You may not have been aware of using calculus, but you were using calculus.
Applied calculus is not always obviously calculus. You may not need to recognize it to use it, and there is a certain degree of luck, or instinct, in getting the calculus right when you don't know that's what you are doing.
But you were using calculus. And a bunch of other higher math, too.
I'd even go a bit further. (Completely ignoring some obvious questions begging in the topic about work in programming.)
Every job worth doing has interesting things about it, if you know how and where to look.
The math teaches you how and where to look.
And you can do a much better job at any job you are interested in.
Admittedly, there is a dangerous down side to that. If you get too interested in the stuff that isn't on the project goals, you may end up getting fired for playing instead of doing your job.
But, if you're slinging burgers and you have the math, you can keep a running estimate in your head of which supplies are being used at what rates on what days of the week. That's a key to anticipating customer demand. And the only way you're going to make a living slinging burgers is to be a manager.
Maybe you need to apply strategy when you talk with management about the things you notice, because managers can get paranoid when their employees seem to know more than they do, but the math opens options. It's up to you how you use those options.
What I'm saying is that their projection makes a number of limiting assumptions. (Projections can't avoid that.)
One assumption they seem to not assume is the optimistic possibility that I mentioned, about moving the the mandatory retirement age back. Retirement, for people too poor or under-motivated to go out and get involved in charity work, starting a new business, hobbies that can now be done full-time, or whatever, is bad for the health in a way that is very expensive for society with mandatory health insurance.
That's just one variable that has a reasonable probability of changing.
Another, which i did not mention, is the pessimistic probability of people turning to other drugs as they quit tobacco, and committing delayed suicide that way. (It appears the more realistic one, but I don't like pessimism.)
And that ignores the whole question of how we are going to re-invent the economy as we go, a variable that is continually changing. The evolution of the means we use to care for the elderly is another. (Assisted care, as opposed to medical incarceration, is a growing trend.)
The problem is not how to kill people off before they become a drag on society, the problem is how to help people remain able to add value to society. And how to make sure enough of the added value can be translated to making the necessities of life available.
I can't imagine trying to extend the addressing of a widely deployed CPU by changing its minimum addressable integer.
Widening the internal registers generally impacts software much less.
Check your use of ptrdiff_t. If you are running into "horriific" issues, you may be trying to do things the wrong way (possibly inducing security issues, as well).
Server in your fixed (wired) phone. Your backup is at your phone company (access provider) in the usual case, maybe at some specialy "cloud" company under certain special conditions.
Your phone serves your blog, your tweets, your picture and other sharing, your family bbs, etc. If it's your year to do the soccer club's site, you host it on your phone.
Google or LinkedIn or maybe FaceBok or some other similar company takes care of the links you use to connect with your virtual community.
these particular GM tend to push the natural species out. So, yeah, in this case.
Engineering a speicies to be "hardy" is going to have this kind of effect. That's one of the things Monsanto doesn't want to deal with, but, if they/we don't, we do end up pushing towards monoculture. Their "hardy" stuff gets into a field with the natural stuff and the natural stuff can't hold its own, even if the farmer doesn't want Monsanto's junk crowding out his own crops.
Well, there's a good fiat. "People DYING of starvation. So give Monsanto a monopoly on corn (and a bunch of other things) because they know how to make genetically engineered crops!"
Kind of sounds like the "Won't someone think of the children?!?!?!" meme.
There are better ways. In spite of what a bunch of shill scientists say, we can feed them this year and next year.
Maybe we use some GMO crops in limited places where regular crops really couldn't grow. But just those really few places, and we watch the results carefully for at least a couple of decades. And we try to make sure that we have backup plans and emergency exits.
All of those precautions, otherwise, we know only too well what happens in a monoculture.
And, guess what? Yeah, by the time we could be confident there are no dangers, and, by the time we have figured out how to prevent the monoculture, Monsanto's pantents will have expired. But that's a good thing, because they never should have been granted those patents.
That's corn, right? It didn't suddenly turn into a horse because its blue?
Means what?
Many things which are not horses are a different kind of maize, different nutritional properties (and thus flavors), etc.
What are you arguing here?
That modified foods are still the same as the foods they're based off of.
I would post AC if I were saying such things, myself.
