Also if you want to compete EFFECTIVELY it does mean trying to do the things that Windows can do.
"The things Windows can do" are things that pretty much every OS+UI been able to do for damn near twenty years. There's nothing magical there, and yes, obviously any desktop OS needs to be able to do those things. The problem is that a lot of people working on Linux distros and software seem to have the idea that "competing effectively" means copying, rather than trying to find a better way to do things.
Look, nobody will ever be as good (or bad) at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. Try to make your UI look like Windows, or your word processor look like Word, and you're not going to fool anyone. Most users aren't going to be impressed at what a great job you've done reverse-engineering Microsoft's crappy standards. They're just going to say, "Why should I go with a knockoff when the original comes free* with my computer?" Chasing anyone's tail, in any industry, is usually a losing proposition. Chasing the tail of a lame, half-blind, diarrhetic horse just means you don't get anywhere very fast and end up covered in shit.
*Yeah, I know. From a marketing perspective, the "Windows tax" makes no difference at all to the vast majority of computer buyers. Deal with it.
Agreed, but not every user has the time to spend customizing every aspect of the OS and each application. I share the author's frustration at a "Linux experience" that keeps trying to be Windows-like and ends up feeling like a cheap knockoff. Windows sucks, and most applications written for Windows suck, and everyone knows it; it's the search for a better alternative that drives most users away from Microsoft's smothering embrace out into the wild world of F/OSS in the first place. So why is it so damned hard to find a distro with a UI that doesn't try to look like Windows, or a word processor that doesn't try to look like Word, or what-have-you?
But rest assures, if there is proof that a CEO, Board Member, or any Manager gave orders to fleece the public, those people can and will be held criminally accountable.
how about blaming the fucking terrorist who have made it necessary to do this
The point, which you have spectacularly missed, is that The Terrorists(tm) haven't made it necessary to do this; other countries, such as the UK and Israel, which have been dealing with rather determined and persistent terrorists far longer than the US has, have managed to come up with security measures that are both effective and unobtrusive. The IRA has never, AFAIK, hijacked an airliner, and it's been decades since the PLO managed to do so -- and both of these organizations in their heyday were every bit as fanatical and a hell of a lot more organized than al-Qaeda ever dreamed of being. Do you really think they wouldn't have pulled the equivalent of 9/11 on London or Tel Aviv if they could have? And yet flying through British and Israeli airports is much easier and more pleasant than flying through American airports.
Blaming terrorism for stupid airport security is like blaming crime for police brutality. The people screwing up in this case aren't the people we're supposedly being protected from, but the people supposedly doing the protecting. And inevitably, it makes the actual job of preventing horrifying acts of violence -- like the deaths of "all the 1000,s of people who have been murdered flying into skyscrapers and other things" -- a hell of a lot harder, and greatly increases the chances of such events in the future.
What do you say we reward someone who doesn't burden actual customers with troublesome and self defeating DRM instead of mocking them?
There is a very successful model for this way of doing business, actually; it's called shareware. Hardly anyone gets rich writing shareware, but I know a number of people who have made good money doing it. And the characteristics of shareware that makes its authors money? Well, as a rule, it's fully functional without payment, i.e. not crippleware; and unobtrusive about its demands for money. i.e. not nagware. The less functional and more annoying the unregistered version is, the less likely it is ever to get paid for, especially these days when there are so many choices for almost every category of software.
Application to the current case is left as an exercise for the reader.
It simply says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
In the case of corporations, there is no freedom of speech to abridge. Saying that campaign finance laws infringe on the free speech rights of corporations is like saying that quarrying infringes on the rights of rocks to a fair trial.
The notion that I have free speech as an individual but not when I band together with other like-minded individuals is absurd and offensive.
No campaign finance law has ever taken away your freedom of speech, or that of your coworkers. No matter who you work for, you are always free to say, "I'm voting for candidate X," or "As an employee of corporation Y, I think candidate Z would be a disaster in office." You can contribute as much of your paycheck to whatever political cause you choose, and you have always been free to do this. Stop pretending that Citizens United had anything whatsoever with people exercising their rights. It didn't, and you know it.
The argument isn't over what "shall make no law" means, it's over what "freedom of speech" means. The common assumption, and what the 1st Am. almost certainly means, is that freedom of speech is a right of individuals, not corporations.
I don't give a good goddamn what was written over a century ago into a Supreme Court decision about a railroad company by a court clerk (who had, by an astonishing coincidence, a substantial financial interest in that same railroad company.) Corporations are not people, and they have no rights. They are legal fictions created and maintained on the suffrance of the government. Anyone who claims to love liberty but does not acknowledge this is a liar, ready and willing to sell his last shred of freedom and integrity to the highest bidder.
