Contrary to what most people seem to think, the material taught in most Calculus and Differential Equations courses has very little resemblance to what most Mathematicians study. These fields actually all fall under the heading of Analysis, which is just one of several major branches of mathematics. A student not interested in analysis could easily spend most of his math career working in another area.
For the most part, differential equations courses are aimed at non math majors, such as physicists, chemists, engineers, and the more analytically minded biologists and economists, so even a Math major specifically interested in analysis isn't necessarily going to take classes on partial differential equations.
I myself double majored in Physics and Math, and every single course i took about differential equations was for the Physics major rather than the math Major, so I think that Math grad student could quite easily end up with a PhD without ever dealing with differential equations unless they interested him.
I'd like to second all of these recommendations, but for Quantum Mechanics if your linear algebra is sharp, I might suggest Principles of Quantum Mechanics by Shankar.
Griffifhs' Quantum Mechanics is an excellent introduction, but it assumes relatively little math knowledge, and tends to gloss over some of the assumptions being made. This is good for a student who's going to spend most of his effort trying to learn the practical aspects of doing Quantum Mechanical calculations, but not ideal for someone who grasps the math quickly and easily, and wants to really understand how things work.
Shankar is a little more difficult mathematically (and is thus often a poor introduction for an undergrad) but it very clearly lays out the assumptions being made, and how the math relates to the physics.
I haven't actually read the Sean Carroll book, but I took a course from him, and I can't imagine the book is anything but excellent.
Not to mention that, if you really insist, you can still choose a different copy of Wikipedia to get information about him. Ok, granted, not in German, but is there anyone in Germany using the internet and NOT able to read English?
Ohh, it's worse than that even. Germans can still access de.wikipedia.org and read it in German there, they just can't access it through the convenient wikipedia.de address. Since this address is apparently quite popular, all this idiot has done is ensure that a whole lot of people using Wikipedia will now know the name Lutz Heilmann (which is mentioned on the placeholder page at wikipedia.de), while completely failing to prevent information from being transmitted.
It's true that the placeholder page doesn't tell you that you can still get wikipedia at the other address (presumably for legal reasons), but so many people use wikipedia that the news about that is bound to spread. It boggles the mind how thoroughly this guy has screwed up.
The new President is appointing knowledgeable experts to important government posts instead of industry cronies? Pinch me.
Well, sort of. These aren't permanent positions - just his transition team. He could still choose to appoint industry cronies to the actual important government posts. That said, this is still surprisingly good news.
And how do you end up with a (Score:2, Troll) anyway?
Well, at least if you rule out bribery, blackmail, and assassination. Actually, a sufficiently large mailing campaign might sway Obama's decisions too, so I suppose there are actually quite a few things you could do.
Not that I'm saying you should do these things, but voting isn't the only tool for change in a democracy, just the easiest.
This is a worthwhile project -- without it, the Linux desktop basically ceases to exist (sorry KOffice fans, it's a great project, but it isn't even close to OpenOffice in terms of being usable as a true MS Office replacement).
I'm not sure throwing more man hours at OpenOffice is really the solution. In my opinion, Microsoft Office is at its core poorly designed, and poorly executed. OOo strives to be an MS Office replacement, but even if it manages to do everything MS Office does better and faster, it will still be mediocre.
This is a little off topic, but what I think we really need is an open standard for office program integration so that one group can make a spreadsheet, another can make a wordprocessor, and you can be guaranteed interoperability. That way developers would be able to experiment with different approaches for various components, or even mix and match, and still compete with MS.
Simply put: If you're looking for help online for flu symptoms, that doesn't correlate with an 'outbreak' of flu.
I think you need to look up 'correlate' in a dictionary, you obviously have no idea what the word means. A correlation is not a one to one relation, if A correlates with B all that means is that A is more likely if B is true.
Sure, the fact that i just went and searched for flu stuff out of curiosity doesn't mean there's an outbreak near me, but people presumably perform searches on this at a pretty steady rate, and a flu outbreak ought to cause a spike in searches. The occasional false positive happen in a region, say if there's a news story on the flu, but to say there's no correlation is ridiculous.
