Honestly, I've encountered someone who denied heredity. That was a bit extreme (and baffling)... More generally, I would say that evolution is difficult to understand simply because so many people walk away with so many wrong impressions, and so many who think they understand it don't. That said, it's certainly easier to understand than quantum theory - indeed, I think it's reasonably within the grasp of virtually everyone *if* they make the effort. If they already think they understand what it's saying, they usually won't.
Largely correct, but I think you place the starting point too late. Life probably didn't start out in a cell. Evolution may well still explain how it got from a bunch of replecating molecules to single celled organisms. The one point that evolution can't explain is the creation of the first molecules that make it more likely that other molecules similar to themselves will come to be compared to alernatives. What evolution *does* do is make it a whole lot *easier* to explain. Going with chance because it's simple, it's plainly a whole lot more likely that such a molecule would come about by chance than an entire organism. Other explainations are surely easier, too.
Actually, someone solved "trusting trust" for compilers a while back. Take known good source for a C compiler, compile on N compilers that are of sufficiently different origin so that the chance of both containing the *same* malicious modification is sufficiently small. This produces compilers which are (likely) bitwise different, but (necessarily) functionally equivalent unless one of them contains malicious code (or a bug). Compile the known good compiler source code with each of these new builds. As they are functionally equivalent, some of them may be faster than others, but what they produce will be *bitwise identical* if all N compilers are functioning properly. If you compare the output and all N builds are in fact bitwise identical, you've a high confidence that there is no malicious code in the final product that wasn't introduced in source.
We have learned a bit about project management and system design since America was founded. What is the legislative process but a large project to design a complex system? We certainly have to be careful while doing so, but we should certainly use this experience in informing the workings of our government.
Do note that there is already a certain amount of this going on. Consider the various versions posted on Thomas. It would be interesting to see this further refined.
I'm mildly disturbed by how much people simply rally behind their talking points, although not as surprised as I would like to be.
As I see it, this is an interesting perspective, and has the potential to clarify the human contribution to global warming, in either direction. What we need is to figure out how to get historical temperature data for the other planets. Fluctuations caused by external influences should correlate strongly. Deviations are probably caused by local factors. If we find a strong correlation that includes Earth only until recently at which point there is increasing deviation, this is pretty strong evidence for human cause in global warming. If we find a strong correlation that includes the Earth presently as well as earlier, then this is pretty strong evidence for a lack of human cause. I personally would expect the former and be surprised at the latter, but I'd accept the evidence once the astronomers and climatologists have had a look at it.
I guess it technically *is* O(N * log(N)) to the number of items, but this is misleading. It's actually O(N).
As pretty much everyone has pointed out, it's just radix sort. The time taken by radix sort scales linearly to the number of keys, and with the log of the maximum key that can be held by the container.
If we're dealing entirely with unique keys, this is of course >= log(N), by the pigeonhole principle and all that. If we may have duplicate keys, however, there may be more keys than container space, and radix *does* scale linearly to the keys.
Time to prepare and overhead of this alrogrithm are negligable in any context large enough for us to care about the O() of the algorithms. For some things, this *is* better than mergesort. I'm just not sure why it was posted, as it's also not new - it was invented over 50 years ago.
No, the foundation for most sensory experience cannot be *extra* sensory perception, for reasons which should be obvious in the expansion of the acronym.
I, for one, am calling all of my congresspeople, and insisting that Gonzales be impeached for gross incompetance. He serves, and is paid with my tax dollars, at the consent of Congress. If this is the level and type of service he is providing, I am not okay with money for his paycheck coming out of mine. The President and Vice President can only be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors;" there is no such standard for the officers of the executive branch, and I think something like this - particularly when added his previous statements - more than merits his removal. As far as I am concerned, he is fired. I'll be doing what I can to see that reality reflects this.
We need evidence. If someone has a condition which they can't or don't treat, and it leads them to commit a crime, they are responsible for that crime. Moral judgements depend on your specific moral framework. Laws should not be based upon morals, but upon protecting people from each other.
That said, we also must be protected from the government, and we must particularly protect those who are different from the majority - as the majority is usually able to take care of its own. As many statistical factors as there may be, we only know that someone is not overcoming those factors once they commit a crime.
"I couldn't help it" is not an excuse. Neither is "He won't be able to help it" a crime. If we are able to determine correlating factors, these may absolutely be used to justify providing resources which the individuals can take advantage of. They should not be used to force anything on anyone until they have committed a crime.
"We interpret the Second Amendment in military terms."
