From what I understand, the government asked for web search strings alone. No identifying information at all.
Just that the information in question isn't particularly sensitive, doesn't mean government gets to force corporations to hand over whatever they ask for.
They don't intend to use this information as evidence in court, so they don't get to subpoena it.
From what I understand, the government asked them for similar search data, with no identifying information, for their own statystical analysis.
From what *I* understand, they didn't ask, they're trying to force them to hand it over. They were subpoenad, now it's the DoJ suing that it should be handed over - even though this has nothing to do with any specific criminal lawsuit, but as you say, just some statistical analysis they want to do. It's completely ridiculous.
Because other people are too sensitive and might get their feelings hurt by seeing/hearing things they object to, it's in Blizzard's best interest to put a muzzle on things that are potentially offensive or would cause other problems ("LOL FAGS").
I don't agree, because:
- Discriminating against homosexuals is offensive in itself, it's not reasonable to be offensive in order to prevent being potentially offensive
- There is an infinite amount of things that people are potentially offended by. Not least of which, killing things for xp. But they single out this issue.
Re:Lisp not accessible
on
Beyond Java
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· Score: 1
Nice troll.
Lisp has macros. They're extremely powerful, and one of the most important features of the language, and as far as I know not available in any other. And they would hardly be possible with a C like syntax.
Re:Application Programming
on
Beyond Java
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· Score: 1
What ever happened to programming stand-alone application programs? For several years now I've seen almost nothing discussed on Slashdot other than web programming. It's all about scripting websites and accessing databases, etc. Is application programming no longer interesting, or profitable, or fashionable? Is it an activity now considered contemptible?
We're just in the part of the cycle now where everything is client/server; specifically, web apps. I've worked at three software companies in the last five years, and it's all either websites or web apps. Perhaps it'll all be different again in five or ten years, but for now, companies seem to want web apps. In my experience, and in the Netherlands, anyway.
Every computer already has the client installed, there's a huge global network so you can connect to the server from everywhere (in case you want to have that functionality), and all the parts (clients, servers, networks) are fast enough nowadays. So the client/server model is on top at the moment.
Re:Lisp not accessible
on
Beyond Java
·
· Score: 1
If it's the parens, then obviously people are too superficial to look past the syntax
Sadly, it's true.
It's true, but the people that are held back by that are the same people who wouldn't try Python because of the indentation, Perl because of the "line noise", C++ for its odd streams / template syntax, etc etc. One shudders to think what they would think of actually fundamentally different languages, like Haskell or Prolog, but luckily they probably won't ever be exposed to them.
In short, those are the people who don't want to switch to something that's not exactly like what they already know. And if there's ever going to be a move in this industry to actually better ways to do development, these sheep who are scared by mere parens will not be the ones to initiate the move. So why cater to them? They'll follow the hype once it's there, or more likely be left behind because they didn't want to learn anything new.
I used to work as a Java programmer, then on to Python and Perl. I've looked at RoR, and it's extremely impressive (basically, one guy defined web app best practices for the next decade, I think - not necessarily this particular implementation in Ruby, but the setup of the framework, emphasis on good defaults, sensible object model, well integrated testing, real easy use of Ajax, etc... very impressive)
But then I read Practical Common Lisp. And it rather opened my eyes. Turns out all these dynamic features of Python, Perl, Ruby etc are really just subsets of what's available in Lisp (like those Lisp people always insisted, but I never believed), and it's blazingly fast. It's compiled into machine code. I'm in love.
Right now, the useful Web libraries are just about there, but I don't think they are quite as featureful yet as what we're used to in the scripting languages. But I expect that to change dramatically in the coming year, as so many web programmers are checking out that book...
It's a huge difference. But beyond that, if a theory/model makes predictions about how the universe works, and it is impossible to ever prove it wrong (falsifiable), by definition you've just demonstrated that it is a perfect model of the universe. That is, after all, the goal of the Theory of Everything, to have a model that explains and can predict everything.
No, if it is impossible to test any of its predictions, then it doesn't actually predict anything at all, and it's perfectly useless. With your "perfect model", it'd have lots of testable predictions, and the tests would all confirm the model if they were carried out.
String/M- theory is a mathematical construct that makes predictions about reality.
No, right now it's just a mathematical construct.
