And guess what? 99% of the time, it works. Thats because there is a set of common diseases that everyone gets (sometimes, like the flu, on a seasonal basis) that goes to the doctor for and a superficial diagnosis is correct.
In my opinion, for the most part it works pretty well. The treatments for these diseases is relatively mundane, and for the most part won't hurt you if the diagnosis is wrong. What then happens, is the people who are unusually sick with something more serious will realize that they aren't getting better and go back. Its the 2nd and 3rd visits that begin to tell the doctor whats wrong when they realize that there is something going on.
But people do not realize this, they go in get a 1st stage cure, go home and if something is odd, begin complaining about know-nothing doctors and go somewhere else, where *surprise* they receive the same diagnosis. Its understanding and knowing what to do will help patients in the long run, realizing if something isn't quite right and going back and informing the doctor that "I came in, you gave me such and such for these symptoms, but its been xx days and I've seen no improvement and since then I've also seen this, this and this." That is how my sister got (correctly) diagnosed as having Mono. They thought it was strep throat, the antibiotics caused no improvement and caused a slight puffyness in the face, so they tested for allergic reactions, all returned negative. So then they went on knowing that the antibiotics cause a reaction in SOME people with Mono, did that test and it came back positive.
Up here in Canada (speaking from a Manitoban perspective) we have the same sort of problem except at double the pressure. No HMO's, its the province that pays the doctor's but unfortunately the pay structure is in the same vein. The amount of funding a doctor receives to run an office is linked to the volume of patients they see. In addition, the number of doctors we have isn't sufficient for the number of people in the province, so the doctors are under a lot of pressure to take on more patients. If they want a well run office that can handle the patients wanting to get in the door they need to hire more staff, but in able to afford it they have to see more patients and so on the patient side of things its extremely difficult to find a doctor, and when you do, getting seen for more than 2 minutes is a chore.
Wow, thats probably one of the best analogies I've heard in this thread filled with half-jokes and analogies. Especially now that in the interests of code separation, speed, and maintainability I've spent the last day trying to bang one of these newfangled square pegs into the traditional round hole, and its just not working.
"Now IANAL but I'm pretty sure that cutting up a dead body is illegal."
Wow... I'd hate to be a medical student, coroner, or funeral director where you live. As far as I am aware, dissection is not a crime although the sometimes related murder or tampering with a crime scene would be.
I'm a liberal pacifist; anti-Iraq war (though I did think the Afghanistan invasion was justified), pro-choice, think the UN is a great institution and should be given more authority to impose sanctions on countries that go to war without approval, I'm Canadian and I hate George Bush.
However, that said I found a lot to like in every single game that you enjoyed as well. Deus Ex was good, KOTOR and Jade Empire were amazing (though KOTOR 2 didn't live up to the hype).
I think biases present in games and media only become a problem if there are no dissenting viewpoints OR a person does not possess the wherewithall to critically examine what is being presented to them and the judgement to determine if it is a view that has merit or is made of smoke and mirrors, AND be willing to adjust their beliefs when appropriate.
Take what you read with a grain of salt and be aware of what agenda the writer is trying to push.
No matter where you go in the world, some communities have more problems than others. I know of an Amish community near to where I lived that in that in 20 years the biggest crime that occured was one incident of spousal abuse that was dealt with by due process and resulted in excommunication and expulsion from the community of the offending individual.
There are bad examples, and there are good examples, don't condemn a way of life because you can only see the evil in those you disagree with.
I have a feeling you're taking a too simple view of how the Old Order Mennonites (Amish) see themselves and the rest of the world.
A little bit of reference, I am a Mennonite myself, I'm not Old Order but I have spent a number of years in close proximity to them plus a couple months learning specifically about their beliefs and values.
It's not about good vs evil. Yes, the rest of the world are 'the others', people who do not believe as they do but it isn't about seeing them as evil or unenlightened. It would be like feeling that the Jewish people, or the Mormons, or the Kalahari Bushmen are evil because they do not hold the same beliefs. It is sad to say people have held those beliefs, but it is far from prevailing opinion. The emphasis among the Old Order is on us. This is what WE believe, this is how WE do things, this is why WE do what we do. The rest of the world is what it is, and many Old Order that I know accept that and aren't concerned about it. The view about everyone else is simply that they exist, trade occurs, and so forth. Those other people aren't seen as evil or ignorant, they have simply made a different choice in life and the Old Order really don't much care. If you aren't part of their community, its really a non-issue.
