Actually, in Hebrew, the commandment in question is: "lo teer tsakh", were the verb ratsakh refers to murder or manslaughter, not simple killing.
By the time the Vulgate bible came around, this was translated to "non occides", which does indeed mean "do not kill", so the KJV cannot be blamed for the mistranslation, it happened earlier.
Right. I'll bet the Serbs said the same thing about Kosovo - and now look at them. Post WW2 the population of Kosovo was about half Serbian and half Albanian Muslim. Amazing, isn't it, given the ethnic cleansing of the native Albanian population by the Serbs under Milosevic. Interesting thing about Kosovo -- it was created as a province of Yugoslavia in 1945 to protect its ethnic Albanian majority. If it was ever half Serbian, it was so because native Kosovans were rounded up and executed. Or maybe you missed that? At any rate, the notion that it was half Serbian at the end of WW2 is poppycock.
Today it's something like 97% Muslim, and more and more Serbs are forced out every day. I hate to say this, but if you pursue a policy of ethnic cleansing in a place that doesn't belong to you, you're not going to be well liked.
Kosovo has gone from being a part of Serbia to being it's own mini-state which is more or less part of Albania. It's annexation through overpopulation. Both Serbia and Kosovo were part of Yugoslavia until relatively recently, which was not Serbia. Before that, Kosovo was part of the Kingdom of Serbia -- from 1912 onwards. Before that, it was part of the Ottoman Empire. Where exactly do you get the idea that it should be part of Serbia? Serbia held Kosovo for *gasp* 3 years until the great Serbian retreat of 1915.
Or look at Israel - a Jewish state which is facing the very real possibility that within a generation they may become majority Muslim. At which point they have the option of either ceasing to be a Jewish state, or ceasing to be a democracy. This Jewish state was not a Jewish state but a Muslim state until 1948. While 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes to create this "land without a people for people without a land", a few hundred thousand did stay in the ancestral home they'd resided in for millenia and, as it happens, raised their families and reproduced. The shock of it!
What you say is true, though: they are reproducing faster than the Jewish majority in Israel, and in a few generations, they will have a majority. Israel has already decided how to proceed with this, though. They'll be a democracy in much the same way South Africa was a democracy.
If you really think it can't happen in England, you haven't been paying attention. The idea that "this could happen in England" completely ignores the historical backdrop. Muslims that come to England, with the exception of a few raving loonies, mostly integrate into English society just fine. And make British food a bit more edible in the process, for which they are to be commended.
All this is is brown-skinned immigrant fear-mongering.
As the parent said, there are ways around it (using VBA... ugh). But Excel is not a program whose purpose is to solve math equations, it is a program whose purpose is to manage spreadsheets. Spreadsheets contain data, and typically not just numeric data.
I work at an investment firm, and we get CSVs from our vendors with SEDOLs in them. Excel will helpfully (and silently) strip the leading zeros on UK securities, for example. Oops.
I don't doubt that the Chinese government would like to build such a system. I have no doubt that they would love, honestly, to actually have the power and influence that they are rumored to have in the west over their people, and to truly be the police state they are accused of being. The government there, like most governments everywhere, has an appetite for power.
But the days of Mao are long gone. There was a time not so long ago when parents everywhere encouraged their children to pursue a career in the state, as a policeman or soldier or political cadre. In the socialist days, that was how you advanced, how you got a good life. The promise of wealth, power, but most of all prestige could be found in those careers. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of police and military folks in those days.
Now, though, the situation has changed. True wealth and prestige come from the market, from private enterprise, and this simple fact is not lost on anyone in China. Parents are realistic about this. They don't encourage their children to enter the police or military anymore -- and if you are Chinese or even Chinese American you know well what "encourage" means when it's being done by a Chinese parent. The policeman and soldier's life is no longer stable or guaranteed, and besides being dangerous it generates far less income for the family than an office job (or, truth be told, even one selling fruit.)
Because of this, there are not enough young Chinese entering the police force.
To put this in perspective, Beijing has 10 million residents, around 4 million migrant workers, and a likely 2 or 3 million undocumented (illegal) residents. In a city this size, a small police force simply doesn't cut it.
It's not for lack of trying, but mainland China simply does not have the infrastructure necessary to be the police state it wants to be and that the west fears it is. As Beijingers say, "guan bu zhao", there are too many people and not enough cops.
So it's not the least bit surprising that this golden shield idea is the goverment's latest fantasy, a way to keep tabs on the populace all while circumventing the increasing human resources shortage that is crippling their once formidable security force.
But that's all it is -- a fantasy.
Sure, they'll put up cameras and buy high-tech imaging software, and maybe they'll be able to maintain that infrastructure in Wang Fu Jing, Xin Tian Di, and downtown Shen Zhen. But in the rest of China -- where the bulk of the population lives -- the notion is simply untenable.
China has more than a billion people, and most of them live in small rural villages that lack sewage infrastructure and running water. The idea that the government would prioritize CCTV surveillance systems in these areas is laughable. They simply don't have the money, the experts necessary to put it up, or any of the other basic requirements for a system that size.
You simply cannot govern a billion people by force alone. Nationalist propaganda can help get people to give you the benefit of the doubt, but once people are suffering the government gets the blame whether it deserves it or not. If you don't believe me, have a chat with a Beijing taxi driver about their wages, which are set by the government. They'll give you an earful. And that's in the capital. It's worse in the provinces.
The Chinese government knows this, and they aren't fools. The polarization of wealth is a much more pressing problem on their agenda than putting up cameras, because they remember that it was precisely a wealthy upper class stomping on the rural poor that put them into power in the first place.
Really Ray? I mean it IS egregious, but a fine, any fine, really doesn't compare to losing your liberty for simple possession of marijuana. And that happens to people every day. I agree with you entirely on the Marijuana issue, and on the futility and staggering inefficacy of the war on drugs in general, but there are two things to point out here.
