The point was that if they aren't concerned with utility, it doesn't matter to them whether the problems they solve allow nuclear reactors to be designed, have no apparent use, or improve network communications - it's just another meaningless, but interesting, puzzle. While they shouldn't necessarily be concerned with applications themselves, they should be making their solutions as easy to absorb as possible for those who will make practical use of it.
To me, "you should pay me because someone will probably come up with a use for what I do, even if I don't know what" is a lot more acceptable attitude than "you should pay me because I am doing something that I appreciate aesthetically, despite the fact that you don't understand it and thus can't appreciate it, because of your bad taste and low intelligence."
I agree that every branch of math that solves new problems (no matter how abstract) is likely to have applications, but that doesn't excuse hostility to application-centered minds, which I see implicit in the structure of educational materials. Applied math isn't naturally as hard as they make it, by teaching it through proofs.
They are producing new math, which is good, but they are obfuscating it and the old math (into forms suited to the purposes of researchers, not students or practical users), which is bad. We should take care to only allow the good out, and thus maximize their utility, because they don't care to do it themselves. ---
Ah, the call of the "pure" mathematician: "You want to apply this stuff? To hell with you, philistine!"
True pure mathematicians, unconcerned with application, are insane. They don't recognize mathematics as derived from real-world observation, they are just happy little computers, playing with meaningless symbols to solve meaningless puzzles, upset when you point out that there is no such thing as a self-evident truth to make an axiom of.
Practical applications may not be their motivation, but it's the justification for their pay, and the origin of their field. We, the economic animals that value utility enough to put food on the table, shouldn't defer to their irrationality.
The one advantage of using these economically insane individuals is, of course, that they come cheap. But while it makes sense to take advantage of them, we must be careful not to let them spread their insanity with their products.
For mathematicians, give me a Donald Knuth any day, who mixes practical work and theory in his life, for the improvement of both, and is eager to change notations and rules to make them easier to work with and learn and into a better reflection of reality. He has, and spreads, a healthy appreciation of useful math, not a degenerate disdain for "applied" (sullied, tainted) math. ---
Proofs and "mathematical rigor" are ridiculously overused in teaching.
This is a ridiculous extension of the current misconception that mathematical simplicity and conceptual simplicity go hand in hand, when the opposite is true.
Imagine if children were taught arithmetic by route of logistics... only a handful of geniuses would be able to make change! Yet go to university and you'll see professors trying to build understanding the way they would build proofs: introduce axioms, show higher relationships that emerge from these axioms, later introduce tricks of the trade for practical , and then, maybe, once (or rather, if!) the student shows a good understanding, talk about applications. You have to take it on faith that years of painful, boring proofs will lead to interesting and useful ideas.
It's sheer idiocy, and terrifically destructive of promising young minds. Not only does it drive people away from math, it encourages absurd semi-religious attitudes that math somehow has independent existence that we are discovering, rather than being a language invented by man to describe the universe around us.
Possibly my favorite book is "Mathematician's Delight", which shows the correct method of teaching math: explain applications first (to build interest), practical method second, and then, maybe, if the student shows understanding and interest, talk about proofs that the math works. ---
And these people would be /so/ much better off...
on
Philanthropy Redefined
·
· Score: 2
...if the drugs had never been developed in the first place. ---
Sure, just install Service Pack 7, followed by Service Pack 3, Service Pack 6, then Service Pack 7 again. Now, delete everything in your Windows directory, and your "My Documents" directory, and the auto-restore will change your state so that it asks who to trust again.
This post is Verisign certified Microsoft content. Trust us, it will work. Really. ---
despite his idealism he certainly managed to make quite a lot of money in his life
Some of his ideals were industry, prudence, and thrift. I'd say his ideals contributed very strongly to his wealth.
Have you read his parable of the whistle? Or the story of buying his own food as a child?
His ideals always lead him to seek the greatest profit for the least expense, certainly in matters of money, but also in those of public benefit, knowledge, morality, and happiness.
