Sadly the service that LulzSec is providing is that of: "Now Feds have reason for totalitarian internet laws and broad ISP log searches."
Very true. All the post-9/11 "freedom restriction acts" legislated by the US or enacted by executive order, these policies were made under provocation. They wouldn't exist if the terrorists left us alone. And this talk about taking on hackers? It wouldn't be happening if hackers would stop poking the sleeping giant. But how will the US take them on? By sweeping infringements on all citizens rights. Thank a lot for nothing, Lulzsec. You aren't protesting for freedom's sake. You're the ones ultimately to blame for the coming civil rights mess.
It's not their data. It's not their property. They don't have a right to inspect or collect or distribute someone else's data. It's not any different than someone breaking into your house, rooting through your drawers, and handing out photocopies of whatever documents they find there.
For every pro-hacker on Slashdot, these are people who will still call the police if someone breaks into their house. Will the police say, "We see no reason to pursue this; those crackheads were providing you with a free service, exposing flaws in your security measures! Lesson learned". No, and the pro-hacker would be distraught if that was the response. These are the true hypocrites. The hackers and pro-hackers value their own property, demand everyone respects their ownership rights, but then they claim universal ownership over everyone else's things.
So... basically everyone here is in favor of Anonymous, and opposed to citizens/organizations/states/nations defending themselvse against cyber terrororism?
I don't know if you have been paying attention to the war on terror, but the guys with the missiles? They bomb pretty much whoever they want. Along with the collateral damage, they generally also get their target. But you get bombed. Whether you're a real terrorist or not. They just have to think "oh that's the target" and BOOM you're dust.
Now imagine (by your standards) these morons fumbling through their computer forensics data, eventually identifying YOUR computer as a source of an attack by Anonymous.
If you live in America, you're probably safe except incarceration. Live elsewhere? Remote missile defense pattern. You're gone, dude.
And anonymous may seem imposing against individuals and small companies. But nation-states take their security very seriously. They WILL retaliate. You'd have to be an 8-year old sociopath to delude yourself otherwise.
Haha that was about my reaction, and I agree with you entirely. The majority of my off-work hobby time involves something relating to THIS field. 60% of my personal notebooks are dedicated to it.
In particular, I am not so much interested in the models of physical intelligent machines (ANN's and so on) so much as the kind of abstract features of intelligence these capture (language, reasoning, decision making, etc.) I don't think there's a one-to-one mapping between the ability to use, computationally at least, a language - and the physical features of the machine that achieves that "behavior". I mean, I don't think the AI you mentioned depends on those physical details, much like our automobiles do the same things but don't all have internal combustion engines.
I think comp ling, and a few others fields (like those pertaining purely to natural deduction), these are the best approaches to get what you said.
Though let us be responsible as programmers and dispense with the notion of "consciousness" problem. We all know that the machine does what it's told. We will have machines that do very well to understand language in general, but map out its physical implementations, the spaces of RAM the "information" occupies, you see a bunch of disjointed, disconnected, random bits of meaningless data, whose only meaning is determined by the constraints provided by the programmer. This is quite different from the brain, where pieces of matter assert their own relationships. Machines won't be conscious, they need not be.
Along the lines of the P=NP commenter, I see the problem of, well, this task involves the computer translating natural language into internal symbolism subject to rules of valid inferential reasoning, in order to achieve the desired solution (this would be a necessary thing to do if one is to check for redundancies, contradictions, loop-holes, and so on).
That would be no problem if the computer had a bunch of WFF in some synthetic formal language with appropriate grammar and lexicon available. But it doesn't. It has natural language as input.
I realize there is tax software out there that already have turned the tax code into a series of software states. (meaning I don't think the programs refer to rules translated from tax code and draws inferences from them, I think it just transitions from one valid state to another according to hard-coded conditionals that direct program flow. I don't know if that would be better as input than the tax code in English, but it might help as a verification tools)
So my final thought is, this would be a monumental project involving some serious AI, NLP, machine learning, and heavy linguistics. A very, VERY expensive project that would take years and would likely produce seriously erroneous results.
There are people who already understand the tax code well enough that the best solution is to just start from scratch rebuilding it. It'd be cheaper, and faster.
I use bing, I get better results than google, which the first 10 pages for essentially ANY search these days are links to just computer-generated content, my keyword match being the caption text of some advertisement or worse, not anywhere on the page. Bing filters through all that and gives me the legitimate pages I'm after. Another problem with google, is it won't bother to return results for "old" web pages - even if the site has been indexed, and you can run a query with an EXACT match from within the site's text. There are sites from 2002-2004 I reference all the time in my academic work, they don't need to be updated, so why should the value of their informative content ever expire like Google thinks it should? so when I am using a computer without my bookmarks, I'll never find those sites on google.
