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Comment Re: WOW (Score 2) 288

More to the point, it wasn't even used correctly. "Per se" does not mean "exactly" or "specifically" or as generic space filler. "Per se" means "by itself" and is usually used to say something has an intrinsic property vs a property it has that is not intrinsic. It's used to say things like "an orthographical error is not a huge problem per se, but when it confuses the meaning or syntax of a sentence it can be."

Which brings me to the next point, which is that if you're going to be a pedant, at least be pedantic about shit that matters more than spelling.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 359

Why is this even a question? If you want to run your Windows 10 applications, why don't you simply use Windows? Why switch to Linux if you just want it to be another form of Windows?

The applications are not the OS. Wanting to run a common application that runs easily in Windows is not the same as wanting to run Windows. Since this is Slashdot maybe a stupid car analogy will help.

Suppose operating systems were cars and applications were features in the cars. Microsoft makes cars and ValveCo makes valves and caps that fit on the gas tanks but they only make them for Microsoft cars. Gas stations have licensing agreements and if you go to one its nozzle almost certainly fits a ValveCo valve. So if you want to get gas conveniently you pretty much need to use ValveCo devices, and if you want one to work well with your car you need a Microsoft car. Problem is Microsoft cars get terrible gas mileage and smell like old cabbage. You can buy a different and better car pretty easily, but it won't have a ValveCo valve and then if you want to get gas you'll have to find one of the few gas stations with nozzles that integrate well with your car or use a hack someone put together that will adapt a ValveCo valve to your car. The former sucks because the station near your house and the one by your work and the ones in between all use nozzles that require ValveCo valves, and the latter sucks because since they're hacks they're always a little leaky.

What you want is to be able to buy a car that doesn't smell like old cabbage but use industry-standard gas caps on it so driving it isn't super inconvenient and you don't have to go miles out of your way to get gas from a station outside the MS system.
What computer users want is to be able to use industry-standard applications without using hacks like Wine or dealing with the bullshit the Microsoft OS puts you through to do it.

Comment Re: Any that aren't about 'social justice'. (Score 4, Insightful) 364

'Social justice' is an amplification of the bigotry of the past. The leftists pushing 'social justice' are the ones who are fixated on classifying people into extremely fine-grained groupings based on physical traits or other attributes. They have even managed to take it to a level never seen in the past, continually introducing new ways of dividing people into smaller and smaller groups.

By "dividing people into...groups" do you mean "describing different groups?" Talking about different demographics and how policies might affect them differently isn't dividing them, it's simply recognizing them. Society has always been comprised of different groups of people, some large and some small. Have you ever talked about your family vs someone else's family or families in general? You're "dividing people into groups." Almost everyone I've ever talked to who rails against this kind of practice is also likely to blame talking about racism for racism ("there wasn't all this racism before Obama"), but what that argument ignores is that society has already done these divisions and is already treating people differently based on their physical traits or other attributes. What you have issue with isn't the division, but merely talking about it. You want to ignore society's unfair treatment of some groups because they're not your groups. That's your prerogative but don't pretend you're the victim of leftist propaganda when all you have to do is not watch or read those stories and you still get to not care.

"Social justice" and activists looking at how certain populations are underserved and/or underrepresented is how we got the 19th Amendment. It's why Jim Crow laws aren't legal anymore. And in the future it'll be why nobody raises a fuss when a trans woman uses the women's bathroom (if separate bathrooms even still exist). Discrimination in sci-fi is generally not treated as a good thing, but there's an entire subgenre of dystopian sci-fi you can read to get your fix of the powerful stepping on everyone else. But I should warn you that even in most of those books your side loses.

The people who are supposedly decrying things like racism, sexism, prejudice, and intolerance often end up being the ones who engage in such behaviors the most egregiously.

Citation needed

Comment Re:White noise can be copied too (Score 1) 219

His work is 10 hours long and each of the five claims could be for different, non-overlapping sections within it, so none of the five need contain any content from another. For example, if I took five songs from five different performers and concatenated them together, all five would have the right to make a copyright claim even though none contain another's work.

This is true, but wouldn't it be weird if that were the case? Is one minute of white noise repeated 600 times somehow worse or measurably different from five separate one-minute clips concatenated then repeated 120 times? Is the human ear+brain discriminating enough to notice that the almost-entirely-uniform static in the first example repeats with a shorter period than the second? Wouldn't that indicate poor randomness to begin with?

