I am a graduate student in Mathematics. I have worked on projects in C involving emergency egress simulations, simulated annealing applied to elevator scheduling, and am currently working on Bandwidth problems with applications in multichannel communications (i.e. streaming media over TCP).
I am also working on using scheme to develop systems for modern algebra, specifically finding SN-forms of matrices over finite fields.
I am a graduate student, so I work for cheap, and working over the internet is not a problem for me. Drop me a line if interested!
Why don't you do a study on how Environmental Standards have effected the cost of living of lower income workers. If you find a correlation, I will be truly shocked.
Meanwhile, I think that lower class Americans might enjoy paying a third of what they pay for gas now. They might also enjoy the thinning of the disgusting halo that rings our major cities.
I think that based on the lecture notes, the New Scientist is just trying to make a sensational article out of a nice lecture on a few of the more surprising highlights of 20th century math.
First of all, the statement that mathematical theory is riddled with holes is questionable. Finding an unprovable statement is a rarity that happens once every so often. Most things can either be proven or separated out as an axiom (such as the Continuum Hypothesis). Granted, every formal algebraic system is going to have at least one unprovable theorem, but no one has attempted to count out the percentage of theorems that are provable.
The New Scientist is claiming that the percentage of provable theorems is small compared to the number of theorems in any given system. This is akin to the idea that the rational numbers are "sparse" on the real number line. Such a statement about a formal system, such as the ZFC axioms of set theory, needs to be proven.
It would be an interesting study to Godelize ZFC in an intuitive way and use automated theorem proving to see what percentage of statements of a given length are theorems, and what percentage of those could be proven with proofs of less than a certain length. Then by asymptotic analysis one might be able to make a statement to see if "most" theorems could be proven.
Such a study would be similar in method to Graphical Evolution, but would require quite a bit of supercomputer time. Even then, some really difficult proofs would have to be made. However, one does not know if the statement is provable:)
The oil giants, Exxon, BP, Texaco, etc...are rapidly attempting to portray themselves as energy corporations. In the event of a switch to a more modern power source, they will be ready to jump in and provide much of the power and infrastructure that is needed.
I think that the smaller drilling and prospecting firms are the real lobbies that will keep us stuck to fossil fuel dependence. With Dubya, proud CEO of multiple failed drilling operations, at the helm, the lobbies of these smaller companies will have a great effect on standards and federal research effort.
I don't think OPEC will keep us dependent as the entire world would love to force that cartel out of business.
Although it may seem strange (and to many libertarian minds quite unethical), the best way to move society towards clean sustainable power is to toughen emission standards. The trucking industry will always cry out that this will make profit impossible. The effect of this is to unbalance the economic playing field in such a way that clean == profitable. This effect was noted in the 70s when new emissions standards transformed the auto industry. You can thank your 35 mpg sportscar on these efforts. New standards, if they ever go through, will immediately lead to hybrid and fuel cell cars with 70+ mpg initially, and over 100 mpg later (or whatever equivalent metric fuel cells use).
The large cap corps can predict and move with these changes, causing at most a 3 year dip in margins and stock prices.
You can probably get the quake shotgun in EMACS with some clever ELISP code hooking text mode quake into an emacs window.
With a few robots an a little soldering, you could build a car with emacs. Hell, with a few old nintendo robots even procmail, your handy email filtering system, could cook you breakfast whenever you send mail to your boss in the morning.
My friend uses his computer joystick to control his remote control car. I used to have a customized network report sent to me every morning by my computer.
*nix is not an OS, *nix is not meant to be easy to comprehend. *nix is like the dirt. It is a complex aggregate of simple things. It is not visually appealing. But as does the dirt, *nix holds the secret to the growth of new things. *nix is not a product, but a starting point.
Without total comprehension, computing must necessarily suck. Any system designed to circumvent this rule must also suck. This was forgotten in the mid nineties. It is the Tao.
Whatever...in a toltalitarian police state crime effectively drops to zero, but who wants that?
By invading the private lives of every american household, and doubling the world's incarceration rate, the US can effectively wipe out marijuana use completely.
By warehousing consumer data large corporations can market more effectively, that is, convince you that you are not happy w/o their product.
