If your calculations are processor-dependent, that's a bad sign for your code. If your results really depend on things that can be altered by the specific floating-point implementation, you need to write code that's robust to changes in the way floating-point arithmetic is done, generally by tracking the uncertainty associated with each number in your calculation. (Obviously you don't need real-time performance since you're using cloud computing in the first place.) I'm not an expert on Mathematica, but it probably has such things built in if you go through the documentation, since Mathematica notebooks are supposed to exhibit reproduceable behavior on different machines. (Which is not to say that no matter what you write it's automatically going to be reproduceable.
Archiving hardware to get consistent results is mainly used when there are legal issues and some lawyer can jump in and say, "A-ha! This bit here is different, and therefore there's some kind of fraud going on!"
Yep. Generally what happens when there are multiple defendants and no solid case is that the suspects are threatened with a Russian Roulette-style court case, causing one to decide to confess and implicate the other defendants in exchange for a lighter penalty.
I dunno what you mean by "UC isn't even all that prestigious," but the Times Higher Education Supplement rated UC Berkeley as the #8 university in the world and #6 in the U.S., behind Caltech, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. In particular, they feel that it's better than the entire university system of every country that isn't the U.S. or the U.K. I'd say that's pretty good. UCLA is world-class as well, and UCSF is one of the top three or four medical schools in the world. Even the lesser-known campuses like Riverside and Irvine have strong reputations.
Personally, I find it fascinating that if you just randomly put forward and back slashes on a screen then it forms a pattern like that. To me, it's much more interesting than an algorithm that generates mazes. I'd have expected that you just got a bunch of diamonds and things.
In elementary school in the late 1980's, our school librarian of all people -- a nice, fun older lady -- taught us LOGO programming. The class went relatively deep given that the students were all eight or nine years old. Our last assignment was to write a function that would draw a regular n-gon (taking n as a parameter), then incorporate that into a recursive function that would draw arbitrarily deep spirograph-type shapes using a callback function. Pretty much everyone figured it out on his or her own, as I recall. Our "computer lab" at the time consisted of someone going and setting up folding tables in a hallway or the cafeteria and then lugging a bunch of Apple//e machines out of a closet, then tearing the whole setup down after a couple of hours.
In middle school, we had a short unit on BASIC programming, by now on the Apple IIGS. By this time it was the late 1990's, and I'd started teaching myself QBASIC on our home PC; the computers we were using in school were around seven years old by this point.
In high school, I took a semester of computer science as a freshman and a year of "AP Computer Science" as a sophomore. This was largely just indoctrination into OOP. The entire course consisted of writing completely trivial C++ programs which would consist of several objects, none of whose member functions exceeded one or two lines. Nobody really enjoyed the course or learned much of anything, but we were pretty much bound to the AP curriculum so there wasn't much that could be done.
Had I my druthers, I'd design a computer science program for schoolkids by focusing more on the sort of stuff I did as a little kid, which was really conceptually much deeper and certainly a lot more fun.
You *definitely* don't need a PhD to work as a mathematician at the NSA, nor do you need a specific background in cryptography. If you failed abstract algebra in college you're probably not getting a job there, but my understanding is that it's not that difficult to get in so long as you're qualified, a citizen, and can pass a background check. The NSA is the single largest employer of mathematicians in the world -- they're certainly not just hiring the extreme elites.
Did you read his twitter post? It was an obvious joke. No reasonable person could possibly interpret it as an actual threat. Most unreasonable people would even understand it was a joke.
Unless things have drastically changed since (recently) I went to Caltech, math is its own department -- part of the division of physics, math, and astronomy -- and CS is its own department as well -- part of the division of engineering and applied sciences. There's also an applied/computational math under the E&AS umbrella, but that's not anything like either math or CS.
Generally coursework is the least important component of a graduate education -- in some cases, people won't take any courses at all during certain terms. Additionally, the courses generally require much more work, and a 'C' is a failing grade.
