You're right, Monty isn't really giving you any information by opening a door. But YOU are giving HIM information, based on your initial choice, which affects his subsequent actions.
You see only that he opens a door without a prize. You can't tell whether he had a choice between 2 doors (you picked right) or his move was forced (you picked wrong and there's only one other non-prize door). It's not a case of Monty "not really giving you any information" (whine, whine, life is so unfair). Monty is simply giving you no information.
The probability would be 1/2 IF AND ONLY IF Monty could choose to open the door that you picked, to show it empty. But he is forbidden from doing that. Therefore, 2/3 of the time, the prize is hidden behind the OTHER door, the one that you didn't pick and he didn't open.
Bull. If Monty is allowed to open the door you picked, IF it's empty, then you'd better switch to one of the other doors. Guess what? You've now got a 50% chance of choosing the right one from the two others.
If all else fails, just count. Call the doors A, B, and C, and have the contestant choose door A. Case 1: there's a prize behind the door. Monty can open door B or door C: two possibilities. Case 2: there isn't a prize behind door A. In that case the prize is either behind door B, and Monty opens door C, or it's behind door C and Monty opens door B. Also 2 cases. Probability that prize is behind door A: 1/2.
For pity's sake, kids, this isn't quantum mechanics with some sort of spooky action at a distance which somehow magically moves the prize in a way that you can predict (although some real-world game shows sometimes appear to work that way;). It's elementary counting, so if you end up with a counter-intuitive result, the chances are that you haven't understood what you're doing.
(Whether God plays game shows with the universe is left as an exercise for the humor-impaired, who will post to/. and get moderated +1 funny by other humor-impaired denizens and +1 insightful by those who regard/. as being little more than a game show itself these days.)
What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?
For one thing, "When I was a boy" stories are going to get really irritating to youngsters less than 65 years old....
Trying to be serious, I'm not sure I'd want to live significantly longer than the current western lifespan, anyway[1], even if health and welfare are guaranteed. Look around and make an estimate of the proportion of elderly people you know who are still lively and interested in keeping up to date with the world as it changes. I'd guess that one consequence would be that ending your life voluntarily would become socially and legally acceptable, and that 'terminal boredom' would appear on an increasing proportion of death certificates.
[1] I'm past halfway myself, fwiw, and am no longer a stranger to funerals. It does alter your perspective on things.
Looked at the first/. story reference, clicked on its Washington Post link. Story starts "At the moment, they have no navigation data and the horses are closing in again." Humor aside, story was dated end of April 2001, so kudos to the WP for keeping cost-free content online for so long.
Luck to the project - a bit like long-distance amateur radio contacts with just a few mW of transmitted power, just pushing the limits of what can be done.
... The release quotes Darl McBride, SCO's President and CEO, as being 'disappointed' with Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik for not being 'forthcoming' about Red Hat's intentions in a previous discussion....
Well, I'm disappointed that Nicole Kidman didn't drop by yesterday to offer me a blowjob. Shucks, life is hard[1]. Fortunately, I have recently acquired the original version of Napoleon's last will and testament (excerts available for inspection if you sign my NDA). Yes, that's right: I am now the owner of la France, and I am truely, vraiment horrified and shocke at what later imposeurs have done. The country, she is tainted. But I can help you. Just send me 10 Euros in used notes, and tell me your name, your address, your inside leg measurement, and the numbers of your bank accounts, and I will give you a promise that I will never visit your own lovely little house and pee on your front door! C'est formidable, n'est ce pas? En plus, I will put you on my naughty little mailing list for my next offerts speciales. How can you resist?
[1]Or not, as the case may be.
[2]More to the point, how is it that when Luigi and his 'family' make a living selling 'insurance' that your business doesn't get torched, everyone understands that the rule of law has broken down in the district, but when parasitic growths like SCO launder their threats through the US legal system itself, everything is OK and they can continue their shakedown attempts for months, possibly years on end?
By the way, mainframe manufacturers had a funny trick. They would ship all of their mainframes with all the necessary hardware for both basic (cheaper) and advanced (more expensive) machines.
(sigh)
A generalisation: some machines were engineered that way, more commonly as LSI came in during the 1980's. But the customers weren't entirely ignorant about it: it wasn't primarily a technical issue, but a matter of contracts and resourses - factors that members of/.'s army of part-time boy programmers may eventually understand when they've had to earn their living in the trade for a few years.
