For "CIA", read "Special Circumstances", if I read your user name correctly?;-)
Seriously, though, it would probably be an NSA project, rather than CIA. Not to mention the fact that the CIA has too much trouble getting their act together. Or perhaps the FBI, which would be more frightening. Or maybe the TAA (TLA Assignment Authority).
It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's SUPER Fly. No, wait, superfly has been done. The six million dollar fly? The bionic fly? If it could do marketing, I see a TV series in the offing... The problem, though, would be making the tiny super suits for the various insects. Very expensive.
You have taken a term from game theory, and tried to apply it in a social/economic sense. "Zero-sum" refers to a well-defined property of the payoff matrix of a game. What you are looking for is more of a distinction between "competitive" and "cooperative" games. In this case, trying to generalize the term is just an invitation to misunderstanding.
The best games tend to mix both aspects. This teaches the value of both sets of skills, in addition to the ways in which they interact.
I'd suggest that you get your kids involved in some team sports. Particularly those where one competes with others for a place on the team, and then cooperates with those same individuals to succeed in competition against other groups.
In the larger sense, consider this: if a game is truly "zero-sum" (in your sense, not the game-theoretic sense), no one would play it. Why would they play if they did not get anything out of it? In the real world, people play games because they derive some personal, emotional, or economic benefit from playing, apart from winning or losing in the structure of the game. I would suggest that the "zero-sum" characteristic is mostly irrelevant to teaching children what you want them to learn.
Consider the "game" of professional football. Nominally, the payoff matrix is zero-sum (one winning team, one losing team). However, each player on the field is paid more than an average American makes in a year. The players themselves net millions every week. The teams make money from the fans and the television rights. So who loses? The fans? They line up to pay money to see the game in person, or they sit through moronic TV ads to watch this "game". There must be some emotional satisfaction here (note that I don't insist that everyone enjoys pro football, only that those who do watch it derive some perceived personal benefit from doing so).
Looking at games as social/economic/emotional activities, they are both strictly zero-sum (assuming conservation of man-hours and appropriate valuations), and wildly non-zero-sum (in the emotional sense). Which means, of course, that the term is being misused.
I assume that you're looking for positive-sum games, here (that is, everybody "wins"), rather than negative-sum games (everybody "loses" - the only winning strategy is not to play). Unforunately, they tend to be fairly uninteresting (and, as mentioned above, they tend to turn into a competition into who can "win the most").
There have been quite a few comments on the contracting business in this thread, but my take on this is somewhat different. I am partially responsible for hiring both contract and employee developers. In this capacity, I would have to say that you would probably have a better chance of getting a full-time job.
I've done a few networking/Sys Admin jobs, but no programming jobs. This is a bit of a problem. You may have "great programming skills," but where have you demonstrated this? Note the distinction between a programmer and a developer. You can code (I assume), but can you take a project from requirements to delivery? That is what I am looking for from a contractor. I have to be sure that you can do the job before you come in, because the (nearly inevitable) time that you spend learning while doing the job is wasted for me - you will be leaving when the job is done. In addition to the fact that you will cost me a bit more, relative to an employee. My expectations are higher for a contractor, because I'm not developing a long-term employee.
You should also consider the development role that you want. I would hire contract developers for detailed design and implementation, but architecture decisions are made (in general) by employees. This is biased by the fact that I work for a software company, meaning that I am hiring developers for the company's main product (read: revenue stream), rather than hiring for a project that is a cost item. There is a huge cost when the developers that best know the product leave the company.
There are several pieces of advice the I would offer. First, do something to establish a track record. You will need some working experience developing software before anyone that you want to work for will hire you as a contractor. Second, be very careful who you work for at first. There are many companies who will be looking to exploit you in return for that first entry of programming experience on your resume. I would advise a smaller company, but (more importantly) try and find one where you know a working developer. Third, try and find an agency that will help you get placed. A good agency can be very helpful to both you and the employer. Again, knowing someone who has dealt with the agency is very helpful (what agency or agencies does your current employer use?). Fourth, consider your current employer. Do they do development work? They might be willing to have you do development work, and they get bargain while you get much-needed work experience. Of course, you may not want to work for this company. Fifth, be careful about how you state your experience. From my point of view, you don't have
any
development experience (note that I don't know how you acquired your "programming experience" - I would consider work on an open source project to be good experience).
