1) Certainly most of Heinlein's female characters are as competent as the male ones, but the air of "don't you worry your pretty little head" that so many of his mouthpiece characters have, especially in his earlier works, drives me batty. "Sure, she can pilot a starship and shoot the center out of the ace of spades at 50 paces, and isn't it cute? She'll meet the right man one day and settle down, and then she won't have to because he'll take care of her."
2) There's also Heinlein's assumption that gender roles are as they should be--this was his opinion, and I strongly disagree with it, but overall it didn't detract much from his writing.
3) Finally, a lot of his female characters break under the slightest pressure and start crying. His male characters never do. Especially in the Future History, where sexuality and gender identity is supposed to be androgynous, this bothers me. Even Galahad in Time Enough for Love, (the most sympathetic portrayal an effeminate man ever got in Heinlein) never cries.
I can ignore sexism in most of the authors of Heinlein's generation and earlier (*coughAsimovcough*), but Heinlein himself was just so progressive in everything else that a lot of his gender politics show up as glaring flaws, when they would just fade into the background in works by other writers. Writers shouldn't have to be politically correct, and Heinlein was perfectly justified in coloring his stories with his opinion, but I find that it tempers my enjoyment of his works.
Heinlein is one of those authors who made science fiction. His chauvinism occasionally sets my teeth on edge, and his later works are preachy, but these are small blemishes on the body of work of a man, who above everything else, knew how to tell a story. Unlike much SF, his stories are always character-driven. I've often gone back to Glory Road or The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for a good read that never gets old. Finding out that there's an unpublished Heinlein a few days after hearing about a new Zelazny collection? My cup runneth over!
My hat's off to the cranky old Grand Master who still makes me all sniffly at the end of Stranger in a Strange Land, almost 10 years after I read it the first time. Where can I place a pre-order?
Does right of first sale apply to other data "property?" For instance, could I sell my copy of an OS (*coughWinXPcough*) that came with hardware I purchased? Or have I simply bought a non-transferable license?
Has a court with some teeth (say, a Circuit Court) ruled on things like EULAs and ownership of software, or are corporations just attempting to set a common-law precedent and hoping nobody notices?
(Please don't tell me to Google for it--I'm at work and can barely get away with reading/.)
its just that it seems software is much more complex and is therefore much harder to test.
I can see that. And maybe it's that in hardware design we can throw on redundancy, and that, oftentimes, "pretty close" can be good enough. I don't think software has that built in margin of safety. (My extensive experience with off-by-one errors seems to support this..."Seg fault?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'SEG FAULT!?' AHHHH!" *throws computer out window*)
But my point is, I don't think Carmack's proposed "build a little, test a little" method of aerospace design will work unless he has some very careful QA aero engineers vetting his designs for big, likely-to-blow-things-up mistakes. The aero community is justified in viewing him skeptically. If an aero engineer decided that he had this great new method for developing gaming software, would you believe him, or wait to see some results?
That said, I do wish Carmack and his team the best of luck. Spaceflight could benefit from a little more risk-taking--but I hope that he's taking the right risks, and getting some experienced people to help him decided what the right risks are.
-Carolyn
Software Design *most definitely* != Rocket Design
on
X Prize and John Carmack
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
But software design would benefit from being more like aerospace design. Aerospace can't afford the test-patch-test-patch cycle that software goes through. Before we send our designs off to be built, we had better be damn sure they will work. We can't just decide to bolt a wing on later if the orginial doesn't work--it's too expensive and the consequences of a failure are too great. Accurate computer modeling is rapidly becoming the engineer's best friend.
I fucking shudder to think of the average software developer deciding that his skills can carry over into engineering. Like the parent said, QA in the software community at large is sadly lacking. I don't understand why programmers get away with it. From an engineer's perspective, it just looks like shoddy design or laziness. Is it just that software is so intangible, and losses due to bad code are hard to quantify? Is it that we're just used to buggy software and it doesn't occur to us that it could be otherwise?
(Frustration brought to you by:
Sobig: Bogging Down My Company's Network Since Early This Week
and
Win2k SP Four: Breaking Third Party Software So You Don't Have To.)
I am awed that you are perceptive enough to judge my reaction based on one post.
Out of curiosity, how much materials science does your wife know? Does she really understand how chemically unremarkable a diamond is? Are you both aware how prices have been inflated through cynical marketing because a mining cartel in the 1800's realized how little intrisic worth a diamond really has? Does your wife know just how blood-soaked that diamond you bought her is? (Retracted if you bought a Canadian or otherwise "clean" stone.)
