We wouldn't know about these cases except that they get caught.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. Cheating, by its very nature, exhibits distinctive characteristics that are easy for an expert in the subject area to spot. It is like a first year art student trying to pass off another's painting as their own who has no clue about differences in brush technique. To an expert, this is easily spotted from a mile off. This applies even in hard science fields like computer science (where I teach).
In other words, generally people who need to cheat don't know enough about the material to get away with cheating because if they did know enough then they wouldn't need to cheat. Consider that before you ever think of cheating.
Also, once you are suspected of cheating, a teacher can verbally quiz you about the material and your answers. If you didn't know enough about the material to earn that A or B, what makes you think you can convince the teacher that you know enough about the material to merit the A or a B you cheated to get.
So, yeah, it happens all over the place, but they also get caught (assuming the instructor is paying attention) all over the place. This falls under stuff you see others do but that you shouldn't "try at home".
Actually the frequency would go up not the voltage (GP got it wrong), but basically if you are putting in more energy into the wires than people are taking out, the energy has to go somewhere.
In fact, the big power outages on the east coast a few years back were due to this sort of thing. When the wrong transmission line suddenly cut out, the resulting power imbalances tweaked the AC frequency enough that safety systems started disconnecting parts of the grid to protect themselves. Those disconnects then triggered more power imbalances and the whole thing cascaded from there. (Don't get me wrong. The safety systems prevented far worse problems.)
Cool fact: The US power grid used to be required by law to average out to 60Hz over long periods of time so that wall clocks could use the frequency for keeping time. When enough drift accumulates, the power company will boost or lower their generation to get the long term average back to 60Hz. (The laws may have changed so I'm not sure they still do this.)
The electric company has no problem dealing with low total loads. The only problem is when the load is unpredictable or changes quickly. The biggest generators take a while to spin up/down. Night time tends to be a fairly predictable change though so city lights aren't really burning "free" electricity.
Maybe it is too late at night right now, but I don't see where the linked article addresses how large a skin sample has to be taken to produce enough for a blood transfusion. Could you elaborate (even if I'm "not even wrong")?
Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies. (Song of Songs 7:2, NIV)
The point in question is the meaning of the word "sharerech" (transliterated, it seems./ doesn't do Hebrew script). Most (all?) English translations translate this as "navel" as a derivative of the Hebrew word for umbilical cord. Good evidence for this translation is the use of the word in Ezekiel 16:4 where the meaning is clear from context.
Some claim that the word drives from the Arabic word for secret and thus is a woman's private parts, but the context is describing the looks of a woman dancing (see versus 6:13 "Come back, come back, O Shulammite; come back, come back, that we may gaze on you! Why would you gaze on the Shulammite as on the dance of Mahanaim?"). Thus a navel would be a more natural reference as depending on the style of dance it would be visible.
Some claim that since the sequence of body parts listed goes from feet to head (surrounding verses are of the form "Your [body part] is like [some object]") and the preceding and following body parts are the thighs and belly, then the navel is too high. However this ignores the later verse where eyes are mentioned before the nose which in turn is before the head. So despite what Wikipedia says, this argument is far from conclusive.
IANA Hebrew scholar, but you are incorrect to say it was "intentionally mistranslated". "Navel" is a perfectly reasonable translation. Or perhaps it is a pun in the original language. Of course unlike those "English puritans", modern American sensationalists would prefer the more sexually explicit version.
Think of X11 as a two part system. One's the rendering and compositing layer and the other is the network transport layer that makes it network transparent.
But can I run X with just the network half and without the code/install/memory/cpu bloat of the other half? If so then it sounds like X-network-only would be a good complement to Wayland (though so far I haven't seen anyone implement it). If not then Wayland is just increasing the complexity of the system because I'll have to run both a full X server and Wayland server.
VNC/RDP and other protocalls are MUCH faster then using X.
Prove it. Programs with vector based rendering will always be faster sending the vectors (as X does) rather than the bitmaps (as VNC does abet compressed). On the other hand a program with lots of bitmaps should send those bitmaps only once when over X, but many times over VNC.
It matters not whether it is "possible" to bolt networking onto Wayland. It matters whether networking "is" or "will be soon" in Wayland.
