If you have never helped a desperate company raise capital to avoid going bust by working consecutive 100 hour weeks, I suppose I can't really explain the feeling.
Seriously, I don't get statements like this. Programming languages give us a comfortable way to wield one of the best tools ever invented; the wrappings and trappings may change, but the fundamental tool they help us grip on to doesn't.
It's like saying that the grip on a Stanley hammer will forever taint your ability to drive nails.
I know I did lab work for my degree; in fact, there were a couple of different labs.
There was an Internet lab, and each station had four desktops on a KVM, four Cisco switches, four dumb D-Link switches and all the ethernet cables you could ever want in a giant, tangled mess.
There was a cluster lab, which wasn't really a physical place - you'd just SSH into the gateway computer, and do your stuff.
There was the digilab, which had a computer equipped with some funky ribbon cables you could program at every station along with an osciliscope, a multimeter, a function generator, some 9v DC power jacks hanging everywhere, and some drawers with tons and tons of various different kinds of resistors and capacitors, along with all the 26 gauge wire you could ever hope for in three different colors. There were also signs encouraging you to not solder and eat in the same place, though there weren't any soldering irons as far as I could tell.
There was also a CS specific computer lab, equipped with a ton of slow computers and bad smells. The ECE computer lab was across a partition, and I never went there but I heard their computers were even slower than ours.
So yeah, I mean I guess it depends on the program but I did do quite a bit of lab work.
Until recently, I never thought there was a functional difference between a lone line containing "i++;" "++i;". Of course, for variable assignment it matters, but what's going on under the covers? If you stop and think about it, i++ actually has to return the old value. ++i can destroy that old value and never needs to worry about returning the old value (you can avoid an extra copy).
Isn't it great that we have optimizing compilers that'll take care of considerations like that for us?
A.. code should be written for clarity first, and if it turns out that it's not quite fast enough only then should you start worrying about whetehr or not it should be i++ or ++i.
Did you have a working carbon monoxide detector in the house?
CO has been known to cause hallucinations, which would explain the apparitions if they weren't caused by (say) some sort of steam or clouds of gnats or even fungal spores*. The crashing and footsteps are also easily explained by the fact that wooden houses settle and make all sorts of noises, up to and including "crashing" noises that, upon investigation, are not the result of anything falling.
Rearranging the furniture could have resulted in anything from psychological reassurance ("oh those aren't footsteps, they're just the house settling in") to moving heavy things off of floorboards that frequently warp to maybe ventilating the room better so that there was less ambient CO. After all, it had been a year since you bought the house; you might have gotten settled in to the point where you stopped being a little bit freaked out about the house, or the house might have gotten used to you (you would certainly have had a different heating envelope than the previous owner, which might have caused the house to creak more violently until things wore down).
*When leaving an apartment in college, I cleaned for the first time in a year by applying diluted Pine-Sol to the walls; this seemed to trigger some sort of mass exodus amongst whatever the heck was living there. A faint black cloud rose out of the wall, swirled around in the middle of the room, and then slowly dissipated. I attributed it to some combination of filthy bachelor living habits, mass spore release triggered by the cleaning agent, and hallucinations due to fumes.
That said, No, really, I really did. I don't know how such phenomena could be explained without some very tortured rationalisms, given what I have personally seen. Anecdotes are not evidence, and I don't expect you to believe me, or to change your opinion. If you are truly curious about the things I have personally experienced on this matter, I can entertain you for a while, but not in this post.
Here's the only one you need: carbon monoxide poisoning. It has been known to cause hallucinations, and carbon monoxide is frequently found in (you guessed it!) old, "haunted" houses with shitty broken down heaters.
I've never seen a ghost hunter with an instant handheld CO detector, either, since those things are pretty expensive and can't really be hacked together on the cheap like an EMF detector, and the CO detectors most people have in their houses only take aggregate measurements over the course of days.
The "girl inna box" sequence was explicitly an homage to Outlaw Star. Unfortunately, Fox's advertising for Firefly focused way too much on it, which made Firefly look like a ripoff (e.g, "these Americans won't have seen an anime, we can steal as much from it as we want and even advertise the fact")
Actually I said nothing about proofs in that direction. Epicurus' trilemma, for instance, has been around since before Christianity, and they have yet to answer it.
