Others have replied to this question well enough. It's the same argument 'when am I ever going to use algebra/geometry [as taught in high school]'. First colleges aren't trade-schools. Their job is to give you a broad foundation, and more importantly, they teach you how to think.
Math teaching you profoundly how to think. As an electrical-engineering undergraduate that doesn't directly use any of his main teachings, I still revisit all my text-books as one might revisit a game of sudoku. Being able to 'prove' a relationship, or walk through a design process requires a great deal of concentration and mental flexing.
I would think that most people that go through a pure mathematics degree genuinely enjoy these processes (at least I do).
I can guarantee you that this mental training does give me an edge over high-school, or even non-mathematically rigorous colleges in my field. A complex business process is met by my colleges with 'that gives me a headache', or 'lets take a break'. Which frustrates me, who would rather dig in deep and long.
Believe me, it isn't because I'm any smarter than them. I strongly believe it's because I had a background in complex problem solving - given by my high school and there-after my university.
As you know, the 'leading digit' is related the highest power of a base. Logs pull the exponents off a power - with only the highest power having any great effect. Namely, with 2 * 10^2 + 9 * 10^1, the 9 part is neglegable.
Benford's law (BL) is based on the distribution the log-scale, so obviously the 'base' (the 10) is meaningless.
However, if you used a number system that wasn't based on exponential powers, then you could definitely reveal different patterns. Maybe a non-linear, a circular, a factorial number system.
Read the articles. This is pretty cool stuff. There's a hundred+ year old model called Benford's Law (BL), and more recently, seemingly originated via the study of prime, a generalization (GBL). Lots of data-sets apparently have a log-scale even probability distribution instead of a uniform probability distribution or bell-shaped-curve probability distribution. Things that grow exponentially have a log-scale even distribution (the articles give several examples). And thus the BL applies (the leading 1 occurs more than 2, than 3, etc, in all bases). This is useful for fraud-detection. Namely if you know BL distributions should apply, but you are handed numbers by a potentially fraudulent vendor. Simply test for BL. Granted, a careful fraudulent vendor would randomize their fraudulent data by BL instead of uniform distribution. But if the vendor can't control the data set (say there is a stock market intermediary that is in a position to sell stock that doesn't exist, even if only on a small scale), then it is the aggregate sales would reveal such an anomaly.
What GBL does is open up the statistical model so it applies to more data-sets that were previously considered without a pattern. Prime numbers are an example. And the key was that it was scale-dependent. An infinite number of prime numbers has an even distribution of leading digits. But smaller data-sets DID express BL distributions. GBL applies by using the scale of the data-set. And that scale factor is the new component in GBL.
wireless network topology is no different than wired topology.. Namely there is a stated bandwidth, a stated congestion strategy, and the need to segment networks to provide local BW.
Consider that switching is USLESS if all hosts connect to a common point (like a file-server, or the internet). Granted, you commonly have 50/50, so you get some parallelization.
Namely, wireless has multiple channels.. So you put as many routers as you need in a given region (using only short-range modes), each on a different channel, and spacially separate such as to minimize interference. Ideally you can use dishes that direct radio-traffic in non-conflicting directions.. e.g. put 4 AP's in the center of the room facing outwards in different directions.
You then specifically assign cube-farm A to SSID 1, cube-farm B to SSID 2, etc. Viola, pentuppling BW and concurrency.
Just think back to thin-net and thick-net days. You had hubs and gateways (don't even remember hearing about switches back then). Granted you had a slightly different network topology issue.. Namely that w/in a gateway'd network, you had to bound the longest lag between any two possible points.. Even w/ the gateway, you had the issue of store-and-forward packet overflow. Man that was a fun homework assignment.
I've been arguing for wire mostly today, but I feel the need to qualify your assessment.
Wired may have greater Security and Bandwith, but is less convenient. And more and more the security/BW is more than sufficient for most users, thus, the fact that a honda can do 90mph and a racecar can do 220mph is meaningless when you can't go over 85 w/o getting arrested. Therein the practicality of the honda v.s. the racecar is no-contest.
And for the bandwidth issue, you're often limited by your ISP BW which is less than wireless. In an office where most local traffic are 5Meg word-files or maybe 20M worth of email-downloads, BW is no longer an issue.
On the security side, certainly if you require pre-shared-certificates that aren't directly transmitted + pre-registered MAC-addresses, you can secure your network in wireless sufficiently.
There might be a compression component to the protocol (I know modems did). So this is guaranteed to be useless if transferring video/compressed files, and only marginally useful w/ binary files.
I'm still a huge proponent of desktops (not enough horsepower in laptops for my work needs), but many of the business types about me have tremendous liquidity with their laptops. Instead of having you come to their office, they can bring their laptop to you to show the problem.. They bring their laptops into the conference room, etc. When using an external USB hub, then you only really have 3 wires to plug/unplug (external monitor(optional), power and USB hub(optional)). Plus their desk is cleaner, no external speakers, possibly no external keyboard (I still require a split-keyboard for carpel tunnel).
Finally, for me to setup shop at home to continue development as lots of overhead. W/ a laptop (assuming one had enough horsepower), I could pick up on the subway, during dinner, etc.
My point is that to the average business employee, the laptop yields added productivity that warrants the reduction in speed/security (including the possibility of lost data). Note w/ lost data, this is best-practices - Require strong passwords on the local machine.. Use a disk-encryption software like truecrypt. Ideally have a thumbprint for rapid recovery from screen-saver. Ideally, you're a large enough shop that you can simply ghost a secure configuration, and it takes less than an hour to configure a machine to replace a lost one or for a new employee. I've seen this done at big institutions, and have been somewhat impressed.
But if anything is hogging bandwidth, or pounding local machines (such that/var/log/security catches the events), then you're bound to get caught at some point. Either that or you should fire your sys-admin.
