If you don't like the RIAA, don't buy their stuff. There are a lot of really great bands on independent labels because of the economics of the music biz. They know they can make just as much or more money (and retain far more creative control) by being on a small label and touring. Shopping may not be quite as convenient because their music is often not carried by the big chain stores. It's worth the extra effort though because, unlike most of what the major labels put out, these bands don't suck.
"No federal laws protect the privacy of medical records."
This part is just plain wrong. There is indeed a federal law to protect the privacy of medical records, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It's not in effect yet because there are provisions in the law that give health providers a specific amount of time to bring their organizations into compliance after the publication of the rules. The rules have been published. The clock is ticking and health care providers are spending big $$$ right now to implement their plans for compliance by the deadline. The law implements real fundamental changes in the way personal health information is handled (including required logging of every access to medical records and serious penalties for misappropriation of patient data).
Tablet PCs have a tremendous potential for use in business situations where people have to be mobile, need access to a lot of information, and don't need to do a lot of textual data entry. The clearest example of such a situation is medicine. Combined with a good electronic medical records system, Tablet PCs can be very useful in medical environments, particularly hospitals. Doctors and nurses could easily access a patient's record via WiFi on their rounds while they're in the room with the patient without all the inherent problems of shuffling around papers, x-ray films, etc.
Many of the data entry tasks that nurses do can be done with well-designed checkboxes and pull down menus that are easily performed on a Tablet PC. The few bits of text they do enter are in a sort of shorthand that they can enter just as quickly via handwriting as they could by going to find the nearest terminal with a keyboard. Doctors don't type anyway, they dictate. So all they'd need would be a built-in, or conveniently attachable microphone. All of these things can potentially result in a higher standard of care for the patient and savings for the care provider.
Business has already taken over the internet and destroyed much of it's utility. Too bad these guys didn't get any press around 1994 or so before the proverbial fit hit the shan. Now you can't even view most websites without accepting cookies, answering 3 pages of marketing survey questions, and closing 5 pop-up ads (not to mention that damn Best Buy advertisement that displays a bunch of stick figures dancing around on top of the NYT article I'm trying to read so I can't see the text and eventually decide that it's not worth the hassle to try). And quality content is buried deep underneath a pile of sites that modified their META tags or paid off the search engine owners to get themselves listed at the top of your search results despite their total irrelevance to the topic you're searching for information about.
Besides the new anti-counterfeiting benefits of the new money, there is another reason that our government likes to print new money. It is an easy source of revenue for the government. If they just printed more of the same currency style, it would inevitably result in inflation. But if they change the currency design, they can get away with printing more currency without inducing inflation.
When the government prints a new currency design they can rest assured that numismatists all over the land will instinctively hoard both the currency produced for the last few years prior to the change and the first few years of the new currency. Take a look on eBay and see what a 1909 V.B.D. penny or one of the WWII steel pennies sells for nowadays (in comparison with other currency of the same denomination and similar age).
This collecting activity essentially allows the government to add more value to its coffers than the value it must expend to produce the new currency. This can be done because much of the currency will never be spent as such. It will be kept as a collectible object with inherent value above and beyond it's face value as currency. The net effect is that collectors are paying the government for the ability to retire currency from circulation. They're doing the same thing with the quarters that have logos of the 50 states on the back.
The U.S. Postal service is another successful example of this sort of practice. They print and sell a tremendous number of postage stamps that will never be used to send a letter.
If the DOJ is just going to roll over and play dead in the penalty phase of the trial after spending large quantities of taxpayer money to get a conviction (like they've done in another recent anti-trust case), then the only ones who come out ahead are the abusive monopolists and the lawyers.
Languages C++: The Complete Reference, Herbert Schildt...My 1991 copy of this book is so tattered and dog-eared from heavy use that I'm going to have to replace it soon.
The C++ Programming Language, Bjarne Stroustrup...An excellent reference that covers the language's intricacies.
ANSI Common Lisp, Paul Graham...Even if you never ever write anything in Lisp on the job, you should still learn to program in a language such as Lisp or Scheme because it will expose you to powerful ideas that will have a lasting effect on how you approach programming tasks, regardless of what language you end up using.
Database Design Designing Quality Databases with IDEF1X Information Models, Thomas Bruce...This book is the Bible of good relational database design.
Operating Systems Solaris 2.x for Managers and Administrators, Freeland, McKay, & Parkinson...A good explanation of all the nitty gritty details you never learned in college for working with Solaris.
UNIX Power Tools, Peek, O'Reilly, & Loukides...If you need to do something with a UNIX shell script, you'll find something in here that'll accomplish your task with minor modifications.
Modern Operating Systems, Tanenbaum...The Classic OS book.
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, W. Richard Stevens...Everything you ever needed to know about UNIX system calls.
Theory Languages and Machines, Thomas Sudkamp...Grammars, Finite Automata, Turing Machines and other good stuff.
Mathematics Linear Algebra and Its Applications, Gilbert Strang...If you're ever going to deal with vectors and matrices and all that other fun stuff, this is a good book to learn it from.
Statistics for Engineering Problem Solving, Stephen Vardeman...Sooner or later, the probability that you will need to use statistics for something approaches 1.
Software Design The Unified Modelling Language User Guide, Booch, Rumbaugh, & Jacobson...Does this one need explanation?
Software Engineering, Sommerville...An excellent treatise on processes of software development.
Software Architect Bootcamp, Malveau & Mowbray...Great design advice.
Use Cases: Requirements In Context, Kulak & Guiney...If you don't get the software requirements right, you'll inevitably build software that solves problems that nobody needs solved.
