It's a stretch. Adding new symbols doesn't magically turn it into experimental science rather than maths.
1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples is math just as much as 1 + 1 = 2 is.
Empirically, you can never be sure, so it's not proven. Even if you 1000 times take one apple, and then another, and find you now have 2, how can you *know* this will happen the 1001th time ?
You can't. Math can tell you it will, but then you lack proof that the math is applicable to the apples.
This is philosophical anyway, as I said, for all *practical* purposes, there are lots of statements that are "proved" to be true. I feel pretty confident in claiming that we have proof that australia exists, evenothugh none of this proof is 100% irrefutable.
That's different. 1+1 ain't empircally proven to be 2, it is *defined* to be 2. (or more precisely, given the normal definition for the symbols 1, +, = and 2 this is a true statement.
Yeah. Fine. Enough to establish that by "definitely prove" you mean something like show consistent with experiment. None of those things are proven in the sense of 100% certanity.
But for everyday use I agree, for practical purposes those things are correct. (well, H and O does not actually combine 2:1 by volume, but 2:1 by atom-count, but we'll let that fly.)
Yes and no. One the one hand, being careful is always a good idea. On the other hand, going overboard with "security devices" is likely to send out completely the wrong signals. You don't want to send out signals that *here* is a pack worth going the extra mile to protect (i.e. containing something valuable)
In general, it's better to carry as few valuables as possible, and make it obvious that there's no real point in stealing from you. I generally don't bring anything more expensive than my digital camera, and even that fits in my pocket and comes along 100% of the time.
Steal my pack, and you're left with a few well-used maps, a small assortment of clean and dirty clothes, basic toiletries and a paperback-book or two and a small first-aid kit with the most important/most commonly needed items. Also if I plan to go into the bush, basic wilderness-equipment. The pack itself is probably the most valuable thing, atleast it used to be, it's a *good* backpack. But then again, it *is* 11 years old now, and has seen around 300 days on the road and/or in the wilderness (looks it too!), not really that sellable anymore I think.
Never had a problem. And frankly, even if someone *did* eventually steal the thing, I'd simply buy a new set of gear, the benefit of having cheap/little gear is that that ain't such an expensive proposition.
True, stupid employers who think that programming is primarily about learning language X or Y are much too common, when in reality the language as such is a mere detail.
Now, programming-techniques that various langauges support more or less well is an important topic to be aware of, I don't care if a programmer knows Java or C++, but I'm gonna be skeptical if all I get is a blank stare when I ask about Object-Oriented programming. Learning some language with strong support for OO is probably worth it, as is learning atleast the basics of functional programming.
Knowing the basic, standard algorithms isn't really the important part. The important part is how to think about solving a problem in a fundamental way. Sorting, for example, isn't really terribly important as such, you're unlikely to spend much of your time as a programmer designing or implementing sorting-algorithms.
But the *methods* used are interesting. For example:
Selection-sort works by converting a "harder" problem to a set of "simpler" problems. Instead of "sort this array", you get: "find the smallest value in this array" (repeatedly)
Merge-sort works by divide-and-conquer. Instead of sorting one 100-item array, you sort 2 50-item arrays, which you do by sorting 4 25-item arrays and so on down to the trivial case of sorting 1-item arrays. This also nicely introduces recursion, since the most readable implementation will recurce. (though it's usually not the most efficient way to do it)
Bubble-sort works by successive improvements. Swapping two items in an array that are "wrong" relative to oneanother is guaranteed to give you an array that is "more" sorted than it was before, if you do it sufficiently (in this case O(N^2) so not really efficient) you end up with a correctly sorted array.
Bad programmers and non-programmers often have trouble seeing the abstraction-level. They think that today we learnt sorting a list of integers. If that was all one learnt, it'd be quite useless.
You've been talking to the wrong students then, seriously. Language is completely beside the point.
You can't even pass *first* year in CS at the University of Bergen without programming, yourself, from scratch, atleast a dozen or 2 of the archetypical basic algorithms and datastructures; linked-list, double-linked-list, stack, circular-buffer, Heap, BubbleSort, QuickSort, Binary Trees, Red-Black Trees, Shortest-path that sort of stuff.
