I don't remember this, nor can I find any reference to it. Do you have a link?
I'm surprised no one remembers this. At the time it
struck me as rather petty and mean. But it was quite hard to find, since it
is a needle in the haystack of 9610 hits for
"Harry Potter" "takedown notice".
Anyway, I found a reference to it
in
"Intellectual Property and Free Speech
in the Online World" (PDF file)
p. 15 (PDF p. 18), footnote 39. I vaguely recall a
newspaper article on it a long time ago.
I stopped buying Harry Potter books for my son a few years ago after she
went after some kid who posted a homework paper on Harry Potter, unlike
most authors who would probably be flattered. I just didn't feel
like contributing financially to someone so mean-spirited anymore. (My
son still insisted on reading the books, but either we got them from the
library or he borrowed from a friend.)
Maybe fame and fortune changes
the fundamental nature of a person, or maybe she was already that way
and only mean-spirited people tend to achieve fame and fortune; I just
don't know.
This may seem like a very silly question, and maybe the answer is
obvious, but I haven't been able to find it. But it is of crucial
importance if I'm going to use it myself. While I'm sure it is
theoretically possible given that it runs Red Hat Linux underneath, it
is the first thing I'd want to do with it, and I'd be frustrated if I have to
spend my first hour with it figuring out the secret to unlock it.:)
The question is: what is the procedure for getting into a bash
shell?
A related question is whether the kid stuff can be
turn off to expose the underlying Red Hat window manager (whatever it
is), for adult geek usage. What is the underlying window manager?
I think it is a little
absurd to think that of all the millions of species (plants,
animals) available on earth, they would specifically want to eat
humans, although that doesn't make for scary science fiction tales.
But even more to the point, if they are sufficiently advanced,
there's no reason their meat needs - if they are carnivores -
would have to be met by living creatures at all. Even humans are
looking towards
grow meat in a lab. I would imagine they would have this
down to a science, eventually developing meat-like foods that
far surpass what nature has to offer in terms of appealing flavor,
texture, lack of messiness, etc.
For me, the do-not-call registry has worked pretty well in the
sense that I'm getting many fewer calls from commercial companies.
The problem now is the charity exemption. Years ago I don't
recall receiving anywhere near the charity solicitations that I do now.
Charities seem to be popping up out of the woodwork.
For example, it used to be you'd get a call from a real local police
person once a year, asking to donate to their fund, and receive
tickets to their annual comedy show or
some such where you could meet the actual people. Now there's the police safety education fund, the police widows
fund, the police families fund, the police community fund, the state
police fund, etc. etc. (I'm making up some of these names since I don't
remember them, but you get the idea), most of which seem to have nothing
to do with the local police dept and are obviously being made from
telemarketing centers. Some of them offer official stickers to put on
your house door or your car, with the unstated implication that it might
be good to have them if you're stopped, or worse it might be bad not to
have them... And double all this for the firemen's funds. Never mind
the innumerable "special olympics".
I'm all for helping my local police, but this is ridiculous. I know
some people have no trouble brushing them off, and I force myself to
do that too, but with that twinge of guilt that some widow may now
starve because of me (even though rationally I suspect it's a scam)
- and I imagine many nice aunts and grandmothers are easily sucked into
their pitches.
I know, call screening and all that. Unfortunately I'm an old-fashioned
person who tends to answer the phone when it rings. On the other hand, I've come to recognize the few seconds of
silence after I say "hello", and then the sudden telemarketing background
noise when their computer switches me into the next free telemarketer. *Plonk*.
I took a quick look at the Stix fonts - only a few samples, so maybe
I'm overlooking something - but they seem to have the same problem that
plagues almost all recently designed fonts, free and otherwise: they
don't render clean bitmaps at small sizes, when ClearType or other font
smoothing is turned off. To me, smoothing often just doesn't work all
that well for small point sizes. Sometimes it makes very small fonts
nearly illegible that are easily readable in bitmap form (e.g. Mono
Andale at 8pt where it is essentially impossible to distinguish a period
and a comma with smoothing turned on).
Compare these to the fonts of yore, such as Times or Arial or
essentially any font that existed in the early Mac and Windows days.
The font designers took great care to ensure that bit maps were
customized for best appearance at small point sizes, given the inherent
limitation of the black-and-white screens and resolution available then.
