I do have a kind of an example of this. My boss, an atheist like myself, doesn't believe in the Darwinian account of evolution. He's a Lamarckian. I think he's mistaken, although I have a lot of respect for his intellect.
> Why can't you accept the fact that there is a being greater than man?
I have no problem at all with the notion that somewhere, somewhen, there are beings greater (in some sense) than man. I just don't believe that they are gods, or that they created the universe. I'm also quite content with being the descendant of chimps.
I also don't need a religion to give my life purpose.
As an aside, I'm sure you will have noticed that the value of $A is measured against other currencies to 1/100 of a cent at the end of the ABC news, and petrol prices are always given to 1/10 of a cent. (Why, I don't know, since the smallect currency in circulation is 5c... ) As even more of an aside to the aside, my son recently spotted a petrol price of 133.7 per litre, which as you can imagine was the cause of much hilarity.
Of course, when I grew up, we had to calculate money in 3 number systems (20 shillings to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling, and you're doing it all in base 10 numbers). Decimal points in money is for poofters.
I'm sure you're wrong (but I'm too drunk to explain why). You should never ever ever ever use floats of whatever arbritary precision is available to deal wtih money. Sixteen digits of precision just doesn't cut it (considering how much information you lose adding a really big number to a really small number). If you don't get my drift you need to go back to school.
You're absolutely correct. We don't want a bigger float. Floating point numbers are just about (ah... no... absolutely) _the_ _most_ _innapropriate_ thing to use for financial calculations. These things can be managed much better (binary coded decimal, very long ints scaled, other stuff I can't be fucked thinking about). Maple is pretty good for HUGE numbers.
You didn't do a lot of maths at university, did you. You're probably an economist or an accountant or something. You certainly aren't a computer scientist. Or a mathematician.
You've been short-changed. Through no fault of your own, you're profoundly ignorant of something very important, to both computer scientists _and_ civil engineers.
The introductory course I did in Numerical Analysis in 2nd year uni was a semester unit, as was the slightly more advanced unit I did in 3rd year. In each case, the lecture was one of the highlights of my week.
The bloke who taught it was really cool. He's the only person I've ever seen manage to shut up the two back rows full of engineering students - just by glaring at them.
We didn't do a significant amount of numerical analysis until 2nd year at university (although the 1st year course touched on it), but it was one of my favourite subjects. The bloke who taught us (Silvan Elhay) found an error in the FP hardware on the VAX, apparently. He's pretty smart, and also a good sax player.
Also, how is this relevant to financial transactions? I thought they were all done with either BCD, or large integers scaled at the end of the calculation.
>... human tallying is more error prone than computer tallying.
That's not the issue. It seems to me that most of us are focussing on deliberate fraud rather than error, and it's _much_ easier to perpetrate fraud on a massive scale with electonic voting than with properly scrutinised counting of paper ballots.
In Australia, we do it the same way as the Canadians. Sure, our population is somewhat smaller (a bit over 20 million), but we have close to 100% voter participation because it's compulsory. Additionally, we use a preferential voting system which is more complicated to tally than the winner-takes-all system the US uses. I can't remember when it's taken more than a day from the polls closing to get a result for the lower house. (The Senate usually takes a few weeks because the ballot paper is usually the size of a bedsheet and the tally system is complicated, but this doesn't affect who governs the country.)
Because we have an Electoral Commission with considerable independance from political influence who are responsible for running the elections and redrawing electorate boundaries when required to ensure each one has roughly the same number of voters, I'm confident that Australia has one of the least corrupt electoral systems in the world (even though it's produced an unfortunate result the last four times).
It seems to me that the only reason that the political class in the US likes electronic voting so much is precisely because it is so vulnerable to fraud.
There are two big problems with the WalMart model. First, it destroys the local economy. (Does anyone in the US still make anything? I know we don't in Australia - even without actual WalMart [just the same mind-set]. Not to mention all the small businesses that close because they can't compete on price.) Second, it removes the possibility of buying good-quality, locally-made stuff even if you have the money and you're prepared to spend it.
The reason, of course, that poor people can't afford anything better than the crap sold in such places as WalMart is because they no longer have jobs, or at least ones that pay enough for a decent life. And don't even think about mentioning trickle-down - it's fraudulent.
I'd certainly be surprised if there were still people who didn't know that smoking and shitty food _could_ harm you, but you need to be reasonably well-educated to understand the science behind the correlation between diet and disease well enough to do a proper risk-assessment. Most people are lousy at this. (That is also why the right can keep most people fooled about climate change.)