Corn is still corn, whether its yellow, blue, red, or poison.
... or poison.
You said, it, not me.
All that matters is whether something got added to the mix that makes it harmful to the things it's being fed to (humans, animals, or compost) or their environment. Hence, poison corn is something to be worried about. GM corn that's more golden that normal corn? Who gives a fuck if you can still eat it?
I have a jar of peanut butter that I can eat. It actually tastes pretty good.
A couple of hours after I eat some of that peanut butter, I get indigestion and headaches. Then I have trouble thinking through problems for work, have trouble sleeping that night, just generally don't like life for a couple of days. If I eat too much, I get diarrhea the next day. (Or, worse, constipation for several days and then diarrhea.)
But it's peanut butter, right? My friend has a stronger stomache than I, and peanut butter a year past it's best-eaten-by date gives him no problems, so I should just attribute all my reactions to psychosomasis. I should go ahead and eat the peanut butter and use a positive mental attitude to get me through the next several days, especially because I'm too poor to afford a fresh jar of peanut butter.
Sure.
What's the argument against corn that's been modified to be hardier, easier to produce, and cheaper to produce?
You trust Monsanto's engineers. Maybe you want, deep down inside you, bio-engineering to be as simple as other kinds of engineering.
I look at the amount of time it took to develop the code base of DNA across the earth as a system, and I scratch my head and wonder what hot-shot programmer trusts himself so much to dare muck directly in the live code? Why isn't Monsanto content to do a slow roll-out of the code? Why do they use their patents to build a monopoly instead of using the patents to keep the rollout slow enough to observe the effects over a couple of decades, at least?
That's arrogance beyond mere hubris.
It's also irresponsible, criminally so.
Cuz there's a lot of starving people in the world who couldn't give two shits about what's in their corn as long as it keeps them fed and it doesn't kill them, and yet morons keep tossing out the "Oh, GM food is so horrible because it's not carbon-neutral organic local and it'll turn everyone into Frankenstein monsters because Frankenfood is totally the same as combining buried corpses and zapping them with electricity!" as a reason for why this stuff shouldn't be made.
Now, who's being absurd?
But blue or red or orange or purple maize are not the unusual colors because the corn is genetically engineered. Neither are the red or purple carrots you can sometimes get in Japanese grocery stores.
If Monsanto is willing to wipe out all the natural species by forcing all farmers whose seed crop gets infested with the Monsanto genes, they need to have a far greater variety of viable breeds.
And your expansion of the term "genetic engineering" is gratuitous.
Genetic Engineering: "The deliberate modification of the characteristics of an organism by manipulating its genetic material."
I hate to be contrary here, but you're still shifting the blame.
The FDA has lots of problems, I'll grant that. But you can't just push any principle out of context and say it's the principle that's wrong.
Monsanto is to blame. The FDA isn't doing its job, true. They should not be letting anyone mess with the live DNA code base like this.
The US Patent office isn't doing its job. True. Those patents should never have issued, and we can see why such things should not be patentable -- because Monsanto can use them (with only ever-so-little under-the-table-money-for-grease) to establish a monopoly that reaches way and beyond anything they invented or discovered.
The courts are not doing their job. True. If a judge can tell something is beyond his own understanding, he should recuse himself. A jury that does not understand a question is not a jury of peers of the accused. Judges and jurors need to be sought outside the system sometimes, and if understanding is bias, both parties are in the wrong: neither party should be found for, neither should win.
But, in any active society, there will always be such problems. Good citizens should not take advantage of the failures of the system. They do so at their own peril, because it destroys the very environment in which they are trying to "win".
That is what is evil about what Monsanto is doing here.
Monsanto is dead wrong. Monsanto is the problem, until they quit trying to take control of the system under the excuse of "recouping their costs and making their fair profit."
(1) Monsanto is pushing for a global monopoly on what you eat. Do you want any one company, no matter how neutral to you you may think they are now, controlling the production of the crops that make up the bulik of your caloric intake? Or even just one of those crops? No, they haven't limited themselves to just corn, but, since I have to point it out to you, do you even want them controlling all your corn? That includes corn syrup, which is not evil if you aren't eating too much, and if you haven't developed a reaction to it. That also includes corn starch, among a number of other such things. You'd be surprised what corn starch is used in. Corn is not just canned corn and on-the-cob and corn tortillas and such.
