Helen Fraser and her husband lived just over 400 metres from a turbine. She says the sound and strobing effect caused her to develop headaches and body aches, and her caused her husband's diabetes to get worse.
Somehow I'm having a hard time imagining how diabetes is influenced by a big windmill. I suppose she could be ranting and raving about the turbine so much that her husband's stress levels affected his diabetes.
I assume you studied computer science or software engineering.... Humans have an innate sense of logic (well, most of them), but that's not enough for you to/really/ understand mathematical proofs, especially if you're talking about something like inductive proofs by contradiction.
No, I was a math major. I made it through my undergrad and masters, with several graduate classes in real and complex analysis that were nothing but proofs, with induction, contradiction, etc. I got A's in those classes. I suppose I just picked up logic by example, the way someone might figure out how physical tools work without sitting in a formal class about them.
and as for the internet.... he kind of has a point. most of the 'development' is about 'doing it because we can', not 'why are we doing this at all'
That's not just the case with the internet--your statement could describe any advancement ever made in the history of human civilization (or any adaptation ever made by life, for that matter). I doubt people sat around and debated the virtue of using fire, brass, iron, gunpowder, etc., before they started using them. Somebody noticed, "hey, I can do X," and then some people made use of X and some people didn't. If it was generally beneficial to use X, we kept doing it.
Since we've got 3 or 4 billion years of "doing it because we can" built into our makeup, it seems a little strange to think we'd be inclined to do anything else. Yes, maybe we *should* do something else with advancements that could kill most or all of us, but I bet that we won't.
My point is that understanding the formal rules of logic is fundamental to being able to understand proofs.
Really? I couldn't tell you what the formal rules of logic are to save my life, and as far as I know nobody ever tried to teach me what they were. I've not had any trouble with proofs, though.
So I shouldn't have enjoyed all those proofs in geometry and trig, then? Dammit, why doesn't anybody tell me these things--here I was growing up without knowing there's only one proper order in which to learn things!
But the US doesn't even bother with treaties for such things nowadays, does it? We just call it an "agreement," and then we all act like it's a treaty without all that pesky two-thirds consent by the Senate. Hell, one of my former senators from Virginia didn't even *know* that you need a Senate supermajority to ratify a treaty.
What sorts of movements will you still be able to make that could be used as input? It seems that some people have been fairly creative in adapting remaining limited movement to operate computers.
How does he use the computer he has now--what sort of inputs is he using? I can imagine there's not many places to go buy a complete solution off a shelf, and even then it's probably as expensive as hell (and not covered by insurance or government aid).
My question to Slashdot: Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable, what's keeping you from volunteering and working with geeks who are already disabled?
Nice -- throw out the guilt card right there at the end, when I'm just about to decide whether or not following the link is worth my time. That really makes me want to read more of what you have to say, yessir.
If I was going to work on hardware or software for disabled people, I'd be more inclined to work on stuff for people with little or no voluntary muscle control. What fraction of disabled geeks also can't speak?
Turn off the search filtering, and click on "Images" or "Videos" in the left nav panel (in other words, do the same thing you'd have to do for Google to show you pictures/videos of naked women).
I mean 10s or 100s of millions of people pooling there money together for a single cause could financially trump any corporation.
Of course they could, and do (sometimes). I think the the problem is that there's hundreds and thousands of monied interests flooding legislators and executives with lobbyists, and in most cases there's just not enough "public outrage bandwidth" to support the effort required to push back any significant fraction of them.
I mean, how many unrelated grass-roots efforts can the average Joe support before he's out of time and/or money? Most of us are too busy earning a living to do very much.
This analogy is just dumb. This is a free product. Obviously the analogy would have the water company saying, "Sure, we can remove that for free."
Well, if this free AV product resembles any of the for-pay AV products I've used, I'd have to modify the analogy some more. In that case, the water company would say, "Sure, we'll come install a device in your house to remove the odor. It will only take up a couple hundred square feet of your house, and it has some moving parts that will only get in your way a few times a day while you're trying to go about your daily activities. But, hey, it's free!"
