... to see how this thread will go. Soon it'll be flooded with debates about virtual property, whatever that means, and whether you should be able to prosecute someone for murdering your Elf Lord or whatever. The fact is that this guy was commissioned for an artistic project, retained full rights, and then had his property deleted. Take an entirely analogous situation: suppose that Ray Charles -- whose contract stated that he owned the original masters of all his recordings -- goes into a studio to record an album, and the studio subsequently throws said recordings away. Ray would have a pretty solid case, and so does this guy. This case has nothing to do with the MMO aspects of the incident; however, I can solidly say that at least half the population of Slashdot will *make* it about that, somehow.
When a stranger calls you up and tells you to do something on their authority, and you do it, you're not doing it because you trust him. After all, you don't even know him. You're doing it because you've been taught to take orders from anyone who speaks in complete sentences and has a manager he can put on the phone. These pranks don't erode my trust in other people any more than the thousands of Nigerian scam emails I get each day. They might, however, give me a little more courage to speak up when something doesn't make sense.
Precisely. If this guy is able to pull off this kind of crap without any ulterior motive other than his own amusement, imagine what someone actually *trying* to cause serious harm might be able to get away with. Remember, these "stupid" people are the ones who keep society running at a very fundamental level. If they can be convinced to drink strangers' pee and smash their own windows, is it really all *that* hard to imagine that hotel staff might be convinced to hand your room keys to burglars, or that fast food workers might be convinced into inadvertently poisoning their food?
Let's be clear: this has nothing at all to do with trust; it has to do with authority. The pranksters didn't call up and ask for a personal favor; each time they called up and pulled rank, relying on an appearance of professionalism to manipulate people lower in the hierarchy. If it only costs a few thousand dollars of damage here and there to erode the do-what-you're-told-and-don't-think-about-it culture that modern businesses encourage, it will be a bargain.
Unfortunately, these incidents will probably just lead to more training regarding the org chart rather than to an environment in which employees are not actively discouraged from questioning their managers' instructions.
Actually, Samuel Johnson, widely regarded as one of the greatest contributors to the English language, is famously quoted as saying "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
It seems to me that the first and heaviest place to go is medical research. Healthcare costs in the United States are so high that international health insurance plans generally just cover every country that isn't America. A huge part of the problem is the extreme expense associated with the opaque nature of the pharmaceutical industry. When it's actually profitable to run extremely long primetime commercials advertising certain medicines, it's blatantly obvious that there's something horrendously wrong with the system -- clearly the proper medication shouldn't depend on what you saw on TV last night.
Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized. I'm guessing that if we got healthcare costs down on the supply end we wouldn't have so many problems with health insurance in this country.
I'm pretty sure that the reason that nobody on Slashdot agrees with you has more than a little to do with the fact that you're a "Married with Children" fan.
Admittedly, "The Beast with a Thousand Backs" or whatever it was called did more to creep me out than to amuse me. That being said, as a literary critic I can't agree with the assertion that a single second of any episode of "Family Guy" could be classified as "meh." For thousands of years comedy has not developed past Aristophanes -- indeed, fewer than a hundred years ago the great cultural historian Edith Hamilton compared the popular entertainment of the previous generation to his oeuvre. The cutaway scenes in Family Guy represent the first departure from classical comedy I've ever been aware of. In my (professional) estimation Seth McFarlane is the single most important writer in the English language since the time Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Blake.
I wish I'd been there the day in debate class where they taught me how to make the argument that my opponent's position was "soul deadening," on the authority, no less, of "every mature, moral person." It seems like a pretty powerful argument, after all: anyone who would even attempt to dispute your position is then either immature or immoral, and in either case universally despised, which has to put a serious dent in his standing to argue his point with the likes of an ethical powerhouse of your eminence.
Indeed, your argument is so powerful that it shows us that Voltaire, previously thought to be one of the great ethical minds, is in fact a blubbering degenerate -- after all, his resolve to fight for free expression even for distasteful or outrageous opinions is by your argument tantamount to directly acting out the furthest slippery-slope consequences of those expressions.
