Not sure if you are joking, but wouldn't this be counter productive? Couldn't a tech-savvy crook look at the blockchain and see these bitcoins once were owned by Ulbricht, and run away?
The place I worked was a State school with modest admissions standards. Moreover, if grades generally had been lower, we probably would have lowered the standards, which were mostly enrollment driven, so yes, they probably still would have been admitted. But the students would not have erroneously believed they were good at math and didn't have to work particularly hard at it, which I think would have been a win.
The problem with math, if problem is the right word, is that it changes its character, and the kind of thinking that is required at each level is quite different. It helps to be painstaking, but that is true in many fields. The skills required in arithmetic, algebra, calculus, discrete math, linear algebra, and number theory are all quite different, and students who think they are good at math move to the next level and find something quite foraign and quite unpleasant.
Along with this is the problem of grade inflation in high schools. I spent most of my career as a college math professor, and I ran into students every year who thought they were good at math because they had gotten good grades in it, but when I handed out problem sets the first week which reviewed prerequisite material, they could not do them at all. Math is pretty standardized nationally - f you have completed Intermediate Algebra or Precalculus or Calculus 1, there is a standard collection of problems that the student ought to be able to solve - you can find them in any standard text. And since it was the first week, it wasn't because I was a bad teacher - they had barely been exposed to me. But even though their transcript said they had received an A or B in the course, they couldn't solve the problems at all. So suddenly they get to college and a subject that previously didn't require a lot of work, now requires a great deal of work. It happens all the time
No, it's not just you. The orignal article was quite short, and the summary is just a verbatim lift of most of the article. THe article was clearly written in a hurry, paerhaps from a press realease originally in some other language.
Also, one of my pet peeves shows up here, which I hoped we could keep off Slashdot. THe artical and the summary use "exponentially" to mean "fast", or at least, they don't give any data to show there is a constant doubling time. Slashdotters should know what "exponentially" means, let's use it correctly.
I agree. The article is next to worthless. In particular, it appears (and that is the problem - the article is just too vague) that they are not counting the GPU time against Amdahl's law. That's splitting hairs, at best.
There might be some "there there" if they tried to refine Amdahl's law to include different kinds of processors, and the kinds of physical restrictions they talk about. All the article does is say such a thing might be possible - I think we already knew that.
As is often the case, we need more information. Several here have suggested acquiring facility with IDEs, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. Being an Eclipse wizard will improve your productivity immensely. There are a variety of tutorials that will help you with that, but it may not get you a paycheck tomorrow. You need to do it, though, if you don't want to end up right back here.
One problem you may be facing is that you are unaware of many of the new trends (where "new" may be 30 years or so) in programming languages. Computer Science students are typically required to program in a language like Scheme, Miranda, or Haskell not because anyone expects them to encounter them in a production environment, but because it allows them to design code for optimization and parallelization and other useful, modern features of computing. If you don't come up to speed with these kind of techniques, you will find yourself relegated to an ever shrinking niche of the industry, and a poorly paid one at that. This may be part of why you are having some trouble with your online course. I'm not recommending that you run out and learn those three languages, but maybe try to find a course of study that is a little more basic, even if some of it is old hat.
Also, there is no such thing as needing a paycheck from programming. You may need a paycheck, but as long it is ethicl and legal, it doesn't matter if it comes from programming or not. There are all kinds of oddball things you can do for a paycheck - I retired in 2007, and have been bouncing around among them. Probably the oddest was as Pace Instructor, teaching math on board navy ships. Not much money, and not for everyone, but I had a blast and it's just an example of what's out there.
At least not as far as anyone knows. This is not a scientific question, it is more of a philosophical or even a theological question. If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything. Realistically, no one will have the computational power to make such a prediction, so achieving randomness is really just a matter of achieving something close enough to truly random that no one can predict it.
In the Eudemonic Pie, some young iconoclasts managed to predict the "random" behavior of a roulette wheel. Any randomizing algorithm that you can find in a standard library assumes some environmental condition - often related to the time - is unknown. These are probably pretty good assumptions, but the results are not truly random.
The only way we could have true randomness is if there are some sort of measurable phenomena that cannot be predicted. Quantum mechanics dances around this question, and even if there is a state change that is genuinely random, it would be difficult bordering on heroic to measure it in a practical way so as to create a random number generator.