Design Patterns, Gamma et al...Read it. Read it again. Did I mention that you should READ THIS BOOK?
User Interface Design User and Task Analysis for Interface Design, Hackos & Redish...What you really need to know in order to get your users to tell you what they need and build software that they can really use.
The Usability Engineering Lifecycle, Mayhew
The Humane Interface, Raskin...An insightful look into what makes a user interface good or bad.
Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines...Know the look and feel of the platform you're developing for and always adhere to it unless there is some very compelling usability reason not to.
The Non-Designers Design Book, Robin Williams...This book isn't even about user interfaces, but everything it says about good graphic design is applicable to user interfaces, web pages, printed documentation, etc.
Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence, Winston...An excellent introduction to the field.
Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Foundation, Simon Haykin...When they subtitled this book "A Comprehensive Foundation", they meant it.
An Introduction To Genetic Algorithms, Mitchell...A relatively light read that introduces some very interesting concepts.
Graphics Graphics Gems, Andrew Glassner...The nitty gritty algorithms behind graphics.
Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques, Watt & Watt
The Computer Image, Watt & Policarpo...A comprehensive treatise on damn near anything you want to know about graphics.
Miscellaneous Useful Books Technical Writing, Paul Anderson...Your software is worth nothing unless you can explain clearly and concisely to somebody else how to use it.
Software Testing and Continuous Quality Improvement, William Lewis...How to test your software systematically and thoroughly.
I saw the word "Ixianism" in the title and immediately thought of Frank Herbert's Dune series. But, alas, no mention in the article of such wonders as no-ships, remote controlled Laza tigers, shigawire, lasguns, and the Royal Cart of the God Emperor. No melange, no Tlielaxu axlotl tanks, no Honored Matres, no sandtrout, no semuta music, no Bene Gesserit witches. How disappointing...
And if you get through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and want more *quality* reading, his book "Lila" continues with the topic and is every bit as good.
"The Art of War", Sun Tzu
"All Families Are Psychotic", Douglas Coupland
"Otherland", Tad Williams
"Palace", Katharine Kerr & Mark Kreighbaum
"The Trial", Franz Kafka
"Noir", K.W. Jeter
"Chung Kuo", David Wingrove
"Mona Lisa Overdrive", William Gibson
"The Human Zoo", Desmond Morris
"Ambient", Jack Womack
"Being and Nothingness", Jean-Paul Sartre
"The Illuminatus! Trilogy", Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
"Miss Wyoming", Douglas Coupland
"The Onion Girl", Charles de Lint
I wish there'd been more profs like you when I was in college. All my physics courses were closed-book, closed-notes AND they gave NO partial credit. Even if your only error was in incorrectly copying your answer from the notebook paper to the answer box, you still got NO credit.
Perhaps the most ridiculous example of this kind of thinking was Physical Chemistry class. You couldn't even have an equation notecard for it. The professor just expected everyone to memorize Maxwell's equations and derive everything from them.
I recall having to memorize all the different frequency bands for IR spectroscopy for organic chemistry class too. Do I remember any of it now? Hell no.
On the other hand, all of my Chemical Engineering classes had open-book, open-notes, bring any kind of calculator you want exams. They were smart enough to realize that if you didn't know the concepts really well there's no way you'd be able to even get close to finishing the exam in the two hours allotted. For Transport/Unit Operations, the final was a take home exam (which I did finish and get an A on after slaving away for 16 hours).
Computer science exams were closed-book too with the additional handicap of having to write syntactically and semantically correct code on paper. I hope they had fun grading all my exams with the microscopic text sqeezed inbetween everything because I forgot something on the first pass through and it belonged inbetween bits of code I'd already written down. I can understand them not wanting us to have access to a compiler or the net during an exam, but why they couldn't have set up a room full of computers running nothing but text editors so we could at least write code in a reasonable fashion for our exams is beyond me.
In the spirit of slashdot i have decided to be slightly irrational and try to make a definitive reference of all formulae and values and mathematical... things people should know off the top of their head... to a reasonable approximation;)
sqrt 2
sqrt 5
Wouldn't it be more useful to know an appropriate method to calculate the square root of any number, should the need arise without a calculator handy? I certainly don't have a need for the sqrt 2 or 5 often enough to justify rote memorization.
What an Angstrom is
I know what an Angstrom is, but it's hardly a useful bit of knowledge. It's not even an SI unit. Nanometers or picometers will do just fine for length measurements. I'm more likely to use units like foot-Lamberts, psi, or BTU in real life if I come across something nonstandard.
Only if you're an electrical engineer or physicist... The rest of us just pick up the CRC handbook when we need such things.
s = D/t
Speed of Sound
c;; need I say more?
I've never needed any of these outside of a physics class.
Patterns for Alkanes etc.
Most people would be better served by a basic knowledge of the Periodic Table, simple acid/base chemistry, and polar vs. nonpolar substances.
Things I would add to the list: PV=nRT
Basic rules of logical inference: Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens, etc.
Basic knowledge of quantization and it's effects (Nyquist frequency, etc.)
Significant figures
Unit conversions
F=ma (this should be especially emphasized in driver's ed)
Graphing calculators and high-powered math software on computers can be a useful aid to learning, but only if the teacher sets the class up in a way that forces the student to really learn the math. Unfortunately, all too often that is not the case.
I took calculus the first year my university offered a section with Wolfram's Mathematica software as part of the course. For the first three terms of the course, our instructors taught the class pretty much the same way they'd always taught calculus. We did everything by hand in class for the most part. We'd use calculators if a lot of arithmetic was involved for some particular task, but for the most part it was just pen, paper, chalk, and chalkboard. Our homework was divided into ordinary homework intended to be done by hand and a set of problems we were expected to solve with Mathematica. All of the Mathematica homework problems we did were story problems and we always started with a blank Mathematica notebook and wrote all our own code to accomplish the task.
