This. Occam's Razor is an experimental guide, not a standard of scientific proof. It's one of a number of maxims that gets abused by armchair scientists who think it says something it doesn't.
Likewise, this paper doesn't actually prove anything. It does appear to disprove one popular interpretation of quantum physics, by showing that it contradicts observed data. But by itself, that does not prove the other popular interpretation to be necessarily true.
Re:so Occupy Iran is next?
on
Occupy Flash?
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· Score: 1
On a side note: After first hand experience with those in Atlanta, all I can say is, Occupy THIS. Damn if I don't want to ever be around people like that.
But... but their rights! They can do whatever they want; they're the 99%!
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
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· Score: 2
It's also very easy to disprove. Just show me the message.
This study doesn't so much rebut phonics -long proven as an effective method of teaching literacy in most scripts- as much as it shows that phonics is only the baseline: what people fall back on when more advanced heuristics (like shape recognition) fail. And fail they do, from time to time: that's just the nature of heuristics. They work often enough to provide appreciable speed boosts -even huge ones- but fail often enough that you can't completely discard slower methods.
What this study suggests to me is that while having a solid grasp of phonics is a major milestone in literacy training, it should not be the end of said training (as it often is). Rather, once the students can walk, it is time to teach them to run: I don't know how you'd teach shape recognition, for example, but this is something that might have use as an advanced reading technique.
It is, however, still important not to try teaching the students to run before they can walk. The various attempts to replace phonics in the last few decades have ended in dismal failure, and they failed for a reason. That doesn't make phonics the be-all and end-all, but it remains the best foundation skill for reading yet devised.
How is your assumption that several million dollars won't make a corporation blink relevant, or even for that matter anything but absurd? Contrary to your crassly class-envious beliefs, even a corporation will blink at a penalty like that.
Like any form of mass marketing, crowdsourcing science basically comes down to convincing large numbers of people that what you are doing provides enough value (not necessarily in monetary terms) that putting some of their own money toward it is a worthwhile thing to do.
In a society that has become increasingly skeptical of doing a thing for the thing's own sake, that's a lot harder than it used to be, and it's true in fields across all political boundaries: weapons research would find itself without all that many takers, and likewise for most kinds of zoological research (though paleontologists might be able to find funding because OMG DINOSAURS). Those fields with a large number of armchair theorists would find themselves in particular peril: no one, but no one, wants to risk their pet models of sociology or educational theory being counter-proven into oblivion.
Some would say that this difficulty for finding funding in some fields is a feature, not a bug. You could probably convince most people of that, actually, if you carefully weighted your arguments toward fields toward which they would not contribute. But the question remains: what becomes of those fields?
As long as this rule applies both ways -i.e. if Greenpeace were to hack into the computers if some other company, they would be fined a more or less equal amount- then I can't say I see any problem with it.
I do wish they hadn't spent several pages whining about dynamic typing -one of JavaScript's best features- when they mistook it for having no types at all. Seriously; what position are they in to argue when they can't even get their definitions straight?
Come on. Can't even one smartphone maker do a decent clamshell design? I've found the slide mechanism on slide-outs way too vulnerable to breakdowns, and the bar phones are even worse. When did the idea of a reliable case design that protects the important stuff go out of fashion?
The thing is, you're not swapping individual pancakes. You have to flip the entire stack above the insertion point. So if I have a stack [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] and I flip from where the 5 is, my stack is now [5,4,3,2,1,6,7,8,9], not [5,2,3,4,1,6,7,8,9].
That's what makes it hard. If all you were doing was swapping individual pancackes around then this would be easy, but you have to move stacks of pancakes.
DRM is only evil when it gives a third party control over your stuff...
...which is the entire point of DRM.
...not when it gives you control over your own stuff.
This has never happened. Furthermore, it never will. That would go against the point of the exercise. It's occasionally sold as a "potential" "future" benefit, but no one has any intention of ever implementing it.
The reason that software is bigger these days is that it does more for you.
That doesn't explain everything. In fact, it doesn't even explain very much. The only thing on that chart that does more than Turbo Pascal is the Erlang parser: the rest either deals with simple Unix commands or libraries, or is simple documentation (which doesn't do anything by itself).
Or to put it another way: if you really don't like bloat, when are you going to trade in your car and start driving to work in a hot wheels?
The Hot Wheels car doesn't do what I want. De-bloating software means cutting out unnecessary crap, not necessary things.