One is that he said "one of", which implies that there could be several. Remember, he's a lawyer, so you have to pay attention to the words he uses because you'd better bet he's in the habit of choosing them carefully. You seem to think that he's saying that this is "the most irrational thing", not "one of the most irrational things."
The second, and to my mind more important issue here, is that with the marijuana issue, there's a bit of a social rift. Large swaths of the US disagree that marijuana should be made legal, whether their arguments against its legality are logically or morally legitimate or not. To reiterate, I am not one of those people and I am not defending their position, just pointing it out.
The thing about these copyright suits is that nearly everyone -- an overwhelming majority of people -- copies things on the internet, often without even thinking about it. Thanks to the RIAA's media campaign against music "piracy", lots of people are aware that downloading music might not be legal (notice I didn't say wrong). But when it comes to other things -- pictures on websites, software, games, or whatever else -- people copy with impunity and don't even think about what they're doing.
We have a situation here where actions previously living in a legal gray area are being pushed into illegality by a handful of wealthy elites who stand to benefit.
They are, in a sense -- and this is where the issue differs from the marijuana issue -- attempting to illegalize something that nearly everyone in the US does whether they (the US citizens) realize it or not. While I know that marijuana-use is far more pervasive than many people realize, it is nowhere near as pervasive as people downloading, say, a copyrighted image to use as their wallpaper at work.
That action is entirely analogous to the music downloading issue and strengthening the legal basis for outlawing so-called "music piracy" will essentially make everyone in the US a criminal in some way.
This is not the direction that the average US citizen wants his country to go -- even in the heartland bible-belt where support for smoking marijuana is, well, relatively low.
Why would children at age six not know 18? Relating a number like 18 to the real world is manifestly trivial: here, there are 18 pencils in a box, let's count them.
As for the number line, why would that make any sense at all? The concept of positive infinity is hard enough to grasp already. I remember, as a kid, that Sesame Street used to run all these little skits and segments trying to help kids understand that there was "no biggest number". "Think of the biggest number you can think of," it would say. "A billion," the child would answer (or whatever). "Now add one more!" And so on... it was clearly not a simple thing. In fact, I would guess that many people simply accept the notion of infinity without truly deeply understanding what it actually means. A surprisingly large number of innumerate people actually think it is a number in and of itself.
So now you start making them think about negative infinity, when they don't even understand negative numbers... it just doesn't seem realistic. Why must the line extend to the left at all, they'll wonder, and you probably won't be able to give them a better answer than "it just does", which is exactly the sort of answer your teacher gave you.
The best real-world applications of negative numbers are in simple 1 dimensional physics -- moving forward, moving backward -- and to model the concept of debt. Both of these extremely simple use cases are an order of magnitude more complex than the "I have 5 marbles, Timmy takes 3 away, how many do I have left" scenarios the average child is using to understand subtraction at that age. Of the two, debt is probably easier to understand, but illustrating it requires at the very least a good understanding of money, borrowing, and bookkeeping. It's not something you teach a 6 year old, it's something you might teach an 11 or 12 year old (which, IIRC, is about the time negative numbers are first introduced conceptually).
I want you to know that I do not disagree with the central thesis here, which is that the American education system is screwed up, that it needs a swift kick in the butt, etc. But the reason it is screwed up is not so much because we're not taking on enough material, but rather because we fail to teach the material we ostensibly require. It's not because we're not learning about negative numbers at age 6 (no one anywhere does that) but rather because we're failing to even teach kids basic subtraction.
Sure, but what exactly would you have had them tell you? You get a negative number? What exactly would that mean to you as a first grader? It would take quite some time to explain, and the teacher isn't just teaching you, he's teaching everyone. Assume for a second that you're unusually precocious and are able to grasp, at age 6, why additive closure in the ring of integers is important. The other 29 kids in the class didn't get it, and all they've taken away from the discussion is that you can subtract a bigger number from a smaller one, under circumstances they don't understand and that are utterly irrelevant to the context of the lesson. The result? The teacher, whose job is to make sure first graders understand how the mathematical concept of subtraction (which is abstract) is related to the real world action of "taking away", has failed in his goal. Score one for American math education!
I don't know if you're a parent, or if you have younger siblings or nieces/nephews around, but little kids ask why to everything, which is great (and in my opinion, you should do your best to satisfy their natural curiosity). But in the context of a classroom, where one teacher's attention is divided among 30 students or more, taking this approach is like herding cats. The opportunity cost of explaining something to the one or two sublimely gifted children is simply to high if it means that the rest of the class is penalized. You will learn about negative numbers, eventually — you obviously did. Why must it be when you are six and the rest of the class is still struggling with the basics? And be honest with yourself, would you have really understood negative numbers then? European mathematicians only started accepting their existence in the fifteenth century, and I would posit that many of them were much smarter than you were at age six (or now, for that matter — no offense).
As an exercise, try coming up with an intuitive, real world explanation of negative numbers that you could relate lucidly to a six year old. I doubt you can.
(And on a related note: if America's math scores suck, it most certainly is not because teachers are failing to teach abstract mathematics in first grade.)
I hate to say I agree with the Chinese government, but the Falun Gong are a bunch of raving loonies and the only reason they are afforded the smallest inch of credibility in the west is because doing so helps to justify an increasing paranoia about the rise of mainland China here.
Seriously, Li Hongzhi fits every definition of a cult leader. Check out this interview with him in Time magazine for a taste of his wackiness.
Not that any of this justifies persecution, of course, but he's the Chinese L. Ron Hubbard.
Oh, I know what it means. I wasn't confused about that. I just always thought that it got its meeting from the way we (as in white people) treated the native americans (here, have this land, oh no wait, nevermind...) But the OP is suggesting that it's actually the other way around, and so I was confused.
