The best way to learn math is in a classroom with an instructor who lectures a little and expects student participation a lot. But since you can't be a full-time student, you'll have to make do without it for the most part. I strongly reccommend against striking out on your own until you've taken the full calculus sequence, though. Whether you need to start at the beginning or not is at your discretion, but take actual courses with an actual teacher up through multivariable calc, which will be the third semester or fourth/fifth quarter.
Whether or not it's useful to put undergraduates through a course in proof-writing before jumping into advanced courses is subject to a lot of debate (my position is that it is useful but not essential). But in your case, since you won't have feedback from a professor when you're trying to learn the advanced stuff, it's an absolute necessity. If possible, take a course like that from a local college or university. If you can't, I reccommend a textbook called Chapter Zero by Carol Schumacher. Carol was my academic adviser at Kenyon College, and I took a class from her based on that book. You won't learn a lot of math from it, but you'll learn what math is, and you'll learn how to learn math.
After that, go to mathworld.wolfram.com
and look around. It's a great resource for learning stuff, and even better for finding topics
you want to explore further. Find something that sounds interesting and that you can basically understand the description of. A lot of colleges and universities have course catalogs available online--find some schools teaching an undergraduate class on the topic you picked, then look for the most common textbook. Buy it. Read it, working through problem sets, until you get tired of it. Go back to mathworld and repeat.
I've had a similar set of experiences. I have a degree in math from a small, selective liberal arts college (Kenyon College), I took a mid-level course one summer at a Big Ten university (Ohio State, which has an excellent math graduate program), and second-year calculus in high school from a teacher who is now teaching essentially the same class at the local community college (Columbus State). Neither OSU nor CSCC can come close to comparing with my experience at Kenyon, but neither was really bad, and they didn't differ from each other that much. I would never trust a two-year school to teach the humanities or fine arts adequately, but any reputable community college will do a fine job with intro-level math or science.
...with everybody defending instead of creating something fun to watch.
I beg to differ. Except for baseball, the following is true of every sport I can think of: If you don't know anything about it, good offense is fun to watch. If you do know something about it, good defense is fun to watch. If you really understand the strategy of a sport, the better it's played, the happier you are as a spectator. The rules favor the defense in football/soccer, which means that a match played perfectly by both teams will end in a 0-0 draw. You're right that quality of play wasn't up to par for the most part, but the low scoring is a counterexample to that, not an argument in favor of it. In this case, the low scoring was more a matter of bad offense than good defense, but you have to remember that good defense will beat good offense.
You attempt the following as an illustrative paraphrasing of the post you're responding to:
...I'm getting the sense that the government doesn't want me harming that guy's family, which is obviously some sort of attack on my freedom.
Your attempt was, however, a miserable failure. This example differs from the government telling us what religion to believe in a substantial way, relevant to the discussion.
As I see it, and as there is reason to believe the Founders saw it, the role of government is to protect the freedom of its citizens. If I "rape some guy's wife and murder his daughter," I'm infringing on the freedom of that family to live their own life. If the government tells the same guy's daughter she's supposed to believe in God, it's infringing on the freedom of that family to live their own life (clearly to a lesser degree, but you get that when you use extreme examples). A government whose goal is the protection of freedom should condemn both acts.
Metallica has a significant techie fan base. Every techie I know, myself included, likes at least their old stuff. Thinking Lars is an idiot and disliking Metallica are two very different things.
all of the prebuilt PC manufacturers get huge bulk discounts
So do wholesalers.
assuming you want to run Windows or some other commercial OS and don't wish to steal it
Who wants to run a commercial OS? Even if you do, taking a copy from your old computer, if you don't plan to use it anymore, is NOT STEALING.
Less than a month ago, I built a new computer. It's an Athlon XP 1800+ with a 400W power supply, 512 megs of RAM and a 40 gig 7200rpm hard drive. I cannibalized the CD drives and sound card from my old computer, which is still my web- and mailserver. Even if I hadn't used anything from my old computer, it still would have cost me less than $500. I just configured a comparable system at Dell's website and it ended up costing over $1000. CompUSA advertises a similar system for $950.
For extreme low-end systems, the price is about the same for buying from a store vs. building yourself, but the shipping overhead very quickly pays for itself as you move towards more expensive components. The $10 savings on a slow CPU won't pay for shipping, but the $200 savings on a fast CPU will.
a respectable name brand
Like what? I can think of only one name brand I have the slightest respect for--IBM, which doesn't sell cheap low-end computers. HP, Dell, and Gateway all use in-house non-standard hardware so you can't upgrade and have to keep buying from them. But software and standard peripherals don't do a good job dealing with the broken hardware, so big-name computers are more error-prone.
