He got away with it *both* times because the law emasculates the citizen from carrying a weapon at all times. If there were no restrictions on concealed carry, more people would carry. If V. Tech (like may schools) didn't ban firearms on its grounds, it's probable that some people in either group would have been armed and could have defended themselves. You're playing with hypotheticals here. It is certainly conceivable that, if a large number of VT students were all carrying concealed weapons that, when the shooting broke out, someone would have shot the nutcase. On the other hand it is conceivable that, if a large number of VT students were all carrying concealed weapons, there may have been a number of accidental or mistaken shootings at the same time.
Consider: you are carrying a concealed weapon and you hear gunfire coming from the room down the hall (or maybe from the floor below). You draw your weapon, and the next thing you know someone carrying a gun walks into the room. Is it another student from elsewhere in the building responding to the gunfire, or the nutcase? Do you shoot them before they can shoot you? Now add plenty of screaming and panic, and multiply this scenario by the number of different panicked scared students all carrying firearms.
To my mind each case (the nutcase getting shot, and a anumber of innocent students getting shot) seems equally reasonable, so given that the whole thing is purely hypothetical can you really claim, with any certainty, that lots of students carrying guns would have saved lives? I don't see that that is clear at all.
However, if corporations start using open source contributions as a yardstick to measure potential candidates en masse, the landscape will change dramatically. Consider college - used to be, you didn't go to college unless there was really a point in learning for the sake of learning. Them employers started demanding degrees. All of a sudden, degree mills start popping up, grade inflation makes 4.0 GPA's meaningless, colleges are pushed to teach "practical" "skills"... What I find interesting is that corporations using open source as a yardstick has the potential to reverse that trend at colleges, at least as far as computer science goes. If open source projects in general become widely recognised and highly regarded then hands on experience on open source projects related to the hiring field is going to look much more valuable than a CS degree with no promise of actual experience. That could easily lead to a trend where getting a degree is much less important than managing to make significant contributions to open source projects as far as getting a job goes. University can go back to being about theoretical computer science, and people who want to earn job credentials can put in the time on open source and point commit logs and reccomendations from projects maintainers.
You do have a point. I wrote the Concurrency chapter in The Java Tutorial, struggled for 15 pages just to discuss the basics of the topic, and ran out of time to cover more than half of what I should have. Most of what I wrote was about keeping your threads consistent, statewise. Ideally I would like to see Java take up something like this as a means to handle concurrency. It is simple, easy to understand, easy to reason about concurrent code, and doesn't require stepping very far outside standard stateful OO programming methods. Whether that will actually happen is, of course, another question, but something along those lines does offer a good way forward.
Abandon C and Fortran. Functional programing makes multithreading easy and programs can be written for parallel execution with ease. And as an added benefit, goodbye buffer overflows and double frees! Functional languages seem to regularly get trotted out when the subject of multi-cores and multi-threading comes up, but it really isn't a solution -- or, at least, it isn't a solution in and of itself. If you program in a completely pure functional manner with no state then, yes, things can be parallelised. The reality is that isn't really a viable option for a lot of applications. State is important. Functional languages realise this, and have ways to cope. With the ML family you get a little less purity as a tradeoff for a little more practicality. With truly pure languages like Haskell you just have to bind up state into monads, which is fine, except then you still have to reason about how to multithread the monadic portions of code.
This is not to say that functional programming isn't good. It is. It's great! It just doesn't magically make multi-threading problems go away -- at least not for the majority of applications. Functional programming is a fantastic way to go with many benefits, but it isn't a magic cure-all for multi-threading, and I wish people woul stop presenting it as if it were. If you want languages that are great for multi-threading then try languages designed with concurrency in mind like Erlang, or E, or Oz, or Scala. They won't magically make your problems go away either, but they will, at least, provide you with a paradigm that allows you to think and reason about your multi-threaded code much more easily.
Do you really think that going against the group-think would win Libertarians any votes? Probably not, but then, looking at the LP platform and past performance, that never seems to have been an issue for them with regard to deciding policy in the past...
