The problem is that the "education" that you need for higher level positions is job experience. It is not enough to have gone to school and done well. We aren't talking about people walking in off the streets and expecting jobs, we're talking about people who finished their undergrad, perhaps have even had a job or two, but are not "qualified".
What exactly are you suggesting that people do to up their education enough to get a job in America? Should they all go back to school and get a masters? A PhD? Given that they can't get a job, how are they supposed to be able to train themselves? Especially since the training desired doesn't seem to be the kind you can get in a classroom?
The problem is that in 10 or 20 years, if we don't put enough people here in entry level positions, we won't have enough people here to put in higher than entry level positions. Moreover, if people feel they can't get IT related jobs out of college, they will major in something else. There are consequences to every action, and raising the minimum level of education and training to above what can be achieved without having a job means either that (1) People will have to go to trade school instead of college (2) The industry will have to revert back to older hiring policies, or (3) The industry, as it stands in the US, will completely die off.
Also, management, finance, and HR positions don't require more education. They require different education. If people have to work towards this instead of learning technology, our next generations of technology managers will not really be qualified for their jobs either. And if we outsource all the jobs that create value because we won't pay the standard of living for an American (especially given that they need a good education too), why would anybody bother trying to work their way up the ladder? And what will the people in finance and HR do when we have no money and no people to hire or manage? Once again, the focus on short term profits seems to be blinding us to any long term vision.
We might still have time before all of the ice in Greenland is melted (assuming the rate seems constant, which the article doesn't indicate is likely), but the effect of a rise of a foot would be huge, not just for global climate, but also for people living along the coast. At 3mm per year, that is a foot every century (again, assuming things remain constant, which is unlikely). That will be 6 inches in my lifetime. This won't just affect our grandchildren, it will affect our children, and most likely it will affect us.
Saying that we have 12k years before all the ice in Greenland has melted is really not a useful statistic. It might be a million years before my bones completely decay, but that doesn't mean that I should not worry about driving drunk: what truly matters, as it affects me, will be felt much sooner.
Godel's theorem does not quite say what you suggest that it does. Rather, assume you have a logical system (built from axioms) which is consistent (the axioms don't contradict each other) and in which you can express enough different ideas (namely, you can formalize arithmetic in the system)). Then you can express certain ideas that cannot be proven or disproven.
A fairly canonical example of this idea is the continuum hypothesis. If you look at the counting numbers, you can put them all into one infinite list in such a way that if you pick a particular number and then start reading the list, you will eventually find that number. You can make a list of all the rational numbers too. However, if you try to make a list of all the points between 0 and 1, you can prove that whatever list you make must be incomplete. The unit interval has a higher cardinality, a larger order of infinity, than the counting numbers. It is easy enough to make sets that are of even larger cardinality than the unit interval, and it is easy to see that anything smaller than the counting numbers must be finite, but people for a long time wondered if there was anything in between the two.
As it turns out, we can assume there are no orders of infinity in the middle. Or we can assume that there are two. Or three. Or infinitely many. As long as you don't do something stupid (like put more than a lines worth of kinds of infinity less than the infinity of the line), you can make a consistent model of set theory with almost any answer to the question. The continuum hypothesis is said to be independent of the axioms of set theory.
Of course, we could take any answer we wanted as a new axiom, but we don't because we have no good reason to believe that one answer is the "right" one as it relates to the real world.
Another example, perhaps a little less abstract, is Goldbach's conjecture. Every time people try to express an even number as a sum of two odd primes, they are able to. We think that you are always able to, and if there exists a counter example, we would be able to eventually find it. However, going through all even numbers and showing that we can decompose them would take a very long time and cannot actually lead to a proof. The statement looks like it should have a definitie answer, and many smart people are looking for one, but others have suggested that we might not actually be able to prove it. In this case, however, if we could prove that the statement was unprovable one way or the other, it would in essence show that no counter example exists and that the statement was "true". This is closer to the thought that there are "true" statements that cannot be proven.
In any event, there is a difference between true and proveable and "knowable", just as there is a difference between a model, an axiomatic system, and reality. People like to throw around Godel's theorem a lot without fully appreciating its limits in scope. It is a powerful theorem of mathematical logic in that it shows that we cannot fully axiomatize the world. Still, it does not have the implications that you might suspect.
Disclaimer: I am a mathematician, not a physicist, and I am not even a geometer. The ramblings here meant to be taken as nothing more.
I think you might be right. Given that he claims to be marketing his ideas in his book to the layman, it seems likely that he is just rephrasing some of the ideas of general relativity. Most people think of spacetime only in the context of special relativity where you have a simple Lorentz space, and so the complaint that people think about spacetime with a single time axis might be referring to exactly this. Honestly, I can't blame non-cosmologists for thinking about the world in these terms. General relativity is hard. So hard, in fact, that Einstein thought nobody would find a nontrivial solution to the Einstein equation (though Schwarzschild did 3 years later, only to die in the Russian army shortly afterwards). The mathematics to really understand the model is not easy, and finding models for anything more complicated is nigh impossible.
However, it is possible that Mayer means something different. There is mention of multiple dimensions of time. Generally, general relativity is done on a semiriemannian manifold with a metric of index 1 (corresponding to time being locally 1 dimensional). Perhaps there are models of the universe of higher dimensions which use a higher index? Perhaps having multiple time lines with some sort of relationship between them is a way to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics? Of course, I don't see how you could view the movement of objects as geodesics in such a system, but it is possible that there are new and interesting theories that could potentially be put forward.
I'm still skeptical that he actually is producing something new: If he were, he would probably be publishing in Nature or something. However, you never know.
I had said ignoring issues of money. The thing is, it doesn't matter why they do what they do. There are situations where motives matter, but this is not one of them. When Bill gates gives a billion dollars for AIDS research, people might say "He's only doing it for the good press it will bring," but they never follow with "and since I don't believe that is a noble reason, he should take the money back." Likewise, when a company open sources a program in a move designed either for publicity or to get other people to improve their code for free, people don't demand that the source be re-closed. Why should the good of Google's action be canceled out just because it is self serving?
My argument was based on effect, not motives. Google being in China doesn't become less good for the people of China because it is also good for Google.
I don't understand why Americans don't seem to grasp the concept of a middle ground. Sometimes, something in the middle can be better than any extreme view. In the case of search engines in China, the common American perspective seems to be that we have only two extreme choices. Google is EVIL for allowing any censorship and therefore must either pull out of the market entirely or must force the Chinese government to allow them to operate uncensored. Ignoring issues of sovereignty, money, or human rights, why is anything between these two ends not acceptable?
The Chinese government doesn't care enough about Google to bow to threats of "do it or we're taking our ball and going home." Likewise, Google pulling out means that, for the people of China, some information will be harder or impossible to find compared to if Google stayed.. Google entering the Chinese market under these terms benefits everybody involved. Why do we demand that they either do the impossible or that they stand by their "values" to the detriment of everybody involved?
