>You might be good to remember that mathematics, like most languages, describe observations
Uh, no? Maybe you're thinking of applied math, or physics, but math deals with purely abstract entities. Certainly this is the case with Big O notation.
>When O(2n + 1) takes four hours
Hold on WHAT? Big O notation doesn't have any notion of time. If I say "this algorithm is O(2n + 1)", I'm not saying "this algorithm takes 2n + 1 steps to complete", I'm saying "as n approaches infinity, the steps to complete the algorithm divided by (2n + 1) does not approach infinity." This is equivalent to O(n), that's easily provable. I don't know how you're not understanding this. Maybe this is what you get from shunning "popular attitudes", when some of those "popular attitudes" include indisputable fact.
I don't think you understand big O notation. In the "real world", where mathematicians devised a formal definition for big O, O(2n + 1) = O(n). This is as true as "2/4 = 1/2". I don't know what you're trying to imply by "==="; this is the language of mathematics, not PHP.
Also, only COMPARISON-BASED sorts are limited by O(n log n). It's rather simple to devise an O(n) sort if the data are discrete, although it may take a while to pay off if the range is large.
Intellectual Property Crime Unit: London would be the worst crime drama ever. It would consist entirely of people sitting at desks, sending strongly worded emails.
First of all, I get where you're going with your argument. "Technically the picture is mine, I should be able to do with it what I please." But take a step back from the legalistic line of reasoning and see who this law benefits and who it hurts:
Hurts:
Websites whose business depends on the sharing of these pictures
The people wanting to share these pictures
Benefits:
Women who would otherwise be shamed
Men, whose girlfriends now feel more at ease giving pictures, knowing it will be illegal to share them
So tell me if I'm missing something, but unless you fall in the former category (which I find unlikely), you have no reason to be opposed to this legislation, right?
at some point in my college maths I stopped seeing fractions
Must have not gotten very far in college maths then. Because in academia, fractions are the only widely accepted way of representing division (either by a horizontal line, or a slashed line, '/')
This isn't a problem that needs solving. I never needed a teacher or diagram to explain to me that a half of something is larger than a quarter; that's effing obvious. "Learning that one-fifth is larger than one-sixth, which is counter-intuitive in the beginning"? WHAT? And even so, this article's point is moot, since visual representations other than pies have been around for many years. Containers of liquid, pieces of chocolate bar, etc.
The only things I needed to learn about fractions were the tricks for adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing them. And a bigger problem is that teachers nowadays focus more on teaching the procedures than the concepts. Kids may know "you cross out a number on the top and a number on the bottom when multiplying fractions" but they don't understand WHY.
No, I'm not. Would you be impressed by a computer capable of multiplying two large numbers in half a second, just because most people can't? Ok that's a mediocre example, but it illustrates the flaw in your logic...
I don't see myself ever really wanting to use this controller.
If I need precise movement (like they say the trackpad will offer), I'd much rather use a mouse.
If I don't need a mouse, and the game has relatively simple controls, then I'd prefer to have a controller which feels nice in the hands and has a bunch of buttons, like the Xbox 360 controller.
So under what situation would I want to play a game with 2 trackpads, a touch screen and only 8 buttons (with some slightly awkward looking positioning)? I honestly can't think of any.
When did he say anything about being "in favor" of any action? You know, it IS possible to state facts/ideas without taking a side. Which, as a sidenote, is something Americans seem to have a notoriously hard time doing. The recent Trayvon Martin shooting is a good example. Everyone had strong feelings towards one side, even though a logical person would say "there's not enough information to make a definitive judgement", and shift his mind to more productive matters.
Except how much of that money went to the record label and distributors? And it's much worse for more unknown artists, they really get screwed over.
I'm positive I read the Radiohead thing somewhere, although I can't find the reference any more... Meh.
Although Kickstarter and its ilk have plenty of flaws (for instance, that you probably will never see any returns on your investments), I see crowdfunding as having an important place in the information age. It takes the money and power from the big publishers, and gives it back to the developers and customers, respectively. And it allows the existence of niche projects which most companies would deem as "too risky".
