TomDavey
Some comments in this thread are arguing that many less economically developed countries provide poorer connectivity and lesser bandwidth than elsewhere. Are the users in these countries truly "sub-3%" of the global user base? I honestly don't know.
Depends on the site, naturally, but it seems to me that devoting dev resources to serve users in less developed countries is a good thing. Wikipedia, for instance, renders essentially the same with or without Javascript. That helps to account for its vast international uptake, is my guess.
Elisp authors have written package extensions (aka "plug-ins") for Org-mode that provide even more powerful and specialized note-taking. Among the most popular today are org-roam (built on the zettlekasten method) and denote.el.
Org-mode can't be beat, IMO, if you live in Emacs all day long, as I do.
My control key is hard to reach, so I hold spacebar instead,
and I configured Emacs to interpret a rapid temperature rise
as "Control."
As noted by others in this thread, the active voice puts the focus on the actor, i.e. the grammatical subject. This lends the construction vigor. The passive voice, which puts the focus on the grammatical object, is weak and even dull by comparison,
As well, by diminishing the actor, the passive voice can serve to evade responsibility and accountability: "The campaign finance rules were violated by the senators." rather than the more pointed "The senators violated the campaign finance rules." This convenient effect explains the prevalence of the passive voice in bureaucratic prose, which was Orwell's particular bête noire.
The active voice is also less "wordy," which improves the vigor of the style. In the example I just gave, the word count is 9 versus 7. I achieved the lower count by removing an auxiliary verb ("were") and a preposition ("by").
Now, I could have written the previous sentence like this: "The lower count was achieved by removing an auxiliary verb . . ." etc. Here the passive voice is probably preferred, because the actor, "I", is not of significance, and may even distract.
The passive voice does have its uses, hence the caveat "whenever feasible" in the first sentence above.
And he was stone deaf by then. It's staggering.
The musical style, a decisive break from the High Baroque, was initially called "Sturm und Drang." It appeared in the work of Gluck and Haydn in the 1760s.
By the first decade of the 19th century, Goethe and Schiller had retreated from Romanticism. In the same decade, middle-period Beethoven had already made Romanticism immortal.
Immortal is not an exaggeration. To this day, orchestral film music remains utterly derivative of late Romantic composers like Richard Strauss.
The most famous example of musical Romanticism's enduring dominion is probably the opening of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Everybody knows the fanfare and the ecstatic harmonic progression that follows in full tutti; few know it was written by Strauss in 1894.
The rip-offs of Academy Award winner John Williams would be impossible without the much better music of the 19th century.
Corresponding data point: in 1822, Beethoven chose Schiller's "Ode to Joy" (1785) to provide the lyrics for the final movement of the 9th Symphony.
And, as the parent noted, my 6s is still getting security updates; current is 15.7.1. I'd swear Apple is sneaking in some UI polishing too.
The experience I dislike goes like this: The server gives you the hand-held terminal and then stands watching you, tapping his/her foot impatiently, while you hurriedly verify the check, then calculate a tip amount under the server's scrutiny. I guess I'm a wimp. With the server's eyes on me, I feel the pressure to tip generously, no matter how poor the service or the overall experience.
By contrast, I find the traditional system, where the server would drop off the paper check for you to examine on your own time, to be private, un-rushed, and less prone to error.
After three decades of paying my restaurant checks without a POS terminal, I've never encountered any monkey business during the brief time the server is in possession of my credit card. Is "restaurant credit-card fraud" really a thing?
What is this Windows Explorer of which you speak?
Serious question: how does "media on elections" disenfranchise voters? I would have thought that they usefully inform voters, or at least remind voters of the importance of voting.
However, the single Firefox extension that's indispensable to me is Tree Style Tabs. See: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab.
Is it possible (for a Web page hoarder like me) to organize and access 500+ tabs across seven Firefox windows? You betcha it is, with Tree Style Tabs.
Something that I have read, and highly recommend, is Steven Pinker's latest book, his 17th: "Rationality." As a person who considers himself to be coldly rational, I found the book quite humbling.
In case Emacs aborts for some reason, at restart Emacs will alert you that the newer copy exists and ask if you want to use the copy instead, which you usually (but not always) do.
If you want Emacs to automatically save the original file after a configurable interval, use auto-save-visited-mode.
This is the best way to fix a first draft, of short texts at least, without having to wait for it to cool off first. Often an email must be sent quickly, with no time to set the message aside. So always before I hit Send, I invest a minute to pronounce the text aloud, or at least under my breath while moving my lips.
I'm often amazed at the obvious typos I catch this way. As well, my oral fluency -- which appears to come from a whole different place than my written voice -- can often improve entire sentences with better word choices or figures of speech that emerge from my mouth spontaneously as I speak the text back.
Voilà! A much better second draft of the message in a very efficient manner.
And yes, I read this post aloud before I pressed "add comment." I hope it doesn't betray me.
In comparison, the most famous works of cinema about ancient Rome -- Ben-Hur, Spartacus, I Claudius, and so forth -- are laughably sanitized and similar to our own world, which is the common failing of most historical drama of course. Fellini ditched the convention by, among other things, staying extremely faithful to the original source. The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter is a jolting and bizarre read. A lot of the humor and wordplay, I'm told, is lost in translation.
Because of the plastic bladder and preservation from oxidization, the BotaBox wine tastes the same from the first glass until the box is drained, normally a week, at room temperature. I imagine though that one would get that same benefit from boxes of swill like Franzia.
I solved the problem with pliable silicone "putty" earplugs. They provide the closest to dead silence I've found.
The earplugs attenuate sound by 50% is my guess, making inaudible all but the loudest ambulance sirens and shoes dropped to the floor in the unit above.
I contribute $2 USD a month to Petrucci/IMSLP for the same reason I contribute $3 a month to Wikipedia and $11 a month to WNYC: for the greater good of human civilization.
Org has fine hyperlinking, and equally fine searching -- including searches on headline tags and properties -- using regexps if desired. Underneath is the logical outline structure -- just like a website -- and the hierarchical inheritance of tags and properties.
Plus -- here's where Org is superior to a Web-based wiki IMO -- it's so easily refactored. When I started I had only a few top-level entries. Over time, I have accumulated hundreds of headlines and their accompanying body text. Multi-level structure emerged naturally, and continues to evolve.
Here are my top-level categories today:
1. Arts and Entertainment 2. Diet and Health 3. Household 4. Restaurant and Bars 5. Petronius.me (my household LAN) 6. Subscriptions 7. People and Me 8. Travel 9. Commonplace Book (quotes, links, and reading I've saved)
Org makes it easy to move things around and re-organize as needed: just cut a subtree and paste it to a new location in the hierarchy.
Org's linking make cross-references a cinch. Who was that person I met on this trip? Oh, here's a link to their personal entry in "People and Me". And that entry will link back to the trip in "Travel."
A headline's unique ID property guarantees that a link will never break, no matter how frequently or drastically you move things around.
An additional benefit of using Emacs: the personal wiki can be integrated with my task-management system, which Org-Mode handles as well. Plus I can draft and edit at warp speed, having customized the native Emacs keybindings to suit me better.
Were I going to publish my wiki to the Web for others to use, I'd export the wiki to HTML with Org. But for now it's all personal.
Mastering the Machine
How Ray Dalio built the world's richest and strangest hedge fund.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/07/25/mastering-the-m...
This hour-long interview at a members-only event at the Council on Foreign Relations is also worth watching to get the distinct flavor of the man:
http://www.cfr.org/world/ceo-speaker-series-conversation-ray...