The last time I checked, we still live in a democracy.
Actually, we live in a representative republic, not a direct democracy. (IMHO, a direct democracy would be icky...but that is for another post.)
If anybody tries to give the Presidency to someone that didn't get a majority vote, I'm going to throw a fit.
Wow...I'll bet that will affect who becomes president almost as much as the price of eggs in China!
Take a look at our constitution, which can be found at a variety of places, such as USConstitution.net. Pay particular attention to Article 2, Section 1 and the 12 Amendment. Then, if you don't like how things work...get cracking on a constitutional amendment!
I grew up in rural Kansas, and have some bona-fide hillbilly relatives. I'd like to defend them a bit, I think.
"Yup," you sound a bit elitist, you city slicker! Nothing wrong with pickups or beer from a can, as long as it's not something icky like Budweiser.;-)
Seriously, I owe a lot to my hillbilly roots.
I have a father who worked hard (in a steel foundry) for thirty years to make sure his children had every opportunity he could give them. I am trying to do as well for mine. Largely because of him, I worry more about carpal tunnel syndrome than steel dust in my lungs.
I had a family and community which taught me basic values like honesty, hard work, looking out for your family and neighbors, etc.
When I go back to my home town, I enjoy talking both to the beer swillers about their "mundane" interests. I also enjoy talking to those small-towners who are cruising the web and publishing web sites. I don't demand that you should enjoy both, but your "disgust" disgusts me.
Jeff (a pickup-driving, suburb-dwelling, hillbilly with a Ph.D.)
I shouldn't respond to flamebait, but in short, why don't you just bite me?
I have never used blocking software, and never will. My solution at home is discussion and supervision.
You are under the mistaken view that censorship is always bad. Censorship is evil when it the use of force to prevent the exchange of information. If I decline to pay for distributing information I find objectionable, some would call that censorship too, but I do not see it as a problem. In fact, I would normally reserve the actual word "censorship" for the former case, just to keep from diluting its effect.
Short-sighted and greedy? Because I would prefer to direct my giving as I see fit, rather than have my resources redistributed by force? Guilty, I guess.
Do you have children? I have those discussions you talk about routinely. Even so, I would prefer to "shield" my kids from some of the more vile stuff on the internet for a bit. I think that reasonable, since they are all under 10. As each child gets older, he gets exposed to more stuff, and gets continuing direction and guidance from his mother, myself, and others. We do try to exert a reasonable amount of control on who are those others, but that too will decrease gradually as the children get older.
By all rights, whoever pays for the service should be able to limit it as they see fit. The taxpayers pay for it, but will never agree on what or whether anything should be blocked. Solution? Don't force taxpayers pay for it in the first place.
For this reason we should not have public schools. We tax all (at least all property owners in most states) to fund public schools, when there is no way we can come to agreement on what the students should learn or be exposed to. I send my children to a particular parochial school, because I happen to approve of both the academics and morals taught there.
I had never before considered that this should apply to public libraries as well as schools.
He's been nominated mainly because of his ties to his dad... His dad was the head of the CIA for many years.... Somehow enough strings were pulled to get someone with 5 years of political experience nominated for president...
Um, not to defend G.W. or Republicans, but he was nominated mainly because he won a bunch of primaries.
Are you trying to say that the CIA pulled strings with all those voters?
FSMs and TMs are not equivalent. In computing theory, automatons are often classified by the set of languages that they can accept. To accept a language is to be able to determine whether any given string is a member of the language.
The set of languages that can be accepted by a FSM is the set of "regular languages." The set of languages that can be accepted by a TM is the set of "recursively enumerable" languages. The second is a strict superset of the first.
Theoretically, you can solve more problems with unbounded storage than without. Of course, practically, for a given problem, if the finite storage is big enough...
You are quite correct that the tape must only be unbounded. A realized infinity is not required for any problem solvable by a TM. If it were, it would imply that the TM actually visits an infinite number of tape cells, and so the machine would never halt.
When I said a computer was a FSM rather than a TM, I was not considering using removeable storage. One might prove the combination of the computer, the human, and an unbounded supply of floppies to be equivalent to a TM.
However, it is not at all clear that the universe would allow an unbounded supply of floppies. If the universe is finite, and if there is a finite limit to information storage density, then there is a practical bound on the length of a TM tape that can be built.
If you can't build or simulate a tape that can really grow to any arbitrary length, then you can't solve all problems solvable by a TM. In fact, you can't even pose all problems solvable by a TM, because that also requires unbounded storage.
My mommy always said, if you don't have anything nice to say, STFU.
