While I may disagree with you on some particulars of your point, I'd like to thank you for a well thought-out and formulated post. Don't know why I felt compelled to state so--it's just one of the few in this thread I found comprehensible.
Your post seems to have some mistaken ideas about MCSE:
1) MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineer) is not a programming certification
2) It hasn't got a thing to do with MS programmers, excepting that Microsoft administers the cert.
I'd have to say that you're worth about.05 regular slashdot clowns.
Keep trying, you'll get there one day.
The only problem was Yahoo was the king before the Internet became common place .
No I reckon their biggest problem was the amount of crap on their front page.
I stopped using yahoo as soon as a Flash version of Britney promoting Pepsi started dancing across my screen. I can't remember the exact year, but I think it was around 2000. The damn ad would actually *obscure* the search box!!!
Saratov is a major Russian city on Volga (and that always meant something).
No joke. ~1 mil. pop. Not to mention Engles across the river, or all the undocumented Kazakstanis. You see, I'm currently attending SGU (Saratovskij Gosudarsvenij Universitet) in their langauge preparatory department. I hope to snag a couple of courses in Mathematics or Comp. Sci before I head back to the states.
, ! ,.
The cyrilic above doesn't seem to be comming through, so let me try a transliteration (which, I don't really know what's accepted, so sorry for any strangeness)...
Molodci, studenti! Vy nastojaszczije uchjonyje, i teper eto fsje znajut. Vam jelaju prodolzhajuszczije udachi i uspehi.
When I was younger, I was raised in a household with a library.
When I was younger, I was lucky to have a house. We occasionally didn't and had to live with extended family. I never quite had it as bad as my younger sister (who once had to live in a shelter with a group of nuns), but hey, I think I got my point across. Now, there's a cultural problem for you. As you might imagine, my parents aren't incredibly literate. I'm even surprised to this day to see the words they misuse. As it is, I've had to apply myself to bring my English usage to the level that I have, though even still it's lacking in certain areas. There are really a complex of issues that are a result of my difficulties. Here are a few:
1) I was a fairly bright child. I scored exceptionally well on an intelligence test administered to me as a child (~145). School, as a result, was always painfully easy for me. I quickly decided that what I was learning was useless, and didn't really bother applying myself. I treated my work as rote exercises without regard to the content of the material. As a consequence, I'm constantly relearning things now that I had *mastered* in school.
2) The English I learned at home is not the English that is generally accepted (or correct). It is difficult for me to remember where I learned certain phrases or meanings of words. Even still, I have to keep this in mind if I want to be sure I am using them correctly.
3) I find that I forget things that I have known all my life. New mistakes creep into my usage no matter how vigilant I try to be. It doesn't help that my wife is a non-native speaker and I'm currently living in Russia.
4) My peers have never been model English speakers. This is more important than many people realize. You learn best through actual usage and real social situations. The internet, laughably, have been the best medium for me to carry out model discourse. Of course, I've been posting to places like here, alt.usage.english, alt.creative.writing, and blogs that attract a more eloquent crowd (there is a standard here that is missing in some darker regions of the 'net, no matter how much flak it gets).
That said, I don't know why your post spurred a response from me besides the sheer contrast. The only books I remember finding in our house as a kid I had to dig out of a box: and that was _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Robinson Crusoe_. It so happens that Clemens is one of my favorite authors now.
So, I guess in a way you're right. There certainly is a correlation between having a "library" and literacy in the household. I'm not sure that the one necessarily follows from the other, or at least, completely follows from the other. There's something to be said about the general atmosphere that fosters both a library and literacy in itself. More specifically, those two elements tend to reinforce each other.
My wife and I plan to have quite a library of are own, though I doubt we'll ever be able to have an entire room devoted to it because we just are not of that caste. It currently includes such things as: assorted works of Joyce, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Twain, Pushkin, Dostoevsky. Many singular novels from writers who I would like to read more of, such as Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf. A few works of philosophy: _The Social Contract_, _Being and Nothingness_. A hodgepodge of references pertaining to: theatre, mathematics, costume design. What encyclopedias and dictionaries we can get a hold of. Unfortunately, through our bouncing around the world like we have with no storage available to us, we've had to cut down our library and start over numerous times, so most of the books I have are ones I either just read or soon plan to read or know I will read many, many times over.
