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This subthread is a perfect example of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy...

Blah, blah, totally agree. Show me one of these "historically stable" nations that hasn't engaged in war. Agonism is part of the human experience, wired into our psychology, and an unforntunately inevitable part of existence.

This article is a pretty good summary of the reasons behind the search for large primes. Although finding a new large prime doesn't necessarily have any specific, short term "benefits", it serves to deepen our understanding of mathematics. As extremely large primes are of importance in cryptography, the ability to find and work with large primes has a great deal relevancy in IT, as well. The more we discover large primes the more we learn about ways to factor them quickly and efficiently.

That's an irrelevant detail of how I presented it. Let's say they're babies who don't know any better, or they're blind and deaf, or Snidely Whiplash has tied them to the tracks, or they were crossing the tracks, but some superglue had spilled onto the tracks from a passing truck.

None of which are irrelevant details because, again, we're discussing free agents not inanimates. If the people sleeping on the tracks are completely ignorant of their choices or victims of circumstance like the truly innocent victim in #2, then that's another different situation. Of course, in the heat of the moment, you probably don't know that and will just make an erroneous assumption which we can't fault you for given the information available.

That's an entirely different thing than saying it's irrational to not sacrifice a person you know to be innocent to save some people who might be innocent. Then again, people sacrifice themselves in such situations regularly.

Sure, the law would probably view it that way, but that doesn't mean the law has a rational basis. Law is based on morality, and morality is based on irrational biases built into the primate brain.

Law is not based on morality, it has its own philosophical basis [1] [2]. Western law tends to be based on a rational consequentialist philosophy. Don't try to apply your new shiny hammer to all of your old nails. :-)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence
[2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/law-phil.htm

I'm sorry that it wasn't clearer from the start. I really was just trying to express my amusement. Also sorry that you found it a waste of time. I found it kind of interesting, though I can't claim not to have been frustrated too.

Anyway, may we both have success in convincing clueless religious zealot SUV drivers of the error of their ways. They are an offense to common sense and a menace to resource conservation, regardless of whether you buy all the claims of global warming proponents (and let's not get into that).

(I know, already! ;-)

My point is that the problem that remains to be solved isn't a problem of technology but a problem of understanding how our human mind works. This will come from someone studying the human mind, not someone studying technology (as in the universal human language analogy -- the hard part is figuring out human linguistics and how we commnicate, not being clever enough as a computer programmer).

On the other hand, the theorem of universal computing means that once that peice is understood, it will be capable of being modeled in any logical environment, meaning that indeed, all you need is the right program and "poof", as there is a proof to this effect.

There is a HUUUUGE assumption in this statement: basically (as I wrote) that the brain is hardware and the mind is software, so if we understood the human mind already (which we don't -- and again there are arguments that say that we never will; we can't. The argument basically says that it always takes a more advanced mind to understand a lesser one. A single intelligence is by definition not smart enough to understand itself.) it'd just be a matter of writing the correct software for your TSR-80 (or whatever computer).

However, once you start thinking about it, this model of the human mind as "software" starts breaking down quickly. I have come to believe that (forgetting the difficulties of understanding the workings of the human mind in detail) a software program will never actually achieve human intelligence in any form. It might be smart by some definition of intelligence, but it'd never be human intelligence as human intelligence is innately biological.

One cool thought experiment is "the chinese room argument":

http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/chineser.htm#H1

Check it out: I'm sure that if you're willing to think about it it'll start challenging the assumptions that we *all*, as technology minded people seem to make about how things (our human mind in this case) work.

Another paper, by the prof I studied under, is unfortunately actually a bit dense reading IMHO (even though I'm familiar with what he's saying), but he makes a lot really cool arguments attacking the idea that all we need for strong AI is the "right" computer program:

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/p apers/msb.html

Basically, I'd have more respect for the futurist if he'd actually acknowledge some of these questions regarding AI -- a lot of which are actually quite old (as old as Turing, who, as a techonologist, also made some proposals for strong AI that have turned out to be quite naive, as in the Basic program Eliza passing the Turing Test for intelligence.)

Oh, here's a better-explained (IMHO) link to the chinese room experiment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room

I'm pretty sure 669689 is prime.

I checked my UID at this website:
http://primes.utm.edu/curios/includes/file.php?fil e=primetest.html

Yes, but you have to split it approximately 78,000 ways[1]

[1] http://primes.utm.edu/howmany.shtml

"Flyboy Connor is getting sick and tired of this job and wants to go home. Should we let him?"

