From an evolutionary standpoint, monogamy favors low quality men and high quality women at the expense of high quality men and low quality women.
Given the quality threshold required to have multiple wives, monogamy thus benefits most men and few women.
High quality men suffer because they are unable to have additional wives, even though they could support them.
Low quality women suffer because they cannot become the second or third or nth wife of a high quality man, even if that would improve their situation.
Low quality men benefit because they are much more likely to marry than in a polygamous situation, in which their potential wives would instead be the nth wives of high quality men.
High quality women benefit because they can be the only wives of high quality men, whereas in a polygamous situation they would have to share their husbands with additional wives.
Autolock is a feature that automatically turns off your display after a period of time. This is a sensible feature. My issue is with turning the display back on, which always requires a finger swipe, whether the display was turned off by Autolock or manually. I want to remove the finger swipe requirement.
And one more thing: smarter auto-correction. I've now typed my name hundreds of times, and it still, even to this day, automatically "corrects" it to another word.
That's right: every time I type my name, I have to manually cancel the auto-correction. This is, to put it mildly, really irritating.
* A way to search mail! It's absurd that you can't do this already.
* A way to disable the slide lock. I can't think of a good reason why I have to slide to unlock every time, especially since I have a case protector that recesses the main button and makes it even more difficult to accidentally press. At least give me the option to turn off the lock.
* Better contacts dialing/searching support. If you don't know what you're missing, try any WM device. The iPhone takes twice as many actions to call someone.
* A scroll bar for long documents or emails. Sure, it's easy to automatically get to the top of the document, but often I need to scroll to the bottom, or to the middle. This requires lots of tedious finger-swiping.
Similarly, it would be nice for the hardware volume buttons to double as page up/page down buttons when you are reading a document. (Other devices allow this remapping, and the buttons revert to their original actions in the home screen or during a call.) It's irritating to have to swipe to scroll since it covers up what I'm trying to read, and it's much easier to keep my thumb on the volume buttons and scroll that way. Again, it's hard to know what you're missing unless you've tried something better.
Re:You're assuming they pay their taxes ...
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 0
Except that as H1Bs they are likely working for companies large enough to sponsor them, who will almost certainly be extracting their taxes from their paychecks automatically.
1. Exactly when did "India" make this claim? And if the programmers are so bad, why are you worried about them? Is it the number zero that scares you?
2. It's in Microsoft's best interest, as a corporation, to hire good programmers. Why would they not care if the people they employ are "any good at programming at all"? What do they expect the new employees to do, print money directly?
3. This we agree upon. Good luck to your people.
4. Oh, I get it. The suits don't have any common sense because if they piss you off, you're going to write viruses to destroy them. I say you cut out the middleman, and write viruses to destroy the Indians directly.
The reason you cannot apply the halting problem to DFAs is that they are not powerful enough.
The proof of the halting problem is based on diagonalization: constructing a machine that would have to do the opposite of itself and therefore cannot exist.
In the case of the halting problem, this machine has to be able to simulate Turing Machines and do the opposite of what they do.
DFAs are just not powerful enough to simulate other DFAs, and so the proof fails.
hope this helps:)... you might want to check out theory books by Sipser or Lewis and Papadimitriou; both have fairly lucid explanations of the halting problem.
The number of inputs to any machine is (countably) infinite. Even a DFA. Regardless, it is much easier to reason about DFAs than about TMs.
This is because the partition problem that you mention, while intractable for TMs, is easy for DFAs: the set of all possible configurations forms a graph, which edges leading from one configuration to all the other valid configurations reachable from it on one character of input. Therefore computing the set of valid reachable states reduces to graph reachability, an O(N) algorithm. Using this algorithm, you can fully determine the set of reachable states, even considering that there are infinite inputs, just because there are finitely many states and so (by the pigeonhole principle) many input strings are going to have to be handled in the same way.
[In fact, another way to represent a DFA's states is as equivalence classes of input strings.]
