That's like saying an infinitely large container is guaranteed to contain a corvette. It's certainly big enough to contain one, but if only has air in it, there will be no corvette. Likewise, infinite space, and infinite mass, and infinite energy does not actually mean infinite possibilities.
1) Life has already arisen, so it's possible.
2) The argument is based on the cosmological principle. If the Universe is infinite and everywhere has the general properties that gave life to us, and our creation is based on random variation, then it is possible everywhere and will occur an infinite number of times.
Of course, the cosmological principle could be wrong, and/or space may not be infinite. There are lots of uncertainties, some that may never be resolved, so this is mostly just an academic discussion.
But what's more mind boggling than that, there's no way to guarantee that series contains any particular number. That's because a real number could be anything including pi, e or any number we can conceive of. If life arises out of an incredibly specific set of events, the same way pi is a very specific ratio, even in an infinite universe it could arise only once, or only a few times, or maybe not at all. There's just no way to know.
Sorry, this doesn't make any sense. We're not talking about real numbers, we're talking about events that happen on a crude scale. Any event that happened once is possible and can happen again, and will happen again given an infinite amount of chances.
If you want to talk about real numbers, then the probability of getting any particular real number when randomly picking from a continuous distribution is zero. That's why you specify intervals for continuous distributions.
I'd also add Bayesian analysis sucks when it comes to these all or nothing analysis with such a small sample size.
Pretty much all statistics suck when you have a such a small sample size. All the paper is doing is making the argument that high estimates for the probability of life are based on assumptions, or beliefs, by the scientists. They use a Bayesian model because that's what they are trying to isolate.
I hope that one day you can experience the love and connection that I feel.
You realize that feeling isn't special, right? People of different religions or even just people that like to meditate all lay claim to that feeling. It's like Santa Claus for adults.
And it doesn't matter if the number could be arbitrarily large, as you contend, because the probability could still be small enough that there is only one planet with life, since you don't know what it is.
If the universe is actually infinite, which is what current cosmology suggests, and the probability of life arising is a purely random event, then by probability life has arisen an infinite number of times, and there's even somebody typing this very same comment out an infinite number of times.
We would find that the "resilient" inherit the earth.( Early church wanted meek parishioners as they are easier to control than resilient ones) [..] So, my longwinded point is, Get your hands on the original and ignore annotations of the politically motivated.
OK, so did you do that for "meek"? Because I can find no reference to "resilient". Alternatives I've seen mentioned are "gentle" and "humble", which would fit in with the surrounding text.
But if you're talking about the Bible, in particular the New Testament, you have to realize even that is second-hand, third-hand, or more removed from the source.
Scattered throughout are warnings for man to follow Gods governance rather than mans
Now there's a reference to the supposed original source, "God", yet for some reason he doesn't directly talk to most people, and prefers instead to send conflicting messengers of dubious veracity.
Here's the real deal: the purpose is to slow down initial piracy enough to make a profit from people who would choose the pirated, free version if they can find it.
will I not be able to find a pirated version of? I just did a test for "The Witness", which was released 9 days ago, and found it no problem.
I suspect the real reason for DRM is to "keep the honest people honest", in that by putting up some token security measures you're preventing them from casually copying.
If the Golden Rule were really common sense, we wouldn't have to be reminded of it by every religious teacher or moral philosopher that has come along in history.
I remember getting into a lunchtime conversation with a coworker, and he asked why people should be good, and talked about how lions don't apologize for their actions.
Then there's the religious zealots who think we need a "God" to even have morality. The idea that somebody would act out of empathy instead of fear of punishment just seems alien to them. Really, it's like they have the morality of self-centered children.
You might be right. However, I looked for previous change pages on the web site, but couldn't find them. If you had better examples you should have sent them. Don't blame me for your crappy examples.
So in other words, you choose to ignore the evidence as "crappy examples". It just so happens that this month's index was changed based on a user suggestion that caused a language to jump 10 ranks (how convenient for me, or maybe inconvenient for you), and there's a large table with groupings and exceptions and an invitation to send them suggestions for improvements, yet somehow the onus is still on me to provide even more evidence. I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make them drink, especially when they are biased because they are defending a position.