I'll counter your argument with more of the same.. You argue that the 'average' wired network is insecure.. Then you use the argument that you have an unsecured wire to your building - which I would argue is NOT average.. What percentage of the worlds wired networks are building-to-building? Most, instead will have a switch in a secure room of each floor. There, of course, IS a wire to the building - going to your ISP. But you have that in both wired and wireless networks (with the possible exception of campus building-to-building wireless).
With the switch secure, it's relatively easy to track down where an infiltration came from - is there a new MAC address in the switch? When did it arrive, which port => trace down the wire.
I'm not a big windows guy, so I don't know how the lepers of the world survive, but on a Linux network, being on the internal network itself only gives you access to the internet. You can't actually access most services (other than DHCP, DNS and NAT), as all servers and desktops are sufficiently firewalled by and/or use secured connection points (ssh, rsync -e ssh, scp, NFS over ssh, LDAP permissioning). Certainly you could DOS the network. But that doesn't seem very useful - and again, this would be easy to track down.. Identify the local IP with all the connections, find it's mac, track down the switch port.
We fought back and forth with the idea of Sequoia (CJDBC), and it never really made sense.
A) no cross DB/schema talk B) Requires a configuration for each DB separately (we have 50 independent apps that share hardware) C) uses a database to store journal data (thus still a single point of failure) D) SLOW for write-mostly transactional apps (we're 20/80 read/write) E) Crippled command-line client. F) Requires slightly extra hardware, especially w/ redundant front-ends.
Granted w/ Master/slave, you can't use cross DB updates. And certainly, w/ MySQL master/slave you're at the mercy of bugs.
I did some reading on wikipedia about the various nuclear reactors recently. So being a lay-person, there's some existing common wisdom.
The placement of the nuclear reactor to the sea is a safety issue. You NEED guaranteed large cool water in the condenser stage or reactor goes boom. Wiki says thermal heat is regularly used as hot-water heaters - similar to geothermal heating in iceland. Whether anybody actually uses this is anybody's guess.. Obviously you'd need to pipe the hot water to end locations, so existing suburbia obviously isn't anywhere near able to handle this.
As for breeder reactors: A) All fission reaction is of a breeding nature. The ratio of bred material is what the different processes produce. The bred ratio varies from 0.5 to 1.2. Where 1.01 is the accepted min ratio to be called a breeder reactor (producing more fissile fuel than originally introduced).
B) Any of the high breeder reactors utilize some aspect of fast-fission. Canada, India and Russia (and France?). Fast fission requires the ABSENCE of water, as water (either light or heavy(deutreonic)) captures energetic neutrons. Instead reaction-neutral coolants are used such as sodium, molten lead, etc. The problem here is related to safety. It is harder to produce intrinsic stability into non-water-based fission. Namely, in boiler-based reactors, when a greater ratio of steam is produced, the reaction naturally slows down, thus naturally regulating the system if electronic control mechanisms don't catch and compensate the control rods in time. With non steam based systems, you use complex chemical fission-poisons (in high-pressure based reactors as found in subs) or are fully reliant on control-rod actuators. (possible single point of failure). (note: I could be wrong about liquid metal based systems not having alternate backup mechanisms such as fission-poisons)
C) Chernobyl was a fast-fission reactor. And it's melt-down was related to the inability to shutdown quickly enough.. (specifically pressure-valve failures and insufficient monitoring which would have initiated the shutdown sooner) The environmental DAMAGE, however was due exclusively to the fact that it was a warhead manufacturing site, and the construction apparatus is too large to enclose with a hardened concrete barrier.
D) 70% of Thorium is in India. Thus, even though Thorium is (likely) a less efficient starting process for a breeder reactor, it's a better long-term strategy for India so as to provide energy independence. This isn't true of most countries.
E) Breeder reactors are the basis of nuclear warheads, thus it's an extremely hot-button issue. The US and Russia specifically discontinue their breeder reactors to comply with arms control. Russia now strip-mines their old warhead supply to fuel existing reactors both domestically and abroad. I suspect that China is not indifferent to this topic as well. The french reprocessing plant is actively/heavily monitored by the UN (IAEA).
F) The French rebreeding process is apparently NOT cost effective by any measure. The reason they do it is similar to the Indian Thorium objective - international energy independence.. China is not likely to be short-supplied of uranium mineral deposits - but I'm not aware of their status. I know Canda has massive Uranium supplies.
Currently boiler and pressure based reactors are 'cheap' to build and are cheap to operate (so long as raw Uranium ore is cheap). They both require 'pre-processing' of the ore to increase the concentration of U-235 to a sufficient level. So it's slightly more expensive in the long run as both ore prices will increase over time, and the added cost of pre-processing.
heavy-water and liquid-metal and inert-gas based reactors facilitate 'raw' Uranium, (e.g. U-238 and possibly thorium), and thus make the operating costs MUCH cheaper, but they don't have the longevity of trivial passive boiler-based plants, and thus the high capital costs are for shorter terms - and thus the average cost is higher.
So now, when Pakistan gets upset with India, they'll shoot down the satellite, which will mark the first space war.. Which will mark the way for N.K shooting down a US satellite, and we'll be in the wild wild west!!!
Not saying they shouldn't do it.. But it's an 'oh boy' moment for me.
I don't think it's fair to list you as a flaimbit - it was a legitimate question.
My response (and probably echoing hundreds of others) - there is no death involved.. The stem cell, on the contrary, is being given a chance to live on as a new replicating mass organ. I would imagine if the cell could experience thought - it would be thanking us for saving us from the bowels of the toilet.. Which is where ALLLLLLLL stems cells go when their host mother has their period.
I've not used Vista, but if it's anything like XP, the half-weekly FORCED reboots are a horrid configuration. Equivalent to crashing in my opinion. You either have to manually check for updates, or succumb to losing data with autoreboot!!! Yes there are registry hacks, but seriously, who came up with this idea? (Oh, windows users are use to rebooting or powering-down daily??)
Also, I would disagree that XP (and most likely Vista) are as stable as Linux. I've often had shoddy hardware that I'm trying to salvage, and even windows XP in safe mode guarantees a crash. Linux starts up just fine. Lets me get in, recover, get out. My guess is that it's related to the invasiveness of the drivers. But again, I'm talking safe-mode, so we're not dealing with vendor drivers as far as I understand it.
