OK, so how do we measure "information"? I understand that we're using it as a technical term, but for those of us at home the universe remains stubbornly made up of matter and energy. What do we do to what to get some "information" out of it?
It means that the math works. It doesn't necessarily mean that the theory provides falsifiable hypotheses we can test via experiment to differentiate it from competing theories. See: string theory, Zombie Feynman.
You shouldn't have to do extensive overtime, or in fact any overtime at all, to keep your job -- whether or not they feel generous give you a bonus or a raise at the end without having offered it in the first place. There's a damn reason we have laws mandating overtime pay after a 40-hour work week: to discourage employers from forcing their employees into double-shifts and waking up at 3AM just to rectify the management's incompetence.
There's no such thing as overeducated, merely educated enough to qualify for a job better than the one you have. Education is a human good, not a device to get you ready for your job allocated from Your Corporate Lords and Masters. You're thinking of job training.
If you're serious about Computer Science and becoming a programmer you will eventually need to take a course in discrete mathematics, and ideally for a broader skill-set you ought to take both the classes you've listed. However, to decide for this coming semester, pick the course with the better professor. In my experience, the quality of professors in =200-level math courses varies really, really widely, and that can make the difference between getting a C+ after not learning much and receiving an A after taking one of the most enlightening courses of your life. Pick the one that most points towards the latter scenario this semester, and just make sure to have taken both by the time you graduate.
My last company was "employee owned", which meant the executives had all the stock and were able to give themselves dividends whenever they felt like it.
Dune is not a "noble savage" story. No civilization with chemical and ecological engineering techniques beyond those of current-day science can be called "savages" just because they seem more like Bedouin Muslims than Judeo-Christian-Postenlightenment Westerners -- we call that racism.
That said, the instant they introduced that really big pterodactyl thingy as The Big One that you ride to show your supreme mastery of everything Na'vi, I started hoping they would at least lampshade their complete unoriginality by calling it "Shai-Hulud". I was again disappointed.
Yeah, me too. Of course it was science fiction. After all, it's a note-for-note rip-off of Dune, cleverly disguised by using a lush, green world instead of a sandy desert, then gutted to remove any of the bits that actually make Dune an interesting novel: evil corporation stealing, literally, unobtainium from savages who are "in touch" with their environment in ways the evil corporates can't understand. Character from evil corporation changes sides and becomes messiah figure. Character falls in love with savage. Messiah figure leads savages to victory. Heck, they even have ornithopter-like flying machines. Now just throw in a thinking forest composed of the thoughts of the dead, ala Orson Scott Card's "Children of the Mind". Oh, plus some Mechs ala every random anime you've ever seen.
Goddamn it, that is not how Dune went!
Dune does not have an "evil corporation". CHOAM only exists on paper as a device for distributing trade profits to the Great Houses. The villain is a feudal lord, and a fuckton cleverer than any of the gits in Avatar. Actually, everyone in Dune was cleverer than the saps in Avatar. The Atreides walked straight into a trap and they were cleverer than everyone in Avatar.
Paul Atreides never "changed sides". He always played his own side, and he knew that he was controlling the Fremen to win his fief and later his empire. Paul was a messiah figure, yes, but only because the Bene Gesserit and his mother genetically engineered and trained him for that role -- making him just a rather ambiguous messiah. Note that the Mahdi/Lisan al-Gaib was the messiah figure, whereas Kwisatz Haderach meant "male with lots of superpowers and genetic memory", but that they fitted together because the Missionaria Protectiva had deliberately implanted messiah-legends in the Fremen culture to prepare them to accept the Kwisatz Haderach as leader when they bring him.
The Fremen were not savages. They had a culture with enough science to manufacture the stillsuits and other Fremkit components themselves, and once the older Dr. Kynes joined them they had the ecological science to slowly terraform their planet. They lived "in harmony" with the desert as a survival adaptation with eyes towards transforming it into a human-friendly environment. You can't call them savages just because they seem more like Bedouin than Westerners.
So then the ambiguous-messiah leads the not-savages to victory by threatening supplies of an essential natural resource (note that Avatar totally missed the "keep the unobtainium flowing" angle). He thus tragically dooms himself, because winning back his fief and an empire for himself using deliberately-stoked religious fanaticism creates a fanatic cult that the so-called "messiah" can't actually control. He then loses the Fremen girl he loved so much and cannot stand the thought of what he'd have to do to set humanity back on a healthy course, so he marches into the desert to die and leaves that task to his son. He doesn't just kick out the "evil imperialists" and somehow obtain a nature-hippie utopia complete with loving wife and noble-savage lifestyle.
The problem is that if you filter the message of this film through its all-too-blatant subtext, it is about evil prevailing. Or at the very least, it's about how people who we normally think of as evil are actually good and should totally prevail. Goddamn hippie crap.
Bad news: they don't have sex. They just cuddle, and then she tells him they're married.
