No wonder every time I'm staying in the U.S. and flick a hotel TV on I'm met with there-is-no-cure-for-herpes ads in practically every commercial break - it must be a booming business.
AFAIK, herpes stats are pretty much the same for the US and European countries.
You know, I wish that somehow "I didn't feel like using method X" weren't counted as failure or improper use in the contraceptive-effectiveness stats. If it weren't, then abstinence would of course be considered 100% effective, but the condom stats would also be a heck of a lot better. As it is, the commonly-cited condom effectiveness stats are all screwed up and seem pretty worthless because, since they don't differentiate between failure of the condom itself, actual improper use, and just not bothering occasionally to use one (which euphemistically gets called "improper use," but I say that's bullshit), I get the impression that they overstate the risk.
Seconded. GLUT is probably the easiest way to get started. If you go to the GLUT page you'll also find a list of OSS alternatives to GLUT (GLUT is free but closed-source) if you'd prefer to use one of those. Although this tutorial makes a reference in the beginning to some MSVC-specific pragmas to set linker options, it's probably pretty good for your purposes on the whole. Finally, there are other forums more specifically geared towards the things you're interested in; e.g. gamedev.net.
I guess that the availability of schematics and hardware specs makes it easier for people who want to write drivers; I can't see much broader (say, legal) significance than this. Of course, I'm not a lawyer.
money (and its associated concepts: cost and value) are basically information summarization mechanisms.
This much I agree with. And I think this is more key than even you are acknowledging!
Here's my issue: You refer to
The decision problem in a command economy [.]
This is precisely my problem: What mathematical optimization problem?
Whichever problem it is, you assert that
is asymptotically exponential
but that depends of course on which problem is actually being solved, and this is something we haven't established yet. One plausible way to pose the problem actually does give you something that can be solved by a centralized algorithm in polynomial time; that algorithm is called the Hungarian algorithm. As far as I know, finding a decentralized equivalent is still an open problem.
Next:
but the use of money allows a free market economy to reduce the decision problem to one that is polynomial.
In principle, there's nothing a billion little computers can do that one big one can't; as I mentioned before, any parallel algorithm can be made sequential. So if the problem is nothing but solving a particular optimization problem with full information, then in principle a command economy should always be able to do no worse than a decentralized economy, simply by simulating the decentralized one inside a big computer in the Kremlin.
It has nothing to do with human nature, they simply allocate resources far more efficiently.
See, I would argue that it is exactly human nature, and more specifically an inability or an unwillingness to share private valuations of things that causes the problem. The optimization algorithm requires as input peoples' honest preferences, and they don't reveal (or perhaps even really know) this.
Yeah, this is on the level of an ENGS62/31 project, and I'd hope that most EEs would be able to do this by the time they graduated. Still, as such projects go it's pretty good; if I were teaching a course at that level and a student handed this in as a final project she'd get an A on it.
A decentralized optimization algorithm would be like...evolution. An invisible hand that takes on a life of its own, quite literally. A free-market environment is like that. Along with the good, bad, and ugly.
A centralized approach is often a solution looking for a problem which leads to wasteful use of human/material resources.
Ok, I thought you had a mathematical model in your head... I guess not. Fair enough; the points you raise may well be true; we're just not talking about math or about optimization any more. Ok.
Hate to break it to you, but testicular cancer and prostate cancer are not caused by HPV
Oh, that's good news, since those cancers aren't too common... I don't remember where I'd read that HPV was linked to these other cancers...
At the very least vaccinating men would (1) prevent most kinds of genital warts, and (2) prevent men from infecting women (I'd hate to be responsible for, in effect, giving a woman cancer), so it still seems like a good idea.
I've dated a couple Chinese women, but I will never EVER do business in China. It's a losing proposition.
Aha! So that's how it works!
Pretty much. If you date a woman of another race, be prepared to have all the guys-you-thought-were-cool of that race resent you and reveal how racist they actually are. And other women of that race, for that matter.
Happened to my roommate (white guy; people thought he was dating an African-American girl (actually, he was gay, but they didn't know)); it was pretty bad for him and worse for her. Happened to another friend of mine (Indian guy, dating Chinese girl); her Chinese friends told her they didn't like that she was dating an Indian, and ostracized her until she ended it. There's also another (white) guy who I don't know personally, but who a number of Indian friends of mine have essentially said they don't like because he's dating an Indian girl (I react uncomfortably to this, and then they try to justify their reaction, and then we change the subject). Even happened to me a long-ish time ago (white guy, dating Chinese girl), but in my case, unlike the aforementioned, it wasn't quite as big a deal; still it was definitely there.