The thing is, those particular file systems also use a different notion of what a file is than what Unix folks are used to. One major example of this is that on these systems, a file can contain multiple streams of data, which both NTFS and HFS+ call forks. NTFS doesn't use forks much, but Macs used them heavily in the pre-OSX days (not so much anymore).
Files-11 and HFS+ also support a notion of files as being containers of discrete data records, rather than streams of bytes. Again, Macs used this concept heavily in the pre-OSX days, mostly when dealing with a file's resource fork, but it's not as common anymore.
It's a matter of usability. Far from being usable, Unity actively gets in my way. It's a pity, because I actually do like a small number of the UI concepts it uses (foremost among them the Mac-style unified menu bar). But on balance it's just not worth it: it's clunky and slow, and the search bar is simply no substitute for being able to organize things.
I'm on Lubuntu now, and much happier with it: faster, lighter, and more in tune with the way I work. I can even use LXLauncher for those times when a tablet-ized interface is actually useful.
Uh...you know how a flashlight beam spreads out when you turn it on? Like, the opening of the flashlight is an inch wide but you shine it on the wall and it's two feet wide? Yeah, that. A laser is just a flashlight. When you shine it on an aircraft, the beam spreads out and can easily blind the pilots.
Actually, the beam doesn't spread out. This is one of the defining characteristics -perhaps the defining characteristic- of laser light. This is also what makes it dangerous to pilots: an ordinary flashlight's beam spreads so much that by the time it's gone far enough to hit the plane in the first place, the light is so weak that the pilot doesn't even notice. Lasers, on the other hand, stay together and, in so doing, stay strong.
I've never quite understood how painting the underside of an airplane could reflect up into the pilot's eyes; the geometry doesn't sound like it would work out unless the underside of the plane were transparent, and IIRC they typically aren't. But since it happens, it must be possible. This leads me to wonder, however, if geometry might also be used to solve the problem: could an aircraft be shaped such that lasers hitting the underside can't reflect into the cockpit?
Slashdot Mirror
C++ - even Java - are horrible UI metaphors
Um... how are C++ and Java UI metaphors?
Which makes the subsequent WoW-ization of many popular PnP games even more troubling. They're feeding off of each other in a viscious cycle of fail.
What are you using for confirmation? NetCraft?
This. Occam's Razor is an experimental guide, not a standard of scientific proof. It's one of a number of maxims that gets abused by armchair scientists who think it says something it doesn't.
Likewise, this paper doesn't actually prove anything. It does appear to disprove one popular interpretation of quantum physics, by showing that it contradicts observed data. But by itself, that does not prove the other popular interpretation to be necessarily true.
On a side note: After first hand experience with those in Atlanta, all I can say is, Occupy THIS. Damn if I don't want to ever be around people like that.
But... but their rights! They can do whatever they want; they're the 99%!
It's also very easy to disprove. Just show me the message.
This study doesn't so much rebut phonics -long proven as an effective method of teaching literacy in most scripts- as much as it shows that phonics is only the baseline: what people fall back on when more advanced heuristics (like shape recognition) fail. And fail they do, from time to time: that's just the nature of heuristics. They work often enough to provide appreciable speed boosts -even huge ones- but fail often enough that you can't completely discard slower methods.
What this study suggests to me is that while having a solid grasp of phonics is a major milestone in literacy training, it should not be the end of said training (as it often is). Rather, once the students can walk, it is time to teach them to run: I don't know how you'd teach shape recognition, for example, but this is something that might have use as an advanced reading technique.
It is, however, still important not to try teaching the students to run before they can walk. The various attempts to replace phonics in the last few decades have ended in dismal failure, and they failed for a reason. That doesn't make phonics the be-all and end-all, but it remains the best foundation skill for reading yet devised.
How is your assumption that several million dollars won't make a corporation blink relevant, or even for that matter anything but absurd? Contrary to your crassly class-envious beliefs, even a corporation will blink at a penalty like that.
Like any form of mass marketing, crowdsourcing science basically comes down to convincing large numbers of people that what you are doing provides enough value (not necessarily in monetary terms) that putting some of their own money toward it is a worthwhile thing to do.
In a society that has become increasingly skeptical of doing a thing for the thing's own sake, that's a lot harder than it used to be, and it's true in fields across all political boundaries: weapons research would find itself without all that many takers, and likewise for most kinds of zoological research (though paleontologists might be able to find funding because OMG DINOSAURS). Those fields with a large number of armchair theorists would find themselves in particular peril: no one, but no one, wants to risk their pet models of sociology or educational theory being counter-proven into oblivion.
