First off, by multiplying by ten, they lost one 9 at the end of the series.
Your objection assumes there is an end to the series. There isn't an end to the series, so your objection is moot.
The real question is: what do we mean by 0.999...? If it's a number with an infinite number of digits, then the arguments based on algebra are correct and 1=0.999...
I have my taskbar down one side of the screen, and when I want to work on something, I click on the thing I want to work on and work on it.
This is only an efficient way of doing this if each `thing I want to work on' maps onto a single application, or a single window.
What if you're working on a number of projects, each of which requires the use of a spreadsheet, a graphics program, a web browser, and some software for writing or presenting? If you assign each project to a separate virtual desktop then switching between these projects is a one-click operation. Without virtual desktops, you spend a lot of time hunting through windows.
Taking humans out of the loop can't overcome differences in the way vehicles handle.
On the contrary, that's exactly what a computer can do - and more reliably than a human (think of autopilots and fly-by-wire). The system would need to know the performance curve (especially braking performance) of each vehicle involved, but we understand physics pretty well and these things are easily quantifiable. If designed properly, the system would be constantly measuring and updating its model of the vehicle's performance in real time, and would take account of weather, road surface, etc.
growing the defense mechanism does not constitute an evolutionary disadvantage, so it stays in place.
Actually, the defense mechanism inevitably costs some energy to produce, and imposes design compromises that may affect the other functions of the plant. A mutant without these defenses will certainly have a fitness advantage.
However, while 1500 years sounds like a long time to us, it probably doesn't represent very many generations of these trees.
American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world
They produce more in terms of total output, but the USA is a big country so you have to take its size into account when assessing the quality of its scientists. Measured in terms of Nobel prizes per capita, the USA is nothing exceptional by the standards of developed nations - a little better than France, a little worse than Germany, and way behind Nordic counties and Switzerland.
Clearly this doesn't tell the whole story (and I'd be interested to see the figures in terms of output per unit expenditure, and output per scientist), but perhaps part of the problem is that no-one in the USA challenges the idea that the USA is the top-performing scientific nation.
You're all wrong - open source software IS capable of innovation. For instance, take a look at LyX, a document processor that beats all else hands down. For that matter, LaTeX itself is open source and is the gold standard in creating technical documents. Neither of these is a copy of a closed source original.
The free software/open source approach works well where people can scratch their own itches - in fields where those who need technical innovation are also capable of developing the technology to do it, such as science and mathematics. It fares less well for products which are developed to be sold to someone else - `office suite' software, or for that matter computer monitor hardware (to get us back onto topic). However, saying that open source is incapable of innovation is like saying that all major discoveries are made by commercial entities rather than universities.
Nothing is stopping companies from paying the developers. What is this guy's point exactly. And it's not like a company can't add a developer to their payroll to pick up dead OSS projects. `Nothing', except simple economics and game theory. If a piece of software is going to be used by many companies, consider the three options:
Pay a developer to create the software
Hope another company does (1) and releases the software for free
Buy a commercial package
Option (1) is the most expensive; option (2) is the cheapest but relies on another company doing (1) first. This is very unlikely if option (3) is open, because it is in no company's interest to pay the whole cost of development rather than sharing the costs with other users. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but the evidence is that the overwhelming majority of companies will use software created by someone else if it is available.
This is not good for `science', because in the absence of the patent issue companies would be free to direct their R&D to whatever technology they wanted, rather than solving an already-solved problem.
What worries me isn't so much the invasion of privacy by CCTV, or being patronised by being told to pick up litter, but rather that this technology threatens to render CCTV ineffective.
CCTV is pervasive in British cities, but there are too many cameras and too few operatives for every camera to be monitored all the time. Criminals are deterred by the uncertainty of whether they are being watched. However, once CCTV becomes reactive, the absence of a verbal warning could be taken as confirmation that you are not being watched.
