I'd love too but Bill needs me to work Saturday on those TPS reports. How am I going to be able to afford that new HD TV that I never have time to watch if I don't keep up with all my other coworkers who don't care about their kids? Jesus, if Bill finds out we have any....well, you can kiss promotion goodbye.
Do you think they're getting kickbacks? Follow the money...
It's not money that's being tossed around here. It's power.
Do you think these officials are outrigh lying and conspiring to subvert the democractic process for a few meager bucks. Most of the subversives in charge of the Maryland voting system recieve no monies, but instead the kudos and respect from their superiors. In time, they may also get a slice of the power for their efforts, and will then be free to stamp on a few faces.
Did the communist revolutionaries get paid? No, they did what they did because they belived what they were doing was right. Just as absolutist Republician party members believe what they are doing by rigging elections is also right, because it helps the "godly and patriotic" stay in power. These people don't believe in democracy or freedom or rights. They believe whatever they want to and have only contempt for those who disagree.
So don't follow the money trail. It won't be that simple, because these people are working on different rules. Their kickbacks will only come after it's too late to expose them.
I would say Maths/Statistics has the most cheaters, pretty much everyone I know who takes it cheats at it.
Pardon me. As a former Maths/Stats student, I must say that this is a total misrepresentation of our group. We most certainly do not go for cheating as assignments are rare and mathematical exams defy cheating techniques.
We do however, have the highest proportion of crammers and caffine addicts.
There has been a number of scandals involving professors from the far east that fabricated research. This is evidence that research ethics are different in those countries than in the west. And most foreign students from the far east go into physical sciences.
Well, the general consenus is that New Yorkers are more cynical and unscrupulous than 'Friscoians. But try and remember that Hollywood is on the west coast too.
Yau supposledy tried to take credit for Perelmans work on the Poincare conjecture, publishing a solution after Perelman published his on arxiv, calling Perelmans 'incomplete' and saying he and his students didn't understand it.
He's more or less right. Perelman's solution was, by modern standards, woefully patchy and incomplete. He didn't even try to get it published in a journal because no modern mathematical journal would accept such a "lax" work, hence he only posted on the arXiv.
Perelman got by on geometric intuition and terse writing, probably because he was either unable or more likely unwilling to go into the level of pedantic and often overbearing detail demanded of modern mathematics journals. In other words, he proved the theorem like the great masters of old.
Yau on the other hand (well, it was more his students Zhu and Cao if the names on the actual papers mean anything), took Perelman's theorem and gave a modern complete description and process of the proof, complete with tight, near unparsable syntax. But later, another team, Morgan and Tian, actually gave another even more pedantic, incomprehensible and unintuative version of the proof, involving much more set theory than Yau et al, who leaned more towards analysis.
Yau's dilemma is this. He was not the one who came up with the great mathematical leaps that make up the proof. However, he was the first to publish a more "complete" version of the proof by modern standards. But, his proof was not as overburdened, pedantic and semantically garbled as the next team's published proof, this being the accepted style nowadays. Thus Yau is between a rock and a hard place, namely Perelman's actual breakthroughs and Morgan and Tian's heavy abstraction. His one saving grace is that he published first. Where Zhu and Cao come into this drama is a mystery as yet left unsolved.
And so, modern mathematics, unwilling to give the Fields medal to the intuative but not pedatic Perelman, but unable to give it to the super garbled Morgan and Tian, instead had to give it to Yau. But since Yau hadn't actually added anything but formality to the proof, and the other team and only added more, they had to give the medal to Perelman as well. They would have preferred to have just given it to Morgan and Tian, so they're bitter now and blaming Yau for publishing so soon.
Perhaps you are right, and mathematics is just something we came up with. However, where did we come up with it from? Our brains. Our brains are part of the universe, so if the universe is goverrned by laws which can be well expressed in mathematical language, one might predict that brains would invent mathematics.
There's little need for such an elaborate argument. Mathematics is something we came up with to describe and quantify the world we see around us. The fact that mathematics is so good at describing nature and natural phenomena is hardly surprising if one considers that mathematics was from the beginning, built to describe these ideas.
