> Not voting is the same as a vote for the various (accused) incumbents.
I wonder how all those people feel now, who argued against voting for the Democrats as the lesser of two evils in 2000 and 2004?
Even my redneck fundamentalist mother (female parent, not the Jerry Jeff Walker "redneck mother") has expressed regret for voting for GWB. And that was last year.
> > Anyone got the stats on which side has killed the most innocent civilians over the past 5, 10, 20, 50 years?
> Have any statistics on how many innocent civilians where directly targetted by each side? Hizballah's objective is to destroy Israel. Israel's objective is to survive. It doesn't fit into the objective of Israel to target civilians. Hizballah on the other hand...
> > but wasnt hezbollah elected into the position of palistinan government recently?
> No, that was Hamas.
However, Hezbollah holds about 20% of the seats in the Lebanese legislature, and holds two cabinet positions. See the Wikipedia article.
Notice that that's a big increase over their pre-"Cedar Revolution" role in the Lebanese government. A cynic might conclude that the naive notion of democratizing the Middle East is, well, naive.
> You know, the US revolutionary forces were considered terrorists as well, then they became the us government.
And the French Resistance. And some of the early Zionists. And lots of other "good guys".
The important distinction is alwasy "us vs. them". The labelling is propaganda.
> I just dont see the point in waging a war of what basically amounts to revenge, especially when its against the whole of lebanon for the sake a few extremists who happen to live there.
That's why Israel is getting itself into such a bad odor over this. Their apologists usuall try to seize the moral high ground by claiming that they don't target civilians (and, of course, "collateral damage" doesn't count). But here they're forfieting even that dubious argument, by blatantly making war on the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon.
> When last I looked into this it was a unilateral isreali action.
Hizbollah is just a wee bit involved as well.
> since when did NASA of all government agencies have to do with a war in lebanon. It seems to me like theyre doing the cyber equivalent to nasa that isrealis are doing to lebanese civillian centers.
When you can't strike at a power, you strike at a perceived symbol of that power.
Presumably the choice of symbol had a way whole lot to do with whose website they could crack.
> So if these MECO are for real, then gravitational collapse canot result in a singularity, which is nice, right? Then how about the big bang? Does that need to have been a singularity, or can we continue with this programme of avoiding the nasty things?
I don't think you'll have any luck finding a physicist who thinks sigularities actually exist in black holes or actually existed at the start of the big bang. In fact, AIUI, that's why bigbangologists don't try to extrapolate back beyond one planck time "after" the start of the universe. As for black holes, the consensus (AFAICT) is that when we get our theory that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, it will explain what "really" happens at the heart of a black hole (and it won't be a singularity, since QM won't allow it).
Once nice thing about MECOs is that they make the BH singularities go away without waiting for the GUT. But as I mentioned in another post, the authors seem to be having trouble convincing their colleagues.
> From the article: "But Chris Reynolds of the University of Maryland, in Baltimore, US, says the evidence for a MECO inside this quasar is not convincing."
> Apparently the experts are not conviced about this "interesting" observation but at slashdot the expert will come to a final conclusion. How many slashdot posters actualy are qualified to talk about these subjects?
The named researchers aren't neutral observers in some grand BH vs. MECO debate; they're the proponents of the MECO idea. See for example the bibliography at the bottom of this article. (And while you're at it, notice the author's persecution complex, his attempt to dismiss scientific dating methods at the very end, and, of course, the curious URL.)
Doens't mean they're wrong, but it's useful to keep in mind that they're partisans in a debate, offering an interpretation of some observations that they think supports their side of the debate. They haven't convinced Reynolds, and the persecution complex displayed in the linked article suggests that they haven't had much luck convincing other people about MECOs in the past.
> Typically, the Anonymous Coward's contentless sarcasm betrays his shallow grasp of reality. The relevance is clear: When you design your service suite and do not minimize complexity, you aren't just asking for trouble, you are, by definition, producing a low quality suite. You can, in fact, produce a compression of a natural language knowledge base without even using a compression program and have that be an important human accomplishment. Epistemology is virtually defined by such advances. So the fact that the problem is computationally hard is neither here nor there to first order. The important thing is quality of knowledge.