Suppose you're a would-be mugger in the centre of Midlesborough. You drop some litter and mess about with traffic cones, and if there's no verbal warning then you know there's a good chance that you're invisible to surveillance for the time being. Knowing you're relatively safe from being caught, you can now select your victim with impunity.
in the long run it pretty much guarantees that people will still get malaria
Not necessarily. Overdominance (heterozygote fitter than either homozygote) does indeed guarantee that a finite fraction of the mosquitos will be malaria-resistant homozygotes, but the number of resistant mosquitos will be less than it was in the absence of the resistance gene. Since the capacity of the disease to spread is proportional to the density of available carriers, it is possible that this capacity has been reduced to below the threshold for disease persistance.
What you've done is effectively vaccinated a fraction of the intermediate hosts at birth, and it's well known that you can erradicate a disease without having to vaccinate everyone (smallpox being a case in point). If the `basic reproduction ratio' of the disease (the number of secondary cases caused by one primary case) is R, you only need to vaccinate a fraction 1-1/R of the population in order for each case to produce fewer than one further case on average, whereupon the disease will die out. If the introduction of the malaria resistance gene reduces the population of susceptible mosquitos by the same fraction, the disease will die out.
Or maybe, just maybe, it's that these coutries have:
A: Higher population density
B: Government OFFERED internet access (As opposed to regulated, as you stated)
From the CIA factbook: Sweden: land area 410,934 square km, population 9,016,596, so density=21.94/sq km ; USA: land area 9,161,923 square km, population 298,444,215, so density=32.57/sq km. No, internet access is not `offered' by the government.
In any case, it's the population density in the cities which matters. I'll leave it up to you to figure out whether New York City has a lower density than Stockholm.
Perhaps you should check your own facts? Nah, much better to make them up based on your own prejudices.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the 1973 Physics Nobel Laureate, Brian Josephson, discoverer of the Josephson Effect and director of the Mind-Matter Unification Project. Have a look at his home page. He's also a very vocal and articulate critic of the scientific community's treatment of such `crackpot' topics as homeopathy and cold fusion.
Personally, I side with the view that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, but I think we need figures such as Josephson to keep us on our toes.
I work in the public sector, and I have a sizable budget for IT expenses. I can justify expenditure on just about anything simply by saying I need it. However, the purchasing department wouldn't let me give money to a project if I can get the same software free of charge. We're very carefully audited to make sure our software is licensed, but if the license permits usage at no cost then there is no way we can justify giving a donation. We would be in big trouble if we were found to be `wasting' taxpayers' money in this way.
Even in the private sector, a corporation has a legal responsibility to its shareholders to reduce costs, and runs the risk of being sued by them if it donates money unnecessarily.
Neither public nor private organizations are allowed to be charitable with their patrons' money.
Now governments can mandate all documents be in ODF format without being accused of abandoning their disabled constituency, and Microsoft will have to compete on its features and performance rather than vendor lock-in.
He already has the same rights as everyone else. If society determines that he doesn't have the right to marry another guy, neither does anyone else.
Would you say that the Taliban supported equal religious rights, because everyone had the right to be a muslim?
Would you say that `equal rights' for handicapped people does not mandate accessible building design, because everyone has the right to take the stairs?
There was a story a few years back about an hightech aircraft that ran out of fuel because of human error (The error being that stupid people do not use metric (bite me yanks))
That plane was the Gimli Glider, a Boeing 767 run by Air Canada. Canada generally uses metric units, but the confusion was causes by this being the first 767 in the fleet to measure fuel in kilogrammes. The plane was, however, `low-tech' in the sense that it didn't have fly-by-wire (very few commercial aircraft did at the time), and it was remarked at the time that some of the glider-like maneouvres would not have been possible in a fly-by-wire plane.
