Math doesn't require infinities. Or infinitesimals. They are only there because they make calculation easier. There were a lot of arguments about this back in the early days of the calculus, and the people in favor in infinites won only for two reasons: 1) God is infinite and unbounded, and 2) It makes calculation easier.
While agree with the second point, this doesn't imply accepting it as anything other than a calculational convenience.
In a way this is sort of like boolean logic. It's a great tool, but one never knows with 100% certainty that something is either true or false. Probability theory is a more accurate statement, but harder to calculate with. And finite probability theory is, I believe, and even better model. Unfortunately, it's also harder to calculate with.
Similarly, Relativity gives more accurate orbital predictions than Newton's laws, but NASA uses Newton, because the calculation is easier. Ease of calculation is frequently the deciding factor, but the underlying model should understand the inherent uncertainty in the measurements, and acknowledge that we don't have infinite precision. (And I believe that the universe doesn't contain infinite precision, but *that* is a belief, not a fact.)
The concept of limit is not only not simple, I believe it to be false. It's a very useful theoretical concept, as is the real number line, but I do not believe that it has any actual existence in the world outside of mathematics. Just because you can't look at something close enough to see where it dissolves into pieces doesn't mean that it's actually continuous. This is why Xeno's paradoxes were so annoying. Most of them rely simplicity on the assumption of continuity, which is intuitive, but false. (Some of them have more complex failing, however. Achilles and the Tortoise also relies on the sums of infinite series being not being finite.) But Cantor's solution was not the way the universe solves the problems.
Archimedes didn't discover the calculus. He didn't discover the theory of limits. He discovered what I to be a more accurate thing, the method of approximation.
As I don't believe in infinities or continuity, I consider the calculus to be a useful but false approximation of reality, just as I consider the real number line. I mean just think a minute about one of the proofs: You make two copies of all the real numbers between 1 and 0, and you paint one red and the other blue.... What does that even MEAN!!
Just because the universe is continuous to below levels that we can measure (and probably below levels that we can hope to measure...i'm thinking around 10^-33 cm here... that doesn't imply that it's continuous below that level. Just because the space-time is continuous as far as we can see, and plausibly far beyond that, doesn't imply that it's actually unending. Just that we'll never be able to see the end. (Or it could wrap around and rejoin itself even within our visual horizon, and we'd never know because of the time variable.)
This doesn't, by the way, imply an absence of singularities. It actually implies that small singularities are everywhere, they're just usually too small to see.
And this is much more in agreement with the theories of Archimedes than with either the calculus or Cantor. But when seen from a distance you can't tell the results apart.
In the 1960's most newpapers were independent of outside owners. In 201x I can't think of a single major news source that is independent. The net, which should be the replacement, is so splintered and filled with untrustworthy sources that most people only pay attention to sites that they already agree with. (We were warned that this was coming back in, I think it was, the 1980's, but nobody took it seriously, even though newspapers were already being bought by corporations that had no, or minimal, interest in the news business and the web had already started to separate into echo chambers. I ignored it myself. I was opposed to the newspaper acquisitions because I was against centralized controls on principle, not because I could see where it would lead.)
I didn't realize just what the purpose of this was until the main local newspaper was bought by a liquor company. This was clearly not an investment for capital gain, as the paper was losing money. It could have been made barely profitable with careful work, but it couldn't ever repay the cost paid to buy it. So there was clearly some other reason. It took a few years to be certain what the purpose was, but they were clearly sculpting the news. Not lying anymore than before, but selecting which stories to push and which to let die.
And this was being done all over the country. Now even the small local news only sheet has been bought by a chain, and only the neighborhood newspaper hasn't been purchased. One of the corporations buying newspapers was Heublein, Inc., but they didn't print any more liquor (or fewer) ads after they bought the paper. And they sure didn't buy them as money makers.
You can trace a large part of the problem back to the patent office decision to not require a working copy before granting a patent. And for software, even worse, to not require the source code.
Certain sources of new/content may only be available on one web site, or one small class of web sites. You can't always find a version that doesn't require JavaScript or worse.
Pretty much, since scaling laws are quite important, but pure communism scales better than pure anarchy. I believe that the Oneida lasted as a pure communism until there were more than 200 people (or was that families?) involved. Then it segued into a socialism. It's still going, but I don't know what it's current social structure is.
But if your community is small enough, a charismatic leader and a strong belief system can make pretty much anything work. Most things can be made to work with a group size below 20.
