When I tried to sell a bunch of (legal) copies of some Adobe software on Ebay the BSA told Ebay to pull my auction because I was breaking the law. I sent Ebay a pretty snotty email about how ridiculous it was that they'd listen to a third party making random accusations that were completely and utterly unfounded. Clearly they had gone scouting through Ebay looking for all sales of software by their members accusing them all of piracy. My ad had even made a special point of having photos to show the original packaging and I had spelled out the fact that I was ready to carry out a proper transfer of license through Adobe. They didn't even read that far.
Fortunately Ebay did in fact reinstate my auctions but I was pretty unhappy about the disgusting way I had been treated. I can only hope that the shoot first, ask questions later attitude will be moderated now that this guy has a government job.
Seeing as every story on/. results in someone repeating this quotation I propose a protocol that we can use to save bandwidth. Any time you're about to say "Those who..." you merely need to say IMAMFKW[1] instead and we'll know what you mean.
Even better, given that this quotation is completely inevitable you don't actually need to say it at all. Just sit back and enjoy the view from your window for the minute you'd spend typing it.
[1] The W stands for 'whore'. You can probably figure out the rest.
even be called a theory, the scientist must be able to at least prove to himself that the hypothesis is correct,
You just made this up. It bears no relation to any classification of ideas I've ever come across that is used by practising scientists or philosophers of science.
The word 'theory' is used in a multitude of ways by different people. It might mean a hypothesis that nobody is commiteed to but has been proposed tentatively, it might mean a body of knowledge like "group theory" that is a 100% rock solid branch of proven mathematics, it might be something like "String Theory" which is a whole slew of ideas in physics that have a common thread but haven't yet been tested, let alone 'verified', or it might be used in a phrase like "theory of evolution" or "theory of electromagnetism" to mean a body of knowledge about the natural world that nobody who works in the field disputes. The word 'theory' is probably best understood as one of Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" than through a definition.
It certainly isn't used in the way you suggest it is and most important of all, very few conclusions should be drawn from the fact that a body of knowledge has been called a theory. After all, calling "the theory of evolution" by the name "fact of evolution" would just sound silly.
I think you mean 'formerly'. But I don't think you're right, ID is not waning. It seems to me that the two post-Enlightenment centuries that we've enjoyed are an abberation and that humanity is making its slow journey back to theocracy, the form that much of human civilization has taken for most of the last few millennia. My reasoning is simple. The world's most popular religions are by their nature evangelical and will stop at nothing in a quest to convert everyone possibly to their cause. The Enligtenment world view is not evangelical. Sure, scientists, say, like to talk about their work, but they don't have the same emotional investment in converting society at large to their way of thinking. The upshot is that the evangelical religions will eventually win out.
I'm glad to be alive now. I think I have lived through the peak of freedom of thought at any time in human history. But I think that peak has now passed and the world one hundred years hence will be dark indeed.
I agree. It's time to stop. It's like saying that 1.5 is the missing link between 1 and 2 and then someone comes along and says "no, there's a gap between 1 and 1.5".
'Contracts', 'obligations' and a pile of other meaningless jargon that is so loose in meaning that it might as well apply to cooking roast beef.
Design by contract is essentially putting assertions into your code. You typically insert these as pre- and post-conditions. For example part of the contract for a real square root function might be the precondition that the argument is greater than or equal to zero. In C assertions generally cause program failure if they turn out to be false. And the support in C is pretty crude, simply a macro called assert(). In Eiffel this stuff is built right into the language and the language offers graceful recovery in the event that one of these conditions has failed. Most people I know who have used Eiffel hate these features. I've never used it so I reserve judgement.
Now you too can make up technobabble to impress people with your knowledge of contracts.
Actually the world is going to be created next Tuesday. We're just the false memories of someone from the future remembering the imaginary past that God created to test their faith.
Actually, both the meaning in ordinary speech and the meaning in speech for technical people who work with computers more or less agree. It's the meaning in the speech of philosophers, would-be philosophers and marketing people that's the problem.
Look, there is a nearly trivial theorem that says you can't put more than N pigeons into N pigeon holes with no more than one pigeon per hole. And from this it can be deduced that there is no algorithm that is guaranteed to compress any N-bit stream into one with fewer than N bits. But a useful compression algorithm doesn't need to compress every single bitstream. It just needs to be able to compress the kinds of streams that come up in real life. This is a tiny fraction of the total number of streams that could possibly appear. So the standard no-go theorem does nothing whatsoever to prove that there isn't a useful 25x compression algorithm.
