I know that google maps has been used like this before, but it amazes me every time that this very same tool is available to everyone for free.
The FA didn't talk about any fieldwork that might have been done to gather/clarify the folklore, but the rest of it seems like it could have been done from a bathtub with a smartphone!
Isa Dick Hackett, a daughter of Mr. Dick, states Google has its 'Android system, and now they are naming a phone "Nexus One."
Umm, what rights exactly does the PKD estate have over the term android? Does Isa think Phillip coined the term? Or came up with it's current usage (William Gibson, I believe)?
android
"automaton resembling a human being," 1727, from Mod.L. androides, from Gk. andro- "human" + eides "form, shape." Listed as "rare" in OED (1879), popularized from c.1951 by science fiction writers.
-http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=science
It seems similar to someone writing a novel about "computers" 30 years ago, with a computer named "Deep Thought", just to have a real company shamelessly create a real "computer" also named "Deep Thought". I mean, that would just be terrible and ruin the value of the original work...
I'm actually surprised you have a choice. The CS programs at 3 different schools I know of all require discrete math but nothing else. Discrete math is about modeling (analysing) discrete objects. This will tie in directly to not only algorithms but also data-structures.
Any other math you learn will be field dependent. Discrete math is the math of the CS field itself.
Also, please ignore the people who are saying that you don't need math at all. As a parallel example, paramedics and registered nurses are capable of dealing with a large number of medical conditions without the level of education and training that M.D.'s go through, but I'd never go to one for surgery or long-term treatment of a chronic or terminal illness.
I strongly recommend old-school BASIC. It's a fairly straightforward imperative language that will introduce people to boolean logic, branching, and loops. It works really well as a simple platform for writing algorithmic code.
Later on, the transition from writing GOTO based code to GOSUB based code will be a good introduction to functions. And before anyone says that GOSUB != f(), I want to point out that it's surprisingly similar to the way function calls are implemented in machine language.
I think you should avoid strongly typed languages, there's no need to get tripped up about the differences between int and float until the student gets more serious. I also think you should avoid object oriented languages in the beginning also.
No one would recommend learning VHDL before learning gate-based logic circuits, why are so many people advocating learning very high level languages before learning algorithms?
If the student really takes to programming, they'll probably transition themselves off BASIC in a month or two and go pick up all those other techniques and concepts on their own.
I absolutely hate that python enforces whitespace as part of it's syntax. I'm myself am a stickler for readable formatting, but I'd rather not have my language tell me how to do it.
Still, lets not pretend that, "Proper indenting hasn't been a problem for *years*". I know (and work with) plenty of people who work in IDE's that somehow manage to totally mangle whitespace.
It won't make a bit of difference,as AV software don't work already. A more realistic solution being to allow a whitelist of know good software.
Realistic for who? A whitelist approach sounds great if you're already a massive software company that can pay the fees and jump through the hoops necessary to get listed. It's also great for weeding out real competition and innovation in software.
Fortunately, it's already been tried by MS (Signed software) and found to be totally irrelevant (Install anyway).
Exactly, the logging industry (as related to paper production) uses farmed trees. This means that the paper/logging industry has led to an increase in the number of trees growing in North America, while at the same time no longer contributing to deforestation. I believe almost all of our paper comes from these farmed trees.
Of course, increased forest cover could be just as bad as decreased forest cover. It's more about balance than maximization.
"And in doing so will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of ALL sciences without fully seeing proof of it but assuming that infighting exists in them all. Is this a serious risk?"
No, having doubt and skepticism is called being scientific. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've seen complaints that "lay" people aren't scientifically critical enough. Maybe if people actually questioned what "scientists" tell them, fewer would fall victim to the bottomless sea of unproven alternative medical treatments.
And infighting does exists in all sciences, at least if it's an active field.
It's incredibly likely that the issues experienced by the LHC are mundane and do not require time travel to explain. If that's the case, I would hardly call a malfunction in one of the most sophisticated machines ever built "pure science", or even interesting.
But you miss my point. Pure science is about discovery. Finding evidence of time-travel and/or multiple universes would be AMAZING. It would be the first trickle of a new understanding of our place in the universe. In my mind, that really is as good as science gets.
I'm not sure how much the LHC has actually ended up costing.
I don't know if it's possible to prove this time-travelling higgs theory without attempting to build several more LHC scale colliders.
But if it's true, the cost has/will have been worth it. Maybe it's not in the list of breakthrough discoveries we were hoping for, but wouldn't it be mind-bogglingly amazing anyway? I don't think pure science gets much better.
Esperanto failed because it was artificial, created from theories on language that were popular at the time and not created naturally out of actual human communication. I'd think that any serious attempt to use Klingon as a REAL language would fail for the same reason.
