Upon re-reading the post, I think I'm being sucked in by a troll. But since I've put so much effort (almost 10 minutes) into writing my reply, I'll post it anyway:
With all due respect, that's a load of crap.
Before white people and black people walked on the same land, one clan of white people killed and enslaved another group of white people in one land, and one tribe of black people killed and enslaved another tribe of black people in a different land. Race (or tribe, family, clan, gender) discrimination has existed for as long as there have been people and weapons that people could use on each other.
Before computers existed, there was copyright law, because people who made a living creating "intellectual property" had a right to control how the fruits of their mental labour were distributed, in order to ensure that they could benefit from their work.
Why should you have the right to enjoy? If I put a year's work into creating a beautiful garden, why should you automatically have the right to enjoy it? If I want to charge $10 per head admission, what's wrong with that? I deserve to be rewarded for my effort in creating the garden that you are enjoying.
Why should you have the right to inspect or study? If I spend years of my life trying to solve a problem, and during that year I manage to create a solution that nobody else has thought of, why should you get the benefit of that? Why can't I ask (or require) you to pay me to use that solution which I have worked so hard to create? And the only way I can be sure that people are fairly paying me for the use of my solution is for me to keep it secret.
Why should you have the right to share? That's got to be the silliest "right" I've heard of. If I spend a year of my time creating something, I'd like to be rewarded for that year of effort. Ideally, I'd like to be rewarded somewhere around $100,000 for that year of my life. I could try to sell one copy of my work for $100,000, but nobody wants it that much. So I want to sell 10,000 copies for $10. That way, I get rewarded, and 6000 people get to benefit from my work. Everyone's happy. But if you pay $10 for my work and then "share" it with the 9999 other people, I only get $10 for a year's work. That's good for your and your friends, but not good for me.
We live in a society where we exchange "money" for "things of value". As long as software is a "thing of value", people have a right to want to have "money" exchanged for it.
A while ago, Mythbusters did a "free energy" show. They collected a bunch of plans from "the Internet", built the devices, and tested them.
One of the devices that surprised me was a 50' long aerial, attached to some simple circuitry. The aerial absorbed RF energy, and the electronics converted it into a somewhat useful DC power supply. I think it was producing somewhere around 1 volt, no idea how much current, indoors. IIRC, they said it was "almost as good as a AA battery".
So, not only is is possible in theory, it's possible in practice. But it's still wildly impractical.
There's been enough comment on traction control, but did you notice the part in TFA about the noise? There is a speaker built into the car to produce part of the engine noise.
Engine noise has gone from something to be suppressed with a muffler to something that should be managed and shaped with a muffler, now to something that is simulated with a speaker.
That's just silly. It's one thing to think that the sound which is a byproduct of how your engine works is cool, but to actually generate the sound with a speaker: that's pathetic and silly.
(deploying the boots early can result in the ice simply forming around the shape of the inflated boots, rather than their deflated shape, rendering the boots ineffective.)
I really hope that no pilots are getting their flying advice from slashdot (just like no lawyers are getting legal advice here), but just in case: the latest research indicates that ice bridging is a myth, and you should use the boots as soon as you detect any icing, rather than waiting for build-up.
This really comes down to terminology. People use the same word to mean different things, and then argue about who's right, without actually realizing that they disagree about the meaning of key words.
If you define sound as "pressure waves through the air", then the tree makes a sound. If you define sound as "pressure waves striking the eardrum (or other organ of hearing) and producing sensations", then the tree does not make a sound.
(Interesting, my dictionary includes both meanings, so you can defend either a "yes" or a "no" answer from the same dictionary.)
It's not deep. Just define your terms, and the question is easy to answer.
Notice the last four words of the parent post: "... if done for interoperability."
I suppose there's a really weak argument that this reverse engineering was done to make AMD interoperate with Intel, but that's not going to fly.
Reverse engineering for interoperability is about examining the code to see exactly what the code was designed to do, so that you can make some other code do compatable things.
This reverse engineering was done to modify the code to make it do something which the code was specifically designed not to do.
The fact that this reverse engineering hack ended up modifying the behaviour of the Skype software throws out the interoperability defense.
... of a poor argument. Every second statement seems to be an ad hominem argument. "I'm smart, and I don't agree with X, so X must be an idiot, and therefore nobody should agree with X, because he's an idiot."
When not insulting those who believe time travel might be possible, the author spends a lot of time defining movement as dx/dt, and then says time travel is logically impossible, because dt/dt is 1 (which is meaningless). But dx/dt is not movement, dx/dt is velocity. Movement is dx. In the time dimension, movement is dt.
Velocity is not movement, in the same way that force is not power, nor is acceleration speed. His primary argument is based either on not understanding the difference between movement and velocity, or on the unstated assumption that movement is impossible without velocity. The lengthy discussion of velocity though time is a straw man in place of the real issue, which is movement through time.
Note that some time-travel theories rest on things like quantum jumps, which are an example of movement without meaningful velocity. So even if the article proved that velocity through time is meaningless, it does not prove that time travel is impossible.
