The company is displaying a lack of fortitude that MS and Sony are showing by proudly displaying their consoles, and the press will jump on the Big N for it.
Correction -- they're displaying an abundance of testicular fortitude by snubbing the US market for the time being.
Soldering irons, solder, breadboards, servo motors, different lengths and gauges of wire, cable, transistors, operational amplifiers, timer chips, ARM processors, wheels, access to a machine shop, car/boat batteries, capacitors, inductors, resistors, steel or solid plastics, and so on.
Robots are uninteresting until you reach a few levels of complexity higher than what could be done in a high school.
I was thinking that topological statistics might be most appropriate. The idea is pretty simple: say you want to measure three (possibly dependent) variables. You make each datum a real triple. Then you measure the distances between distinct points. You might want to set a fixed radius about each point in which to measure in, to avoid dealing with billions of data points at a time. If you collect enough data and analyze it using a small enough neighborhood, assuming that the variables are independent, you end up with a nice blobby picture to look at and analyze. Isolated clusters, surfaces, and curves indicate that one or more of the variables aren't independent, i.e., something suspicious is happening. This is similar to what Apple uses in their mail client. Only instead of alerting you of anomalies, it just throws them out.
That's not what the GP was referring to. OS X has the super-user disabled by default. Unless one goes through some (trivial, if relatively obscure) trouble to enable root, nobody can use it. System maintenence (in the terminal) is done via a pretty restrictive sudo, passwords are shadowed in the NetInfo database (owned and readable only by root). System administration stuff in Aqua requires an administrator to enter their password in a popup. This seems like trouble, and it probably is, but it's not too bad -- users tend to know what sorts of administration tasks actually require sudo and don't just blindly type it in.
In short, it's (almost) secure by default, and goes out of its way to keep users from doing anything stupid.
I'm no accountant, but it seems to me that google could easily donate money to open source projects they're interested it, while getting credit for philanthropic work. Taxation isn't too big of a deal in this scenario, since funding open source projects would probably be called R&D -- and I'm pretty sure that's tax deductible. But man, the PR!
Although the Safari upgrade re-added Apple, Amazon, eBay, etc. links to my bookmark bar. That was sort of annoying, but easy enough to fix.
That's because Software Update downloaded a fresh copy of Safari for you. Your "personal" bookmarks are stored in your ~/Library/ directory somewhere, whereas the stock ones are in the application bundle.
Re:Speaking as an astronomer...
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 1
... I'm utterly appalled at the decision to not service HST. This view is essentially universal among all the professional astronomers that I know.
As an astronomer, you should realize that the universe is mighty big. Considering its size, it seems unlikely that you know even $2.5 \times 10^{-19} \frac{\mbox{astronomers}}{\mbox{parsec}^3}$. (Ph3@r my l337 \LaTeX ski11z!!!!11eleventyone)
Basically, yes. The information we're talking about is already public. What I did last Saturday is public, if obscure, knowledge. You're not undermining my right to privacy by publishing it. You'd just be an asshole.
Regarding "fighting words," if you're enough of an asshole (like, publishing my address in a pedophile bbs or something), in some jurisdictions I can beat the crap out of you and have any assault and battery charges dismissed because of your legal, but incredibly provocative speech act. Note that this isn't censorship.
At least, I think that's how it works in "fighting words" states. IANAL, YMMV, ETC.
Which is more important to you? Your right to personal privacy, or my right to freedom of speech? Would you be OK with me posting your home address & phone number in my blog, along with an account of what I saw you doing last Saturday?
I'd think you were despicable, but the First Amendment was designed to do the important job of protecting assholes. Keep in mind that if you post something that qualifies as "fighting words," I could kick your ass in some jurisdictions.
Good work pointing out it was a real troll. I was about to reply to it, but your warning stopped me from making a fool of myself. But seriously, when you see a good troll like that, it's best to leave it be until someone actually responds seriously.
(admittedly, brief exposure to alcohol doesn't really sterilize anything... but I feel better doing it... how's that for being dogmatic?)
I was under the impression that rubbing alcohol would dissolve the organic compounds microorganisms use to attach themselves to their environment. So although brief exposure wouldn't kill anything, a bit of scrubbing would physically remove the micro doodles.
You miss the point. Your internal voice is consistently several hundred miliseconds behind the action elsewhere in the brain. You might tell yourself not to say something, but that's only a reflection of a decision made elsewhere in the brain. You don't thinking by talking to yourself. Your internal voice is epiphenomenal. Hell, some people function just fine without one.
