I wasn't particularly trying to get you to change your vote. My point was, you have a choice. Too many liberals complain they don't have a choice in who to vote for, no point in having conservatives do the same.
You could vote for the constitution party, you could write in a ballot, you could not vote. You could decide how likely voting for Bush will change abortion laws or gun laws versus how effective they might be at other things.
It is true, in the current system a vote for anyone but Bush is.5 votes for Kerry, and I don't really recommend not voting. In the end, I wouldn't choose my vote based on which candidate I most agreed with, but which person do I think is going to leave the country a better place in 2008. I find it unlikely that Kerry will get any significant gun control legislation, and unlikely Bush will be able to ban abortion. Of the things I think are likely to change, I think Kerry will do a much better job than Bush.
True. Clinton commited a crime, Bush did not. However, lying under oath was not what the huge spectacle was about. Perjury was an excuse for people who thought that having sex with an intern was wrong to get all upset with him. Nevertheless, Clinton got what he deserved for lying under oath, and I don't expect legal action against Bush for his actions.
What bothers me is that many people are way less upset that Bush lied about something really important that that Clinton got a blowjob. That roughly 50% of voters are still going to vote for him after what he did is unfathomable to me.
Neither. Doing the wrong thing worries me. Attacking Iraq or not attacking Iraq could be the wrong thing, staying with an all-volunteer army or instituting the draft could be the wrong thing.
I think it was the wrong choice to invade Iraq, but that doesn't preclude the possibility that our troops that are currently there could need support from conscripts to do an effective job. I don't think this is the case either, but it is a possibility.
What bothers me is that GWB is "100% committed" to ideas that do not have constant value. He was committed to regime change, not determining the best course of action to protect us from Saddam. He is committed to an all-volunteer army, not providing our army with what it needs to carry out the task before it. While that might be the right answer today (and I think it is), it might not be the right answer next month (I really hope it is not).
The point is not that Clinton didn't lie, but that some people think that lying about having sex with someone that is frankly nobodys business is less bad than lying about evidence that another nation has facilities for manufacturing nuclear weapons and intends to use them against the US or give them to people who will in order to justify a massive miliary campaign.
Now, I question Clinton's judgment in having an affair. He obviously knew that if it were discovered, a huge deal would be made, and it sounds like a dangerous bit of arrogance to think you can do that and not get caught.
In the end, though, getting a BJ from someone who isn't your wife is not actually a crime, and was of no material consequence to the investegation underway. That doesn't excuse lying about it under oath, but I still think GWB's lies (that are not under oath) are much, much worse. While not illegal, I hope it would make people reconsider voting for him again.
The thing I don't get is why a 2 second shot of a breast is considered "worse" than all the other sexual content of the superbowl and its commercials, and really most other TV. Or, why it is considered worse that some pretty extreme violence in movies (and in the superbowl).
Personally, I don't have a problem with any of the above, but it worries me that only a few people complain yearly about how lewd the beer commercials or the dancing are, but when we see Janet's boob, everyone goes ape shit.
In particular, many of the commercials can be interpreted as being seriously degrading to women (again, I don't particularly care: I can respect women and laugh at the commercials and not mix up real women with models on TV), while the halftime show was definately sexual in nature, but not at all degrading (in my book).
All my mail filtering is done by procmail and spamprobe.
What still annoys me are things like address books, signatures, SMTP server settings, "do not send html email" checkboxes, and special mail folders (Sent, Drafts, and Trash).
What I am looking for is something where I can sit down in front of any computer with a mail client installed, type in my imap server, username, and password, and all other settings will be set up automatically. Then, if I (for instance) add or change address book entries, it will automatically propogate to every other mail client I use.
Obviously not every configuration item applies to every clinet, but it seems the the majority of them could be standardized. Ideally, I would also like to be able to edit my mail filters from the IMAP client, rather than using a shell account, but that is really a minor issue for me. If I were to try to set my parents up with a system like that, they would need to have the equivelent of the mozilla or evolution mail filters, but have them control procmail on the server.
It is certainly a lot of work to get all that to work together, but IMHO, email is *the* internet application worth putting all the resources into, even more than WWW clients.
