Ability to solve problems in the limited-time test format.
Heh. Not really related, but I have fond memories of some "tests" from upper division real analysis and abstract algebra courses during my undergraduate degree. They were open-note, open-book, take-home, with only 6-8 problems and we were given a full week to finish them. Of course, all of the problems began "prove or disprove:" and each one took several hours of hard thinking/playing to grasp the core issues so that you could either write a proof or construct a counterexample.
I guess they were technically more like assignments which constituted a major part of your grade, but they sure felt like exams, even when I was working on them at home in the bathtub (my favorite place for the part of the thinking process where no paper or pencil is required; after the nature of the problem is thoroughly internalized, but the key structure not yet apparent). My wife remembers those tests, too, mostly me staring blankly into space for hours on end until I finally shouted "Gotcha!" as the last pieces fell into place.
Wolfram Alpha would not have been the slightest assistance with those tests:-)
Why do problems with paperwork make it necessary to turn away patients?
In an ER, "paperwork" includes information on whether they'll kill you if they give you a certain drug or transfusion. Stuff like that.
In some cases that's true, but not usually. It's only true if they already have records for the patient, and if they have identified the patient, and if they have bothered to look it up. The first is often not true and in urgent care situations the second and third are not usually done. Not until the emergency situation is stabilized, anyway.
If you have an issue that could create serious problems if you were given the wrong drugs, etc., you should get a medic-alert bracelet or similar with the information. Otherwise, there's a very good chance the ER doctors will have no idea, even if you're at your local hospital.
I think it is a competitor to Alpha. I don't know that I'd say it's better, though.
Alpha operates only on "curated" data, which means that there's a lot more that can be done with the data, since Alpha understands its structure much better. Also, Alpha can do math on it, create graphs, etc.. But with Alpha, you can only use the data that's been made available.
Google squared can't do as much with the data, but it can use the whole web, so it's data source is much richer.
Of course, alpha can add data, and Google can add knowledge of relationships and the ability to do calculations and generate graphs. Their capabilities may converge over time. In which case Google will win.
I do think it would be very cool if legislators adopted source code management tools to manage the legal code. I think it would work very well, and would make the whole process much more visible to everyone. Imagine github for the legal code!
Hmm... Maybe I should download my state laws and publish them via github. Hmm.
So, typing the above inspired me to go do it.
I put the Utah and United States codes in repositories on github. Further, I have a cron job that re-downloads the current statutes daily, commits any changes and pushes them to the github repos.
Now I can easily tell when the law changes, and what changed, and so can anyone else who cares to watch my repositories. I wish there were an easy way to go grab older versions of the laws, but at least I'll have a change history going forward. I'm going to be interested to see what it looks like in a few years.
3. Law should be treated like software: any and all changes should be incorporated into the text, not distributed as amendments. The current legal system looks like Linux 0.01 with all the patches distributed separately up to 2.6.30, and you can win a case by confusing the judge and your opponent into forgetting a critical patch.
3. Make the up to date text of every law easily accessible and searchable by anyone.
[...]
5. Arguments should be based on merit, not qualifications and the overuse of jargon.
These three, at least. are already the case in the US, at both federal and state level. Your second 3 is not yet implemented by all counties and municipalities, but they're getting there. As for your first 3, while changes in statutes are passed as "diffs" by the legislature, generally, the patches are applied after they're passed, and the up-to-date version of the law includes a footnote that it was changed and on what date, but the text you read is the "patched-up" version.
I do think it would be very cool if legislators adopted source code management tools to manage the legal code. I think it would work very well, and would make the whole process much more visible to everyone. Imagine github for the legal code!
Hmm... Maybe I should download my state laws and publish them via github. Hmm.
LTSP is not the topic at hand, virtualization is. I agree with HateBreeder.
Slightly off the topic, perhaps, but both are within the sphere of enterprise system administration, and any competent sysadmin would know of both. Plus, LTSP isn't a particularly obscure topic within that realm. I'm not a system administrator on anything but my own computer, and I know about it.
