Ah, but if you come up with a novel way to generate those random numbers, along with a novel way to store their representations for future use, then you've invented something and not merely discovered it.
Consider, as a counterexample, the FFT multiplication algorithm. It is based on the observation that integer multiplication involves computing a convolution, and that the pointwise product in the frequency domain is equal to convolution in the "time" domain. The algorithm is only an "invention" if the mathematics the underlie it were "invented," and so this just returns to the question of whether or not mathematics itself is invented or discovered.
Maybe, but I do not think that Euclid sat down and invented his postulates. More likely he sat down and observed various shapes and geometric properties in the world around him, and then formalized what he had observed (or perhaps many people had done so over a period of time, and Euclid wrote down the formal notions that had developed).
Fair enough, but the post I was replying to seemed to claim as a matter of fact that mathematics is discovered. I was merely pointing out that the debate is still active, and that defending the "McCarthy invented Lisp!" statement needs to be backed up by more than "Philosophers say that math is discovered!"
I am not certain that it was a troll. For some reason, a lot of people seem to view Lisp the way the poster described: an academic language that does not live up to its promise in the real world.
Or maybe I was trolled so hard that I do not know what hit me.
Lisp can be viewed as a fancy variant of combinator logic, which is a mathematical model of computation. If you believe that mathematics is discovered, then in some sense Lisp was discovered. This may seem a a bit contrived, since one could argue that a C program is a fancy way of expressing a Turing Machine, although Lisp is a little closer to its theoretical underpinnings than C is.
Your education,... [is] your responsibility, not mine.
Except that democracy cannot function if people do not understand the issues they are expected to vote on. Our public education system is supposed to ensure that all citizens have at least enough education to responsible citizens.
Ron Paul merely endorses the proper way things should be, including a very limited government and individual responsibility
Except that teachers need to be paid, and if the education system were privatized then only the wealthy would be able to afford an education. Preventing people from receiving an education is one way to prevent them from obtaining power. This is not a society where only the ruling class is allowed to be educated.
The US will fail if it continues to act on the lies of socialism, "state capitalism", and oligarchy.
No, the US will fail because the voters have no clue about what their government is up to, and just vote for whatever candidate looks best on TV. The best solution to the problem cannot be implemented if nobody understands that there is a problem to be solved.
We need to reset our expectations for the vast majority (including business) and say that a HS diploma may be enough for a lot of jobs.
We cannot do that until we improve the quality of high school education. People do not even have to read beyond the level of an elementary school student to get a high school diploma. If we cannot expect someone with a high school diploma to be able to read and understand a modestly complex document, how can we expect them to do anything beyond running a cash register?
tenure needs to go as well. the fact that academics get to play by some different set of rules than the rest of us is an absurd notion
Job security used to be commonplace. Just because you don't have it does not mean that you should try to take it away from others.
performance should be key; not time in
Professors at universities receive tenure based on their ability to publish academic papers and guide graduate students to PhDs. What is your definition of "performance?"
a good question is what will happen if the gov't does cut the program
That depends on whether or not we manage to improve our high school system. If we do not, then we will live to see a generation of illiterates in this country.
A University should be a place of higher learning and research, not a factory for just the next step in education.
Where else are people expected to receive the education needed to be responsible members of our society? I do not know where you are from, but here in America a high school diploma indicates nothing about a person's literacy or ability to think. High schools are just a way to condition people to do as they are told, with a little bit of warm up for an increasingly likely stay in prison.
We need to revamp our high school education, so that someone who graduates high school can actually be expected to perform their job.
I am all for going after child molesters, as long as there is evidence that they are abusing children. Looking at images of other people abusing children is not a form of child abuse, and neither is possessing such images, and it is not necessarily the case that someone who enjoys looking at child sex abuse imagery is a child molester. Keep in mind that the sites that were taken down were publicly listed -- not the sort of sites that the real monsters are spending time on.
