They are very much *not* dying -- if you look at the year's chart, you can see an enormous peak beginning around June, and they're just now settling back into their old stock price; they're still about 20% above where their stock price was this time last year. The sad thing is, being evil pays nowadays.
This is simply absurd. The FBI asked this gentleman to answer some questions, and he has complied. Nobody is being accused of anything, nobody is being punished for anything. Preventing crime is certainly legal -- if somebody's pointing a gun at someone and the police come up from behind and disable them, would you complain that the person hadn't actually been committing a crime (assuming, say, that this happened at a shooting or hunting range or someplace like that where having the gun out was legal)?
It is technically "illegal," as you'll notice if you read the signs that say, "It's illegal to go down here" or whatever the doors say. Sort of like how my hometown has a law against reading comics in the back seat of a car.
Before I was at Caltech (see tunneling thread above or below or wherever it is) I was at the University of Oklahoma. As I recall we broke in and ate y'all guys' mascot a few times, which tells you about how good UT security is.
(For those unacquainted with the OU/Texas rivalry, it's nuts. And their mascot is Bevo the bull.)
I am not a lawyer, but in civics class they always taught that you were innocent until proven guilty -- thus employers do not have the right to ask questions of the form, "Have you ever been investigated for / accused of / etc," or at least to make hiring decisions on the answers to such questions. Basically any hiring decisions that are demonstratably made based on considerations other than your ability to do the job are gonna be against some discriminatory hiring law.
Personally, I don't see what the fuss is. If government officals want to see what I do on the internet, they're perfectly welcome to come to my room and watch over my shoulder, so long as they don't step on anything.
By the way, since it appears we're all math majors here, I should point out that it is impossible for my statement to be incorrect, regardless of who you actually are. What you probably meant to say was, "This is correct, although your information isn't.":)
Yeah, I know who posted that now:) We were going somewhere we shouldn't have (there were detectors and alarms on it) and there was a section where every several feet there were frayed wires carrying small current/enormous voltage -- as we ran through the section they kept zapping me through my clothing.
No, I'm not exaggerating. If I wanted to, I'd have no reservations about getting up right now and going down there in broad daylight. If I was caught by security (which is unlikely), they'd ask to see ID, write down my name, and tell me to go home, and nothing would be done with my name. And my friends and I have certainly used the tunnels to avoid rain.
I should add that in my lack of any information about the particular circumstances, I'd agree with the decision to question the guy. Questioning is *not* a form of intimidation; as its name implies it's an attempt to get some information. From what I've *ahem* heard from people who've been questioned by various enforcement organizations, questionings aren't overtly hostile or intimidating situations. It does not appear that the intent of the FBI in this case is to discourage use of the FIA, simply to check on what's going on.
I'm an undergrad at Caltech and here at least it's really popular to illegally enter the underground tunnel system for various reasons. There are all sorts of reasons for it -- you can get to classes when it's raining, you can get into buildings that would normally be locked at odd hours to turn in homework, etc. Also, some of our parties and other events have components in the tunnels and there's a bit of a cultural legacy associated with them as well -- people who attend the school are often given midnight tours highlighting various murals and the like. I've heard that this is popular at Carnegie Mellon as well.
Is this a joke or outright trolling? "Spend money on stuff you don't want to create some sort of image of a stable economy?" Yeah, I'm going to go out on the corner and sell worthless junk to people and tell them that it's their civic duty to buy it from me so that they can pay taxes on it to support their government. Let's look at the situation you propose:
I pay for a copy of Microsoft Office for some amount of money X, and I pay a tax tX (where t is the tax rate), so I end up spending (t+1)X on this. Since the government has volume licensing, they purchase a copy of Office at a price Y. They do this by collecting n people's tax on Office, where n = Y/tX.
Approximating Y/X =.5 and t =.1, we get the following results:
(a) I have a copy of Office, as do 4 others.
(b) The government has a copy of Office.
(c) Microsoft has an amount of money equal to 5X + Y = 5.5X
Now let's consider using OO:
(a) I have a copy of OO, as do 4 others. Also, we get to keep our money.
(b) The government has as many copies as they want, and they have as much money as they had before
(c)Microsoft gets NOTHING... Just like they deserve.
Of course, I realize that this is a drastic oversimplification of economics. But the point is, the money you spend is not even enough to buy the government its copies of Office. If nobody used it, the government would save a lot of money by NOT buying it, much more than they would collect in taxes just off of people buying it.
To summarize, you're a total moron, or a Microsoft FUD agent; I'm not sure which is worse.