Number, quantity, time, order, coalesance, divergence, dimension, distance, speed, etc, etc. Mathematics was slowly but surely developed and refined to be able to accurately describe all these physical phenomena, and to allow us to infer their qualities and properties based one the simple relationships and actions they exhibit.
Mathematics is not a game played with numbers that have no meaning. First we find the numbers in nature, infer their basic properties. The properties that we "prove" are simply physical facts, that exist independant of our ability to make theorems. That the area of a triangle inscribed in a circle is equal to the product of its three sides divided by four times the circles radius is a physical fact, not resulting from our mathematical manipulations, but one which our mathematics can only "prove" because they correctly describe and quantify all of the geometrical entites involved. And they do this beacause we built them to do that.
So the next time you wonder why vector calculus describes electromagnetism so well, or why biological problems are solved so well by statistical models, understand that the mathematics used was, from the very beginning constructed to solve such problems, i.e. problems of the physical world, by finding the basics and working from there. And in case you think that this is all too convienient, just look at the problems that mathematics can't solve. Spam for instance.
I don't smoke. But it's my body, and damn anyone who revokes my right to purchase an unhealthy product and use it, of which there are millions in the world that Truth.com doesn't go after.
It's your body, but its inevitably someone elses taxes that subsidise or outright pay for your inevitable medical treatments. Yes, cigarettes and cheese burgers should be regulated, just like every other consumable good in existance. The alternative is aresnic and sawdust in your cheeseburger and pigs blood in your cigarette. You think private companies won't do it? You must be new here.
While I my self at 23 play a great deal of games, I still acknowledge my responsibilities and don't spend 14 hours a day playing like most kids will over weekends.
The magic number is closer to nine or ten hours. There's no way you're going to spend 14 hours playing games unless you're in deep, deep immersion mode. Nine or ten is closer to the average weekend mark. The day goes as follows:
Get up at around 12-1pm. Spend about 40 minutes eating throught the day. An hour perhaps watching a DVD/TV/Reading (yes reading). These days maybe two or three hours browsing the net. Your going to need to stock up on sweets, use the head, stretch for a bit, adjust wires cables, etc, and adjust the quilt cover over your gaming chair throught the day, so add another 20 minutes for that. The family can occassionally make unreasonable demands to see and even talk to you over the course of the day, so there's more time deducted. Again in this modern age your "friends" may try to text message or call you on your mobile, which can be almost as irritating as family members knocking at your door. Finally, due to the weekday cycle having burned itself into your biological clock, you will begin to wilt at about 3am, and sleep usually comes at about 4-5am.
Amid all that, you're talking nine or ten hours of games. Any longer will require a seriously good game to engage you, and those are few and far between these days. I did play an 18 hour stretches of some of the better games back in the day, but now only Oblivion has managed to engage me for over 8 hours at a time. A word of warning on going over 36 hours; any in game optical effects will cause sharp pains in your frontal lobe, and anything over 640x480 resolution will be unplayable/readable.
It's not even the case that one need consider an aging gene as a parasitic gene. Evolution does not work on individuals but rather on populations, and for the population, it is better to have individuals eventually die off to make room for the next generation of random mutations, to try and get a better fit this time around. The population is constantly optimising. The individual is simply static throughout its lifespan.
Only 13% of young americans surveyed could find Iraq, but you still went to war there. I was under the impression that neither public knowladge or approval were prerequitites for American laws.
I think I speak for all true Tolkien fans when I say; This book will give the conclusive, irrefutable evidence that Balrog's indeed have wings. Namely, there will be one with wings on the cover.
No way!!! Without patents! there will be no!! innovation!!! I mean just look at what we wouldn't have were it not for patents!! Planes, microwave ovens, fast fourier transforms, cheap pharmaceuticals, IPv6. Take eLearning systems. Without patents, there would be no eLearning!! Just look at economies like China where there are no patents!! They will never prosper!! like countries that do have them!