Well, the actual string theorists that I know don't insist that it is the one true theory, but I have some non-physics friends who saw Elegant Universe on NOVA and insist that it is the light and the way. I don't think the problem is in how it is presented to other scientists, but rather how it is presented to the media and the public. While it is necessary to overstate your case and your confidence for the sake of funding, it does create a certain appearance which at this stage does appear like a blind religious zeal.
I'm actually not so sure that string theories are not unfalsifiable by either construction or definition. The link between string theory and reality is a bit tenuous (compared to say general relativity where one could say that gravity should change the orbit of mercury by such an amount). The link is even a bit stretched compared to theories about fundamental particles, which give only that we should have such energy bursts at such frequencies when we collide two particles into each other at 99.999% of the speed of light. However strings can never be directly observed, and the indirect effects that we think maybe we should be able to see, which vary on who you ask, are so subtle that we can't really hope to measure them.
As a mathematician by trade, I understand the beauty that a nice mathematical model can offer, but nobody has ever given me a compelling argument for string theory other than "D-Branes are cool, and if I talk about strings vibrating, people can relate because they have seen vibrating strings before."
Are there physical predictions made by string theory, not made by other theories, that should be detectable by experiment which we can conceive now (even if we cannot run the experiment with current technology/funding) in which a negative result would cause people to abandon the core of string theory? If so, it is not just a religion. If not, then it currently is, regardless of how many scientists are working to change that.
Until you know how to make it falsifiable, it fails to be science.
Just because it has equations or big ideas or lofty goals or the support of intelligent people does not mean that one can make the leap "this has potential" to "this is right." By insisting that you have found the one true theory when it is not CURRENTLY falsifiable means that you are following a religion.
One day, we may discover a God who can attest that the god of the Christians does not exist, or who brings other elements of the supernatural to a scientific grounding. Or we may discover a way to travel through time (or at least look back in time, sans interaction) that would allow us to see if Jesus was real and did what is claimed. If religion becomes falsifiable, and if we can conclusively prove that the events in the bible or Koran are true or false, do those who worship God cease to practice a religion? I do not think that impossibility of falsifiability is part of the definition of religion. In the present context, I'd prefer to define religion as "A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."
Science needs a certain aspect of religion to it for it to progress: If people did not earnestly believe that budding theories might one day become mature enough to be falsifiable, they never would mature to that level. If people did not have faith that the world has regularity which is governed by knowable scientific principles, nobody would attempt to do science. However, to have the arrogance to presume that your religion will one day be falsifiable while someone else's can never be (by definition?) is to confuse your faith with your facts.
Time might be money to an economist, and there may be an opportunity cost to playing WoW (which is not an actual cost, and to speak as it were is to confuse reality with an economic model), at least assuming that one has the opportunity to profit by working more hours elsewhere. However I don't think it is relevant to the argument. The question at hand is why should blizzard care enough to forbid gold selling in the ToS, and one reason is that many players dislike the game imbalance caused by such sales. The spirit of the game is that progress should be roughly proportionate to effort, and gold sales violate that spirit.
Once the rules of the game have been set forth, anybody who buys or sells gold is in violations of the rules of the game (and what is a game if not a set of rules and constraints within which to explore possibilities?) However, if the rules were not in place, I don't think people would feel moral superiority over those who buy gold so much as a sadness that reality seeped into what was intended to be a realm of fantasy in such an obscene way.
The game was not intended to be impacted by how much money you make outside of the game, because such a factor would have been a great unequalizer. The game required little skill that could not be easily learned, as that too would have been a great unequalizer. There are MMORPGS where game money is meant to have a relationship to real money, or where reflexes or intelligence are designed to make a big impact to the game. There is an egalitarian ideal to the game, even if not everybody can be equal. Just because things are not completely equal does not mean that it is ok to add additional elements of inequality to the game. Just because you equate time and money does not mean that the two should be interchangeable in this instance.
If I am paying $15/month to play some game and I find parts of it to be boring, why should Blizzard care if I want to pay someone else to play that part? It is no different from real life, where I pay someone else to grow (and sometimes cook) my food, kill cows for me, etc.
The short answer is that Blizzard minds because the players mind. The long answer is that the players mind for a reason. The problem is not inflation, because someone would probably be killing the monsters and causing the gold and items to drop anyway, even if in a slightly lesser quantity. The problem is rather that of influence and distribution. The external nature of the money that people buy the gold with means that the egalitarian nature of the game (that people start off equal and distinguish themselves via work and skill, with a small amount of luck). Additionally, since one in theory has to work hard in game to make something of oneself, it is a mockery of the dedication people put into the game to see what is in a sense a mark of distinction placed upon one who does not deserve it.
To illustrate these points, I would like to offer some analogies. Suppose that you went to your friend's house to play monopoly, but because someone paid your friend $10 under the table, he started with triple the money of everybody else. The game would be more fun for that person, but less fun for everybody but the person who had the extra money: the shape of the game changed because of something which should not be affecting the game. Or if you spent all year preparing for a golf tournament and finished spectacularly, but the trophy were given to a man who did not do as well but had promised to donate a new clubhouse if he "won". Or what if legislation was passed to make it illegal to circumvent any encryption used as a means of copy protection because someone had enough congressmen on payroll? Money can buy things that make some things just less enjoyable for the majority of people.
Just because certain actions can't be controlled by software does not mean that they should be allowed; just because one can do something does not mean one should. Rules exist for reasons. People disapprove of paying off players to throw sports games, and people disapprove of paying players to farm gold. Just because both still happen despite the rules does not mean that we should accept it and stop trying to fix the problem.
The way language is used changes over time. Just as "liberal" was not always a pejorative, the term "geek" is being used either in a different context or possibly in a completely new way. Part of the reason language can shift like this is because words are defined by examples of their usage. There is no clear and objective standard for judging when an activity is "fun" or a pigment is "red" (I challenge you to, on a 256 color palette, decide which shades are clearly red and which are clearly not red. If you put every shade in one category or the other, your best friend will probably disagree on at least some of your decisions, though you probably won't be confident about it either). So too, there is no clear definition of geek.
"Geek" was previously used to describe several, often overlapping groups of people; Geek described those who prefer math and computers to drinking or those who preferred Star Wars to women. Somehow, because of the correlation between "geekiness" and earnings potential, people felt the need to cast being in a geek in a more positive light and decided to focus on the relatively common (but not defining) tendency of geeks to be passionate about something. Passion bordering on fanatical zealotry that interferes in social interaction is not a requirement: I have heard people say things like "I'm a music geek" to mean as little as "I buy a few cds or 2 a month and go to a few concerts a year." As the common usage of the term changes, the definition changes. At this rate, in 10 years the term geek will be nothing but a meaningless modifier indicating slight interest.