I've been reading John Dewey's _Democracy and Education_ online recently, and I must say, it deals fairly well with many problems of education that have been brought up in this thread. His position centers around how he defines intelligence
It's important that you comprehend the mathematical problem as presented in english. Getting hung up on semantics and ambiguities is what makes this problem difficult.
You'll see I presented that exact solution (if n is the number of blue-eyed people on the island minus the guru, n blued eyed people leave on the nth night). The point of my post was somewhat similar to what you're saying about "getting hung up on" and understanding the problem "as presented in english". My point, however, is that it is impossible to formulate the problem as a problem that one has to intuit. The formulation *excactly coincides* with the divulgence of the solution. In this sense "groking" such a *problem* is inherently different than people typically think.
In particular, I hinged my argument on the fact that the "rules" of such a puzzle are never clear in themselves, but only in reference to the solution. A real and substantial communication of what the solution may be must be present for me to "infer" (read confirm) the solution.
I suppose I got into difficulties when I tried to demonstrate that this was the fact.
1) That everyone with blue eyes (at least) is wholly involved in figuring out if they have blue eyes and should comply (bear with me, this is different than you think)
Without this specification, there can be no implicit communication as to the understanding of others.
But to be fair, this is hardly the end of the specifications, and is why I so detest logic puzzles. An earlier poster had it right when they said that a logic puzzle is hardly about logic, but about communication between the puzzle maker and tester.
I think there is an issue with your stipulation about the islanders not "otherwise" communicating with each other because I think communication other than the exact count of islanders is exactly what happens.
To rectify this I could, for instance, instead demand there be such stipulations as: 2) The islanders don't tell each other what their eye colors are 3) Or otherwise sign and because we're tired and want to stop this progression from escaping us we'll try a catch all... 4) or intentionally let each others know Perhaps you might say someone demanding that there could be such a "outside mode of communication" isn't "playing along", but this is precisely what I mean. There must be a communication of what the solution might be for a guesser to play along with what might get him there. I would like to especially point out that one can get into the same trouble with rule 4 as you did with your stipulation (and for the same reason, and that this is unavoidable). I would say that an islander following stipulation 1 is implicitly breaking this or any such rule.
But we're hardly done yet... I want to examine rule 1 a little closer and to do that I need to outline the "solution".
1 blue eyed islander: In the case of the 1 blue eyed islander, he sees that everyone else has brown eyes (and the guru green) so knows he must have blue eyes. He leaves. The others do not leave because they see him leave.
2 blue eyed islanders: The two blue eyed islanders see that there is another blue eyed islander and so don't leave on the first day. They then both leave on the second day, knowing that the other must have not left because they expected themselves to leave the first day*. No one else leaves, because they knew there were at least two others, and so waited for the third night**.
And so on for n blue eyed islanders.
So, first onto the problem with condition 1), and then onto those little stars.
Condition 1) at first seems as if it is a simple restatement of the condition that islanders know the count of other's people eye color at all times. It is not. In addition, it also signifies that every islander (or at least ever islander with blue eyes) must be *carrying out* the logical processes and understand its implications.
But then, for any islander to have any certainty of what the other islanders know, he must also have the guarantee that every other islander is carrying out these processes. This leads us to: 5) Every islander knows that every (blue eyed) islander is wholly involved in deciding if they have blue eyes. It's actually a bit more involved and also involves knowing all other stipulations are also in effect, but I would like to keep this somewhat comprehensible. And now that we realize this is a stipulation for the valid reasoning of an islander, an islander also needs to be assured of 5). Thus: 6) Every islander knows that every (blue eyed) islander knows that every (blue eyed) islander is wholly involved in deciding if they have blue eyes.
