First off, not being able to prove or disprove something doesn't mean it's not true or untrue, just that one can't prove it either way. Incompleteness specficially means that there are true statements in the system that can't be proven or derived in the system. It doesn't mean that "not everything has to necessarily be true or untrue."
Secondly, iirc, Gödel showed that sufficiently complex systems have to either be inconsistant or incomplete using a very specific paradox... the equivalent of "this statement is unprovable" (if you prove it's true, you've contradicted yourself. if you can't prove it's true, then it's true, but you're not able to prove it so it's incomplete). The overwhelming majority of mathematics is complete and consistant, and there's no reason to expect it not to be and give up prematurely.
Finally, who's being "hasty"? What exactly are you suggesting? That they give up the search for a proof because there's a tiny chance that it may be unprovable? Why doesn't the entire field of theoretical math just stop right now, then?
i'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but one of our teachers showed us how you can derive "E=mc^2" from one of newton's equations by not throwing away the derivative-of-mass term. Unfortunately, this derivation required an equation from special relativity as well, which was definately not part of newtonian mechanics.
Ack! I just turned in my senior design project yesterday, after spending almost two all-nighters in a row getting everything to work. And guess what it was? A CPU designed from the ground up, implemented on a Xilinx XC4010E FPGA!
Course I did mine completely in schematic entry -- VHDL code is for wimps;)
The problem with primary education is it seems to cater to the almost lowest common denominator -- they set the curriculum at a level where most of the kids learn the material pretty well, a few excel, and a few fail. Like a nice bell curve distribution.
Now what if we tried putting advanced topics like OS operation into grade school? Very few kids would be able to keep up with the material. It would be beyond most of them, and therefore would not be a very efficient use of the kids' time -- the time spent not understanding obscure computer internals could be better spent learning more fundamental general knowledge.
What about those kids who would be able to handle it? That's what accelerated classes, summer camps, home schooling, going to the library and reading on your own, etc are for. But the general education system is going to have to concentrate on a plan of study that works for most kids, covers the essential bits of common and academic knowledge in our society, and has been tried and tested over decades.
You use the example of your 10 year old learning BASIC. I'm sorry to inform you, but BASIC is a tad bit easier than operating system design. Take it from a guy who taught himself BASIC and was writing graphical animated programs all by himself by 3rd grade, but is now putting off the ton of studying he has to do for his Operating Systems final exam tomorrow by posting on Slashdot instead.
(ps: My grade school *did* teach programming by the way, both LOGO and BASIC)
Flash Course? In college? Where do they teach this properiatary junk? Flash is not something to be taught in an academic class that same way you won't teach about PEPSI to a food engineering student.
You seem to have a narrow realization of how broad the college experience can be. Climb out of your engineering hole. It's not CS or Software Engineering students who would take a course like Flash (usually). It's electronic arts and communications students. And flash is certainly a viable medium for art. Usually the medium is taught along with presentation and communication theory that works with it. (just what is the non-proprietary vector animation standard, anyway?)
I do some tests, and find out that yes, Y happens.
This does not mean that X is true! It's a one way conditional.
If, on the other hand, I do a test and find out that Y does NOT happen, then it's pretty certain that X is false, since "if X then Y" implies "if not Y then not X".
Gathering more evidence bolsters a theory in an inductive reasoning sense, but in the framework above, you can only prove for sure that theories are false.
The second you introduce intellectual property laws into the mix, you no longer have a completely free market in any useful sense of the word. IP laws create some of the most artificial and arbitrary situations one could think of in economics.
Course I don't believe in the old maxim that "free market will solve all problems" anyway -- but the point is that if one doesn't even have a free market to begin with, then all cries that we should just leave business alone are moot.
I click that link. It says "you have chosen to download text.txt, would you like to open it or save it" etc.
So I choose "open it" and then it gives me another dialog: "you have chosen to download calc.exe, would you like to run it or save it"
So If this example doesn't exploit a vulnerability in IE, then "Opera is vulnerable too" is a non-sequitur. How can it be vulnerable if IE isn't vulnerable in the first place?
Or maybe the Microsoft apologists could write a little explanation of how to set up a safe testing account on Windows? Oh, that's right you can't, too bad about that.