Now it seems it is universally assumed that everyone will have
smoothing turned on. Modern fonts may look professional and polished at
larger point sizes, but the unsmoothed bitmap versions of many of them
at small sizes tend to look rough and amateurish, with ugly artifacts
and inconsistent line widths and sometimes barely legible. Even the
smoothed ones aren't necessarily great at small sizes - the smoothing
can make them blurry with poor contrast, unlike the crisp black and
white of well-designed bitmaps.
Perhaps I am alone, but I am more efficient working with small font
sizes for things like programming, so I can have the maximum amount of
information simultaneously available on the screen. So I almost always have smoothing
turned off and use old-fashioned (and typically mono) fonts that have clean, carefully
crafted bitmaps suited for that purpose. But when I switch to web
browsing, if the site sports a trendy font and I have smoothing turned
off, it can be an eyesore.
Here is the explanation about the suposed "flaw", which of course it is
not:
"Of course"? I'll take Pratt's word over yours.
http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1472
And my comments on the guy that thinks that the
universality definition was changed for the prize benefit (I am
surprised about how many people write about this without knowing a bit
of the subject and trying to sound technical talking about "AND gates"
completely nonsense):
Irrelevant ad hominem. Yes, my example is a little silly and exaggerated, but
the point stands. Any machine at all is a
"generalization" of a Turing machine. The way the post I responded to was worded
almost made
it sound like generalization was good thing -
"concludes that the Turing machine is universal in a generalized sense"
is an obvious, meaningless tautology. Of course it is; it can emulate
any other machine, including 2,3. You don't need Smith's proof to
"conclude" that as if it were some new discovery.
Concerning the definition of universality, a
halting state or halting instruction wasn't a requirement. This is a
common usage nowadays in the field of small universal Turing machines,
which is a generalization of previous definitions.
A Turing machine is a precisely
defined and well-studied mathematical object, and this generalization is
apparently not
equivalent to it in any mathematically acceptable
sense.
If there is no clear
definition is because there is no clear-cut, established procedure to
determine when an initial condition is computationally simple enough to
be acceptable.
Some would wish universal computation stick to a finite
initial condition with an unbounded tape filled with "blanks", because
that's the only case where the theory is entirely clear.
However,
others accept generalizations such as periodic "blank" words as long as
they remain computationally simple enough (possibly generated in the
same fashion as an unbounded "blank" tape).
These sound like weasel words to me. "There is no clear definition"?
"Others accept"? While I'm not an expert in the field and
may not be familiar with all of current literature, I have some background
in Turing machines and find it hard to believe that the time-tested
and quite clear
mathematical definition has been abandoned by any serious researcher.
Literature references please.
Smith's use of non-repetitive infinite initial conditions is
controversial, but is a natural extension of current definitions which
allow infinite repetitive initial conditions. We hope that the ensuing
discussion will enrich debate in the scientific community concerning the
nature of computational universality.
Whenever a generalization of the definition of a universal Turing
machine is put forward, that the status of some machines will
necessarily change from 'non-universal' to 'universal'. It is a
challenge to explicitly construct a machine with initial conditions
similar in spirit to Smith's, that is obviously too simple to be
considered universal, and which is performing a universal computation
with those infinite initial conditions.
"The status of some machines will
necessarily change from 'non-universal' to 'universal'"???
This sounds like a cop-out to justify the error in the proof:
re-define the problem so the proof fits it.
Let's generalize the definition of FLT (Fermat's Last Theorem) to
include n=2. It seems to me this is a "natural extension" of its
current definition. Guess what, I have a truly marvelous
proof that FLT in a generalized sense is
false, which the margin of this post is not too narrow to contain:
3^2+4^2=5^2.
Seriously, once you have fixed the statement of a problem in
mathematics, there is no "controversy" as to whether it is true, false,
or undecidable, and a correct proof will show which one of these three is
be the case. Someone else can't come along and show that another of
these three is the case, unless one of the proofs is flawed (or unless
the foundations of math are inconsistent, which would be a major
discovery in itself). In this case
it appears that
Smith's proof is flawed and simply does not prove the stated
problem. It sounds like Wolfram Research is twisting the
definition of the problem to save face, rather than just admitting the proof is flawed
and moving on.
Earlier in that post,
Alex Smith did not only show that the encoding of the initial condition
is non-universal. He showed that the encoding is very computationally
weak and then concludes that the Turing machine is universal in a
generalized sense.
Well, allow me to generalize even more. I'll define anything that can
perform the computing done by an AND gate as universal in a
super-generalized sense. I conclude that a Turing machine is
universal in a super-generalized sense. Let me sell you my line of
AND gate computers. If you complain that they can't do much, I'll merely
point to my proof that they are universal in a super-generalized sense,
just like Turing machines.
