It's easy to forget that most of Africa's problems stem from the fact that the culture places very little value on human life. I'm not sure African culture is particularly different wrt the value of human life, it's just that circumstances have lead to some very extremely unstable situations.
Colonialization made countries that deliberately didn't conform to tribal borders. If you create a country where not only do the people not have a shared identity, but many of them identify more with people from a neighbouring country, it's a sure recipe for internal and external instability. Note one of the causes of the two world wars in Europe was disputes over bits of land (which had changed hands in previous wars), it's no accident that one of the main ideas behind the UN is that territory cannot change hands as the result of a war, territorial disputes are extremely destabilizing. To compound this these countries had no real experience forming national governments, without experience running countries rampant corruption is somewhat inevitable. There's also the fact that there's a big Muslim/Christian split going through the middle, of course the US occasionally going in and throwing out stable authorities like the Union of Islamic Courts doesn't particularly help this relationship to stabilize.
That being said there's actually a good number of African countries that are currently peaceful with growing economies. It's just a few bad apples really capture the attention of the western media.
You know all those "relief funds" that go to poor/starving/fucked African countries? Yeah, most of those funds end up in the hands of the corrupt government leaders and/or military, who are MORE than happy to let everybody starve if it means more cash for them.
The problems with Africa can't be solved with donations. They can only be solved with armed revolutions. Of course, the U.S. and most of the rest of the world is making too much money off of the exploitation of Africa to actually want to fix things. One interesting argument I've heard is that foreign aid actually hurts Africa. The basic idea is that when you send a shirt to an African child, you're helping but an African tailor out of business. When you send food the farmer gets a lower price for the food they grew. Plus much of the aid money ends up in the hands of gangs and corrupt governments giving them the funds to stay in business.
I don't know how accurate that argument is but I can certainly see building a strong African business community, who has a serious interest in stability, and the funds to enforce that stability, really helping to form some good stable governments.
I broadly agree with your sentiment, if the Iranians' wish for civilian nuclear power was genuine. But the UN has already offered to supply them with all the fuel they need for their reactors, as long as they shut down their enrichment program. Iran has so far refused to accept this offer, and enrichment is the only important technology that nuclear power has in common with nuclear weapons. So it's unclear what their true intentions are. My belief is Iran has two objectives.
1) They want to have completely self sufficient nuclear power generation. There are two reasons for this, first there are strategic concerns, you don't really want to have a large part of your energy supply dependent on foreign powers. The US is already complaining about this with their reliance on foreign oil (don't worry, Middle Eastern countries, however much they hate the US, can't actually afford to not sell their oil). If you were Iran would you be willing to bet your supply of power on the assurance that the fuel supply would keep flowing from outside sources?
Also, if you consider the implications it is a bit insulting to say "we won't let you enrich uranium (even though international law says you can) since we don't think you're responsible enough", the Middle East is a bit insecure in their history with the west and pride is probably a significant factor.
2) They probably do want to be in a place where they can build nukes in a rush. They are relatively close to Israel, who isn't exactly friendly and has a lot of nukes pointed at them. As well the NeoCons have been begging for an excuse to invade for a long time. If I were Iran I'd probably feel a lot safer if I had some nukes to stop the US from invading or trying to overthrow my regime. That being said I think they're paranoid enough to stop at the threshold point but who knows.
What's the best thing to do? I haven't a clue. More nukes floating around in the Middle East isn't a good thing but it is important to remember that the agents involved are generally rational people.
you work for the white house? According to wiki, it is STILL going in. "greenies" have had nothing to do with it. In fact, according to the wiki, just this year, the town confirmed it.
My suggestion is that you go back to preaching about the WMD that Iran/Iraq/NK has. It is idiots like you that cause more issues than the "greenies". They voice concerns. You and your neo-cons voice lies. *Sigh*
Please don't equate opposition to anti-nuclear environmentalists with neo-cons. They are two completely different topics and there are many people, just like me, who believe that both anti-nuclear environmentalists AND neo-cons are both morons.
Executive: "How can we get ahold of some of that Mars glacial ice? We could make a killing selling it to the bottled water crowd!"
R&D: "We could make it a dilute 'blend' with filtered municipal tap water and disclose (in small print) that it is 'filtered for your purity'." In small print?! You clearly know nothing of consumers, it's not "filtered" or "diluted", it's homoeopathy!!
at which point some guy noticed one of his emails had the subject "Enormous Pussy". The prof stammered and said it wasn't what it sounded like, that's just a big cat one of his friends has, and his friend likes to send email with provocative subjects.
At which point someone else saw an email called "Giant Beaver", destroying the prof's credibility. Huh? What's wrong with a CS prof who likes pictures of animals?