Ouch. I did not mean my message to be a flame, but rather a request for more information. Not being sophisticated with respect to theory of computing should not be considered a character flaw. However, it does seem to determine how valuable is Katz's opinion on this book.
What I wanted to known was whether the book covers anything new, something not already covered in a good undergraduate course in theory of computing.
Has anyone a little more sophisticated than Katz read this book? Is this just another rehash of decidability and intractability? Or is there something new here?
Slashdot Mirror
Take a look at our constitution, which can be found at a variety of places, such as USConstitution.net. Pay particular attention to Article 2, Section 1 and the 12 Amendment. Then, if you don't like how things work...get cracking on a constitutional amendment!
"Yup," you sound a bit elitist, you city slicker! Nothing wrong with pickups or beer from a can, as long as it's not something icky like Budweiser. ;-)
Seriously, I owe a lot to my hillbilly roots.
I have a father who worked hard (in a steel foundry) for thirty years to make sure his children had every opportunity he could give them. I am trying to do as well for mine. Largely because of him, I worry more about carpal tunnel syndrome than steel dust in my lungs.
I had a family and community which taught me basic values like honesty, hard work, looking out for your family and neighbors, etc.
When I go back to my home town, I enjoy talking both to the beer swillers about their "mundane" interests. I also enjoy talking to those small-towners who are cruising the web and publishing web sites. I don't demand that you should enjoy both, but your "disgust" disgusts me.
Jeff (a pickup-driving, suburb-dwelling, hillbilly with a Ph.D.)
I have never used blocking software, and never will. My solution at home is discussion and supervision.
You are under the mistaken view that censorship is always bad. Censorship is evil when it the use of force to prevent the exchange of information. If I decline to pay for distributing information I find objectionable, some would call that censorship too, but I do not see it as a problem. In fact, I would normally reserve the actual word "censorship" for the former case, just to keep from diluting its effect.
Short-sighted and greedy? Because I would prefer to direct my giving as I see fit, rather than have my resources redistributed by force? Guilty, I guess.
Do you have children? I have those discussions you talk about routinely. Even so, I would prefer to "shield" my kids from some of the more vile stuff on the internet for a bit. I think that reasonable, since they are all under 10. As each child gets older, he gets exposed to more stuff, and gets continuing direction and guidance from his mother, myself, and others. We do try to exert a reasonable amount of control on who are those others, but that too will decrease gradually as the children get older.
By all rights, whoever pays for the service should be able to limit it as they see fit. The taxpayers pay for it, but will never agree on what or whether anything should be blocked. Solution? Don't force taxpayers pay for it in the first place.
For this reason we should not have public schools. We tax all (at least all property owners in most states) to fund public schools, when there is no way we can come to agreement on what the students should learn or be exposed to. I send my children to a particular parochial school, because I happen to approve of both the academics and morals taught there.
I had never before considered that this should apply to public libraries as well as schools.
Um, not to defend G.W. or Republicans, but he was nominated mainly because he won a bunch of primaries.
Are you trying to say that the CIA pulled strings with all those voters?
I keep a minimum of bookmarks, for those sites I really visit a lot. For everything else I guess URLs or use Google/Deja/Yahoo/etc.
And I NEVER guess a .us domain.
Um, I think the original meant the ability to transfer access without the cost of paying a fee to the publisher.
...not.
...the booth babes. Would have been a better use of your time. *grin*
The set of languages that can be accepted by a FSM is the set of "regular languages." The set of languages that can be accepted by a TM is the set of "recursively enumerable" languages. The second is a strict superset of the first.
Theoretically, you can solve more problems with unbounded storage than without. Of course, practically, for a given problem, if the finite storage is big enough...
The "Turing Test" is totally unrelated to "Turing Machines." They just happen to have been formulated by the same person.
When I said a computer was a FSM rather than a TM, I was not considering using removeable storage. One might prove the combination of the computer, the human, and an unbounded supply of floppies to be equivalent to a TM.
However, it is not at all clear that the universe would allow an unbounded supply of floppies. If the universe is finite, and if there is a finite limit to information storage density, then there is a practical bound on the length of a TM tape that can be built.
If you can't build or simulate a tape that can really grow to any arbitrary length, then you can't solve all problems solvable by a TM. In fact, you can't even pose all problems solvable by a TM, because that also requires unbounded storage.
What I wanted to known was whether the book covers anything new, something not already covered in a good undergraduate course in theory of computing.
Has anyone a little more sophisticated than Katz read this book? Is this just another rehash of decidability and intractability? Or is there something new here?