If you disagree with "Intelligent Design," that's fine. But can you refrain from making side jabs at those who study it by saying that "real biologists" don't believe it?
"Real biologists" may or may not believe in intelligent design, but they know that when they are on the job doing real biology, they should concern themselves with testable hypotheses (which ID is not).
OK, sure, but there is a place for government in this tragedy of the commons. Assume for the moment that a) global warming does exist and b) will cause harm to everyone unless c) average mileage of cars driven in the US increases by 15 MPG. Assume further that d) the price of cars increases as mileage does (this is certainly not true across the spectrum, but over a certain threshold it is reasonable).
In this case, it is in noone's best interest to buy a high-mileage car; it is in each person's best interest that everyone else buys one. Here the government can step in by 1) increasing the gas tax, 2) giving tax credits for high mileage cars, 3) fining car companies when the average MPG of the cars that they sell is below a certain threshold. Each of these actions provides incentive to increase the mileage, either by increasing TCO (1) or initial price (3) of inefficient vehicles or decreasing TCO of efficient vehicles (2).
To say that the private market can solve this absent any intervention (when assumptions a-d hold) is ludicrous and free-market fundamentalism at its worst.
Why exactly should uber accurate unique visitor statistics matter to websites?
Because it impacts ad revenue? If IPs >> visitors, advertisers want to know this and lower the amount their willing to pay. If visitors >> IPs, websites want to raise their advertising rates.
You're confusing causation and correlation. The people who download illegally now also probably bought more music than the overall average before Napster was around. The question is, do they buy more than they would if there were no illegal downloading at all?
Anyway, that's beside the point. All of that "well they buy music anyway" is simply rationalization for acting illegally and/or unethically. Saying "I wouldn't have paid for it anyway so they lose nothing" doesn't make it OK -- you're enjoying the benefit of something that costs money but you haven't paid for. It may not be theft per se, but it's pretty nearly morally equivalent.
then came harry potter. a wizard going to wizard school, making friends and enemies while learning his special abilities and discovering his hidden power. huh. that sounds familiar. i awaited word of a lawsuit, but alas...
i have yet to trudge my way through any of the potter books, or for that matter see the movies, but i recommend to any of my adult friends who do that they read a wizard of earthsea before inflicting potter on their children.
hey, what a good idea! let's trash a book we've never read!
i heard that wizard of earthsea has a wizard in it that fights dragons! that sounds a lot like the hobbit! tolkien's estate should sue!
it's great that you recommend that parents have their children read earthsea; it's a great book that's perfect for readers from curious pre-teens to fantasy-minded adults. but rowling writes some fine fiction for children, and for you to discount it without reading it is pretty lame.
Oh, it was terribly, terribly subtle. It wasn't like the fascist propaganda messages were patently ridiculous, obviously done with tongue in cheek, or campy as all hell.
Subtle. I barely noticed the clever satire of a fascist ideology.
It's not the money from the research that helps the students, although it does allow the professors to stay there (at most research universities, a large part of professorial compensation depends on research money brought in, rather than a guaranteed salary). It's the knowledge gained through research. What many people seem to forget is that what is learned in the classroom was cutting edge research at some point. Knowledge has to be discovered before it can be passed on. The grandparent snipes about professors waiting around to write their next book, but where do you think your textbooks come from?
Universities have been traditionally and should continue to be centers of research; private research advances are much less frequently (not to mention less quickly) disseminated to the rest of the community and eventually back into undergraduate texts.
a. This is in Canada. b. From the fifth: "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself". This is not a criminal case; it is an academic matter. You hear of very few criminal trials concerning plagiarism in an undergraduate classroom.
Yes, because grading is the only individual attention a student gets. And coursework is the only value of a college education.
People pay tuition because high-quality employers (and graduate schools) prefer candidates who come from prestigious four-year universities. A degree (and high GPA) from such a university indicates: (1) The student excelled at the coursework. This is the bare minimum, and can be provided by any university; however, most employers prefer the guarantee of rigor and a reasonable breadth and depth that is provided by a prestigious school. (2) The student was mature enough to do well at the coursework while at the same time living away from home for the first time (in most cases). Again, this can be provided by most four-year schools, but the more prestigious the school, the more of an accomplishment this is presumed to be (with good reason--the culture at, say, MIT, requires a much faster maturation than, say, the local community college; whether that's a good thing is another question, but adaptability is certainly a virtue prized by employers and grad schools). (3) The student was exposed to and had (the opportunity for) contact with some of the finest minds on the planet, and presumably to their research. This is especially important for graduate school. This is not accomplished primarily in the classroom, but through one-on-one conversations in office hours, small discussion sections or reading groups, and undergraduate research.