Text needs to be looked over and watched for vandalism, and for any project (and content in the project) you need to have a clear and definite purpose.
Wouldn't it be better to somehow flag it as unverified than to flat out delete it. "here's some info, it might be wrong, dig deeper if you to rely on this being true" is better than "no results found - did you mean CompletelyUnrelatedTopic" Even if you let the content completely rot there's still the fact that it's somewhat tangential to Wikipedia's purpose (depending on what you consider Wikipedia's purpose of course). Besides, incorrect or even confusing math proofs can easily do more harm than good by confusing and discouraging people. I wouldn't be surprised if a dedicated math wiki community could do a better job of producing solid understandable content, existing complex content (like proofs) could probably be copied over (if the license allows).
As to the not finding content hopefully people would be able to find it by either going there from the simpler wikipedia page or if they already know about the math wiki starting there.
Why the hell not include ALL proofs that someone takes the time to type into Wikipedia? They're running low on hard drive space or what? And what's gonna be next, drop proofs from textbooks because they can't figure which one to include? Text needs to be looked over and watched for vandalism, and for any project (and content in the project) you need to have a clear and definite purpose. Should contributors be writing articles to teach math and offer in-depth discussions of scientific concepts? Or should they simply be trying to pass along the core concepts as clearly, and easily, as possible.
I think it would be quite valid to say that mathematical proofs should be transferred to another project, you could easily link to them in the Wikipedia article, but a separate project would allow a resource to be developed specifically for the purpose of showing proofs and teaching advanced mathematical concepts.
While I certainly hope you're correct, do you have any basis for that? If it were a majority government, I suspect it would pass easily, and if Harper really wants to make everything a confidence vote, the Liberals aren't going to choose digital rights as the election issue. Exactly, there are only two issues we might end up going to the polls over in the foreseeable future, Afghanistan and Kyoto. For Afghanistan nothing is happening until at least January when a committee comes back with a report. For Kyoto my hunch is the other parties are working it over for the polls but they don't think it's an issue they can build a campaign on.
If the Conservatives decide they want to fast track this (as they did with the camcording bill) and make it a confidence issue than chances are it will pass in short order. Note I haven't seen any evidence that the Liberals are opposed to this kind of bill, heck they were trying to pass one when they got booted out of office.
Now if I want a working JVM it's sitting right there in my yum repo and I have one less non-standard app I have to worry about on my system. That's kind of funny.. considering IcedTea isn't the standard JVM implementation, Sun's is... I meant non-standard in installation and maintainence. The standard way that programs come to live on my system is with "yum install program", to get updated it's "yum update", and to do this requires negligible effort. When I have to go out of my way to do an installation there's a bunch of other stuff that can go wrong and a bunch of other time I have to spend, last time to install Sun's JVM properly I had to rebuild a bunch of RPMs, half of which wouldn't install properly. That I consider a PITA and non-standard, I have better things to do then than custom install programs.
IcedTea is OpenJDK with the remaining non-free parts replaced with free stuff, I'm not sure how much this impacts its usability but it's an awesome step forward.
For how long has Java been a massive PITA on Linux. GCJ doesn't work for half the apps, Sun's Java (formerly) required you to go to their site, click on some licenses, then you can either have it sitting in ~/ unlike almost every other app or use their RPMs which aren't quite configured to your distro.
Now if I want a working JVM it's sitting right there in my yum repo and I have one less non-standard app I have to worry about on my system.
You don't have to be an expert in a field to be reasonably literate in it. I'm not an expert in rocketry and my physics is horribly weak, but I know why you can't turn around a ballistic missile in midflight — which is more than a certain POTUS could claim. This is the same guy who thought we could and should put a missile shield around North America that would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". In that case, lack of knowledge and lack of judgment went hand in hand.
WRT to the value of knowledge in judgement I think this is a useful, though slightly tangential, read (an excellent blog btw), specifically this exert (note that "Foxes" are essentially uncertain generalists while "Hedgehogs" are overconfident specialists)
One rather bizarre result relates to an experiment where Tetlock asked experts to also make predictions far from their field of expertise. Among Foxes, as we might expect, experts do better than the "dilettantes" who are going outside their field. But among Hedgehogs, the results are reversed! Hedgehogs actually do worse in their own fields where they are supposed experts than when they are forced to make predictions in other areas.
My general thought with that excerpt is that specific knowledge isn't as big an asset as you'd expect in making a decision about a subject, a willingness to learn and an open mind really dwarfs the effect of knowledge in that area.
Of course if a candidate does have science knowledge that is a very good sign, not necessarily because they'll make better science conditions but because it's a sign of curiosity and general "foxiness" which suggests they'll make good decisions in general.