He was a great man, and not the sort of vapid egalitarian we are now expected to pretend to be. He certainly believed in gaining profit for humanity by giving all men equal opportunity to better themselves, but not in redistributing the benefits of talent and hard work to those less able and less willing. He gave when he was moved to do so, freely shared his intangible thoughts at little cost to himself, and otherwise kept the fruits of his labor. His wealth is a mark of his ability, and of the benefit he conferred on those with whom he had commerce, not a mark of shame or immorality, as if he had acquired it by trickery or theft.
I say because of his idealism he managed to make quite a lot of money. ---
If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
(quoted from the GNU manifesto, as are the following quotes)
Or perhaps:
The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
IOW, withholding some benefit you could give is stealing. You owe the world everything you can make, and whether you are rewarded isn't relevant.
Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned.
Go go Stallman! Protect us from those high-paying jobs!
The problem is poor buying habits. Good interfaces are passed up in favor of tons of unnecessary functionality. If people actually insisted on being able to understand and use software they buy, it would straighten out pretty quickly. Instead, they assume that new is good and more functionality is better. Instead of ridiculing people who buy incompatible software and send out data in unreadable formats, they ridicule people who haven't "kept up" with the newest software.
Consumers have the bad habit of assuming novelty means progress when they have to encourage progress through intelligent selection. ---
There's nothing wrong with the clock-setting procedure you describe. It sounds complicated when you describe it step by step, but anyone willing to fool around for a few seconds would figure it out without reading the instructions.
You honestly think that the engineers should have added 4 buttons just to set the time of day? Perhaps another 6 for the year, month and day? Maybe three other sets of displays and buttons for different timed recordings? The menu selection style is simple, versatile, and doesn't require extra buttons for every extra feature.
I think the problem here is more one of poor documentation than poor design. ---
Okay, so we're teaming with stars, the universe is teaming with black holes. My bet is that the universe goes for pulsars next; if so, planets will be our next choice.
When it comes down to nebulae, we'll probably do the usual "I don't care if it's my turn, you can have him." "I don't want him!" thing. Nobody likes the fat kid. We'll get stuck with them anyway; it's not so bad, they're not entirely useless.
The universe will probably win though. It's a lot older than us. ---
Wow, the Playstation 3 sound great! I'm saving the money I was going to spend on a Playstation 2 to make sure I can buy the next one as soon as it comes out! ---
Oo, a mass-transit proposal which requires 1) huge investments in infrastructure and 2) every user to buy a special car, seeking investors, and with no committed government support.
We can manufacture oil from any combination of things containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It's just not worth the expense because the stuff is just sitting around waiting to be pumped out of the ground.
Most of that expense is energy. If the "fossil" fuels run out (some scientists believe that it was formed with the Earth, and there is such a vast supply that it is practically infinite, as the rock supply is), we'll switch to nuclear energy, whether fission or fusion, which will be so much cheaper and more plentiful that such expenses will be affordable (current fission is too expensive primarily because it is constantly held back for political reasons).
IOW, the faster we run out of oil the better, if you ask me.
At any rate, none of the current electronics technology will be relevant after a few decades, so only short-term pricing matters. You don't need to guess at supplies of raw materials a hundred years from now. ---
RTFA. That's basic research you're bitching about, not superfast CPU development.
Better fab processes improve all the microcircuitry, not just the main processor.
Incidentally, the old modular tech you can snap together with thick, clumsy fingers can't be improved much further, which is why it's lagging. There's no sense bitching about your cheap swappable DIMMs when you won't shell out for faster RAM or buy a non-expandable machine. There is faster RAM available, it's just more expensive and needs a special set-up. Same thing for hard drives; people buy gigs, not MB/s. The market's producing what people want: layered caching of inexpensive, immense data stores. ---
All us techies could learn something from this guy
on
Single-Atom Transistor
·
· Score: 3
Emperor: This is only one finger. How can you make a tool?
