And this is how your actual presentation goes (spoken part in italics):
Slide 1: TFA Um, okay, so my name is Tod, and, um, I'm gonna talk to you today about the, um article. We call it, um, TFA, which stands for... The... "Farkin" Article. -Their right The first point I want to make is, that, okay, basically, they're right. They said, you know, information that's correct. "I think you misspelled they're." *awkward pause* "Um, oh, yeah, okay, I'll have to... correct that later. -They make good points Basically, they make a lot of good points. -They are smart And they really made some good analysis, basically, they're really smart.
Slide 2: Cheese Now, I want to talk about cheese for a minute -Tastes good One of the advantages of cheese is that it tastes good. You know, when you eat cheese, it tastes really good, so you know, you want to have a lot of it. -Great with sandwiches You can add cheese to sandwiches, that's one of the things that makes it good, and then the sandwiches taste really good. -Bad for you But gotta watch out, it's bad for you.
Slide 3: Conclusion
=The article: Correct So, I just want to say, in, uh, conclusion, the article is correct. =Cheese: Jury's still out Jury's uh, still out on the matter of cheese.
Well, it's tricky, and I've never found an easy way to do it. Put all the information, and there's clutter. Put too little, and there's nothing to keep the eye occupied while you ramble.
Hm, so what you're saying is, because of a tenuous, rarely-used connection between computers/physics and art/theatre, someone studying physics should have learned less actual physics and spent more time learning a topic that mainly exists to keep otherwise unemployable people employed, in order to improve his general skill in physics?
I agree, that was kind of a doozy. Using skill alone as proof of cheating? How condescending! Imagine that in a work environment:
"I need you to calculate these three companies' approximate net current assets by tomorrow." (Heheheh, no way he can possibly do that.) "Yes sir!" *next day* "Here you go, boss, and all the justification for my calculations to a 95% confidence." "There's no way you could have done this. Obviously you had extra help and disclosed proprietary data to outsiders. You're fired." "But..."
Hm, that's not the lesson I got. What I learned was:
Actually being able to do what was assigned matters zero to your future ability to do an important job. Ergo, it is pure waste. Ergo, making more people not cheat on school papers is ultimately wasteful. Ergo, employers should stop hiring based on a useless test of your skills (university diploma). Ergo, professors need to really evaluate how important they really are to these students.
If a corporation gave me 35% of its profits every year, before I asked, regardless of what I ever did for it, I think people would characterize that relationship as "me asserting myself over that corporation".
The reason, I think, is that in other countries -- those ones with all the revolutions -- political corruption is *the* way to get rich. In developed, transparent countries, your livelihood doesn't depend much on which party is in power in the first place. You can still get a job, you can still start a business, you can still buy farmland or a house, etc. While Congress still doles out a HUGE number of special favors that lobbyists fight over, that "corrupt" spending doesn't take such a large *fraction* of the total economy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I'd like to be wrong, but isn't this (just) another application of Bayesian logic like is done for spam? They have some kind of way of quantifying the image in a number of variables and then use training to match certain variable values to a search term.
(Even if it is, I don't want to trivialize the road from theory to practice, I just want to know what's different.)
I did something a little while ago where I had a program search through text, and for all occurrences of all n-character strings (where you choose n) appearing, it would gather the information about how often each other character comes after each string appearing in the text. Then you'd give it an n-character string and it would use those probabilities to generate a new body of text. It was cool, even if it generated complete garbage except for large n.
Would mod you to "5, required reading" if I could.
I have to ask, why does this always happen? (Not just with OSes but with lots of consumer products.) Who are the avid home users who leap at the chance to upgrade to "Vista"? How many consumers could articulate the differences between the two and articulate the reasons for upgrading? Why does it seem that so many people buy the latest version of whatever MS puts out?
Miyamoto: What the heck is wrong with you people? Get a life! I mean, I love success as much as anyone else, but I can't stand by and watch this any longer. Video games are supposed to be a side hobby, not something you build your life around. I almost fainted when I heard we'd be licensing Mario bedsheets. I mean, get out there. Get a date. Take down the Kirby poster...
