I can only speak from my own experience: in my undergrad math program, we were required to take a two-semester sequence of physics. It just covered basic stuff like Newton's Laws, rotating rigid bodies, electrostatics, and magnetostatics. Yeah, we saw a PDE here and there, but only had to solve them in really simple situations. You could get the 4-year degree without taking any more physics than this. YMMV at other institutions.
Which is fine by me; I'm sure somebody who's really interested in pursuing a graduate degree in pure math doesn't care to be required to take additional physics any more than they would like having to take advanced philosophy or English literature. Those things are all there if you want them for a minor, of course, but only if you care to take them.
In my current applied math PhD program, we're only required to pick up a coherent sequence of courses from an area of application, and there are lots of areas of application that aren't heavily reliant on knowledge of physics. So it may not be so unusual to get to third year without seeing any significant amount of physics if you don't want to.
Of course, getting to the third year without seeing any "serious" physics and then bemoaning your lack of physics background to help you understand what the math is for seems like poor planning. Not that I'm the best planner in the world--I'm currently wishing I'd spent a little more time digging into linear algebra during my time as an undergrad...:P Sometimes it's hard to know what you should be interested in to make learning other things easier later on.
There can be a world of difference between graduate and undergraduate PDE courses; it's not like everything that's known about PDEs can be taught in a couple of undergraduate semesters. I expect most undergrad PDE courses are geared towards showing you the methods that work for a few classes of linear PDEs; a graduate course might be concerned with the analytical underpinning of those methods, or maybe about numerical and analytic techniques that are useful in solving classes of nonlinear PDEs, etc.
That being said, though, from the way the original question is worded, it sounds like it's the first time this person has seriously encountered PDEs. Not having this happen until the third year of a PnD program does seem a little odd.
PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality.
Hm, what a coincidence, I'm puzzled that they have yet to be substantively challenged on any vital issue.
Sorry pal, but that is what they teach in high school Algebra I/II classes as a stand-in for analytically solving equations.
Inquiring minds want to know: where the fuck do they teach this in Algebra I/II?
P.S. If you've got some way to analytically solve any constrained optimization problem with 50+ variables, there's probably a long line of people with medals and/or piles of cash to give you.
Although, I would imagine that were I still in high school, rather than two and a half years out of college, seeing things from the viewpoint of normal students would give me a much better grasp on campus life than the promotional propaganda filled with happy looking, so-called students, who are hired models pretending the part.
Since I don't have any mod points, I'll just have to say that this is the main reason I'd like to see this sort of thing succeed. I know not every negative thing posted there will be true of course, but that should just balance out all the "puppies, sunshine and rainbows" propaganda stuff that's not true, either.;)
Certainly, having a pile of unreviewed papers, or papers reviewed by people that don't know what the hell they're talking about, is mostly worthless.
Thanks for mentioning the "everybody does it for free because they want it on their resume" thing--I didn't know whether people that did reviews for journals were paid by the journal or not.
Has there been any effort to establish an open, reputation-based peer review system for papers? If not, are there big reasons it wouldn't work? (Apart from the vast effort required to screen out every nutjob with a "revolutionary new theory" that they will cling to no matter how much reality disagrees with them, that is.)
And why in the bloody hell would you rub their faces in the fact that you're a bisexual pagan during the hiring process? If that comes across as a negative to HR, it's your own attention-whoring fault -- not theirs.
Uh, it looked to me like Coraon said that being a bisexual pagan was none of their business, which (to me, at least) implies that's something Coraon wouldn't mention during a job interview. In no way did Coraon come across (to me) as an attention whore that liked to rub their religious and sexual preferences in prospective employers faces.
For what it's worth, I bought a dual-boot Panasonic Toughbook from EmperorLinux 5 years ago, and I'm still using it. I never had any issues with the machine (apart from the hard drive dying after 4 years, wasn't hard to replace), so I didn't get to see how their tech support was, but the manuals seemed pretty thorough and everything worked right out of the box. It's been in use for pretty much all 5 years at both work and school...definitely got my money's worth out of it.
The placebo effect is when you get the effects of having taken a medicine when you didn't really take it, so it would be beneficial because you could cure diseases, or maybe just symptoms, without actually needing an effective agent, just an agent that you believed to be effective.
If I understand correctly (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), the placebo effect is all about subjective measures of benefit. For example, if you give subjects a placebo pill for their back pain, and tell them it's a pain reliever, there's a measurable reduction in reported pain. However, if you give a placebo to people with an objectively measurable problem X, and tell them it's a cure for X, then there's a much smaller effect, or no effect at all.
...so we can't post embarrassing video on youtube or paste a jackass's head on the candidate or chop the speach apart and paste back together into something insanely funny.