In defining movement through time as the meaningless "dt/dt", the author also neglects to mention that many time travel theorists define multiple timescale references (observer's time, traveller's time, etc.). So the ratio is more like "dt1/dt2", which, although unitless, can still be a useful and meaningful ratio.
Finally, the author's argument boils down to the idea that because the author cannot define how "fast" someone can move through time, it is impossible to move through time. This is an argument from ignorance. The fact that the author (or anyone else) does not know how to measure something does not mean that something is impossible. It only means that once we figure out how to do that something, we should also figure out how to measure it. That might require creating new units and new concepts.
There are some good and (in my opinion) logical arguments against "backwards" time travel (even of information), but this article is not one of them. A good argument against "backwards" time travel is the plan to build a time machine, go back into time, and prevent yourself from building the time machine. It's simple and logically valid.
This was my final exam, by which I mean it was my last year of university, and the last scheduled exam of the year. Like most people in my position, I had done the math beforehand. To graduate, I needed a bunch of required and optional courses. I had them. I needed an overall average of greater than 60, and my average was high enough that this wasn't a problem: even with 0 in this course, my overall would be fine. Besides, in this course, the exam only counted for 1/4 of the final mark, and I had done well enough on the assignments that even if I got a 0 on the final exam, I'd get a mark in the 60s for the course. I needed no more than 3 failures, and I had 3 (a really bad couple of terms before I learned that I should study sometimes). It sounded idiot-proof, except for one hazard: not writing the exam gets you an "incomplete" in the course, which is a failure. All I needed to do in order to graduate was show up, write my name on the exam paper, and turn it in.
Of course, by now you know where this is going. On my way to school for the afternoon exam session, I met my roommate coming back. He wondered where I was this morning. I told him I was studying, even though I didn't really need to. He told me the exam was this morning. I thought he was kidding me. He wasn't. My date-book had the exam written down in the afternoon, but when I looked though course notes, I found the handout announcing the exam in the morning session. To this day I have no idea why I wrote it down in the wrong timeslot.
I didn't quite panic, but I was close. I continued to school, found the professor, and explained my stupidity. Almost, but not quite hysterical, I begged to at least give me a zero on the exam, instead of a "did not write".
He found a couple of empty grad student offices for me and the other guy who made the same mistake, and let us both write it. I didn't quite ace it, but I did do reasonably well, passed the course, graduated, got a good paying job and a successful life.
That's silly. Taking up 5 minutes for 60 people is not the same as taking up 5 hours for 1 person, nor is it the same as delaying 1800 people for a second.
It's like the joke about the IBM man-year: 700 people trying to get a project done before lunch. In simplistic math, 700 people times 4 hours is more than a man-year of effort. In reality, a task that requires one man-year of effort is not going to get done in 4 hours, no matter how many people you throw at it.
Everyone has a certain amount of "buffer-time" in their lives. When you delay a large group of people a small amount of time, that time comes out of their buffer, and in many cases, they don't even notice it. On the other hand, when you take a lot of time from one person, that one person is really going to notice it.
For example, given that I usually walk as well as take the bus, if my bus was delayed 5 minutes, I'd just walk a little faster, and get home at the same time. If there was someone waiting to pick me up at the station, that person could also wait 5 minutes without too much hassle. Sensible people allow for small amounts of time being lost to unexpected events.
I wouldn't worry too much about the full-time vs. contract vs. whatever else part of the job.
I suggest you first, ask yourself what you are interested in, and excited by. Your masters thesis might be a good hint, or maybe you're sick of that subject by now.
Then you do research (you should know how to do that by now).
Find out which companies do that. Find out which companies are the best in that field. Find out what makes those companies better than the competition.
Then research that specific company, finding out the kind of people who work there (social networking). Find out if the work env. is something you'd like. Find out if the people are people you'd like.
Then you start trying to get noticed by recruiters and hiring managers at that company, to get an interview.
As a person who interviews, I really care about passion. Even though I'm doing a "technical" interview, I always ask "why do you want to work here?". Often (from new grads) I get an answer that boils down to "one job is as good as another, and I've heard you're hiring." Those people don't get my recommendation.
On the other hand, I have been quite impressed by people who can talk about our products and can even say what they'd like to do to improve our products. Even when their suggestions won't work, the fact that they thought enough about it to have suggestions impresses me.
An important part of the interview is to convince the interviewer that you really can and want to make a difference at the company. And in order to do that, you first need to convince yourself of that. And doing that will really help you decide where you want to work.
Oh, and I wouldn't expect a senior position. Almost all new grads (ba, masters, even Phd) come in at the bottom (the starting salary is slightly higher for the more educated ones, but that's the only difference). It is real-world experience that gets you the promotion to more senior positions.
In theory, we expect the more educated people to be smarter, and therefore impress us sooner, and therefore get promoted faster. In reality, I don't often see any correlation between the letters after people's names and the quality of the work they do, so sometimes we have a person with a BSc leading people with a phd.
It's really simple to explain: it's hard to do good work.
I know, once it's finished, it seems easy. So helpful people say "just do another thing like that one, only completely different". But it's not easy.
