Who gets to determine the difference between responsible dissent and irresponsible dissent? A Conservative might claim that comparing George Bush to Hitler is "irresponsible", while a Liberal might say that claiming Obama is not a U.S. Citizen is "irresponsible."
It's best just to let people who are wrong keep talking, and simply ignore them. Shutting them up with the power of the government is a bad idea - because those same powers could be used against people trying to bring attention to government misdeeds, like the people in Boston who were arrested for recording what they saw as police brutality.
The first course will be far more useful to you than the second course. You need a solid background in discrete math to prove algorithms are correct and to prove things about their running times. The second course would be more useful to someone who will need advanced math for modeling things. Even if you eventually go on to take the second course, the first will definitely prove useful to you.
Maybe your problem is your unwillingness to 'whore the product out' - advertising is supposedly the number one indicator of whether a small business succeeds or fails. If nobody's heard of your app, why would they buy it?
The existence of natural climate change on Mars does not rule out anthropogenic climate change on Earth. The shifts in temperature on Mars happened over periods of hundreds of thousands of years. The climate change we're observing on earth has happened in less than 100 years. There's a huge difference between the two phenomena.
Fred Brooks put it best in 'The Mythical Man Month:'
"...when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse. More fire requires more gasoline, and thus begins a regenerative cycle which ends in disaster."
Most likely, I'm missing something here, but this seems obvious to me, as a simple result of the fact that cellular Automata are Turing complete:
A model of the universe is nothing other than an algorithm for converting initial conditions into empirical measurements. Initial conditions and empirical measurements are both describable in terms of numbers. Therefore, any model of the universe is an algorithm for converting numbers into numbers, and thus expressible as a Turing machine. Since cellular automata are Turing complete, any model of the universe is expressible as some cellular automaton. QED, bitches.
As an aside note, the fact that some model (e.g. cellular automaton) is capable of predicting everythign we've experienced in no way implies that the model is 'real' - i.e. that the universe is really a finite automaton / Turing machine.
The grad students do all the work, and the professor takes all the credit. Anyone can come up with ideas, the real work is in actually getting things done. This is the reason I stopped grad school with my MS even though I LOVE computer science, more than anyone i've ever met.
God is a computer programmer who made the many species by writing in some high level language which is ultimately compiled into DNA. The similarities in DNA among different species are a result of code re-use, and mammals are his (her?) "flagship product." He's currently refactoring the code, to make it more efficient.
I don't get network neutrality. Could someone explain it to me? This is not a troll, this is an honest attempt to understand a different point of view.
I call myself a 'conservatively liberal libertarian' which means I believe markets are great as long as they're reasonably regulated to prevent collusion and outright theft, but I'm not an Ayn-Rand syncophant. I just don't see what the harm in letting people who own pipes on the internet give preference to different traffic on those pipes. I'd gladly pay more to have my starcraft traffic given preference to someone else's email messages or porn downloads. What's the harm in that?
If you say that the prices will go through the roof because companies can charge whatever they want, I really don't think you understand how markets work.
I think the key to winning the evoultion vs. creationism argument is to have respect for the other side. I know this is hard to do when creationism seems so ludicrous, but keep a few things in mind.
Firstly, properly constructed creationist theories are not falsifiable. If I said that God created the universe 5,000 years ago, but he made it look as if it'd been around for billions of years in order to test our faith, you couldn't prove me wrong. Radio-Carbon dating is based upon the assumption that at one time the ratio of carbon isotopes was at a certain level - you can't use it to prove the age of an object unless you first posit that the object had, at one time, a certain ratio of isotopes. If I just claimed that the object never had that ratio because it was never alive (i.e. that fossil was created as a fossil), you couldn't prove me wrong. Falsifiability is KEY to science, which means creationism can never be science, but it also means that creationism can never be shown to be wrong.
Second, There are intelligent creationists out there. I am working with a guy who got a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science at Stanford. He's absolutely brilliant, and he's also a young earth creationist. You're never going to win a guy like that over by telling him he's stupid and that he's destroying science.
The ONLY way to win someone's mind over is to be patient and respectful. Every human being (even creationists and republicans) deserves that much.
Suppose you have an alphabet with 'S' different Symbols. There are S^N possible strings of length N. The authors say of that paper claim that the difficulty in reading an N digit string is proportional to the product SN. Therefore, what we'd like to do is minimize the product SN while keeping S^N Constant.
