You make your choices. And if the choices are "you do it my way or you don't get this sales commission..." or "you adhere to this corporate policy if you want to continue working here..." you hopefully make the wise choice.
Of course the slashdotters who are actually in that kind of position of authority tend to choose their fights wisely.
1. Failure to communicate causes adverse consequences to fall on you. (You don't get a job, sale, boss gets angry, etc.) 2. Consequences fall to the party who chooses not to accept your correspondence.
>In turn, the notion that other people can't markup or change my text has a psychological impact on me.
Sometimes you have to be careful with this. A one-shot-or-you-blow-it medical school application is one thing, and a memo to your subordinates in the office you manage is another.
>The only thing I can figure is that the Democrats in Congress are simply allowing him to take as much rope as he needs to hang himself, thereby helping to > assure a Democratic victory in 2008.
I don't think they are too worried about '08. They are letting the Republicans make things bad enough for themselves that they will remain out of power for decades to come.
>Keep in mind also that the level of repression differs from area to area.
I know a researcher who wants to do a study on the uniformity of application of laws concerning reproduction.
Some people you meet from China have Aunts and Uncles. Others think of these as rather foreign concepts, highly unusual. Definitely, the "one child" policy is enforced very differently in different parts of the country.
"I've always felt sorry for the people who have deliberately learnt to notice a minor quality loss that would not normally and thus ruined thier own ability to enjoy music without spending lots of money on expensive equipment."
We probably disagree as to what constitutes a "minor quality loss."
People who claim not to be able to hear the difference between low-bitrate MP3 and high, or even, between MP3 and WAV, often change their minds when they get an A/B test on a big sound system such as a high quality FOH or club system, or in a production studio in a well-treated room with good monitors and a clean signal path. It's night and day, in both dynamic and frequency terms. In some cases, it can be as shocking as the lost dynamic range effect you see on digital television (details in dark backgrounds are lost; same deal with audio), and in other cases, it's like "listen to just the cymbals... hear that?" People who who think they can't hear the difference often think that because of what they believe they are listening to, not because of what they are actually hearing.
Unfortunately, I've "cured" quite of few people of the belief that compressed audio is good enough. It's not just dogs, teenagers, and professional mastering engineers who can perceive these differences. You can to. But part of the psychoacoustic model is intentionally tricking you into not listening.
What would really be impressive is if the "pirate" version was something better than the 160Kbps MP3 download version... Of course, that would scream "inside job", or at least "industrial sabotage" to me.
"Oil is on its way to $100 a barrel, the US has troops and mercenaries (Blackwater) killing people in a "war" in a foreign country and nearly every day, young men and women from the US are being killed in that "war" and you think that the most important thing on people's minds is freaking analog vs digital TV?"
1. We're talking about people who will still buy gasoline even when it is an order of magnitude more expensive. 2. There war is actually a strong driver of television viewership. News and political talk shows are among the *reasons* people are buying new TVs in large numbers.
But people aren't really thinking about "HD versus SD" or formats, so much as the fact that a flat TV is both a status symbol and frees up a few square feet of space in their houses. People bought CD's because they don't scratch like records or turn to spaghetti like tapes. People buy new TVs because they are flat and they have a big picture.
>Well the guy used to use a 200-node parallel supercomputer, but now he prefers to use 8 PS3s. That to me proves that 8 PS3s is like a supercomputer TO HIM.
In my shop you pretty much need to be an NSF-funded project in order to really use the teragrid; and the supercomputing center will bill for it. If you can do your own computing in your own lab with your own equipment, especially if it costs less, it may not be very important that your PS3 cluster (vector processors! yay!) is not as fast as the top-500 machine on the other side of campus. There's something similar going on right here in my lab. We get to use #102 from the top-500 list, but we do lots of rendering on a cluster of re-purposed desktops instead.
A cluster in your lab that you don't have to negotiate for, play politics to use, or share, is usually going to be "better" when you look at total benefits instead of just overall horsepower.
