They have a space in there because they are not talking about "copyleft" as in licensing, but rather "the Copy Left" as in "the Left" as in the political category.
I'm not sure that it's accurate to lump everyone who's opposed to the current copyright schemes together as "leftists," which seems to be the implication. Indeed, one would think that a return to a 14 + 14 "founder's copyright" would be not so much radical as reactionary.
I'm a little disappointed. These aren't bioluminescent-type glow-in-the-dark fish like the ones that live in the deep sea. They're fluorescent glow-in-the-UV fish like the ones that live in the rave.
Can a hosting provider create a robots.txt file outside of my control?
Well, yeah, they can do whatever the hell they want (though some things might alienate their customers). Keep in mind that your hosting provider could also just have firewalled away the Google crawlers. They can also try to block them by User-Agent, but just I checked and they don't appear to be doing the latter. From the looks of it, they're not that competent, anyway.
re-checking now I see no such file exists
That's not what your web server says, according to the HTTP protocol it claims to be following.
When I request http://www.holocaustnow.org/robots.txt, I get a 302 redirect to http://64.202.166.210/index.html, which returns 200 but says "Page Not Found" in the text (it should return 404 if it means to say "Page Not Found").
That is silly, and non-standards-compliant behavior, and the resulting page is totally unparsable as a robots.txt file. Basically your web hosting provider is saying to the robot that robots.txt does exist, but it's over there, and its a big blob of incomprehensible HTML.
Now, of course, I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if well-behaved robots (i.e. not grub) found this behavior to be confusing, and decided therefore not to index the site just to be safe and avoid stepping on any toes.
SCO's refusal to keep their lips zipped has fed IBM more fuel for their own counter-suits and defense. [...] IBM is not making the same mistake.
It's only a "mistake" if the goal of the people whose lips are in question is for SCO to win the lawsuit.
If, on the other hand, the goal is to pump up stock prices to make some personal profit before the company's demise, it would make sense both to make all sorts of wild claims to boost investor confidence, and to put off the day of reckoning in court as long as possible. So far, with that in mind, their statements and actions seem to have been pretty sensible and successful.
Why should the SCO executives care about the success of the lawsuit or their company when there's money to be made on the stock market?
The waste involved in processing, collecting, and transporting the cans vastly exceeds the savings from doing so.
You're comparing a small part of the life cycle of a can made from raw materials to the entire life cycle of a can made from recycled materials.
Waste that isn't recycled doesn't just magically disappear in the trash can, and packaging made from virgin materials doesn't magically materialize on the doorstep. You have to do the collection, transportation, and distribution whether the packaging is recycled or not.
Watch all the soccer moms dropping off the cans in their SUV's.
Certainly, it's not very efficient if "soccer moms" individually drive each piece of trash to the landfill or recycling center in their SUVs, but that's an argument against people hauling their own trash, not against recycling itself. It's also why many communities support curbside pickup of recyclables on trash day, and the recyclables and other waste are driven off in the same truck.
Then watch trucks haul the cans around.
If the cans weren't separated, the trucks would still have to haul them around.
Then watch them get processed.
Others have shown that this reprocessing costs a lot less energy than refining new aluminum from ore.
Then watch them get shipped again.
Cans are going to get shipped whether they are new or recycled. Do you really think people would stop buying canned food if recycling were to stop? We've had a problem with excess packaging since well before recycling was introduced en masse, and there's no reason why we can't pursue a reduction in packaging material at the same time as pursuing recycling.
So, sure, it does cost energy to haul disposable packaging around, but your argument is obviously flawed if you discount the fact that it has to be hauled around whether it is recycled or not.
This is all a good argument for a reducing the use of disposable packaging, and for the use of more efficient transportation methods, but not really a good argument against recycling.
There's a reason why people say "reduce, reuse, recycle" in that order.
I think we're actually in agreement, but maybe there is some misunderstanding and we're talking about different things, but that's no reason to get so condescending and patronizing. Let me re-cap and clarify.
Quoth Gainjin42: Note, I am not saying the mean and median IQ aren't the same. Im just saying if they ARE the same, it has more to do with the way intelligence is distributed among the populace, and not with the way IQ was defined. [emphasis mine]
Quoth pla: Let me give you an example. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 100, 200, 300, 400.
Let me take that example and run with it. scoring guide for this round of testing Raw...Final ----------- 1.....F 2..... D 3.....D 4.....C 5.....C 100...C 200...B 30 0...B 400...A
Mean, medium, and mode of "C".
And a distribution of grades absolutely non-representative of the distribution of the raw data, but that doesn't stop teachers from grading on a curve, because they're grading, not publishing an article in Applied Statistics.
Technically, you can count a map as a function. So in that sense, yes, a function exists that would always convert a dataset post hoc into something having a set mean and median. Such a function would completely invalidate the results, however (which I suspect as your underlying implication), so no one wanting their work taken seriously would use any non-smooth transformation on the original data.
Yes, absolutely correct, and that is exactly my point. The essential problem is that intelligence is not really a physically measurable thing. There is not even agreement upon what intelligence is.