Speaking of corn-on-the-cob, maybe monoculture is okay if all you want is corn flour, but corn that makes good flour is not the best corn to eat whole-kernel. It isn't just taste, there is a reason for the taste variations, and a reason the body sometimes wants one taste instead of another. It's about what the body needs.
And if one company controls all that, they have the right to tell you, if you want/need/crave corn a certain way, no, this year there isn't enough interest, we've cancelled that crop. One more bureaucracy to screw up your day-to-day life. One moer bureacracy that could have been avoided.
(2) No, it doesn't matter that the modifications might be entirely transparent to human nutrition. For all we know, there might even be some beneficial unexpected effect. The problem is, mixing and matching bits of the program that produces corn is not known to be safe in the long term, any more than it is not known to have some surprise beneficial effect.
It's very much like some young hot-shot programmer taking your source code base, and without the time necessary to fully understand it, grabbing chunks from the advertising group's code base and pasting them into the payroll code at near-random, and watching the results for a few minutes, and saying,
"Let's take that live. Now. Across the entire corporate system. Trust me!"
With the more "natural", more "traditional" methods (that we have only been using for a relatively short time, true), there is more time, more separation from the overall agricultural base, more room to make mistakes and recover from them without turning the entire race into guinea pigs.
You may be comfortable with a company that arrogant. I am not.
But blue or red or orange or purple maize are not the unusual colors because the corn is genetically engineered. Neither are the red or purple carrots you can sometimes get in Japanese grocery stores.
If Monsanto is willing to wipe out all the natural species by forcing all farmers whose seed crop gets infested with the Monsanto genes, they need to have a far greater variety of viable breeds.
And your expansion of the term "genetic engineering" is gratuitous.
Dihydrogen monoxide is dangerous when you have a wall of it ten meters high approaching you at high speed.
It's also dangerous when you are ten meters down in a pool of it without breathing apparatus.
In fact, it's dangerous at much lower levels, such as when you drink more than 4 liters a day (for someone of about average build) or try to chug two liters of it in one go. (Not as dangerous as chugging dihydrogen monoxide with fermented grain products, but still dangerous.)
Of course, this is not an allegory. Water is all around us, has been for a long time, and can be dangerous in large volumes.
GM crops are only recent, all we have scientific proof of is their short-term effects and their tendency to cross-breed with everything they can breed with, and the damage to the friendly fauna.
Kind of like seeing a tsunami wave of some water substitute coming at you. Except that it's hard to imagine a real water substitute.
The patenting, at any rate, would be evil enough without the tendency to naturally cross-bread with neighboring crops, but add the tendency to cross-breed, and it's like pointing a shotgun at all the farmers who don't want to mess with it and saying, "Resistance is futile." Because resistance is now futile, and Monsanto is not known for taking a light hand on enforcing their rights.
Slashdot Mirror
The foundation of statistics is calculus.
I encourage you to dicsover the calculus which you have been using without even realizing it.
It will make your job more interesting, and will give you more options in improving your work.
You may not have been aware of using calculus, but you were using calculus.
Applied calculus is not always obviously calculus. You may not need to recognize it to use it, and there is a certain degree of luck, or instinct, in getting the calculus right when you don't know that's what you are doing.
But you were using calculus. And a bunch of other higher math, too.
I'd even go a bit further. (Completely ignoring some obvious questions begging in the topic about work in programming.)
Every job worth doing has interesting things about it, if you know how and where to look.
The math teaches you how and where to look.
And you can do a much better job at any job you are interested in.
Admittedly, there is a dangerous down side to that. If you get too interested in the stuff that isn't on the project goals, you may end up getting fired for playing instead of doing your job.
But, if you're slinging burgers and you have the math, you can keep a running estimate in your head of which supplies are being used at what rates on what days of the week. That's a key to anticipating customer demand. And the only way you're going to make a living slinging burgers is to be a manager.
Maybe you need to apply strategy when you talk with management about the things you notice, because managers can get paranoid when their employees seem to know more than they do, but the math opens options. It's up to you how you use those options.
Huh? Everyone has already quit smoking?
A projection is always a hypothetical.
What I'm saying is that their projection makes a number of limiting assumptions. (Projections can't avoid that.)
