Freedom of speech has limits, something that has been shown time and time again. Phelps crossed that line.
Freedom of speech shouldn't have limits, despite the disagreement from the courts. The only way to cross that line is to by moving to action beyond speech, i.e. violence. The best way of dealing with Phelps and his church isn't by curtailing their freedom of speech, it's by making use of that right yourself.
The people at comic-con had an incredibly peaceful, classy, and humorous way of making the WBC's protest irrelevant. When people show off their ridiculous intolerance, demonstrate to others how ridiculous they are by making fun of them. It works, and nobody's rights get trampled on.
Well put...
Or as Feynman said it so succinctly in one lecture:
"I had the most remarkable experience this evening. While coming in here I saw license plate ANZ912. Calculate for me, please, the odds that of all the license plates in the state of Washington I should happen to see ANZ912."
Wow. That one sentence not only says everything I tried to say in two paragraphs, but it does a better job of it. Things like this is why Feynman has the reputation to have been a great teacher.
No, because it blatantly and desperately reverses cause-and-effect.
The odds of you winning the lottery is not made 1 by concluding that if you didn't win the lottery, you wouldn't be thinking about winning the lottery.
Once you have already won the lottery, the probability that you have won is 1. Despite the fact that the odds were against you before you found out you won, you can't look at the fact that you've won as evidence that you were destined to win it and a supernatural being interfered. Millions of people played and the fact that one person among them won is not that special, it happens all the time. The odds that it was going to be you were not zero, which means there was always a chance it could happen.
Basically, when you see an extremely improbable event occur, that's not proof that the event wasn't improbable and it's not proof that the game was fixed. Improbable events happen all the time, they just happen less often. After they've already occurred, the probability that they have occurred is 100%, which is really all that that the anthropic principle is saying: any one state of the the cosmological constants are equally probable, and it doesn't make sense to examine the universe we ended up with and ask, "why did it end up this way?" It had to end up in SOME way, and if they were tuned such that a completely different universe had been created in which we could not exist, but which formed some type of life we cannot conceive of, they would be asking, "why is the universe so fine-tuned for us?"
I do also wonder how well the argument that linking creates a derivative work would hold up in court - you could make the case that you can create a partial index to a work without creating a derivative work (and e.g. Google would certainly want to support you in making that case), and you can link using a partial "index" to the kernel without using the kernel itself.
They're incomplete by themselves though. They are literally replete with symbols which are undefined until loaded by the kernel. The result of their operations rely upon calls to the symbols they "indexed". I wouldn't see any problems making the case that they are a derivative work.
That said, I'm not a lawyer, nor an expert in such matters. Either way, I don't see Linus or any of the kernel hackers who share the copyrights giving anyone a hard time for shipping drivers, and the entire point is moot if they don't want to enforce that clause for this particular purpose.
I understand you to be saying that yes, you can work around the GPL, but you have to include an extra step. You have something which links in directly to the kernel and ship source for that, but it ties together the kernel and the driver and allows you to ship a binary driver with the kernel. Is that it?
Yeah, that's it, although I personally wouldn't call it "working around the GPL." That point is arguable, but the way I see it, the GPL restricts distribution, not use. If you, as the user, are willing to link something that is not free with your gpl code, you're absolutely free to do so. You're just not allowed to distribute the results.
Basically, I agree with your point on aggregation. I just wanted to clarify that if all you need to is type "modprobe driver_name", than that means that a driver_name.ko file exists which was already pre-linked with your kernel. Distributing that.ko file (with or without the kernel) is a violation of the GPL. Distributing a binary file that has not yet been linked with the kernel, and then having you build the.ko file yourself is not.
It gets complicated. You can ship a kernel and a driver side-by-side ("mere aggregation" - section 2 of GPLv2). A user can then use modprobe to load the driver. At this point, has infringement occurred?
That is not mere aggregation. To get a binary that can be loaded into the kernel with modprobe, you must have already linked with the kernel. It's the reason why nvidia doesn't ship a driver ready to be loaded that way. You must use gcc to compile their little wrapper and link to the kernel yourself.