Sorry about your job sucking, but I can't stand having to worry about giving out my email address. I *want* people to be able to email me. I don't give my address to people that I think have no use for it, nor do I reply to spam, but I refuse to post obfuscated versions of my email address, which I believe is rude to people that I actually want to contact me.
Better to do spam filtering with your MTA/MDA anyway, if possible. That way, the same filter is used no matter which email client you use from which computer. Plus, it means you don't have to download spams to your MUA when on a slow connection.
Now if only I could get the rest of my mail configuration to be shared between evolution, mutt, and squirrelmail.
If I give you a batch of 8000 emails and ask you to classify them, then do it again a week later, you will not make the same partition. If you then go look at the few messages you assigned differently between the two trials, you will (usually) decide that it is either spam or not, in a (mostly) repeatable fashion.
The difference is, you don't look at each message carefully when scanning in bulk.
When I first trained spamprobe, I trained it on about 3000 messages, then ran it over those messages to classify them. It came up with about two spams and one notspams that I had misclassified, plus one ambigious case (marketing email from a company I buy stuff from at work on a regular basis, and who I let scan my badge at a tradeshow).
Today, the USA alone bears the distinction of being the only nation on the planet that has not yet made any sort of government sponsored effort to switch to the metric system. I find this slightly amusing personally.
The US government has made several (if halfhearted) attempts to convert to the metric system, and in fact, almost everything "offical" in the US is specified either in metric, or (more commonly) both metric and imperial units. And we are changing, albiet gradually. It turns out that educating kids on the metric system does work in the long run, and doesn't require the govt. forbidding people to use the metric system, nor refusing to provide english units where people want to see them.
And it has been for over a hundred years, specifically since 1893, along with all the other imperial units of measure.
Re:Command and source/test review.
on
Java Faster Than C++?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The method test is limited by two things: First, gcc appears unable to inline virtual method calls through a pointer to an object, even when the exact type is available, second, he didn't turn on loop unrolling. Loop unrolling is a huge, huge advantage on any sort of null benchmark like this.
Changing the objects the be stack allocated and adding -funroll-loops moves the c++ benchmark up to just ahead of the java benchmarks.
Of course, this does point to several advantages of a runtime optimizer. A static optimizer will never be as good at optimizing virtual function calls as a runtime optimizer, since it will never be as good at identifying types. Also, a runtime optimizer will always be better at creating specializations of existing functions (creating a special version of a routine when some input value is treated as a constant).
I actually agree, _if and only if_ he can show that A) someone with the authority to act on it knew he was cheating (professor or TA), and B) that person knowingly waited a substantial amount of time before turning him in.
Chances are, that is not true. First, most of his professors did not know (or could not prove) that he was cheating. Second, tt takes a lot of evidence and guts for a professor to turn a student in for cheating, precicely because of lawsuits such as this one.
What I suspect happened is that most professors didn't know he was cheating, a few did, but decided not to do anything about it, and one professor in his third year noticed, cared, had enough evidence to turn him in, and did so.
The point of people worry about "running out of gas" is that if we recognize that our current rates of oil consumption cannot last forever, and spend money now to transition to another fuel now (ie, make it as cheap / plentiful (the same thing in an ideal capitalist society) as gasoline), we will be saved the "transient" where new fuel X is way too expensive for people to afford.
Your example makes it look like a slam dunk, but that is not necessarily the case. If now, gasoline vs. electric cars cost $50,000 vs. $110,000 over 10 years, while in 20 years those costs are $120,000 vs $100,000, we will be in bad shape.
Add to that, the world is not an ideal economic system: People are not rational, and they do not have perfect information. We don't know how much oil is available. Recently, Shell oil had dramatically reduced its estimates of "proven" oil reserved, I believe other oil companies have done so as well. On the other hand, a few people believe that oil is being produced by subterranian microorganisms at a rate similar to our consumption rates.
Finally, and selfishly, in 30 years when I am driving around in my biodiesel hybrid electric / solar car, I would like gasoline for my vintage Delorian / Cessna / Mustang I maintain as a hobby to cost less than $10 / gallon instead of $100 / gallon.