Whether corporal punishment works or not. The issue is the word punishment.. A child can not react to the classical definition of punishment. They can only digest, as you suggest the fact that there is an immediate reaction to walking into a wall, touching a hot plate, etc. Simulating the immediate reaction can only work if it's as consistent. If a child eventually learned that they can sometimes run through a wall with no pain, then they will be all the more encouraged and frustrated when they are only occasionally blocked. Thus the occasional punishment leads them to learn something other than what the evolution-hijacking was intending.
Namely that X + parent == pain, instead of just that X == pain.. If you implement (X,Y,Z,A,J,K) + parent == pain, but X..K by themselves don't, then eventually they learn that it's really parent that equals pain.
Certainly controlling your child's behavior is critical, but just recognize that you need nearly 100% consistency in the experiences of a child to assure discouraged behavior.. Most likely this isn't always practical - thus the unintended side-effects might outweigh the benifits in this case.
I haven't decided which approach I'm going to take just yet.. I only have another couple months.:(
I don't get the aversion to dog leashes [child teathers if you must] either.. I can't wait for the next 6 months before my child starts running around and I can walk her on a leash. Course I seem to have a disturbing appreciation for the dog-whisperer episode of South Park.
I let my 3.. 7mo child play with plastic bags, sharp-edged spoons, razor-sharp magazines. But never more than 3 inches away from me. I've let her cut herself several times. I don't know that I'm messing her up for the future next few years where she'll want to get into every possible piece of trouble. But my mentality is that it's hard to learn on her own when she's always kept from all dangers - that denying her something only makes her more determined to acquire it - and most importantly, a child is a full time job.
Ok, I'll amend my argument because I missed an important point. There's a difference between the argument that you 'believe' or not, and the proclamation that there is or is not a God.. No proof is necessary, because belief is the knowledge in the absence of proof. Thus you can formally disbelief without the true knowledge that there is no god. So sure, Atheism is legitimate, and Agnosticism is legitimate in that they represent your beliefs.
The belief in extra terrestrials is held by many with a scientific mind, justified by the expression 'I want to believe'. So while you can't know that there are or aren't aliens, your belief guides your scientific process.
Knowledge in the big-bang being the limit of measurement, likewise may or may not deter your scientific mind from questing to find a prior existence - possibly divine or multi-verse, possibly related to black-holes.. It doesn't matter ultimately.. The drive to search in a particular direction is really what we're talking about here.. 'Belief' that spending your precious time, and at the expense of producing confusion to the general public by posing questions from a presumable authority.
And thus while it's legitimate to hold a personal drive and belief, there are consequences to expressing that belief.
I'm a militant Agnost. I love religious wars on slashdot. The militancy and [dis]belief in God are independent.
Generally people that are frustrated by the actions of those that hold a different belief than theirs (including the lack of belief or the belief in the opposite) are likely to be militant.. if they were not personally affected by the opposition, then they tend to be neutral. Separately is one's willingness to coexist with oppositions.
I'm willing to coexist (only because I feel it would be hypocritical not to, not because I respect alternate views). But am frustrated by decisions of politicians, friends and family members as they relate to religion, and thus I'm militant.
I am agnostic, for the reasons articulated by various people in this discussion, that while there is overwhelming scientific evidence that the universe and life progressed unaffected by radical outside influences - that the classical view of miracles are primative testimonials, and more importantly, any mechanism that a 'God' would employ has no reason to be believed to be beyond our grasp. And thus a 'greater power' has no intrinsic specialness over us, or more specifically our understanding of Science. Thus, as Descartes might argue, even if the true God him/her/itself appeared before me, I could have no true reason to believe his testimony, as statistically it's more likely that I'm under the influence of drugs or brain-washing, than being singled out by God to change the world (though Descartes didn't use statistics to my knowledge).
You're not looking at it through their eyes, and thus you're misrepresenting their motivations.
They're not trying to prove God. They are trying to disprove Atheism. They are as grossly offended by the teaching of Evolution to their children as they would be about condom use, sex education, condoning sex outside of marriage, promotion of interracial relations, public support of planned parenthood, etc.
These are honest points of disagreement (some being more laughable than others).
Thus, teaching Evolution exclusively is essentially forcing their children to admin that the 7-day universe is false - they come home to the parents and pose difficult questions.
By promoting at least one other distinct alternative to evolution, then the parents can successfully say, see, it's only one of several possible theories, so don't worry about it.
It's the exact same process I use to disprove Christianity. If you have 2 or more mutually exclusive descriptions of God's will, then at least one is guaranteed to be at least partialy wrong (and thus not worthy of mindless acceptance), and in the absence of any credible proof of one verses the other, then in all likelihood they are both wrong.. Continue this trend until you've reach every single man made religion, and you've welcomed the world of Agnosticism.
Note I don't believe Atheism is legitimate - because you can't prove the absence of something. But functionally, Agnosticism is equivalent to Atheism. I frown at Dawkins (and others) view that Agnostics are cognitively dissodent. It doesn't serve his cause of winning the hearts and minds of the religious, and is provably incorrect.
US gasoline is lower octane than European gasoline.
I don't understand why people keep saying this.. No they don't. They rate Octane differently than we do. They use Unloaded Octane reference engine values. The US uses (Loaded + Unloaded) / 2. Says so on every freaking gas pump in the US. There is typically a swing of 2 to 10 Octaine points between loaded and unloaded - thus the averaging allows for greater variability in synthetic blend possibilities while simultaneously giving a more accurate performance characteristic.
As someone who grew up on old style VW rabbit diesels @ 52mpg (note the plural). I think I can see the mindset of most Americans. Poor gas-station selection/convenience, stigma (for a teenage boy), cold start problems. VERY low horse-power (I've also driven turbo diesels from the 80s), noisy, sooty.
