> It's all been tried before and it never works because programming is not maths.
Actually all computer science (with the possible subset of computer architecture, which is engineering) is applied mathematics, including the subset of programming.
Wasn't it Don Knuth that compared writing a computer program using a specific language to proving a mathematical theorem using a specific set of axioms?
Eventually programming comes down to boolean operations and base two arithmetic. Sounds like math to me.
Re:If you *really* want to get at telemarketeers.
on
Spammer Gets Spammed
·
· Score: 1
I've done this, too. It's actually quite effective. I had one telemarketer go "Whatever..." after the third round of
Hiragana (for Native Words and inflections) and Katakana (for Foreign Words and emphasis) are syllabaries: they can be considered akin to alphabets.
Kanji ARE Chinese characters, with all of the associated complications, including identificationa and dictionary complexities (radical tables, anyone?)
It's common knowledge that whenever you get two or more CS grad students together, the conversation will inevitably drift to the same topic: automatic weapons. Lately, we've noticed that whenever we attend a CS party, picnic, or bullsession, we always hear the same questions and discussions, usually from the younger grad students:
When I switched from guncotton to standard ball powder on my.223 loads, the gas ports on my M16 would clog like you wouldn't believe. Steer clear of that stuff.
You haven't cleared an ejection port jam until you've cleared one in the Hill district at 4:00 AM on a Saturday morning.
I want to mount an M60 in front of the sun roof of my Tercel, but the mounting bracket wasn't drilled for import cars. How did Josh Bloch do his?
What exactly are those special 'conference rounds' that Newell hand loads before AAAI every year?
Some of my friends at the MIT AI Lab don't like M203's because the grenade launcher adds too much weight, but I wouldn't have gotten out of IJCAI-85 in one piece if it hadn't been for those 40mm flechette rounds. What do you think?
Do you have to be a god-damned tenured professor to get teflon rounds at this place?
Does the 'reasonable person principle' cover hosing down a member of the Soar project after he's used the phrase 'cognitively plausible' for the fifteenth time in a 20 minute conference talk?
Where did Prof. Vrsalovic get that Kalashnikov AK-47?
I used to use Dri-Slide to lube my M16. How come my advisor says Dri-Slide is for momma's boys and Stanford profs?
Does the way Jon Webb keeps flicking the safety of his Mac-10 on and off at thesis defenses make you nervous, too?
In short, there is a lot of concern in this department for the proper care, handling and etiquette of automatic weapons. So as a service to the department, we are starting a two week daily series on "The Care and Handling of Your M16A1." Every day for the next two weeks, we will post on the wall outside our office the day's helpful hint on care and maintenance of that good old departmental standby: the M16A1. Our thanks to the US Army, whose training manuals we have shamelessly cribbed for material.
We would like to encourage other knowledgeable members of the CS community to share their expertise in a similar fashion. There is a real need for this kind of dialogue in the department. The new students come in here every fall, and are totally unequipped to handle the realities of graduate student life at CMU. Computability theory and lexical scoping are fine things to know about, but they just don't cut the mustard when somebody from the Psych department opens up on you with an Ingram set to full auto.
-the friendly automatic weapons enthusiasts of SkyCave1, Olin, Derek, and Allan
Research for research's sake is the only way to produce revolutionary results.
Look at it this way:
- Why do smart people get into research? To make money? Maybe, but most get into it because they enjoy solving difficult problems that others haven't solved before.
- How are these research problems formulated? Two methods prevail. Business needs and the researcher's interests.
- Business needs are all well and good, but the real breakthroughs tend to come from those projects that the researcher thought he would like to work on. The problem might not necessarily have an immediate business application, but because it's neat, he tends to put more effort into it and get more excited about it. Never underestimate the benefits of self-motivation.
- If you eliminate research for research's sake, you eliminate this source of innovation.
The elimination of this type of research is one of the main concerns of industry research labs (regardless of academia), and there are big fights going on concerning it.