Comment Re:When *police* are in danger? (Score 5, Insightful) 318

Here's a clue from a responsible adult - if you go into the world and treat the police like an enemy, or teach your kids the same - you are going to be in for a very rough time. Not because of the police - because of your own actions and statements.

Many people have good reason to believe the police are not there to help them whenever they show up, and that at best they'll be thought of as suspects before victims, and not just suspects but guilty suspects. Trust must be earned. If the police do not have the public's (or any non-empty subset thereof) trust, that is the fault of the police and the criminal justice system as a whole and not that of the public.

You may be responsible for yourself but you've also been tricked into thinking a police state is a good thing and trying to convince others of the same. But it's a cop's job to protect me, not the other way around. They're public servants and I'm the public so I don't owe the police anywhere near what they owe me. They should smile if I flip them off. Otherwise why am I paying for them?

Comment Re:Health Care vs. Health Insurance (Score 1) 415

This is exactly how the system currently works, for people with insurance anyway. They buy isopropyl alcohol and bandages and cough medicine and contraceptives and soap and toothbrushes and aspirin and shoe inserts and vitamins and hemorrhoid cream and ankle braces and all kinds of things that are part of their everyday health upkeep. But they go to the dentist for cavities and to the doctor for broken bones and cancer and pregnancy and whatnot.

I don't know anyone who thinks health care is free and since your analogy describes the status quo it's really unclear what your point is.

Comment Re: Good and Stop Reviving Them When They OD (Score 1) 422

The cruel fact of the matter is homelessness is a choice. They want to be homeless and not seek out the hundreds of opportunities there are to pull oneself out of their holes. We are a society of welfare and foodstamps. Hell, I even signed up for foodstamps in college just because I could! If a broke college student can do it, so can a homeless drug addled bum.

If you were broke and government assistance helped you, good. I just wish the lesson you learned from that wasn't that you should be a selfish jerk and demonize everyone else who's worse off now than you've likely ever been.

Want to know why they don't bother? Because it's easier to make a living panhandling from guilty nitwits like yourself and shooting up / drinking to oblivion.

This is pure made-up garbage. Homeless people aren't raking in big bucks, or for most even small bucks. The homeless of San Francisco are dirt poor and the most vulnerable people in our society. There are something in the neighborhood of six homeless people for every shelter bed. Most shelters don't admit families.

I used to hang with gutter punks in Berkeley and I acknowledge that some people are homeless by choice, but they're usually kids from bad homes who found a community on the street that was safer than home for them, and they are a small minority of the homeless population in the Bay Area. Almost nobody wants to be homeless. Almost nobody wants to be addicted to drugs. The solution to these problems is treatment and prevention, not punishment. It costs more than $70K per year to incarcerate someone in California so it doesn't even make economic sense to criminalize homelessness. You could pay them a living wage and still have money left over. Most people with stable housing and a strong community don't end up addicted to drugs or homeless, and a lot of homeless are there simply because losing their jobs started a downward spiral that's VERY hard to escape from.

People with mental health issues and drug addiction (which isn't even close to all homeless) don't need to be pushed into improvement by cattle prods. They need to be given opportunities to get better on terms that work for them. This approach is backed up by experience and evidence, rather than your idiotic ideas that are based entirely on your own idiotic ideas of what causes homelessness, which lead to your idiotic ideas of how to deal with it.

Comment Sentence missing in the summary (Score 1) 190

If the summary read a little odd to anyone else, this is what it's supposed to say (missing sentence in bold).

It's a gorgeous $500 machine. But Xbox One X is still just an Xbox One. That's why I keep eyeballing it. My brain screams, "Why do you exist?" The Xbox One X does not answer. It sits silently...

It was not eyeballed for being a gorgeous $500 machine, but for being an unnecessary redundant object, which matches the tone of the rest of the summary. The real mystery is why I clicked through to TFA just to figure out why this section of the summary was so awkward to read.

Comment Re:Inequality is meaningless (Score 3, Insightful) 509

The bottom quintile benefit from a myriad of government programs. They aren't living in mud huts eating bugs.

Nobody claimed that the poor in the United States have it worse off than the poor everywhere else. The game of Who's Poorest is one without winners and that's not what we're playing here. The claim was that the "poorest of the poor" here are better off than the rich elsewhere. So name one country where wealthy people live in mud huts eating bugs because that's all they can afford. Name one country where those in the top quintile can't afford a car...or socks. Name one where the rich have to sleep outside and get harassed by police on the regular. Name one country where the rich must depend on handouts simply to stay alive.

Comment Re:Inequality is meaningless (Score 5, Insightful) 509

in our country alone the poorest of the poor are still better off than the rich in many places around the world.