Criminals will not want to use e-money, but I think a lot of people will get creeped out when they buy something, and 10 seconds later they are texted a coupon for a store next door, for something they were Googling about last week. Don't get me wrong - some people will absolutely love that. But not everyone will. I wouldn't, which is why I intend to keep carrying cash.
These cables look relatively safe, but if the trend continues, how long before a virus exploits a vulnerability in the cable? The cyberwarfare guys might be working on that one right now.
You're right, but shortly after that it says this:
"Justice McKinnon said little of what the Americans told Ottawa was true "
Either way, the judge didn't have a very constructive view of US Attorney. It would be nice to see some follow-up, on the US Attorney's "no comment", but I doubt we will.
Does anyone have any idea how much energy these panels will be saving simply by using the sunlight for something other than heating the building? I realize you could accomplish much the same thing with a simple awning, but it seems like it should still be part of the calculation.
Thanks for the reply. I guess I was thinking of API at a lower level than is the general use - showing my age.
I understand and appreciate your answer, but the question still lingers - I'll use Java as an example - it is a bad one since the source is available, but assume for a moment it were not - what if swing (showing my age again) had tests throughout it saying that if the panel/frame/container/whatever was going to appear on wikileaks.org, then abort the program? I mean no one would ever do that, but what if they did? Could they? Has it already happened?
I'm not really feeling paranoid (yet), I'm wondering more about technical feasibility.
Does this sort of thing happen often? If Oracle decides I have too many weeds in my yard, will my Java programs stop working?
Seriously, is the wave of the present/future APIs with all sorts of tests in them so they do different things for different users? Sounds both intriguing and insidious.
The problem with DST is the free lunch mentality that goes with it. It was the first response of Congress to the "energy crisis" of the early 70's, and has remained the solution of choice for similar problems ever since. People genuinely believe they are getting "an extra hour of daylight", and expect other little bonuses to be handed to them just as painlessly.
Sorry for the rant, but it's long been a pet peeve of mine.
I was a university CS professor for most of my career, and the easiest things to teach students are the things that they want to learn. What that is will vary, but working in a lab, one on one, you will have a lot of opportunities to find out what the individuals are interested in. Don't worry if it's not the same thing to every student; they will talk and teach each other what you have taught them, and they will learn it better that way
The one thing you can can be certain they want to learn are things that will help them get a good grade in the course. So if it is a programming course, teach them how to login, manage files, and to use whatever IDE you are using for the course, whether it is vi, emacs, eclipse, or something else. While you are doing that, talk to them and see what else they are interested in, and try to run with that.
I disagree with some of the comments here that have suggested philosophy and history. That is great stuff, but do not make the mistake of thinking that just because it interests you, it will interest them. Give them a taste, sure, but dwell on things that will help them get a good grade, and then let them suggests breadth or depth beyond that.
Lots of Californians want to pay extra for green power, but do they really care who gets which power, as long as the green power is generated and used? I would guess that the vast majority of them would be fine with paying more to have green power generated and used elsewhere, but that isn't an option - when you opt into a green power program, it says you are getting that power.
The northwest already has plenty of hydropower that can be interrupted briefly while the reservoirs are allowed to fill, or at least not deplete as quickly. The wind power could be diverted to the aluminum potlines and other big users - there is still a grid issue, but much smaller than getting those big surges down to California.
A lot of this could be solved administratively, if the parties involved really wanted to solve it
This is ironic because Ulysses not only was the cause for stricter pornography laws in the United States, when it was first published not as a book but in serialized form, but it was also the book that was used to get the laws struck down. Although the Ulysses case itself never went to the Supreme Court, it did influence later cases that did wind up in the Supreme Court.
Maybe Apple could have an Ulysses app with all the nasty bits removed. Or better yet, a Bowdlerization filter that would transform any book into something absolutely harmless.
They didn't work at home. Well, I guess Mendel did in the sense that the monastary was his home, but he did most of his work when he was the abbot. Edison's "home" was a huge lab/factory, with his house on the grounds, but he had a huge machine shop and all sorts of other resources available to him.
Cows have magnets in their first stomach - farmers and ranchers throw them in there so that any metal the inadvertently swallow won't go any further and will get barfed up with the magnet.
