Of course, genetic transmission does not imply memetic transmission (though they are obviously highly correlated). You could argue that, on the one hand, you have communities and societies that are fecund, but scientifically (and hence economically) backward.
Right, but if I'm simply an animal, and not a human being endowed by my creator, and I'm not a creation in God's imagine, but rather a result of natural selection over generations, shouldn't I focus entirely on passing my DNA along?
I see two problems with that argument. First, you cannot in principle get an "ought" from an "is" (this is a well-pedigreed philosophical principle). Just because you, say, have the urge to pick your nose, or beat up your subling or whatever, doesn't mean you ought to do it. Second, it presumes that the essence of your individuality is expressed solely in your genes. That completely ignores both the epigenetic and (more important) memetic components of you. For example, I would feel continuity off self were I to undergo a transplant of reproductive organs, and even, I believe, were my consciousness (my memetic self) to be transferred to a robot.
Memes are both more ambiguous and fluid than genes. They also evolve more quickly. It is quite possible that, once the genetic and cultural substrate for vibrant memetic evolution has been established, genes become almost irrelevant.
Isn't man's "wiring" for promiscuity stem form a desire to spread their seed, a desire the that Hebrew Bible merely channeled by declaring each woman his bride and obligating him towards them.
I quite agree. Evolutionary psychology has quite a few interesting things to say about culture and monogamy.
Buy yes, the ABSOLUTELY funniest part of the issue is that pro-Creationist, anti-Evolution religious types are the ones acting to best preserve their genetic material from an evolutionary point of view, while the anti-Creation, pro-Evolution atheist-led movements encourage behavior that causes their DNA to be deselected...
Of course, genetic transmission does not imply memetic transmission (though they are obviously highly correlated). You could argue that, on the one hand, you have communities and societies that are fecund, but scientifically (and hence economically) backward. On the other, you have the "enlightened" communities and societies with success in achieving happiness and progress for their members, but with low reproductive rates.
One might argue that, to the extent the latter communities and societies can invite and assimilate members from among the population of fundamentalists, they will ultimately prove successful.
Indeed it has. And, as a frequent sufferer of its output, I can say with confidence that it sucks. I have no experience of anyone else's system, but Mathematica's TeX output seeks to duplicate the on-screen appearance, and is way too close to plain TeX, to be all that useful. It requires major hand-editing.
One topic that is evidently too hot to handle: How do you cope with sexual desire among healthy young men and women during a mission years long?
Easy. Send couples with small children. That solves the sex problem. Now all you have to worry about is little hands working the airlock controls while your back is turned.
It can be a bad idea to sign even an unenforceable noncompete. In any industry where noncompetes are common (as in my case, finance), prospective employers always ask if you are subject to one. If you say "yes", they don't want to get involved, whether or not the noncompete is enforceable.
One thing that has always bemused me about the penny stock spams is the brokerage fees. If you pay, say, 1 1/2 cents per share in brokerage, (thus 3 cents total for buying and eventually selling), your 15 cent stock trade is 20% in the hole the minute you do it.
...and here we have another M.D. who thinks he knows something about science. I wish medical schools would concentrate less on memorization and more on critical thinking skills, especially with respect to statistical studies.
This is a spectacularly good example of really stupid statistical games.
In actuality, the paper is a good example of the way in which social research can take advantage of natural experiments.
I only skimmed it...
Then why write with such unwarranted authority and in such certain terms about its contents and conclusions?
Aside from the basic methodologic errors (confusing correlation with causation, adopting a highly questionable proxy indicator without validating it, and spending almost no time ruling out confounding factors or tainted data), there remain the dozens of smaller tactical problems...
They made none of the errors you list. I would like to think you might have realized this had you bothered (as I did) to actually read the paper, but based on the evidence of your post, I would be reckless to assume that.
This is modded funny, but it's the downright truth. I've worked closely with developers (I'm a quant in the finance industry). In my experience, the very best developers work normal (or, dare I say it, short) hours. The ones who think they are good work long hours. And BTW the best developers very very very very rarely take all day to quash a bug.
Oh for Pete's sake. You should not use an ad hominem attack, even one made, as you do, against such a despicable entity as the RIAA. Do you really think copyrights should never be enforced?
The point of the question is to determine whether the RIAA stopped suing the functional equivalents of Kazaa because it became too difficult, or because they thought a campaign against individuals was really the right way to go about trying to reduce infringement. I found the suits against companies utterly reprehensible, while suits against infringing individuals are, in principle, much more reasonable. If they stopped suing companies because it was the wrong thing to do (though I doubt it), all the better.
