Everyone has obviously forgotten that good looks do not alone make a great actor. Sure, you can "resurrect" Katherine Hepburn or Judy Garland, but who'll want to watch them if all the acting is done by some modern incompetent?
I'm a programmer, and I would have no idea how to switch the mouse buttons. I know it's probably possible, but I would definitely need to google some HOWTO document to find out. So don't just laugh at nontechnical people for not knowing obscure stuff that you only know because you've had to do it before.
There is one mistake made by experienced (C++) programmers that really bugs me: fear of decisions. Every time this programmer needs to design something, he tries really hard to not place any constraints on the design until it becomes absolutely impossible to create an implementation without doing so. He separates interface from implementation. Then he separates the implementation from the real implementation by some indirect pattern like pimpl. (Heaven forbid that the API user would ever have to recompile!) He places no constraints on parameter values and spends months ensuring that the code handles each one, somehow, even for parameter values that clearly indicate that the caller royally screwed up. He makes all code reusable, even if nobody will ever do so. He writes all his code in templates, just in case the API user might want to write his own string class. He invents his own scripting language (with freeform syntax and comments and God knows what other features) and writes configuration files in it, just so the user could configure every possible variable in the program and to do it in the most ingenuous and convoluted manner.
To top it off, he then takes all of the above and puts it in a library. Never mind that he has never tried to use it with anything but the one little app he is currently writing. Never mind that the library is so bloated that linking to it would triple the memory footprint of OpenOffice. Never mind that nobody in the right mind would even consider using it. But it's OPEN SOURCE, man, so it must be GOOD!
In today's job market, most people really can't afford to quit. You do that, and you'll be unemployed for a LONG time. Then the bills will pile up and you'll find that even the worst job is better than starving and living on the street.
> I don't know what's more stupid, your generalization of all functional languages by using Erlang as an example
And it's stupid because Erlang is not a functional language? Or is it just because the conclusion does not support your prejudices? Will you switch to promoting other languages until you find one that supports your argument?
> Look at Haskell, OCaml, or F# for much faster comparisons
Yes, do look. The benchmark page I linked to has all those too, and they are all just as slow. Get out of your academic ivory tower already; nothing beats C++ in speed.
> or your comparison to video games which isn't even relevant - both because of the types of hardware games target
Oh, please! Games target the very type of hardware that 99.99999% people have. Maybe you'll be able to find some weird LISP-in-hardware computer which runs a functional language faster than C++, but who in hell is going to care about it? For the hardware pretty much everybody has, C++ is the clear choice, as the benchmarks show.
> An Erlang or Haskell program can (and will) make calls to C-linkage libraries.
Oh, so you admit that you know your functional languages are so dead slow you need C for the important parts? And then you have the gall to talk about how fast functional languages are? Gees... If you wrote your program in C++ to begin with, you wouldn't need to link to stuff written in anything else.
And yes, there are reasons other than speed for using something other than C++; you should not be writing shell scripts in it, for instance. But when you need a general purpose language, C++ is the only sane choice.
The main reason to get a discrete card is the noise. Onboard audio always puts out white noise to the speakers, which you really can hear in a quiet environment. My Xonar D2X puts out no noise at all; you can put your ear right to the speaker and hear nothing. This way I can leave the speakers on instead of having to turn them on each time I want to watch a movie and turn them back off again to avoid the damn noise grating on my ears. The card's sound quality is excellent and Linux fully supports it.
> Most real cpu intensive applications applications are written in Fortran
Nobody outside the academia uses Fortran. At least, nobody under retirement age. And that same site also has a comparison of Fortran with C++, and C++ wins hands down. In one case, C++ is 26 times faster.
According to benchmarks, a functional language like Erlang is slower than C++ by an order of magnitude. Sure, it can distribute processing over more cores, which is the only thing that enabled it to win one of the benchmarks. I suspect that was only because it used a core library function that was written in C. So no, if you want to write code with acceptable performance, DON'T use a functional language. All CPU intensive programs, like games, are written in C or C++; think about that.
> You both understand that the Clean Air/Clean Water Act made it possible for common citizens to sue over pollution, right?