And they *do* use Java in the first year. Later they don't care what language you use, as that tends to be completely beside the point in more advanced courses. I did most of my crypto-assignments in 3rd year using Python, others stuck with Java, some made a point of using a different language for just about every assignment to get a bit of experience in diverse languages, I saw Diffie-Hellman implemented in C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp (various), Modula-2 and Perl, a friend of mine threathened to do it in intercal, but I don't think that actually happened. Shouldn't really matter, the point is to understand Diffie-Hellman, not the language used.
No, it doesn't make sense to sell a plan as "unlimited", and then pull users for using "too much", while simultaneously refusing to come out openly stating what exactly is considered "too much".
It makes *perfect* sense to have one or more plans which are not, infact, unlimited. But when you do, you should have the guts to openly say so, and state up-front what exactly the limits are.
It's fine to sell "2Mbps broadband, will be throttled to 64Kbps if you use more than 100GB/month", and then enforce that.
It's NOT fine to sell "2Mbps broadband, unlimited flat-rate", and then subsequently warn and disconnect users for using "too much" bandwith.
It's ok to have limits. Just be honest about it. Saying one thing in the comersials and another thing to customers who use a lot of bandwith is fraud, plain and simple. If you claim to be selling an unlimited plan -- you better actually *do* that.
True, but I suspect that even MS doesn't really know *exactly* what effects such options have, and many of them interlock. 1900 is a leap-year if you ask certain versions of certain MS-programs, and they codified this too. So, to be compliant, a modern word-processor has to be able to *pretend* that 1900 is a leap-year, and do date-calculations and similar correctly both with and without this (erroneous) assumption.
It's a non-trivial job to enumerate all possible consequences of 1900 being a leap-year, for example. One that MS has *zero* incentive to undertake. Why would they spend effort helping out their competitors.
That ISO appears poised to accept such bullshit as a "standard" is another matter entirely and a complete disgrace.
Sure. I absolutely agree that it is infact completely braindead for a supposedly modern file-format to include tags such as "Render however Word 5.3 on a Mac used to do it" at all. I wasn't defending it, merely stating that it *is* so, and that imho the stupid tags don't make it much harder to *write* a correct Ms-Office-xml document. (because you can simply ignore the braindead tags)
That is true. It is however less of a problem for a program merely wishing to *write* a document that MS-Word will (well, let's be realistic -- SHOULD) interpret correctly.
True, there is a tag for "Do Line-spacing the way Word version x.y.z used to do it on a Mac" (with no further specification what exactly that was), but if you're just *writing* the files there's a simple solution to that: don't use that tag at all. (it exists only for backwards compatibility anyway, I very much doubt that it's possible to make a new version of Word write that tag if you're starting from a clean new document)
If you need to *read* the stuff though, you're out of luck, because you can bet someone is gonna complain if you're able to correctly read only 99% of all Ms-office documents, despite the documents themselves being the insane ones.
Sure. In the US the same companies that profit from poor options are the same ones that are in the sole position to remedy the situation, if I get things rigth.
What I *don't* get though, is why neighbourhoods don't deal with it themselves. It's not that expensive. For example, the fiber-optic cable installed to the basement of every house in my neighbourhood was installed this year. 270 buildings. Total price ? On the order of $100K. (which is less than $500/house!)
We got it for free, in exchange for promising to purchase service (ip-telephony, tv, optionally internet) over it for a minimum period of a year, since the services where competitive anyway that really is close to free. (~$50/month) We outrigth *own* the neighbourhood-network though, and are thus in an *excellent* position to bargain with any number of providers for service once the 1-year period is over.
But even if not, just *paying* the $500 is well worth the price for the improved infrastructure, and the savings you'll experience in the future as a result of needing to buy 1 fast internet-connection rather than 270 slower ones. (economics of scale means that 100 times the bandwith tends to cost only aproximately 10 times the price.)
What prevents this sort of thing in the US ? I mean, is there some law that you can't put a cable between your house and that of your neighbour ?
This is detached housing (well, some of it are wussname houses-in-a-row), for apartment-blocks and the like installation-costs pro apartment should be a lot lower still.