That means we define k = S^N, and therefore ln k = N ln S, so N = (ln k / ln S). That means we're trying to choose an S to minimize f(S) = S * (ln k / ln S).
If f(S) = (S / ln S) * ln(k), then
f'(S) = (S*(-1/S) + + ln(-S))* ln k
f'(S) = (-1 + ln(-S)) * ln k
The function reaches its minimum when the derviative is 0, so:
0 = (-1 + ln(-S))* ln k
1 = ln(-S)
1 = 1/ln(S)
ln(S) = 1
S = e
Does anyone else find it as depressing as I do that such obviously intelligent, motivated individuals can't find a more productive use of their talents?
You could get a job as a Program Manager or similar position. They do more design work than actual programming. Those positions pay about the same as programming positions.
Communism and Anarchy would only work if people were not jerks - you're right about that. Capitalism works because it's based upon the assumption that people will be jerks. The point of a market economy is to try to make it so that even selfish jerks are forced into helping other people. Without government intervention, the best way to make a ton of money is to do your damndest to help your fellow man by building a company that produces desired goods at dirt cheap prices.
The key problem with capitalism is that the government does interfere with the markets - you get big corporations (aka microsoft) pressuring the government to give them special breaks and abilities. Government subsidies are NOT a part of capitalism - they run counter to the nature of free markets.
The idea that capitalism encourages greed is akin to saying that having fire departments encourages people to start fires. People will be greedy no matter what social system they live in - captialism is simply designed to alleviate that condition as much as possible.
Anybody with a parachute will "plummet to the ground at terminal velocity." Terminal velocity is different for different objects - The purpose of a parachute is to make your terminal velocity low enough that you won't get hurt.
Clearly, this isn't a partisan issue. The bill that just passed did so with the approval of the democratic controlled congress. People are playing partisan games over this because, unfortunately, it makes political sense to do so. Politics don't help anyone make rational decisions, though, so let's get them out of the way.
Clearly, there is a security case to be made for listening to phone calls without warrants. If a known member of al-Qaeda makes a call into the united states, there isn't time to ask a judge to approve a wiretap. Even more clearly, the power to tap phones could very easily be abused. This is slashdot; we're all paranoid here. Having phones with built in mechanisms for wiretapping is just asking for all kinds of trouble.
I think the most rational response to this is to recognize the usefulness of such a program, and then attempt to design one that is as impervious to manipulation as possible. General rules that have proven useful for this sort of thing in the past:
Distribution of Power - You don't want one guy making all the decisions. The problem with spreading power out too much here is that you'll completely ruin the effectiveness of the program. You can't wait for three committees and a judge to hear the case. Balance is needed.
Transparency - There needs to be a list made of all calls that have been recorded, along with the name of someone who approved this recording. This is risky because it exposes the people who made the decisions to liability, but i think that's a necessary risk in order to safeguard privacy. Especially when coupled with some sort of protection mechanism.
Protection - One of the reasons the bush administration likes secrecy so much is that people are more likely to make decisions when they know they're not going to be held accountable for them. It definitely sounds shady, but how many decisions would you make if you knew you'd be held liable (potentially criminally) for everything you did, by a group of people notorious for getting pissed off? Oftentimes decisions that made perfect sense at the time sound absurd in hindsight, and you're always going to be safer by ignoring potential problems than trying to act on them.
The people making these decisions need to be guaranteed protection from harassment by groups like CAIR who'll undoubtedly continue their past behavior of attempting to use the legal system to bully anyone who tries to do anything to a moslem.
Ultimately, though, it's not our laws that keep us safe. It's not the Constitution that protects our liberties. We are free because we have a culture that values freedom above almost all else. Personally, I think it's a culture worth aggressively defending. Will we sacrifice some freedom in the defense of freedom? Of course. From a historical perspective, all American wars have resulted in the citizenry being less free. Lincoln and Wilson both threw detractors in jail. Nobody is proposing that here. The loss of freedom is extremely mild from an historical perspective. When the struggle is over, the freedoms will return like they always have in the past, as long as we demand them, which we will. If you think the struggle is never going to be over; you're absolutely right. Until we get everybody in the country as committed to destroying al-qaeda as they are to protecting moslems from being offended and suspected terrorist's phone calls from being interpreted, nothing is going to get accomplished.
