As for male and female brains being different, that is not really an object of discussion - here is an old-ish article discussing the issue:
You forgot to add that all important disclaimer; On average.
On average, a lot of things are the case. On average, most people are only in the 50th percentile ability wise. On average, the sun shines for 12 hours each day anywhere in the world. On average a person annual income in the world is ~$6000.
The average value of a set of data, sometimes doesn't tell you a whole lot. The difference between the averages of two data sets sometimes tells you even less. In fact, it can sometimes be misleading, as when you combine or compare data, strange things can happen.
I'd hardly call VTK (Visualisation Toolkit) a failure. It's made my job a lot easier.
Have you ever.....Ever had to compile that wretched toolkit. I've been around. I once had to compile snns on a 64 bit FC4 machine. But VTK takes compilation hell to the next level. It uses its own "cmake" system. A mutant abomination of make that creates and works from an unintelligable mire of file directories and dependancies. It's the fourth circle of hell.
Combine this with trying to comiple "Octaviz" the Octave vtk based toolkit, and you may simply go utterly mad from the expierience. Compiling vtk with cmake can destroy minds, but only compiling Octaviz can strip someone of their soul.
The reason there is a vast imbalance of men vs women in math and science fields is not because of a social structure that "guides" them away from these fields. It's because they just aren't interested.
In my undergraduate mathematics degree, there was just about a 50% split between men and women, and this continued throughout the duration of the course, roughly speaking. However, in the very same university, the proportion of women doing postgraduate research or learning, in the mathematics department, is only about 25%, if that. That's a big drop off.
You say the drop off is probably a result of the females in the class simply not being interested. I was in that class, and people's level of interest was totally unrelated to their gender. On top of that, the proportion of females in that very same course 10 or even 20 years ago was probably less than 10%, if there were any at all? Is it the case that somehow the female population spontaniously became more interested in mathematics in the intervening years?
The answer is probably; yes, they did become more interested. But not from some "innate" mathematical ability somehow emerging in one generation. Rather, it was as a result of changing social mores and expectations. In the 1950's, if a girl had said that she even liked mathematics, let alone wished to study it, the reaction would have been surprise and bemusment at best, and outrage and ridicule at worst. Today, such a girl is just about in the same boat as any boy who expresses an interest in mathematics.
Girls are told, from numerous sources, that "Girl's just don't do science." The message may never be overtly stated, but the irrefutable fact of its presence is a miasma that chokes the desire for science out of young girls. In the same way that someone can be encouraged to enter science via science fairs, presentations, practical work, etc; so too can someone be discouraged from entering science via uneasy support, social mores, outright skepticism, etc.
Free Software means you don't have to pay for the software, much like "free beer" means you don't have to pay for the beer.. The correct term for software that belongs to the community is Open Source. With Open Source, you are guarenteed to have the four fundamental software freedoms. With "Free Software", there is no such guarentee.
By my definition, even Windows is Free Software. In principle, I can get Windows for free. It's difficult and I have to sign a whole bunch of documents but I could do it with sufficient patience. This is why I don't like Free Software as a term; it is far too misleading. In fact, it doesn't actually mean anything other than the fact there is a mechanism by which you can get the software for free that doesn't involve getting a court-order.
In contrast, the term Open Source has a very precise meaning and really should be trade-marked by ESR. Then ESR could only issue licenses to se the trade-mark where the software is licensed that protects the four freedoms. This way, companies couldn't profit from the name unless they labelled their products correctly.
In the end, every fact you haven't personally experienced is based on faith.
Perhaps, but religious "facts", unlike scientific facts, require a large degree of doublethink to accept.
For example, you have never been into space. You may have never looked out the window of an aircraft, yet you are told that the earth is round. You can accept this fact, in contridiction to your own expieriences of a flat earth, as locally the round earth looks like a flat one. What you have accepted as fact, and what you expierience, are indeed compatable. There were no mental gymnastics required to accept the idea of a spherical earth, once given gravity.
However, for religious facts, virtually every one contridicts our expieriences and knowladge. We require doublethink to accept them. The definition of doublethink is one accepts a fact that one knows to be untrue or impossible, and simultaniously forgets that one ever thought or could ever have thought otherwise. The best example of this is clearly a physisist or indeed, any scientist believing in the miracle of loaves and fishes from the new testament. It's clear that numerous physical laws are grossly violated in the parable, yet there are learned, educated people who hold the story to be absolute fact, despite the reality that they would consider you mad if you recounted witnessing a similar event. Doublethink at its purest.