However, we have in this child's brain a language generation machine. It's possible that he "fixes" the Klingon language, turning it into a true human language worthy of serious study. God knows that Chomsky would have done to get to study this child (and father).
(F.Y.I - In reality, I seriously object to experimenting on children this way. It is really interesting though.)
Umm, who's talking about tree hugging hippies?
The green movement is corporate, the organic movement has been for some time. They do have soooo much money, and they have a scary amount of psychological power over western culture. The mega-corporations managed to stall long enough to bring their own products to market, then began a standard, guilt based campaign saying that it was time to rise above our consumerist past and that they are at the forefront of the technology needed to make it happen.
The organic food corporation IS McDonalds. The alternative-fuel corporation IS the oil corporation.
I wonder what would be wrong with a modernized version of this? The process of binding chemicals to a substrate to record data was an effective and durable system even thousands of years ago. I guess the issue with modernization(miniaturize and automate) of this technology might one of balancing durability vs. data density.
nano-punchcards?
Museums are going to have to deal with this more and more. It doesn't seem feasible to have to support each artists solution to archiving. They don't make painters provide a climate controlled storage environment to ensure the longevity of a painting.
Fortunately, the nature of digital art makes a solution easy if the museums cooperate. They could simply backup each others archives. This way a copy of any piece of digital art is stored at every major museum in the world. Loss of data would be a sign that much worse things were happening in the world.
Of course, encryption would probably be used to protect exclusive showing rights. Oh well.
When we're talking about true rebellion, I doubt the government would continue to use tasers for very long. We are talking about treason here...
Modern machine guns fire ~600 to over 900 rounds per minute with many hundreds of rounds to a belt. 500 angry people vs 4 army infantry soldiers would last 1 minute, with much of the death/injury resulting from trampling as people flee for their lives.
If a tank is called in, there's no need to fight at all. The tank can just sit there.
<Off Topic>
I firmly believe in the right to bear arms for the purposes of overthrowing our government should the need arise. But lets be realistic, civilians with guns won't cut it against modern military superpowers. We need digital arms. We need the right to be online, we need the right assemble virtually, we need the right to protect our personal communications.
I don't think the electrical conductivity of hair is as big an issue as you think. The hair replaces silicon (a semi-conductor), not the metal (conductor) running across it. What's important is that the hair can act as sink for electron freed by the photo-electric effect.
Also, 18 watts seems...impressive for hair... but not totally outrageous. As for the amperage, would people feel more comfortable if the panel could generate 200 milliamps at 90 volts?
From http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_silicon's_electrical_conductivity -
"From a practical sense, silicon behaves like an insulator at less than 700 deg K and as a conductor at much higher temperatures."
Given that perfection is impossible...
I believe that the open source process is much less likely to lead to problems such as this. When it goes well.
The problem is that being open source defines so little about how the work is actually getting done. I could create an open source math library consisting of:
add(a, b){ return a*b; }
, make it open source, post it on source-forge and everything, and then simply refuse outside contribution. This is not really a problem for the community since anyone can fork and fix, but if I happen to be a software giant that has integrated my own faulty code into half of my products...
I don't think the point at the end is really the interesting part. I don't think the music industry is going to be comforted because "at least someone else is making lots of money." But his opening idea, that people who download illegally often download a LOT more than they could possibly buy, should seriously be taken account when thinking about this issue.
Maybe any illegal downloads, beyond the value that the person might have otherwise actually gone out and paid, could be seen as free advertising (for concerts and other products not digitally reproduceable).
I agree with Mark completely. At my company (A research/teaching hospital), auto-updates are actually turned off by policy. There are several critical, legacy web-apps used by the entire clinical staff that simply will not run on anything newer than IE6. Why this means we can't update other components of windows, idk...
I've also seen many people turn off auto-updates because of the "click me every 15 minutes or I'll reboot your computer" message that it threatens you with.
Many laptop users (or even desktop users who have "gone green") often sleep/power-off their machines before the update process can really get anywhere.
If the AUTO-updates for IE weren't bundled with with all the other updates, then we might see more people staying up to date.
I personally have WU notify me, so that I can decide when and what it downloads/updates and when I'll be forced to reboot. Hardly auto-magic enough for most users/corporations.
*This isn't the first post but it's my first post.
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I know that google maps has been used like this before, but it amazes me every time that this very same tool is available to everyone for free.
The FA didn't talk about any fieldwork that might have been done to gather/clarify the folklore, but the rest of it seems like it could have been done from a bathtub with a smartphone!
