"The scientists used a mathematical formula to create a treatment based on neutrofiles that strengthened the patient's immune system."
This is the closest thing this article provides to an explanation of whatever it is trying to talk about. What is a neutrofile?
The paper is about the growth rate of tumors, not curing them. Can someone explain to me what this supposed mathematical cure for cancer is, or at least provide a link to something with an actual discussion?
I am a male math PhD student and I've seen the same things. There are more men than women in my department and in my field in general. But in my experience, women in math are every bit as capable as men. There are just fewer of them. So maybe there are cultural or innate differences between men and women that lead fewer women to choose to study math or science, but I don't believe there are any differences that affect their abilities.
Some people have noticed that women in math gravitate towards subjects that do not involve visualization, while men gravitate to those that do. This is something worth studying. Why so few women choose careers in math is worth studying. But fictional differences in the mathematical abilities of the sexes are not.
And how much about the problem did he know in advance? Did he know it would be a 13th root of a 100-digit number? Did he know that the number would be a perfect 13th power of an integer? I find it impossible to believe he calculated a 13th root of a 100-digit number in 11.8 seconds without knowing any of these things. Knowing all of them makes the problem a lot easier.
The 13th root of a 100-digit number will always have 7 digits. If you memorize the first few digits of the 13th powers of numbers between 49 and 58 and you are given a 100-digit number, then you immediately know the first 2 digits of the 13th root. Memorize the initial digits of 13th power of numbers between 491 and 588 and you immediately know the first 3 digits. By memorizing the terminal digits of 13th powers of numbers less than 100, you could similarly immediately get the last 3 digits. That leaves 1 digit to compute, which is a slightly less impressive-sounding feat for 11.8 seconds. It's not a trivial calculation, though, and not at all shabby for 11.8 seconds.
It depends what you mean by pathological statements. There are certainly interesting statements that are undecidable, for example the continuum hypothesis (the cardinality of the set of real numbers is equal to the cardinality of the first uncountable ordinal) is undecidable given the axioms of set theory.
However, I think what you are asking is if every undecidable statement that is true can be given by some kind of Godel construction. I think the answer to this is no. A proof might go like this:
Define an axiom A which says: any statement which is a Godel construction is true. Adjoin this to your list of axioms. Then Godel's incompleteness theorem says that there will be an undecidable statement in this extended system of axioms.
Why is there such a backlash against this feature? It's potentially useful and it's off by default. Granted, Microsoft should be using a META tag to turn this thing on, not turn it off, but otherwise, what's the big deal?
I've seen a lot written about this proportional voting system on these boards, but, at least in the form it's usually described, it doesn't work. Here's a hypothetical example with four candidates from yesterday's election.
For simplicity, suppose each person fills out one of four different ballots in the following distribution:
4/9
1. Bush
3/9
1. Gore
2. Nader
1/9
1. Nader
2. Gore
1/9
1. Nader
2. Browne
3. Gore
Here's how the votes would get counted:
First pass:
Bush - 4/9
Gore - 3/9
Nader - 2/9
Second Pass:
Bush - 4/9
Gore - 4/9
Browne - 1/9
Third Pass:
Bush - 4/9
Gore - 5/9
So, Gore wins. But if you remove Gore before Nader, you get:
Second Pass:
Bush - 4/9
Nader - 5/9
You can imagine the Gore votes being 22 and 23 instead of 2 and 3 on the two ballots that place Nader first, and it's clear that a majority of the population would prefer to see Nader win, but because of the system, Gore would.
Considering that I read somewhere that this system is used in some places in Europe, this problem has probably been solved. If anyone knows how, do share.
Why is the "two-party duopoly" necessarily a bad thing? It might actually be a strength of the system.
Does anyone actually want to see a third party candidate in the White House? Let's see: we could elect Ralph Nader and listen to him whine about corporate crime and poverty; we could elect Browne and reduce the federal government to a shack in a Washington ghetto. There's McReynolds, who will proudly tell us how little he knows. And there's Buchanan, who will have all except white Protestants deported.
There is a reason that hard line idealists are only nominated by third parties: they are hard line idealists. Having two dominant, centrist parties keeps those idealists away from places where they could do some serious damage.
