Wouldn't the "regular" plural be Matrixs then? Isn't -es already an irregular form, like -ies for -y, etc.?
But "Matrixs" would be a spelling error. -es is the regualar form for a word that ends in x.
The Golden Child is a great example for variation in plural formation. One Golden Child, a whole nursery full of Golden Children. One DVD of The Golden Child, a whole stack of unsold Golden Childs
Plus, while the title of the movie is clearly proper, is the reality construct "the Matrix" actually proper at all?
how do you plurialize a proper name with a previously existing plural form of a general noun?
Proper names take a regular plural. Thus when talking of mathematics, it is one matrix, many matrices. When talking of movie-reality-constructs, one Matrix, many Matrixes. That's the English language for you.
Re:Comments are not irrelevent
on
Latest SCO News
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· Score: 1
In the USL vs BSDI & UC Board of Regents case annotations were explicitly discounted as infringements because they have no role in the execution of the software and are thus immaterial breeches.
I don't think that's the point. As I see it, code for the same function converges to the same idioms. Comments, being freeform text, vary a lot more. For instance I make characteristic spellos in my typing.
If the code *isn't* a cut and paste, there's really no way the comments would be identical. It's a smoking gun that the code has been copied wholeseale.
Thus: same comments -> cut and paste code -> ??? -> profit!
The.NET CLR was designed for C#. None of the other.NET languages are any better for anything than C#
The x86 range of chips are designed for assembly language. None of the other 'high level languages' can be any better for anything than assembly.
So all.Net languages compile down to the same bytecode. C# is the closest fit to it. Functional languages will not be 'close' to the.NET VM just as compiled LISP is not 'close' to x86 assembly. That doesn't in itself mean that they are pointless.
"That's not possible nobody can visualized 4 dimensional spaces." But this is only because your basic mathematical education fucked up your brain.
I think you'll find that the problems that most people have with visualising spaces with more than three spatial dimensions is that our evolution has equipped us with excellent tools with visualising three-dimensional spaces, and in general found no need to help us visualise spaces with more dimensions. This should not really be surprising.
In short, the problem is innate, not caused by any educational deficiency.
If this sounds like a lot of expensive roads think about trying to haul that many people using rails. A typical single track of railroad handles about 1/5th of the traffic of a single highway lane
And where do you get that "fact" from? Comparing what I see daily: London underground - at peak time, a train every 1-2 minutes, packed full of people, moving quickly, vs London street at same time - cars with 1 or 2 occupants crawling along, it certainly fails my anecdote test.
Oh you meant fast-moving freeways (if there can be such a thing at rush-hour)? Sorry, there are no big roads between where I live and where I work, and I don't find that unusual. Care to defeat my anecdote with data?
The more I reread your post, the more I am convinced that it is a subtle troll. I mean the wrong statements that nevertheless have a certain crazed right of logic to them: "If the roads are too crowded, build bigger roads" and "Cars... are the most economically efficient solution"; coupled with the emotional appeal to the rugged American frontier spirit that is so woefully inappropriate to the modern urban world: "I want a back yard. The bigger the better."
This gets +5? Our moderators are not on the ball today.
Re:This is a good thing.
on
Ogg Now An RFC
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Why would apple want to put OGG support into the iPod? MP3 is the bait, AAC is the hook. OGG isn't even a player, and apple has no percentage in making it one.
By that I mean that MP3 support is important for market acceptance - you'll buy one for the MP3z; but AAC with all that DRM is important to the business model. Promoting another no-DRM format over AAC is not in Apple's interest.
That said, I'd love to be wrong. The day that Apple do idealistically put OGG support into Ipod, I will buy one. Or if another manufacturer makes a good one, I'll get that instead.
Car's aren't perfect but they are the most economically efficient solution for most places.
Have you got any stats to back that up or are you just guessing without reading the article? I accept that there were valid reasons why cars caught on, but that was 80 years ago. A lot has changed since. It could be that the privately owned gasholine-engined car is nothing but an entrenched technology with a huge legacy investment that hinders new solutions.