As to your second question, India already has hundreds of campuses with extremely competitive admissions standards; a reason that skilled, educated workers are available in India is that a large number of Indians are highly educated, most in India, not the U.S.
If it had gone the other way, the same Republicans that are telling people to shut up about the election would be whining about the result, and the same Democrats that are whining about the result would be telling people to shut up about the election already.
It turns out that Bush did win Florida. But wouldn't it have been nice be sure about that *before* declaring him the winner? Since when is a recount undemocratic? Since when did we trust machines to completely correctly read nondigital data? Have you tried OCR lately? It requires a human check to weed out the mistakes.
Sure, doing hand counts of Democrat-leaning counties is a bit one-sided. Sure, recounts are expensive. But if the result of an election is in doubt (and with a margin that close, it was in doubt), it's worth the cost.
On the same token, those people still claiming that Gore won are in their own little world with little relation to this one.
Google is running this through TopCoder, which started out Java/C++ only and has recently added C# and VB.NET. TopCoder challenges are object-oriented in nature, although in some cases, this is basically a thin veneer over a non-object-oriented problem.
Much of it. He takes things ridiculously out of context and out-and-out lies in some cases. This, this, and this cover some of the issues. The third link is the longest and outlines in some detail deceptions perpetrated by Moore in his film. The first two are opinion pieces and cover fewer discrepancies in less depth. One interesting excerpt from the second link:
Forbes reports that an early scene in "Bowling" in which Mr. Moore tries to demonstrate how easy it is to obtain guns in America was staged. He goes to a small bank in Traverse City, Mich., that offers various inducements to open an account and claims "I put $1,000 in a long-term account, they did the background check, and, within an hour, I walked out with my new Weatherby," a rifle.
But Jan Jacobson, the bank employee who worked with Mr. Moore on his account, says that only happened because Mr. Moore's film company had worked for a month to stage the scene. "What happened at the bank was a prearranged thing," she says. The gun was brought from a gun dealer in another city, where it would normally have to be picked up. "Typically, you're looking at a week to 10 days waiting period," she says. Ms. Jacobson feels used: "He just portrayed us as backward hicks."
Re:Self-repairing robots have been around for a wh
on
Learning Robots
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So? Sounds like a good solution to the problem. In this case, the goal is to get to the end of the maze, not to see the maze.
Many AI and robotics researchers seem to fall into the trap of modelling human cognition rather than designing an intelligent artifact. Both approaches have their place, but it's a shame when someone who's trying to design AI gets blinded by experience as a human being and tries to program an agent to make decisions the same way.
That being said, computer vision is an important field in AI, but vision isn't necessarily the best way to avoid walls.
I have read her books, and I find her philosophy to have a strange appeal while at the same time appalling the hell out of me. There is more to this world than wealth creation. Moreover, if these lawyers have whined, cried, and preached about the selfishness of others, quote them.
These lawyers do serve a function in society. They are not (all) leeches. Some lawyers are--the ambulance chasers that create lawsuits out of thin air, for example, and the lawyers who will sue McDonald's because their food is fatty. But this case seems to have at least some merit.
Well, the article says 15,000 people/year would pay $100,000 for a 15-minute trip by 2021. Personally, I'd want more than 15 minutes in space for $100k, but there you go.
That doesn't seem like a bad growth rate for an industry--from 0 to 1.5 billion per year in only 20 years. Of course, the PC industry puts that to shame, but I don't think a whole lot of industries have matched that growth rate.
Is it so awful that someone should act for their own good? I can only assume that your nickname is sarcastic; Ayn Rand would applaud people who look after their own ass while deriding those who act altruistically.
The whole purpose of class action lawsuits is to allow a large group of people who think they have been wronged in the same way by the same party to band together and share resources to try to get recompense.
Many class action suits do give the lawyers a massive payoff as they work without payment from the clients in order to get a share of the pie if they win. The class in question is free to retain a lawyer and pay their normal fee and get the entire settlement to themselves if they wish and have the means.
No, he described the economic model that the parent was proposing. Besides which, most payouts aren't nearly this size, and the upfront risk is probably higher than $10,000 and 1000 hrs in this case. Sure, if you average it out over all the litigation, it's still a good hourly rate, but if you're uncomfortable with that, work out a different deal with a different firm. Don't bitch about it afterward.
What about laptops? You'd have to remount every time it comes back on the network, and now you're trying to make the Wrong Tool fit the job.
I'm not trying to say that SMB is the right tool for Linux, but it's better than NFS. It would be nice to specify and implement an open protocol for network file sharing.