The guy who graduated from a major technical university with a _masters
degree_ in network engineering who couldn't tell me what the network and
broadcast IPs were for a classless network? For example,
123.123.123.123/11....
Right, and I once knew an electrical engineer with a PhD who didn't
know the color code for resistors! The shame.
Seriously, the purpose of a university education is to teach deep
fundamental concepts, not trade skills. Now not knowing CIDR notation (RFC 1519)
may be an arguable deficiency, but it is simply a notational device that may
or may not be covered in the network theory courses he took, or may have
been presented with an alternate notation (netmasks or even IP ranges).
The important thing is, did he understand the concept of what CIDR
notation means and represents, once it is explained? Similarly, it's
more important for an EE to understand the concept of resistance than to
know the color code. A soldering tech, OTOH, could have the color
code down cold without having the slightest notion of how electricity works.
Although PDFs are great when you view them in Xpdf or Evince or the Mac
OS X viewer thing, the common PDF viewer for Windows - Adobe Acrobat
Reader - is a bloated piece of crap that makes Firefox freeze while it
loads as a browser plugin.
So ODFs would be better for viewing in Firefox? Seems to me they would be
even slower, while waiting for OpenOffice to load.
Anyway, for faster speed you can use the 2MB
Foxit
PDF reader. I don't think an ODF reader would be easy to do in
that size/speed, if possible at all. (But who knows - 15 years ago
word processors fit on a floppy or two, and a reader would be a subset
of its functionality.)
What class action suits need is some competition. As it is now, there
is (almost?) always only one law firm sending out a mass mailing about
the suit, and the only choice a consumer has is (a) to agree to be a
class member or (b) to seek independent litigation. Of course no one is
going to choose (b) and hire a lawyer, go to court, etc. to get an $80
refund, so in effect the law firm has a monopoly.
Instead, imagine that you
receive 2 or more such mass mailings: law firm 1 promises to seek an
$80 refund, whereas law firm 2, by lowering its fee, promises to
seek a $100 refund. Now capitalism can work the way it's supposed to.
Of course IANAL so feel free to point out the flaws of this idea. Is
there a reason this isn't done now, given that there are plenty of hungry lawyers?
I had thought that the Game of Life was one of the simplest possible,
although someone else will have to clarify how it compares. I think
Life was proved universal a number of years ago, and an actual
implementation is here: Life Universal Computer.
There are also universal machines possible with S-K combinators,
which in a sense is also one of the simplest if not the simplest, with only two possible
commands: S and K. (I guess it depends on how simplicity is measured.)
Amazingly, the
shortest universal machine
found so far with SK combinators
has 272 bits, compared to 5495 bits for Roger Penrose's universal Turning machine
built from the original Turing machine and 268,096 cells for the Life version.
I couldn't quite glean the size of a universal machine implemented
with Wolfram's 2,3 cellular automaton, but I would imagine it would be very large.
I think the GP meant the most recent version of
copyright law, although I think it might be somewhat thick if it is
printed out (not sure).
The exact same thing happened to me twice at Circuit
City over the years - I was told
I couldn't return a video game that was opened because
it would violate copyright law. I could only exchange it for the same product
if it was defective - a lot of good that would do, since the problem
was a bug that prevented it from installing on my computer in one case, and it
crashed constantly in the other case.
Well, in both of these cases, amazingly, it turned out the video game was
no longer in stock, so it couldn't be exchanged, and I did get my money back.
The copyright ignorance being spread by these employees is appalling - I'm
sure they were told to say that by management, and they probably believe it
themselves. At the time I almost regretted that I lucked out by the games not
being in stock, since they raised my ire and I was getting ready to educate them.
You can download it from MS for free but it's an exe file.
Unfortunately, it's not quite free. First you have to purchase Visual Studio 2005.
I ran the setup.exe, and just before it finished installing (it completed two
sets of progress bars without complaint) it said, "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 must be installed prior to installing this
package."
Your intentions are good, but I think you may be doing more harm
than good for someone seeking an elementary remedial grasp of
math. Part of the problem for math-phobics is that they are intimidated
by it.
Do you really think that an on-line video of an MIT math
lecture is going to help someone seeking a remedial-level math education?
Consider the audience of those lectures: students with math
test scores among the best in the country, or even the world.