Imagine a future distribution where Wayland has replaced X. I won't care about whether networking "could" part of Wayland. I'll care about whether "ssh -Wayland" tunnels properly and efficiently.
The problem is that SSH can't do this on its own. Sure it could ship entire buffers from one side to the other but that is frightfully slow. In order to efficiently use the network, SSH has to be tunnelling higher level drawing command like it does with X currently. But that requires the apps to be rendering in terms of a common higher level drawing API. This is anathema to the Wayland philosophy as they want to be rendering agnostic.
Wayland "could" get great networking support. But the attitudes... er... design goals expressed by the developers tell me that isn't likely.
Yeah, but then even when both the local machine and the remote app are Wayland aware, you still fall back to X.
I can accept needing X for compatibility with old apps, but if Wayland doesn't get some network transparency then it will never be a replacement for X.
You can layer X on top of Wayland but then you may as well use X without Wayland.
The Sep 18 2010 7:31 pm post to [1] suggests designing a common network protocol on top of Wayland, but it doesn't look like the Wayland devs are going to implementing that.
In theory implementing such a protocol is easy. In practice it doesn't matter how easy it is if no one implements it or few applications use it.
Such a protocol might simply take X and subtract out the parts that Wayland takes over, but that is a good idea only if both the X protocol and the X server significantly simplify in the process. I don't know enough about either X or Wayland to know whether this is the case.
Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients
That seems to contradict you. It is from the Wayland homepage. As best I can understand Wayland moves the compositor into the server and delegates as much functionality to standard libraries (e.g. OpenGL ES).
I've never heard of Wayland before so if I've wrong please correct me. I just want to understand.
I'd reconsider requiring/allowing handguns on aircraft if someone could convince me that the probability of a stray bullet hitting something vital is high enough (like 5 or 10%, as opposed to 0.1%).
In a crowded environment like a plane, the likelyhood of hitting the wrong person is very high. Bullets come out a weird angles after passing through a body and can still be lethal. Add to that the 99% of the population who doesn't know how to properly aim a gun.
Weapons in general level the playing field (the side with more people is more likely to win an unarmed fight than an armed fight), but when the good guys (non-terrorist passengers) vastly outnumber the bad guys (attempted hijackers), levelling the playing field is a bad idea.
(Exception #1: when the terrorists already have weapons. Exception #2: when the terrorist needs to be eliminated quickly as unarmed fights are often longer than armed fights.)
As a published academic myself, I concur. I don't get a dime from my published articles so paywalls don't help me. I benefit from people hearing about, reading, being influenced by and eventually citing my work because those things lead to higher academic ratings which lead to better positions, grants, etc.
Seconded! NoScript breaks too many pages and it takes to much fiddling to figure out which scripts to allow. I'm constantly faced with broken pages that are importing javascript from a dozen different places and it's neigh impossible to figure out which ones to allow. Right now FlashBlock plus a custom AdBlock blacklist does a good job of stopping 99% of annoying adds, but as things move from Flash to HTML 5, I'm sure that will change.
It lets us compute more precise simulations faster. This helps everything from better weather predictions, to faster simulations for industrial design, to game physics engines.
Basically if you can solve X=A*B or Ax=b more quickly then you can run simulations faster. The paper shows a way to solve Ax=b faster provided A is diagonally dominant (it usually is). Here A, B and b are given, X and x are unknowns. Upper case is matrix. Lower case is vector.
In theory simulations that took days (~10^15 cycles) will now take hundreds of microseconds (~10^5 cycles). In practice, we already have techniques that usually work on "most" inputs to these types of simulations. This paper presents a technique that works on "more" inputs to those systems. (But note that their runtime, n*[log(n)]^2, is expected time and not worst case time.) The potential impact is huge but the actual impact is yet to be seen.
Disclaimer: I've published in this area before so I have some background understanding, but it's been a while and I've read only the abstract of the paper. Once I read the full paper I'll have a better idea of whether it lives up to the hype. I'm hopeful because this could be a very important result. I'm also cautious because they use an approximation algorithm (that is what the " epilon" is about) and also use expected time rather than worst case time. These factors may limit the usefulness of the algorithm.
