I had two immediate reactions to the summary. The first was that Microsoft got what they deserved, so what you posted is an interesting correction to that.
The second was that I'd need some really persuasive evidence before I believe that Microsoft "only halted their appeal to avoid the cost of further litigation". My immediate assumption was that they were worried that a court judgment against them would open them to many similar claims, and considered 10,000usd a cheap way to reduce that possibility. (On the other hand, they rolled over on this, so maybe others should try sueing them in similar circumstances?)
Question: if Steve Ballmer had been in charge, would Microsoft have dropped the appeal?
From memory: Austerlitz 1805, Marne 1914, and the French held the Germans at Verdun 1916, which counts as a strategic victory, because it negated what the chief of the German general staff, Falkenhayn, was trying to do.
There is also the small matter of the large amount of assistance that the French gave to the American revolutionaries in 1775-1783
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
Well, for the sake of completeness I was - I think - given option (2) of posting anonymously, so it's arguable that moderating and then posting anonymously while being logged in isn't breaking the rules, or at least the rules as implemented.
From what I remember of the moderating system, if someone is logged in and has moderated in a thread and then tries to make a post in the same thread they are given two options:
(1) make the post with their user name visible and all their moderation in the thread is cancelled
(2) make the post anonymously leaving their moderation in the thread unchanged
I assume it would be simple to (3) prevent a logged in user posting in a thread even anonymously, so if my memory about (2) is correct I conclude it is intentional to allow a moderator to post anonymously in a thread that they've moderated, perhaps because (4) from a practical viewpoint they can unlogin and post anonymously anyway.
So I don't think it's particularly "sneaky" to moderate and post (anonymously) in the same thread, and it's arguably not sneaky at all if you're upfront about it, as the parent was. If you don't like it you can just ignore the upfront and anonymous comment, or you can treat it more or less as you would any other anonymous comment, that is on its intrinsic merits (or dismerits).
Or you can argue for and convince the site administrators to implement (3) - if they have not already done so - and rely on the inconvenience of (4) to reduce its impact.
(Aside, for what it's worth, I usually find your posts interesting, even if I were to disagree with one on the basis of personal expertise.)
So, having said that, I'm now going to try to post this, and on this occasion (but not necessarily on all occasions) I'm going to choose option (1) if I'm given it.
So: the first thing that happened is I get this message: "If you continue to post this comment, all moderations done to this discussion will be undone! Are you sure you want to post?"
Which raises doubts in my mind as to whether I'm going to be given option (2) even if I don't want to use it.
"Primes are not random. Primes are determined."
Yes and no: from a revised version of Don Zagier's inaugural lecture at Bonn University on 5.May.1975 on "The First 50 Million Prime Numbers"
"... There are two facts about the distribution of prime numbers of which I hope to convince you so overwhelmingly that they will be permanently engraved in your hearts. The first is that, despite their simple definition and role as the building blocks of the natural numbers, the prime numbers belong to the most arbitrary and ornery objects studied by mathematicians: they grow like weeds among the natural numbers, seeming to obey no other law than that of chance, and nobody can predict where the next one will sprout. The second fact is even more astonishing, for it states just the opposite: that the prime numbers exhibit stunning regularity, that there are laws governing their behavior, and that they obey these laws with almost military precision...."
Note that both of Zagier's facts of the distribution of primes are in a way orthogonal to the primes being determined not random. It's surprising that probability can profitably be used on determined numbers, but it can. Search for Mark Kac and Paul Erdos and probabilistic number theory, or read this article on the Erdos-Kac Theorem.
"We need a new mod, +1 delusional."
By a possibly not strange not coincidence, I thought almost exactly the same thing a few hours ago while reading the comments on another story. The only difference is that I was thinking of "-1 delusional". Maybe we can compromise on "+-0 delusional"?
" The Irish had rebellions for hundreds of years before the British allowed them to vote out of the empire."
I am British: this article on the Irish War of Independence seems a fair assessment, and this on Michael Collins is also useful. They both expand on what I already knew, which is that you could say that the British "allowed" the Irish to have independence (excepting Northern Ireland), but only because many Irish fought for independence and both sides, for possibly different reasons, eventually concluded that peace was better than war. (A small correction: technically the Irish Free State was a "Dominion" in the British Empire (a similar status to, for example, that of Canada, Australia and New Zealand), then from 1937 became detatched and in 1949 left what was then the "Commonwealth".)