Seriously, nothing brings out the racism in people like dating one of "their" women. And of course, once you experience it, you become a little racist yourself. It's not so much ideological racism as it is defensive racism: you expect some racism directed against you, so you keep your guard up. This learned response is inevitable, unless (1) you restrict your dealings to people of other races to particular bounds (in which case these problems simply won't come up and you can be happily naive, like I was), or (2) you can't tell the "races" apart (Exhibit A: All the white ethnic groups who used to hate each other but who intermarried in the US. They still hate each other in Europe though, where language or accent still separates them; just read the letters-to-the-editor in a conservative English publication for evidence).
There are a few exceptions.
The first, I honestly believe, is educated white people in the US (i.e., we don't get pissed off when white women date minorities), for two reasons: (1) we've been drilled "not to be racist" since we were small (i.e., "white guilt"), and (2) there's no shortage of white women in the US. The flip side of #2 is that this ugly reaction probably does appear among Caucasians in places where they are a minority.
The second is certain highly-religious Christians. In this situation, I think interracial tension is alleviated because their peers, also Christian, honestly believe that the important distinction is not between races but between Christian and non-Christian. I single Christians out here as opposed to other religions because (1) this is a class of religions I have had some experience with, and (2) Christian faiths are on-the-whole evangelical, and not tied to a racial or ethnic identity (though there are certainly exceptions to this; just see the K.K.K.) Other evangelical faiths (e.g., Islam) may have the same property. Of course, these religious divisions aren't better than racial ones, just different.
Where am I going with all of this? Oh yeah: Grandparent's reaction is completely understandable.
On paper an economy is a glorified optimization problem, and communism is a shitty algorithm even theoretically.
Huh? Why should one expect a decentralized optimization algorithm to converge to a global optimum and a centralized one not to? If anything, shouldn't one expect more problems from the decentralized approach? There's nothing about e.g. Nash equilibrium for a matrix game that causes it to maximize the total reward to all players... Moreover, in principle the class of decentralized algorithms is really a subset of that of centralized ones (since parallel processes can always be serialized), so choosing a centralized approach is no limitation at all, except maybe for speed...
I'm not arguing for (or against) communism here; I just really don't get what you're getting at with your mathematical optimization metaphor...
when the public has no recourse against any drugs that the FDA has approved already
I'm confused; what do you mean? In what way does FDA approval shield a company from liability? And, if such a regulatory structure did not exist, what recourse would patients have? The civil courts?
If that “medical evidence” came from Elsevier, or Monsanto, etc, it’s worth shit.
Huh? Apples and oranges, as far as I know; they're two entirely different companies.
Elsevier, AFAIK, is just a publishing company which owns a number of academic journals; those journals are peer-reviewed in the usual manner (by academics -- who, if not always competent, are at least basically independent in my (limited?) experience). It's not a pharmeceutical company or anything. So while there might be a lot wrong with the academic publishing system, I don't see any reason to look at a journal that happens to be owned by Elsevier any differently from any other. Unless you really know something I don't.
Monsanto on the other hand is a giant chemical/agriculture/pharmaceutical corporation, and I'd be inclined not to trust anything with their name on it (or money funding it) -- in large part because, IIRC, they've been caught committing various kinds of fraud in the past...
I still don't understand why that vaccine doesn't work for (or at least isn't recommended for) men; we die of prostate and testicular cancer caused by HPV too...
I just hope it doesn't turn out to be just like other university subdepartments dedicated to "specialty" studies, home to a bunch of self-righteous blowhards who don't really know what they're talking about.
*sigh*.....yeah..... but it will.
There's a lot about video games that's interesting, but I seriously doubt these people will focus on those things. Really, games are formal mathematical systems. It could be interesting to study them as such.
Yeah, Facebook has begun to seriously scare me. I think it has been successful only because it started so slowly; we are frogs being boiled.
Remember how it started? Initially it was literally a web-based "facebook" -- like those printed things you used to get in college -- which (1) was restricted to students at a few Ivy-League schools, and (2) only shared information between people in the same "network" (which at the time meant "university"). Being on Facebook didn't mean broadcasting your profile to the entire world.