I do not buy into the DeBeers-fostered sugar-fest about diamonds being "forever" or indicative of "eternal love." Symbols have only as much meaning as the participants in a tradition give them, and to me, diamonds mean a monopoly built on market manipulation and slave labor. My principles are worth far more than the few grand an engagement ring costs.
Also...I'm left-handed. An engagement ring and wedding band would just get in the way. ~_^
For my senior thesis, I helped design a proposed Mars mission. I was working at Johnson when Columbia broke up, but I've since graduated and am no longer associated with NASA, and can speak freely.
I'm not sure to start on what's wrong with NASA. Many other posters have covered that in detail, and I think many of them are spot on.
But there is one thing very, very right--the people. From janitors and groundskeepers, all the way to the directors of the various centers, NASA employees are passionately devoted to the job they do. Losing Columbia hurt like losing members of their families, hurt their professional pride, hurt that part of their souls where they keep their their dedication and hope. They will continue because there is still work to be done, because the journey is still unfinished, because that's what their fallen comrades wanted. This spark is fundamental to NASA--the institutional culture cannot extinguish it, but I fear that it may become impotent.
Space travel is costly and risky. It will be centuries before we can consider it routine. The people of NASA have the expertise and the will to carry on, but will they be permitted to do so? I say, Stand aside and let your scientists and engineers work. Let your astronauts fly. They may greatly fail, but it will be because they have greatly dared.
This once-in-60000-years or whatever is a silly technicality.
So was the clock rolling over to 2000 three years back. Even though it was an artifact of the dating system, and didn't actually signify a millenium in that system, people were still out partying. We like marking biggests, bests, and firsts.
I think anything that gets people looking up at the sky is a good thing. Maybe a sense of wonder needs a kick-start in some people. If the hype surrounding this particular opposition convinces people to look up and actually see the heavens for once, in their majesty and awesome beauty, then the superlatives getting thrown around don't bother me.
You obviously don't need the help. But please don't go all sour on those who do.
Even though Mars will subtend a visually undetectably larger arc, I'm still going to be up on the roof in the boonies with my wimpy little 4" refracting 'scope to take a look at the polar caps. And I'll feel that thrill of hitting the focus just right and resolving a disc out of a distant point of light. I want other people, people who don't care about science enough to understand why any other opposition would work just as well, to know what that feels like, too. The mathematical difference between a few arc-seconds may be minute, but the emotional difference is huge.
What's wrong with public office by lottery? We choose juries that way. Most people selected at random would not be in the game for money or power. A truly random selection of the population would better represent the majority opinion than our current system, which chooses those who self-select for politics. Any true loonies chosen would, statistically, be balanced by other true loonies with diametric opinions. Government should not be so complicated that an ordinary person of good will would be unable to handle it. The reason it is now is because we have a government of lawyers and career politicians.
Of course...this assumes that your population has some sense of civic responsibility--so forget I said anything, I guess.
Is mathematics running into the same barrier as physics? It's just getting too complex and what do you do?
I don't think math can ever be "too complex." Certain problems can be beyond our ability to solve, but that is the fault of our models and tools. We're just now starting to work on the problems that, 40, 50 years ago, people set aside as insoluble because they lacked the computational power to plow through them. The problem with complexity exists only in the real world; pure mathematics can be as infinitely complex as the human mind can devise. It's just that, eventually, these elegant structures cease to have any purpose outside of mathematical aesthetics. I like pure math, but there's not a lot you can do with some of the really out-there stuff except set it aside and wait until we trip over a physical problem that it just happens to fit.
Math as used in engineering and science is just a way to describe the world. Take Newtonian and relativistic gravitation. The Newtonian model is simple and adequately describes gravitation in day to day life. It's what we could call a coarse model--rough and makes some wrong assumptions, but it gets the job done. The relativistic model is much truer to how gravity actually works, a more refined model than the Newtonian, but it contains math that only a specialist can really understand, and isn't necessary for a great many cases where we need to model gravitation. Coarse models usually have much more elegant math than refined ones, but they don't always provide the detail necessary. It's the refined models that are hitting the complexity barrier--our need to describe the physical world in greater and greater detail is outstripping the tools we have with which to describe it.
If you can't given an exact answer, estimate the result and give upper bounds for the error.
