A lot of the resistance children have to maths is the mental aspect and having to work things out by hand when they know that a calculator could do it for them.,
And the fact that so much of mathematics instruction is not directed at understanding, but is directed at making you solve a problem longhand slightly faster. We spent a couple of years at school learning how to solve differential equations about an order of magnitude faster, which still put us a few orders of magnitude slower than a computer could do it. Worse, after a couple of years of not practicing, my speed at solving differential equations was back to close to where it was when I started, so the entire exercise was entirely pointless.
Did the UK become a super computer nation with all its access to years of computers?
Yes. Unlike most other 'educational' platforms, the BBC was part of a surprisingly well thought out government initiative. Schools received a subsidy on computers only if they met a bunch of conditions, including coming with an environment for structured programming. BBC BASIC (Roger / Sophie Wilson's creation) won Acorn the contract to produce the recommended version. This dialect of BASIC had subroutines, structured loop constructs, direct memory access, a built-in assembler (you could even write a JIT compiler in it!), teletext and vector graphics, and a bunch of other things. The BBC also had a bunch of I/O ports.
A few really smart people in the UK made really great games, hardware and software over a generation.
All the access to computers did not result in an advanced computer exporting workforce a generation later.
Wow, you really have no idea what you're talking about. The USA has a lot of larger tech companies for several reasons, but the biggest ones are the huge internal markets. A company in the UK has a few tens of millions of potential domestic customers. If they want to export to the EU, it's easy from a legal standpoint, but then they have to deal with a dozen localisation variations, which add a lot of costs that's beyond a small business (especially for support). If they want to break into the US market, they typically need a US front company because most US companies are surprisingly hesitant to buy directly from a small foreign company. The second-largest reason is that it's much harder to get the second round of VC money in the UK: the investment that lets you grow from a turnover of a few tens of millions to a few billions. As a result, most successful British companies end up being bought by multinational corporations before they make the jump to being multinationals themselves.
Winamp cannot load your songs onto the iPod. iTunes could.
WinAMP could with a plugin. WinAMP 2 didn't really manage your music, it expected you to manage it yourself and just managed a playlist. WinAMP 3 (remember, the one all the WinAMP users hated?) tried to.
There were lots of reasons that iTunes took over but the big one is that, for most users, hierarchies are not intuitive (only something like 10-20% of the population finds tree structures natural) and are horrible for managing music because there isn't a strict hierarchy even out of genre, performer, album, and composer. iTunes realised this and gave you a filtering mechanism (as did the BeOS tracker).
Most of the machinery is probably built by other Foxconn departments and paid for with a very large markup so that Foxconn US can post a big loss (and therefore not pay any tax) and another Foxconn division can post a large profit.
First, if you drive 600 miles on a regular basis, you're a statistical outlier and if a mass-market product isn't good for you then that's not very relevant. Second, 600 miles at 70 miles per hour is 8.5 hours of driving. You're going to drive that long without a break, then you're probably dangerous. UK rules for commercial drivers require that you have a half-hour break every 5.5 hours, which is only slightly over the maximum range. A half-hour break is long enough to recharge the car.
Nope, a lot of crimes are motivated by material gain. Sociopaths don't hate their victims, they just don't regard costs (emotional, physical, or material) to their victims as important.
It did detect a git repository, but one with no files. He then told it to discard all changes since the last commit, which (because there were no commits) meant discard all files. It then popped up a big warning saying that it was going to delete files and that this action is irreversible. He then told it to proceed. It then deleted all of his files.
A better UI might have been to move all of the files to the recycle bin, but that doesn't work well with modified files. Perhaps creating a diff and dumping that in the recycle bin would allow undo a bit better, but there's a warning that the operation can't be undone (which, by the way, isn't there with the command-line git tool).
And, ostensibly, it only exists inside the secure enclave and in Apple's care
It only exists unencrypted there. It also exists encrypted in the firmware update blobs that Apple ships. It's entirely possible that Apple's use of encryption in their distribution chain included some flaws. This wouldn't be the first time: there was a vulnerability in FileVault2 (Apple's full-disk encryption code) caused by incorrect use of AES keys, which dramatically reduced the search space.