You might consider C&R to have "foreign policy experience", but they showed a horrible lack of knowledge of conditions in the Middle East. Worse, they shut down anybody in the executive branch that disputed their scenario of Iraq magically transforming itself into a modern democracy as soon as the Bathist dictatorship was decapitated. Nobody with any judgment would have trusted them with that much power. Alas, the president was even more ignorant and ideological than they were. Perhaps if he had been made to answer some real questions about conditions in the middle east instead of being allowed to spout crap about the "Axis of Evil", we'd have avoided this quagmire.
From a previous article on the hedgehog vs. fox thing "The hedgehog is said to know one thing and know it well. He sees events and trends in terms of his big idea, and aggressively extends it into new realms. Hedgehogs tend to be confident in the applicability of their fundamental concepts and impatient with those who "do not get it"." That seems to describe Bush and friends pretty well. Essentially I believe they know a lot about Iraq and the middle east, far more than either of us, but because of their judgement in general either of us would probably make far better decisions about Iraq. Back when they first started talking about invading I didn't know much about Shia vs. Sunni, but I could sure tell you that when you invade a country in an unstable part of the world, like Iraq, you're going to get some local factions duking it out.
Note another interesting analysis I saw a while back (though I don't think it was based on an actual study) noted that for Presidents there wasn't much correlation between foreign policy experience before being elected and the quality of their foreign policy decisions while in office.
About the ancient link: no feat of memory here. There's a discussion elsewhere on Joss Whedon's new TV show, where I argue that Firefly was killed by a conspiracy of network hacks. I remembered the previous Joss Whedon story because I submitted and also becaus
Let me get this right: it doesn't matter if the Prez is an ignorant twit, as long as he listens to "the right people"? Isn't that pretty much how we got into this Iraq quaqmire?
"Judgment" isn't a knack that you acquire through some mysterious magic process. It comes through education and experience. Being able to talk in a knowledgeable way about stuff relevant to your job is a pretty strong indicator that have the right E&E. My understanding is an "ignorant twit" is someone generally wilfully ignorant, that's very different from the person I'm describing. The fact is that there's no one alive who knows close to all of physics, much less all of physics, biology, chemistry, math, computers, not to mention foreign policy and the zillion other things a president would have to make decisions about. It's nice if they know something about science, it will probably increase the quality of their decisions on science related issues, but for any issue they're probably going to need a specialist to make the proper decision. I'd rather take a rational thinker who is ignorant of science but who knows their limits, is seeking new knowledge, and is trying to avoid bias when making a decision about something than an expert who knows a lot of facts initially but doesn't have a good decision making process.
Speaking of Iraq Rumsfeld and Cheney were two of the major players in getting into Iraq, and both had a ton of foreign policy experience, particularly with respect to Iraq. Nevertheless their decision making process was highly biased and the current situation happened as a result. I don't know how Bush's experience compares to theirs but I'm sure it wouldn't have made a difference. Even some prominent scientists make surprisingly ignorant statements about other fields, they may be brilliant, and extremely knowledgeable, but that still doesn't make you capable of good judgement.
But what do I know? I'm just a shill for Fox. Awesome! That post is over 5 years old!! Sorry you lost your job with Fox though;-)
In my defence I have no idea if I was trying to make a joke or showing the poor judgement of youth but I'm impressed with your recollection regardless:)
This debate would give no particularly useful information to choose the best leader, at the best it might embarrass some with inconsistent belief systems. The job of the President is to lead the country, not win a game of Jeopardy. The fact is that there is there is only one skill a President needs to make a correct decision, and that's judgement. Is it nice if the president knows about the middle east? Sure, but more importantly you want a leader who asks, and listens to, the person who knows everything about the middle east when they need to make a decision. I really feel that a leader who makes the best policy isn't necessarily the one who is the smartest or most knowledgeable, it's the one who knows how to get the correct conclusions from the smart and knowledgeable people.
"Canadians may soon pay a small tax on every legal music store download, says a new measure (PDF) sanctioned by the Copyright Board of Canada. Requested by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), the tax would apply at least 2.1 cents to every individual song download and 1.5 cents per track for complete albums."
So... the people who pay for music are paying for the people who don't pay for music?
"The publishing group draws similarities between this and a 21-cent fee already applied to blank CDs in the country; the right to copy a song from an online store demands the same sort of levy applied to copying a retail CD, SOCAN argues."
This is clearly some new definition for the word "similarities", one that apparently means "the same general approach but completely misses the point". The idea of the CD levy is that the pirates who buy blank CDs end up paying money to the artists to compensate for the sales lost to those pirates who buy the blank CDs (not a particularly accurate approach but that's the idea). With this new levy it's the legal purchasers paying for the piracy while the pirates, who don't buy music online, don't pay for anything.