The problem is that while people don't want to view all "geeks" in a bad light because they see positives to being geeky, not all geeks are going to be deserving of praise for their geekiness, and so either "geek" will remain a pejorative depending on context or some other term will fill the niche of the formerly derogatory use of the word. When I was younger, there did not seem to be a large difference between "geek" and "nerd", but perhaps now "nerd" will become the formerly negative connotation of "geek"? Who knows?
Language changes because we use many not quite equivalent definitions or examples to define terms, and as we shift from one definition to another, we change the canonical examples and alternate definitions. Do not be confused, though, geeks have not changed, only the usage of the term. Personally, I think that people changing the language I want to use is double plus ungood, but what can you do?
The commend made me laugh too, but not because the answer is to use an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias might be useful for getting a quick summery of ideas related to a topic, perhaps to suggest directions for research, but it is an entirely innapropriate source for information for a thesis. Even if one ignores the fact that a thesis should be mostly new research, the resources one uses should be books, scholarly journals, primary sources, and the like. If a wikipedia article is useful for more than inspiration and a list of references, you are doing your thesis completely wrong.
That said, there are a lot of times when Wikipedia is both useful and convenient. Just, not when one is writing a thesis.
The problem with the nature study is that it only focused on science articles. Being less popular and less politically charged, one would expect fewer trolls and fewer people putting in incorrect information that they think is true. To a certain extent, if you have less people looking at a page (but still have trolls), you have less people trying to correct the page and doing so incorrectly.
In short, the nature study is an indicator of the quality of part of wikipedia, but not a good indicator of the overall quality, which is not uniform.
I think that efforts to curb easy trolling will help to improve quality in more controversial or popular articles, though, and this very mild effort can only be a good thing.
You're partly right. Between 1 and n, there are about n/ln(n) primes, but between n and n+k for some small k, there are much fewer. The odds that an arbitrary number n is prime is about 1/ln(n). In fact, this empirical observation is what caused Gauss to define the Li function, Li(n)=Integral1/ln(x)] from 2 to n. It is an even better estimator for Pi(x) than n/ln(n). While there are constants that bound how well n/ln(n) works (about 1.1 and.9), Li(n)-Pi(n) actually changes signs an infinite number of times.
While there is about a 1/ln(n) chance that n is prime, trial division up to something small can eliminate the majority of composites fairly quickly, though, so I probably gave a slightly less than ideal estimate on how long it would take to find two primes. However, I do not believe that this will put me off by more than a constant factor.
Assuming the riemann hypothesis, I believe there are O((log n)^12) algorithms for proving primality (with a pretty big constant in front....I'm basing this on memory, its been a while since I have studied this stuff heavily), but I don't recall reading about better. As another poster mentioned, you can suffice with strong pseudoprimes to multiple bases to get a negligible chance of compositness fairly quickly, but it still requires nontrivial time on numbers this large (about 2500 digits). I haven't ever played around with timing for pseudo-primality tests for numbers quite this large, but I have coded all the standard algorithms before and done testing for smaller numbers.
For what its worth, I am an aspiring mathematician. I did my undergrad at a top 5 school in math (with a large smattering of comp sci classes), and I'm currently working on my PhD at another top 5 school in math. I have done work on computational aspects of primes (and on prime distribution) both recreationally and for classes. I might have been off by a little on some of this stuff (I was working from memory, I'm sorry), but I am not as ill informed as you might like.
I realize you were joking, but I'd like to respond anyway.
RSA keys are based on having two large prime numbers whose product is then difficult to factor. In general, the larger these numbers are, the harder it is to factor: trial division is O(sqrt(n)), and even the best methods of factoring are still of increasing time for increasing numbers. Using a general method, a 1.44mb key would take a LONG time to factor. However, there is one very important caveat...
If you go high enough, people don't know very many primes. In fact, there are lists of the largest known primes. I'd wager that there are less than a few thousand known primes greater than 2^720k, probably a lot less. This means that if you have a 1.44Mb number which you know to be the product of two primes, then either you can do trial divisions from a short list to factor the number, or else someone has discovered a new large prime.
In short, if you have a large enough key, the task of generating primes is difficult enough that factoring becomes much easier. To give you an idea of how difficult finding primes is, n has about a 1/(ln n) chance of being prime, and using a specialized algorithm, it takes about a day to check a mersenne number of this size for primality. General algorithms are, of course, slower. This means that, to perhaps an order of magnitude or two, it would take about million 1Ghz computer days to find two new suitible primes to multiply together. Of course, if you do this, its not likely that someone will crack your key without a quantum computer, but its also not likely that you will find a key pair until quantum computers are widespread.
I guess if you want big keys like that, you should look into eliptic curves. At least by the time you generate a key, there is a chance that it won't be trivial to break!
If he can "regurgitate" well enough to read what he needs to read, answer questions, and pass tests, how is that *different* from having "really" learned it?
I don't know what your highschool experience was like, but mine did involve a lot of regurgitation. Tests can test a number of things:
What is the title of chapter 5? What is the name of the protagonist? How did the farmer travel back in time? Why did the farmer travel back in time? Do you believe the farmer was morally justified in traveling back in time? Elaborate.
Different tests require different levels of understanding and different levels of analysis and synthesis. I once had a history class that, while we were asked open ended questions about why things happened, we were given points only for mentioning the points which the teacher felt were the "actual" reasons (which he often told the class the day before). It turned history from something that should have been about understanding the interplay between different events and personalities and situations into a mere regurgitation of facts.
Even in math or science, high school requires very little in the way of understanding. If you can remember the worked solutions and just plug in your new numbers or variables into them, you can succeed admirably. I knew a lot of people in highschool who started having trouble in math only when they couldn't memorize the examples in entirety.
Mere regurgitation with a slight amount of variation (a la simple regex) is enough to get you through highschool quite easily.
As a slight bit of an asside, several of the people in the PhD program I'm in have mentioned that the only way they made it through some early classes was through understanding the concepts and being able to rederive the formulas quickly. As you progress in your education further, the amount you can get by just on memorization decreases considerably. However, there is a large chunk of it where regurgitation and rote memorization will help you a lot more than real understanding. With any luck, college will present this boy with an opportunity ro prove that he can actually think. So far, there are no gaurentees.
"What MMORPGs need to do is implement better server-side analysis to identify cheaters. Difficult? Yes. Expensive? Yes. But probably less difficult and less expensive that losing craploads of clients, and hiring craploads of lawyers. Then they won't need to have the invasion clause in the license for their games."