This is offtopic, but I was always under the impression that the term "indian giver" referred to a people giving to Native Americans, not the other way around. Is that not the case?
You should consider the very real possibility that the code on the forum (like most working code available on forums) was actually copied from somewhere else. If you're lucky, it was written by the poster, or lifted from a BSD-licensed or public domain work. But it could very well be GPL'd code, or it could be code belonging to the company the poster works for, or whatever.
I mean, forums aren't exactly the best place to write and test code. If it's a one-line deal, ok, but if it's 200 lines, and the code compiles and is reasonably bug-free as given, that seems to indicate strongly that it comes from somewhere else. That would make me very nervous.
Let me second the sibling poster's objections, and add a few other points of my own: code posted in a forum may have been written by the poster on the spot, but if it compiles and works, in all likelihood he copied it from somewhere else himself. Lots of code sitting around on the internet (and discussed in forums) is GPL'd, and including 200 lines of GPL'd code in a closed source product will have your company in for a world of hurt if anyone ever finds out. People who write GPL'd software are... passionate.
Secondly, 200 lines of Java may not do much, but 200 lines of a denser language (like Haskell, for example) could be decidedly non-trivial. xmonad, a fully-featured tiling window manager for X11, is under 500 lines of code. Even if it's 200 lines of a sparse language, it may do something non-trivial and a fair use argument would fall flat on its face in that situation.
While I agree with your general feeling that our societies have become far too litigious, your solution seems to be to put your head in the sand and pretend that they haven't. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, you can (and will, if anyone ever finds out) get sued for things like this.
Regardless of whether this registers as right or wrong on your personal moral compass, CYA dictates that you rewrite the code as quickly as possible and hope no one ever finds out.
Even so, as the GP pointed out that has nothing to do with race. What is the logic of giving aid to members of a particular race or gender as opposed to individuals based on their actual present-day circumstances?
I would disagree that this has nothing to do with race. I used to feel similarly, reasoning that most racial discrimination had perished in the 1960s, and that affirmative action policies were misguided holdovers from a time when growing up black was more of a barrier than growing up poor. Then, due to a housing shortage at my university, I was placed in an African American interest dorm my freshman year of undergrad. Let me say with some embarrassment that until then I had not known many black people personally. Several months later, virtually all my friends were black, as was my girlfriend. Let me tell you: dating a black girl will teach you really quickly how alive racial discrimination still is.
At my university, very few of the black students were actually from "the ghetto". Most of them were middle class, with a few rich kids and a smattering of poor kids, that is to say, the distribution was basically the same as for white students. Despite that, proportionally they were drastically under-represented as a group. I live in California, and went to a top-tier university. It's not like I was in the South or some other place historically and stereotypically associated with overt racism. It's California, only some miles away from San Francisco, an area generally seen as one of the most tolerant in the nation.
Why were there so few black university students? That's the first question. Other universities are similar.
Let me tell you, walking around with a black person you care about will teach you just how constantly they are discriminated against, even in what I had previously seen as "enlightened" surroundings. We would be at the checkout line in the supermarket and the person wouldn't bag her groceries, people would give her nasty looks constantly, it was a never-ending deluge of little things. The days of lynching and the KKK might be over, but discrimination lives on.
One of the girls in our dorm was a freshman from a pretty decent prep-school who had apparently graduated with the best GPA in her graduating class. She was a good student, smart, pretty, and basically had everything going for her. Except, of course, she was black. She had aspirations to be a neurologist and go to med school; when she went to the academic counselor she was told that "neuroscience was hard" and that "exercise science would be a better major for her." I know for a fact that no one would have ever told me that.
When senior year came around, job offers for my black friends were fewer than for white friends with the same major, and salaries were much lower. Census data appears to support my anecdotal experience. Equally qualified blacks are paid, as a whole, less than whites. And Latinos are even worse off.
I can really identify with the "it's not my fault that slavery happened" position. I'm a first generation European immigrant; neither of my parents is American, and I spent much of my own youth on the other side of the pond. So not only did I personally have nothing to do with the whole deal, not even my ancestors were involved. So why should I feel even the smallest amount of guilt?
The answer is, I don't. Not personally. Like you said, I'm a good person, I'm not racist, etc. However, this individualist view is overly-simplistic and just a tad too convenient. The real world doesn't match up. It is a fact that the United States' economic clout was built on the backs of the African slave trade; to pretend it wasn't is nothing short of denial of reality. We all benefit, even children of recent immigrants, from this.
It's difficult to quantify exactly how much we've benefited, which makes paying reparations difficult, not to mention the astonishingly complex task of deci
Good to know the slashdot privacy is still guaranteed. I am a mathematician. So I have some "foggiest" idea how it works. You should see how big a chuckle I have on my face right now.
If this is true, I'll take back what I said about you not having the foggiest idea about how math works. But I will stand by my assertion that your characterization of how things happen in the industry is completely incorrect. If you think there's a lot of secret math going on of any real complexity, you're seriously deluded.
Firms like Renaissance hire a bunch of PhDs...
Well, thanks for advertising what I am sure is a firm that you are directly affiliated with.
God, I wish. This comment alone makes it pretty clear that you really have no idea at least how the financial industry works. Renaissance is insane. They're a black box, and they make insane amounts of money. I assumed you'd have heard of them. They're the gods of algorithmic trading.
Anyway, your examples are interesting — I did not know the history of the Student's distribution, for example — but (and I suppose this proves it's all just a matter of degree) I don't consider the Student's distribution to be extremely exciting or innovative mathematics. Then again, I didn't come from the stats/applied math side of things, my research was in topology, so perhaps we have different definitions of innovative and exciting.