I see the same kind of thing happening with music as well, with sites like bandcamp. As I recall, Radiohead made much more money selling pay-what-you-want copies of "In Rainbows" than they did with all their previous albums put together. Realistically, I don't see the recording industry dying any time soon, but at least we now have financially viable alternatives. It allows things to exist that simply could not have existed otherwise.
I don't see why "has a steep learning curve" contradicts anything. It may be intimidating at first (especially if the person has previously only worked with higher-level languages), but it all makes sense once you learn it... with some exceptions (function pointer syntax comes to mind). Whereas PHP, for instance, seems confusing no matter how experienced the programmer is.
IMHO, C++ is a simple, flexible, intuitive, and powerful language... IF (and only if) you know how to use it.
The problem is, most programmers don't. So often, I end up working on spaghetti code written 5 years ago by someone who, for example, thinks inheritance is the solution to all problems, and that private member variables are for sissies.
Also, I wonder how many of those "WTF"s were from people trying to use Windows APIs (don't you just love COM?). That's what consistently causes me the most frustration.
... Like on Slashdot. What usually happens is that, over time, certain behaviors or ideas end up getting reinforced within the community. For example, "government bad", "open source good", "patents and copyrights bad", "bitcoins good". Or just the general cynicism about absolutely everything.
Eventually the community becomes so polarized that anyone who disagrees on some minor point gets modded into oblivion. The rating system ends up as a popularity contest, where the most commonly-held opinion will always win, no matter how banal the comment is. So people are forced to either adopt the popular opinion, or give up on commenting, perpetuating the cycle, and devolving into groupthink.
I think, despite its flaws, 4chan has my favorite kind of comment system (if you're willing to wade through the shit). Put all comments on the same level; let users decide for themselves whether or not they agree with each other. You'll always have a healthy mix of perspective that way.
Slashdot Mirror
http://xkcd.com/1273/
>You might be good to remember that mathematics, like most languages, describe observations
Uh, no? Maybe you're thinking of applied math, or physics, but math deals with purely abstract entities. Certainly this is the case with Big O notation.
>When O(2n + 1) takes four hours
Hold on WHAT? Big O notation doesn't have any notion of time. If I say "this algorithm is O(2n + 1)", I'm not saying "this algorithm takes 2n + 1 steps to complete", I'm saying "as n approaches infinity, the steps to complete the algorithm divided by (2n + 1) does not approach infinity." This is equivalent to O(n), that's easily provable. I don't know how you're not understanding this. Maybe this is what you get from shunning "popular attitudes", when some of those "popular attitudes" include indisputable fact.
I don't think you understand big O notation. In the "real world", where mathematicians devised a formal definition for big O, O(2n + 1) = O(n). This is as true as "2/4 = 1/2". I don't know what you're trying to imply by "==="; this is the language of mathematics, not PHP.
Also, only COMPARISON-BASED sorts are limited by O(n log n). It's rather simple to devise an O(n) sort if the data are discrete, although it may take a while to pay off if the range is large.
Intellectual Property Crime Unit: London would be the worst crime drama ever. It would consist entirely of people sitting at desks, sending strongly worded emails.
"Remember kids, it's fine to massacre people, but you gotta use the right weapons! If you don't, Obama might threaten 'narrow, punitive action.'"
A couple other sources say it's $60. Which is not too bad (especially compared to their $199 MinnowBoard).
... The main purpose of the Slashdot beta design seems to be to make the comment system unusable?
First of all, I get where you're going with your argument. "Technically the picture is mine, I should be able to do with it what I please." But take a step back from the legalistic line of reasoning and see who this law benefits and who it hurts:
Hurts:
Websites whose business depends on the sharing of these pictures
The people wanting to share these pictures
Benefits:
Women who would otherwise be shamed
Men, whose girlfriends now feel more at ease giving pictures, knowing it will be illegal to share them
So tell me if I'm missing something, but unless you fall in the former category (which I find unlikely), you have no reason to be opposed to this legislation, right?
at some point in my college maths I stopped seeing fractions
Must have not gotten very far in college maths then. Because in academia, fractions are the only widely accepted way of representing division (either by a horizontal line, or a slashed line, '/')
This isn't a problem that needs solving. I never needed a teacher or diagram to explain to me that a half of something is larger than a quarter; that's effing obvious. "Learning that one-fifth is larger than one-sixth, which is counter-intuitive in the beginning"? WHAT? And even so, this article's point is moot, since visual representations other than pies have been around for many years. Containers of liquid, pieces of chocolate bar, etc.
