I'm not directly familiar with either course (and the one-word summaries are a bit limited for providing informed advice!) but it sounds to me like the first one would be generally useful and you should take it regardless of what programming you intend to do - it sounds like it covers sort of the "mathematical fundamentals of programming". The second sounds more like it's useful for certain *types* of programming - perhaps 3d or game programming. Unlikely to be terribly useful for writing database-backed web applications, for example.
I'm certainly interested in my own privacy, I had gone through the privacy options in great detail when I first set up my account (and turned most of them off except to friends). And I don't allow apps access to my profile unless I trust the source. At the time, nothing much seemed to help me with regard to third party apps that access me via my friends. Otherwise how is it that those third party spam apps are able to blast me with invites and "random friend sent you a hug"s?
I note that you're not making any substantive corrections to what I'm trying to say, in favor of just telling me I'm wrong. Perhaps you'd care to illuminate *why* I'm wrong?
If I understand correctly, before this change this information was already accessible not only to any apps you used but any apps that your friends used. Those apps could do whatever they like with it and you don't have any control over what apps your friends use. Also much of it was available to anyone who happened to want to serve an ad on your page.
By designating it as irredeemably public, they're not making privacy worse, they're just admitting what was already true.
I wish they didn't include friends list and pages in the must-be-public information, but I'd rather this approach than having it be ACTUALLY public (because any app can access it) while allowing you to set a setting making it "private" that didn't actually do anything to really make it so.
The feature I've always wanted from a GPS is the ability to go to google maps on my computer, come up with a route on there, and then send it to the device. This looks like it could easily offer that ability but curiously it's not mentioned in any of the blurbs that I've seen. Anyone know if it's supported?
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1
Xenocide was the only one that I actively disliked. I actually liked Children of the Mind and I'd like to see a sequel to that...
It's relevant because the more companies MAKING MONEY in the space industry - especially the "consumer level" space industry - the more investment there will be in those industries and the more the state of the art WILL be advanced.
I certainly cheer for SpaceX and other private companies doing what you insist on referring to as "real" space flight like it's the only kind that matters. They're doing amazing things. But their focus is - quite naturally - on bringing costs down in the market that exists today - satellite launch for large companies; astronauts for NASA. As long as that remains the focus of the entire space market, there will never be any prospect of people like you and I getting into space at all - orbital or not.
VG is doing something in an entirely different market - going after consumers, albeit very rich ones for now. If you're insanely rich right now, you can go Space Adventures for $20Mil and get into space. VG's very first flights will be at 1% of that price! There is at least the theoretical prospect that within my lifetime the prices might go down enough and I might be able to save enough that I could make that flight. They may not be advancing the technical state of the art, but they're sure as hell advancing the state of the art in availability.
Besides - knowing Branson's well-publicized personality - can you really imagine that VG will STOP at suborbital?
From the article: "The entire passage was previously decrypted to read: This was his last message: x Thirty-eight degrees fifty-seven minutes six point five seconds North, seventy-seven degrees eight minutes forty-four seconds West. ID by rows."
This seems very clearly a set of geographical longitude/lattitude coordinates. Presumably whatever's actually at that location would be necessary context for the "layer two" to make sense. So what location does that set of coordinates refer to? One of these cryptography buffs must know... but the article doesn't mention the answer.
I rewatched Serenity today right after watching the series through a couple of times, and the first thing I thought was "what the hell did they do to the ship?!"
I never noticed it watching the movie the first time, but one of the most beautiful things about the series was that even though it was a spaceship, everything was all mechanical and just a touch run-down and clunky. In the movie they made it all shiny - and not in a good way. The doors to the crew quarters actually went mechanical and got fluorescent lights around them when opened!
Oh well. Still a great movie, but it just seemed like a shame after they put so much effort into getting the atmosphere of the ship so perfect in the series.
No he didn't. He said that making Serenity brought "closure", but that's not the same as being finished for good. He followed up with a clarification once it was clear that lots of people were misinterpreting what he'd said. Check previous slashbacks for the link.