The problem with getting rid of cars is that I want a back yard. The bigger the better. Most people don't want to live on top of one another in big buildings with no place for their kids to play. A world without cars is a world where everyone needs to be packed in on top of each other so that mass transit can work. I don't like that idea.
So what you're saying is that a carless solution is one that would only work in a few small niche markets like, say, most of West Europe, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, New York and LA?
Yes, speaking of not knowing what you're talking about, you just said a mouthful or three.
They can't use anything else, because they want to keep humans at bay And how is the situation where rebels can awaken people from the matrix better than the machine simply wiping them out, all of them? If it's "bioenergy" (snigger) that the machines are after then any animal will do. Cows or overgrown tissue cultures don't rebel.
there are no cows in this world, they DIED OFF! Says who? I don't recall that being cannon in either the Matrix movie or any of the shorts. Look, the fact is that for every 1 unit of thermal energy that you get from a human body, you'd have to feed it food with a thermal energy value of something like 10 to 100 units. You'd do better just burning your oatmeal in something like a present-day coal-buring power station.
And if the sky is scorched and the cows all dead, what are they feeding the humans? "other humans" would maybe fulfill 1% of the food needs.
The only reasonable explanation within the Matrix universe is that Morpheus doesn't know what he's talking about and the machines need human brains for some kind of processing. Other explanations are 1) It's a daft action movie with a plot hole the size of Texas. (Myself, I'll go with this one). 2) It's like a metaphor for the lives of downtrodden workers beeing leeched by the capitalist system. Fight the power!
The goal of all the cognitive scientists I've met is to make machines think, just as with A.I.
I have never met any cognitive scientists, but I've read books on the subject by Danniel Dennet (who is arguably a philosopher not a scientist) and Steven Pinker (a cognitive scientist). The works of both of them are highly recommended.
Anyway, niether of them are focused on making machines think, but rather on understanding what makes humans think.
No matter how long they "evolve" they're still virii. They didn't morph into bacteria or amoebas.
That is precisely what I'm not saying. Your line of argument seem to be "no matter how you walk around your apartment, you will never find yourself in another country."
You don't have to believe in evolution, evolution believes in you
Bacteria and virii evolve faster than large animals. Hence, we have antibiotic-resistant bacteria, new strains of HIV, SARS etc. Deny evolution and you deny them.
There are two ways out of this, besides the obvious giving in and admitting that creationism is a crock (which does not necessarily mean denying god, just denying the literal truth of scripture).
Doublethink: Humans are perfectly capable of holding mutually contradictory beliefs, so long as they are held in different contexts. I'm not going to object overly to what my doctor believes in church on Sundays, so long as he understands modern medicine when I visit him on Wednseday.
The old "concede micro evolution, deny macro evolution" malarkey: I saw this well debunked here on slashdot like this:
Microwalking is when you walk from one side of the apartment to the other. It takes 1 minute. Macrowalking is when you walk from one side of the country to the other. It could take years. Sure Microwalking happens, we've seen it, but Macrowalking has never been seen, is something completely different, in fact it's impossible.
Spot the logical flaw? Macroevolution is nothing but microevolution on a longer timeline.
I'm waiting for the Motorola V600... best of all, A NORMAL, USABLE KEYBOARD LAYOUT!
For a minite there you had me hoping for a qwerty layout, but from the link it looks just like another numeric keypad. I don't find writing messages on those to be either normal or usable.
I always thought that relativity + big bang theory = finitie space/mass of the universe.
So did I, but the new data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe apparently says otherwise.
I have seen it argued that since the universe started as a point at the big bang, it cannot be infinite is size now, as nothing can grow from finite to infinite size. There are two things wrong with this: Our understanding doesn't go all the way back to the origin. Physics as we know it breaks down before that. The big bang describes an increase in scale, from ultra-dense to what we see now. Infinite spaces can also increase in scale.
Why should it be suprising that the universe be infinite - or else there is some special *largest number*.
Because numbers have no physical existence. They are abstract concepts. You may as well say "How can there only be 80 apples on that tree, I can count to 90".