I seriously can't figure out how this is supposed to make sense, say for a moment you do need to charge a little extra on every online sale to compensate for piracy. You know what you do? Raise your prices!!
Does anyone have a clue how this is supposed to be a good idea? The only thing I can possibly think of is that a) the fee will hurt independent sellers more than CRIA aligned sellers (conspiracy), b) it's designed to be absurd to help kill the levy which the CRIA dislikes(conspiracy), or c) the story as reported by MacNN is inaccurate since I've never heard of them and was too lazy to look through the 65 page pdf(conspiracy or stupidity).
I'm anxious to hear any alternate interpretations.
He was talking about reading the firehose, not just the front page. From a different part of the grandparent's post
"And that sad part of all of it is that reading the comments is even worse. I see tons of posts modded +5 Informative or Insightful and a reply 15 minutes later points out why the post is plainly wrong yet the correct post stays at a 0-2 mod."
As I type this post I see the grandparent as +5 informative and the parent as +2, I guess the grandparent was right about one thing!
Then he was found beaten to death. According to the Wired article I remember reading some time ago (link posted below) the people who killed him really took their time to make sure he suffered. No bullets are mentioned, although a lot of blood and a very sound kicking is. Then the police just swept the whole thing under the carpet.
I really would recommend that anyone who gets pissed off when they receive spam read the link the below. It cured me as I actually felt sorry for him by then end:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/spamking.html Actually I lost sympathy for him as I read the article. I mean he showed absolutely no remorse about the damage he caused and actually seemed to enjoy the fact that his spam was causing so many problems. Also despite the fact he was making loads of money from his operation he withheld pay from his employees.
Who knows how biased the wired article is but from their profile he seemed to be an astonishingly self-centred person who didn't care about anyone else at all. I don't believe in the death penalty and thus don't endorse murder by a long shot, but there's many a murderer I've felt more sympathy for than this individual.
"Editing is down 20% suggests that users are going dormant at a faster rate than they are being added to the system,thus the effective number of wikipedia users is decreasing."
No it doesn't. Almost all numbers related to wikipedia are very power-law ish. Most of the edits (by count) are done by the top few of the users. If they sleep in the editing rate drops like a rock. If everyone but the top 2000 or so quit at once that probably wouldn't result in a 20% reduction. That's true to an extent which is kinda why I said "effective users". Practically speaking there isn't a big difference between two users who have become half as active and a user who has become completely dormant, whether the active user base has increased or decreased is somewhat less relevant than the fact that the activity of the active user base, whatever its size, has decreased.
Of course active users, even if they aren't very active, are better than completely dormant users since the active users have a higher probability of becoming more active users than the dormants have of leaving dormancy.
As usual, statistics tell what you want them to tell.
For example, "new user creation is down 30%" means that the number of users is still increasing, but the rate of increase is less. Which also means the rate of the rate of increase is now negative. Hey, how's that for a headline?:-) The vast majority of websites do not allow a user to delete an account, and from what I can tell Wikipedia is no exception, instead of deletion accounts simply go dormant. Thus total number of members, or the number of new members, doesn't actually mean much, the number you actually want to track is the number of active users, or over a given period the # of new users vs # of current users gone dormant. I couldn't find any stats on dormant accounts in the articles but the "Editing is down 20%" suggests that users are going dormant at a faster rate than they are being added to the system, thus the effective number of wikipedia users is decreasing.
Do all OS developers become assholes? I've done a lot with VxWorks and I hope I don't become as twisted as these folk. I better just stay away from authoring my own kernel. I didn't read the full thread though I read a good portion of it and the kerneltrap summary.
In total I thought the responses of the kernel devs were fairly measured and restrained. Basically people (well one guy in particular) was arguing that chroot should successfully jail root. Then when several immensely qualified people said they were wrong, and pointed out why, they continued to argue.
When you claim X and the expert claims Y, if you want to continue to argue you'd better be very sure, and have done some real research into your position, before claiming the answer is still X. In the thread several times I could see the experts had done more thorough research to show that the current chroot functionality was correct than the people claiming otherwise. It's the responsibility of the person disproving the expert to do the research, if the expert is doing more research do prove the non-expert wrong than I feel the expert has a very legitimate reason to get mad at the non-expert for wasting their time.
And the statement "Just 6 percent of developers working with open-source software have adopted the new GNU General Public License version 3" is obviously false, since the vast majority of GPL-licensed software have copyright notices that say that the software is available "under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version" - which includes GPL version 3. Well speaking of "obviously false" please explain how you equate the option to adopt a license with actually adopting it. Hey while we're at it why don't we add the entire list of GPLv3 compatible licenses to your list as well, it makes sense that tomcat and apache be counted as GPLv3 projects!