IQ testing starts with an assumption of a normal distribution of results, makes up various quantities of questions of varying difficulty to measure this thing, and then generally uses a map generated post hoc (or at least based on the results of previous, similar tests or of a smaller sample) to translate the observed distribution of raw scores into a normalized one consistent with the original assumption.
In a sense, IQ scores are mapped twice -- first in the collection of data by the choice of questions, and second in the analysis of the data by the transformation of raw scores. Each of these is done with the express goal of producing a output in agreement with the starting assumptions.
Yes, manipulating one's data until they are consistent with one's assumtions is absolutely unscientific, and I agree with you that no one wanting their work taken seriously would engage in this sort of chicanery if they had something scientific to prove about the distribution of intelligence in the population.
Of course, the real point of IQ tests is not to provide information about the distribution of intelligence within the population, but rather to describe the testing performance of an individual compared to others (in the sense of what fraction of the population scored worse). To use the results for anything else is missing the point.
It was the original poster's contention that the distribution of IQ test scores is representative of the distribution of an actual quality ("intelligence") among the population. It is my contention that the distribution is representative of the goals of the test designers.
Finally, a nit:
these don't result in discontinuities in the result (ie, you will never hear a jet engine sound quieter than a falling leaf, which your assertion of testing trickery would require)
Testing trickery does not require a discontinuity in the manner you describe. A better analogy would be to describe a jet engine as being as much louder than a falling oak leaf as a poplar leaf is quiter to support your oak-leaf-average model of sound, and to adjust the characteristics of your measuring equipment to make things fit even better.
In any case, I think we can be in agreement that using data manipulated in this manner to draw conclusions about the distribution of real phemomena would be foolish and unscientific.
Having one person like einstein in your sample would scew the mean, but not the median.
Only if one assumes that the scoring is a linear representation of actual intelligence, which seems a silly assumption. IQ is not intelligence; it is a score awarded on an artificial scale based on test performance. In practice, with a large enough sample size, the effects of outliers will be minimal and easily adjusted for in the scoring algorithm.
There is no way to "define" IQ in such a way that a situation like that makes the mean and median different.
Sure you can, if you have control over the way final scores are generated from raw scores (which the test creators do). For every distribution of raw scores, there exists some normalization function (usually represented as a table) that can assure that the final distribution of scores into one in which the mean and median are the same.
Finding that function is what standardized testing is all about.
What is so patrotic about the statement "stop your whining and get behind the president already", especially in the context of voting fraud?
It's a bad sign for our country when people think that patriotism means slient obedience to the President.
Patriotism is about love, support, and defense of one's country, not of one's head of state. It does not require the love of authority figures simply because of their authority. (Love of authority for authority's sake is, however, a characteristic of fascism, which was, I imagine, the point of the earlier AC's post.)
There's a reason we pledge allegiance to the Republic, and not to the President. People used to be compelled to swear an oath of allegiance to King George, but we don't do that anymore.
We need dissent, and we need people questioning the President. When people are afraid to tell the President what he doesn't want to hear, or otherwise disagree with him, the government stops working effectively. No one is right all the time, but when people are free to disagree with and criticize our leaders, we can avoid letting the mistakes of one man become the mistakes of our entire nation. That's what democracy is all about. It may be a pain in the President's neck sometimes, but it works better than anything else out there. After all, silent obedience to their insane King George didn't serve the British very well, did it?
Should the founding fathers have been told to quit their whining and rally behind King George like good British patriots? No doubt they were told as much by the Tories. Were they unpatriotic for not obeying? No, it was their very patriotism that led them to risk and sometimes to sacrifice their lives by defying the King.
More to the point, did they risk and sacrifice so much to give us freedom and the right to vote only to let us piss it away with unauditable and easily-manipulated elections? Should we stand by and let our vote be taken from us because, as some people think, patriots don't complain?
No! Dissent is the duty of the patriot. Open and free elections form the very foundation of this country. Those who would silence this healthy dissent regarding the safety of our elections with a call to patriotism may love something, but it's not America, at least not the America for which our forefathers fought and died.
OUTBOUND emails should _automatically_ have their recipient mail server added to the OK list.
So you add mailin.mx.domain.com to your whitelist, but that domain sends all its outbound mail from mailout.mx.domain.com.
This is an extremely common setup on large sites, because inbound and outbound mail have totally different requirements. Once you need more than a couple of mail servers, it makes sense to separate them so you can use the right tools for each job.
Inbound mail servers need to accept SMTP connections from the Internet, need to filter mail, don't need to canonicalize or masquerade addresses, and need not to allow relaying or SMTP AUTH. They should probably be put in a DMZ, since it's accepting internet connections. They could probably benefit from fast spooling devices to handle sudden increases in incoming traffic.
Outbound mail servers need not accept any connections from the Internet, and need not filter mail (unless one wants to be nice). If they are accepting submissions directly from your clients (rather than that being delegated to a third set of servers), they need to perform address canonicalization, masquerading, and other header munging, and they need to allow relaying from a set of IPs and/or allow SMTP AUTH. They probably need more spool space, and possibly structured queues, to hold delayed mail.