So scientific facts such as the conservation of mass, the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, the average height of a population, the theory of flight, etc; are all acceptable facts which can be shown to agree, eventually, with our own expierience and common sense. Religious facts such as Noah's Ark, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the ressurection of Jesus, meeting Gabriel on Hira, the incarnations of Vishnu, the visions of Joseph Smith, etc; are all facts which can never been shown to agree with either our own expierience or common sense. They are also, unlike scientific, completely unverifiable, uncheckable, unreproducable, and in general, poorly or ambiguously stated.
Doublethink is essential if one is to accept religious facts, especially if one also accepts reason and the scientific method. Only in this way is it possible to completely accept two totally contridictory facts. Humans are quite capable of believing that both A and not A will hold simultaniously, though this can hardly be described as a healthy state of mind. In the words of Mark Twain: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so". Science on the other hand is believing what you know, or what you can deduce, to be true.
I work with Data in the private sector and data like this cannot be on an unprotected machine.
I don't know what companies you've been working for, but out there in the real world, people tend to run things by the seat of their pants. I've seen data, including credit card data, stored in a database on a windows 2000 server directly connected to the internet. I've had data worth millions of dollars emailed to me on the same machine I browsed Slashdot on during lunch. It was a windows 2000 machine too.
That's just personal expierience. I've heard stories of critical data sitting in USB shared drives, secured by nothing but friction to their sockets. Private company files transferred to the upstairs office via a hotmail account. Databases being backed up to iPods. The list goes on.
These stories didn't come from government or other public organisations. No. These are stories straight from private industry, that magical market force that will save us all. If you think people actually follow the rules out there in the real world, you'd do better to think again.
Theo is essentially taking the position that personal information is tantamount to currency, and therefore, requesting personal info is tantamount to charging...hence, HIFN can no longer be considered Open Source.
Considering that marketers and their ilk pay handsomely for personal data, legitimately obtained or otherwise, it's safe to say that personal information isn't just tantamount to currency. It has a concrete monetary value. They are charging you, in a very real sense. You could seel your personal information for real cash, yet they want you to give it away in exchange for "something", then claim they are not charging you.
Baah! Just dump the driver I say. these chumps aren't worth the time.
At what point in the last 200 years was America doing fine without it?
Primarily, from the post civil war era to the end of the second world war. I don't imagine there was any great amount of foreign investement in America during that time in comparision to the vast internal investment funding the country's rapid development. It's a source of much intruige for me as to how the United States developed so much economically during this period. Take for example the city of Chicago. It went from being a small hamlet in the 1830's to one of the birthplaces of the skyscraper in the 1880's.
From what I've been able to gather the growth of the US was down to two main factors. First the huge availability of cheap natural resources. Huge swathes of the continent were simply untouched. What's important to remember here is that many areas of the planet are to this day in a similar conditions, and most importantly, so was the rest of the americas around the same time, especially south america.
The second factor, and I think the most important, was the fact that the US, virtually alone in the america's, was a democratic republic. It was a free society where no man was subject to anyone but the law. There was no vestigal class system and the press had full freedom to critisise government. This I think was the key factor for US expansion. The rest of the world, paticularly europe, simply did not enjoy these freedoms at the time. Democracy was the catalyst, not investment, or resource potential, or foreign capital. It was not hard work, but the freedom to do it, that made america what it is today.
These things do not come for free. As the grandparent said, these involve investments from external companies and governments.
Democracy must be paid for? Do people have to earn it or something? Is it only meant for the rich and the poor aren't worthy of it yet? And who said "external" companies are needed for any of this. America seemed to do fine with a virtual absence of foreign investment.
Other nations don't "need" the west to become developed. In fact, most of them would be better off if they didn't deal with the west at all.
You know who I blame for this rising sentiment? EA Games.
Like William Hearst before them, EA are selling games based on an idea that China is the United States' next great enemy. This is a recent trend, and not actually restricted to just one company. Like yellow journalism before it, racism in the games industry is making a generation of young people ultra paranoid when it comes to China.