Of course. We are not living under a laissez faire economic system. As the previous poster said, land ownership in our society does not give ownership of the minerals under it or the air above it; the government owns those. Government ownership of property is the socialist system. With the Clean Air act, it has benevolently allowed aggrieved subjects to sue over pollution in government air. If the people owned the air over their land, basic property rights would have already allowed it.
In laissez faire economical system all property is private. When I own a plot of land, I own everything above and below it, including the air and water flowing through it. When you pollute the air and it drifts over my land, you are committing vandalism against my property, and are criminally liable for the damages you cause. That's a much stronger protection than what you get from the EPA.
You need to keep in mind that all of quantum mechanics is exclusively about probabilities, and no "reality" separate from the probabilities can exist. Niels Bohr repeatedly stated that quantum mechanics forbids any ontological questions to be raised; "is it real?" is simply not a question that this theory can answer. Unfortunately, people have been attempting to do just that ever since '37 and confused the issue beyond repair, because a quantum probability really is a purely epistemological quantity, describing what you believe about what you are measuring. When people start talking about "collapsing the wavefunction", they are confusing what happens in their mind with what happens in the real world, an error called the mind projection fallacy.
Before you make a measurement on the electron, you know nothing about it. In your mind, there is no information about its properties, so in your mind the electron does not exist (the definition of existence being that it has measurable properties) until you get some of that information. This does not mean that the electron does not exist in the real world, where it does indeed have all the properties that your experiment is about to measure.
Your mind does not have any definite information about the electron, but it does have a probability wavefunction for it. When you calculate a probability of something, you do so based on whatever prior information you have about it. For example, if you have measured the properties of other electrons before, you might make the assumption that the particular electron you are about to measure has a mass or charge similar to that of the other electrons, adjusted by the distribution of occurence of particular values. You know that all electrons have the same mass and charge, so our prior and posterior probability distributions (a graph of probability against measurement) are a single spike at the known value. Position and momentum, on the other hand, are unconstrained, so our prior probability distribution is a flat line infinitely close to zero. When you measure an electron's position or momentum, you are using that information to update your probability distribution into a single spike whose width is determined by the uncertainty of your measurement. You might view this update as a "collapsing" of your previous flat zero-knowledge distribution into this spike. A complete set of these probability distributions comprises the wavefunction of the electron, hence the term "wavefunction collapse".
It must be emphasized that this "collapse" happens entirely in your mind! While the electron's state may have been perturbed by your measurement, that has nothing do with it. The electron had a position before you measured it and still has one after you measured it. If you were to plot its position against the likelihood of finding it at that position, it would be a single spike at its real position with no uncertainty whatsoever. The uncertainty only occurs because you do not have perfect information about what the real position is, and it is only in the probability distribution in your mind does the spike have width.
It's the same with entanglement. You create two particles with correlated states, like say a production of an electron-positron pair. If you measure one particle and discover that it's an electron, you know for certain that the other one is a positron. All the ballihoo about "spooky action at a distance" is merely a mind projection fallacy; the second particle does not magically become a positron from nothing. It was a positron all along; you just didn't know that. When the probability wavefunction "collapsed" in your mind, you did not make any FTL measurements. The positron did not send you any information; you deduced it from w
www.nearlyfreespeech.net is the best registrar and webhost anywhere. Rock bottom prices, clean website, and absolutely no bullshit. Just sayin' as a satisfied customer for three years.
Maybe so, but it's much easier to convince people that texting is bad and should be banned than to convince them that social life is bad and should be banned. Nerds rule! We need more of us! And since we can't reproduce sexually, our only recourse is to reproduce legally.
Liver happens to be edible and quite tasty. If they manage to grow these livers in a vat on a commercial scale, they could significantly help with the world hunger problem. And, of course, the factory farm problem.
> All this means is that you don't know how to teach a person to think.
Then let me rephrase my statement: I've never known anybody who started out stupid and was made smart by education. With some reflection I might be able to come up with examples of the reverse happening. In all the time I've spent in schools of various kinds in two different countries, I could always tell who the dumb ones were, and as time passed, that never changed.