I love to smoke. I love to smoke and I love to eat red meat. I love to eat raw fucking red meat. Nothing I like better than sucking down a hot steaming cheese burger and a butt at the same time. I love to smoke. I love to eat red meat. I'll only eat red meat that comes from cows who smoke, ok!? Special cows they grow in Virginia with voice boxes in their necks.
I tried eating vegetarian. I feel like a wimp going into a restaurant. "What do you want to eat sir? Brocolli?" Brocolli's a side dish, folks. Always was, always will be, ok? When they ask me what I want, I say, "What do you think I want!? This is America. I want a bowl of raw red meat right now. Forget about that. Bring me a live cow over to the table. I'll carve off what I want and ride the rest home!
I gonna open up my own place. Open my own restaurant and get away from you people. I gonna open up a restaurant with two smoking sections; Ultra and Regular, ok? And we're not gonna have any tables or any chairs or any napkins. None of that pussy shit. Just a big wide open black space. And all we're gonna serve is raw meat, right on the bone! And only men are going to eat there, naked men, sitting around a big giant camp fire, and no men's room either. You have to piss, you mark your territory like a wolf! And if some guy has a heart attack from eating too much meat, fuck him, we throw him in the fire! More meat for the other meat-eaters! Yeah!
Because you gotta have goals. Because everybody in this room knows everybody who's quitting. You all have that friend who's quitting it. You know what I mean? The guys quitting it, "I quit smoking. I quit drugs. I quit drinking. I quit meat, and I feel great. I get up in the morning and have a nice big bowl of oat bran. I go to the bathroom for three and a half hours. I have another bowl of oat bran. I go back in the bathroom for six more hours. All I do is eat and shit, I'm gonna live forever! My colon is the strongest muscle in my body right now. I could pass Elvis through my colon right now."
And all these cereals they have, Cracklin' Oat Bran, and Horkin' Fiber Chunks, you know? Cereal used to come with a free prize. Now it comes with a free roll of toilet paper in every box. Guys get up on Sunday morning, "Forget about the New York Times, I'm gonna need the Bible. I got a big one brewing here." "Dad, there's a phone call!" "I'm on Genesis, God dammit! You tell 'em to call back after the creation!" People checking their own feces for fiber. You have too much free fucking time on your hands, ok.
Red meat, white meat, blue meat, meat-o-fucking-rama. You will eat it. Because not eating meat is a decision. Eating meat is an instinct! Yeah! And I know what it's about. "I don't want to eat the meat because I love the animals. I love the animals." Hey, I love the animals too. I love my doggy. He's so cute. My fluffy little dog.. He's so cute- There's the problem. We only want to save the cute animals, don't we? Yeah. Why don't we just have animal auditions. Line 'em up one by one and interview them individually. "What are you?" "I'm an otter." "And what do you do?" "I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands." "You're free to go." "And what are you?" "I'm a cow." "Get in the fucking truck, ok pal!" "But I'm an animal." "You're a baseball glove! Get on that truck!" "I'm an animal, I have rights!" "Yeah, here's yer fucking cousin, get on the fucking truck, pal!" We kill the cows to make jackets out of them and then we kill each other for the jackets we made out of the cows.
You will eat the meat folks, because this country was founded on two things. Meat, and war. You eat enough fucking meat, you wanna kill somebody. That's the way it works. That was the ultimate American dream. During that Persian Gulf War, I was sitting in my living room, naked, with a can of Budweiser and a three inch stake watching the war, live, on TV. I had a six foot erection with a giant cheese burger on the end of it. I ate so much meat during the war that by the time the war was over three weeks later, I was like, "No no no. We need to keep fighting. Make a couple of stops on our way home from the Persian Gulf. First stop! Vietnam! Surprise the fuck out of those people, huh?" "You make a movie?" "Not this time, pal!"
Personally, I think Mama Cass said it best when she said, "[Choking noises]" "All the leaves are [Choking noises]" "Monday [Choking noises]"
Having taken Japanese in college for three years, and having also taken Spanish and Chinese, I can say with confidence that becoming fluent in Japanese is one of the more challenging things that an English speaker can do on a rainy afternoon.
Where to start...