Researcher: We can pick up a grain of rice when we wet the tip of our finger. That force is some kind of tool.
Now that is the way to dumb things down for management and VIPs. ---
Why do people have these irrational attachments to the first meaning they encountered of a word?
Aside from the racial slur, "cracker" means someone who break protective mechanisms to get at the things protected, like cracking a nut. Ever heard of safecrackers? Ever see the TV series "cracker" about a spooky crime-fighting psychiatrist who did mind-reading by analysis?
Just because one subculture adopts a word doesn't mean that they gain a monopoly on it.
Personally, I refer to people by whatever term they would like me to use, unless I don't like them.
Funny, I prefer to use an accurate term, whether I like them or not. The names people make up for themselves are usually misleading. ---
What else could be unnatural? Alien artifacts? Gnome-made objects?
The classical seperation is between that which has been formed by the influence of an intelligent mind (artificial and unnatural) and that which has not (natural). If you just decide that because man arose from nature, all the works of man are natural, then you'd just have to throw out the words "natural" and "artificial". It's pointless destructiveness due to bad semantics. ---
What it says is that some rare websites that provide almost nothing yet inexplicably get tons of hits can be profitable. You can't just decide you'll be run such a site, you need either genius or luck, and probably a bit of both now.
Incidentally, it says these things using made-up numbers and ignoring the most important issues such as attracting good quality hits and the cost of actually producing content.
Basically, the article says nothing more than that advertising sometimes pays more you spend than hosting and bandwidth, sometimes not. It's hardly a rousing defense of banner ad based business models. ---
Slashdot Mirror
The point was that if they aren't concerned with utility, it doesn't matter to them whether the problems they solve allow nuclear reactors to be designed, have no apparent use, or improve network communications - it's just another meaningless, but interesting, puzzle. While they shouldn't necessarily be concerned with applications themselves, they should be making their solutions as easy to absorb as possible for those who will make practical use of it.
To me, "you should pay me because someone will probably come up with a use for what I do, even if I don't know what" is a lot more acceptable attitude than "you should pay me because I am doing something that I appreciate aesthetically, despite the fact that you don't understand it and thus can't appreciate it, because of your bad taste and low intelligence."
I agree that every branch of math that solves new problems (no matter how abstract) is likely to have applications, but that doesn't excuse hostility to application-centered minds, which I see implicit in the structure of educational materials. Applied math isn't naturally as hard as they make it, by teaching it through proofs.
They are producing new math, which is good, but they are obfuscating it and the old math (into forms suited to the purposes of researchers, not students or practical users), which is bad. We should take care to only allow the good out, and thus maximize their utility, because they don't care to do it themselves.
---
Ah, the call of the "pure" mathematician: "You want to apply this stuff? To hell with you, philistine!"
True pure mathematicians, unconcerned with application, are insane. They don't recognize mathematics as derived from real-world observation, they are just happy little computers, playing with meaningless symbols to solve meaningless puzzles, upset when you point out that there is no such thing as a self-evident truth to make an axiom of.
Practical applications may not be their motivation, but it's the justification for their pay, and the origin of their field. We, the economic animals that value utility enough to put food on the table, shouldn't defer to their irrationality.
The one advantage of using these economically insane individuals is, of course, that they come cheap. But while it makes sense to take advantage of them, we must be careful not to let them spread their insanity with their products.
For mathematicians, give me a Donald Knuth any day, who mixes practical work and theory in his life, for the improvement of both, and is eager to change notations and rules to make them easier to work with and learn and into a better reflection of reality. He has, and spreads, a healthy appreciation of useful math, not a degenerate disdain for "applied" (sullied, tainted) math.
---
Proofs and "mathematical rigor" are ridiculously overused in teaching.
This is a ridiculous extension of the current misconception that mathematical simplicity and conceptual simplicity go hand in hand, when the opposite is true.
