> I don't even use a spelling or grammar checker anymore. If I have any > doubt, just post it on/. and wait for 100 anal-retentive, pedantic > grammar-nazis to nit-pick it to death. It's great to have a community > of Asperberger's victims at my disposal. > That would be "If I have any doubt, *I* just post it on/. and wait for 100 anal-retentive, pedantic grammar-nazis to nit-pick it to death." Unless you really mean to offer other people the advice of posting things to/. in case *you* have any doubt, which would be a bit strange.
But the OP did not write that "3.999..." and "4" were the same, he wrote that 3.999... and 4 were the same, and for the purposes of that claim, he was talking about what those strings mean rather than the strings themselves. In the same way it is not hard to argue that 2 and 7 are the same, if by 2 and 7 you mean elements of Z_5. It IS of course hard to argue that the strings "2" and "7" are the same.
As a math PhD-student, I too care about this sort of thing;)
> > Mathematically, 4 and 4.0, 3.999... represent the same element of the real numbers. > > Change "element" to "equivalence class" and you're spot on. > It seems to me to me that if you want to define the reals using a sequence of decimal digits, that you should define the real numbers as a set of equivalence classes of such decimal sequences. Certainly most people would not expect the real numbers to contain several non-equal elements that represent the same value. So the original poster was already spot on.
I don't think that a relationship that ends is necessarily "failed" - it just ended. People can grow from being in a relationship even if that relationship does not last forever. On the other hand a relationship can easily be a total failure without actually ending, which to me is so much more tragic. I recognize that it is much easier to count marriages that end than marriages that end up "being a bad idea on the whole".
"But Linus does really seem to have a bit of an attitude problem at times. Which is many times good if you are a boss for employees, [...]"
It seems to me that a boss with an attitude problem will tend to drive away the employees who are skilled enough that they can find employment elsewhere, leaving behind the ones who cannot. Creating a toxic work environment is not a good quality in a boss. I don't think you meant to say so, but your comment does seem to imply that it is.
Legislation around bluetooth spam might be more effective, as the people who are doing it have to physically present in the country in order to carry out bluetooth spam, so it is actually possible to catch them. An email spammer, on the other hand, can move to any country that will allow him to carry out his activities.
I get exercise outside of transportation, so it is not a health issue for me. I think that if walking around is something that makes people significantly more fit, then they must be in pretty poor shape to begin with. It is more a question of me simply not wanting to deal with the cost and problems that come with owning a car, and I like walking and had gotten used to that in my home country.
If I was living here permanently I would definately get a car. The problem is the distances involved. There a plenty of extremely small convenience stores around where I live, and I can buy fruit and such at a food mall if I feel like walking for half an hour each way, but that is it as far as near by shopping opportunities go. Most social events are distributed throughout the city, it seems, which makes it unlikely for most things to be close because the city is not very dense. E.g. dancing salsa is a lot easier for me in Aarhus (where I normally live), even though it has fewer salsa events and 1/10 the population of Minneapolis (3 million versus 300.000). I'll have to check out the co-op close to the university one of the other posters mentioned, though.
All of this would be no problem if I had a car and enjoyed spending time on the road, and it seems most americans fall into this category, so the city designs they are choosing make sense. I'm not saying it is good or bad, I'm just saying it's different and that to me it is no wonder that people around here prefer driving to walking, which puts people who prefer walking at a disadvantage. I suspect the very cold winters around here play a role in that too.
I come from Denmark but am staying in Minneapolis for a year. In Denmark you can walk to a nearby mall or at least a well-stocked convenience store pretty much no-matter where you live if you do not live too far from the central city. Where I live in Denmark I can *walk* to *everything* I need to do on a regular basis, and everything else is within convinient biking or bus distance. I don't have a car and I would have a use for a driver's license maybe once a year (when living in Denmark, that is).