I don't know enough about hardware design to come up with a truly accurate analogy, but I'm sure there are plenty.
Girls perform at least as well mathematically as boys in a number of countries
I'm not really arguing that there is a gender gap, but I have to point out that at the very pinnacle of mathematics, the people who are making significant new breakthroughs, there is an almost complete lack of women. No woman has won the Fields Medal, for example.
Perhaps given time we'll see more parity in not just ability to do well-understood school-level mathematics, but also ability to make grand new leaps. Or perhaps we won't. I'm open to either possibility, and have no problem with the idea that there are differences between men and women.
So why should I bother memorizing field specific acronyms for projects like LTSP that have little or no interest to me?
No reason. But you shouldn't really be surprised when they crop up in field-specific discussions. Would you expect participants in a discussion about board design to spell out ASIC and FPGA?
Four cases that were important enough to make it to the highest court in the land. When you restrict the set from thousands to that 11, four is a pretty big number
1-2% is a large number? On what planet?
4 of 11 is 1-2% on what planet?
Also, why do you say the rejection was over "summary details"? I'll admit I haven't read the opinions in question
You almost answered your own question in one sentence. I give you an E for effort.
Haven't read them either, I see.
Given her failure to get it right on 10 of the 11 (and soon to be 11 of 12) cases that have gone the distance, combined with the other criticisms discussed ad nauseum, I hope the Senate rejects Sotomayor and forces Obama to choose a better nominee.
You do know she blows Scalia, the paragon of a 'brilliant conservative judge' out of the water, right? Magna cum lade from Princeton, won the highest academic honor for an undergrad, and got her JD from Yale while editing two journals. Oh, and she's got more experience on the federal bench than any nominee in a hundred years. But it's a free country, keep voicing your Concerns all you want.
Academic qualifications are well and good, and perhaps experience works against a nominee. That's the one argument I keep waiting to see someone raise -- that Sotomayor's record in this respect is comparable or better than a lot of other federal and appellate judges, or than the members of the sitting court when they were federal judges... but no one does, which makes me think that's because there isn't such an argument to be made.
Oh, and as for the comparison with Scalia, I don't like him very much either. He too often allows his conservative, federalist leanings to influence his decisions, even when his claimed originalist/textualist philosophy indicates otherwise. He's not rigorous enough and his arguments often contain puzzling contradictions that make it difficult for lower courts to decide how to read his opinions.
I find it very hard to believe that employers would base their hiring decisions on the attendance policy of the school, rather than technical drilling of the applicant.
Based on other posts here, it appears that employers base their hiring decisions on the admissions policy of the school, plus a little bit on the extra-curricular activities (sports and whatnot) of the students. The first is to make sure they're competent, the second is to make sure they can get along with others.
You're quibbling over summary details on 4 cases out of thousands?
Four cases that were important enough to make it to the highest court in the land. When you restrict the set from thousands to that 11, four is a pretty big number, especially when you add it to the other six which were also rejected, though not unanimously.
Also, why do you say the rejection was over "summary details"? I'll admit I haven't read the opinions in question (though I did read a couple of the others). Have you read the four to learn the reason for the unanimous rejections of her reasoning? Are they minor details?
Given her failure to get it right on 10 of the 11 (and soon to be 11 of 12) cases that have gone the distance, combined with the other criticisms discussed ad nauseum, I hope the Senate rejects Sotomayor and forces Obama to choose a better nominee.
I do disagree with Sotomayor's politics, but if that were the issue, I would probably be rooting for her appointment. I'm not quite jaded enough to prefer an incompetent liberal judge over a competent one, though. Obviously, whoever Obama picks is going to be well left of center; besides his own preferences inclining that way, he has debts to pay. But I'd still rather have a serious intellectual who thinks deeply and formulates airtight arguments. Out of hundreds of federal judges and dozens of appellate judges, I'm sure there's a better choice. That choice may not have the political benefit of being a minority woman (or it may! Obama cares about that; I don't), but a lifetime appointment to what is arguably one of the most powerful small bodies in the world is not a place to play affirmative action politics.