What happens is this: 1. Game company (or movie company, or car company or any other sort of company) makes a lot of things. 2. Most of the things they make are average, some are way below average. Consumers brand everything that is less than way above average as "sucks". 3. One or two turn out to be really good (way above average). The consumers like those ones. 4. The company tries to make more like the ones that turned out good (the sequels). 5. They make a lot of sequels. 6. Most of them suck. See (2).
By the way, the reasons consumers say that anything which isn't well above average "sucks" is simple: once they see the absolute best, they raise the bar, and want everything to be that good. Essentially, people want everything to be well above average, which is illogical, but nobody ever said people are logical.
As to the question about exploiting for the short term, that's not the idea. The ideas are: 1) You've got to ship something, or you go out of business. A crappy game (movie, car, etc.) released now is better than a perfect game never released. 2) You really don't know how popular it's going to be until you release it. People are fickle.
But I think that the main factor is the simple one: by simple math, most things are average or below. And most consumers are only excited by games that are well above average. So most consumers are going be disappointed a lot of the time.
They can't do that. Internet access WANTS to be free. It's evil to force people to pay for something of value.
The world will be a much better place when everyone gets everything they want for free. These "businesspeople" are just greedy bastards who are trying to opress the masses.
And what's this with paying for the coffee? I don't have to pay for my coffee at work, so why should I have to pay for the coffee at the coffee shop? Coffee wants to be free, too.
Anyone who opposes the Open Coffee and Open Wi-Fi movement is clearly a slave of Bill Gates. They must be stopped. Someone should do something about them. Me, I'm too busy looking for free broadband internet access to liberate my mp3s, movies, and software.
I'm a Christian, and I think that it is morally wrong to be untrue to how God made you. If God makes you homosexual, then it is an insult to God and yourself to pretend to be hetro, or to be celebate.
So, one Christian says that being gay is wrong. Others say that being gay is OK, but acting on it is wrong (i.e. those who say all homosexuals must be celebate). A third says if you're gay, then acting gay is right.
The world is complicated. Not everyone agrees. That's all part of the wonderful diversity of God's creation.
I'm not trying to start an argument with the parent poster. I just want people to realize that there is a variety of views even within christianity.
(Oh, and to get to the actual topic of the article, I'll say that MS is fully within thier rights to have a neutral stance. It's nice if they go out of their way to make the world a better place, but they are a software company, not a civil rights movement, and they can decide to focus their efforts on software instead of civil rights if that's what they want.)
It is impossible to "kick him out" of the Christian church, because there is no central authority to define who is or who is not part of the church. If he believes in the trinity, he's a Christian. In fact, even if he doesn't believe this, he can still call himself a Christian because there's nobody to stop him (nobody owns a trademark on the name).
What can happen, however, is that he can be kicked out of one specific Christian organization. For example, it is possible for someone to be kicked out of the Roman Catholic church, or out of the Anglican church, or out of the United church.
However, that's extremely rare. What is way more common is for the Christian organization to move forward, and the hard-liner to refuse to move, and leave the organization. In other words, these people usually aren't fired, they usually quit. And then they go on to create their own organization, with people that agree with them.
I belong to the Anglican church in Canada (BC, to be specific). We have worked hard for gay rights. Recently, the church organization has decided to officially bless homosexual unions. A few priests in our area could not live with that, and they left the church. They were not "kicked out", and they would be welcome to re-join the church any time they want to. But they decided that their beliefs are incompatible with the church's beliefs, so they quit. They are still Christians, but they aren't members of the Anglican church any more.
People often talk about "Christians" as if they were all of one mind. That's as silly as saying "all Americans believe this" or "all black people think that". People interpret the bible and the teachings of respected elders differently, so it is very common for people who all believe they are following the teachings of Christ to have very different opinions on some matters. This is one of those matters.
The goal of roulette is to try to guess where the ball will land, and to bet accordingly. These people simply used technology to make better guesses than everyone else.
There is a huge difference between people who break the rules, and people who exploit a loophole in the rules.
If the rules clearly stated (like the do in Nevada) that you cannot use electronic devices to predict the outcome of a game, then they would be cheating. But if there is no rule about it, then it's not cheating. It's just being creative.
Many slashdotters (myself included) are impressed because it's people who find loopholes in the rules that make progress for society.
Here's an extremely contrived example. There is no "rule" of nature that explicitly states "man cannot fly". For centuries, people saw that all flying things had wings, humans didn't have wings, and concluded that it was impossible, against the rules of nature. People even made pithy comments like "If God had intended man to fly, He would have given us wings."
As smarter people looked at the rules of how the universe worked, they found things like gravity, buoyancy, Bernoulli's law (something to do with gas pressure and velocity), but no actual law of nature that says "humans can't fly". Lots of laws that made it really challenging, but nothing to say it's impossible. So the clever people started to look for loopholes in the rules, and devised artifical wings. And now we fly further, higher and faster than the birds. This is because people were willing to ignore the assumed rules, and only focus on the rules that are actually there.
Now what often happens when someone is good enough to exploit a loophole in the rules, is that new rules are created (not in nature, but in casinos). So I wouldn't be surprised to find new laws passed that makes what they did illegal for the next people who try it. --- Personally, I think it would be a badge of honour to have a law created to patch a loophole that you found and exploited.