If you have the know-how to do it right, there is not a single disadvantage to building your own computer. You'll save a lot of money, and you'll end up with a substantially better product.
Exactly. I have a degree in math. Show me a pool table, and I can tell you the best shot to take, not just to pocket the ball, but to set yourself up for the next shot. I watch professionals on espn2, and I'm just as good as they are at that part of the game. Even someone without much mathematical aptitude could learn that stuff a lot faster than the part I'm bad at. I don't play very often, so I don't have nearly the required precision with the cue stick, and everyone who plays more than once a month can beat me easily. Anyone can learn to figure out what to do. But actually doing it is a lot harder. It takes a lot of practice, and some degree of inborn skill. You can't get that any faster with the computer than without it.
Assembly will always be faster than a compiled language.
Not exactly true. Perfectly written assembly will always be faster than a compiled language. If it were easy enough to come up with perfectly written assembly that most programmers could do it, there wouldn't be any need for compilers at all.
Keep in mind that a 100-page book tells about as much story as a two-hour movie. Ender's Game is more than 300 pages. Some stuff has to be left out or changed. And also keep in mind that the very early draft that Card put online three or four years ago is NOT "the script thus far." It was written before he realized there were enough good child actors to keep the focus of the story on the children, and before he wrote Ender's Shadow.
Anderson is turned into a woman So what? Point to one place in the book where Anderson's gender makes the slightest bit of difference. In a visual medium, Anderson works better as a foil to Graff as a woman.
Bean is more prominent in order to do the sequel Bean is more prominent because he's an interesting character. Card regretted not doing more with him in the first place, that's why he wrote ES. Exploring the superficial similarities and subtle but important differences between Bean and Ender is interesting enough to warrant combining EG and ES into one movie--Card originally planned to do them separately.
As for Peter and Valentine, the reason EG is the book Card is trying to get filmed, instead of some of his other wonderful novels, is that the main storyline would work as a movie. Peter and Valentine aren't part of the main storyline. In Card's original short story, they didn't even exist. The story works without them, and their subplot would make for pretty boring cinema--all they do is talk and write. There's some stuff that works better in text, and some stuff that works better in drama. Peter and Valentine are firmly in the former category.
Enemy Mine was a horrible adaptation of the original story, with critical plot elements (like the human reciting the other's lineage to his family) given short shrift
Note that Wolfgang Petersen was the director of Enemy Mine, NOT the screenwriter. The screenwriter is the one who makes the decisions of what to keep or leave out when adapting a book. If you think Orson Scott Card is going to let anyone else write the script, you haven't been paying much attention. He's been waiting for years to find a studio that would let him write the script, give him some say in the director and cast, etc. He's a perfectionist and a control freak, and would much rather never have the movie made than have it made without his input. I'm completely confident that if this movie is being made at all, it's being made the way Card wants it.
I wouldn't exactly call it a "sleeper hit." Sleeper maybe, but not hit. It's a lot of fun, but it's not selling well at all. There's a reason it's only $25--you and the other three people who already own it are the only ones who realize it's worth buying.
A number of people have posted asking what the point was of making a single processor act like two processors. It's actually explained in the article linked to above.
Apparantly, he big deal is that a single processor can only handle one thread at a time--multitasking works by breaking programs down into threads, and working on one thread for a little while, then another, then another, then back to the first. But at any given time, only one thread is being actively executed. Hyperthreading changes this--a single processor can work on two threads truly simultaneously. This makes multitasking a hell of a lot more efficient.
Yes, I really believe that they can compress random data. Even though the various mathematical definitions of the word "random" all essentially mean "noncompressible." As pointed out many many times already, for any compression scheme to work at all, there HAVE to be noncompressible strings. The word "random" simply refers to such strings.
For a ratio of 100:1, a fantastically high proportion of strings must be noncompressible. Information theory is not my field, but I would assume it'd be something like this: Given an arbitrary string, there's a 1 in 2^100 chance it's compressible. Yay, the world's bandwidth problems are solved.
I can't believe Slashdot's editors even bothered to post this load of bull.
