You shouldn't need a keyboard with accented characters, or a non-English locale. I'm just saying that this editor behaves strangely with Alt-numeric-keypad combinations, which one normally uses to produce non-English characters.
For instance, the character reproduced here as "Ã" (Alt-138) should be a lowercase 'e' with an "accent grave". It displays as the correct character in the editor, but not on the web page.
Though, thinking about it, this may be because I'm using a United Kingdom English keyboard driver, rather than the United States English one. Whà knÃws? And indeed, whà cares?
No, I meant 'homonym'. As in: "In linguistics, a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings."
There's obviously a couple of homonyms at work here... "prestige of the state" and "weakening national morale". Because here in the UK at least, our perception of what makes us prestigious is that we ARE free to comment on the state, and what weakens our national morale as much as anything is when the state is seen to exercise excessive power over the freedom of the population.
The President of Syria has worked very hard at creating an image of being a humble, quietly-spoken, Western-educated ex-ophthalmologist who's had power lavished upon him almost inadvertently. Well it's back to the drawing board for the Damascus spin-doctors now then!
Having once played a gig to an audience of zero, I can't agree with your logic here. "Appear" doesn't have to be "to" anyone, sadly! At least the moons got to come back the next night. I didn't.
That's to say: pick some criteria (say, A and B) which most closely define the essence of the object being looked at, and if the current case has 50% of the required A and 50% of the required B then if BOTH of the attributes are required you AND them and multiply the attribute values (therefore getting 50% * 50% = object is 25% like target). If EITHER of the attributes are required, you OR them and add the values (50% + 50% = object is 100% like target), then apply your result to other attributes, forming a chain of probabilities.
It's possible to achieve some good results with quite complex problems this way, though of course the real intelligence comes in deciding what the crucial attributes are in the first place!
I wonder when Google will decide to archive the world's opinions into some kind of a "this thing is like this other thing and unlike this third thing [etc]" database. that would be CBR on the grand scale (and very useful to the marketing profession too, I shouldn't wonder).
Isn't it rather bad scientific method to test (n) out on users of (n), then measuring effect rather than cause? Or is this just a really good argument to dismiss marketing generally as pseudo-science?
Cripes, I can't buy a response on here these days! It's 03.45 here now, the wife's in bed and I'm to all intents and purposes stuffed. Who could have predicted that? Nor Bornhuetter and Ferguson for sure.
She's a foot shorter than me but that stuff about a good big 'un beating a good little 'un every time is so much foo!
Wasn't it Peter Cook, in his incarnation as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, who said "Certainly I have learned from my mistakes. And if I had to start all over again, I'm sure I could repeat them exactly!" That's case-based reasoning for you.
It's just occured to me that my comment above is a nearly a good example for the discussion (on here? maybe) the other day about the desirability of more complex algorithms, versus the greater and greater amounts of data available, when data mining. Any thoughts?
I used to do Delphi stuff (I know) for a firm of insurance actuaries. They were writing code for (essentially) predicting how long it would take to pay out for natural disasters. They had some very clever Stochastics in there, along with some nice triangulation/vector stuff too: I remember the names Bornhuetter and Ferguson (sadly it's been a long time and there's been the odd small sweet sherry since, so life isn't that clear recently).
What I do remember though, is that I mentioned to my superiors that a case-based reasoning engine would take a lot of the (non-discrete) math out of the whole thing. Because things happen and we learn from them. Has the nature of nature changed, or was I wrong in the first place?
Isn't the point that the silver halides are supposed to react with something in the atmosphere and not just kinda sit there policing the world's smoggerists or sumthin? This is alarmism silver-wise in the same way as anyone trying to get oxygen banned because of its nasty role in those oxides of Thallium and Polonium etc.
Silver per se is just antiseptic and shiny when you polish it, surely? My (purely fictitious) pool guy tells me that they use it in pool filters so that the kiddies don't come down with the lurgi. And he has a purely fictitious tan which is in no way blue.
Unlike mine, as I live in the UK and our temperate climate ensures a lovely pale blue complexion all-year-long.
Cheers for that, but there is a (vague and itsyrcall flippant) point to this: we've got a rake of sulfur and sodium already (atmosphere and sea). Who's for scooping up dead seabirds and mechanically recovering their stomachs, then flogging them on to the likes of Blood And Roses (my fave goths - old story) for stuff to hold their trousers up with?