Just put big coils of wire out in the fields or the dairy barns and have the cows constantly walking through them (in the same direction - that's the tricky part) and generate electricity.
And how to you suggest to apply that system on an election environment? If the checksum doesn't match, you remove all votes from the voters who used that particular machine? You repeat the elections until no machine was tampered with?
Yes, sounds about right.
Nice system. So once my party governs I can simply block any further election to ever finish, just by touching a single machine.
Hell, once your party governs you can find all sorts of ways, some sophisticated, some not, of staying in power.
Take your cue from the Slashdot logo for this section - use combination padlocks wherever you can.
A long time ago, I went to a locksmith and ordered a box of combination locks, all with the same combination. I memorized that one combination and now I'm set - anytime I can secure something with a padlock, I use one of those.
I realize this won't work for most of your keys, but maybe your bike?
If you want to share access with someone, don't give them the combination to all your locks - have him or her get another padlock and shackle them together, with a length of chain or cable, to secure the object. Anyone who can open either lock can get to it.
Actually several lessons, none of which are likely to be learned. But the one I was thinking of is that you can't just rest on your laurels. The boom in cable took place in the 70s and 80s, and all the cable companies thought once they got the cable installed they would have a monopoly and wouldn't have to work again. The satellite companies rained on their parade, but the fact was they had that wire into everyone's house, and they didn't have to do very much to make money. Several times there were ideas floated about letting the customers buy services directly from the creators, paying the cable company a fee as a common carrier. The cable companies got that shot down, and went back to their comfortable life of doing almost nothing.
As ought to be clear by now, they had a huge, underutilized asset with a line into so many homes. They didn't care, as long as the money flowed in, but now they have been overtaken by events. The service that they offer is not only overpriced, but outmoded. Their network of cables will allow them to survive, but they ignored the new technology for many years and now they are paying the price.
Ever been to the post office in Princeton, NJ, or the Southeastern Pennsylvania mail facility, which has an address of Valley Forge (even though it's in King of Prussia)? They have a ridiculous number of PO boxes - people want those addresses, they just sound so much better than Cranbury or Freehold or Conshohoken.
With email addresses, there is a difference - a vanity PO box tells me that the person may be willing to waste time and money to use that address, with an email address it's different, and depends on the address. With AOL, it tells me that you (someone) decided a long time ago that you needed some sort of net presence, had a CD that AOL had sent you and put in the computer, and since it worked, never looked back. It tells me that at least you don't put much effort into your net presence, and probably don't use it very effectively. That wouldn't be a problem for me if you were running a car repair shop, it would if you were selling me anything that had some direct relationship to communications.
Other addresses provoke different, mostly negative, reactions. pigsticker72@earthlink.net doesn't make me any more comfortable than RushDittoHead@hotmail.com - both make me want to run the other way.
It's become so easy to have your web address and mailbox have the same domain, one has to wonder about people who don't bother - is the rest of the office a mess? And domains are cheap, and easy to register. Not having time or claiming not enough savvy makes you look lazy and dumb.
Leaving the author's lack of social skills aside, the powers-that-be in computer science education agree with him, at least for now. The Computer Science Accreditation Board lists a course in probability and statistics among its criteria (sorry, I couldn't find an online link to the latest criteria) and has for at least 20 years. I don't know how influential those criteria are outside the US (though I'd be curious, if any slashdotters can help me out), but here they are pretty important, especially for the vast majority of programs that are not at the top schools, and need the credibility that accreditation can bring them.
Not everyone is happy, though. At the 2005 OOPSLA there was a panel discussion where one thing they all could agree on was that the CS curriculum was way too mathematical. They favored something more like a software apprenticeship where "projects" where replaced with "products". That point of view does not appear to be in the ascendant in computer science yet, but it might catch on in the information science departments that are often found in business colleges.
Personally, I don't think the CS departments are likely to get less mathematical as long as there is strong demand for their graduates. There are certainly a lot of students who don't major in computer science because it is too mathematical for them, and I'm sure some of them wind up as programmers through some other route, and others find some other career. Moreover, I'd say that with one probability and statistics course that follows calculus, the students do get enough to "know what they don't know", which was what the author wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure if you are joking, but wouldn't this be counter productive? Couldn't a tech-savvy crook look at the blockchain and see these bitcoins once were owned by Ulbricht, and run away?