Yes, I realize that MOST of these issues have been resolved (BMW has dared to release a diesel sportster in the US), but the stigma hasn't gone away. The only red-blooded Americans that support diesel are truck drivers (pickup, etc).
The problem right now is that pricing structures are such that a 35mpg gas burner is as cheap per gallon as a 42mpg diesel. The diesel has been more lucrative and the gas has been a by-product for the past couple years (of course they didn't price it that way for gas). Even today, the higher price of diesel remains.
As for turbo... Having owned both turbo and non-turbo. The extra up-front cost, the maintenance (had that bastard in for repairs constantly), and turbo-lag issues are generally such that all else being equal, you should prefer a non-turbo option for any given performance and efficiency characteristics. Turbo is generally a less efficient option ironically.
I say this because as I'd gotten older, it no longer made sense for me to support diesel. What was the value add for me personally?
Without the hippie support/better-than-you support, all american support, or pure-economic-sense support, the US isn't going to accept Diesel.
With that being said, I see more and more manufacturers correctly saying they want to move their heavier vehicles over to diesel instead of these crazy-ass 2 tonne hybrids.
All my money is in CD's earning 5% thank you very much. I've weathered the dot-com and recession very well - because I had the forsite to label gambling addicts for what they were.
Honestly, the only good investment in the stock market is outside the public market. Namely investment into your own startup, or as part of the initial investors of some other managed startup. Sure it'll fail in the long run (most do), but you add to the public good and often can earn some semblance of a salary while doing it. It's still gambling, but this is skill based more than luck based.. And so long as you're only investing discressionary monies (e.g. not retirement money), then it's fine.
Note the next step in a startup is often venture capital - to match your own investments. This process is still alive and well (albeit largely dried up at the moment).. Here is where all the due-diligence that is SUPPOSED to happen in the public-market but which doesn't. Rather, it happens but is ignored in light of more powerful forces (read my other posts today for dry analysis/reasoning).
Huh? In other words, if I have the intellect and the good fortune to make an extra dollar, I shouldn't? We're not talking necessarily about evil pyramid schemes here. We're talking about the aggregate effect of every day investors that see the potential of making literally an extra penny per share by taking a course of action.. Since they're essentially gambling, they've taken incredible losses over the months (any given set of months), and thus are more and more desperate for every little bit that can count. Couple this with the fact that many investors are rated based on their ROI performance - they are not acting out of greed, they're acting out of self preservation for their job.
So are you saying, the aggregate masses should be a little less greedy? Then that 1% net profitability for which gambling greed drives them should simply not play.
Hey, I'm all for it man. I think Mutual funds and Hedge funds were the beginning of the end of Capitalism as we know it. Lets go back to Direct investment where people have a stake in their stock. Make retirement funds for the middle class purely interest bearing again. I'm not even being sarcastic - all my retirement is in inflation based securities. I'm in disbelief of the 401k mania over the past 15 years - and scold republicans for wanting to replace S.S. with 401ks.
I disagree. A model defines a static or pseduo-static system. It takes the non-linearities out of a system to make them as close to a linear, 1st order or 2nd order system as much as possible, such that you can produce matrices of inputs to outputs. All models also are accompanied by regions of legitimacy.. Namely the non-linear (or super non-linear) components press close to zero in these regions. Outside the regions, those non-linearities become too much 'error' for the model to be valid. Ideally, you can use separate models for different regions, and you have a nice continuum. But for that, you need to be able to first measure a region parameter.
The problem here is that you're talking about a model for an investment strategy that is inherently non-deterministic, non-linear and more importantly recursively adaptive. The region you're operating in, is part of the outcome variables.
Consider 3 investors each with equivalent information systems (including risk modeling, present-valuation, and product-viability forecast, whatever).
In a vaccum, a model, assuming a static system might be appropriate. Balance-sheets, due-dilligence, market trends, geo-politics, etc. are all valid. But consider that the other two investors have the power to effect the system. Consider that they can manipulate, propping up an industry, or willfully collapsing it (over-buying, or short-selling). By acting irrationally in the short term, they can sufficiently distort all the measureable parameters to your equation to force you to act inappropriately.
Thus by taking a short-term hit, one of your competitors can gain a much greater long term advantage.
Thus, KNOWING that you use certain models, allows your competitors to game the system.. Note they need to have significant resources in which to do this.. But the old addage that you need money to make money exactly applies here. Why would a wealthy person only accept 3% to 15% ROI when they can control certain markets and earn 500%.
Now explicit market manipulation is illegal. But there is nothing illegal about gambling (sadly). Thus betting against the 'known wisdom' is perfectly legal.
So now you have two camps.. Conservatives that trust their models (blind to the fact that people can manipulate them in the long-run). And advanced speculators who bet against the market. Over time, if one is considered unbalanced, then more and more itchy investors will switch from one side to another.. Until an equilibrium is reached where any and all metrics become meaningless - An equal proportion of investors will honor measureable data as there are people betting against the data. The raw data therefore has no material impact as to the future valuation of an asset. Note, as such a system evolves, the 'measureable' data will change over time. Namely instead of measuring the viability of a company, you measure the prospects for news and bet based on historical trends of the news outlets, not whether the news is good or not.
This can only happen if you have a gaussian distribution of strategies. Namely a massive pool of investors operating independently with an equal liklihood of choosing one of an infinite number of strategies, such that an equal ration of buy/sell decisions could be produced.
You can think of it as the classic "Is the poison in your drink or mine" attempt at gaming the system. Any number of strategies can be employed to decide which action is best, but the more you employ, the greater resemblance to random-decisions is created.
The short is, no formula can adequately valuate a market that is based on such a recursively adaptive system. Determining the risk of a car accident, a plane accident, a flood, etc. These are deterministic to a large degree (short of global warming and legalizing pot). But the college that first advocated investment strategies based on such finite metrics should be unaccredited in my view. A car owner isn't trying to game the insurance market, but a stock holder or company seeking stock value is.