Which article? I don't see any discussion of Qt even loops either in the article or in the links from the article. Excuse me if I missed something obvious, but I can't find what you're talking about.
I'm more concerned with her competence than her politics. In particular, the four unanimous rejections of her reasoning, from a court that would split 5-4 on the color of the sky.
Is the constitution a flexible, living document into which we can read much or is it literal, limited only to the context in which its authors lived?
Both.
It is quite literal, but it lives in that whenever circumstances change, we can amend it to adjust for the new circumstances. If the amendment process is too burdensome, perhaps we should amend it to make amendments easier to ratify.
Reinterpreting the unmodified text based on the whims of the day doesn't make the document alive, it makes it dead as a doornail, powerless to have any effect to preserve liberty or restrain tyranny.
Of the thousands of decisions she's made, only 5 have been taken up by the Supreme Court, and of those 3 were reversed, one affirmed and one has not yet been decided
According to CNN's list she's had eleven cases decided by the Supreme Court. Of those, eight were reversed, and of the three upheld two of them were upheld in spite of unanimous rejection of her reasoning. I'd put "got it right by accident" in the "got it wrong" category, myself, so the Supreme Court said she got it wrong 10 out of 11 times.
And it seems very likely that the Ricci case will soon make it 11 out of 12.
The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected.
I believe the sentiment of the study is that BECAUSE people aren't aware of DRM, they still do things that are illegal, according to the DRM. I don't believe most people go out of their way to infringe--they just do by the nature of using their content in the context of the current laws.
Not quite.
The study looked at people who have special privileges to make use of copyrighted material, like libraries and educators. These people are allowed under UK law to bypass the DRM, and there is supposed to be a process in place that they use to get DRM-free copies of the bits they need from the publisher.
What the author found is that this process is never used. Some people don't use it because they don't know it exists. Others don't use it because they think it's too cumbersome. As a result, both sorts of users admit to having resorted to using circumvention tools to bypass the DRM themselves, rather than going through the proper legal channels. What she's saying is that the legal circumvention process is broken, which impels users who could use it to instead use illegal circumvention technology.
One implication of this finding is that it is likely that at least some users don't know how to illegally circumvent the DRM and either don't know how to or don't want to go through the legal process and therefore simply don't use the material they're legally entitled to use. This means that the DRM is effectively preventing important use. The law carves out exceptions in copyright for uses that are deemed important to society and important to academic freedom, and it requires DRM makers to honor those exceptions -- but the process by which they do that is broken.
This is very important because the ability of certain uses to legally bypass the DRM is an important element of the compromise that (supposedly) justifies outlawing circumvention. But that half of the bargain is not being upheld.
Seriously, if science has taught us *anything* it's that tampering with things we don't understand almost always makes them worse. Even when - actually, maybe that should be especially when - we're trying to "correct" a "mistake we've made".
Hmm. I thought it was comic books that taught us that lesson.
Are you sure he said that? Wikiquotes lists the quote as disputed because there has been no citation given for it. When did he say it? And if he did, what was the context?
I'm not a Rush fan, but I have listened to his show a few times, enough to realize that he's an entertainer more than a politician, and he often says stuff just to be funny that if taken out of context is really bad. Or maybe he did say it and it wasn't a joke... it's possible, though it does seem to be inconsistent with his actions, as the GP pointed out.
Without a citation, though, it's really hard to know how much credence to lend this alleged quote.
Slashdot Mirror
Ability to solve problems in the limited-time test format.
Heh. Not really related, but I have fond memories of some "tests" from upper division real analysis and abstract algebra courses during my undergraduate degree. They were open-note, open-book, take-home, with only 6-8 problems and we were given a full week to finish them. Of course, all of the problems began "prove or disprove:" and each one took several hours of hard thinking/playing to grasp the core issues so that you could either write a proof or construct a counterexample.
