I see the same problem on many web pages. I've adjusted the fonts in the browser so I can read things easily and then some web designer seems to believe that nobody would ever do that, so their layout breaks. I used to email people with screenshots, but it never seemed to do much good. If designers would just lay things out with dimensions specified in ems rather than pixels much of this would not be a problem.
Then again there are the flash sites where the user has no control at all. Though the mozilla flash blocker does handle those well.
You really haven't been paying attention have you?
The "TOP of the pyramid in the election process" is clearly the courts, followed by the party currently in power in your area, followed by the two major parties in general, followed by the media - then maybe you. Maybe.
Remember, the government has the right to conceal whatever it wants from you via classification, to lie to you (check out the court decisions), to toss out your ballot if it does not like it, (and on and on and on). And of course, to toss you in secret prisons without notifying anyone, and without court review.
Letting Diebold manipulate (er, "run") the elections is relatively minor as these things go.
"Renegade government agencies will not be able to dictate"
... puts white envelope to head, considers a moment, and proclaims that
poster is probably working hard to get a job as a corporate shill (AKA Public Relations Person).
Maybe he's just reluctant to put himself through that kind of
pain - lots of blood taken and who knows what else.
And then to have some greedy doctor or drug company patent the
resulting drugs and sell them to the world's AIDS patients
for billions and billions. Including his HIV+ partner.
I, personally, hope he helps out - but I hope he does it after
consulting a bunch of lawyers and finding some way to ensure
that the drug companies don't ride his blood to profits.
I think it would be best if we always bought physical
copies of software in stores and insisted on opening them and reading the
EULA's -- in the store -- on every purchase. Of course, if the EULA
is not something you can agree to you can refuse to accept it before
you pay. It would be even more fun to add
a few minor modifications to a printed copy of the EULA and getting the
store manager to sign off on it (as an agent of the developer/distributer).
... the Bush administration obviously has quite a bit of respect for privacy.
After all they worked very, very hard to protect the privacy of Harriet Miers work.
And, after all, that privacy represented the privacy of every american taxpayer who paid taxes to support Miers in doing this, so by keeping all that information secret, they were helping out each and every person's individual privacy.
You are making a fairly fundamental mistake - that math is defined by calculus, or geometry, or one of those other things you were conditioned to dislike in high school by mathophobes.
Math is not those things. Math is a collection of ways of thinking about things. And if you are using those ways of thinking, or any of the rules that hide behind them, you're thinking mathematically.
Perhaps the most important part of mathematics is the proof. Proofs are ways to convince yourself (and others) that you thought about the problem in the right way. And programming is all about proofs. Every time you write a loop and convince yourself it works, you're doing an inductive proof.
I like the characterization by Juris Hartmanis - offered, he says, half in jest, that "computer science is the engineering of mathematics".
Perhaps you'd like a more practical and less abstract notion though....
Essentially all programming is just practical algebra - it just uses slightly different rules.
It all hinges on the notion, that you can abstract a thing to a name ("x") and manipulate that name in ways that are common to all of the things of the same kind.
That computer science in many, many fields (other than simple web servers) depends on mathematics in (sometimes very) deep ways, is also pretty clear to those who look at the field in any deeper way than "I never use maths" - category theory is important in the idea of types, calculus in anything involving moving objects (like many computer games), linear algebra in graphics, automata theory in just how computers work, and the list goes on and on and on....
And to top it off, even if you never do any of this other stuff (or prefer to believe that you do not), graph theory permeates the field, and even if you don't do Hamiltonian circuits, you're using and manipulating graphs every time you build a tree (like that file system you're using).
I'm curious about the quote from Lady Bracknell.
A well spoken lady indeed and well worth quoting - but so much so that it is hard to pick out any one quote worthy (so to speak) of being quoted in the context of Perl.
However, looking at a copy of the play online I discover: "Three addresses always inspire confidence. But certainly that pertains more to C than Perl.