Solar activity in general is undermeasured in the global warming/climate change debate, if only because of the difficulty of measuring the sun as a whole. There has actually been a reasonable amount of study since initial questions as to the degree of solar activity influence in current warming trends was raised back in the 90s. Sunpots are a decent indicator, and we do have somewhat respectable sunspot records going back to almost 1600. Going back further than thet gets tricky. That's where proxies like 10Be are useful, although how accurate that is is debatale (the other common option, 14C, is pretty good, but unreliable after 1950 and the advent of nuclear testing). The important point, as far as current warming trends is concerned, however, is how well the recent rise in solar activity (which peaked around 1960) can account for recent warming. In practice CO2 (which has a remarkably good explanation involving absorption spectra to provide mechanics for causation to go with the correlation) provides a better explanation for the warming in the last 50 years. Indeed, the latest IPCC report, which put some effort into refining the solar contributions, puts solar activity as a significant, but still minor compared anthropogenic effects, contributor to warming. Don't take my word though -- all those graphs cite sources that you can chase up and verify for yourselves.
The number of sunspots has been near constant (on average) over the past 20 years, yet they are at the highest level in over 1000 years for the last 60 years "yet the average temperature of the earth has continued to increase". This shows the author doesn't understand lag times between applying extra energy input to the atmospheric system versus the time required for the large mass of the Earth's ecosystem to respond by warming land, sea and air to the point where average temperature changes can be measured.
Well you can pose that as a possible explanation for the lag time between increase in sunspot activity and increase in global average temperatures, but then you have explain why, when the 60 year lag has been adjusted for, the result fails to correlate with all the other global average temperature fluctuations over the last 250 years. The data for sunspots, and the data for temperatures are all freely available -- plot them and you can look for correlations or lack thereof yourself. There aren't any good ones that explain the recent (last 50 years) warming while still providing any correlation for similar historical fluctuations. But don't take my word for it, download the data and break out Gnuplot. Really, why guess, or trust someone elses interpretation when you can go straight to the raw data and see for yourself.
I create and give presentations to others every week or so, and frequently use my own slides as a reference for myself in future work. If the slides had nothing but pictures and figures on them, they would be absolutely worthless. There HAS to be at least a sentence or two on each slide in order to jog your memory about what the presenter was saying, and give the context to the content. This, however, is the problem in many ways. The small amount of text in these sorts of slides is hardly enough to actually communicate the point. Reading someone's powerpoint slides and trying to infer or remember what they were saying is usually rather difficult. The number of powerpoint (style) presentations published on the web that are all but useless is staggering. A set of slides is no substitute for a good written presentation of the material. If you want slides make slides, and if you want people (including yourself) to remember the details of what was presented then provide a proper written document as well.
The article says that what you propose is the wrong way to do Powerpoint. The basic idea is that when people have to read and hear the same thing, they don't take it in. Visuals should be used for things that are visual, not written. An alternative approach, which is very effective, is simply to use text slides to emphasise the key points (with only a word or short sentence per slide) of what is otherwise a normal speech. This is the "Lessig Style", and it can be very effective when done well. This also allows you to freely mix in visual material as well. The catch with this approach is that it is hard to do well -- you actually need to really rehearse you presentation, and be able to synchronise your (many, and rapid) slide transitions with your speech.
If an expert can organize the material and the student is willing to read it, then the middle man university is becoming less important much like the MPAA/RIAA, and work experience more important. It will take much longer for universities, however, to change as employers will need new ways to test knowledge and skill. Universities will only be useful in that they generate peer discussion, which doesn't happen as much for drunken undergraduate students anyways. In theory universities always were useful as a place to generate peer discussion -- that was their primary purpose. Somewhere along the line, however, people have gotten universities confused with trade schools (and indeed, the universities themselves perpetuate this confusion), and view university as a place to get career training and a degree as nothing more than a ticket to a job. Certainly this function of universities is likely to slowly dry up over the next few decades. Hopefully then universities can get back to being what they used to be.
Where I go to college, one of my professors (in a social science) has a standing bet with all his students: if we ever have to write a term paper for our job in the real world (i.e., not academia), he'll donate $25 to the charity of our choice. He's been teaching since the 1970s and has never had to pay up... Well I've certainly had jobs outside of academia that involved writing research papers. Then again those were research positions, just within private industry and government as opposed to academia.
