You're understanding of the dollar is laughable, at best.
" but there is no limit to the amount of dollars the government can print." Not true in in practical way, but common statements from the ignorant masses.
This is probably a nitpick on top of a nitpick.. but you did lead off with this statement.
It's true that the Federal Reserve can only print a finite amount of money at any given time.
But, it (the thing known as the Federal Reserve) creates money electronically that never needs to be printed. It just changes the numbers in the computer. There is literally no limit to the amount of "money" or float that can be created.
Granted, there may be some psychological limit..
But just like gold was abandoned as a literal backing of U.S. Dollar.. the actual physical bills have been abandoned as a backing of the currency too. (It would be sort of stupid to try and ship all those bills around anyhow.)
Only ideas back the U.S. Dollar.. (that.. several hundred million people living here.. and some bombs, ships, tanks and guns and whatnot.)
And really.. oh, your mind begins to melt when you try to think of notional amounts of derivatives outstanding. Random banks and hedge funds just write a legal contract and will more money into existence.
I'm not sure why more people aren't more suspicious of this story.
The guy is traveling overseas. A $500,000 investment property of his was sold by supposed Nigerian scammers. He rushes home, after being notified by his neighbors, to halt the sale of a second investment property.
And, if you believe the comments about Australian law, he will get compensated for the sale of the house while the buyers get to keep it.. and this $500,000 that was wired to China just disappears.
Since the owner stands to benefit the most from this scam, I'm inclined to believe he is the scammer. Not some dude in an internet cafe in Abuja, Nigeria.
Mainly.. because a lot of commenters here are assholes, and it seems fashionable to dismiss anything that isn't 80% certain to happen.
Its not hard to imagine the entire internet becoming a sort of gargantuan parallel processing swarm intelligence (or the infrastructure being utilized to create an AI based on Swarm Intelligence).
There's some quote that I cannot even remotely remember, but can be paraphrased as such:
People assume that their limitations are the limitations of man.
Anyway.. humanity advances (at times) due to the exceptional works of less than 0.001% (yeah, you heard me.. the population times 0.00001) of the people that are living. (No citations here, just lazy speculation).
I suppose the rate of technological advancement could just sort of fizzle out over the next 20 years.. with the only new inventions being things like cheaper toasters and more fuel efficient vehicles and bigger televisions and faster computers.. but I sure hope the future holds more than that.
I concur! The concept of particle swarm optimizations is so simple.. (and me being fairly dumb, me like so much).
One particular approach I like is where you have randomly defined neighborhoods for your particles. And as the simulation progresses.. members of the neighborhood that do well get more random connections to other algorithms while ones that do worse lose connections.
Then, the particles just move towards (with some random perturbations) whatever member of the neighborhood is doing "better" (however you wish to define that) at any given time.
So... your particles swarm over your search space.. and form into these different neighborhood clumps around potential solutions.. and also discover new solutions while moving towards an old one.
For me, its more intuitive than some of the other genetic algorithm approaches where you have algorithms dying off and creating offspring. Instead they're like the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, "Fly, my pretties! Fly! Bring me my solution!"
Well.. if you read their pdf (linked at the bottom of the blog post), you see that they literally turn the Fitness Function into a trainer that leads teams to the most proper ways to play (see pg5 Section "4.5 Fitness evaluation").
The first step in the learning process is that the teams should spread out on the field and be relatively evenly distributed.
Second was, move players closer to the ball.
Third, kicking the ball was given value.
Fourth, getting the ball closer to the opponents goal.
Then finally, the most weight was given to scoring goals.
So.. they have a great system here.. but it is mainly suggesting that these fitness guidelines eventually lead to behaviours that we understand as playing good defense or whatever.
To be fair, I'm guessing that maybe Mr. Elmenreich was using the word "trainer" in some literal sense.. They didn't need some trainer for other parts of the system since that was built into the fitness evaluation step.
What I want to know is: Did they put in a penalty for offsides?
Well, it's even a little less amazing than you suggest.
If you read the pdf that the blog post links to ("Evolving neural network controllers for a team of self-organizing robots"), on Page 5 in section "4.5 Fitness Function"... they discuss how they decompose fitness down from simply "Score the most goals" to little component tasks that "ensure a smooth learning process assuming some preliminary knowledge or ideas about the solution."
