I'm not sure I do want GSM built into it. I'd rather have a nice small phone which I can comfortably hold to my ear, and a separate tablet. They can talk to each other via Bluetooth.
In our room it would fall straight into a pile of clothing and stay there. This will be great for the sorts of people who have a hard time getting up but somehow manage to keep their bedrooms 100% tidy, but I suspect that the intersection of those two sets is small.
AFAICT people can mean two different things when they say "moral relativism":
* The position I've described as "moral non-cognitivism" here
* A weird kind of moral absolutism by which it is absolutely, objectively wrong to "impose ones morality on others".
The former is my position. The latter seems to me to be inherently self-contradictory.
If neither of these describe what you mean by it, could you go into a little more detail? I'll check your journal if the thread closes before you're able to reply. cheers!
Yes, a difference is only a difference if it makes a difference. However, it's my experience that this difference *does* make a profound difference in what people do in response to moral questions, so you shouldn't be so quick to proudly tout your lack of understanding on this point.
Moral non-cognitivism doesn't require (or even allow) that I judge my own moral precepts to be somehow objectively more valid than another person's before I act on them.
"Right" and "wrong" have no existence outside our heads. I'm against certain kinds of behaviour, but that's not because they are wrong by some external moral standard, but because I find them to be wrong. This position is known as "moral non-cognitivism".
Note that it is *very* different from what some people call "moral relativism" - it is perfectly consistent for a moral non-congnitivist to eg have someone arrested for murder, even though they do not believe that murder is somehow "objectively wrong".
We get to run the operating system of our choice, though these days everyone runs either Debian, Ubuntu or Windows. When I do Windows development, I run VMWare - one virtual machine to compile the app, another to install and run it. I would hate to sit at a Windows machine for the most part - I know how to make my Linux box do what I want it to.
If I were forced to use Windows, I'd just VNC into a nearby Unix box and use that as my full-time desktop.
I see people at a client's office who wear heels for work every day, and while they're often nice to look at, I'm mystified. Why waste the hard work of wearing heels on your colleagues? Save the for going out!
On the other hand, there's controversy on whether heels and corsets really do cause damage for most wearers. The tightlacers I know best seem to be in fine health, though they've pursued it with real care. I've never really gone for proper tightlacing/corset training - my favourite corset takes me in about four, five inches, which looks dramatic enough.
May I commend you on your effective use of politeness:-) Having recently discovered that even the simplest two-dimensional case of label placement isn't as trivial as you might assume, I have to give your layout serious respect.
This is absolutely fantastic. How much does the software that generates the map "know in advance" about science? Did you have to categorize papers by hand, or tell it keywords that correlate with fields? Or does it work it all out from phrase frequency and the citation graph?
I was scrolling around the big map on my tiny screen, and when I got to the bit that said "signature scheme, elliptic curves, side channel..." my eyes welled up, and I pointed and said "that's MY bit!"
Oooh, hints of dark and secret knowledge! Those are always very impressive.
The delay I mentioned is due to links being made, not links being discovered. Think about some small community of scientists making an almost closed cluster of sites about their niche research subject.
There is simply no way for Google to know that those pages are any good until people start linking to them. Fortunately it doesn't take long - for example, the scientists will get karma from the links from their institution front pages, which in turn get karma from the other respected scientists at those institutions.
Since the answer is a closely guarded secret within Google, it's always fun to be contradicted by someone speaking in authoritative tone of voice who knows as little about this as I do:-)
You're mistaken about your argument against, in any case; PageRank itself is public information, so I can tell you that it does not have the property you assign to it. There's a delay between a link being made and Google spidering and discovering it, but the eigenvector calculation at the heart of PageRank will propogate karma along the links as fast as it needs to go.
Every page has to start with some small, intrinsic amount of karma, otherwise there would be none to pass around.
There has to be a "root set", but that root set doesn't have to consist of all pages. There's some evidence that it includes all top-level pages, because the Scientologists experimented with creating zillions of top-level domains to increase their Google ranking. But ordinary pages, as I understand it, have no intrinsic karma at all.
Yeah, blog SEO spam is a great evil irritant. I do understand how *that* helps them.
Er, that sounds like the old saw "we lose a penny on each one sold, but we make it up in volume".
If there's only so much karma going into your pages, there's only so much karma they have to give, no matter how huge it is. A trillion pages pointing at my page won't increase its karma, if those trillion have no karma to give.
PageRank is designed to be resistant to exactly this sort of attack. The amount of Google karma you get is proportional to the karma of the pages that link to you. Creating lots of pages with no karma that link to you therefore shouldn't do you any good at all. Why do they bother?
Theories:
(1) There's a subtle way that it helps I haven't spotted yet, perhaps to do with non-PageRank elements of Google's search ordering
(2) This is all done by a very few companies because they are the few that don't understand PageRank and therefore don't realise it won't help...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I do want GSM built into it. I'd rather have a nice small phone which I can comfortably hold to my ear, and a separate tablet. They can talk to each other via Bluetooth.
Putting off registering an account as long as possible is probably just good sense.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:
Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
We pretty much know how to make radio very hard to jam now - use some form of spread spectrum, either frequency hopping or direct sequence.
Looking at your example:
* An absolutist might say "Murder is wrong, so I'm going to turn in the murderer, but growing pot is not wrong so I'm not going to turn the grower in"
* A moral non-cognitivist might say "I find murder to be wrong... but I don't find pot-smoking to be wrong"
So I don't think it clarifies much I'm afraid.