It's a ridiculous assumption to make that servers performing these two distinct tasks would be using the same sets of IP addresses.
If you make that assumption, and start blocking mail based upon it, you will find that you are no longer able to receive mail from AOL, Yahoo, and other large mail providers. That's not going to make your users happy, and if you're a professional mail admin, blocking vast amounts of legitimate mail is a good way to be forced into a career change.
No, you don't. You simply go into "power saver" mode.
Heh. So do modern computers.
In any case, a computer shutting down doesn't "die". When you power it on again, it starts up working again just fine.
Now if an AI erased its permanent storage and sent a power surge through its processing units, or just used its robotic arms to shoot itself in the head, that I'd call suicide.
Do bridge builders give an unfair advantage to concrete vendors because their requirements are structured in a way that unfairly discriminates against marshmallow vendors? Should they consider all building materials on a "level playing field"?
Maybe the state is looking for the specific qualities OSS has to offer by its very nature. Not the oft-cited and vague assertions of "lower cost" or "increased security", but the direct effects of the licensing itself.
Namely, if, among other things, I want software:
which does not subject me to burdensome licensing schemes that waste my time and resources;
which protects my investment by ensuring that I will have perpetual access to it, and will never "lock me out" in the future if the company that wrote it goes out of business, or gets purchased, or decides for some reason to change its licensing policy;
which does not require me unduly to surrender any of my rights in order to use the software;
the source code of which I can audit for security and comprehension reasons, then compile to be sure I'm actually running that same code;
to which I can make any desired or needed modifications without having to wait for the author to get around to it, and modifications of which I can distribute directly to or receive directly from other users, instead of waiting for the author to approve them; and
which provides open document standards and open protocols with no "intellectual property" resctrictions that prevent the implementation of alternative editors, readers, clients, and servers, and which therefore does not place an undue financial burden on poor constituents who wish to communicate with me,
then I don't see any reason why these very concrete requirements of mine give OSS an "unfair" advantage. It may be that it's impossible for non-open-source software to fulfill these requirements, but how is that "unfair," and why should I care? All I care about is finding something that fulfills my requirements. Why should the business models of some bidders, instead of my needs, dictate the bid requirements? How would it be "fair" to force me to forgo some of my requirements just so some company can try to sell me its product?
Now, I don't claim to know the real reasons why Massachusetts is doing what it is doing, but those are the reasons why I use Open Source software whenever I can. They are, as I am sure you can tell, directly sprung from countless past frustrations with proprietary software. Nevertheless, I am open to any company which is able to provide a product, even a proprietary one, that fulfills those requirements, and will then evaluate it on a features-per-dollar basis against other competing products.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft is not actually excluded from bidding. They are welcome to provide their own open source solution to win the government contract.
Now, they may be unwilling to do so, but that's their problem. If they don't want to attempt to fulfill the requirements of the request for bids, they don't get a shot at the juicy government contract.
Did you know that there are thousands of people in the world who discuss all manner of differemces without "knocking" anything? For instance, when biologists who study insects meet biologists who study lizards, they do not rant at one another about whether lizards r0x0r and insects sux0r or vice versa.
I think your reply is a bit of an over-reaction. Never did I say you ranted, and there's no call to become condescending. "Knock" is a pretty mild term for criticism. I don't think it's out of line to say you are criticising PCREs, and specifically their syntax, when you say the syntax is "arcane" and use words like "clearer" and "better" when describing the syntax of Lisp expressions.
I'm not trying to start a flame war either. I just think that, in the interest of level-headed discussion, you should make fair comparisons.
It's funny that you invoke biological science. A biologist, when performing an experiment, tries to limit the changes between groups to one independent variable, as do all scientists.
When comparing the clarity of expressions in two different syntaxes, the syntax is your independent variable. It doesn't provide a valid comparison to introduce needlessly another variable by changing what the expression does.
Well yes, but I was using "foo" to stand in for any sequence. It was intended as an example of a more full regex syntax.
But in the Lisp sequence, "foo" is just a simple string. In the perl sequence, you use a grouping operator for no apparent reason.
The equivalent expression to the PCRE (?:foo) in CL-PPCRE is (:group "foo"), not "foo". The equivalent expression to the CL-PPCRE "foo" is the PCRE foo, not (?:foo).
Similarly, you don't use (:register...) in the CL-PPCRE expression when you use (...) in the PCRE expression.
It may seem like I'm picking nits, but that's what syntax (and science) is all about -- details. When you're making a comparison of syntaxes, these things are important.
So, the point of my post is that you should compare apples to apples. To do otherwise is to use the techniques of the very r0x0r/sux0r trolls you decry.
America was formed on Christian principles [...] It is a Christian country and it is defined and based on those assumptions.
That's not what America said when it signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796.
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Saying that America "is a Christian country" is insulting to all those citizens who practice other faiths, and to the founding fathers who thought it important enough to declare otherwise in the Bill of Rights itself.
Where in the Constitution can there be seen the unmistakable signs of uniquely Christian principles? Is it the bicameral legislature? Did they steal that from Leviticus? Oh, no, wait, that would make it a Jewish principle.