Example: between the world wars, Germany had a proportional representation scheme. Seats would be granted to a party in proportion to the fraction of the popular vote the party received. In 1930, the small National Socialist third party, which, according to this article, polled in no district more than 40%, earned 18.3% of the seats in parliament.
The principle behind American government seems to be to minimize the sort of drastic change typical of parliamentary systems. Checks and balances, the division between federal and state government, the "bloated bureaucracy", and the electoral college all have this effect. Of course, the pace of change can be too slow -- the US took an awfully long time to do something about slavery, for instance -- but it also offers stability. As someone once said in a Saturday Night Live skit, "Is there anything you can't do because your guy didn't win?" Not to suggest that there aren't problems which need to be fixed, but might this stability be better than a government built up by Nader, dismantled by Browne, and then build up by Nader again in successive terms?
The electoral college also allows people to cast "protest votes". If we used a national popular vote instead of the electoral college, a vote for Nader really would be a vote for Bush. As it is, most people can safely "vote their consciences" without affecting the outcome of the election.
This seems a little dangerous. What happens when the user loses his balance? Is there anything to catch him? Also, if I understand this correctly, it seems like one might be able to get the poles to cross by crossing his legs.
Dictating acceptable content is not a good solution.
I don't know about the feasibility of this, but...
Your school could try limiting a user's bandwidth by day. That is, each user is allotted a certain number of kb/day which he may use at his discretion. Beyond that limit, one may continue to use the network, but priority goes to those with "download points".
This seems like a mutated version of the question about the legality of napster itself (and many other things).
Should something which provides the means to do something illegal itself be illegal?
I haven't been following the napster case very closely, but I gather that the decision in napster's case has been something like, "yes, pending further review".
So, napster's website provides access to napster, which could potentially be used to do something illegal. Therefore, napster's website should be banned.
I think some quantitative data might aid Mr Katz' argument. Broad statements like "Poll after poll shows mistrust, boredom, alienation and disgust", unsupported by references to acutal polls, inspire mistrust, boredom, alienation and disgust in this reader. I hope this will be corrected in the rest of this series.
To his credit, Mr Katz does quote the speculations of of authors and political historians, which, while not exactly concrete data, are more than I will give in the speculation to follow.
I don't think politics are dead or dying. A better word might be hibernating, at least in some parts of the world. I think this has a lot to do with economic prosperity, and in the technological corner of the world where we are debating, prosperity is not lacking. If rising gas prices or some other, unforeseen disaster sends our economy grinding to a halt, you will probably find our president posting weekly addresses on a website, and people will be as enraptured by them now as they were in the 60 years ago by Roosevelt's weekly radio addresses.
To the question of whether government can control the internet, I think the answer is a qualified no. Taking Napster as an example, if its use is made illegal, you and I will just fire up Gnutella and continue pirating music to our hearts' content. I think most people agree that Gnutella can't be policed, and, even if it can, we'll find a way around that too. However, less technically savvy people tend to find Gnutella difficult to use, and they tend to prefer paying exploitive prices instead of learning how to work around them. The same thing probably applies to DeCSS. Government clearly can't exercise total control of the internet, but it will find a way to exercise significant partial control. I think the internet will remain a place of freedom, but only for those determined enough to seek it out. But is this situation really different from the "real world" anyway?
A better question than "What does the internet do to politics?" might be "What does the internet do to the media?". Practically anyone can be a news source now, but there is hardly any control to make sure that news is accurate. "Ideas fly through the ether", but hardly anyone stops to ask for evidence to justify them.
This sounds to me more like politics' rebirth than their death. Mr Katz' article seems to assert that people have turned or are turning indifferent to politics, but I think that the UK blockade demonstrates, if anything, that the opposite is true. It is one thing for people to hate their government and quite another to simply not care about it.
Someone said something about the crowd obediantly absorbing Linus' opnions. I know I have.
Disclaimer: These are just some thoughts from someone who probably doesn't understand the real issues.
It is difficult to argue that piracy is not wrong. It is illegal, first, but it also goes against the wish of the author, and, unless you not only disbelieve in intellectual property, but also have a thorough disregard for the desires of others, I think that it is hard to justify.
