That's a lovely theory. Now let me tell you about the realities of teaching. With personally owned machines, I have to worry about XP vs Vista vs OS X, which versions, which patch levels, did the student download the right applications and install them properly, are there conflicts, do they have the latest version, whether site licensing requirements are being met if I put copies into the hands of the students, etc., etc., etc.
1) When the software is on the lab computers, uniformity of environment and correctness of the install are something I can count on. Since I always test my assignments on lab machines before I give 'em out, I know there's no problem when I walk into class, because if something didn't work I already had words with the lab staff and got it fixed.
2) If something doesn't work in the lab, it's the lab staff's full time job to make it right. I'm there to teach the students the course content, not as their first line of defense in software support. If something doesn't work on a student's machine, one or more of the student, the class, or me gets hosed and there's very little I can do ahead of time to avoid the issue. If I try to fix it right there in the lab, I open a can of worms. If I change anything in their setup I may be hosing some other piece of software they count on. Meanwhile the rest of the class are twiddling their collective thumbs. If I don't try to fix it, that student gets left in the dust and will almost certainly require one-on-one tutoring later to catch up. On top of that, I'm perceived as unhelpful and unknowledgeable and the student evaluations ream me.
I'll take the campus labs over personally owned student machines, thank you.
I doubt the wave's amplitude scales linearly against energy, or cannonballs into a pool would produce negligible results.
Somebody below gave a link to a site which calculates that the crater opened in the water could have a diameter of 1.4km. I'm inclined to believe you'd see more than a 1.5m surge if something punched a 1.4km hole in the ocean along the continental shelf.
We won't do anything about these things till there's a loss of life. There's a 70% chance it hits the ocean, and with 1MT energy? There's pretty good odds it will go unnoticed by anything but defence satellites.
You think sea strikes are harmless? The odds of actually hitting a city are pretty small, but the odds of hitting a chunk of water near enough to populated areas to cause tsunami damage are much larger since, according to NOAA, coastal counties in the continental US account for only 17% of land area but have 53% of the population. Imagine what a 10m or more surge from a tsunami could do to the Netherlands, or Miami, or New York. For comparison purposes, the Sumatra tsunami of 2004 was estimated to release around 20MT of energy at the surface, and produced as much as 30m surges hundreds of miles away from the epicenter.
MS is not some giant monolith, any more than any company is. It's comprised of individuals, some of whom are more clueless than others. This is not meant as a defense of them, just an observation that managers on one project may have started listening to consumer feedback while managers on another project are continuing business as usual.
First off, this is old news -- the article is copyright 2007.
Next, the article claims...
Generating random numbers using physical sources -- which can be as simple as coin-flipping and tossing dice -- are preferred over other methods, such as computer generation, because they yield nearly ideal random numbers: those that are unpredictable, unreproducible, and statistically unbiased.
This is garbage -- there are applications where people prefer physical sources, but those of us doing simulation work realized long ago that good algorithmic sources are far better for our needs: 1) It's mighty hard to debug a complex simulation model without reproducibility; 2) You can use the reproducibility to induce covariance between runs, greatly reducing the standard error of your estimates for a given sampling effort; 3) The distributions of algorithmically generated pseudo-random numbers are provably uniform, whereas for physical sources the best you know is that they haven't (yet) failed a hypothesis test for uniformity. Finally, the last statement about being "statistically unbiased" is utter nonsense -- unbiasedness is a property of an estimator, not a distribution.
Usually, but not always. Correlation measures the degree of linear relationship. If the relationship (causal or not) is non-linear, correlation can be zero.
You can confirm this with the following small example. If X is uniformly distributed between -1 and 1, and Y = X**2, then Cov(X,Y) is zero even though you can predict Y perfectly if I tell you the value of X. In fact, it works for Y equal to any even power of X.