Now, in Minneapolis, practically nothing is within walking distance no matter where you live and the bus system is an absolute pain to figure out even using their online planner. Not having a car around here is a serious social handicap, and it makes shopping a taxing experience, because everything is spread out within a huge area. I can't help but conclude that people around here actually *enjoy* spending alot of time in their cars, so that distance is an advantage to them.
Other than that, this is a very nice place, but for people who live here permanently, not having a car is simply not a workable option.
Why would the jump to level 70 not enable a raid of casual players to go through instances that were hard at level 60? As far as I remember from my days of playing World of Warcraft, there was a large gap betweeen a level 50 player and a level 60 player. On top of that, from what I have read, the gear easily available to a level 70 player is better than the very best gear present in the game without the Burning Crusade expansion. So my thinking is that the casual players could screw up alot of the precision techniques and still handle the hard level 60 instances because they are so much more powerful than level 60.
I do not know the details of this, but I strongly suspect that the universe is still continuous in this model. In that case things are set up so that if you hit a boundary between two faces, then the two corresponding faces that you come out of are also adjacent, meaning that you would not notice that you have hit a boundary. Possibly the faces are just a way to explain what is going on, and there would not need to be any actual boundaries that could be detected.
That is true, but as far as I know, the only reason such rootkits of the malicious kind are not out in the wild is simply that no one has bothered to write one. There are no unsolved problems that would need to be tackled to do it - it is solely a question of doing it.
An agnostic does not know if there exist any gods, which means that he does not believe in any gods, while at the same time he does not disbelieve either. Since he does not believe, an agnostic is an atheist: a-theist = non-religous. I am an agnostic in the sense that I do not claim to be able to prove the non-existance of gods (I do not know how that would ever be possible). You are free to define atheist differently.
It is not so much that I actively disbelieve in gods, it is more that I simply do not take seriously the possibility of any gods existing. I imagine this notion is familiar to most people, as I would think that this is the same way that they feel about, say, the gods of the vikings like Thor and Odin. We cannot prove that they do not exist, but it is not interesting to do so anyway, since we do not take that possibility seriously. We do not go around actively seeing an absence of Thor and Odin in the world. We just do not see them and do not expect to do so in future either. That is how I feel about all gods.
Why is this modded funny? One of the hardest kind of rootkits to detect is ones based on virtualization, and they indeed do run under the kernel, tricking the kernel to believe that the kernel is running on actual hardware when in fact it is running on virtual hardware generated by the rootkit. I do not know if there are any actual, malicious rootkits out there doing this, but they could do it, and it would be very hard to get rid of such a rootkit if it was done properly.
> You are an agnostic, not an atheist. Mere quibbles, as you say. > Perhaps. I certainly acknowledge that I cannot disprove the existance of any god. On the other hand, I would say the exact same thing about Santa Claus or the easter bunny, and I view gods in the same category. An atheist is someone who does not have a belief in any god, and that describes me. I may also be an agnostic according to some definitions, since I acknowledge that I cannot disprove any gods.
> When engaging a religious person, you must be willing and able to see the world through > their eyes if you expect to have a decent conversation. > Very true.
> In a pragmatic sense, religious beliefs exist because believers naturally see God > in the world, and atheistic beliefs exist because some people naturally see an > absense of God in the world. > I do not see an absence of a god in the world, I merely have not seen a god. The difference is that seeing an absence is active, as if I were looking for a god but did not find one. This is nitpicking and I think we agree.
> The exact same events are interpreted in different ways depending on one's worldview. > I completely agree that this is true. This does not prevent me from believing that some interpretations are more rational than others. Internal consistency does not imply reasonableness.
> It would be incredibly selfish for me to demand that a religious person see > the world as I see it, just as it would be incredibly selfish for a religious > person demand that I require the existence of a god in the world. > I try to be as rationally selfish as possible, but while I think religion is irrational I do not require religious people to become athiests. They are free to believe irrational things just as I require them to allow me to hold beliefs they disagree with.