And so on. It is only important that every blue eyed islander has correctly proceeded for one to decide how to proceed.
Those stars: *Conveniently, this directly extends from the previous statement, so it should flow nicely. For an islander with blue eyes to know that the others know he has blue eyes, he must assume that the islanders "correctly proceeded". Thi
"Isn't the SF area the most peace loving, new Beetle driving, whale saving, artsy-fartsy community in, oh, the whole world? "
Wrong. Try Santa Fe, NM. There was a huge hippie migration to the mountains of Northern New Mexico. Damn Subaru Outbacks are everywhere. When I moved here this spring I was surprised at the graffiti to be found at every other coner: denouncing the war, Bush, et al. Stop signs that read... "Stop Bush". etc.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with pirsig (just did a quick google now). Anything interesting of his that you'd reccommend reading?
BTW: By my comment I meant to indicate that *scientific observation* in itself should not lead to moral judgements as moral judgements are not, by definition, scientific. We could, of course, debate this point... but I've never heard someone to claim otherwise. That is, beyond simply stating that such judgements are always made in *tandem* with *any* observation; yet I would counter that such observations are indeed relying on these "other factors".
This discussion is difficult in part because of what I see as the vacuous term "scientific", but as long as we are using it I like to enforce the presupposition of objectivity.
That's actually a very accurate description of how many genetic algorithms find their stopping conditions--either run for X generations, or stop when within a certain threshold of the theoretical maximum (or estimated maximum).
What can be tough about such stopping conditions is making sure you have a good scoring function so that the optimal solution indeed scores best, and that you know what that score should be (though, of course, not how to get there, or the alg is pointless).
I had thought that the comment about check to see what was installed was so that you *could* rebuild the computer? Not to see what has been planted....
I will retract my previous statement, as it seems, I have been overly rigorous in my definition of agnostic--which I have determined after some research over at wikipedia.
Just as a fair warning: I suggest you find corraborating evindence of some of the details I mentioned as I may have skewed some of the details. I would hate for my report to have totally changed your opinion of the man.
At any rate, I'm not sure why I wrote "homosexualism instead of homosexuality (actually, bisexuality)."
Furthermore, can you be certain that if he did molest a child, that he in fact knew what he was doing? I would think it somewhat unfair to hold it morally against him if he didn't. My point was... that we should *quesiton* whether or not we approve of him..... anyways...
Personally, I think *anyone* who says they know the answer for sure is deluded. Of course, I could be wrong.
Well now, that's not very agnostic of you. If you were indeed agnostic you would beleive that knowledge of any deities would be *impossible*, and for anyone to claim such knowledge (for any way) would be against your basic tenet. There would be no... "of course, I could be wrong." How then, are you agnostic? It sounds more like you are uncertain as to what to believe. That is not agnostic.
It also left out very important details about his homosexualism, predatory sexual behavior (molesting young boys in bathrooms) and his anti-semitism. I think it including these details could have made for a much richer experiecne--asking the audience what it truly takes for us to admire an individual. Can great accomplishments cause us to overlook other blemishes? Can a mental illness excuse certain behaviours? What is *Greatness*, anyways?
The movie dropped the ball on all of these very important and illuminating questions--questions that were immediately available in the subject matter.
Technically, your worst case scenario is still big O of n, it just depends on the particular instance of your tree--unless we had some sort of balanced tree structure.
Now, I have a question: I've seen it mentioned that some file systems do indeed have a btree implementation. How is this accomplished? What does this mean? I am fairly certain that this "tree" does not refer to a directory hierachy as it would be imposible to exert this sort of balanced stipulation on that. Is there then, some sort of exernal behind-the-scenes heirachy in place? Or is the btree only for individual directory lists? Thanks to whoever will answer this question (I'm going to do a little research on this myself as well...I'm just not certain I will find anything definitive).
I sure hope you have some sort of caveat on that statement... such as "a blackhole *with* an equivalent amount of mass as the sun". Otherwise the question is quite meaningless.
