It would be wise to start with a common point of reference. I would point out, however, that atheists are as vulnerable to memes as the rest of humankind--the few pounds of gray matter we all carry around above the neck seems to act as a single point of failure. These days--as opposed to a few hundred years ago when being an atheist actually meant something--it's almost rare to meet an atheist who has arrived at the viewpoint because of a genuinely skeptical temperament. I think that the problem was communism. Communism was a cult in a lot of ways--reasons for both its initial success and eventual collapse--and it made atheism popular for the masses. Personally, if atheism gets any more popular, I'll be in the mood for a revival.
I think the slashdot moderators misunderstand the mechanics of slashdot meme creation. It all starts out with some inane, yet generally applicable, statement getting modded up to 5. It's read by tens thousands of slashdoters who imprint the idea on their psyche. From then on, there is usually at least one, but possibly several, posters who feel the need to update the comment for each new article--really the comment has gone beyond a simple joke for these poor souls, it becomes almost a mystical experience each time they post. I imagine it's almost like they are communing with their god. Simply the way the brain works. Christianity and Islam and Judaism all started out the same way. You start off with some nut with an seemingly inexplicable ability to influence large groups of people to do idiotic things, and suddenly you have a beowulf cluster of hot grits getting poured all over a dead BSD system. In soviet Russia, of course, it's the other way around.
What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that memes are powerful things. So use your mod points for interesting and thought provoking posts relevant to the subject at hand. You don't have to mod a lot of stuff down, but show some restraint in modding junk up.
I mean, do we really want the second coming to occur during in some long post about Natalie Portman and the basalt content of her nude body?
Okay. But what I really want to know is how to throttle off those old DOS games without running a program that simply works by using up the rest of the computers processing power.
Fundamental right to share (copy) information? Never been such a beast. And for good reason. On the other hand, property rights over information bearing material--books, hard drives--are quite well established.
Trying to make the digital world just like the real world doesn't work. Sure it would be great to check out e-books from the library. And it would be great to rent videos on the net. But in order to make it happen you have to take away freedoms.
You see, the internet is just information passing between computers over the phone lines (or what not). In order to get an ebook to you over the internet, that ebook needs to be copied. You cannot transfer a physical copy of something over the internet. Now, since duplication occurs, this falls under copyright.
But wait--what if we were to use technology to lock out the copy at one end, and only allow one user at a time to access the ebook? And after a period of time, technology locks out the information on the user's side? That would be just like a library correct?
No. Because in order to accomplish that, you need to take away a user's control over the information he possesses. This is taking away a fundamental right. In other words, you can make the digital world like the real world, but you can't make it the same. Sure, you open up a new business model or service. But on the other hand, you take away rights.
And that is exactly what a set-up like this can do. Luckily, in America, rights are protected, not business models.
But you can erode rights. A set-up like this comes along at first. Laws like the DMCA are passed to strengthen it. Hell, the DMCA is enough already. Suddenly renting digital information is possible.
And what if one year then, your college decides that it's cheaper to rent ebooks than have you buy real thing? Maybe they don't even publish the dead tree version anymore. Palladium and the DMCA lock out you out from real control of the information. In fact, the ebook manufacturer--given the ease of EULAs with this distribution system, might even decide to make a little more profit. After all who's to stop him? He makes you agree in the EULA not share the information you rent. Suddenly Stallman's vision of the future has come true. Brave new world, what not.
Of course--choose the language to fit the problem. And for the most part, if you have a very simple application that you want to finish up very quickly, C# or Java or such can be very good. I find, however, that C++ is the best tool for a number of complicated things. And that's what interests me for the most part.
Hehehe--got me there. But the ctrl-c, ctrl-v really seems to be having some problems. At first I thought it was some sort of stuck key problem on the keyboard--that didn't turn out to be it though.
Goddamn cut and paste from the spell checker--mod the above post down. Anyone else been having problems with ctrl-c, ctrl-p, and Phoenix?
Godwin's law fails!