Shouldn't be *that* sligth. In general, the large majority of the people ever entering a POW-camp have survived the experience, even in deathcamps like Aushwitz thousands of people survived and hundreds of people successfully escaped. Of the ones who *where* killed, aproximately 75% where killed within a few hours after arrival, so for those religion or lack of it wouldn't have played any significant role.
And that's the extreme example, most POW-camps aren't even in the same ballpark. In total 8 million soldiers surrendered and where put in POW-camps during WW-I, they actually had a *higher* survival-rate than the non-captured soldiers, so though they doubtlessly suffered many hardships in the camps, it's not as if their situation was more hopeless than it was prior to being put in camp.
In WW-II your chanses depended a lot on your nationality, and who took you prisoner. Worst-off where Russians captured by the Nazis, this happened to aproximately 5.7 million people, and 57% of them died. In contrast, 37% of the 3 million Nazi-soldiers captured by Russians died, only 3.5% of the British and American soldiers captured by the Nazis died. (from a total of aproximately 250.000)
POWs captured by the Allies did a lot better, and in most cases where treated humanely according to the Geneva-convention. This actually worked out very well for the Allies, because knowledge of the fair treatment spread among nazi-troops, and made them surrender more easily than they otherwise would have. It also boosted morale among the allied troops, since it gave a feeling of moral superiority.
Believable enough, but then again, such situations are rare in current western society.
Evolution is not about "survivor advantage" anyway, but about having children. If someone survives because of religion, yet never gets kids, then from an evolutionary standpoint he migth just aswell have died earlier.
I'd think another "advantage" much more important currently: Some religious people are opposed to contraception and therefore get a lot more kids than the average person. If being religious causes you to breed more, then that is a huge "advantage" from an evolutionary standpoint.
Now, it's important to separate provisioning of necessities, which GGP was talking about, and luxuries which, for most people, net access, especially WiFi, still is one.
Well, maybe, but that is rapidly getting less true every minute. Lack of good broadband-connectivity is today a *huge* disadvantage for a region, not as important as say roads, electricity or water, but still something that for an increasing part of the population belongs to "basic infrastructure".
I live in Stavanger, which have excellent broadband-penetration, still there are pockets here too where "only" ADSL are available. (most have more choices, for example my current house can get ADSL, ADSL2, ip-over-coax (along with the cable-tv) and ip over fiberoptic cable installed to the basement. I currently use the latter, but its nice to have a choice nevertheless. The fiberoptic is cool. Offers 50Mbps today, but the physical fibre is capable of terabits, it's just nobody is interested in paying for more than 50Mbps today. (most even go for the slowest speed available over the fibre: 6Mbps symetrical (i.e. 6mbps up and download))
I'd honestly hesitate with buying a house in one of the areas with "only" ADSL. And that is *with* ADSL. A house with no broadband available would be completely out of the question. I doubt I'm the only one thinking along these lines.
I'd argue that they then actualy *do* care about thread-scheduling and *are* passionate about it. Sure, they may be because of what it allows you to do, rather than because of the topic itself, but that is -- if not the same thing -- then very close anyway.
By the way, simulation of automobile traffic patterns is a perfectly legitimate CompSci topic. (though the compsci major may (or may not) choose to express the same problem in different terms.
Human activities releases about 7000 million metric tonnes of CO2/year, trend rapidly growing. Continuing current CO2-releases would require *radical* measures, since that would mean somehow stopping the breaknect *increase* in CO2-pollution that we're currently experiencing.
In general, I seldom see really cool stuff that makes the world better come from people who are not passionate about what they do.
The human mind has limits. I am not convinced that it is *possible* to keep learning and studying abstract topics at an advanced level for literally decades without passion. Sure, you can go trough the moves, let your eyes scan the pages, but can you force yourself to pay full attention, to think about a particularily hard problems sometimes at 3am in the nigth when by chance you wake up, without passion for your subject ? I don't think so, but if you can, more power to you.
This ain't nothing special for CompSci by the way, I don't think there's really great musicians, doctors, painters, or sports-people who aren't passionate about what they do.
I never suggested kicking anyone out by the way. I just said I don't think they belong. If they think differently, they're offcourse free to go at it.
Not actually true, though I used to believe it until I was perhaps 20.