The particular (very few) scienticians mentioned in the article deny climate change and then go on to claim that in any case it isn't anthropogenic. Even if it were occurring. Which it isn't. No, don't show me the drowning polar bears, it isn't happening. And anyway, we didn't cause it. We weren't there when it happened. Which it didn't anyway. This isn't the climate change you're looking for.
And so it goes.
To be frank, I think it's way too late to do anything. We should have listened to the hippies 40 years ago, but even then it was probably too late to do anything useful.
Only if the god were just and merciful. A malevolent god would've just let it roll on (and maybe have permitted or encouraged even greater excesses). So you've proved nothing either way. (Disclaimer: I'm an atheist with an interest in theology as a formal system.)
(Sigh) Someone (probably your mother) neglected to point out to you that complex problems don't have simple answers. There is a correlation between poverty and early death, and the probable causes include:
Poor people generally can't afford adequate health care or a decent diet.
They are likely to be poorly educated, so won't grasp the importance of the correlation between smoking and a shitty diet, and an early death from lung or bowel cancer or heart disease.
There's probably a bunch of stuff I've left out, but I'm not going to do any more of your thinking for you.
As an aside, my mother recently died a bit before her 80th birthday. Her lungs and heart were fucked because she'd smoked for 50 years, but because she was well-off, she lived for probably 20 years longer than she would have if she'd been poor and smoked for the same time. She could afford high-quality health care, and because she was well educated she got to work in a clean environment.
Well. It's the usual suspects, and they've been very noisily, over some years, promoting their view of "climate change is junk science and anyway it's caused by changes in solar radiation... er... that's if it's happening at all, which it isn't". It's hard to take the fuckers seriously, but they'll muddy the waters a lot.
Me, I'm moving to the country (paint my mailbox blue, water tastes like wine), with a.303 and a lot of ammunition, hoping to survive the Resource Wars.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot: // You _really_ don't want to try to understand this
// Ugly hack alert! Trying to work around braindead earlier implementation // Shit. I wish I'd tried to generalise this earlier
and
I do have a kind of an example of this. My boss, an atheist like myself, doesn't believe in the Darwinian account of evolution. He's a Lamarckian. I think he's mistaken, although I have a lot of respect for his intellect.
> Why can't you accept the fact that there is a being greater than man?
I have no problem at all with the notion that somewhere, somewhen, there are beings greater (in some sense) than man. I just don't believe that they are gods, or that they created the universe. I'm also quite content with being the descendant of chimps.
I also don't need a religion to give my life purpose.
As an aside, I'm sure you will have noticed that the value of $A is measured against other currencies to 1/100 of a cent at the end of the ABC news, and petrol prices are always given to 1/10 of a cent. (Why, I don't know, since the smallect currency in circulation is 5c ... ) As even more of an aside to the aside, my son recently spotted a petrol price of 133.7 per litre, which as you can imagine was the cause of much hilarity.
Of course, when I grew up, we had to calculate money in 3 number systems (20 shillings to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling, and you're doing it all in base 10 numbers). Decimal points in money is for poofters.
I'm sure you're wrong (but I'm too drunk to explain why). You should never ever ever ever use floats of whatever arbritary precision is available to deal wtih money. Sixteen digits of precision just doesn't cut it (considering how much information you lose adding a really big number to a really small number). If you don't get my drift you need to go back to school.
I think you're wasting your time. You can't educate these people.
You're absolutely correct. We don't want a bigger float. Floating point numbers are just about (ah ... no ... absolutely) _the_ _most_ _innapropriate_ thing to use for financial calculations. These things can be managed much better (binary coded decimal, very long ints scaled, other stuff I can't be fucked thinking about). Maple is pretty good for HUGE numbers.
You didn't do a lot of maths at university, did you. You're probably an economist or an accountant or something. You certainly aren't a computer scientist. Or a mathematician.
You've been short-changed. Through no fault of your own, you're profoundly ignorant of something very important, to both computer scientists _and_ civil engineers.
The introductory course I did in Numerical Analysis in 2nd year uni was a semester unit, as was the slightly more advanced unit I did in 3rd year. In each case, the lecture was one of the highlights of my week.
The bloke who taught it was really cool. He's the only person I've ever seen manage to shut up the two back rows full of engineering students - just by glaring at them.
We didn't do a significant amount of numerical analysis until 2nd year at university (although the 1st year course touched on it), but it was one of my favourite subjects. The bloke who taught us (Silvan Elhay) found an error in the FP hardware on the VAX, apparently. He's pretty smart, and also a good sax player.
