A news organization's purpose is to inform, not to proffer an opinion.
I think you mean should be. Traditionally, US media's purpose has been neither; it has been to profit. Fox news is breaking new ground in pushing a particular point of view. I guess it is profitable, too.
In a recent study, a major condom manufacturer showed photos of men and women to internet users. Surprisingly, most people were not able to distinguish those with an STD from those without.
Conclusion: most internet users are in serious danger of contracting AIDS.
The DVDs you buy on the street in Shanghai for $1.25 (9 Yuan) are exact copies of the commercial ones, so the fidelity is the same. The packaging is crappy and you have to waste a bit of your time insisting the vendor show it to you before buying. Perhaps that's why I never saw one for $0.75 -- I only bought from people who were prepared to give me a demo.
But seriously a $1.25 street price in Shanghai would probably map to $5.00 in New York and maybe $0.75 in less travelled parts of China.
And in both places there's an upscale and/or convenience market. People think nothing of paying double or triple the floor price for exactly the same candy, food, beer, etc. depending on the situation. But ten or twenty times is a bit of a reach in any marketplace.
Don't forget the mind-numbingly repetitive scences salvaged from the cutting room recycle bin that find their way into the "director's cut."
(Perhaps "40-year-old virgin" could be cut to an amusing movie; I'll never know because I saw the director's cut and I'm certainly not going to invest *another* couple of hours of my time to see.)
Employers (and `justice' officials) put way too much faith in these unvalidated para-scientific tests. Polygraphs have false positive and false negative rates of around 50% -- that is, they are as effective as tea leaves, divining rods, and Tarot cards. Voice stress analysis, ink blots, and other personality tests are just the same.
Polygraphs and voice stress have largely been banned for employment screening. So should any other non-validated test used to make decisions that bear on somebody's well-being.
Interestingly your friends in `security' are exempt in the US. The FBI routinely screens using lie detectors. If you fail (which is quite likely; less so if you are a trained spy) you will get a permanent federal record of being deceitful.
The "trick question" about stealing from your employer is discussed in some detail. The bottom line is that these devices are interrogation techniques not diagnostic tools, along with racks, bright lights, rubber hoses, dogs, immersion,...
While I agree with the basic theme of the parent -- that there's more to life than one narrowly defined technology -- I don't necessarily agree with the subtext that a liberal arts formal education is better than a more specialized one.
By a specialized education I mean a university level course in which one tries to acquire as large a fraction as possible of human knowledge in a field and an appreciation of its limits. Such an education is necessarily narrower than can be achieved with a bunch of bird courses in humanities. Yet the general skills of analytic thought, investigation of *primary* sources, experiment, and argument, I suspect are better learned in the specialized environment. In the end, you can pick an encyclopedia (or even read Wikipedia for anything but a politically hot topic) or a text book or Scientific American or National Geographic and get pointers to way more interesting stuff than you'll ever have see in Sociology 101.
In many ways it all boils down to the "intellectual curiosity" attribute alluded to in the original article. Obligatory humanities courses will not engender curiosity in the un-curious, and specialized education will not kill it in the curious. Personally, I think that mentors and peers -- from parents through professors and fellow students and life partners -- stimulate intellectual curiosity more than any particular subject matter. But of course, strong programs (in any discipline) will be likely to attract such mentors and peers.
Newswires are wrong. I have the printed standings in front of me.
The top 4 (Saratov, Jagiellonian, Altai, Twente) got gold, the next 4 silver, the next 4 bronze.
Gordon Cormack Coach, Waterloo
P.S. Please do lobby ICPC to be more spectator-friendly. Although they seem to care about the profile of the contest, they seem indifferent to advertising and reporting on-line results. They refused to disclose a scoreboard link in advance; the actual contest time was not well advertised; even after the start of the contest they had "2006 World Champions" as a label on last year's results; the *real* scoreboard link was posted nearly an hour after the start; the start and finish times were never posted; the scoreboard was frozen with no indication. Detailed results are *never* posted and summary results still aren't there more than 15 hours after the awards ceremony.
Bush surrendered on 9/11. He said, "Yes we should be terrified. We should forsake all we believe about tolerance, justice, liberty and privacy. We should attack the (evil-doers, axis of evil, freedom haters, people who see things differently from us). We will play the terrorists' game according to their rules."
Imagine if the most powerful nation in the world had had a leader with the strength to say "We are not afraid. We will overcome terror by declining to be terrorized. We will never waver in our resolve to protect the principles on which this nation was founded."
