I meant by analogy with defining 1 as a prime; you have to change the wording on a lot of theorems to say something like all primes (except for one). If you defined four to be prime, you'd have to modify lots of theorems to say all primes (except four). My point is that what you call a thing doesn't matter; how the numbers actually relate and operate on each other DOES matter. You can call things anything you want, and even giving them 'contradictory' names is acceptable as long as you use your naming convention consistently.
So each prime (except four) has a single non-unit factor that is equal to itself.
Re:Which is exactly why it has a girls name
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
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· Score: 5, Funny
And they STILL manage to talk about men more than men talk aout women.
Re:We're forgetting about one group of readers
on
Science Askew
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· Score: 2
Proof of moderators' stupidity...one guy makes a joke and is at 1. Someone else explains it and goes to 4, Funny.
you have to exclude one so that numbers will have unique prime factorizations. 6=2*3 - there's only one way to factor it into primes. If you include one, the 6=2*3=1*2*3=1*1*2*3=1*1*1*2*3, etc. There are an infinitude of factorizations. Of course, if you call one prime, you can work around this by saying that tere is only one prime factorization that does not include one.
Now, consider that this (the uniqueness of prime factorizations) is often known as the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. There are thousands of other theorems that depend on prime numbers. It would be a lot more difficult to communicate about them if you always had to say "all prime numbers except for one." Mathematicians are as lazy as programmers (with their ls and their cp) so the clarified the definition of prime numbes.
It completely does not matter mathematically how you define the set of prime numbers; it simply makes everything a little more straightforward. In fact, you could define 4 as prime if you were so inclined.
My ball, my rules That hardly matters if you're sitting in a ball factory. If Linus won't let you play with his ball, pick up one of the thousands on the floor.
Take note that Linus decided to remind us nine times that it is his tree. I suppose you've been following the mailing list for the past six months? So you've can count how many times people have suggested that maybe it isn't Linus's tree by their incessant suggestions that he hasn't the right to do with it as he pleases? I suspect he's being pretty conservative.
Wow, taste this Wonder bread! They use bleached flour so there's ABSOLUTELY NO character or distinguishing flavor. Forget those whole wheat or rye breads...use WONDER! Who wants their bread to taste unique? Not me! I want to show some pride in my loaf!
Yup. It's all for the bottom line. They won't give up ONE...RED...CENT*... unless it increases their profits. Pretty abominable, really, but the stockholders pretty much force this on them. Imagine the hue and cry that would come up if MS was just giving money away without expecting anything in return.
Flawed analogy. You don't stand to make any money in the future by hooking the beggar. Now, if you were a liquor store owner, then it might behoove you to pass out free booze. If someone complains that it's practically vinegar, do you look down on them for rejecting your charity? NO! You give them the good stuff. Once they're addicted, they'll take anything you have to offer.
MS is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. MS is giving them their first hit for free (metaphorically).
Granted, there are Peeping Tom laws, but stripping in front front of a picture window at night with the lights on is likely to get you busted for indecenct exposure.
Cool...but an old concept
on
Water Computing
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· Score: 5, Informative
Scientific American had an article about water-based logic gates and circuits some decades ago. IIRC, they even created circuits that had no electronic analogy. I can find no reference to this on the web - perhaps some other science geek with access to a complete collection could find it. I believe it was in the Amateur Scientist, but it's been about fifteen years since I read through the stacks of magazines in the cabinets of my chemistry classroom, so I could be mistaken.
For a similar concept (ie, non-silicon machine logic) that I first read about in the pages of Scientific American, check out the Apraphulians here . For more info on this ancient race, Google is your friend.
The stick is the only thing you have. Look at it from the owner's perspective:
I own a healthcare company. I will lose my livelihood if the people working for me don't adhere to these regulations. Therefore, anyone who refuses to comply CAN NOT work for me. Just like anybody else, I've got a spouse and kids and a house payment. Unlike most other people, I've got 20 other people working for me, all of whom have a spouse and kids and a house payment. I CAN NOT permit some nimrod to jeopardize the business. The reward for complying is a job. There is no punishment for failure to comply; you simply won't work for me.