> You want to know a sign of a hard core extremist atheist? If they use this statement, > "Religion is cause of more death than any thing else in the world." That is the war cry > of the Atheist just as much as "Those that do believe in my Church will be dammed" is > the war cry of the extremists of religion. Both are equally offensive and untrue. > If some religious people believe that, then it is actually kind of nice of them to let everyone know, so we at least have a chance to avoid eternal damnation! At the same time I do not think you have to be especially hard core to believe that religion has caused a lot of death, since it is one of the things that is used to justify a whole lot of killing. Of course we can never know if all that killing would actually have taken place regardless of religion, so we cannot know if it is true that religion has caused a lot of death. The number of killings in the (atheist) communist countries would seem to indicate otherwise, though.
If you knew more athiests, I think you would discover that they are just as different from one another as other people are, and that they do not have common warcries. Atheists are not united the way religious extremists are, since NOT believing something is not much a unifying force.
I am more asking than saying the opposite, so there is not much to disagree with:-) I think you points are all valid, and they show that there is benefit to knowing what has come before in order to understand the present. Also, it is certainly not impossible that research into the Big Bang could eventually help with other more practical areas of physics, and I certainly understand the motivation of simply wanting to know.
My question was a bit more demanding than that, though. The question I responded to gives the impression that it is *necessary* to know what has come before in order to understand where things are going. I still do not see how this is necessary, as long as one has general knowledge of the kinds of things that the present kind of situation can lead to. Of course that understanding could come from a complete knowledge of history (galactic or otherwise), but I do not see how that is necessary, even if it is helpful.
> At least for me as a christian I can get along with people > that Christians that are more liberal than I am. I can get > along with some Christians that are less liberal than I am. > I can get along with people that are Jewish, Buddhists, and Muslims. > > The one group that tends to be a problem are > the hard core extremist liberal atheist/humanists. > So you get along fine with hard core extremist christians, hard core extremist jews, hard core extremist buddhists and hard core extremist muslims? Then you, sir, are a very tolerant individual!
Atheist often do not mention that they are atheists, and there is no obvious way to find out since they will not be talking about going to the atheist club meeting, since there are not a lot of those, like religious people talk about going to church and such. Thus you will be most likely to hear about atheism from an atheist who actively seeks to talk about atheism with you, and those will probably be more argumentative on average than the average atheist.
But hey, for all I know, all the atheists in your area are insufferable. At least the hard core extremist ones.
How can you know where you are going, unless you understand where you come from?
Lots of people say that, but I've never understood it. Mind explaining why it is that you need to know where you were in order to know where you are going to end up? Maybe knowing where you were is nicer or helpful in some way, but that is not the question - why it is necessary to do so?
Basically, why is it that your question is not in the same category as:
How can you know that you car is pink, unless you understand why your mother is hungry?
> And what constitutes justice is something decided by law, not by the law-of-the-jungle. > I sincerely hope that justice is what decided how the law is rather than the other way around. Otherwise any atrocity would be just as long as it was sanctioned by law. A courtroom does not determine justice, it tries to determine facts about what happened and what the law has to say about that. Whether or not that decision is just is something you have to decide for yourself.
> Issues you have with other people should not become the job of a third party. > If you want to kill Osama, go get him yourself or stop whining about your irrelevant wishes. > So if someone steals from me, I should single-handedly track him down and beat him up? The job of the police is exactly to be that third party.
"I'm kinda surprised the victim just gave up -- the media was just starting to call the harassers "terrorists" "
Possibly due to the same thing that made the media call those people terrorists in the first place? I.e. that he had to face the fact of his presence being a direct threat to the lives of everyone around him.
On the other hand it would be a statement that no one could stop them if they succeeded. Perhaps they figured that their idea of hiding liquid explosives as drinks was so good that it would get through even tightened security.
Slashdot Mirror
> I don't even use a spelling or grammar checker anymore. If I have any /. and wait for 100 anal-retentive, pedantic /. and wait for /.