Either that or get it from your distro, who are most certainly violating the GPL when they ship it. The reason nobody is complaining is because all that this would accomplish is getting the distros to stop compiling drivers for you, and making everybody else's life difficult. Nvidia would still be able to ship their little wrapper with a binary blob, but now you'd have to go through that extra step.
From a democrat perspective, she's unlikely to win, but there's no guarantee that's the case. Not to mention that when both sides start trying to get the worst of the other party to get elected, we guarantee ourselves a choice between the worst possible candidates.
That said, if Palin's team came up with this, it's a brilliant campaign strategy for her. Hopefully people aren't stupid enough to vote for her, whatever the motivations of the organizers.
I don't know if education works optimally unless people have to earn the opportunity for an education, not just offering a way to earn a degree. You can give people tuition and they'll go, but if they don't have an appreciation for the cost of what they've been given, they're likely to spend as much of the time as possible partying, squandering the opportunity they've been given.
Because you can't spend as much of the time as possible partying without squandering the opportunity?
I went to college on a full ride myself (in the US, if that affects the argument in any way), and although I wasn't a big partier in the college-sense, I skipped as many classes as possible to play video games instead. I don't regret it, and I don't feel as if I "squandered" my opportunity, as I got my degree, a job, and am a fairly productive member of society now.
Classes are, most of the time, an incredibly inefficient method of learning. I can sit at home with the book, show up to class to ask question on the occasions when the book isn't enough, and take exams so that an independent person can verify that I have learned what I think I've learned. The rest of the time was spent appreciating my youth and doing absolutely nothing, because that was going to be the last opportunity in my life until retirement to do so.
It's not about how hard you work, it's about the results you achieve. I saw plenty of people spending their entire free time in the labs, people who absolutely worked much, much harder than I did...and some of those did not deserve to graduate, because they still failed to understand and/or apply what they were being taught. I'm not saying they were stupid, but their aptitudes laid elsewhere.
You want to ensure people don't waste their opportunity, there's a simple way to do that: stop giving them money to earn the degree if they're not making the grades. Now you've tied the opportunity to the result. Incidentally, that is how scholarships work.
Ever hear the expression "beggars can't be choosers"?
You know, if you see a homeless person on the street begging for money, and you decide to give them a very generous $10, but you do so by pulling out a huge wad of bills, taking out that $10, crumpling it up, and throwing it down on the floor where the man needs to jump on the floor to get it before the wind will take it away...you're a better man if you instead decide not to give him the money.
"Beggars can't be choosers" means that because the homeless person is in such dire straights, he will probably take the humiliation and grab the money anyway. It's not about giving you justification to be an asshole.
Actually, I think I got it from a Start Trek book. I have been looking unsuccessfully on the internet for a reference to it:(
So, it looks like at best I have a non-canon understanding and I should be the one turning in my nerd badge.
In my defense, I read dozens of Star Trek books in college instead of dating... certainly that should buy me another chance to join the club.
New Frontier After the Fall?
That's the closest I can think of in any of the novels I've read. If so, it's not a nerve pinch, but a version of the Vulcan Death Grip. I say "a version of" because Soleta was the first to use it, and it's implied she was only able to do it thanks to being half Romulan.
For me, what would have really ruined B5 was if it boiled down to the superevil badass race turning out to be overgrown teenagers afraid to move out on their own so they are beating up on the 5 year olds. That would have been so pathetic I might have blocked it out of my memory and never watched another episode again.
That's not really what it was all about. The superevil badass race AND the supergood badass race were both parents with different strategies for raising their kids. Both of them failed to realize that the kids had become adults, and it was time for them to move on on their own, and make their own choices.
The Shadows weren't just beating up on us. They were trying to make us stronger by forcing us to face ever more challenging situations. The Vorlons instead favored nurturing, by giving us a little nudge in the right direction here and then.
That approach works with tons of domains. If you ask "what is the hardest mountain to climb" it will score with an answer like "I dunno, it's either K2 because of the nasty glacier or Everest because of the fuked up weather that only gives you 4 days to start safely".
You're right, but the problem is that humans have a lot of different lists, and it's hard to constrain yourself to the limited domain where the bot has useful info. I tried chatting with Suzette, and it did try your strategy. It mentioned that "she" lived in Hawaii and was pursuing a doctorate in a university. This was a nice way to try to direct the conversation to its limited knowledge database, so I asked if she liked Hawaii, and it replied about she's close to ocean, and likes to watch the waves.
