Publishing a book is not really that difficult. There are thousands of complete idiots who have done it and will do it again in the future. If schools really think that all material that is not absolutely reliable should be off-limits to students, they might as well just ban access to all available information, books, journals, and the net.
cdrecord always complains about how opening by device name (as opposed to a SCSI LUN) is a bug and unsupported, however, thanks to this little oversight, I and other people with IDE CD writers (=everyone) can use it.
And assert(condition && "Explanation of why it's bad and what to do to fix it") is even better. Don't make me read your code and figure out why the hell you put some obscure assert(n != 455) in there.
I find it difficult to believe that people working from home would generate all that much traffic. All they would do is download what they need to work on, work on it, and then upload it back. Developers would checkout source from svn. All of these activities require very little time on the net. Things might change a bit if you have people using terminal services to their Windows machines at work, but even that doesn't use so much bandwidth. In fact I doubt that all the people in the world working from home could exceed the traffic of a single bittorrent site.
> I'm reading, slowly, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where there > is a quaint attitude that a priori Knowledge is preferable.
Religious people don't want to learn, which is both the cause and effect of their beliefs. This inclination naturally leads to preferring knowledge acquired without having to do any learning. Sort of a lazy-man's education, where you know everything without any effort whatsoever. This particular definition of "a-priori knowledge" is definitely not what I had in mind when I suggested that a-priori knowledge is possible. All I said was that it is possible to be certain about a future event when all information affecting this event is known.
> You seem to be getting at the inference problem, which is still a bit of a > Gordian knot with frequentist or alternative approaches.
And the best way to solve a Gordian knot is to cut it, just like in the story. Read the Jaynes' book and you'll understand why the frequentist and any other approach is invalid. Really. The whole book is more or less about this very subject, with examples, extensive proofs and explorations.
> Also, some folks still feel that a priori knowledge is possible when you seem to claim that is is not.
What does it matter what they feel? The real world is what matters, people's feelings are irrelevant where knowledge is concerned, and people would do well to concentrate on reality and place far less importance on feelings. The progress of science would be greatly advanced this way.
Second, a priori knowledge is possible, if you have all the necessary information. Suspend two billard balls somewhere in space, sufficiently far away from any large masses. Chart the surrounding space with radar out to a radius of a few light minutes. Give one of the balls a velocity vector so it hits the other. If you know the vector, the impact point, the surface structure of the balls, the makeup of all the moving bodies that might transit this area and impact your setup, etc, etc, etc. It is entirely possible in this case to know the trajectory of each ball after impact with certainty of 1. Certainty is only affected by availability of information, or the lack thereof. We can not be certain about future events if we can not predict other events between now and then that might influence them. If we can predict them, as in my empty-space-balls example, then absolute certainty is achievable.
Even in more complex scenarios it is indeed possible to have absolute certainty, but it may be impractical, just like predicting weather. With enough simulation power it is quite possible to be absolutely certain that it will rain tomorrow. The question is whether we care enough, and at some point we just shrug and say it's certain enough. Do you really care about improving the certainty of your guess from 0.999999999 to 1? People can deal with a bit of uncertainty, so having a bit of uncertainty in our knowledge is acceptable.
Searching for absolute truths is a good thing, and that is what mathematics is all about. Perhaps eventually we really will know everything with absolute certainty, because this really is possible. Until then, we can make do.
If you ask enough women on a date, eventually one of them will agree. The more you ask, the better your chances. Because you probably live in a populated area with millions of people, you ought to have a million women to bother. If it takes you ten minutes on average to find a woman and ask "Hey, wanna have dinner sometime?", then you can ask nearly a hundred women out every day. More if you work hard. If you are so unappealing that only one woman in a thousand will agree to go out with you, on average you'll have a date every five days.
Then you can move on to the next great problem: how do you keep a date?
It is only a problem because you make it so. If you define knowledge as "justified true belief", then you arrive to this contradiction because you have not specified how a belief is supposed to be justified. If Smith "justifies" his belief that Jones will get the job by counting the number of coins in Jones's pocket, he is just making an unrelated assertion. "A man with ten coins gets the job" is only a valid argument if the employer states this as a condition for employment. Otherwise, Smith might as well believe that a man with dark hair will get the job, or a man with a 63mm pinky will get the job, or whatever. He can believe whatever he wants, but he will still not know a thing. Knowledge consists of concepts that are logically rooted in reality, and thus can serve as valid representations of reality in cognition, which is the primary purpose of knowledge.
