Well, I think it's pretty clear that Iraq did not pose the sort of immenent threat to the rest of the world we were led to beleive before the war. And I think it's clear that the Bush administration either knew that or should have. But I don't suppose there is much point in arguing that at length here.
What I really wanted to reply to was:
"More than parties though, I hate the amount of people that believe a vote for a non Democratic/Republican is a waste. And those that think you have to be one of them to have your ideas pushed. My best friend is this way and it annoys the hell out of me."
I've got to agree with your friend. In most races, someone who isn't one of the two major party nominees just isn't going to win. Heck, in presidential elections my vote is a waste no matter what: The fact that my state will go Republican is a foregone conclusion, and thanks to the Electoral College, what percentage it goes Republican by is irrelevant.
"Why vote if you don't believe in who/what your voting in" Well, most of the time I'm not necessarily all that excited about who I'm voting for, but I'm pretty excited (in a bad way) about the guy I'm voting against. In a bunch of the local races, my vote does matter, so as long as I'm in the booth, I check a box in the Presidential race for the hell of it.
"And how they always turn liberal itno Demo and conservative into rep. As if those two were all encompassing together. They're both very much middle of the road." Definitely. Having only two viable parties means they're both pretty centrist. But they're also pretty polarized. Like the Republicans stand on one big issue and the Democrats on another? Well, there's probably plenty of potential candidates who agree with you on both, but sorry, they're political road-kill.
All of which is why I disagree with: "But then again, i'd take our government with all it's flaws, over any other government in the world so i guess I can't complain to much."
I wouldn't, so I guess I can complain. I know it's blasphemous, but I think our founding fathers screwed up. Gonvernmental systems created after ours in several countries do a much better job of dividing power. In our system, if the same party holds the presidency and a one seat majority in both houses of congress, they can do pretty much whatever they want. They have all the power, even though the voters may be split almost exactly down the middle. In most Parlimentary systems, that would be compromise time. But the thing that really bugs me is that representation is tied to geographic areas in winner take all fashion. So if you're in the minority in your State/Congressional district, you get no representation at all. Add in that the districts are drawn by the party in power and you've got the makings of a real mess. My magic solution? Abolish the electoral college and elect the president by popular vote. Abolish the Senate. Anyone can vote for anyone they want to for Congress, those with votes from say a million people gets a seat (making for a few hundred seats, adjust the numbers as needed). You can reassign your vote at any time (or at least at fairly frequent intervals), so if the guy your voting for isn't getting enough votes you can switch to someone who's closer, or if your representative isn't representing you the way you'd like you can ditch him. This way, every member of congress knows exactly who they represent, and everyone can feel they are represented. Of course, it will never happen. Nor will any other reforms that make it easier for non-major-party voices to be heard. Because the major parties are the ones who make the rules, and they make the rules so as to keep it that way. Bleh./End Rant
I honestly am not confusing anything on purpose. I am genuinely interested in how you can justify this statement:
"Any music that can't be performed by real people in the absence of some technological crutch shouldn't be taken seriously."
If I listen to a CD, and it sounds great, and I'm jumping around the living room like a fool dancing to it, why should I care what means were used to produce it? Why should I care how it would sound live? Why should I judge it based on any criteria but the fact that I enjoy listening to it?
"Yeah, except the environmentalist don't protest much other than here in the US."
In much of Europe the Green party is an actual political force with real influence. I'll grant you enviromentalism is less prevalent in countries where people are more worried about whether they'll get to eat tommorow. Worrying about things that will be big problems in a generation or two is something of a luxury.
Perhaps I'm falling into a different version of the same trap, but I think the interesting things to do now are in low earth orbit. I like dreams of moon bases and beyond as much as the next geek. But now, and for quite some time to come, Earth is where we are, and close to earth is where space efforts are likely to impact our lives in any significant way. I think there are plenty of interesting and useful things that might come from dirt-cheap ground-to-LEO transport.
"If indeed it can be shown the problem may not be solved in less than N!, then the problem becomes hardware to solve"
I have to disagree. If it can be shown the problem may not be solved in less than N!, hardware won't save you. Let's say at your current level of computer speed, in the time you have available to work on a given instance of the problem, you can solve it for 100 cities. But now you want to solve it for 110 cities in the same time. You must increase the speed of your computer by a factor of roughly:
No amount of quantum or DNA computing is going to do that. And even if it did, we could do the calculation for going from 1000 to 1010, but I suspect slashdot would not alow a post big enough to contain the zeroes.