It's not just about money. You wouldn't believe the political shenanigans that goes on in university HPC. We have less of a problem since we do a lot of practical work for NOAA and the USGS, but someone doing purely academic work in physics or atmospheric science might have real difficulties.
>If you're making something that flies or designing simulations, you'll need calculus.
I work with basin-scale flood modeling. It's entirely possible that calculus errors can kill large numbers of people...
>Of course, any programming relies a lot on algorithms and discrete mathematics, but trig and calculus aren't needed for most of that.
Well... Discrete mathematics intersects relational calculus, and for graphics and graphical algorithms, the student is going to be in a great deal of trouble without strong linear algebra and trig.
The cost of tuition is rarely the monumental concern that people make it out to be.
The cost of housing, food, and transportation tend to dwarf tuition, especially when one looks for ways to accommodate these things while unemployed. When I had this problem to solve, I took a job that paid a *third* of what I was accustomed to. Believe me, I never sweated the cost of tuition. If you can't afford a university that costs $30,000 a year, then by all means, go to one that costs $1200 a semester. If there's no such institution in your state, plan a year ahead and move someplace where you can make that happen.
But don't come whining about "the rising cost of tuition" and expect people to accept that as an excuse for not making a sacrifice in order to pursue an education. For every person with your complaint, there are dozens who are actually working to make it happen for them. If I can do it, so can you.
>I think that taking courses at a community college is the best idea.
In many cases, a good idea even for university students. It is quite often the case that teachers in Community College are better educated and more experienced than those in universities. Worse, many university math courses are actually being taught by grad students, and sometimes from a callous perspective of "weeding people out."
In any event, the actual learning in a math course is usually a result of being under the gun to go teach it to yourself enough that you can spark the gap and do homework. It's very common for a college math class to consist of an lecture with the same examples in the book, and then the student has to go do problems from the book, that usually can't be done just with the information from the book and lecture.
Years ago, a discussion on slashdot ended with some snide poster saying something like "go figure out how to teach yourself how to solve boundary value problems and get back to us." The topic was something to do with the necessity of university degrees, etc. Anyway, I thought about that quite a bit. The conclusion I came to is that a person would not actually seek out that knowledge without first understanding the nature of the problems addressed by such knowledge. Moreover, I suspect that the person who asked that question, had looked up in frustration from Boyce/DiPrima and posted that remark here. The whole DiffEq regime seems like just an exercise in math for its own sake, if you don't actually encounter the kind of problem which it is a tool for solving.
Actually, the entire traditional method of teaching math seems to be based on showing the student a problem that's difficult to solve in whatever formalism he uses, and then (surprise!) here's a tool for solving that problem! It happens going from arithmetic to algebra (surprise! here's a quadratic formula for magically finding roots!), and it happens again going from algebra to calculus (surprise! here's how you can really find roots and maxima!). Similar shenanigans are perpetrated on you going from differential to integral calculus, and again, going to multivariable integration, and again and again. There's actually a point where it all comes together, and I have come to regard even *that* as another example of forcing the itch in order to give the student a scratching tool.
Anyway, good luck to the O.P. And I echo your remarks; if you aren't under pressure, you don't have that itch, and figuring out how to scratch it might not be such an imperative.
One other point. It happens to nontraditional students that they cannot stand the idea of starting in a course that's at their level. This is understandable for many reasons (e.g., dealing with what is basically a remedial class of college freshmen who didn't place into "college algebra" might be extremely frustrating for an intelligent and mature person whose weakness is that they did poorly in math their first time through school). If it were me in that position (it was once, if you hadn't guessed), I'd try to find a self-paced course in algebra and really learn it. Hopefully, learn logarithms and plane trig while you're at it. Take a course in trig if you can. If you know this stuff cold, calculus won't ever be a problem.
Okay, just one other, other point. Be aware that in the college setting, you basically get *a day* to learn about logarithms. And maybe if you're lucky, you get *a week* to learn trig. And then you get similar pressure in the first year calculus to learn to apply the log and trig stuff into derivatives and again for integration. The pace is crazy, and most programs assume this stuff is review, and will coldly leave students in the dust.
