I'm iffy on the whole concept of blocking content. People just need to learn to surf responsibly, and teach their children right and wrong. And no matter what, children are going to be exposed to smut, mostly by their peers.
That being said, there are clear cases where the sensorship is wrong, and technical explanations are not adequate excuses.
Professionally, I worked as a chip designer and software developer for air traffic control systems. I've made my share of mistakes. I've coded bugs and had to fix them. But when that happens, I take it VERY seriously. Yes, the ATC systems have sophisticated fail-over systems, but the last thing I want is to have ANY chance of increasing the probability of putting airline passengers in danger. "Oops, sorry." doesn't cut it, and once a bug is discovered, I certainly can't dismiss it. I have to fix it right away!
If you know anything about this history of the USA and plenty of other free countries, you know that people are willing to trade their lives for freedom from oppression. And I generally think of censorship as oppression. Of course, I'd prefer that there were no blocking software. But with it being there, all I can say is that there's no excuse for leaving discovered blocking errors unfixed for any length of time. People's rights are being infringed, and the people who develop these blockers need to take those rights seriously.
As long as there is censorship, there's going to be a slippery slope. The law must protect people against abuses of censorship laws. There needs to be checks and balances. There are laws that let the police search your home. The check against that is that they have to have a warrant issued by a judge, which means they need to show significant probably cause. A balance against that is called "exigent circumstances", where if they believe someone's life is in danger, they can enter a home even without a warrant. The balance against THAT is that even WITH exigent circumstances, things they find in your home are likely to be inadmissable in court. Likewise, with censorship laws, there needs to be other laws that come with penalties for abuse of the censorship laws. If you censor, you're taking on a huge responsibility, because false positives and false negatives are not something you can just brush off.
What is it with doctors and their God complex? Alternative medicine has been aware of this fact (that the microorganisms that live in our bodies are a normal part of our physiology) for ages. But alternative medicine is poppycock, right? (Well, okay, a lot of it is, but not all of it.) Then all of a sudden mainstream medicine "discovers" this long-known fact, and suddenly, they're fscking geniuses for having discovered it? Give me a break!
This reminds me of something Neil deGrasse Tyson once said about MDs. He cites an example (common enough) where some person is diagnosed with terminal cancer by three different doctors. His family prays for him, and he recovers. Why is it that people are more willing to believe that God cured him than that he had just seen three idiot doctors?
Slashdot doesn't give me room for the title I wanted to enter, so I have to write something lame.
Anyhow, I would suggest that you buy something that is (a) not on the cutting edge, and (b) designed for ultra low power. The reason is that the newer the silicon, the greater the impact of aging effects. Process variation and the effects of heat and just general usage have a greater impact on the silicon and interconnects in smaller transistors. With low-power devices, heat and power are minimised, further reducing the effect of "wear" on the device. It'll remain reliable for a longer time.
Others have mentioned moving parts. See if you can get some Via or Atom system that you can run with passive cooling.
The one place where I might suggest that you splurge on the latest tech is the hard disk. You might want to consider an SLC flash drive. It'll cost more than the whole rest of the computer, but with no moving parts, it'll last a damn long time. And don't worry about the effects of write cycles to the SSD; today's wear-leveling will make the drive last AT LEAST 10 year, but probably much longer.
You might consider doing your short-term backups to an external USB hard drive. Since the backup drive is only going to spin up when accessed for backups (if you set it up right), then it won't get much use. Do your medium, and long-term backups to DVDs and/or tape.
How long should I make this buffer? A second doesn't seem to be enough. And what's worse, it interferes with pause. Why does pause have to be affected by buffering? Can't they pause further towards the front end?
Another problem I notice is that some of the keyboard shortcuts don't work. You can find out what they are from the preferences menu. Sometimes, I'd like to skip back a few seconds, but the shortcut assigned to that skips back about a minute. The one that's supposed to skip back a minute goes to the start of the movie. BROKEN.
VLC is nice. But I am forced to copy any movie I want to play to my local hard drive. It absolutely cannot handle playing over a LAN, at least not wireless ones. Where Quicktime will play a movie without skipping a beat, VLC will badly stutter, freeze, and otherwise be really annoying. I've played around with various buffering settings, and nothing seems to help. (At least for 0.9.8. I'll try 0.9.9 later today, but I can't imagine that they've fixed this yet.)
It sounds like that they're going to take Python, which is already gets translated to some kind of p-code (right?) and either translate the original Python or the p-code into LLVM code, which is then JIT-compiled to the native architecture.
The translation from Python to LLVM is going to lose some specificity and require that extra code be added to implement whatever needs to be done in Python that isn't trivially implemented by LLVM. Then the LLVM code needs to be compiled to native, introducing yet more "glue" code in the process.
Wouldn't a more direct compile yield a better result?
