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Comment Re:Here's an idea. (Score 1) 252

Thing is, if I were running a clandestine organization, I'd want my recruits to stay off social networking sites. I don't want the authorities to find our network mirrored on Facebook. So my ideal recruit would have the social networking trail of . . . an undercover policeman.

Comment Re:Libraries? (Score 1) 669

Libraries may close or may go fully digital. They'll be allowed to do this because nobody will care about paper books. The books might go into storage somewhere (even in the basement) or they might be trashed. The Library of Congress will still be there, and so will the city zoo, with lions.

Comment Re:No big secret here (Score 1) 235

I don't even see a cable saying the contact didn't see bloodshed. What two of them (with slightly different wording) say is "THERE WAS NO MASS FIRING INTO THE CROWD OF STUDENTS AT THE MONUMENT". These are edited by the Telegraph, but if they edited out a clearer refutation of bloodshed . . . why? "No mass firing" in the square is consistent with what I thought we thought we knew. Nothing about people not being run over by tanks or other vehicles in a part of the square this diplomat may or may not have been watching.

Comment The third way (Score 1) 720

That's the other thing about the CLI vs GUI debate. It doesn't only ignore the fact that you can use both together, but that some applications are neither CLI nor GUI. Yes, they have GUI versions, but emacs and vim are fundamentally not GUI applications. They are, let's speak it, full screen text mode.

Full screen text mode is not a CLI. There are editors that run in a pure command line. The most famous is ed. When vi was invented, it was a big step up from ed, but it wasn't a full replacement because it required full screen text mode.

Full screen text mode is certainly not a class of GUI. It doesn't require graphics. It may borrow concepts from a GUI, like pointers, menus, even windows, but it isn't graphical because it doesn't require the operating system to have graphics capabilities.

Full screen text mode is what we were using before GUIs took off. For certain tasks, it can be as usable as a GUI. It does, however become redundant when you have a GUI, hence vim and emacs get upgraded to GUI applications. The CLI, then, is the survivor, and full screen text mode gets written out of history.

Comment Re:We'll Have to Agree to Disagree (Score 1) 1073

Sorry, great analysis and all, but how do you make Jim wise and intelligent? He believes in witches. He thinks touching a snake skin brings you bad luck. He lets a white boy lead him south down the Mississippi. He goes along with Tom's ridiculous escape plan, even leaving his prison to help carry the useless grindstone back, because he trusts white folks to know what's best for him. If there weren't so many white idiots in the book you'd think he was a racial stereotype.

Comment Re:Ministry of Truth? (Score 1) 1073

They had the words "negro" and "slave". (And, yes, often the word "nigger" does mean "slave" as it's used in the book. I have the Gutenberg Project file here, 5 mentions of "slave" and 5 of "slavery" against 203 of "nigger" in a book about slavery.) Google says that "nigger" was always a minority term in print. Twain made a deliberate decision to use it, and not to use other offensive words (no "damn", no "bitch", and a lot of highly suspicious "blame"-ing). The language was chosen to shock. It was shocking then as it is now. That doesn't mean it should be censored, but let's call a spade a spade.

Comment Re:Ministry of Truth? (Score 1) 1073

Because, Samuel Clemmons was a unapologetic satirist. The only people using the derogatory words were the idiots of the book, the so-called "fine and upstanding citizens of society" were fools, criminals and murderers. The fact that the words are more hideous now makes the fools of the book look even more foolish.

Not true. Everybody uses the word. Huck, as narrator, uses the word. Jim uses the word. You can say every character is an idiot, but don't suggest that the word was used selectively.

Comment Re:Abomination (Score 1) 136

I've seen presentations run from a PDF before. It would be a pity to lose these possibilities.

I don't see anything in the linked page to say you'll lose that possibility. All you need is a projector-sized page and internal hyperlinks. (You don't need hyperlinks, but they can be used for navigation.) You will lose embedded animations.

Comment Re:How to kill the evil capslock key (Score 1) 391

Indeed, and here's how to do it, from the xmodmap man page:

remove Lock = Caps_Lock
remove Control = Control_L
keysym Control_L = Caps_Lock
keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L
add Lock = Caps_Lock
add Control = Control_L

That's actually not the best way, because running it twice leaves you back where you started. And sometimes you do need to re-run it, like if you plug in a USB keyboard or Gnome decides that it knows better what mapping you want. If you're on Gnome, it's best to work with it, and set this in Keyboard Preferences|Layouts|Layout Options. A .Xmodmap file in your home directory might also be respected.

There we go, a serious answer from a frivolous thread.

Comment Re:Hunger Strike? (Score 1) 151

The truth is, the PRC is completely clueless about PR (public relations) and will continue to be roundly slaughtered in the court of public opinion because of this.

They're clueless about international PR. They manage the Chinese public's opinion very well. What we see as bad PR is partly that the message for China doesn't work outside China and partly that the government doesn't realize this and doesn't understand liberal culture.

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