It's a'raining silver, hallelujah, it's raining silver. Am I on my own here, in the same way as the guy that was asking for "any good Hafnium stocks" was a few months ago?/*;-) */
Now that Polaroid has stopped making photographic films, I was wondering what we were going to do with all those spare silver halides short of flooding the world markets with goth jewellery.
Now I can sleep happy knowing that the Chinese are going to be spraying them into the atmosphere. I'm not a chemist, but as someone with an interest in photography, I predict a negative effect on our climate which may take some time to develop but will take a whole lot of sodium thiosulfate to fix!
Over 95% of ivory now on the market comes from one or other of just 2 species: African or Indian elephant.
If we hunt these to extinction, then not only will there be a 100% drop in the increase of fresh ivory coming onto the market, but there'll be the benefit of a huge increase in demand for the existing stuff: it'll become a valuable commodity once again, instead of something that people turn their noses up at!
At the risk of scuppering my own argument here, I freely admit that although I used HAM frequencies quite a lot in the eighties, I've never applied for a license! Though sadly I was always more pantomime Long John Silver than Johnny Depp when it came to matters of piracy. In my defence, however, it is a lot easier to let the next-door neighbours know that if their TV reception goes a bit wonky they should pop over and let you know, than it is to figure out how many millions of people your home PC has just spammed and then write personally to them to apologise for the inconvenience!
And a whole lot of the people involved in HAM data transmission, microwave and satellite stuff in the seventies and eighties *have* got a whole lot sexier over the years, wouldn't you say? Like a good wine, perhaps?
Perhaps we can learn a lesson from another mode of communications: I understand that in the amateur radio field here in the UK we have changed our regulatory strategy from an outright ban on those who had not passed a written "theory and practice" examination from using radio transmitting equipment (ostensibly, this prevented the unskilled from causing RF interference to other radio amateurs or to RF-sensitive devices used by the general public).
Instead, it's my understanding that the regulations now allow *anybody* to transmit on any amateur frequency, with no license or study at all, but with the provisos that:
(a) they can't use any hardware which hasn't been pre-approved by the authorities
(b) they can't modify that hardware in any way once purchased
(c) they can't add amplifiers etc (even though legal to purchase) which would increase the power of their setups to a point where they might interefere with others.
Anyone wishing to become a 'hobbyist' (ok, just think 'nerd'), and construct their own equipment/use more power, is required to undertake a period of study towards an examination, and to be supervised in the construction of eqipment by an existing licensed radio amateur.
I think there's a parallel here between newbie users and newcomers to Ham radio. As somebody who used to teach introductory PC skills, I now regret using the well-worn phrase: "Software is anything that if you hit yourself over the head with it, won't hurt you" to my newcomers without any caveat. Nowadays, badly configured software can give you more of a headache than a hard drive with an imprint of your forehead on it any day of the week! That headache can also spread to others faster than sudden lumbago the Monday after Superbowl.
I don't think it would hurt too many people to give them a 'locked down' PC to practice with for their first few months. Most universities already do that for their freshman computing students, don't they? And you never know, the position of town nerd might become sexy again with the general populace, after a while!
A dominant market position?
Major players unwilling to share their source code?
Smaller organisatons unable to gain a niche in a still-growing market?
End-users don't really want to use the product but have little choice?
I have the answer: EU Antitrust legislation.
I'm not a scientist, I'm a software engineer (or that's what they told me when I left college anyway).
But isn't the nature of science that we can only BELIEVE in ideas until they're disproven?
Don't we BELIEVE that the sun will continue shining because we BELIEVE that in the worst case scenario [...] we MIGHT BE ABLE TO see signs that such an event was happening[?]
Mind you, I'm reassured in my unwavering belief in metanarratives before paradigm shifts by my elders and betters here...
http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm
We won't be immune to gamma radiation. It's a vector for evolution: it causes genetic mutations. As long as we can stay alive long enough to reproduce after being irradiated, we'll be something else BECAUSE of it. Not so much gamma radiation as delta population, if you will.
I'm going out on a limb here and assuming that you're talking about a 2008 ballot box.
In that case, you're wrong: you're in 50 VERY deterministic states.
Slashdot Mirror
You shouldn't need a keyboard with accented characters, or a non-English locale. I'm just saying that this editor behaves strangely with Alt-numeric-keypad combinations, which one normally uses to produce non-English characters.
For instance, the character reproduced here as "Ã" (Alt-138) should be a lowercase 'e' with an "accent grave". It displays as the correct character in the editor, but not on the web page.
