Re:Correlation vs. Causality
on
BSA IDC FUD
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Brilliant!!! This also proves that software piracy increases life expectancy. After all, software piracy was hardly existent in the 1800's. Nowadays software piracy is abundant, and people can expect to live some thirty years longer. If software piracy was legal, we would be immortals...
Solution: Buy a laptop, nail it to the wall, and watch TV!
I was thinking about that actually (without the nails, though). Why have so many screens cluttering up your living quarters if one will do? But unfortunately TV cards for laptops are much more expensive than those for desktop computers.
There is a very large call for LCDs for laptops, and the laptop manufacturers get them at almost cost, then intergrate them into the laptops.
Now if I recall my Economics 101 correctly... high demand leads to higher prices, and low demand leads to lower prices. The market seems to go in exactly the opposite direction, though.
On a different note: How do laptop LCDs, stand-alone LCD displays, and LCD television screens compare in terms of viewing angle, brightness, contrast ratio, color accuracy and such? Maybe the laptop screens are simply of inferior quality. After all, the average life cycle of a laptop is maybe three years, but most people would want to keep their LCD monitor a bit longer than that.
Please, somebody mark the parent as "funny" instead of "interesting"! It's utter BS (if you want to learn something about synesthesia, try this site), but admittedly, it's quite hilarious.
Does anyone know if SuSE 8.2 supports LT winmodems? (I know... "ugh!", but my laptop came with one and I don't feel like spending extra money on a pcmcia card) This is pretty much the only point that keeps me with RedHat at the moment.
We cannot move on NK without China being OK with it. Well, we could, but then we'd have to deal with a very pissed off China.
With Iraq, on the other hand, we only have to deal with a horde of very pissed off Muslim fundamentalists that will flock into the arms of terrorist organizations.
While the people that are responsible for this war claim that their aim is to curb terrorism (which is certainly a noble goal), the effect of the war may just be the opposite. People in other islamic countries will feel threatened by the US. Terrorist and fundamentalist leaders are going to use the war on Iraq as ammunition for their anti-US rhetorics. Overall, terrorism may increase as a result of this war, not decrease.
No country in the world can seriously threaten the US, due to its military superiority. The biggest threat to US comes from anti-american sentiments throughout the world. Why is nobody talking about curbing these?
Well, it's too late now to discuss whether this war is a good idea. We can only hope that it will end with as few casualties as possible, and that our leaders will do a great job in rebuilding Iraq as a free country.
but that is their downfall.....never ending fun. not that i ever complained, bur my gpa and girlfriend sure did....oh well, at least i still have something of a gpa..
They fail, but pauls wife dies due to the speed of the pregnancy and delivery. The children grow up under the care of pauls wife
I know it's confusing, but let's go over this again: Chani, Paul's concubine and mother of his children, dies in the second book. Paul married Irulan for purely political reasons, and she doesn't give him any children.;-)
Mileage usually varies quite a bit when it comes to installing Linux on different machines. But the last time I installed a SuSE Linux distribution (which was version 7.3, so I might be a bit out of date here...) all I had to do was to make a boot floppy disk for FTP install, reboot, sit back and wait a while... no fiddling, everything worked out of the box. In my experience, an operating system install can't possibly be any easier. Installing new packages and updating existing ones is also done by point-and-click and works extremely smoothly for me. The only gripe I have is that SuSE doesn't support winmodems (unfortunately many laptops come with such an abomination), but that's more the manufacturer's fault for not disclosing the specs, I think... (on the other hand, why can RedHat support them, and SuSE can't?)
The focus here shouldn't be on the word gasses, but rather on impurities contained in the water. My impression is that they created the analogue of a supercooled gas: if you cool a gas very slowly and carefully below its condensation temperature, and there are no catalysts present, it may remain in a metastable gaseous phase. But as soon as it is disturbed (by the presence of impurities, for example) it will condense into a liquid state, which is the stable thermodynamic state at that temperature.