The British economics commentator Hamish McRae once wrote about a bright young executive put in charge of a project which subsequently failed: he tried to resign but was told by a superior that he had just been through an expensive training course in what not to do, and that if he thought that he could leave and take that knowledge to a competitor he had better think again.
For some reason "small-minded primitive tribalism mixed with the entitlement and egotism of an idle dependent life" brings an image of Donald Trump to my mind. And I wish it hadn't.
"In other words, the US has no good locations in the southwest." - Which is because of the light pollution, which is caused by the US which makes it the fault of the US that there are no good locations in the southwest.
"Hawaiian culture was stone age before the white man arrived"
Yes, so stone age that they travelled about 4,000 kilometres from the Society Islands and did that in sufficient numbers that they settled in Hawaii.
Discovery and Settlement of Polynesia ... The Polynesian migration to Hawai‘i was part of one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity: the discovery and settlement of the remote, widely scattered islands of the central Pacific. The migration began before the birth of Christ. While Europeans were sailing close to the coastlines of continents before developing navigational instruments that would allow them to venture onto the open ocean, voyagers from Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa began to settle islands in an ocean area of over 10 million square miles. The settlement took a thousand years to complete and involved finding and fixing in mind the position of islands, sometimes less than a mile in diameter on which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By the time European explorers entered the Pacific Ocean in the 16th century almost all the habitable islands had been settled for hundreds of years.
The voyaging was all the more remarkable in that it was done in canoes built with tools of stone, bone, and coral. The canoes were navigated without instruments by expert seafarers who depended on their observations of the ocean and sky and traditional knowledge of the patterns of nature for clues to the direction and location of islands.
"All of them tend to follow the law, but the law can be pretty flexible and go against you if you piss them off too much."
A personal experience to support that. About ten years ago I was an observer in a court case where an Independent Financial Advisor (IFA) was trying to overturn a judgement against him by an ombudsman. The lawyer for the IFA expounded arguments at length, and I got the distinct impression that (a) the judge wasn't exactly impressed by the length of time that lawyer was taking, including some near repetition of arguments, and (b) that if the argument for overturning the ombudsman's judgement was essentially a "technical" one (and it was) then the judge wasn't going to let legal technicalities get in the way of justice if he could help it. In other words, if the legal technicalities were cast iron, then the IFA would (perhaps regrettably) win, but if there was any room at all for ignoring those technicalities then they were going to be ignored.
So my advice (warning - I am not a lawyer) is that if you are trying to evade "justice" (whatever that is) by using legal technicalities and loopholes you are - using the words of the parent - liable to "piss off" the judge, and I don't recommend that unless your case is watertight and bullet-proof.
So it seems I can't correctly predict where Slashdot will place a post. By "What the AC just wrote" I meant the AC post (just below?) starting "That is a big deal though."
What the AC just wrote, plus if Wikipedia is correct:
* "However, that crew didn't land it very well."
** Phugoid: Captain Chelsey (Sully) Sullenberger of US Airways Flight 1549 that water landed in the Hudson said in a Google talk that the automatic protection from phugoid mode implemented in the Airbus A320 prevented him from manually getting all possible lift from the wings at four seconds before water impact, causing the crash to be more violent.
* "They never pressed the "ditch" button which inflates pads which seal the cargo doors after which a mostly intact aircraft (such as theirs) can float indefinitely."
** They didn't press the "ditch" button, but that might not have made much difference. US Airways Flight 1549 The Airbus A320 has a "ditching" button that closes valves and openings underneath the aircraft, including the outflow valve, the air inlet for the emergency RAT, the avionics inlet, the extract valve, and the flow control valve. It is meant to slow flooding in a water landing. The flight crew did not activate the "ditch switch" during the incident. Sullenberger later noted that it probably would not have been effective anyway, since the force of the water impact tore holes in the plane's fuselage much larger than the openings sealed by the switch.
Me too. Which raises the possibilities that there are two or more "cow" posters, and - disturbingly? - that some of these are cooperating with each other - "bad cow" and "good cow"?
