His remarks about libertarianism don't fit his remarks about MS not being punished by the market. Obviously, in his view, the markets have failed in Microsoft's case. So how can he believe in them? It doesn't make sense.
But he is right about Dell being a distributor, not a manufacturer. I love when business mags publish stuff about what a great manufacturer Dell is. They manufacture _nothing_ except maybe Powerpoints and advertising material. Chances are, your Dell equipment was never even seen by a Dell employee.
This will eventually catch up to Dell because the company adds so little value. But that won't kill the Wintel standard. Only the death of MS can do that, and the hardware side would survive anyway. The death of Sun will kill Sun's stuff though. So comparing Dell's demise with Sun'S doesn't make a lot of sense.
Nealy is right about execution. Make a profit this quarter. Repeat. That is more important than "vision".
This article was designed to amaze people that don't know anything about genetic regulatory systems. The hugely complex bodies of all organisms are "computed" by the the genes of the original fertilized egg. there are plenty of examples of genes that switch other genes on and off, and AND and OR are all over the place.
More interesting are the abstract pattern creation systems. Think about the following example.
Fly legs have precursors in maggots which are flat disks. The disks are concentric circles of precursor cells. The "toes" are in the middle and the "hips" are on outside. The whole thing swells up into a leg when it gets switched on.
Butterflies often have "eye spots" on their wings, which are concentric circles of different colored scales. The scales "know" what color to be based on the genes expressed in the circle.
Think about it. The concentric circles are abstract - the same genetic machinery creates both patterns and then the patterns are applied to completely different applications.
As a matter of a fact, society is the aggregation of individual decisions. The key issue here is how the aggregation works.
This kind of decision making (based on complete knowledge) can be modelled using game theory, and the results are often counterintuitive.
For one thing society as a whole cannot be said to "want" anything, because it is easy to construct a situation in which a society "wants" A more than B, B more than C and C more than A, which is clearly irrational.
So there is no such thing as democracy in the sense of public institutions that determine and carry out "the will of the people". Democracy is always sort of an approximation. The majority of Americans didn't want George W Bush, and the majority of the French didn't want Chirac, but the countries are still considered democracies. The relations of the two countries suffered afterwards. Was that the will of the people?
I believe its real contribution of democracy is that the election process tends to keep politicians on their toes, and term limits are a natural cleansing process. the free press is also very important.
Another counterintuitive idea is the "Nash Equilibrium". It is a situation in which none of the players in the game can improve their situations by unilaterally changing their behavior. Since no one has any incentive to change his behavior, the situation is stable. The counterintuitive part is that there can be more than one such equilibrium in a given "game", and that they don't necessarily maximize the benefits of the players.
So you could think of Saddam's regime as a Nash equilibrium. It'S bad news, but there's no way out (without an external push).
Americans... don't really realize how good [they] have.
True. Or how bad. I tried wholesaling UPSs in Germany, but there is no market for them. Why? No power outages. Meanwhile, my sister in law in Lexington, KY reports that after a recent ice storm, they went three days without power and there was widespread looting. She lost her TV and stereo. No wonder those rednecks running (or not running) Iraq take such a relaxed attitude. It's just like home. The solution is to run the power lines underground, but that would require investment in infrastructure.
Europeans cope with ridiculous gasoline prices (1 a quart!) by buying fuel efficient cars. Americans cope with their awful electricity infrastructure buying USPs and guns. Poles and Russians can repair just about anything. It is impossible to try to explain to your average Korean what a dump Seoul is, because he can't imagine a city that is actually pleasant.
Poor countries have spurts of growth unimagineable in rich counties. Look what's going on in China. It's partly because they see rich countries in other places and know things could be better. Backwards places like Pakistan don't progress partly because they don't see the need to. They can't imagine a better place. There was a huge debate in India among Hindu fundamentalists about whether the flyover pictures of Southern California in a popular TV series showing all the swimming pools were real or just CIA backed propaganda.
Once the entire world is equalized, and every talks to everyone, the will be a burst of growth and then all progress will stop, because no one will aspire to anything better.