A university-level book on discrete math, that you mention, is
going to scare them away before they finish the first page - most of
these books assume you already know basic calculus, etc. And they
presuppose a certain level of math competence, so that details of
proofs, etc. are often "left to the reader." Perhaps you are right that
discrete math should be taught in high school, but only if
the material is rewritten at the appropriate level and presented in the
right way - something that apparently doesn't exist now and thus is not
helpful to the OP.
Another poster wrote, "I went to graduate school at Cal in Math,
and I couldn't agree more...[about discrete math]" etc. Someone
with advanced math skills and talents isn't always the best teacher,
simply because he or she often just don't get how a concept
is not obvious to the student. (This isn't to say that there
aren't many exceptions.) But the point is, there are no elementary
books on discrete math AFAIK suitable for remedial math teaching,
so the advice has no value.
Finally, you top it off with a suggestion that the
remedial student give P=NP a go... (OK, I know it's supposed to be
a joke.)
And KOffice can open PDFs for editing. Awesome. Sure, the
layout rendering is not always exact, but it does a tremendous job of
converting the PDF to paragraphs, with the occasional embedded
images.
It would be nice would to have completely clean PDF to ODF conversion,
preferable integrated with KOffice and OO.org of course, but even stand-alone
version would
be useful. Is ODF theoretically capable of exactly representing a PDF?
Both specs are open, so there shouldn't be the undocumented proprietary
format problem that
hampers.doc conversion.
Does anyone know what the issues are? (The KOffice folks must
know some of the issues, since they're trying to do it.)
A Google search for PDF2ODF shows some comments saying there's a
converter on Sourceforge, but I couldn't find it there.
For the
converse problem,
OO.org seems to have done a good job of that with its PDF output.
If some guy in the swap meet is selling bootlegs of your work, and you
can't prove how many he sold, how can there be any possibility of
determining actual damages.
There is no way, and that is how it should work as I see it. Actual damages should
be based on actual damages that can be proven, not some wild guess.
If that's the only worry he has, there is no reason not to sell
bootlegs. There is next to no risk.
Well, a fact of life is that sometimes
people get away with crimes. That doesn't
mean we go should around punishing innocent people on questionable evidence
just so we can get the occasional guilty one. If someone wants
to go after a bootlegger, they should have to have some evidence collected
over a period of time, or financial records of bootleg sales, or
something else solid. The damages from a random bootlegger caught
at a flea market should be just the damages that can be proved for
that one incident, if no other evidence is available. That's how
a just society should work - innocent (or at least innocent of any
damaging acts not proven) until proven guilty, even in civil cases as I
see it.
Reasonable people understand that it's ethically wrong to buy a creative
work for your own use, and than give it away to all your friends so they
don't have to buy it. Most people understand this ethical truth as a
separate thing from the question of if or not a Mega-Huge-Record-Company
is "evil" or not.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention! I wasn't aware of
this "ethical truth", and I'll definitely have to mend my ways.
The
next time I buy a CD, I'll play it only when I'm sure that no one else
is around to hear it, unless I know they also have
bought a copy. But even that may be ethically questionable since they're
not listening to their copy but to mine. Like homeopathic water,
even though the sound waves are physically indistinguishable, it might
be possible they have a "memory" of which CD they came from - which might
not be the same physical CD my friend purchased. Oh, the immorality!
And when I
bring my friends over to watch a movie, I'll make sure they bring their
own DVDs and DVD players, and carefully position everyone so they can't peak
at the other guy's copy being played, thus preventing any possibility of
ethical leakage.
It looks like 1500 people had $109 million over the 100K FDIC insurance
limit - an average of about $73K - so they'll probably lose it. Many of
these will probably be small amounts, say accumulated interest on $100K
deposits; at other extreme, there a likely an unfortunate few who will
be in very bad shape, essentially having lost most of their life
savings, if they put all their eggs in this one basket.
Most banks do not try to discourage deposits more than $100K.
I recall seeing offers of jumbo CDs starting at $100K, for a slightly
higher rate. The very first interest payment, therefore, is uninsured.
An
E*TRADE salesman once tried to convince me that a deposit of over $100K
was quite safe and that the FDIC insurance is for a worst-case scenario
that was essentially impossible to happen. He said lots of people have
over $100K and implied I was paranoid even to bring it up, in an attempt
to get me to consolidate all of my accounts with E*TRADE (which, at the
time, offered a higher interest rate).
MIT owns the software radio
patent, but Vanu thinks he should pay no royalties because
he was a key developer of the technology, which formed the basis for his
PhD thesis. This is an old
article (1999), but I couldn't find a followup on the outcome.
