I'm a fan of learning JavaScript as a first language, it can be presented in a nice way. One of the best parts of js is closures, it really gets them right. I put together some interactive js lessons to teach closures a little while ago, give them a try and let me know what you think.
I'm an instructor for a university. The general principle that universities use is that anything you turn in, you assign copyright to the university. This means the instructor can use turnitin without violating copyright law. Is it right to require students to give up copyright over their own work? I don't agree with it, but it's not unreasonable. Most assignments are similar to "work for hire", written to a specification of someone else for a particular purpose (in this case, grading).
For public school, you can't choose whether to attend or compare policies between schools. In this case it is the government stealing intellectual property of its citizens. I applaud the kids for standing up to it.
Arnold Kling in Under the Radar recommends that entrepreneurs start out by bootstrapping their operation by finding paying customers and actually making money before thinking about outside funding. What are your opinions about this way of starting up?
The situation is not as dire as that: under the GPL you are allowed to distribute the GPL program along with its source code. The only reason this could conceivably be a problem is that it biases an outside observer into thinking that your product is a derivative work. But objectively, whether you distribute GPL code along with its source doesn't change whether your other product is a derivative work or not.
I also recommend Emigrant Direct, they are another good online savings bank that pay you good interest. Don't start investing in the markets until you are out of school and debt free. It's that simple.
Read my blog, Finance.ParanoidBrain.com about investing and managing money. You really have to be careful about which advice you listen to regarding money, most people really are clueless. I'm clueless myself in a lot of ways, too, but I keep learning and reading up on financial topics.
What degree is higher than a PhD?
A PhD degree shows that the holder can do original research and write it up. It's actually not really that high a bar. In academia there are levels and levels of quality. Similarly, when hirers look for good people that have PhDs, you can read their theses to compare them. It shows you how meticulous they are, how smart they are, and how well they can communicate their ideas.
They don't have any incentive to be quick about it. The consumer has already parted with their money. The manufacturer farmed out the rebate work to a firm, so the ease of the rebate doesn't reflect much on the manufacturer. The rebate center has a big incentive to fight fraud since it costs them money, and almost no incentive to serve the customer's interest.
Surprisingly I haven't seen my explanation in the comments, so here it is. The basic idea is that rebates and coupons enable the suppliers to do a form of price discrimination. Consumers have different prices that they are willing to pay for the product. The supplier would ideally like to price the product just below what each consumer is willing to pay. This maximizes their profit more than a flat price would.
The problem for the supplier is discriminating between cheapskates (to which it wants to offer a low price to get the sale) and marks (to which it wants to offer a high price to maximize profit). Rebates and coupons offer a time-money tradeoff to the buyer. The buyer chooses whether to fill out the rebate/clip out the coupon to get the low price, or shop somewhere else and pay a bit more. The suppliers are betting that there is a correlation between being willing to spend time filling out forms and being a cheapskate (not a bad bet!)
Your study is interesting, but without knowing the 3rd party tools and applications that were used in the test how can we know the results are valid? Without disclosure the results are irreproducible. My hypothesis is that many of the applications were very poorly supported for linux and well-supported for Windows, but without knowing the applications I can't know if this is true or not.
You don't have an expectation of privacy in a restroom. This was settled recently with a drug-use case in a restroom. A couple was using drugs in a public restroom, a police officer knocked on the door and asked them to come out. The court ruled they do not have an expectation of privacy that would exclude the drugs as evidence.
Right, there are toll roads that work to a degree. But there are very significant costs associated with metering the roads. There have to be booths, ways to collect money, technology developed, congestion at the toll areas, etc.. I think for most roads there is more benefit to having the roads be publicly funded.
I actually think the correct solution for roads is carpool lanes that are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Anyone can use the regular lanes, and if you want to drive during rush hours and avoid the traffic you have to pay for it. There could be classes of HOV passes, some that only go to motorcycles, some that only go to buses, some that require multiple occupants, etc..
I agree with your sentiment, but there are more considerations. Every issue has points in favor of allowing the government to do it, and points against it. I think the best way to answer this question is by starting with excludability, then possibly making arguments against the general principle if a particular case has novel features.
The principle of excludability says that the government should provide services when the cost of excluding non-payers is higher than the cost of the service. When a service is excludable, i.e. only people who pay for the service get it, then private industry is a better option. The free market will come up with more efficient solutions than a government if the service is excludable, but the government solution will be more efficient if the service is not excludable.
Under the principle of excludability, roads should be government funded, universities should be private, electricity should be private, air pollution should be regulated by the government, libraries should be private.
What about wireless? I think right now there is a significant cost of excluding non-payers. This is the login window where you enter your Cingular account info (or whatever). But, this time cost is much smaller than the monthly wireless service charges, so I believe that wireless should not be provided by the government. I can also imagine many technological measures that make excluding non-payers very cheap.