For a bit on anecdotal evidence I should note that in my little 3 person project we considered an upgrade to GPLv3 from v2 (we have the "or later" clause), however decided against it since one of the devs was strongly against the idea. The fact is that GPLv3 is a different kind of license from GPLv2, v2 basically just says you need to allow distribution and modification and stuff, but the GPLv3 also covers usage with its anti-DRM clause. Not to mention the fact that v3 is way longer than v2. Until the FSF comes out with a GPLv4 that somehow manages to appease both camps I really suspect that you're going to see both licenses in wide usage, however I'm not sure that unity is possible. I think the fundamental debate between between GPLv2 and GPLv3 is similar to the old debate between GPLv2 and BSD licenses, it depends on what restrictions you're willing to enforce to ensure what you consider freedom.
I hate how you type:) in IM or message boards now and they replace the:) with a graphic. I think that ruins it. Indeed, particularly I sometimes like to use a smiley to close a parenthetical statement (what can I say, I like balanced parenthesis:)
Unfortunately this is ruined entirely when the ':)' becomes a graphical smiley and my parenthetical statement is never closed.
Of course this doesn't compare to pasting anything resembling source code (or worse an RE) into pidgen or something and watching your carefully crafted logic transformed into a pulsating blob of little cousin speak.
There are companies out there which, for a fee, install tracker software on your laptop. If it's stolen or lost, they track its whereabouts whenever it gets on the 'Net and work with local law enforcement and ISPs to find the machine.
I've been the victim of a stolen vehicle before... and I know police really don't give a diddly squat about stolen vehicles. Sure, paperwork will be filed but that's all they do. When a stolen vehicle is recovered it's almost always recovered due to happenstance. So, my question is.. what makes anyone think police care about your $1000 laptop when they barely care about your $20,000 vehicle as it is?
Even with an IP address, postal address, and mapquest directions to the thief's house, I have a hard time believing an officer will put down his chocolate iced donut to go knock on doors over a laptop. A couple years back my friend had his apartment broken into and his computer along with some other things stolen, his roommate actually walked in while it was being robbed and recognized the thief as he left. Despite actually knowing who the thief was he was never able to get the police to do anything and never recovered any of his property.
Exactly. The essence of McConnell's argument is "X is an instance of Z, and some instance of Z prevented Y, therefore we need X to prevent future Y".
Now perhaps the actual instance of Z that prevented Y is X, and perhaps if X was unavailable than no other instance of Z could take its place and Y would occur. But I'm not going to make those highly non-trivial assumptions on his behalf.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not betting real money then you lose a lot of the motivation to be completely honest about the odds.
Colonialization made countries that deliberately didn't conform to tribal borders. If you create a country where not only do the people not have a shared identity, but many of them identify more with people from a neighbouring country, it's a sure recipe for internal and external instability. Note one of the causes of the two world wars in Europe was disputes over bits of land (which had changed hands in previous wars), it's no accident that one of the main ideas behind the UN is that territory cannot change hands as the result of a war, territorial disputes are extremely destabilizing. To compound this these countries had no real experience forming national governments, without experience running countries rampant corruption is somewhat inevitable. There's also the fact that there's a big Muslim/Christian split going through the middle, of course the US occasionally going in and throwing out stable authorities like the Union of Islamic Courts doesn't particularly help this relationship to stabilize.
That being said there's actually a good number of African countries that are currently peaceful with growing economies. It's just a few bad apples really capture the attention of the western media. You know all those "relief funds" that go to poor/starving/fucked African countries? Yeah, most of those funds end up in the hands of the corrupt government leaders and/or military, who are MORE than happy to let everybody starve if it means more cash for them.
The problems with Africa can't be solved with donations. They can only be solved with armed revolutions. Of course, the U.S. and most of the rest of the world is making too much money off of the exploitation of Africa to actually want to fix things. One interesting argument I've heard is that foreign aid actually hurts Africa. The basic idea is that when you send a shirt to an African child, you're helping but an African tailor out of business. When you send food the farmer gets a lower price for the food they grew. Plus much of the aid money ends up in the hands of gangs and corrupt governments giving them the funds to stay in business.
I don't know how accurate that argument is but I can certainly see building a strong African business community, who has a serious interest in stability, and the funds to enforce that stability, really helping to form some good stable governments.
1) They want to have completely self sufficient nuclear power generation. There are two reasons for this, first there are strategic concerns, you don't really want to have a large part of your energy supply dependent on foreign powers. The US is already complaining about this with their reliance on foreign oil (don't worry, Middle Eastern countries, however much they hate the US, can't actually afford to not sell their oil). If you were Iran would you be willing to bet your supply of power on the assurance that the fuel supply would keep flowing from outside sources?