And don't give me any junk about compiling dynamic languages. LISP and Self are highly dynamic languages, yet they're compiled. If they can be compiled, then so can Python. I mean, the fact that it can be done through multiple levels of translation proves that it can be done, although possibly inefficiently. I just think that a more direct approach would reduce some of the superfluous glue code and a variety of other inefficiencies in translation that result from a loss of knowledge about what the original program was actually trying to implement.
Check out the following groups: The Open Hardware Foundation (www.openhardwarefoundation.org) The Open Graphics Project (www.opengraphics.org, www.traversaltech.com)
Their OGD1 board is in prototypes. They should be able to help you with design and refer you to board fabrication companies.
I keep seeing people mention that part of the premium price of Apple products is that they put better quality hardware into their computers. If that's the case, then you get what you pay for.
In my experience, Dells are cheaper, but they're also cheap hardware, and their customer service isn't all that great. On the other hand, I have had good experiences with HP hardware (and customer service). But then again, you pay a bit more.
Still, if you go reading through Apple-related forums, while you'll hear about Apple having great customer service (if you pay extra for AppleCare), they don't always choose the best parts. For instance, there seems to be a lot of people who think Apple could have done a lot better job of sourcing their notebook hard drives.
After having been personally burned far too many times from buying the cheaper product and then ending up with useless junk and no recourse, I'm very willing to pay a bit extra to get something or higher quality that I can count on. But, are we really getting that from Apple?
At least, I've met very few doctors who would ever do any out-side research into what was ailing me. If they didn't know right-off what it was that was bothering me, they would send me away untreated. Or they would prescribe drugs that were inappropriate or superficially purported to treat symptoms.
It wasn't until I went to see a clinical nutritionist who wasn't afraid of doing some off-hours research that I was able to make any headway into the causes of my CFIDS. Turns out that the root cause of all of my problems was an intestinal parasite. On reflection, I had all the classic symptoms, both in terms of GI symtoms and other side-effects (energy problems, alergies, etc.), but every GI doctor I went to just treated my IBS symptoms and completely ignored the fatigue and never considered doing certain basic tests. Infectious disease doctors never found anything either. One doctor did a endoscopy, looking for anything mechanically wrong, but that wouldn't identify a protozoan.
Similar things happened with my wife. They wanted to treat her with antidepressants, when it turned out that she had a helmenth that caused mood problems as a symptom. When the nutritionist's ordered tests found that, some flagyl cleared it right up, and voila.
This is a problem with MD's especially. DO's are a little better, coming from a traditionally more open-minded discipline, but even they tend to operate a revolving door.
As a counter point, I also had strabismus. (My eyes crossed, and an in unusual pattern.) I had to get more than one opinion, but I found this one eye doctor who specialized in correcting pediatric eye alignment problems. He was absolutely fantastic. Other doctors told me that correcting my problem wasn't even possible. This guy knew exactly what to do, did it, and the results have been brilliant.
This leads me to differentiate between surgeons and medical doctors, and I have come to respect the surgeons a hell of a lot more. (But this is just due to my relatively small statistical sample.) Modern medicine seems to be good at treating COMMON illnesses and physical problems that are easy to measure. Anything else, and you're out of luck.
So, after the nutritionist found our problems, we went to a DO, and he happily wrote scrips. Because we had certified medical test results from respected laboratories. Which he himself would never have thought to suggest we get.
This problem with the medical system tends to lead to a catch 22. If you have a problem and don't know anything about it, they won't treat you because they don't want to investigate. You have to learn all about the medicine yourself. But when you do that and discuss symptoms and potential causes with them and even use the right terminology and talk about "differential diagnosis", they label you a hypocondriac and send you away untreated. We were just lucky enough to get a nutritionist with the right credentials who herself was willing to do the research and arm us with hard test results that we could use to get the MDs to do what we needed.
Now, while MDs won't argue with you about hard test results, they WILL argue about treatment. I have a friend who got lyme disease, having been bit by a tick. Classic bulls-eye shape. The doctor gave her the WRONG TREATMENT (one that is specifically cited as being ineffective against this disease). When it didn't work and the disease started to enter some late stage that's dangerous, my wife had to go into the doctor's office with her WITH THE MEDICAL TEXT that lists the appropriate treatments before the doctor would prescribe the right medicine. And lo and behold, the treatment worked. Fucking moron doctor.
I switched to Firefox for two reasons. One is that Safari is a major memory hog. It can use like 3x the memory as Firefox for the same thing. (And I'm talking about fresh starts. I know all about how VMs can swap unused pages to disk.)
The other missing thing from Safari was something as basic as session saving and crash protection. You have to buy Saft for that. With Firefox, it's free.
I wonder if Apple has done anything about these issues.
