Okay, so let's take a look at the original quote again:
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
This would seem to predict that people who have something to be proud of have no need of national pride. You would expect, then, that these people would be less inclined to it. Sir Tim Berners-Lee might disagree. So would a whole lot of other British and American heroes. So would the vast majority of the officers in the US military, who generally hold degrees in higher education. What happens instead is that these people view their accomplishments as part of the greatness of the their country, and rightly attribute their chances to do great things to it.
National pride is a social imperative that helps keep a country cohesive and working together. The United States would have had a much harder time getting through WWII without it. It generated the amazing cash flow to New York after 9/11. The examples go on and on.
My theory about you: in forsaking national pride, you seek to distance yourself from the "common man," because you view him as lazy and ignorant - especially them dern rednecks. (I mean, this is Slashdot. We can assume at least half the population here believes that. "Joe sixpack?" Heh.) Thus, it's a manifestation of your selfish pride.
Why 'General Grievous?'? Because General Electric was already taken!
It's actually because it's as much as he deserved. He isn't that dangerous, so they can't call him "General Deadly" or something. They call him "General Grievous" because he just kind of makes you...sad.
When on earth will people learn that no matter HOW GOOD your intensions are; the only thing that simply CAN NOT be stuffed down people's throat, is freedom and the concept of freedom.
When on Earth will you learn that people who live under tyranny don't share the views of their tyrants on the subject of freedom?
You can shove it down people's throats, because the majority of them want it. What you're really doing is shoving it down their governments' throats.
Oh, hang on. You mean the terrorist so-called "insurgents?" Funny. That's not the first thing that comes to mind when I think "Iraqis." That you associate all "Iraqis" with a minority of violent jerks who want to destroy any chance the country has of developing democracy says something rather disturbing about you.
Parent's signature (We sleep...) is sad but so accurate.
So remember to thank your neighborhood cops, active military, and reservists next time you see one of them. I know that doesn't go over well with the anarchist / teenage angst crowd here.... But purely from a selfish standpoint, it's a good idea. Let them know you appreciate it, and they'll have another good reason to keep protecting you.
Medical bills that run into 5 or 6 figures aren't uncommon and it's a sad fact that the biggest factor in personal bankrupcy in the US is unpaid (and, more importantly, unpayable) medical bills.
I'd like you to cite a source for that. I googled for it and found a few charts, most of them indicating loss of job as the #1 cause.
- The WTO is trying to make the US ban on Internet gambling illegal
Sovereignty, anyone? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
No, wait. There was that thing about the Earth being hollow, with openings at the poles and the lost ten tribes of Israel walking around upside-down on the other side of the crust.... I think that was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
If that weren't enough, a look at the groups behind the disclaimers should remove all doubt of motive.
The problem is that both sides of this debate muddy the waters.
First, it seems that most biology textbooks never claim that their conjectures on the origin of life (not origin of species, which evolution claims) are only conjectures. They also never talk about how, as theories go, evolution (as the origin of species) is pretty weak. It does a decent job at explaining things, but has anyone seen it make a real prediction? Hmm... And some, in their haste to tell "their side," never mention unresolved issues with evolution, such as fossil record biases and the homochirality of certain molecules...
Then, the other side won't entertain any idea that doesn't jive with their interpretation of the Bible. And when they discover an unresolved issue with evolution, they attack it with glee. They escalate the problem up to lawyers and politicians, who generally couldn't tell a proof from a theory from a fact from a conjecture...and you get crap attempts at compromise like the sticker in the front of the book.
Personally, I'd just like to see more intellectual honesty in the textbooks - but too many scientists unfortunately have an agenda as much as the religionists do.
Understanding (basic of) GAs is easy and so is implementation.
I'm a machine learning researcher, and I'll second this. Also, the code for it will be quite self-contained (if done right), and shouldn't affect any parts of the kernel except where it's called to run an iteration.
They also work quite well. That's why they are so popular.
Sure they do. For a lot of problems, though, they're not so hot compared to other optimization methods like hill climbing and empirical gradient descent - they tend to run slowly - and I would like to ask Mr. Moilanen why he didn't use one. GAs are especially good with nominal parameters (discrete, unordered). But I would expect tuning parameters to be either discrete or continuous.