David Deutsch is a really bright guy, but he has a problem understanding how other people think, including lots of other really smart physicists.
He believes the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics adamantly, and thinks that any other interpretation is, if not outright wrong, not a useful frame of mind to understand QM.
I am also a many-worlds person, as are many other physicsts I know, but I also know many very smart quantum physicicst who are not, and I am not willing to say they are wrong (yet).
I think a historical analogy might be appropriate: Back in the day. there was substantial scientific contention over whether the sun revolved around the earth or vice versa (I am not considering the religious contention -- for a while the scientific evidence was not sufficiently clear). You see, you could reproduce all the observable motion of the planets in the geo-centric model using finer and finer epicycles. So, planets would revolve the earth, and had wobbles in their orbits that faithfully represented their entire movement patterns. Or, you could adopt a helio-centric model, in which all the retrograde motion and other strange behavior cleanly fell out of the equations. You could do the math either way, but in retrospect, the helio-centric model is a much better "interpretation" of the data than the geo-centric model, because it is useful for figuring out all sorts of other things, like gravity and conservation of momentum.
Deutcsh feels similarly about the many-worlds interpretation. But as I said, among quantum physicsts you will find the whole range of people with different levels of commitment to different theories. or interpretations.
I have been addicted to caffeine and quit several times. There are withdrawl symtoms, but they really aren't that bad. Increased irritability and minor headaches, mostly. People who make a big deal of it suffer from another "disease" where they think it makes them cool to whine about how bad their withdrawl symptoms are.
Also, it is not that addictive. I have never had a problem quitting. It is true that I have always started again, eventually (typically a copuple months later), but I think that is just because I am weak willed.
I don't know if _A Brief History of Time_ would count, but I don't think there is an a priori reason to exclude popular science publications from being considered literature (whether or not they qualify as Nobel Prize material...). If done correctly, they are as much about "emotionalizing" as informing the reader, or rather, at that level they are the same thing. If you can really explain science to a layman, he should be really, really amazed and awed. The world is an awesome place, and to effectively allow more people to experience that is a task worthy of the highest level of recognition.
I don't read much in the way of popular science, so I don't really know if any of it is that good, but the principle sounds fine to me.
The sperm race may be a gimmick, but it doesn't preclude educational content. There are lots of educational things you can put into a program centered around a sperm race. Also, it isn't necessarily stupid -- the characteristics that make sperm win races are almost certainly related to the probability of sucessful conception.
If an educational program loses its audience, it ceases to educate.
No, if hitting the ground has a 50% chance of flipping the coin, it will eliminate the bias. It would even eliminate the bias if the coin always hit the ground heads up.
Almost nobody is researching using quantum entanglement for FTL communication because it is impossible. Entanglement just does not allow it, and that has been shown by many, many experements. This is not to say that FTL communication is impossible, it is just that no known laws of physics permit it, and the phenomenon we call entanglement certainly does not.
My personal opinion as a scientist is that FTL communication/travel is not possible because the laws of physics we know seem so peversely designed to prevent it. This suggests at least two possiblities to me. First, God designed the universe, it has a speed limit, and you *will* obey, or second, that there is a much simpler set of laws of the universe, one of which is "speed = c", and the rules only look peverse because we are describing them in a peverse way. I hope I am wrong on this one, though.
So, using entanglement for FTL communication is fine for a sci-fi book (and a truly brilliant book at that), but it is still science fiction.
That is strange, every person I know who has been victim of fraud of this sort (4, I think: 1 ATM fraud, 1 check fraud, and a couple of credit card frauds) has gotten their money back. It does not matter if they catch anyone. In fact, in most cases, the victim never knows if the perp was caught -- the bank just wants to take care of it quickly and quietly.
The only person I know who had to do more than that was the check fraud victim, because in addition to dealing with the bank, there were lots of angry merchants who wanted to know why her checks were being bounced.
Yes, they use ear protection at firing ranges. Still, some fraction (5% or so, I think) have minor permenant hearing loss. The hope is that this will prevent that.