You could I suppose argue that the correlation is too weak to pick out from the noise, however if you RTFA, it is quite clear that the correlation is quite strong enough to produce useful results.
When will you get it into your head that your your political opponent isn't automatically evil incarnate?
To be fair, your political opponent is almost always a politician, so he may not be evil incarnate, but it's a safe bet that he's a corrupt, opportunistic liar. I'm glad McCain didn't win the election, I'm not sure how happy I am that Obama did.
Laws licensing airwaves are important. If they didn't exist, no one within 100' of me would ever be able to use a cell phone, because I would have a jammer.
This would make me happier since I wouldn't have to deal with people talking on cell phones in restaurants, or in theaters, and I wouldn't have to listen to obnoxious ringtones, but ultimately, I have to admit that preventing me from jamming cell phones is in society's best interest
Dude, no offence but what you've described is extremely unlikely, and while that is no consolation to you when it happened, it is unlikely to happen again.
I don't know - I haven't been playing nethack that long and I've had almost the identical scenario happen to me several times. I once ended up on level 10 of the dungeon from level 2 because of a series of trap doors and level teleports.
I used every trick in the book, and even managed to survive working my way back up to level 3 before I messed up and died. Part of the real fun of nethack is that at times it can be sadistic, but if you're careful and learn from previous mistakes you can handle most the things it throws at you (there's always the Gnome with the wand of Death of course).
If there's a problem with nethack it's that the game isn't sadistic enough at the later levels. The beginning is very challenging, but you reach a point where you are near invincible and only a stupid mistake will kill you, and then you have to play another 10 hours to finish the game. Not that winning is assured at that point, stupid mistakes are quite common.
Anyway, the question you should be asking is what happens if you use a cursed potion of gain level on the uppermost level of the dungeon, i.e. the first floor below the surface.
And the answer is that, unless you're carrying the Amulet of Yendor, then nothing happens.
Actually, if you use a cursed potion of gain level on the 1st dungeon level while not carrying the Amulet of Yendor something does happen - you leave the dungeon and the game ends. This is more or less the same as losing, except the game notes that you survived, and the high scores chart notes that you left the dungeon.
To be fair to the GP, IE doesn't really qualify as 'fully featured'. I for one consider things like full support for css and compliance with well established internet standards rather important missing features, and that's not even mentioning the huge range of features IE is missing that appear as add-ons in other browsers.
If IE were actually fully featured (and if I still ran windows) I would probably use it.
I think the current state of airport security is just that - the best the agency can do, with it's current resources, budget and enormous demand for speedy throughput.
I agree that actual proper security isn't viable given the resources available, but the current state of affairs is far from "the best the agency can do." Currently the security system wastes millions of dollars and costs travelers massive inconvenience and countless hours of time all to create the illusion of security. I agree that real security in the airport may be more or less impossible, but the best the TSA could do would be to get rid of all the completely ineffectual security and stop wasting millions in tax-payer dollars, and millions of hours of travelers' time.
As matters stand now, what the TSA is doing borders on fraud.
So, I grant that ideally each person would choose who he votes for based on an objective and direct observation of the candidates' records and statements, but the reality is that most people's opinions are heavily swayed by the opinions of others.
Scientists can of course be morons too, and don't necessarily know what they're talking about, but I'd much rather people base their vote on the opinion of a scientist than a political pundit like O'Reilly or Coulter, or whoever the left-wing equivalents are (I have trouble choosing a left wing figure who stands out the same way: they tend to be bland).
So it may be laughable that voters could be swayed by scientists, but it's a lot better than the alternative.
Well, there is a difference here. Microsoft quite clearly engaged in illegal monopolistic practices, forcing vendors into exclusive deals using their market dominance, while charging excessive prices for increasingly inferior products. So far at least, Google doesn't seem to engage in any anti-competitive behaviour, and its success is based on providing good services at reasonable prices.
That said, I think it's good that the government is paying attention - Google may not be doing anything wrong yet, but they have amassed enough power that they bear close watching.
It seems to me that this is the system working as intended.