Forbidding someone from using HTTPS is like forbidding someone from ever locking their car. It is cruel because it prevents someone from taking everyday precautions to protect themselves. It is unusual because it has nothing to do with the crime.
You have a point about it being his probation agreement so maybe legally "cruel and unusual" isn't a problem, but it still isn't right.
Similar complete failure of logic is seen in the anti stem-cells crowd, many of which will happily eat eggs, bacon or chicken, while at the same time declaring IVF and embryonic stem cell research as unacceptable attacks on the sanctity of life.
People aren't objecting to animal stem-cells, they object to the killing of a living human individual(*) that is a necessary part of embryonic stem cells. The logic is simple on the one hand killing people is wrong and if embryos are people then killing them are wrong. If there is no such prohibition against killing animals then there is no problem with eating eggs. You may think embryos are not people or may think some other list of traits qualifies an entity as something that it is wrong to kill, but that is not a failure of logic on the part of those against harvesting embryonic step cells. That is a failure on your part either to understand your opponents position or to acknowledge the differing assumptions that you both bring to the table.
It isn't a "failure of logic" when someone starting with different assumptions arrives at different conclusions. Abusing terms like that muddies the debate and makes it harder for people to honestly discuss, engage those with differing opinions and perhaps even change their own minds based on rational insight.
(*) By any scientific measure embryos are both alive and human. Their DNA is unique which makes them an individual. The central point of debate is whether that or some other list is enough to qualify one for moral personhood. (I mean person as a technical term that is not exclusive to humans.)
You don't need mystical mumbo jumbo to not want pesticides all over your fruits and vegetables.
But organic farmers do use pesticides. They limit themselves to non-synthetic pesticides so they can be organic, but those "organic" pesticides don't work as well as the newer synthetic pesticides so they actually have to spray more pesticides than a non-organic farmer.
Not wanting pesticides in your food is not a reason for a "purely scientific, rational-minded person" to prefer organic.
Numbers in general are mental constructs so your question is difficult to answer (at as you have phrased it). For example, the number "3" isn't a tangible object. Many things are modeled by the number 3 (e.g. the number of strikes to strikeout a batter, the number of cookies in a jar), but those things are only modeled by "3". They are not "3" itself.
If we rephrase your question as "Is there anything that infinity is a good model for?", then the answer is yes. For example, if you accept the idea that a perfect circle can model real things, then the ratio of the diameter to the circumference also models a real thing. Of course, this ratio is pi, which has a infinite number of non-repeating digits. Accurately modeling ballistic paths or planetary orbits essentially requires summing over infinite number of infinitely small steps (i.e. integral calculus). Taylor series expamsions have an infinite number of terms but form the foundation of modeling waveforms including video and audio compression. In computer science, modeling a recursive function or proving properties of that function often requires an infinite expansion of that function (a.k.a. co-induction). Interactive input to a program is also best modeled by assuming that sequential input is stored in an infinitely long list.
Some of these examples, may not seem like "real" infinites to you, but that is because the common notion of infinity as a "number bigger than any other number" is misleading. Infinity is a modeling tool for certain problems where we would normally like to count something (e.g. the digits in pi), but where we aren't actually allowed to stop counting (e.g. there is no last digit of pi).
(Qualification: There is a branch of logic (i.e. Finitism) that reject infinity as a usable mental model, but until you understand the difference between constructive logic and classical logic and their relation to the rule of excluded middle, you should really ignore finitism. These are doctoral level math/logic topics and for anything at a lower level than that it is actually simpler to use infinity as a mental model than to try to live without it. At that level you can choose between a number of different mental models.)
.999... is not a rational number, it's a real number.
Wrong, as the GP said:
... all numbers that have "infinite repeating decimals" are rational.
This is just like 1.0 which is a rational number. In computers the integer 1 is different than the floating point 1.0, but rational vs. real is a mathematical concept and in math 1 = 1.0.
Slashdot Mirror
We wouldn't know about these cases except that they get caught.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. Cheating, by its very nature, exhibits distinctive characteristics that are easy for an expert in the subject area to spot. It is like a first year art student trying to pass off another's painting as their own who has no clue about differences in brush technique. To an expert, this is easily spotted from a mile off. This applies even in hard science fields like computer science (where I teach).
