As you point out, every empire has done these things. It is therefore rendered meaningless as a metric for comparing empires (and yes, the US is an empire, albeit mainly economic, its just that most members of the empire are states).
Things like severity are impossible to measure, since most of these events were either poorly reported, or to be frank, ignored at the time. As we can only judge severity on incomplete information, this is again meaningless.
A general rule is, if group A wants something that group B has, and group A is more powerful, group B is going to get stomped. That covers everything from the ancient Egyptians (where this reasoning was in fact central to their identity as a people) to modern day Iraq. They have oil, we want to control it, ergo, we crush them.
If the roles were reversed, they'd crush us.
In summary, we're all barstards.
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
colliding universes? Eh? Where'd you get that from? Your apparent lack of ability to understand the simplest part of my post does tend to make me skeptical as to the rest of your post.
Modeling galaxy collision is a very real research topic, and the very issue of to what extent a model can be considered proof is a big part of the discussion.
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
The AMS isn't worried about the correctness of these "proofs." They aren't proofs. It is logically possible for one of these programs to return the wrong answer, even if the program is correctly implemented. Ergo, it is not a proof.
I might be wrong, but it occurs to me that a program which 'proves' a mathematical hypothesis can only, on inspection, be shown to be a proof of the program itself, not the initial hypothesis.
The problem with software is that it can be made to do anything. Want to model colliding galaxies that mimic observed or hypothesised behaviour? Easy, jut twealk till you get the right result. The result however will not be a 'proof' of the true mechanisms underlying the event in the real universe. The issue then is what you are trying to prove. If it's something that is outside of the domain of the computer, then you can't use it as a proof, since you almost certainly cannot reproduce enough of the influencing factors, in most cases you need to simplify to model in silico. If, on the other hand you aim is solely to produce a model that looks the same, but is not said to be trying to prove the mechanism of galaxy collision, then you can say the software is the 'proof' of your simulation being able to poduce something that looks the same.
If the problem being demonstrated is itself solely in the domain of software, then the software can be the proof, in way, albeit not the conventional meaning of the word proof as used in mathematics.
Consider machine learning as applied to pattern recognition. You design your classification data structure/algorithm, then construct software that optimises it to perform that pattern recognition as well as can be cheived. In that case the result of the software can be considered the the evidence that supports the hypothesised performance, and the souce code would, in effect, be the 'proof' in loose terms, as it would be the means by which the aproach is shown to be valid.
In most cases, it would just be the result that mattered, but unless you can provide a description of the software, or the software itself, so the method can be independantly implemented and verified as producing the results you show, you wouldn't get taken seriously. In that way the software performs the same function as a mathematical proof. It can be independantly checked.
You know, I just got a vista box a few weeks ago. It's not the only machine in the house, we have linux and XP boxen too.
I was starting to like it, now, not so much. The copying is frankly embarassingly slow. It's so slow in fact that I've taken to using winscp (ssh) to transfer files too and from the vista box because its faster. 1.5mb of text files in a minute over a 10/100 network? Hello? And I frequently have to copy >10,000 small text files (source code) to and from it whilst doing porting work. That's agonising if I leave it to vista.
I could cope with it though. I actully use winscp all the time, so no really big deal I guess.
What's got me steaming though is that I came downstairs the other day to check on the progres of program that would likely take two days to complete a run (an evolutionary algorithm as it happens), and found vista sat there telling me it had rebooted to complete an update. My work had been shut down ithout asking, Vista, it seems, had decided that programs running in userspace were unimportant when compared to routine maintenance.
What!
I didn't ask it too, it just did it. Is this normal? I have *never* had an operating system interrupt what I was doing to assert its own decision in this manner before (aside from crashes, well they don't count). I lost a days processing, and I'm not amused. It happened again last night, but now I haven't used it for any experiments, because until I find out how to turn this off Vista cannot be trusted.
I am:
1: Baffled that this would be an actual design choice. 2: Looking meaningfully at a Ubuntu disc.
I might be willing to accept it as a newspaper, since that would in effect be just like a webpage I could update daily.
The problem of how to gain further information on a story exists though, I'd need to exit the ebook and go to a web machine.
If the ebook reader for a newspaper were also a web browser, then perhaps that would be better, but then you might as well just have a website instead of an ebook newspaper.
I'm unconvinced about this thing, and ebooks in general personally. My idea of a pleasant afternoon is a browse in my local antiquarian bookshop, and I like the look of my bookshelves as is.
What really interests me is this book vending machine thing. Now that I could get behind.
