What if there were just giant planets inhabitted by slime-mold, or intelligent creatures that just didn't give a damn, and so they never developed useful society?
Where the hell is Planet Hollywood!?!
Why do these creatures want to form governments anyway. With drastically different evolutionary timelines, one creature has propably evolved past war, another so evolved that all of the others seem more like suitable pets, another so unevolved that it's unaware that the others exist.
Why do people in the future right with light sabers?
Why do people in the future fight in person, if there are autonomous robots capable of doing so?
Why do space ships need pilots at the helm rather than computers?
Why is future technology so bad it always needs fixing?
Why does C3P0 handle machinery with his hands, rather than some sort of networking?
When R2D2 connects with machinery, why isn't it wirelessly? Why does it require physical manipulation? For that matter, when he's in Cloud City, why does he move so slowly when hacking into that computer, how many bits could he really encode a second through physical manipulation?
Probably, because it makes a better movie. My bet is that, if we ever talk to life somewhere else in the universe, that they are literally nothing like us. It won't be humanoids in space suits breathing nitrogen... it will be giant amoebas in polymer bags that prevent them from splashing apart in the low atmosphere of the earth.
Smuckers sells PB&J sandwiches that are little round circles. The circles look like they are made by a process involving 2 pieces of bread thusly, but I really don't know the process:
1) Take 2 slices of bread
2) Dollop PB&J in the center
3) Put a ring on top, and one on bottom, smash the rings together crushing the dough into a crimped solid bit of dough.
I posted earlier. I'm going to post again. I posted at 1, nested deeply... but this is something that burns inside me. I wish I had filed a complaint against the department when I was an undergraduate, I will someday, but it will be too late then. I don't even know how to do so.
In some places, the police can do whatever they please. You have no rights if the right people want to take them away from you. Police need to be watched for misconduct. There are good officers out there, who make our world safer.
That said, I can't think of one incident involving the police, where I was an undergrad, that went the way it should have.
So, my criminal activities. I drank underage. That was really about it though. I was an A student, president of Lutheran Student Movement, and logged hundreds of hours of community service in my free time.
So, how about my dealings with the police (I'm going to leave out a lot, this gets long):
1: A guy picks a fight with me outside the student union at the behest of a young lady who dislikes me. Police come. They try to trick me into admitting to a crime I didn't commit. They load me into a car to be "escorted" back. I say something a little rude (but justified) about the situation. The officer in the car proceeds to arrest me. He takes my wallet, says the picture does not look like me. I spend the night in jail as John Doe, and the police inside are warned that I am dangerous. When I asked the school lawyer for free representation (the school gives free legal services to students), she said she couldn't represent me because she was related to a party involved in my incident. The university did not seek to provide me with other representation. In the aftermath, everything was dropped because there was no evidence against me. This didn't end my adventures with the local police though.
2: Police come onto my property to break up a party. The party is hidden from the street, obscured by 2 large buildings surrounding my yard. I am told that I am tresspassing (people are entering the yard from my house, through the only door that leads into the yard, the neighbors had no yards). We called the only good cop I knew and had the police called away.
3: The only good cop I knew gets fired.
4: A kid gets severely beaten at a local party. I take him back to my place and call 911. I get patched through to the police, who refuse to come out and take care of the situation. This kid had all of his teeth broken, had a broken nose, and was bleeding pretty steadily. I feared for his life. It gets worse, while I'm on the phone with the police, I lose him! The police refuse to come out and look for him. After many phone calls, I find out that the kid had been brought to the hospital by some friends who saw him wandering the street.
4: I get a death threat. An officer comes out, listens to it, tells me its a prank. I said I thought not, and asked to have my phone calls traced for a few days. The officer refuses. I stay in a friends house for a few days.
5: Not long later, a friend of mine back home died of cancer. The girl I was dating at the time loaned me her car (she went to a different school). The day she came back to pick it up, her brakes lines went at about 70 miles an hour, hurtling her car out of control. She survived through some clever driving. The mechanic who looked at the vehicle (damaged, but in one piece), said that it had obviously been sabotaged. We didn't even bother to call the police on this one.
6: The snowboard team had a party. We purchased a permit. The police showed up about 30 mins before the permit expired. One of them asked me to help him steal satellite service, but I refused. The minute the permit expired the police came in and shut us down, and fined us around $2000.
So, where am I now? I'm a graduate student at a respected university. I like my life. I haven't had any legal problems. I loved the professors at the school where I was an undergrad, but this stuff was unacceptable.
