cop359

You're sort of equating working long hours with quality of life and general health which I don't think is a fair comparison, and even if it is, you're overstating it

First of all, I don't think quality of life necessarily translates to years spent living, or at least that's very hard to quantify.

For the Quality of Life vs. Long Hours:

Firs of all, it's also a weak comparison. You can work at a job 8 hours a day and hate it while the guy next to you does it for 12 hours a day and loves it. You might end up ruining your quality of life and he won't be. So you can't quantify your quality of life with time spent at work.

But even considering that there is probably a strong correlation; fortunately there is also a very natural balancing mechanism. If work long hours is really ruining your life then that's a direct incentive for you to not do it. You have a constant pressure to not overwork yourself because you it psychologically make you feel horrible and no one wants to feel horrible. So things sorta tend to balance themselves out. Even if you look at environments/careers were people really push themselves due to competitiveness in the long term I don't think they end up having shorter or worse lives.

Sure there are masochists that work 12 hours a day, hate it, but do it for the promotion; but even for them I think in their minds they don't have a horrible life. The prospect of the promotion prolly keeps them happy and keeps them going.

Now compare that with taking a pill or zapping your brain: If you take a pill and you get dementia 40 years later then you're trading in current gains for future pains. You're not getting constant negative feedback to hold you back. So to keep up with your peers you and all the people around you will be popping every pill possible because otherwise you drop out of the race.

Now since there are no brakes to the process and everyone is trashing their bodies to make it to the top your society eventually ends up with a group of super smart pill-poppers and brain zappers and they become all the CEO and PhDs but live to only 40 before their brains are fried and then you've got the rest that live to 90 and clean toilets.

The ethical problem in my mind is that by taking brain boosting meds you are taking a health risk.

So for instance, say the people that take these meds end up living 5 years less on average due to side effects of the drugs but are for instance able to read 2 times fast, remember thing better and only need 5 hours of sleep a day. Naturally because they're on average better they will get better jobs, more promotions and so on. So the people that choose not to trade in years of their life end up getting screwed (in relative terms) and (taken to the extreme - say 50 years down the road) will be second class citizens.

To a very minor degree this happens with caffeen, but when you put things in the equation like amphetamines and provigil it gets a lot scarier.

If I was taking amphetamines and provigil in college I know for certain I would have graduated with a lot higher GPA and I probably would have done a lot more in college. But what would have been the cost? I don't know.. and know one really can say; I wasn't willing to take that gamble. Why should the person that was willing to gamble his health get rewarded for it?

All the animated movies; some of which I think are absolutely great, would not have happened.

>So the first hit is free, but you as a farmer is stuck buying seed for eternity.

The heroin analogy is idiotic. Nothing is stopping the farmers from switching back to conventional crops if they don't find GMO's more profitable then what they were doing before

I've got the same issue with all the Linux distros I've seen. There might be some way of fixing it... but I just end up almost never using a GUI.

Better be in jail but alive (with free health care btw.) then dead. You could do the procedure overseas.

I think bad statistics education is just a facade that hides what is really happening. Now I don't have proof, but I think the majority of these "errors" are done on purpose. It's far better to fudge your math, get amazing (and wrong) conclusions and then get published in Nature then it is to not get published in Nature.

The prestige of getting published in Nature or Science far outweighs the criticism you will get for forging or manipulating your data. In large part because the later can almost never be proven. You can always say you just made a mistake or plead ignorance.

Older satellites might have crummy encryption like DES and might be hackable... (not a security guy, so talking out of my ass)

It seems you're being overly sensitive.

I don't really know what you mean by moral failing. To morally failyou have to start doing something that is immoral, like killing kitten or something

Just out of curiosity (I don't really know what the answer is because I don't have depression), but do you think it's impossible for a person to become depressed due to being weak or having a weak character?

Could for example being a loser make your life difficult and lead to depression?

Now I understand "loser" is kind of a meaningless term, but I'm just using it as an illustrative example.

Say for a particular set of reasons (having to due with your character/personality) everyone around you always teases you. Couldn't that lead to depression; and if you were that kind of person, wouldn't addressing what makes you a "loser" be the correct way ultimately to deal with your depression.

Or is depression never caused by problems with one's own personality/character?

The whole war = innovation thing never held much water for me.

First of all, there is no way to know what would have happened if there was no war. Some of those things might have been invented anyway. Maybe other more important things would have been invented.

Also, if you look at non-war years they too are full of innovation. The period just before WW1 brought us the light bulb, the telegraph, the phone, skyscrapers, the type writer, etc. etc. I mean, it was over a slightly longer period of time, but I don't think it would be outrageous to argue that the rate of innovation was just as high as during WW2.

That's actually very weird. Wouldn't having an OS like Linux make it so you can't guarantee computation times and guarantee exactly when processes will start and end?

I don't really know much about OS's but I'd write control systems in a pure language compiled directly to machine code with no OS. That way you would have certain guarantees of execution and auditing the code would be significantly cheaper. I remember hearing that auditing code for satellites is outrageously expensive because most languages have side effects. So it's thousands and thousands of dollars per line of code to guarantee that it'll do what it says it will do regardless of execution path.

I don't really know a lot about this stuff, but my understanding is that Perl was more or less replaced sed and awk.

Follow up question.

How does it compare with Scala?

I prefer the MIT model of just having video lectures online. You can do things at your own pace.

Whats the advantage of this sign-up and do assignment that get graded by a computer model?

" 99% of the design problems you'll encounter have been encountered before and are probably cataloged. "

Bonus: It's already been done!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns_(book)

I heard that when they wrote the book they basically mailed a whole bunch of people in the field to find out all the patterns people were using and they weren't able to find more then 23. After getting 23 every other pattern they would hear about would be just an iteration of one of the ones they had.

