Understanding if a sequence ends is very important. You don't like it when your word processor crashes (ends) when you try to save a file do you?
The halting problem is unsolvable, but we have to solve it anyway, as well as we can. And that's just one possible application. The fact is, you have to have a paintbrush before you can paint, and you have to develop the proof before you can say what the proof technique can be used for.
If mathematicians had slowed down every time some "practically minded person" (I'm trying to be nice here) asked if there was a practical application to being able to solve a certain problem, we'd have absolutely no modern technology. None at all. Cell phone, gps, microwave, electricity coming to your house-- I can't even begin to describe the magnitude of the loss we'd have.
Even more than that, it seems extremely odd that a person would ask what the "application" of humans being able to solve a math problem could be. What the hell can be more important to you than humanity taking 1 step forward and being able to reason more effectively?
40% of Democrats voted against, compared to only 10% of Republicans. If you want to effect change, vote Democrat, straight ticket, every time.
NO.
Let me repeat that.
NO!!!
If you vote for a party, in this case Democrats, who are 60% in support of a bill then you are telling them that it is ok to continue supporting this bill. The only reason even 40% are against it is because of all the people voting away from their party. Keep voting away from both parties until they reach 100%.
And stop being a shill for your political party. If you are so heavily loyal to one that you'd advocate a party line ticket for them just because they only fucked up 60% percent of their vote, then you need a new hobby. ESPN might be good for you.
It's the wrong target altogether. If a country allows for an oppressive government, then short of foreign military occupation it's the fault of the people living in the country for letting it happen. In china, it's not the programmer's fault for the great firewall, it's the chinese fault. The programmer is just a scapegoat. In the US, it's not the FBI or the "government's" fault for abusive 4-th-amendment ignoring national security letters, it's your fault and your neighbor's fault and his neighbor's fault...
Stop looking for scapegoats. Talk to everyone you know about these problems, tell them who they can vote for to fix them, or they are YOUR fault.
The future of retail is online ordering and delivery. Been to a record store lately? A video rental store? A bank branch? A travel agency? Look at all the vacant retail space that will never again be occupied.
Well, those are examples of stores that sell information. A better example would be a bookstore instead of amazon, but even then very few people buy books very often, and even that is being pressured by digital book sales.
The main reason that the future of grocery won't be delivery though is that it will be used by humans, not robots. Humans need human interaction, and for a large proportion of "stay at home moms" and others, getting out to the grocery store is one of their few weekly chances to see other humans besides their family.
If they had wanted to make people disregard skepticism, especially in the US, then they would have said they found child porn. The fact that it's regular porn suggests that it's probably not a plant.
I don't think the editors got the summary wrong. Satire, specifically the use of copyright material to criticize something, by itself is not protected as fair use. It is natural that the owner of the copyright material would try to convince the court that it is being used only as satire, as the summary says.
Parody, specifically the use of copyright material to criticize or make humor about the material itself, is protected by fair use. The court ruled that the use was a parody. The summary isn't saying parodies are satires, it is simply using the terms as the 2 sides of the case probably used them to describe the same material. Satire and parody are not strictly exclusive.
The indictment sets up a complicated global legal battle between the Department of Justice and the online poker entrepreneurs who have long argued that their operations in the U.S. do not violate U.S. law. Indeed, in recent days, one of the nation’s most prominent casino billionaires, Steve Wynn, announced a strategic relationship with PokerStars and said “in the United States of America the Justice Department has an opinion but several states have ruled and courts have agreed that poker is a game of skill, it’s not gambling. PokerStars rests their argument on that.”
They must have seen Tombstone:
"Didn't you always say that gambling's an honest trade?"
"No.
I said poker's an honest trade. Only suckers buck the tiger's odds all on the house."
Quite often engineers have to create formulae.
And if all you can do is use a calculator to solve them, you're then helpless, and won't be more than a technician or programmer.
Yes, tools are good, but you should show that you understand what they do before you get to use them. Else, the only one you're cheating is yourself.
That is absolutely true.
I don't even like math books that are designed to be used by students with calculators. Comparison of an algebra book from 70 years ago to an algebra book from today (I have several), today's books are obese, rambling, full of pictures and light on critical thinking.