Now they can (um) persuade the major computer vendors to offer the "Vista Basic" as their standard - make it $5 or so to the vendor and $50 on the open market and vendors will be able to cut the prices of computer systems (with windows pre-installed) quite a bit. In all likelihood this would increase the number of systems sold.
But of course the "Basic" version should do nothing but IE and email. Minimal (if any) media support. Minimal (if any) security support. For some people (who mostly use a computer to browse the web and get email) this might even be a very good deal.
Then anyone who wants to do anything will have to upgrade to a better version - and that upgrade can be made nicely expensive. Upgrades from that to anything higher would also be expensive. Computer vendors could offer the upgraded version at even higher profit margins.
So every computer sold will result in the sale of at least two versions of the OS - Basic and one of the more powerful systems.
And if they really wanted to put the screws to you, they could ensure that Office (and the like) would only run on one of the more expensive versions.
Stanislaw Lem wrote a great story (actually a fictional book review) called "Non Serviam" (found in his collection of fictional reviews : "A Perfect Vacuum") in which precisely this is done and the scientist running the experiment eavesdrops on his artificial creations discussing the nature of God.
An excellent read (as are all the pieces in "A Perfect Vacuum").
But, it is also possible that this kind of experiment will help us to figure out how the human brain works. So that this experiment might be one of the requirements of such understanding.
I you are using LaTeX, use bibtex to manage the bibliography. It is not only easy to use, but can produce bibliographies in a variety of formats that are requested/required by various professional publications.
I think that citeseer and other online resources often provide bibliographic information in bibtex format.
I think there are also ways to export/import various bibliographic formats into bibtex as well, which makes it easy to use bibliographies that are already compiled.
Two of the current justices were appointed by Clinton, the others by Reagan, Ford and Bush.
So the "whinning" (is that a sad, begging noise, or a horsey noise? Or what?) by those who do not share the conservative viewpoint of seven out of the nine justices may well be justified.
Of course, according to
this part of the problem is that you are all not buying new machines soon enough. You should all push forward your purchases to keep MS solvent (er, afloat, um, er...)
The idea is that a computer is intelligent if it can hold a conversation with a human such that it is indistinguishable from a conversation with a real human.
RIDICULOUS.
Nonsense.
The Turing test is really a very good test as it does not rely on any predefined notions of how intelligence works (as you do in later paragraphs), but on an operational test. Furthermore, it is not a measure of conversational ability (per se) so much as a measure of how well the program can seem to be human. (And, to respond to a further statement in your post, it is a pattern recognition system (as well as a pattern generation system)).
Ultimately it depends on a limiting definition, but one that is very reasonable - that the only "system" that we know that is intelligent is human, that essentially all humans communicate verbally (one way or another) and that therefore,
such communication is probably an intrinsic part of human intelligence. Is this likely to be a "universal" definition of intelligence? No. But we can certainly reframe the Turing test (or discard it) when (if) we encounter alien intelligences that helps broaden the definition. Of course, if they can't (or won't) converse with us (somehow) are we even likely to notice them and believe they are intelligent?
That the Loebner contest is not a good example of a Turing test does not change the underlying validity of the test itself. Just as a rigged (for instance) footrace does not invalidate footraces in general.
The fallacy - that intelligence in programs be measured by "how it works" - is relatively common among AI researchers many of whom decide that their own particular interest is an essential ingredient in how an intelligent program would work and thus rule out anything that does not work that way.
In fact, Windows XP SP1 with AVG *and* a software firewall ran office and home apps faster...
Faster how?
In particular, how did you measure "run faster"? Time to respond to a keypress? In an empty office document or one with 100 pages that need to be reformatted? Were you running with only one application active at a time, was it full screen mode?
Not that I don't believe that Windows runs MS Office faster than FreeBSD. Or even that Windows runs Open Office faster. I'm just curious as to how you measured this. Mostly because I suspect that given any particular set of criteria, any given application, and any given pair of OSs, someone could tweak the OSs to make one system run the application faster than the other.