In older days, his father Amar Bose's company was made possible
because MIT let him have the patent for nothing. Now that Amar is
(presumably) a billionaire from his high profit-margin products that
gross $600 million a year, he has donated $6 million back to MIT.
Whether or not that is generous, given that MIT made it all possible, is
a matter of opinion I suppose.
For those who think the Boses should have owned the patents on their
technologies outright, and not MIT, it is a complicated issue. I don't
know about the Bose's particular cases, but keep in mind that usually
PhD theses are not developed in a vacuum: ideas are discussed, topics
are suggested, usually the thesis advisor is interested in the topic if
not actively working on it already, there is a support staff to help
develop it, etc.
Or look at Google Apps, GMail, YouTube. Not even possible without client side scripting. A well programmed client side script (like anything Google's coded) runs great on even a 500MHz Pentium 3.
The one app where Web 2.0 shines is Google Maps. But Google has
been phasing into other things where it is just not appropriate,
making them bloated, slow, awkward to use, and even buggy where
they weren't before.
Example: The new Google Groups is an abortion, replacing the
older interface (which was already slower and less user-friendly than
the simple, plain DejaNews it replaced, with bugs like overlaying
ad text on top of posts) with something that is
truly horrendous. Nothing is formatted right unless you're
in full-screen mode, making copy and paste from a local editor
inconvenient. False line breaks are inserted at column 69 (whatever
happened to the old column 72 or even 80 worst case?), so I have to switch my
text editor to column 69 wrapping just for Google Groups if I want
my post to look halfway decent. Google has ignored the
huge number of user complaints about the new format (including
my own insignificant one FWIW).
I've switched back to a Usenet reader for regular newsgroups and am
much happier. Unfortunately Google-only groups are becoming popular,
forcing me to use Google Groups sometimes. This morning I must have
spent 10 minutes futzing with a post to one such group due to my post
being rejected because it somehow forgot I was logged in, then rejected
because of a timeout, then... oops I forgot to wrap my text editor at
column 69, so the post looked like crap with successive long and short
lines and code formatting that was barely comprehensible.
Example 2: I've played with Google Analytics, but god is it slow.
Finding out a referring page is often impossible because it strips off
everything after "?" in the referring URL. Maybe managers with time to
kill like its pretty interface, but just give me the quick and dirty
output of analog (web server logfile analyser) and I'm much happier.
The formula used to calculate BMI breaks down once the subject is very tall.
The problem with BMI is that it uses the square and not the cube of height
in its formula. I have no idea why the stupidity of this is accepted by
the medical community without question - didn't they take basic geometry (physics?) in
high school? Perhaps they all think we live in Flatland.
From p. 7-8 of 25 of
Defendant's Reply Memorandum of Law in Support of Motion to Dismiss
Complaint, referring to
17 USC 106(3): "distribution...to the public" [See, e.g., 2 Nimmer on
Copyright 8.11[A], at 81-148. "[I]t is not any distribution of copies
or phonorecords that falls within this right, but only such
distributions as are made available 'to the public'...[A] limited
publication, i.e., a distribution made to a limited group for a limited
purpose and not made to the public at large, should not infringe this
right."
This is very interesting. Independent of the RIAA case, it seems
to open a whole can of worms for copyright holders generally.
Example: I wonder why this wasn't brought up in the case of Share a
News Story With Coworkers, Pay a Fine where a company settled for
$300,000 for distributing news articles internally to employees.
Another (hypothetical) example: internally distributing copies of
Microsoft Office to employees is certainly making them available to a limited group
and not to the public at large. What is the catch? The EULA wouldn't
seem to apply since it is only agreed to after the program is run, not
when it is distributed before ever running it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised no one remembers this. At the time it struck me as rather petty and mean. But it was quite hard to find, since it is a needle in the haystack of 9610 hits for "Harry Potter" "takedown notice". Anyway, I found a reference to it in "Intellectual Property and Free Speech in the Online World" (PDF file) p. 15 (PDF p. 18), footnote 39. I vaguely recall a newspaper article on it a long time ago.
Maybe fame and fortune changes the fundamental nature of a person, or maybe she was already that way and only mean-spirited people tend to achieve fame and fortune; I just don't know.
The question is: what is the procedure for getting into a bash shell?
A related question is whether the kid stuff can be turn off to expose the underlying Red Hat window manager (whatever it is), for adult geek usage. What is the underlying window manager?
