There's an international Western culture. You could ask about the Moon race, Shakespare's plays, the Roman Empire and so on.
But if you don't want to do that, you should at least say "American trivia" instead of just "trivia".
As usual, bad summary. TFA explains how to exploit a theoretical kernel bug that happens to "read a function pointer from address 0, and then call through it". That's a long shot from turning "any NULL pointer" into a root exploit as the summary claims.
To be honest, I'm not sure why I bothered writing this comment. If the editors themselves don't care about the accuracy of the stories, why should I?
The next digit is whichever you want. All of 464570, 464571,..., 464579 are expected to appear infinite times in pi's decimal representation; each one of them is expected to appear once every million digits approximately.
Furthermore, "predictable" obviously doesn't mean "computable based on whichever information you choose to provide". You can compute the next digit of pi given its position, so it's predictable.
If you're not convinced, let me turn the table. Give me an example of something that you consider "predictable" and let's see how it's different from pi's decimal representation.
You're saying that because any given 5 consecutive digits appear infinite times among pi's expansion, pi is unpredictable? That is, multiple solutions = unpredictable? Sorry, but that doesn't make sense. By that definition, 1/9 = 1.11111... is unpredictable too, since if I give you the sequence "11111" and ask you for the position I took it from, you can't know the answer either! That question is equivalent to "guess the number I'm thinking of"; hardly a mathematical experiment.
My take is that predicting is nothing more that arriving at an answer by making calculations. Predictable = deterministic = non-random.
What exactly do you mean by pi not being "predictable"? Pi can be calculated algorithmically to any desired precision, nothing to "predict" there. You can even calculate arbitrary digits without having to calculate the preceding ones.
Random means precisely "not predictable". It seems some people here are equating not following a uniform distribution with not being random, which is incorrect.
There is plenty of evidence that women are discriminated when they look for loans or investments. A good read is Blake 2006 "Gendered Lending: Gender, Context and the Rules of Business Lending" in Venture Capital 8(2) pp. 183-201. Basisiaclly, there are pretty large, statistically signifigant, differences in loan approval rates between men and women, after controling for a host of factors like education, business plan, experience ect.
I have looked up that study and I must say that I find the statements here a bit misleading. The abstract says it is "a case study involving interview data from loan officers in Worcester, Massachusetts in the US". While a case study can be interesting for other reasons, statistically speaking it's on the level of anecdotal evidence. Furthermore this study "[looks] through the lens of geography" (presumably because the author works for a Department of Geography). Hard to extrapolate from such a tiny sample of VC lending in the USA, isn't it?
So you say that there is "plenty of evidence that women are discriminated" and "statistically significant differences", and in the same breath you mention a study that doesn't support what you just said because it's not statistically significant. If there is plenty of evidence why not pick a study that supports your rather strong statement?
I wouldn't describe Fox News as "not factually inaccurate" but "subconsciously misleading". From what I've seen they don't even bother to pretend they have that modicum of respect for their audience.
I quota from TFA: "Eclipse 3.1 lacks features that MonoDevelop has, including code completion, integrated debugging, refactoring, and unit testing capabilities"
Excuse me !? That stuff was even in Eclipse 2.0. Claiming a Java IDE without code completion exists is just stupid.
In fact, Eclipse's code completion, integrated debugging and especially refactoring capabilities are stellar. Can Visual Studio do "extract to local variable" and "extract to method"?
So their "fairly small resistors" are about the size of a washing machine? I'm sure that's pretty good in the power grid industry, but I'd hate to know what they call "huge resistors".
Of course this doesn't fit e.g. China, but they are not really communist - they only pretend to. They are just an authoritarian regime with an ideology. However, the above description fits the former Soviet bloc countries.
Why is it any more appropriate to define communism by what Soviet bloc countries did than by what China does?
Why do i want themes? I would much rather have a clean simple music player
Because people disagree on what "clean simple" means. If the UI is not themeable and you don't like it, you have to switch to a different player altogether. If it is themeable, you just need to switch to a different theme.
I'm a fan of turn-based strategy games such as Civilization, and yet I usually stop playing most of them after a while because I get angry at the way hard difficulty levels are implemented.
You see, the developers of these games apparently find it too difficult to implement an AI that plays by the same rules as human players and yet provides a good challenge. So AIs cheat. Cheats come in two flavours: information cheats (e.g. send an unprotected valuable unit and you'll see an enemy fighter, who in theory has no way of knowing about your unit, beeline for it) and stats cheats (e.g. the AI produces units 40% faster than you).
I call those special rules "cheats" because they are typically not documented or consistent with the game story. So you end up making blind guesses about what rules the AI is playing by in a very atmosphere-shattering way and trying to adapt to them. It really feels like cheating and drains my interest in otherwise excellent games pretty fast.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an international Western culture. You could ask about the Moon race, Shakespare's plays, the Roman Empire and so on. But if you don't want to do that, you should at least say "American trivia" instead of just "trivia".