The place I worked was a State school with modest admissions standards. Moreover, if grades generally had been lower, we probably would have lowered the standards, which were mostly enrollment driven, so yes, they probably still would have been admitted. But the students would not have erroneously believed they were good at math and didn't have to work particularly hard at it, which I think would have been a win.
The problem with math, if problem is the right word, is that it changes its character, and the kind of thinking that is required at each level is quite different. It helps to be painstaking, but that is true in many fields. The skills required in arithmetic, algebra, calculus, discrete math, linear algebra, and number theory are all quite different, and students who think they are good at math move to the next level and find something quite foraign and quite unpleasant.
Along with this is the problem of grade inflation in high schools. I spent most of my career as a college math professor, and I ran into students every year who thought they were good at math because they had gotten good grades in it, but when I handed out problem sets the first week which reviewed prerequisite material, they could not do them at all. Math is pretty standardized nationally - f you have completed Intermediate Algebra or Precalculus or Calculus 1, there is a standard collection of problems that the student ought to be able to solve - you can find them in any standard text. And since it was the first week, it wasn't because I was a bad teacher - they had barely been exposed to me. But even though their transcript said they had received an A or B in the course, they couldn't solve the problems at all. So suddenly they get to college and a subject that previously didn't require a lot of work, now requires a great deal of work. It happens all the time
No, it's not just you. The orignal article was quite short, and the summary is just a verbatim lift of most of the article. THe article was clearly written in a hurry, paerhaps from a press realease originally in some other language.
Also, one of my pet peeves shows up here, which I hoped we could keep off Slashdot. THe artical and the summary use "exponentially" to mean "fast", or at least, they don't give any data to show there is a constant doubling time. Slashdotters should know what "exponentially" means, let's use it correctly.
I agree. The article is next to worthless. In particular, it appears (and that is the problem - the article is just too vague) that they are not counting the GPU time against Amdahl's law. That's splitting hairs, at best.
There might be some "there there" if they tried to refine Amdahl's law to include different kinds of processors, and the kinds of physical restrictions they talk about. All the article does is say such a thing might be possible - I think we already knew that.
As is often the case, we need more information. Several here have suggested acquiring facility with IDEs, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. Being an Eclipse wizard will improve your productivity immensely. There are a variety of tutorials that will help you with that, but it may not get you a paycheck tomorrow. You need to do it, though, if you don't want to end up right back here.
One problem you may be facing is that you are unaware of many of the new trends (where "new" may be 30 years or so) in programming languages. Computer Science students are typically required to program in a language like Scheme, Miranda, or Haskell not because anyone expects them to encounter them in a production environment, but because it allows them to design code for optimization and parallelization and other useful, modern features of computing. If you don't come up to speed with these kind of techniques, you will find yourself relegated to an ever shrinking niche of the industry, and a poorly paid one at that. This may be part of why you are having some trouble with your online course. I'm not recommending that you run out and learn those three languages, but maybe try to find a course of study that is a little more basic, even if some of it is old hat.
Also, there is no such thing as needing a paycheck from programming. You may need a paycheck, but as long it is ethicl and legal, it doesn't matter if it comes from programming or not. There are all kinds of oddball things you can do for a paycheck - I retired in 2007, and have been bouncing around among them. Probably the oddest was as Pace Instructor, teaching math on board navy ships. Not much money, and not for everyone, but I had a blast and it's just an example of what's out there.
At least not as far as anyone knows. This is not a scientific question, it is more of a philosophical or even a theological question. If there are deterministic physical laws governing how objects interact, then it is possible to predict anything. Realistically, no one will have the computational power to make such a prediction, so achieving randomness is really just a matter of achieving something close enough to truly random that no one can predict it.
In the Eudemonic Pie, some young iconoclasts managed to predict the "random" behavior of a roulette wheel. Any randomizing algorithm that you can find in a standard library assumes some environmental condition - often related to the time - is unknown. These are probably pretty good assumptions, but the results are not truly random.
The only way we could have true randomness is if there are some sort of measurable phenomena that cannot be predicted. Quantum mechanics dances around this question, and even if there is a state change that is genuinely random, it would be difficult bordering on heroic to measure it in a practical way so as to create a random number generator.