"What?!? Have you lost your mind, man? Don't you understand that Flyboy is the neurotransmitter in my synapses? If he leaves, I'll die! I'll cease to be! I'll be an EX-CHINESE-ROOM! Oh, dear God, please don't let him leave!!! I don't want to die! I have my whole life ahead of me! There are so many questions left for me to ponder! You can't do this to me! Flyboy Connor must NEVER be allowed to leave! NEVER, I tell you! NEVER NEVER NEVER!!!"

I prefer a solid and complete defense of the scientific method to the feel good relativism of "your belief is just as good as my belief." See the Sokal thread I posted for the pernicious effects of realativistic philosophy. News flash if your belief is an ignorant myth it is NOT as valid as my rigorously tested scientific theory. And I only have a stock of scientific theories to know about at all if the scientific method as a whole is defended against superstition such that scientific progress may continue. Your feel good moderate relativism is just the wedge towards undermining the scientific method that the theocrats are looking for, screw that.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/r/relativi.htm

Yes, the "Hitler card" as in the "all jews must die" mentality coming from Iran's Hitler, or did you not hear that from the Iranian President?

Iran's president denies the Holocaust, he wants to eliminate Israel, and he institutes discrimination against Jews in Iran. He may also sponsor terrorism against Jews elsewhere in the world. That makes him an evil man, a demagogue, and and opportunist, but none of that puts him in the same league as Hitler.

In any case, the problem of people like you is that you escalate rather than deescalate. People like you think because Iran's government is evil (which it is) and because other people who happen to share your religion have been badly mistreated in the past (which they have), you have some sort of special license to do whatever it takes to reduce your risk and survive. That stance is not only ethically unjustifiable, racist, and plain evil (in a banal sort of way), it also simply doesn't work.

Israel isn't being destroyed by Iran or the Palestinians, it's being destroyed by people like you, on both sides of the conflict.

more usability testing, more QA, and more effective marketing as well as tried-and-true "advertising" techniques, I'd agree.

One of the many wonderful things about the model is we can provide those things ourselves, as individuals, and out of whichever mode of personal reasoning we d*rn well please: directed self-interest (very Randy of Mr. Phipps, btw), volunteerism, revolutionary proclivity, or all or none of the above.

That the bulk of this discussion surrounds the Zealotry v. [*] PoVs means the discussion is, for the most part, missing Mr. Phipp's point.

From the perspective of capitalism, the fact these things are needed (and, IMO, they are) has been and continues to be a fantastic opportunity for those with the wherewithal to provide the "Fit and Finish" needed by many technically and functionally fantastic projects to get them better suited for business.

S
http://www.meanbusiness.com/

So you cant include it out of the box, but what about forcing the user to implcitly enable it? Still shipping it then, so I'd say still a violation.. But what about shipping a script to download/install? What about extracting the drivers out of a prime number?

Another point, one has to be put a lot of faith in other theories associated with a measurement/observation. Say, a distant galaxy is being looked at. I might be using some IR imaging satellite; I have to trust in the theories that developed it and the process that converted it's sensors into human readable data. This is especially true when we are talking about such subtle changes.

It is the 5,000th prime number (no commas).

Someone should have checked judges personal computers to understand merits of this verdict.

Your statement is a classic case of logical fallacy called ad hominem tu quoque. Please read up about it here.

That's what I immediately thought too. It sounds like this essay is making the exact same point that John Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment is intended to make. It also seems to fail for the same reasons as Searle's argument: By defining semantic understanding as something only humans are capable of he begs his question without addressing why we are to assume that other humans are capable of semantic understanding but computers are not (if able to pass a Turing Test). Basically he's an organics bigot.

(Disclaimer: I have been out of the cognitive science game for a long, long time, and was only a student even back then.)

Based on the extremely short treatment his essay is given in the review, Ellerman's The Semantics Differentiation of Minds and Machines sounds like a tired rehash of Searle's "Chinese Room" argument - that is to say, a restatement of an argument that I didn't find that compelling the first time around. Douglas Hofstadter, writing about Searle's essay, called it "religious diatribe against AI, masquerading as a serious scientific argument."

Can anyone who read Ellerman's essay comment on how it differs from Searle's?

Reminds me of the Chinese Room argument. http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/chineser.htm What is intelligence for that matter?!?

http://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/one.html

Anybody want to run a PRP test on this number? It will probably take at least 2 CPU-months.