Well, maybe if you're autistic. SOME of us computer geeks are actually quite good at reading subtle cues that people give off in their posture, mannerisms, choice of clothing&makeup, etc., etc., etc. Can you rely on it 100%? Certainly not. People will surprise you. But there's an absolutely astounding amount you can learn about a person just from casual observation. And for many of us, the intuitions are handed to us on a platter, rather than having to reason it out by consciously noticing the underlying clues.
To put it in technical terms, there's a high noise to signal ratio. You can get at the signal, but you need really sophisticated filters, and it's a knowledge-intensive abductive inference process that involves a significant amount of hypothesis generation and testing. How conscious or automatic and effective it is depends on practice, natural talent, empathy, and the willingness to actually pay attention.
Currently, I do part time (5 or so hours per week each) for two different companies, as a chip design consultant. For the first one, I worked for them for 9 years before I decided to go back to grad school, so it wasn't hard to talk them into it. For the second one, they begged me to work on this project for them because they didn't feel they could find someone else they could trust to do it. I mostly telecommute for both.
Impossible? No.
But you can't get into this kind of thing sight unseen. They have to know you and already trust you and find you invaluable. Going through head hunters, applying to positions directly to companies you haven't worked for -- no one will hire you for part-time work, and few will hire for telecommute. This sort of thing requires networking (in the human sense).
You are right. It's not because the DRM made it harder. It's because the actions of the RIAA and the threat of DRM opened their eyes to the mistake they were making. Were it not for that, these people would still be casual pirates.
And nothing's going to stop the hard-code mass pirates. They KNOW what they're doing is wrong and in fact are the primary profit loss for the recording companies. One of the RIAA's mistakes is to ignore all the 3rd world mass piracy and just go after the small fraction of pirates at home. They really have screwed up priorities.
We're the good guys, right? DRM is evil (true that), and we offer alternatives. But the fact is that before DRM came along, piracy of music on the internet was rampant. People (good and bad) didn't give it much thought since it was just so easy to copy. We now say "give it to us without DRM, and we'd gladly pay a reasonable price." But for most people, this is a lie. If it weren't for DRM, they would have no concept of the value of the thing they're copying. They would not have "paid a reasonable price" because they would just have downloaded it for free. Only when they were threatened by having that taken away did they think about opening their wallets.
The RIAA and DRM have been an important corrective event in our society. Because of them, we have become more aware that the producers of this content have a right to protect their investment. Whether you're an artist publishing a song or a coder licensing under GPL, respecting copyright is important for our economy, our access to artistic works, and our freedom.
We still have an uphill battle against the RIAA and their efforts to lock down every little bit of content and take away our right to listen to the content we paid for on any device we wish, let friends listen, etc. When the dust settles, a happy compromise will be reached where sharing with a friend (who will probably turn around and buy the whole album as a result) is reasonable fair use, while the same is not true for posting the copyrighted work on a P2P sharing network, completely taking away the livelihood of the artist who created the work.
My favorite band is They Might Be Giants. Not all of their stuff is fantastic, though, so I have sought ways to listen before buying. But in the end, I have legally bought and paid for every one of their albums. Maybe that's mostly because I'm a fanatic, but I also see it as a statement of respect to people whom I want to produce more of the same kind of brilliant stuff.
Given the number of food allergies you have, it sounds like you ALREADY have a parasite. Both my wife and I picked up giardia somewhere, and it's caused all kinds of health problems, along with a list of food sensitivities. I did an IgG food sensitivity panel and my test results make me look like an AIDS patient (although I am HIV negative). I've taken Tinidazole for the giardia, but that didn't work so I'm on Metronidazole right now.
You should also be checked for problems with neuraltransmitters and hormones, including adrenal, thyroid, dopamine, etc. Defficiencies of some of these things (as well as several key vitamins) can also result in flaky immune systems and food sensitivities.
Towards the end of the essay, an introductory course is described where the student, as programmer, is required to build a formal mathematical definition of his program and prove that his program conforms to the definition.
At The Ohio State University, we teach precisely this in the form of the "Resolve" programming language. For every function and every block of code, one must provide both the procedural code and a set of logical constraints that describe the effects of the process. For instance, if a function's job is to reverse the order of items in a list, then the internals of the function are accompanied by a logical constraint that tracks the movement of items from one list to another and ensures that the operation is totally consistent at every step, in terms, for instance, that the two lists sum to a constant size that is the same size as the input, and that the concatenation of the lists in a particular way yields the original list. (I'm summarizing.)
An active area of research here is on automatic provers that take your code and your logical definitions and actually prove whether your code and defintions match or not.
Well, I sound like I'm from Ohio (because I grew up in Tampa, FL), so I don't have that problem either. And to tell you the truth, ASR systems perform almost acceptably with my speech, either my native "neutral" US accent or my fairly decent imitation of UK Received Pronunciation. However, my classmates from India and China have no hope.
I'm a grad student in computer science, specializing in AI. Although it is not my forte, I have studied speech recognition a fair amount, and I am friends with professors and grad students who are on the cutting edge of ASR.