So America's founding fathers thought it necessary to make sure that future governments didn't prohibit their militaries from having weapons? Could someone please explain to me why they would consider this a) a threat to our liberties and b) a possible scenario.
"Silberman and Judge Thomas B. Griffith seemed to wrestle, however, with the meaning of the amendment's language about militias. If a well-regulated militia is no longer needed, they asked, is the right to bear arms still necessary?"
If a well-regulated militia is no longer necessary to our security, the second amendment asserts that we are not a free state. I might say this is an argument for shrinking the size of the military.
On a side note, I think we should amend the 2nd amendment to allow exceptions to be made in cases where one individual having a weapon is a significant threat to a large number of others - WMDs and so forth. Presently, banning such *is* a violation of the 2nd amendment - one we tolerate, because it makes so much sense. If it makes so much sense, however, certainly amending the law of the land is a more proper response than ignoring it.
It's 72 cents over what he's already paying for unlimited service, for the priveledge of using it in Canada rather than the US. While a little on the cheap side, this does not seem ridiculous. He's actually *not* expecting to get 35M for just 72 cents here.
No one cares how bad the worst game is for each system - even if purchased, it's not going to get much playtime if it falls below a certain threshold. How many bad games there are only matters if you're making uninformed decisions about what to play. What is interesting is whether there are enough good games to keep my schedule full, and the quality of those games. A much better metric would be the average of the best N games, where N is the number I'm likely to purchase. Now, this clearly differs from player to player, so it's more difficult to come up with a single number to represent it, but it would be a more informative comparison. I propose a triplet of averages for different values of N. The question is, what should those be? Might as well ask the question here... How many games do you buy in a year for a given console, and what type of gamer do you consider yourself?
Really, I'm worried more about an honest person reading through FISA and saying, "Everyone's been saying it says this, but it doesn't!"
Despite the Attorney General asserting that the laws governing wiretapping are extremely complicated, anyone who's had to maintain someone else's program of any reasonable size should be able to wrap their head around it pretty easily, and there's some interesting stuff there - I do recommend making the effort.
"FISA also specifies that it is the only law covering such surveillance."
Technically, it's 28 USC 2511 (2) (f) which specifies "procedures in this chapter or chapter 121 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance [...] may be conducted." This of course does not substantively affect your argument, but it's a detail many have been getting wrong.
I don't think this is a big problem.
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 1
The fact that the typical user will still be experiencing the problem is mostly irrelevant. While - accepting the stipulation in the article as I have no better data - most use the software included in their distribution, they have every ability to grab the brand-spanking-new CVS release, and those who are sufficiently troubled by the issue WILL. The bulk that don't care, well... don't care.
That said, it is unreasonable to expect journalists to be experienced with the very latest from CVS. If something was fixed 4 weeks ago in CVS, it likely wasn't fixed when the journalist started looking at the product - there's time spent using the product, time spent writing, and time between submission of the piece and publication. The fact that they will likely be using the most prevelant versions rather than the newest only adds to the latency. It may, however, be reasonable to expect one to look over the changelogs between the version they were using and the latest, and make some mention of relavent changes.
"The request had a twist: Instead of asking to eavesdrop on the contents of the e-mail messages, which would require some evidence of wrongdoing, prosecutors instead requested the identities of the correspondents."
Under the definitions in FISA (50 USC 1801): (n) "Contents", when used with respect to a communication, includes any information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of that communication.
The article addresses the disparities as seen by Peter Korn. It does not address what the honest opponents of the switch see as the most pressing issues.
Does anyone know what the specific greivances are? What does MS Office do that OpenOffice does not? What can be done to put it right? Let's get hacking, and I bet we can have OpenOffice out ahead of MS Office in accessability before the bureaucrats have made up their minds.
oops, I'll refrain from use in the future.
Your reply used the word "the" however, and I really must insist that you stop use of that word. I have to protect my trademark or it goes away, remember.
you haven't heard of my company: Thomas Hegemonical Enterprises
We have many different product lines in a wide variety of products, and as such own the trademark on "the", which we intend to enforce with extreme prejudice. All Slashdot posters please refrain from use of the definate article, or I'll send you a cease-and-desist letter.
Unfortunately, this would prove impractical. People will still refer to things primarily by their original names and most wouldn't bother to learn all the new ones, and using the new names in conversation would distract from the matter at hand as much as giving the word in English does.
Looked at a couple of these, they're expensive and are designed as reference material rather than learning material. Better than nothing, but not a first choice. Thanks, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I've encountered someone who denied heredity. That was a bit extreme (and baffling)... More generally, I would say that evolution is difficult to understand simply because so many people walk away with so many wrong impressions, and so many who think they understand it don't. That said, it's certainly easier to understand than quantum theory - indeed, I think it's reasonably within the grasp of virtually everyone *if* they make the effort. If they already think they understand what it's saying, they usually won't.
