Yeah, but I'm waiting for that website gets a -1 Troll for adding incorrect words to its dictionary, thus legitimizing the undereducated to bring the rest of society down with them.
Why would "the undereducated" care what's in a dictionary?!
There's no fusion going on in the Earth. Indeed, most of the Earth's heat is still left over from the formation of Earth, with some additional heat being produced by radioactive decays.
<pedantry> However, even the heat produced by radioactive decay is ultimately the result of fusion since no complex atom would exist to decay if it hadn't at some point been fused from simpler atoms. </pedantry>
Would you frame the discussion of your sense of smell in terms of computational power?
I sure would. In fact, if you replace "sense" above with "perception", I think it's counterproductive to frame it any other way. Our eyes/ears/noses/whatever are nothing more than sensors with finite capabilities, just like the CCD on a digital camera or the microphone on your headset. All are quantifiable (with, for example, resolution and light-sensitivity determined by the number of sensors in the CCD or the numbers of rods and cones in our eyes) and, more importantly, all are completely without computation.
Where the computation comes into play is when we take the step from "sensing" a stimulus (which all of us whose senses function do essentially identically -- with the only real variation being physical variations in the sensors themselves), to "perceiving" or interpreting that stimulus. This step is very much a computational step. The raw data are processed by the brain using something very much like a simple nearest-neighbour pattern matching algorithm (which anybody can code up in a short time), and matched against a huge, interconnected library of "things we've seen/heard/felt" before.
I don't think there's anything really magical, unquantifiable or infinite about our senses -- most of the problems seem to reduce to trying to replicate the data structure used to store all that information.:)
The regulations to ensure it doesn't get out of control aren't in place and I don't see anyone beginning to care much about this for a long time.
I don't think those regulations will be in place until the relevant technology has been devised. It's pointless trying to legislate about something that hasn't even come to pass yet -- we need to invent the car before we can decide how fast it should go.
So to get to my point... Before you bash unices as being too hard for Sally Secretary to use, consider this. Create a distro that emulates a typewriter exactly. No command prompt, no shell, no KDE, no Mozilla, no translucent alpha blended windowing system. Just a typewriter. And it's free, and you can run it easily on a $200 computer.
And of course secretaries, mindless peons that they are, have neither the need nor the desire to do anything but type letters in a stripped down word processor all day, right? "She" (I can't help but be dismayed that secretaries have been invaribly referred to with feminine pronouns in this topic) has no use for email or the web, whether it's for corporate or *gasp* personal use?
Evolution, in its simplest form -- the contention that species change over many generations -- is a fact. We can observe this change in species with quick mating cycles. Fruit flies, for example have been rather exhaustively studied in past years. You could put fruit flies in an environment slightly different from the one they're adapted to, watch them for a few hundred generations, and if the ecosystem you made for them can support their presence long enough, you will be able to see certain defining characteristics of the fruit fly begin to change.
An implicit agreement with the basic premise of evolution has made its way into our language. We speak casually of species mutating, of strains of virii becoming resistant to whichever antibiotic is being used against them, but we just can't stomach the claim that we, perfect omniscient humans, are descended from a more primitive species. Evidence of evolution can be found almost everywhere.
In the broader sense, the statement that all species currently on earth are descended from some common ancestor or that humans are descended from some early species of primate are less certain, but very well supported both by the amount of genetic similarity between the species and by our archaeological (and geological) records.
I agree -- go to grad school. If you genuinely like computer science, then maybe it's the endless stream of repetitive coding tasks that you're being assigned. Try theory. Get away from coding for a while and look at the theoretical underpinnings of computer science. You might really like what you see.
I admit that CS theory isn't the most popular place to be -- there are 35 Comp Sci master's students at my school, and only three or so are actually doing theory (the rest are in networking, or database systems, or some other field that receives a lot of corporate attention). But I find it interesting and exciting. This is the stuff from which everything else in CS is derived.
It's build-you-own, without most of the pain of build-your-own.
very well put -- I started off with Slackware in 1994. I tried Redhat for a while, but found myself spending most of my time trying to figure out what Redhat's scripts were failing to do correctly, and I moved back to slack. Last year, I tried Debian because I was getting sick of the lack of package support for slack, but I then spent most of my time learning how to use dpkg and trying to figure out what the hell got installed to my system on my last upgrade.
Now, I'm happily back to slack, and I'll stay here. No other distribution enables you to know as much about precisely what's installed on your system as slack, and for somebody learning linux, I think Slackware is the best learning tool out there. I find that most of the other distributions try to do too much for the user (making it a "windows-like" experience), which makes learning what it's doing that much more difficult.
