All scientists retire in one sense of the word or another. Wouldn't an optimal scientist just cut out off of the intermediate experimentation stuff and immediately retire? I think this guy's taking an easy problem he's already solved and building it up to land a tasty stream of grants.
Odd that we detest the idea of being likened to man made creations (robots) when we are man made creations (e.g. we have parents). I guess we are very aware of the failings of robots, or much more likely, we are very proud of ourselves (and no robot can encapsulate our "us-ness", no matter how good the copy). This helps explain why we fear clones, clones are purported to be perfect copies (which they cannot be), an a perfect copy must include a copy of our "us-ness".
The interest IS THE PENALTY. Considering it takes nearly two years for them to contact you about an error, and their interest rates make credit cards look reasonable, being on the hook for just the interest and taxes is punitive.
Cost per line of code is like cost per flower. You don't mention what kind of flower, whether it is a cheap bulk flower or a premium single flower, whether it is spoiled or fresh, or whether it can be picked outside your window or it has to be shipped half way around the world. Since there is so much variability in what a flower can be, you can manipulate the cost per flower by manipulating the size, quality, and desirability of delivered flowers.
Cost per line of code is subject to similar manipulations as cost per flower. One can easily take one line of code and cut it into two lines without changing the functionality of the program. One can likewise take two lines of code and make them one without changing the functionality of the program. With ability to manipulate the number of lines, one can take a program and arrive at nearly any cost per line they desire.
I know it's flame-bait, but there's few alternatives to suing someone. Every alternative involves taking vigilante action (highly illegal) or letting someone take advantage of you.
So each time my boss tells me something, I'm supposed to go up the chain of command until I am sure my boss is not in the wrong? That might work for a small set of rules (United Code of Military Conduct) but it can't work for general policy. General company policy is based on your boss having the authority to decide what you do and don't do (within reason). If my boss says I can use a company resource for personal use, and that they don't monitor such personal use, what about such a directive is so unreasonable that I shouldn't believe him? If my boss says the project requires delivery by such and such a date, the luxury of double guessing him is a fools luxury.
What if this had been a clipboard with a provided pad of paper? You can write on the paper for personal reasons, but if your personal writing consumes the pad you will have to buy additional pads of paper at your own expense. Is the use of a company clipboard sufficient to warrant the monitoring of your writing on your self-purchased pads of paper? If you write something personal on the initial pad, do you get compensation for work related messages on the privately owned pads of paper?
I can clearly imagine that this is a very grey area. The police department admitted that their OFFICER directed police to believe that one policy was in place, when in fact another was in place. In certain circumstances, such an act could be considered entrapment. A court decided to dismiss charges after having access to the details of the case, so why do people decide that the court was wrong having access to their hunches and gut feelings?
A frequency is a count over a span of time. Frequency is a useful measurement, but dividing the count by time doesn't get rid of the fact that it's based on counting.
Re:Experimental set-up raises a few questions
on
Ants That Can Count
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, that might be a good explanation for the reason the short legged ants failed to arrive home. However, it doesn't explain why the artificially leg lengthened ants overshot their nest. I mean, if it were you or me, we would have seen our home and stopped, so the ants must really heavily rely on step counting.
Re:This doesn't prove ants can count
on
Ants That Can Count
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Math isn't just about a bunch of numbers. Push down automata can count (I know, it's incredible! Even more so considering they have no fingers) The program as I heard it basically described a behaviour which could easily be simulated via a push down automata.
As a drummer, you might be so accustomed to a particular rhythm that you don't count it out in the literal sense of counting out loud, but you do put eight strikes into a measure. Whether you acknowledge that as counting or not, it is still counting, it is just counting that you have become so accustomed to that you don't consider it counting because you need to reframe it in a different context before you can acknowledge to yourself that you are counting.
Rather than using your own logic to falsify the scientist's hypothesis, perhaps you should have listened to the details of the experiment and observed the results. You might have found a superior but alternate explanation, in which case you would have expanded the realm of possibilities a bit. You might even be able to suggest a follow up experiment to differentiate between the counting hypothesis and your alternative to determine which is more correct.
I take it that you haven't done much with functional programming languages, as there are often certain types of problems that are more easily solved in functional languages by counting in the manner of "one one one one one" (as five) than by actually storing a five.
And while I'm at it, trade doesn't require counting. Bartering might involve counting, or it might simply be a swap of my fishtank for your LP collection. However, the idea that we knew counting would be good for trade so we developed counting is a cunning bit of mental gymnastics; it's the mental equivalent of putting the cart before the horse.