To the moderator who modded parent "off topic:" The point of the parent is that just throwing up a web site claiming to do something proves nothing. It is certainly premature to say that large companies have wasted their money because somebody throws up a demo that purports to do a similar thing.
Of course. My primary concern was electrocution. Protection from inadvertent shorts is a somewhat different kettle of fish.
Think of the level of insulation under the hood of your car. The loose leads are insulated, but not the battery terminal posts, or any of the high-current binding-post connections, etc. They depend on rigid physical separation for isolation. Sure, somebody occasionally shorts a battery terminal with a wrench - usually with little substantive damage. But the general idea is that if you open the hood you know where to put your wrench. And if you don't, you won't get killed (at least not by the 12V electrical system).
For physics reasons, it's easier to transmit AC over long distances; DC requires thick copper cables or bars, instead of comparatively lightweight wires. But DC becomes a more serious possibility for power once AC reaches a building.
What a load of crap. Low voltage (high current) requires thick wires - it has nothing to do with AC/DC. AC is horrible for long-distance transmission; up north megavolt DC is popular. AC is useful because it is easy to transform - you can step the voltage up or down with turn-of-the-previous-century technology and hence transmit at a higher voltage than you'd like to use.
That said, if space and cooling are an issue it might well make engineering sense to get the transformers, capacitors, and rectifiers out of the computer boxes. Big 5v/12v power busses wouldn't even need to be insulated. So while the reporter badly mangled the story, the engineering sounds reasonable to me.
Once upon a time, Microsoft's crappy Windows 386 was in danger of getting killed by OS/2. So they announced Windows NT - the killer ap that would be so much better than OS/2 it would be worthwhile hanging on to your DOS-based box until it was delivered.
Eventually - ten years late - Windows NT somewhere near met its promise. Was it a failure? Of course not - even as vapourware it killed OS/2.
Perhaps any half-decent lawyer can have the patent invalidated, but perhaps not before some yahoo judge slaps a permanent injunction on the whole web. (cf. RIM)
Here are the results of the latest TREC Spam Evaluation. No filter - not even CRM114 or DSPAM - comes close to 99.9% overall accuracy.
That said, filters can remove 98% of spam with about 0.1% false positives, which makes them pretty useful. Most, but not all, of
those 1-in-1000 false positives are marginal anyway.
If you're interested in doing your own tests, there's a free toolkit and corpus with 92,000 messages.
Apparently to be heard (i.e. not modded down) in this forum one must use small words and avoid metaphor, while repeating learned wisdom.
The parent says that the granparent is excessively dismissive of network computing, and ignores the cost, effort, and risks involved with maintaining and using one's own computer system.
The parent uses a device called allegory to make this point.
The economies of scale don't usually apply to software in the same way they apply to physical processes/things.
That's exactly what Thomas Alva Edison said (in addition to frying small and large mammals with the dread alternating current) in an effort to discredit George Westinghouse's electical grid.
Anyone who can't afford to be fucked by the loss of a connection to any centralised system (like, say, a hospital) has a localised back-up already in place. It's not efficient but it keeps things working.
Exactly. Their primary source is the grid. For backup only, they have an inferior, expensive, hard-to-maintain alternative.
If I would be seriously fucked by loss of my computing, I wouldn't be using my laptop, or a home desktop, or any sort of consumer-grade solution. In terms of availability, I have done no serious study, but I think I've spent more time waiting for my personal computers to come up (or be updated, reconfigured, repaired, etc.) than for my internet connection. At least in the last five years. And that's not to mention actual and potential loss of data, or the administrative time spent trying to mitigate these. Then there's version control. Which one of these fifty Word documents on various machines and media is the current draft? Where are the notes from that meeting?
And we should all have our own electric generators, wells, septic tanks, oil patches, gardens, dairies, and so on. And perhaps we should dine in our bomb shelters, eating whatever we can take out of a can and cook on sterno. Just in case.
It is commonly argued here that RMS and FSF are out-of-touch crusaders to be marginalized when considering how really to get software written. I disagree.
Torvald's kernel and the community that support it are quite remarkable, and I wish to take nothing away from them. However, they would not exist if not for gcc and a host of other tools that themselves would simply not exist were it not for Stallman. He was savvy enough to see the creation of these tools; part of this savvy manifested itself in the GPL which demands quid-quo-pro from users of free software.
