Usually (I mean in the 80's when I used to visit Russia more often) they just have holes in the floor. No walls, no barriers, just a sh*tty dark hall with a sh*tload of sh*tholes. Knowing Russian mentality, I assumed that central Moscow would have more civilised toilets, but no, the same sh*tty format even in the main railway station facing the West - and that I saw around the turn of the millennium last time.
When you enter that kind of hall of sh*t, you immediately get the impression that under the sh*tty floor is another hall as large, entirely consisting of pure sh*t. That's the right impression, btw. You also begin to wonder if the floor of the hall of sh*t will hold or maybe you fall and land into pure sh*t. Well, the floor never failed when I was visiting those places. Be brave! And don't fall through those holes.
Nothing. Some keep on saying Hare Krishna and nothing else. I don't know if they are Buddhists but they seem so.
Those are a Hinduist sect, not Buddhist.
Hinduism comes in many forms. In its subtlest form it's barely distinguishable from Buddhism, but the teachings on spirit and soul are exactly what solidly keeps Hinduism apart from Buddhism. According to tolerant and inclusive Hinduist view, Buddhist are heterodox Hinduism, as opposed to orthodox.
If there's no soul, what reincarnates? Can some expert on Buddhism answer this? Is nobody bothered by this incoherence?
You get used to incoherence if you follow the path of the Buddha. Or, at least, if you listen to what is told to you by his followers.
Are there many followers of the Buddhist path where you live? What do they tell? And no, I will never get used to incoherence. Whether I discover some mistake of my own or it's other people who don't make sense, I never got used to it.
On a certain irc network, I am a regular member of #buddhism channel, but I tend to know more about Buddhism than everybody else there combined (no, I'm not op or mod there). Makes me wonder how and why those channels get set up.
My information on Buddhism comes largely from secondary and tertiary sources. I have read two PDF files from Pesala's site and I have a tiny Buddhist book at home, Santideva's Bodhicharyavatara, which I haven't read.
Pesala is the directest contact with Buddhism I have had. He represents Theravada. Tibetan Buddhism is another important sect. And of course everybody knows Zen. I'm honestly interested if there's anything more I should know. And astonished that the folks at #buddhism don't seem to know even this much.
I was wildly enthusiastic about mouse gestures, right up until the point I discovered flip back and flip forward. I started using them less and less, and can't recall the last time I used them.
Yes, those are fabulous. In addition to these, I still use up-directory and fast-forward gestures on touchpad.
Agreed. An illustrated page of text allows me to read the instructions at the speed I am comfortable with. Videos need a good narrator and director, to keep viewers engaged, not bored, and not missing key points while overwhelmed with new information.
Yep, or what if you just don't remember that Alt+Tab was the keyboard shortcut for that neat switching functionality? Try to find that in a 10-minute video.
Hey, guys! Some people grew up with that video and became decent people. In fact, the caption below the video that I linked to says so.
To me the video is not just about its technically informative content, but also about the background music, the voice of the narrator, the tints and forms - the design, the esthetic experience. Really good computers don't make only geeks happy, but also children and ladies.
Sorry, I remembered the drag-to-email-body procedure too boldly. It requires proper selection and copy in the file manager, then paste in the email composer, and you will get a list. I must have thought intensely it would be cool if such a function worked merely by dragging, so intensely that I imagined it's already implemented.
For me it always seemed that mouse is importantly for drag&drop, whereas you think it's prone to disaster. Did you dislike Opera's mouse gestures too? I of course liked them a lot! (until they added the utterly unnecessary flashing instructions)
Btw, did you know it's possible to select and drag text around in text areas in Opera? Probably in all browsers these days, but I discovered it first in Opera.
I like this feature I discovered in Linux over a decade ago: Drag a bunch of files from a file manager to email composer. The result is list of filenames. Worked from Nautilus to Evolution and Opera.
Select any language you like. It respects your choice. The default is English of course. Nothing will be imposed on you based on your perceived location or time zone or such.
I personally use a number of localisations. And for professional use, I need to have the support for several languages installed to do spell-checking etc. They don't conflict. If something doesn't work, the default is English.
Ah, concerning languages I remember one nasty experience with Antix Linux. I selected Estonian to boot it up, but the keyboard became Ethiopian You know Estonia? It's that tiny country between Eritrea and Ethiopia - in alphabetical order.
For dragging, or more specifically dropping, I think doing so with text is usually a recipe for disaster. My opinion differs for spreadsheets and file management. Call it a personal idiosyncrasy if you will.
Agreed on spreadsheets. I never found mouse much useful in spreadsheets, except for pointing (i.e. selecting a cell to work on).
