The screen turns at a faster rate than your head. For example 15-30 degrees (gentle enough to turn your eyeballs and still look at the screen) correlates to 90 degrees of camera rotation. Many people use this system already for PC racing sims successfully.
With word coming out that they removed Natal's processor and it'll now use anywhere from 10% to 33% of the 360's own processing power, just how good will the games be? There's going to be a price in what developers can you do when you chop that much CPU time out of the system compared to a standard game.
I don't think it will be a problem for games designed from the get-go to take advantage of the system, but it will limit adding the feature to already released games.
It is how we use the technology that will be important. It might be a fad in games but this has so many other uses and might present a cheaper method for many people to enter into this field (motion control portion not the game portion).
An interesting potential use is like TrackIR for head tracking and controlling the game camera. Especially for flight or driving games where it's inconvenient to use the right thumb stick to look around. I can envision other, similar uses to augment standard control schemes.
1) Too bad you will have to leave your device in the path of that directional beam.
Why does it have to be a directional beam? It can be anything from a beam to a pretty decent cone.
Even a cone diminishes at an inverse-squared rate, it just starts more powerful. The measurement of an antenna reflects this, as it is simply a dB ratio of the power compared to a spherical-radiating antenna.
Even if you have a 4W transmitter focused onto 1m^2, this receiver is no bigger than 10cm^2. You'd still only receive 1% of the power (40mW), and only if the receiver stays within that 1m^2 area, and that's also your WiFi signal. The point of WiFi is to let you access the internet in a way that lets you move more than 1m, so the idea is bunk anyway.
You're still starting with too small of an initial power and losing too much of it to be of any practical use even if you design the system to take advantage of it, let alone in a random public location.
The Phubby isn't that bad. There are times where you don't want your phone in your pocket, such as when exercising. I mean, iPods already have armband holders, this just looks like a generic one for your phone. I could see wanting something like this for my phone, moreso than a hat that can hold my phone in the brim. And it certainly relates to consumer electronics, so I think CES is as good a place as any to debut it.
It's meant to scavenge from 2.4GHz WiFi, which emits radially, and therefor follows the inverse square law.
Luckily for me I have a parabolic dish behind all my wifi base stations;)
1) Too bad you will have to leave your device in the path of that directional beam.
2) If you're in your own house, is this supremely more useful than charging from the wall?
3) Still doesn't make it useful as soon as you leave your house, which is the idea.
The inverse square law and dBm being a logarithmic unit can all go to hell.
What makes you think it's got to be an inverse square law? An inverse square law would apply to something emitted radially, but in the case of a charger, it need not be.
True, but that's not what this charger is. It's meant to scavenge from 2.4GHz WiFi, which emits radially, and therefor follows the inverse square law.
Because a lot of that advantage is gained by the gas generator running at an efficient RPM for power generation. The car would still need a bank of batteries (or maybe supercapacitors) to smooth out the available power to the electric motor. Without batteries, the mileage would drop.
They could sell a version with fewer batteries, but it would still be more expensive than a hybrid with comparable mileage. Better for them to charge a premium and fill the 'plug-in ERV electric' niche instead.
A discussion of weight doesn't change the fact that the original poster is incorrect about his assumption that performance is automatically going to be the same on an electrically-powered vehicle when running on battery, accelerating on stored charge in a capacitor bank or running directly off its generator. The amount of power available to drive the motor is different in all those scenarios, so the only way you will get identical performance is if you artificially limit all of them to the performance characteristics of the lowest performing mode of operation.
Automatically the same, no, but it's relatively simple to engineer it that way. Consider that an engine's hp is measured as the peak. Under normal driving conditions, the engine puts out far below its peak power, particularly if your car has an automatic transmission. You only need that peak power for 10-15 seconds as you accelerate to highway speeds. Moreover, the electric motor will only use its peak power at high revs, meaning high speeds.
Let me rework your numbers. I'm guessing normal driving conditions will be closer to 33hp, or 25kW. Your estimate of nearly 20% losses in the power system seems high to me as well (I'm an EE), let's go with a more reasonable 10%. So, a 30kW (40hp) generator would be able to charge the battery slowly.
So there may be a limit to the performance (can't keep the pedal to the floor at 100mph when the generator is running for more than 1 minute), but it's unreasonable for anyone to reach that limit under normal use. This won't be a race car, but you can't fault it for that, just like you don't fault a Larmbourghini for not being able to tow a trailor.
