That may count if you are in public, but a policeman can't enter your property without permission unless he has probable cause. While you might get arrested, charges will be thrown out if challenged, since any evidence is inadmissable. I have several friends who escaped a underage drinking charge this way.
I REALLY do not trust this technology. Let's hope it sees just as many blockades as regular lie detectors.
Almost certainly this will fall under the same restrictions as polygraphs (which despite being called lie detectors are not really). What all of these devices are useful for is not so much detecting lies, but enabling an interrogator to get truthful answers -- either by convincing the subject that the machine really can detect lies, or by allowing the stress response to guide the questioner to ask the right questions. Only useful when used by an expert interrogator who understands the functioning of the device. I know several people who have been subjected to polygraphs in the course of security clearance who seemed to feel it was reasonably administered.
Well, I think you cast a pretty big net with your description of "values of asian cultures", but I want to point out that just because they are different doesn't mean they aren't wrong.
China's government is wrong about censorship. The question here is whether Google and friends should voluntarily self-censor in order to cater to the Chinese market. While it pains me to see people submit to censorship, the question of rightness in this instance is complicated and subtle.
And if new observations topple your carefully constructed modifications? What are you going to do - change your maths again?
Yes, exactly. It is called science. We make a theory that explains the available data, make new predictions based on that theory, perform experiments and either invalidate or corroborate the theory. If invalidated, we search for a new theory.
While punctuation changes can indeed wildly change the meaning of a sentence, as the GP said, usually they don't. Also, english (and all natural languages) are inherently ambigious. -- lots of constructions have multiple well defined contradictory meanings.
And, TFA says that while 98% of patents have errors, only 2% of patents have errors that jeapordize the claims. I think it is safe to say that most of those errors are mere speed bumps to reading.
Much of academia - especially at UCLA - is far to the left of Joe Stalin.
Yes, and several of my professors were taller than Chairman Mao. Stalin was bad because he was a brutal totalitarian dictator that murdered countless of his countrymen to maintain his power. This has nothing to do with left or right, or your professors political beliefs, and to compare the two is disingenuous.
It [identifying profesorial ideologues who abuse their students by propagandizing them in class and/or grading on their students' ideologies] shouldn't be allowed
Blatant abuse of editorial notation. Marking this sentance as a quote when 'shouldn't be allowed' are the only words in the parent is disrespectful.
I know professors who are worried about this sort of thing because they are worried about harrasment, especially from people not associated with the university at all, but "right-wing nut jobs" who are upset over professors poisoning the minds of the children. This seems paranoid and delusional, but it turns out lots and lots of professors have been victims of harassment for a wide variety of reasons, so it is understandable. I personally just think it is obnoxious and misguided -- I expect my professors to have strong opinions, and I expect that one of the things that you learn in a liberal education (in the tradition of liberal arts, not political bias) is how to analyze rhetoric and form your own opinions.
Furthermore, all of the specific complaints on his website that I read skimming through half a dozen of his top 30 list were of the form "this professor is a radical liberal because of this book he wrote, this information on his personal website, his involvement in this political organization, etc." or in a few cases "this seminar class on the dynamics of post-modern a reformation of traditional gender archetypes is bullshit". The former is a stupid complaint, and doesn't mean that the person is a bad teacher. The latter may have some merit, but is not really a political issue, and either way I am not qualified to judge a senior seminar class in sociology based on the title of the class. Perhaps if they actually get some information from courses as they hope this will change, but right now their complaints are almost entirely meritless.
My (admittedly old) 200 disc DVD changer is slow and annoying. I would much rather have my DVDs ripped onto a HTPC or streamed over the network from my fileserver.
It only takes a few true believers or shameless panderers to bring a bill like this to a vote, and once they do so, nobody wants to be on record opposing it, since it makes excellent fodder for an opponent at your next reelection campaign (Senator X is pro drugs and killing hookers! Vote Y for Senate!). So, people vote for the ban confident that the courts will overturn it and everybody saves face. Kind of a waste of time and money, but I have much bigger gripes about the legislature. The cynic in me says that every minute debating a bill like this is a minute they can't be passing the DMCA II.
If they don't want dishes all over the roof, an apartment building can (and should) install a single dish with repeaters, and allow tenants to choose whether they want their cable feed to be cable or satellite.
There definately is collusion between cable companies and property managment, my old apartment required me to subscribe to cable, along with everyone else in the building (at a discount! but still for more than satellite). This was common, if not ubiquitous among large apartment buildings in the area.