However upon this news, I will no longer be using bing. I want facebook and facebook alone to know that I'm using facebook, if I'm logged into facebook, I don't want bing or any other site to be aware of that.
Uh, the first point, I agree with. I don't research online as a social function, and if I don't fact check my political opinions, the fault is on me, not the "filter bubble". There is no other side to "opinions", there are reasons to investigate what facts one uses to draw one's conclusions.
But I think overall the guy just misses the point of the internet and the point of using it to find exactly what you want to find. If I goto the library to check out a non-fiction math book, am I obligated to "consider" other subject areas? Am I doing damage to my information acquisition attempt by ignoring history, or fantasy sci-fi for that matter?
All the Malware/Virus problems windows has that can be attributed to 3rd party programs, this means now Microsoft is vindicated?
My question is, does this Flash exploit work in other browsers? Or does it specifically take advantage of something wrong with Chrome? Cos if it's the latter, then whether it's a "Flash problem" or not, it still means Chrome is the vector.
I'd like to see the source code and specs, constraints, etc. I've seen robots designed to evolve under certain constraints, that lead to very predictable and obvious traits based on those constraints. For example, if a robot had a goal to pass on its genes, and sharing food was the means to accomplish this, it isn't a surprise that's the result: It didn't evolve that response; it was designed to acheieve it! That's why I'd like to see the actual research. Till then I have to call bogus.
I've been alive in America in over 20 years and never had my rights violated.
I certainly don't feel some overwhelming police power restricting my every thought, word, and action, anyways. I have yet to experience any retribution for dissent, I don't FEAR retribution for dissent, I don't FEEL persecuted/repressed/oppressed... In fact, the number of times per day that I'd say your awful, tyrannical and unjust government affects my life as negatively as it has somehow affected yours, is about zero. It's one thing to spend time thinking about the government, it's another to spend time feeling threatened by the government, when there is nothing to show for those thoughts, nothing to warrant such preoccupation.
I guess what I'm getting at, is it sounds downright crazy to talk like the way you are.... sorry, but if you heard me rambling about the imminent danger and threat sharks pose to my life, though I enjoy life without such threats, you'd think I was crazy. And it's not far off from rambling about government taking my freedoms, though I enoy quite a reasonably free life - like I said not ONCE has due process been violated in the interest of violating my rights...
I don't know if that analogy works. Verifying he is dead, and finding him, aren't accomplished upon the same model of abstract computation mechanism. Verifying a subset of a set has a certain sum, and finding a subset within a set that has that sum, those are problems that would use the same means of computation and information processing, albeit different algorithms. Besides, the fact that P = NP doesn't mean one automatically, inherently can find the correct algorithm to go ahead and compute the answer. it may take me a long time just to freakin find the algorithm. Then, once the algorithm is executed, we'd find that computation is in polynomial time. In other words, the "problem" of P = NP doesn't assume that the method used to verify an answer is identical to the method used to compute the answer, and it doesn't assume we'd be able to get the algorithm for the latter; it would just assume that, if P = NP, we know there IS such an algorithm out there... finding it is something else altogether.
Well that's how I've been regarding the issue for years now, and a lot of my work would suffer greatly if I had such a fundamental misunderstanding here...
Slashdot, this headline, the comment, and the article are not about the Internet; or some general impact technology has had on society; this is not news for nerds. It is a political piece about the behavior of birthers, with the greater implication that conservatives/right-wingers have a distorted view of reality and are willing to accept misinformation instead of facts. That's what it's about, plain and simple, and obviously so.
Slashdot, I can go elsewhere for my politics. I come here to get news that is NOT political. But seems every other day or so, there is some thinly veiled political article being linked here. Plus, the comments section just explodes when you do that. This is becoming another ridiculous site like Fark. Can we knock it off already?
Same here. A few piles, and a mail basket (where other items like remotes, ipods and wallets often randomly get tossed in), and a drawer in my dresser where all my documents (receipts, paid bills, billing statements, etc) go in, obviously very unsorted. I am ok with that system because I know I DEFINITELY have every document in that drawer should I need it, and I don't mind spending the hour it takes to find it, since I've only ever had to bring up past documents maybe once or twice a year since I was 16. The searching process also is the purging process.