I guess they were technically more like assignments which constituted a major part of your grade, but they sure felt like exams, even when I was working on them at home in the bathtub (my favorite place for the part of the thinking process where no paper or pencil is required; after the nature of the problem is thoroughly internalized, but the key structure not yet apparent). My wife remembers those tests, too, mostly me staring blankly into space for hours on end until I finally shouted "Gotcha!" as the last pieces fell into place.
Wolfram Alpha would not have been the slightest assistance with those tests :-)
But, it allows you to sell the same stuff to the same people more than once.
How do you figure? It runs your old gamecube games just fine.
Yes, but if they file for bankruptcy and there are no assets to seize because the money has already been paid out, then you get nothing.
Sotomayor's overturn rate is lower than average.
Cite?
Because he's a partisan hack in a justice's clothing, that's why.
Yes. Are you certain Sotomayor is not?
In an ER, "paperwork" includes information on whether they'll kill you if they give you a certain drug or transfusion. Stuff like that.
In some cases that's true, but not usually. It's only true if they already have records for the patient, and if they have identified the patient, and if they have bothered to look it up. The first is often not true and in urgent care situations the second and third are not usually done. Not until the emergency situation is stabilized, anyway. If you have an issue that could create serious problems if you were given the wrong drugs, etc., you should get a medic-alert bracelet or similar with the information. Otherwise, there's a very good chance the ER doctors will have no idea, even if you're at your local hospital.
I think it is a competitor to Alpha. I don't know that I'd say it's better, though.
Alpha operates only on "curated" data, which means that there's a lot more that can be done with the data, since Alpha understands its structure much better. Also, Alpha can do math on it, create graphs, etc.. But with Alpha, you can only use the data that's been made available.
Google squared can't do as much with the data, but it can use the whole web, so it's data source is much richer.
Of course, alpha can add data, and Google can add knowledge of relationships and the ability to do calculations and generate graphs. Their capabilities may converge over time. In which case Google will win.
I do think it would be very cool if legislators adopted source code management tools to manage the legal code. I think it would work very well, and would make the whole process much more visible to everyone. Imagine github for the legal code!
Hmm... Maybe I should download my state laws and publish them via github. Hmm.
So, typing the above inspired me to go do it.
I put the Utah and United States codes in repositories on github. Further, I have a cron job that re-downloads the current statutes daily, commits any changes and pushes them to the github repos.
Now I can easily tell when the law changes, and what changed, and so can anyone else who cares to watch my repositories. I wish there were an easy way to go grab older versions of the laws, but at least I'll have a change history going forward. I'm going to be interested to see what it looks like in a few years.
see also: Miller
Which one?
Doh! Sorry for not fixing up the formatting in your text. It seems like the slashdot "quote" feature used to work better than it does...
3. Law should be treated like software: any and all changes should be incorporated into the text, not distributed as amendments. The current legal system looks like Linux 0.01 with all the patches distributed separately up to 2.6.30, and you can win a case by confusing the judge and your opponent into forgetting a critical patch. 3. Make the up to date text of every law easily accessible and searchable by anyone. [...] 5. Arguments should be based on merit, not qualifications and the overuse of jargon.
These three, at least. are already the case in the US, at both federal and state level. Your second 3 is not yet implemented by all counties and municipalities, but they're getting there. As for your first 3, while changes in statutes are passed as "diffs" by the legislature, generally, the patches are applied after they're passed, and the up-to-date version of the law includes a footnote that it was changed and on what date, but the text you read is the "patched-up" version.
I do think it would be very cool if legislators adopted source code management tools to manage the legal code. I think it would work very well, and would make the whole process much more visible to everyone. Imagine github for the legal code!
Hmm... Maybe I should download my state laws and publish them via github. Hmm.
LTSP is not the topic at hand, virtualization is. I agree with HateBreeder.
