Yes, it is. Because as I pointed out elsewhere, the four months are not distributed evenly. Most people probably lose a lot less than four months. It could be that most people lose less than a months, fair number of people lose a year, and few lose a decade or more.
Plus, the run-up to slightly early death can be quite protracted and unpleasant. You might get yourself to within spitting distance of your natural lifespan by repeated rounds of chemotherapy, for example.
Actually, parallelizing your algorithms isn't the only way to parallelize a software system. If it were, then adding cores would be pretty much a no-brainer.
The simplest and most common way to parallelize your system is through system architecture. If you have a program which manages data, instead of writing your own reading and writing of files, you let a database management system handle that. On reads, you just do the reads asynchronously. On writes, it's even easier: just tell the database to write the data and assume that not only the writing is done, but any kind of journaling and logging as well.
Certainly other kinds of services besides data persistence could be handled this way, and a few are (like messaging). We can imagine computationally difficult tasks like image processing, pattern matching, or inference generation being handled by separate processes.
There are few cases, although they are important, where a task can be effectively broken up into threads that can run largely independent of each other. In many more cases there is some benefit, but dependencies between threads makes any advantage something like logarithmic (I'd guess) in the number of cores. But I also suspect that within the context of an entire software system, the otherwise useful practice of handing complex tasks off to somebody else (like a database platform) could provide opportunities for exploiting more cores.
What if you get to have a nice estate in the country with clean air and healthy exercise, because you skim extra profits by polluting other people's air? You in effect ensure yourself decades of healthy living by taking a little bit of a bunch of other peoples' lives.
I bring this up because viewing the atmosphere as a common cesspool hides the connection between the good quality of your life and the reduced length/quality of other peoples' lives. Yeah, you might say, it's too bad about the higher morbidity rate of people who don't have the gumption to pull themselves up by their bootstraps like I did, but it's not my problem. Except it should be your problem if what's really keeping you afloat isn't your bootstrap pulling, it's standing on somebody else's back.
The important thing about capital, the thing that makes it really useful and powerful, is the way it has of flowing towards opportunity. But if you look at that trait carefully, you'll also see that the very same behavior means that it runs away from problems. So you take your profits from your goldmine and liquidate the company before the arsenic in the tailings starts leaking out. The entity legally responsible for the problems is now an empty shell.
Any attempt to fix the incentive problem after the fact would undermine the positive functions of capitalism and corporations. Oh, I think there should be criminal prosecutions in such cases, don't get me wrong. But what you really have to do is to remove the ability to exploit the mobility of capital by creating problems and running away from them. People will bitch and moan that you're restricting capital's ability to build wealth, and they're right. But it doesn't restrict capital's real ability to generate value.
It doesn't work that way. It's more like adjusting the odds on the lottery. Most people breathe crap faithfully every day of their lives yet still up dying of something unrelated like pancreatic cancer at age 80. A relatively small number of people win the air pollution fatality lottery and get to check out at age 50.
Well, the point about the people earning money by using the atmosphere as a cesspool is valid, but that's not why this is science.
Science often proves the obvious because the "obvious" has to be tested from time to time to keep it honest. Yes, it's obvious that pollution is bad. It's also obvious that radiation is "bad". You do not want to sleep on top of an unshielded nuclear reactor core, for example, even if you could avoid getting cooked. But at some point the effects of radiation aren't worth bothering about.
The same goes for pollution. It's a valid question to say, at what point does reducing air pollution become irrational? This study shows we haven't passed that point yet.
Creationism is not a rejection of science. The understanding of science behind it is too flawed for it be considered a rejection.
Cribbing from my thesis on scientific data management: Science has its orthodoxies, but they aren't touchstones against which the truth of a hypothesis is measured. Rather, they are storehouses of reliably negateable null hypothesis patterns. So if you are using the theory of evolution in an empirical ecological study, you set out to show that evolution does NOT occur in a situation where the theory suggests it will. What makes evolution scientifically useful is that if you succeed in proving the null hypothesis, you will reliably find a flaw in either your methods or hypothesis.
Evolution isn't an ideology, it's a tool.
The problem with "scientific" creationism isn't that it is "not true", it is that it has no scientific usefulness. You would set out to prove that creation didn't happen in some set of circumstances, and if you succeeded it wouldn't tell you anything.
Ballmer has failed to cast his Svengali-like spell over me. I... I just don't know. It's just that for some reason I cannot explain, I am able to control the impulse to go out and buy a retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate.
Sometimes it seems that I can go days without even thinking about it. This very morning, I got out of bed, and got myself a cup of coffee, and it didn't even occur to me that if only I had Microsoft Select Plus licensing, I might have Windows Embedded Enterprise in my coffee pot.
I wonder. Does this mean I have developed some kind of unusual resistance to Ballmer's powers of persuasion? Does this mean that I, unlike so many millions of others, have somehow managed to penetrate that fatal glamour?