Parent is dead on. Hydrogen isn't a fuel source - it's a great way to store energy, but there simply isn't enough on earth to consider it a source of fuel.
Slashdot Mirror
Who gets to determine the difference between responsible dissent and irresponsible dissent? A Conservative might claim that comparing George Bush to Hitler is "irresponsible", while a Liberal might say that claiming Obama is not a U.S. Citizen is "irresponsible."
It's best just to let people who are wrong keep talking, and simply ignore them. Shutting them up with the power of the government is a bad idea - because those same powers could be used against people trying to bring attention to government misdeeds, like the people in Boston who were arrested for recording what they saw as police brutality.
The first course will be far more useful to you than the second course. You need a solid background in discrete math to prove algorithms are correct and to prove things about their running times. The second course would be more useful to someone who will need advanced math for modeling things. Even if you eventually go on to take the second course, the first will definitely prove useful to you.
Maybe your problem is your unwillingness to 'whore the product out' - advertising is supposedly the number one indicator of whether a small business succeeds or fails. If nobody's heard of your app, why would they buy it?
The existence of natural climate change on Mars does not rule out anthropogenic climate change on Earth. The shifts in temperature on Mars happened over periods of hundreds of thousands of years. The climate change we're observing on earth has happened in less than 100 years. There's a huge difference between the two phenomena.
Fred Brooks put it best in 'The Mythical Man Month:'
"...when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse. More fire requires more gasoline, and thus begins a regenerative cycle which ends in disaster."
Most likely, I'm missing something here, but this seems obvious to me, as a simple result of the fact that cellular Automata are Turing complete:
A model of the universe is nothing other than an algorithm for converting initial conditions into empirical measurements. Initial conditions and empirical measurements are both describable in terms of numbers. Therefore, any model of the universe is an algorithm for converting numbers into numbers, and thus expressible as a Turing machine. Since cellular automata are Turing complete, any model of the universe is expressible as some cellular automaton. QED, bitches.
As an aside note, the fact that some model (e.g. cellular automaton) is capable of predicting everythign we've experienced in no way implies that the model is 'real' - i.e. that the universe is really a finite automaton / Turing machine.
The grad students do all the work, and the professor takes all the credit. Anyone can come up with ideas, the real work is in actually getting things done. This is the reason I stopped grad school with my MS even though I LOVE computer science, more than anyone i've ever met.
They only want nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. I can only hope Israel pulls another Osirak on these assholes before it's too late.
If the conversion process is resilient enough, it might not depend upon the image having an identical binary format.
God is a computer programmer who made the many species by writing in some high level language which is ultimately compiled into DNA. The similarities in DNA among different species are a result of code re-use, and mammals are his (her?) "flagship product." He's currently refactoring the code, to make it more efficient.
Someone with a high BMI might be overweight - or they might be in really good shape and have lots of muscle. Just something to think about.
What exactly is the 'dire fallacy' involved in socioeconomic Darwinism?
Thanks. I think the answer to the problem is not Network Neutrality, then, but removing local monopolies on internet / cable TV service.
I don't get network neutrality. Could someone explain it to me? This is not a troll, this is an honest attempt to understand a different point of view.
I call myself a 'conservatively liberal libertarian' which means I believe markets are great as long as they're reasonably regulated to prevent collusion and outright theft, but I'm not an Ayn-Rand syncophant. I just don't see what the harm in letting people who own pipes on the internet give preference to different traffic on those pipes. I'd gladly pay more to have my starcraft traffic given preference to someone else's email messages or porn downloads. What's the harm in that?
If you say that the prices will go through the roof because companies can charge whatever they want, I really don't think you understand how markets work.
I think the key to winning the evoultion vs. creationism argument is to have respect for the other side. I know this is hard to do when creationism seems so ludicrous, but keep a few things in mind.
Firstly, properly constructed creationist theories are not falsifiable. If I said that God created the universe 5,000 years ago, but he made it look as if it'd been around for billions of years in order to test our faith, you couldn't prove me wrong. Radio-Carbon dating is based upon the assumption that at one time the ratio of carbon isotopes was at a certain level - you can't use it to prove the age of an object unless you first posit that the object had, at one time, a certain ratio of isotopes. If I just claimed that the object never had that ratio because it was never alive (i.e. that fossil was created as a fossil), you couldn't prove me wrong. Falsifiability is KEY to science, which means creationism can never be science, but it also means that creationism can never be shown to be wrong.