I thought the point to late binding and polymophism was that you don't tell the computer "precisely" what to do - the computer decides at run time.
Another thing. If Java can run on different machines, then there must be some imprecision in the program, because the two system won't be doing "precisely" the same thing, will they?
Actually the Spanish cam to America with short term goals - getting gold was the main one. They never intended anything long term. the colonists who didn't want to export tabacco or something at least were dreaming of a better life for their children. They were mostly self financed. Forget manned space flight, send robots to keep the dream alive. In 200 years we'll have the technology to start terraforming, in case anyone really wants to.
1) Going to Mars would probably suck. For example, I think living in Anarctica sounds a lot better. I predict the population of Mars will never exceed that of Antarctica.
2) Finding life on Mars would be a massive boost to understanding life in general. I bet that if things get better in the next few centuries it will be because mankind improves things on Earth, and that understanding biology is going to be important in that process.
So destroying life, however primitive, on Mars, is probably a bad bet, because colonizing Mars isn't going to help anyone anyway, and studying alien life may very well..
In Japan all the new houses have toilet bowls operated by remote control. You can adjust the seat heating and fine tune the flush and there are nozzles that squirt your butt for fun and hygiene. They are about as standardized and easy to use as VCR remotes and the instructions are in Japanese, providing a powerful incentive to learn the language. Seems like the perfect niche for Windows WC or whatever.
In fact just because this thing had feathers and could fly - or at least glide - doesn't mean it was a bird or a precursor to a bird. A lot of dinosaurs had feathers. And after all, flying squirrels aren't bats.
I live in Germany where there's a _lot_ more cell phones than in the US, and I thought pay phones were doomed five years ago, so I scooped slashdot by a long shot.
And at first it looked like I was right.
Telekom, the old monopoly, was dismantling them left and right.
But now they are popping up again like mushrooms. Interestingly, It isn't Telekom that's doing it. There seem to be small companies that can make them pay. They also seem to be popular - you see people using them a lot.
It doesn't make any sense to me, but it is an undeniable fact.
Bacterion in Greek, bacterium in fake Latin
on
Conan the Bacterium
·
· Score: 1
The Latin ending -um (neuter singular) replaces the Greek -on when Latin borrows Greek words. But Bacterium (meaning "walking stick") wasn't really ever Latin. It got taken directly from the Greek and by convention switched to -um long after Latin was in affect dead. The neuter plural in both languages (For this declension) is -a
The real solution to water problems in the American West is not to increase the supply but to make the users pay the real price for the existing supply. This is especially true of farmers, who get water much cheaper than cities do.
The sum of the digits of the square of a number is equal to the square of the sum of the digits of that number if and only if the square of the palindrome of the number is equal to the palindrome of the square of the number. (The palindrome of a number is the number written backwards - for example 69 is the palindrome of 96).
Thus (1+2)^2 = 1+4+4 and (1+3)^2 = 1+6+9. Also 102^2 = 10404 and 3001^2 = 9006001 etc.
11^2 = 121 and 22^2 = 484 also fit the above pattern. 23 and 32 don't work. And 33^2 = 1089 doesn't either, but interestingly 99^2 = 9801. The problem is that base ten gets too small and you have to start carrying your digits when you start squaring numbers with high digits. The solution is to escape to a higher base, so you don't have to carry so much.
In base 11, the equation
23^2= 529 (base 10) is written 21^2= 441 (base 11)
because 529 = 4*121 + 4*11 + 1
Furthermore
13^2= 169 (base 10) is the same as 12^2= 144 (base 11)
This is confusing. We need some nomenclature just to explain it. let's say p(n) is the palindrome of n and s(n) is the sum of the digits of n.
What about 13 (base 11)?
13^2 = 169 (base 11) is the same as 14^2 = 196 (base 10).
31^2 = 961 (base 11) is the same as 34^2 = 1156 (base 10).
And 14 (base 11)?
14^2 = 196 is the same as 15^2 = 225 (base 10). Note that 14^2 = 196 (base 10).