(On another note, here's an interesting theological/moral question: Assume that the lottery rules clearly state that it's illegal to affect the outcome of the game, but don't mention prediction the random outcome. Assume that God is all-powerful and all-knowing. If you pick 6 numbers at random for the lottery, and then you pray to God to make your numbers the winning numbers (and you win), did you cheat? If you pray for the right numbers, see the 6 numbers in a dream, and you then play those numbers the next day and win, did you cheat?)
I think you'd be better off if you worried about what the different schools can teach you, rather than which gives you a better chance at a job.
Some posters have said that small class sizes mean you can learn more from the "unknown" schools. Other posters point out the benefits of learning directly from the leaders in the field.
It's up to you and your learning style. If you need hand-holding, then go to a small school where you can get all the personal attention you need. If you are more independent, then go learn from the best, even if you do have 249 other people in your classroom.
Personally, I'm biased toward the big schools. Not for the name, but for the chance to learn from people who literally are the best in their field. And I think it makes a difference, even for low-level courses. Someone who takes "Algorithms 101" from Knuth is going to learn much more than the person who takes the same course taught by Joe Average, even if the syllabus is the same.
Also, I'd like to point out that you can get personal attention at the big schools, you just have to work harder to get it.
One of the basic ideas behind the Wiki is that people will only edit things if they actually know better than what is already there. After all, why would a person who knows very little about a subject "correct" something written by an expert?
The problem is that people who know almost nothing about subjects, tend to think they are experts. And sadly, the experts -- knowing the limits of their knowledge -- tend to not consider themselves expert.
If you happen to think you know a lot about something (anything), you really should read this study: http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html. It probably applies to you. It certainly does apply to the people writing and "correcting" Wiki articles.
I expect this is more about "power to the corporations; down with the people!"
However, it's not completely stupid. If you publish detailed info about outages, you tell people: a) Where the system is (after all, if it says "The cable along 53rd street broke, which took out the comms for the entire state", that tells people there's a telecom cable along 53rd street, and it's important. b) Where the weaknesses are (Gee, this is the 3rd time this month that this thingy has failed. Maybe I should encourage a 4th time). c) What's hard to fix ("The outage lasted 12 hours because it's really hard to find the wires in the dark.").
I'm Christian, and I'm fairly conservitave, and I think Bush is a danger to the free world (assuming such a thing exists). So don't assume that the "right-wing Christians" support Bush.
This power grab thing has nothing to do with "right wing Christians", it's all about people who are in power, wanting to stay in power.
When religion and politics get together, it's not because a religious person uses politics to spread his or her views, it's because a political person uses religion to increase his or her power.
Repeat after me: It's all about power. Power. Power! POWER!! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!!!!
I think I speak for all the people who actually read the article, when I say: "According to the London Free Press article, the research was funded by Labatt and Guinness".
(Who hoo! I'm going to get +3 informative, just because I actually bothered to RTFA. Karma karma karma.)
It all depends on what you are doing. When I upload the 100 pictures of yesterday's wedding from my digital camera, I need to extract the 20 or so good ones from the 80 bad ones. They are named "img_1932.jpg" through "img_2032.jpg", by the way.
With a command line interface, I can view each picture, one at a time. I can find and delete the really bad ones, but it is a slow process. And, when I get to the end of the 100 pictures, I recall that I have around 12 pictures of Bob. I don't need that many, so I should pick the best 2, and delete the rest. The pictures of Bob are evenly distributed through the 100 pictures in total. So, it takes another pass through the 100 pics to even find the 12 ones with Bob, and then I need to compare them to see which ones I like the best. This would probably require me to write down the file names and my comments on a scrap of paper as I go through them.
With a GUI, I view the entire directory at a glance, using the thumbnails. Then I multi-select the ones with Bob them, and copy-drag them to a folder named "Bob" (he is vain, and wants them all). Then I drill down into a few to get a better look. I can see all the thumbs at once, so it is easy for me to decide which ones to keep and which to delete. Then I drag one from the image viewer app onto my mail program to e-mail it to someone. Likewise, I can drag some onto my HTML editor to add them to a web page I am creating.
Command lines are great for many things (and I do normally use the CLI), but they are really bad at visual or graphical tasks.
Also, CLIs are great for frequently used commands. Once you get old enough to start fogettting things, you find that you can't remember the command you want. With a GUI, you can troll through the menus (and hopefully the menus are well designed, so you don't need to look under "Window" for the command to adjust the colour). With a CLI, you try to guess what the command is, or use "apropros" and try to guess a good keyword to search with. (As an exercise in futulity, try to use "apropros" to find the program that displays images).
Slashdot Mirror
Upon re-reading the post, I think I'm being sucked in by a troll. But since I've put so much effort (almost 10 minutes) into writing my reply, I'll post it anyway:
With all due respect, that's a load of crap.
Before white people and black people walked on the same land, one clan of white people killed and enslaved another group of white people in one land, and one tribe of black people killed and enslaved another tribe of black people in a different land. Race (or tribe, family, clan, gender) discrimination has existed for as long as there have been people and weapons that people could use on each other.