8 years later another plane ran out of fuel over the atlantic, and also managed to land without injury to the passangers. However, this time it was a `high-tech' plane with modern fly-by wire, and there's no suggestion that the pilots had to use some archaic skills to land the plane. Conclusion: the failure of a high-tech system doesn't have to be catastrophic, if it's properly engineered.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, by multiplying by ten, they lost one 9 at the end of the series.
Your objection assumes there is an end to the series. There isn't an end to the series, so your objection is moot.
The real question is: what do we mean by 0.999...? If it's a number with an infinite number of digits, then the arguments based on algebra are correct and 1=0.999...
I have my taskbar down one side of the screen, and when I want to work on something, I click on the thing I want to work on and work on it.
This is only an efficient way of doing this if each `thing I want to work on' maps onto a single application, or a single window.
What if you're working on a number of projects, each of which requires the use of a spreadsheet, a graphics program, a web browser, and some software for writing or presenting? If you assign each project to a separate virtual desktop then switching between these projects is a one-click operation. Without virtual desktops, you spend a lot of time hunting through windows.
Just read the essay. Makes me want to weep
I agree. The guy's a mathematician, and he wrote his essay in Microsoft Word!
Taking humans out of the loop can't overcome differences in the way vehicles handle.
On the contrary, that's exactly what a computer can do - and more reliably than a human (think of autopilots and fly-by-wire). The system would need to know the performance curve (especially braking performance) of each vehicle involved, but we understand physics pretty well and these things are easily quantifiable. If designed properly, the system would be constantly measuring and updating its model of the vehicle's performance in real time, and would take account of weather, road surface, etc.
Since when does ASLR improve performance or reliability?
To quote TFA: "If someone else is running your machine, it's more unreliable than if you're running it,"
growing the defense mechanism does not constitute an evolutionary disadvantage, so it stays in place.
Actually, the defense mechanism inevitably costs some energy to produce, and imposes design compromises that may affect the other functions of the plant. A mutant without these defenses will certainly have a fitness advantage.
However, while 1500 years sounds like a long time to us, it probably doesn't represent very many generations of these trees.
General rule: Every hour you put into the project before the rollout saves you 10 hours support :-)
1. Increase engineers's salaries to more than 10 times those of helpdesk monkeys
2. Spend no time at all on rollout
3. PROFIT!
American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world
They produce more in terms of total output, but the USA is a big country so you have to take its size into account when assessing the quality of its scientists. Measured in terms of Nobel prizes per capita, the USA is nothing exceptional by the standards of developed nations - a little better than France, a little worse than Germany, and way behind Nordic counties and Switzerland.
Clearly this doesn't tell the whole story (and I'd be interested to see the figures in terms of output per unit expenditure, and output per scientist), but perhaps part of the problem is that no-one in the USA challenges the idea that the USA is the top-performing scientific nation.
Google is your friend
You're all wrong - open source software IS capable of innovation. For instance, take a look at LyX, a document processor that beats all else hands down. For that matter, LaTeX itself is open source and is the gold standard in creating technical documents. Neither of these is a copy of a closed source original.
The free software/open source approach works well where people can scratch their own itches - in fields where those who need technical innovation are also capable of developing the technology to do it, such as science and mathematics. It fares less well for products which are developed to be sold to someone else - `office suite' software, or for that matter computer monitor hardware (to get us back onto topic). However, saying that open source is incapable of innovation is like saying that all major discoveries are made by commercial entities rather than universities.
Anyone who wants to use FileVault (or other Leopard features) with a PowerPC Mac
- Pay a developer to create the software
- Hope another company does (1) and releases the software for free
- Buy a commercial package
Option (1) is the most expensive; option (2) is the cheapest but relies on another company doing (1) first. This is very unlikely if option (3) is open, because it is in no company's interest to pay the whole cost of development rather than sharing the costs with other users. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, but the evidence is that the overwhelming majority of companies will use software created by someone else if it is available.From TFA - quoting Steve Jobs:
The risk of damage would be a lot less damage if every app on the iPhone didnt run as root.
Your reasoning is an example of the fallacy of the broken window.