In other words, it's something that the clients could have done themselves...
Sure - if they had their own engineering organisation, trained to maintain the machines they used, and were willing to take full responsibility for any and all unanticipated consequences of what they did. You needed to be a pretty big organisation with pretty unusual requirements for that to be worthwhile.
The vendors charged what they reckoned the market would bear. Big customers did better than small ones. Another aspect of the mainframe era that is being repeated today - I'm sure I don't have to give any clues about the particular platforms and products involved.
Dr Hu - who worked with mainframes as recently as the early 1990s.
OK, this is taking BG out of context, and he was exagerating to make a point, but I'd take a side bet that those banks that weren't using IBM mainframes for their main operational data processing mostly didn't buy into OS/2. A minority in the banking business, granted, but including some pretty big companies.
Arguably, with OS/2, just as with the PS/2 hardware line, IBM was intent on continuing the mainframe/ terminal approach that worked so well for so many years. BG came from the opposite direction, bet that having a cheap but adequate offering that spanned home and low-level office would be ubiquitous enough to compete, and turned out to be right.
Looking at this from across the Atlantic, it looks a rather complex and baroque solution. Here in Switzerland, you just ask for your phone directory entry to be flagged as 'advertising not desired' (it shows up as an asterisk by your number(s) in the directory services - printed, online, whatever). Given costs of local calls telemarketing here isn't at plague levels, but it does make a difference, and if you do get an unsolicited call regardless, telling the caller that your directory entry is flagged tends to discourage persistence on the part of the caller.
The other nice point is that your address isn't in the files that the directory compilers sell to the snailmail marketers - which also helps, after a year or so.
This legislation is really silly. Even
if this was ever needed in the past it was because the cost of publishing was a barrier to entry, so if a newspaper slagged you the cost to refute them would be too high to ever get your voice heard. However the beauty of internet is that the cost of entry is almost non-existent. After all, I'm spouting my opinions right here and now and it didn't cost me a penny.
You've correctly identified the reason that right-to-reply has been mandated in quite a few nations in Europe: to provide a balance against negative commentary in major media outlets which the individuals or organisations affected would otherwise not have the resources to obtain. The Internet doesn't invalidate this concept. As you correctly say, we are currently spouting our opinions right here. You may want to consider the likelihood that doing so would be likely to change the opinion of Joe Sixpack about us if he were to read an op-ed piece in <insert name of your most influencial gutter-press imprint> asserting that we're terrorists/ unamericans/ liberals/ whatever.
The point about right of reply in this context is that it gets to the same people who saw the original piece.
Unless the legislation is written truely clumsily, it shouldn't be a big problem. Or unless you're under US jurisdiction - but then, as Mark Twain once commented in another context, I repeat myself.
My niece could use some money to ease her way through the first year of college. You think you could drop around one evening for a round of poker or two? Any time, just give her a day or so notice so she can skim the rules first.
PS: she asks that you reply soon, while you still have some money.
Good post. Can I take issue with you, however. You say:
The problem can never be fully solved by technical means, being a sociological problem, but technical solutions can do a much more effective job in curbing the problem than any legislative solution, and cause fewer additional problems in the process.
The problem I have is with the effectiveness of the technical solutions to date and the likelihood that they'll become much more effective in the medium-term future unless they're accompanied by legislation.
It seems to me that the ongoing technology race between spam-blockers and spammers has been instrumental in accelerating the adoption by spammers of increasingly objectionable subterfuges for delivering of their unwanted material and obscuring its origins. The result has been that users of the Internet are incurring measurable additional costs for dealing with the sh*t and that despite this many people find that enough gets through to make the going through their email an activity, as the Economist observed in a recent article on the topic, about as alluring and attractive as sorting through raw garbage.
To put it simply, the technological solutions deployed so far have not worked. Sorry, but I think it's high time for the 'Net community to get its collective head around this unpalatable fact.
