Unicode support depends on the operating system and the specific compiler. If you want to be sure everything will work on everyone's computer, escape everything that isn't standard ASCII-128. If you only care about your machine and you happen to have a nicely behaved compiler/OS combination, you can happily type an u-umlaut directly instead of \"u and it will work. That said, the escape codes are not exactly hard - it's not HTML where they're non-standard; if you want an acute accent then you use \' followed by the letter, et cetera.

If you use LaTeX, since it's built on top of TeX, what you are basically doing is accepting Don Knuth's idea of good style. Some of it is good, some is not so good.

If you use HTML, you aren't really taking anyone's idea of good style; HTML rendering is supposed to be minimalist, the browser is not meant to try to fix pretty hyphenation or whatever.

HTML is not, originally, designed to do document design. It's not even really meant to do 'pretty' web design, which is why websites are typically a mess of CSS and set styles forcing the HTML to do something it's not basically meant to do - and the later HTML spec confuses this further by trying to make the ugly forcing style standardised. What HTML was originally for was a very basic markup, enough to cope with a few text sizes and colours (and pictures, badly) on a screen that could be anything from ASCII-text only (i.e. drop all the markup and pictures), 12'' mono, 21'' VGA, et cetera - the point being that the markup should be easy to parse for the browser to render as something intelligible.

LaTeX is not especially antiquated; there's not much 'modern' that you can't do in LaTeX. What you can't easily do, is anything Knuth doesn't like. So, you may want to flow text by an image, but because Knuth doesn't like that you can't do it without a lot of work.

But the simple fact for a journal is, if everything is in the same style it looks professional. So the journal will do everything in LaTeX, and your argument that your new style looks better will be ignored; they'll just bill you for retyping the document in LaTeX.

I can tell you exactly what a journal would do with HTML: the same as they'd do with a word doc or a handwritten manuscript, namely charge you a fee for retyping.

Just a few reasons why not:

Journals today routinely refuse to accept anything but LaTeX submissions, or charge for retyping anything not in LaTeX. So there is an 'industry standard' barrier to overcome.

If Word is to compete, it will have to be possible for a journal to easily force the supplied word document into the journal style. In LaTeX this is done by telling the author not to use anything stupid (i.e. commands that force styles, which most authors will normally not use anyway) then editing one line of the supplied LaTeX to use the journal style file (or supplying said style file and having the author do it).

Microsoft will need to make it possible to easily put together LaTeX and Word submissions into one journal, with the styling indistinguishable.

Short version: the only way MS can possibly get Word to be seriously used for scientific papers is to make it export (good, non-style-forcing) LaTeX source. Which in turn would mean it would have to lose all the desktop-publishing features MS has tried to put in (since these force styles). So you'd have to have two Word modes, one where it does what it usually does, and the other where it throws out all the DTP stuff, uses LaTeX styles, and in general becomes a tex editor. But then it is in competition with a whole bunch of free software, and at most universities you are supplied with a computer which may be pre-loaded with Word, but it's also pre-loaded with a default tex editor which will not be Word. Since it's quicker (IMO) to type the tex for most of the markup you need than to switch to the mouse and place symbols on a GUI, no-one who's already using other editors will switch, and since the students who are learning LaTeX will get the default (non-MS) editor, no-one would use the MS version.

First off, I wouldn't usually consider playground teasing to be the sort of thing that does much emotional damage, so the reasonable man's (magistrate's) response ought to be that there isn't any merit in the action and here is a bill for wasting my time if it's a one-off. That said, sometimes it does mount up; sometimes there is a child who does get teased all the time, and they end up 'dealing with it' by killing themselves, or finding a gun and shooting the school up. But the school shouldn't be the obvious target to sue unless they're obviously failing in some way. The parents of the children who are actually doing the bullying should be the target.

Are you seriously suggesting that makes it all OK? A rapist should be able to say 'oh but I thought she might be a girl who had rape fantasies' and walk away free?

So most of what they're doing is a waste of time: reasonable targets would be the CHP guys who sent the original images (though I don't really see why this would go anywhere, and apparently the court agreed) and the guy who sent the abusive private email (if they could be found, which almost certainly is impossible). But how would things be different in your world? Would you suggest making it illegal to start this sort of legal action?

With regards to why you can't ignore some events, then I don't think I can explain it. I used to think you could always choose to ignore such things - I got bullied a lot at school at one point, and found I could ignore that; by now it doesn't matter to me - but then something else happened that I couldn't ignore.

Let me put it in a more simple way: most people do agree that some things you cannot just choose to ignore, and the people who stand up and disagree (obviously I can't say anything about those who don't agree but don't say so) seem to be mainly people who haven't ever had anything all that bad happen to them. You're prepared from a quite young age that your grandparents are much older than you and will die, and probably it was to some extent expected and peaceful, as opposed to an unexpectd violent death. So, either you can continue to argue that even though nothing very bad has ever happened to you, you still know how you would be able to deal with it, or you can decide that maybe the majority might have a point, your choice.