Criminals will not want to use e-money, but I think a lot of people will get creeped out when they buy something, and 10 seconds later they are texted a coupon for a store next door, for something they were Googling about last week. Don't get me wrong - some people will absolutely love that. But not everyone will. I wouldn't, which is why I intend to keep carrying cash.
These cables look relatively safe, but if the trend continues, how long before a virus exploits a vulnerability in the cable? The cyberwarfare guys might be working on that one right now.
You're right, but shortly after that it says this:
"Justice McKinnon said little of what the Americans told Ottawa was true "
Either way, the judge didn't have a very constructive view of US Attorney. It would be nice to see some follow-up, on the US Attorney's "no comment", but I doubt we will.
Does anyone have any idea how much energy these panels will be saving simply by using the sunlight for something other than heating the building? I realize you could accomplish much the same thing with a simple awning, but it seems like it should still be part of the calculation.
Thanks for the reply. I guess I was thinking of API at a lower level than is the general use - showing my age.
I understand and appreciate your answer, but the question still lingers - I'll use Java as an example - it is a bad one since the source is available, but assume for a moment it were not - what if swing (showing my age again) had tests throughout it saying that if the panel/frame/container/whatever was going to appear on wikileaks.org, then abort the program? I mean no one would ever do that, but what if they did? Could they? Has it already happened?
I'm not really feeling paranoid (yet), I'm wondering more about technical feasibility.
Does this sort of thing happen often? If Oracle decides I have too many weeds in my yard, will my Java programs stop working?
Seriously, is the wave of the present/future APIs with all sorts of tests in them so they do different things for different users? Sounds both intriguing and insidious.
The problem with DST is the free lunch mentality that goes with it. It was the first response of Congress to the "energy crisis" of the early 70's, and has remained the solution of choice for similar problems ever since. People genuinely believe they are getting "an extra hour of daylight", and expect other little bonuses to be handed to them just as painlessly. Sorry for the rant, but it's long been a pet peeve of mine.
During this decade, the two 'fuels of the future' will be electricity and gasoline.
Electricty isn't a fuel.
Maybe if you get it from lightning, then it counts as a fuel?
I was a university CS professor for most of my career, and the easiest things to teach students are the things that they want to learn. What that is will vary, but working in a lab, one on one, you will have a lot of opportunities to find out what the individuals are interested in. Don't worry if it's not the same thing to every student; they will talk and teach each other what you have taught them, and they will learn it better that way
The one thing you can can be certain they want to learn are things that will help them get a good grade in the course. So if it is a programming course, teach them how to login, manage files, and to use whatever IDE you are using for the course, whether it is vi, emacs, eclipse, or something else. While you are doing that, talk to them and see what else they are interested in, and try to run with that.
I disagree with some of the comments here that have suggested philosophy and history. That is great stuff, but do not make the mistake of thinking that just because it interests you, it will interest them. Give them a taste, sure, but dwell on things that will help them get a good grade, and then let them suggests breadth or depth beyond that.
Lots of Californians want to pay extra for green power, but do they really care who gets which power, as long as the green power is generated and used? I would guess that the vast majority of them would be fine with paying more to have green power generated and used elsewhere, but that isn't an option - when you opt into a green power program, it says you are getting that power.
The northwest already has plenty of hydropower that can be interrupted briefly while the reservoirs are allowed to fill, or at least not deplete as quickly. The wind power could be diverted to the aluminum potlines and other big users - there is still a grid issue, but much smaller than getting those big surges down to California.
A lot of this could be solved administratively, if the parties involved really wanted to solve it
This is ironic because Ulysses not only was the cause for stricter pornography laws in the United States, when it was first published not as a book but in serialized form, but it was also the book that was used to get the laws struck down. Although the Ulysses case itself never went to the Supreme Court, it did influence later cases that did wind up in the Supreme Court.
Maybe Apple could have an Ulysses app with all the nasty bits removed. Or better yet, a Bowdlerization filter that would transform any book into something absolutely harmless.
They didn't work at home. Well, I guess Mendel did in the sense that the monastary was his home, but he did most of his work when he was the abbot. Edison's "home" was a huge lab/factory, with his house on the grounds, but he had a huge machine shop and all sorts of other resources available to him.