Exactly. Something we often forget is that computers are tools, they were never intended to be ends unto themselves. If you're interested in the real-world-problem-solving aspect, find a job where instead of writing software, you'll be building computer models. Operations research comes to mind--it'll take another couple of years to get a master's in it, but if you enjoy it it'll be worth it. If you're interested in the logic behind programming, go to grad school and become a computational (mathematician/physicist/chemist/biologist/etc.). Bottom line, if you like coding, but not the stuff in your classes, find something else to code. It's only another few months until graduation, and then you can do something you like, with your CS degree as a way in.
It's not that this is a monopolisic practice, it's that it's false advertising. They're trying to convince people to "upgrade" to the latest version of their product on the completely, undeniably false premise that all competetor's products are incapable of showing certain web pages properly. I'm using Mozilla 0.9.5 on Linux, and after applying a workaround, I found that the MSN page loaded and displayed properly. The only browser I can think of that MIGHT not display a remotely well-designed page correctly is Netscape 4.x. Presenting IE as the only competent browser is blatantly untrue, and false advertising is illegal.
Reverse engineering is taking all the information required to figure something out, and then figuring it out. This is not a metaphor, it's a literal definition. Under the DMCA and other laws that attempt to criminalize reverse engineering, you're allowed to have all the information you need to figure out how (for example):CueCat works, you're just not allowed to actually figure it out. This scares me, because I'm a mathematician (in-training). The intellectual process of reverse engineering is logically equivalent to the intellectual process of doing theoretical mathematics.
You may say that allowing math research is beneficial to everybody, so nobody would want to illegalize it, but the same is true of reverse engineering, and allowing research into algebraic number theory (which I happen to be interested in) is NOT beneficial to the NSA, because they want a worldwide monopoly on any field of study related to cryptography. If the RIAA and MPAA can bully the government into passing the DMCA, think what the NSA can do.
Disclaimer: I know the above paragraph is an overly reactionary exaggeration, so please don't flame me. My point was not to suggest that math might someday be illegal (I'm NOT suggesting that), but rather to illustrate the absurdity of restricting reverse engineering by showing a more obviously absurd equivalent law.
Have you ever used a VAX? Do you really know what one is or how it works?
Kenyon College, where (as you may already have guessed from my email and url) I go to school and, this summer, work for computing services, is just now phasing out the VAXen that were symbolically the center of computing here since the campus was first wired. Two years ago, when we were listed as one of Yahoo! Internet Life's 100 most wired colleges and universities, the VAX systems were the only options for official Kenyon e-mail. So while I'm no expert on VAXen or VMS, I have used a VAX many, many times (on the order of 5-10 times a day for a year and a half). I have yet to see a VMS VAX system do anything that can't be done faster and better by a Linux box, leading me to the conclusion that they're best used as doorstops.
This post has been moderated as funny (and rightly so), but it's actually not a bad idea.
It'd be pretty easy to write a CGI script that replaced all objectionable words with "(censored)" and blocked or replaced all images on sites that contained censored words. It seems to me that it would be pretty effective at stopping all and only objectionable content. Images aren't essential to most websites (and ALT tags are pretty effective for the exceptions--use Lynx for an hour or two if you don't believe me), so if the wrong ones got blocked, it's not a big deal. Wrongly censored content, such as "(censored) cancer is a disease that affects 10 million women nationwide", would still be intelligible, while rightly censored content, like "He (censored) her (censored) with the (censored) (censored) (censored)", is rendered more or less unintelligible, or at least mostly harmless. If you can decipher it, then you don't really need to be "protected" from it in the first place.
Don't forget Symphony&Metallica. Speaking as a classical musician who's recently been turned on to metal, I've found that the two genres are pretty stylistically similar to begin with. Aside from style, they're also similar in that they're both a lot more concerned with artistry than other kinds of music, which mostly focus on gut-level entertainment at the expense of all artistic value.
I can see how people who don't listen actively to music might think that metal and classical are totally dissimilar, because the instrumentation is so different. But really listening to music is more than just hearing it in the background--it's paying attention, searching for patterns and hidden similarities. If you listen for those things, you find that instrumentation is one of the only differences between metal and classical. I consider metal to be more related to classical than it is to rock/pop, even.
They arent mentally capable of refuting his points due to their truth and eloquence.
Truth? I don't object to Katz because his facts are wrong--they're not--or because I completely disagree with him--his opinions are usually pretty similar to mine.