I think you're a utilitarian, but you haven't made it clear what you mean by relativist here and how it differs from standard positions on morality.
In our room it would fall straight into a pile of clothing and stay there. This will be great for the sorts of people who have a hard time getting up but somehow manage to keep their bedrooms 100% tidy, but I suspect that the intersection of those two sets is small.
AFAICT people can mean two different things when they say "moral relativism":
* The position I've described as "moral non-cognitivism" here
* A weird kind of moral absolutism by which it is absolutely, objectively wrong to "impose ones morality on others".
The former is my position. The latter seems to me to be inherently self-contradictory.
If neither of these describe what you mean by it, could you go into a little more detail? I'll check your journal if the thread closes before you're able to reply. cheers!
Yes, a difference is only a difference if it makes a difference. However, it's my experience that this difference *does* make a profound difference in what people do in response to moral questions, so you shouldn't be so quick to proudly tout your lack of understanding on this point.
Moral non-cognitivism doesn't require (or even allow) that I judge my own moral precepts to be somehow objectively more valid than another person's before I act on them.
"Right" and "wrong" have no existence outside our heads. I'm against certain kinds of behaviour, but that's not because they are wrong by some external moral standard, but because I find them to be wrong. This position is known as "moral non-cognitivism".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cognitivism
Note that it is *very* different from what some people call "moral relativism" - it is perfectly consistent for a moral non-congnitivist to eg have someone arrested for murder, even though they do not believe that murder is somehow "objectively wrong".
Debian GNU/Win32 would be a great blessing for sure. It's been considered but never got very far AFAIK.
We get to run the operating system of our choice, though these days everyone runs either Debian, Ubuntu or Windows. When I do Windows development, I run VMWare - one virtual machine to compile the app, another to install and run it. I would hate to sit at a Windows machine for the most part - I know how to make my Linux box do what I want it to.
If I were forced to use Windows, I'd just VNC into a nearby Unix box and use that as my full-time desktop.
I see people at a client's office who wear heels for work every day, and while they're often nice to look at, I'm mystified. Why waste the hard work of wearing heels on your colleagues? Save the for going out!
On the other hand, there's controversy on whether heels and corsets really do cause damage for most wearers. The tightlacers I know best seem to be in fine health, though they've pursued it with real care. I've never really gone for proper tightlacing/corset training - my favourite corset takes me in about four, five inches, which looks dramatic enough.
I'd sooner wear a corset and high heels than a suit and tie any day - they may be just as uncomfortable but at least they look stylish :-)
The excreable "Babylon 5: Thirdspace" post-series mini-movie.
Given your sig, you should at least be aware of this punk/industrial track...
May I commend you on your effective use of politeness :-) Having recently discovered that even the simplest two-dimensional case of label placement isn't as trivial as you might assume, I have to give your layout serious respect.
This is absolutely fantastic. How much does the software that generates the map "know in advance" about science? Did you have to categorize papers by hand, or tell it keywords that correlate with fields? Or does it work it all out from phrase frequency and the citation graph?
I was scrolling around the big map on my tiny screen, and when I got to the bit that said "signature scheme, elliptic curves, side channel..." my eyes welled up, and I pointed and said "that's MY bit!"
Hints of dark and secret knowledge backed by insults! I'm more impressed by the minute.
Oooh, hints of dark and secret knowledge! Those are always very impressive.
The delay I mentioned is due to links being made, not links being discovered. Think about some small community of scientists making an almost closed cluster of sites about their niche research subject.
There is simply no way for Google to know that those pages are any good until people start linking to them. Fortunately it doesn't take long - for example, the scientists will get karma from the links from their institution front pages, which in turn get karma from the other respected scientists at those institutions.
Since the answer is a closely guarded secret within Google, it's always fun to be contradicted by someone speaking in authoritative tone of voice who knows as little about this as I do :-)
You're mistaken about your argument against, in any case; PageRank itself is public information, so I can tell you that it does not have the property you assign to it. There's a delay between a link being made and Google spidering and discovering it, but the eigenvector calculation at the heart of PageRank will propogate karma along the links as fast as it needs to go.
Every page gets some weight even if no one links to it. It's small, but it's positive.
o ld=1&commentsort=3&mode=thread&pid=18413697#184137 87
That's not the impression I'm under - I thought that most pages were not part of Google's "root set". See my reply here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=227331&thresh
Indeed, and this has happened to me.
Every page has to start with some small, intrinsic amount of karma, otherwise there would be none to pass around.
There has to be a "root set", but that root set doesn't have to consist of all pages. There's some evidence that it includes all top-level pages, because the Scientologists experimented with creating zillions of top-level domains to increase their Google ranking. But ordinary pages, as I understand it, have no intrinsic karma at all.
Yeah, blog SEO spam is a great evil irritant. I do understand how *that* helps them.
Er, that sounds like the old saw "we lose a penny on each one sold, but we make it up in volume".
If there's only so much karma going into your pages, there's only so much karma they have to give, no matter how huge it is. A trillion pages pointing at my page won't increase its karma, if those trillion have no karma to give.
PageRank is designed to be resistant to exactly this sort of attack. The amount of Google karma you get is proportional to the karma of the pages that link to you. Creating lots of pages with no karma that link to you therefore shouldn't do you any good at all. Why do they bother?
Theories:
(1) There's a subtle way that it helps I haven't spotted yet, perhaps to do with non-PageRank elements of Google's search ordering
(2) This is all done by a very few companies because they are the few that don't understand PageRank and therefore don't realise it won't help...