I'm a power user and I never plan on switching to Linux. It boggles my mind that I can see these blanket "you will save much time in the long run..." exactly how? Are you adding up the seconds that the OS will boot faster (mainly because there are less apps available to install and run, and devices, so it may have less to load) or something else?
Well, I am going on my own experience as a power user who used to use XP. There are of course significant time savings involved in the automation capabilities linux provides via various scripting languages, and for largish repetitive tasks this can be huge. The main time savings come from the little things though. The time it takes each program to load up, the number of mouse click/button presses it takes to do things like open files, copy files, etc., the ease with which I can quickly switch between programs and desktops to manage an efficient workflow, all these add up. Granted, if you spend most your time working in a single program, you won't notice much difference, but if you do any serious multitasking, the difference is huge.
When I use Windows now, even on a brand new machine, I feel as if I spend half my time waiting for the OS to catch up to what I'm doing. I'm guessing you haven't spent much real work time using Linux, because the difference is really tangible.
As far as 'supporting a vastly larger application base' goes, I question your definition of 'support'. Microsoft makes very little effort to support applications, XP failed to support Windows 95 applications, and the applications for XP came out after the fact; when XP first released, relatively few programs would run on it. Windows doesn't support a vast application base, rather, a vast application base has grown up around it despite the poor support. If there's any measure of what constitutes good support for applications, it would be how easy it is to program for the OS. I've never met a programmer who claims windows is easier to program for.
The OS may be no more difficult to learn (for everyday use; if you're a power user, though, XP -> Vista is still easier than XP -> Ubuntu), but then you also have the added learning curve of replacing every single application except possibly Firefox, if they weren't using IE before.
If you're a power user, the increased control and efficiency you get from switching to Ubuntu will save you so much time in the long run that the slightly greater learning curve is a minimal cost to pay. I personally run Linux, but for casual users, I've started recommending Mac since it's easier to learn than either Vista or Ubuntu, and better in almost every respect than Vista.
Bottom line is, there's really no good reason for anyone to run Vista, though I can see the argument for sticking with XP as long as that's viable (and Microsoft keeps pushing back the deadline on that one).
Whether Nielsen is a governmental entity or not is quite irrelevant here. The DMCA notice being used to restrain free speech takes its power from the threat of legal penalty which would be inflicted by the government.
Now it may be true that this notice isn't valid, and therefore doesn't have the actual force of the government behind it (the article is sort of short on details there so I don't know), but the fact that the DMCA is constructed such that companies have every incentive to obey take down notices whether valid or not means that the law, and hence the government is responsible for the restraint of free speech, at least indirectly.
An automated system may in fact be more vulnerable to sabotage than what we have now, though I suspect you overestimate the difficulty in committing sabotage in the current system. But that isn't really the point.
Right now cars are ridiculously dangerous, accounting for about 2 percent of deaths, and most of these accidents are due to human error. I suspect that the number of deaths due to sabotage are much, much lower than those due to human caused car accidents, and besides, a potential saboteur can always look elsewhere for targets if the road system is hard to attack.
If automated systems can reduce the accident rate by any significant amount at all, the increased risk of sabotage is a pretty ridiculous thing to worry about.
Ultimately, the decisions made by policy makers on this front may not be so important. I'd like to have a government that respects my privacy, but I can always encrypt anything I don't store locally. Right now this might be involve some inconvenience, but I don't think it will be long before convenient and fast encryption is available for data stored in the cloud.
No. Valid means that it is a legally valid notice. If YouTube fails to comply with a notice, the noticee can sue them - a notice without any follow up is just a piece of paper. But if the noticee doesn't have the right to file the notice, or if the notice isn't valid, he's obviously not in any position to sue.
Companies like YouTube choose to comply with every DMCA notice they receive without checking because it's easier and safer for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to what most people seem to think, the material taught in most Calculus and Differential Equations courses has very little resemblance to what most Mathematicians study. These fields actually all fall under the heading of Analysis, which is just one of several major branches of mathematics. A student not interested in analysis could easily spend most of his math career working in another area.
