Have you considered the possibility that children actually don't acquire their values exclusively from their mothers? But rather, acquire them from their interaction with the culture at large? Have you considered the possibility that, just for example, schools are sites of sustainable transmission of values between the children themselves? So that kids end up learning a very large chunk of their values from peers and kids slightly above their grade.
This is the central argument of an excellent book called The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris.
Interestingly, truth was not always a defense against libel. That defense was first used by John Peter Zenger in 1735. (Well, technically, by his lawyer Andrew Hamilton). It worked. No clue how old libel laws actually are.
In one camp, you have the guys that see Computer Science as a branch of Mathematics, and find it unfortunate that "Computer" appears in the name. For them Computational Science would be a much better name.
Unfortunately, the term "computational science" has now been taken by a third camp, which is completely different from the two that you mention. Computational science refers to the application of computers to solve scientific problems, typically by simulating physical phenomena. Computational scientists are what we traditionally think of scientists (e.g. chemists, physicists, climatologists, biologists, etc.) who do their work in computer simulation and use those big, expensive computers. For example, UCSD has a computational science program.
Oh and don't kid yourself - smoking pot all day is not healthy. It's like smoking many cigarettes without a filter at the same time and that ain't good for your lungs.
Interestingly, there's some recent research that suggests that marijuana isn't as dangerous as people previously thought, and certainly less dangerous than smoking.
This is a question, not a recommendation: Does anybody out there using program slicing tools? Or any of the other "program understanding" tools that people doing software engineering research seem to spend a lot of time developing?
None of those tools have ever been demonstrated to be cost-effective means of making software more dependable. It's an article of faith that adding a complex notation and another complex set of tools to the development process makes the product any better.
You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, that also applies to pretty much every other software engineering tool, including ones that are currently being used. There are very few tools and techniques that have been experimentally validated (inspections are a notable exception).
Actually, if you look at the long-term trend, the dot-com era was an anomaly that caused a temporary upswing in CS majors. The number of CS graduates started declining in 1987, which means enrollments started to decline back in 1983.
Hopefully now global warming can take its place next to DDT, killer bees, and acid rain on the list of scientific catastrophies that never materialized.
I thought acid rain was actually a success story. Scientists warned there was a problem, the U.S. government changed regulations about certain types of pollutants produced by factories, and it had the desired effect (I'm no expert here, and I don't have a source handly, hopefully a more knowledgeable Slashdotter has more details).
But you bring up an important point. When experts warn of an impending problem and that society should take action, and society takes action, and the problem doesn't occur, was it a "scare", or was the preventative action successful? (e.g. Was Y2K a problem that was averted by the numerous fixes, or was it a scare? What about swine flu precautions in the 70's(?), or bird flu today?
To be fair, almost every CS PhD student receives funding to do their research, typically through an advisor's research grants, occasionally by funding from an employer. It's not much, but it pays the tuition and some living expenses. On the other hand, medical students pretty much always have to pay their own way, which means they will be saddled with a lot more debt when they complete their studies.
I would say that's even better than what you describe. Some people accuse scientists of "groupthink", that they don't publish papers that contradicts the majority point of view. But it's every scientist's dream to make some discovery that contradicts the current majority view of the field! That's what makes you famous.
Got a link or bill number or something explicitly stating the president signed a bill before it was finalized by the House and Senate?
That isn't quite what the OP said, which was: "Just this week, Bush signed into law a bill that was not Constitutional, because it had not been agreed in the same terms by both Senate and House of Representatives."
And that is exactly what happened. It was an accident, there was a minor change in the bill due to a clerical error, so the House and Senate ended up voting on slightly different bills. But given that the nature of this particular bill, and the fact that it just barely squeaked by, the Republicans do not want it to go back to the House for another vote and risk it not passing.
Imagine a programming language that is really just a mix of every other programming language available and you would have a close approximation of English.
The main mistake I think people are making is the idea of having each thread do something different, e.g. one thread for graphics and one for AI. To harness a large number of cores equally, we need libaries which divide up big repetitive tasks (say, collision detection or matrix multiplication) into a large number of chunks.
In the jargon, you're talking about the difference between task parallelism and data parallelism.
IEEE Software is my favorite software development magazine. It tends to straddle the academic and professional worlds in a way that most other publications don't. To give you a sense of how good it is, it was once edited by the author of Code Complete, and it features a column by the guys who wrote "The Pragmatic Programmer".
Stalin believed that Darwinian evolution was just a bouguoise concept. He believed in Lamarckian evolution and directed his agricultural ministry to ignore studies that supported Darwinain evolution. Their agricultural industry suffered and people went hungry in the process.
Ah yes, Lysenkoism. Science and ideology do not mix well. Although, to be fair to Stalin, the people went hungry more because of forced collectivization than because of Lysenko, although the pseudo-science didn't help matters any. Ideology shouldn't trump science, social or agricultural.
The "conservatives" who typically are more "creationist" and who believe that "if it ain't in the constitution, we shouldn't try and add it."
I'm a little puzzled by your use of the term creationist in this context. Do you mean originalist? The court doesn't see many creationism-vs-evolution style cases these days.
for example, there is no real reason why IBM shouldn't be able to build a system roughly a thousand times as fast as the BG/W system if someone paid the necessary 40 billion dollars
Slashdot Mirror
Have you considered the possibility that children actually don't acquire their values exclusively from their mothers? But rather, acquire them from their interaction with the culture at large? Have you considered the possibility that, just for example, schools are sites of sustainable transmission of values between the children themselves? So that kids end up learning a very large chunk of their values from peers and kids slightly above their grade.
This is the central argument of an excellent book called The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris.
Who're the beetles?