Basically, all the basic building blocks of our models are well known in the industry, and yet we still win 4 out of 5 deals: it's how we put it together keeps us ahead of the market and ahead of our competition. I chose Renaissance as an example earlier because if any firm was likely to be a counterexample, it's them, but even in their case, I suspect they're just making innovative use of existing ideas rather than truly innovating in the way, say, Evariste Galois or even Stephen Smale were when they did the work they did.
If you think NSA is the only intelligence agency involved in doing math, you haven't read the story of Australia's intelligence agency cracking the codes of American-made fighter planes a few month ago... Math is done in secret all the time.
Another example from the intelligence community... ho hum. Again, as I said in my previous post, these kinds of situations are the exception, not the rule. There are only a handful of them with any real clout, and since neither of us work with them neither of us is particularly qualified to comment on what sort of stuff they do behind closed doors. As I said earlier, I'm willing to believe that they come up with innovative stuff, but the reason I responded to your post was because you were sitting here talking about how lots of math is done closed and how we all had to accept it etc etc because if there was money to be made keeping it closed, then it would be kept closed. You then gave investment bankers as an example, a field you clearly know nothing about, no offense. That seems to be your only financially-motivated example, because intelligence agencies are not under much financial pressure.
If you are revising your list of examples down to just the NSA and agencies like it, then we have no disagreement.
I suppose you can argue that most pure math is done in the light of day... When people dedicate their lives to making money, breaking secrets, oh... designing antennas (this one I am actually just guessing) they come up with math constructs that are not available for public to see... not until it's been thoroughly exploited for competitive advantage of the organization paying for the design.
What you're describing sounds suspiciously like engineering, not math. For example, building a bridge requires a fair amount of math, but all that math is
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Or Haskell, which is cooler in pretty much every way, and has nicer syntax.
Luckily for you, you haven't the foggiest idea how mathematics is developed. As it happens, I am a trained mathematician, and I work in finance, so I think I'm relatively qualified to comment. Your naive analysis makes a great deal of sense when you're dealing with procedures that are simple enough for a few smart people to come up with, but modern mathematics has become so complex that we only advance by standing on each others shoulders.
At my firm we use a lot of "proprietary mathematics", but guess what: none of it is stuff that wasn't discovered by some academic, we just combine their results in innovative ways. We depend completely — and it's not just us, it's everyone in the industry — on the results of academics.
Firms like Renaissance hire a bunch of PhDs who then apply their years of research in academia to generate the returns they do. Derivatives pricing in particular is so complex that it's not that the math isn't freely available for anyone to peruse, it's that it takes years of study to properly understand how it even works. So when a firm hires one of these guys, they aren't hiring them hoping that they'll come up with the next Black-Scholes-Merton pricing theory on company time. They're hoping that they understand the theory that already exists well enough to be able to apply it to real-world data and tweak it as necessary. That's what all those proprietary processes really are: not new, exciting theory, but old theory, properly combined and tested and written up into algorithmic trading or security selection algorithms.
Now, cryptography is not my thing, that's not the field I studied or what I have an interest in, but it may be that the NSA has a bunch of tech that no one else has. However, the NSA is not a private firm, and they'll be funded no matter what happens, so they can afford to employ thousands of brilliant cryptography researchers (in the same way a university does) and sit on the results. A private company can't do that. You can point to them as an example of how "it makes sense to keep results closed" if you want, but understand: they are the exception, not the rule. No one else works the way they do.
Universities, many of the best of which are private, depend on their professors publishing new and innovative stuff nearly non-stop. It's not altruistic; they make their money on tuition and they can justify charging 40k a year for an education only if they employ the best and the brightest. The measure of the best and the brightest is in their scholarly output. It's no coincidence that Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Yale have so many Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners in their employ. Reputation is what makes or breaks a school; without it, they have no income, because the best students want to study at a university with pedigree.
So while your (cynical) view of the world may "feel" right if you don't know what you're talking about, thankfully for all of us, open mathematical and scientific development will always trump private proprietary systems. That may not be true of software, I don't know. But when it comes to research, academia wins.
* You surreptitiously modified a legal contract to your advantage and presented it to someone as the original, unmodified contract, and said "caveat emptor" to the other party. In other words, you lie on legal documents and are proud of it.
While this is certainly sneaky, I'm not certain that it qualifies as a lie, anymore than any other deliberately obfuscated contract qualifies as a lie. For example, when presented with a contract to sign, the person explaining the contract will often give a very hand-wavy explanation of what's in the contract, but a strict read of what's actually on the paper may be very different from what he's saying. It's probably not malicious; the company is probably just being overly-broad to cover their butts. But it's still sneaky. In my mind, these are similar situations.
This is a very, very dangerous practice...
I agree 100%. I would never do this, myself.
... and means that *nothing* you present can be relied on. If I've got to do a word-by-word diff on any document you sign to find out where you modified it surreptitiously, that means that your code and your program results are probably as fraudulent.
I don't know where you get this from. All it means, strictly, is that you need to carefully read everything that you sign, whether you are an employee or the company in question. How you get that his code and program results are as fraudulent is beyond me. In my mind, the OP is playing a dangerous "legal in letter but not in spirit" game here. If you give me a document to sign, and I refuse to sign it, or I sign a modified version of it, I have not broken the law. I am not acting in good faith if I return the modified document to you and hope you don't notice, granted. But that's all I've done. What that has to do with my code or anything else is something else entirely.
See, your idea here seems to be "you lied once, so you'll probably lie again and probably have before." Good and well. But in the mind of the OP, he wasn't lying, and the law probably sides with him in that regard. So why should a sneaky non-lie mean that he is truly dishonest in other situations? He might be, he might not be. It doesn't follow.