> He found one teacher in New York, who really knew how to work with kids, and also understood math, > who was teaching first graders advanced math thinking. It wasn't just a few bright kids, it was all her students.
Selection bias, definition problems, etc., etc., etc. And it doesn't matter anyway. Yes, there are a (very) few good teachers out there, but none of it really matters. All a teacher needs to do to be "good" is to cram a certain amount of information into a student's head. Actual thinking is seldom required, and when it is, it is easy to cram a few appropriate algorithms into each head, which is what I suspect really happened in your example. Teachers don't teach thinking; they teach passing the test, because that's all they have time to teach.
Meanwhile, the smart ones will pass anyway, and the dumb ones might get by with a good teacher who knows what to cram into them. After the test, both will forget most of the memorized material with equal ease and move on with their lives. Real learning involving real thinking does not and can not happen in a classroom. You need to want to learn something, and usually you need to need to learn in order to do something else you want to do. Even a scientist doing pure research has some specific goal in mind of what he wants to accomplish - develop a theory of everything, find a new species, send men to Mars, etc. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as learning for its own sake; when you do it, it's called "wasting time". (Not that there is anything wrong with that once in a while...)
In my experience, you can't teach a person to think. It doesn't matter whether you try it with math, logic, or MBA "critical thinking"; those who already know how to think will pass your courses, those who don't will fail them, and guess which you are going to count if you don't know much about statistics and have an agenda to pursue?
Like Newton said: "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction". If there is a centripetal force exerted on your body by the train, then there is a centrifugal force exterted on the train by your body. Neither of these forces is in any way "pseudo", and neither is your centripetally accelerated frame of reference is in any way "invalid". All these mind games about "pseudo forces" are nothing but linguistic mismatches between the pedantic physicists and the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone has obviously forgotten that good looks do not alone make a great actor. Sure, you can "resurrect" Katherine Hepburn or Judy Garland, but who'll want to watch them if all the acting is done by some modern incompetent?
I'm a programmer, and I would have no idea how to switch the mouse buttons. I know it's probably possible, but I would definitely need to google some HOWTO document to find out. So don't just laugh at nontechnical people for not knowing obscure stuff that you only know because you've had to do it before.
There is one mistake made by experienced (C++) programmers that really bugs me: fear of decisions. Every time this programmer needs to design something, he tries really hard to not place any constraints on the design until it becomes absolutely impossible to create an implementation without doing so. He separates interface from implementation. Then he separates the implementation from the real implementation by some indirect pattern like pimpl. (Heaven forbid that the API user would ever have to recompile!) He places no constraints on parameter values and spends months ensuring that the code handles each one, somehow, even for parameter values that clearly indicate that the caller royally screwed up. He makes all code reusable, even if nobody will ever do so. He writes all his code in templates, just in case the API user might want to write his own string class. He invents his own scripting language (with freeform syntax and comments and God knows what other features) and writes configuration files in it, just so the user could configure every possible variable in the program and to do it in the most ingenuous and convoluted manner.
To top it off, he then takes all of the above and puts it in a library. Never mind that he has never tried to use it with anything but the one little app he is currently writing. Never mind that the library is so bloated that linking to it would triple the memory footprint of OpenOffice. Never mind that nobody in the right mind would even consider using it. But it's OPEN SOURCE, man, so it must be GOOD!
In US high schools you are not required to take calculus. Students going to college usually take it, but the rest prefer not to.
> So, I mean, things like chocolate bars and apple juice, you could probably get away with.
Judging by the examples you picked, I can guess what you have in mind, and I assure you, people will notice.
I googled myself the other day and found out I was murdered!
In today's job market, most people really can't afford to quit. You do that, and you'll be unemployed for a LONG time. Then the bills will pile up and you'll find that even the worst job is better than starving and living on the street.
Clearly, these people greatly overestimate the size and value of their souls...
> I don't know what's more stupid, your generalization of all functional languages by using Erlang as an example
And it's stupid because Erlang is not a functional language? Or is it just because the conclusion does not support your prejudices? Will you switch to promoting other languages until you find one that supports your argument?