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Others have replied to this question well enough. It's the same argument 'when am I ever going to use algebra/geometry [as taught in high school]'. First colleges aren't trade-schools. Their job is to give you a broad foundation, and more importantly, they teach you how to think.
Math teaching you profoundly how to think. As an electrical-engineering undergraduate that doesn't directly use any of his main teachings, I still revisit all my text-books as one might revisit a game of sudoku. Being able to 'prove' a relationship, or walk through a design process requires a great deal of concentration and mental flexing.
I would think that most people that go through a pure mathematics degree genuinely enjoy these processes (at least I do).
I can guarantee you that this mental training does give me an edge over high-school, or even non-mathematically rigorous colleges in my field. A complex business process is met by my colleges with 'that gives me a headache', or 'lets take a break'. Which frustrates me, who would rather dig in deep and long.
Believe me, it isn't because I'm any smarter than them. I strongly believe it's because I had a background in complex problem solving - given by my high school and there-after my university.
As you know, the 'leading digit' is related the highest power of a base. Logs pull the exponents off a power - with only the highest power having any great effect. Namely, with 2 * 10^2 + 9 * 10^1, the 9 part is neglegable.
Benford's law (BL) is based on the distribution the log-scale, so obviously the 'base' (the 10) is meaningless.
However, if you used a number system that wasn't based on exponential powers, then you could definitely reveal different patterns. Maybe a non-linear, a circular, a factorial number system.
Read the articles. This is pretty cool stuff. There's a hundred+ year old model called Benford's Law (BL), and more recently, seemingly originated via the study of prime, a generalization (GBL). Lots of data-sets apparently have a log-scale even probability distribution instead of a uniform probability distribution or bell-shaped-curve probability distribution. Things that grow exponentially have a log-scale even distribution (the articles give several examples). And thus the BL applies (the leading 1 occurs more than 2, than 3, etc, in all bases). This is useful for fraud-detection. Namely if you know BL distributions should apply, but you are handed numbers by a potentially fraudulent vendor. Simply test for BL. Granted, a careful fraudulent vendor would randomize their fraudulent data by BL instead of uniform distribution. But if the vendor can't control the data set (say there is a stock market intermediary that is in a position to sell stock that doesn't exist, even if only on a small scale), then it is the aggregate sales would reveal such an anomaly.
What GBL does is open up the statistical model so it applies to more data-sets that were previously considered without a pattern. Prime numbers are an example. And the key was that it was scale-dependent. An infinite number of prime numbers has an even distribution of leading digits. But smaller data-sets DID express BL distributions. GBL applies by using the scale of the data-set. And that scale factor is the new component in GBL.
I love taking both sides of an argument...
wireless network topology is no different than wired topology.. Namely there is a stated bandwidth, a stated congestion strategy, and the need to segment networks to provide local BW.
Consider that switching is USLESS if all hosts connect to a common point (like a file-server, or the internet). Granted, you commonly have 50/50, so you get some parallelization.
Namely, wireless has multiple channels.. So you put as many routers as you need in a given region (using only short-range modes), each on a different channel, and spacially separate such as to minimize interference. Ideally you can use dishes that direct radio-traffic in non-conflicting directions.. e.g. put 4 AP's in the center of the room facing outwards in different directions.
You then specifically assign cube-farm A to SSID 1, cube-farm B to SSID 2, etc. Viola, pentuppling BW and concurrency.
Just think back to thin-net and thick-net days. You had hubs and gateways (don't even remember hearing about switches back then). Granted you had a slightly different network topology issue.. Namely that w/in a gateway'd network, you had to bound the longest lag between any two possible points.. Even w/ the gateway, you had the issue of store-and-forward packet overflow. Man that was a fun homework assignment.
I've been arguing for wire mostly today, but I feel the need to qualify your assessment.
Wired may have greater Security and Bandwith, but is less convenient. And more and more the security/BW is more than sufficient for most users, thus, the fact that a honda can do 90mph and a racecar can do 220mph is meaningless when you can't go over 85 w/o getting arrested. Therein the practicality of the honda v.s. the racecar is no-contest.
And for the bandwidth issue, you're often limited by your ISP BW which is less than wireless. In an office where most local traffic are 5Meg word-files or maybe 20M worth of email-downloads, BW is no longer an issue.
On the security side, certainly if you require pre-shared-certificates that aren't directly transmitted + pre-registered MAC-addresses, you can secure your network in wireless sufficiently.
There might be a compression component to the protocol (I know modems did). So this is guaranteed to be useless if transferring video/compressed files, and only marginally useful w/ binary files.
I'm still a huge proponent of desktops (not enough horsepower in laptops for my work needs), but many of the business types about me have tremendous liquidity with their laptops. Instead of having you come to their office, they can bring their laptop to you to show the problem.. They bring their laptops into the conference room, etc. When using an external USB hub, then you only really have 3 wires to plug/unplug (external monitor(optional), power and USB hub(optional)). Plus their desk is cleaner, no external speakers, possibly no external keyboard (I still require a split-keyboard for carpel tunnel).
Finally, for me to setup shop at home to continue development as lots of overhead. W/ a laptop (assuming one had enough horsepower), I could pick up on the subway, during dinner, etc.
My point is that to the average business employee, the laptop yields added productivity that warrants the reduction in speed/security (including the possibility of lost data). Note w/ lost data, this is best-practices - Require strong passwords on the local machine.. Use a disk-encryption software like truecrypt. Ideally have a thumbprint for rapid recovery from screen-saver. Ideally, you're a large enough shop that you can simply ghost a secure configuration, and it takes less than an hour to configure a machine to replace a lost one or for a new employee. I've seen this done at big institutions, and have been somewhat impressed.
But if anything is hogging bandwidth, or pounding local machines (such that /var/log/security catches the events), then you're bound to get caught at some point. Either that or you should fire your sys-admin.
I'll counter your argument with more of the same.. You argue that the 'average' wired network is insecure.. Then you use the argument that you have an unsecured wire to your building - which I would argue is NOT average.. What percentage of the worlds wired networks are building-to-building? Most, instead will have a switch in a secure room of each floor. There, of course, IS a wire to the building - going to your ISP. But you have that in both wired and wireless networks (with the possible exception of campus building-to-building wireless).