*fat guy in suit waddles up* *pulls Miyamoto aside* *starts scolding in Japanese* *makes huge gestures with his hands* *makes gesture for "small child"* *makes gesture for "big house"* *makes gesture for "money"* *makes "cutting neck" gesture* *Miyamoto bows to him* *returns to stage*
Miyamoto: What I mean is, if you're going to design a game, you should have separate interests...
If I were a lawyer, AND evil, I would argue that by working in the same field, you're necessarily using information gathered at your previous employer, because you ulimately draw on those experiences to improve what you do.
Actually that's not a bad idea. Scientists recently demonstrated a computer that can take take brain waves as inputs. Feed that input into a wireless DualShock (PlayStation) controller like Psycho Mantis, conceal the brainwave reader well enough, and seriously impress chicks at parties:-P
I haven't read the book, but it seems like if you were to play back a "recording" of someone ingesting a psychoactive drug, and the recording was being piped directly into your brain in such a way that it was perceived as real, wouldn't that be just as physiologically addictive as the actual drug?
Not just that, I don't think you can "wipe" your brain's "RAM" as easily as you can on a computer.:-P
Hey, I'm not *that* bothered by a diphthong in tube -- but there is such a thing as overkill. "tyoob" wouldn't bother me, but when you tilt the scales toward the "teeeeeee"... then, you're askin for it:-P
"Sense-hacking" seems like a very fun, interesting pursuit. I recently learned that humans can be trained to echolocate. Wiki article. That looks like a historical example of what they're trying to do -- get the hearing inputs tuned so that you can "sense" the location of nearby objects because your brain transforms that echo into location data.
Sure, that's how things happen at the moment. And look at the state of the world. If workers had a say ( or had THE say ), they would make decisions that were more responsible. They'd be far more inclined to consider things like sustainability, or protecting the environment, etc.
You're kidding, right? Regardless of whether "sustainability" policies are good ideas, you have to be insane to think that workers as such are more concerned about this. Who derails environmental legislation in Australia? Coal mining unions. Who derails it in America? The United Auto Workers. Who lobbies for cap-and-trade emissions programs? Energy and bank executives.
WAIT. I'm not trying to paint this as black-and-white, just showing how baseless your claim of "worker-run companies would care about the environment" is. The exact same forces that you claim (below) make workers unable to start businesses, make them have a higher "money-to-environment" preference. On the other hand, when someone has all material goods he could ever want, suddenly, clear air seems like more of a priority. Notice how it's less popular in poorer countries to protect the environment -- they want the cash.
Sorry, but that's just bullshit. There are massive institutional barriers that prevent workers from becoming capitalists. Individual workers are lucky to pay off their family home by the time they retire. They are certainly in no position to 'start their own factory' as you put it. Otherwise they wouldn't be workers, would they?
Sorry, this is just a tissue of error. First of all, workers typically have a lot of home equity they can tap, especially en masse, even if it's not paid off. Second, workers (of all classes) spend a significant fraction of their incomes on extravagances. Third, lacking the money to start a business is *far* from the most important reason why it's disadvantageous to start your own factory: it's called "risk". If you sink all of that money into a factory, you are "betting it all on one horse". If it doesn't work out, you lose your job *and* all assets. Plus, there are reasons having nothing to do with your personal diligence why it would fail: for one, other workers could shirk, and for another demand for your product could plummet.
I can 100% guarantee you that if my net assets (which is positive and significant compared to my annual income) increased 10x tomorrow, I *still* wouldn't start a business requiring more than about 10% of it to be at risk.
Oh come ON! They MAKE the laws. And then break them. And buy their way out, or cop the 'fine' as a cost of doing business.
This is ridiculous. Not all businesses (or even all large corprations) can have this kind of influence for the simple reason that their goals conflict. And even if they did laugh off everything with a fine, why do you think workers (more hungry for cash, remember) wouldn't do the same thing?
Well that's very backwards of you. Most people in the world are fighting for democracy, you know. And democracy doesn't mean voting for one dickhead over another every couple of years. It means taking part in the decision-making process about what society does with it's resources, and how the end products are distributed.
I wish you'd be more precise in your terminology. People generally accept democracy as good in some areas but not others. They most certainly don't want democracy in e.g. what job they take (labor is a resource) and what they do on weekends. You're trying to equate any advocacy of democracy with advocacy of state-run businesses.