GAs are theoretically capable of finding global optima, except that's kind of a red herring. The only reason you can prove that is that, theoretically, no matter how small the probability, you'll eventually get exactly the right sequence of mutations to produce a global optimum. In practice, they tend to produce local optima like most other optimization algorithms - especially as Moilanen describes it:
All of the tunings are then ordered from best performance to worst, and the worst half of the performers are replaced with new possible tunings derived from the best half of the performers.
You generally have to be a little less selective (more random) than this.
I'm not so sure. One of the things that has caused mainstream news to fail spectacularly is exactly that they all use each other as sources, and every article is just a 'synthesis' of what a bunch of the others said. This causes errors, falsehoods and blatant propaganda to be repeated through the networks for ever if they first get in there.
One thing that could separate WikiNews from that is the presence of actual experts - or, at least, people who have more than just a passing familiarity with the subject at hand.
There are blogs by active military in Iraq and by retired military officers. Whenever a big military story breaks, I check those. It's astonishing how utterly ignorant the media is about the military. They haven't got a clue. For example, remember the soldier who questioned Rummy about the vehicle armor? Remember the MSM's speculations about his imminent retirement? Well, it didn't happen - and the military bloggers were very quick to point out that asking hard questions of superior officers, no matter how superior, is actually encouraged in the US military. The reporters, in their wonderful ignorance, just assumed it was curtains for the poor guy.
We all have a good laugh when the MSM tries to cover technology accurately, because they tend to fail miserably. How can we assume they don't in other fields? We can't. The really crappy thing about it is that, so far, we've been powerless to change the stories before they reach readers. Maybe that's why we're laughing...it's really more like a nervous giggle.
By providing a central place for the thousands of experts on the Internet to offer corrections, WikiNews could give a tremendous boost to reporting accuracy. At the very least, the MSM might feel another presence looking over their shoulders and try a little harder.
They should have held up one or two exemplary examples of blogging done right - good content and timley information (and a lack of words like "dat", "ur", "OMG", "LOL", and "ROFLMAO")
You mean, like, instead of holding up our buddy Howard "YEEEEEEEEEAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!" Dean (who, according to Dave Barry, is most famous for "making a sound like a hog being castrated with a fondue fork"), they could have mentioned, oh, I dunno...
Do you have a way of looking at the world that's more unbiased than the scientific viewpoint?
Speaking as a machine learning researcher, I can tell you for a fact that any answer to that question is absolutely meaningless. We have no good way of comparing bias. In fact, to compare two biases, we would have to make some assumptions about what parts of bias are important, which is itself a bias.
You can't prove that any way of developing hypotheses to explain facts is better than any other. (See The Need for Biases in Learning Generalizations for a start.) The best thing we can do is decide based on what seems to work - which, interestingly enough, is a biased measure. Religion, if it does nothing else, tends to be useful in perpetuating a species. Practitioners, in general, have both a survival and a reproductive advantage. Religious people (myself included) report that it makes them happy. Science also has a good track record in both areas. If you really must make them compete - and I'd rather not - I'd call it even.
Yes, ignorant atheists are at least as bad as ignorant religious fundamentalists. But I think the latter group outnumbers the former by a thousand to one.
My stuck-up-prick-o-meter won't stop beeping. Maybe I know too many brilliant, religious people. Maybe you should get out more.
Compare the number of religious folks who have undertaken proving the existence of God to the number of athiests who have tried to prove the non-existence of God. Both actions are equally ignorant. I think you'll find a decent representation in both camps - and definitely not "a thousand to one."
I'm not a biologist, but I do remember from BIOL 220 that a genetic mutation, in order to be beneficial, has to be a heritable mutation. That's not going to happen unless these cell phone users are holding their phones next to their genitals or something.
I'm sure those crafty Japanese could come up with a cell phone that works like that...but until they do, the mutations can only be very localized, and therefore, harmful.
Every single poll I've seen has more than 95% of iraqis wanting this.
Cite, please. This might pass the Slashdot majority who agrees with your overall point, but some of us have standards.
Why should we be there fighting the desires of the Iraqi people?
Are we? 85% of them are planning to vote in the elections in January. The Bush administration and the military is working hard to make sure it happens.
If our goal was to get rid of Sadam, we've already done that, so why stick around?
Our goal is to bring democracy to the Middle East. It's the only long-term solution to terrorism.
It's not hospitals and food banks that rid the world of terrorism. It's deposing dictators and tyrants that does it.
Oh, the real reason is so we can steal their oil. And I do mean steal.
How much oil have we "stolen" so far? Got numbers?