I'm sure that there are lots of things that Blizzard does server side to detect cheating. The problem is, their view of cheating is broad enough that it cannot be completely detected server side. Consider the following (real) example:
During the WoW Beta, in game fishing was fairly easy to do. It was so easy, in fact, that people were able to completely automate the process. So Blizzard changed the mechanics of fishing so that you had to cast your line, observe a small splash if something got caught in your lure, and quickly click to reel your fish in before it escaped. People then wrote more elaborate fishing macros which had an external program constantly scanning sections of the screen for certain kinds of pixel changes that would indicate a splash. Blizzard then responded by slashing the prices of fished items that are sold to vendors. Macroing fishing went from highly profitable at a low level to unprofitable at all levels.
The point of all this is that macroing fishing was completely within game mechanics. Except for noting the time that someone spends fishing (which may or may not be a good indicator of cheating), there was no way to detect this "cheating" server side. But it was cheating. It caused a few people to create wealth for themselves with no effort, which leads to an imballance in other areas of the game (like equipment).
People are (almost) not stupid enough anymore to use hacks that would change game mechanics for them. They would get caught very easily and they know it. With very few exceptions, cheating in WOW is limited to botting. There are small differences between how a human might play as opposed to a decent bot, but I'm not entirely sure that it is the kind of thing that can be detected server side.
Do I want them scanning my computer? Not if it can be helped. However, if they are nice about it (reasonable disclosure, plus scanning only hashes and file sizes but not actual text, and not sending back any information that isn't absolutely necessary), it seems the best solution. Cheating is a serious problem in a game like this, and I'm not sure there is another viable approach to stopping botting.
My guess (I didn't do the moderation) is that it is considered off topic because: (1) it appears to be mostly a complaint about the legal drinking age in the USA (2) "No WINE before its time" is more of a reference to the fact that certain wines are aged greatly and that aficionado's won't drink the wine before it has had sufficient time to age. The title was a reference to the age of the wine, not to the age of the wine drinker.
Overall, it would have been a not very joke had the title been referencing drinking age, but as it stands it is merely an off topic complaint about the drinking age. The intent may have been humor, but I don't think that a mod of off topic is completely unwarranted.
The problem with a tax is that, unless things are really elastic, the cost will just be passed onto the consumer. I suppose that maybe they should be helping pay for the tax, given that they are helping to create the additional waste, but the point of the tax is not just to cover the cost of cleanup. Ideally, we want to discourage the companies from being so socially irresponsible. This might work if we do a tax plus a price ceiling to force the companies to pay the tax out of whatever profits they are already making, but that doesn't seem like a great solution. Any tax large enough to significantly impact the companies bottom line (assuming that demand isn't too elastic) will probably be enough to make the product not worth making in the first hand. That is one way to solve the problem, but I don't think that is a great solution either.
Economic models aren't that hard, but making good economic policy is a pain.
I think its important to remember that, among the anti-software-patent crowd at slashdot, there are two camps. The first is against stupid or obvious software pattents. One click shopping was fairly stupid and obvious. The things that google pattents (to my knowledge, for the most part) are not stupid or obvious. This crowd isn't going to be up in arms over google.
The second group is against all software patents and tye system itself. I think many of those people understand a few things that make google's actions seem not that bad: (1) Google is not using its patents in an offensive or predatory manner. (2) Google is offering its services (which employ the pattents) for free. (3) If Google did not patent what they did, Microsoft would and then try to sue them (see iPod interface). Google is forced to play in the system, and as such they are forced to make a defense. Blame the system, not those who play by its rules to survive.
I think there are many times the anti-patent people have reason to be angry. Google, however, does not seem to be a shining example of why the system needs to be changed.
What are best practices for passwords, though? Different places seem to have different rules, Different places have different rules, and I don't know what matters and what doesn't anymore. Sometimes I need a long password. Sometimes I need a mix of cases and letters and non alphanumerics. Sometimes, no substrinng can be a word cound in the dictionary. Sometimes I need exactly 8 characters. Sometimes, the system just truncates whatever password that is entered to 8 characters!
Are there any set of standards for picking good passwords that can be remembered? If so, why isn't there some agreed upon standard?
"But it was like 9/11 when many people had been trying to warn the public for years and everyone turned a deaf ear."
Given the similarities to 9/11 (a horrible but predictible tragedy that people wanted to ignore until it hit), I wonder what the aftermath will be. Of course, the nation will lend a hand, we will resolve to face the aftermath with courage, and we will rebuild. But what next? Perhaps people will cry that the severity of recent hurricanes is due to globaal warming, due in part to fossil fuels, due in part to iranian oil, and this will be justification for another war? Perhaps people will question the nature of god, some declaring war on god while others decry New Orleans as a den of sin and vice?
Recent tragedy has been channeled into vengence, and I fear where this might lead. Somehow, someone will take the blame. At least life is strangely amusing and highly televised.
WoW allows Windows and Mac users to play together on the same realms, something which isn't done in other MMORPGS
Is this true? I never tried out the non-windows everquest clients when I played, but I see no technological reason (and heard no mention) why a Mac client would be restricted to different servers than a Windows client in any game. MMORPGs on consoles might choose to have different servers for different platforms, eiher to level the playing field where different systems use different vastly different controllers or because of differences in the online console networks, but there seems to me to be no limitations for PCs that wouldn't be completely artificial.
For those children who are gifted and have concomittant special needs (i.e. can finish assigned reading in 1/2 the allotted time and then disrupt the class because they're bored, does the teacher have anything for them to do afterwards?)/i.
In many cases, no, they do not. In highschool, I was required to take a health clsss, which was one of the few classes where I did not have the option of at least an honors class. Classes like these, which were designed to be taught to the lowest common denomintor, had football coaches for teachers (who were required to teach at least one class in my school district).
One day, durring the second week of class, I finished the days work in 10 minutes. Not knowing what to do with the other 80 minutes of the class, I took out a piece of paper and started drawing things. I was then scolded, my drawings were confiscated, and I was ordered not to draw in class ever again. I sat wiith my head on my desk for the remaining 78 minutes.
I dropped the class with the intention of finishing it via correspondance, although I later left the school and didn't even have to do that, but the point is that classes can be very very bad if you have any idea what you are doing.
On the other hand, if you have good classes, things can be ok. That same year, I was spending half my day at another school to take AP calculus and AP computer science. When it was clear that I was bored in AP comp sci 1, they moved me to 2, and since there were tons of competent people in the class they let us do our own thing most of the class. As long as we got the work done, they didn't mind. In my calc class, I sat in the back talking to my friends and playing games on my calculator. But I also got the best grades in the class, so the teacher let me be. I took a history class where we actually thought critically about things and were given fun and creative tasks.
Unfortunately, I was one of the lucky ones. My family took proactive steps to ensure I went to the schools with the gifted programs, even going so far as putting me in private school when we moved and my new school was forcing me to retake classes because they couldn't schedule me otherwise. If parents don't care about your education, if teachers aren't motivated (and knowing the students most of them get, I don't see how they could be), if the students dont' havee the drive to learn, if society doesn't value education, then we will get crap results. But all these things are related, and significant change won't be easy.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the "education" that you need for higher level positions is job experience. It is not enough to have gone to school and done well. We aren't talking about people walking in off the streets and expecting jobs, we're talking about people who finished their undergrad, perhaps have even had a job or two, but are not "qualified".