The thing about senses of insects being wired directly to their muscles is how you kill them by hand, using intelligence. To kill flies, creep up slowly near them after they land. Clap hands quickly about 6 inches above the stationary fly. Flies instinctively and involuntarily jump backwards and up and start flying when startled. Right into your crushing hands!
It's funny, when you see someone do this is sticks with you, and you pass it on to other people by doing it when they are watching. It reminds me of the experiments with tool use in apes. Only we humans have the internet...
It's that mutually agreed condition part that is problematic. When I buy hardware or software, I don't normally agree to any conditions on it. If I did, your philosophy would have merit. There are even good examples of things you buy where you must agree to conditions (like cell phones); you read a contract and sign your name. Software and hardware companies want to have it both ways. They want an enforceable contract that users agree to, but they also want to present their wares in a friendly way that makes people think they are buying something normally.
The act itself has not affected me in a negative way directly, but it has affected my school, the University of California, Santa Cruz. International admissions are down, both to undergraduate and graduate programs. I believe things like the Patriot Act play a role in discouraging students from applying to schools in the US. Even if the act hasn't been used against students, it creates a chilling effect.
Luckily there are things my school is doing to try to limit any damage the Patriot Act could cause to foreign students (or any students) on campus. Here is a resolution that passed the academic senate unanimously at UCSC that instructs the chancellor to implement various policies to limit the damage Patriot Act requests can do. For example, it asks that library records be destroyed as soon as possible so they cannot be obtained by silent Patriot Act requests. If you are a student, ask what your school is doing about academic freedom and the Patriot Act. If the answer is "nothing", help make something happen. Join a committee as a student representative, or write letters to your chancellor or president.
You have to be really careful when you combine things. A lot of times you can end up with something that is less secure than either part separately. That said, I think this form of chaining is good. Being able to find MD5 or SHA1 collisions/preimages alone is not enough to break this hash. The hash is also at least as secure as SHA1 to any type of attack, since the SHA1 hash is included verbatim. The remaining item is to show why this chaining is better than simply using SHA1 with a longer signature length (i.e. the length of HASH1 + HASH2). I would guess that against known attacks, the longer single hash is better than two half-size hashes. The added safety of a chaining scheme such as this is the safety against unknown attacks that might completely break SHA1 or MD5 somehow.
What are the reasons to believe it is impossible to have the intelligence to be ethical without having something akin to free will? I'm not an expert in ethics or AI, but I would say there is no reason to believe one can't understand ethics without free will.
A more plausible statement might be that one cannot have any intelligence without free will, but this raises all kinds of controversial philosophical issues. Just focusing on ethics, it seems entirely reasonable that one could encode a standard system of ethics formally into a program. The only "free will" issue seems to come up if the ethical system is ambiguous or contradictory. Then the program would have to non-deterministically choose a resolution to the conflict.
But for people who gather fruit and nuts... it seems like it would be a survival necessity to be able to tell the differnce between 4 cashews (I'm going to need to eat more) and 400 (I'm going to be so full).
Actually, counting and comparison of two numbers are different cognitive activities. I would bet that tribal people with no concept of numbers beyond two or three are still quite capable of comparing quantities.
None of your examples apply to the ruling, since it is separate (list) syntax.
Actually, my examples are lists, of length two. Longer lists are an extension.
Regarding your comments about each case, I think you misunderstood my meaning. I was not describing words that should replace the connectives in the English sentence; I was describing the logical function of the connectives in the English sentence. In the first two cases, the logical meaning is indeed "nor" (as in the logical function). Whether they are "grammatical" or not I leave to the philosophers of language, noting only that I have seen both used by intelligent people. I would phrase the notice as "neither eating nor drinking is allowed in the library". Regarding the third case, the evaluation order is a red herring. There are four cases of returning books and being fined; the statement means to exclude the cases where you DON'T return the books and DON'T get fined, and the case where you DO return the books and DO get fined. Logically this is xor. You are right that there is also a temporal aspect that is not captured by the logical view; it wasn't my intention to presume to capture the entire meaning of the sentence using a single logical operator.
I have no issue using programming mentality to parse logical statements in language, but it's important to learn how the logic syntax of the target langauge (English) differs from your base of comparison.
I'm not sure where this is coming from. I was demonstrating that words such as "and" and "or" in English can have diverse meanings in a logical sense.
There is actually ambiguity in the English language on this issue (natural languages are ambiguous? Who would have guessed?) For an even simpler example, consider the following signs:
(1) No eating and drinking in the library.
(2) No eating or drinking in the library.
(3) Return your overdue books or you will get fined.
In the first case, "and" really means "nor". In the second case, "or" really means "nor". In the third case, "or" really means "xor".
