Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:False Summary - Haigh Agrees with Knuth's Thesi (Score 2) 149

" far more important event than being the iPod/iPhone taskmaster"

I am actually going to argue that point with you. From an applications POV; IPods, IPads, iPhones, and OS X took the capabilities of Unix, and a host of other technologies, and leveraged them into something with a huge impact on social order, business, art, and science. Having Unix at the ready was important. But creating those products took the power of Unix into a whole new realm.

By analogy, knowing 2 Ca3SiO5 + 7 H2O ---> 3 CaO.2SiO2.4H2O + 3 Ca(OH)2 + 173.6kJ is important.

Taking that and using it to create a transcontinental highway system is also very important.

Comment Re:Knuth is right. (Score 1) 149

"Ignorance of mathematics isn't the cause of stupid laws and policy around technology..."

I agree somewhat but I think ignorance allows bad policy to exists. Some of what you hear coming from hucksters would, IMO, be akin to repealing the laws of gravity or building a warp drive. I am very skeptical of things such as facial recognition, trawling email to stop terrorist attacks, data mining, anything that handles data which is not ACID compliant, missile defense, and AI (AFAIAC it will never truly exist) though reflection is nice to have.

CS and the principles behind it are often so abstract that many people are not even aware of when they are lying.

Slashdot Top Deals

The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't. -- Ernest Rutherford

Working...