The math is never how things really are. There's no such thing as an "exact" answer. Your answers are only exact to the limits of your equipment, or to the certainty of your mathematical model, whichever is less. All our science, all our technology, is built atop our best guess. Then, we hand it off to the philosophers.;D
I've been seeing a lot of comments disappointed with brute-force problem-solving--but I am all for it. Here's why:
In my job, I do fine structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics for aerospace design. Aerospace engineering is rapidly reaching the point where simplified, elegant models are inadequate to the real-world structures they are meant to mimic. For instance, the Navier-Stokes equations, a set of second-order partial differential equations which describe fluid flow, are not susceptible to analytical solution in any but the most simplified cases, and as things like airfoils, turbine blades, and computers grow more refined, their properties require much hairier math to describe. Turbulent flow around a wing or turbine blade has no elegant solution, but a brute-force computational model can yield a solution that allows us to design a lighter wing, and thus a more fuel-efficient plane, or a stronger turbine fan, and a more efficient generator. Or, to cite an example near and dear to many slashdotter hearts, as we can better model the heat transfer inside a microprocessor, we can better devise ways to cool it, and thus build a faster, more stable computer. (And then, we can solve more iterations on it, and build an even faster computer...and then we can solve more iterations... ^_~)
There is an intense intellectual satisfaction to a 20 or 100 line proof (I still remember the triumph of my high school proof that a triangle's interior angles sum to 180), but for a lot of things, there simply exist no such proofs. As we tackle more and more mathematical problems, those with relatively simple proofs will quickly be solved and set aside, and we will move on to messier things. For instance, the proof of Fermat's Theorem runs to several hundred pages of dense elliptic curve math. It was an aesthetic disappointment for those hoping for a simpler solution, but it was a triumph for the field of mathematics as a whole.
There is a whole 'nother world of proofs involved in brute-force solutions. Estimated time to solution, order of error--elegant mathematical tools are still necessary, but they are increasingly used to delineate regions of uncertainty as the complete picture becomes messier. The closer mathematical models get to the real world, the more complex and beautiful, but the less elegant, they become. I do not think that the field of mathematics will stop producing elegant proofs, but I do think they will have less and less to do with the world we live in and more and more to do with hypothetical mathematical constructs, whose usefulness will then filter down in the form of special cases to more prosaic disciplines, like science and engineering. This diminishes neither science nor engineering, and adds to the knowledge available in all fields.
My parents used to tape a program on public television called Discover: The World of Science, presumably related to the magazine. Peter Graves hosted it, and my folks would stick one of the tapes in the VCR to keep me amused when I was being difficult.
The format was a series of 15-20 minute pieces on various neat pieces of science, and I distinctly remeber a segement about a "talking glove." It was a mechanical hand on a small stand with a keyboard and Hawking-esque voice synthesizer, and a glove wired with electrodes. When someone typed into the keyboard, the hand would fingerspell whatever was being typed. When a person wearing the glove fingerspelled something, the voice would read it out, a la Mac SimpleText (anyone else get in trouble with that in school when it first came out?) The system had to be trained to recognize someone's fingerspelling. They showed a deaf and blind woman going out shopping with the system, not needing an interpreter.
Based on the hairstyles I remember from the program and my age at the time, this would have been in the mid to late 80's. I have no way of proving I'm not making this up, of course.
If you have cable you may have access to phone service over the cable.
I tried to get phone service from the cable company. They claimed they couldn't provide it, which I found fishy in light of the fact that I was getting cable TV and Internet. So I investigated. Turns out that SBC and my apartment complex have an agreement which blocks other phone providers. Frustrating, no? And possibly actionable. Hope my landlords get back to me next week.
SBC screwed me for years paying an extra 15$ a month for a "metro" line so I could call to downtown Dallas even though downtown Dallas could call me in the burbs without the charge. I swore I would never pay SBC another cent.
I've had 'em for 2 months so far and I already want the company to die the Death of a Thousand Frivolous Lawsuits. Damn monopoly tactics...
Again, this is not SBC's fault. Many businesses do this all the time, its called doing business. They never forced the apartment complex to sign this deal. Blame the right people, the apartment complex management. (atleast you talked to them so your on the right track).
At least we agree about my landlords. My apartment complex made a deal restricting which services I can hire, to which nowhere in my lease did I agree. (I think I specifically agreed not to sell drugs, though.)
As for SBC--my apartment complex isn't buying their services. I am. SBC made a deal with someone not authorized to neogtiate on my behalf, which is at best a failure of due diligence, and at worst very, very illegal. I suspect both parties are counting on no one complaining.
and since you like signage so much (because it helps oh so much to identify people), here ya go.
