That's not remotely true. We lost the war, very gradually, over the last hundred years, as we slowly and methodically traded away essential liberty for the illusion of security. We just stepped up our pace of losing the war after 9/11/2001
Which can lead you to acquire legendary status on Usenet if your name happens to be Mel and you use a MAXINT rollover and flag bit to address a jump instruction.
Well if the court system is corrupt or sloppy enough that they can convict you even if you're innocent, then that's a problem with or without the Fifth Amendment. Suppose you remain silent instead of denying guilt, and they railroad you on a murder charge anyway. If you're already getting convicted of murder, an extra charge of lying under oath wouldn't have mattered very much.
A big driver behind the 5th Amendment is that jurors tend to credit admissions of guilt. After all, you wouldn't admit guilt if you weren't actually guilty, would you? That creates an incentive for police to coerce confessions from people (guilty or innocent). And yes, innocent people will admit to crimes they did not commit under intense coercive techniques. And once they have that confession, a conviction is pretty much guaranteed.
This isn't as big a concern with third-party witnesses.
A polygon with many sides gives you a good approximation of the are of the circle. To get the exact area, you make the number of sides infinite. As the number of sides approaches infinity, the area of the circle approaches the exact value of pi*r^2. Welcome to the first week of Calculus I: infinite limits.
I'm not a mathematician by trade, but I don't see any conceptual way to get to pi*r^2 without an infinite limit of some kind. If you know a definition of calculus that amounts to something other than breaking stuff down into an infinite number of infinitely-tiny bits, if like to know what it is.
Actually, there is also another method, using numerical estimation such as engineers sometimes use, but that one is getting a bit close to Calculus.
If all you're concerned about is estimation, then sure, no calculus needed. It's easy to run a Monte Carlo simulation on a circle. Take a square R x R pixels, define a circle with center C and radius R. Choose P points at random. For each point P_n whose distance from C is less than or equal to R, increment counter X. The approximate area of the circle is (X/P)*R^2. Accuracy increases as P gets large. That's estimation. It doesn't become calculus until P goes to infinity (with a corresponding infinitely-small pixel width), at which point X/P goes to pi. So yes, you can approximate lots of things without calculus. My fifth-grader is learning how to do that. But I don't see any way of getting to pi*R^2 without an infinite limit, and as my Calculus I professor said, infinite limits are calculus.
Lack of standards--NCLB implemented standards and it just got worse.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Texas has gone through about five iterations of the standardized test since I was a student 20 years ago. We're assured that each iteration will be more "rigorous" than the last and will increase the quality of education. And the result of each iteration is less teaching and more drilling of practice tests. When my wife taught elementary school, she was expressly instructed not to teach the second half of the year. She was told to continuously drill the two subjects that would be on the standardized test in the spring. I hear this complaint from teachers all the time. They are no longer allowed to teach. So of course the best of them are quitting. They got into teaching because they loved teaching. Now that they can't teach, they hate their jobs. It's just a paycheck, and they get out as soon as they are able.
When our oldest got into middle school, she asked if she could home school. We agreed to try it last year, and she learned the material much better than she did at school. We just started her second year, and last week, she learned how to measure the speed of light with a chocolate bar, a microwave oven, and ruler. Suddenly science is interesting to her.
If you don't care about the underpinnings, you won't get very far in math.
Which is exactly why we should never teach a child in middle school how to calculate the area of a circle until he has mastered integral calculus. And don't even get me started on the volume of a cone.
It *also* means that whatever genetic predispositions to cancer she may have had were likely passed on to her children, who are now more likely than others to get cancer and need the same treatment. This does not make the science bad, nor its use bad. But it clearly is bad.
Unless one of the twins comes up with the cure for cancer. Or solves the Grand Unified Field Theory. Or spends her life traveling the world feeding starving orphans. Perhaps you and I have different definitions of "clearly."
taking pot-shots at the monumentally, epically difficult jobs of regulators is lazy comedy.
/ no, i am not a regulator, but I know what they do.
Presumably they regulate...
Regulators tend instead to end up in bed with the folks they're supposedly regulating (both literally and figuratively). Your top-tier regulators do a lot more golfing than regulating.
A trademark is not a copyright. Intel does not "own" the word Pentium. They own the exclusive right to use the name Pentium and confusingly-similar names in connection with microprocessors and confusingly-similar products. It's possible that Pentium could be a famous mark, which would give it even broader protection, but if you discover a planet, or new creature, or new element and want to name it a "pentium," it would be difficult for them to stop you. (I'm not saying they won't try, though.)