Some of the "identical" computers in the lab here seem to die a lot more often than others. After further examination, our ITS guy determined people were screwing them up somehow (I never heard exactly why), but it was always the same two machines or so. Maybe the people who preferred those computers preferred installing spyware/porn dialers/etc. ?
Of course, now everyone just uses the new one with the enormous monitor to play UT2004...
The point of a good novel is NOT simply to tell a story but to express a theme in some manner or other. Can you imagine, say, "Great Expectations" without the unification provided by Dicken's social insight? "Boy meets fugitive in chance event, later becomes pivotal experience in life, wastes a bunch of money, and then we find out everyone is related to everyone else somehow." People would call it boring, unrealistic, out of touch. The novel format, however, takes this story and makes it into much more -- an indictment of the absurdities of the British class system the author lived in, a heartful endorsement of the rustic life over the dehumanization of industry, a survey of all the paths life can lead one down.
I'm not saying it's impossible to rework the Bildungsroman into a more "modern" style -- try watching a John Hughes movie and notice how much of a genius the man was when it came to social interactions. It's unfortunate that his work is ignored as "sentimental" or "cute;" he's probably one of the most brilliant analysts of human emotion alive. However, the idea of turning something into a computer game begins to destroy the author's sense of control over the story. There's a tradeoff between interactivity and control here, and I don't think a compromise can be reached. After all, if the interactive fiction work has a message, it's going to constrain the audience to pursuits which make this message clear; this makes for poor gameplay. On the other hand, if the audience is allowed to control everything they want to, the question of who's actually telling the story begins to come up.
In order to create the equivalent of a novel in the form of interactive fiction, an author would have to create digital analogs of real people, able to interact with the audience in a manner that live actors would be able to do. This has never, to my knowledge, been tested even with human agents (although the Bill Murray movie "The Man Who Knew Too Little" has such a premise), and the interactive fiction aspect would involve all such difficulties plus the whole issue of passing a Turing test. In short, I don't think this is going to happen any time soon.
Intellectual property has never before been subjected to such ridiculous shackles as the software industry has placed on it. More tragically, other creative industries (the music and movie industries, for example) are piggybacking a ride on the increasingly draconian IP laws that have resulted from the sucess of the software industry.
Furthermore, the unprecedented modularity of the software industry has been bastardized by Microsoft et al to create an enormous vertical monopoly, using tactics which are of questionable legality, to say the least.
I'm currently studying to be a mathematician. I'll be doing several years of research, eventually leading to a Ph.D. But in all of this time I will not own any copyrights or patents, nor will I ever see royalties for the applications of my work. Instead, my work will be published in publicly available journals for anyone to see and adapt as they wish, provided that they give me credit.
Sound like a crazy idea? Some new-age such-and-such that will only last through my 20's and leave me living in my parents' basement? Think about this, then -- this has been the standard practice in pure mathematics for at least the past 100 years, and I don't know of any vast supply of starving 40-year-old mathematicians.
By the way, who is this idiot who wrote this letter and why are we listening to him anyway? This guy, as far as I can tell, has nothing to his name other than running some obscure German software company that nobody has ever heard of. If that is qualification enough, I can find a lot of my friends with small, unheard of software companies who will say much more interesting things than, "You need to go out and get a job, boy. That's just the way it is." I mean, seriously, he sounds like a comic-book redneck.
I recently saw a performance of La Boheme directed by Bahz Luhrman. The opera, written a hundred years ago by Puccini, is the story of a group of creative artists - a musician, painter, playwrite, and philosopher - who live together in poverty. The opera celebrates the Bohemian lifestyle -- rejecting social customs to pursue a more meaningful life. In case you wondered, they don't write operas about pragmatist software engineers, no matter how much money they accumulate. There's no price that can be placed on a well-lived life.
Never underestimate the stupidity of people in small numbers? Are you including yourself? Or is this a joke? If so, you should make it a little more clear.
"If you're a regular iTunes Music Store user, you're spending 21 c on a pepsi"
"If you're a cola drinker but not a Pepsi drinker, buying a Coke is really costing you $1.20 + 99"
So in other words, a pepsi now costs 21c and a coke costs $2.19, a difference of $1.98; how does this work?
You can't have it both ways; your standard state either has to be "getting a free song with your drink" or "not getting a free song with your drink." Changing midstream simply doesn't work.
I believe that we are seeing an effect of language on thought here -- it seems that the reason that people would posit a connection between computer languages and human languages is that they are both called "languages."
