... and no i'm not going to connect my computer up to the stereo becase evry time someone IM's me or I get an email or windows breaks you get horible alert noises that would drive everyone insane!
What kind of geek are you? You actually leave those things turned on? What's your pointer icon, Comet Cursor? Do you distribute links to smiley collections in your email sig?
When moving away from home you encounter a hell of a lot of new experiences and theres so much to learn and take in.
For instance, embedding the location of the pub and distance to the nearest kebab shop are key.
Students who cannot manage this feat rarely last a week...
Aha, so it makes sense that TFA found development in "areas that take information from our current body state and apply it for use in navigating the world"... students that didn't have this development didn't survive the Uni environment long enough to be studied....
1. That makes too much sense and it absolves Capitalism and the United States from guilt. There is no room in the Global Climate Change arguement for past climatic shifts or any evidence of the Sun rising in output or cyclical events.
Oh, ok, so we should take past climactic shifts into account. So everything's ok then.
2. "At least 10 to 30 percent of global warming measured during the past two decades may be due to increased solar output rather than factors such as increased heat-absorbing carbon dioxide gas released by various human activities, two Duke University physicists report.
Gotcha. Fully 10-30 percent of warming is accounted for by solar output. And the remaining piddling 70% comes from where? Leprechauns?
3. The physicists said that their findings indicate that climate models of global warming need to be corrected for the effects of changes in solar activity. However, they emphasized that their findings do not argue against the basic theory that significant global warming is occurring because of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases."
Hmm, the second sentence of para 3 seems to contradict the intent of your paragraphs #1 and #4.
4. Nope, we can't talk in this arguement about how the planet's climate has shifted in the past, but must blame the US, George W. Bush and/or Capitalism for Global Warming.
Oh goody. The planet's climate has shifted IN THE PAST, so everything's ok. You've exonerated George Bush, your work here is done. You may now go pick up your check from the RNC.
Listen bucko, some of us would like to avoid having our grandchildren live through the start of another ice age, whether or not it's George Bush's fault. Some of us have higher goals than absolving the current administration of all blame. But a party that can inspire people to believe that they are doing God's work by driving a pickup truck over a field full of memorial crosses must be distributing some pretty powerful drugs. Ok, George Bush is innocent. Now, does that mean you're ok with another ice age, or would you like to prevent it, even so?
Jeepers, you know nothing about business. Did you see the line in TFA where they said that a number of balls from the first half would be donated to charity? They get the good will of making valuable donations to many charities, for the cost of a few footballs.
Not to mention that there's a tax deduction for the value of the footballs donated -- which you can bet will be set at the auction price the charity gets, not by the purchase price for the football.
More generally, the league's job is to promote football; one of the ways to do that is to keep the memorabilia market hyped and excitable. Increasing the perceived value of all the league's products.
Interesting... in the current climate, there's pressure to keep stuff in Beta for a long time (e.g., Google News, anyone?).
In the new climate...
Inventions not actually available in the marketplace would not be protected.
... which means that people will rush unfinished buggy crapware to market as '1.0' to grab their 4 years of prior art protection, and take their sweet time actually making improvements.
Thanks to you and the others who have responded on this, reassuring me that mixing languages isn't as risky! But, hey, I'm a neurotic geek, coming up with new things to worry about is practically a hobby.
I probably should have added that another reason for the no-mixing rule was to help my wife and I keep up our French. Living in the US, it would be very easy to let English words start slipping in, first occasionally, then regularly. While our English might remain correct, the French could get seriously degraded over time -- it might be hard to speak 'pure' French when I needed to.
More curiously, I've occasionally found myself almost using a French word in English conversation at work -- and I'm a native speaker of English. So I've even felt this sort of language-drift pressure _away_ from my native language.
Nali taka? Ne e vazmozhno! Zhena mi e syshto Bulgarka!
Our situation is even weirder; we met in France -- so we still speak French to each other. I speak English to the kids and she speaks Bulgarian to them (sometimes) and English sometimes. The kids are starting to pick up the French as well as the English and the Bulgarian. (Their Bulgarian gets more active after they spend the summer there.)
The one principle we decided on very early was -- Complete Sentences Only! Either a full sentence in English, or a full sentence in French, or in Bulgarian -- no mixing languages. This way, we prevent corrupting the kids' grammar, let alone our own. I've heard stories that Turkish children growing up in Germany who end up speaking and hearing a mishmash of the two languages end up being fluent in neither -- and could be said to have no native language of their own.