They practically lead the algorithms to better solutions along certain paths. The first thing they want the algorithms to learn is that "a good distribution on the field might lead to good overall play." So, now you have a "trainer" telling the players on a team to spread out.
So.. while their framework looks interesting.. and reading the pdf is good food for thought and helps me think about my own problem domains.. they seem to have restricted the system to prevent any truly odd (yet successful) behaviours from evolving. Thus.. their fitness function encourages successful behaviours that they expect to see.
Conveniently, the only Republicans on their list are Larry Craig (dirty homo), Rudy Giuliani (so obviously corrupt, it's undeniable, AND friendly to homos!),and "Scooter" Libby (convicted of a felony... so throw 'em en for "fair and balancedness").
Now... I guess.. if I could get motivated.. I'd have another cup of coffee and actually attempt to research their claims about Obama.. but they better have some easily available citations.
If individuals are already accessing the data over the network (if it's on a file server), then one already has bandwidth issues.
For a LAN, most offices are not using up much bandwidth internally... you could have it set to sync the mirrors in a way that didn't monopolize the bandwidth.
Why set up all this SAN, Fibre Channel, iSCSI stuff when you could have a decentralized program that spreads out over your network and mirrors the data across every machine?
I thought everyone was on board that decentralization was where everything was headed?
Why is no one as jazzed about the idea of using all of this extra space up?
With 100 PCs with 80GB hdds... reserve 40GB on each machine to give 4,000GB of available storage.
Divide out that 4,000GB by 8 to get 500 GB of storage with is mirrored 8 times over. That's 5GB of 8x mirrored file storage for each PC.
The hard part.. is having some software genius write out a decentralized program that can keep track of which machines are up and decide how to distribute any changes to the files.
This program could store the users files (that would normally be on a network file server) on the PC they usually logged onto. It could do a sort of Volume Shadow Copy process to distribute changes in the files to the other 7 mirrors.
If one HDD on the network goes down, I'm assuming one would have to replace it since the PCs are in use.. once the HDD is replace and the PC is running again... the mirror would be rebuilt.
I don't know about you... but on my network of 120 PCs, I haven't had 8 HDDs go out at the same time nor do my end users have control over whether they shut down the machines. Not to mention the fact that I can remotely force machines to wake up anyhoo...
I'm guessing that we will eventually move to full decentralization... it's the safest way to run things... if you can have all of the data spread out over the LAN... and have a program that manages everything... why is that a bad idea?
Why do people want to have everything stuck on some big machine in the server closet? What happens when that goes down? What happens when the SAN or NAS or whatever goes out?
When he was posting about Wild Oats being cruddy stock.. it was in Jan and April 2005. Whole Foods offered to buy out Wild Oats earlier this year. So.. if he's trying to knock the stock down... he sure has a weird way of going about it.
Maybe he figured the words of the Mighty Rahodeb needed about 20 - 24 months to really have an impact.:p
A less exciting explanation is that.. he didn't think Wild Oats was worth buying then.. and he changed his mind more recently.
Well.. if you can transmit data.. then the only problems for making something appear on the other end would be the process of recording all of its information on one end.. transporting the information.. then re-assembling it. Granted.. it may be easier to do this recording and re-assembling for some objects than others...
Oh and I guess you're just creating copies. I suppose it would be weird to make copies of people.. would an exact copy of me be the same? It seems pretty hard, also, to have some machine that materialized all that blood and tissue. But.. I don't see why it should be impossible.
Isn't there some difference between sending "information" (which has no mass?) faster than light and sending something with a mass greater than zero faster than light? I guess some thing (with greater than zero mass) cannot travel faster than light because of all these nifty paradoxes or more simply.. because that would cause it to have infinite density. (Is that correct? Doesn't mass increase and volume decrease as you accelerate through space?)
So.. mainly.. does information have mass? I'd guess no.. but.. who knows.. I mean.. does information have to be represented in a physical medium to exist? Do you need to move something physical (with mass) to transmit information?
Maybe it is possible to transmit information faster than light.. but it is impossible to prove that the information did indeed travel faster than light. (Since that would require some sort of physical movement to observe.. or a comparison using different frames of reference.) In many systems, there are things that can be unknowably true or false.