OK, laws currently on the statute books have not been noticably effective, either, despite their obvious applicability to much of the spam that's swilling around. Admittedly, the nature of many of the 'products' and 'services' being peddled in this way undoubtedly discourages dissatisfied customers from seeking redress by way of formal law enforcement. And unwilling recipients of the nastier types of material may also be understandably wary of requesting law enforcement involvement. That's a sociological problem in itself, of course, and while technical measures like providing means for forwarding anonymous tip-offs will help, what's really needed is for people to be able to feel confident they can report such stuff to the local police without coming under automatic suspicion themselves of being part of the problem. Intelligently-drafted legislation does have a role in promoting such a consensus.
So I guess I have to put up and then shut up. Here are a few guidelines for legislation which I think could help shift the balance between profit and risk for spamming. Al Capone, remember, was eventually nabbed for tax violations.
The biggest problem at the moment is unsolicited commercial email. Email is cheap, costs are distributed between sender, recipient, and intermediate carriers, and there's currently no mechanism for allocating the costs to either of the end-parties (sender pays, or recipient agrees to accept - think call-collect between individuals, or toll-free phone lines). With such a medium, there is a large onus on senders not to abuse the sharing of costs for their own benefits. Spammers have demonstrated that good sense cannot be relied upon, therefore, all email communications that are promoting some product, or service, or cause must follow a strong opt-in model. NO EXCEPTIONS. Not even for charities, religious organisations, political groupings, human rights activists, etc.
Strong opt-in means that I make the initial contact with you. You can then contact me on the matter concerned for as long as I'm willing to receive your communications. If I decide to terminate the communications, then I tell you of this, and you follow my instruction. (OK, this is tricky to get right. Basically, the more that communications can be a nuisance, the higher the onus on making sure that they begin and continue acceptably. If I include my email address on a post to an online discussion board, it's reasonable to suppose that I'm willing to receive email responses on the topic concerned or on closely related ones. If I sign up to an email information list I've agreed to accept messages from it until I sign off. If I request inform
Unsurprisingly, given the question, there's a lot of noise even at +4. So, a few basic suggestions:
If you haven't yet done so, read your terms and conditions of employment, including the small print. Pay especial attention to procedures laid down for handling employee grievances, and disciplinary issues, and over what activities may constitute grounds for disciplinary actions.
Give your local managers the chance to recognise that they have a problem and to make a sincere attempt to resolve it before moving to the grievance stage.
Keep a written record of these discussions - make a summary at the end of meetings and indicate to the people you're talking with what you consider were the important points and what you understand to have been agreed (or not) on each side.
Don't indulge in wishful thinking on a matter as important as this. As others have already noted, it's easy to believe that you're more vital to the enterprise than you actually are, and there's the unpleasant possibility that even if everyone who's unhappy acts responsibly you'll still be identified as trouble-makers and find yourselves looking for other work. I'm not saying that you should wimp out and let yourselves be shafted because of the current state of the job market, only that you are realistic about the situation.
When are these clowns going to figure out what their story is? Coming out of a back room filing cabinet with an amendment that Novell doesn't even have on file sounds like a pretty bizarre circumstance.
(Shrug)
Depends on many things - the people involved at the time, any people who inherited their responsibilities later, the general corporate culture, who was filing the papers after they were signed, who took decisions about what to archive for the long term and what could be dispensed with to save storage costs. You would hope that anything remotely contractual would be retained as a matter of course, but mistakes do get made.
And that, O Best Beloveds, is why long-established large corporations tend to have such extensive procedures detailing who is authorised to make agreements on the corporation's behalf and the track the paperwork has to take, and why stepping outside those procedures is so frowned on.
Cost. The budget was extremely tight and Russia launch cheaper than ESA, even for ESA-run missions. It's a pretty strange state of affairs.
Plus Arianespace was in the process of moving from Ariane-4 (well-understood, pretty reliable) to Ariane-5 (track record not particularly good so far) while the program was being planned. I'd say the project leads called it right. (In any case, ESA also subcontracts Soyuz launches from Starsem where that makes commercial sense.)
<blockquote>
With backing from Microsoft Corp., a Toronto company's dream of a universal addressing system is taking a step closer to reality. </blockquote>
Sell.
<font size="0.1pt"> If you want investment advice, consult with an investment advisor qualified and authorised to practice in the same jurisdiction that obtains where you reside and/ or do business. Not/. </font>
BBC update here - or for the next day or so it'll be on the news.bbc.com front page.
Textbook launch - well, that's what you expect from Soyuz - and now the departure from Earth orbit has succeeded as well.