Something not entirely different: in Otto Frisch's delightful memoir "What Little I Remember" he relates a story about Niels Bohr and him, which can also be read here (search on the page for "thought experiments" or - even better - just read the whole transcript); in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes this is told as follows:
He [Bohr] was traveling through Germany to determine who needed help. [This was in the 1930s.] "To me it was a great experience," Frisch writes, "to be suddenly confronted with Niels Bohr - an almost legendary name for me - and to see him smile at me like a kindly father; he took me by my waistcoat button and said: 'I hope you will come and work with us sometime; we like people who can carry out "thought experiments"!'" (Frisch had recently verified the prediction of quantum theory that an atom recoils when it emits a photon, a movement previously considered too slight to meaasure.)
His aunt was Lise Meitner, and together they gave a correct interpretation of experiment by Otto Hahn: "We [Frisch and Lise Meitner] walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot (she said and proved that she could get along just as fast that way), and gradually the idea took shape that this was no chipping or cracking of the nucleus but rather a process to be explained by Bohr's idea that the nucleus was like a liquid drop; such a drop might elongate and divide itself."
I highly recommend Frisch's memoir. From it another Bohr story. Frisch was invited to Bohr's home, and on seeing a horseshoe hanging above the door and said to Bohr: "Surely you don't believe in that?"; Bohr's reply: "Of course not, but I'm told it works even if you don't believe in it!"
A quote by Frisch: "Scientists have one thing in common with children: curiosity. To be a good scientist you must have kept this trait of childhood, and perhaps it is not easy to retain just one trait. A scientist has to be curious like a child; perhaps one can understand that there are other childish features he hasn't grown out of."
Sort of. If it took 5 years and actually worked they were clearly becoming very, very well acquainted with a heart of the problem. (I do mean "a" heart: there can be more than one way of dealing with a complex problem.)
Whether they were becoming very, very well acquainted with disciplines at the heart of the problem is another question.
For example in perturbation theory (examining what happens to a system if you change a parameter by a small amount) there are objects called Canards. These were first discovered by non-standard analysts who applied infinitesimal perturbations. (Which incidentally acts as a ripost to someone recently claiming in another thread that the concept of infinity was practically useless.) These analysts were French, and graphs of the objects had curves which looked a bit like ducks. Hence Canards.
The mathematician Ian Stewart writes about this in "From Here to Infinity" (Oxford University Press 1996), one of his books on problems in contemporary mathematics. He relates how some non-standard analysts found the canards, adds that the reaction of a conventional perturbation theorist was to find a rather complicated and delicate normal perturbation theory proof while expressing (unjustified) doubts about the non-standard proof. Stewart then comments that it's easy to discover things with hindsight, and that he'd be more impressed by the perturbation theory proof if it had been found before the non-standard analysts had done the donkey work.
Also: I don't know how well known the late playwright Harold Pinter is on Slashdot. There is an adjective "pinteresque".
Definition of Pinteresque in English: adjective - Of or relating to Harold Pinter; resembling or characteristic of his plays. Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses.
Origin: 1960s; earliest use found in The Times. From the name of Harold Pinter, British playwright + -esque.
Note the similarity of the sounds of "pinteresque" and "pinterest". Surely a creative lawyer could make something of that?
An "Englander" also suggests/recommends a USA book: Strunk/Whyte's "The Elements of Style", including the entertaining portrait of Strunk by White: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
page.20: "Originally, much of the United States of America was covered with primeval forest: great areas in the western half and a vast area in the eastern half. In the eastern half, this primitive forest stretched westwards from Maine, around the Great Lakes, to about halfway through Minnesota;..."
page.21: "It was not until the 1830s, however, that really large-scale lumbering operations commenced, turning lumbering into a major industry of an importance and status equal to that of the railroad and iron industries.
By 1850, as can be seen from Map.1, quite substantial inroads had been made into the virgin timber of the vast forest area in the eastern half..."
page.23: "As Map.2 vividly shows, by 1942 there was not a great deal left of the vast virgin forest which originally covered all the eastern part of the United States..."
[I've read the book at least twice, but I can't find my copy: the above is all I can get from Google Books.]
In short, USA citizens removed a lot of those lost 3 trillion trees!
An example of one [simple group] that was discovered using geometry is the Leech lattice. John Leech constructed a remarkable lattice in 24 dimensions.... This lattice was absolutely brilliant. He [Leech] constructed it using Mathieu's largest group of permutations, and then he hawked this lattice around to a number of mathematicians, trying to get them to work on the symmetry group of the lattice.