An algorithm whose time calculation has a factorial term in there is dead in the water as a practical solution. We have to fall back to various polynomial-time algorithms that provide very nice, but not necessarily perfect, solutions, and for these you'll generally get a solution that is closer to optimal in rough proportion to the processor cycles you throw at it, so hardware helps. But if you need the real-deal-optimal solution in reasonable time, you're doomed if N! is the best there is.
I was atempting to define the problem without going into P vs. NP etc. In any case, I'd consider the incomplete graph problem a variant of the basic problem.
The various heuristic, genetic, ant colony, etc. aproaches are also not directed at solving the core problem. Because no one has come up with an algorithm to provide a provably optimal solution in reasonable time, and because the TSP and it's kin are actual important real world problems, there is much interest in answering the question "OK, forget about provably optimal, is there an algorithm that gives me a pretty good solution in reasonable time?" The aproaches you mention are all about coming up with good (but not necessarily perfect) answers quickly, but not necessarily the very best answer.
Still when someone claims to have "Solved the Traveling Salesman Problem" one expects they are talking about the hard core find-a-provably-optimal-solution-in-polynomial-tim e problem. One also suspects they are mistaken.
I haven't looked at the state of the art for finding provably optimal solutions lately, but as far as I am aware, all of them have a factorial term in there somewhere. When N gets large, N!/2 (for example) isn't much help.
Unfortunately, that's not the traveling salesman problem. Finding a path that leads to all cities without hitting any twice is easy. Finding such a path that is provably the shortest possible path is trickier, and a fine thing to do. But the famously unsolved "Traveling Salesman Problem" is to find an algorithm that finds the provably shortest path between N cities in a number of steps that is not proportional to N factorial (or worse). There is no proof that an algorithm better than N! does not exist, but no one has come up with one. There are a wide variety of problems which can be shown to be equivalent to the traveling salesman problem, and N! is a killer for attacking these programatically, so it would be really awesome if a solution could be found. But it's an algoithm problem, not a hardware proble.
Sure they can promote and produce their own music. But are they any good at it? Are they even interested in doing it?
What makes someone a good musician does not have much to do with what makes someone a good producer or marketer. And what makes making music enjoyable certainly doesn't make marketing enjoyable.
I have a friend who is a great programmer. He and some other great programmers got together, started a company, and produced some great software. Since they didn't like marketing/sales types, they didn't hire any. So they soon found themselves spending most of their time doing marketing/sales, which they didn't enjoy and weren't any good at.
Much as we geeks look down on them and consider them unnecessary, Marketing and Sales are real jobs that need to be done well. Most jobs are done well only by people who enjoy them. There are people who actually enjoy Sales/Marketing, and I'm sure my enjoyment of coding seems just as bizarre to them as their enjoyment of Sales/Marketing seems to me.
Very close to all of the music I hear is recorded. If a band is great live, but their CD is lame (true of several I've seen), then for my purposes the band is lame. If they produce a great CD, but they are lame live, then for my purposes they are great. Even if they are great live, the chances slim I will ever see them.
What I, and I suspect many others, will benefit from most is having bands around that produce great recorded music. Why should we place value only on one very restricted medium (live acoustic music) that we'll in all probability never experience?
That's like saying if an author can't make up an interesting well thought out story on the spot, without any research, editing or rewriting, he doesn't deserve compensation for producing the greatest novel I've ever read. That's stupid.
Recorded music and live performance are diferent mediums. Why should an artists quality in one be judged solely by their quality in the other?
Then you have never seen a correct statement of the problem, and the people you have heard it from are indeed idiots trying to look smart. A true Math geek would understand the importance of accurately stating the problem:
There are three doors. Behind one is a million dollars. Behind the other two there are goats. You pick one door. Monty opens one of the other doors to reveal a goat, and offers you the option of switching your choice to the remaining door. Assuming the location of the million dollars is random, and this pattern is always followed, should you switch?
That is the problem to which the correct answer is "Yes, you should switch." If the fundamentals of the problem are stated differently, the answer may be different.
Note that even if they state the problem correctly, they're not actually cleverer than anyone else, since they probably heard the answer along with the problem. If the person telling you about this is a true Math geek though, they probably aren't trying to look clever. They just think this problem is really cool and worth talking about specifically because their intuition fails it just like everyone elses.
Maybe he wasn't trolling; and I was certainly nit-picking about his grammar, but only to make a point. It was the "ordinary non-educated workers" that really set me off. Why didn't he just go ahead and say "proles"?
"A side note, if you were president and you felt very strongly that going to war was teh right thing to do and most of the people who knew what you know agree with you, would you not do it just because the people, whom don't have all the intelligence you do, decide it's not worth it."