With the switch secure, it's relatively easy to track down where an infiltration came from - is there a new MAC address in the switch? When did it arrive, which port => trace down the wire.
I'm not a big windows guy, so I don't know how the lepers of the world survive, but on a Linux network, being on the internal network itself only gives you access to the internet. You can't actually access most services (other than DHCP, DNS and NAT), as all servers and desktops are sufficiently firewalled by and/or use secured connection points (ssh, rsync -e ssh, scp, NFS over ssh, LDAP permissioning). Certainly you could DOS the network. But that doesn't seem very useful - and again, this would be easy to track down.. Identify the local IP with all the connections, find it's mac, track down the switch port.
We fought back and forth with the idea of Sequoia (CJDBC), and it never really made sense.
A) no cross DB/schema talk
B) Requires a configuration for each DB separately (we have 50 independent apps that share hardware)
C) uses a database to store journal data (thus still a single point of failure)
D) SLOW for write-mostly transactional apps (we're 20/80 read/write)
E) Crippled command-line client.
F) Requires slightly extra hardware, especially w/ redundant front-ends.
Granted w/ Master/slave, you can't use cross DB updates. And certainly, w/ MySQL master/slave you're at the mercy of bugs.
I did some reading on wikipedia about the various nuclear reactors recently. So being a lay-person, there's some existing common wisdom.
The placement of the nuclear reactor to the sea is a safety issue. You NEED guaranteed large cool water in the condenser stage or reactor goes boom. Wiki says thermal heat is regularly used as hot-water heaters - similar to geothermal heating in iceland. Whether anybody actually uses this is anybody's guess.. Obviously you'd need to pipe the hot water to end locations, so existing suburbia obviously isn't anywhere near able to handle this.
As for breeder reactors:
A) All fission reaction is of a breeding nature. The ratio of bred material is what the different processes produce. The bred ratio varies from 0.5 to 1.2. Where 1.01 is the accepted min ratio to be called a breeder reactor (producing more fissile fuel than originally introduced).
B) Any of the high breeder reactors utilize some aspect of fast-fission. Canada, India and Russia (and France?). Fast fission requires the ABSENCE of water, as water (either light or heavy(deutreonic)) captures energetic neutrons. Instead reaction-neutral coolants are used such as sodium, molten lead, etc. The problem here is related to safety. It is harder to produce intrinsic stability into non-water-based fission. Namely, in boiler-based reactors, when a greater ratio of steam is produced, the reaction naturally slows down, thus naturally regulating the system if electronic control mechanisms don't catch and compensate the control rods in time. With non steam based systems, you use complex chemical fission-poisons (in high-pressure based reactors as found in subs) or are fully reliant on control-rod actuators. (possible single point of failure). (note: I could be wrong about liquid metal based systems not having alternate backup mechanisms such as fission-poisons)
C) Chernobyl was a fast-fission reactor. And it's melt-down was related to the inability to shutdown quickly enough.. (specifically pressure-valve failures and insufficient monitoring which would have initiated the shutdown sooner) The environmental DAMAGE, however was due exclusively to the fact that it was a warhead manufacturing site, and the construction apparatus is too large to enclose with a hardened concrete barrier.
D) 70% of Thorium is in India. Thus, even though Thorium is (likely) a less efficient starting process for a breeder reactor, it's a better long-term strategy for India so as to provide energy independence. This isn't true of most countries.
E) Breeder reactors are the basis of nuclear warheads, thus it's an extremely hot-button issue. The US and Russia specifically discontinue their breeder reactors to comply with arms control. Russia now strip-mines their old warhead supply to fuel existing reactors both domestically and abroad. I suspect that China is not indifferent to this topic as well. The french reprocessing plant is actively/heavily monitored by the UN (IAEA).
F) The French rebreeding process is apparently NOT cost effective by any measure. The reason they do it is similar to the Indian Thorium objective - international energy independence.. China is not likely to be short-supplied of uranium mineral deposits - but I'm not aware of their status. I know Canda has massive Uranium supplies.
Currently boiler and pressure based reactors are 'cheap' to build and are cheap to operate (so long as raw Uranium ore is cheap). They both require 'pre-processing' of the ore to increase the concentration of U-235 to a sufficient level. So it's slightly more expensive in the long run as both ore prices will increase over time, and the added cost of pre-processing.
heavy-water and liquid-metal and inert-gas based reactors facilitate 'raw' Uranium, (e.g. U-238 and possibly thorium), and thus make the operating costs MUCH cheaper, but they don't have the longevity of trivial passive boiler-based plants, and thus the high capital costs are for shorter terms - and thus the average cost is higher.
They're planing on building 100 1.1GW plants. Consider how much real-estate that much power would consume in solar panels.
So now, when Pakistan gets upset with India, they'll shoot down the satellite, which will mark the first space war.. Which will mark the way for N.K shooting down a US satellite, and we'll be in the wild wild west!!!
Not saying they shouldn't do it.. But it's an 'oh boy' moment for me.
I don't think it's fair to list you as a flaimbit - it was a legitimate question.
My response (and probably echoing hundreds of others) - there is no death involved.. The stem cell, on the contrary, is being given a chance to live on as a new replicating mass organ. I would imagine if the cell could experience thought - it would be thanking us for saving us from the bowels of the toilet.. Which is where ALLLLLLLL stems cells go when their host mother has their period.
I've not used Vista, but if it's anything like XP, the half-weekly FORCED reboots are a horrid configuration. Equivalent to crashing in my opinion. You either have to manually check for updates, or succumb to losing data with autoreboot!!! Yes there are registry hacks, but seriously, who came up with this idea? (Oh, windows users are use to rebooting or powering-down daily??)