That sounds pretty bad. In the UK, the buyer and seller each have their own solicitor. Typically, all communication happens via the two solicitors (which can sometimes involve long round-trip times) and anything that you're supposed to sign will be first read by your solicitor, who should point out anything that looks dubious.
The French system is much better. The estate agents work for the buyer and have a legal responsibility to them: they are liable for any costs incurred by the buyer that the buyer was not aware of up-front (which means that they have an incentive to have a surveyor look at any property that they're selling and ensure that they have records or pointing out anything important in it to the buyer).
And, perhaps more importantly, most SIP providers have endpoints in many countries and so the call costs are fairly uniform. It costs me about the same amount to call the UK or USA from my SIP client, but a lot more to call the US as a telephone call from the same phone. I mostly use SIP for international calls - it's a lot cheaper than using POTS.
Or walk into any top computer science university department, or into any of the top-tier computer science conferences. Same deal. But I guess none of those people are power users according to the GP either.
There are some advantages in having a bank with known weak security practices. If your account is ever compromised, it's really easy to argue in court that it's their liability if you can point to a dozen places where they're not following industry best practices.
On the Psion Series 3, it was possible to set a password containing arbitrary ASCII characters. Unfortunately, I discovered after doing this, it wasn't possible to enter any of the special characters from the login screen...
So, $44m/year, for a tax break of $3bn, which works out at 68 years to break even. The calculations that came up with two decades must have included that and around double that from other sources.
If string theory makes predictions that will affect the values of their investments, then sure. For example, if advances in string theory lead to a dirt-cheap energy source that's likely to hit the market in 10-20 years, this would make it a good idea to start divesting stocks in more expensive energy production methods. This is exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect to find in a report from an investment form.
Devote your time to investment and leave climate science to climate scientists.
That's exactly what they are doing: surveying research and providing a risk assessment.
In neuroscience, for instance, you'd be a fool to say that men's brains and women's brains are exactly the same.
Maybe you missed the large study from a year or two ago (you don't have a good excuse though, it was even linked to from Slashdot) that showed that (to the limits of fMRI technology, which admittedly isn't that great) there was far more variation between any pair of human brains than there was between the averages of gender groups. Or, to put it another way, given an fMRI image of a brain, it's impossible to classify it as male or female and be significantly more likely to be correct than if you randomly assigned them male/female labels.
Women make up 18% of college CS students. Even if there are zero statistically meaningful sex differences affecting performance between men and women, there will still be about as many men who are 1+ standard deviations better than he median than women CS engineers in total. That means if I am building a team (or a company) out of really good engineers, it will be much easier to find good male engineers than women engineers, even without sex differences
That's only true if you assume a uniform distribution of ability for the women. In practice, you'll often see a bimodal distribution.
He provided citation after citation to peer reviewed science all the way through
Look at the end of the document. See the References section? No, you don't, because (unlike any scientific publication that you will ever read) it isn't there. His citations are not written as citations, they are hyperlinks. Because of this, it's difficult to inspect them all and judge their quality, but the vast majority of the ones that I clicked on went to Wikipedia (which is not a peer-reviewed publication).
No he didn't. A bunch of his citations went to wikipedia, others (such as claiming that gender differences are 'universal across human cultures') are sufficiently nebulous that they're technically true (for example, men, by and large, have penises across all human cultures) but not true in their context (the perception that engineering and computer science are subjects that are more interesting to men than women varies both in time within a single human culture and geographically across current cultures). This is near the beginning and is the first example, but is far from the last.
He did make some good points. He was correct, for example, that there is very little (and no conclusive) evidence that implicit bias training actually reduces implicit bias. In fact, there's something for everyone to hate in there, irrespective of political biases
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of the resistance children have to maths is the mental aspect and having to work things out by hand when they know that a calculator could do it for them.,
And the fact that so much of mathematics instruction is not directed at understanding, but is directed at making you solve a problem longhand slightly faster. We spent a couple of years at school learning how to solve differential equations about an order of magnitude faster, which still put us a few orders of magnitude slower than a computer could do it. Worse, after a couple of years of not practicing, my speed at solving differential equations was back to close to where it was when I started, so the entire exercise was entirely pointless.