What exactly are you suggesting that people do to up their education enough to get a job in America? Should they all go back to school and get a masters? A PhD? Given that they can't get a job, how are they supposed to be able to train themselves? Especially since the training desired doesn't seem to be the kind you can get in a classroom?
The problem is that in 10 or 20 years, if we don't put enough people here in entry level positions, we won't have enough people here to put in higher than entry level positions. Moreover, if people feel they can't get IT related jobs out of college, they will major in something else. There are consequences to every action, and raising the minimum level of education and training to above what can be achieved without having a job means either that
(1) People will have to go to trade school instead of college
(2) The industry will have to revert back to older hiring policies, or
(3) The industry, as it stands in the US, will completely die off.
Also, management, finance, and HR positions don't require more education. They require different education. If people have to work towards this instead of learning technology, our next generations of technology managers will not really be qualified for their jobs either. And if we outsource all the jobs that create value because we won't pay the standard of living for an American (especially given that they need a good education too), why would anybody bother trying to work their way up the ladder? And what will the people in finance and HR do when we have no money and no people to hire or manage? Once again, the focus on short term profits seems to be blinding us to any long term vision.
We might still have time before all of the ice in Greenland is melted (assuming the rate seems constant, which the article doesn't indicate is likely), but the effect of a rise of a foot would be huge, not just for global climate, but also for people living along the coast. At 3mm per year, that is a foot every century (again, assuming things remain constant, which is unlikely). That will be 6 inches in my lifetime. This won't just affect our grandchildren, it will affect our children, and most likely it will affect us.
Saying that we have 12k years before all the ice in Greenland has melted is really not a useful statistic. It might be a million years before my bones completely decay, but that doesn't mean that I should not worry about driving drunk: what truly matters, as it affects me, will be felt much sooner.
Godel's theorem does not quite say what you suggest that it does. Rather, assume you have a logical system (built from axioms) which is consistent (the axioms don't contradict each other) and in which you can express enough different ideas (namely, you can formalize arithmetic in the system)). Then you can express certain ideas that cannot be proven or disproven.
A fairly canonical example of this idea is the continuum hypothesis. If you look at the counting numbers, you can put them all into one infinite list in such a way that if you pick a particular number and then start reading the list, you will eventually find that number. You can make a list of all the rational numbers too. However, if you try to make a list of all the points between 0 and 1, you can prove that whatever list you make must be incomplete. The unit interval has a higher cardinality, a larger order of infinity, than the counting numbers. It is easy enough to make sets that are of even larger cardinality than the unit interval, and it is easy to see that anything smaller than the counting numbers must be finite, but people for a long time wondered if there was anything in between the two.
As it turns out, we can assume there are no orders of infinity in the middle. Or we can assume that there are two. Or three. Or infinitely many. As long as you don't do something stupid (like put more than a lines worth of kinds of infinity less than the infinity of the line), you can make a consistent model of set theory with almost any answer to the question. The continuum hypothesis is said to be independent of the axioms of set theory.
Of course, we could take any answer we wanted as a new axiom, but we don't because we have no good reason to believe that one answer is the "right" one as it relates to the real world.
Another example, perhaps a little less abstract, is Goldbach's conjecture. Every time people try to express an even number as a sum of two odd primes, they are able to. We think that you are always able to, and if there exists a counter example, we would be able to eventually find it. However, going through all even numbers and showing that we can decompose them would take a very long time and cannot actually lead to a proof. The statement looks like it should have a definitie answer, and many smart people are looking for one, but others have suggested that we might not actually be able to prove it. In this case, however, if we could prove that the statement was unprovable one way or the other, it would in essence show that no counter example exists and that the statement was "true". This is closer to the thought that there are "true" statements that cannot be proven.
In any event, there is a difference between true and proveable and "knowable", just as there is a difference between a model, an axiomatic system, and reality. People like to throw around Godel's theorem a lot without fully appreciating its limits in scope. It is a powerful theorem of mathematical logic in that it shows that we cannot fully axiomatize the world. Still, it does not have the implications that you might suspect.
Disclaimer: I am a mathematician, not a physicist, and I am not even a geometer. The ramblings here meant to be taken as nothing more.
I think you might be right. Given that he claims to be marketing his ideas in his book to the layman, it seems likely that he is just rephrasing some of the ideas of general relativity. Most people think of spacetime only in the context of special relativity where you have a simple Lorentz space, and so the complaint that people think about spacetime with a single time axis might be referring to exactly this. Honestly, I can't blame non-cosmologists for thinking about the world in these terms. General relativity is hard. So hard, in fact, that Einstein thought nobody would find a nontrivial solution to the Einstein equation (though Schwarzschild did 3 years later, only to die in the Russian army shortly afterwards). The mathematics to really understand the model is not easy, and finding models for anything more complicated is nigh impossible.
However, it is possible that Mayer means something different. There is mention of multiple dimensions of time. Generally, general relativity is done on a semiriemannian manifold with a metric of index 1 (corresponding to time being locally 1 dimensional). Perhaps there are models of the universe of higher dimensions which use a higher index? Perhaps having multiple time lines with some sort of relationship between them is a way to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics? Of course, I don't see how you could view the movement of objects as geodesics in such a system, but it is possible that there are new and interesting theories that could potentially be put forward.
I'm still skeptical that he actually is producing something new: If he were, he would probably be publishing in Nature or something. However, you never know.
I had said ignoring issues of money. The thing is, it doesn't matter why they do what they do. There are situations where motives matter, but this is not one of them. When Bill gates gives a billion dollars for AIDS research, people might say "He's only doing it for the good press it will bring," but they never follow with "and since I don't believe that is a noble reason, he should take the money back." Likewise, when a company open sources a program in a move designed either for publicity or to get other people to improve their code for free, people don't demand that the source be re-closed. Why should the good of Google's action be canceled out just because it is self serving?
My argument was based on effect, not motives. Google being in China doesn't become less good for the people of China because it is also good for Google.
This is *literally* saying "Slavery is Freedom"
I don't understand why Americans don't seem to grasp the concept of a middle ground. Sometimes, something in the middle can be better than any extreme view. In the case of search engines in China, the common American perspective seems to be that we have only two extreme choices. Google is EVIL for allowing any censorship and therefore must either pull out of the market entirely or must force the Chinese government to allow them to operate uncensored. Ignoring issues of sovereignty, money, or human rights, why is anything between these two ends not acceptable?
The Chinese government doesn't care enough about Google to bow to threats of "do it or we're taking our ball and going home." Likewise, Google pulling out means that, for the people of China, some information will be harder or impossible to find compared to if Google stayed.. Google entering the Chinese market under these terms benefits everybody involved. Why do we demand that they either do the impossible or that they stand by their "values" to the detriment of everybody involved?