Well, if (1) the TV antenna will be pouring out 1MW whether there's phones charging off it or not, and (2) charging your phone from the TV station eliminates one or more permanently plugged-in wall warts per cell phone, then, yes, I would think that's environmentally friendly.
Even if eliminating a couple of wall warts really doesn't help with pollution or anything, I would still like to have this sort of charger in my phone just for the convenience of not having to plug it in as often.
Of the billions of lines of code that runs on most of the world's fastest supercomputers, 99% of it is in FORTRAN. This will NEVER CHANGE. PERIOD. Anybody who tries to change this, should be shown the door. Granted, most if it is still Fortran77, but it works, runs the fastests and the easist to maintain.
That's all well and good for existing applications, but if somebody comes along with a new language and tools that let me write a new number-crunching app with a lot less effort than the current set of languages, then all the Fortran/C/etc. fans can go fly a kite.
Yeah, maybe Chapel/X10/Fortress won't be massively successful, maybe they won't knock Fortran off the roost, but if they're introducing new ideas and trying to make parallel coding a little easier and a little more foolproof for us not-so-uber coders, then I'm all for it. Something tells me the Fortran standards group will gladly assimilate any cool ideas that come out of DARPA's research effort.
Yeah, this is really just what we need: for somebody to come along and encumber the future of parallel processing with a metric fuckload of patents. Thanks, Microsoft!
You'd think that somebody that's light-years ahead when it comes to parallel processing would rule the roost in the Top 500 supercomputer list. I'm sure there's a good explanation, though....just waiting to hear it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Being the user of many different *nix systems, I hate to say it, but we're so behind the curve on so many things.
Could you come up with real specific examples?
Thanks, Buzz Killington!
Helen Fraser and her husband lived just over 400 metres from a turbine. She says the sound and strobing effect caused her to develop headaches and body aches, and her caused her husband's diabetes to get worse.
Somehow I'm having a hard time imagining how diabetes is influenced by a big windmill. I suppose she could be ranting and raving about the turbine so much that her husband's stress levels affected his diabetes.
I assume you studied computer science or software engineering. ... Humans have an innate sense of logic (well, most of them), but that's not enough for you to /really/ understand mathematical proofs, especially if you're talking about something like inductive proofs by contradiction.
No, I was a math major. I made it through my undergrad and masters, with several graduate classes in real and complex analysis that were nothing but proofs, with induction, contradiction, etc. I got A's in those classes. I suppose I just picked up logic by example, the way someone might figure out how physical tools work without sitting in a formal class about them.
and as for the internet.... he kind of has a point. most of the 'development' is about 'doing it because we can', not 'why are we doing this at all'
That's not just the case with the internet--your statement could describe any advancement ever made in the history of human civilization (or any adaptation ever made by life, for that matter). I doubt people sat around and debated the virtue of using fire, brass, iron, gunpowder, etc., before they started using them. Somebody noticed, "hey, I can do X," and then some people made use of X and some people didn't. If it was generally beneficial to use X, we kept doing it.
Since we've got 3 or 4 billion years of "doing it because we can" built into our makeup, it seems a little strange to think we'd be inclined to do anything else. Yes, maybe we *should* do something else with advancements that could kill most or all of us, but I bet that we won't.
Well said. I presume you're a teacher; if so, your students are lucky to have you. :)
My point is that understanding the formal rules of logic is fundamental to being able to understand proofs.
Really? I couldn't tell you what the formal rules of logic are to save my life, and as far as I know nobody ever tried to teach me what they were. I've not had any trouble with proofs, though.
I wasn't responding to The Fine Paper, I was responding to a comment made by a person on Slashdot (where we don't read The Fine Paper anyway).
And I really doubt I would have enjoyed seeing proofs more if I'd learned the rules of logic first.
So I shouldn't have enjoyed all those proofs in geometry and trig, then? Dammit, why doesn't anybody tell me these things--here I was growing up without knowing there's only one proper order in which to learn things!
Just getting into low orbit requires ~24kmph, which (for me, anyway) seems very fast.