But there's nothing specifically Christian on that list. I'd be curious to know what exactly, in the mind of those who espouse "Christian business principles," distinguishes those principles from "ethical business principles." Because the words of Christ were not exactly friendly to the whole idea of making money.
Okay, thanks, that makes sense. (The covariance matrix of strictly linearly dependent r.v.s is kind of a degenerate case, though.) My main question is about implication in the other direction; I believe that DD ==> PSD and SDD ==> PD, but I'm guessing that the inverse is not true, i.e. PSD =/=> DD and PD =/=> SDD.
I think SDD is sufficient for positive definiteness, and therefore for a matrix to be a valid covariance matrix, but not necessary. Anyone got an answer on this?
Never met them in the computer vision and image processing for example.
On the other hand, I meet them all the time in statistical programming, which makes me think that as image processing algorithms get more probabilistically based, speedups like the one discussed here may be very useful to people working in your field. I know they will be in mine, and I'm looking forward to seeing practical implementations.
There can be no justification for military security of any sort, so your duty as a member of government would be to dump as much information as possible into the open...
Nice argument there. Did you gather all that straw yourself, or did you have help?
Almost everyone agrees that some degree of secrecy in the affairs of government, particularly in matters of defense, is necessary. But this does not mean that our current "classify everything, admit nothing" level of security-state paranoia is in any way justified.
I'm just surprised that so many people on/. seem to fall into the same trap of assuming that "The Government" can do these things while simultaneously going on about how stupid and inept various branches are.
Incompetent tyrannical governments are a lot more common than competent tyrannical ones. For every Hitler, there are a hundred Mussolinis. Which is lucky for the rest of the world, I guess, but doesn't make things any less miserable for the people who have to live under them.
Note: I am not comparing the US to either Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Just pointing out that a belief that the government is evil, and a belief that it is stupid and inept, are not necessarily contradictory. Actually I think the US government is, like most very large organizations, home to a few very good people, a few very bad ones, and a whole bunch in the middle doing their best to get through their day.
Um... you don't actually know what the Swedish role during the Cold War was, do you? Hint: they were anything but the chest-thumping jingoists you're talking about.
There are a lot of very good schools that let lots of people in but still manage to graduate a decent proportion of their students. Mine was a pretty common story: at 18 I "went off to college" at my nearby Enormous State University (University of Colorado in my case) and partied all the time, ended up with a crappy GPA my first semester, dropped out and spent a few years in the service, then came back with a much more mature attitude and a determination to do better. The problem was that CU didn't want me back (I mean, my GPA was really bad.) So I did my BS at Metropolitan State College of Denver, which admits just about anyone with a pulse, but still maintains high educational standards. It cost me a lot less than CU or CSU would have, too.
Did it work? Well, I'm back at CU now... working on my PhD and supported by an NIH fellowship. It worked for most of my classmates, too, many of whom had hard-luck stories like mine. I don't know where we'd be if we'd decided to go the UofP route, but I'm guessing most of us would be a lot worse off, educationally and financially, than we are now.
UofP's problem isn't low admission standards. Its problem is that it's a moneymaking machine run by vultures who prey on desperate people.
the policeman drives up and down the street, looks at cars, looks at people walking on the street, looking at residences...
One more time: these are government agents pretending to be people's friends in order to gain access to information that people only want their friends to see. So the proper analogy here would be the cop pretending to be an old high school buddy to look in your car's trunk, follow you around town all day to see where you go, and gain entrance to your home. All of which is illegal without a warrant, and damn well should be.
Are people naive about the public accessibility of the information they post on Facebook and the like? Of course they are. Does this mean it's acceptable for the government to take advantage of this naivete? No more than it is for garden-variety con men to do the same thing... and the potential consequences when it's the government doing it are much, much worse.
what is going on here is less east german secret police tracking innocent civilians, and more plain old gum shoe police work against actual criminals
RTFA. They're tracking enormous numbers of people, with no probable cause to believe these people are committing any crimes... unless you consider "potentially having political affiliations the government doesn't like" to be probable cause, of course. It's a fishing expedition, something which US law has traditionally frowned upon but which is very characteristic of governments like the old East German one. It's perfectly true that people should be more careful about what information they post online. It is also true that our government should not be looking willy-nilly through the information people do provide in order to find the rope with which to hang them.
