How about we stop caring if students just copy the right answer from somewhere on their homework? It's a participation grade anyway - the goal of homework isn't for the student to take some questions home and return one day with the answer (that's what grad school is for), the goal is for the student to spend some time thinking about the problems and trying to work them out; ideally successfully but the important part is the thinking and working, not having a correct answer. If the student really wants to know what the solutions are and how to work them out, they'll come in to discussion section or office hours (or lecture!).
And if the student is the sort of person who just copies the right answers from somewhere, then he's fucked for the quizzes, midterms and finals anyway.
Basically, we care waaaay too much about whether or not people have correct answers on homework. It's like grading a weight training class on how far up people can lift their weights, and then complaining that some people use a crane - that's your own damn fault for losing sight of the fact that the metric is not the goal in and of itself. Those people will fail during the final anyway (when you have to wrestle a grizzly bear).
That's pretty much what I was going to post. The bees almost certainly aren't solving the Traveling Salesman problem, they're getting good enough approximations of a solution. Our computers don't chug for days trying to figure out the answer to TSPs, they chug for a couple of seconds and produce a close-to-optimal solution.
And the thing is, not all instances of the TSP are necessarily NP-Hard (for instance: if there was only one road between each city + 1 extra road between the first and last cities, the optimal solution is obvious), and the cases of it found in practical applications are generally far easier to handle than the cases found in more esoteric theoretical constructs (for instance: if you move east, you move closer to all the flowers in the east; this is not necessarily true in the general TSP). Most real instances of the TSP can be handled well enough with simple, quick greedy algorithms; they won't necessarily give you the best answer, but it'll be pretty close.
From what I've heard, the life expectency for consumer grade SSDs is on the order ot 5 years, minimum.
The life expectancy for consumer computers, on the other hand, is on the order of 3-4 years; they fuck up the operaring system somehow, take it in to Best Buy or whatever, and get upsold on buying a new one for $500 or so instead of paying $100 - $200 for a new copy of Windows (who manages to kee, the installation media or recovery partitoon for that long, after all?) plus the time it would take some minimum wage computer monkey to hit next five times.
So while cost might be an issue, life expectancy definitely isn't.
What if you wait until the animal has been slaughtered (which is, in this hypothetical example, what eventually will happen to it) and then have sex with it? At that point it's an object, and consent doesn't matter, right?
So by that logic, zoophilia totally okay if you add in a side order of necrophilia.
Sorry, I bought the game, I own my computer's ram - I can use the two in whatever way I see fit. If I want to tell my computer's ram to modify the game, then I'm allowed to do that. If Blizzard wants to ban me from using their servers because my computer's ram holds a modified copy of their game, they are allowed to do that.
But if Blizzard makes it so that I can't use the game I bought with the computer I own, then they have sold me a faulty product. If they intentionally make the game stop working, then that's something along the lines of destruction of property.
So what's different now? Well, they've been fighting digital distribution tooth and nail to combat privacy (ostensibly), preferring to stamp out piracy even if it means killing themselves.
Your rather humorous Freudian slip aside, I think this is something that is endemic to our culture.
We are so incredibly terrified of the horrific thought of someone, somewhere, might possibly getting something they don't deserve that we spend an inordinate amount of time and effort hunting them down, and for no good (economical) reason.
Yes, you do need some - maybe even a significant amount - of policing activities, in order to ensure that certain privileges aren't too abused. However, after a certain point (and this is a point I think we've far exceeded) the amount of policing required to ensure that one more person gets only what they are entitled to and nothing costs far more than the excess resources that person would have used. Even deterrence doesn't really matter - once it gets to the point that you can be sued for millions of dollars, who cares if you can be sued for millions + 1 dollars? Once it gets to the point where you can be put in jail for ten years, who really cares if you can be put in jail for 12?
Basically, I think we've turned into a nation that is far too obsessed with crime and vengeance, when we should be concerned more with justice and silly things like actual, measured outcomes.
The thing is, the parts of those views that we actually took away and which are well-supported aren't wrong at all - despite the fact that Newtonian gravity was superseded by Einstein's Theory of Relativity, it's still a useful tool. Thus, looking at the human body as a machine is useful sometimes, looking at it as a chemical system is useful other times, and looking at it as an ecology is useful as well. This is basic relativity of wrong stuff.
Furthermore, it's kind of funny (and I don't know if it was intentional) but the models of the human body you describe increase in complexity - from a complex mechanical machine to a chemical system to a full-blown ecology. I would argue, in fact, that we used those models because they were what was available at the time, more than because that's how we looked at everything. After all, you wouldn't have been able to do what the scientists did in this article just ten years ago (at least, not economically enough to justify it).