Pffft...like DRM and/or not being able to view it in Linux is going to stop *that*!:)
Unlike a chemical rocket, a spacecraft using this engine would be able to get to orbit with some payload, and would not resemble "a disintegrating totem pole" getting there.
If by "get to orbit" you mean "take off from the ground and travel upward into orbit around the Earth," I don't think this engine is able to do that. Assuming this plot is correct, 10MW gives you 40 Newtons of thrust (less than 10 pounds) at maximum exhaust velocity. It's great for long trips (like to Mars) where you need as much impulse as possible for a given reaction mass, over a long period of time, but is completely useless for getting off the ground.
I think the last time I saw something that was obviously a bot outside of a battleground was almost 6 months ago. In the battlegrounds it seems there's almost always a couple of leeching bots, but (as far as I can tell) it's not nearly as bad as it was a year ago (and it's not like I'm gonna win any BG's on my alliance toon anyway, so a couple of leechers don't matter so much...:P)
I do play WoW quite a bit (maybe 10-15 hours a week), and I'm also an open source user and contributor. Maybe they'll send Richard Stallman to take away my open-source-zealot-club card, but I don't see any point in getting my knickers in a twist over Blizzard's stance on IP and open source. They provide an entertainment service, for Odin's sake--getting worked up over it is like raging about the price of popcorn at the movies, or the price of a music CD, IMHO.
Probably because nobody's seriously talking about creating a regulatory framework for them like physicians, lawyers, engineers, and (IIRC) accountants have. Any software project that is going to fuck up somebody's life or property in a bad way if it fails probably already has a physician, lawyer, engineer or accountant signing off on it so that somebody can officially take the blame if there's a problem.
I suspect we won't see any serious talk of regulating software designers or developers until there's some serious incident that injures or kills a lot of people, but that's just a wild guess. Were there any big events that led to the current forms of licensing of medical practitioners, lawyers, engineers, etc., or did those things just develop gradually over the decades/centuries?
If SETI ever detects a real, verified alien signal, as soon as I hear the news, I'm going to drop whatever I'm doing, and rush to see the comments on Slashdot. I can't imagine what the response would be if a project so (apparently) universally hated here actually turned up a positive result.
Not that I run SETI@home, plan to, or expect an actual SETI discovery to happen in my lifetime, if ever. It's just something on my "wouldn't it be funny to watch if..." list.
Please help me out here, does the author really think that kids in third world countries are going to be doing development work on these limited devices?
I think that was generally the idea, that the kids would be able to change almost anything they wanted in the user environment they were given.
Based on the quote below from the article the author really beleives that these devices should be open to tampering/fiddling. Does he think that if the device fails there will be a geek squad near by?
If I understood correctly, there was supposed to be a reset feature that would restore the original state of the OS if you really screwed it up, so that there needn't be any fear of allowing them to fiddle with things.
Are hacking skills of value when you live in a mud hut?
Again, if I understand correctly, the idea was to avoid putting up artificial barriers by assuming that kids have no need to poke and prod and see how things work. Maybe hacking skills will be of little interest and/or value to most kids, and for them the OLPC was supposed to be at least a container for a lot of textbook material, at a cost less than a big stack of textbooks. And, as a bonus, for the kids that find hacking on software interesting, maybe it's something that will help them.
If you think money is better spent on something else, please agitate in favor of that other option instead of railing against a program that (whatever you think of their chances of success are) is trying to provide education to people that can benefit from it.
If they're worried about who's in the theater, then it seems like they'd be more interested in the identity of those *buying* the tickets, no? Do they have prohibitions against giving the tickets away if you get them legitimately? Can I donate them to a charity auction, and do they send the Oscar Gestapo to the auction to fingerprint and photograph the winners at the charity auction?
If not, then why is Craigslist such a security threat?
As far as I understand it, the original intent of the Constitution was something along the lines of "this is a list of things the federal government is allowed to do, and if it's not mentioned here, they can't do it." So it's not an explicit bar against prohibiting gold ownership; it's probably that they couldn't bend the interpretation of one of their granted powers far enough to fit the gold ban into it.
Of course, IANAL, so take my oversimplified guess with a grain of salt.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I can only speak from my own experience: in my undergrad math program, we were required to take a two-semester sequence of physics. It just covered basic stuff like Newton's Laws, rotating rigid bodies, electrostatics, and magnetostatics. Yeah, we saw a PDE here and there, but only had to solve them in really simple situations. You could get the 4-year degree without taking any more physics than this. YMMV at other institutions.
