I use high level math in graphics. Sometimes to do actual graphics tasks, other times to verify that some piece of code is mathematically correct.
Recently, I had to calculate derivatives recently for splines. I couldn't find a package that did quite what I wanted (with a license that would work for my task) with splines which meant I had to roll my own. Splines are used everywhere in computer graphics and video games, namely for animation. In implementing my own, I found that I had to use a fair amount of calculus and linear algebra to understand a) which spline algorithm met my criteria and b) to understand the math behind the splines well enough to implement them.
The MacBookPros may not be that much more expensive than their counterpart at another company, but the MacPros and just plain too expensive *AND* they're still running old (non-ivy bridge) hardware...
Apple seems to have given up on the high end desktop market.
While I usually see the worst in people, Steve Jobs was extremely secretive about his health. Perhaps he got this shell company so that people wouldn't start to investigate why he was buying a house in Tennessee?
I never considered smoking because...I hated how my friends' houses all smelled because their parents were chain smokers...I saw how close my friend's mother came to dying when her lungs collapsed...I saw ads of people who had lost their voice, or had their finger nails turn yellow from the smoke...In essence the idea of smoking both grossed me out and scared me.
I don't think it ever crossed my mind that I shouldn't do it because it was 'too expensive'. When kids decide something is 'cool' I don't think the price tag is the foremost thought in their mind.
Because the schools are too afraid the parents will sue them if someone breaks an arm horsing around or gets a splinter on the jungle gym.
I agree whole heartedly that our school's lack of hands on learning is screwing our kids education. But the system also won't let them be kids for fear of some helicopter parent suing when little Joey something childish and gets himself hurt. It wouldn't surprise me if some teachers are too afraid to do experiments in class for fear of a child doing something lawsuit worthy.
Lastly: exercise helps people think and be happy and lets the children vent some much needed energy in order to be able to concentrate. In my opinion, the school system sets children up for failure.
Seems like we're trying to circumvent natural selection.....let these people take themselves out of the gene pool....and maybe we'll have fewer stupid people in a couple of generations?
I've honestly started to wonder, with all the problems we're seeing in modern kids, autism on the rise...so many of them with food allergies (I never heard of anyone almost dying from PB&J sandwiches at school when I grew up, and we ALL ate them)...etc.
Maybe we ARE doing too much to protect weak genes in the pool....that might have weeded themselves out in the past....and allowing them to continue to proliferate?
The problem is that when they get ill, the health system then has to cover that. And with all the medical technology out there, these people wouldn't be taking themselves out of the gene pool before they could reproduce, so it wouldn't actually have any natural selection effect.
But it would be a dangerous road to decide someone couldn't get healthcare because they didn't take care of the problem before it became a problem.
I always thought it would be interesting to try this system:
Each Senator (or Congressman) get N votes, where N is the number of their voters minus the number of their constituents that care enough about the issue to vote on it themselves. So if there's a vote on an issue (say for changing the calendar to an 8 day week), and 100 constituents in Smallville care enough about this to vote on this, they get to vote however they wish. If you're the Senator of Smallville population 500, you now cast a vote equal to 400 votes.
There are problems with this system. A) It encourages Senators to play down a particular vote if they think the populace will go against their interests B) It may lead to the majority suppressing the minority in bad ways (like racial, sexual, or gender in-equalities) C) could potentially take a lot of time D) could require people to understand lawyer-speak.
But I think it has some interesting pros. A) It means that on an issue where the corporations are throwing their weight around with kickbacks to the Senators, the public just needs to mobilize and the Senators are powerless because they don't have any votes left. We know that people *can* mobilize. They did when SOPA hit the senate floor. And the public could find ways to make sure people know what's being voted on. B) It may nerf the current policy of tacking unrelated items together to get them through the senate.
It's a sad fact of life that in the U.S. it is often cheaper to replace something than it is to repair it. With electronics you have the added penalty that you're often repairing something that's now slower than the replacement.
A sign of our times
I was babysitting a 5 year old in high school and she had this alphabet book of professions. U = upholsterer. She asked me what that was. I told her it was someone who repaired or replaced the fabric on your couch. She asked me why you didn't throw it out and get a new one. That it didn't even occur to her that someone might want to try to fix something rather than just dump it in a landfill somewhere really struck me.
If you are in a room that is getting too hot, it is a good idea to switch the heating off, open a window or turn the air con on. Who or what is to blame for the excess heat doesn't matter as much as stopping the room getting so hot it causes problems for the people in it.