To verify that a concept is rooted in reality, you must be able to logically deduce it from real premises. Sometimes this is not possible due to insufficient information, in which case your concept's reality becomes uncertain. This uncertainty depends on the amount of information you have and can be computed by using Bayesian inference rules. For example, if the employer in question explicitly states that only men with ten coins in their pockets will get the job and Smith has knowledge of his previous statements and knows that he keeps his word, then Smith can compute his degree of certainty that Jones will get the job from the employer's statement and Jones' coin count. Because the employer's choice is involved, no matter how honest he may be, it is unlikely that this certainty value will be 1. Also, Smith is predicting a future event, and his certainty value must necessarily be less than 1 because he does not have complete information about every event that might happen between his calculation and the employer's decision and how such events may influence the outcome.
Absolute certainty is only possible when all information is available, and we may approach this in precisely defined fields such as mathematics. In most other disciplines some degree of uncertainty about our statements is inevitable, but by acquiring information, this uncertainty value can be made insignificant. It must be emphasized that this uncertainty is in our minds and does not in any way relate to the state of the universe. Smith and Jones may both have different certainty values for Jones' chance of employment, but neither number has any direct effect on who will really be employed. Both men have knowledge of the choice, but this knowledge is uncertain due to lack of informaiton. Knowledge is derived from reality, not the other way around. Because of this it is not proper to ask whether each man's conjecture is true, since the event has not occured (=been made real) yet. The proper questions to ask are whether each man had correct information on which to base his decision and whether he used proper rules of inference in manipulating them.
It's too bad there really are no alternatives to living in a suburb, unless you can telecommute or are a farmer. I would, naturally, prefer to live in a more pedestrian friendly place, but that just ain't gonna happen.
> there is a Fallout 2, right? It was a better game than the original.
Yes and no. Fallout 2 was pretty darn good and I certainly enjoyed it. However, it just doesn't have the same atmosphere. There's a lot more joking around and ridiculousness (exploding outhouse anyone?), which IMO somewhat detracts from the story. That said, the game engine was better and the world was larger, so I suppose those things made up for whatever atmospheric deficiencies it has.
> Personally, I suspect the kid ran away and eventually hooked up with some random guy that let him live there.
Or may be he really was kidnapped, but wasn't too fond of his family.
When I was a kid I had a sincere fantasy, hoping to be kidnapped by pirates and spend my teenage years robbing spanish galleons, courting lovely young ladies, and counting my piasters (yeah, I had been reading Captain Blood:) Life as a regular nerd in a big city just couldn't compare to the glory of the high seas...
> Most women prefer to be with men that are not stuck in their own heads. > Some people are too intelligent for their own good.
Birds of a feather stick together. Women who lack intelligence naturally prefer men who lack it also.
> "Deep thinking?" In tech?
Yes. Doing any kind of technical or scientific work requires a desire to know how things work and how to make them work better. That requires thinking, but more importantly, being interested in thinking about the world. Most women just aren't interested; they only care about the day-to-day stuff that is already there, how they dress, who they know, whey they eat, etc.
> Then you dismiss astrology, religion and a bunch of other interesting parts of life.
Dismiss them categorically as the most mind-damaging things EVER invented. Religion is so drastically anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-thought, that anyone who has a brain would recoil from it with disguist and loathing once he understands what it teaches.
> Dismissing what you never have studied or experienced, just amounts to dogma.
Absolutely correct! This is exactly what religious fanatics do with science and all the other things they don't understand. Scientists do indeed study religion, and discard it when they understand that it teaches people to stop thinking and take things on faith instead. "How do you know something is right? You can never really know anything! Only God knows everything. How can I do X? Blaspheming infidel! Only God actually does things, you just do as you are told and keep your mouth shut unless it is to praise God! Conform! Obey! Believe!" If it were up to me, I'd ground the whole thing out of its miserable existence.