We all agree that the signal is crappy. My only objection was with the statement that was "absolutely meaningless".
You said more than that. You said, "since the methodology is self-consistent, a change in relative position even in this flawed ranking is with very high probability paralleled by a move (though not necessarily a swap) in the actual ranking in the actual index with the proper absolute rankings."
Yet the introduction of a large class of false positives negates that, in addition to all the "self-consistency" problems.
You need to argue why those changes are significant enough to matter. It's not like search engines one day give one count of popularity and the next a completely different one. So why should we believe that regular maintenance would radically change the results, particularly in ways that affect the ranking?
Because there's a prominent example listed right on their main page:
"What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?
A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology. They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after this incident."
The lesson here is, read the actual science , not the advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers.
The problem with reading the actual science is that you get bogged down in details, the kind of details they pay scientists to deal with as a full time job. The point of Working Group 2 is to "assesses the scientific, technical, environmental, economic and social aspects of the vulnerability (sensitivity and adaptability) to climate change of, and the negative and positive consequences for, ecological systems, socio-economic sectors and human health, with an emphasis on regional sectoral and cross-sectoral issues."
In other words, it was their job to read the actual science and make sense of it for policy makers, and not to have a hidden agenda or be incompetent in doing so. It gets even worse when a leading climate scientist like Phil Jones publishes a scientifically fraudulent graph on the cover of a WMO report.
You're moving the goalposts, as you said "It is my understanding that they simply search for "X programming" for all X values in the set of programming languages." [emphasis mine]
They routinely go beyond that, and what they do changes from time to time with material impact. That's a simple statement of fact, so you cannot naively rely on TIOBE to be self-consistent.
The other problems, which you haven't addressed are:
"add rank inputs like new search engines"
"the search engines underneath them change their methods over time, and these don't necessarily correspond to what TIOBE is trying to measure -- language popularity."
"have "a manually determined confidence factor" that they apply"
Also, even if they were self-consistent, that doesn't change the fact that their measurements are crude and prone to false positives for a language named "C". For example, I don't see any exceptions for C, yet if I do a Google search for "C programming" and I click deep enough I see a hit for Objective-C. The rise in the popularity of Objective-C alone could be inflating C's rank.
Maybe you don't see it because you've got blinders on? This is what you said: "It is my understanding that they simply search for "X programming" for all X values in the set of programming languages."
And I pointed to a specific example where they did something different from one month to another, and how it caused the ranking for a language to jump 10 positions. I'm not interested in arguing with people that won't admit the most basic errors in their positions.
It is my understanding that they simply search for "X programming" for all X values in the set of programming languages. Thus the self-consistency claim. You are saying that they change that?
Yes, they do. Read the definition page. There's even a current example on the main page, under "This Month's Changes in the Index":
"Andrew Gerrand suggested to add "golang" to the Go programming language. This month Go gained 10 positions from #72 to #62."
For one, since the methodology is self-consistent, a change in relative position even in this flawed ranking is with very high probability paralleled by a move (though not necessarily a swap) in the actual ranking in the actual index with the proper absolute rankings.
You overplayed your hand as well, because TIOBE is not self-consistent. TIOBE rankings can go through wild swings from month to month as they change their methodologies. They do things like add or subtract words, add rank inputs like new search engines, and have "a manually determined confidence factor" that they apply. In addition, the search engines underneath them change their methods over time, and these don't necessarily correspond to what TIOBE is trying to measure -- language popularity.
This story and TIOBE watching in general is ridiculous. The idea that the numbers from several years apart can be meaningfully compared is a fallacy -- unless you're willing to undertake a serious study of the numbers and how they were derived, including the underlying search engines.
They'd have to convince all their industry partners, too, and deal with all the existing applications already written for Android. Worst comes to worst, they're going to pay Oracle a whopping fine and negotiate a license.
Uh, no, yourself. First you ignored the meat of his post, which thoroughly demolished your original post. Second, what he said was correct: the asymptotic complexity is defined by how the algorithm behaves as n goes to infinity. Technically, it doesn't matter whether n is small or large.
