It's the study of spaces where you don't have knowledge of the distance between points.
Sorry if he tacked on "It's difficult". It really and truly is, but I think even a child could understand the basic notions with that one-sentence description.
DON'T BUY ANYTHING PROTECTED BY SONY'S DRM TECHNOLOGY.
It's so easy, if you don't want it, don't pay for it. Go rant about how you have the right to privacy, but you have no constitutionally protected right to rent movies or buy music. And I don't see how you have any right to tell someone else how to do business.
The US refused to back the ICC because it felt it would give undemocratic, repressive states a platform from which to attack/discourage US military action against anyone (any state that signs on the treaty can vote for the 18 judges and 1 prosecutor). It felt that it would be used to prevent Israel from defending itself against Hamas terrorists. And it felt that it would bypass due process for US citizens.
Yhe US did not support the ICC because the ICC is flawed, not because it isn't among the worlds' most principled militaries.
And many nations have used weapons of mass destruction. I assume you mean that the US is the only nation to use thermonuclear weapons against another country. This is regrettable and true, although I find it interesting this is focused on so much more than the firestorms in Tokyo started by US bombs that killed more than Hiroshima & Nagasaki combined. Furthermore, I suppose you don't feel that chemical weapons count as weapons of mass destruction, because Germany used them in WWI, and Iraq used them against the Kurds. If you count death by inaction, the failure to act by the UN in Rwanda killed upwards of a half-million....
Have to admit, I've been to North Tonowanda, Buffalo, the Canal Fest, etc and never had problem with the smell. Granted, I'm from NJ... but the smell isn't much worse than most of the urban areas I've seen in my life.
You're right though, summers in Buffalo & the surrounding areas are great. Too bad that big natural air conditioner turns into a big natural snow machine for 6 months of the year, huh?
From the first post: As in all things, balance is key.
From your post: This results in a market-driven quality/price 'sweet point' after time is given to reach equilibrium.
Seems like the same point to me.
I guess your disagreement is with this part -
Too much competition results in prices to low to sustain healthy businesses, which results in rashes of bankruptcy.
But honestly, I don't know why you'd have trouble accepting this. You seem to miss the point that even if a product is priced above the cost of production, nobody has to buy it. There is a finite pool of consumers with finite amounts of money, and even if company x makes a per-time profit on product y, company x can still have a net loss if they do not sell enough of their inventory. In fact, from the perspective of minimizing net loss, selling below production cost might be the optimal strategy. So too much competition can be a bad thing. I think the appropriate economic topics are the income elasticity of demand/elasticity of supply. I know next to nothing about pricing strategies, though. Perhaps one of those CS/Econ double majors can lend a hand...
Erdos had 2 separate ideas: 1. The idea of a 'book proof'. He seemed to like the idea that God had a book containing all perfect proofs. Whenever he saw an extremely elegant and powerful proof, he referred to it as a 'book proof' as a compliment.
2. Erdos had a totally unrelated idea that we lived our lives in competition with the Devil. When you do something bad, he gets 1 point. When you do something good, you get 0 points. I think he said the goal of the game was to 'keep the devil's score down'. This was totally unrelated to math.
He was the perfect example of eccentricity. His life was interesting, and I'd encourage you to read about him, but don't spread half truths.
Yeah, there are too many programmers in the world that feel they are excellent dba's, while in fact they couldn't begin to talk about schema refinement, functional dependencies, attribute closure, or normal forms.
I would plug 'Database Management Systems' by Ramakrishnan and Gehrke for a more theory oriented approach to databases on an advanced undergraduate to 1rst year grad student level.
Oh come on... The servers, bandwidth, storage, maintainence, and support cost a lot of money as you must know. It's one thing to host a archive that has sporadic users, no guarantee of uptime, and multiple well known mirrors. It's something else to run a business site that has to be up.
Anyway, I'm sure they make money off of that price, but nobody's stopping you from getting 99 of your closest acquaintences together, putting in $1 each, downloading the programs once, and burning a CD to pass around. The programs are GPLed after all.
