I can accept that many consumers don't care, or even like, being locked into the Apple store. I'm somewhat more sceptical that many consumers like that that "lock" is enforced by criminal law and that they'll be jailed if they ever try to leave the Apple store. I think John Sullivan brings up a valid concern. Also, you shouldn't conflate the issue with choice: the FSF and RMS, to my knowledge, have never advocated choice. Having the freedom to use your device the way you want is a separate concern from choosing which device to use.
That's not to say they can't use DHCPv6. From what I've heard, a lot of organizations have opted for DHCPv6 instead of stateless auto-configuration because the network admins get the warm fuzzies from having logs of everything. Who knows, there might even be legal ramifications (if the MPAA has anything to say about it?) for ISPs that don't keep logs about who's assigned what?
There is a final solution: make sending spam more expensive. Spammers will only spam so long as it's mind-blowingly wealthy. If you can raise their operating costs and bump them down from "mind-blowingly wealthy" to only "obscenely wealthy", they might switch to other lucrative immoral industries like manufacturing printer ink.
What this does is increase the computational power required to generate a spam email. The method they described sounds like it's self-learning (just hook it up to a spambot "oracle" and it'll figure out the new template), so spammers will likely have to abandon the use of templates altogether. If you increase the amount of computational time required to generate spam, you decrease the amount of spam sent and really decrease the profitability of it.
We keep pushing the requirements for spam further and further up the computational totem pole (or Chomsky hierarchy, if you will) and you get closer and closer to a point where spammers are going to have to create strong AI to write spam. If they fail, we don't have spammers anymore and if they win, well we have spam, but we also have strong AI! Win-win, I say.
It's more like building a house, selling it to someone else, and then trying to dictate what the new owner can and can't do with their own house! The bits of artists controlling their works has the nice side-effect that it helps them get paid and no one's against artists getting paid, right? The problem is it gives them all sorts of bizarre rights that don't exist in any other domain in society. If a woodworker tried to keep control of his art after he'd sold it he'd be rightly told to go fuck himself; why is a writer given special permission to tell people what to do with the things they've bought just because they're creating something that's not physical?
Next up, the researchers want to evaluate 500 vets, alongside 500 civilians, to further validate their findings.
It sounds like a case of "well we didn't have enough grant money to do this study properly this time around, but our results still look promising! I'm sure some more grant money would give really conclusive results! *waggles eyebrows suggestively*"
You just explained why colour TV and colour movies are useless. Watch a black and white and within a couple minutes you'll forget you're watching black and white.
The short answer is "because we can". It won't be too long before 3D technology brings prices down so that it's as cheap as 2D is now. Just like when colour first came out, people were initially using it for whiz-bang "look what we can do" effect and it took a few years before it just became nothing special. So it will go with 3D.
Keep in mind that AES-256 only uses a 128-bit key and has recently been broken (down to 118 bits of security or something like that?). AES-256 is currently less secure than AES-128.
To follow up on my own post, the big practical advantage to the first course is graph theory. Graph theory is a huge field and I have yet to come across any discipline of computer science that does not reduce to graph theory.
You could take an entire math degree and still not have enough math to be a decent computer scientist (being a programmer is another matter, I suppose). Discrete math (or at least I hope you meant to say "discrete". "Discreet" math would be much less useful) is extremely useful for all areas of computer science. Analysis is extremely useful for a lot of areas of computer science, but I don't think as comprehensively as discrete math.
For the same reason that most other operating systems, including most flavors of linux, requires admin rights to install software.
Depending on what you mean by "install". I can't think of a single problem I've had going the "./configure --prefix=$HOME ; make ; make install" route.
That wouldn't be a surprise. Evolutionists haven't believed in Darwinism in a lot of years (though, to be fair, Darwin at least got most of the broad strokes right). In any case, Darwin didn't say anything about intelligence winning out, to the best of my knowledge. Fitness is a very complex beast and there's no reason to think an intelligent species is going to be more fit, all other things being equal.
It shouldn't be entirely meaningless. Claude Shannon showed that no matter how you represent something, it contains the same amount of information. If I remember right, he did a study early on that showed that each letter in English text carries, on average, about 1 bit of information (in the information theory sense of "information"). You can store it in ASCII or UCS-4 or as a JPEG and even though the different representations require different amounts of data, they all contain the same amount of information: some representations just have more redundancy than others. (Sadly it's undecidable to determine how much information something contains; otherwise compression would be a lot easier).