That seems like it might be "good enough", but in truth it's not. Why? I hadn't asked anything about what she does, so when it blurted out where she "lived" it was extremely random. As I asked more questions, the bot also really tried to direct the conversation to surfing in ways that didn't fit what I was asking. That's with me actually trying to give it a chance by staying in the topic of conversation that it preferred. The moment I actually try to have a natural conversation, it reverts to the traditional chat-bot answer, "I don't know."
Basically, your strategy is fine, but only if the human were to ask about chess or mountain climbing. You can't anticipate all possible subjects, and it's really hard to steer the conversation to your subset of knowledge in a natural way.
This is one of the reasons why I release all the music I make on last.fm and in a torrent...both of which will be freely available and supported by me when the time comes to put my stuff up for sale.
Granted, I'm not trying to make a living off it, but still...the more access people have to it...
The article had a quote by the author that he posted on the 4chan boards that really got to me:
As for putting all the pages up here. What can I say? I get that this is how things go, and I'm trying to live in the same decade as everyone else. If nothing else, I'm flattered that someone thought enough of the book to take the time to scan and post it.
From that quote, I noticed two things: he didn't expect that he would get a huge boost in sales from the event, he was just kinda resigned that you can't stop piracy. However, the most important part was the whole bit about being flattered that people liked his book. Sometimes you forget this caliber of artist still exists: the guy who cares about the work more than the money. The money is nice, and I'm happy when the artists can survive and even get rich off it. However, that shouldn't be the motivation for what they do.
So, thanks for what you do, keeping the real art alive. I went to your website, and found the links to last.fm to your music, and I will take a listen. Obviously I don't know if I'll enjoy it, but if I do, you can count me on your list of customers as soon as they go on sale.
Multigrid is theoretically O(s), so I don't immediately see how this is such a huge leap. Of course the actual complexity also depends on the problem and the implementation. Maybe their method.is applicaple to a wider variety of problems.
Also, the "iterated sparsifying" sounds a lot like algebraic multigrid.
I think the wider variety of problems is exactly the major advantage. A symmetrically diagonally dominant matrix is not necessarily sparse, but it does come up a lot. I know from experience that nodal-analysis based circuit simulators will end up like that most of the time, since each matrix cell represents a node connection, and when you have a circuit element between node i and j, it's obviously also between j and i (exceptions made when modeling things like transistors, because you need to handle the gate differently). The diagonal values consist of the sum of the entire row plus whatever's connected to ground, so it's always dominant.
That said, circuit simulators also tend to come up with sparse matrices most of the time, since you rarely have every node being connected to every other node...
In base 8,.11111111 = 1/8 + 1/80 + 1/800.... That number, multiplied by 7 becomes.77777777777... or 7/8 + 7/80 + 7/800... You can use the same bad math you used earlier to prove that 1 =.7777777... base 8 that you used to claim that 1 =.99999 in base 10
But when you translate that back to base 10, you get.111111... base 8 =.140138888.... (base 10). Then base 8.777777... = base 10.9809722222222...
As you can quite clearly see that.980972222... is NOT equal to 1
You need to recheck your math. 0.777... is, as you've said, 7/8 + 7/80 + 7/800 +... + 7/8^n. That's a pretty simple series. 7 * sum(1/ 8^n), where n goes from 1 to infinity. The sum part converges to 1/7. 7 * 1/7 = 1.
If you want to check my math to find the sum of that infinite series, all I did was:
Yeah, there was a sweet full-color poster of Cassiopeia, and there was a really hot shot of the Gemini twins... quite the thing to behold. We also catered to the women too: the stars below Orion's belt were quite popular.
I think you were also catering to women with the Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux.:)
So because my wife and I have comparable incomes, we have to pay MORE than would two gays living together. Is the oh-so-enlightened management at Google also going to mount a social crusade to fix my tax woes?
Uh...no, you don't. You are not required to file jointly. This is like the choice between itemizing or not itemizing your taxes. Sometimes one is more beneficial than the other, and you need to figure out which is which before you file if you want to get the best deal.
