Check out http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/. Those games take the essence of what makes programming fun and turn it into a game. Spacechem is not free but the other games are. They do get fiendishly difficult though.
The slider where you can select what scores should be shown as full, abbreviated or hidden has a little bug/typo. The score track goes 5 4 3 2 2 0 -1 making me wonder what happens with comments with a score of 1.
There are two good examples of this. A lot of people don't believe that 0.999999... (infinite repetition) is equal to 1. Even if you prove it to them they remain convinced that there is a similar argument showing that they are unequal. Another example is the monty hall problem which is famous for even tricking many mathematicians.
I'm British - I use "," to separate thousands and "." to separate decimals, but that doesn't make me 'right' - it really is just usage and custom, there isn't anything to really recommend one way over the other.
Actually there is. The reason why a comma is used as a decimal separator in some places is the following. The decimal separator is more important that the thousands separator, a misplaced thousands separator doesn't matter since it has no effect on the value. Now a speck of ink is more easily mistaken for a dot than a comma. It would be bad to mistake a speck of ink for a decimal separator.
Some people have argued that because the dot is more important for sentence structure it should also be used for the more important decimal separator. However this isn't a very strong argument since there is no reason to use grammar rules for the notation of numbers.
That said, personally I use a dot since I need the comma to separate lists of numbers (e.g. 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 ) and the comma notation for lists is almost universal.
This is just plain wrong. Even the ancient greeks knew that the earth was spherical. This has been the dominant scientific position for a long time. The wikipedia article on it is quite good flat earth.
No, in general formalizing a proof does not require a lot of computer power. Usually it takes a lot of man power instead. Most current proof assitants are actually proof verifiers. The user has to break down the proof to elementary steps that the program can verify.
Now sometimes a computer is used to verify a lot of cases by brute force computation. Often this is not done in an actual proof assistant but within a computer algebra package. But this is also met with a sceptical eye.
The four colour theorem is perhaps one of the most famous formalized theorems. It was orginally proven by a large computation. But noone could really verify this. Recentely (2004) it was formalized completely in the proof assistant Coq (actually a custom extension). This formalized proof did require a lot of computer time allthough just on a normal computer, not a supercomputer.
More imporantly will the average voter make a rational decision based on those facts, or just believe McCain because he kept repeating it over and over. My money is on the second option.
Hmm... That depends. How much water is in the five liter bottle to start with?
Is there anything else in the bottle?
Does it have to be a whole number of litres?
While it may be a minor issue, it is an issue that most people here find important. If we don't weigh this topic more heavily then the average voter then who will?
Doesn't an agreement imply that both parties agree to it? According to TFA it's just a notice that Apple put in the letter, that's not an agreement. Why would the recipients be legally obligated to accept it?
There's an obvious flaw in that theory. If a program contains a bug that doesn't mean that it's possible to fix that bug by removing an instruction. It's very likely that fixing the bug would require adding more instructions.
While I despise DRM, I'm quite sure that the EULA mentions secuROM. Of course Melissa Thomas, like most people, didn't bother to actually read it before agreeing to it.
Another issue with this experiment is that it by nature can not be a double blind test.
Why couldn't it be double blind? Just have one researcher see only the textual communication and decide which questions to ask while another researcher actually controls the avatar.
Compare it to the halting problem. You can't write a program to decide it. That doesn't mean it isn't predictable if a given program will stop on a given input. That is simply pre-determined, it just shows that Turing machines aren't powerfull enough to compute it.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out http://www.zachtronicsindustries.com/. Those games take the essence of what makes programming fun and turn it into a game. Spacechem is not free but the other games are. They do get fiendishly difficult though.
The slider where you can select what scores should be shown as full, abbreviated or hidden has a little bug/typo. The score track goes 5 4 3 2 2 0 -1 making me wonder what happens with comments with a score of 1.