Another thing I've learned from you just now is that abstract arguments do not apply to concrete situations. For instance, I may believe in freedom of religion in the abstract, but when a Muslim moves in next door all bets are off -- after all, there is now the concrete threat of my family being the victim of a "holy war," which trumps my ideals (and for that matter statistics) and tells me that I need to take action.
Truth be told, you're (perhaps unintentionally) basing your ethics around what makes you feel outraged or uncomfortable, rather than on ideals or on lucid consideration of how cause leads to effect. Forget the twentysomething videogame addicts -- even the core audience for Hannah Montana can tell you that right and wrong are universal and that you don't get to make exceptions based on your personal likes and dislikes.
If these exact videos were coming from an open-source python program and there was a link to sourceforge in the article, you'd be calling it cool. If it were a new feature in GarageBand and they'd announced it at MacWorld, it would have been *the* highlight of the conference. What this program does is explore the harmonies that are compatible with a melody, and you can see from the "Roxanne" video that it does a really, really good job of it. Maybe plugging it directly into a Casio-style accompaniment generator is not exactly the best thing to do with it, but this is definitely a *very* cool little program in its own right.
Basically what's being said here is that the academic publication system is vulnerable to the sorts of SEO attacks that briefly caused search engines to be befuddled by sites full of interlinked pages full of nonsense text and viagra ads. The academic publication system just moves a little slower, so it's going to take them a little longer to update things.
Here's my story: I am a math / English double major, and I interviewed with a trading firm at the recommendation of a friend. They asked me various questions about probability and some somewhat relevant brain-teasers -- nothing at all about the market, which at the time I knew nothing about -- and ended up offering me a job with a six-figure first year salary (that is, if I count bonuses.)
I will definitely enjoy it, but I'm only doing it because I decided that I don't really have the full complement of skills it would take to be a good mathematician -- otherwise I'd happily be entering grad school and making slave wages for next several years.
I don't think I was reading the Slashdot coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting, but elsewhere on the internet the response was nearly completely rational -- almost everyone pointed out that the "disturbing plays" the killer had written were nothing to be followed up on, and that faulting the administration for not looking into that sort of thing was and incredibly misguided attempt at dehumanizing the killer. People are not entertained by media circuses which remind them that murderers and dictators are no different from the rest of us, so anything "disturbing" about the latest undesirable to become news entertainment gets splashed all over the place.
What people *did* fault the administration of Virginia Tech for were the things they actually did wrong:
(1) Allowing a student who was stalking multiple female students to remain on campus -- though admittedly the concern would have been rape and not murder here.
(2) Waiting for over an hour to inform students of the first shooting, and then doing it with an *email* and nothing else.
(3) Giving up on the investigation on the hypothesis that everything was just a lover's spat, without checking into the alternatives.
I'm not sure that I really agree with the assertion that you'd have to be crazy not to have a certain opinion about evolution. If we polled the public on their opinion on, say, the comparative benefits of declarative versus functional programming languages, or the assumption of complete markets on which Black-Sholes analysis relies, or on their ideas about differential equations, would we expect to receive reasonable answers?
In truth, there is no difference between these fields and evolutionary biology -- they are arbitrary areas of science, and to understand any of them takes the equivalent of several college courses. I "believe" in evolutionary biology the same way that I "believe" in the heliocentric model, the VSEPR model, Newtonian gravity, etc. -- which is to say that I believe these because I've been taught them. I've never performed any experiments to confirm any of these things.
When we ask random people their opinions on things which have no relevance to their lives whatsoever, what are we really asking? Does it really benefit anyone to have a "Jeopardy" knowledge of these subjects -- "Evolution explains the diversity of life on this planet, Alex"? I can't see why. Sure, if you're interested, go ahead and look into these areas for your own entertainment, or you really want to do serious work in a particular field, by all means go ahead. But it seems that certain fields -- evolutionary biology, cosmology, etc. -- are considered "privileged" areas by some solely because of their interface with "religious" ideas.