- Take two alphabets, and add over 1,900 Chinese characters.
- Most Chinese Characters can be pronounced in two or more ways (on and kun readings), and can be used in two different contexts. For example, one character often appears with some hiragana as an adjective with on pronounciation, and the same character can appear as part of a compound word with another pronounciation. The meanings will be similar, if you're lucky.
- Most grammatical concepts have no relation to anything found in English (Japanese is usually S-O-V).
I could go on, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is this:
Japanese is possibly as hard as it gets for English speakers to learn.
Yes, I saw the acknowledgement on the bottom of the page myself (about April 10), but supposedly this pertains to whomever can identify the source of the ciphertext, as opposed to deciphering it.
I remember hearing somewhere that this facility was no longer being used for the nefarious purposes (fun stuff like the F117, test flights of stolen MiGs, new radar systems, alien cryogenic storage) that earned the place its reputation.
There were even rumors that it was shut down because the level of radiation there was too intense.
The functions of the Groom Lake facility were supposedly moved to secret bases in places like Utah and Colorado.
Anybody heard anything? Or am I just watching the Discovery Channel waaaaaaaaay to much?
That's not my point. My point is that whenever you encounter a really difficult problem (the ones stated above, for example), a degree in the field can at least give you an idea of where to start looking. You might have seen something like that problem in passing during a class.
> How many people with BSs in CS do you know that are actually doing research?
MIT has a program called the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, or UROP for short. It allows undergraduates (even freshmen!) to participate in research.
The only problem I have with your statements is the tone, not the content. I'm just trying to say that although you are obviously very intelligent, having a degree would probably benefit you in more ways that just having a piece of paper, and maybe you were a bit quick to drop out.
That's all well and good, but after being involved in a bit of education myself (3 degrees), I've found that higher-level education is more than an information dump (if it's done right).
Education can allow you to see the errors of those who have gone before you so you don't repeat those mistakes. You know you've achieved enlightenment when you realize how shockingly little we really know about anything, and how we manage to make do anyway. You appear to have a long way to go before you reach that point my friend...
So while you're waiting to go the valley and make your millions, here are some problems you can work on to fill your time...
1) Solve all of the "research"-level problems in Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming".
2) Prove whether or not solutions can be obtained for NP-Complete problems.
3) Create a programming language that has the functional elegance of LISP, the systems programming ability of C, the type-checking system of ML, and objects like Java. Market it correctly so that it goes into wide use. Wallow in cash.
I breathlessly look forward to hearing from you...
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, no!
1) You can't win.
2) You can only break even on a cold day.
3) It never gets that cold.
What do you consider "visual"?
One of the Java demos has an interactive sorter that performs Quicksort.
CLR or Knuth Vol 3. tell you on paper what a quicksort algorithm is. I have to read the paper to "visualize" that algorithm.
How about a flowchart?
> It's all been tried before and it never works because programming is not maths.
Actually all computer science (with the possible subset of computer architecture, which is engineering) is applied mathematics, including the subset of programming.
Wasn't it Don Knuth that compared writing a computer program using a specific language to proving a mathematical theorem using a specific set of axioms?
Eventually programming comes down to boolean operations and base two arithmetic. Sounds like math to me.
I've done this, too. It's actually quite effective. I had one telemarketer go "Whatever..." after the third round of
"Hello, this is Spumco.."
"Hello?"
"Yes sir, we are offering..."
"Hello?!?"
"Sir, can you hear me? I'm with Spu..."
"HELLO?"
"What-everrr..." CLICK
Hehehe
Christ, this is so wrong it isn't even funny.
Japanese has three character classifications:
Hiragana (for Native Words and inflections) and Katakana (for Foreign Words and emphasis) are syllabaries: they can be considered akin to alphabets.
Kanji ARE Chinese characters, with all of the associated complications, including identificationa and dictionary complexities (radical tables, anyone?)
Sheesh.
Quoted from Olin Shivers' page at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ shivers/autoweapons.html
.223 loads, the gas ports on my M16 would clog like you wouldn't believe. Steer clear of that stuff.