Even if they were, that wouldn't imply that individual people should need to attend to them.
What *is* legitimate is to consider viewing them the price of seeing the web page. I have not problem with that, but I almost always consider the price too high.
Yes/No. You do need to execute something. Flash isn't a passive display system. You don't need to intentionally trust that particular Flash ad. Not if you haven't already taken evasive action.
I agree with you sufficiently that I don't have Flash installed on my computer. I disagree with you sufficiently that my wife was able to browbeat me into installing it on hers.
Sorry, but a major attack vector for malware is random improperly trusted executables. I'll agree that it's not *the* major attack vector, but it's a major one. (Here I'm thinking of "Intended to install application X, but I got application Y [and possibly also X].)
Not only have we not, we won't. Socialism can be a workable large scale system, Communism and communism cannot. Small-scale communism can work reasonably well, though it requires a charismatic leader and a strong belief system. The Oneida community worked for generations. I have not run across any example of Communism (i.e., Marxism) working. I believe that it is probably unworkable at any scale beyond, perhaps, the individual.
I expect that the next dominant form of government will be either a socialism or some variety of monarchy. Either may also be totalitarian, which is orthogonal to the democratic/monarchist axis. (So is socialism. Socialisms can be either democratic or monarchical.)
Please note: I say monarchy rather than dictatorship because persisting dictatorships inevitably turn into monarchies as the generations pass. Also note that I left out oligarchy. Oligarchy seems to be the persistent substrate on which these other distinctions float.
That wasn't fiction, and wasn't set in an era with fast transport. If you want to use the East India Company as a horrible example, you need to have either at least interplanetary travel or some sort of post catastrophe scenario where travel is again slow enough that it can take months for a message to get through.
What did current "authoritative sources" derive from? They derived from locally maintained lists of contacts that people had...which worked quite well as long as you only needed to track 20 or so sites. So the multiple sources would get their data by polling local sites for "who lives there?", just like was done originally. there would need to be mechanisms for collision resolution, but variations have been worked out in hash tables, so it's not an intrinsically hard problem...actually there are several plausible solutions, and different implementations could pick different answers. Also different higher level sources should pick different groups of local sources to poll for efficiency, but if there's duplication isn't not that much of a problem. (You would get more network traffic while establishing a connection, with each site maintaining an authentication key...it would be nice if the authentication key could be unforgeable, but I see no way to do that.)
If you mean the idea needs fleshing out and lots of work, you're correct, but as stated I suspect you of being a teenager trying to look informed.
When I hear "Chapter 11" I think of SCOx. It may not be bankruptcy for the company, but it is for the creditor. I believe that most of the assets ended up with the friends of the bankruptcy judge. And even with that I don't consider the bankruptcy judge to be the major villain of the piece.
Ever since then I don't trust any business headquartered in Utah. Even though I know that "guilt by association" is unreasonable.
That's not necessarily true if you're using directional antennas to partition the mesh. For that matter, if you're using directional antennas you could probably get away with infra-red links, which have a huge potential bandwidth. Doesn't sound like they're doing anything that fancy, though. Sounds more like a cellular system with a mesh local connection, which, which a small enough cell, could be done with next to no power so you wouldn't have a problem with overloading.
Yeah, if they were using a simple mesh network they could easily get overfilled, but then they wouldn't be using directional antennas, so that's not what they're doing.
Well, it's a vote, so those entitled to vote can vote either way. So they *are* allowed to voice their opinions. And you are voicing your opinion.
Were I a Wikipedia Editor, I'd probably vote to ask for his removal. He sounds like someone with an established history of anti-employee actions, and even if Wikipedia Editors aren't employees (I think it's volunteer work), there is substantial similarity.
No. The most likely place is in the implementation of the crypto algorithm. And I doubt anyone will check that. (It's not actually impossible, but the first step would be to turn the binary into assembler...and I'm guessing it's easy to read the binary.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it appears that she had a home email server and *didn't* know how to use it.
Math doesn't require infinities. Or infinitesimals. They are only there because they make calculation easier. There were a lot of arguments about this back in the early days of the calculus, and the people in favor in infinites won only for two reasons:
1) God is infinite and unbounded, and
2) It makes calculation easier.
While agree with the second point, this doesn't imply accepting it as anything other than a calculational convenience.