From what I can see, your biggest priority at this point is resume building. A contracting Web site might help; there will be more emphasis on how you present yourself in terms of information content. An open source development project would also help.
Assuming that you have a good mirror on the ship, ground-based lasers could give you up to twice the impulse of a ship-based laser. Plus, you avoid having to carry the engine and fuel along. Of course, you also have to have a braking laser on the other end (or you have a braking engine). This was a plot element in one of Niven's stories (main theme was RNA education pills). The ship in question was a light-sail craft that launched by laser (or by making the star explode), and braked by starlight alone.
In the book, the Fenrings represent the ruthlessness of the BG breeding program. He is an "almost-Kwisatz Haderach, a genetic-eunuch and a killer." She seduces Feyd to save his genes for the program. This is lost in the miniseries, as far as I could tell.
You're spot on about Penrose's book. I had some trouble with his personal biases, but there is a ton of interesting stuff.
Didn't Gödel's incompleteness theorem precede the halting proof, though? It's not the set of axioms that is significant, in any case, it is the power of the formal system that is used to reason from them.
As I stated in this comment...
Stating doesn't make it so. If you're talking about the Halting Problem, it is correct that a certain class of machines (those with computing power equivalent to a Turing (how's that for irony?) machine) cannot decide whether or not, given a certain input, a machine of this class will halt. However, your contention that humans can accurately make such a decision is likely not correct.
If you want to argue about whether or not the human mind is a fiendishly complex state machine, you can't start by assuming your conclusion.
Actually, not 23 people. That's the size of a group where the probability that two unspecified individuals have the same birthday exceeds 0.5. In this case, the birthday is specified, so the assumptions of the "paradox" do not apply. The probability that we're actually looking at in this case is the probability that a given person was born on November 20.
Example #1: Florida would have 25 electoral points. Assuming the following vote percentages ( Nader 20%; Bush 40%; Gore 40% ) the electoral points would be awarded as: Nader 5; Bush 20; Gore 20.
Did you write the vote-counting software for New Mexico?
7:30 EST = 6:30 CST. All of the polls in the Midwest were also still open. In fact, polls in the Florida panhandle were still open (according to the news that I saw last night).
While I don't agree with Bush in this case (though I will vote for him anyway), your political analysis is inaccurate at best. The vast majority of Americans are largely ignorant of the Internet, and even knowledgeable users are frequently unaware of many of its implications. On this matter, Bush is (unfortunately) in tune with majority thought. The fact is that your "Americans turning 18" vote in insignificant numbers.
I find the "Internet as panacea" even more irritating than "Internet as demon" line of thought. The net is a tool, it is used to both create and solve problems.
This hysterical pandering has nothing to do with the reality of children's lives, or their welfare.
Good point. What about your equally hysterical pandering to the biases of Slashdot users?
The sad political truth is that access to the Net, the Web and broadband equals creativity, confidence and opportunity.
Absolutely untrue. Your prejudice is showing.
If American schoolchildren were provided the same kind of bandwidth college students are, just imagine the kind of creative technological outpouring they might be capable of, not only in primary and secondary schools, but by the time they hit colleges and universities.
Hot air worthy of a professional "Boobus Americanus," Jon.
Countries that are spending the money to give young children access to bandwidth -- many of the Scandinavian countries are doing this -- are seeding economic, educational and creative success, equality and prosperity.
A post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument at best. For one with your intellectual attitude, you demonstrate a remarkable lack of knowledge of logic and scientific method.
If either Bush, Cheney, Gore or Lieberman cared a whit about children, they would shriek instead about the paucity of decent Internet access -- and even decent computers -- in America's public elementary and middle schools.
America's schools need fewer computers and better teachers. If the money wasted on computers (read Cliff Stoll's High Tech Heretic) were put into teacher salaries, we might be able to attract the cream of the next generation of college graduates. If parents were willing to fight local bureaucracies, the result might be quality education. But this is not something that can be done on the national level, outside of providing funds.
Personal experience indicates that the role of computers in education is primarily for political figures to impress validators (voters and parents) with how well they are doing their job. Once the computers reach the classroom, those students that already know how to use them do so; those students most in need of computer education ignore them.