I cannot prove to you that God exists or that religion is not just a creation of humans (many of them certainly are though) but that does not mean that there is not evidence the He exists.
I can prove that God doesn't exist.
If God existed, you would have either logical or empirical proof that God exists. This stands to reason, as theologists have been searching for such proof for centuries; if it existed, someone would have found it and it would be everywhere.
You have admitted you have no such proof.
Therefore God does not exist.
That was easy, wasn't it?
And before someone brings up one of the million bad arguments for the existence of God - do you really think it hasn't been refuted yet? I'm a Dungeons and Dragons playing, fantasy loving nerd; I want with all my heart to live in a universe where magic exists; I want to be the kid who walks through the wardrobe and finds Narnia and talks to Aslan. And yet, with all the good will in the world, I have yet to see a single even remotely plausible argument for the existence of God. Which is a death blow, when you are talking about a being whose existence would have a noticeable impact on the very fabric of reality itself. Whenever the topic comes up, I always get riffs off of the Cosmological Argument or the Argument from Personal Revelation in the Form of a Waterfall or the Argument from Incredulity or the Argument from You're Going to Hell. Absolutely none of it is convincing, since obviously Muslims think the same thing about you, using the same arguments, and yet here you are still talking about Christianity. If there were even one good argument for the existence of God, it would be the first one to get brought up every single time - not the Argument from I Can't Believe It's Not Cilia.
We haven't revisited it because there's really no point.
The conditions on ancient Earth were, basically, various different permutations on this experiment repeated over and over again in a million trillion gallons of water (i.e, the entirety of the liquid water present on this planet) for several million years. The Miller-Urey experiment was conducted in order to demonstrate feasibility, and it did so; in conditions similar to what we think the ancient Earth looked like, the basic building blocks of life would have been present.
Why revisit it? We can't go much further than they did; after all, it's not like we've got a lot of water in which to conduct this experiment over and over again for a long period of time; and even if we did, all we'd get out of it are some self-replicating molecules that we probably already know about.
The original experiment showed that it was feasible. With what we know about organic chemistry (this stuff is so simple it doesn't even qualify as biology), self-replication and thence natural selection are both inevitable, once you have feasibility, time and space. The original experiment proved we have the former, and geology proves we have the latter. QED.
The only reason why this is being revisited right now is because there's a lot of Americans who don't actually believe in abiogenesis, and thus there's some funding available to try and convince them.
(not that any amount of evidence will change their minds, because the root of their disbelief doesn't lie in a lack of evidence)
And when you (the customer) agree to a contract that says "tethering costs extra," and then you tether anyway without paying that extra fee... aren't you violating the very basic principles of how agreements work as well?
Not particularly, because it is impossible to find a contract that doesn't contain that clause.
The principles of agreements are exactly that - that two sides reach an agreement. However, for some occasionally valid reasons, there's absolutely no room for negotiation on the customer side; our only option is to either take the "agreement" as presented, or not take it. (after all, it would be difficult to do business if every single one of your millions of customers could have a unique contract, and we don't want businesses to have any difficulty, do we?)
This is somewhat reasonable when there are multiple different companies offering different agreements - you can choose which one you want to accept. However, nowadays, all of the telecom companies are offering essentially the same agreement, which means that there is no choice on the customer's side.
Therefore, if you agree to any of these contracts, you're not really doing so as an agent who has a choice in the matter; the binary "I agree/disagree" choice is not good enough when every single company in the market offers the same contract.
Believing in God does not make you a creationist. You can believe in God AND evolution. Catholic church has supported the theory for a long time.
This is a true statement, but not if interpreted the way you wanted it to be.
The only kind of God who is compatible with evolution is one who doesn't interfere with it; the theory of natural selection is fundamental to the theory of evolution, and once you posit that God comes around and fiddles in our genomes every once in a while you no longer have natural selection.
This is the kind of "evolution" that the Catholic Church says is okay to believe in - the kind where God took an active hand in the formation of humanity. This is not, however, evolution. Why not? Because every part of every genome we've ever examined is explained through naturalistic processes; therefore, including God in the hypothesis is not supported by the evidence.
If you want to believe in God and evolution, that's fine. If you want to believe that God in any way interfered with evolution, that's not fine; to make a comparison, believing that God interferes with evolution is like believing that God keeps the planets in orbit: you have to be an ignorant cretin who completely ignores all of the scientific work that's gone in to the field for that to make any sense (or be Bill O'Riley, but I repeat myself).