Slightly off the topic, perhaps, but both are within the sphere of enterprise system administration, and any competent sysadmin would know of both. Plus, LTSP isn't a particularly obscure topic within that realm. I'm not a system administrator on anything but my own computer, and I know about it.
I don't know enough about hardware design to come up with a truly accurate analogy, but I'm sure there are plenty.
Girls perform at least as well mathematically as boys in a number of countries
I'm not really arguing that there is a gender gap, but I have to point out that at the very pinnacle of mathematics, the people who are making significant new breakthroughs, there is an almost complete lack of women. No woman has won the Fields Medal, for example.
Perhaps given time we'll see more parity in not just ability to do well-understood school-level mathematics, but also ability to make grand new leaps. Or perhaps we won't. I'm open to either possibility, and have no problem with the idea that there are differences between men and women.
Heh. I could have sworn that said 32 million seconds. Oops :-)
So why should I bother memorizing field specific acronyms for projects like LTSP that have little or no interest to me?
No reason. But you shouldn't really be surprised when they crop up in field-specific discussions. Would you expect participants in a discussion about board design to spell out ASIC and FPGA?
This is the might Slash. We can understand proper units.
Femto = 10^-15
Which is a lot smaller than 1/32 million. Not only did the comparison insult our intelligence, but it was wrong, too.
Four cases that were important enough to make it to the highest court in the land. When you restrict the set from thousands to that 11, four is a pretty big number
1-2% is a large number? On what planet?
4 of 11 is 1-2% on what planet?
Also, why do you say the rejection was over "summary details"? I'll admit I haven't read the opinions in question
You almost answered your own question in one sentence. I give you an E for effort.
Haven't read them either, I see.
Given her failure to get it right on 10 of the 11 (and soon to be 11 of 12) cases that have gone the distance, combined with the other criticisms discussed ad nauseum, I hope the Senate rejects Sotomayor and forces Obama to choose a better nominee.
You do know she blows Scalia, the paragon of a 'brilliant conservative judge' out of the water, right? Magna cum lade from Princeton, won the highest academic honor for an undergrad, and got her JD from Yale while editing two journals. Oh, and she's got more experience on the federal bench than any nominee in a hundred years. But it's a free country, keep voicing your Concerns all you want.
Academic qualifications are well and good, and perhaps experience works against a nominee. That's the one argument I keep waiting to see someone raise -- that Sotomayor's record in this respect is comparable or better than a lot of other federal and appellate judges, or than the members of the sitting court when they were federal judges... but no one does, which makes me think that's because there isn't such an argument to be made.
Oh, and as for the comparison with Scalia, I don't like him very much either. He too often allows his conservative, federalist leanings to influence his decisions, even when his claimed originalist/textualist philosophy indicates otherwise. He's not rigorous enough and his arguments often contain puzzling contradictions that make it difficult for lower courts to decide how to read his opinions.
I find it very hard to believe that employers would base their hiring decisions on the attendance policy of the school, rather than technical drilling of the applicant.
Based on other posts here, it appears that employers base their hiring decisions on the admissions policy of the school, plus a little bit on the extra-curricular activities (sports and whatnot) of the students. The first is to make sure they're competent, the second is to make sure they can get along with others.
You're quibbling over summary details on 4 cases out of thousands?
Four cases that were important enough to make it to the highest court in the land. When you restrict the set from thousands to that 11, four is a pretty big number, especially when you add it to the other six which were also rejected, though not unanimously.
Also, why do you say the rejection was over "summary details"? I'll admit I haven't read the opinions in question (though I did read a couple of the others). Have you read the four to learn the reason for the unanimous rejections of her reasoning? Are they minor details?
Given her failure to get it right on 10 of the 11 (and soon to be 11 of 12) cases that have gone the distance, combined with the other criticisms discussed ad nauseum, I hope the Senate rejects Sotomayor and forces Obama to choose a better nominee.
