I think this proves that the guys at the NSA have cooler jobs than the guys at Google. (This is relevent to Signal Intelligence because the theoretical question is the same -- how do you look at apparent noise and determine if there is a signal in it?)
BS: To learn to think. MS: To think about what others have thought. PhD: To boldly think where none have thought before.
Anyone who learned to think getting their BS... didn't.
This is more like it
BS: Think what you're told. MS: Think what you're told. PhD: Ok, you've been here 10 years, now what do you think?
Kudos to those who can bring original thoughts out of THAT process. If you want originality, this pattern is more typical:
Highschool: BS BS: BS drop out learn to think (hopefully)think about what others have thought boldly think where none have thought before. (and make sure you're right, because the originality of your thoughts will shock people, and they'll believe you, and teach it alongside the rest of the BS)
NEED to have your fun then through early 20's. Get laid as much as possible...you're peaking dude!! Fuck everything while it is still tight enough to *squeek*. Party some too...while you're young enough that it doesn't hurt....don't forget, you're young and you won't be forever...ENJOY it too.
Yeah, dude... Live like an animal. What is "human" anyway? Turn your body into a sewer. Rot out your rationality. Who needs a mind, when you have a body! It's not like life forms you into anything -- you can just push the "reset" button and embrace the life of the mind when the body is too old to enjoy, right? It's not like you'll end up sitting around wishing that you could do more drugs and fanticizing about sex with young girls, and finding all the life sucked out of your existence. It's not like there are any great objectives like Love or Wisdom, which are incompatible with the life of the animal, and which are infinitely more enjoyable than any animal enjoyment. I mean, unless the continuous stream of people who have been saying otherwise since before history are right, but what's the chance of that? The worst that will happen is that you will make yourself worthless, and your life pointless.
If taxing the poor and middle class doesn't tckle your fancy then you're saying tax the rich. There's no way around it. But, if only the rich can afford to drive then there's damn little pollution to worry about, is there?
Sure, but then if polution is all you're worried about, why mess with taxes at all? Just outlaw cars. That will have the added effect of getting rid of that other thing that annoys California so much -- capitalism. With nothing to eat, all the bolemics will be cured; with no money all the rappers will have something more compelling to rap about than how rich they are; and there will be no more Hollywood movies or TV shows! EVERYBODY WINS! The only potential downside is that with no more movie stars, no one will know who to vote for. Still, I think it's worth a ballot initiative.
Er, no. Just as you don't have to prove that someone deliberately ran into you with their car to collect damages from them.
Right, but you DO have to prove ACTUAL damage. And you have to show that the defendant's actions were the cause of your damage. Which is of course impossible, because, even assuming that the state of California even owns the beaches that it built up due to erosion, the half centimeter of ocean level rise experienced since the invention of the auto, is responsible for such an increadibly small amount of the beach erosion, and the CO2 output of those particular autos, if responsible for ANY, is responsible for such an increadibly small amount of that half centimeter......ya know that fence we're going to build on the Mexican border... any chance we can just scoot that puppy so it goes up around this side of California? Better yet, can we fake some evidence that California is harboring terrorists?
What should really happen, is that North Carolina should sue California for raising global ocean levels by building up their beaches! Seriously, though, when you consider that New York (and who knows who else around the world) dumps barge-fulls of garbage into the ocean every day, I wonder if that could cause a measurable ocean-level effect over time.
when I became a man I realized organized religion has killed more people than every other reason combined, and is inherrently evil.
Ah, the penetrating knowledge of the liberally-educated. You mean other than in war??? Maybe the numbers only add up right when you're binge-drinking. Please help me out with what I'm missing... Here are the significant non-war killings that come to my mind, purposely excluding anything older than 1,000 years, as the data for such becomes very sketchy.