A computer language isn't really a language in many senses -- for example, in the English language, all parties involved in a conversation take input in English and provide output in the English language. I haven't studied Portugese, Japanese, et al, but I'd be very surprised if the same principle didn't hold for them. Computer languages, on the other hand, don't obey this property. If I write a C program ("Talk to the computer in C,") the computer won't give output in C (unless I happened to be writing a code generator or something).
For another thing, computer languages, for the most part, have only "imperative sentences." Sure, there are exceptions like PROLOG, but almost all code is written in C/C++.
Should I teach computer programming to a bunch of people without ever using the word "language," I'm sure a couple people would come up with a language metaphor, but they'd also come up with others that they'd probably find were better.
I certainly don't think about "talking" to my computer when writing code.
I want to start by saying that I am a student of mathematics, and I have much more than a "high school algebra" background.
To anyone who understands what mathematics is about, the idea that mathematics could be different in different places is absurd. This is because there is no connection between mathematics and physical reality. Certainly, we can perhaps model reality with mathematics, just as we use literature, dance, etc. to model reality. But mathematics itself has an existance of its own, entirely unconnected with the physical universe.
Mathematical statements never say "X is true" in the sense that one might say "Mass is conserved in physical processes." (Indeed, this is not true; special relativity tells us that mass is converted into energy and back all the time) Mathematics says "If x is true, y is true" -- "If the axioms of Euclidean Geometry are true, then the statement that the internal angles of a regular n-gon is equal to pi(n - 2);" "If the peano axioms are true, 2 + 3 = 5"
Physics can be location-dependant. Mathematics cannot. No matter what, the property of eigenvalues follows directly from the definition of linear transformations. Whether or not this has anything to do with the universe is a moot point. Indeed, I really don't care whether or not the universe even exists, or whether we are living in a matrix (by which I refer to Gibson's Neuromancer, not the popular movie, which sucked). Mathematics is the study of absolute truth, no matter where you are.
Slashdot Mirror
They are very much *not* dying -- if you look at the year's chart, you can see an enormous peak beginning around June, and they're just now settling back into their old stock price; they're still about 20% above where their stock price was this time last year. The sad thing is, being evil pays nowadays.
I was gonna reply to that, but Aerollini just said it perfectly; I'd simply like to reiterate that you're a fucking moron.
This is simply absurd. The FBI asked this gentleman to answer some questions, and he has complied. Nobody is being accused of anything, nobody is being punished for anything. Preventing crime is certainly legal -- if somebody's pointing a gun at someone and the police come up from behind and disable them, would you complain that the person hadn't actually been committing a crime (assuming, say, that this happened at a shooting or hunting range or someplace like that where having the gun out was legal)?
It is technically "illegal," as you'll notice if you read the signs that say, "It's illegal to go down here" or whatever the doors say. Sort of like how my hometown has a law against reading comics in the back seat of a car.
In general, any reply from the guy that the original post is about should be modded up...
Before I was at Caltech (see tunneling thread above or below or wherever it is) I was at the University of Oklahoma. As I recall we broke in and ate y'all guys' mascot a few times, which tells you about how good UT security is.
(For those unacquainted with the OU/Texas rivalry, it's nuts. And their mascot is Bevo the bull.)
I am not a lawyer, but in civics class they always taught that you were innocent until proven guilty -- thus employers do not have the right to ask questions of the form, "Have you ever been investigated for / accused of / etc," or at least to make hiring decisions on the answers to such questions. Basically any hiring decisions that are demonstratably made based on considerations other than your ability to do the job are gonna be against some discriminatory hiring law.
Personally, I don't see what the fuss is. If government officals want to see what I do on the internet, they're perfectly welcome to come to my room and watch over my shoulder, so long as they don't step on anything.
By the way, since it appears we're all math majors here, I should point out that it is impossible for my statement to be incorrect, regardless of who you actually are. What you probably meant to say was, "This is correct, although your information isn't." :)
"I probably know who you think I am."
I'm going to go order a T-shirt with that printed on it now.
Yeah, I know who posted that now :) We were going somewhere we shouldn't have (there were detectors and alarms on it) and there was a section where every several feet there were frayed wires carrying small current/enormous voltage -- as we ran through the section they kept zapping me through my clothing.
The person posting that is from a secret tunnel-exploring group at CMU known as the (name deleted), according to my information.
Funny thing -- I actually have a pretty good idea of who you are (creepy!) as a result of searching for info about tunneling at other schools :)
No, I'm not exaggerating. If I wanted to, I'd have no reservations about getting up right now and going down there in broad daylight. If I was caught by security (which is unlikely), they'd ask to see ID, write down my name, and tell me to go home, and nothing would be done with my name. And my friends and I have certainly used the tunnels to avoid rain.
