on Constitutional Development and Political Structures. Here is the abstract:
This Essay, forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law, argues that ideas associated with the field of American political development can assist constitutional scholars interested in constitutional development. It speculatively examines structural features of contemporary constitutional politics using such ideas as the possibility that President Obama is (or might be) a reconstructive or transformative President and the institutional thickening of structures of resistance to reconstruction, to suggest how APD ideas might be of use in setting the contingencies of quotidian politics into a larger structural framework.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46716
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Monday, October 31, 2005
Happy Satan Day
Halloween: Pissing off religious types since a long time ago. I'll take all the candy you don't eat, religious types.
Above is me in '81 or so, dressed as The Greatest American Hero. By far, my best costume ever. The travesty is that I'm holding up a Clark bar. I can only guess that I'd already started sorting the good candy on the floor, and the Clark was the only thing left in the pumpkin-thing, so I held it out, surely at mom's request, for the picture.
Comment from my mom, who can't seem to figure out how to comment on these newfangled blog things:
"You'd never heard of a Clark bar. You thought it was a hilarious name because of our neighbor, Crystal Clark. Mom"
Well, that solves it. I wonder what happened to Crystal.
And whatever happened to The Greatest American Hero?
Um, he's on DVD.
Nice blog, freethinker.
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Location: Rhode Island, United States
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46735
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The Ridiculous Range of "Size 8" in Women's Clothing
There is almost no reality-based standard by which clothing is sized and labeled. It's easy to see in guys' jeans, but as the New York Times shows in an eye-opening graphic, women have it much, much worse.
The Times does suggest a ray of hope inside the maelstrom of (somewhat intentional) confusion. There's a movement afoot to create standards for sizing, and one firm, MyBestFit, is slowly rolling out a full body scanner to provide sizing guidance across all brands. In the meantime, merchandise returns will continue to be a big part of clothing retail, and charts like the Times' can only try to provide a little guidance.
Got any sizing tips, or horror stories, of your own to share? Let's hear them in the comments.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46736
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KDE 4.9 Improves Stability, Performance, and File Management on Linux
Linux: KDE is one of our favorite desktop environments for Linux, and this week it released an update that brings increased stability, performance, and apps to the Linux desktop.
This update focuses a lot on stability, but isn't without a few handy feature improvements. The most notable include:
• The Dolphin file manager includes back and forward buttons, inline file renaming, and the ability to show metadata like ratings, tags, image size, file size, date, and more. You can also sort files by these metadata properties, which is awesome. It also includes a better Places panel, improved search, and better integration with the Terminal.
• The Konsole terminal now includes the ability to change directory when you drag and drop a folder into the window, detach tabs by dragging them out of the window, and more.
• Activities, the feature that helps you separate your work from your play, is now a bit more powerful, letting you link certain files to each workspace. You can also encrypt certain activities for more private work.
• The KWin window manager now has better performance all around, as well as a few improvements here and there with certain effects like Wobby Windows.
There's a lot more happening in KDE 4.9 (like full annotations inside Okular, our favorite PDF viewer for Linux), so head on over to your updates panel and download the new version now. It should be available for most distributions already, but if it's not, give your repositories a few days to update (Kubuntu users can enable the backports repository to get it now). Hit the link below to read more about the new update.
KDE Release 4.9 – in memory of Claire Lotion | KDE Announcements
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46740
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From heavy traffic to parking woes, there are various things that eat away at your fuel reserves. Which is why we created PETRONAS PRIMAX. It’s specially advanced additive technology including a friction modifier to reduce internal friction between the cylinder and piston rings.
As a result, better fuel economy is achieved, giving you more kilometers for every litre of fuel used.
PETRONAS PRIMAX also contains synthetic detergent that cleans up and prevents the build-up of dirt deposits in the engine. This means it restores and maintains the engine at its optimum efficiency and giving even an old ride a new lease on life.
Now you can start using less fuel, and start enjoying more with each drive. What would you #Like2SaveFor?
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46763
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updated ports tree
Joe Altman fj at panix.com
Fri Apr 23 18:52:02 PDT 2004
On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 11:41:36PM +0000, Killermink ! wrote:
> I see what your saying and i suppose I have two points:
> 1) Can you install a port without installing the ports tree?
I see that you and I are using terms that aren't really at odds, in
what we mean; but are at odds in what they are normally used for.
Let me explain: you are, in your query, and in your previous email,
talking about packages. What you want to do is download a pre-compiled
binary of each application you wish to use, and install each one.
So no, you cannot install *from* the ports tree without installing the
ports tree. But you *can* install a pre-compiled binary, entirely
bypassing the ports tree.
> 2) If you must install the ports tree, what is the best way to keep it up
> to date?
AFAIK, the best way is the only way: via a make update/kernel/world
process run out of /usr/src/ and employing cvs. I suggest cd'ing to
/usr/src/ and reading the Makefile there; it is well-commented.
> I am still new at this, and can't seem to find packages for all the
> ports in the tree...
You will not find packages for any port in the ports tree. Have you
looked at the various mirrors for the binary you wish to install?
That's where you will find the packages you seek. There, or perhaps on
one of your 5.x CDs?
However, it occurs to me that the pre-compiled binaries might take up
as much room as the ports tree and the distiles they fetch, if the
packages are large enough. I'd bet that this is an FAQ, of sorts; and
that someone might actually take a stab at answering it.
They probably do not: my /usr/ports/ tree, without distfiles, comes to
about 300 and some few meg out of a gigabyte...sheesh:
61M /usr/ports/distfiles/teTeX
87M /usr/ports/distfiles/gnome2
I'm almost sorry I looked.
HTH, Killermink; let me know if I've made things clearer or foggier,
> ----Original Message Follows----
> From: Joe Altman <fj at panix.com>
> Reply-To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> To: Killermink! <killermink at hotmail.com>
> CC: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: updated ports tree
> Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2004 14:23:37 -0400
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 10:04:06PM +0000, Killermink ! wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I am about to (re)install FreeBSD 5.2.1, and wish to make sure I have the
> > latest ports afterwards. I do not really wish to install the whole ports
> > tree from sysinstall as disk space is at a premium, and i will (soon)
> have
> > a fast internet connection so seems pointless when i am only going to
> > install like 10 ports. Also, the ports tree on the 5.2.1 ISO is out of
> date
> > now.
> >
> > I have read the manual over and over, but cannot fathom how I can make a
> > port without the whole ports tree being installed...
> >
> > Is it possible to make a port in this way, and how is it done?
> If disk space is at a premium with an out of date ports tree, and
> ports were likely added in the interim, then disk space will still be
> an issue with a current ports tree, no?
> So you may want to:
> 1) use packages, and skip ports entirely
> or
> 2) install the ports tree, and update it as a part of a make world
> process.
More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46766
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Corrupt file issue?
jkaye jkaye at
Tue Jun 27 18:02:16 CEST 2006
Hello all,
I've had some success solving problems here before thanks to the
kindness of many of you and thought I would give this another try.
We've got an intermittent issue (about once a week) where a daily
process that generates a text file, encrypts it and transfers it by
FTP will sometimes create a file that the recipient cannot decrypt.
If I run the process again, it will produce an encrypted file which
is a few bytes smaller than the original file. This new file can
be decrypted by the recipient without a problem.
Has anyone else encountered a similar issue?
Here's the command I use to perform the (signed) encryption:
gpg -r <key> -e <filename>
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
- Jack
Jack Kaye
Senior Business Analyst
Celera Systems LLC
(262) 834-0080 x204
More information about the Gnupg-users mailing list
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46772
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From: Julian Reschke <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2006 22:32:20 +0200
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
we've been discussing the interpretation of ETags returned upon an HTTP
PUT request for some time now. Jim Whitehead started work on an Internet
Draft discussing this topic in February (see
but unfortunately we didn't make any progress since.
Personally, I think that we really need a very minor clarification, plus
a simple new feature to help clients that want to avoid a re-fetch after
sending the content. I therefore decided to write up my own draft. It
summarizes the situation (as RFC2616 is concerned), proposes one
clarification to RFC2616 (as mentioned in
Feedback appreciated. I mean it. We really should resolve this, as two
drafts in front of the IESG already make contradicting requirements.
HTML at
Best regards, Julian
[email protected] schrieb:
> Title : The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Entity Tag (^ETag^) Response Header in Write Operations
> Author(s) : J. Reschke
> Filename : draft-reschke-http-etag-on-write-00.txt
> Pages : 19
> Date : 2006-8-9
> The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specifies a state identifier,
> called "Entity Tag", to be returned in the "ETag" response header.
> However, the description of this header for write operations such as
> PUT is incomplete, and has caused confusion among developers and
> protocol designers, and potentially interoperability problems.
> This document explains the problem in detail and suggests both a
> clarification for a revision to the HTTP/1.1 specification (RFC2616)
> and a new response header, making HTTP entity tags more useful for
> user agents that want to avoid round-trips to the server after
> modifying a resource.
> A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-reschke-http-etag-on-write-00.txt
> to change your subscription settings.
> type "cd internet-drafts" and then
> "get draft-reschke-http-etag-on-write-00.txt".
> A list of Internet-Drafts directories can be found in
> http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
> Send a message to:
> [email protected].
> In the body type:
> "FILE /internet-drafts/draft-reschke-http-etag-on-write-00.txt".
> exhibit different behavior, especially when dealing with
> how to manipulate these messages.
> implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
> Internet-Draft.
> _______________________________________________
> I-D-Announce mailing list
> [email protected]
Received on Wednesday, 9 August 2006 20:32:28 GMT
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46773
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Re: Status Line Syntax production/parsing
From: Mark Nottingham <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2012 10:59:00 +1000
Cc: Karl Dubost <[email protected]>, Bjoern Hoehrmann <[email protected]>, "[email protected] Group" <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
To: Julian Reschke <[email protected]>
On 29/08/2012, at 5:46 AM, Julian Reschke <[email protected]> wrote:
> Well,
> HTTP-version SP status-code [ SP reason-phrase ] CRLF
> On the other hand, a ultra-simple syntax for the first line might sense; and there may be code out there relying on it.
Yes, that's the thing. If we were designing this from scratch, that'd make sense; however, we're not, and I'd say it's very likely some implementations depend upon this.
Mark Nottingham
Received on Wednesday, 29 August 2012 00:59:20 GMT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0+W3C-0.50 : Wednesday, 29 August 2012 00:59:32 GMT
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46774
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Re: Change proposal for ISSUE-56
From: Maciej Stachowiak <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:20:52 -0700
Message-id: <[email protected]>
To: Adam Barth <[email protected]>
Thanks for the update. I've recorded this Change Proposal on the issue status page:
On Jul 14, 2010, at 6:12 PM, Adam Barth wrote:
> Here is the updated text of my change proposal. Hopefully the updated
> proposal is sufficiently specific about the text it proposes
> restoring.
> == Summary ==
> There is no need to align "URL" processing in HTML documents with the
> IRI specifications because HTML documents do not contain IRIs (or URIs
> for that matter). We should restore the removed text that explained
> how to translate input strings contained in text/html documents into
> URIs.
> == Rationale ==
> ISSUE-56 was raised in error by Michael(tm) Smith based on a message
> Roy sent to the working group. Roy said that "pretending to define a
> new URL standard as part of HTML5 is not acceptable ... HTML will
> never define the identifiers for the Web. That would be a fundamental
> violation of the Web architecture." Based on my current understanding
> of the web architecture and of how a sequence of characters in a
> text/html document becomes a URI, he is correct. However, that does
> not imply that we ought to remove the "URL" processing requirements
> from the HTML5 specification.
> In a recent message to the IRI working group [1], Roy writes:
> [[
> RFC 3986 defines how to parse URIs (for recipients) and provides many
> rules for scheme-specific specs to define how to generate URIs of a
> given scheme (for producers) within the overall constraint of matching
> the URI syntax (the formal ABNF).
> [...]
> Please understand that browsers almost never parse URI or IRI or
> anything in between. Browsers have input strings that contain one or
> more references, usually in the document encoding, and so there is a
> sequence of context-specific and charset-specific and
> media-type-specific processing that occurs before you even get to the
> individual URI-reference or IRI-reference that are defined by
> 3986/3987.
> Some people have proposed that most of that pre-processing be added to
> the IRIbis spec, but I have seen no evidence to suggest that such
> pre-processing is even remotely standardizable (it seems to be
> different for every input context). If you can demonstrate or get
> agreement on a single way to preprocess an input string, or at least a
> few named processes (like single-ref and multi-ref), then that would
> be useful.
> ]]
>> From this more detailed message, it appears that it is fully
> appropriate for HTML5 to define an algorithm for translating input
> strings containing one or more references into one or more URIs (or an
> IRIs, as appropriate). In particular, Roy expects such translations
> to be context-specific, charset-specific, and (importantly)
> media-type-specific. To wit: HTML5 ought define the pre-processing
> rules that are specific to the text/html media type.
> To lend even more credence to this rationale, I quote from the very
> same email message [2] written by Roy that Michael(tm) Smith cited in
> the description of ISSUE-56. This quote was omitted from the
> description of ISSUE-56 for reasons unknown to me and to Michael(tm)
> Smith:
> [[
> I suggest that the section be removed or replaced with the limited and
> specific needs for parsing href and src attribute values such that the
> base-URI. HTML owns that process of extracting a valid URI-reference
> from an attribute's value string. A simple string parsing
> description, with associated context-specific error-handling, is more
> than sufficient to satisfy the needs of HTML5 without appearing to
> override an existing standard that has recently been agreed to by all
> vendors, including the few browser vendors that care about HTML5.
> ]]
> In effect, this change proposal urges the working group to adopt Roy's
> proposal: HTML5 should define how to extract a URI-reference from
> strings contained in text/html documents, complete with
> context-specific error handling.
> For those that prefer rationales expressed in terms of objects, this
> change proposal makes the following objections:
> 1) I object to HTML5 deferring to RFC 3987 for parsing input strings
> containing one or more references because RFC 3987 does not define an
> algorithm for parsing input strings containing one or more references
> that takes into account the context-specific, charset-specific, and
> media-type-specific rules required by user agents to interoperably
> parse such input strings in text/html documents.
> 2) I object to HTML5 being blocked in the IRIbis working group for
> defining an algorithm for extracting URI-references from strings
> contained in text/html documents for two reasons:
> a) Defining such an algorithm is out of scope for that working
> group's charter [3] because these strings are not IRIs and therefore
> are not subject to the requirements contained in RFC 3987.
> b) The IRIbis working group has made essentially no technical
> progress since its inception. To wit: the working group has published
> only a -00 version of a single Internet-Draft. In contrast to Larry's
> claim in his change proposal, the mailing list is essentially dead:
> i) There have been only two message in June.
> ii) The messages in May consisted (essentially) of a discussion of
> how to render BIDI URIs on billboards.
> iii) The messages in April consisted of coordinating with this
> working group.
> 3) I (strongly) object to HTML5 not defining how to interoperably
> process a hyperlink because a hyperlink is the essential feature of a
> *hypertext* markup language.
> == Proposal Details ==
> The proposal details herein takes the form of a set of edit
> instructions, specific enough that they can be applied without
> ambiguity:
> 1) Revert http://svn.whatwg.org/webapps@3245. (Note: the editor and
> the working group should feel free to continue to improve this text
> after adopting this change proposal.)
> == Impact ==
> 1) Positive effects: User agents will be able to implement
> interoperable error handling for translating strings in HTML documents
> into URIs.
> 2) Negative effects: Readers of the HTML5 specification will need to
> learn the difference between these input strings and the URIs they
> represent.
> Q: What conformance classes will have to change?
> A: User agents.
> Q: What are the risks?
> A: We might actually be able to process hyperlinks interoperably,
> leading to joy and happiness. With so much joy in the work, purveyors
> of whisky might go out of business.
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-iri/2010May/0008.html
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2008Jun/0435.html
> [3] http://tools.ietf.org/wg/iri/charters
Received on Wednesday, 21 July 2010 22:21:25 GMT
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46776
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RE: Example accessible CSS templates?
From: Steve Donie <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 14:41:26 -0600
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
To: "'Steven McCaffrey'" <[email protected]>, [email protected]
When I was at Microsoft, Greg Lowney put together some CSS templates. They
are available at http://microsoft.com/enable/products/ie4.htm
The two style sheets he put together are high contrast styles with large
Steve Donie
Senior Software Engineer, StratWorks
Landmark Graphics Corporation
-----Original Message-----
From: Steven McCaffrey [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 1999 9:46 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Example accessible CSS templates?
I am new to CSS and am wondering if there are any example accessible
templates. Also, is it possible to create CSS in a text editor or basic
word processor like Notepad?
Since tables in particular are generally difficult, though not impossible,
to make accessible to people using screen reading technology which I myself
use, are there any standard CSS layouts for tables
-Thanks in advance,
Steven McCaffrey
Information Technology Services
Received on Tuesday, 12 January 1999 15:45:52 GMT
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46777
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Re: Accept-Charset support
On Sun, 8 Dec 1996, Koen Holtman wrote:
> Larry Masinter:
> >
> ># Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
> ># Content-Features: utf-8-cs="<hebrew>" utf-8-cs="<latin-x>"
> >
> >There's no real point to this, though. The text/html;charset=utf8
> >is enough to tell you how to interpret the body, and the body itself
> >will tell you which repertoire(s) are used. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Yes, it will; but the whole point of entity header fields seems to
be to have essential metainformation available without/before peeking
into the body.
Attempt to define "essential": Essential metainformation is
metainformation that enables a client to make decisions about what to do
with the content which have to be made (or should be made) before looking
at the content. Examples for a Web browser: whether to render, or start
a file save dialog, or invoke an external viewer (and which one).
The example given earlier by Larry Masinter, about a browser understanding
HTML 3.5 tables but not the "border" parameter, would not be about
essential information; it is unlikely that a client has different
rendering processes available to choose from, of which one understands
"border" and the other does not.
> Yes. Consider the above a bad example. I should have written:
> Accept-Charset: utf-8
> Accept-Features: utf-8-cs="<hebrew>", utf-8-cs="<latin-x>", *
> because we are really talking about how the user agent can make its
> capabilities known to the server.
Ok but that character (sub-)repertoire would also be useful ("essential"
in many cases) for non-nogotiating clients. [Of course you may think
there shouldn't be any non-negotiating clients left, but that probably
will take a while.]
> The content-features header is not really useful. It is only there for
> symmetry with Accept-Features. Even if it is present in a response, it is
> not supposed to list all features used by the content, but only the features
> that were negotiated on.
That would make Content-Features less useful for carrying additional
information in other protocols, e.g. mail.
> You should be able to know which features to use
> by looking at the content itself.
I think charset (sub-)repertoire information should be available without
looking at the content. That may be less of a concern for monolithic
Web browsers prevalent today. But the protocol shouldn't be restricted
to that paradigm.
Follow-Ups: References:
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vertical scrollbars: proposed extension to CSS
From: Justin Watt <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2002 04:39:33 -0400 (EDT)
Message-ID: <59097137.1019882336@[]>
To: [email protected]
There is a lot of discussion about control of vertical scrollbars in
web-browsers (see: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72540),
specifically for 2 different page layouts that are very popular: the
centered table, and the width=100% table. In the scope of a website, many
pages may have similar navigational elements, though page length may vary
widely. Often, when going from a short page to a long page within a
website, the rendering of the scrollbar causes the page to shift.
As I see it, there are three table-based HTML page layout paradigms that we
to concern ourselves with, regarding vertical scrollbars:
1) the centered table with width less than 100% of the browser window (the
is usually specified absolutely in pixels)
2) the left justified table with a width equal to 100% of the browser window
3) the left justified table with a width equal to 100% of the browser
containing centered elements (that should not shift between similar pages of
varying lengths).
For each of the three layout paradigms above, a *different* vertical
behavior is called for---and I have a feeling that most web designers may
not agree on which vertical scrollbar behavior is optimal for each of the
cases above (and all those others that exist).
Which generally means, the decision should be left up to the web-designer
not the web-browser), through the following extension I propose to CSS:
vertical-scrollbar: auto | always-on | always-off | reserved
auto - this is mozilla's current behavior, the scrollbar is rendered and
page canvas resized when the page elements are taller than the page canvas.
would probably remain the default behavior, optimal for pages without
table-based layout, and for tables with width=100% but without centered
(like navigation bars/menus) that might shift when the scrollbar is
rendered for
longer pages.
always-on - this is IE's current behavior, the scrollbar is shaded
when not needed and is rendered when necessary. This would probably be
for page designs that have centered elements within tables that occupy 100%
width of the page canvas.
always-off - this would supress the rendering of the scrollbar regardless
the height of the page elements
reserved - in this alternative the "vertical scrollbar zone" is reserved
and takes on the color/image of the page background, preventing page
designs of the centered table variety from shifting when the scrollbar is
Received on Tuesday, 30 April 2002 07:54:20 GMT
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Show Mobile Navigation
25 English Language Oddities
Listverse Staff
Many cultures find that English might possibly be one of the most difficult languages to learn. Not, in fact, for its words, but for the fact that it has so many unusual and contradictory rules. Just looking over an English study book will tell you that so many odd ifs and buts apply to so many words that it is enough to drive one crazy. Here are 25 examples of the oddities in the English language.
Oddities 21 – 25
25. “Rhythms” is the longest English word without the normal vowels, a, e, i, o, or u.
24. Excluding derivatives, there are only two words in English that end -shion and (though many words end in this sound). These are cushion and fashion.
22. There is only one common word in English that has five vowels in a row: queueing.
21. Soupspoons is the longest word that consists entirely of letters from the second half of alphabet.
Oddities 16 – 20
20. “Almost” is the longest commonly used word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.
