You make a series of predictions and yet none of them seem to be tied to natural selection in any way. Any reasonably observant person could make the same statements without making any reference to natural selection at all. In fact, they are just common knowledge (most of which I agree with). Do you have anything specific to say in the light of the theory of evolution to which you refer in your original posting?
Actually, there's one exception. You say "the relative male/female distribution of will be the same in most societies". This is a testable prediction, it's not trivial, and it would strongly hint at a biological rather than cultural phenomenon if true. But it still isn't clear to me that this is a prediction from natural selection.
If there were no psychopaths in our society you'd have a story about how they're weeded out. If society were made up entirely of psychopaths you'd have a story about how psychopaths have what it takes to survive. And if there were a small proportion of psychopaths you'd give the story you've just given. When you don't back up your claims by actual figures and real predictions then what you are doing has as much validity as scholastic theology and only serves to give evolutionary biologists a bad name.
I used to live in London. Now I spend my day in San Francisco. Either way, the sky's gray. I hear rumors that it's blue in the areas around San Francisco. But you tell me - just how plausible is it that I just so happen to live in a city that has a different sky color from all of the areas around it?
I personally can't find any way to view pornography that makes it 'speech'. Google "define: speech" and you get a whole lot of definitions, both literal and metaphorical. I don't see how pictures of lesbians munching pussy, say, fit any of those definitions, even approximately. Methinks the modern interpretation of the Constitution has drifted quite a bit over the years.
I've been doing lots of numerical work (graphics stuff) involving numerical optimization lately and one of the techniques I've been using to compute derivatives for optimization is Automatic Differentiation (AD). Along the way I came across a few papers on applytng the technique to trajectory optimization. So I'm guessing that people choose something to optimize (a function of how close they get to the target, the journey time and fuel costs among other things) and use AD methods with a simulator and numerical minimizer optimize the path.
...but it used to flood. So King said: "If only we could halve the amount of water flowing through this river we could stop the flooding". So one of the King's wise men studied the river and found that if he observed a cross-section of the river, half the water went through the left half and half the water went through the right half. So the wise man proposed this to the King: "If we build a dam that spans half the width of the river we can stem these floods". The King was pleased with the wise man's suggestion. So the wise man arranged the building of the dam. When the dam was complete he took his payment, and being the wise man that he was, he ran.
We haven't 'stuffed up' the Earth. I live on it. It's a very nice place.
There are something like 10^11 stars in the galaxy. As we've been discovering, many of them have planets. There are probably countless places where humans can live out there. Why shouldn't we go and live on them? Most humans aren't secluded hermits who close themselves off from reality.
Why change a planet for us? Why not? Do you see anyone else out there staking a claim? There are billions of other planets out there. Who cares about Mars which is one piddly speck of dust compared to the immensity of the universe.
I wonder if we'll ever reach the stage of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings where we can cast magic spells 'n' stuff. That way we could just magic ourselves to other planets.
Does it highlight the word 'thousand'. You young whippersnappers, you think you know it all. But it took billions of dollars for MS to figure out how to highlight numbers written as words.
Dedicated games machines are aimed at a quite different market. A serious PC games player will pay 4 digit prices for a gaming PC while consoles typically have 3 digit prices. Quite different markets. Someone who has rejected Macs because they lack games is clearly otherwise in the 4 digit market so what you say is irrational and I suspect it was just an excuse to use the offtopic but mod-point attracting phrase "sucky OS".
Is there a license associated with a CD? As I don't sign any kind of agreement when I buy a CD I presume there is no license and instead there is simply copyright law preventing me from copying the CD except for 'fair use'. I would have thought that making a backup, damaging the original, and then playing the backup was fair use. This is different from the situation of software with a EULA. (But IANAL.)
But then there's the slippery slope. If I lend it to a friend and continue to play my backup is that fair use? If I lend the disk to a friend but keep the liner is that fair use? If I lend a backup to a friend is that fair use? Is it fair use if I don't play the original while the copy is lent out? And if the friend decides not to return the disk, so they have become a thief, at what point does my backup cease to be fair use? And my original point: if a thief steals my CD is playing the backup 'fair use'? I don't know for sure what the answer to any of these questions is although I have my suspicions. We've had copyright law for centuries now so I'd be interested to hear from lawyers if any precedents have already been set for any of these cases.