If you're looking to decide if a one pixel wide red line around a menu entry works better than a one pixel wide green line, it won't much matter if you use Java or C#.
If you'd like to develop new ideas in UI's and really experiment with different ways to handle them, probably neither Java nor C# will really help much.
But squeak (a smalltalk implementation) might. You should at least give it a serious look.
Of course there are other possibilities (self, raw X windows...) but squeak looks like a good one to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I see the same problem on many web pages. I've adjusted the fonts in the browser so I can read things easily and then some web designer seems to believe that nobody would ever do that, so their layout breaks. I used to email people with screenshots, but it never seemed to do much good. If designers would just lay things out with dimensions specified in ems rather than pixels much of this would not be a problem. Then again there are the flash sites where the user has no control at all. Though the mozilla flash blocker does handle those well.
The NY Times (reg req and all) has a story covering this that seems worth reading. They say RMS is a "person of emphatic views".
On the subject of elections and electronic voting machines, this report, from the US GAO is worth reading.
The "TOP of the pyramid in the election process" is clearly the courts, followed by the party currently in power in your area, followed by the two major parties in general, followed by the media - then maybe you. Maybe.
Remember, the government has the right to conceal whatever it wants from you via classification, to lie to you (check out the court decisions), to toss out your ballot if it does not like it, (and on and on and on). And of course, to toss you in secret prisons without notifying anyone, and without court review.
Letting Diebold manipulate (er, "run") the elections is relatively minor as these things go.
"renegades and pirates and thieves, oh my!"
I suspect that if this guy is really going to sue over the bad reviews, he would be equally likely to sue if Amazon dropped his book.
And then to have some greedy doctor or drug company patent the resulting drugs and sell them to the world's AIDS patients for billions and billions. Including his HIV+ partner.
I, personally, hope he helps out - but I hope he does it after consulting a bunch of lawyers and finding some way to ensure that the drug companies don't ride his blood to profits.
Ramen!
I think it would be best if we always bought physical copies of software in stores and insisted on opening them and reading the EULA's -- in the store -- on every purchase. Of course, if the EULA is not something you can agree to you can refuse to accept it before you pay. It would be even more fun to add a few minor modifications to a printed copy of the EULA and getting the store manager to sign off on it (as an agent of the developer/distributer).
And, after all, that privacy represented the privacy of every american taxpayer who paid taxes to support Miers in doing this, so by keeping all that information secret, they were helping out each and every person's individual privacy.
I suspect if you are wrong about this, you're wrong about more.
"sell it to some registered sex offender."
Thats no problem, just make it illegal to sell anything to a registered sex offender.
Oh, wait, what if the person is not registered?
But for true obscurity, go back a few more years to find "The Flock" and their album "Dinosaur Swamp"
Math is not those things. Math is a collection of ways of thinking about things. And if you are using those ways of thinking, or any of the rules that hide behind them, you're thinking mathematically.
Perhaps the most important part of mathematics is the proof. Proofs are ways to convince yourself (and others) that you thought about the problem in the right way. And programming is all about proofs. Every time you write a loop and convince yourself it works, you're doing an inductive proof.
I like the characterization by Juris Hartmanis - offered, he says, half in jest, that "computer science is the engineering of mathematics".
Perhaps you'd like a more practical and less abstract notion though....
Essentially all programming is just practical algebra - it just uses slightly different rules. It all hinges on the notion, that you can abstract a thing to a name ("x") and manipulate that name in ways that are common to all of the things of the same kind.
That computer science in many, many fields (other than simple web servers) depends on mathematics in (sometimes very) deep ways, is also pretty clear to those who look at the field in any deeper way than "I never use maths" - category theory is important in the idea of types, calculus in anything involving moving objects (like many computer games), linear algebra in graphics, automata theory in just how computers work, and the list goes on and on and on....