Software piracy has been around and possible in large volumes for a long time. Developers have put various forms of copy protection on their software, but I think (and correct me if I am wrong--I haven't used anything but free software in a long time) that with at best rare exception do those copy protection prove unbreakable. However, and, again, correct me if I am wrong, I have never heard of a software company's going out of business because everyone copied its software and no one purchased it.
I think shareware is the most beautiful form of software distribution conceived. Try this, if you like it, send me some money. It has been complicated recently, but at its core it is a simple, easily abused system founded entirely on faith in the consumer. Plenty of people just use the software and never consider registering (especially if it is not crippled), but there will always be some suckers who are willing to pay for something they can get for free.
Call me an idealist, but I like to believe that the suckers outnumber the others, and I like to think of myself as a sucker. I think that the enormous success some shareware authors have achieved should testify to the large numbers of suckers out there.
This relates to Napster, somehow. I believe the record companies are evil. Lars points out that besides overcharging their customers and offering minimal royalties to the artists, they do provide their clients with publicity. This "service" amounts to ensuring that the music we hear on the radio is the music they want us to hear. They tell us what music to like and then they sell it to us.
Wouldn't it be better if we could decide for ourselves what music we like, download it, and pay the artists directly? I believe that shareware is the Right Way to distribute anything electronically, including music. Why not eliminate the middleman?
Remember paylars.com? It may be a joke, but I think the idea is right.
After reading this article, I began to feel a little guilty. I mean, I use Gnutella, which, if you don't know, is like Napster, but reliable and professionally constructed, to pirate CDs. I realize now that by downloading hundreds and thousands of mp3s, I have been doing a horrible disservice to the record companies, whose business it is to distribute this music. It is easy to criticize them, but we must realize that record companies provide an essential service. Without them, who would there be to exploit the artists who produce the music we listen to? Who would there be to force us to pay for packaging and take most of the artists' profits? The job of the middleman is to exploit both producer and consumer and that can't be easy. Still, the record companies manage somehow, and for that, they deserve our support! The people who deserve our support are the artists whose music we enjoy. Now that we have easy electronic distribution of music, I think that the time of big record companies is past. When they are not needed anymore to press CDs, their only function will be to provide publicity for their clients and take their money. The problem of finding a secure way to distribute music online, protecting the artists' rights is a complicated one to which I can't pretend to have a solution. For me, I am not going to start buying CDs again and I am not going to stop downloading entire albums with Gnutella. What I am going to do is this: for every album I download and keep on my hard disk, I am going to send a check to the artist who recorded it for whatever it would have cost to buy that album at Best Buy. Shareware worked pretty well with software. I am fairly certain I am still committing a crime, but at least this way, my conscience is clear.
Just a quick note to point out that NetBSD also has full IPv6 support, including IPv4-IPv6 gatewaying, IPv6 tunneling over IPv4, and dual stack network utilities (i.e. ftp, ssh, telnet, etc. will use IPv4 or IPv6 depending on the host they are connecting to).
You would need a lot of `leisure' to brute-force a 128-bit IDEA key.
Realistically, with any crypto systems, you have to assume that someone will get your ciphertext, and make sure you're safe even if they do. PGP does this.
It's probably not worth responding to nonsense like this, but:
what in hell are you talking about? The only place `there are winners and losers' is in the closed source world, where if you don't make the big bucks your product dies even if it's better than everything else out there. This is the game microsoft plays -- it's not an approach that makes any sense in the open source world.
Once more: Open source software is not a zero sum game. If more projects set out to write the same thing, more ideas get tried, and everyone wins. Why are you trying to stop this?
Slashdot Mirror
The article says
"The scientists used a mathematical formula to create a treatment based on neutrofiles that strengthened the patient's immune system."
This is the closest thing this article provides to an explanation of whatever it is trying to talk about. What is a neutrofile?
The paper is about the growth rate of tumors, not curing them. Can someone explain to me what this supposed mathematical cure for cancer is, or at least provide a link to something with an actual discussion?