One assumption they seem to not assume is the optimistic possibility that I mentioned, about moving the the mandatory retirement age back. Retirement, for people too poor or under-motivated to go out and get involved in charity work, starting a new business, hobbies that can now be done full-time, or whatever, is bad for the health in a way that is very expensive for society with mandatory health insurance.
That's just one variable that has a reasonable probability of changing.
Another, which i did not mention, is the pessimistic probability of people turning to other drugs as they quit tobacco, and committing delayed suicide that way. (It appears the more realistic one, but I don't like pessimism.)
And that ignores the whole question of how we are going to re-invent the economy as we go, a variable that is continually changing. The evolution of the means we use to care for the elderly is another. (Assisted care, as opposed to medical incarceration, is a growing trend.)
The problem is not how to kill people off before they become a drag on society, the problem is how to help people remain able to add value to society. And how to make sure enough of the added value can be translated to making the necessities of life available.
Or, at least, for elements thereof.
One counter to the hypothetical the article proposes:
If fewer people smoke, more people are healthier, longer. If they don't look for some other means of slow suicide. Sure, that's given.
But does that necessarily mean longer time in nursing homes?
If more people over 65 are healthy enough to keep working, we can raise the mandatory retirement age and let them keep working.
We do know that, statistically, retirement itself is bad for the health, and in the specific way that tends to send people to the nursing homes.
The laws are self-contradictory.
Clear?
RMS uses the internal contradictions.
Clear?
His use of the internal contradictions is a somewhat-effective block against the abuse of those laws.
Clear?
Of course clear. You know just exactly why you want to try to discredit RMS. And we all have a pretty good idea why, too.
But you're fooling yourself if you think you can use bad law for you own ends and not get cut in the backlash.
I can't imagine trying to extend the addressing of a widely deployed CPU by changing its minimum addressable integer.
Widening the internal registers generally impacts software much less.
Check your use of ptrdiff_t. If you are running into "horriific" issues, you may be trying to do things the wrong way (possibly inducing security issues, as well).
We don't need to stoop so low to insult Microsoft products.
Server in your fixed (wired) phone. Your backup is at your phone company (access provider) in the usual case, maybe at some specialy "cloud" company under certain special conditions.
Your phone serves your blog, your tweets, your picture and other sharing, your family bbs, etc. If it's your year to do the soccer club's site, you host it on your phone.
Google or LinkedIn or maybe FaceBok or some other similar company takes care of the links you use to connect with your virtual community.
Simple.
It sounds like you're talking about wall wart servers. If so, I think you're on the right track.
these particular GM tend to push the natural species out. So, yeah, in this case.
Engineering a speicies to be "hardy" is going to have this kind of effect. That's one of the things Monsanto doesn't want to deal with, but, if they/we don't, we do end up pushing towards monoculture. Their "hardy" stuff gets into a field with the natural stuff and the natural stuff can't hold its own, even if the farmer doesn't want Monsanto's junk crowding out his own crops.
Well, there's a good fiat. "People DYING of starvation. So give Monsanto a monopoly on corn (and a bunch of other things) because they know how to make genetically engineered crops!"
Kind of sounds like the "Won't someone think of the children?!?!?!" meme.
There are better ways. In spite of what a bunch of shill scientists say, we can feed them this year and next year.
Maybe we use some GMO crops in limited places where regular crops really couldn't grow. But just those really few places, and we watch the results carefully for at least a couple of decades. And we try to make sure that we have backup plans and emergency exits.
All of those precautions, otherwise, we know only too well what happens in a monoculture.
And, guess what? Yeah, by the time we could be confident there are no dangers, and, by the time we have figured out how to prevent the monoculture, Monsanto's pantents will have expired. But that's a good thing, because they never should have been granted those patents.
What do you call a red carrot?
A carrot.
I suppose you would. (Whoever you are, AC shill.)
Never seen blue corn?
That's corn, right? It didn't suddenly turn into a horse because its blue?
Means what?
Many things which are not horses are a different kind of maize, different nutritional properties (and thus flavors), etc.
What are you arguing here?
That modified foods are still the same as the foods they're based off of.
I would post AC if I were saying such things, myself.
Corn is still corn, whether its yellow, blue, red, or poison.