I'm not saying there's a huge amount of hope for the show to be reborn, but Joss has never ruled it out.
Both of those numbers are dwarfed by those making a living doing custom development that's neither open nor closed, and those people could use either kind of software equally.
"Less than a thousand bucks" isn't expensive? I'm 27 years old, have been full-time employed for 6 years, and have a family, and there's still no way I could afford a thousand bucks for a patent on any ideas I come up with while programming.
One of the patent defenders in this discussion talked about patents being useful to protect "16 year olds in their basements". How many of those could afford a thousand bucks?
The problem is that by definition the people who need protection don't have a thousand bucks per idea, and the people who can afford to throw a thousand bucks at every trivial idea don't need protection, but ARE more than willing to attack all the people who can't.
One other thing... you wrote: "So, everyone would be willing to program for free, and provide tech support for free?"
Ever heard of open source? I hear it's quite the rage these days...
(this is the URL that displays in the right-hand frame when you click the root of your subscription tree).
You'll get all new entries on all your subscriptions as they show up. But be careful not to close the window before you've read them all, because just visiting that URL marks them all as read and you can't get them back!
When I saw that this had made/. I wondered if anyone would have bothered to read my comments, and what the feedback would be. Glad to see that somebody did:)
IANAL either but IMHO "dismissed with prejudice" doesn't mean unappealable. Rather, "dismissed without prejudice" means that you can bring the same case again (presumably with new evidence or better arguments) *without* appealing the decision.
AIUI, there are some intermediate procedural rulings that can't be appealed, but any final decision can be appealed except for:
1) A decision by the Supreme Court (that's why we're absolutely screwed on Eldred vs Ashcroft)
2) A decision that the Supreme Court expressly declines to consider (this is essentially the SC saying "the decision of the lower court stands")
I'm sure there are some other situations, and I've probably horribly mischaracterized the ones that do exist, but I'm pretty sure that merely "dismissed with prejudice" isn't a showstopper for an appeal.
I'd prefer to mandate it to be proportionally. I can't see anything good coming from splitting it by district except turning the campaign to "battleground districts" instead of "battleground states". To be honest, I doubt there are many districts where it's close - at least states as a whole often balance urban and rural so there's a split in opinion on those lines.
Besides, letting the people who win the races decide the district lines that will determine who gets elected next time seems like a recipe for disaster (I believe this is called gerrymandering).
I also can't see any scheme except proportional that could lead to good results. Let me know if you can.
I assume that since you're talking about strategy-free, you must be in favor of Concordet and not IRV. In the purest sense, strategy-free is mathematically impossible; Concordet comes closer than anything else, but on this score Approval does much better than IRV.
I don't think that what you are talking about is voting dishonestly, anyway. I think there's a major distinction between the kind of strategy required for plurality or IRV (where the best strategy is frequently to rank the candidates in something other than your true order of preference) and the kind of strategy required for Approval (where you have a choice between a range of equally honest votes and the strategy lies in deciding which one would be more effective).
In Approval, if your true preferences are A > B > C > D > E, it's equally honest if you vote ABCD, ABC, AB or A. In fact, it's also equally honest to vote ABCDE if you think they're all pretty good, or vote for nobody if you think that even A is still not good enough, despite being better than the others. There's strategy in deciding which of those votes you should cast, but voting BCD is never in your best interest.
Under IRV, the only honest vote in that situation is ABCDE, but your best strategy could be CADBE - or anything.
In your example, if people vote for just one in order to tip the results to that candidate, I'm generally likely to be okay with that - after all, it's my own silly fault if I voted for someone but wouldn't be okay with them winning!
While I'd love to support Concordet which is the only method that (IMO) does better than Approval, I don't believe that voters can handle ranked ballots.
If I were casting a Concordet ballot between voting systems, my rankings would be Approval > Concordet > Plurality > IRV. I think Plurality sucks - but I think IRV sucks worse.
The main advantage of Approval in my book is that you can realistically eliminate primaries and have *all* eligible candidates on the main ballot. In the last election, this would have been a particularly big deal since by most indications McCain would have convincingly beaten either Bush *or* Gore in a head-to-head race. Stick him on an Approval ballot with both of them, and he would have won.