So far it's worked out that spending the one-two hours a year finding documents saves me MORE time than implementing an organized solution! It takes 30 seconds to file something in a sorted manner, and 30 seconds to find it. I'd say I "file" an average of more than 60 documents a year, so that works out to spending more than an hour a year organizing files... and then when you have to purge old documents, you have to go through each category rather than throw them out as you encounter them, so you spend more than THAT, whenever you purge. just think about it.:)
Ironically, what I *do* file in a very organized information is warranty information and instruction manuals for things like appliances, software licenses, electronics, even self-assembly furniture. You never know when you have to re-order a rare part or send out a repair order and so on, that kind of stuff can't afford to be misplaced or disorganized.
I have no idea what I'm doing wrong, but I somehow manage to "modify" files in Windows XP and Vista, without modifying them. So searching for files across the file system turns up a lot of unwanted nonsense.
Meanwhile, Windows Search (formerly Indexing Service) often inexplicably omits entires that I already know should and would belong in the list
I've written my own tool to get around this... didn't think to look for an existing product. What a waste of Christmas break.
For some time around here, Slashdot user's general attitude seems to be that it's OK to violate patents. I guess that stems from the FOSS mentality, but just because you're willing to give your work away, doesn't mean you should expect everyone else to do the same. You have to allow that other people value their time and work in different ways than you value yourrs. And, just because you think it's not immoral to violate patents, doesn't mean it's immoral to enforce them. Someone steals your car, I'm sure you'll call the police.
B&N argument is terrible. Patents don't need marketed products to be valid. What about the "non-essential" features MS targets? Well, if one's product includes a feature that violates a patent, Microsoft won't claim the entire product violates it - they will say just THAT feature violates it. Unfortunately that means the product incorporating, or relying on it, can't exist without modification and compensation to MS.
Point Number 9? Microsoft and Nokia planned to enforce their patents and litigate patent violaters? Clearly that demonstratably invalidates Microsoft's right to pursue those cases. "Hey, why don't we both just start going after patent infringement cases?" That's illegal? I doubt it. Anyways, now I know, if police departments ever openly discuss intentions and PLAN to catch DUI offenders, well that's just predatory and any resulting arrests and convictions should just be dismissed.
Microsoft's brief quote was priceless. The issues isn't whether Microsft is over-doing it with the patent thing. The problem is that companies keep prompting them to litigate because companies keep infringing on their patents. If patent holders should not take legal recourse to stop such incidents, then exactly what IS the purpose of a patent, anyways?
What is the probability you'd be in a situation professionally where you had enough time to boot up a laptop, install the relevant software, assume you already know how to use it, and do something productive with it and not get fired?
Solving simple differential equations or linear algebra in a pinch is exactly why I keep my calculator. The same calculator I used in school many moons ago. I've used Matlab and Mathematica, and can be moderately productive with them. But I'll always stick to my trust TI-89 for its utility and consistently error-free operation.
For me its the same thing as having a PC instead of a TV. Yeah, it works. But the startup cost (in time) and maintenance is non-negligible.
Everything here is how I feel. Also, I am decent in math, a software programmer, who is young and I'm no luddite. If you need something beyond a scientific calculator or phone app calculator, chances are you need functionality a graphing calculator provides. It's much more productive and reliable to keep one handy and use it whenever possible than using math software to do the same thing.
Honestly given ten seconds of pondering, it should easily make sense. Seems to me the anti-gc crowd are just on about superiority complex of mathematical ability and/or utilization of lesser known math tools.
1) Near universal standardization. Text books and labs across dozens of disciplines rely on common graphing calculators, as do instructors. The industry invested on this tech and no one wants to re-write the curriculum to support alternative tech. Most calculators do most tasks the same way; it's standard. Also, the education hardly relies on functionality greater than what GC provide, so why go elsewhere? and the educators don't have to worry about who has Windows/Linux/etc or who has which software or who can afford to pay the extra $100... or who didn't download a virus that crippled their system and prevented their math software from loading, so on and so forth. It makes sense to package these functions in an isolated, portable, dedicated calculating machine which gives consistent and predictable results! Additionally, because of the standardization, everyone knows how to use these things, and the learning curve is negligible for just about anyone.
2) Cost. Yes, more expensive devices can offer superior calculating power. But the educational needs are well-met by the GC, so going the distance and paying more makes absolutely no sense. Plus, as every student knows, GC's are VERY recyclable and the recovery of cost is normally as much as 75% ! Try selling your netbook at the end of the semester, see how far that gets you.
3) Ease of Use. The OP suggested students and educators, perhaps professionals, rely too much on GC tech, then suggested using even more sophisticated math software as a replacement? Forget that learning curve! And what about portability, battery life? I can pack up my calculator and go anywhere with it, very easily. The thing is superior to any other alternative on this point alone.