As other people have pointed out, no there is no evidence. But it is a reasonably simple and quite elegant model. Whether or not we can experimentally verify that 'strings' exist, and whether or not the model is even 'right', its strength comes from its ability to explain what has been so far unexplainable.
If it's not inconsistent with the models we already have and (ideally) if we can use it to make predictions that we can test (and that turn out to be true), then we will start to gather evidence for it.
I think the nature of the field is one that couldn't allow direct empirical confirmation but, as was the case with General Relativity, the theory could be confirmed through seemingly unrelated methods (it was a subtle variation in Mercury's orbit around 1928 that put the first nail in Newtonian Gravitation's coffin).
I don't think it's a simple matter of the basic arithmetic involved. The company gives themselves a lot of slack with their Termination Charge clause. Maybe I'm a conspiracy theorist, but I don't like the fact that they never explicitly define what actions of mine would cause them to cancel my account (one which I would never intend to use anyway). If my account were misused (by myself, by a roommate, by anybody at all), then I would be charged $499.
If I'm buying a piece of hardware, I would rather pay a premium to ensure that I won't have to pay any more. It's like buying an extended warranty in a way, but in this case what I'm paying the extra money for is the right to modify the equipment (which is also a no-no, according to their TOS), and for protection from their licensing agreement.
I would not pay 600 dollars, I would likely not pay 400. According to their TOS, after three months of their online service, the equipment is mine, and I don't think they're silly enough to lose too much money on the deal, so it's probably worth somewhere between 2 and 3 hundred dollars, which I would pay.
Exactly - it's because of the fact that they're small, portable, and perhaps a little cool-looking that I want one of them. Pretty much the only thing deterring me from buying one now and trying to find a different way to hack it to suit my purposes is their license agreement. The minimum 3 month registration with their online service @ $21.95/mo, and the clause in their agreement which says "If your account is terminated within the first 90 days (either by you or by Netpliance), a $499 'Termination Charge' will be applied to your credit card account."
Ideally, they would leave some room inside the box (and take out the 56k modem so I can install an NIC on my own), and charge a little more for the thing. Unfortunately, the modem is the only thing I can see that they could strip out of it to cut their costs, but if there happens to be anything else 'expendable', get rid of it, and sell the iopener, not the online service.
Yes, but I have to wonder just how much of this technology is even possible. The article didn't really say that any of it had been done, it just said things like "If this technology takes hold..." and "We're working with chemists now who are designing molecules that when attached will act like transistors that can switch at 100 trillion times a second."
If press-releases are sent out before the article is seen in a recognized journal, I have to wonder about the feasibility of it all.
Although it would be nice to have memory that has to wait for my processor, I don't think I'm going to hold my breath for this.
There are actually no confirmed reports of extra-solar planets.
True, but a genuinely "confirmed" report of an extra-solar planet would require nothing less than a flyby or a photograph as evidence. It's the same thing with black holes. There is definitely compelling evidence that they exist, but there's no way to photograph one.
We can detect extra-solar planets through a bunch of different methods -- gravitational interference with the star, varying Doppler-shift of the star, or more conventionally, looking for points of light orbiting the star, but this is much more difficult.
So while we really can't "see" them, we can still know they're there.
Slashdot Mirror
Analogies form in the mind of submitters and editors of slashdot the same way driftwood washes up in the beaches of South Carolina.
Now, you see, this is where a dung beetle analogy would be more appropriate.
Yeah, but I'm waiting for that website gets a -1 Troll for adding incorrect words to its dictionary, thus legitimizing the undereducated to bring the rest of society down with them.
Why would "the undereducated" care what's in a dictionary?!
There's no fusion going on in the Earth. Indeed, most of the Earth's heat is still left over from the formation of Earth, with some additional heat being produced by radioactive decays.
<pedantry>
However, even the heat produced by radioactive decay is ultimately the result of fusion since no complex atom would exist to decay if it hadn't at some point been fused from simpler atoms.
</pedantry>
I sure would. In fact, if you replace "sense" above with "perception", I think it's counterproductive to frame it any other way. Our eyes/ears/noses/whatever are nothing more than sensors with finite capabilities, just like the CCD on a digital camera or the microphone on your headset. All are quantifiable (with, for example, resolution and light-sensitivity determined by the number of sensors in the CCD or the numbers of rods and cones in our eyes) and, more importantly, all are completely without computation.
Where the computation comes into play is when we take the step from "sensing" a stimulus (which all of us whose senses function do essentially identically -- with the only real variation being physical variations in the sensors themselves), to "perceiving" or interpreting that stimulus. This step is very much a computational step. The raw data are processed by the brain using something very much like a simple nearest-neighbour pattern matching algorithm (which anybody can code up in a short time), and matched against a huge, interconnected library of "things we've seen/heard/felt" before.