Most of the Mennonite faith is like that really, they believe that you cannot blindly follow. That is why Mennonites do not baptise children, because children cannot make the concious choice to accept the faith. We will teach them, and raise them as Mennonite, but they cannot become full church congregation until they are old enough to make decisions for themselves and they choose to join. If they do not choose to do so, then that is the path they take. They are not evil for doing so, although family members who leave are often seen in less favour than someone who has never been close to the community.
That being said, I also know Old Order deacons and teachers who try to teach more to their children, give them a wider view of life and let them choose for themselves inside their communities. Although it is difficult for them as they are missing much of the experience and knowledge that we take for granted, they do try to give their children the best that they can and are sincere in the effort.
An educated young populace is one thing that a military needs to have, because they are the people who generally make good officers. But out of all young people, the well-off and educated are the least likely to see the military as a positive career option. If you want to be a successful military recruiter, then you need to present as an attractive case as possible using all the tricks in your book to the people who are most likely to see the military as a positive career, or are likely to be swayed by a convincing recruiter.
Those, unfortunately tend to be the poor and uneducated. So it all depends on what the military is looking for, but if they're out for strong backs that can fire a gun, you can be sure they won't be out canvassing Beverly Hills. (I'm not American, any upscale community with quality schooling and a high percentage of university level students would work.)
The defence to such manipulation techniques is education, and the people most likely to fall to his tricks would be the uneducated. They are precisely the kind of people he is trying to prey on and would make good little soldiers for the army.
That is also true:) I have a friend who also was the in the Math faculty with me who would routinely add numbers incorrectly such as 7+5. Though I suppose the benefit to that is that we never allowed him to keep score at Spades.
I'm aware of that, I have one. That is why I included (non-programmable) in my post. Exams always make that distinction, that for a math exam you are allowed to bring a non-programmable calculator as an aide.
That is definitely the truth, a lot of my university level math exams allowed the use of (non-programmable) calculators precisely because they were pretty much useless to you on a math exam. If you're solving for maxima on the intersection of multiple dimension functions, and you need to type something into a calculator then your answer is probably already wrong.
AC answered your question probably better than I could, but I'll put it very simply.
Java 1.5 added a Monitor that works. The major flaw in all previous version of Java was that its multi-threading was non-priority blocking (most of the time) and to get things to work as expected you had to be very careful with conditional loops, and even then it was easy to starve a thread if things weren't perfect.
Monitor that work mean that we can have reliable priority blocking multi-threading constructs that require minial work to implement correctly, and thus make complex multi-threaded Java applications practical and easy to implement (without having to worry about a lot of niggling details).
It does to some extent, but I guess I keep looking at it from a different perspective.
OOP as a design method has tremendous advantages, but you're right, it doesn't address many multi-threading issues. Its appropriate design and understanding accessibility issues that allow for multiple thread access. It must be in part due to the fact that I've spent the last couple years doing real-time device level programming, kernel level programming, and a number of complex client-server projects that make multi-threading natural for me.
For kernel level stuff, if you need specific functionality or specialized resources for something important you just write a process administrator to manage it and spawn worker threads as necessary. Once that sort of thing becomes second nature, multi-threading simply becomes a matter of syntax. But without my now 5 years of university, I doubt I ever would have reached the same comfort level with it.
The computing theory and architectures are already there. Now that Java has finally jumped on the bandwagon of reliable multi-threading with v1.5 (or v5.0, or whatever the hell they're calling it today), chances are unless you're using really legacy code the language will have the appropriate system calls available to it.
The difficulty is that in order for multi-threading to be worthwhile, a developer really needs to know their stuff. It is not easy, there are a number of things that must be taken into consideration that simply do not occur in single-threaded programming. A programmer who just picked up a 'C++ in 24 hours' book is most likely not going to have the tools available to them in order to handle or understand the complexities of multi-threaded programming.
That being said, there are many situations where multi-threading is not appropriate, but if you think the theory needs to play catch-up, you might be surprised at how common it is in professional development.
Definitely... its much easier for a customer to grasp and express how something needs to be changed and what needs to be added than how it needs to work from scratch.
Also a good reason to involve customers interactively in the development process when doing custom web-apps, because often they won't know exactly what they want until they see something that isn't right. (Though for the business side, sign a contract agreement for what you are going to develop for them and be clear that additional costs will be incurred for changes.)
Hypothesis... a better word, but it still has the element of explanation of observation that can be tested.
Although prediction might evoke the idea of a theory, it is the other way around. Predictions are often made based upon a theory, where the theory is the underlying explanation, the reasoning that led to the prediction.
Another term submitted for thought: Moore's conjecture. "Inference or judgment based on inconclusive or incomplete evidence; guesswork." I think is as close as I can get with my current knowledge of the english language.