Unless you approve of the rat race, something about how it fosters "meritocracy". But I can tell you for sure the following: highly successful people are talented, hardworking, lucky, and good at backstabbing. Only two of those attributes are objectively good (and frankly hardworking is only good in combination with talented), one is noise, and the last is downright negative. Rat races enhance the value of the two latter, and make everyone's life miserable.
But it's not my (or "society's") place to decide whether the "rat race" is good. Maybe the "rat race" leads to superior quality of legal services. Or maybe it just leads to burned out and miserable attorneys and over-billing. If the partners of a specific firm decide, "We don't like the way this rat race thing goes. We'd like to have more women in the ranks of partners to change things up," then let them try the experiment for themselves. It will either lead to a better firm or it won't. Like I said, to some extent NALP is already doing that by giving bonus smileys for women partners. So firms try to have more women partners to look better on NALP. From what I saw, the firms hire at least as many female new associates as males, and a woman who stays with the firm for seven years and gets her billable hours is practically guaranteed to make partner, just like a man. But a lot more women end up going in-house, or taking an of-counsel position so they can work part time, or doing something less conventional. I know one who started a clothing boutique and does law on the side. Another one got pregnant and decided she'd rather be a stay-at-home mom for a while. And that's my point. If they're happier doing those things than being a big-firm partner, let's not (as a society) try to push them into a place they'd rather not be. I, for one, am confident that women, as a body, are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, taking care of themselves, and deciding what careers they do or do not want to pursue. They don't need a bunch of middle-aged white guys to social engineer them into "equality."
That sounds more like an argument that people need to be married before they have kids and stop getting divorced. Then kids have the ultimate male role model: a dad.
I think it just depends upon where you are. Here in Hicksville, midwest, I can't seem to get hired as the dogcatcher. I am female, have 10+ years of varied experience in IT at a couple of large companies, and an Information Systems degree. It would be nice if someone actually showed interest when I applied...
Well, it's not hard to see why. None of that comes close to qualifying you as a competent dog catcher.
Large disequilibrium in male-to-female employment in various fields is a cause for worry in general.
And yet we don't see the articles bemoaning the lack of men in elementary education, or talking about how we are doing a disservice to the field because we aren't attracting enough men. Because, of course, educating children is a menial job, and we want to make sure that women are represented in REAL jobs like programming and IT.
You know where women aren't underrepresented? In law school. Women are easily half (or more) of law school matriculants. But they are "underrepresented" among the partner ranks in big firms, despite the fact that big firms are eager to elect every eligible woman as a partner, because it helps their NALP scores. So why are women still "underrepresented"? In my experience, it's because many of them aren't interested in being part of the partnership rat race. And I don't blame them. I don't think we need to push more women into a place they don't want to be.
As a society, we have an obligation to ensure that capable individuals are not handicapped by sex, race, religion, or other factors that don't affect their capability. If I'm hiring, I shouldn't care that you're a black, transgendered, lesbian Muslim or whatever. I should care about your ability to do the job. But that also means I shouldn't go out of my way to hire you because you're a black, transgendered, lesbian Muslim. Social engineering doesn't belong in a meritocracy.
You appear to have recently posted a comment with an explicit and/or implied criticism of the King^H^H^H^H President and/or his ministers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H executive agencies. On an unrelated note, we are writing to inform you that, as a courtesy, we will be auditing you in the near future. Please prepare for this audit by gathering all tax records since the dawn of time, including supporting documentation, and a generous supply of ointment for lacerations and bruises. We sincerely apologize for any minor inconveniences that may be caused by this totally random audit that is not remotely motivated by your exercise of free speech, and for any inappropriate glee, delight, satisfaction, or excitation our agents may display during the beatings^H^H^H^H^H^H^H proceedings.
we have a bad process. so your solution is to fork another process.
what we need is a new bashrc. using the old broken one and forking new instances will never fix our hung process.
Our.bashrc is fine. The problem is that for 240 years, the sysadmins have been writing hackish, winding, indecipherable spaghetti code extension scripts designed to circumvent or undo all the good things.bashrc does. Then the auditors come in, look very closely at the scripts, and say, "Yup. Looks good. Those are definitely legitimate extensions to.bashrc."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but order of magnitude has nothing to do with the number of significant digits. Didn't you take 7th grade science?
I wouldn't say "safely"...
Depends on who's holding the phaser, and if he's planning to aim it at you next.
That's not remotely true. We lost the war, very gradually, over the last hundred years, as we slowly and methodically traded away essential liberty for the illusion of security. We just stepped up our pace of losing the war after 9/11/2001
often write inscrutable code
Which can lead you to acquire legendary status on Usenet if your name happens to be Mel and you use a MAXINT rollover and flag bit to address a jump instruction.