I looked seriously at replacing my TiVo (series 1) with a MythTV box. It was going to cost about $900-$1000. You could do it cheaper, maybe for $700, but I wanted a nice looking AV form factor case with a VFD on the front panel. Any less than that and you are looking at a loud computer in an ugly tower case with limited storage.
No, it is simple. Anybody you give the software to you have to give the source to. If you give modified GPL software to a coworker, your employer, or some dude named Bob, you have to give them the source. Any of those people who accept the GPL are allowed to distribute it further, but your obligation is satisfied, regardless of who the code eventually makes it to. Nor are you ever under an obligation to return your modified code to the original author unless you give that person modified binaries.
You are free to create a screw-the-GPL club, but you cannot actually bind the members to not redistribute the code. To do so is to not accept the GPL, and without agreeing to it you are prohibited from distributing the software to anyone. Other than that, creating a club of members who voluntarily share modified versions of a program and do not redistribute it outside the club is within the letter (and mostly the spirit) of the GPL.
What IS ambigious (and supposedly addressed in GPL3) is whether letting someone use a program on your computer counts as distributing it to them -- the "ASP loophole". This is a whole bucket of worms that I sincerely hope the FSF thinks clearly about before making a decision. I suspect that a court would decide that allowing someone to run a program on your computer counts as a performance, not a copy, however public performance is protected by copyright law, so the FSF is free in principle to put whatever restrictions they want on that as well.
Well, we do tend to make fun of the CS guys for working on toy problems, but to be fair there are a number of other factors in addition to the availability of test data. First, you do not do just one problem for four years, you have classes, are a TA, and possibly do other smaller projects that might not be part of an interview presentation. Second, in an academic setting you are expected to beat the problem to death -- not just come up with a solution that works. You have to explore every avenue and analyze things in great detail (that likely aren't immediately obvious in a 30 minute presentation). This mentality works essentially because grad students are cheap. My physics grad student stipend is about $16500/year, I suspect CS is about the same or slightly less, while you were probably paid considerably more to do your work. So, if you make the grad student spend 2 years (of his 4 year lifetime) working on this project, and get the work accepted to a slightly better journal or conference than the 3 month solution, it is worth it to the students advisor.
Of course, whether the 4 years is well spent from the students persepective is hard to say. If you like being in the academic world, it probably is. If you want to get a "real job" possibly not.
Re:The children will ask themselves
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A few comments: learning to come up with ideas is the hardest that people can do. Among physics PhDs (a reasonablly intelligent bunch, on average) it is typically to get 12-14 years of training after high school before you are ready to be a professor (or other PI) and come up with your own research ideas. Even exceptionally bright kids will be hard pressed to come up with a complete project that they can do in their free time. In order to cultivate their talents, they need adults to help guide them. Second, most of their time is spent in classes which they are not permitted to leave or ignore even if they had something to do. Their time outside of classes must be divided between whatever extra projects they might be doing and sports, social activities, and family interaction, all of which are also important.
I personally found ways to entertain myself throught grade school which mostly involved reading books in class, which landed me in both the behavior modification program and the gifted and talented program (I think the only student in both).
Finally, while even the smartest kid will learn things in their mundane classes, it is still boring to master they days lesson in 10 minutes and have to sit around doing boring excercises while waiting for the other students to figure it out.
For some people that is really hard. I personally find it very hard to judge how something looks on me, though I can tell pretty well for other people. If you can, it is really much better to go with a friend.
For people who have been practicing since they were 12, this may not be much of an issue, but if you wake up one day and realize that you are in your 20s and dress to have lots of free friday nights, you are going to need some help, not just motivation.
(For straight guys) the best bet is probably to find one of your friends girlfriends, if you can find one you are comfortable shopping with and trust her fashion sense. Otherwise, go with a male friend if you can get over feeling gay going to The Gap with another guy. Also, pay attention both to what people recommend for you and what you see other people wear. Try to figure out *why* something looks good or bad. There are logical rules for fashion that a geek type should be able to figure out, but only if you work at it.
I wouldn't mention this except that you shine 90W lasers into people, but a laser is either CW or Q-switched (though many can operate in both modes). Q-switching is a way of making a laser emit short pulses, (typically a few nanoseconds with peak power in the 10 kW region and up) the opposite of continuous wave. According to Laserscope's website, the 800 series are CW lasers, which can be switched for exposure times down to.1 seconds -- not the same as Q-switching.
Well, there is no reason in principle you can't cut through all the jacketing and get to the bare fiber without cutting it, then sand away some of the cladding until you can use evanescent wave coupling to pick off 10% of the signal, which will hardly be noticed (10% ~1 dB loss).