Also, if you consider the implications it is a bit insulting to say "we won't let you enrich uranium (even though international law says you can) since we don't think you're responsible enough", the Middle East is a bit insecure in their history with the west and pride is probably a significant factor.
2) They probably do want to be in a place where they can build nukes in a rush. They are relatively close to Israel, who isn't exactly friendly and has a lot of nukes pointed at them. As well the NeoCons have been begging for an excuse to invade for a long time. If I were Iran I'd probably feel a lot safer if I had some nukes to stop the US from invading or trying to overthrow my regime. That being said I think they're paranoid enough to stop at the threshold point but who knows.
What's the best thing to do? I haven't a clue. More nukes floating around in the Middle East isn't a good thing but it is important to remember that the agents involved are generally rational people.
My suggestion is that you go back to preaching about the WMD that Iran/Iraq/NK has. It is idiots like you that cause more issues than the "greenies". They voice concerns. You and your neo-cons voice lies. *Sigh*
Please don't equate opposition to anti-nuclear environmentalists with neo-cons. They are two completely different topics and there are many people, just like me, who believe that both anti-nuclear environmentalists AND neo-cons are both morons.
R&D: "We could make it a dilute 'blend' with filtered municipal tap water and disclose (in small print) that it is 'filtered for your purity'." In small print?! You clearly know nothing of consumers, it's not "filtered" or "diluted", it's homoeopathy!!
At which point someone else saw an email called "Giant Beaver", destroying the prof's credibility. Huh? What's wrong with a CS prof who likes pictures of animals?
What? Why is everyone looking at me?
"IE is the only browser that follows standards; frames and tables are the best way to organize your website"
Back in 1997 this may have been somewhat accurate (not sure about the standards though).
As to the not finding content hopefully people would be able to find it by either going there from the simpler wikipedia page or if they already know about the math wiki starting there.
I think it would be quite valid to say that mathematical proofs should be transferred to another project, you could easily link to them in the Wikipedia article, but a separate project would allow a resource to be developed specifically for the purpose of showing proofs and teaching advanced mathematical concepts.
If the Conservatives decide they want to fast track this (as they did with the camcording bill) and make it a confidence issue than chances are it will pass in short order. Note I haven't seen any evidence that the Liberals are opposed to this kind of bill, heck they were trying to pass one when they got booted out of office.
did you read the notes?
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/8/ReleaseSummary#head-4f0c6fbce5ef70b1b3c850fbd9dd725ddfd48a42 I can go on. I'm very excited about this release you kidding? You're missing what I consider to be the coolest part
* Java Support : IcedTea
IcedTea is OpenJDK with the remaining non-free parts replaced with free stuff, I'm not sure how much this impacts its usability but it's an awesome step forward.
For how long has Java been a massive PITA on Linux. GCJ doesn't work for half the apps, Sun's Java (formerly) required you to go to their site, click on some licenses, then you can either have it sitting in ~/ unlike almost every other app or use their RPMs which aren't quite configured to your distro.
Now if I want a working JVM it's sitting right there in my yum repo and I have one less non-standard app I have to worry about on my system.
You don't have to be an expert in a field to be reasonably literate in it. I'm not an expert in rocketry and my physics is horribly weak, but I know why you can't turn around a ballistic missile in midflight — which is more than a certain POTUS could claim. This is the same guy who thought we could and should put a missile shield around North America that would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". In that case, lack of knowledge and lack of judgment went hand in hand.
WRT to the value of knowledge in judgement I think this is a useful, though slightly tangential, read (an excellent blog btw), specifically this exert (note that "Foxes" are essentially uncertain generalists while "Hedgehogs" are overconfident specialists)
One rather bizarre result relates to an experiment where Tetlock asked experts to also make predictions far from their field of expertise. Among Foxes, as we might expect, experts do better than the "dilettantes" who are going outside their field. But among Hedgehogs, the results are reversed! Hedgehogs actually do worse in their own fields where they are supposed experts than when they are forced to make predictions in other areas.
My general thought with that excerpt is that specific knowledge isn't as big an asset as you'd expect in making a decision about a subject, a willingness to learn and an open mind really dwarfs the effect of knowledge in that area.
Of course if a candidate does have science knowledge that is a very good sign, not necessarily because they'll make better science conditions but because it's a sign of curiosity and general "foxiness" which suggests they'll make good decisions in general.
You might consider C&R to have "foreign policy experience", but they showed a horrible lack of knowledge of conditions in the Middle East. Worse, they shut down anybody in the executive branch that disputed their scenario of Iraq magically transforming itself into a modern democracy as soon as the Bathist dictatorship was decapitated. Nobody with any judgment would have trusted them with that much power. Alas, the president was even more ignorant and ideological than they were. Perhaps if he had been made to answer some real questions about conditions in the middle east instead of being allowed to spout crap about the "Axis of Evil", we'd have avoided this quagmire.