Obligatory YouTube video
Truth is an absolute defense to libel.
Interestingly, truth was not always a defense against libel. That defense was first used by John Peter Zenger in 1735. (Well, technically, by his lawyer Andrew Hamilton). It worked. No clue how old libel laws actually are.
There was a Newsweek article on this a few weeks ago that I would recommend. I found out pretty skeptical on the ultimate usefulness of doin this.
With multi-core processors becoming more and more prevalent, R's developers should remedy this as soon as possible.
Ask and ye shall receive
Lisp is the oldest, still in use, high level programming that exists today
Technically, Fortran (1954) has that honor over Lisp (1958). Source: O'Reilly.
There's someone's law that says organizations are constrained to make machines that emulate or otherwise reflect the structure of the organization.
It's called Conway's Law.
In one camp, you have the guys that see Computer Science as a branch of Mathematics, and find it unfortunate that "Computer" appears in the name. For them Computational Science would be a much better name.
Unfortunately, the term "computational science" has now been taken by a third camp, which is completely different from the two that you mention. Computational science refers to the application of computers to solve scientific problems, typically by simulating physical phenomena. Computational scientists are what we traditionally think of scientists (e.g. chemists, physicists, climatologists, biologists, etc.) who do their work in computer simulation and use those big, expensive computers. For example, UCSD has a computational science program.
Oh and don't kid yourself - smoking pot all day is not healthy. It's like smoking many cigarettes without a filter at the same time and that ain't good for your lungs.
Interestingly, there's some recent research that suggests that marijuana isn't as dangerous as people previously thought, and certainly less dangerous than smoking.
This is a question, not a recommendation: Does anybody out there using program slicing tools? Or any of the other "program understanding" tools that people doing software engineering research seem to spend a lot of time developing?
You're absolutely right. Unfortunately, that also applies to pretty much every other software engineering tool, including ones that are currently being used. There are very few tools and techniques that have been experimentally validated (inspections are a notable exception).
Actually, if you look at the long-term trend, the dot-com era was an anomaly that caused a temporary upswing in CS majors. The number of CS graduates started declining in 1987, which means enrollments started to decline back in 1983.
Hopefully now global warming can take its place next to DDT, killer bees, and acid rain on the list of scientific catastrophies that never materialized.
I thought acid rain was actually a success story. Scientists warned there was a problem, the U.S. government changed regulations about certain types of pollutants produced by factories, and it had the desired effect (I'm no expert here, and I don't have a source handly, hopefully a more knowledgeable Slashdotter has more details).
But you bring up an important point. When experts warn of an impending problem and that society should take action, and society takes action, and the problem doesn't occur, was it a "scare", or was the preventative action successful? (e.g. Was Y2K a problem that was averted by the numerous fixes, or was it a scare? What about swine flu precautions in the 70's(?), or bird flu today?
It's really impossible to know...
To be fair, almost every CS PhD student receives funding to do their research, typically through an advisor's research grants, occasionally by funding from an employer. It's not much, but it pays the tuition and some living expenses. On the other hand, medical students pretty much always have to pay their own way, which means they will be saddled with a lot more debt when they complete their studies.
I would say that's even better than what you describe. Some people accuse scientists of "groupthink", that they don't publish papers that contradicts the majority point of view. But it's every scientist's dream to make some discovery that contradicts the current majority view of the field! That's what makes you famous.
Got a link or bill number or something explicitly stating the president signed a bill before it was finalized by the House and Senate?
That isn't quite what the OP said, which was: "Just this week, Bush signed into law a bill that was not Constitutional, because it had not been agreed in the same terms by both Senate and House of Representatives."
And that is exactly what happened. It was an accident, there was a minor change in the bill due to a clerical error, so the House and Senate ended up voting on slightly different bills. But given that the nature of this particular bill, and the fact that it just barely squeaked by, the Republicans do not want it to go back to the House for another vote and risk it not passing.
Imagine a programming language that is really just a mix of every other programming language available and you would have a close approximation of English.
Perl?
The main mistake I think people are making is the idea of having each thread do something different, e.g. one thread for graphics and one for AI. To harness a large number of cores equally, we need libaries which divide up big repetitive tasks (say, collision detection or matrix multiplication) into a large number of chunks.
In the jargon, you're talking about the difference between task parallelism and data parallelism.
Aquamacs is an OS X port of Emacs that tries to conform to the OS X guidelines as closely as possible.
Steve Scott wasn't gone very long. He returned to Cray as CTO a few months ago (Don't have a link, but it was reported in Oct. 7 issue of HPCWire).
IEEE Software is my favorite software development magazine. It tends to straddle the academic and professional worlds in a way that most other publications don't. To give you a sense of how good it is, it was once edited by the author of Code Complete, and it features a column by the guys who wrote "The Pragmatic Programmer".
Stalin believed that Darwinian evolution was just a bouguoise concept. He believed in Lamarckian evolution and directed his agricultural ministry to ignore studies that supported Darwinain evolution. Their agricultural industry suffered and people went hungry in the process.
Ah yes, Lysenkoism. Science and ideology do not mix well. Although, to be fair to Stalin, the people went hungry more because of forced collectivization than because of Lysenko, although the pseudo-science didn't help matters any. Ideology shouldn't trump science, social or agricultural.
Second place gets 8 first row Coldplay tickets with back-stage passes.
I'm a little puzzled by your use of the term creationist in this context. Do you mean originalist? The court doesn't see many creationism-vs-evolution style cases these days.
for example, there is no real reason why IBM shouldn't be able to build a system roughly a thousand times as fast as the BG/W system if someone paid the necessary 40 billion dollars
For example, somebody like DARPA?