Well, if you have deep knowledge of any program that accepts untrusted input, can't the same apply? I mean, couldn't the same hold true for malformed XML, GIFs, mp3s, or even virus definition files? I think you're right, that Michael was wrong to say that jpgs are completely safe - that depends on the decoder and the input. But to single out jpgs is wrong, as it's not a 'vulnerability of jpgs' per se, but rather a bug in a jpg decoder.
I tutored math ~2 yrs as well... I found it sad that those students you mentioned intially were precisely the hardest to teach. They were so far behind in actual comprehension of the concepts involved in math that I almost had to reteach them entirely in some subject areas. And their prior 'success' in the subject made them among the most impatient to tutor....
As far as what level graphing calculars should be introduced... I say never. Allow whatever the students want for homework assignments (TI85s, PCs with Maple/Mathematica/Matlab, PDAs...), but exams should be strictly pencil and paper. At least for subjects where math is central - ie, physics/math/EE/ME.... (I suppose allowing intro calculus courses for general students to use graphing calculators is hurting nobody much).
I never, ever said writing a decent compiler was trivial. I only said that any competent CS grad student should be able to write one - maybe I should have added 'with a year or so of hard work in their spare time'.
However, there's a big difference between writing a new compiler and using one that is the result of 15 years of massive collaboration and debugging. The years of eyeballs and highly skilled developers' contributions are what make GCC invaluable now. I'm confident it would be in a similarly advanced state if someone else besides Stallman wrote the intitial code.
All that said, Stallman was the one to write it. Nobody else did, and the kudos go to him.
Any competent computer science grad student should be able to write a servicable compiler. Thousands of people are capable of doing this, and the only remarkable aspect of GCC is that it was released under the GPL. The GPL was revolutionary, and for that he deserves great credit.
But he hasn't done anything except rest on his laurels for a long time now. Perhaps if he stopped scheduling/cancelling talks and getting involved in petty naming disputes, and sat down and actually _wrote some code_ for Hurd, he'd regain some of the respect that most of us have lost for him (perhaps this is why Torvalds is still respected?).
Anyway, I don't think anyone cares about his facial hair or hygiene. I don't think anyone would disrespect him for his advocacy of Free software (no matter how much they may disagree with him). However, his 'GNU/Linux v Linux' crusade is petty and ego driven and is worthy of contempt.
It's most interesting to me, because I remember seeing articles presented evidence that the universe was expanding at a rate that would imply it's open (no big crunch, right?).
I remember hearing the same thing you mentioned - that the shear number of neutrinos in the universe meant that the universe would be closed if they had mass.
Interesting. I wonder if anyone is doing prominent work on this question...
And just because we don't understand how something works doesn't mean that anyone can go and make stupid claims about it, either.
We don't have a unified theory of quantum physics and gravity, but that still doesn't mean that I have to entertain some fraud who claims a unifying theory based on organic waves and universal harmony. Nor do I have to believe that magnets will cure AIDS, even though we have no cure for AIDS yet.
All I expect from a scientific claims is this: A description of an accepted/reviewed experimental method that gives statistically concrete results that can be reproduced in any setting.
If that can't be given, it's a worthless waste of my time.
If you have something better to add that will illuminate me, then post links or shut up.
And if you can show me something which credibly states that American revolutionaries or French saboteurs used teenagers in suicide attacks aimed at pizza stores, dance clubs, religious gatherings, and bus depots, then I'll be very surprised.
But this is completely offtopic now, so I will only say that I think the idea that 'ethnic cleansing' is going on in the Gaza Strip & West bank is too stupid to reply to. But it's funny how this mis-named 'ethnic cleansing' (ie, any form of attack on Palestinians) only occurs after a couple of hundred Israeli's are killed by suicide bombers working at the command of Arafat...
I said nothing about the US's extermination of Native Americans, and I have no idea why you brought it up.
By your logic the Allies in WWII were in the wrong for giving information on sabotage tactics to the French resistance. So much for supporting freedom fighters in tyranical nations.