So no, believing in God doesn't make you a creationist. Believing in the God supported by the Catholic Church does make you a creationist, except now you're an old-earth creationist and for some reason those guys get a free pass.
Like most things, it was pirated primarily because it was there, not out of some specific desire for the Humble Indie Bundle games. Statements like yours make the mistake of assuming that people pirate things like the Humble Indie Bundle because they want it; in fact, the case is exactly the opposite - they almost certainly pirated it because they saw no reason not to.
Most people who pirate things are really nothing more than information packrats - they'll grab any interesting-looking set of files just because the opportunity cost is so low. Back in college, when I had access to the intra-campus peer-to-peer piracy network (DC++, which came with a built-in chat client!), I was like that; I still have hard drives sitting around somewhere that, unless they've decayed to the point of no recovery, are filled to the brim* with movies and games that in all honesty I'll probably never actually bother to dig up again, and nowadays even if I did want them I'd probably just buy them off of Steam or rent them from Netflix instead of fucking around with those ancient disks (they're not even SATA!).
Basically, a pirate's goal isn't to have your game, it's to have every game. Even if they're never going to play any of them. And they're not going to pay for anything, or at least not until after they graduate from college and have money (most of the games in my Steam library have never been installed, but I got them all for so cheap that I don't really care).
*Literally; I was so hard up for space that I actually wrote a shell script that would go through and take an MD5 hash of every file on my hard drives and compare it to the MD5 hashes of every other file on my hard drives, just to make sure I didn't have two copies of any large files. Then I realized that some Quake 3 Arena asset file randomly had the same hash as my smb.conf (or something like that), so I re-wrote the script to do both MD5 and SHA. Piracy taught me about hash collisions!
I have (distant) relatives in Japan. My mother, who is pretty much insane, CC'd me on an e-mail she sent to them saying "Come visit the United States to escape the radiation!".
This is despite the fact that my Japanese relatives live in southern Japan, and are far enough away from the reactors for it to not be a problem.
I don't know if I should blame my crazy mother or our crazy media more, honestly.
Maybe it's the Asimov effect, that that when I finally got hold of a copy of the books a decade or so ago (had to wait until i had a job after uni to be able to have spare cash) then I was bitterly disappointed. "Hang on!" I said, "It's just a load of Star Trek TNG episodes but not done as thoroughly". Then I realised the concept of derivative works.
Yep, basically. Niven's Ringworld series essentially roughed out the shape of the now-classical Sci-Fi "find an archaeotech artifact, explore it, escape" storyline. As far as I know, Larry Niven was one of the first authors to really develop the "Hey, what would happen if there were significantly more advanced aliens who existed before us, and left their toys laying around for some reason?" idea; until then, I think humanity was almost always either one of the more advanced races in fiction, or contemporaneous with the more advanced races (e.g, getting invaded in War of the Worlds).
All AT&T sourced data -- servers directly on their network, such as their IPTV servers -- don't apply to the cap since it is all internal.
So if I set my torrent client to prefer IP addresses in AT&T's network, do those transfers not count towards the cap? Or what about downloading from in-network servers that aren't owned by AT&T, like AT&T business clients?
Because if this limit doesn't apply to any in-network usage, then it's a bit iffy but reasonable. If it specifically applies to U-Verse and no other in-network usage, then that is pretty much the definition of abuse of monopoly.
In my CS degree I took a "Discrete Mathematics" course. There was also a "Linear Algebra" course that covered matrices and vectors. I also took several other mathematics classes that covered calculus, statistics, etc. Basically, courses over the real and complex numbers. Ignoring calculus is basically throwing out almost all of mathematics that has happened since Newton. Any formulas you use will just be the algebraic results of applying calculus to find them.
Good grief. Did you not read my post at all? My point was that in my major, I was required to take other kind of mathematics that were not the useful kinds of mathematics.
Though we did have a discrete math course - it was offered through the CS department, because the math department didn't have any equivalent, and it kicked everyone's ass because we'd never done discrete mathematics before - it'd all been continuous math up until that point. Heck, I remember that the professor put up a bar graph of midterm results, and his Y axis extended off to the left of zero - someone had actually gotten a negative grade on the midterm.