I'll pose a quick question. Does anybody know how to fix this? Does anybody know any way that I can possibly seek to fix this terrible situation? How do you file a complaint against a police department?
At the University where I was an undergraduate, I was harassed by the police.
One time, a number of police (I forget how many, at least 2, but I think 4) showed up to my party, walked into my back yard (not visible from the street, boxed in from all 4 sides, accessible only by 2 alleys. The only way they could see it was by entering my property. They proceeded onto my property, then told me I was trespassing on the property of the house next door. Please note that, the door from my house entered onto the yard, and the door from the house next door, did not. Interestingly, I was underage at the time, and they didn't even think of checking that.
Another time, I called the (911 actually, and was patched to the police). I had been at a party. About 10 guys came in and beat the tar out of some kid. He was coughing up blood and had broken several teeth. His nose was broken. He had a black eye and looked like he had a couple cracked ribs. I told them what had happened, and they asked me what they were supposed to do about it. I told them that I had a kid who looked like he was dying, and needed to be rushed to the hospital. The delerious kid had wandered out into the street, I couldn't find him. I pleaded with the police to come help me find him. They refused. Some friends found the kid and brought him to the hospital.
One time police asked me to help them steal satellite service. I refused. They proceeded to a party held by friends of mine, and started arresting underaged drinkers.
We all suspected the police of accepting payoffs from local bars, to overlook criminal activities.
One time a kid picked a fight with me. I knocked the guy down, but that was about the stretch of it. A police officer put me in his car to "escort me home." I said something nasty about the situation. He then proceeded to arrest me. During the arrest he told me that my picture in my ID didn't look like me. I went to the local lockup as John Doe, and a violent offender. When I had my day in court, everything was dismissed because there was no evidence against me. Incidentally, the University lawyer refused to represent me in the case because she was related to one of the people involved. Nothing ever happened to the officer who did this to me.
I received a death threat. An officer came out, said it sounded like a prank. I asked to have my calls logged. He said he wouldn't do it. I stayed on my friend's couch for a few weeks.
I knew one honest officer on that police force. He was fired.
The girl I was dating had the brake lines to her car cut. She took it to a mechanic, who said that it had obviously been sabotaged in a manner that was intended to kill the driver. The lines had been scored and tied shut with a shirt.
I'm not saying that all police are bad, but some are.
So, what did I do wrong in all of this? I drank underage a few times. That's about it. I was the president of Lutheran Student Movement, and did several hundred hours of community service of my own volition. I was an A student, graduated cum laude, and now am a graduate student at an extremely reputable university. I trace most of my problems with the police back to the only night I was ever arrested. According to rumor, the girl the guy who picked a fight with me was with was also the sister of a local drug dealer.
The only thing I worry about is people thinking the wrong thing of me. I like my life now. I don't want people to think of me as a criminal because of my many brushes with this P.D. I thought that many of my professors as an undergrad were great, and they seemed to think the same of me. I had no problems finding recommendations for grad school.
I thought I would share. Police departments need to be transparent to the citizens, and responsible for the things that they do. We can't, as a country, go on like this. Police like those in the town of my undergraduate institution give all police a bad name.
I should clarify what I mean by "I absolutely agree."
I agree that certain people make it hard to advocate Linux, because there is little content to what they say.
I disagree that Laura Didio is right in any way, shape, or form. Laura thinks that SCO has a case and might want to settle. I think that SCO might want to settle, because that would at least prevent the absolute embarassment that has been their side of the suit.
As for TCO. I don't know what it costs a business to run Windows. I would imagine that it's not cheap. As for myself, running Windows was free because I was given a license, as was running most of the Microsoft apps that I run. My understanding is that the MS software that I run would have cost me thousands of dollars had I not been given (legally) the licenses.
Running Gentoo cost me a couple hours of my life during compilation. Really, it's more like 30 minutes, and a couple hours of suffering without my notebook.
As for ease of use/installation:
GCC - Installation is a breeze, it's a freebie with most Linux installs. Visual Studio - Installing Visual Studio is... an experience. It takes a couple hours, it requires lots of media. It fills your hard drive. Visual Studio is the reason that I'm going to have to repartition my hard drive, because I want about a Gigabyte of support software that I don't have space for.