Ignoring the fact that your post was merely a bit of self-aggrandizement unrelated to to the Ask Slashdot question, you're chasing a will-o-the-wisp. There is no universal compression algorithm.
It should be immediately obvious that, when using the same symbol set for plaintext strings and their compressed form, any compression algorithm that makes some strings shorter must make some other strings longer.[*]
Thus the design goal of any useful compression algorithm is to bias it toward the expected properties of the input strings. The algorithm that compresses English text the best probably doesn't compress Latin text the best. The algorithm that compresses Slashdot best probably doesn't compress the New American Standard Bible best. The algorithm that compresses Slashdot stories on astronomy best probably doesn't compress Slashdot stories on biotech best. The algorithm that compresses your post best probably doesn't compress my post best.
What do you expect to accomplish with a prize for best compression of some pre-specified corpus, other than finding out who can do the best job of tuning their algorithm to that corpus?
You certainly won't learn anything about artificial intelligence. Hor help thesandbender with his IT question.
[*] You can get ahead by using different symbol sets for the strings and their compressions, but if you are going to process them with a binary computer and/or store them on binary media, you're stuck with {0,1} under the hood, regardless of what superficial symbol sets you specify.
> As it happens -- unsurprising to many of us -- it is now a theorem of computer science that the closer the size of that "executable" gets to the Kolmogorov complexity of the use cases, the better. This theorem is a major breakthrough in CS and should be learned in every institute purporting to teach IT.
Could you give us a source on that theorem, please?
> I got my PhD 4 years ago. Microsoft Research and IBM are the two widely respected industrial CS research labs. I'm not sure how you could get through a PhD program and not know this.
Do they do a lot of research in mechanical engineering?
> First off, get over yourself. Brandishing about the fact [...] is load of self-important horseshit.
That's almost universal on Ask Slashdot articles. Most of the "questions" should be posted to Brag on Slashdot instead.
Fertile ground for parody, though:
"I've been sleeping with seven beautiful women for the past five years, but now some of them are hinting that they expect me to marry them. Are there any good IT jobs in Utah?"
"My IQ is so high that I have trouble comunicating my ideas to ordonary programmars. Is there an open source tool to help me?"
"I invented an incredibly programming tool, but my boss won't make everyone use it. Please tell him he's wrong."
> The stock market hasn't been the sure thing it used to be of late.
Sorry, I linked the log-scale version of the plot. You can click their link to get the linear-scale plot.
Also, if you shorten the period to 5 years you'll see that the market is finally showing some signs of life, though IMO the growth isn't convincingly stable yet.
If you've got any loans that aren't deferred, they're probably charging you a higher interest rate than the bank is paying you for your deposit. If you don't find an investment that grows your money faster than the loans' interest rate is growing your debt, you're better off paying off the loan rather than investing the money.
Slashdot Mirror
> Pitchfork has an article on how being unable to write about technology has dumbed-down the media.
Now consider whether they can write about other topics, where you happen to be less capable of spotting any flaws.
> Not voting is the same as a vote for the various (accused) incumbents.
I wonder how all those people feel now, who argued against voting for the Democrats as the lesser of two evils in 2000 and 2004?
Even my redneck fundamentalist mother (female parent, not the Jerry Jeff Walker "redneck mother") has expressed regret for voting for GWB. And that was last year.
> > Anyone got the stats on which side has killed the most innocent civilians over the past 5, 10, 20, 50 years?
> Have any statistics on how many innocent civilians where directly targetted by each side? Hizballah's objective is to destroy Israel. Israel's objective is to survive. It doesn't fit into the objective of Israel to target civilians. Hizballah on the other hand...
The civilians are still dead.
Also, you didn't answer my question.
> They don't target civilians unless Hezbollah is there.
Yeah, right. That's why they started by blowing up the whole frikkin' civilian infrastructure of Lebanon.