My question/objection is, have they looked at the patents Microsoft has on this? This is an area Microsoft has been working on lately, and I'm sure they have a bunch of patents on the work they've done.
Re:I had this idea a long time ago :)
on
Rendering Shrek@Home?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I agree with most of the comments so far about why the idea wouldn't work directly, but I'm more optimistic about the general idea. For example, there is a technique called "partial abstract interpretation". The idea is that given code and the input data, one can see what the code would do on the input data and then change the code to not accept any input and do the correct thing on that particular given input. If the company distributed code in this way, it would just be code and no data (so their artwork doesn't leak out), and the code would only work to generate one scene; it would be hard or impossible to uninterpret the code (so they doen't leak their proprietary rendering technology).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a fan of learning JavaScript as a first language, it can be presented in a nice way. One of the best parts of js is closures, it really gets them right. I put together some interactive js lessons to teach closures a little while ago, give them a try and let me know what you think.
I'm an instructor for a university. The general principle that universities use is that anything you turn in, you assign copyright to the university. This means the instructor can use turnitin without violating copyright law. Is it right to require students to give up copyright over their own work? I don't agree with it, but it's not unreasonable. Most assignments are similar to "work for hire", written to a specification of someone else for a particular purpose (in this case, grading).
For public school, you can't choose whether to attend or compare policies between schools. In this case it is the government stealing intellectual property of its citizens. I applaud the kids for standing up to it.
Arnold Kling in Under the Radar recommends that entrepreneurs start out by bootstrapping their operation by finding paying customers and actually making money before thinking about outside funding. What are your opinions about this way of starting up?
The situation is not as dire as that: under the GPL you are allowed to distribute the GPL program along with its source code. The only reason this could conceivably be a problem is that it biases an outside observer into thinking that your product is a derivative work. But objectively, whether you distribute GPL code along with its source doesn't change whether your other product is a derivative work or not.
I also recommend Emigrant Direct, they are another good online savings bank that pay you good interest. Don't start investing in the markets until you are out of school and debt free. It's that simple.
Read my blog, Finance.ParanoidBrain.com about investing and managing money. You really have to be careful about which advice you listen to regarding money, most people really are clueless. I'm clueless myself in a lot of ways, too, but I keep learning and reading up on financial topics.
Don't forget UC Santa Cruz! We're closer to Silicon Valley than Berkeley.
Start reading from the description of what actually happened, that is the interesting part of the article.
What degree is higher than a PhD? A PhD degree shows that the holder can do original research and write it up. It's actually not really that high a bar. In academia there are levels and levels of quality. Similarly, when hirers look for good people that have PhDs, you can read their theses to compare them. It shows you how meticulous they are, how smart they are, and how well they can communicate their ideas.
They don't have any incentive to be quick about it. The consumer has already parted with their money. The manufacturer farmed out the rebate work to a firm, so the ease of the rebate doesn't reflect much on the manufacturer. The rebate center has a big incentive to fight fraud since it costs them money, and almost no incentive to serve the customer's interest.
The problem for the supplier is discriminating between cheapskates (to which it wants to offer a low price to get the sale) and marks (to which it wants to offer a high price to maximize profit). Rebates and coupons offer a time-money tradeoff to the buyer. The buyer chooses whether to fill out the rebate/clip out the coupon to get the low price, or shop somewhere else and pay a bit more. The suppliers are betting that there is a correlation between being willing to spend time filling out forms and being a cheapskate (not a bad bet!)
Your study is interesting, but without knowing the 3rd party tools and applications that were used in the test how can we know the results are valid? Without disclosure the results are irreproducible. My hypothesis is that many of the applications were very poorly supported for linux and well-supported for Windows, but without knowing the applications I can't know if this is true or not.
You don't have an expectation of privacy in a restroom. This was settled recently with a drug-use case in a restroom. A couple was using drugs in a public restroom, a police officer knocked on the door and asked them to come out. The court ruled they do not have an expectation of privacy that would exclude the drugs as evidence.
I actually think the correct solution for roads is carpool lanes that are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Anyone can use the regular lanes, and if you want to drive during rush hours and avoid the traffic you have to pay for it. There could be classes of HOV passes, some that only go to motorcycles, some that only go to buses, some that require multiple occupants, etc..
I agree with your sentiment, but there are more considerations. Every issue has points in favor of allowing the government to do it, and points against it. I think the best way to answer this question is by starting with excludability, then possibly making arguments against the general principle if a particular case has novel features. The principle of excludability says that the government should provide services when the cost of excluding non-payers is higher than the cost of the service. When a service is excludable, i.e. only people who pay for the service get it, then private industry is a better option. The free market will come up with more efficient solutions than a government if the service is excludable, but the government solution will be more efficient if the service is not excludable. Under the principle of excludability, roads should be government funded, universities should be private, electricity should be private, air pollution should be regulated by the government, libraries should be private. What about wireless? I think right now there is a significant cost of excluding non-payers. This is the login window where you enter your Cingular account info (or whatever). But, this time cost is much smaller than the monthly wireless service charges, so I believe that wireless should not be provided by the government. I can also imagine many technological measures that make excluding non-payers very cheap.