Anybody want to run a PRP test on this number? It will probably take at least 2 CPU-months.

Not to mention that using a prime of this form means Williams' P+1 method will crack your key in no time!

There once was a dedicated prime-finding device called a Dubner Cruncher, but those are getting pretty old.

Sophie Germain was a female who made important advances in number theory, inparticular to do with prime numbers (and Fermat's Last Theorem).

When this prime:
http://primes.utm.edu/primes/page.php?id=20278 885817959*2^24712-1
was found, several years ago, it was something like the 7th largest known Sophie Germain prime in the world. The finder, like Sophie, was female. Both were and are utterly devoid of (their own) penis.

Alas it's no longer one of the top-20 Sophie Germains, but time marches on at a frightening rate, and primes are growing at an amazing rate:
http://primes.utm.edu/top20/sizes.php

Sophie Germain was a female who made important advances in number theory, inparticular to do with prime numbers (and Fermat's Last Theorem).

When this prime:
http://primes.utm.edu/primes/page.php?id=20278 885817959*2^24712-1
was found, several years ago, it was something like the 7th largest known Sophie Germain prime in the world. The finder, like Sophie, was female. Both were and are utterly devoid of (their own) penis.

Alas it's no longer one of the top-20 Sophie Germains, but time marches on at a frightening rate, and primes are growing at an amazing rate:
http://primes.utm.edu/top20/sizes.php

There are undoubtedly more primes between this Mersenne prime and the last one as there is roughly a million orders of magnitude between this new number and the previous record. Good luck trying to prove that one of them is prime however. Mersenne numbers are "easy" to prove composite or prime by running the Lucas-Lehmer test. http://primes.utm.edu/mersenne/index.html has some background info.

This is a matter of philosophy. If you are to take this standpoint, you can just as well say that you don't believe AI is possible. An AI will never be human, but it could be something that is capable of appearing freakishly similar to human. The interesting thing is whether it is "intelligent", we already know it's "artificial". This is analogous to the chinese room argument among armchair AI philosophers.

By my standards, we'll have achieved creating a digital/robotic, sentient being when the original code is entirely basic, but develops its knowledge and personality by using senses/experiences in order to learn and develop itself.

I must disagree. There's absolutely no reason to insist on the original code being "entirely basic". And I would be very surprised if it turned out to be so. Neither do I believe that the "original code" of the human brain is "entirely basic". If it was, we would already have figured it out. More likely, the "original code" of the human brain is freakishly complicated, and close to impossible to understand. As most psychologists have long since figured out, we are not born "tabula rasa", with the brain in a "blank slate". Our behaviour is preprogrammed, although we have the ability to change that behaviour to some extent through learning.

What we seem to agree upon is that it must "develop its knowledge and personality by using senses/experiences in order to learn and develop itself". Untill we have something like that, it is not "intelligent".

And even then, emotions are going to be a really hard one to put in there. It's a little more difficult than just saying, If bot.senses(touch) = poked then bot.speach(yell) = "OW!" End If

I'm not convinced emotions are that important. Well, of course it would need to have some kind of emotions. Emotions would guide it's behaviour, and one important emotion would be curiosity. But it doesn't need to have emotions that mimic human behaviour, for us to call it "intelligent". Although it would make it easier for us to communicate with it, if it did. I can easily imagine an intelligent alien lifeform somewhere in the universe, having totally different emotions from us, so why not an AI?

In fact, if I were to develop an AI (assuming I had the abilities to do it), I would choose my emtotions with care. Anger? No, I don't want an angry AI/robot, anger is needed in nature as a defense mechanism, but I don't want an AI to start defending itself. Love? It complicates our lives so much, and part of the reason for an AI would be to create something without those problems, so the answer is still no. Friendship? Possibly... Hunger? Definitely not. And so on...

"The obvious mathematical breakthrough [to break modern encryption] would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers."

-- Bill Gates from "The Road Ahead," p. 265.


Although I'm sure he didn't realise its curiosity value.

There's so little to go on concerning the true character of Socrates. AFAIK there's Plato and Xenophon. I can't remember reading Aristophanes The Clouds wherein Socrates was caricatured.

Burnet (as I read in Russell's History of Wester Philosophy) wrote: 'Xenophon's defense of Socrates is too successful. He would never have been put to death if he had been like that.' Personally I like the bit on Socrates attributed to the prosecution: Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others. The, perhaps apocryphal, report that near death he asked a friend to pay a debt owed, a cock to Asclepius, is cool, as such a debt was paid when the debtor recovered from an illness.