19. The longest uncommon word whose letters are in alphabetical order is the eight-letter Aegilops (a grass genus).
18. The longest common single-word palindromes are deified, racecar, repaper, reviver, and rotator.
17. “One thousand” contains the letter A, but none of the words from one to nine hundred ninety-nine has an A.
Oddities 11 – 15
Words Are Sweet-1
15. Cwm (pronounced “koom”, defined as a steep-walled hollow on a hillside) is a rare case of a word used in English in which w is the nucleus vowel, as is crwth (pronounced “krooth”, a type of stringed instrument). Despite their origins in Welsh, they are accepted English words.
14. “Asthma” and “isthmi” are the only six-letter words that begin and end with a vowel and have no other vowels between.
12. “Underground” and “underfund” are the only words in the English language that begin and end with the letters “und.”
11. “Stewardesses” is the longest word that can be typed with only the left hand.
Oddities 6 – 10
8. There are many words that feature all five regular vowels in alphabetical order, the commonest being abstemious, adventitious, facetious.
7. The superlatively long word honorificabilitudinitatibus (27 letters) alternates consonants and vowels.
6. “Fickleheaded” and “fiddledeedee” are the longest words consisting only of letters in the first half of the alphabet.
Oddities 1 – 5
5. The two longest words with only one of the six vowels including y are the 15-letter defenselessness and respectlessness.
4. “Forty” is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order. “One” is the only number with its letters in reverse alphabetical order.
3. Bookkeeper is the only word that has three consecutive doubled letters.
Listverse Staff
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From LISWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
The results of processing by a computer system, as distinct from data entered or transferred into the system for processing (input). Also refers to the signal which emanates from an video or audio player, as opposed to the signal fed into it.
See also the Wikipedia article on:
Personal tools
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46787
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Opinion: ‘America Didn’t Invent Plastic Surgery’
Writer Euny Hong rebuts criticism of CBS anchor Julie Chen’s decision to have eyelid surgery. Photo credit: Associated Press.
Transcript +
WSJ Podcasts WSJ Radio
... I ... I ... the show you a side by side of the dramatic this surgery really was ... I mean if you look at that after ... that ... eyes are bigger ... I look more ... alert ... um I ... seem ... more expressive more expressive ... than how do you have how do you feel well backed yourself right now well now it's like I sometimes wonder ... but I will say it was Wed night ... after I had that Dion ... everything kind of ... the ball to roll for me ... for welcome back to Opinion Journal I'm Mary Kissel that was CBS anchor Julie Channing ... talking about her decision to get double eyelid surgery to advance her Korea or ... the comments of sparked a really big debate about Rachel reassignment surgery ... and prompting an app that in this morning's Wall Street Journal From author uni Hong ... he's got the book the birth of Korean cool walk into the future forthcoming from piquant or uni at welcome to the show thinking ... on how this turned into a discussion about race because Telis situ leaching and she says ... I'd I did this to look better ... he is a visual medium what what's what I was this discussion that way ... I ... might be based on the assumption that only white people are suppose to get plastic surgery ... um I can say that other people get it to win in Korea they have a separate duty standard and has nothing to do it swung to a white otherwise the plastic surgery she would crumble under the weight of malpractice fears the easy bit of this recipe criticism for its own issues getting the surgery to look why they ... use in the op ed that ... it's because of that it has nothing to do was was looking like right exactly that would be a separate surgery which is not practiced by me and I mean I've had it done and come out about this and I'd ... I don't think that that would of been successful or Michael ... well he won a surprise than any we've seen fads in Asia for example that the classes in Hong Kong with oil and seasoning didn't catch on here or is it just ... isn't because those trends don't ... really come to America my shirt because we'll talk about this much whining this first one is this thing called discretion ... I vetoed the end of the year I think that people are not aware that did ... the bike just be different countries in Chile with are not aware that other countries have their own QD standards on Aintree a few years ago was that it had black black eyes ... and they had black context I don't remember contacts and I remember any trend in Korea with the goal is to let clients ... know it so this is sort of an odd criticism but ... let's let's stay on the topic of a culture ... of it are we not familiar with but say the surgery or eat ... a probably because we don't see them in the American media ... he'll turn on your favorite shows and see ... fashionable Chinese factional Koreans in the same weensy ... fashionable waits for fashionable blacks ... it's part of the anti has always been a little bit behind the trends um because a lot of money is involved in American TV compared to other countries than ... they try not to take big risks but I think part of that was also the site surgery is so subtle ... that people are surprised it themselves they did notice that ... and they think that if it's not visible the mess the Center for its reason for the next ... is it in a patronizing element here too ... to say that God she knew she ... would we should be able to calculate and ... how she looks and and and and say what's good what's bad and sad is is that also factor in him ... while I think it's just not sporting to accuse people of feeding themselves ... on that side of the most insulting part of all of this actually ... mean speaking only for myself I don't and raise the funds they receive twelve and a new admitted in public okay ... on one what we have reactions got to be up and and ... in people agree with you learned anything surprising amount of the reader with ... the most surprising thing was their reaction to what I said it was the big reveal that I had the ... if the procedure dot Naeimi dot it felt like they had come out as straight or something I can really understand the reaction in all ... IAC will really that that that encourage everybody to read the op ed and read her book it's coming out ... soon the birth of Creek walking in the home thanks much being
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Blanketing opinions that I'll probably regret soon.
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Uffie: I prefer my music talentless and highly addictive, thank you.
Everyone has a guilty cultural pleasure hidden deep. The tattooed biker guy may be a huge fan of the emo band Stars---listening on headphones, tucked under his comforter each night; your bass playing hipster friend may be a big U2 fan (and not just "early U2"); and the cartoonist who has a following among alternative weekly newspapers like the City Paper may have recorded every episode of That's so Raven. These are realities.
For me, I have no false modesty: my latest hook is Uffie.
I would highly discourage you from clicking on that link, which will take you directly to Uffie's myspace page. But if you cannot resist clicking, I would urge you---at all costs---NOT to click on her second track, "Ready to Uff". Please, please: I'm warning you. In addition, at serious risk to your cultural well-being, do NOT---NOT---click on Uffie's third track "Hot ChickIn Charge" unless you want to find yourself---like me---secretly skulking back for a second, third, or eventually (or sadly) a 20th time.
My god, I'm this addicted and she hasn't even put out her first album. I suppose that makes me a creep and a philistine.
She hasn't put out an album yet? You're not a philistine, you're the cutting edge. You're the hipster. You're the one who's discovered the ironic hip answer to tween-pop. Play it for all it's worth.
And dude, I play bass and I can still remember the day I learned to play U2's "New Year's Day."
Don't ever hit the red one...
Does she have representation? Why she doesn't have a record deal is beyond me.
Much like this guy:
The Mike Chapman Band
"I started rapping and beatboxing in the 6th grade. My debut solo album was self-released in 1986 at age 12. Distribution of this record was promptly halted by my parents due to "obscenity" and violation of community decency standards. I was ridiculed and humiliated. The trauma of this experience led me to banish those musical impulses to the dark recesses of my mind. Eighteen years later, I have come out of retirement for your listening displeasure."
as soon as she will get signed to a big corporate label, she will become crappy, and commercial. just like lady gaga
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46800
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Get Your Ex Back by Letting Go!
in Love
You read right! If you want to get your ex back let go... Set them free and see how effective this step is! What happens is, we sometimes forget that loving a person does not mean that we own them. This is a common mistake lots of people in relationships make, but it can kill the love. Since your partner has broken up with you, but you still want to get your ex back, it makes sense to try this strategy out.
Love is free, love is confident and secure. Or at least it should be... When you give your ex the space to do their own thing by setting them free, you stand a much better chance of winning their heart back. So, stay away and let them decide their own path, make their own choices and figure out what to do next now that you both are no longer a couple.
To give you a similar analogy - When you no longer live with your family and you're away from them, that's when you start missing them. Does this sound familiar to you? Well, the same holds true for your ex. Distance does make the heart fonder... So, let there be some distance between you and your ex for them to realize your importance in their life. Give them a chance to miss you at least, which is not possible if you're always around!
Space and time fix many a broken heart and heal wounds that seemed permanent... Having spent time away from each other, whatever led to the break-up may no longer seem that big or insurmountable anymore. Just pull away from your ex and notice things from a distance. If your ex seems unhappy, it could very well be due to your absence! In order to get your ex back, you need to be patient. If they still have feelings for you, this strategy should help in stirring their emotions!
In the meantime, spend some time introspecting. Look back and analyze your behaviour. Sift through your memories and get to the core reason for the break-up. If it's something about you, work on changing that characteristic or habit. A new, improved version of you will make your ex sit up and take notice. The effort has to come from you to right any wrongs done, and then, relegate it to the past. Your ex will also appreciate the fact that you're trying to change for the better and this is bound to draw them closer.
If your ex genuinely loved you and still loves you, setting them free should help you get your ex back. And then, both of you need to put everything behind you and look towards the future together. It's time to forgive and forget. That's how you regain a lost love.
Author Box
Monique Delancy has 1 articles online
Do you want to make your ex fall for you once again? Imagine how it would feel like if you could just erase all the pain and get your ex back in your life and very much in love with you again. Regardless of how crazy the situation might be right now... you can still reverse the breakup and get back the one you love and lost.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46810
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Thread: [WIP] LDR's WIPs
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Old 11-30-2010, 03:11 PM #42
Your Death Angel
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Malachor V
Posts: 1,136
Current Game: Halo 3
Helpful! Roleplayer Imperialist Meatbags Guild Member The Walking Carpets Guild Member
Hello everybody! Sorry for the lack of updates as I'm taking a break from my Korriban Restoration. To make up for that, I just released a new mod: http://knightsoftheoldrepublic.filef...od_LKIM;117596 . This is a private project I made which I WILL update eventually.
My Mods
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46812
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Next Meeting:
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Re: [vox-tech] sata 2
Re: [vox-tech] sata 2
On 01/31/2012 10:34 AM, Shwaine wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jan 2012, jimbo wrote:
>> Greetings:
>> I am compiling a list of possible components to build a mini pc. I want to
>> use a solid state drive that is sata 2. I am not sure if this is compatible
>> with the ITX board I am interested in. According to light research sata 2
>> is just a more robust stream and should be compatible with any sata on any
>> motherboard. Is this a wrong assumption?
>> Bottom line will it work with my desired ITX board?
>> Reference:
>> ITX board of interest:
>> http://www.zotacusa.com/zotac-h67-wifi-h67itx-a-e.html
>> Wiki sata reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
> Since you are planning to use a SSD, you may want to consider SATA3
> (6.0Gb/s) and one of the faster SSD drives. Some of the better SSDs can
> come pretty close to saturating the SATA2 (3.0 Gb/s) bus. The price
> differential is minor (although some might argue so is the difference in
> saturating SATA2 vs using SATA3). Any Sandy or Ivy Bridge motherboard will
> have at least two SATA3 ports. It's standard in their supporting Intel
> chipsets.
> You might also want to keep looking around for another mini ITX
> motherboard. I've had bad luck with Zotac in the past. The NewEgg reviews
> for the newer version of the motherboard you listed (H67ITX-C-E) show that
> I'm not really alone in this (14% 1 egg, 23% 2 eggs). There are some more
> reliable manufacturers that make mini ITX boards for Sandy Bridge (LGA
> 1155). NewEgg lists several alternatives from more reputable companies
> like Asus, Gigabyte, ASRock, and Intel. For example, this ASRock board has
> the same price point, integrated 802.11n, and much better feedback:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157239
> Just something to ponder.
I guess that depends on the use case, my file/print/web server Zotac all
in one box (Atom based) has been great and super low power. But I agree
if you're building a desktop or something for intensive use Asus tends
to be my preferred brand, with the other mentioned boards all having
good reputations.
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[ previous ] [ next ] [ threads ]
From: Brett Krueger <sigterm at rootednetworks dot com>
To: Chris Buechler <cbuechler at gmail dot com>
Cc: m0n0wall at lists dot m0n0 dot ch
Subject: Re: [m0n0wall] Picture of Manuel
Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 06:56:30 -1000
Hash: SHA1
Yea that someone was me!
I'm such a horrid bad case of irc judgement.
- -brett
Chris Buechler wrote:
> On 1/19/06, Chet Harvey <chet at pittech dot com> wrote:
>>man....the image in my head never matches reality
> I know what ya mean. Though I didn't have any sort of clear image in my head.
> seems to be a common thing though. guy in the #m0n0wall IRC channel
> had the impression, over more than a year, that I was like 5'6", 120
> lbs. heh I'm 6'5", 255 lbs.
> I'm waiting for my picture to show up next. there's one bad one of me
> out there on the net, though not that any picture would be good. ;)
> -Chris
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux)
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46858
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From Tue Apr 26 23:22:53 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: Received: (qmail 82167 invoked from network); 26 Apr 2005 23:22:52 -0000 Received: from (HELO ( by with SMTP; 26 Apr 2005 23:22:52 -0000 Received: (qmail 21555 invoked by uid 500); 26 Apr 2005 23:23:11 -0000 Delivered-To: Received: (qmail 21532 invoked by uid 500); 26 Apr 2005 23:23:11 -0000 Mailing-List: contact; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Help: List-Post: List-Id: "Tomcat Users List" Reply-To: "Tomcat Users List" Delivered-To: mailing list Received: (qmail 21509 invoked by uid 99); 26 Apr 2005 23:23:10 -0000 X-ASF-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=10.0 tests=RCVD_BY_IP X-Spam-Check-By: Received-SPF: pass ( domain of designates as permitted sender) Received: from (HELO ( by (qpsmtpd/0.28) with ESMTP; Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:23:10 -0700 Received: by with SMTP id 34so155682nzf for ; Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:22:19 -0700 (PDT) DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=beta;; h=received:message-id:date:from:reply-to:to:subject:in-reply-to:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition:references; b=KhXvYAAjKNqy03sWtaucJhfbn5YOJu0qFnIQS+1sAJE7yyZt8/EV5dBYb+uKhhebDQDID25i0UtQrkHm1S9zP6SKx/C+UXtko31Kwi43G7Allt1nEu4ecmSvddfwmZb0Lbp8UFKQjA/guNkrGUixh04Rd3aLEfrqbaaicbz56dw= Received: by with SMTP id u20mr14729nza; Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:22:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: by with HTTP; Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:22:19 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: Date: Tue, 26 Apr 2005 18:22:19 -0500 From: Andre Van Klaveren Reply-To: Andre Van Klaveren To: Tomcat Users List , Riyad Kalla Subject: Re: Tomcat creating new sessions between Servlet->JSP request dispatch under load In-Reply-To: <> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline References: <> X-Virus-Checked: Checked X-Spam-Rating: 1.6.2 0/1000/N Riyad, You should not be using the Session object to store your DTO for display. Especially if you are forwarding the request to a JSP. The Session object should only be used to store data that is required to remain in server memory between client requests. I would place your DTO in the Request object instead. That alone will probably solve your problem. Now, assuming you continue to use the Session object, you should synchronize on the Session object before attempting to add your DTO object to it. That will prevent multiple requests from stepping on each other while trying to add their DTOs to the Session. I haven't looked at Tomcat's code to see how they implemented the hashCode method of the Session object but it's not the best way to determine if two Sessions are equal in your case. The hash code may depend on the contents of the Session object. I would print out the session ID instead. This will truely tell you if you have two different sessions. From what you describe I find it hard to beleive that you there is a second session creeping into the picture within the same request. --=20 Virtually, Andre Van Klaveren SCP --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: For additional commands, e-mail:
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46860
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Subject: bin/18292: file/mkmagic not build as a host tool properly
To: None <>
From: None <>
List: netbsd-bugs
Date: 09/14/2002 17:49:00
>Number: 18292
>Category: bin
>Synopsis: file/mkmagic not build as a host tool properly
>Confidential: no
>Severity: serious
>Priority: medium
>Responsible: bin-bug-people
>State: open
>Class: sw-bug
>Submitter-Id: net
>Arrival-Date: Sat Sep 14 17:50:00 PDT 2002
>Originator: Jason R Thorpe
>Release: NetBSD 1.6D
Wasabi Systems, Inc.
System: NetBSD 1.6D NetBSD 1.6D (YEAH-BABY-XP) #10: Wed Jul 10 11:36:52 PDT 2002 i386
Architecture: i386
Machine: i386
mkmagic uses apprentice.c and print.c from the file sources.
However, it includes a "config.h" which is the target's config.h
in the file sources. It needs to include the host's config.h
generated for host tools (and that config.h also needs to define
macros that mksyntax needs).
To do this properly probably requires a separate directory in
which to build these the host tool.
Code inspection.
Not provided.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46865
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[Numpy-discussion] converting IDL to python
Rick White rlw at stsci.edu
Tue Dec 18 21:31:06 CST 2001
On Tue, 18 Dec 2001, Mark Fardal wrote:
> earlier this month Joe Harrington posted this:
> NASA's immediate objective will be a complete data-analysis system to
> replace IDL, in short order, including an IDL-to-python converter
> program. That shouldn't be hard as IDL is a simple language, and PyDL
> may have solved much of that problem.
> I'm an IDL user, and I'm currently trying to see if I can switch over
> to python. It strikes me that an IDL-to-python converter program is a
> VERY ambitious idea. While IDL's syntax is rather similar to Python,
> and less powerful (so that there is less to translate), there are
> enough differences between them that conversion is probably not a
> simple task. For example, in IDL:
> arguments are passed by reference
> array storage order is different
> there's a different notion of "truth" than in Python
> a structure type exists, and a notation for slicing arrays of structures
> trailing "degenerate" array dimensions are truncated in a hard-to-predict way
> array subscripting generates copy, not reference
> I'm sure there are some other big differences too.
I'm thinking about this problem too. For the PyRAF system
(pyraf.stsci.edu), I wrote a set of Python programs that parse IRAF CL
scripts and automatically translate them to Python. CL scripts have a
much less regular syntax than IDL (making them harder to parse), but the
CL has a vastly more limited functionality (making it easier to translate
the results to IDL.) I did have to deal with issues similar to those
above. E.g., the CL does pass arguments by reference (sometimes -- I told
you it is irregular!) and I figured out how to handle that. The array
storage order doesn't strike me as a biggie, it is just necessary to swap
the order of indices. The CL also has a different notion of truth
(boolean expressions have the value yes or no, which are magic values
along the lines of None in Python.) The IDL notion of truth is really
pretty similar to Python's when you get down to it.
The new numeric array module that we have been working on (numarray) also
supports the equivalent of arrays of structures that can be sliced and
indexed just like arrays of numbers. We had IDL structures (among other
things) in mind when we developed this capability, and think our version
is a significant improvement over IDL. We also have arrays of strings
and aim to have all the basic array functionality that is available in
IDL. (By the way, I'm a long-time IDL user and am reasonably expert in it.)
collection of built-in functions which probably will not be readily
available in Python. Until someone writes things like the morphological
dilation and erosion operations, it won't be possible to translate IDL
programs that use them. And there will always be some weird corners of
IDL behavior where it just would not be worth the effort to try to
replicate exactly what IDL does. That's true in the CL translation too
-- but it does not seem to be a big limitation, because users tend to stay
away from those weird spots too.
My conclusion is that an automatic conversion of (most) IDL to Python
probably can be done with a reasonable amount of work. It certainly is
not trivial, but I think (based on my experience with the CL) that it is
not impossibly difficult either. I'm hoping to take a shot at this
sometime during the next 6 months.
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, MD
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46867
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[alsa-devel] Reasonable sound hardware parameters?
Jaroslav Kysela perex at suse.cz
Mon May 28 10:52:18 CEST 2007
On Sat, 26 May 2007, Joachim Förster wrote:
> Hi ALSA devs,
> as I already described in one of my last posts on the list, I'm going to
> write a ALSA driver for a sound controller which will also be "written"
> at the same time (VHDL for FPGA) - on top of an embedded system (Xilinx
> ML403 EvalBoard, PowerPC 405). We will do playback feature only.
> The point is, that we will have _no_ real DMA and we don't want to use
> the copy/silence or ack/workqueue (with intermediate buffer). So we
> decided to move the ring buffer, which usually exists in RAM into the
> sound controller and handle it as some kind of device IO memory, which
> should be mmap'able (kernel function io_remap_pfn_range()). So, the
> important goal is, to have mmap feature in the ALSA driver.
> First question: To implement mmap on such kind of device IO memory, I
> have to use snd_pcm_lib_mmap_iomem() as mmap() callback - like it is
> used in the rme32 driver, right?
Yes. rme32 is quite similar.
> Second question: Do the following parameters make sense regarding the
> size of the HW ring buffer and period sizes:
> .buffer_bytes_max=16*1024;
> .period_bytes_max=8*1024;
> .period_bytes_min=?? resonable value ??
32 or 64
> .periods_min=2;
> .periods_max=?? resonable value ??
> Furthermore, the sound controller will fire an interrupt after one
> period is played. Are there any arguments against these values? Any
> comments?
Yes, I think that the access through a PCI I/O window to a PCI device is
much slower than PCI DMA transfers with bursts. I would really consider to
design hardware with real DMA. Of course, if it's only experimental stuff,
then don't worry.
Jaroslav Kysela <perex at suse.cz>
Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
ALSA Project, SUSE Labs
More information about the Alsa-devel mailing list
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46881
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A Challenge for Richard Branson
...along with George Soros, Andrew Grove, and Bill Gates
by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
September 7, 1998
Copyright ©1998 by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
This letter was sent to Richard Branson on September 7, 1998. Several weeks later, I received a 'generic' response from Virgin, and a few weeks after that, the remnants of a letter shredded by the post office. What I could read from this letter sounded to me like a hopeful and positive response. Eventually, however, in late October, a curt letter arrived from Virgin's V2 music group espousing no interest in the idea.