Oh, no, danger of that. You see logic is the handmaiden of chaos. Just because something is logical doesn't mean it makes sense. And vice versa.
Anybody with an ounce of sense can see that a bat is nothing but a flying mouse, with a few added features like echolocation. But if you try to piece together the logic of how such things came to be, you will find that bats have more in common with hippopotamuses than mice, which is obviously complete nonsense. It is, however, perfectly logical.
Actually, Bigfoot is a parasitic life form. It has no bones, muscles or digestive tract of its own, so it can't go shambling through the woods on its own. Instead it wraps its rubbery skin around its human prey.
What's interesting is bats aren't even close to rodents, taxonomically speaking.
Humans and other primates are, along with rodents, rabbits and treeshrews in the superorder "Euarchontoglires", below the infraclass "Eutheria" of "Mammalia".
Bats are in the infraclass "Laurasiatheria" under "Eutheria", along with hedgehogs, various ground shrews and moles, bears, dogs, cats, horses, weasels, skunks and so on. Most marine mammals are in the same infraclass as bats: otters, seals, walruses, whales etc. Curiously, although the various moles and shrews resemble bats superficially, they are not the closest living relatives of bats. Bats are more closely related to carnivores like dogs and cats, or even ungulates like rhinos, tapirs and horses.
One thing that is stupid: trying the same things that failed in the past.
This is a component of smart behaviors as well. If you don't know what to do, try something and watch very carefully how it fails. If you are in a desperate situation and you are going to definitely fail through inaction, then try an action which failed in the past and hope you get lucky. Or vice versa, when the action that usually works looks like its going to fail, try doing nothing.
Animals freezing in the face of danger is an example of this. It's not much of a defense, but you might get lucky. Maybe the prey a couple animals down the line will get itchy and draw the predator's attention.
On the other hand, smart behavior can be a component of stupidity. If the red button gets you a treat 80% of the time and the green one gets you a treat 20% of the time, the intelligently stupid thing is to push the red button 100% of the time. The stupidly intelligent thing is to try to work out the pattern of red/green rewards.
If you want realistic model of stupidity, provide the NPCs with a range of decision making strategies, all of which work to some degree, but the better of which take more effort (computation). The NPC can choose between the strategies with a random function weighted towards the better strategies, but as time and "stress" come into play the function can shift towards the easy but less effective strategies.
That's a pretty good model of human performance "choking".
Evolution did not produce human stupidity because it was useless, after all.
Hmmm. Possibly this is a sign that TFA was written by an AI agent. Asserting that there are mistakes that are too stupid for for any human to make is a mistake that is too stupid for any human to make.
But the data is encoded in physical matter. If I were arguing on the patent holder's side, I'd argue that the creation of specific physical forms for the data is intrinsic to the usage of a DRM format, therefore the process is "transformative".
This is in contrast to something that is an algorithm. In this case while some physical form is needed in order to communicate that algorithm, it does not matter whether that is paper or an optical CD or photons emitted by somebody's screen. The container is entirely irrelevant to the value of the content. No matter what the physical or logical properties of the container are, if I can open it I can still study the algorithm. The algorithm's value is entirely independent of its physical manifestation.
This, by the way, is EXACTLY how a purchaser of e-books feels about the physical manifestation of that e-book. But it is not how a producer of e-book reading software views the container. The properties of the container itself are important to him, and therefore (again arguing for the paintiff) the physical format is an economically valuable product. Economically significant transformations in such physical formats should then be eligible to be inventions.
Whether this argument is utter rot or not depends on whether intellectual property is utter rot or not. If cryptography had never existed before, then DRM would be an invention if anything qualified as an invention. Furthermore, non-obvious technological innovations that make DRM more practical would probably qualify too. It's just the "use the standard techniques that everybody in a field knows and apply them in a situation none of them have encountered yet" that is rubbish under any reasonable set of assumptions.
Can't do the math? I find that a bit hard to believe. It seems more likely that the students can't download solutions to their homework.
One thing I could believe is that OO doesn't produced proper scientific graphs. I wouldn't use either OO or MS Office for this these days, but this used to be true of MS Office as well. Perspective pie chart? No problem. Errors bars? What are those? If MS Office has subsequently acquired those features but OOo doesn't have them, then clearly MSO would be more usable for student lab work.
Well, ease of integration would be the dominant concern for most hardware hackers. Provided that the software CAN do what is needed, you'd look at part count and complexity.
The PICAxe is available assembled to a board with motor drivers on it, which would be a big plus for some. The iButton interface is intriguing as well.
The Microchip controller's power management and A/D capabilities make it an interesting choice for field instruments.
I bet this guy chose the PICAxe because kits were available to connect it to the keyboard and LCD easily.
unless "transformation" applies solely to physical artifacts directly observable to human senses, or such senses augmented by things like microscopy etc.