And the simple fact is, if you can do the work without a calculator, then you can do the work just as well with a calculator. But if you learned to do the work with a calculator, odds are it is just some magical box to you and you have no idea how to do work without. All this nonsense about "real life skills" and "students need to learn how to use it" is just that, nonsense. Didn't we just have a slashdot article with the Harvard Entrance exam from 1869? Do you think even 1% of high school graduates could answer 2 of those math questions without a calculator? Or since they were designed to test your reasoning, even with a calculator?
I wrote what was practically an entire operating system in a VERY limited version of BASIC. That took (if I do say so myself) a remarkable amount of programming skill. Some of the things I first did there (subroutines, nested loops, text parsing) are now things I use daily (GOTO, thankfully, not being one of them).
Meanwhile, I have not used the quadratic formula since I finished Calculus, let alone had to recite a proof of it. I have little doubt that knowing what the formula is and how to use it is relatively important. However, I would like to see a plausible theoretical situation in which one would need to recite a proof of the quadratic formula, without the use of any references.
The quadratic equation is basic. I mean it's basic as dirt. Asking when you would need to use the quadratic equation without a reference is like asking "when will I need to know how to add properly without a direction sheet, I can just use my fingers anyway".
Like most math equations, you don't need to know it from memory if you can figure it out. But relying on a reference hinders you in a few ways : (1) if you haven't conditioned yourself to know why the formula is what it is, then your mind is just a little bit weaker for that. If you don't make a habit of understanding things that are presented to you, overall, it has a big impact. (2) If you don't have it memorized (or readily available by derivation), then you probably won't look it up when you could use it, and more likely, you won't even recognize when you can use it.
I agree with you that knowing how to write a mimicry program in BASIC is more important than memorizing the quadratic formula. On the other hand, knowing how to derive the quadratic formula is more useful than the basically code-monkey work of writing such a program in basic.
I always hear people saying "I never use math in real life..." and I find that really sad. I use math all the time in real life. I'll be playing an RPG and want to create an optimal setup for a character...there's the quadratic formula often right there. How about taking an analog circuit class...can't get away with not knowing the quadratic formula and more, which is very basic. Was helping design a low pass filter, if you can't understand how to derive the math for a simple quadratic then you will be screwed for anything that actually requires a brain. Someone was showing me the nature how musical strings interact with electrical light reflections...that's sequences and series right there.
I'm not trying to be condescending, but the truth is you probably don't use the quadratic equation "in real life" (whatever people mean by that) because you can't use it. It amazes me how some people get through life without knowing math, explaining the usefulness of it is like trying to explain the usefulness of vision to a world of blind men. You are missing out on a whole lot.
the military is one of the ONLY things our federal government is actually constitutionally allowed to spend money on
For the Navy (I'd include Air Force today), yes, but *not* for a standing Army.
Article 1 Section 8
The Congress shall have power....
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
Unless it's written somewhere else in the constitution, it doesn't say that the army has to disband outside of wartime. The air force was originally part of the army until 1947, it is appropriate to consider it "an army" or part of the army.
I liked the graphic.
I agree military spending needs to be cut, but what you don't realize is that the military is one of the ONLY things our federal government is actually constitutionally allowed to spend money on. All the handouts and state bribes are not only killing us but they are not supposed to be a federal program anyway.
There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense.
The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.
At least Medicare and Social Security are doing something for American citizens.
And yet, the constitution actually provides for a defense, not social security or medicare. Let the states handle that, and if your state sucks at it you can move, and if one of them has a budget crisis as a result it only affects their state.
A "surplus" in terms of taxes only means they decided to arbitrarily select X% of your tax to be "for" social security. WHOOP-DE-DOO.
Suppose you make $300, are taxed $100, and the total cost of social security divided by tax paying population is $50. If I say "51 dollars of your 100 dollar tax was for social security" then it's running a surplus. If I say "49 dollars of your 100 dollar tax was for social security" then it's running a deficit.
Putting taxes into categories is just manipulation that politicians use on stupid people so that they don't have to bring into attention:
a) The total amount of taxes you pay
b) The actual distribution of taxes into individual programs/costs/giveaways
There is a difference between wanting to change the rules of a game, and playing a game as if the rules have changed.