I have seen police reports on child pornography arrests. In general, there are two categories: the people who were downloading material that has been shared online for many years (even decades), and the people who are actively producing it. The focus needs to be shifted to the producers of this material, but they are very hard to track down and they often employ various technical and operational security measures to thwart law enforcement agencies. Most of the arrests for child pornography are (at least as far as the evidence goes) arrests of passive consumers, who were in possession of the material and in some cases were caught downloading/sharing it on P2P networks.
My guess, not having looked very closely at the details, is that all or almost all of the websites that were attacked fell into the "consumer" category. The police have done a good job of pushing producers of child sex abuse images underground, and in the wake of the large bust a few months ago I doubt that anyone who produces this material would use a website that is listed on a publicly accessible wiki. I would guess that if there are Tor hidden services where newly produced child pornography is swapped, those services are not publicly listed and the onion URL is kept secret. Producers of this stuff are usually busted when someone else becomes a police informant, usually because they were caught molesting children (e.g. the victims report them).
Show them a program that can play Texas Hold'em. Tell them about crypto and the cool things that are happening with that (disclaimer: I am a grad student whose research is in crypto). Show them stuff about robotics. Show them how more information can be extracted from medical scans because of advances in image processing.
It already happened. Remember all those people in the 80s and early 90s who were arrested because of fears that they were child molesters? Remember the satanic ritual abuse panic? People were being arrested on accusations of being witches and engaging in ritualistic abuse of children, and there was practically no evidence for any of it. We are seeing the tail end of that witch hunt with the modern fears of child pornography and pedophiles hiding around every corner.
Child porn people are one of those groups I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for.
If someone told me a child molester died
Is there evidence that the users of these sites were actually molesting children, rather than just looking at pictures or videos of other people doing so? It is hard to defend someone who likes child pornography, but we do not want to start accusing those people of far worse crimes they may not have committed. Many of these sites were apparently publicly listed (from the wiki), which makes me doubt that there was much new "material" on them (i.e. someone who shares new child pornography images is someone who can reasonably be suspected of being a child molester).
It is likely that there are many more child pornography hidden services out there, that are not publicly listed. The hidden services architecture makes it difficult to say how many hidden services there are, and I doubt that the worst child porn websites are keen on being publicly listed.
Most open source projects are released for free, so if users have bad experience with it and stop using it, there's no real impact to the developers.
Except that they lose people who might potentially report minor bugs or even contribute small patches. "Users are developers" is pretty much the central tenet of the open source movement.
On the other hand, if people use half-baked releases of Android and have bad experience, they might switch to other platforms and Google would lose out in terms of profit.
Google could just as easily use trademark laws to accomplish this goal -- that is what Mozilla does, that is what Red Hat does, etc. The problem is that Google's decision makers does not "get" the "open source" concept.
Google was clear that Honeycomb's code was not going to be released because they did not want people attempting to shoehorn what was effectively a tablet OS on to mobile phones. End of story.
...so much for open source. Since when do "open source" software vendors try to prevent people from using their software in whatever manner they want?
You left out the DEA. Really, we should scrap the war on drugs, release the millions of people who are in prison because they were in possession of drugs, and save billions of dollars each year.
When did the constitution start mattering in this country? We do plenty of constitutionally questionable things all the time, so why single this out? I would be more concerned about the fact that we killed an American citizen without any due process.
Additionally, the police, also, are a necessary function to maintain the order needed to keep a society function
Too bad the majority of the laws enforced by the police have nothing to do with keeping society functioning. Societies do not break down because a woman is wearing a burkha or because someone snorts some cocaine. If the only thing the police did was to keep the public safe, by arrested people who pose an immediate threat, your argument would hold water.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps prolog-in-lisp?
Ah, but if you come up with a novel way to generate those random numbers, along with a novel way to store their representations for future use, then you've invented something and not merely discovered it.