What the hell?
win2000: Save your executable, make it executable by everyone, then log out and log back in as "guest." The default guest account on win2000 doesn't have access to shite.
winxp: same thing, except you can log in as guest without logging out from your previous account (yeh i know, not that special).
Any copyright holder who wants to put his music up for legal download can do so. What do you think mp3.com is all about? In other words, what the hell are you talking about?
The "point" that the above poster was saying Jurrasic Park missed was the issue of mitochondrial DNA, not holes in the regular DNA being filled in by frog DNA.
Though I'd have to ask -- just how different is mitochondrial DNA across similar species? Don't all mitochondria do approximately the same thing?
Part of the problem of economic philosophical debates (especially on the internet) is that both sides seem to completely ignore the actual arguments that the other side is making, spending all their effort instead shooting down strawmen and repeating their own oversimplified ideals.
Here's an example:
"Part of the socialist straw man is the concept that everybody has no choice whatsoever but to work for giant corporations at unionless wages."
Not only is this an accusation of the above, but it's a strawman itself. I've never heard a "socialist" claim that *nobody* has a choice but to work as a wageslave -- obviously in our system there exist upstarts, people who move up the ranks in their jobs, effective unionization, and other such exceptions. But I think it's certainly true that a large number of people have severely limited occupational choices, due to things outside of their control. It's just not *possible* for everyone to start a successful company.
"You do not have the right to work for a giant corporation at some awesome wage that you feel is "good enough". You have the right to work for them at a mutually negotiated wage, or you can go start your own business, or go work for a smaller company."
What "rights" you have are exactly what your socioeconomic system dictates. Under free market capitalism, yes, you do not have said rights. But someone might argue that you *should* have certain other rights. My point is that saying "you don't have x right" isn't a valid argument when talking about different economic frameworks, since the concept of given rights varies among them -- in fact, it's probably the most significant differentiating factor!
"Heck, if schools are failing at anything, it's that they're failing to teach kids how to start their own business the way they make sure they know how to read and write."
Well unless you want to cater to the "socialist" concept of governments determining what schools teach, you'd better start your own school that teaches basic business administration and economics at the high school level. (which now that i think about it, ain't a bad idea)
Re:Globalism is not the problem: Government is
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 1
"That centralized government decision that attempt to control the economy will fail."
This is certainly true. But likewise we don't know if letting the market run completely free is going to lead to an optimal situation. Some people seem to take "free market is best" as an a priori assumption without much justification.
...with the exception of things like copyright control laws, most of these industry campaign donations that you so despise are going towards implementing the freer trade that you so love.
Re:Globalism is not the problem: Government is
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 1
"Big Business will always fail with no government intervention, eventually. 10 smaller companies in a co-op situation will always do better in the long run if they have the competitive edge and no sanctions to hurt them or subsidies to help the Big Business competition. "
This seems to be a core assertion of your argument, yet you don't justify it at all. It seems to me that money natrually makes more money in any captialist free-trade system, and that this isn't a result of government interaction but simply the natural progression of things -- with large amounts of capital and resources you're more likely to be able to: undercut smaller competitors' prices, develop higher quality products and produce them at mass volume, buy out competitors or technologies.
At this point you may complain that if consumers are getting cheaper, higher quality products, then supply-and-demand worked and there's no problem with that. But that's irrelevant to my specific argument -- which is that big business will not tend to crumble, but to continue to grow.
Why large, powerful corporations that generate products that we rely on and that continue to grow more powerful, and that have no government checks on their power, is a bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader. Of course you may disagree that it's a bad thing, or even possible, but imho no one really know's what's going on in economics and it's all oversimplified bull anyway;)
I thought Jitter was only an artifact of the timing of actual digital signals, and only affects the sound at the D/A conversion. In other words, signals recorded to disk don't have "Jitter" and it really doesn't make and sense to talk about how much Jitter different compression formats produce.... or am i wrong?
Let's suppose all we needed was such spin information from every particle in a person's body in order to transport them. Try figuring out how many megabytes of information that is: we have 2^N possible values, where N is the number of particles. Divide by 2^23 to convert to megabytes. 23 is a lot smaller than N, so we may as well say it's still 2^N. N is really, really big.
