Please understand what you are responding to. The OP thought that considering the loan interest rate of the money meant that the money would actually have to be loaned. The OP then went on to say "start living on your own fucking money", referring to the OOP not having 10$ of spare cash since the OP thought the OOP said that he would have to loan the 10$. If you yourself understand what opportunity cost is, then you'll also know that the OP needs to Google it. That the actual opportunity cost on 10$ is tiny has nothing to do with the topic, so I don't know what your point is. You could have made that reply to OOP. The OP was also wrong in thinking that the total cost was 10$ in the first place.
Oh yeah I'm such a bore, but not to worry: If you give me a few hundred dollars, I'll guarantee not to hang out with you. If you take this excellent deal, all you lose is the pointless option of spending those hundreds of dollars on something else. It's practically a steal!
This means that the highly resourceful people who may have enough influence to change the system out of personal annoyance with the whole thing will now be appeased by by-passing the security theater. Then the only people left to be annoyed are the people who don't have the influence to hurt the TSA. It's brilliant in an evil mustache twirling sort of way.
I am pretty damn confident that the airlines would love nothing better than to discard the ineffective security theater measures. It is an incredible loss for them. Terrorism happens exceedingly rarely, so the money lost when a plane goes down is a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of all the security theater. Most hijackings don't involve totaling the plane anyway. It also means that people are avoiding flying just to avoid the security theater. Sometimes people are late to their flights because of security theater. Security theater is a loss for the airlines on every count.
From what little I know of Google's systems from seeing lots of presentations by Google people, I think they do generally set things up so that you can put another server in the corner with a network cable attached and the infrastructure to make that server useful to your computation automatically takes over from there. I suspect what happened wasn't that some particular computer ran out of disk space - that is just a simple way to explain it. I suspect what really happened was that the Google+ team had secured permission to use X amount of storage from their data centers for that particular purpose, and then more than X storage was unexpectedly needed. So I think the fix wasn't even to attach more machines, I think it was updating a field in a database.
I believe that you are assuming that there is a shortage of talented musicians so that record companies make money mainly based on their ability to sign those very rare talented musicians. The mere fact that the record companies manage to sign their talent on such ridiculously unfavorable contracts shows that this is not the case. There is a huge oversupply of talented people who desperately want to live off their music, so you can discard 95% of those and still not have a shortage. So getting access to that 95% isn't going to be any big advantage for the hypothetical honest record label. At most they might waste less time in negotiations with people who aren't ultimately going to accept the unfavorable terms.
Probably lots of people turn them down, but that still leaves the people who have a life attitude of "don't worry about it". In any case this is not the most compelling case of when contracts shouldn't be valid, even if it is still compelling. The more compelling cases are where you are presented with impenetrable 50 page documents for doing completely routine things like getting a cell phone, installing software or opening a bank account. Those contracts wouldn't need to be more than a page or two of very simple language (there's been research done on this). Yet it benefits the companies who write the contracts if the customers don't have the option of knowing what they are signing short of hiring a lawyer to go over it in detail.
I think there should be some kind of law that if a contract is written such that a reasonable person would conclude that it was to a significant degree unnecessarily long, unnecessarily complicated or even willfully deceptive, then any non-standard, reasonably surprising or onerous statements in the contract are void. That way you can still make any kind of agreement you want, but you have to be clear about what the agreement actually is. It's just like in medicine: a patient's consent to something dangerous is only meaningful if the patient has understood what you are asking him and it is the doctor's responsibility to make sure that that is the case. We should have a concept of "informed signature" just like we have a concept of "informed consent" in medicine, and that concept should have some real legal bite. Then perhaps contracts can become honest - today you'll be hard pressed to find just a few honest contracts that you've signed.
Huge SAT problems are routinely solved on computers. In fact the CPU in your computer was probably formally tested in software by solving a huge SAT problem. NP-completeness does not necessarily mean that a problem can't be solved in practice even if it is huge. Complexity theory does provide an approximation to what is tractable, but it isn't all that accurate.
Showing applications to the real world may make someone see how math is useful. However it goes counter to what Math itself is. Math is about being able to engage in and appreciate a symbolic and logical way of communicating and reasoning. Applying that to the real world has two steps: make a model to embed your real world situation into math and then derive facts from your model mathematically. The problem is that the model making isn't itself math at all, and doing math on a model will rarely show the beauty of math. That is because those models are made to fit reality and not to be mathematically interesting. Applied math and math might seem similar if you don't understand math, but they are actually very far apart.
It's like the difference between having sight and using a mirror to generate solar power. Having sight makes understanding and making mirrors a lot easier, but sight is so much richer than that. Problem is that it is very hard to explain to someone who is blind what it feels like to see. When you see abstract math you are like a blind person listening to an explanation of sight when all you really care about are mirrors. The explanation will seem weirdly obtuse and off the point, but that's because the person talking isn't talking about mirrors, he's talking about seeing.