This is an entirely nonscientific way of thinking, and really isn't much better than what "creation scientists" push; so far as I have seen, most non-biologists who are militant about their views are really militant about a religious belief in atheism rather than a real desire for a more comprehensive understanding of science in the general populace. As a mathematician, I am not worried at all about the fact that the average person might have severe misconceptions about abstract algebra or differentiable manifolds or combinatorics. As far as I can tell, hoping for plumbers to have a surface-level grasp of biology makes about as much sense as hoping for biologists to have a surface-level grasp of plumbing.
"Minister of the Interior" is equivalent to the American "Secretary of the Interior." It's not a religious position, any more than Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
You're talking about the same police that complained that Mozilla was complicating their investigations because the menu options to get at history and cache were different. These are not the most computer-saavy people in the world, here.
As a matter of fact, I own the cartridge, but I don't have a TV to plug a console into; can't fit in my tiny dorm room. In any case, I seriously doubt it's an emulation issue.
I played that game (Genesis version) until I was around the final boss. Somehow I left the room after the boss fight started; now the door is permanently locked... Anyone have any ideas
As I said, I was looking at the syllabus at that link and the sample tests from the other professional actuarial society. I'm not 100% sure what you're talking about when you say "Gauss's Theorem" or "Liebnitz's theorem," as both of those men produced enormous amounts of work in all areas of math and science, but as far as I could tell you didn't need anything past the basic laws of probability and layman's (i.e. nonrigorous) understandings of calculus and statistics to pass the first three actuarial tests. Of course, I haven't actually taken the exams, and I didn't read all ~200 pages of the samples, so if you have an example of more interesting math that an actuary does, I'd be interested to see it.
According to the ASU math website at http://www.asu.edu/aad/catalogs/general/department -mathematics-statistics.html there are two degrees offered in math: a B.A. and a B.S. The Intermediate Calculus class is apparently an easier version of "Advanced Calculus I," which is a requirement for the B.S. degree. So the math majors in the class you were in were people getting B.A.'s, which, as you say, are mainly people studying to be teachers. The serious research mathematicians would have been in math 371, and it certainly wouldn't have been the last class they were taking. Also, math 370 is listed on that page as a requirement for math education majors, so I'd be willing to bet that there were a lot of them in the course.
Most good math majors would have already gotten their calculus out of way in high school, so the math majors you took calc with were probably mainly the slow ones.
According to the sample syllabi at http://www.casact.org/admissions/syllabus/2006/ind ex.cfm?fa=summary the mathematics involved are of the sort that a good high school student will pick up if he/she takes the AP Calculus and Statistics courses. Failing that, the math would surely be easily within reach of a mathematics major at a university. Of course, only the first 3 out of 7 tests deal with pure mathematics, so I can't say much about the others, but it doesn't look like these tests really require any mathematical fireworks.
I can think of plenty of ways to go after the clients. For instance, start a spam site selling "V1agra." Simultaneously produce a product called "V1agra" which consists of cyanide and strychnine, with instructions in fine print saying that it's only for pesticide use. Or or a message saying, "Guess what we did with your credit card number." Personally, I'd take credit card numbers, and then use their credit cards to run ads in their local papers announcing in huge type that this person was supporting the people who send you all that spam.
On the one hand, it sounds like this mug would probably break if dropped from waist height, since there wouldn't be time for it to right itself. Also, even if it could, it would only work once, since the "Holy Hand Grenade" portion at the bottom would disappear. So this design is, in practice, completely worthless.
On the other hand, I have to appreciate the creation of a contest entry designed to satisfy the verbatim rules of the contest, as my buddy and I are responsible for at least a page of prohibitions in the Botball rules (although I hear some of the things we did are once again legal), so I can't really say I don't appreciate entries like this.
Back on the first hand, it seems ridiculous that the second-place team gets a full-page article which only passingly mentions the first place team and doesn't describe the properties of their entry or how high it was able to survive falling from. If I was on the UMR team, I'd be pretty upset right now.