Thing is, in childcare and primary-school you don't have any *choice* you're put in a group, and those are your friends (or not!) no matter what you think of it or them.
This changes in the late teenages, once you're in university, you don't really *care* if you don't get all that well along with everyone. There's bound to be *some* groups that you get along with well, and that's enough. You have a very important choice that are simply barred from you as a child -- the choice to simply ignore and avoid people that annoy you.
True. Lots of people have little or no real choise of schools. Luckily learning ain't limited to school though, the brigth kids will tend to learn most stuff *outside* of school anyway. Most stuff I know was never taugth in any school I attended (or I knew it before it was taugth) I'm sure if you think back this'll apply to you too.
It's no excuse for bad schools, but it does mean brigth kids are capable of learning a lot *even* with bad schools.
This stopped being funny like literally 2 decades ago, if ever it was.
It's true that there are more males than females in in CompSci, but the ones which are there are no more and no less attractive than the average girl in any other line of work. Same goes for the males.
What the people in CompSci do share is an above-average passion for computing, abstract thinking and maths. (or if they don't they don't belong in CompSci regardless of sex) but neither of these things have any influence on looks.
You have an advantage to start with. Only this far, in -practice- the legitimate services has choosen to voluntarily toss away this advantage in the name of restricting their customers. (DRM does nothing to piracy anyway, so the pirates aren't affected)
A DRM-infected version of an album is, in practice, grossly inferior to any openly documented format. Ideally flac or ogg, but even plain-old mp3s are an order of magnitude more versatile, despite the patent-crap on them.
Slashdot Mirror
1 apple + 1 apple = 2 apples is math just as much as 1 + 1 = 2 is.
Empirically, you can never be sure, so it's not proven. Even if you 1000 times take one apple, and then another, and find you now have 2, how can you *know* this will happen the 1001th time ?
You can't. Math can tell you it will, but then you lack proof that the math is applicable to the apples.
This is philosophical anyway, as I said, for all *practical* purposes, there are lots of statements that are "proved" to be true. I feel pretty confident in claiming that we have proof that australia exists, evenothugh none of this proof is 100% irrefutable.
That's different. 1+1 ain't empircally proven to be 2, it is *defined* to be 2. (or more precisely, given the normal definition for the symbols 1, +, = and 2 this is a true statement.
But for everyday use I agree, for practical purposes those things are correct. (well, H and O does not actually combine 2:1 by volume, but 2:1 by atom-count, but we'll let that fly.)
In general, it's better to carry as few valuables as possible, and make it obvious that there's no real point in stealing from you. I generally don't bring anything more expensive than my digital camera, and even that fits in my pocket and comes along 100% of the time.
Steal my pack, and you're left with a few well-used maps, a small assortment of clean and dirty clothes, basic toiletries and a paperback-book or two and a small first-aid kit with the most important/most commonly needed items. Also if I plan to go into the bush, basic wilderness-equipment. The pack itself is probably the most valuable thing, atleast it used to be, it's a *good* backpack. But then again, it *is* 11 years old now, and has seen around 300 days on the road and/or in the wilderness (looks it too!), not really that sellable anymore I think.
Never had a problem. And frankly, even if someone *did* eventually steal the thing, I'd simply buy a new set of gear, the benefit of having cheap/little gear is that that ain't such an expensive proposition.
Just 3-4 random examples will do.
Now, programming-techniques that various langauges support more or less well is an important topic to be aware of, I don't care if a programmer knows Java or C++, but I'm gonna be skeptical if all I get is a blank stare when I ask about Object-Oriented programming. Learning some language with strong support for OO is probably worth it, as is learning atleast the basics of functional programming.
Knowing the basic, standard algorithms isn't really the important part. The important part is how to think about solving a problem in a fundamental way. Sorting, for example, isn't really terribly important as such, you're unlikely to spend much of your time as a programmer designing or implementing sorting-algorithms.
But the *methods* used are interesting. For example:
Bad programmers and non-programmers often have trouble seeing the abstraction-level. They think that today we learnt sorting a list of integers. If that was all one learnt, it'd be quite useless.