In other words, generally people who need to cheat don't know enough about the material to get away with cheating because if they did know enough then they wouldn't need to cheat. Consider that before you ever think of cheating.
Also, once you are suspected of cheating, a teacher can verbally quiz you about the material and your answers. If you didn't know enough about the material to earn that A or B, what makes you think you can convince the teacher that you know enough about the material to merit the A or a B you cheated to get.
So, yeah, it happens all over the place, but they also get caught (assuming the instructor is paying attention) all over the place. This falls under stuff you see others do but that you shouldn't "try at home".
Actually the frequency would go up not the voltage (GP got it wrong), but basically if you are putting in more energy into the wires than people are taking out, the energy has to go somewhere.
In fact, the big power outages on the east coast a few years back were due to this sort of thing. When the wrong transmission line suddenly cut out, the resulting power imbalances tweaked the AC frequency enough that safety systems started disconnecting parts of the grid to protect themselves. Those disconnects then triggered more power imbalances and the whole thing cascaded from there. (Don't get me wrong. The safety systems prevented far worse problems.)
Cool fact: The US power grid used to be required by law to average out to 60Hz over long periods of time so that wall clocks could use the frequency for keeping time. When enough drift accumulates, the power company will boost or lower their generation to get the long term average back to 60Hz. (The laws may have changed so I'm not sure they still do this.)
The electric company has no problem dealing with low total loads. The only problem is when the load is unpredictable or changes quickly. The biggest generators take a while to spin up/down. Night time tends to be a fairly predictable change though so city lights aren't really burning "free" electricity.
Maybe it is too late at night right now, but I don't see where the linked article addresses how large a skin sample has to be taken to produce enough for a blood transfusion. Could you elaborate (even if I'm "not even wrong")?
Your navel is a rounded goblet that never lacks blended wine. Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies. (Song of Songs 7:2, NIV)
The point in question is the meaning of the word "sharerech" (transliterated, it seems ./ doesn't do Hebrew script). Most (all?) English translations translate this as "navel" as a derivative of the Hebrew word for umbilical cord. Good evidence for this translation is the use of the word in Ezekiel 16:4 where the meaning is clear from context.
Some claim that the word drives from the Arabic word for secret and thus is a woman's private parts, but the context is describing the looks of a woman dancing (see versus 6:13 "Come back, come back, O Shulammite; come back, come back, that we may gaze on you! Why would you gaze on the Shulammite as on the dance of Mahanaim?"). Thus a navel would be a more natural reference as depending on the style of dance it would be visible.
Some claim that since the sequence of body parts listed goes from feet to head (surrounding verses are of the form "Your [body part] is like [some object]") and the preceding and following body parts are the thighs and belly, then the navel is too high. However this ignores the later verse where eyes are mentioned before the nose which in turn is before the head. So despite what Wikipedia says, this argument is far from conclusive.
IANA Hebrew scholar, but you are incorrect to say it was "intentionally mistranslated". "Navel" is a perfectly reasonable translation. Or perhaps it is a pun in the original language. Of course unlike those "English puritans", modern American sensationalists would prefer the more sexually explicit version.
Think of X11 as a two part system. One's the rendering and compositing layer and the other is the network transport layer that makes it network transparent.
But can I run X with just the network half and without the code/install/memory/cpu bloat of the other half? If so then it sounds like X-network-only would be a good complement to Wayland (though so far I haven't seen anyone implement it). If not then Wayland is just increasing the complexity of the system because I'll have to run both a full X server and Wayland server.
Do you suppose writing an app directly on Wayland will be any less arcane?
Have you people used X?
Have you looked at the Wayland design? It doesn't do rendering ... at all. Wayland just does compositing.
Yes, X needs to be replaced (or so the meme goes), but Wayland is only half a replacement and in this case half is worse than none.
VNC/RDP and other protocalls are MUCH faster then using X.
Prove it. Programs with vector based rendering will always be faster sending the vectors (as X does) rather than the bitmaps (as VNC does abet compressed). On the other hand a program with lots of bitmaps should send those bitmaps only once when over X, but many times over VNC.
It matters not whether it is "possible" to bolt networking onto Wayland. It matters whether networking "is" or "will be soon" in Wayland.