Do I detect a whiff of sarcasm? It's only tangentially about identification. It has more to do with guts.
-Troll
I have a friend who goes by the nickname "Troll." He uses apostrophes better than you do.
I was royally screwed (if you totalled up the dollars and the cost of my time, etc., it was thousands of dollars) by SBC over about 6 months a few years back.
Their "customer service" makes me want to tear my hair out. I called 'em to scale back the services I was getting to just a phone line...you would have thought I was speaking Ancient Greek with a thick Russian accent for all the comprehension registering on the other end.
ME: I'd like to cancel the deluxe package, please. HER: Are you dissatisfied with the quality of the service you are recieving? ME: No, I just don't need it. HER: Do you feel that you have had enough time to evaluate this service. ME: Yes, and I just don't need it. HER: You are aware that your caller ID will no longer work, callers who call when you are on the phone will recieve a busy signal-- ME: Yes. And I JUST DON'T NEED IT.
Repeat 3x. Eventually get extra services cancelled. Later that week receive a US$163 phone bill. Post to/. bitching about it.
my phone service (including 911) is via a gadget that plugs into my hub.
Any idea how good their call tracing is? I would just use my cell for everything, including emergencies, except the landline gives a name and address to the 911 dispatcher. Handy if I'm, y'know, gasping my last as the axe murderer is slowly dismembering my boyfriend in the shower--or if I'm having a severe anaphylactic reaction, which seems slightly more likely.
And exactly how is this SBC's fault that you can't get the service you want.
Come on, you talk about your apartment complex not having a certain service (irrelevant, don't bitch to me)
SBC specifically negotiated an agreement whereby they block competing services, which are otherwise available in my area. This is both their fault and relevant.
Then don't buy it [SBC DSL].
I didn't. But you already knew that, from the rest of my post.
the lines belong to SBC. If they don't want to sell them to someone they don't have to. However, chances are it is because of financials. SBC said they wanted to charge so much and Speakeasy said no (again, not SBC's problem)
They do, in fact, have to sell them, because otherwise they run afoul of monopoly laws. SBC charges too much for use of their lines, again, blocking competition. This makes them a de facto monopoly, which is not simply a dull game with dice, real estate, and Get Out of Jail Free cards, but also an illegal market practice.
It is a load of duplicitous crap for SBC to say, "we offered our lines but they wouldn't pay" when SBC knows it is charging too much for any other company to turn a profit. It's analogous to offering someone a ride, but driving too fast for them to get in the car, then saying it's their fault they didn't run fast enough.
(It may also get SBC in trouble with the whole Common Carrier thing, but I don't want to look it up and you certainly don't care.)
In conclusion, if you can't even be arsed to sign your trolls, piss off.
They have an (extremely sketchy) agreement with my apartment complex under which they are the only available phone service. This locks me out of both cheaper digital phone service from the local cable company, and also a neat little promotion where I would have been getting a substantial discount for ordering multiple services. I'm talking to managment, but no headway yet.
SBC DSL is also a ripoff--I wanted to get Speakeasy, but SBC won't share their lines. Hence, my cable modem will be delivered today or Monday.
A hearty >:p to SBC. I'd cut my landline and go entirely cellular but for reliable 911 service.
Slashdot Mirror
Three points:
1) Certainly most of Heinlein's female characters are as competent as the male ones, but the air of "don't you worry your pretty little head" that so many of his mouthpiece characters have, especially in his earlier works, drives me batty. "Sure, she can pilot a starship and shoot the center out of the ace of spades at 50 paces, and isn't it cute? She'll meet the right man one day and settle down, and then she won't have to because he'll take care of her."
2) There's also Heinlein's assumption that gender roles are as they should be--this was his opinion, and I strongly disagree with it, but overall it didn't detract much from his writing.
3) Finally, a lot of his female characters break under the slightest pressure and start crying. His male characters never do. Especially in the Future History, where sexuality and gender identity is supposed to be androgynous, this bothers me. Even Galahad in Time Enough for Love, (the most sympathetic portrayal an effeminate man ever got in Heinlein) never cries.
I can ignore sexism in most of the authors of Heinlein's generation and earlier (*coughAsimovcough*), but Heinlein himself was just so progressive in everything else that a lot of his gender politics show up as glaring flaws, when they would just fade into the background in works by other writers. Writers shouldn't have to be politically correct, and Heinlein was perfectly justified in coloring his stories with his opinion, but I find that it tempers my enjoyment of his works.