Unfortunately, the real answer is that, at least by my standards, there is no good speech recognition anywhere.
One of the most challenging things about human speech is what we call "lack of invariance". The same word can be said by the same person two times in a row, within exactly the same context, and the signals will differ to an amazing degree.
At this point, if you have a hand-segmented accoustic signal, where the phone boundaries (such that there are any) are already marked, we have recognition rates exceeding 90%. But if the signal is not already marked, where the ASR machine has to segment automatically, the rate goes down dramatically. Then you have to recognize words, where the realization of any given word in any give context is not necessarily consistent with how you would typically describe the word phonemically. We see it all the time where what's in the accoustic signal is actually quite different from what the listener hears. It's really quite frustrating.
In my opinion, the accuracy of even cutting edge speech recognition software is pretty miserable.
What confuses me about this is that the spin rate of the black hole does not affect its mass, and the gravity is a function of the mass and your distance to that mass. So how does this work? I'm familiar with something called "frame dragging" where a spinning mass distorts spacetime in a way that a non-spinning mass doesn't. Is this involved here?
And along what axis is it naked? Let me reason this out: Along the plane of the spin, the frame dragging is (I'm guessing) counteracting the effects of gravity. Spin fast enough, and the singularity is visible along that plane. As you move around the black hole to observe it from along the axis of spin, the lack of frame dragging makes the black hole no longer observable. Is this on track?
I'm not going to advocate the student's suspension, because I don't know enough about the details. But I can say that the student asked for what they got. My ensuing rant isn't about the law. It's about right and wrong.
Free speech in the US allows for a lot of abusive speech. It has to in order allow all forms of more constructive speech. But what people have to realize is that freedoms don't just come with responsibilities. They ARE responsibilities. As a citizen, it is your responsibility to both ensure that free speech is allowed AND to use that right responsibly.
Part of what students in school should learn is constructive civil behavior. Calling the principal a paedophile was both uncivil and unconstructive. In saying what the student said, they had a point to make. Unfortunately, by using irresponsible means, the student got into trouble instead. Their point was not made.
The primary purpose of free speech is to allow any idea to be conveyed publicly. It's about CONTENT. While free speech laws do not and should not dictate the FORM of the speech, it is one's personal responsibilty to try to convey the content in a form that is clear and effective.
"Principal X is a dick" is vague and unhelpful. Why is principal X a dick? I just think you're being a jackass by saying it. You probably got into trouble for something you did wrong, and you're sore about it. Maybe that's not true, but your petulant attitude is consistent with my inference.
On the other hand, this would be productive to say (if true): "Principal X should be fired. He has a history of placing authoritarianism above all else, disregarding circumstances. For instance, there's a rule against running in the halls. My friend was running in the hall the other day because he was going to have diarrhea if he didn't make it to the toilet. On his way, he ran past principal X who grapped him by the arm and spent 5 minutes yelling at him about it. Meanwhile, he shit his pants, which was really embarrassing."
Notice that I have no qualms about the use of certain words like "shit" or whatever. It's not the words we should care about. It's the meaning and intent. If the content is a message, or it has artistic value, it should be encouraged. If the content and/or form are designed purely for the purpose of being offensive, the speaker is being irresponsible. I'm not saying offensive speech should be outlawed. I'm saying that purely offensive speech is WRONG.
As for the student's punishment, I think it's appropriate. It's one thing to bad-mouth your teachers at home or at a party. It's entirely another to publish lies about them in a recorded medium. This is libel pure and simple.
As for the rap song with the death threat, that should be taken seriously too. I don't give a damn about rap artist posturing. Murder is wrong, and so is threatening murder. Maybe a professional rap artist can get away with it. I think there's a case for considering it to be artistic and not a specific threat. But it's still iffy. Death threats, even when not specific, could be an indication of something more serious. All you can really do, of course, is be a careful listener.
For a teenager, one has to be even more careful. Brains aren't fully developed, social conventions are not fully learned. While I knew plenty of teenagers who could distinguish reality from fantasy, I knew far more who could not. Hell, I know far too many adults who can't either. Children are often held to higher standards and stricter rules than adults because they lack experience that tells them what the exceptions are. When my kid is 10 and says "fuck", I'm going to smack his mouth. When he's 20 and says it, I'm going to assume he's grown up enough to know when not to say it and that its use was to emphasize a point, not merely to be gratuitously offensive. That being said, I know 30-year-olds who haven't learned how to temper their language, and as a result, they're losers who can't hold a job at McDonalds.
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I'm iffy on the whole concept of blocking content. People just need to learn to surf responsibly, and teach their children right and wrong. And no matter what, children are going to be exposed to smut, mostly by their peers.
That being said, there are clear cases where the sensorship is wrong, and technical explanations are not adequate excuses.