Not to mention that it would be possible to get a true indication of how much support third parties really have, without the problem that so many people are afraid to vote for them for fear of hurting their "least worst" favorite out of the major two.
While it's true that there is some strategy still required under Approval (btw, this is also true of IRV, just that in that case the strategy is *more* complicated and involves actively lying about your true preferences), it doesn't even begin to compare with what's required under the current system.
Under the current system you first have to vote in the primaries (which you may not be eligible to do unless you register the right party affiliation). This vote suffers all the normal problems of a plurality vote (see below) but is also complicated by another factor: as well as considering your own preferences, you also need to consider the likelihood of the chosen candidate winning the real election against whoever gets picked by the other primary.
Then you come to the main election which is straight plurality. The problems with plurality are well-documented but it comes down to this in realistic situations: when there are only two candidates who can win, you have a catch-22 situation. Either you vote for one of the two who can win, and perpetuate a situation where the candidates you really prefer never even get a look in, or you vote for one of the others and end up completely disenfranchised in the main race.
IRV purports to solve this last problem but emphatically doesn't scale to the point where you can eliminate the primaries. It starts to show cracks as soon as a third party actually gets a chance to win, and as somebody else points out, it actively works to eliminate candidates with broad appeal early in the process (while Approval actively favors such candidates).
Approval addresses all these issues, and I hope the McCain example shows that there's a very real possibility of it making a real, positive difference in practice.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not directly familiar with either course (and the one-word summaries are a bit limited for providing informed advice!) but it sounds to me like the first one would be generally useful and you should take it regardless of what programming you intend to do - it sounds like it covers sort of the "mathematical fundamentals of programming". The second sounds more like it's useful for certain *types* of programming - perhaps 3d or game programming. Unlikely to be terribly useful for writing database-backed web applications, for example.
I'm certainly interested in my own privacy, I had gone through the privacy options in great detail when I first set up my account (and turned most of them off except to friends). And I don't allow apps access to my profile unless I trust the source. At the time, nothing much seemed to help me with regard to third party apps that access me via my friends. Otherwise how is it that those third party spam apps are able to blast me with invites and "random friend sent you a hug"s?
I note that you're not making any substantive corrections to what I'm trying to say, in favor of just telling me I'm wrong. Perhaps you'd care to illuminate *why* I'm wrong?
If I understand correctly, before this change this information was already accessible not only to any apps you used but any apps that your friends used. Those apps could do whatever they like with it and you don't have any control over what apps your friends use. Also much of it was available to anyone who happened to want to serve an ad on your page.
By designating it as irredeemably public, they're not making privacy worse, they're just admitting what was already true.
I wish they didn't include friends list and pages in the must-be-public information, but I'd rather this approach than having it be ACTUALLY public (because any app can access it) while allowing you to set a setting making it "private" that didn't actually do anything to really make it so.
The feature I've always wanted from a GPS is the ability to go to google maps on my computer, come up with a route on there, and then send it to the device. This looks like it could easily offer that ability but curiously it's not mentioned in any of the blurbs that I've seen. Anyone know if it's supported?
Xenocide was the only one that I actively disliked. I actually liked Children of the Mind and I'd like to see a sequel to that...
It's relevant because the more companies MAKING MONEY in the space industry - especially the "consumer level" space industry - the more investment there will be in those industries and the more the state of the art WILL be advanced.
I certainly cheer for SpaceX and other private companies doing what you insist on referring to as "real" space flight like it's the only kind that matters. They're doing amazing things. But their focus is - quite naturally - on bringing costs down in the market that exists today - satellite launch for large companies; astronauts for NASA. As long as that remains the focus of the entire space market, there will never be any prospect of people like you and I getting into space at all - orbital or not.
VG is doing something in an entirely different market - going after consumers, albeit very rich ones for now. If you're insanely rich right now, you can go Space Adventures for $20Mil and get into space. VG's very first flights will be at 1% of that price! There is at least the theoretical prospect that within my lifetime the prices might go down enough and I might be able to save enough that I could make that flight. They may not be advancing the technical state of the art, but they're sure as hell advancing the state of the art in availability.