-Carolyn
Heinlein is one of those authors who made science fiction. His chauvinism occasionally sets my teeth on edge, and his later works are preachy, but these are small blemishes on the body of work of a man, who above everything else, knew how to tell a story. Unlike much SF, his stories are always character-driven. I've often gone back to Glory Road or The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress for a good read that never gets old. Finding out that there's an unpublished Heinlein a few days after hearing about a new Zelazny collection? My cup runneth over!
My hat's off to the cranky old Grand Master who still makes me all sniffly at the end of Stranger in a Strange Land, almost 10 years after I read it the first time. Where can I place a pre-order?
-Carolyn
Does right of first sale apply to other data "property?" For instance, could I sell my copy of an OS (*coughWinXPcough*) that came with hardware I purchased? Or have I simply bought a non-transferable license?
/.)
Has a court with some teeth (say, a Circuit Court) ruled on things like EULAs and ownership of software, or are corporations just attempting to set a common-law precedent and hoping nobody notices?
(Please don't tell me to Google for it--I'm at work and can barely get away with reading
-Carolyn
So popular was the contest that the server suffered from a veritable slashdot effect.
Think they're ready for the real thing?
-Carolyn
its just that it seems software is much more complex and is therefore much harder to test.
I can see that. And maybe it's that in hardware design we can throw on redundancy, and that, oftentimes, "pretty close" can be good enough. I don't think software has that built in margin of safety. (My extensive experience with off-by-one errors seems to support this..."Seg fault?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'SEG FAULT!?' AHHHH!" *throws computer out window*)
But my point is, I don't think Carmack's proposed "build a little, test a little" method of aerospace design will work unless he has some very careful QA aero engineers vetting his designs for big, likely-to-blow-things-up mistakes. The aero community is justified in viewing him skeptically. If an aero engineer decided that he had this great new method for developing gaming software, would you believe him, or wait to see some results?
That said, I do wish Carmack and his team the best of luck. Spaceflight could benefit from a little more risk-taking--but I hope that he's taking the right risks, and getting some experienced people to help him decided what the right risks are.
-Carolyn
But software design would benefit from being more like aerospace design. Aerospace can't afford the test-patch-test-patch cycle that software goes through. Before we send our designs off to be built, we had better be damn sure they will work. We can't just decide to bolt a wing on later if the orginial doesn't work--it's too expensive and the consequences of a failure are too great. Accurate computer modeling is rapidly becoming the engineer's best friend.
I fucking shudder to think of the average software developer deciding that his skills can carry over into engineering. Like the parent said, QA in the software community at large is sadly lacking. I don't understand why programmers get away with it. From an engineer's perspective, it just looks like shoddy design or laziness. Is it just that software is so intangible, and losses due to bad code are hard to quantify? Is it that we're just used to buggy software and it doesn't occur to us that it could be otherwise?
(Frustration brought to you by:
Sobig: Bogging Down My Company's Network Since Early This Week
and
Win2k SP Four: Breaking Third Party Software So You Don't Have To.)
-Carolyn
I only like 2D platformers and DDR.
I don't own any D&D books, just Star Wars 2nd and World of Darkness.
I only have two computers, and one of them isn't working because I haven't decided between Linux and BSD yet.
I'd rather use emacs than vi.
The only programming languages I can code in are C and Fortran.
We're from different worlds. And...and...I don't deserve you.
No...don't look back. Promise me you'll never look back.
(I did not expect marriage proposals, even in jest...though, in retrospect, I should have.)
-Carolyn
I call BS. You'd melt. My wife did...
I am awed that you are perceptive enough to judge my reaction based on one post.
Out of curiosity, how much materials science does your wife know? Does she really understand how chemically unremarkable a diamond is? Are you both aware how prices have been inflated through cynical marketing because a mining cartel in the 1800's realized how little intrisic worth a diamond really has? Does your wife know just how blood-soaked that diamond you bought her is? (Retracted if you bought a Canadian or otherwise "clean" stone.)
I do not buy into the DeBeers-fostered sugar-fest about diamonds being "forever" or indicative of "eternal love." Symbols have only as much meaning as the participants in a tradition give them, and to me, diamonds mean a monopoly built on market manipulation and slave labor. My principles are worth far more than the few grand an engagement ring costs.