DRM undoubtedly entails a transformation: from a digital object in unprotected form to one in protected form.
I think, though, the source of that sense of absurdity we all feel is that this is yet another attempt to patent a pre-existing technology when used for a range of its originally intended uses. Encryption technology exists, in part, to control when and how recipients of information use that information. DRM is just a specific instance of this.
Back in the 1990s there were tons of really insipid patents on using GPS to locate things in various contexts. They were stupid because GPS was a technology specifically designed to provide location data for various uses, e.g., navigating in the field, guiding bombs, etc. My boss used to come in about once a quarter and toss a sheaf of papers on my desk describing some GPS related patent he wanted me to look at. I'd pick it up and tell him to send it to the lawyers because (a) it was almost certainly one of those "use GPS in such and so context" patents which meant it was (b) almost surely improperly granted, but was (c) intended to shake down honest users of an obvious idea, which would (c) be a hell of a lot easier to do for us if I so much as glanced at the damned thing.
Salesmen do one thing, they sell. Just like chainsaws do one thing: they cut. That doesn't mean that your arborist has to run around in a hockey mask terrorizing people.
Anybody who has worked with salesmen know that they quickly create problems for a company that greedily turns a blind eye to what they'll do to make a good sale. You select salesmen by their willingness to do anything to sell. For crhissakes, you don't even bother to pay them a living wage. You through them in a deep dark financial pit and force them sell their way out of it through the dying bodies of other salesmen if they want to see the light of day. It's no accident that airline magazines are chock full of advertisement for height boosting shoe implants and brass lated nose hair trimmers. Salesmen are selected for their high strung temperament then penuriously nurtured on a diet of unnatural meats until they are as neurotic as starving ferrets on amphetamines.
Salesmen perform a useful and important function in a company, but they are not people who want managing customer relationships on their own, any more than you'd leave the cannibals in charge of arranging hospitality for visiting missionaries.
In parameter space (e.g. factors needed to support life sustainably), pretty far. By comparison, the distinction between the stratosphere and the north pole as an ecological niche is considerably greater than that between the north pole and an equatorial rain forest. Keeping in mind that the distance from the equator and the pole is 10,000km, one might say for poetic purposes (you claim to be an English major after all) that the distance between the surface of the Earth and the stratosphere in their capacities to support life is, at a minimum, over at thousand times greater than their physical separation.
The average pocket point-n-shoot type will not see any benefit from more megapixels.
You have to be careful about arguing "diminishing returns" because net average result diminishing returns is often made up of a few pieces of considerable return mixed into lots of no return at all.
For example, for the "average point-n-shoot" type, sure more MP doesn't help when they're shooting a snapshot of the their friends posing. But they do run out of zoom getting that picture of their kid receiving his diploma on a stage that is 50 yards away. If they had a good enough lens, and if the shot were stabilized, they might well wish to enlarge and crop the image in the latter case to the point where they'd be able to see individual pores in the former.
This is engineering, folks, not voodoo. It's about trade-offs and opportunities. If you're talking about a wallet sized camera without image stabilization and a fixed focus, spherical plastic lens, any MP increases are not economical because situations where MP is a limiting factor before something else are rare or non-existent. If you are talking about tripod mounted DSLR with a very large aperture lens, I'm guessing (since I don't own such a rig) that there are situations where the difference between 12MP and 20MP would be the difference between having yet another anonymous landscape and having a valuable shot. It wouldn't be something that happened every day, mind you, but my experience with people in that kind of profession is that being prepared for rare good fortune is a big part of success.
A consumer camera, in some ways, is better engineered than a pro camera. Rather, it reflects that art of engineering to a greater degree than a pro camera. The importance of getting that once in a blue moon or even once of a career shot means that pros are willing to remove two significant engineering constraints from their cameras: cost and physical size. If you start from a a consumer camera and ask how you can make it better by making it more expensive and larger, thats easy. If you start with a pro camera and ask how you can minimize the loss of quality while making it smaller and cheaper, that's engineering.
except mostly what they were selling before wasn't old Coke, and now they're changing the name to acknowledge this.
I understand Battlestar Galactica is pretty good, but every time I've happened to look to see what's on Sci-Fi, it's a bunch of hardbodies in fatigues who appear to be doing a low rent remake of Aliens, or some kind of cheesy paranormal reality show. How many times can you watch a squad of space marines run through the studio's utility tunnels shouting "go, go, go" before it gets old?
So if they're getting a crappy viewing demographic, maybe the problem isn't the name. Maybe it's the content. Why would anyone want to look at a bunch of admittedly amazing bodies posing in sweaty olive drab tank tops when you've got the Internet, where you practically have to poke your own eyes out to avoid seeing a lot of amazing bodies wearing a lot less than a tank top. To survive against that the medium has to provide more, let's say sustainable forms of stimulation. As cheap is some of their programming is, it can't be much cheaper than The Twilight Zone was. There's a lot of brilliant people in the world; who knows, there could be hundreds of Rod Serlings out there. But as soon as a production gets expensive, it's too risky take a chance on them when you can go for the old standby of boobs in a tank top. Of course once you become a cable network, maybe you're already past the point where boobs are optional.