The oil-water mixture is probably also a metastable state. In the presence of any catalysts (in this case dissolved gases; in the case of biological systems this function could be taken over by proteins, salt ions, I-don't-know-what-else...) the oil molecules would condense and clot together. Oil droplets are thermodynamically stable only above a certain droplet size; the same is true for water droplets in the case of the supercooled gas. Without catalysts, the critical droplet size cannot be achieved.
Very true! And on the same note, unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material should not be called piracy in the first place. This is an anti-euphemism of sorts. Pirates are people that use vehement violence to capture ships, loot their treasures, and kill the crew. Not some college kids that care more about music than about copyright laws. This label takes a rather trivial issue (a little less dough in the pockets of big recording companies) and blows it out of proportion (affront to civilized society by criminal, blood-thirsty hordes of mp3 pirates). To attach this 'piracy' label to file sharing was a very clever move by the recording industry.
so I'd think that if those aminos ARE from Earth, they'd be from someplace strange, like a hydrothermal vent. How they would've gotten onto a meteor from there, who knows.
How about this: 10 billion years ago a gigantic asteroid hits earth, sending countless fragments of terran rock into space, many of them harbouring life in its early stages. Now, billions of years later, one of those galactic pieces of rubble happens to cross earth's path again. Hence the amino acids we found might be from earth's own past...
A former colleague, who now runs his own financial software company, told me that a very similar thing happened to his company. He received a letter from Microsoft, basically saying that his company has to round up the original media and license forms for all the Microsoft products they are using.
After consulting with his lawyer, he sent a reply to Microsoft along the following lines: "We would be very happy to assist you in this matter, but since your request would take up a considerable amount of time of our employees, we will have to charge you accordingly."
Microsoft's reply to this was: "Oh, well, never mind..."
Does anybody have similar experiences? It seems perfectly legitimate to charge for any such burden imposed by another company. I wonder if there's a profound legal basis, however.
I'm just waiting for the day when they construct a spaceship out of this material... with black dials on black background in the cockpit, illuminated by black lights. And then they gonna set it on remote, and crash it into the sun...
And why would sitting at a computer be any different to sitting in an aeroplane seat or sitting in ANY seat for that matter?
Because when sitting in front of a computer, at least you can easily stretch
your legs from time to time. The problem with airplane seats is that you barely have
enough room to wiggle your toes (depending on your height, of course, I'm 6'3'').
Maybe the blood clotting occurs when people play highly addictive games,
so that they simply forget to stretch their legs.
No. If they were more intelligent than humans,
they would also beat us at other games like Go, Bridge,
Civilization... Humans still hold a large edge over
computers in games where the player has a larger number
of possible moves than in chess, or where the game involves
psychology.
2) Computers can be made to play better chess than humans.
Yes. Certainly. Computers already beat most humans hands-down
at chess, and it is just a matter of time before the strongest will
falter. Chess is relatively easy for a computer since it is such a
well-structured game.
3) Computers can be programmed to beat Garry Kasparov.
No. I don't think this factor plays a major role, at least not in this match.
Kasparov was given several months to analyze Deep Junior, so he
probably would have discovered any "exploits" aimed solely against
his playing style. If Deep Junior can beat Kasparov, it can probably
beat any other human being.
4) Chess can be reduced to a set of mathematical computations, which a computer can then perform faster than a human.
No. Chess is a "hard" problem in terms of complexity. It is
impossible to calculate all variations until the end, to figure out the winner,
and it will remain impossible at least for the next half-century (if Moore's
Law holds...) The computer can look 10 or 15 moves ahead, but it also has to
know how to evaluate the 4 billion or so positions it sees there.
To do so, it has to use a form of "wisdom", an evaluation function, which
is implemented by its programmers. To completely reduce chess to mathematical
computation would mean to eliminate the need for such an evaluation
function, and with our present knowledge, it cannot be done.
deep junior can calculate 3-4 million moves per
second! how can garry possibly win?