The biggest social, cultural and political issues in the country almost all relate to technology...
You greatly overplay the significance of the technology aspect of these issues. They are about our values, and the choices that we make. Too often, we are abdicating those choices. To the extent that Bush introduces values into the discussion, he is far the superior candidate. Lieberman as well (Gore, on the other hand, appears to be a philosophical null pointer). Values should not (and in fact can not) be rammed down anyone's throat, but they do have a place in the discussion.
The aproximately 78 million Americans aged 21 and younger account for 28% of the population.
Many of your stories have dealt with the rights of young people. While such advocacy is needed, the reason that individuals under 18 can't vote is because they are not judged to be responsible for their actions. From my experience this is accurate.
Check the Census Bureau for some real numbers on this; they show population under 18 at the same level as 1990 (down since 1995, though probably not statistically significant).
Don't blame the Internet; blame the parents (and hold them responsible).
Re:I'm a Maths Graduate but ...
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure (don't remember). The Halting Problem came to mind first. Anything that involves enumerating all possible solutions is solvable in polynomial time on a non-deterministic computer. Perhaps something where the cardinality of the solution space is aleph-one or above. Depends on a good definition of a non-deterministic computer (which, in my experience, has always had a degree of fuzziness).
Re:Minimum clique????
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
"Minimum clique partition" refers to the minimum number of complete subgraphs into which the subject graph can be partitioned, not the smallest subgraphs (which is trivial).
Re:what the hell is polynomial time?
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
Polynomial time means that the time required to execute the algorithm can be expressed by some polynomial in n, the size of the input (for instance, the number of cities in a travelling salesman problem). Practically, this is expressed as O(n^k), for some constant k representing the highest power of n in the polynomial (since this term is likely to dominate, as n increases).
Polynomial time is generally used to distinguish from exponential time (O(k^n), usually O(2^n)), which is generally the amount of time required to check all possible solutions.
There are also time complexities that are not polynomial, but are not considered to be exponential, such as O(n^log n).
It is important to remember that these are theoretical complexity measures. The generalities that they imply often are masked by features of specific implementations, particularly for small values of n.
Re:This is an incorrect definition of NP
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
No, the definition is exactly correct, without the parenthetical comment. Although there are aspects of human cognition that are remarkably similar to non-deterministic algorithms.
P is a subset of NP; the question is whether or not there exist any problems that are in NP but not in P. This is reducible to the problem of satisfiability (See the Garey and Johnson reference from the article page).
The concept of "verified in polynomial time" seems less than useful; all NP-complete problems are decision problems (have a yes/no answer) because they are (by definition) transformable to satisfiability in polynomial time. What does it mean to verify a yes or no answer (outside of re-solving the problem)?
Re:I'm a Maths Graduate but ...
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 5
One inaccuracy...
NP does not mean non-P. An NP problem is one that can be solved in polynomial time on a "non-deterministic" (think infinitely parallel) computer. There are some problems (such as the Halting Problem) that are formally undecidable - not solvable in polynomial time even on a non-deterministic computer. So the statement "A problem is said to be within the class of complexity P if... Otherwise the problem is said to be in complexity class NP." is not strictly accurate.
I tend to agree with the person who is inclined to wait for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
The last few nights, stories on the CluelessCat have been airing on WFAA (TV) in Dallas, which is owned by one of the major CC investment partners. They give the appearance of a balanced view, but last night they gave prominence the the COT's assertion that they have coded the server-side software so as to make it "impossible" to track individual users. Until they change the software, of course. They did interview someone from the Privacy Foundation, who made some good points. If DC were running out of cash, would they hesitate to track and sell your Web browsing information? I don't think so - or, at least, I'm not willing to trust them. They have not acted in a trustworthy manner.
You didn't want one in your Pentium III. You didn't want them in your Microsoft Word documents. But you've got one in your CueCat. No big deal, DC just wants to track everything that you do on the Web.
The net has enabled communication to an unprecedented degree. The same effect that allows you to look up directions to any address also allows pedophiles and hate groups to gather in virtual communities. These "negative" groups are tightly knit, due to strongly held beliefs and social pressure.