Slashdot Mirror
... to see how this thread will go. Soon it'll be flooded with debates about virtual property, whatever that means, and whether you should be able to prosecute someone for murdering your Elf Lord or whatever. The fact is that this guy was commissioned for an artistic project, retained full rights, and then had his property deleted. Take an entirely analogous situation: suppose that Ray Charles -- whose contract stated that he owned the original masters of all his recordings -- goes into a studio to record an album, and the studio subsequently throws said recordings away. Ray would have a pretty solid case, and so does this guy. This case has nothing to do with the MMO aspects of the incident; however, I can solidly say that at least half the population of Slashdot will *make* it about that, somehow.
When a stranger calls you up and tells you to do something on their authority, and you do it, you're not doing it because you trust him. After all, you don't even know him. You're doing it because you've been taught to take orders from anyone who speaks in complete sentences and has a manager he can put on the phone. These pranks don't erode my trust in other people any more than the thousands of Nigerian scam emails I get each day. They might, however, give me a little more courage to speak up when something doesn't make sense.
Precisely. If this guy is able to pull off this kind of crap without any ulterior motive other than his own amusement, imagine what someone actually *trying* to cause serious harm might be able to get away with. Remember, these "stupid" people are the ones who keep society running at a very fundamental level. If they can be convinced to drink strangers' pee and smash their own windows, is it really all *that* hard to imagine that hotel staff might be convinced to hand your room keys to burglars, or that fast food workers might be convinced into inadvertently poisoning their food?
Let's be clear: this has nothing at all to do with trust; it has to do with authority. The pranksters didn't call up and ask for a personal favor; each time they called up and pulled rank, relying on an appearance of professionalism to manipulate people lower in the hierarchy. If it only costs a few thousand dollars of damage here and there to erode the do-what-you're-told-and-don't-think-about-it culture that modern businesses encourage, it will be a bargain.
Unfortunately, these incidents will probably just lead to more training regarding the org chart rather than to an environment in which employees are not actively discouraged from questioning their managers' instructions.
Actually, Samuel Johnson, widely regarded as one of the greatest contributors to the English language, is famously quoted as saying "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."
It seems to me that the first and heaviest place to go is medical research. Healthcare costs in the United States are so high that international health insurance plans generally just cover every country that isn't America. A huge part of the problem is the extreme expense associated with the opaque nature of the pharmaceutical industry. When it's actually profitable to run extremely long primetime commercials advertising certain medicines, it's blatantly obvious that there's something horrendously wrong with the system -- clearly the proper medication shouldn't depend on what you saw on TV last night.
Worse, a lot of drug research is publicly funded, but then the results wind up privatized. I'm guessing that if we got healthcare costs down on the supply end we wouldn't have so many problems with health insurance in this country.
I'm pretty sure that the reason that nobody on Slashdot agrees with you has more than a little to do with the fact that you're a "Married with Children" fan.
Admittedly, "The Beast with a Thousand Backs" or whatever it was called did more to creep me out than to amuse me. That being said, as a literary critic I can't agree with the assertion that a single second of any episode of "Family Guy" could be classified as "meh." For thousands of years comedy has not developed past Aristophanes -- indeed, fewer than a hundred years ago the great cultural historian Edith Hamilton compared the popular entertainment of the previous generation to his oeuvre. The cutaway scenes in Family Guy represent the first departure from classical comedy I've ever been aware of. In my (professional) estimation Seth McFarlane is the single most important writer in the English language since the time Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Blake.
So there's that.
I wish I'd been there the day in debate class where they taught me how to make the argument that my opponent's position was "soul deadening," on the authority, no less, of "every mature, moral person." It seems like a pretty powerful argument, after all: anyone who would even attempt to dispute your position is then either immature or immoral, and in either case universally despised, which has to put a serious dent in his standing to argue his point with the likes of an ethical powerhouse of your eminence.
Indeed, your argument is so powerful that it shows us that Voltaire, previously thought to be one of the great ethical minds, is in fact a blubbering degenerate -- after all, his resolve to fight for free expression even for distasteful or outrageous opinions is by your argument tantamount to directly acting out the furthest slippery-slope consequences of those expressions.