Time to wake up the populace: Your well being is not a univariate function depending only on GDP growth. Crime prevention will not help your well being if the means outweigh the ends. Does nobody care about search and seizure rights?
...that free speech and intellectual property are mutually incompatible in a society where people speak in a language such as html.
I think that it is clear: A Corporate Republic will always choose IP, a Democracy will choose freedom. Enjoy the extra 0.0004 cents squelching DeCSS just might bring to shareholder dividends in a few years. You will not be able to link (speak, what's the difference?) freely because of it.
Actually, I hold a degree in physics. Just attempting humor there...
But science never proved anything. However, theories are useful in that they can predict the future, with allarming accuracy. It is as likely that I will fall down after jumping up as it is that humans hold some relation to other primates.
I also feel that way about gravity, but it simply is not provably, a priori true. Sure, planets seem to rotate around the sun because all particles with mass are mutually attracted, but the reality is that this is the simple order of things, as Azathoth and the Outer Gods created. There is no evidence against this claim.
If anyone can give me concrete proof of gravity, I will eat my hat.
Now, I have to check the mitocloria count in my processor, my computer is behaving slowly. It is probably either that of a disturbance in the force.
Military conquest was made obsolete with the WTO. There is no reason to march in and install a puppet government when you can control the existing one.
You sure do go a long way in painting all corporations as being evil. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the US, with it's many large corporations also has one of the highest stardards of living on the planet. I don't know too many other countries where people are literally killing themselves to try to get into.
Yea, corps aren't all bad, but I would argue that the US standard of living is pitiful. We have a very high murder rate, 25% of the worlds incarceration, the worst education system, 60% obesity, and a slew of mental disorders. Heck, I can't even go out for a walk in the summer with a beer in my hand where I live.
We have a very high standard of stuff which jives well with the corps. However, I think we could pay a little more attention to life outside of furnishing the house and eating McDonalds, being the fat, murderous, uneducated, and restricted people we are.
I put it to you that the reason companies and governments are being forced into these drastic actions is because people, the geeks and high school students who use napster for one, are not responsible with the ability to copy music.
I put it to you that the reason geeks and high school students are being forced into piracy is because people, the RIAA and associated corporate cartel, are not responsible with the ability to market music, rip off artists, and lobby the US govt.
If you are not responsible, you do not have any rights, and any whining is pointless and idiotic.
If a corporation is not responsible, it does not have any rights, and any whining is pointless and idiotic.
Those who would copy music need to start being responsible.
Those who would control the music industry need to start being responsible.
Lets just say you are average Joe POWERuser (the only people that need look at *nix anyway.
You need xterm, mozilla, an image viewer, a mp3 player (optional), and fvwm2.
Hell, throw in gimp and gnumeric for fun.
I swtiched back to win98 for a while to play games, and discovered that I did all my work in IE or a terminal. I realized that I didn't need GNOME, KDE, or any of this.
AIDS has historically discriminated between sexes becuase it arose in the urban scene through the gay community. The latency is natural and understandable when one studies the effects of the disease.
Duesberg is not correct. This attack is outside his area of expertise completely, and probably an attack on gay and recreational drug lifestyles. The African leaders are promoting these theories as a measure against giving massive amounts of money to US corporations, an issue that this slashdot story is bringing up. No scientist is attacking HIV-AIDS theory that does not have a political motive.
Furthermore, a virus can happily kill its host as long as it propogates to a new host before the first dies. The latency makes this a highly successful virus.
Errr...This guy (Duesburg) believes that the weight loss due to AIDS is actually due to cocaine use, and sarcoma due to nitrous. The number of cocaine and inhalant users in the world is not near large enough to support such a hypothesis. Not only that, I think most Africans have no possible way to obtain cocaine and inhalants such as he describes.
Furthermore, there is such a thing as HIV, it does attack immune cells, many people who test positive with HIV tend to have their T-cell count decrease quite a bit. If you read the other side of the argument, their position is incredibly strong.
My uncle, who died of AIDS, did not use recreational drugs on a normal basis, but did have sex with a person who contracted AIDS a few years later, and was HIV positive. My uncle then tested HIV positive and several years later became ill with AIDS, and then died. He did not use AZT until after AIDS symptoms were present. I can point you at about ten million people with similar stories.