Toby McCasker was sacked for a number of reasons, one of which was his decision to post a private email on his Facebook page. This email was not referring to a game review. He should not be considered a credible source of information on this matter.
As a reviewer you don't go around posting emails sent by the game publishers that are intended to be private, that reflects badly both on you and your employer. Some of the circumstantial information we got on him suggests he might just be a self-centered douche-bag.
The private e-mail in question is as follows, according to the article Moryath linked to:
This is the biggest game we’ve done since GTA IV, and is already receiving Game of the Year 2010 nominations from specialists all around the world.
Can you please ensure Toby’s article reflects this – he needs to respect the huge achievement he’s writing about here.
Exposing that is the ethical responsibility of anyone who reads it.
The USA isn't a Christian nation. It's a nation where the majority consider themselves to be part of the minority of "real" Christians. Oh, and they love pornography as it's a billion dollar business.
What he meant is that the same people who want to abolish pornography are the ones that like to claim that the US is a Christian nation.
I know this is probably going to come as a shock to you, but the reason it's been getting rave reviews is because people actually fucking like it. It's cool if you don't, I hate some of the most acclaimed games (and movies, and music for that matter) of all time. That's just because it doesn't fit me, not because everyone else got paid to pretend to like it.
Uh...that would be fine, except that particular reviewer didn't like it, and it's his right to have an opinion, and his job to write about it. However, Rockstar responded by trying to get him to write a more favorable review. That's incredibly unethical, and it seems to me that if the game is as great as you say, they could afford some critics disliking it and survive it just fine. When the reviewer in question pointed out Rockstar's unethical behavior by publishing their e-mail, he got fired. So I guess the people he works for don't want to end whatever perks they get from Rockstar by exposing their tactics. Which is again, bullshit.
It might very well be that you're right, and the rave reviews are there because the game is awesome. The point is that when Rockstar pulls this shit, there's no way to tell if that's true because you can't tell if any one positive review is being honest or dishonest.
That's wrong. We only laugh when we know that the person/animated character is not seriously hurt.
A surprisingly large portion of the movie audienced laughed when Heath Ledger's Joker performed his "disappearing pencil trick."
Oh, please. I'm in the group of people who laughed, but that falls under of the category of the audience knowing the person is not seriously hurt. Yes, the character was killed, but it's easy to keep fantasy and reality straight in a PG-13 movie, where the scene in question had absolutely no blood, screams, or any graphical representation at all of the pencil stabbing the man's eye. Had that scene been made more realistic, my reaction and that of the rest of the audience would have been quite different. Of course, that wasn't what Nolan was going for with that scene. He wanted us to laugh.
he same is true of real life. If someone falls, our first reaction is the need to know whether they are OK or not.
The circumstances of her murder and the lack of reaction of numerous neighbors were reported by a newspaper article published two weeks later; the common portrayal of neighbors being fully aware but completely nonresponsive has later been criticized as inaccurate...None of the witnesses observed the attacks in their entirety. Because of the layout of the complex and the fact that the attacks took place in different locations, no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Most only heard portions of the incident without realizing its seriousness, a few saw only small portions of the initial assault, and no witnesses directly saw the final attack and rape in an exterior hallway which resulted in Genovese's death. Additionally, after the initial attack punctured her lungs (leading to her eventual death from asphyxiation), it is unlikely that she was able to scream at any volume.
I will even agree that some people do take genuine pleasure or at the very least don't care at all about the misfortune of others. The thing is that they don't represent a significant portion of the population. You can't even place all of/b's frequenters in that category. Yes, there's some freaky shit going on there, but most of it is just immaturity, not actual disturbing stuff. And you have no way of knowing if the actual disturbing stuff that gets posted is representative of the entire group or a small minority that uses it. I'd be going for small minority since that type of stuff gets posted for shock value. If they didn't care, there'd be no shock.
Slashdot Mirror
Freedom of speech has limits, something that has been shown time and time again. Phelps crossed that line.
Freedom of speech shouldn't have limits, despite the disagreement from the courts. The only way to cross that line is to by moving to action beyond speech, i.e. violence. The best way of dealing with Phelps and his church isn't by curtailing their freedom of speech, it's by making use of that right yourself.