In a way this is sort of like boolean logic. It's a great tool, but one never knows with 100% certainty that something is either true or false. Probability theory is a more accurate statement, but harder to calculate with. And finite probability theory is, I believe, and even better model. Unfortunately, it's also harder to calculate with.
Similarly, Relativity gives more accurate orbital predictions than Newton's laws, but NASA uses Newton, because the calculation is easier. Ease of calculation is frequently the deciding factor, but the underlying model should understand the inherent uncertainty in the measurements, and acknowledge that we don't have infinite precision. (And I believe that the universe doesn't contain infinite precision, but *that* is a belief, not a fact.)
The concept of limit is not only not simple, I believe it to be false. It's a very useful theoretical concept, as is the real number line, but I do not believe that it has any actual existence in the world outside of mathematics. Just because you can't look at something close enough to see where it dissolves into pieces doesn't mean that it's actually continuous. This is why Xeno's paradoxes were so annoying. Most of them rely simplicity on the assumption of continuity, which is intuitive, but false. (Some of them have more complex failing, however. Achilles and the Tortoise also relies on the sums of infinite series being not being finite.) But Cantor's solution was not the way the universe solves the problems.
I bet you don't believe in the year 0 BCE either.
Archimedes didn't discover the calculus. He didn't discover the theory of limits. He discovered what I to be a more accurate thing, the method of approximation.
As I don't believe in infinities or continuity, I consider the calculus to be a useful but false approximation of reality, just as I consider the real number line. I mean just think a minute about one of the proofs: You make two copies of all the real numbers between 1 and 0, and you paint one red and the other blue.... What does that even MEAN!!
Just because the universe is continuous to below levels that we can measure (and probably below levels that we can hope to measure...i'm thinking around 10^-33 cm here ... that doesn't imply that it's continuous below that level. Just because the space-time is continuous as far as we can see, and plausibly far beyond that, doesn't imply that it's actually unending. Just that we'll never be able to see the end. (Or it could wrap around and rejoin itself even within our visual horizon, and we'd never know because of the time variable.)
This doesn't, by the way, imply an absence of singularities. It actually implies that small singularities are everywhere, they're just usually too small to see.
And this is much more in agreement with the theories of Archimedes than with either the calculus or Cantor. But when seen from a distance you can't tell the results apart.
Concentration of media ownership.
In the 1960's most newpapers were independent of outside owners. In 201x I can't think of a single major news source that is independent. The net, which should be the replacement, is so splintered and filled with untrustworthy sources that most people only pay attention to sites that they already agree with. (We were warned that this was coming back in, I think it was, the 1980's, but nobody took it seriously, even though newspapers were already being bought by corporations that had no, or minimal, interest in the news business and the web had already started to separate into echo chambers. I ignored it myself. I was opposed to the newspaper acquisitions because I was against centralized controls on principle, not because I could see where it would lead.)
I didn't realize just what the purpose of this was until the main local newspaper was bought by a liquor company. This was clearly not an investment for capital gain, as the paper was losing money. It could have been made barely profitable with careful work, but it couldn't ever repay the cost paid to buy it. So there was clearly some other reason. It took a few years to be certain what the purpose was, but they were clearly sculpting the news. Not lying anymore than before, but selecting which stories to push and which to let die.
And this was being done all over the country. Now even the small local news only sheet has been bought by a chain, and only the neighborhood newspaper hasn't been purchased. One of the corporations buying newspapers was Heublein, Inc., but they didn't print any more liquor (or fewer) ads after they bought the paper. And they sure didn't buy them as money makers.
What he was pointing out was the the shell company fronting the suit wouldn't have any resourced to recover damages, or even lawyers fees, from.
You can trace a large part of the problem back to the patent office decision to not require a working copy before granting a patent. And for software, even worse, to not require the source code.
I think he's objecting to the placement of the apostrophe. Thinks that it should be "trolls' " rather than "troll's". I agree, but that's being picky.
Perhaps not directly, but I'm now considering making my next purchase from NewEgg rather than from a local store.
OK, let me be more explicit.
Certain sources of new/content may only be available on one web site, or one small class of web sites. You can't always find a version that doesn't require JavaScript or worse.
Pretty much, since scaling laws are quite important, but pure communism scales better than pure anarchy. I believe that the Oneida lasted as a pure communism until there were more than 200 people (or was that families?) involved. Then it segued into a socialism. It's still going, but I don't know what it's current social structure is.