If the windows XP firewall is a system component, why is it not integral to the network connection so that there is no "loading" of the firewall per se, the connection driver itself is swapable as a firewalled connection, or a streamlined (non-firewalled) one?
Slashdot Mirror
While I may disagree with you on some particulars of your point, I'd like to thank you for a well thought-out and formulated post. Don't know why I felt compelled to state so--it's just one of the few in this thread I found comprehensible.
Cheers.
Your post seems to have some mistaken ideas about MCSE: 1) MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineer) is not a programming certification 2) It hasn't got a thing to do with MS programmers, excepting that Microsoft administers the cert. I'd have to say that you're worth about .05 regular slashdot clowns.
Keep trying, you'll get there one day.
The only problem was Yahoo was the king before the Internet became common place .
No I reckon their biggest problem was the amount of crap on their front page.
I stopped using yahoo as soon as a Flash version of Britney promoting Pepsi started dancing across my screen. I can't remember the exact year, but I think it was around 2000. The damn ad would actually *obscure* the search box!!!
Btw, the Volga *is* both the longest and the largest river in Europe.
No joke. ~1 mil. pop. Not to mention Engles across the river, or all the undocumented Kazakstanis. You see, I'm currently attending SGU (Saratovskij Gosudarsvenij Universitet) in their langauge preparatory department. I hope to snag a couple of courses in Mathematics or Comp. Sci before I head back to the states.
, ! , .
The cyrilic above doesn't seem to be comming through, so let me try a transliteration (which, I don't really know what's accepted, so sorry for any strangeness)...
Molodci, studenti! Vy nastojaszczije uchjonyje, i teper eto fsje znajut. Vam jelaju prodolzhajuszczije udachi i uspehi.
Pshah! It has the word *zombie* in it! You don't know the slashdot I do.
Though I'm not being serious, you know, I actual am. Tongue in cheek, I suppose, is the phrase.
When I was younger, I was lucky to have a house. We occasionally didn't and had to live with extended family. I never quite had it as bad as my younger sister (who once had to live in a shelter with a group of nuns), but hey, I think I got my point across. Now, there's a cultural problem for you. As you might imagine, my parents aren't incredibly literate. I'm even surprised to this day to see the words they misuse. As it is, I've had to apply myself to bring my English usage to the level that I have, though even still it's lacking in certain areas. There are really a complex of issues that are a result of my difficulties. Here are a few:
1) I was a fairly bright child. I scored exceptionally well on an intelligence test administered to me as a child (~145). School, as a result, was always painfully easy for me. I quickly decided that what I was learning was useless, and didn't really bother applying myself. I treated my work as rote exercises without regard to the content of the material. As a consequence, I'm constantly relearning things now that I had *mastered* in school.
2) The English I learned at home is not the English that is generally accepted (or correct). It is difficult for me to remember where I learned certain phrases or meanings of words. Even still, I have to keep this in mind if I want to be sure I am using them correctly.
3) I find that I forget things that I have known all my life. New mistakes creep into my usage no matter how vigilant I try to be. It doesn't help that my wife is a non-native speaker and I'm currently living in Russia.
4) My peers have never been model English speakers. This is more important than many people realize. You learn best through actual usage and real social situations. The internet, laughably, have been the best medium for me to carry out model discourse. Of course, I've been posting to places like here, alt.usage.english, alt.creative.writing, and blogs that attract a more eloquent crowd (there is a standard here that is missing in some darker regions of the 'net, no matter how much flak it gets).
That said, I don't know why your post spurred a response from me besides the sheer contrast. The only books I remember finding in our house as a kid I had to dig out of a box: and that was _Huckleberry Finn_ and _Robinson Crusoe_. It so happens that Clemens is one of my favorite authors now.
So, I guess in a way you're right. There certainly is a correlation between having a "library" and literacy in the household. I'm not sure that the one necessarily follows from the other, or at least, completely follows from the other. There's something to be said about the general atmosphere that fosters both a library and literacy in itself. More specifically, those two elements tend to reinforce each other.
