Posts by HORansome
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I know one Minister's aide that was vetted, and I have to tell you, if the way they were vetted is normal, I would say our culture of secrecy is more Python than Kafka.
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Well, actually, no. There have been repeated tests on different and presumably more efficient keyboard layouts (especially QWERTY vs DVORAK) and typing speeds are basically the same throughout (the testing gets a little tricky because we can assume that different languages require some degree of localised and optimised layouts); it seems that it's just a persistent urban myth that the QWERTY layout hinders typing speeds.
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Some people claim that the reason everything has gone to pieces over the last six thousand years was God's reliance on early speech recognition software as an interface for the Creation Engine.
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Let me clear up one thing; the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow typists down; it was designed to prevent the keys from jamming, thus allowing typists to work even faster.
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Actually, rather than buy software to make iPad compatible videos, can I recommend Handbrake? It's free and works wonderfully.
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Like many people on a low income, I lust after things I can't really afford. However, I'm an experienced Apple user and thus will wait to spend my precious dollars on the second generation machine.
Especially since someone has ported TeX to the iPad. If Apple can fix the version of Keynote for the iPad (the current version has two limitations that mean my slides, which were made in iWork 09's version of Keynote, will not work with the iPad version of the software), then I will find not having to lug the laptop everywhere with me when I want to do work a(n expensive) blessing.
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I read the paper twice a week, when I go over to visit my Mother and thus get to see the Sunday Star-Times and the Monday New Zealand Herald. Everytime I flip through the pages al I can think of is "What a waste of paper" and not just because the reporting is rubbish to horrible in nature; I really do think print papers (and magazines) are an appalling waste of our precious resources (I'm glad academia has, by and large, embraced ejournals; I haven't had to look at a paper copy of an article for years now).
Would I be willing to pay a subscription to those papers as online, paperless entities? No; they are frankly quite awful, but I do pay subscriptions to other things online.
For example, I like "Red vs. Blue" and thus pay the meagre US$10 a year to be a sponsor (and all you get is access to the videos a few hours before anyone else) and I subscribe to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (which gives me access to pretty PDFs for the entries).
In both cases I'm not getting additional content for my subscriptions; I'm getting an additional service; early access to the videos and nicely formatted text. I think that's one way to go; restricting the news to people who pay won't work, because you can get the news elsewhere. Giving subscribers additional content if they subscribe (Raw interview footage, epub versions of the articles or sections you are interested in, et al) works, I think; people, like David Mitchell says, value content and are willing to pay for it. They're not going to pay for content they can get elsewhere but they might be willing to pay for special access to content that they would otherwise not get or special access to content.
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Gio, I'm saving my 'e's for later.
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Dammit. Now I want gelato and the campus gelataria (which, if it isn't a word, is now) is closed.
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"Collapse" was intriguing; essentially an hour and an half of Michael Rapport's face telling us how he thinks the world will end.
Rapport is engrossing; you feel like he's talking to you, not the interviewer or the camera, and everything sounds just plausible enough (and he sounds so authoritative) to keep you interested.
Of course, I'm both scared that he's the logical endpoint of my existence and that, even though I've never met him, he's already got me into trouble (he wrote the book Jeanette Fitzsimmons liked that Matt Nippert had me comment on that then got the 9/11 Truth people on my back for two weeks).