I'm sure atheists don't go an mail the researchers no. BUT atheists don't threaten them with bodily harm. They don't leave bombs on the front step.
Extremists and radicals of any color do ridiculous shit, they don't really belong to the group they are radicals from (hence the name). Some pro-choice guy from near my hometown shot two anti-abortion activists because they were holding signs, that doesn't mean pro-choice activists are violent and shoot those who disagree with them.
It's better to just focus on the mainline and ignore the radicals, because otherwise everyone becomes a whacko.
2) The idea is to not play whack-a-mole and have to ban a cheater 5 times, once for each game. It results in a better experience for the clean end-user.
cheating in one games doesn't mean cheating in an other game.
Not necessarily, but if there is a serial-cheater on PS3, Sony really can't do anything about it. Even if it's only one game they get banned from, they could make another PSN account for free and continue cheating.
Yet MS did that + other things to render the console it self useless (and that wasn't for in game cheaters, it was done to people who moded their box, some do it to play backups -- not paying for games --, some simply do it to get more out of their console, but that doesn't make a difference they are banned).
Right, but the consoles broke the ToS and were thus no longer elligible to use any Live-enabled services. Microsoft is under no requirement to provide online service to them, and the players can still access Live from un-modded consoles.
PC is a gaming platform with less control, an yet it is very successful (it is related come to think of it).
I wouldn't say that PC is more successful, aside from Valve, Blizzard, and The Sims being the obvious success stories.
Of course, if you want to continue that train of thought, the Wii is equally restrictive (can't even use text chat aside from pre-entered sentences in most games) yet has much larger sales. So, the secret to success is no unifying online presence (different ID for each game) and limited communication?
As for ToS most people won't bother reading them and most of those people take them lightly or see them as just an annoying step to get what they want. (that is a very big problem in it's self, EFF web site has some nice reading in that regard)
I agree, but I don't think that gives carte blanche to break them, especially if the terms are obvious. I can have sympathy on some people, but when it comes to cheating you should know you're doing something wrong and could be punished.
You do stupid stuff on home you get banned from home. you do stupid stuff on game X you get banned from game X. when you buy a console you don;t just own one game. banning simply from the service is not fair (not that I'm defending the cheaters here) especially if you're paying for that service and you don;t get a refund.
1) Banning them from the service is fair if you don't follow the rules of the service. MS doesn't just ban on a whim.
2) The idea is to not play whack-a-mole and have to ban a cheater 5 times, once for each game. It results in a better experience for the clean end-user.
3) Many cheaters in a game are simply banned from that game by the developers, depending on the nature of the cheat/exploit. Microsoft only bans accounts when there is a ToS violation.
They can ban the PS3 it self.
Seems like a much more severe penalty than needed, especially if multiple players share a console. And, it would result in increased used consoles which have no online capabilities. Ban the player, not the terminal.
On an other unrelated note, forcing people to pay to play online is just plain wrong (not talking about World of warcraft, the games is designed that way). most shooters on PC you get at least the possibility to set up you own game server and invite friends without going through any service at all. a possibility that is taken away in the console world. and With PSN they're are adding premium to get more money but for added values you can opt-out from, at least the basic feature (among other things) of playing will remain free.
Right, PC games (usually) do it differently. That's not the issue here. We're comparing PS3 to XBox online service.
Regardless, MS charges for the online services they provide, one of which is maintaining a level playing field by globally banning cheaters. Many feel this is worth paying for, others don't. Use whichever you prefer.
You are blaming sony for a lack of control of their hardware ? that should be a first here.
No, control on their network. MS only has control over their hardware in as much as they can limit access to their network capabilities. However, more importantly, they can use this same control to limit any ToS violation, particularly cheating, while any mechanism on PSN can be easily circumvented with a new account.
would you care to elaborate on PSN vs Live ??? Live has nothing more to give than PSN except the cost (I don't see the added value to justify that)
Frankly I fail to see a relation between the matter at hand and that.
On Live, if you get banned for violating their ToS (for example, hacking your box, cheating, sufficient complaints of racism) then you are banned from all online play. On the PS3, Sony does not (to my knowledge) participate in the ban process except for their own services. So, if you get banned from Home for racism you can still play all your other games online. Each game needs to ban you individually, thus fewer asshats will be banned for any particular game.