So, my advice is to start slow, and really take the time to learn certain things very well when there's time, because this pays off nicely, later.
>If I just recall those feelings, I can much more easily find the motivation to get up early enough to bike to the rail station in the morning.
I went as far as to move to a town where my workplace could be in a nice neighborhood to live in. I'm not sure what kind of job would ever tempt me to go back into a situation that required traveling by car or train to be there. I put the value of "not having to commute" at around $150K per year, meaning, that's the value on *top* of salary, or putting it another way, approximately what I walked away from in order to avoid it. This isn't hypothetical or speculative. I actually did this.
"I agree. I've been seeing a physical therapist for a few months now for some thoracic outlet stuff, and after driving for about 5 or 6 hours this past weekend, it's now flared up again."
Mine's due to a birth defect: Extra ribs that cage the thoracic nerve bundles. Get an MRI and see if something like that is going on. I was quite surprised, to say the least. This kind of stuff doesn't really show up well on X-Rays, but on an MRI scan it's plain as day.
I've played piano for nearly forty years. I've been typing since first grade, in the early 60s. I've been working with (at least playing with) computers since they were accessed via Teletype. I've spent my career typing and coding. I think I'm a good candidate for RSI or CTS. So when I started having severe pain, I went to the doctor, unsurprised. What did I learn? I learned that I have neither. I learned that I have a birth defect which is a weird shaped extra set of ribs. My thoracic nerve bundle goes out *between* ribs because of it, and every once in a while, will get constricted, causing numbness and pain, and occasionally, persistent agony and near paralysis. Despite decades of typing and playing keyboards, I have no symptoms of RSI. I do have a mild bit of arthritis in my finger joints, but I expect that kind of thing at my age.
What I'm saying is, I was almost as disappointed as relieved that I somehow don't have CTS. And I still think a lot of people's CTS is a result of bad posture while driving cars.
I'm reasonably convinced that poor posture and hand position while *driving* contributes more tho CTS and/or RSI than typing does. I think it's a serious confounding variable, that most office workers have those two things in common: significant time spent driving a car, and typing on computer keyboards.
>Thats fine and dandy, but at what point did government stop playing by the rules?
They didn't, at least not in the sense that's being implied by this thread. The Constitution establishes the power of Congress to make laws, and constrains that power in certain ways intended to preserve the rights of the people and the power of state governments.
>I look through Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, and I can't find the part where Congress Shall Have The Power to make cars better.
As long as it doesn't say they are NOT allowed to, then if the PEOPLE abide by it, they have the power.
Are you one of those people who thinks no rights exist except those specified in the Constitution? Or are you one of those people who believes Congress does not represent the consensed will of those who put them in office?
>Do you really think that the cops would use choke holds and batons on someone for not shutting up?
Yes. I've experienced this personally. I've been very painfully restrained while being ticketed for occupying public land. I can put you in touch with hundreds of others who have had similar experiences, and a few who have been shot at, and even severely injured by being intentionally run down with vehicles or horses. For doing nothing more than peacefully gathering on public land.
This is my personal "worst civil rights atrocity perpetrated by the government", at least since the draft ended.
>why should 6 people risk a bite from someone who could have some diesease when they can be subdued without injury to the suspect or themselfs?
Before you can even ask that question, you must show that the "cops" have a right to "subdue" the person to begin with.
If the situation is such that the use of force is justified, say, the use of a taser as an alternative to.45 shots to the head, thorax and pelvis, that's one thing. If you are trying to make your "bite" case in defense of police action that isn't justified to begin with, it's irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
>Apparently no one is forced to do anything.
You make your choices. And if the choices are "you do it my way or you don't get this sales commission..." or "you adhere to this corporate policy if you want to continue working here..." you hopefully make the wise choice.
Of course the slashdotters who are actually in that kind of position of authority tend to choose their fights wisely.