Unfortunately this study seems to have ignored all of that good research and ignored the whole field of "information theory" in general. The numbers they're using on page 8 are totally exaggerated and seem to have no basis in information theory. There's no way a "small picture" contains 8 million bits of information, and even if it did there's no way a person could actually appreciate all that information unless they were staring at it for hours.
Why? There's no reason a filesystem like ZFS can't be used on CD or tape and a lot of people do use them.
Even if you didn't want to do that, ISO 9660, the filesystem used by default on data CDs, contains its own error correction scheme (288 bytes of redundancy for every 2048 byte block).
I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've seen the law usually deals not with the technical details but the intention or social details. So doing an "rm" after watching the movie would (I'm guessing) probably count as it being temporary. We all know that the movie is still stored on the disk and it wouldn't be hard to recover it, but still it shows an intention: it was intended to be used temporarily.
Err the whole premise to the linked article is that "God" wouldn't allow the collisions to be observed. Unless you're arguing that all the collisions in the upper atmosphere are being observed, I don't think that's very relevant. If we could observe what's going on in our own sky we probably wouldn't be going through the trouble of building the LHC.
Here in Ontario the big problem is cost. I don't know if this is an inherent problem with nuclear power or our province is just especially incompetent at running them, but nuclear plants we've had have just been fantastic money sinks (as opposed to every other method of power generation, which have been profitable) in terms of maintenance. One could argue that the monetary cost is worth it the environmental benefits of nuclear, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to look into alternatives.
Actually quantum computing is, by design, probabilistic. Every specifically quantum algorithm (even Shor's infamous factoring algorithm) gives incorrect results by design for the simple reason that it's really not possible to have quantum algorithms which succeed all the time (unless you forgeo their quantum properties). So long as the probability of a correct answer is strictly greater than 0.5, however, one only has to repeat the computation a constant number of times to get the probability of success arbitrarily close to 1.
I think an easier way to think of this is to think about how another functional language, Concurrent Clean, does side effects. It has an object "world" (and, with typing restrictions, ensures that you can only ever have one copy of "world"). If you want to do a side effect like write to a file, you need to give it (the only copy of) "world" and it will hand you back a changed "world" to reflect that it did something magical. I.e., all functions with side-effects require this passing of "world" around.
Well that's not actually how Haskell does side effects, but it could be! A monad is abstractly a way of threading implicit information around. A monad by itself is purely functional: all it does is hide away implicit things like passing around data. Every monad except for one is totally transparent and you can see exactly what it's doing behind the scenes, because every monad except for one is side-effect-free.
The IO monad is the only monad that has side effects and, not coincidentally, it's the only one that's opaque (you're not allowed to see how it's implemented). That's for a very good reason: since it does have side effects, it would be impossible to implement the IO monad in Haskell. But conceptually sometimes I like to think of it as secretly passing "world" around from function to function because conceptually it makes it simpler to understand.
Yeah the revisions are really tiny (well except for FFI, which also doesn't relate to concurrency). I think the Slashdot poster was trying to say that Haskell in general is nice for concurrency, not these revisions specifically.
With the exception of FFI, these revisions are dreadfully boring. It would be like if a new C standard came out that allowed you to write "floating" instead of just "float". That's about on par with the magnitude of the changes Haskell 2010 brings in:P
Those things were implemented many years ago. The new standard only standardizes features which have been stable in multiple implementations for years. That's how standards are supposed to work.
I haven't found that to be true at all. ratemyprofessors.com even has a separate "easiness" rating (distinct from "helpfulness" and "clarity") so you can ignore it if you want. Most people I've found treat these 3 ratings properly and don't necessarily give the "easy" professors a high rating in general. The big problem with ratemyprofessors.com is its small sample size and that it's prone to selection bias (people generally don't bother to rate a professor unless they've had a really extraordinarily good/bad experience with them). The teacher evaluations given by the university (which should be public) usually work better than ratemyprofessors.com in my experience.