For me the most important questions we should be asking are:
* Is the climate changing?
* What effects will that cause (good and bad)?
* What can we do to affect the rate of change?
* What can we do to mitigate the bad effects?
* What can we do to benefit from the good effects?
The reasons why the climate is changing are important as they can suggest what we can do to affect things but even if we determine that the climate change is not down to human activity, we should still be looking for ways to affect it in our favour.
While I absolutely agree, if people don't believe that car emissions (for instance) affect climate change, then they may not believe that changing what car they drive would have any effect either.
My understanding is they do some financial buck passing so they can say they took a loss, pay less to some of the people involved, and still walk away with lots of $ in their pockets.
I cannot comment on the world, but I can comment on my experiences here. People say they're atheist or agnostic, no problem. Someone says they're Christian, like I have in the past, and I'll get a bunch of replies mocking my belief in "fairy tales" and "how's that intelligent design going for you." And that's all I say- I'm a Christian, don't defend anything, don't push any agenda. I'll await the derision over in the left corner.
The point being I get derided just because I say I'm something different from you, but Cthulhu help me if I try to say anything against atheists/agnostics here, which I never have, BTW.
Same problem I have when I say "I'm a vegetarian". People either tease me about being an animal lover or go on the defensive and explain why they eat me. I didn't ask why they eat meat or otherwise try to convince them to change their ways. But if something is a heated topic in any way and it comes up ever so innocently, people have to react to it. I don't really understand why.
What I'd like to know is how any religion that professes to believe in an all knowing and creative deity would deny the mastery apparent in the minds of its own creations.
I mean seriously, why would God create a brilliant analytical brain, only to shun its use?
Maybe the same reason he made a tree we weren't supposed to eat from.
Would eliminating privileges of marriage be better?
Well, it would be fairer.
It always drove me nuts that some people are trying to define the notion of marriage in a government context in a religious context. I wonder how long before we either a) ban marriage between anyone who's not religious or b) just make up a new damn word for government marriages.
Once the word marriage became a term in law religion no longer had any say in the definition.
The real question is how long it will be until people realize this stuff *can* happen to them. Until that happens, I don't think any of this will change.
By and large people still have the perception that arrests happen to *other* people. You don't get arrested unless you do something wrong. They don't realize a) that's not always true and b) we all do something wrong at some point from being lazy and jaywalking to doing something we honestly didn't know what wrong because there are so many laws in this country.
the social services worker made a judgement call that there was a non-trivial chance that the porn came from the man himself.
I'm glad an underpaid bureaucrat can destroy my life and my hurt my family based on a "non-trivial chance", that's... that's just awesome.
That goes both ways. I've seen children forced to see abusive parents because the courts were trying to decide who gets custody. Often when the child is 'too young' to have an opinion that carries any legal weight in court.
In my opinion the solution is to ask the child (in some circumstance where the child feels safe telling the truth) if they feel safe at home.
You're also jamming the receipt of said important calls, which the jammer has no knowledge of. For instance, what if there's a doctor on the bus who doesn't get the call saying he's needed in emergency surgery, or there's an undercover cop on the bus watching for trouble (we have undercover cops in Boston for instance) who doesn't get a call saying that he's needed for something.
Why is the right answer to jam them and everyone around them? Why not walk up to them and ask them to bring the volume down? Why must we resort to under-handed/passive aggressive techniques that affect others that aren't violating the social rules?
"The only reason why Macs are perceived as more secure is because they have less market share, and therefore less interest to those who make the malware."
That may be why techies believe it, but then they tell their non-techie friends who just spread the word that macs are immune to viruses. I know a lot of people who tell others that they're immune to viruses without knowing why that might be.
Worst I had a teacher, whom I was a TA for, telling freshmen that macs couldn't get viruses. If I recall correctly his logic was they they were unix and therefore the open source nature had eliminated all bugs.
10,000 may not be unreasonable for what he's selling. It depends on what product it competes against. After Effects sells for approximately $700. Nuke sells for several grand. Autodesk products sell for more.
For those, the doctor only has to worry about a lawsuit about how he didn't take care of that particular patient. With the vaccines he has to worry about the unvaccinated person's affect on his other patients' health.
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Likely to get the retina display on your operating system of choice. I considered it myself for the very same reason.
I use high level math in graphics. Sometimes to do actual graphics tasks, other times to verify that some piece of code is mathematically correct.