"One day the US will have to fight China." Why? Because you've spent too many hours online blowing away red guards? Give me a break. Five years ago, most americans probably didn't know where China was. Hell, most probably still don't. Yet now that they're actually making money, somehow they're the next big threat? What a crock.
Get real. Do you even think the US could fight a war anymore? As far as I'm concerned, the war in Iraq, and the war on terror aka, fighting shadows, has broken the US as a military power. It not the country it was. So instead of stirring up trouble, I'd advise young USians who've watched too many Gulf War reruns and not enough Vietnam documentaries to avoid taking their world view from Battlefield 2. You're more likely to be conquered by Brazil than China jackass.
While I agree that sweatshops suck, I have yet to hear of any practical way to bring third world countries up to first world standard that does not involve exploiting the gap in labour cost between coutries.
Were I you, I would simply unblock those addresses and let it all in. Use a bayesian spam filter, such as the one found in Thunderbird. I'm achieving enormous success rates with it and I'll be recommending it to all the lusers in my fold when the next upgrade cycle comes around.
If java runs a code portion more and more times, it makes every time some slight optimizations on it. The more you run a code portion, the more optimized it will be. So, in some seconds or minutes your code will be highly optimized. These places in the code called hotspots.
I keep hearing this one, but I've yet to see a real world example of this almosy mythical property of JVMs. In any case, I seriously doubt most Java programs, or more appropriately, troublespots within programs, will be running long enough either for optimisations to take place, or for the optimisation overheads to be justified.
I credit them with raising my IQ at least 10 points, (probably 20 or more).... By the way, I hated amphetamines, they made me cold to the bone and antisocial, as well as putting me into a state of meloncholie. I also credit them with stunting my growth, as well as making me a more antisocial person today than I belive I would have been otherwise
So basically, amphetamines turned you into a Slashdotter.
This sounds a bit corny, and is so out of place on Slashdot that it isn't even funny, but I've found being physically active (like at least 30 mins exercise a day) and maintaining a healthy lifestyle does good things to your concentration and studying abilities. You'll be less tired because your lung capacity improves and more, and there's of course other good side effects beyond the realms of studies, like better looks and health.
I tried that, it didn't work. In fact it failed miserably. I was more tired, had less energy, put on weight and my grades suffered. Reason, I hated exercise. It was boring, uncomfortable, embarrassing, unrealistic, tiring and unproductive.
Instead of cycling, running, or horror of horrors, going to the gym, I just took up walking down a few quiet country lanes. No people. Nice and quiet. Time to think. Walking normally, not "briskly" or whatever the hell those people waddling along in the wrong gait are up to.
I had linear algebra and EM physics finals the next morning. I've never concentrated that hard in my life.
And now, the final test of the effectiveness of this method. Can you, given Maxwell Equations, derive the wave equation for EM-Waves? Alternatively, can you obtain the inverse of a non singular matrix? Did the pills really work?
The return to the shareholders is short term and long term this practice stands to damage employee morale, and based on the kind of "replacement" results piss off the customers.
What is this, "long term" return of which you speak? I've been investing for over 8 months and this is a new and strange concept to me and my colleuges as we take time out from tossing millions of dollars in and out of companies we know little about.
The definition should be based on surface gravity, or average surface gravity, that way the definition of a planet would be usefult. The watershed could be say, an average surface gravity that would make it feasable to build a facility of some kind where a long term human prensence can be sustained without major risk to health.
This would also be useful as objects could be classed with a relevance that would be important to any future explorer. Even non elliptical objects could still be given a metric to judge their habitability. "Sir, object is a Class G planetoid! Our noses will be crushed by our feet if we set foot on it." "I see" "However sir, the Halo Ring, despite not being isomorphic to a sphere, does qualify as a planet due to a reasonable average surface gravity." "Cue music. We're going in.
Slashdot Mirror
As for male and female brains being different, that is not really an object of discussion - here is an old-ish article discussing the issue:
You forgot to add that all important disclaimer; On average.
On average, a lot of things are the case. On average, most people are only in the 50th percentile ability wise. On average, the sun shines for 12 hours each day anywhere in the world. On average a person annual income in the world is ~$6000.
The average value of a set of data, sometimes doesn't tell you a whole lot. The difference between the averages of two data sets sometimes tells you even less. In fact, it can sometimes be misleading, as when you combine or compare data, strange things can happen.