The RIAA's execution of these suits against individuals is (as we all know) horrifying. Your sloppy litany of the RIAA's bad behavior actually misses many of the worst aspects of them. But I would far rather see the RIAA go after high-volume and low-volume infringers, very much in that order, than after providers of technology that I find useful or interesting. I am seeking faint hope that they will no longer stoop so low.
Some years ago, the RIAA's legal actions tended to be againt companies, such as Napster, that created the tools or ran servers used by millions of people to share files. Much of this sharing consisted of alleged copyright violations, so the argument was that such software was contributory to infringement despite any non-infringing uses it might have.
Many people here on Slashdot were repelled (so to speak) by the attack on software that did truly have non-infringing uses, and argued that the lawsuits should target the individuals responsible, rather than the technology they were using. I had a lot of sympathy for those arguments.
Now that the RIAA does sue individuals instead, do you believe they do so because it became too hard to sue companies, or because they bought into the idea of individual responsibility? In other words, did the category of lawsuits change because the companies and software are now structured so as to be too difficult to sue?
I don't think the submitter would be floor trading. It appears he plans to stay with his global bank, which is much more likely to involve OTC trading, based on customer flows, prop desks, etc.
I think the most reasonable place to start would be to try to internal transfer to a junior trading position on the FX trading desk. Such positions come up a lot because so many people hate keeping up with the time zone differences. There is a lot of flow, and there are not nearly as many currencies out there as there are, say, equities.
Unlikely, Windows tends to freak out if it wakes up with a different motherboard to when it went to sleep
I don't believe the GP is proposing sleeping under the virtual machine and waking again in Boot Camp.
You might get it to boot but it would probably bluescreen before you got the chance to do much.
It would be easy, though, to allow the VM and Boot Camp to share many applications and user settings on an NTFS volume, as Windows is quite used to Active Directory and other ways of separating the user environment from the machine it is running on. Not Unix- or OSX-level separation to be sure, but it is there. That alone would save the majority of duplicated HD space between a VM and Boot Camp. The OS itself is probably less than 1GB.
It may even be possible to develop (on the VM side) some way of keeping "alternative" system files and executables around, to be substituted for the ones present on the NTFS partition as necessary so that the system behaves properly. An even better trick would be to make such a solution work with Windows Genuine Advantage (or whatever it is called) as well as FLEXlm and other license managers so that a single license for Windows and proprietary software will suffice for both installations.
It is worth noting that one thing you give up by having a VM use an actual partition is the incredible portability and duplicatability of VMs stored in a disk image.
Heh, good on you, though I believe hyperbole is the word you seek.
The truthful kernel of my statement is that something must be done to encourage institutions to stop treating SSNs as either secrets or unique identifiers.
I know that in this case more than social security numbers were taken. But this is a good spot to say that I would like the US government to publish, for free download, a list of all issued SSNs and their associated names. Then the banks, insurance companies, universities and so on will have to stop pretending the damn things are secret.
I am a quant. QuantLib is a good idea, but every time I have considered contributing to it, or using it, I have been stymied by the baroque architecture and hit-or-miss grab bag of features. The AC post above gives me a clue as to how it got this way.
That said, this is all a bit offtopic, as the real discussion is about contributing patches to, say, python-dateutil and not bits of proprietary secrets.
Write a PDE solver, Monte Carlo integration routine, or LU decomposer in a high-level language. Any high-level language. Write it again in C and note the 10x or 100x speedup without even optimizing. Optimize further, and you may get, what? 30% better, tops? So the reward for the development time invested is much greater in the transition from a high-level language to C, than it is in worrying about further optimizations once in C.
Example: I wrote my own LU decomposer that comes within a fraction of the speed of the one in Intel's MKL, without worrying about optimizations. I find it implausible therefore that further optimization would do me whole lotta good. I've had similar experiences with a PDE solver I've been working with.
The GP poster probably works in investment banking, like I do, where C still has its place in valuing complex instruments. The routines naturally belong in a library, and what the hell the GP ever does with fork() I don't know. But it is true that there is a lot of practical use of C out there that doesn't really scream for optimization.
