Spherical Time @18: Do you feel that part of the penalty of a jail sentence should be that nobody in governmental power has any incentive to look out for your welfare and to ensure that your punishment is in fact fair and just, rather than cruel and unreasonable due to mismanagement?
I think a large part of the crux of Abi and Pericat's point is summed up in a "no" answer to that question. That's something rather different from, say, bearing arms.
Also, I would note that you're lumping "rights and privileges" into a single homogeneous mass, which I think is misleading your thinking. You would agree that a prisoner has the right not to be starved to death, not to be raped or murdered, and similar things, yes? If so, then I hope you can see that the question is one of which rights and privileges should be revoked, and can then reframe your position to explain why this particular one should be one of the ones that's revoked rather than one of the ones that's retained.
theophylact @55: And then, when a guest complains about the noise from the party in room 1, you simply assign them to the room number obtained by doubling their existing room number.
lightning @66: Oh, right, that part about letting the steak rest reminds me of the other part of my steak "recipe" that I find fairly critical. (The first is putting a decent amount of pepper, and ideally a little bit of salt and other spice, on it.) Take some bread, ideally a thick slice of sourdough though french also works well, and toast it to a light golden brown. Serve the steak on top of it, so that it soaks up the juices.
I suspect this likely originated as a way to make a small steak into a larger meal, but it's how I always had steaks when I was a child, and now they just taste a bit overly greasy to me if they don't have the bread with them.
The combination of these two factors tends to mean that I find steakhouse steaks, even ones at supposedly really outstanding steakhouses, to be unsatisfying and disappointing. (The one exception that comes to mind involved strips of green onion, IIRC, and fresh herbs and some sort of sauce, and was really about combining the steak with other flavors. It was delicious, and very different from the other steak-based dish on the menu that my wife had.)
Okay, now I want to put fresh cilantro on my next steak....
First question: What thickness of steak is this recipe intended for? These things vary quite a lot.
Meanwhile, as for quality of steaks -- IMO, the quality of a cut of steak has little relationship to its price. The price of a steak is generally proportional to its tenderness and fashionability, as far as I can tell, but to some extent flavor tends to go inverse to tenderness, and any steak can be made tender with a thorough massage. So lately I've been buying chuck steaks, which are tough as leather if ill-prepared but delicious, and tenderizing them.
More importantly, I guess the point is that different cuts of steak have quite different flavor levels and textures and so forth, and that this is something that is a matter of taste and preference, not a matter of some absolute scale.
Here's my "recipe" for tenderizing a steak: Mash flat with heel of hand, pressing hard. Once the steak is flat, squeeze it in one horizontal direction to make it thick again. Then squeeze in the other horizontal direction. Repeat until you get about a 2x dimensional change for each direction of squeezing. (Focus on the firm bits when squeezing it flat.) Spice rub -- salt, pepper, etc. -- should be applied before the tenderizing. Cook the steak in the "thick" configuration, with the horizontal dimensions evened out.
I usually cook my steaks under the stove broiler, with a good coating of McCormick's "Montreal Steak Seasoning" (coarse salt, black pepper, dill seeds, and a handful of other things). Start with a cold oven to avoid overcooking the middle, and cook the first side twice as long as the second.
It should probably be noted that, even with normal physical sales, the "I bought it, therefore I own it" does not apply to stolen property, regardless of whether the purchaser knows it's stolen. I'm not so sure how the "and am secure from having it taken away without warning" applies, but I would expect that also does not apply -- after all, repossessors quite often take away unpaid-for cars and the like, sans consent and participation of the current holder of the car.
Translating this all into the electronic information realm is tricky, but I think it's worth remembering that it's not quite as cut-and-dried as we might claim even in the physical-object world.
Nix @83: Nonetheless, there is something going on with Mozilla that's not going on with Opera, given that I regularly have 60-70 tabs open in Opera, leave it running for months, and only get slowdowns on rare occasions when I've reloaded a single tab a few hundred times and it's caching all the previous stuff for me to go back to with my "back" button. Closing that single tab fixes it.