Jonathan
I am a male math PhD student and I've seen the same things. There are more men than women in my department and in my field in general. But in my experience, women in math are every bit as capable as men. There are just fewer of them. So maybe there are cultural or innate differences between men and women that lead fewer women to choose to study math or science, but I don't believe there are any differences that affect their abilities.
Some people have noticed that women in math gravitate towards subjects that do not involve visualization, while men gravitate to those that do. This is something worth studying. Why so few women choose careers in math is worth studying. But fictional differences in the mathematical abilities of the sexes are not.
Jonathan
And how much about the problem did he know in advance? Did he know it would be a 13th root of a 100-digit number? Did he know that the number would be a perfect 13th power of an integer? I find it impossible to believe he calculated a 13th root of a 100-digit number in 11.8 seconds without knowing any of these things. Knowing all of them makes the problem a lot easier.
The 13th root of a 100-digit number will always have 7 digits. If you memorize the first few digits of the 13th powers of numbers between 49 and 58 and you are given a 100-digit number, then you immediately know the first 2 digits of the 13th root. Memorize the initial digits of 13th power of numbers between 491 and 588 and you immediately know the first 3 digits. By memorizing the terminal digits of 13th powers of numbers less than 100, you could similarly immediately get the last 3 digits. That leaves 1 digit to compute, which is a slightly less impressive-sounding feat for 11.8 seconds. It's not a trivial calculation, though, and not at all shabby for 11.8 seconds.
Jonathan
The nurses just need to get together and all agree to bid the maximum.
Better yet, the nurses could distribute the labor among themselves and then have just one person bid the maximum for each shift.
Jonathan
here.
It depends what you mean by pathological statements. There are certainly interesting statements that are undecidable, for example the continuum hypothesis (the cardinality of the set of real numbers is equal to the cardinality of the first uncountable ordinal) is undecidable given the axioms of set theory.
However, I think what you are asking is if every undecidable statement that is true can be given by some kind of Godel construction. I think the answer to this is no. A proof might go like this:
Define an axiom A which says: any statement which is a Godel construction is true. Adjoin this to your list of axioms. Then Godel's incompleteness theorem says that there will be an undecidable statement in this extended system of axioms.
Jonathan
A graduate student in math is taking his preliminary exams. They are oral, and the student is very nervous.
The first examiner begins, "We'll start with something easy. Give an example of a compact space."
The student's mind is completely blank. He stammers for a few seconds and then blurts out "Um... the real numbers!"
Dead silence follows. After some time passes, one of the examiners says, "In what topology?"
Why is there such a backlash against this feature? It's potentially useful and it's off by default. Granted, Microsoft should be using a META tag to turn this thing on, not turn it off, but otherwise, what's the big deal?
One sentence that the boy's father said and a blanket statement about his parents' religion is not sufficient reason to blame them for his suicide.
Not all of their software is bad. Ever use visual c++?
I've seen a lot written about this proportional voting system on these boards, but, at least in the form it's usually described, it doesn't work. Here's a hypothetical example with four candidates from yesterday's election.
For simplicity, suppose each person fills out one of four different ballots in the following distribution:
4/9
1. Bush
3/9
1. Gore
2. Nader
1/9
1. Nader
2. Gore
1/9
1. Nader
2. Browne
3. Gore
Here's how the votes would get counted:
First pass:
Bush - 4/9
Gore - 3/9
Nader - 2/9
Second Pass:
Bush - 4/9
Gore - 4/9
Browne - 1/9
Third Pass:
Bush - 4/9
Gore - 5/9
So, Gore wins. But if you remove Gore before Nader, you get:
Second Pass:
Bush - 4/9
Nader - 5/9
You can imagine the Gore votes being 22 and 23 instead of 2 and 3 on the two ballots that place Nader first, and it's clear that a majority of the population would prefer to see Nader win, but because of the system, Gore would.
Considering that I read somewhere that this system is used in some places in Europe, this problem has probably been solved. If anyone knows how, do share.
Why do we need some kind of reform?
Why is the "two-party duopoly" necessarily a bad thing? It might actually be a strength of the system.