To give a more complete answer to your rant, terrorism related, or rather "anti"-terrorism related news has become news for nerds. As technicially competant educated people, with not a small sprinkling of intellectual, Slashdotters are more likely to be aware of and engaged in the civil liberties debate, especially when it concerns technology being used to "save us".
1984 crops up in discussions a lot. That's because a lot of people on these boards have actually read the book. There's not a lot of internet forums you can say that about. Slashdotters are interested in what is happening to free society in the wake of the twin towers' collapse, even if you are not. To cap it all off, Bruce Schneier is a computer security super geek. His words carry weight.
As an aside, I'm willing to bet that a big factor in Slashdotters interest and in general opposition to anti-terrorism legislation, is the fact that many here had a hard time in secondary education and would rather not be stamped on again in the emerging neo-facist society. Once you've tasted the lash, you won't be so eager for flogging as others.
But what it really comes down to is, once again, the Open Source people don't like the fact that someone is using GPL'd code to make money without "giving back" even when there is no real violation of the GPL.
Yeah basically, that being the whole point of the GPL in the first place. Bring on version 3 I say.
You've hit upon the key flaw in Google's championing of liberty in the face of book banners/burners. Yes, once again its the shrill call of "pedophile", summoning all decent people the world over to stamp their boots on deserving human faces over and over.
Google has now committed an "indefensible" action, thus siding themselves with "inhuman hordes of evil". Expect this book and any like it to be dragged out and thumped repeatedly in condemnation the next time Google crosses the powers that be.
Capcom don't want to make a patch to fix this. They wan't you to fix it by buying a HD TV. In this way, they can make even more de facto "HD-only" games, and hence justify higher game cost by claiming; "Most 360 gamers have/want "HD!!!(TM)", and it is more expensive for them to make HD games for whatever reason.
More than a few of the kids present were squatting on the ground, or in car seats, blank expressions on their faces, banging away at portable game machines.
When I was young, my parents always wanted me to go to sports matches I had no interest in. My father in paticular despaired at my complete and utter boredom throughout the games. I would regularly wander about staring at the fences, railings, seats, gravel, etc, etc, rarely taking interest in the game itself. If I'd had a gameboy, I would have played it.
We went to France once. Here my mother stood aghast at my total disinterest in the majesty of the cultural capital of the world. My regard for Paris paticularly offended her. I was bored out of my tree, and if I'd had a gameboy, I would have finished Metroid during that trip.
But in Paris, there was succor. The Musée des Arts et Métiers. Oh such joy! When my parents refused to take me, as they had more "cultured" places to visit, I went alone to what was one of the most memorable expieriences of my life. A menagere of scientific legend awaits all who enter. I went twice. If I'd had a gameboy, I would gladly have smashed it to pieces to get another tour.
I did finally manage to drag them to the Panthéon. They went for the "cultural" expierience, as some great men or other were entombed within. But I went for Foucault's Pendulum, one of the most elegant experimental proofs ever made. And within also, is a copy of Foucault's paper on the pendulum, containing his own mathematical equations, explaining the revolution of the pendulum as being caused by the rotation of the earth! Bliss!!
They left France thinking themselves "educated", and I a philistine, just as you might think that children dragged off to rocket launchings they have no interest in are similarly philistines. The simple reality is that people have different interests, and if you want to encourage your children to put down their gameboys you have to find activities that they find interesting, not activities you find interesting and simply want to force them into enjoying. So lay off sespairing at their lack of interests when you don't even know what their interests are.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you think these officials are outrigh lying and conspiring to subvert the democractic process for a few meager bucks. Most of the subversives in charge of the Maryland voting system recieve no monies, but instead the kudos and respect from their superiors. In time, they may also get a slice of the power for their efforts, and will then be free to stamp on a few faces.
Did the communist revolutionaries get paid? No, they did what they did because they belived what they were doing was right. Just as absolutist Republician party members believe what they are doing by rigging elections is also right, because it helps the "godly and patriotic" stay in power. These people don't believe in democracy or freedom or rights. They believe whatever they want to and have only contempt for those who disagree.
So don't follow the money trail. It won't be that simple, because these people are working on different rules. Their kickbacks will only come after it's too late to expose them.