I expect in that situation, I would try to convince the people. I can accept that the President might have intelligence that he cannot share with everyone. In that case I expect him to say "I have seen evidence that X is the case. I have looked into it thouroughly. Even though I can't show you the evidence, I will stake my reputation and sacred honor on the fact that X is the case, becasue I have confirmed it with all the surety one must before asking people to lay down their lives because of it." If the President says something like that, I will accept it. And I will hold him to it. Our president said things like that. And X is not the case. So I will hold him to it, and conclude that he is either a liar, or no where near sufficiently dilligent where the lives of our service people are concerned.
"And yes there is a point where people should be led. You wouldn't want people deciding what software to use on your server, would you?"
That's a bit out of left field. I'll decide what to put on my server thank you. And we should decide whether to commit our country to war. We will do it though our elected representatives, certainly, but that doesn't mean I won't expect those representatives to provide us with as much accurate information as possible. And when I'm told it's not possible, but here's a summarry, I'm going to be five times the stickler on the accuracy part. I was told Iraq had WMD ready to use on twenty minutes notice. We knew where they were. Massive stockpiles. There was not the hint of doubt. Well, it's not true. So the administration lied to me intentionally, or they didn't even know themselves. I don't really care much which it was.
"'Proud Patriot and Republican voter' You suspect it means blind follower and blind follower?" In his case, based on the rest of his post, yes. You seem more thoughtful.
"In fact i am very critical of all opinions stances when it comes to national ideas. As everyone should be, but most people seem to just vote republic or democrat because taht's what they consider themselves for some reason. personally I wouldn't mind gettign rid of parties all together." Amen to that. At the least, I don't see why we should encourage thoughtless party-line voting by putting the party names on the ballots. If you want to vote a straight party lines, you could at least be asked to learn the names of your party's nominees.
What happens if every closed source package decides to cripple their product? I don't upgrade. That's what happens.
You say in the open source world someone will decide they don't want the product crippled? I believe the previous posters point was that the same is true of the proprietary world. If Mathcad goes for something stupid that makes it unacceptable to him and lots of others, one of their competitors will no doubt be happy to pick up the business.
If a peice of software does not fit my needs, I'll use something else.
So you think property rights in modern society should be limited to what they would be if we didn't have modern society?
I see it this way: My uncle builds better boats than most. I write better code than most. Why should the law protect his ownership of the boats and not mine of the code? Your argument seems to be that even without the state, he could shoot the people who try to take the boats. Then again, I could shoot people who steal my code; sure, it might be harder to catch the code theives than the boat theives, but in at least some cases I could do it. Really though, both my uncle and I are fairly pacifist types, and we don't really want to shoot anyone over boats or code. So I think it would be very nice if we lived in a society where almost everyone respected peoples ownership of the things they create, and even established a legal system that protected that ownership. Oh wait, we do live in such a society! So why should we abandon it again?
An example would make that statement more convincing. And if it really is free as in speach, I can slap it up on an ftp site and bingo, free as in beer.
I know you're probably just trolling, but what the hell:
"someone wanted to call it "Operation Iraqi liberation" but for some reason they abadonded that"
It was a little too meaningful. It spells OIL.
"I think this was a good thing as the word "liberation" is a reference to a french word." Along with alot of our language; notably "Operation".
"In a perfect world this would not be neccesary, but as long as the public is so relluctant to wars in general this is a good way to convince them to fight for the country in wars that are neccesary but hard to understand ordinary non-educated workers."
Lying to them works well too. In fact, both techniques work equally well regardless of whether the war is necessary. Anyway, it's sure a good thing we have these smart people deciding whether a war is necessary, then selling it to the people by any means possible. I mean, if they just presented the actual facts and let people make up their own minds, the people might think they lived in a democracy or something.
And while we're at it, I suspect even most of the "ordinary non-educated workers" you think ought to be led about like sheep could demonstrate a better grasp of basic gramar that you did in that last sentence.
"Proud Patriot and Republican voter"
Why do I suspect this means "Blind Follower and Blind Follower"? I'm a proud patriot, which I think compels me to look more deeply at candidates than their party affiliation. I even voted for a Republican once.
Well, I'm not watching TV, but NPR has a parade of "experts" talking about how power grids work and what sorts of things might have happened. Being NPR, their experts are mostly saying "We don't really know exactly what happened, and probably won't for days." I expect if you tune in FoxNews right now you'll get a bunch of experts telling you all the implications of the latest wild rumor.
Mere hours into a big complex event, everyone is saying "We don't know all the details. Doesn't appear to be terrorism", and you're attacking their credibility.