Imagine a future distribution where Wayland has replaced X. I won't care about whether networking "could" part of Wayland. I'll care about whether "ssh -Wayland" tunnels properly and efficiently.
The problem is that SSH can't do this on its own. Sure it could ship entire buffers from one side to the other but that is frightfully slow. In order to efficiently use the network, SSH has to be tunnelling higher level drawing command like it does with X currently. But that requires the apps to be rendering in terms of a common higher level drawing API. This is anathema to the Wayland philosophy as they want to be rendering agnostic.
Wayland "could" get great networking support. But the attitudes ... er ... design goals expressed by the developers tell me that isn't likely.
Yeah, but then even when both the local machine and the remote app are Wayland aware, you still fall back to X.
I can accept needing X for compatibility with old apps, but if Wayland doesn't get some network transparency then it will never be a replacement for X.
Wayland does not do tunnelling (see [1]).
You can layer X on top of Wayland but then you may as well use X without Wayland.
The Sep 18 2010 7:31 pm post to [1] suggests designing a common network protocol on top of Wayland, but it doesn't look like the Wayland devs are going to implementing that.
In theory implementing such a protocol is easy. In practice it doesn't matter how easy it is if no one implements it or few applications use it.
Such a protocol might simply take X and subtract out the parts that Wayland takes over, but that is a good idea only if both the X protocol and the X server significantly simplify in the process. I don't know enough about either X or Wayland to know whether this is the case.
[1] http://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/browse_thread/thread/e7ed0c0118fb31b4
Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients
That seems to contradict you. It is from the Wayland homepage. As best I can understand Wayland moves the compositor into the server and delegates as much functionality to standard libraries (e.g. OpenGL ES).
I've never heard of Wayland before so if I've wrong please correct me. I just want to understand.
I'd reconsider requiring/allowing handguns on aircraft if someone could convince me that the probability of a stray bullet hitting something vital is high enough (like 5 or 10%, as opposed to 0.1%).
In a crowded environment like a plane, the likelyhood of hitting the wrong person is very high. Bullets come out a weird angles after passing through a body and can still be lethal. Add to that the 99% of the population who doesn't know how to properly aim a gun.
Weapons in general level the playing field (the side with more people is more likely to win an unarmed fight than an armed fight), but when the good guys (non-terrorist passengers) vastly outnumber the bad guys (attempted hijackers), levelling the playing field is a bad idea.
(Exception #1: when the terrorists already have weapons. Exception #2: when the terrorist needs to be eliminated quickly as unarmed fights are often longer than armed fights.)
As a published academic myself, I concur. I don't get a dime from my published articles so paywalls don't help me. I benefit from people hearing about, reading, being influenced by and eventually citing my work because those things lead to higher academic ratings which lead to better positions, grants, etc.
A human speaking C who says there are 6 words in the sentence is going to cause memory corruption. The last word is at index 6 but there are 7 words.
Seconded! NoScript breaks too many pages and it takes to much fiddling to figure out which scripts to allow. I'm constantly faced with broken pages that are importing javascript from a dozen different places and it's neigh impossible to figure out which ones to allow. Right now FlashBlock plus a custom AdBlock blacklist does a good job of stopping 99% of annoying adds, but as things move from Flash to HTML 5, I'm sure that will change.
It lets us compute more precise simulations faster. This helps everything from better weather predictions, to faster simulations for industrial design, to game physics engines.
Basically if you can solve X=A*B or Ax=b more quickly then you can run simulations faster. The paper shows a way to solve Ax=b faster provided A is diagonally dominant (it usually is). Here A, B and b are given, X and x are unknowns. Upper case is matrix. Lower case is vector.
In theory simulations that took days (~10^15 cycles) will now take hundreds of microseconds (~10^5 cycles). In practice, we already have techniques that usually work on "most" inputs to these types of simulations. This paper presents a technique that works on "more" inputs to those systems. (But note that their runtime, n*[log(n)]^2, is expected time and not worst case time.) The potential impact is huge but the actual impact is yet to be seen.