Does anyone actually want to see a third party candidate in the White House? Let's see: we could elect Ralph Nader and listen to him whine about corporate crime and poverty; we could elect Browne and reduce the federal government to a shack in a Washington ghetto. There's McReynolds, who will proudly tell us how little he knows. And there's Buchanan, who will have all except white Protestants deported.
There is a reason that hard line idealists are only nominated by third parties: they are hard line idealists. Having two dominant, centrist parties keeps those idealists away from places where they could do some serious damage.
Example: between the world wars, Germany had a proportional representation scheme. Seats would be granted to a party in proportion to the fraction of the popular vote the party received. In 1930, the small National Socialist third party, which, according to this article, polled in no district more than 40%, earned 18.3% of the seats in parliament.
The principle behind American government seems to be to minimize the sort of drastic change typical of parliamentary systems. Checks and balances, the division between federal and state government, the "bloated bureaucracy", and the electoral college all have this effect. Of course, the pace of change can be too slow -- the US took an awfully long time to do something about slavery, for instance -- but it also offers stability. As someone once said in a Saturday Night Live skit, "Is there anything you can't do because your guy didn't win?" Not to suggest that there aren't problems which need to be fixed, but might this stability be better than a government built up by Nader, dismantled by Browne, and then build up by Nader again in successive terms?
The electoral college also allows people to cast "protest votes". If we used a national popular vote instead of the electoral college, a vote for Nader really would be a vote for Bush. As it is, most people can safely "vote their consciences" without affecting the outcome of the election.
This seems a little dangerous. What happens when the user loses his balance? Is there anything to catch him? Also, if I understand this correctly, it seems like one might be able to get the poles to cross by crossing his legs.
Dictating acceptable content is not a good solution. I don't know about the feasibility of this, but... Your school could try limiting a user's bandwidth by day. That is, each user is allotted a certain number of kb/day which he may use at his discretion. Beyond that limit, one may continue to use the network, but priority goes to those with "download points".
This seems like a mutated version of the question about the legality of napster itself (and many other things).
Should something which provides the means to do something illegal itself be illegal?
I haven't been following the napster case very closely, but I gather that the decision in napster's case has been something like, "yes, pending further review".
So, napster's website provides access to napster, which could potentially be used to do something illegal. Therefore, napster's website should be banned.
While we're at it, we should ban networking.
I think some quantitative data might aid Mr Katz' argument. Broad statements like "Poll after poll shows mistrust, boredom, alienation and disgust", unsupported by references to acutal polls, inspire mistrust, boredom, alienation and disgust in this reader. I hope this will be corrected in the rest of this series.
To his credit, Mr Katz does quote the speculations of of authors and political historians, which, while not exactly concrete data, are more than I will give in the speculation to follow.
I don't think politics are dead or dying. A better word might be hibernating, at least in some parts of the world. I think this has a lot to do with economic prosperity, and in the technological corner of the world where we are debating, prosperity is not lacking. If rising gas prices or some other, unforeseen disaster sends our economy grinding to a halt, you will probably find our president posting weekly addresses on a website, and people will be as enraptured by them now as they were in the 60 years ago by Roosevelt's weekly radio addresses.
To the question of whether government can control the internet, I think the answer is a qualified no. Taking Napster as an example, if its use is made illegal, you and I will just fire up Gnutella and continue pirating music to our hearts' content. I think most people agree that Gnutella can't be policed, and, even if it can, we'll find a way around that too. However, less technically savvy people tend to find Gnutella difficult to use, and they tend to prefer paying exploitive prices instead of learning how to work around them. The same thing probably applies to DeCSS. Government clearly can't exercise total control of the internet, but it will find a way to exercise significant partial control. I think the internet will remain a place of freedom, but only for those determined enough to seek it out. But is this situation really different from the "real world" anyway?
A better question than "What does the internet do to politics?" might be "What does the internet do to the media?". Practically anyone can be a news source now, but there is hardly any control to make sure that news is accurate. "Ideas fly through the ether", but hardly anyone stops to ask for evidence to justify them.
This sounds to me more like politics' rebirth than their death. Mr Katz' article seems to assert that people have turned or are turning indifferent to politics, but I think that the UK blockade demonstrates, if anything, that the opposite is true. It is one thing for people to hate their government and quite another to simply not care about it.