We're given a maximum page length, not a minimum (usually around four to five pages), into which we have to cram 15 or so term-paper-pages' worth of material. It's surprisingly difficult, but (according to him; I'm not yet in the real world full-time) that kind of skill is vastly important and not taught enough. Real-world types: does this sound accurate (and/or wise)? I can certainly say that being able to condense, rather than bloat, material is a vital skill. When writing papers outside of academia what mattered was managing to sell whatever research you've just done -- the aim is to get the project moved out of research and into production, the other option being you watching all your hard work get mothballed. Often, after putting in months on a project, you have a lot you would like to say. Paring that down to something that really emphasises they key points and gets that across efficiently is important. You often have to leave out weeks worth of work that, while good, is just going to distract, and that's painful. Knowing how to do that well is a very valuable skill, and it makes the difference between being the guy who sees his work turn into something, and the guy who sees all his projects get shelved.
I agree that it is not different in terms of principle, the issue here is whether it is different in terms of degree, which is what the law is concerned with. Did MS go too far in giving a false impression while failing to provide appropriate disclaimers? That is a reasonable question to ask. I'm not saying that MS is just flat wrong here -- that's for the courts to decide. I am saying that there certainly appears to be enough potential for deception to at least make the case reasonable. Whether the advertsing was too misleading or not will be determined by the court.
The fact that it is not being done shows that either 1) it just recently became possible to do it profitably and people are working on it right now, or 2) its not profitable. It is not profitable as long as you have the heavily subsidised road system and airlines to compete with. Were there as much government cash sloshing in the direction of rail as there is into highways, car infrastructure, and airlines, then I suspect rail, at least in the high population areas like the east caost and California, would look quite profitable. As it is rail is the ugly stepchild, gets no cash, and can't compete economically with alternatives that recieve considerable explicit and implicit subsidies.
Me too - just because I am running Gnome on my Linux box doesn't mean that because I am lacking XGL and Beryl/Compiz functionality I'm not running Gnome on Linux. Aero != Vista I believe the difference here is that Gnome doesn't have all its advertising show off the cool 3D effects available from Beryl/Compiz. The issue is that Microsoft is playing both sides here: they advertise Vista based on its fancy new UI, and then advertise "Vista Capable machines" that offer none of the features for which they are advertising Vista with. If I advertise my hamburgers as having 1/2 a pound of beef, and also have advertisements saying that my salads come with a free hamburger (not mentioning that the free hamburger is a McDonalds hamburger) then the advertising is being deceptive. Sure, both ads are technically true, but in conjucction they are designed to mislead.
It is true that the machines are technically Vista Capable in that they can run, and the features MS advertises for Vista are features that Vista has. However, the machines that are Vista Capable are not capable of running what MS is advertising Vista to be. Sure, both ads are technically true, but in conjunction they are designed to mislead.
Yeah, if all out population in the US was situated with very high density in an almost straight line, rail would be an option. Sadly, the American Dream includes owning a Home, with a yard and all that fun stuff. This means that we don't have the population densities outside of a few major metropolitan areas to support rail travel. While it is true that overall the US population is spread over a very large area, there are certainly regions of the US that are sufficiently densely populated that a rail system would be reasonable. In particular there is the east coast, particularly the Boston/New York/Philadelphia/Baltimore corridor. It is sufficiently dense that they already technically have a "high speed train" there -- its just that they never upgraded the tracks for it, so the train doesn't actually go very fast, and the service is poor and always late. If The US and Canada could cooperate there's also a good potential corridor along Chicago/Detroit/Toronto/Montreal/Quebec.