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I wasn't particularly trying to get you to change your vote. My point was, you have a choice. Too many liberals complain they don't have a choice in who to vote for, no point in having conservatives do the same.
You could vote for the constitution party, you could write in a ballot, you could not vote. You could decide how likely voting for Bush will change abortion laws or gun laws versus how effective they might be at other things.
.5 votes for Kerry, and I don't really recommend not voting. In the end, I wouldn't choose my vote based on which candidate I most agreed with, but which person do I think is going to leave the country a better place in 2008. I find it unlikely that Kerry will get any significant gun control legislation, and unlikely Bush will be able to ban abortion. Of the things I think are likely to change, I think Kerry will do a much better job than Bush.
It is true, in the current system a vote for anyone but Bush is
True. Clinton commited a crime, Bush did not. However, lying under oath was not what the huge spectacle was about. Perjury was an excuse for people who thought that having sex with an intern was wrong to get all upset with him. Nevertheless, Clinton got what he deserved for lying under oath, and I don't expect legal action against Bush for his actions.
What bothers me is that many people are way less upset that Bush lied about something really important that that Clinton got a blowjob. That roughly 50% of voters are still going to vote for him after what he did is unfathomable to me.
Neither. Doing the wrong thing worries me. Attacking Iraq or not attacking Iraq could be the wrong thing, staying with an all-volunteer army or instituting the draft could be the wrong thing.
I think it was the wrong choice to invade Iraq, but that doesn't preclude the possibility that our troops that are currently there could need support from conscripts to do an effective job. I don't think this is the case either, but it is a possibility.
What bothers me is that GWB is "100% committed" to ideas that do not have constant value. He was committed to regime change, not determining the best course of action to protect us from Saddam. He is committed to an all-volunteer army, not providing our army with what it needs to carry out the task before it. While that might be the right answer today (and I think it is), it might not be the right answer next month (I really hope it is not).
The point is not that Clinton didn't lie, but that some people think that lying about having sex with someone that is frankly nobodys business is less bad than lying about evidence that another nation has facilities for manufacturing nuclear weapons and intends to use them against the US or give them to people who will in order to justify a massive miliary campaign.
Now, I question Clinton's judgment in having an affair. He obviously knew that if it were discovered, a huge deal would be made, and it sounds like a dangerous bit of arrogance to think you can do that and not get caught.
In the end, though, getting a BJ from someone who isn't your wife is not actually a crime, and was of no material consequence to the investegation underway. That doesn't excuse lying about it under oath, but I still think GWB's lies (that are not under oath) are much, much worse. While not illegal, I hope it would make people reconsider voting for him again.
The thing I don't get is why a 2 second shot of a breast is considered "worse" than all the other sexual content of the superbowl and its commercials, and really most other TV. Or, why it is considered worse that some pretty extreme violence in movies (and in the superbowl).
Personally, I don't have a problem with any of the above, but it worries me that only a few people complain yearly about how lewd the beer commercials or the dancing are, but when we see Janet's boob, everyone goes ape shit.
In particular, many of the commercials can be interpreted as being seriously degrading to women (again, I don't particularly care: I can respect women and laugh at the commercials and not mix up real women with models on TV), while the halftime show was definately sexual in nature, but not at all degrading (in my book).
The long distance network is basically virtual circuit switched, but has been physically packet switched for a long time now.
It has been done before. HP's visualize workstations used to ship with graphics cards that were build around the FPU core of their PA-RISC chips.
All my mail filtering is done by procmail and spamprobe.
What still annoys me are things like address books, signatures, SMTP server settings, "do not send html email" checkboxes, and special mail folders (Sent, Drafts, and Trash).
What I am looking for is something where I can sit down in front of any computer with a mail client installed, type in my imap server, username, and password, and all other settings will be set up automatically. Then, if I (for instance) add or change address book entries, it will automatically propogate to every other mail client I use.
Obviously not every configuration item applies to every clinet, but it seems the the majority of them could be standardized. Ideally, I would also like to be able to edit my mail filters from the IMAP client, rather than using a shell account, but that is really a minor issue for me. If I were to try to set my parents up with a system like that, they would need to have the equivelent of the mozilla or evolution mail filters, but have them control procmail on the server.