John Conway took this up. Now, Conway is a big name in mathematics, but at that time he wasn't well-known. He had a wife and four children, so he was a fairly busy man. He said to his wife, 'Look, this is really exciting - I really think this lattice is worth looking into. I have to have some time on my own to do it.' So they had an agreement that he would have from Wednesday 6pm to midnight, and Saturday midday to midnight. So on the first Saturday, he got himself all set to work on this. He took an enormous sheet of paper, a great long roll of paper, and started to write down everything he knew about the Leech Lattice. He worked and worked, and after about six hours of this, he finally decided he was getting somewhere. He was quite excited, and he picked up the phone and talked to John Thompson, because Conway and Thompson were both at Cambridge University.
He [Conway] said, 'Look John, I think that the size of the group is either this number or it's half of that number.'
Thompson said, 'I will think about it and call you back.' Twenty minutes later, Thompson called back and said, 'It's half that number!'
He [Thompson?] said, 'But have you really got it?'
He [Conway] said, 'No, but I need to find one new symmetry that we don't already know about.'
So he got terribly excited and he worked, and then by about ten o'clock he phoned Thompson again, and he said, 'I've got it!'
Thompson said, 'Well, that's great.'
And he [Conway] said, 'I'm going to bed now - I'm really tired.'
Then he thought, well, it is pretty stupid to go to bed, because I haven't actually got it; I have almost got it, but not yet! So he stayed up until after midnight, and then he rang Thompson one last time and said, 'I've got it,' and the next day, they worked together on studying this fascinating group of symmetries. At any rate, it was a wonderful group of symmetries 'very important, and it contains most of the other ones that were known at that time.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/h... ... Overall, Netics researchers estimated a yearly cost per user of Eur530.38 over a five-year period...
... By contrast, for Office 365, the cost was Eur197.49 a year....
... Using Skype for Business and Yammer... the total cost per user per year could drop to Eur111.98.
This implies that the Netics report has figures to an accuracy of better than 0.01%, which I find, to put it mildly, surprising.
I was going to post something along the lines that I am prepared to believe that an organisation might find it more efficient to use Microsoft products instead of open source, but that given the unbelievable precison of the figures:
(1) I don't trust the figures, and (2) I don't trust anyone who prepares a report with unbelievably precise figures: at best, they are being lazy in not rounding the raw figures, or worse they don't understand what they are doing, or at worst they are being deliberately misleading:
Spurious accuracy seduces journalists time and time again Wikipedia - False Precision
Slashdotters may enjoy the 3.5inch floppy diskette story. Personal computers with 3.5 inch diskette drives were commonly specified as having 88.9 mm drives in metric countries, 88.9 mm being the exact, though overly precise, conversion of 3.5 inches. In fact, the diskettes are 90 mm wide everywhere in the world per ISO/IEC 9529-1 specification, 3.5 inch being an approximation. (I had intended to put an "allegedly" in front of that story, but the Wikipedia article links to that ISO/IEC specification and to an HP specifications sheet with the width of the diskette drive being 3.5in/88.9 mm!)
That was what I intended to post. Then it occurred to me to look at the Microsoft Italy page linked in the ZDNet article:
https://news.microsoft.com/it-...
Using Google Translate gives:
... with OpenOffice annual spending per user has been estimated at more than 500 euros, much higher than the previous annual spending Office user of about 118 Euros...
... The annual expenditure per user with Office 365 is also approximately 197 euros...
... the net annual spending per user falls further to around 110 euros...
The "more than 500" is fine and the "around 110" is probably ok.
Being picky, the "about 118" and "approximately 197" should probably be rounded.
Even so, that is much better than the ludicrous "precision" of the figures in the ZDNet article. I assume Federico Guerrini (for Italy's got tech) didn't invent the figures in the ZDNet article, so a plausible guess is:
1. Maybe the Netics researchers' report did give figures to "better" than 0.01% "accuracy".
2. Someone in news.microsoft.com/it had the good sense to round these figures for their news item.
3. The ZDNet article by Federico Guerrini used the figures directly from the Netics report.
If so, then I suggest that the Italian ZDNet reporters take their Microsoft colleagues out for a long lunch and learn how to treat statistics properly, including asking *really* hard and probing questions to any researchers who use inappropriate precision.
If not, then I am really intrigued as to why the ZDNet article has those "precise" figures.