Zone encoded DVDs violate fair use rules. I think you are missing my point. I don't care about the drug companies, human life is more important. If there are domestic knock-offs, than these companies don't need to sell there.
IP != Capitalism
If the drug corps go under, there will be new ones. There will always be new drug corps, even if the IP law does not suit them perfectly. Human greed is not quite that fragile.
Allright, forget about profit and capitalism for a moment, and think about this from the third world perspective:
Your poor country is suffering from plague, your family is dying, and a strange organization is a far away land states that you do not have the right to cheaply produce the medication your family needs to survive, because said organization spent the money to develop this, and you cannot afford to buy it from them.
So then through capitalist ethics, you say oh well, dont buy the drugs (since you can't) watch your family and countrymen die, and capitalism remains intact so that the betterment of humanity may continue.
...or you can die on your feet, and maybe the corporation will cave in, and you just might live. That is what you learn from Brazil.
Just look at some of these posts. You would think people were analyzing the strength of Intel and AMD's offensive lines. I mean, many of you have a true, heartfelt desire to see one of these corps obliterate the other.
If Itanium sucks, too bad for intel, go buy AMD. If Sledgehammer sucks, too bad for AMD, go buy Itanium.
They are just companies competing. They are both publicly traded, multibillion dollar massive corporations who care about profit.
I think slashdot has become a site for corporate cheerleading. Can we discuss something else, technical perhaps?
Re:What were they thinking?!
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 2
Illegal Drugs killed just over 8000 americans in 1994. Compare that to how many died from alcohol or tobacco.
Is it really worth imprisoning over 800,000 americans, and letting out violent criminals?
Is it really worth funding the Columbian army with 12 billion dollars to kill other Columbians, when the Columbian army is guilty of human rights violations?
Have you noted the fact that despite actions over the last decade to curb supply, and massively increased funding, the street price of cocaine has dropped significantly in the last ten years. You might also look at the fact that drug use is not declining in American youth.
In the Netherlands, where soft drugs are basically legal, drug use statistics are generally half that of the US, and the murder rate is down.
Just wait until one of your friends or family gets imprisoned for taking a wrong turn in life, and watch just how much that imprisonment helps them overcome their problems and addictions.
The war on drugs is the war on american children.
Education is better than the slow erosion of the Bill of Rights.
Slashdot Mirror
TV say Donuts are high in fat
Kazoo
Found a hobo in my room
It's Pricess Leia
The yodel of life
Give me my sweater back
Or I will play the guitar
Hyakugojyuuichi!
I am also working on using scheme to develop systems for modern algebra, specifically finding SN-forms of matrices over finite fields.
I am a graduate student, so I work for cheap, and working over the internet is not a problem for me. Drop me a line if interested!
Err...I wish that link hadn't been been broken. Evidently this is what he was saying, even though the other link made it seem a bit different.
Meanwhile, I think that lower class Americans might enjoy paying a third of what they pay for gas now. They might also enjoy the thinning of the disgusting halo that rings our major cities.
First of all, the statement that mathematical theory is riddled with holes is questionable. Finding an unprovable statement is a rarity that happens once every so often. Most things can either be proven or separated out as an axiom (such as the Continuum Hypothesis). Granted, every formal algebraic system is going to have at least one unprovable theorem, but no one has attempted to count out the percentage of theorems that are provable.
The New Scientist is claiming that the percentage of provable theorems is small compared to the number of theorems in any given system. This is akin to the idea that the rational numbers are "sparse" on the real number line. Such a statement about a formal system, such as the ZFC axioms of set theory, needs to be proven.
It would be an interesting study to Godelize ZFC in an intuitive way and use automated theorem proving to see what percentage of statements of a given length are theorems, and what percentage of those could be proven with proofs of less than a certain length. Then by asymptotic analysis one might be able to make a statement to see if "most" theorems could be proven.
Such a study would be similar in method to Graphical Evolution, but would require quite a bit of supercomputer time. Even then, some really difficult proofs would have to be made. However, one does not know if the statement is provable :)
The oil giants, Exxon, BP, Texaco, etc...are rapidly attempting to portray themselves as energy corporations. In the event of a switch to a more modern power source, they will be ready to jump in and provide much of the power and infrastructure that is needed.