I'll put in another vote for the desirability of high speed rail. You do need a fairly densely populated rail corridor to really make it really worthwhile, but the east coast of the US would/should qualify. I'm now living in Canada and would kill for rail service through Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal that is even comparable to the "limited express" service in Japan (which still rattles along at a healthy 120-180kph). The passenger rail service here is terrible -- the tracks are owned by the freight rail company so you end up with the already far too slow passenger trains having to pull off for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to let freight trains past. You should be able to do Toronto to Montreal in about 2 hours with high speed trains, and even less time for Toronto to Ottawa. Instead the scheduled times take over 4 hours, and the trains are consistently anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour late. In all my travelling in Japan by rail I have once seen a train that was late, with the board announcing it would be arriving precisely 3 minutes behind schedule (which it duly did). The rest of the time you can (and in fact I did) set your watch by when the train pulls away from the station. I loved rail in Japan -- it was simple, efficient, comfortable, and took you city centre to city centre. I wish we had anything even vaguely comparable in North America.
These sorts of surveys are more about who has the more devoted and active fanbase at the moment. That doesn't make the result less significant, its just a matter of what the result is actually saying: Firefly has managed to develop and extremely devoted and extremely active fanbase. This isn't that surprising; I've loaned or recommended the DVD set to several people, only to have them become devout fans of the series. Still, interest in Firefly is obviously still going strong, which is, again, notable. The other side to this is that the Star Wars fanbase has apparently grown increasingly apathetic -- and the blame for that can be laid squarely upon the prequel trilogy which left many Star Wars fans (myself included) feeling flat, and has taken a little of the shine off the franchise. Oddly enough it still remains far more likely that we will see another Star Wars film than a sequel to Serenity (though neither is that likely). Star Wars fans may be apathetic about the films these days, but they still exist in vast numbers.
All in all, this reminds me of way back in the day when Enlightenment (the window manager, kdawson, not the metaphysical oneness-with-all thing) first came out. Everyone started making these obscenely complex themes showing off how cool E was. Then it seems like everyone uttered a collective "Meh," and went back to FVWM. I did, anyway. The comparison is quite apt. Hopefully we'll get a similar end result -- back in the day, after the initial flurry of eyecandy for eyecandy's sake, Enlightenment themes settled down and some good functionality started to come out of that eyecandy (pagers that had window previews, likewise window previews in iconboxes). More importantly, as the core visual improvements that Enlightenment offered started to catch on, newer window-managers offered similar features. I suspect the same thing will happen here -- while compiz and beryl are the new shiny thing that takes some effort to get running they will have all manner of eyecandy effects that do little more than show off (as well as a basic core of good functionality that makes use of the 3D desktop). As the technology slowly shifts into the mainstream people will stop worrying so much and we'll start to see more focus on the useful features.
How was it that Britain was the only place to survive? You know, given that it doesn't really have vast natural resources to begin with? It wasn't the only place to survive, but it was implicated to be one of the few. The news reports in the film mentioned viruses in the USA that had decimated the population. There was also an implication that early implementation of relatively authoritarian control in the UK had managed to keep the rioting and looting to a minimum compared to many other countries where people ran amuck and significant infrastructure was destroyed. Come now, all these things were covered, at least through implication, if you were actually paying attention.
27% of Agnostics and Atheists think God guided the process of evolution 13% of Agnostics and Atheists think God created man in his present form.
So a better title for the article might have been "40% of Atheists believe in God". How you come to the conclusion you do baffles me. For starters it is not at all clear that "God guided the process of evolution" and "God created man in his present form" are mutually exclusive ideas - it would quite possible to believe both. Thus there is likely to be a high degree of intersection between the 27% who believe God guided evolution, and the 13% who believe God created man in his present form. As long as there is a non-empty intersection you can't just add the percentages together to get 40%.
Secondly the article was talking about "Agnostics and Atheists" which you somehow convert into just "Atheists". Agnostics simply believe that the question of whether God exists or not cannot be answered. That doesn't preclude a belief in God. Thus you could have absolutely non of the Atheists believing in God, and a larger percentage of Agnostics believing that God guided the process of evolution.
Congratulations on being (only) the third person in this thread to actually provide mathematically correct response. The number of people (including the OP) who began their comments with "as a mathematician" and then proceeded to spout pure garbage almost made me despair. Thanks for helping to prove that there are still people on Slashdot who know what they are talking about.