I'd hardly call VTK (Visualisation Toolkit) a failure. It's made my job a lot easier.
Have you ever..... Ever had to compile that wretched toolkit. I've been around. I once had to compile snns on a 64 bit FC4 machine. But VTK takes compilation hell to the next level. It uses its own "cmake" system. A mutant abomination of make that creates and works from an unintelligable mire of file directories and dependancies. It's the fourth circle of hell.
Combine this with trying to comiple "Octaviz" the Octave vtk based toolkit, and you may simply go utterly mad from the expierience. Compiling vtk with cmake can destroy minds, but only compiling Octaviz can strip someone of their soul.
The reason there is a vast imbalance of men vs women in math and science fields is not because of a social structure that "guides" them away from these fields. It's because they just aren't interested.
In my undergraduate mathematics degree, there was just about a 50% split between men and women, and this continued throughout the duration of the course, roughly speaking. However, in the very same university, the proportion of women doing postgraduate research or learning, in the mathematics department, is only about 25%, if that. That's a big drop off.
You say the drop off is probably a result of the females in the class simply not being interested. I was in that class, and people's level of interest was totally unrelated to their gender. On top of that, the proportion of females in that very same course 10 or even 20 years ago was probably less than 10%, if there were any at all? Is it the case that somehow the female population spontaniously became more interested in mathematics in the intervening years?
The answer is probably; yes, they did become more interested. But not from some "innate" mathematical ability somehow emerging in one generation. Rather, it was as a result of changing social mores and expectations. In the 1950's, if a girl had said that she even liked mathematics, let alone wished to study it, the reaction would have been surprise and bemusment at best, and outrage and ridicule at worst. Today, such a girl is just about in the same boat as any boy who expresses an interest in mathematics.
Girls are told, from numerous sources, that "Girl's just don't do science." The message may never be overtly stated, but the irrefutable fact of its presence is a miasma that chokes the desire for science out of young girls. In the same way that someone can be encouraged to enter science via science fairs, presentations, practical work, etc; so too can someone be discouraged from entering science via uneasy support, social mores, outright skepticism, etc.
Free Software means you don't have to pay for the software, much like "free beer" means you don't have to pay for the beer.. The correct term for software that belongs to the community is Open Source. With Open Source, you are guarenteed to have the four fundamental software freedoms. With "Free Software", there is no such guarentee.
By my definition, even Windows is Free Software. In principle, I can get Windows for free. It's difficult and I have to sign a whole bunch of documents but I could do it with sufficient patience. This is why I don't like Free Software as a term; it is far too misleading. In fact, it doesn't actually mean anything other than the fact there is a mechanism by which you can get the software for free that doesn't involve getting a court-order.
In contrast, the term Open Source has a very precise meaning and really should be trade-marked by ESR. Then ESR could only issue licenses to se the trade-mark where the software is licensed that protects the four freedoms. This way, companies couldn't profit from the name unless they labelled their products correctly.
In the end, every fact you haven't personally experienced is based on faith.
Perhaps, but religious "facts", unlike scientific facts, require a large degree of doublethink to accept.
For example, you have never been into space. You may have never looked out the window of an aircraft, yet you are told that the earth is round. You can accept this fact, in contridiction to your own expieriences of a flat earth, as locally the round earth looks like a flat one. What you have accepted as fact, and what you expierience, are indeed compatable. There were no mental gymnastics required to accept the idea of a spherical earth, once given gravity.
However, for religious facts, virtually every one contridicts our expieriences and knowladge. We require doublethink to accept them. The definition of doublethink is one accepts a fact that one knows to be untrue or impossible, and simultaniously forgets that one ever thought or could ever have thought otherwise. The best example of this is clearly a physisist or indeed, any scientist believing in the miracle of loaves and fishes from the new testament. It's clear that numerous physical laws are grossly violated in the parable, yet there are learned, educated people who hold the story to be absolute fact, despite the reality that they would consider you mad if you recounted witnessing a similar event. Doublethink at its purest.
So scientific facts such as the conservation of mass, the theory of gravity, the theory of evolution, the average height of a population, the theory of flight, etc; are all acceptable facts which can be shown to agree, eventually, with our own expierience and common sense. Religious facts such as Noah's Ark, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the ressurection of Jesus, meeting Gabriel on Hira, the incarnations of Vishnu, the visions of Joseph Smith, etc; are all facts which can never been shown to agree with either our own expierience or common sense. They are also, unlike scientific, completely unverifiable, uncheckable, unreproducable, and in general, poorly or ambiguously stated.