I don't think there's anything really magical, unquantifiable or infinite about our senses -- most of the problems seem to reduce to trying to replicate the data structure used to store all that information. :)
I don't think those regulations will be in place until the relevant technology has been devised. It's pointless trying to legislate about something that hasn't even come to pass yet -- we need to invent the car before we can decide how fast it should go.
-chris
And of course secretaries, mindless peons that they are, have neither the need nor the desire to do anything but type letters in a stripped down word processor all day, right? "She" (I can't help but be dismayed that secretaries have been invaribly referred to with feminine pronouns in this topic) has no use for email or the web, whether it's for corporate or *gasp* personal use?
Evolution, in its simplest form -- the contention that species change over many generations -- is a fact. We can observe this change in species with quick mating cycles. Fruit flies, for example have been rather exhaustively studied in past years. You could put fruit flies in an environment slightly different from the one they're adapted to, watch them for a few hundred generations, and if the ecosystem you made for them can support their presence long enough, you will be able to see certain defining characteristics of the fruit fly begin to change.
An implicit agreement with the basic premise of evolution has made its way into our language. We speak casually of species mutating, of strains of virii becoming resistant to whichever antibiotic is being used against them, but we just can't stomach the claim that we, perfect omniscient humans, are descended from a more primitive species. Evidence of evolution can be found almost everywhere.
In the broader sense, the statement that all species currently on earth are descended from some common ancestor or that humans are descended from some early species of primate are less certain, but very well supported both by the amount of genetic similarity between the species and by our archaeological (and geological) records.
Chris.
I admit that CS theory isn't the most popular place to be -- there are 35 Comp Sci master's students at my school, and only three or so are actually doing theory (the rest are in networking, or database systems, or some other field that receives a lot of corporate attention). But I find it interesting and exciting. This is the stuff from which everything else in CS is derived.
At the very least, it's worth a look.
very well put -- I started off with Slackware in 1994. I tried Redhat for a while, but found myself spending most of my time trying to figure out what Redhat's scripts were failing to do correctly, and I moved back to slack. Last year, I tried Debian because I was getting sick of the lack of package support for slack, but I then spent most of my time learning how to use dpkg and trying to figure out what the hell got installed to my system on my last upgrade.
Now, I'm happily back to slack, and I'll stay here. No other distribution enables you to know as much about precisely what's installed on your system as slack, and for somebody learning linux, I think Slackware is the best learning tool out there. I find that most of the other distributions try to do too much for the user (making it a "windows-like" experience), which makes learning what it's doing that much more difficult.
If it's not inconsistent with the models we already have and (ideally) if we can use it to make predictions that we can test (and that turn out to be true), then we will start to gather evidence for it.
I think the nature of the field is one that couldn't allow direct empirical confirmation but, as was the case with General Relativity, the theory could be confirmed through seemingly unrelated methods (it was a subtle variation in Mercury's orbit around 1928 that put the first nail in Newtonian Gravitation's coffin).
If I'm buying a piece of hardware, I would rather pay a premium to ensure that I won't have to pay any more. It's like buying an extended warranty in a way, but in this case what I'm paying the extra money for is the right to modify the equipment (which is also a no-no, according to their TOS), and for protection from their licensing agreement.
I would not pay 600 dollars, I would likely not pay 400. According to their TOS, after three months of their online service, the equipment is mine, and I don't think they're silly enough to lose too much money on the deal, so it's probably worth somewhere between 2 and 3 hundred dollars, which I would pay.
Ideally, they would leave some room inside the box (and take out the 56k modem so I can install an NIC on my own), and charge a little more for the thing. Unfortunately, the modem is the only thing I can see that they could strip out of it to cut their costs, but if there happens to be anything else 'expendable', get rid of it, and sell the iopener, not the online service.
If press-releases are sent out before the article is seen in a recognized journal, I have to wonder about the feasibility of it all.
Although it would be nice to have memory that has to wait for my processor, I don't think I'm going to hold my breath for this.
True, but a genuinely "confirmed" report of an extra-solar planet would require nothing less than a flyby or a photograph as evidence. It's the same thing with black holes. There is definitely compelling evidence that they exist, but there's no way to photograph one.
We can detect extra-solar planets through a bunch of different methods -- gravitational interference with the star, varying Doppler-shift of the star, or more conventionally, looking for points of light orbiting the star, but this is much more difficult.
So while we really can't "see" them, we can still know they're there.