Oh...and one last case...is it fair use to buy a CD, rip it, and then throw it the original because I think that filling my house with with 12cm disks that hold only 700MB is a waste of space? And if that is fair use, it is reasonable for a court to presume I'm guilty of copyright infringement when they find I have all this music without the original CDs? Life is complicated these days!
And please someone fix that 'troll' mod on my post. It's called 'shooting the messenger'.
translating from through specification to code is trivial
OK. I want a function that takes as argument a list of integers and returns a list in non-descending order. Tell me the name of a computer language in which translating this specification into a program is trivial and show me the steps involved in the translation.
The code is structured as a proof that the function maps to objects of the correct type, not as a proof that it works. What's nice about pure functional code is that it's structured like a mathematical proposition and so you can use ordinary mathematical proof techniques to prove correctness. So I think you meant proposition, not proof.
I just wrote some Haskell code to manipulate formal power series in Haskell. One thing that was cool was that I was able to take propositions that I could prove mathematically and simply rewrite them as code. It was pretty mind-blowing. Things that were traditionally hard to compute became one liners because of lazy evaluation. On the other hand, almost trivial changes to the code that still resulted in true mathematical propositions didn't result in working code. Essentially the problem was to do with what precisely depended on what. The wrong mathematical proposition and a1 depends on a2 which depends on a3 up to infinity so the code never terminated. In fact, it's very easy to write code that looks provably correct but doesn't terminate. I just came across a paper on this very subject - the fact that some things we take for granted in mathematics aren't true of guaranteed to terminate functional programs. Pity I can't find the link.
Wow! You're not joking. My preferred programming language for personal projects is Haskell these days. But I'd hardly say I could 'just tell' my code worked by looking at it. And a piece of functional code is a proof of something (by Curry-Howard), but it's not a proof that the program does what a specification says it should do.
I wonder how much R&D went into designing a circular user interface. Maybe they had to set up a number of labs each with a bunch of researchers. There would have been the lab for the triangular user interface, one for the square one and maybe one for the pentagonal one, as well as one for the circular one. I suppose each lab would have spent millions on fabricating protoype iPods using each shape and then spent many hours using each one to decide which one was best. Yup, I can see now why they might need to recoup their costs.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there's one exception. You say "the relative male/female distribution of will be the same in most societies". This is a testable prediction, it's not trivial, and it would strongly hint at a biological rather than cultural phenomenon if true. But it still isn't clear to me that this is a prediction from natural selection.
If there were no psychopaths in our society you'd have a story about how they're weeded out. If society were made up entirely of psychopaths you'd have a story about how psychopaths have what it takes to survive. And if there were a small proportion of psychopaths you'd give the story you've just given. When you don't back up your claims by actual figures and real predictions then what you are doing has as much validity as scholastic theology and only serves to give evolutionary biologists a bad name.
With a calculator?
...allows people to eavesrop on my thoughts and drawing a black line round your cds makes them sound better. How does this nonsense get posted on /. ?
I used to live in London. Now I spend my day in San Francisco. Either way, the sky's gray. I hear rumors that it's blue in the areas around San Francisco. But you tell me - just how plausible is it that I just so happen to live in a city that has a different sky color from all of the areas around it?
The sky isn't blue. Where did you get that idea? During the day it's gray, in the evenings it goes red round the edges and at night it's black.
I personally can't find any way to view pornography that makes it 'speech'. Google "define: speech" and you get a whole lot of definitions, both literal and metaphorical. I don't see how pictures of lesbians munching pussy, say, fit any of those definitions, even approximately. Methinks the modern interpretation of the Constitution has drifted quite a bit over the years.
I've been doing lots of numerical work (graphics stuff) involving numerical optimization lately and one of the techniques I've been using to compute derivatives for optimization is Automatic Differentiation (AD). Along the way I came across a few papers on applytng the technique to trajectory optimization. So I'm guessing that people choose something to optimize (a function of how close they get to the target, the journey time and fuel costs among other things) and use AD methods with a simulator and numerical minimizer optimize the path.
No, the Tungsten T|3 is much better. For one thing, unless you have large pockets it's less obvious that you're going to have a read in the bathroom.