Is it legal to resell Microsoft software that comes with a new computer? I seem to recall having read once that it is not.
Someone said something about the crowd obediantly absorbing Linus' opnions. I know I have.
Disclaimer: These are just some thoughts from someone who probably doesn't understand the real issues.
It is difficult to argue that piracy is not wrong. It is illegal, first, but it also goes against the wish of the author, and, unless you not only disbelieve in intellectual property, but also have a thorough disregard for the desires of others, I think that it is hard to justify.
Software piracy has been around and possible in large volumes for a long time. Developers have put various forms of copy protection on their software, but I think (and correct me if I am wrong--I haven't used anything but free software in a long time) that with at best rare exception do those copy protection prove unbreakable. However, and, again, correct me if I am wrong, I have never heard of a software company's going out of business because everyone copied its software and no one purchased it.
I think shareware is the most beautiful form of software distribution conceived. Try this, if you like it, send me some money. It has been complicated recently, but at its core it is a simple, easily abused system founded entirely on faith in the consumer. Plenty of people just use the software and never consider registering (especially if it is not crippled), but there will always be some suckers who are willing to pay for something they can get for free.
Call me an idealist, but I like to believe that the suckers outnumber the others, and I like to think of myself as a sucker. I think that the enormous success some shareware authors have achieved should testify to the large numbers of suckers out there.
This relates to Napster, somehow. I believe the record companies are evil. Lars points out that besides overcharging their customers and offering minimal royalties to the artists, they do provide their clients with publicity. This "service" amounts to ensuring that the music we hear on the radio is the music they want us to hear. They tell us what music to like and then they sell it to us.
Wouldn't it be better if we could decide for ourselves what music we like, download it, and pay the artists directly? I believe that shareware is the Right Way to distribute anything electronically, including music. Why not eliminate the middleman?
Remember paylars.com? It may be a joke, but I think the idea is right.
After reading this article, I began to feel a little guilty. I mean, I use Gnutella, which, if you don't know, is like Napster, but reliable and professionally constructed, to pirate CDs. I realize now that by downloading hundreds and thousands of mp3s, I have been doing a horrible disservice to the record companies, whose business it is to distribute this music. It is easy to criticize them, but we must realize that record companies provide an essential service. Without them, who would there be to exploit the artists who produce the music we listen to? Who would there be to force us to pay for packaging and take most of the artists' profits? The job of the middleman is to exploit both producer and consumer and that can't be easy. Still, the record companies manage somehow, and for that, they deserve our support! The people who deserve our support are the artists whose music we enjoy. Now that we have easy electronic distribution of music, I think that the time of big record companies is past. When they are not needed anymore to press CDs, their only function will be to provide publicity for their clients and take their money. The problem of finding a secure way to distribute music online, protecting the artists' rights is a complicated one to which I can't pretend to have a solution. For me, I am not going to start buying CDs again and I am not going to stop downloading entire albums with Gnutella. What I am going to do is this: for every album I download and keep on my hard disk, I am going to send a check to the artist who recorded it for whatever it would have cost to buy that album at Best Buy. Shareware worked pretty well with software. I am fairly certain I am still committing a crime, but at least this way, my conscience is clear.
Just a quick note to point out that NetBSD also has full IPv6 support, including IPv4-IPv6 gatewaying, IPv6 tunneling over IPv4, and dual stack network utilities (i.e. ftp, ssh, telnet, etc. will use IPv4 or IPv6 depending on the host they are connecting to).
You would need a lot of `leisure' to brute-force a 128-bit IDEA key.
Realistically, with any crypto systems, you have to assume that someone will get your ciphertext, and make sure you're safe even if they do. PGP does this.
It's probably not worth responding to nonsense like this, but:
what in hell are you talking about? The only place `there are winners and losers' is in the closed source world, where if you don't make the big bucks your product dies even if it's better than everything else out there. This is the game microsoft plays -- it's not an approach that makes any sense in the open source world.
Once more: Open source software is not a zero sum game. If more projects set out to write the same thing, more ideas get tried, and everyone wins. Why are you trying to stop this?