I agree, but I don't see the relevance. Drawing some kind of arbitrary line might well create false positives, but that's not what I suggested.

If you feel you have a choice about how you're going to react to something, then it wasn't really emotionally damaging. If you think this parent would have been able to somehow decide not to be upset by seeing gory pictures of a recently dead daughter with mocking captions, then you're either stupid or massively naive.

Reasonable person is already defined, I don't have to. A reasonable person is the standard for 'prove beyond reasonable doubt', et cetera. For example, a magistrate is presumed to be a reasonable person with the power to make summary decisions (unless an appeal is granted, which is really not that common).

As to your idea of retaliation in kind, that theory of morals has been dead in the water for the last 2000 years, because all it ever does is escalate a minor incident into a major incident and people getting killed.

It's important in either case. I don't think that an extremist should be able to claim freedom of speech as a defence to (say) telling a suicide bomber how to get near the President. But I don't think the right way to go about restricting his freedom of speech is to pass massively over-the-top acts giving summary powers to a bunch of badly paid, unemployable-in-any-better-job, often racist DHS security people who are even protected from the consequences of their mistakes. The right way is, when you actually need to have a decision (which again isn't that often) you let a reasonable person decide. The reason for the patriot act type stuff is essentially that Bush didn't expect his judiciary to make the decisions he wanted, so he did something that's at best borderline illegal to run around that process.

Simple test here, really. If you think you can ignore something that's happened to you, then it didn't really cause much emotional damage. Some things just are not like that - for example, rape really causes very little physical harm, but rape victims are often seriously emotionally damaged. That's not because they chose to be, it's because they couldn't ignore what happened to them. If you don't understand this, you're lucky so far, but someday you likely will understand, perhaps when you have to bury your parents, or your siblings, or your spouse - or if life is exceptionally cruel, your child.

Of course I'd go for 'I know it when I see it'. You can't write down a five line law (or even a five million page collection of laws) which is supposed to cover the whole of human behaviour in some black and white manner, there will always be loopholes and things that are forbidden that shouldn't be if you try it.

So you have to accept that some things should be decided on the individual merits of the particular case.
In this case - you saying 'fuck you' to all of Slashdot isn't really going to offend anyone.
Me playing a numbers game with something more offensive (which, yes, obviously I was) probably does offend people, but I was trying to make a point. Given you did read it, and you don't seem to have liked reading it - point proved, you can stop me doing this again, but you've already suffered some very small emotional harm, and none of the fixes you suggest would stop me using another identity and a rewording of the same text to be similarly offensive in future.
If on the other hand I'd somehow found out that you'd recently split up with someone, and I sent you that sentence in a private email, then it would probably hurt you a lot more. And it would not be in the context of a post trying to make a general point, so there wouldn't be much argument that it could contribute to any 'public good'.
This emailed picture that started the topic is a step worse again; it's not something that you could easily block (a picture sent as a real estate listing, to a realtor, cannot be spam-filtered!) and it's clearly designed just to cause hurt.

As to freedom of speech, yes, I think it means a law shouldn't be needed. Of course, it's an amendment that's been ignored by various governments, with arguments like 'oh but freedom of speech isn't important compared to the war on terror', but basically there should be a default position that you can do (publish, or act) whatever you like, with the restriction that if a reasonable person believes your action is clearly bad for society you should expect to get a kicking for it.

In the context of 'free speech', there are things which you clearly should not publish to the whole world; like a list of account and PIN numbers, or in general personal secrets which the person in question should reasonably expect to remain secret (e.g. if your neighbour leaves his blow-up sheep out in his back garden, then he might want to keep its existence a secret but he loses the reasonable expectation, if he keeps it in a locked room and you find out only by breaking in to his house, then you should expect to get in trouble if you publish its existence).
So there are some things which you should be restricted from publishing to the whole world; but in most cases, you should be able to argue that something may be offensive to many people but you were trying to make a point - like the Danish cartoons, or similar - and in that case you should be given the benefit of the doubt. In short, it should be quite hard to find things which you are actually not allowed to publish to the whole world.
However, when you write an email (or letter, or whatever) to one person, then you should lose a lot of that protection. You're no longer doing anything that could be good for society - putting pictures of a car crash on the internet you could argue you're convincing people to drive more safely in future, sending them to the parents of the dead girl, you cannot make that argument.

Intent to punch someone in the face isn't a crime, either. Actually doing it (deliberately) is a crime, and a jury will decide whether you were deliberately punched (or not) before sending the guy who punched you to jail (or not).

Saying 'fuck you' to Joe Random on the internet won't meet any reasonable person's idea of causing emotional harm, so no jury will be convinced that your post is something that means you should be sent to jail, so no problem. But that doesn't mean that emotional harm is impossible, or not a crime. That's what slander and libel laws are for, in part. As to your half-baked idea that you 'like your civil liberties', the idea that you can say anything you like and get away with it is not and has never been part of any civil code. Go and read the 1st amendment to the US constitution (guessing that you're thinking of that) and you'll find it does not say what you assume.