Well if the court system is corrupt or sloppy enough that they can convict you even if you're innocent, then that's a problem with or without the Fifth Amendment. Suppose you remain silent instead of denying guilt, and they railroad you on a murder charge anyway. If you're already getting convicted of murder, an extra charge of lying under oath wouldn't have mattered very much.
A big driver behind the 5th Amendment is that jurors tend to credit admissions of guilt. After all, you wouldn't admit guilt if you weren't actually guilty, would you? That creates an incentive for police to coerce confessions from people (guilty or innocent). And yes, innocent people will admit to crimes they did not commit under intense coercive techniques. And once they have that confession, a conviction is pretty much guaranteed.
This isn't as big a concern with third-party witnesses.
A polygon with many sides gives you a good approximation of the are of the circle. To get the exact area, you make the number of sides infinite. As the number of sides approaches infinity, the area of the circle approaches the exact value of pi*r^2. Welcome to the first week of Calculus I: infinite limits. I'm not a mathematician by trade, but I don't see any conceptual way to get to pi*r^2 without an infinite limit of some kind. If you know a definition of calculus that amounts to something other than breaking stuff down into an infinite number of infinitely-tiny bits, if like to know what it is.
Correction. The length of each side of the square is 2R. The square encloses the circle.
Actually, there is also another method, using numerical estimation such as engineers sometimes use, but that one is getting a bit close to Calculus.
If all you're concerned about is estimation, then sure, no calculus needed. It's easy to run a Monte Carlo simulation on a circle. Take a square R x R pixels, define a circle with center C and radius R. Choose P points at random. For each point P_n whose distance from C is less than or equal to R, increment counter X. The approximate area of the circle is (X/P)*R^2. Accuracy increases as P gets large. That's estimation. It doesn't become calculus until P goes to infinity (with a corresponding infinitely-small pixel width), at which point X/P goes to pi. So yes, you can approximate lots of things without calculus. My fifth-grader is learning how to do that. But I don't see any way of getting to pi*R^2 without an infinite limit, and as my Calculus I professor said, infinite limits are calculus.
Also, one can develop the formula for the area of a circle without calculus.
I'm intrigued. Please demonstrate. (I'm serious. I've never seen a non-calculus method of doing this.)
Lack of standards--NCLB implemented standards and it just got worse.
This is a pet peeve of mine. Texas has gone through about five iterations of the standardized test since I was a student 20 years ago. We're assured that each iteration will be more "rigorous" than the last and will increase the quality of education. And the result of each iteration is less teaching and more drilling of practice tests. When my wife taught elementary school, she was expressly instructed not to teach the second half of the year. She was told to continuously drill the two subjects that would be on the standardized test in the spring. I hear this complaint from teachers all the time. They are no longer allowed to teach. So of course the best of them are quitting. They got into teaching because they loved teaching. Now that they can't teach, they hate their jobs. It's just a paycheck, and they get out as soon as they are able.
When our oldest got into middle school, she asked if she could home school. We agreed to try it last year, and she learned the material much better than she did at school. We just started her second year, and last week, she learned how to measure the speed of light with a chocolate bar, a microwave oven, and ruler. Suddenly science is interesting to her.
If you don't care about the underpinnings, you won't get very far in math.
Which is exactly why we should never teach a child in middle school how to calculate the area of a circle until he has mastered integral calculus. And don't even get me started on the volume of a cone.
If you can come up with anything outside of the Military, and interest to private banks, I'll be impressed.
I'm pretty sure that the U.S. Federal Government is the single biggest supplier of pork in the entire world.
It *also* means that whatever genetic predispositions to cancer she may have had were likely passed on to her children, who are now more likely than others to get cancer and need the same treatment. This does not make the science bad, nor its use bad. But it clearly is bad.
Unless one of the twins comes up with the cure for cancer. Or solves the Grand Unified Field Theory. Or spends her life traveling the world feeding starving orphans. Perhaps you and I have different definitions of "clearly."
There is a reason why there is an expression: Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Specifically, the reason is that Mark Twain said it and a bunch of people quoted him.
taking pot-shots at the monumentally, epically difficult jobs of regulators is lazy comedy.
/ no, i am not a regulator, but I know what they do.
Presumably they regulate...
Regulators tend instead to end up in bed with the folks they're supposedly regulating (both literally and figuratively). Your top-tier regulators do a lot more golfing than regulating.
A trademark is not a copyright. Intel does not "own" the word Pentium. They own the exclusive right to use the name Pentium and confusingly-similar names in connection with microprocessors and confusingly-similar products. It's possible that Pentium could be a famous mark, which would give it even broader protection, but if you discover a planet, or new creature, or new element and want to name it a "pentium," it would be difficult for them to stop you. (I'm not saying they won't try, though.)