"You wanna know my vision? Dollar signs! Money! You think i want to go to the stars? I don't even like to fly!" - Zefram Cochrane
But the US doesn't even bother with treaties for such things nowadays, does it? We just call it an "agreement," and then we all act like it's a treaty without all that pesky two-thirds consent by the Senate. Hell, one of my former senators from Virginia didn't even *know* that you need a Senate supermajority to ratify a treaty.
What sorts of movements will you still be able to make that could be used as input? It seems that some people have been fairly creative in adapting remaining limited movement to operate computers.
How does he use the computer he has now--what sort of inputs is he using? I can imagine there's not many places to go buy a complete solution off a shelf, and even then it's probably as expensive as hell (and not covered by insurance or government aid).
Are there any voluntary motions you can make that aren't affected by intention tremor?
My question to Slashdot: Given that some form of disability is almost inevitable, what's keeping you from volunteering and working with geeks who are already disabled?
Nice -- throw out the guilt card right there at the end, when I'm just about to decide whether or not following the link is worth my time. That really makes me want to read more of what you have to say, yessir.
If I was going to work on hardware or software for disabled people, I'd be more inclined to work on stuff for people with little or no voluntary muscle control. What fraction of disabled geeks also can't speak?
Turn off the search filtering, and click on "Images" or "Videos" in the left nav panel (in other words, do the same thing you'd have to do for Google to show you pictures/videos of naked women).
Then they need to produce said document with evidence of the guy's signature, or leave him alone.
I mean 10s or 100s of millions of people pooling there money together for a single cause could financially trump any corporation.
Of course they could, and do (sometimes). I think the the problem is that there's hundreds and thousands of monied interests flooding legislators and executives with lobbyists, and in most cases there's just not enough "public outrage bandwidth" to support the effort required to push back any significant fraction of them.
I mean, how many unrelated grass-roots efforts can the average Joe support before he's out of time and/or money? Most of us are too busy earning a living to do very much.
Why the heck does the law make an imessuarably small dent in a megacorporations profits more important than fraud being perpetrated against a citizen?
Because the megacorporations can afford more lobbyists than most citizens? (Sorry for answering the rhetorical question :)
This analogy is just dumb. This is a free product. Obviously the analogy would have the water company saying, "Sure, we can remove that for free."
Well, if this free AV product resembles any of the for-pay AV products I've used, I'd have to modify the analogy some more. In that case, the water company would say, "Sure, we'll come install a device in your house to remove the odor. It will only take up a couple hundred square feet of your house, and it has some moving parts that will only get in your way a few times a day while you're trying to go about your daily activities. But, hey, it's free!"
Well, if (1) the TV antenna will be pouring out 1MW whether there's phones charging off it or not, and (2) charging your phone from the TV station eliminates one or more permanently plugged-in wall warts per cell phone, then, yes, I would think that's environmentally friendly.
Even if eliminating a couple of wall warts really doesn't help with pollution or anything, I would still like to have this sort of charger in my phone just for the convenience of not having to plug it in as often.
Of the billions of lines of code that runs on most of the world's fastest supercomputers, 99% of it is in FORTRAN. This will NEVER CHANGE. PERIOD. Anybody who tries to change this, should be shown the door. Granted, most if it is still Fortran77, but it works, runs the fastests and the easist to maintain.
That's all well and good for existing applications, but if somebody comes along with a new language and tools that let me write a new number-crunching app with a lot less effort than the current set of languages, then all the Fortran/C/etc. fans can go fly a kite.
Yeah, maybe Chapel/X10/Fortress won't be massively successful, maybe they won't knock Fortran off the roost, but if they're introducing new ideas and trying to make parallel coding a little easier and a little more foolproof for us not-so-uber coders, then I'm all for it. Something tells me the Fortran standards group will gladly assimilate any cool ideas that come out of DARPA's research effort.
Yeah, this is really just what we need: for somebody to come along and encumber the future of parallel processing with a metric fuckload of patents. Thanks, Microsoft!
You'd think that somebody that's light-years ahead when it comes to parallel processing would rule the roost in the Top 500 supercomputer list. I'm sure there's a good explanation, though....just waiting to hear it. :)