...but it used to flood. So King said: "If only we could halve the amount of water flowing through this river we could stop the flooding". So one of the King's wise men studied the river and found that if he observed a cross-section of the river, half the water went through the left half and half the water went through the right half. So the wise man proposed this to the King: "If we build a dam that spans half the width of the river we can stem these floods". The King was pleased with the wise man's suggestion. So the wise man arranged the building of the dam. When the dam was complete he took his payment, and being the wise man that he was, he ran.
- We haven't 'stuffed up' the Earth. I live on it. It's a very nice place.
- There are something like 10^11 stars in the galaxy. As we've been discovering, many of them have planets. There are probably countless places where humans can live out there. Why shouldn't we go and live on them? Most humans aren't secluded hermits who close themselves off from reality.
- Why change a planet for us? Why not? Do you see anyone else out there staking a claim? There are billions of other planets out there. Who cares about Mars which is one piddly speck of dust compared to the immensity of the universe.
I think you need to get a bit of perspective.I wonder if we'll ever reach the stage of Gandalf in Lord of the Rings where we can cast magic spells 'n' stuff. That way we could just magic ourselves to other planets.
Does it highlight the word 'thousand'. You young whippersnappers, you think you know it all. But it took billions of dollars for MS to figure out how to highlight numbers written as words.
Dedicated games machines are aimed at a quite different market. A serious PC games player will pay 4 digit prices for a gaming PC while consoles typically have 3 digit prices. Quite different markets. Someone who has rejected Macs because they lack games is clearly otherwise in the 4 digit market so what you say is irrational and I suspect it was just an excuse to use the offtopic but mod-point attracting phrase "sucky OS".
But then there's the slippery slope. If I lend it to a friend and continue to play my backup is that fair use? If I lend the disk to a friend but keep the liner is that fair use? If I lend a backup to a friend is that fair use? Is it fair use if I don't play the original while the copy is lent out? And if the friend decides not to return the disk, so they have become a thief, at what point does my backup cease to be fair use? And my original point: if a thief steals my CD is playing the backup 'fair use'? I don't know for sure what the answer to any of these questions is although I have my suspicions. We've had copyright law for centuries now so I'd be interested to hear from lawyers if any precedents have already been set for any of these cases.
Oh...and one last case...is it fair use to buy a CD, rip it, and then throw it the original because I think that filling my house with with 12cm disks that hold only 700MB is a waste of space? And if that is fair use, it is reasonable for a court to presume I'm guilty of copyright infringement when they find I have all this music without the original CDs? Life is complicated these days!
And please someone fix that 'troll' mod on my post. It's called 'shooting the messenger'.
I suggest crying because you know one day it will come up in court.
It wasn't even subtle. You must be American or something.
If your CDs were stolen but you're still playing the Ogg files you ripped then you too are a thief.
I screwed up my specification. The returned list should have the same elements in a new order.
I just wrote some Haskell code to manipulate formal power series in Haskell. One thing that was cool was that I was able to take propositions that I could prove mathematically and simply rewrite them as code. It was pretty mind-blowing. Things that were traditionally hard to compute became one liners because of lazy evaluation. On the other hand, almost trivial changes to the code that still resulted in true mathematical propositions didn't result in working code. Essentially the problem was to do with what precisely depended on what. The wrong mathematical proposition and a1 depends on a2 which depends on a3 up to infinity so the code never terminated. In fact, it's very easy to write code that looks provably correct but doesn't terminate. I just came across a paper on this very subject - the fact that some things we take for granted in mathematics aren't true of guaranteed to terminate functional programs. Pity I can't find the link.
Wow! You're not joking. My preferred programming language for personal projects is Haskell these days. But I'd hardly say I could 'just tell' my code worked by looking at it. And a piece of functional code is a proof of something (by Curry-Howard), but it's not a proof that the program does what a specification says it should do.
The scary thing is not being able to tell if you are joking.
I wonder how much R&D went into designing a circular user interface. Maybe they had to set up a number of labs each with a bunch of researchers. There would have been the lab for the triangular user interface, one for the square one and maybe one for the pentagonal one, as well as one for the circular one. I suppose each lab would have spent millions on fabricating protoype iPods using each shape and then spent many hours using each one to decide which one was best. Yup, I can see now why they might need to recoup their costs.