Sorry, I don't see it in the official guide.
Then you're not paying attention.
That is both phenomenally boring, and inexplicably fascinating.
Unless you approve of the rat race, something about how it fosters "meritocracy". But I can tell you for sure the following: highly successful people are talented, hardworking, lucky, and good at backstabbing. Only two of those attributes are objectively good (and frankly hardworking is only good in combination with talented), one is noise, and the last is downright negative. Rat races enhance the value of the two latter, and make everyone's life miserable.
But it's not my (or "society's") place to decide whether the "rat race" is good. Maybe the "rat race" leads to superior quality of legal services. Or maybe it just leads to burned out and miserable attorneys and over-billing. If the partners of a specific firm decide, "We don't like the way this rat race thing goes. We'd like to have more women in the ranks of partners to change things up," then let them try the experiment for themselves. It will either lead to a better firm or it won't. Like I said, to some extent NALP is already doing that by giving bonus smileys for women partners. So firms try to have more women partners to look better on NALP. From what I saw, the firms hire at least as many female new associates as males, and a woman who stays with the firm for seven years and gets her billable hours is practically guaranteed to make partner, just like a man. But a lot more women end up going in-house, or taking an of-counsel position so they can work part time, or doing something less conventional. I know one who started a clothing boutique and does law on the side. Another one got pregnant and decided she'd rather be a stay-at-home mom for a while. And that's my point. If they're happier doing those things than being a big-firm partner, let's not (as a society) try to push them into a place they'd rather not be. I, for one, am confident that women, as a body, are perfectly capable of thinking for themselves, taking care of themselves, and deciding what careers they do or do not want to pursue. They don't need a bunch of middle-aged white guys to social engineer them into "equality."
That sounds more like an argument that people need to be married before they have kids and stop getting divorced. Then kids have the ultimate male role model: a dad.
I think it just depends upon where you are. Here in Hicksville, midwest, I can't seem to get hired as the dogcatcher. I am female, have 10+ years of varied experience in IT at a couple of large companies, and an Information Systems degree. It would be nice if someone actually showed interest when I applied...
Well, it's not hard to see why. None of that comes close to qualifying you as a competent dog catcher.
Large disequilibrium in male-to-female employment in various fields is a cause for worry in general.
And yet we don't see the articles bemoaning the lack of men in elementary education, or talking about how we are doing a disservice to the field because we aren't attracting enough men. Because, of course, educating children is a menial job, and we want to make sure that women are represented in REAL jobs like programming and IT.
You know where women aren't underrepresented? In law school. Women are easily half (or more) of law school matriculants. But they are "underrepresented" among the partner ranks in big firms, despite the fact that big firms are eager to elect every eligible woman as a partner, because it helps their NALP scores. So why are women still "underrepresented"? In my experience, it's because many of them aren't interested in being part of the partnership rat race. And I don't blame them. I don't think we need to push more women into a place they don't want to be.
As a society, we have an obligation to ensure that capable individuals are not handicapped by sex, race, religion, or other factors that don't affect their capability. If I'm hiring, I shouldn't care that you're a black, transgendered, lesbian Muslim or whatever. I should care about your ability to do the job. But that also means I shouldn't go out of my way to hire you because you're a black, transgendered, lesbian Muslim. Social engineering doesn't belong in a meritocracy.
From: IRS
RE: Audit
Dear Zlives,
You appear to have recently posted a comment with an explicit and/or implied criticism of the King^H^H^H^H President and/or his ministers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H executive agencies. On an unrelated note, we are writing to inform you that, as a courtesy, we will be auditing you in the near future. Please prepare for this audit by gathering all tax records since the dawn of time, including supporting documentation, and a generous supply of ointment for lacerations and bruises. We sincerely apologize for any minor inconveniences that may be caused by this totally random audit that is not remotely motivated by your exercise of free speech, and for any inappropriate glee, delight, satisfaction, or excitation our agents may display during the beatings^H^H^H^H^H^H^H proceedings.
Sincerely,
The Internal Revenue Service.
we have a bad process. so your solution is to fork another process.
what we need is a new bashrc. using the old broken one and forking new instances will never fix our hung process.
Our .bashrc is fine. The problem is that for 240 years, the sysadmins have been writing hackish, winding, indecipherable spaghetti code extension scripts designed to circumvent or undo all the good things .bashrc does. Then the auditors come in, look very closely at the scripts, and say, "Yup. Looks good. Those are definitely legitimate extensions to .bashrc."