Before computers existed, there was copyright law, because people who made a living creating "intellectual property" had a right to control how the fruits of their mental labour were distributed, in order to ensure that they could benefit from their work.
Why should you have the right to enjoy? If I put a year's work into creating a beautiful garden, why should you automatically have the right to enjoy it? If I want to charge $10 per head admission, what's wrong with that? I deserve to be rewarded for my effort in creating the garden that you are enjoying.
Why should you have the right to inspect or study? If I spend years of my life trying to solve a problem, and during that year I manage to create a solution that nobody else has thought of, why should you get the benefit of that? Why can't I ask (or require) you to pay me to use that solution which I have worked so hard to create? And the only way I can be sure that people are fairly paying me for the use of my solution is for me to keep it secret.
Why should you have the right to share? That's got to be the silliest "right" I've heard of. If I spend a year of my time creating something, I'd like to be rewarded for that year of effort. Ideally, I'd like to be rewarded somewhere around $100,000 for that year of my life. I could try to sell one copy of my work for $100,000, but nobody wants it that much. So I want to sell 10,000 copies for $10. That way, I get rewarded, and 6000 people get to benefit from my work. Everyone's happy. But if you pay $10 for my work and then "share" it with the 9999 other people, I only get $10 for a year's work. That's good for your and your friends, but not good for me.
We live in a society where we exchange "money" for "things of value". As long as software is a "thing of value", people have a right to want to have "money" exchanged for it.
A while ago, Mythbusters did a "free energy" show. They collected a bunch of plans from "the Internet", built the devices, and tested them.
i sode/episode_06.html).
One of the devices that surprised me was a 50' long aerial, attached to some simple circuitry. The aerial absorbed RF energy, and the electronics converted it into a somewhat useful DC power supply. I think it was producing somewhere around 1 volt, no idea how much current, indoors. IIRC, they said it was "almost as good as a AA battery".
So, not only is is possible in theory, it's possible in practice. But it's still wildly impractical.
I think it's episode 24 (http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/ep
There's been enough comment on traction control, but did you notice the part in TFA about the noise? There is a speaker built into the car to produce part of the engine noise.
Engine noise has gone from something to be suppressed with a muffler to something that should be managed and shaped with a muffler, now to something that is simulated with a speaker.
That's just silly. It's one thing to think that the sound which is a byproduct of how your engine works is cool, but to actually generate the sound with a speaker: that's pathetic and silly.
What's next? A playing card in the spokes?
I really hope that no pilots are getting their flying advice from slashdot (just like no lawyers are getting legal advice here), but just in case: the latest research indicates that ice bridging is a myth, and you should use the boots as soon as you detect any icing, rather than waiting for build-up.
http://www.aopa.org/pilot/features/inflight9910.ht ml, http://www.elliottaviation.com/wavelink/1999q1/wav art21.asp and
http://www.faa.gov/library/manuals/examiners_inspe ctors/8400/fsat/media/fsat9818.doc are good references.
http://www.pilotfriend.com/safe/safety/icing_condi tions.htm is a great article about all sorts of aircraft de-icing and anti-icing methods.
Kingdom of Loathing and Progress Quest.
Progress Quest is -- by far -- the most entertaining RPG I've played.
"Fetch a larva for the council."
It must be the best quest, since it appears in the two best RPGs ever written.
This really comes down to terminology. People use the same word to mean different things, and then argue about who's right, without actually realizing that they disagree about the meaning of key words.
If you define sound as "pressure waves through the air", then the tree makes a sound. If you define sound as "pressure waves striking the eardrum (or other organ of hearing) and producing sensations", then the tree does not make a sound.
(Interesting, my dictionary includes both meanings, so you can defend either a "yes" or a "no" answer from the same dictionary.)
It's not deep. Just define your terms, and the question is easy to answer.
Notice the last four words of the parent post: "... if done for interoperability."
I suppose there's a really weak argument that this reverse engineering was done to make AMD interoperate with Intel, but that's not going to fly.
Reverse engineering for interoperability is about examining the code to see exactly what the code was designed to do, so that you can make some other code do compatable things.
This reverse engineering was done to modify the code to make it do something which the code was specifically designed not to do.
The fact that this reverse engineering hack ended up modifying the behaviour of the Skype software throws out the interoperability defense.
... of a poor argument. Every second statement seems to be an ad hominem argument. "I'm smart, and I don't agree with X, so X must be an idiot, and therefore nobody should agree with X, because he's an idiot."
When not insulting those who believe time travel might be possible, the author spends a lot of time defining movement as dx/dt, and then says time travel is logically impossible, because dt/dt is 1 (which is meaningless). But dx/dt is not movement, dx/dt is velocity. Movement is dx. In the time dimension, movement is dt.
Velocity is not movement, in the same way that force is not power, nor is acceleration speed. His primary argument is based either on not understanding the difference between movement and velocity, or on the unstated assumption that movement is impossible without velocity. The lengthy discussion of velocity though time is a straw man in place of the real issue, which is movement through time.
Note that some time-travel theories rest on things like quantum jumps, which are an example of movement without meaningful velocity. So even if the article proved that velocity through time is meaningless, it does not prove that time travel is impossible.