The people at comic-con had an incredibly peaceful, classy, and humorous way of making the WBC's protest irrelevant. When people show off their ridiculous intolerance, demonstrate to others how ridiculous they are by making fun of them. It works, and nobody's rights get trampled on.
They haven't so far. Probably because it's rather difficult to run a train into a skyscraper.
Uh-huh...keep thinking that.
Remain metabolically active? You mean they'd put him in some sort of suspended animation? Cryo-freeze perhaps?
In a way. He's saying they'd put him on ice.
Well put... Or as Feynman said it so succinctly in one lecture: "I had the most remarkable experience this evening. While coming in here I saw license plate ANZ912. Calculate for me, please, the odds that of all the license plates in the state of Washington I should happen to see ANZ912."
Wow. That one sentence not only says everything I tried to say in two paragraphs, but it does a better job of it. Things like this is why Feynman has the reputation to have been a great teacher.
No, because it blatantly and desperately reverses cause-and-effect.
The odds of you winning the lottery is not made 1 by concluding that if you didn't win the lottery, you wouldn't be thinking about winning the lottery.
Once you have already won the lottery, the probability that you have won is 1. Despite the fact that the odds were against you before you found out you won, you can't look at the fact that you've won as evidence that you were destined to win it and a supernatural being interfered. Millions of people played and the fact that one person among them won is not that special, it happens all the time. The odds that it was going to be you were not zero, which means there was always a chance it could happen.
Basically, when you see an extremely improbable event occur, that's not proof that the event wasn't improbable and it's not proof that the game was fixed. Improbable events happen all the time, they just happen less often. After they've already occurred, the probability that they have occurred is 100%, which is really all that that the anthropic principle is saying: any one state of the the cosmological constants are equally probable, and it doesn't make sense to examine the universe we ended up with and ask, "why did it end up this way?" It had to end up in SOME way, and if they were tuned such that a completely different universe had been created in which we could not exist, but which formed some type of life we cannot conceive of, they would be asking, "why is the universe so fine-tuned for us?"
I do also wonder how well the argument that linking creates a derivative work would hold up in court - you could make the case that you can create a partial index to a work without creating a derivative work (and e.g. Google would certainly want to support you in making that case), and you can link using a partial "index" to the kernel without using the kernel itself.
They're incomplete by themselves though. They are literally replete with symbols which are undefined until loaded by the kernel. The result of their operations rely upon calls to the symbols they "indexed". I wouldn't see any problems making the case that they are a derivative work.
That said, I'm not a lawyer, nor an expert in such matters. Either way, I don't see Linus or any of the kernel hackers who share the copyrights giving anyone a hard time for shipping drivers, and the entire point is moot if they don't want to enforce that clause for this particular purpose.
I understand you to be saying that yes, you can work around the GPL, but you have to include an extra step. You have something which links in directly to the kernel and ship source for that, but it ties together the kernel and the driver and allows you to ship a binary driver with the kernel. Is that it?
Yeah, that's it, although I personally wouldn't call it "working around the GPL." That point is arguable, but the way I see it, the GPL restricts distribution, not use. If you, as the user, are willing to link something that is not free with your gpl code, you're absolutely free to do so. You're just not allowed to distribute the results.
Basically, I agree with your point on aggregation. I just wanted to clarify that if all you need to is type "modprobe driver_name", than that means that a driver_name.ko file exists which was already pre-linked with your kernel. Distributing that .ko file (with or without the kernel) is a violation of the GPL. Distributing a binary file that has not yet been linked with the kernel, and then having you build the .ko file yourself is not.
It gets complicated. You can ship a kernel and a driver side-by-side ("mere aggregation" - section 2 of GPLv2). A user can then use modprobe to load the driver. At this point, has infringement occurred?
That is not mere aggregation. To get a binary that can be loaded into the kernel with modprobe, you must have already linked with the kernel. It's the reason why nvidia doesn't ship a driver ready to be loaded that way. You must use gcc to compile their little wrapper and link to the kernel yourself.
Either that or get it from your distro, who are most certainly violating the GPL when they ship it. The reason nobody is complaining is because all that this would accomplish is getting the distros to stop compiling drivers for you, and making everybody else's life difficult. Nvidia would still be able to ship their little wrapper with a binary blob, but now you'd have to go through that extra step.