In his BuSab future (Whipping Star, The Dosadi Experiment, a couple of stories), Frank Herbert postulated a time when all red tape had been removed from the government machinery. It worked too well. The Bureau of Sabotage was created to throw some judicious monkey wrenches into the machinery. The question of whether or not the communications structure of the Internet works too well has yet to be answered.
On the question of languages. My opinion is that the different conceptual maps encouraged by different languages are a valuable phenomenon. And I don't think that multiple languages are going to disappear. Change form, perhaps, however. As current languages reflect current community structure (geographical), future languages may well reflect the structure of intellectual communities. To some extent, this is already happening.
Slashdot Mirror
For "CIA", read "Special Circumstances", if I read your user name correctly? ;-)
Seriously, though, it would probably be an NSA project, rather than CIA. Not to mention the fact that the CIA has too much trouble getting their act together. Or perhaps the FBI, which would be more frightening. Or maybe the TAA (TLA Assignment Authority).
It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's SUPER Fly. No, wait, superfly has been done. The six million dollar fly? The bionic fly? If it could do marketing, I see a TV series in the offing... The problem, though, would be making the tiny super suits for the various insects. Very expensive.
You have taken a term from game theory, and tried to apply it in a social/economic sense. "Zero-sum" refers to a well-defined property of the payoff matrix of a game. What you are looking for is more of a distinction between "competitive" and "cooperative" games. In this case, trying to generalize the term is just an invitation to misunderstanding.
The best games tend to mix both aspects. This teaches the value of both sets of skills, in addition to the ways in which they interact.
I'd suggest that you get your kids involved in some team sports. Particularly those where one competes with others for a place on the team, and then cooperates with those same individuals to succeed in competition against other groups.
In the larger sense, consider this: if a game is truly "zero-sum" (in your sense, not the game-theoretic sense), no one would play it. Why would they play if they did not get anything out of it? In the real world, people play games because they derive some personal, emotional, or economic benefit from playing, apart from winning or losing in the structure of the game. I would suggest that the "zero-sum" characteristic is mostly irrelevant to teaching children what you want them to learn.
Consider the "game" of professional football. Nominally, the payoff matrix is zero-sum (one winning team, one losing team). However, each player on the field is paid more than an average American makes in a year. The players themselves net millions every week. The teams make money from the fans and the television rights. So who loses? The fans? They line up to pay money to see the game in person, or they sit through moronic TV ads to watch this "game". There must be some emotional satisfaction here (note that I don't insist that everyone enjoys pro football, only that those who do watch it derive some perceived personal benefit from doing so).
Looking at games as social/economic/emotional activities, they are both strictly zero-sum (assuming conservation of man-hours and appropriate valuations), and wildly non-zero-sum (in the emotional sense). Which means, of course, that the term is being misused.
I assume that you're looking for positive-sum games, here (that is, everybody "wins"), rather than negative-sum games (everybody "loses" - the only winning strategy is not to play). Unforunately, they tend to be fairly uninteresting (and, as mentioned above, they tend to turn into a competition into who can "win the most").
Oops - wrong tag. Consider the "any" bolded. Consider me embarassed.
Could we have the "Submit" button further away from the "Preview" button?
I've done a few networking/Sys Admin jobs, but no programming jobs. This is a bit of a problem. You may have "great programming skills," but where have you demonstrated this? Note the distinction between a programmer and a developer. You can code (I assume), but can you take a project from requirements to delivery? That is what I am looking for from a contractor. I have to be sure that you can do the job before you come in, because the (nearly inevitable) time that you spend learning while doing the job is wasted for me - you will be leaving when the job is done. In addition to the fact that you will cost me a bit more, relative to an employee. My expectations are higher for a contractor, because I'm not developing a long-term employee.
You should also consider the development role that you want. I would hire contract developers for detailed design and implementation, but architecture decisions are made (in general) by employees. This is biased by the fact that I work for a software company, meaning that I am hiring developers for the company's main product (read: revenue stream), rather than hiring for a project that is a cost item. There is a huge cost when the developers that best know the product leave the company.