It's funny, when you see someone do this is sticks with you, and you pass it on to other people by doing it when they are watching. It reminds me of the experiments with tool use in apes. Only we humans have the internet...
It's that mutually agreed condition part that is problematic. When I buy hardware or software, I don't normally agree to any conditions on it. If I did, your philosophy would have merit. There are even good examples of things you buy where you must agree to conditions (like cell phones); you read a contract and sign your name. Software and hardware companies want to have it both ways. They want an enforceable contract that users agree to, but they also want to present their wares in a friendly way that makes people think they are buying something normally.
Luckily there are things my school is doing to try to limit any damage the Patriot Act could cause to foreign students (or any students) on campus. Here is a resolution that passed the academic senate unanimously at UCSC that instructs the chancellor to implement various policies to limit the damage Patriot Act requests can do. For example, it asks that library records be destroyed as soon as possible so they cannot be obtained by silent Patriot Act requests. If you are a student, ask what your school is doing about academic freedom and the Patriot Act. If the answer is "nothing", help make something happen. Join a committee as a student representative, or write letters to your chancellor or president.
You have to be really careful when you combine things. A lot of times you can end up with something that is less secure than either part separately. That said, I think this form of chaining is good. Being able to find MD5 or SHA1 collisions/preimages alone is not enough to break this hash. The hash is also at least as secure as SHA1 to any type of attack, since the SHA1 hash is included verbatim. The remaining item is to show why this chaining is better than simply using SHA1 with a longer signature length (i.e. the length of HASH1 + HASH2). I would guess that against known attacks, the longer single hash is better than two half-size hashes. The added safety of a chaining scheme such as this is the safety against unknown attacks that might completely break SHA1 or MD5 somehow.
What are the reasons to believe it is impossible to have the intelligence to be ethical without having something akin to free will? I'm not an expert in ethics or AI, but I would say there is no reason to believe one can't understand ethics without free will. A more plausible statement might be that one cannot have any intelligence without free will, but this raises all kinds of controversial philosophical issues. Just focusing on ethics, it seems entirely reasonable that one could encode a standard system of ethics formally into a program. The only "free will" issue seems to come up if the ethical system is ambiguous or contradictory. Then the program would have to non-deterministically choose a resolution to the conflict.
Actually, counting and comparison of two numbers are different cognitive activities. I would bet that tribal people with no concept of numbers beyond two or three are still quite capable of comparing quantities.
Actually, my examples are lists, of length two. Longer lists are an extension.
Regarding your comments about each case, I think you misunderstood my meaning. I was not describing words that should replace the connectives in the English sentence; I was describing the logical function of the connectives in the English sentence. In the first two cases, the logical meaning is indeed "nor" (as in the logical function). Whether they are "grammatical" or not I leave to the philosophers of language, noting only that I have seen both used by intelligent people. I would phrase the notice as "neither eating nor drinking is allowed in the library". Regarding the third case, the evaluation order is a red herring. There are four cases of returning books and being fined; the statement means to exclude the cases where you DON'T return the books and DON'T get fined, and the case where you DO return the books and DO get fined. Logically this is xor. You are right that there is also a temporal aspect that is not captured by the logical view; it wasn't my intention to presume to capture the entire meaning of the sentence using a single logical operator.
I have no issue using programming mentality to parse logical statements in language, but it's important to learn how the logic syntax of the target langauge (English) differs from your base of comparison.
I'm not sure where this is coming from. I was demonstrating that words such as "and" and "or" in English can have diverse meanings in a logical sense.
There is actually ambiguity in the English language on this issue (natural languages are ambiguous? Who would have guessed?) For an even simpler example, consider the following signs: (1) No eating and drinking in the library. (2) No eating or drinking in the library. (3) Return your overdue books or you will get fined. In the first case, "and" really means "nor". In the second case, "or" really means "nor". In the third case, "or" really means "xor".
My question/objection is, have they looked at the patents Microsoft has on this? This is an area Microsoft has been working on lately, and I'm sure they have a bunch of patents on the work they've done.
I agree with most of the comments so far about why the idea wouldn't work directly, but I'm more optimistic about the general idea. For example, there is a technique called "partial abstract interpretation". The idea is that given code and the input data, one can see what the code would do on the input data and then change the code to not accept any input and do the correct thing on that particular given input. If the company distributed code in this way, it would just be code and no data (so their artwork doesn't leak out), and the code would only work to generate one scene; it would be hard or impossible to uninterpret the code (so they doen't leak their proprietary rendering technology).