Recently, I had to calculate derivatives recently for splines. I couldn't find a package that did quite what I wanted (with a license that would work for my task) with splines which meant I had to roll my own. Splines are used everywhere in computer graphics and video games, namely for animation. In implementing my own, I found that I had to use a fair amount of calculus and linear algebra to understand a) which spline algorithm met my criteria and b) to understand the math behind the splines well enough to implement them.
The MacBookPros may not be that much more expensive than their counterpart at another company, but the MacPros and just plain too expensive *AND* they're still running old (non-ivy bridge) hardware... Apple seems to have given up on the high end desktop market.
While I usually see the worst in people, Steve Jobs was extremely secretive about his health. Perhaps he got this shell company so that people wouldn't start to investigate why he was buying a house in Tennessee?
Also the people who decided that corporations are people too...
I never considered smoking because...I hated how my friends' houses all smelled because their parents were chain smokers...I saw how close my friend's mother came to dying when her lungs collapsed...I saw ads of people who had lost their voice, or had their finger nails turn yellow from the smoke...In essence the idea of smoking both grossed me out and scared me.
I don't think it ever crossed my mind that I shouldn't do it because it was 'too expensive'. When kids decide something is 'cool' I don't think the price tag is the foremost thought in their mind.
Because the schools are too afraid the parents will sue them if someone breaks an arm horsing around or gets a splinter on the jungle gym.
I agree whole heartedly that our school's lack of hands on learning is screwing our kids education. But the system also won't let them be kids for fear of some helicopter parent suing when little Joey something childish and gets himself hurt. It wouldn't surprise me if some teachers are too afraid to do experiments in class for fear of a child doing something lawsuit worthy.
Lastly: exercise helps people think and be happy and lets the children vent some much needed energy in order to be able to concentrate. In my opinion, the school system sets children up for failure.
Seems like we're trying to circumvent natural selection.....let these people take themselves out of the gene pool....and maybe we'll have fewer stupid people in a couple of generations? I've honestly started to wonder, with all the problems we're seeing in modern kids, autism on the rise...so many of them with food allergies (I never heard of anyone almost dying from PB&J sandwiches at school when I grew up, and we ALL ate them)...etc. Maybe we ARE doing too much to protect weak genes in the pool....that might have weeded themselves out in the past....and allowing them to continue to proliferate?
The problem is that when they get ill, the health system then has to cover that. And with all the medical technology out there, these people wouldn't be taking themselves out of the gene pool before they could reproduce, so it wouldn't actually have any natural selection effect.
But it would be a dangerous road to decide someone couldn't get healthcare because they didn't take care of the problem before it became a problem.
I always thought it would be interesting to try this system:
Each Senator (or Congressman) get N votes, where N is the number of their voters minus the number of their constituents that care enough about the issue to vote on it themselves. So if there's a vote on an issue (say for changing the calendar to an 8 day week), and 100 constituents in Smallville care enough about this to vote on this, they get to vote however they wish. If you're the Senator of Smallville population 500, you now cast a vote equal to 400 votes.
There are problems with this system. A) It encourages Senators to play down a particular vote if they think the populace will go against their interests B) It may lead to the majority suppressing the minority in bad ways (like racial, sexual, or gender in-equalities) C) could potentially take a lot of time D) could require people to understand lawyer-speak.
But I think it has some interesting pros. A) It means that on an issue where the corporations are throwing their weight around with kickbacks to the Senators, the public just needs to mobilize and the Senators are powerless because they don't have any votes left. We know that people *can* mobilize. They did when SOPA hit the senate floor. And the public could find ways to make sure people know what's being voted on. B) It may nerf the current policy of tacking unrelated items together to get them through the senate.
It's a sad fact of life that in the U.S. it is often cheaper to replace something than it is to repair it. With electronics you have the added penalty that you're often repairing something that's now slower than the replacement.
A sign of our times
I was babysitting a 5 year old in high school and she had this alphabet book of professions. U = upholsterer. She asked me what that was. I told her it was someone who repaired or replaced the fabric on your couch. She asked me why you didn't throw it out and get a new one. That it didn't even occur to her that someone might want to try to fix something rather than just dump it in a landfill somewhere really struck me.
I assume we would have to - as there are many diseases out there where the sole problem is the build up of something bad.
If you are in a room that is getting too hot, it is a good idea to switch the heating off, open a window or turn the air con on. Who or what is to blame for the excess heat doesn't matter as much as stopping the room getting so hot it causes problems for the people in it.