I think Plato did history a disservice in his fictional representation of Socrates. Given you're posts I think you're better read in terms of Plato than I am (not a difficult feat);) so I'll defer to your characterization. I can't immediately recall the Classical Greek concept of history but I seem to remember their concept of history was radically different than ours.

Read up on the philosophy of Descartes: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/descarte.htm

You can go around thinking that because something was obtained scientifically it is a fact, but you fail to understand what science truly is. It's a system, the best we know, of establishing a common knowledge. Many people would LOVE to get their bit in, some manage to do so when it is not warranted, even when common sense will tell you otherwise, to further their personal ambitions, political agenda, financial interest, whatever.

Hah, don't go turning the tables on me dude, you are the one that hates everything. I'm not trying to convert you to some ideology, you obviously don't even recognize my ideology, I'm not a Christian, I explained it to you with the Einstein quote. Ideally you would like me to join with you and start hating all religions, especially Muslims and Christians. Right? I guess my ideology is to hold people accountable for crimes against humanity, bring them to justice, let things take their course, and each person is free to develop his or her own sense of spirituality, whether it belongs to the realm of organized religion or not.

You don't understand what logic is. You have not applied a shred of logic to anything you've said so far. I am not going to go back and count the number of lies and hyperbole's you've stated. Wherever you get your FACTS from has a questionable sense of ethics.

From your deep cynicizm about the state of US democracy I must assume you are from Europe. I find your nihilism to be not to be much of an alternative.

Bzzt. Argentina it is, land of corrupt politicians, fat cows and maradona/tango/gaucho whatever cliché you prefer :D
Still, I don't see where I claimed my country's political stance was better than US's. Argentina's involvement with global problems is nonexistant, as sadly, we have enough to take care around here.

Your pacifism is hard to comprehend. Perhaps if your country were under a more immediate threat you would feel differently.

Maybe, I find that hard to believe, but hey, Argentina has not that many enemies. Still, that doesn't make it right. It is not because killing in self defense is justifiable that somehow murder becomes nice. It is not because I feel compelled to do something - sentimentally, out of anger, or out of fear, desire of revenge - that it somehow becomes the right thing to do. Understandable, maybe. Right? No.

My country's justice system applies only to its citizens, not to enemy nations that seek to harm it.

Well, obviously that sucks. It is not justice unless it is the same for all. Did you ever notice that this lady has her eyes covered?
Judging "others" (whatever that means for you, "attacking countries", the "axis of evil", black people, jews) differently than yourself is discrimination.
When a killer murders, he can be *trying* to deliberately hurt you. He still gets (at least in theory, which is good enough for this era) a fair trial.

For them Mr. Bush is judge, jury, and executioner!

What can I say, "Heil Bush" maybe?

1207 sounds like a prime number, but it's not.

(That's your daily dose of useless information.)

1. http://www.iep.utm.edu/t/timetravel.htm

Time travel is a fairly new topic of scientific and philosophical investigation. In science, different models of the cosmos and the natural laws governing the universe imply different possibilities for time travel. Theories about time travel have changed as the dominant cosmological theories have evolved from classical, Newtonian conceptions to modern, relativistic and quantum mechanical conceptions. Philosophers were quick to note some of the implications of the new physics for venerable issues in metaphysics: the nature of time, causation and personal identity to name just a few. The subject continues to produce a fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas between scientists and philosophers as theorists in both fields struggle to resolve confounding paradoxes that emerge when time travel is pondered seriously. This article discusses both the scientific and philosophical issues relevant to time travel.

2. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys /

Time travel has been a staple of science fiction. With the advent of general relativity it has been entertained by serious physicists. But, especially in the philosophy literature, there have been arguments that time travel is inherently paradoxical. The most famous paradox is the grandfather paradox: you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, thereby preventing your own existence. To avoid inconsistency some circumstance will have to occur which makes you fail in this attempt to kill your grandfather. Doesn't this require some implausible constraint on otherwise unrelated circumstances? We examine such worries in the context of modern physics.