That we don't have the technology to check them yet, and that all of the predictions haven't been derived yet, is different from being non-falsifiable. In fact, one can argue that it already has. It predicts the existence of gravity, and our observations match the prediction. If they didn't, it would be false, hence it's falsifiable.
Except that we already knew that; basically it was a given for the mathematical construct. It's not a actual prediction. Consider how some of Einstein's predictions based on his theories were only finally confirmed a few years back; that's the sort of thing we're looking for.
If this story means that there is finally something in string theory that we can actually check, that it predicts that the number of neutrinos or whatever is different from what we'd expect with normal theory... then that's something we can test, and it would immediately be a falsifiable theory. But as far as I know, that would be the first time string theory "connects to reality", if it's true.
Put yet another way, if string/M- theory is not falsifiable then it is not making any predictions about reality and hence it is useless as a model to tell us anything. That's hardly the case.
That is, in fact, exactly the case. Hopefully that'll change some day.
Natural selection says something like 1) not every individual is the same, 2) some of their different traits are hereditary, 3) some traits are beneficial to survival and chance of reproduction, some are not, 4) therefore, as a logical conclusion, over time, you'd expect the beneficial traits to become more common within a group and the less beneficial traits to become less common.
Third and most important: Evolution leaves out *a lot*.
In much the same way that the theory of Gravity does not record the actual path of every stone that ever fell down from a high place to a lower one, etc.
It's a description of a process, not a catalogue of every step along that process ever taken.
They are basing their findings on people who remembered to take the time to report their bills on this website? What about the thousands or millions of people who don't? That would make for a pretty big error margin wouldn't it?
That depends. You can predict the behavior of a large group by measuring only the behavior of a small subgroup, provided the small subgroup is representative for the whole. That's how statistics works.
So the question is, do people who remember to take the time to report their bills move about the country in a significantly different way from the whole population?
I'd say that if you think they do, you'd need to argue that.
If a hypothesis involving gravitons is explained by experimental evidence, then this hypothesis could be elevated to theory.
There's no such thing as being "elevated to theory".
A hypothesis is just a proposed explanation for some phenomenon. A theory is just a bunch of them taken together because it seems to makes sense to do so (e.g., we group a bunch of hypotheses into something we call the "theory of evolution", and another bunch into a "theory of gravity", because it doesn't make sense to make a "theory of evolution and gravity". But those are just names).
It's just that the theory that scientific consensus currently thinks explains all our observations on gravity best doesn't include this hypothesis. Some day, it might.
Exactly the same here, except my MUD online time was about one and a half _years_ (real time).
I allow myself to play Puzzle Pirates, but WoW would immediately mean losing my job and all the life I built up after MUDs.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Thanks, I didn't know that they were generators! I haven't been able to use Python intensively for about 18 months, and I think they weren't implemented that way orignally (seem to recall list comprehensions came out before generators). Cool.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The mind-bending thing of Haskell's list comprehension is mostly that they're evaluated lazily, and can be of infinite length. A famous examples is of course the implementation of the Fibonacci function in Haskell as an infinite list:
fibo = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibo (tail fibo)
Python's list comprehensions are rather neat, but they lack those features, so they don't come near Haskell's level of mindbendingness. They're mostly a cool shorthand for writing down lists that would have been ugly with map() and filter(). I wish the dict comprehension PEP had made it...
(I'm a Python fan, but nowadays I program Perl for a living and play with the book Practical Common Lisp in my spare time... give Lisp a try!)
Re:What is Perl 6?
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But if you need to do a longer project, pick up Programming Perl and read it (from front to end). Without that book, Perl can just be extremely weird, after reading the book it at least makes sense in its own world, no matter how unconnected that world seems to be to the rest of the universe:-)
Remember that by using hte software, you are agreeing to a license of some kind (GPL, Apache...whatever).
No you don't. The GPL doesn't restrict use in any way, and you're entirely free not to agree to any of its terms. If you don't agree, you're not allowed to do any things that copyright law restricts (e.g., distributing it) but then you weren't allowed to do before you started using the software either. Merely using GPL software doesn't mean you have to agree to anything.
On the other hand, if you use any software that has a EULA, an actual use license, then you are perhaps agreeing to something when you start using it. But I've never seen any open source software with a EULA.
I don't agree at all. Human brains work by neurons firing in specific patterns, in specific ways, in extremely huge numbers and with complicated interneuron connections. There is no quick fix to knowing how the brain works, since it's not a simple thing.