Also...I'm left-handed. An engagement ring and wedding band would just get in the way. ~_^
-Carolyn
If my hypothetical fiance presented me with a $14,000 lump of carbon, my first response would be "Are you fuckin' insane?!"
My second would be "Sell the rock and let's get a plasma TV."
Gems are just sparkly pencil lead.
-Carolyn
For my senior thesis, I helped design a proposed Mars mission. I was working at Johnson when Columbia broke up, but I've since graduated and am no longer associated with NASA, and can speak freely.
I'm not sure to start on what's wrong with NASA. Many other posters have covered that in detail, and I think many of them are spot on.
But there is one thing very, very right--the people. From janitors and groundskeepers, all the way to the directors of the various centers, NASA employees are passionately devoted to the job they do. Losing Columbia hurt like losing members of their families, hurt their professional pride, hurt that part of their souls where they keep their their dedication and hope. They will continue because there is still work to be done, because the journey is still unfinished, because that's what their fallen comrades wanted. This spark is fundamental to NASA--the institutional culture cannot extinguish it, but I fear that it may become impotent.
Space travel is costly and risky. It will be centuries before we can consider it routine. The people of NASA have the expertise and the will to carry on, but will they be permitted to do so? I say, Stand aside and let your scientists and engineers work. Let your astronauts fly. They may greatly fail, but it will be because they have greatly dared.
We've forgotten courage, I think.
-Carolyn
This once-in-60000-years or whatever is a silly technicality.
So was the clock rolling over to 2000 three years back. Even though it was an artifact of the dating system, and didn't actually signify a millenium in that system, people were still out partying. We like marking biggests, bests, and firsts.
I think anything that gets people looking up at the sky is a good thing. Maybe a sense of wonder needs a kick-start in some people. If the hype surrounding this particular opposition convinces people to look up and actually see the heavens for once, in their majesty and awesome beauty, then the superlatives getting thrown around don't bother me.
You obviously don't need the help. But please don't go all sour on those who do.
Even though Mars will subtend a visually undetectably larger arc, I'm still going to be up on the roof in the boonies with my wimpy little 4" refracting 'scope to take a look at the polar caps. And I'll feel that thrill of hitting the focus just right and resolving a disc out of a distant point of light. I want other people, people who don't care about science enough to understand why any other opposition would work just as well, to know what that feels like, too. The mathematical difference between a few arc-seconds may be minute, but the emotional difference is huge.
-Carolyn
Think about it.
What's wrong with public office by lottery? We choose juries that way. Most people selected at random would not be in the game for money or power. A truly random selection of the population would better represent the majority opinion than our current system, which chooses those who self-select for politics. Any true loonies chosen would, statistically, be balanced by other true loonies with diametric opinions. Government should not be so complicated that an ordinary person of good will would be unable to handle it. The reason it is now is because we have a government of lawyers and career politicians.
Of course...this assumes that your population has some sense of civic responsibility--so forget I said anything, I guess.
-Carolyn
That headline made my lunch break.
"Mommy, make Big Blue stop picking on me!"
Hee hee.
Why spoil it by RTFA?
Mmm, nummy sammich.
-Carolyn
Is mathematics running into the same barrier as physics? It's just getting too complex and what do you do?
;D
I don't think math can ever be "too complex." Certain problems can be beyond our ability to solve, but that is the fault of our models and tools. We're just now starting to work on the problems that, 40, 50 years ago, people set aside as insoluble because they lacked the computational power to plow through them. The problem with complexity exists only in the real world; pure mathematics can be as infinitely complex as the human mind can devise. It's just that, eventually, these elegant structures cease to have any purpose outside of mathematical aesthetics. I like pure math, but there's not a lot you can do with some of the really out-there stuff except set it aside and wait until we trip over a physical problem that it just happens to fit.
Math as used in engineering and science is just a way to describe the world. Take Newtonian and relativistic gravitation. The Newtonian model is simple and adequately describes gravitation in day to day life. It's what we could call a coarse model--rough and makes some wrong assumptions, but it gets the job done. The relativistic model is much truer to how gravity actually works, a more refined model than the Newtonian, but it contains math that only a specialist can really understand, and isn't necessary for a great many cases where we need to model gravitation. Coarse models usually have much more elegant math than refined ones, but they don't always provide the detail necessary. It's the refined models that are hitting the complexity barrier--our need to describe the physical world in greater and greater detail is outstripping the tools we have with which to describe it.
If you can't given an exact answer, estimate the result and give upper bounds for the error.