As a mathematician (or at least, an ex-mathematician) I am always amazed by mathematicians who forget that 'equality' between distinct domains is introduced (in standard developments) as a mere abuse of notation. Just because there is a canonical injection of Z into (say) Q does not mean that any element of Z is equal to any element of Q in any normal sense. Kudos! Someone who actually understands mathematics. There exists natural injective maps from N -> Z -> Q-> R -> C, but they are actually different domains, and not strictly, subsets (as people like to presume for convenience). To see this clearly (and simply), consider the formal defintions for a natural number 4, and the rational number 4, in set theoretic foundations: the first is finite set, the second is an infinite equivalence class. Clearly they are different objects.
As a mathematician, I'm always surprised by people who think that 4 and 4.0 should not be equal. Really? As a mathematician I can see a valid reason to find a difference. It is reasonable to assume that 4 represents the natural number 4, while 4.0 is referring to the real number 4.0000..., which are clearly, mathematically, quite separate objects. Sure, there exists a canonical injection of N into R that allows for identification of the objects in question if you choose to apply it, but strictly R and N are quite distinct: for instance there exists a complete and consistent axiomitization of R, while Goedel demonstrated that no such axiomitization of N exists. There is, actually, a natural quality to type theory in mathematics, particularly when working in terms of Category (and specifically Topos) theory. While type theory might have been something Russell was initially forced into to escape paradoxes when writing Principia Mathematica (that's right, type theory was originally developed for mathematics, and had nothing to do with programming), mathematicians have increasingly come to view it as a natural approach that allows one to tease apart the more subtle philosphical quandries at the heart of mathematics.
The next step would be to check and make sure that the intention the code works with is the intention the people desire. And this is why formal specification should be used. It provides a middle tier between implementation code, and English language specification. Verifying that the code properly implements the formal specification can be done programatically and independently quite easily. In turn, validating the formal specification, by comparing it to the peoples desires in terms of a English language set of requirements is easier than trying to compare coed to the requirements, since it is only intentions that are formally defined, with no issues of implementation to complicate the matter. Stating your intentions in an unambiguous way, via formal specification, ought to be an obvious first step for anything where the need for assurance is as high as it with electronic voting.
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Consider: you are carrying a concealed weapon and you hear gunfire coming from the room down the hall (or maybe from the floor below). You draw your weapon, and the next thing you know someone carrying a gun walks into the room. Is it another student from elsewhere in the building responding to the gunfire, or the nutcase? Do you shoot them before they can shoot you? Now add plenty of screaming and panic, and multiply this scenario by the number of different panicked scared students all carrying firearms.
To my mind each case (the nutcase getting shot, and a anumber of innocent students getting shot) seems equally reasonable, so given that the whole thing is purely hypothetical can you really claim, with any certainty, that lots of students carrying guns would have saved lives? I don't see that that is clear at all.
This is not to say that functional programming isn't good. It is. It's great! It just doesn't magically make multi-threading problems go away -- at least not for the majority of applications. Functional programming is a fantastic way to go with many benefits, but it isn't a magic cure-all for multi-threading, and I wish people woul stop presenting it as if it were. If you want languages that are great for multi-threading then try languages designed with concurrency in mind like Erlang, or E, or Oz, or Scala. They won't magically make your problems go away either, but they will, at least, provide you with a paradigm that allows you to think and reason about your multi-threaded code much more easily.
Or you could just take a moving average over a suitable time-frame (like say, an 11 year window) like in the graphs linked.
Well you can pose that as a possible explanation for the lag time between increase in sunspot activity and increase in global average temperatures, but then you have explain why, when the 60 year lag has been adjusted for, the result fails to correlate with all the other global average temperature fluctuations over the last 250 years. The data for sunspots, and the data for temperatures are all freely available -- plot them and you can look for correlations or lack thereof yourself. There aren't any good ones that explain the recent (last 50 years) warming while still providing any correlation for similar historical fluctuations. But don't take my word for it, download the data and break out Gnuplot. Really, why guess, or trust someone elses interpretation when you can go straight to the raw data and see for yourself.