Consider, as a counterexample, the FFT multiplication algorithm. It is based on the observation that integer multiplication involves computing a convolution, and that the pointwise product in the frequency domain is equal to convolution in the "time" domain. The algorithm is only an "invention" if the mathematics the underlie it were "invented," and so this just returns to the question of whether or not mathematics itself is invented or discovered.
I think you meant (format t "~a" "World says goodbye")
/pedantic
You invent the axioms
Maybe, but I do not think that Euclid sat down and invented his postulates. More likely he sat down and observed various shapes and geometric properties in the world around him, and then formalized what he had observed (or perhaps many people had done so over a period of time, and Euclid wrote down the formal notions that had developed).
Fair enough, but the post I was replying to seemed to claim as a matter of fact that mathematics is discovered. I was merely pointing out that the debate is still active, and that defending the "McCarthy invented Lisp!" statement needs to be backed up by more than "Philosophers say that math is discovered!"
I am not certain that it was a troll. For some reason, a lot of people seem to view Lisp the way the poster described: an academic language that does not live up to its promise in the real world.
Or maybe I was trolled so hard that I do not know what hit me.
Lisp can be viewed as a fancy variant of combinator logic, which is a mathematical model of computation. If you believe that mathematics is discovered, then in some sense Lisp was discovered. This may seem a a bit contrived, since one could argue that a C program is a fancy way of expressing a Turing Machine, although Lisp is a little closer to its theoretical underpinnings than C is.
Philosophically, you don't "create" or "invent" math you discover it.
That is not universally agreed upon by philosophers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_mathematics
Hm....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxima_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Analysis_and_Replanning_Tool
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirai_(software)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHINE_Expert_System
Yeah, this language is useless outside of academia.
Your education, ... [is] your responsibility, not mine.
Except that democracy cannot function if people do not understand the issues they are expected to vote on. Our public education system is supposed to ensure that all citizens have at least enough education to responsible citizens.
Ron Paul merely endorses the proper way things should be, including a very limited government and individual responsibility
Except that teachers need to be paid, and if the education system were privatized then only the wealthy would be able to afford an education. Preventing people from receiving an education is one way to prevent them from obtaining power. This is not a society where only the ruling class is allowed to be educated.
The US will fail if it continues to act on the lies of socialism, "state capitalism", and oligarchy.
No, the US will fail because the voters have no clue about what their government is up to, and just vote for whatever candidate looks best on TV. The best solution to the problem cannot be implemented if nobody understands that there is a problem to be solved.
We need to reset our expectations for the vast majority (including business) and say that a HS diploma may be enough for a lot of jobs.
We cannot do that until we improve the quality of high school education. People do not even have to read beyond the level of an elementary school student to get a high school diploma. If we cannot expect someone with a high school diploma to be able to read and understand a modestly complex document, how can we expect them to do anything beyond running a cash register?
universities are dying for money right now.
I call BS. Universities are expanding right now.
tenure needs to go as well. the fact that academics get to play by some different set of rules than the rest of us is an absurd notion
Job security used to be commonplace. Just because you don't have it does not mean that you should try to take it away from others.
performance should be key; not time in
Professors at universities receive tenure based on their ability to publish academic papers and guide graduate students to PhDs. What is your definition of "performance?"
a good question is what will happen if the gov't does cut the program
That depends on whether or not we manage to improve our high school system. If we do not, then we will live to see a generation of illiterates in this country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier
A University should be a place of higher learning and research, not a factory for just the next step in education.
Where else are people expected to receive the education needed to be responsible members of our society? I do not know where you are from, but here in America a high school diploma indicates nothing about a person's literacy or ability to think. High schools are just a way to condition people to do as they are told, with a little bit of warm up for an increasingly likely stay in prison.
We need to revamp our high school education, so that someone who graduates high school can actually be expected to perform their job.
