The Mathworld entry on the Pythagorean theorem is surprisingly engaging - even including pop culture references...
which seems to be exactly the kind of thing that wikipedia would mark for deletion. Ironic enough.
But mathworld IP status seems strange - user contributed articles to the original site ended up in the CRC book with serious copyright restrictions and an eventual lawsuit which required Wolfram Research to entangle any further contributions with (unspecified, or at least hard to find) IP restrictions. Not that I don't use mathworld (and planet math) as a reference, but I'd quite like wikipedia to continue making proofs and other serious mathematical explanations available.
Not only are proofs as important as the theorems, Often the proofs are rather more important. Really theorems are just construction blocks and are useful mostly as part of more proofs. Certainly there are proofs that stand on their own and are interesting in and of themselves, but thats not the usual case.
Obviously if the universe is mostly spaghetti code, it is a clear indication that the Creator must have been somehow involved in, well, spaghetti. Like say the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Talk about Occam's Razor - there is no simpler hypothesis available. Pasta -> Pasta. QED.
Ah, the counter-script. Great fun. I used it before the DNC list went operational and eventually developed several variations. I think I managed to really disturb some of the operators (try asking them for their names, cities, home addresses and numbers some time).
I'm interested in this deal, but would like more technical specs. In part because I have specific ideas about how I'd like to use one and would like to know if it will work for what I want. Is there a page somewhere (I don't see one quickly) detailing what is and is not in the machine?
I keep thinking it would be fun to offer a randomizing service for discount cards. Get a web site somewhere and have people mail you their discount card with a self-addressed stamped envelope. Pull one out of a box and return that, and drop the one you got into a box. The very paranoid could do this every month or two. Make it very hard to track anyone's purchases.
Of course, then your name might get associated with someone who is buying strange stuff. But if that occurred in another state, it would probably be easy to show it had nothing to do with you. Of course the supermarket chain would be likely to never want to sell anything to you again.
I also wonder how long such a site would be in existence before the stores hired legal hit men to take it down in court.
I suspect we've far from paid for it. It seems all too likely that we'll be paying for the current administration for many years in fairly painful ways. I hope I'm wrong.
I do wonder though if Bush can pardon himself. Since the power of the pardon seems pretty sweeping, I suppose so, but it just seems even more wrong than blanket pardons for every ass-kissing loyalist in the administration.
Seems to me I've been reading a lot recently about people who have been convicted and then found to be innocent (in various ways). There are a bunch of factors here - many prosecutors gain (promotions, publicity...) from convictions, so it is in their interest to convict people - and a dubious conviction is probably better than no conviction. (Not saying that they do it deliberately, though some probably do, more that they convince themselves that the person is really guilty - perhaps even unconsciously.) Often, once the justice system has a good candidate for a crime they focus more on convicting that person than looking for other possibilities. Witnesses are often mistaken. Lots of times people who cannot afford good legal representation get convicted just on that factor.
I don't know anything about this particular case, but the implication that anyone convicted by a jury is really guilty seems unlikely.
Now there's an interesting page that bears thinking about. Of the most wanted articles 218 are random tennis players (mostly linked to by the same group of pages), and 55 are on Texas legislative sessions (again linked to by the same group of pages (but not the same group of pages that link to the tennis players)).
It is the tragedy of the commons. The tragedy is that no one is better off after the commons is abused, and the commons is public perception of what GB (or MB) means, and the size of the drivers they are purchasing.
Actually, I believe that the "tragedy of the commons" pertains to a number of individuals making rational decisions and by so doing ruining the "commons". The wikipedia article backs this up (I think - I've not had my morning coffee yet).
A couple of times I've gone to wikipedia to look something up - perhaps trivia in someones view, but of interest to me at the moment and found the page "marked for possible deletion", or I've found a page I remember reading had been removed. One locally relevant example was on "slashdot trolls". Was this earthshakingly important information? No. But it did collect in one place a bunch of data that might well have been useful to someone looking at the sociology of trolling (and similar phenonema) on the internet.
While I find the improvement in general quality in wikipedia a good thing, I also find the removal of some of the "less important" information to be seriously regrettable. So while I've given wikipedia money in the past, and while I find wikipedia to be an increasingly valuable tool, I suspect this time I'll give it a pass.
It boils down to the fact that the number of lives saved isn't worth it to the US taxpayer, or at least the ones that vote.