Also, the concept of simultaneity is meaningless.. things happen at different times based on who you ask.
This is absurd. Just go here and follow the instructions.
Three steps.
1. Create.reg file by copy/pasting from that page. 2. Create.vbs file by copy/pasting from that page. 3a. Create GPO to import reg key and run VBScript on Win2k machines at Startup. or 3b. In absence of AD, modify script to copy itself and.reg file to all Win2k machines and apply fix.
If you're such a small organization that you don't have an I.T. group.. then.. it's probably simple to use TZEdit to update your piddly network.
For fun, you can trick out the script to make sure it only runs once.
Yeah.. it's really only about an $80 savings IFF you want the nvidia card and the CD/DVD RW drive. There are probably a lot of people who would add those to a system anyway.
That is odd about the nic. I can't imagine why Dell would be integrating a Gigabit nic onto the n-series mobo and not the one for Home, Business. My guess is there's a typo somewhere. Though, it is possible that the n-series is a new mobo spin that includes this gigabit nic that will eventually show on the Windows 520s.
Also, to the typical Linux user.. a support contract probably isn't value added, but the hardware replacement contract (which you can get) may be desirable.
Oooh! and AOL included is -$30 in my book (but I didn't factor that in).
I was merely being fair in my comparison. The windows system would cost more if I matched them up exactly since I would be paying to put in the 250GB HDD upgrade (free on the n-series), an FDD, and a Modem (both are forced to be included on the n-series). That's about $100 more.
I went by the assumption that this is just juicing my case.. since.. a person may only want a 160GB drive so a free upgrade to 250GB is nice.. but not required. So, if it's confusing, just imagine that the n-series has a 160GB HDD since the price would be the same either way. The same goes for the FDD and modem. Just imagine they don't exist.
Then you have Apples to Apples with Windows XP Home Edition!
Not sure where everyone is doing their cart comparisons... but I'm getting cheaper n-series with direct comparisons. 520n ($509) vs 520 ($589) (through smallbusiness which is a little cheaper than home) with:
Pentium® D Processor 820 with Dual CoreTechnology(2.80GHz,800FSB) 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2DIMMs 256MB nVidia Geforce 7300LE TurboCache No Monitor 48X CD-RW/ DVD Combo Drive
The big difference in them would be HDD upgrades since the n-series had a free upgrade to 250GB, but I just left the Windows 520 with the default 160GB HDD. Also, the n-series forces you to buy a FDD and a modem. The Windows 520 did not.. if I'd added them to make it more even.. that'd be an extra $50 on the Windows system.
Either way, this is better than in the past when the n-series did appear to cost more no matter what you did. Also, this is a system that's $80 cheaper and it comes with 100 more GB on the harddrive and has an FDD, modem. (not sure what to do with that though).
If you run a cart through the Home section, the price comes to about $609 for the 520 (using the above mentioned setup) with Windows though you do get a 320GB HDD in the deal.
One of my favorite, vaguely remembered concepts about the bell curve, normal distribution, Gaussian distribution in relation human attributes.. is this:
The truly average person does not exist. They would be some sort of freakish monster from the deep.. a horrible sight that might make babies cry.
Now, I've added my extra seasoning to the sentiment, but I hope that I am being clear enough.
With that said.. Take the following assumptions:
N% of the adult population has an arrest record (N + x)% of employees that do the bad thing had an arrest record upon being hired. (N - x)% of employees that do the great thing had an arrest record upon being hired.
Then, I gotta dump anyone with an arrest record. I'm playing the averages since.. it's less likely that those individuals will do "the great thing" and it's more likely that they will do "the bad thing" when compared to people without arrest records.
Note, I needed to add in "the great thing" part since.. what if we had this scenario:
N% of the adult population has an arrest record (N + x)% of employees that do the bad thing had an arrest record upon being hired. (N + x + y)% of employees that do the great thing had an arrest record upon being hired.
Now, I'm all like.. What do I do? People with arrest records are more likely to do "the bad thing" but.. they're even more likely to do "the great thing" when compared to those without arrest records! ahhhh!! ohnoenononono!
How great is the great thing that they do?!