In file managers, I often Ctrl+A (to select all) and drag&drop to another window. Similar gestures to move text around in word processors. I never disastered. I am of course clipboard-conscious too, aware of chances of loss. I have a clipboard recorder running, and keep in mind undo.
Btw, did you know it's possible to select and drag text around in text areas in Opera? Probably in all browsers these days, but I discovered it first in Opera.
Everybody knows that keyboard shortcuts are absolutely fabulous, but I was specifically asking about mouse. Mouse is unbeatable for furious selection and dragging movements in word processors and file managers.
For Serious Business™ kind of work, I find mouse operations indispensable.
However, I most definitely used a mouse in MS Works 2, and just about all DOS programs really. You can install gpm for a very similar effect in Linux. In DOS it was named MOUSE.EXE.
So mouse can work without X? Amazing! I didn't know this. Does gpm work with touchpads too? (because we obviously have touchpads on netbooks) Did the DOS mouse enable dragging text around like in a real word processor?
One thing I can tell you: Windows 3 actually came with a really, really good integrated tutorial for n00bs (i.e. me). I haven't been able to find something that good in any Windows since.
Geography means etymologically maps as such, any map.
That's cartography.
These terms are overlapping, etymologically. Which is unfortunate. Ptolemy is called geographer, not cartographer, even though he surely made a major contribution to cartographic projections and such.
Google's term "terrain" is really apt here. "Terrain map".
Geography means etymologically maps as such, any map. Geology and geophysics may mean mineral contents and structure of the soil. Nothing fits better than "terrain map".
Really? Therefore attempts to edit doc and xls files in command line? For Serious Business™ kind of work, I find mouse operations indispensable.
Maybe my view stems from the fact that I made proper closer acquaintance with computers only in the end of 90's. To me graphical desktops and mouses are the norm when using a computer for some other purpose than computer itself. Command line is mostly to fix the computer itself and tweak stuff inside it, not so much for third-party purposes. Well, web-browsing, viewing and typing (text input) obviously work, but bigger text operations don't look good...
That'll leave a fair bit of RAM to spare even on 64-bit. (I think it feels more responsive in 64-bit. Sue me.)
I'm not savvy enough (yet) to know what's the big deal between them. When I install the latest and greatest, I naturally install 64-bit. 32-bit is for single-core weaker processors, I figure. Nobody sues me. Then again, I am not doing this for a living or as a profession, and neither does any of my friends. I am the best hacker in my circle of acquaintances. Which means I'm just an advanced dumbuser...
On TTY 1GB is virtually limitless. But I'm not the biggest fan of Vim or Nano, although they'll certainly do the trick. And are there any spreadsheet applications similar to e.g. Works 2.0* which I used to use back in DOS 4?
Vlc does HD videos, Firefox does Youtube, etc. No hiccups, no slowdown. I'm sure it's the same on your machine too.
It can play regular video; I have no idea if it can play full HD. It's kind of a moot question considering the resolution of the screen. I expect it'll cope in MPlayer, fail in Flash, and it may or may not be able to do so in VLC.
I meant HD as Youtube labels it. This is, yes, bigger than the screen, but it plays in VLC. Plus everything else I mentioned (and you mention) can run in parallel. Still no hiccups, no slowdown.
I haven't installed Flash on this netbook. Good riddance, I think.
@Josh I also have a map on paper titled "World Physical" - in English, but printed in Budapest. You know, when you say "physical map" on the internet, it's like...
Well, I admit your mastery of the English language is superior to any and all of us. You demonstrate it constantly. You even know how the syntax in T&C must be. Everybody else got it wrong, but luckily we have you.
My netbook with 1GB RAM runs Xubuntu perfectly fine. But I only do light browsing and text editing on it.
About half of the time I boot to shell, without starting X. That's how I do light stuff. However, I really mean rabbit and hawk also with X running: Libreoffice does word processing, Vlc does HD videos, Firefox does Youtube, etc. No hiccups, no slowdown. I'm sure it's the same on your machine too.
I seem to have not more than 1 GB RAM, remember? It seems that I'd like to start a separate topic on ways to boost the RAM.
Yes, I remember. And my netbook is the same, remember? I put Manjaro Linux Openbox on it. Runs like a rabbit and flies like a hawk. I see no need to add RAM.
Right now, my old laptop is near the end of its life. Windows XP is nearly at the end of its cycle, and while it looks as though the old machine could take Windows 8 it would mean getting a bigger hard-drive at a minimum, and it would be struggling to keep up with now limited RAM (when I got the machine 2 gigabytes was almost unimaginable, now it's pathetically tiny). I have to really think about it before spending money trying to update the old machine.