> Did you know Einstein and Newton and most of the deep thinkers in history, > studied and praised such institutions that you so handily dismiss?
Did you know you are spouting bullshit?
Einstein said the following about religion (Albert Einstein, 1954, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side"):
It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
As for Newton, while he did indeed write much about religion, his views were very much in conflict with the teachings of the church, though perhaps that is not immediately obvious. He definitely believed that the universe was rational and knowable, in direct contrast to the common religious teaching of a sacred and mystical universe that we can neither understand nor are worthy to try to. The only reason he still believed in God after such departure is that he did not follow his premises to their natural conclusions, being concerned with physics more than epistemology. If he had thought to consider it, it would have became obvious to him that a rational universe can not contain a God, whose very definition excludes him from existence.
> An overly sceptical mind will never be the inventor or discoverer.
On the contrary, a sceptical mind is precisely what is required to invent, for scepticism is necessary to discard all those illogical superstitions you religious people hoist upon everyone since childhood.
> It requires faith to do what most cant do.
Faith in yourself and your own abilities, not in God. Faith in God is the exact opposite of the faith in yourself and results in letting God do the things most can't do instad of attempting to do them yourself.
Get some busted piece of electronics and fix it. I recently bought a Tektronix 475 scope and have certainly learned quite a few things about circuits while troubleshooting it. I already rebuilt the 5V power supply (the scope was partially salvaged for parts) and found three bad transistors and two leaking capacitors. It is now up to the point where I can see decent waveforms on the screen at some sweep settings. The trace is still fuzzy and the sweep board is very buggy, so there is plenty of work left. This is all much easier than you think, as the circuit diagrams are available in the manual. Naturally, you'll need to get some theoretical background first, so you have some idea about what to look for; that's what Horowitz and Hill are for. You'll also need some equipment; a soldering station, a multimeter, and a cheap scope (I have a Tek 453, which, IMHO is a much better quality instrument than the 475, which is starting to show signs of the cheap revolution).
Legacy wouldn't have been half as bad if all that combat was a bit easier. I am not some kind of a super-duper mouse twiddler, and I suspect most normal people aren't either. So why is it that you have to fight forty something Romulan ships in the second mission? The mission that is supposedly still a part of the tutorial when people are just learning the game, and yes, I'm on the easiest difficulty level. Yup, I can get eight kills there after three days of practice. I might try it one more time, but it is really such an incredible turnoff. Come on, game designers! Give us some slack! An average person ought to be able to play the game, if only on the easy level. Especially the average person who wants to hear the story more than just fly around endlessly shooting enemy vessels arriving from some inexhaustible source. At the very least, give us cheat codes or something, because as things are now, I have very little desire to die yet another time for no good reason.
Considering that I already pay Comcast loads of money for cable TV (because if you don't, they charge you just as much more in the cable modem bill). It is none of their business what I watch the shows on, whether it is on my TV or on my computer. Likewise, I see no difference between "downloading" a show to the TV screen and downloading it to my hard drive. Sure, there are no commercials on the P2P versions, but if I was going to watch it on the TV, I would have taped it first to skip over commercials anyway.
> And people want to use webmail on a regular basis?
Evidently quite a few people do. I can't understand why, but I'm not them.
> if someone wants private communication, he can do something about it instead of just whining
Well, duh! My point is not that it is impossible, but that it is inconvenient. For most messages neither I nor the recepient cares whether somebody reads it. If I could use encryption without the inconvenience, like if we both were using Mozilla mail with enigmail, then I'd always encrypt. But the way things are now, with everyone going to webmail, convenience of plaintext far outweighs the benefits of encryption for most messages.
Considering that most of my correspondents use webmail of some kind, encryption is simply not practical. I would dearly love to encrypt everything by default, but only people using standalone mail applications can decrypt, and the current trend is unfortunately toward webmail, so the situation is likely to get even worse with time.
Slashdot Mirror
Publishing a book is not really that difficult. There are thousands of complete idiots who have done it and will do it again in the future. If schools really think that all material that is not absolutely reliable should be off-limits to students, they might as well just ban access to all available information, books, journals, and the net.
