Not to be competitive or anything, but the email reader my cat wrote in perl this morning included a Bayesian spam filter. Did your child think of including that, huh?
I suspect that the problem has more to do with students' motivations. You can teach them all you like about source reliability, but if all they want is to pass that assignment in the shortest possible time, many of them will still use whatever then can quickly find online. It's somewhat easier in at least some of the sciences to create new questions, but in the humanities, there are only so many worthwhile questions about Columbus.
As an academic, all I can say is that you have no authority on the subject whatsoever in my opinion. Not because you don't go to the library, but because you think managing to almost completely avoid going to the library is something to be proud of.
I think what you mean is that if you know you're going to lose in the next few moves then it is courtesy to resign rather than drag out the inevitable. Unfortunately, this correction would render the analogy completely irrelevant to the article...
Not necessarily. If the solution was free, some (and I'm not saying all) users/managers wouldn't take it seriously. Charge them for it, and they'll want it, install it, run it, update it, whatever in order to justify spending money on it. Make it free and for some of them they'll consider installing it, and if they get that far, forget about ever running or updating it. For these people, free=worthless.
Maybe it's because I'm Swedish and not an expert on English grammar, but doesn't your fine language use "is" when the subject is singular? I.e, "our population is literate"?
Your example is correct, but "the majority of our population" is plural, so the original post was correct in their usage.
So if I pick a format at random and send it to a company at random (assuming an equal probability for each version of 20% each), there is only a 1% chance that they use the same format. Thus, MS Word has a 5% market share? OO must really be taking off!
I won't even bother with your claim that the versions of MS Word are, aside from plain text and some headers, completely incompatible. I use Office XP, and having installed the.docx converter, all seems to work well for me as far as attachments go.
By the way, send me an.odt file as a resume, assuming I'm not a Linux shop or similar, and I'll never contact you because you're being deliberately difficult. PDF in the first place would be fine.
So my question is: Even if there is no God, and you are an atheist, is it possible that a world containing religious people is actually a "better" society than a world full of atheists? The Earth's people evolved into a world of mixed beliefs (some religious, some not), which could be argued to be the survival of the fittest idea or world. The mixed-belief world appears to be the "fittest" world, as opposed to such less-fit worlds of all atheists or all Christians, as examples.
If we evolved to be a mixed world of beliefs, as the "fittest", perhaps we should accept that, and quit trying to convert people with arguments for our favorite religious/non-religious belief.
It could also be argued that we are evolving to a world populated by atheists, and that theism is merely a stepping stone. How many people with religious beliefs do you think would accept that?
I suspect that the point being made is that if Radiohead were a new band, they would presumably have needed to generate a great deal of publicity to achieve these sales or needed to have settled for a much lower number of sales and consequent revenue. While Radiohead have, I'm sure, more than adequately recompensed their label, the value of this strategy for a new band is harder to ascertain due to these costs already having been incurred. Not to mention the "neat" and "I want to encourage this" factors. In short, "Internet distribution is a successful strategy for a well-established band when they are among the first of such bands to try it" is, aside from being entirely predictable, not especially informative about how well it would work for an up-and-coming band after it has become normal practice and who has never received the benefit of a label's marketing.
Devs would love the idea, I'll wager. Learn the technology once and keep developing for the same, iteratively improving target. They'd love it up until the publishers stop getting paid for platform-exclusive releases.
I don't know about that. At the moment, different consoles not only suit different consumers, they potentially also suit different developers. Homogenising the console would also tend to homogenise the games and the development process. Maybe developers like variety as much as consumers?
...or is scaring the heck out of the office staff not really the best way to deal with her problems with the technicians and managers of the company? If this counts as "heroic", I can only assume a villain would have taken out a local school as well.
I think the important part of the GP's point was that this would require you to go through all the tedious work of verifying it's not patented. By including the constraints in the algorithm, you have to do all of this tedious work before searching for solutions and you have to do this for all relevant patents, not just those that look related to the solution you found. And translating a patent into a series of constraints doesn't strike me as particularly easy to do. Aside from avoiding a particular patent, this doesn't appear to be especially useful.