This study tries to figure out in what way the average person enjoys a story. Aside from the fact that asking people to rate things from 1 to 10 is a great way to determine their favorite numbers and very little else, even if the study were completely accurate I wouldn't care. Why? Because the average person is the guy who makes Michael Bay, Twilight, The Jersey Shore, and Justin Bieber popular. They are the people who books like "The Secret" outsell actual literature. It's already well-established that the average person is worse than useless, dragging us into the gutter and away from the stars. If this research could start to teach us to fix what's wrong with the average person then maybe it'd be worthwhile, but it's clear from the researchers' comments that they actually think that there's something *okay* about the fact that people have gotten so stupid that they can't even follow a simple plot without having the Cliff's Notes embedded into the first paragraph.
If your idea is that the average person alive today -- never mind the average high school student -- has any knowledge at all of relativistic mechanics, evolutionary biology, computer science/engineering, medical science, etc., I think you'll find you're sadly mistaken. Yes, the average teenager knows how to use a cell phone. Clearly this is an insurmountable obstacle, and Isaac Newton himself would be unable to figure out my Nokia.
At any rate, the material on the "arithmetic" and "algebra" sections is still taught and used in schools today, and I'll outright guarantee you that if I printed those out and took them to a Calculus III section at the local university I'd be unlikely to get a very high pass rate, despite the fact that most of them have memorized how to take dozens of integrals or apply Lagrange multipliers.
Knowledge isn't worth as much as people seem to think; at its heart, it's just trivia. What matters is the ability to think, and that doesn't change from generation to generation.
And for that matter, heaven forbid that college should be about getting an education instead of necessary vocational training. Clearly knowledge is worthless except as a bullet on a résumé.
Umm, you realize this is *Rob Pike* you're talking about, right? One of the original developers of UNIX? I'm guessing that, what with working at Bell Labs while they were *inventing* C, he might know a little more about the language than you do.
'Your stocks will be worthless (than any other's) in 23 hours if and only if those said others are allowed to sell sooner than you and *specially* sooner than the buyer's knowledge about the bankrupcy'
No, your stocks will be worthless, period. People won't magically be willing to pay more money for stock in a bankrupt company because they weren't allowed to trade the stock for a while. But this isn't really a great example of why liquidity is necessary, because in this case there's not much that can be done. Market liquidity is necessary to allow risks to be reallocated, and risks need to be reallocated on a regular basis, not just once a day. Just because you could conceivably regulate "official" stock prices doesn't mean you can regulate the instantaneous factors that dictate them -- the cost of oil, local and international politics, the weather, etc.
"Remember that extracting wealth from the markets and transferring it from one account to another is not the same thing as 'profit', because it reduces the wealth available to actual productive investment - the corporate processes which do not and cannot change any faster than the time it takes to gear-up a factory or harvest a crop."
Nonsense. Say the price of oil changes; then all of a sudden all sorts of companies make or lose enormous amounts of money. Same thing with interest rates, the weather, natural disasters, international politics, etc. Here's an exercise for you: go buy stock in a pharmaceutical company that's waiting to get approval of a new drug. On principal, refuse to trade it even after the announcement comes out and the price spikes or plunges. Afterwards, you can give us all a nice lecture on how little you care for market liquidity.
For that matter, how do you determine a fair price to pay for your investments? Do you bring up a spreadsheet, model the company's discounted future earnings, and derive the price you're willing to buy and sell at? Of course not. You rely on the market to let you know what a fair price is. Without a liquid market, you might as well be buying stock from some guy who calls you up on the phone.
Of course, I'm going to guess that you or someone else is going to say, "But I just take the high road -- I invest in indexed mutual funds and don't try to beat the market." But what do you think the fund's traders are doing? Just sitting around all day and not trading? All you're doing is paying someone else to execute those same trades for you.
Au contraire. True, you can't walk up to a total stranger on the street and say "I'm going to kill you." This is, however, a normal and completely acceptable way to speak to your ex- (or current!) boyfriend, or really anyone you're on a first-name basis with. Nobody would bat an eye if they heard someone say such a thing in public. It appears, however, that school administrators are all send through some kind of indoctrination progress where they're taught that the internet automatically makes everything more sinister.