That said, even if the brain relied on some quantum effect, I find the idea that just building something completely different that also relies on a quantum effect (a quantum computer) and just letting it run (doing what?) to be pretty bizarre.
The main problem to solving "true AI" remains _defining true AI_. You can't solve a problem if nobody can say what the actual problem is.
Artificial intelligence, i.e. thinking machines, are always about 10 years away. They have been for years.
That's not quite true. AI used to be always 50 years away. Not that that means much, of course. I believe we still have no idea what it is we're actually looking for, and keep redefining it (people used to think that a computer playing chess would be AI).
The speed of innovation is increasing all the time, so our feeling of "some time in the future" is getting shorter. In ten years AI will probably be always "just after next weekend", and no closer than ever...
But yeah, it's a good analogy. Nowadays we build things at nano-scale (materials), but as long as it's not actual grey goo it'll be called "not real nano-tech".
Why is a global free market for goods considered good, but that for labor bad by so many inhabitants of "developed" nations?
Because free markets are good for consumers (who get low prices for good products), not for suppliers (who are driven towards zero profit). On the labor market, the people are the suppliers. It's not really surprising that free goods markets are more popular than free labor markets.
It works like this: say, someone has a business and makes $10 million profit. He has to pay like 40% tax on it, so he only gets $6 million.
Except he doesn't - he immediately invests that $10 million into a film, so he doesn't have to pay tax over it (there's a law that promotes investments in films, and it means the investor doesn't have to pay tax on that $10M at all - he gets to deduce the whole investment from his income). The film loses money and only manages to bring in $8 million, which is owned by the investor. The film didn't make any profit, so no tax is paid.
Investor owns $8 million instead of $6 million. Net profit to the investor: $2 million.
Your mistake is in your very first paragraph; the investor doesn't have a $90 deduction, he has a $100 deduction since it was an investment in a domestic film. And he doesn't get $10 back on his $100 investment, but something that's usually over the $70 he'd have after the taxes in your example.
I never go to arcades, but I might if I there was a fixed entrance fee, with all the games inside being free to play. Having to pay for each short game is no fun.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understand, the government asked for web search strings alone. No identifying information at all.
Just that the information in question isn't particularly sensitive, doesn't mean government gets to force corporations to hand over whatever they ask for.
They don't intend to use this information as evidence in court, so they don't get to subpoena it.
From what I understand, the government asked them for similar search data, with no identifying information, for their own statystical analysis.
From what *I* understand, they didn't ask, they're trying to force them to hand it over. They were subpoenad, now it's the DoJ suing that it should be handed over - even though this has nothing to do with any specific criminal lawsuit, but as you say, just some statistical analysis they want to do. It's completely ridiculous.
Because other people are too sensitive and might get their feelings hurt by seeing/hearing things they object to, it's in Blizzard's best interest to put a muzzle on things that are potentially offensive or would cause other problems ("LOL FAGS").
I don't agree, because:
- Discriminating against homosexuals is offensive in itself, it's not reasonable to be offensive in order to prevent being potentially offensive
- There is an infinite amount of things that people are potentially offended by. Not least of which, killing things for xp. But they single out this issue.
Nice troll.
Lisp has macros. They're extremely powerful, and one of the most important features of the language, and as far as I know not available in any other. And they would hardly be possible with a C like syntax.
What ever happened to programming stand-alone application programs? For several years now I've seen almost nothing discussed on Slashdot other than web programming. It's all about scripting websites and accessing databases, etc. Is application programming no longer interesting, or profitable, or fashionable? Is it an activity now considered contemptible?
We're just in the part of the cycle now where everything is client/server; specifically, web apps. I've worked at three software companies in the last five years, and it's all either websites or web apps. Perhaps it'll all be different again in five or ten years, but for now, companies seem to want web apps. In my experience, and in the Netherlands, anyway.
Every computer already has the client installed, there's a huge global network so you can connect to the server from everywhere (in case you want to have that functionality), and all the parts (clients, servers, networks) are fast enough nowadays. So the client/server model is on top at the moment.
Sadly, it's true.
It's true, but the people that are held back by that are the same people who wouldn't try Python because of the indentation, Perl because of the "line noise", C++ for its odd streams / template syntax, etc etc. One shudders to think what they would think of actually fundamentally different languages, like Haskell or Prolog, but luckily they probably won't ever be exposed to them.