You can be very much against a certain policy, but as long as it is in effect there is nothing hypocritical about exploiting it at all. In fact, the person who is most against the rule should be the one who has the most right to abuse it against those who favor it, since if he had his way it wouldn't exist.
I agree with you that the threshold is terrible for DUI. This might interest you, it goes over a lot of the problems with due process when it comes to DUI, and covers some of the problems with the technology behind it:
That said, the solution to bad legal protocol is not light sentences. I'd rather see a drunk driver walk than an innocent person get convicted for it, but having light sentences and violated due process is the worst of both worlds.
The main difference here is you were convicted. I think many of us would consider 65 days for 2 DUIs pretty lax (granted there are a lot of problems with DUI procedure that makes many convictions questionable.)
What is happening here is:
Guy records cop making arrest.
Cop arrests person because it made him angry.
Cop charges citizen with felony wiretapping.
Citizen gets his DNA stuck into a public database that the rest of the citizenry don't have to be part of.
While you certainly lose liberties from being incarcerated, you should never lose rights. Even if you are arrested, you still have:
The right to protection against cruel and unusual punishment (first and foremost in this situation)
The right to entertain whatever religion you like
The right to a trial if you are accused of another crime
Etc
Some places will remove a person's rights upon conviction, like right to vote, but that is an enormous mistake. First of all, if there are enough felony convictions to influence votes, then we have a bigger problem. Second, it sets the precedent for other rights being removed. Third, no one should ever have their vote removed even if they committed a crime: there actually are bad laws, and the people most affected by them should have the most right to vote against their supporters.
The legislation will expand what's called "Katie's Law" in memory of Kathryn Sepich, a New Mexico State University student who was raped and murdered in 2003. Sepich's killer was identified more than three years later with DNA evidence after he was CONVICTED of another crime.
So why swab someone who has only been arrested?
"If we can start by matching these CRIMINALS up to their previous crimes..." --Rep. Al Park
Wow. So this is what due process has come to. Arrest = criminal. I'd like to take a jab at New Mexico but DNA testing at arrest is a nationwide effort.
The strategy with the highest expectation of winning is to pick 1 of 3 completely at random, unrelated to previous behavior. Then if humans have any strategy or pattern at all other than this, the computer has a winning expectation.
It's a somewhat paradoxical approach to the game: they assume that humans all have non-random patterns, which gives the random strategy an advantage, but then choose a predictive strategy which possibly gives the computer a losing expectation.
So to be proper, they are not trying to win since a known winning strategy already exists for any nonrandomizing human. They are trying to increase the chance of a win at the risk incorrectly predicting the pattern of some humans and losing in their cases.
At this point, I wish SCOTUS would crash and burn.
They've lost all my respect, turning into corrupt politicos pushing their owners' agenda, and not unbiased protectors of the individuals that make up the nation and her constitution. If it wasn't for SCOTUS' bought and paid for decisions during the last 15 years, this would have gone nowhere.
And I can't even vote them off the bench. Some democracy.
Bullshit.
First of all, it's not the SCOTUS responsibility to protect people. Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum. It's their responsibility to protect the law, and the consequences to any of the population are not their concern.
Secondly, what are these bought and paid for decisions? Bought for by how much? There is an argument to be made for justices improperly resolving ambiguity to their own personal preferences, but bought? Show me.
Most importantly, if you don't like any of their decisions, they can ALL be fixed by the legislature. If you want more restrictions placed on warrants, vote third party or stfu.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, my favorite "classic" is probably the Tragedy of Julius Caesar, but it's a play.
I'm a casual reader of the classics. . .
To what do you refer to as classics, and do you recommend any in particular?
Understanding if a sequence ends is very important. You don't like it when your word processor crashes (ends) when you try to save a file do you?
The halting problem is unsolvable, but we have to solve it anyway, as well as we can. And that's just one possible application. The fact is, you have to have a paintbrush before you can paint, and you have to develop the proof before you can say what the proof technique can be used for.