You can't even pass *first* year in CS at the University of Bergen without programming, yourself, from scratch, atleast a dozen or 2 of the archetypical basic algorithms and datastructures; linked-list, double-linked-list, stack, circular-buffer, Heap, BubbleSort, QuickSort, Binary Trees, Red-Black Trees, Shortest-path that sort of stuff.
And they *do* use Java in the first year. Later they don't care what language you use, as that tends to be completely beside the point in more advanced courses. I did most of my crypto-assignments in 3rd year using Python, others stuck with Java, some made a point of using a different language for just about every assignment to get a bit of experience in diverse languages, I saw Diffie-Hellman implemented in C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp (various), Modula-2 and Perl, a friend of mine threathened to do it in intercal, but I don't think that actually happened. Shouldn't really matter, the point is to understand Diffie-Hellman, not the language used.
It makes *perfect* sense to have one or more plans which are not, infact, unlimited. But when you do, you should have the guts to openly say so, and state up-front what exactly the limits are.
It's fine to sell "2Mbps broadband, will be throttled to 64Kbps if you use more than 100GB/month", and then enforce that.
It's NOT fine to sell "2Mbps broadband, unlimited flat-rate", and then subsequently warn and disconnect users for using "too much" bandwith.
It's ok to have limits. Just be honest about it. Saying one thing in the comersials and another thing to customers who use a lot of bandwith is fraud, plain and simple. If you claim to be selling an unlimited plan -- you better actually *do* that.
It's a non-trivial job to enumerate all possible consequences of 1900 being a leap-year, for example. One that MS has *zero* incentive to undertake. Why would they spend effort helping out their competitors.
That ISO appears poised to accept such bullshit as a "standard" is another matter entirely and a complete disgrace.
Sure. I absolutely agree that it is infact completely braindead for a supposedly modern file-format to include tags such as "Render however Word 5.3 on a Mac used to do it" at all. I wasn't defending it, merely stating that it *is* so, and that imho the stupid tags don't make it much harder to *write* a correct Ms-Office-xml document. (because you can simply ignore the braindead tags)
True, there is a tag for "Do Line-spacing the way Word version x.y.z used to do it on a Mac" (with no further specification what exactly that was), but if you're just *writing* the files there's a simple solution to that: don't use that tag at all. (it exists only for backwards compatibility anyway, I very much doubt that it's possible to make a new version of Word write that tag if you're starting from a clean new document)
If you need to *read* the stuff though, you're out of luck, because you can bet someone is gonna complain if you're able to correctly read only 99% of all Ms-office documents, despite the documents themselves being the insane ones.
Not thousands. Hundreds of thousands.
What I *don't* get though, is why neighbourhoods don't deal with it themselves. It's not that expensive. For example, the fiber-optic cable installed to the basement of every house in my neighbourhood was installed this year. 270 buildings. Total price ? On the order of $100K. (which is less than $500/house!)
We got it for free, in exchange for promising to purchase service (ip-telephony, tv, optionally internet) over it for a minimum period of a year, since the services where competitive anyway that really is close to free. (~$50/month) We outrigth *own* the neighbourhood-network though, and are thus in an *excellent* position to bargain with any number of providers for service once the 1-year period is over.
But even if not, just *paying* the $500 is well worth the price for the improved infrastructure, and the savings you'll experience in the future as a result of needing to buy 1 fast internet-connection rather than 270 slower ones. (economics of scale means that 100 times the bandwith tends to cost only aproximately 10 times the price.)
What prevents this sort of thing in the US ? I mean, is there some law that you can't put a cable between your house and that of your neighbour ?
This is detached housing (well, some of it are wussname houses-in-a-row), for apartment-blocks and the like installation-costs pro apartment should be a lot lower still.
And that's the extreme example, most POW-camps aren't even in the same ballpark. In total 8 million soldiers surrendered and where put in POW-camps during WW-I, they actually had a *higher* survival-rate than the non-captured soldiers, so though they doubtlessly suffered many hardships in the camps, it's not as if their situation was more hopeless than it was prior to being put in camp.