The letter probably never reached Branson himself -- he's a busy man, of course -- but also the nature of the response (and a certain level of skepticism) suggested that I should identify my 'intellectual ownership', so to speak, of this idea as presented. Hence, I have published it here on the web (exactly as sent, except for the activation of the links provided here). Perhaps Mr. Branson will indeed see it published on this page, and be inspired. It still sounds like the sort of challenge he would appreciate.
Mr. Richard Branson
The Virgin Group
London, UK
Dear Mr. Branson,
You have met many remarkable challenges and won. You have successful airlines and hotels and cinemas and shops, and your public presence is a joy. Some ventures involving balloons are yet to be achieved.
I'm writing to propose an incredibly difficult challenge, one that has not been met for nearly a century: inspiring popular enjoyment of contemporary 'classical' music. I am passionate about its power and beauty and exhilaration, and believe that you, as an imaginative leader, can reveal a public yearning and re-awaken a worldwide passion.
Let me visit with you and convince you. Or come to Vermont, where I'll make you a wonderful home-cooked meal and present you with an exciting and nearly impossible challenge involving the Branson Positions, The New Virgins, Deep Thought Music, and 100 composers you can explode onto the popular stage. It's been since Puccini, this dry spell unprecedented in the world's music. And now we're entering a great new Golden Age of music. You could be the historical figure who makes it possible for the public to be carried into this era. The challenge is great ... and failure is a real possibility.
I've thought about writing you this letter for a long time, and when I saw your look of genuine enjoyment once again on a recent news program, I knew it had to be now. Maybe Richard Branson can be the one to meet this challenge.
If you're surfing the web, you can see a fragment of this dream here on my website: http://www.maltedmedia.com/kalvos/
Right now I am in Amsterdam working on this dream. I can meet you on my way back, or you are welcome to join me in Vermont, where I can fill you with food and wondrous musical styles you may never have heard.
Best to you,
Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
176 Cox Brook Road
Northfield, Vermont 05663
Contact Form
September 7, 1998
I have invented some questions you might ask.
What is this music?
Once it was called 'classical' music, but that word doesn't fit now. For a while people tried adjectives like serious, avant-garde, concert or art music--a panoply of terms that tried to identify this music as different from entertainment music. Yes, this music is different because it asks the listener's intimate attention and involvement. You might say that entertainment music wears familiar clothes; this music--this art music--simply drops its clothes to the floor, inviting a longer look. It's quite a story. Let's talk about it.
Who cares about this music?
Few enough people, but that's because they don't know much about it. An entire generation--maybe two--simply got out of the habit of listening closely to music. Maybe the music wasn't listenable for a while. Maybe recordings overtook the concert hall. Maybe music became a commodity or a utility. The reasons aren't important, because listeners are ready to re-discover this music-without-a-name.
With so many important causes, why should I care about this?
For the same reasons people buy recordings or wear fashionable clothes or fly balloons--because, when the day is done, there's growth and good beyond raw survival. Perhaps, in a world of pain, all pleasure is indefensible. So ultimately, if you don't want to do this, nothing can justify it.
What will I get out of it?
This is not a financial investment. It's an open question whether you will reap a penny. History will hardly know you, any more than it remembers the Margrave of Brandenburg. But there will be Branson compositions and dedications and concerts and recordings. Something will be forever changed in the musical and cultural history of the world. But your own reward will be entirely personal.
Isn't arts sponsorship the government's business?
Hardly. Who knows why they continue funding the arts? Maybe it's a hand-me-down from royal patronage. Perhaps it insulates artists from a commercial world. But I believe--and have lived the belief--that individual risk sharpens appreciation for the imagination of art and music.
But isn't it just charity anyway?
No. Here's the difference. Society pays for what it values, or perceives to have value ... the basics, travel, entertainment, and even one-of-a-kind artwork by the Great Masters. By hiring living composers and paying for their products, you, Richard Branson, assign value--cash value--that others can wonder about, consider, and emulate. Don't call the awards or commissions or fellowships; call them the Branson Positions, where you hire composers as inventors of worthwhile products.
What am I actually doing?
Consider it R&D--I like the research and development analogy. To start, you'll hire 100 composers as 'creative developers' to work in an environment free from outside pressures, perhaps for two years. When they've completed their experimental designs, you'll bring the results in for engineering (rehearsals), improvement (revisions), beta-testing (concerts), and production. Then, with all your enthusiasm behind them, you'll market the products under your own New Virgins label and purchase time on concerts for their performance. Aside from the artistic integrity guaranteed the composers, it will partly be a commercial venture in the public's eyes. If orchestras and chamber groups play the music, they will receive payment, publicity, and your good graces; if they don't, they'll continue to beg for contributions to play more Mozart. Audiences will pack the halls for Branson Concerts.
And then what?
If you've done it up right, others less artistically aware will emulate you--the technological barons, the financiers, the Wall Street investors. Where millions went to purchase paintings of the Old Masters, millions will also go to create new musical masterpieces. You will have met the challenge.
Who else did you ask?
No one. I had three other people in mind, but am writing to you first because, frankly, you have broader vision, sensitivity, and experience. If you want to take up this challenge, then I'd suggest three other leaders with the wherewithal to join you in transforming the musical world: George Soros, because he remembers 'the time before'; Andrew Grove, because he will appreciate that composers work as hard as he does; and Bill Gates, because he hates not understanding something.
Why should I let you advise me?
Because I am knowledgeable, I have experience, and my mind is open. Because I am not a politician. Because I will be fair. But most of all, because I believe it can be done--that people can once again find the thrilling in new music. (Information about me is found at http://maltedmedia.com/bathory/)
What projects have you done so far that I can evaluate?
The most important public project is Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, a radio/cyber show and website, at http://kalvos.org/. This week, we are doing an inaugural cybercast from Amsterdam, with co-hosts from both sides of the Atlantic. Our visibility is low outside the community of people who listen to new music, which is why your imagination is needed.
Who are the composers you'd have me fund?
I will list many of them if you like. Famous names will probably not appear, but there will be a mix of young and old. All will need the Branson Positions because none survive as full-time composers. For the moment, the majority will be North Americans. To the world of professional composers, the list will look strange. But my choices aren't arbitrary; they are guided by my extended interviews with them and listening to their music.
How can I reach you?
Contact the author
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46895
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Saturday, January 23, 2010
What Happens in Prayer
"True prayer is God the Holy Spirit talking to God the Father in the name of God the Son, and the believer's heart is the prayer room." (S.W. Zwemer, cited here)
What's Wrong with Reading the Horoscope?
Julie started reading the daily horoscope a few months ago. She thought it was interesting that on some days, the guidance she found there seemed exactly relevant to her situation. She didn't really believe in it, mind you.
At least, she didn't believe in it at first. But as the days wore on and Julie continued to read her daily horoscope, she found that while she still didn't really believe in what she read, she still told friends, "It's amazing how often it seems to be true." Julie had become a horoscope "evangelist."
Julie also started wearing clothing using the horoscope's colors of the day. If the horoscope said that thirteen was her number for the day, she would order a baker's dozen of goodies at the pastry shop on her way to work.
The thing is that Julie is a Christian. She should know better. We all should know better.
In my daily devotional reading this morning, a passage from 1 Chronicles came up; it contains the Bible's epitaph for Israel's first king, Saul, a man who started out strong in faith, but who in his impatience, had come to depend not on God, but on himself....and other things. The passage says:
So Saul died for his unfaithfulness; he was unfaithful to the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord; moreover, he had consulted a medium, seeking guidance, and did not seek guidance from the Lord...(1 Chronicles 10:13-14)
There's nothing innocent or harmless about reading horoscopes, messing with Ouija boards, playing with Tarot cards, or going to a spiritual "advisor" who claims to know your future.
As much as you tell yourself and others that you don't really believe in that stuff, consulting them will inevitably diminish your dependence on God for guidance and "daily bread." You will, as mentioned in last Sunday's sermon, "hedge your bets" when it comes to trusting wholly in the God revealed to all the world in Jesus Christ.
Martin Luther, pointing to Jesus as God in flesh, was fond of saying that any time our faith, the things in which we trust, can be termed as "Christ-and-somehing else," we have fallen out of relationship with Christ. Christ will not share His throne or His eminence with anyone or anything. Not horoscopes. Not Ouija boards. Nor, for that matter, with the wisdom of the world, your country, your political party, your life philosophy, piety, or good religious works.
Christ is the way and the truth and the life. Christ alone.
If I had the chance, I would tell Julie to throw out the horoscopes and simply pray, "Today, Lord, your will be done in my life."
UPDATE: I just found this prayer while re-reading Prayer Power Unlimited: Achieving Intimacy with God Through Prayer by J. Oswald Sanders. It's a prayer composed by Erasmus:
O Lord Jesus Christ, who hast said that Thou art the way, the truth, and the life; suffer us not at any time to stray from Thee, who art the way; nor to distrust the promises, who art the truth; nor to rest in any other thing but Thee, who art life; beyond which there is nothing to be desired, neither in heaven nor on earth; for Thy Name's sake.
Faith Tidbit #27
Scholars refer to the Ten Commandments as the decalog. This is a compound word from an ancient translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, which was commonly read by diaspora Jews in the days of Jesus and the apostles. Deca, which appears in our common word, decade, means ten and logoi means words. Thus, the commandments are referred to as the ten words. The original Hebrew texts of the Old Testament give no title to the Ten Commandments. As noted in The Lutheran Cyclopedia, "The Bible gives us no basis for numbering of the Commandments or of determining their respective position..."
Friday, January 22, 2010
This is so good!
When Joe Stowell had a mishap, he learned something about himself...and about God's will for God's people.
Home Win for Buckeyes Critical...Hopeful It Sets Table for Away Win at West Viriginia on Saturday
Faith Tidbit #26
Obeying the Ten Commandments, important as they are, cannot save us from sin, death, or futile living. (We're incapable of complete obedience to the commandments anyway.) In the New Testament, the Ephesian Christians were reminded that, “by grace you have been saved through faith” in Jesus Christ. Faith in Christ and not obedience to the Ten Commandments is what saves us. Even before Jesus came into our world, God's people were saved not by adherence to the law, but by their faith in God and God's promises. Genesis says that Abraham "believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness." In other words, Abraham had a right relationship because he adhered perfectly to God's law. (In fact, Genesis makes clear that on more than one occasion, Abraham deliberately acted in ways contrary to God's law.) But, Abraham received the gift of a right relationship with God, the meaning of righteousness, by trusting in God. The Bible says that when we receive God's righteousness as undeserved gift, God justifies us.
God is There When We Set Out on New Ventures
Kay Weaver talks about leaving the Evangelcial Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to be part of a new Lutheran congregational venture.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
"Source of Life"
That's the title of a wonderful post by Patrick Oden. Some of what he says:
Sin is an orientation, and as such it may include the list of usual vices but also includes anything that becomes, for us, a distracting source of our identity. Indeed, I think that it is often more dangerous to be caught up in the socially acceptable distractions. Being approved by the world means we are not constantly reminded of our need for grace, for redemption, for renewal. We strive and strive, doing ‘good’ works, but miss the mark because we are not finding our life in God...
...Holiness is an orientation. It is an embrace of the source of life who brings us new life, and brings us to the place we truly are most alive. In turning to God, in orienting ourselves to God and letting everything else fall into place around this orientation, we do not lose the created things or the joy or the hope or the freedom.
Biblical Christianity is not a religion, per se; it's a relationship of trust with the God we cannot see. Something of Him and His nature may be seen by us in God's people, the Church...or in a breathtaking sunset...or in service rendered in Christ's Name.
But, as the voice of God the Father taught Peter when Peter sought to build booths memorializing Jesus, Moses, and Elijah at the transfiguration, faith isn't about experiences, moments, or human works, however pious or lauded by others. "This is My Son, My Chosen," the voice said, "Listen to Him!" (Luke 9:28-36)
In our cluttered lives, it becomes difficult to remember that to have life, Jesus Christ is all we need.
This was the lesson Jesus taught His friend, Martha, on a day when He and His disciples visited her and her sister Mary. Martha, you'll remember, worked to do the right thing, treating the guests with hospitality.
The Gospel of Luke which describes this incident, says that Martha was "distracted." Mary, her sister, by contrast, sat at Jesus' feet and listened to Him. Martha got upset and asked the Lord to tell her sister to get busy. She seems within her rights, I suppose. But Jesus tells her:
There are lots of things we can do in life that seem like the right things to do and that the world will commend us for doing. But unless our aim in them is to follow Christ, to "listen" to Him by paying heed to His will for us, to heed His call to be human "beings" more than human "doings," the life of God given by Christ is not in us.
God gives life through Jesus Christ. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life," Jesus says. "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6).
We must never allow our involvement in "good" things, whether it's regular worship, Bible study, prayer, service to others, or family time, to delude us that these things, in themselves, bring life. Only Jesus Christ brings life. Only Jesus Christ is life.
The call of Christian is to give up anything that we use to define ourselves and to give us life, other than Jesus Christ. All other ways are dead-ends. Only Christ gives life. Our surrender, imperfect and halting though it inevitably is, happens in a daily process the New Testament calls discipleship.
Read Patrick's entire post.
Faith Tidbit #25
A third kind of law or commandment appearing in the Old Testament is the moral law. It's also sometimes called the Mosaic Law, because it was first revealed by God to Israel through Moses, in the ten commandments. The commandments appear in Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. They're also explained in much Leviticus, chapters 18-20. The moral law reflects God’s will for all humanity for all time, including today.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
How Christ Understands Freedom v. How Americans Understand Freedom
This comes from scholar and pastor Roy Harrisville's commentary on this coming Sunday's Gospel reading, Luke 4:14-21, in which Jesus, after being tempted in the wilderness, reads Isaiah 58:6 and 61:1-2. Harrisville is right on, I think:
Americans are used to the idea of freedom as license to do as one wishes. Jesus, however, understands freedom differently. It is a release from captivity to death, the will of others, and the will of the self. Jesus will preach the freedom of slavery to God's will and service to the neighbor (Luke 22:24-27). Such a definition of freedom can only be grasped from the way Jesus will fulfill the words of Isaiah's prophecy.
Faith Tidbit #24
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Faith Tidbit #23
Reading the Old Testament, we see that there are three different kinds of commandments or laws that God gave to ancient Israel. First, there was ritual or sacrificial law. This regulated what and when pious Jews were to sacrifice for their sins. Such sacrifices are no longer needed. Jesus is, as John the Baptist proclaimed Him to be, "the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world." And the New Testament book of Hebrews notes that Jesus came into our world to be the once-for all sacrifice for our sins.
Adding to Something We Talked About in 'Shack' Discussion Group on Monday Night
Martin Luther said, “When [the devil] comes knocking upon the door of my heart and asks, ‘Who lives here?’ the dear Lord Jesus goes to the door and says, ‘Martin Luther used to live here but he has moved out. Now I live here.’ The devil, seeing the nail prints in His hands, and the pierced side, takes flight immediately.” The Bible says that Christ lives in those who let Him in. It’s only when we let Christ in that the devil can be turned away.
Monday, January 18, 2010
"To love our neighbor means to make the persecution, suffering, and injustice of our fellow human beings our own."
"It is the business of all who follow Christ." Good thoughts for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Faith Tidbit #22
The first five books of the Old Testament--Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy--are referred to as the Pentateuch. As scholar John Drane notes, the five books contain "accounts of humanity's beginnings..., accounts of Israel's forebears..., and accounts from Israel's escape from Egypt and journey to the promised land...But above all it contains 'laws': regulations for religious and social life, and great moral laws built on the ten commandments."
Sunday, January 17, 2010
God Revealed in Joy
John 2:1-11
During last week’s adult Sunday School class, I mentioned that the Gospel lessons for the Epiphany Season each year remind me of the jumbled images you see projected on Jumbotrons at a major league baseball game. A picture of a ball player, cut into maybe sixteen squares, is shown. Gradually, the squares are put in their right places to, eventually, reveal a clear picture of the player.
Each Sunday’s Gospel reading in the Epiphany season, in effect, moves another square into place and we see more clearly Who Jesus is and what He means for us.
Of course, because Jesus is the Word made flesh, truly God and truly human, there are mysteries about Him we will never fathom.
Nowhere in Scripture am I more struck by the unknowable mysteries of Jesus, than when I read today’s Gospel lesson, John 2:1-11.
The incident itself is probably familiar to all of us. It happens early in Jesus’ ministry. He and his five disciples—more would be added later—are invited, along with Jesus’ mother, to a wedding in Cana, a town not far from Nazareth.
Wedding feasts in those days usually went on for seven days. While drunkenness was always prohibited to God’s people, wine was served with every meal.
At some point during this particular feast, the wine gave out. For some reason, Jesus’ mother got wind of this crisis and went to Jesus. She hoped that Jesus would do something about the situation. It would have been considered deeply embarrassing for the bridal family to run out of wine.
Jesus’ initial response to His mother is jarring. “Woman,” He says to her, “what has this got to do with you and me?” That always reminds me of the way my grandfather addressed my grandmother when he was upset with her. She was no longer Evelyn, but Woman, as in, "Woman, what do you want from me?"
I think that Lutheran pastor Deb Grant helps us to understand Jesus’ reaction. She says, “Mary was the first to believe that Jesus was the Son of God. She knew his potential. She knew he was capable of great things and had yet to reveal them. Jesus abruptly puts her in her place. It sounds rude to us. The time was at hand…for Jesus to fulfill God's purposes for him. It was important that Jesus [make] clear to Mary that she had no authority over him. The best thing that Jesus could do for his mother was to be her savior.”
Mary seems to understand this. She doesn’t argue with Jesus; she simply turns to the servants of the bridal family, telling them, “Do whatever he tells you.”
You know what happens next. The bridal family has six stone water jars on hand, jars used for religious purification rites. Jesus tells the servants to fill the jars with water. The water turns into wine.
Our Gospel lesson closes by saying that when the newly called disciples see this, Jesus’ glory is revealed to them and they believe—or trust—in Him.
What about this event caused the disciples to trust Jesus as Messiah, as the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world?
We could spend ages on those questions. But I want to suggest something about this miracle—this sign pointing to Who Jesus is—that may have convinced the disciples to believe in Jesus.
Consider the trip Jesus and the disciples took to get to the wedding at Cana.* Just a few days before, they would have walked near the town of Scythopolis, a place where the Greco-Roman deity, Dionysus, also called Bacchus, was worshiped.
Dionysus was the god of wine and he was always associated with celebrations. It was said that once, he even turned water into wine.
Many people in that region, their lives dependent on agriculture and wanting to cover all their bases, not only worshiped the God of Israel—the one God of all creation, who had told His people, “I am the Lord, your shall have no other gods”—also worshiped Dionysus.
Before the eyes of the disciples and all the wedding guests, Jesus did in real life what some thought that a false god no one had ever seen had done. This is one of those epiphanies, among the lights of revelation from God, that John referred to in the prologue to his gospel when he wrote, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, Who is close to the Father’s heart, Who has made Him known.”
This is all more than a historical jaw from a pastor interested in history, by the way. Even today, we struggle with whether we’ll depend on the God revealed to us in Jesus and the Bible, or if we’ll hedge out bets, mixing in other deities or dependencies.
A woman I know was on vacation with her family out West. She talked her husband and kids into going to some area that New Agers claimed had a particular spiritual aura. It was said that if you walked around the area, new peace and success would come to you. As they traversed the terrain, this woman’s enthusiasm grew. “I can feel it!” she would say. “Can you feel it?” Her oldest child, a kid who had just been confirmed, wasn’t buying any of it. “No, Mom, I don't feel it” he said. “What are you looking for? Don’t you know that because of Jesus, you can talk with God any time? What more do you need than that?”**
Nothing, really! But that doesn’t keep some Christians from hedging their bets, adding a little bit more to their Christian "religion," as though we needed anything other than the God we meet in Jesus Christ.
Some Christians, for example, pray on Sunday and then consult their horoscopes in the Monday papers.
Or, they pray for daily bread and then base the value of their lives on how much money they make.
Or, in the case of even some theologians and pastors, they sing, “Glory to God in the highest” and then dare to replace the revealed Word and will of God with their own thoughts, feelings, and interpretations.***
Many Christians divide their loyalties more innocently, worshiping with their congregations one day and then, thinking that they can’t bother God, relying on themselves or their own ingenuity the rest of the week.
The Old Testament prophet Elijah described this sometimes-depending-on God-and-sometimes-turning-to-other-little-gods as “limping.” “How long will you go limping along with two different opinions?” he asked the people of Israel. “If the LORD is God, follow Him; but if Baal [a false god of those times], then follow him.”
Jesus made it very clear that He came to bring God’s grace and truth to the world, but to receive Him means to lay aside all bet-hedging. I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” Jesus tells us, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.”
The early disciples, Peter and John, after Jesus' resurrection and ascension, were told by religious authorities, on pain of death to never speak the Name of Jesus. They said they couldn't comply with their command. "We cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard," they said. "There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved."
The fact is that relying on anything other than God results from our desire to control our lives. We would rather have little deities we can manipulate than surrender our lives to the God we know in Jesus, acknowledge our sins, trust Him to bring forgive us, and to take us through good times and bad, all the way to eternity with God.
When the disciples at Cana saw Jesus turn water into wine, they saw the God Who had true dominion over the world. And they saw something about this God that I hope you see as you live from day to day.
In his book of daily devotionals, Hope for Each Day, evangelist Billy Graham, asks, “Have you ever watched a young couple communicate their love for each other without even a word?...Every glance, every touch, every smile conveys love. People deeply in love find absolute bliss simply being in each other’s presence.” He goes on to say that for those who have come to know God through Jesus Christ, “simply being in the presence of God brings joy.”
When Jesus turned water to wine at Cana, He showed us that God is the One Who can bring joy to us. The wine ran out and Jesus replenished it with even better wine.