America and its founders were certainly influenced by Christian tought, but they were also certainly influenced by the pagan Western philosophers of the ancient world. That doesn't make America Roman any more than it makes it Christian or Greek.
(Note that there is a large difference in meaning between the phrases "a Christian country" and "a predominantly Christian country".)
Now, you may want America to become a Christian country, but that does not mean it is or has been.
For instance, in place of the regex string "(?:foo)|(?:bar)|(?:b(a|(?:uz))z)" you can write [...]
Dude, I realize your post is about knocking perl regexes, but there's no need to obfuscate what could just as easily have been written as:
foo|bar|b(a|uz)z
or, even more simply, as
foo|buzz|ba[rz]
if you did not want to capture the a|uz, since you didn't indicate that you wanted to do so in your Lisp expression. Your eyes can pick that last one up in one chunk, and there's no need to scan back and forth to remember what it's doing.
In any case, just because Lisp is parenthesis-happy doesn't mean perl regexes have to be.
The second oldest equipment which I actively use is the power cords from the IBM PS/2 computer, the ones with the piggy-back plugs.
I'm still using an IBM PS/2 computer, with one of my model Ms, running a very old install of MS DOS, with a 3c509 stuck in the back so I can run NCSA Telnet on it. It makes a pretty decent networked terminal.
Even more old-school than that, however, was when I moved into my last apartment (circa 2001), and didn't have internet access yet, so I hooked up my VT220 (with the unfortunately-less-clicky LK-201 keyboard) to my Hayes external modem and dialed into the modem pool at the university where I worked. That held me over for a couple of months while AT&T shuffled my work order around, took me back to my younger days, and made me really appreciate vi (and backwards-compatibility in modems).
What if Arnold knows exactly what his weaknesses is? What if Arnold surrounds himself with smart advisors that he agrees with and listens too?
[Sorry this is long, but it's late and I'm too tired to edit.]
People always bring up this "smart advisor" theory when discussing not-so-bright candidates, but I'm not sure I buy it.
Here's the flaw I see in it: incompetent people have been shown to be less capable not only of judging their own performance, but also of judging the performance of others.
You see this all the time when it comes to technical advisement. Some non-technical manager will think some consultant "really knows his stuff" when that consultant is really just spouting buzzwords or telling the manager what he wants to hear, and the consultant actually performs like a train wreck.
How is the incompetent candidate supposed to be able to judge who is competent among his potential advisors?
Maybe surrounding yourself with advisors that you agree with is not the best sign. And maybe you have to have a certain foundation of competence and be both willing and able to do the sort of critical thinking and analysis that distinguishes the truly competent advisors from the advisors that are just buttering you up.
Another interesting thing about the study linked above is that while the best performers tend to accurately judge how well they did in an absolute sense, they tend humbly to underestimate their own performance relative to everyone else.
Perhaps that is because part of becoming competent is learning from your mistakes and pushing against your limits, which probably imparts a healthy sense of your own failings. In fact, some of the most impressively competent people I have met were, while confident, at the same time oddly humble -- perhaps because, while it seemed to me that they could do just about anything, they were more keenly aware of the vast depths of their field that they had yet to plumb.
At the same time, lots of the less-guruish but merely competent technical folks I see complaining bombastically on IRC or/. and acting condescending to users turn out not to be so hot after all when it comes down to it.
Of course, the problem is that the blowhards are a lot more fun to listen to than the real gurus. Where's the fun in someone saying "emacs and vi are equally viable alternatives, and here are the cases in which each is best used"? We like people who make bold statements and who "stick to their ideals", even if it's only because they're too arrogant to consider that they might be wrong. We laugh today at "640k should be enough for anybody," but no one remembers what the other guy said.
If there were more geeks, and there such a thing as nationally-syndicated geek talk radio, those guys who hang out, start editor/distribution wars, and flame the newbies would probably get pretty high ratings, and people would probably call in and agree with them and take their turn to flame the newbies.
They'd be pretty popular, but they wouldn't necessarily be more competent. (Take/. for instance;)
Maybe the problem isn't the spotlight or the low pay. Maybe the problem is that the world is really complicated, but we are attracted to people who see things in black-and-white. Maybe nobody wants to listen to the people who really understand things, because it's too complicated and they don't have the time. We like quick, pithy sound bites, even if they're totally off-base. Arnold is not popular because he has a firm grasp of the issues or because he's a loyal representative of his party, but because he's got some quick one-liners, and he's famous. We don't even care if some of the one-liners contradict the other ones, as long as they are funny.
When you look at it that way, coming back to the topic at hand, I can't imagine anything that would prepare you worse
to successfully set up and harness the power of the sun using solar cells would mean venturing out into the sun. what's a geek to do?
Ummmm... set them up at night?
That's when we're awake, anyway, and our eyes have long ago adjusted to living in cave-like darkness, so it all works out. Remember to wear eye protection if the moon is out.
Slashdot Mirror
They have a space in there because they are not talking about "copyleft" as in licensing, but rather "the Copy Left" as in "the Left" as in the political category.