That's all fine a well, more CO2 is more food for plants, except you have it wrong. Sugar is food for plants, and it is produced from Sunlight, using CO2 as a temporary storage for the energy captured by sunlight. When the plants then burn that sugar, they too release CO2. It's just that the overall picture has plants storing a lot of that CO2 in its structural elements.
Also, expecting nature to pull the system back in line based on supply of CO2 is just silly. Did we also increase the supply of sunlight? What about suitable water sources? What about increased arable land? As far as I can tell, we are tearing up forests that have stood for a mere 30 years (possibly longer, but I'm not old enough to know) to build subdivisions. Then we plant "trees" which are so small (cost savings) that it will be 20 years before they can provide a usable amount of shade.
I would say that if we provided more of all of the necessary elements, then we would see things coming back in line. But as far as I can tell, we have less sunlight (smog), less suitable water (diverting surface water to feed cities), less fresh air (pollution), and less land (development), and somehow nature is to bring it all back because we have a bumper crop of CO2?
Well, if you can't manage "yum install httpd", you are better off staying with Win98.
Pretty sad statement but yeah if you think win98 is better than Redhat linux I guess you're right.
That's not exactly what the grandparent poster said. The grandparent poster said something more like, "Since you haven't learned anything since Windows 98, you should stick to the operating system you're proficient in."
I'm pretty sure that my fireplace can provide some prior art on how to turn cellulose into fuel. Perhaps some of the researchers who are a bit confused can come over and investigate it in detail. If the kids don't mind, we can also introduce them to marshmallows and camp fire songs, time permitting.
As for converting cellulose into gasoline, perhaps they can bury a few billion tons of cellulose in the earth's crust. I seem to recall that that worked once, but anecdotal data probably won't hold up to scientific scrutiny.
So if I never compile my machine code, the performance or memory usage must suck?
Setting the performance and memory usage requirements down as requirements, instead of discovering what they are after the fact, is what makes code work fast with little memory. It is very rare to find a platform that's so messed up it cannot perform quickly with little memory. When you do find such a platform, odds are it was provided by a third party who didn't give a hoot about performance or memory consumption.
You don't lose your whole life, that's the militant feminist rant talking. Your life changes, that's all.
Then again, it changes every time there's a major event. Marriage, new job, car crash, theft, death of family member. I've heard a few women complain about losing their life to marriage. While I agree that you lose your former life, that doesn't mean you don't get a new one in return. People complain about losing their life to ailing family members. People complain a lot (human condition).
Death is the only item where you really lose your life. The rest is what you make out of it. For everyone that weeps a tear for the days of lesser responsibility, there's a person who would never go back to how it was. If you don't want to have a child, that's fine. If you want to not be bothered by someone else, then don't have a child, husband, family, etc. I'm not being facetious, not everyone is cut out to live like everyone else.
Likening a child to a cancer is just silly, unless I can call you, your parents, your bothers, and sisters cancers. In that case, you've mis-defined cancer; we all call that life.
The irony is that children are the only future which really will keep you in mind after you are gone. Eventually that won't last, but if you want a longer future than the one you will experience, you need to put your stamp on things that will outlast you.
Automation is just a fact of life in the modern world, I'll accept your point.
What I don't understand is why they used such a horrible example to justify it. Any critical thinker will immediately realize that while it does suck to be hauling around large drums of heavy coins after being kept up by a crying infant, it sucks far more to not have a job hauling around large drums of heavy coins when needing to provide an income to support your crying infant.
Seems to me that the person pitching the plan didn't think his argument out throughally.
Well, most people aren't Willie Nelson, but part of the negotiations of his back taxes were paid by the proceeds of a record album. You might say that's US dollars at work, but since the proceeds went directly to the IRS, I would say it was more of a barter arrangement.
Even worse, these kind of organizations eventually idolize their most effective fire-fighters. What they don't realize is the lack of proper management and sufficient prevention techniques often lead to their fire-fighters leaving around piles of dry wood in the organizations, and departments containing arsonists are often the most highly hailed due to the large number of successful fires extinguished.
The chance for ecological whaling passed a long time ago, when people decided that it wasn't important to kill whales at a rate lower than their reproduction rate.
Now, due to the errors of the past, we are left with the alternative to stop whaling altogether, or have no whales in the future. Most sound minded people realize that having no whales in the future means whaling will stop altogether, so it's a matter of stopping whaling either way. I vote we stop whaling now, so the species can repopulate and ecological whaling will be a possibility in the future.
