I've actually thought about the vandalism problem myself. I haven't played on a multiplayer server but I never understood what the purpose of security doors, etc. was if one could just break out a shovel or pickaxe and circumvent them. Do multiplayer servers have rules of etiquette that state that if somebody else has built a security door, you respect it?
Yes, it is "that bad" although I don't really think it's fair to judge it in that manner. It's like playing with legos, scribbling in a sketch pad, singing to oneself, or writing poetry. Just a creative outlet for its own sake. So what if it's "just like a sandbox?" Nobody criticizes children for liking to play in a sandbox. It's fun and if it weren't so messy, I'm sure some adults would continue to do it. So why not create a game that allows for some of that sandbox experience?
I don't think it's Eternal Grove. It's the Luxon mission that we have affectionately nicknamed "Stupid Turtles." (Gyala Hatchery, I think.) We have heroes but they're only good for blobbing, not for coordinated maneuvers.
Even games that are fun online can have their foibles. My first thought when I opened this article was my experience with Guild Wars: Factions. I can't play often enough to belong to a guild so my fiancee and I usually just team up to play. Unfortunately, we're now stuck on a mission that is going to require at least one more human player (and really, probably 3 or 4 more human players) to beat. It's just too complicated and difficult a mission for us to rely on AI companions. In our circumstances, that's going to mean doing the mission with a pick-up-group, so we haven't played that campaign for months, ever since we hit that wall.
Evolution does not require the development of new traits. The most basic definition of evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles within a population from generation to generation. When this occurs because of natural selection, the evolution is non-random and adaptive. Some fish possessed traits that made them resistant to the toxin; some fish did not. The presence of the toxin served as a selective pressure for the fish that were resistant to the toxin. In subsequent generations, the allele for resistance to the toxin was more common in the population than in preceding generations. That is (adaptive) evolution of the population of mollies living in that cave.
This is the comment I was waiting to see. The entire discussion that I've read up until this point is incredibly biased. People arguing both the pros and cons of more or less math education were starting with considerations about the utility of a math education. Why are we settling for education merely as a pragmatic instrument? Yes, I understand that it costs money and that as things stand now, the cost/benefit analysis of education must consider how practical the knowledge will be. Must it be that way? Should it be that way? Some people like to solve logical problems; some people like to create beautiful music; some people like build furniture. Regardless of how much more or less useful any of these is than the others, why aren't we fighting to give people an opportunity to learn whatever skills they want to pursue whatever passions they want?
This is not entirely so. The advantage of getting a longer mortgage with lower payments, even if the net interest rate is higher, is security in lean times. If you're in a good position now, make double payments. If you get laid off or incur unexpected expenses, then you can make single payments until you get back into a better position. Creating a 15- or 30-year plan with the assumption that nothing could possibly go wrong in that time is not a good idea.
Your comment just helped me to realize an advantage of a reader device WITHOUT wi-fi or 3G. I recently purchased a Sony pocket reader in a charity auction and it has the mild inconvenience of needing to connect via USB cable to get books. But now I realize that this means that any DRM scheme implemented by Sony can't delete/deactivate my books once they're on the device. (Of course, for the time being, I'm satisfied just to load up a bunch of Public Domain works from Project Gutenberg.)
Infinity isn't really a number. It is an idea of magnitude beyond the ability of numbers to express. You can't add another 9 on the end of the string because there is no end of the string. It is endless. The 9 you thought you were going to add is already there. You're confusing the ideas of infinite and arbitrarily large. If the number of 9's in the decimal expansion is an arbitrarily large natural number, then you can always increase it by 1. If the number of 9's is infinite, though, then you can't.
The closest analogy I can come up with is that trying to add another 9 when there's already infinity of them is like trying to take something out of a box that has nothing in it. (Note that I DIDN'T say putting one more object in a box that is full because it's easy to imagine a bigger box; or filling the box to overflowing. But if the box has NOTHING in it, then it is simply nonsense to talk about taking the nothing out of the box to make it emptier.)
I assume you're being facetious but in case there are younger geeks in training reading this, I shall point out that step 5 is what breaks this proof. If a=b then dividing by (a-b) is division by 0, an illegal operation.