And that's the point that the guy in the article is raising. CS students are getting math, but not the right kinds of math.
And seriously, how is anyone supposed to do any sort of numerical analysis without understanding taylor series or fourier transforms?
Fucking right, how is anyone supposed to do numerical analysis without understanding Taylor series or Fourier transforms? And why were these topics not covered in any of the classes I took, until I was ambushed by them in senior level CS courses?
Given that calculus-based statistics is pretty important to CS (eg, software metrics, big "O" stuff, writing programs that use statistics, etc), how is this relevant to your complaint?
Because, as I went on to explain, the statistics course with calculus was primarily about continuous classical statistics, with discrete classical statistics as something of a side note and Bayesian statistics not even in the curriculum. Software metrics are discrete statistics, big "O" stuff is discrete classical statistics, and programs that use statistics are almost certainly going to be using discrete Bayesian statistics.
I am not complaining about the fact that I was required to take a statistics course for my major; I am complaining about the fact that I was required to take the wrong statistics course. A classical and Bayesian statistics course emphasizing discrete statistics would have been better; this stuff I'm never going to use, ever, except for maybe the Central Limit Theorem.
Yeah, exactly - CS needs some very specific kinds of math, and instead of organizing the curriculum around it, universities teach a "jack of all trades" mathematical toolkit that's not especially useful.
For example: in order to get my CS degree, I had to take a statistics course that used calculus. However, according to the school curriculum, this statistics course mostly covered continuous, classical statistics - not the discrete, Bayesian statistics which are so incredibly useful in computer science (why do you think your inbox isn't full of spam? Discrete Bayesian statistics). The only reason why we covered Bayesian statistics at all is because the professor was a Bayesian statistician, and he shoe-horned it into the class.
Another example: I had to take the first calculus series, which was comprised of introductory calculus topics; I also had to take the first quarter of the second calculus series, which was advanced calculus. However, I found out from other students who took the rest of the second calculus series that the later courses covered mathematical topics that are ridiculously useful for computer vision and computer graphics - I believe they covered things like convolution and calculating the curl of a vector field.
Basically, computer science uses a lot of discrete math, and a lot of vector/matrix math. Universities don't have a lot of general education courses that teach discrete math or vector/matrix math. This means that CS students have to slog through a lot of continuous mathematics that is, quite frequently, not very useful, and not necessary to learn the discrete stuff - when they could instead be learning mathematics that would be very useful.
I know Uplink did that on purpose, for the same reason why telephone numbers in media frequently begin with 555 - you wouldn't want to pick a number someone actually has (though I believe they've started distributing 555 numbers in some area codes).
There was one hilarious scene in one of the CSI derivatives where a CSI lab techniciangets shot because his gun jams.
Because that's what crime scene investigators do. They have guns, and they occasionally need to use them. They don't just do science in the lab and occasionally go on field trips to collect evidence, oh no. They actually deal with criminals directly; that's totally not the job of actual police officers and detectives.
Slashdot Mirror
It's okay, each dollar of your $1M in the bank is an extra vote he won't have.
Whoa, really? Sounds like it's been explained already.
No company is worth 100 hour work weeks, much less consecutive ones.
Seriously, I don't get statements like this. Programming languages give us a comfortable way to wield one of the best tools ever invented; the wrappings and trappings may change, but the fundamental tool they help us grip on to doesn't.
It's like saying that the grip on a Stanley hammer will forever taint your ability to drive nails.
I know I did lab work for my degree; in fact, there were a couple of different labs.
There was an Internet lab, and each station had four desktops on a KVM, four Cisco switches, four dumb D-Link switches and all the ethernet cables you could ever want in a giant, tangled mess.
There was a cluster lab, which wasn't really a physical place - you'd just SSH into the gateway computer, and do your stuff.
There was the digilab, which had a computer equipped with some funky ribbon cables you could program at every station along with an osciliscope, a multimeter, a function generator, some 9v DC power jacks hanging everywhere, and some drawers with tons and tons of various different kinds of resistors and capacitors, along with all the 26 gauge wire you could ever hope for in three different colors. There were also signs encouraging you to not solder and eat in the same place, though there weren't any soldering irons as far as I could tell.