So, what you're really saying is that somewhere out there my double is having sex with a gorgeous supermodel right now?
No. On the alternate earths different possibilitues play out. The probable happens often, the improbable less often. And the impossible never happens ever, even in an infinite universe.
Actually the argument for them in the article, (you read it, right? Try it, I found it riveting) is that given infinite space and infinite matter, parallel earths are a simple logical consequence, and it would take a special argument to say that they won't happen.
Then there's the many-worlds quantum parallel universe, which the article also points out are a logical consequence of our theories and experiments so far.
In short, the article's take is that the hard part is not to "work infinite multiverses into life" but to work them out of it.
I think he means 10^90 particles in our observable space.
He probably does. Having read the article now, it's clear a few more terms are needed, or at least far more precise usage guides. e.g. "the universe" is infinite in space, and contains an infinite amount of matter, but "the observable universe" is limited to 4 * 10^26 meters across (due to the speed of light and the time since the big bang), and a finite amount of matter therein.
Incidentally "other sphere" is also a bit misleading, as there is no clear boundary between spheres. Laboured analogy: If you and your friends are standing in thick fog, with 10m visiblity, and you are standing 6m apart, you both see a sphere of stuff, and those spheres overlap. Your sphere is not part of nature, just an artifact of your perspective. You may see friend A and friend B both within your sphere, but they are not within each other's spheres as they are 12m from each other. Multiply by 26 orders of magnitude, and there you are...
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't the "regular" plural be Matrixs then? Isn't -es already an irregular form, like -ies for -y, etc.?
But "Matrixs" would be a spelling error. -es is the regualar form for a word that ends in x.
The Golden Child is a great example for variation in plural formation. One Golden Child, a whole nursery full of Golden Children. One DVD of The Golden Child, a whole stack of unsold Golden Childs
Plus, while the title of the movie is clearly proper, is the reality construct "the Matrix" actually proper at all?
Probably not.
Mode=pedant
how do you plurialize a proper name with a previously existing plural form of a general noun?
Proper names take a regular plural. Thus when talking of mathematics, it is one matrix, many matrices. When talking of movie-reality-constructs, one Matrix, many Matrixes. That's the English language for you.
In the USL vs BSDI & UC Board of Regents case annotations were explicitly discounted as infringements because they have no role in the execution of the software and are thus immaterial breeches.
I don't think that's the point. As I see it, code for the same function converges to the same idioms. Comments, being freeform text, vary a lot more. For instance I make characteristic spellos in my typing.
If the code *isn't* a cut and paste, there's really no way the comments would be identical. It's a smoking gun that the code has been copied wholeseale.
Thus:
same comments -> cut and paste code -> ??? -> profit!
If they get a lunar base, bank on it that it will be heavily militarized and its top priority will be to learn how to drop rocks on American cities.
Given the current size of the US military budget, and the prevailing governmental culture, would a US base be much different?
Disclaimer: I'm not an American. Dead Chinese, Iraqui or Afghan children sadden me just as dead American ones.
The .NET CLR was designed for C#. None of the other .NET languages are any better for anything than C#
.Net languages compile down to the same bytecode. C# is the closest fit to it. Functional languages will not be 'close' to the .NET VM just as compiled LISP is not 'close' to x86 assembly. That doesn't in itself mean that they are pointless.
The x86 range of chips are designed for assembly language. None of the other 'high level languages' can be any better for anything than assembly.
So all
"That's not possible nobody can visualized 4 dimensional spaces."
But this is only because your basic mathematical education fucked up your brain.
I think you'll find that the problems that most people have with visualising spaces with more than three spatial dimensions is that our evolution has equipped us with excellent tools with visualising three-dimensional spaces, and in general found no need to help us visualise spaces with more dimensions. This should not really be surprising.
In short, the problem is innate, not caused by any educational deficiency.
If this sounds like a lot of expensive roads think about trying to haul that many people using rails. A typical single track of railroad handles about 1/5th of the traffic of a single highway lane
And where do you get that "fact" from? Comparing what I see daily: London underground - at peak time, a train every 1-2 minutes, packed full of people, moving quickly, vs London street at same time - cars with 1 or 2 occupants crawling along, it certainly fails my anecdote test.