Isa Dick Hackett, a daughter of Mr. Dick, states Google has its 'Android system, and now they are naming a phone "Nexus One."
Umm, what rights exactly does the PKD estate have over the term android? Does Isa think Phillip coined the term? Or came up with it's current usage (William Gibson, I believe)?
android "automaton resembling a human being," 1727, from Mod.L. androides, from Gk. andro- "human" + eides "form, shape." Listed as "rare" in OED (1879), popularized from c.1951 by science fiction writers.
-http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=science
It seems similar to someone writing a novel about "computers" 30 years ago, with a computer named "Deep Thought", just to have a real company shamelessly create a real "computer" also named "Deep Thought". I mean, that would just be terrible and ruin the value of the original work...
+100 to tharsis
I'm actually surprised you have a choice. The CS programs at 3 different schools I know of all require discrete math but nothing else. Discrete math is about modeling (analysing) discrete objects. This will tie in directly to not only algorithms but also data-structures.
Any other math you learn will be field dependent. Discrete math is the math of the CS field itself.
Also, please ignore the people who are saying that you don't need math at all. As a parallel example, paramedics and registered nurses are capable of dealing with a large number of medical conditions without the level of education and training that M.D.'s go through, but I'd never go to one for surgery or long-term treatment of a chronic or terminal illness.
I strongly recommend old-school BASIC. It's a fairly straightforward imperative language that will introduce people to boolean logic, branching, and loops. It works really well as a simple platform for writing algorithmic code.
Later on, the transition from writing GOTO based code to GOSUB based code will be a good introduction to functions. And before anyone says that GOSUB != f(), I want to point out that it's surprisingly similar to the way function calls are implemented in machine language.
I think you should avoid strongly typed languages, there's no need to get tripped up about the differences between int and float until the student gets more serious. I also think you should avoid object oriented languages in the beginning also. No one would recommend learning VHDL before learning gate-based logic circuits, why are so many people advocating learning very high level languages before learning algorithms?
If the student really takes to programming, they'll probably transition themselves off BASIC in a month or two and go pick up all those other techniques and concepts on their own.
I absolutely hate that python enforces whitespace as part of it's syntax. I'm myself am a stickler for readable formatting, but I'd rather not have my language tell me how to do it.
Still, lets not pretend that, "Proper indenting hasn't been a problem for *years*". I know (and work with) plenty of people who work in IDE's that somehow manage to totally mangle whitespace.
It won't make a bit of difference,as AV software don't work already. A more realistic solution being to allow a whitelist of know good software.
Realistic for who? A whitelist approach sounds great if you're already a massive software company that can pay the fees and jump through the hoops necessary to get listed. It's also great for weeding out real competition and innovation in software.
Fortunately, it's already been tried by MS (Signed software) and found to be totally irrelevant (Install anyway).
Exactly, the logging industry (as related to paper production) uses farmed trees. This means that the paper/logging industry has led to an increase in the number of trees growing in North America, while at the same time no longer contributing to deforestation. I believe almost all of our paper comes from these farmed trees.
Of course, increased forest cover could be just as bad as decreased forest cover. It's more about balance than maximization.
"And in doing so will make the lay person unsure of the credibility of ALL sciences without fully seeing proof of it but assuming that infighting exists in them all. Is this a serious risk?"
No, having doubt and skepticism is called being scientific. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've seen complaints that "lay" people aren't scientifically critical enough. Maybe if people actually questioned what "scientists" tell them, fewer would fall victim to the bottomless sea of unproven alternative medical treatments.
And infighting does exists in all sciences, at least if it's an active field.
It's incredibly likely that the issues experienced by the LHC are mundane and do not require time travel to explain. If that's the case, I would hardly call a malfunction in one of the most sophisticated machines ever built "pure science", or even interesting.
But you miss my point. Pure science is about discovery. Finding evidence of time-travel and/or multiple universes would be AMAZING. It would be the first trickle of a new understanding of our place in the universe. In my mind, that really is as good as science gets.
I'm not sure how much the LHC has actually ended up costing.
I don't know if it's possible to prove this time-travelling higgs theory without attempting to build several more LHC scale colliders.
But if it's true, the cost has/will have been worth it. Maybe it's not in the list of breakthrough discoveries we were hoping for, but wouldn't it be mind-bogglingly amazing anyway? I don't think pure science gets much better.
Esperanto failed because it was artificial, created from theories on language that were popular at the time and not created naturally out of actual human communication. I'd think that any serious attempt to use Klingon as a REAL language would fail for the same reason. However, we have in this child's brain a language generation machine. It's possible that he "fixes" the Klingon language, turning it into a true human language worthy of serious study. God knows that Chomsky would have done to get to study this child (and father).