Eloquence? He's pretty good with words, but I wouldn't go so far as eloquent. Eloquence doesn't have anything to do with the quality of an argument, anyway.
I object to Katz for two reasons: First because his essays are uniformally simplistic and populist. He assumes that his first reaction to something is the absolute truth, and furthermore assumes that the reasons he can immediately think of to support his viewpoint are the best ones. He looks at everything at the lowest level. Well, there's more to it than that. If your objective is to predict something, being right for the wrong reasons is the same as being right, but when your objective is to make a logical argument, being right for the wrong reasons is the same as being wrong. The mathematician in me reads Katz and thinks, "I've done it! Fermat's Last Theorem is correct because motorcycles don't have doors!" While FLT is correct, as proved by Wiles a couple of years ago, anyone who think's it's because motorcycles don't have doors is an idiot. Katz is doing the same thing (though obviously to a less extreme degree).
In this case, he argues from the (in his mind) self-evident truth that we all have a right to get free online music. That's neither self-evident nor necessarily true. He barely touches on why he believes that, and most of the thoughts he expressed on the matter are directly taken from the Against Intellectual Property essay linked to on/. the other day. The real issues are whether the company Napster has itself violated copyright laws, how much responsibility they should hold for assisting others in violating copyright laws, whether mp3-quality is enough lower than CD-quality that trading is fair use, and whether copyright laws in their present form are just and constitutional. Katz addresses only the last of these, and does not go into it in any depth. His article sounds like the outrage of a toddler who just lost a favorite toy.
The other reason I don't like Katz is this. It's not that he doesn't have anything interesting to say, it's that he has only one interesting thing to say, and insists upon saying it over and over again. All his columns are basically about the same ideas. I used to like him, actually. The first couple of his articles I read, I really enjoyed. As I read more and more of his stuff, I see that it's all exactly the same. If you look closely, you'll see that this is the theme of most of the Katz-bashing: the lists of key words found in every Katz article, the KatzBot jokes, and such.
Slashdot Mirror
The best way to learn math is in a classroom with an instructor who lectures a little and expects student participation a lot. But since you can't be a full-time student, you'll have to make do without it for the most part. I strongly reccommend against striking out on your own until you've taken the full calculus sequence, though. Whether you need to start at the beginning or not is at your discretion, but take actual courses with an actual teacher up through multivariable calc, which will be the third semester or fourth/fifth quarter.
Whether or not it's useful to put undergraduates through a course in proof-writing before jumping into advanced courses is subject to a lot of debate (my position is that it is useful but not essential). But in your case, since you won't have feedback from a professor when you're trying to learn the advanced stuff, it's an absolute necessity. If possible, take a course like that from a local college or university. If you can't, I reccommend a textbook called Chapter Zero by Carol Schumacher. Carol was my academic adviser at Kenyon College, and I took a class from her based on that book. You won't learn a lot of math from it, but you'll learn what math is, and you'll learn how to learn math.
After that, go to mathworld.wolfram.com and look around. It's a great resource for learning stuff, and even better for finding topics you want to explore further. Find something that sounds interesting and that you can basically understand the description of. A lot of colleges and universities have course catalogs available online--find some schools teaching an undergraduate class on the topic you picked, then look for the most common textbook. Buy it. Read it, working through problem sets, until you get tired of it. Go back to mathworld and repeat.
I've had a similar set of experiences. I have a degree in math from a small, selective liberal arts college (Kenyon College), I took a mid-level course one summer at a Big Ten university (Ohio State, which has an excellent math graduate program), and second-year calculus in high school from a teacher who is now teaching essentially the same class at the local community college (Columbus State). Neither OSU nor CSCC can come close to comparing with my experience at Kenyon, but neither was really bad, and they didn't differ from each other that much. I would never trust a two-year school to teach the humanities or fine arts adequately, but any reputable community college will do a fine job with intro-level math or science.
I beg to differ. Except for baseball, the following is true of every sport I can think of: If you don't know anything about it, good offense is fun to watch. If you do know something about it, good defense is fun to watch. If you really understand the strategy of a sport, the better it's played, the happier you are as a spectator. The rules favor the defense in football/soccer, which means that a match played perfectly by both teams will end in a 0-0 draw. You're right that quality of play wasn't up to par for the most part, but the low scoring is a counterexample to that, not an argument in favor of it. In this case, the low scoring was more a matter of bad offense than good defense, but you have to remember that good defense will beat good offense.