There was also a CS specific computer lab, equipped with a ton of slow computers and bad smells. The ECE computer lab was across a partition, and I never went there but I heard their computers were even slower than ours.
So yeah, I mean I guess it depends on the program but I did do quite a bit of lab work.
Isn't it great that we have optimizing compilers that'll take care of considerations like that for us?
A.. code should be written for clarity first, and if it turns out that it's not quite fast enough only then should you start worrying about whetehr or not it should be i++ or ++i.
Did you have a working carbon monoxide detector in the house?
CO has been known to cause hallucinations, which would explain the apparitions if they weren't caused by (say) some sort of steam or clouds of gnats or even fungal spores*. The crashing and footsteps are also easily explained by the fact that wooden houses settle and make all sorts of noises, up to and including "crashing" noises that, upon investigation, are not the result of anything falling.
Rearranging the furniture could have resulted in anything from psychological reassurance ("oh those aren't footsteps, they're just the house settling in") to moving heavy things off of floorboards that frequently warp to maybe ventilating the room better so that there was less ambient CO. After all, it had been a year since you bought the house; you might have gotten settled in to the point where you stopped being a little bit freaked out about the house, or the house might have gotten used to you (you would certainly have had a different heating envelope than the previous owner, which might have caused the house to creak more violently until things wore down).
*When leaving an apartment in college, I cleaned for the first time in a year by applying diluted Pine-Sol to the walls; this seemed to trigger some sort of mass exodus amongst whatever the heck was living there. A faint black cloud rose out of the wall, swirled around in the middle of the room, and then slowly dissipated. I attributed it to some combination of filthy bachelor living habits, mass spore release triggered by the cleaning agent, and hallucinations due to fumes.
Here's the only one you need: carbon monoxide poisoning. It has been known to cause hallucinations, and carbon monoxide is frequently found in (you guessed it!) old, "haunted" houses with shitty broken down heaters.
I've never seen a ghost hunter with an instant handheld CO detector, either, since those things are pretty expensive and can't really be hacked together on the cheap like an EMF detector, and the CO detectors most people have in their houses only take aggregate measurements over the course of days.
The "girl inna box" sequence was explicitly an homage to Outlaw Star. Unfortunately, Fox's advertising for Firefly focused way too much on it, which made Firefly look like a ripoff (e.g, "these Americans won't have seen an anime, we can steal as much from it as we want and even advertise the fact")
Actually I said nothing about proofs in that direction. Epicurus' trilemma, for instance, has been around since before Christianity, and they have yet to answer it.
I can prove that God doesn't exist.
If God existed, you would have either logical or empirical proof that God exists. This stands to reason, as theologists have been searching for such proof for centuries; if it existed, someone would have found it and it would be everywhere.
You have admitted you have no such proof.
Therefore God does not exist.
That was easy, wasn't it?
And before someone brings up one of the million bad arguments for the existence of God - do you really think it hasn't been refuted yet? I'm a Dungeons and Dragons playing, fantasy loving nerd; I want with all my heart to live in a universe where magic exists; I want to be the kid who walks through the wardrobe and finds Narnia and talks to Aslan. And yet, with all the good will in the world, I have yet to see a single even remotely plausible argument for the existence of God. Which is a death blow, when you are talking about a being whose existence would have a noticeable impact on the very fabric of reality itself. Whenever the topic comes up, I always get riffs off of the Cosmological Argument or the Argument from Personal Revelation in the Form of a Waterfall or the Argument from Incredulity or the Argument from You're Going to Hell. Absolutely none of it is convincing, since obviously Muslims think the same thing about you, using the same arguments, and yet here you are still talking about Christianity. If there were even one good argument for the existence of God, it would be the first one to get brought up every single time - not the Argument from I Can't Believe It's Not Cilia.
We haven't revisited it because there's really no point.
The conditions on ancient Earth were, basically, various different permutations on this experiment repeated over and over again in a million trillion gallons of water (i.e, the entirety of the liquid water present on this planet) for several million years. The Miller-Urey experiment was conducted in order to demonstrate feasibility, and it did so; in conditions similar to what we think the ancient Earth looked like, the basic building blocks of life would have been present.
Why revisit it? We can't go much further than they did; after all, it's not like we've got a lot of water in which to conduct this experiment over and over again for a long period of time; and even if we did, all we'd get out of it are some self-replicating molecules that we probably already know about.