You can have 80% accuracy on correct signals whilst simultaneously, and erroniously, interpretating any amount from 1 to 100% of the incorrect signals as being of the type required.
The two sets are theoretically distinct, but finding the line that separates them is very hard indeed.
I'm guessing the 80% comes from the fact that this is an issue of the linear separability of signals. Its generally hard to get reliable sensitivity/specificity measures over this that anyone is going to take seriously.
Sensitivity = percentage number of correct identifications Specificity = corresponding percentage of incorrect identifications at each measured sensitivity.
Probably they can get up to 90%, but from experience I would say the rate of false positives at this sensitivity likely is moving towards exponential increase. It's better to stop at 80%, at least when something is in the early stages.
This is just guessing of course, I have no understanding of their research, but going from my own work on non linearly separable sets, I'd say this is what's happening.
They seem to be forgetting that these very same institutions are busily turning out the workers and business men/women/person/s [delete as appropriate] of tomorrow. I'll just bet they'll be queuing up to work for the companies that tried to screw them over when they were at uni, oh yes....
What it may well do is force an upsurge in people looking for new ways of doing business, and happily stomping on the remains of the current companies and their representative organizations.
Isn't that how Hollywood got started? with groups of creative people yarding it across the continent to escape oppressive patent/IP enforcing that controlled their ability to make movies and the equipment required? cameras, film and suchlike?
If copyright would have gotten abolished in the early 20th century, we would be possibly not only culturally richer, but more technologically advanced aswell.
Nice idea, but copyright came into being because the concepts of intellectual property have changed. There was a time when books, for example, were copied by scribes, and the authors got no money. However the concept of making money from copies and derivative works of books hadn't been considered, and anyway, people who wrote the books originally were either well off enough to not mind, or paid on the initial writing of the book. If someone scrubbed their name from the work and republished it, that would be frowned upon.
As soon as we got the printing press books became a potential source of regular income in a way they had never been before, that needed new protection mechanisms for authors.
Nowadays we have otherwise ordinary people who wish to make a living from writing books. They can only do this if they can be assured that others won't just start reprinting their work and taking away their income.
If Rowling allowed this work that gains its value from her work to be published without having some control over content, she would be laying open her work for exploitation. Precedent is a dangerous thing. She is rich, yes, but rich because copyright controls have enabled her to be the sole controller of her work. Without that she'd just be someone who wrote a few stories that circulate the Internet in text files.
Nor would we have movies. If a movie company was only able to make money from the first showing of a film, they wouldn't make them. If a new piece of technology could be copied immediately without permission, there would be no incentive for invention. That computer your using, how much of the technology it contains would have been invented if there were no chance of making a profit from it? Nothing, not even the plastic it contains.
Our society, far from being enhanced, would be harmed if there were no copyright. We no longer live in the ancient world, idea's require protection, and they cost money to develop that needs to be recouped.
You should watch 'Free Enterprise'. Play it with the dvd commentary on and you get a fascinating glimpse into the problems of writing a film that employs the star trek mythos. They could talk episode titles, say Kirk and Spock's names, describe those characters, talk about events in episodes, and quote to their hearts content, but they could not use any images or trademarks like the federation insignia on a boys shirt, although they could 'rip' the shirt, kirk stylee, to pretend it was just temporarily concealed. Plus they could have an ornamental enterprise, a small one, in a box.
Posters were a problem too, they would have had to pay a fortune just to show a few posters about the place. Thus you get some interesting, but obscure posters on walls.
The film itself is cracking, really funny, but it wasn't until I put the commentary on that I realised how hard it had been for them to get through the permissions thing.
there exists the possibility of cloning portions of human anatomy on pigs. That way the problem of brainless humans would go away. After all why make whole humans if you only want certain bits? Some parts can be regenerated, and skin is pretty much able to go anywhere, except for mucosa, which would just require that we also grow that.
Mao and Stalin (both of whom killed more people in cold blood than Hitler) come to mind. What's your excuse for them?
I'd say they were brutal psychopaths who gained power and had some kind of messianic belief in their right to kill people by the town full. Alas I cannot hide behind religious platitudes to explain away these things as evil and related to the devil, because that way denial of human responsibility lies.
Those two were not religious to be sure, but in those two particuler cases, they created a cult of personality around them which was in many ways similar to the religious model, particularly the pharaonic one.
