So what is better? Something free that everyone has access to or something that only the rich and privileged can attain? I would think that most \.ers would be cheering this since its akin to open source.
To be fair to Stanford, it's not only the "rich and privileged" who have access to its degree programs. As of this year, Stanford no longer charges tuition for students whose family income is less than $100,000 per year. Most other "posh" American schools have similar programs -- Harvard, for example, waives tuition for families earning less than $60,000. In 2005, Yale announced that it would waive tuition for any musicians who wanted to pursue a Master's degree in music and were good enough to be accepted in the program. And so on.
Education really doesn't put up as many barriers in America as people think. It's the people who are rich who put up the barriers, whether they're going to university or not.
IQ has a normal distribution because IQ is defined to have a normal distribution.
Bingo. You can define a normal distribution curve by its mean and its standard definition. Common IQ tests define IQ as having a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. They then tailor the questions on the test to meet that curve.
Wow, psychologists must be forbidden to ever take a statistics class then. Remember, these people are usually just as fucked up as the people who pay them $$$ to listen and now we're trusting them to do math.
Uh? I'm in a statistics class right now, and I can assure you that in a normal distribution the median is the same as the mean. The plot of the probability distribution function of a normal distribution is a bell curve. It's symmetric, so the mean is in the middle (which is the median). I think you might be the one who needs to crack a book.
Yep. Because I'd have one too. So if he is a bad guy, I will see his, he will see mine, and probably figure I'm not the only one. So more likely, he's another one just like me.
Meanwhile, the other guy's thinking: "Whoops. Looks like dumbass brought a gun to a plane fight."
But there are ATM's in my area that I know are running OS/2.
These aren't obscure products, either. It's my understanding that the older Bank of America ATMs found in California (the ones with the monochrome screens) still run OS/2. The newer ones with the color screens run Windows Embedded, if I understand correctly -- and they feel much more sluggish to me.
Ah, but in this case the value 100 is not quite but almost two standard deviations away from the mean, which suggests it may be an anomalous data point that should be discarded. If you do discard it, the median and the mean are practically the same.
IMO, the Baroque Cycle is the best historical fiction written in the last 20 years.
But that ain't saying much.
Seriously, if you limit your scope to that range, you conveniently leave off The Alienist, the best of Umberto Eco, and most (but not all) Patrick O'Brien. And then, what is historical fiction anyway? How "historical" does it really have to be? Does Kavalier and Clay count? Does Carter Beats the Devil? What about Cormac McCarthy?
Meanwhile, the Baroque Cycle pretends to be historical fiction, but half the "history" presented in the book is either flat-out made up, or else twisted to suit Stephenson's anachronistic, geek-friendly version of human nature. You put down the books, never sure if you learned anything from them at all.
To my mind, the most "historical" thing about Stephenson's prose is the geologic pace at which you're forced to lumber through his verbal diarrhea. IMO, a truly terrible writer.
If you get to System of the World, you'll be going back-and-forth between all three books, cross-referencing journal entries and passages, trying to figure out where all the gold is.
No. No I will not, because that would imply that I still gave a shit after slogging through the unholy tedious mess that is Quicksilver. It will also be difficult to cross-reference given that I ritually burned my copy of Quicksilver after finishing it, and fed it to the neighbor's cat.
That being said, Baroque Cycle is definitely his most sophisticated and challenging read. It may well be his War and Peace.
In the sense that most people who start it will never get past the first couple of sections, and when they ask somebody what's so great about it their friend will explain that they really should have read Anna Karenina instead? Or in the sense that it will just become the butte of countless 'literature' jokes?
Re:Who needs privacy when people are so predictabl
on
Blown to Bits
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I had the opportunity to work with some city forensic computer guys lately and was surprised at how little they can actually do. "Phone Dumps" and other monitoring type stuff is actually a bitch for them to get their hands on, while all the while I assumed it was like Law and Order.
The last two times I was called for jury selection, both attorneys felt compelled to belabor exactly this point. Both Law and Order and CSI were mentioned by name.
In one case (real-life case now), a woman who was known to work as a prostitute had been physically assaulted by an alleged client (stabbed). Now, already someone who is a self-admitted prostitute and drug abuser is not the ideal defendant to inspire sympathy in a jury. Imagine, then, if the jury is also expecting to see DNA evidence and digitally enhanced fingerprints that prove that the lock of hair and the scrap of paper found on the victim's coat actually belonged to the defendant.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of thing that modern juries have come to expect, and it just Ain't Gonna Happen in your average real-life trial. Attorneys and judges alike have begun crafting explicit boilerplate to remind potential jurors of this fact.