Showers, Laundry, Soap (and possibly even SOAP) -- ALL unnecessary. In my new development model, which this article has inspired me to formalize and publish (called Double-Super-Extreme Programming), I will include schematics for how to build a forced-air ozone machine out of an old vacuum cleaner, a high-voltage neon sign transformer, a pyrex guitar slide, and a small amount of aluminum screening. (A computer interface for controlling the duty-cycle programmatically is left as an exercise for the reader.) When the output tube is directed up a pant-leg, all foul-smelling bacteria, fungus, and algae cells that may chance to accumulate on the body or clothes are killed instantly by the ozone. Since air-borne ozone only penetrates liquid with difficulty, the ambient temperature is recommended to be kept below 65F to prevent sweating. If using ozone to eliminate mouth-borne bacteria, one should seal the glottis to prevent entry of ozone into the lungs. (Asthmatics are encouraged to avoid this method altogether)
As explained in my forthcoming manifesto on "Double-Super-Extreme Programming", every time you hear or use a buzzword, a part of your brain dies forever. Under my theory, you also realease frequently to the client, except that you release "deliverables" instead of "stories". Aside from making sense, it looks a lot more justifiable on an invoice. As far as "pair programming", DSXP calls it "cluster coding", and outlaws it under penalty of death. Instead you just program the entire system in the same "programming language", and hire programmers who are all proficient in that language. The result is that, in theory, any programmer can sit down and work on any part of the system. To further that end, technical documentation is added. But hey, if "XP" increases the value you deliver to the customer, more power to you!
A lot of the bad code you see around stems from 'lone ranger' coders, not realizing the fact that, programming like most other disciplines, is collaborate work.
Sure, there's is collaboration involved in pretty much anything you can get paid for. However, bad code simply comes from bad coders. If take a bad coder, pair him with another coder, and find that the quality of code increases, then try getting rid of him altogether, so that the good coder isn't bothered. The quality will increase even more! Seriously, there may be certain beginners who can produce better code in pairs than individually, but whether it came from a pair, trio, or quartet, you should assume that such a product is not ready for production until someone who knows what he's doing looks at it.
Except for kitchen table projects most code is written with other people. Other programmers, designers, project managers, users ( damned be the last two) , and other stakeholders. XP addresses a lot of the problems you have when collaborating with these and so it can help you to get more time to code.
Oh good, so now the project managers, users, and stakeholders are going to sit behind me while I code? Terrific! Personally, I use what I call Super-Extreme-Programming. That's where the program managers, users, and stakeholders all get my email address, but none of them get my phone number or are welcome in my physical location. (Requirements analysis is done at their location, of course.) It takes a little discipline on their part, but the end-product makes it all worth it.
Sorry to ask, but can someone give an example of a field of "real engineering" which uses formal methods to ensure correctness, and of the formal methods used?
I would also be interested in what that is, if anyone knows. As far as I know, such "real engineering" means that the design of the bridge is put into the computer, and the computer simulates the forces of gravity, wind, and whatnot, and monitors the simulated stresses on the materials, comparing those against established safe parameters for those materials. Of course, automated testing is done on software too, but the search-space for the possible user interactions with a big software system is vastly larger than the possible stresses on a bridge, so such testing is not very conclusive.
Where have you been the last 20 years? The stereotypical programmer, hacking his piece of kernel over night is very endangered species, and rightly so. Like any kind of engineering, software engineering needs as much face to face collaboration as possible.
Right, come on! Everyone knows that all programmers are extroverts! Programming should be a social event! Besides, the dramatic spike in programmer suicides will only drive up the average salary. If you don't think that the XP model works, just look back at the great collaberative works by the master artists of the renaissance... like, um... well there IS this collaberative mural in the subway, and it looks... well, WAY better than bare cinder block!
However, the word "counterfeit" was not defined in an age with computers and software that could be EXACTLY copied...A "counterfeit" copy of Windows XP has the same content and MD5 hash as a "real" one.
Yes, and a forged $100 bill using plates, paper stock and ink stolen from the US Treasury contains the exact same content as a genuine $100 bill. So what? The authorized "copies" are still genuine and the unauthorized copies are still not.