Then, over time, it became steadily less selective. First it opened up to non-Ivy-leage schools. Then eventually it opened up to everyone, dropping the academic associations entirely.
Trend-setting, upper-class, intelligent, elite-college-educated people signed up in the beginning because they thought it was a safe little sandbox for their own kind, and their presence made it respectable. Then slowly it opened up, morphing into Myspace -- but with the advantage that people who weren't dumb enough to give out their information on Myspace were already hooked.
It all feels pretty insidious.
In a generation, people will, I hope, rise up against this whole corporate-sponsored social networking thing and leave en masse. But what I'm afraid will actually happen is that they will instead grow up having Facebook profiles from the age of 10 up, with absolutely no expectation of privacy, or any idea that something is wrong.
Hear hear. I'm now at a large research-oriented state university (which is where you want to be for grad school), but I had your experience for undergrad, and I can say that the difference is night and day. I feel so sorry for the undergrads who ended up here. Those poor bastards.
Tools are amoral. The have no character, no conscience.
I kind of like this worldview; the belief in personal responsibility I think improves behavior. But one thing I find interesting is the amount of research indicating that we might not be as "in control" as we like to think we are; psychologists of a certain school call this the "fundamental attribution error." The basic conclusion is that the situation plays a much, much larger role in determining people's actions than who the people themselves are. Applied to the laptop issue, this would mean that perhaps the situation of being in the classroom with your laptop in front of you is more important in determining what you do than are any individual variations in self-control. In other words the laptop isn't neutral; it creates a situation in which people typically react in one of a few ways.
Still, from a rights perspective it may not be the professor's job to prevent people from putting themselves into bad situations. That sometimes people actually do use laptops or tablets to take notes would tend to reinforce this view.
Slashdot Mirror
No wonder every time I'm staying in the U.S. and flick a hotel TV on I'm met with there-is-no-cure-for-herpes ads in practically every commercial break - it must be a booming business.
AFAIK, herpes stats are pretty much the same for the US and European countries.
You know, I wish that somehow "I didn't feel like using method X" weren't counted as failure or improper use in the contraceptive-effectiveness stats. If it weren't, then abstinence would of course be considered 100% effective, but the condom stats would also be a heck of a lot better. As it is, the commonly-cited condom effectiveness stats are all screwed up and seem pretty worthless because, since they don't differentiate between failure of the condom itself, actual improper use, and just not bothering occasionally to use one (which euphemistically gets called "improper use," but I say that's bullshit), I get the impression that they overstate the risk.
It does not take doing a ho to get it. [...] it is not who you screw, but who the person 5 removed from you that had it and passed it on
True true.
This is no different than HIV
Except, on the plus side, it's currently curable, and on the minus side it's a hell of a lot more common.
Seconded. GLUT is probably the easiest way to get started. If you go to the GLUT page you'll also find a list of OSS alternatives to GLUT (GLUT is free but closed-source) if you'd prefer to use one of those. Although this tutorial makes a reference in the beginning to some MSVC-specific pragmas to set linker options, it's probably pretty good for your purposes on the whole. Finally, there are other forums more specifically geared towards the things you're interested in; e.g. gamedev.net.
True true. Your Hoover reference surprised me though; I really thought you'd be going with McCarthy on this one... :-)
I guess that the availability of schematics and hardware specs makes it easier for people who want to write drivers; I can't see much broader (say, legal) significance than this. Of course, I'm not a lawyer.
Funny, but I see it more as a pejorative
Me too.
It's not a good thing to be called, and not a good thing to call yourself anymore.
Agreed.
Anyway, my point was basically this: I've got the feeling that someone calling someone else a nerd on Slashdot probably is one too.
money (and its associated concepts: cost and value) are basically information summarization mechanisms.
This much I agree with. And I think this is more key than even you are acknowledging!
Here's my issue: You refer to
The decision problem in a command economy [.]
This is precisely my problem: What mathematical optimization problem?
Whichever problem it is, you assert that
is asymptotically exponential
but that depends of course on which problem is actually being solved, and this is something we haven't established yet. One plausible way to pose the problem actually does give you something that can be solved by a centralized algorithm in polynomial time; that algorithm is called the Hungarian algorithm. As far as I know, finding a decentralized equivalent is still an open problem.
Next:
but the use of money allows a free market economy to reduce the decision problem to one that is polynomial.