Plus, most iraqis I've heard interviewed prefer Sadaam to the US. They say things like "at least Sadaam was an Iraqi."
Antecdotal evidence based on "news" reporting from Reuters, no doubt, or possibly Al Jazeera. Every poll I've seen has a large majority of Iraqis glad Saddam is gone, with mixed responses about the future of the country and American occupation. Terrorists (some still insist on calling them "insurgents" even after the discovery of torture chambers in Fallujah) are giving Iraq a very hard time right now, trying to change the minds of the people. And this is the fault of the US?
You know what reporters do? They like to provide "balance" and "conflict" so they go hunt down crusty old former Ba'athists to make statements like, "at least Saddam was an Iraqi." Despite what opinion polls show on that subject, they still think they need 50/50 in the news. (Or worse, given the anti-war attitude amongst the majority of them.)
You really need to get out more. Find out who doesn't like what Kos is saying and read them as well.
Come to Spoltog, wuss. My Demicanadian bastard lunatic will...do...something...nasty, I suppose...with his level CXXXII Slime Finger. You will cower as he curses your family (level V), and tremble with fear as you go under the knife for a tonsilectomy (level III)!
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so let's take a look at the original quote again:
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
This would seem to predict that people who have something to be proud of have no need of national pride. You would expect, then, that these people would be less inclined to it. Sir Tim Berners-Lee might disagree. So would a whole lot of other British and American heroes. So would the vast majority of the officers in the US military, who generally hold degrees in higher education. What happens instead is that these people view their accomplishments as part of the greatness of the their country, and rightly attribute their chances to do great things to it.
National pride is a social imperative that helps keep a country cohesive and working together. The United States would have had a much harder time getting through WWII without it. It generated the amazing cash flow to New York after 9/11. The examples go on and on.
My theory about you: in forsaking national pride, you seek to distance yourself from the "common man," because you view him as lazy and ignorant - especially them dern rednecks. (I mean, this is Slashdot. We can assume at least half the population here believes that. "Joe sixpack?" Heh.) Thus, it's a manifestation of your selfish pride.
What a swap: national pride for selfish pride.
Why 'General Grievous?'? Because General Electric was already taken!
It's actually because it's as much as he deserved. He isn't that dangerous, so they can't call him "General Deadly" or something. They call him "General Grievous" because he just kind of makes you...sad.
When on earth will people learn that no matter HOW GOOD your intensions are; the only thing that simply CAN NOT be stuffed down people's throat, is freedom and the concept of freedom.
When on Earth will you learn that people who live under tyranny don't share the views of their tyrants on the subject of freedom?
You can shove it down people's throats, because the majority of them want it. What you're really doing is shoving it down their governments' throats.
The game is interesting when people play it because people have a huge amount of trouble actually being random.
It's even interesting enough to have a world championship.
It'll be a sad day when a computer is the world champion. This was humanity's last hope. Well, this and Go.
Replying to grandparent:
Oh, hang on. You mean the terrorist so-called "insurgents?" Funny. That's not the first thing that comes to mind when I think "Iraqis." That you associate all "Iraqis" with a minority of violent jerks who want to destroy any chance the country has of developing democracy says something rather disturbing about you.
In fact, I think they may get kind of pissed...
Have you got some reason for thinking so? Or are you trusting the groupthink around here to validate your point of view for you?
Maybe we should have sent 100,000 human shields instead? That would have worked.
I do wish I had editors that kept historical trees instead of a single undo chain, though.
Space requirements of O(2^n) rule!
Seriously, though, how would you navigate it?
Parent's signature (We sleep...) is sad but so accurate.
So remember to thank your neighborhood cops, active military, and reservists next time you see one of them. I know that doesn't go over well with the anarchist / teenage angst crowd here.... But purely from a selfish standpoint, it's a good idea. Let them know you appreciate it, and they'll have another good reason to keep protecting you.
Medical bills that run into 5 or 6 figures aren't uncommon and it's a sad fact that the biggest factor in personal bankrupcy in the US is unpaid (and, more importantly, unpayable) medical bills.
I'd like you to cite a source for that. I googled for it and found a few charts, most of them indicating loss of job as the #1 cause.
- The WTO is trying to make the US ban on Internet gambling illegal
Sovereignty, anyone? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
No, wait. There was that thing about the Earth being hollow, with openings at the poles and the lost ten tribes of Israel walking around upside-down on the other side of the crust.... I think that was the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
It was close, though.
