When I saw the headline I thought this was another sweat lodge post.
@26: "It's pretty telling that people thought Tsvangirai had a shot at the Prize for joining a "unity" government in Zimbabwe."
Sadly, I think there's something to be said for even that, rather than resorting to violence.
The problem with the 'incentive' strategy is that it fails to perceive US domestic politics in the same way that US hawks failed to understand the likely effect of strongly expressing support for the green movement in Iran.
Yeah, maybe it'll be an incentive to live up to the promises and potential. But it might also be an extra incentive for the GOP to block any such efforts and otherwise bring Obama down. It'd be twice as sweet for them to make both Obama and the Nobel people look bad. (And then there are the rapture people for whom anyone peace oriented must surely be the antichrist.)
Personally, I think someone like Morgan Tsvangarai would have been a better choice. Sure, Mugabe's still in control, but Tsvangarai's peacefully overcome near-fatal beatings to obtain a seat in government, and things have arguably improved somewhat (though mostly due to changing to the dollar from their currency which was rapidly approaching Planck scale value.)
serge @10: "They go to Berkeley?"
I'd think San Jose.
abi @14: "Teresa is a bad influence."
Teresa is a wonderfully bad influence.
Fixed that for you.
Charlie @115: "Jon H: BSD and witchcraft? That's all too plausible."
I also have your 'Wireless' on there, Lovecraft's "Shadow Out Of Time", some C++ books, a book about the money market, and for "there is none geekier" giggles, an illicit PDF of the 1st ed. Fiend Folio.
I suspect the combination may have opened a wormhole through time and caused the whole banking mess. My bad.
Ah, I have a clippings file backed up on my Mac.
Here's a verbatim sample:
The Age of Napoleon (Alistair Horne)
- Highlight Loc. 287-91 | Added on Saturday, June 13, 2009, 03:34 AM
After nine months of intense secret negotiations, the Concordat, signed in July 1801, brought France back into the Roman Catholic fold. As head of state, Napoleon, however, retained the right to appoint bishops, who took their oaths before him. It was part of the deal that compensation was promised for ecclesiastical lands seized by the Revolution; few, in fact, were actually handed back. Napoleon’s conciliatory masterstroke, the Concordat, remained in force for more than a hundred years, until 1905, when a new bout of anticlericalism swept France and the Church was disestablished.
==========
Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System, The (John S. Quarterman)
- Bookmark Loc. 719 | Added on Sunday, June 14, 2009, 03:48 AM
==========
Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds (Darren Oldridge)
- Highlight Loc. 123-25 | Added on Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 11:50 PM
philosophy of the Church Fathers. The most and worship the devil—were found mainly in the writings of educated men. serious allegations against witches—that they gathered at night to kill babies While the legal prosecution of witches was exceptional in many respects, there is little in the surviving records to
==========
geekosaur @63 "So, for example: What happens to local annotations when the work they are attached to no longer exists in the cloud? "
I'm not sure what happens, but annotations are *not* (only?) stored in the books themselves.
If you plug your kindle in via USB, all your annotations and marked passages, from all your books, are in a single plain text file. IIRC there are indications of source text and location for each item, and I think they're grouped by source book, so it's not a horrible jumble.
Presumably when you're reading a book, the reader application parses the file in order to know what annotations and markings exist for the current book.
I don't know, but I doubt that they delete annotations from this file if the source book is deleted.
Re: water and e-book readers
Kindles work fairly well in zip-lock bags. My father uses one for his kindle when reading on the back deck and concerned about bird poo.
The main problem is the little joystick, so best to select your reading material before getting in the tub.
I would think a double-ziploc might provide adequate protection in the bath in the event of a quick drop. If you're really worried, you could always put tampons in each of the ziplocs to lock up any water that intrudes.
geekosaur @63 "Something that occurs to me: you don't actually store all the books in the Kindle, do you?"
You probably can. I have 70-some on mine. If you remove an e-book that you purchased, it is listed in the "Archive", which are books that are stored on Amazon's server and can be re-downloaded when you want them.
Files on your kindle that you didn't buy (ie, what you put on there via USB or email) are permanently deleted when you remove them from your Kindle. So keep backups.
All the text (purchased and otherwise) on your kindle are in the "documents" directory when the device is mounted as a flash drive. You can copy everything to your hard drive to make a local backup.
What I don't know is what would happen if a backed-up copy of the 'illicit' 1984 were restored to a kindle. Would the 'delete' command from Amazon be performed again? Would the restored file be checked against the account's list of owned ebooks, found to be discrepant, and deleted or made unusable? Or would it work? (And, what effect would it have if the wireless were always off when the 1984 text was on the device?)
Fragano @75: "Avram #61: The Kindle is a symptom, not a cause. It's part of the larger "bowling alone" phenomenon, that's had other social scientists worried about the collapse of social capital."
Reading books in public is also part of "bowling alone". Or writing in a journal. Or typing on a laptop. Basically, anything where you're not telegraphing that you're eager for conversation.
Nothing new about the kindle, apart from it being harder to tell if a person with a kindle is reading "Fap-king of Gor".
I'm not at all surprised somebody managed to slip some unauthorized editions on to the kindle store.
The kindle store has woeful quality control. Lots of self-published dreck. Lots of public domain spam. Spam? Yes, when one publisher fills the store with page after page of obscure public-domain e-books, including the diaries of Samuel Pepys divided into individual months, I call it spamming.
I dearly wish I could ban publishers from my Kindle store listings. First to go would be, yes, "Amazon Digital Services".
Xopher @19: "Are there any Republican governors who are NOT narcissists with severe delusions of adequacy?"
Well, there was the Republican governor of Utah, but he's now Obama's ambassador to China.
Connecticut's Republican governor, Jodi Rell, hasn't AFAIK had any major problems.
TNH: "Come, now. They'd only be a threat if they had the ability to reproduce themselves."
Would that include the ability to set up a Vegas flesh-eating robot stage show and travelling exhibition, feeding ticket receipts into various robot-controlled shell corporations with Swiss bank accounts, who hire Chinese factories to make more flesh-eating robots?
Direct reproduction is so.... traditional. Outsourcing is where it's at.
It's not the futuristic ones you have to worry about, it's when they're present-day robots feeding on the human population.
Hm. Seems like a hole in his statement that you could drive a killdozer through.
ajay #18: "It's the setting that makes me suspicious - I don't think Romans would build on an island, either temporarily or permanently. They had more faith in themselves."
Maybe it wasn't an island when it was built, but a low hill.
"Nice idea, but the ferries do not carry cars."
That's why I said "almost drive to France". You can drive to the ferry, and I'm not sure why you'd need a car on the teeny tiny islands.
You can also almost drive to France from the US via Newfoundland and a trip on a ferry. The islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, southwest of Newfoundland, are French territories.
Tim Walters @63: " (well, that and the fact that it's probably quite a bit flimsier than the monome, being built out of plastic rather than wood)"
Actually, the Tenori-on frame is apparently made out of magnesium, so it ought to be pretty sturdy.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 40 |
| 2008 | 45 |
| 2007 | 101 |
| 2006 | 47 |
| 2005 | 61 |
| 2004 | 37 |
| 2003 | 69 |
| 2002 | 4 |
Total: 404 comments. View all these comments on a single page. (May take some time to load.)
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jon H:
Show all comments by Jon H.