/Your local anal-retentive, pedantic grammar-nazi
> doubt, just post it on
> grammar-nazis to nit-pick it to death. It's great to have a community
> of Asperberger's victims at my disposal.
>
That would be "If I have any doubt, *I* just post it on
100 anal-retentive, pedantic grammar-nazis to nit-pick it to death." Unless
you really mean to offer other people the advice of posting things to
in case *you* have any doubt, which would be a bit strange.
But the OP did not write that "3.999..." and "4" were the same, he wrote that 3.999... and 4 were the same, and for the purposes of that claim, he was talking about what those strings mean rather than the strings themselves. In the same way it is not hard to argue that 2 and 7 are the same, if by 2 and 7 you mean elements of Z_5. It IS of course hard to argue that the strings "2" and "7" are the same.
;)
As a math PhD-student, I too care about this sort of thing
> > Mathematically, 4 and 4.0, 3.999... represent the same element of the real numbers.
>
> Change "element" to "equivalence class" and you're spot on.
>
It seems to me to me that if you want to define the reals using a sequence of decimal digits, that you should define the real numbers as a set of equivalence classes of such decimal sequences. Certainly most people would not expect the real numbers to contain several non-equal elements that represent the same value. So the original poster was already spot on.
I don't think that a relationship that ends is necessarily "failed" - it just ended. People can grow from being in a relationship even if that relationship does not last forever. On the other hand a relationship can easily be a total failure without actually ending, which to me is so much more tragic. I recognize that it is much easier to count marriages that end than marriages that end up "being a bad idea on the whole".
"But Linus does really seem to have a bit of an attitude problem at times. Which is many times good if you are a boss for employees, [...]"
It seems to me that a boss with an attitude problem will tend to drive away the employees who are skilled enough that they can find employment elsewhere, leaving behind the ones who cannot. Creating a toxic work environment is not a good quality in a boss. I don't think you meant to say so, but your comment does seem to imply that it is.
Legislation around bluetooth spam might be more effective, as the people who are doing it have to physically present in the country in order to carry out bluetooth spam, so it is actually possible to catch them. An email spammer, on the other hand, can move to any country that will allow him to carry out his activities.
I'll have to check those out. Thanks!
Sure it is possible to walk, but things are spread out so much that the distances become prohibitive.
You are definately right about the public bikes in Denmark - we danes only use them when we have to.
I get exercise outside of transportation, so it is not a health issue for me. I think that if walking around is something that makes people significantly more fit, then they must be in pretty poor shape to begin with. It is more a question of me simply not wanting to deal with the cost and problems that come with owning a car, and I like walking and had gotten used to that in my home country.
If I was living here permanently I would definately get a car. The problem is the distances involved. There a plenty of extremely small convenience stores around where I live, and I can buy fruit and such at a food mall if I feel like walking for half an hour each way, but that is it as far as near by shopping opportunities go. Most social events are distributed throughout the city, it seems, which makes it unlikely for most things to be close because the city is not very dense. E.g. dancing salsa is a lot easier for me in Aarhus (where I normally live), even though it has fewer salsa events and 1/10 the population of Minneapolis (3 million versus 300.000). I'll have to check out the co-op close to the university one of the other posters mentioned, though.
All of this would be no problem if I had a car and enjoyed spending time on the road, and it seems most americans fall into this category, so the city designs they are choosing make sense. I'm not saying it is good or bad, I'm just saying it's different and that to me it is no wonder that people around here prefer driving to walking, which puts people who prefer walking at a disadvantage. I suspect the very cold winters around here play a role in that too.
I come from Denmark but am staying in Minneapolis for a year. In Denmark you can walk to a nearby mall or at least a well-stocked convenience store pretty much no-matter where you live if you do not live too far from the central city. Where I live in Denmark I can *walk* to *everything* I need to do on a regular basis, and everything else is within convinient biking or bus distance. I don't have a car and I would have a use for a driver's license maybe once a year (when living in Denmark, that is).