4) Dedicated device. This kind of overlaps in what I've mentioned before, but it's a very important point. The GC is dedicated to one of a handful of purposes. Replacing it with a multi-purpose machine, and the latter becomes more valuable to me as it suits other important uses. Storing music, running other software, all this interferes with the "focus" afforded by simply having a GC next to my textbook - I learn less effectively! Also, running calculations are not likely to be interrupted or erroneous on the GC as they are on the other devices (e.g. netbook) due to software flaws, machine crashes (i.e. iTunes freezes up!) and so on. I lose or damage my netbook, and replacement cost is prohibitive; whereas a used cheap GC is very easy to find these days. Hell, I keep ROM backups and emulation software of my GC's for just that reason. Also, who is going to lend out a netbook? Who is going to study group around a desktop PC or pass around a heavy laptop low on battery life among eight other friends in the study hall? I've loaned out my GC's dozens of times, and expect just about everyone to have one somewhere, so study group is way easier, and at work we each have one and that's so much better than "let's go to my office and load up X math software"
5) Dedicated device. Hate to over-emphasize, but it's important. I use my GC to solve all kinds of random problems in a flash, you know little debates you get at work over whose algorithm is more efficient, where a quick visual is crucial. Explaining to colleagues that their mess of a word problem is just a system of equations, that a solution exists or can easily be obtained? GC does it in five minutes.
As violent as the drug trade is now, think how much more violent it would become as the market for illicit drugs shrinks. Your average cartel foot soldier is uneducated and comes from poor areas. He isn't going to want to go back to the old neighborhood and make a couple of bucks a month when he is now used to making a couple thousand. These guys have money, power, and status. When these things are threatened, people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep it. Think Iraq 2003. You have a bunch of guys with guns who no longer have a job or the status that came with it. Legalize drugs and these guys won't go legit; the profit margins would be way too small with all the fees, licenses, and import duties. They will start fighting over what little drug trade is left, and it will be ten times as violent as it is now if we are lucky.
Yep, this happened in my area. Two examples. 1) "Medical" weed dispensary was established, and not taxed by the county. So high quality drugs that could compete price-wise with the gangs (gangs can always out-compete taxed weed). The gangs lowered the cost and increased quality, but also became aggressive and violent as they competed among themselves. Then to offset lowered profit margins, they started dabbling in pharma's and ecstacy - the former of which used to be the domain of non-threatening college kids, the latter of which was virtually unheard of in the area. Now it's a bigger problem than ever, thanks to legalized weed.
2) They took down all the under-funded meth labs local here, which produced cheap and poor quality meth (hence the target market was small). To compensate, the cartels shipped in high quality meth, and drug use went up with the availability, and local police lost the ability to manage the trade at all. Employment rates plummeted over the last five years, school drop-outs soared as kids got hooked and schools encountered the presence of cocaine and meth for the first time since the early 1990's. We lost a boettcher awarded student to cocaine! Gang violence and presence has increased, and now we have a type of taxpayer-funded swat team here we never needed more - all of these consequences are burdens on the normal peaceful citizen in so many regrettable, tragic and obviously preventable ways.
These examples illustrate that if you disrupt the profit margins of criminal organizations, the consequences CAN be dire, no matter how your "best interests" in the community, liberal or conservative, happen to be.
All this talk about legalization in this thread is very confusing. All it accomplishes is to eliminate one social harm (violence) by enabling another (drug use), but I don't see strong justification that one or the other deserves less attention from police power. Both social ills honestly are not matters of personal liberty because each has significant, discernible impacts on society as a whole. As a result, the government has to address them both, and its drug war attempts to reduce both simultaneously. I'd say it does a good job of it so far, because at least myself and the people I care about live free from the influence of violence and drugs. I can't predict the effects of using a different strategy like legalization, I think it could go either way - make matters worse, or better.
I don't think drug traffickers using sophisticated submersible technologies constitutes a security threat to the United States. They won't be utilizing these things to ship little else other than small arms, drugs and people - and they won't outsource to work with terrorists because it goes against their business interests. Cartels aren't really terrorists, they don't want to destroy average citizens, well, as long as they can make money off them. But legalize cocaine, and you motivate them to use their operations in other ways, like cooperating with terrorists for profit, and that would cause us to distribute more of our homeland defense resources across a greater number of people and organizations throughout the world - diminishing efficacy of intel, defense and response to those threats. You don't see such a risk?
Slashdot Mirror
Hypocrisy... based on what exactly? You strung some words together, but you didn't use them to make any kind of intelligible point.
Sadly the service that LulzSec is providing is that of: "Now Feds have reason for totalitarian internet laws and broad ISP log searches."