Slashdot Mirror
The 1984 commercial was about IBM, not Microsoft. Sorry, just being a pedant: your point still stands ;)
I can accept that many consumers don't care, or even like, being locked into the Apple store. I'm somewhat more sceptical that many consumers like that that "lock" is enforced by criminal law and that they'll be jailed if they ever try to leave the Apple store. I think John Sullivan brings up a valid concern. Also, you shouldn't conflate the issue with choice: the FSF and RMS, to my knowledge, have never advocated choice. Having the freedom to use your device the way you want is a separate concern from choosing which device to use.
That's not to say they can't use DHCPv6. From what I've heard, a lot of organizations have opted for DHCPv6 instead of stateless auto-configuration because the network admins get the warm fuzzies from having logs of everything. Who knows, there might even be legal ramifications (if the MPAA has anything to say about it?) for ISPs that don't keep logs about who's assigned what?
Two wrongs make a right?
There is a final solution: make sending spam more expensive. Spammers will only spam so long as it's mind-blowingly wealthy. If you can raise their operating costs and bump them down from "mind-blowingly wealthy" to only "obscenely wealthy", they might switch to other lucrative immoral industries like manufacturing printer ink.
What this does is increase the computational power required to generate a spam email. The method they described sounds like it's self-learning (just hook it up to a spambot "oracle" and it'll figure out the new template), so spammers will likely have to abandon the use of templates altogether. If you increase the amount of computational time required to generate spam, you decrease the amount of spam sent and really decrease the profitability of it.
We keep pushing the requirements for spam further and further up the computational totem pole (or Chomsky hierarchy, if you will) and you get closer and closer to a point where spammers are going to have to create strong AI to write spam. If they fail, we don't have spammers anymore and if they win, well we have spam, but we also have strong AI! Win-win, I say.
It's more like building a house, selling it to someone else, and then trying to dictate what the new owner can and can't do with their own house! The bits of artists controlling their works has the nice side-effect that it helps them get paid and no one's against artists getting paid, right? The problem is it gives them all sorts of bizarre rights that don't exist in any other domain in society. If a woodworker tried to keep control of his art after he'd sold it he'd be rightly told to go fuck himself; why is a writer given special permission to tell people what to do with the things they've bought just because they're creating something that's not physical?
It sounds like a case of "well we didn't have enough grant money to do this study properly this time around, but our results still look promising! I'm sure some more grant money would give really conclusive results! *waggles eyebrows suggestively*"
Uhh maybe a less sensationalist headline?
Yes, but evidently that doesn't define teenagers from previous generations. That's the whole point of the study.
You just explained why colour TV and colour movies are useless. Watch a black and white and within a couple minutes you'll forget you're watching black and white.
The short answer is "because we can". It won't be too long before 3D technology brings prices down so that it's as cheap as 2D is now. Just like when colour first came out, people were initially using it for whiz-bang "look what we can do" effect and it took a few years before it just became nothing special. So it will go with 3D.
Keep in mind that AES-256 only uses a 128-bit key and has recently been broken (down to 118 bits of security or something like that?). AES-256 is currently less secure than AES-128.
To follow up on my own post, the big practical advantage to the first course is graph theory. Graph theory is a huge field and I have yet to come across any discipline of computer science that does not reduce to graph theory.
You could take an entire math degree and still not have enough math to be a decent computer scientist (being a programmer is another matter, I suppose). Discrete math (or at least I hope you meant to say "discrete". "Discreet" math would be much less useful) is extremely useful for all areas of computer science. Analysis is extremely useful for a lot of areas of computer science, but I don't think as comprehensively as discrete math.
Depending on what you mean by "install". I can't think of a single problem I've had going the "./configure --prefix=$HOME ; make ; make install" route.
That wouldn't be a surprise. Evolutionists haven't believed in Darwinism in a lot of years (though, to be fair, Darwin at least got most of the broad strokes right). In any case, Darwin didn't say anything about intelligence winning out, to the best of my knowledge. Fitness is a very complex beast and there's no reason to think an intelligent species is going to be more fit, all other things being equal.