They laughed at the Wright brothers. They laughed at Torvalds. But they also laughed at Bozo the clown.
cdrecord always complains about how opening by device name (as opposed to a SCSI LUN) is a bug and unsupported, however, thanks to this little oversight, I and other people with IDE CD writers (=everyone) can use it.
> assert(condition) is your friend.
And assert(condition && "Explanation of why it's bad and what to do to fix it") is even better. Don't make me read your code and figure out why the hell you put some obscure assert(n != 455) in there.
Enormous Trove of Configuration files, that's what it is.
This technology.
No, the opposite of n00b is demonstrated by the following code:
I find it difficult to believe that people working from home would generate all that much traffic. All they would do is download what they need to work on, work on it, and then upload it back. Developers would checkout source from svn. All of these activities require very little time on the net. Things might change a bit if you have people using terminal services to their Windows machines at work, but even that doesn't use so much bandwidth. In fact I doubt that all the people in the world working from home could exceed the traffic of a single bittorrent site.
> I'm reading, slowly, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where there
> is a quaint attitude that a priori Knowledge is preferable.
Religious people don't want to learn, which is both the cause and effect of their beliefs. This inclination naturally leads to preferring knowledge acquired without having to do any learning. Sort of a lazy-man's education, where you know everything without any effort whatsoever. This particular definition of "a-priori knowledge" is definitely not what I had in mind when I suggested that a-priori knowledge is possible. All I said was that it is possible to be certain about a future event when all information affecting this event is known.
> You seem to be getting at the inference problem, which is still a bit of a
> Gordian knot with frequentist or alternative approaches.
And the best way to solve a Gordian knot is to cut it, just like in the story. Read the Jaynes' book and you'll understand why the frequentist and any other approach is invalid. Really. The whole book is more or less about this very subject, with examples, extensive proofs and explorations.
> Also, some folks still feel that a priori knowledge is possible when you seem to claim that is is not.
What does it matter what they feel? The real world is what matters, people's feelings are irrelevant where knowledge is concerned, and people would do well to concentrate on reality and place far less importance on feelings. The progress of science would be greatly advanced this way.
Second, a priori knowledge is possible, if you have all the necessary information. Suspend two billard balls somewhere in space, sufficiently far away from any large masses. Chart the surrounding space with radar out to a radius of a few light minutes. Give one of the balls a velocity vector so it hits the other. If you know the vector, the impact point, the surface structure of the balls, the makeup of all the moving bodies that might transit this area and impact your setup, etc, etc, etc. It is entirely possible in this case to know the trajectory of each ball after impact with certainty of 1. Certainty is only affected by availability of information, or the lack thereof. We can not be certain about future events if we can not predict other events between now and then that might influence them. If we can predict them, as in my empty-space-balls example, then absolute certainty is achievable.
Even in more complex scenarios it is indeed possible to have absolute certainty, but it may be impractical, just like predicting weather. With enough simulation power it is quite possible to be absolutely certain that it will rain tomorrow. The question is whether we care enough, and at some point we just shrug and say it's certain enough. Do you really care about improving the certainty of your guess from 0.999999999 to 1? People can deal with a bit of uncertainty, so having a bit of uncertainty in our knowledge is acceptable.
Searching for absolute truths is a good thing, and that is what mathematics is all about. Perhaps eventually we really will know everything with absolute certainty, because this really is possible. Until then, we can make do.
If you ask enough women on a date, eventually one of them will agree. The more you ask, the better your chances. Because you probably live in a populated area with millions of people, you ought to have a million women to bother. If it takes you ten minutes on average to find a woman and ask "Hey, wanna have dinner sometime?", then you can ask nearly a hundred women out every day. More if you work hard. If you are so unappealing that only one woman in a thousand will agree to go out with you, on average you'll have a date every five days.
Then you can move on to the next great problem: how do you keep a date?
It is only a problem because you make it so. If you define knowledge as "justified true belief", then you arrive to this contradiction because you have not specified how a belief is supposed to be justified. If Smith "justifies" his belief that Jones will get the job by counting the number of coins in Jones's pocket, he is just making an unrelated assertion. "A man with ten coins gets the job" is only a valid argument if the employer states this as a condition for employment. Otherwise, Smith might as well believe that a man with dark hair will get the job, or a man with a 63mm pinky will get the job, or whatever. He can believe whatever he wants, but he will still not know a thing. Knowledge consists of concepts that are logically rooted in reality, and thus can serve as valid representations of reality in cognition, which is the primary purpose of knowledge.