Of course it is! People have a right to live, and living requires food & shelter. Food & shelter, in our society, are gained via work. So it follows that everyone has a right to work. It's very simple.
The GP said people don't have the "'right' to work anywhere.". He was saying that you don't have the right (and I agree) to pick an arbitrary workplace and make the owner hire you on your terms. I
That's a good point. For a true apples-to-apples comparison, that would capture the per-mile energy efficiency of a car *and load transported*, you would have to go by:
(total mile-cargopounds driven over vehicle life) divided by (total vehicle-life carbon emitted in constructing, operating, and disposing of vehicle)
Presumably, a car in the hands of a mechanic proficient in that car would have an indefinite life (Ship of Theseus and all), but there would probaby be a point where additions to the numerator equal additions to the denominator, which would then become the ratio in the infinite limit.
Want to handle non-carbon environmental damage (e.g., strip mining)? Then it gets more complicated, but you could probably handle it by including "cleanup costs", that themselvs only have carbon emitted as the waste, and have everything on one scale again.
Well, then they'll probably just go for the "but we need security by obscurity" defense... (not endorsing that, OBVIOUSLY)
And maybe it's just me, but the worry about someone stealing your "innovative intellectual property" has always seemed hollow. It's a vote tabulation program for heaven's[1] sake!
Slashdot Mirror
And this is how your actual presentation goes (spoken part in italics):
... The ... "Farkin" Article. ... correct that later.
Slide 1: TFA
Um, okay, so my name is Tod, and, um, I'm gonna talk to you today about the, um article. We call it, um, TFA, which stands for
-Their right The first point I want to make is, that, okay, basically, they're right. They said, you know, information that's correct. "I think you misspelled they're." *awkward pause* "Um, oh, yeah, okay, I'll have to
-They make good points Basically, they make a lot of good points.
-They are smart And they really made some good analysis, basically, they're really smart.
Slide 2: Cheese
Now, I want to talk about cheese for a minute
-Tastes good One of the advantages of cheese is that it tastes good. You know, when you eat cheese, it tastes really good, so you know, you want to have a lot of it.
-Great with sandwiches You can add cheese to sandwiches, that's one of the things that makes it good, and then the sandwiches taste really good.
-Bad for you But gotta watch out, it's bad for you.
Slide 3: Conclusion
=The article: Correct So, I just want to say, in, uh, conclusion, the article is correct.
=Cheese: Jury's still out Jury's uh, still out on the matter of cheese.
Ring a bell, anyone?
Well, it's tricky, and I've never found an easy way to do it. Put all the information, and there's clutter. Put too little, and there's nothing to keep the eye occupied while you ramble.
Hm, so what you're saying is, because of a tenuous, rarely-used connection between computers/physics and art/theatre, someone studying physics should have learned less actual physics and spent more time learning a topic that mainly exists to keep otherwise unemployable people employed, in order to improve his general skill in physics?
I agree, that was kind of a doozy. Using skill alone as proof of cheating? How condescending! Imagine that in a work environment:
"I need you to calculate these three companies' approximate net current assets by tomorrow." (Heheheh, no way he can possibly do that.)
"Yes sir!"
*next day*
"Here you go, boss, and all the justification for my calculations to a 95% confidence."
"There's no way you could have done this. Obviously you had extra help and disclosed proprietary data to outsiders. You're fired."
"But..."
Hm, that's not the lesson I got. What I learned was:
Actually being able to do what was assigned matters zero to your future ability to do an important job. Ergo, it is pure waste. Ergo, making more people not cheat on school papers is ultimately wasteful. Ergo, employers should stop hiring based on a useless test of your skills (university diploma). Ergo, professors need to really evaluate how important they really are to these students.
If a corporation gave me 35% of its profits every year, before I asked, regardless of what I ever did for it, I think people would characterize that relationship as "me asserting myself over that corporation".