I've haven't seen anything concerning about it; as far as I know security is pretty lax about it. On the other hand, I've only been here for a while.
I should add that in my lack of any information about the particular circumstances, I'd agree with the decision to question the guy. Questioning is *not* a form of intimidation; as its name implies it's an attempt to get some information. From what I've *ahem* heard from people who've been questioned by various enforcement organizations, questionings aren't overtly hostile or intimidating situations. It does not appear that the intent of the FBI in this case is to discourage use of the FIA, simply to check on what's going on.
I'm an undergrad at Caltech and here at least it's really popular to illegally enter the underground tunnel system for various reasons. There are all sorts of reasons for it -- you can get to classes when it's raining, you can get into buildings that would normally be locked at odd hours to turn in homework, etc. Also, some of our parties and other events have components in the tunnels and there's a bit of a cultural legacy associated with them as well -- people who attend the school are often given midnight tours highlighting various murals and the like. I've heard that this is popular at Carnegie Mellon as well.
Is this a joke or outright trolling? "Spend money on stuff you don't want to create some sort of image of a stable economy?" Yeah, I'm going to go out on the corner and sell worthless junk to people and tell them that it's their civic duty to buy it from me so that they can pay taxes on it to support their government. Let's look at the situation you propose:
.5 and t = .1, we get the following results:
I pay for a copy of Microsoft Office for some amount of money X, and I pay a tax tX (where t is the tax rate), so I end up spending (t+1)X on this. Since the government has volume licensing, they purchase a copy of Office at a price Y. They do this by collecting n people's tax on Office, where n = Y/tX.
Approximating Y/X =
(a) I have a copy of Office, as do 4 others.
(b) The government has a copy of Office.
(c) Microsoft has an amount of money equal to 5X + Y = 5.5X
Now let's consider using OO:
(a) I have a copy of OO, as do 4 others. Also, we get to keep our money.
(b) The government has as many copies as they want, and they have as much money as they had before
(c)Microsoft gets NOTHING... Just like they deserve.
Of course, I realize that this is a drastic oversimplification of economics. But the point is, the money you spend is not even enough to buy the government its copies of Office. If nobody used it, the government would save a lot of money by NOT buying it, much more than they would collect in taxes just off of people buying it.
To summarize, you're a total moron, or a Microsoft FUD agent; I'm not sure which is worse.
I've seen the same thing -- perhaps the fact that you're there means that you're preventing anyone from actively breaking the computer. =D
Some of the "identical" computers in the lab here seem to die a lot more often than others. After further examination, our ITS guy determined people were screwing them up somehow (I never heard exactly why), but it was always the same two machines or so. Maybe the people who preferred those computers preferred installing spyware/porn dialers/etc. ?
Of course, now everyone just uses the new one with the enormous monitor to play UT2004...
The point of a good novel is NOT simply to tell a story but to express a theme in some manner or other. Can you imagine, say, "Great Expectations" without the unification provided by Dicken's social insight? "Boy meets fugitive in chance event, later becomes pivotal experience in life, wastes a bunch of money, and then we find out everyone is related to everyone else somehow." People would call it boring, unrealistic, out of touch. The novel format, however, takes this story and makes it into much more -- an indictment of the absurdities of the British class system the author lived in, a heartful endorsement of the rustic life over the dehumanization of industry, a survey of all the paths life can lead one down.
I'm not saying it's impossible to rework the Bildungsroman into a more "modern" style -- try watching a John Hughes movie and notice how much of a genius the man was when it came to social interactions. It's unfortunate that his work is ignored as "sentimental" or "cute;" he's probably one of the most brilliant analysts of human emotion alive. However, the idea of turning something into a computer game begins to destroy the author's sense of control over the story. There's a tradeoff between interactivity and control here, and I don't think a compromise can be reached. After all, if the interactive fiction work has a message, it's going to constrain the audience to pursuits which make this message clear; this makes for poor gameplay. On the other hand, if the audience is allowed to control everything they want to, the question of who's actually telling the story begins to come up.
In order to create the equivalent of a novel in the form of interactive fiction, an author would have to create digital analogs of real people, able to interact with the audience in a manner that live actors would be able to do. This has never, to my knowledge, been tested even with human agents (although the Bill Murray movie "The Man Who Knew Too Little" has such a premise), and the interactive fiction aspect would involve all such difficulties plus the whole issue of passing a Turing test. In short, I don't think this is going to happen any time soon.