For the fourth, and final, calculus course our instructor continued teaching the course as before except that our Mathematica assignments came in the form of pre-fabricated Mathematica notebooks. Each notebook had explanatory text with example code interspersed throughout that we were suppose to run, followed by exercises at the end that we were supposed to solve on our own. This was no big deal for any of us in the class since we already had a solid understanding of the fundamentals of calculus and we all knew Mathematica quite well by that time.
The university started teaching many sessions of calculus with Mathematica and used the pre-fab notebooks from day one in all the new courses. I was hired as a "help desk" employee for the mathematics computer lab and worked there throughout the rest of my college career.
For the first year or so when most of the students in the classes had just switched over from traditional calc courses into the Mathematica courses, nearly all of the questions I was asked dealt with basic issues of using the software (syntax errors, printer problems, user interface issues). The students understood the mathematics.
Later, when we started having students in the lab who had been using the pre-fab notebooks from day one, more of the questions revolved around the mathematics. These students were cutting and pasting code from the examples and making slight modifications to solve the homework problems. In general, they had only a cursory understanding of what it was that they were really doing.
Eventually, they started having class in the lab. When that batch of students arrived, it was entirely clear to me from the questions they asked and the frequency with which they asked them that they had no clue what they were doing. They could get by cutting and pasting, except for the few problems that required something more than the cookie cutter approach. Then I'd have to sit there and dutifully employ the Socratic method with each of them to guide them toward some understanding of what they needed to do. Even then, they still didn't get any lasting understanding of the concepts. They'd been trained to just follow the few algorithms they'd learned rather than the more useful approach of deriving an algorithm from a fundamental set of ideas.
Today, the new laser powered Concorde XIII crashed during it's maiden voyage over Scotland when a very large cloud came in between the ground-based laser beam power source and the craft, resulting in a total loss of propulsion. No survivors have been reported at this time.
Yeah..... I know... responding to one's own post is generally considered lame.... anywho...
Here are a few of the legal things that you can do to rebel:
1) Vote. Even if all of the major candidates are filthy scum, you should still vote. The media always interprets low voter turnout as apathy. On the other hand, if there are enough of them, votes for third party candidates, family members, friends, and dead people send the clear message of dissatisfaction with the available choices even though they generally fail to change the result of the election (at the very least, it cannot be interpreted as voter apathy because you did take the time go to the polls).
2) Change attitudes one person at a time. Start with your parents, friends, and other people who you have some influence with already and move outward from there. Be opinionated and expressive.
3) Refuse to be a consumer, to the extent possible. If you don't like Corporation X's policies, don't buy their shit unless you can't find a way to get around it. Make sure they know that you're not buying their shit and why. Remember when McDonalds used to package their burgers in styrofoam containers? They don't anymore because enough assholes (like me) made a stink about it and refused to accept any burger that had been packaged in styrofoam. When the check-out guy at store X asks you for personally identifying information (and you're paying CASH!), refuse to give them so much as a zip code. When a telemarketer calls, waste as much of their time as possible but never buy anything from them or give them any information about you that they can sell to other marketroids.
This, of course, brings us back to the topic at hand. If you like David Bowie's stance on copyright, buy his album. If you loathe the RIAA's stranglehold on music distribution, support independent record labels and artists who sell their music direct, attend live concerts, etc.
If you're looking for thousands of young people marching in D.C. or holding sit-ins on college campuses, then yes you're going to get the impression that there aren't any young rebels. I, and I'd suspect many other young people, have no interest in being on the receiving end of tear gas, a policeman's nightstick, incarceration, or hot lead in the name of idealism when it's unlikely to result in any real change or even significant media attention. I'm a rebel, but a pragmatic one. I know plenty of others and they are similarly pragmatic. We'll speak out when there is an opportunity for real change to occur and take what individual actions we can take to work for incremental changes. It makes no sense for Gen-Xers to take on the system directly. Just from the standpoint of demographics, we're vastly outnumbered by aging boomers (who are now the supporters of the status quo). We change what we can, subvert the system when given opportunity, and bide our time until the "Me Generation" steps aside so we can fix the world (if the planet is still inhabitable).
That's a rather narrow interpretation of Orwell's work. Communist Russia may have been the inspiration for Orwell's novel, but the themes he developed in the book are far more general. If the book had been that limited in scope, it is unlikely that it would be as popular as it is today.
Also, the fact that many governments of the Eastern world have already adopted mass surveillance and propaganda/censorship as a means of control does not in any way constitute a valid argument for allowing other nations to adopt equally abusive policies.
Why does everything involving security/privacy have to come down to the same tired, inapplicable old refences to 1984?
Explain to me how the reference is inapplicable. As I recall, having *gasp* actually read the book, surveillance of individual citizens by the government and control of the populous through manipulation of all news and history was precisely what Orwell was writing about and feared would come to be in the future. So, now that governments throughout the Western world are rapidly enacting measures that enable far greater surveillance of their own citizens and chilling effects on free speach we're just supposed to shut up about it. We should retire the reference to 1984 because you think it's tired and overused, despite it being entirely on-topic to the discussion at hand? Maybe we should ban Kafka from the discussion, since he too voiced a number of poignant and applicable ideas regarding the nature of justice, beaureaucracy, and power? If Orwell is spinning in his grave, it is because governments throughout the western world are interpreting his novel as a howto guide for building morally bankrupt, totalitarian states rather than as a warning against such things.