For the most part, differential equations courses are aimed at non math majors, such as physicists, chemists, engineers, and the more analytically minded biologists and economists, so even a Math major specifically interested in analysis isn't necessarily going to take classes on partial differential equations.
I myself double majored in Physics and Math, and every single course i took about differential equations was for the Physics major rather than the math Major, so I think that Math grad student could quite easily end up with a PhD without ever dealing with differential equations unless they interested him.
I'd like to second all of these recommendations, but for Quantum Mechanics if your linear algebra is sharp, I might suggest Principles of Quantum Mechanics by Shankar.
Griffifhs' Quantum Mechanics is an excellent introduction, but it assumes relatively little math knowledge, and tends to gloss over some of the assumptions being made. This is good for a student who's going to spend most of his effort trying to learn the practical aspects of doing Quantum Mechanical calculations, but not ideal for someone who grasps the math quickly and easily, and wants to really understand how things work.
Shankar is a little more difficult mathematically (and is thus often a poor introduction for an undergrad) but it very clearly lays out the assumptions being made, and how the math relates to the physics.
I haven't actually read the Sean Carroll book, but I took a course from him, and I can't imagine the book is anything but excellent.
Not to mention that, if you really insist, you can still choose a different copy of Wikipedia to get information about him. Ok, granted, not in German, but is there anyone in Germany using the internet and NOT able to read English?
Ohh, it's worse than that even. Germans can still access de.wikipedia.org and read it in German there, they just can't access it through the convenient wikipedia.de address. Since this address is apparently quite popular, all this idiot has done is ensure that a whole lot of people using Wikipedia will now know the name Lutz Heilmann (which is mentioned on the placeholder page at wikipedia.de), while completely failing to prevent information from being transmitted.
It's true that the placeholder page doesn't tell you that you can still get wikipedia at the other address (presumably for legal reasons), but so many people use wikipedia that the news about that is bound to spread. It boggles the mind how thoroughly this guy has screwed up.
The new President is appointing knowledgeable experts to important government posts instead of industry cronies? Pinch me.
Well, sort of. These aren't permanent positions - just his transition team. He could still choose to appoint industry cronies to the actual important government posts. That said, this is still surprisingly good news.
And how do you end up with a (Score:2, Troll) anyway?
Well, at least if you rule out bribery, blackmail, and assassination. Actually, a sufficiently large mailing campaign might sway Obama's decisions too, so I suppose there are actually quite a few things you could do.
Not that I'm saying you should do these things, but voting isn't the only tool for change in a democracy, just the easiest.
This is a worthwhile project -- without it, the Linux desktop basically ceases to exist (sorry KOffice fans, it's a great project, but it isn't even close to OpenOffice in terms of being usable as a true MS Office replacement).
I'm not sure throwing more man hours at OpenOffice is really the solution. In my opinion, Microsoft Office is at its core poorly designed, and poorly executed. OOo strives to be an MS Office replacement, but even if it manages to do everything MS Office does better and faster, it will still be mediocre.
This is a little off topic, but what I think we really need is an open standard for office program integration so that one group can make a spreadsheet, another can make a wordprocessor, and you can be guaranteed interoperability. That way developers would be able to experiment with different approaches for various components, or even mix and match, and still compete with MS.
Simply put: If you're looking for help online for flu symptoms, that doesn't correlate with an 'outbreak' of flu.
I think you need to look up 'correlate' in a dictionary, you obviously have no idea what the word means. A correlation is not a one to one relation, if A correlates with B all that means is that A is more likely if B is true.
Sure, the fact that i just went and searched for flu stuff out of curiosity doesn't mean there's an outbreak near me, but people presumably perform searches on this at a pretty steady rate, and a flu outbreak ought to cause a spike in searches. The occasional false positive happen in a region, say if there's a news story on the flu, but to say there's no correlation is ridiculous.
You could I suppose argue that the correlation is too weak to pick out from the noise, however if you RTFA, it is quite clear that the correlation is quite strong enough to produce useful results.
Actually, we taste like pork.
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Or at least so they say
The real solution is to open 100% of PDFs in a simpler reader, and refuse to tolerate PDFs that require scripting.