Most taxpayers are already paying for the war and associated expenses. I suspect many would be not displeased to put money into actually saving troops rather than (to pick a couple of examples) paying mercenary armies who don't pay their own taxes, or paying corrupt contractors building the US embassy with (semi-)slave labor, or paying the CIA to run secret prisons where they can torture with impunity, or paying Haliburton so Cheney can make a profit.
Yup, looks like a big chunk of their business is in helping spammers say they're not spamming. Lawyers and spammers - find one and you find the other - and the neighborhood always smells bad.
Upgrade should not touch your/home. If you do a new install (I had to with the release candidate version a week or two back because I didn't have enough free space on/), you'll need to pick the manual partitioning method - but it is all pretty much point and click.
The RC was the easiest Unix (not just linux) install I've ever done (and I've been doing Unix installs for mumblety-mumblety years now) with the possible exception of a MacOS X install. The worst part was waiting for everything to load so I could check it on reboot (having done installs where after an hour or so of loading resulted in an unbootable machine and a retry or two or three). Restricted drivers (for NVidia and Broadcom wireless) were trivial.
I did have some troubles loading in updates after the fact (loading the million or so oddball packages I had installed previously), but these were not likely to be of concern to most users (for example loading "ocaml-core" failed).
Could work well - especially if there were a way to compare torrented downloads and direct downloads - so that if there were only a couple of people downloading a package, it could revert to http or ftp.
Last time I looked, the House and Senate had subpoena power....
A few contempt citations should clarify the issue...
From the way things are going, Bush would refuse to allow them to testify based on "executive privilege and the separation of powers". This would spend some time travelling up to the Supreme court - long enough to allow the very-short-attention-span congresscritters to forget. If the Supreme court did rule against Bush he could still tell his minions to refuse to testify and pardon them immediately on issue of contempt citations. Bingo, a congress that can do nothing.
I also interviewed at google and agree completely. The questions were not only college exam type, but the college exam type where the instructor knows the One True Answer and will accept only that. And I was easily the oldest person in the room at lunch and got very odd looks (and overheard a couple of comments about my age).
Don't bother applying there if you're over about 35.
Does this make them evil? No. It does make them more than a bit shortsighted and it indicates that the quality of the management is not what it should be. Still their search is great.
Slashdot Mirror
which seems to be exactly the kind of thing that wikipedia would mark for deletion. Ironic enough.
But mathworld IP status seems strange - user contributed articles to the original site ended up in the CRC book with serious copyright restrictions and an eventual lawsuit which required Wolfram Research to entangle any further contributions with (unspecified, or at least hard to find) IP restrictions. Not that I don't use mathworld (and planet math) as a reference, but I'd quite like wikipedia to continue making proofs and other serious mathematical explanations available.
Not only are proofs as important as the theorems, Often the proofs are rather more important. Really theorems are just construction blocks and are useful mostly as part of more proofs. Certainly there are proofs that stand on their own and are interesting in and of themselves, but thats not the usual case.
Not that I believe in it or all that, but it is a great quote (and applies to all of us at one point or another).
Wordstar dot commands?
Heretic! Clearly God intended us to use TeX and LaTeX.
Obviously if the universe is mostly spaghetti code, it is a clear indication that the Creator must have been somehow involved in, well, spaghetti. Like say the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Talk about Occam's Razor - there is no simpler hypothesis available. Pasta -> Pasta. QED.
Ah, the counter-script. Great fun. I used it before the DNC list went operational and eventually developed several variations. I think I managed to really disturb some of the operators (try asking them for their names, cities, home addresses and numbers some time).
Puns count, but eunuchs don't tend to contribute lots of genetic material themselves.
I'm interested in this deal, but would like more technical specs. In part because I have specific ideas about how I'd like to use one and would like to know if it will work for what I want. Is there a page somewhere (I don't see one quickly) detailing what is and is not in the machine?
But then too :
Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
I keep thinking it would be fun to offer a randomizing service for discount cards. Get a web site somewhere and have people mail you their discount card with a self-addressed stamped envelope. Pull one out of a box and return that, and drop the one you got into a box. The very paranoid could do this every month or two. Make it very hard to track anyone's purchases.
Of course, then your name might get associated with someone who is buying strange stuff. But if that occurred in another state, it would probably be easy to show it had nothing to do with you. Of course the supermarket chain would be likely to never want to sell anything to you again.
I also wonder how long such a site would be in existence before the stores hired legal hit men to take it down in court.