Now it might be right that teaching someone to "get" abstract math in the course of a museum visit is a fool's errand. Still, I wish this guy luck in that goal if indeed that is his goal. However, I think the article writer simply views all math as abstract and what the museum will actually be about will be the people involved in math, it's applications and so on. Just like you wanted.
What if the press were there with video cameras and he was watching his TV and thus obtained information about the location of police? Should the journalists then go to jail? Or is it only OK when a journalist does it? I'm not sure myself, but I do think the issue is not so simple as you make it out to be.
Yeah, just like a computer will never play chess at grandmaster level. On language you can do anything with enough data. Consider how easy translation is if you've got a table that translates every sentence or even every document that anyone is likely to write. Just look it up in the table. The world doesn't have enough language data to create such a table, so the trick is improving the algorithms so they can work with a smaller amount of data than that. The computer doesn't need to be immersed in the culture because the people who created the language data it is processing are immersed themselves and their knowledge of the language and culture becomes embedded into the data they create. At that point it is an algorithm challenge to make sense of the data. Even then, there is nothing preventing computers from analyzing billions of hours of video recordings of a culture or even being embodied in a robot body and directly interacting with the culture. The question is not whether it is possible for computers to do human-level translation, the question is just how hard it will be to make that happen. I think robot bodies won't be necessary.
I'd rather not have video compression implemented in slow Javascript (even if it is getting faster). I also imagine that you can't access web cam peripherals from Javascript without some kind of browser extension, though I don't know.
I'm outraged that government employees are being treated this poorly which is bound to decrease their efficiency and is thus directly costing me money. We need many more xboxes and other entertainment devices in the government break rooms. That is the story, right? I really hope it's not about how people working for the government cannot be allowed 5 cents per employee on xboxes. That's a level of expense of one candy bar per 20 employees over 10 years!
There is no kind of evidence that I can think of that could not possibly be misleading. So that video evidence might be misleading isn't really a big problem with video evidence in particular. I would say that video evidence is perhaps one of the kinds of evidence that are least likely to be misleading. Compare it to more easily doctorable photographs and the notoriously unreliable eye witness. If we were ruling out video evidence because it might be misleading, then I could by the same argument say that no one could bring up DNA evidence against me because it might be that someone planted that DNA evidence - it's not just that I could make the argument that DNA evidence could be planted, I could say that no one should be allowed to even collect DNA evidence because that evidence might, once collected, be misleading. This is clearly a preposterous argument. If police don't want misleading video of themselves distributed, they need to make their own videos that include any salient follow-up. They cannot be allowed to interfere with the collection of evidence against them.
Honest, well-meaning sales people with high ethical standards and an excellent grasp of the product they are selling as well as the needs of the customer are great. This story is about a situation where it seems that the customers are hanging on to the company in spite of their poor impression of the sales team. I think it's quite likely that the breed of salespeople at this company are not the kind who are too concerned about losing credibility. You are right that it's not fair to the honest salespeople to draw the whole profession with one brush.
Make that 8.8 gigabits per second compared to 6Gb/s hard drive. Doesn't sound revolutionary. There must be something in the other details that make this exciting.
The only way for the speed comparison to make sense so that we get a 1000x improvement on conventional harddisks and only a 7x improvement on flash is if speed is referring to latency instead of bandwidth, which is correct even if counter to normal marketing material. If the stated bandwidth is for a small element then you can add X of those elements to your drive to multiply the bandwidth by X, so possibly the bandwidth could be pretty good too.
We humans like to pretend that our assumptions are facts. So when our assumptions come closer to actually really being facts, we have to say that that is a worthless endeavor because otherwise our pretense would be disrupted. It is much nicer to feel superior to those stupid scientists than it is to realize how little we really know.
If you file patents on any GM product that has the capacity to cross-contaminate natural organisms with your patented gene thereby giving you the opportunity to sue people for growing crop with your contaminated gene then you should be thrown in the same pool as Monsanto.
I'll get on that right away then to swim in Monsanto's pool of money!
I don't mind you directly obviously lying about the quality of discussion in this case or others, because you have no worthwhile response, but I do worry about my grammar being criticized.:p
I didn't criticize your grammar, but thanks for illustrating my point.
If the Christian god existed and wanted us to have knowledge about something, he wouldn't need anyone to write it down. We could just become aware of the facts through an act of a god. Yet, it seems he insists on only informing us about the fact of his existence in ways which are consistent with there being no God at all. I guess all the gods that people believe in are trickster gods. The only conclusion I can see is that if the Christian god exists, he does not want rational people to believe in him. So either way I've got it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Please understand what you are responding to. The OP thought that considering the loan interest rate of the money meant that the money would actually have to be loaned. The OP then went on to say "start living on your own fucking money", referring to the OOP not having 10$ of spare cash since the OP thought the OOP said that he would have to loan the 10$. If you yourself understand what opportunity cost is, then you'll also know that the OP needs to Google it. That the actual opportunity cost on 10$ is tiny has nothing to do with the topic, so I don't know what your point is. You could have made that reply to OOP. The OP was also wrong in thinking that the total cost was 10$ in the first place.