Now the reason that this algorithm is infeasible for modern computers has nothing to do with the halting problem; it's because even though the algorithm is linear, N in this case is monumentally huge.
All modern computers are really deterministic finite automata. They have a fixed number of registers of fixed width (the fixed width is the killer), and a finite amount of storage space.
A simple turing machine with an infinite supply of tape is more powerful.
As it is, because of these finite limitations, any computer has a finite number of configurations, and therefore can be simulated by a finite automaton, with one state for each configuration.
(In fact, since all physical models are finite, it would be difficult to do better than this.)
Luckily, since the number of configurations is so large, we are able to do some very powerful things anyway, such as do TM-like things on any reasonably-sized input.
Mozilla was written "natively" for nothing, really. Most of the core OS stuff that varies from platform to platform is abstracted in the Netscape Portable Runtime (nspr), which is distributed with Mozilla. This way the rest of the code base can remain the same, especially since Mozilla uses its own UI widgets.
"Let's say, for example, that I've got a 1 AU (about 8 light-minitue) long indistructable rod and I'm out in space. I push the rod. Common sense says that the far tip of the rod moves at the same time I move the near tip. "
In this case, common sense is wrong. Your push will propogate through the rod at the speed of sound in the medium of which the rod is made. So chances are it'll take a lot longer than 8 minutes for the other end of the rod to move.
If you like tabs and pop-up blocking, check out Crazy Browser. It uses an embedded IE for rendering and also provides tabs and ad blocking and a bunch of other useful stuff.
I'm surprised I'm wasting so much time responding to this, but it's so hideously wrong that I feel I must.
Because no one knows what controls evolution, and saying the mysterious forces of nature control it, is as silly as saying the universe was created by a random big bang.
Nothing needs to control evolution, and nothing does. In this sense it simply represents a statistical fact: genes that increase reproductive success (relative to other, "competing" genes) will be present in larger numbers in future generations simply because the bodies they inhabit are reproducing more often and/or more successfully. There's no magic here; it's simply math. No forces of nature "control" anything.
Nothing is random, if logic and science teaches you anything, thats what you learn first.
I'll avoid mentioning quantum mechanics here. The term "random mutation" -- the miscopying of a gene -- really means "unpredictable mutation". On a case-by-case basis a "random mutation" is deterministic, if you consider all the environmental factors surrounding it. That is, if you look carefully as the base pairs are being copied, you can identify the specific physical causes of a miscopy.
A reasonable analogy is a scribe copying a long book. He's bound to make some mistakes while copying but we don't know where beforehand ("random mutation"). However, if we look at a given mistake, we can pinpoint why it was made (someone interrupted him, his mind wandered, etc.).
Second nothing is absolute, meaning nothing is for sure. At last, a sensible comment. Of course this is correct. No scientific theories are "for sure": all scientific theories are falsifiable. That's how science works. But on average they predict phenomena correctly enough that we're willing to use them. When someone tosses you a ball, there is a probability (however small) that it'll shift two feet upwards and whack you in the face when you try to catch it. But you trust the Newtonian laws of physics (consciously or unconsciously, as the case may be) to the extent that you keep your hands where the laws say the ball will end up, instead of covering your face.
The same applies to evolution. There exists the possibility that it is incomplete (as Newtonian mechanics is) or wrong, but as far as we know it is right enough that it's accepted. So saying "nothing is absolute" is either agreeing with this or throwing all scientific laws out the window. Your pick.
Third if its proven our actions control revolution, its saying we with our brains control our own evolution, so does this mean monks will be the most evolved because they spend their lives trying to master mind over matter?
Ummm.
Re:Are there any meteorologist nerds here?
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 1
Well, considering the humans wiped themselves out in those intervening 2000 years, my guess is that some (human-made) catastrophe took place -- say, nuclear war.
Which would have sent up huge clouds of radioactive dust, etc. and blotted out the sun, sending the planet into an ice age really quickly.
Probably similar to the meteor theory for dinosaur extinction.
Slashdot Mirror
From an evolutionary standpoint, monogamy favors low quality men and high quality women at the expense of high quality men and low quality women.