In principle, there's nothing a billion little computers can do that one big one can't; as I mentioned before, any parallel algorithm can be made sequential. So if the problem is nothing but solving a particular optimization problem with full information, then in principle a command economy should always be able to do no worse than a decentralized economy, simply by simulating the decentralized one inside a big computer in the Kremlin.
It has nothing to do with human nature, they simply allocate resources far more efficiently.
See, I would argue that it is exactly human nature, and more specifically an inability or an unwillingness to share private valuations of things that causes the problem. The optimization algorithm requires as input peoples' honest preferences, and they don't reveal (or perhaps even really know) this.
There's something about people calling each other geeks on Slashdot that just reeks of self-loathing.
Reference to recent Toyota recall. The cars supposedly accelerated even if you didn't tell them to.
Yeah, this is on the level of an ENGS62/31 project, and I'd hope that most EEs would be able to do this by the time they graduated. Still, as such projects go it's pretty good; if I were teaching a course at that level and a student handed this in as a final project she'd get an A on it.
Nice! An optimist!
A decentralized optimization algorithm would be like...evolution. An invisible hand that takes on a life of its own, quite literally. A free-market environment is like that. Along with the good, bad, and ugly. A centralized approach is often a solution looking for a problem which leads to wasteful use of human/material resources.
Ok, I thought you had a mathematical model in your head... I guess not. Fair enough; the points you raise may well be true; we're just not talking about math or about optimization any more. Ok.
Hate to break it to you, but testicular cancer and prostate cancer are not caused by HPV
Oh, that's good news, since those cancers aren't too common... I don't remember where I'd read that HPV was linked to these other cancers...
At the very least vaccinating men would (1) prevent most kinds of genital warts, and (2) prevent men from infecting women (I'd hate to be responsible for, in effect, giving a woman cancer), so it still seems like a good idea.
I've dated a couple Chinese women, but I will never EVER do business in China. It's a losing proposition.
Aha! So that's how it works!
Pretty much. If you date a woman of another race, be prepared to have all the guys-you-thought-were-cool of that race resent you and reveal how racist they actually are. And other women of that race, for that matter.
Happened to my roommate (white guy; people thought he was dating an African-American girl (actually, he was gay, but they didn't know)); it was pretty bad for him and worse for her. Happened to another friend of mine (Indian guy, dating Chinese girl); her Chinese friends told her they didn't like that she was dating an Indian, and ostracized her until she ended it. There's also another (white) guy who I don't know personally, but who a number of Indian friends of mine have essentially said they don't like because he's dating an Indian girl (I react uncomfortably to this, and then they try to justify their reaction, and then we change the subject). Even happened to me a long-ish time ago (white guy, dating Chinese girl), but in my case, unlike the aforementioned, it wasn't quite as big a deal; still it was definitely there.
Seriously, nothing brings out the racism in people like dating one of "their" women. And of course, once you experience it, you become a little racist yourself. It's not so much ideological racism as it is defensive racism: you expect some racism directed against you, so you keep your guard up. This learned response is inevitable, unless (1) you restrict your dealings to people of other races to particular bounds (in which case these problems simply won't come up and you can be happily naive, like I was), or (2) you can't tell the "races" apart (Exhibit A: All the white ethnic groups who used to hate each other but who intermarried in the US. They still hate each other in Europe though, where language or accent still separates them; just read the letters-to-the-editor in a conservative English publication for evidence).
There are a few exceptions.
The first, I honestly believe, is educated white people in the US (i.e., we don't get pissed off when white women date minorities), for two reasons: (1) we've been drilled "not to be racist" since we were small (i.e., "white guilt"), and (2) there's no shortage of white women in the US. The flip side of #2 is that this ugly reaction probably does appear among Caucasians in places where they are a minority.
The second is certain highly-religious Christians. In this situation, I think interracial tension is alleviated because their peers, also Christian, honestly believe that the important distinction is not between races but between Christian and non-Christian. I single Christians out here as opposed to other religions because (1) this is a class of religions I have had some experience with, and (2) Christian faiths are on-the-whole evangelical, and not tied to a racial or ethnic identity (though there are certainly exceptions to this; just see the K.K.K.) Other evangelical faiths (e.g., Islam) may have the same property. Of course, these religious divisions aren't better than racial ones, just different.
Where am I going with all of this? Oh yeah: Grandparent's reaction is completely understandable.
Perhaps we could go and mess with Toyotas to make the gas pedal malfunction and so the car won't stop.
Wrong country...