The math is never how things really are. There's no such thing as an "exact" answer. Your answers are only exact to the limits of your equipment, or to the certainty of your mathematical model, whichever is less. All our science, all our technology, is built atop our best guess. Then, we hand it off to the philosophers.
-Carolyn
I've been seeing a lot of comments disappointed with brute-force problem-solving--but I am all for it. Here's why:
In my job, I do fine structural analysis and computational fluid dynamics for aerospace design. Aerospace engineering is rapidly reaching the point where simplified, elegant models are inadequate to the real-world structures they are meant to mimic. For instance, the Navier-Stokes equations, a set of second-order partial differential equations which describe fluid flow, are not susceptible to analytical solution in any but the most simplified cases, and as things like airfoils, turbine blades, and computers grow more refined, their properties require much hairier math to describe. Turbulent flow around a wing or turbine blade has no elegant solution, but a brute-force computational model can yield a solution that allows us to design a lighter wing, and thus a more fuel-efficient plane, or a stronger turbine fan, and a more efficient generator. Or, to cite an example near and dear to many slashdotter hearts, as we can better model the heat transfer inside a microprocessor, we can better devise ways to cool it, and thus build a faster, more stable computer. (And then, we can solve more iterations on it, and build an even faster computer...and then we can solve more iterations... ^_~)
There is an intense intellectual satisfaction to a 20 or 100 line proof (I still remember the triumph of my high school proof that a triangle's interior angles sum to 180), but for a lot of things, there simply exist no such proofs. As we tackle more and more mathematical problems, those with relatively simple proofs will quickly be solved and set aside, and we will move on to messier things. For instance, the proof of Fermat's Theorem runs to several hundred pages of dense elliptic curve math. It was an aesthetic disappointment for those hoping for a simpler solution, but it was a triumph for the field of mathematics as a whole.
There is a whole 'nother world of proofs involved in brute-force solutions. Estimated time to solution, order of error--elegant mathematical tools are still necessary, but they are increasingly used to delineate regions of uncertainty as the complete picture becomes messier. The closer mathematical models get to the real world, the more complex and beautiful, but the less elegant, they become. I do not think that the field of mathematics will stop producing elegant proofs, but I do think they will have less and less to do with the world we live in and more and more to do with hypothetical mathematical constructs, whose usefulness will then filter down in the form of special cases to more prosaic disciplines, like science and engineering. This diminishes neither science nor engineering, and adds to the knowledge available in all fields.
-Carolyn
...went down and then back up in about 10 seconds. Really screwed up our dyanmic IP allocations for a while.
And it's *obviously* terrorism. Any out-of-the-ordinary event not instantly explained is terrorism!
(...sounds like a regional grid overload to me...)
-Carolyn
Would deaths by suicide skyrocket?
-Carolyn
My parents used to tape a program on public television called Discover: The World of Science, presumably related to the magazine. Peter Graves hosted it, and my folks would stick one of the tapes in the VCR to keep me amused when I was being difficult.
The format was a series of 15-20 minute pieces on various neat pieces of science, and I distinctly remeber a segement about a "talking glove." It was a mechanical hand on a small stand with a keyboard and Hawking-esque voice synthesizer, and a glove wired with electrodes. When someone typed into the keyboard, the hand would fingerspell whatever was being typed. When a person wearing the glove fingerspelled something, the voice would read it out, a la Mac SimpleText (anyone else get in trouble with that in school when it first came out?) The system had to be trained to recognize someone's fingerspelling. They showed a deaf and blind woman going out shopping with the system, not needing an interpreter.
Based on the hairstyles I remember from the program and my age at the time, this would have been in the mid to late 80's. I have no way of proving I'm not making this up, of course.
-Carolyn
I'll look into it. Thanks!
(As should be blazingly obvious by now, I know little about telephony. But I do know when I'm gettin' screwed.)
-Carolyn
If you have cable you may have access to phone service over the cable.
I tried to get phone service from the cable company. They claimed they couldn't provide it, which I found fishy in light of the fact that I was getting cable TV and Internet. So I investigated. Turns out that SBC and my apartment complex have an agreement which blocks other phone providers. Frustrating, no? And possibly actionable. Hope my landlords get back to me next week.
SBC screwed me for years paying an extra 15$ a month for a "metro" line so I could call to downtown Dallas even though downtown Dallas could call me in the burbs without the charge. I swore I would never pay SBC another cent.
I've had 'em for 2 months so far and I already want the company to die the Death of a Thousand Frivolous Lawsuits. Damn monopoly tactics...