THE END
oh.. let x,y > 0
Of course, we should not let ourselves be confused by the concept that... what happens if no one hires workers with arrest records? What if it damages society, and we should employ them to save our community? I bet, it's good to hire people with arrest records to work in shitty jobs since.. they'll be afraid to quit because it's too hard to get a better job with an arrest record. Success! Society is saved! Cruddy employers will hire anyone with an arrest record!
The point is.. i believe.. Imagine someone walks into a room and says to you, for no discernible reason, "I could kill you... but, I would never do that." Why was that brought up?
Seems a little odd.. It's already known that humans are technically capable of any number of actions. It's just odd when people protest "too much".. (I suppose it depends on what "too much" means to you.. maybe a single announcement about one's non-murderous intentions is not too much to some.)
I am tired of all of these illustrations discussing what "0/0" is.. based on the mathematical definition of a Ring with unity.. there is no inverse for the "0". By definition, 0*a = 0 for all a.. but there is no 0^-1 thus 0*(0^-1), or as so many like to write "0/0", makes no sense. AND, it makes no sense to say a*(0^-1) either.
If you want.. you can say 0^-1 exists. Then, that requires 0*(0^-1) = 0/0 = 1 based on the rules we've given to a Ring with unity. Ok.. but.. also, 0*(0^-1)=0*0*(0^-1)=0*1=0.. so.. it's just gibberish. You cannot fit it into the system since assuming 0-inverse exists gives you 0=1
So.. for the fuck of it.. you can say, "I like to think of zero-inverse as the closure of the set of a Ring with unity.." i guess.. since it seems to have a more topological meaning but.. it makes no sense to try to utilize it with the ring operations. Or, if you want to use it, then you made R into something besides a Ring.
Slashdot Mirror
Read Yoshinori Matsunobu's blog:
http://yoshinorimatsunobu.blogspot.com/
At least, read his first post and view the slide deck:
http://yoshinorimatsunobu.blogspot.com/2009/04/mastering-art-of-indexing-slides.html
You're understanding of the dollar is laughable, at best.
" but there is no limit to the amount of dollars the government can print."
Not true in in practical way, but common statements from the ignorant masses.
This is probably a nitpick on top of a nitpick.. but you did lead off with this statement.
It's true that the Federal Reserve can only print a finite amount of money at any given time.
But, it (the thing known as the Federal Reserve) creates money electronically that never needs to be printed. It just changes the numbers in the computer. There is literally no limit to the amount of "money" or float that can be created.
Granted, there may be some psychological limit..
But just like gold was abandoned as a literal backing of U.S. Dollar.. the actual physical bills have been abandoned as a backing of the currency too. (It would be sort of stupid to try and ship all those bills around anyhow.)
Only ideas back the U.S. Dollar.. (that.. several hundred million people living here.. and some bombs, ships, tanks and guns and whatnot.)
And really.. oh, your mind begins to melt when you try to think of notional amounts of derivatives outstanding. Random banks and hedge funds just write a legal contract and will more money into existence.
Anyhow, the only limits are mental..
I'm not sure why more people aren't more suspicious of this story.
The guy is traveling overseas. A $500,000 investment property of his was sold by supposed Nigerian scammers. He rushes home, after being notified by his neighbors, to halt the sale of a second investment property.
And, if you believe the comments about Australian law, he will get compensated for the sale of the house while the buyers get to keep it.. and this $500,000 that was wired to China just disappears.
Since the owner stands to benefit the most from this scam, I'm inclined to believe he is the scammer. Not some dude in an internet cafe in Abuja, Nigeria.
Mainly.. because a lot of commenters here are assholes, and it seems fashionable to dismiss anything that isn't 80% certain to happen.
Its not hard to imagine the entire internet becoming a sort of gargantuan parallel processing swarm intelligence (or the infrastructure being utilized to create an AI based on Swarm Intelligence).
There's some quote that I cannot even remotely remember, but can be paraphrased as such:
People assume that their limitations are the limitations of man.
Anyway.. humanity advances (at times) due to the exceptional works of less than 0.001% (yeah, you heard me.. the population times 0.00001) of the people that are living. (No citations here, just lazy speculation).
I suppose the rate of technological advancement could just sort of fizzle out over the next 20 years.. with the only new inventions being things like cheaper toasters and more fuel efficient vehicles and bigger televisions and faster computers.. but I sure hope the future holds more than that.
