The article has so little to do with ancient history it's staggering. It's the "conceptual drought modelling" equivalent of a woodworker trying to drum up attention for his range of kitchen cabinets by saying "they're the kinds of cabinet I think Justin Bieber would like".
Some guy in a fedora and freebsd t-shirt hanging around sleazy bars downtown waiting for his flipped FBI agent to come around and drop him some new juicy goss on the latest... TF2 hat update? Sounds legit
Well, Wired is a business, and cybercrime stories are pretty good business, and a lot of people the FBI might want to reach (and let know that they're on to your games, criminal scum) probably read Wired. It would be a mutually beneficial relationship, and this isn't exactly bad press for the government, so it might be more legit than it sounds at first glance.
You have some very strange and unfounded beliefs on all this.
There is no evidence to suggest medical costs will increase as a result of legalisation. In every instance of drug legalisation or decriminalisation recorded, drug use has spiked in the short term and then fallen back down to either pre-change levels, or actually seen a long-term drop. Deaths and serious illnesses will decrease massively as a result of increased ability to provide care and safe usage conditions for drug users, as well as controlling drug quality and dosage.
You'll get a whole bunch of people out of the overcrowded and SUPREMELY expensive prison system. It's not just the cells and food while they're there, it's the lost productivity from that person while they're in prison, and it's the exorbitant administrative cost of arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning a citizen.
Why would medicare providers test you for legal drug use when healthcare costs do not scale for soft drink consumption, obesity, smoking, exercise, or any one of a thousand legal things that could affect your health? Should office workers pay more for medical care considering the adverse health effects of their living conditions?
I can't respond to any of the rest of your post because I didn't really understand it. That might be my fault, I apologise that I failed to comprehend it. I took a look at some of your other posts on this matter and it doesn't look like a once off so we may be coming at this from fundamentally incommunicable positions.
I built this free, online, no-registration tool to practise verb conjugations in French, Latin, and Italian. It is designed to replace pen-and-paper conjugation tables and to track your performance.
It is a work in progress (I want to expand to German and maybe Spanish) but the system is pretty much done, all it's missing is a few tweaks to the language sets (to better reflect current teaching practices) and some extra features for greater customisation. I also intend to add more detailed statistics tracking, such as your performance for specific verbs.
This is a one-man project and I would love any and all feedback, not just on the implementation but on the concept as well. To my mind it is a study aid for students and independent learners - if you have thoughts on why you would or wouldn't use it over the long term, I'd love to hear them.
One thing that really sucks still is the conversion of PDFs (for e.g. journal articles) into formats suitable for e-ink readers. I've tinkered with its heuristic processing and regex formatting, but I'd never considered manually touching up the final .epub as it comes. If their ebook editor is any good I might start reading journal articles again.
I think it would make much more sense to instead have the journals publish articles in more formats, rather than just HTML and PDF. For example, they should offer them in EPUB[0].
Since EPUB is much more accessible to blind/visually impaired people than PDF, perhaps the federal government could step in and mandate that all articles with content produced using federal grants must be available in a format that the blind/visually impaired can consume as well.
> "K2pdfopt works by converting each page of the PDF/DJVU file to a bitmap and then scanning the bitmap for viewable areas (rectangular regions) and cutting and cropping these regions and assembling them into multiple smaller pages without excess margins so that the viewing region is maximized. Making use of this method, k2pdfopt can re-flow text lines, even on scanned documents"
Looks promising. Hopefully this would also remove javascript and executable code from the source PDF, although any exploits may run within the context of the converter. To be safe, conversion could be run from a livecd.
PDF malware can be used for economic espionage targeting commercial research. What would help is a single open registry which has: bibliographic metadata + hash of known-good PDF for each paper.
Hey, that's pretty neat, I was just thinking it shouldn't be that hard to do something like that. I would love to be able to read academic papers on my Kindle Paperwhite, this might help with that. Reading on a regular tablet is a bit annoying at times.
I found that the easiest/best way to read PDFs on an e-reader is by extracting the text with PDFminer. It throws away the images, and the formatting often sucks, but at least you can read the text pretty well. I didn't try 2-column journal articles, so maybe it doesn't work for those, though.
I tried all sorts of other things, but this was the least painful.
The burden of that argument is that you'd never be able to 'own' photos of strangers or anybody who doesn't sign a release, or stranger's pets, or any piece of art or architecture, because the scene or object that gives the photos its essence was actually created largely by other people. You have to tie photo ownership to the physical act of taking them, and this one was not taken by him. He hadn't even intended to give the monkey his camera or tried to arrange for it - it was pure fluke, unless you count the agency of the monkey. Which here almost seems more legitimate.
This is copyright, because the photographer strapped cameras to the bird: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_photography
"A photograph of Schlosshotel Kronberg (then called Schloss Friedrichshof after its owner Kaiserin Friedrich) became famous due to its accidental inclusion of the photographer's wing tips. In a breach of copyright it was shown in German cinemas as part of the weekly newsreel in 1929.[16]"
I've been dreaming of doing this for years and I've been considering doing something quite similar to what you're talking about for my next project. The only problem, as another poster said, was investment. I was planning on doing a web-based text-based game, which would obviously turn a lot of people off ("that's not a real game!") but open it up to greater variation and modularity.
I think it's a great idea (well, see my above comment :)! Keep the scope small - this doesn't need an MMO to be successful, make it single player. Start with text and find an artist along the way.
On my walk home between posting my initial comment above and this one, I started thinking about how to make it happen as a side project and the conclusion I came to was writing the entire script/story out first as that would be the hardest part.
I've used numbeo before and I had a look at this, comparing about 10 or so different cities. The format and function is pretty much the same and I use them both for the same purpose -- a simple comparison of aggregate data on different cities using the same metric. I moved to Rome a year ago and in another year I'll be moving to some German-speaking country, so I'm comparing different cities now. It's not important to me whether the rental estimates are 100% correct or slightly high/low, what's important is that the data is collected the same way for both cities under comparison. I want a broader view to narrow the search, and then I will go elsewhere to get more accurate info -- apartment searches in the respective cities, for example. If you get enough data from varied enough sources to minimise biases (e.g. expats might live in the more expensive parts of the city and not know the local tricks, or most of your contributors might only be from a certain subset of expats) then I don't need to know the comparison of a hundred different types of little things because I can get more exact information elsewhere. What I'd recommend doing instead of narrowing your data selection is to actually broaden the scope of your comparison -- compare aggregated measures of quality of life, average temperatures/rainfall, hours of sunlight per day, number of bars or gyms per capita, etc. If I know what city I'm looking at, I can easily find a list of apartments for rent and get direct information that way. What I can't do as easily is compare the general perspective of life satisfaction or public transport penetration, crime stats, etc.