If that weren't enough, a look at the groups behind the disclaimers should remove all doubt of motive.
The problem is that both sides of this debate muddy the waters.
First, it seems that most biology textbooks never claim that their conjectures on the origin of life (not origin of species, which evolution claims) are only conjectures. They also never talk about how, as theories go, evolution (as the origin of species) is pretty weak. It does a decent job at explaining things, but has anyone seen it make a real prediction? Hmm... And some, in their haste to tell "their side," never mention unresolved issues with evolution, such as fossil record biases and the homochirality of certain molecules...
Then, the other side won't entertain any idea that doesn't jive with their interpretation of the Bible. And when they discover an unresolved issue with evolution, they attack it with glee. They escalate the problem up to lawyers and politicians, who generally couldn't tell a proof from a theory from a fact from a conjecture...and you get crap attempts at compromise like the sticker in the front of the book.
Personally, I'd just like to see more intellectual honesty in the textbooks - but too many scientists unfortunately have an agenda as much as the religionists do.
Understanding (basic of) GAs is easy and so is implementation.
I'm a machine learning researcher, and I'll second this. Also, the code for it will be quite self-contained (if done right), and shouldn't affect any parts of the kernel except where it's called to run an iteration.
They also work quite well. That's why they are so popular.
Sure they do. For a lot of problems, though, they're not so hot compared to other optimization methods like hill climbing and empirical gradient descent - they tend to run slowly - and I would like to ask Mr. Moilanen why he didn't use one. GAs are especially good with nominal parameters (discrete, unordered). But I would expect tuning parameters to be either discrete or continuous.
GAs are theoretically capable of finding global optima, except that's kind of a red herring. The only reason you can prove that is that, theoretically, no matter how small the probability, you'll eventually get exactly the right sequence of mutations to produce a global optimum. In practice, they tend to produce local optima like most other optimization algorithms - especially as Moilanen describes it:
All of the tunings are then ordered from best performance to worst, and the worst half of the performers are replaced with new possible tunings derived from the best half of the performers.
You generally have to be a little less selective (more random) than this.
Excuse me, what is MSM?
It's an abbreviation used by bloggers to denote the "Mainstream Media." I couldn't say when it came into common use.
I'm not so sure. One of the things that has caused mainstream news to fail spectacularly is exactly that they all use each other as sources, and every article is just a 'synthesis' of what a bunch of the others said. This causes errors, falsehoods and blatant propaganda to be repeated through the networks for ever if they first get in there.
One thing that could separate WikiNews from that is the presence of actual experts - or, at least, people who have more than just a passing familiarity with the subject at hand.
There are blogs by active military in Iraq and by retired military officers. Whenever a big military story breaks, I check those. It's astonishing how utterly ignorant the media is about the military. They haven't got a clue. For example, remember the soldier who questioned Rummy about the vehicle armor? Remember the MSM's speculations about his imminent retirement? Well, it didn't happen - and the military bloggers were very quick to point out that asking hard questions of superior officers, no matter how superior, is actually encouraged in the US military. The reporters, in their wonderful ignorance, just assumed it was curtains for the poor guy.
We all have a good laugh when the MSM tries to cover technology accurately, because they tend to fail miserably. How can we assume they don't in other fields? We can't. The really crappy thing about it is that, so far, we've been powerless to change the stories before they reach readers. Maybe that's why we're laughing...it's really more like a nervous giggle.
By providing a central place for the thousands of experts on the Internet to offer corrections, WikiNews could give a tremendous boost to reporting accuracy. At the very least, the MSM might feel another presence looking over their shoulders and try a little harder.
New poll idea:
Is it possible for MirrorDot.com to be any uglier?
- Yes
- No
- Only if someone pukes on your monitor while you're reading it
And 78.35% of statistics are fabricated.....
I read somewhere that it's a little closer to 78.352%.
They should have held up one or two exemplary examples of blogging done right - good content and timley information (and a lack of words like "dat", "ur", "OMG", "LOL", and "ROFLMAO")
You mean, like, instead of holding up our buddy Howard "YEEEEEEEEEAAAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!" Dean (who, according to Dave Barry, is most famous for "making a sound like a hog being castrated with a fondue fork"), they could have mentioned, oh, I dunno...
The people who broke Rathergate, maybe? A marketing guy in DC who dug up a forensics document expert or Charles Johnson and his famous reproduction of the faked memos?