USENET authorities are disturbed by the failure of a law that some thought to be a lynchpin of internet discussion: Godwin's Law. Simply stated, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Beginning last week observers began to notice something was wrong. Says one 'lurker', "I came across this thread on abortion, you see. I started reading--and that's when I noticed something strange. Every post in the thread simply got better and better as each participant read the other's arguments and replied calmly. It was then when it hit me--no Nazi references anywhere. I went back to read it again, and I was sure--Godwin's Law has been broken."
The violation of Godwin's law is hailed by some as a doomsday scenario for USENET. "These threads will just keep going and going forever! There is nothing to stop them. Eventually it'll all just reach critical mass and collapse in on itself," says a popular USENET troll. Others don't see it as cataclysmic, put painful all the same. "World War II is a large part of the world's history--I don't want to see that forgotten," reads one post to alt.military.history.
USENET authorities are disturbed by the failure of a law that some thought to be a lynchpin of internet discussion: Godwin's Law. Simply stated, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Beginning last week observers began to notice something was wrong. Says one 'lurker', "I came across this thread on abortion, you see. I started reading--and that's when I noticed something strange. Every post in the thread simply got better and better as each participant read the other's arguments and replied calmly. It was then when it hit me--no Nazi references anywhere. I went back to read it again, and I was sure--Godwin's Law has been broken."
The violation of Godwin's law is hailed by some as a doomsday scenario for USENET. "These threads will just keep going and going forever! There is nothing to stop them. Eventually it'll all just reach critical mass and collapse in on itself," says a popular USENET troll. Others don't see it as Godwin's law fails!
USENET authorities are disturbed by the failure of a law that some thought to be a lynchpin of internet discussion: Godwin's Law. Simply stated, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Beginning last week observers began to notice something was wrong. Says one 'lurker', "I came across this thread on abortion, you see. I started reading--and that's when I noticed something strange. Every post in the thread simply got better and better as each participant read the other's arguments and replied calmly. It was then when it hit me--no Nazi references anywhere. I went back to read it again, and I was sure--Godwin's Law has been broken."
The violation of Godwin's law is hailed by some as a doomsday scenario for USENET. "These threads will just keep going and going forever! There is nothing to stop them. Eventually it'll all just reach critical mass and collapse in on itself," says a popular USENET troll. Others don't see it as cataclyismic, put painful all the same. "World War II is a large part of the world's history--I don't want to see that forgotten," reads one post to alt.military.history., put painful all the same. "World War II is a large part of the world's history--I don't want to see that forgotten," reads one post to alt.military.history.
Re:There goes another one of my solid beliefs :)
on
Moore's Law Disputed
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The 2nd law is usually presented as a statement about multiplicity. You'd expect it to be violated over small systems for short time periods. That's the whole point about statistical laws--they're valid over long time periods where there are lots of events.
Sorry--I just had to be contrarian about a new "discovery" in physics for a bit.
David Weber's "War of Honor" came with a very cool CD. The CD contains a copy of the entire Baen Library, as well as all of the previous Honor Harrington books.
On the front of the CD is stated "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold."
I think that this is all very cool and encouraging. On the other hand, I'd like to point out that they don't have much legal ground for the "NOT sold" requirement. I can certainly sell the CD itself, it's my property. What they should have said was: "You are granted the right to copy and share this information, provided that you agree not to sell the copies."
And, unfortunately, the book sucked too. I enjoy politics. Real politics. 1000 pages of fictional politics falls flat in any number of ways. The other books in the series are very good though.
You use the one-dimensional potential well because you don't need to take angular momentum into account (which would require the 3-D Schrodinger equation). Think about modeling a baseball in freshman physics. You could do that in 3 dimensions--but you could also beat yourself over the head with a club because it's so much fun when you stop. You model the baseball in 2 dimensions, because that is mathematically equivalent. That doesn't mean that ballistic motion is 2-dimensional.
Personally, I think the word dimension should be banned from from all discussions of popular science. But hell, there are enough Ph.D.'s out there that shoot thier mouths off like they are unclear on the concept.