Besides - knowing Branson's well-publicized personality - can you really imagine that VG will STOP at suborbital?
From the article: "The entire passage was previously decrypted to read: This was his last message: x Thirty-eight degrees fifty-seven minutes six point five seconds North, seventy-seven degrees eight minutes forty-four seconds West. ID by rows."
This seems very clearly a set of geographical longitude/lattitude coordinates. Presumably whatever's actually at that location would be necessary context for the "layer two" to make sense. So what location does that set of coordinates refer to? One of these cryptography buffs must know... but the article doesn't mention the answer.
I rewatched Serenity today right after watching the series through a couple of times, and the first thing I thought was "what the hell did they do to the ship?!"
I never noticed it watching the movie the first time, but one of the most beautiful things about the series was that even though it was a spaceship, everything was all mechanical and just a touch run-down and clunky. In the movie they made it all shiny - and not in a good way. The doors to the crew quarters actually went mechanical and got fluorescent lights around them when opened!
Oh well. Still a great movie, but it just seemed like a shame after they put so much effort into getting the atmosphere of the ship so perfect in the series.
No he didn't. He said that making Serenity brought "closure", but that's not the same as being finished for good. He followed up with a clarification once it was clear that lots of people were misinterpreting what he'd said. Check previous slashbacks for the link.
:)
I'm not saying there's a huge amount of hope for the show to be reborn, but Joss has never ruled it out.
Keep buying those DVDs!
Um, what about Metallica? I'd say they're far more likely to be known by a non-slashdotter than any of your list...
It's a penguin with a rubber glove on it's head.
That joke really sucked.
No, but I can't point out any in HTML 4.01 Strict either, and I can find plenty in XHTML Transitional.
Semanticness is nothing to do with XHTML versus HTML, but to do with Strict versus Transitional of either one.
Five-odd years according to what obser... oh forget it.
That's the most insightful thing I've read all day. Thank you for a much needed laugh :) I only wish I had mod points.
Both of those numbers are dwarfed by those making a living doing custom development that's neither open nor closed, and those people could use either kind of software equally.
"Less than a thousand bucks" isn't expensive? I'm 27 years old, have been full-time employed for 6 years, and have a family, and there's still no way I could afford a thousand bucks for a patent on any ideas I come up with while programming.
One of the patent defenders in this discussion talked about patents being useful to protect "16 year olds in their basements". How many of those could afford a thousand bucks?
The problem is that by definition the people who need protection don't have a thousand bucks per idea, and the people who can afford to throw a thousand bucks at every trivial idea don't need protection, but ARE more than willing to attack all the people who can't.
One other thing... you wrote: "So, everyone would be willing to program for free, and provide tech support for free?"
Ever heard of open source? I hear it's quite the rage these days...
Bookmark http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs_display?all=1
(this is the URL that displays in the right-hand frame when you click the root of your subscription tree).
You'll get all new entries on all your subscriptions as they show up. But be careful not to close the window before you've read them all, because just visiting that URL marks them all as read and you can't get them back!
Thanks for the endorsement ;)
/. I wondered if anyone would have bothered to read my comments, and what the feedback would be. Glad to see that somebody did :)
When I saw that this had made
IANAL either but IMHO "dismissed with prejudice" doesn't mean unappealable. Rather, "dismissed without prejudice" means that you can bring the same case again (presumably with new evidence or better arguments) *without* appealing the decision.
AIUI, there are some intermediate procedural rulings that can't be appealed, but any final decision can be appealed except for:
1) A decision by the Supreme Court (that's why we're absolutely screwed on Eldred vs Ashcroft)
2) A decision that the Supreme Court expressly declines to consider (this is essentially the SC saying "the decision of the lower court stands")
I'm sure there are some other situations, and I've probably horribly mischaracterized the ones that do exist, but I'm pretty sure that merely "dismissed with prejudice" isn't a showstopper for an appeal.