While I don't doubt the writer's observation that "continuous scans for open mail systems are ongoing in most IP blocks," his claim that this is the method that generates the bulk of spam is wrong. As someone who gets about 200 spams a day over three domains, and successfully blocks over 99% of it without using any techniques that can create false positives, I can tell you that well over 90% of spam comes from "servers" on IP addresses allocated for dial-up, dsl, cable or the like. In other words, either spammers running their own server software on an ISP account, or, more likely, botnets.
1) With the whole "net neutrality" issue having emerged, the survival of every large (and small) Internet-base corporations is in the hands of the US Congress. 2) The US Congress is in the hands of witless cowards. 3) Those witless cowards are in the hands of the professional lobbyists. 4) The most effective tool of professional lobbyists, is to either incite the masses to make a lot of noise, or at least cause the appearance that the masses are making a lot of noise, to scare the witess cowards into action.
Of course, it's not just DCI; the Democratic lobbyists have been doing this for years by hiring people to attend protests, etc. So the whole system is rediculous, but if Google wants to survive they have to play it. As for whether the whole "astroturfing" thing is evil... I guess the question is, is it evil to advertise pseudonomynously? I would say, of course not. There are a lot of good and valid reasons to publish a persuasive opinion under a pseudonym. For example, if you're Microsoft or Exxon, maybe you want people to consider the merits of your argument, and not prejudge it based on their preconception that you (Microsoft or Exxon) are intrinsically wrong and evil.
Right... if only we hadn't kept military stationed in Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda wouldn't have attacked us! Well maybe if we pulled out of Saudi Arabia, and also Germany and Japan, which we are bound by law to protect, maybe then? Well, maybe if we then denounced Israel and called for their destruction? Ok, well if we nuked Isreal, and passed a law requiring universal conversion of Americans to Islam. Ok, then we'd be in even more trouble... make that universal conversion to SUNNI Islam. I think that should do it. Of course then Iran would nuke us and we'd all be dead, so we wouldn't have to worry about it. Try not to be a complete appeasing idiot.
Think you can help? Go to the DARPA web site and look at their Requests For Proposals. If you truely have the skills (and don't mind piles of paperwork), they have grant money for you.
FYI, the programs that they have major interest in at the present include self-healing networks, in-the-field real-time portable translation devices, and such. One particularly freaky program they're interested in involves implanting electronic devices in flying insects to control them.
In the 1860s, the Democrats were the conservatives and the Republicans were the "liberals."
How do you figure? Then as now, Democrats viewed Republicans as religious nuts who should mind their own business and let other people do as they please, and Republicans thought they had a God-given duty to protect the fundamental rights of others. Democrats then claimed that the Constitution said that blacks didn't count as people; now they say that the Constitution says that babies still in the birth canal don't count as people. I don't know which one you want to call "conservative" or "liberal" but it seems it should be consistent. By today's usage, it's true that Republicans back then weren't "conservatives" they were "neo-conservatives". Also, Teddy Roosevelt was the opposite of "progressive" (i.e. socialist). If he had been a progressive, he wouldn't have broken up monopolies, he would have taken government control of them. What he did was to fight for free markets, not redistribute of wealth.
It probably depends on what criteria they use to deny someone. I'm pretty sure a night club that posted a "Whites Only" sign -- or never let in anyone of color -- would find itself in court and losing. But I'm not an ADA or civil rights lawyer, so what do I know?
Yep, nowadays (since the Civil Rights movement [although the Republicans set the precedent with the 15th amendment]), the law enumerates which criteria are illegal bases for discrimination. So as a result, you now need a lobby in Washington if you want whatever is distictive about you to be protected from discrimination. For example, you can end up in court for providing a shopping atmosphere that disenfranchises... Polynesians...whereas, you can hang up a sign that says "no dogs or nerds allowed" and you'd be fully within your rights. Okay, who wants to start up a nerd lobby???
