Agreed. It completely depends on what kind of software you want to write or what kind of computing research you want to do. I love continuous math, so I took a fair bit of it, but I've hardly ever used it because of the application domains of most of my software development thus far. I never really liked discrete math or statistics, which is too bad, since they're both a lot more applicable for what I do.

And for Software Engineering as a discipline, math is not a high priority. It's more about prioritizing, process, requirements, documentation, dealing with other humans, and other stuff I'm probably forgetting just now. It's a far cry from a lot of scientific or engineering-oriented programming, which is often done by by small teams with more training in the application area than in computer science or software engineering.

I'd say do the math you like and pursue software development that uses that math.

So would you also advocate giving up on, say, weather prediction? Until we can come up with a model of the weather based on experimentally-tested theories such as how individual molecules of air move and interact?

It would be really helpful to me professionally if we had models of people that were more like our models of bridges, car engines, airplanes, integrated circuits, etc. But modelling humans explicitly as systems of millions of individual units (e.g., cells, neurons) is going to be a long time coming. Current models of human perception, congition, and so on, are far from perfect, but they're sitll a lot better than nothing.

"The advantage of mg is that it loads immediately"

Loads, loads... Hmmm. What's that? ... Oh, yeah, you mean what you do once every few years when you have to reboot for a kernel or hardware upgrade and then you log in and have to wait 10s or so until emacs fills your screen again? Is that this "load" time you're talking about?

Anybody who cares how long emacs takes to load isn't using it the Right Way(TM)*.

[*] Meaning, of course, how I use it.

I like trac a lot for small projects, but for tracking lots of bugs I find its search interface really frustrating after being used to the flexibility of Bugzilla (esp. for searches). A project I was on used Bugzilla for bugs, and trac for everything else (with its tickets as internal to-do items), and that worked really well.

I never noticed this flaw in US legal system before: one of these litigants has to win. If only *both* could lose...

I don't know if it's geeky, exactly, but I suspect fondness for castles is correlated with geekiness. In any case, I strongly recommend the Tower of London. It might have been just the tour guide we happened to get, but the best tour I ever had of anything anywhere was at the Tower of London.

The Crown Jewels are there, too, and you can look get a surprisingly close look at them. They weren't the highlight, though, at least for me. (Mainly, they were surreal to me; they were so big, I just couldn't believe enough that they were real to be impressed by them.)

Yeah, the stereoscopic effect of two eyes provides depth info, although only to about 20 feet.

Fortuantely, there are other cues, too. I don't think I remember them all, but a few are: parallax (different apparent relative motion of objects at different depth as the viewer moves), occlusion, and accomodation (like a camera, your eye focuses differently for different depths).

So yes, each retina is 2D, but even statically you can build a 3D model from that, and over time you get even more cues. (It is useful to remember, though, that the 3D model in your head is just a a model and may not correspond exactly to what's out there.)

Actually, at least for software, there is definitely concern and scrutiny about whether it's made in the US or elsewhere. Or if it's made in the US but by foreign nationals.

On the hardware side, I heard from someone who works in the defense industry that in his organization, ThinkPads are no longer permitted since they became Lenovo.

And no, I'm not saying that it's a perfect system and there's no chance that a bad actor could sneak something in, but it definitely is the case that they are paying attention to where and by whom their stuff is made.

We've had a Samsung ML-1210 laserprinter (back & white) for several years (more than 4, maybe 6) and it works just as well as ever. It got quite a lot of use for a home printer since my wife was in a web-based grad program for 4 of those years and had to print lots of stuff for that. The only feature I really miss is that it's not duplex.

It isn't PostScript, but on Windows and Mac the Samsung drivers work just fine, and on Linux it works with foomatic no problem. They do also provide drivers for it for Linux, and those are good, too.

If you decided to get color, you should check cost per page. It varies a lot across manufacturers.

Yeah, it should. But it's not. I feel both relieved that the right decision was made, and sad that I feel so relieved.

So whether it's art or not depends on what the creator's attitude to it was? It seems to me that the important thing should be the nature of the artifact produced.

But that's probably why I don't get "modern art": it seems to base the artisticness of an artifact on the story one crafts around the creator, the process whereby the artifact was created, and the artfact, rather than the artifact itself.

[sigh] I've been reading /. for a long time, yet I'm still surprised that this got modded Insightful.

Are you saying that for humans physical traits are evolutionarily irrelevant, or in general they aren't?

Our mental abilities are clearly important, possibly the most important differentiator from other species (from a survival perspective). But I think it's obvious that some physical traits have survival benefits, too. As the earlier post pointed out, bipedalism is a huge beneift for humans, since it lets us use tools better than other species. Our mental abilities wouldn't be nearly as useful in the absence of tool use.

I agree that the judge made only decision possible under current law.

However, I'd like to point out that fair use is statutory law:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html

It's true that it has/leaves more room for interpretation by the courts than some statutes, but it's still based on statute.