If mathematicians had slowed down every time some "practically minded person" (I'm trying to be nice here) asked if there was a practical application to being able to solve a certain problem, we'd have absolutely no modern technology. None at all. Cell phone, gps, microwave, electricity coming to your house-- I can't even begin to describe the magnitude of the loss we'd have.
Even more than that, it seems extremely odd that a person would ask what the "application" of humans being able to solve a math problem could be. What the hell can be more important to you than humanity taking 1 step forward and being able to reason more effectively?
40% of Democrats voted against, compared to only 10% of Republicans. If you want to effect change, vote Democrat, straight ticket, every time.
NO.
Let me repeat that.
NO!!!
If you vote for a party, in this case Democrats, who are 60% in support of a bill then you are telling them that it is ok to continue supporting this bill. The only reason even 40% are against it is because of all the people voting away from their party. Keep voting away from both parties until they reach 100%.
And stop being a shill for your political party. If you are so heavily loyal to one that you'd advocate a party line ticket for them just because they only fucked up 60% percent of their vote, then you need a new hobby. ESPN might be good for you.
It's the wrong target altogether. If a country allows for an oppressive government, then short of foreign military occupation it's the fault of the people living in the country for letting it happen. In china, it's not the programmer's fault for the great firewall, it's the chinese fault. The programmer is just a scapegoat. In the US, it's not the FBI or the "government's" fault for abusive 4-th-amendment ignoring national security letters, it's your fault and your neighbor's fault and his neighbor's fault...
Stop looking for scapegoats. Talk to everyone you know about these problems, tell them who they can vote for to fix them, or they are YOUR fault.
The future of retail is online ordering and delivery. Been to a record store lately? A video rental store? A bank branch? A travel agency? Look at all the vacant retail space that will never again be occupied.
Well, those are examples of stores that sell information. A better example would be a bookstore instead of amazon, but even then very few people buy books very often, and even that is being pressured by digital book sales.
The main reason that the future of grocery won't be delivery though is that it will be used by humans, not robots. Humans need human interaction, and for a large proportion of "stay at home moms" and others, getting out to the grocery store is one of their few weekly chances to see other humans besides their family.
If they had wanted to make people disregard skepticism, especially in the US, then they would have said they found child porn. The fact that it's regular porn suggests that it's probably not a plant.
That is not a difference of one thousandth. It is a difference of 33%.
No it is a proportion of 33% (beyond 100%). It is a difference of 1 thousandth.
I don't think the editors got the summary wrong. Satire, specifically the use of copyright material to criticize something, by itself is not protected as fair use. It is natural that the owner of the copyright material would try to convince the court that it is being used only as satire, as the summary says.
Parody, specifically the use of copyright material to criticize or make humor about the material itself, is protected by fair use. The court ruled that the use was a parody. The summary isn't saying parodies are satires, it is simply using the terms as the 2 sides of the case probably used them to describe the same material. Satire and parody are not strictly exclusive.
This PDF have a nice summary of related cases and whatnot to explain the courts view on satire vs parody in terms of fair use:
http://www.fbm.com/docs/speaking_engagement/e5734cbb-85e9-464c-9696-09947cefcf06_document.pdf
The indictment sets up a complicated global legal battle between the Department of Justice and the online poker entrepreneurs who have long argued that their operations in the U.S. do not violate U.S. law. Indeed, in recent days, one of the nation’s most prominent casino billionaires, Steve Wynn, announced a strategic relationship with PokerStars and said “in the United States of America the Justice Department has an opinion but several states have ruled and courts have agreed that poker is a game of skill, it’s not gambling. PokerStars rests their argument on that.”
They must have seen Tombstone:
"Didn't you always say that gambling's an honest trade?"
"No. I said poker's an honest trade. Only suckers buck the tiger's odds all on the house."
Quite often engineers have to create formulae. And if all you can do is use a calculator to solve them, you're then helpless, and won't be more than a technician or programmer.
Yes, tools are good, but you should show that you understand what they do before you get to use them. Else, the only one you're cheating is yourself.
That is absolutely true.
I don't even like math books that are designed to be used by students with calculators. Comparison of an algebra book from 70 years ago to an algebra book from today (I have several), today's books are obese, rambling, full of pictures and light on critical thinking.