Technically its not really a theory either, because theories don't expire, they just get replaced with better approximations.
Moore's Law was a prediction of an interesting observable phenomenon that occured over a finite length of time, it does nothing to explain why it happened, just to point out that it did.
--Sticklers for grammar will notice the use of past tense, I used it because the law was coined some time ago and because I believe that the Law has held true longer in the past than it will in the future.
Thank you:) I'm a UWaterloo CS student who is graduating at the end of the month.
To address your very last point about not being 'fresh out of college' types, I believe this is mostly due to our co-op program. The vast majority of CS graduates went through the co-op program which over 5 years includes 6 terms (2 full years) of work experience. Luckily most positions, especially for upper year students, are industry development positions. First year students usually end up doing tech support or some such work, but the variety of companies that come to Waterloo looking for co-op students is amazing.
Black holes, or the objects theorized as such, are X-ray emitters. Although light does not have sufficient energy to escape, higher energy forms of radiation do. So although gravitation may play a part in forming an 'event horizon', there are other considerations as well.
I am not completely up to date on black hole theories, but I understand the basic principles of them. And to me it seems that current theories are insufficient to explain the phenomena that have been observed. Although there was one that interested me quite a bit. A theory that black holes, quasars, and radio-wave emitting objects are the same things but seen from different angles.
Well, in your case it probably really was more effort than it was worth. Nobody lost any money, there was an unsuccessful attempt at fraud, and thus no evidence of any serious crime.
At best, if the cops had followed up on it, gotten a warrent for search and seizure they might have found evidence for other fraud crimes, but it is just as likely to be a crime of opportunity and yours was the only card stolen.
As much as I agree with you that ideally all such cases should be followed and prosecuted, and as much as I dislike people who do that sort of thing, I understand the reality that it isn't practical or worthwhile to do so.
I've seen more than a few 'the police wouldn't do anything!' type stories, and so far yours is the most mundane, the least likely anyone would have been punished even if they were caught.
I've spent the last 3 weeks ~12 hours a day working to complete a project for one of my classes in C++... and when I read your post I thought my subconciousness was leaking...
Slashdot Mirror
And guess what? 99% of the time, it works. Thats because there is a set of common diseases that everyone gets (sometimes, like the flu, on a seasonal basis) that goes to the doctor for and a superficial diagnosis is correct.
In my opinion, for the most part it works pretty well. The treatments for these diseases is relatively mundane, and for the most part won't hurt you if the diagnosis is wrong. What then happens, is the people who are unusually sick with something more serious will realize that they aren't getting better and go back. Its the 2nd and 3rd visits that begin to tell the doctor whats wrong when they realize that there is something going on.
But people do not realize this, they go in get a 1st stage cure, go home and if something is odd, begin complaining about know-nothing doctors and go somewhere else, where *surprise* they receive the same diagnosis. Its understanding and knowing what to do will help patients in the long run, realizing if something isn't quite right and going back and informing the doctor that "I came in, you gave me such and such for these symptoms, but its been xx days and I've seen no improvement and since then I've also seen this, this and this." That is how my sister got (correctly) diagnosed as having Mono. They thought it was strep throat, the antibiotics caused no improvement and caused a slight puffyness in the face, so they tested for allergic reactions, all returned negative. So then they went on knowing that the antibiotics cause a reaction in SOME people with Mono, did that test and it came back positive.
Up here in Canada (speaking from a Manitoban perspective) we have the same sort of problem except at double the pressure. No HMO's, its the province that pays the doctor's but unfortunately the pay structure is in the same vein. The amount of funding a doctor receives to run an office is linked to the volume of patients they see. In addition, the number of doctors we have isn't sufficient for the number of people in the province, so the doctors are under a lot of pressure to take on more patients. If they want a well run office that can handle the patients wanting to get in the door they need to hire more staff, but in able to afford it they have to see more patients and so on the patient side of things its extremely difficult to find a doctor, and when you do, getting seen for more than 2 minutes is a chore.
Wow, thats probably one of the best analogies I've heard in this thread filled with half-jokes and analogies. Especially now that in the interests of code separation, speed, and maintainability I've spent the last day trying to bang one of these newfangled square pegs into the traditional round hole, and its just not working.
If I were a marketer, I'd want to smack you right about now... ...Thank god I'm a tech :) Kudos!
Its Chechnya, a place and a conflict that has gone on far too long and people with blood on their hands on both sides.
"Now IANAL but I'm pretty sure that cutting up a dead body is illegal."