Doublethink is essential if one is to accept religious facts, especially if one also accepts reason and the scientific method. Only in this way is it possible to completely accept two totally contridictory facts. Humans are quite capable of believing that both A and not A will hold simultaniously, though this can hardly be described as a healthy state of mind. In the words of Mark Twain: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so". Science on the other hand is believing what you know, or what you can deduce, to be true.
I work with Data in the private sector and data like this cannot be on an unprotected machine.
I don't know what companies you've been working for, but out there in the real world, people tend to run things by the seat of their pants. I've seen data, including credit card data, stored in a database on a windows 2000 server directly connected to the internet. I've had data worth millions of dollars emailed to me on the same machine I browsed Slashdot on during lunch. It was a windows 2000 machine too.
That's just personal expierience. I've heard stories of critical data sitting in USB shared drives, secured by nothing but friction to their sockets. Private company files transferred to the upstairs office via a hotmail account. Databases being backed up to iPods. The list goes on.
These stories didn't come from government or other public organisations. No. These are stories straight from private industry, that magical market force that will save us all. If you think people actually follow the rules out there in the real world, you'd do better to think again.
Theo is essentially taking the position that personal information is tantamount to currency, and therefore, requesting personal info is tantamount to charging...hence, HIFN can no longer be considered Open Source.
Considering that marketers and their ilk pay handsomely for personal data, legitimately obtained or otherwise, it's safe to say that personal information isn't just tantamount to currency. It has a concrete monetary value. They are charging you, in a very real sense. You could seel your personal information for real cash, yet they want you to give it away in exchange for "something", then claim they are not charging you.
Baah! Just dump the driver I say. these chumps aren't worth the time.
When I say incomplete, I mean that he left off Windows.
....Oh Wait.
But these days, you only need Windows for gaming.
....for at least the past four decades it has been a general, highly respectable news source with no religious slant.
In other words, a once Godly and Respectable publication has been overrun by terro-communists!!!
At what point in the last 200 years was America doing fine without it?
Primarily, from the post civil war era to the end of the second world war. I don't imagine there was any great amount of foreign investement in America during that time in comparision to the vast internal investment funding the country's rapid development. It's a source of much intruige for me as to how the United States developed so much economically during this period. Take for example the city of Chicago. It went from being a small hamlet in the 1830's to one of the birthplaces of the skyscraper in the 1880's.
From what I've been able to gather the growth of the US was down to two main factors. First the huge availability of cheap natural resources. Huge swathes of the continent were simply untouched. What's important to remember here is that many areas of the planet are to this day in a similar conditions, and most importantly, so was the rest of the americas around the same time, especially south america.
The second factor, and I think the most important, was the fact that the US, virtually alone in the america's, was a democratic republic. It was a free society where no man was subject to anyone but the law. There was no vestigal class system and the press had full freedom to critisise government. This I think was the key factor for US expansion. The rest of the world, paticularly europe, simply did not enjoy these freedoms at the time. Democracy was the catalyst, not investment, or resource potential, or foreign capital. It was not hard work, but the freedom to do it, that made america what it is today.
These things do not come for free. As the grandparent said, these involve investments from external companies and governments.
Democracy must be paid for? Do people have to earn it or something? Is it only meant for the rich and the poor aren't worthy of it yet? And who said "external" companies are needed for any of this. America seemed to do fine with a virtual absence of foreign investment.
Other nations don't "need" the west to become developed. In fact, most of them would be better off if they didn't deal with the west at all.
With 'Amerikan' spelling and grammar is how in future I shall write.
One day the U.S. will have to fight China.
You know who I blame for this rising sentiment? EA Games.
Like William Hearst before them, EA are selling games based on an idea that China is the United States' next great enemy. This is a recent trend, and not actually restricted to just one company. Like yellow journalism before it, racism in the games industry is making a generation of young people ultra paranoid when it comes to China.
"One day the US will have to fight China." Why? Because you've spent too many hours online blowing away red guards? Give me a break. Five years ago, most americans probably didn't know where China was. Hell, most probably still don't. Yet now that they're actually making money, somehow they're the next big threat? What a crock.