I'm sure (or would like to believe) there was a spirited
If there was a spirit, then it would be logical to assume it is the result of sentience. That being so, any clone of a human would have one. Any idea to the contrary is little more than the standard religious doctrine of 'hate that which is different', achieved by the simple mechanism of asserting that the target of that hate does not posses something required for acceptance by the group doing the hating.
Did you know that the catholics debated for centuries whether black people had souls? And look how we treated them....
I believe that biologically we are no different from him, so we'd gain little there.
It would be interesting though. Getting it past the religious types, now that would be tricky.
I recognize the need for cloning and genetic manipulation. I'm rather hopeful that one day our species will get off this planet, but I am not hopeful it will be to another planet that quickly, Mars is a big job, we may not get to do it.
More likely is that we will fragment into smaller groups occupying pretty big ships, and head off. That could only work with modification to our biology that would help our surface dweller bodies cope with travel in space. After all, even with artificial gravity, there would be differences.
I don't think that at all. What I think is that fiscally punishing students in order to protest an unreasonable bill is going too far. That is, if you read the parent I replied to, the point I was making.
Anyway, people who raped the bandwidth at my uni by file sharing all the time were a real pain, I worked from my room, ssh'ing into my ten lab machines (Mmm, post grad goodness), and when the network slowed because some jackass (or hundred of jackasses most of the time) was trying to get some mp3's, it really annoyed. This is the UK though, so they got kicked off the network if caught, that's all.
What of the individuals who's futures would be irreparably harmed if this were done? Not everyone can survive even a short term reduction in money at college.
If this passes you might see an upsurge in US students choosing to study abroad. Over here in England we have had a wonderful boom in Chinese students since the US decided, post 9/11 to start making it hard for those students to study in the US. Beats me why they did this, but my university has profited mightily by it, and we are not alone.
Slashdot Mirror
As you point out, every empire has done these things. It is therefore rendered meaningless as a metric for comparing empires (and yes, the US is an empire, albeit mainly economic, its just that most members of the empire are states).
Things like severity are impossible to measure, since most of these events were either poorly reported, or to be frank, ignored at the time. As we can only judge severity on incomplete information, this is again meaningless.
A general rule is, if group A wants something that group B has, and group A is more powerful, group B is going to get stomped. That covers everything from the ancient Egyptians (where this reasoning was in fact central to their identity as a people) to modern day Iraq. They have oil, we want to control it, ergo, we crush them.
If the roles were reversed, they'd crush us.
In summary, we're all barstards.
colliding universes? Eh? Where'd you get that from? Your apparent lack of ability to understand the simplest
part of my post does tend to make me skeptical as to the rest of your post.
Modeling galaxy collision is a very real research topic, and the very issue of to what extent a model can be considered proof is a big part of the discussion.
The AMS isn't worried about the correctness of these "proofs." They aren't proofs. It is logically possible for one of these programs to return the wrong answer, even if the program is correctly implemented. Ergo, it is not a proof.
I might be wrong, but it occurs to me that a program which 'proves' a mathematical hypothesis can only, on inspection, be shown to be a proof of the program itself, not the initial hypothesis.
The problem with software is that it can be made to do anything. Want to model colliding galaxies that mimic observed or hypothesised behaviour? Easy, jut twealk till you get the right result.
The result however will not be a 'proof' of the true mechanisms underlying the event in the real universe. The issue then is what you are trying to prove. If it's something that is outside of the domain of the computer, then you can't use it as a proof, since you almost certainly cannot reproduce enough of the influencing factors, in most cases you need to simplify to model in silico. If, on the other hand you aim is solely to produce a model that looks the same, but is not said to be trying to prove the mechanism of galaxy collision, then you can say the software is the 'proof' of your simulation being able to poduce something that looks the same.
If the problem being demonstrated is itself solely in the domain of software, then the software can be the proof, in way, albeit not the conventional meaning of the word proof as used in mathematics.
Consider machine learning as applied to pattern recognition. You design your classification data structure/algorithm, then construct software that optimises it to perform that pattern recognition as well as can be cheived.
In that case the result of the software can be considered the the evidence that supports the hypothesised performance, and the souce code would, in effect, be the 'proof' in loose terms, as it would be the means by which the aproach is shown to be valid.
In most cases, it would just be the result that mattered, but unless you can provide a description of the software, or the software itself, so the method can be independantly implemented and verified as producing the results you show, you wouldn't get taken seriously. In that way the software performs the same function as a mathematical proof. It can be independantly checked.
Yeah, really, why use anything other than slack 5?
slackware 5? Pah, real men still use v4, and emacs WITHOUT A MOUSE!!!!111one
You know, I just got a vista box a few weeks ago. It's not the only machine in the house, we have linux and XP boxen too.