In defining movement through time as the meaningless "dt/dt", the author also neglects to mention that many time travel theorists define multiple timescale references (observer's time, traveller's time, etc.). So the ratio is more like "dt1/dt2", which, although unitless, can still be a useful and meaningful ratio.
Finally, the author's argument boils down to the idea that because the author cannot define how "fast" someone can move through time, it is impossible to move through time. This is an argument from ignorance. The fact that the author (or anyone else) does not know how to measure something does not mean that something is impossible. It only means that once we figure out how to do that something, we should also figure out how to measure it. That might require creating new units and new concepts.
There are some good and (in my opinion) logical arguments against "backwards" time travel (even of information), but this article is not one of them. A good argument against "backwards" time travel is the plan to build a time machine, go back into time, and prevent yourself from building the time machine. It's simple and logically valid.
This was my final exam, by which I mean it was my last year of university, and the last scheduled exam of the year. Like most people in my position, I had done the math beforehand. To graduate, I needed a bunch of required and optional courses. I had them. I needed an overall average of greater than 60, and my average was high enough that this wasn't a problem: even with 0 in this course, my overall would be fine. Besides, in this course, the exam only counted for 1/4 of the final mark, and I had done well enough on the assignments that even if I got a 0 on the final exam, I'd get a mark in the 60s for the course. I needed no more than 3 failures, and I had 3 (a really bad couple of terms before I learned that I should study sometimes). It sounded idiot-proof, except for one hazard: not writing the exam gets you an "incomplete" in the course, which is a failure. All I needed to do in order to graduate was show up, write my name on the exam paper, and turn it in.
Of course, by now you know where this is going. On my way to school for the afternoon exam session, I met my roommate coming back. He wondered where I was this morning. I told him I was studying, even though I didn't really need to. He told me the exam was this morning. I thought he was kidding me. He wasn't. My date-book had the exam written down in the afternoon, but when I looked though course notes, I found the handout announcing the exam in the morning session. To this day I have no idea why I wrote it down in the wrong timeslot.
I didn't quite panic, but I was close. I continued to school, found the professor, and explained my stupidity. Almost, but not quite hysterical, I begged to at least give me a zero on the exam, instead of a "did not write".
He found a couple of empty grad student offices for me and the other guy who made the same mistake, and let us both write it. I didn't quite ace it, but I did do reasonably well, passed the course, graduated, got a good paying job and a successful life.
That's silly. Taking up 5 minutes for 60 people is not the same as taking up 5 hours for 1 person, nor is it the same as delaying 1800 people for a second.
It's like the joke about the IBM man-year: 700 people trying to get a project done before lunch. In simplistic math, 700 people times 4 hours is more than a man-year of effort. In reality, a task that requires one man-year of effort is not going to get done in 4 hours, no matter how many people you throw at it.
Everyone has a certain amount of "buffer-time" in their lives. When you delay a large group of people a small amount of time, that time comes out of their buffer, and in many cases, they don't even notice it. On the other hand, when you take a lot of time from one person, that one person is really going to notice it.
For example, given that I usually walk as well as take the bus, if my bus was delayed 5 minutes, I'd just walk a little faster, and get home at the same time. If there was someone waiting to pick me up at the station, that person could also wait 5 minutes without too much hassle. Sensible people allow for small amounts of time being lost to unexpected events.
I wouldn't worry too much about the full-time vs. contract vs. whatever else part of the job.
I suggest you first, ask yourself what you are interested in, and excited by. Your masters thesis might be a good hint, or maybe you're sick of that subject by now.
Then you do research (you should know how to do that by now).
Find out which companies do that. Find out which companies are the best in that field. Find out what makes those companies better than the competition.
Then research that specific company, finding out the kind of people who work there (social networking). Find out if the work env. is something you'd like. Find out if the people are people you'd like.
Then you start trying to get noticed by recruiters and hiring managers at that company, to get an interview.
As a person who interviews, I really care about passion. Even though I'm doing a "technical" interview, I always ask "why do you want to work here?". Often (from new grads) I get an answer that boils down to "one job is as good as another, and I've heard you're hiring." Those people don't get my recommendation.
On the other hand, I have been quite impressed by people who can talk about our products and can even say what they'd like to do to improve our products. Even when their suggestions won't work, the fact that they thought enough about it to have suggestions impresses me.
An important part of the interview is to convince the interviewer that you really can and want to make a difference at the company. And in order to do that, you first need to convince yourself of that. And doing that will really help you decide where you want to work.
Oh, and I wouldn't expect a senior position. Almost all new grads (ba, masters, even Phd) come in at the bottom (the starting salary is slightly higher for the more educated ones, but that's the only difference). It is real-world experience that gets you the promotion to more senior positions.
In theory, we expect the more educated people to be smarter, and therefore impress us sooner, and therefore get promoted faster. In reality, I don't often see any correlation between the letters after people's names and the quality of the work they do, so sometimes we have a person with a BSc leading people with a phd.
It's really simple to explain: it's hard to do good work.
I know, once it's finished, it seems easy. So helpful people say "just do another thing like that one, only completely different". But it's not easy.