Get real. Do you even think the US could fight a war anymore? As far as I'm concerned, the war in Iraq, and the war on terror aka, fighting shadows, has broken the US as a military power. It not the country it was. So instead of stirring up trouble, I'd advise young USians who've watched too many Gulf War reruns and not enough Vietnam documentaries to avoid taking their world view from Battlefield 2. You're more likely to be conquered by Brazil than China jackass.
While I agree that sweatshops suck, I have yet to hear of any practical way to bring third world countries up to first world standard that does not involve exploiting the gap in labour cost between coutries.
Democracy, Education, Rule of Law.
I solved the spam problem a long time ago. It's called 'delete'.
This solution work for me for a while to. But, after wearing out three keyboards in as many months, I realised that it was just not cost effective.
Were I you, I would simply unblock those addresses and let it all in. Use a bayesian spam filter, such as the one found in Thunderbird. I'm achieving enormous success rates with it and I'll be recommending it to all the lusers in my fold when the next upgrade cycle comes around.
Odysseus: "Aww, Nuts."
*Tosses Antikythere overboard*
If java runs a code portion more and more times, it makes every time some slight optimizations on it. The more you run a code portion, the more optimized it will be. So, in some seconds or minutes your code will be highly optimized. These places in the code called hotspots.
I keep hearing this one, but I've yet to see a real world example of this almosy mythical property of JVMs. In any case, I seriously doubt most Java programs, or more appropriately, troublespots within programs, will be running long enough either for optimisations to take place, or for the optimisation overheads to be justified.
I have my smb server set up to all of the heating controls in my apt building. I can make it snow or rain whenever I want...
Like Gremlins 2.
I credit them with raising my IQ at least 10 points, (probably 20 or more).... By the way, I hated amphetamines, they made me cold to the bone and antisocial, as well as putting me into a state of meloncholie. I also credit them with stunting my growth, as well as making me a more antisocial person today than I belive I would have been otherwise
So basically, amphetamines turned you into a Slashdotter.
This sounds a bit corny, and is so out of place on Slashdot that it isn't even funny, but I've found being physically active (like at least 30 mins exercise a day) and maintaining a healthy lifestyle does good things to your concentration and studying abilities. You'll be less tired because your lung capacity improves and more, and there's of course other good side effects beyond the realms of studies, like better looks and health.
I tried that, it didn't work. In fact it failed miserably. I was more tired, had less energy, put on weight and my grades suffered. Reason, I hated exercise. It was boring, uncomfortable, embarrassing, unrealistic, tiring and unproductive.
Instead of cycling, running, or horror of horrors, going to the gym, I just took up walking down a few quiet country lanes. No people. Nice and quiet. Time to think. Walking normally, not "briskly" or whatever the hell those people waddling along in the wrong gait are up to.
I had linear algebra and EM physics finals the next morning. I've never concentrated that hard in my life.
And now, the final test of the effectiveness of this method. Can you, given Maxwell Equations, derive the wave equation for EM-Waves? Alternatively, can you obtain the inverse of a non singular matrix? Did the pills really work?
The return to the shareholders is short term and long term this practice stands to damage employee morale, and based on the kind of "replacement" results piss off the customers.
What is this, "long term" return of which you speak? I've been investing for over 8 months and this is a new and strange concept to me and my colleuges as we take time out from tossing millions of dollars in and out of companies we know little about.
Perhaps she needs the SUV. Have you ever tried to haul any equipment in a subcompact or a "family" sedan? I have and it sucks.
I don't know what you've been hauling, but I've packed a ton of equipment into "family" sized sedans and had room to spare.
The definition should be based on surface gravity, or average surface gravity, that way the definition of a planet would be usefult. The watershed could be say, an average surface gravity that would make it feasable to build a facility of some kind where a long term human prensence can be sustained without major risk to health.
This would also be useful as objects could be classed with a relevance that would be important to any future explorer. Even non elliptical objects could still be given a metric to judge their habitability.
"Sir, object is a Class G planetoid! Our noses will be crushed by our feet if we set foot on it."
"I see"
"However sir, the Halo Ring, despite not being isomorphic to a sphere, does qualify as a planet due to a reasonable average surface gravity."
"Cue music. We're going in.
But even dyson spheres could qualify as planets.