Largely correct, but I think you place the starting point too late. Life probably didn't start out in a cell. Evolution may well still explain how it got from a bunch of replecating molecules to single celled organisms. The one point that evolution can't explain is the creation of the first molecules that make it more likely that other molecules similar to themselves will come to be compared to alernatives. What evolution *does* do is make it a whole lot *easier* to explain. Going with chance because it's simple, it's plainly a whole lot more likely that such a molecule would come about by chance than an entire organism. Other explainations are surely easier, too.
Actually, someone solved "trusting trust" for compilers a while back. Take known good source for a C compiler, compile on N compilers that are of sufficiently different origin so that the chance of both containing the *same* malicious modification is sufficiently small. This produces compilers which are (likely) bitwise different, but (necessarily) functionally equivalent unless one of them contains malicious code (or a bug). Compile the known good compiler source code with each of these new builds. As they are functionally equivalent, some of them may be faster than others, but what they produce will be *bitwise identical* if all N compilers are functioning properly. If you compare the output and all N builds are in fact bitwise identical, you've a high confidence that there is no malicious code in the final product that wasn't introduced in source.
We have learned a bit about project management and system design since America was founded. What is the legislative process but a large project to design a complex system? We certainly have to be careful while doing so, but we should certainly use this experience in informing the workings of our government.
Do note that there is already a certain amount of this going on. Consider the various versions posted on Thomas. It would be interesting to see this further refined.
When I'm in congress, I'll take a look at it.
I'm mildly disturbed by how much people simply rally behind their talking points, although not as surprised as I would like to be.
As I see it, this is an interesting perspective, and has the potential to clarify the human contribution to global warming, in either direction. What we need is to figure out how to get historical temperature data for the other planets. Fluctuations caused by external influences should correlate strongly. Deviations are probably caused by local factors. If we find a strong correlation that includes Earth only until recently at which point there is increasing deviation, this is pretty strong evidence for human cause in global warming. If we find a strong correlation that includes the Earth presently as well as earlier, then this is pretty strong evidence for a lack of human cause. I personally would expect the former and be surprised at the latter, but I'd accept the evidence once the astronomers and climatologists have had a look at it.
With unique keys, it's probably fair to call it O(N * log(N)).
I guess it technically *is* O(N * log(N)) to the number of items, but this is misleading. It's actually O(N).
As pretty much everyone has pointed out, it's just radix sort. The time taken by radix sort scales linearly to the number of keys, and with the log of the maximum key that can be held by the container.
If we're dealing entirely with unique keys, this is of course >= log(N), by the pigeonhole principle and all that. If we may have duplicate keys, however, there may be more keys than container space, and radix *does* scale linearly to the keys.
Time to prepare and overhead of this alrogrithm are negligable in any context large enough for us to care about the O() of the algorithms. For some things, this *is* better than mergesort. I'm just not sure why it was posted, as it's also not new - it was invented over 50 years ago.
"I bought some of TCBY" makes sense, you're just talking about stocks...
Well, I do like cheese, but I also like innovating. Can I do both?
No, the foundation for most sensory experience cannot be *extra* sensory perception, for reasons which should be obvious in the expansion of the acronym.
Semantics aside, what did you mean here?
I, for one, am calling all of my congresspeople, and insisting that Gonzales be impeached for gross incompetance. He serves, and is paid with my tax dollars, at the consent of Congress. If this is the level and type of service he is providing, I am not okay with money for his paycheck coming out of mine. The President and Vice President can only be impeached for "high crimes and misdemeanors;" there is no such standard for the officers of the executive branch, and I think something like this - particularly when added his previous statements - more than merits his removal. As far as I am concerned, he is fired. I'll be doing what I can to see that reality reflects this.
We need evidence. If someone has a condition which they can't or don't treat, and it leads them to commit a crime, they are responsible for that crime. Moral judgements depend on your specific moral framework. Laws should not be based upon morals, but upon protecting people from each other.
That said, we also must be protected from the government, and we must particularly protect those who are different from the majority - as the majority is usually able to take care of its own. As many statistical factors as there may be, we only know that someone is not overcoming those factors once they commit a crime.
"I couldn't help it" is not an excuse. Neither is "He won't be able to help it" a crime. If we are able to determine correlating factors, these may absolutely be used to justify providing resources which the individuals can take advantage of. They should not be used to force anything on anyone until they have committed a crime.