Should people have a RIGHT to minimum wage or decent working conditions? Workers can always choose to work for a different company, or not work at all.
Of course not. The idea that people should have a right to a wage greater than the value of their labour is one the most absurd theories out there.
Just look at the Interstate Commerce clause in the Constitution.
Telling people how to build websites, or ramps for entrances, goes well beyond "regulating interstate commerce" and well into the "powers not enumerated" which are reserved for the states and the people.
like when your SO tells you, "overall I think you're a really great guy, but here, I've compiled a list of your 611 significant defects and 71 major character flaws."
The stack of $500's in monopoly has no very little intrinsic value based on labor... HOWEVER, these items in online games have MASSIVE intrinisic value based on labor....Those 400 hours of my life have massive value, both to me, and in the real world, where it could easily translate to $5000 or more dollars.
No. PLEASE, can we dispense with two fundamental falacies?
1) Real money is not based upon labor, but value itself. If person A were to spend 10 straight years welding together a mamoth piece of artwork that completely sucked, and everyone acknowldged that it sucked, it would not have value, despite the labor, and he would not get money for it. (Ignoring the NEA for sake of argument). If person B spent 3 hours and made something beautiful, that lots of people wanted, it would have value, and he would get a lot money for it, despite the little labor that it required. Or ask any songwriter if the artistic or monitary value of a given song is in any way related to the amount of time and effort required to write it. For most artists, the relationship tends to be inverse.
2) PLAYING GAMES IS NOT LABOR. Once again, PLAYING GAMES IS NOT LABOR. If you spent 400 hours of your life playing a game, not because it was a really fun game to play, but because you wanted to "earn" a bucketful of imaginary gold, which the game company would allow you to pretend you owned, even though they would still own it (the IMAGINARY gold), then it might just be time to reevaluate how you "invest" your time. The reason that you are not awarded with anything of actual value for your in-game "labor" is that such "labor" does not benefit anyone else sufficiently for them to be willing to exchange anything of value for it.
Slashdot Mirror
That must suck for Louisiana.
I think this proves that the guys at the NSA have cooler jobs than the guys at Google. (This is relevent to Signal Intelligence because the theoretical question is the same -- how do you look at apparent noise and determine if there is a signal in it?)
Spoken like one who hasn't left adolescence.
Anyone who learned to think getting their BS... didn't.
This is more like it
Kudos to those who can bring original thoughts out of THAT process.
If you want originality, this pattern is more typical:
Yeah, dude... Live like an animal. What is "human" anyway? Turn your body into a sewer. Rot out your rationality. Who needs a mind, when you have a body! It's not like life forms you into anything -- you can just push the "reset" button and embrace the life of the mind when the body is too old to enjoy, right? It's not like you'll end up sitting around wishing that you could do more drugs and fanticizing about sex with young girls, and finding all the life sucked out of your existence. It's not like there are any great objectives like Love or Wisdom, which are incompatible with the life of the animal, and which are infinitely more enjoyable than any animal enjoyment. I mean, unless the continuous stream of people who have been saying otherwise since before history are right, but what's the chance of that? The worst that will happen is that you will make yourself worthless, and your life pointless.
Sure, but then if polution is all you're worried about, why mess with taxes at all? Just outlaw cars. That will have the added effect of getting rid of that other thing that annoys California so much -- capitalism. With nothing to eat, all the bolemics will be cured; with no money all the rappers will have something more compelling to rap about than how rich they are; and there will be no more Hollywood movies or TV shows! EVERYBODY WINS! The only potential downside is that with no more movie stars, no one will know who to vote for. Still, I think it's worth a ballot initiative.
Right, but you DO have to prove ACTUAL damage. And you have to show that the defendant's actions were the cause of your damage. Which is of course impossible, because, even assuming that the state of California even owns the beaches that it built up due to erosion, the half centimeter of ocean level rise experienced since the invention of the auto, is responsible for such an increadibly small amount of the beach erosion, and the CO2 output of those particular autos, if responsible for ANY, is responsible for such an increadibly small amount of that half centimeter...