(F.Y.I - In reality, I seriously object to experimenting on children this way. It is really interesting though.)
Umm, who's talking about tree hugging hippies? The green movement is corporate, the organic movement has been for some time. They do have soooo much money, and they have a scary amount of psychological power over western culture. The mega-corporations managed to stall long enough to bring their own products to market, then began a standard, guilt based campaign saying that it was time to rise above our consumerist past and that they are at the forefront of the technology needed to make it happen. The organic food corporation IS McDonalds. The alternative-fuel corporation IS the oil corporation.
I wonder what would be wrong with a modernized version of this? The process of binding chemicals to a substrate to record data was an effective and durable system even thousands of years ago. I guess the issue with modernization(miniaturize and automate) of this technology might one of balancing durability vs. data density. nano-punchcards?
Museums are going to have to deal with this more and more. It doesn't seem feasible to have to support each artists solution to archiving. They don't make painters provide a climate controlled storage environment to ensure the longevity of a painting.
Fortunately, the nature of digital art makes a solution easy if the museums cooperate. They could simply backup each others archives. This way a copy of any piece of digital art is stored at every major museum in the world. Loss of data would be a sign that much worse things were happening in the world.
Of course, encryption would probably be used to protect exclusive showing rights. Oh well.
When we're talking about true rebellion, I doubt the government would continue to use tasers for very long. We are talking about treason here... Modern machine guns fire ~600 to over 900 rounds per minute with many hundreds of rounds to a belt. 500 angry people vs 4 army infantry soldiers would last 1 minute, with much of the death/injury resulting from trampling as people flee for their lives.
If a tank is called in, there's no need to fight at all. The tank can just sit there.
<Off Topic>
I firmly believe in the right to bear arms for the purposes of overthrowing our government should the need arise. But lets be realistic, civilians with guns won't cut it against modern military superpowers. We need digital arms. We need the right to be online, we need the right assemble virtually, we need the right to protect our personal communications.
I don't think the electrical conductivity of hair is as big an issue as you think. The hair replaces silicon (a semi-conductor), not the metal (conductor) running across it. What's important is that the hair can act as sink for electron freed by the photo-electric effect. Also, 18 watts seems ...impressive for hair... but not totally outrageous. As for the amperage, would people feel more comfortable if the panel could generate 200 milliamps at 90 volts?
From http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_silicon's_electrical_conductivity -
"From a practical sense, silicon behaves like an insulator at less than 700 deg K and as a conductor at much higher temperatures."
According to Wikipedia, IE5 for Mac did have it's own rendering engine (Tasman).
That's why I use IE.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are"
Your ability to combine those two statements into a single post makes you one of the most irresistable trolls I've seen...
Given that perfection is impossible... I believe that the open source process is much less likely to lead to problems such as this. When it goes well. The problem is that being open source defines so little about how the work is actually getting done. I could create an open source math library consisting of: add(a, b){ return a*b; } , make it open source, post it on source-forge and everything, and then simply refuse outside contribution. This is not really a problem for the community since anyone can fork and fix, but if I happen to be a software giant that has integrated my own faulty code into half of my products...
I don't think the point at the end is really the interesting part. I don't think the music industry is going to be comforted because "at least someone else is making lots of money." But his opening idea, that people who download illegally often download a LOT more than they could possibly buy, should seriously be taken account when thinking about this issue. Maybe any illegal downloads, beyond the value that the person might have otherwise actually gone out and paid, could be seen as free advertising (for concerts and other products not digitally reproduceable).
Aren't all objects fixed relative to themselves? To call an object fixed, I'd think that it'd at least have to feel no force of acceleration.
maybe a good comedy movie will do the trick.
Like that recent JJ Abrams comedy based on Star Trek characters?
Wait, I thought the original Star Trek was a comedy. You know, like Mork and Mindy...
I agree with Mark completely. At my company (A research/teaching hospital), auto-updates are actually turned off by policy. There are several critical, legacy web-apps used by the entire clinical staff that simply will not run on anything newer than IE6. Why this means we can't update other components of windows, idk...
I've also seen many people turn off auto-updates because of the "click me every 15 minutes or I'll reboot your computer" message that it threatens you with.
Many laptop users (or even desktop users who have "gone green") often sleep/power-off their machines before the update process can really get anywhere.
If the AUTO-updates for IE weren't bundled with with all the other updates, then we might see more people staying up to date.
I personally have WU notify me, so that I can decide when and what it downloads/updates and when I'll be forced to reboot. Hardly auto-magic enough for most users/corporations.
*This isn't the first post but it's my first post.
-- Best sig ever