We do however, have the highest proportion of crammers and caffine addicts.
Perelman got by on geometric intuition and terse writing, probably because he was either unable or more likely unwilling to go into the level of pedantic and often overbearing detail demanded of modern mathematics journals. In other words, he proved the theorem like the great masters of old.
Yau on the other hand (well, it was more his students Zhu and Cao if the names on the actual papers mean anything), took Perelman's theorem and gave a modern complete description and process of the proof, complete with tight, near unparsable syntax. But later, another team, Morgan and Tian, actually gave another even more pedantic, incomprehensible and unintuative version of the proof, involving much more set theory than Yau et al, who leaned more towards analysis.
Yau's dilemma is this. He was not the one who came up with the great mathematical leaps that make up the proof. However, he was the first to publish a more "complete" version of the proof by modern standards. But, his proof was not as overburdened, pedantic and semantically garbled as the next team's published proof, this being the accepted style nowadays. Thus Yau is between a rock and a hard place, namely Perelman's actual breakthroughs and Morgan and Tian's heavy abstraction. His one saving grace is that he published first. Where Zhu and Cao come into this drama is a mystery as yet left unsolved.
And so, modern mathematics, unwilling to give the Fields medal to the intuative but not pedatic Perelman, but unable to give it to the super garbled Morgan and Tian, instead had to give it to Yau. But since Yau hadn't actually added anything but formality to the proof, and the other team and only added more, they had to give the medal to Perelman as well. They would have preferred to have just given it to Morgan and Tian, so they're bitter now and blaming Yau for publishing so soon.
There's little need for such an elaborate argument. Mathematics is something we came up with to describe and quantify the world we see around us. The fact that mathematics is so good at describing nature and natural phenomena is hardly surprising if one considers that mathematics was from the beginning, built to describe these ideas.
Number, quantity, time, order, coalesance, divergence, dimension, distance, speed, etc, etc. Mathematics was slowly but surely developed and refined to be able to accurately describe all these physical phenomena, and to allow us to infer their qualities and properties based one the simple relationships and actions they exhibit.
Mathematics is not a game played with numbers that have no meaning. First we find the numbers in nature, infer their basic properties. The properties that we "prove" are simply physical facts, that exist independant of our ability to make theorems. That the area of a triangle inscribed in a circle is equal to the product of its three sides divided by four times the circles radius is a physical fact, not resulting from our mathematical manipulations, but one which our mathematics can only "prove" because they correctly describe and quantify all of the geometrical entites involved. And they do this beacause we built them to do that.
So the next time you wonder why vector calculus describes electromagnetism so well, or why biological problems are solved so well by statistical models, understand that the mathematics used was, from the very beginning constructed to solve such problems, i.e. problems of the physical world, by finding the basics and working from there. And in case you think that this is all too convienient, just look at the problems that mathematics can't solve. Spam for instance.
Gone to the Dark Side young Banh has.
We feel your pain.
Vinyls don't rootkit your PC. Plus you can "scratch" them.
The magic number is closer to nine or ten hours. There's no way you're going to spend 14 hours playing games unless you're in deep, deep immersion mode. Nine or ten is closer to the average weekend mark. The day goes as follows:
Get up at around 12-1pm. Spend about 40 minutes eating throught the day. An hour perhaps watching a DVD/TV/Reading (yes reading). These days maybe two or three hours browsing the net. Your going to need to stock up on sweets, use the head, stretch for a bit, adjust wires cables, etc, and adjust the quilt cover over your gaming chair throught the day, so add another 20 minutes for that. The family can occassionally make unreasonable demands to see and even talk to you over the course of the day, so there's more time deducted. Again in this modern age your "friends" may try to text message or call you on your mobile, which can be almost as irritating as family members knocking at your door. Finally, due to the weekday cycle having burned itself into your biological clock, you will begin to wilt at about 3am, and sleep usually comes at about 4-5am.
Amid all that, you're talking nine or ten hours of games. Any longer will require a seriously good game to engage you, and those are few and far between these days. I did play an 18 hour stretches of some of the better games back in the day, but now only Oblivion has managed to engage me for over 8 hours at a time. A word of warning on going over 36 hours; any in game optical effects will cause sharp pains in your frontal lobe, and anything over 640x480 resolution will be unplayable/readable.