But remember what James Cameron: the Na'vi represent the higher nature of real people, the people we wish we were! Don't let the behavior of the Na'vi fool you!
I find it interesting that despite that in the context of the movie it is clear that the blue people are actually (more or less) right about their religion (as evidenced by the communication), you still consider it to be irrational.
In James Cameron's fictional universe he can make whatever spirituality or religion he wants true. He can show God parting the Reed Sea to let the Hebrews cross, he can show Fremen bowing in evening prayer to Shai-Hulud... or can pull this crap. A film that wants to preach religion ought to preach it like an actual religion, on its religious merits, instead of telling us a hero-story about the brave little convert who won a war by faith in his new-found god. Cameron chose the latter rather than the former, and quite frankly most of us don't like a preacher telling us anything he wants can happen in his parable because it's fiction while still using it to preach his religion.
It's not like e-cash is a technologically hard issue. It's just a matter of issuing a cryptographically-signed capability redeemable for monetary value. The problem is that, with the amount of data that users discard and destroy regularly on the internet, we'd more likely have to use "e-checks": cryptographically-signed capabilities redeemable for monetary value from a specific bank account. Of course, that would allow someone to start an "e-bank" that holds the backing account themselves and issues e-checks backed by that account in exchange for the equivalent in actual money (cash or credit or whatever). You would pay for it like a real checking account and checkbook, so that to get the right to $100 of e-cash you might pay $105 or something. The neat bit is that once they issue you the capability they don't need to know what account backs it; when you withdraw $25 e-cash they would just subtract $25 from your account and issue you a capability valued at $25 backed by that bank. You could then pass that capability all across the network willy-nilly without anyone ever being able to trace it back to its original owner.
Religion isn't what's killing science. Pyramid funding is killing science. Scientists have to be imported from outside the United States because so few native-born Americans feel like working long hours for crappy wages with lottery-grade chances at advancement.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, passing a number and a symbol to the cons function works the exact same way as passing a string and a cons-cell to it.
For example, you can measure all the angles in the known universe if you want to, but you will *never* be able to prove the Pythagoras theorem wrong.
Provided that your angles all exist in two-dimensional planes of zero curvature, that's correct.
OK, so how do we measure "information"? I understand that we're using it as a technical term, but for those of us at home the universe remains stubbornly made up of matter and energy. What do we do to what to get some "information" out of it?
He's a string theorist, what did you expect?
Just as each generation thinks it invented sex
The sheer stupidity of anyone ever thinking that they invented sex astounds me. I wish I could mod you Funny just for that.
It means that the math works. It doesn't necessarily mean that the theory provides falsifiable hypotheses we can test via experiment to differentiate it from competing theories. See: string theory, Zombie Feynman.
Why are there exempted categories of salaried employees who can be required to work overtime without compensation?
That Wall Street Journal thing is full of shit. It lists "Philosopher" as a paid occupation.
Well as I remember there were these people called strike-breakers or "scabs".
You shouldn't have to do extensive overtime, or in fact any overtime at all, to keep your job -- whether or not they feel generous give you a bonus or a raise at the end without having offered it in the first place. There's a damn reason we have laws mandating overtime pay after a 40-hour work week: to discourage employers from forcing their employees into double-shifts and waking up at 3AM just to rectify the management's incompetence.
There's no such thing as overeducated, merely educated enough to qualify for a job better than the one you have. Education is a human good, not a device to get you ready for your job allocated from Your Corporate Lords and Masters. You're thinking of job training.
If you're serious about Computer Science and becoming a programmer you will eventually need to take a course in discrete mathematics, and ideally for a broader skill-set you ought to take both the classes you've listed. However, to decide for this coming semester, pick the course with the better professor. In my experience, the quality of professors in =200-level math courses varies really, really widely, and that can make the difference between getting a C+ after not learning much and receiving an A after taking one of the most enlightening courses of your life. Pick the one that most points towards the latter scenario this semester, and just make sure to have taken both by the time you graduate.
Between graph theory, set theory, and game theory, you've got 90% of computer science.
Add in automata theory and type theory and you've got yourself a deal!
My last company was "employee owned", which meant the executives had all the stock and were able to give themselves dividends whenever they felt like it.
That is not what "employee owned" means.
My preferences are Arabic coffee with cinnamon, peach iced tea, or diet coke. Run, my gophers, run!
Or you could just buy some ground coffee, a hot plate, and an ibrik and brew your own freaking coffee.
Iranians and Afghans aren't Arabs.
Dune is not a "noble savage" story. No civilization with chemical and ecological engineering techniques beyond those of current-day science can be called "savages" just because they seem more like Bedouin Muslims than Judeo-Christian-Postenlightenment Westerners -- we call that racism.
That said, the instant they introduced that really big pterodactyl thingy as The Big One that you ride to show your supreme mastery of everything Na'vi, I started hoping they would at least lampshade their complete unoriginality by calling it "Shai-Hulud". I was again disappointed.