You seem to be saying that we need 2^N amount of space to store the spins? No we don't. You said it yourself: there are 2^N possible values that can be stored, and this requires precisely N amount of storage space. Say we have ten particles, that requires ten bits to store the spins, not 2^10 (1024) bits!.
It's still a lot though -- how many particles are in the human body again?;)
I just read that courts have interpreted "which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication" so that it basically applies to any computer on the internet. Crap. Never mind my post then, this is as disturbing as you implied. Hacking microsoft.com and putting "hi! i was here!" might be terrorism =/
See http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/15_18/wor kplace/14995-1.html for a specific case where they used this interpretation. Basically, you could send email out of state from a computer, so it was a "protected computer"
The only one that concerns me very much here is 5A - it seems like high-paid corporate lawyers could easy "prove" that for example, if 1337D00D@scriptkiddy.com maliciously hacks into www.microsoft.com and puts a link to his website on the index page, that he's obtained at least $5000 worth of advertisement...
Come to think of it, I'm a little leery of the "or exceeds authorized access" bit in (4) - if one "accesses" a computer to purchase and legally download some proprietary "protected" piece of music or video, and finds a way to convert it to a nonproprietary format for personal use, has one "exceeded authorized access" and is therefore not merely a DMCA Criminal but a full-fledged DMCA Terrorist? It's a bit of a stretch, but I think a wealthy corporation can buy enough lawyer-approved powerpoint slides "proving" this to a non-technical jury...
If you noticed, sections 4 5A and 7 only apply to "protected computers." From the US Code:
(d)(e)(2) the term ''protected computer'' means a computer -
(A) exclusively for the use of a financial institution or the
United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not
exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial
institution or the United States Government and the conduct
constituting the offense affects that use by or for the
financial institution or the Government; or
(B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or
communication;
So only attacks against state and financial institutions, and computers used for interstate or foreign commerce and communication can be deemed terrorism. There are further definitions in that section if you're curious. Hacking www.microsoft.com or downloading pirated video won't count as terrorism. Slashdot folk have to stop being so knee-jerk about all this.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, not being able to prove or disprove something doesn't mean it's not true or untrue, just that one can't prove it either way. Incompleteness specficially means that there are true statements in the system that can't be proven or derived in the system. It doesn't mean that "not everything has to necessarily be true or untrue."
... the equivalent of "this statement is unprovable" (if you prove it's true, you've contradicted yourself. if you can't prove it's true, then it's true, but you're not able to prove it so it's incomplete). The overwhelming majority of mathematics is complete and consistant, and there's no reason to expect it not to be and give up prematurely.
Secondly, iirc, Gödel showed that sufficiently complex systems have to either be inconsistant or incomplete using a very specific paradox
Finally, who's being "hasty"? What exactly are you suggesting? That they give up the search for a proof because there's a tiny chance that it may be unprovable? Why doesn't the entire field of theoretical math just stop right now, then?
i'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but one of our teachers showed us how you can derive "E=mc^2" from one of newton's equations by not throwing away the derivative-of-mass term. Unfortunately, this derivation required an equation from special relativity as well, which was definately not part of newtonian mechanics.
Ack! I just turned in my senior design project yesterday, after spending almost two all-nighters in a row getting everything to work. And guess what it was? A CPU designed from the ground up, implemented on a Xilinx XC4010E FPGA!
;)
Course I did mine completely in schematic entry -- VHDL code is for wimps
The problem with primary education is it seems to cater to the almost lowest common denominator -- they set the curriculum at a level where most of the kids learn the material pretty well, a few excel, and a few fail. Like a nice bell curve distribution.
Now what if we tried putting advanced topics like OS operation into grade school? Very few kids would be able to keep up with the material. It would be beyond most of them, and therefore would not be a very efficient use of the kids' time -- the time spent not understanding obscure computer internals could be better spent learning more fundamental general knowledge.
What about those kids who would be able to handle it? That's what accelerated classes, summer camps, home schooling, going to the library and reading on your own, etc are for. But the general education system is going to have to concentrate on a plan of study that works for most kids, covers the essential bits of common and academic knowledge in our society, and has been tried and tested over decades.