I concur! The concept of particle swarm optimizations is so simple.. (and me being fairly dumb, me like so much).
One particular approach I like is where you have randomly defined neighborhoods for your particles. And as the simulation progresses.. members of the neighborhood that do well get more random connections to other algorithms while ones that do worse lose connections.
Then, the particles just move towards (with some random perturbations) whatever member of the neighborhood is doing "better" (however you wish to define that) at any given time.
So... your particles swarm over your search space.. and form into these different neighborhood clumps around potential solutions.. and also discover new solutions while moving towards an old one.
For me, its more intuitive than some of the other genetic algorithm approaches where you have algorithms dying off and creating offspring. Instead they're like the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, "Fly, my pretties! Fly! Bring me my solution!"
Well.. if you read their pdf (linked at the bottom of the blog post), you see that they literally turn the Fitness Function into a trainer that leads teams to the most proper ways to play (see pg5 Section "4.5 Fitness evaluation").
The first step in the learning process is that the teams should spread out on the field and be relatively evenly distributed.
Second was, move players closer to the ball.
Third, kicking the ball was given value.
Fourth, getting the ball closer to the opponents goal.
Then finally, the most weight was given to scoring goals.
So.. they have a great system here.. but it is mainly suggesting that these fitness guidelines eventually lead to behaviours that we understand as playing good defense or whatever.
To be fair, I'm guessing that maybe Mr. Elmenreich was using the word "trainer" in some literal sense.. They didn't need some trainer for other parts of the system since that was built into the fitness evaluation step.
What I want to know is: Did they put in a penalty for offsides?
Well, it's even a little less amazing than you suggest.
If you read the pdf that the blog post links to ("Evolving neural network controllers for a team of self-organizing robots"), on Page 5 in section "4.5 Fitness Function"... they discuss how they decompose fitness down from simply "Score the most goals" to little component tasks that "ensure a smooth learning process assuming some preliminary knowledge or ideas about the solution."
They practically lead the algorithms to better solutions along certain paths. The first thing they want the algorithms to learn is that "a good distribution on the field might lead to good overall play." So, now you have a "trainer" telling the players on a team to spread out.
So.. while their framework looks interesting.. and reading the pdf is good food for thought and helps me think about my own problem domains.. they seem to have restricted the system to prevent any truly odd (yet successful) behaviours from evolving. Thus.. their fitness function encourages successful behaviours that they expect to see.
"Same as it would be gross to smoke a turkey inside or any number of things..."
Somehow... that just feels like a lead-in to a good joke..
:) good thing someone knows what I'm saying without everything needing to be spelled out.
For those with the need for more info, find "Back Door Man" by Howlin' Wolf.
For the record, I would have no problem being a back-door man until I turn 40. Little girls understand they need their back-door man.
Does it help you get laid, or what??
:(
Yes.. it just prevents them from getting wives or long-term girlfriends.
They are sadly relegated to a lifetime of being the back-door man.
Convenient that Judicial Watch has dubious affiliations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_Watch
Conveniently, the only Republicans on their list are Larry Craig (dirty homo), Rudy Giuliani (so obviously corrupt, it's undeniable, AND friendly to homos!),and "Scooter" Libby (convicted of a felony... so throw 'em en for "fair and balancedness").
Now... I guess.. if I could get motivated.. I'd have another cup of coffee and actually attempt to research their claims about Obama.. but they better have some easily available citations.
If individuals are already accessing the data over the network (if it's on a file server), then one already has bandwidth issues.
For a LAN, most offices are not using up much bandwidth internally... you could have it set to sync the mirrors in a way that didn't monopolize the bandwidth.
Why would that not work?
..but all of those drives could be the array.
That, to me, is the whole point.
Why set up all this SAN, Fibre Channel, iSCSI stuff when you could have a decentralized program that spreads out over your network and mirrors the data across every machine?
I thought everyone was on board that decentralization was where everything was headed?
Why is no one as jazzed about the idea of using all of this extra space up?
With 100 PCs with 80GB hdds... reserve 40GB on each machine to give 4,000GB of available storage.
Divide out that 4,000GB by 8 to get 500 GB of storage with is mirrored 8 times over. That's 5GB of 8x mirrored file storage for each PC.