Given the quality threshold required to have multiple wives, monogamy thus benefits most men and few women.
High quality men suffer because they are unable to have additional wives, even though they could support them.
Low quality women suffer because they cannot become the second or third or nth wife of a high quality man, even if that would improve their situation.
Low quality men benefit because they are much more likely to marry than in a polygamous situation, in which their potential wives would instead be the nth wives of high quality men.
High quality women benefit because they can be the only wives of high quality men, whereas in a polygamous situation they would have to share their husbands with additional wives.
Autolock is a feature that automatically turns off your display after a period of time. This is a sensible feature. My issue is with turning the display back on, which always requires a finger swipe, whether the display was turned off by Autolock or manually. I want to remove the finger swipe requirement.
And one more thing: smarter auto-correction. I've now typed my name hundreds of times, and it still, even to this day, automatically "corrects" it to another word.
That's right: every time I type my name, I have to manually cancel the auto-correction. This is, to put it mildly, really irritating.
* A way to search mail! It's absurd that you can't do this already.
* A way to disable the slide lock. I can't think of a good reason why I have to slide to unlock every time, especially since I have a case protector that recesses the main button and makes it even more difficult to accidentally press. At least give me the option to turn off the lock.
* Better contacts dialing/searching support. If you don't know what you're missing, try any WM device. The iPhone takes twice as many actions to call someone.
* A scroll bar for long documents or emails. Sure, it's easy to automatically get to the top of the document, but often I need to scroll to the bottom, or to the middle. This requires lots of tedious finger-swiping.
Similarly, it would be nice for the hardware volume buttons to double as page up/page down buttons when you are reading a document. (Other devices allow this remapping, and the buttons revert to their original actions in the home screen or during a call.) It's irritating to have to swipe to scroll since it covers up what I'm trying to read, and it's much easier to keep my thumb on the volume buttons and scroll that way. Again, it's hard to know what you're missing unless you've tried something better.
Except that as H1Bs they are likely working for companies large enough to sponsor them, who will almost certainly be extracting their taxes from their paychecks automatically.
1. Exactly when did "India" make this claim? And if the programmers are so bad, why are you worried about them? Is it the number zero that scares you?
2. It's in Microsoft's best interest, as a corporation, to hire good programmers. Why would they not care if the people they employ are "any good at programming at all"? What do they expect the new employees to do, print money directly?
3. This we agree upon. Good luck to your people.
4. Oh, I get it. The suits don't have any common sense because if they piss you off, you're going to write viruses to destroy them. I say you cut out the middleman, and write viruses to destroy the Indians directly.
The only size required by the C spec is char: 1 byte. int can be anything you want, as long as it's >= short and = long.
The reason you cannot apply the halting problem to DFAs is that they are not powerful enough.
:)... you might want to check out theory books by Sipser or Lewis and Papadimitriou; both have fairly lucid explanations of the halting problem.
The proof of the halting problem is based on diagonalization: constructing a machine that would have to do the opposite of itself and therefore cannot exist.
In the case of the halting problem, this machine has to be able to simulate Turing Machines and do the opposite of what they do.
DFAs are just not powerful enough to simulate other DFAs, and so the proof fails.
hope this helps
The number of inputs to any machine is (countably) infinite. Even a DFA. Regardless, it is much easier to reason about DFAs than about TMs.
This is because the partition problem that you mention, while intractable for TMs, is easy for DFAs: the set of all possible configurations forms a graph, which edges leading from one configuration to all the other valid configurations reachable from it on one character of input. Therefore computing the set of valid reachable states reduces to graph reachability, an O(N) algorithm. Using this algorithm, you can fully determine the set of reachable states, even considering that there are infinite inputs, just because there are finitely many states and so (by the pigeonhole principle) many input strings are going to have to be handled in the same way.
[In fact, another way to represent a DFA's states is as equivalence classes of input strings.]