Very true. All the post-9/11 "freedom restriction acts" legislated by the US or enacted by executive order, these policies were made under provocation. They wouldn't exist if the terrorists left us alone. And this talk about taking on hackers? It wouldn't be happening if hackers would stop poking the sleeping giant. But how will the US take them on? By sweeping infringements on all citizens rights. Thank a lot for nothing, Lulzsec. You aren't protesting for freedom's sake. You're the ones ultimately to blame for the coming civil rights mess.
It's not their data. It's not their property. They don't have a right to inspect or collect or distribute someone else's data. It's not any different than someone breaking into your house, rooting through your drawers, and handing out photocopies of whatever documents they find there.
For every pro-hacker on Slashdot, these are people who will still call the police if someone breaks into their house. Will the police say, "We see no reason to pursue this; those crackheads were providing you with a free service, exposing flaws in your security measures! Lesson learned". No, and the pro-hacker would be distraught if that was the response. These are the true hypocrites. The hackers and pro-hackers value their own property, demand everyone respects their ownership rights, but then they claim universal ownership over everyone else's things.
Hahaha ... right, they're going to take down NATO! LOL
So... basically everyone here is in favor of Anonymous, and opposed to citizens/organizations/states/nations defending themselvse against cyber terrororism?
I don't know if you have been paying attention to the war on terror, but the guys with the missiles? They bomb pretty much whoever they want. Along with the collateral damage, they generally also get their target. But you get bombed. Whether you're a real terrorist or not. They just have to think "oh that's the target" and BOOM you're dust.
Now imagine (by your standards) these morons fumbling through their computer forensics data, eventually identifying YOUR computer as a source of an attack by Anonymous.
If you live in America, you're probably safe except incarceration. Live elsewhere? Remote missile defense pattern. You're gone, dude.
And anonymous may seem imposing against individuals and small companies. But nation-states take their security very seriously. They WILL retaliate. You'd have to be an 8-year old sociopath to delude yourself otherwise.
These are just kamikazes looking for their next amphetamine fix.
Haha that was about my reaction, and I agree with you entirely. The majority of my off-work hobby time involves something relating to THIS field. 60% of my personal notebooks are dedicated to it.
In particular, I am not so much interested in the models of physical intelligent machines (ANN's and so on) so much as the kind of abstract features of intelligence these capture (language, reasoning, decision making, etc.) I don't think there's a one-to-one mapping between the ability to use, computationally at least, a language - and the physical features of the machine that achieves that "behavior". I mean, I don't think the AI you mentioned depends on those physical details, much like our automobiles do the same things but don't all have internal combustion engines.
I think comp ling, and a few others fields (like those pertaining purely to natural deduction), these are the best approaches to get what you said.
Though let us be responsible as programmers and dispense with the notion of "consciousness" problem. We all know that the machine does what it's told. We will have machines that do very well to understand language in general, but map out its physical implementations, the spaces of RAM the "information" occupies, you see a bunch of disjointed, disconnected, random bits of meaningless data, whose only meaning is determined by the constraints provided by the programmer. This is quite different from the brain, where pieces of matter assert their own relationships. Machines won't be conscious, they need not be.
Along the lines of the P=NP commenter, I see the problem of, well, this task involves the computer translating natural language into internal symbolism subject to rules of valid inferential reasoning, in order to achieve the desired solution (this would be a necessary thing to do if one is to check for redundancies, contradictions, loop-holes, and so on).
That would be no problem if the computer had a bunch of WFF in some synthetic formal language with appropriate grammar and lexicon available. But it doesn't. It has natural language as input.
I realize there is tax software out there that already have turned the tax code into a series of software states. (meaning I don't think the programs refer to rules translated from tax code and draws inferences from them, I think it just transitions from one valid state to another according to hard-coded conditionals that direct program flow. I don't know if that would be better as input than the tax code in English, but it might help as a verification tools)
So my final thought is, this would be a monumental project involving some serious AI, NLP, machine learning, and heavy linguistics. A very, VERY expensive project that would take years and would likely produce seriously erroneous results.
There are people who already understand the tax code well enough that the best solution is to just start from scratch rebuilding it. It'd be cheaper, and faster.
I use bing, I get better results than google, which the first 10 pages for essentially ANY search these days are links to just computer-generated content, my keyword match being the caption text of some advertisement or worse, not anywhere on the page. Bing filters through all that and gives me the legitimate pages I'm after. Another problem with google, is it won't bother to return results for "old" web pages - even if the site has been indexed, and you can run a query with an EXACT match from within the site's text. There are sites from 2002-2004 I reference all the time in my academic work, they don't need to be updated, so why should the value of their informative content ever expire like Google thinks it should? so when I am using a computer without my bookmarks, I'll never find those sites on google.