Even the cost itself helps here. If someone gets banned from PSN for cheating, they can just make another free account. If someone gets banned from XBL, they must pony up cash to create a new account, giving a monetary disincentive not to cheat.
They definitely aren't sentient before the formation of neural system. Which can be approximated to, useful in practice, "only first trimester"
First trimester is an embryo. Afterward (when it has a nervous system) it is a fetus. I believe you and I are in agreement. The only difference between a 3rd trimester fetus and a newborn (from a sentience/humanity view) are which side of the vagina it is on.
BTW, however I do have my reservations towards abortion on the moral grounds, I do accept it as necessary (only limited to, say, first trimester mentioned above, pharmacological methods, etc.) Limited one is the least of evils. On one hand you have practically unlimited one throughout whole pregnancy, which is inexcusable.
Agreed, abortions are awful, but so are a lot of the alternatives (abandoned or abused children, unnecessary death of mothers, reminders of sexual abuse, etc). Whichever choice we make, we still lose...
As for statistics - surely you must realize that being a scientist, even a statistician specifically, doesn't automatically cause one to use those methods in daily life. Or doesn't automatically cause one to dismiss things we were brought into from our earliest days - it's damn hard, much more than pursuing a career path which is a bit disconnected from the social experiences of first dozen years of life.
Absolutely, my issue is more with the GP's claim that the religious have less 'understanding' of statistics than others. It's absolutely human nature to dismiss statistics for psychological reasons. It has nothing to do with the implied naiivete of 'religious folks'.
But do you think one of them bothered to write a thank you note to the surgeon who performed heroic surgery?
I do expect that your relatives thanked their doctor, they're the ones who should be thanking him.
I don't generally see people thanking they had no contact with ("hey, I'm going to thank your barber for giving you a good haircut"), though they may pass their praise along through the original person ("tell your barber he did a good job"). I would expect the same in this situation ("pass along our thanks to the surgeon, please").
Uhm, no. There's this "Satan"/etc. safety valve that stops people from blaming gods too much. And even if gods are held responsible, it's always: "I wasn't good enough, I wasn't praying enough, gods are testing me, it is beyond our understanding" - they always have some excuse
I dunno, I tend to hear a lot more "Why did you let them die, God" than "Why did you let them die, Dr. Soandso".
And please, religious folks understanding medical statistics? Where on Earth have you seen that?
Consider: if they would understand statistics, there would be no miracles. But you hear about one from time to time, when the patient simply managed to be in the very small group that survives serious condition. But...why it's not a miracle when somebody dies from flu? Why? The mechanism is the same.
One can understand statistics and also believe that they can be manipulated. Are you claiming that the many religious mathematicians, scientists, and engineers do not understand statistics?
For example, statistics tells us that if we roll a standard die, our likelyhood of rolling a 6 is 1/6. However, if the die roll is obscured and only the final result is seen, it could be a reasonable assumption that a 3rd party may be modifying the result of the rolls. Whether there is evidence or not, it is possible, and would be silly to assume there is no possible way it couldn't be modified.
So, for those who believe in an omnipotent, omnipresent diety, miracles and statistics are consistent with each other. Your issue is not with misunderstandings of statistics, but rather with belief in afforementioned diety.
Does a fetus instantaneously become sentient while passing through a vagina, but no earlier? Or does it happen afterward, meaning some infants are not sentient and can also be killed at will?
I'm not saying abortion is immoral in all circumstances (rape, extreme deformity, unfit parents, etc), but I don't think the argument that embryos or fetuses aren't human or living doesn't hold much water, scientifically or philosophically.
To be fair, I think God gets a lot of the blame when things don't work out, too. And how many atheists do you think thank the researchers instead of just the doctor?
That said, most people I know thank God for providing a good doctor who performs their treatment effectively, as well as for putting them in the 80% (for example) of people for whom the treatment works. I don't know anyone who doesn't thank the doctor as well.
Well, if he takes calculus and vectors he'll also learn how to find his own solutions to an array of problems, just different ones. The thing is that the kinds of problems that you can solve with one of them are invariable either impossible or intractable with the other. The questions he should ask himself are things like "what do I want to do with my life - games or crypto?" and "what is easier for me to do on the side later in professional life if it turns out I needed it after all?" and "can I do them both?" and "do I really need either of them?" Most programmers don't touch maths any more these days. Most programming is either monkey work where someone else did the maths for you or design work where you build complex systems out of pre-existant parts that already contain all the algorithms you'll ever need and probably more efficient than you could ever hope to implement them yourself.