Of course they can, and presumably have. That person will get their info from the engineers. The engineers will say "Looks like an overload. Gotta go." The PR person will pass this along, probably stating it more calmly and verbosely. But the basic information content will be the same. I'm sure all the news broadcasts will have science correspondents, retired power grid administrators and so forth on air as fast as they can get them to a studio. But any number of experts speculating doesn't add to the available information, which at this point is not much.
Who says the FBI is investigating to see if it was caused by MSBlaster? Besides you I mean? According to your posts in another thread, it's actually terrorism, but being covered up.
The only thing I've heard from anyone in any position to know anything is that it appears to have been a simple overload resulting in a cascading failure.
We probably won't know excatly what happened for a few days. In the mean time, why are you making stuff up?
Not really relevant. The ten dollar bills they are selling are for some reason (counterfiet, illegally gotten) actually worth less than ten dollars, and in any case, they bought them for less than they are selling them for, so they are in fact making money. In that after doing business for a while, they have more (untainted)money than when they started. This is not true of RedHat, so I say they are not "making money".
I don't see why you can't see it, or why you assume you can't. This did, of course, just happen, about an hour ago. Everyone connected with running the power grid is probably just a little bit busy right now, so you might give them say, any time at all to fully diagnose the failure and get the details out in some organized fashion. You're free to ask if it's a terrorist attack, but if you want the right answer, with all the reasoning filled in, wait a few days. Ask while it's still going on and the best you can expect is "Doesn't look like it. Gotta go." It doesn't mean, or even suggest, that they are hiding anything.
All indications are no. But really, that should not be the first question about anything. If you don't know the answer immediately, you probably won't for several days at least. A better first question might be "What needs to be done to fix it, and how long is that likely to take?" Power out in NYC (for example) for a few hours is a PITA; for a couple days is a serious problem.
If I started a business selling ten dollar bills for 9 dollars, I'm sure I'd have lots of revenue. I don't think anyone would say I was making money though.
If you're looking for suggestions, maybe you should just keep the link in your.sig, and post other interesting things. Thus you get the word out and add to discussions instead of just repeating the same thing in every one.
"For what it's worth, this algorithm wouldn't be too complicated to do. I lack the programming ability, but I could do the algorithm in pseudocode (at point most decent programmers could reduce it to C++). It should be quite possible"
No offense but: In general, statements like that are used by people who haven't actually thought through the algorithm in detail, or who don't have good knowledge of algorithmic theory.
In specific, your suggestion sounds excellent. Sufficiently excellent that I would be very surprised if Google, with their famously large R&D division, didn't have some very smart people thinking about it or something similar. In any case I'm sure they've got people thinking about some way to deal with what I'll name "The Apple Problem". It's really the main problem with their engine as far as I can tell. The fact that they haven't come out with something encourages my suspicion that this is one of theose seemingly-easy-but-actually-incredibly-difficult deals. Thinking about it briefly the first couple aproaches I come up with wind up being factorial time. Plus there is a lot of fuziness as far as how to promote Fiona Apple links but not just lousy Apple Computer ones, not to mention search terms where the "families" of hits are less distinct than for Apple.
I think I understand what you mean; the maiming threat stands:)
It sounds like you do better than most on unnecessary paper use. But it bugs me that in this day and age, most offices use more paper than they would have before computers. In the typewriter age, regenerating a document was a pain, and the paper version was the "real" one. Now, the electronic version is the "real" one, but people still print it out to read it or hand it to someone. Then they throw it away where once they would have filed it. Need it again, print it again.
I got a new computer at work about 8 months ago. I have yet to set up a printer connection. I just never print. I do have a legal pad on my desk for notes that don't need to live for more than a day or so. I go through one every few months. If there was something like whiteboard marker that wrote as finely as a ballpoint, and didn't get erased accidentally, I wouldn't need paper at all.
I don't see how a paper index is going to be better than the same one plus hyperlinks how anything can be considered "accessible" that isn't searchable, or how you can possibly think of paper as more "editable".
"However, you will probably find NPR stations run by public colleges, that obtain some portion of their revenue from the college's budget - which in turn may come partially from taxes"
That's pretty tenuous (and not the case for any of the 5 NPR member stations that I know the organization of). Those same colleges undoubtably run all sorts of programs that pay dues to various non-profit orgs. That doesn't make the non-profits government programs. Heck, the big public university in my town gives free rent to several big technology corporations, mostly just for locating their R&D departments on the campus. It's undoubtably worth it in part-time jobs for grad students, access to lab equipment, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think it's pretty clear that Iraq did not pose the sort of immenent threat to the rest of the world we were led to beleive before the war. And I think it's clear that the Bush administration either knew that or should have. But I don't suppose there is much point in arguing that at length here.