Edit your hosts file to redirect any distracting sites to localhost. Change permissions so you can't edit, and change ownership, hopefully to a friend. Give it time. Don't use the web unless you need it for a work related function.
Jesus H. Christ, look at the context. We're talking about computer generated proofs that are too long to be verified by humans. The fact that a cosmic ray could cause a bit-flip and ruin a computation makes a purported proof not one until it is verified. Let alone the historical abundance of implementation bugs in software.
I've already seen computer generated proofs. These are easily verifiable, if tedious to do so. They are proofs. A sequence of sentences, computer generated or not, is not a proof until verified.
Now, before you go off and accuse people of magical thinking, you should learn a bit more literacy. Your characterization of my position is wildly incongruous with what I have written, in context. Kindly go fuck yourself next time you want to call someone irrational.
1. Fine, here's a non-slashdot characterization of Godel's theorem. Godel proved that for any recursively enumerable axiomatization of arithmetic S, there is a sentence A which is true in some models and non in others. From the completeness theorem, it follows that there is no proof of A from S. Geez, are you happy now?
2. Enderton is a good book. We worked from Mendelson's. His definition of a formal system is as an alphabet and inductive rules for forming "words" and "sentences". For FOL, well-formed formulae are the product of applying the formation rules on the alphabet.
ZFC, PA, etc are logics, meaning that they're endowed with much more structure than just a set of sentences. Look it up in Ebbinghaus or Enderton if you'd like -- logics are defined as ordered triples or quadruples (I forget which at the moment), the first entry of which is a formal system. Godel's theorem cannot be a theorem about formal systems. To wit, Pressberger arithmetic and Euclidean geometry are complete.
Sarcasm aside, computers are better at performing simple calculations quickly. Except when they aren't. Like when cosmic rays plow through my processor. Or when an implementation bug fucks up a computation. Mathematicians want certainty.
Slashdot Mirror
He didn't allude. He referred.
The company is displaying a lack of fortitude that MS and Sony are showing by proudly displaying their consoles, and the press will jump on the Big N for it.
Correction -- they're displaying an abundance of testicular fortitude by snubbing the US market for the time being.
Yeah... I can hardly get -60 dB out of the built-in, Apple manufactured microphone.
Oh wait... I made a poopie.
Soldering irons, solder, breadboards, servo motors, different lengths and gauges of wire, cable, transistors, operational amplifiers, timer chips, ARM processors, wheels, access to a machine shop, car/boat batteries, capacitors, inductors, resistors, steel or solid plastics, and so on.
Robots are uninteresting until you reach a few levels of complexity higher than what could be done in a high school.
I was thinking that topological statistics might be most appropriate. The idea is pretty simple: say you want to measure three (possibly dependent) variables. You make each datum a real triple. Then you measure the distances between distinct points. You might want to set a fixed radius about each point in which to measure in, to avoid dealing with billions of data points at a time. If you collect enough data and analyze it using a small enough neighborhood, assuming that the variables are independent, you end up with a nice blobby picture to look at and analyze. Isolated clusters, surfaces, and curves indicate that one or more of the variables aren't independent, i.e., something suspicious is happening. This is similar to what Apple uses in their mail client. Only instead of alerting you of anomalies, it just throws them out.
That's not what the GP was referring to. OS X has the super-user disabled by default. Unless one goes through some (trivial, if relatively obscure) trouble to enable root, nobody can use it. System maintenence (in the terminal) is done via a pretty restrictive sudo, passwords are shadowed in the NetInfo database (owned and readable only by root). System administration stuff in Aqua requires an administrator to enter their password in a popup. This seems like trouble, and it probably is, but it's not too bad -- users tend to know what sorts of administration tasks actually require sudo and don't just blindly type it in.
In short, it's (almost) secure by default, and goes out of its way to keep users from doing anything stupid.
I'm no accountant, but it seems to me that google could easily donate money to open source projects they're interested it, while getting credit for philanthropic work. Taxation isn't too big of a deal in this scenario, since funding open source projects would probably be called R&D -- and I'm pretty sure that's tax deductible. But man, the PR!
Although the Safari upgrade re-added Apple, Amazon, eBay, etc. links to my bookmark bar. That was sort of annoying, but easy enough to fix.
That's because Software Update downloaded a fresh copy of Safari for you. Your "personal" bookmarks are stored in your ~/Library/ directory somewhere, whereas the stock ones are in the application bundle.