That says what I wanted to say, but is expressed much much better. It's also worth pointing out that his legal team's clarification makes it worse than the original "misinterpretation"
Slashdot Mirror
Seconding that, can we have an award - just kudos, no money - for the comment of the week, and so far this seems a good candidate for this week.
I had two immediate reactions to the summary. The first was that Microsoft got what they deserved, so what you posted is an interesting correction to that.
The second was that I'd need some really persuasive evidence before I believe that Microsoft "only halted their appeal to avoid the cost of further litigation". My immediate assumption was that they were worried that a court judgment against them would open them to many similar claims, and considered 10,000usd a cheap way to reduce that possibility. (On the other hand, they rolled over on this, so maybe others should try sueing them in similar circumstances?)
Question: if Steve Ballmer had been in charge, would Microsoft have dropped the appeal?
Well, for the sake of completeness I was - I think - given option (2) of posting anonymously, so it's arguable that moderating and then posting anonymously while being logged in isn't breaking the rules, or at least the rules as implemented.
From what I remember of the moderating system, if someone is logged in and has moderated in a thread and then tries to make a post in the same thread they are given two options:
(1) make the post with their user name visible and all their moderation in the thread is cancelled
(2) make the post anonymously leaving their moderation in the thread unchanged
I assume it would be simple to (3) prevent a logged in user posting in a thread even anonymously, so if my memory about (2) is correct I conclude it is intentional to allow a moderator to post anonymously in a thread that they've moderated, perhaps because (4) from a practical viewpoint they can unlogin and post anonymously anyway.
So I don't think it's particularly "sneaky" to moderate and post (anonymously) in the same thread, and it's arguably not sneaky at all if you're upfront about it, as the parent was. If you don't like it you can just ignore the upfront and anonymous comment, or you can treat it more or less as you would any other anonymous comment, that is on its intrinsic merits (or dismerits).
Or you can argue for and convince the site administrators to implement (3) - if they have not already done so - and rely on the inconvenience of (4) to reduce its impact.
(Aside, for what it's worth, I usually find your posts interesting, even if I were to disagree with one on the basis of personal expertise.)
So, having said that, I'm now going to try to post this, and on this occasion (but not necessarily on all occasions) I'm going to choose option (1) if I'm given it.
So: the first thing that happened is I get this message: "If you continue to post this comment, all moderations done to this discussion will be undone! Are you sure you want to post?"
Which raises doubts in my mind as to whether I'm going to be given option (2) even if I don't want to use it.
"Primes are not random. Primes are determined." ..."
Yes and no: from a revised version of Don Zagier's inaugural lecture at Bonn University on 5.May.1975 on "The First 50 Million Prime Numbers"
"... There are two facts about the distribution of prime numbers of which I hope to convince you so overwhelmingly that they will be permanently engraved in your hearts. The first is that, despite their simple definition and role as the building blocks of the natural numbers, the prime numbers belong to the most arbitrary and ornery objects studied by mathematicians: they grow like weeds among the natural numbers, seeming to obey no other law than that of chance, and nobody can predict where the next one will sprout. The second fact is even more astonishing, for it states just the opposite: that the prime numbers exhibit stunning regularity, that there are laws governing their behavior, and that they obey these laws with almost military precision.
Note that both of Zagier's facts of the distribution of primes are in a way orthogonal to the primes being determined not random. It's surprising that probability can profitably be used on determined numbers, but it can. Search for Mark Kac and Paul Erdos and probabilistic number theory, or read this article on the Erdos-Kac Theorem.
"We need a new mod, +1 delusional."
By a possibly not strange not coincidence, I thought almost exactly the same thing a few hours ago while reading the comments on another story. The only difference is that I was thinking of "-1 delusional". Maybe we can compromise on "+-0 delusional"?
" The Irish had rebellions for hundreds of years before the British allowed them to vote out of the empire."
I am British: this article on the Irish War of Independence seems a fair assessment, and this on Michael Collins is also useful. They both expand on what I already knew, which is that you could say that the British "allowed" the Irish to have independence (excepting Northern Ireland), but only because many Irish fought for independence and both sides, for possibly different reasons, eventually concluded that peace was better than war. (A small correction: technically the Irish Free State was a "Dominion" in the British Empire (a similar status to, for example, that of Canada, Australia and New Zealand), then from 1937 became detatched and in 1949 left what was then the "Commonwealth".)