OO.Org - Also simple Office - A snap
Dell Truemobile Wireless (Linux) - A pain in the ass. Recompile your kernel. Recompile ndiswrapper after you recompile your kernel. Install Windows DLLs into ndiswrapper. Install a suite of wireless software. The first version I got was heaven! The second version I got froze my machine. The current version runs fine. Dell Truemobile Wireless (Windows) - A snap, but under XP Home, Wireless Zero Configuration continually drops the signal. XP Pro doesn't seem to have this issue.
Security (Linux) - Pretty straightforward honestly. That said, people should drop the nonesense about it just being super secure by default. Linux is not invulnerable to viruses (I wish people would quit saying it is). If you are telnetting in, people are listening in. X-Windows also has a number of vulnerabilities. Security (Windows) - I haven't a clue where to begin. I install the software that my campus network people tell me to, and run Windows update. I operate under the assumption that the install is fairly insecure, and life has little ways of telling me this is true.
Oh, for double reference, I ran Linux exclusively for about 6 years. I switched to a dual boot because I needed to develop a few software projects under Visual Studio. I have a second PC that is Linux only.
The problem isn't the reality of the matter. The problem is multifold:
1) People who advocate Linux, who share ill-informed opinions. 2) People who advocate Linux, who would advocate it if it was buggy and useless. 3) People who merely want to strike at Microsoft, and use Linux as an engine to do so. 4) People who advocate Linux, because it's cool to advocate Linux.
All this does is stiffle the voices of people who actually have a point. If you want to advocate Linux, the best way to do so is: 1) Present concrete, real reasons that Linux does X better than Y. 2) If you're going to attack Windows, do it on solid footing. Here's an example of where the Slashdot community did not do this.
I read an article on this site regarding Windows Cluster Edition. Many, many people posted saying that they would never run a cluster of Windows boxes, why would you do this, Windows isn't mature enough. In reality, Windows Cluster Edition did many things right. I know this based on conversations with people directly involved with the project and people who run a large Windows cluster. 3) Don't cling to ideals that don't resonate with your audience. If they don't mind paying for software, saying that Linux is gratis won't do much. 4) Don't cling to Open Source as the cure for cancer. Having 1000's of people read your code doesn't necessarily make it any better. Commercial products go through test phases and Quality Assurance. If this is the core of your argument, your audience won't listen.
Essentially, it's simple. If you preach to the choir, you're not going to convert anyone. You have to talk on their ground. People who run Linux already agree with you.
That is inaccurate. By using PKI, you could whitelist only those users with authorized signatures. This would require no modifications to existing infrastructure, people would just have to do it.
Having read the PageRank paper, which is apparently the backbone of their search engine technology, I'd have to say that they openned at least part of their technology to peer review.
That said, as far as question answering is concerned. Question answering systems are an active area of Natural Language Processing research. If you are curious about them, you can easily get your hands on a paper or two on the topic by Googling "Question Answering Systems."
I'm an American graduate student. I honestly don't feel it the case, in my experience, that professors are stealing credit for the work of their grad students.
Many of the professors that I know can't say enough good things about the students that they work with. That's very cool. They let the world know that their students are doing good work.
If people remember the Professors involved (sure, they do), it's because those professors have many great pieces of work to their credit. People will easily remember the name of a professor who has done lots of great research. Sometimes, people will remember the graduate students, however.
A good example of this is Michael Collins. The parser from his PhD thesis is widely used, and is called the Collins parser.
You would think that would be the case, but those of us with id's like say... mine, have groupies who follow us around offering us sexual favors constantly.
Automated theorem proving (currently the most important subfield of automated reasoning) is the proving of mathematical theorems by a computer program. Depending on the underlying logic, the problem of deciding the validity of a theorem varies from trivial to impossible. For the frequent case of propositional logic, the problem is decidable but NP-complete, and hence only exponential time algorithms are believed to exist. For first-order logic it is recursively enumerable, i.e., given unbounded resources, any true theorem can eventually be proven, but invalid theorems cannot always be recognized. Despite these theoretical limits, practical theorem provers can solve many hard problems in these logics.
I actually didn't make any statements regarding P's equivalence to NP. I just made a statement regarding FOL theorem proving. If we need to compare credentials, there are certainly better sources regarding my credentials than my outdated web site.
All of that said, it's really not a question of whether or not the proofs are trustworthy, but whether an unaided computer can/will generate any interesting/useful proofs. I'm not going to try to distinct myself as an expert in automated theorem proving in a discussion with a troll, but my understanding is that, experimentally speaking, only a few interesting proofs have ever been produced by machines. To say that it is a bit premature to make the assertion that humans will be replaced in this task is an understatement.