From a democrat perspective, she's unlikely to win, but there's no guarantee that's the case. Not to mention that when both sides start trying to get the worst of the other party to get elected, we guarantee ourselves a choice between the worst possible candidates.
That said, if Palin's team came up with this, it's a brilliant campaign strategy for her. Hopefully people aren't stupid enough to vote for her, whatever the motivations of the organizers.
I don't know if education works optimally unless people have to earn the opportunity for an education, not just offering a way to earn a degree. You can give people tuition and they'll go, but if they don't have an appreciation for the cost of what they've been given, they're likely to spend as much of the time as possible partying, squandering the opportunity they've been given.
Because you can't spend as much of the time as possible partying without squandering the opportunity?
I went to college on a full ride myself (in the US, if that affects the argument in any way), and although I wasn't a big partier in the college-sense, I skipped as many classes as possible to play video games instead. I don't regret it, and I don't feel as if I "squandered" my opportunity, as I got my degree, a job, and am a fairly productive member of society now.
Classes are, most of the time, an incredibly inefficient method of learning. I can sit at home with the book, show up to class to ask question on the occasions when the book isn't enough, and take exams so that an independent person can verify that I have learned what I think I've learned. The rest of the time was spent appreciating my youth and doing absolutely nothing, because that was going to be the last opportunity in my life until retirement to do so.
It's not about how hard you work, it's about the results you achieve. I saw plenty of people spending their entire free time in the labs, people who absolutely worked much, much harder than I did...and some of those did not deserve to graduate, because they still failed to understand and/or apply what they were being taught. I'm not saying they were stupid, but their aptitudes laid elsewhere.
You want to ensure people don't waste their opportunity, there's a simple way to do that: stop giving them money to earn the degree if they're not making the grades. Now you've tied the opportunity to the result. Incidentally, that is how scholarships work.
Ever hear the expression "beggars can't be choosers"?
You know, if you see a homeless person on the street begging for money, and you decide to give them a very generous $10, but you do so by pulling out a huge wad of bills, taking out that $10, crumpling it up, and throwing it down on the floor where the man needs to jump on the floor to get it before the wind will take it away...you're a better man if you instead decide not to give him the money.
"Beggars can't be choosers" means that because the homeless person is in such dire straights, he will probably take the humiliation and grab the money anyway. It's not about giving you justification to be an asshole.
Actually, I think I got it from a Start Trek book. I have been looking unsuccessfully on the internet for a reference to it :(
So, it looks like at best I have a non-canon understanding and I should be the one turning in my nerd badge.
In my defense, I read dozens of Star Trek books in college instead of dating... certainly that should buy me another chance to join the club.
New Frontier After the Fall?
That's the closest I can think of in any of the novels I've read. If so, it's not a nerve pinch, but a version of the Vulcan Death Grip. I say "a version of" because Soleta was the first to use it, and it's implied she was only able to do it thanks to being half Romulan.
Guess what I did in college...
For me, what would have really ruined B5 was if it boiled down to the superevil badass race turning out to be overgrown teenagers afraid to move out on their own so they are beating up on the 5 year olds. That would have been so pathetic I might have blocked it out of my memory and never watched another episode again.
That's not really what it was all about. The superevil badass race AND the supergood badass race were both parents with different strategies for raising their kids. Both of them failed to realize that the kids had become adults, and it was time for them to move on on their own, and make their own choices.
The Shadows weren't just beating up on us. They were trying to make us stronger by forcing us to face ever more challenging situations. The Vorlons instead favored nurturing, by giving us a little nudge in the right direction here and then.
Here's hoping for Starfleet Academy daytime Soap Opera, and Star-Trek babies!
I'm ashamed to admit I would probably watch that just because it's Star Trek.
If they ever make anything like that, I give you permission not to watch it.
That approach works with tons of domains. If you ask "what is the hardest mountain to climb" it will score with an answer like "I dunno, it's either K2 because of the nasty glacier or Everest because of the fuked up weather that only gives you 4 days to start safely".