In WW-II your chanses depended a lot on your nationality, and who took you prisoner. Worst-off where Russians captured by the Nazis, this happened to aproximately 5.7 million people, and 57% of them died. In contrast, 37% of the 3 million Nazi-soldiers captured by Russians died, only 3.5% of the British and American soldiers captured by the Nazis died. (from a total of aproximately 250.000)
POWs captured by the Allies did a lot better, and in most cases where treated humanely according to the Geneva-convention. This actually worked out very well for the Allies, because knowledge of the fair treatment spread among nazi-troops, and made them surrender more easily than they otherwise would have. It also boosted morale among the allied troops, since it gave a feeling of moral superiority.
Evolution is not about "survivor advantage" anyway, but about having children. If someone survives because of religion, yet never gets kids, then from an evolutionary standpoint he migth just aswell have died earlier.
I'd think another "advantage" much more important currently: Some religious people are opposed to contraception and therefore get a lot more kids than the average person. If being religious causes you to breed more, then that is a huge "advantage" from an evolutionary standpoint.
Well, maybe, but that is rapidly getting less true every minute. Lack of good broadband-connectivity is today a *huge* disadvantage for a region, not as important as say roads, electricity or water, but still something that for an increasing part of the population belongs to "basic infrastructure".
I live in Stavanger, which have excellent broadband-penetration, still there are pockets here too where "only" ADSL are available. (most have more choices, for example my current house can get ADSL, ADSL2, ip-over-coax (along with the cable-tv) and ip over fiberoptic cable installed to the basement. I currently use the latter, but its nice to have a choice nevertheless. The fiberoptic is cool. Offers 50Mbps today, but the physical fibre is capable of terabits, it's just nobody is interested in paying for more than 50Mbps today. (most even go for the slowest speed available over the fibre: 6Mbps symetrical (i.e. 6mbps up and download))
I'd honestly hesitate with buying a house in one of the areas with "only" ADSL. And that is *with* ADSL. A house with no broadband available would be completely out of the question. I doubt I'm the only one thinking along these lines.
Realistically, that is a huge truckload of work, it'd need to be robust, newbie-friendly and flexible.
By the way, simulation of automobile traffic patterns is a perfectly legitimate CompSci topic. (though the compsci major may (or may not) choose to express the same problem in different terms.
Human activities releases about 7000 million metric tonnes of CO2/year, trend rapidly growing. Continuing current CO2-releases would require *radical* measures, since that would mean somehow stopping the breaknect *increase* in CO2-pollution that we're currently experiencing.
The human mind has limits. I am not convinced that it is *possible* to keep learning and studying abstract topics at an advanced level for literally decades without passion. Sure, you can go trough the moves, let your eyes scan the pages, but can you force yourself to pay full attention, to think about a particularily hard problems sometimes at 3am in the nigth when by chance you wake up, without passion for your subject ? I don't think so, but if you can, more power to you.
This ain't nothing special for CompSci by the way, I don't think there's really great musicians, doctors, painters, or sports-people who aren't passionate about what they do.
I never suggested kicking anyone out by the way. I just said I don't think they belong. If they think differently, they're offcourse free to go at it.
Thing is, in childcare and primary-school you don't have any *choice* you're put in a group, and those are your friends (or not!) no matter what you think of it or them.
This changes in the late teenages, once you're in university, you don't really *care* if you don't get all that well along with everyone. There's bound to be *some* groups that you get along with well, and that's enough. You have a very important choice that are simply barred from you as a child -- the choice to simply ignore and avoid people that annoy you.
Kids needs to experience that demands are set -- but they also need to experience freedom.
They need to experience organization and structure, but also need to have time of their own.
They need rules and limits -- but also love and care that is given unconditionally.
It's like many things in life really, the trick is finding the sensible middle-road.
It's no excuse for bad schools, but it does mean brigth kids are capable of learning a lot *even* with bad schools.
It's true that there are more males than females in in CompSci, but the ones which are there are no more and no less attractive than the average girl in any other line of work. Same goes for the males.
What the people in CompSci do share is an above-average passion for computing, abstract thinking and maths. (or if they don't they don't belong in CompSci regardless of sex) but neither of these things have any influence on looks.
A DRM-infected version of an album is, in practice, grossly inferior to any openly documented format. Ideally flac or ogg, but even plain-old mp3s are an order of magnitude more versatile, despite the patent-crap on them.