Here's a quick article on the topic. Should I have prefaced my statement with "if p != np?" I didn't think that we needed to stand to such scrutiny.
I must, however, admit to a certain level of interest in the topic, so, if you want to have a more detailed conversation on the topic, I'd be glad to have a chit-chat sometime.
Feel free to post your proof that P = NP, or a paper referencing a linear time FOL theorem prover or SAT solver;-)
FOL Theorem provers jump through a number of hoops to make the whole bit a little more practical, but realistically speaking, having a computer that just runs through mathematical proofs in the manner that a human does is a long way off.
An interesting thing about the article is that the first proof was done with an FOL prover... it was a long, non-intuitive proof, but an FOL prover has performed that proof.
The second was done with code, a human had to write the program. There is no computer replacing the activity of a human in performing this action that I can see here. It was merely code to brute attack the problem from what I can see, but I didn't read the guys article (from what I can see, it hasn't reached publication yet anyway).
If you say anything logical regarding effiency (A power plant running diesel, to power an air compressor, to power a car, which then generates electricity, to run an electric engine). The Slashdot thought police will get you.
Having a point of view that isn't incredibly liberal makes me a bad person. People around here will downmod me as a "Troll" because I make such a statement.
Here's an idea, throw an academic paper my way that demonstrates that an electric vehicle, fueled by a diesel plant, is more environmentally friendly than my Camaro Z28.
Slashdot Mirror
For that matter, why are they humanoid.
What if there were just giant planets inhabitted by slime-mold, or intelligent creatures that just didn't give a damn, and so they never developed useful society?
Where the hell is Planet Hollywood!?!
Why do these creatures want to form governments anyway. With drastically different evolutionary timelines, one creature has propably evolved past war, another so evolved that all of the others seem more like suitable pets, another so unevolved that it's unaware that the others exist.
Why do people in the future right with light sabers?
Why do people in the future fight in person, if there are autonomous robots capable of doing so?
Why do space ships need pilots at the helm rather than computers?
Why is future technology so bad it always needs fixing?
Why does C3P0 handle machinery with his hands, rather than some sort of networking?
When R2D2 connects with machinery, why isn't it wirelessly? Why does it require physical manipulation? For that matter, when he's in Cloud City, why does he move so slowly when hacking into that computer, how many bits could he really encode a second through physical manipulation?
Probably, because it makes a better movie. My bet is that, if we ever talk to life somewhere else in the universe, that they are literally nothing like us. It won't be humanoids in space suits breathing nitrogen... it will be giant amoebas in polymer bags that prevent them from splashing apart in the low atmosphere of the earth.
Forget the water spectacular. This phallic image is sure to have feminists commenting the male dominated society that the Rebels promote.
This patent claim is an example of why I don't think I could ever work as a cullinary researcher.
I just couldn't imagine writing a design for stuffed crust pizza, let alone a patent!
You must be new here.
Smuckers sells PB&J sandwiches that are little round circles. The circles look like they are made by a process involving 2 pieces of bread thusly, but I really don't know the process:
1) Take 2 slices of bread
2) Dollop PB&J in the center
3) Put a ring on top, and one on bottom, smash the rings together crushing the dough into a crimped solid bit of dough.
Heres a product link
I posted earlier. I'm going to post again. I posted at 1, nested deeply... but this is something that burns inside me. I wish I had filed a complaint against the department when I was an undergraduate, I will someday, but it will be too late then. I don't even know how to do so.
In some places, the police can do whatever they please. You have no rights if the right people want to take them away from you. Police need to be watched for misconduct. There are good officers out there, who make our world safer.
That said, I can't think of one incident involving the police, where I was an undergrad, that went the way it should have.
So, my criminal activities. I drank underage. That was really about it though. I was an A student, president of Lutheran Student Movement, and logged hundreds of hours of community service in my free time.
So, how about my dealings with the police (I'm going to leave out a lot, this gets long):
1: A guy picks a fight with me outside the student union at the behest of a young lady who dislikes me. Police come. They try to trick me into admitting to a crime I didn't commit. They load me into a car to be "escorted" back. I say something a little rude (but justified) about the situation. The officer in the car proceeds to arrest me. He takes my wallet, says the picture does not look like me. I spend the night in jail as John Doe, and the police inside are warned that I am dangerous. When I asked the school lawyer for free representation (the school gives free legal services to students), she said she couldn't represent me because she was related to a party involved in my incident. The university did not seek to provide me with other representation. In the aftermath, everything was dropped because there was no evidence against me. This didn't end my adventures with the local police though.