It's moderated down, because programming is a good way of teaching a bunch of mathematics and logic.
Did the UK become a super computer nation with all its access to years of computers?
Yes. Unlike most other 'educational' platforms, the BBC was part of a surprisingly well thought out government initiative. Schools received a subsidy on computers only if they met a bunch of conditions, including coming with an environment for structured programming. BBC BASIC (Roger / Sophie Wilson's creation) won Acorn the contract to produce the recommended version. This dialect of BASIC had subroutines, structured loop constructs, direct memory access, a built-in assembler (you could even write a JIT compiler in it!), teletext and vector graphics, and a bunch of other things. The BBC also had a bunch of I/O ports.
A few really smart people in the UK made really great games, hardware and software over a generation. All the access to computers did not result in an advanced computer exporting workforce a generation later.
Wow, you really have no idea what you're talking about. The USA has a lot of larger tech companies for several reasons, but the biggest ones are the huge internal markets. A company in the UK has a few tens of millions of potential domestic customers. If they want to export to the EU, it's easy from a legal standpoint, but then they have to deal with a dozen localisation variations, which add a lot of costs that's beyond a small business (especially for support). If they want to break into the US market, they typically need a US front company because most US companies are surprisingly hesitant to buy directly from a small foreign company. The second-largest reason is that it's much harder to get the second round of VC money in the UK: the investment that lets you grow from a turnover of a few tens of millions to a few billions. As a result, most successful British companies end up being bought by multinational corporations before they make the jump to being multinationals themselves.
Winamp cannot load your songs onto the iPod. iTunes could.
WinAMP could with a plugin. WinAMP 2 didn't really manage your music, it expected you to manage it yourself and just managed a playlist. WinAMP 3 (remember, the one all the WinAMP users hated?) tried to.
There were lots of reasons that iTunes took over but the big one is that, for most users, hierarchies are not intuitive (only something like 10-20% of the population finds tree structures natural) and are horrible for managing music because there isn't a strict hierarchy even out of genre, performer, album, and composer. iTunes realised this and gave you a filtering mechanism (as did the BeOS tracker).
Wrong Bill Gates. It was his dad, Bill Senior, that was behind the income tax initiative.
Confusing post. Do you mean his grandfather, Bill Senior, or his father, Bill Junior? The father of William Gates III is not William Gates Senior.
Most of the machinery is probably built by other Foxconn departments and paid for with a very large markup so that Foxconn US can post a big loss (and therefore not pay any tax) and another Foxconn division can post a large profit.
First, if you drive 600 miles on a regular basis, you're a statistical outlier and if a mass-market product isn't good for you then that's not very relevant. Second, 600 miles at 70 miles per hour is 8.5 hours of driving. You're going to drive that long without a break, then you're probably dangerous. UK rules for commercial drivers require that you have a half-hour break every 5.5 hours, which is only slightly over the maximum range. A half-hour break is long enough to recharge the car.
I mean, aren't all crimes motivated by hatred?
Nope, a lot of crimes are motivated by material gain. Sociopaths don't hate their victims, they just don't regard costs (emotional, physical, or material) to their victims as important.
Three months is a noun phrase, three-months is an adjective phrase. Three-month is a nonsense.
A better UI might have been to move all of the files to the recycle bin, but that doesn't work well with modified files. Perhaps creating a diff and dumping that in the recycle bin would allow undo a bit better, but there's a warning that the operation can't be undone (which, by the way, isn't there with the command-line git tool).
And, ostensibly, it only exists inside the secure enclave and in Apple's care
It only exists unencrypted there. It also exists encrypted in the firmware update blobs that Apple ships. It's entirely possible that Apple's use of encryption in their distribution chain included some flaws. This wouldn't be the first time: there was a vulnerability in FileVault2 (Apple's full-disk encryption code) caused by incorrect use of AES keys, which dramatically reduced the search space.