>I envision two scen[a]rios:
1. Failure to communicate causes adverse consequences to fall on you. (You don't get a job, sale, boss gets angry, etc.)
2. Consequences fall to the party who chooses not to accept your correspondence.
>In turn, the notion that other people can't markup or change my text has a psychological impact on me.
Sometimes you have to be careful with this. A one-shot-or-you-blow-it medical school application is one thing,
and a memo to your subordinates in the office you manage is another.
>For all other cases where I am sending, I export to PDF.
This has a psychological impact on some people. They can't markup your text in their word processor.
>The only thing I can figure is that the Democrats in Congress are simply allowing him to take as much rope as he needs to hang himself, thereby helping to
> assure a Democratic victory in 2008.
I don't think they are too worried about '08. They are letting the Republicans make things bad enough for themselves that they will remain out of power for decades to come.
>Keep in mind also that the level of repression differs from area to area.
I know a researcher who wants to do a study on the uniformity of application of laws concerning reproduction.
Some people you meet from China have Aunts and Uncles. Others think of these as rather foreign concepts, highly unusual. Definitely, the "one child" policy is enforced very differently in different parts of the country.
"I've always felt sorry for the people who have deliberately learnt to notice a minor quality loss that would not normally and thus ruined thier own ability to enjoy music without spending lots of money on expensive equipment."
We probably disagree as to what constitutes a "minor quality loss."
People who claim not to be able to hear the difference between low-bitrate MP3 and high, or even, between MP3 and WAV,
often change their minds when they get an A/B test on a big sound system such as a high quality FOH or club system, or in
a production studio in a well-treated room with good monitors and a clean signal path. It's night and day, in both dynamic and frequency terms.
In some cases, it can be as shocking as the lost dynamic range effect you see on digital television (details in dark backgrounds are lost; same deal with audio), and in other cases, it's like "listen to just the cymbals... hear that?" People who who think they can't hear the difference often think that because of what they believe they are listening to, not because of what they are actually hearing.
Unfortunately, I've "cured" quite of few people of the belief that compressed audio is good enough. It's not just dogs, teenagers, and professional mastering engineers who can perceive these differences. You can to. But part of the psychoacoustic model is intentionally tricking you into not listening.
When I went to the site, all I saw was a flash movie doing a color morph.
If this is some kind of puzzle, I'm not into it. It would not surprise me
to learn that the next step for many people would be to find a torrent.
What would really be impressive is if the "pirate" version was something better than the 160Kbps MP3 download version... Of course, that would scream "inside job", or at least "industrial sabotage" to me.
"Oil is on its way to $100 a barrel, the US has troops and mercenaries (Blackwater) killing people in a "war" in a foreign country and nearly every day, young men and women from the US are being killed in that "war" and you think that the most important thing on people's minds is freaking analog vs digital TV?"
1. We're talking about people who will still buy gasoline even when it is an order of magnitude more expensive.
2. There war is actually a strong driver of television viewership. News and political talk shows are among the *reasons* people are buying new TVs in large numbers.
But people aren't really thinking about "HD versus SD" or formats, so much as the fact that a flat TV is both a status symbol and frees up a few square feet of space in their houses. People bought CD's because they don't scratch like records or turn to spaghetti like tapes. People buy new TVs because they are flat and they have a big picture.
>Well the guy used to use a 200-node parallel supercomputer, but now he prefers to use 8 PS3s. That to me proves that 8 PS3s is like a supercomputer TO HIM.
In my shop you pretty much need to be an NSF-funded project in order to really use the teragrid; and the supercomputing center will bill for it.
If you can do your own computing in your own lab with your own equipment, especially if it costs less, it may not be very important that your PS3 cluster (vector processors! yay!) is not as fast as the top-500 machine on the other side of campus. There's something similar going on right here in my lab. We get to use #102 from the top-500 list, but we do lots of rendering on a cluster of re-purposed desktops instead.