When our capacity to cope with life runs out, Jesus gives us more strength than we imagined possible.
When our patience with family members or work situations runs thin, Jesus can help us endure.
When we grow weary, Jesus can renew our strength.
When our hope is gone, Jesus destroys our despair, stands by us, and throws down new bridges at the ends of what seem like dead-end roads. (There are many in this sanctuary this morning who have experienced these things.)
And when we die, the risen Jesus gives all who believe in Him life that never ends! All who follow Jesus know that God is the great joy-bringer!
In the marriage liturgy we use any time a couple is married here at Saint Matthew, there’s an ancient prayer we offer. It begins, “Eternal God, our creator and redeemer, as you gladdened the wedding at Cana by the presence of Your Son, so by His presence now bring your joy to this wedding…”
Jesus’ disciples knew that they were in the presence of God that day at Cana because they understood it’s always God’s will to bring us joy. In Psalm 16, King David wrote, “In your presence, there is fullness of joy; in your right hand are pleasures evermore.”
The past week brought sad days to our world. The earthquake in Haiti is heartbreaking.
And contrary to what some--like people whose initials are Pat Robertson--might say, the multiple tragedies that have befallen Haiti in recent years are not punishment from God.****
We live in a fallen, imperfect world where bad things happen. All human beings are born into sin and all of creation groans under the weight of an old world that is dying. Those groans--encompassing the tragedies and difficulties that come to the world world from which none of us is immune--are, the Bible tells us, the labor pains of the new heaven and new earth that Jesus will one day establish.
We await the return of Jesus, when He will set all things to rights and death and tears will be no more.
Even now, in the midst of the Haitian disaster, we see God’s Spirit moving in the hearts of millions—through their prayers, contributions of money, and acts of compassion—to bring joy and restoration to the people of Haiti.
Jesus' miracle at Cana is a sign that one day, God’s joy will have the last word in our world. It presents a clear picture of God showing us that beyond the wants and needs of this world, there will be a marriage feast which has no end.
In Jesus Christ, the whole world is invited to that feast.
You are invited. Amen
*This is discussed extensively in Following the Way: The Setting of John's Gospel, written by my late seminary professor, Pastor Bruce Schein. Rare is the day that I don't rely on his scholarship, remember his passion for Jesus Christ, or both.
**This is a true story, but I've changed a few details in order to protect the innocent...and the guilty.
***I once heard a Bible scholar from a major university report matter-of-factly that he and a group to which he belonged had cast votes on what in the Bible they believed. They voted, for example, that the resurrection had never happened, that Jesus never performed a miracle, and that Mary didn't become pregnant with Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. I wondered why he and his colleagues even bothered being church members.
***On his 700 Club TV show, Robertson claimed that Haiti's poverty, history of repressive governments, and numerous natural disasters resulted from the country having made a "pact with the devil." If acquiescence to the devil, the sinful world, or our sinful selves resulted in the kinds of experiences which are the lot of ordinary Haitians everyday, I would have died long ago. Jesus says that it rains on the just and unjust a like. And the Old Testament figure of Job, about whose piety even God bragged, was not immune from unspeakable tragedy.
In Scripture, wealth is usually associated with insolence and with heedlessness to God. Jesus saw the wealth of the rich man asking about how he could have eternal life as an impediment to his relationship with God, so much so that Jesus said that the rich man needed to give away all he had before he could meet God in eternity. Wealth in itself wasn't (and isn't) the problem. Abraham, the founding patriarch of God's people, the Jews, was wealthy, for example. The problem was the role that money played in the life of the man who approached Jesus.
This is why Jesus later observed to His disciples that it will be harder for wealthy people to enter eternity than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Wealth is a powerful addiction, a consuming god that can create the false impression that it bestows all the blessed gifts to which we can aspire.
The poor know better. While no one wants to be poor and it's up to those of us with wealth to share our blessings--I say this from the perspective of a lower middle class American, wealthy by the world's standards--with others, the poor aren't addicted to their wealth. In that sense, they are more open to trust in God, not less.
Faith Tidbit #21
Jesus' turning water into wine (John 2:1-11) and the moment when water and blood came from the lifeless Jesus' pierced side (John 19:34), form what the scholars call an "inclusio" in the Gospel of John's account of Jesus' earthly ministry. Jesus came to earth to give eternal life to all who believe in Him. Christ's life comes to us in Holy Baptism (water) and Holy Communion (wine/blood and bread/body). In Baptism, God claims us His children and in Communion, God sustains us with the very body and blood of Jesus. Through these gifts, we experience the truth of Jesus' words, "I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10:10).
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46912
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Date: Thu, 22 Apr 1999 10:47:12 -0600 (CST)
Subject: radius of an arc
Name: Rusty
Who is asking: Other
Level: All
I need to find the equation for finding the radius of an arc; I know the lenght of the arc (i.e the distance of the line connecting the two ends of the arc) and the height; (i.e the rise of the arc at its apex,) I had the formula years ago but it has lost me; this would be invalable for work in new homes i.e. where we need to build an "arch" with a rise of 21" between two columns 11 feet apart
Hi Rusty,
Using the theorem of Pythagoras on the triangle on the right,
r2 = (r-h)2 + (L/2)2
r2 = r2 - 2rh + h2 + L2/4
2rh = (4h2 + L2)/4
and hence
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46913
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Take the 2-minute tour ×
(Apologies for not having gotten around to responding to and accepting answers on my other recent questions—as a meticulous and thorough type, I'd like to take my time to fully comprehend and play with all answers before responding. I'll definitely follow up.)
I'm trying to reproduce a variant of this view, where hovering the mouse over a point highlights its "corresponding" point on all plots:
Google Finance page for AAPL, with a volume chart and the "Slow Stochastic Oscillator"
In my case, the additional complexion is that the x-axes are not the same (i.e. they're not all time), though they do all increase monotonically.
I'm in the process of reading, experimenting, and further exploring based on comments on these threads:
However, I've yet to understand (though perhaps the answer may be in one of those threads) how one would affect a plot based on an event triggered on another plot. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. I'll post my solution when I figure it out, though I'm sure it won't be the best one could do, as I'm still new to Mathematica.
After @ssch's answer was posted, I realized I left out some critical details/clarifications.
First, I'm working with discreet data, i.e. two ListPlots. That doesn't seem to matter, though. @ssch's example worked for me, using ListPlot.
Second, and more importantly, the two x-axes are not linear images—_i.e._they do not increase uniformly. For example:
Non-uniform example
The above plots graph the same y-axes, but based on different x-axes. (The dotted gray lines correspond, so one can see how certain areas are "stretched" or "compressed" in the second graph.)
Is there a way to get a corresponding cursor in such a case?
share|improve this question
But still n-th point in first plot is referring to the n-th point in the second? – Kuba Oct 21 '13 at 6:33
I found my answer in another thread: mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/34611/…. But I will post back here when I get it working with a hovering cursor. – Andrew Cheong Oct 24 '13 at 8:05
3 Answers 3
Using Scaled coordinates can be quite helpful:
loc = Scaled[{0.5, 0.5}]},
x, {x, 1, 2},
Epilog -> Dynamic[ Point[Scaled[{loc[[1, 1]], loc[[1, 1]]}]] ]],
x^2, {x, -1, 2},
Epilog -> Dynamic@Locator[Dynamic[loc]]]
some plots
See how the point in the first coordinates follows quite nicely even though their ranges are completely different.
You can of course use EventHandler with MousePosition, which supports "GraphicsScaled" coordinates, instead of a Locator.
share|improve this answer
Thanks for the starter, @ssch! Indeed, your example worked up to the point of getting a locator to correspond to a depicted point on another graph. I wasn't aware of DynamicModule's use in this way. However, I've edited my question to reflect a more involved aspect of my problem: my x-axes are not linear multiples of one another! Would you have any suggestion(s) as to how to approach this problem? Thank you. – Andrew Cheong Oct 21 '13 at 2:24
@acheong87 I'd start by defining an invertible mapping between the two plotranges and use that to transform the location data. – ssch Oct 21 '13 at 2:49
data = Table[{i, 5 Sin[i/10] + RandomReal[]}, {i, 100}];
data2 = {Log[#], #2} & @@@ data;
In case when you don't know how both axes are related to each other but only have point sets you can do something like:
Deploy@With[{opts = {Axes -> False, Frame -> True, ImageSize -> {300, 300/GoldenRatio},
AspectRatio -> 1/GoldenRatio}},
DynamicModule[{sel = 1, mark},
Graphics[{[email protected], Dynamic@mark[data],
Red, [email protected], Dynamic@Point[data[[sel]]]}, opts],
Graphics[{[email protected], Dynamic@mark[data2],
Red, [email protected], Dynamic@Point[data2[[sel]]]}, opts]
, Initialization :> (
mark[data_] := MapIndexed[Dynamic@{If[CurrentValue["MouseOver"], sel = First@#2];,
Point[#]} &, data];
enter image description here
share|improve this answer
I apologize I haven't had a chance to return to my project since the workweek began! I'll get to it later today, but this already looks like it's gonna do what I want. You guessed correctly that I have only point sets that map one-to-one, not a continuous function of any sort (though, I recall seeing an Interpolate function in Mathematica that might help with that). Can't wait to try this. (And I'll delete this otherwise frivolous comment.) – Andrew Cheong Oct 22 '13 at 14:09
@acheong87 I'm looking forward hearing how it fits your needs :) If any improvements need to be done, just tell me. Good luck. – Kuba Oct 22 '13 at 14:33
Your code, using 100 sample points, works. Unfortunately however, when I up the number of points to 6,300 (the typical size of my lists), Mathematica hangs at the "Formatting Notebook Contents" dialog, bringing up the "Disable Dynamic Evaluation" dialog every 10 seconds. Do you think perhaps the mouseover aspect consumes a lot of processing power? (I'm trying to remove that now, as I don't necessarily need hovering (clicking is sufficient). Or is it something else? – Andrew Cheong Oct 23 '13 at 2:13
@acheong87 hi, sorry for delay, could you tell more about the data? Is the sampling constant etc? or you want a solution for just two list with arbitrary points related with pairs? – Kuba Oct 24 '13 at 6:56
No problem! I should thank you. I learned a ton over the past two days, starting from your code, and trying to modify it in various ways to do the minimum processing necessary. I know I probably could have been clearer about my data, too; I apologize. Two days ago, I didn't see my data that way, but yes, you're right, I have two arbitrarily lists, say {{1,2},{3,4},{5,6},...} and {{10,20},{30,40},{50,60},...} and need corresponding pairs to be "related," e.g. {1,2} and {10,20}. However, while asking a sub-question on another thread, @belisarius provided yet another answer, which I – Andrew Cheong Oct 24 '13 at 7:03
up vote 0 down vote accepted
@belisarius answered my question in another thread. The following is his code with one modification: replacing MouseDown with MouseMoved.
opts = {Axes -> False, Frame -> True, ImageSize -> {300, 200}, AspectRatio -> 1/GoldenRatio};
td1 = Table[{x, 5 Sin[x] + RandomReal[]}, {x, 1, 10, (10 - 1)/500}];
td2 = {Log[#], #2} & @@@ td1;
f = Nearest[td1 -> Automatic];
g = Nearest[td2 -> Automatic];
DynamicModule[{pt1 = {0, 0}, pt2 = {0, 0}, x1 = First@td1, x2 = First@td2},
Graphics[{Point@td1 , Red, PointSize[Large], Point[x1]}, opts, GridLines -> {{x1[[1]]}, {}}],
"MouseMoved" :> ({x1, x2} = {td1[[#]], td2[[#]]} &@ f[MousePosition["Graphics"], 1])],
Graphics[{Point@td2, Green, PointSize[Large], Point[x2]}, opts ,GridLines -> {{x2[[1]]}, {}}],
"MouseMoved" :> ({x1, x2} = {td1[[#]], td2[[#]]} &@ g[MousePosition["Graphics"], 1])]
I'm only copying the answer here for posterity, as a comment may be overlooked (especially as I plan to accept @Kuba's answer for the time being, as his led me in the right direction). I will delete this answer if @belisarius chooses to move his answer here.
share|improve this answer
Your Answer
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46914
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Drexel dragonThe Math ForumDonate to the Math Forum
Ask Dr. Math - Questions and Answers from our Archives
Working with Multi-Part Ratios
Date: 05/21/2007 at 20:38:06
From: Joshua
Subject: Ratios with three parts
I've been studying for the ACT test and can't seem to remember how to
do ratios with three parts like 2:3:6. I fully understand normal
ratios like 1:4. No need to cover the basics of ratios.
In the three part ones I find it hard to understand how each of the
numbers relates to the other two, though. Using my earlier example,
how does the 2 relate to the 3 and 6? The 3 to the 2 and 6?
If you could please give me a few examples of their uses along with
explanations of the problems I would be much obliged!
- Joshua
Date: 05/29/2007 at 22:29:16
From: Doctor Peterson
Subject: Re: ratios with three parts
Hi, Joshua.
The usual situation with this sort of ratio would involve dividing
something (say, an inheritance) among three people in the ratio 2:3:6.
Imagine taking the whole and dividing it up this way:
| 2 | 3 | 6 |
That is, person A gets 2 parts, B gets 3, and C gets 6 (all the parts
being equal).
How many parts are there in all? 2 + 3 + 6 = 11.
What fraction of the whole does A get? He gets 2 of the 11 parts, or
What amount of a $99,000 inheritance does A get? 2/11 times 99,000 =
You can do the same thing with any number of parts, e.g. 1:2:5:3:6:7.
Just add the parts to get the total number of parts, and use that as
the denominator to find the fraction corresponding to each.
- Doctor Peterson, The Math Forum
Date: 05/31/2007 at 13:22:02
From: Joshua
Subject: Thank you (Ratios with three parts)
Dear Doctor Peterson,
Thank you for your speedy reply to my ratio question! I understood
your example and explanation without any trouble.
- Joshua
Associated Topics:
Middle School Ratio and Proportion
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46915
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Take the 2-minute tour ×
Are there any three dimensional subalgebras of GA(n) where GA(n) is the geometric algebra corresponding to $R^n$? If yes, what about for GA(2)?
Edit: a geometric algebra is a Clifford algebra.
share|improve this question
1 Answer 1
up vote 1 down vote accepted
I see from Wikipedia that "geometric algebra" is another name for a Clifford algebra, which I suppose explains the clifford-algebras tag. Since you are working over the real numbers, you need to specify what the signature of the quadratic form is, as the isomorphism type of the Clifford algebra strongly depends on the signature.
When $n=2$ and you take a quadratic form of Euclidean signature (i.e. a positive-definite symmetric bilinear form), for instance, the Clifford algebra is isomorphic to $M_2(\mathbb{R})$, and there is the subalgebra consisting of all matrices of the form $$ \begin{pmatrix} * & * \\\ 0 & * \end{pmatrix}, $$ or anything conjugate to that.
For forms with other signatures, there are tables written down which list the isomorphism type of the associated Clifford algebras. For instance, there is this Wikipedia page. Also there is a reasonably good explanation of the classification in Chapter 5 of the book Elements of Noncommutative Geometry, by Gracia-Bondia, Varilly, and Figueroa.
In general, you end up with either a matrix algebra or a direct sum of two matrix algebras, with coefficients in $\mathbb{R},\mathbb{C}$, or $\mathbb{H}$. In any of those cases, you should be able to find lots of three-dimensional subalgebras.
If you want a more intrinsic description, it might help to say why you're looking for these things in the first place.
share|improve this answer
Thanks! The motivation comes from looking for 3d analogues of the Mandelbrot set. – antianticamper May 27 '12 at 21:02
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46920
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China’s digital transformation: The Internet’s impact on productivity and growth
Though the Chinese economy’s shift toward the Internet involves some risks, ultimately it supports China’s goal of creating a more sustainable model for economic growth.
Monetizing mobile apps: Striking the right balance
An application programming interface can turn data into new revenue streams.
Japan’s cautious luxury resurgence
Data nuggets: Customer Analytics
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The New York Times
Businesses that start with open source models and then switch to more proprietary offerings raises the question of whether it makes sense to build free things at all.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46924
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Please contact, Laurie Edwards at 406-444-6053.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46926
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Take the 2-minute tour ×
A normal average European car has a diesel motor with less than a 2.0 liter engine which consumes 1 litre of fuel in 18-22 km.
A normal American car has a gasoline (benzin) engine at least a 2.5 liter engine and gets only 10-14 km with 1 liter of fuel.
• European Ford Focus 1.6 TDci 80KW power: turbo diesel engine - 22km/l.
• USA Ford Focus 2.0 Vti gasolin engine - 10km/l and less power than the European twin
Most of European (and Japanese) cars have really low consumption and more power than American cars. European engines are mostly diesel 1.6L with 18-24km/l.
share|improve this question
closed as not constructive by Bob Cross Nov 19 '12 at 20:04
The language in this question is intentionally pejorative. If you would like to ask why diesels have longer range than gas/petrol engines, you need to rewrite this question extensively. Otherwise, this is covered directly by multiple topics in the FAQ: mechanics.stackexchange.com/faq#dontask – Bob Cross Nov 19 '12 at 13:33
1 Answer 1
I would guess your downvotes are from your huge generalisations of European and American cars. There are some high power-to-weight ratio engines in the US, and there are some low ones in Europe. So I could pick two examples that show the opposite.
Also, your assumptions on diesel and petrol are not useful - you cannot generalise the 'average' European car to be a diesel. There are many fleet cars which are diesels, sure, but there are also many which aren't.
Also, I think your sizing may not be indicative. I have only ever owned European and Japanese cars, and the smallest engine I have ever had was a 2.0 litre.
So your question comes across as stating some assumptions, then wondering why they are true - when in reality they aren't as cut and dried as that.
If we go with your generalisations, however, there is a very simple answer: pricing of oil and its products (petrol/gasoline)
In the US, there has not been the same driver to produce highly tuned/highly efficient engines as in other parts of the world, as gasoline has been available and very cheap. So engines can be big and simply machined - efficiency doesn't need to matter in this context.
Also, if we do include size, a larger capacity engine will burn more fuel per cycle, so in general, as size increases, consumption increases. As these engines will also weigh more, and the car carrying it is likely to be bigger you will also lose efficiency through moving a larger mass.
share|improve this answer
there are not generalisations, it is a defacto situation, the most sells cars in europe are medium/small engine cars not bigger than 2.0 litre both diesel and benzin. When I bought a car at USA the minimun that I could find was a 2.5 gasolin engine. – albanx Nov 19 '12 at 12:42
That may be all you could find, but a quick google search shows me cars in the USA with 1.8 and 2.0 litre engines. And certainly, as time goes on, all countries are trying to produce smaller/more efficient engines as oil will run out, but in any case, my answer is still true. – Rory Alsop Nov 19 '12 at 12:52
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/46927
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Take the 2-minute tour ×
I just bough an old (1980s) Nissan Pathfinder.
In the engine I have managed to identify the engine-oil hole, the radiator-water hole and the windshield-washer hole (you can tell I'm a car expert!) which are generally all I need to understand.
But there is a metal tank at the top of the engine about the size of a coke can with an oil type filler cap. In it is a pinkish liquid that looks a lot like hydraulic fluid.
What is this for?, what do I put in it?, and how bad is it if I don't!
share|improve this question
Pictures help... – Iszi May 31 '11 at 2:31
Please add a link to a picture, you don't have the rep to add the picture itself but I will take care of that for you as soon as you post the link. Without a picture or more of a description it will be difficult to get an accurate answer. – Larry May 31 '11 at 14:12
A great resource for figuring out parts on our Nissan vehicles is courtesyparts.com You can select your vehicle and browse through schematics of all the different sections of the car, clicking on the parts to get a name/part number/price/availability/etc for them. For your pathfinder it would be courtesyparts.com/pathfinder-parts-wd21-1987-1995-c-5572.html – ManiacZX Jun 1 '11 at 23:48
3 Answers 3
up vote 4 down vote accepted
Without seeing what you're referring to, I'd have to guess that it's the power steering reservoir, although it's possible that it could also be the brake fluid.
The power steering cap should have a dipstick type wand to check the level. Before putting anything in it, check the owners manual to determine what type of fluid it needs - some systems use power steering fluid, while others use something like ATF.
If it's brake fluid, it would probably be a bad thing if it was pinkish - that might indicate that someone had added improper fluids to the brake reservoir. The cap to the brake reservoir will not usually have a dipstick.
share|improve this answer
Thank you - yes it has a dipstick and so is probably the power steering. – mgb May 31 '11 at 15:33
Agreed on it sounded like the power steering reservoir. You share an engine and many parts under the hood with my 84 300ZX and the only tank under the hood with a dipstick is the power steering. See this diagram for a general depiction of it courtesyparts.com/pathfinder-parts-wd21-1987-1995/… if the cap is on top (doesn't overlap the edges) and has two pipes coming off of it then you have a match. – ManiacZX Jun 1 '11 at 23:43
Also it looks like it should be on the passenger side, mounted near the wheel well (same as mine is). – ManiacZX Jun 1 '11 at 23:52
It is likely a power steering reservoir, and it should be labeled as such. You do not put anything in it, unless it is low. If it is low, and you are hearing whine, check for a leak. Some power steering systems use transmission fluid as their fluid, but it is a completely separate system from the transmission.
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Is it a manual transmission? It could be the hydraulic fluid for clutch, assuming it's a hydraulic clutch and not cable.
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Havelockalso called Bulembutown on the northwest border of Swaziland. Located in the Highveld, it is the site of one of the world’s largest asbestos mines. Operations began in the 1930s, and asbestos was Swaziland’s economic mainstay until the 1950s, when agricultural products began to play an equally important role. The town and mine are dominated by Bulembu (Emlembe), Swaziland’s highest peak (6,109 feet [1,862 metres]). Pop. (19861997) 42,850443.