However upon this news, I will no longer be using bing. I want facebook and facebook alone to know that I'm using facebook, if I'm logged into facebook, I don't want bing or any other site to be aware of that.
Uh, the first point, I agree with. I don't research online as a social function, and if I don't fact check my political opinions, the fault is on me, not the "filter bubble". There is no other side to "opinions", there are reasons to investigate what facts one uses to draw one's conclusions. But I think overall the guy just misses the point of the internet and the point of using it to find exactly what you want to find. If I goto the library to check out a non-fiction math book, am I obligated to "consider" other subject areas? Am I doing damage to my information acquisition attempt by ignoring history, or fantasy sci-fi for that matter?
God damn it. Politcs on Slashdot. AGAIN. Wtf??
All the Malware/Virus problems windows has that can be attributed to 3rd party programs, this means now Microsoft is vindicated? My question is, does this Flash exploit work in other browsers? Or does it specifically take advantage of something wrong with Chrome? Cos if it's the latter, then whether it's a "Flash problem" or not, it still means Chrome is the vector.
Uh, wouldn't the act of interacting with the photons that encounter the face destroy the entanglement?
Won't be long till someone figures out how to exploit this. Or at least abuse it possibly.
I'd like to see the source code and specs, constraints, etc. I've seen robots designed to evolve under certain constraints, that lead to very predictable and obvious traits based on those constraints. For example, if a robot had a goal to pass on its genes, and sharing food was the means to accomplish this, it isn't a surprise that's the result: It didn't evolve that response; it was designed to acheieve it! That's why I'd like to see the actual research. Till then I have to call bogus.
I've been alive in America in over 20 years and never had my rights violated. I certainly don't feel some overwhelming police power restricting my every thought, word, and action, anyways. I have yet to experience any retribution for dissent, I don't FEAR retribution for dissent, I don't FEEL persecuted/repressed/oppressed... In fact, the number of times per day that I'd say your awful, tyrannical and unjust government affects my life as negatively as it has somehow affected yours, is about zero. It's one thing to spend time thinking about the government, it's another to spend time feeling threatened by the government, when there is nothing to show for those thoughts, nothing to warrant such preoccupation. I guess what I'm getting at, is it sounds downright crazy to talk like the way you are.... sorry, but if you heard me rambling about the imminent danger and threat sharks pose to my life, though I enjoy life without such threats, you'd think I was crazy. And it's not far off from rambling about government taking my freedoms, though I enoy quite a reasonably free life - like I said not ONCE has due process been violated in the interest of violating my rights...
I don't know if that analogy works. Verifying he is dead, and finding him, aren't accomplished upon the same model of abstract computation mechanism. Verifying a subset of a set has a certain sum, and finding a subset within a set that has that sum, those are problems that would use the same means of computation and information processing, albeit different algorithms. Besides, the fact that P = NP doesn't mean one automatically, inherently can find the correct algorithm to go ahead and compute the answer. it may take me a long time just to freakin find the algorithm. Then, once the algorithm is executed, we'd find that computation is in polynomial time. In other words, the "problem" of P = NP doesn't assume that the method used to verify an answer is identical to the method used to compute the answer, and it doesn't assume we'd be able to get the algorithm for the latter; it would just assume that, if P = NP, we know there IS such an algorithm out there... finding it is something else altogether.
Well that's how I've been regarding the issue for years now, and a lot of my work would suffer greatly if I had such a fundamental misunderstanding here...
btw, I am holding out that P = NP.
Slashdot, this headline, the comment, and the article are not about the Internet; or some general impact technology has had on society; this is not news for nerds. It is a political piece about the behavior of birthers, with the greater implication that conservatives/right-wingers have a distorted view of reality and are willing to accept misinformation instead of facts. That's what it's about, plain and simple, and obviously so.
Slashdot, I can go elsewhere for my politics. I come here to get news that is NOT political. But seems every other day or so, there is some thinly veiled political article being linked here. Plus, the comments section just explodes when you do that. This is becoming another ridiculous site like Fark. Can we knock it off already?
Same here. A few piles, and a mail basket (where other items like remotes, ipods and wallets often randomly get tossed in), and a drawer in my dresser where all my documents (receipts, paid bills, billing statements, etc) go in, obviously very unsorted. I am ok with that system because I know I DEFINITELY have every document in that drawer should I need it, and I don't mind spending the hour it takes to find it, since I've only ever had to bring up past documents maybe once or twice a year since I was 16. The searching process also is the purging process.