> > but wasnt hezbollah elected into the position of palistinan government recently?
> No, that was Hamas.
However, Hezbollah holds about 20% of the seats in the Lebanese legislature, and holds two cabinet positions. See the Wikipedia article.
Notice that that's a big increase over their pre-"Cedar Revolution" role in the Lebanese government. A cynic might conclude that the naive notion of democratizing the Middle East is, well, naive.
> How about years and years of killing that have been going on in Israel by Hizballah and Hamas terrorist organizations?
Anyone got the stats on which side has killed the most innocent civilians over the past 5, 10, 20, 50 years?
> You know, the US revolutionary forces were considered terrorists as well, then they became the us government.
And the French Resistance. And some of the early Zionists. And lots of other "good guys".
The important distinction is alwasy "us vs. them". The labelling is propaganda.
> I just dont see the point in waging a war of what basically amounts to revenge, especially when its against the whole of lebanon for the sake a few extremists who happen to live there.
That's why Israel is getting itself into such a bad odor over this. Their apologists usuall try to seize the moral high ground by claiming that they don't target civilians (and, of course, "collateral damage" doesn't count). But here they're forfieting even that dubious argument, by blatantly making war on the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon.
Not that my country has much room to criticize...
> When last I looked into this it was a unilateral isreali action.
Hizbollah is just a wee bit involved as well.
> since when did NASA of all government agencies have to do with a war in lebanon. It seems to me like theyre doing the cyber equivalent to nasa that isrealis are doing to lebanese civillian centers.
When you can't strike at a power, you strike at a perceived symbol of that power.
Presumably the choice of symbol had a way whole lot to do with whose website they could crack.
> staggering that in such a short time the US has gone from loved to hated
Actually, that only took about 18 months, from 09/2001 to 03/2003. Things haven't changed very much in the past 40 months.
I've heard of "earth closet" and "water closet", but I'm aghast at the idea of a "server closet".
All the same, I'd equip it with toilet paper and hand soap, just like the others.
> Having an unsecured wireless network provides plausible deniability for p2p downloading and what-not.
Yeah, but it sucks when all the songs are backwards.
> A persecution complex hardly indicates bad science.
What part of "Doens't mean they're wrong" did you fail to understand?
> So if these MECO are for real, then gravitational collapse canot result in a singularity, which is nice, right? Then how about the big bang? Does that need to have been a singularity, or can we continue with this programme of avoiding the nasty things?
I don't think you'll have any luck finding a physicist who thinks sigularities actually exist in black holes or actually existed at the start of the big bang. In fact, AIUI, that's why bigbangologists don't try to extrapolate back beyond one planck time "after" the start of the universe. As for black holes, the consensus (AFAICT) is that when we get our theory that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, it will explain what "really" happens at the heart of a black hole (and it won't be a singularity, since QM won't allow it).
Once nice thing about MECOs is that they make the BH singularities go away without waiting for the GUT. But as I mentioned in another post, the authors seem to be having trouble convincing their colleagues.
Curiously, the Wikipedia article on MECOs didn't exist until yesterday.
> From the article: "But Chris Reynolds of the University of Maryland, in Baltimore, US, says the evidence for a MECO inside this quasar is not convincing."
> Apparently the experts are not conviced about this "interesting" observation but at slashdot the expert will come to a final conclusion. How many slashdot posters actualy are qualified to talk about these subjects?
The named researchers aren't neutral observers in some grand BH vs. MECO debate; they're the proponents of the MECO idea. See for example the bibliography at the bottom of this article. (And while you're at it, notice the author's persecution complex, his attempt to dismiss scientific dating methods at the very end, and, of course, the curious URL.)
Doens't mean they're wrong, but it's useful to keep in mind that they're partisans in a debate, offering an interpretation of some observations that they think supports their side of the debate. They haven't convinced Reynolds, and the persecution complex displayed in the linked article suggests that they haven't had much luck convincing other people about MECOs in the past.
Is the Army worried about getting sued over downloaded songs or something?