Alternately, you can just go to where there is already a splice, such as an amplifying station.
This is harder than attaching a tap to a copper line, but only because people haven't really tried. I am sure that the NSA and friends can do this just fine, and if it becomes profitable for others they will develop the tools to do what I have described or something equivelent quickly and efficiently.
Actually, Oracle (and every other database I have used) have an export to SQL command, which without much effort can be used to load the database into postgresql, mysql, or whatever.
As much as DB vendors would like to lock people into their software, people get very possesive of their data, and would scream bloody murder if they thought Oracle were doing something to make it hard for them to get their data out of the database system.
Why do you think that is pointless? While it is not the same style of "basic" research as some of their other work (which is, as the original poster said, top notch), it is certainly valuable, at least from the abstract you posted. They also do some cool stuff with compiler optimization, distributed/parallel computing, and all sorts of more respectable forms of research.
I don't know your background, but I have never met anyone with a substantial CS background to say anything bad about MS research, including a number of OSS zealots (such as myself). I suspect that most people who make fun of them are simply not in a position to judge their work.
400 Hz (and similar) systems require smaller transformers, but may or may not be more efficient. Copper losses decrease with frequency, but core losses increase, unless you move to ferrite or powdered iron cores. Also, for long distribution lines, capacitive coupling to ground is an important cause of loss which is exacerbated by higher frequencies (which is one reason very high power/long range distribution uses high voltage DC).
That would probably only apply to individually licensed software, not those purchsed through volume licensing programs, which is what this is about. It is possible that you could resell or transfer your entire license block, but probably not do so per seat if it was forbidden in the license agreement.
Well, since I have been told for years that there are over a gajillion cancer causing and toxic chemicals in tobacco, I would assume that eliminating two of them would not make a big difference. If that isn't true, perhaps everything the anti-tobacco lobby has taught me is a lie!
Greg Egan has a very cool applet that lets you see how the right GVD allows superluminal pulse propogation and why it cannot be used to transmit information faster than light.
In fact, in the US, that is required by law. Sadly, it has led to me calling 911 from my pocket, since it overrides the key lock as well. I guess my next phone will have to be a flip phone, though I don't really like them.
Slashdot Mirror
That may count if you are in public, but a policeman can't enter your property without permission unless he has probable cause. While you might get arrested, charges will be thrown out if challenged, since any evidence is inadmissable. I have several friends who escaped a underage drinking charge this way.
Almost certainly this will fall under the same restrictions as polygraphs (which despite being called lie detectors are not really). What all of these devices are useful for is not so much detecting lies, but enabling an interrogator to get truthful answers -- either by convincing the subject that the machine really can detect lies, or by allowing the stress response to guide the questioner to ask the right questions. Only useful when used by an expert interrogator who understands the functioning of the device. I know several people who have been subjected to polygraphs in the course of security clearance who seemed to feel it was reasonably administered.
Well, I think you cast a pretty big net with your description of "values of asian cultures", but I want to point out that just because they are different doesn't mean they aren't wrong.
China's government is wrong about censorship. The question here is whether Google and friends should voluntarily self-censor in order to cater to the Chinese market. While it pains me to see people submit to censorship, the question of rightness in this instance is complicated and subtle.
Yes, exactly. It is called science. We make a theory that explains the available data, make new predictions based on that theory, perform experiments and either invalidate or corroborate the theory. If invalidated, we search for a new theory.
While punctuation changes can indeed wildly change the meaning of a sentence, as the GP said, usually they don't. Also, english (and all natural languages) are inherently ambigious. -- lots of constructions have multiple well defined contradictory meanings.
And, TFA says that while 98% of patents have errors, only 2% of patents have errors that jeapordize the claims. I think it is safe to say that most of those errors are mere speed bumps to reading.
Much of academia - especially at UCLA - is far to the left of Joe Stalin.
Yes, and several of my professors were taller than Chairman Mao. Stalin was bad because he was a brutal totalitarian dictator that murdered countless of his countrymen to maintain his power. This has nothing to do with left or right, or your professors political beliefs, and to compare the two is disingenuous.
It [identifying profesorial ideologues who abuse their students by propagandizing them in class and/or grading on their students' ideologies] shouldn't be allowed
Blatant abuse of editorial notation. Marking this sentance as a quote when 'shouldn't be allowed' are the only words in the parent is disrespectful.