So far it's worked out that spending the one-two hours a year finding documents saves me MORE time than implementing an organized solution! It takes 30 seconds to file something in a sorted manner, and 30 seconds to find it. I'd say I "file" an average of more than 60 documents a year, so that works out to spending more than an hour a year organizing files... and then when you have to purge old documents, you have to go through each category rather than throw them out as you encounter them, so you spend more than THAT, whenever you purge. just think about it. :)
Ironically, what I *do* file in a very organized information is warranty information and instruction manuals for things like appliances, software licenses, electronics, even self-assembly furniture. You never know when you have to re-order a rare part or send out a repair order and so on, that kind of stuff can't afford to be misplaced or disorganized.
I have no idea what I'm doing wrong, but I somehow manage to "modify" files in Windows XP and Vista, without modifying them. So searching for files across the file system turns up a lot of unwanted nonsense.
Meanwhile, Windows Search (formerly Indexing Service) often inexplicably omits entires that I already know should and would belong in the list
I've written my own tool to get around this ... didn't think to look for an existing product. What a waste of Christmas break.
For some time around here, Slashdot user's general attitude seems to be that it's OK to violate patents. I guess that stems from the FOSS mentality, but just because you're willing to give your work away, doesn't mean you should expect everyone else to do the same. You have to allow that other people value their time and work in different ways than you value yourrs. And, just because you think it's not immoral to violate patents, doesn't mean it's immoral to enforce them. Someone steals your car, I'm sure you'll call the police.
B&N argument is terrible. Patents don't need marketed products to be valid. What about the "non-essential" features MS targets? Well, if one's product includes a feature that violates a patent, Microsoft won't claim the entire product violates it - they will say just THAT feature violates it. Unfortunately that means the product incorporating, or relying on it, can't exist without modification and compensation to MS.
Point Number 9? Microsoft and Nokia planned to enforce their patents and litigate patent violaters? Clearly that demonstratably invalidates Microsoft's right to pursue those cases. "Hey, why don't we both just start going after patent infringement cases?" That's illegal? I doubt it. Anyways, now I know, if police departments ever openly discuss intentions and PLAN to catch DUI offenders, well that's just predatory and any resulting arrests and convictions should just be dismissed.
Microsoft's brief quote was priceless. The issues isn't whether Microsft is over-doing it with the patent thing. The problem is that companies keep prompting them to litigate because companies keep infringing on their patents. If patent holders should not take legal recourse to stop such incidents, then exactly what IS the purpose of a patent, anyways?
What is the probability you'd be in a situation professionally where you had enough time to boot up a laptop, install the relevant software, assume you already know how to use it, and do something productive with it and not get fired?
Solving simple differential equations or linear algebra in a pinch is exactly why I keep my calculator. The same calculator I used in school many moons ago. I've used Matlab and Mathematica, and can be moderately productive with them. But I'll always stick to my trust TI-89 for its utility and consistently error-free operation.
For me its the same thing as having a PC instead of a TV. Yeah, it works. But the startup cost (in time) and maintenance is non-negligible.
Everything here is how I feel. Also, I am decent in math, a software programmer, who is young and I'm no luddite. If you need something beyond a scientific calculator or phone app calculator, chances are you need functionality a graphing calculator provides. It's much more productive and reliable to keep one handy and use it whenever possible than using math software to do the same thing.
Honestly given ten seconds of pondering, it should easily make sense. Seems to me the anti-gc crowd are just on about superiority complex of mathematical ability and/or utilization of lesser known math tools.
1) Near universal standardization. Text books and labs across dozens of disciplines rely on common graphing calculators, as do instructors. The industry invested on this tech and no one wants to re-write the curriculum to support alternative tech. Most calculators do most tasks the same way; it's standard. Also, the education hardly relies on functionality greater than what GC provide, so why go elsewhere? and the educators don't have to worry about who has Windows/Linux/etc or who has which software or who can afford to pay the extra $100 ... or who didn't download a virus that crippled their system and prevented their math software from loading, so on and so forth. It makes sense to package these functions in an isolated, portable, dedicated calculating machine which gives consistent and predictable results! Additionally, because of the standardization, everyone knows how to use these things, and the learning curve is negligible for just about anyone.
2) Cost. Yes, more expensive devices can offer superior calculating power. But the educational needs are well-met by the GC, so going the distance and paying more makes absolutely no sense. Plus, as every student knows, GC's are VERY recyclable and the recovery of cost is normally as much as 75% ! Try selling your netbook at the end of the semester, see how far that gets you.