The reason, I think, is that in other countries -- those ones with all the revolutions -- political corruption is *the* way to get rich. In developed, transparent countries, your livelihood doesn't depend much on which party is in power in the first place. You can still get a job, you can still start a business, you can still buy farmland or a house, etc. While Congress still doles out a HUGE number of special favors that lobbyists fight over, that "corrupt" spending doesn't take such a large *fraction* of the total economy.
Just my theory... okay, okay, hypothesis.
I thought feel-good legislation always worked. :-/
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I'd like to be wrong, but isn't this (just) another application of Bayesian logic like is done for spam? They have some kind of way of quantifying the image in a number of variables and then use training to match certain variable values to a search term.
(Even if it is, I don't want to trivialize the road from theory to practice, I just want to know what's different.)
I did something a little while ago where I had a program search through text, and for all occurrences of all n-character strings (where you choose n) appearing, it would gather the information about how often each other character comes after each string appearing in the text. Then you'd give it an n-character string and it would use those probabilities to generate a new body of text. It was cool, even if it generated complete garbage except for large n.
I hope to see usable OSS code in a few years.
You mean for this algorithm, or at all?
Would mod you to "5, required reading" if I could.
I have to ask, why does this always happen? (Not just with OSes but with lots of consumer products.) Who are the avid home users who leap at the chance to upgrade to "Vista"? How many consumers could articulate the differences between the two and articulate the reasons for upgrading? Why does it seem that so many people buy the latest version of whatever MS puts out?
What happened to "less is more"?
Here's what actually happened:
Miyamoto: What the heck is wrong with you people? Get a life! I mean, I love success as much as anyone else, but I can't stand by and watch this any longer. Video games are supposed to be a side hobby, not something you build your life around. I almost fainted when I heard we'd be licensing Mario bedsheets. I mean, get out there. Get a date. Take down the Kirby poster...
*fat guy in suit waddles up*
*pulls Miyamoto aside*
*starts scolding in Japanese*
*makes huge gestures with his hands*
*makes gesture for "small child"*
*makes gesture for "big house"*
*makes gesture for "money"*
*makes "cutting neck" gesture*
*Miyamoto bows to him*
*returns to stage*
Miyamoto: What I mean is, if you're going to design a game, you should have separate interests...
crowd: *Hm, what sage advice*
If I were a lawyer, AND evil, I would argue that by working in the same field, you're necessarily using information gathered at your previous employer, because you ulimately draw on those experiences to improve what you do.
No, it's like telling him he can use while loops, as long as the entire conditional is "true".
Yeah, but in all fairness, they were really just looking for a killer chance to say, "Ze goggles! Zey do nussing!"
Actually that's not a bad idea. Scientists recently demonstrated a computer that can take take brain waves as inputs. Feed that input into a wireless DualShock (PlayStation) controller like Psycho Mantis, conceal the brainwave reader well enough, and seriously impress chicks at parties :-P
I haven't read the book, but it seems like if you were to play back a "recording" of someone ingesting a psychoactive drug, and the recording was being piped directly into your brain in such a way that it was perceived as real, wouldn't that be just as physiologically addictive as the actual drug?
:-P
Not just that, I don't think you can "wipe" your brain's "RAM" as easily as you can on a computer.
Hey, I'm not *that* bothered by a diphthong in tube -- but there is such a thing as overkill. "tyoob" wouldn't bother me, but when you tilt the scales toward the "teeeeeee" ... then, you're askin for it :-P
"Sense-hacking" seems like a very fun, interesting pursuit. I recently learned that humans can be trained to echolocate. Wiki article. That looks like a historical example of what they're trying to do -- get the hearing inputs tuned so that you can "sense" the location of nearby objects because your brain transforms that echo into location data.
Thanks, I'm sure others have examples.
Oh and we STILL don't have bins (translation for across the pond: trash cans) at train stations!
Yeah, and you still say "tee-yoob" instead of "toob".
Just a heads-up: the UK doesn't follow due process very rigorously regarding IRA crimes.
Then you can submerge him in water, and ask if that's a pollutant.
Um, hydroxilic acid (aka dihydrogen monoxide) *is* a pollutant. It's in acid rain and cancerous cells, for example
Sure, that's how things happen at the moment. And look at the state of the world. If workers had a say ( or had THE say ), they would make decisions that were more responsible. They'd be far more inclined to consider things like sustainability, or protecting the environment, etc.