I'm not sure. It would certainly be fraud if you attempted to change the contract after it was signed, but before it's signed it's just a piece of paper. If you change the contract and sign that instead, and then they sign your changed contract, they're agreeing to your terms. Sure, it's sneaky, but it's no less illegal than putting a bunch of stuff in fine print and hoping the person signing won't read it.
Now, if they've already signed it, you're in an altogether different situation.
I agree with you, he probably wasn't fired for missing the Friday meeting. However, your immediate assumption is that he was actually fired because he was incompetent in some way — ie, that the company was actually dissatisfied with his work. That may very well have been the case, but there's another (extremely common) scenario that you're not considering: they may have wanted him out and needed an excuse to let him go.
Lots of states and countries have labor laws that make it difficult to terminate someone without a reason, unless their employment contract specifically states that they serve at will. People in the latter category are typically paid an awful lot more than people who don't serve at will as compensation for the risk. If you let someone go for reasons not related to their performance you often need to compensate them accordingly, which can be expensive, especially if the reason you're letting them go in the first place is to cut costs during a crunch.
So the typical thing to do is to find something work-related to let them go for.
It sounds like the OP didn't have much use for those Friday meetings; my hunch would be that this wasn't the first one he missed, and probably no one cared one way or another for the entire duration of his employment at the firm. But it served as a good reason to let him go when they needed to trim the fat. Or maybe you're right, maybe he was jerking off in the server room to kiddie porn he downloaded on the company pipe, or whatever.
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Actually, in Hebrew, the commandment in question is: "lo teer tsakh", were the verb ratsakh refers to murder or manslaughter, not simple killing.
By the time the Vulgate bible came around, this was translated to "non occides", which does indeed mean "do not kill", so the KJV cannot be blamed for the mistranslation, it happened earlier.
What you say is true, though: they are reproducing faster than the Jewish majority in Israel, and in a few generations, they will have a majority. Israel has already decided how to proceed with this, though. They'll be a democracy in much the same way South Africa was a democracy. If you really think it can't happen in England, you haven't been paying attention. The idea that "this could happen in England" completely ignores the historical backdrop. Muslims that come to England, with the exception of a few raving loonies, mostly integrate into English society just fine. And make British food a bit more edible in the process, for which they are to be commended.
All this is is brown-skinned immigrant fear-mongering.
As the parent said, there are ways around it (using VBA ... ugh). But Excel is not a program whose purpose is to solve math equations, it is a program whose purpose is to manage spreadsheets. Spreadsheets contain data, and typically not just numeric data.
I work at an investment firm, and we get CSVs from our vendors with SEDOLs in them. Excel will helpfully (and silently) strip the leading zeros on UK securities, for example. Oops.
I don't doubt that the Chinese government would like to build such a system. I have no doubt that they would love, honestly, to actually have the power and influence that they are rumored to have in the west over their people, and to truly be the police state they are accused of being. The government there, like most governments everywhere, has an appetite for power.
But the days of Mao are long gone. There was a time not so long ago when parents everywhere encouraged their children to pursue a career in the state, as a policeman or soldier or political cadre. In the socialist days, that was how you advanced, how you got a good life. The promise of wealth, power, but most of all prestige could be found in those careers. Not surprisingly, there were a lot of police and military folks in those days.
Now, though, the situation has changed. True wealth and prestige come from the market, from private enterprise, and this simple fact is not lost on anyone in China. Parents are realistic about this. They don't encourage their children to enter the police or military anymore -- and if you are Chinese or even Chinese American you know well what "encourage" means when it's being done by a Chinese parent. The policeman and soldier's life is no longer stable or guaranteed, and besides being dangerous it generates far less income for the family than an office job (or, truth be told, even one selling fruit.)
Because of this, there are not enough young Chinese entering the police force.
To put this in perspective, Beijing has 10 million residents, around 4 million migrant workers, and a likely 2 or 3 million undocumented (illegal) residents. In a city this size, a small police force simply doesn't cut it.
It's not for lack of trying, but mainland China simply does not have the infrastructure necessary to be the police state it wants to be and that the west fears it is. As Beijingers say, "guan bu zhao", there are too many people and not enough cops.
So it's not the least bit surprising that this golden shield idea is the goverment's latest fantasy, a way to keep tabs on the populace all while circumventing the increasing human resources shortage that is crippling their once formidable security force.
But that's all it is -- a fantasy.
Sure, they'll put up cameras and buy high-tech imaging software, and maybe they'll be able to maintain that infrastructure in Wang Fu Jing, Xin Tian Di, and downtown Shen Zhen. But in the rest of China -- where the bulk of the population lives -- the notion is simply untenable.
China has more than a billion people, and most of them live in small rural villages that lack sewage infrastructure and running water. The idea that the government would prioritize CCTV surveillance systems in these areas is laughable. They simply don't have the money, the experts necessary to put it up, or any of the other basic requirements for a system that size.
You simply cannot govern a billion people by force alone. Nationalist propaganda can help get people to give you the benefit of the doubt, but once people are suffering the government gets the blame whether it deserves it or not. If you don't believe me, have a chat with a Beijing taxi driver about their wages, which are set by the government. They'll give you an earful. And that's in the capital. It's worse in the provinces.
The Chinese government knows this, and they aren't fools. The polarization of wealth is a much more pressing problem on their agenda than putting up cameras, because they remember that it was precisely a wealthy upper class stomping on the rural poor that put them into power in the first place.
One is that he said "one of", which implies that there could be several. Remember, he's a lawyer, so you have to pay attention to the words he uses because you'd better bet he's in the habit of choosing them carefully. You seem to think that he's saying that this is "the most irrational thing", not "one of the most irrational things."
The second, and to my mind more important issue here, is that with the marijuana issue, there's a bit of a social rift. Large swaths of the US disagree that marijuana should be made legal, whether their arguments against its legality are logically or morally legitimate or not. To reiterate, I am not one of those people and I am not defending their position, just pointing it out.