Blu-ray has yet to get any traction, and in all honesty, with only higher quality video and marginally better audio to have over DVD, I seriously doubt it ever will. It's going to remain a niche videophile technology for the foreseeable future
Then again, there is the whole "transition to digital TV" thing, and high-quality picture on digital cable and satellite has inspired many people to go out and buy brand-new, high resolution TVs. The DVD format does nothing for these sets. Anybody who wants to see his home video collection match the picture quality of television is a candidate for a Blu-ray player. Consider, especially, the fact that DVDs of modern TV series are selling really well. Now imagine if the show actually looked better on TV before you bought the DVD. That, combined with the rapidly dropping price of Blu-Ray hardware, makes me not want to discount the format too quickly.
That's a very unsettling thought. If we cannot trust even the basic morality of people who have worked hard for their measures of respect in today's global community, who can we trust?
Please. Obviously you can't "trust" any person from any category, because the categories are totally arbitrary.
If you read a story in the news that said a 70-year-old woman had murdered her own son and left the son's children orphans, would you start posting on Internet forums about what a terrible world it is when we can't even trust our own grandmothers? I doubt it.
People aren't rotten as a whole. Some people do some very rotten things. The Hans Reiser case reveals nothing more to us than that. Honestly I don't understand why geeks feel so personally invested in it.
Hans Reiser is, unfortunately, a murderer. Fortunately, Hans Reiser is not you. For most of you, he's not even a distant relative. His case has no bearing on your life. None. Feel thankful that he will receive justice for the sake of the victim's family, and move on.
Just so we can all understand, where did you get your medical degree in Psychiatry or Ph.D in Psychology from again? Because, unless you have one, you're really not qualified to diagnose anyone as a sociopath.
Same goes for you, I guess.
He might be a killer, but there's little to no evidence of any sociopathic tendencies.
Seriously? Murdering his wife in cold blood seems like pretty good evidence of sociopathic "tendencies" to me. You really, honestly don't think murder suggests antisocial behavior? Or wait -- maybe it's just that you don't know what "sociopathy" means. (Hint: It's a personality disorder, not a mental illness.)
Kidding, right? Last I checked, most Linux distros still ship on an entire DVD full of software, much of which gets installed by default.
The important difference, I think, is that even the Linux software that gets installed but never used tends not to be in-your-faceware. Most of the cruft that ships on a standard Windows laptop these days is designed to pester you with all manner of pop-up windows and nag messages.
Think of it: In theory, people install anti-virus software to avoid viruses that pop ad windows on their computers. But by default, when you buy a new computer you automatically subject yourself to pop-up advertising for the anti-virus software. A lot of people will get themselves roped into a service contract just to make the pop-ups go away! Irony, no?
Yes, but make sure that's professionally pressed CD/DVD media, with real pits, and not consumer-grate writable blanks. The technology is very different, and I for one do not expect a CD-R to be readable in 25 years. I have some that I wrote 10 years ago that have already rotted away.
Under heavy use (e.g. chemistry class), the four AAAs in my HP 50g calculator will last maybe a month. I use rechargeables, which have come a long way since the old days, but it's still a drag. I love the calculator, though.
I, too, have noticed a decline in the overall amount of spam. My mail server runs SpamAssassin, but it's configured to dump spam into a quarantine box, rather than reject it outright. That makes it easy to count the amount that I get. I've never received tons and tons, but it's gone down from 100+ per day to maybe 20 or so. Still too many, but a significant drop.
Wait... are you saying that the Linux kernel will remain free in the future, but that people will pay for extras on top of that, including commercial software in some cases? That is just... insane! What barking madman would even conceive of such a concept?
Incidentally, how do you go from what that article actually says:
Expect to see a three-way split among different versions of Linux. Not different distributions per se, but three basic usage models:... For-pay... Free to use... Free/libre
...to "Linux forsaking its free usage model"? What are you, running for Congress?
The end result is that your thinking becomes stuck in a quagmire of complex personal matters that are not of your own.
As an aside to your point, in most cases they are not the personal matters of the people on the show, either. Very often all the "drama" in the featured players' lives is manufactured in the editing booth.
These things are generally used for very low-security applications. My bank doesn't use them, stock trading sites don't use them, etc.
I have retirement accounts at two different major financial companies and both use these kinds of questions. I know this because I forgot my passwords recently, because their "more secure" password rules wouldn't allow me to use my normal password-generation formula.
Under Soviet communism, all property nominally belonged to the state, and in practice it was a hierarchy from the top thugs in moscow to the local zampolit who decided who got to use what property, regardless of who'd produced it.
Damn. You could almost say that in Soviet Russia, property owned you. (But obviously that would be a gross exaggeration.)
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So what is better? Something free that everyone has access to or something that only the rich and privileged can attain? I would think that most \.ers would be cheering this since its akin to open source.