Though, thinking about it, this may be because I'm using a United Kingdom English keyboard driver, rather than the United States English one. Whà knÃws? And indeed, whà cares?
No, I meant 'homonym'. As in: "In linguistics, a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonymy
An oxymoron is a contradiction in terms, rather like "Charlton Athletic", "Hamilton Academicals" or "German Democratic Republic".
Yes, it IS difficult to use accented characters on this site, isn't it?
There's obviously a couple of homonyms at work here... "prestige of the state" and "weakening national morale". Because here in the UK at least, our perception of what makes us prestigious is that we ARE free to comment on the state, and what weakens our national morale as much as anything is when the state is seen to exercise excessive power over the freedom of the population.
The President of Syria has worked very hard at creating an image of being a humble, quietly-spoken, Western-educated ex-ophthalmologist who's had power lavished upon him almost inadvertently. Well it's back to the drawing board for the Damascus spin-doctors now then!
...because Revved Sun Wanged Moon, perhaps?
Having once played a gig to an audience of zero, I can't agree with your logic here. "Appear" doesn't have to be "to" anyone, sadly! At least the moons got to come back the next night. I didn't.
So, like, many many multiple tides per day, dude?
Gnarly. SURF'S UP AND UP AND UP!
This is old news down in the South.
They don't bother splicing. Them good ol' boys been big on Kernel Sanders for years now.
I realise that rule-based systems (at least the monotonic ones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic) are static and not of a great deal of use in anything more complex than Eliza (http://i5.nyu.edu/~mm64/x52.9265/january1966.html) games, but CBR is a powerful tool if you incorporate some amount of Bayesian algebra into it.
That's to say: pick some criteria (say, A and B) which most closely define the essence of the object being looked at, and if the current case has 50% of the required A and 50% of the required B then if BOTH of the attributes are required you AND them and multiply the attribute values (therefore getting 50% * 50% = object is 25% like target). If EITHER of the attributes are required, you OR them and add the values (50% + 50% = object is 100% like target), then apply your result to other attributes, forming a chain of probabilities.
It's possible to achieve some good results with quite complex problems this way, though of course the real intelligence comes in deciding what the crucial attributes are in the first place!
I wonder when Google will decide to archive the world's opinions into some kind of a "this thing is like this other thing and unlike this third thing [etc]" database. that would be CBR on the grand scale (and very useful to the marketing profession too, I shouldn't wonder).
Isn't it rather bad scientific method to test (n) out on users of (n), then measuring effect rather than cause?
Or is this just a really good argument to dismiss marketing generally as pseudo-science?
There are no hafnium deposits there, I fear.
Cripes, I can't buy a response on here these days! It's 03.45 here now, the wife's in bed and I'm to all intents and purposes stuffed. Who could have predicted that? Nor Bornhuetter and Ferguson for sure.
She's a foot shorter than me but that stuff about a good big 'un beating a good little 'un every time is so much foo!
Wasn't it Peter Cook, in his incarnation as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, who said "Certainly I have learned from my mistakes. And if I had to start all over again, I'm sure I could repeat them exactly!" That's case-based reasoning for you.
Goodbye world!
It's just occured to me that my comment above is a nearly a good example for the discussion (on here? maybe) the other day about the desirability of more complex algorithms, versus the greater and greater amounts of data available, when data mining. Any thoughts?
I used to do Delphi stuff (I know) for a firm of insurance actuaries. They were writing code for (essentially) predicting how long it would take to pay out for natural disasters. They had some very clever Stochastics in there, along with some nice triangulation/vector stuff too: I remember the names Bornhuetter and Ferguson (sadly it's been a long time and there's been the odd small sweet sherry since, so life isn't that clear recently).
What I do remember though, is that I mentioned to my superiors that a case-based reasoning engine would take a lot of the (non-discrete) math out of the whole thing. Because things happen and we learn from them. Has the nature of nature changed, or was I wrong in the first place?
Isn't the point that the silver halides are supposed to react with something in the atmosphere and not just kinda sit there policing the world's smoggerists or sumthin? This is alarmism silver-wise in the same way as anyone trying to get oxygen banned because of its nasty role in those oxides of Thallium and Polonium etc.
Silver per se is just antiseptic and shiny when you polish it, surely? My (purely fictitious) pool guy tells me that they use it in pool filters so that the kiddies don't come down with the lurgi. And he has a purely fictitious tan which is in no way blue.
Unlike mine, as I live in the UK and our temperate climate ensures a lovely pale blue complexion all-year-long.