It shouldn't be entirely meaningless. Claude Shannon showed that no matter how you represent something, it contains the same amount of information. If I remember right, he did a study early on that showed that each letter in English text carries, on average, about 1 bit of information (in the information theory sense of "information"). You can store it in ASCII or UCS-4 or as a JPEG and even though the different representations require different amounts of data, they all contain the same amount of information: some representations just have more redundancy than others. (Sadly it's undecidable to determine how much information something contains; otherwise compression would be a lot easier).
Unfortunately this study seems to have ignored all of that good research and ignored the whole field of "information theory" in general. The numbers they're using on page 8 are totally exaggerated and seem to have no basis in information theory. There's no way a "small picture" contains 8 million bits of information, and even if it did there's no way a person could actually appreciate all that information unless they were staring at it for hours.
Why? There's no reason a filesystem like ZFS can't be used on CD or tape and a lot of people do use them.
Even if you didn't want to do that, ISO 9660, the filesystem used by default on data CDs, contains its own error correction scheme (288 bytes of redundancy for every 2048 byte block).
I'm not a lawyer, but from what I've seen the law usually deals not with the technical details but the intention or social details. So doing an "rm" after watching the movie would (I'm guessing) probably count as it being temporary. We all know that the movie is still stored on the disk and it wouldn't be hard to recover it, but still it shows an intention: it was intended to be used temporarily.
Err the whole premise to the linked article is that "God" wouldn't allow the collisions to be observed. Unless you're arguing that all the collisions in the upper atmosphere are being observed, I don't think that's very relevant. If we could observe what's going on in our own sky we probably wouldn't be going through the trouble of building the LHC.
Here in Ontario the big problem is cost. I don't know if this is an inherent problem with nuclear power or our province is just especially incompetent at running them, but nuclear plants we've had have just been fantastic money sinks (as opposed to every other method of power generation, which have been profitable) in terms of maintenance. One could argue that the monetary cost is worth it the environmental benefits of nuclear, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to look into alternatives.
Actually quantum computing is, by design, probabilistic. Every specifically quantum algorithm (even Shor's infamous factoring algorithm) gives incorrect results by design for the simple reason that it's really not possible to have quantum algorithms which succeed all the time (unless you forgeo their quantum properties). So long as the probability of a correct answer is strictly greater than 0.5, however, one only has to repeat the computation a constant number of times to get the probability of success arbitrarily close to 1.
I think an easier way to think of this is to think about how another functional language, Concurrent Clean, does side effects. It has an object "world" (and, with typing restrictions, ensures that you can only ever have one copy of "world"). If you want to do a side effect like write to a file, you need to give it (the only copy of) "world" and it will hand you back a changed "world" to reflect that it did something magical. I.e., all functions with side-effects require this passing of "world" around.
Well that's not actually how Haskell does side effects, but it could be! A monad is abstractly a way of threading implicit information around. A monad by itself is purely functional: all it does is hide away implicit things like passing around data. Every monad except for one is totally transparent and you can see exactly what it's doing behind the scenes, because every monad except for one is side-effect-free.
The IO monad is the only monad that has side effects and, not coincidentally, it's the only one that's opaque (you're not allowed to see how it's implemented). That's for a very good reason: since it does have side effects, it would be impossible to implement the IO monad in Haskell. But conceptually sometimes I like to think of it as secretly passing "world" around from function to function because conceptually it makes it simpler to understand.
Yeah the revisions are really tiny (well except for FFI, which also doesn't relate to concurrency). I think the Slashdot poster was trying to say that Haskell in general is nice for concurrency, not these revisions specifically.
With the exception of FFI, these revisions are dreadfully boring. It would be like if a new C standard came out that allowed you to write "floating" instead of just "float". That's about on par with the magnitude of the changes Haskell 2010 brings in :P
Those things were implemented many years ago. The new standard only standardizes features which have been stable in multiple implementations for years. That's how standards are supposed to work.
I haven't found that to be true at all. ratemyprofessors.com even has a separate "easiness" rating (distinct from "helpfulness" and "clarity") so you can ignore it if you want. Most people I've found treat these 3 ratings properly and don't necessarily give the "easy" professors a high rating in general. The big problem with ratemyprofessors.com is its small sample size and that it's prone to selection bias (people generally don't bother to rate a professor unless they've had a really extraordinarily good/bad experience with them). The teacher evaluations given by the university (which should be public) usually work better than ratemyprofessors.com in my experience.