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Chung Sŭng-Hwaalso spelled Chung Jeong Seung-Hwa ( born Feb. 27, 1926 , Kimch’ŏn, North Kyŏngsang province, Korea [now in South Korea]—died June 12, 2002 , Seoul, S.Kor ) Korean general and army chief of staff who was implicated in the October 1979 assassination of South Korean Pres. Park Chung-Hee.
During the Korean War (1950–53), Chung helped defend Taegu (Daegu) against a North Korean assault. In 1961 he was made a brigadier general, and he built a reputation for honesty and incorruptibility. He became the army chief of staff in February 1979.
Immediately following Park’s death, Chung was the most powerful man in South Korea. As the general in charge of martial law, he imposed a curfew, closed the universities, instituted even stricter censorship than that established under Park, and banned all meetings. It was he who arrested Park’s assassin, Kim Jae-Kyu. On Dec. 12, 1979, Chung was involved in a shootout with a group of military investigators led by Gen. Chun Doo-Hwan, then chief of the army’s security command (and later [1980–88] president of South Korea). Chun arrested Chung on charges that he was complicit in Park’s assassination, and a military court found in March 1980 that Chung had not arrested Kim quickly enough, despite having had the opportunity, and that Chung had had previous knowledge of the assassination plot. The court sentenced Chung to 10 years in prison, but he gained early release. In 1981 he was granted amnesty, but, still officially under suspicion of having had some part in the assassination, he was not reinstated as general.
Chung steadfastly maintained his innocence, asserting that it was the chaos of the events that had prevented him from making an immediate arrest. In 1993 he and several dozen colleagues brought an official complaint against then president Roh Tae-Woo, former president Chun Doo-Hwan, and others on charges that included treason; after . After a yearlong investigation, the government’s chief prosecutor found that the defendants had committed mutiny in their takeover of the military after the Park assassination. Although the prosecutor initially declined to indict the defendants, in 1995 he included these charges with bribery indictments In 1995 these charges were added to bribery indictments that had been brought against Chun and Roh; the following year both were convicted on all counts, although they later received presidential pardons. A Seoul district court subsequently reviewed Chung’s 1980 conviction and exonerated him in 1997, restoring his status as a general, his retirement allowance, and his military pension. His autobiography was published posthumously in 2002.
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Kierkegaard, Sørenin full SØren Søren Aabye Kierkegaard ( born May 5, 1813 , Copenhagen, Den.—died Nov. 11, 1855 , Copenhagen ) Danish religious philosopher, theologian, and critic of rationalism, regarded as the founder of existentialist philosophy. He is famous for his critique of systematic rational philosophy, particularly Hegelianism, on the grounds that actual life cannot be contained within an abstract conceptual system. With this stance, he intended to clear the ground for an adequate consideration of faith and, accordingly, of religion—specifically Christianity.
Early life.
Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, who had a great influence on his character, had begun his own career as a poor tenant-farmers’ helper in the desolate moorlands of western Jutland. One day, desperate with rage at divine indifference to his sufferings and privations, he stood on a hill and solemnly cursed God. Soon after, he was sent to Copenhagen, to an uncle who was a dealer in woolen articles, and from that moment he prospered, ending his life as a rich man—the owner of five houses in the capital that all miraculously escaped destruction during the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807. Moreover, having placed his entire fortune in gilt-edged securities, he was among the few who escaped ruin in the state bankruptcy of 1813, the year Søren was born. Thus, at his death in 1838, the old man left Kierkegaard and his brother a considerable fortune that enabled Kierkegaard to spend his life writing, unhampered by financial considerations.
Kierkegaard’s psychological heritage was, however, far more important than his financial legacy in its consequences for his development as a man and a writer. His father combined a strict adherence to orthodox Lutheranism with a fondness for the logic of formal argument, and yet the austere religious and intellectual training he devised for the most brilliant of his sons was enlivened by a captivating imagination. Kierkegaard never shook off the influence of his father’s overpowering personality nor of the suppressed melancholy that lay so disquietingly below the surface of his father’s piety. At an early age, Kierkegaard became aware of the heavy burden of guilt that weighed his father down and later learned, in circumstances the traumatic effect of which he designated as “The Great Earthquake,” that the reasons for it lay in the boyhood curse his father had hurled at God. Appalled by the knowledge of his father’s sin, he threw himself into a life of dissipation yet remained haunted by the elder Kierkegaard’s conviction that God’s curse lay on the family, a conviction that the deaths of Kierkegaard’s mother and five of his six brothers and sisters seemed to confirm. He went to the University of Copenhagen to study theology but neglected this in favour of philosophy.
The death of his father in 1838 had a sobering effect on Kierkegaard. He resumed his theological studies and two years later took his master’s degree. There was, however, another reason for his renewal of purpose; he had fallen in love with a young girl, Regine Olsen, and become engaged to her. Almost immediately, however, he began to think he had made a mistake, though he still felt himself deeply in love. It appears that he became increasingly aware of the gulf between the young, innocent, inexperienced girl and himself, weighed down as he was by a feeling of guilt and by his unusual consciousness of the complexities of the human mind, which he would never be able to communicate to Regine. As he wrote in his diary: “I was a thousand years too old for her.”
Accordingly, he decided to break the engagement. But Regine was in love with him, and the more he tried to persuade her to let him go, the more she clung to him. In the end he had to break off their relationship himself, but, in order to preserve her reputation, he staged an elaborate show of caddishness so as to make it appear that it was she who had rejected him. This point established, he fled to Berlin, where he lived for half a year. This little romance, novelettish though it may seem in bare outline, had a profound effect on Kierkegaard and furnished him with material for reflection and comment in several of his books.
First philosophical works.
He returned from Berlin with an enormous manuscript in his trunk, Enten-Eller: et-livs fragment (1843; Either/Or: A Fragment of Life). Nearly all Kierkegaard’s books were published pseudonymously, with fictitious names suited to the particular work, a peculiarity intended to persuade the reader that the ideas he proposed were not to be taken as the pronouncements of an authority but presented as various modes of life for the reader’s judgment and, especially, choice. This is, in fact, the meaning of the title Either/Or, which offers the alternatives of an aesthetic or an ethical (or ethico-religious) view of life. Kierkegaard’s belief in the necessity—for each individual—of making a fully conscious, responsible choice among the alternatives that life offers has become fundamental in all existential writing and thought.
Kierkegaard’s unhappy experience with Regine obviously plays a great role in Either/Or, and, indeed, the final part of the first volume recalls his own love story in many details recorded in his diary. The book can be seen as a secret communication to Regine, intended to explain and justify his attitude to her. Such secret communications run through all his works, and Kierkegaard returns again and again to the question of his responsibility for what he did. Either/Or is a work of high artistic value; in addition, it provides an important illustration of the current literary trend when Romanticism was developing some of its later preoccupations—social realism and individual psychology—and was becoming more pessimistic and morbid in its outlook. These elements also occur in Kierkegaard’s subsequent books, which appeared in rapid succession.
A life of collisions
Kierkegaard’s life has been called uneventful, but it was hardly that. The story of his life is a drama in four overlapping acts, each with its own distinctive crisis or “collision,” as he often referred to these events. His father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, was a prosperous but retired businessman who devoted the later years of his life to raising his children. He was a man of deep but gloomy and guilt-ridden piety who was haunted by the memory of having once cursed God as a boy and of having begun his family by getting his maid pregnant—and then marrying her—shortly after the death of his first wife. His domineering presence stimulated young Søren’s imaginative and intellectual gifts but, as his son would later bear witness, made a normal childhood impossible.
Kierkegaard enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1830 but did not complete his studies until 1841. Like the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), whose system he would severely criticize, Kierkegaard entered university in order to study theology but devoted himself to literature and philosophy instead. His thinking during this period is revealed in an 1835 journal entry, which is often cited as containing the germ of his later work:
The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.…What is truth but to live for an idea?
While a student at the university, Kierkegaard explored the literary figures of Don Juan, the wandering Jew, and especially Faust, looking for existential models for his own life.
The first collision occurred during his student days: he became estranged both from his father and from the faith in which he had been brought up, and he moved out of the family home. But by 1838, just before his father’s death, he was reconciled both to his father and to the Christian faith; the latter became the idea for which he would live and die. Despite his reference to an experience of “indescribable joy” in May of that year, it should not be assumed that his conversion was instantaneous. On the one hand, he often seemed to be moving away from the faith of his father and back toward it at virtually the same time. On the other hand, he often stressed that conversion is a long process. He saw becoming a Christian as the task of a lifetime. Accordingly, he decided to publish Sygdommen til døden (1849; Sickness unto Death) under a pseudonym (as he had done with several previous works), lest anyone think he lived up to the ideal he there presented; likewise, the pseudonymous authors of his other works often denied that they possessed the faith they talked about. Although in the last year of his life he wrote, “I dare not call myself a Christian,” throughout his career it was Christianity that he sought to defend by rescuing it from cultural captivity, and it was a Christian person that he sought to become.
After his father’s death, Kierkegaard became serious about finishing his formal education. He took his doctoral exams and wrote his dissertation, Om begrebet ironi med stadigt hensyn til Socrates (On the Concept of Irony, with Constant Reference to Socrates), completing it in June of 1841 and defending it in September. In between, he broke his engagement with Regine Olsen, thus initiating the second major collision of his life. They had met in 1837, when she was only 15 years old, and had become engaged in 1840. Now, less than one year later, he returned her ring, saying he “could not make a girl happy.” The reasons for this action are far from clear.
What is clear is that this relationship haunted him for the rest of his life. Saying in his will that he considered engagement as binding as marriage, he left all his possessions to Regine (she did not accept them, however, since she had married long before Kierkegaard died). It is also clear that this crisis triggered a period of astonishing literary productivity, during which Kierkegaard published many of the works for which he is best known: Enten-Eller: et livs-fragment (1843; Either/Or: A Fragment of Life), Gjentagelsen (1843; Repetition), Frygt og baeven (1843; Fear and Trembling) and Gjentagelsen (1843; Repetition), both of which deal with faith and with the idea of sacrifice. The starting point of Fear and Trembling is the story of Abraham and Isaac. Once more Kierkegaard examines the implications of his break with Regine, a sacrifice, like that of Abraham, performed in obedience to a higher duty, and, like Abraham’s readiness to slay his son, an act that contravenes the laws of ethics. The problem is whether situations can be imagined in which ethics can be suspended by a higher authority—i.e., by God, when God himself must be considered the essence of everything ethical. This problem—which Kierkegaard calls “the teleological suspension of the ethical”—led him to the conclusion that faith is essentially paradoxical. Repetition is associated with Fear and Trembling since it provides a psychological demonstration of these ideas.
In 1844 Philosophiske smuler (Philosophical Fragments) and Begrebet angest (The Concept of Dread) appeared. The former is an attempt to present Christianity as it should be if it is to have any meaning. It aims particularly at presenting Christianity as a form of existence that presupposes free will, without which everything becomes meaningless. This was an attack on the prevailing Hegelian philosophy, which employed grandiose historical perspectives in which the individual was sucked up as tracelessly as a grain of dust. In fact, by this time Kierkegaard was preparing for a showdown with Hegelian philosophy, but, before he did so, he felt the need to extend his ideas concerning the philosophy of freedom into the sphere of psychology. The result was The Concept of Dread. Extraordinarily penetrating, it is perhaps the first work of depth psychology in existence.
In this work Kierkegaard makes a clear distinction between what he calls angst, or dread—a feeling that has no definite object—and the fear and terror that derive from an objective threat (e.g., a wild animal, a gunman). How intimately Kierkegaard’s ideas were intertwined with his life can be seen from an extract from his diary:
But if I had explained things to her [Regine], I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my relationship with my father, his melancholy, the eternal night that broods over me, my despair, lusts, and excesses, which perhaps in God’s eyes were not so heinous; for it was dread which caused me to go astray.
In the last part of the sentence we have the starting point and key to The Concept of Dread. Kierkegaard perceived that freedom cannot be proved philosophically because any proof would imply a logical necessity, which is the opposite of freedom. The discussion of freedom does not belong to the sphere of logic but to that of psychology, which cannot discuss freedom itself but can describe the state of mind that makes freedom possible. This state of mind is dread. Through experiencing dread, one leaps from innocence to sin, and, if the challenge of Christianity is accepted, from guilt to faith. Dread is thus sin’s prelude, not its sequel, as one would think at first.
In 1845 Kierkegaard had a new book ready, Stadier paa livets vei (Stages on Life’s Way), a voluminous work and perhaps his most mature artistic achievement. In a way, it reiterates the idea of Either/Or, as the two titles indicate, but there is a vital difference—now the religious stage, or sphere, is distinguished not merely from the aesthetic but also from the ethical. This development was, in fact, a logical consequence of the ideas embodied in all his former works, which aimed at exposing the inadequacy of human ethics as a way of life. Accordingly, while in Either/Or there were only two spheres, the aesthetic and the ethical, in Stages on Life’s Way there are three. In the third and last section of the book, “Guilty?/Not Guilty?,” Kierkegaard dissects the story of his broken engagement from a new angle. On the aesthetic plane, a love tragedy signifies that two lovers cannot be united because an extraneous power prevents them; the story of Romeo and Juliet provides a classic example. On the ethical plane, the obstacle consists in their belonging to different spheres of existence, one interpreting love aesthetically, the other ethically. This obstacle can only be overcome by one elevating the other to his own sphere of existence, a thing that rarely happens. On the religious plane, however, the obstacle lies in the fact that one of the two is constitutionally different, for he conceives his destiny to be one of suffering, and only the acceptance of suffering will enable him to achieve detachment from the here and now and so prepare him for eternity. The aesthetic hero has his opposition outside himself; the religious finds it within. The aesthetic hero becomes great by conquering; the religious hero by suffering. But suffering in the service of “the idea” is precisely the realization of the idea in the religious sphere of existence. This was the argument that Kierkegaard had not himself conceived when he wrote Either/Or and for whose sake he had to write the book over again.
It is an argument that evinces an increasingly sombre outlook on life and on humanity as a whole. A number of unpleasant experiences had contributed to his changed mood. Regine had married and thus crushed a romantic illusion about their remaining in a sort of divine marriage, raised above the terrestrial level, only waiting for God to make the impossible possible. This, in fact, was the idea underlying both Fear and Trembling and Repetition. Now it had all come to nothing, and the disillusionment emerges clearly in the first part of Stages on Life’s Way, called “In Vino Veritas” or “The Banquet,” which is modeled on Plato’s Symposium and deals with the same subjects—love, eros, sex, woman—and reflects a biting sarcasm and scathing contempt for women in general.
Attack on Hegelianism.
Kierkegaard also had other disappointments. He quarreled with literary critics who did not see the purport of his writings or, even worse, did see it and still tried to make him a laughingstock. From these skirmishes, he emerged victorious but deeply hurt and filled with an enormous disgust for mankind. This bitterness manifests itself in most of what he wrote afterward. But his next book was an exception. It bears the impressive title “Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition, an Existential Contribution. By Johannes Climacus. Published by S. Kierkegaard.” (1846).
It is typical of Kierkegaard’s irony that his most philosophically important work figures as a postscript to a book only about a fifth its size. And by calling his book “an existential contribution,” Kierkegaard gives the reader a strong hint of his own philosophical position; his aim is to settle accounts with the predominant philosophy of his time, the Hegelian philosophy, which had swept Europe. Kierkegaard attacked Hegel’s attempt to systematize the whole of existence, declaring that a system of existence cannot be constructed, since existence is incomplete and constantly developing. He further drew attention to the logical error that arose from Hegel’s attempt to introduce mobility into logic and so revealed the confusion arising from the mixing of categories. Hegel thought he had created the objective theory of knowledge; Kierkegaard put forward the thesis that subjectivity is truth or, to quote his own definition, “the objective uncertainty maintained in the most passionate spirit of dedication is truth, the highest truth for one existing.”
These tenets, which have become the foundation stones of modern existentialism, have not only punctured “the system,” as Hegel called his own philosophy, but have made all philosophical systems precarious. The system builder will never understand that it is not possible to understand existence intellectually. Hegel equated existence and thought and thus left no room for faith. Accordingly, Christianity appeared as a mere paragraph in the system, an example of the general, and that, according to Kierkegaard, was the scandal. Kierkegaard did not feel himself called upon to persuade people to become Christians, but he certainly did feel an obligation to let his contemporaries understand what Christianity really is. And more than that, he had a feeling that God had designated him for a special task and that he should give up writing altogether.
Showdown with the church.
Kierkegaard could not abstain from writing, and now the “mission” was beginning to crystallize. God had appointed him, he thought, to reveal to his contemporaries the true nature of Christianity and to expose the scandal of the established Church of Denmark, the clergy of which had betrayed their religion by making themselves comfortable in secular society, in short, had become civil servants instead of followers of Christ.
It is clear that Kierkegaard was moving in the direction of even greater austerity in his religious thinking, and in the works that he now produced, particularly Kjerlighedens gjerninger (1847; Works of Love), Christelige taler (1848; Christian Discourses), Sygdommen til døden (1849; The Sickness unto Death), and Indøvelse i Christendom (1850; Training in Christianity), he depicted a Christianity sterner and more uncompromising than in any of his other writings. The last book was also a disguised attack on the heads of the Danish church. By 1855 he felt convinced that God had authorized him to attack the established church and its clergy ruthlessly, and he began at once with a great number of small books and pamphlets and even a periodical called The Moment, to the 10 numbers of which he was the sole contributor.
The strain of this intensely conducted campaign made grave inroads on his health. After nearly two years of it he collapsed and was brought to a hospital, where he died a month later. By that time he had exhausted his fortune. The few things of value he possessed he left to Regine, the woman he had loved and who by that time lived in the Danish West Indies, married to the governor.
Influence on modern existentialism.
It was not until several decades after Kierkegaard’s death that the philosophical and artistic value of his work began to be fully appreciated. In 1877 the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes published the first book ever written about Kierkegaard and gave a brilliant analysis of his thought and life. In Germany interest in Kierkegaard became widespread, and everything of his was translated before World War I. It was not, however, until the years between the two world wars that knowledge of his work became widespread. The theology of the Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth also helped to escalate existentialist thinking, as did the philosophical thought of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger and the Jewish religious thinker Martin Buber.
The crucial understanding of Kierkegaard’s writing came in the post-World War II years, which seem to have created a more penetrating realization of such states as angst and suffering. Now the interest in Kierkegaard became universal, and by a century after his lonely death, Kierkegaard’s time had finally come.
Biographical and critical works include Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard (1938, reissued in 2 vol., 1970), a comprehensive study of his life and thought; Johannes Hohlenberg, Sören Kierkegaard (1954, reprinted 1978), a reliable account; Peter P. Rohde, Søren Kierkegaard: An Introduction to His Life and Philosophy (1963), for the general reader; Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought (1971, reprinted 1974), a standard work; James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard (1953, reissued with a new preface and bibliography, 1983), a good introduction to Kierkegaard’s philosophy;
, Philosophiske smuler (1844; Philosophical Fragments), Begrebet angest (1844; The Concept of Anxiety), Stadier paa livets vei (1845; Stages on Life’s Way), and Afsluttende uvidenskabelig efterskrift (1846; Concluding Unscientific Postscript). Even after acknowledging that he had written these works, however, Kierkegaard insisted that they continue to be attributed to their pseudonymous authors. The pseudonyms are best understood by analogy with characters in a novel, created by the actual author to embody distinctive worldviews; it is left to the reader to decide what to make of each one.
Kierkegaard had intended to cease writing at this point and become a country pastor. But it was not to be. The first period of literary activity (1843–46) was followed by a second (1847–55). Instead of retiring, he picked a quarrel with The Corsair, a newspaper known for its liberal political sympathies but more famous as a scandal sheet that used satire to skewer the establishment. Although The Corsair had praised some of the pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard did not wish to see his own project confused with that of the newspaper, so he turned his satirical skills against it. The Corsair took the bait, and for months Kierkegaard was the target of raucous ridicule, the greatest butt of jokes in Copenhagen. Better at giving than at taking, he was deeply wounded, and indeed he never fully recovered. If the broken engagement was the cloud that hung over the first literary period, the Corsair debacle was the ghost that haunted the second.
The final collision was with the Church of Denmark (Lutheran) and its leaders, the bishops J.P. Mynster and H.L. Martensen. In his journals Kierkegaard called Sickness unto Death an “attack upon Christendom.” In a similar vein, Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Indøvelse i Christendom (1850; Training in Christianity), declared the need “again to introduce Christianity into Christendom.” This theme became more and more explicit as Kierkegaard resumed his writing career. As long as Mynster, the family pastor from his childhood, was alive, Kierkegaard refrained from personal attacks. But at Mynster’s funeral Martensen, who had succeeded to the leadership of the Danish church, eulogized his predecessor as a “witness to the truth,” linking him to the martyrs of the faith; after this Kierkegaard could no longer keep silent. In December 1854 he began to publish dozens of short, shrill pieces insisting that what passed as Christianity in Denmark was counterfeit and making clear that Mynster and Martensen were responsible for reducing the religion to “leniency.” The last of these pieces was found on Kierkegaard’s desk after he collapsed in the street in October 1855.
Stages on life’s way
In the pseudonymous works of Kierkegaard’s first literary period, three stages on life’s way, or three spheres of existence, are distinguished: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. These are not developmental stages in a biological or psychological sense—a natural and all-but-automatic unfolding according to some DNA of the spirit. It is all too possible to live one’s life below the ethical and the religious levels. But there is a directionality in the sense that the earlier stages have the later ones as their telos, or goal, while the later stages both presuppose and include the earlier ones as important but subordinate moments. Kierkegaard’s writings taken as a whole, whether pseudonymous or not, focus overwhelmingly on the religious stage, giving credence to his own retrospective judgment that the entire corpus is ultimately about the religious life.