P.S. Good courses dealing with vector calculus targeted at programmers will deal with tractability, precision, performance, data storage and other issues, and will learn you many a great lesson on doing for example matrix math efficiently, including the most important one: there are good matrix maths libraries out there, use them - people have devoted large chunks of time to small parts of them and you can't hope to outdo them. Avoid doing such low-level things yourself unless you genuinely have special needs.
First, the problems solved by calculus don't make you a good programmer without the fundamentals of discrete to back them up. If you can only write specialized functions, you will be quickly replaced by someone more versitile than you (especially if you are self-described 'bad at math').
Also, if the goal is to take the class that is useful to only about 1% of programmers, he'd better be sure he's better than 99% of other programmers at those tasks, otherwise he's hosed. But, as you said, most of the math functions are built into libraries, making the calculus slightly redundant. However, discrete is more about logic and actually programming, rather than math. Discrete is necessary to know how to make many programs work, and it can't be imported as a library.
The algorithms are less important than understanding the inherent issues with numeric computing. If you know why to avoid floating point subtraction, division, and compounding then the algorithms follow pretty naturally (or can be researched). On the other hand, knowing several algorithms is less useful and doesn't guarantee you learn anything that would transfer to more general skills.
Agreed. Discrete math is vital groundwork for a lot of what is expected from a programmer, while the second course seems more focused but less generally applicable. Basically, if you take discrete you will learn how to find your own solutions to an array of problems through logic, set theory, combinatorics, and algorithms; while the second course will basically teach you a few concepts used in 3D graphics and physics modeling. Unless you absolutely know you want to work in a field that would heavily use the second course, take discrete. However, even if you take the 'selected chapters' course, I think you would have difficulties doing much useful with vector math or calculus without knowing discrete math to turn it into an effective and efficient algorithm.
To be truly successful, though, you should take both, even if you take one pass/fail or not for credit. The information is just too important not to have.
Slashdot Mirror
The screen turns at a faster rate than your head. For example 15-30 degrees (gentle enough to turn your eyeballs and still look at the screen) correlates to 90 degrees of camera rotation. Many people use this system already for PC racing sims successfully.
With word coming out that they removed Natal's processor and it'll now use anywhere from 10% to 33% of the 360's own processing power, just how good will the games be? There's going to be a price in what developers can you do when you chop that much CPU time out of the system compared to a standard game.
I don't think it will be a problem for games designed from the get-go to take advantage of the system, but it will limit adding the feature to already released games.
It is how we use the technology that will be important. It might be a fad in games but this has so many other uses and might present a cheaper method for many people to enter into this field (motion control portion not the game portion).
An interesting potential use is like TrackIR for head tracking and controlling the game camera. Especially for flight or driving games where it's inconvenient to use the right thumb stick to look around. I can envision other, similar uses to augment standard control schemes.
What about Gay, MI and the local Gay Bar?
1) Too bad you will have to leave your device in the path of that directional beam.
Why does it have to be a directional beam? It can be anything from a beam to a pretty decent cone.
Even a cone diminishes at an inverse-squared rate, it just starts more powerful. The measurement of an antenna reflects this, as it is simply a dB ratio of the power compared to a spherical-radiating antenna.
Even if you have a 4W transmitter focused onto 1m^2, this receiver is no bigger than 10cm^2. You'd still only receive 1% of the power (40mW), and only if the receiver stays within that 1m^2 area, and that's also your WiFi signal. The point of WiFi is to let you access the internet in a way that lets you move more than 1m, so the idea is bunk anyway.
You're still starting with too small of an initial power and losing too much of it to be of any practical use even if you design the system to take advantage of it, let alone in a random public location.
The Phubby isn't that bad. There are times where you don't want your phone in your pocket, such as when exercising. I mean, iPods already have armband holders, this just looks like a generic one for your phone. I could see wanting something like this for my phone, moreso than a hat that can hold my phone in the brim. And it certainly relates to consumer electronics, so I think CES is as good a place as any to debut it.
The name, though, is certainly unfortunate...
It's meant to scavenge from 2.4GHz WiFi, which emits radially, and therefor follows the inverse square law.