Professionally, I worked as a chip designer and software developer for air traffic control systems. I've made my share of mistakes. I've coded bugs and had to fix them. But when that happens, I take it VERY seriously. Yes, the ATC systems have sophisticated fail-over systems, but the last thing I want is to have ANY chance of increasing the probability of putting airline passengers in danger. "Oops, sorry." doesn't cut it, and once a bug is discovered, I certainly can't dismiss it. I have to fix it right away!
If you know anything about this history of the USA and plenty of other free countries, you know that people are willing to trade their lives for freedom from oppression. And I generally think of censorship as oppression. Of course, I'd prefer that there were no blocking software. But with it being there, all I can say is that there's no excuse for leaving discovered blocking errors unfixed for any length of time. People's rights are being infringed, and the people who develop these blockers need to take those rights seriously.
As long as there is censorship, there's going to be a slippery slope. The law must protect people against abuses of censorship laws. There needs to be checks and balances. There are laws that let the police search your home. The check against that is that they have to have a warrant issued by a judge, which means they need to show significant probably cause. A balance against that is called "exigent circumstances", where if they believe someone's life is in danger, they can enter a home even without a warrant. The balance against THAT is that even WITH exigent circumstances, things they find in your home are likely to be inadmissable in court. Likewise, with censorship laws, there needs to be other laws that come with penalties for abuse of the censorship laws. If you censor, you're taking on a huge responsibility, because false positives and false negatives are not something you can just brush off.
What is it with doctors and their God complex? Alternative medicine has been aware of this fact (that the microorganisms that live in our bodies are a normal part of our physiology) for ages. But alternative medicine is poppycock, right? (Well, okay, a lot of it is, but not all of it.) Then all of a sudden mainstream medicine "discovers" this long-known fact, and suddenly, they're fscking geniuses for having discovered it? Give me a break!
This reminds me of something Neil deGrasse Tyson once said about MDs. He cites an example (common enough) where some person is diagnosed with terminal cancer by three different doctors. His family prays for him, and he recovers. Why is it that people are more willing to believe that God cured him than that he had just seen three idiot doctors?
The arrogance is unbelievable.
Slashdot doesn't give me room for the title I wanted to enter, so I have to write something lame.
Anyhow, I would suggest that you buy something that is (a) not on the cutting edge, and (b) designed for ultra low power. The reason is that the newer the silicon, the greater the impact of aging effects. Process variation and the effects of heat and just general usage have a greater impact on the silicon and interconnects in smaller transistors. With low-power devices, heat and power are minimised, further reducing the effect of "wear" on the device. It'll remain reliable for a longer time.
Others have mentioned moving parts. See if you can get some Via or Atom system that you can run with passive cooling.
The one place where I might suggest that you splurge on the latest tech is the hard disk. You might want to consider an SLC flash drive. It'll cost more than the whole rest of the computer, but with no moving parts, it'll last a damn long time. And don't worry about the effects of write cycles to the SSD; today's wear-leveling will make the drive last AT LEAST 10 year, but probably much longer.
You might consider doing your short-term backups to an external USB hard drive. Since the backup drive is only going to spin up when accessed for backups (if you set it up right), then it won't get much use. Do your medium, and long-term backups to DVDs and/or tape.
How long should I make this buffer? A second doesn't seem to be enough. And what's worse, it interferes with pause. Why does pause have to be affected by buffering? Can't they pause further towards the front end?
Another problem I notice is that some of the keyboard shortcuts don't work. You can find out what they are from the preferences menu. Sometimes, I'd like to skip back a few seconds, but the shortcut assigned to that skips back about a minute. The one that's supposed to skip back a minute goes to the start of the movie. BROKEN.
VLC is nice. But I am forced to copy any movie I want to play to my local hard drive. It absolutely cannot handle playing over a LAN, at least not wireless ones. Where Quicktime will play a movie without skipping a beat, VLC will badly stutter, freeze, and otherwise be really annoying. I've played around with various buffering settings, and nothing seems to help. (At least for 0.9.8. I'll try 0.9.9 later today, but I can't imagine that they've fixed this yet.)
Ugh. The site is just down. They'll fix it shortly.
It sounds like that they're going to take Python, which is already gets translated to some kind of p-code (right?) and either translate the original Python or the p-code into LLVM code, which is then JIT-compiled to the native architecture.
The translation from Python to LLVM is going to lose some specificity and require that extra code be added to implement whatever needs to be done in Python that isn't trivially implemented by LLVM. Then the LLVM code needs to be compiled to native, introducing yet more "glue" code in the process.
Wouldn't a more direct compile yield a better result?
And don't give me any junk about compiling dynamic languages. LISP and Self are highly dynamic languages, yet they're compiled. If they can be compiled, then so can Python. I mean, the fact that it can be done through multiple levels of translation proves that it can be done, although possibly inefficiently. I just think that a more direct approach would reduce some of the superfluous glue code and a variety of other inefficiencies in translation that result from a loss of knowledge about what the original program was actually trying to implement.