So I would think that to be evidence that, if Mozilla can't do the same thing without getting slow, it's doing something wrong somehow.
(On the other hand, I turn off all plugins; no flash, in-browser PDFs, etc. That may have something to do with it.)
Oh, and -- what with this being the modern world and all -- it has its own official website: http://www.por-bajin.ru.
(I note, as a completely different thing, that the style sheet for "your entry is in the moderation queue" is either hideous or got misloaded when I hit it. I mean, 150-point red-on-blue blink text? Seriously?)
Hmm. I posted a couple of links, but my comment got stuck in the moderation queue. Let me try a different Google-Earth one, this time without the hyperlink: http://wikimapia.org/2563655/Fort-Por-Bajin
It's called Por-Bazhyn or Por-Bajin, and claimed to be 8th-century. I think Tom's suggestion about it being built "after the style of a Roman camp" rather than actually being Roman sounds pretty plausible.
The first Google Images search result on "Por-Bazhyn" is a rather interesting little archaeological find from the site; I'm not quite sure exactly what it is.
Found some other comments on the article via Google, with some links.
First, the obligatory "here it is on Google Earth" link:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/download.php?Number=820571&t=k&om=1
(Note that that loads some rather low-quality overlay images, but if you uncheck their checkboxes, you can see the actual Google-earth photo.)
Apparently it's called Por-Bazhyn, and it's not actually Roman. (The Google-earth annotations assert 8th-century, but give no cite for that.) Here's some more info about it:
http://www.uyghurcongress.org/En/news.asp?ItemID=-1237346334&rcid=803688565&pcid=1110134820&cid=803688565&mid=-2139923529
I wish to register the observation that I also use Opera.
Except earlier today, when I was using IE8 because my computer has only had this hard disk since yesterday noon, and top priority was getting Powerpoint working again and essentials restored before I got on the plane out yesterday evening. A lot about my day can be inferred from this datapoint.
Phiala @5: My impression when trying to match DMC threads to things is that there are a number of notable gaps in that range. (Of course, I suppose there are likely to be some in crayons, too.)
Alex @92: I am reminded of this story, in which telling the truth had the same effect:
Answerer: Hello, this is the Lastname residence, may I help you?
Telemarketer: Hello! Is this Mrs. Lastname?
Answerer: No, she's not here at the moment. Can I take a message?
Telemarketer: Is Mr. Lastname home?
Answerer: No, he's not. How can I help you?
Telemarketer: Are you his daughter?
Answerer: No, I'm not. Would you like to leave a message?
Telemarketer: Are you the housekeeper?
Answerer: No, I'm not.
Telemarketer: Well, who the heck are you?
Answerer: I'm Mr. Lastname's mistress. May I take a message for you?
Telemarketer: *stunned silence* *click*
John L. @3: "Well, why didn't you do that INSTEAD OF phoning him in the first place?"
In my experience, a lot of questions -- particularly relatively small questions, or questions that require a little back-and-forth communication -- can be rather more efficiently solved by phone than by email, especially when the person being asked is not in a mode where they're likely to have problems with being interrupted. (For example, a friend of mine is working on her house today; she emailed me early this morning to ask if she could borrow my sander. The right way to respond was calling her back -- in less than a minute, with only one interruption to both of us, I'd confirmed that I could loan it to her and we'd agreed on a time and place to hand it over. It's taking me nearly a minute just to type out this explanation!)
For my work, where most of us are programmers who are likely to find phonecalls quite interruptive to our process, I've found that our internal IRC network is pretty much ideal for this -- it allows real-time conversation, but is not real-time interruption.
Meanwhile, on the original topic -- one of the things I really like about my phone service is that they'll convert voicemail messages to MP3 and bounce them to my email. That way, I'll at least know that I got the message in a timely fashion, and also I don't have to deal with an interminable phone menu to listen to them and erase them.