To be fair to Stanford, it's not only the "rich and privileged" who have access to its degree programs. As of this year, Stanford no longer charges tuition for students whose family income is less than $100,000 per year. Most other "posh" American schools have similar programs -- Harvard, for example, waives tuition for families earning less than $60,000. In 2005, Yale announced that it would waive tuition for any musicians who wanted to pursue a Master's degree in music and were good enough to be accepted in the program. And so on.
Education really doesn't put up as many barriers in America as people think. It's the people who are rich who put up the barriers, whether they're going to university or not.
IQ has a normal distribution because IQ is defined to have a normal distribution.
Bingo. You can define a normal distribution curve by its mean and its standard definition. Common IQ tests define IQ as having a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. They then tailor the questions on the test to meet that curve.
Even higher. As it turns out, the limit of 4/x as x approaches 2 is 50%.
Wow, psychologists must be forbidden to ever take a statistics class then. Remember, these people are usually just as fucked up as the people who pay them $$$ to listen and now we're trusting them to do math.
Uh? I'm in a statistics class right now, and I can assure you that in a normal distribution the median is the same as the mean. The plot of the probability distribution function of a normal distribution is a bell curve. It's symmetric, so the mean is in the middle (which is the median). I think you might be the one who needs to crack a book.
Yep. Because I'd have one too. So if he is a bad guy, I will see his, he will see mine, and probably figure I'm not the only one. So more likely, he's another one just like me.
Meanwhile, the other guy's thinking: "Whoops. Looks like dumbass brought a gun to a plane fight."
But there are ATM's in my area that I know are running OS/2.
These aren't obscure products, either. It's my understanding that the older Bank of America ATMs found in California (the ones with the monochrome screens) still run OS/2. The newer ones with the color screens run Windows Embedded, if I understand correctly -- and they feel much more sluggish to me.
Ah, but in this case the value 100 is not quite but almost two standard deviations away from the mean, which suggests it may be an anomalous data point that should be discarded. If you do discard it, the median and the mean are practically the same.
Hey, you started it.
IMO, the Baroque Cycle is the best historical fiction written in the last 20 years.
But that ain't saying much.
Seriously, if you limit your scope to that range, you conveniently leave off The Alienist, the best of Umberto Eco, and most (but not all) Patrick O'Brien. And then, what is historical fiction anyway? How "historical" does it really have to be? Does Kavalier and Clay count? Does Carter Beats the Devil? What about Cormac McCarthy?
Meanwhile, the Baroque Cycle pretends to be historical fiction, but half the "history" presented in the book is either flat-out made up, or else twisted to suit Stephenson's anachronistic, geek-friendly version of human nature. You put down the books, never sure if you learned anything from them at all.
To my mind, the most "historical" thing about Stephenson's prose is the geologic pace at which you're forced to lumber through his verbal diarrhea. IMO, a truly terrible writer.
If you get to System of the World, you'll be going back-and-forth between all three books, cross-referencing journal entries and passages, trying to figure out where all the gold is.
No. No I will not, because that would imply that I still gave a shit after slogging through the unholy tedious mess that is Quicksilver. It will also be difficult to cross-reference given that I ritually burned my copy of Quicksilver after finishing it, and fed it to the neighbor's cat.
That being said, Baroque Cycle is definitely his most sophisticated and challenging read. It may well be his War and Peace.
In the sense that most people who start it will never get past the first couple of sections, and when they ask somebody what's so great about it their friend will explain that they really should have read Anna Karenina instead? Or in the sense that it will just become the butte of countless 'literature' jokes?
I had the opportunity to work with some city forensic computer guys lately and was surprised at how little they can actually do. "Phone Dumps" and other monitoring type stuff is actually a bitch for them to get their hands on, while all the while I assumed it was like Law and Order.
The last two times I was called for jury selection, both attorneys felt compelled to belabor exactly this point. Both Law and Order and CSI were mentioned by name.
In one case (real-life case now), a woman who was known to work as a prostitute had been physically assaulted by an alleged client (stabbed). Now, already someone who is a self-admitted prostitute and drug abuser is not the ideal defendant to inspire sympathy in a jury. Imagine, then, if the jury is also expecting to see DNA evidence and digitally enhanced fingerprints that prove that the lock of hair and the scrap of paper found on the victim's coat actually belonged to the defendant.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the type of thing that modern juries have come to expect, and it just Ain't Gonna Happen in your average real-life trial. Attorneys and judges alike have begun crafting explicit boilerplate to remind potential jurors of this fact.
"Godson"... The new Jesus chip?
I'm hoping to use one to power my Network Attached Storage.
Blu-ray has yet to get any traction, and in all honesty, with only higher quality video and marginally better audio to have over DVD, I seriously doubt it ever will. It's going to remain a niche videophile technology for the foreseeable future
Then again, there is the whole "transition to digital TV" thing, and high-quality picture on digital cable and satellite has inspired many people to go out and buy brand-new, high resolution TVs. The DVD format does nothing for these sets. Anybody who wants to see his home video collection match the picture quality of television is a candidate for a Blu-ray player. Consider, especially, the fact that DVDs of modern TV series are selling really well. Now imagine if the show actually looked better on TV before you bought the DVD. That, combined with the rapidly dropping price of Blu-Ray hardware, makes me not want to discount the format too quickly.