Well, the actual string theorists that I know don't insist that it is the one true theory, but I have some non-physics friends who saw Elegant Universe on NOVA and insist that it is the light and the way. I don't think the problem is in how it is presented to other scientists, but rather how it is presented to the media and the public. While it is necessary to overstate your case and your confidence for the sake of funding, it does create a certain appearance which at this stage does appear like a blind religious zeal.
I'm actually not so sure that string theories are not unfalsifiable by either construction or definition. The link between string theory and reality is a bit tenuous (compared to say general relativity where one could say that gravity should change the orbit of mercury by such an amount). The link is even a bit stretched compared to theories about fundamental particles, which give only that we should have such energy bursts at such frequencies when we collide two particles into each other at 99.999% of the speed of light. However strings can never be directly observed, and the indirect effects that we think maybe we should be able to see, which vary on who you ask, are so subtle that we can't really hope to measure them.
As a mathematician by trade, I understand the beauty that a nice mathematical model can offer, but nobody has ever given me a compelling argument for string theory other than "D-Branes are cool, and if I talk about strings vibrating, people can relate because they have seen vibrating strings before."
Are there physical predictions made by string theory, not made by other theories, that should be detectable by experiment which we can conceive now (even if we cannot run the experiment with current technology/funding) in which a negative result would cause people to abandon the core of string theory? If so, it is not just a religion. If not, then it currently is, regardless of how many scientists are working to change that.
Until you know how to make it falsifiable, it fails to be science.
Just because it has equations or big ideas or lofty goals or the support of intelligent people does not mean that one can make the leap "this has potential" to "this is right." By insisting that you have found the one true theory when it is not CURRENTLY falsifiable means that you are following a religion.
One day, we may discover a God who can attest that the god of the Christians does not exist, or who brings other elements of the supernatural to a scientific grounding. Or we may discover a way to travel through time (or at least look back in time, sans interaction) that would allow us to see if Jesus was real and did what is claimed. If religion becomes falsifiable, and if we can conclusively prove that the events in the bible or Koran are true or false, do those who worship God cease to practice a religion? I do not think that impossibility of falsifiability is part of the definition of religion. In the present context, I'd prefer to define religion as "A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."
Science needs a certain aspect of religion to it for it to progress: If people did not earnestly believe that budding theories might one day become mature enough to be falsifiable, they never would mature to that level. If people did not have faith that the world has regularity which is governed by knowable scientific principles, nobody would attempt to do science. However, to have the arrogance to presume that your religion will one day be falsifiable while someone else's can never be (by definition?) is to confuse your faith with your facts.
"I don't buy from Walmart, I don't buy music from the RIAA, and I don't buy ten year old girls from the local human trafficker."
Like your music, you get your ten year old girls for free online?
Time might be money to an economist, and there may be an opportunity cost to playing WoW (which is not an actual cost, and to speak as it were is to confuse reality with an economic model), at least assuming that one has the opportunity to profit by working more hours elsewhere. However I don't think it is relevant to the argument. The question at hand is why should blizzard care enough to forbid gold selling in the ToS, and one reason is that many players dislike the game imbalance caused by such sales. The spirit of the game is that progress should be roughly proportionate to effort, and gold sales violate that spirit.
Once the rules of the game have been set forth, anybody who buys or sells gold is in violations of the rules of the game (and what is a game if not a set of rules and constraints within which to explore possibilities?) However, if the rules were not in place, I don't think people would feel moral superiority over those who buy gold so much as a sadness that reality seeped into what was intended to be a realm of fantasy in such an obscene way.
The game was not intended to be impacted by how much money you make outside of the game, because such a factor would have been a great unequalizer. The game required little skill that could not be easily learned, as that too would have been a great unequalizer. There are MMORPGS where game money is meant to have a relationship to real money, or where reflexes or intelligence are designed to make a big impact to the game. There is an egalitarian ideal to the game, even if not everybody can be equal. Just because things are not completely equal does not mean that it is ok to add additional elements of inequality to the game. Just because you equate time and money does not mean that the two should be interchangeable in this instance.
If I am paying $15/month to play some game and I find parts of it to be boring, why should Blizzard care if I want to pay someone else to play that part? It is no different from real life, where I pay someone else to grow (and sometimes cook) my food, kill cows for me, etc.
The short answer is that Blizzard minds because the players mind. The long answer is that the players mind for a reason. The problem is not inflation, because someone would probably be killing the monsters and causing the gold and items to drop anyway, even if in a slightly lesser quantity. The problem is rather that of influence and distribution. The external nature of the money that people buy the gold with means that the egalitarian nature of the game (that people start off equal and distinguish themselves via work and skill, with a small amount of luck). Additionally, since one in theory has to work hard in game to make something of oneself, it is a mockery of the dedication people put into the game to see what is in a sense a mark of distinction placed upon one who does not deserve it.
To illustrate these points, I would like to offer some analogies. Suppose that you went to your friend's house to play monopoly, but because someone paid your friend $10 under the table, he started with triple the money of everybody else. The game would be more fun for that person, but less fun for everybody but the person who had the extra money: the shape of the game changed because of something which should not be affecting the game. Or if you spent all year preparing for a golf tournament and finished spectacularly, but the trophy were given to a man who did not do as well but had promised to donate a new clubhouse if he "won". Or what if legislation was passed to make it illegal to circumvent any encryption used as a means of copy protection because someone had enough congressmen on payroll? Money can buy things that make some things just less enjoyable for the majority of people.
Just because certain actions can't be controlled by software does not mean that they should be allowed; just because one can do something does not mean one should. Rules exist for reasons. People disapprove of paying off players to throw sports games, and people disapprove of paying players to farm gold. Just because both still happen despite the rules does not mean that we should accept it and stop trying to fix the problem.
The way language is used changes over time. Just as "liberal" was not always a pejorative, the term "geek" is being used either in a different context or possibly in a completely new way. Part of the reason language can shift like this is because words are defined by examples of their usage. There is no clear and objective standard for judging when an activity is "fun" or a pigment is "red" (I challenge you to, on a 256 color palette, decide which shades are clearly red and which are clearly not red. If you put every shade in one category or the other, your best friend will probably disagree on at least some of your decisions, though you probably won't be confident about it either). So too, there is no clear definition of geek.
"Geek" was previously used to describe several, often overlapping groups of people; Geek described those who prefer math and computers to drinking or those who preferred Star Wars to women. Somehow, because of the correlation between "geekiness" and earnings potential, people felt the need to cast being in a geek in a more positive light and decided to focus on the relatively common (but not defining) tendency of geeks to be passionate about something. Passion bordering on fanatical zealotry that interferes in social interaction is not a requirement: I have heard people say things like "I'm a music geek" to mean as little as "I buy a few cds or 2 a month and go to a few concerts a year." As the common usage of the term changes, the definition changes. At this rate, in 10 years the term geek will be nothing but a meaningless modifier indicating slight interest.