To verify that a concept is rooted in reality, you must be able to logically deduce it from real premises. Sometimes this is not possible due to insufficient information, in which case your concept's reality becomes uncertain. This uncertainty depends on the amount of information you have and can be computed by using Bayesian inference rules. For example, if the employer in question explicitly states that only men with ten coins in their pockets will get the job and Smith has knowledge of his previous statements and knows that he keeps his word, then Smith can compute his degree of certainty that Jones will get the job from the employer's statement and Jones' coin count. Because the employer's choice is involved, no matter how honest he may be, it is unlikely that this certainty value will be 1. Also, Smith is predicting a future event, and his certainty value must necessarily be less than 1 because he does not have complete information about every event that might happen between his calculation and the employer's decision and how such events may influence the outcome.
Absolute certainty is only possible when all information is available, and we may approach this in precisely defined fields such as mathematics. In most other disciplines some degree of uncertainty about our statements is inevitable, but by acquiring information, this uncertainty value can be made insignificant. It must be emphasized that this uncertainty is in our minds and does not in any way relate to the state of the universe. Smith and Jones may both have different certainty values for Jones' chance of employment, but neither number has any direct effect on who will really be employed. Both men have knowledge of the choice, but this knowledge is uncertain due to lack of informaiton. Knowledge is derived from reality, not the other way around. Because of this it is not proper to ask whether each man's conjecture is true, since the event has not occured (=been made real) yet. The proper questions to ask are whether each man had correct information on which to base his decision and whether he used proper rules of inference in manipulating them.
There is an entire book on this subject, called "Probability Theory, The Logic of Science", which you are invited to read.
It's too bad there really are no alternatives to living in a suburb, unless you can telecommute or are a farmer. I would, naturally, prefer to live in a more pedestrian friendly place, but that just ain't gonna happen.
> there is a Fallout 2, right? It was a better game than the original.
Yes and no. Fallout 2 was pretty darn good and I certainly enjoyed it. However, it just doesn't have the same atmosphere. There's a lot more joking around and ridiculousness (exploding outhouse anyone?), which IMO somewhat detracts from the story. That said, the game engine was better and the world was larger, so I suppose those things made up for whatever atmospheric deficiencies it has.
> Personally, I suspect the kid ran away and eventually hooked up with some random guy that let him live there.
:) Life as a regular nerd in a big city just couldn't compare to the glory of the high seas...
Or may be he really was kidnapped, but wasn't too fond of his family.
When I was a kid I had a sincere fantasy, hoping to be kidnapped by pirates and spend my teenage years robbing spanish galleons, courting lovely young ladies, and counting my piasters (yeah, I had been reading Captain Blood
> Some people are too intelligent for their own good.
Birds of a feather stick together. Women who lack intelligence naturally prefer men who lack it also.
> "Deep thinking?" In tech?
Yes. Doing any kind of technical or scientific work requires a desire to know how things work and how to make them work better. That requires thinking, but more importantly, being interested in thinking about the world. Most women just aren't interested; they only care about the day-to-day stuff that is already there, how they dress, who they know, whey they eat, etc.
> Then you dismiss astrology, religion and a bunch of other interesting parts of life.
Dismiss them categorically as the most mind-damaging things EVER invented. Religion is so drastically anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-thought, that anyone who has a brain would recoil from it with disguist and loathing once he understands what it teaches.
> Dismissing what you never have studied or experienced, just amounts to dogma.
Absolutely correct! This is exactly what religious fanatics do with science and all the other things they don't understand. Scientists do indeed study religion, and discard it when they understand that it teaches people to stop thinking and take things on faith instead. "How do you know something is right? You can never really know anything! Only God knows everything. How can I do X? Blaspheming infidel! Only God actually does things, you just do as you are told and keep your mouth shut unless it is to praise God! Conform! Obey! Believe!" If it were up to me, I'd ground the whole thing out of its miserable existence.
> Did you know Einstein and Newton and most of the deep thinkers in history,
> studied and praised such institutions that you so handily dismiss?