The scatter and gather instructions in recent Intel chips were specifically designed to make it possible to autovectorise a lot more normal loops.
I would read it as 'if a has fewer elements than b'.
That sounds pretty bad. In the UK, the buyer and seller each have their own solicitor. Typically, all communication happens via the two solicitors (which can sometimes involve long round-trip times) and anything that you're supposed to sign will be first read by your solicitor, who should point out anything that looks dubious.
The French system is much better. The estate agents work for the buyer and have a legal responsibility to them: they are liable for any costs incurred by the buyer that the buyer was not aware of up-front (which means that they have an incentive to have a surveyor look at any property that they're selling and ensure that they have records or pointing out anything important in it to the buyer).
No need to bounce data via Apple, but the app can still quit when there's no data waiting for it.
And, perhaps more importantly, most SIP providers have endpoints in many countries and so the call costs are fairly uniform. It costs me about the same amount to call the UK or USA from my SIP client, but a lot more to call the US as a telephone call from the same phone. I mostly use SIP for international calls - it's a lot cheaper than using POTS.
Or walk into any top computer science university department, or into any of the top-tier computer science conferences. Same deal. But I guess none of those people are power users according to the GP either.
There are some advantages in having a bank with known weak security practices. If your account is ever compromised, it's really easy to argue in court that it's their liability if you can point to a dozen places where they're not following industry best practices.
On the Psion Series 3, it was possible to set a password containing arbitrary ASCII characters. Unfortunately, I discovered after doing this, it wasn't possible to enter any of the special characters from the login screen...
So, $44m/year, for a tax break of $3bn, which works out at 68 years to break even. The calculations that came up with two decades must have included that and around double that from other sources.
The finer points of string theory?
If string theory makes predictions that will affect the values of their investments, then sure. For example, if advances in string theory lead to a dirt-cheap energy source that's likely to hit the market in 10-20 years, this would make it a good idea to start divesting stocks in more expensive energy production methods. This is exactly the kind of thing that you'd expect to find in a report from an investment form.
Devote your time to investment and leave climate science to climate scientists.
That's exactly what they are doing: surveying research and providing a risk assessment.
In neuroscience, for instance, you'd be a fool to say that men's brains and women's brains are exactly the same.
Maybe you missed the large study from a year or two ago (you don't have a good excuse though, it was even linked to from Slashdot) that showed that (to the limits of fMRI technology, which admittedly isn't that great) there was far more variation between any pair of human brains than there was between the averages of gender groups. Or, to put it another way, given an fMRI image of a brain, it's impossible to classify it as male or female and be significantly more likely to be correct than if you randomly assigned them male/female labels.
Women make up 18% of college CS students. Even if there are zero statistically meaningful sex differences affecting performance between men and women, there will still be about as many men who are 1+ standard deviations better than he median than women CS engineers in total. That means if I am building a team (or a company) out of really good engineers, it will be much easier to find good male engineers than women engineers, even without sex differences
That's only true if you assume a uniform distribution of ability for the women. In practice, you'll often see a bimodal distribution.
He provided citation after citation to peer reviewed science all the way through
Look at the end of the document. See the References section? No, you don't, because (unlike any scientific publication that you will ever read) it isn't there. His citations are not written as citations, they are hyperlinks. Because of this, it's difficult to inspect them all and judge their quality, but the vast majority of the ones that I clicked on went to Wikipedia (which is not a peer-reviewed publication).
He gave citations for all of it.
No he didn't. A bunch of his citations went to wikipedia, others (such as claiming that gender differences are 'universal across human cultures') are sufficiently nebulous that they're technically true (for example, men, by and large, have penises across all human cultures) but not true in their context (the perception that engineering and computer science are subjects that are more interesting to men than women varies both in time within a single human culture and geographically across current cultures). This is near the beginning and is the first example, but is far from the last.
He did make some good points. He was correct, for example, that there is very little (and no conclusive) evidence that implicit bias training actually reduces implicit bias. In fact, there's something for everyone to hate in there, irrespective of political biases