The problem is that while people don't want to view all "geeks" in a bad light because they see positives to being geeky, not all geeks are going to be deserving of praise for their geekiness, and so either "geek" will remain a pejorative depending on context or some other term will fill the niche of the formerly derogatory use of the word. When I was younger, there did not seem to be a large difference between "geek" and "nerd", but perhaps now "nerd" will become the formerly negative connotation of "geek"? Who knows?
Language changes because we use many not quite equivalent definitions or examples to define terms, and as we shift from one definition to another, we change the canonical examples and alternate definitions. Do not be confused, though, geeks have not changed, only the usage of the term. Personally, I think that people changing the language I want to use is double plus ungood, but what can you do?
The commend made me laugh too, but not because the answer is to use an encyclopedia. Encyclopedias might be useful for getting a quick summery of ideas related to a topic, perhaps to suggest directions for research, but it is an entirely innapropriate source for information for a thesis. Even if one ignores the fact that a thesis should be mostly new research, the resources one uses should be books, scholarly journals, primary sources, and the like. If a wikipedia article is useful for more than inspiration and a list of references, you are doing your thesis completely wrong.
That said, there are a lot of times when Wikipedia is both useful and convenient. Just, not when one is writing a thesis.
The problem with the nature study is that it only focused on science articles. Being less popular and less politically charged, one would expect fewer trolls and fewer people putting in incorrect information that they think is true. To a certain extent, if you have less people looking at a page (but still have trolls), you have less people trying to correct the page and doing so incorrectly.
In short, the nature study is an indicator of the quality of part of wikipedia, but not a good indicator of the overall quality, which is not uniform.
I think that efforts to curb easy trolling will help to improve quality in more controversial or popular articles, though, and this very mild effort can only be a good thing.
You're partly right. Between 1 and n, there are about n/ln(n) primes, but between n and n+k for some small k, there are much fewer. The odds that an arbitrary number n is prime is about 1/ln(n). In fact, this empirical observation is what caused Gauss to define the Li function, Li(n)=Integral1/ln(x)] from 2 to n. It is an even better estimator for Pi(x) than n/ln(n). While there are constants that bound how well n/ln(n) works (about 1.1 and .9), Li(n)-Pi(n) actually changes signs an infinite number of times.
While there is about a 1/ln(n) chance that n is prime, trial division up to something small can eliminate the majority of composites fairly quickly, though, so I probably gave a slightly less than ideal estimate on how long it would take to find two primes. However, I do not believe that this will put me off by more than a constant factor.
Assuming the riemann hypothesis, I believe there are O((log n)^12) algorithms for proving primality (with a pretty big constant in front....I'm basing this on memory, its been a while since I have studied this stuff heavily), but I don't recall reading about better. As another poster mentioned, you can suffice with strong pseudoprimes to multiple bases to get a negligible chance of compositness fairly quickly, but it still requires nontrivial time on numbers this large (about 2500 digits). I haven't ever played around with timing for pseudo-primality tests for numbers quite this large, but I have coded all the standard algorithms before and done testing for smaller numbers.
For what its worth, I am an aspiring mathematician. I did my undergrad at a top 5 school in math (with a large smattering of comp sci classes), and I'm currently working on my PhD at another top 5 school in math. I have done work on computational aspects of primes (and on prime distribution) both recreationally and for classes. I might have been off by a little on some of this stuff (I was working from memory, I'm sorry), but I am not as ill informed as you might like.
I realize you were joking, but I'd like to respond anyway.
RSA keys are based on having two large prime numbers whose product is then difficult to factor. In general, the larger these numbers are, the harder it is to factor: trial division is O(sqrt(n)), and even the best methods of factoring are still of increasing time for increasing numbers. Using a general method, a 1.44mb key would take a LONG time to factor. However, there is one very important caveat...
If you go high enough, people don't know very many primes. In fact, there are lists of the largest known primes. I'd wager that there are less than a few thousand known primes greater than 2^720k, probably a lot less. This means that if you have a 1.44Mb number which you know to be the product of two primes, then either you can do trial divisions from a short list to factor the number, or else someone has discovered a new large prime.
In short, if you have a large enough key, the task of generating primes is difficult enough that factoring becomes much easier. To give you an idea of how difficult finding primes is, n has about a 1/(ln n) chance of being prime, and using a specialized algorithm, it takes about a day to check a mersenne number of this size for primality. General algorithms are, of course, slower. This means that, to perhaps an order of magnitude or two, it would take about million 1Ghz computer days to find two new suitible primes to multiply together. Of course, if you do this, its not likely that someone will crack your key without a quantum computer, but its also not likely that you will find a key pair until quantum computers are widespread.
I guess if you want big keys like that, you should look into eliptic curves. At least by the time you generate a key, there is a chance that it won't be trivial to break!
I don't know what your highschool experience was like, but mine did involve a lot of regurgitation. Tests can test a number of things:
Different tests require different levels of understanding and different levels of analysis and synthesis. I once had a history class that, while we were asked open ended questions about why things happened, we were given points only for mentioning the points which the teacher felt were the "actual" reasons (which he often told the class the day before). It turned history from something that should have been about understanding the interplay between different events and personalities and situations into a mere regurgitation of facts.
Even in math or science, high school requires very little in the way of understanding. If you can remember the worked solutions and just plug in your new numbers or variables into them, you can succeed admirably. I knew a lot of people in highschool who started having trouble in math only when they couldn't memorize the examples in entirety.
Mere regurgitation with a slight amount of variation (a la simple regex) is enough to get you through highschool quite easily.
As a slight bit of an asside, several of the people in the PhD program I'm in have mentioned that the only way they made it through some early classes was through understanding the concepts and being able to rederive the formulas quickly. As you progress in your education further, the amount you can get by just on memorization decreases considerably. However, there is a large chunk of it where regurgitation and rote memorization will help you a lot more than real understanding. With any luck, college will present this boy with an opportunity ro prove that he can actually think. So far, there are no gaurentees.
"What MMORPGs need to do is implement better server-side analysis to identify cheaters. Difficult? Yes. Expensive? Yes. But probably less difficult and less expensive that losing craploads of clients, and hiring craploads of lawyers. Then they won't need to have the invasion clause in the license for their games."
I'm sure that there are lots of things that Blizzard does server side to detect cheating. The problem is, their view of cheating is broad enough that it cannot be completely detected server side. Consider the following (real) example:
During the WoW Beta, in game fishing was fairly easy to do. It was so easy, in fact, that people were able to completely automate the process. So Blizzard changed the mechanics of fishing so that you had to cast your line, observe a small splash if something got caught in your lure, and quickly click to reel your fish in before it escaped. People then wrote more elaborate fishing macros which had an external program constantly scanning sections of the screen for certain kinds of pixel changes that would indicate a splash. Blizzard then responded by slashing the prices of fished items that are sold to vendors. Macroing fishing went from highly profitable at a low level to unprofitable at all levels.