"We interpret the Second Amendment in military terms." So America's founding fathers thought it necessary to make sure that future governments didn't prohibit their militaries from having weapons? Could someone please explain to me why they would consider this a) a threat to our liberties and b) a possible scenario. "Silberman and Judge Thomas B. Griffith seemed to wrestle, however, with the meaning of the amendment's language about militias. If a well-regulated militia is no longer needed, they asked, is the right to bear arms still necessary?" If a well-regulated militia is no longer necessary to our security, the second amendment asserts that we are not a free state. I might say this is an argument for shrinking the size of the military. On a side note, I think we should amend the 2nd amendment to allow exceptions to be made in cases where one individual having a weapon is a significant threat to a large number of others - WMDs and so forth. Presently, banning such *is* a violation of the 2nd amendment - one we tolerate, because it makes so much sense. If it makes so much sense, however, certainly amending the law of the land is a more proper response than ignoring it.
It's 72 cents over what he's already paying for unlimited service, for the priveledge of using it in Canada rather than the US. While a little on the cheap side, this does not seem ridiculous. He's actually *not* expecting to get 35M for just 72 cents here.
No one cares how bad the worst game is for each system - even if purchased, it's not going to get much playtime if it falls below a certain threshold. How many bad games there are only matters if you're making uninformed decisions about what to play. What is interesting is whether there are enough good games to keep my schedule full, and the quality of those games. A much better metric would be the average of the best N games, where N is the number I'm likely to purchase. Now, this clearly differs from player to player, so it's more difficult to come up with a single number to represent it, but it would be a more informative comparison. I propose a triplet of averages for different values of N. The question is, what should those be? Might as well ask the question here... How many games do you buy in a year for a given console, and what type of gamer do you consider yourself?
Really, I'm worried more about an honest person reading through FISA and saying, "Everyone's been saying it says this, but it doesn't!" Despite the Attorney General asserting that the laws governing wiretapping are extremely complicated, anyone who's had to maintain someone else's program of any reasonable size should be able to wrap their head around it pretty easily, and there's some interesting stuff there - I do recommend making the effort.
"FISA also specifies that it is the only law covering such surveillance."
Technically, it's 28 USC 2511 (2) (f) which specifies "procedures in this chapter or chapter 121 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance [...] may be conducted." This of course does not substantively affect your argument, but it's a detail many have been getting wrong.
The fact that the typical user will still be experiencing the problem is mostly irrelevant. While - accepting the stipulation in the article as I have no better data - most use the software included in their distribution, they have every ability to grab the brand-spanking-new CVS release, and those who are sufficiently troubled by the issue WILL. The bulk that don't care, well... don't care.
That said, it is unreasonable to expect journalists to be experienced with the very latest from CVS. If something was fixed 4 weeks ago in CVS, it likely wasn't fixed when the journalist started looking at the product - there's time spent using the product, time spent writing, and time between submission of the piece and publication. The fact that they will likely be using the most prevelant versions rather than the newest only adds to the latency. It may, however, be reasonable to expect one to look over the changelogs between the version they were using and the latest, and make some mention of relavent changes.
"The request had a twist: Instead of asking to eavesdrop on the contents of the e-mail messages, which would require some evidence of wrongdoing, prosecutors instead requested the identities of the correspondents."
Under the definitions in FISA (50 USC 1801):
(n) "Contents", when used with respect to a communication, includes any information concerning the identity of the parties to such communication or the existence, substance, purport, or meaning of that communication.
The article addresses the disparities as seen by Peter Korn. It does not address what the honest opponents of the switch see as the most pressing issues.
Does anyone know what the specific greivances are? What does MS Office do that OpenOffice does not? What can be done to put it right? Let's get hacking, and I bet we can have OpenOffice out ahead of MS Office in accessability before the bureaucrats have made up their minds.
oops, I'll refrain from use in the future. Your reply used the word "the" however, and I really must insist that you stop use of that word. I have to protect my trademark or it goes away, remember.
you haven't heard of my company:
Thomas Hegemonical Enterprises
We have many different product lines in a wide variety of products, and as such own the trademark on "the", which we intend to enforce with extreme prejudice. All Slashdot posters please refrain from use of the definate article, or I'll send you a cease-and-desist letter.
Unfortunately, this would prove impractical. People will still refer to things primarily by their original names and most wouldn't bother to learn all the new ones, and using the new names in conversation would distract from the matter at hand as much as giving the word in English does.
Looked at a couple of these, they're expensive and are designed as reference material rather than learning material. Better than nothing, but not a first choice. Thanks, though.