Oh you meant fast-moving freeways (if there can be such a thing at rush-hour)? Sorry, there are no big roads between where I live and where I work, and I don't find that unusual. Care to defeat my anecdote with data?
The more I reread your post, the more I am convinced that it is a subtle troll. I mean the wrong statements that nevertheless have a certain crazed right of logic to them: "If the roads are too crowded, build bigger roads" and "Cars ... are the most economically efficient solution"; coupled with the emotional appeal to the rugged American frontier spirit that is so woefully inappropriate to the modern urban world: "I want a back yard. The bigger the better."
. htm
Then there are inflammatory statements "stupid things like the Big Dig in Boston.", an absence of any evidence for your claims, and finally a disregard for technical advancements such as this: http://taxi2000.com/ http://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/prtquick
This gets +5? Our moderators are not on the ball today.
Why would apple want to put OGG support into the iPod? MP3 is the bait, AAC is the hook. OGG isn't even a player, and apple has no percentage in making it one.
By that I mean that MP3 support is important for market acceptance - you'll buy one for the MP3z; but AAC with all that DRM is important to the business model. Promoting another no-DRM format over AAC is not in Apple's interest.
That said, I'd love to be wrong. The day that Apple do idealistically put OGG support into Ipod, I will buy one. Or if another manufacturer makes a good one, I'll get that instead.
Car's aren't perfect but they are the most economically efficient solution for most places.
Have you got any stats to back that up or are you just guessing without reading the article? I accept that there were valid reasons why cars caught on, but that was 80 years ago. A lot has changed since. It could be that the privately owned gasholine-engined car is nothing but an entrenched technology with a huge legacy investment that hinders new solutions.
The problem with getting rid of cars is that I want a back yard. The bigger the better. Most people don't want to live on top of one another in big buildings with no place for their kids to play. A world without cars is a world where everyone needs to be packed in on top of each other so that mass transit can work. I don't like that idea.
So what you're saying is that a carless solution is one that would only work in a few small niche markets like, say, most of West Europe, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, New York and LA?
don't mean to sound like a fanboy, but 'words can't describe...'
How about "3d shooter game sequel with fancy shadows"?
This good line of argument sounds familiar, but are you sure it wasn't Dr James Lovelock who said that Mars is barren.
Yes, speaking of not knowing what you're talking about, you just said a mouthful or three.
They can't use anything else, because they want to keep humans at bay And how is the situation where rebels can awaken people from the matrix better than the machine simply wiping them out, all of them? If it's "bioenergy" (snigger) that the machines are after then any animal will do. Cows or overgrown tissue cultures don't rebel.
there are no cows in this world, they DIED OFF! Says who? I don't recall that being cannon in either the Matrix movie or any of the shorts. Look, the fact is that for every 1 unit of thermal energy that you get from a human body, you'd have to feed it food with a thermal energy value of something like 10 to 100 units. You'd do better just burning your oatmeal in something like a present-day coal-buring power station.
And if the sky is scorched and the cows all dead, what are they feeding the humans? "other humans" would maybe fulfill 1% of the food needs.
The only reasonable explanation within the Matrix universe is that Morpheus doesn't know what he's talking about and the machines need human brains for some kind of processing. Other explanations are
1) It's a daft action movie with a plot hole the size of Texas. (Myself, I'll go with this one).
2) It's like a metaphor for the lives of downtrodden workers beeing leeched by the capitalist system. Fight the power!
Not even.
Most game playing programs do not use rule-based reasoning like expert systems. They use look-head trees, the minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning.
According to the may 2nd report on CBC news, SARS has killed at =~ 418 people worldwide.
Compare this with annual deaths from the flu [proratenih.com] which kills approximately =~ 36000 people in the USA alone.
What the fuck?
The flu situation is not expected to get much worse. The SARS situation will get far far worse unless strong rapid action is taken. That's what.