That's better than Bush Jr's stats, where over 50% was convinced he wasn't legally elected.
And then it eventually turned out that, strictly speaking, he wasn't elected by Florida - more thorough recounts done later on for research purposes made it pretty clear that Florida had actually gone to Gore, but nobody publicized this result too much because it wouldn't have gotten anyone anywhere at that point.
Though of course he was legally elected, given that the Supreme Court ordered the recounts halted since they wouldn't have been done in time.
Yeah, if only Wikileaks had asked the Pentagon for help in redacting the names. I'm sure they would have agreed to do it, because after all saving people's lives is far more important than political ass-covering, right?
Oh wait except Wikileaks did ask the Pentagon for help, and the Pentagon refused. I guess we know what their priorities are, right?
You rent a truck, like anyone else with a small car.
How do I travel when it's raining?
Then you bike in the rain. Is this a trick question or something?
When it's fucking cold? When it's fucking hot?
Then you bike in the fucking cold, or you bike in the fucking heat. Just like you would drive in the fucking cold or drive in the fucking heat.
When it's more than a few kms?
Then you bike more than a few kms. My wife and I go on ~6 mile (~10 km) bike rides on the weekend for fun, and it doesn't take more than about 45 minutes on our mid-range bikes - and that's going at a moderate pace. I bike more than she does, so when I'm on my own I can do it in about 30 minutes.
And as a side benefit, you get calves like rocks and a lower resting heart rate. It's pretty impressive.
Yeah, you also need a backup plan for the once or twice a year you need a really big truck, like when you buy a new piece of furniture or your friend moves. That's why you should buy a huge gas guzzler and drive it to and from work every day. Sure you could rent one, but that does leave you with a dependence on the schedules, pricing and general whims of transportation companies.
Or not, because that's totally uneconomical.
Seriously, this is basic capability planning - you don't buy a car that meets needs you only have once or twice a year, you buy a car that meets the needs you have every day. If you don't drive over 300 miles every week, there's no point in having a car that's capable of doing that if the alternative is significantly cheaper.
Clearly you didn't understand what I meant when I said "group selection" two posts back, or "reproduction". It's not enough to just have children; you have to also ensure that they have children as well. After all, if you have a child but it dies before you have grandchildren, you haven't really reproduced, now have you?
Furthermore, in order to be a successful reproducer, you don't have to raise your own kids. As long as they share some amount of genetic material with you, that counts as a partial success. I mean think about it: if we grade your reproductive success by how many copies of your genome are passed down to the next generation, then if you have one child that means that statistically you only half of your genes will continue on, giving you half a point (the other half being your wife's). If, on the other hand, you're gay but your brother has children, then every kid he successfully raises is a quarter of a point for you. Thus, it is in your best interest to help your brothers and sisters raise their children, even though you won't have any of your own. So if your gay brother babysits every once in a while, or your lesbian sister helps out with the chores, or your sterile sibling helps pay rent, then they're aiding their own reproductive success along with yours.
Indeed, since all humans are genetically related to some degree, even adopting children makes sense - sure, it might only be 1/800th of a point (or something like that), but a gay couple raising an adopted child still makes reproductive sense.
All of that is beside the point, however: what I said was that this moral compass was crafted by evolutionary pressures pushing us towards reproductive success; that doesn't mean that it only points to reproductive success. That's like saying that because you can craft a shovel by banging on a piece of metal, the only thing shovels are good for is banging on metal. You can use your moral compass for other things, like figuring out that some organizations are more oppressive than others.
It doesn't really matter - given your existence, the fact that your parents were successful at reproduction is not in question. Thus, you've inherited some form of social moral compass from them, be it cultural or biological (or more likely, some mixture of both). You've got one whether or not you want to reproduce.
Now, you don't have to listen to your moral compass, but doing that in excess tends to lead to a distinct lack of reproductive success.
And if you don't reproduce, society won't care about you in a century.
Yeah, and even in this report Gates says both of these things:
"The initial assessment in no way discounts the risk to national security," Gates wrote. "However, the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by the disclosure."
and...
"We assess this risk as likely to cause significant harm or damage to national security interests of the United States and are examining mitigation options," Gates wrote in the letter. "We are working closely with our allies to determine what risks our mission partners may face as a result of the disclosure."
Wait so which is it? If nothing was compromised so far, why is this risk likely to cause significant harm or damage? Haven't they heard of Bayesian statistics?