The median net worth of the bottom quintile of American households is about -$6000. That means they have less than nothing. Everything is borrowed. So what do you consider the poor and what do you consider rich elsewhere? What do you know about the homeless? What do you know about alcohol and drug addicts? What do you know about prison inmates working for next to nothing?

Get out of here with your "poor people should stop being so uppity and be thankful for what they have" garbage. The poorest of the poor ain't got shit.

Comment Re:prove that the program works (Score 1) 189

Um, excuse me. If you're going to quote me and change what I said, then indicate your edits. I have done so above, in bold. Not that I can make sense of them.

Sorry, I realized at one point I was editing the quote rather than my own text and thought I fixed it but apparently missed one of my edits and there's no reason it should make sense there. Entirely my fault.

Wha...? That's just plain wrong. I can think up all kinds of invalid proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. But showing that a proof is invalid does not mean the theorem is incorrect. It just means your proof is.

Double wha...? I never claimed the theory behind the algorithm is incorrect, just that if an algorithm designed to produce correct proofs produces a fautly proof, the algorithm is faulty. If you think up an invalid proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, you're at fault for violating the rules of the system and I don't know why anyone would claim it's a fault of the system itself.

As for the rest, please see my other reply to your first post, relating to specific vs. universal algorithms. The gist is that a specific algorithm can be written to check the validity of this proof, but doing so is functionally equivalent to manual verification, but a universal algorithm to verify all correct proofs is impossible.

I never said that one couldn't produce either an algorithm that generates proofs or one that verifies proofs, but the fact is, since there exist true statements that are unprovable the latter algorithm cannot be universal. It can only check whether the symbols follow its understanding of the rules of manipulation.

I get what you're saying. Since Program A can be written to conform to certain rules, Program B can be written to confirm the output of A conforms to the rules that A was given, so yes the proof can be "verified" that way, but by definition you're still only covering some of the proofs A might generate.

But note that the poster I originally responded to said that the output need not be evaulated, but rather only the generating algorithm. I never even said this was a useless approach, since it will likely converge to a correct result, but it hardly counts as a proof of the result. Checking programming isn't the same as checking output, and checking output isn't the same as proving mathematical validity, though of course it can be the same as proving that what you get is what you expected to get, which may be good enough in many cases but wasn't even what I was originally responding to.

It may be that I'm assigning too much power to the algorithm that generated the proof. While it's impossible to program an algorithm with the axioms of a system and tell it to generate all the valid proofs of the system, and equally impossible to similarly program one to verify all proofs of the system, some smaller tasks (maybe this one) are certainly within the realm of algorithmic possibility. I was thinking of the original poster's comment in a very general context and not just in that of this specific problem.

Comment Re:prove that the program works (Score 1) 189

Note also the poster I responded to didn't say prove the algorithm is correct and error-free, but rather that it "works," which means generates a correct proof, the checking of which (probably) invokes the halting problem. I say probably because it's likely no easier to write an algorithm that is designed specifically to check this "proof" for correctness than it is for a mathematician to verify it manually, and therefore it would be verified by a general one designed to verify proofs. The halting problem doesn't apply to the former case since it would involve a single-use algorithm to verify one single input, but it surely applies to the latter.

Comment Re:prove that the program works (Score 1) 189

I think the issue here stems from the concept of "correct" and how knowable that value is.

Turing's halting problem is a statement about limitations in the ability of algorithms to examine other algorithms. Again, it doesn't mean you can't prove that an algorithm is correct, no matter how "correct" the algorithm appears.

That's kind of my point. Given this proof, it would show that the algorithm is incorrect if the proof is shown to be invalid, yet the proof is too long to be verified by anything but another algorithm, so the halting problem is definitely relevant in a discussion about algorithm-generated proofs which can't be verified by humans.

Sure, if errors are found in a generating algorithm, then they will be fixed and it will be run again, but that again doesn't show that its "proof" is a real proof without independent verification, which again invokes the halting problem if its proof is horrendously long since what it creates must be evaluated by another algorithm. There is no way to demonstrate that such an algorithm as this generates only correct proofs.

Yes, some proofs can be generated by algorithms and others can be checked by algorithms, but a mathematician is necessary at some point in the process since no non-trivial generating algorithm can be shown to create only correct proofs and no universal checking algorithm can be created which generates no false positives or negatives.

Considering how complex computer systems are, is it even possible to claim that an algorithm can run bug-free enough to consider correctness of code equivalent to verification that its output is correct in any but trivial cases?

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