You attempt the following as an illustrative paraphrasing of the post you're responding to:
Your attempt was, however, a miserable failure. This example differs from the government telling us what religion to believe in a substantial way, relevant to the discussion.
As I see it, and as there is reason to believe the Founders saw it, the role of government is to protect the freedom of its citizens. If I "rape some guy's wife and murder his daughter," I'm infringing on the freedom of that family to live their own life. If the government tells the same guy's daughter she's supposed to believe in God, it's infringing on the freedom of that family to live their own life (clearly to a lesser degree, but you get that when you use extreme examples). A government whose goal is the protection of freedom should condemn both acts.
Metallica has a significant techie fan base. Every techie I know, myself included, likes at least their old stuff. Thinking Lars is an idiot and disliking Metallica are two very different things.
I'm dumbfounded that this got modded up to 5.
all of the prebuilt PC manufacturers get huge bulk discounts
So do wholesalers.
assuming you want to run Windows or some other commercial OS and don't wish to steal it
Who wants to run a commercial OS? Even if you do, taking a copy from your old computer, if you don't plan to use it anymore, is NOT STEALING.
Less than a month ago, I built a new computer. It's an Athlon XP 1800+ with a 400W power supply, 512 megs of RAM and a 40 gig 7200rpm hard drive. I cannibalized the CD drives and sound card from my old computer, which is still my web- and mailserver. Even if I hadn't used anything from my old computer, it still would have cost me less than $500. I just configured a comparable system at Dell's website and it ended up costing over $1000. CompUSA advertises a similar system for $950.
For extreme low-end systems, the price is about the same for buying from a store vs. building yourself, but the shipping overhead very quickly pays for itself as you move towards more expensive components. The $10 savings on a slow CPU won't pay for shipping, but the $200 savings on a fast CPU will.
a respectable name brand
Like what? I can think of only one name brand I have the slightest respect for--IBM, which doesn't sell cheap low-end computers. HP, Dell, and Gateway all use in-house non-standard hardware so you can't upgrade and have to keep buying from them. But software and standard peripherals don't do a good job dealing with the broken hardware, so big-name computers are more error-prone.
If you have the know-how to do it right, there is not a single disadvantage to building your own computer. You'll save a lot of money, and you'll end up with a substantially better product.
Exactly. I have a degree in math. Show me a pool table, and I can tell you the best shot to take, not just to pocket the ball, but to set yourself up for the next shot. I watch professionals on espn2, and I'm just as good as they are at that part of the game. Even someone without much mathematical aptitude could learn that stuff a lot faster than the part I'm bad at. I don't play very often, so I don't have nearly the required precision with the cue stick, and everyone who plays more than once a month can beat me easily. Anyone can learn to figure out what to do. But actually doing it is a lot harder. It takes a lot of practice, and some degree of inborn skill. You can't get that any faster with the computer than without it.
Assembly will always be faster than a compiled language.
Not exactly true. Perfectly written assembly will always be faster than a compiled language. If it were easy enough to come up with perfectly written assembly that most programmers could do it, there wouldn't be any need for compilers at all.
I could be wrong, but I thought that Andy Kaufmann? I can see either him or Python wanting to do that.
Actually, it's crypto people who use number theory. Physicists use analysis and topology :-)
Keep in mind that a 100-page book tells about as much story as a two-hour movie. Ender's Game is more than 300 pages. Some stuff has to be left out or changed. And also keep in mind that the very early draft that Card put online three or four years ago is NOT "the script thus far." It was written before he realized there were enough good child actors to keep the focus of the story on the children, and before he wrote Ender's Shadow.
Anderson is turned into a woman
So what? Point to one place in the book where Anderson's gender makes the slightest bit of difference. In a visual medium, Anderson works better as a foil to Graff as a woman.
Bean is more prominent in order to do the sequel
Bean is more prominent because he's an interesting character. Card regretted not doing more with him in the first place, that's why he wrote ES. Exploring the superficial similarities and subtle but important differences between Bean and Ender is interesting enough to warrant combining EG and ES into one movie--Card originally planned to do them separately.
As for Peter and Valentine, the reason EG is the book Card is trying to get filmed, instead of some of his other wonderful novels, is that the main storyline would work as a movie. Peter and Valentine aren't part of the main storyline. In Card's original short story, they didn't even exist. The story works without them, and their subplot would make for pretty boring cinema--all they do is talk and write. There's some stuff that works better in text, and some stuff that works better in drama. Peter and Valentine are firmly in the former category.