It sounds like he's just covering ass, but is compelled to tell the truth. After all, they were out in the media saying that Assange has "blood on his hands" - apparently, it was imaginary blood.
Yeah, and then absolutely everyone listens to the Cliff's Notes version and ignores TFM. So Protestantism is "you can RTFM if you want to, or just listen to our Cliff's Notes version", and most people do the latter, and Catholicism was "You shouldn't RTFM, just listen to our Cliff's Notes version", and most people do the latter. What was the difference again?
Seriously, the best way to deconvert someone is to get them to actually RTFM. Not just the New Testament, but starting all the way at Genesis and working their way through. If they can stomach the raping and pillaging and incest and death and destruction and OCD laws about absolutely everything that God demands in the OT, and how much of a jerk Jesus was (he cursed an innocent fig tree just because it didn't have any figs) in the NT, then sure Christianity might be for them.
On the other hand, most rational people realize that God cannot be both benevolent and have acted as described in the OT, and that Jesus probably wasn't that great of a guy, so maybe this whole "Christianity" thing isn't that great.
Upon the fact that a victorious army being given permission to rape the women and kill the men disgusts me.
We all have built in moral compasses that work to one extent or another; they've been carefully honed by hundreds of thousands of years of group selection, because those who act too amorally get kicked out of the tribe and have a lower chance of reproduction. You don't need some divine, external lawgiver to explain that.
But you touch it, and then eat with your hands without washing them because hey it's just a receipt. If the concentration is high enough, this can matter.
But this isn't pointless-cool, this is pointless-stupid. It would be cool if, say, he'd run power from, say, the PSU's 12v rail - you could actually hook that up, and maybe do a neat little case mod to expose the plug to the outside world. 30 USB ports, though? Where are you going to get 30 USB ports from? And plugging them all in has got to be a pain in the ass.
Yeah! How dare we force businesses to serve both white and black people! You can give it a fancy name, but it's like all other Progressive measures designed to use government to force individuals to do what you want.
Or maybe, when you run a business, it's okay for the rules to be different?
Given that Oracle thinks this will lead to a conflict of interest, doesn't that kind of imply that there will be a conflict of interest? In other words, that what Oracle sees LibreOffice doing is going to conflict with where they want OpenOffice to go?
In other words, doesn't this basically mean that Oracle is actively planning to screw the pooch with OpenOffice?
Slashdot Mirror
How about we stop caring if students just copy the right answer from somewhere on their homework? It's a participation grade anyway - the goal of homework isn't for the student to take some questions home and return one day with the answer (that's what grad school is for), the goal is for the student to spend some time thinking about the problems and trying to work them out; ideally successfully but the important part is the thinking and working, not having a correct answer. If the student really wants to know what the solutions are and how to work them out, they'll come in to discussion section or office hours (or lecture!).
And if the student is the sort of person who just copies the right answers from somewhere, then he's fucked for the quizzes, midterms and finals anyway.
Basically, we care waaaay too much about whether or not people have correct answers on homework. It's like grading a weight training class on how far up people can lift their weights, and then complaining that some people use a crane - that's your own damn fault for losing sight of the fact that the metric is not the goal in and of itself. Those people will fail during the final anyway (when you have to wrestle a grizzly bear).
That's pretty much what I was going to post. The bees almost certainly aren't solving the Traveling Salesman problem, they're getting good enough approximations of a solution. Our computers don't chug for days trying to figure out the answer to TSPs, they chug for a couple of seconds and produce a close-to-optimal solution.
And the thing is, not all instances of the TSP are necessarily NP-Hard (for instance: if there was only one road between each city + 1 extra road between the first and last cities, the optimal solution is obvious), and the cases of it found in practical applications are generally far easier to handle than the cases found in more esoteric theoretical constructs (for instance: if you move east, you move closer to all the flowers in the east; this is not necessarily true in the general TSP). Most real instances of the TSP can be handled well enough with simple, quick greedy algorithms; they won't necessarily give you the best answer, but it'll be pretty close.
From what I've heard, the life expectency for consumer grade SSDs is on the order ot 5 years, minimum.
The life expectancy for consumer computers, on the other hand, is on the order of 3-4 years; they fuck up the operaring system somehow, take it in to Best Buy or whatever, and get upsold on buying a new one for $500 or so instead of paying $100 - $200 for a new copy of Windows (who manages to kee, the installation media or recovery partitoon for that long, after all?) plus the time it would take some minimum wage computer monkey to hit next five times.