The goal of all the cognitive scientists I've met is to make machines think, just as with A.I.
I have never met any cognitive scientists, but I've read books on the subject by Danniel Dennet (who is arguably a philosopher not a scientist) and Steven Pinker (a cognitive scientist). The works of both of them are highly recommended.
Anyway, niether of them are focused on making machines think, but rather on understanding what makes humans think.
That is precisely what I'm not saying. Your line of argument seem to be "no matter how you walk around your apartment, you will never find yourself in another country."
You don't have to believe in evolution, evolution believes in you
Bacteria and virii evolve faster than large animals. Hence, we have antibiotic-resistant bacteria, new strains of HIV, SARS etc. Deny evolution and you deny them.
There are two ways out of this, besides the obvious giving in and admitting that creationism is a crock (which does not necessarily mean denying god, just denying the literal truth of scripture).
Doublethink: Humans are perfectly capable of holding mutually contradictory beliefs, so long as they are held in different contexts. I'm not going to object overly to what my doctor believes in church on Sundays, so long as he understands modern medicine when I visit him on Wednseday.
The old "concede micro evolution, deny macro evolution" malarkey: I saw this well debunked here on slashdot like this:
Microwalking is when you walk from one side of the apartment to the other. It takes 1 minute. Macrowalking is when you walk from one side of the country to the other. It could take years. Sure Microwalking happens, we've seen it, but Macrowalking has never been seen, is something completely different, in fact it's impossible.
Spot the logical flaw? Macroevolution is nothing but microevolution on a longer timeline.
I'm waiting for the Motorola V600 ... best of all, A NORMAL, USABLE KEYBOARD LAYOUT!
For a minite there you had me hoping for a qwerty layout, but from the link it looks just like another numeric keypad. I don't find writing messages on those to be either normal or usable.
I always thought that relativity + big bang theory = finitie space/mass of the universe.
So did I, but the new data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe apparently says otherwise.
I have seen it argued that since the universe started as a point at the big bang, it cannot be infinite is size now, as nothing can grow from finite to infinite size. There are two things wrong with this:
Our understanding doesn't go all the way back to the origin. Physics as we know it breaks down before that.
The big bang describes an increase in scale, from ultra-dense to what we see now. Infinite spaces can also increase in scale.
See more here: The universe is finite
Why should it be suprising that the universe be infinite - or else there is some special *largest number*.
Because numbers have no physical existence. They are abstract concepts. You may as well say "How can there only be 80 apples on that tree, I can count to 90".
So, what you're really saying is that somewhere out there my double is having sex with a gorgeous supermodel right now?
No. On the alternate earths different possibilitues play out. The probable happens often, the improbable less often. And the impossible never happens ever, even in an infinite universe.
Actually the argument for them in the article, (you read it, right? Try it, I found it riveting) is that given infinite space and infinite matter, parallel earths are a simple logical consequence, and it would take a special argument to say that they won't happen.
Then there's the many-worlds quantum parallel universe, which the article also points out are a logical consequence of our theories and experiments so far.
In short, the article's take is that the hard part is not to "work infinite multiverses into life" but to work them out of it.
I think he means 10^90 particles in our observable space.
He probably does. Having read the article now, it's clear a few more terms are needed, or at least far more precise usage guides. e.g. "the universe" is infinite in space, and contains an infinite amount of matter, but "the observable universe" is limited to 4 * 10^26 meters across (due to the speed of light and the time since the big bang), and a finite amount of matter therein.
Incidentally "other sphere" is also a bit misleading, as there is no clear boundary between spheres. Laboured analogy: If you and your friends are standing in thick fog, with 10m visiblity, and you are standing 6m apart, you both see a sphere of stuff, and those spheres overlap. Your sphere is not part of nature, just an artifact of your perspective. You may see friend A and friend B both within your sphere, but they are not within each other's spheres as they are 12m from each other. Multiply by 26 orders of magnitude, and there you are...
and there are 10^90 particles in the universe ... the entire universe goes on forever
So, if the universe contains a finite amount of matter in an infinite amount of space, does that mean that it has an effective density of zero?