The point of all this is that macroing fishing was completely within game mechanics. Except for noting the time that someone spends fishing (which may or may not be a good indicator of cheating), there was no way to detect this "cheating" server side. But it was cheating. It caused a few people to create wealth for themselves with no effort, which leads to an imballance in other areas of the game (like equipment).
People are (almost) not stupid enough anymore to use hacks that would change game mechanics for them. They would get caught very easily and they know it. With very few exceptions, cheating in WOW is limited to botting. There are small differences between how a human might play as opposed to a decent bot, but I'm not entirely sure that it is the kind of thing that can be detected server side.
Do I want them scanning my computer? Not if it can be helped. However, if they are nice about it (reasonable disclosure, plus scanning only hashes and file sizes but not actual text, and not sending back any information that isn't absolutely necessary), it seems the best solution. Cheating is a serious problem in a game like this, and I'm not sure there is another viable approach to stopping botting.
My guess (I didn't do the moderation) is that it is considered off topic because:
(1) it appears to be mostly a complaint about the legal drinking age in the USA
(2) "No WINE before its time" is more of a reference to the fact that certain wines are aged greatly and that aficionado's won't drink the wine before it has had sufficient time to age. The title was a reference to the age of the wine, not to the age of the wine drinker.
Overall, it would have been a not very joke had the title been referencing drinking age, but as it stands it is merely an off topic complaint about the drinking age. The intent may have been humor, but I don't think that a mod of off topic is completely unwarranted.
The problem with a tax is that, unless things are really elastic, the cost will just be passed onto the consumer. I suppose that maybe they should be helping pay for the tax, given that they are helping to create the additional waste, but the point of the tax is not just to cover the cost of cleanup. Ideally, we want to discourage the companies from being so socially irresponsible. This might work if we do a tax plus a price ceiling to force the companies to pay the tax out of whatever profits they are already making, but that doesn't seem like a great solution. Any tax large enough to significantly impact the companies bottom line (assuming that demand isn't too elastic) will probably be enough to make the product not worth making in the first hand. That is one way to solve the problem, but I don't think that is a great solution either.
Economic models aren't that hard, but making good economic policy is a pain.
I think its important to remember that, among the anti-software-patent crowd at slashdot, there are two camps. The first is against stupid or obvious software pattents. One click shopping was fairly stupid and obvious. The things that google pattents (to my knowledge, for the most part) are not stupid or obvious. This crowd isn't going to be up in arms over google.
The second group is against all software patents and tye system itself. I think many of those people understand a few things that make google's actions seem not that bad:
(1) Google is not using its patents in an offensive or predatory manner.
(2) Google is offering its services (which employ the pattents) for free.
(3) If Google did not patent what they did, Microsoft would and then try to sue them (see iPod interface). Google is forced to play in the system, and as such they are forced to make a defense. Blame the system, not those who play by its rules to survive.
I think there are many times the anti-patent people have reason to be angry. Google, however, does not seem to be a shining example of why the system needs to be changed.
What are best practices for passwords, though? Different places seem to have different rules, Different places have different rules, and I don't know what matters and what doesn't anymore. Sometimes I need a long password. Sometimes I need a mix of cases and letters and non alphanumerics. Sometimes, no substrinng can be a word cound in the dictionary. Sometimes I need exactly 8 characters. Sometimes, the system just truncates whatever password that is entered to 8 characters!
Are there any set of standards for picking good passwords that can be remembered? If so, why isn't there some agreed upon standard?
"But it was like 9/11 when many people had been trying to warn the public for years and everyone turned a deaf ear."
Given the similarities to 9/11 (a horrible but predictible tragedy that people wanted to ignore until it hit), I wonder what the aftermath will be. Of course, the nation will lend a hand, we will resolve to face the aftermath with courage, and we will rebuild. But what next? Perhaps people will cry that the severity of recent hurricanes is due to globaal warming, due in part to fossil fuels, due in part to iranian oil, and this will be justification for another war? Perhaps people will question the nature of god, some declaring war on god while others decry New Orleans as a den of sin and vice?
Recent tragedy has been channeled into vengence, and I fear where this might lead. Somehow, someone will take the blame. At least life is strangely amusing and highly televised.
WoW allows Windows and Mac users to play together on the same realms, something which isn't done in other MMORPGS
Is this true? I never tried out the non-windows everquest clients when I played, but I see no technological reason (and heard no mention) why a Mac client would be restricted to different servers than a Windows client in any game. MMORPGs on consoles might choose to have different servers for different platforms, eiher to level the playing field where different systems use different vastly different controllers or because of differences in the online console networks, but there seems to me to be no limitations for PCs that wouldn't be completely artificial.
Can you cite examples?
For those children who are gifted and have concomittant special needs (i.e. can finish assigned reading in 1/2 the allotted time and then disrupt the class because they're bored, does the teacher have anything for them to do afterwards?)/i.
In many cases, no, they do not. In highschool, I was required to take a health clsss, which was one of the few classes where I did not have the option of at least an honors class. Classes like these, which were designed to be taught to the lowest common denomintor, had football coaches for teachers (who were required to teach at least one class in my school district).
One day, durring the second week of class, I finished the days work in 10 minutes. Not knowing what to do with the other 80 minutes of the class, I took out a piece of paper and started drawing things. I was then scolded, my drawings were confiscated, and I was ordered not to draw in class ever again. I sat wiith my head on my desk for the remaining 78 minutes.
I dropped the class with the intention of finishing it via correspondance, although I later left the school and didn't even have to do that, but the point is that classes can be very very bad if you have any idea what you are doing.
On the other hand, if you have good classes, things can be ok. That same year, I was spending half my day at another school to take AP calculus and AP computer science. When it was clear that I was bored in AP comp sci 1, they moved me to 2, and since there were tons of competent people in the class they let us do our own thing most of the class. As long as we got the work done, they didn't mind. In my calc class, I sat in the back talking to my friends and playing games on my calculator. But I also got the best grades in the class, so the teacher let me be. I took a history class where we actually thought critically about things and were given fun and creative tasks.
Unfortunately, I was one of the lucky ones. My family took proactive steps to ensure I went to the schools with the gifted programs, even going so far as putting me in private school when we moved and my new school was forcing me to retake classes because they couldn't schedule me otherwise. If parents don't care about your education, if teachers aren't motivated (and knowing the students most of them get, I don't see how they could be), if the students dont' havee the drive to learn, if society doesn't value education, then we will get crap results. But all these things are related, and significant change won't be easy.