What should really happen, is that North Carolina should sue California for raising global ocean levels by building up their beaches! Seriously, though, when you consider that New York (and who knows who else around the world) dumps barge-fulls of garbage into the ocean every day, I wonder if that could cause a measurable ocean-level effect over time.
Ah, the penetrating knowledge of the liberally-educated. You mean other than in war??? Maybe the numbers only add up right when you're binge-drinking. Please help me out with what I'm missing... Here are the significant non-war killings that come to my mind, purposely excluding anything older than 1,000 years, as the data for such becomes very sketchy.
Taliban (organized religion) 5,000
Spanish Inquisition (organized religion) 30,000
Witch Burning (hold-over of [unorganized] western-european paganism) 30,000
Frech Reign of Terror (anti-religion, class hatred, socialism) 30,000
Bath Party (power-consolidation, racism, nationalism) 300,000
Hutu (power-consolidation, racism, nationalism) 1,000,000
Khmer Rouge (communism [anti-religion, anti-humanity]) 1,000,000
Ottomans (racism, nationalism, secular anti-christianity) 1,500,000
Nazis (nationalism, socialism, science [eugenics]) 20,000,000
Stalist Russia (communism [anti-religion, anti-humanity]) 40,000,000
Maoist China (communism [anti-religion, anti-humanity]) 60,000,000
Showers, Laundry, Soap (and possibly even SOAP) -- ALL unnecessary. In my new development model, which this article has inspired me to formalize and publish (called Double-Super-Extreme Programming), I will include schematics for how to build a forced-air ozone machine out of an old vacuum cleaner, a high-voltage neon sign transformer, a pyrex guitar slide, and a small amount of aluminum screening. (A computer interface for controlling the duty-cycle programmatically is left as an exercise for the reader.) When the output tube is directed up a pant-leg, all foul-smelling bacteria, fungus, and algae cells that may chance to accumulate on the body or clothes are killed instantly by the ozone. Since air-borne ozone only penetrates liquid with difficulty, the ambient temperature is recommended to be kept below 65F to prevent sweating. If using ozone to eliminate mouth-borne bacteria, one should seal the glottis to prevent entry of ozone into the lungs. (Asthmatics are encouraged to avoid this method altogether)
As explained in my forthcoming manifesto on "Double-Super-Extreme Programming", every time you hear or use a buzzword, a part of your brain dies forever. Under my theory, you also realease frequently to the client, except that you release "deliverables" instead of "stories". Aside from making sense, it looks a lot more justifiable on an invoice. As far as "pair programming", DSXP calls it "cluster coding", and outlaws it under penalty of death. Instead you just program the entire system in the same "programming language", and hire programmers who are all proficient in that language. The result is that, in theory, any programmer can sit down and work on any part of the system. To further that end, technical documentation is added. But hey, if "XP" increases the value you deliver to the customer, more power to you!
While I don't doubt the writer's observation that "continuous scans for open mail systems are ongoing in most IP blocks," his claim that this is the method that generates the bulk of spam is wrong. As someone who gets about 200 spams a day over three domains, and successfully blocks over 99% of it without using any techniques that can create false positives, I can tell you that well over 90% of spam comes from "servers" on IP addresses allocated for dial-up, dsl, cable or the like. In other words, either spammers running their own server software on an ISP account, or, more likely, botnets.
1) With the whole "net neutrality" issue having emerged, the survival of every large (and small) Internet-base corporations is in the hands of the US Congress.
2) The US Congress is in the hands of witless cowards.
3) Those witless cowards are in the hands of the professional lobbyists.
4) The most effective tool of professional lobbyists, is to either incite the masses to make a lot of noise, or at least cause the appearance that the masses are making a lot of noise, to scare the witess cowards into action.