You're right, but the problem is that humans have a lot of different lists, and it's hard to constrain yourself to the limited domain where the bot has useful info. I tried chatting with Suzette, and it did try your strategy. It mentioned that "she" lived in Hawaii and was pursuing a doctorate in a university. This was a nice way to try to direct the conversation to its limited knowledge database, so I asked if she liked Hawaii, and it replied about she's close to ocean, and likes to watch the waves.
That seems like it might be "good enough", but in truth it's not. Why? I hadn't asked anything about what she does, so when it blurted out where she "lived" it was extremely random. As I asked more questions, the bot also really tried to direct the conversation to surfing in ways that didn't fit what I was asking. That's with me actually trying to give it a chance by staying in the topic of conversation that it preferred. The moment I actually try to have a natural conversation, it reverts to the traditional chat-bot answer, "I don't know."
Basically, your strategy is fine, but only if the human were to ask about chess or mountain climbing. You can't anticipate all possible subjects, and it's really hard to steer the conversation to your subset of knowledge in a natural way.
This is one of the reasons why I release all the music I make on last.fm and in a torrent...both of which will be freely available and supported by me when the time comes to put my stuff up for sale.
Granted, I'm not trying to make a living off it, but still...the more access people have to it...
The article had a quote by the author that he posted on the 4chan boards that really got to me:
As for putting all the pages up here. What can I say? I get that this is how things go, and I'm trying to live in the same decade as everyone else. If nothing else, I'm flattered that someone thought enough of the book to take the time to scan and post it.
From that quote, I noticed two things: he didn't expect that he would get a huge boost in sales from the event, he was just kinda resigned that you can't stop piracy. However, the most important part was the whole bit about being flattered that people liked his book. Sometimes you forget this caliber of artist still exists: the guy who cares about the work more than the money. The money is nice, and I'm happy when the artists can survive and even get rich off it. However, that shouldn't be the motivation for what they do.
So, thanks for what you do, keeping the real art alive. I went to your website, and found the links to last.fm to your music, and I will take a listen. Obviously I don't know if I'll enjoy it, but if I do, you can count me on your list of customers as soon as they go on sale.
Multigrid is theoretically O(s), so I don't immediately see how this is such a huge leap. Of course the actual complexity also depends on the problem and the implementation. Maybe their method.is applicaple to a wider variety of problems.
Also, the "iterated sparsifying" sounds a lot like algebraic multigrid.
I think the wider variety of problems is exactly the major advantage. A symmetrically diagonally dominant matrix is not necessarily sparse, but it does come up a lot. I know from experience that nodal-analysis based circuit simulators will end up like that most of the time, since each matrix cell represents a node connection, and when you have a circuit element between node i and j, it's obviously also between j and i (exceptions made when modeling things like transistors, because you need to handle the gate differently). The diagonal values consist of the sum of the entire row plus whatever's connected to ground, so it's always dominant.
That said, circuit simulators also tend to come up with sparse matrices most of the time, since you rarely have every node being connected to every other node...
In base 8, .11111111 = 1/8 + 1/80 + 1/800 .... That number, multiplied by 7 becomes .77777777777... or 7/8 + 7/80 + 7/800 ... You can use the same bad math you used earlier to prove that 1 = .7777777... base 8 that you used to claim that 1 = .99999 in base 10
But when you translate that back to base 10, you get .111111... base 8 = .140138888.... (base 10). Then base 8 .777777... = base 10 .9809722222222...
As you can quite clearly see that .980972222... is NOT equal to 1
You need to recheck your math. 0.777... is, as you've said, 7/8 + 7/80 + 7/800 + ... + 7/8^n. That's a pretty simple series. 7 * sum(1/ 8^n), where n goes from 1 to infinity. The sum part converges to 1/7. 7 * 1/7 = 1.
If you want to check my math to find the sum of that infinite series, all I did was:
Sn = 1/8^1 + 1/8^2 + 1/8^3 +...
Sn / 8 = 1/8^2 + 1/8^3 + 1/8^4 + ...
Sn - Sn / 8 = 1/8
Sn = 1/7
Yeah, there was a sweet full-color poster of Cassiopeia, and there was a really hot shot of the Gemini twins... quite the thing to behold. We also catered to the women too: the stars below Orion's belt were quite popular.