Now the reason that this algorithm is infeasible for modern computers has nothing to do with the halting problem; it's because even though the algorithm is linear, N in this case is monumentally huge.
It sounds like it, but it isn't.
All modern computers are really deterministic finite automata. They have a fixed number of registers of fixed width (the fixed width is the killer), and a finite amount of storage space.
A simple turing machine with an infinite supply of tape is more powerful.
As it is, because of these finite limitations, any computer has a finite number of configurations, and therefore can be simulated by a finite automaton, with one state for each configuration.
(In fact, since all physical models are finite, it would be difficult to do better than this.)
Luckily, since the number of configurations is so large, we are able to do some very powerful things anyway, such as do TM-like things on any reasonably-sized input.
Mozilla was written "natively" for nothing, really. Most of the core OS stuff that varies from platform to platform is abstracted in the Netscape Portable Runtime (nspr), which is distributed with Mozilla. This way the rest of the code base can remain the same, especially since Mozilla uses its own UI widgets.
"Let's say, for example, that I've got a 1 AU (about 8 light-minitue) long indistructable rod and I'm out in space. I push the rod. Common sense says that the far tip of the rod moves at the same time I move the near tip. "
In this case, common sense is wrong. Your push will propogate through the rod at the speed of sound in the medium of which the rod is made. So chances are it'll take a lot longer than 8 minutes for the other end of the rod to move.
If you like tabs and pop-up blocking, check out Crazy Browser. It uses an embedded IE for rendering and also provides tabs and ad blocking and a bunch of other useful stuff.
No it's not. How about a world in which everyone chooses to do only "good things." Still free will, but no sin.
Hmmm.. how's that?
AFAIK they both scored their 12 goals in 14 games. Check the stats...
Because no one knows what controls evolution, and saying the mysterious forces of nature control it, is as silly as saying the universe was created by a random big bang.
Nothing needs to control evolution, and nothing does. In this sense it simply represents a statistical fact: genes that increase reproductive success (relative to other, "competing" genes) will be present in larger numbers in future generations simply because the bodies they inhabit are reproducing more often and/or more successfully. There's no magic here; it's simply math. No forces of nature "control" anything.
Nothing is random, if logic and science teaches you anything, thats what you learn first.
I'll avoid mentioning quantum mechanics here. The term "random mutation" -- the miscopying of a gene -- really means "unpredictable mutation". On a case-by-case basis a "random mutation" is deterministic, if you consider all the environmental factors surrounding it. That is, if you look carefully as the base pairs are being copied, you can identify the specific physical causes of a miscopy.
A reasonable analogy is a scribe copying a long book. He's bound to make some mistakes while copying but we don't know where beforehand ("random mutation"). However, if we look at a given mistake, we can pinpoint why it was made (someone interrupted him, his mind wandered, etc.).
Second nothing is absolute, meaning nothing is for sure.
At last, a sensible comment. Of course this is correct. No scientific theories are "for sure": all scientific theories are falsifiable. That's how science works. But on average they predict phenomena correctly enough that we're willing to use them. When someone tosses you a ball, there is a probability (however small) that it'll shift two feet upwards and whack you in the face when you try to catch it. But you trust the Newtonian laws of physics (consciously or unconsciously, as the case may be) to the extent that you keep your hands where the laws say the ball will end up, instead of covering your face.
The same applies to evolution. There exists the possibility that it is incomplete (as Newtonian mechanics is) or wrong, but as far as we know it is right enough that it's accepted. So saying "nothing is absolute" is either agreeing with this or throwing all scientific laws out the window. Your pick.
Third if its proven our actions control revolution, its saying we with our brains control our own evolution, so does this mean monks will be the most evolved because they spend their lives trying to master mind over matter?
Ummm.
Well, considering the humans wiped themselves out in those intervening 2000 years, my guess is that some (human-made) catastrophe took place -- say, nuclear war. Which would have sent up huge clouds of radioactive dust, etc. and blotted out the sun, sending the planet into an ice age really quickly. Probably similar to the meteor theory for dinosaur extinction.