Actually the link I gave in my above post discussed the LNT model a great deal. Here it is if you missed it the first time. Moreover, your whyfiles had a number of large errors--such as the analysis of the thyroid cancer rate in the Ukraine. And a couple of short quotes about LNT at the end do not a "lack of understanding" make.
The LNT isn't just conservative--it's overwhelmingly, crushingly, conservative. It's like making your little kid put on a football helmet before going to his piano lesson. We have come an incredibly long way since the 1950's.
This would have been nice to know about before Christmas...
Very cool. One feature I'd like to see in the next version of this watch is some sort of hook-up to a computer that would let you record good data on long-term exposure. Still, I want one of these.
As far as measuring your total dosage goes, I might as well take this opportunity to inform everyone that government mandated radiation standards are mostly erroneous. By orders of magnitude even. We now know that low-level radiation is simply far less harmful (and far better understood) than we thought it was in the 1950's. Major reason is that the 1950's model is simply a straight line extrapolation from the known lethal dosage. Back then, that was a reasonable guess considering the knowledge of genetics at the time. Needless to say, our current understanding is quite different.
Re:The Yes Men could be at fault
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 2
Corporations deserve the same rights as human beings?
But there is another problem with your reasoning. Where is the bright line between parody and misrepresentation? If there is only a gray area, you are going to have to wind up banning otherwise legal speech in order to protect Dow. That's not worth it.
A message...I don't know that it's even a complete sentence. I thought the bold just made it stand out from the rest of my post. You know, make it easy for people to see that it's a sig.
Sorry if the over-the-top emphasis on the letters made your eyes hurt. I'm sure that a couple asprin will make the headache go away by morning.
Slashdot Mirror
You should have followed the advice in: "G.U.E. on nine zorkmids a day."
Trying to rig the million dollar give-aways, I see :). Good luck.
The reference, in case you didn't get it, is from this: Conan the Librarian
It would be wise to start with a common point of reference. I would point out, however, that atheists are as vulnerable to memes as the rest of humankind--the few pounds of gray matter we all carry around above the neck seems to act as a single point of failure. These days--as opposed to a few hundred years ago when being an atheist actually meant something--it's almost rare to meet an atheist who has arrived at the viewpoint because of a genuinely skeptical temperament. I think that the problem was communism. Communism was a cult in a lot of ways--reasons for both its initial success and eventual collapse--and it made atheism popular for the masses. Personally, if atheism gets any more popular, I'll be in the mood for a revival.
I think the slashdot moderators misunderstand the mechanics of slashdot meme creation. It all starts out with some inane, yet generally applicable, statement getting modded up to 5. It's read by tens thousands of slashdoters who imprint the idea on their psyche. From then on, there is usually at least one, but possibly several, posters who feel the need to update the comment for each new article--really the comment has gone beyond a simple joke for these poor souls, it becomes almost a mystical experience each time they post. I imagine it's almost like they are communing with their god. Simply the way the brain works. Christianity and Islam and Judaism all started out the same way. You start off with some nut with an seemingly inexplicable ability to influence large groups of people to do idiotic things, and suddenly you have a beowulf cluster of hot grits getting poured all over a dead BSD system. In soviet Russia, of course, it's the other way around.
What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that memes are powerful things. So use your mod points for interesting and thought provoking posts relevant to the subject at hand. You don't have to mod a lot of stuff down, but show some restraint in modding junk up.
I mean, do we really want the second coming to occur during in some long post about Natalie Portman and the basalt content of her nude body?
Hell, before whiteout was invented, we just struck out letters with the slash key of the typewriter. That was the real undo.
Okay. But what I really want to know is how to throttle off those old DOS games without running a program that simply works by using up the rest of the computers processing power.
And now we know that some of the Microsoft employees moderate...
Parent shouldn't be at -1! Mod back up.
What disturbs me about those commericals is advertisers being paid large sums of money who can't even come up with a funnier and less cliched joke.
Fundamental right to share (copy) information? Never been such a beast. And for good reason. On the other hand, property rights over information bearing material--books, hard drives--are quite well established.