The British economics commentator Hamish McRae once wrote about a bright young executive put in charge of a project which subsequently failed: he tried to resign but was told by a superior that he had just been through an expensive training course in what not to do, and that if he thought that he could leave and take that knowledge to a competitor he had better think again.
For some reason "small-minded primitive tribalism mixed with the entitlement and egotism of an idle dependent life" brings an image of Donald Trump to my mind. And I wish it hadn't.
"In other words, the US has no good locations in the southwest." - Which is because of the light pollution, which is caused by the US which makes it the fault of the US that there are no good locations in the southwest.
"Hawaiian culture was stone age before the white man arrived"
Yes, so stone age that they travelled about 4,000 kilometres from the Society Islands and did that in sufficient numbers that they settled in Hawaii.
Discovery and Settlement of Polynesia
... The Polynesian migration to Hawai‘i was part of one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity: the discovery and settlement of the remote, widely scattered islands of the central Pacific. The migration began before the birth of Christ. While Europeans were sailing close to the coastlines of continents before developing navigational instruments that would allow them to venture onto the open ocean, voyagers from Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa began to settle islands in an ocean area of over 10 million square miles. The settlement took a thousand years to complete and involved finding and fixing in mind the position of islands, sometimes less than a mile in diameter on which the highest landmark was a coconut tree. By the time European explorers entered the Pacific Ocean in the 16th century almost all the habitable islands had been settled for hundreds of years.
The voyaging was all the more remarkable in that it was done in canoes built with tools of stone, bone, and coral. The canoes were navigated without instruments by expert seafarers who depended on their observations of the ocean and sky and traditional knowledge of the patterns of nature for clues to the direction and location of islands.
"All of them tend to follow the law, but the law can be pretty flexible and go against you if you piss them off too much."
A personal experience to support that. About ten years ago I was an observer in a court case where an Independent Financial Advisor (IFA) was trying to overturn a judgement against him by an ombudsman. The lawyer for the IFA expounded arguments at length, and I got the distinct impression that (a) the judge wasn't exactly impressed by the length of time that lawyer was taking, including some near repetition of arguments, and (b) that if the argument for overturning the ombudsman's judgement was essentially a "technical" one (and it was) then the judge wasn't going to let legal technicalities get in the way of justice if he could help it. In other words, if the legal technicalities were cast iron, then the IFA would (perhaps regrettably) win, but if there was any room at all for ignoring those technicalities then they were going to be ignored.
So my advice (warning - I am not a lawyer) is that if you are trying to evade "justice" (whatever that is) by using legal technicalities and loopholes you are - using the words of the parent - liable to "piss off" the judge, and I don't recommend that unless your case is watertight and bullet-proof.
So it seems I can't correctly predict where Slashdot will place a post. By "What the AC just wrote" I meant the AC post (just below?) starting "That is a big deal though."
** Phugoid: Captain Chelsey (Sully) Sullenberger of US Airways Flight 1549 that water landed in the Hudson said in a Google talk that the automatic protection from phugoid mode implemented in the Airbus A320 prevented him from manually getting all possible lift from the wings at four seconds before water impact, causing the crash to be more violent.
** They didn't press the "ditch" button, but that might not have made much difference. US Airways Flight 1549 The Airbus A320 has a "ditching" button that closes valves and openings underneath the aircraft, including the outflow valve, the air inlet for the emergency RAT, the avionics inlet, the extract valve, and the flow control valve. It is meant to slow flooding in a water landing. The flight crew did not activate the "ditch switch" during the incident. Sullenberger later noted that it probably would not have been effective anyway, since the force of the water impact tore holes in the plane's fuselage much larger than the openings sealed by the switch.
Me too. Which raises the possibilities that there are two or more "cow" posters, and - disturbingly? - that some of these are cooperating with each other - "bad cow" and "good cow"?
For those who avoid Googling, this thought experiment is by Galileo Galilei.
Something not entirely different: in Otto Frisch's delightful memoir "What Little I Remember" he relates a story about Niels Bohr and him, which can also be read here (search on the page for "thought experiments" or - even better - just read the whole transcript); in "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes this is told as follows:
He [Bohr] was traveling through Germany to determine who needed help. [This was in the 1930s.] "To me it was a great experience," Frisch writes, "to be suddenly confronted with Niels Bohr - an almost legendary name for me - and to see him smile at me like a kindly father; he took me by my waistcoat button and said: 'I hope you will come and work with us sometime; we like people who can carry out "thought experiments"!'" (Frisch had recently verified the prediction of quantum theory that an atom recoils when it emits a photon, a movement previously considered too slight to meaasure.)