> Look at Haskell, OCaml, or F# for much faster comparisons
Yes, do look. The benchmark page I linked to has all those too, and they are all just as slow. Get out of your academic ivory tower already; nothing beats C++ in speed.
> or your comparison to video games which isn't even relevant - both because of the types of hardware games target
Oh, please! Games target the very type of hardware that 99.99999% people have. Maybe you'll be able to find some weird LISP-in-hardware computer which runs a functional language faster than C++, but who in hell is going to care about it? For the hardware pretty much everybody has, C++ is the clear choice, as the benchmarks show.
> An Erlang or Haskell program can (and will) make calls to C-linkage libraries.
Oh, so you admit that you know your functional languages are so dead slow you need C for the important parts? And then you have the gall to talk about how fast functional languages are? Gees... If you wrote your program in C++ to begin with, you wouldn't need to link to stuff written in anything else.
And yes, there are reasons other than speed for using something other than C++; you should not be writing shell scripts in it, for instance. But when you need a general purpose language, C++ is the only sane choice.
The main reason to get a discrete card is the noise. Onboard audio always puts out white noise to the speakers, which you really can hear in a quiet environment. My Xonar D2X puts out no noise at all; you can put your ear right to the speaker and hear nothing. This way I can leave the speakers on instead of having to turn them on each time I want to watch a movie and turn them back off again to avoid the damn noise grating on my ears. The card's sound quality is excellent and Linux fully supports it.
> Most real cpu intensive applications applications are written in Fortran
Nobody outside the academia uses Fortran. At least, nobody under retirement age. And that same site also has a comparison of Fortran with C++, and C++ wins hands down. In one case, C++ is 26 times faster.
According to benchmarks, a functional language like Erlang is slower than C++ by an order of magnitude. Sure, it can distribute processing over more cores, which is the only thing that enabled it to win one of the benchmarks. I suspect that was only because it used a core library function that was written in C. So no, if you want to write code with acceptable performance, DON'T use a functional language. All CPU intensive programs, like games, are written in C or C++; think about that.
> You both understand that the Clean Air/Clean Water Act made it possible for common citizens to sue over pollution, right?
Of course. We are not living under a laissez faire economic system. As the previous poster said, land ownership in our society does not give ownership of the minerals under it or the air above it; the government owns those. Government ownership of property is the socialist system. With the Clean Air act, it has benevolently allowed aggrieved subjects to sue over pollution in government air. If the people owned the air over their land, basic property rights would have already allowed it.
In laissez faire economical system all property is private. When I own a plot of land, I own everything above and below it, including the air and water flowing through it. When you pollute the air and it drifts over my land, you are committing vandalism against my property, and are criminally liable for the damages you cause. That's a much stronger protection than what you get from the EPA.
You need to keep in mind that all of quantum mechanics is exclusively about probabilities, and no "reality" separate from the probabilities can exist. Niels Bohr repeatedly stated that quantum mechanics forbids any ontological questions to be raised; "is it real?" is simply not a question that this theory can answer. Unfortunately, people have been attempting to do just that ever since '37 and confused the issue beyond repair, because a quantum probability really is a purely epistemological quantity, describing what you believe about what you are measuring. When people start talking about "collapsing the wavefunction", they are confusing what happens in their mind with what happens in the real world, an error called the mind projection fallacy.
Before you make a measurement on the electron, you know nothing about it. In your mind, there is no information about its properties, so in your mind the electron does not exist (the definition of existence being that it has measurable properties) until you get some of that information. This does not mean that the electron does not exist in the real world, where it does indeed have all the properties that your experiment is about to measure.
Your mind does not have any definite information about the electron, but it does have a probability wavefunction for it. When you calculate a probability of something, you do so based on whatever prior information you have about it. For example, if you have measured the properties of other electrons before, you might make the assumption that the particular electron you are about to measure has a mass or charge similar to that of the other electrons, adjusted by the distribution of occurence of particular values. You know that all electrons have the same mass and charge, so our prior and posterior probability distributions (a graph of probability against measurement) are a single spike at the known value. Position and momentum, on the other hand, are unconstrained, so our prior probability distribution is a flat line infinitely close to zero. When you measure an electron's position or momentum, you are using that information to update your probability distribution into a single spike whose width is determined by the uncertainty of your measurement. You might view this update as a "collapsing" of your previous flat zero-knowledge distribution into this spike. A complete set of these probability distributions comprises the wavefunction of the electron, hence the term "wavefunction collapse".