In short, those are the people who don't want to switch to something that's not exactly like what they already know. And if there's ever going to be a move in this industry to actually better ways to do development, these sheep who are scared by mere parens will not be the ones to initiate the move. So why cater to them? They'll follow the hype once it's there, or more likely be left behind because they didn't want to learn anything new.
Agile Web Development with Rails is very good, and cheap.
Hey, that's what I was going to post!
I used to work as a Java programmer, then on to Python and Perl. I've looked at RoR, and it's extremely impressive (basically, one guy defined web app best practices for the next decade, I think - not necessarily this particular implementation in Ruby, but the setup of the framework, emphasis on good defaults, sensible object model, well integrated testing, real easy use of Ajax, etc... very impressive)
But then I read Practical Common Lisp. And it rather opened my eyes. Turns out all these dynamic features of Python, Perl, Ruby etc are really just subsets of what's available in Lisp (like those Lisp people always insisted, but I never believed), and it's blazingly fast. It's compiled into machine code. I'm in love.
Right now, the useful Web libraries are just about there, but I don't think they are quite as featureful yet as what we're used to in the scripting languages. But I expect that to change dramatically in the coming year, as so many web programmers are checking out that book...
It's a huge difference. But beyond that, if a theory/model makes predictions about how the universe works, and it is impossible to ever prove it wrong (falsifiable), by definition you've just demonstrated that it is a perfect model of the universe. That is, after all, the goal of the Theory of Everything, to have a model that explains and can predict everything.
No, if it is impossible to test any of its predictions, then it doesn't actually predict anything at all, and it's perfectly useless. With your "perfect model", it'd have lots of testable predictions, and the tests would all confirm the model if they were carried out.
String/M- theory is a mathematical construct that makes predictions about reality.
No, right now it's just a mathematical construct.
That we don't have the technology to check them yet, and that all of the predictions haven't been derived yet, is different from being non-falsifiable. In fact, one can argue that it already has. It predicts the existence of gravity, and our observations match the prediction. If they didn't, it would be false, hence it's falsifiable.
Except that we already knew that; basically it was a given for the mathematical construct. It's not a actual prediction. Consider how some of Einstein's predictions based on his theories were only finally confirmed a few years back; that's the sort of thing we're looking for.
If this story means that there is finally something in string theory that we can actually check, that it predicts that the number of neutrinos or whatever is different from what we'd expect with normal theory... then that's something we can test, and it would immediately be a falsifiable theory. But as far as I know, that would be the first time string theory "connects to reality", if it's true.
Put yet another way, if string/M- theory is not falsifiable then it is not making any predictions about reality and hence it is useless as a model to tell us anything. That's hardly the case.
That is, in fact, exactly the case. Hopefully that'll change some day.
natural selection (which is readily observable)
No. It is not. That is a lie.
Natural selection says something like 1) not every individual is the same, 2) some of their different traits are hereditary, 3) some traits are beneficial to survival and chance of reproduction, some are not, 4) therefore, as a logical conclusion, over time, you'd expect the beneficial traits to become more common within a group and the less beneficial traits to become less common.
Which part of that is not readily observable?
Third and most important: Evolution leaves out *a lot*.
In much the same way that the theory of Gravity does not record the actual path of every stone that ever fell down from a high place to a lower one, etc.
It's a description of a process, not a catalogue of every step along that process ever taken.
They are basing their findings on people who remembered to take the time to report their bills on this website? What about the thousands or millions of people who don't? That would make for a pretty big error margin wouldn't it?
That depends. You can predict the behavior of a large group by measuring only the behavior of a small subgroup, provided the small subgroup is representative for the whole. That's how statistics works.
So the question is, do people who remember to take the time to report their bills move about the country in a significantly different way from the whole population?
I'd say that if you think they do, you'd need to argue that.
Besides, this is 2006, I thought the idea that being "loose" is normal for men but morally wrong for women died decades ago?
If a hypothesis involving gravitons is explained by experimental evidence, then this hypothesis could be elevated to theory.
There's no such thing as being "elevated to theory".
A hypothesis is just a proposed explanation for some phenomenon. A theory is just a bunch of them taken together because it seems to makes sense to do so (e.g., we group a bunch of hypotheses into something we call the "theory of evolution", and another bunch into a "theory of gravity", because it doesn't make sense to make a "theory of evolution and gravity". But those are just names).