A cluster in your lab that you don't have to negotiate for, play politics to use, or share, is usually going to be "better" when you look at total benefits instead of just overall horsepower.
It's not just about money. You wouldn't believe the political shenanigans that goes on in university HPC. We have less of a problem since we do a lot of practical work for NOAA and the USGS, but someone doing purely academic work in physics or atmospheric science might have real difficulties.
>anyway, tuition costs, while not as high as the general cost of staying alive, are not heading downward.
Plotted versus inflation, they are.
>If you're making something that flies or designing simulations, you'll need calculus.
I work with basin-scale flood modeling. It's entirely possible that calculus errors can kill large numbers of people...
>Of course, any programming relies a lot on algorithms and discrete mathematics, but trig and calculus aren't needed for most of that.
Well... Discrete mathematics intersects relational calculus, and for graphics and graphical algorithms, the student is going to be
in a great deal of trouble without strong linear algebra and trig.
>have you seen the rising costs of tuition?
The cost of tuition is rarely the monumental concern that people make it out to be.
The cost of housing, food, and transportation tend to dwarf tuition, especially when
one looks for ways to accommodate these things while unemployed. When I had this problem
to solve, I took a job that paid a *third* of what I was accustomed to. Believe me, I never
sweated the cost of tuition. If you can't afford a university that costs $30,000 a year, then
by all means, go to one that costs $1200 a semester. If there's no such institution in your
state, plan a year ahead and move someplace where you can make that happen.
But don't come whining about "the rising cost of tuition" and expect people to accept that as
an excuse for not making a sacrifice in order to pursue an education. For every person with your
complaint, there are dozens who are actually working to make it happen for them. If I can do it,
so can you.
>I think that taking courses at a community college is the best idea.
In many cases, a good idea even for university students. It is quite often the case that teachers in Community College are better educated and more experienced than those in universities. Worse, many university math courses are actually being taught by grad students, and sometimes from a callous perspective of "weeding people out."
In any event, the actual learning in a math course is usually a result of being under the gun to go teach it to yourself enough that you can spark the gap and do homework. It's very common for a college math class to consist of an lecture with the same examples in the book, and then the student has to go do problems from the book, that usually can't be done just with the information from the book and lecture.
Years ago, a discussion on slashdot ended with some snide poster saying something like "go figure out how to teach yourself how to solve boundary value problems and get back to us." The topic was something to do with the necessity of university degrees, etc. Anyway, I thought about that quite a bit. The conclusion I came to is that a person would not actually seek out that knowledge without first understanding the nature of the problems addressed by such knowledge. Moreover, I suspect that the person who asked that question, had looked up in frustration from Boyce/DiPrima and posted that remark here. The whole DiffEq regime seems like just an exercise in math for its own sake, if you don't actually encounter the kind of problem which it is a tool for solving.
Actually, the entire traditional method of teaching math seems to be based on showing the student a problem that's difficult to solve in whatever formalism he uses, and then (surprise!) here's a tool for solving that problem! It happens going from arithmetic to algebra (surprise! here's a quadratic formula for magically finding roots!), and it happens again going from algebra to calculus (surprise! here's how you can really find roots and maxima!). Similar shenanigans are perpetrated on you going from differential to integral calculus, and again, going to multivariable integration, and again and again. There's actually a point where it all comes together, and I have come to regard even *that* as another example of forcing the itch in order to give the student a scratching tool.
Anyway, good luck to the O.P. And I echo your remarks; if you aren't under pressure, you don't have that itch, and figuring out how to scratch it might not be such an imperative.
One other point. It happens to nontraditional students that they cannot stand the idea of starting in a course that's at their level. This is understandable for many reasons (e.g., dealing with what is basically a remedial class of college freshmen who didn't place into "college algebra" might be extremely frustrating for an intelligent and mature person whose weakness is that they did poorly in math their first time through school). If it were me in that position (it was once, if you hadn't guessed), I'd try to find a self-paced course in algebra and really learn it. Hopefully, learn logarithms and plane trig while you're at it. Take a course in trig if you can. If you know this stuff cold, calculus won't ever be a problem.