I think that the smaller drilling and prospecting firms are the real lobbies that will keep us stuck to fossil fuel dependence. With Dubya, proud CEO of multiple failed drilling operations, at the helm, the lobbies of these smaller companies will have a great effect on standards and federal research effort.
I don't think OPEC will keep us dependent as the entire world would love to force that cartel out of business.
Although it may seem strange (and to many libertarian minds quite unethical), the best way to move society towards clean sustainable power is to toughen emission standards. The trucking industry will always cry out that this will make profit impossible. The effect of this is to unbalance the economic playing field in such a way that clean == profitable. This effect was noted in the 70s when new emissions standards transformed the auto industry. You can thank your 35 mpg sportscar on these efforts. New standards, if they ever go through, will immediately lead to hybrid and fuel cell cars with 70+ mpg initially, and over 100 mpg later (or whatever equivalent metric fuel cells use).
The large cap corps can predict and move with these changes, causing at most a 3 year dip in margins and stock prices.
With a few robots an a little soldering, you could build a car with emacs. Hell, with a few old nintendo robots even procmail, your handy email filtering system, could cook you breakfast whenever you send mail to your boss in the morning.
My friend uses his computer joystick to control his remote control car. I used to have a customized network report sent to me every morning by my computer.
*nix is not an OS, *nix is not meant to be easy to comprehend. *nix is like the dirt. It is a complex aggregate of simple things. It is not visually appealing. But as does the dirt, *nix holds the secret to the growth of new things. *nix is not a product, but a starting point.
Without total comprehension, computing must necessarily suck. Any system designed to circumvent this rule must also suck. This was forgotten in the mid nineties. It is the Tao.
EMACS is easily extensible using its very own version of lisp
EMACS lets you work with regexps. Will Word do that?
EMACS is GPL. You dont have to pay anything. It is stable and runs on a 486 with 16 MB of RAM.
By invading the private lives of every american household, and doubling the world's incarceration rate, the US can effectively wipe out marijuana use completely.
By warehousing consumer data large corporations can market more effectively, that is, convince you that you are not happy w/o their product.
Time to wake up the populace: Your well being is not a univariate function depending only on GDP growth. Crime prevention will not help your well being if the means outweigh the ends. Does nobody care about search and seizure rights?
Karma whoring??? For Great Justice.
I think that it is clear: A Corporate Republic will always choose IP, a Democracy will choose freedom. Enjoy the extra 0.0004 cents squelching DeCSS just might bring to shareholder dividends in a few years. You will not be able to link (speak, what's the difference?) freely because of it.
But science never proved anything. However, theories are useful in that they can predict the future, with allarming accuracy. It is as likely that I will fall down after jumping up as it is that humans hold some relation to other primates.
I agree completely.
I also feel that way about gravity, but it simply is not provably, a priori true. Sure, planets seem to rotate around the sun because all particles with mass are mutually attracted, but the reality is that this is the simple order of things, as Azathoth and the Outer Gods created. There is no evidence against this claim.
If anyone can give me concrete proof of gravity, I will eat my hat.
Now, I have to check the mitocloria count in my processor, my computer is behaving slowly. It is probably either that of a disturbance in the force.
And, of course, you are the exeception to this rule. Gee, how kind of you to even deign to speak to the rest of us sub-human slobs.
Sure, if you wish to put words in my mouth. Most people just argue the point though...
Military conquest was made obsolete with the WTO. There is no reason to march in and install a puppet government when you can control the existing one.
You sure do go a long way in painting all corporations as being evil. I don't think that it's a coincidence that the US, with it's many large corporations also has one of the highest stardards of living on the planet. I don't know too many other countries where people are literally killing themselves to try to get into.
Yea, corps aren't all bad, but I would argue that the US standard of living is pitiful. We have a very high murder rate, 25% of the worlds incarceration, the worst education system, 60% obesity, and a slew of mental disorders. Heck, I can't even go out for a walk in the summer with a beer in my hand where I live.
We have a very high standard of stuff which jives well with the corps. However, I think we could pay a little more attention to life outside of furnishing the house and eating McDonalds, being the fat, murderous, uneducated, and restricted people we are.
I put it to you that the reason companies and governments are being forced into these drastic actions is because people, the geeks and high school students who use napster for one, are not responsible with the ability to copy music.