3. http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001673/0 1/TMArchive.pdf

We discuss the possibility to build and operate a time machine, a device that produces closed timelike curves (CTCs). We specify the spacetime structure needed to implement a time machine and assess attempted no-go results against time machines in classical general relativity, semi-classical quantum gravity, quantum field theory on curved spacetime, and in Euclidean quantum gravity. Such no-go theorems for time machines would show that, under physically reasonable conditions, CTCs cannot develop in spacetimes initially free of these pathologies. Our review indicates that an investigation of the prospects of achieving no-go results has not been entirely successful in establishing such generality. At the same time, the pursuit of chronology protection results has proved to be a fruitful way to probe the foundations of classical GTR and the interface between general relativity and quantum field theory.

Maybe the point to be highlighted is one of judgement. If you're crossing a rope bridge, over an abyss, and, you think it's showing signs of giving way, do you sprint for the other side or do you go gingerly, testing as you go, looking for more proof of what's happening? In the first world, the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle is not ruggedly robust, or, highly redundant. Redundancy as a concept is, historically, only yesterday's news. The internet is an example of an infrastructure built with redundancy in mind. So, if the biosphere is showing signs of change, do we hope for benign change and/or for science to sprint to the rescue? Sir Francis Bacon Will climate change force a parameter shift that will invite a runaway state? The concept of key species tells us that specific species are necessary to maintaining the ecology of an eco niche. Could climate change destroy key species and cause collapse of ecosystems. This brings on the old bogey man of the domino effect.

Change is inevitable, so it's really a matter of placing your bet on science as the ultimate super hero, or, do we begin to exercise caution now to mitigate against change. After all there's no place like home./p

Maybe the point to be highlighted is one of judgement. If you're crossing a rope bridge, over an abyss, and, you think it's showing signs of giving way, do you sprint for the other side or do you go gingerly, testing as you go, looking for more proof of what's happening? In the first world, the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle is not ruggedly robust, or, highly redundant. Redundancy as a concept is, historically, only yesterday's news. The internet is an example of an infrastructure built with redundancy in mind. So, if the biosphere is showing signs of change, do we hope for benign change and/or for science to sprint to the rescue? Sir Francis Bacon Will climate change force a parameter shift that will invite a runaway state? The concept of key species tells us that specific species are necessary to maintaining the ecology of an eco niche. Could climate change destroy key species and cause collapse of ecosystems. This brings on the old bogey man of the domino effect.

Change is inevitable, so it's really a matter of placing your bet on science as the ultimate super hero, or, do we begin to exercise caution now to mitigate against change. After all there's no place like home./p

Maybe the point to be highlighted is one of judgement. If you're crossing a rope bridge, over an abyss, and, you think it's showing signs of giving way, do you sprint for the other side or do you go gingerly, testing as you go, looking for more proof of what's happening? In the first world, the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle is not ruggedly robust, or, highly redundant. Redundancy as a concept is, historically, only yesterday's news. The internet is an example of an infrastructure built with redundancy in mind. So, if the biosphere is showing signs of change, do we hope for benign change and/or for science to sprint to the rescue? Sir Francis Bacon Will climate change force a parameter shift that will invite a runaway state? The concept of key species tells us that specific species are necessary to maintaining the ecology of an eco niche. Could climate change destroy key species and cause collapse of ecosystems. This brings on the old bogey man of the domino effect.

Change is inevitable, so it's really a matter of placing your bet on science as the ultimate super hero, or, do we begin to exercise caution now to mitigate against change. After all there's no place like home./p

Maybe the point to be highlighted is one of judgement. If you're crossing a rope bridge, over an abyss, and, you think it's showing signs of giving way, do you sprint for the other side or do you go gingerly, testing as you go, looking for more proof of what's happening? In the first world, the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle is not ruggedly robust, or, highly redundant. Redundancy as a concept is, historically, only yesterday's news. The internet is an example of an infrastructure built with redundancy in mind. So, if the biosphere is showing signs of change, do we hope for benign change and/or for science to sprint to the rescue? Sir Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of deductive reasoning, suggested we had to wrest the secrets of life from nature, like a mythological hero wresting a prize from some monster. I think many, maybe all of us, are subject to living, in part, in the heroic age, and, I think that is the greatest danger. The ancient Greeks fostered the idea of hubris as one of mankind's greatest weaknesses. The philosophy of the heroic age doesn't hold in an indeterminate universe and science shouldn't be seen as the ultimate big stick that will beat back the threats of nature.

Life, as we know it, is characterzed as an non-equilibrium, open-system. The sun rains down ~10^24 calories per year on the biosphere. Carbon based life forms, in the perfect mileu of water, harness this energy in various ways.But it's a system of systems and subject, as much as we know, to Systems Theory. If we know change is in the works do we risk positive feedback and trust in science to carry us past any threat?