Yes.
Intellectual property has never before been subjected to such ridiculous shackles as the software industry has placed on it. More tragically, other creative industries (the music and movie industries, for example) are piggybacking a ride on the increasingly draconian IP laws that have resulted from the sucess of the software industry.
Furthermore, the unprecedented modularity of the software industry has been bastardized by Microsoft et al to create an enormous vertical monopoly, using tactics which are of questionable legality, to say the least.
I'm currently studying to be a mathematician. I'll be doing several years of research, eventually leading to a Ph.D. But in all of this time I will not own any copyrights or patents, nor will I ever see royalties for the applications of my work. Instead, my work will be published in publicly available journals for anyone to see and adapt as they wish, provided that they give me credit.
Sound like a crazy idea? Some new-age such-and-such that will only last through my 20's and leave me living in my parents' basement? Think about this, then -- this has been the standard practice in pure mathematics for at least the past 100 years, and I don't know of any vast supply of starving 40-year-old mathematicians.
By the way, who is this idiot who wrote this letter and why are we listening to him anyway? This guy, as far as I can tell, has nothing to his name other than running some obscure German software company that nobody has ever heard of. If that is qualification enough, I can find a lot of my friends with small, unheard of software companies who will say much more interesting things than, "You need to go out and get a job, boy. That's just the way it is." I mean, seriously, he sounds like a comic-book redneck.
I recently saw a performance of La Boheme directed by Bahz Luhrman. The opera, written a hundred years ago by Puccini, is the story of a group of creative artists - a musician, painter, playwrite, and philosopher - who live together in poverty. The opera celebrates the Bohemian lifestyle -- rejecting social customs to pursue a more meaningful life. In case you wondered, they don't write operas about pragmatist software engineers, no matter how much money they accumulate. There's no price that can be placed on a well-lived life.
Never underestimate the stupidity of people in small numbers? Are you including yourself? Or is this a joke? If so, you should make it a little more clear.
"If you're a regular iTunes Music Store user, you're spending 21 c on a pepsi"
"If you're a cola drinker but not a Pepsi drinker, buying a Coke is really costing you $1.20 + 99"
So in other words, a pepsi now costs 21c and a coke costs $2.19, a difference of $1.98; how does this work?
You can't have it both ways; your standard state either has to be "getting a free song with your drink" or "not getting a free song with your drink." Changing midstream simply doesn't work.
I believe that we are seeing an effect of language on thought here -- it seems that the reason that people would posit a connection between computer languages and human languages is that they are both called "languages."
A computer language isn't really a language in many senses -- for example, in the English language, all parties involved in a conversation take input in English and provide output in the English language. I haven't studied Portugese, Japanese, et al, but I'd be very surprised if the same principle didn't hold for them. Computer languages, on the other hand, don't obey this property. If I write a C program ("Talk to the computer in C,") the computer won't give output in C (unless I happened to be writing a code generator or something).
For another thing, computer languages, for the most part, have only "imperative sentences." Sure, there are exceptions like PROLOG, but almost all code is written in C/C++.
Should I teach computer programming to a bunch of people without ever using the word "language," I'm sure a couple people would come up with a language metaphor, but they'd also come up with others that they'd probably find were better.
I certainly don't think about "talking" to my computer when writing code.
I want to start by saying that I am a student of mathematics, and I have much more than a "high school algebra" background.
To anyone who understands what mathematics is about, the idea that mathematics could be different in different places is absurd. This is because there is no connection between mathematics and physical reality. Certainly, we can perhaps model reality with mathematics, just as we use literature, dance, etc. to model reality. But mathematics itself has an existance of its own, entirely unconnected with the physical universe.
Mathematical statements never say "X is true" in the sense that one might say "Mass is conserved in physical processes." (Indeed, this is not true; special relativity tells us that mass is converted into energy and back all the time) Mathematics says "If x is true, y is true" -- "If the axioms of Euclidean Geometry are true, then the statement that the internal angles of a regular n-gon is equal to pi(n - 2);" "If the peano axioms are true, 2 + 3 = 5"
Physics can be location-dependant. Mathematics cannot. No matter what, the property of eigenvalues follows directly from the definition of linear transformations. Whether or not this has anything to do with the universe is a moot point. Indeed, I really don't care whether or not the universe even exists, or whether we are living in a matrix (by which I refer to Gibson's Neuromancer, not the popular movie, which sucked). Mathematics is the study of absolute truth, no matter where you are.