There are two good examples of this. A lot of people don't believe that 0.999999... (infinite repetition) is equal to
1. Even if you prove it to them they remain convinced that there is a similar argument showing that they are unequal. Another example is the monty hall problem which is famous for even tricking many mathematicians.
I'm British - I use "," to separate thousands and "." to separate decimals, but that doesn't make me 'right' - it really is just usage and custom, there isn't anything to really recommend one way over the other.
Actually there is. The reason why a comma is used as a decimal separator in some places is the following. The decimal separator is more important
that the thousands separator, a misplaced thousands separator doesn't matter since it has no effect on the value. Now a speck of ink is more easily mistaken for a dot than a comma. It would be bad to mistake a speck of ink for a decimal separator.
Some people have argued that because the dot is more important for sentence structure it should also be used for the more important decimal separator. However this isn't a very strong argument since there is no reason to use grammar rules for the notation of numbers.
That said, personally I use a dot since I need the comma to separate lists of numbers (e.g. 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 ) and the comma notation for lists is almost
universal.
This is just plain wrong. Even the ancient greeks knew that the earth was spherical. This has been the dominant scientific position for a long time. The wikipedia article on it is quite good flat earth.
No, in general formalizing a proof does not require a lot of computer power. Usually it takes a lot of man power instead. Most current proof assitants are actually proof verifiers. The user has to break down the proof to elementary steps that the program can verify.
Now sometimes a computer is used to verify a lot of cases by brute force computation. Often this is not done in an actual proof assistant but within a computer algebra package. But this is also met with a sceptical eye.
The four colour theorem is perhaps one of the most famous formalized theorems. It was orginally proven by a large computation. But noone could really verify this. Recentely (2004) it was formalized completely in the proof assistant Coq (actually a custom extension). This formalized proof did require a lot of computer time allthough just on a normal computer, not a supercomputer.
More imporantly will the average voter make a rational decision based on those facts, or just believe McCain because he kept repeating it over and over. My money is on the second option.
If Google is fully in control of youtube, why don't they screen every video?
Hmm... That depends. How much water is in the five liter bottle to start with? Is there anything else in the bottle? Does it have to be a whole number of litres?
Is it a Klein bottle?
While it may be a minor issue, it is an issue that most people here find important. If we don't weigh this topic more heavily then the average voter then who will?
self help books?
What should truly paranoid user do?
get help?
Doesn't an agreement imply that both parties agree to it? According to TFA it's just a notice that Apple put in the letter, that's not an agreement. Why would the recipients be legally obligated to accept it?
There's an obvious flaw in that theory. If a program contains a bug that doesn't mean that it's possible to fix that bug by removing an instruction. It's very likely that fixing the bug would require adding more instructions.
However, the reality is that it would be better to have no bugs in the first place.
Sadly the reality is that it's just too hard to write such complicated software without bugs.
Looks like I was right. While secuROM isn't mentioned by name, the mention of DRM is on the very first page.
I'm not saying EULAs are a good thing. I'm just saying that she has accepted it and it probably does mention secuROM.
While I despise DRM, I'm quite sure that the EULA mentions secuROM. Of course Melissa Thomas, like most people, didn't bother to actually read it before agreeing to it.
Another issue with this experiment is that it by nature can not be a double blind test.
Why couldn't it be double blind? Just have one researcher see only the textual communication and decide which questions to ask while another researcher actually controls the avatar.
Won't someone think of the children!
That rendering of the tree-house could have been a screenshot from any of the Myst games.
The beauty is that it doesn't HAVE to be useful.
To what use will this long, long prime be put?
Absolutely none whatsoever. That's the beauty of mathematics.
I fully endorse this idea! Between brackets: where exactly is this LAN party?
Compare it to the halting problem. You can't write a program to decide it. That doesn't mean it isn't predictable if a given program will stop on a given input. That is simply pre-determined, it just shows that Turing machines aren't powerfull enough to compute it.