I do disagree with Sotomayor's politics, but if that were the issue, I would probably be rooting for her appointment. I'm not quite jaded enough to prefer an incompetent liberal judge over a competent one, though. Obviously, whoever Obama picks is going to be well left of center; besides his own preferences inclining that way, he has debts to pay. But I'd still rather have a serious intellectual who thinks deeply and formulates airtight arguments. Out of hundreds of federal judges and dozens of appellate judges, I'm sure there's a better choice. That choice may not have the political benefit of being a minority woman (or it may! Obama cares about that; I don't), but a lifetime appointment to what is arguably one of the most powerful small bodies in the world is not a place to play affirmative action politics.
Not beyond what was in the original article.
Which article? I don't see any discussion of Qt even loops either in the article or in the links from the article. Excuse me if I missed something obvious, but I can't find what you're talking about.
I'm more concerned with her competence than her politics. In particular, the four unanimous rejections of her reasoning, from a court that would split 5-4 on the color of the sky.
Is the constitution a flexible, living document into which we can read much or is it literal, limited only to the context in which its authors lived?
Both.
It is quite literal, but it lives in that whenever circumstances change, we can amend it to adjust for the new circumstances. If the amendment process is too burdensome, perhaps we should amend it to make amendments easier to ratify.
Reinterpreting the unmodified text based on the whims of the day doesn't make the document alive, it makes it dead as a doornail, powerless to have any effect to preserve liberty or restrain tyranny.
Of the thousands of decisions she's made, only 5 have been taken up by the Supreme Court, and of those 3 were reversed, one affirmed and one has not yet been decided
According to CNN's list she's had eleven cases decided by the Supreme Court. Of those, eight were reversed, and of the three upheld two of them were upheld in spite of unanimous rejection of her reasoning. I'd put "got it right by accident" in the "got it wrong" category, myself, so the Supreme Court said she got it wrong 10 out of 11 times.
And it seems very likely that the Ricci case will soon make it 11 out of 12.
The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected.
I believe the sentiment of the study is that BECAUSE people aren't aware of DRM, they still do things that are illegal, according to the DRM. I don't believe most people go out of their way to infringe--they just do by the nature of using their content in the context of the current laws.
Not quite.
The study looked at people who have special privileges to make use of copyrighted material, like libraries and educators. These people are allowed under UK law to bypass the DRM, and there is supposed to be a process in place that they use to get DRM-free copies of the bits they need from the publisher.
What the author found is that this process is never used. Some people don't use it because they don't know it exists. Others don't use it because they think it's too cumbersome. As a result, both sorts of users admit to having resorted to using circumvention tools to bypass the DRM themselves, rather than going through the proper legal channels. What she's saying is that the legal circumvention process is broken, which impels users who could use it to instead use illegal circumvention technology.
One implication of this finding is that it is likely that at least some users don't know how to illegally circumvent the DRM and either don't know how to or don't want to go through the legal process and therefore simply don't use the material they're legally entitled to use. This means that the DRM is effectively preventing important use. The law carves out exceptions in copyright for uses that are deemed important to society and important to academic freedom, and it requires DRM makers to honor those exceptions -- but the process by which they do that is broken.
This is very important because the ability of certain uses to legally bypass the DRM is an important element of the compromise that (supposedly) justifies outlawing circumvention. But that half of the bargain is not being upheld.
Seriously, if science has taught us *anything* it's that tampering with things we don't understand almost always makes them worse. Even when - actually, maybe that should be especially when - we're trying to "correct" a "mistake we've made".
Hmm. I thought it was comic books that taught us that lesson.
Are you sure he said that? Wikiquotes lists the quote as disputed because there has been no citation given for it. When did he say it? And if he did, what was the context?
I'm not a Rush fan, but I have listened to his show a few times, enough to realize that he's an entertainer more than a politician, and he often says stuff just to be funny that if taken out of context is really bad. Or maybe he did say it and it wasn't a joke... it's possible, though it does seem to be inconsistent with his actions, as the GP pointed out.
Without a citation, though, it's really hard to know how much credence to lend this alleged quote.