It must be emphasized that this "collapse" happens entirely in your mind! While the electron's state may have been perturbed by your measurement, that has nothing do with it. The electron had a position before you measured it and still has one after you measured it. If you were to plot its position against the likelihood of finding it at that position, it would be a single spike at its real position with no uncertainty whatsoever. The uncertainty only occurs because you do not have perfect information about what the real position is, and it is only in the probability distribution in your mind does the spike have width.
It's the same with entanglement. You create two particles with correlated states, like say a production of an electron-positron pair. If you measure one particle and discover that it's an electron, you know for certain that the other one is a positron. All the ballihoo about "spooky action at a distance" is merely a mind projection fallacy; the second particle does not magically become a positron from nothing. It was a positron all along; you just didn't know that. When the probability wavefunction "collapsed" in your mind, you did not make any FTL measurements. The positron did not send you any information; you deduced it from w
That's nothing! Wait until I tell you about winters I had lived through in Soviet Russia. Compared to that, Minnesota is a beach resort.
www.nearlyfreespeech.net is the best registrar and webhost anywhere. Rock bottom prices, clean website, and absolutely no bullshit. Just sayin' as a satisfied customer for three years.
I am going to guess that there will not be any humans involved in reading the output either.
Maybe so, but it's much easier to convince people that texting is bad and should be banned than to convince them that social life is bad and should be banned. Nerds rule! We need more of us! And since we can't reproduce sexually, our only recourse is to reproduce legally.
That's why the diode worked!
Liver happens to be edible and quite tasty. If they manage to grow these livers in a vat on a commercial scale, they could significantly help with the world hunger problem. And, of course, the factory farm problem.
> All this means is that you don't know how to teach a person to think.
Then let me rephrase my statement: I've never known anybody who started out stupid and was made smart by education. With some reflection I might be able to come up with examples of the reverse happening. In all the time I've spent in schools of various kinds in two different countries, I could always tell who the dumb ones were, and as time passed, that never changed.
> He found one teacher in New York, who really knew how to work with kids, and also understood math,
> who was teaching first graders advanced math thinking. It wasn't just a few bright kids, it was all her students.
Selection bias, definition problems, etc., etc., etc. And it doesn't matter anyway. Yes, there are a (very) few good teachers out there, but none of it really matters. All a teacher needs to do to be "good" is to cram a certain amount of information into a student's head. Actual thinking is seldom required, and when it is, it is easy to cram a few appropriate algorithms into each head, which is what I suspect really happened in your example. Teachers don't teach thinking; they teach passing the test, because that's all they have time to teach.
Meanwhile, the smart ones will pass anyway, and the dumb ones might get by with a good teacher who knows what to cram into them. After the test, both will forget most of the memorized material with equal ease and move on with their lives. Real learning involving real thinking does not and can not happen in a classroom. You need to want to learn something, and usually you need to need to learn in order to do something else you want to do. Even a scientist doing pure research has some specific goal in mind of what he wants to accomplish - develop a theory of everything, find a new species, send men to Mars, etc. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as learning for its own sake; when you do it, it's called "wasting time". (Not that there is anything wrong with that once in a while...)
In my experience, you can't teach a person to think. It doesn't matter whether you try it with math, logic, or MBA "critical thinking"; those who already know how to think will pass your courses, those who don't will fail them, and guess which you are going to count if you don't know much about statistics and have an agenda to pursue?
> I've only used math two times in my life: when learning it in school, when counting my kids at night, and when doing my taxes.
Three should be the number of thy counting!
Like Newton said: "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction". If there is a centripetal force exerted on your body by the train, then there is a centrifugal force exterted on the train by your body. Neither of these forces is in any way "pseudo", and neither is your centripetally accelerated frame of reference is in any way "invalid". All these mind games about "pseudo forces" are nothing but linguistic mismatches between the pedantic physicists and the rest of us.