By "public investment," do you mean from governments? In that case, your idea is flawed on several levels.
First, the results, the open source software, would not be free as in beer. They would have been paid for with money seized from taxpayers, so if you have a job, you're paying for the software anyway, whether you want to use it or not.
That's certainly a valid argument for many kinds of software. However, what about software that benefits our society as a whole (in the same way that roads and schools do)?
For example, we all keep hearing about the rising cost of healthcare. So, why doesn't our government fund development of the kinds of medical software that are ubiquitous in the industry? Canada has done some of this (and saved big $$$ in doing so).
Of course, some think that our government shouldn't be in the healthcare business at all because it's outside of the scope of the powers assigned to it by the constitution... I'm not entering into that argument. My point is that, since the federal government already is in the biz (Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals) it would only make sense to obtain software the cheap way, which for an enormously large institution is to build it yourself or buy out a company that's already built it. Software development seems like one area where public works projects make sense because once you get beyond the development costs the only significant per unit cost is tech support.
When you resolve these conflicts, you are making a rational choice, not following a biological imperative, and morality is the tool which guides these choices.
Morality is certainly a tool that guides rational choice, but that still does not mean that "God" is required for morality to have arisen as an artifact of culture. One of the important distinctions between humans and other animals is that we humans teach a tremendous amount of what we have learned to our offspring. We don't learn everything the hard way. In fact, most of our strategies for dealing with the world are derived from communication and a reward/punishment system imposed upon us by parents and others. Because of this communication and conditioning we are able to quickly acquire behavioral strategies that are far more advanced than what we could have acquired through instincts and trial-and-error experiences. For example, I know that I don't want to touch a hot burner on the stove. I've never done that before and stoves haven't been in existence long enough for humans to have evolved an instinct against touching them, yet I have internalized a very effective means of avoiding biological discomfort.
Morality is a technology that we are taught and we use it (along with many other technologies that we are taught) to guide our behavior. The concept of "God" is another cultural artifact that is transmitted through communication. That these two concepts are often communicated in unison does not necessarily mean that the concept of "God" is essential to the transmission of moral concepts, nor does it mean that morality cannot have arisen naturally through iterative refinement of a good survival strategy passed on from generation to generation of a social, sentient species.
Regarding your second point, I'm not suggesting that every human decision is preceded by a risk/benefit analysis specific to that situation. Human beings don't work that way. We don't come up with novel creative solutions to every problem we face. We'd have become extinct long ago if we had to perform complex reasoning in every situation. The strategies we learn are internalized and we apply them quite consistently. In general, it is only when we experience a very strong individual stimulus or a long-term trend of reward/punishment for some behavior that we modify our strategies.
Of course, there's a problem here: you judge that `being happy and comfortable' is what you should be seeking. Is not this a moral decision? Is it not true that you could have chose another goal, such as making others happy, or short term gratification, or who knows what else?
No. "Being happy and comfortable" is not a moral decision. It's a biological one. Nature has equipped us with a pleasure system that rewards us for behavior that promotes our survival. Our reasoning capabilites allow us to make risk/benefit assessments of our own behavior. Without invoking "God", human beings will still seek to optimize benefit and minimize risk. Learning ability provides for greater optimization over time. Thus, as we gain experience, morality becomes an increasingly attractive strategy because, in general, it effectively minimizes risk without undue sacrifice of pleasure.
Of course it's AI. Is it sentient? No. Would it pass a Turing test? No. Are those features necessary criteria for it to be AI? No. To satisfy the definition of "artificial intelligence" all the system needs to do is exhibit behavior that is intelligent from the perspective of an outside observer.
Its a purely dumb expert system. it has no self reasoning capability -- it draws inferences from already preprogrammed facts.
All intelligent systems draw their inferences from knowledge they already posses, including you and I (unless you're psychic). That the designers of the system have chosen thus far to make human beings part of the system (functioning as the sensory/learning rule subsystems) does not negate what they have achieved. It also does not prevent them from implementing automatic sensory/learning systems and adding them to Cyc once the initial knowledge base is deemed to be capable of producing good judgments about the quality of sensory input.
Youre not teaching it about morality -- it doesnt learn. its dumb. youre just adding new constraints to filter through.
Expert systems get slammed a lot for taking a human-guided learning approach, but it is the careful construction of a high quality knowledge base that makes them useful. Neural nets are great for situations where lots of data is available and it is relatively easy to evaluate the quality of the system's response (DSP, OCR, industrial process control). But, one of the big problems with neural nets is that convergence of the system to stable behavior and the quality of the system's responses to stimuli are at odds with each other. I suspect if you were to try to train a neural net in the same domain (common sense reasoning), you'd spend many more person-hours generating enough good training sets to get the system to perform at the same level of competence as Cyc than what they've spent on this project to hand-feed the knowledge.
It'll be interesting to see what new developments come about through Cyc's release to the public at large. Who knows what it will be able to do once the KB undergoes massive growth and people develop gateways to other databases and possibly attach automatic learning capabilities to it?
I hate to think just how much time I've wasted trying to configure various Windows applications to run with minimum privilege. Developers either don't understand the security model or just don't care about designing software with security policies in mind, leaving admins stuck with software that is a major headache to lock down appropriately.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like the RIAA, don't buy their stuff. There are a lot of really great bands on independent labels because of the economics of the music biz. They know they can make just as much or more money (and retain far more creative control) by being on a small label and touring. Shopping may not be quite as convenient because their music is often not carried by the big chain stores. It's worth the extra effort though because, unlike most of what the major labels put out, these bands don't suck.