Now, in Minneapolis, practically nothing is within walking distance no matter where you live and the bus system is an absolute pain to figure out even using their online planner. Not having a car around here is a serious social handicap, and it makes shopping a taxing experience, because everything is spread out within a huge area. I can't help but conclude that people around here actually *enjoy* spending alot of time in their cars, so that distance is an advantage to them.
Other than that, this is a very nice place, but for people who live here permanently, not having a car is simply not a workable option.
Why would the jump to level 70 not enable a raid of casual players to go through instances that were hard at level 60? As far as I remember from my days of playing World of Warcraft, there was a large gap betweeen a level 50 player and a level 60 player. On top of that, from what I have read, the gear easily available to a level 70 player is better than the very best gear present in the game without the Burning Crusade expansion. So my thinking is that the casual players could screw up alot of the precision techniques and still handle the hard level 60 instances because they are so much more powerful than level 60.
I do not know the details of this, but I strongly suspect that the universe is still continuous in this model. In that case things are set up so that if you hit a boundary between two faces, then the two corresponding faces that you come out of are also adjacent, meaning that you would not notice that you have hit a boundary. Possibly the faces are just a way to explain what is going on, and there would not need to be any actual boundaries that could be detected.
That is true, but as far as I know, the only reason such rootkits of the malicious kind are not out in the wild is simply that no one has bothered to write one. There are no unsolved problems that would need to be tackled to do it - it is solely a question of doing it.
An agnostic does not know if there exist any gods, which means that he does not believe in any gods, while at the same time he does not disbelieve either. Since he does not believe, an agnostic is an atheist: a-theist = non-religous. I am an agnostic in the sense that I do not claim to be able to prove the non-existance of gods (I do not know how that would ever be possible). You are free to define atheist differently.
It is not so much that I actively disbelieve in gods, it is more that I simply do not take seriously the possibility of any gods existing. I imagine this notion is familiar to most people, as I would think that this is the same way that they feel about, say, the gods of the vikings like Thor and Odin. We cannot prove that they do not exist, but it is not interesting to do so anyway, since we do not take that possibility seriously. We do not go around actively seeing an absence of Thor and Odin in the world. We just do not see them and do not expect to do so in future either. That is how I feel about all gods.
Why is this modded funny? One of the hardest kind of rootkits to detect is ones based on virtualization, and they indeed do run under the kernel, tricking the kernel to believe that the kernel is running on actual hardware when in fact it is running on virtual hardware generated by the rootkit. I do not know if there are any actual, malicious rootkits out there doing this, but they could do it, and it would be very hard to get rid of such a rootkit if it was done properly.
> You are an agnostic, not an atheist. Mere quibbles, as you say.
>
Perhaps. I certainly acknowledge that I cannot disprove the existance of any god. On the other hand, I would say the exact same thing about Santa Claus or the easter bunny, and I view gods in the same category. An atheist is someone who does not have a belief in any god, and that describes me. I may also be an agnostic according to some definitions, since I acknowledge that I cannot disprove any gods.
> When engaging a religious person, you must be willing and able to see the world through
> their eyes if you expect to have a decent conversation.
>
Very true.
> In a pragmatic sense, religious beliefs exist because believers naturally see God
> in the world, and atheistic beliefs exist because some people naturally see an
> absense of God in the world.
>
I do not see an absence of a god in the world, I merely have not seen a god. The difference is that seeing an absence is active, as if I were looking for a god but did not find one. This is nitpicking and I think we agree.
> The exact same events are interpreted in different ways depending on one's worldview.
>
I completely agree that this is true. This does not prevent me from believing that some interpretations are more rational than others. Internal consistency does not imply reasonableness.
> It would be incredibly selfish for me to demand that a religious person see
> the world as I see it, just as it would be incredibly selfish for a religious
> person demand that I require the existence of a god in the world.
>
I try to be as rationally selfish as possible, but while I think religion is irrational I do not require religious people to become athiests. They are free to believe irrational things just as I require them to allow me to hold beliefs they disagree with.