The personages Kierkegaard creates to embody the aesthetic stage have two preoccupations, the arts and the erotic. It is tempting to see the aesthete as a cultured hedonist—a fairly obvious offshoot of the Romantic movement—who accepts the distinction made by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) between artistic and sensuous pleasure while combining them in a single existential project. But in one of the essays of Either/Or, the aesthete sees boredom as the root of all evil and is preoccupied with making life interesting; and the famous seducer in the same volume seems less concerned with sex than with the fascinating spectacle of watching himself seduce his victim.
This clue helps one both to define the aesthetic stage and to see what a stage or sphere of existence in general is. What the various goals of aesthetic existence have in common is that they have nothing to do with right and wrong. The criteria by which the good life is defined are premoral, unconcerned with good and evil. A stage or sphere of existence, then, is a fundamental project, a form of life, a mode of being-in-the-world that defines success in life by its own distinctive criteria.
What might motivate an aesthete to choose the ethical? The mere presence of guardians of the good, who are willing to scold the aesthete’s amorality as immorality, is too external, too easily dismissed as bourgeois phariseeism. Judge William, the representative of the ethical in Either/Or, tries another tack. The aesthete, he argues, fails to become a self at all but becomes, by choice, what David Hume (1711–76) said the self inevitably is: a bundle of events without an inner core to constitute identity or cohesion over time. Moreover, the aesthete fails to see that in the ethical the aesthetic is not abolished but ennobled. Judge William presents marriage as the scene of this transformation, in which, through commitment, the self acquires temporal continuity and, following Hegel, the sensuous is raised to the level of spirit.
In Fear and Trembling this ethical stage is teleologically suspended in the religious, which means not that it is abolished but that it is reduced to relative validity in relation to something absolute, which is its proper goal. For Plato (c. 428–c. 348 BC) and Kant, ethics is a matter of pure reason gaining pure insight into eternal truth. But Hegel argued that human beings are too deeply embedded in history to attain such purity and that their grasp of the right and the good is mediated by the laws and customs of the societies in which they live. It is this Hegelian ethics of socialization that preoccupies Judge William and that gets relativized in Fear and Trembling. By retelling the story of Abraham, it presents the religious stage as the choice not to allow the laws and customs of one’s people to be one’s highest norm—not to equate socialization with sanctity and salvation but to be open to a voice of greater authority, namely God.
This higher normativity does not arise from reason, as Plato and Kant would have it, but is, from reason’s point of view, absurd, paradoxical, even mad. These labels do not bother Kierkegaard, because he interprets reason as human, all too human—as the rationale of the current social order, which knows nothing higher than itself. In the language of Karl Marx (1818–83), what presents itself as reason is in fact ideology. Kierkegaard interprets Abrahamic faith as agreeing with Hegel and Marx about this historical finitude of reason, and, precisely because of this, he insists that the voice of God is an authority that is higher than the rationality of either the current establishment (Hegel) or the revolution (Marx). Against both Hegel and Marx, Kierkegaard holds that history is not the scene in which human reason overcomes this finitude and becomes the ultimate standard of truth.
Three dimensions of the religious life
The simple scheme of the three stages becomes more complex in Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The fundamental distinction is now between objectivity and subjectivity, with two examples of each. Objectivity is the name for occupying oneself with what is “out there” in such a way as to exempt oneself from the strenuous inward task of becoming a self in the ethico-religious sense. One example is the aesthetic posture, presented in earlier work; the other is the project of speculative philosophy, to which this text devotes major attention. The target is Hegelian philosophy, which takes the achievement of comprehensive, absolute knowledge to be the highest human task.
But, it is argued in the first place, speculative philosophy cannot even keep its own promises. It purports to begin without presuppositions and to conclude with a final, all-encompassing system. The very idea that thought should be without presuppositions, however, is itself a presupposition, and thus the system is never quite able to complete itself. The goal of objective knowledge is legitimate, but it can never be more than approximately accomplished. Reality may well be a system for God, but not for any human knower.
Secondly, even if speculative philosophy could deliver what it promises, it would have forgotten that the highest human task is not cognition but rather the personal appropriation or embodiment of whatever insights into the good and the right one is able to achieve. Becoming a self in this way is called existence, inwardness, and subjectivity. This use of existence as a technical term for the finite, human self that is always in the process of becoming can be seen as the birth of existentialism.
The two modes of subjectivity are not, as one might expect, the ethical and the religious stages. One does not become a self simply through successful socialization. Besides, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ethics is treated as already recontextualized in a religious rather than merely a social context. So the two modes of ethico-religious subjectivity are “Religiousness A” and “Religiousness B.” The fact that the latter turns out to be Christianity should not lead one to think that the former is some other world religion. It is rather the generic necessary condition for any particular religion and, as such, is available apart from dependence on the revelation to be found in any particular religion’s sacred scriptures. Socrates (c. 470–399 BC), here distinguished from the speculative Plato, is the paradigm of Religiousness A.
Religiousness A is defined not in terms of beliefs about what is “out there,” such as God or the soul, but rather in terms of the complex tasks of becoming a self, summarized as the task of being simultaneously related “relatively” to relative goods and “absolutely” to the absolute good. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms refer to the absolute good variously as the Idea, the Eternal, or God. As the generic form of the religious stage, Religiousness A abstracts from the “what” of belief to focus on the “how” that must accompany any “what.” The Hegelian system purports to be the highest form of the highest religion, namely Christianity, but in fact, by virtue of its merely objective “how,” it belongs to a completely different genus. It could not be the highest form of Christianity, no more than a dog could be the world’s prettiest cat.
There is something paradoxical about Religiousness A. Socratic ignorance—the claim of Socrates that he is the wisest of men because, while others think that they know, he knows that he does not—reflects the realization that the relation of the existing, and thus temporal, individual to the eternal does not fit neatly into human conceptual frameworks. But Christianity, as Religiousness B, is more radically paradoxical, for the eternal itself has become paradoxical as the insertion of God in time. In this way the task of relating absolutely to the absolute becomes even more strenuous, for human reason is overwhelmed, even offended, by the claim that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript there is an echo of Kant’s admission, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith”—though Kantian faith has a very different “what.”
Some writings of Kierkegaard’s second literary period extend the analyses of the first. For example, the two halves of Sickness unto Death can be read as reprising Religiousness A and B, respectively, in a different voice. But several texts, most notably Kjerlighedens gjerninger (1847; Works of Love), Training in Christianity, Til selvprøvelse (1851; For Self-Examination), and Dømmer selv! (1851; Judge for Yourselves!), go beyond Religiousness B to what might be called “Religiousness C.” The focus is still on Christianity, but now Christ is no longer just the paradox to be believed but also the paradigm or prototype to be imitated.
These works present the second, specifically Christian, ethics that had been promised as far back as The Concept of Anxiety. They go beyond Hegelian ethics, which only asks one to conform to the laws and customs of one’s society. They also go beyond the religion of hidden inwardness, whether A or B, in which the relation between God and the soul takes place out of public view. They are Kierkegaard’s answer to the charge that religion according to his view is so personal and so private as to be socially irresponsible. Faith, the inward God-relation, must show itself outwardly in works of love.
The first half of Works of Love is a sustained reflection on the biblical commandment “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Matthew 22:36). This commanded love is contrasted with erotic love and friendship. Through its poets, society celebrates these two forms of love, but only God dares to command the love of neighbours. The celebrated loves are spontaneous: they come naturally, by inclination, and thus not by duty. Children do not have to be taught to seek friends; nor, at puberty, do they need to be commanded to fall in love. The celebrated loves are also preferential: one is drawn to this person but not to that one as friend or lover; something in the other is attractive or would satisfy one’s desire if the relation could be established. Because they are spontaneous and preferential, Kierkegaard calls the celebrated loves forms of “self-love.”
This is not to say that every friend or lover is selfish. But, by their exclusionary nature, such relations are the self-love of the “We,” even when the “I” is not selfish in the relation. Here one sees the political ramifications of commanded love, for an ethics that restricts benevolence to one’s own family, tribe, nation, race, or class expresses only the self-love of the We.
By contrast, commanded love is not spontaneous, and it needs to be commanded precisely because it is not preferential. Another person need not be attractive or belong to the same We to be one’s neighbour, whom one is to love. Even one’s enemy can be one’s neighbour, which is a reason why society never dares to require that people love their neighbours as they do themselves. For the Christian, this command comes from Christ, who is himself its embodiment to be imitated.
One could hardly expect the literary and philosophical elite to focus on the strenuousness of faith as a personal relation to God unsupported by reason, or on the strenuousness of love as responsibility to and for one’s neighbour unsupported by society’s ethos. That task was the responsibility of the church—a responsibility that, in Kierkegaard’s view, the church had spectacularly failed to fulfill. As these themes came more clearly into focus in his writings, the attack upon Christendom with which his life ended became inevitable.
Kierkegaard says that his writings as a whole are religious. They are best seen as belonging to the prophetic traditions, in which religious beliefs become the basis for a critique of the religious communities that profess them. The 20th-century theologies that were influenced by Kierkegaard go beyond the tasks of metaphysical affirmation and ethical instruction to a critique of complacent piety. In existential philosophies—which are often less overtly theological and sometimes entirely secular—this element of critique is retained but is directed against forms of personal and social life that do not take the tasks of human existence seriously enough. Thus, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) complains that his secular contemporaries do not take the death of God seriously enough, just as Kierkegaard complains that his Christian contemporaries do not take God seriously enough. Likewise, the German existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) describes how people make life too easy for themselves by thinking and doing just what “they” think and do. And Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), the leading representative of atheistic existentialism in France, calls attention to the ways in which people indulge in self-deceiving “bad faith” in order to think more highly of themselves than the facts warrant.
Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard (2001), is a comprehensive intellectual biography. Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (1990), is a detailed account of the historical and cultural context of Kierkegaard’s work. Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, 2 vol. (1962), is a comprehensive and illuminating, if somewhat hagiographic, intellectual biography.
An overview of the pseudonymous writings from both the first and second periods is Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (1975). An overview of the second period is John W. Elrod, Kierkegaard and Christendom (1981), a study of the later religious works; Niels Thulstrupp, Commentary on Kierkegaard’s “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” (1984), a helpful explication of this important text; Joseph H. Smith .
Analyses of particular texts are presented in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self (1981), a multiauthor collection of essays, approaching Kierkegaard’s work from literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytic viewpoints; Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (1969), the first work to underline the existentialist point of view; Eduard Geismar, Lectures on the Religious Thought of Søren Kierkegaard (1937), a clear account of Kierkegaard’s thought by one of his leading students; Adi Shmüeli, Kierkegaard and Consciousness (1971), a penetrating account of Kierkegaard’s thought; and Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (1980), a clear comparison. See also François H. Lapointe, Sören Kierkegaard and His Critics: An International Bibliography of Criticism (1980) Fear and Trembling and Repetition (1993); C. Stephen Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments (1992); Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1996); M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (2001); and Alastair Hannay and Gordon Daniel Marino (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (1998).
Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (1971); and Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics (1994), discuss the significance of the fact that Kierkegaard often wrote more as a poet than as a philosopher or theologian.
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The new vacuum cleaner from AEG is the upright A8602AZ Nimble Bagless Vacuum Cleaner / The unique swivelling action makes getting around and under furniture a breeze, while the LED headlight ensures there're no dark corners for dust to hide in / Featuring 276 watts of air power, the A8602AZ Nimble Bagless Vacuum Cleaner packs a pretty hefty punch for its low weight, while the HEPA filtration system prevents pollen, dust mites and allergens being released back into the room / Useful features include a 10 metre hose and a long 4 metre telescopic hose, which can be used with the 3 in 1 "Versatool" attachment to clean hard to reach surfaces and upholstery / Finally the large 2 litre capacity dust bin allows you to suck up a lot of dust before emptying / The AEG A8602AZ Nimble Bagless Vacuum Cleaner is a lightweight and easy-to-use vacuum that makes short work of keeping your floor surfaces spick and span! Characteristics Type Bagless vacuum cleaner Power (Watts) 1300 Appropriate power (Watts) 276 Watts Bag volume or reservoir (litre) 2 litres Filter type Washable HEPA filter Ergonomy Telescopic tube Yes Cable length 10 Others Colours Grey Included accessories 3 in 1 ''''Versatool'''' Weight (Kg) 8.1kg / Short name: AEG A8605AZ
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That's What They Say
8:05 am
Sun March 23, 2014
When proverbial phrases aren’t from proverbs
There are not enough proverbs in the world for everything that is proverbial.
On this week’s edition of That’s What They Say, host Rina Miller and University of Michigan Professor of English Anne Curzan examine the overuse of the word proverbial.
The term proverbial first appears in the English language in 1475. At this time, a proverbial saying is a proverb itself. However, by the late 16th century, proverbial is used to describe sayings that are well-known, or merely similar to proverbs.
Nowadays, this usage continues. Curzan looked in the Corpus of Contemporary American English to find some examples.
“The proverbial calm before the storm,” “the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back,” “clean as the proverbial whistle” and “the proverbial icing on the cake,” are all ways proverbial is used today. In these examples, proverbial refers to connections with idioms, not proverbs.
Why are we using proverbial as a synonym for idiomatic? “As a speaker or a writer, it shows that you are self-aware,” Curzan reasons. “You are aware that you are using something that is perhaps a cliché, but you’re going to use it anyway.”
Perhaps proverbial is confused with idiomatic because there is a fine line between idioms and proverbs. Proverbs are short expressions of sentiments we take to be truths or lessons, whereas idioms are fixed expressions that do not need to include wisdom.
What do you think? Is the term proverbial chopped liver? Let us know by writing on our Facebook wall or commenting on our website.
-Clare Toeniskoetter, Michigan Radio Newsroom
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For most non-professionals, a translation seems to be a simple enough process of taking words from one language and restituting them in another language with the necessary grammatical adjustments.
Though this covers the general idea of what a translation entails, it is woefully inadequate when referring to legal translations, as each country has its own legal system, with its own particularities.
Without entering into a detailed study of the intricacies of any legal entity, a glance at a sample of translation problems arising simply from the official institutions of two different countries will illustrate the difficulty of legal translations. Two different legal entities will have either:
1. the same institution, governed in the same way. This occurrence is extremely rare, if not non-existent;
2. the same institution, governed differently (even if only slightly);
3. an institution present in one legal system but extinct in the other;
4. an institution present in one legal system but absent in the other.
The first case poses virtually no problem, the legal translator needs only to check the translation of the statute, ruling or other used in the target country and ensure that they match.
A simple example of the second point is the locution "House of Representatives". Intuitively, everyone thinks he knows the meaning of the word. However, depending on the country, it refers to either a unicameral legislature or to the lower chamber of a bicameral legislature. Or, as is the case in Israel, it has a different name altogether, the Knesset, that has it's own specific rules. The legal translator has to ensure that the translation of the term matches the reality in the target country.
The third case is best exemplified by the differences between former and existing monarchies. Though in these monarchies, terms like "Royal Edicts" still appear, the translation of the legal implications of such a term in non-monarchic governmental systems implies that the legal translators fully understands both.
The fourth and last point is best illustrated by the differences between countries where separation between State and religion is fully or partly implemented or is absent altogether. This is particularly important in all that relates to family law, such as marriage, divorce and inheritance, where religious courts are particularly important in countries where religious authorities are traditionally very involved.
These are just some very basic examples of the difficulties encountered by a legal translator in the course of his work. Despite President Barak Obama's recommendation to use automated translations extensively, until the advent of automated lawyer's office, it is unlikely that machines will perform legal translations.
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Miller Center
American President
A Reference Resource
Foreign Affairs
In the realm of foreign affairs, James Monroe sought to improve the country's international reputation and assert its independence. By virtue of his solid working relationship with Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the two men successfully pursued an aggressive foreign policy, especially with regard to European intervention in the Americas.
In its early days, the Monroe administration wanted to improve relations with Britain. Toward that end, it negotiated two important accords with Britain that resolved border disputes held over from the War of 1812. The Rush-Bagot Treaty of 1817, named after acting Secretary of State Richard Rush and Charles Bagot, the British minister, demilitarized the Great Lakes, limiting each country to one 100-ton vessel armed with a single 18-pound cannon on Lake Chaplain and Lake Ontario. The Convention of 1818 fixed the present U.S.-Canadian border from Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains at the 49th parallel. The accords also established a joint U.S.-British occupation of Oregon for the next ten years.
Spanish Florida
For years, southern plantation owners and white farmers in Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina had lost runaway slaves to the Florida swamps. Seminole and Creek Indians offered refuge to these slaves and led raids against white settlers in the border regions. The U.S. government could do little about the problem because the swamps lay deep within Spanish Florida. If the United States moved decisively against the Seminoles, it would risk war with Spain. Although the United States had tried to convince Spain to cede the territory on various occasions (including during Monroe's stint as special envoy to Spain in 1805), its efforts had failed.
With the end of the War of 1812, the U.S. government turned its attention to the raids. President Monroe sent General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, to the Florida border in 1818 to stop the incursions. Liberally interpreting his vague instructions, Jackson's troops invaded Florida, captured a Spanish fort at St. Marks, took control of Pensacola, and deposed the Spanish governor. He also executed two British citizens whom he accused of having incited the Seminoles to raid American settlements.
The invasion of Florida caused quite a stir in Washington, D.C. Although Jackson said he had acted within the bounds of his instructions, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun disagreed and urged Monroe to reprimand Jackson for acting without specific authority. In addition, foreign diplomats and some congressmen demanded that Jackson be repudiated and punished for his unauthorized invasion. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams came to Jackson's defense, stating that Jackson's measures were, in fact, authorized as part of his orders to end the Indian raids. Monroe ultimately agreed with Adams.
To the administration, the entire affair illustrated the lack of control Spain had over the region. Secretary of State Adams thought that he could use the occasion to pressure Spain to sell all of Florida to the United States. Preoccupied with revolts throughout its Latin American empire, Spain understood that the United States could seize the territory at will. Adams convinced Spain to sell Florida to the United States and to drop its claims to the Louisiana Territory and Oregon. In return, the United States agreed to relinquish its claims on Texas and assume responsibility for $5 million that the Spanish government owed American citizens. The resulting treaty, known as the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819—named after John Quincy Adams and Luis de Onís, the Spanish minister—was hailed as a great success.
Questions about the Florida raids resurfaced during Jackson's presidency. In 1830, a rift opened up between President Jackson and his vice president, John C. Calhoun. One of the issues involved Jackson's prior conduct in Florida and Calhoun's reaction as secretary of war. At the time of the invasion, Jackson claimed that he had received secret instructions from Monroe to occupy Florida. Weeks before his death, Monroe wrote a letter disclaiming any knowledge of the secret instructions that Jackson claimed he had received.
Monroe Doctrine
During much of his administration, Monroe was engaged in diplomacy with Spain regarding its Latin American colonies. These lands had begun to break free from Spain in the early 1800s, gaining the sympathy of the United States, which viewed these later revolutions as reminiscent of its own struggle against Britain. Although many in Congress were eager to recognize the independence of the Latin American colonies, the President feared that doing so might risk war with Spain and its allies. It was not until March 1822 that Monroe officially recognized the countries of Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico.
At the same time, rumors abounded that Spain's allies might help the once vast empire reclaim its lost colonies. To counter the planned move, Britain proposed a joint U.S.-British declaration against European intervention in the Western Hemisphere. Secretary of State Adams convinced Monroe that if the United States issued a joint statement, it would look like the United States was simply adopting Britain's policy without formulating one tailored to its own interests. The United States, he argued, should devise its own strategy to address European intervention in the Western Hemisphere.
This statement, which in the 1850s came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, sounded tough, but most countries knew that America had little ability to back it up with force. Nevertheless, because Britain had also favored Monroe's policy, the United States was able to "free ride" on the back of the Royal Navy. In addition, London had extracted a promise from Paris that France would not assist Spain in the recovery of its colonies.
The Monroe Doctrine constituted the first significant policy statement by the United States on the future of the Western Hemisphere. As befitting the leader of a nation founded on the principles of republican government, Monroe saw the United States as a model and protector to the new Latin American republics. His declared intention to resist further European encroachment in the Western Hemisphere was the foundation of U.S. policy in Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and remains one of Monroe's lasting achievements.
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The Ludwig von Mises Institute
Advancing Austrian Economics, Liberty, and Peace
Advancing the scholarship of liberty in the tradition of the Austrian School
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Women and Work
Mises Daily: Monday, February 01, 1999 by
President Clinton's proposed expansion of sex anti-discrimination statutes is based on economic fallacy, violates the freedom of contract, and fails to come to terms with the reality behind women's voluntary choices in the labor market.
Clinton proposes to permit "full compensatory and punitive" (read: envy-driven) damages for plaintiffs. He wants to punish employers who seek to reduce employee strife by keeping salaries private. He proposes to "recognize and promote" firms that "have made strides to eliminate pay disparities," and expand the EEOC's staff to crack down on those who have not. In other words, his proposals will subsidize inefficiency and transfer wealth to firms where with more equal-paying jobs from firms with a greater range of wages.
Supporters of such equal pay regulations make much of the "76-cent statistic." The Department of Labor's Women's Bureau, a product of the twilight of the Progressive Era, has issued a report claiming that the average women earns 76 cents for every dollar the average man makes. The President's Council of Economic Advisors says the ratio is 75 cents for every dollar a man earns.