What I really wanted to reply to was:
"More than parties though, I hate the amount of people that believe a vote for a non Democratic/Republican is a waste. And those that think you have to be one of them to have your ideas pushed. My best friend is this way and it annoys the hell out of me."
I've got to agree with your friend. In most races, someone who isn't one of the two major party nominees just isn't going to win. Heck, in presidential elections my vote is a waste no matter what: The fact that my state will go Republican is a foregone conclusion, and thanks to the Electoral College, what percentage it goes Republican by is irrelevant.
"Why vote if you don't believe in who/what your voting in"
Well, most of the time I'm not necessarily all that excited about who I'm voting for, but I'm pretty excited (in a bad way) about the guy I'm voting against. In a bunch of the local races, my vote does matter, so as long as I'm in the booth, I check a box in the Presidential race for the hell of it.
"And how they always turn liberal itno Demo and conservative into rep. As if those two were all encompassing together. They're both very much middle of the road."
Definitely. Having only two viable parties means they're both pretty centrist. But they're also pretty polarized. Like the Republicans stand on one big issue and the Democrats on another? Well, there's probably plenty of potential candidates who agree with you on both, but sorry, they're political road-kill.
All of which is why I disagree with:
"But then again, i'd take our government with all it's flaws, over any other government in the world so i guess I can't complain to much."
I wouldn't, so I guess I can complain. I know it's blasphemous, but I think our founding fathers screwed up. Gonvernmental systems created after ours in several countries do a much better job of dividing power. In our system, if the same party holds the presidency and a one seat majority in both houses of congress, they can do pretty much whatever they want. They have all the power, even though the voters may be split almost exactly down the middle. In most Parlimentary systems, that would be compromise time. But the thing that really bugs me is that representation is tied to geographic areas in winner take all fashion. So if you're in the minority in your State/Congressional district, you get no representation at all. Add in that the districts are drawn by the party in power and you've got the makings of a real mess. My magic solution? Abolish the electoral college and elect the president by popular vote. Abolish the Senate. Anyone can vote for anyone they want to for Congress, those with votes from say a million people gets a seat (making for a few hundred seats, adjust the numbers as needed). You can reassign your vote at any time (or at least at fairly frequent intervals), so if the guy your voting for isn't getting enough votes you can switch to someone who's closer, or if your representative isn't representing you the way you'd like you can ditch him. This way, every member of congress knows exactly who they represent, and everyone can feel they are represented. Of course, it will never happen. Nor will any other reforms that make it easier for non-major-party voices to be heard. Because the major parties are the ones who make the rules, and they make the rules so as to keep it that way. Bleh.
I honestly am not confusing anything on purpose. I am genuinely interested in how you can justify this statement:
"Any music that can't be performed by real people in the absence of some technological crutch shouldn't be taken seriously."
If I listen to a CD, and it sounds great, and I'm jumping around the living room like a fool dancing to it, why should I care what means were used to produce it? Why should I care how it would sound live? Why should I judge it based on any criteria but the fact that I enjoy listening to it?
"Yeah, except the environmentalist don't protest much other than here in the US."
In much of Europe the Green party is an actual political force with real influence. I'll grant you enviromentalism is less prevalent in countries where people are more worried about whether they'll get to eat tommorow. Worrying about things that will be big problems in a generation or two is something of a luxury.
Perhaps I'm falling into a different version of the same trap, but I think the interesting things to do now are in low earth orbit. I like dreams of moon bases and beyond as much as the next geek. But now, and for quite some time to come, Earth is where we are, and close to earth is where space efforts are likely to impact our lives in any significant way. I think there are plenty of interesting and useful things that might come from dirt-cheap ground-to-LEO transport.
"If indeed it can be shown the problem may not be solved in less than N!, then the problem becomes hardware to solve"
0 ,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,0000 00,000,000,0000 0,000
I have to disagree. If it can be shown the problem may not be solved in less than N!, hardware won't save you. Let's say at your current level of computer speed, in the time you have available to work on a given instance of the problem, you can solve it for 100 cities. But now you want to solve it for 110 cities in the same time. You must increase the speed of your computer by a factor of roughly:
15,882,455,415,227,429,404,160,376,911,
647,00
000,000,000,000
000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,0
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
(1.5etc times 10^178 if I counted corectly)
No amount of quantum or DNA computing is going to do that. And even if it did, we could do the calculation for going from 1000 to 1010, but I suspect slashdot would not alow a post big enough to contain the zeroes.
