I loved the books when the series started. At the time they were the best I'd ever read. And then...
Book after book after book seemed to be an excuse to drag out the story line. What appeared to be solid progress towards a story climax in book N, was largely undone or obviated in book N+1.
Jordan could have made a several-book series that would be nearly as popular with fantasy buffs as Tolkein's stuff. But he blew it, and left me (and I'm sure many others) feeling like we'd been milked.
So now I'm soured on the story line, and that's a real shame. Screw it.
It sounds like you need to do a risk analysis. For each of those "preventative maintenance" tasks you do, you may be able to quantify:
The degree by which you reduce the probability of various risks, and
The cost to the company if each individual risk gets realized.
(Unfortunately tis can be difficult for numerous reasons. Even if you can reasonably determine the probabilities and costs of individual risks becoming realized, two or more risks might not have independent probabilities. Also, if two or more risks are actualized at the same time, their cost to the business may not simply be the sum of their costs if they were to happen just one at a time.)
The ultimate answer to whether or not you should do those tasks will depend on management's risk tolerance.
At least, that seems to be the mathematical answer. I'm not sure what you should do when it's impossible to confidently calculate the probability and cost of various risks.
If you're getting a lot of heat from management, maybe the best solution is to take a leave of absence for two months and work a contract somewhere. Then pop your head in and see how they did without you?
Actually, could it be considered fraudulent? They intentionally did something that made the product somewhat not fit for use, because in certain cases it's actually not a correct router.
Alternatively, Google might have a trademark claim or unfair competition claim against D-Link, because of the surreptitious redirect.
I think you missed my point. I agree that fallacies are just that.
But when people employ a fallacious argument, it's often the case that they're in the neighborhood of a valid argument, but goofed up their argument. I think their intuitions often draw their attention to an issue which can be useful to bring up, but they accidentally (or perhaps intentionally) concoct an invalid argument instead of the valid one which was actually available to them.
Like with my example about grade distributions. McCain could have reasonably stated something like this: "Even if you're unsure about my policies, you know for sure you hate Obama's policies. So do you really think it's likely that you'll regret my Presidency as much as you would Obama's?"
Unfortunately reasoning about the real world is messy, because you often have to deal with unknowns. Life would be simpler if it was clear how to model everything with first-order predicate logic, but it's not.
I think this makes a really good case for the value of bio-diversity, and why slashing and burning rainforests is bad for even non-aesthetic reasons.
If the entire Patagonian rain forest had been converted to crop land and then (a few seasons later) dessert, we may have never discovered a fungus like this, on account of it no longer existing.
That's my favorite logical fallacy, the "argument from ignorance": the other guy is bad, so we must be better.
So fallacies have a grain of truth. For instance, if you know that students' grades are normally distributed around a "C+", and kid #1 has a "D-", then in the absence of other information it's pretty likely that kid #2 did better than kid #1. Not saying that totally matches this particular situation, I'm just talking about fallacies in general.
I thought that the real problem now wasn't our ability to get feature sizes small, but rather that at those sizes, quantum effects really start to matter.
So how does being able to produce such small features really help us?
Imagine some psychopath who programs the GPS announcer to lie about its position, telling nearby cars that it's approaching them at 100 mph?
In the best case, this leads to people ignoring the collision warning beeps from their cars. In the worst case, someone is develops a car that automatically performs some evasive maneuver based on that data.
until the class is comfortable with turning algorithms into code. This is what computer science is.
If I understand you properly, then I strongly disagree with your definition of computer science. Where you're describing sounds like programming, which is a small albeit popular discipline within computer science.
I am sure I am not the only one who thinks that the consideration here shouldn't be "what do we do about these issues, given the date of the election?" but "what do we do with the date of the election, given these issues?"
I've somewhere read a quote, "For a tyrant, any excuse is sufficient." Do we really want to give elected officials any plausible excuse for delaying elections? Delaying elections is a favorite tactic of autocrats that want to stay in power while pretending to support democracy.
No it isn't, since simply no OSS application matches the features Skype provides accross platforms.
I wasn't saying that such software exists at the moment. I was just making the more general point that an open-source application with Skype's functionality would be less likely to secretly harbor such snooping and filtering functionality.
Then they should start paying developers to make it possible to communicate with other people.
'This is the worst nightmares of the conspiracy theorists around surveillance coming true,' says Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.
This is also an argument in favor of using open source software. I've been dubious in the past about claims that closes-source vendors couldn't be trusted, but apparently I was being naive.
I am not going to give up time with my family so some middle manager can get some slaps on his back...
And therein lies the problem. You may not be willing to, but it's almost certain that someone else (probably someone with no kids yet) will be willing to waste his time in that manner. And he's your competition. And new replicas of him are graduated every year.
Am I the only person who would be delighted if through some mysterious cause, all resolutions of Kentucky's government-related domain names get redirected to off-shore gambling sites?
Slashdot Mirror
I loved the books when the series started. At the time they were the best I'd ever read. And then...