Which is fine by me; I'm sure somebody who's really interested in pursuing a graduate degree in pure math doesn't care to be required to take additional physics any more than they would like having to take advanced philosophy or English literature. Those things are all there if you want them for a minor, of course, but only if you care to take them.
In my current applied math PhD program, we're only required to pick up a coherent sequence of courses from an area of application, and there are lots of areas of application that aren't heavily reliant on knowledge of physics. So it may not be so unusual to get to third year without seeing any significant amount of physics if you don't want to.
Of course, getting to the third year without seeing any "serious" physics and then bemoaning your lack of physics background to help you understand what the math is for seems like poor planning. Not that I'm the best planner in the world--I'm currently wishing I'd spent a little more time digging into linear algebra during my time as an undergrad... :P Sometimes it's hard to know what you should be interested in to make learning other things easier later on.
Ah, you're probably right; in that case, it's probably not too odd. :)
There can be a world of difference between graduate and undergraduate PDE courses; it's not like everything that's known about PDEs can be taught in a couple of undergraduate semesters. I expect most undergrad PDE courses are geared towards showing you the methods that work for a few classes of linear PDEs; a graduate course might be concerned with the analytical underpinning of those methods, or maybe about numerical and analytic techniques that are useful in solving classes of nonlinear PDEs, etc.
That being said, though, from the way the original question is worded, it sounds like it's the first time this person has seriously encountered PDEs. Not having this happen until the third year of a PnD program does seem a little odd.
p.s. No, you're not.
PopMech columnist Glenn Derene is puzzled that the candidates have yet to be challenged on a vital issue directly related to both those topics: Net neutrality.
Hm, what a coincidence, I'm puzzled that they have yet to be substantively challenged on any vital issue.
Oops, thanks. Integer problems are just as easily solvable by hand as problems posed in the reals, then?
Sorry pal, but that is what they teach in high school Algebra I/II classes as a stand-in for analytically solving equations.
Inquiring minds want to know: where the fuck do they teach this in Algebra I/II?
P.S. If you've got some way to analytically solve any constrained optimization problem with 50+ variables, there's probably a long line of people with medals and/or piles of cash to give you.
Although, I would imagine that were I still in high school, rather than two and a half years out of college, seeing things from the viewpoint of normal students would give me a much better grasp on campus life than the promotional propaganda filled with happy looking, so-called students, who are hired models pretending the part.
Since I don't have any mod points, I'll just have to say that this is the main reason I'd like to see this sort of thing succeed. I know not every negative thing posted there will be true of course, but that should just balance out all the "puppies, sunshine and rainbows" propaganda stuff that's not true, either. ;)
Certainly, having a pile of unreviewed papers, or papers reviewed by people that don't know what the hell they're talking about, is mostly worthless.
Thanks for mentioning the "everybody does it for free because they want it on their resume" thing--I didn't know whether people that did reviews for journals were paid by the journal or not.
Has there been any effort to establish an open, reputation-based peer review system for papers? If not, are there big reasons it wouldn't work? (Apart from the vast effort required to screen out every nutjob with a "revolutionary new theory" that they will cling to no matter how much reality disagrees with them, that is.)
TDS Is An Effing Joke
What are you? A soccer mom?
No wonder governments like censorship if people censor themselves.
A soccer mom with the user name "Skeetskeetskeet?" How likely is that?
And why in the bloody hell would you rub their faces in the fact that you're a bisexual pagan during the hiring process? If that comes across as a negative to HR, it's your own attention-whoring fault -- not theirs.
Uh, it looked to me like Coraon said that being a bisexual pagan was none of their business, which (to me, at least) implies that's something Coraon wouldn't mention during a job interview. In no way did Coraon come across (to me) as an attention whore that liked to rub their religious and sexual preferences in prospective employers faces.
For what it's worth, I bought a dual-boot Panasonic Toughbook from EmperorLinux 5 years ago, and I'm still using it. I never had any issues with the machine (apart from the hard drive dying after 4 years, wasn't hard to replace), so I didn't get to see how their tech support was, but the manuals seemed pretty thorough and everything worked right out of the box. It's been in use for pretty much all 5 years at both work and school...definitely got my money's worth out of it.
The placebo effect is when you get the effects of having taken a medicine when you didn't really take it, so it would be beneficial because you could cure diseases, or maybe just symptoms, without actually needing an effective agent, just an agent that you believed to be effective.
If I understand correctly (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), the placebo effect is all about subjective measures of benefit. For example, if you give subjects a placebo pill for their back pain, and tell them it's a pain reliever, there's a measurable reduction in reported pain. However, if you give a placebo to people with an objectively measurable problem X, and tell them it's a cure for X, then there's a much smaller effect, or no effect at all.
...so we can't post embarrassing video on youtube or paste a jackass's head on the candidate or chop the speach apart and paste back together into something insanely funny.