... or poison.
You said, it, not me.
All that matters is whether something got added to the mix that makes it harmful to the things it's being fed to (humans, animals, or compost) or their environment. Hence, poison corn is something to be worried about. GM corn that's more golden that normal corn? Who gives a fuck if you can still eat it?
I have a jar of peanut butter that I can eat. It actually tastes pretty good.
A couple of hours after I eat some of that peanut butter, I get indigestion and headaches. Then I have trouble thinking through problems for work, have trouble sleeping that night, just generally don't like life for a couple of days. If I eat too much, I get diarrhea the next day. (Or, worse, constipation for several days and then diarrhea.)
But it's peanut butter, right? My friend has a stronger stomache than I, and peanut butter a year past it's best-eaten-by date gives him no problems, so I should just attribute all my reactions to psychosomasis. I should go ahead and eat the peanut butter and use a positive mental attitude to get me through the next several days, especially because I'm too poor to afford a fresh jar of peanut butter.
Sure.
What's the argument against corn that's been modified to be hardier, easier to produce, and cheaper to produce?
You trust Monsanto's engineers. Maybe you want, deep down inside you, bio-engineering to be as simple as other kinds of engineering.
I look at the amount of time it took to develop the code base of DNA across the earth as a system, and I scratch my head and wonder what hot-shot programmer trusts himself so much to dare muck directly in the live code? Why isn't Monsanto content to do a slow roll-out of the code? Why do they use their patents to build a monopoly instead of using the patents to keep the rollout slow enough to observe the effects over a couple of decades, at least?
That's arrogance beyond mere hubris.
It's also irresponsible, criminally so.
Cuz there's a lot of starving people in the world who couldn't give two shits about what's in their corn as long as it keeps them fed and it doesn't kill them, and yet morons keep tossing out the "Oh, GM food is so horrible because it's not carbon-neutral organic local and it'll turn everyone into Frankenstein monsters because Frankenfood is totally the same as combining buried corpses and zapping them with electricity!" as a reason for why this stuff shouldn't be made.
Now, who's being absurd?
But blue or red or orange or purple maize are not the unusual colors because the corn is genetically engineered. Neither are the red or purple carrots you can sometimes get in Japanese grocery stores.
If Monsanto is willing to wipe out all the natural species by forcing all farmers whose seed crop gets infested with the Monsanto genes, they need to have a far greater variety of viable breeds.
And your expansion of the term "genetic engineering" is gratuitous.
Genetic Engineering: "The deliberate modification of the characteristics of an organism by manipulating its genetic material."
If the current crop of "bio-
Dihydrogen monoxide is dangerous when you have a wall of it ten meters high approaching you at high speed.
Just about anything including air is dangerous when you have a wall of it ten meters high approaching you at a high speed.
Exactly.
Which is why Monsanto should quit trying to build their tsunami of commerce (in other words, their monopoly).
(Well, it took me a moment, but that would be the microbursts we see so much of these days? Or were you thinking of cyclic storms?)
I hate to be contrary here, but you're still shifting the blame.
The FDA has lots of problems, I'll grant that. But you can't just push any principle out of context and say it's the principle that's wrong.
Monsanto is to blame. The FDA isn't doing its job, true. They should not be letting anyone mess with the live DNA code base like this.
The US Patent office isn't doing its job. True. Those patents should never have issued, and we can see why such things should not be patentable -- because Monsanto can use them (with only ever-so-little under-the-table-money-for-grease) to establish a monopoly that reaches way and beyond anything they invented or discovered.
The courts are not doing their job. True. If a judge can tell something is beyond his own understanding, he should recuse himself. A jury that does not understand a question is not a jury of peers of the accused. Judges and jurors need to be sought outside the system sometimes, and if understanding is bias, both parties are in the wrong: neither party should be found for, neither should win.
But, in any active society, there will always be such problems. Good citizens should not take advantage of the failures of the system. They do so at their own peril, because it destroys the very environment in which they are trying to "win".
That is what is evil about what Monsanto is doing here.
Monsanto is dead wrong. Monsanto is the problem, until they quit trying to take control of the system under the excuse of "recouping their costs and making their fair profit."