Disclaimer: I've published in this area before so I have some background understanding, but it's been a while and I've read only the abstract of the paper. Once I read the full paper I'll have a better idea of whether it lives up to the hype. I'm hopeful because this could be a very important result. I'm also cautious because they use an approximation algorithm (that is what the " epilon" is about) and also use expected time rather than worst case time. These factors may limit the usefulness of the algorithm.
How is it cruel and unusual?
Forbidding someone from using HTTPS is like forbidding someone from ever locking their car. It is cruel because it prevents someone from taking everyday precautions to protect themselves. It is unusual because it has nothing to do with the crime.
You have a point about it being his probation agreement so maybe legally "cruel and unusual" isn't a problem, but it still isn't right.
Similar complete failure of logic is seen in the anti stem-cells crowd, many of which will happily eat eggs, bacon or chicken, while at the same time declaring IVF and embryonic stem cell research as unacceptable attacks on the sanctity of life.
People aren't objecting to animal stem-cells, they object to the killing of a living human individual(*) that is a necessary part of embryonic stem cells. The logic is simple on the one hand killing people is wrong and if embryos are people then killing them are wrong. If there is no such prohibition against killing animals then there is no problem with eating eggs. You may think embryos are not people or may think some other list of traits qualifies an entity as something that it is wrong to kill, but that is not a failure of logic on the part of those against harvesting embryonic step cells. That is a failure on your part either to understand your opponents position or to acknowledge the differing assumptions that you both bring to the table.
It isn't a "failure of logic" when someone starting with different assumptions arrives at different conclusions. Abusing terms like that muddies the debate and makes it harder for people to honestly discuss, engage those with differing opinions and perhaps even change their own minds based on rational insight.
(*) By any scientific measure embryos are both alive and human. Their DNA is unique which makes them an individual. The central point of debate is whether that or some other list is enough to qualify one for moral personhood. (I mean person as a technical term that is not exclusive to humans.)
You don't need mystical mumbo jumbo to not want pesticides all over your fruits and vegetables.
But organic farmers do use pesticides. They limit themselves to non-synthetic pesticides so they can be organic, but those "organic" pesticides don't work as well as the newer synthetic pesticides so they actually have to spray more pesticides than a non-organic farmer.
Not wanting pesticides in your food is not a reason for a "purely scientific, rational-minded person" to prefer organic.
Numbers in general are mental constructs so your question is difficult to answer (at as you have phrased it). For example, the number "3" isn't a tangible object. Many things are modeled by the number 3 (e.g. the number of strikes to strikeout a batter, the number of cookies in a jar), but those things are only modeled by "3". They are not "3" itself.
If we rephrase your question as "Is there anything that infinity is a good model for?", then the answer is yes. For example, if you accept the idea that a perfect circle can model real things, then the ratio of the diameter to the circumference also models a real thing. Of course, this ratio is pi, which has a infinite number of non-repeating digits. Accurately modeling ballistic paths or planetary orbits essentially requires summing over infinite number of infinitely small steps (i.e. integral calculus). Taylor series expamsions have an infinite number of terms but form the foundation of modeling waveforms including video and audio compression. In computer science, modeling a recursive function or proving properties of that function often requires an infinite expansion of that function (a.k.a. co-induction). Interactive input to a program is also best modeled by assuming that sequential input is stored in an infinitely long list.
Some of these examples, may not seem like "real" infinites to you, but that is because the common notion of infinity as a "number bigger than any other number" is misleading. Infinity is a modeling tool for certain problems where we would normally like to count something (e.g. the digits in pi), but where we aren't actually allowed to stop counting (e.g. there is no last digit of pi).
(Qualification: There is a branch of logic (i.e. Finitism) that reject infinity as a usable mental model, but until you understand the difference between constructive logic and classical logic and their relation to the rule of excluded middle, you should really ignore finitism. These are doctoral level math/logic topics and for anything at a lower level than that it is actually simpler to use infinity as a mental model than to try to live without it. At that level you can choose between a number of different mental models.)
.999... is not a rational number, it's a real number.
Wrong, as the GP said:
... all numbers that have "infinite repeating decimals" are rational.
This is just like 1.0 which is a rational number. In computers the integer 1 is different than the floating point 1.0, but rational vs. real is a mathematical concept and in math 1 = 1.0.
So what do you go hunting with?
So Intel should have "leaked" before the hackers got to it.