I know professors who are worried about this sort of thing because they are worried about harrasment, especially from people not associated with the university at all, but "right-wing nut jobs" who are upset over professors poisoning the minds of the children. This seems paranoid and delusional, but it turns out lots and lots of professors have been victims of harassment for a wide variety of reasons, so it is understandable. I personally just think it is obnoxious and misguided -- I expect my professors to have strong opinions, and I expect that one of the things that you learn in a liberal education (in the tradition of liberal arts, not political bias) is how to analyze rhetoric and form your own opinions.
Furthermore, all of the specific complaints on his website that I read skimming through half a dozen of his top 30 list were of the form "this professor is a radical liberal because of this book he wrote, this information on his personal website, his involvement in this political organization, etc." or in a few cases "this seminar class on the dynamics of post-modern a reformation of traditional gender archetypes is bullshit". The former is a stupid complaint, and doesn't mean that the person is a bad teacher. The latter may have some merit, but is not really a political issue, and either way I am not qualified to judge a senior seminar class in sociology based on the title of the class. Perhaps if they actually get some information from courses as they hope this will change, but right now their complaints are almost entirely meritless.
My (admittedly old) 200 disc DVD changer is slow and annoying. I would much rather have my DVDs ripped onto a HTPC or streamed over the network from my fileserver.
It only takes a few true believers or shameless panderers to bring a bill like this to a vote, and once they do so, nobody wants to be on record opposing it, since it makes excellent fodder for an opponent at your next reelection campaign (Senator X is pro drugs and killing hookers! Vote Y for Senate!). So, people vote for the ban confident that the courts will overturn it and everybody saves face. Kind of a waste of time and money, but I have much bigger gripes about the legislature. The cynic in me says that every minute debating a bill like this is a minute they can't be passing the DMCA II.
Apartment buildings look like crap anyway.
If they don't want dishes all over the roof, an apartment building can (and should) install a single dish with repeaters, and allow tenants to choose whether they want their cable feed to be cable or satellite.
There definately is collusion between cable companies and property managment, my old apartment required me to subscribe to cable, along with everyone else in the building (at a discount! but still for more than satellite). This was common, if not ubiquitous among large apartment buildings in the area.
I looked seriously at replacing my TiVo (series 1) with a MythTV box. It was going to cost about $900-$1000. You could do it cheaper, maybe for $700, but I wanted a nice looking AV form factor case with a VFD on the front panel. Any less than that and you are looking at a loud computer in an ugly tower case with limited storage.
No, it is simple. Anybody you give the software to you have to give the source to. If you give modified GPL software to a coworker, your employer, or some dude named Bob, you have to give them the source. Any of those people who accept the GPL are allowed to distribute it further, but your obligation is satisfied, regardless of who the code eventually makes it to. Nor are you ever under an obligation to return your modified code to the original author unless you give that person modified binaries.
You are free to create a screw-the-GPL club, but you cannot actually bind the members to not redistribute the code. To do so is to not accept the GPL, and without agreeing to it you are prohibited from distributing the software to anyone. Other than that, creating a club of members who voluntarily share modified versions of a program and do not redistribute it outside the club is within the letter (and mostly the spirit) of the GPL.
What IS ambigious (and supposedly addressed in GPL3) is whether letting someone use a program on your computer counts as distributing it to them -- the "ASP loophole". This is a whole bucket of worms that I sincerely hope the FSF thinks clearly about before making a decision. I suspect that a court would decide that allowing someone to run a program on your computer counts as a performance, not a copy, however public performance is protected by copyright law, so the FSF is free in principle to put whatever restrictions they want on that as well.
Well, we do tend to make fun of the CS guys for working on toy problems, but to be fair there are a number of other factors in addition to the availability of test data. First, you do not do just one problem for four years, you have classes, are a TA, and possibly do other smaller projects that might not be part of an interview presentation. Second, in an academic setting you are expected to beat the problem to death -- not just come up with a solution that works. You have to explore every avenue and analyze things in great detail (that likely aren't immediately obvious in a 30 minute presentation). This mentality works essentially because grad students are cheap. My physics grad student stipend is about $16500/year, I suspect CS is about the same or slightly less, while you were probably paid considerably more to do your work. So, if you make the grad student spend 2 years (of his 4 year lifetime) working on this project, and get the work accepted to a slightly better journal or conference than the 3 month solution, it is worth it to the students advisor.
Of course, whether the 4 years is well spent from the students persepective is hard to say. If you like being in the academic world, it probably is. If you want to get a "real job" possibly not.