By the way, your ex left you because they were bored with you.

If you didn't like that, why did you read it? Your fault, not my problem - at least that's what you seem to think.

So what you're saying is, if you lose your daughter (even if it was mainly due to her being an idiot) the first thing you should do is reset your mail filter in case someone sends you gory pictures of her dead body? And along the way you should massively improve our current ability to perform image recognition (given the description, the image wasn't named anything obvious)?

In terms of censorship, you cannot just legislate and expect rules to cover everything. You have to accept that many, or even most, cases will have to be decided on their own. To give examples, there are some things that clearly should not be public knowledge - so someone who tries to publish a list of (illegally acquired) account and PIN numbers should find they are censored (and prosecuted). There are some things that should clearly not be censored - like Rushdie's works, whether or not you think they lack much literary merit.

In this case, there is no public interest - it's an email sent to one person. This is nothing more than some jackass trying to cause hurt, and the jackass in question deserves to receive a legal kicking. Of course, it may well be impossible to find the jackass, and it's not sensible to try to sue the internet...

With the Danish cartoons (or Entropa, or a whole host of such things) you have to ask whether the creator is solely intending to cause offence or not - and even if you decide the aim is just to cause offence, possibly you might still decide that publication is in the public good. As an example, if the jackass who sent the email had posted these images to some website with a caption like 'darwin strikes again' or something of that nature, then I'd say that is fine.

Short version: if you send a private message to one person, you should try to make sure it doesn't cause pain, and you should expect not to receive any benefit of doubt about your motives. If you publish something to the whole world (and you're not being deceptive, for example you don't link a shock image as 'cute lambs in a field') then you should receive every possible benefit of the doubt.

Lots of questions.

There aren't really any viable 'non-math' approaches to finance these days. However if you want to work in finance, you need to have in mind ideas of risk, profit, and so on. 100 years ago when there was some idea of 'any profit is good' you could hire an expert in mining to advise you on which mine stocks to buy, and that would be all you'd need - these days, small percentage profits are actually bad for your business (your market value is better if you make £100 on a £1000 investment compared to £500 on a £10,000 investment, so it can be good to sell off bits of a business that make a profit). So, banks will continue to want quants.

On the other hand, something that isn't well-enough realised is that ultimately what banks are playing with is quite close to a fixed-total-reward game. If you make a huge profit then someone has to be making a huge loss to compensate. What confuses the issue is that various financial tricks - hedging and the like - mean that you're effectively playing not only against every other bank on the planet, but also against future time versions of yourself and your competitors. If you and everyone else are doing too well now, then what you are doing is beating up on the future-time versions of yourselves. Which is fine for a while - those future-time versions can in turn beat up on their futures: but eventually you end up claiming that you hold a certificate now for 100 years of future work, and people refuse to believe in its value. At this point you get an economic collapse.

Short version: you should not go for a PhD just because you think it will increase your salary later. If that's all you want, drop your graduate program and get a job, it will save you several years of misery trying to work on something you're not really interested in. If you are actually passionate about some subject, then that is what you should do a PhD on.

What's wrong with a few different variants of string? It's not as if there is only one type of integer or 'real' variable...

16 bit strings are not huge, but a 32 bit string is a reasonable chunk of data; and we won't run into trouble with 64 bit strings for a while yet. So - STR for 8 bit, LSTR for 32 bit and XSTR for 128-bit strings will do for the next millennium or so... seems this might be familiar?

Long ago, you've set up a table with a bunch of entries, and at some point you decide not to enter a datum into a field (because, perhaps, you don't at present know the correct datum). This has to be stored somehow; and NULL is the placeholder that is used (avoiding placeholders is access-expensive). For obvious good reasons, NULL should be distinguishable from 'real' data. No problems so far.

Then a bit later SQL is standardised, and by this time your database has quite a lot of NULL entries floating around, so you want NULL comparison tools to exist in SQL. So they are created. And then lots of DBA types proceed to abuse them in production software, by doing stuff like 'this field is INT but we allow NULL to be a wildcard'.

Instant dismissal and the teacher would be lucky if they didn't end up on the sex offenders list (which especially when the list says offences against a minor means you will never get another job working with minors, and many other jobs will suddenly be harder to get). Probably no significant criminal punishment, because the standards are different (a court is very unlikely to uphold charges of molestation when it clearly isn't) but a destroyed career and very limited options to start another is bad enough with or without jail time.

If it is theft then why the private prosecutions? Thieves are prosecuted by the authorities not the victim.

Theft happens when something physical is lost to the victim as well as the thief getting something illegally.

Piracy (in the TPB sense not the high-seas sense) is when nothing physical is lost, the pirate gets something illegally, and the victim has to sue to recover the lost potential earnings (i.e. the money they should have if the stuff had been bought not pirated). It simply isn't the same thing, not least because it is always pretty easy to put a money value on theft, but much harder to put a money value on piracy.