Slashdot Mirror
I see two problems with that argument. First, you cannot in principle get an "ought" from an "is" (this is a well-pedigreed philosophical principle). Just because you, say, have the urge to pick your nose, or beat up your subling or whatever, doesn't mean you ought to do it. Second, it presumes that the essence of your individuality is expressed solely in your genes. That completely ignores both the epigenetic and (more important) memetic components of you. For example, I would feel continuity off self were I to undergo a transplant of reproductive organs, and even, I believe, were my consciousness (my memetic self) to be transferred to a robot.
Memes are both more ambiguous and fluid than genes. They also evolve more quickly. It is quite possible that, once the genetic and cultural substrate for vibrant memetic evolution has been established, genes become almost irrelevant.
I quite agree. Evolutionary psychology has quite a few interesting things to say about culture and monogamy.
Buy yes, the ABSOLUTELY funniest part of the issue is that pro-Creationist, anti-Evolution religious types are the ones acting to best preserve their genetic material from an evolutionary point of view, while the anti-Creation, pro-Evolution atheist-led movements encourage behavior that causes their DNA to be deselected...
Of course, genetic transmission does not imply memetic transmission (though they are obviously highly correlated). You could argue that, on the one hand, you have communities and societies that are fecund, but scientifically (and hence economically) backward. On the other, you have the "enlightened" communities and societies with success in achieving happiness and progress for their members, but with low reproductive rates.
One might argue that, to the extent the latter communities and societies can invite and assimilate members from among the population of fundamentalists, they will ultimately prove successful.
Indeed it has. And, as a frequent sufferer of its output, I can say with confidence that it sucks. I have no experience of anyone else's system, but Mathematica's TeX output seeks to duplicate the on-screen appearance, and is way too close to plain TeX, to be all that useful. It requires major hand-editing.
One topic that is evidently too hot to handle: How do you cope with sexual desire among healthy young men and women during a mission years long?
Easy. Send couples with small children. That solves the sex problem. Now all you have to worry about is little hands working the airlock controls while your back is turned.
But does he have an enormous schwanstucker?
//enormous
I believe that is schwangstücke
For our non-USA friends: a "DWB" means Driving While Black.
It can be a bad idea to sign even an unenforceable noncompete. In any industry where noncompetes are common (as in my case, finance), prospective employers always ask if you are subject to one. If you say "yes", they don't want to get involved, whether or not the noncompete is enforceable.
Given what I have read about Russian prisons, I think a year in one of those is probably more severe punishment than a decade in a U.S. prison.
Perhaps the sampling would go better with a quasirandom sequence.
You forgot to hyperlink it
ExpertSexChange.com
One thing that has always bemused me about the penny stock spams is the brokerage fees. If you pay, say, 1 1/2 cents per share in brokerage, (thus 3 cents total for buying and eventually selling), your 15 cent stock trade is 20% in the hole the minute you do it.
Yeah they can, when the songs are on the hard drive. Just don't try plugging in your USB flash drive unless you love the command line.
...and here we have another M.D. who thinks he knows something about science. I wish medical schools would concentrate less on memorization and more on critical thinking skills, especially with respect to statistical studies.
This is a spectacularly good example of really stupid statistical games.
In actuality, the paper is a good example of the way in which social research can take advantage of natural experiments.
I only skimmed it...
Then why write with such unwarranted authority and in such certain terms about its contents and conclusions?
Aside from the basic methodologic errors (confusing correlation with causation, adopting a highly questionable proxy indicator without validating it, and spending almost no time ruling out confounding factors or tainted data), there remain the dozens of smaller tactical problems...
They made none of the errors you list. I would like to think you might have realized this had you bothered (as I did) to actually read the paper, but based on the evidence of your post, I would be reckless to assume that.
This is modded funny, but it's the downright truth. I've worked closely with developers (I'm a quant in the finance industry). In my experience, the very best developers work normal (or, dare I say it, short) hours. The ones who think they are good work long hours. And BTW the best developers very very very very rarely take all day to quash a bug.
They're amazing.
Oh for Pete's sake. You should not use an ad hominem attack, even one made, as you do, against such a despicable entity as the RIAA. Do you really think copyrights should never be enforced?
The point of the question is to determine whether the RIAA stopped suing the functional equivalents of Kazaa because it became too difficult, or because they thought a campaign against individuals was really the right way to go about trying to reduce infringement. I found the suits against companies utterly reprehensible, while suits against infringing individuals are, in principle, much more reasonable. If they stopped suing companies because it was the wrong thing to do (though I doubt it), all the better.