Yeah, me too. Of course it was science fiction. After all, it's a note-for-note rip-off of Dune, cleverly disguised by using a lush, green world instead of a sandy desert, then gutted to remove any of the bits that actually make Dune an interesting novel: evil corporation stealing, literally, unobtainium from savages who are "in touch" with their environment in ways the evil corporates can't understand. Character from evil corporation changes sides and becomes messiah figure. Character falls in love with savage. Messiah figure leads savages to victory. Heck, they even have ornithopter-like flying machines. Now just throw in a thinking forest composed of the thoughts of the dead, ala Orson Scott Card's "Children of the Mind". Oh, plus some Mechs ala every random anime you've ever seen.
Goddamn it, that is not how Dune went!
Dune does not have an "evil corporation". CHOAM only exists on paper as a device for distributing trade profits to the Great Houses. The villain is a feudal lord, and a fuckton cleverer than any of the gits in Avatar. Actually, everyone in Dune was cleverer than the saps in Avatar. The Atreides walked straight into a trap and they were cleverer than everyone in Avatar.
Paul Atreides never "changed sides". He always played his own side, and he knew that he was controlling the Fremen to win his fief and later his empire. Paul was a messiah figure, yes, but only because the Bene Gesserit and his mother genetically engineered and trained him for that role -- making him just a rather ambiguous messiah. Note that the Mahdi/Lisan al-Gaib was the messiah figure, whereas Kwisatz Haderach meant "male with lots of superpowers and genetic memory", but that they fitted together because the Missionaria Protectiva had deliberately implanted messiah-legends in the Fremen culture to prepare them to accept the Kwisatz Haderach as leader when they bring him.
The Fremen were not savages. They had a culture with enough science to manufacture the stillsuits and other Fremkit components themselves, and once the older Dr. Kynes joined them they had the ecological science to slowly terraform their planet. They lived "in harmony" with the desert as a survival adaptation with eyes towards transforming it into a human-friendly environment. You can't call them savages just because they seem more like Bedouin than Westerners.
So then the ambiguous-messiah leads the not-savages to victory by threatening supplies of an essential natural resource (note that Avatar totally missed the "keep the unobtainium flowing" angle). He thus tragically dooms himself, because winning back his fief and an empire for himself using deliberately-stoked religious fanaticism creates a fanatic cult that the so-called "messiah" can't actually control. He then loses the Fremen girl he loved so much and cannot stand the thought of what he'd have to do to set humanity back on a healthy course, so he marches into the desert to die and leaves that task to his son. He doesn't just kick out the "evil imperialists" and somehow obtain a nature-hippie utopia complete with loving wife and noble-savage lifestyle.
Why yes, I am a Dune fanboy. What tipped you off?
The problem is that if you filter the message of this film through its all-too-blatant subtext, it is about evil prevailing. Or at the very least, it's about how people who we normally think of as evil are actually good and should totally prevail. Goddamn hippie crap.
Bad news: they don't have sex. They just cuddle, and then she tells him they're married.
But remember what James Cameron: the Na'vi represent the higher nature of real people, the people we wish we were! Don't let the behavior of the Na'vi fool you!
I find it interesting that despite that in the context of the movie it is clear that the blue people are actually (more or less) right about their religion (as evidenced by the communication), you still consider it to be irrational.
In James Cameron's fictional universe he can make whatever spirituality or religion he wants true. He can show God parting the Reed Sea to let the Hebrews cross, he can show Fremen bowing in evening prayer to Shai-Hulud... or can pull this crap. A film that wants to preach religion ought to preach it like an actual religion, on its religious merits, instead of telling us a hero-story about the brave little convert who won a war by faith in his new-found god. Cameron chose the latter rather than the former, and quite frankly most of us don't like a preacher telling us anything he wants can happen in his parable because it's fiction while still using it to preach his religion.
It's not like e-cash is a technologically hard issue. It's just a matter of issuing a cryptographically-signed capability redeemable for monetary value. The problem is that, with the amount of data that users discard and destroy regularly on the internet, we'd more likely have to use "e-checks": cryptographically-signed capabilities redeemable for monetary value from a specific bank account. Of course, that would allow someone to start an "e-bank" that holds the backing account themselves and issues e-checks backed by that account in exchange for the equivalent in actual money (cash or credit or whatever). You would pay for it like a real checking account and checkbook, so that to get the right to $100 of e-cash you might pay $105 or something. The neat bit is that once they issue you the capability they don't need to know what account backs it; when you withdraw $25 e-cash they would just subtract $25 from your account and issue you a capability valued at $25 backed by that bank. You could then pass that capability all across the network willy-nilly without anyone ever being able to trace it back to its original owner.
Excuse me, I need to go pitch a start-up idea.
Right, so it lurches after the living to consume our tasty, delicious brains, yeah?
Religion isn't what's killing science. Pyramid funding is killing science. Scientists have to be imported from outside the United States because so few native-born Americans feel like working long hours for crappy wages with lottery-grade chances at advancement.