1. Create a usable, simple, Google distro that the masses can use for web/email/etc.
2. Market the hell out of it until they get a certain viable user base.
3. Start equipping a few thousand public libraries with a few Google Distro machines each, and monitor their usage
4. Here's the key step: in all high-bandwidth installations, CONVERT THE GOOGLE DISTRO MACHINES TO DISKLESS TERMINALS with the same UI.
5. People get used to having 'their' desktop available to them in multiple locations, spanning a disked install with networked-synched customizations to the diskless terminals.
6. The era of disk-based installs of OSs dies a well-deserved death.
7. Profit!!
If you think about it, a lot of Google's products (Gmail, the Google Toolbar) are introducing portable features. A new OS distro that they can eventually deploy as a diskless terminal version for high-bandwidth locations is the next logical step. And there will be more tears in Redmond when that happens.
'As-is' is exactly right, same as if you're buying a used car from a dirt lot. If you read your MS licenses carefully, you will find that they specifically avoid claiming that the software will allow you to type a sentence, add two numbers, or draw a straight line.
In practical terms, you are actually licencing a product that is not guaranteed to *DO* anything at all. Any functionality you might use is just gravy you should be grateful for. So from a licensing standpoint, they owe you nothing in terms of continued functionality of any kind, because they never promised you any functionality in the first place.
I had a professor who used to read a software license, but replaced the words 'software application' with 'Ford car' wherever they occurred. The effect was hysterical -- it wasn't guaranteed to do anything, wasn't guaranteed not to crash, not to have defects, etc. Try it sometime, it's a good brain exercise.
One of his doctors actually did this -- perhaps thinking it would help 'jar' his memory or something, not really thinking through the effect that suddenly seeing yourself old would have. HM's reaction was predictable -- 'Hey, Doc! What the hell is this??'
Fortunately, the doctor realized his error quickly, took away the mirror, and said, 'It's complicated, but I can explain it to you. But first, come on over to the window'. After looking out the window for a bit, HM forgot why he was there, or even that he was upset.
If you're looking forward towards a sustainable, rewnewable, efficient fuel source, they should be looking at wind, solar, nuclear, or hydrogen, to name a few.
Nuclear is renewable?? Who knew?
... my guess is that it's probably not even rewnewable, and I say that as a fan...
Re:Jobs doesn't make $3.5bn
on
Disney Buys Pixar
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The way deals of this size are accomplished is a 'stock swap'. For simplicity's sake, let's say that the deal goes down at the market price of Pixar's shares on the day of the deal. Before the deal, you own $10,000 of Pixar; after the deal, you own $10,000 of (Pixar + Disney). Similarly, someone who had $10,000 of Disney prior to the deal would have $10,000 of (Pixar + Disney).
The gory details are that Disney writes new shares equivalent in value to the value it's assigned to the acquisition of Pixar, and 'swaps' those Disney shares for Pixar shares (effectively removing them from the market). The value of Pixar is added to the value of Disney (that's the +$7bn), but no new value is created. All Pixar shareholders are now (Disney + Pixar) shareholders; they have a same-value piece of a larger pie. Their slice is 'thinner' -- a smaller percentage; Jobs goes from 50% of Pixar to 7% of (Disney + Pixar). Similarly for Disney shareholders, but not as big of a percentage drop since Disney's valuation prior to the deal was closer to that of the combined entity.
The robot is a complex case, because of the programming. What about the bird? What about the waves? What about the falling acorn? If you say that they're 'solving' too, then we mean rather different things by 'to solve'. If you wouldn't say they're 'solving' too, then we're fundamentally in agreement, modulo some quibbles about programming and how you and I use words differently, and so on.
In what sense, then, is it not legitimate to say that a person, who exhibits the same behavior in the same situation, is solving the problem?
In the sense that in the robot case, you are aware of each specific equation you either have to solve explicitly or model some boundary conditions for -- then the robot is just the carrier in its programming of the solution you previously worked out. (On a related topic, I have no issues with the idea of saying that an AI 'solving' a problem, as long as this sense of explicitness remains.) If the word 'solve' means anything distinct from the word 'exist', it carries some sense of awareness of both the problem and the algorithm used to obtain the solution.