2: Police come onto my property to break up a party. The party is hidden from the street, obscured by 2 large buildings surrounding my yard. I am told that I am tresspassing (people are entering the yard from my house, through the only door that leads into the yard, the neighbors had no yards). We called the only good cop I knew and had the police called away.
3: The only good cop I knew gets fired.
4: A kid gets severely beaten at a local party. I take him back to my place and call 911. I get patched through to the police, who refuse to come out and take care of the situation. This kid had all of his teeth broken, had a broken nose, and was bleeding pretty steadily. I feared for his life. It gets worse, while I'm on the phone with the police, I lose him! The police refuse to come out and look for him. After many phone calls, I find out that the kid had been brought to the hospital by some friends who saw him wandering the street.
4: I get a death threat. An officer comes out, listens to it, tells me its a prank. I said I thought not, and asked to have my phone calls traced for a few days. The officer refuses. I stay in a friends house for a few days.
5: Not long later, a friend of mine back home died of cancer. The girl I was dating at the time loaned me her car (she went to a different school). The day she came back to pick it up, her brakes lines went at about 70 miles an hour, hurtling her car out of control. She survived through some clever driving. The mechanic who looked at the vehicle (damaged, but in one piece), said that it had obviously been sabotaged. We didn't even bother to call the police on this one.
6: The snowboard team had a party. We purchased a permit. The police showed up about 30 mins before the permit expired. One of them asked me to help him steal satellite service, but I refused. The minute the permit expired the police came in and shut us down, and fined us around $2000.
So, where am I now? I'm a graduate student at a respected university. I like my life. I haven't had any legal problems. I loved the professors at the school where I was an undergrad, but this stuff was unacceptable.
I'll pose a quick question. Does anybody know how to fix this? Does anybody know any way that I can possibly seek to fix this terrible situation? How do you file a complaint against a police department?
At the University where I was an undergraduate, I was harassed by the police.
One time, a number of police (I forget how many, at least 2, but I think 4) showed up to my party, walked into my back yard (not visible from the street, boxed in from all 4 sides, accessible only by 2 alleys. The only way they could see it was by entering my property. They proceeded onto my property, then told me I was trespassing on the property of the house next door. Please note that, the door from my house entered onto the yard, and the door from the house next door, did not. Interestingly, I was underage at the time, and they didn't even think of checking that.
Another time, I called the (911 actually, and was patched to the police). I had been at a party. About 10 guys came in and beat the tar out of some kid. He was coughing up blood and had broken several teeth. His nose was broken. He had a black eye and looked like he had a couple cracked ribs. I told them what had happened, and they asked me what they were supposed to do about it. I told them that I had a kid who looked like he was dying, and needed to be rushed to the hospital. The delerious kid had wandered out into the street, I couldn't find him. I pleaded with the police to come help me find him. They refused. Some friends found the kid and brought him to the hospital.
One time police asked me to help them steal satellite service. I refused. They proceeded to a party held by friends of mine, and started arresting underaged drinkers.
We all suspected the police of accepting payoffs from local bars, to overlook criminal activities.
One time a kid picked a fight with me. I knocked the guy down, but that was about the stretch of it. A police officer put me in his car to "escort me home." I said something nasty about the situation. He then proceeded to arrest me. During the arrest he told me that my picture in my ID didn't look like me. I went to the local lockup as John Doe, and a violent offender. When I had my day in court, everything was dismissed because there was no evidence against me. Incidentally, the University lawyer refused to represent me in the case because she was related to one of the people involved. Nothing ever happened to the officer who did this to me.
I received a death threat. An officer came out, said it sounded like a prank. I asked to have my calls logged. He said he wouldn't do it. I stayed on my friend's couch for a few weeks.
I knew one honest officer on that police force. He was fired.
The girl I was dating had the brake lines to her car cut. She took it to a mechanic, who said that it had obviously been sabotaged in a manner that was intended to kill the driver. The lines had been scored and tied shut with a shirt.
I'm not saying that all police are bad, but some are.