Wow... I'd hate to be a medical student, coroner, or funeral director where you live. As far as I am aware, dissection is not a crime although the sometimes related murder or tampering with a crime scene would be.
I'm a liberal pacifist; anti-Iraq war (though I did think the Afghanistan invasion was justified), pro-choice, think the UN is a great institution and should be given more authority to impose sanctions on countries that go to war without approval, I'm Canadian and I hate George Bush.
However, that said I found a lot to like in every single game that you enjoyed as well. Deus Ex was good, KOTOR and Jade Empire were amazing (though KOTOR 2 didn't live up to the hype).
I think biases present in games and media only become a problem if there are no dissenting viewpoints OR a person does not possess the wherewithall to critically examine what is being presented to them and the judgement to determine if it is a view that has merit or is made of smoke and mirrors, AND be willing to adjust their beliefs when appropriate.
Take what you read with a grain of salt and be aware of what agenda the writer is trying to push.
No matter where you go in the world, some communities have more problems than others. I know of an Amish community near to where I lived that in that in 20 years the biggest crime that occured was one incident of spousal abuse that was dealt with by due process and resulted in excommunication and expulsion from the community of the offending individual.
There are bad examples, and there are good examples, don't condemn a way of life because you can only see the evil in those you disagree with.
I have a feeling you're taking a too simple view of how the Old Order Mennonites (Amish) see themselves and the rest of the world.
A little bit of reference, I am a Mennonite myself, I'm not Old Order but I have spent a number of years in close proximity to them plus a couple months learning specifically about their beliefs and values.
It's not about good vs evil. Yes, the rest of the world are 'the others', people who do not believe as they do but it isn't about seeing them as evil or unenlightened. It would be like feeling that the Jewish people, or the Mormons, or the Kalahari Bushmen are evil because they do not hold the same beliefs. It is sad to say people have held those beliefs, but it is far from prevailing opinion. The emphasis among the Old Order is on us. This is what WE believe, this is how WE do things, this is why WE do what we do. The rest of the world is what it is, and many Old Order that I know accept that and aren't concerned about it. The view about everyone else is simply that they exist, trade occurs, and so forth. Those other people aren't seen as evil or ignorant, they have simply made a different choice in life and the Old Order really don't much care. If you aren't part of their community, its really a non-issue.
Most of the Mennonite faith is like that really, they believe that you cannot blindly follow. That is why Mennonites do not baptise children, because children cannot make the concious choice to accept the faith. We will teach them, and raise them as Mennonite, but they cannot become full church congregation until they are old enough to make decisions for themselves and they choose to join. If they do not choose to do so, then that is the path they take. They are not evil for doing so, although family members who leave are often seen in less favour than someone who has never been close to the community.
That being said, I also know Old Order deacons and teachers who try to teach more to their children, give them a wider view of life and let them choose for themselves inside their communities. Although it is difficult for them as they are missing much of the experience and knowledge that we take for granted, they do try to give their children the best that they can and are sincere in the effort.
Or a Canuck...
Oi, we have English majors, and using British spellings.
An educated young populace is one thing that a military needs to have, because they are the people who generally make good officers. But out of all young people, the well-off and educated are the least likely to see the military as a positive career option. If you want to be a successful military recruiter, then you need to present as an attractive case as possible using all the tricks in your book to the people who are most likely to see the military as a positive career, or are likely to be swayed by a convincing recruiter.
Those, unfortunately tend to be the poor and uneducated. So it all depends on what the military is looking for, but if they're out for strong backs that can fire a gun, you can be sure they won't be out canvassing Beverly Hills. (I'm not American, any upscale community with quality schooling and a high percentage of university level students would work.)
The defence to such manipulation techniques is education, and the people most likely to fall to his tricks would be the uneducated. They are precisely the kind of people he is trying to prey on and would make good little soldiers for the army.
That is also true :) I have a friend who also was the in the Math faculty with me who would routinely add numbers incorrectly such as 7+5. Though I suppose the benefit to that is that we never allowed him to keep score at Spades.
I'm aware of that, I have one. That is why I included (non-programmable) in my post. Exams always make that distinction, that for a math exam you are allowed to bring a non-programmable calculator as an aide.
That is definitely the truth, a lot of my university level math exams allowed the use of (non-programmable) calculators precisely because they were pretty much useless to you on a math exam. If you're solving for maxima on the intersection of multiple dimension functions, and you need to type something into a calculator then your answer is probably already wrong.
AC answered your question probably better than I could, but I'll put it very simply.
Java 1.5 added a Monitor that works. The major flaw in all previous version of Java was that its multi-threading was non-priority blocking (most of the time) and to get things to work as expected you had to be very careful with conditional loops, and even then it was easy to starve a thread if things weren't perfect.
