His excuse for the seat -- which struck me as plausible -- was that he was forced to sleep in his car. What with him being near broke, and being told he couldn't stay in his mother's house. Sure, that's plausible. But that's not what he did. He took the seat out and then washed out the interior leaving an inch of water standing in the car. Would anyone who wanted to sleep in the car leave it wet like that?
a: XO's spokesperson has publically stated (see the PCWorld article) that it was probably a reseller, not XO itself. Don't resellers normally only handle billing and other client facing services? Surely XO would be the ones providing the actual service - otherwise the reseller is not a reseller, they're an ISP in their own right.
No, it's not 'obviously wrong' because unless you have a very large windmill or it runs a very high percentage of the time, it isn't putting out very much energy. The person you replied to stated that it would pay for itself over time. You may dispute that, but you did not in your reply. You talked about energy costs, and in a way that implied that you believe it would never produce as much energy as was required to manufacture the parts. But clearly the cost of the energy required for manufacture must have been included in the sale price if the manufacturer wanted a profit. So if it is capable of recouping it's sale price then it must be capable of producing more energy than was required to manufacture it.
more importantly, is this any form of copyright violation? IANAL, but I think so. They are distributing a derived work (the modified webpage). They'd need permission from the owner of the copyright on the original work (the original webpage) or they'd be infringing.
Your windmill will be rusted junk long before it replaces the energy needed to create its components. That is obviously wrong. If you can buy the parts for $300-400 then they can not be anywhere near as energy expensive as you are making out. The energy costs for industry are usually lower than residential customers pay, but if the windmill can generate enough electricity to pay for itself then it will be close to paying for the energy costs of manufacturing the parts. These things will probably pay for themselves many times over.
Monty's choice *cannot* change your odds of winning; Monty's choice doesn't change the odds that the door you've picked is the correct one. They were 1/3 and they are still 1/3. But what his choice does do is give you information on the remaining unpicked door. There was a 2/3 chance the car was behind one of the doors you did not pick, Monty reveals a door with a goat behind so the 2/3 chance now applies only to the remaining unpicked door. Your door has a 1/3 chance of a car, the other door has a 2/3 chance of a car, so you should switch.
his removal of one of the two goats simply informs you that your odds have just changed from 1/3 to 1/2. How can your odds have changed? They can't and don't. They would only have changed if you got to choose again at this point.
It simply cannot provide any additional information as to whether your choice was a strong or weak one. Exactly. It doesn't provide any information about your door. That's why the chance of you having the car remains 1/3.
Take the deck of cards version: you get to pick one card from a deck (without seeing the card). You are aiming to pick the ace of spades. Monty then shows you 50 cards which are not the ace of spades, so he has one unrevealed card left. Now, should you switch cards with him? Do you see that the card you picked still only has a 1 in 52 chance of being the ace of spades?
If you are still not convinced then go to the website and play the game.
You are wrong. The problem with your "proof" is that you have assigned equal probabilities to each row in your table when they are not equally likely.
Take the four results where the car is behind door one and you always switch. One time in three you choose door 1. One time in two Monty chooses door 2 and one time in two Monty chooses door 3.
C G G 1 2 YES LOSE 1/3*1/2 = 1/6
C G G 1 3 YES LOSE 1/3*1/2 = 1/6
Now one time in three you pick door two. In this case Monty must pick door three every time:
C G G 2 3 YES WIN 1/3*1 = 1/3
Same situation if you pick door 3:
C G G 3 2 YES WIN 1/3*1 = 1/3
Now add up the probabilities. If you switch you lose 2 times in 6 and you win 2 times in 3. You can do the exact same analysis on the cases where you don't switch and you'll find you win one time in three and lose 2 times in 3. The cases where the car is behind doors 2 and 3 work exactly the same way.
If you still don't believe me then go the site and play the game. You should see a difference in success for switching vs not switching after only 10 or so trials.
Short version: When he shows you which one it is NOT, that improves your odds. Only if you switch. If you don't switch you are ignoring the information he just gave you and leaving yourself with the 1/3 chance of being right that you had when you made your selection.
Thinking about it further I have had false negatives in the last year - not more than 10, but not zero.