That's a very unsettling thought. If we cannot trust even the basic morality of people who have worked hard for their measures of respect in today's global community, who can we trust?
Please. Obviously you can't "trust" any person from any category, because the categories are totally arbitrary.
If you read a story in the news that said a 70-year-old woman had murdered her own son and left the son's children orphans, would you start posting on Internet forums about what a terrible world it is when we can't even trust our own grandmothers? I doubt it.
People aren't rotten as a whole. Some people do some very rotten things. The Hans Reiser case reveals nothing more to us than that. Honestly I don't understand why geeks feel so personally invested in it.
Hans Reiser is, unfortunately, a murderer. Fortunately, Hans Reiser is not you. For most of you, he's not even a distant relative. His case has no bearing on your life. None. Feel thankful that he will receive justice for the sake of the victim's family, and move on.
Just so we can all understand, where did you get your medical degree in Psychiatry or Ph.D in Psychology from again? Because, unless you have one, you're really not qualified to diagnose anyone as a sociopath.
Same goes for you, I guess.
He might be a killer, but there's little to no evidence of any sociopathic tendencies.
Seriously? Murdering his wife in cold blood seems like pretty good evidence of sociopathic "tendencies" to me. You really, honestly don't think murder suggests antisocial behavior? Or wait -- maybe it's just that you don't know what "sociopathy" means. (Hint: It's a personality disorder, not a mental illness.)
Thankfully, Linux comes pretty free of bloatware.
Kidding, right? Last I checked, most Linux distros still ship on an entire DVD full of software, much of which gets installed by default.
The important difference, I think, is that even the Linux software that gets installed but never used tends not to be in-your-faceware. Most of the cruft that ships on a standard Windows laptop these days is designed to pester you with all manner of pop-up windows and nag messages.
Think of it: In theory, people install anti-virus software to avoid viruses that pop ad windows on their computers. But by default, when you buy a new computer you automatically subject yourself to pop-up advertising for the anti-virus software. A lot of people will get themselves roped into a service contract just to make the pop-ups go away! Irony, no?
Yes, but make sure that's professionally pressed CD/DVD media, with real pits, and not consumer-grate writable blanks. The technology is very different, and I for one do not expect a CD-R to be readable in 25 years. I have some that I wrote 10 years ago that have already rotted away.
Strange that this would be a turn-off to the author of this review.
Under heavy use (e.g. chemistry class), the four AAAs in my HP 50g calculator will last maybe a month. I use rechargeables, which have come a long way since the old days, but it's still a drag. I love the calculator, though.
First it was 720p, then 1080i, then 1080p for the sets.
And given that the highest broadcast resolution is 1080i, and has been specified as such for at least a decade, do you expect this trend to continue?
For port connections, there was component, then DVI, then HDMI.
It's not as if they took away the older ones when they added the new ones.
I, too, have noticed a decline in the overall amount of spam. My mail server runs SpamAssassin, but it's configured to dump spam into a quarantine box, rather than reject it outright. That makes it easy to count the amount that I get. I've never received tons and tons, but it's gone down from 100+ per day to maybe 20 or so. Still too many, but a significant drop.
Wait ... are you saying that the Linux kernel will remain free in the future, but that people will pay for extras on top of that, including commercial software in some cases? That is just ... insane! What barking madman would even conceive of such a concept?
Incidentally, how do you go from what that article actually says:
Expect to see a three-way split among different versions of Linux. Not different distributions per se, but three basic usage models: ... For-pay ... Free to use ... Free/libre
...to "Linux forsaking its free usage model"? What are you, running for Congress?
The end result is that your thinking becomes stuck in a quagmire of complex personal matters that are not of your own.
As an aside to your point, in most cases they are not the personal matters of the people on the show, either. Very often all the "drama" in the featured players' lives is manufactured in the editing booth.
First pet. (which one?) Town you grew up in? (which one?)
Ummmm... by chance you wouldn't ever have had a job taking orders at McDonald's, would you?
These things are generally used for very low-security applications. My bank doesn't use them, stock trading sites don't use them, etc.
I have retirement accounts at two different major financial companies and both use these kinds of questions. I know this because I forgot my passwords recently, because their "more secure" password rules wouldn't allow me to use my normal password-generation formula.
Under Soviet communism, all property nominally belonged to the state, and in practice it was a hierarchy from the top thugs in moscow to the local zampolit who decided who got to use what property, regardless of who'd produced it.
Damn. You could almost say that in Soviet Russia, property owned you. (But obviously that would be a gross exaggeration.)