Not so. The point of standardized libraries isn't that they're better than third-party ones, but that there aren't competitors. That way all development goes into the same library which everyone is familiar with and there's no bizarre fragmentation to deal with.
The point is that, assuming we've got a guy following around Verizon trucks and pretending to be a tech, he's probably gone to the trouble of printing up some random ID card and laminating it. Since you don't even know what a Verizon ID card looks like it wouldn't even take any research on his part -- it'd just be a card with a downloaded Verizon logo on it, a photograph of him, and a fake name, that had been run through a laminating machine.
The client hired the contractor to do some work for him. They had a real-world contract stating that he was to be paid with real money and was to retain full rights to his creations. From a legal standpoint this is no different from doing graphic design for a website, writing a book and selling limited rights to a publisher, etc. If you hire me to make a baseball bat for you and our contract states that I retain copyright to the design, and then you start selling knockoffs of it, you are not going to be successful in a lawsuit by stating that the official baseball rulebook says nothing about copyright. In other words, the rules of a virtual world do not somehow override the rules of the real world.
It wasn't Second Life that contracted him to do the work, it was someone with a Second Life account. I don't know anything about Second Life, but context seems to imply that there's no straightforward way to do a local backup of these things, i.e. apparently they can only reside on the Second Life servers. As such, the client did not have the right to delete them, because the creator had some rights to them.
A roughly analogous situation would involve your building a duplex (in real life) and selling half of it to me, and my setting the whole thing on fire one day.
Also, you seem to be confusing "imaginary property" with "intellectual property."
Intellectual property = literature, music, code, etc. Protected by copyright law for centuries in a reasonably well-defined system.
Imaginary property = "I have a property right to the record in the game's database that says that my character has 100,000 gold coins and 75 experience points, and if someone in any way indirectly causes and SQL UPDATE statement that affects that record, it's theft."
Slashdot Mirror
If your calculations are processor-dependent, that's a bad sign for your code. If your results really depend on things that can be altered by the specific floating-point implementation, you need to write code that's robust to changes in the way floating-point arithmetic is done, generally by tracking the uncertainty associated with each number in your calculation. (Obviously you don't need real-time performance since you're using cloud computing in the first place.) I'm not an expert on Mathematica, but it probably has such things built in if you go through the documentation, since Mathematica notebooks are supposed to exhibit reproduceable behavior on different machines. (Which is not to say that no matter what you write it's automatically going to be reproduceable.
Archiving hardware to get consistent results is mainly used when there are legal issues and some lawyer can jump in and say, "A-ha! This bit here is different, and therefore there's some kind of fraud going on!"
Yep. Generally what happens when there are multiple defendants and no solid case is that the suspects are threatened with a Russian Roulette-style court case, causing one to decide to confess and implicate the other defendants in exchange for a lighter penalty.
I dunno what you mean by "UC isn't even all that prestigious," but the Times Higher Education Supplement rated UC Berkeley as the #8 university in the world and #6 in the U.S., behind Caltech, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Princeton. In particular, they feel that it's better than the entire university system of every country that isn't the U.S. or the U.K. I'd say that's pretty good. UCLA is world-class as well, and UCSF is one of the top three or four medical schools in the world. Even the lesser-known campuses like Riverside and Irvine have strong reputations.
Personally, I find it fascinating that if you just randomly put forward and back slashes on a screen then it forms a pattern like that. To me, it's much more interesting than an algorithm that generates mazes. I'd have expected that you just got a bunch of diamonds and things.
In elementary school in the late 1980's, our school librarian of all people -- a nice, fun older lady -- taught us LOGO programming. The class went relatively deep given that the students were all eight or nine years old. Our last assignment was to write a function that would draw a regular n-gon (taking n as a parameter), then incorporate that into a recursive function that would draw arbitrarily deep spirograph-type shapes using a callback function. Pretty much everyone figured it out on his or her own, as I recall. Our "computer lab" at the time consisted of someone going and setting up folding tables in a hallway or the cafeteria and then lugging a bunch of Apple //e machines out of a closet, then tearing the whole setup down after a couple of hours.