I've been using gmail for just under 4 years and in that time I've received about 30,000 messages, 90% of which are from mailing lists. I've never had a false positive for me personally and I've only had a small number (<20) of false positives for mailing list emails (and none in the last year). Overall I think the detection is probably on the order of 99.5% accurate for me, but seems to have got better lately, not worse.
Obviously usage specifics matters - I don't get many emails from people I haven't previously emailed so almost all of my personal emails can be validated against addresses I've previously sent to. I'd expect someone who gets valid email from strangers to have a higher number of false positives.
Even their filtering is having troubles with false positives
and false negatives--and the spam is just increasing. Got any evidence that this is true? Because my experience is the complete opposite. I get a couple of dozen spam messages a day and I haven't had a false positive or a false negative in well over a year.
Let's start with, it's multiplicative, not additive. That's 255^3, not 255*3. This is because, as you mentition later, the eye combines all three subpixels into a new color. You are saying that a valid distinct colour is produced when you combine the output of three subpixels, but not when you combine the output of separate pixels. But what is the significant difference between dithering at the subpixel level and dithering between pixels? It seems to me that if you disqualify 6-bit panels from claiming millions of colours because they dither then the same should apply to 8-bit panels as they also dither to produce their 16.7M colours.
And yet it fails at grasping the issue. No, you've missed the point. The point is that an 8-bit panel generates 16.7M colours by dithering: the combination of the 766 actually different shades and intensities of light that the panel can produce. So if the use of dithering disqualifies a 6-bit panel from claiming "millions of colours" then it must also disqualify an 8-bit panel from making that claim as well.
You can fall back to backtracking when the obscure backtracking features are used - and use the regular engine when they are not. There's nothing obscure about requiring the regex to return the first match. That is simply the semantics that most of these languages have chosen.
Appearently the regexp implementors are a bunch of idiots after all:-) You seem to prefer to believe that every modern regex implementer is an idiot rather than recognize the fact that the Thompson NFA approach is not suited to the regex semantics most languages now employ. I think that's an extremely arrogant attitude. But hey, if you're so sure you're right then why not produce an implementation that proves it? Perl has pluggable regex engines now...
Well it's the job of the language people to do that NFA stuff.
As long as they do it in a backward compatible way I don't care. They can't. Otherwise they would have. This is the point that the OP seems to have missed - language implementers aren't just a pack of idiots as the OP seems to believe. Non-backtracking NFAs can handle a certain subset of the requirements very efficiently, but can't handle the rest of the requirements at all. Back references are one thing they struggle with. Another is the requirement that many languages (such as Perl) impose to return the first match, not just any match or the longest match.
If you read the link I posted, you will see that they are indeed evil and slow - and not for any good reason. Actually there are very good reasons. Just because that paper doesn't address them doesn't mean that they don't exist.
I'll close with a somewhat depressing fact: Regular expression and string processing can be done quickly and efficiently (and was done that way back decades ago, with grep and awk), but is actually done in a horribly inefficient way in all modern/popular programming language regexp engines. I think you'll find that the regex algorithms used in the likes of Perl were chosen for a very good reason - not just because the implementers were lazy or stupid. The author of the article never addresses the fundamental differences in semantics between Posix regular expressions (such as grep and awk implement) and Perl regular expressions semantics. In the Posix case you must find the longest match, a requirement that the Thompson NFA approach handles easily. In the Perl case you must find the first match (i.e. you must try left branches of '|' before right branches, and treat '?' '*' and '+' as greedy). This requirement is problematic for the Thompson NFA algorithm.
Comments on the Cox paper from the Haskell regex implementer.
Another response, from the Perl side.
And of course, Apple doesn't make a version of iTunes that she could have installed on her PC. If you now have to use iTunes to access the iPod (when you didn't with older models) doesn't that pretty much prove the "lockdown" contention?
Areva would be able to produce the ingot itself with an investment of about 100 million euros ($155 million), he said as workers coated the inside of a Japan Steel reactor shell part with stainless steel to prevent rust.
I think that passage is referring to the paragraph above:
Areva, the world's biggest reactor builder, is considering modifying its newest design to be able to make the central reactor-vessel part from a 350-ton ingot instead of more than 500 tons as required today So Areva could produce the 350 ton ingot themselves with an investment of $100M, but it doesn't say what investment would be required to produce 500 ton ingots. And creating the ingot is only part of the problem. They also need to be able to forge the containment vessel.
