are high school students nowadays aware of the fact that libraries, and librarians, exist? why are they asking slashdot questions that, for the most part, we are woefully underqualified to answer?
a word of advice: if you are trying to do research by asking around on the internet, you ought to be careful. the signal to noise ratio is very low, and you can get trapped if you don't double check the information you gather by sources that you trust (such as refereed journals).
isn't that routine? does anyone here NOT have a hotmail (or yahoo) account that they only use to give an email address to websites that require it for one reason or another? (ahem, slashdot..)
when i was installing tiberian sun, i set up westwood's online game thing, and it _required_ an email address to send me a password. so i put in blahblah@yahoo.com. it told me to shove it; they don't accept freemail accounts. this really pissed me off. who are they to say what isn't a valid email address? what if i _only_ had a freemail account? (anyway, i wound up making a sendmail alias, receiving my password there, and then deleting it).
bookstar, if it's the one you are talking about, is a national chain. in fact, i believe it may be owned by barnes and noble. i cannot locate a reference to support this, however.
i think this because i worked at a barnes and noble in college, and when i started i was fed a bunch of garbage about the company's history. this included the list of chains that barnes and noble owns (such as b. dalton, etc). i could swear it included bookstar.
i am afraid of lab machines. even if an implementation of ssh were available, that's no guarantee of any security. how could you tell that there isn't a keystroke logger installed on the machine?
They don't tell us things we don't know. They don't offer us good writing or strong opinion.
i just have to say that this is pretty much the most hypocritical statement i've ever seen come out of anyone's mouth. who doesn't tell us things we don't know? who couldn't write his (ahem) way out of a paper bag (or, say, a college writing class)? if we can define "strong" to mean "researched" or "well-argued", i think i have you on a third count (though this is hardly fair).
of course newspapers tell us things we don't know. how else are we supposed to discover these things? from tv? not likely. tv news is awful.
what's the difference if the newspaper delivers its content to me on newsprint or on a web page? the new york times is the new york times.
and, by the way, if we're going to criticize people for printing things we already know, i think we ought to start at home. for instance, the previous story announces a service that has been around for _years_. of course, i think we're all pretty much familiar with this particular aspect of slashdot.
Floppy disks are degrading rapidly, but most people's floppy collection can fit on a single CD-R. Then again, most people just don't care about their floppy collection, and will just let it die. The data contained on it isn't useful anymore.
let me just say that this is an understatement. i don't think i've ever used a 3.5" that lasted more than a week. and this isn't just with one drive, either! as amazing as it seems, i don't think i _ever_ lost anything i put on 5.25" (which admittedly wasn't very much). but 3.5" disks are almost entirely useless. i don't store _anything_ on those suckers that is even of marginal importance.
didn't isaac asimov push microfiche? (maybe in the foundation books?) i think that's the answer! man, i've looked up newspapers from nearly a century ago on microfiche..
can you imagine the human genome project using microfiche for data archiving? =)
we linux users can't play the videos that windows/mac users view with the latest quicktime product. i'm sure apple knows this already, and i guess it's ok to remind them, but i think there's a better idea.
how about the next time you run across a web site that is using a media architecture that _you_ can't view (because you are using something other than windows or macos) *tell the webmaster*!
next time you head over to broadcast.com, and you can't play the "windows media" streams, let them know. email starwars.com and tell them you can't view the trailer that's in quicktime. and so on...
perhaps if the _content providers_ realize that there is a large market that is entirely overlooked, they will pressure the people who provide them technology into doing something smart -- making it accessible to everyone. of course, apple will listen to people (ie, lucasarts) that license ($$) their technology. if not, too bad for them. maybe the content providers will switch to a more widely accepted format.
either way, we win.
- pal
perhaps a complicated license is not what you want
on
GPL for Books?
·
· Score: 2
i think a written work, if edited by the community, would suffer. there are several aspects of the written word (and a good book, in particular) that numerous people working indepedently won't be able to capture
brevity - good books are short and to the point. if people add whatever they choose and redistribute, it might be a bad thing
linguistic flow - (maybe there is a better word for this?) everyone writes in a different style. if many different authors scatter snippits throughout the book, it could easily become hard to follow.
direction of the content - tutorials and texts generally start at the beginning and follow through material in a specific order. what happens when you start inserting material?
that's off the top of my head. these three things lead me to believe that it might be best to allow people to redistribute the book without charge, but don't let them redistribute altered copies. you can handle revisions yourself, accept suggestions and comments (in return for being able to duplicate the document freely) and maintain control yourself.
i don't think this is unreasonable. speaking personally, i am sure i'd rather read a good book by an intelligent author than slop written by a large community.