Anytime the underlying assumptions of a computer input or algorithm are faulty, even the 3 1/2 million hours of computation on a supercomputer will not lead to the discovery of the scientific truth. The principle of garbage in garbage out still applies. The bottom line is simple: the dark matter emperor is as naked as a newborn.
They have a theory about how dark matter should work. They expended 3.5M hours of computing to make a prediction based on that theory. Now they'll try to confirm the prediction empirically. If the prediction doesn't pan out, the theory will be jettisoned or patched. If the empirical observations agree with the prediction, the theory is left standing until such time as new evidence shows it to be squidgy around the edges. That's how science works.
Or there is of course, another possibility: That humans are the only "intelligent" species using radio transmission as a communications medium and that any other "intelligent" species is such a great distance away and/or in a region of space where we haven't been listening that we are unable to detect them.
You're almost right on the first part, wrong on the second. It turns out that every time an advanced culture tries to use radio transmission, the RIAG (G = galaxy) issues a take-down notice to protect their intellectual property.
The RIAG is also waiting for us to acknowledge receipt of any transmission, at which point their invasion fleet is poised to present us with the bill. The fact that we went to all of the expense of building Arecibo is considered conclusive proof of our intent to participate in illegal data sharing.
You beat me to it, but that was my very first thought.
Re:Depends on function
on
Clean Code
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Comments are for readabilty, not the code. Always go for efficiency.
I endorse the saying "when debugging, ignore the comments - they can be very misleading." Hence I want the code itself to be readable more than I want it to be maximally efficient.
He plans to hook it to a light bulb, and shine the light back onto his cell. With the additional energy, the bulb will glow brighter, producing yet more energy, and so on, and so on... Heck, with TWO light bulbs he can get 1000x improvement! He could probably achieve fusion if he hooked it up in Vegas!
Since when is it 'hacking' to guess that her email password is her zip code? You can't hack stupidity and ignorance.
If you put the key to your front door under the welcome mat, it's stupid beyond belief. If somebody finds your key, uses it to go into your house, and carts off your stereo and TV, they're still guilty of theft no matter how stupid you were.
Price is the intersection of supply and demand curves. The US carriers charge what they do because people are willing to pay those prices. If you don't like the pricing, don't text. If enough people vote the same way with their fingers, prices will drop.
a super-earth? It is a bigger planet with Earth-like atmosphere, or it this just a bad translation? I seriously doubt it. With the short orbital periods those things are right on top of their sun. I would expect them to be well roasted, not at all earth-like.
It's amazing how on Slashdot, a completely baseless insult or accusation gets modded "insightful". Don't forget to take a jab at Ayn Rand for that extra point!
Congradulations, in one sentence you have completely discredited free market economics! Incidentally, how's that high school economics class going?
Oh, the hypocrisy. It's amazing how on Slashdot an AC can whine about "baseless insults", then finish the post with a gratuitous putdown about high school economics and be modded insightful.
FYI, I have a degree in economics from MIT and took all of the PhD level macroecon courses offered. What they taught me is that the functioning of a free market isn't a question of theology or mindless belief, the system's behavior can be studied analytically. Doing so shows that there are cases in which free markets work wonderfully, and other cases where they can break down spectacularly. Knowing this, I'm unwilling to just willy-nilly accept free markets as a universal solution.
Hence I'm not a big fan of Ron Paul, Ayn Rand, or anybody else who advocates free markets dogmatically.
the executive branch (which has no say-so on interpreting law, by the way)
Well, not except for the whole "will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" part of the Presidential Oath.
The President has a duty to interpret the law. The President has a duty to uphold the law. Uphold != interpret. As you pointed out, the presidential oath of office requires him to "preserve, protect, and defend...". It doesn't say "preserve, protect, defend, and interpret...". The constitution defines interpretation as the role of the judicial branch, not the executive branch.
Personally, I am for immunity for the telecoms. What they did was wrong, but the Bush administration said it was legal. Companies should be able to take the government at their word for what is legal or not. Going after the justice department would be a much better solution, though a harder one.