Trying to make the digital world just like the real world doesn't work. Sure it would be great to check out e-books from the library. And it would be great to rent videos on the net. But in order to make it happen you have to take away freedoms.
You see, the internet is just information passing between computers over the phone lines (or what not). In order to get an ebook to you over the internet, that ebook needs to be copied. You cannot transfer a physical copy of something over the internet. Now, since duplication occurs, this falls under copyright.
But wait--what if we were to use technology to lock out the copy at one end, and only allow one user at a time to access the ebook? And after a period of time, technology locks out the information on the user's side? That would be just like a library correct?
No. Because in order to accomplish that, you need to take away a user's control over the information he possesses. This is taking away a fundamental right. In other words, you can make the digital world like the real world, but you can't make it the same. Sure, you open up a new business model or service. But on the other hand, you take away rights.
And that is exactly what a set-up like this can do. Luckily, in America, rights are protected, not business models.
But you can erode rights. A set-up like this comes along at first. Laws like the DMCA are passed to strengthen it. Hell, the DMCA is enough already. Suddenly renting digital information is possible.
And what if one year then, your college decides that it's cheaper to rent ebooks than have you buy real thing? Maybe they don't even publish the dead tree version anymore. Palladium and the DMCA lock out you out from real control of the information. In fact, the ebook manufacturer--given the ease of EULAs with this distribution system, might even decide to make a little more profit. After all who's to stop him? He makes you agree in the EULA not share the information you rent. Suddenly Stallman's vision of the future has come true. Brave new world, what not.
Ah, but it's the data structures in C++ that I love. Once you know how to use the STL, you'll find that it's quite the tool for data structures.
Of course--choose the language to fit the problem. And for the most part, if you have a very simple application that you want to finish up very quickly, C# or Java or such can be very good. I find, however, that C++ is the best tool for a number of complicated things. And that's what interests me for the most part.
I own each of Meyer's books, and they are all wonderful. If you work with C++ in any sort of professional capacity get a hold of copies right now.
Hehehe--got me there. But the ctrl-c, ctrl-v really seems to be having some problems. At first I thought it was some sort of stuck key problem on the keyboard--that didn't turn out to be it though.
Goddamn cut and paste from the spell checker--mod the above post down. Anyone else been having problems with ctrl-c, ctrl-p, and Phoenix?
Godwin's law fails!
USENET authorities are disturbed by the failure of a law that some thought to be a lynchpin of internet discussion: Godwin's Law. Simply stated, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Beginning last week observers began to notice something was wrong. Says one 'lurker', "I came across this thread on abortion, you see. I started reading--and that's when I noticed something strange. Every post in the thread simply got better and better as each participant read the other's arguments and replied calmly. It was then when it hit me--no Nazi references anywhere. I went back to read it again, and I was sure--Godwin's Law has been broken."
The violation of Godwin's law is hailed by some as a doomsday scenario for USENET. "These threads will just keep going and going forever! There is nothing to stop them. Eventually it'll all just reach critical mass and collapse in on itself," says a popular USENET troll. Others don't see it as cataclysmic, put painful all the same. "World War II is a large part of the world's history--I don't want to see that forgotten," reads one post to alt.military.history.
Godwin's law fails!
USENET authorities are disturbed by the failure of a law that some thought to be a lynchpin of internet discussion: Godwin's Law. Simply stated, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Beginning last week observers began to notice something was wrong. Says one 'lurker', "I came across this thread on abortion, you see. I started reading--and that's when I noticed something strange. Every post in the thread simply got better and better as each participant read the other's arguments and replied calmly. It was then when it hit me--no Nazi references anywhere. I went back to read it again, and I was sure--Godwin's Law has been broken."