I put it to you that the reason geeks and high school students are being forced into piracy is because people, the RIAA and associated corporate cartel, are not responsible with the ability to market music, rip off artists, and lobby the US govt.
If you are not responsible, you do not have any rights, and any whining is pointless and idiotic.
If a corporation is not responsible, it does not have any rights, and any whining is pointless and idiotic.
Those who would copy music need to start being responsible.
Those who would control the music industry need to start being responsible.
Sheesh....
You need xterm, mozilla, an image viewer, a mp3 player (optional), and fvwm2.
Hell, throw in gimp and gnumeric for fun.
I swtiched back to win98 for a while to play games, and discovered that I did all my work in IE or a terminal. I realized that I didn't need GNOME, KDE, or any of this.
Let us all sing:
X is for xterm, that's good enough for me,
Oh, X is for xterm, that's good enough for me,
Oh, X is for xterm, that's good enough for me,
Oh, xterm, xterm, xterm starts with....c?
Go read some science:
HIV-AIDS
AIDS has historically discriminated between sexes becuase it arose in the urban scene through the gay community. The latency is natural and understandable when one studies the effects of the disease.
Duesberg is not correct. This attack is outside his area of expertise completely, and probably an attack on gay and recreational drug lifestyles. The African leaders are promoting these theories as a measure against giving massive amounts of money to US corporations, an issue that this slashdot story is bringing up. No scientist is attacking HIV-AIDS theory that does not have a political motive.
Furthermore, a virus can happily kill its host as long as it propogates to a new host before the first dies. The latency makes this a highly successful virus.
Errr...This guy (Duesburg) believes that the weight loss due to AIDS is actually due to cocaine use, and sarcoma due to nitrous. The number of cocaine and inhalant users in the world is not near large enough to support such a hypothesis. Not only that, I think most Africans have no possible way to obtain cocaine and inhalants such as he describes. Furthermore, there is such a thing as HIV, it does attack immune cells, many people who test positive with HIV tend to have their T-cell count decrease quite a bit. If you read the other side of the argument, their position is incredibly strong. My uncle, who died of AIDS, did not use recreational drugs on a normal basis, but did have sex with a person who contracted AIDS a few years later, and was HIV positive. My uncle then tested HIV positive and several years later became ill with AIDS, and then died. He did not use AZT until after AIDS symptoms were present. I can point you at about ten million people with similar stories.
IP != Capitalism
If the drug corps go under, there will be new ones. There will always be new drug corps, even if the IP law does not suit them perfectly. Human greed is not quite that fragile.
Your poor country is suffering from plague, your family is dying, and a strange organization is a far away land states that you do not have the right to cheaply produce the medication your family needs to survive, because said organization spent the money to develop this, and you cannot afford to buy it from them.
So then through capitalist ethics, you say oh well, dont buy the drugs (since you can't) watch your family and countrymen die, and capitalism remains intact so that the betterment of humanity may continue.
...or you can die on your feet, and maybe the corporation will cave in, and you just might live. That is what you learn from Brazil.
If Itanium sucks, too bad for intel, go buy AMD. If Sledgehammer sucks, too bad for AMD, go buy Itanium.
They are just companies competing. They are both publicly traded, multibillion dollar massive corporations who care about profit.
I think slashdot has become a site for corporate cheerleading. Can we discuss something else, technical perhaps?
Illegal Drugs killed just over 8000 americans in 1994. Compare that to how many died from alcohol or tobacco. Is it really worth imprisoning over 800,000 americans, and letting out violent criminals? Is it really worth funding the Columbian army with 12 billion dollars to kill other Columbians, when the Columbian army is guilty of human rights violations? Have you noted the fact that despite actions over the last decade to curb supply, and massively increased funding, the street price of cocaine has dropped significantly in the last ten years. You might also look at the fact that drug use is not declining in American youth. In the Netherlands, where soft drugs are basically legal, drug use statistics are generally half that of the US, and the murder rate is down. Just wait until one of your friends or family gets imprisoned for taking a wrong turn in life, and watch just how much that imprisonment helps them overcome their problems and addictions. The war on drugs is the war on american children. Education is better than the slow erosion of the Bill of Rights.