Fingers crossed. Hopefully there will be some wide smiles round about Christmas this year when we hear that "The Beagle has landed". (No offense whatever intended to the US lunar program: I saw the tv broadcasts of the first landing in the early hours of the morning when I was still at university.)
I'd like to know why IBM hasn't counter-sued SCO yet.
Because they don't want to suggest that there's enough in the SCO allegations to be worth a knee-jerk tit-for-tat response. This is IBM, for pity's sake... if IBM countersued every two-bit scam-artist who tried to hang them out to dry on questionable claims, they'd block their own business and much of the US civil court system for years on end.
Given SCO's apparent commercial position, after the lawyers they have hired for this exercise have taken their fees, how much is likely to be left for the company's creditors, let alone civil action plaintifs against the company?
You know you've spent too much time on /., when
on
Sperm Sorting Chip
·
· Score: 1
Professors Wickramasinghe and Hoyle, leading proponents of the panspermia theory, suggested an extraterrestrial cause for the observed mutability of the influenza virus back in the 1980's. Ask Google about 'Wickramasinghe Hoyle influenza theory' for more details. My impression is that even the good professor's fellow astronomers regard him as a bit of a nutcase on this topic; I imagine that workers more familiar with the field take it as just the latest example of a tendancy among scholars of the physical sciences to be condescending or even downright arrogant towards branches in which results are not so simple or amenable to straightforward experimental verification - Lord Rutherford famously commented once that all science is either physics or stamp collecting.
I'm afraid what we have here is "I don't understand how this could have come about, so the workers in the field may be overlooking something". It's not that far away from the creationists' logic, which shorn of a lot of verbiage, comes down to "I don't understand how modern forms of life could have resulted from an evolutionary process, therefore they must be the result of an external creative agent."
Darwinists are beginning to accept the evidence that horizontal gene transfer can deliver the components of large genetic programs. However, darwinism cannot explain how independently evolving genes would gradually acquire the correct sequences needed to become parts of a large program
whose total function could not be performed until all the genes are installed. The necessary mutations would not be neutral, so if the genes were active before the complete installation, natural selection would hinder the process....
(My italics)
This is semantically equivalent to the creationist "argument from design" - how could (to take a favourite example) an organ as complex as a vertebrate's eye have arisen by random mutation? This question - and it is a valid one, and an explanation is indeed called for - was dealt with head on a few years ago by Richard Dawkins in his book "Climbing Mount Improbable". To summarise Dawkin's argument, the 'necessary mutations' were indeed not neutral. But they didn't arrive suddenly in their full-blown form, but in small steps, each of which confered a small advantage to organisms which carried them compared with organisms which did not. The individual steps that eventually resulted in an eye don't even need to have been connected with vision, or even sensitivity to light, at the start of the process. All that is needed is that small incremental advantage at the time a mutation occurred and enough time for effects of different mutations and combinations of mutations to affect survival, and time is something that life on Earth has had copious supplies of.
Apologies for the rant: I read physics at university, and get irritated when its practitioners start making ex cathedra pronouncements on topics outside their expertise.
Why do we need yet another form of forgable identification.
Rejoice, for your government has anticipated your concern! The esteemed correspondent of the Guardian has been given to understand - and a nudge is as good as a wink to a dead horse, remember - that
Under Mr Blunkett's proposal, the card is expected to carry name, date of birth, address, employment status, sex, photo, national insurance, passport and driving licence numbers, and a password or PIN to authorise transactions. It will also carry "biometric information" such as an eye scan or electronic fingerprint to guard against identity fraud.
So that's all right, then. These cards will be more secure against forgery even than the very Passports which are required to leave Her Majesty's Glorious Realm to take up work and residence Abroad. Excuse me, now, the clock has just struck thirteen.
</sarcasm> - or as it's called these days, </irony>. I think I'm going to have to cancel my subscription to Private Eye - the world is rapidly surpassing the satirists' attempts to hold it to account.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, penguiN42.
Knight's tours... Sample space... Early morning...
<Monty mode="python not hall">
My brain hurts...