The patent, as I understand it, provided additional constraints on possible solutions (presumably certain solution characteristics had to be avoided due to being covered by the patent). This would have reduced the solution space that the algorithm could explore. Without those constraints, a better solution might have emerged (including ones better than those produced by the patent-holder). In theory these constraints could push design into an interesting area of the solution space that it would generally not reach, but it would generally result in an approach that was no better than that possible without those constraints (a large easy to reach local maxima/small difficult to reach global maxima in the "goodness" function might mean that a better solution would emerge with these constraints, but that seems unlikely to occur in any particular case due to the random starting points). Without the patent system, they could still have tried to find new solutions by including existing solutions as constraints anyway, if that approach tended to be fruitful in finding novel solutions.
If so many people want to watch it "after the fact", doesn't that imply that it has considerable financial value? If people can download it, will they watch the replays (which also attract advertising revenue)? Will they buy the DVDs (more revenue)? If you want to argue that soccer is so important culturally that it should be freely available, why not extend this argument to the live feed? Why not take all the profit out of it and then we can go back to the era of amateur sport where the players had to fit training and playing in between their "real job"? If you want to see the absolute best in human athleticism, you have to accept the profit-turning of professional sport--money is that much of a motivator/enabler for some (note that I said "some", not "all").
Eternity can mean "outside of time", but when people talk about living for all eternity, I think they are generally talking about an unending existence, one which stretches from now to the end of time. A hamster who spent an eternity running in a wheel doesn't exist outside the wheel.
Slashdot Mirror
And you'd have a 50% chance of killing the cat for sure
So what you're saying is that they've been claiming the fifth horseman is global warming?
Not to be competitive or anything, but the email reader my cat wrote in perl this morning included a Bayesian spam filter. Did your child think of including that, huh?
A quick check of this revealed that you are now number one! Congratulations...I think.
That said, I didn't want my point to be lost in the cries of "your just prejudice and insensitive".
But now they're going to be lost in cries of "your!=you are" and "my insensitive what?" :-).
I suspect that the problem has more to do with students' motivations. You can teach them all you like about source reliability, but if all they want is to pass that assignment in the shortest possible time, many of them will still use whatever then can quickly find online. It's somewhat easier in at least some of the sciences to create new questions, but in the humanities, there are only so many worthwhile questions about Columbus.
As an academic, all I can say is that you have no authority on the subject whatsoever in my opinion. Not because you don't go to the library, but because you think managing to almost completely avoid going to the library is something to be proud of.
I think what you mean is that if you know you're going to lose in the next few moves then it is courtesy to resign rather than drag out the inevitable. Unfortunately, this correction would render the analogy completely irrelevant to the article...
Not necessarily. If the solution was free, some (and I'm not saying all) users/managers wouldn't take it seriously. Charge them for it, and they'll want it, install it, run it, update it, whatever in order to justify spending money on it. Make it free and for some of them they'll consider installing it, and if they get that far, forget about ever running or updating it. For these people, free=worthless.
Your example is correct, but "the majority of our population" is plural, so the original post was correct in their usage.
So if I pick a format at random and send it to a company at random (assuming an equal probability for each version of 20% each), there is only a 1% chance that they use the same format. Thus, MS Word has a 5% market share? OO must really be taking off!
I won't even bother with your claim that the versions of MS Word are, aside from plain text and some headers, completely incompatible. I use Office XP, and having installed the .docx converter, all seems to work well for me as far as attachments go.
By the way, send me an .odt file as a resume, assuming I'm not a Linux shop or similar, and I'll never contact you because you're being deliberately difficult. PDF in the first place would be fine.
So my question is: Even if there is no God, and you are an atheist, is it possible that a world containing religious people is actually a "better" society than a world full of atheists? The Earth's people evolved into a world of mixed beliefs (some religious, some not), which could be argued to be the survival of the fittest idea or world. The mixed-belief world appears to be the "fittest" world, as opposed to such less-fit worlds of all atheists or all Christians, as examples.