And the simple fact is, if you can do the work without a calculator, then you can do the work just as well with a calculator. But if you learned to do the work with a calculator, odds are it is just some magical box to you and you have no idea how to do work without. All this nonsense about "real life skills" and "students need to learn how to use it" is just that, nonsense. Didn't we just have a slashdot article with the Harvard Entrance exam from 1869? Do you think even 1% of high school graduates could answer 2 of those math questions without a calculator? Or since they were designed to test your reasoning, even with a calculator?
I wrote what was practically an entire operating system in a VERY limited version of BASIC. That took (if I do say so myself) a remarkable amount of programming skill. Some of the things I first did there (subroutines, nested loops, text parsing) are now things I use daily (GOTO, thankfully, not being one of them). Meanwhile, I have not used the quadratic formula since I finished Calculus, let alone had to recite a proof of it. I have little doubt that knowing what the formula is and how to use it is relatively important. However, I would like to see a plausible theoretical situation in which one would need to recite a proof of the quadratic formula, without the use of any references.
The quadratic equation is basic. I mean it's basic as dirt. Asking when you would need to use the quadratic equation without a reference is like asking "when will I need to know how to add properly without a direction sheet, I can just use my fingers anyway".
Like most math equations, you don't need to know it from memory if you can figure it out. But relying on a reference hinders you in a few ways : (1) if you haven't conditioned yourself to know why the formula is what it is, then your mind is just a little bit weaker for that. If you don't make a habit of understanding things that are presented to you, overall, it has a big impact. (2) If you don't have it memorized (or readily available by derivation), then you probably won't look it up when you could use it, and more likely, you won't even recognize when you can use it.
I agree with you that knowing how to write a mimicry program in BASIC is more important than memorizing the quadratic formula. On the other hand, knowing how to derive the quadratic formula is more useful than the basically code-monkey work of writing such a program in basic.
I always hear people saying "I never use math in real life..." and I find that really sad. I use math all the time in real life. I'll be playing an RPG and want to create an optimal setup for a character...there's the quadratic formula often right there. How about taking an analog circuit class...can't get away with not knowing the quadratic formula and more, which is very basic. Was helping design a low pass filter, if you can't understand how to derive the math for a simple quadratic then you will be screwed for anything that actually requires a brain. Someone was showing me the nature how musical strings interact with electrical light reflections...that's sequences and series right there.
I'm not trying to be condescending, but the truth is you probably don't use the quadratic equation "in real life" (whatever people mean by that) because you can't use it. It amazes me how some people get through life without knowing math, explaining the usefulness of it is like trying to explain the usefulness of vision to a world of blind men. You are missing out on a whole lot.
the military is one of the ONLY things our federal government is actually constitutionally allowed to spend money on
For the Navy (I'd include Air Force today), yes, but *not* for a standing Army.
Article 1 Section 8
The Congress shall have power....
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;
To provide and maintain a Navy;
Unless it's written somewhere else in the constitution, it doesn't say that the army has to disband outside of wartime. The air force was originally part of the army until 1947, it is appropriate to consider it "an army" or part of the army.
I liked the graphic. I agree military spending needs to be cut, but what you don't realize is that the military is one of the ONLY things our federal government is actually constitutionally allowed to spend money on. All the handouts and state bribes are not only killing us but they are not supposed to be a federal program anyway.
There are three giant money-sucking programs that need drastic cuts if we want to do anything about the budget: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Defense. The few million dollars these sites cost to run is a drop in the bucket compared to those three programs.
At least Medicare and Social Security are doing something for American citizens.
And yet, the constitution actually provides for a defense, not social security or medicare. Let the states handle that, and if your state sucks at it you can move, and if one of them has a budget crisis as a result it only affects their state.
Social Security still has a surplus.
Bullshit.
A "surplus" in terms of taxes only means they decided to arbitrarily select X% of your tax to be "for" social security. WHOOP-DE-DOO.
Suppose you make $300, are taxed $100, and the total cost of social security divided by tax paying population is $50. If I say "51 dollars of your 100 dollar tax was for social security" then it's running a surplus. If I say "49 dollars of your 100 dollar tax was for social security" then it's running a deficit.