My wife and I plan to have quite a library of are own, though I doubt we'll ever be able to have an entire room devoted to it because we just are not of that caste. It currently includes such things as: assorted works of Joyce, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Twain, Pushkin, Dostoevsky. Many singular novels from writers who I would like to read more of, such as Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf. A few works of philosophy: _The Social Contract_, _Being and Nothingness_. A hodgepodge of references pertaining to: theatre, mathematics, costume design. What encyclopedias and dictionaries we can get a hold of. Unfortunately, through our bouncing around the world like we have with no storage available to us, we've had to cut down our library and start over numerous times, so most of the books I have are ones I either just read or soon plan to read or know I will read many, many times over.
I've been reading John Dewey's _Democracy and Education_ online recently, and I must say, it deals fairly well with many problems of education that have been brought up in this thread. His position centers around how he defines intelligence
You'll see I presented that exact solution (if n is the number of blue-eyed people on the island minus the guru, n blued eyed people leave on the nth night). The point of my post was somewhat similar to what you're saying about "getting hung up on" and understanding the problem "as presented in english". My point, however, is that it is impossible to formulate the problem as a problem that one has to intuit. The formulation *excactly coincides* with the divulgence of the solution. In this sense "groking" such a *problem* is inherently different than people typically think.
In particular, I hinged my argument on the fact that the "rules" of such a puzzle are never clear in themselves, but only in reference to the solution. A real and substantial communication of what the solution may be must be present for me to "infer" (read confirm) the solution.
I suppose I got into difficulties when I tried to demonstrate that this was the fact.
*sigh*
I was being fanciful. It was a parable, not meant to be taken within the logic of the puzzle.
That'll teach me to post on slashdot.
*spoiler warning*
I think this stipulation is also necessary:
1) That everyone with blue eyes (at least) is wholly involved in figuring out if they have blue eyes and should comply (bear with me, this is different than you think)
Without this specification, there can be no implicit communication as to the understanding of others.
But to be fair, this is hardly the end of the specifications, and is why I so detest logic puzzles. An earlier poster had it right when they said that a logic puzzle is hardly about logic, but about communication between the puzzle maker and tester.
I think there is an issue with your stipulation about the islanders not "otherwise" communicating with each other because I think communication other than the exact count of islanders is exactly what happens.
To rectify this I could, for instance, instead demand there be such stipulations as:
2) The islanders don't tell each other what their eye colors are
3) Or otherwise sign
and because we're tired and want to stop this progression from escaping us we'll try a catch all...
4) or intentionally let each others know
Perhaps you might say someone demanding that there could be such a "outside mode of communication" isn't "playing along", but this is precisely what I mean. There must be a communication of what the solution might be for a guesser to play along with what might get him there. I would like to especially point out that one can get into the same trouble with rule 4 as you did with your stipulation (and for the same reason, and that this is unavoidable). I would say that an islander following stipulation 1 is implicitly breaking this or any such rule.
But we're hardly done yet... I want to examine rule 1 a little closer and to do that I need to outline the "solution".
1 blue eyed islander:
In the case of the 1 blue eyed islander, he sees that everyone else has brown eyes (and the guru green) so knows he must have blue eyes. He leaves. The others do not leave because they see him leave.
2 blue eyed islanders:
The two blue eyed islanders see that there is another blue eyed islander and so don't leave on the first day. They then both leave on the second day, knowing that the other must have not left because they expected themselves to leave the first day*. No one else leaves, because they knew there were at least two others, and so waited for the third night**.
And so on for n blue eyed islanders.
So, first onto the problem with condition 1), and then onto those little stars.
Condition 1) at first seems as if it is a simple restatement of the condition that islanders know the count of other's people eye color at all times. It is not. In addition, it also signifies that every islander (or at least ever islander with blue eyes) must be *carrying out* the logical processes and understand its implications.
But then, for any islander to have any certainty of what the other islanders know, he must also have the guarantee that every other islander is carrying out these processes. This leads us to:
5) Every islander knows that every (blue eyed) islander is wholly involved in deciding if they have blue eyes.