The original experiment showed that it was feasible. With what we know about organic chemistry (this stuff is so simple it doesn't even qualify as biology), self-replication and thence natural selection are both inevitable, once you have feasibility, time and space. The original experiment proved we have the former, and geology proves we have the latter. QED.
The only reason why this is being revisited right now is because there's a lot of Americans who don't actually believe in abiogenesis, and thus there's some funding available to try and convince them.
(not that any amount of evidence will change their minds, because the root of their disbelief doesn't lie in a lack of evidence)
Slashdot will be in violation of this patent in about a week and a half :)
Not particularly, because it is impossible to find a contract that doesn't contain that clause.
The principles of agreements are exactly that - that two sides reach an agreement. However, for some occasionally valid reasons, there's absolutely no room for negotiation on the customer side; our only option is to either take the "agreement" as presented, or not take it. (after all, it would be difficult to do business if every single one of your millions of customers could have a unique contract, and we don't want businesses to have any difficulty, do we?)
This is somewhat reasonable when there are multiple different companies offering different agreements - you can choose which one you want to accept. However, nowadays, all of the telecom companies are offering essentially the same agreement, which means that there is no choice on the customer's side.
Therefore, if you agree to any of these contracts, you're not really doing so as an agent who has a choice in the matter; the binary "I agree/disagree" choice is not good enough when every single company in the market offers the same contract.
This is a true statement, but not if interpreted the way you wanted it to be.
The only kind of God who is compatible with evolution is one who doesn't interfere with it; the theory of natural selection is fundamental to the theory of evolution, and once you posit that God comes around and fiddles in our genomes every once in a while you no longer have natural selection.
This is the kind of "evolution" that the Catholic Church says is okay to believe in - the kind where God took an active hand in the formation of humanity. This is not, however, evolution. Why not? Because every part of every genome we've ever examined is explained through naturalistic processes; therefore, including God in the hypothesis is not supported by the evidence.
If you want to believe in God and evolution, that's fine. If you want to believe that God in any way interfered with evolution, that's not fine; to make a comparison, believing that God interferes with evolution is like believing that God keeps the planets in orbit: you have to be an ignorant cretin who completely ignores all of the scientific work that's gone in to the field for that to make any sense (or be Bill O'Riley, but I repeat myself).
So no, believing in God doesn't make you a creationist. Believing in the God supported by the Catholic Church does make you a creationist, except now you're an old-earth creationist and for some reason those guys get a free pass.
No worries, we'll make sure they have plenty of glass too.
Like most things, it was pirated primarily because it was there, not out of some specific desire for the Humble Indie Bundle games. Statements like yours make the mistake of assuming that people pirate things like the Humble Indie Bundle because they want it; in fact, the case is exactly the opposite - they almost certainly pirated it because they saw no reason not to.
Most people who pirate things are really nothing more than information packrats - they'll grab any interesting-looking set of files just because the opportunity cost is so low. Back in college, when I had access to the intra-campus peer-to-peer piracy network (DC++, which came with a built-in chat client!), I was like that; I still have hard drives sitting around somewhere that, unless they've decayed to the point of no recovery, are filled to the brim* with movies and games that in all honesty I'll probably never actually bother to dig up again, and nowadays even if I did want them I'd probably just buy them off of Steam or rent them from Netflix instead of fucking around with those ancient disks (they're not even SATA!).
Basically, a pirate's goal isn't to have your game, it's to have every game. Even if they're never going to play any of them. And they're not going to pay for anything, or at least not until after they graduate from college and have money (most of the games in my Steam library have never been installed, but I got them all for so cheap that I don't really care).
*Literally; I was so hard up for space that I actually wrote a shell script that would go through and take an MD5 hash of every file on my hard drives and compare it to the MD5 hashes of every other file on my hard drives, just to make sure I didn't have two copies of any large files. Then I realized that some Quake 3 Arena asset file randomly had the same hash as my smb.conf (or something like that), so I re-wrote the script to do both MD5 and SHA. Piracy taught me about hash collisions!
I have (distant) relatives in Japan. My mother, who is pretty much insane, CC'd me on an e-mail she sent to them saying "Come visit the United States to escape the radiation!".