Luckily for me I have a parabolic dish behind all my wifi base stations ;)
1) Too bad you will have to leave your device in the path of that directional beam.
2) If you're in your own house, is this supremely more useful than charging from the wall?
3) Still doesn't make it useful as soon as you leave your house, which is the idea.
Cell phones, no. WiFi, Bluetooth, and most other consumer wireless products, yes.
The inverse square law and dBm being a logarithmic unit can all go to hell.
What makes you think it's got to be an inverse square law? An inverse square law would apply to something emitted radially, but in the case of a charger, it need not be.
True, but that's not what this charger is. It's meant to scavenge from 2.4GHz WiFi, which emits radially, and therefor follows the inverse square law.
Because a lot of that advantage is gained by the gas generator running at an efficient RPM for power generation. The car would still need a bank of batteries (or maybe supercapacitors) to smooth out the available power to the electric motor. Without batteries, the mileage would drop.
They could sell a version with fewer batteries, but it would still be more expensive than a hybrid with comparable mileage. Better for them to charge a premium and fill the 'plug-in ERV electric' niche instead.
A discussion of weight doesn't change the fact that the original poster is incorrect about his assumption that performance is automatically going to be the same on an electrically-powered vehicle when running on battery, accelerating on stored charge in a capacitor bank or running directly off its generator. The amount of power available to drive the motor is different in all those scenarios, so the only way you will get identical performance is if you artificially limit all of them to the performance characteristics of the lowest performing mode of operation.
Automatically the same, no, but it's relatively simple to engineer it that way. Consider that an engine's hp is measured as the peak. Under normal driving conditions, the engine puts out far below its peak power, particularly if your car has an automatic transmission. You only need that peak power for 10-15 seconds as you accelerate to highway speeds. Moreover, the electric motor will only use its peak power at high revs, meaning high speeds.
Let me rework your numbers. I'm guessing normal driving conditions will be closer to 33hp, or 25kW. Your estimate of nearly 20% losses in the power system seems high to me as well (I'm an EE), let's go with a more reasonable 10%. So, a 30kW (40hp) generator would be able to charge the battery slowly.
So there may be a limit to the performance (can't keep the pedal to the floor at 100mph when the generator is running for more than 1 minute), but it's unreasonable for anyone to reach that limit under normal use. This won't be a race car, but you can't fault it for that, just like you don't fault a Larmbourghini for not being able to tow a trailor.
I'm sure atheists don't go an mail the researchers no. BUT atheists don't threaten them with bodily harm. They don't leave bombs on the front step.
Extremists and radicals of any color do ridiculous shit, they don't really belong to the group they are radicals from (hence the name). Some pro-choice guy from near my hometown shot two anti-abortion activists because they were holding signs, that doesn't mean pro-choice activists are violent and shoot those who disagree with them.
It's better to just focus on the mainline and ignore the radicals, because otherwise everyone becomes a whacko.
2) The idea is to not play whack-a-mole and have to ban a cheater 5 times, once for each game. It results in a better experience for the clean end-user.
cheating in one games doesn't mean cheating in an other game.
Not necessarily, but if there is a serial-cheater on PS3, Sony really can't do anything about it. Even if it's only one game they get banned from, they could make another PSN account for free and continue cheating.
Yet MS did that + other things to render the console it self useless (and that wasn't for in game cheaters, it was done to people who moded their box, some do it to play backups -- not paying for games --, some simply do it to get more out of their console, but that doesn't make a difference they are banned).
Right, but the consoles broke the ToS and were thus no longer elligible to use any Live-enabled services. Microsoft is under no requirement to provide online service to them, and the players can still access Live from un-modded consoles.
PC is a gaming platform with less control, an yet it is very successful (it is related come to think of it).
I wouldn't say that PC is more successful, aside from Valve, Blizzard, and The Sims being the obvious success stories.
Of course, if you want to continue that train of thought, the Wii is equally restrictive (can't even use text chat aside from pre-entered sentences in most games) yet has much larger sales. So, the secret to success is no unifying online presence (different ID for each game) and limited communication?
As for ToS most people won't bother reading them and most of those people take them lightly or see them as just an annoying step to get what they want. (that is a very big problem in it's self, EFF web site has some nice reading in that regard)
I agree, but I don't think that gives carte blanche to break them, especially if the terms are obvious. I can have sympathy on some people, but when it comes to cheating you should know you're doing something wrong and could be punished.