Enemy Mine was a horrible adaptation of the original story, with critical plot elements (like the human reciting the other's lineage to his family) given short shrift
Note that Wolfgang Petersen was the director of Enemy Mine, NOT the screenwriter. The screenwriter is the one who makes the decisions of what to keep or leave out when adapting a book. If you think Orson Scott Card is going to let anyone else write the script, you haven't been paying much attention. He's been waiting for years to find a studio that would let him write the script, give him some say in the director and cast, etc. He's a perfectionist and a control freak, and would much rather never have the movie made than have it made without his input. I'm completely confident that if this movie is being made at all, it's being made the way Card wants it.
I wouldn't exactly call it a "sleeper hit." Sleeper maybe, but not hit. It's a lot of fun, but it's not selling well at all. There's a reason it's only $25--you and the other three people who already own it are the only ones who realize it's worth buying.
That having been said, has anyone converted this to RPM yet?
Error: Rootkit depends on Rootkit. Installation failed.
A number of people have posted asking what the point was of making a single processor act like two processors. It's actually explained in the article linked to above.
Apparantly, he big deal is that a single processor can only handle one thread at a time--multitasking works by breaking programs down into threads, and working on one thread for a little while, then another, then another, then back to the first. But at any given time, only one thread is being actively executed. Hyperthreading changes this--a single processor can work on two threads truly simultaneously. This makes multitasking a hell of a lot more efficient.
Yes, I really believe that they can compress random data. Even though the various mathematical definitions of the word "random" all essentially mean "noncompressible." As pointed out many many times already, for any compression scheme to work at all, there HAVE to be noncompressible strings. The word "random" simply refers to such strings.
For a ratio of 100:1, a fantastically high proportion of strings must be noncompressible. Information theory is not my field, but I would assume it'd be something like this: Given an arbitrary string, there's a 1 in 2^100 chance it's compressible. Yay, the world's bandwidth problems are solved.
I can't believe Slashdot's editors even bothered to post this load of bull.
CS is an enabler for most of us not an end.
Exactly. Something we often forget is that computers are tools, they were never intended to be ends unto themselves. If you're interested in the real-world-problem-solving aspect, find a job where instead of writing software, you'll be building computer models. Operations research comes to mind--it'll take another couple of years to get a master's in it, but if you enjoy it it'll be worth it. If you're interested in the logic behind programming, go to grad school and become a computational (mathematician/physicist/chemist/biologist/etc.). Bottom line, if you like coding, but not the stuff in your classes, find something else to code. It's only another few months until graduation, and then you can do something you like, with your CS degree as a way in.
It's not that this is a monopolisic practice, it's that it's false advertising. They're trying to convince people to "upgrade" to the latest version of their product on the completely, undeniably false premise that all competetor's products are incapable of showing certain web pages properly. I'm using Mozilla 0.9.5 on Linux, and after applying a workaround, I found that the MSN page loaded and displayed properly. The only browser I can think of that MIGHT not display a remotely well-designed page correctly is Netscape 4.x. Presenting IE as the only competent browser is blatantly untrue, and false advertising is illegal.
Reverse engineering is taking all the information required to figure something out, and then figuring it out. This is not a metaphor, it's a literal definition. Under the DMCA and other laws that attempt to criminalize reverse engineering, you're allowed to have all the information you need to figure out how (for example) :CueCat works, you're just not allowed to actually figure it out. This scares me, because I'm a mathematician (in-training). The intellectual process of reverse engineering is logically equivalent to the intellectual process of doing theoretical mathematics.
You may say that allowing math research is beneficial to everybody, so nobody would want to illegalize it, but the same is true of reverse engineering, and allowing research into algebraic number theory (which I happen to be interested in) is NOT beneficial to the NSA, because they want a worldwide monopoly on any field of study related to cryptography. If the RIAA and MPAA can bully the government into passing the DMCA, think what the NSA can do.
Disclaimer: I know the above paragraph is an overly reactionary exaggeration, so please don't flame me. My point was not to suggest that math might someday be illegal (I'm NOT suggesting that), but rather to illustrate the absurdity of restricting reverse engineering by showing a more obviously absurd equivalent law.
Have you ever used a VAX? Do you really know what one is or how it works?