In middle school, we had a short unit on BASIC programming, by now on the Apple IIGS. By this time it was the late 1990's, and I'd started teaching myself QBASIC on our home PC; the computers we were using in school were around seven years old by this point.
In high school, I took a semester of computer science as a freshman and a year of "AP Computer Science" as a sophomore. This was largely just indoctrination into OOP. The entire course consisted of writing completely trivial C++ programs which would consist of several objects, none of whose member functions exceeded one or two lines. Nobody really enjoyed the course or learned much of anything, but we were pretty much bound to the AP curriculum so there wasn't much that could be done.
Had I my druthers, I'd design a computer science program for schoolkids by focusing more on the sort of stuff I did as a little kid, which was really conceptually much deeper and certainly a lot more fun.
You *definitely* don't need a PhD to work as a mathematician at the NSA, nor do you need a specific background in cryptography. If you failed abstract algebra in college you're probably not getting a job there, but my understanding is that it's not that difficult to get in so long as you're qualified, a citizen, and can pass a background check. The NSA is the single largest employer of mathematicians in the world -- they're certainly not just hiring the extreme elites.
Did you read his twitter post? It was an obvious joke. No reasonable person could possibly interpret it as an actual threat. Most unreasonable people would even understand it was a joke.
Your example of gears is bicycles? That's cool, I guess. But, you know, *cars*...
I'm pretty sure most young people have also seen calendars, clipboards, film cameras, and Manila folders outside of a museum.
Unless things have drastically changed since (recently) I went to Caltech, math is its own department -- part of the division of physics, math, and astronomy -- and CS is its own department as well -- part of the division of engineering and applied sciences. There's also an applied/computational math under the E&AS umbrella, but that's not anything like either math or CS.
Generally coursework is the least important component of a graduate education -- in some cases, people won't take any courses at all during certain terms. Additionally, the courses generally require much more work, and a 'C' is a failing grade.
So you figured out what was going on and you didn't help your friend out?
Some friend you are...
s/who books like "The Secret" outsell/who cause books like "The Secret" to outsell/
This study tries to figure out in what way the average person enjoys a story. Aside from the fact that asking people to rate things from 1 to 10 is a great way to determine their favorite numbers and very little else, even if the study were completely accurate I wouldn't care. Why? Because the average person is the guy who makes Michael Bay, Twilight, The Jersey Shore, and Justin Bieber popular. They are the people who books like "The Secret" outsell actual literature. It's already well-established that the average person is worse than useless, dragging us into the gutter and away from the stars. If this research could start to teach us to fix what's wrong with the average person then maybe it'd be worthwhile, but it's clear from the researchers' comments that they actually think that there's something *okay* about the fact that people have gotten so stupid that they can't even follow a simple plot without having the Cliff's Notes embedded into the first paragraph.
If your idea is that the average person alive today -- never mind the average high school student -- has any knowledge at all of relativistic mechanics, evolutionary biology, computer science/engineering, medical science, etc., I think you'll find you're sadly mistaken. Yes, the average teenager knows how to use a cell phone. Clearly this is an insurmountable obstacle, and Isaac Newton himself would be unable to figure out my Nokia.
At any rate, the material on the "arithmetic" and "algebra" sections is still taught and used in schools today, and I'll outright guarantee you that if I printed those out and took them to a Calculus III section at the local university I'd be unlikely to get a very high pass rate, despite the fact that most of them have memorized how to take dozens of integrals or apply Lagrange multipliers.
Knowledge isn't worth as much as people seem to think; at its heart, it's just trivia. What matters is the ability to think, and that doesn't change from generation to generation.
Please tell me you're kidding. Latin != Italian.
And for that matter, heaven forbid that college should be about getting an education instead of necessary vocational training. Clearly knowledge is worthless except as a bullet on a résumé.
Umm, you realize this is *Rob Pike* you're talking about, right? One of the original developers of UNIX? I'm guessing that, what with working at Bell Labs while they were *inventing* C, he might know a little more about the language than you do.