On paper an economy is a glorified optimization problem, and communism is a shitty algorithm even theoretically.
Huh? Why should one expect a decentralized optimization algorithm to converge to a global optimum and a centralized one not to? If anything, shouldn't one expect more problems from the decentralized approach? There's nothing about e.g. Nash equilibrium for a matrix game that causes it to maximize the total reward to all players... Moreover, in principle the class of decentralized algorithms is really a subset of that of centralized ones (since parallel processes can always be serialized), so choosing a centralized approach is no limitation at all, except maybe for speed...
I'm not arguing for (or against) communism here; I just really don't get what you're getting at with your mathematical optimization metaphor...
when the public has no recourse against any drugs that the FDA has approved already
I'm confused; what do you mean? In what way does FDA approval shield a company from liability? And, if such a regulatory structure did not exist, what recourse would patients have? The civil courts?
I'm really not seeing your argument...
If that “medical evidence” came from Elsevier, or Monsanto, etc, it’s worth shit.
Huh? Apples and oranges, as far as I know; they're two entirely different companies.
Elsevier, AFAIK, is just a publishing company which owns a number of academic journals; those journals are peer-reviewed in the usual manner (by academics -- who, if not always competent, are at least basically independent in my (limited?) experience). It's not a pharmeceutical company or anything. So while there might be a lot wrong with the academic publishing system, I don't see any reason to look at a journal that happens to be owned by Elsevier any differently from any other. Unless you really know something I don't.
Monsanto on the other hand is a giant chemical/agriculture/pharmaceutical corporation, and I'd be inclined not to trust anything with their name on it (or money funding it) -- in large part because, IIRC, they've been caught committing various kinds of fraud in the past...
I still don't understand why that vaccine doesn't work for (or at least isn't recommended for) men; we die of prostate and testicular cancer caused by HPV too...
I just hope it doesn't turn out to be just like other university subdepartments dedicated to "specialty" studies, home to a bunch of self-righteous blowhards who don't really know what they're talking about.
*sigh*.....yeah..... but it will.
There's a lot about video games that's interesting, but I seriously doubt these people will focus on those things. Really, games are formal mathematical systems. It could be interesting to study them as such.
Yeah, Facebook has begun to seriously scare me. I think it has been successful only because it started so slowly; we are frogs being boiled.
Remember how it started? Initially it was literally a web-based "facebook" -- like those printed things you used to get in college -- which (1) was restricted to students at a few Ivy-League schools, and (2) only shared information between people in the same "network" (which at the time meant "university"). Being on Facebook didn't mean broadcasting your profile to the entire world.
Then, over time, it became steadily less selective. First it opened up to non-Ivy-leage schools. Then eventually it opened up to everyone, dropping the academic associations entirely.
Trend-setting, upper-class, intelligent, elite-college-educated people signed up in the beginning because they thought it was a safe little sandbox for their own kind, and their presence made it respectable. Then slowly it opened up, morphing into Myspace -- but with the advantage that people who weren't dumb enough to give out their information on Myspace were already hooked.
It all feels pretty insidious.
In a generation, people will, I hope, rise up against this whole corporate-sponsored social networking thing and leave en masse. But what I'm afraid will actually happen is that they will instead grow up having Facebook profiles from the age of 10 up, with absolutely no expectation of privacy, or any idea that something is wrong.
Hear hear. I'm now at a large research-oriented state university (which is where you want to be for grad school), but I had your experience for undergrad, and I can say that the difference is night and day. I feel so sorry for the undergrads who ended up here. Those poor bastards.
Tools are amoral. The have no character, no conscience.
I kind of like this worldview; the belief in personal responsibility I think improves behavior. But one thing I find interesting is the amount of research indicating that we might not be as "in control" as we like to think we are; psychologists of a certain school call this the "fundamental attribution error." The basic conclusion is that the situation plays a much, much larger role in determining people's actions than who the people themselves are. Applied to the laptop issue, this would mean that perhaps the situation of being in the classroom with your laptop in front of you is more important in determining what you do than are any individual variations in self-control. In other words the laptop isn't neutral; it creates a situation in which people typically react in one of a few ways.
Still, from a rights perspective it may not be the professor's job to prevent people from putting themselves into bad situations. That sometimes people actually do use laptops or tablets to take notes would tend to reinforce this view.
1 - You didn't read the article, did you?
2 - Although their method for generating uniformly-random permutations is incorrect, they are doing nothing to favor IE.