It's common knowledge that whenever you get two or more CS grad students together, the conversation will inevitably drift to the same topic: automatic weapons. Lately, we've noticed that whenever we attend a CS party, picnic, or bullsession, we always hear the same questions and discussions, usually from the younger grad students:
When I switched from guncotton to standard ball powder on my
You haven't cleared an ejection port jam until you've cleared one in the Hill district at 4:00 AM on a Saturday morning.
I want to mount an M60 in front of the sun roof of my Tercel, but the mounting bracket wasn't drilled for import cars. How did Josh Bloch do his?
What exactly are those special 'conference rounds' that Newell hand loads before AAAI every year?
Some of my friends at the MIT AI Lab don't like M203's because the grenade launcher adds too much weight, but I wouldn't have gotten out of IJCAI-85 in one piece if it hadn't been for those 40mm flechette rounds. What do you think?
Do you have to be a god-damned tenured professor to get teflon rounds at this place?
Does the 'reasonable person principle' cover hosing down a member of the Soar project after he's used the phrase 'cognitively plausible' for the fifteenth time in a 20 minute conference talk?
Where did Prof. Vrsalovic get that Kalashnikov AK-47?
I used to use Dri-Slide to lube my M16. How come my advisor says Dri-Slide is for momma's boys and Stanford profs?
Does the way Jon Webb keeps flicking the safety of his Mac-10 on and off at thesis defenses make you nervous, too?
In short, there is a lot of concern in this department for the proper care, handling and etiquette of automatic weapons. So as a service to the department, we are starting a two week daily series on "The Care and Handling of Your M16A1." Every day for the next two weeks, we will post on the wall outside our office the day's helpful hint on care and maintenance of that good old departmental standby: the M16A1. Our thanks to the US Army, whose training manuals we have shamelessly cribbed for material.
We would like to encourage other knowledgeable members of the CS community to share their expertise in a similar fashion. There is a real need for this kind of dialogue in the department. The new students come in here every fall, and are totally unequipped to handle the realities of graduate student life at CMU. Computability theory and lexical scoping are fine things to know about, but they just don't cut the mustard when somebody from the Psych department opens up on you with an Ingram set to full auto.
-the friendly automatic weapons enthusiasts of SkyCave1, Olin, Derek, and Allan
You, sir, are an idiot.
Research for research's sake is the only way to produce revolutionary results.
Look at it this way:
- Why do smart people get into research? To make money? Maybe, but most get into it because they enjoy solving difficult problems that others haven't solved before.
- How are these research problems formulated? Two methods prevail. Business needs and the researcher's interests.
- Business needs are all well and good, but the real breakthroughs tend to come from those projects that the researcher thought he would like to work on. The problem might not necessarily have an immediate business application, but because it's neat, he tends to put more effort into it and get more excited about it. Never underestimate the benefits of self-motivation.
- If you eliminate research for research's sake, you eliminate this source of innovation.
The elimination of this type of research is one of the main concerns of industry research labs (regardless of academia), and there are big fights going on concerning it.
Trust me, I work in one of them.
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to RMS.
Caution: RMS may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
RMS Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
Do not use RMS on concrete.
Discontinue visit with RMS if any of the following occurs:
Itching
Vertigo
Dizziness
Tingling in extremities
Loss of balance or coordination
Slurred speech
Temporary blindness
Profuse sweating
Heart palpitations
If RMS begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.
RMS may stick to certain types of skin.
When not in use, RMS should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration...
Failure to do so relieves the relatives of RMS, the FSF, and www.gnu.org, of any and all liability.
Ingredients of RMS include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
RMS has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is also being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.
Do not taunt RMS.
RMS comes with a lifetime guarantee.
RMS!
ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!
Heh heh...
http://www.claymath.org/prize_pr oblems/p_vs_np.htm
I'll be sure to tell Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie when I see 'em.
Christ
It's my evil robot nemesis, Mr. Tin!
I lie awake at night lest he sneak into my bedchamber and inject me with a serum to make me stupid!
Curse you, Tin!
