There's an anecdote about Donald Knuth, the famous computer scientist who invented scalable fonts. When a new edition of an early book in his series came back from the printer, he was upset by the degraded appearance relative to the earlier hot-lead editions. So he spent ten year inventing scalabale fonts - fonts that are described as vectors so that they can be made arbitrarily larger or smaller and still look good. The story goes that, after years of work, he actually printed out a book using this new technology, and it looked like crap, as most new technology does. And he turned to a bystander and said, "isn't it beautiful?" Because he saw it as it could and would be, not as it actually was.

My question is, when this guy here wrote this Emacs manual, what exactly was he picturing when he wrote elegant?

You might do this by manually editing the file, but Emacs offers an elegant method to change some (but not all) settings in this file, and I describe this modification as an example. Start Emacs from the start menu. Use the Help|Customize|Top-level customization group menu command to start the customization. Locate the Environment group and jump to it by clicking on the [Go to Group] button next to the Environment group. Locate the Load path entry and fold out the values by clicking on the [Show] button. Make sure that the subdirectory site-lisp is listed. If this entry is missing, create it by clicking on the [INS] button at the end of the list. Click the [Current dir?] button and select "Directory". Then enter the full path, e.g. C:\Programs\emacs2031\site-lisp. Save this setting by clicking on the [Save for future sessions] button on top of the Environment group.

A phrase I've been reading a lot, both in emails and in published work, is "I guess I've been naive but ...." While I think it's possible to simply become a complete partisan and assume that everything Bush (or whomever your chosen "enemy" is) does is wrong, what if his team really is that dirty?

As May was drawing to a close, his manager told him that someone from the CPA wanted the company to estimate the building costs of replacing the New Diyala Bridge on the South East end of Baghdad. He got his team together, they went out and assessed the damage, decided it wasn’t too extensive, but it would be costly. They did the necessary tests and analyses (mumblings about soil composition and water depth, expansion joints and girders) and came up with a number they tentatively put forward- $300,000. This included new plans and designs, raw materials (quite cheap in Iraq), labor, contractors, travel expenses, etc.

Let’s pretend my cousin is a dolt. Let’s pretend he hasn’t been working with bridges for over 17 years. Let’s pretend he didn’t work on replacing at least 20 of the 133 bridges damaged during the first Gulf War. Let’s pretend he’s wrong and the cost of rebuilding this bridge is four times the number they estimated- let’s pretend it will actually cost $1,200,000. Let’s just use our imagination.

A week later, the New Diyala Bridge contract was given to an American company. This particular company estimated the cost of rebuilding the bridge would be around- brace yourselves- $50,000,000 !!
Riverbend (A little bit about myself: I'm female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That's all you need to know. It's all that matters these days anyway.)