I'm not sure that it's accurate to lump everyone who's opposed to the current copyright schemes together as "leftists," which seems to be the implication. Indeed, one would think that a return to a 14 + 14 "founder's copyright" would be not so much radical as reactionary.
You've repeatedly relapsed on your food and air addictions, and now you're giving advice?
I, on the other hand, haven't eaten or taken a breath in centuries.
I'm a little disappointed. These aren't bioluminescent-type glow-in-the-dark fish like the ones that live in the deep sea. They're fluorescent glow-in-the-UV fish like the ones that live in the rave.
Can a hosting provider create a robots.txt file outside of my control?
Well, yeah, they can do whatever the hell they want (though some things might alienate their customers). Keep in mind that your hosting provider could also just have firewalled away the Google crawlers. They can also try to block them by User-Agent, but just I checked and they don't appear to be doing the latter. From the looks of it, they're not that competent, anyway.
re-checking now I see no such file exists
That's not what your web server says, according to the HTTP protocol it claims to be following.
When I request http://www.holocaustnow.org/robots.txt, I get a 302 redirect to http://64.202.166.210/index.html, which returns 200 but says "Page Not Found" in the text (it should return 404 if it means to say "Page Not Found").
That is silly, and non-standards-compliant behavior, and the resulting page is totally unparsable as a robots.txt file. Basically your web hosting provider is saying to the robot that robots.txt does exist, but it's over there, and its a big blob of incomprehensible HTML.
Now, of course, I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if well-behaved robots (i.e. not grub) found this behavior to be confusing, and decided therefore not to index the site just to be safe and avoid stepping on any toes.
SCO's refusal to keep their lips zipped has fed IBM more fuel for their own counter-suits and defense. [...] IBM is not making the same mistake.
It's only a "mistake" if the goal of the people whose lips are in question is for SCO to win the lawsuit.
If, on the other hand, the goal is to pump up stock prices to make some personal profit before the company's demise, it would make sense both to make all sorts of wild claims to boost investor confidence, and to put off the day of reckoning in court as long as possible. So far, with that in mind, their statements and actions seem to have been pretty sensible and successful.
Why should the SCO executives care about the success of the lawsuit or their company when there's money to be made on the stock market?
The waste involved in processing, collecting, and transporting the cans vastly exceeds the savings from doing so.
You're comparing a small part of the life cycle of a can made from raw materials to the entire life cycle of a can made from recycled materials.
Waste that isn't recycled doesn't just magically disappear in the trash can, and packaging made from virgin materials doesn't magically materialize on the doorstep. You have to do the collection, transportation, and distribution whether the packaging is recycled or not.
Watch all the soccer moms dropping off the cans in their SUV's.
Certainly, it's not very efficient if "soccer moms" individually drive each piece of trash to the landfill or recycling center in their SUVs, but that's an argument against people hauling their own trash, not against recycling itself. It's also why many communities support curbside pickup of recyclables on trash day, and the recyclables and other waste are driven off in the same truck.
Then watch trucks haul the cans around.
If the cans weren't separated, the trucks would still have to haul them around.
Then watch them get processed.
Others have shown that this reprocessing costs a lot less energy than refining new aluminum from ore.
Then watch them get shipped again.
Cans are going to get shipped whether they are new or recycled. Do you really think people would stop buying canned food if recycling were to stop? We've had a problem with excess packaging since well before recycling was introduced en masse, and there's no reason why we can't pursue a reduction in packaging material at the same time as pursuing recycling.
So, sure, it does cost energy to haul disposable packaging around, but your argument is obviously flawed if you discount the fact that it has to be hauled around whether it is recycled or not.
This is all a good argument for a reducing the use of disposable packaging, and for the use of more efficient transportation methods, but not really a good argument against recycling.
There's a reason why people say "reduce, reuse, recycle" in that order.
I think we're actually in agreement, but maybe there is some misunderstanding and we're talking about different things, but that's no reason to get so condescending and patronizing. Let me re-cap and clarify.
. D0 0...B
Quoth Gainjin42:
Note, I am not saying the mean and median IQ aren't the same. Im just saying if they ARE the same, it has more to do with the way intelligence is distributed among the populace, and not with the way IQ was defined.
[emphasis mine]
Quoth pla:
Let me give you an example. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 100, 200, 300, 400.
Let me take that example and run with it.
scoring guide for this round of testing
Raw...Final
-----------
1.....F
2....
3.....D
4.....C
5.....C
100...C
200...B
3
400...A
Mean, medium, and mode of "C".
And a distribution of grades absolutely non-representative of the distribution of the raw data, but that doesn't stop teachers from grading on a curve, because they're grading, not publishing an article in Applied Statistics.
Technically, you can count a map as a function. So in that sense, yes, a function exists that would always convert a dataset post hoc into something having a set mean and median. Such a function would completely invalidate the results, however (which I suspect as your underlying implication), so no one wanting their work taken seriously would use any non-smooth transformation on the original data.
Yes, absolutely correct, and that is exactly my point. The essential problem is that intelligence is not really a physically measurable thing. There is not even agreement upon what intelligence is.