This is a deeply flawed, naive response. First, France was occupied by a hostile power. This is a German group 'resisting' a democratically elected German government. They are not disenfranchised or repressed, but rather lazy and/or malicious. The could affect changes in German nuclear energy policy through political means, but choose not to. Second, French freedom fighters did not intentionally target and endanger German civilians. They sabotaged military targets. This group recklessly endangers civilian targets, which is disgusting.
This is the same basic flaw of logic that burdens the US's war on terror. According to the definition we are using (all non-government supported organized violence) our own founding fathers were terrorists.
Another bold claim with nothing to back it up. Please explain to me in a moderately logical way how the American revolution relates to the current 'war on terror' and this anti-nuclear group.
The US's current military action against these militant Islamic groups began when we were attacked. Al Queda hates the US - their main goal is the killing of 'infidels'. They attacked 2 African embassies, the USS Cole, and the WTC. On the other hand, the American revolution's goals were stated in the Declaration of Independence which was sent to the British monarchy. We reached our goals through military conflict, not by attacking non-combatants. The comparison between the rebelling colonies and the German group is even worse. The colonies fought because they did not recieve Parlimentary representation - the German group has that at it's fingertips.
Re:Iceball Earth
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Now there's a promising movie plot... In a billion years, humanity would become the extremely technologically and genetically evolved caretakers of newly developing sentient life in the universe. And how would we treat it?
eat the tasty ones, f*ck the sexy ones, and market pepsi products to the rest as 'emerging markets'.
Slashdot Mirror
He described it completely and thoroughly.
It's the study of spaces where you don't have knowledge of the distance between points.
Sorry if he tacked on "It's difficult". It really and truly is, but I think even a child could understand the basic notions with that one-sentence description.
DON'T BUY ANYTHING PROTECTED BY SONY'S DRM TECHNOLOGY.
It's so easy, if you don't want it, don't pay for it. Go rant about how you have the right to privacy, but you have no constitutionally protected right to rent movies or buy music. And I don't see how you have any right to tell someone else how to do business.
http://usps.com/common/category/aboutusps.htm, you obviously need to read up.
The article says that the chief electricians were able to get a ping-pong ball to levitate!
Has anyone told Boeing yet?
Your logic is shitty.
The US refused to back the ICC because it felt it would give undemocratic, repressive states a platform from which to attack/discourage US military action against anyone (any state that signs on the treaty can vote for the 18 judges and 1 prosecutor). It felt that it would be used to prevent Israel from defending itself against Hamas terrorists. And it felt that it would bypass due process for US citizens.
Yhe US did not support the ICC because the ICC is flawed, not because it isn't among the worlds' most principled militaries.
And many nations have used weapons of mass destruction. I assume you mean that the US is the only nation to use thermonuclear weapons against another country. This is regrettable and true, although I find it interesting this is focused on so much more than the firestorms in Tokyo started by US bombs that killed more than Hiroshima & Nagasaki combined. Furthermore, I suppose you don't feel that chemical weapons count as weapons of mass destruction, because Germany used them in WWI, and Iraq used them against the Kurds. If you count death by inaction, the failure to act by the UN in Rwanda killed upwards of a half-million....
Have to admit, I've been to North Tonowanda, Buffalo, the Canal Fest, etc and never had problem with the smell. Granted, I'm from NJ... but the smell isn't much worse than most of the urban areas I've seen in my life.
You're right though, summers in Buffalo & the surrounding areas are great. Too bad that big natural air conditioner turns into a big natural snow machine for 6 months of the year, huh?
can you tell me how it ends? i read the thing and didn't like it at all, but i hate not knowing how it ended.
It looks like you're agreeing with stu72.
From the first post:
As in all things, balance is key.
From your post:
This results in a market-driven quality/price 'sweet point' after time is given to reach equilibrium.
Seems like the same point to me.
I guess your disagreement is with this part -
Too much competition results in prices to low to sustain healthy businesses, which results in rashes of bankruptcy.