The thing about these copyright suits is that nearly everyone -- an overwhelming majority of people -- copies things on the internet, often without even thinking about it. Thanks to the RIAA's media campaign against music "piracy", lots of people are aware that downloading music might not be legal (notice I didn't say wrong). But when it comes to other things -- pictures on websites, software, games, or whatever else -- people copy with impunity and don't even think about what they're doing.
We have a situation here where actions previously living in a legal gray area are being pushed into illegality by a handful of wealthy elites who stand to benefit.
They are, in a sense -- and this is where the issue differs from the marijuana issue -- attempting to illegalize something that nearly everyone in the US does whether they (the US citizens) realize it or not. While I know that marijuana-use is far more pervasive than many people realize, it is nowhere near as pervasive as people downloading, say, a copyrighted image to use as their wallpaper at work.
That action is entirely analogous to the music downloading issue and strengthening the legal basis for outlawing so-called "music piracy" will essentially make everyone in the US a criminal in some way.
This is not the direction that the average US citizen wants his country to go -- even in the heartland bible-belt where support for smoking marijuana is, well, relatively low.
Why would children at age six not know 18? Relating a number like 18 to the real world is manifestly trivial: here, there are 18 pencils in a box, let's count them.
As for the number line, why would that make any sense at all? The concept of positive infinity is hard enough to grasp already. I remember, as a kid, that Sesame Street used to run all these little skits and segments trying to help kids understand that there was "no biggest number". "Think of the biggest number you can think of," it would say. "A billion," the child would answer (or whatever). "Now add one more!" And so on... it was clearly not a simple thing. In fact, I would guess that many people simply accept the notion of infinity without truly deeply understanding what it actually means. A surprisingly large number of innumerate people actually think it is a number in and of itself.
So now you start making them think about negative infinity, when they don't even understand negative numbers... it just doesn't seem realistic. Why must the line extend to the left at all, they'll wonder, and you probably won't be able to give them a better answer than "it just does", which is exactly the sort of answer your teacher gave you.
The best real-world applications of negative numbers are in simple 1 dimensional physics -- moving forward, moving backward -- and to model the concept of debt. Both of these extremely simple use cases are an order of magnitude more complex than the "I have 5 marbles, Timmy takes 3 away, how many do I have left" scenarios the average child is using to understand subtraction at that age. Of the two, debt is probably easier to understand, but illustrating it requires at the very least a good understanding of money, borrowing, and bookkeeping. It's not something you teach a 6 year old, it's something you might teach an 11 or 12 year old (which, IIRC, is about the time negative numbers are first introduced conceptually).
I want you to know that I do not disagree with the central thesis here, which is that the American education system is screwed up, that it needs a swift kick in the butt, etc. But the reason it is screwed up is not so much because we're not taking on enough material, but rather because we fail to teach the material we ostensibly require. It's not because we're not learning about negative numbers at age 6 (no one anywhere does that) but rather because we're failing to even teach kids basic subtraction.
Sure, but what exactly would you have had them tell you? You get a negative number? What exactly would that mean to you as a first grader? It would take quite some time to explain, and the teacher isn't just teaching you, he's teaching everyone. Assume for a second that you're unusually precocious and are able to grasp, at age 6, why additive closure in the ring of integers is important. The other 29 kids in the class didn't get it, and all they've taken away from the discussion is that you can subtract a bigger number from a smaller one, under circumstances they don't understand and that are utterly irrelevant to the context of the lesson. The result? The teacher, whose job is to make sure first graders understand how the mathematical concept of subtraction (which is abstract) is related to the real world action of "taking away", has failed in his goal. Score one for American math education!
I don't know if you're a parent, or if you have younger siblings or nieces/nephews around, but little kids ask why to everything, which is great (and in my opinion, you should do your best to satisfy their natural curiosity). But in the context of a classroom, where one teacher's attention is divided among 30 students or more, taking this approach is like herding cats. The opportunity cost of explaining something to the one or two sublimely gifted children is simply to high if it means that the rest of the class is penalized. You will learn about negative numbers, eventually — you obviously did. Why must it be when you are six and the rest of the class is still struggling with the basics? And be honest with yourself, would you have really understood negative numbers then? European mathematicians only started accepting their existence in the fifteenth century, and I would posit that many of them were much smarter than you were at age six (or now, for that matter — no offense).
As an exercise, try coming up with an intuitive, real world explanation of negative numbers that you could relate lucidly to a six year old. I doubt you can.
(And on a related note: if America's math scores suck, it most certainly is not because teachers are failing to teach abstract mathematics in first grade.)
I hate to say I agree with the Chinese government, but the Falun Gong are a bunch of raving loonies and the only reason they are afforded the smallest inch of credibility in the west is because doing so helps to justify an increasing paranoia about the rise of mainland China here.
Seriously, Li Hongzhi fits every definition of a cult leader. Check out this interview with him in Time magazine for a taste of his wackiness.
Not that any of this justifies persecution, of course, but he's the Chinese L. Ron Hubbard.
Oh, I know what it means. I wasn't confused about that. I just always thought that it got its meeting from the way we (as in white people) treated the native americans (here, have this land, oh no wait, nevermind...) But the OP is suggesting that it's actually the other way around, and so I was confused.
CYA stands for "cover your ass".
This is offtopic, but I was always under the impression that the term "indian giver" referred to a people giving to Native Americans, not the other way around. Is that not the case?
You should consider the very real possibility that the code on the forum (like most working code available on forums) was actually copied from somewhere else. If you're lucky, it was written by the poster, or lifted from a BSD-licensed or public domain work. But it could very well be GPL'd code, or it could be code belonging to the company the poster works for, or whatever.
