It's worse than that. They say 4 out of 5 parents have at *some* time been stomped by some science-question of their child.
And children up to the age of 16. When my daughter was 16 she was asking me questions about the precise way specific enzymes worked that stumped me until I looked them up. As a non-biologist I don't see that as a huge gap in my understanding of science.
Wow... you have no idea how advanced Newton's knowlege was do you?
He practically invented calculus
Leibniz wouldn't have agreed with you -- Newton got the credit for it, but then, he chaired the enquiry to decide who should get the credit.
F = dP/dt is what he wrote down, something that many physics students don't understand.
[citation needed]. Not that Newton said that force is proportional to rate of change of momentum, rather than saying that force is proportional to mass times acceleration (which I assume is what you were getting at), but that most physics students don't understand it. We covered that on the physics module of an electronic engineering course, and I don't think anybody had any problem understanding it (or the implication that relativity had less impact on Newton's laws than is commonly thought).
There's also the slight problem that he seemed to place more emphasis on his pseudoscience than on his science, so talking about his knowledge as "advanced" is -- er -- optimistic. "Anyone with even a bit of physics" knows that there's no point in looking for the Philosopher's Stone, for instance. Maybe "anyone with even a bit of physics" couldn't have derived the science that Newton did, but I think it's fair to say that they know more science than Newton did.
Unfortunately the answers that they give (from the Web site) are only partly true from a politically correct nanny state perspective (i.e. "babies are created when a cell from the mother and a cell from the father join together or "fuse""). It is indeed a very British answer.
It's a pretty useless answer, because of what it misses out, but I don't think it's fair to blame the British as a whole. The "British" answer my kids got when they were very young was that men and women have a special sort of cuddle that puts a baby in the woman's tummy. When they were a bit older they were told about the mechanics of that "special cuddle", and later still they were told about cells fusing.
Nevertheless, I would go so far as to say that even if they are the nailbombing type, we should still demand that they be subjected to the same legal procedures that we ourselves would expect.
No argument. As I said, there's a lot wrong with that law, just not the fact that the people being prosecuted are animal rights activists.
Er, yes, I'll speak up for them holding peaceful (albeit loud) protests. But I will not speak up for them sending nail bombs to charity shops. Which category do the ones in this case fall into? Well, we don't know, and that is the issue, not the fact that they're campaigning for what might be seen as a legitimate cause.
Well -- "union" does mean what I think it means, but it doesn't mean what I meant. I meant intersection of course. Although what I typed was still true...
Here in England we drink something called "Tea", which in order to be correctly made involves pouring boiling water over leaves ("Pot to kettle, never kettle to pot" was instilled into us as kids -- if you take the kettle to the pot the water goes off the boil) and allowing them to infuse in an insulated vessel (the insulation is traditionally a woolen jacket called a "Tea Cosy") before serving. I bet that's not far below boiling when served. And yet, when tea drinking was at its peak we managed to hold together a worldwide empire, hampered very little by tea-related injuries.
Isn't the word count (in Word 2k7, at least) automatically provided in the bottom left of the window?
Sometimes. If the document gets complex, with tables and the like, it sometimes goes away. I've raised this with MS, and their fix is to use the original word count info box on Review | Word Count.
No. Nor is there any evidence that they weren't, because the government is keeping everything secret. That is a problem, I agree. But you seemed to be suggesting they were animal rights activists rather than terrorists, and that this was a case of terrorist legislation being used on non-terrorists, which happens, but not necessarily in this case. The union of the sets "Animal rights activist" and "Terrorist" is not empty.
Drug dealers use the same trick... Instead of hiding their drugs under floorboards or taped to the top of draws, they simply open a bag of flower, empty the contents, and refill it with drugs...
Where the definition of 'terrorist cell' is up to the authorities, and in this case means 'animal rights activist'. It could mean anything according to this corrupt, overbearing government.
Some animal rights activists do use terror tactics, including bombing campaigns, so in this case it might not just mean 'animal rights activist', it could mean everything you normally mean by 'terrorist'. Yes, there are huge problems with the law, but its being used against animal rights campaigners is not de facto one of them.
The code I was involved with was one of these "secure kernels". We did use formal methods for portions of it, but once you leave the formal model section there are other portions that requires months of tedious work. And, when I say tedious, I mean stuff like hand verifying every byte of output from the compilers (because you can't trust the compiler)
What is the error rate for hand verification of compiler output?
and using in-circuit emulators to step through every machine instruction and verify every possible case.
These systems are absurdly simple.