Cows have magnets in their first stomach - farmers and ranchers throw them in there so that any metal the inadvertently swallow won't go any further and will get barfed up with the magnet.
Just put big coils of wire out in the fields or the dairy barns and have the cows constantly walking through them (in the same direction - that's the tricky part) and generate electricity.
And how to you suggest to apply that system on an election environment? If the checksum doesn't match, you remove all votes from the voters who used that particular machine? You repeat the elections until no machine was tampered with?
Yes, sounds about right.
Nice system. So once my party governs I can simply block any further election to ever finish, just by touching a single machine.
Hell, once your party governs you can find all sorts of ways, some sophisticated, some not, of staying in power.
Take your cue from the Slashdot logo for this section - use combination padlocks wherever you can.
A long time ago, I went to a locksmith and ordered a box of combination locks, all with the same combination. I memorized that one combination and now I'm set - anytime I can secure something with a padlock, I use one of those.
I realize this won't work for most of your keys, but maybe your bike?
If you want to share access with someone, don't give them the combination to all your locks - have him or her get another padlock and shackle them together, with a length of chain or cable, to secure the object. Anyone who can open either lock can get to it.
Actually several lessons, none of which are likely to be learned. But the one I was thinking of is that you can't just rest on your laurels. The boom in cable took place in the 70s and 80s, and all the cable companies thought once they got the cable installed they would have a monopoly and wouldn't have to work again. The satellite companies rained on their parade, but the fact was they had that wire into everyone's house, and they didn't have to do very much to make money. Several times there were ideas floated about letting the customers buy services directly from the creators, paying the cable company a fee as a common carrier. The cable companies got that shot down, and went back to their comfortable life of doing almost nothing.
As ought to be clear by now, they had a huge, underutilized asset with a line into so many homes. They didn't care, as long as the money flowed in, but now they have been overtaken by events. The service that they offer is not only overpriced, but outmoded. Their network of cables will allow them to survive, but they ignored the new technology for many years and now they are paying the price.
Ever been to the post office in Princeton, NJ, or the Southeastern Pennsylvania mail facility, which has an address of Valley Forge (even though it's in King of Prussia)? They have a ridiculous number of PO boxes - people want those addresses, they just sound so much better than Cranbury or Freehold or Conshohoken.
With email addresses, there is a difference - a vanity PO box tells me that the person may be willing to waste time and money to use that address, with an email address it's different, and depends on the address. With AOL, it tells me that you (someone) decided a long time ago that you needed some sort of net presence, had a CD that AOL had sent you and put in the computer, and since it worked, never looked back. It tells me that at least you don't put much effort into your net presence, and probably don't use it very effectively. That wouldn't be a problem for me if you were running a car repair shop, it would if you were selling me anything that had some direct relationship to communications.
Other addresses provoke different, mostly negative, reactions. pigsticker72@earthlink.net doesn't make me any more comfortable than RushDittoHead@hotmail.com - both make me want to run the other way.
It's become so easy to have your web address and mailbox have the same domain, one has to wonder about people who don't bother - is the rest of the office a mess? And domains are cheap, and easy to register. Not having time or claiming not enough savvy makes you look lazy and dumb.
Sorry. That's what I see
Leaving the author's lack of social skills aside, the powers-that-be in computer science education agree with him, at least for now. The Computer Science Accreditation Board lists a course in probability and statistics among its criteria (sorry, I couldn't find an online link to the latest criteria) and has for at least 20 years. I don't know how influential those criteria are outside the US (though I'd be curious, if any slashdotters can help me out), but here they are pretty important, especially for the vast majority of programs that are not at the top schools, and need the credibility that accreditation can bring them.
Not everyone is happy, though. At the 2005 OOPSLA there was a panel discussion where one thing they all could agree on was that the CS curriculum was way too mathematical. They favored something more like a software apprenticeship where "projects" where replaced with "products". That point of view does not appear to be in the ascendant in computer science yet, but it might catch on in the information science departments that are often found in business colleges.
Personally, I don't think the CS departments are likely to get less mathematical as long as there is strong demand for their graduates. There are certainly a lot of students who don't major in computer science because it is too mathematical for them, and I'm sure some of them wind up as programmers through some other route, and others find some other career. Moreover, I'd say that with one probability and statistics course that follows calculus, the students do get enough to "know what they don't know", which was what the author wanted.