> You want to know a sign of a hard core extremist atheist? If they use this statement,
> "Religion is cause of more death than any thing else in the world." That is the war cry
> of the Atheist just as much as "Those that do believe in my Church will be dammed" is
> the war cry of the extremists of religion. Both are equally offensive and untrue.
>
If some religious people believe that, then it is actually kind of nice of them to let everyone know, so we at least have a chance to avoid eternal damnation! At the same time I do not think you have to be especially hard core to believe that religion has caused a lot of death, since it is one of the things that is used to justify a whole lot of killing. Of course we can never know if all that killing would actually have taken place regardless of religion, so we cannot know if it is true that religion has caused a lot of death. The number of killings in the (atheist) communist countries would seem to indicate otherwise, though.
If you knew more athiests, I think you would discover that they are just as different from one another as other people are, and that they do not have common warcries. Atheists are not united the way religious extremists are, since NOT believing something is not much a unifying force.
I am more asking than saying the opposite, so there is not much to disagree with :-) I think you points are all valid, and they show that there is benefit to knowing what has come before in order to understand the present. Also, it is certainly not impossible that research into the Big Bang could eventually help with other more practical areas of physics, and I certainly understand the motivation of simply wanting to know.
My question was a bit more demanding than that, though. The question I responded to gives the impression that it is *necessary* to know what has come before in order to understand where things are going. I still do not see how this is necessary, as long as one has general knowledge of the kinds of things that the present kind of situation can lead to. Of course that understanding could come from a complete knowledge of history (galactic or otherwise), but I do not see how that is necessary, even if it is helpful.
> At least for me as a christian I can get along with people
> that Christians that are more liberal than I am. I can get
> along with some Christians that are less liberal than I am.
> I can get along with people that are Jewish, Buddhists, and Muslims.
>
> The one group that tends to be a problem are
> the hard core extremist liberal atheist/humanists.
>
So you get along fine with hard core extremist christians, hard core extremist jews, hard core extremist buddhists and hard core extremist muslims? Then you, sir, are a very tolerant individual!
Atheist often do not mention that they are atheists, and there is no obvious way to find out since they will not be talking about going to the atheist club meeting, since there are not a lot of those, like religious people talk about going to church and such. Thus you will be most likely to hear about atheism from an atheist who actively seeks to talk about atheism with you, and those will probably be more argumentative on average than the average atheist.
But hey, for all I know, all the atheists in your area are insufferable. At least the hard core extremist ones.
How can you know where you are going, unless you understand where you come from?
Lots of people say that, but I've never understood it. Mind explaining why it is that you need to know where you were in order to know where you are going to end up? Maybe knowing where you were is nicer or helpful in some way, but that is not the question - why it is necessary to do so?
Basically, why is it that your question is not in the same category as:
How can you know that you car is pink, unless you understand why your mother is hungry?
> And what constitutes justice is something decided by law, not by the law-of-the-jungle.
>
I sincerely hope that justice is what decided how the law is rather than the other way around. Otherwise any atrocity would be just as long as it was sanctioned by law. A courtroom does not determine justice, it tries to determine facts about what happened and what the law has to say about that. Whether or not that decision is just is something you have to decide for yourself.
> Issues you have with other people should not become the job of a third party.
> If you want to kill Osama, go get him yourself or stop whining about your irrelevant wishes.
>
So if someone steals from me, I should single-handedly track him down and beat him up? The job of the police is exactly to be that third party.
"I'm kinda surprised the victim just gave up -- the media was just starting to call the harassers "terrorists" "
Possibly due to the same thing that made the media call those people terrorists in the first place? I.e. that he had to face the fact of his presence being a direct threat to the lives of everyone around him.
On the other hand it would be a statement that no one could stop them if they succeeded. Perhaps they figured that their idea of hiding liquid explosives as drinks was so good that it would get through even tightened security.