41^2 = 1581 (base 11) is the same as 45^ = 2025 (base 10).
So the game continues, but only gets funner with the square of the base. In other words, new fun stuff is added at a decreasing rate.
I hav a tendency to spell "pronunciation" wrong - or in a non standard way! I usually get "English" right tho. (Or "doch" as the Germans say and write?)
I majored in Chinese and never sorted out the different ways to write "yuan". Especially since I studied Japanese and they use a different set of abbreviations. Gave up on it
I spent some time last summer wandering around Walmart stores in Eastern Kentucky last summer, and I can tell you, poor Americans don't need any more meat, or anything else to eat.
I've spent time in poor Asian countries in my day, and I can assure you - really poor people don't weigh three hundred pounds.
I'm not that old, but I can remember when hillbillies were skinny. Times change.
Note that deer populations were never a problem before hunters with guns showed up.
The argument that you should kill deer in order to reduce the occurrence of the disease is rather dubious, not least because it isn't clear that the "disease" is infectuous.
Calling people "bunny huggers" is like tattooing "I'm an asshole" on your forehead. Go ahead, whatever. (Put more philosophically, it reveals your locus of loyalty without materially contributing to the argument.)
The claim that hunting stabilizes the population is invented. In fact you don't know why the population is what it is - and neither do I. One way to test it would be to ban hunting completely for a decade or two and see what happens. None too likely in the near future.
An important fact is that hunting - or something -reduced the population of many species in North America over the last few hundred years.
The claim that hunting "stabilises" something which was in a long term decline and has recently bounced back is sophistry - it presupposes that we all agree that the populations are stable and claims without proof that they would be less so if hunting disappeared.
Of course there are still a lot of other factors involved. I suspect that the spread in marginal wooded areas has a lot to do with the increase in deer population.
The real point to the whole article is that she's a hot chick. There's lot's of speculative ideas floating around about how to resolve the differences between relativity and quantum Mechanics. The discussion has been running since the twenties.
She may well have some contribution to make, but that's not how you get your picture in a magazine. You get your picture in a magazine by looking good. I used to work as a TV cameraman, and we always interviewed the hottest chicks we could find. Why not? They have opinions too. And they draw audiences, thus spreading the word.
"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down / In the most delightful way" as Mary Poppins put it.
So sexist remarks are very appropriate. Pile'm on.
Most of the vast amount of information an organism contains is not in the genes at all. For example, ion concentrations in cells are often very far from equilibrium. If that pattern of disequilibria is messed up, it could kill the organism. Another example is the pattern of switched on and switched off genes, which varies from cell type to cell type - and is mostly controlled by proteins binding to "junk" DNA.
Because genes are so neatly digital, people tend to think of them as being all the information in a cell. Actually a cell is like a computer - some information is stored explicitly as software, and the rest is hardware, but it is really hard to tell where software ends and hardware begins. After all, floating point coprocessors work with big internal tables - so are those tables hardware or software? And think of the IBM keyboard BIOS. It started out life as hardware and ended up as software that emulate the hardware. Similarly, some proteins are taken from the same gene, but with a different set of exons.
Another thing is that biological systems love hacks, so the borders are constantly shifting. I think there's a good chance of finding introns doing unexpected stuff.
I just read "A New Kind of Science". It really is funny to observe Wolfram's attitude toward prior art. He's so bad at acknowledging other people's work that it's almost touching. It's like he's crying out for recognition.
He claims to have invented a new kind of prose for the book, and one of the symptoms of this claim is that he constantly refers to the discoveries of his book or his book's discoveries.
My impression of the book: If he were better at collaborating he'd be much more productive. The same is no doubt true of Mathematica.
Maybe we should all write him an email: "Hey dude you're a genius!" Maybe then he'd open source Mathematica. He definitely want Mathematica to be the lingua france of math, but I don't think money is the reason.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.gaminggeeks.org/Resources/KateMonk/Engl and-Medieval/Puritan.htm
Any sales guy will tell you that.
If the customer walks out of the store with exactly what he wanted when he came in, you have sold him nothing.