It is the bread and butter of politicians to take such statistics, mix them with an ill-formulated version of the law of "one price," and turn out a bitter brew of labor market intervention. Goods considered equal by their demanders will indeed be sold for the same price throughout the market. But the sameness between the goods is not determined by the physical characteristics of the good in question, but by the demander. Hence, it is possible that for some tasks, both men and women are perceived as practically identical. In these markets, one would expect that the earnings by men and women are virtually the same.
Indeed, when the data are broken down, this is what one finds. Don't compare the "average" man and the "average" woman; compare men and women of similar ages, education, major fields of study, occupation, and marital status. The so-called "earnings gap" shrinks dramatically. Even the government admits that, statistically, only one-third of the 24-cent pay gap is "unexplained" by the above mentioned factors.
In other words, only an 8-cent difference is unexplained. Of course, this 8-cent "unexplained" pay difference is written off by the administration as sexual discrimination. It never occurs to them (they do not want it to) that the remaining perceived 8-cent pay gap for similar-appearing men and women is due to things that are immeasurable.
There are many cases in which women are actually earning more than men. Beating the state at its own statistical game, for example, women aged 35-44, who graduated with a bachelor's degree in communications and are employed in a marketing occupation, earn $1.30 for every dollar a similar man makes.
If the "76-cent statistic" is evidence of workplace discrimination against women in general, why is the "$1.30 statistic" not evidence of discrimination against men in the marketing industry? In reality, what counts to employers is not averages at all, but how much will a particular applicant contribute to my firm? There is no way for a government bureaucrat to know this in advance.
What they should know, however, is that there are good reasons why the "average" woman earns less than the "average" man, almost all of which are connected to the fact that a women's primary concern tends to be her family. The big difference between men and women is how they react to marriage and child-birth. Marriage tends to increase men's participation in the labor force and decrease women's. The hours men work tend to increase with the birth of a child. Hours that women work tend to decrease when a child is born. Mothers tend to work less overtime and take fewer jobs that will require that they work long hours in return for high pay than fathers do.
Marriage and child rearing contribute to a number of choices that women make that place them on a lower earning trajectory over time. Women have higher turnover rates and fewer continuous years on a single job than men do. More women work part-time jobs than men do, so they can devote time to the family. They also have a higher absence rate than men. Further, women tend to take those occupations where an absence of five to six years to raise a pre-schooler will not make them obsolete.
A five-year layoff from teaching in the public school system will not damage a woman's earnings nearly as much as if she left the computer software industry for five years. Additionally, women tend to drop out of the labor force more completely than men do after children enter the picture. In fact, for those individuals not looking for work in 1996, almost five times as many women than men said they were not pursuing employment due to family responsibilities.
Finally, wives tend to follow their husbands in pursuit of employment rather than the other way around. Hence, while a husband usually chooses his best earning opportunity, wives tend to choose their best earning option, given where the family moves. Recognizing the divergent paths women and men expect their careers to take after childbirth, it should not surprise anyone that women have fewer incentives to invest in education and training because they are expecting a shorter career in the labor market than men are.
It also should not surprise anyone that employers take these possibilities into account when deciding to hire someone. An employer rarely hires a person for only a day. The employer begins a relationship with that worker, often putting substantial resources into training his new recruit. He may be less likely to hire a woman to fill a crucial position that may require substantial training expenditures, recognizing that the newly hired woman may quit whenever she has children. This is even more true now that the government has saddled firms with mandated family leave regulations.
That family ties are the primary reason behind male/female pay differentials is born out by a glance at demographic changes over the past hundred years. From the mid-1800s to the 1930s, the fertility rates in the United States declined, but then increased through the mid-1950s. Up to the 1930s, more and more women felt free to enter the labor force. Indeed, the 1902 Who's Who in America had more than twice as many entries for women as did the 1958 edition. In both 1921 and 1932, 17 percent of all doctorates awarded were to women. Following the rise in the birth rate, that percentage was down to 10 percent by the late 1950s. The percentage of professional and technical occupations (jobs that tended to pay well) held by women decreased by 9 per cent from 1940 to 1950.
Then fertility rates began to decline again. From 1950 through 1990, the birth rate fell by 36.7 percent. Women began entering the labor force. The number of professional and technical occupations held by females increased from 11 per cent in the 1960s to 14 percent in the 1970s. From 1975 to 1995 women's share of professional jobs increased 82 percent. The increase for technical jobs was 79 percent.
* * * * *
Shawn Ritenour, who teaches economics at Southwest Baptist University, is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute.
Further Reading: "Statistics: Achilles' Heel of Government," by Murray Rothbard, in Logic of Action (Edward Elgar, 1997).
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Advancing Austrian Economics, Liberty, and Peace
Advancing the scholarship of liberty in the tradition of the Austrian School
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The Fight against Intellectual Property
Mises Daily: Wednesday, March 02, 2011 by
[Chapter 10 of Libertarianism Today by Jacob Huebert (Praeger, 2010). Reproduced with permission of ABC-CLIO, LLC, Santa Barbara, CA.]
When the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) wins a $1.92 million verdict against a 32-year-old Minnesota woman for sharing 24 songs online, is that good for liberty? When Disney and other big media companies got Congress to extend copyright protection for Mickey Mouse (and everything else) far into the future, should libertarians have cheered? When a patent-holding company threatened to shut down the Blackberry network unless Blackberry's creator paid it hundreds of millions in licensing fees, was this a win for property rights, or was it just extortion?[1]
For a long time, libertarians were conflicted about "intellectual property" (IP). On the one hand, libertarians support property rights, so IP sounds like something they should favor. On the other hand, IP empowers some people to use government to limit other people's speech and actions. Libertarian giants of the past such as Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises endorsed IP, either as a moral matter (for Rand), or to encourage the production of creative works and inventions (for Mises). But more recent libertarian thinking attacks the idea that so-called intellectual property is either justified or necessary.
Older Libertarian Views
To call the ideas protected by patents and copyrights "property" is misleading. Historically, "property rights" referred only to interests in real property (land, buildings) and personal property (tangible objects). This kind of property right existed before there even were governments, as people homesteaded land, produced goods, and traded. Government came into existence later, to protect these property rights; it didn't invent them.
Intellectual property has origins that are far different and far more recent. As law professor Lawrence Lessig has put it, some people's desire to treat IP rights just like we treat other property rights has "no reasonable connection to our actual legal tradition."[2] Rather, intellectual property rights are the product of government fiat — of statutes that grant inventors, writers, and artists a monopoly privilege to use certain ideas for certain lengths of time.
The people who enacted IP laws in the first place knew this well — that they were not recognizing some preexisting natural property right, but just granting a temporary privilege. This is clear in the wording of Article I, section 8, clause 8 of the US Constitution, which gives Congress "the power to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." The language shows that Congress would be granting a positive right to serve a specific purpose, not recognizing some preexisting natural right.
We can contrast this, for example, with the First and Second Amendments, which state that certain rights "shall not be infringed," implying that those rights already exist. Congress didn't need to grant those rights because they derived from individuals' rights to their lives and property and therefore preceded the formation of the government.
If IP rights really were just like other property rights, they wouldn't present a controversial or difficult issue for libertarians. After all, libertarianism is founded on property rights. So, in that case, libertarians could simply agree with the late Motion Picture Association of America head Jack Valenti, who declared before Congress, "Creative property owners must be accorded the same rights and protection resident in all other property owners in the nation."[3] And libertarians would also then have to agree with present-day representatives of the recording industry who claim that, when a person illegally downloads an album online, it's no different than if the person went into to a store, took a copy of the CD off the shelf, and walked out with it. And maybe libertarians would find those huge verdicts against file sharers justified.
But even in the days when a greater proportion of libertarians supported IP, it was never quite that simple.
Ayn Rand considered the legal protection of a patent or copyright necessary to protect the rights of an idea's creator because of "man's right to the product of his mind." But Rand recognized that ideas couldn't really be treated just like other property. Rights to ordinary property exist in perpetuity — you can pass the property on to your heirs, and they to their heirs, and so on forever. But Rand believed that IP rights could only be recognized for some limited period of time. She could see that if people retained permanent property rights in ideas, this would "paralyze" society as research and innovation would grind to a halt and people would be forced to pay royalties for virtually everything they use to the layabout heirs of long-dead inventors. So Rand recognized that some time limit would have to be established that balanced the inventor's rights with the ability of others to pursue further research.[4]
Rand maintained that her philosophy and her views on IP were a product of her moral views on man's rights, so limiting the duration of IP rights to encourage innovation seems uncharacteristically utilitarian. But anyone who believes that IP rights are natural property rights will have to contend with this difficulty.
Ludwig von Mises was not concerned with natural rights, so he didn't run into this problem. He simply considered IP necessary to motivate people to create useful books and technological innovations. He wrote in Human Action that it is "unlikely that people would undertake the laborious task of writing" such things as "textbooks, manuals, handbooks, and other nonfiction works," if "everyone were free to reproduce them," and that it is "very probable that technological progress would be seriously retarded" if inventors and those who finance their work could not have a patent's help to recoup their expenses.[5]
Murray Rothbard began to chip away at the IP idea but still clung to parts of it.[6] He attempted to justify copyrights and, in a limited sense, patents by rooting them in the traditional Lockean system of property rights, even though IP did not actually arise out of that tradition.
"Libertarians approach issues by going back to their philosophical first principles in a way that most adherents to the more nebulous political philosophies do not."
For Rothbard, a believer in natural law and natural rights, copyright could not be justified on utilitarian grounds or legitimately established by government fiat. But Rothbard thought copyright could be justified if it were the product of contract. For example, if, when Smith sells Jones a book, Smith marks it "copyright," then Jones would only receive from Smith the right to possess and use that physical book, but not the right to copy it.
In other words, by giving Jones notice of copyright, Smith does not include the right to make and sell copies of the book in the bundle of rights that he sells to Jones. Because a person cannot transfer any greater rights in something than he or she owns, any third parties who later got the book after Jones would be subject to the same restriction Jones faced. Under this line of thinking, anyone who copied a copyrighted book without permission would be stealing by exercising a right that still belonged to the book's original owner because he or she had never given it up.
Rothbard justified patents of a sort on similar grounds. If Smith sells Jones a new kind of vacuum cleaner and marks it "patented" (or, as Rothbard would have it, "copyright"), that tells Jones that he is only receiving the right to the physical object, not the right to make copies of it. The patent/copyright creates a contractual limitation, just as in the copyright context.
This type of "patent" would not, however, prevent another inventor who comes up with the same device completely on his own from producing and distributing his device. As it stands, patent law grants exclusive rights to the first inventor of a good, and later inventors — even if they never saw or heard about the original invention — are bound by the patent. For Rothbard, this was unjust because the later inventor did not violate any property rights of the first inventor when he thought up and created the invention on his own. (This problem doesn't arise in the copyright context because it's safe to assume that two people will not independently write the exact same novel, play, or piece of music, Shakespeare-typing monkeys notwithstanding.)
Rejecting Intellectual Property
IP remained a questionable issue among libertarians for decades, but in the first years of the 21st century, opinion seems to have shifted strongly against the legitimacy of IP for natural-rights libertarians and consequentialist libertarians alike. (Here, and throughout the chapter, when we refer to IP rights, we refer to patents and copyrights; trademarks, another concept typically grouped with IP rights, are relatively uncontroversial.)
IP Violates Property Rights
The current generation's libertarian scholars in the natural-rights tradition have largely rejected the legitimacy of IP. The most influential figure in this intellectual revolution has been lawyer and legal scholar Stephan Kinsella, whose article, "Against Intellectual Property," appeared in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 2001 and was published separately as a monograph in 2008.[7] According to Kinsella, the problem with IP is that it isn't grounded in property rights — as all libertarian rights must be — and in fact requires government to violate property rights for its enforcement.
Under the Lockean-libertarian theory of property rights, people create private property in land (assuming it is unowned when they find it) by occupying it and making it theirs. Then, they are entitled to do what they please with that land — live there, enjoy what they produce on it, sell it to someone else, give it away — as long as they don't aggress against anyone else or anyone else's property in the process.
Land and tangible items are subject to becoming private property in this way because they are scarce. That is, they are limited in quantity, and one person's use of a piece of property prevents someone else from using it. Two people cannot occupy the same space or eat the same orange. Without property rights, there would be irresolvable conflicts over who can use what land and objects, and how they may use them. With property rights, these conflicts are avoided. On the other hand, if certain things weren't scarce — if we could reproduce them infinitely at no cost, or if they were somehow abundant — there would be no conflicts over those things and no need for ethical rules, property rights, or laws to govern such conflicts.
As it happens, ideas fall into this latter category. If two people want to have the same idea in their minds, or put that same idea to use, there is no conflict between them — they both can do it. And they can pass on an idea to as many people as they want without diminishing their own possession of the idea. Kinsella uses the example of a book:
[I]f you copy a book I have written, I still have the original (tangible) book, and I also still "have" the pattern of words that constitute the book. Thus, authored works are not scarce in the same sense that a piece of land or a car are scarce. If you take my car, I no longer have it. But if you "take" a book-pattern and use it to make your own physical book, I still have my own copy.[8]
Thomas Jefferson had essentially the same insight some two hundred years before:
So IP rights cannot be true "property rights." And when government grants IP rights, it's not really granting a property right in an idea, but is instead granting a monopoly on the right to use an idea for certain profitable purposes. If you own a copyright in a book, only you (or someone to whom you give permission) can produce and sell copies of that book. If you own a patent on an invention, only you (or someone to whom you give permission) can produce and sell the invention for a certain period of time.
This means that IP rights are not property rights, but are in fact a power to stop other people from exercising their own property rights.[10]
"IP rights are not property rights at all
but are a government-issued license
to attack
property rights."
If I own a copyright in a book, I can use the force of government to stop someone from using their own paper and ink to produce their own copies of the book. If I own a patent in an invention, I can use the force of government to shut down someone else's factory that produces copies of my invention, even though the other person is using his or her own equipment, machinery, and components. I can even do this if the other person is not using a "copy" of my invention, but independently invented it all on his or her own. For a libertarian, this is unjust because it's using aggressive force against peaceful people. As law professor Tom W. Bell has put it,
By invoking state power, a copyright or patent owner can impose prior restraint, fines, imprisonment, and confiscation on those engaged in peaceful expression and the quiet enjoyment of tangible property. Because it thus gags our voices, ties our hands, and demolishes our presses, the law of copyrights and patents violates the very rights Locke defended.[11]
So according to libertarian theory, IP rights are not "property rights" at all but are a government-issued license to attack property rights — and therefore they should be abolished.
Rand's attempt to justify IP fails under this framework because it presumes that ownership of ideas is possible and legitimate. So does Rothbard's attempt to ground IP in contract. We can see why by comparing Rothbard's contract-based copyright to a case in which Jones makes a contract with Smith to tell him a secret. A contract to keep a secret, standing alone, is legitimate — people can always make deals to do or not do things. If Smith tells everyone Jones's secret, Jones rightly can sue Smith because he broke their deal. Jones cannot, however, sue everyone else in the world who now knows the secret to stop them from repeating it; he didn't have contracts with those people and therefore can't claim any rightful ownership over them, the ideas in their heads, or their property.
And so it is with copyright: a seller can make his buyers agree not to copy a book, but he may not stop others who happen to see it from doing so.[12] Likewise, an inventor may not stop someone who sees his or her invention (say, a machine) from using this knowledge to make a similar or better machine.
All this analysis may sound academic, but it illustrates how libertarians approach issues by going back to their philosophical first principles in a way that most adherents to the more nebulous political philosophies of conservatism and liberalism do not. And it is important for libertarians, as champions of property rights, to explain why IP rights are not property rights because to call IP "property" is not only Orwellian, it also sullies the reputation of true property rights. This is why Bell suggests we instead refer to IP as a "privilege," not as "property,"[13] and why the two authors we'll focus on in the next section, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, suggest an even more blunt term for IP: "intellectual monopoly."
IP, Creation, and Innovation
Of course, our argument about property rights might not matter to a utilitarian. Libertarian thinkers such as Mises or, today, Richard Epstein, would argue that even if IP rights aren't property rights in the usual sense, we should make an exception to the usual rule of liberty and property rights for IP because it presents a rare case where the benefits to society of a government intervention far outweigh the costs.[14] If such claims by IP supporters were true, they might present a compelling argument in favor of IP. But the facts show that this is not true, and that IP not only isn't necessary for creation and innovation to occur, it also actively harms these things.
The leaders in debunking the myth of IP's necessity have been Boldrin and Levine, whose 2008 book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, argues that patents and copyrights are not necessary for progress and creativity, and, in fact, have greatly harmed it. (Boldrin and Levine may not be strict libertarians across the board, but they are close, they have influenced libertarians, and they are pure libertarians on the subjects of patent and copyright, so that's good enough for our purposes.)
Many IP advocates take it as self-evident, as the framers of the US Constitution did, that copyrights are necessary to motivate people to produce creative works. Supposedly, writers, musicians, and filmmakers wouldn't bother to produce books, music, and films if other people could come along and copy and take the benefits of their work — or at least, creative people wouldn't produce "enough" of these types of works, whatever that means. But it is not self-evident that this is the case, and the evidence shows that it's just wrong.
After all, for most of history, there were no copyrights, but people still created great literature, art, and music. Suppose Shakespeare had lived in a world where copyright existed. As one writer put it, "his legal bills would have been staggering."[15] Shakespeare made a unique contribution to Western civilization by putting words together in a way that no human being had before or since, but he was not a pure original. He took many stories, characters, and ideas from other works by other people — which he wouldn't have been able to do if the creators of those previous works had possessed and enforced copyrights.
And what of copyright protection for Shakespeare's own plays? He authored 38 plays without any incentive or protection from copyright law, and he managed to prosper besides. It's difficult to see how copyright would have prompted him to create more. One can imagine, though, that if copyright had existed in Shakespeare's day, he might have spent his some of his time and effort suing people who sold transcriptions of his plays or performed them without permission, and devoted less of his time to writing, and we would all be immeasurably poorer for it.
A rich public domain allowed Shakespeare to become what he was, and it has allowed the world to benefit in turn from Shakespeare. It seems likely that IP rights would only have resulted in less for him to draw upon and less for us to enjoy.
Writers today could make money without copyright even if they're not modern-day Shakespeares. Of course, even with copyright protection, most authors whose names are not Stephen King or J.K. Rowling don't make much money from book royalties. Instead, publishing a book gives an author prestige and opportunities to do other things. Publishing in academic journals (for no pay) creates opportunities to get teaching jobs. Publishing books for a popular audience (usually for low pay) may raise one's profile as an expert and create opportunities to give speeches or do other things for money.
Still, even without copyrights, many authors would make some money from book sales, and some authors would make a lot of money. One reason we can be confident of this is because books by foreign authors did not receive copyright protection in the United States for most of the 19th century, yet the authors made money here anyway. A publisher would pay an author to be the first to receive a copy of the author's manuscript, which would allow the publisher to be first publisher to reach the market with the book.[16]
Even without copyright protection, there is great value in being the first publisher to sell a book. The first publisher will have the market to itself for a while because it will take competitors time to come out with their own editions. Plus, other publishers are unlikely to find it worthwhile to copy that book unless it proves to be a success for the first publisher. Once the first publisher has success, then it might be worthwhile for others to copy and sell it, if they believe they can profitably sell enough additional copies. But in any event the first publisher is likely to reap the biggest profits, especially since books on average make 80 percent of their profits in their first three months.[17]
So that's the 19th century. What about now? In this century, the government gave W.W. Norton the right to be the first to publish the 9-11 Commission Report. As a government work, the 568-page report would immediately enter the public domain, and others would be free to copy and sell it. Despite this lack of copyright protection — and even though the report was also available online for free and downloaded millions of times — Norton's edition of the Report became a bestseller and earned Norton profits approaching $1 million.[18] Two weeks after Norton's edition came out, St. Martin's released its own edition, with additional articles and analysis included, and it too became a bestseller.
Based on this and similar cases, Boldrin and Levine estimate that J.K. Rowling could have received multimillion-dollar advances for later books in her Harry Potter series — not enough, perhaps, to make her one of England's richest women, as copyright protection did, but surely enough to keep her writing.
What about the music industry? Here we know what happens because artists have already effectively lost copyright protection for their recordings as millions of people trade them for free on the Internet instead of buying them. This has simply pushed artists into other ways of making money, especially performances. Even before the Internet age, most rock musicians, even successful ones, made comparatively little from their album sales. So, like books, recordings have been a way for their creators to attract attention and make money through other projects.
In the realm of serious music, many of the great composers' works were never protected by copyright. England began protecting musical compositions with copyright in 1777, yet relatively few composers lived or worked in England after that time, despite England's relative prosperity overall. Beethoven, for one, lived in Germany, which offered no copyright protection, yet he made enough money to survive and felt sufficiently motivated to create some of the greatest musical works ever.[19] Like Shakespeare, pre-IP composers were able to draw on previous composers' works and alter and adapt them freely. Today, that requires permission from copyright holders that may or may not be granted.
Like the record labels, movie studios face rampant piracy, yet they remain in business. This is so in part because people are willing to pay for the experience of seeing a film in a theater; for many people, a DVD or downloaded version is no substitute. This wouldn't change in the absence of copyright. Studios could use contracts, technology, and security to make sure their films are only exhibited in theaters that pay for copies of them. Like book publishers, studios would also profit from being the first to market with a DVD. We could also note, as Boldrin and Levine do, that the pornographic film industry has always thrived and constantly innovated even though it essentially operates outside the protection of IP law because of its lack of social respectability.[20]
Another point that applies to all media is that many people create just for the joy of doing it, without concern for further benefits; no government policy is necessary to "incentivize" them. For example, one of the most important American composers, Charles Ives, spent his days making money as an insurance executive and wrote serious music on the side, for which he received minimal recognition (let alone money) during his lifetime.
