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drinian

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I'm blogging over at http://auspicacious.org/ these days.

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I haven't tried this in a few years, but I recall that Kubuntu and Ubuntu desktops used to have serious issues co-existing on the same box for some reason.

Don't really care, now, as I'm on Lubuntu.

This is not "starting to become" for South Korea. The fact of the matter is that South Korea is far more democratic now than it was during the Cold War. These laws restricting the dissemination of North Korean propaganda have been in place for decades, and were often used with the tacit approval of the US in years past to suppress dissent.(In fact, until about ten years ago, it was technically illegal to import Japanese pop music into South Korea!)

The only difference now is that their use is becoming increasingly controversial. This, at least, is a good thing.

Probably a bit late for most readers here, but I highly recommend taking advantage of whatever opportunities for public speaking and performance your high school offers -- whether that's just walking on stage as an extra in a school theater production, or joining the debate club. Even a little can go a long way in relieving anxiety for the rest of your life.

Thanks for clearing that up. They are a very different sort of organization than the one behind my old summer job.

That being said, I don't really care what their Web interface looks like, but the wording used in this press release is not related to reality, and that bothers me.

Everything that China blocks with their national firewall is considered "illegal" in China. That is, in fact, the exact same justification, even the same wording, that was used to build the Great Firewall of China.

It's true, in many ways US law is much more just than Chinese law. But that doesn't mean that walling off US citizens from the rest of the Internet in any way is a good idea.

What on earth does "read-online access" mean? Are they making people use some kind of Flash application to read them (so you'll have to screencap important stuff), or are they just blocking access to the PDFs?

I would continue by asking who on Earth let people with such poor technical knowledge run a major academic publisher, but I have a funny story about an internship several years ago at another academic publisher.

Circa 2005, IIRC, I sat in on a sales meeting where I was told that the company was seriously considering requiring institutions to buy microfilm copies of journals in order to get online access, as their margins were higher on microfilm. Or something like that.

new legislation must be narrowly targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law, cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws, and be effectively tailored, with strong due process and focused on criminal activity.

In short, reserving the right to build a Great Firewall around the US.

A lot of people in this thread seem to think that being in school until 5 or 6 PM would mean being in the classroom for ten hours a day or more.

That additional time would be fantastic if used for athletics, self-study, club activities (with a lot of personal freedom for the students), and so on.

By the way, you can get a prepaid Softbank mobile on a 90-day entry permit if you look in the right places. I had luck at the Don Quixote in Roppongi (no surprise there). It probably didn't hurt that I had my Japanese address written out in kanji and folded in a piece of paper inside my passport.

Data service, though, is still unavailable prepaid, I think.

Hey, if you're willing to shoulder the true costs of that style of living -- environmentally, that's at least air pollution, and runoff from increased paving and lawns replacing woods and fields; then there's the cost of building out utilities, which you'll share with far fewer people in the exurbs -- then I guess you can. I suspect that far fewer people can truly afford suburban density than our current setup has allowed.

To be honest, I have their business service at home to avoid trouble when I'm running VPN servers, etc. and the occasional Web service from home -- not to mention the usage cap issue.

And it's nice to know that they're up to 35 mbits upload (much faster than what I have), but their hardware is capable of much more (assuming it's on par with Google Fiber's).

How about just convincing Verizon to sell the higher speeds to those who want them, at a higher price? The hardware's there, but their most expensive FiOS business connections are far short of Google's numbers.

Going back in history about five hundred years, I wonder if you could compare the Arabic dialects vs. classical Arabic to Romance languages vs. Latin.

The really interesting point is that people don't seem to put any thought into what should be possible with a computer.

Intuitively, people with a decent mental model of how text is processed by computers would expect that the computer could search through that text, and look for a command in the program to do that. But many people's mental model is that they are looking through a sheet of paper displayed on the screen.

How to change this is going to be difficult.

When you're mailing something that needs more than one stamp, you still have to know the current value of that Forever Stamp.

That being said, the reason you can't just print postage online for anything but Priority/Express seems to be a really bad deal the USPS made with PitneyBowes.

I think government needs to use tax money for “police, courts, and defense” and that’s it. If I were king of the world, there wouldn’t be a king of the world and NASA would be private. But who cares what I think? We have NASA and they do the coolest things. It can’t be justified with Tang and Crazy Glue. Exploration of space is worth it because humans need to explore.

Cognitive dissonance much?

What rights do you have as an employee? Vacation time, maternity leave, severance pay?

In the US, these things are not mandatory. Good employers (like mine) are relatively generous, but not like what I've heard in Europe.