An algorithm can be impractically inefficient to the point of "intractable" and still have a better asymptotic complexity than a more practical one. That's the problem with over-relying on big-O behavior.
Another interesting fact about low-level languages is that it is much more difficult for bugs to hide. Writing correct code is nearly the same as writing understandable code.
That's nonsense, not a "fact". Even readable code can have a simple off-by-one error that results in memory corruption that can be hard to track down.
The only things that can go wrong (huge functions, tons of global variables, etc.) could just as well go wrong in a higher level language.
Do you actually code in C or C++? There are *many* places in these languages where "things go wrong" that they don't in higher level languages.
It's OK in that it conveys the sense of salt being valuable, where the phrase "not worth his salt" derived its meaning, but his usage was unidiomatic and mixed up with another idiomatic phrase. It's even worse that in today's world salt is very cheap by weight, yet gold is still very valuable by weight, so I dispute that his usage was "fine".
Those younger than forty will probably live to see the fall of the Big Bang Theory.
Even if it turns out that many phenomena have electric-plasma origins, I don't think the most basic premise of the big bang is going to go away. Red-shifted galaxies provide strong evidence that galaxies have been moving away, and if you rewind the process you're left with a big bang.
If, however, this were Microsoft or Apple, they would not offer such high amounts as bounties as they would soon go bankrupt from the financial burden of paying out these bounties.
Patently ridiculous. Both Apple and Microsoft make billions of dollars per year in profits. They could pay $100,000 per bounty and only owe $100 million for 1,000 security bugs.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like saying an infinitely large container is guaranteed to contain a corvette. It's certainly big enough to contain one, but if only has air in it, there will be no corvette. Likewise, infinite space, and infinite mass, and infinite energy does not actually mean infinite possibilities.
1) Life has already arisen, so it's possible.
2) The argument is based on the cosmological principle. If the Universe is infinite and everywhere has the general properties that gave life to us, and our creation is based on random variation, then it is possible everywhere and will occur an infinite number of times.
Of course, the cosmological principle could be wrong, and/or space may not be infinite. There are lots of uncertainties, some that may never be resolved, so this is mostly just an academic discussion.
But what's more mind boggling than that, there's no way to guarantee that series contains any particular number. That's because a real number could be anything including pi, e or any number we can conceive of. If life arises out of an incredibly specific set of events, the same way pi is a very specific ratio, even in an infinite universe it could arise only once, or only a few times, or maybe not at all. There's just no way to know.
Sorry, this doesn't make any sense. We're not talking about real numbers, we're talking about events that happen on a crude scale. Any event that happened once is possible and can happen again, and will happen again given an infinite amount of chances.
If you want to talk about real numbers, then the probability of getting any particular real number when randomly picking from a continuous distribution is zero. That's why you specify intervals for continuous distributions.
I'd also add Bayesian analysis sucks when it comes to these all or nothing analysis with such a small sample size.
Pretty much all statistics suck when you have a such a small sample size. All the paper is doing is making the argument that high estimates for the probability of life are based on assumptions, or beliefs, by the scientists. They use a Bayesian model because that's what they are trying to isolate.
Besides, you will have all the proof you need that man is not alone around 2030. End of discussion.
Oh, great. So we'll all just be quiet until then, oh wise one and powerful one. *snort*
I'm quite convinced that a lot of people have pet theories about god(s), and they are worth what I pay for them.
I hope that one day you can experience the love and connection that I feel.
You realize that feeling isn't special, right? People of different religions or even just people that like to meditate all lay claim to that feeling. It's like Santa Claus for adults.
You do realize that it is possible to be cynical without being an asshole right?
This coming from the guy who in his very next post says, "WRONG - Strike 3! You are out of there!" Very mature and civil of you.
And it doesn't matter if the number could be arbitrarily large, as you contend, because the probability could still be small enough that there is only one planet with life, since you don't know what it is.
If the universe is actually infinite, which is what current cosmology suggests, and the probability of life arising is a purely random event, then by probability life has arisen an infinite number of times, and there's even somebody typing this very same comment out an infinite number of times.