The problem is that if we set a precedent that the government cannot be trusted by big corporations, than we will run in to problems later.... I think you have it completely backwards. The USA is supposed to be run by laws, not by personalities. It seems to me the law was unequivocal in this case, but the telecoms went ahead and violated it on the say-so of the executive branch (which has no say-so on interpreting law, by the way). The telecom's lawyers should have told them that they were opening a big can of liability, and the fact that they're pushing so hard for retroactive immunity indicates that they know it, and are getting very concerned at the prospect of a change of administration. That's a huge tell - if they thought the law was on their side, they wouldn't worry about the next administration taking power.
If they are granted the immunity, it basically gives future administrations a precedent for saying they're above the law. Who cares what those pesky laws say, we'll immunize you if you do our bidding.
Slashdot Mirror
1) When the software is on the lab computers, uniformity of environment and correctness of the install are something I can count on. Since I always test my assignments on lab machines before I give 'em out, I know there's no problem when I walk into class, because if something didn't work I already had words with the lab staff and got it fixed.
2) If something doesn't work in the lab, it's the lab staff's full time job to make it right. I'm there to teach the students the course content, not as their first line of defense in software support. If something doesn't work on a student's machine, one or more of the student, the class, or me gets hosed and there's very little I can do ahead of time to avoid the issue. If I try to fix it right there in the lab, I open a can of worms. If I change anything in their setup I may be hosing some other piece of software they count on. Meanwhile the rest of the class are twiddling their collective thumbs. If I don't try to fix it, that student gets left in the dust and will almost certainly require one-on-one tutoring later to catch up. On top of that, I'm perceived as unhelpful and unknowledgeable and the student evaluations ream me.
I'll take the campus labs over personally owned student machines, thank you.
Do you prefer your bat roasted or freeze dried? Once the launch started I think those were the only two options.
Somebody below gave a link to a site which calculates that the crater opened in the water could have a diameter of 1.4km. I'm inclined to believe you'd see more than a 1.5m surge if something punched a 1.4km hole in the ocean along the continental shelf.
We won't do anything about these things till there's a loss of life. There's a 70% chance it hits the ocean, and with 1MT energy? There's pretty good odds it will go unnoticed by anything but defence satellites.
You think sea strikes are harmless? The odds of actually hitting a city are pretty small, but the odds of hitting a chunk of water near enough to populated areas to cause tsunami damage are much larger since, according to NOAA, coastal counties in the continental US account for only 17% of land area but have 53% of the population. Imagine what a 10m or more surge from a tsunami could do to the Netherlands, or Miami, or New York. For comparison purposes, the Sumatra tsunami of 2004 was estimated to release around 20MT of energy at the surface, and produced as much as 30m surges hundreds of miles away from the epicenter.
MS is not some giant monolith, any more than any company is. It's comprised of individuals, some of whom are more clueless than others. This is not meant as a defense of them, just an observation that managers on one project may have started listening to consumer feedback while managers on another project are continuing business as usual.
Next, the article claims...
Generating random numbers using physical sources -- which can be as simple as coin-flipping and tossing dice -- are preferred over other methods, such as computer generation, because they yield nearly ideal random numbers: those that are unpredictable, unreproducible, and statistically unbiased.
This is garbage -- there are applications where people prefer physical sources, but those of us doing simulation work realized long ago that good algorithmic sources are far better for our needs: 1) It's mighty hard to debug a complex simulation model without reproducibility; 2) You can use the reproducibility to induce covariance between runs, greatly reducing the standard error of your estimates for a given sampling effort; 3) The distributions of algorithmically generated pseudo-random numbers are provably uniform, whereas for physical sources the best you know is that they haven't (yet) failed a hypothesis test for uniformity. Finally, the last statement about being "statistically unbiased" is utter nonsense -- unbiasedness is a property of an estimator, not a distribution.