Another thing I've learned from you just now is that abstract arguments do not apply to concrete situations. For instance, I may believe in freedom of religion in the abstract, but when a Muslim moves in next door all bets are off -- after all, there is now the concrete threat of my family being the victim of a "holy war," which trumps my ideals (and for that matter statistics) and tells me that I need to take action.
Truth be told, you're (perhaps unintentionally) basing your ethics around what makes you feel outraged or uncomfortable, rather than on ideals or on lucid consideration of how cause leads to effect. Forget the twentysomething videogame addicts -- even the core audience for Hannah Montana can tell you that right and wrong are universal and that you don't get to make exceptions based on your personal likes and dislikes.
If these exact videos were coming from an open-source python program and there was a link to sourceforge in the article, you'd be calling it cool. If it were a new feature in GarageBand and they'd announced it at MacWorld, it would have been *the* highlight of the conference. What this program does is explore the harmonies that are compatible with a melody, and you can see from the "Roxanne" video that it does a really, really good job of it. Maybe plugging it directly into a Casio-style accompaniment generator is not exactly the best thing to do with it, but this is definitely a *very* cool little program in its own right.
Basically what's being said here is that the academic publication system is vulnerable to the sorts of SEO attacks that briefly caused search engines to be befuddled by sites full of interlinked pages full of nonsense text and viagra ads. The academic publication system just moves a little slower, so it's going to take them a little longer to update things.
Here's my story: I am a math / English double major, and I interviewed with a trading firm at the recommendation of a friend. They asked me various questions about probability and some somewhat relevant brain-teasers -- nothing at all about the market, which at the time I knew nothing about -- and ended up offering me a job with a six-figure first year salary (that is, if I count bonuses.)
I will definitely enjoy it, but I'm only doing it because I decided that I don't really have the full complement of skills it would take to be a good mathematician -- otherwise I'd happily be entering grad school and making slave wages for next several years.
I don't think I was reading the Slashdot coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting, but elsewhere on the internet the response was nearly completely rational -- almost everyone pointed out that the "disturbing plays" the killer had written were nothing to be followed up on, and that faulting the administration for not looking into that sort of thing was and incredibly misguided attempt at dehumanizing the killer. People are not entertained by media circuses which remind them that murderers and dictators are no different from the rest of us, so anything "disturbing" about the latest undesirable to become news entertainment gets splashed all over the place.
What people *did* fault the administration of Virginia Tech for were the things they actually did wrong:
(1) Allowing a student who was stalking multiple female students to remain on campus -- though admittedly the concern would have been rape and not murder here.
(2) Waiting for over an hour to inform students of the first shooting, and then doing it with an *email* and nothing else.
(3) Giving up on the investigation on the hypothesis that everything was just a lover's spat, without checking into the alternatives.
How long after this post will this be a real development framework?
I'm not sure that I really agree with the assertion that you'd have to be crazy not to have a certain opinion about evolution. If we polled the public on their opinion on, say, the comparative benefits of declarative versus functional programming languages, or the assumption of complete markets on which Black-Sholes analysis relies, or on their ideas about differential equations, would we expect to receive reasonable answers?
In truth, there is no difference between these fields and evolutionary biology -- they are arbitrary areas of science, and to understand any of them takes the equivalent of several college courses. I "believe" in evolutionary biology the same way that I "believe" in the heliocentric model, the VSEPR model, Newtonian gravity, etc. -- which is to say that I believe these because I've been taught them. I've never performed any experiments to confirm any of these things.
When we ask random people their opinions on things which have no relevance to their lives whatsoever, what are we really asking? Does it really benefit anyone to have a "Jeopardy" knowledge of these subjects -- "Evolution explains the diversity of life on this planet, Alex"? I can't see why. Sure, if you're interested, go ahead and look into these areas for your own entertainment, or you really want to do serious work in a particular field, by all means go ahead. But it seems that certain fields -- evolutionary biology, cosmology, etc. -- are considered "privileged" areas by some solely because of their interface with "religious" ideas.