The whalers don't want to know what the whale reproduction rate is, and they don't want to be limited to harvesting at a very low rate. To them it's money in the ocean, and they want to pull it all out faster than their competing whalers.
So you don't know how much energy it takes to make a vacuum, but you pose that it might be more than the light will save? This kind of lazy false tree-hugging disappoints those who care and scares off those who don't.
Air pressure is roughly 15 PSI at sea level. The energy required to create a vacuum is roughly the energy needed to lift 15 pounds from the bottom of your vacuum vessel to the top of the vacuum vessel. Naturally, the exact amount of energy depends on the size of the vessel, and you'll probably have to use a bit more due to mechanical inefficiencies in the apparatus moving the air out.
If you can't bother to calculate something, then don't pose it as a reason it's less efficient overall.
The funny thing I keep seeing in the original article is the assertion that it's not oil.
Considering the history of oil spills (Valdez was only the largest, by no means it it unique) I wouldn't be one bit surprised if there was a considerable amount of organic dense crude hanging around on the bottom of the ocean. Who knows what this stuff will look like after the lighter hydrocarbon chains are chewed up by underwater oil loving organisms? They are not super plentiful, but there were plenty detected in the Gulf of Oman in the 1990's so I guess Alaska might have a few too.
If it was large enough, it could eventually turn into a stew teeming with all sorts of life. I'll wager that we wouldn't exactly know what such a mass would look like after a few dozen / hundred / thousand years. The article doesn't give us enough clues; we may never know how long this stuff went undetected. There's probably a few people who could hazard a decent guess if you asked them the right questions.
Of course, it's all speculation. It could be a rotting whale carcass. It could be anything. The lack of information is typical with a first sighting, but it's also indicative of a news reporter that didn't want to really report any facts. Perhaps there are no facts to report, but from my past interactions with real live news reporters, they probably focused on the aspects of the story that would sell (aka the mystery).
Perhaps that's why they are offering to sell the entire set of indexed hashes for just under $600? (shipped on a 1.5 TB usb disk drive). Considering their relative lack of mark-up on the 1.5 TB usb disk drive, I don't get the impression that these guys were in it for the money.
Slashdot Mirror
All scientists retire in one sense of the word or another. Wouldn't an optimal scientist just cut out off of the intermediate experimentation stuff and immediately retire? I think this guy's taking an easy problem he's already solved and building it up to land a tasty stream of grants.
Odd that we detest the idea of being likened to man made creations (robots) when we are man made creations (e.g. we have parents). I guess we are very aware of the failings of robots, or much more likely, we are very proud of ourselves (and no robot can encapsulate our "us-ness", no matter how good the copy). This helps explain why we fear clones, clones are purported to be perfect copies (which they cannot be), an a perfect copy must include a copy of our "us-ness".
The interest IS THE PENALTY. Considering it takes nearly two years for them to contact you about an error, and their interest rates make credit cards look reasonable, being on the hook for just the interest and taxes is punitive.
Cost per line of code is like cost per flower. You don't mention what kind of flower, whether it is a cheap bulk flower or a premium single flower, whether it is spoiled or fresh, or whether it can be picked outside your window or it has to be shipped half way around the world. Since there is so much variability in what a flower can be, you can manipulate the cost per flower by manipulating the size, quality, and desirability of delivered flowers.
Cost per line of code is subject to similar manipulations as cost per flower. One can easily take one line of code and cut it into two lines without changing the functionality of the program. One can likewise take two lines of code and make them one without changing the functionality of the program. With ability to manipulate the number of lines, one can take a program and arrive at nearly any cost per line they desire.
I know it's flame-bait, but there's few alternatives to suing someone. Every alternative involves taking vigilante action (highly illegal) or letting someone take advantage of you.
Um, how in the *ell is it too easy to do a control-alt-backspace by mistake? By habit, perhaps, but by mistake?
So each time my boss tells me something, I'm supposed to go up the chain of command until I am sure my boss is not in the wrong? That might work for a small set of rules (United Code of Military Conduct) but it can't work for general policy. General company policy is based on your boss having the authority to decide what you do and don't do (within reason). If my boss says I can use a company resource for personal use, and that they don't monitor such personal use, what about such a directive is so unreasonable that I shouldn't believe him? If my boss says the project requires delivery by such and such a date, the luxury of double guessing him is a fools luxury.
What if this had been a clipboard with a provided pad of paper? You can write on the paper for personal reasons, but if your personal writing consumes the pad you will have to buy additional pads of paper at your own expense. Is the use of a company clipboard sufficient to warrant the monitoring of your writing on your self-purchased pads of paper? If you write something personal on the initial pad, do you get compensation for work related messages on the privately owned pads of paper?