(1) Monsanto is pushing for a global monopoly on what you eat. Do you want any one company, no matter how neutral to you you may think they are now, controlling the production of the crops that make up the bulik of your caloric intake? Or even just one of those crops? No, they haven't limited themselves to just corn, but, since I have to point it out to you, do you even want them controlling all your corn? That includes corn syrup, which is not evil if you aren't eating too much, and if you haven't developed a reaction to it. That also includes corn starch, among a number of other such things. You'd be surprised what corn starch is used in. Corn is not just canned corn and on-the-cob and corn tortillas and such.
Speaking of corn-on-the-cob, maybe monoculture is okay if all you want is corn flour, but corn that makes good flour is not the best corn to eat whole-kernel. It isn't just taste, there is a reason for the taste variations, and a reason the body sometimes wants one taste instead of another. It's about what the body needs.
And if one company controls all that, they have the right to tell you, if you want/need/crave corn a certain way, no, this year there isn't enough interest, we've cancelled that crop. One more bureaucracy to screw up your day-to-day life. One moer bureacracy that could have been avoided.
(2) No, it doesn't matter that the modifications might be entirely transparent to human nutrition. For all we know, there might even be some beneficial unexpected effect. The problem is, mixing and matching bits of the program that produces corn is not known to be safe in the long term, any more than it is not known to have some surprise beneficial effect.
It's very much like some young hot-shot programmer taking your source code base, and without the time necessary to fully understand it, grabbing chunks from the advertising group's code base and pasting them into the payroll code at near-random, and watching the results for a few minutes, and saying,
"Let's take that live. Now. Across the entire corporate system. Trust me!"
With the more "natural", more "traditional" methods (that we have only been using for a relatively short time, true), there is more time, more separation from the overall agricultural base, more room to make mistakes and recover from them without turning the entire race into guinea pigs.
You may be comfortable with a company that arrogant. I am not.
Monsanto is in far too big a hurry to establish their monopolies.
Could be, if we gave it all lots more time.
Time is one of the big problems, you see.
But giving direct genetic intervention time to play out doesn't support Monsanto's monopoly.
Have you checked the links that reve_etrange provided?
Not just the judge.
Again, Monsanto is playing the 800 pound gorilla baby and complaining that they aren't being allowed their monopoly.
What do you call a red carrot?
Never seen blue corn?
What are you arguing here?
But blue or red or orange or purple maize are not the unusual colors because the corn is genetically engineered. Neither are the red or purple carrots you can sometimes get in Japanese grocery stores.
If Monsanto is willing to wipe out all the natural species by forcing all farmers whose seed crop gets infested with the Monsanto genes, they need to have a far greater variety of viable breeds.
And your expansion of the term "genetic engineering" is gratuitous.
Looking is not tasting. I suppose you'r going to claim gold auido wires and such, but there is a difference.
(And the difference is in fact sometimes visilble, but that's a side-issue.)
Is it somehow wrong to want to retain a little variety in the world?
GM was demonized by a patent-crazed monomegalomaniac corporation.
Dihydrogen monoxide is dangerous when you have a wall of it ten meters high approaching you at high speed.
It's also dangerous when you are ten meters down in a pool of it without breathing apparatus.
In fact, it's dangerous at much lower levels, such as when you drink more than 4 liters a day (for someone of about average build) or try to chug two liters of it in one go. (Not as dangerous as chugging dihydrogen monoxide with fermented grain products, but still dangerous.)
Of course, this is not an allegory. Water is all around us, has been for a long time, and can be dangerous in large volumes.
GM crops are only recent, all we have scientific proof of is their short-term effects and their tendency to cross-breed with everything they can breed with, and the damage to the friendly fauna.
Kind of like seeing a tsunami wave of some water substitute coming at you. Except that it's hard to imagine a real water substitute.
The patenting, at any rate, would be evil enough without the tendency to naturally cross-bread with neighboring crops, but add the tendency to cross-breed, and it's like pointing a shotgun at all the farmers who don't want to mess with it and saying, "Resistance is futile." Because resistance is now futile, and Monsanto is not known for taking a light hand on enforcing their rights.
No different from alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs (relative to compulsive behaviors).
I think that's the reason for the excitement.
There's this discovery that addiction is addiction, whatever the addiction is.
Might as well throw in watching Pro Football, too?