But even more to the point, if they are sufficiently advanced, there's no reason their meat needs - if they are carnivores - would have to be met by living creatures at all. Even humans are looking towards grow meat in a lab. I would imagine they would have this down to a science, eventually developing meat-like foods that far surpass what nature has to offer in terms of appealing flavor, texture, lack of messiness, etc.
The problem now is the charity exemption. Years ago I don't recall receiving anywhere near the charity solicitations that I do now. Charities seem to be popping up out of the woodwork.
For example, it used to be you'd get a call from a real local police person once a year, asking to donate to their fund, and receive tickets to their annual comedy show or some such where you could meet the actual people. Now there's the police safety education fund, the police widows fund, the police families fund, the police community fund, the state police fund, etc. etc. (I'm making up some of these names since I don't remember them, but you get the idea), most of which seem to have nothing to do with the local police dept and are obviously being made from telemarketing centers. Some of them offer official stickers to put on your house door or your car, with the unstated implication that it might be good to have them if you're stopped, or worse it might be bad not to have them... And double all this for the firemen's funds. Never mind the innumerable "special olympics".
I'm all for helping my local police, but this is ridiculous. I know some people have no trouble brushing them off, and I force myself to do that too, but with that twinge of guilt that some widow may now starve because of me (even though rationally I suspect it's a scam) - and I imagine many nice aunts and grandmothers are easily sucked into their pitches.
I know, call screening and all that. Unfortunately I'm an old-fashioned person who tends to answer the phone when it rings. On the other hand, I've come to recognize the few seconds of silence after I say "hello", and then the sudden telemarketing background noise when their computer switches me into the next free telemarketer. *Plonk*.
You mean like LinuxBIOS? Boots to a Linux console in 3 seconds.
Even better, check out the The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List (PDF file). For a quick and dirty overview of what kinds of symbols aren't in Times New Roman, a large scientific/mathematical subset of these have been converted to screen bitmaps: GIF and PNG Images for Math Symbols.
Compare these to the fonts of yore, such as Times or Arial or essentially any font that existed in the early Mac and Windows days. The font designers took great care to ensure that bit maps were customized for best appearance at small point sizes, given the inherent limitation of the black-and-white screens and resolution available then.
Now it seems it is universally assumed that everyone will have smoothing turned on. Modern fonts may look professional and polished at larger point sizes, but the unsmoothed bitmap versions of many of them at small sizes tend to look rough and amateurish, with ugly artifacts and inconsistent line widths and sometimes barely legible. Even the smoothed ones aren't necessarily great at small sizes - the smoothing can make them blurry with poor contrast, unlike the crisp black and white of well-designed bitmaps.
Perhaps I am alone, but I am more efficient working with small font sizes for things like programming, so I can have the maximum amount of information simultaneously available on the screen. So I almost always have smoothing turned off and use old-fashioned (and typically mono) fonts that have clean, carefully crafted bitmaps suited for that purpose. But when I switch to web browsing, if the site sports a trendy font and I have smoothing turned off, it can be an eyesore.
"The status of some machines will necessarily change from 'non-universal' to 'universal'"??? This sounds like a cop-out to justify the error in the proof: re-define the problem so the proof fits it.
Let's generalize the definition of FLT (Fermat's Last Theorem) to include n=2. It seems to me this is a "natural extension" of its current definition. Guess what, I have a truly marvelous proof that FLT in a generalized sense is false, which the margin of this post is not too narrow to contain: 3^2+4^2=5^2.
Seriously, once you have fixed the statement of a problem in mathematics, there is no "controversy" as to whether it is true, false, or undecidable, and a correct proof will show which one of these three is be the case. Someone else can't come along and show that another of these three is the case, unless one of the proofs is flawed (or unless the foundations of math are inconsistent, which would be a major discovery in itself). In this case it appears that Smith's proof is flawed and simply does not prove the stated problem. It sounds like Wolfram Research is twisting the definition of the problem to save face, rather than just admitting the proof is flawed and moving on.
Earlier in that post,
Well, allow me to generalize even more. I'll define anything that can perform the computing done by an AND gate as universal in a super-generalized sense. I conclude that a Turing machine is universal in a super-generalized sense. Let me sell you my line of AND gate computers. If you complain that they can't do much, I'll merely point to my proof that they are universal in a super-generalized sense, just like Turing machines.Right, and I once knew an electrical engineer with a PhD who didn't know the color code for resistors! The shame.