This is despite the fact that my Japanese relatives live in southern Japan, and are far enough away from the reactors for it to not be a problem.
I don't know if I should blame my crazy mother or our crazy media more, honestly.
Yep, basically. Niven's Ringworld series essentially roughed out the shape of the now-classical Sci-Fi "find an archaeotech artifact, explore it, escape" storyline. As far as I know, Larry Niven was one of the first authors to really develop the "Hey, what would happen if there were significantly more advanced aliens who existed before us, and left their toys laying around for some reason?" idea; until then, I think humanity was almost always either one of the more advanced races in fiction, or contemporaneous with the more advanced races (e.g, getting invaded in War of the Worlds).
And then when the Kzinti invade, we'll just turn the lasers on them! It's a win/win situation, really.
So if I set my torrent client to prefer IP addresses in AT&T's network, do those transfers not count towards the cap? Or what about downloading from in-network servers that aren't owned by AT&T, like AT&T business clients?
Because if this limit doesn't apply to any in-network usage, then it's a bit iffy but reasonable. If it specifically applies to U-Verse and no other in-network usage, then that is pretty much the definition of abuse of monopoly.
Good grief. Did you not read my post at all? My point was that in my major, I was required to take other kind of mathematics that were not the useful kinds of mathematics.
Though we did have a discrete math course - it was offered through the CS department, because the math department didn't have any equivalent, and it kicked everyone's ass because we'd never done discrete mathematics before - it'd all been continuous math up until that point. Heck, I remember that the professor put up a bar graph of midterm results, and his Y axis extended off to the left of zero - someone had actually gotten a negative grade on the midterm.
And that's the point that the guy in the article is raising. CS students are getting math, but not the right kinds of math.
Fucking right, how is anyone supposed to do numerical analysis without understanding Taylor series or Fourier transforms? And why were these topics not covered in any of the classes I took, until I was ambushed by them in senior level CS courses?
Because, as I went on to explain, the statistics course with calculus was primarily about continuous classical statistics, with discrete classical statistics as something of a side note and Bayesian statistics not even in the curriculum. Software metrics are discrete statistics, big "O" stuff is discrete classical statistics, and programs that use statistics are almost certainly going to be using discrete Bayesian statistics.
I am not complaining about the fact that I was required to take a statistics course for my major; I am complaining about the fact that I was required to take the wrong statistics course. A classical and Bayesian statistics course emphasizing discrete statistics would have been better; this stuff I'm never going to use, ever, except for maybe the Central Limit Theorem.
Yeah, exactly - CS needs some very specific kinds of math, and instead of organizing the curriculum around it, universities teach a "jack of all trades" mathematical toolkit that's not especially useful.
For example: in order to get my CS degree, I had to take a statistics course that used calculus. However, according to the school curriculum, this statistics course mostly covered continuous, classical statistics - not the discrete, Bayesian statistics which are so incredibly useful in computer science (why do you think your inbox isn't full of spam? Discrete Bayesian statistics). The only reason why we covered Bayesian statistics at all is because the professor was a Bayesian statistician, and he shoe-horned it into the class.
Another example: I had to take the first calculus series, which was comprised of introductory calculus topics; I also had to take the first quarter of the second calculus series, which was advanced calculus. However, I found out from other students who took the rest of the second calculus series that the later courses covered mathematical topics that are ridiculously useful for computer vision and computer graphics - I believe they covered things like convolution and calculating the curl of a vector field.
Basically, computer science uses a lot of discrete math, and a lot of vector/matrix math. Universities don't have a lot of general education courses that teach discrete math or vector/matrix math. This means that CS students have to slog through a lot of continuous mathematics that is, quite frequently, not very useful, and not necessary to learn the discrete stuff - when they could instead be learning mathematics that would be very useful.
I know Uplink did that on purpose, for the same reason why telephone numbers in media frequently begin with 555 - you wouldn't want to pick a number someone actually has (though I believe they've started distributing 555 numbers in some area codes).
There was one hilarious scene in one of the CSI derivatives where a CSI lab technician gets shot because his gun jams.
Because that's what crime scene investigators do. They have guns, and they occasionally need to use them. They don't just do science in the lab and occasionally go on field trips to collect evidence, oh no. They actually deal with criminals directly; that's totally not the job of actual police officers and detectives.
It was hilarious, from a certain point of view.