This is an entirely nonscientific way of thinking, and really isn't much better than what "creation scientists" push; so far as I have seen, most non-biologists who are militant about their views are really militant about a religious belief in atheism rather than a real desire for a more comprehensive understanding of science in the general populace. As a mathematician, I am not worried at all about the fact that the average person might have severe misconceptions about abstract algebra or differentiable manifolds or combinatorics. As far as I can tell, hoping for plumbers to have a surface-level grasp of biology makes about as much sense as hoping for biologists to have a surface-level grasp of plumbing.
"Minister of the Interior" is equivalent to the American "Secretary of the Interior." It's not a religious position, any more than Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair is the Archbishop of Canterbury.
You're talking about the same police that complained that Mozilla was complicating their investigations because the menu options to get at history and cache were different. These are not the most computer-saavy people in the world, here.
As a matter of fact, I own the cartridge, but I don't have a TV to plug a console into; can't fit in my tiny dorm room. In any case, I seriously doubt it's an emulation issue.
I played that game (Genesis version) until I was around the final boss. Somehow I left the room after the boss fight started; now the door is permanently locked... Anyone have any ideas
As I said, I was looking at the syllabus at that link and the sample tests from the other professional actuarial society. I'm not 100% sure what you're talking about when you say "Gauss's Theorem" or "Liebnitz's theorem," as both of those men produced enormous amounts of work in all areas of math and science, but as far as I could tell you didn't need anything past the basic laws of probability and layman's (i.e. nonrigorous) understandings of calculus and statistics to pass the first three actuarial tests. Of course, I haven't actually taken the exams, and I didn't read all ~200 pages of the samples, so if you have an example of more interesting math that an actuary does, I'd be interested to see it.
According to the ASU math website at http://www.asu.edu/aad/catalogs/general/department -mathematics-statistics.html there are two degrees offered in math: a B.A. and a B.S. The Intermediate Calculus class is apparently an easier version of "Advanced Calculus I," which is a requirement for the B.S. degree. So the math majors in the class you were in were people getting B.A.'s, which, as you say, are mainly people studying to be teachers. The serious research mathematicians would have been in math 371, and it certainly wouldn't have been the last class they were taking. Also, math 370 is listed on that page as a requirement for math education majors, so I'd be willing to bet that there were a lot of them in the course.
Most good math majors would have already gotten their calculus out of way in high school, so the math majors you took calc with were probably mainly the slow ones.
According to the sample syllabi at http://www.casact.org/admissions/syllabus/2006/ind ex.cfm?fa=summary the mathematics involved are of the sort that a good high school student will pick up if he/she takes the AP Calculus and Statistics courses. Failing that, the math would surely be easily within reach of a mathematics major at a university. Of course, only the first 3 out of 7 tests deal with pure mathematics, so I can't say much about the others, but it doesn't look like these tests really require any mathematical fireworks.
I can think of plenty of ways to go after the clients. For instance, start a spam site selling "V1agra." Simultaneously produce a product called "V1agra" which consists of cyanide and strychnine, with instructions in fine print saying that it's only for pesticide use. Or or a message saying, "Guess what we did with your credit card number." Personally, I'd take credit card numbers, and then use their credit cards to run ads in their local papers announcing in huge type that this person was supporting the people who send you all that spam.
"Ever try to drive a nail with a screwdriver?"
Nope, but I've put in screws with a hammer, even when I had a screwdriver on hand.
On the one hand, it sounds like this mug would probably break if dropped from waist height, since there wouldn't be time for it to right itself. Also, even if it could, it would only work once, since the "Holy Hand Grenade" portion at the bottom would disappear. So this design is, in practice, completely worthless.
On the other hand, I have to appreciate the creation of a contest entry designed to satisfy the verbatim rules of the contest, as my buddy and I are responsible for at least a page of prohibitions in the Botball rules (although I hear some of the things we did are once again legal), so I can't really say I don't appreciate entries like this.
Back on the first hand, it seems ridiculous that the second-place team gets a full-page article which only passingly mentions the first place team and doesn't describe the properties of their entry or how high it was able to survive falling from. If I was on the UMR team, I'd be pretty upset right now.
(And no, I'm not a UMR student/alum)