Really, there's no good reason for a document viewer to have the bloat of Acrobat, and we shouldn't encourage Adobe by doing what they want.
When will you get it into your head that your your political opponent isn't automatically evil incarnate?
To be fair, your political opponent is almost always a politician, so he may not be evil incarnate, but it's a safe bet that he's a corrupt, opportunistic liar. I'm glad McCain didn't win the election, I'm not sure how happy I am that Obama did.
Laws licensing airwaves are important. If they didn't exist, no one within 100' of me would ever be able to use a cell phone, because I would have a jammer.
This would make me happier since I wouldn't have to deal with people talking on cell phones in restaurants, or in theaters, and I wouldn't have to listen to obnoxious ringtones, but ultimately, I have to admit that preventing me from jamming cell phones is in society's best interest
Dude, no offence but what you've described is extremely unlikely, and while that is no consolation to you when it happened, it is unlikely to happen again.
I don't know - I haven't been playing nethack that long and I've had almost the identical scenario happen to me several times. I once ended up on level 10 of the dungeon from level 2 because of a series of trap doors and level teleports.
I used every trick in the book, and even managed to survive working my way back up to level 3 before I messed up and died. Part of the real fun of nethack is that at times it can be sadistic, but if you're careful and learn from previous mistakes you can handle most the things it throws at you (there's always the Gnome with the wand of Death of course).
If there's a problem with nethack it's that the game isn't sadistic enough at the later levels. The beginning is very challenging, but you reach a point where you are near invincible and only a stupid mistake will kill you, and then you have to play another 10 hours to finish the game. Not that winning is assured at that point, stupid mistakes are quite common.
Anyway, the question you should be asking is what happens if you use a cursed potion of gain level on the uppermost level of the dungeon, i.e. the first floor below the surface.
And the answer is that, unless you're carrying the Amulet of Yendor, then nothing happens.
Actually, if you use a cursed potion of gain level on the 1st dungeon level while not carrying the Amulet of Yendor something does happen - you leave the dungeon and the game ends. This is more or less the same as losing, except the game notes that you survived, and the high scores chart notes that you left the dungeon.
To be fair to the GP, IE doesn't really qualify as 'fully featured'. I for one consider things like full support for css and compliance with well established internet standards rather important missing features, and that's not even mentioning the huge range of features IE is missing that appear as add-ons in other browsers.
If IE were actually fully featured (and if I still ran windows) I would probably use it.
I think the current state of airport security is just that - the best the agency can do, with it's current resources, budget and enormous demand for speedy throughput.
I agree that actual proper security isn't viable given the resources available, but the current state of affairs is far from "the best the agency can do." Currently the security system wastes millions of dollars and costs travelers massive inconvenience and countless hours of time all to create the illusion of security. I agree that real security in the airport may be more or less impossible, but the best the TSA could do would be to get rid of all the completely ineffectual security and stop wasting millions in tax-payer dollars, and millions of hours of travelers' time.
As matters stand now, what the TSA is doing borders on fraud.
So, I grant that ideally each person would choose who he votes for based on an objective and direct observation of the candidates' records and statements, but the reality is that most people's opinions are heavily swayed by the opinions of others.
Scientists can of course be morons too, and don't necessarily know what they're talking about, but I'd much rather people base their vote on the opinion of a scientist than a political pundit like O'Reilly or Coulter, or whoever the left-wing equivalents are (I have trouble choosing a left wing figure who stands out the same way: they tend to be bland).
So it may be laughable that voters could be swayed by scientists, but it's a lot better than the alternative.
Well, there is a difference here. Microsoft quite clearly engaged in illegal monopolistic practices, forcing vendors into exclusive deals using their market dominance, while charging excessive prices for increasingly inferior products. So far at least, Google doesn't seem to engage in any anti-competitive behaviour, and its success is based on providing good services at reasonable prices.
That said, I think it's good that the government is paying attention - Google may not be doing anything wrong yet, but they have amassed enough power that they bear close watching.
It seems to me that this is the system working as intended.