So simple that it's possible to test every possible state transition? That was what I meant by "trivial" above. Although actually it still doesn't guarantee bug free, because errors can occur in the testing process, too; all it can do is give assurance that the defect rate is acceptably low for the application in question.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I've written and used formal specs in Z and VDM, I've used SPADE and MALPAS to do the formal analysis. On the training course for SPADE our instructors led us through a trivial PASCAL program from formal spec to code to proof, and presented it as an example of what could be achieved. I promptly gave it an input set that caused it to give a wrong answer (it's my flair for that which led me into software safety in the first place). Sorry, but although I'm strongly in favour of formal methods for critical software, with current techniques they do not guarantee that the software will be bug free and anybody who claims zero defects on the grounds of formal methods shouldn't be let anywhere near safety critical systems.
It is possible to produce defect-free non-trivial software.
How?
you have a security kernel that is guaranteed to be defect-free
How? You are just repeating the assertion that it is possible to produce defect-free software without saying how. I know of no technique to guarantee that, and all of the software that I've encountered that was supposedly bug-free has subsequently been found to have bugs. What is this process that produces software "guaranteed to be defect-free"? I agree that defect-tolerant is the way to go (as well as trying to get the software to be at least low in defects), not (solely) on cost grounds but because as far as I am aware you're never going to get rid of all defects -- or at least, never know that you have.
I'd be interested to know how, because I work in the field (including having done formal analysis of military systems) and although I know of methods to get exceptionally low bug rates, I'm not aware of any techniques that offer bug free for any but the most trivial program. And I've seen software houses make claims of bug-free software that have been accepted by safety regulators but that have subsequently been found to be wrong as bugs have been found.
Of course, it's possible the DoD knows how but is keeping quiet about the techniques...
If you gradually increase the lightness of black, at what point does it become white?
The fact that there is no clear boundary does not mean that there is not a useful distinction -- the ancients spotted that logical fallacy: the continuum fallacy
It won't be a human brain if it's on a microchip. It might do all the relevant stuff that a human brain does, and might do it better, but it wouldn't be human. Whether that's relevant to anything much is another debate.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse than that. They say 4 out of 5 parents have at *some* time been stomped by some science-question of their child.
And children up to the age of 16. When my daughter was 16 she was asking me questions about the precise way specific enzymes worked that stumped me until I looked them up. As a non-biologist I don't see that as a huge gap in my understanding of science.
Now the air itself is not a perfect screen, it happens to scatter more of the blue light than the red light.
It was all going so well, and then you begged the question and turned the answer into "Because it is" :-(
The trickier one was "who made mosquitoes?"
Mummy mosquitos and daddy mosquitos. Next?
Wow... you have no idea how advanced Newton's knowlege was do you?
He practically invented calculus
Leibniz wouldn't have agreed with you -- Newton got the credit for it, but then, he chaired the enquiry to decide who should get the credit.
F = dP/dt is what he wrote down, something that many physics students don't understand.
[citation needed]. Not that Newton said that force is proportional to rate of change of momentum, rather than saying that force is proportional to mass times acceleration (which I assume is what you were getting at), but that most physics students don't understand it. We covered that on the physics module of an electronic engineering course, and I don't think anybody had any problem understanding it (or the implication that relativity had less impact on Newton's laws than is commonly thought).
There's also the slight problem that he seemed to place more emphasis on his pseudoscience than on his science, so talking about his knowledge as "advanced" is -- er -- optimistic. "Anyone with even a bit of physics" knows that there's no point in looking for the Philosopher's Stone, for instance. Maybe "anyone with even a bit of physics" couldn't have derived the science that Newton did, but I think it's fair to say that they know more science than Newton did.
Unfortunately the answers that they give (from the Web site) are only partly true from a politically correct nanny state perspective (i.e. "babies are created when a cell from the mother and a cell from the father join together or "fuse""). It is indeed a very British answer.
It's a pretty useless answer, because of what it misses out, but I don't think it's fair to blame the British as a whole. The "British" answer my kids got when they were very young was that men and women have a special sort of cuddle that puts a baby in the woman's tummy. When they were a bit older they were told about the mechanics of that "special cuddle", and later still they were told about cells fusing.
Is the question "Where do babies come from?" really a science question?
Ever heard of biology? You fuck!
Fixed that for ya!
Nevertheless, I would go so far as to say that even if they are the nailbombing type, we should still demand that they be subjected to the same legal procedures that we ourselves would expect.
No argument. As I said, there's a lot wrong with that law, just not the fact that the people being prosecuted are animal rights activists.
Er, yes, I'll speak up for them holding peaceful (albeit loud) protests. But I will not speak up for them sending nail bombs to charity shops. Which category do the ones in this case fall into? Well, we don't know, and that is the issue, not the fact that they're campaigning for what might be seen as a legitimate cause.
Well -- "union" does mean what I think it means, but it doesn't mean what I meant. I meant intersection of course. Although what I typed was still true...