IQ testing starts with an assumption of a normal distribution of results, makes up various quantities of questions of varying difficulty to measure this thing, and then generally uses a map generated post hoc (or at least based on the results of previous, similar tests or of a smaller sample) to translate the observed distribution of raw scores into a normalized one consistent with the original assumption.
In a sense, IQ scores are mapped twice -- first in the collection of data by the choice of questions, and second in the analysis of the data by the transformation of raw scores. Each of these is done with the express goal of producing a output in agreement with the starting assumptions.
Yes, manipulating one's data until they are consistent with one's assumtions is absolutely unscientific, and I agree with you that no one wanting their work taken seriously would engage in this sort of chicanery if they had something scientific to prove about the distribution of intelligence in the population.
Of course, the real point of IQ tests is not to provide information about the distribution of intelligence within the population, but rather to describe the testing performance of an individual compared to others (in the sense of what fraction of the population scored worse). To use the results for anything else is missing the point.
It was the original poster's contention that the distribution of IQ test scores is representative of the distribution of an actual quality ("intelligence") among the population. It is my contention that the distribution is representative of the goals of the test designers.
Finally, a nit:
these don't result in discontinuities in the result (ie, you will never hear a jet engine sound quieter than a falling leaf, which your assertion of testing trickery would require)
Testing trickery does not require a discontinuity in the manner you describe. A better analogy would be to describe a jet engine as being as much louder than a falling oak leaf as a poplar leaf is quiter to support your oak-leaf-average model of sound, and to adjust the characteristics of your measuring equipment to make things fit even better.
In any case, I think we can be in agreement that using data manipulated in this manner to draw conclusions about the distribution of real phemomena would be foolish and unscientific.
Having one person like einstein in your sample would scew the mean, but not the median.
Only if one assumes that the scoring is a linear representation of actual intelligence, which seems a silly assumption. IQ is not intelligence; it is a score awarded on an artificial scale based on test performance. In practice, with a large enough sample size, the effects of outliers will be minimal and easily adjusted for in the scoring algorithm.
There is no way to "define" IQ in such a way that a situation like that makes the mean and median different.
Sure you can, if you have control over the way final scores are generated from raw scores (which the test creators do). For every distribution of raw scores, there exists some normalization function (usually represented as a table) that can assure that the final distribution of scores into one in which the mean and median are the same.
Finding that function is what standardized testing is all about.
What is so patrotic about the statement "stop your whining and get behind the president already", especially in the context of voting fraud?
It's a bad sign for our country when people think that patriotism means slient obedience to the President.
Patriotism is about love, support, and defense of one's country, not of one's head of state. It does not require the love of authority figures simply because of their authority. (Love of authority for authority's sake is, however, a characteristic of fascism, which was, I imagine, the point of the earlier AC's post.)
There's a reason we pledge allegiance to the Republic, and not to the President. People used to be compelled to swear an oath of allegiance to King George, but we don't do that anymore.
We need dissent, and we need people questioning the President. When people are afraid to tell the President what he doesn't want to hear, or otherwise disagree with him, the government stops working effectively. No one is right all the time, but when people are free to disagree with and criticize our leaders, we can avoid letting the mistakes of one man become the mistakes of our entire nation. That's what democracy is all about. It may be a pain in the President's neck sometimes, but it works better than anything else out there. After all, silent obedience to their insane King George didn't serve the British very well, did it?
Should the founding fathers have been told to quit their whining and rally behind King George like good British patriots? No doubt they were told as much by the Tories. Were they unpatriotic for not obeying? No, it was their very patriotism that led them to risk and sometimes to sacrifice their lives by defying the King.
More to the point, did they risk and sacrifice so much to give us freedom and the right to vote only to let us piss it away with unauditable and easily-manipulated elections? Should we stand by and let our vote be taken from us because, as some people think, patriots don't complain?
No! Dissent is the duty of the patriot. Open and free elections form the very foundation of this country. Those who would silence this healthy dissent regarding the safety of our elections with a call to patriotism may love something, but it's not America, at least not the America for which our forefathers fought and died.
OUTBOUND emails should _automatically_ have their recipient mail server added to the OK list.
So you add mailin.mx.domain.com to your whitelist, but that domain sends all its outbound mail from mailout.mx.domain.com.
This is an extremely common setup on large sites, because inbound and outbound mail have totally different requirements. Once you need more than a couple of mail servers, it makes sense to separate them so you can use the right tools for each job.
Inbound mail servers need to accept SMTP connections from the Internet, need to filter mail, don't need to canonicalize or masquerade addresses, and need not to allow relaying or SMTP AUTH. They should probably be put in a DMZ, since it's accepting internet connections. They could probably benefit from fast spooling devices to handle sudden increases in incoming traffic.
Outbound mail servers need not accept any connections from the Internet, and need not filter mail (unless one wants to be nice). If they are accepting submissions directly from your clients (rather than that being delegated to a third set of servers), they need to perform address canonicalization, masquerading, and other header munging, and they need to allow relaying from a set of IPs and/or allow SMTP AUTH. They probably need more spool space, and possibly structured queues, to hold delayed mail.