This is of course all just guesses on my part :)
What you're discussing is the Fermi paradox.
We would find that the "resilient" inherit the earth.( Early church wanted meek parishioners as they are easier to control than resilient ones) [..] So, my longwinded point is, Get your hands on the original and ignore annotations of the politically motivated.
OK, so did you do that for "meek"? Because I can find no reference to "resilient". Alternatives I've seen mentioned are "gentle" and "humble", which would fit in with the surrounding text.
But if you're talking about the Bible, in particular the New Testament, you have to realize even that is second-hand, third-hand, or more removed from the source.
Scattered throughout are warnings for man to follow Gods governance rather than mans
Now there's a reference to the supposed original source, "God", yet for some reason he doesn't directly talk to most people, and prefers instead to send conflicting messengers of dubious veracity.
Here's the real deal: the purpose is to slow down initial piracy enough to make a profit from people who would choose the pirated, free version if they can find it.
Really? So which book from:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooks/new-releases.asp
will I not be able to find a pirated version of? I just did a test for "The Witness", which was released 9 days ago, and found it no problem.
I suspect the real reason for DRM is to "keep the honest people honest", in that by putting up some token security measures you're preventing them from casually copying.
If the Golden Rule were really common sense, we wouldn't have to be reminded of it by every religious teacher or moral philosopher that has come along in history.
I remember getting into a lunchtime conversation with a coworker, and he asked why people should be good, and talked about how lions don't apologize for their actions.
Then there's the religious zealots who think we need a "God" to even have morality. The idea that somebody would act out of empathy instead of fear of punishment just seems alien to them. Really, it's like they have the morality of self-centered children.
You might be right. However, I looked for previous change pages on the web site, but couldn't find them. If you had better examples you should have sent them. Don't blame me for your crappy examples.
So in other words, you choose to ignore the evidence as "crappy examples". It just so happens that this month's index was changed based on a user suggestion that caused a language to jump 10 ranks (how convenient for me, or maybe inconvenient for you), and there's a large table with groupings and exceptions and an invitation to send them suggestions for improvements, yet somehow the onus is still on me to provide even more evidence. I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make them drink, especially when they are biased because they are defending a position.
We all agree that the signal is crappy. My only objection was with the statement that was "absolutely meaningless".
You said more than that. You said, "since the methodology is self-consistent, a change in relative position even in this flawed ranking is with very high probability paralleled by a move (though not necessarily a swap) in the actual ranking in the actual index with the proper absolute rankings."
Yet the introduction of a large class of false positives negates that, in addition to all the "self-consistency" problems.
You need to argue why those changes are significant enough to matter. It's not like search engines one day give one count of popularity and the next a completely different one. So why should we believe that regular maintenance would radically change the results, particularly in ways that affect the ranking?
Because there's a prominent example listed right on their main page:
"What happened to Java in April 2004? Did you change your methodology?
A: No, we did not change our methodology at that time. Google changed its methodology. They performed a general sweep action to get rid of all kinds of web sites that had been pushed up. As a consequence, there was a huge drop for languages such as Java and C++. In order to minimize such fluctuations in the future, we added two more search engines (MSN and Yahoo) a few months after this incident."
This is my last reply.
The lesson here is, read the actual science , not the advocates or deniers or bloggers or politicians or special interest groups or popularizers.
The problem with reading the actual science is that you get bogged down in details, the kind of details they pay scientists to deal with as a full time job. The point of Working Group 2 is to "assesses the scientific, technical, environmental, economic and social aspects of the vulnerability (sensitivity and adaptability) to climate change of, and the negative and positive consequences for, ecological systems, socio-economic sectors and human health, with an emphasis on regional sectoral and cross-sectoral issues."
In other words, it was their job to read the actual science and make sense of it for policy makers, and not to have a hidden agenda or be incompetent in doing so. It gets even worse when a leading climate scientist like Phil Jones publishes a scientifically fraudulent graph on the cover of a WMO report.
Critique of tired light: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm
It's possible that the big bang theory has it wrong about galactic redshift, but that seems more like wishful thinking than observational data.