It's just that the theory that scientific consensus currently thinks explains all our observations on gravity best doesn't include this hypothesis. Some day, it might.
Exactly the same here, except my MUD online time was about one and a half _years_ (real time).
I allow myself to play Puzzle Pirates, but WoW would immediately mean losing my job and all the life I built up after MUDs.
Thanks, I didn't know that they were generators! I haven't been able to use Python intensively for about 18 months, and I think they weren't implemented that way orignally (seem to recall list comprehensions came out before generators). Cool.
The mind-bending thing of Haskell's list comprehension is mostly that they're evaluated lazily, and can be of infinite length. A famous examples is of course the implementation of the Fibonacci function in Haskell as an infinite list:
fibo = 1 : 1 : zipWith (+) fibo (tail fibo)Python's list comprehensions are rather neat, but they lack those features, so they don't come near Haskell's level of mindbendingness. They're mostly a cool shorthand for writing down lists that would have been ugly with map() and filter(). I wish the dict comprehension PEP had made it...
(I'm a Python fan, but nowadays I program Perl for a living and play with the book Practical Common Lisp in my spare time... give Lisp a try!)
But if you need to do a longer project, pick up Programming Perl and read it (from front to end). Without that book, Perl can just be extremely weird, after reading the book it at least makes sense in its own world, no matter how unconnected that world seems to be to the rest of the universe :-)
Remember that by using hte software, you are agreeing to a license of some kind (GPL, Apache...whatever).
No you don't. The GPL doesn't restrict use in any way, and you're entirely free not to agree to any of its terms. If you don't agree, you're not allowed to do any things that copyright law restricts (e.g., distributing it) but then you weren't allowed to do before you started using the software either. Merely using GPL software doesn't mean you have to agree to anything.
On the other hand, if you use any software that has a EULA, an actual use license, then you are perhaps agreeing to something when you start using it. But I've never seen any open source software with a EULA.
I don't agree at all. Human brains work by neurons firing in specific patterns, in specific ways, in extremely huge numbers and with complicated interneuron connections. There is no quick fix to knowing how the brain works, since it's not a simple thing.
That said, even if the brain relied on some quantum effect, I find the idea that just building something completely different that also relies on a quantum effect (a quantum computer) and just letting it run (doing what?) to be pretty bizarre.
The main problem to solving "true AI" remains _defining true AI_. You can't solve a problem if nobody can say what the actual problem is.
Artificial intelligence, i.e. thinking machines, are always about 10 years away. They have been for years.
That's not quite true. AI used to be always 50 years away. Not that that means much, of course. I believe we still have no idea what it is we're actually looking for, and keep redefining it (people used to think that a computer playing chess would be AI).
The speed of innovation is increasing all the time, so our feeling of "some time in the future" is getting shorter. In ten years AI will probably be always "just after next weekend", and no closer than ever...
But yeah, it's a good analogy. Nowadays we build things at nano-scale (materials), but as long as it's not actual grey goo it'll be called "not real nano-tech".
Well, hack up the sources for your local copy of Nethack to make it much much harder.
"There is another theory, which states that this has already happened..."
Why is a global free market for goods considered good, but that for labor bad by so many inhabitants of "developed" nations?
Because free markets are good for consumers (who get low prices for good products), not for suppliers (who are driven towards zero profit). On the labor market, the people are the suppliers. It's not really surprising that free goods markets are more popular than free labor markets.
It works like this: say, someone has a business and makes $10 million profit. He has to pay like 40% tax on it, so he only gets $6 million.
Except he doesn't - he immediately invests that $10 million into a film, so he doesn't have to pay tax over it (there's a law that promotes investments in films, and it means the investor doesn't have to pay tax on that $10M at all - he gets to deduce the whole investment from his income). The film loses money and only manages to bring in $8 million, which is owned by the investor. The film didn't make any profit, so no tax is paid.
Investor owns $8 million instead of $6 million. Net profit to the investor: $2 million.
Your mistake is in your very first paragraph; the investor doesn't have a $90 deduction, he has a $100 deduction since it was an investment in a domestic film. And he doesn't get $10 back on his $100 investment, but something that's usually over the $70 he'd have after the taxes in your example.
I never go to arcades, but I might if I there was a fixed entrance fee, with all the games inside being free to play. Having to pay for each short game is no fun.
99%? 1997 called; they want their browser statistics back
It's a Windows flaw, not a IE flaw. Firefox is vulnerable too.