-Carolyn
Again, this is not SBC's fault. Many businesses do this all the time, its called doing business. They never forced the apartment complex to sign this deal. Blame the right people, the apartment complex management. (atleast you talked to them so your on the right track).
At least we agree about my landlords. My apartment complex made a deal restricting which services I can hire, to which nowhere in my lease did I agree. (I think I specifically agreed not to sell drugs, though.)
As for SBC--my apartment complex isn't buying their services. I am. SBC made a deal with someone not authorized to neogtiate on my behalf, which is at best a failure of due diligence, and at worst very, very illegal. I suspect both parties are counting on no one complaining.
and since you like signage so much (because it helps oh so much to identify people), here ya go.
Do I detect a whiff of sarcasm? It's only tangentially about identification. It has more to do with guts.
-Troll
I have a friend who goes by the nickname "Troll." He uses apostrophes better than you do.
-Carolyn
I was royally screwed (if you totalled up the dollars and the cost of my time, etc., it was thousands of dollars) by SBC over about 6 months a few years back.
/. bitching about it.
Their "customer service" makes me want to tear my hair out. I called 'em to scale back the services I was getting to just a phone line...you would have thought I was speaking Ancient Greek with a thick Russian accent for all the comprehension registering on the other end.
ME: I'd like to cancel the deluxe package, please.
HER: Are you dissatisfied with the quality of the service you are recieving?
ME: No, I just don't need it.
HER: Do you feel that you have had enough time to evaluate this service.
ME: Yes, and I just don't need it.
HER: You are aware that your caller ID will no longer work, callers who call when you are on the phone will recieve a busy signal--
ME: Yes. And I JUST DON'T NEED IT.
Repeat 3x. Eventually get extra services cancelled. Later that week receive a US$163 phone bill. Post to
my phone service (including 911) is via a gadget that plugs into my hub.
Any idea how good their call tracing is? I would just use my cell for everything, including emergencies, except the landline gives a name and address to the 911 dispatcher. Handy if I'm, y'know, gasping my last as the axe murderer is slowly dismembering my boyfriend in the shower--or if I'm having a severe anaphylactic reaction, which seems slightly more likely.
-Carolyn
Companies holding monopolies should be physically broken down. >:[=
I'm picturing mobs of irate villagers, wielding pitchforks and firebrands. Not sure that's exactly how to go about it...
re sig: The version I'm familiar with is "If you can't baffle 'em with brilliance, befuddle 'em with bullshit."
Hmm. Verbs aside, I find it's a maxim that has served me quite well, both in college and in the corporate world beyond.
Bless Dad's black, misanthropic little heart.
-Carolyn
And exactly how is this SBC's fault that you can't get the service you want.
Come on, you talk about your apartment complex not having a certain service (irrelevant, don't bitch to me)
SBC specifically negotiated an agreement whereby they block competing services, which are otherwise available in my area. This is both their fault and relevant.
Then don't buy it [SBC DSL].
I didn't. But you already knew that, from the rest of my post.
the lines belong to SBC. If they don't want to sell them to someone they don't have to. However, chances are it is because of financials. SBC said they wanted to charge so much and Speakeasy said no (again, not SBC's problem)
They do, in fact, have to sell them, because otherwise they run afoul of monopoly laws. SBC charges too much for use of their lines, again, blocking competition. This makes them a de facto monopoly, which is not simply a dull game with dice, real estate, and Get Out of Jail Free cards, but also an illegal market practice.
It is a load of duplicitous crap for SBC to say, "we offered our lines but they wouldn't pay" when SBC knows it is charging too much for any other company to turn a profit. It's analogous to offering someone a ride, but driving too fast for them to get in the car, then saying it's their fault they didn't run fast enough.
(It may also get SBC in trouble with the whole Common Carrier thing, but I don't want to look it up and you certainly don't care.)
In conclusion, if you can't even be arsed to sign your trolls, piss off.
-Carolyn
They have an (extremely sketchy) agreement with my apartment complex under which they are the only available phone service. This locks me out of both cheaper digital phone service from the local cable company, and also a neat little promotion where I would have been getting a substantial discount for ordering multiple services. I'm talking to managment, but no headway yet.
SBC DSL is also a ripoff--I wanted to get Speakeasy, but SBC won't share their lines. Hence, my cable modem will be delivered today or Monday.
A hearty >:p to SBC. I'd cut my landline and go entirely cellular but for reliable 911 service.
-Carolyn