I suppose NFS would work if you use a central fileserver(s). But say a coworker shares files locally on her machine. It would be nice to open up network neighborhood (or the equivalent), double-click on her computer, and see the shares available. With NFS, you have to know what to mount before getting at the files; with Samba, you can browse through a hierarchical network of computers.
The point is, what else would Linux use? I guess you could use NFS, but if you want a browsable network, samba is better. If there were a high-quality Samba replacement, that'd be one thing, but I haven't seen one.
I think a single Windows box on a Linux network wouldn't do so badly. There is no Linux-specific filesharing protocol (or Unix-specific, for that matter) that is comparable to SMB. There's no IM protocol in wide use that doesn't have a Windows client (that I know of). There is a version of OpenOffice for Windows. The interop problems that were mentioned in the review wouldn't present themselves here.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, sure, but there is a place for government in this tragedy of the commons. Assume for the moment that a) global warming does exist and b) will cause harm to everyone unless c) average mileage of cars driven in the US increases by 15 MPG. Assume further that d) the price of cars increases as mileage does (this is certainly not true across the spectrum, but over a certain threshold it is reasonable).
In this case, it is in noone's best interest to buy a high-mileage car; it is in each person's best interest that everyone else buys one. Here the government can step in by 1) increasing the gas tax, 2) giving tax credits for high mileage cars, 3) fining car companies when the average MPG of the cars that they sell is below a certain threshold. Each of these actions provides incentive to increase the mileage, either by increasing TCO (1) or initial price (3) of inefficient vehicles or decreasing TCO of efficient vehicles (2).
To say that the private market can solve this absent any intervention (when assumptions a-d hold) is ludicrous and free-market fundamentalism at its worst.
Because it impacts ad revenue? If IPs >> visitors, advertisers want to know this and lower the amount their willing to pay. If visitors >> IPs, websites want to raise their advertising rates.
I think that was Captain N. Maybe it was on Saturdays? I remember there was something about Mother Brain, and maybe Kid Icarus too.
You're confusing causation and correlation. The people who download illegally now also probably bought more music than the overall average before Napster was around. The question is, do they buy more than they would if there were no illegal downloading at all?
Anyway, that's beside the point. All of that "well they buy music anyway" is simply rationalization for acting illegally and/or unethically. Saying "I wouldn't have paid for it anyway so they lose nothing" doesn't make it OK -- you're enjoying the benefit of something that costs money but you haven't paid for. It may not be theft per se, but it's pretty nearly morally equivalent.
hey, what a good idea! let's trash a book we've never read!
i heard that wizard of earthsea has a wizard in it that fights dragons! that sounds a lot like the hobbit! tolkien's estate should sue!
it's great that you recommend that parents have their children read earthsea; it's a great book that's perfect for readers from curious pre-teens to fantasy-minded adults. but rowling writes some fine fiction for children, and for you to discount it without reading it is pretty lame.
here's a tip--try not to be so pretentious.
Oh, it was terribly, terribly subtle. It wasn't like the fascist propaganda messages were patently ridiculous, obviously done with tongue in cheek, or campy as all hell.
Subtle. I barely noticed the clever satire of a fascist ideology.
Sorry, the snipe about books wasn't in the grandparent but a different thread. The point stands.
It's not the money from the research that helps the students, although it does allow the professors to stay there (at most research universities, a large part of professorial compensation depends on research money brought in, rather than a guaranteed salary). It's the knowledge gained through research. What many people seem to forget is that what is learned in the classroom was cutting edge research at some point. Knowledge has to be discovered before it can be passed on. The grandparent snipes about professors waiting around to write their next book, but where do you think your textbooks come from?
Universities have been traditionally and should continue to be centers of research; private research advances are much less frequently (not to mention less quickly) disseminated to the rest of the community and eventually back into undergraduate texts.
a. This is in Canada.
b. From the fifth: "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself". This is not a criminal case; it is an academic matter. You hear of very few criminal trials concerning plagiarism in an undergraduate classroom.
Yes, because grading is the only individual attention a student gets. And coursework is the only value of a college education.
People pay tuition because high-quality employers (and graduate schools) prefer candidates who come from prestigious four-year universities. A degree (and high GPA) from such a university indicates:
(1) The student excelled at the coursework. This is the bare minimum, and can be provided by any university; however, most employers prefer the guarantee of rigor and a reasonable breadth and depth that is provided by a prestigious school.
(2) The student was mature enough to do well at the coursework while at the same time living away from home for the first time (in most cases). Again, this can be provided by most four-year schools, but the more prestigious the school, the more of an accomplishment this is presumed to be (with good reason--the culture at, say, MIT, requires a much faster maturation than, say, the local community college; whether that's a good thing is another question, but adaptability is certainly a virtue prized by employers and grad schools).