It's a ridiculous assumption to make that servers performing these two distinct tasks would be using the same sets of IP addresses.
If you make that assumption, and start blocking mail based upon it, you will find that you are no longer able to receive mail from AOL, Yahoo, and other large mail providers. That's not going to make your users happy, and if you're a professional mail admin, blocking vast amounts of legitimate mail is a good way to be forced into a career change.
(let me help get you started)
vi? Emacs? What are these things of which you speak?
Ed is the standard text editor!
No, you don't. You simply go into "power saver" mode.
Heh. So do modern computers.
In any case, a computer shutting down doesn't "die". When you power it on again, it starts up working again just fine.
Now if an AI erased its permanent storage and sent a power surge through its processing units, or just used its robotic arms to shoot itself in the head, that I'd call suicide.
when my computer does a power-down, if it were an AI, would that be considered suicide?
I don't know about you, but I power down for eight hours of maintenance every night, and nobody has calls it "suicide."
Do bridge builders give an unfair advantage to concrete vendors because their requirements are structured in a way that unfairly discriminates against marshmallow vendors? Should they consider all building materials on a "level playing field"?
Maybe the state is looking for the specific qualities OSS has to offer by its very nature. Not the oft-cited and vague assertions of "lower cost" or "increased security", but the direct effects of the licensing itself.
Namely, if, among other things, I want software:
then I don't see any reason why these very concrete requirements of mine give OSS an "unfair" advantage. It may be that it's impossible for non-open-source software to fulfill these requirements, but how is that "unfair," and why should I care? All I care about is finding something that fulfills my requirements. Why should the business models of some bidders, instead of my needs, dictate the bid requirements? How would it be "fair" to force me to forgo some of my requirements just so some company can try to sell me its product?
Now, I don't claim to know the real reasons why Massachusetts is doing what it is doing, but those are the reasons why I use Open Source software whenever I can. They are, as I am sure you can tell, directly sprung from countless past frustrations with proprietary software. Nevertheless, I am open to any company which is able to provide a product, even a proprietary one, that fulfills those requirements, and will then evaluate it on a features-per-dollar basis against other competing products.
It's also worth noting that Microsoft is not actually excluded from bidding. They are welcome to provide their own open source solution to win the government contract.
Now, they may be unwilling to do so, but that's their problem. If they don't want to attempt to fulfill the requirements of the request for bids, they don't get a shot at the juicy government contract.
an attack on the satellite would, in all likelihood, presage some further assault on planetside assets.
ITYM: "A communications disruption can only mean one thing...invasion!"
Conectiva routinely releases patches that are months late.
Take, for instance, the most recent, CLA-2003:762, released October 14 for a glibc bug from August 14.
My all-time favorite, however, is CLA-2003:628, released in April 2003 for a vulnerability in vixie cron announced in March 2001!
So, if you count Conectiva, Gates is probably right about it taking a couple of weeks on average, even if everyone else does it in 24 hours.
760 days for Conectiva + 1 day each for 50 other distributions is about 16 days, on average.
Did you know that there are thousands of people in the world who discuss all manner of differemces without "knocking" anything? For instance, when biologists who study insects meet biologists who study lizards, they do not rant at one another about whether lizards r0x0r and insects sux0r or vice versa.
...) in the CL-PPCRE expression when you use (...) in the PCRE expression.
I think your reply is a bit of an over-reaction. Never did I say you ranted, and there's no call to become condescending. "Knock" is a pretty mild term for criticism. I don't think it's out of line to say you are criticising PCREs, and specifically their syntax, when you say the syntax is "arcane" and use words like "clearer" and "better" when describing the syntax of Lisp expressions.
I'm not trying to start a flame war either. I just think that, in the interest of level-headed discussion, you should make fair comparisons.
It's funny that you invoke biological science. A biologist, when performing an experiment, tries to limit the changes between groups to one independent variable, as do all scientists.
When comparing the clarity of expressions in two different syntaxes, the syntax is your independent variable. It doesn't provide a valid comparison to introduce needlessly another variable by changing what the expression does.
Well yes, but I was using "foo" to stand in for any sequence. It was intended as an example of a more full regex syntax.
But in the Lisp sequence, "foo" is just a simple string. In the perl sequence, you use a grouping operator for no apparent reason.
The equivalent expression to the PCRE (?:foo) in CL-PPCRE is (:group "foo"), not "foo". The equivalent expression to the CL-PPCRE "foo" is the PCRE foo, not (?:foo).
Similarly, you don't use (:register
It may seem like I'm picking nits, but that's what syntax (and science) is all about -- details. When you're making a comparison of syntaxes, these things are important.
So, the point of my post is that you should compare apples to apples. To do otherwise is to use the techniques of the very r0x0r/sux0r trolls you decry.
That's not what America said when it signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796.
Saying that America "is a Christian country" is insulting to all those citizens who practice other faiths, and to the founding fathers who thought it important enough to declare otherwise in the Bill of Rights itself.
Where in the Constitution can there be seen the unmistakable signs of uniquely Christian principles? Is it the bicameral legislature? Did they steal that from Leviticus? Oh, no, wait, that would make it a Jewish principle.