(Sigh. Apparently my editing of that last sentence broke, too.)
The "drink from the cup as if it is already broken" maxim reminds me very much of this piece of artwork that Theresa (aka Tiger Spot) made when one her much-liked teacup broke.
Mary Aileen @64: There's also the (very not-mobile) "New England Mobile Bookfair" on the outskirts of Boston that does that with theirs (and then by title within that!). Their reasoning is that it saves them lots of trouble in that they just get the box from the publisher, take it to the right aisle, and shelve it all right there. Their reasoning for subjecting the buyers to this is that they offer cheaper prices and can carry vast amounts of inventory by doing things like this; they're sort of a brick-and-mortar Amazon.
(Oh, and they also have a labyrinthine other half of the store that's remaindered books; those are sorted approximately by subject.)
Why, yes, this does make them a dangerous place to visit. Why do you ask?
David @17: Indeed; that's one of the big changes since SETI@Home started -- computers have become much better about not having "spare CPU cycles" in the original sense. It used to be that (to a reasonable approximation) a computer that was only sitting and waiting for you to press a key would be using just as much power as if it were actively computing as much as it could, so there really was no additional cost to running these things. These days, a computer that's not doing computations has all sorts of ways to reduce its power consumption by quite a lot, especially if you're talking about computations on the graphics card as well as the CPU, and so the unused cycles aren't being wasted in the same way. Moreover, these days the cost of a computer compared to the cost of the power required to run it is going down, so that pushes the balance even farther towards the incremental cost of running these programs instead of the already-sunk fixed cost of the idle hardware.
It's still valuable work, but it's not nearly the "something for nothing" that it once was. At a rough guess, I'd say the costs of running SETI@Home on four hundred thousand machines instead of letting those machines sit idle are somewhere in the millions of dollars per month.
(The fact that something like this can get people to contribute that much cash, via their electric bill, to such a project is itself quite a remarkable thing, IMO.)
I just want to point out this blog post of a Republican who got 'punked'. Because she has written an intelligent and thoughtful reply, and most of the comments on the thread are very much in that vein.
And it's good to be reminded that (a) 'we' can be just a gullible and susceptible to confirmation bias as 'them', and (b) that 'they' are often people a lot like us, rather than like the loud obnoxious jerks with radio/TV shows.
Randolph @305 and @338, Jon Baker @307: Unlike Google Books (which functionally contains the actual books), Google Scholar is a bibliographic database. It does not present the user with the academic books and journal articles; it contains bibliographic data about them and provides links back to places the articles are published.
The biggest problems arise not when the information in the database is erroneous, but the same as the problem with AmazonFail: when the information is incomplete in misleading ways, and things are missing. (And sometimes the information in the database is wrong -- I've heard of papers getting put up on publisher's sites with errors in things like DOIs and author names. If you're looking for the author name on a paper, are you going to actually follow the link back, rather than just looking at what Google's page says?)
Some ways that the information in the database can be incomplete: First, the database is not necessarily up-to-date. If a paper was published in the last couple of months, it may not be in the index.
Second, if the publisher has their articles behind a paywall (as most do, to pay for editing and other expenses of making published material) and has not gone to special lengths to allow Google to index the articles, these links will not contain the official version of the article -- they will only contain unofficial versions at preprint servers and the like. Similarly, if for some reason the publisher's site was down that day, or something else was going wrong, those articles won't be in the database.
Third, the confluence of these -- if a publisher had a glitch that prevented Google from indexing their site several months ago, those papers may still not be in the index.
(FWIW, I don't have insider-to-Google knowledge of the database, but I do have knowledge from people in the journal publishing industry who have talked to them about it, and in particular have complained about item 3 and gotten replies that it's just in Beta so this isn't considered a problem.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 29 |
| 2008 | 127 |
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