Okay, just one other, other point. Be aware that in the college setting, you basically get *a day* to learn about logarithms. And maybe if you're lucky, you get *a week* to learn trig. And then you get similar pressure in the first year calculus to learn to apply the log and trig stuff into derivatives and again for integration. The pace is crazy, and most programs assume this stuff is review, and will coldly leave students in the dust.
So, my advice is to start slow, and really take the time to learn certain things very well when there's time, because this pays off nicely, later.
>If I just recall those feelings, I can much more easily find the motivation to get up early enough to bike to the rail station in the morning.
I went as far as to move to a town where my workplace could be in a nice neighborhood to live in. I'm not sure what kind of job would ever tempt me to go back into a situation that required traveling by car or train to be there. I put the value of "not having to commute" at around $150K per year, meaning, that's the value on *top* of salary, or putting it another way, approximately what I walked away from in order to avoid it. This isn't hypothetical or speculative. I actually did this.
"I agree. I've been seeing a physical therapist for a few months now for some thoracic outlet stuff, and after driving for about 5 or 6 hours this past weekend, it's now flared up again."
Mine's due to a birth defect: Extra ribs that cage the thoracic nerve bundles. Get an MRI and see if something like that is going on. I was quite surprised, to say the least. This kind of stuff doesn't really show up well on X-Rays, but on an MRI scan it's plain as day.
I've played piano for nearly forty years. I've been typing since first grade, in the early 60s. I've been working with (at least playing with) computers since they were accessed via Teletype. I've spent my career typing and coding. I think I'm a good candidate for RSI or CTS. So when I started having severe pain, I went to the doctor, unsurprised. What did I learn? I learned that I have neither. I learned that I have a birth defect which is a weird shaped extra set of ribs. My thoracic nerve bundle goes out *between* ribs because of it, and every once in a while, will get constricted, causing numbness and pain, and occasionally, persistent agony and near paralysis. Despite decades of typing and playing keyboards, I have no symptoms of RSI. I do have a mild bit of arthritis in my finger joints, but I expect that kind of thing at my age.
What I'm saying is, I was almost as disappointed as relieved that I somehow don't have CTS. And I still think a lot of people's CTS is a result of bad posture while driving cars.
I'm reasonably convinced that poor posture and hand position while *driving* contributes more tho CTS and/or RSI than typing does.
I think it's a serious confounding variable, that most office workers have those two things in common: significant time spent driving a car, and typing on computer keyboards.
If it works, don't be ashamed of it.
It you planned it, and then executed the plan to completion, there's nothing "amateurish" about that. This is one
*definition* of professional work.
>Thats fine and dandy, but at what point did government stop playing by the rules?
They didn't, at least not in the sense that's being implied by this thread.
The Constitution establishes the power of Congress to make laws, and constrains that power in certain ways
intended to preserve the rights of the people and the power of state governments.
>I look through Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, and I can't find the part where Congress Shall Have The Power to make cars better.
As long as it doesn't say they are NOT allowed to, then if the PEOPLE abide by it, they have the power.
Are you one of those people who thinks no rights exist except those specified in the Constitution? Or are you one of those people who believes Congress does not represent the consensed will of those who put them in office?
>Do you really think that the cops would use choke holds and batons on someone for not shutting up?
Yes. I've experienced this personally. I've been very painfully restrained while being ticketed for
occupying public land. I can put you in touch with hundreds of others who have had similar experiences,
and a few who have been shot at, and even severely injured by being intentionally run down with vehicles
or horses. For doing nothing more than peacefully gathering on public land.
This is my personal "worst civil rights atrocity perpetrated by the government", at least since the draft ended.
>why should 6 people risk a bite from someone who could have some diesease when they can be subdued without injury to the suspect or themselfs?
Before you can even ask that question, you must show that the "cops" have a right to "subdue" the person to begin with.
If the situation is such that the use of force is justified, say, the use of a taser as an alternative to