Unfortunately, that would mean it isn't the content either. It would have to be the concept itself. I think there's an argument to be made here. There may be lot of valuable eyeballs that like science fiction, but all the people I know who really like science fiction are inveterate readers. These are people who 99/100 times given a choice of turning on the TV vs. re-reading a mediocre sci-fi book they'd put down a few months ago and which just turned up under the couch, would go for the book. In point of fact, in our household we almost never watch TV, except when we have to do something mindless like folding laundry. I realize this means that I am probably being extremely unfair to all that fine science fiction content that the folks at the sci-fi channel have been piping into my living room, but still it makes me think the concept is broken.
So the name change may simply be acknowledging the reality that the whole idea of a sci-fi channel was cockeyed to start with. Maybe you could have a go at something that would appeal to readers of sci-fi. But changing the name of the channel without changing the content isn't going to get mature people interested in watching.
It was back in the early 90s. I wasn't so long in the tooth myself, but I'd had over a decade of solid accomplishment behind me, and I was working with this kid fresh out of college (and prep school before that) who was certain he knew everything, and pretty much did and said whatever he pleased without any regard to how it affected my responsibilities.
The problem with narcissism isn't self-confidence; I like self-confidence. The problem isn't challenging the beliefs of senior colleagues. I like to have my beliefs challenged. The problem was that this kid acted as if his were the only experiences and ideas that mattered. What was galling to me was that I found myself having to justify to him why a decade of professional experience was worth taking into consideration, because that's the very justification that old-timers use to squelch new ideas. I know better, so STFU. But sometimes, you do know better, so it's nice to have the opportunity to offer your experience graciously.
There's a symmetry between young narcissism and mature narcissism. The common theme is treating the workplace as a stage on which coworkers are bit players in the wonderful story of you.
Narcissism sometimes is cured by life experience, but not always. The senior version of newbie narcissism is dismissing anything the newbie has to contribute. The fresh perspective newcomers bring is valuable -- it's just not proven. Nobody can be at their best professionally by sticking to what has worked for them in the past, nor can they by ignoring the experiences of others.
The bottom line is that very, very few people are any damn good at what they do. It pays to listen and learn, at every stage of your career.
Now the phenomenon of catering to newbie narcissism, that's driven by economics. Experience is more expensive to hire than talent, so hiring inexperienced talent has a certain appeal. I won't say whether it's smart or not; it depends on how good you are at spotting talent. There's a lot less of it out there than people who think they're talented.
Well, if it is a moral question, you can't say "go along and don't rock the boat." Moral questions are about when you should rock the boat and when you shouldn't. For example, if the government asks you to provide user email data without proper legal authorization, management may decide to go along. Given that the customers have no way of finding out, the path of least resistance is to give the secret police anything they ask for. On the other hand, the situation is usually different if the authorities have a constitutionally proper authorization and are engaged in the legitimate business of criminal investigation.
Morality, if it exists at all, isn't about doing what makes you feel immediately comfortable and secure. If it doesn't place more demands upon you than that, it does not exist, and some have so argued. You might not like Arabs or gays, but it doesn't mean you can go along with making their lives miserable because it makes your life convenient. You might not like the government, but it doesn't mean you can assume anything you do to thwart it is automatically moral.
The question of what is the moral choice in this situation seems to me to depend on several things. First it depends on what the customer was promised. Second, it depends on what the customer's contract says. Third it depends on the net effect on freedom of information in society, which is a special concern given that your customers don't have a reasonable alternative.
We can assume that the profit motive ensures the shareholders are looked after.
P2P, in my opinion, is not more important to society than other kinds of use of bandwidth. If you didn't sell your service as unlimited bandwidth, and you don't have some ulterior commercial motive (e.g. you want to steer subscribers to your business partners), it seems reasonable to step in to prevent that use of bandwidth from preempting other uses. As long as the throttling is protocol based, not content based, you aren't imposing your choices of information on users.
If the total bandwidth that P2P users is more than a local ISP can provide, then they should consider forming a co-op. Building an ISP shouldn't take truckloads of capital these days. You can get the network off the ground when subscribers are few with frame relay, moving to leased lines as the traffic over links costs too much.
Chances are, all the subscribers would have to do is make what looks like serious noises in this direction, and the local ISP will find a way to accommodate them P2P users, possibly with a special premium plan priced just low enough to make it not worth bothering to form a co-op. In that case, P2P users ought to embrace this deal, considering the value it would represent.
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Yes, it is. Because as I pointed out elsewhere, the four months are not distributed evenly. Most people probably lose a lot less than four months. It could be that most people lose less than a months, fair number of people lose a year, and few lose a decade or more.
