You're going to have to use actual English if you want to make a point. Do you mean, "Evidently the people advocating a government takeover of medical research are sure that it's Big Pharma's sabotage that prevents cures from becoming widely available."?
That neither addresses my point nor is what the comment you refer to actually said.
In general, we don't specify strong enough requirements and we don't do sufficient validation. Of course, validation of software is hard when you have the source and is nearly impossible without it.
I think any farmer recognizes that the manual methods of weed control are much more effective than herbicides. They're just not nearly as cost-effective.
No, changing the prevalence of a genetic trait in a population through natural selection is evolution. It's not, however, speciation -- which, as you correctly point out, is what creationists really have a problem with.
As I understand it, they are required to provide other options. I'm certain that everywhere these machines are in use in the US, they do, in fact, provide other options.
Is it worth mentioning that any scientist should know that "on the order of" refers to, essentially, the logarithm of a number and, as such, there is no reason to be so specific as "2100". You might as well say "on the order of 1000".
Regrettably, that's true. It gets complicated because the side with all the scientists is almost certainly right. However, a lot of the "everyone elses" on either side are driven by special interest, money, dogma, what have you. It's embarrassing to me (as a non-climatologist scientist) that a lot of environmentalists (for lack of a better term) are approaching the situation no better than the global warming denialists.
That's really not true, at least among reasonable people. Once you get into specifics of consequences, and then really when you get into what the best solution is, people quickly disagree.
And yes, realistically, nobody should be surprised that there are probably similar numbers of anti-global warming and pro-global warming idiots.
I bet if you came up with a system that remembered your payment information where you remained logged in, enabling you to go from viewing an item to having purchased it in one click, it would be such a clever system that you'd be issued a patent for it.
This is so wrong it hurts. You assume running code in a VM imposes the same slowdown regardless of the nature of the VM environment. You conflate two different types of "slow": time to start up and speed once started. Needing to compile only influences one of these. In some scenarios, only one or the other of these is of interest. You also assume either that compilation (or lack thereof) makes up most of the startup overhead or that all VMs can start up equally fast. You correctly identify that JavaScript has received much better optimization than Flash has (although the title, at least, suggests that comparing to HTML5 might be more relevant). But then you incorrectly assume that this is irrelevant and that theoretical efficiency has any relevance to real efficiency and use a scenario based on real efficiency: "What a low powered sub-notebook (palmtop / netbook / whatever kids call it these days) can't do in Flash because of lack of processing power, it by immediate consequence can't do in HTML5."
You might as well be one more step abstracted from reality and claim that since JavaScript and Flash are both Turing-complete languages, in an idealized situation, they'll run at the same speed.
JavaScript receives more optimization because anyone can (try) to write a JavaScript interpreter. Lots of people have a vested interest in fancy Web junk executing quickly, so there's a lot of motivation for people to write good JS interpreters. On the other hand, only Adobe can write a Flash interpreter. While they may be motivated to do so, it's clear that's insufficient to bring fast Flash execution to all the platforms where it might be useful.
While I'm angry, a sibling post brings up a major point. As I mentioned, this is talking about HTML5, not JavaScript. One of the major applications of Flash is video, which HTML5 addresses. While the current HTML5 video situation isn't such that it's poised to replace Flash, Flash video is an abomination. A black-box wrapper that requires its own execution environment for video, when we have so many perfectly-good video standards and players out there? Really? What the hell? It seems the biggest effect Flash video has is to make playing streaming video impossible on low-power systems -- which are more powerful than systems I used to play streaming video ages ago. Good job, Adobe.
Of course, nobody actually suggested just administering a lie detector test to everyone in the area. They only suggested allowing the results of the lie detector to be admitted into evidence.
That's fairly disingenuous math -- you'd be saying that 100% accuracy is only twice as good as flipping a coin. For simple systems (two equally-probable states, like flipping a coin), 50% is a good baseline. It really depends on what their "accuracy" is measuring.
But yes, 75% accuracy is pretty terrible, and 90% accuracy might be good enough to help out an investigator, but not nearly good enough to present as factual.
Real economics and politics dictate that you can't just discard complaints. From a management standpoint, you can only discard complaints if you think that every professor you hire is perfect without checking up on them -- and even the most optimistic, pro-university person will tell you that can't possibly be true. At every level, things can go wrong. People's scores can be entered incorrectly, TAs can be bad, professors can be bad, entire curricula can be bad. You depend on parents, the government, or some combination of them continuing to pay tuition, and if you just toss out complaints, that could stop.