So while cost might be an issue, life expectancy definitely isn't.
What if you wait until the animal has been slaughtered (which is, in this hypothetical example, what eventually will happen to it) and then have sex with it? At that point it's an object, and consent doesn't matter, right?
So by that logic, zoophilia totally okay if you add in a side order of necrophilia.
Sorry, I bought the game, I own my computer's ram - I can use the two in whatever way I see fit. If I want to tell my computer's ram to modify the game, then I'm allowed to do that. If Blizzard wants to ban me from using their servers because my computer's ram holds a modified copy of their game, they are allowed to do that.
But if Blizzard makes it so that I can't use the game I bought with the computer I own, then they have sold me a faulty product. If they intentionally make the game stop working, then that's something along the lines of destruction of property.
Your rather humorous Freudian slip aside, I think this is something that is endemic to our culture.
We are so incredibly terrified of the horrific thought of someone, somewhere, might possibly getting something they don't deserve that we spend an inordinate amount of time and effort hunting them down, and for no good (economical) reason.
Yes, you do need some - maybe even a significant amount - of policing activities, in order to ensure that certain privileges aren't too abused. However, after a certain point (and this is a point I think we've far exceeded) the amount of policing required to ensure that one more person gets only what they are entitled to and nothing costs far more than the excess resources that person would have used. Even deterrence doesn't really matter - once it gets to the point that you can be sued for millions of dollars, who cares if you can be sued for millions + 1 dollars? Once it gets to the point where you can be put in jail for ten years, who really cares if you can be put in jail for 12?
Basically, I think we've turned into a nation that is far too obsessed with crime and vengeance, when we should be concerned more with justice and silly things like actual, measured outcomes.
I think this calls for some pithy 4chan meme, but right now I can't stop laughing for long enough to look one up.
The thing is, the parts of those views that we actually took away and which are well-supported aren't wrong at all - despite the fact that Newtonian gravity was superseded by Einstein's Theory of Relativity, it's still a useful tool. Thus, looking at the human body as a machine is useful sometimes, looking at it as a chemical system is useful other times, and looking at it as an ecology is useful as well. This is basic relativity of wrong stuff.
Furthermore, it's kind of funny (and I don't know if it was intentional) but the models of the human body you describe increase in complexity - from a complex mechanical machine to a chemical system to a full-blown ecology. I would argue, in fact, that we used those models because they were what was available at the time, more than because that's how we looked at everything. After all, you wouldn't have been able to do what the scientists did in this article just ten years ago (at least, not economically enough to justify it).
And then it eventually turned out that, strictly speaking, he wasn't elected by Florida - more thorough recounts done later on for research purposes made it pretty clear that Florida had actually gone to Gore, but nobody publicized this result too much because it wouldn't have gotten anyone anywhere at that point.
Though of course he was legally elected, given that the Supreme Court ordered the recounts halted since they wouldn't have been done in time.
Tops and Guns?
Yeah, if only Wikileaks had asked the Pentagon for help in redacting the names. I'm sure they would have agreed to do it, because after all saving people's lives is far more important than political ass-covering, right?
Oh wait except Wikileaks did ask the Pentagon for help, and the Pentagon refused. I guess we know what their priorities are, right?
You rent a truck, like anyone else with a small car.
Then you bike in the rain. Is this a trick question or something?
Then you bike in the fucking cold, or you bike in the fucking heat. Just like you would drive in the fucking cold or drive in the fucking heat.
Then you bike more than a few kms. My wife and I go on ~6 mile (~10 km) bike rides on the weekend for fun, and it doesn't take more than about 45 minutes on our mid-range bikes - and that's going at a moderate pace. I bike more than she does, so when I'm on my own I can do it in about 30 minutes.
And as a side benefit, you get calves like rocks and a lower resting heart rate. It's pretty impressive.
Yeah, you also need a backup plan for the once or twice a year you need a really big truck, like when you buy a new piece of furniture or your friend moves. That's why you should buy a huge gas guzzler and drive it to and from work every day. Sure you could rent one, but that does leave you with a dependence on the schedules, pricing and general whims of transportation companies.
Or not, because that's totally uneconomical.
Seriously, this is basic capability planning - you don't buy a car that meets needs you only have once or twice a year, you buy a car that meets the needs you have every day. If you don't drive over 300 miles every week, there's no point in having a car that's capable of doing that if the alternative is significantly cheaper.