I can clearly imagine that this is a very grey area. The police department admitted that their OFFICER directed police to believe that one policy was in place, when in fact another was in place. In certain circumstances, such an act could be considered entrapment. A court decided to dismiss charges after having access to the details of the case, so why do people decide that the court was wrong having access to their hunches and gut feelings?
Good, because they are counting on you!
A frequency is a count over a span of time. Frequency is a useful measurement, but dividing the count by time doesn't get rid of the fact that it's based on counting.
Well, that might be a good explanation for the reason the short legged ants failed to arrive home. However, it doesn't explain why the artificially leg lengthened ants overshot their nest. I mean, if it were you or me, we would have seen our home and stopped, so the ants must really heavily rely on step counting.
Math isn't just about a bunch of numbers. Push down automata can count (I know, it's incredible! Even more so considering they have no fingers) The program as I heard it basically described a behaviour which could easily be simulated via a push down automata.
As a drummer, you might be so accustomed to a particular rhythm that you don't count it out in the literal sense of counting out loud, but you do put eight strikes into a measure. Whether you acknowledge that as counting or not, it is still counting, it is just counting that you have become so accustomed to that you don't consider it counting because you need to reframe it in a different context before you can acknowledge to yourself that you are counting.
Rather than using your own logic to falsify the scientist's hypothesis, perhaps you should have listened to the details of the experiment and observed the results. You might have found a superior but alternate explanation, in which case you would have expanded the realm of possibilities a bit. You might even be able to suggest a follow up experiment to differentiate between the counting hypothesis and your alternative to determine which is more correct.
I take it that you haven't done much with functional programming languages, as there are often certain types of problems that are more easily solved in functional languages by counting in the manner of "one one one one one" (as five) than by actually storing a five.
And while I'm at it, trade doesn't require counting. Bartering might involve counting, or it might simply be a swap of my fishtank for your LP collection. However, the idea that we knew counting would be good for trade so we developed counting is a cunning bit of mental gymnastics; it's the mental equivalent of putting the cart before the horse.
That's all fine a well, more CO2 is more food for plants, except you have it wrong. Sugar is food for plants, and it is produced from Sunlight, using CO2 as a temporary storage for the energy captured by sunlight. When the plants then burn that sugar, they too release CO2. It's just that the overall picture has plants storing a lot of that CO2 in its structural elements.
Also, expecting nature to pull the system back in line based on supply of CO2 is just silly. Did we also increase the supply of sunlight? What about suitable water sources? What about increased arable land? As far as I can tell, we are tearing up forests that have stood for a mere 30 years (possibly longer, but I'm not old enough to know) to build subdivisions. Then we plant "trees" which are so small (cost savings) that it will be 20 years before they can provide a usable amount of shade.
I would say that if we provided more of all of the necessary elements, then we would see things coming back in line. But as far as I can tell, we have less sunlight (smog), less suitable water (diverting surface water to feed cities), less fresh air (pollution), and less land (development), and somehow nature is to bring it all back because we have a bumper crop of CO2?
Well, if you can't manage "yum install httpd", you are better off staying with Win98.
Pretty sad statement but yeah if you think win98 is better than Redhat linux I guess you're right.
That's not exactly what the grandparent poster said. The grandparent poster said something more like, "Since you haven't learned anything since Windows 98, you should stick to the operating system you're proficient in."
I'm pretty sure that my fireplace can provide some prior art on how to turn cellulose into fuel. Perhaps some of the researchers who are a bit confused can come over and investigate it in detail. If the kids don't mind, we can also introduce them to marshmallows and camp fire songs, time permitting.
As for converting cellulose into gasoline, perhaps they can bury a few billion tons of cellulose in the earth's crust. I seem to recall that that worked once, but anecdotal data probably won't hold up to scientific scrutiny.
At true north, the sun never sets, and sometimes never rises for days on end.
I personally would like to see a Sun that never sets and yet only rarely rises.
It is an Atom, and it runs Windows; so, you can pretty much bet that the memory size is 1GB shipped.
So if I never compile my machine code, the performance or memory usage must suck?
Setting the performance and memory usage requirements down as requirements, instead of discovering what they are after the fact, is what makes code work fast with little memory. It is very rare to find a platform that's so messed up it cannot perform quickly with little memory. When you do find such a platform, odds are it was provided by a third party who didn't give a hoot about performance or memory consumption.
You don't lose your whole life, that's the militant feminist rant talking. Your life changes, that's all.