Check out the following groups:
The Open Hardware Foundation (www.openhardwarefoundation.org)
The Open Graphics Project (www.opengraphics.org, www.traversaltech.com)
Their OGD1 board is in prototypes. They should be able to help you with design and refer you to board fabrication companies.
I keep seeing people mention that part of the premium price of Apple products is that they put better quality hardware into their computers. If that's the case, then you get what you pay for.
In my experience, Dells are cheaper, but they're also cheap hardware, and their customer service isn't all that great. On the other hand, I have had good experiences with HP hardware (and customer service). But then again, you pay a bit more.
Still, if you go reading through Apple-related forums, while you'll hear about Apple having great customer service (if you pay extra for AppleCare), they don't always choose the best parts. For instance, there seems to be a lot of people who think Apple could have done a lot better job of sourcing their notebook hard drives.
After having been personally burned far too many times from buying the cheaper product and then ending up with useless junk and no recourse, I'm very willing to pay a bit extra to get something or higher quality that I can count on. But, are we really getting that from Apple?
At least, I've met very few doctors who would ever do any out-side research into what was ailing me. If they didn't know right-off what it was that was bothering me, they would send me away untreated. Or they would prescribe drugs that were inappropriate or superficially purported to treat symptoms.
It wasn't until I went to see a clinical nutritionist who wasn't afraid of doing some off-hours research that I was able to make any headway into the causes of my CFIDS. Turns out that the root cause of all of my problems was an intestinal parasite. On reflection, I had all the classic symptoms, both in terms of GI symtoms and other side-effects (energy problems, alergies, etc.), but every GI doctor I went to just treated my IBS symptoms and completely ignored the fatigue and never considered doing certain basic tests. Infectious disease doctors never found anything either. One doctor did a endoscopy, looking for anything mechanically wrong, but that wouldn't identify a protozoan.
Similar things happened with my wife. They wanted to treat her with antidepressants, when it turned out that she had a helmenth that caused mood problems as a symptom. When the nutritionist's ordered tests found that, some flagyl cleared it right up, and voila.
This is a problem with MD's especially. DO's are a little better, coming from a traditionally more open-minded discipline, but even they tend to operate a revolving door.
As a counter point, I also had strabismus. (My eyes crossed, and an in unusual pattern.) I had to get more than one opinion, but I found this one eye doctor who specialized in correcting pediatric eye alignment problems. He was absolutely fantastic. Other doctors told me that correcting my problem wasn't even possible. This guy knew exactly what to do, did it, and the results have been brilliant.
This leads me to differentiate between surgeons and medical doctors, and I have come to respect the surgeons a hell of a lot more. (But this is just due to my relatively small statistical sample.) Modern medicine seems to be good at treating COMMON illnesses and physical problems that are easy to measure. Anything else, and you're out of luck.
So, after the nutritionist found our problems, we went to a DO, and he happily wrote scrips. Because we had certified medical test results from respected laboratories. Which he himself would never have thought to suggest we get.
This problem with the medical system tends to lead to a catch 22. If you have a problem and don't know anything about it, they won't treat you because they don't want to investigate. You have to learn all about the medicine yourself. But when you do that and discuss symptoms and potential causes with them and even use the right terminology and talk about "differential diagnosis", they label you a hypocondriac and send you away untreated. We were just lucky enough to get a nutritionist with the right credentials who herself was willing to do the research and arm us with hard test results that we could use to get the MDs to do what we needed.
Now, while MDs won't argue with you about hard test results, they WILL argue about treatment. I have a friend who got lyme disease, having been bit by a tick. Classic bulls-eye shape. The doctor gave her the WRONG TREATMENT (one that is specifically cited as being ineffective against this disease). When it didn't work and the disease started to enter some late stage that's dangerous, my wife had to go into the doctor's office with her WITH THE MEDICAL TEXT that lists the appropriate treatments before the doctor would prescribe the right medicine. And lo and behold, the treatment worked. Fucking moron doctor.
I switched to Firefox for two reasons. One is that Safari is a major memory hog. It can use like 3x the memory as Firefox for the same thing. (And I'm talking about fresh starts. I know all about how VMs can swap unused pages to disk.)
The other missing thing from Safari was something as basic as session saving and crash protection. You have to buy Saft for that. With Firefox, it's free.
I wonder if Apple has done anything about these issues.
You can't spot a personality from across a room
Well, maybe if you're autistic. SOME of us computer geeks are actually quite good at reading subtle cues that people give off in their posture, mannerisms, choice of clothing&makeup, etc., etc., etc. Can you rely on it 100%? Certainly not. People will surprise you. But there's an absolutely astounding amount you can learn about a person just from casual observation. And for many of us, the intuitions are handed to us on a platter, rather than having to reason it out by consciously noticing the underlying clues.