An algorithm whose time calculation has a factorial term in there is dead in the water as a practical solution. We have to fall back to various polynomial-time algorithms that provide very nice, but not necessarily perfect, solutions, and for these you'll generally get a solution that is closer to optimal in rough proportion to the processor cycles you throw at it, so hardware helps. But if you need the real-deal-optimal solution in reasonable time, you're doomed if N! is the best there is.
I was atempting to define the problem without going into P vs. NP etc. In any case, I'd consider the incomplete graph problem a variant of the basic problem.
m e problem. One also suspects they are mistaken.
The various heuristic, genetic, ant colony, etc. aproaches are also not directed at solving the core problem. Because no one has come up with an algorithm to provide a provably optimal solution in reasonable time, and because the TSP and it's kin are actual important real world problems, there is much interest in answering the question "OK, forget about provably optimal, is there an algorithm that gives me a pretty good solution in reasonable time?" The aproaches you mention are all about coming up with good (but not necessarily perfect) answers quickly, but not necessarily the very best answer.
Still when someone claims to have "Solved the Traveling Salesman Problem" one expects they are talking about the hard core find-a-provably-optimal-solution-in-polynomial-ti
I haven't looked at the state of the art for finding provably optimal solutions lately, but as far as I am aware, all of them have a factorial term in there somewhere. When N gets large, N!/2 (for example) isn't much help.
Unfortunately, that's not the traveling salesman problem. Finding a path that leads to all cities without hitting any twice is easy. Finding such a path that is provably the shortest possible path is trickier, and a fine thing to do. But the famously unsolved "Traveling Salesman Problem" is to find an algorithm that finds the provably shortest path between N cities in a number of steps that is not proportional to N factorial (or worse). There is no proof that an algorithm better than N! does not exist, but no one has come up with one. There are a wide variety of problems which can be shown to be equivalent to the traveling salesman problem, and N! is a killer for attacking these programatically, so it would be really awesome if a solution could be found. But it's an algoithm problem, not a hardware proble.
Sure they can promote and produce their own music. But are they any good at it? Are they even interested in doing it?
What makes someone a good musician does not have much to do with what makes someone a good producer or marketer. And what makes making music enjoyable certainly doesn't make marketing enjoyable.
I have a friend who is a great programmer. He and some other great programmers got together, started a company, and produced some great software. Since they didn't like marketing/sales types, they didn't hire any. So they soon found themselves spending most of their time doing marketing/sales, which they didn't enjoy and weren't any good at.
Much as we geeks look down on them and consider them unnecessary, Marketing and Sales are real jobs that need to be done well. Most jobs are done well only by people who enjoy them. There are people who actually enjoy Sales/Marketing, and I'm sure my enjoyment of coding seems just as bizarre to them as their enjoyment of Sales/Marketing seems to me.
Why?
Very close to all of the music I hear is recorded. If a band is great live, but their CD is lame (true of several I've seen), then for my purposes the band is lame. If they produce a great CD, but they are lame live, then for my purposes they are great. Even if they are great live, the chances slim I will ever see them.
What I, and I suspect many others, will benefit from most is having bands around that produce great recorded music. Why should we place value only on one very restricted medium (live acoustic music) that we'll in all probability never experience?
That's like saying if an author can't make up an interesting well thought out story on the spot, without any research, editing or rewriting, he doesn't deserve compensation for producing the greatest novel I've ever read. That's stupid.
Recorded music and live performance are diferent mediums. Why should an artists quality in one be judged solely by their quality in the other?
Then you have never seen a correct statement of the problem, and the people you have heard it from are indeed idiots trying to look smart. A true Math geek would understand the importance of accurately stating the problem:
There are three doors. Behind one is a million dollars. Behind the other two there are goats. You pick one door. Monty opens one of the other doors to reveal a goat, and offers you the option of switching your choice to the remaining door. Assuming the location of the million dollars is random, and this pattern is always followed, should you switch?
That is the problem to which the correct answer is "Yes, you should switch." If the fundamentals of the problem are stated differently, the answer may be different.
Note that even if they state the problem correctly, they're not actually cleverer than anyone else, since they probably heard the answer along with the problem. If the person telling you about this is a true Math geek though, they probably aren't trying to look clever. They just think this problem is really cool and worth talking about specifically because their intuition fails it just like everyone elses.
Maybe he wasn't trolling; and I was certainly nit-picking about his grammar, but only to make a point. It was the "ordinary non-educated workers" that really set me off. Why didn't he just go ahead and say "proles"?
"A side note, if you were president and you felt very strongly that going to war was teh right thing to do and most of the people who knew what you know agree with you, would you not do it just because the people, whom don't have all the intelligence you do, decide it's not worth it."