The hard part.. is having some software genius write out a decentralized program that can keep track of which machines are up and decide how to distribute any changes to the files.
This program could store the users files (that would normally be on a network file server) on the PC they usually logged onto. It could do a sort of Volume Shadow Copy process to distribute changes in the files to the other 7 mirrors.
If one HDD on the network goes down, I'm assuming one would have to replace it since the PCs are in use.. once the HDD is replace and the PC is running again... the mirror would be rebuilt.
I don't know about you... but on my network of 120 PCs, I haven't had 8 HDDs go out at the same time nor do my end users have control over whether they shut down the machines. Not to mention the fact that I can remotely force machines to wake up anyhoo...
I'm guessing that we will eventually move to full decentralization... it's the safest way to run things... if you can have all of the data spread out over the LAN... and have a program that manages everything... why is that a bad idea?
Why do people want to have everything stuck on some big machine in the server closet? What happens when that goes down? What happens when the SAN or NAS or whatever goes out?
When he was posting about Wild Oats being cruddy stock.. it was in Jan and April 2005. Whole Foods offered to buy out Wild Oats earlier this year. So.. if he's trying to knock the stock down... he sure has a weird way of going about it.
:p
Maybe he figured the words of the Mighty Rahodeb needed about 20 - 24 months to really have an impact.
A less exciting explanation is that.. he didn't think Wild Oats was worth buying then.. and he changed his mind more recently.
Well.. if you can transmit data.. then the only problems for making something appear on the other end would be the process of recording all of its information on one end.. transporting the information.. then re-assembling it. Granted.. it may be easier to do this recording and re-assembling for some objects than others...
Oh and I guess you're just creating copies. I suppose it would be weird to make copies of people.. would an exact copy of me be the same? It seems pretty hard, also, to have some machine that materialized all that blood and tissue. But.. I don't see why it should be impossible.
Isn't there some difference between sending "information" (which has no mass?) faster than light and sending something with a mass greater than zero faster than light? I guess some thing (with greater than zero mass) cannot travel faster than light because of all these nifty paradoxes or more simply.. because that would cause it to have infinite density. (Is that correct? Doesn't mass increase and volume decrease as you accelerate through space?)
So.. mainly.. does information have mass? I'd guess no.. but.. who knows.. I mean.. does information have to be represented in a physical medium to exist? Do you need to move something physical (with mass) to transmit information?
Maybe it is possible to transmit information faster than light.. but it is impossible to prove that the information did indeed travel faster than light. (Since that would require some sort of physical movement to observe.. or a comparison using different frames of reference.) In many systems, there are things that can be unknowably true or false.
Also, the concept of simultaneity is meaningless.. things happen at different times based on who you ask.
I can't tell if this is supposed to be a joke or what. :)
This is absurd. Just go here and follow the instructions.
.reg file by copy/pasting from that page. .vbs file by copy/pasting from that page. .reg file to all Win2k machines and apply fix.
Three steps.
1. Create
2. Create
3a. Create GPO to import reg key and run VBScript on Win2k machines at Startup.
or
3b. In absence of AD, modify script to copy itself and
If you're such a small organization that you don't have an I.T. group.. then.. it's probably simple to use TZEdit to update your piddly network.
For fun, you can trick out the script to make sure it only runs once.
Yeah.. it's really only about an $80 savings IFF you want the nvidia card and the CD/DVD RW drive. There are probably a lot of people who would add those to a system anyway.
That is odd about the nic. I can't imagine why Dell would be integrating a Gigabit nic onto the n-series mobo and not the one for Home, Business. My guess is there's a typo somewhere. Though, it is possible that the n-series is a new mobo spin that includes this gigabit nic that will eventually show on the Windows 520s.
Also, to the typical Linux user.. a support contract probably isn't value added, but the hardware replacement contract (which you can get) may be desirable.
Oooh! and AOL included is -$30 in my book (but I didn't factor that in).
I was merely being fair in my comparison. The windows system would cost more if I matched them up exactly since I would be paying to put in the 250GB HDD upgrade (free on the n-series), an FDD, and a Modem (both are forced to be included on the n-series). That's about $100 more.
I went by the assumption that this is just juicing my case.. since.. a person may only want a 160GB drive so a free upgrade to 250GB is nice.. but not required. So, if it's confusing, just imagine that the n-series has a 160GB HDD since the price would be the same either way. The same goes for the FDD and modem. Just imagine they don't exist.