Putting taxes into categories is just manipulation that politicians use on stupid people so that they don't have to bring into attention:
a) The total amount of taxes you pay
b) The actual distribution of taxes into individual programs/costs/giveaways
Don't put up with it.
There is a difference between wanting to change the rules of a game, and playing a game as if the rules have changed. You can be very much against a certain policy, but as long as it is in effect there is nothing hypocritical about exploiting it at all. In fact, the person who is most against the rule should be the one who has the most right to abuse it against those who favor it, since if he had his way it wouldn't exist.
I agree with you that the threshold is terrible for DUI. This might interest you, it goes over a lot of the problems with due process when it comes to DUI, and covers some of the problems with the technology behind it:
http://www.duicenter.com/lectures/exception01.html
That said, the solution to bad legal protocol is not light sentences. I'd rather see a drunk driver walk than an innocent person get convicted for it, but having light sentences and violated due process is the worst of both worlds.
The main difference here is you were convicted. I think many of us would consider 65 days for 2 DUIs pretty lax (granted there are a lot of problems with DUI procedure that makes many convictions questionable.)
What is happening here is:
Guy records cop making arrest.
Cop arrests person because it made him angry.
Cop charges citizen with felony wiretapping.
Citizen gets his DNA stuck into a public database that the rest of the citizenry don't have to be part of.
There's a reason we have juries.
While you certainly lose liberties from being incarcerated, you should never lose rights. Even if you are arrested, you still have:
The right to protection against cruel and unusual punishment (first and foremost in this situation)
The right to entertain whatever religion you like
The right to a trial if you are accused of another crime
Etc
Some places will remove a person's rights upon conviction, like right to vote, but that is an enormous mistake. First of all, if there are enough felony convictions to influence votes, then we have a bigger problem. Second, it sets the precedent for other rights being removed. Third, no one should ever have their vote removed even if they committed a crime: there actually are bad laws, and the people most affected by them should have the most right to vote against their supporters.
The legislation will expand what's called "Katie's Law" in memory of Kathryn Sepich, a New Mexico State University student who was raped and murdered in 2003. Sepich's killer was identified more than three years later with DNA evidence after he was CONVICTED of another crime.
So why swab someone who has only been arrested?
"If we can start by matching these CRIMINALS up to their previous crimes..." --Rep. Al Park
Wow. So this is what due process has come to. Arrest = criminal. I'd like to take a jab at New Mexico but DNA testing at arrest is a nationwide effort.
The strategy with the highest expectation of winning is to pick 1 of 3 completely at random, unrelated to previous behavior. Then if humans have any strategy or pattern at all other than this, the computer has a winning expectation.
It's a somewhat paradoxical approach to the game: they assume that humans all have non-random patterns, which gives the random strategy an advantage, but then choose a predictive strategy which possibly gives the computer a losing expectation.
So to be proper, they are not trying to win since a known winning strategy already exists for any nonrandomizing human. They are trying to increase the chance of a win at the risk incorrectly predicting the pattern of some humans and losing in their cases.
This is why we can't have nice things.
At this point, I wish SCOTUS would crash and burn. They've lost all my respect, turning into corrupt politicos pushing their owners' agenda, and not unbiased protectors of the individuals that make up the nation and her constitution. If it wasn't for SCOTUS' bought and paid for decisions during the last 15 years, this would have gone nowhere.
And I can't even vote them off the bench. Some democracy.
Bullshit.
First of all, it's not the SCOTUS responsibility to protect people. Fiat Justitia Ruat Caelum. It's their responsibility to protect the law, and the consequences to any of the population are not their concern.
Secondly, what are these bought and paid for decisions? Bought for by how much? There is an argument to be made for justices improperly resolving ambiguity to their own personal preferences, but bought? Show me.
Most importantly, if you don't like any of their decisions, they can ALL be fixed by the legislature. If you want more restrictions placed on warrants, vote third party or stfu.
A group of detectives just talked adults into voluntarily installing keyloggers on their own computer.
It's like a cop's wet dream, a city full of computers with keyloggers already installed on them. All they needed was a little it's-for-the-children.
"Your children need to learn how to avoid potentially dangerous situations on a computer.
Here.
Install this keylogger."
Did the detectives have to practice keeping a straight face during the seminars?