Here in England we drink something called "Tea", which in order to be correctly made involves pouring boiling water over leaves ("Pot to kettle, never kettle to pot" was instilled into us as kids -- if you take the kettle to the pot the water goes off the boil) and allowing them to infuse in an insulated vessel (the insulation is traditionally a woolen jacket called a "Tea Cosy") before serving. I bet that's not far below boiling when served. And yet, when tea drinking was at its peak we managed to hold together a worldwide empire, hampered very little by tea-related injuries.
Isn't the word count (in Word 2k7, at least) automatically provided in the bottom left of the window?
Sometimes. If the document gets complex, with tables and the like, it sometimes goes away. I've raised this with MS, and their fix is to use the original word count info box on Review | Word Count.
No. Nor is there any evidence that they weren't, because the government is keeping everything secret. That is a problem, I agree. But you seemed to be suggesting they were animal rights activists rather than terrorists, and that this was a case of terrorist legislation being used on non-terrorists, which happens, but not necessarily in this case. The union of the sets "Animal rights activist" and "Terrorist" is not empty.
Drug dealers use the same trick... Instead of hiding their drugs under floorboards or taped to the top of draws, they simply open a bag of flower, empty the contents, and refill it with drugs...
Well, that should confuse the sniffer dogs!
is an encryption system with 2 keys.
One decrypts the files or filesystem while the other key overwrites the contents with random data.
Yes, like the authorities wouldn't take backups first. You've just made your case worse. A duress key might get you further, but probably not.
Where the definition of 'terrorist cell' is up to the authorities, and in this case means 'animal rights activist'. It could mean anything according to this corrupt, overbearing government.
Some animal rights activists do use terror tactics, including bombing campaigns, so in this case it might not just mean 'animal rights activist', it could mean everything you normally mean by 'terrorist'. Yes, there are huge problems with the law, but its being used against animal rights campaigners is not de facto one of them.
he believes good reporting is worth paying for, and Kindle WSJ subscribers are examples of precisely that.
Could you remind me what the connection is between Murdoch and good journalism?
It's all those dratted protons and neutrons...
"You appear to be typing angrily. Would you like some help with stress releif techniques?"
How do you respond to such a public relations disaster?
Presumably they will stonewall, as they have on all previous criticism of ID cards.
The code I was involved with was one of these "secure kernels". We did use formal methods for portions of it, but once you leave the formal model section there are other portions that requires months of tedious work. And, when I say tedious, I mean stuff like hand verifying every byte of output from the compilers (because you can't trust the compiler)
What is the error rate for hand verification of compiler output?
and using in-circuit emulators to step through every machine instruction and verify every possible case.
These systems are absurdly simple.
So simple that it's possible to test every possible state transition? That was what I meant by "trivial" above. Although actually it still doesn't guarantee bug free, because errors can occur in the testing process, too; all it can do is give assurance that the defect rate is acceptably low for the application in question.
Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I've written and used formal specs in Z and VDM, I've used SPADE and MALPAS to do the formal analysis. On the training course for SPADE our instructors led us through a trivial PASCAL program from formal spec to code to proof, and presented it as an example of what could be achieved. I promptly gave it an input set that caused it to give a wrong answer (it's my flair for that which led me into software safety in the first place). Sorry, but although I'm strongly in favour of formal methods for critical software, with current techniques they do not guarantee that the software will be bug free and anybody who claims zero defects on the grounds of formal methods shouldn't be let anywhere near safety critical systems.
It is possible to produce defect-free non-trivial software.
How?
you have a security kernel that is guaranteed to be defect-free
How? You are just repeating the assertion that it is possible to produce defect-free software without saying how. I know of no technique to guarantee that, and all of the software that I've encountered that was supposedly bug-free has subsequently been found to have bugs. What is this process that produces software "guaranteed to be defect-free"? I agree that defect-tolerant is the way to go (as well as trying to get the software to be at least low in defects), not (solely) on cost grounds but because as far as I am aware you're never going to get rid of all defects -- or at least, never know that you have.
I'd be interested to know how, because I work in the field (including having done formal analysis of military systems) and although I know of methods to get exceptionally low bug rates, I'm not aware of any techniques that offer bug free for any but the most trivial program. And I've seen software houses make claims of bug-free software that have been accepted by safety regulators but that have subsequently been found to be wrong as bugs have been found.
Of course, it's possible the DoD knows how but is keeping quiet about the techniques...
If you gradually increase the lightness of black, at what point does it become white?
The fact that there is no clear boundary does not mean that there is not a useful distinction -- the ancients spotted that logical fallacy: the continuum fallacy
.
It won't be a human brain if it's on a microchip. It might do all the relevant stuff that a human brain does, and might do it better, but it wouldn't be human. Whether that's relevant to anything much is another debate.