Then you have Apples to Apples with Windows XP Home Edition!
Not sure where everyone is doing their cart comparisons... but I'm getting cheaper n-series with direct comparisons. 520n ($509) vs 520 ($589) (through smallbusiness which is a little cheaper than home) with:
Pentium® D Processor 820 with Dual CoreTechnology(2.80GHz,800FSB)
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2DIMMs
256MB nVidia Geforce 7300LE TurboCache
No Monitor
48X CD-RW/ DVD Combo Drive
The big difference in them would be HDD upgrades since the n-series had a free upgrade to 250GB, but I just left the Windows 520 with the default 160GB HDD. Also, the n-series forces you to buy a FDD and a modem. The Windows 520 did not.. if I'd added them to make it more even.. that'd be an extra $50 on the Windows system.
Either way, this is better than in the past when the n-series did appear to cost more no matter what you did. Also, this is a system that's $80 cheaper and it comes with 100 more GB on the harddrive and has an FDD, modem. (not sure what to do with that though).
If you run a cart through the Home section, the price comes to about $609 for the 520 (using the above mentioned setup) with Windows though you do get a 320GB HDD in the deal.
One of my favorite, vaguely remembered concepts about the bell curve, normal distribution, Gaussian distribution in relation human attributes.. is this:
The truly average person does not exist. They would be some sort of freakish monster from the deep.. a horrible sight that might make babies cry.
Now, I've added my extra seasoning to the sentiment, but I hope that I am being clear enough.
With that said.. Take the following assumptions:
N% of the adult population has an arrest record
(N + x)% of employees that do the bad thing had an arrest record upon being hired.
(N - x)% of employees that do the great thing had an arrest record upon being hired.
Then, I gotta dump anyone with an arrest record. I'm playing the averages since.. it's less likely that those individuals will do "the great thing" and it's more likely that they will do "the bad thing" when compared to people without arrest records.
Note, I needed to add in "the great thing" part since.. what if we had this scenario:
N% of the adult population has an arrest record
(N + x)% of employees that do the bad thing had an arrest record upon being hired.
(N + x + y)% of employees that do the great thing had an arrest record upon being hired.
Now, I'm all like.. What do I do? People with arrest records are more likely to do "the bad thing" but.. they're even more likely to do "the great thing" when compared to those without arrest records! ahhhh!! ohnoenononono!
How great is the great thing that they do?!
THE END
oh.. let x,y > 0
Of course, we should not let ourselves be confused by the concept that... what happens if no one hires workers with arrest records? What if it damages society, and we should employ them to save our community? I bet, it's good to hire people with arrest records to work in shitty jobs since.. they'll be afraid to quit because it's too hard to get a better job with an arrest record. Success! Society is saved! Cruddy employers will hire anyone with an arrest record!
THIS! IS! REALLY! THE! END! !
The point is.. i believe.. Imagine someone walks into a room and says to you, for no discernible reason, "I could kill you... but, I would never do that." Why was that brought up?
Seems a little odd.. It's already known that humans are technically capable of any number of actions. It's just odd when people protest "too much".. (I suppose it depends on what "too much" means to you.. maybe a single announcement about one's non-murderous intentions is not too much to some.)
I am tired of all of these illustrations discussing what "0/0" is.. based on the mathematical definition of a Ring with unity.. there is no inverse for the "0". By definition, 0*a = 0 for all a.. but there is no 0^-1 thus 0*(0^-1), or as so many like to write "0/0", makes no sense. AND, it makes no sense to say a*(0^-1) either.
If you want.. you can say 0^-1 exists. Then, that requires 0*(0^-1) = 0/0 = 1 based on the rules we've given to a Ring with unity. Ok.. but.. also, 0*(0^-1)=0*0*(0^-1)=0*1=0.. so.. it's just gibberish. You cannot fit it into the system since assuming 0-inverse exists gives you 0=1
So.. for the fuck of it.. you can say, "I like to think of zero-inverse as the closure of the set of a Ring with unity.." i guess.. since it seems to have a more topological meaning but.. it makes no sense to try to utilize it with the ring operations. Or, if you want to use it, then you made R into something besides a Ring.