I mean, forums aren't exactly the best place to write and test code. If it's a one-line deal, ok, but if it's 200 lines, and the code compiles and is reasonably bug-free as given, that seems to indicate strongly that it comes from somewhere else. That would make me very nervous.
Let me second the sibling poster's objections, and add a few other points of my own: code posted in a forum may have been written by the poster on the spot, but if it compiles and works, in all likelihood he copied it from somewhere else himself. Lots of code sitting around on the internet (and discussed in forums) is GPL'd, and including 200 lines of GPL'd code in a closed source product will have your company in for a world of hurt if anyone ever finds out. People who write GPL'd software are... passionate.
Secondly, 200 lines of Java may not do much, but 200 lines of a denser language (like Haskell, for example) could be decidedly non-trivial. xmonad, a fully-featured tiling window manager for X11, is under 500 lines of code. Even if it's 200 lines of a sparse language, it may do something non-trivial and a fair use argument would fall flat on its face in that situation.
While I agree with your general feeling that our societies have become far too litigious, your solution seems to be to put your head in the sand and pretend that they haven't. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, you can (and will, if anyone ever finds out) get sued for things like this.
Regardless of whether this registers as right or wrong on your personal moral compass, CYA dictates that you rewrite the code as quickly as possible and hope no one ever finds out.
You mean interstellar, right? Voyager 2 won't be intergalactic for a long, long time...
I would disagree that this has nothing to do with race. I used to feel similarly, reasoning that most racial discrimination had perished in the 1960s, and that affirmative action policies were misguided holdovers from a time when growing up black was more of a barrier than growing up poor. Then, due to a housing shortage at my university, I was placed in an African American interest dorm my freshman year of undergrad. Let me say with some embarrassment that until then I had not known many black people personally. Several months later, virtually all my friends were black, as was my girlfriend. Let me tell you: dating a black girl will teach you really quickly how alive racial discrimination still is.
At my university, very few of the black students were actually from "the ghetto". Most of them were middle class, with a few rich kids and a smattering of poor kids, that is to say, the distribution was basically the same as for white students. Despite that, proportionally they were drastically under-represented as a group. I live in California, and went to a top-tier university. It's not like I was in the South or some other place historically and stereotypically associated with overt racism. It's California, only some miles away from San Francisco, an area generally seen as one of the most tolerant in the nation.
Why were there so few black university students? That's the first question. Other universities are similar.
Let me tell you, walking around with a black person you care about will teach you just how constantly they are discriminated against, even in what I had previously seen as "enlightened" surroundings. We would be at the checkout line in the supermarket and the person wouldn't bag her groceries, people would give her nasty looks constantly, it was a never-ending deluge of little things. The days of lynching and the KKK might be over, but discrimination lives on.
One of the girls in our dorm was a freshman from a pretty decent prep-school who had apparently graduated with the best GPA in her graduating class. She was a good student, smart, pretty, and basically had everything going for her. Except, of course, she was black. She had aspirations to be a neurologist and go to med school; when she went to the academic counselor she was told that "neuroscience was hard" and that "exercise science would be a better major for her." I know for a fact that no one would have ever told me that.
When senior year came around, job offers for my black friends were fewer than for white friends with the same major, and salaries were much lower. Census data appears to support my anecdotal experience. Equally qualified blacks are paid, as a whole, less than whites. And Latinos are even worse off.
I can really identify with the "it's not my fault that slavery happened" position. I'm a first generation European immigrant; neither of my parents is American, and I spent much of my own youth on the other side of the pond. So not only did I personally have nothing to do with the whole deal, not even my ancestors were involved. So why should I feel even the smallest amount of guilt?
The answer is, I don't. Not personally. Like you said, I'm a good person, I'm not racist, etc. However, this individualist view is overly-simplistic and just a tad too convenient. The real world doesn't match up. It is a fact that the United States' economic clout was built on the backs of the African slave trade; to pretend it wasn't is nothing short of denial of reality. We all benefit, even children of recent immigrants, from this.
It's difficult to quantify exactly how much we've benefited, which makes paying reparations difficult, not to mention the astonishingly complex task of deci
Right, because the intelligentsia had nothing to do with the October revolution, for example. Smart people are immune to stupid ideas!
Yeah! Remember, child labour never existed in the US or Europe! We're civilized, and were especially so as we industrialized! Those damn chinks!
Our disagreements aside, I think it was inappropriate of me to open the way I did. Hopefully you'll accept my apologies.
If this is true, I'll take back what I said about you not having the foggiest idea about how math works. But I will stand by my assertion that your characterization of how things happen in the industry is completely incorrect. If you think there's a lot of secret math going on of any real complexity, you're seriously deluded.
God, I wish. This comment alone makes it pretty clear that you really have no idea at least how the financial industry works. Renaissance is insane. They're a black box, and they make insane amounts of money. I assumed you'd have heard of them. They're the gods of algorithmic trading.
Anyway, your examples are interesting — I did not know the history of the Student's distribution, for example — but (and I suppose this proves it's all just a matter of degree) I don't consider the Student's distribution to be extremely exciting or innovative mathematics. Then again, I didn't come from the stats/applied math side of things, my research was in topology, so perhaps we have different definitions of innovative and exciting.
Basically, all the basic building blocks of our models are well known in the industry, and yet we still win 4 out of 5 deals: it's how we put it together keeps us ahead of the market and ahead of our competition. I chose Renaissance as an example earlier because if any firm was likely to be a counterexample, it's them, but even in their case, I suspect they're just making innovative use of existing ideas rather than truly innovating in the way, say, Evariste Galois or even Stephen Smale were when they did the work they did.