You're kidding, right? Regardless of whether "sustainability" policies are good ideas, you have to be insane to think that workers as such are more concerned about this. Who derails environmental legislation in Australia? Coal mining unions. Who derails it in America? The United Auto Workers. Who lobbies for cap-and-trade emissions programs? Energy and bank executives.
WAIT. I'm not trying to paint this as black-and-white, just showing how baseless your claim of "worker-run companies would care about the environment" is. The exact same forces that you claim (below) make workers unable to start businesses, make them have a higher "money-to-environment" preference. On the other hand, when someone has all material goods he could ever want, suddenly, clear air seems like more of a priority. Notice how it's less popular in poorer countries to protect the environment -- they want the cash.
Sorry, but that's just bullshit. There are massive institutional barriers that prevent workers from becoming capitalists. Individual workers are lucky to pay off their family home by the time they retire. They are certainly in no position to 'start their own factory' as you put it. Otherwise they wouldn't be workers, would they?
Sorry, this is just a tissue of error. First of all, workers typically have a lot of home equity they can tap, especially en masse, even if it's not paid off. Second, workers (of all classes) spend a significant fraction of their incomes on extravagances. Third, lacking the money to start a business is *far* from the most important reason why it's disadvantageous to start your own factory: it's called "risk". If you sink all of that money into a factory, you are "betting it all on one horse". If it doesn't work out, you lose your job *and* all assets. Plus, there are reasons having nothing to do with your personal diligence why it would fail: for one, other workers could shirk, and for another demand for your product could plummet.
I can 100% guarantee you that if my net assets (which is positive and significant compared to my annual income) increased 10x tomorrow, I *still* wouldn't start a business requiring more than about 10% of it to be at risk.
Oh come ON! They MAKE the laws. And then break them. And buy their way out, or cop the 'fine' as a cost of doing business.
This is ridiculous. Not all businesses (or even all large corprations) can have this kind of influence for the simple reason that their goals conflict. And even if they did laugh off everything with a fine, why do you think workers (more hungry for cash, remember) wouldn't do the same thing?
Well that's very backwards of you. Most people in the world are fighting for democracy, you know. And democracy doesn't mean voting for one dickhead over another every couple of years. It means taking part in the decision-making process about what society does with it's resources, and how the end products are distributed.
I wish you'd be more precise in your terminology. People generally accept democracy as good in some areas but not others. They most certainly don't want democracy in e.g. what job they take (labor is a resource) and what they do on weekends. You're trying to equate any advocacy of democracy with advocacy of state-run businesses.
Of course it is! People have a right to live, and living requires food & shelter. Food & shelter, in our society, are gained via work. So it follows that everyone has a right to work. It's very simple.
The GP said people don't have the "'right' to work anywhere.". He was saying that you don't have the right (and I agree) to pick an arbitrary workplace and make the owner hire you on your terms. I
"but there would probably be a point where additions to the numerator equal additions to the denominator"
should be
"but there would probably be a point where the ratio of additions to the numerator, to additions to the denominator, stabilizes".
That's a good point. For a true apples-to-apples comparison, that would capture the per-mile energy efficiency of a car *and load transported*, you would have to go by:
(total mile-cargopounds driven over vehicle life) divided by (total vehicle-life carbon emitted in constructing, operating, and disposing of vehicle)
Presumably, a car in the hands of a mechanic proficient in that car would have an indefinite life (Ship of Theseus and all), but there would probaby be a point where additions to the numerator equal additions to the denominator, which would then become the ratio in the infinite limit.
Want to handle non-carbon environmental damage (e.g., strip mining)? Then it gets more complicated, but you could probably handle it by including "cleanup costs", that themselvs only have carbon emitted as the waste, and have everything on one scale again.
Any chance they'll use that metric?
Hell fuckin no.
Well, then they'll probably just go for the "but we need security by obscurity" defense ... (not endorsing that, OBVIOUSLY)
And maybe it's just me, but the worry about someone stealing your "innovative intellectual property" has always seemed hollow. It's a vote tabulation program for heaven's[1] sake!
[1] I mean "heaven" in the secular sense.