Carrots are nice for persuading people to do things that are not essential, but in this kind of a situation, a stick is all that exists. If you disagree, I encourage you to find the carrots in the regulations that mandate compiance.
It could take much longer than 5 days to go from earth to orbit. The most optimistic predictions of the space shuttle's schedule were never more frequent than once every two weeks. We don't have emergency rescue rockets sitting on launch pads, ready to go. The expense to do something like that would be enormous. Spending money on a superfluous rescue system in a time of budget cuts seems wrong.
Sleeping pills that put you to sleep for five days are pretty close to fatal. Taking sleeping pills repeatedly over the course of five days could also be fatal, or at least addictive.
Travel to exciting distant lands. Meet exotic, interesting people. And kill them. (But only on weekends).
Re:Who cares if a football player's taking steroid
on
Unmaking The Game
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I watched for two years as Blizzard would constantly fix...My point is, as soon as they fix one bug, another will surface.
I'll bet you don't eat, either....a few hours after one meal, you just have to eat another. =)
Software development is an ITERATIVE process. If a bug is discovered a year after a product comes out, it obviously hasn't affected a whole lot of people...but it's fixed anyway, because clearly people have begun to exercise the software in a fashion that has caused the bug to be exposed. There's something comparable to a learning curve with any software product. Some features are widely used immediately, some take a while to enter widespread usage. Until there's a good-sized userbase for a feature, usable bug reports don't come in for the feature. Once the bug reports start rolling in, the feature is obviously being used (or misused). Failing to fix the bug means that further development for that aspect of the software is halted; users don't use the feature (since it doesn't work), they don't suggest ways to expand it, they don't exercise the features "beyond" the feature, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
But dividing a non-zero number by zero is different from dividing zero by zero. They are undefined for two different conceptual reasons.
Yes. France is a nation in Europe on Earth. Belgium is recognized galaxy-wide as a rude word. It's important to know the difference.
I meant by analogy with defining 1 as a prime; you have to change the wording on a lot of theorems to say something like all primes (except for one). If you defined four to be prime, you'd have to modify lots of theorems to say all primes (except four). My point is that what you call a thing doesn't matter; how the numbers actually relate and operate on each other DOES matter. You can call things anything you want, and even giving them 'contradictory' names is acceptable as long as you use your naming convention consistently.
So each prime (except four) has a single non-unit factor that is equal to itself.
And they STILL manage to talk about men more than men talk aout women.
Proof of moderators' stupidity...one guy makes a joke and is at 1. Someone else explains it and goes to 4, Funny.
OMIGOSH! What just happened? The whole world went dark...(CTRL-2)...Ah, that's better.
In these days of zero tolerance I can get a kid suspended for teasing my kid.
P.S. I salute your user number.
you have to exclude one so that numbers will have unique prime factorizations. 6=2*3 - there's only one way to factor it into primes. If you include one, the 6=2*3=1*2*3=1*1*2*3=1*1*1*2*3, etc. There are an infinitude of factorizations. Of course, if you call one prime, you can work around this by saying that tere is only one prime factorization that does not include one.
Now, consider that this (the uniqueness of prime factorizations) is often known as the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. There are thousands of other theorems that depend on prime numbers. It would be a lot more difficult to communicate about them if you always had to say "all prime numbers except for one." Mathematicians are as lazy as programmers (with their ls and their cp) so the clarified the definition of prime numbes.
It completely does not matter mathematically how you define the set of prime numbers; it simply makes everything a little more straightforward. In fact, you could define 4 as prime if you were so inclined.
The NASA engineer pours out half the beer and says "Triple redundancy!"
Ya know, what's funny is that you actually sound like a stereotypical clueless Hollywood producer prodding hack into writing Yet Another Screenplay...
=)
My ball, my rules
That hardly matters if you're sitting in a ball factory. If Linus won't let you play with his ball, pick up one of the thousands on the floor.
Take note that Linus decided to remind us nine times that it is his tree.
I suppose you've been following the mailing list for the past six months? So you've can count how many times people have suggested that maybe it isn't Linus's tree by their incessant suggestions that he hasn't the right to do with it as he pleases? I suspect he's being pretty conservative.