Stuart.
I'd prefer to mandate it to be proportionally. I can't see anything good coming from splitting it by district except turning the campaign to "battleground districts" instead of "battleground states". To be honest, I doubt there are many districts where it's close - at least states as a whole often balance urban and rural so there's a split in opinion on those lines.
Besides, letting the people who win the races decide the district lines that will determine who gets elected next time seems like a recipe for disaster (I believe this is called gerrymandering).
I also can't see any scheme except proportional that could lead to good results. Let me know if you can.
I assume that since you're talking about strategy-free, you must be in favor of Concordet and not IRV. In the purest sense, strategy-free is mathematically impossible; Concordet comes closer than anything else, but on this score Approval does much better than IRV.
I don't think that what you are talking about is voting dishonestly, anyway. I think there's a major distinction between the kind of strategy required for plurality or IRV (where the best strategy is frequently to rank the candidates in something other than your true order of preference) and the kind of strategy required for Approval (where you have a choice between a range of equally honest votes and the strategy lies in deciding which one would be more effective).
In Approval, if your true preferences are A > B > C > D > E, it's equally honest if you vote ABCD, ABC, AB or A. In fact, it's also equally honest to vote ABCDE if you think they're all pretty good, or vote for nobody if you think that even A is still not good enough, despite being better than the others. There's strategy in deciding which of those votes you should cast, but voting BCD is never in your best interest.
Under IRV, the only honest vote in that situation is ABCDE, but your best strategy could be CADBE - or anything.
In your example, if people vote for just one in order to tip the results to that candidate, I'm generally likely to be okay with that - after all, it's my own silly fault if I voted for someone but wouldn't be okay with them winning!
While I'd love to support Concordet which is the only method that (IMO) does better than Approval, I don't believe that voters can handle ranked ballots.
If I were casting a Concordet ballot between voting systems, my rankings would be Approval > Concordet > Plurality > IRV. I think Plurality sucks - but I think IRV sucks worse.
Probably not, I lurk much more than I post. When I do post I just use my real name, "Stuart".
;)
Look for crazy HBP theories and suggestions that Luc Besson should direct the movies
How closely are you following the nascent commercial space industry (SpaceShipOne, Virgin Galactic, etc)?
How soon do you see private industry making it to orbit?
The main advantage of Approval in my book is that you can realistically eliminate primaries and have *all* eligible candidates on the main ballot. In the last election, this would have been a particularly big deal since by most indications McCain would have convincingly beaten either Bush *or* Gore in a head-to-head race. Stick him on an Approval ballot with both of them, and he would have won.
Not to mention that it would be possible to get a true indication of how much support third parties really have, without the problem that so many people are afraid to vote for them for fear of hurting their "least worst" favorite out of the major two.
While it's true that there is some strategy still required under Approval (btw, this is also true of IRV, just that in that case the strategy is *more* complicated and involves actively lying about your true preferences), it doesn't even begin to compare with what's required under the current system.
Under the current system you first have to vote in the primaries (which you may not be eligible to do unless you register the right party affiliation). This vote suffers all the normal problems of a plurality vote (see below) but is also complicated by another factor: as well as considering your own preferences, you also need to consider the likelihood of the chosen candidate winning the real election against whoever gets picked by the other primary.
Then you come to the main election which is straight plurality. The problems with plurality are well-documented but it comes down to this in realistic situations: when there are only two candidates who can win, you have a catch-22 situation. Either you vote for one of the two who can win, and perpetuate a situation where the candidates you really prefer never even get a look in, or you vote for one of the others and end up completely disenfranchised in the main race.
IRV purports to solve this last problem but emphatically doesn't scale to the point where you can eliminate the primaries. It starts to show cracks as soon as a third party actually gets a chance to win, and as somebody else points out, it actively works to eliminate candidates with broad appeal early in the process (while Approval actively favors such candidates).
Approval addresses all these issues, and I hope the McCain example shows that there's a very real possibility of it making a real, positive difference in practice.
(btw, are you the same sirius kase from TLC?)