In a nutshell: even with 3-4 million moves per second,
the computer cannot look ahead much more than, say,
12-15 moves. The branching factor is just too large, with
about 20 possible moves to choose from; the number of
positions grows exponentially with the number of moves.
Drawing from his vast experience and intuition,
however, Kasparov can sense, in certain situations, how
something he does now might affect the endgame 20
moves later. The computer has no chance to see this,
because its horizon is limited to 15 moves. Kramnik made
good use of this approach in two of his games against
Deep Fritz. Unfortunately he got carried away in the later
games. He could have beaten Fritz if he would have kept
his calm.
I think the problem is that making good fonts is just not as much fun
as writing your own kernel or your own desktop environment. In the
latter two cases, people get a lot of satisfaction out of cool features,
elegant technical solutions, or simply out of the fact that something
works, produces some output ("Look, it's alive!"). It's striving
for the bigger, better, more modern, more shiny, desktop or kernel
experience.
Creating or polishing a high-quality font, on the other hand, must
be an extremely tedious and repetitive experience. It's about accuracy,
about getting just the right amount of spacing between the 'm' and
the 'i', and about making the 'g' look just as tall as the 'o'. And after
you've spent countless hours on perfecting the look of the 'a' you
simply move on to the 'b'...
I don't mean to downplay the importance of high quality fonts,
rather the contrary. But I think that the reason why there haven't been
any high quality free fonts so far is... working on them is just not
very 'sexy'.
The fact that gravity decreases exponentially with distance means that even gravitational waves from extremely powerful sources, like binary neutron-star systems, are very weak when they get to Earth.
Gravity is a long-distance force that decreases as inverse distance squared. This is Newton's famous 1/r^2 law, and it remains unaltered by the theory of general relativity (after all, Newton's laws are just a limiting case of General Relativity.)
With a short-range gravitational force, decaying exponentially with distance, stable planetary orbits and galaxies, with their literally astronomical extent, could not exist.
13) Encourage powerful, monopolistic companies to rest on their fat assets (pun intended) and squelch any competition by their sheer size and market domination. Allow them to stamp out any potential competitors before they become a real threat to the established company. This will discourage innovation and widespread use of better products.
Jeez, someone should remove the stick from your butt! Yes, the poster mentions bonuses, but only as a side remark. To me it sounds like he's mainly offended by the utter tastelessness of the christmas gift. A company that wants to show some appreciation to their employees could at least go through the effort of selecting a nice christmas gift, even if it's just a box of chocolates or something like that. That would at least be a nice gesture. But a bobble head of the boss? C'mon! This strikes me as tasteless, arrogant, and silly! I'd pe pissed, too, and the Voodoo doll idea wouldn't seem so bad after all...
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Brilliant!!! This also proves that software piracy increases life expectancy. After all, software piracy was hardly existent in the 1800's. Nowadays software piracy is abundant, and people can expect to live some thirty years longer. If software piracy was legal, we would be immortals...
I was thinking about that actually (without the nails, though). Why have so many screens cluttering up your living quarters if one will do? But unfortunately TV cards for laptops are much more expensive than those for desktop computers.
Now if I recall my Economics 101 correctly... high demand leads to higher prices, and low demand leads to lower prices. The market seems to go in exactly the opposite direction, though.
On a different note: How do laptop LCDs, stand-alone LCD displays, and LCD television screens compare in terms of viewing angle, brightness, contrast ratio, color accuracy and such? Maybe the laptop screens are simply of inferior quality. After all, the average life cycle of a laptop is maybe three years, but most people would want to keep their LCD monitor a bit longer than that.
Please, somebody mark the parent as "funny" instead of "interesting"! It's utter BS (if you want to learn something about synesthesia, try this site), but admittedly, it's quite hilarious.