Seriously, the purpose of a university education is to teach deep fundamental concepts, not trade skills. Now not knowing CIDR notation (RFC 1519) may be an arguable deficiency, but it is simply a notational device that may or may not be covered in the network theory courses he took, or may have been presented with an alternate notation (netmasks or even IP ranges).
The important thing is, did he understand the concept of what CIDR notation means and represents, once it is explained? Similarly, it's more important for an EE to understand the concept of resistance than to know the color code. A soldering tech, OTOH, could have the color code down cold without having the slightest notion of how electricity works.
So ODFs would be better for viewing in Firefox? Seems to me they would be even slower, while waiting for OpenOffice to load.
Anyway, for faster speed you can use the 2MB Foxit PDF reader. I don't think an ODF reader would be easy to do in that size/speed, if possible at all. (But who knows - 15 years ago word processors fit on a floppy or two, and a reader would be a subset of its functionality.)
Instead, imagine that you receive 2 or more such mass mailings: law firm 1 promises to seek an $80 refund, whereas law firm 2, by lowering its fee, promises to seek a $100 refund. Now capitalism can work the way it's supposed to.
Of course IANAL so feel free to point out the flaws of this idea. Is there a reason this isn't done now, given that there are plenty of hungry lawyers?
There are also universal machines possible with S-K combinators, which in a sense is also one of the simplest if not the simplest, with only two possible commands: S and K. (I guess it depends on how simplicity is measured.) Amazingly, the shortest universal machine found so far with SK combinators has 272 bits, compared to 5495 bits for Roger Penrose's universal Turning machine built from the original Turing machine and 268,096 cells for the Life version.
I couldn't quite glean the size of a universal machine implemented with Wolfram's 2,3 cellular automaton, but I would imagine it would be very large.
The exact same thing happened to me twice at Circuit City over the years - I was told I couldn't return a video game that was opened because it would violate copyright law. I could only exchange it for the same product if it was defective - a lot of good that would do, since the problem was a bug that prevented it from installing on my computer in one case, and it crashed constantly in the other case.
Well, in both of these cases, amazingly, it turned out the video game was no longer in stock, so it couldn't be exchanged, and I did get my money back.
The copyright ignorance being spread by these employees is appalling - I'm sure they were told to say that by management, and they probably believe it themselves. At the time I almost regretted that I lucked out by the games not being in stock, since they raised my ire and I was getting ready to educate them.
Unfortunately, it's not quite free. First you have to purchase Visual Studio 2005. I ran the setup.exe, and just before it finished installing (it completed two sets of progress bars without complaint) it said, "Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 must be installed prior to installing this package."
Do you really think that an on-line video of an MIT math lecture is going to help someone seeking a remedial-level math education? Consider the audience of those lectures: students with math test scores among the best in the country, or even the world.
A university-level book on discrete math, that you mention, is going to scare them away before they finish the first page - most of these books assume you already know basic calculus, etc. And they presuppose a certain level of math competence, so that details of proofs, etc. are often "left to the reader." Perhaps you are right that discrete math should be taught in high school, but only if the material is rewritten at the appropriate level and presented in the right way - something that apparently doesn't exist now and thus is not helpful to the OP.
Another poster wrote, "I went to graduate school at Cal in Math, and I couldn't agree more...[about discrete math]" etc. Someone with advanced math skills and talents isn't always the best teacher, simply because he or she often just don't get how a concept is not obvious to the student. (This isn't to say that there aren't many exceptions.) But the point is, there are no elementary books on discrete math AFAIK suitable for remedial math teaching, so the advice has no value.
Finally, you top it off with a suggestion that the remedial student give P=NP a go... (OK, I know it's supposed to be a joke.)
It would be nice would to have completely clean PDF to ODF conversion, preferable integrated with KOffice and OO.org of course, but even stand-alone version would be useful. Is ODF theoretically capable of exactly representing a PDF? Both specs are open, so there shouldn't be the undocumented proprietary format problem that hampers .doc conversion.
Does anyone know what the issues are? (The KOffice folks must
know some of the issues, since they're trying to do it.)
A Google search for PDF2ODF shows some comments saying there's a
converter on Sourceforge, but I couldn't find it there.
For the converse problem, OO.org seems to have done a good job of that with its PDF output.
There is no way, and that is how it should work as I see it. Actual damages should be based on actual damages that can be proven, not some wild guess.
If that's the only worry he has, there is no reason not to sell bootlegs. There is next to no risk.