There is a strong consensus that climate change is happening. Will climate change force a parameter shift that will invite a runaway state? The concept of key species tells us that specific species are necessary to maintaining the ecology of an eco niche. Could climate change destroy key species and cause collapse of ecosystems. This brings on the old bogey man of the domino effect.

Change is inevitable, so it's really a matter of placing your bet on science as the ultimate super hero, or, do we begin to exercise caution now to mitigate against change. After all there's no place like home.

I've tried to find web sites that present these arguments in simple language. Most are too long and involved for people to wade through. Here's some I found readable. Does anyone know of other sites that have a concise presentation of either side?

http://www.doesgodexistanswer.net/

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/crea tion.html

http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/ont-arg.htm

I've tried to find web sites that present these arguments in simple language. There's not many. These were OK.

http://www.doesgodexistanswer.net/

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/crea tion.html

http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/ont-arg.htm

I, the site owner, hereby give full access to my content to any visitor. I acknowledge that how the content is presented or how much of it is actually shown is fully up to the visitor.
I have chosen a business model based on ads, fully knowing that I have no way of controlling whether they are shown with my content or not.

Because one is not prime.

John Searle advocates a position that symbol manipulation isn't intelligence. Rather that consciousness is an emergent property of patterns in neural firing.

You're equating "intelligence" with "consciousness"...that's problematic, as I can infer your intelligence by your words and actions but I cannot infer your consciousness by anything other than analogy to my own. Intelligence is functional, consciousness is purely experiential.

Searle's view falls down on two counts: it requires us to say that a symbol manipulation system that seems to be presenting intelligent output (like the Chinese room example) isn't intelligent; and it requires some unspecified "magic" property of brains.

I recommend the discussion in Hofstadter and Dennett's The Mind's I .

There is no intentionality for 1 + 1 = 2. But there is for the statement "I believe in the validity of axiomatic mathematicaly systems."

I know that there is intentionality when I make statements about belief. But there's no way that I can know that you're not just a clever but "dark inside" symbol manipulator when similar statements come out of your mouth.

Yes, that way lies solipsism, but we need not go all the way down that road, just enought to establish what we really can and cannot know about other minds.

I am not sure when a non-Mersenne last had that status, but it is a rare occurrence.

391581*2^216193-1 was the largest known prime from 1989 to 1992. Before that, the last non-Mersenne record was 1951-1952. A complete list can be found here.

If you read the entry page (www.mersenne.org), you would have seen this link:

Why participate?

The top three previously known primes were Mersenne. Here's a list. At the time they were discovered, almost all largest Mersenne primes have held the record for biggest prime until being edged out by another Mersenne prime. I am not sure when a non-Mersenne last had that status, but it is a rare occurrence.

Looking for Mersennes is "picking the low fruit" when it comes to prime hunting so I question the phrasing "Not only is it the biggest Mersenne .."

What would have been remarkable would have been if the new largest prime were *not* a Mersenne.

This is by no means a "neo-Luddite" argument. It is instead a plea for the Unixish Approach (or Philosophy) to be implemented even with (x)html tools: a well-made, well-designed tool does its job and then another tool may take over from there. If you want a net-based application, fine. Make a program whose specific function is to serve as the container for such applications. Just don't try to shoehorn code into a space designed for data.

You are right that things are often appropriated for other uses, and that this is the way things often work. Yet, the fact that something does happen, or is the case, does not imply that it ought to happen; Hume made sure we could not dance around that conclusion.

This is not holding technology back. This is instead a reasoned approach to the problem, one which would likely prevent many of the security/performance/stability issues which currently do and which inevitably will pop up because of the tendency to appropriate one tool for another use. Coded tools do not have the same tolerances as do physical tools.

28433 * 2^7830457 + 1

Probably to manage to do one more iteration of the algo utilized in the Rieman Hypotesis?

I hadn't realized Sanger's background was in the theory of knowledge. I'm wondering now if what he's actually up to is something much more subtle than seems evident on the surface. Of course Google is into the "sum of all human knowledge" business too, but they're going for bulk and automated quality selection methods, rather than Wikipedia's human touch. Having been around myself since the Interpedia days, I know there's a long history here...

The first encyclopedists had at least ulterior motives. Anybody have any other ideas what this is really all about? Then there's always the parallels to the world of Asimov's Foundation series, which started off as an Encyclopedia project!