From a previous article on the hedgehog vs. fox thing "The hedgehog is said to know one thing and know it well. He sees events and trends in terms of his big idea, and aggressively extends it into new realms. Hedgehogs tend to be confident in the applicability of their fundamental concepts and impatient with those who "do not get it"." That seems to describe Bush and friends pretty well. Essentially I believe they know a lot about Iraq and the middle east, far more than either of us, but because of their judgement in general either of us would probably make far better decisions about Iraq. Back when they first started talking about invading I didn't know much about Shia vs. Sunni, but I could sure tell you that when you invade a country in an unstable part of the world, like Iraq, you're going to get some local factions duking it out.
Note another interesting analysis I saw a while back (though I don't think it was based on an actual study) noted that for Presidents there wasn't much correlation between foreign policy experience before being elected and the quality of their foreign policy decisions while in office.
About the ancient link: no feat of memory here. There's a discussion elsewhere on Joss Whedon's new TV show, where I argue that Firefly was killed by a conspiracy of network hacks. I remembered the previous Joss Whedon story because I submitted and also becaus
"Judgment" isn't a knack that you acquire through some mysterious magic process. It comes through education and experience. Being able to talk in a knowledgeable way about stuff relevant to your job is a pretty strong indicator that have the right E&E. My understanding is an "ignorant twit" is someone generally wilfully ignorant, that's very different from the person I'm describing. The fact is that there's no one alive who knows close to all of physics, much less all of physics, biology, chemistry, math, computers, not to mention foreign policy and the zillion other things a president would have to make decisions about. It's nice if they know something about science, it will probably increase the quality of their decisions on science related issues, but for any issue they're probably going to need a specialist to make the proper decision. I'd rather take a rational thinker who is ignorant of science but who knows their limits, is seeking new knowledge, and is trying to avoid bias when making a decision about something than an expert who knows a lot of facts initially but doesn't have a good decision making process.
Speaking of Iraq Rumsfeld and Cheney were two of the major players in getting into Iraq, and both had a ton of foreign policy experience, particularly with respect to Iraq. Nevertheless their decision making process was highly biased and the current situation happened as a result. I don't know how Bush's experience compares to theirs but I'm sure it wouldn't have made a difference. Even some prominent scientists make surprisingly ignorant statements about other fields, they may be brilliant, and extremely knowledgeable, but that still doesn't make you capable of good judgement. But what do I know? I'm just a shill for Fox. Awesome! That post is over 5 years old!! Sorry you lost your job with Fox though
In my defence I have no idea if I was trying to make a joke or showing the poor judgement of youth but I'm impressed with your recollection regardless
This debate would give no particularly useful information to choose the best leader, at the best it might embarrass some with inconsistent belief systems. The job of the President is to lead the country, not win a game of Jeopardy. The fact is that there is there is only one skill a President needs to make a correct decision, and that's judgement. Is it nice if the president knows about the middle east? Sure, but more importantly you want a leader who asks, and listens to, the person who knows everything about the middle east when they need to make a decision. I really feel that a leader who makes the best policy isn't necessarily the one who is the smartest or most knowledgeable, it's the one who knows how to get the correct conclusions from the smart and knowledgeable people.
"Canadians may soon pay a small tax on every legal music store download, says a new measure (PDF) sanctioned by the Copyright Board of Canada. Requested by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), the tax would apply at least 2.1 cents to every individual song download and 1.5 cents per track for complete albums."
So... the people who pay for music are paying for the people who don't pay for music?
"The publishing group draws similarities between this and a 21-cent fee already applied to blank CDs in the country; the right to copy a song from an online store demands the same sort of levy applied to copying a retail CD, SOCAN argues."
This is clearly some new definition for the word "similarities", one that apparently means "the same general approach but completely misses the point". The idea of the CD levy is that the pirates who buy blank CDs end up paying money to the artists to compensate for the sales lost to those pirates who buy the blank CDs (not a particularly accurate approach but that's the idea). With this new levy it's the legal purchasers paying for the piracy while the pirates, who don't buy music online, don't pay for anything.
I seriously can't figure out how this is supposed to make sense, say for a moment you do need to charge a little extra on every online sale to compensate for piracy. You know what you do? Raise your prices!!
Does anyone have a clue how this is supposed to be a good idea? The only thing I can possibly think of is that a) the fee will hurt independent sellers more than CRIA aligned sellers (conspiracy), b) it's designed to be absurd to help kill the levy which the CRIA dislikes(conspiracy), or c) the story as reported by MacNN is inaccurate since I've never heard of them and was too lazy to look through the 65 page pdf(conspiracy or stupidity).