Then again, it changes every time there's a major event. Marriage, new job, car crash, theft, death of family member. I've heard a few women complain about losing their life to marriage. While I agree that you lose your former life, that doesn't mean you don't get a new one in return. People complain about losing their life to ailing family members. People complain a lot (human condition).
Death is the only item where you really lose your life. The rest is what you make out of it. For everyone that weeps a tear for the days of lesser responsibility, there's a person who would never go back to how it was. If you don't want to have a child, that's fine. If you want to not be bothered by someone else, then don't have a child, husband, family, etc. I'm not being facetious, not everyone is cut out to live like everyone else.
Likening a child to a cancer is just silly, unless I can call you, your parents, your bothers, and sisters cancers. In that case, you've mis-defined cancer; we all call that life.
The irony is that children are the only future which really will keep you in mind after you are gone. Eventually that won't last, but if you want a longer future than the one you will experience, you need to put your stamp on things that will outlast you.
Automation is just a fact of life in the modern world, I'll accept your point.
What I don't understand is why they used such a horrible example to justify it. Any critical thinker will immediately realize that while it does suck to be hauling around large drums of heavy coins after being kept up by a crying infant, it sucks far more to not have a job hauling around large drums of heavy coins when needing to provide an income to support your crying infant.
Seems to me that the person pitching the plan didn't think his argument out throughally.
Well, most people aren't Willie Nelson, but part of the negotiations of his back taxes were paid by the proceeds of a record album. You might say that's US dollars at work, but since the proceeds went directly to the IRS, I would say it was more of a barter arrangement.
Wikipedia's entry A better description
Even worse, these kind of organizations eventually idolize their most effective fire-fighters. What they don't realize is the lack of proper management and sufficient prevention techniques often lead to their fire-fighters leaving around piles of dry wood in the organizations, and departments containing arsonists are often the most highly hailed due to the large number of successful fires extinguished.
Ok, I shouldn't but I'll bite.
The chance for ecological whaling passed a long time ago, when people decided that it wasn't important to kill whales at a rate lower than their reproduction rate.
Now, due to the errors of the past, we are left with the alternative to stop whaling altogether, or have no whales in the future. Most sound minded people realize that having no whales in the future means whaling will stop altogether, so it's a matter of stopping whaling either way. I vote we stop whaling now, so the species can repopulate and ecological whaling will be a possibility in the future.
The whalers don't want to know what the whale reproduction rate is, and they don't want to be limited to harvesting at a very low rate. To them it's money in the ocean, and they want to pull it all out faster than their competing whalers.
So you don't know how much energy it takes to make a vacuum, but you pose that it might be more than the light will save? This kind of lazy false tree-hugging disappoints those who care and scares off those who don't.
Air pressure is roughly 15 PSI at sea level. The energy required to create a vacuum is roughly the energy needed to lift 15 pounds from the bottom of your vacuum vessel to the top of the vacuum vessel. Naturally, the exact amount of energy depends on the size of the vessel, and you'll probably have to use a bit more due to mechanical inefficiencies in the apparatus moving the air out.
If you can't bother to calculate something, then don't pose it as a reason it's less efficient overall.
The funny thing I keep seeing in the original article is the assertion that it's not oil.
Considering the history of oil spills (Valdez was only the largest, by no means it it unique) I wouldn't be one bit surprised if there was a considerable amount of organic dense crude hanging around on the bottom of the ocean. Who knows what this stuff will look like after the lighter hydrocarbon chains are chewed up by underwater oil loving organisms? They are not super plentiful, but there were plenty detected in the Gulf of Oman in the 1990's so I guess Alaska might have a few too.
If it was large enough, it could eventually turn into a stew teeming with all sorts of life. I'll wager that we wouldn't exactly know what such a mass would look like after a few dozen / hundred / thousand years. The article doesn't give us enough clues; we may never know how long this stuff went undetected. There's probably a few people who could hazard a decent guess if you asked them the right questions.
Of course, it's all speculation. It could be a rotting whale carcass. It could be anything. The lack of information is typical with a first sighting, but it's also indicative of a news reporter that didn't want to really report any facts. Perhaps there are no facts to report, but from my past interactions with real live news reporters, they probably focused on the aspects of the story that would sell (aka the mystery).
Perhaps that's why they are offering to sell the entire set of indexed hashes for just under $600? (shipped on a 1.5 TB usb disk drive). Considering their relative lack of mark-up on the 1.5 TB usb disk drive, I don't get the impression that these guys were in it for the money.