I agree that it is not different in terms of principle, the issue here is whether it is different in terms of degree, which is what the law is concerned with. Did MS go too far in giving a false impression while failing to provide appropriate disclaimers? That is a reasonable question to ask. I'm not saying that MS is just flat wrong here -- that's for the courts to decide. I am saying that there certainly appears to be enough potential for deception to at least make the case reasonable. Whether the advertsing was too misleading or not will be determined by the court.
It is true that the machines are technically Vista Capable in that they can run, and the features MS advertises for Vista are features that Vista has. However, the machines that are Vista Capable are not capable of running what MS is advertising Vista to be. Sure, both ads are technically true, but in conjunction they are designed to mislead.
Sadly, the American Dream includes owning a Home, with a yard and all that fun stuff. This means that we don't have the population densities outside of a few major metropolitan areas to support rail travel. While it is true that overall the US population is spread over a very large area, there are certainly regions of the US that are sufficiently densely populated that a rail system would be reasonable. In particular there is the east coast, particularly the Boston/New York/Philadelphia/Baltimore corridor. It is sufficiently dense that they already technically have a "high speed train" there -- its just that they never upgraded the tracks for it, so the train doesn't actually go very fast, and the service is poor and always late. If The US and Canada could cooperate there's also a good potential corridor along Chicago/Detroit/Toronto/Montreal/Quebec.
I'll put in another vote for the desirability of high speed rail. You do need a fairly densely populated rail corridor to really make it really worthwhile, but the east coast of the US would/should qualify. I'm now living in Canada and would kill for rail service through Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal that is even comparable to the "limited express" service in Japan (which still rattles along at a healthy 120-180kph). The passenger rail service here is terrible -- the tracks are owned by the freight rail company so you end up with the already far too slow passenger trains having to pull off for anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to let freight trains past. You should be able to do Toronto to Montreal in about 2 hours with high speed trains, and even less time for Toronto to Ottawa. Instead the scheduled times take over 4 hours, and the trains are consistently anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour late. In all my travelling in Japan by rail I have once seen a train that was late, with the board announcing it would be arriving precisely 3 minutes behind schedule (which it duly did). The rest of the time you can (and in fact I did) set your watch by when the train pulls away from the station. I loved rail in Japan -- it was simple, efficient, comfortable, and took you city centre to city centre. I wish we had anything even vaguely comparable in North America.
These sorts of surveys are more about who has the more devoted and active fanbase at the moment. That doesn't make the result less significant, its just a matter of what the result is actually saying: Firefly has managed to develop and extremely devoted and extremely active fanbase. This isn't that surprising; I've loaned or recommended the DVD set to several people, only to have them become devout fans of the series. Still, interest in Firefly is obviously still going strong, which is, again, notable. The other side to this is that the Star Wars fanbase has apparently grown increasingly apathetic -- and the blame for that can be laid squarely upon the prequel trilogy which left many Star Wars fans (myself included) feeling flat, and has taken a little of the shine off the franchise. Oddly enough it still remains far more likely that we will see another Star Wars film than a sequel to Serenity (though neither is that likely). Star Wars fans may be apathetic about the films these days, but they still exist in vast numbers.
13% of Agnostics and Atheists think God created man in his present form.
So a better title for the article might have been "40% of Atheists believe in God". How you come to the conclusion you do baffles me. For starters it is not at all clear that "God guided the process of evolution" and "God created man in his present form" are mutually exclusive ideas - it would quite possible to believe both. Thus there is likely to be a high degree of intersection between the 27% who believe God guided evolution, and the 13% who believe God created man in his present form. As long as there is a non-empty intersection you can't just add the percentages together to get 40%.
Secondly the article was talking about "Agnostics and Atheists" which you somehow convert into just "Atheists". Agnostics simply believe that the question of whether God exists or not cannot be answered. That doesn't preclude a belief in God. Thus you could have absolutely non of the Atheists believing in God, and a larger percentage of Agnostics believing that God guided the process of evolution.
Congratulations on being (only) the third person in this thread to actually provide mathematically correct response. The number of people (including the OP) who began their comments with "as a mathematician" and then proceeded to spout pure garbage almost made me despair. Thanks for helping to prove that there are still people on Slashdot who know what they are talking about.