You use the example of your 10 year old learning BASIC. I'm sorry to inform you, but BASIC is a tad bit easier than operating system design. Take it from a guy who taught himself BASIC and was writing graphical animated programs all by himself by 3rd grade, but is now putting off the ton of studying he has to do for his Operating Systems final exam tomorrow by posting on Slashdot instead.
(ps: My grade school *did* teach programming by the way, both LOGO and BASIC)
Flash Course? In college? Where do they teach this properiatary junk? Flash is not something to be taught in an academic class that same way you won't teach about PEPSI to a food engineering student.
You seem to have a narrow realization of how broad the college experience can be. Climb out of your engineering hole. It's not CS or Software Engineering students who would take a course like Flash (usually). It's electronic arts and communications students. And flash is certainly a viable medium for art. Usually the medium is taught along with presentation and communication theory that works with it. (just what is the non-proprietary vector animation standard, anyway?)
"without question, without argument, without qualification"
but with the chance to appeal.
That only proves that a sufficiently complex system is either inconsistant or incomplete. It doesn't prove mathematical proofs themselves impossible.
"Remember, all our products at Smokey Hash's Get-High Stoner Shop are for tobacco and cold fusion developmental use only!"
My theory X predicts that Y will happen.
In other words: if X is true then Y will happen.
I do some tests, and find out that yes, Y happens.
This does not mean that X is true! It's a one way conditional.
If, on the other hand, I do a test and find out that Y does NOT happen, then it's pretty certain that X is false, since "if X then Y" implies "if not Y then not X".
Gathering more evidence bolsters a theory in an inductive reasoning sense, but in the framework above, you can only prove for sure that theories are false.
our free market system
The second you introduce intellectual property laws into the mix, you no longer have a completely free market in any useful sense of the word. IP laws create some of the most artificial and arbitrary situations one could think of in economics.
Course I don't believe in the old maxim that "free market will solve all problems" anyway -- but the point is that if one doesn't even have a free market to begin with, then all cries that we should just leave business alone are moot.
Thought I'd inform you as well :)
IE 5.50.4522.1800 with SP1 and all the critical updates.
Just tries to open it in winzip.
I click that link. It says "you have chosen to download text.txt, would you like to open it or save it" etc.
So I choose "open it" and then it gives me another dialog: "you have chosen to download calc.exe, would you like to run it or save it"
So If this example doesn't exploit a vulnerability in IE, then "Opera is vulnerable too" is a non-sequitur. How can it be vulnerable if IE isn't vulnerable in the first place?
oh silly me, almost forgot about "Run As."
Or maybe the Microsoft apologists could write a little explanation of how to set up a safe testing account on Windows? Oh, that's right you can't, too bad about that.
What the hell?
win2000: Save your executable, make it executable by everyone, then log out and log back in as "guest." The default guest account on win2000 doesn't have access to shite.
winxp: same thing, except you can log in as guest without logging out from your previous account (yeh i know, not that special).
Any copyright holder who wants to put his music up for legal download can do so. What do you think mp3.com is all about? In other words, what the hell are you talking about?
The "point" that the above poster was saying Jurrasic Park missed was the issue of mitochondrial DNA, not holes in the regular DNA being filled in by frog DNA.
Though I'd have to ask -- just how different is mitochondrial DNA across similar species? Don't all mitochondria do approximately the same thing?
Part of the problem of economic philosophical debates (especially on the internet) is that both sides seem to completely ignore the actual arguments that the other side is making, spending all their effort instead shooting down strawmen and repeating their own oversimplified ideals.
Here's an example:
"Part of the socialist straw man is the concept that everybody has no choice whatsoever but to work for giant corporations at unionless wages."
Not only is this an accusation of the above, but it's a strawman itself. I've never heard a "socialist" claim that *nobody* has a choice but to work as a wageslave -- obviously in our system there exist upstarts, people who move up the ranks in their jobs, effective unionization, and other such exceptions. But I think it's certainly true that a large number of people have severely limited occupational choices, due to things outside of their control. It's just not *possible* for everyone to start a successful company.
"You do not have the right to work for a giant corporation at some awesome wage that you feel is "good enough". You have the right to work for them at a mutually negotiated wage, or you can go start your own business, or go work for a smaller company."