But if your community is small enough, a charismatic leader and a strong belief system can make pretty much anything work. Most things can be made to work with a group size below 20.
Even if they were, that wouldn't imply that individual people should need to attend to them.
What *is* legitimate is to consider viewing them the price of seeing the web page. I have not problem with that, but I almost always consider the price too high.
Yes/No. If you want to follow "Starts with a Bang", you may not have an alternative to Forbes. Still, the argument is usually true.
Yes/No. You do need to execute something. Flash isn't a passive display system. You don't need to intentionally trust that particular Flash ad. Not if you haven't already taken evasive action.
I agree with you sufficiently that I don't have Flash installed on my computer. I disagree with you sufficiently that my wife was able to browbeat me into installing it on hers.
Sorry, but a major attack vector for malware is random improperly trusted executables. I'll agree that it's not *the* major attack vector, but it's a major one. (Here I'm thinking of "Intended to install application X, but I got application Y [and possibly also X].)
Not only have we not, we won't. Socialism can be a workable large scale system, Communism and communism cannot. Small-scale communism can work reasonably well, though it requires a charismatic leader and a strong belief system. The Oneida community worked for generations. I have not run across any example of Communism (i.e., Marxism) working. I believe that it is probably unworkable at any scale beyond, perhaps, the individual.
I expect that the next dominant form of government will be either a socialism or some variety of monarchy. Either may also be totalitarian, which is orthogonal to the democratic/monarchist axis. (So is socialism. Socialisms can be either democratic or monarchical.)
Please note: I say monarchy rather than dictatorship because persisting dictatorships inevitably turn into monarchies as the generations pass. Also note that I left out oligarchy. Oligarchy seems to be the persistent substrate on which these other distinctions float.
That wasn't fiction, and wasn't set in an era with fast transport. If you want to use the East India Company as a horrible example, you need to have either at least interplanetary travel or some sort of post catastrophe scenario where travel is again slow enough that it can take months for a message to get through.
What did current "authoritative sources" derive from? They derived from locally maintained lists of contacts that people had...which worked quite well as long as you only needed to track 20 or so sites. So the multiple sources would get their data by polling local sites for "who lives there?", just like was done originally. there would need to be mechanisms for collision resolution, but variations have been worked out in hash tables, so it's not an intrinsically hard problem...actually there are several plausible solutions, and different implementations could pick different answers. Also different higher level sources should pick different groups of local sources to poll for efficiency, but if there's duplication isn't not that much of a problem. (You would get more network traffic while establishing a connection, with each site maintaining an authentication key...it would be nice if the authentication key could be unforgeable, but I see no way to do that.)
If you mean the idea needs fleshing out and lots of work, you're correct, but as stated I suspect you of being a teenager trying to look informed.
When I hear "Chapter 11" I think of SCOx. It may not be bankruptcy for the company, but it is for the creditor. I believe that most of the assets ended up with the friends of the bankruptcy judge. And even with that I don't consider the bankruptcy judge to be the major villain of the piece.
Ever since then I don't trust any business headquartered in Utah. Even though I know that "guilt by association" is unreasonable.
That's not necessarily true if you're using directional antennas to partition the mesh. For that matter, if you're using directional antennas you could probably get away with infra-red links, which have a huge potential bandwidth. Doesn't sound like they're doing anything that fancy, though. Sounds more like a cellular system with a mesh local connection, which, which a small enough cell, could be done with next to no power so you wouldn't have a problem with overloading.
Yeah, if they were using a simple mesh network they could easily get overfilled, but then they wouldn't be using directional antennas, so that's not what they're doing.
Well, it's a vote, so those entitled to vote can vote either way. So they *are* allowed to voice their opinions. And you are voicing your opinion.
Were I a Wikipedia Editor, I'd probably vote to ask for his removal. He sounds like someone with an established history of anti-employee actions, and even if Wikipedia Editors aren't employees (I think it's volunteer work), there is substantial similarity.
No. The most likely place is in the implementation of the crypto algorithm. And I doubt anyone will check that. (It's not actually impossible, but the first step would be to turn the binary into assembler...and I'm guessing it's easy to read the binary.)
Aspin's "Cold Cash War" was before that, and Mack Reynolds stories even before that. And I'm not sure he was the first.
Is everyone not seeing the sarcasm, or am I mis-imputing it?
To me the parent post was clearly sarcasm, but the moderators and every other respondent seems not to have read it that way.