Of course, what you'd *love* to do is address every legitimate complaint (every professor I worked for truly wanted to remedy the troubles of anyone who wanted to learn but wasn't succeeding) and throw out every illegitimate complaint. Since the people one level higher can't tell the difference between the two, the ideal is to be able to justify throwing out a complaint with documented data -- a pattern of poor performance, low attendance, etc.
In practice, we really took the stance you advocate -- tell people flat out that if they don't attend, they can't complain; tell them if they don't attend, they may be boned, and that's their own damn fault; tell them if they're failing, bring it up with your teachers or leave, but don't pretend a complaint will make you pass. But politics and documentation make that ever so slightly more complicated.
I actually have to agree, although I was always miserably slow at taking attendance by hand. (I can't remember faces / names, so I used quiz attendance as a proxy for real attendance.) If the class is to large to do attendance by hand (waste of time that it may be), then attendance shouldn't be mandatory.
To be fair, the school I TA'd at a) had a lot of students that would file complaints and b) took a very hard-nosed approach to these complaints.
When I taught as a TA, we tracked attendance by hand in TA'd sections. (Not using RFID technology, tracking attendance in lectures was pointless.) It's useful information to the instructor to know whether someone who is doing poorly (or doing well) has good attendance. We also often ran into students who liked to file complaints when they got a grade they didn't like. If you've tracked attendance and they have poor attendance, you can quickly show that their complain has no merit.
The journalists read or had described to them the research, and arbitrarily picked (based on what seemed interesting or novel to them) parts to talk about. Science journalists rarely have any real understanding of which parts of research are actually novel and which aren't. Of course, they can repeat (badly) the summary "what these results mean", but when talking about the methodology, unless the scientist is careful to point out which parts are novel, they never get it right. Since a lot of the more interesting techniques are already well-understood, journalists will repeat those and phrase them as if they're novel.
Not that I have firsthand experience with this and am bitter about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Going to college doesn't make one smart.
Doesn't seem relevant, particularly since parent said "How would a democracy where the people aren't educated work?"
You're going to have to use actual English if you want to make a point. Do you mean, "Evidently the people advocating a government takeover of medical research are sure that it's Big Pharma's sabotage that prevents cures from becoming widely available."?
That neither addresses my point nor is what the comment you refer to actually said.
Yeah, we're in serious danger of curing every major disease, thus putting medical researchers out of business.
In general, we don't specify strong enough requirements and we don't do sufficient validation. Of course, validation of software is hard when you have the source and is nearly impossible without it.
I think any farmer recognizes that the manual methods of weed control are much more effective than herbicides. They're just not nearly as cost-effective.
Which is why they ought to be pulling up all the weeds not killed by herbicide and destroying them.
No, changing the prevalence of a genetic trait in a population through natural selection is evolution. It's not, however, speciation -- which, as you correctly point out, is what creationists really have a problem with.
As I understand it, they are required to provide other options. I'm certain that everywhere these machines are in use in the US, they do, in fact, provide other options.
Is it worth mentioning that any scientist should know that "on the order of" refers to, essentially, the logarithm of a number and, as such, there is no reason to be so specific as "2100". You might as well say "on the order of 1000".
Regrettably, that's true. It gets complicated because the side with all the scientists is almost certainly right. However, a lot of the "everyone elses" on either side are driven by special interest, money, dogma, what have you. It's embarrassing to me (as a non-climatologist scientist) that a lot of environmentalists (for lack of a better term) are approaching the situation no better than the global warming denialists.
Ah, Slashdot. Where else can most speculation be based on popular fictional plots?
No, it's tautologically true -- most skeptics are skeptics out of principle.
However, nearly all people who say that the conclusions of climatologists are wrong (or even probably wrong) aren't skeptics.
I find the noun "idiot" to be adaptable and appropriate.
That's really not true, at least among reasonable people. Once you get into specifics of consequences, and then really when you get into what the best solution is, people quickly disagree.
And yes, realistically, nobody should be surprised that there are probably similar numbers of anti-global warming and pro-global warming idiots.
Don't worry. The politicians already have that covered.
I bet if you came up with a system that remembered your payment information where you remained logged in, enabling you to go from viewing an item to having purchased it in one click, it would be such a clever system that you'd be issued a patent for it.