I think that the point that you're missing is that there is no adding of 9's here. 0.999... is a symbolic representation of a number that is already imagined to have infinite digits. It is not representative of the process of writing a 0. followed by an arbitrary number of 9's. Yes, it's hard to wrap one's mind around the concept of infinity, but the question, "But what if you put another 9 on the end" is logically nonsensical. There are already infinity 9's on the end.
The town in question owned a quarter mile of highway that was part of an important artery into and out of the city. Generally, I'd support their right to enforce the law as strictly as they like but it was actually making the highway more hazardous. None of the neighboring municipalities enforced nearly as strictly so you'd have people all of a sudden trying to slow down; or just the general congestion caused by having people getting pulled over a lot during rush hour. The highway became safer when everybody was free to pass through that city at the same ~7 mph over the speed limit that they drove the entire rest of their commute.
OMG! You're talking about Lyndale. I love you. I always drive the speed limit so Lyndale was never a problem for me personally but I loved to see them get roasted.
I think that a careful separation of media companies and media producers is in order here. Aside from a few media producers who have made it big and therefore want to support "the system," many producers are as victimized by media companies as are those of us who consume media. (Mostly consume, anyway. This/. comment is media that I have produced but I don't do this for a living.) There is a belief among content creators, which may or may not be true, that you require the backing of a respected, powerful media company in order to succeed.
Over at TechDirt, this topic is constantly under discussion - how media producers can incorporate content into a business model. Unfortunately, most of those ideas revolve around the principle that copies of content cost nothing; the value they generate will have to be extracted in other ways (selling merchandise, selling access to the creator, and other related scarcities.) What none of these business models allow content creators to do, however, is to make a living exclusively by creating content. In my opinion, if there is one pitch that media producers can sell to producers, it is that: sign with us and all you have to do is make music/write books/illustrate comics, like you love to do.
One could rightly argue that media companies could still make that offer to producers if the companies embraced a business model in which they, the company, sold the scarcities, removing that "burden" from the producer. At this time, however, that has not yet happened.
You've missed the point of my argument. Finding the answer online or obtaining it from another person in any way is NOT solving the problem. It is just providing an answer. A solution is a process - the method of thinking that allows you to find that answer from the data available to you. If your solution is, "I consulted with people who already knew the answer to this question," then you have not performed the requested exercise. This is why professors usually want their students to "show your work." The answer on the bottom line isn't valueless but the student's thought process in getting there is what is really important.
In my opinion, there are a couple of valid objections to this idea: 1) I think that it cheapens education if it is reduced just to being job training, just as it cheapens citizenship if people are reduced just to being laborers. As citizenship involves more than just contributing to the economy, but also contributing to and participating in a shared culture, education should involve more than just learning skills but in contributing to the formation of new ideas. 2) On a related note, understanding problems and being able to SOLVE them is a very different skill than being able to provide an answer to a question. With a couple of hours of review, I could regurgitate the Schroedinger Wave Equation and apply it to a simple system. I never was quite able to understand the S.W.E., though. I can't develop new ideas about particle statistics by thinking deeply about the S.W.E. That is to say, I can answer questions using it but I can't verbalize or solve new problems. If we want to develop in students the ability to solve problems then we can't let them use the internet to find answers to test questions. The purpose of the exam isn't to determine whether the student can identify answers by any practical means; it is to determine whether the student can solve the problem using their own cognitive abilities.
You caught me. I made an ill-informed simplification. Nonetheless, aging, like cancer, would have a relatively small impact on an organism's likelihood to breed. I spoke out of turn when I said there weren't consequences to DNA damage in somatic cells but I think that my conclusion was still reasonably accurate. (Thank you for pointing out where I was wrong, though. I'm fairly novice at biology but it's a subject I enjoy learning more about.)
Cancer is a disease that affects organisms late in life. Generally speaking, they will have already had an opportunity to reproduce by the time that they develop cancer. The introduction of this mutation could have been completely coincidental and it would not have affected the reproductive fitness of the organisms that had it. You might suggest that damage to DNA has consequences besides cancer but it actually doesn't, really. If a cell's DNA becomes too corrupt but the cell doesn't become cancerous as a result, just that one cell is likely to die. You're constantly making new skin cells anyway.