Kenyon College, where (as you may already have guessed from my email and url) I go to school and, this summer, work for computing services, is just now phasing out the VAXen that were symbolically the center of computing here since the campus was first wired. Two years ago, when we were listed as one of Yahoo! Internet Life's 100 most wired colleges and universities, the VAX systems were the only options for official Kenyon e-mail. So while I'm no expert on VAXen or VMS, I have used a VAX many, many times (on the order of 5-10 times a day for a year and a half). I have yet to see a VMS VAX system do anything that can't be done faster and better by a Linux box, leading me to the conclusion that they're best used as doorstops.
This post has been moderated as funny (and rightly so), but it's actually not a bad idea.
It'd be pretty easy to write a CGI script that replaced all objectionable words with "(censored)" and blocked or replaced all images on sites that contained censored words. It seems to me that it would be pretty effective at stopping all and only objectionable content. Images aren't essential to most websites (and ALT tags are pretty effective for the exceptions--use Lynx for an hour or two if you don't believe me), so if the wrong ones got blocked, it's not a big deal. Wrongly censored content, such as "(censored) cancer is a disease that affects 10 million women nationwide", would still be intelligible, while rightly censored content, like "He (censored) her (censored) with the (censored) (censored) (censored)", is rendered more or less unintelligible, or at least mostly harmless. If you can decipher it, then you don't really need to be "protected" from it in the first place.
Candlemass?
Apocalyptica?
Don't forget Symphony&Metallica. Speaking as a classical musician who's recently been turned on to metal, I've found that the two genres are pretty stylistically similar to begin with. Aside from style, they're also similar in that they're both a lot more concerned with artistry than other kinds of music, which mostly focus on gut-level entertainment at the expense of all artistic value.
I can see how people who don't listen actively to music might think that metal and classical are totally dissimilar, because the instrumentation is so different. But really listening to music is more than just hearing it in the background--it's paying attention, searching for patterns and hidden similarities. If you listen for those things, you find that instrumentation is one of the only differences between metal and classical. I consider metal to be more related to classical than it is to rock/pop, even.
But hell do I love it!
Amen to that!
They arent mentally capable of refuting his points due to their truth and eloquence.
Truth? I don't object to Katz because his facts are wrong--they're not--or because I completely disagree with him--his opinions are usually pretty similar to mine.
Eloquence? He's pretty good with words, but I wouldn't go so far as eloquent. Eloquence doesn't have anything to do with the quality of an argument, anyway.
I object to Katz for two reasons:
First because his essays are uniformally simplistic and populist. He assumes that his first reaction to something is the absolute truth, and furthermore assumes that the reasons he can immediately think of to support his viewpoint are the best ones. He looks at everything at the lowest level. Well, there's more to it than that. If your objective is to predict something, being right for the wrong reasons is the same as being right, but when your objective is to make a logical argument, being right for the wrong reasons is the same as being wrong. The mathematician in me reads Katz and thinks, "I've done it! Fermat's Last Theorem is correct because motorcycles don't have doors!" While FLT is correct, as proved by Wiles a couple of years ago, anyone who think's it's because motorcycles don't have doors is an idiot. Katz is doing the same thing (though obviously to a less extreme degree).
In this case, he argues from the (in his mind) self-evident truth that we all have a right to get free online music. That's neither self-evident nor necessarily true. He barely touches on why he believes that, and most of the thoughts he expressed on the matter are directly taken from the Against Intellectual Property essay linked to on /. the other day. The real issues are whether the company Napster has itself violated copyright laws, how much responsibility they should hold for assisting others in violating copyright laws, whether mp3-quality is enough lower than CD-quality that trading is fair use, and whether copyright laws in their present form are just and constitutional. Katz addresses only the last of these, and does not go into it in any depth. His article sounds like the outrage of a toddler who just lost a favorite toy.
The other reason I don't like Katz is this. It's not that he doesn't have anything interesting to say, it's that he has only one interesting thing to say, and insists upon saying it over and over again. All his columns are basically about the same ideas. I used to like him, actually. The first couple of his articles I read, I really enjoyed. As I read more and more of his stuff, I see that it's all exactly the same. If you look closely, you'll see that this is the theme of most of the Katz-bashing: the lists of key words found in every Katz article, the KatzBot jokes, and such.
I could write better drivel with a Perl script that randomly assembled blocks of text from Katz's buzzword-bingo writing style.
Better drivel? Jon Katz writes the best damn drivel I've ever read in my life!
This is absurd. How can you sue a search engine for working? Next they'll be looking for the guy who invented FTP.