This is so wrong it hurts. You assume running code in a VM imposes the same slowdown regardless of the nature of the VM environment. You conflate two different types of "slow": time to start up and speed once started. Needing to compile only influences one of these. In some scenarios, only one or the other of these is of interest. You also assume either that compilation (or lack thereof) makes up most of the startup overhead or that all VMs can start up equally fast. You correctly identify that JavaScript has received much better optimization than Flash has (although the title, at least, suggests that comparing to HTML5 might be more relevant). But then you incorrectly assume that this is irrelevant and that theoretical efficiency has any relevance to real efficiency and use a scenario based on real efficiency: "What a low powered sub-notebook (palmtop / netbook / whatever kids call it these days) can't do in Flash because of lack of processing power, it by immediate consequence can't do in HTML5."
You might as well be one more step abstracted from reality and claim that since JavaScript and Flash are both Turing-complete languages, in an idealized situation, they'll run at the same speed.
JavaScript receives more optimization because anyone can (try) to write a JavaScript interpreter. Lots of people have a vested interest in fancy Web junk executing quickly, so there's a lot of motivation for people to write good JS interpreters. On the other hand, only Adobe can write a Flash interpreter. While they may be motivated to do so, it's clear that's insufficient to bring fast Flash execution to all the platforms where it might be useful.
While I'm angry, a sibling post brings up a major point. As I mentioned, this is talking about HTML5, not JavaScript. One of the major applications of Flash is video, which HTML5 addresses. While the current HTML5 video situation isn't such that it's poised to replace Flash, Flash video is an abomination. A black-box wrapper that requires its own execution environment for video, when we have so many perfectly-good video standards and players out there? Really? What the hell? It seems the biggest effect Flash video has is to make playing streaming video impossible on low-power systems -- which are more powerful than systems I used to play streaming video ages ago. Good job, Adobe.
For that matter, the stated accuracy of a lie detector is higher than fMRI lie detection, and most papers will simply label fMRI as "promising".
Of course, nobody actually suggested just administering a lie detector test to everyone in the area. They only suggested allowing the results of the lie detector to be admitted into evidence.
That's fairly disingenuous math -- you'd be saying that 100% accuracy is only twice as good as flipping a coin. For simple systems (two equally-probable states, like flipping a coin), 50% is a good baseline. It really depends on what their "accuracy" is measuring.
But yes, 75% accuracy is pretty terrible, and 90% accuracy might be good enough to help out an investigator, but not nearly good enough to present as factual.
Real economics and politics dictate that you can't just discard complaints. From a management standpoint, you can only discard complaints if you think that every professor you hire is perfect without checking up on them -- and even the most optimistic, pro-university person will tell you that can't possibly be true. At every level, things can go wrong. People's scores can be entered incorrectly, TAs can be bad, professors can be bad, entire curricula can be bad. You depend on parents, the government, or some combination of them continuing to pay tuition, and if you just toss out complaints, that could stop.
Of course, what you'd *love* to do is address every legitimate complaint (every professor I worked for truly wanted to remedy the troubles of anyone who wanted to learn but wasn't succeeding) and throw out every illegitimate complaint. Since the people one level higher can't tell the difference between the two, the ideal is to be able to justify throwing out a complaint with documented data -- a pattern of poor performance, low attendance, etc.
In practice, we really took the stance you advocate -- tell people flat out that if they don't attend, they can't complain; tell them if they don't attend, they may be boned, and that's their own damn fault; tell them if they're failing, bring it up with your teachers or leave, but don't pretend a complaint will make you pass. But politics and documentation make that ever so slightly more complicated.
I actually have to agree, although I was always miserably slow at taking attendance by hand. (I can't remember faces / names, so I used quiz attendance as a proxy for real attendance.) If the class is to large to do attendance by hand (waste of time that it may be), then attendance shouldn't be mandatory.
To be fair, the school I TA'd at a) had a lot of students that would file complaints and b) took a very hard-nosed approach to these complaints.
When I taught as a TA, we tracked attendance by hand in TA'd sections. (Not using RFID technology, tracking attendance in lectures was pointless.) It's useful information to the instructor to know whether someone who is doing poorly (or doing well) has good attendance. We also often ran into students who liked to file complaints when they got a grade they didn't like. If you've tracked attendance and they have poor attendance, you can quickly show that their complain has no merit.
The journalists read or had described to them the research, and arbitrarily picked (based on what seemed interesting or novel to them) parts to talk about. Science journalists rarely have any real understanding of which parts of research are actually novel and which aren't. Of course, they can repeat (badly) the summary "what these results mean", but when talking about the methodology, unless the scientist is careful to point out which parts are novel, they never get it right. Since a lot of the more interesting techniques are already well-understood, journalists will repeat those and phrase them as if they're novel.
Not that I have firsthand experience with this and am bitter about it.
People don't understand numbers, they just hit the "0" and "9" keys until the number they're typing in "looks big" or "looks small".