Of course, it's not just DCI; the Democratic lobbyists have been doing this for years by hiring people to attend protests, etc. So the whole system is rediculous, but if Google wants to survive they have to play it. As for whether the whole "astroturfing" thing is evil... I guess the question is, is it evil to advertise pseudonomynously? I would say, of course not. There are a lot of good and valid reasons to publish a persuasive opinion under a pseudonym. For example, if you're Microsoft or Exxon, maybe you want people to consider the merits of your argument, and not prejudge it based on their preconception that you (Microsoft or Exxon) are intrinsically wrong and evil.
Right... if only we hadn't kept military stationed in Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda wouldn't have attacked us! Well maybe if we pulled out of Saudi Arabia, and also Germany and Japan, which we are bound by law to protect, maybe then? Well, maybe if we then denounced Israel and called for their destruction? Ok, well if we nuked Isreal, and passed a law requiring universal conversion of Americans to Islam. Ok, then we'd be in even more trouble... make that universal conversion to SUNNI Islam. I think that should do it. Of course then Iran would nuke us and we'd all be dead, so we wouldn't have to worry about it. Try not to be a complete appeasing idiot.
Think you can help? Go to the DARPA web site and look at their Requests For Proposals. If you truely have the skills (and don't mind piles of paperwork), they have grant money for you.
FYI, the programs that they have major interest in at the present include self-healing networks, in-the-field real-time portable translation devices, and such. One particularly freaky program they're interested in involves implanting electronic devices in flying insects to control them.
How do you figure? Then as now, Democrats viewed Republicans as religious nuts who should mind their own business and let other people do as they please, and Republicans thought they had a God-given duty to protect the fundamental rights of others. Democrats then claimed that the Constitution said that blacks didn't count as people; now they say that the Constitution says that babies still in the birth canal don't count as people. I don't know which one you want to call "conservative" or "liberal" but it seems it should be consistent. By today's usage, it's true that Republicans back then weren't "conservatives" they were "neo-conservatives". Also, Teddy Roosevelt was the opposite of "progressive" (i.e. socialist). If he had been a progressive, he wouldn't have broken up monopolies, he would have taken government control of them. What he did was to fight for free markets, not redistribute of wealth.
Yep, nowadays (since the Civil Rights movement [although the Republicans set the precedent with the 15th amendment]), the law enumerates which criteria are illegal bases for discrimination. So as a result, you now need a lobby in Washington if you want whatever is distictive about you to be protected from discrimination. For example, you can end up in court for providing a shopping atmosphere that disenfranchises... Polynesians
Of course not. The idea that people should have a right to a wage greater than the value of their labour is one the most absurd theories out there.
Telling people how to build websites, or ramps for entrances, goes well beyond "regulating interstate commerce" and well into the "powers not enumerated" which are reserved for the states and the people.
like when your SO tells you, "overall I think you're a really great guy, but here, I've compiled a list of your 611 significant defects and 71 major character flaws."
1) Real money is not based upon labor, but value itself. If person A were to spend 10 straight years welding together a mamoth piece of artwork that completely sucked, and everyone acknowldged that it sucked, it would not have value, despite the labor, and he would not get money for it. (Ignoring the NEA for sake of argument). If person B spent 3 hours and made something beautiful, that lots of people wanted, it would have value, and he would get a lot money for it, despite the little labor that it required. Or ask any songwriter if the artistic or monitary value of a given song is in any way related to the amount of time and effort required to write it. For most artists, the relationship tends to be inverse.
2) PLAYING GAMES IS NOT LABOR. Once again, PLAYING GAMES IS NOT LABOR. If you spent 400 hours of your life playing a game, not because it was a really fun game to play, but because you wanted to "earn" a bucketful of imaginary gold, which the game company would allow you to pretend you owned, even though they would still own it (the IMAGINARY gold), then it might just be time to reevaluate how you "invest" your time. The reason that you are not awarded with anything of actual value for your in-game "labor" is that such "labor" does not benefit anyone else sufficiently for them to be willing to exchange anything of value for it.