You do stupid stuff on home you get banned from home. you do stupid stuff on game X you get banned from game X. when you buy a console you don;t just own one game. banning simply from the service is not fair (not that I'm defending the cheaters here) especially if you're paying for that service and you don;t get a refund.
1) Banning them from the service is fair if you don't follow the rules of the service. MS doesn't just ban on a whim.
2) The idea is to not play whack-a-mole and have to ban a cheater 5 times, once for each game. It results in a better experience for the clean end-user.
3) Many cheaters in a game are simply banned from that game by the developers, depending on the nature of the cheat/exploit. Microsoft only bans accounts when there is a ToS violation.
They can ban the PS3 it self.
Seems like a much more severe penalty than needed, especially if multiple players share a console. And, it would result in increased used consoles which have no online capabilities. Ban the player, not the terminal.
On an other unrelated note, forcing people to pay to play online is just plain wrong (not talking about World of warcraft, the games is designed that way). most shooters on PC you get at least the possibility to set up you own game server and invite friends without going through any service at all. a possibility that is taken away in the console world. and With PSN they're are adding premium to get more money but for added values you can opt-out from, at least the basic feature (among other things) of playing will remain free.
Right, PC games (usually) do it differently. That's not the issue here. We're comparing PS3 to XBox online service.
Regardless, MS charges for the online services they provide, one of which is maintaining a level playing field by globally banning cheaters. Many feel this is worth paying for, others don't. Use whichever you prefer.
You are blaming sony for a lack of control of their hardware ? that should be a first here.
No, control on their network. MS only has control over their hardware in as much as they can limit access to their network capabilities. However, more importantly, they can use this same control to limit any ToS violation, particularly cheating, while any mechanism on PSN can be easily circumvented with a new account.
would you care to elaborate on PSN vs Live ??? Live has nothing more to give than PSN except the cost (I don't see the added value to justify that) Frankly I fail to see a relation between the matter at hand and that.
On Live, if you get banned for violating their ToS (for example, hacking your box, cheating, sufficient complaints of racism) then you are banned from all online play. On the PS3, Sony does not (to my knowledge) participate in the ban process except for their own services. So, if you get banned from Home for racism you can still play all your other games online. Each game needs to ban you individually, thus fewer asshats will be banned for any particular game.
Even the cost itself helps here. If someone gets banned from PSN for cheating, they can just make another free account. If someone gets banned from XBL, they must pony up cash to create a new account, giving a monetary disincentive not to cheat.
They definitely aren't sentient before the formation of neural system. Which can be approximated to, useful in practice, "only first trimester"
First trimester is an embryo. Afterward (when it has a nervous system) it is a fetus. I believe you and I are in agreement. The only difference between a 3rd trimester fetus and a newborn (from a sentience/humanity view) are which side of the vagina it is on.
BTW, however I do have my reservations towards abortion on the moral grounds, I do accept it as necessary (only limited to, say, first trimester mentioned above, pharmacological methods, etc.) Limited one is the least of evils. On one hand you have practically unlimited one throughout whole pregnancy, which is inexcusable.
Agreed, abortions are awful, but so are a lot of the alternatives (abandoned or abused children, unnecessary death of mothers, reminders of sexual abuse, etc). Whichever choice we make, we still lose...
As for statistics - surely you must realize that being a scientist, even a statistician specifically, doesn't automatically cause one to use those methods in daily life. Or doesn't automatically cause one to dismiss things we were brought into from our earliest days - it's damn hard, much more than pursuing a career path which is a bit disconnected from the social experiences of first dozen years of life.
Absolutely, my issue is more with the GP's claim that the religious have less 'understanding' of statistics than others. It's absolutely human nature to dismiss statistics for psychological reasons. It has nothing to do with the implied naiivete of 'religious folks'.
But do you think one of them bothered to write a thank you note to the surgeon who performed heroic surgery?
I do expect that your relatives thanked their doctor, they're the ones who should be thanking him.
I don't generally see people thanking they had no contact with ("hey, I'm going to thank your barber for giving you a good haircut"), though they may pass their praise along through the original person ("tell your barber he did a good job"). I would expect the same in this situation ("pass along our thanks to the surgeon, please").