Duh
His remarks about libertarianism don't fit his remarks about MS not being punished by the market. Obviously, in his view, the markets have failed in Microsoft's case. So how can he believe in them? It doesn't make sense.
But he is right about Dell being a distributor, not a manufacturer. I love when business mags publish stuff about what a great manufacturer Dell is. They manufacture _nothing_ except maybe Powerpoints and advertising material. Chances are, your Dell equipment was never even seen by a Dell employee.
This will eventually catch up to Dell because the company adds so little value. But that won't kill the Wintel standard. Only the death of MS can do that, and the hardware side would survive anyway. The death of Sun will kill Sun's stuff though. So comparing Dell's demise with Sun'S doesn't make a lot of sense.
Nealy is right about execution. Make a profit this quarter. Repeat. That is more important than "vision".
This article was designed to amaze people that don't know anything about genetic regulatory systems. The hugely complex bodies of all organisms are "computed" by the the genes of the original fertilized egg. there are plenty of examples of genes that switch other genes on and off, and AND and OR are all over the place.
More interesting are the abstract pattern creation systems. Think about the following example.
Fly legs have precursors in maggots which are flat disks. The disks are concentric circles of precursor cells. The "toes" are in the middle and the "hips" are on outside. The whole thing swells up into a leg when it gets switched on.
Butterflies often have "eye spots" on their wings, which are concentric circles of different colored scales. The scales "know" what color to be based on the genes expressed in the circle.
Think about it. The concentric circles are abstract - the same genetic machinery creates both patterns and then the patterns are applied to completely different applications.
All this is based on NOTs and ANDs.
As a matter of a fact, society is the aggregation of individual decisions. The key issue here is how the aggregation works.
This kind of decision making (based on complete knowledge) can be modelled using game theory, and the results are often counterintuitive.
For one thing society as a whole cannot be said to "want" anything, because it is easy to construct a situation in which a society "wants" A more than B, B more than C and C more than A, which is clearly irrational.
So there is no such thing as democracy in the sense of public institutions that determine and carry out "the will of the people". Democracy is always sort of an approximation. The majority of Americans didn't want George W Bush, and the majority of the French didn't want Chirac, but the countries are still considered democracies. The relations of the two countries suffered afterwards. Was that the will of the people?
I believe its real contribution of democracy is that the election process tends to keep politicians on their toes, and term limits are a natural cleansing process. the free press is also very important.
Another counterintuitive idea is the "Nash Equilibrium". It is a situation in which none of the players in the game can improve their situations by unilaterally changing their behavior. Since no one has any incentive to change his behavior, the situation is stable. The counterintuitive part is that there can be more than one such equilibrium in a given "game", and that they don't necessarily maximize the benefits of the players.
So you could think of Saddam's regime as a Nash equilibrium. It'S bad news, but there's no way out (without an external push).
As has been pointed out, I was talking about guns as an anti looting mechanism
Americans... don't really realize how good [they] have.
True. Or how bad. I tried wholesaling UPSs in Germany, but there is no market for them. Why? No power outages. Meanwhile, my sister in law in Lexington, KY reports that after a recent ice storm, they went three days without power and there was widespread looting. She lost her TV and stereo. No wonder those rednecks running (or not running) Iraq take such a relaxed attitude. It's just like home. The solution is to run the power lines underground, but that would require investment in infrastructure.
Europeans cope with ridiculous gasoline prices (1 a quart!) by buying fuel efficient cars. Americans cope with their awful electricity infrastructure buying USPs and guns. Poles and Russians can repair just about anything. It is impossible to try to explain to your average Korean what a dump Seoul is, because he can't imagine a city that is actually pleasant.
Poor countries have spurts of growth unimagineable in rich counties. Look what's going on in China. It's partly because they see rich countries in other places and know things could be better. Backwards places like Pakistan don't progress partly because they don't see the need to. They can't imagine a better place. There was a huge debate in India among Hindu fundamentalists about whether the flyover pictures of Southern California in a popular TV series showing all the swimming pools were real or just CIA backed propaganda.