To be honest, I'm not sure why I bothered writing this comment. If the editors themselves don't care about the accuracy of the stories, why should I?
You should mention that all of the questions in Frustration Trivia are so USA-centric that people from other countries need not bother.
The next digit is whichever you want. All of 464570, 464571, ..., 464579 are expected to appear infinite times in pi's decimal representation; each one of them is expected to appear once every million digits approximately.
Furthermore, "predictable" obviously doesn't mean "computable based on whichever information you choose to provide". You can compute the next digit of pi given its position, so it's predictable.
If you're not convinced, let me turn the table. Give me an example of something that you consider "predictable" and let's see how it's different from pi's decimal representation.
And MirrorDot seems to be down, too.
Follow the Wikipedia link in the comment you're responding to.
My take is that predicting is nothing more that arriving at an answer by making calculations. Predictable = deterministic = non-random.
What exactly do you mean by pi not being "predictable"? Pi can be calculated algorithmically to any desired precision, nothing to "predict" there. You can even calculate arbitrary digits without having to calculate the preceding ones. Random means precisely "not predictable". It seems some people here are equating not following a uniform distribution with not being random, which is incorrect.
There is plenty of evidence that women are discriminated when they look for loans or investments. A good read is Blake 2006 "Gendered Lending: Gender, Context and the Rules of Business Lending" in Venture Capital 8(2) pp. 183-201. Basisiaclly, there are pretty large, statistically signifigant, differences in loan approval rates between men and women, after controling for a host of factors like education, business plan, experience ect.
I have looked up that study and I must say that I find the statements here a bit misleading. The abstract says it is "a case study involving interview data from loan officers in Worcester, Massachusetts in the US". While a case study can be interesting for other reasons, statistically speaking it's on the level of anecdotal evidence. Furthermore this study "[looks] through the lens of geography" (presumably because the author works for a Department of Geography). Hard to extrapolate from such a tiny sample of VC lending in the USA, isn't it?
So you say that there is "plenty of evidence that women are discriminated" and "statistically significant differences", and in the same breath you mention a study that doesn't support what you just said because it's not statistically significant. If there is plenty of evidence why not pick a study that supports your rather strong statement?
And cajones with cojones. Cajones means drawers, of the furniture kind.
Mmm. Cajones... furniture... flying chairs... There must be a pun in there somewhere.
This is the first time I've seen a "can i haz your stuff" reply in Slashdot.
And if so, what is your company name and address, please?
Arresting someone for voyeurism for a peek? Those crazy kids.
I wouldn't describe Fox News as "not factually inaccurate" but "subconsciously misleading". From what I've seen they don't even bother to pretend they have that modicum of respect for their audience.
Good book, so-so review, passable review of the review (good point, but not very original).
Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber from the early twentieth century, when asked why he robs banks said, "Because that is where the money is."
FYI, according to Wikipedia, Sutton says that the quote is apocryphal.
In fact, Eclipse's code completion, integrated debugging and especially refactoring capabilities are stellar. Can Visual Studio do "extract to local variable" and "extract to method"?
So their "fairly small resistors" are about the size of a washing machine? I'm sure that's pretty good in the power grid industry, but I'd hate to know what they call "huge resistors".
Why is it any more appropriate to define communism by what Soviet bloc countries did than by what China does?
Maybe they'll get a clue one day?
Just to be prepared, I've patented a pig repellent. Never know when one of those obnoxious pigs might fly in through your window.
Erratum: for "the world", read "the USA".
Come on, don't nitpick. Everyone knows those are synonyms in American English.
Why do i want themes? I would much rather have a clean simple music player
Because people disagree on what "clean simple" means. If the UI is not themeable and you don't like it, you have to switch to a different player altogether. If it is themeable, you just need to switch to a different theme.
256 cores means that it can be stored in a 16-byte flag
Er... there are 128 bits in 16 bytes. HTH.
Have WoW's 10+ million subscribers suddenly decided to abandon PC gaming?
Seriously, when has PC gaming been a bigger industry than in the last few years?
I'm a fan of turn-based strategy games such as Civilization, and yet I usually stop playing most of them after a while because I get angry at the way hard difficulty levels are implemented.
You see, the developers of these games apparently find it too difficult to implement an AI that plays by the same rules as human players and yet provides a good challenge. So AIs cheat. Cheats come in two flavours: information cheats (e.g. send an unprotected valuable unit and you'll see an enemy fighter, who in theory has no way of knowing about your unit, beeline for it) and stats cheats (e.g. the AI produces units 40% faster than you).
I call those special rules "cheats" because they are typically not documented or consistent with the game story. So you end up making blind guesses about what rules the AI is playing by in a very atmosphere-shattering way and trying to adapt to them. It really feels like cheating and drains my interest in otherwise excellent games pretty fast.