What happens is this:
1. Game company (or movie company, or car company or any other sort of company) makes a lot of things.
2. Most of the things they make are average, some are way below average. Consumers brand everything that is less than way above average as "sucks".
3. One or two turn out to be really good (way above average). The consumers like those ones.
4. The company tries to make more like the ones that turned out good (the sequels).
5. They make a lot of sequels.
6. Most of them suck. See (2).
By the way, the reasons consumers say that anything which isn't well above average "sucks" is simple: once they see the absolute best, they raise the bar, and want everything to be that good. Essentially, people want everything to be well above average, which is illogical, but nobody ever said people are logical.
As to the question about exploiting for the short term, that's not the idea. The ideas are:
1) You've got to ship something, or you go out of business. A crappy game (movie, car, etc.) released now is better than a perfect game never released.
2) You really don't know how popular it's going to be until you release it. People are fickle.
But I think that the main factor is the simple one: by simple math, most things are average or below. And most consumers are only excited by games that are well above average. So most consumers are going be disappointed a lot of the time.
They can't do that. Internet access WANTS to be free. It's evil to force people to pay for something of value.
The world will be a much better place when everyone gets everything they want for free. These "businesspeople" are just greedy bastards who are trying to opress the masses.
And what's this with paying for the coffee? I don't have to pay for my coffee at work, so why should I have to pay for the coffee at the coffee shop? Coffee wants to be free, too.
Anyone who opposes the Open Coffee and Open Wi-Fi movement is clearly a slave of Bill Gates. They must be stopped. Someone should do something about them. Me, I'm too busy looking for free broadband internet access to liberate my mp3s, movies, and software.
I'm a Christian, and I think that it is morally wrong to be untrue to how God made you. If God makes you homosexual, then it is an insult to God and yourself to pretend to be hetro, or to be celebate.
So, one Christian says that being gay is wrong. Others say that being gay is OK, but acting on it is wrong (i.e. those who say all homosexuals must be celebate). A third says if you're gay, then acting gay is right.
The world is complicated. Not everyone agrees. That's all part of the wonderful diversity of God's creation.
I'm not trying to start an argument with the parent poster. I just want people to realize that there is a variety of views even within christianity.
(Oh, and to get to the actual topic of the article, I'll say that MS is fully within thier rights to have a neutral stance. It's nice if they go out of their way to make the world a better place, but they are a software company, not a civil rights movement, and they can decide to focus their efforts on software instead of civil rights if that's what they want.)
It is impossible to "kick him out" of the Christian church, because there is no central authority to define who is or who is not part of the church. If he believes in the trinity, he's a Christian. In fact, even if he doesn't believe this, he can still call himself a Christian because there's nobody to stop him (nobody owns a trademark on the name).
What can happen, however, is that he can be kicked out of one specific Christian organization. For example, it is possible for someone to be kicked out of the Roman Catholic church, or out of the Anglican church, or out of the United church.
However, that's extremely rare. What is way more common is for the Christian organization to move forward, and the hard-liner to refuse to move, and leave the organization. In other words, these people usually aren't fired, they usually quit. And then they go on to create their own organization, with people that agree with them.
I belong to the Anglican church in Canada (BC, to be specific). We have worked hard for gay rights. Recently, the church organization has decided to officially bless homosexual unions. A few priests in our area could not live with that, and they left the church. They were not "kicked out", and they would be welcome to re-join the church any time they want to. But they decided that their beliefs are incompatible with the church's beliefs, so they quit. They are still Christians, but they aren't members of the Anglican church any more.
People often talk about "Christians" as if they were all of one mind. That's as silly as saying "all Americans believe this" or "all black people think that". People interpret the bible and the teachings of respected elders differently, so it is very common for people who all believe they are following the teachings of Christ to have very different opinions on some matters. This is one of those matters.
No, I don't think it's plain and simple.
The goal of roulette is to try to guess where the ball will land, and to bet accordingly. These people simply used technology to make better guesses than everyone else.
There is a huge difference between people who break the rules, and people who exploit a loophole in the rules.
If the rules clearly stated (like the do in Nevada) that you cannot use electronic devices to predict the outcome of a game, then they would be cheating. But if there is no rule about it, then it's not cheating. It's just being creative.
Many slashdotters (myself included) are impressed because it's people who find loopholes in the rules that make progress for society.
Here's an extremely contrived example. There is no "rule" of nature that explicitly states "man cannot fly". For centuries, people saw that all flying things had wings, humans didn't have wings, and concluded that it was impossible, against the rules of nature. People even made pithy comments like "If God had intended man to fly, He would have given us wings."
As smarter people looked at the rules of how the universe worked, they found things like gravity, buoyancy, Bernoulli's law (something to do with gas pressure and velocity), but no actual law of nature that says "humans can't fly". Lots of laws that made it really challenging, but nothing to say it's impossible. So the clever people started to look for loopholes in the rules, and devised artifical wings. And now we fly further, higher and faster than the birds. This is because people were willing to ignore the assumed rules, and only focus on the rules that are actually there.
Now what often happens when someone is good enough to exploit a loophole in the rules, is that new rules are created (not in nature, but in casinos). So I wouldn't be surprised to find new laws passed that makes what they did illegal for the next people who try it. --- Personally, I think it would be a badge of honour to have a law created to patch a loophole that you found and exploited.