There are several pieces of advice the I would offer. First, do something to establish a track record. You will need some working experience developing software before anyone that you want to work for will hire you as a contractor. Second, be very careful who you work for at first. There are many companies who will be looking to exploit you in return for that first entry of programming experience on your resume. I would advise a smaller company, but (more importantly) try and find one where you know a working developer. Third, try and find an agency that will help you get placed. A good agency can be very helpful to both you and the employer. Again, knowing someone who has dealt with the agency is very helpful (what agency or agencies does your current employer use?). Fourth, consider your current employer. Do they do development work? They might be willing to have you do development work, and they get bargain while you get much-needed work experience. Of course, you may not want to work for this company. Fifth, be careful about how you state your experience. From my point of view, you don't have
any
development experience (note that I don't know how you acquired your "programming experience" - I would consider work on an open source project to be good experience).From what I can see, your biggest priority at this point is resume building. A contracting Web site might help; there will be more emphasis on how you present yourself in terms of information content. An open source development project would also help.
Good luck!
Assuming that you have a good mirror on the ship, ground-based lasers could give you up to twice the impulse of a ship-based laser. Plus, you avoid having to carry the engine and fuel along. Of course, you also have to have a braking laser on the other end (or you have a braking engine). This was a plot element in one of Niven's stories (main theme was RNA education pills). The ship in question was a light-sail craft that launched by laser (or by making the star explode), and braked by starlight alone.
In the book, the Fenrings represent the ruthlessness of the BG breeding program. He is an "almost-Kwisatz Haderach, a genetic-eunuch and a killer." She seduces Feyd to save his genes for the program. This is lost in the miniseries, as far as I could tell.
You're spot on about Penrose's book. I had some trouble with his personal biases, but there is a ton of interesting stuff.
Didn't Gödel's incompleteness theorem precede the halting proof, though? It's not the set of axioms that is significant, in any case, it is the power of the formal system that is used to reason from them.
As I stated in this comment...
Stating doesn't make it so. If you're talking about the Halting Problem, it is correct that a certain class of machines (those with computing power equivalent to a Turing (how's that for irony?) machine) cannot decide whether or not, given a certain input, a machine of this class will halt. However, your contention that humans can accurately make such a decision is likely not correct.
If you want to argue about whether or not the human mind is a fiendishly complex state machine, you can't start by assuming your conclusion.
Actually, not 23 people. That's the size of a group where the probability that two unspecified individuals have the same birthday exceeds 0.5. In this case, the birthday is specified, so the assumptions of the "paradox" do not apply. The probability that we're actually looking at in this case is the probability that a given person was born on November 20.
Example #1: Florida would have 25 electoral points. Assuming the following vote percentages ( Nader 20%; Bush 40%; Gore 40% ) the electoral points would be awarded as: Nader 5; Bush 20; Gore 20.
Did you write the vote-counting software for New Mexico?
7:30 EST = 6:30 CST. All of the polls in the Midwest were also still open. In fact, polls in the Florida panhandle were still open (according to the news that I saw last night).
While I don't agree with Bush in this case (though I will vote for him anyway), your political analysis is inaccurate at best. The vast majority of Americans are largely ignorant of the Internet, and even knowledgeable users are frequently unaware of many of its implications. On this matter, Bush is (unfortunately) in tune with majority thought. The fact is that your "Americans turning 18" vote in insignificant numbers.
I find the "Internet as panacea" even more irritating than "Internet as demon" line of thought. The net is a tool, it is used to both create and solve problems.
This hysterical pandering has nothing to do with the reality of children's lives, or their welfare.
Good point. What about your equally hysterical pandering to the biases of Slashdot users?
The sad political truth is that access to the Net, the Web and broadband equals creativity, confidence and opportunity.
Absolutely untrue. Your prejudice is showing.
If American schoolchildren were provided the same kind of bandwidth college students are, just imagine the kind of creative technological outpouring they might be capable of, not only in primary and secondary schools, but by the time they hit colleges and universities.
Hot air worthy of a professional "Boobus Americanus," Jon.
Countries that are spending the money to give young children access to bandwidth -- many of the Scandinavian countries are doing this -- are seeding economic, educational and creative success, equality and prosperity.
A post hoc, ergo propter hoc argument at best. For one with your intellectual attitude, you demonstrate a remarkable lack of knowledge of logic and scientific method.