Plus, the run-up to slightly early death can be quite protracted and unpleasant. You might get yourself to within spitting distance of your natural lifespan by repeated rounds of chemotherapy, for example.
Actually, parallelizing your algorithms isn't the only way to parallelize a software system. If it were, then adding cores would be pretty much a no-brainer.
The simplest and most common way to parallelize your system is through system architecture. If you have a program which manages data, instead of writing your own reading and writing of files, you let a database management system handle that. On reads, you just do the reads asynchronously. On writes, it's even easier: just tell the database to write the data and assume that not only the writing is done, but any kind of journaling and logging as well.
Certainly other kinds of services besides data persistence could be handled this way, and a few are (like messaging). We can imagine computationally difficult tasks like image processing, pattern matching, or inference generation being handled by separate processes.
There are few cases, although they are important, where a task can be effectively broken up into threads that can run largely independent of each other. In many more cases there is some benefit, but dependencies between threads makes any advantage something like logarithmic (I'd guess) in the number of cores. But I also suspect that within the context of an entire software system, the otherwise useful practice of handing complex tasks off to somebody else (like a database platform) could provide opportunities for exploiting more cores.
It's more complicated than that.
What if you get to have a nice estate in the country with clean air and healthy exercise, because you skim extra profits by polluting other people's air? You in effect ensure yourself decades of healthy living by taking a little bit of a bunch of other peoples' lives.
I bring this up because viewing the atmosphere as a common cesspool hides the connection between the good quality of your life and the reduced length/quality of other peoples' lives. Yeah, you might say, it's too bad about the higher morbidity rate of people who don't have the gumption to pull themselves up by their bootstraps like I did, but it's not my problem. Except it should be your problem if what's really keeping you afloat isn't your bootstrap pulling, it's standing on somebody else's back.
The important thing about capital, the thing that makes it really useful and powerful, is the way it has of flowing towards opportunity. But if you look at that trait carefully, you'll also see that the very same behavior means that it runs away from problems. So you take your profits from your goldmine and liquidate the company before the arsenic in the tailings starts leaking out. The entity legally responsible for the problems is now an empty shell.
Any attempt to fix the incentive problem after the fact would undermine the positive functions of capitalism and corporations. Oh, I think there should be criminal prosecutions in such cases, don't get me wrong. But what you really have to do is to remove the ability to exploit the mobility of capital by creating problems and running away from them. People will bitch and moan that you're restricting capital's ability to build wealth, and they're right. But it doesn't restrict capital's real ability to generate value.
It doesn't work that way. It's more like adjusting the odds on the lottery. Most people breathe crap faithfully every day of their lives yet still up dying of something unrelated like pancreatic cancer at age 80. A relatively small number of people win the air pollution fatality lottery and get to check out at age 50.
Well, the point about the people earning money by using the atmosphere as a cesspool is valid, but that's not why this is science.
Science often proves the obvious because the "obvious" has to be tested from time to time to keep it honest. Yes, it's obvious that pollution is bad. It's also obvious that radiation is "bad". You do not want to sleep on top of an unshielded nuclear reactor core, for example, even if you could avoid getting cooked. But at some point the effects of radiation aren't worth bothering about.
The same goes for pollution. It's a valid question to say, at what point does reducing air pollution become irrational? This study shows we haven't passed that point yet.
Creationism is not a rejection of science. The understanding of science behind it is too flawed for it be considered a rejection.
Cribbing from my thesis on scientific data management: Science has its orthodoxies, but they aren't touchstones against which the truth of a hypothesis is measured. Rather, they are storehouses of reliably negateable null hypothesis patterns. So if you are using the theory of evolution in an empirical ecological study, you set out to show that evolution does NOT occur in a situation where the theory suggests it will. What makes evolution scientifically useful is that if you succeed in proving the null hypothesis, you will reliably find a flaw in either your methods or hypothesis.
Evolution isn't an ideology, it's a tool.
The problem with "scientific" creationism isn't that it is "not true", it is that it has no scientific usefulness. You would set out to prove that creation didn't happen in some set of circumstances, and if you succeeded it wouldn't tell you anything.
Ballmer has failed to cast his Svengali-like spell over me. I... I just don't know. It's just that for some reason I cannot explain, I am able to control the impulse to go out and buy a retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate.
Sometimes it seems that I can go days without even thinking about it. This very morning, I got out of bed, and got myself a cup of coffee, and it didn't even occur to me that if only I had Microsoft Select Plus licensing, I might have Windows Embedded Enterprise in my coffee pot.
I wonder. Does this mean I have developed some kind of unusual resistance to Ballmer's powers of persuasion? Does this mean that I, unlike so many millions of others, have somehow managed to penetrate that fatal glamour?
That makes me feel so... so... special.
Oh, no, danger of that. You see logic is the handmaiden of chaos. Just because something is logical doesn't mean it makes sense. And vice versa.