The RIAA's execution of these suits against individuals is (as we all know) horrifying. Your sloppy litany of the RIAA's bad behavior actually misses many of the worst aspects of them. But I would far rather see the RIAA go after high-volume and low-volume infringers, very much in that order, than after providers of technology that I find useful or interesting. I am seeking faint hope that they will no longer stoop so low.
Some years ago, the RIAA's legal actions tended to be againt companies, such as Napster, that created the tools or ran servers used by millions of people to share files. Much of this sharing consisted of alleged copyright violations, so the argument was that such software was contributory to infringement despite any non-infringing uses it might have.
Many people here on Slashdot were repelled (so to speak) by the attack on software that did truly have non-infringing uses, and argued that the lawsuits should target the individuals responsible, rather than the technology they were using. I had a lot of sympathy for those arguments.
Now that the RIAA does sue individuals instead, do you believe they do so because it became too hard to sue companies, or because they bought into the idea of individual responsibility? In other words, did the category of lawsuits change because the companies and software are now structured so as to be too difficult to sue?
This sounds like a great place to house an aimbot, if those still exist.
I don't think the submitter would be floor trading. It appears he plans to stay with his global bank, which is much more likely to involve OTC trading, based on customer flows, prop desks, etc.
I think the most reasonable place to start would be to try to internal transfer to a junior trading position on the FX trading desk. Such positions come up a lot because so many people hate keeping up with the time zone differences. There is a lot of flow, and there are not nearly as many currencies out there as there are, say, equities.
Unlikely, Windows tends to freak out if it wakes up with a different motherboard to when it went to sleep
I don't believe the GP is proposing sleeping under the virtual machine and waking again in Boot Camp.
You might get it to boot but it would probably bluescreen before you got the chance to do much.
It would be easy, though, to allow the VM and Boot Camp to share many applications and user settings on an NTFS volume, as Windows is quite used to Active Directory and other ways of separating the user environment from the machine it is running on. Not Unix- or OSX-level separation to be sure, but it is there. That alone would save the majority of duplicated HD space between a VM and Boot Camp. The OS itself is probably less than 1GB.
It may even be possible to develop (on the VM side) some way of keeping "alternative" system files and executables around, to be substituted for the ones present on the NTFS partition as necessary so that the system behaves properly. An even better trick would be to make such a solution work with Windows Genuine Advantage (or whatever it is called) as well as FLEXlm and other license managers so that a single license for Windows and proprietary software will suffice for both installations.
It is worth noting that one thing you give up by having a VM use an actual partition is the incredible portability and duplicatability of VMs stored in a disk image.
Heh, good on you, though I believe hyperbole is the word you seek.
The truthful kernel of my statement is that something must be done to encourage institutions to stop treating SSNs as either secrets or unique identifiers.
I know that in this case more than social security numbers were taken. But this is a good spot to say that I would like the US government to publish, for free download, a list of all issued SSNs and their associated names. Then the banks, insurance companies, universities and so on will have to stop pretending the damn things are secret.
I can set up Samba, etc. on just about any box. What defies me is setting up OpenAFS. How about a server that supports OpenAFS or Coda?
How did you get Thunderbird to filter them so well? I have the exact same problem, and Thunderbird only gets about 90%.
I am a quant. QuantLib is a good idea, but every time I have considered contributing to it, or using it, I have been stymied by the baroque architecture and hit-or-miss grab bag of features. The AC post above gives me a clue as to how it got this way.
That said, this is all a bit offtopic, as the real discussion is about contributing patches to, say, python-dateutil and not bits of proprietary secrets.
Allow me to answer that one, Mr. "dubl-u".
Write a PDE solver, Monte Carlo integration routine, or LU decomposer in a high-level language. Any high-level language. Write it again in C and note the 10x or 100x speedup without even optimizing. Optimize further, and you may get, what? 30% better, tops? So the reward for the development time invested is much greater in the transition from a high-level language to C, than it is in worrying about further optimizations once in C.
Example: I wrote my own LU decomposer that comes within a fraction of the speed of the one in Intel's MKL, without worrying about optimizations. I find it implausible therefore that further optimization would do me whole lotta good. I've had similar experiences with a PDE solver I've been working with.
The GP poster probably works in investment banking, like I do, where C still has its place in valuing complex instruments. The routines naturally belong in a library, and what the hell the GP ever does with fork() I don't know. But it is true that there is a lot of practical use of C out there that doesn't really scream for optimization.