Does anyone know if SuSE 8.2 supports LT winmodems? (I know... "ugh!", but my laptop came with one and I don't feel like spending extra money on a pcmcia card) This is pretty much the only point that keeps me with RedHat at the moment.
With Iraq, on the other hand, we only have to deal with a horde of very pissed off Muslim fundamentalists that will flock into the arms of terrorist organizations.
While the people that are responsible for this war claim that their aim is to curb terrorism (which is certainly a noble goal), the effect of the war may just be the opposite. People in other islamic countries will feel threatened by the US. Terrorist and fundamentalist leaders are going to use the war on Iraq as ammunition for their anti-US rhetorics. Overall, terrorism may increase as a result of this war, not decrease.
No country in the world can seriously threaten the US, due to its military superiority. The biggest threat to US comes from anti-american sentiments throughout the world. Why is nobody talking about curbing these?
Well, it's too late now to discuss whether this war is a good idea. We can only hope that it will end with as few casualties as possible, and that our leaders will do a great job in rebuilding Iraq as a free country.
Wrong! That was YOUR downfall...
:-)
I know it's confusing, but let's go over this again: Chani, Paul's concubine and mother of his children, dies in the second book. Paul married Irulan for purely political reasons, and she doesn't give him any children. ;-)
Mileage usually varies quite a bit when it comes to installing Linux on different machines. But the last time I installed a SuSE Linux distribution (which was version 7.3, so I might be a bit out of date here...) all I had to do was to make a boot floppy disk for FTP install, reboot, sit back and wait a while... no fiddling, everything worked out of the box. In my experience, an operating system install can't possibly be any easier. Installing new packages and updating existing ones is also done by point-and-click and works extremely smoothly for me. The only gripe I have is that SuSE doesn't support winmodems (unfortunately many laptops come with such an abomination), but that's more the manufacturer's fault for not disclosing the specs, I think... (on the other hand, why can RedHat support them, and SuSE can't?)
1) Stop being so self-conscious. None of the stuff you're worrying about right now matters in the long run.
2) Don't even think about going into academics. Find something that you like doing and that pays a decent amount of money.
3) Brush your teeth and floss regularly.
The oil-water mixture is probably also a metastable state. In the presence of any catalysts (in this case dissolved gases; in the case of biological systems this function could be taken over by proteins, salt ions, I-don't-know-what-else...) the oil molecules would condense and clot together. Oil droplets are thermodynamically stable only above a certain droplet size; the same is true for water droplets in the case of the supercooled gas. Without catalysts, the critical droplet size cannot be achieved.
Very true! And on the same note, unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material should not be called piracy in the first place. This is an anti-euphemism of sorts. Pirates are people that use vehement violence to capture ships, loot their treasures, and kill the crew. Not some college kids that care more about music than about copyright laws. This label takes a rather trivial issue (a little less dough in the pockets of big recording companies) and blows it out of proportion (affront to civilized society by criminal, blood-thirsty hordes of mp3 pirates). To attach this 'piracy' label to file sharing was a very clever move by the recording industry.
Why? Don't you know that Deep Blue only faked his dismantlement, and is now secretly running both IBM and the CIA?
How about this: 10 billion years ago a gigantic asteroid hits earth, sending countless fragments of terran rock into space, many of them harbouring life in its early stages. Now, billions of years later, one of those galactic pieces of rubble happens to cross earth's path again. Hence the amino acids we found might be from earth's own past...
Just a thought...
After consulting with his lawyer, he sent a reply to Microsoft along the following lines: "We would be very happy to assist you in this matter, but since your request would take up a considerable amount of time of our employees, we will have to charge you accordingly."
Microsoft's reply to this was: "Oh, well, never mind..."
Does anybody have similar experiences? It seems perfectly legitimate to charge for any such burden imposed by another company. I wonder if there's a profound legal basis, however.
I'm just waiting for the day when they construct a spaceship out of this material... with black dials on black background in the cockpit, illuminated by black lights. And then they gonna set it on remote, and crash it into the sun...