Another example from the intelligence community... ho hum. Again, as I said in my previous post, these kinds of situations are the exception, not the rule. There are only a handful of them with any real clout, and since neither of us work with them neither of us is particularly qualified to comment on what sort of stuff they do behind closed doors. As I said earlier, I'm willing to believe that they come up with innovative stuff, but the reason I responded to your post was because you were sitting here talking about how lots of math is done closed and how we all had to accept it etc etc because if there was money to be made keeping it closed, then it would be kept closed. You then gave investment bankers as an example, a field you clearly know nothing about, no offense. That seems to be your only financially-motivated example, because intelligence agencies are not under much financial pressure.
If you are revising your list of examples down to just the NSA and agencies like it, then we have no disagreement.
What you're describing sounds suspiciously like engineering, not math. For example, building a bridge requires a fair amount of math, but all that math is
Or Haskell, which is cooler in pretty much every way, and has nicer syntax.
Luckily for you, you haven't the foggiest idea how mathematics is developed. As it happens, I am a trained mathematician, and I work in finance, so I think I'm relatively qualified to comment. Your naive analysis makes a great deal of sense when you're dealing with procedures that are simple enough for a few smart people to come up with, but modern mathematics has become so complex that we only advance by standing on each others shoulders.
At my firm we use a lot of "proprietary mathematics", but guess what: none of it is stuff that wasn't discovered by some academic, we just combine their results in innovative ways. We depend completely — and it's not just us, it's everyone in the industry — on the results of academics.
Firms like Renaissance hire a bunch of PhDs who then apply their years of research in academia to generate the returns they do. Derivatives pricing in particular is so complex that it's not that the math isn't freely available for anyone to peruse, it's that it takes years of study to properly understand how it even works. So when a firm hires one of these guys, they aren't hiring them hoping that they'll come up with the next Black-Scholes-Merton pricing theory on company time. They're hoping that they understand the theory that already exists well enough to be able to apply it to real-world data and tweak it as necessary. That's what all those proprietary processes really are: not new, exciting theory, but old theory, properly combined and tested and written up into algorithmic trading or security selection algorithms.
Now, cryptography is not my thing, that's not the field I studied or what I have an interest in, but it may be that the NSA has a bunch of tech that no one else has. However, the NSA is not a private firm, and they'll be funded no matter what happens, so they can afford to employ thousands of brilliant cryptography researchers (in the same way a university does) and sit on the results. A private company can't do that. You can point to them as an example of how "it makes sense to keep results closed" if you want, but understand: they are the exception, not the rule. No one else works the way they do.
Universities, many of the best of which are private, depend on their professors publishing new and innovative stuff nearly non-stop. It's not altruistic; they make their money on tuition and they can justify charging 40k a year for an education only if they employ the best and the brightest. The measure of the best and the brightest is in their scholarly output. It's no coincidence that Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, and Yale have so many Nobel Prize and Fields Medal winners in their employ. Reputation is what makes or breaks a school; without it, they have no income, because the best students want to study at a university with pedigree.
So while your (cynical) view of the world may "feel" right if you don't know what you're talking about, thankfully for all of us, open mathematical and scientific development will always trump private proprietary systems. That may not be true of software, I don't know. But when it comes to research, academia wins.
While this is certainly sneaky, I'm not certain that it qualifies as a lie, anymore than any other deliberately obfuscated contract qualifies as a lie. For example, when presented with a contract to sign, the person explaining the contract will often give a very hand-wavy explanation of what's in the contract, but a strict read of what's actually on the paper may be very different from what he's saying. It's probably not malicious; the company is probably just being overly-broad to cover their butts. But it's still sneaky. In my mind, these are similar situations.
I agree 100%. I would never do this, myself.
I don't know where you get this from. All it means, strictly, is that you need to carefully read everything that you sign, whether you are an employee or the company in question. How you get that his code and program results are as fraudulent is beyond me. In my mind, the OP is playing a dangerous "legal in letter but not in spirit" game here. If you give me a document to sign, and I refuse to sign it, or I sign a modified version of it, I have not broken the law. I am not acting in good faith if I return the modified document to you and hope you don't notice, granted. But that's all I've done. What that has to do with my code or anything else is something else entirely.
See, your idea here seems to be "you lied once, so you'll probably lie again and probably have before." Good and well. But in the mind of the OP, he wasn't lying, and the law probably sides with him in that regard. So why should a sneaky non-lie mean that he is truly dishonest in other situations? He might be, he might not be. It doesn't follow.
I'm not sure. It would certainly be fraud if you attempted to change the contract after it was signed, but before it's signed it's just a piece of paper. If you change the contract and sign that instead, and then they sign your changed contract, they're agreeing to your terms. Sure, it's sneaky, but it's no less illegal than putting a bunch of stuff in fine print and hoping the person signing won't read it.
Now, if they've already signed it, you're in an altogether different situation.
I agree with you, he probably wasn't fired for missing the Friday meeting. However, your immediate assumption is that he was actually fired because he was incompetent in some way — ie, that the company was actually dissatisfied with his work. That may very well have been the case, but there's another (extremely common) scenario that you're not considering: they may have wanted him out and needed an excuse to let him go.
Lots of states and countries have labor laws that make it difficult to terminate someone without a reason, unless their employment contract specifically states that they serve at will. People in the latter category are typically paid an awful lot more than people who don't serve at will as compensation for the risk. If you let someone go for reasons not related to their performance you often need to compensate them accordingly, which can be expensive, especially if the reason you're letting them go in the first place is to cut costs during a crunch.
So the typical thing to do is to find something work-related to let them go for.
It sounds like the OP didn't have much use for those Friday meetings; my hunch would be that this wasn't the first one he missed, and probably no one cared one way or another for the entire duration of his employment at the firm. But it served as a good reason to let him go when they needed to trim the fat. Or maybe you're right, maybe he was jerking off in the server room to kiddie porn he downloaded on the company pipe, or whatever.
Yeah! And then, how long it took us to get involved in Korea! ... oh, wait.