How about Glenn Reynolds? Or Moulitsas Zúniga? Who really rallied the troops this election season?
Howard Dean??
What about some of the many Iraqi blogs - written by, you know, people on the ground, as it were? How about Spirit of America's Arabic blogging tool, and the bloggers who took the the challenge to raise money for it?
There's a lot more going on out there than ABC is reporting.
Do you have a way of looking at the world that's more unbiased than the scientific viewpoint?
Speaking as a machine learning researcher, I can tell you for a fact that any answer to that question is absolutely meaningless. We have no good way of comparing bias. In fact, to compare two biases, we would have to make some assumptions about what parts of bias are important, which is itself a bias.
You can't prove that any way of developing hypotheses to explain facts is better than any other. (See The Need for Biases in Learning Generalizations for a start.) The best thing we can do is decide based on what seems to work - which, interestingly enough, is a biased measure. Religion, if it does nothing else, tends to be useful in perpetuating a species. Practitioners, in general, have both a survival and a reproductive advantage. Religious people (myself included) report that it makes them happy. Science also has a good track record in both areas. If you really must make them compete - and I'd rather not - I'd call it even.
Yes, ignorant atheists are at least as bad as ignorant religious fundamentalists. But I think the latter group outnumbers the former by a thousand to one.
My stuck-up-prick-o-meter won't stop beeping. Maybe I know too many brilliant, religious people. Maybe you should get out more.
Compare the number of religious folks who have undertaken proving the existence of God to the number of athiests who have tried to prove the non-existence of God. Both actions are equally ignorant. I think you'll find a decent representation in both camps - and definitely not "a thousand to one."
I find this extremely hard to believe.
Well, so do I.
I'm not a biologist, but I do remember from BIOL 220 that a genetic mutation, in order to be beneficial, has to be a heritable mutation. That's not going to happen unless these cell phone users are holding their phones next to their genitals or something.
I'm sure those crafty Japanese could come up with a cell phone that works like that...but until they do, the mutations can only be very localized, and therefore, harmful.
Hello, moderators. Can somebody please mod the parent up to at least give it equal weight with the craptastically cynical grandparent?
Ha! That would be just as funny if you had said the same thing about liberals!
Wait, this is Slashdot.
Every single poll I've seen has more than 95% of iraqis wanting this.
Cite, please. This might pass the Slashdot majority who agrees with your overall point, but some of us have standards.
Why should we be there fighting the desires of the Iraqi people?
Are we? 85% of them are planning to vote in the elections in January. The Bush administration and the military is working hard to make sure it happens.
If our goal was to get rid of Sadam, we've already done that, so why stick around?
Our goal is to bring democracy to the Middle East. It's the only long-term solution to terrorism.
It's not hospitals and food banks that rid the world of terrorism. It's deposing dictators and tyrants that does it.
Oh, the real reason is so we can steal their oil. And I do mean steal.
How much oil have we "stolen" so far? Got numbers?
Plus, most iraqis I've heard interviewed prefer Sadaam to the US. They say things like "at least Sadaam was an Iraqi."
Antecdotal evidence based on "news" reporting from Reuters, no doubt, or possibly Al Jazeera. Every poll I've seen has a large majority of Iraqis glad Saddam is gone, with mixed responses about the future of the country and American occupation. Terrorists (some still insist on calling them "insurgents" even after the discovery of torture chambers in Fallujah) are giving Iraq a very hard time right now, trying to change the minds of the people. And this is the fault of the US?
You know what reporters do? They like to provide "balance" and "conflict" so they go hunt down crusty old former Ba'athists to make statements like, "at least Saddam was an Iraqi." Despite what opinion polls show on that subject, they still think they need 50/50 in the news. (Or worse, given the anti-war attitude amongst the majority of them.)
You really need to get out more. Find out who doesn't like what Kos is saying and read them as well.
It probably has to do with export restrictions on strong encryption.
Come to Spoltog, wuss. My Demicanadian bastard lunatic will...do...something...nasty, I suppose...with his level CXXXII Slime Finger. You will cower as he curses your family (level V), and tremble with fear as you go under the knife for a tonsilectomy (level III)!
I love this game.
Well, look at that. I was +5: Informative until some whiny idiots here decided they'd mod me down because they didn't agree with me.
WAKE UP, SLASHDOT. YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.
Does anyone here actually want honest debate?