Also, I would disagree that XP (and most likely Vista) are as stable as Linux. I've often had shoddy hardware that I'm trying to salvage, and even windows XP in safe mode guarantees a crash. Linux starts up just fine. Lets me get in, recover, get out. My guess is that it's related to the invasiveness of the drivers. But again, I'm talking safe-mode, so we're not dealing with vendor drivers as far as I understand it.
Whether corporal punishment works or not. The issue is the word punishment.. A child can not react to the classical definition of punishment. They can only digest, as you suggest the fact that there is an immediate reaction to walking into a wall, touching a hot plate, etc. Simulating the immediate reaction can only work if it's as consistent. If a child eventually learned that they can sometimes run through a wall with no pain, then they will be all the more encouraged and frustrated when they are only occasionally blocked. Thus the occasional punishment leads them to learn something other than what the evolution-hijacking was intending.
Namely that X + parent == pain, instead of just that X == pain.. If you implement (X,Y,Z,A,J,K) + parent == pain, but X..K by themselves don't, then eventually they learn that it's really parent that equals pain.
Certainly controlling your child's behavior is critical, but just recognize that you need nearly 100% consistency in the experiences of a child to assure discouraged behavior.. Most likely this isn't always practical - thus the unintended side-effects might outweigh the benifits in this case.
I haven't decided which approach I'm going to take just yet.. I only have another couple months. :(
I don't get the aversion to dog leashes [child teathers if you must] either.. I can't wait for the next 6 months before my child starts running around and I can walk her on a leash. Course I seem to have a disturbing appreciation for the dog-whisperer episode of South Park.
I let my 3 .. 7mo child play with plastic bags, sharp-edged spoons, razor-sharp magazines. But never more than 3 inches away from me. I've let her cut herself several times. I don't know that I'm messing her up for the future next few years where she'll want to get into every possible piece of trouble. But my mentality is that it's hard to learn on her own when she's always kept from all dangers - that denying her something only makes her more determined to acquire it - and most importantly, a child is a full time job.
Ok, I'll amend my argument because I missed an important point. There's a difference between the argument that you 'believe' or not, and the proclamation that there is or is not a God.. No proof is necessary, because belief is the knowledge in the absence of proof. Thus you can formally disbelief without the true knowledge that there is no god. So sure, Atheism is legitimate, and Agnosticism is legitimate in that they represent your beliefs.
The belief in extra terrestrials is held by many with a scientific mind, justified by the expression 'I want to believe'. So while you can't know that there are or aren't aliens, your belief guides your scientific process.
Knowledge in the big-bang being the limit of measurement, likewise may or may not deter your scientific mind from questing to find a prior existence - possibly divine or multi-verse, possibly related to black-holes.. It doesn't matter ultimately.. The drive to search in a particular direction is really what we're talking about here.. 'Belief' that spending your precious time, and at the expense of producing confusion to the general public by posing questions from a presumable authority.
And thus while it's legitimate to hold a personal drive and belief, there are consequences to expressing that belief.
I'm a militant Agnost. I love religious wars on slashdot. The militancy and [dis]belief in God are independent.
Generally people that are frustrated by the actions of those that hold a different belief than theirs (including the lack of belief or the belief in the opposite) are likely to be militant.. if they were not personally affected by the opposition, then they tend to be neutral. Separately is one's willingness to coexist with oppositions.
I'm willing to coexist (only because I feel it would be hypocritical not to, not because I respect alternate views). But am frustrated by decisions of politicians, friends and family members as they relate to religion, and thus I'm militant.
I am agnostic, for the reasons articulated by various people in this discussion, that while there is overwhelming scientific evidence that the universe and life progressed unaffected by radical outside influences - that the classical view of miracles are primative testimonials, and more importantly, any mechanism that a 'God' would employ has no reason to be believed to be beyond our grasp. And thus a 'greater power' has no intrinsic specialness over us, or more specifically our understanding of Science. Thus, as Descartes might argue, even if the true God him/her/itself appeared before me, I could have no true reason to believe his testimony, as statistically it's more likely that I'm under the influence of drugs or brain-washing, than being singled out by God to change the world (though Descartes didn't use statistics to my knowledge).
You're not looking at it through their eyes, and thus you're misrepresenting their motivations.
They're not trying to prove God. They are trying to disprove Atheism. They are as grossly offended by the teaching of Evolution to their children as they would be about condom use, sex education, condoning sex outside of marriage, promotion of interracial relations, public support of planned parenthood, etc.
These are honest points of disagreement (some being more laughable than others).
Thus, teaching Evolution exclusively is essentially forcing their children to admin that the 7-day universe is false - they come home to the parents and pose difficult questions.
By promoting at least one other distinct alternative to evolution, then the parents can successfully say, see, it's only one of several possible theories, so don't worry about it.
It's the exact same process I use to disprove Christianity. If you have 2 or more mutually exclusive descriptions of God's will, then at least one is guaranteed to be at least partialy wrong (and thus not worthy of mindless acceptance), and in the absence of any credible proof of one verses the other, then in all likelihood they are both wrong.. Continue this trend until you've reach every single man made religion, and you've welcomed the world of Agnosticism.
Note I don't believe Atheism is legitimate - because you can't prove the absence of something. But functionally, Agnosticism is equivalent to Atheism. I frown at Dawkins (and others) view that Agnostics are cognitively dissodent. It doesn't serve his cause of winning the hearts and minds of the religious, and is provably incorrect.
US gasoline is lower octane than European gasoline.
I don't understand why people keep saying this.. No they don't. They rate Octane differently than we do. They use Unloaded Octane reference engine values. The US uses (Loaded + Unloaded) / 2. Says so on every freaking gas pump in the US. There is typically a swing of 2 to 10 Octaine points between loaded and unloaded - thus the averaging allows for greater variability in synthetic blend possibilities while simultaneously giving a more accurate performance characteristic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octane_rating
As someone who grew up on old style VW rabbit diesels @ 52mpg (note the plural). I think I can see the mindset of most Americans. Poor gas-station selection/convenience, stigma (for a teenage boy), cold start problems. VERY low horse-power (I've also driven turbo diesels from the 80s), noisy, sooty.