Imagine if children were taught arithmetic by route of logistics... only a handful of geniuses would be able to make change! Yet go to university and you'll see professors trying to build understanding the way they would build proofs: introduce axioms, show higher relationships that emerge from these axioms, later introduce tricks of the trade for practical , and then, maybe, once (or rather, if!) the student shows a good understanding, talk about applications. You have to take it on faith that years of painful, boring proofs will lead to interesting and useful ideas.
It's sheer idiocy, and terrifically destructive of promising young minds. Not only does it drive people away from math, it encourages absurd semi-religious attitudes that math somehow has independent existence that we are discovering, rather than being a language invented by man to describe the universe around us.
Possibly my favorite book is "Mathematician's Delight", which shows the correct method of teaching math: explain applications first (to build interest), practical method second, and then, maybe, if the student shows understanding and interest, talk about proofs that the math works.
---
...if the drugs had never been developed in the first place.
---
Let's lynch doctors for wanting a high salary, too!
What, you volunteer at a for-profit hospital? What a sucker you are!
Refuse to help treat cancer, and the world will be a better place!
---
Would that be the algorists or the abacists?
---
Sure, just install Service Pack 7, followed by Service Pack 3, Service Pack 6, then Service Pack 7 again. Now, delete everything in your Windows directory, and your "My Documents" directory, and the auto-restore will change your state so that it asks who to trust again.
This post is Verisign certified Microsoft content. Trust us, it will work. Really.
---
despite his idealism he certainly managed to make quite a lot of money in his life
Some of his ideals were industry, prudence, and thrift. I'd say his ideals contributed very strongly to his wealth.
Have you read his parable of the whistle? Or the story of buying his own food as a child?
His ideals always lead him to seek the greatest profit for the least expense, certainly in matters of money, but also in those of public benefit, knowledge, morality, and happiness.
He was a great man, and not the sort of vapid egalitarian we are now expected to pretend to be. He certainly believed in gaining profit for humanity by giving all men equal opportunity to better themselves, but not in redistributing the benefits of talent and hard work to those less able and less willing. He gave when he was moved to do so, freely shared his intangible thoughts at little cost to himself, and otherwise kept the fruits of his labor. His wealth is a mark of his ability, and of the benefit he conferred on those with whom he had commerce, not a mark of shame or immorality, as if he had acquired it by trickery or theft.
I say because of his idealism he managed to make quite a lot of money.
---
- If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
(quoted from the GNU manifesto, as are the following quotes)Or perhaps:
- The desire to be rewarded for one's creativity does not justify depriving the world in general of all or part of that creativity.
IOW, withholding some benefit you could give is stealing. You owe the world everything you can make, and whether you are rewarded isn't relevant.- Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned.
Go go Stallman! Protect us from those high-paying jobs!I'm sure MS believes this is their motto:
---
The problem is poor buying habits. Good interfaces are passed up in favor of tons of unnecessary functionality. If people actually insisted on being able to understand and use software they buy, it would straighten out pretty quickly. Instead, they assume that new is good and more functionality is better. Instead of ridiculing people who buy incompatible software and send out data in unreadable formats, they ridicule people who haven't "kept up" with the newest software.
Consumers have the bad habit of assuming novelty means progress when they have to encourage progress through intelligent selection.
---
There's nothing wrong with the clock-setting procedure you describe. It sounds complicated when you describe it step by step, but anyone willing to fool around for a few seconds would figure it out without reading the instructions.
You honestly think that the engineers should have added 4 buttons just to set the time of day? Perhaps another 6 for the year, month and day? Maybe three other sets of displays and buttons for different timed recordings? The menu selection style is simple, versatile, and doesn't require extra buttons for every extra feature.
I think the problem here is more one of poor documentation than poor design.
---
Okay, so we're teaming with stars, the universe is teaming with black holes. My bet is that the universe goes for pulsars next; if so, planets will be our next choice.
When it comes down to nebulae, we'll probably do the usual "I don't care if it's my turn, you can have him." "I don't want him!" thing. Nobody likes the fat kid. We'll get stuck with them anyway; it's not so bad, they're not entirely useless.