It's a pretty blurry line, and a key part of "information that a person doesn't want others to have" is who those "others" are. Presumably, there's information that people give out on Facebook etc. that they want their friends to have, but not someone at DHS trolling for points to use against them. Now, you can argue that these people are idiots, that they shouldn't "friend" people so readily, that they shouldn't trust FB's (complete lack of) security, etc. -- and all that is true, but a spy who takes advantage of sloppy security practices is still a spy.
Apollo was a technological dead-end. The Shuttle was a technological dead end. On the other hand Soyuz did what it needed to do and had a design that could be adapted effectively while cutting costs.
Apollo also did what it needed to do, and while it cost more than contemporary Soyuz designs, it also had to do a hell of a lot more than Soyuz or any other spacecraft has ever done. The reason it was a dead end was political, not technological. The Shuttle, I'll grant you, although I'll note that the early designs for a reusable people-launcher made a lot of sense; it was when they tried to combine it with a heavy-lift system that things went to hell.
We could have kept turning out Saturn V's assembly-line style and even without incorporating all the improvements we could have made over the last 40 years, we'd still be ahead of where we are now, for less money.
As long as there are large numbers of Americans who are unable to acknowledge that the USA is ever at fault for anything, or ever less than the best at everything, you have to expect a certain amount of reaction.
Given that governments are, to date, the only entities that have done so much as put human beings in LEO -- to say nothing of sending them to the Moon -- you're going to have do some fancy dancing to make the case that government is what's stopping us from achieving science fiction dreams.
One of the meanings is logical and useful, the other one isn't.
Logical? You're pushing for natural language to be logical? You might want to spend your time on more useful pursuits, like tilting at windmills. There is in any case a historical reason for this usage.
As far as "useful" goes, it depends on context. "Mac vs. PC" was certainly a useful way to distinguish the two major desktop OSs at a time when the Mac OS and DOS, then Windows, were about the only games in town. Nowadays, with the rise of Linux, maybe it doesn't make that much sense; but again, neither does natural language in general. Programming languages can make sense, although this seems to be more a matter of theory than practice.;)
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Also if you want to compete EFFECTIVELY it does mean trying to do the things that Windows can do.
"The things Windows can do" are things that pretty much every OS+UI been able to do for damn near twenty years. There's nothing magical there, and yes, obviously any desktop OS needs to be able to do those things. The problem is that a lot of people working on Linux distros and software seem to have the idea that "competing effectively" means copying, rather than trying to find a better way to do things.
Look, nobody will ever be as good (or bad) at being Microsoft as Microsoft is. Try to make your UI look like Windows, or your word processor look like Word, and you're not going to fool anyone. Most users aren't going to be impressed at what a great job you've done reverse-engineering Microsoft's crappy standards. They're just going to say, "Why should I go with a knockoff when the original comes free* with my computer?" Chasing anyone's tail, in any industry, is usually a losing proposition. Chasing the tail of a lame, half-blind, diarrhetic horse just means you don't get anywhere very fast and end up covered in shit.
*Yeah, I know. From a marketing perspective, the "Windows tax" makes no difference at all to the vast majority of computer buyers. Deal with it.
Agreed, but not every user has the time to spend customizing every aspect of the OS and each application. I share the author's frustration at a "Linux experience" that keeps trying to be Windows-like and ends up feeling like a cheap knockoff. Windows sucks, and most applications written for Windows suck, and everyone knows it; it's the search for a better alternative that drives most users away from Microsoft's smothering embrace out into the wild world of F/OSS in the first place. So why is it so damned hard to find a distro with a UI that doesn't try to look like Windows, or a word processor that doesn't try to look like Word, or what-have-you?
But rest assures, if there is proof that a CEO, Board Member, or any Manager gave orders to fleece the public, those people can and will be held criminally accountable.
And all the customers will get ponies!
how about blaming the fucking terrorist who have made it necessary to do this
The point, which you have spectacularly missed, is that The Terrorists(tm) haven't made it necessary to do this; other countries, such as the UK and Israel, which have been dealing with rather determined and persistent terrorists far longer than the US has, have managed to come up with security measures that are both effective and unobtrusive. The IRA has never, AFAIK, hijacked an airliner, and it's been decades since the PLO managed to do so -- and both of these organizations in their heyday were every bit as fanatical and a hell of a lot more organized than al-Qaeda ever dreamed of being. Do you really think they wouldn't have pulled the equivalent of 9/11 on London or Tel Aviv if they could have? And yet flying through British and Israeli airports is much easier and more pleasant than flying through American airports.