I love to smoke. I love to smoke and I love to eat red meat. I love to eat raw fucking red meat. Nothing I like better than sucking down a hot steaming cheese burger and a butt at the same time. I love to smoke. I love to eat red meat. I'll only eat red meat that comes from cows who smoke, ok!? Special cows they grow in Virginia with voice boxes in their necks.
I tried eating vegetarian. I feel like a wimp going into a restaurant. "What do you want to eat sir? Brocolli?" Brocolli's a side dish, folks. Always was, always will be, ok? When they ask me what I want, I say, "What do you think I want!? This is America. I want a bowl of raw red meat right now. Forget about that. Bring me a live cow over to the table. I'll carve off what I want and ride the rest home!
I gonna open up my own place. Open my own restaurant and get away from you people. I gonna open up a restaurant with two smoking sections; Ultra and Regular, ok? And we're not gonna have any tables or any chairs or any napkins. None of that pussy shit. Just a big wide open black space. And all we're gonna serve is raw meat, right on the bone! And only men are going to eat there, naked men, sitting around a big giant camp fire, and no men's room either. You have to piss, you mark your territory like a wolf! And if some guy has a heart attack from eating too much meat, fuck him, we throw him in the fire! More meat for the other meat-eaters! Yeah!
Because you gotta have goals. Because everybody in this room knows everybody who's quitting. You all have that friend who's quitting it. You know what I mean? The guys quitting it, "I quit smoking. I quit drugs. I quit drinking. I quit meat, and I feel great. I get up in the morning and have a nice big bowl of oat bran. I go to the bathroom for three and a half hours. I have another bowl of oat bran. I go back in the bathroom for six more hours. All I do is eat and shit, I'm gonna live forever! My colon is the strongest muscle in my body right now. I could pass Elvis through my colon right now."
And all these cereals they have, Cracklin' Oat Bran, and Horkin' Fiber Chunks, you know? Cereal used to come with a free prize. Now it comes with a free roll of toilet paper in every box. Guys get up on Sunday morning, "Forget about the New York Times, I'm gonna need the Bible. I got a big one brewing here." "Dad, there's a phone call!" "I'm on Genesis, God dammit! You tell 'em to call back after the creation!" People checking their own feces for fiber. You have too much free fucking time on your hands, ok.
Red meat, white meat, blue meat, meat-o-fucking-rama. You will eat it. Because not eating meat is a decision. Eating meat is an instinct! Yeah! And I know what it's about. "I don't want to eat the meat because I love the animals. I love the animals." Hey, I love the animals too. I love my doggy. He's so cute. My fluffy little dog.. He's so cute- There's the problem. We only want to save the cute animals, don't we? Yeah. Why don't we just have animal auditions. Line 'em up one by one and interview them individually. "What are you?" "I'm an otter." "And what do you do?" "I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands." "You're free to go." "And what are you?" "I'm a cow." "Get in the fucking truck, ok pal!" "But I'm an animal." "You're a baseball glove! Get on that truck!" "I'm an animal, I have rights!" "Yeah, here's yer fucking cousin, get on the fucking truck, pal!" We kill the cows to make jackets out of them and then we kill each other for the jackets we made out of the cows.
You will eat the meat folks, because this country was founded on two things. Meat, and war. You eat enough fucking meat, you wanna kill somebody. That's the way it works. That was the ultimate American dream. During that Persian Gulf War, I was sitting in my living room, naked, with a can of Budweiser and a three inch stake watching the war, live, on TV. I had a six foot erection with a giant cheese burger on the end of it. I ate so much meat during the war that by the time the war was over three weeks later, I was like, "No no no. We need to keep fighting. Make a couple of stops on our way home from the Persian Gulf. First stop! Vietnam! Surprise the fuck out of those people, huh?" "You make a movie?" "Not this time, pal!"
Personally, I think Mama Cass said it best when she said, "[Choking noises]" "All the leaves are [Choking noises]" "Monday [Choking noises]"
All this stuff Copyright Dennis Leary.
Be sure to write us after your hair and fingernails fall out.
BTW, you did a really good job with Babylon 5.