Some great bands on indie labels include:
Sarge
All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors
Sarah Shannon (ex-singer from Velocity Girl)
The Dismemberment Plan
Future Loop Foundation
Helium
The Poster Children
Anna Waronker (former singer for That Dog)
Rainer Maria
Glade
The Jeyds
Some online places to shop for indie music include:
Insound.com
Parasol Records
Restless Records (Golden Palominos, They Might Be Giants, Flaming Lips, etc.)
Matador Records (Helium, Pizzicato Five, Bettie Serveert, etc.)
FuturePopShop.com
"No federal laws protect the privacy of medical records."
This part is just plain wrong. There is indeed a federal law to protect the privacy of medical records, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). It's not in effect yet because there are provisions in the law that give health providers a specific amount of time to bring their organizations into compliance after the publication of the rules. The rules have been published. The clock is ticking and health care providers are spending big $$$ right now to implement their plans for compliance by the deadline. The law implements real fundamental changes in the way personal health information is handled (including required logging of every access to medical records and serious penalties for misappropriation of patient data).
Many of the data entry tasks that nurses do can be done with well-designed checkboxes and pull down menus that are easily performed on a Tablet PC. The few bits of text they do enter are in a sort of shorthand that they can enter just as quickly via handwriting as they could by going to find the nearest terminal with a keyboard. Doctors don't type anyway, they dictate. So all they'd need would be a built-in, or conveniently attachable microphone. All of these things can potentially result in a higher standard of care for the patient and savings for the care provider.
Business has already taken over the internet and destroyed much of it's utility. Too bad these guys didn't get any press around 1994 or so before the proverbial fit hit the shan. Now you can't even view most websites without accepting cookies, answering 3 pages of marketing survey questions, and closing 5 pop-up ads (not to mention that damn Best Buy advertisement that displays a bunch of stick figures dancing around on top of the NYT article I'm trying to read so I can't see the text and eventually decide that it's not worth the hassle to try). And quality content is buried deep underneath a pile of sites that modified their META tags or paid off the search engine owners to get themselves listed at the top of your search results despite their total irrelevance to the topic you're searching for information about.
Besides the new anti-counterfeiting benefits of the new money, there is another reason that our government likes to print new money. It is an easy source of revenue for the government. If they just printed more of the same currency style, it would inevitably result in inflation. But if they change the currency design, they can get away with printing more currency without inducing inflation.
When the government prints a new currency design they can rest assured that numismatists all over the land will instinctively hoard both the currency produced for the last few years prior to the change and the first few years of the new currency. Take a look on eBay and see what a 1909 V.B.D. penny or one of the WWII steel pennies sells for nowadays (in comparison with other currency of the same denomination and similar age).
This collecting activity essentially allows the government to add more value to its coffers than the value it must expend to produce the new currency. This can be done because much of the currency will never be spent as such. It will be kept as a collectible object with inherent value above and beyond it's face value as currency. The net effect is that collectors are paying the government for the ability to retire currency from circulation. They're doing the same thing with the quarters that have logos of the 50 states on the back.
The U.S. Postal service is another successful example of this sort of practice. They print and sell a tremendous number of postage stamps that will never be used to send a letter.
If the DOJ is just going to roll over and play dead in the penalty phase of the trial after spending large quantities of taxpayer money to get a conviction (like they've done in another recent anti-trust case), then the only ones who come out ahead are the abusive monopolists and the lawyers.
Languages ...My 1991 copy of this book is so tattered and dog-eared from heavy use that I'm going to have to replace it soon.
...An excellent reference that covers the language's intricacies.
...Even if you never ever write anything in Lisp on the job, you should still learn to program in a language such as Lisp or Scheme because it will expose you to powerful ideas that will have a lasting effect on how you approach programming tasks, regardless of what language you end up using.
C++: The Complete Reference, Herbert Schildt
The C++ Programming Language, Bjarne Stroustrup
ANSI Common Lisp, Paul Graham
Database Design ...This book is the Bible of good relational database design.
Designing Quality Databases with IDEF1X Information Models, Thomas Bruce
Operating Systems ...A good explanation of all the nitty gritty details you never learned in college for working with Solaris.
...If you need to do something with a UNIX shell script, you'll find something in here that'll accomplish your task with minor modifications.
...The Classic OS book.
...Everything you ever needed to know about UNIX system calls.
Solaris 2.x for Managers and Administrators, Freeland, McKay, & Parkinson
UNIX Power Tools, Peek, O'Reilly, & Loukides
Modern Operating Systems, Tanenbaum
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, W. Richard Stevens
Theory ...Grammars, Finite Automata, Turing Machines and other good stuff.
Languages and Machines, Thomas Sudkamp
Mathematics ...If you're ever going to deal with vectors and matrices and all that other fun stuff, this is a good book to learn it from.
...Sooner or later, the probability that you will need to use statistics for something approaches 1.
Linear Algebra and Its Applications, Gilbert Strang
Statistics for Engineering Problem Solving, Stephen Vardeman
Software Design ...Does this one need explanation?
...An excellent treatise on processes of software development.
...Great design advice.
...If you don't get the software requirements right, you'll inevitably build software that solves problems that nobody needs solved.
...Read it. Read it again. Did I mention that you should READ THIS BOOK?
The Unified Modelling Language User Guide, Booch, Rumbaugh, & Jacobson
Software Engineering, Sommerville
Software Architect Bootcamp, Malveau & Mowbray
Use Cases: Requirements In Context, Kulak & Guiney
Design Patterns, Gamma et al
User Interface Design ...What you really need to know in order to get your users to tell you what they need and build software that they can really use.