Full Disclosure: I haven't actually read the book yet. But I'm planning to...

The repetition is obviously intentional (I'm surprised this wasn't evident to you). It's written more as a speech rather then a pamphlet. Have you listened to for instance Obama, or any other politician? Usually they have very little to say(you could probably summarize in 5 sentences), but to get the point across they use repetition. It's an effective communication tool.

From what I've heard, the long term consequences of the "filgrastim" stuff is unknown. It's a pretty intense drugs (it's basically causing your marrow to be release into your blood stream)

Thanks! =D

Really appreciate it. Bit of a bummer. Oh well.

I've been considering buying one myself. I had a quick question that I haven't been able to find the answer to: Can you boot from and SD card? I know it's not a high demand feature... but it's important for me.

The Qwikster/Netflix thing is not at all simple

As far as I understand streaming and renting are two unrelated businesses. On the surface, there is no good reason they should be tied to each other.

It one of the very basics of organizing corporations: If there is no synergy between different divisions then you should spin the company (at least Russel Ackoff is behind me on this).

On the other hand, having these two divisions together allows them to hedge off each other. If rentals get unpopular and everyone starts streaming then the business as a whole isn't in the red. So there might be good reasons to keep them together.. but I don't think it's a no-brainer.

(sry posting from a different account, but same person)

I think your views of Chinese culture is being colored by a skin deep look at China's past hundred years. I think as a a whole Chinese history would disagree with you. During times of dynastic change Taoism was the prevailing cultural trope. Because dynastic change isn't the majority of historical time it can give the impression that Confucianism is the dominant "religion", but these moments of turmoil are critical and their effects are long lasting. Taoism (or at least their way of looking at things) is always in the background.

Just as an example, look at the literati culture after the take over of the Yuan Dynasty. Southern Song loyalists persisted for about two generations and really revitalized Taoist-inspired world views. They were the driving engine of Chinese culture during that time. Things like romanticizing the farmer, living of the land, the life of recluses etc.

A very similar thing happened after the take over of the Qing dynasty. Ming loyalists revitalized many of the same ideas.

During more tumultuous times Chinese turn to the more individualistic, less paternalistic side of their Culture as the central authority (and everything it represents - a father figure, the cultural vanguard etc.) erodes.

Right now, with the influx of Western ideas/culture and lifestyle the authority of the Communist regime is eroding to an extent. People view it as corrupt, inept and it doesn't command the respect it once had.

I think there is a cultural "swing" that is going to happen. And my argument was that neither system is conducive to entrepreneurship

"Assigning the idea of e.g. fatalism to "mostly Taoism" is also inaccurate." it's obviously an over simplification on my part. It's a complicated multifaceted world view of course, but fatalism plays an important part from what I understand. It's a little unfortunate that you didn't elaborate because I'd love to know your view of Taoism. I'm by no means an expert (haven't read any Taoist literature for instance), but from what I know it isn't the belief system of the capitalist-entrepreneur.

___ Example of Taoist influence: I've mostly approached Chinese culture from the artistic perspective, but look at for example Bada Shanren (Ming Loyalist), vs. like

http://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0oGdVGUT7... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_Zhou

Even without knowing a lot of abotu Chinese art, you can see that Shen Zhou has a more traditional Confusian take on art (he's imitating the masters. That's why his work looks more "generic") while Bada is a lot more experimental and lets his individuality come through his art (Shen does too, but in more subtler ways that aren't very easy to explain).

Nope, sorry. Just thinking out loud.

Their UI is pretty radically new and it's reasonable to assume aspects of it are patented. I don't know of a competing product that works the same way.

I doubt they've devised some fundamentally new algorithm. Like you said, it'll probably be some aspect of the UI. I think the Siri "way of doing things" is pretty radically new and I think Apple will be rewarded for that with some patent protection.

Yes, patent lengths are rather absurd in this day and age. It should be on the order of 3 years. While it's easy for Apple to catapult new software into the market place, it can take several years for a small entrepreneur to market his technology.

How about if the rocket blows up on launch? Wouldn't the launch pad area be covered it aerosolized plutonium?

Unless Apple has it patented up the wazoo. Which they no doubt do.

(As an aside; I think this is a completely fair use of patents. You're creative, you make a new patent, you get to exclusively use that technology for the next X years to build market share)

While I don't agree with this agreement, I don't see any particular problem keeping the negotiations and drafts secret. I mean, the final deal is obviously made public (otherwise there would be no way of enforcing that countries abide by it), but I don't think the negotiators needs to disclose every thought they brainstorm. It would create a lot of public and political pressure on the negotiators and instead of trying to reach something that every country can agree on, they'd be trying to appease domestic lobbyists.

I think it's implied after 8 years of experience.. Still seems a little sketch, but I think it would be on par in say the Bay Area (though the programmer would have no debt)

A slightly more advance books which I love is: Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra by Carl Meyer. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0898714540

You can find a free PDF version online.

I like it more then Strang because it's a lot more concise, covers some more advanced topics and unlike Strang everything is said very accurately. I think Strang's rather hand-wavy way of explaining things starts faltering when he talks about more advance topics.

I would read Strang and listen to his lectures to get a good feel for Linear Algebra (to build up the intuition), and if you feel like you want more then pick up Meyer's book

If I initiate contact I always keep my first email extremely formal and polite. You never really know how the other person interprets emails (they could be a total snob for all you know) so it's better to play it safe.

If they respond in a more "casual" way, then I write back in a tone that matches theirs.

If I am writing to apologize about something, I try to write it in a more personable manner so that I can connect with them on a personal level. This generally diffuses any tension and makes people more sympathetic (at the cost of making you look less professional.. but something that's just worth it)