To put it in technical terms, there's a high noise to signal ratio. You can get at the signal, but you need really sophisticated filters, and it's a knowledge-intensive abductive inference process that involves a significant amount of hypothesis generation and testing. How conscious or automatic and effective it is depends on practice, natural talent, empathy, and the willingness to actually pay attention.
My server at home is called "compute0". Guess why. It's because I expect eventually to build another one and call it "compute1". Heh.
On the other hand, the desktop and notebook computers do have somewhat more interesting names. They include:
hermione
epimetheus
quechua
tzeltal
basque
zapotec
The last three are the most recent. I'm on a language kick.
I'm serious. I've had three papers rejected by IEEE, and they except one that came out of a hidden markov model? That seriously pisses me off.
Currently, I do part time (5 or so hours per week each) for two different companies, as a chip design consultant. For the first one, I worked for them for 9 years before I decided to go back to grad school, so it wasn't hard to talk them into it. For the second one, they begged me to work on this project for them because they didn't feel they could find someone else they could trust to do it. I mostly telecommute for both.
Impossible? No.
But you can't get into this kind of thing sight unseen. They have to know you and already trust you and find you invaluable. Going through head hunters, applying to positions directly to companies you haven't worked for -- no one will hire you for part-time work, and few will hire for telecommute. This sort of thing requires networking (in the human sense).
You are right. It's not because the DRM made it harder. It's because the actions of the RIAA and the threat of DRM opened their eyes to the mistake they were making. Were it not for that, these people would still be casual pirates.
And nothing's going to stop the hard-code mass pirates. They KNOW what they're doing is wrong and in fact are the primary profit loss for the recording companies. One of the RIAA's mistakes is to ignore all the 3rd world mass piracy and just go after the small fraction of pirates at home. They really have screwed up priorities.
We're the good guys, right? DRM is evil (true that), and we offer alternatives. But the fact is that before DRM came along, piracy of music on the internet was rampant. People (good and bad) didn't give it much thought since it was just so easy to copy. We now say "give it to us without DRM, and we'd gladly pay a reasonable price." But for most people, this is a lie. If it weren't for DRM, they would have no concept of the value of the thing they're copying. They would not have "paid a reasonable price" because they would just have downloaded it for free. Only when they were threatened by having that taken away did they think about opening their wallets.
The RIAA and DRM have been an important corrective event in our society. Because of them, we have become more aware that the producers of this content have a right to protect their investment. Whether you're an artist publishing a song or a coder licensing under GPL, respecting copyright is important for our economy, our access to artistic works, and our freedom.
We still have an uphill battle against the RIAA and their efforts to lock down every little bit of content and take away our right to listen to the content we paid for on any device we wish, let friends listen, etc. When the dust settles, a happy compromise will be reached where sharing with a friend (who will probably turn around and buy the whole album as a result) is reasonable fair use, while the same is not true for posting the copyrighted work on a P2P sharing network, completely taking away the livelihood of the artist who created the work.
My favorite band is They Might Be Giants. Not all of their stuff is fantastic, though, so I have sought ways to listen before buying. But in the end, I have legally bought and paid for every one of their albums. Maybe that's mostly because I'm a fanatic, but I also see it as a statement of respect to people whom I want to produce more of the same kind of brilliant stuff.
Given the number of food allergies you have, it sounds like you ALREADY have a parasite. Both my wife and I picked up giardia somewhere, and it's caused all kinds of health problems, along with a list of food sensitivities. I did an IgG food sensitivity panel and my test results make me look like an AIDS patient (although I am HIV negative). I've taken Tinidazole for the giardia, but that didn't work so I'm on Metronidazole right now.
You should also be checked for problems with neuraltransmitters and hormones, including adrenal, thyroid, dopamine, etc. Defficiencies of some of these things (as well as several key vitamins) can also result in flaky immune systems and food sensitivities.
Towards the end of the essay, an introductory course is described where the student, as programmer, is required to build a formal mathematical definition of his program and prove that his program conforms to the definition.
At The Ohio State University, we teach precisely this in the form of the "Resolve" programming language. For every function and every block of code, one must provide both the procedural code and a set of logical constraints that describe the effects of the process. For instance, if a function's job is to reverse the order of items in a list, then the internals of the function are accompanied by a logical constraint that tracks the movement of items from one list to another and ensures that the operation is totally consistent at every step, in terms, for instance, that the two lists sum to a constant size that is the same size as the input, and that the concatenation of the lists in a particular way yields the original list. (I'm summarizing.)
An active area of research here is on automatic provers that take your code and your logical definitions and actually prove whether your code and defintions match or not.
I have no idea why this posted anonymously. This was posted by me, Theovon.