For me the most important questions we should be asking are:
* Is the climate changing? * What effects will that cause (good and bad)? * What can we do to affect the rate of change? * What can we do to mitigate the bad effects? * What can we do to benefit from the good effects?
The reasons why the climate is changing are important as they can suggest what we can do to affect things but even if we determine that the climate change is not down to human activity, we should still be looking for ways to affect it in our favour.
While I absolutely agree, if people don't believe that car emissions (for instance) affect climate change, then they may not believe that changing what car they drive would have any effect either.
Isn't this why M$ had to invent C#? Didn't they get into trouble hwen they implemented a bastardized version of Java that only worked on Windows?
My understanding is they do some financial buck passing so they can say they took a loss, pay less to some of the people involved, and still walk away with lots of $ in their pockets.
I cannot comment on the world, but I can comment on my experiences here. People say they're atheist or agnostic, no problem. Someone says they're Christian, like I have in the past, and I'll get a bunch of replies mocking my belief in "fairy tales" and "how's that intelligent design going for you." And that's all I say- I'm a Christian, don't defend anything, don't push any agenda. I'll await the derision over in the left corner. The point being I get derided just because I say I'm something different from you, but Cthulhu help me if I try to say anything against atheists/agnostics here, which I never have, BTW.
Same problem I have when I say "I'm a vegetarian". People either tease me about being an animal lover or go on the defensive and explain why they eat me. I didn't ask why they eat meat or otherwise try to convince them to change their ways. But if something is a heated topic in any way and it comes up ever so innocently, people have to react to it. I don't really understand why.
What I'd like to know is how any religion that professes to believe in an all knowing and creative deity would deny the mastery apparent in the minds of its own creations.
I mean seriously, why would God create a brilliant analytical brain, only to shun its use?
Maybe the same reason he made a tree we weren't supposed to eat from.
Only one of them would have the emotional capacity to cry.
Would eliminating privileges of marriage be better?
Well, it would be fairer.
It always drove me nuts that some people are trying to define the notion of marriage in a government context in a religious context. I wonder how long before we either a) ban marriage between anyone who's not religious or b) just make up a new damn word for government marriages.
Once the word marriage became a term in law religion no longer had any say in the definition.
The real question is how long it will be until people realize this stuff *can* happen to them. Until that happens, I don't think any of this will change.
By and large people still have the perception that arrests happen to *other* people. You don't get arrested unless you do something wrong. They don't realize a) that's not always true and b) we all do something wrong at some point from being lazy and jaywalking to doing something we honestly didn't know what wrong because there are so many laws in this country.
Obligatory XKCD reference: http://xkcd.com/882/
the social services worker made a judgement call that there was a non-trivial chance that the porn came from the man himself.
I'm glad an underpaid bureaucrat can destroy my life and my hurt my family based on a "non-trivial chance", that's... that's just awesome.
That goes both ways. I've seen children forced to see abusive parents because the courts were trying to decide who gets custody. Often when the child is 'too young' to have an opinion that carries any legal weight in court.
In my opinion the solution is to ask the child (in some circumstance where the child feels safe telling the truth) if they feel safe at home.
You're also jamming the receipt of said important calls, which the jammer has no knowledge of. For instance, what if there's a doctor on the bus who doesn't get the call saying he's needed in emergency surgery, or there's an undercover cop on the bus watching for trouble (we have undercover cops in Boston for instance) who doesn't get a call saying that he's needed for something.
Why is the right answer to jam them and everyone around them? Why not walk up to them and ask them to bring the volume down? Why must we resort to under-handed/passive aggressive techniques that affect others that aren't violating the social rules?
"The only reason why Macs are perceived as more secure is because they have less market share, and therefore less interest to those who make the malware."
That may be why techies believe it, but then they tell their non-techie friends who just spread the word that macs are immune to viruses. I know a lot of people who tell others that they're immune to viruses without knowing why that might be.
Worst I had a teacher, whom I was a TA for, telling freshmen that macs couldn't get viruses. If I recall correctly his logic was they they were unix and therefore the open source nature had eliminated all bugs.
10,000 may not be unreasonable for what he's selling. It depends on what product it competes against. After Effects sells for approximately $700. Nuke sells for several grand. Autodesk products sell for more.
For those, the doctor only has to worry about a lawsuit about how he didn't take care of that particular patient. With the vaccines he has to worry about the unvaccinated person's affect on his other patients' health.