Having said that, this article is pure BS simply because it implies the existence of an algorithm that does an amazing job at characterizing the kinds of strings that might come up in real life. I don't believe that anyone can do that job as well as this story implies. And that's why I don't believe it, not because of some oh-so-smart-but-ultimately-useless theorem that people are bandying around to show how clever they are.
My original analogy with gases is far better than the silly rule based thing that I wrote when jumping the gun in response to your accusing me of jumping the gun.
I suspect that the poster simply jumped the gun without a clue of what the article was talking about
Try suspecting again.
Most amazing was how they separated into equal groups, but still preferred larger groups to smaller groups
You're easily amazed. This cockroach behavior is trivial by comparison. It's explained by the simplest of models: "Find a place to hide. Given a choice of places to hide, pick one with more cockroaches. if I don't fit in a place to hide, find somewhere else." The last rule is implicit in the first anyway so it's even simpler than I said. Ant, termite or bee behavior is a few orders of magnitude less trivial.
Researchers in Kentucky performed the following experiment: they placed a carboard divide with a small hole in it across the middle of a shoe box so as to split it into to halves of equal size. Amazingly it was found that the same amount of air ended up in both halves. "I reckon this proves that atoms have notions of fairness, democracy and property," said the leading researcher of the group, "they were able to divide themselves up equally between the partitions.". They found that similar results were obtained with a variety of different partitioning scheme - whatever scheme was chosen the atoms always divided themselves up fairly so that each atom had the same amount of space.
Even more significantly the researchers showed that this equilibrium was dynamic. If a bunch of atoms drifted from one partition to another then another bunch would go back the other way. It's not always the same atoms that stay in any particular partition. This demonstrates that the atoms are actually smart enough to be able to count how many atoms are leaving and entering a partition at any time.
"This could revolutionize thinking about atoms," claimed the researcher.
the definition of "computer" - a device that computes
That may be a fine definition for philosophers, but not for ordinary speech, or even for speech by technical users of computers. For example, if the head of systems in our company said to a sysadmin "please install a computer for this new developer, the fastest thing we have" he'd be pretty unhappy if he swung by later and found a rack of a thousand machines stuffed in there. On the other hand, for philosophical discourse that would be a reasonable interpretation of the word 'computer'. If we take a look at the original discussion I think you'll find that it was closer to ordinary usage than philosophical usage.
Can't say I disagree. I work in an industry where people used to buy multiprocessor machines for tasks that could easily be separated into tasks runnable on separate machines. These machines were probably as much a status symbol as anything else.
Nonetheless, it irks me that people use 'supercomputer' to mean cluster. It irks me even more that one of our competitors uses a network of a few thousand CPUs and claims that as a supercomputer, getting it listed in the top 100 list (or was it top 400, can't remember). The vendor may have sold it to them as a cluster but they submit jobs to individual PCs without any kind of intra-node communication. Anyone can claim they have a supercomputer these days.
Similarly two people working on a task become one person - after all, the complete system of person 1 and person 2 accepts inputs, produces outputs, and there's a single subset of spacetime containing grey matter that could be considered to be their brain.
Or maybe you've done more philosophy than is good for you:-)
There's a wider pattern here. The private but 'guilty' pleasures that many guys enjoy are frequently seen as immoral, or at least worthy of question - whether it's playing violent video games, paying for sex, looking at pictures of naked women and so on. The guilty pleasures of women, like romance novels, are seen as harmless and worthy of nothing more than the occasional joke. Looks to me like women have somehow managed to achieve the upper hand in setting the agenda for morality. I personally think that "Lifetime, TV for Women" has done more harm by presenting women with negative role models than any amount of porn.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately Ebay did in fact reinstate my auctions but I was pretty unhappy about the disgusting way I had been treated. I can only hope that the shoot first, ask questions later attitude will be moderated now that this guy has a government job.
If you think repeatedly quoting holy writ is what keeps the US from falling apart then you are part of the problem.
Even better, given that this quotation is completely inevitable you don't actually need to say it at all. Just sit back and enjoy the view from your window for the minute you'd spend typing it.
[1] The W stands for 'whore'. You can probably figure out the rest.
I've also heard that modern artists don't know how to mix their own paints from animal dung, blood and dirt.