It's actually a bit more involved and also involves knowing all other stipulations are also in effect, but I would like to keep this somewhat comprehensible.
And now that we realize this is a stipulation for the valid reasoning of an islander, an islander also needs to be assured of 5). Thus:
6) Every islander knows that every (blue eyed) islander knows that every (blue eyed) islander is wholly involved in deciding if they have blue eyes.
And so on. It is only important that every blue eyed islander has correctly proceeded for one to decide how to proceed.
Those stars:
*Conveniently, this directly extends from the previous statement, so it should flow nicely. For an islander with blue eyes to know that the others know he has blue eyes, he must assume that the islanders "correctly proceeded". Thi
"Isn't the SF area the most peace loving, new Beetle driving, whale saving, artsy-fartsy community in, oh, the whole world? "
Wrong. Try Santa Fe, NM. There was a huge hippie migration to the mountains of Northern New Mexico. Damn Subaru Outbacks are everywhere. When I moved here this spring I was surprised at the graffiti to be found at every other coner: denouncing the war, Bush, et al. Stop signs that read... "Stop Bush". etc.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with pirsig (just did a quick google now). Anything interesting of his that you'd reccommend reading?
BTW: By my comment I meant to indicate that *scientific observation* in itself should not lead to moral judgements as moral judgements are not, by definition, scientific. We could, of course, debate this point... but I've never heard someone to claim otherwise. That is, beyond simply stating that such judgements are always made in *tandem* with *any* observation; yet I would counter that such observations are indeed relying on these "other factors".
This discussion is difficult in part because of what I see as the vacuous term "scientific", but as long as we are using it I like to enforce the presupposition of objectivity.
basing their judgement on factors other than scientifically observable phenomenon.
So, when *exactly* does scientific observation lead to moral judgements, while not relying on "other factors"?
Only, that's a midrange.
Well, the jury is still, technically, out on this one. To indicate otherwise is disingenuous.
That's actually a very accurate description of how many genetic algorithms find their stopping conditions--either run for X generations, or stop when within a certain threshold of the theoretical maximum (or estimated maximum).
What can be tough about such stopping conditions is making sure you have a good scoring function so that the optimal solution indeed scores best, and that you know what that score should be (though, of course, not how to get there, or the alg is pointless).
I had thought that the comment about check to see what was installed was so that you *could* rebuild the computer? Not to see what has been planted....
my apologies.
At any rate, I'm not sure why I wrote "homosexualism instead of homosexuality (actually, bisexuality)."
Furthermore, can you be certain that if he did molest a child, that he in fact knew what he was doing? I would think it somewhat unfair to hold it morally against him if he didn't. My point was... that we should *quesiton* whether or not we approve of him..... anyways...
Well now, that's not very agnostic of you. If you were indeed agnostic you would beleive that knowledge of any deities would be *impossible*, and for anyone to claim such knowledge (for any way) would be against your basic tenet. There would be no... "of course, I could be wrong." How then, are you agnostic? It sounds more like you are uncertain as to what to believe. That is not agnostic.
The movie dropped the ball on all of these very important and illuminating questions--questions that were immediately available in the subject matter.
ditto.
Now, I have a question: I've seen it mentioned that some file systems do indeed have a btree implementation. How is this accomplished? What does this mean? I am fairly certain that this "tree" does not refer to a directory hierachy as it would be imposible to exert this sort of balanced stipulation on that. Is there then, some sort of exernal behind-the-scenes heirachy in place? Or is the btree only for individual directory lists? Thanks to whoever will answer this question (I'm going to do a little research on this myself as well...I'm just not certain I will find anything definitive).
I sure hope you have some sort of caveat on that statement... such as "a blackhole *with* an equivalent amount of mass as the sun". Otherwise the question is quite meaningless.
If the windows XP firewall is a system component, why is it not integral to the network connection so that there is no "loading" of the firewall per se, the connection driver itself is swapable as a firewalled connection, or a streamlined (non-firewalled) one?