What "rights" you have are exactly what your socioeconomic system dictates. Under free market capitalism, yes, you do not have said rights. But someone might argue that you *should* have certain other rights. My point is that saying "you don't have x right" isn't a valid argument when talking about different economic frameworks, since the concept of given rights varies among them -- in fact, it's probably the most significant differentiating factor!
"Heck, if schools are failing at anything, it's that they're failing to teach kids how to start their own business the way they make sure they know how to read and write."
Well unless you want to cater to the "socialist" concept of governments determining what schools teach, you'd better start your own school that teaches basic business administration and economics at the high school level. (which now that i think about it, ain't a bad idea)
"That centralized government decision that attempt to control the economy will fail."
This is certainly true. But likewise we don't know if letting the market run completely free is going to lead to an optimal situation. Some people seem to take "free market is best" as an a priori assumption without much justification.
...with the exception of things like copyright control laws, most of these industry campaign donations that you so despise are going towards implementing the freer trade that you so love.
"Big Business will always fail with no government intervention, eventually. 10 smaller companies in a co-op situation will always do better in the long run if they have the competitive edge and no sanctions to hurt them or subsidies to help the Big Business competition. "
;)
This seems to be a core assertion of your argument, yet you don't justify it at all. It seems to me that money natrually makes more money in any captialist free-trade system, and that this isn't a result of government interaction but simply the natural progression of things -- with large amounts of capital and resources you're more likely to be able to: undercut smaller competitors' prices, develop higher quality products and produce them at mass volume, buy out competitors or technologies.
At this point you may complain that if consumers are getting cheaper, higher quality products, then supply-and-demand worked and there's no problem with that. But that's irrelevant to my specific argument -- which is that big business will not tend to crumble, but to continue to grow.
Why large, powerful corporations that generate products that we rely on and that continue to grow more powerful, and that have no government checks on their power, is a bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader. Of course you may disagree that it's a bad thing, or even possible, but imho no one really know's what's going on in economics and it's all oversimplified bull anyway
I thought Jitter was only an artifact of the timing of actual digital signals, and only affects the sound at the D/A conversion. In other words, signals recorded to disk don't have "Jitter" and it really doesn't make and sense to talk about how much Jitter different compression formats produce.... or am i wrong?
You seem to be saying that we need 2^N amount of space to store the spins? No we don't. You said it yourself: there are 2^N possible values that can be stored, and this requires precisely N amount of storage space. Say we have ten particles, that requires ten bits to store the spins, not 2^10 (1024) bits!.
It's still a lot though -- how many particles are in the human body again? ;)
thanks for reading my own reply to my post first.
I just read that courts have interpreted "which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication" so that it basically applies to any computer on the internet. Crap. Never mind my post then, this is as disturbing as you implied. Hacking microsoft.com and putting "hi! i was here!" might be terrorism =/
r kplace/14995-1.html for a specific case where they used this interpretation. Basically, you could send email out of state from a computer, so it was a "protected computer"
See http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/15_18/wo
Come to think of it, I'm a little leery of the "or exceeds authorized access" bit in (4) - if one "accesses" a computer to purchase and legally download some proprietary "protected" piece of music or video, and finds a way to convert it to a nonproprietary format for personal use, has one "exceeded authorized access" and is therefore not merely a DMCA Criminal but a full-fledged DMCA Terrorist? It's a bit of a stretch, but I think a wealthy corporation can buy enough lawyer-approved powerpoint slides "proving" this to a non-technical jury...
If you noticed, sections 4 5A and 7 only apply to "protected computers." From the US Code:
(d)(e)(2) the term ''protected computer'' means a computer -
United States Government, or, in the case of a computer not
exclusively for such use, used by or for a financial
institution or the United States Government and the conduct
constituting the offense affects that use by or for the
financial institution or the Government; or
communication;
So only attacks against state and financial institutions, and computers used for interstate or foreign commerce and communication can be deemed terrorism. There are further definitions in that section if you're curious. Hacking www.microsoft.com or downloading pirated video won't count as terrorism. Slashdot folk have to stop being so knee-jerk about all this.