I was starting to like it, now, not so much. The copying is frankly embarassingly slow. It's so slow in fact that I've taken to using winscp (ssh) to transfer files too and from the vista box because its faster. 1.5mb of text files in a minute over a 10/100 network? Hello? And I frequently have to copy >10,000 small text files (source code) to and from it whilst doing porting work. That's agonising if I leave it to vista.
I could cope with it though. I actully use winscp all the time, so no really big deal I guess.
What's got me steaming though is that I came downstairs the other day to check on the progres of program that would likely take two days to complete a run (an evolutionary algorithm as it happens), and found vista sat there telling me it had rebooted to complete an update. My work had been shut down ithout asking, Vista, it seems, had decided that programs running in userspace were unimportant when compared to routine maintenance.
What!
I didn't ask it too, it just did it. Is this normal? I have *never* had an operating system interrupt what I was doing to assert its own decision in this manner before (aside from crashes, well they don't count). I lost a days processing, and I'm not amused. It happened again last night, but now I haven't used it for any experiments, because until I find out how to turn this off Vista cannot be trusted.
I am:
1: Baffled that this would be an actual design choice.
2: Looking meaningfully at a Ubuntu disc.
I might be willing to accept it as a newspaper, since that would in effect be just like a webpage I could update daily.
The problem of how to gain further information on a story exists though, I'd need to exit the ebook and go to a web machine.
If the ebook reader for a newspaper were also a web browser, then perhaps that would be better, but then you might as well just have a website instead of an ebook newspaper.
I'm unconvinced about this thing, and ebooks in general personally. My idea of a pleasant afternoon is a browse in my local antiquarian bookshop, and I like the look of my bookshelves as is.
What really interests me is this book vending machine thing. Now that I could get behind.
nope
You misunderstand me. The two sets are distinct.
You can have 80% accuracy on correct signals whilst simultaneously, and erroniously, interpretating any amount from 1 to 100% of the incorrect signals as being of the type required.
The two sets are theoretically distinct, but finding the line that separates them is very hard indeed.
I'm guessing the 80% comes from the fact that this is an issue of the linear separability of signals. Its generally hard to get reliable sensitivity/specificity measures over this that anyone is going to take seriously.
Sensitivity = percentage number of correct identifications
Specificity = corresponding percentage of incorrect identifications at each measured sensitivity.
Probably they can get up to 90%, but from experience I would say the rate of false positives at this sensitivity likely is moving towards exponential increase. It's better to stop at 80%, at least when something is in the early stages.
This is just guessing of course, I have no understanding of their research, but going from my own work on non linearly separable sets, I'd say this is what's happening.
The subject turns out to have Tourettes syndrome?
OI! [redacted] will you [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] make me a [redacted][redacted][redacted] cup of [redacted] coffee?
Brain obscenity filters for teh wins....
They seem to be forgetting that these very same institutions are busily turning out the workers and business men/women/person/s [delete as appropriate] of tomorrow. I'll just bet they'll be queuing up to work for the companies that tried to screw them over when they were at uni, oh yes....
What it may well do is force an upsurge in people looking for new ways of doing business, and happily stomping on the remains of the current companies and their representative organizations.
Isn't that how Hollywood got started? with groups of creative people yarding it across the continent to escape oppressive patent/IP enforcing that controlled their ability to make movies and the equipment required? cameras, film and suchlike?
Eh? Trying to be hip is it. Why not 'agrees with', or even 'has the same findings as'.
'Jives' is not a particularly useful term to use when describing financial dealings.
[/mutter]
If copyright would have gotten abolished in the early 20th century, we would be possibly not only culturally richer, but more technologically advanced aswell.
Nice idea, but copyright came into being because the concepts of intellectual property have changed. There was a time when books, for example, were copied by scribes, and the authors got no money. However the concept of making money from copies and derivative works of books hadn't been considered, and anyway, people who wrote the books originally were either well off enough to not mind, or paid on the initial writing of the book. If someone scrubbed their name from the work and republished it, that would be frowned upon.
As soon as we got the printing press books became a potential source of regular income in a way they had never been before, that needed new protection mechanisms for authors.
Nowadays we have otherwise ordinary people who wish to make a living from writing books. They can only do this if they can be assured that others won't just start reprinting their work and taking away their income.