The violation of Godwin's law is hailed by some as a doomsday scenario for USENET. "These threads will just keep going and going forever! There is nothing to stop them. Eventually it'll all just reach critical mass and collapse in on itself," says a popular USENET troll. Others don't see it as Godwin's law fails! USENET authorities are disturbed by the failure of a law that some thought to be a lynchpin of internet discussion: Godwin's Law. Simply stated, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Beginning last week observers began to notice something was wrong. Says one 'lurker', "I came across this thread on abortion, you see. I started reading--and that's when I noticed something strange. Every post in the thread simply got better and better as each participant read the other's arguments and replied calmly. It was then when it hit me--no Nazi references anywhere. I went back to read it again, and I was sure--Godwin's Law has been broken." The violation of Godwin's law is hailed by some as a doomsday scenario for USENET. "These threads will just keep going and going forever! There is nothing to stop them. Eventually it'll all just reach critical mass and collapse in on itself," says a popular USENET troll. Others don't see it as cataclyismic, put painful all the same. "World War II is a large part of the world's history--I don't want to see that forgotten," reads one post to alt.military.history., put painful all the same. "World War II is a large part of the world's history--I don't want to see that forgotten," reads one post to alt.military.history.
The 2nd law is usually presented as a statement about multiplicity. You'd expect it to be violated over small systems for short time periods. That's the whole point about statistical laws--they're valid over long time periods where there are lots of events.
Sorry--I just had to be contrarian about a new "discovery" in physics for a bit.
David Weber's "War of Honor" came with a very cool CD. The CD contains a copy of the entire Baen Library, as well as all of the previous Honor Harrington books.
On the front of the CD is stated "This disk and its contents may be copied and shared but NOT sold."
I think that this is all very cool and encouraging. On the other hand, I'd like to point out that they don't have much legal ground for the "NOT sold" requirement. I can certainly sell the CD itself, it's my property. What they should have said was: "You are granted the right to copy and share this information, provided that you agree not to sell the copies."
And, unfortunately, the book sucked too. I enjoy politics. Real politics. 1000 pages of fictional politics falls flat in any number of ways. The other books in the series are very good though.
You use the one-dimensional potential well because you don't need to take angular momentum into account (which would require the 3-D Schrodinger equation). Think about modeling a baseball in freshman physics. You could do that in 3 dimensions--but you could also beat yourself over the head with a club because it's so much fun when you stop. You model the baseball in 2 dimensions, because that is mathematically equivalent. That doesn't mean that ballistic motion is 2-dimensional.
Personally, I think the word dimension should be banned from from all discussions of popular science. But hell, there are enough Ph.D.'s out there that shoot thier mouths off like they are unclear on the concept.
Actually the link I gave in my above post discussed the LNT model a great deal. Here it is if you missed it the first time. Moreover, your whyfiles had a number of large errors--such as the analysis of the thyroid cancer rate in the Ukraine. And a couple of short quotes about LNT at the end do not a "lack of understanding" make.
The LNT isn't just conservative--it's overwhelmingly, crushingly, conservative. It's like making your little kid put on a football helmet before going to his piano lesson. We have come an incredibly long way since the 1950's.
This would have been nice to know about before Christmas...
Very cool. One feature I'd like to see in the next version of this watch is some sort of hook-up to a computer that would let you record good data on long-term exposure. Still, I want one of these.
As far as measuring your total dosage goes, I might as well take this opportunity to inform everyone that government mandated radiation standards are mostly erroneous. By orders of magnitude even. We now know that low-level radiation is simply far less harmful (and far better understood) than we thought it was in the 1950's. Major reason is that the 1950's model is simply a straight line extrapolation from the known lethal dosage. Back then, that was a reasonable guess considering the knowledge of genetics at the time. Needless to say, our current understanding is quite different.
Corporations deserve the same rights as human beings?
But there is another problem with your reasoning. Where is the bright line between parody and misrepresentation? If there is only a gray area, you are going to have to wind up banning otherwise legal speech in order to protect Dow. That's not worth it.
A message...I don't know that it's even a complete sentence. I thought the bold just made it stand out from the rest of my post. You know, make it easy for people to see that it's a sig.
Sorry if the over-the-top emphasis on the letters made your eyes hurt. I'm sure that a couple asprin will make the headache go away by morning.
Oops...If they were prime, they would be easy to factor. You need to factor the products of some very large primes.
(The last post wasn't a mistake--it was my intentional FUD to keep the terrorist from figuring out RSA. Shhhh!)