It is certainly a lot of work to get all that to work together, but IMHO, email is *the* internet application worth putting all the resources into, even more than WWW clients.
Sorry about your job sucking, but I can't stand having to worry about giving out my email address. I *want* people to be able to email me. I don't give my address to people that I think have no use for it, nor do I reply to spam, but I refuse to post obfuscated versions of my email address, which I believe is rude to people that I actually want to contact me.
Better to do spam filtering with your MTA/MDA anyway, if possible. That way, the same filter is used no matter which email client you use from which computer. Plus, it means you don't have to download spams to your MUA when on a slow connection.
Now if only I could get the rest of my mail configuration to be shared between evolution, mutt, and squirrelmail.
If I give you a batch of 8000 emails and ask you to classify them, then do it again a week later, you will not make the same partition. If you then go look at the few messages you assigned differently between the two trials, you will (usually) decide that it is either spam or not, in a (mostly) repeatable fashion.
The difference is, you don't look at each message carefully when scanning in bulk.
When I first trained spamprobe, I trained it on about 3000 messages, then ran it over those messages to classify them. It came up with about two spams and one notspams that I had misclassified, plus one ambigious case (marketing email from a company I buy stuff from at work on a regular basis, and who I let scan my badge at a tradeshow).
The US government has made several (if halfhearted) attempts to convert to the metric system, and in fact, almost everything "offical" in the US is specified either in metric, or (more commonly) both metric and imperial units. And we are changing, albiet gradually. It turns out that educating kids on the metric system does work in the long run, and doesn't require the govt. forbidding people to use the metric system, nor refusing to provide english units where people want to see them.
And it has been for over a hundred years, specifically since 1893, along with all the other imperial units of measure.
The method test is limited by two things: First, gcc appears unable to inline virtual method calls through a pointer to an object, even when the exact type is available, second, he didn't turn on loop unrolling. Loop unrolling is a huge, huge advantage on any sort of null benchmark like this.
Changing the objects the be stack allocated and adding -funroll-loops moves the c++ benchmark up to just ahead of the java benchmarks.
Of course, this does point to several advantages of a runtime optimizer. A static optimizer will never be as good at optimizing virtual function calls as a runtime optimizer, since it will never be as good at identifying types. Also, a runtime optimizer will always be better at creating specializations of existing functions (creating a special version of a routine when some input value is treated as a constant).
I actually agree, _if and only if_ he can show that A) someone with the authority to act on it knew he was cheating (professor or TA), and B) that person knowingly waited a substantial amount of time before turning him in.
Chances are, that is not true. First, most of his professors did not know (or could not prove) that he was cheating. Second, tt takes a lot of evidence and guts for a professor to turn a student in for cheating, precicely because of lawsuits such as this one.
What I suspect happened is that most professors didn't know he was cheating, a few did, but decided not to do anything about it, and one professor in his third year noticed, cared, had enough evidence to turn him in, and did so.
In which case, he loses. I hope.
The point of people worry about "running out of gas" is that if we recognize that our current rates of oil consumption cannot last forever, and spend money now to transition to another fuel now (ie, make it as cheap / plentiful (the same thing in an ideal capitalist society) as gasoline), we will be saved the "transient" where new fuel X is way too expensive for people to afford.
Your example makes it look like a slam dunk, but that is not necessarily the case. If now, gasoline vs. electric cars cost $50,000 vs. $110,000 over 10 years, while in 20 years those costs are $120,000 vs $100,000, we will be in bad shape.
Add to that, the world is not an ideal economic system: People are not rational, and they do not have perfect information. We don't know how much oil is available. Recently, Shell oil had dramatically reduced its estimates of "proven" oil reserved, I believe other oil companies have done so as well. On the other hand, a few people believe that oil is being produced by subterranian microorganisms at a rate similar to our consumption rates.
Finally, and selfishly, in 30 years when I am driving around in my biodiesel hybrid electric / solar car, I would like gasoline for my vintage Delorian / Cessna / Mustang I maintain as a hobby to cost less than $10 / gallon instead of $100 / gallon.