Well, I sound like I'm from Ohio (because I grew up in Tampa, FL), so I don't have that problem either. And to tell you the truth, ASR systems perform almost acceptably with my speech, either my native "neutral" US accent or my fairly decent imitation of UK Received Pronunciation. However, my classmates from India and China have no hope.
I'm a grad student in computer science, specializing in AI. Although it is not my forte, I have studied speech recognition a fair amount, and I am friends with professors and grad students who are on the cutting edge of ASR.
Unfortunately, the real answer is that, at least by my standards, there is no good speech recognition anywhere.
One of the most challenging things about human speech is what we call "lack of invariance". The same word can be said by the same person two times in a row, within exactly the same context, and the signals will differ to an amazing degree.
At this point, if you have a hand-segmented accoustic signal, where the phone boundaries (such that there are any) are already marked, we have recognition rates exceeding 90%. But if the signal is not already marked, where the ASR machine has to segment automatically, the rate goes down dramatically. Then you have to recognize words, where the realization of any given word in any give context is not necessarily consistent with how you would typically describe the word phonemically. We see it all the time where what's in the accoustic signal is actually quite different from what the listener hears. It's really quite frustrating.
In my opinion, the accuracy of even cutting edge speech recognition software is pretty miserable.
What confuses me about this is that the spin rate of the black hole does not affect its mass, and the gravity is a function of the mass and your distance to that mass. So how does this work? I'm familiar with something called "frame dragging" where a spinning mass distorts spacetime in a way that a non-spinning mass doesn't. Is this involved here?
And along what axis is it naked? Let me reason this out: Along the plane of the spin, the frame dragging is (I'm guessing) counteracting the effects of gravity. Spin fast enough, and the singularity is visible along that plane. As you move around the black hole to observe it from along the axis of spin, the lack of frame dragging makes the black hole no longer observable. Is this on track?
I'm not going to advocate the student's suspension, because I don't know enough about the details. But I can say that the student asked for what they got. My ensuing rant isn't about the law. It's about right and wrong.
Free speech in the US allows for a lot of abusive speech. It has to in order allow all forms of more constructive speech. But what people have to realize is that freedoms don't just come with responsibilities. They ARE responsibilities. As a citizen, it is your responsibility to both ensure that free speech is allowed AND to use that right responsibly.
Part of what students in school should learn is constructive civil behavior. Calling the principal a paedophile was both uncivil and unconstructive. In saying what the student said, they had a point to make. Unfortunately, by using irresponsible means, the student got into trouble instead. Their point was not made.
The primary purpose of free speech is to allow any idea to be conveyed publicly. It's about CONTENT. While free speech laws do not and should not dictate the FORM of the speech, it is one's personal responsibilty to try to convey the content in a form that is clear and effective.
"Principal X is a dick" is vague and unhelpful. Why is principal X a dick? I just think you're being a jackass by saying it. You probably got into trouble for something you did wrong, and you're sore about it. Maybe that's not true, but your petulant attitude is consistent with my inference.
On the other hand, this would be productive to say (if true): "Principal X should be fired. He has a history of placing authoritarianism above all else, disregarding circumstances. For instance, there's a rule against running in the halls. My friend was running in the hall the other day because he was going to have diarrhea if he didn't make it to the toilet. On his way, he ran past principal X who grapped him by the arm and spent 5 minutes yelling at him about it. Meanwhile, he shit his pants, which was really embarrassing."
Notice that I have no qualms about the use of certain words like "shit" or whatever. It's not the words we should care about. It's the meaning and intent. If the content is a message, or it has artistic value, it should be encouraged. If the content and/or form are designed purely for the purpose of being offensive, the speaker is being irresponsible. I'm not saying offensive speech should be outlawed. I'm saying that purely offensive speech is WRONG.
As for the student's punishment, I think it's appropriate. It's one thing to bad-mouth your teachers at home or at a party. It's entirely another to publish lies about them in a recorded medium. This is libel pure and simple.
As for the rap song with the death threat, that should be taken seriously too. I don't give a damn about rap artist posturing. Murder is wrong, and so is threatening murder. Maybe a professional rap artist can get away with it. I think there's a case for considering it to be artistic and not a specific threat. But it's still iffy. Death threats, even when not specific, could be an indication of something more serious. All you can really do, of course, is be a careful listener.
For a teenager, one has to be even more careful. Brains aren't fully developed, social conventions are not fully learned. While I knew plenty of teenagers who could distinguish reality from fantasy, I knew far more who could not. Hell, I know far too many adults who can't either. Children are often held to higher standards and stricter rules than adults because they lack experience that tells them what the exceptions are. When my kid is 10 and says "fuck", I'm going to smack his mouth. When he's 20 and says it, I'm going to assume he's grown up enough to know when not to say it and that its use was to emphasize a point, not merely to be gratuitously offensive. That being said, I know 30-year-olds who haven't learned how to temper their language, and as a result, they're losers who can't hold a job at McDonalds.
Wh