The universe will probably win though. It's a lot older than us.
---
It should have started like this -
...which becomes a blatantly angry or seemingly thoughtful and even-handed (but actually angry) denial.
Subject: Apparently unrelated "teaser" title...
Body:
---
Angry denial reiterated.
Supporting claim. Second supporting claim.
Revelation of inconsistencies in the complaints.
Setup for attempt at witty attack on academics.
Punchline of witty attack.
---
Wow, the Playstation 3 sound great! I'm saving the money I was going to spend on a Playstation 2 to make sure I can buy the next one as soon as it comes out!
---
Oo, a mass-transit proposal which requires 1) huge investments in infrastructure and 2) every user to buy a special car, seeking investors, and with no committed government support.
Where do I place my pre-order?
---
We can manufacture oil from any combination of things containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It's just not worth the expense because the stuff is just sitting around waiting to be pumped out of the ground.
Most of that expense is energy. If the "fossil" fuels run out (some scientists believe that it was formed with the Earth, and there is such a vast supply that it is practically infinite, as the rock supply is), we'll switch to nuclear energy, whether fission or fusion, which will be so much cheaper and more plentiful that such expenses will be affordable (current fission is too expensive primarily because it is constantly held back for political reasons).
IOW, the faster we run out of oil the better, if you ask me.
At any rate, none of the current electronics technology will be relevant after a few decades, so only short-term pricing matters. You don't need to guess at supplies of raw materials a hundred years from now.
---
See? It works like that.
---
RTFA. That's basic research you're bitching about, not superfast CPU development.
Better fab processes improve all the microcircuitry, not just the main processor.
Incidentally, the old modular tech you can snap together with thick, clumsy fingers can't be improved much further, which is why it's lagging. There's no sense bitching about your cheap swappable DIMMs when you won't shell out for faster RAM or buy a non-expandable machine. There is faster RAM available, it's just more expensive and needs a special set-up. Same thing for hard drives; people buy gigs, not MB/s. The market's producing what people want: layered caching of inexpensive, immense data stores.
---
Emperor: This is only one finger. How can you make a tool?
Researcher: We can pick up a grain of rice when we wet the tip of our finger. That force is some kind of tool.
Now that is the way to dumb things down for management and VIPs.
---
"Disney Adopts Python"
Well, they already have over 101 dalmations to feed it with. What else would they do with them, make a coat?
---
Why do people have these irrational attachments to the first meaning they encountered of a word?
Aside from the racial slur, "cracker" means someone who break protective mechanisms to get at the things protected, like cracking a nut. Ever heard of safecrackers? Ever see the TV series "cracker" about a spooky crime-fighting psychiatrist who did mind-reading by analysis?
Just because one subculture adopts a word doesn't mean that they gain a monopoly on it.
Personally, I refer to people by whatever term they would like me to use, unless I don't like them.
Funny, I prefer to use an accurate term, whether I like them or not. The names people make up for themselves are usually misleading.
---
What else could be unnatural? Alien artifacts? Gnome-made objects?
The classical seperation is between that which has been formed by the influence of an intelligent mind (artificial and unnatural) and that which has not (natural). If you just decide that because man arose from nature, all the works of man are natural, then you'd just have to throw out the words "natural" and "artificial". It's pointless destructiveness due to bad semantics.
---
What it says is that some rare websites that provide almost nothing yet inexplicably get tons of hits can be profitable. You can't just decide you'll be run such a site, you need either genius or luck, and probably a bit of both now.
Incidentally, it says these things using made-up numbers and ignoring the most important issues such as attracting good quality hits and the cost of actually producing content.
Basically, the article says nothing more than that advertising sometimes pays more you spend than hosting and bandwidth, sometimes not. It's hardly a rousing defense of banner ad based business models.
---
There's a difference between going out of your way to circumvent copy protection, and not going out of your way to enforce copy protection.
---