Uhm, no. There's this "Satan"/etc. safety valve that stops people from blaming gods too much. And even if gods are held responsible, it's always: "I wasn't good enough, I wasn't praying enough, gods are testing me, it is beyond our understanding" - they always have some excuse
I dunno, I tend to hear a lot more "Why did you let them die, God" than "Why did you let them die, Dr. Soandso".
And please, religious folks understanding medical statistics? Where on Earth have you seen that?
Consider: if they would understand statistics, there would be no miracles. But you hear about one from time to time, when the patient simply managed to be in the very small group that survives serious condition. But...why it's not a miracle when somebody dies from flu? Why? The mechanism is the same.
One can understand statistics and also believe that they can be manipulated. Are you claiming that the many religious mathematicians, scientists, and engineers do not understand statistics?
For example, statistics tells us that if we roll a standard die, our likelyhood of rolling a 6 is 1/6. However, if the die roll is obscured and only the final result is seen, it could be a reasonable assumption that a 3rd party may be modifying the result of the rolls. Whether there is evidence or not, it is possible, and would be silly to assume there is no possible way it couldn't be modified.
So, for those who believe in an omnipotent, omnipresent diety, miracles and statistics are consistent with each other. Your issue is not with misunderstandings of statistics, but rather with belief in afforementioned diety.
Does a fetus instantaneously become sentient while passing through a vagina, but no earlier? Or does it happen afterward, meaning some infants are not sentient and can also be killed at will?
I'm not saying abortion is immoral in all circumstances (rape, extreme deformity, unfit parents, etc), but I don't think the argument that embryos or fetuses aren't human or living doesn't hold much water, scientifically or philosophically.
To be fair, I think God gets a lot of the blame when things don't work out, too. And how many atheists do you think thank the researchers instead of just the doctor?
That said, most people I know thank God for providing a good doctor who performs their treatment effectively, as well as for putting them in the 80% (for example) of people for whom the treatment works. I don't know anyone who doesn't thank the doctor as well.
Well, if he takes calculus and vectors he'll also learn how to find his own solutions to an array of problems, just different ones. The thing is that the kinds of problems that you can solve with one of them are invariable either impossible or intractable with the other. The questions he should ask himself are things like "what do I want to do with my life - games or crypto?" and "what is easier for me to do on the side later in professional life if it turns out I needed it after all?" and "can I do them both?" and "do I really need either of them?" Most programmers don't touch maths any more these days. Most programming is either monkey work where someone else did the maths for you or design work where you build complex systems out of pre-existant parts that already contain all the algorithms you'll ever need and probably more efficient than you could ever hope to implement them yourself. P.S. Good courses dealing with vector calculus targeted at programmers will deal with tractability, precision, performance, data storage and other issues, and will learn you many a great lesson on doing for example matrix math efficiently, including the most important one: there are good matrix maths libraries out there, use them - people have devoted large chunks of time to small parts of them and you can't hope to outdo them. Avoid doing such low-level things yourself unless you genuinely have special needs.
First, the problems solved by calculus don't make you a good programmer without the fundamentals of discrete to back them up. If you can only write specialized functions, you will be quickly replaced by someone more versitile than you (especially if you are self-described 'bad at math').
Also, if the goal is to take the class that is useful to only about 1% of programmers, he'd better be sure he's better than 99% of other programmers at those tasks, otherwise he's hosed. But, as you said, most of the math functions are built into libraries, making the calculus slightly redundant. However, discrete is more about logic and actually programming, rather than math. Discrete is necessary to know how to make many programs work, and it can't be imported as a library.
The algorithms are less important than understanding the inherent issues with numeric computing. If you know why to avoid floating point subtraction, division, and compounding then the algorithms follow pretty naturally (or can be researched). On the other hand, knowing several algorithms is less useful and doesn't guarantee you learn anything that would transfer to more general skills.
Agreed. Discrete math is vital groundwork for a lot of what is expected from a programmer, while the second course seems more focused but less generally applicable. Basically, if you take discrete you will learn how to find your own solutions to an array of problems through logic, set theory, combinatorics, and algorithms; while the second course will basically teach you a few concepts used in 3D graphics and physics modeling. Unless you absolutely know you want to work in a field that would heavily use the second course, take discrete. However, even if you take the 'selected chapters' course, I think you would have difficulties doing much useful with vector math or calculus without knowing discrete math to turn it into an effective and efficient algorithm.
To be truly successful, though, you should take both, even if you take one pass/fail or not for credit. The information is just too important not to have.