Blaming terrorism for stupid airport security is like blaming crime for police brutality. The people screwing up in this case aren't the people we're supposedly being protected from, but the people supposedly doing the protecting. And inevitably, it makes the actual job of preventing horrifying acts of violence -- like the deaths of "all the 1000,s of people who have been murdered flying into skyscrapers and other things" -- a hell of a lot harder, and greatly increases the chances of such events in the future.
If you commit a crime and are never caught, you're still a criminal.
What do you say we reward someone who doesn't burden actual customers with troublesome and self defeating DRM instead of mocking them?
There is a very successful model for this way of doing business, actually; it's called shareware. Hardly anyone gets rich writing shareware, but I know a number of people who have made good money doing it. And the characteristics of shareware that makes its authors money? Well, as a rule, it's fully functional without payment, i.e. not crippleware; and unobtrusive about its demands for money. i.e. not nagware. The less functional and more annoying the unregistered version is, the less likely it is ever to get paid for, especially these days when there are so many choices for almost every category of software.
Application to the current case is left as an exercise for the reader.
It simply says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
In the case of corporations, there is no freedom of speech to abridge. Saying that campaign finance laws infringe on the free speech rights of corporations is like saying that quarrying infringes on the rights of rocks to a fair trial.
The notion that I have free speech as an individual but not when I band together with other like-minded individuals is absurd and offensive.
No campaign finance law has ever taken away your freedom of speech, or that of your coworkers. No matter who you work for, you are always free to say, "I'm voting for candidate X," or "As an employee of corporation Y, I think candidate Z would be a disaster in office." You can contribute as much of your paycheck to whatever political cause you choose, and you have always been free to do this. Stop pretending that Citizens United had anything whatsoever with people exercising their rights. It didn't, and you know it.
The argument isn't over what "shall make no law" means, it's over what "freedom of speech" means. The common assumption, and what the 1st Am. almost certainly means, is that freedom of speech is a right of individuals, not corporations.
I don't give a good goddamn what was written over a century ago into a Supreme Court decision about a railroad company by a court clerk (who had, by an astonishing coincidence, a substantial financial interest in that same railroad company.) Corporations are not people, and they have no rights. They are legal fictions created and maintained on the suffrance of the government. Anyone who claims to love liberty but does not acknowledge this is a liar, ready and willing to sell his last shred of freedom and integrity to the highest bidder.
But there's nothing specifically Christian on that list. I'd be curious to know what exactly, in the mind of those who espouse "Christian business principles," distinguishes those principles from "ethical business principles." Because the words of Christ were not exactly friendly to the whole idea of making money.
Okay, thanks, that makes sense. (The covariance matrix of strictly linearly dependent r.v.s is kind of a degenerate case, though.) My main question is about implication in the other direction; I believe that DD ==> PSD and SDD ==> PD, but I'm guessing that the inverse is not true, i.e. PSD =/=> DD and PD =/=> SDD.
Are covariance matrices SDDs?
I think SDD is sufficient for positive definiteness, and therefore for a matrix to be a valid covariance matrix, but not necessary. Anyone got an answer on this?
Never met them in the computer vision and image processing for example.
On the other hand, I meet them all the time in statistical programming, which makes me think that as image processing algorithms get more probabilistically based, speedups like the one discussed here may be very useful to people working in your field. I know they will be in mine, and I'm looking forward to seeing practical implementations.
I don't think they teach "sell that thou hast, and give to the poor" to aspiring MBAs these days.
There can be no justification for military security of any sort, so your duty as a member of government would be to dump as much information as possible into the open...
Nice argument there. Did you gather all that straw yourself, or did you have help?
Almost everyone agrees that some degree of secrecy in the affairs of government, particularly in matters of defense, is necessary. But this does not mean that our current "classify everything, admit nothing" level of security-state paranoia is in any way justified.
I'm just surprised that so many people on /. seem to fall into the same trap of assuming that "The Government" can do these things while simultaneously going on about how stupid and inept various branches are.
Incompetent tyrannical governments are a lot more common than competent tyrannical ones. For every Hitler, there are a hundred Mussolinis. Which is lucky for the rest of the world, I guess, but doesn't make things any less miserable for the people who have to live under them.
Note: I am not comparing the US to either Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Just pointing out that a belief that the government is evil, and a belief that it is stupid and inept, are not necessarily contradictory. Actually I think the US government is, like most very large organizations, home to a few very good people, a few very bad ones, and a whole bunch in the middle doing their best to get through their day.