Because when sitting in front of a computer, at least you can easily stretch your legs from time to time. The problem with airplane seats is that you barely have enough room to wiggle your toes (depending on your height, of course, I'm 6'3''). Maybe the blood clotting occurs when people play highly addictive games, so that they simply forget to stretch their legs.
No. If they were more intelligent than humans, they would also beat us at other games like Go, Bridge, Civilization... Humans still hold a large edge over computers in games where the player has a larger number of possible moves than in chess, or where the game involves psychology.
2) Computers can be made to play better chess than humans.
Yes. Certainly. Computers already beat most humans hands-down at chess, and it is just a matter of time before the strongest will falter. Chess is relatively easy for a computer since it is such a well-structured game.
3) Computers can be programmed to beat Garry Kasparov.
No. I don't think this factor plays a major role, at least not in this match. Kasparov was given several months to analyze Deep Junior, so he probably would have discovered any "exploits" aimed solely against his playing style. If Deep Junior can beat Kasparov, it can probably beat any other human being.
4) Chess can be reduced to a set of mathematical computations, which a computer can then perform faster than a human.
No. Chess is a "hard" problem in terms of complexity. It is impossible to calculate all variations until the end, to figure out the winner, and it will remain impossible at least for the next half-century (if Moore's Law holds...) The computer can look 10 or 15 moves ahead, but it also has to know how to evaluate the 4 billion or so positions it sees there. To do so, it has to use a form of "wisdom", an evaluation function, which is implemented by its programmers. To completely reduce chess to mathematical computation would mean to eliminate the need for such an evaluation function, and with our present knowledge, it cannot be done.
In a nutshell: even with 3-4 million moves per second, the computer cannot look ahead much more than, say, 12-15 moves. The branching factor is just too large, with about 20 possible moves to choose from; the number of positions grows exponentially with the number of moves.
Drawing from his vast experience and intuition, however, Kasparov can sense, in certain situations, how something he does now might affect the endgame 20 moves later. The computer has no chance to see this, because its horizon is limited to 15 moves. Kramnik made good use of this approach in two of his games against Deep Fritz. Unfortunately he got carried away in the later games. He could have beaten Fritz if he would have kept his calm.
Creating or polishing a high-quality font, on the other hand, must be an extremely tedious and repetitive experience. It's about accuracy, about getting just the right amount of spacing between the 'm' and the 'i', and about making the 'g' look just as tall as the 'o'. And after you've spent countless hours on perfecting the look of the 'a' you simply move on to the 'b'...
I don't mean to downplay the importance of high quality fonts, rather the contrary. But I think that the reason why there haven't been any high quality free fonts so far is... working on them is just not very 'sexy'.
Why? What is wrong with the tried-and-true diet of chips and coke?
Gravity is a long-distance force that decreases as inverse distance squared. This is Newton's famous 1/r^2 law, and it remains unaltered by the theory of general relativity (after all, Newton's laws are just a limiting case of General Relativity.)
With a short-range gravitational force, decaying exponentially with distance, stable planetary orbits and galaxies, with their literally astronomical extent, could not exist.
13) Encourage powerful, monopolistic companies to rest on their fat assets (pun intended) and squelch any competition by their sheer size and market domination. Allow them to stamp out any potential competitors before they become a real threat to the established company. This will discourage innovation and widespread use of better products.
hmm... I wonder why it's called Christmas then?
Jeez, someone should remove the stick from your butt! Yes, the poster mentions bonuses, but only as a side remark. To me it sounds like he's mainly offended by the utter tastelessness of the christmas gift. A company that wants to show some appreciation to their employees could at least go through the effort of selecting a nice christmas gift, even if it's just a box of chocolates or something like that. That would at least be a nice gesture. But a bobble head of the boss? C'mon! This strikes me as tasteless, arrogant, and silly! I'd pe pissed, too, and the Voodoo doll idea wouldn't seem so bad after all...