I suspect we've far from paid for it. It seems all too likely that we'll be paying for the current administration for many years in fairly painful ways. I hope I'm wrong.
I do wonder though if Bush can pardon himself. Since the power of the pardon seems pretty sweeping, I suppose so, but it just seems even more wrong than blanket pardons for every ass-kissing loyalist in the administration.
Only as long as it remains legal to encrypt your mail.
Seems to me I've been reading a lot recently about people who have been convicted and then found to be innocent (in various ways). There are a bunch of factors here - many prosecutors gain (promotions, publicity...) from convictions, so it is in their interest to convict people - and a dubious conviction is probably better than no conviction. (Not saying that they do it deliberately, though some probably do, more that they convince themselves that the person is really guilty - perhaps even unconsciously.) Often, once the justice system has a good candidate for a crime they focus more on convicting that person than looking for other possibilities. Witnesses are often mistaken. Lots of times people who cannot afford good legal representation get convicted just on that factor.
I don't know anything about this particular case, but the implication that anyone convicted by a jury is really guilty seems unlikely.
Now there's an interesting page that bears thinking about. Of the most wanted articles 218 are random tennis players (mostly linked to by the same group of pages), and 55 are on Texas legislative sessions (again linked to by the same group of pages (but not the same group of pages that link to the tennis players)).
Actually, I believe that the "tragedy of the commons" pertains to a number of individuals making rational decisions and by so doing ruining the "commons". The wikipedia article backs this up (I think - I've not had my morning coffee yet).
A couple of times I've gone to wikipedia to look something up - perhaps trivia in someones view, but of interest to me at the moment and found the page "marked for possible deletion", or I've found a page I remember reading had been removed. One locally relevant example was on "slashdot trolls". Was this earthshakingly important information? No. But it did collect in one place a bunch of data that might well have been useful to someone looking at the sociology of trolling (and similar phenonema) on the internet.
While I find the improvement in general quality in wikipedia a good thing, I also find the removal of some of the "less important" information to be seriously regrettable. So while I've given wikipedia money in the past, and while I find wikipedia to be an increasingly valuable tool, I suspect this time I'll give it a pass.
Most taxpayers are already paying for the war and associated expenses. I suspect many would be not displeased to put money into actually saving troops rather than (to pick a couple of examples) paying mercenary armies who don't pay their own taxes, or paying corrupt contractors building the US embassy with (semi-)slave labor, or paying the CIA to run secret prisons where they can torture with impunity, or paying Haliburton so Cheney can make a profit.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.....
(Can't believe I'm the first one to respond with that. Of course by now I'm probably not. )
Yup, looks like a big chunk of their business is in helping spammers say they're not spamming. Lawyers and spammers - find one and you find the other - and the neighborhood always smells bad.
Upgrade should not touch your /home. If you do a new install (I had to with the release candidate version a week or two back because I didn't have enough free space on /), you'll need to pick the manual partitioning method - but it is all pretty much point and click.
The RC was the easiest Unix (not just linux) install I've ever done (and I've been doing Unix installs for mumblety-mumblety years now) with the possible exception of a MacOS X install. The worst part was waiting for everything to load so I could check it on reboot (having done installs where after an hour or so of loading resulted in an unbootable machine and a retry or two or three). Restricted drivers (for NVidia and Broadcom wireless) were trivial.
I did have some troubles loading in updates after the fact (loading the million or so oddball packages I had installed previously), but these were not likely to be of concern to most users (for example loading "ocaml-core" failed).
Could work well - especially if there were a way to compare torrented downloads and direct downloads - so that if there were only a couple of people downloading a package, it could revert to http or ftp.
From the way things are going, Bush would refuse to allow them to testify based on "executive privilege and the separation of powers". This would spend some time travelling up to the Supreme court - long enough to allow the very-short-attention-span congresscritters to forget. If the Supreme court did rule against Bush he could still tell his minions to refuse to testify and pardon them immediately on issue of contempt citations. Bingo, a congress that can do nothing.
Perhaps they'll be blocked by Koza's patents on genetic programming.
I also interviewed at google and agree completely. The questions were not only college exam type, but the college exam type where the instructor knows the One True Answer and will accept only that. And I was easily the oldest person in the room at lunch and got very odd looks (and overheard a couple of comments about my age).
Don't bother applying there if you're over about 35.
Does this make them evil? No. It does make them more than a bit shortsighted and it indicates that the quality of the management is not what it should be. Still their search is great.