David Deutsch is a really bright guy, but he has a problem understanding how other people think, including lots of other really smart physicists.
He believes the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics adamantly, and thinks that any other interpretation is, if not outright wrong, not a useful frame of mind to understand QM.
I am also a many-worlds person, as are many other physicsts I know, but I also know many very smart quantum physicicst who are not, and I am not willing to say they are wrong (yet).
I think a historical analogy might be appropriate: Back in the day. there was substantial scientific contention over whether the sun revolved around the earth or vice versa (I am not considering the religious contention -- for a while the scientific evidence was not sufficiently clear). You see, you could reproduce all the observable motion of the planets in the geo-centric model using finer and finer epicycles. So, planets would revolve the earth, and had wobbles in their orbits that faithfully represented their entire movement patterns. Or, you could adopt a helio-centric model, in which all the retrograde motion and other strange behavior cleanly fell out of the equations. You could do the math either way, but in retrospect, the helio-centric model is a much better "interpretation" of the data than the geo-centric model, because it is useful for figuring out all sorts of other things, like gravity and conservation of momentum.
Deutcsh feels similarly about the many-worlds interpretation. But as I said, among quantum physicsts you will find the whole range of people with different levels of commitment to different theories. or interpretations.
I have been addicted to caffeine and quit several times. There are withdrawl symtoms, but they really aren't that bad. Increased irritability and minor headaches, mostly. People who make a big deal of it suffer from another "disease" where they think it makes them cool to whine about how bad their withdrawl symptoms are.
Also, it is not that addictive. I have never had a problem quitting. It is true that I have always started again, eventually (typically a copuple months later), but I think that is just because I am weak willed.
I don't know if _A Brief History of Time_ would count, but I don't think there is an a priori reason to exclude popular science publications from being considered literature (whether or not they qualify as Nobel Prize material...). If done correctly, they are as much about "emotionalizing" as informing the reader, or rather, at that level they are the same thing. If you can really explain science to a layman, he should be really, really amazed and awed. The world is an awesome place, and to effectively allow more people to experience that is a task worthy of the highest level of recognition.
I don't read much in the way of popular science, so I don't really know if any of it is that good, but the principle sounds fine to me.
The sperm race may be a gimmick, but it doesn't preclude educational content. There are lots of educational things you can put into a program centered around a sperm race. Also, it isn't necessarily stupid -- the characteristics that make sperm win races are almost certainly related to the probability of sucessful conception.
If an educational program loses its audience, it ceases to educate.
No, if hitting the ground has a 50% chance of flipping the coin, it will eliminate the bias. It would even eliminate the bias if the coin always hit the ground heads up.
Almost nobody is researching using quantum entanglement for FTL communication because it is impossible. Entanglement just does not allow it, and that has been shown by many, many experements. This is not to say that FTL communication is impossible, it is just that no known laws of physics permit it, and the phenomenon we call entanglement certainly does not.
My personal opinion as a scientist is that FTL communication/travel is not possible because the laws of physics we know seem so peversely designed to prevent it. This suggests at least two possiblities to me. First, God designed the universe, it has a speed limit, and you *will* obey, or second, that there is a much simpler set of laws of the universe, one of which is "speed = c", and the rules only look peverse because we are describing them in a peverse way. I hope I am wrong on this one, though.
So, using entanglement for FTL communication is fine for a sci-fi book (and a truly brilliant book at that), but it is still science fiction.
That is strange, every person I know who has been victim of fraud of this sort (4, I think: 1 ATM fraud, 1 check fraud, and a couple of credit card frauds) has gotten their money back. It does not matter if they catch anyone. In fact, in most cases, the victim never knows if the perp was caught -- the bank just wants to take care of it quickly and quietly.
The only person I know who had to do more than that was the check fraud victim, because in addition to dealing with the bank, there were lots of angry merchants who wanted to know why her checks were being bounced.
Yes, they use ear protection at firing ranges. Still, some fraction (5% or so, I think) have minor permenant hearing loss. The hope is that this will prevent that.