> Typically, the Anonymous Coward's contentless sarcasm betrays his shallow grasp of reality. The relevance is clear: When you design your service suite and do not minimize complexity, you aren't just asking for trouble, you are, by definition, producing a low quality suite. You can, in fact, produce a compression of a natural language knowledge base without even using a compression program and have that be an important human accomplishment. Epistemology is virtually defined by such advances. So the fact that the problem is computationally hard is neither here nor there to first order. The important thing is quality of knowledge.
Ignoring the fact that your post was merely a bit of self-aggrandizement unrelated to to the Ask Slashdot question, you're chasing a will-o-the-wisp. There is no universal compression algorithm.
It should be immediately obvious that, when using the same symbol set for plaintext strings and their compressed form, any compression algorithm that makes some strings shorter must make some other strings longer.[*]
Thus the design goal of any useful compression algorithm is to bias it toward the expected properties of the input strings. The algorithm that compresses English text the best probably doesn't compress Latin text the best. The algorithm that compresses Slashdot best probably doesn't compress the New American Standard Bible best. The algorithm that compresses Slashdot stories on astronomy best probably doesn't compress Slashdot stories on biotech best. The algorithm that compresses your post best probably doesn't compress my post best.
What do you expect to accomplish with a prize for best compression of some pre-specified corpus, other than finding out who can do the best job of tuning their algorithm to that corpus?
You certainly won't learn anything about artificial intelligence. Hor help thesandbender with his IT question.
[*] You can get ahead by using different symbol sets for the strings and their compressions, but if you are going to process them with a binary computer and/or store them on binary media, you're stuck with {0,1} under the hood, regardless of what superficial symbol sets you specify.
> As it happens -- unsurprising to many of us -- it is now a theorem of computer science that the closer the size of that "executable" gets to the Kolmogorov complexity of the use cases, the better. This theorem is a major breakthrough in CS and should be learned in every institute purporting to teach IT.
Could you give us a source on that theorem, please?
> McDonalds!
I suppose they could use an ME to research cheaper ways to flip burgers.
> I got my PhD 4 years ago. Microsoft Research and IBM are the two widely respected industrial CS research labs. I'm not sure how you could get through a PhD program and not know this.
Do they do a lot of research in mechanical engineering?
> grocers throw out thousands of bushels of fruit a year because it ripens too fast [...] RediRipe stickers turn from white to blue as fruit ripens
Looks like a solution in search of a problem, because it sure doesn't address the stated one.
> You could have typed "bushels to liters" in Google and gotten the conversion in a few seconds.
Or you could learn to use the archaic units we do.
You'll be amazed at the feeling of superiority you get by being backwards deliberately!
> First off, get over yourself. Brandishing about the fact [...] is load of self-important horseshit.
That's almost universal on Ask Slashdot articles. Most of the "questions" should be posted to Brag on Slashdot instead.
Fertile ground for parody, though:
"I've been sleeping with seven beautiful women for the past five years, but now some of them are hinting that they expect me to marry them. Are there any good IT jobs in Utah?"
"My IQ is so high that I have trouble comunicating my ideas to ordonary programmars. Is there an open source tool to help me?"
"I invented an incredibly programming tool, but my boss won't make everyone use it. Please tell him he's wrong."
etc...
> The stock market hasn't been the sure thing it used to be of late.
Sorry, I linked the log-scale version of the plot. You can click their link to get the linear-scale plot.
Also, if you shorten the period to 5 years you'll see that the market is finally showing some signs of life, though IMO the growth isn't convincingly stable yet.
If you've got any loans that aren't deferred, they're probably charging you a higher interest rate than the bank is paying you for your deposit. If you don't find an investment that grows your money faster than the loans' interest rate is growing your debt, you're better off paying off the loan rather than investing the money.
The stock market hasn't been the sure thing it used to be of late.
Use this advice at your own risk; I'm not qualified to give it, and when your lawyer sees my net worth he'll laugh at the idea of suing me.
On second thought, there are probably minors reading this, so I won't give the URL of the B&D web site I stumbled across last week.