Also, how is this relevant to financial transactions? I thought they were all done with either BCD, or large integers scaled at the end of the calculation.
In other news, Congress repeals the Laws of Thermodynamics ...
> ... the other side is bankrupt!
Morally, at least, they both are already.
> ... human tallying is more error prone than computer tallying.
That's not the issue. It seems to me that most of us are focussing on deliberate fraud rather than error, and it's _much_ easier to perpetrate fraud on a massive scale with electonic voting than with properly scrutinised counting of paper ballots.
In Australia, we do it the same way as the Canadians. Sure, our population is somewhat smaller (a bit over 20 million), but we have close to 100% voter participation because it's compulsory. Additionally, we use a preferential voting system which is more complicated to tally than the winner-takes-all system the US uses. I can't remember when it's taken more than a day from the polls closing to get a result for the lower house. (The Senate usually takes a few weeks because the ballot paper is usually the size of a bedsheet and the tally system is complicated, but this doesn't affect who governs the country.)
Because we have an Electoral Commission with considerable independance from political influence who are responsible for running the elections and redrawing electorate boundaries when required to ensure each one has roughly the same number of voters, I'm confident that Australia has one of the least corrupt electoral systems in the world (even though it's produced an unfortunate result the last four times).
It seems to me that the only reason that the political class in the US likes electronic voting so much is precisely because it is so vulnerable to fraud.
Not quite. This (dictionary.reference.com/browse/kleptocracy) is a bit closer.
Nah, don't need the training. I already know KOBOLD.
It reads like you have a head cold.
There are two big problems with the WalMart model. First, it destroys the local economy. (Does anyone in the US still make anything? I know we don't in Australia - even without actual WalMart [just the same mind-set]. Not to mention all the small businesses that close because they can't compete on price.) Second, it removes the possibility of buying good-quality, locally-made stuff even if you have the money and you're prepared to spend it.
The reason, of course, that poor people can't afford anything better than the crap sold in such places as WalMart is because they no longer have jobs, or at least ones that pay enough for a decent life. And don't even think about mentioning trickle-down - it's fraudulent.
Phillip Dick wrote a book about this, which I'm too lazy to locate on my bookshelf at the moment.
Weather != climate.
I'd certainly be surprised if there were still people who didn't know that smoking and shitty food _could_ harm you, but you need to be reasonably well-educated to understand the science behind the correlation between diet and disease well enough to do a proper risk-assessment. Most people are lousy at this. (That is also why the right can keep most people fooled about climate change.)
No.
The particular (very few) scienticians mentioned in the article deny climate change and then go on to claim that in any case it isn't anthropogenic. Even if it were occurring. Which it isn't. No, don't show me the drowning polar bears, it isn't happening. And anyway, we didn't cause it. We weren't there when it happened. Which it didn't anyway. This isn't the climate change you're looking for.
And so it goes.
To be frank, I think it's way too late to do anything. We should have listened to the hippies 40 years ago, but even then it was probably too late to do anything useful.
Only if the god were just and merciful. A malevolent god would've just let it roll on (and maybe have permitted or encouraged even greater excesses). So you've proved nothing either way. (Disclaimer: I'm an atheist with an interest in theology as a formal system.)
The problem of evil gets blown away by Moloch or Qetzoqatl. It becomes irrelevant.
IIRC, the disagreement between satellite and surface data was resolved by taking account of orbital decay.
The cranks focus on the inconsistency while ignoring its resolution.
(Sigh) Someone (probably your mother) neglected to point out to you that complex problems don't have simple answers. There is a correlation between poverty and early death, and the probable causes include:
Poor people generally can't afford adequate health care or a decent diet.
They are likely to be poorly educated, so won't grasp the importance of the correlation between smoking and a shitty diet, and an early death from lung or bowel cancer or heart disease.
There's probably a bunch of stuff I've left out, but I'm not going to do any more of your thinking for you.
As an aside, my mother recently died a bit before her 80th birthday. Her lungs and heart were fucked because she'd smoked for 50 years, but because she was well-off, she lived for probably 20 years longer than she would have if she'd been poor and smoked for the same time. She could afford high-quality health care, and because she was well educated she got to work in a clean environment.
Well. It's the usual suspects, and they've been very noisily, over some years, promoting their view of "climate change is junk science and anyway it's caused by changes in solar radiation ... er ... that's if it's happening at all, which it isn't". It's hard to take the fuckers seriously, but they'll muddy the waters a lot.
.303 and a lot of ammunition, hoping to survive the Resource Wars.
Me, I'm moving to the country (paint my mailbox blue, water tastes like wine), with a