Oh yeah I'm such a bore, but not to worry: If you give me a few hundred dollars, I'll guarantee not to hang out with you. If you take this excellent deal, all you lose is the pointless option of spending those hundreds of dollars on something else. It's practically a steal!
Please Google "opportunity cost".
This means that the highly resourceful people who may have enough influence to change the system out of personal annoyance with the whole thing will now be appeased by by-passing the security theater. Then the only people left to be annoyed are the people who don't have the influence to hurt the TSA. It's brilliant in an evil mustache twirling sort of way.
I am pretty damn confident that the airlines would love nothing better than to discard the ineffective security theater measures. It is an incredible loss for them. Terrorism happens exceedingly rarely, so the money lost when a plane goes down is a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of all the security theater. Most hijackings don't involve totaling the plane anyway. It also means that people are avoiding flying just to avoid the security theater. Sometimes people are late to their flights because of security theater. Security theater is a loss for the airlines on every count.
From what little I know of Google's systems from seeing lots of presentations by Google people, I think they do generally set things up so that you can put another server in the corner with a network cable attached and the infrastructure to make that server useful to your computation automatically takes over from there. I suspect what happened wasn't that some particular computer ran out of disk space - that is just a simple way to explain it. I suspect what really happened was that the Google+ team had secured permission to use X amount of storage from their data centers for that particular purpose, and then more than X storage was unexpectedly needed. So I think the fix wasn't even to attach more machines, I think it was updating a field in a database.
I believe that you are assuming that there is a shortage of talented musicians so that record companies make money mainly based on their ability to sign those very rare talented musicians. The mere fact that the record companies manage to sign their talent on such ridiculously unfavorable contracts shows that this is not the case. There is a huge oversupply of talented people who desperately want to live off their music, so you can discard 95% of those and still not have a shortage. So getting access to that 95% isn't going to be any big advantage for the hypothetical honest record label. At most they might waste less time in negotiations with people who aren't ultimately going to accept the unfavorable terms.
Probably lots of people turn them down, but that still leaves the people who have a life attitude of "don't worry about it". In any case this is not the most compelling case of when contracts shouldn't be valid, even if it is still compelling. The more compelling cases are where you are presented with impenetrable 50 page documents for doing completely routine things like getting a cell phone, installing software or opening a bank account. Those contracts wouldn't need to be more than a page or two of very simple language (there's been research done on this). Yet it benefits the companies who write the contracts if the customers don't have the option of knowing what they are signing short of hiring a lawyer to go over it in detail.
I think there should be some kind of law that if a contract is written such that a reasonable person would conclude that it was to a significant degree unnecessarily long, unnecessarily complicated or even willfully deceptive, then any non-standard, reasonably surprising or onerous statements in the contract are void. That way you can still make any kind of agreement you want, but you have to be clear about what the agreement actually is. It's just like in medicine: a patient's consent to something dangerous is only meaningful if the patient has understood what you are asking him and it is the doctor's responsibility to make sure that that is the case. We should have a concept of "informed signature" just like we have a concept of "informed consent" in medicine, and that concept should have some real legal bite. Then perhaps contracts can become honest - today you'll be hard pressed to find just a few honest contracts that you've signed.
Huge SAT problems are routinely solved on computers. In fact the CPU in your computer was probably formally tested in software by solving a huge SAT problem. NP-completeness does not necessarily mean that a problem can't be solved in practice even if it is huge. Complexity theory does provide an approximation to what is tractable, but it isn't all that accurate.
Showing applications to the real world may make someone see how math is useful. However it goes counter to what Math itself is. Math is about being able to engage in and appreciate a symbolic and logical way of communicating and reasoning. Applying that to the real world has two steps: make a model to embed your real world situation into math and then derive facts from your model mathematically. The problem is that the model making isn't itself math at all, and doing math on a model will rarely show the beauty of math. That is because those models are made to fit reality and not to be mathematically interesting. Applied math and math might seem similar if you don't understand math, but they are actually very far apart.
It's like the difference between having sight and using a mirror to generate solar power. Having sight makes understanding and making mirrors a lot easier, but sight is so much richer than that. Problem is that it is very hard to explain to someone who is blind what it feels like to see. When you see abstract math you are like a blind person listening to an explanation of sight when all you really care about are mirrors. The explanation will seem weirdly obtuse and off the point, but that's because the person talking isn't talking about mirrors, he's talking about seeing.