I expect in that situation, I would try to convince the people. I can accept that the President might have intelligence that he cannot share with everyone. In that case I expect him to say "I have seen evidence that X is the case. I have looked into it thouroughly. Even though I can't show you the evidence, I will stake my reputation and sacred honor on the fact that X is the case, becasue I have confirmed it with all the surety one must before asking people to lay down their lives because of it." If the President says something like that, I will accept it. And I will hold him to it. Our president said things like that. And X is not the case. So I will hold him to it, and conclude that he is either a liar, or no where near sufficiently dilligent where the lives of our service people are concerned.
"And yes there is a point where people should be led. You wouldn't want people deciding what software to use on your server, would you?"
That's a bit out of left field. I'll decide what to put on my server thank you. And we should decide whether to commit our country to war. We will do it though our elected representatives, certainly, but that doesn't mean I won't expect those representatives to provide us with as much accurate information as possible. And when I'm told it's not possible, but here's a summarry, I'm going to be five times the stickler on the accuracy part. I was told Iraq had WMD ready to use on twenty minutes notice. We knew where they were. Massive stockpiles. There was not the hint of doubt. Well, it's not true. So the administration lied to me intentionally, or they didn't even know themselves. I don't really care much which it was.
"'Proud Patriot and Republican voter'
You suspect it means blind follower and blind follower?"
In his case, based on the rest of his post, yes. You seem more thoughtful.
"In fact i am very critical of all opinions stances when it comes to national ideas. As everyone should be, but most people seem to just vote republic or democrat because taht's what they consider themselves for some reason. personally I wouldn't mind gettign rid of parties all together."
Amen to that. At the least, I don't see why we should encourage thoughtless party-line voting by putting the party names on the ballots. If you want to vote a straight party lines, you could at least be asked to learn the names of your party's nominees.
What happens if every closed source package decides to cripple their product? I don't upgrade. That's what happens.
You say in the open source world someone will decide they don't want the product crippled? I believe the previous posters point was that the same is true of the proprietary world. If Mathcad goes for something stupid that makes it unacceptable to him and lots of others, one of their competitors will no doubt be happy to pick up the business.
If a peice of software does not fit my needs, I'll use something else.
So you think property rights in modern society should be limited to what they would be if we didn't have modern society?
I see it this way: My uncle builds better boats than most. I write better code than most. Why should the law protect his ownership of the boats and not mine of the code? Your argument seems to be that even without the state, he could shoot the people who try to take the boats. Then again, I could shoot people who steal my code; sure, it might be harder to catch the code theives than the boat theives, but in at least some cases I could do it. Really though, both my uncle and I are fairly pacifist types, and we don't really want to shoot anyone over boats or code. So I think it would be very nice if we lived in a society where almost everyone respected peoples ownership of the things they create, and even established a legal system that protected that ownership. Oh wait, we do live in such a society! So why should we abandon it again?
An example would make that statement more convincing. And if it really is free as in speach, I can slap it up on an ftp site and bingo, free as in beer.
I know you're probably just trolling, but what the hell:
"someone wanted to call it "Operation Iraqi liberation" but for some reason they abadonded that"
It was a little too meaningful. It spells OIL.
"I think this was a good thing as the word "liberation" is a reference to a french word."
Along with alot of our language; notably "Operation".
"In a perfect world this would not be neccesary, but as long as the public is so relluctant to wars in general this is a good way to convince them to fight for the country in wars that are neccesary but hard to understand ordinary non-educated workers."
Lying to them works well too. In fact, both techniques work equally well regardless of whether the war is necessary. Anyway, it's sure a good thing we have these smart people deciding whether a war is necessary, then selling it to the people by any means possible. I mean, if they just presented the actual facts and let people make up their own minds, the people might think they lived in a democracy or something.
And while we're at it, I suspect even most of the "ordinary non-educated workers" you think ought to be led about like sheep could demonstrate a better grasp of basic gramar that you did in that last sentence.
"Proud Patriot and Republican voter"
Why do I suspect this means "Blind Follower and Blind Follower"? I'm a proud patriot, which I think compels me to look more deeply at candidates than their party affiliation. I even voted for a Republican once.
Well, I'm not watching TV, but NPR has a parade of "experts" talking about how power grids work and what sorts of things might have happened. Being NPR, their experts are mostly saying "We don't really know exactly what happened, and probably won't for days." I expect if you tune in FoxNews right now you'll get a bunch of experts telling you all the implications of the latest wild rumor.
Mere hours into a big complex event, everyone is saying "We don't know all the details. Doesn't appear to be terrorism", and you're attacking their credibility.