More generally, any physical object, let alone any living thing, can be 'modeled' by many, many mathematical representations, simultaneously. Are you willing to say that a bumblebee is 'solving' for (one of) the zeroes of its velocity equation every time it stops at a flower? Is it solving Schroedinger's equation for each moment of its existence? I have a hard time imagining the dictionary definition you'd give the word 'solve' so that it would cover all the uses you want to put it to.
A "highly evolved real-time feedback mechanism" is just another model, dude.
Wow! That sure would be a cutting criticism... if I had said anything to the contrary. Remember, I'm answering someone who thinks climbing upstairs is equivalent to solving equations; if calling it a feedback mechanism gives him a little dose of enlightenment (because he's no longer anthropomorphising) so much the better. After he digests that, he'll be in a slightly better position to swallow your hard-core mechanist epistemology.
As is "understanding" and "solving". Your post boils down to "I don't like the name of your model, use the name of my model instead!" and is therefore content-free.
Hmmm... other posters would seem to disagree. I thought my post boiled down to : 'saying that someone/thing solves an equation, just because that equation models something that someone/thing is doing, can end up making you sound pretty silly'.
If by 'content-free', you're saying that there's no difference between saying 'that bird/that wind tunnel is solving a particular case of the Navier-Stokes equations' and saying 'the bird has a sort of real-time feedback mechanism'/'the wind tunnel has settled into an equilibrium state', then you'd better make that clear. If you're not saying that, then maybe my original note wasn't so content-free after all.
You seem to be confused about the nature and utility of models.
You seem to have confused what I actually said with a straw man you're capable of taking some weak potshots at.
"I honestly believed I invented the calculus when finding some shortcuts for algebraic equations in the 7th grade."
No, you rediscovered (independently) principles of calculus perhaps, but you did not invent it. You cannot invent calculus anymore than you can invent gravity or hydrogen -- they already exist, and are waiting to be discovered by the fertile human mind.
No, GP said 'I honestly believed I invented...' and I take him at his word. Do you have reason to believe that he didn't believe that -- that he was lying about thinking that he invented it?
To your other, presumably more serious point, that math was 'always there', waiting to be discovered -- this is not exactly a settled opinion. You should indicate some awareness of the related controversies before preaching on it. For example -- what about propositions that are independent of ZFC? Do you accept V=L? Are all weakly inaccessible cardinals also strongly inaccessible?
A lot of these questions end up depending on what axiom system you choose, and you run into further difficulties if you try to 'prove' that one of these less common axioms are 'true of the world'. Hell, even Euclid turned out to be wrong about that. To put it another way, reading Ayn Rand is not a very good introduction to the philosophy of mathematics -- things are weirder than we can suppose.
We can subconsciously solve graduate level mathematical problems every time we go up or down stairs.
Yee-haa, let's apply this epistemological principle elsewhere:
Birds fly -- they must be able to solve aerodynamical problems!
Acorns fall -- they must be able to solve second-order differential equations!
Water makes waves -- it must understand turbulent flow better than humans do!
Sheesh. Stop banging everything with your big Anthropomorphism Stick. Equations modeling some behavior are not 'understood' or 'solved' by whatever exhibits that behavior; the equations are just a model. Living being climbing steps or whatever are using highly-evolved real-time feedback mechanisms, not solving anything.
There are plenty who argue that neither knew about the attack, which would mean that those planning such things are probably smart enough to be discrete about it...
I beg to differ. I'm almost certain the planning was continuous.
...Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week... try the pi!
No, not Saturn, not even a Mars lander...:) Cool, no problem, glad you took it well... what makes it even funnier was that the subject was 'lack of proper validation' and you were going on about "it shows a carelessness and thoughtlessness" which was what made me think that you'd gone to Google in the first place...
I read TFA, and as GP writes, it's slower than current designs. But... "more comfortable". When's the last time you took an elevator ride and said, "damn, this is really uncomfortable!" How is the comfort issue better solved by maglev than by installing benches or heaters or AC or whatever in the current elevators?
What problem is this new design solving? Or is it just the Tamagochi of commercial architecture -- cuteness is its only market differentiator?
I agree... my trousers filled with steam when I read your post. It sounds like you're describing a remake of the US series 'The Shield', but set in the business/IT world, rather than among the LA police. All the same nastiness/politics/pranks/vindictiveness, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Listen bucko, some of us would like to avoid having our grandchildren live through the start of another ice age, whether or not it's George Bush's fault. Some of us have higher goals than absolving the current administration of all blame. But a party that can inspire people to believe that they are doing God's work by driving a pickup truck over a field full of memorial crosses must be distributing some pretty powerful drugs. Ok, George Bush is innocent. Now, does that mean you're ok with another ice age, or would you like to prevent it, even so?