It's not even the case that one need consider an aging gene as a parasitic gene. Evolution does not work on individuals but rather on populations, and for the population, it is better to have individuals eventually die off to make room for the next generation of random mutations, to try and get a better fit this time around. The population is constantly optimising. The individual is simply static throughout its lifespan.
Only 13% of young americans surveyed could find Iraq, but you still went to war there. I was under the impression that neither public knowladge or approval were prerequitites for American laws.
I think I speak for all true Tolkien fans when I say; This book will give the conclusive, irrefutable evidence that Balrog's indeed have wings. Namely, there will be one with wings on the cover.
....that they don't have to use the word "free".
No way!!! Without patents! there will be no!! innovation!!! I mean just look at what we wouldn't have were it not for patents!! Planes, microwave ovens, fast fourier transforms, cheap pharmaceuticals, IPv6. Take eLearning systems. Without patents, there would be no eLearning!! Just look at economies like China where there are no patents!! They will never prosper!! like countries that do have them!
</ rapid patent defense>
To give a more complete answer to your rant, terrorism related, or rather "anti"-terrorism related news has become news for nerds. As technicially competant educated people, with not a small sprinkling of intellectual, Slashdotters are more likely to be aware of and engaged in the civil liberties debate, especially when it concerns technology being used to "save us".
1984 crops up in discussions a lot. That's because a lot of people on these boards have actually read the book. There's not a lot of internet forums you can say that about. Slashdotters are interested in what is happening to free society in the wake of the twin towers' collapse, even if you are not. To cap it all off, Bruce Schneier is a computer security super geek. His words carry weight.
As an aside, I'm willing to bet that a big factor in Slashdotters interest and in general opposition to anti-terrorism legislation, is the fact that many here had a hard time in secondary education and would rather not be stamped on again in the emerging neo-facist society. Once you've tasted the lash, you won't be so eager for flogging as others.
....Astronomy needs class to get funding.
You've hit upon the key flaw in Google's championing of liberty in the face of book banners/burners. Yes, once again its the shrill call of "pedophile", summoning all decent people the world over to stamp their boots on deserving human faces over and over.
Google has now committed an "indefensible" action, thus siding themselves with "inhuman hordes of evil". Expect this book and any like it to be dragged out and thumped repeatedly in condemnation the next time Google crosses the powers that be.
Capcom don't want to make a patch to fix this. They wan't you to fix it by buying a HD TV. In this way, they can make even more de facto "HD-only" games, and hence justify higher game cost by claiming; "Most 360 gamers have/want " HD!!! (TM)", and it is more expensive for them to make HD games for whatever reason.
We went to France once. Here my mother stood aghast at my total disinterest in the majesty of the cultural capital of the world. My regard for Paris paticularly offended her. I was bored out of my tree, and if I'd had a gameboy, I would have finished Metroid during that trip.
But in Paris, there was succor. The Musée des Arts et Métiers. Oh such joy! When my parents refused to take me, as they had more "cultured" places to visit, I went alone to what was one of the most memorable expieriences of my life. A menagere of scientific legend awaits all who enter. I went twice. If I'd had a gameboy, I would gladly have smashed it to pieces to get another tour.
I did finally manage to drag them to the Panthéon. They went for the "cultural" expierience, as some great men or other were entombed within. But I went for Foucault's Pendulum, one of the most elegant experimental proofs ever made. And within also, is a copy of Foucault's paper on the pendulum, containing his own mathematical equations, explaining the revolution of the pendulum as being caused by the rotation of the earth! Bliss!!
They left France thinking themselves "educated", and I a philistine, just as you might think that children dragged off to rocket launchings they have no interest in are similarly philistines. The simple reality is that people have different interests, and if you want to encourage your children to put down their gameboys you have to find activities that they find interesting, not activities you find interesting and simply want to force them into enjoying. So lay off sespairing at their lack of interests when you don't even know what their interests are.