Wow, taste this Wonder bread! They use bleached flour so there's ABSOLUTELY NO character or distinguishing flavor. Forget those whole wheat or rye breads...use WONDER! Who wants their bread to taste unique? Not me! I want to show some pride in my loaf!
Yup. It's all for the bottom line. They won't give up ONE...RED...CENT*... unless it increases their profits. Pretty abominable, really, but the stockholders pretty much force this on them. Imagine the hue and cry that would come up if MS was just giving money away without expecting anything in return.
Like by making campaign contributions.
Flawed analogy. You don't stand to make any money in the future by hooking the beggar. Now, if you were a liquor store owner, then it might behoove you to pass out free booze. If someone complains that it's practically vinegar, do you look down on them for rejecting your charity? NO! You give them the good stuff. Once they're addicted, they'll take anything you have to offer.
MS is not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. MS is giving them their first hit for free (metaphorically).
Granted, there are Peeping Tom laws, but stripping in front front of a picture window at night with the lights on is likely to get you busted for indecenct exposure.
Scientific American had an article about water-based logic gates and circuits some decades ago. IIRC, they even created circuits that had no electronic analogy. I can find no reference to this on the web - perhaps some other science geek with access to a complete collection could find it. I believe it was in the Amateur Scientist, but it's been about fifteen years since I read through the stacks of magazines in the cabinets of my chemistry classroom, so I could be mistaken.
For a similar concept (ie, non-silicon machine logic) that I first read about in the pages of Scientific American, check out the Apraphulians here . For more info on this ancient race, Google is your friend.
+42, Gets It.
/.'s S/N ratio.
You, sir, are the signal in
The stick is the only thing you have. Look at it from the owner's perspective:
I own a healthcare company. I will lose my livelihood if the people working for me don't adhere to these regulations. Therefore, anyone who refuses to comply CAN NOT work for me. Just like anybody else, I've got a spouse and kids and a house payment. Unlike most other people, I've got 20 other people working for me, all of whom have a spouse and kids and a house payment. I CAN NOT permit some nimrod to jeopardize the business. The reward for complying is a job. There is no punishment for failure to comply; you simply won't work for me.
Carrots are nice for persuading people to do things that are not essential, but in this kind of a situation, a stick is all that exists. If you disagree, I encourage you to find the carrots in the regulations that mandate compiance.
Are you sure it's not "silicone" grease?
(Sorry - my pet peeve; I go nuts when I hear about "silicon" breast implants or "silicone" chips)
It could take much longer than 5 days to go from earth to orbit. The most optimistic predictions of the space shuttle's schedule were never more frequent than once every two weeks. We don't have emergency rescue rockets sitting on launch pads, ready to go. The expense to do something like that would be enormous. Spending money on a superfluous rescue system in a time of budget cuts seems wrong.
Sleeping pills that put you to sleep for five days are pretty close to fatal. Taking sleeping pills repeatedly over the course of five days could also be fatal, or at least addictive.
Travel to exciting distant lands. Meet exotic, interesting people. And kill them. (But only on weekends).
I watched for two years as Blizzard would constantly fix...My point is, as soon as they fix one bug, another will surface.
I'll bet you don't eat, either....a few hours after one meal, you just have to eat another. =)
Software development is an ITERATIVE process. If a bug is discovered a year after a product comes out, it obviously hasn't affected a whole lot of people...but it's fixed anyway, because clearly people have begun to exercise the software in a fashion that has caused the bug to be exposed. There's something comparable to a learning curve with any software product. Some features are widely used immediately, some take a while to enter widespread usage. Until there's a good-sized userbase for a feature, usable bug reports don't come in for the feature. Once the bug reports start rolling in, the feature is obviously being used (or misused). Failing to fix the bug means that further development for that aspect of the software is halted; users don't use the feature (since it doesn't work), they don't suggest ways to expand it, they don't exercise the features "beyond" the feature, etc.
Who knows. I'm sure there's a valid financial reason for doing so.
Yup. It's called "What the market will bear."
and the puritans did approve of killing people (remember, they burned witches for entertainment value)... just not of sex.
PUH-LEASE!
How do you think they made little baby Puritans?
Answer: Marketspeak. Lots of marketspeak. Terms like "commodity", "arena", and "enterprise" are a good first step.