You're moving the goalposts, as you said "It is my understanding that they simply search for "X programming" for all X values in the set of programming languages." [emphasis mine]
They routinely go beyond that, and what they do changes from time to time with material impact. That's a simple statement of fact, so you cannot naively rely on TIOBE to be self-consistent.
The other problems, which you haven't addressed are:
Also, even if they were self-consistent, that doesn't change the fact that their measurements are crude and prone to false positives for a language named "C". For example, I don't see any exceptions for C, yet if I do a Google search for "C programming" and I click deep enough I see a hit for Objective-C. The rise in the popularity of Objective-C alone could be inflating C's rank.
Couldn't even bother to read the first paragraph of the article, eh?
THIS... IS... SLASHDOT!
Maybe you don't see it because you've got blinders on? This is what you said: "It is my understanding that they simply search for "X programming" for all X values in the set of programming languages."
And I pointed to a specific example where they did something different from one month to another, and how it caused the ranking for a language to jump 10 positions. I'm not interested in arguing with people that won't admit the most basic errors in their positions.
It is my understanding that they simply search for "X programming" for all X values in the set of programming languages. Thus the self-consistency claim. You are saying that they change that?
Yes, they do. Read the definition page. There's even a current example on the main page, under "This Month's Changes in the Index":
"Andrew Gerrand suggested to add "golang" to the Go programming language. This month Go gained 10 positions from #72 to #62."
For one, since the methodology is self-consistent, a change in relative position even in this flawed ranking is with very high probability paralleled by a move (though not necessarily a swap) in the actual ranking in the actual index with the proper absolute rankings.
You overplayed your hand as well, because TIOBE is not self-consistent. TIOBE rankings can go through wild swings from month to month as they change their methodologies. They do things like add or subtract words, add rank inputs like new search engines, and have "a manually determined confidence factor" that they apply. In addition, the search engines underneath them change their methods over time, and these don't necessarily correspond to what TIOBE is trying to measure -- language popularity.
This story and TIOBE watching in general is ridiculous. The idea that the numbers from several years apart can be meaningfully compared is a fallacy -- unless you're willing to undertake a serious study of the numbers and how they were derived, including the underlying search engines.
They'd have to convince all their industry partners, too, and deal with all the existing applications already written for Android. Worst comes to worst, they're going to pay Oracle a whopping fine and negotiate a license.
Uh, no, yourself. First you ignored the meat of his post, which thoroughly demolished your original post. Second, what he said was correct: the asymptotic complexity is defined by how the algorithm behaves as n goes to infinity. Technically, it doesn't matter whether n is small or large.
An algorithm can be impractically inefficient to the point of "intractable" and still have a better asymptotic complexity than a more practical one. That's the problem with over-relying on big-O behavior.
Another interesting fact about low-level languages is that it is much more difficult for bugs to hide. Writing correct code is nearly the same as writing understandable code.
That's nonsense, not a "fact". Even readable code can have a simple off-by-one error that results in memory corruption that can be hard to track down.
The only things that can go wrong (huge functions, tons of global variables, etc.) could just as well go wrong in a higher level language.
Do you actually code in C or C++? There are *many* places in these languages where "things go wrong" that they don't in higher level languages.
It's OK in that it conveys the sense of salt being valuable, where the phrase "not worth his salt" derived its meaning, but his usage was unidiomatic and mixed up with another idiomatic phrase. It's even worse that in today's world salt is very cheap by weight, yet gold is still very valuable by weight, so I dispute that his usage was "fine".
Those younger than forty will probably live to see the fall of the Big Bang Theory.
Even if it turns out that many phenomena have electric-plasma origins, I don't think the most basic premise of the big bang is going to go away. Red-shifted galaxies provide strong evidence that galaxies have been moving away, and if you rewind the process you're left with a big bang.
If, however, this were Microsoft or Apple, they would not offer such high amounts as bounties as they would soon go bankrupt from the financial burden of paying out these bounties.
Patently ridiculous. Both Apple and Microsoft make billions of dollars per year in profits. They could pay $100,000 per bounty and only owe $100 million for 1,000 security bugs.