I am all for going after child molesters, as long as there is evidence that they are abusing children. Looking at images of other people abusing children is not a form of child abuse, and neither is possessing such images, and it is not necessarily the case that someone who enjoys looking at child sex abuse imagery is a child molester. Keep in mind that the sites that were taken down were publicly listed -- not the sort of sites that the real monsters are spending time on.
I have seen police reports on child pornography arrests. In general, there are two categories: the people who were downloading material that has been shared online for many years (even decades), and the people who are actively producing it. The focus needs to be shifted to the producers of this material, but they are very hard to track down and they often employ various technical and operational security measures to thwart law enforcement agencies. Most of the arrests for child pornography are (at least as far as the evidence goes) arrests of passive consumers, who were in possession of the material and in some cases were caught downloading/sharing it on P2P networks.
My guess, not having looked very closely at the details, is that all or almost all of the websites that were attacked fell into the "consumer" category. The police have done a good job of pushing producers of child sex abuse images underground, and in the wake of the large bust a few months ago I doubt that anyone who produces this material would use a website that is listed on a publicly accessible wiki. I would guess that if there are Tor hidden services where newly produced child pornography is swapped, those services are not publicly listed and the onion URL is kept secret. Producers of this stuff are usually busted when someone else becomes a police informant, usually because they were caught molesting children (e.g. the victims report them).
Show them a program that can play Texas Hold'em. Tell them about crypto and the cool things that are happening with that (disclaimer: I am a grad student whose research is in crypto). Show them stuff about robotics. Show them how more information can be extracted from medical scans because of advances in image processing.
It already happened. Remember all those people in the 80s and early 90s who were arrested because of fears that they were child molesters? Remember the satanic ritual abuse panic? People were being arrested on accusations of being witches and engaging in ritualistic abuse of children, and there was practically no evidence for any of it. We are seeing the tail end of that witch hunt with the modern fears of child pornography and pedophiles hiding around every corner.
Child porn people are one of those groups I just can't bring myself to feel sorry for.
If someone told me a child molester died
Is there evidence that the users of these sites were actually molesting children, rather than just looking at pictures or videos of other people doing so? It is hard to defend someone who likes child pornography, but we do not want to start accusing those people of far worse crimes they may not have committed. Many of these sites were apparently publicly listed (from the wiki), which makes me doubt that there was much new "material" on them (i.e. someone who shares new child pornography images is someone who can reasonably be suspected of being a child molester).
It is likely that there are many more child pornography hidden services out there, that are not publicly listed. The hidden services architecture makes it difficult to say how many hidden services there are, and I doubt that the worst child porn websites are keen on being publicly listed.
Most open source projects are released for free, so if users have bad experience with it and stop using it, there's no real impact to the developers.
Except that they lose people who might potentially report minor bugs or even contribute small patches. "Users are developers" is pretty much the central tenet of the open source movement.
On the other hand, if people use half-baked releases of Android and have bad experience, they might switch to other platforms and Google would lose out in terms of profit.
Google could just as easily use trademark laws to accomplish this goal -- that is what Mozilla does, that is what Red Hat does, etc. The problem is that Google's decision makers does not "get" the "open source" concept.
Google was clear that Honeycomb's code was not going to be released because they did not want people attempting to shoehorn what was effectively a tablet OS on to mobile phones. End of story.
They were not exploiting the open source community, they just wanted to control how people use their software!
You left out the DEA. Really, we should scrap the war on drugs, release the millions of people who are in prison because they were in possession of drugs, and save billions of dollars each year.
Libertarian indeed.
When did the constitution start mattering in this country? We do plenty of constitutionally questionable things all the time, so why single this out? I would be more concerned about the fact that we killed an American citizen without any due process.
Additionally, the police, also, are a necessary function to maintain the order needed to keep a society function
Too bad the majority of the laws enforced by the police have nothing to do with keeping society functioning. Societies do not break down because a woman is wearing a burkha or because someone snorts some cocaine. If the only thing the police did was to keep the public safe, by arrested people who pose an immediate threat, your argument would hold water.