His aunt was Lise Meitner, and together they gave a correct interpretation of experiment by Otto Hahn: "We [Frisch and Lise Meitner] walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot (she said and proved that she could get along just as fast that way), and gradually the idea took shape that this was no chipping or cracking of the nucleus but rather a process to be explained by Bohr's idea that the nucleus was like a liquid drop; such a drop might elongate and divide itself."
I highly recommend Frisch's memoir. From it another Bohr story. Frisch was invited to Bohr's home, and on seeing a horseshoe hanging above the door and said to Bohr: "Surely you don't believe in that?"; Bohr's reply: "Of course not, but I'm told it works even if you don't believe in it!"
A quote by Frisch: "Scientists have one thing in common with children: curiosity. To be a good scientist you must have kept this trait of childhood, and perhaps it is not easy to retain just one trait. A scientist has to be curious like a child; perhaps one can understand that there are other childish features he hasn't grown out of."
Sort of. If it took 5 years and actually worked they were clearly becoming very, very well acquainted with a heart of the problem. (I do mean "a" heart: there can be more than one way of dealing with a complex problem.)
Whether they were becoming very, very well acquainted with disciplines at the heart of the problem is another question.
For example in perturbation theory (examining what happens to a system if you change a parameter by a small amount) there are objects called Canards. These were first discovered by non-standard analysts who applied infinitesimal perturbations. (Which incidentally acts as a ripost to someone recently claiming in another thread that the concept of infinity was practically useless.) These analysts were French, and graphs of the objects had curves which looked a bit like ducks. Hence Canards.
The mathematician Ian Stewart writes about this in "From Here to Infinity" (Oxford University Press 1996), one of his books on problems in contemporary mathematics. He relates how some non-standard analysts found the canards, adds that the reaction of a conventional perturbation theorist was to find a rather complicated and delicate normal perturbation theory proof while expressing (unjustified) doubts about the non-standard proof. Stewart then comments that it's easy to discover things with hindsight, and that he'd be more impressed by the perturbation theory proof if it had been found before the non-standard analysts had done the donkey work.
Well said.
Also: I don't know how well known the late playwright Harold Pinter is on Slashdot. There is an adjective "pinteresque".
Definition of Pinteresque in English: adjective - Of or relating to Harold Pinter; resembling or characteristic of his plays. Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses.
Origin: 1960s; earliest use found in The Times. From the name of Harold Pinter, British playwright + -esque.
Note the similarity of the sounds of "pinteresque" and "pinterest". Surely a creative lawyer could make something of that?
No, you were not necessarily wrong the first time! In characteristic two rings or fields: 1+1=0
An "Englander" also suggests/recommends a USA book: Strunk/Whyte's "The Elements of Style", including the entertaining portrait of Strunk by White: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
page.20: "Originally, much of the United States of America was covered with primeval forest: great areas in the western half and a vast area in the eastern half. In the eastern half, this primitive forest stretched westwards from Maine, around the Great Lakes, to about halfway through Minnesota; ..."
page.21: "It was not until the 1830s, however, that really large-scale lumbering operations commenced, turning lumbering into a major industry of an importance and status equal to that of the railroad and iron industries. ..."
By 1850, as can be seen from Map.1, quite substantial inroads had been made into the virgin timber of the vast forest area in the eastern half
page.23: "As Map.2 vividly shows, by 1942 there was not a great deal left of the vast virgin forest which originally covered all the eastern part of the United States ..."
[I've read the book at least twice, but I can't find my copy: the above is all I can get from Google Books.]
In short, USA citizens removed a lot of those lost 3 trillion trees!
Symmetry and the Monster - Gresham College
An example of one [simple group] that was discovered using geometry is the Leech lattice. John Leech constructed a remarkable lattice in 24 dimensions. ... This lattice was absolutely brilliant. He [Leech] constructed it using Mathieu's largest group of permutations, and then he hawked this lattice around to a number of mathematicians, trying to get them to work on the symmetry group of the lattice.