Now you can imagine a world in which we all just gave away our efforts, and you can imagine a world in which this benevolency resulted in a societal revolution in which open-source (but not necessarily free) software thrived. I can never prove that such a world might not have evolved, but the world as it actually exists has been heavily shaped by Stallman's efforts.
Stallman is certainly not irrelevant in the history of software. I would hesitate to dismiss him as irrelevant to the future.
Slashdot Mirror
A news organization's purpose is to inform, not to proffer an opinion.
I think you mean should be. Traditionally, US media's purpose has been neither; it has been to profit. Fox news is breaking new ground in pushing a particular point of view. I guess it is profitable, too.
In a recent study, a major condom manufacturer showed photos of men and women to internet users. Surprisingly, most people were not able to distinguish those with an STD from those without.
Conclusion: most internet users are in serious danger of contracting AIDS.
[note to moderators. this is a parody.]
There was never any rational basis for rotating passwords. Spafford's 70's rationale is amusing but bogus.
The DVDs you buy on the street in Shanghai for $1.25 (9 Yuan) are exact copies of the commercial ones, so the fidelity is the same. The packaging is crappy and you have to waste a bit of your time insisting the vendor show it to you before buying. Perhaps that's why I never saw one for $0.75 -- I only bought from people who were prepared to give me a demo.
But seriously a $1.25 street price in Shanghai would probably map to $5.00 in New York and maybe $0.75 in less travelled parts of China.
And in both places there's an upscale and/or convenience market. People think nothing of paying double or triple the floor price for
exactly the same candy, food, beer, etc. depending on the situation.
But ten or twenty times is a bit of a reach in any marketplace.
Don't forget the mind-numbingly repetitive scences salvaged
from the cutting room recycle bin that find their way into
the "director's cut."
(Perhaps "40-year-old virgin" could be cut to an amusing movie;
I'll never know because I saw the director's cut and I'm certainly
not going to invest *another* couple of hours of my time to see.)
Employers (and `justice' officials) put way too much faith in these unvalidated para-scientific tests. Polygraphs have false positive and false negative rates of around 50% -- that is, they are as effective as tea leaves, divining rods, and Tarot cards. Voice stress analysis, ink blots, and other personality tests are just the same.
...
Polygraphs and voice stress have largely been banned for employment screening. So should any other non-validated test used to make decisions that bear on somebody's well-being.
Interestingly your friends in `security' are exempt in the US. The FBI routinely screens using lie detectors. If you fail (which is quite likely; less so if you are a trained spy) you will get a permanent federal record of being deceitful.
See "The Lie Behind the Lie Detector," a free book: http://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml
The "trick question" about stealing from your employer is discussed in some detail. The bottom line is that these devices are interrogation techniques not diagnostic tools, along with racks, bright lights, rubber hoses, dogs, immersion,
While I agree with the basic theme of the parent -- that there's more to life than one narrowly defined technology -- I don't necessarily agree with the subtext that a liberal arts formal education is better than a more specialized one.
By a specialized education I mean a university level course in which one tries to acquire as large a fraction as possible of human knowledge in a field and an appreciation of its limits. Such an education is necessarily narrower than can be achieved with a bunch of bird courses in humanities. Yet the general skills of analytic thought, investigation of *primary* sources, experiment, and argument, I suspect are better learned in the specialized environment. In the end, you can pick an encyclopedia (or even read Wikipedia for anything but a politically hot topic) or a text book or Scientific American or National Geographic and get pointers to way more interesting stuff than you'll ever have see in Sociology 101.
In many ways it all boils down to the "intellectual curiosity" attribute alluded to in the original article. Obligatory humanities courses will not engender curiosity in the un-curious, and specialized education will not kill it in the curious. Personally, I think that mentors and peers -- from parents through professors and fellow students and life partners -- stimulate intellectual curiosity more than any particular subject matter. But of course, strong programs (in any discipline) will be likely to attract such mentors and peers.
Newswires are wrong. I have the printed standings in front of me.
The top 4 (Saratov, Jagiellonian, Altai, Twente) got gold, the
next 4 silver, the next 4 bronze.
Gordon Cormack
Coach, Waterloo
P.S. Please do lobby ICPC to be more spectator-friendly.