I'm anxious to hear any alternate interpretations.
"And that sad part of all of it is that reading the comments is even worse. I see tons of posts modded +5 Informative or Insightful and a reply 15 minutes later points out why the post is plainly wrong yet the correct post stays at a 0-2 mod."
As I type this post I see the grandparent as +5 informative and the parent as +2, I guess the grandparent was right about one thing!
I really would recommend that anyone who gets pissed off when they receive spam read the link the below. It cured me as I actually felt sorry for him by then end:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/spamking.html Actually I lost sympathy for him as I read the article. I mean he showed absolutely no remorse about the damage he caused and actually seemed to enjoy the fact that his spam was causing so many problems. Also despite the fact he was making loads of money from his operation he withheld pay from his employees.
Who knows how biased the wired article is but from their profile he seemed to be an astonishingly self-centred person who didn't care about anyone else at all. I don't believe in the death penalty and thus don't endorse murder by a long shot, but there's many a murderer I've felt more sympathy for than this individual.
No it doesn't. Almost all numbers related to wikipedia are very power-law ish. Most of the edits (by count) are done by the top few of the users. If they sleep in the editing rate drops like a rock. If everyone but the top 2000 or so quit at once that probably wouldn't result in a 20% reduction. That's true to an extent which is kinda why I said "effective users". Practically speaking there isn't a big difference between two users who have become half as active and a user who has become completely dormant, whether the active user base has increased or decreased is somewhat less relevant than the fact that the activity of the active user base, whatever its size, has decreased.
Of course active users, even if they aren't very active, are better than completely dormant users since the active users have a higher probability of becoming more active users than the dormants have of leaving dormancy.
For example, "new user creation is down 30%" means that the number of users is still increasing, but the rate of increase is less. Which also means the rate of the rate of increase is now negative. Hey, how's that for a headline?
In total I thought the responses of the kernel devs were fairly measured and restrained. Basically people (well one guy in particular) was arguing that chroot should successfully jail root. Then when several immensely qualified people said they were wrong, and pointed out why, they continued to argue.
When you claim X and the expert claims Y, if you want to continue to argue you'd better be very sure, and have done some real research into your position, before claiming the answer is still X. In the thread several times I could see the experts had done more thorough research to show that the current chroot functionality was correct than the people claiming otherwise. It's the responsibility of the person disproving the expert to do the research, if the expert is doing more research do prove the non-expert wrong than I feel the expert has a very legitimate reason to get mad at the non-expert for wasting their time.
For a bit on anecdotal evidence I should note that in my little 3 person project we considered an upgrade to GPLv3 from v2 (we have the "or later" clause), however decided against it since one of the devs was strongly against the idea. The fact is that GPLv3 is a different kind of license from GPLv2, v2 basically just says you need to allow distribution and modification and stuff, but the GPLv3 also covers usage with its anti-DRM clause. Not to mention the fact that v3 is way longer than v2. Until the FSF comes out with a GPLv4 that somehow manages to appease both camps I really suspect that you're going to see both licenses in wide usage, however I'm not sure that unity is possible. I think the fundamental debate between between GPLv2 and GPLv3 is similar to the old debate between GPLv2 and BSD licenses, it depends on what restrictions you're willing to enforce to ensure what you consider freedom.
Unfortunately this is ruined entirely when the ':)' becomes a graphical smiley and my parenthetical statement is never closed.
Of course this doesn't compare to pasting anything resembling source code (or worse an RE) into pidgen or something and watching your carefully crafted logic transformed into a pulsating blob of little cousin speak.
I've been the victim of a stolen vehicle before... and I know police really don't give a diddly squat about stolen vehicles. Sure, paperwork will be filed but that's all they do. When a stolen vehicle is recovered it's almost always recovered due to happenstance. So, my question is.. what makes anyone think police care about your $1000 laptop when they barely care about your $20,000 vehicle as it is?
Even with an IP address, postal address, and mapquest directions to the thief's house, I have a hard time believing an officer will put down his chocolate iced donut to go knock on doors over a laptop. A couple years back my friend had his apartment broken into and his computer along with some other things stolen, his roommate actually walked in while it was being robbed and recognized the thief as he left. Despite actually knowing who the thief was he was never able to get the police to do anything and never recovered any of his property.
Exactly. The essence of McConnell's argument is "X is an instance of Z, and some instance of Z prevented Y, therefore we need X to prevent future Y".
Now perhaps the actual instance of Z that prevented Y is X, and perhaps if X was unavailable than no other instance of Z could take its place and Y would occur. But I'm not going to make those highly non-trivial assumptions on his behalf.