Did you know you are spouting bullshit?
Einstein said the following about religion (Albert Einstein, 1954, from "Albert Einstein: The Human Side"):
As for Newton, while he did indeed write much about religion, his views were very much in conflict with the teachings of the church, though perhaps that is not immediately obvious. He definitely believed that the universe was rational and knowable, in direct contrast to the common religious teaching of a sacred and mystical universe that we can neither understand nor are worthy to try to. The only reason he still believed in God after such departure is that he did not follow his premises to their natural conclusions, being concerned with physics more than epistemology. If he had thought to consider it, it would have became obvious to him that a rational universe can not contain a God, whose very definition excludes him from existence.
> An overly sceptical mind will never be the inventor or discoverer.
On the contrary, a sceptical mind is precisely what is required to invent, for scepticism is necessary to discard all those illogical superstitions you religious people hoist upon everyone since childhood.
> It requires faith to do what most cant do.
Faith in yourself and your own abilities, not in God. Faith in God is the exact opposite of the faith in yourself and results in letting God do the things most can't do instad of attempting to do them yourself.
> Yeah, sure. It's a study. That's nice. What does it say?
That your dentist was right and you should floss. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Fallout was unquestionably the best PC game ever made.
Get some busted piece of electronics and fix it. I recently bought a Tektronix 475 scope and have certainly learned quite a few things about circuits while troubleshooting it. I already rebuilt the 5V power supply (the scope was partially salvaged for parts) and found three bad transistors and two leaking capacitors. It is now up to the point where I can see decent waveforms on the screen at some sweep settings. The trace is still fuzzy and the sweep board is very buggy, so there is plenty of work left. This is all much easier than you think, as the circuit diagrams are available in the manual. Naturally, you'll need to get some theoretical background first, so you have some idea about what to look for; that's what Horowitz and Hill are for. You'll also need some equipment; a soldering station, a multimeter, and a cheap scope (I have a Tek 453, which, IMHO is a much better quality instrument than the 475, which is starting to show signs of the cheap revolution).
Legacy wouldn't have been half as bad if all that combat was a bit easier. I am not some kind of a super-duper mouse twiddler, and I suspect most normal people aren't either. So why is it that you have to fight forty something Romulan ships in the second mission? The mission that is supposedly still a part of the tutorial when people are just learning the game, and yes, I'm on the easiest difficulty level. Yup, I can get eight kills there after three days of practice. I might try it one more time, but it is really such an incredible turnoff. Come on, game designers! Give us some slack! An average person ought to be able to play the game, if only on the easy level. Especially the average person who wants to hear the story more than just fly around endlessly shooting enemy vessels arriving from some inexhaustible source. At the very least, give us cheat codes or something, because as things are now, I have very little desire to die yet another time for no good reason.
Not a single one of those games runs on Linux. Curious, isn't it?
Considering that I already pay Comcast loads of money for cable TV (because if you don't, they charge you just as much more in the cable modem bill). It is none of their business what I watch the shows on, whether it is on my TV or on my computer. Likewise, I see no difference between "downloading" a show to the TV screen and downloading it to my hard drive. Sure, there are no commercials on the P2P versions, but if I was going to watch it on the TV, I would have taped it first to skip over commercials anyway.
> And people want to use webmail on a regular basis?
Evidently quite a few people do. I can't understand why, but I'm not them.
> if someone wants private communication, he can do something about it instead of just whining
Well, duh! My point is not that it is impossible, but that it is inconvenient. For most messages neither I nor the recepient cares whether somebody reads it. If I could use encryption without the inconvenience, like if we both were using Mozilla mail with enigmail, then I'd always encrypt. But the way things are now, with everyone going to webmail, convenience of plaintext far outweighs the benefits of encryption for most messages.
> You could encrypt plain-text files, zip/gzip them and send them as attachments.
Oh, please! So that people could download them, extract them, and run gpg on them? Be serious; nobody will want to do that on a regular basis.
Considering that most of my correspondents use webmail of some kind, encryption is simply not practical. I would dearly love to encrypt everything by default, but only people using standalone mail applications can decrypt, and the current trend is unfortunately toward webmail, so the situation is likely to get even worse with time.