"The Greats" of science in the past weren't tenured civil-servants. People like Newton and Michaelangelo were practical men of the world, as well as scientists.
your intent here is false. newton, as i'm sure you know, was tenured at cambridge. in fact, he held the chair of the mathematics department. if you look at the history of mathematics, you'll see that almost everyone who contributed anything worthwhile had a similar situation -- either at a university or by a wealthy benefactor. gauss, euler, fourier, artin, etc. physicists too.
even those who didn't make a career of it worked for their own enjoyment in their own free time, not for an employer. for instance, fermat.
i don't understand why you would be so critical of the university. it works, apparently. also, they're not all publicly funded you know.
speaking of the shop button -- how do i get rid of that damned thing? is there a way? what makes them think that's a good idea. i mean, if it weren't for us non-ms-os users, would netscape even _have_ a user base for its browser? are they trying to alienate even us?
i doubt that the chinese judiciary is upset at the fact that this involved a computer. i am quite sure that all they care about is the following
a crime was committed -- robbery.
they think this guy did it.
this guy didn't admit to it. infact, he's had the tenacity to appeal it! what hubris!
i am no chinese legal scholar, but i am sure that they use extreme punishments over there (stealing $87k == capital offense, that's totally ridiculous) as a quite effective deterent. i have some friends from china who insist there is virtually no crime where they come from. why? because you get caught, and it sucks big time. you say you didn't do it? yeah, ok, (wink-wink nudge-nudge), then who did?
how on earth does a us district court impose fines on european citizens (regardless of WHY)? isn't there a jurisdictional problem here? is the machine running the site located in the united states? if not, why would they take it down?
(ps - i don't know if i would file this under censorship. do you have a section for corporate extortion?)
the constitution is certainly an excellent document, but as long as we're talking about hacks -- why don't we just nominate the bill of rights?
i mean, it's a patch!
it says what it needs to say in terse form.
it's timely even now (with some exceptions. i think the third ammendment is a bit outdated. and explicit mention of the figure "$20").
and it's certainly more popularly known than the full text of the constitution. (although, i'd be willing to bet that a large number of people think that the bill of rights == the first amendment, and that it applies to everyone, not just the federal government).
Smullyan, Forever Undecided, A Puzzle Guide to Godel - this book essentially derives godel's second incompleteness theorem in a series of puzzles. it is extremely entertaining! much more so than godel-escher-bach. and it's written by an actual mathematician as well. (might be hard to find).
Pinker, How the Mind Works - i think this may have been covered on slashdot, but i can't remember. arrogant title, good read. pinker is involved with cognitive neuroscience at mit.
Kors, The Shadow University - essentially, the discussion of how university administrators have been gradually widdling away at students' ability to think for and express themselves. the first chapter is absolutely chilling. go to b&n and read chapter 1 -- you will definitely buy it
frequently, results in mathematics can be interesting, while at the same time the development of the theory can be tedious or boring.
sometimes a proof doesn't shed any light on why something SHOULD be true, or obvious.
other times, a proof can be bogged down in awful details that drag it on longer than anyone would care to read. if this process is unimaginably complicated, mathematicians sometimes call the proof "technical."
anyway, the interesting part of mathematics is putting it all together -- seeing how high you can stand and what view you get of the landscape. where do things interact? what results effect other results? etc.
modular arithmetic != modular forms. the former you are familiar with, obviously, but the latter is a complex analytic structure ("complex" here in the technical sense, this is not a judgement on my part).
most people that i know believe that fermat had a "proof" that relies on unique factorization in cyclotomic extensions of the integers.
a cyclotomic extension of the integers is what you get if you take the integers, throw in some new element x so that x^p=1 and x^q1 if qp, and close it under addition and multiplication.
kummer proved fermat in 1840ish using this technique, but it only works when the extension at hand has unique factorization (i.e., for "regular primes"). and fermat probably thought this was reasonable in 1637.
by the way, the fact that fermat mentions his proof for n=3 and n=4 repeatedly, but never (besides the one note in that one letter) again mentions the general case leads us to believe he may have realized his error, or at the least thought it was true and was not able to prove it.
actually, a special case of STW gives you FLT. (if you can show STW for a subclass of elliptic curves, "semistable" ones, then you have proved FLT). this is due to Ribet, Serre, and perhaps others.