Pffft...like DRM and/or not being able to view it in Linux is going to stop *that*! :)
Radical tech solutions for....providing low-voltage DC to a gadget? Is there *really* some need for "outside the box" thinking for that?
Unlike a chemical rocket, a spacecraft using this engine would be able to get to orbit with some payload, and would not resemble "a disintegrating totem pole" getting there.
If by "get to orbit" you mean "take off from the ground and travel upward into orbit around the Earth," I don't think this engine is able to do that. Assuming this plot is correct, 10MW gives you 40 Newtons of thrust (less than 10 pounds) at maximum exhaust velocity. It's great for long trips (like to Mars) where you need as much impulse as possible for a given reaction mass, over a long period of time, but is completely useless for getting off the ground.
I think the last time I saw something that was obviously a bot outside of a battleground was almost 6 months ago. In the battlegrounds it seems there's almost always a couple of leeching bots, but (as far as I can tell) it's not nearly as bad as it was a year ago (and it's not like I'm gonna win any BG's on my alliance toon anyway, so a couple of leechers don't matter so much... :P)
I do play WoW quite a bit (maybe 10-15 hours a week), and I'm also an open source user and contributor. Maybe they'll send Richard Stallman to take away my open-source-zealot-club card, but I don't see any point in getting my knickers in a twist over Blizzard's stance on IP and open source. They provide an entertainment service, for Odin's sake--getting worked up over it is like raging about the price of popcorn at the movies, or the price of a music CD, IMHO.
<equip outfit="flame-retardant-suit"/>
Probably because nobody's seriously talking about creating a regulatory framework for them like physicians, lawyers, engineers, and (IIRC) accountants have. Any software project that is going to fuck up somebody's life or property in a bad way if it fails probably already has a physician, lawyer, engineer or accountant signing off on it so that somebody can officially take the blame if there's a problem.
I suspect we won't see any serious talk of regulating software designers or developers until there's some serious incident that injures or kills a lot of people, but that's just a wild guess. Were there any big events that led to the current forms of licensing of medical practitioners, lawyers, engineers, etc., or did those things just develop gradually over the decades/centuries?
If SETI ever detects a real, verified alien signal, as soon as I hear the news, I'm going to drop whatever I'm doing, and rush to see the comments on Slashdot. I can't imagine what the response would be if a project so (apparently) universally hated here actually turned up a positive result.
Not that I run SETI@home, plan to, or expect an actual SETI discovery to happen in my lifetime, if ever. It's just something on my "wouldn't it be funny to watch if..." list.
Oh, as far as I could tell, you were talking about fiddling with the software, not taking a screwdriver to the machine. Sorry.
Please help me out here, does the author really think that kids in third world countries are going to be doing development work on these limited devices?
I think that was generally the idea, that the kids would be able to change almost anything they wanted in the user environment they were given.
Based on the quote below from the article the author really beleives that these devices should be open to tampering/fiddling. Does he think that if the device fails there will be a geek squad near by?
If I understood correctly, there was supposed to be a reset feature that would restore the original state of the OS if you really screwed it up, so that there needn't be any fear of allowing them to fiddle with things.
Are hacking skills of value when you live in a mud hut?
Again, if I understand correctly, the idea was to avoid putting up artificial barriers by assuming that kids have no need to poke and prod and see how things work. Maybe hacking skills will be of little interest and/or value to most kids, and for them the OLPC was supposed to be at least a container for a lot of textbook material, at a cost less than a big stack of textbooks. And, as a bonus, for the kids that find hacking on software interesting, maybe it's something that will help them.
If you think money is better spent on something else, please agitate in favor of that other option instead of railing against a program that (whatever you think of their chances of success are) is trying to provide education to people that can benefit from it.
If they're worried about who's in the theater, then it seems like they'd be more interested in the identity of those *buying* the tickets, no? Do they have prohibitions against giving the tickets away if you get them legitimately? Can I donate them to a charity auction, and do they send the Oscar Gestapo to the auction to fingerprint and photograph the winners at the charity auction?
If not, then why is Craigslist such a security threat?
As far as I understand it, the original intent of the Constitution was something along the lines of "this is a list of things the federal government is allowed to do, and if it's not mentioned here, they can't do it." So it's not an explicit bar against prohibiting gold ownership; it's probably that they couldn't bend the interpretation of one of their granted powers far enough to fit the gold ban into it.
Of course, IANAL, so take my oversimplified guess with a grain of salt. ;)
Awesome, now I'm modded troll as well...hooray Slashdot!
WTF...somebody points out that the story is over a year old and it's modded troll? What the hell is wrong with you people?