by the way, sorry for being a dick earlier. i strongly disagree with you (very strongly. ok, VERY strongly), but i shouldn't have resorted to schoolyard insults. i apologize.
Agreed - and do you call public, mandatory pornography a sound policy decision, in the complete absence of any independently funded, unbiased studies indicating benefit from said policies in reducing risk of *spooky voice* terrorism?
that is the stupidest argument i have or will ever hear in my entire life. scared people do irrational things. they let incorrect things be done. greedy people take advantage of this. 'laws' that were created by these greedy people shouldn't be respected, they should be torn out of the books and shat on, then burned, then force-fed to the people who passed them in the first place. oh, and to you.
lolz. but seriously, what are all these complaints i've been hearing about spam in google search results? anyone have an example where, say, bing provides search results that are obviously better than google's?
maybe if i ever searched for anything other than the latest semi-supervised learning paper, i'd have noticed this too.. DAMN YOU, GRADUATE SCHOOL!!!
i think we need a new word to describe a sector of the market dominated not by one, but a few very large units - say, instead of 'monopoly', we'll call it a 'polypoly'? [there probably already is a word for that, but whatever it is, i'm sure it's not as much fun to write as 'polypoly'. go ahead, give it a shot.]
now, as far as i can tell, 'polypolies' aren't as bad as monopolies, but they're still problematic in many ways - they concentrate a lot of the wealth in the hands of a few, making it next to impossible for individuals/small groups to enter the market. and i have plenty of examples for that, retail probably being the most obvious. that's what walmart is - it's not a monopoly, it's a polypoly [heh, i love that word...].
it sucks, but if you let demand determine everything, i think polypolies are inevitable. walmart can give you the best prices around, so people will go there. as people go there, they get bigger, and offer even better prices. a small mom and pop store doesn't have a chance to compete against that. you're right, natural monopolies seem to be rare without government support. but that doesn't mean complete deregulation leads to good things.
i see your point about the evidence suggesting there's some underlying difference between christianity and islam, which leads to different kinds of corruption. i wonder how true that is, though. i don't have a lot of knowledge on this matter, but it is my understanding that for a long period of time during the middle ages, christianity was turned into a tool of oppression much like islam is today in many places. i wonder if the difference isn't purely cultural... or, perhaps, a combination of cultural factors, and the greater ease with which violence can be justified through islam (which is another claim i have no proof of, but have heard often, and don't find hard to believe - AFAIK, muhamed, being a warrior in many ways, often stated that violence can be justified).
WTF kind of 3rd world country is this? It sounds like France, for christ's sake! Seriously, if you have all that, maybe it's time to re-classify that country? I've lived in a third world country, and I've seen two kinds of relationships between employers and employees: family members, or slave-owner/slave.
out of curiosity, if science is all well and good in your book, then what exactly is the subset of your beliefs that match the definition of a religious fundamentalist? (i'm not suggesting anything, i just want to know... if you feel like sharing.)
I'm not sure I agree with this. Right now I'm at a top CS grad school, and from everything I've seen, the university itself isn't really doing squat to support the CS program. All the individual professors' funding comes from grants, and the infrastructure comes from other contributions. BTW, though I don't have much love for MS, I gotta say -- thanks Mr. Gates, LOVE the building!!!
I wonder what the marginal cost of processing each application, + the extra marketing required to get it, is? Is it really less than $50? I'd think it'd take at least a few man-hours to process an application, and admissions people don't come cheap...
1 - college doesn't have to cost anything [need-based scholarship]
2 - I needed a college degree to go to graduate school, and spend 5 years busting my ass at minimum wage.
3 - ???
4 - Profit!
again, the positive effects refer to performance on a specific task, not rate of learning a new task. a persistent change in the latter would be truly groundbreaking news, but it doesn't seem to me that they have any such results (positive or negative).
well, what i meant was that my guess is that their rate of learning was only affected while the current was on, in which case there would be no effect on their ability to learn a new job, etc. but that's only a guess, i didn't read the article in detail, and i don't know if their experiments address this question or not.
you can't improve upon the performance of your brain and your body without longterm tradeoffs
i hate that kind of defeatist, "nature/god knows best" attitude. everything you have right now is thanks to people who believed they could do better than nature, and they did. yes, you shouldn't do lines of coke to be better at your job, because that is a hack. it doesn't mean we can't make ourselves truly better, without "overclocking" and burning out. a candle that burns twice as bright could burn out twice as fast, or it could simply be a fucking light bulb that lasts 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
meh, real men use LaTeX for theses...
:]
I have never modded (negatively) based on agreement. I have been tempted, but I admonish myself every time, to make sure it never happens.
by the way, sorry for being a dick earlier. i strongly disagree with you (very strongly. ok, VERY strongly), but i shouldn't have resorted to schoolyard insults. i apologize.