Clearly you didn't understand what I meant when I said "group selection" two posts back, or "reproduction". It's not enough to just have children; you have to also ensure that they have children as well. After all, if you have a child but it dies before you have grandchildren, you haven't really reproduced, now have you?
Furthermore, in order to be a successful reproducer, you don't have to raise your own kids. As long as they share some amount of genetic material with you, that counts as a partial success. I mean think about it: if we grade your reproductive success by how many copies of your genome are passed down to the next generation, then if you have one child that means that statistically you only half of your genes will continue on, giving you half a point (the other half being your wife's). If, on the other hand, you're gay but your brother has children, then every kid he successfully raises is a quarter of a point for you. Thus, it is in your best interest to help your brothers and sisters raise their children, even though you won't have any of your own. So if your gay brother babysits every once in a while, or your lesbian sister helps out with the chores, or your sterile sibling helps pay rent, then they're aiding their own reproductive success along with yours.
Indeed, since all humans are genetically related to some degree, even adopting children makes sense - sure, it might only be 1/800th of a point (or something like that), but a gay couple raising an adopted child still makes reproductive sense.
All of that is beside the point, however: what I said was that this moral compass was crafted by evolutionary pressures pushing us towards reproductive success; that doesn't mean that it only points to reproductive success. That's like saying that because you can craft a shovel by banging on a piece of metal, the only thing shovels are good for is banging on metal. You can use your moral compass for other things, like figuring out that some organizations are more oppressive than others.
It doesn't really matter - given your existence, the fact that your parents were successful at reproduction is not in question. Thus, you've inherited some form of social moral compass from them, be it cultural or biological (or more likely, some mixture of both). You've got one whether or not you want to reproduce.
Now, you don't have to listen to your moral compass, but doing that in excess tends to lead to a distinct lack of reproductive success.
And if you don't reproduce, society won't care about you in a century.
Yeah, and even in this report Gates says both of these things:
and...
Wait so which is it? If nothing was compromised so far, why is this risk likely to cause significant harm or damage? Haven't they heard of Bayesian statistics?
It sounds like he's just covering ass, but is compelled to tell the truth. After all, they were out in the media saying that Assange has "blood on his hands" - apparently, it was imaginary blood.
Yeah, there's a massive difference: the former is useless, the latter is a lie.
Yeah, and then absolutely everyone listens to the Cliff's Notes version and ignores TFM. So Protestantism is "you can RTFM if you want to, or just listen to our Cliff's Notes version", and most people do the latter, and Catholicism was "You shouldn't RTFM, just listen to our Cliff's Notes version", and most people do the latter. What was the difference again?
Seriously, the best way to deconvert someone is to get them to actually RTFM. Not just the New Testament, but starting all the way at Genesis and working their way through. If they can stomach the raping and pillaging and incest and death and destruction and OCD laws about absolutely everything that God demands in the OT, and how much of a jerk Jesus was (he cursed an innocent fig tree just because it didn't have any figs) in the NT, then sure Christianity might be for them.
On the other hand, most rational people realize that God cannot be both benevolent and have acted as described in the OT, and that Jesus probably wasn't that great of a guy, so maybe this whole "Christianity" thing isn't that great.
Upon the fact that a victorious army being given permission to rape the women and kill the men disgusts me.
We all have built in moral compasses that work to one extent or another; they've been carefully honed by hundreds of thousands of years of group selection, because those who act too amorally get kicked out of the tribe and have a lower chance of reproduction. You don't need some divine, external lawgiver to explain that.
But you touch it, and then eat with your hands without washing them because hey it's just a receipt. If the concentration is high enough, this can matter.
But this isn't pointless-cool, this is pointless-stupid. It would be cool if, say, he'd run power from, say, the PSU's 12v rail - you could actually hook that up, and maybe do a neat little case mod to expose the plug to the outside world. 30 USB ports, though? Where are you going to get 30 USB ports from? And plugging them all in has got to be a pain in the ass.
Yeah! How dare we force businesses to serve both white and black people! You can give it a fancy name, but it's like all other Progressive measures designed to use government to force individuals to do what you want.
Or maybe, when you run a business, it's okay for the rules to be different?
Wow, that's a lot of other words. Maybe I shouldn't post at this time of night.
Given that Oracle thinks this will lead to a conflict of interest, doesn't that kind of imply that there will be a conflict of interest? In other words, that what Oracle sees LibreOffice doing is going to conflict with where they want OpenOffice to go?
In other words, doesn't this basically mean that Oracle is actively planning to screw the pooch with OpenOffice?
Sorry, someone else already beat you to it.