So, what did I do wrong in all of this? I drank underage a few times. That's about it. I was the president of Lutheran Student Movement, and did several hundred hours of community service of my own volition. I was an A student, graduated cum laude, and now am a graduate student at an extremely reputable university. I trace most of my problems with the police back to the only night I was ever arrested. According to rumor, the girl the guy who picked a fight with me was with was also the sister of a local drug dealer.
The only thing I worry about is people thinking the wrong thing of me. I like my life now. I don't want people to think of me as a criminal because of my many brushes with this P.D. I thought that many of my professors as an undergrad were great, and they seemed to think the same of me. I had no problems finding recommendations for grad school.
I thought I would share. Police departments need to be transparent to the citizens, and responsible for the things that they do. We can't, as a country, go on like this. Police like those in the town of my undergraduate institution give all police a bad name.
I should clarify what I mean by "I absolutely agree."
I agree that certain people make it hard to advocate Linux, because there is little content to what they say.
I disagree that Laura Didio is right in any way, shape, or form. Laura thinks that SCO has a case and might want to settle. I think that SCO might want to settle, because that would at least prevent the absolute embarassment that has been their side of the suit.
As for TCO. I don't know what it costs a business to run Windows. I would imagine that it's not cheap. As for myself, running Windows was free because I was given a license, as was running most of the Microsoft apps that I run. My understanding is that the MS software that I run would have cost me thousands of dollars had I not been given (legally) the licenses.
Running Gentoo cost me a couple hours of my life during compilation. Really, it's more like 30 minutes, and a couple hours of suffering without my notebook.
As for ease of use/installation:
GCC - Installation is a breeze, it's a freebie with most Linux installs.
Visual Studio - Installing Visual Studio is... an experience. It takes a couple hours, it requires lots of media. It fills your hard drive. Visual Studio is the reason that I'm going to have to repartition my hard drive, because I want about a Gigabyte of support software that I don't have space for.
OO.Org - Also simple
Office - A snap
Dell Truemobile Wireless (Linux) - A pain in the ass. Recompile your kernel. Recompile ndiswrapper after you recompile your kernel. Install Windows DLLs into ndiswrapper. Install a suite of wireless software. The first version I got was heaven! The second version I got froze my machine. The current version runs fine.
Dell Truemobile Wireless (Windows) - A snap, but under XP Home, Wireless Zero Configuration continually drops the signal. XP Pro doesn't seem to have this issue.
Security (Linux) - Pretty straightforward honestly. That said, people should drop the nonesense about it just being super secure by default. Linux is not invulnerable to viruses (I wish people would quit saying it is). If you are telnetting in, people are listening in. X-Windows also has a number of vulnerabilities.
Security (Windows) - I haven't a clue where to begin. I install the software that my campus network people tell me to, and run Windows update. I operate under the assumption that the install is fairly insecure, and life has little ways of telling me this is true.
The Dell Inspiron 9100 runs Linux as well as it does Windows, given a few things that you'll probably have to compile in yourself.
Oh, for double reference, I ran Linux exclusively for about 6 years. I switched to a dual boot because I needed to develop a few software projects under Visual Studio. I have a second PC that is Linux only.
I absolutely agree.
The problem isn't the reality of the matter. The problem is multifold:
1) People who advocate Linux, who share ill-informed opinions.
2) People who advocate Linux, who would advocate it if it was buggy and useless.
3) People who merely want to strike at Microsoft, and use Linux as an engine to do so.
4) People who advocate Linux, because it's cool to advocate Linux.
All this does is stiffle the voices of people who actually have a point. If you want to advocate Linux, the best way to do so is:
1) Present concrete, real reasons that Linux does X better than Y.
2) If you're going to attack Windows, do it on solid footing. Here's an example of where the Slashdot community did not do this.
I read an article on this site regarding Windows Cluster Edition. Many, many people posted saying that they would never run a cluster of Windows boxes, why would you do this, Windows isn't mature enough. In reality, Windows Cluster Edition did many things right. I know this based on conversations with people directly involved with the project and people who run a large Windows cluster.
3) Don't cling to ideals that don't resonate with your audience. If they don't mind paying for software, saying that Linux is gratis won't do much.
4) Don't cling to Open Source as the cure for cancer. Having 1000's of people read your code doesn't necessarily make it any better. Commercial products go through test phases and Quality Assurance. If this is the core of your argument, your audience won't listen.
Essentially, it's simple. If you preach to the choir, you're not going to convert anyone. You have to talk on their ground. People who run Linux already agree with you.