John Conway took this up. Now, Conway is a big name in mathematics, but at that time he wasn't well-known. He had a wife and four children, so he was a fairly busy man. He said to his wife, 'Look, this is really exciting - I really think this lattice is worth looking into. I have to have some time on my own to do it.' So they had an agreement that he would have from Wednesday 6pm to midnight, and Saturday midday to midnight. So on the first Saturday, he got himself all set to work on this. He took an enormous sheet of paper, a great long roll of paper, and started to write down everything he knew about the Leech Lattice. He worked and worked, and after about six hours of this, he finally decided he was getting somewhere. He was quite excited, and he picked up the phone and talked to John Thompson, because Conway and Thompson were both at Cambridge University.
He [Conway] said, 'Look John, I think that the size of the group is either this number or it's half of that number.'
Thompson said, 'I will think about it and call you back.' Twenty minutes later, Thompson called back and said, 'It's half that number!'
He [Thompson?] said, 'But have you really got it?'
He [Conway] said, 'No, but I need to find one new symmetry that we don't already know about.'
So he got terribly excited and he worked, and then by about ten o'clock he phoned Thompson again, and he said, 'I've got it!'
Thompson said, 'Well, that's great.'
And he [Conway] said, 'I'm going to bed now - I'm really tired.'
Then he thought, well, it is pretty stupid to go to bed, because I haven't actually got it; I have almost got it, but not yet! So he stayed up until after midnight, and then he rang Thompson one last time and said, 'I've got it,' and the next day, they worked together on studying this fascinating group of symmetries. At any rate, it was a wonderful group of symmetries 'very important, and it contains most of the other ones that were known at that time.
... Overall, Netics researchers estimated a yearly cost per user of Eur530.38 over a five-year period
... By contrast, for Office 365, the cost was Eur197.49 a year.
... Using Skype for Business and Yammer
This implies that the Netics report has figures to an accuracy of better than 0.01%, which I find, to put it mildly, surprising.
I was going to post something along the lines that I am prepared to believe that an organisation might find it more efficient to use Microsoft products instead of open source, but that given the unbelievable precison of the figures:
(1) I don't trust the figures, and (2) I don't trust anyone who prepares a report with unbelievably precise figures: at best, they are being lazy in not rounding the raw figures, or worse they don't understand what they are doing, or at worst they are being deliberately misleading:
Spurious accuracy seduces journalists time and time again
Wikipedia - False Precision
Slashdotters may enjoy the 3.5inch floppy diskette story. Personal computers with 3.5 inch diskette drives were commonly specified as having 88.9 mm drives in metric countries, 88.9 mm being the exact, though overly precise, conversion of 3.5 inches. In fact, the diskettes are 90 mm wide everywhere in the world per ISO/IEC 9529-1 specification, 3.5 inch being an approximation. (I had intended to put an "allegedly" in front of that story, but the Wikipedia article links to that ISO/IEC specification and to an HP specifications sheet with the width of the diskette drive being 3.5in/88.9 mm!)
That was what I intended to post. Then it occurred to me to look at the Microsoft Italy page linked in the ZDNet article:
https://news.microsoft.com/it-...
Using Google Translate gives:
... with OpenOffice annual spending per user has been estimated at more than 500 euros, much higher than the previous annual spending Office user of about 118 Euros ...
... The annual expenditure per user with Office 365 is also approximately 197 euros ...
... the net annual spending per user falls further to around 110 euros ...
The "more than 500" is fine and the "around 110" is probably ok.
Being picky, the "about 118" and "approximately 197" should probably be rounded.
Even so, that is much better than the ludicrous "precision" of the figures in the ZDNet article. I assume Federico Guerrini (for Italy's got tech) didn't invent the figures in the ZDNet article, so a plausible guess is:
1. Maybe the Netics researchers' report did give figures to "better" than 0.01% "accuracy".
2. Someone in news.microsoft.com/it had the good sense to round these figures for their news item.
3. The ZDNet article by Federico Guerrini used the figures directly from the Netics report.
If so, then I suggest that the Italian ZDNet reporters take their Microsoft colleagues out for a long lunch and learn how to treat statistics properly, including asking *really* hard and probing questions to any researchers who use inappropriate precision.
If not, then I am really intrigued as to why the ZDNet article has those "precise" figures.
That says what I wanted to say, but is expressed much much better. It's also worth pointing out that his legal team's clarification makes it worse than the original "misinterpretation"