And to top it off, even if you never do any of this other stuff (or prefer to believe that you do not), graph theory permeates the field, and even if you don't do Hamiltonian circuits, you're using and manipulating graphs every time you build a tree (like that file system you're using).
However, looking at a copy of the play online I discover :
"Three addresses always inspire confidence.
But certainly that pertains more to C than Perl.
Now they can (um) persuade the major computer vendors to offer the "Vista Basic" as their standard - make it $5 or so to the vendor and $50 on the open market and vendors will be able to cut the prices of computer systems (with windows pre-installed) quite a bit. In all likelihood this would increase the number of systems sold.
But of course the "Basic" version should do nothing but IE and email. Minimal (if any) media support. Minimal (if any) security support. For some people (who mostly use a computer to browse the web and get email) this might even be a very good deal.
Then anyone who wants to do anything will have to upgrade to a better version - and that upgrade can be made nicely expensive. Upgrades from that to anything higher would also be expensive. Computer vendors could offer the upgraded version at even higher profit margins.
So every computer sold will result in the sale of at least two versions of the OS - Basic and one of the more powerful systems.
And if they really wanted to put the screws to you, they could ensure that Office (and the like) would only run on one of the more expensive versions.
An excellent read (as are all the pieces in "A Perfect Vacuum").
But, it is also possible that this kind of experiment will help us to figure out how the human brain works. So that this experiment might be one of the requirements of such understanding.
I think that citeseer and other online resources often provide bibliographic information in bibtex format.
I think there are also ways to export/import various bibliographic formats into bibtex as well, which makes it easy to use bibliographies that are already compiled.
On the other hand, I agree about congress.
Of course, according to this part of the problem is that you are all not buying new machines soon enough. You should all push forward your purchases to keep MS solvent (er, afloat, um, er...)
Isn't that Wendy's new Logo?
RIDICULOUS.
Nonsense.
The Turing test is really a very good test as it does not rely on any predefined notions of how intelligence works (as you do in later paragraphs), but on an operational test. Furthermore, it is not a measure of conversational ability (per se) so much as a measure of how well the program can seem to be human. (And, to respond to a further statement in your post, it is a pattern recognition system (as well as a pattern generation system)).
Ultimately it depends on a limiting definition, but one that is very reasonable - that the only "system" that we know that is intelligent is human, that essentially all humans communicate verbally (one way or another) and that therefore, such communication is probably an intrinsic part of human intelligence. Is this likely to be a "universal" definition of intelligence? No. But we can certainly reframe the Turing test (or discard it) when (if) we encounter alien intelligences that helps broaden the definition. Of course, if they can't (or won't) converse with us (somehow) are we even likely to notice them and believe they are intelligent?
That the Loebner contest is not a good example of a Turing test does not change the underlying validity of the test itself. Just as a rigged (for instance) footrace does not invalidate footraces in general.
The fallacy - that intelligence in programs be measured by "how it works" - is relatively common among AI researchers many of whom decide that their own particular interest is an essential ingredient in how an intelligent program would work and thus rule out anything that does not work that way.
Faster how?
In particular, how did you measure "run faster"? Time to respond to a keypress? In an empty office document or one with 100 pages that need to be reformatted? Were you running with only one application active at a time, was it full screen mode?
Not that I don't believe that Windows runs MS Office faster than FreeBSD. Or even that Windows runs Open Office faster. I'm just curious as to how you measured this. Mostly because I suspect that given any particular set of criteria, any given application, and any given pair of OSs, someone could tweak the OSs to make one system run the application faster than the other.
If you'd like to develop new ideas in UI's and really experiment with different ways to handle them, probably neither Java nor C# will really help much.
But squeak (a smalltalk implementation) might. You should at least give it a serious look. Of course there are other possibilities (self, raw X windows...) but squeak looks like a good one to me.