Anybody with an ounce of sense can see that a bat is nothing but a flying mouse, with a few added features like echolocation. But if you try to piece together the logic of how such things came to be, you will find that bats have more in common with hippopotamuses than mice, which is obviously complete nonsense. It is, however, perfectly logical.
Now all IBM needs to do is buy the Unification Church.
Actually, Bigfoot is a parasitic life form. It has no bones, muscles or digestive tract of its own, so it can't go shambling through the woods on its own. Instead it wraps its rubbery skin around its human prey.
I'll always be a cheapskate.
What's interesting is bats aren't even close to rodents, taxonomically speaking.
Humans and other primates are, along with rodents, rabbits and treeshrews in the superorder "Euarchontoglires", below the infraclass "Eutheria" of "Mammalia".
Bats are in the infraclass "Laurasiatheria" under "Eutheria", along with hedgehogs, various ground shrews and moles, bears, dogs, cats, horses, weasels, skunks and so on. Most marine mammals are in the same infraclass as bats: otters, seals, walruses, whales etc. Curiously, although the various moles and shrews resemble bats superficially, they are not the closest living relatives of bats. Bats are more closely related to carnivores like dogs and cats, or even ungulates like rhinos, tapirs and horses.
I would have named her "Misty".
And vice versa.
One thing that is stupid: trying the same things that failed in the past.
This is a component of smart behaviors as well. If you don't know what to do, try something and watch very carefully how it fails. If you are in a desperate situation and you are going to definitely fail through inaction, then try an action which failed in the past and hope you get lucky. Or vice versa, when the action that usually works looks like its going to fail, try doing nothing.
Animals freezing in the face of danger is an example of this. It's not much of a defense, but you might get lucky. Maybe the prey a couple animals down the line will get itchy and draw the predator's attention.
On the other hand, smart behavior can be a component of stupidity. If the red button gets you a treat 80% of the time and the green one gets you a treat 20% of the time, the intelligently stupid thing is to push the red button 100% of the time. The stupidly intelligent thing is to try to work out the pattern of red/green rewards.
If you want realistic model of stupidity, provide the NPCs with a range of decision making strategies, all of which work to some degree, but the better of which take more effort (computation). The NPC can choose between the strategies with a random function weighted towards the better strategies, but as time and "stress" come into play the function can shift towards the easy but less effective strategies.
That's a pretty good model of human performance "choking".
Evolution did not produce human stupidity because it was useless, after all.
Hmmm. Possibly this is a sign that TFA was written by an AI agent. Asserting that there are mistakes that are too stupid for for any human to make is a mistake that is too stupid for any human to make.
But the data is encoded in physical matter. If I were arguing on the patent holder's side, I'd argue that the creation of specific physical forms for the data is intrinsic to the usage of a DRM format, therefore the process is "transformative".
This is in contrast to something that is an algorithm. In this case while some physical form is needed in order to communicate that algorithm, it does not matter whether that is paper or an optical CD or photons emitted by somebody's screen. The container is entirely irrelevant to the value of the content. No matter what the physical or logical properties of the container are, if I can open it I can still study the algorithm. The algorithm's value is entirely independent of its physical manifestation.
This, by the way, is EXACTLY how a purchaser of e-books feels about the physical manifestation of that e-book. But it is not how a producer of e-book reading software views the container. The properties of the container itself are important to him, and therefore (again arguing for the paintiff) the physical format is an economically valuable product. Economically significant transformations in such physical formats should then be eligible to be inventions.
Whether this argument is utter rot or not depends on whether intellectual property is utter rot or not. If cryptography had never existed before, then DRM would be an invention if anything qualified as an invention. Furthermore, non-obvious technological innovations that make DRM more practical would probably qualify too. It's just the "use the standard techniques that everybody in a field knows and apply them in a situation none of them have encountered yet" that is rubbish under any reasonable set of assumptions.
Can't do the math? I find that a bit hard to believe. It seems more likely that the students can't download solutions to their homework.
One thing I could believe is that OO doesn't produced proper scientific graphs. I wouldn't use either OO or MS Office for this these days, but this used to be true of MS Office as well. Perspective pie chart? No problem. Errors bars? What are those? If MS Office has subsequently acquired those features but OOo doesn't have them, then clearly MSO would be more usable for student lab work.
Well, ease of integration would be the dominant concern for most hardware hackers. Provided that the software CAN do what is needed, you'd look at part count and complexity.
The PICAxe is available assembled to a board with motor drivers on it, which would be a big plus for some. The iButton interface is intriguing as well.
The Microchip controller's power management and A/D capabilities make it an interesting choice for field instruments.
I bet this guy chose the PICAxe because kits were available to connect it to the keyboard and LCD easily.
unless "transformation" applies solely to physical artifacts directly observable to human senses, or such senses augmented by things like microscopy etc.