...An insightful look into what makes a user interface good or bad.
...Know the look and feel of the platform you're developing for and always adhere to it unless there is some very compelling usability reason not to.
...This book isn't even about user interfaces, but everything it says about good graphic design is applicable to user interfaces, web pages, printed documentation, etc.
User and Task Analysis for Interface Design, Hackos & Redish
The Usability Engineering Lifecycle, Mayhew
The Humane Interface, Raskin
Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines
The Non-Designers Design Book, Robin Williams
Artificial Intelligence ...An excellent introduction to the field.
...When they subtitled this book "A Comprehensive Foundation", they meant it.
...A relatively light read that introduces some very interesting concepts.
Artificial Intelligence, Winston
Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Foundation, Simon Haykin
An Introduction To Genetic Algorithms, Mitchell
Graphics ...The nitty gritty algorithms behind graphics.
...A comprehensive treatise on damn near anything you want to know about graphics.
Graphics Gems, Andrew Glassner
Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques, Watt & Watt
The Computer Image, Watt & Policarpo
Miscellaneous Useful Books ...Your software is worth nothing unless you can explain clearly and concisely to somebody else how to use it.
...How to test your software systematically and thoroughly.
Technical Writing, Paul Anderson
Software Testing and Continuous Quality Improvement, William Lewis
I saw the word "Ixianism" in the title and immediately thought of Frank Herbert's Dune series. But, alas, no mention in the article of such wonders as no-ships, remote controlled Laza tigers, shigawire, lasguns, and the Royal Cart of the God Emperor. No melange, no Tlielaxu axlotl tanks, no Honored Matres, no sandtrout, no semuta music, no Bene Gesserit witches. How disappointing...
And if you get through "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and want more *quality* reading, his book "Lila" continues with the topic and is every bit as good.
"The Art of War", Sun Tzu
"All Families Are Psychotic", Douglas Coupland
"Otherland", Tad Williams
"Palace", Katharine Kerr & Mark Kreighbaum
"The Trial", Franz Kafka
"Noir", K.W. Jeter
"Chung Kuo", David Wingrove
"Mona Lisa Overdrive", William Gibson
"The Human Zoo", Desmond Morris
"Ambient", Jack Womack
"Being and Nothingness", Jean-Paul Sartre
"The Illuminatus! Trilogy", Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
"Miss Wyoming", Douglas Coupland
"The Onion Girl", Charles de Lint
I wish there'd been more profs like you when I was in college. All my physics courses were closed-book, closed-notes AND they gave NO partial credit. Even if your only error was in incorrectly copying your answer from the notebook paper to the answer box, you still got NO credit.
Perhaps the most ridiculous example of this kind of thinking was Physical Chemistry class. You couldn't even have an equation notecard for it. The professor just expected everyone to memorize Maxwell's equations and derive everything from them.
I recall having to memorize all the different frequency bands for IR spectroscopy for organic chemistry class too. Do I remember any of it now? Hell no.
On the other hand, all of my Chemical Engineering classes had open-book, open-notes, bring any kind of calculator you want exams. They were smart enough to realize that if you didn't know the concepts really well there's no way you'd be able to even get close to finishing the exam in the two hours allotted. For Transport/Unit Operations, the final was a take home exam (which I did finish and get an A on after slaving away for 16 hours).
Computer science exams were closed-book too with the additional handicap of having to write syntactically and semantically correct code on paper. I hope they had fun grading all my exams with the microscopic text sqeezed inbetween everything because I forgot something on the first pass through and it belonged inbetween bits of code I'd already written down. I can understand them not wanting us to have access to a compiler or the net during an exam, but why they couldn't have set up a room full of computers running nothing but text editors so we could at least write code in a reasonable fashion for our exams is beyond me.
In the spirit of slashdot i have decided to be slightly irrational and try to make a definitive reference of all formulae and values and mathematical... things people should know off the top of their head... to a reasonable approximation ;)
sqrt 2
sqrt 5
Wouldn't it be more useful to know an appropriate method to calculate the square root of any number, should the need arise without a calculator handy? I certainly don't have a need for the sqrt 2 or 5 often enough to justify rote memorization.
What an Angstrom is
I know what an Angstrom is, but it's hardly a useful bit of knowledge. It's not even an SI unit. Nanometers or picometers will do just fine for length measurements. I'm more likely to use units like foot-Lamberts, psi, or BTU in real life if I come across something nonstandard.
Capacitive Reactance = 1/(2*pi*frequency*capacitance rating)
Inductive Reactance = 2*pi*frequency*Inductance
Z = sqrt(R^2 + (Inductive-Reactance - Capacitive-Reactance)^2
Peak = RMS / (sqrt2/2)
I = Q/t
Only if you're an electrical engineer or physicist... The rest of us just pick up the CRC handbook when we need such things.
s = D/t ;; need I say more?
Speed of Sound
c
I've never needed any of these outside of a physics class.
Patterns for Alkanes etc.
Most people would be better served by a basic knowledge of the Periodic Table, simple acid/base chemistry, and polar vs. nonpolar substances.
Things I would add to the list:
PV=nRT
Basic rules of logical inference: Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens, etc.
Basic knowledge of quantization and it's effects (Nyquist frequency, etc.)
Significant figures
Unit conversions
F=ma (this should be especially emphasized in driver's ed)
Graphing calculators and high-powered math software on computers can be a useful aid to learning, but only if the teacher sets the class up in a way that forces the student to really learn the math. Unfortunately, all too often that is not the case.