Well, a fact of life is that sometimes people get away with crimes. That doesn't mean we go should around punishing innocent people on questionable evidence just so we can get the occasional guilty one. If someone wants to go after a bootlegger, they should have to have some evidence collected over a period of time, or financial records of bootleg sales, or something else solid. The damages from a random bootlegger caught at a flea market should be just the damages that can be proved for that one incident, if no other evidence is available. That's how a just society should work - innocent (or at least innocent of any damaging acts not proven) until proven guilty, even in civil cases as I see it.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention! I wasn't aware of this "ethical truth", and I'll definitely have to mend my ways.
The next time I buy a CD, I'll play it only when I'm sure that no one else is around to hear it, unless I know they also have bought a copy. But even that may be ethically questionable since they're not listening to their copy but to mine. Like homeopathic water, even though the sound waves are physically indistinguishable, it might be possible they have a "memory" of which CD they came from - which might not be the same physical CD my friend purchased. Oh, the immorality!
And when I bring my friends over to watch a movie, I'll make sure they bring their own DVDs and DVD players, and carefully position everyone so they can't peak at the other guy's copy being played, thus preventing any possibility of ethical leakage.
Most banks do not try to discourage deposits more than $100K. I recall seeing offers of jumbo CDs starting at $100K, for a slightly higher rate. The very first interest payment, therefore, is uninsured.
An E*TRADE salesman once tried to convince me that a deposit of over $100K was quite safe and that the FDIC insurance is for a worst-case scenario that was essentially impossible to happen. He said lots of people have over $100K and implied I was paranoid even to bring it up, in an attempt to get me to consolidate all of my accounts with E*TRADE (which, at the time, offered a higher interest rate).
In older days, his father Amar Bose's company was made possible because MIT let him have the patent for nothing. Now that Amar is (presumably) a billionaire from his high profit-margin products that gross $600 million a year, he has donated $6 million back to MIT. Whether or not that is generous, given that MIT made it all possible, is a matter of opinion I suppose.
For those who think the Boses should have owned the patents on their technologies outright, and not MIT, it is a complicated issue. I don't know about the Bose's particular cases, but keep in mind that usually PhD theses are not developed in a vacuum: ideas are discussed, topics are suggested, usually the thesis advisor is interested in the topic if not actively working on it already, there is a support staff to help develop it, etc.
The one app where Web 2.0 shines is Google Maps. But Google has been phasing into other things where it is just not appropriate, making them bloated, slow, awkward to use, and even buggy where they weren't before.
Example: The new Google Groups is an abortion, replacing the older interface (which was already slower and less user-friendly than the simple, plain DejaNews it replaced, with bugs like overlaying ad text on top of posts) with something that is truly horrendous. Nothing is formatted right unless you're in full-screen mode, making copy and paste from a local editor inconvenient. False line breaks are inserted at column 69 (whatever happened to the old column 72 or even 80 worst case?), so I have to switch my text editor to column 69 wrapping just for Google Groups if I want my post to look halfway decent. Google has ignored the huge number of user complaints about the new format (including my own insignificant one FWIW).
I've switched back to a Usenet reader for regular newsgroups and am much happier. Unfortunately Google-only groups are becoming popular, forcing me to use Google Groups sometimes. This morning I must have spent 10 minutes futzing with a post to one such group due to my post being rejected because it somehow forgot I was logged in, then rejected because of a timeout, then... oops I forgot to wrap my text editor at column 69, so the post looked like crap with successive long and short lines and code formatting that was barely comprehensible.
Example 2: I've played with Google Analytics, but god is it slow. Finding out a referring page is often impossible because it strips off everything after "?" in the referring URL. Maybe managers with time to kill like its pretty interface, but just give me the quick and dirty output of analog (web server logfile analyser) and I'm much happier.
The problem with BMI is that it uses the square and not the cube of height in its formula. I have no idea why the stupidity of this is accepted by the medical community without question - didn't they take basic geometry (physics?) in high school? Perhaps they all think we live in Flatland.
This is very interesting. Independent of the RIAA case, it seems to open a whole can of worms for copyright holders generally.
Example: I wonder why this wasn't brought up in the case of Share a News Story With Coworkers, Pay a Fine where a company settled for $300,000 for distributing news articles internally to employees.
Another (hypothetical) example: internally distributing copies of Microsoft Office to employees is certainly making them available to a limited group and not to the public at large. What is the catch? The EULA wouldn't seem to apply since it is only agreed to after the program is run, not when it is distributed before ever running it.