This is real. I've seen Rob himself give this talk.
I think what all of these e-business people need is an e-nema.
Listen to me:
You - are - on - crack.
Having taken Japanese in college for three years, and having also taken Spanish and Chinese, I can say with confidence that becoming fluent in Japanese is one of the more challenging things that an English speaker can do on a rainy afternoon.
Where to start...
- Take two alphabets, and add over 1,900 Chinese characters.
- Most Chinese Characters can be pronounced in two or more ways (on and kun readings), and can be used in two different contexts. For example, one character often appears with some hiragana as an adjective with on pronounciation, and the same character can appear as part of a compound word with another pronounciation. The meanings will be similar, if you're lucky.
- Most grammatical concepts have no relation to anything found in English (Japanese is usually S-O-V).
I could go on, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is this:
Japanese is possibly as hard as it gets for English speakers to learn.
Have you actually taken any Japanese?
Heck with the Elric series. That run had Cthulhu Mythos in it! Hastur Hastur Hastur!
Use Java Servlets:
- Security risks from buffer overflows elminiated.
- Just about all web servers support them now.
- More understandable and maintainable. Sorry. I like perl as much as the rest guy, but sometimes it's like reading chinese.
- "synchronized" keyword helps with re-entrancy.
- Use a native JDBC driver, if you can. The speed is very good and the code makes sense.
- Phun stuff like servlet chaining and JSP's.
- BTW: Make sure you use templates for your pages and a tool that supports them. You should never have to edit a web resource in more than one place.
I've just had very good results with this combination. Your mileage may vary.
Continuing with http://www.eruditorum.org:
Yes, I saw the acknowledgement on the bottom of the page myself (about April 10), but supposedly this pertains to whomever can identify the source of the ciphertext, as opposed to deciphering it.
Hmmm....
I don't mean to bitch, but this review is a bit late for anyone who wasn't aware of the book and wanted to participate in the contest.
According to the leader board, 8 out of 10 of the codes have already been broken, so get going if you wanted to participate in the last two!
On an unrelated note, was anybody able to break the code on http://www.eruditorum.org ?
It has been taken down.
I remember hearing somewhere that this facility was no longer being used for the nefarious purposes (fun stuff like the F117, test flights of stolen MiGs, new radar systems, alien cryogenic storage) that earned the place its reputation.
There were even rumors that it was shut down because the level of radiation there was too intense.
The functions of the Groom Lake facility were supposedly moved to secret bases in places like Utah and Colorado.
Anybody heard anything? Or am I just watching the Discovery Channel waaaaaaaaay to much?
That's not my point. My point is that whenever you encounter a really difficult problem (the ones stated above, for example), a degree in the field can at least give you an idea of where to start looking. You might have seen something like that problem in passing during a class.
> How many people with BSs in CS do you know that are actually doing research?
MIT has a program called the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, or UROP for short. It allows undergraduates (even freshmen!) to participate in research.
The only problem I have with your statements is the tone, not the content. I'm just trying to say that although you are obviously very intelligent, having a degree would probably benefit you in more ways that just having a piece of paper, and maybe you were a bit quick to drop out.
You are correct, sir!
Restated:
2) Does a polynomial-time algorithm (P) exists that can solve an NP-complete problem?
That's all well and good, but after being involved in a bit of education myself (3 degrees), I've found that higher-level education is more than an information dump (if it's done right).
Education can allow you to see the errors of those who have gone before you so you don't repeat those mistakes. You know you've achieved enlightenment when you realize how shockingly little we really know about anything, and how we manage to make do anyway. You appear to have a long way to go before you reach that point my friend...
So while you're waiting to go the valley and make your millions, here are some problems you can work on to fill your time...
1) Solve all of the "research"-level problems in Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming".
2) Prove whether or not solutions can be obtained for NP-Complete problems.
3) Create a programming language that has the functional elegance of LISP, the systems programming ability of C, the type-checking system of ML, and objects like Java. Market it correctly so that it goes into wide use. Wallow in cash.
I breathlessly look forward to hearing from you...