I took calculus the first year my university offered a section with Wolfram's Mathematica software as part of the course. For the first three terms of the course, our instructors taught the class pretty much the same way they'd always taught calculus. We did everything by hand in class for the most part. We'd use calculators if a lot of arithmetic was involved for some particular task, but for the most part it was just pen, paper, chalk, and chalkboard. Our homework was divided into ordinary homework intended to be done by hand and a set of problems we were expected to solve with Mathematica. All of the Mathematica homework problems we did were story problems and we always started with a blank Mathematica notebook and wrote all our own code to accomplish the task.
For the fourth, and final, calculus course our instructor continued teaching the course as before except that our Mathematica assignments came in the form of pre-fabricated Mathematica notebooks. Each notebook had explanatory text with example code interspersed throughout that we were suppose to run, followed by exercises at the end that we were supposed to solve on our own. This was no big deal for any of us in the class since we already had a solid understanding of the fundamentals of calculus and we all knew Mathematica quite well by that time.
The university started teaching many sessions of calculus with Mathematica and used the pre-fab notebooks from day one in all the new courses. I was hired as a "help desk" employee for the mathematics computer lab and worked there throughout the rest of my college career.
For the first year or so when most of the students in the classes had just switched over from traditional calc courses into the Mathematica courses, nearly all of the questions I was asked dealt with basic issues of using the software (syntax errors, printer problems, user interface issues). The students understood the mathematics.
Later, when we started having students in the lab who had been using the pre-fab notebooks from day one, more of the questions revolved around the mathematics. These students were cutting and pasting code from the examples and making slight modifications to solve the homework problems. In general, they had only a cursory understanding of what it was that they were really doing.
Eventually, they started having class in the lab. When that batch of students arrived, it was entirely clear to me from the questions they asked and the frequency with which they asked them that they had no clue what they were doing. They could get by cutting and pasting, except for the few problems that required something more than the cookie cutter approach. Then I'd have to sit there and dutifully employ the Socratic method with each of them to guide them toward some understanding of what they needed to do. Even then, they still didn't get any lasting understanding of the concepts. They'd been trained to just follow the few algorithms they'd learned rather than the more useful approach of deriving an algorithm from a fundamental set of ideas.
November 13, 2013
Today, the new laser powered Concorde XIII crashed during it's maiden voyage over Scotland when a very large cloud came in between the ground-based laser beam power source and the craft, resulting in a total loss of propulsion. No survivors have been reported at this time.
Yeah..... I know... responding to one's own post is generally considered lame.... anywho...
Here are a few of the legal things that you can do to rebel:
1) Vote. Even if all of the major candidates are filthy scum, you should still vote. The media always interprets low voter turnout as apathy. On the other hand, if there are enough of them, votes for third party candidates, family members, friends, and dead people send the clear message of dissatisfaction with the available choices even though they generally fail to change the result of the election (at the very least, it cannot be interpreted as voter apathy because you did take the time go to the polls).
2) Change attitudes one person at a time. Start with your parents, friends, and other people who you have some influence with already and move outward from there. Be opinionated and expressive.
3) Refuse to be a consumer, to the extent possible. If you don't like Corporation X's policies, don't buy their shit unless you can't find a way to get around it. Make sure they know that you're not buying their shit and why. Remember when McDonalds used to package their burgers in styrofoam containers? They don't anymore because enough assholes (like me) made a stink about it and refused to accept any burger that had been packaged in styrofoam. When the check-out guy at store X asks you for personally identifying information (and you're paying CASH!), refuse to give them so much as a zip code. When a telemarketer calls, waste as much of their time as possible but never buy anything from them or give them any information about you that they can sell to other marketroids.
This, of course, brings us back to the topic at hand. If you like David Bowie's stance on copyright, buy his album. If you loathe the RIAA's stranglehold on music distribution, support independent record labels and artists who sell their music direct, attend live concerts, etc.
If you're looking for thousands of young people marching in D.C. or holding sit-ins on college campuses, then yes you're going to get the impression that there aren't any young rebels. I, and I'd suspect many other young people, have no interest in being on the receiving end of tear gas, a policeman's nightstick, incarceration, or hot lead in the name of idealism when it's unlikely to result in any real change or even significant media attention. I'm a rebel, but a pragmatic one. I know plenty of others and they are similarly pragmatic. We'll speak out when there is an opportunity for real change to occur and take what individual actions we can take to work for incremental changes. It makes no sense for Gen-Xers to take on the system directly. Just from the standpoint of demographics, we're vastly outnumbered by aging boomers (who are now the supporters of the status quo). We change what we can, subvert the system when given opportunity, and bide our time until the "Me Generation" steps aside so we can fix the world (if the planet is still inhabitable).
That's a rather narrow interpretation of Orwell's work. Communist Russia may have been the inspiration for Orwell's novel, but the themes he developed in the book are far more general. If the book had been that limited in scope, it is unlikely that it would be as popular as it is today.
Also, the fact that many governments of the Eastern world have already adopted mass surveillance and propaganda/censorship as a means of control does not in any way constitute a valid argument for allowing other nations to adopt equally abusive policies.
Why does everything involving security/privacy have to come down to the same tired, inapplicable old refences to 1984?
Explain to me how the reference is inapplicable. As I recall, having *gasp* actually read the book, surveillance of individual citizens by the government and control of the populous through manipulation of all news and history was precisely what Orwell was writing about and feared would come to be in the future. So, now that governments throughout the Western world are rapidly enacting measures that enable far greater surveillance of their own citizens and chilling effects on free speach we're just supposed to shut up about it. We should retire the reference to 1984 because you think it's tired and overused, despite it being entirely on-topic to the discussion at hand? Maybe we should ban Kafka from the discussion, since he too voiced a number of poignant and applicable ideas regarding the nature of justice, beaureaucracy, and power? If Orwell is spinning in his grave, it is because governments throughout the western world are interpreting his novel as a howto guide for building morally bankrupt, totalitarian states rather than as a warning against such things.