</Monty>
If all else fails, just count. Call the doors A, B, and C, and have the contestant choose door A. Case 1: there's a prize behind the door. Monty can open door B or door C: two possibilities. Case 2: there isn't a prize behind door A. In that case the prize is either behind door B, and Monty opens door C, or it's behind door C and Monty opens door B. Also 2 cases. Probability that prize is behind door A: 1/2.
For pity's sake, kids, this isn't quantum mechanics with some sort of spooky action at a distance which somehow magically moves the prize in a way that you can predict (although some real-world game shows sometimes appear to work that way;). It's elementary counting, so if you end up with a counter-intuitive result, the chances are that you haven't understood what you're doing.
(Whether God plays game shows with the universe is left as an exercise for the humor-impaired, who will post to /. and get moderated +1 funny by other humor-impaired denizens and +1 insightful by those who regard /. as being little more than a game show itself these days.)
Trying to be serious, I'm not sure I'd want to live significantly longer than the current western lifespan, anyway[1], even if health and welfare are guaranteed. Look around and make an estimate of the proportion of elderly people you know who are still lively and interested in keeping up to date with the world as it changes. I'd guess that one consequence would be that ending your life voluntarily would become socially and legally acceptable, and that 'terminal boredom' would appear on an increasing proportion of death certificates.
[1] I'm past halfway myself, fwiw, and am no longer a stranger to funerals. It does alter your perspective on things.
Tracking the money collected might just perhaps be a start[1].
[1]Math is hard. - Barbie-Doll.
Luck to the project - a bit like long-distance amateur radio contacts with just a few mW of transmitted power, just pushing the limits of what can be done.
[1]Or not, as the case may be.
[2]More to the point, how is it that when Luigi and his 'family' make a living selling 'insurance' that your business doesn't get torched, everyone understands that the rule of law has broken down in the district, but when parasitic growths like SCO launder their threats through the US legal system itself, everything is OK and they can continue their shakedown attempts for months, possibly years on end?
A generalisation: some machines were engineered that way, more commonly as LSI came in during the 1980's. But the customers weren't entirely ignorant about it: it wasn't primarily a technical issue, but a matter of contracts and resourses - factors that members of /.'s army of part-time boy programmers may eventually understand when they've had to earn their living in the trade for a few years.
Sure - if they had their own engineering organisation, trained to maintain the machines they used, and were willing to take full responsibility for any and all unanticipated consequences of what they did. You needed to be a pretty big organisation with pretty unusual requirements for that to be worthwhile.The vendors charged what they reckoned the market would bear. Big customers did better than small ones. Another aspect of the mainframe era that is being repeated today - I'm sure I don't have to give any clues about the particular platforms and products involved.
Dr Hu - who worked with mainframes as recently as the early 1990s.
Arguably, with OS/2, just as with the PS/2 hardware line, IBM was intent on continuing the mainframe/ terminal approach that worked so well for so many years. BG came from the opposite direction, bet that having a cheap but adequate offering that spanned home and low-level office would be ubiquitous enough to compete, and turned out to be right.
The other nice point is that your address isn't in the files that the directory compilers sell to the snailmail marketers - which also helps, after a year or so.
The point about right of reply in this context is that it gets to the same people who saw the original piece.
Unless the legislation is written truely clumsily, it shouldn't be a big problem. Or unless you're under US jurisdiction - but then, as Mark Twain once commented in another context, I repeat myself.
No, there are some straight lines that should be left untouched.
PS: she asks that you reply soon, while you still have some money.
The problem I have is with the effectiveness of the technical solutions to date and the likelihood that they'll become much more effective in the medium-term future unless they're accompanied by legislation.
It seems to me that the ongoing technology race between spam-blockers and spammers has been instrumental in accelerating the adoption by spammers of increasingly objectionable subterfuges for delivering of their unwanted material and obscuring its origins. The result has been that users of the Internet are incurring measurable additional costs for dealing with the sh*t and that despite this many people find that enough gets through to make the going through their email an activity, as the Economist observed in a recent article on the topic, about as alluring and attractive as sorting through raw garbage.
To put it simply, the technological solutions deployed so far have not worked. Sorry, but I think it's high time for the 'Net community to get its collective head around this unpalatable fact.