Agreed - and do you call public, mandatory pornography a sound policy decision, in the complete absence of any independently funded, unbiased studies indicating benefit from said policies in reducing risk of *spooky voice* terrorism?
that is the stupidest argument i have or will ever hear in my entire life. scared people do irrational things. they let incorrect things be done. greedy people take advantage of this. 'laws' that were created by these greedy people shouldn't be respected, they should be torn out of the books and shat on, then burned, then force-fed to the people who passed them in the first place. oh, and to you.
ah, just remembered, the word is 'oligopoly'. still, i like polypoly better...
lolz. but seriously, what are all these complaints i've been hearing about spam in google search results? anyone have an example where, say, bing provides search results that are obviously better than google's?
maybe if i ever searched for anything other than the latest semi-supervised learning paper, i'd have noticed this too.. DAMN YOU, GRADUATE SCHOOL!!!
i think we need a new word to describe a sector of the market dominated not by one, but a few very large units - say, instead of 'monopoly', we'll call it a 'polypoly'? [there probably already is a word for that, but whatever it is, i'm sure it's not as much fun to write as 'polypoly'. go ahead, give it a shot.]
now, as far as i can tell, 'polypolies' aren't as bad as monopolies, but they're still problematic in many ways - they concentrate a lot of the wealth in the hands of a few, making it next to impossible for individuals/small groups to enter the market. and i have plenty of examples for that, retail probably being the most obvious. that's what walmart is - it's not a monopoly, it's a polypoly [heh, i love that word...].
it sucks, but if you let demand determine everything, i think polypolies are inevitable. walmart can give you the best prices around, so people will go there. as people go there, they get bigger, and offer even better prices. a small mom and pop store doesn't have a chance to compete against that. you're right, natural monopolies seem to be rare without government support. but that doesn't mean complete deregulation leads to good things.
i see your point about the evidence suggesting there's some underlying difference between christianity and islam, which leads to different kinds of corruption. i wonder how true that is, though. i don't have a lot of knowledge on this matter, but it is my understanding that for a long period of time during the middle ages, christianity was turned into a tool of oppression much like islam is today in many places. i wonder if the difference isn't purely cultural... or, perhaps, a combination of cultural factors, and the greater ease with which violence can be justified through islam (which is another claim i have no proof of, but have heard often, and don't find hard to believe - AFAIK, muhamed, being a warrior in many ways, often stated that violence can be justified).
don't worry, I got your joke, even if nobody else did ;]
wabbit season!
WTF kind of 3rd world country is this? It sounds like France, for christ's sake! Seriously, if you have all that, maybe it's time to re-classify that country? I've lived in a third world country, and I've seen two kinds of relationships between employers and employees: family members, or slave-owner/slave.
dude, i love the new google image search...
I'm German, you insensitive clod! Perversion is our way of life.
Just trollin'. I'm not German, nor do I have any negative opinions about the Superior Race. Oops, Freudian slip!
I've done that. Why else would I have Vista on my machine?
accident? just sayin', screw-ups happen. maybe somebody spilled coffee on a sub's weapons control console.
sounds interesting - would you happen to know a name under which that branch is known today, so I can look up more information?
out of curiosity, if science is all well and good in your book, then what exactly is the subset of your beliefs that match the definition of a religious fundamentalist? (i'm not suggesting anything, i just want to know... if you feel like sharing.)
I'm not sure I agree with this. Right now I'm at a top CS grad school, and from everything I've seen, the university itself isn't really doing squat to support the CS program. All the individual professors' funding comes from grants, and the infrastructure comes from other contributions. BTW, though I don't have much love for MS, I gotta say -- thanks Mr. Gates, LOVE the building!!!
I wonder what the marginal cost of processing each application, + the extra marketing required to get it, is? Is it really less than $50? I'd think it'd take at least a few man-hours to process an application, and admissions people don't come cheap...
1 - college doesn't have to cost anything [need-based scholarship]
2 - I needed a college degree to go to graduate school, and spend 5 years busting my ass at minimum wage.
3 - ???
4 - Profit!
you have such tiny thighs? i'm really sorry...
again, the positive effects refer to performance on a specific task, not rate of learning a new task. a persistent change in the latter would be truly groundbreaking news, but it doesn't seem to me that they have any such results (positive or negative).
well, what i meant was that my guess is that their rate of learning was only affected while the current was on, in which case there would be no effect on their ability to learn a new job, etc. but that's only a guess, i didn't read the article in detail, and i don't know if their experiments address this question or not.
you can't improve upon the performance of your brain and your body without longterm tradeoffs
i hate that kind of defeatist, "nature/god knows best" attitude. everything you have right now is thanks to people who believed they could do better than nature, and they did. yes, you shouldn't do lines of coke to be better at your job, because that is a hack. it doesn't mean we can't make ourselves truly better, without "overclocking" and burning out. a candle that burns twice as bright could burn out twice as fast, or it could simply be a fucking light bulb that lasts 5 years.