Once the entire world is equalized, and every talks to everyone, the will be a burst of growth and then all progress will stop, because no one will aspire to anything better.
I thought the point to late binding and polymophism was that you don't tell the computer "precisely" what to do - the computer decides at run time.
Another thing. If Java can run on different machines, then there must be some imprecision in the program, because the two system won't be doing "precisely" the same thing, will they?
Actually the Spanish cam to America with short term goals - getting gold was the main one. They never intended anything long term. the colonists who didn't want to export tabacco or something at least were dreaming of a better life for their children. They were mostly self financed. Forget manned space flight, send robots to keep the dream alive. In 200 years we'll have the technology to start terraforming, in case anyone really wants to.
I disagree for two reasons:
1) Going to Mars would probably suck. For example, I think living in Anarctica sounds a lot better. I predict the population of Mars will never exceed that of Antarctica.
2) Finding life on Mars would be a massive boost to understanding life in general. I bet that if things get better in the next few centuries it will be because mankind improves things on Earth, and that understanding biology is going to be important in that process.
So destroying life, however primitive, on Mars, is probably a bad bet, because colonizing Mars isn't going to help anyone anyway, and studying alien life may very well..
In Japan all the new houses have toilet bowls operated by remote control. You can adjust the seat heating and fine tune the flush and there are nozzles that squirt your butt for fun and hygiene. They are about as standardized and easy to use as VCR remotes and the instructions are in Japanese, providing a powerful incentive to learn the language. Seems like the perfect niche for Windows WC or whatever.
In fact just because this thing had feathers and could fly - or at least glide - doesn't mean it was a bird or a precursor to a bird. A lot of dinosaurs had feathers. And after all, flying squirrels aren't bats.
I live in Germany where there's a _lot_ more cell phones than in the US, and I thought pay phones were doomed five years ago, so I scooped slashdot by a long shot.
And at first it looked like I was right.
Telekom, the old monopoly, was dismantling them left and right.
But now they are popping up again like mushrooms. Interestingly, It isn't Telekom that's doing it. There seem to be small companies that can make them pay. They also seem to be popular - you see people using them a lot.
It doesn't make any sense to me, but it is an undeniable fact.
The Latin ending -um (neuter singular) replaces the Greek -on when Latin borrows Greek words. But Bacterium (meaning "walking stick") wasn't really ever Latin. It got taken directly from the Greek and by convention switched to -um long after Latin was in affect dead. The neuter plural in both languages (For this declension) is -a
The real solution to water problems in the American West is not to increase the supply but to make the users pay the real price for the existing supply. This is especially true of farmers, who get water much cheaper than cities do.
Heh
slashdot chopped my sig!!
Here's some stuff about base 11 squares:
The sum of the digits of the square of a number is equal to the square of the sum of the digits of that number if and only if the square of the palindrome of the number is equal to the palindrome of the square of the number. (The palindrome of a number is the number written backwards - for example 69 is the palindrome of 96).
Thus (1+2)^2 = 1+4+4 and (1+3)^2 = 1+6+9. Also 102^2 = 10404 and 3001^2 = 9006001 etc.
11^2 = 121 and 22^2 = 484 also fit the above pattern. 23 and 32 don't work. And 33^2 = 1089 doesn't either, but interestingly 99^2 = 9801. The problem is that base ten gets too small and you have to start carrying your digits when you start squaring numbers with high digits. The solution is to escape to a higher base, so you don't have to carry so much.
In base 11, the equation
23^2= 529 (base 10) is written 21^2= 441 (base 11)
because 529 = 4*121 + 4*11 + 1
Furthermore
13^2= 169 (base 10) is the same as 12^2= 144 (base 11)
This is confusing. We need some nomenclature just to explain it. let's say p(n) is the palindrome of n and s(n) is the sum of the digits of n.
What about 13 (base 11)?
13^2 = 169 (base 11) is the same as 14^2 = 196 (base 10).
31^2 = 961 (base 11) is the same as 34^2 = 1156 (base 10).
And 14 (base 11)?