OK, laws currently on the statute books have not been noticably effective, either, despite their obvious applicability to much of the spam that's swilling around. Admittedly, the nature of many of the 'products' and 'services' being peddled in this way undoubtedly discourages dissatisfied customers from seeking redress by way of formal law enforcement. And unwilling recipients of the nastier types of material may also be understandably wary of requesting law enforcement involvement. That's a sociological problem in itself, of course, and while technical measures like providing means for forwarding anonymous tip-offs will help, what's really needed is for people to be able to feel confident they can report such stuff to the local police without coming under automatic suspicion themselves of being part of the problem. Intelligently-drafted legislation does have a role in promoting such a consensus.
So I guess I have to put up and then shut up. Here are a few guidelines for legislation which I think could help shift the balance between profit and risk for spamming. Al Capone, remember, was eventually nabbed for tax violations.
- If you haven't yet done so, read your terms and conditions of employment, including the small print. Pay especial attention to procedures laid down for handling employee grievances, and disciplinary issues, and over what activities may constitute grounds for disciplinary actions.
- Give your local managers the chance to recognise that they have a problem and to make a sincere attempt to resolve it before moving to the grievance stage.
- Keep a written record of these discussions - make a summary at the end of meetings and indicate to the people you're talking with what you consider were the important points and what you understand to have been agreed (or not) on each side.
- Don't indulge in wishful thinking on a matter as important as this. As others have already noted, it's easy to believe that you're more vital to the enterprise than you actually are, and there's the unpleasant possibility that even if everyone who's unhappy acts responsibly you'll still be identified as trouble-makers and find yourselves looking for other work. I'm not saying that you should wimp out and let yourselves be shafted because of the current state of the job market, only that you are realistic about the situation.
Good luck, anyway.Depends on many things - the people involved at the time, any people who inherited their responsibilities later, the general corporate culture, who was filing the papers after they were signed, who took decisions about what to archive for the long term and what could be dispensed with to save storage costs. You would hope that anything remotely contractual would be retained as a matter of course, but mistakes do get made.
And that, O Best Beloveds, is why long-established large corporations tend to have such extensive procedures detailing who is authorised to make agreements on the corporation's behalf and the track the paperwork has to take, and why stepping outside those procedures is so frowned on.
<font size="0.1pt"> /.
If you want investment advice, consult with an investment advisor qualified and authorised to practice in the same jurisdiction that obtains where you reside and/ or do business. Not
</font>
Textbook launch - well, that's what you expect from Soyuz - and now the departure from Earth orbit has succeeded as well.
Fingers crossed. Hopefully there will be some wide smiles round about Christmas this year when we hear that "The Beagle has landed". (No offense whatever intended to the US lunar program: I saw the tv broadcasts of the first landing in the early hours of the morning when I was still at university.)
Memo to self: get outside more often.
I'm afraid what we have here is "I don't understand how this could have come about, so the workers in the field may be overlooking something". It's not that far away from the creationists' logic, which shorn of a lot of verbiage, comes down to "I don't understand how modern forms of life could have resulted from an evolutionary process, therefore they must be the result of an external creative agent."
Looking at the panspermia.org site, I was saddened to see, in one of the recent papers 'Testing Darwinism versus Cosmic Ancestry" the following section:
(My italics)This is semantically equivalent to the creationist "argument from design" - how could (to take a favourite example) an organ as complex as a vertebrate's eye have arisen by random mutation? This question - and it is a valid one, and an explanation is indeed called for - was dealt with head on a few years ago by Richard Dawkins in his book "Climbing Mount Improbable". To summarise Dawkin's argument, the 'necessary mutations' were indeed not neutral. But they didn't arrive suddenly in their full-blown form, but in small steps, each of which confered a small advantage to organisms which carried them compared with organisms which did not. The individual steps that eventually resulted in an eye don't even need to have been connected with vision, or even sensitivity to light, at the start of the process. All that is needed is that small incremental advantage at the time a mutation occurred and enough time for effects of different mutations and combinations of mutations to affect survival, and time is something that life on Earth has had copious supplies of.
Apologies for the rant: I read physics at university, and get irritated when its practitioners start making ex cathedra pronouncements on topics outside their expertise.
</sarcasm> - or as it's called these days, </irony>. I think I'm going to have to cancel my subscription to Private Eye - the world is rapidly surpassing the satirists' attempts to hold it to account.
For further enlightenment, check the a.b.s.f.g FAQ and manifesto. Just say that Pedro sent you.