Shit... I've got to redo my taxes, then.
Jeepers, you know nothing about business. Did you see the line in TFA where they said that a number of balls from the first half would be donated to charity? They get the good will of making valuable donations to many charities, for the cost of a few footballs.
Not to mention that there's a tax deduction for the value of the footballs donated -- which you can bet will be set at the auction price the charity gets, not by the purchase price for the football.
More generally, the league's job is to promote football; one of the ways to do that is to keep the memorabilia market hyped and excitable. Increasing the perceived value of all the league's products.
In the new climate...
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.
Thanks to you and the others who have responded on this, reassuring me that mixing languages isn't as risky! But, hey, I'm a neurotic geek, coming up with new things to worry about is practically a hobby.
I probably should have added that another reason for the no-mixing rule was to help my wife and I keep up our French. Living in the US, it would be very easy to let English words start slipping in, first occasionally, then regularly. While our English might remain correct, the French could get seriously degraded over time -- it might be hard to speak 'pure' French when I needed to.
More curiously, I've occasionally found myself almost using a French word in English conversation at work -- and I'm a native speaker of English. So I've even felt this sort of language-drift pressure _away_ from my native language.
Nali taka? Ne e vazmozhno! Zhena mi e syshto Bulgarka!
Our situation is even weirder; we met in France -- so we still speak French to each other. I speak English to the kids and she speaks Bulgarian to them (sometimes) and English sometimes. The kids are starting to pick up the French as well as the English and the Bulgarian. (Their Bulgarian gets more active after they spend the summer there.)
The one principle we decided on very early was -- Complete Sentences Only! Either a full sentence in English, or a full sentence in French, or in Bulgarian -- no mixing languages. This way, we prevent corrupting the kids' grammar, let alone our own. I've heard stories that Turkish children growing up in Germany who end up speaking and hearing a mishmash of the two languages end up being fluent in neither -- and could be said to have no native language of their own.
Do skoro!
Why is Google putting together a distro? Because it's the first step in a longer-term plan.
Note that Google recently hired away a Microsoft engineer who believes that Microsoft no longer knows how to ship software and believes in the web-services model. He was one of the principal architects of Hailstorm.
Here's what I see Google doing:
1. Create a usable, simple, Google distro that the masses can use for web/email/etc.
2. Market the hell out of it until they get a certain viable user base.
3. Start equipping a few thousand public libraries with a few Google Distro machines each, and monitor their usage
4. Here's the key step: in all high-bandwidth installations, CONVERT THE GOOGLE DISTRO MACHINES TO DISKLESS TERMINALS with the same UI.
5. People get used to having 'their' desktop available to them in multiple locations, spanning a disked install with networked-synched customizations to the diskless terminals.
6. The era of disk-based installs of OSs dies a well-deserved death.
7. Profit!!
If you think about it, a lot of Google's products (Gmail, the Google Toolbar) are introducing portable features. A new OS distro that they can eventually deploy as a diskless terminal version for high-bandwidth locations is the next logical step. And there will be more tears in Redmond when that happens.
'As-is' is exactly right, same as if you're buying a used car from a dirt lot. If you read your MS licenses carefully, you will find that they specifically avoid claiming that the software will allow you to type a sentence, add two numbers, or draw a straight line.
In practical terms, you are actually licencing a product that is not guaranteed to *DO* anything at all. Any functionality you might use is just gravy you should be grateful for. So from a licensing standpoint, they owe you nothing in terms of continued functionality of any kind, because they never promised you any functionality in the first place.
I had a professor who used to read a software license, but replaced the words 'software application' with 'Ford car' wherever they occurred. The effect was hysterical -- it wasn't guaranteed to do anything, wasn't guaranteed not to crash, not to have defects, etc. Try it sometime, it's a good brain exercise.
I have chron's disease
You mean you have to batch-schedule your sleep?
One of his doctors actually did this -- perhaps thinking it would help 'jar' his memory or something, not really thinking through the effect that suddenly seeing yourself old would have. HM's reaction was predictable -- 'Hey, Doc! What the hell is this??'