Now it might be right that teaching someone to "get" abstract math in the course of a museum visit is a fool's errand. Still, I wish this guy luck in that goal if indeed that is his goal. However, I think the article writer simply views all math as abstract and what the museum will actually be about will be the people involved in math, it's applications and so on. Just like you wanted.
Pi^2 jokes.
What if the press were there with video cameras and he was watching his TV and thus obtained information about the location of police? Should the journalists then go to jail? Or is it only OK when a journalist does it? I'm not sure myself, but I do think the issue is not so simple as you make it out to be.
Yeah, just like a computer will never play chess at grandmaster level. On language you can do anything with enough data. Consider how easy translation is if you've got a table that translates every sentence or even every document that anyone is likely to write. Just look it up in the table. The world doesn't have enough language data to create such a table, so the trick is improving the algorithms so they can work with a smaller amount of data than that. The computer doesn't need to be immersed in the culture because the people who created the language data it is processing are immersed themselves and their knowledge of the language and culture becomes embedded into the data they create. At that point it is an algorithm challenge to make sense of the data. Even then, there is nothing preventing computers from analyzing billions of hours of video recordings of a culture or even being embodied in a robot body and directly interacting with the culture. The question is not whether it is possible for computers to do human-level translation, the question is just how hard it will be to make that happen. I think robot bodies won't be necessary.
I'd rather not have video compression implemented in slow Javascript (even if it is getting faster). I also imagine that you can't access web cam peripherals from Javascript without some kind of browser extension, though I don't know.
Far worse than the goatsx? Pics or it didn't happen!
I'm outraged that government employees are being treated this poorly which is bound to decrease their efficiency and is thus directly costing me money. We need many more xboxes and other entertainment devices in the government break rooms. That is the story, right? I really hope it's not about how people working for the government cannot be allowed 5 cents per employee on xboxes. That's a level of expense of one candy bar per 20 employees over 10 years!
According to the summary these people are selling services to other criminals, so it seems to me that they do compete.
There is no kind of evidence that I can think of that could not possibly be misleading. So that video evidence might be misleading isn't really a big problem with video evidence in particular. I would say that video evidence is perhaps one of the kinds of evidence that are least likely to be misleading. Compare it to more easily doctorable photographs and the notoriously unreliable eye witness. If we were ruling out video evidence because it might be misleading, then I could by the same argument say that no one could bring up DNA evidence against me because it might be that someone planted that DNA evidence - it's not just that I could make the argument that DNA evidence could be planted, I could say that no one should be allowed to even collect DNA evidence because that evidence might, once collected, be misleading. This is clearly a preposterous argument. If police don't want misleading video of themselves distributed, they need to make their own videos that include any salient follow-up. They cannot be allowed to interfere with the collection of evidence against them.
Honest, well-meaning sales people with high ethical standards and an excellent grasp of the product they are selling as well as the needs of the customer are great. This story is about a situation where it seems that the customers are hanging on to the company in spite of their poor impression of the sales team. I think it's quite likely that the breed of salespeople at this company are not the kind who are too concerned about losing credibility. You are right that it's not fair to the honest salespeople to draw the whole profession with one brush.
Make that 8.8 gigabits per second compared to 6Gb/s hard drive. Doesn't sound revolutionary. There must be something in the other details that make this exciting.
The only way for the speed comparison to make sense so that we get a 1000x improvement on conventional harddisks and only a 7x improvement on flash is if speed is referring to latency instead of bandwidth, which is correct even if counter to normal marketing material. If the stated bandwidth is for a small element then you can add X of those elements to your drive to multiply the bandwidth by X, so possibly the bandwidth could be pretty good too.
We humans like to pretend that our assumptions are facts. So when our assumptions come closer to actually really being facts, we have to say that that is a worthless endeavor because otherwise our pretense would be disrupted. It is much nicer to feel superior to those stupid scientists than it is to realize how little we really know.
3) you got trolled.
If you file patents on any GM product that has the capacity to cross-contaminate natural organisms with your patented gene thereby giving you the opportunity to sue people for growing crop with your contaminated gene then you should be thrown in the same pool as Monsanto.
I'll get on that right away then to swim in Monsanto's pool of money!
I don't mind you directly obviously lying about the quality of discussion in this case or others, because you have no worthwhile response, but I do worry about my grammar being criticized. :p
I didn't criticize your grammar, but thanks for illustrating my point.
If the Christian god existed and wanted us to have knowledge about something, he wouldn't need anyone to write it down. We could just become aware of the facts through an act of a god. Yet, it seems he insists on only informing us about the fact of his existence in ways which are consistent with there being no God at all. I guess all the gods that people believe in are trickster gods. The only conclusion I can see is that if the Christian god exists, he does not want rational people to believe in him. So either way I've got it right.