But honestly, I don't know why you'd have trouble accepting this. You seem to miss the point that even if a product is priced above the cost of production, nobody has to buy it. There is a finite pool of consumers with finite amounts of money, and even if company x makes a per-time profit on product y, company x can still have a net loss if they do not sell enough of their inventory. In fact, from the perspective of minimizing net loss, selling below production cost might be the optimal strategy. So too much competition can be a bad thing. I think the appropriate economic topics are the income elasticity of demand/elasticity of supply. I know next to nothing about pricing strategies, though. Perhaps one of those CS/Econ double majors can lend a hand...
Seriously, what subject matter interests you. That makes all the difference.
you're wrong.
Erdos had 2 separate ideas:
1. The idea of a 'book proof'. He seemed to like the idea that God had a book containing all perfect proofs. Whenever he saw an extremely elegant and powerful proof, he referred to it as a 'book proof' as a compliment.
2. Erdos had a totally unrelated idea that we lived our lives in competition with the Devil. When you do something bad, he gets 1 point. When you do something good, you get 0 points. I think he said the goal of the game was to 'keep the devil's score down'. This was totally unrelated to math.
He was the perfect example of eccentricity. His life was interesting, and I'd encourage you to read about him, but don't spread half truths.
Yeah, there are too many programmers in the world that feel they are excellent dba's, while in fact they couldn't begin to talk about schema refinement, functional dependencies, attribute closure, or normal forms.
I would plug 'Database Management Systems' by Ramakrishnan and Gehrke for a more theory oriented approach to databases on an advanced undergraduate to 1rst year grad student level.
Oh come on... The servers, bandwidth, storage, maintainence, and support cost a lot of money as you must know. It's one thing to host a archive that has sporadic users, no guarantee of uptime, and multiple well known mirrors. It's something else to run a business site that has to be up.
Anyway, I'm sure they make money off of that price, but nobody's stopping you from getting 99 of your closest acquaintences together, putting in $1 each, downloading the programs once, and burning a CD to pass around. The programs are GPLed after all.
Well, if you have deep knowledge of any program that accepts untrusted input, can't the same apply? I mean, couldn't the same hold true for malformed XML, GIFs, mp3s, or even virus definition files? I think you're right, that Michael was wrong to say that jpgs are completely safe - that depends on the decoder and the input. But to single out jpgs is wrong, as it's not a 'vulnerability of jpgs' per se, but rather a bug in a jpg decoder.
I tutored math ~2 yrs as well... I found it sad that those students you mentioned intially were precisely the hardest to teach. They were so far behind in actual comprehension of the concepts involved in math that I almost had to reteach them entirely in some subject areas. And their prior 'success' in the subject made them among the most impatient to tutor....
As far as what level graphing calculars should be introduced... I say never. Allow whatever the students want for homework assignments (TI85s, PCs with Maple/Mathematica/Matlab, PDAs...), but exams should be strictly pencil and paper. At least for subjects where math is central - ie, physics/math/EE/ME.... (I suppose allowing intro calculus courses for general students to use graphing calculators is hurting nobody much).
I never, ever said writing a decent compiler was trivial. I only said that any competent CS grad student should be able to write one - maybe I should have added 'with a year or so of hard work in their spare time'.
However, there's a big difference between writing a new compiler and using one that is the result of 15 years of massive collaboration and debugging. The years of eyeballs and highly skilled developers' contributions are what make GCC invaluable now. I'm confident it would be in a similarly advanced state if someone else besides Stallman wrote the intitial code.
All that said, Stallman was the one to write it. Nobody else did, and the kudos go to him.
Any competent computer science grad student should be able to write a servicable compiler. Thousands of people are capable of doing this, and the only remarkable aspect of GCC is that it was released under the GPL. The GPL was revolutionary, and for that he deserves great credit.
But he hasn't done anything except rest on his laurels for a long time now. Perhaps if he stopped scheduling/cancelling talks and getting involved in petty naming disputes, and sat down and actually _wrote some code_ for Hurd, he'd regain some of the respect that most of us have lost for him (perhaps this is why Torvalds is still respected?).