(On another note, here's an interesting theological/moral question: Assume that the lottery rules clearly state that it's illegal to affect the outcome of the game, but don't mention prediction the random outcome. Assume that God is all-powerful and all-knowing. If you pick 6 numbers at random for the lottery, and then you pray to God to make your numbers the winning numbers (and you win), did you cheat? If you pray for the right numbers, see the 6 numbers in a dream, and you then play those numbers the next day and win, did you cheat?)
I think you'd be better off if you worried about what the different schools can teach you, rather than which gives you a better chance at a job.
Some posters have said that small class sizes mean you can learn more from the "unknown" schools. Other posters point out the benefits of learning directly from the leaders in the field.
It's up to you and your learning style. If you need hand-holding, then go to a small school where you can get all the personal attention you need. If you are more independent, then go learn from the best, even if you do have 249 other people in your classroom.
Personally, I'm biased toward the big schools. Not for the name, but for the chance to learn from people who literally are the best in their field. And I think it makes a difference, even for low-level courses. Someone who takes "Algorithms 101" from Knuth is going to learn much more than the person who takes the same course taught by Joe Average, even if the syllabus is the same.
Also, I'd like to point out that you can get personal attention at the big schools, you just have to work harder to get it.
One of the basic ideas behind the Wiki is that people will only edit things if they actually know better than what is already there. After all, why would a person who knows very little about a subject "correct" something written by an expert?
The problem is that people who know almost nothing about subjects, tend to think they are experts. And sadly, the experts -- knowing the limits of their knowledge -- tend to not consider themselves expert.
If you happen to think you know a lot about something (anything), you really should read this study: http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html.
It probably applies to you. It certainly does apply to the people writing and "correcting" Wiki articles.
I wasn't aware of that (and I try to stay informed about the current anti-and-pro-gay debate going on in my country).
Can you provide specific references? I'd love to read more about this church that was fined for preaching against homosexuality.
Did the crown actually bring charges against the church, or was it just someone who disagreed with the chuch yelling "I'm gonna sue!"?
I expect this is more about "power to the corporations; down with the people!"
However, it's not completely stupid. If you publish detailed info about outages, you tell people:
a) Where the system is (after all, if it says "The cable along 53rd street broke, which took out the comms for the entire state", that tells people there's a telecom cable along 53rd street, and it's important.
b) Where the weaknesses are (Gee, this is the 3rd time this month that this thingy has failed. Maybe I should encourage a 4th time).
c) What's hard to fix ("The outage lasted 12 hours because it's really hard to find the wires in the dark.").
I'm Christian, and I'm fairly conservitave, and I think Bush is a danger to the free world (assuming such a thing exists). So don't assume that the "right-wing Christians" support Bush.
This power grab thing has nothing to do with "right wing Christians", it's all about people who are in power, wanting to stay in power.
When religion and politics get together, it's not because a religious person uses politics to spread his or her views, it's because a political person uses religion to increase his or her power.
Repeat after me: It's all about power. Power. Power! POWER!! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!!!!
I think I speak for all the people who actually read the article, when I say: "According to the London Free Press article, the research was funded by Labatt and Guinness".
(Who hoo! I'm going to get +3 informative, just because I actually bothered to RTFA. Karma karma karma.)
This would go perfectly with the Aquarium case mod reported here on slashdot a while ago. Then it's all in one box!
It all depends on what you are doing. When I upload the 100 pictures of yesterday's wedding from my digital camera, I need to extract the 20 or so good ones from the 80 bad ones. They are named "img_1932.jpg" through "img_2032.jpg", by the way.
With a command line interface, I can view each picture, one at a time. I can find and delete the really bad ones, but it is a slow process. And, when I get to the end of the 100 pictures, I recall that I have around 12 pictures of Bob. I don't need that many, so I should pick the best 2, and delete the rest. The pictures of Bob are evenly distributed through the 100 pictures in total. So, it takes another pass through the 100 pics to even find the 12 ones with Bob, and then I need to compare them to see which ones I like the best. This would probably require me to write down the file names and my comments on a scrap of paper as I go through them.
With a GUI, I view the entire directory at a glance, using the thumbnails. Then I multi-select the ones with Bob them, and copy-drag them to a folder named "Bob" (he is vain, and wants them all). Then I drill down into a few to get a better look. I can see all the thumbs at once, so it is easy for me to decide which ones to keep and which to delete. Then I drag one from the image viewer app onto my mail program to e-mail it to someone. Likewise, I can drag some onto my HTML editor to add them to a web page I am creating.
Command lines are great for many things (and I do normally use the CLI), but they are really bad at visual or graphical tasks.
Also, CLIs are great for frequently used commands. Once you get old enough to start fogettting things, you find that you can't remember the command you want. With a GUI, you can troll through the menus (and hopefully the menus are well designed, so you don't need to look under "Window" for the command to adjust the colour). With a CLI, you try to guess what the command is, or use "apropros" and try to guess a good keyword to search with. (As an exercise in futulity, try to use "apropros" to find the program that displays images).