I always tried playing NetHack the way that I played Rogue when I was a kid. It never worked. Not that I ever beat Rogue, either, but I had a few good runs at it. Unfortunately, I can't quite figure out what the "right" way to play NetHack is because I always end up dying in the first 10 levels of the dungeon. Starvation plagues me and this whole idea of training my pet to steal from item shops confuses me even after reading guides on how to do it.
We actually can, I think - and not with breeder reactors. I work in an industry that sometimes provides equipment to nuclear power plants and I've heard recently that there are new designs that can use the waste materials without them having to be concentrated in a way that raises fears of nuclear proliferation.
I am also a safe driver with a clean license but I tend to prefer the unbiased judgment of a machine to the arbitrary judgment of a human being. I don't like the privacy issues that cameras raise but as far as doling out punishment for breaking the law is concerned, I don't mind having a camera monitoring people's speed. I just disagree with your assessment that common sense ruled when human police officers were doing the ticketing. Ever since municipalities realized that traffic violations are a source of revenue and instituted ticket quotas (whether explicitly or just through internal "suggestions"), I wouldn't trust a human police officer to be neutral or fair about a speeding ticket.
I hadn't really thought of it that way. You make a good point that I didn't consider. When I think of learning about Isaac Newton, I don't necessarily associate it with a hands-on experiment to determine acceleration due to gravity. I think first of a story about a falling apple and then VOILA!! Isaac Newton discovered gravity. If the story were accompanied by a trip outside with a high-speed camera and some falling tennis balls, I'd definitely agree with your point. If it's just a story, though, as it was to me until 10th-grade physics, then it's no better or worse a story than how the rocket physics of World War 2 paved the way to a moon landing in 1969.
Of the various changes mentioned in the summary, that's the one that bothered me least. I don't exactly trust them to give the topic of scientific advances through military research a "fair" treatment either but it is, at least, an interesting subject. That's not to say that Isaac Newton is neither interesting nor important - only that it isn't strictly necessary to teach every student "the classics." There are lots of topics in science, a lot of different narratives that can be used to treat those topics, and not enough time to cover all them. The military's role in science research at least passes the "that's interesting; I'd like to know that" test.
Slashdot Mirror
I've actually thought about the vandalism problem myself. I haven't played on a multiplayer server but I never understood what the purpose of security doors, etc. was if one could just break out a shovel or pickaxe and circumvent them. Do multiplayer servers have rules of etiquette that state that if somebody else has built a security door, you respect it?
Yes, it is "that bad" although I don't really think it's fair to judge it in that manner. It's like playing with legos, scribbling in a sketch pad, singing to oneself, or writing poetry. Just a creative outlet for its own sake. So what if it's "just like a sandbox?" Nobody criticizes children for liking to play in a sandbox. It's fun and if it weren't so messy, I'm sure some adults would continue to do it. So why not create a game that allows for some of that sandbox experience?
I don't think it's Eternal Grove. It's the Luxon mission that we have affectionately nicknamed "Stupid Turtles." (Gyala Hatchery, I think.) We have heroes but they're only good for blobbing, not for coordinated maneuvers.
Even games that are fun online can have their foibles. My first thought when I opened this article was my experience with Guild Wars: Factions. I can't play often enough to belong to a guild so my fiancee and I usually just team up to play. Unfortunately, we're now stuck on a mission that is going to require at least one more human player (and really, probably 3 or 4 more human players) to beat. It's just too complicated and difficult a mission for us to rely on AI companions. In our circumstances, that's going to mean doing the mission with a pick-up-group, so we haven't played that campaign for months, ever since we hit that wall.
Evolution does not require the development of new traits. The most basic definition of evolution is a change in the frequency of alleles within a population from generation to generation. When this occurs because of natural selection, the evolution is non-random and adaptive. Some fish possessed traits that made them resistant to the toxin; some fish did not. The presence of the toxin served as a selective pressure for the fish that were resistant to the toxin. In subsequent generations, the allele for resistance to the toxin was more common in the population than in preceding generations. That is (adaptive) evolution of the population of mollies living in that cave.