Andrew Wiles did this. now, Conrad, Taylor, Diamond, and Bruile (?) have proved STW for all elliptic curves. that's the breakthrough, and the announcement was made earlier this year. it isn't "news" in the popular media sense.
by the way, the BBC has something wrong, the proof is not printed in the Notices Dec issue (ha!), an announcement is. it's been on my desk for about a week now.
Slashdot Mirror
are high school students nowadays aware of the fact that libraries, and librarians, exist? why are they asking slashdot questions that, for the most part, we are woefully underqualified to answer?
a word of advice: if you are trying to do research by asking around on the internet, you ought to be careful. the signal to noise ratio is very low, and you can get trapped if you don't double check the information you gather by sources that you trust (such as refereed journals).
- pal
isn't that routine? does anyone here NOT have a hotmail (or yahoo) account that they only use to give an email address to websites that require it for one reason or another? (ahem, slashdot..)
when i was installing tiberian sun, i set up westwood's online game thing, and it _required_ an email address to send me a password. so i put in blahblah@yahoo.com. it told me to shove it; they don't accept freemail accounts. this really pissed me off. who are they to say what isn't a valid email address? what if i _only_ had a freemail account? (anyway, i wound up making a sendmail alias, receiving my password there, and then deleting it).
- pal
bookstar, if it's the one you are talking about, is a national chain. in fact, i believe it may be owned by barnes and noble. i cannot locate a reference to support this, however.
i think this because i worked at a barnes and noble in college, and when i started i was fed a bunch of garbage about the company's history. this included the list of chains that barnes and noble owns (such as b. dalton, etc). i could swear it included bookstar.
- pal
i am afraid of lab machines. even if an implementation of ssh were available, that's no guarantee of any security. how could you tell that there isn't a keystroke logger installed on the machine?
- pal
They don't tell us things we don't know. They don't offer us good writing or strong opinion.
i just have to say that this is pretty much the most hypocritical statement i've ever seen come out of anyone's mouth. who doesn't tell us things we don't know? who couldn't write his (ahem) way out of a paper bag (or, say, a college writing class)? if we can define "strong" to mean "researched" or "well-argued", i think i have you on a third count (though this is hardly fair).
of course newspapers tell us things we don't know. how else are we supposed to discover these things? from tv? not likely. tv news is awful.
what's the difference if the newspaper delivers its content to me on newsprint or on a web page? the new york times is the new york times.
and, by the way, if we're going to criticize people for printing things we already know, i think we ought to start at home. for instance, the previous story announces a service that has been around for _years_. of course, i think we're all pretty much familiar with this particular aspect of slashdot.
- pal
they seized his computer. so i don't think that's sound advise.
- pal
let me just say that this is an understatement. i don't think i've ever used a 3.5" that lasted more than a week. and this isn't just with one drive, either! as amazing as it seems, i don't think i _ever_ lost anything i put on 5.25" (which admittedly wasn't very much). but 3.5" disks are almost entirely useless. i don't store _anything_ on those suckers that is even of marginal importance.
- pal
didn't isaac asimov push microfiche? (maybe in the foundation books?) i think that's the answer! man, i've looked up newspapers from nearly a century ago on microfiche..
can you imagine the human genome project using microfiche for data archiving? =)
- pal
we linux users can't play the videos that windows/mac users view with the latest quicktime product. i'm sure apple knows this already, and i guess it's ok to remind them, but i think there's a better idea.
how about the next time you run across a web site that is using a media architecture that _you_ can't view (because you are using something other than windows or macos) *tell the webmaster*!
next time you head over to broadcast.com, and you can't play the "windows media" streams, let them know. email starwars.com and tell them you can't view the trailer that's in quicktime. and so on...
perhaps if the _content providers_ realize that there is a large market that is entirely overlooked, they will pressure the people who provide them technology into doing something smart -- making it accessible to everyone. of course, apple will listen to people (ie, lucasarts) that license ($$) their technology. if not, too bad for them. maybe the content providers will switch to a more widely accepted format.
either way, we win.
- pal
i think a written work, if edited by the community, would suffer. there are several aspects of the written word (and a good book, in particular) that numerous people working indepedently won't be able to capture
that's off the top of my head. these three things lead me to believe that it might be best to allow people to redistribute the book without charge, but don't let them redistribute altered copies. you can handle revisions yourself, accept suggestions and comments (in return for being able to duplicate the document freely) and maintain control yourself.
i don't think this is unreasonable. speaking personally, i am sure i'd rather read a good book by an intelligent author than slop written by a large community.
your intent here is false. newton, as i'm sure you know, was tenured at cambridge. in fact, he held the chair of the mathematics department. if you look at the history of mathematics, you'll see that almost everyone who contributed anything worthwhile had a similar situation -- either at a university or by a wealthy benefactor. gauss, euler, fourier, artin, etc. physicists too.
even those who didn't make a career of it worked for their own enjoyment in their own free time, not for an employer. for instance, fermat.
i don't understand why you would be so critical of the university. it works, apparently. also, they're not all publicly funded you know.