This is not good for `science', because in the absence of the patent issue companies would be free to direct their R&D to whatever technology they wanted, rather than solving an already-solved problem.
What worries me isn't so much the invasion of privacy by CCTV, or being patronised by being told to pick up litter, but rather that this technology threatens to render CCTV ineffective.
CCTV is pervasive in British cities, but there are too many cameras and too few operatives for every camera to be monitored all the time. Criminals are deterred by the uncertainty of whether they are being watched. However, once CCTV becomes reactive, the absence of a verbal warning could be taken as confirmation that you are not being watched.
Suppose you're a would-be mugger in the centre of Midlesborough. You drop some litter and mess about with traffic cones, and if there's no verbal warning then you know there's a good chance that you're invisible to surveillance for the time being. Knowing you're relatively safe from being caught, you can now select your victim with impunity.
Not necessarily. Overdominance (heterozygote fitter than either homozygote) does indeed guarantee that a finite fraction of the mosquitos will be malaria-resistant homozygotes, but the number of resistant mosquitos will be less than it was in the absence of the resistance gene. Since the capacity of the disease to spread is proportional to the density of available carriers, it is possible that this capacity has been reduced to below the threshold for disease persistance.
What you've done is effectively vaccinated a fraction of the intermediate hosts at birth, and it's well known that you can erradicate a disease without having to vaccinate everyone (smallpox being a case in point). If the `basic reproduction ratio' of the disease (the number of secondary cases caused by one primary case) is R, you only need to vaccinate a fraction 1-1/R of the population in order for each case to produce fewer than one further case on average, whereupon the disease will die out. If the introduction of the malaria resistance gene reduces the population of susceptible mosquitos by the same fraction, the disease will die out.
From the CIA factbook: Sweden: land area 410,934 square km, population 9,016,596, so density=21.94/sq km ; USA: land area 9,161,923 square km, population 298,444,215, so density=32.57/sq km. No, internet access is not `offered' by the government.
In any case, it's the population density in the cities which matters. I'll leave it up to you to figure out whether New York City has a lower density than Stockholm.
Perhaps you should check your own facts? Nah, much better to make them up based on your own prejudices.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the 1973 Physics Nobel Laureate, Brian Josephson, discoverer of the Josephson Effect and director of the Mind-Matter Unification Project. Have a look at his home page. He's also a very vocal and articulate critic of the scientific community's treatment of such `crackpot' topics as homeopathy and cold fusion.
Personally, I side with the view that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, but I think we need figures such as Josephson to keep us on our toes.
I work in the public sector, and I have a sizable budget for IT expenses. I can justify expenditure on just about anything simply by saying I need it. However, the purchasing department wouldn't let me give money to a project if I can get the same software free of charge. We're very carefully audited to make sure our software is licensed, but if the license permits usage at no cost then there is no way we can justify giving a donation. We would be in big trouble if we were found to be `wasting' taxpayers' money in this way.
Even in the private sector, a corporation has a legal responsibility to its shareholders to reduce costs, and runs the risk of being sued by them if it donates money unnecessarily.
Neither public nor private organizations are allowed to be charitable with their patrons' money.
Now governments can mandate all documents be in ODF format without being accused of abandoning their disabled constituency, and Microsoft will have to compete on its features and performance rather than vendor lock-in.
Would you say that `equal rights' for handicapped people does not mandate accessible building design, because everyone has the right to take the stairs?
I notice that your PDF declares itself as being made with Pages on Mac OS X. Perhaps they doubted your commitment to Open Source Software?
8 years later another plane ran out of fuel over the atlantic, and also managed to land without injury to the passangers. However, this time it was a `high-tech' plane with modern fly-by wire, and there's no suggestion that the pilots had to use some archaic skills to land the plane. Conclusion: the failure of a high-tech system doesn't have to be catastrophic, if it's properly engineered.
You can already get builds of version 21 and version 22.