A few comments: learning to come up with ideas is the hardest that people can do. Among physics PhDs (a reasonablly intelligent bunch, on average) it is typically to get 12-14 years of training after high school before you are ready to be a professor (or other PI) and come up with your own research ideas. Even exceptionally bright kids will be hard pressed to come up with a complete project that they can do in their free time. In order to cultivate their talents, they need adults to help guide them. Second, most of their time is spent in classes which they are not permitted to leave or ignore even if they had something to do. Their time outside of classes must be divided between whatever extra projects they might be doing and sports, social activities, and family interaction, all of which are also important.
I personally found ways to entertain myself throught grade school which mostly involved reading books in class, which landed me in both the behavior modification program and the gifted and talented program (I think the only student in both).
Finally, while even the smartest kid will learn things in their mundane classes, it is still boring to master they days lesson in 10 minutes and have to sit around doing boring excercises while waiting for the other students to figure it out.
Well, I cant really say why, but I know several intelligent and attractive women who have used match.com, in many cases successfully.
For some people that is really hard. I personally find it very hard to judge how something looks on me, though I can tell pretty well for other people. If you can, it is really much better to go with a friend.
For people who have been practicing since they were 12, this may not be much of an issue, but if you wake up one day and realize that you are in your 20s and dress to have lots of free friday nights, you are going to need some help, not just motivation.
(For straight guys) the best bet is probably to find one of your friends girlfriends, if you can find one you are comfortable shopping with and trust her fashion sense. Otherwise, go with a male friend if you can get over feeling gay going to The Gap with another guy. Also, pay attention both to what people recommend for you and what you see other people wear. Try to figure out *why* something looks good or bad. There are logical rules for fashion that a geek type should be able to figure out, but only if you work at it.
I wouldn't mention this except that you shine 90W lasers into people, but a laser is either CW or Q-switched (though many can operate in both modes). Q-switching is a way of making a laser emit short pulses, (typically a few nanoseconds with peak power in the 10 kW region and up) the opposite of continuous wave. According to Laserscope's website, the 800 series are CW lasers, which can be switched for exposure times down to .1 seconds -- not the same as Q-switching.
Well, there is no reason in principle you can't cut through all the jacketing and get to the bare fiber without cutting it, then sand away some of the cladding until you can use evanescent wave coupling to pick off 10% of the signal, which will hardly be noticed (10% ~1 dB loss).
Alternately, you can just go to where there is already a splice, such as an amplifying station.
This is harder than attaching a tap to a copper line, but only because people haven't really tried. I am sure that the NSA and friends can do this just fine, and if it becomes profitable for others they will develop the tools to do what I have described or something equivelent quickly and efficiently.
Probably several hundred dollars, since the real cost is the games, which may go from $50 to $15. Even for a
Actually, Oracle (and every other database I have used) have an export to SQL command, which without much effort can be used to load the database into postgresql, mysql, or whatever.
As much as DB vendors would like to lock people into their software, people get very possesive of their data, and would scream bloody murder if they thought Oracle were doing something to make it hard for them to get their data out of the database system.
Why do you think that is pointless? While it is not the same style of "basic" research as some of their other work (which is, as the original poster said, top notch), it is certainly valuable, at least from the abstract you posted. They also do some cool stuff with compiler optimization, distributed/parallel computing, and all sorts of more respectable forms of research.
I don't know your background, but I have never met anyone with a substantial CS background to say anything bad about MS research, including a number of OSS zealots (such as myself). I suspect that most people who make fun of them are simply not in a position to judge their work.
400 Hz (and similar) systems require smaller transformers, but may or may not be more efficient. Copper losses decrease with frequency, but core losses increase, unless you move to ferrite or powdered iron cores. Also, for long distribution lines, capacitive coupling to ground is an important cause of loss which is exacerbated by higher frequencies (which is one reason very high power/long range distribution uses high voltage DC).
That would probably only apply to individually licensed software, not those purchsed through volume licensing programs, which is what this is about. It is possible that you could resell or transfer your entire license block, but probably not do so per seat if it was forbidden in the license agreement.
Well, since I have been told for years that there are over a gajillion cancer causing and toxic chemicals in tobacco, I would assume that eliminating two of them would not make a big difference. If that isn't true, perhaps everything the anti-tobacco lobby has taught me is a lie!
Greg Egan has a very cool
applet that lets you see how the right GVD allows superluminal pulse propogation and why it cannot be used to transmit information faster than light.
In fact, in the US, that is required by law. Sadly, it has led to me calling 911 from my pocket, since it overrides the key lock as well. I guess my next phone will have to be a flip phone, though I don't really like them.