This is the comment I was waiting to see. The entire discussion that I've read up until this point is incredibly biased. People arguing both the pros and cons of more or less math education were starting with considerations about the utility of a math education. Why are we settling for education merely as a pragmatic instrument? Yes, I understand that it costs money and that as things stand now, the cost/benefit analysis of education must consider how practical the knowledge will be. Must it be that way? Should it be that way? Some people like to solve logical problems; some people like to create beautiful music; some people like build furniture. Regardless of how much more or less useful any of these is than the others, why aren't we fighting to give people an opportunity to learn whatever skills they want to pursue whatever passions they want?
This is not entirely so. The advantage of getting a longer mortgage with lower payments, even if the net interest rate is higher, is security in lean times. If you're in a good position now, make double payments. If you get laid off or incur unexpected expenses, then you can make single payments until you get back into a better position. Creating a 15- or 30-year plan with the assumption that nothing could possibly go wrong in that time is not a good idea.
One of the newest ones, I think. PRS-350. Its niche is the no-frills, budget-conscious market.
Your comment just helped me to realize an advantage of a reader device WITHOUT wi-fi or 3G. I recently purchased a Sony pocket reader in a charity auction and it has the mild inconvenience of needing to connect via USB cable to get books. But now I realize that this means that any DRM scheme implemented by Sony can't delete/deactivate my books once they're on the device. (Of course, for the time being, I'm satisfied just to load up a bunch of Public Domain works from Project Gutenberg.)
Infinity isn't really a number. It is an idea of magnitude beyond the ability of numbers to express. You can't add another 9 on the end of the string because there is no end of the string. It is endless. The 9 you thought you were going to add is already there.
You're confusing the ideas of infinite and arbitrarily large. If the number of 9's in the decimal expansion is an arbitrarily large natural number, then you can always increase it by 1. If the number of 9's is infinite, though, then you can't.
The closest analogy I can come up with is that trying to add another 9 when there's already infinity of them is like trying to take something out of a box that has nothing in it. (Note that I DIDN'T say putting one more object in a box that is full because it's easy to imagine a bigger box; or filling the box to overflowing. But if the box has NOTHING in it, then it is simply nonsense to talk about taking the nothing out of the box to make it emptier.)
I assume you're being facetious but in case there are younger geeks in training reading this, I shall point out that step 5 is what breaks this proof. If a=b then dividing by (a-b) is division by 0, an illegal operation.
I think that the point that you're missing is that there is no adding of 9's here. 0.999... is a symbolic representation of a number that is already imagined to have infinite digits. It is not representative of the process of writing a 0. followed by an arbitrary number of 9's. Yes, it's hard to wrap one's mind around the concept of infinity, but the question, "But what if you put another 9 on the end" is logically nonsensical. There are already infinity 9's on the end.
The town in question owned a quarter mile of highway that was part of an important artery into and out of the city. Generally, I'd support their right to enforce the law as strictly as they like but it was actually making the highway more hazardous. None of the neighboring municipalities enforced nearly as strictly so you'd have people all of a sudden trying to slow down; or just the general congestion caused by having people getting pulled over a lot during rush hour. The highway became safer when everybody was free to pass through that city at the same ~7 mph over the speed limit that they drove the entire rest of their commute.
OMG! You're talking about Lyndale. I love you. I always drive the speed limit so Lyndale was never a problem for me personally but I loved to see them get roasted.
I think that a careful separation of media companies and media producers is in order here. Aside from a few media producers who have made it big and therefore want to support "the system," many producers are as victimized by media companies as are those of us who consume media. (Mostly consume, anyway. This /. comment is media that I have produced but I don't do this for a living.) There is a belief among content creators, which may or may not be true, that you require the backing of a respected, powerful media company in order to succeed.
Over at TechDirt, this topic is constantly under discussion - how media producers can incorporate content into a business model. Unfortunately, most of those ideas revolve around the principle that copies of content cost nothing; the value they generate will have to be extracted in other ways (selling merchandise, selling access to the creator, and other related scarcities.) What none of these business models allow content creators to do, however, is to make a living exclusively by creating content. In my opinion, if there is one pitch that media producers can sell to producers, it is that: sign with us and all you have to do is make music/write books/illustrate comics, like you love to do.
One could rightly argue that media companies could still make that offer to producers if the companies embraced a business model in which they, the company, sold the scarcities, removing that "burden" from the producer. At this time, however, that has not yet happened.