Monitor that work mean that we can have reliable priority blocking multi-threading constructs that require minial work to implement correctly, and thus make complex multi-threaded Java applications practical and easy to implement (without having to worry about a lot of niggling details).
It does to some extent, but I guess I keep looking at it from a different perspective.
OOP as a design method has tremendous advantages, but you're right, it doesn't address many multi-threading issues. Its appropriate design and understanding accessibility issues that allow for multiple thread access. It must be in part due to the fact that I've spent the last couple years doing real-time device level programming, kernel level programming, and a number of complex client-server projects that make multi-threading natural for me.
For kernel level stuff, if you need specific functionality or specialized resources for something important you just write a process administrator to manage it and spawn worker threads as necessary. Once that sort of thing becomes second nature, multi-threading simply becomes a matter of syntax. But without my now 5 years of university, I doubt I ever would have reached the same comfort level with it.
The computing theory and architectures are already there. Now that Java has finally jumped on the bandwagon of reliable multi-threading with v1.5 (or v5.0, or whatever the hell they're calling it today), chances are unless you're using really legacy code the language will have the appropriate system calls available to it.
The difficulty is that in order for multi-threading to be worthwhile, a developer really needs to know their stuff. It is not easy, there are a number of things that must be taken into consideration that simply do not occur in single-threaded programming. A programmer who just picked up a 'C++ in 24 hours' book is most likely not going to have the tools available to them in order to handle or understand the complexities of multi-threaded programming.
That being said, there are many situations where multi-threading is not appropriate, but if you think the theory needs to play catch-up, you might be surprised at how common it is in professional development.
Definitely... its much easier for a customer to grasp and express how something needs to be changed and what needs to be added than how it needs to work from scratch.
Also a good reason to involve customers interactively in the development process when doing custom web-apps, because often they won't know exactly what they want until they see something that isn't right. (Though for the business side, sign a contract agreement for what you are going to develop for them and be clear that additional costs will be incurred for changes.)
Hypothesis... a better word, but it still has the element of explanation of observation that can be tested.
Although prediction might evoke the idea of a theory, it is the other way around. Predictions are often made based upon a theory, where the theory is the underlying explanation, the reasoning that led to the prediction.
Another term submitted for thought: Moore's conjecture. "Inference or judgment based on inconclusive or incomplete evidence; guesswork." I think is as close as I can get with my current knowledge of the english language.
Technically its not really a theory either, because theories don't expire, they just get replaced with better approximations.
Moore's Law was a prediction of an interesting observable phenomenon that occured over a finite length of time, it does nothing to explain why it happened, just to point out that it did.
--Sticklers for grammar will notice the use of past tense, I used it because the law was coined some time ago and because I believe that the Law has held true longer in the past than it will in the future.
Thank you :) I'm a UWaterloo CS student who is graduating at the end of the month.
To address your very last point about not being 'fresh out of college' types, I believe this is mostly due to our co-op program. The vast majority of CS graduates went through the co-op program which over 5 years includes 6 terms (2 full years) of work experience. Luckily most positions, especially for upper year students, are industry development positions. First year students usually end up doing tech support or some such work, but the variety of companies that come to Waterloo looking for co-op students is amazing.
That doesn't seem to have been raised yet.
Black holes, or the objects theorized as such, are X-ray emitters. Although light does not have sufficient energy to escape, higher energy forms of radiation do. So although gravitation may play a part in forming an 'event horizon', there are other considerations as well.
I am not completely up to date on black hole theories, but I understand the basic principles of them. And to me it seems that current theories are insufficient to explain the phenomena that have been observed. Although there was one that interested me quite a bit. A theory that black holes, quasars, and radio-wave emitting objects are the same things but seen from different angles.
Well, in your case it probably really was more effort than it was worth. Nobody lost any money, there was an unsuccessful attempt at fraud, and thus no evidence of any serious crime.
At best, if the cops had followed up on it, gotten a warrent for search and seizure they might have found evidence for other fraud crimes, but it is just as likely to be a crime of opportunity and yours was the only card stolen.
As much as I agree with you that ideally all such cases should be followed and prosecuted, and as much as I dislike people who do that sort of thing, I understand the reality that it isn't practical or worthwhile to do so.
I've seen more than a few 'the police wouldn't do anything!' type stories, and so far yours is the most mundane, the least likely anyone would have been punished even if they were caught.
One word for you: Gah!
I've spent the last 3 weeks ~12 hours a day working to complete a project for one of my classes in C++... and when I read your post I thought my subconciousness was leaking...