Cheers for that, but there is a (vague and itsyrcall flippant) point to this: we've got a rake of sulfur and sodium already (atmosphere and sea). Who's for scooping up dead seabirds and mechanically recovering their stomachs, then flogging them on to the likes of Blood And Roses (my fave goths - old story) for stuff to hold their trousers up with?
/* ;-) */
It's a'raining silver, hallelujah, it's raining silver. Am I on my own here, in the same way as the guy that was asking for "any good Hafnium stocks" was a few months ago?
Now that Polaroid has stopped making photographic films, I was wondering what we were going to do with all those spare silver halides short of flooding the world markets with goth jewellery.
Now I can sleep happy knowing that the Chinese are going to be spraying them into the atmosphere. I'm not a chemist, but as someone with an interest in photography, I predict a negative effect on our climate which may take some time to develop but will take a whole lot of sodium thiosulfate to fix!
Over 95% of ivory now on the market comes from one or other of just 2 species: African or Indian elephant. If we hunt these to extinction, then not only will there be a 100% drop in the increase of fresh ivory coming onto the market, but there'll be the benefit of a huge increase in demand for the existing stuff: it'll become a valuable commodity once again, instead of something that people turn their noses up at!
At the risk of scuppering my own argument here, I freely admit that although I used HAM frequencies quite a lot in the eighties, I've never applied for a license! Though sadly I was always more pantomime Long John Silver than Johnny Depp when it came to matters of piracy. In my defence, however, it is a lot easier to let the next-door neighbours know that if their TV reception goes a bit wonky they should pop over and let you know, than it is to figure out how many millions of people your home PC has just spammed and then write personally to them to apologise for the inconvenience!
And a whole lot of the people involved in HAM data transmission, microwave and satellite stuff in the seventies and eighties *have* got a whole lot sexier over the years, wouldn't you say? Like a good wine, perhaps?
Perhaps we can learn a lesson from another mode of communications: I understand that in the amateur radio field here in the UK we have changed our regulatory strategy from an outright ban on those who had not passed a written "theory and practice" examination from using radio transmitting equipment (ostensibly, this prevented the unskilled from causing RF interference to other radio amateurs or to RF-sensitive devices used by the general public). Instead, it's my understanding that the regulations now allow *anybody* to transmit on any amateur frequency, with no license or study at all, but with the provisos that: (a) they can't use any hardware which hasn't been pre-approved by the authorities (b) they can't modify that hardware in any way once purchased (c) they can't add amplifiers etc (even though legal to purchase) which would increase the power of their setups to a point where they might interefere with others. Anyone wishing to become a 'hobbyist' (ok, just think 'nerd'), and construct their own equipment/use more power, is required to undertake a period of study towards an examination, and to be supervised in the construction of eqipment by an existing licensed radio amateur. I think there's a parallel here between newbie users and newcomers to Ham radio. As somebody who used to teach introductory PC skills, I now regret using the well-worn phrase: "Software is anything that if you hit yourself over the head with it, won't hurt you" to my newcomers without any caveat. Nowadays, badly configured software can give you more of a headache than a hard drive with an imprint of your forehead on it any day of the week! That headache can also spread to others faster than sudden lumbago the Monday after Superbowl. I don't think it would hurt too many people to give them a 'locked down' PC to practice with for their first few months. Most universities already do that for their freshman computing students, don't they? And you never know, the position of town nerd might become sexy again with the general populace, after a while!
A dominant market position? Major players unwilling to share their source code? Smaller organisatons unable to gain a niche in a still-growing market? End-users don't really want to use the product but have little choice? I have the answer: EU Antitrust legislation.
Thanks, I had realised that Schrodinger was being discussed here. I was attempting a pun, and something politically funny.
I'm not a scientist, I'm a software engineer (or that's what they told me when I left college anyway). But isn't the nature of science that we can only BELIEVE in ideas until they're disproven? Don't we BELIEVE that the sun will continue shining because we BELIEVE that in the worst case scenario [...] we MIGHT BE ABLE TO see signs that such an event was happening[?] Mind you, I'm reassured in my unwavering belief in metanarratives before paradigm shifts by my elders and betters here... http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm
We won't be immune to gamma radiation. It's a vector for evolution: it causes genetic mutations. As long as we can stay alive long enough to reproduce after being irradiated, we'll be something else BECAUSE of it. Not so much gamma radiation as delta population, if you will.
I'm going out on a limb here and assuming that you're talking about a 2008 ballot box. In that case, you're wrong: you're in 50 VERY deterministic states.