3) Ease of Use. The OP suggested students and educators, perhaps professionals, rely too much on GC tech, then suggested using even more sophisticated math software as a replacement? Forget that learning curve! And what about portability, battery life? I can pack up my calculator and go anywhere with it, very easily. The thing is superior to any other alternative on this point alone.
4) Dedicated device. This kind of overlaps in what I've mentioned before, but it's a very important point. The GC is dedicated to one of a handful of purposes. Replacing it with a multi-purpose machine, and the latter becomes more valuable to me as it suits other important uses. Storing music, running other software, all this interferes with the "focus" afforded by simply having a GC next to my textbook - I learn less effectively! Also, running calculations are not likely to be interrupted or erroneous on the GC as they are on the other devices (e.g. netbook) due to software flaws, machine crashes (i.e. iTunes freezes up!) and so on. I lose or damage my netbook, and replacement cost is prohibitive; whereas a used cheap GC is very easy to find these days. Hell, I keep ROM backups and emulation software of my GC's for just that reason. Also, who is going to lend out a netbook? Who is going to study group around a desktop PC or pass around a heavy laptop low on battery life among eight other friends in the study hall? I've loaned out my GC's dozens of times, and expect just about everyone to have one somewhere, so study group is way easier, and at work we each have one and that's so much better than "let's go to my office and load up X math software"
5) Dedicated device. Hate to over-emphasize, but it's important. I use my GC to solve all kinds of random problems in a flash, you know little debates you get at work over whose algorithm is more efficient, where a quick visual is crucial. Explaining to colleagues that their mess of a word problem is just a system of equations, that a solution exists or can easily be obtained? GC does it in five minutes.
As violent as the drug trade is now, think how much more violent it would become as the market for illicit drugs shrinks. Your average cartel foot soldier is uneducated and comes from poor areas. He isn't going to want to go back to the old neighborhood and make a couple of bucks a month when he is now used to making a couple thousand. These guys have money, power, and status. When these things are threatened, people will go to extraordinary lengths to keep it. Think Iraq 2003. You have a bunch of guys with guns who no longer have a job or the status that came with it. Legalize drugs and these guys won't go legit; the profit margins would be way too small with all the fees, licenses, and import duties. They will start fighting over what little drug trade is left, and it will be ten times as violent as it is now if we are lucky.
Yep, this happened in my area. Two examples. 1) "Medical" weed dispensary was established, and not taxed by the county. So high quality drugs that could compete price-wise with the gangs (gangs can always out-compete taxed weed). The gangs lowered the cost and increased quality, but also became aggressive and violent as they competed among themselves. Then to offset lowered profit margins, they started dabbling in pharma's and ecstacy - the former of which used to be the domain of non-threatening college kids, the latter of which was virtually unheard of in the area. Now it's a bigger problem than ever, thanks to legalized weed.
2) They took down all the under-funded meth labs local here, which produced cheap and poor quality meth (hence the target market was small). To compensate, the cartels shipped in high quality meth, and drug use went up with the availability, and local police lost the ability to manage the trade at all. Employment rates plummeted over the last five years, school drop-outs soared as kids got hooked and schools encountered the presence of cocaine and meth for the first time since the early 1990's. We lost a boettcher awarded student to cocaine! Gang violence and presence has increased, and now we have a type of taxpayer-funded swat team here we never needed more - all of these consequences are burdens on the normal peaceful citizen in so many regrettable, tragic and obviously preventable ways.
These examples illustrate that if you disrupt the profit margins of criminal organizations, the consequences CAN be dire, no matter how your "best interests" in the community, liberal or conservative, happen to be.
All this talk about legalization in this thread is very confusing. All it accomplishes is to eliminate one social harm (violence) by enabling another (drug use), but I don't see strong justification that one or the other deserves less attention from police power. Both social ills honestly are not matters of personal liberty because each has significant, discernible impacts on society as a whole. As a result, the government has to address them both, and its drug war attempts to reduce both simultaneously. I'd say it does a good job of it so far, because at least myself and the people I care about live free from the influence of violence and drugs. I can't predict the effects of using a different strategy like legalization, I think it could go either way - make matters worse, or better.
I don't think drug traffickers using sophisticated submersible technologies constitutes a security threat to the United States. They won't be utilizing these things to ship little else other than small arms, drugs and people - and they won't outsource to work with terrorists because it goes against their business interests. Cartels aren't really terrorists, they don't want to destroy average citizens, well, as long as they can make money off them. But legalize cocaine, and you motivate them to use their operations in other ways, like cooperating with terrorists for profit, and that would cause us to distribute more of our homeland defense resources across a greater number of people and organizations throughout the world - diminishing efficacy of intel, defense and response to those threats. You don't see such a risk?