Some would say that this difficulty for finding funding in some fields is a feature, not a bug. You could probably convince most people of that, actually, if you carefully weighted your arguments toward fields toward which they would not contribute. But the question remains: what becomes of those fields?
If they're talking about coating the inside of bottles with this stuff, then clearly it must stick to some things.
What you describe is an unfair system: different parties play by different rules based on a factor of no relevance to the matter at hand.
In a fair system, everyone plays by the same rules, and that's the type of system I'm talking about here.
As long as this rule applies both ways -i.e. if Greenpeace were to hack into the computers if some other company, they would be fined a more or less equal amount- then I can't say I see any problem with it.
I do wish they hadn't spent several pages whining about dynamic typing -one of JavaScript's best features- when they mistook it for having no types at all. Seriously; what position are they in to argue when they can't even get their definitions straight?
Come on. Can't even one smartphone maker do a decent clamshell design? I've found the slide mechanism on slide-outs way too vulnerable to breakdowns, and the bar phones are even worse. When did the idea of a reliable case design that protects the important stuff go out of fashion?
Something about stealing 40 cakes back in the 1990s, if I recall.
The thing is, you're not swapping individual pancakes. You have to flip the entire stack above the insertion point. So if I have a stack [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] and I flip from where the 5 is, my stack is now [5,4,3,2,1,6,7,8,9], not [5,2,3,4,1,6,7,8,9].
That's what makes it hard. If all you were doing was swapping individual pancackes around then this would be easy, but you have to move stacks of pancakes.
Largely because it isn't an important feature. The case can be made for FS-level encryption, but FS-level compression is pure bloat.
DRM is only evil when it gives a third party control over your stuff...
...which is the entire point of DRM.
...not when it gives you control over your own stuff.
This has never happened. Furthermore, it never will. That would go against the point of the exercise. It's occasionally sold as a "potential" "future" benefit, but no one has any intention of ever implementing it.
By knowing when something belongs in a separate, ancillary tool instead of in the original software.
The reason that software is bigger these days is that it does more for you.
That doesn't explain everything. In fact, it doesn't even explain very much. The only thing on that chart that does more than Turbo Pascal is the Erlang parser: the rest either deals with simple Unix commands or libraries, or is simple documentation (which doesn't do anything by itself).
Or to put it another way: if you really don't like bloat, when are you going to trade in your car and start driving to work in a hot wheels?
The Hot Wheels car doesn't do what I want. De-bloating software means cutting out unnecessary crap, not necessary things.
The thing is, those particular file systems also use a different notion of what a file is than what Unix folks are used to. One major example of this is that on these systems, a file can contain multiple streams of data, which both NTFS and HFS+ call forks. NTFS doesn't use forks much, but Macs used them heavily in the pre-OSX days (not so much anymore).
Files-11 and HFS+ also support a notion of files as being containers of discrete data records, rather than streams of bytes. Again, Macs used this concept heavily in the pre-OSX days, mostly when dealing with a file's resource fork, but it's not as common anymore.
It's a matter of usability. Far from being usable, Unity actively gets in my way. It's a pity, because I actually do like a small number of the UI concepts it uses (foremost among them the Mac-style unified menu bar). But on balance it's just not worth it: it's clunky and slow, and the search bar is simply no substitute for being able to organize things.
I'm on Lubuntu now, and much happier with it: faster, lighter, and more in tune with the way I work. I can even use LXLauncher for those times when a tablet-ized interface is actually useful.
In other words, the government is obligated to obtain the shittiest services possible?
No, but they are obligated to get the best possible value: maximized effect at minimal cost.
Yeah, ha, ha. I did call it mad science, you know.
Uh...you know how a flashlight beam spreads out when you turn it on? Like, the opening of the flashlight is an inch wide but you shine it on the wall and it's two feet wide? Yeah, that. A laser is just a flashlight. When you shine it on an aircraft, the beam spreads out and can easily blind the pilots.
Actually, the beam doesn't spread out. This is one of the defining characteristics -perhaps the defining characteristic- of laser light. This is also what makes it dangerous to pilots: an ordinary flashlight's beam spreads so much that by the time it's gone far enough to hit the plane in the first place, the light is so weak that the pilot doesn't even notice. Lasers, on the other hand, stay together and, in so doing, stay strong.
I've never quite understood how painting the underside of an airplane could reflect up into the pilot's eyes; the geometry doesn't sound like it would work out unless the underside of the plane were transparent, and IIRC they typically aren't. But since it happens, it must be possible. This leads me to wonder, however, if geometry might also be used to solve the problem: could an aircraft be shaped such that lasers hitting the underside can't reflect into the cockpit?