You've missed the point of my argument. Finding the answer online or obtaining it from another person in any way is NOT solving the problem. It is just providing an answer. A solution is a process - the method of thinking that allows you to find that answer from the data available to you. If your solution is, "I consulted with people who already knew the answer to this question," then you have not performed the requested exercise. This is why professors usually want their students to "show your work." The answer on the bottom line isn't valueless but the student's thought process in getting there is what is really important.
In my opinion, there are a couple of valid objections to this idea:
1) I think that it cheapens education if it is reduced just to being job training, just as it cheapens citizenship if people are reduced just to being laborers. As citizenship involves more than just contributing to the economy, but also contributing to and participating in a shared culture, education should involve more than just learning skills but in contributing to the formation of new ideas.
2) On a related note, understanding problems and being able to SOLVE them is a very different skill than being able to provide an answer to a question. With a couple of hours of review, I could regurgitate the Schroedinger Wave Equation and apply it to a simple system. I never was quite able to understand the S.W.E., though. I can't develop new ideas about particle statistics by thinking deeply about the S.W.E. That is to say, I can answer questions using it but I can't verbalize or solve new problems. If we want to develop in students the ability to solve problems then we can't let them use the internet to find answers to test questions. The purpose of the exam isn't to determine whether the student can identify answers by any practical means; it is to determine whether the student can solve the problem using their own cognitive abilities.
You caught me. I made an ill-informed simplification. Nonetheless, aging, like cancer, would have a relatively small impact on an organism's likelihood to breed. I spoke out of turn when I said there weren't consequences to DNA damage in somatic cells but I think that my conclusion was still reasonably accurate.
(Thank you for pointing out where I was wrong, though. I'm fairly novice at biology but it's a subject I enjoy learning more about.)
Cancer is a disease that affects organisms late in life. Generally speaking, they will have already had an opportunity to reproduce by the time that they develop cancer. The introduction of this mutation could have been completely coincidental and it would not have affected the reproductive fitness of the organisms that had it. You might suggest that damage to DNA has consequences besides cancer but it actually doesn't, really. If a cell's DNA becomes too corrupt but the cell doesn't become cancerous as a result, just that one cell is likely to die. You're constantly making new skin cells anyway.
I always tried playing NetHack the way that I played Rogue when I was a kid. It never worked. Not that I ever beat Rogue, either, but I had a few good runs at it. Unfortunately, I can't quite figure out what the "right" way to play NetHack is because I always end up dying in the first 10 levels of the dungeon. Starvation plagues me and this whole idea of training my pet to steal from item shops confuses me even after reading guides on how to do it.
We actually can, I think - and not with breeder reactors. I work in an industry that sometimes provides equipment to nuclear power plants and I've heard recently that there are new designs that can use the waste materials without them having to be concentrated in a way that raises fears of nuclear proliferation.
I am also a safe driver with a clean license but I tend to prefer the unbiased judgment of a machine to the arbitrary judgment of a human being. I don't like the privacy issues that cameras raise but as far as doling out punishment for breaking the law is concerned, I don't mind having a camera monitoring people's speed. I just disagree with your assessment that common sense ruled when human police officers were doing the ticketing. Ever since municipalities realized that traffic violations are a source of revenue and instituted ticket quotas (whether explicitly or just through internal "suggestions"), I wouldn't trust a human police officer to be neutral or fair about a speeding ticket.
I hadn't really thought of it that way. You make a good point that I didn't consider. When I think of learning about Isaac Newton, I don't necessarily associate it with a hands-on experiment to determine acceleration due to gravity. I think first of a story about a falling apple and then VOILA!! Isaac Newton discovered gravity. If the story were accompanied by a trip outside with a high-speed camera and some falling tennis balls, I'd definitely agree with your point. If it's just a story, though, as it was to me until 10th-grade physics, then it's no better or worse a story than how the rocket physics of World War 2 paved the way to a moon landing in 1969.
Of the various changes mentioned in the summary, that's the one that bothered me least. I don't exactly trust them to give the topic of scientific advances through military research a "fair" treatment either but it is, at least, an interesting subject. That's not to say that Isaac Newton is neither interesting nor important - only that it isn't strictly necessary to teach every student "the classics." There are lots of topics in science, a lot of different narratives that can be used to treat those topics, and not enough time to cover all them. The military's role in science research at least passes the "that's interesting; I'd like to know that" test.