(3) The student was exposed to and had (the opportunity for) contact with some of the finest minds on the planet, and presumably to their research. This is especially important for graduate school. This is not accomplished primarily in the classroom, but through one-on-one conversations in office hours, small discussion sections or reading groups, and undergraduate research.
As to your second question, India already has hundreds of campuses with extremely competitive admissions standards; a reason that skilled, educated workers are available in India is that a large number of Indians are highly educated, most in India, not the U.S.
If it had gone the other way, the same Republicans that are telling people to shut up about the election would be whining about the result, and the same Democrats that are whining about the result would be telling people to shut up about the election already.
It turns out that Bush did win Florida. But wouldn't it have been nice be sure about that *before* declaring him the winner? Since when is a recount undemocratic? Since when did we trust machines to completely correctly read nondigital data? Have you tried OCR lately? It requires a human check to weed out the mistakes.
Sure, doing hand counts of Democrat-leaning counties is a bit one-sided. Sure, recounts are expensive. But if the result of an election is in doubt (and with a margin that close, it was in doubt), it's worth the cost.
On the same token, those people still claiming that Gore won are in their own little world with little relation to this one.
Google is running this through TopCoder, which started out Java/C++ only and has recently added C# and VB.NET. TopCoder challenges are object-oriented in nature, although in some cases, this is basically a thin veneer over a non-object-oriented problem.
Matt
So? Sounds like a good solution to the problem. In this case, the goal is to get to the end of the maze, not to see the maze.
Many AI and robotics researchers seem to fall into the trap of modelling human cognition rather than designing an intelligent artifact. Both approaches have their place, but it's a shame when someone who's trying to design AI gets blinded by experience as a human being and tries to program an agent to make decisions the same way.
That being said, computer vision is an important field in AI, but vision isn't necessarily the best way to avoid walls.
Matt
I have read her books, and I find her philosophy to have a strange appeal while at the same time appalling the hell out of me. There is more to this world than wealth creation. Moreover, if these lawyers have whined, cried, and preached about the selfishness of others, quote them.
These lawyers do serve a function in society. They are not (all) leeches. Some lawyers are--the ambulance chasers that create lawsuits out of thin air, for example, and the lawyers who will sue McDonald's because their food is fatty. But this case seems to have at least some merit.
Matt
Well, the article says 15,000 people/year would pay $100,000 for a 15-minute trip by 2021. Personally, I'd want more than 15 minutes in space for $100k, but there you go.
That doesn't seem like a bad growth rate for an industry--from 0 to 1.5 billion per year in only 20 years. Of course, the PC industry puts that to shame, but I don't think a whole lot of industries have matched that growth rate.
Matt
Is it so awful that someone should act for their own good? I can only assume that your nickname is sarcastic; Ayn Rand would applaud people who look after their own ass while deriding those who act altruistically.
The whole purpose of class action lawsuits is to allow a large group of people who think they have been wronged in the same way by the same party to band together and share resources to try to get recompense.
Many class action suits do give the lawyers a massive payoff as they work without payment from the clients in order to get a share of the pie if they win. The class in question is free to retain a lawyer and pay their normal fee and get the entire settlement to themselves if they wish and have the means.
Matt
No, he described the economic model that the parent was proposing. Besides which, most payouts aren't nearly this size, and the upfront risk is probably higher than $10,000 and 1000 hrs in this case. Sure, if you average it out over all the litigation, it's still a good hourly rate, but if you're uncomfortable with that, work out a different deal with a different firm. Don't bitch about it afterward.
Matt
mmm, how Fortran-ish. What about variable names like "paintColor" or "prefs"?
Matt
What about laptops? You'd have to remount every time it comes back on the network, and now you're trying to make the Wrong Tool fit the job.
I'm not trying to say that SMB is the right tool for Linux, but it's better than NFS. It would be nice to specify and implement an open protocol for network file sharing.
Matt
I suppose NFS would work if you use a central fileserver(s). But say a coworker shares files locally on her machine. It would be nice to open up network neighborhood (or the equivalent), double-click on her computer, and see the shares available. With NFS, you have to know what to mount before getting at the files; with Samba, you can browse through a hierarchical network of computers.
Matt
The point is, what else would Linux use? I guess you could use NFS, but if you want a browsable network, samba is better. If there were a high-quality Samba replacement, that'd be one thing, but I haven't seen one.
Matt
I think a single Windows box on a Linux network wouldn't do so badly. There is no Linux-specific filesharing protocol (or Unix-specific, for that matter) that is comparable to SMB. There's no IM protocol in wide use that doesn't have a Windows client (that I know of). There is a version of OpenOffice for Windows. The interop problems that were mentioned in the review wouldn't present themselves here.
Matt