If Rowling allowed this work that gains its value from her work to be published without having some control over content, she would be laying open her work for exploitation. Precedent is a dangerous thing. She is rich, yes, but rich because copyright controls have enabled her to be the sole controller of her work. Without that she'd just be someone who wrote a few stories that circulate the Internet in text files.
Nor would we have movies. If a movie company was only able to make money from the first showing of a film, they wouldn't make them. If a new piece of technology could be copied immediately without permission, there would be no incentive for invention. That computer your using, how much of the technology it contains would have been invented if there were no chance of making a profit from it? Nothing, not even the plastic it contains.
Our society, far from being enhanced, would be harmed if there were no copyright. We no longer live in the ancient world, idea's require protection, and they cost money to develop that needs to be recouped.
You should watch 'Free Enterprise'. Play it with the dvd commentary on and you get a fascinating glimpse into the problems of writing a film that employs the star trek mythos.
They could talk episode titles, say Kirk and Spock's names, describe those characters, talk about events in episodes, and quote to their hearts content, but they could not use any images or trademarks like the federation insignia on a boys shirt, although they could 'rip' the shirt, kirk stylee, to pretend it was just temporarily concealed. Plus they could have an ornamental enterprise, a small one, in a box.
Posters were a problem too, they would have had to pay a fortune just to show a few posters about the place. Thus you get some interesting, but obscure posters on walls.
The film itself is cracking, really funny, but it wasn't until I put the commentary on that I realised how hard it had been for them to get through the permissions thing.
the veil of incorporation can be pierced at any time if it is believed that a member or members of the board have personally acted illegally.
It is only when it is the company itself has behaved illegally that it cannot be, no one board member can be singled out and imprisoned.
there exists the possibility of cloning portions of human anatomy on pigs. That way the problem of brainless humans would go away. After all why make whole humans if you only want certain bits? Some parts can be regenerated, and skin is pretty much able to go anywhere, except for mucosa, which would just require that we also grow that.
Mao and Stalin (both of whom killed more people in cold blood than Hitler) come to mind. What's your excuse for them?
I'd say they were brutal psychopaths who gained power and had some kind of messianic belief in their right to kill people by the town full. Alas I cannot hide behind religious platitudes to explain away these things as evil and related to the devil, because that way denial of human responsibility lies.
Those two were not religious to be sure, but in those two particuler cases, they created a cult of personality around them which was in many ways similar to the religious model, particularly the pharaonic one.
Yeah, because hatred doesn't exist outside of religion. [rolling of eyes]
You are of course correct, but they have tended to be the standard bearers.
I'm sure (or would like to believe) there was a spirited
If there was a spirit, then it would be logical to assume it is the result of sentience. That being so, any clone of a human would have one. Any idea to the contrary is little more than the standard religious doctrine of 'hate that which is different', achieved by the simple mechanism of asserting that the target of that hate does not posses something required for acceptance by the group doing the hating.
Did you know that the catholics debated for centuries whether black people had souls? And look how we treated them....
I believe that biologically we are no different from him, so we'd gain little there.
It would be interesting though. Getting it past the religious types, now that would be tricky.
I recognize the need for cloning and genetic manipulation. I'm rather hopeful that one day our species will get off this planet, but I am not hopeful it will be to another planet that quickly, Mars is a big job, we may not get to do it.
More likely is that we will fragment into smaller groups occupying pretty big ships, and head off. That could only work with modification to our biology that would help our surface dweller bodies cope with travel in space. After all, even with artificial gravity, there would be differences.
I wonder what it sounds like if you drive in reverse?
Now who would argue with a Beowulf cluster of those?
Enter your password. You now have ten seconds to comply
How many AOL users even know what an OS is ??
They know exactly what an OS is, it's the blue window that tells them they've got mail, duh..
I don't think that at all. What I think is that fiscally punishing students in order to protest an unreasonable bill is going too far. That is, if you read the parent I replied to, the point I was making.
Anyway, people who raped the bandwidth at my uni by file sharing all the time were a real pain, I worked from my room, ssh'ing into my ten lab machines (Mmm, post grad goodness), and when the network slowed because some jackass (or hundred of jackasses most of the time) was trying to get some mp3's, it really annoyed. This is the UK though, so they got kicked off the network if caught, that's all.
What of the individuals who's futures would be irreparably harmed if this were done? Not everyone can survive even a short term reduction in money at college.
If this passes you might see an upsurge in US students choosing to study abroad. Over here in England we have had a wonderful boom in Chinese students since the US decided, post 9/11 to start making it hard for those students to study in the US. Beats me why they did this, but my university has profited mightily by it, and we are not alone.