Today, countless individuals produce countless written, audio, and visual works, at all levels of quality, for an Internet audience with no expectation of payment. Many even do so anonymously, with no expectation of personal recognition: Wikipedia provides one example. Increasingly, people are not just passive consumers of content from big media companies but producers of original work themselves, and compensation is not their motive.
Copyrights in general are questionable; the kinds of copyright-term extensions we have seen in recent years are entirely indefensible. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (CTEA) increased copyright terms by 40 percent. Copyrights were extended (retroactively) to cover the life of an author plus 70 years, or, in the case of a work for hire, the earlier of 95 years after the date of publication or 120 years after the date of creation. Did this extension create additional incentives for writers, musicians, and filmmakers to produce more? Of course not. What difference does it make to an artist if you extend his or her copyright protection for some number of years long after they're dead?
In fact, economists have determined that the CTEA increases creators' revenue by just 0.33 percent.[21] So copyright extension doesn't benefit artists; instead, it benefits big media companies that own really old properties and don't want to lose them to the public domain. In fact, the CTEA was pushed by one such entity in particular, Disney, which didn't want to lose its copyright on Mickey Mouse.
While copyright extension offers no benefits to anyone but big media, the costs to the rest of society are tremendous. There is no "cultural commons" for creative people to draw from, as Shakespeare did — and as Disney did when it made movies out of stories in the public domain such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and Sleeping Beauty.[22] Countless thousands of books, recordings, and software titles go out of print and remain out of print because the rights holders can't be found, refuse to take advantage of their rights, or refuse to release their rights. We are all poorer as a result.[23]
It is also not obvious that patents are necessary to inspire innovation — and there is much reason to believe that they prevent innovation.
If you own a patent on a mechanical rice picker, that means you can stop other people from building a better rice picker that's based on yours. For a number of years, your potential competitors can't legally innovate and improve your product — or at least, if they do, they can't bring their innovation to market without your permission until the patent expires.
At the same time, you don't have much incentive to improve your product because you can just milk your old invention free from competition — enforcing your patents becomes a substitute for research and development.[24] This forces your competitors to waste effort trying to "invent around" your ideas to make competing products, perhaps inferior ones, without infringing on yours. And it also gives you, the patent holder, an incentive to take out a cluster of broadly worded patents for products similar to your own, to discourage others from even trying to enter your field and legally block them if necessary.[25] The potential to infringe on one of these patents and then get sued scares many would-be competitors out of the market.
On the other hand, what if there were no patents? The first person to implement an idea would still receive exclusive benefits for some period of time, because even without patents, it would take a while for the competition to figure out how to imitate the invention and catch up. But competitors probably would figure it out before too long, so the original inventor couldn't rest on his or her laurels. Everyone would have to constantly improve to stay competitive.
We see that idea at work in the many innovations businesses make where patent law doesn't protect them. The people who invented shopping malls, 24-hour convenience stores, supermarkets, fast-food franchising, and the extra-value meal didn't have any exclusive rights to their ideas. Neither do the people who invent perfumes, recipes, clothing designs, furniture, or car bodies.[26] But people do come up with these things because they want outpace their rivals. Without IP privileges, they have to be focused on what they can do to attract and please customers better — not what they can do with the legal system to crush other businesses.
Historically, there have been many cases where patents allowed their holders to stop innovating and to stop others from innovating. Consider the supposedly heroic Wright brothers. They created their first airplane by slightly improving the unpatented ideas of others who came before them, such as British engineer Sir George Cayley and German Otto Lilienthal. Their 1902 patent was for the system of flight control resulting from "wing warping" and the use of a rudder.
Glenn Curtiss improved on the Wright brothers' design by replacing the wing-warping technique with movable control surfaces, the means by which airplanes to this day control their movements. For this, the Wright brothers — who did not sell many airplanes at the time — sued Curtiss to try to stop him from selling airplanes. The Wrights' litigiousness stunted the growth of the aviation industry in the United States as they focused more on suing Curtiss and other competitors than on making better planes. As a result, airplane development then took off in France, where the Wright brothers "had little legal clout."[27]
Another example Boldrin and Levine point out concerns James Watt's steam engine. During the period in the late 18th century that Watt and his business partner, Matthew Boulton, held their steam-engine patent, innovation in steam engines practically ceased. When Jonathan Hornblower built a better engine in 1790, Watt and Boulton sued and stopped him from bringing it to market. Other competitors invented their own improvements, but kept them off the market while waiting out Watt's patent term; they didn't want to be sued like Hornblower.
Watt himself was distracted from improving his product both because he didn't need to do so — he had monopoly protection — and because he was preoccupied with using the legal system against his competitors. As a result, while his patent was in place, the UK added only about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year; in the 30 years after Watt's patent expired, horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Similarly, fuel efficiency improved little, if at all, during the years of Watt's patent (1769-1800), but increased by approximately a factor of five between 1810 and 1835.[28]
What about pharmaceuticals? Some people argue that we need pharmaceutical patents because drugs require expensive R&D to develop, but then can be cheaply reverse engineered. So, the thinking goes, if we don't give drug makers patent protection, they won't bother to produce drugs in the first place.
Numerous facts undermine this argument. Boldrin and Levine have found that the pharmaceutical industry historically grew "faster in those countries where patents were fewer and weaker."[29] Italy, for one, provided no patent protection for pharmaceuticals before 1978, but had a thriving pharmaceutical industry. Between 1961 and 1980, it accounted for about nine percent of all new active chemical compounds for drugs. After patents arrived, Italy saw no significant increase in the number of new drugs discovered there — contrary, one supposes, to the IP advocates' predictions.[30]
Another fact the conventional view overlooks is that patentable drugs are not the only medical innovations possible. Boldrin and Levine looked to a poll of the British Medical Journal's readers on the top medical milestones in history, and found that almost none had anything to do with patents. Penicillin, x-rays, tissue culture, anesthetic, chlorpromazine, public sanitation, germ theory, evidence-based medicine, vaccines, the birth-control pill, computers, oral rehydration theory, DNA structure, monoclonal antibody technology, and the discovery of the health risks of smoking — of these top 15 entries, only two had anything to do with patents.[31]
Similarly, nothing on the US Centers for Disease Control's list of the top ten public-health achievements of the 20th century had any connection to patents. And even a review of the most important pharmaceuticals reveals that many came about without the motive and/or possibility of acquiring a patent, including, for example, aspirin, AZT, cyclosporine, digoxin, ether, fluoride, insulin, isoniazid, medical marijuana, methadone, morphine, oxytocin, penicillin, Phenobarbital, prontosil, quinine, Ritalin, salvarsan, vaccines, and vitamins.[32]
Patent law does create one incentive for researchers: to pursue more of the kind of research that will lead to patentable drugs, and less of the kind of research that might lead to other types of breakthroughs that cannot be patented — even though, as we've just seen, the latter kind may be some of the most important.[33] If patent law were abolished, we would probably see fewer artificial chemical drugs and more discoveries related to remedies from natural substances such as vitamins, minerals, and plants. Given the harmful side effects of many prescription drugs, it is not at all obvious that this would be a bad thing.
Boldrin and Levine also show that patents are not essential to success in the pharmaceutical industry by pointing to the analogous paint and dye industries (which also depended on chemical formulas) in the 19th century. Germany offered no patent protection for paints and dyes at all until 1877, and even then only for the process involved in producing them, not for the products themselves. Nonetheless, German companies' market share rose from next to nothing in 1862 to 50 percent in 1873 and 80 percent in 1913. Britain and France, on the other hand, had patent protection for both products and processes all along and saw their market shares fall from about 50 percent and 40 percent, respectively, in 1862 to between 13 and 17 percent in 1873.[34] The Germans eventually benefited from patents, but it's clear that patents were not essential to their rise to the top.
Costs and Benefits
So we've seen that copyrights and patents have costs that most people don't think about. How to balance this against their benefits? Austrian economists would say this is impossible. Costs and benefits are subjective; they exist inside people's heads and cannot be measured or compared to each other to find out what is economically optimal. The only way to know what is optimal is to look at what people actually do in the marketplace through their voluntary choices using their own actual tangible property.[35] Because IP rights by their nature interfere with private property and voluntary exchange, they necessarily move us away from what is optimal.
Putting aside that problem, any attempt by non-Austrian economists to measure the costs and benefits of IP will necessarily leave out countless important factors. One such factor is human liberty. Even if we could determine that IP makes us materially better off in some respects — in terms of economic growth or the number of different products produced, for example — IP laws require a government empowered to interfere with individuals' peaceful use of their own property. You don't have to believe in natural rights to value liberty and view its loss as a high cost.
Still, even if you measure IP's effects just in terms of economic growth — a rough measure of prosperity — economists are mostly undecided as to whether IP has even made this greater than it otherwise would be. Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer have found that "intellectual property rights appear to have at best only a weak and indirect relationship to economic growth, the relationship appears to apply only to certain groups of countries or certain specifications, and the direction of causality is unclear."[36] This last point is critical. To the small extent that patents may show a correlation with economic growth, we can't even say whether patents caused the growth, or if the growth caused people to pursue patent protection.
The End of IP
Libertarians may not have to appeal to rights theory, economics, or history to win the war on IP. Libertarians are already winning as people around the globe incessantly violate the legal rights of copyright holders by sharing music through bit-torrent programs and by uploading (and remixing and mashing up) videos of copyrighted material to YouTube without the slightest feeling of guilt.
People cheered the Swedish proprietors of the Pirate Bay website as they went on trial for helping people freely trade music, movies, and software. (The Pirate Bay's anti-IP, proprivacy views are so popular that they have even inspired a Pirate Party that has won one of Sweden's seats in the European Parliament.) As the RIAA and MPAA crack down on file sharers and website operators with ever bigger threats, these organizations only look more like villains to the young people who have always operated under the assumption that they should be allowed to do as they please with their own computers as long as they don't invade anyone else's.
More thinkers outside of libertarianism are challenging IP, too. Lessig and others in the "free-culture" movement have informed a large audience of how lengthy copyright terms and other especially oppressive aspects of IP impoverish us, and how an ever-growing "cultural commons" (public domain) would enrich us. Through the Creative Commons license invented by Lessig, people are deliberately giving up their exclusive rights under copyright law because they believe IP isn't in their interests as creators and they want their ideas to spread.
Along similar lines, the "Free Software" and "Open Source" movements have created software products that people are permitted to download, alter, and distribute freely. Contrary to IP advocates' predictions, people make improvements to these software projects even though they don't stand to profit personally. And many of these products, such as Linux-based operating system and the Firefox web browser, are competing successfully against such IP-dependent dinosaurs as Microsoft.
Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler — not a libertarian himself, but a leading thinker in the "free-culture" movement — has observed that because of the Internet, we "are at a moment in history at which the terms of freedom and justice are up for the grabs," especially in the context of IP.[37] Because libertarians have the intellectual ammunition to show people that what they are feeling and doing online is right, and what the big media and government want to do to them through IP laws is wrong, this moment presents a unique opportunity for libertarians to provide those definitions and advance their cause.
Further Reading
Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. This is the utilitarian case against IP. The authors make the case that intellectual property is not necessary to spur creativity and innovation. Their evidence and arguments go far beyond what is presented in this chapter. This book is available here.
N. Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property. Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008. This is the rights-based case against IP. Kinsella shows how intellectual property is antithetical to true private property rights.
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. New York: Penguin, 2004. Lessig is not a libertarian, and he supports IP in principle, but his book shows how ever-lengthening copyright terms enrich powerful interests at our great cultural expense. This book is available here.Download PDF
[1] For these stories, see David Kravets, "Feds Support $1.92 Million RIAA File Sharing Verdict," Threat Level, August 14, 2009; Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control CreativityDownload PDF (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 213-45; Rob Kelley, "BlackBerry Maker, NTP Ink $612 Million Settlement," CNNMoney.com, March 3, 2006.
[2] Lessig, p. 118.
[3] Quoted in Ibid., p. 117.
[4] Ayn Rand, "Patents and Copyrights," in Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967) pp. 130–34.
[5] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1996), pp. 661-62.
[6] Rothbard's ideas on IP are presented in Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993 [1962]), pp. 652–660; Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy 4th ed. (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006 [1970])Download PDF; Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (New York: New York University Press, 1998 [1982]), pp. 123–24.
[7] Kinsella has not been alone. See also, for example, Roderick T. Long, "The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights," Formulations 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1995); Wendy McElroy, "Contra Copyright," The Voluntaryist (June 1985) pp. 1-3Download PDF; Tom G. Palmer, "Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects," Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 13 (1990) pp. 817-65Download PDF; Timothy Sandefur, "A Critique of Ayn Rand's Theory of Intellectual Property Rights," Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 9:1 (Fall 2007), pp. 139-61.
[8] N. Stephan Kinsella, Against Intellectual Property (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008),p. 32.
[9] Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, Monticello, August 13, 1813 (emphasis added).
[10] For an argument that rejects this analysis, see Adam Mossoff, "Is Copyright Property?" San Diego Law Review 42 (2005), p. 29.
[11] Tom W. Bell, "Indelicate Imbalancing in Copyright and Patent Law," in Adam Thierer and Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr., eds., Copy Fights: The Future of Intellectual Property in the Information Age (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2002), p. 4 (internal footnotes omitted, emphasis added).
[12] "Trade secrets" — a relatively minor part of IP law — may present a special case. If a third party induces someone to give away a company secret, they may be considered liable in the same way that a co-conspirator to any wrongdoing is jointly liable. See Kinsella, pp. 56-57. Perhaps someone who induced a contractual-copyright breach could be held liable as well — but this still would not be enough to stop the information from getting out, so the attempted copyright protection wouldn't really be effective.
[13] Tom W. Bell, "Copyright as Intellectual Property Privilege," Syracuse Law Review 58 (2008) p. 541.
[14] Epstein argues that IP rights can be considered property rights, and has attempted to tie Locke's system to utilitarianism and IP. See Richard A. Epstein, "Liberty versus Property? Cracks in the Foundations of Copyright Law," San Diego Law Review 42 (2005), p. 1.
[15] Tom G. Palmer, "Intellectual Property: A Non-Posnerian Law and Economics Approach," Hamline Law Review 12 (1989), p. 302.Download PDF
[16] Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 22-23.
[17] Ibid., p. 141.
[18] Ibid., p. 25.
[19] Ibid., pp. 187-89.
[20] Boldrin and Levine, pp. 36-38.
[21] Ibid., p. 101.
[22] Ibid., p. 31.
[23] On this, see Lessig and see Jeffrey A. Tucker, "The Music and Book Killers." LewRockwell.com, February 2, 2009.
[24] Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, p. 657.
[25] Julio H. Cole, "Patents and Copyrights: Do the Benefits Exceed the Costs?" Journal of Libertarian Studies 15:4 (2001), p. 92Download PDF; Rothbard, Power and Market, p. 90.
[26] Bell, "Indelicate Imbalancing in Copyright and Patent Law," p. 9.
[27] Boldrin and Levine, pp. 87-88, 206-07.
[28] Ibid., pp. 1-5.
[29] Ibid., p. 246.
[30] Ibid., pp. 222-23.
[31] Ibid., p. 229.
[32] Ibid., p. 230.
[33] Cole, p. 93; Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, p. 658.
[34] Ibid., pp. 218-19.
[35] See Murray N. Rothbard, "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics" in Mary Sennholz, ed., On Freedom and Free Enterprise: The Economics of Free Enterprise, (Princeton, N.J: D. Van Nostrand, 1956)Download PDF; Rothbard, Power and Market, pp. 89-92.
[36] James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer, "Of Patents and Property," Regulation (Winter 2008-09), pp. 22.Download PDF
[37] Robert S. Boyton, "The Tyranny of Copyright?," The New York Times, January 25, 2004.
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/47033
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Reverse Lookup
Exchange 1-908-206-XXXX
Location: New Jersey, Union, Union County
Approximate number of phones: 855
Carrier: Verizon New Jersey, Inc. (Landline)
Mr. Number records show that there are at least 726 active phone numbers with the prefix 908206 out of a possible 10,000. Numbers in this exchange are mainly landline phones. Phone numbers beginning with 908-206 are allocated to New Jersey, in particular Hillside and Union in Union County. Public records tell us that 48.45% (351) of subscribers are men and 51.55% (374) are women. Median household income in this part of the country is $68,688 and 59.99% of housing units are owner-occupied.
Recent comments about numbers in 1-908-206-XXXX
Reported on Apr 17, 2013
Getting calls that hangup for the last 3 days from this and similar numbers
See all commments
Phone numbers in area 1-908-206-0XXX
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global_05_local_4_shard_00000656_processed.jsonl/47034
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But this mascara is better
Around Christmas, I posted about my hopes for the Diorshow Waterproof Mascara (£22/10ml) and how I didn’t think it was waterproof at all, not on me at least. I have persevered and persevered and finally consigned it to the bin in a hissy fit.
The colossal volum express waterproof detail shot 115952
So I have bought this one, (for prices between £1 and £7.14 on Amazon, I forget how much I actually paid) which seems better and more tenacious. The Maybelline Colossal Volum’Express Waterproof mascara does seem to have a more volumising effect on my eyelashes, and definitely lasts longer than the other one. That’s not to say it adhered 100% until the end of what was admittedly a long day, but it wasn’t bad at all, even given the diluting effect of my super-moisturing eye cream. There was plenty left to take off my eyelashes in the evening. I’m a bit of a completist though, and the riotous yellow colour is wreaking havoc in my otherwise funereal cosmetic drawer, but that’s my problem.
It’s not perfect but frankly I’d rather spend around a fiver on a good waterproof mascara that runs a little bit despite the gimmicky liberties it takes with English, than £22 on an overblown, though sophisticated, waterproof mascara that isn’t. Is that overstating the case? We are, after all, all in this together.
*not a sponsored post*
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SQL Server 2000
Topic last updated -- July 2003
Indexes in databases are similar to indexes in books. In a book, an index allows you to find information quickly without reading the entire book. In a database, an index allows the database program to find data in a table without scanning the entire table. An index in a book is a list of words with the page numbers that contain each word. An index in a database is a list of values in a table with the storage locations of rows in the table that contain each value. Indexes can be created on either a single column or a combination of columns in a table and are implemented in the form of B-trees. An index contains an entry with one or more columns (the search key) from each row in a table. A B-tree is sorted on the search key, and can be searched efficiently on any leading subset of the search key. For example, an index on columns A, B, C can be searched efficiently on A, on A, B, and A, B, C.
Most books contain one general index of words, names, places, and so on. Databases contain individual indexes for selected types or columns of data: this is similar to a book that contains one index for names of people and another index for places. When you create a database and tune it for performance, you should create indexes for the columns used in queries to find data.
In the pubs sample database provided with Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000, the employee table has an index on the emp_id column. The following illustration shows how the index stores each emp_id value and points to the rows of data in the table with each value.
When SQL Server executes a statement to find data in the employee table based on a specified emp_id value, it recognizes the index for the emp_id column and uses the index to find the data. If the index is not present, it performs a full table scan starting at the beginning of the table and stepping through each row, searching for the specified emp_id value.
SQL Server automatically creates indexes for certain types of constraints (for example, PRIMARY KEY and UNIQUE constraints). You can further customize the table definitions by creating indexes that are independent of constraints.
See Also
Full-Text Indexes
Index Tuning Wizard
Index Tuning Recommendations
Table and Index Architecture
© 2014 Microsoft
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Basic Resource Service
This sample demonstrates how to implement a HTTP-based service using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) REST Programming model that exposes a collection of customers that supports the retrieve, add, delete and replace operations. This sample consists of 2 components - a self-hosted WCF HTTP service (Service.cs) and a console application (program.cs) that creates the service and makes calls to it.
The WCF service exposes a collection of customers in a resource-oriented/REST manner. In short, this involves having unique URIs for the collection of customers and every customer in the collection. The service supports sending an HTTP GET at the collection URI to retrieve the entire collection and HTTP POST at the collection URI to add a new customer to the collection. Also at the URI for an individual customer, it supports HTTP GET to get the customer details, HTTP PUT to replace the details of the customer and HTTP DELETE to remove the customer from the collection. When a new customer is added to the collection, the service assigns it a unique URI and stores the URI as part of the customer’s details. Also, it communicates the URI to the client using the Location HTTP header of the response.
The App.config file configures the WCF service with a default WebHttpEndpoint that has the HelpEnabled property set to true. As a result, the WCF creates an automatic HTML-based help page at http://localhost:8000/Customers/help that provides information about how to construct HTTP requests to the service and how to access the service’s HTTP response – for instance, an example of how the customer details is represented in XML and JSON.
Exposing the customer collection (and more generally, any resource) in this manner allows the client to interact with it in a uniform way using URIs and HTTP GET, PUT, DELETE and POST. Program.cs demonstrates how such a client can be authored using HttpWebRequest. Note that this is just one way to access a WCF REST service. It is also possible to access the service using other .NET Framework classes like the ChannelFactory and WebClient. Other samples in the SDK (such as the Basic HTTP Service sample and the Automatic Format Selection sample) show how to use these classes to communicate with a WCF service.
The sample consists a self-hosted service and a client that both run within a console application. As the console application runs, the client makes requests to the service and writes the pertinent information from the responses to the console window.
To use this sample
1. Open the solution for the Basic Resource Service Sample. When launching Visual Studio 2012, you must run as an administrator for the sample to execute successfully. Do this by right-clicking the Visual Studio 2012 icon and selecting Run as Administrator from the context menu.
2. Press CTRL+SHIFT+B to build the solution and then press Ctrl+F5 to run the console application. The console window appears and provides the URI of the running service and the URI of the HTML help page for the running service. At any point in time you can view the HTML help page by typing the URI of the help page in a browser. As the sample runs, the client writes the status of the current activity.
3. Press any key to terminate the sample.
Important note Important
© 2014 Microsoft
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