The word 'theory' is used in a multitude of ways by different people. It might mean a hypothesis that nobody is commiteed to but has been proposed tentatively, it might mean a body of knowledge like "group theory" that is a 100% rock solid branch of proven mathematics, it might be something like "String Theory" which is a whole slew of ideas in physics that have a common thread but haven't yet been tested, let alone 'verified', or it might be used in a phrase like "theory of evolution" or "theory of electromagnetism" to mean a body of knowledge about the natural world that nobody who works in the field disputes. The word 'theory' is probably best understood as one of Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" than through a definition.
It certainly isn't used in the way you suggest it is and most important of all, very few conclusions should be drawn from the fact that a body of knowledge has been called a theory. After all, calling "the theory of evolution" by the name "fact of evolution" would just sound silly.
I'm glad to be alive now. I think I have lived through the peak of freedom of thought at any time in human history. But I think that peak has now passed and the world one hundred years hence will be dark indeed.
s/of/have/ s/your/you're/ :-)
I agree. It's time to stop. It's like saying that 1.5 is the missing link between 1 and 2 and then someone comes along and says "no, there's a gap between 1 and 1.5".
Design by contract is essentially putting assertions into your code. You typically insert these as pre- and post-conditions. For example part of the contract for a real square root function might be the precondition that the argument is greater than or equal to zero. In C assertions generally cause program failure if they turn out to be false. And the support in C is pretty crude, simply a macro called assert(). In Eiffel this stuff is built right into the language and the language offers graceful recovery in the event that one of these conditions has failed. Most people I know who have used Eiffel hate these features. I've never used it so I reserve judgement.
Now you too can make up technobabble to impress people with your knowledge of contracts.
Actually the world is going to be created next Tuesday. We're just the false memories of someone from the future remembering the imaginary past that God created to test their faith.
Actually, both the meaning in ordinary speech and the meaning in speech for technical people who work with computers more or less agree. It's the meaning in the speech of philosophers, would-be philosophers and marketing people that's the problem.
Nobody mentioned those. And on my hand too.
Look, there is a nearly trivial theorem that says you can't put more than N pigeons into N pigeon holes with no more than one pigeon per hole. And from this it can be deduced that there is no algorithm that is guaranteed to compress any N-bit stream into one with fewer than N bits. But a useful compression algorithm doesn't need to compress every single bitstream. It just needs to be able to compress the kinds of streams that come up in real life. This is a tiny fraction of the total number of streams that could possibly appear. So the standard no-go theorem does nothing whatsoever to prove that there isn't a useful 25x compression algorithm.
Having said that, this article is pure BS simply because it implies the existence of an algorithm that does an amazing job at characterizing the kinds of strings that might come up in real life. I don't believe that anyone can do that job as well as this story implies. And that's why I don't believe it, not because of some oh-so-smart-but-ultimately-useless theorem that people are bandying around to show how clever they are.
My original analogy with gases is far better than the silly rule based thing that I wrote when jumping the gun in response to your accusing me of jumping the gun.
Even more significantly the researchers showed that this equilibrium was dynamic. If a bunch of atoms drifted from one partition to another then another bunch would go back the other way. It's not always the same atoms that stay in any particular partition. This demonstrates that the atoms are actually smart enough to be able to count how many atoms are leaving and entering a partition at any time.
"This could revolutionize thinking about atoms," claimed the researcher.
Nonetheless, it irks me that people use 'supercomputer' to mean cluster. It irks me even more that one of our competitors uses a network of a few thousand CPUs and claims that as a supercomputer, getting it listed in the top 100 list (or was it top 400, can't remember). The vendor may have sold it to them as a cluster but they submit jobs to individual PCs without any kind of intra-node communication. Anyone can claim they have a supercomputer these days.
Similarly two people working on a task become one person - after all, the complete system of person 1 and person 2 accepts inputs, produces outputs, and there's a single subset of spacetime containing grey matter that could be considered to be their brain. Or maybe you've done more philosophy than is good for you :-)
Anyone remember the days when the word 'supercomputer' actually meant something?
Um...no. It's the credentials of the intern working for the RIAA president.
Offtopic? How is that offtopic? Mod me troll, or flamebait, or even overrated. But certainly not 'offtopic'.
I really should have payed more attention in Quantum class And English.
There's a wider pattern here. The private but 'guilty' pleasures that many guys enjoy are frequently seen as immoral, or at least worthy of question - whether it's playing violent video games, paying for sex, looking at pictures of naked women and so on. The guilty pleasures of women, like romance novels, are seen as harmless and worthy of nothing more than the occasional joke. Looks to me like women have somehow managed to achieve the upper hand in setting the agenda for morality. I personally think that "Lifetime, TV for Women" has done more harm by presenting women with negative role models than any amount of porn.