The only things I needed to learn about fractions were the tricks for adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing them. And a bigger problem is that teachers nowadays focus more on teaching the procedures than the concepts. Kids may know "you cross out a number on the top and a number on the bottom when multiplying fractions" but they don't understand WHY.
No, I'm not. Would you be impressed by a computer capable of multiplying two large numbers in half a second, just because most people can't? Ok that's a mediocre example, but it illustrates the flaw in your logic...
I don't see myself ever really wanting to use this controller.
If I need precise movement (like they say the trackpad will offer), I'd much rather use a mouse.
If I don't need a mouse, and the game has relatively simple controls, then I'd prefer to have a controller which feels nice in the hands and has a bunch of buttons, like the Xbox 360 controller.
So under what situation would I want to play a game with 2 trackpads, a touch screen and only 8 buttons (with some slightly awkward looking positioning)? I honestly can't think of any.
Good point.
When did he say anything about being "in favor" of any action? You know, it IS possible to state facts/ideas without taking a side. Which, as a sidenote, is something Americans seem to have a notoriously hard time doing. The recent Trayvon Martin shooting is a good example. Everyone had strong feelings towards one side, even though a logical person would say "there's not enough information to make a definitive judgement", and shift his mind to more productive matters.
Except how much of that money went to the record label and distributors? And it's much worse for more unknown artists, they really get screwed over.
I'm positive I read the Radiohead thing somewhere, although I can't find the reference any more... Meh.
Although Kickstarter and its ilk have plenty of flaws (for instance, that you probably will never see any returns on your investments), I see crowdfunding as having an important place in the information age. It takes the money and power from the big publishers, and gives it back to the developers and customers, respectively. And it allows the existence of niche projects which most companies would deem as "too risky".
I see the same kind of thing happening with music as well, with sites like bandcamp. As I recall, Radiohead made much more money selling pay-what-you-want copies of "In Rainbows" than they did with all their previous albums put together. Realistically, I don't see the recording industry dying any time soon, but at least we now have financially viable alternatives. It allows things to exist that simply could not have existed otherwise.
I don't see why "has a steep learning curve" contradicts anything. It may be intimidating at first (especially if the person has previously only worked with higher-level languages), but it all makes sense once you learn it... with some exceptions (function pointer syntax comes to mind). Whereas PHP, for instance, seems confusing no matter how experienced the programmer is.
IMHO, C++ is a simple, flexible, intuitive, and powerful language... IF (and only if) you know how to use it.
The problem is, most programmers don't. So often, I end up working on spaghetti code written 5 years ago by someone who, for example, thinks inheritance is the solution to all problems, and that private member variables are for sissies.
Also, I wonder how many of those "WTF"s were from people trying to use Windows APIs (don't you just love COM?). That's what consistently causes me the most frustration.
... Like on Slashdot. What usually happens is that, over time, certain behaviors or ideas end up getting reinforced within the community. For example, "government bad", "open source good", "patents and copyrights bad", "bitcoins good". Or just the general cynicism about absolutely everything.
Eventually the community becomes so polarized that anyone who disagrees on some minor point gets modded into oblivion. The rating system ends up as a popularity contest, where the most commonly-held opinion will always win, no matter how banal the comment is. So people are forced to either adopt the popular opinion, or give up on commenting, perpetuating the cycle, and devolving into groupthink.
I think, despite its flaws, 4chan has my favorite kind of comment system (if you're willing to wade through the shit). Put all comments on the same level; let users decide for themselves whether or not they agree with each other. You'll always have a healthy mix of perspective that way.
"All of this has happened before, and will happen again."
Build robots to control the robots.
... I'd just move to Greenland. Probably wouldn't even take me 600 days or millions of dollars to get there.
Is it just me or does that name seem inspired by 1984?
Shall we start calling the NSA "Minipriv" (Ministry of Privacy)?
The phasers I remember just made their target clutch their chest and fall to the ground dramatically.
I don't know what the standard deviation of exam scores is, but a 5 percent improvement over 3 data points HARDLY seems statistically significant.