No, I really am a computational linguist with a great interest in power laws as applicable to communication.

Well, I plead guilty to being a computational linguist... but inspired by Zipf and Mandelbrot, I have messed around a lot with all kinds of communication data and generally you need a hundred thousand or more.

I doubt very much that there is enough terrorism-related data to have much confidence in this analysis. You need quantities lijke the number of words in a book to extract with any confidence Zipfs law or most other power laws. Even then, there are enough deviations from the straight line (on logscale, of course) to make the drawing of conclusions a very interesting job indeed.

Paai

To begin with, a sucessor/collaborator for Pratchett would have to be sixtyish, like Pratchett himself (and yours truly). That is because he draws so heavily from his experiences as an very intelligent observer of the second half of the 20th century, including the fifties and sixties. I *know* that my 25 and 28 years old daughters are Pratchett adepts, and I always wonder in how far they get the allusions, and if not, why they can enjoy the books so much.

You mentioned Good Omens, which certainly is one of the best (and which incidentally depends very much on biblical knowledge), but ithat book certainly is not the result of a slick writer taking over from a dead or retiring author.

"Terry Pratchetts Diskworld, in association with X" is a possibility that I did not yet even consider. Some things are too horrific even to think about.

But the day that people so completely lost their cultural roots that Salomon is forgotten, will be a black day indeed.

I *like* Pratchett, but Salomon came first :-)

Hasn't Knuth an award out for everybody who found a bug in TeX? Somebody must have found one :-)

Why do American minerals always end up in the soil of other countries?

paai

I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10 on two desktop machines, a laptop and a netbook.

* On the laptop, the wlan (rt61-based) stopped working. After searching the bug database and Google, this appeared a known issue, but the laptop is unuseable for work untill I buy myself an USB dongle. I really was upset about this.

* On one dektop several graphic features of the KDE destop stopped working, such as the revolving cube.

* There are unresolved issues with the fonts of thunderbird. This seems to be related to the use of KDE over an NX connection.

There are some bugs that I hoped/expected to be solved after the upgrade, but still are not working satisfactorily:

* syncing Evolution with a Palm Treo is not yet without problems, like the duplication of entries and having to reconfigure bluetooth after every sync.

* kpilot still a mess, Actually I consider it a total loss that cannot be salvaged any more.

* scrolling of firefox still too slow. This is a problem over a NX connection.

I would expect one of the most important features for a good desktop, the ability to use all functions of the PDA from the desktop, before all, effortless syncing of calendar, contacts and memos.

As far as I know, there is only a single line of PDAs that more or less can sync with Linux: the PALM based ones. Even then, there are all kinds of problems. Kpilot did work after a fashion with KDE3, but it is hopelessly broken with KDE4 because of the Akonadi disaster. Evolution does sync, even with bluetooth, but there still are some bugs. Jpilot works fine, but only over a serial link, and it is a stand-alone application.

If you don't have a Palm (and they are really old fashioned nowadays), the situation is worse. I know of no modern PDA, that is guaranteed to sync with the Linux desktop. Sometimes, partial succes is reported, but even then we are not talking out-of-the-box solutions. There is always a fair amount fiddling with libraries, (re)compiling, much burning of incense and never 100% functionality.

Somebody tell that to marc shuttleworth...

Hans Paijmans
 

yesterday I got this fake when visiting www.tvgids.nl. As I use Linux, for me it is of academic interest only, but I thought it dangerous enough to inform the administrator of that site.

Paai

I don't know if your trip extends to Europe, but if it does, the Deutches Museum at Munich is probably the best museum in its kind that I have seen (and yes, I have seen the Smithsonian too).

Imagine a leading industrial nation that lost two wars, but still is one of the richest countries of the world. Imagine the urge that possesses such a nation to show the world that it still counts as a leading nation in this and other fields. Imagine (almost) unlimited funds. Now you have the Deutsches Museum.

Found in Germany by an international team. But unveiled in the American museum for natural history in New York, and rightly so. Lesser nations have no right on the discoveries made in their own soil.