America and its founders were certainly influenced by Christian tought, but they were also certainly influenced by the pagan Western philosophers of the ancient world. That doesn't make America Roman any more than it makes it Christian or Greek.
(Note that there is a large difference in meaning between the phrases "a Christian country" and "a predominantly Christian country".)
Now, you may want America to become a Christian country, but that does not mean it is or has been.
For instance, in place of the regex string "(?:foo)|(?:bar)|(?:b(a|(?:uz))z)" you can write [...]
Dude, I realize your post is about knocking perl regexes, but there's no need to obfuscate what could just as easily have been written as:
foo|bar|b(a|uz)z
or, even more simply, as
foo|buzz|ba[rz]
if you did not want to capture the a|uz, since you didn't indicate that you wanted to do so in your Lisp expression. Your eyes can pick that last one up in one chunk, and there's no need to scan back and forth to remember what it's doing.
In any case, just because Lisp is parenthesis-happy doesn't mean perl regexes have to be.
The second oldest equipment which I actively use is the power cords from the IBM PS/2 computer, the ones with the piggy-back plugs.
I'm still using an IBM PS/2 computer, with one of my model Ms, running a very old install of MS DOS, with a 3c509 stuck in the back so I can run NCSA Telnet on it. It makes a pretty decent networked terminal.
Even more old-school than that, however, was when I moved into my last apartment (circa 2001), and didn't have internet access yet, so I hooked up my VT220 (with the unfortunately-less-clicky LK-201 keyboard) to my Hayes external modem and dialed into the modem pool at the university where I worked. That held me over for a couple of months while AT&T shuffled my work order around, took me back to my younger days, and made me really appreciate vi (and backwards-compatibility in modems).
or, to quote Alan Cox (emphasis mine):
*rimshot* Thank you folks; Alan will be here all week! Remember to tip your waitress!
Wow! XFce has the most adorable logo I've ever seen!
Now I've got to try it. Screw this waiting around for E17.
[Sorry this is long, but it's late and I'm too tired to edit.]
People always bring up this "smart advisor" theory when discussing not-so-bright candidates, but I'm not sure I buy it.
Here's the flaw I see in it: incompetent people have been shown to be less capable not only of judging their own performance, but also of judging the performance of others.
You see this all the time when it comes to technical advisement. Some non-technical manager will think some consultant "really knows his stuff" when that consultant is really just spouting buzzwords or telling the manager what he wants to hear, and the consultant actually performs like a train wreck.
How is the incompetent candidate supposed to be able to judge who is competent among his potential advisors?
Maybe surrounding yourself with advisors that you agree with is not the best sign. And maybe you have to have a certain foundation of competence and be both willing and able to do the sort of critical thinking and analysis that distinguishes the truly competent advisors from the advisors that are just buttering you up.
Another interesting thing about the study linked above is that while the best performers tend to accurately judge how well they did in an absolute sense, they tend humbly to underestimate their own performance relative to everyone else.
/. and acting condescending to users turn out not to be so hot after all when it comes down to it.
/. for instance ;)
Perhaps that is because part of becoming competent is learning from your mistakes and pushing against your limits, which probably imparts a healthy sense of your own failings. In fact, some of the most impressively competent people I have met were, while confident, at the same time oddly humble -- perhaps because, while it seemed to me that they could do just about anything, they were more keenly aware of the vast depths of their field that they had yet to plumb.
At the same time, lots of the less-guruish but merely competent technical folks I see complaining bombastically on IRC or
Of course, the problem is that the blowhards are a lot more fun to listen to than the real gurus. Where's the fun in someone saying "emacs and vi are equally viable alternatives, and here are the cases in which each is best used"? We like people who make bold statements and who "stick to their ideals", even if it's only because they're too arrogant to consider that they might be wrong. We laugh today at "640k should be enough for anybody," but no one remembers what the other guy said.
If there were more geeks, and there such a thing as nationally-syndicated geek talk radio, those guys who hang out, start editor/distribution wars, and flame the newbies would probably get pretty high ratings, and people would probably call in and agree with them and take their turn to flame the newbies.
They'd be pretty popular, but they wouldn't necessarily be more competent. (Take
Maybe the problem isn't the spotlight or the low pay. Maybe the problem is that the world is really complicated, but we are attracted to people who see things in black-and-white. Maybe nobody wants to listen to the people who really understand things, because it's too complicated and they don't have the time. We like quick, pithy sound bites, even if they're totally off-base. Arnold is not popular because he has a firm grasp of the issues or because he's a loyal representative of his party, but because he's got some quick one-liners, and he's famous. We don't even care if some of the one-liners contradict the other ones, as long as they are funny.
When you look at it that way, coming back to the topic at hand, I can't imagine anything that would prepare you worse
to successfully set up and harness the power of the sun using solar cells would mean venturing out into the sun. what's a geek to do?
Ummmm... set them up at night?
That's when we're awake, anyway, and our eyes have long ago adjusted to living in cave-like darkness, so it all works out. Remember to wear eye protection if the moon is out.