If we evolved to be a mixed world of beliefs, as the "fittest", perhaps we should accept that, and quit trying to convert people with arguments for our favorite religious/non-religious belief.
It could also be argued that we are evolving to a world populated by atheists, and that theism is merely a stepping stone. How many people with religious beliefs do you think would accept that?
I suspect that the point being made is that if Radiohead were a new band, they would presumably have needed to generate a great deal of publicity to achieve these sales or needed to have settled for a much lower number of sales and consequent revenue. While Radiohead have, I'm sure, more than adequately recompensed their label, the value of this strategy for a new band is harder to ascertain due to these costs already having been incurred. Not to mention the "neat" and "I want to encourage this" factors. In short, "Internet distribution is a successful strategy for a well-established band when they are among the first of such bands to try it" is, aside from being entirely predictable, not especially informative about how well it would work for an up-and-coming band after it has become normal practice and who has never received the benefit of a label's marketing.
One thing's for sure: They probably made more money.... ...they might even have..."
You definitely might have made a good point, possibly better than someone else's.
Devs would love the idea, I'll wager. Learn the technology once and keep developing for the same, iteratively improving target. They'd love it up until the publishers stop getting paid for platform-exclusive releases.
I don't know about that. At the moment, different consoles not only suit different consumers, they potentially also suit different developers. Homogenising the console would also tend to homogenise the games and the development process. Maybe developers like variety as much as consumers?
...or is scaring the heck out of the office staff not really the best way to deal with her problems with the technicians and managers of the company? If this counts as "heroic", I can only assume a villain would have taken out a local school as well.
I see you're using the new grammar checker in Word 2007 :-).
I think the important part of the GP's point was that this would require you to go through all the tedious work of verifying it's not patented. By including the constraints in the algorithm, you have to do all of this tedious work before searching for solutions and you have to do this for all relevant patents, not just those that look related to the solution you found. And translating a patent into a series of constraints doesn't strike me as particularly easy to do. Aside from avoiding a particular patent, this doesn't appear to be especially useful.
The patent, as I understand it, provided additional constraints on possible solutions (presumably certain solution characteristics had to be avoided due to being covered by the patent). This would have reduced the solution space that the algorithm could explore. Without those constraints, a better solution might have emerged (including ones better than those produced by the patent-holder). In theory these constraints could push design into an interesting area of the solution space that it would generally not reach, but it would generally result in an approach that was no better than that possible without those constraints (a large easy to reach local maxima/small difficult to reach global maxima in the "goodness" function might mean that a better solution would emerge with these constraints, but that seems unlikely to occur in any particular case due to the random starting points). Without the patent system, they could still have tried to find new solutions by including existing solutions as constraints anyway, if that approach tended to be fruitful in finding novel solutions.
You might want to check your figures. I get 80.55% and 19.45%.
There's something just not write about that!
If so many people want to watch it "after the fact", doesn't that imply that it has considerable financial value? If people can download it, will they watch the replays (which also attract advertising revenue)? Will they buy the DVDs (more revenue)? If you want to argue that soccer is so important culturally that it should be freely available, why not extend this argument to the live feed? Why not take all the profit out of it and then we can go back to the era of amateur sport where the players had to fit training and playing in between their "real job"? If you want to see the absolute best in human athleticism, you have to accept the profit-turning of professional sport--money is that much of a motivator/enabler for some (note that I said "some", not "all").
CDs are old technology. They skip. ...MP3s are in now. Their portable and don't skip and are cheap to buy online.
Repeat after me: "MP3 is a file format, not a medium."
Stay away from the television...
Eternity can mean "outside of time", but when people talk about living for all eternity, I think they are generally talking about an unending existence, one which stretches from now to the end of time. A hamster who spent an eternity running in a wheel doesn't exist outside the wheel.