Of course they can, and presumably have. That person will get their info from the engineers. The engineers will say "Looks like an overload. Gotta go." The PR person will pass this along, probably stating it more calmly and verbosely. But the basic information content will be the same. I'm sure all the news broadcasts will have science correspondents, retired power grid administrators and so forth on air as fast as they can get them to a studio. But any number of experts speculating doesn't add to the available information, which at this point is not much.
Who says the FBI is investigating to see if it was caused by MSBlaster? Besides you I mean? According to your posts in another thread, it's actually terrorism, but being covered up.
The only thing I've heard from anyone in any position to know anything is that it appears to have been a simple overload resulting in a cascading failure.
We probably won't know excatly what happened for a few days. In the mean time, why are you making stuff up?
Not really relevant. The ten dollar bills they are selling are for some reason (counterfiet, illegally gotten) actually worth less than ten dollars, and in any case, they bought them for less than they are selling them for, so they are in fact making money. In that after doing business for a while, they have more (untainted)money than when they started. This is not true of RedHat, so I say they are not "making money".
I don't see why you can't see it, or why you assume you can't. This did, of course, just happen, about an hour ago. Everyone connected with running the power grid is probably just a little bit busy right now, so you might give them say, any time at all to fully diagnose the failure and get the details out in some organized fashion.
You're free to ask if it's a terrorist attack, but if you want the right answer, with all the reasoning filled in, wait a few days. Ask while it's still going on and the best you can expect is "Doesn't look like it. Gotta go." It doesn't mean, or even suggest, that they are hiding anything.
All indications are no. But really, that should not be the first question about anything. If you don't know the answer immediately, you probably won't for several days at least. A better first question might be "What needs to be done to fix it, and how long is that likely to take?"
Power out in NYC (for example) for a few hours is a PITA; for a couple days is a serious problem.
Making money == being cash-flow positive.
If I started a business selling ten dollar bills for 9 dollars, I'm sure I'd have lots of revenue. I don't think anyone would say I was making money though.
In any case, RedHat sells support, not software.
If you're looking for suggestions, maybe you should just keep the link in your .sig, and post other interesting things.
Thus you get the word out and add to discussions instead of just repeating the same thing in every one.
"For what it's worth, this algorithm wouldn't be too complicated to do. I lack the programming ability, but I could do the algorithm in pseudocode (at point most decent programmers could reduce it to C++). It should be quite possible"
No offense but:
In general, statements like that are used by people who haven't actually thought through the algorithm in detail, or who don't have good knowledge of algorithmic theory.
In specific, your suggestion sounds excellent. Sufficiently excellent that I would be very surprised if Google, with their famously large R&D division, didn't have some very smart people thinking about it or something similar. In any case I'm sure they've got people thinking about some way to deal with what I'll name "The Apple Problem". It's really the main problem with their engine as far as I can tell. The fact that they haven't come out with something encourages my suspicion that this is one of theose seemingly-easy-but-actually-incredibly-difficult deals. Thinking about it briefly the first couple aproaches I come up with wind up being factorial time. Plus there is a lot of fuziness as far as how to promote Fiona Apple links but not just lousy Apple Computer ones, not to mention search terms where the "families" of hits are less distinct than for Apple.
I think I understand what you mean; the maiming threat stands
It sounds like you do better than most on unnecessary paper use. But it bugs me that in this day and age, most offices use more paper than they would have before computers. In the typewriter age, regenerating a document was a pain, and the paper version was the "real" one. Now, the electronic version is the "real" one, but people still print it out to read it or hand it to someone. Then they throw it away where once they would have filed it. Need it again, print it again.
I got a new computer at work about 8 months ago. I have yet to set up a printer connection. I just never print. I do have a legal pad on my desk for notes that don't need to live for more than a day or so. I go through one every few months. If there was something like whiteboard marker that wrote as finely as a ballpoint, and didn't get erased accidentally, I wouldn't need paper at all.
I don't see how a paper index is going to be better than the same one plus hyperlinks how anything can be considered "accessible" that isn't searchable, or how you can possibly think of paper as more "editable".
"However, you will probably find NPR stations run by public colleges, that obtain some portion of their revenue from the college's budget - which in turn may come partially from taxes"
That's pretty tenuous (and not the case for any of the 5 NPR member stations that I know the organization of). Those same colleges undoubtably run all sorts of programs that pay dues to various non-profit orgs. That doesn't make the non-profits government programs. Heck, the big public university in my town gives free rent to several big technology corporations, mostly just for locating their R&D departments on the campus. It's undoubtably worth it in part-time jobs for grad students, access to lab equipment, etc.