DRM undoubtedly entails a transformation: from a digital object in unprotected form to one in protected form.
I think, though, the source of that sense of absurdity we all feel is that this is yet another attempt to patent a pre-existing technology when used for a range of its originally intended uses. Encryption technology exists, in part, to control when and how recipients of information use that information. DRM is just a specific instance of this.
Back in the 1990s there were tons of really insipid patents on using GPS to locate things in various contexts. They were stupid because GPS was a technology specifically designed to provide location data for various uses, e.g., navigating in the field, guiding bombs, etc. My boss used to come in about once a quarter and toss a sheaf of papers on my desk describing some GPS related patent he wanted me to look at. I'd pick it up and tell him to send it to the lawyers because (a) it was almost certainly one of those "use GPS in such and so context" patents which meant it was (b) almost surely improperly granted, but was (c) intended to shake down honest users of an obvious idea, which would (c) be a hell of a lot easier to do for us if I so much as glanced at the damned thing.
This is like the "guns don't kill people" thing.
Salesmen don't screw customers. Companies do.
Salesmen do one thing, they sell. Just like chainsaws do one thing: they cut. That doesn't mean that your arborist has to run around in a hockey mask terrorizing people.
Anybody who has worked with salesmen know that they quickly create problems for a company that greedily turns a blind eye to what they'll do to make a good sale. You select salesmen by their willingness to do anything to sell. For crhissakes, you don't even bother to pay them a living wage. You through them in a deep dark financial pit and force them sell their way out of it through the dying bodies of other salesmen if they want to see the light of day. It's no accident that airline magazines are chock full of advertisement for height boosting shoe implants and brass lated nose hair trimmers. Salesmen are selected for their high strung temperament then penuriously nurtured on a diet of unnatural meats until they are as neurotic as starving ferrets on amphetamines.
Salesmen perform a useful and important function in a company, but they are not people who want managing customer relationships on their own, any more than you'd leave the cannibals in charge of arranging hospitality for visiting missionaries.
In physical space, not far. A mere 10km.
In parameter space (e.g. factors needed to support life sustainably), pretty far. By comparison, the distinction between the stratosphere and the north pole as an ecological niche is considerably greater than that between the north pole and an equatorial rain forest. Keeping in mind that the distance from the equator and the pole is 10,000km, one might say for poetic purposes (you claim to be an English major after all) that the distance between the surface of the Earth and the stratosphere in their capacities to support life is, at a minimum, over at thousand times greater than their physical separation.
The average pocket point-n-shoot type will not see any benefit from more megapixels.
You have to be careful about arguing "diminishing returns" because net average result diminishing returns is often made up of a few pieces of considerable return mixed into lots of no return at all.
For example, for the "average point-n-shoot" type, sure more MP doesn't help when they're shooting a snapshot of the their friends posing. But they do run out of zoom getting that picture of their kid receiving his diploma on a stage that is 50 yards away. If they had a good enough lens, and if the shot were stabilized, they might well wish to enlarge and crop the image in the latter case to the point where they'd be able to see individual pores in the former.
This is engineering, folks, not voodoo. It's about trade-offs and opportunities. If you're talking about a wallet sized camera without image stabilization and a fixed focus, spherical plastic lens, any MP increases are not economical because situations where MP is a limiting factor before something else are rare or non-existent. If you are talking about tripod mounted DSLR with a very large aperture lens, I'm guessing (since I don't own such a rig) that there are situations where the difference between 12MP and 20MP would be the difference between having yet another anonymous landscape and having a valuable shot. It wouldn't be something that happened every day, mind you, but my experience with people in that kind of profession is that being prepared for rare good fortune is a big part of success.
A consumer camera, in some ways, is better engineered than a pro camera. Rather, it reflects that art of engineering to a greater degree than a pro camera. The importance of getting that once in a blue moon or even once of a career shot means that pros are willing to remove two significant engineering constraints from their cameras: cost and physical size. If you start from a a consumer camera and ask how you can make it better by making it more expensive and larger, thats easy. If you start with a pro camera and ask how you can minimize the loss of quality while making it smaller and cheaper, that's engineering.
except mostly what they were selling before wasn't old Coke, and now they're changing the name to acknowledge this.
I understand Battlestar Galactica is pretty good, but every time I've happened to look to see what's on Sci-Fi, it's a bunch of hardbodies in fatigues who appear to be doing a low rent remake of Aliens, or some kind of cheesy paranormal reality show. How many times can you watch a squad of space marines run through the studio's utility tunnels shouting "go, go, go" before it gets old?