By "public investment," do you mean from governments? In that case, your idea is flawed on several levels.
First, the results, the open source software, would not be free as in beer. They would have been paid for with money seized from taxpayers, so if you have a job, you're paying for the software anyway, whether you want to use it or not.
That's certainly a valid argument for many kinds of software. However, what about software that benefits our society as a whole (in the same way that roads and schools do)? For example, we all keep hearing about the rising cost of healthcare. So, why doesn't our government fund development of the kinds of medical software that are ubiquitous in the industry? Canada has done some of this (and saved big $$$ in doing so). Of course, some think that our government shouldn't be in the healthcare business at all because it's outside of the scope of the powers assigned to it by the constitution... I'm not entering into that argument. My point is that, since the federal government already is in the biz (Medicare, Medicaid, VA hospitals) it would only make sense to obtain software the cheap way, which for an enormously large institution is to build it yourself or buy out a company that's already built it. Software development seems like one area where public works projects make sense because once you get beyond the development costs the only significant per unit cost is tech support.
When you resolve these conflicts, you are making a rational choice, not following a biological imperative, and morality is the tool which guides these choices.
Morality is certainly a tool that guides rational choice, but that still does not mean that "God" is required for morality to have arisen as an artifact of culture. One of the important distinctions between humans and other animals is that we humans teach a tremendous amount of what we have learned to our offspring. We don't learn everything the hard way. In fact, most of our strategies for dealing with the world are derived from communication and a reward/punishment system imposed upon us by parents and others. Because of this communication and conditioning we are able to quickly acquire behavioral strategies that are far more advanced than what we could have acquired through instincts and trial-and-error experiences. For example, I know that I don't want to touch a hot burner on the stove. I've never done that before and stoves haven't been in existence long enough for humans to have evolved an instinct against touching them, yet I have internalized a very effective means of avoiding biological discomfort.
Morality is a technology that we are taught and we use it (along with many other technologies that we are taught) to guide our behavior. The concept of "God" is another cultural artifact that is transmitted through communication. That these two concepts are often communicated in unison does not necessarily mean that the concept of "God" is essential to the transmission of moral concepts, nor does it mean that morality cannot have arisen naturally through iterative refinement of a good survival strategy passed on from generation to generation of a social, sentient species.
Regarding your second point, I'm not suggesting that every human decision is preceded by a risk/benefit analysis specific to that situation. Human beings don't work that way. We don't come up with novel creative solutions to every problem we face. We'd have become extinct long ago if we had to perform complex reasoning in every situation. The strategies we learn are internalized and we apply them quite consistently. In general, it is only when we experience a very strong individual stimulus or a long-term trend of reward/punishment for some behavior that we modify our strategies.
Of course, there's a problem here: you judge that `being happy and comfortable' is what you should be seeking. Is not this a moral decision? Is it not true that you could have chose another goal, such as making others happy, or short term gratification, or who knows what else?
No. "Being happy and comfortable" is not a moral decision. It's a biological one. Nature has equipped us with a pleasure system that rewards us for behavior that promotes our survival. Our reasoning capabilites allow us to make risk/benefit assessments of our own behavior. Without invoking "God", human beings will still seek to optimize benefit and minimize risk. Learning ability provides for greater optimization over time. Thus, as we gain experience, morality becomes an increasingly attractive strategy because, in general, it effectively minimizes risk without undue sacrifice of pleasure.
Of course it's AI. Is it sentient? No. Would it pass a Turing test? No. Are those features necessary criteria for it to be AI? No. To satisfy the definition of "artificial intelligence" all the system needs to do is exhibit behavior that is intelligent from the perspective of an outside observer.
Its a purely dumb expert system. it has no self reasoning capability -- it draws inferences from already preprogrammed facts.
All intelligent systems draw their inferences from knowledge they already posses, including you and I (unless you're psychic). That the designers of the system have chosen thus far to make human beings part of the system (functioning as the sensory/learning rule subsystems) does not negate what they have achieved. It also does not prevent them from implementing automatic sensory/learning systems and adding them to Cyc once the initial knowledge base is deemed to be capable of producing good judgments about the quality of sensory input.
Youre not teaching it about morality -- it doesnt learn. its dumb. youre just adding new constraints to filter through.
Expert systems get slammed a lot for taking a human-guided learning approach, but it is the careful construction of a high quality knowledge base that makes them useful. Neural nets are great for situations where lots of data is available and it is relatively easy to evaluate the quality of the system's response (DSP, OCR, industrial process control). But, one of the big problems with neural nets is that convergence of the system to stable behavior and the quality of the system's responses to stimuli are at odds with each other. I suspect if you were to try to train a neural net in the same domain (common sense reasoning), you'd spend many more person-hours generating enough good training sets to get the system to perform at the same level of competence as Cyc than what they've spent on this project to hand-feed the knowledge.
It'll be interesting to see what new developments come about through Cyc's release to the public at large. Who knows what it will be able to do once the KB undergoes massive growth and people develop gateways to other databases and possibly attach automatic learning capabilities to it?
Mod-up parent.
I hate to think just how much time I've wasted trying to configure various Windows applications to run with minimum privilege. Developers either don't understand the security model or just don't care about designing software with security policies in mind, leaving admins stuck with software that is a major headache to lock down appropriately.
This sure sounds like Cold Fusion/Red Mercury to me.
......this is truly shocking news.