Yes, I realize that MOST of these issues have been resolved (BMW has dared to release a diesel sportster in the US), but the stigma hasn't gone away. The only red-blooded Americans that support diesel are truck drivers (pickup, etc).
The problem right now is that pricing structures are such that a 35mpg gas burner is as cheap per gallon as a 42mpg diesel. The diesel has been more lucrative and the gas has been a by-product for the past couple years (of course they didn't price it that way for gas). Even today, the higher price of diesel remains.
As for turbo... Having owned both turbo and non-turbo. The extra up-front cost, the maintenance (had that bastard in for repairs constantly), and turbo-lag issues are generally such that all else being equal, you should prefer a non-turbo option for any given performance and efficiency characteristics. Turbo is generally a less efficient option ironically.
I say this because as I'd gotten older, it no longer made sense for me to support diesel. What was the value add for me personally?
Without the hippie support/better-than-you support, all american support, or pure-economic-sense support, the US isn't going to accept Diesel.
With that being said, I see more and more manufacturers correctly saying they want to move their heavier vehicles over to diesel instead of these crazy-ass 2 tonne hybrids.
All my money is in CD's earning 5% thank you very much. I've weathered the dot-com and recession very well - because I had the forsite to label gambling addicts for what they were.
Honestly, the only good investment in the stock market is outside the public market. Namely investment into your own startup, or as part of the initial investors of some other managed startup. Sure it'll fail in the long run (most do), but you add to the public good and often can earn some semblance of a salary while doing it. It's still gambling, but this is skill based more than luck based.. And so long as you're only investing discressionary monies (e.g. not retirement money), then it's fine.
Note the next step in a startup is often venture capital - to match your own investments. This process is still alive and well (albeit largely dried up at the moment).. Here is where all the due-diligence that is SUPPOSED to happen in the public-market but which doesn't. Rather, it happens but is ignored in light of more powerful forces (read my other posts today for dry analysis/reasoning).
I would just hope that we can temper our greed
Huh? In other words, if I have the intellect and the good fortune to make an extra dollar, I shouldn't? We're not talking necessarily about evil pyramid schemes here. We're talking about the aggregate effect of every day investors that see the potential of making literally an extra penny per share by taking a course of action.. Since they're essentially gambling, they've taken incredible losses over the months (any given set of months), and thus are more and more desperate for every little bit that can count. Couple this with the fact that many investors are rated based on their ROI performance - they are not acting out of greed, they're acting out of self preservation for their job.
So are you saying, the aggregate masses should be a little less greedy? Then that 1% net profitability for which gambling greed drives them should simply not play.
Hey, I'm all for it man. I think Mutual funds and Hedge funds were the beginning of the end of Capitalism as we know it. Lets go back to Direct investment where people have a stake in their stock. Make retirement funds for the middle class purely interest bearing again. I'm not even being sarcastic - all my retirement is in inflation based securities. I'm in disbelief of the 401k mania over the past 15 years - and scold republicans for wanting to replace S.S. with 401ks.
I disagree. A model defines a static or pseduo-static system. It takes the non-linearities out of a system to make them as close to a linear, 1st order or 2nd order system as much as possible, such that you can produce matrices of inputs to outputs. All models also are accompanied by regions of legitimacy.. Namely the non-linear (or super non-linear) components press close to zero in these regions. Outside the regions, those non-linearities become too much 'error' for the model to be valid. Ideally, you can use separate models for different regions, and you have a nice continuum. But for that, you need to be able to first measure a region parameter.
The problem here is that you're talking about a model for an investment strategy that is inherently non-deterministic, non-linear and more importantly recursively adaptive. The region you're operating in, is part of the outcome variables.
Consider 3 investors each with equivalent information systems (including risk modeling, present-valuation, and product-viability forecast, whatever).
In a vaccum, a model, assuming a static system might be appropriate. Balance-sheets, due-dilligence, market trends, geo-politics, etc. are all valid. But consider that the other two investors have the power to effect the system. Consider that they can manipulate, propping up an industry, or willfully collapsing it (over-buying, or short-selling). By acting irrationally in the short term, they can sufficiently distort all the measureable parameters to your equation to force you to act inappropriately.
Thus by taking a short-term hit, one of your competitors can gain a much greater long term advantage.
Thus, KNOWING that you use certain models, allows your competitors to game the system.. Note they need to have significant resources in which to do this.. But the old addage that you need money to make money exactly applies here. Why would a wealthy person only accept 3% to 15% ROI when they can control certain markets and earn 500%.
Now explicit market manipulation is illegal. But there is nothing illegal about gambling (sadly). Thus betting against the 'known wisdom' is perfectly legal.
So now you have two camps.. Conservatives that trust their models (blind to the fact that people can manipulate them in the long-run). And advanced speculators who bet against the market. Over time, if one is considered unbalanced, then more and more itchy investors will switch from one side to another.. Until an equilibrium is reached where any and all metrics become meaningless - An equal proportion of investors will honor measureable data as there are people betting against the data. The raw data therefore has no material impact as to the future valuation of an asset. Note, as such a system evolves, the 'measureable' data will change over time. Namely instead of measuring the viability of a company, you measure the prospects for news and bet based on historical trends of the news outlets, not whether the news is good or not.
This can only happen if you have a gaussian distribution of strategies. Namely a massive pool of investors operating independently with an equal liklihood of choosing one of an infinite number of strategies, such that an equal ration of buy/sell decisions could be produced.
You can think of it as the classic "Is the poison in your drink or mine" attempt at gaming the system. Any number of strategies can be employed to decide which action is best, but the more you employ, the greater resemblance to random-decisions is created.
The short is, no formula can adequately valuate a market that is based on such a recursively adaptive system. Determining the risk of a car accident, a plane accident, a flood, etc. These are deterministic to a large degree (short of global warming and legalizing pot). But the college that first advocated investment strategies based on such finite metrics should be unaccredited in my view. A car owner isn't trying to game the insurance market, but a stock holder or company seeking stock value is.