Although they seem to care about the profile of the
contest, they seem indifferent to advertising
and reporting on-line results. They refused to disclose
a scoreboard link in advance; the actual contest time
was not well advertised; even after the start of the
contest they had "2006 World Champions" as a label
on last year's results; the *real* scoreboard link
was posted nearly an hour after the start; the start
and finish times were never posted; the scoreboard
was frozen with no indication. Detailed results are
*never* posted and summary results still aren't there
more than 15 hours after the awards ceremony.
You are making the specious assumption that stock-market price has something to do with having a viable product.
Imagine if the most powerful nation in the world had had a leader with the strength to say "We are not afraid. We will overcome terror by declining to be terrorized. We will never waver in our resolve to protect the principles on which this nation was founded."
To the moderator who modded parent "off topic:" The point of the parent is that just throwing up a web site claiming to do something proves nothing. It is certainly premature to say that large companies have wasted their money because somebody throws up a demo that purports to do a similar thing.
I have an anti-gravity machine: http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~gvcormac/antigravity/. I wonder why the Brits spent so much money building Harrier jets?
Nonsense. See, for example, http://www.dansdata.com/gz013.htm
Think of the level of insulation under the hood of your car. The loose leads are insulated, but not the battery terminal posts, or any of the high-current binding-post connections, etc. They depend on rigid physical separation for isolation. Sure, somebody occasionally shorts a battery terminal with a wrench - usually with little substantive damage. But the general idea is that if you open the hood you know where to put your wrench. And if you don't, you won't get killed (at least not by the 12V electrical system).
That said, if space and cooling are an issue it might well make engineering sense to get the transformers, capacitors, and rectifiers out of the computer boxes. Big 5v/12v power busses wouldn't even need to be insulated. So while the reporter badly mangled the story, the engineering sounds reasonable to me.
Once upon a time, Microsoft's crappy Windows 386 was in danger of getting killed by OS/2. So they announced Windows NT - the killer ap that would be so much better than OS/2 it would be worthwhile hanging on to your DOS-based box until it was delivered.
Eventually - ten years late - Windows NT somewhere near met its promise. Was it a failure? Of course not - even as vapourware it killed OS/2.
IBM dropped the patent claims nearly a year ago, so as to expedite the case.
IBM also file several summary judgement motions and the court told them to stop doing that until after discovery.
I don't think you can say that IBM is dragging this out.
Perhaps any half-decent lawyer can have the patent invalidated, but perhaps not before some yahoo judge slaps a permanent injunction on the whole web. (cf. RIM)
Why do Americans get so worked up about things that nobody else in the world cares about - like betting and bare breasts?
That said, filters can remove 98% of spam with about 0.1% false positives, which makes them pretty useful. Most, but not all, of those 1-in-1000 false positives are marginal anyway.
If you're interested in doing your own tests, there's a free toolkit and corpus with 92,000 messages.
The parent says that the granparent is excessively dismissive of network computing, and ignores the cost, effort, and risks involved with maintaining and using one's own computer system.
The parent uses a device called allegory to make this point.
If I would be seriously fucked by loss of my computing, I wouldn't be using my laptop, or a home desktop, or any sort of consumer-grade solution. In terms of availability, I have done no serious study, but I think I've spent more time waiting for my personal computers to come up (or be updated, reconfigured, repaired, etc.) than for my internet connection. At least in the last five years. And that's not to mention actual and potential loss of data, or the administrative time spent trying to mitigate these. Then there's version control. Which one of these fifty Word documents on various machines and media is the current draft? Where are the notes from that meeting?
And we should all have our own electric generators, wells, septic tanks, oil patches, gardens, dairies, and so on. And perhaps we should dine in our bomb shelters, eating whatever we can take out of a can and cook on sterno. Just in case.
It is commonly argued here that RMS and FSF are out-of-touch crusaders to be marginalized when considering how really to get software written. I disagree.
Torvald's kernel and the community that support it are quite remarkable, and I wish to take nothing away from them. However, they would not exist if not for gcc and a host of other tools that themselves would simply not exist were it not for Stallman. He was savvy enough to see the creation of these tools; part of this savvy manifested itself in the GPL which demands quid-quo-pro from users of free software.
Now you can imagine a world in which we all just gave away our efforts, and you can imagine a world in which this benevolency resulted in a societal revolution in which open-source (but not necessarily free) software thrived. I can never prove that such a world might not have evolved, but the world as it actually exists has been heavily shaped by Stallman's efforts.
Stallman is certainly not irrelevant in the history of software. I would hesitate to dismiss him as irrelevant to the future.