Upgrading a machine for money is conceivable, if you really need additional hardware. With 2GB of RAM, this machine should run any kind of Linux comfortably, experiencing glitches only with the heaviest desktops, such as KDE with all the flashy effects.
So, if you only need to replace the software, it can be done free of charge. Which is how I usually do it. 2GB may seem minimum RAM these days, but I have made machines with below 1GB run smooth with up-to-date set of programs, Firefox, Libreoffice, multimedia players, etc.
So there are different views on Buddhism even among the few posters who have participated here. This is natural for many reasons. Buddhism is an elaborate religion/philosophy, so people construe or interpret it differently. Also, it turns out that not many have in-depth experience with Buddhism, which causes lukewarm or conflicting impressions.
There's a way to become persuaded by immediate personal benefits, such as the therapeutic effects that Sparta describes. Immediate benefits are individual experiential evidence of the religion's effectiveness. These benefits are different from some distant future or afterlife promises that the religion may offer.
String cites his questioning of the tenets of Buddhism. It would be nice to know which tenets they were and if he questioned them because the doctrine wasn't coherent or because it didn't hold the promises he hoped for. Or was he simply too sensitive to the apparent dogmatism of the particular instructor.
There are varieties of Buddhist sects that really don't even try to make logical sense. For example Zen koans are designed to short-circuit the ordinary thinking patterns, in order to provoke or hopefully to inspire, spark some enlightenment, if that's perhaps your genre. In Zen, there's a set of prescriptive dogmas too all right, but it's for the monks. The rest of the people are supposed to base their beliefs and practices on symbolism and mythical/anecdotal stories. Inasmuch as I have understood, Zen sects tend to be radically anti-disputative - the dispute would not be based on logic, so, logically, there's nothing to argue anyway.
Some other sects, on the other hand, represent scriptural fundamentalism reminiscent of the worst kind of Islam and Christianity. Pesala provides an example of the scriptural fundamentalist kind of Buddhism. According to his beliefs, Lotus and Heart Sutras, which are the introductory Buddhist scriptures to pretty much the entire Western world, are bogus texts and should be suppressed, not studied, not believed. The fact that the texts lay out a path to follow that has been successfully followed by many doesn't matter to him.
I haven't met any Buddhists ever, so I have no experience with real-life modern-day Buddhism, and also no grudges against any Buddhist instructor for any reason. I am not group-driven anyway, never was. However, I am aware of the history of the religion and of the culture that it's spreading around the world - by reading about it. My own spirituality stems from individual experience, from personal verification of the immediate effects and logical coherence of the more distant doctrinal tenets, which lead me to make up my mind about the topic.
My personal grounds for rejecting Buddhism are its unmotivating and incoherent metaphysical teachings. There's the teaching of the Void or Emptiness, the locus of the absolute attainment. I find it simply unmotivating. Why strive for something that is basically nothing? Then there's the teaching of non-self, non-spirit, and non-soul, which in my opinion doesn't logically fit together with the doctrine of reincarnation, karma stretching over rebirth cycles. If there's no soul, what reincarnates? Can some expert on Buddhism answer this? Is nobody bothered by this incoherence?
As to the actual practices of meditation, mindfulness, and the rungs or aspects of the eightfold path, they seem satisfying to me both philosophically and psychologically. Also the doctrine of dependent origination, which is a kind of theory of evolution, provides valuable support to inform and spur the practices.
All that said, I'm not familiar with Buddhism through actual practice, because by means of comparative studies I have found another system that made complete sense to me, about which I have no questions whatsoever, so that I can proceed without having to struggle with doubts. Which is how it should be, I think.
I listened to a philosophy podcast on Buddhism today and there was pointed out a fact that I have been forgetting: The bulk of religious people are not converted by philosophical arguments or scientific evidence. The majority of believers regard organised religion as normal cultural environment, roughly the same way as they belong to the family or to the country where they are born. (Incidentally, this is also true of the bulk of atheists/naturalists/materialists.) I tend to forget this because I myself belong to the (statistically tiny) minority who goes by personally persuasive philosophical arguments, scientific evidence and personal psychological experience rather than by convention, convenience, or by attempts to please and accommodate someone else.
I find it odd that Canon would make the driver available on the Asian site, but not the American.
Possible that the Asian branch of Canon made it available by accident. The headquarters didn't mean to, but they don't have control over what is going on in all the departments.
You know Estonia? It's that tiny country between Eritrea and Ethiopia - in alphabetical order.