I think you were also catering to women with the Gemini twins, Castor and Pollux. :)
So because my wife and I have comparable incomes, we have to pay MORE than would two gays living together. Is the oh-so-enlightened management at Google also going to mount a social crusade to fix my tax woes?
Uh...no, you don't. You are not required to file jointly. This is like the choice between itemizing or not itemizing your taxes. Sometimes one is more beneficial than the other, and you need to figure out which is which before you file if you want to get the best deal.
Toby McCasker was sacked for a number of reasons, one of which was his decision to post a private email on his Facebook page. This email was not referring to a game review. He should not be considered a credible source of information on this matter.
As a reviewer you don't go around posting emails sent by the game publishers that are intended to be private, that reflects badly both on you and your employer. Some of the circumstantial information we got on him suggests he might just be a self-centered douche-bag.
The private e-mail in question is as follows, according to the article Moryath linked to:
This is the biggest game we’ve done since GTA IV, and is already receiving Game of the Year 2010 nominations from specialists all around the world.
Can you please ensure Toby’s article reflects this – he needs to respect the huge achievement he’s writing about here.
Exposing that is the ethical responsibility of anyone who reads it.
The sixth commandment is "thou shalt not kill" -- how does it apply?
He's probably Catholic. They number them differently than other Christian denominations.
The USA isn't a Christian nation. It's a nation where the majority consider themselves to be part of the minority of "real" Christians. Oh, and they love pornography as it's a billion dollar business.
What he meant is that the same people who want to abolish pornography are the ones that like to claim that the US is a Christian nation.
I agree with the rest of your points, though.
I know this is probably going to come as a shock to you, but the reason it's been getting rave reviews is because people actually fucking like it. It's cool if you don't, I hate some of the most acclaimed games (and movies, and music for that matter) of all time. That's just because it doesn't fit me, not because everyone else got paid to pretend to like it.
Uh...that would be fine, except that particular reviewer didn't like it, and it's his right to have an opinion, and his job to write about it. However, Rockstar responded by trying to get him to write a more favorable review. That's incredibly unethical, and it seems to me that if the game is as great as you say, they could afford some critics disliking it and survive it just fine. When the reviewer in question pointed out Rockstar's unethical behavior by publishing their e-mail, he got fired. So I guess the people he works for don't want to end whatever perks they get from Rockstar by exposing their tactics. Which is again, bullshit.
It might very well be that you're right, and the rave reviews are there because the game is awesome. The point is that when Rockstar pulls this shit, there's no way to tell if that's true because you can't tell if any one positive review is being honest or dishonest.
I know, I read the first question, which was,
1. I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me.
and humbly thought, "How can I possibly feel that way about everyone?" The study is biased.
That's because you're being honest about it. Another way somebody could be looking at the test might resemble this:
"'I aspire to help my fellow man.' Check. As long as he's not smelly, dirty, or something gross."
-Cordelia Chase
Tests where you know the answer you're expected to give fail at measuring anything other than how you want the test graders to perceive you.
That's wrong. We only laugh when we know that the person/animated character is not seriously hurt.
A surprisingly large portion of the movie audienced laughed when Heath Ledger's Joker performed his "disappearing pencil trick."
Oh, please. I'm in the group of people who laughed, but that falls under of the category of the audience knowing the person is not seriously hurt. Yes, the character was killed, but it's easy to keep fantasy and reality straight in a PG-13 movie, where the scene in question had absolutely no blood, screams, or any graphical representation at all of the pencil stabbing the man's eye. Had that scene been made more realistic, my reaction and that of the rest of the audience would have been quite different. Of course, that wasn't what Nolan was going for with that scene. He wanted us to laugh.
he same is true of real life. If someone falls, our first reaction is the need to know whether they are OK or not.
Kitty Genovese
From the article you reference:
I will even agree that some people do take genuine pleasure or at the very least don't care at all about the misfortune of others. The thing is that they don't represent a significant portion of the population. You can't even place all of /b's frequenters in that category. Yes, there's some freaky shit going on there, but most of it is just immaturity, not actual disturbing stuff. And you have no way of knowing if the actual disturbing stuff that gets posted is representative of the entire group or a small minority that uses it. I'd be going for small minority since that type of stuff gets posted for shock value. If they didn't care, there'd be no shock.