Anyway, I don't think anyone cares about his facial hair or hygiene. I don't think anyone would disrespect him for his advocacy of Free software (no matter how much they may disagree with him). However, his 'GNU/Linux v Linux' crusade is petty and ego driven and is worthy of contempt.
No, Michael just pointed out a fact: The FCC is headed by political appointees appointed by the President.
You're the one who brought the idea of the President doing something blame-worth into play here. Freud would be proud....
You're right, but I think you also missed the point.
What if the guy who's programming the 5 ton presses or industrial laser cutter was up for 32 hours straight to meet a deadline?
It's most interesting to me, because I remember seeing articles presented evidence that the universe was expanding at a rate that would imply it's open (no big crunch, right?).
I remember hearing the same thing you mentioned - that the shear number of neutrinos in the universe meant that the universe would be closed if they had mass.
Interesting. I wonder if anyone is doing prominent work on this question...
So the head of the "Mind-Matter Unification Project", a senior writer for "Wired", and an article from "Infinite Energy" magazine panned the book?
You don't say....
And just because we don't understand how something works doesn't mean that anyone can go and make stupid claims about it, either.
We don't have a unified theory of quantum physics and gravity, but that still doesn't mean that I have to entertain some fraud who claims a unifying theory based on organic waves and universal harmony. Nor do I have to believe that magnets will cure AIDS, even though we have no cure for AIDS yet.
All I expect from a scientific claims is this: A description of an accepted/reviewed experimental method that gives statistically concrete results that can be reproduced in any setting.
If that can't be given, it's a worthless waste of my time.
No, I think I'll stand by my claims.
If you have something better to add that will illuminate me, then post links or shut up.
And if you can show me something which credibly states that American revolutionaries or French saboteurs used teenagers in suicide attacks aimed at pizza stores, dance clubs, religious gatherings, and bus depots, then I'll be very surprised.
Whatever, I totally disagree with you.
But this is completely offtopic now, so I will only say that I think the idea that 'ethnic cleansing' is going on in the Gaza Strip & West bank is too stupid to reply to. But it's funny how this mis-named 'ethnic cleansing' (ie, any form of attack on Palestinians) only occurs after a couple of hundred Israeli's are killed by suicide bombers working at the command of Arafat...
I said nothing about the US's extermination of Native Americans, and I have no idea why you brought it up.
By your logic the Allies in WWII were in the wrong for giving information on sabotage tactics to the French resistance. So much for supporting freedom fighters in tyranical nations.
This is a deeply flawed, naive response. First, France was occupied by a hostile power. This is a German group 'resisting' a democratically elected German government. They are not disenfranchised or repressed, but rather lazy and/or malicious. The could affect changes in German nuclear energy policy through political means, but choose not to. Second, French freedom fighters did not intentionally target and endanger German civilians. They sabotaged military targets. This group recklessly endangers civilian targets, which is disgusting.
This is the same basic flaw of logic that burdens the US's war on terror. According to the definition we are using (all non-government supported organized violence) our own founding fathers were terrorists.
Another bold claim with nothing to back it up. Please explain to me in a moderately logical way how the American revolution relates to the current 'war on terror' and this anti-nuclear group.
The US's current military action against these militant Islamic groups began when we were attacked. Al Queda hates the US - their main goal is the killing of 'infidels'. They attacked 2 African embassies, the USS Cole, and the WTC. On the other hand, the American revolution's goals were stated in the Declaration of Independence which was sent to the British monarchy. We reached our goals through military conflict, not by attacking non-combatants. The comparison between the rebelling colonies and the German group is even worse. The colonies fought because they did not recieve Parlimentary representation - the German group has that at it's fingertips.
Now there's a promising movie plot... In a billion years, humanity would become the extremely technologically and genetically evolved caretakers of newly developing sentient life in the universe. And how would we treat it?
eat the tasty ones, f*ck the sexy ones, and market pepsi products to the rest as 'emerging markets'.