Causation implies correlation.
Usually, but not always. Correlation measures the degree of linear relationship. If the relationship (causal or not) is non-linear, correlation can be zero.
You can confirm this with the following small example. If X is uniformly distributed between -1 and 1, and Y = X**2, then Cov(X,Y) is zero even though you can predict Y perfectly if I tell you the value of X. In fact, it works for Y equal to any even power of X.
Anytime the underlying assumptions of a computer input or algorithm are faulty, even the 3 1/2 million hours of computation on a supercomputer will not lead to the discovery of the scientific truth. The principle of garbage in garbage out still applies. The bottom line is simple: the dark matter emperor is as naked as a newborn.
They have a theory about how dark matter should work. They expended 3.5M hours of computing to make a prediction based on that theory. Now they'll try to confirm the prediction empirically. If the prediction doesn't pan out, the theory will be jettisoned or patched. If the empirical observations agree with the prediction, the theory is left standing until such time as new evidence shows it to be squidgy around the edges. That's how science works.
What next, über-realistic? Or is profit next?
You want über-realistic? Check out http://www.marsipan.co.uk/index2.php?mission=1170270775
Or there is of course, another possibility: That humans are the only "intelligent" species using radio transmission as a communications medium and that any other "intelligent" species is such a great distance away and/or in a region of space where we haven't been listening that we are unable to detect them.
You're almost right on the first part, wrong on the second. It turns out that every time an advanced culture tries to use radio transmission, the RIAG (G = galaxy) issues a take-down notice to protect their intellectual property.
The RIAG is also waiting for us to acknowledge receipt of any transmission, at which point their invasion fleet is poised to present us with the bill. The fact that we went to all of the expense of building Arecibo is considered conclusive proof of our intent to participate in illegal data sharing.
...of spurious precision.
Go wild.
You beat me to it, but that was my very first thought.
Comments are for readabilty, not the code. Always go for efficiency.
I endorse the saying "when debugging, ignore the comments - they can be very misleading." Hence I want the code itself to be readable more than I want it to be maximally efficient.
He plans to hook it to a light bulb, and shine the light back onto his cell. With the additional energy, the bulb will glow brighter, producing yet more energy, and so on, and so on... Heck, with TWO light bulbs he can get 1000x improvement! He could probably achieve fusion if he hooked it up in Vegas!
Since when is it 'hacking' to guess that her email password is her zip code? You can't hack stupidity and ignorance.
If you put the key to your front door under the welcome mat, it's stupid beyond belief. If somebody finds your key, uses it to go into your house, and carts off your stereo and TV, they're still guilty of theft no matter how stupid you were.
No, needs more cowbell.
So that's 5 in decimal, right?
Price is the intersection of supply and demand curves. The US carriers charge what they do because people are willing to pay those prices. If you don't like the pricing, don't text. If enough people vote the same way with their fingers, prices will drop.
Congradulations, in one sentence you have completely discredited free market economics! Incidentally, how's that high school economics class going?
Oh, the hypocrisy. It's amazing how on Slashdot an AC can whine about "baseless insults", then finish the post with a gratuitous putdown about high school economics and be modded insightful.
FYI, I have a degree in economics from MIT and took all of the PhD level macroecon courses offered. What they taught me is that the functioning of a free market isn't a question of theology or mindless belief, the system's behavior can be studied analytically. Doing so shows that there are cases in which free markets work wonderfully, and other cases where they can break down spectacularly. Knowing this, I'm unwilling to just willy-nilly accept free markets as a universal solution. Hence I'm not a big fan of Ron Paul, Ayn Rand, or anybody else who advocates free markets dogmatically.
SP3 is being billed as a security update. By removing TCP/IP you're now inoculated against that interweb thing. It's a feature, not a bug!
If they are granted the immunity, it basically gives future administrations a precedent for saying they're above the law. Who cares what those pesky laws say, we'll immunize you if you do our bidding.