So if they're getting a crappy viewing demographic, maybe the problem isn't the name. Maybe it's the content. Why would anyone want to look at a bunch of admittedly amazing bodies posing in sweaty olive drab tank tops when you've got the Internet, where you practically have to poke your own eyes out to avoid seeing a lot of amazing bodies wearing a lot less than a tank top. To survive against that the medium has to provide more, let's say sustainable forms of stimulation. As cheap is some of their programming is, it can't be much cheaper than The Twilight Zone was. There's a lot of brilliant people in the world; who knows, there could be hundreds of Rod Serlings out there. But as soon as a production gets expensive, it's too risky take a chance on them when you can go for the old standby of boobs in a tank top. Of course once you become a cable network, maybe you're already past the point where boobs are optional.
Unfortunately, that would mean it isn't the content either. It would have to be the concept itself. I think there's an argument to be made here. There may be lot of valuable eyeballs that like science fiction, but all the people I know who really like science fiction are inveterate readers. These are people who 99/100 times given a choice of turning on the TV vs. re-reading a mediocre sci-fi book they'd put down a few months ago and which just turned up under the couch, would go for the book. In point of fact, in our household we almost never watch TV, except when we have to do something mindless like folding laundry. I realize this means that I am probably being extremely unfair to all that fine science fiction content that the folks at the sci-fi channel have been piping into my living room, but still it makes me think the concept is broken.
So the name change may simply be acknowledging the reality that the whole idea of a sci-fi channel was cockeyed to start with. Maybe you could have a go at something that would appeal to readers of sci-fi. But changing the name of the channel without changing the content isn't going to get mature people interested in watching.
It was back in the early 90s. I wasn't so long in the tooth myself, but I'd had over a decade of solid accomplishment behind me, and I was working with this kid fresh out of college (and prep school before that) who was certain he knew everything, and pretty much did and said whatever he pleased without any regard to how it affected my responsibilities.
The problem with narcissism isn't self-confidence; I like self-confidence. The problem isn't challenging the beliefs of senior colleagues. I like to have my beliefs challenged. The problem was that this kid acted as if his were the only experiences and ideas that mattered. What was galling to me was that I found myself having to justify to him why a decade of professional experience was worth taking into consideration, because that's the very justification that old-timers use to squelch new ideas. I know better, so STFU. But sometimes, you do know better, so it's nice to have the opportunity to offer your experience graciously.
There's a symmetry between young narcissism and mature narcissism. The common theme is treating the workplace as a stage on which coworkers are bit players in the wonderful story of you.
Narcissism sometimes is cured by life experience, but not always. The senior version of newbie narcissism is dismissing anything the newbie has to contribute. The fresh perspective newcomers bring is valuable -- it's just not proven. Nobody can be at their best professionally by sticking to what has worked for them in the past, nor can they by ignoring the experiences of others.
The bottom line is that very, very few people are any damn good at what they do. It pays to listen and learn, at every stage of your career.
Now the phenomenon of catering to newbie narcissism, that's driven by economics. Experience is more expensive to hire than talent, so hiring inexperienced talent has a certain appeal. I won't say whether it's smart or not; it depends on how good you are at spotting talent. There's a lot less of it out there than people who think they're talented.
Well, if it is a moral question, you can't say "go along and don't rock the boat." Moral questions are about when you should rock the boat and when you shouldn't. For example, if the government asks you to provide user email data without proper legal authorization, management may decide to go along. Given that the customers have no way of finding out, the path of least resistance is to give the secret police anything they ask for. On the other hand, the situation is usually different if the authorities have a constitutionally proper authorization and are engaged in the legitimate business of criminal investigation.
Morality, if it exists at all, isn't about doing what makes you feel immediately comfortable and secure. If it doesn't place more demands upon you than that, it does not exist, and some have so argued. You might not like Arabs or gays, but it doesn't mean you can go along with making their lives miserable because it makes your life convenient. You might not like the government, but it doesn't mean you can assume anything you do to thwart it is automatically moral.
The question of what is the moral choice in this situation seems to me to depend on several things. First it depends on what the customer was promised. Second, it depends on what the customer's contract says. Third it depends on the net effect on freedom of information in society, which is a special concern given that your customers don't have a reasonable alternative.
We can assume that the profit motive ensures the shareholders are looked after.
P2P, in my opinion, is not more important to society than other kinds of use of bandwidth. If you didn't sell your service as unlimited bandwidth, and you don't have some ulterior commercial motive (e.g. you want to steer subscribers to your business partners), it seems reasonable to step in to prevent that use of bandwidth from preempting other uses. As long as the throttling is protocol based, not content based, you aren't imposing your choices of information on users.
If the total bandwidth that P2P users is more than a local ISP can provide, then they should consider forming a co-op. Building an ISP shouldn't take truckloads of capital these days. You can get the network off the ground when subscribers are few with frame relay, moving to leased lines as the traffic over links costs too much.
Chances are, all the subscribers would have to do is make what looks like serious noises in this direction, and the local ISP will find a way to accommodate them P2P users, possibly with a special premium plan priced just low enough to make it not worth bothering to form a co-op. In that case, P2P users ought to embrace this deal, considering the value it would represent.