Fortunately, the doctor realized his error quickly, took away the mirror, and said, 'It's complicated, but I can explain it to you. But first, come on over to the window'. After looking out the window for a bit, HM forgot why he was there, or even that he was upset.
The way deals of this size are accomplished is a 'stock swap'. For simplicity's sake, let's say that the deal goes down at the market price of Pixar's shares on the day of the deal. Before the deal, you own $10,000 of Pixar; after the deal, you own $10,000 of (Pixar + Disney). Similarly, someone who had $10,000 of Disney prior to the deal would have $10,000 of (Pixar + Disney).
The gory details are that Disney writes new shares equivalent in value to the value it's assigned to the acquisition of Pixar, and 'swaps' those Disney shares for Pixar shares (effectively removing them from the market). The value of Pixar is added to the value of Disney (that's the +$7bn), but no new value is created. All Pixar shareholders are now (Disney + Pixar) shareholders; they have a same-value piece of a larger pie. Their slice is 'thinner' -- a smaller percentage; Jobs goes from 50% of Pixar to 7% of (Disney + Pixar). Similarly for Disney shareholders, but not as big of a percentage drop since Disney's valuation prior to the deal was closer to that of the combined entity.
More generally, any physical object, let alone any living thing, can be 'modeled' by many, many mathematical representations, simultaneously. Are you willing to say that a bumblebee is 'solving' for (one of) the zeroes of its velocity equation every time it stops at a flower? Is it solving Schroedinger's equation for each moment of its existence? I have a hard time imagining the dictionary definition you'd give the word 'solve' so that it would cover all the uses you want to put it to.
If by 'content-free', you're saying that there's no difference between saying 'that bird/that wind tunnel is solving a particular case of the Navier-Stokes equations' and saying 'the bird has a sort of real-time feedback mechanism'/'the wind tunnel has settled into an equilibrium state', then you'd better make that clear. If you're not saying that, then maybe my original note wasn't so content-free after all.
You seem to have confused what I actually said with a straw man you're capable of taking some weak potshots at.
To your other, presumably more serious point, that math was 'always there', waiting to be discovered -- this is not exactly a settled opinion. You should indicate some awareness of the related controversies before preaching on it. For example -- what about propositions that are independent of ZFC? Do you accept V=L? Are all weakly inaccessible cardinals also strongly inaccessible?
A lot of these questions end up depending on what axiom system you choose, and you run into further difficulties if you try to 'prove' that one of these less common axioms are 'true of the world'. Hell, even Euclid turned out to be wrong about that. To put it another way, reading Ayn Rand is not a very good introduction to the philosophy of mathematics -- things are weirder than we can suppose.
We can subconsciously solve graduate level mathematical problems every time we go up or down stairs.
Yee-haa, let's apply this epistemological principle elsewhere:
Birds fly -- they must be able to solve aerodynamical problems!
Acorns fall -- they must be able to solve second-order differential equations!
Water makes waves -- it must understand turbulent flow better than humans do!
Sheesh. Stop banging everything with your big Anthropomorphism Stick. Equations modeling some behavior are not 'understood' or 'solved' by whatever exhibits that behavior; the equations are just a model. Living being climbing steps or whatever are using highly-evolved real-time feedback mechanisms, not solving anything.
No, not Saturn, not even a Mars lander... :) Cool, no problem, glad you took it well ... what makes it even funnier was that the subject was 'lack of proper validation' and you were going on about "it shows a carelessness and thoughtlessness" which was what made me think that you'd gone to Google in the first place...
Time for more coffee. For us both.
I was about to compliment you for your metric conversion, then decided to see for myself to guess at your source, but...
800 pounds = 362.873896 kilograms
Correct to 6 decimal places is funny; being off by more than 3 kg isn't... Use the power of Google, people!
I read TFA, and as GP writes, it's slower than current designs. But... "more comfortable". When's the last time you took an elevator ride and said, "damn, this is really uncomfortable!" How is the comfort issue better solved by maglev than by installing benches or heaters or AC or whatever in the current elevators?
What problem is this new design solving? Or is it just the Tamagochi of commercial architecture -- cuteness is its only market differentiator?
I agree ... my trousers filled with steam when I read your post. It sounds like you're describing a remake of the US series 'The Shield', but set in the business/IT world, rather than among the LA police. All the same nastiness/politics/pranks/vindictiveness, though.
...until they get around to revoking one-click and the other ridiculous business process patents.