Second, There are intelligent creationists out there. I am working with a guy who got a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science at Stanford. He's absolutely brilliant, and he's also a young earth creationist. You're never going to win a guy like that over by telling him he's stupid and that he's destroying science.
The ONLY way to win someone's mind over is to be patient and respectful. Every human being (even creationists and republicans) deserves that much.
It's pretty easy to derive this result.
Suppose you have an alphabet with 'S' different Symbols. There are S^N possible strings of length N. The authors say of that paper claim that the difficulty in reading an N digit string is proportional to the product SN. Therefore, what we'd like to do is minimize the product SN while keeping S^N Constant.
That means we define k = S^N, and therefore ln k = N ln S, so N = (ln k / ln S). That means we're trying to choose an S to minimize f(S) = S * (ln k / ln S).
If f(S) = (S / ln S) * ln(k), then
f'(S) = (S*(-1/S) + + ln(-S))* ln k
f'(S) = (-1 + ln(-S)) * ln k
The function reaches its minimum when the derviative is 0, so:
0 = (-1 + ln(-S))* ln k
1 = ln(-S)
1 = 1/ln(S)
ln(S) = 1
S = e
Does anyone else find it as depressing as I do that such obviously intelligent, motivated individuals can't find a more productive use of their talents?
You could get a job as a Program Manager or similar position. They do more design work than actual programming. Those positions pay about the same as programming positions.
My undergrad did a fine job of teaching me, but they don't grant Ph.D's - why don't I count?
I'll have to change my license plate.
Communism and Anarchy would only work if people were not jerks - you're right about that. Capitalism works because it's based upon the assumption that people will be jerks. The point of a market economy is to try to make it so that even selfish jerks are forced into helping other people. Without government intervention, the best way to make a ton of money is to do your damndest to help your fellow man by building a company that produces desired goods at dirt cheap prices.
The key problem with capitalism is that the government does interfere with the markets - you get big corporations (aka microsoft) pressuring the government to give them special breaks and abilities. Government subsidies are NOT a part of capitalism - they run counter to the nature of free markets.
The idea that capitalism encourages greed is akin to saying that having fire departments encourages people to start fires. People will be greedy no matter what social system they live in - captialism is simply designed to alleviate that condition as much as possible.
I keep hearing that somebody's out there claiming Saddam planned 9/11 - who is saying this? I've never heard it anywhere.
Anybody with a parachute will "plummet to the ground at terminal velocity." Terminal velocity is different for different objects - The purpose of a parachute is to make your terminal velocity low enough that you won't get hurt.
Clearly, this isn't a partisan issue. The bill that just passed did so with the approval of the democratic controlled congress. People are playing partisan games over this because, unfortunately, it makes political sense to do so. Politics don't help anyone make rational decisions, though, so let's get them out of the way.
Clearly, there is a security case to be made for listening to phone calls without warrants. If a known member of al-Qaeda makes a call into the united states, there isn't time to ask a judge to approve a wiretap. Even more clearly, the power to tap phones could very easily be abused. This is slashdot; we're all paranoid here. Having phones with built in mechanisms for wiretapping is just asking for all kinds of trouble.
I think the most rational response to this is to recognize the usefulness of such a program, and then attempt to design one that is as impervious to manipulation as possible. General rules that have proven useful for this sort of thing in the past:
Ultimately, though, it's not our laws that keep us safe. It's not the Constitution that protects our liberties. We are free because we have a culture that values freedom above almost all else. Personally, I think it's a culture worth aggressively defending. Will we sacrifice some freedom in the defense of freedom? Of course. From a historical perspective, all American wars have resulted in the citizenry being less free. Lincoln and Wilson both threw detractors in jail. Nobody is proposing that here. The loss of freedom is extremely mild from an historical perspective. When the struggle is over, the freedoms will return like they always have in the past, as long as we demand them, which we will. If you think the struggle is never going to be over; you're absolutely right. Until we get everybody in the country as committed to destroying al-qaeda as they are to protecting moslems from being offended and suspected terrorist's phone calls from being interpreted, nothing is going to get accomplished.
Parent is dead on. Hydrogen isn't a fuel source - it's a great way to store energy, but there simply isn't enough on earth to consider it a source of fuel.