'Your stocks will be worthless (than any other's) in 23 hours if and only if those said others are allowed to sell sooner than you and *specially* sooner than the buyer's knowledge about the bankrupcy'
No, your stocks will be worthless, period. People won't magically be willing to pay more money for stock in a bankrupt company because they weren't allowed to trade the stock for a while. But this isn't really a great example of why liquidity is necessary, because in this case there's not much that can be done. Market liquidity is necessary to allow risks to be reallocated, and risks need to be reallocated on a regular basis, not just once a day. Just because you could conceivably regulate "official" stock prices doesn't mean you can regulate the instantaneous factors that dictate them -- the cost of oil, local and international politics, the weather, etc.
"Remember that extracting wealth from the markets and transferring it from one account to another is not the same thing as 'profit', because it reduces the wealth available to actual productive investment - the corporate processes which do not and cannot change any faster than the time it takes to gear-up a factory or harvest a crop."
Nonsense. Say the price of oil changes; then all of a sudden all sorts of companies make or lose enormous amounts of money. Same thing with interest rates, the weather, natural disasters, international politics, etc. Here's an exercise for you: go buy stock in a pharmaceutical company that's waiting to get approval of a new drug. On principal, refuse to trade it even after the announcement comes out and the price spikes or plunges. Afterwards, you can give us all a nice lecture on how little you care for market liquidity.
For that matter, how do you determine a fair price to pay for your investments? Do you bring up a spreadsheet, model the company's discounted future earnings, and derive the price you're willing to buy and sell at? Of course not. You rely on the market to let you know what a fair price is. Without a liquid market, you might as well be buying stock from some guy who calls you up on the phone.
Of course, I'm going to guess that you or someone else is going to say, "But I just take the high road -- I invest in indexed mutual funds and don't try to beat the market." But what do you think the fund's traders are doing? Just sitting around all day and not trading? All you're doing is paying someone else to execute those same trades for you.
And you didn't even notice that it begins "For all intensive purposes..."
Au contraire. True, you can't walk up to a total stranger on the street and say "I'm going to kill you." This is, however, a normal and completely acceptable way to speak to your ex- (or current!) boyfriend, or really anyone you're on a first-name basis with. Nobody would bat an eye if they heard someone say such a thing in public. It appears, however, that school administrators are all send through some kind of indoctrination progress where they're taught that the internet automatically makes everything more sinister.
Not so. The point of standardized libraries isn't that they're better than third-party ones, but that there aren't competitors. That way all development goes into the same library which everyone is familiar with and there's no bizarre fragmentation to deal with.
The point is that, assuming we've got a guy following around Verizon trucks and pretending to be a tech, he's probably gone to the trouble of printing up some random ID card and laminating it. Since you don't even know what a Verizon ID card looks like it wouldn't even take any research on his part -- it'd just be a card with a downloaded Verizon logo on it, a photograph of him, and a fake name, that had been run through a laminating machine.
The client hired the contractor to do some work for him. They had a real-world contract stating that he was to be paid with real money and was to retain full rights to his creations. From a legal standpoint this is no different from doing graphic design for a website, writing a book and selling limited rights to a publisher, etc. If you hire me to make a baseball bat for you and our contract states that I retain copyright to the design, and then you start selling knockoffs of it, you are not going to be successful in a lawsuit by stating that the official baseball rulebook says nothing about copyright. In other words, the rules of a virtual world do not somehow override the rules of the real world.
It wasn't Second Life that contracted him to do the work, it was someone with a Second Life account. I don't know anything about Second Life, but context seems to imply that there's no straightforward way to do a local backup of these things, i.e. apparently they can only reside on the Second Life servers. As such, the client did not have the right to delete them, because the creator had some rights to them.
A roughly analogous situation would involve your building a duplex (in real life) and selling half of it to me, and my setting the whole thing on fire one day.
Also, you seem to be confusing "imaginary property" with "intellectual property."
Intellectual property = literature, music, code, etc. Protected by copyright law for centuries in a reasonably well-defined system.
Imaginary property = "I have a property right to the record in the game's database that says that my character has 100,000 gold coins and 75 experience points, and if someone in any way indirectly causes and SQL UPDATE statement that affects that record, it's theft."