I don't think it's as trivial to replicate this manufacturing capability as you seem to thing. The article states that
It would take any competitor more than five years to catch up with Japan Steel's technology, said the company's chief executive officer, Masahisa Nagata. and
"What they do is an art more than a science, and that's why they're the critical path," said Steven Hucik, senior vice president for nuclear plant projects at GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy in Wilmington, North Carolina.
a paperback book beats an ebook in any way, any day Really? How much will you bet me that you can do a text search on your paperback faster than I can on my ebook?
It's just as likely registers could be corrupted No, it's not. CPU registers are a few hundred bytes worth of storage. Assuming the registers have the same density as the main memory then the area taken up by registers is millions of times smaller than the main memory. Even if you include cache, the main memory is by far the largest target - by orders of magnitude.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is "close sourcing"?
Take the deck of cards version: you get to pick one card from a deck (without seeing the card). You are aiming to pick the ace of spades. Monty then shows you 50 cards which are not the ace of spades, so he has one unrevealed card left. Now, should you switch cards with him? Do you see that the card you picked still only has a 1 in 52 chance of being the ace of spades?
If you are still not convinced then go to the website and play the game.
You are wrong. The problem with your "proof" is that you have assigned equal probabilities to each row in your table when they are not equally likely.
Take the four results where the car is behind door one and you always switch. One time in three you choose door 1. One time in two Monty chooses door 2 and one time in two Monty chooses door 3.
C G G 1 2 YES LOSE 1/3*1/2 = 1/6
C G G 1 3 YES LOSE 1/3*1/2 = 1/6
Now one time in three you pick door two. In this case Monty must pick door three every time:
C G G 2 3 YES WIN 1/3*1 = 1/3
Same situation if you pick door 3:
C G G 3 2 YES WIN 1/3*1 = 1/3
Now add up the probabilities. If you switch you lose 2 times in 6 and you win 2 times in 3. You can do the exact same analysis on the cases where you don't switch and you'll find you win one time in three and lose 2 times in 3. The cases where the car is behind doors 2 and 3 work exactly the same way.
If you still don't believe me then go the site and play the game. You should see a difference in success for switching vs not switching after only 10 or so trials.
I've been using gmail for just under 4 years and in that time I've received about 30,000 messages, 90% of which are from mailing lists. I've never had a false positive for me personally and I've only had a small number (<20) of false positives for mailing list emails (and none in the last year). Overall I think the detection is probably on the order of 99.5% accurate for me, but seems to have got better lately, not worse.
Obviously usage specifics matters - I don't get many emails from people I haven't previously emailed so almost all of my personal emails can be validated against addresses I've previously sent to. I'd expect someone who gets valid email from strangers to have a higher number of false positives.
File a counter notice. You've got rights. Exercise them.
As long as they do it in a backward compatible way I don't care. They can't. Otherwise they would have. This is the point that the OP seems to have missed - language implementers aren't just a pack of idiots as the OP seems to believe. Non-backtracking NFAs can handle a certain subset of the requirements very efficiently, but can't handle the rest of the requirements at all. Back references are one thing they struggle with. Another is the requirement that many languages (such as Perl) impose to return the first match, not just any match or the longest match.
See my reply to your other post.
Comments on the Cox paper from the Haskell regex implementer. Another response, from the Perl side.
I think that passage is referring to the paragraph above: Areva, the world's biggest reactor builder, is considering modifying its newest design to be able to make the central reactor-vessel part from a 350-ton ingot instead of more than 500 tons as required today So Areva could produce the 350 ton ingot themselves with an investment of $100M, but it doesn't say what investment would be required to produce 500 ton ingots. And creating the ingot is only part of the problem. They also need to be able to forge the containment vessel.
I don't think it's as trivial to replicate this manufacturing capability as you seem to thing. The article states that
It would take any competitor more than five years to catch up with Japan Steel's technology, said the company's chief executive officer, Masahisa Nagata. and "What they do is an art more than a science, and that's why they're the critical path," said Steven Hucik, senior vice president for nuclear plant projects at GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy in Wilmington, North Carolina.