(michaelangleo was a great of science?)
speaking of the shop button -- how do i get rid of that damned thing? is there a way? what makes them think that's a good idea. i mean, if it weren't for us non-ms-os users, would netscape even _have_ a user base for its browser? are they trying to alienate even us?
- pal
i doubt that the chinese judiciary is upset at the fact that this involved a computer. i am quite sure that all they care about is the following
i am no chinese legal scholar, but i am sure that they use extreme punishments over there (stealing $87k == capital offense, that's totally ridiculous) as a quite effective deterent. i have some friends from china who insist there is virtually no crime where they come from. why? because you get caught, and it sucks big time. you say you didn't do it? yeah, ok, (wink-wink nudge-nudge), then who did?
-pal
how on earth does a us district court impose fines on european citizens (regardless of WHY)? isn't there a jurisdictional problem here? is the machine running the site located in the united states? if not, why would they take it down?
(ps - i don't know if i would file this under censorship. do you have a section for corporate extortion?)
- pal
i think realistic human animation is difficult. take a look at the human figure animation project at ms research. it's interesting.
(it seems motion capture is the best way to go now, i think. i am certainly not an expert here).
- palhornet.org is slashdotted, try: ftp.cdrom.com - pal
the constitution is certainly an excellent document, but as long as we're talking about hacks -- why don't we just nominate the bill of rights?
i mean, it's a patch!
it says what it needs to say in terse form.
it's timely even now (with some exceptions. i think the third ammendment is a bit outdated. and explicit mention of the figure "$20").
and it's certainly more popularly known than the full text of the constitution. (although, i'd be willing to bet that a large number of people think that the bill of rights == the first amendment, and that it applies to everyone, not just the federal government).
also, we may want to include the 14th amendment.
am i spelling "amendment" wrong? bah.
- pal
1 is not prime.
i concur. can i make some suggestions?
cheers,
-pal
frequently, results in mathematics can be interesting, while at the same time the development of the theory can be tedious or boring.
sometimes a proof doesn't shed any light on why something SHOULD be true, or obvious.
other times, a proof can be bogged down in awful details that drag it on longer than anyone would care to read. if this process is unimaginably complicated, mathematicians sometimes call the proof "technical."
anyway, the interesting part of mathematics is putting it all together -- seeing how high you can stand and what view you get of the landscape. where do things interact? what results effect other results? etc.
- pal
stupid html tags.
a cyclotomic extension of the integers is what you get if you take the integers, throw in some new element x such that
a) x is not an integer
b) x^p=1 for some p
(ie, x is a root of unity). and then close this set under addition and multiplication.
for the math majors: Z[x]/.
- pal
actually,
modular arithmetic != modular forms. the former you are familiar with, obviously, but the latter is a complex analytic structure ("complex" here in the technical sense, this is not a judgement on my part).
- pal
most people that i know believe that fermat had a "proof" that relies on unique factorization in cyclotomic extensions of the integers.
a cyclotomic extension of the integers is what you get if you take the integers, throw in some new element x so that x^p=1 and x^q1 if qp, and close it under addition and multiplication.
kummer proved fermat in 1840ish using this technique, but it only works when the extension at hand has unique factorization (i.e., for "regular primes"). and fermat probably thought this was reasonable in 1637.
by the way, the fact that fermat mentions his proof for n=3 and n=4 repeatedly, but never (besides the one note in that one letter) again mentions the general case leads us to believe he may have realized his error, or at the least thought it was true and was not able to prove it.
- pal
actually, a special case of STW gives you FLT. (if you can show STW for a subclass of elliptic curves, "semistable" ones, then you have proved FLT). this is due to Ribet, Serre, and perhaps others.
Andrew Wiles did this. now, Conrad, Taylor, Diamond, and Bruile (?) have proved STW for all elliptic curves. that's the breakthrough, and the announcement was made earlier this year. it isn't "news" in the popular media sense.
by the way, the BBC has something wrong, the proof is not printed in the Notices Dec issue (ha!), an announcement is. it's been on my desk for about a week now.
- pal
i am such an idiot. i meant 23:57:57 7-27-777.