I'm a power user and I never plan on switching to Linux. It boggles my mind that I can see these blanket "you will save much time in the long run..." exactly how? Are you adding up the seconds that the OS will boot faster (mainly because there are less apps available to install and run, and devices, so it may have less to load) or something else?
Well, I am going on my own experience as a power user who used to use XP. There are of course significant time savings involved in the automation capabilities linux provides via various scripting languages, and for largish repetitive tasks this can be huge. The main time savings come from the little things though. The time it takes each program to load up, the number of mouse click/button presses it takes to do things like open files, copy files, etc., the ease with which I can quickly switch between programs and desktops to manage an efficient workflow, all these add up. Granted, if you spend most your time working in a single program, you won't notice much difference, but if you do any serious multitasking, the difference is huge.
When I use Windows now, even on a brand new machine, I feel as if I spend half my time waiting for the OS to catch up to what I'm doing. I'm guessing you haven't spent much real work time using Linux, because the difference is really tangible.
As far as 'supporting a vastly larger application base' goes, I question your definition of 'support'. Microsoft makes very little effort to support applications, XP failed to support Windows 95 applications, and the applications for XP came out after the fact; when XP first released, relatively few programs would run on it. Windows doesn't support a vast application base, rather, a vast application base has grown up around it despite the poor support. If there's any measure of what constitutes good support for applications, it would be how easy it is to program for the OS. I've never met a programmer who claims windows is easier to program for.
The OS may be no more difficult to learn (for everyday use; if you're a power user, though, XP -> Vista is still easier than XP -> Ubuntu), but then you also have the added learning curve of replacing every single application except possibly Firefox, if they weren't using IE before.
If you're a power user, the increased control and efficiency you get from switching to Ubuntu will save you so much time in the long run that the slightly greater learning curve is a minimal cost to pay. I personally run Linux, but for casual users, I've started recommending Mac since it's easier to learn than either Vista or Ubuntu, and better in almost every respect than Vista.
Bottom line is, there's really no good reason for anyone to run Vista, though I can see the argument for sticking with XP as long as that's viable (and Microsoft keeps pushing back the deadline on that one).
Whether Nielsen is a governmental entity or not is quite irrelevant here. The DMCA notice being used to restrain free speech takes its power from the threat of legal penalty which would be inflicted by the government.
Now it may be true that this notice isn't valid, and therefore doesn't have the actual force of the government behind it (the article is sort of short on details there so I don't know), but the fact that the DMCA is constructed such that companies have every incentive to obey take down notices whether valid or not means that the law, and hence the government is responsible for the restraint of free speech, at least indirectly.
An automated system may in fact be more vulnerable to sabotage than what we have now, though I suspect you overestimate the difficulty in committing sabotage in the current system. But that isn't really the point.
Right now cars are ridiculously dangerous, accounting for about 2 percent of deaths, and most of these accidents are due to human error. I suspect that the number of deaths due to sabotage are much, much lower than those due to human caused car accidents, and besides, a potential saboteur can always look elsewhere for targets if the road system is hard to attack.
If automated systems can reduce the accident rate by any significant amount at all, the increased risk of sabotage is a pretty ridiculous thing to worry about.
Of course, packetloss due to geese...
And depending on the power of the laser, there's the inevitable worry of gooseloss due to packets.
Ultimately, the decisions made by policy makers on this front may not be so important. I'd like to have a government that respects my privacy, but I can always encrypt anything I don't store locally. Right now this might be involve some inconvenience, but I don't think it will be long before convenient and fast encryption is available for data stored in the cloud.
Flashblock - don't let it run in the first place and it can't put cookies on your system.
Actually, Flashblock doesn't prevent flash from running - it just shuts it down quickly, so it doesn't block cookies at all.
No. Valid means that it is a legally valid notice. If YouTube fails to comply with a notice, the noticee can sue them - a notice without any follow up is just a piece of paper. But if the noticee doesn't have the right to file the notice, or if the notice isn't valid, he's obviously not in any position to sue.
Companies like YouTube choose to comply with every DMCA notice they receive without checking because it's easier and safer for them.