Um ... you don't actually know what the Swedish role during the Cold War was, do you? Hint: they were anything but the chest-thumping jingoists you're talking about.
There are a lot of very good schools that let lots of people in but still manage to graduate a decent proportion of their students. Mine was a pretty common story: at 18 I "went off to college" at my nearby Enormous State University (University of Colorado in my case) and partied all the time, ended up with a crappy GPA my first semester, dropped out and spent a few years in the service, then came back with a much more mature attitude and a determination to do better. The problem was that CU didn't want me back (I mean, my GPA was really bad.) So I did my BS at Metropolitan State College of Denver, which admits just about anyone with a pulse, but still maintains high educational standards. It cost me a lot less than CU or CSU would have, too.
Did it work? Well, I'm back at CU now ... working on my PhD and supported by an NIH fellowship. It worked for most of my classmates, too, many of whom had hard-luck stories like mine. I don't know where we'd be if we'd decided to go the UofP route, but I'm guessing most of us would be a lot worse off, educationally and financially, than we are now.
UofP's problem isn't low admission standards. Its problem is that it's a moneymaking machine run by vultures who prey on desperate people.
It used to be standard to refer to nations as "she," like ships. The usage is a bit archaic now, but it's not incorrect.
the policeman drives up and down the street, looks at cars, looks at people walking on the street, looking at residences...
One more time: these are government agents pretending to be people's friends in order to gain access to information that people only want their friends to see. So the proper analogy here would be the cop pretending to be an old high school buddy to look in your car's trunk, follow you around town all day to see where you go, and gain entrance to your home. All of which is illegal without a warrant, and damn well should be.
Are people naive about the public accessibility of the information they post on Facebook and the like? Of course they are. Does this mean it's acceptable for the government to take advantage of this naivete? No more than it is for garden-variety con men to do the same thing ... and the potential consequences when it's the government doing it are much, much worse.
what is going on here is less east german secret police tracking innocent civilians, and more plain old gum shoe police work against actual criminals
RTFA. They're tracking enormous numbers of people, with no probable cause to believe these people are committing any crimes ... unless you consider "potentially having political affiliations the government doesn't like" to be probable cause, of course. It's a fishing expedition, something which US law has traditionally frowned upon but which is very characteristic of governments like the old East German one. It's perfectly true that people should be more careful about what information they post online. It is also true that our government should not be looking willy-nilly through the information people do provide in order to find the rope with which to hang them.
It's a pretty blurry line, and a key part of "information that a person doesn't want others to have" is who those "others" are. Presumably, there's information that people give out on Facebook etc. that they want their friends to have, but not someone at DHS trolling for points to use against them. Now, you can argue that these people are idiots, that they shouldn't "friend" people so readily, that they shouldn't trust FB's (complete lack of) security, etc. -- and all that is true, but a spy who takes advantage of sloppy security practices is still a spy.
Apollo was a technological dead-end. The Shuttle was a technological dead end. On the other hand Soyuz did what it needed to do and had a design that could be adapted effectively while cutting costs.
Apollo also did what it needed to do, and while it cost more than contemporary Soyuz designs, it also had to do a hell of a lot more than Soyuz or any other spacecraft has ever done. The reason it was a dead end was political, not technological. The Shuttle, I'll grant you, although I'll note that the early designs for a reusable people-launcher made a lot of sense; it was when they tried to combine it with a heavy-lift system that things went to hell.
We could have kept turning out Saturn V's assembly-line style and even without incorporating all the improvements we could have made over the last 40 years, we'd still be ahead of where we are now, for less money.
But people will blame the USA no matter what.
As long as there are large numbers of Americans who are unable to acknowledge that the USA is ever at fault for anything, or ever less than the best at everything, you have to expect a certain amount of reaction.
Government.
Given that governments are, to date, the only entities that have done so much as put human beings in LEO -- to say nothing of sending them to the Moon -- you're going to have do some fancy dancing to make the case that government is what's stopping us from achieving science fiction dreams.
One of the meanings is logical and useful, the other one isn't.
Logical? You're pushing for natural language to be logical? You might want to spend your time on more useful pursuits, like tilting at windmills. There is in any case a historical reason for this usage.
As far as "useful" goes, it depends on context. "Mac vs. PC" was certainly a useful way to distinguish the two major desktop OSs at a time when the Mac OS and DOS, then Windows, were about the only games in town. Nowadays, with the rise of Linux, maybe it doesn't make that much sense; but again, neither does natural language in general. Programming languages can make sense, although this seems to be more a matter of theory than practice. ;)