(For reference, I run a dual boot system)
That is inaccurate. By using PKI, you could whitelist only those users with authorized signatures. This would require no modifications to existing infrastructure, people would just have to do it.
You're absolutely right.
Spam is inconvenient and annoying. It may be a crime to send it, but it isn't as serious a crime as we treat it.
The same goes for most computer related offenses though.
Yes, this is true.
Here is an academic paper describing e-rater:
http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P98/P98-1032.pdf
Here is a site where you can try it for yourself:
http://www.ets.org/scoreitnow/
Having read the PageRank paper, which is apparently the backbone of their search engine technology, I'd have to say that they openned at least part of their technology to peer review.
That said, as far as question answering is concerned. Question answering systems are an active area of Natural Language Processing research. If you are curious about them, you can easily get your hands on a paper or two on the topic by Googling "Question Answering Systems."
Eh, I'll say a word or two to this effect.
I'm an American graduate student. I honestly don't feel it the case, in my experience, that professors are stealing credit for the work of their grad students.
Many of the professors that I know can't say enough good things about the students that they work with. That's very cool. They let the world know that their students are doing good work.
If people remember the Professors involved (sure, they do), it's because those professors have many great pieces of work to their credit. People will easily remember the name of a professor who has done lots of great research. Sometimes, people will remember the graduate students, however.
A good example of this is Michael Collins. The parser from his PhD thesis is widely used, and is called the Collins parser.
You would think that would be the case, but those of us with id's like say... mine, have groupies who follow us around offering us sexual favors constantly.
Here's another link:
. nsf/0/2f57e13636d5c75085256bfa0067f4c7?OpenDocumen t
http://domino.research.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex
That is inaccurate.
r oving")
(Source, Wikipedia: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_p
Automated theorem proving (currently the most important subfield of automated reasoning) is the proving of mathematical theorems by a computer program. Depending on the underlying logic, the problem of deciding the validity of a theorem varies from trivial to impossible. For the frequent case of propositional logic, the problem is decidable but NP-complete, and hence only exponential time algorithms are believed to exist. For first-order logic it is recursively enumerable, i.e., given unbounded resources, any true theorem can eventually be proven, but invalid theorems cannot always be recognized. Despite these theoretical limits, practical theorem provers can solve many hard problems in these logics.
I actually didn't make any statements regarding P's equivalence to NP. I just made a statement regarding FOL theorem proving. If we need to compare credentials, there are certainly better sources regarding my credentials than my outdated web site.
All of that said, it's really not a question of whether or not the proofs are trustworthy, but whether an unaided computer can/will generate any interesting/useful proofs. I'm not going to try to distinct myself as an expert in automated theorem proving in a discussion with a troll, but my understanding is that, experimentally speaking, only a few interesting proofs have ever been produced by machines. To say that it is a bit premature to make the assertion that humans will be replaced in this task is an understatement.
Here's a quick article on the topic. Should I have prefaced my statement with "if p != np?" I didn't think that we needed to stand to such scrutiny.
;-)
o ving
I must, however, admit to a certain level of interest in the topic, so, if you want to have a more detailed conversation on the topic, I'd be glad to have a chit-chat sometime.
Feel free to post your proof that P = NP, or a paper referencing a linear time FOL theorem prover or SAT solver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_theorem_pr
Theorem proving is NP Complete.
FOL Theorem provers jump through a number of hoops to make the whole bit a little more practical, but realistically speaking, having a computer that just runs through mathematical proofs in the manner that a human does is a long way off.
An interesting thing about the article is that the first proof was done with an FOL prover... it was a long, non-intuitive proof, but an FOL prover has performed that proof.
The second was done with code, a human had to write the program. There is no computer replacing the activity of a human in performing this action that I can see here. It was merely code to brute attack the problem from what I can see, but I didn't read the guys article (from what I can see, it hasn't reached publication yet anyway).
I'll say it anyway.
I want one with Frickin' lasers.
If you say anything logical regarding effiency (A power plant running diesel, to power an air compressor, to power a car, which then generates electricity, to run an electric engine). The Slashdot thought police will get you.
Note to self:
Having a point of view that isn't incredibly liberal makes me a bad person. People around here will downmod me as a "Troll" because I make such a statement.
Here's an idea, throw an academic paper my way that demonstrates that an electric vehicle, fueled by a diesel plant, is more environmentally friendly than my Camaro Z28.