Book after book after book seemed to be an excuse to drag out the story line. What appeared to be solid progress towards a story climax in book N, was largely undone or obviated in book N+1.
Jordan could have made a several-book series that would be nearly as popular with fantasy buffs as Tolkein's stuff. But he blew it, and left me (and I'm sure many others) feeling like we'd been milked.
So now I'm soured on the story line, and that's a real shame. Screw it.
Damn, Greenland is cold!
It sounds like you need to do a risk analysis. For each of those "preventative maintenance" tasks you do, you may be able to quantify:
(Unfortunately tis can be difficult for numerous reasons. Even if you can reasonably determine the probabilities and costs of individual risks becoming realized, two or more risks might not have independent probabilities. Also, if two or more risks are actualized at the same time, their cost to the business may not simply be the sum of their costs if they were to happen just one at a time.)
The ultimate answer to whether or not you should do those tasks will depend on management's risk tolerance.
At least, that seems to be the mathematical answer. I'm not sure what you should do when it's impossible to confidently calculate the probability and cost of various risks.
If you're getting a lot of heat from management, maybe the best solution is to take a leave of absence for two months and work a contract somewhere. Then pop your head in and see how they did without you?
Actually, could it be considered fraudulent? They intentionally did something that made the product somewhat not fit for use, because in certain cases it's actually not a correct router.
Alternatively, Google might have a trademark claim or unfair competition claim against D-Link, because of the surreptitious redirect.
I think you missed my point. I agree that fallacies are just that.
But when people employ a fallacious argument, it's often the case that they're in the neighborhood of a valid argument, but goofed up their argument. I think their intuitions often draw their attention to an issue which can be useful to bring up, but they accidentally (or perhaps intentionally) concoct an invalid argument instead of the valid one which was actually available to them.
Like with my example about grade distributions. McCain could have reasonably stated something like this: "Even if you're unsure about my policies, you know for sure you hate Obama's policies. So do you really think it's likely that you'll regret my Presidency as much as you would Obama's?"
Unfortunately reasoning about the real world is messy, because you often have to deal with unknowns. Life would be simpler if it was clear how to model everything with first-order predicate logic, but it's not.
I think this makes a really good case for the value of bio-diversity, and why slashing and burning rainforests is bad for even non-aesthetic reasons.
If the entire Patagonian rain forest had been converted to crop land and then (a few seasons later) dessert, we may have never discovered a fungus like this, on account of it no longer existing.
So fallacies have a grain of truth. For instance, if you know that students' grades are normally distributed around a "C+", and kid #1 has a "D-", then in the absence of other information it's pretty likely that kid #2 did better than kid #1. Not saying that totally matches this particular situation, I'm just talking about fallacies in general.
No, thanks to Cheney's power-grab, it will be a vice-presidential pardon.
I thought that the real problem now wasn't our ability to get feature sizes small, but rather that at those sizes, quantum effects really start to matter.
So how does being able to produce such small features really help us?
I wouldn't bet on that. It's far cheaper for Microsoft to just give very, very big campaign contributions to Russian legislators.
I thought temperature was a measure of the average speed at which molecules were jostling around?
So wouldn't a thermometer be the wrong tool for the job when you're in space, even if it would register something?
Does space even have a temperature?
Yeah, actually I wasn't expecting to mod my post as "funny". I was expecting/hoping for Insightful.
Imagine some psychopath who programs the GPS announcer to lie about its position, telling nearby cars that it's approaching them at 100 mph?
In the best case, this leads to people ignoring the collision warning beeps from their cars. In the worst case, someone is develops a car that automatically performs some evasive maneuver based on that data.
How do we know that Internet voting hasn't already occurred, if we can't see Diebold's source code?
25 Billion? That's nothing. Have you seen how much just one of RIAA's infringed songs is worth???
Lisa, I would like to by that Jeep.
If I understand you properly, then I strongly disagree with your definition of computer science. Where you're describing sounds like programming, which is a small albeit popular discipline within computer science.
And that you think that there are not right wing zealots on /. heh. It's clear who's new here.
You mean Apple fans? Don't confuse right-wingness with fascism!
You're worried about right-wind Zealots on Slashdot?
You really are new here!
I've somewhere read a quote, "For a tyrant, any excuse is sufficient." Do we really want to give elected officials any plausible excuse for delaying elections? Delaying elections is a favorite tactic of autocrats that want to stay in power while pretending to support democracy.
I wasn't saying that such software exists at the moment. I was just making the more general point that an open-source application with Skype's functionality would be less likely to secretly harbor such snooping and filtering functionality.
They're trying. Can they count on your donation?
This is also an argument in favor of using open source software. I've been dubious in the past about claims that closes-source vendors couldn't be trusted, but apparently I was being naive.
Sounds like the FSF got this one right.
And therein lies the problem. You may not be willing to, but it's almost certain that someone else (probably someone with no kids yet) will be willing to waste his time in that manner. And he's your competition. And new replicas of him are graduated every year.
Am I the only person who would be delighted if through some mysterious cause, all resolutions of Kentucky's government-related domain names get redirected to off-shore gambling sites?