14^2 = 196 is the same as 15^2 = 225 (base 10). Note that 14^2 = 196 (base 10).
41^2 = 1581 (base 11) is the same as 45^ = 2025 (base 10).
So the game continues, but only gets funner with the square of the base. In other words, new fun stuff is added at a decreasing rate.
"Back" may be a little misleading. Maybe the populations "overshot", assuming we agree on what the population should be.
"Infestation"? "Dangerous"? Relax. How do deaths by deer intervention rank? "Effective"? To what end?
My argument was that the previous post was a troll. No more an no less.
I didn't make any policy recommendation at all in my post about deer, hunting or trolls.
If you insist, here's a recommendation on all three: Tax 'm! Or do you prefer income tax?
I didn't call anyone an asshole.
I hav a tendency to spell "pronunciation" wrong - or in a non standard way! I usually get "English" right tho. (Or "doch" as the Germans say and write?)
I majored in Chinese and never sorted out the different ways to write "yuan". Especially since I studied Japanese and they use a different set of abbreviations. Gave up on it
I spent some time last summer wandering around Walmart stores in Eastern Kentucky last summer, and I can tell you, poor Americans don't need any more meat, or anything else to eat.
I've spent time in poor Asian countries in my day, and I can assure you - really poor people don't weigh three hundred pounds.
I'm not that old, but I can remember when hillbillies were skinny. Times change.
Note that deer populations were never a problem before hunters with guns showed up.
The argument that you should kill deer in order to reduce the occurrence of the disease is rather dubious, not least because it isn't clear that the "disease" is infectuous.
Calling people "bunny huggers" is like tattooing "I'm an asshole" on your forehead. Go ahead, whatever. (Put more philosophically, it reveals your locus of loyalty without materially contributing to the argument.)
The claim that hunting stabilizes the population is invented. In fact you don't know why the population is what it is - and neither do I. One way to test it would be to ban hunting completely for a decade or two and see what happens. None too likely in the near future.
An important fact is that hunting - or something -reduced the population of many species in North America over the last few hundred years.
The claim that hunting "stabilises" something which was in a long term decline and has recently bounced back is sophistry - it presupposes that we all agree that the populations are stable and claims without proof that they would be less so if hunting disappeared.
Of course there are still a lot of other factors involved. I suspect that the spread in marginal wooded areas has a lot to do with the increase in deer population.
The post is a troll.
Anyway, I don't think spelling is that important. Pronounciation varies, why shouldn't spelling?
The real point to the whole article is that she's a hot chick. There's lot's of speculative ideas floating around about how to resolve the differences between relativity and quantum Mechanics. The discussion has been running since the twenties.
She may well have some contribution to make, but that's not how you get your picture in a magazine. You get your picture in a magazine by looking good. I used to work as a TV cameraman, and we always interviewed the hottest chicks we could find. Why not? They have opinions too. And they draw audiences, thus spreading the word.
"A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down / In the most delightful way" as Mary Poppins put it.
So sexist remarks are very appropriate. Pile'm on.
Because genes are so neatly digital, people tend to think of them as being all the information in a cell. Actually a cell is like a computer - some information is stored explicitly as software, and the rest is hardware, but it is really hard to tell where software ends and hardware begins. After all, floating point coprocessors work with big internal tables - so are those tables hardware or software? And think of the IBM keyboard BIOS. It started out life as hardware and ended up as software that emulate the hardware. Similarly, some proteins are taken from the same gene, but with a different set of exons.
Another thing is that biological systems love hacks, so the borders are constantly shifting. I think there's a good chance of finding introns doing unexpected stuff.
He claims to have invented a new kind of prose for the book, and one of the symptoms of this claim is that he constantly refers to the discoveries of his book or his book's discoveries.
My impression of the book: If he were better at collaborating he'd be much more productive. The same is no doubt true of Mathematica.
Maybe we should all write him an email: "Hey dude you're a genius!" Maybe then he'd open source Mathematica. He definitely want Mathematica to be the lingua france of math, but I don't think money is the reason.