... I'm utterly appalled at the decision to not service HST. This view is essentially universal among all the professional astronomers that I know.
As an astronomer, you should realize that the universe is mighty big. Considering its size, it seems unlikely that you know even $2.5 \times 10^{-19} \frac{\mbox{astronomers}}{\mbox{parsec}^3}$. (Ph3@r my l337 \LaTeX ski11z!!!!11eleventyone)
I'm a FF using hermaphrodite, you insensitive douche bag.
Oh wait. I made a poopie.
Basically, yes. The information we're talking about is already public. What I did last Saturday is public, if obscure, knowledge. You're not undermining my right to privacy by publishing it. You'd just be an asshole.
Regarding "fighting words," if you're enough of an asshole (like, publishing my address in a pedophile bbs or something), in some jurisdictions I can beat the crap out of you and have any assault and battery charges dismissed because of your legal, but incredibly provocative speech act. Note that this isn't censorship.
At least, I think that's how it works in "fighting words" states. IANAL, YMMV, ETC.
Which is more important to you? Your right to personal privacy, or my right to freedom of speech? Would you be OK with me posting your home address & phone number in my blog, along with an account of what I saw you doing last Saturday?
I'd think you were despicable, but the First Amendment was designed to do the important job of protecting assholes. Keep in mind that if you post something that qualifies as "fighting words," I could kick your ass in some jurisdictions.
Good work pointing out it was a real troll. I was about to reply to it, but your warning stopped me from making a fool of myself. But seriously, when you see a good troll like that, it's best to leave it be until someone actually responds seriously.
Moore's law isn't about clock rate. It's about transistor density.
Oh, the irony. Good job missing the GP's joke.
(admittedly, brief exposure to alcohol doesn't really sterilize anything... but I feel better doing it... how's that for being dogmatic?)
I was under the impression that rubbing alcohol would dissolve the organic compounds microorganisms use to attach themselves to their environment. So although brief exposure wouldn't kill anything, a bit of scrubbing would physically remove the micro doodles.
He didn't claim that they did.
You miss the point. Your internal voice is consistently several hundred miliseconds behind the action elsewhere in the brain. You might tell yourself not to say something, but that's only a reflection of a decision made elsewhere in the brain. You don't thinking by talking to yourself. Your internal voice is epiphenomenal. Hell, some people function just fine without one.
Edit your hosts file to redirect any distracting sites to localhost. Change permissions so you can't edit, and change ownership, hopefully to a friend. Give it time. Don't use the web unless you need it for a work related function.
Yeah, let's get a puppy. I'm hungry.
Jesus H. Christ, look at the context. We're talking about computer generated proofs that are too long to be verified by humans. The fact that a cosmic ray could cause a bit-flip and ruin a computation makes a purported proof not one until it is verified. Let alone the historical abundance of implementation bugs in software.
I've already seen computer generated proofs. These are easily verifiable, if tedious to do so. They are proofs. A sequence of sentences, computer generated or not, is not a proof until verified.
Now, before you go off and accuse people of magical thinking, you should learn a bit more literacy. Your characterization of my position is wildly incongruous with what I have written, in context. Kindly go fuck yourself next time you want to call someone irrational.
A mathematician might make a mistake, but it will get caught if the proof is in human readable form.
1. Fine, here's a non-slashdot characterization of Godel's theorem. Godel proved that for any recursively enumerable axiomatization of arithmetic S, there is a sentence A which is true in some models and non in others. From the completeness theorem, it follows that there is no proof of A from S. Geez, are you happy now?
2. Enderton is a good book. We worked from Mendelson's. His definition of a formal system is as an alphabet and inductive rules for forming "words" and "sentences". For FOL, well-formed formulae are the product of applying the formation rules on the alphabet.
ZFC, PA, etc are logics, meaning that they're endowed with much more structure than just a set of sentences. Look it up in Ebbinghaus or Enderton if you'd like -- logics are defined as ordered triples or quadruples (I forget which at the moment), the first entry of which is a formal system. Godel's theorem cannot be a theorem about formal systems. To wit, Pressberger arithmetic and Euclidean geometry are complete.
Sarcasm aside, computers are better at performing simple calculations quickly. Except when they aren't. Like when cosmic rays plow through my processor. Or when an implementation bug fucks up a computation. Mathematicians want certainty.
Wiles, Ribet, Serre, Shimura, Taniyama, and others wrote several thousand pages which together imply Fermat's last theorem.