If either Bush, Cheney, Gore or Lieberman cared a whit about children, they would shriek instead about the paucity of decent Internet access -- and even decent computers -- in America's public elementary and middle schools.
America's schools need fewer computers and better teachers. If the money wasted on computers (read Cliff Stoll's High Tech Heretic) were put into teacher salaries, we might be able to attract the cream of the next generation of college graduates. If parents were willing to fight local bureaucracies, the result might be quality education. But this is not something that can be done on the national level, outside of providing funds.
Personal experience indicates that the role of computers in education is primarily for political figures to impress validators (voters and parents) with how well they are doing their job. Once the computers reach the classroom, those students that already know how to use them do so; those students most in need of computer education ignore them.
The biggest social, cultural and political issues in the country almost all relate to technology...
You greatly overplay the significance of the technology aspect of these issues. They are about our values, and the choices that we make. Too often, we are abdicating those choices. To the extent that Bush introduces values into the discussion, he is far the superior candidate. Lieberman as well (Gore, on the other hand, appears to be a philosophical null pointer). Values should not (and in fact can not) be rammed down anyone's throat, but they do have a place in the discussion.
The aproximately 78 million Americans aged 21 and younger account for 28% of the population.
Many of your stories have dealt with the rights of young people. While such advocacy is needed, the reason that individuals under 18 can't vote is because they are not judged to be responsible for their actions. From my experience this is accurate.
Check the Census Bureau for some real numbers on this; they show population under 18 at the same level as 1990 (down since 1995, though probably not statistically significant).
Don't blame the Internet; blame the parents (and hold them responsible).
I'm not sure (don't remember). The Halting Problem came to mind first. Anything that involves enumerating all possible solutions is solvable in polynomial time on a non-deterministic computer. Perhaps something where the cardinality of the solution space is aleph-one or above. Depends on a good definition of a non-deterministic computer (which, in my experience, has always had a degree of fuzziness).
"Minimum clique partition" refers to the minimum number of complete subgraphs into which the subject graph can be partitioned, not the smallest subgraphs (which is trivial).
Polynomial time is generally used to distinguish from exponential time (O(k^n), usually O(2^n)), which is generally the amount of time required to check all possible solutions.
There are also time complexities that are not polynomial, but are not considered to be exponential, such as O(n^log n).
It is important to remember that these are theoretical complexity measures. The generalities that they imply often are masked by features of specific implementations, particularly for small values of n.
P is a subset of NP; the question is whether or not there exist any problems that are in NP but not in P. This is reducible to the problem of satisfiability (See the Garey and Johnson reference from the article page).
The concept of "verified in polynomial time" seems less than useful; all NP-complete problems are decision problems (have a yes/no answer) because they are (by definition) transformable to satisfiability in polynomial time. What does it mean to verify a yes or no answer (outside of re-solving the problem)?
NP does not mean non-P. An NP problem is one that can be solved in polynomial time on a "non-deterministic" (think infinitely parallel) computer. There are some problems (such as the Halting Problem) that are formally undecidable - not solvable in polynomial time even on a non-deterministic computer. So the statement "A problem is said to be within the class of complexity P if ... Otherwise the problem is said to be in complexity class NP." is not strictly accurate.
I tend to agree with the person who is inclined to wait for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
>no sig
You didn't want one in your Pentium III. You didn't want them in your Microsoft Word documents. But you've got one in your CueCat. No big deal, DC just wants to track everything that you do on the Web.
The net has enabled communication to an unprecedented degree. The same effect that allows you to look up directions to any address also allows pedophiles and hate groups to gather in virtual communities. These "negative" groups are tightly knit, due to strongly held beliefs and social pressure. In his BuSab future (Whipping Star, The Dosadi Experiment, a couple of stories), Frank Herbert postulated a time when all red tape had been removed from the government machinery. It worked too well. The Bureau of Sabotage was created to throw some judicious monkey wrenches into the machinery. The question of whether or not the communications structure of the Internet works too well has yet to be answered. On the question of languages. My opinion is that the different conceptual maps encouraged by different languages are a valuable phenomenon. And I don't think that multiple languages are going to disappear. Change form, perhaps, however. As current languages reflect current community structure (geographical), future languages may well reflect the structure of intellectual communities. To some extent, this is already happening.