Slashdot Mirror

"Foolish Windows user! Nevermind that you may be at work and given only a single choice of browser. Or that you might actually like IE better than Netscape. Or that you may be at someone else's computer. Or a whole host or reasons that one might be using IE rather than Netscape, et al. You are forbidden to post here because you are a Microsoft Lover! Yes, you betray your lust for the vile software maker via your choice of browser! You obviously hate Linux and all free software and thus we expell thee from our midst!"

I can only imagine what kind of uproar would be generated if Microsoft were to block all non-MS browsers from www.microsoft.com...

If you couldn't tell I thought so, it's a pretty dumb idea, Nicky. (Research project: Kant's Categorical Imperative)

PS: HIBT?

Actually, this slashdot story, http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/17/1639250.shtm l, covers a prime number 48565...29443 that results in a zipped-up DeCSS program (explanation here: http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/glossary/Illega l.html

I haven't got the stomach to read any Vinge philosophizing this morning, but Michael's characterization of Vinge and the "Singularity" doesn't jive with what I remember from his work. Deepness is written around the assumption that there is a fundamental limit to the intelligence (the "weak AI" school of thought).

The last Vinge book I liked at all was Marooned in Real Time. This contained ideas I disagreed with, but they didn't totally infest the story. Been a while since I read it, but distinctly recall it has the Singularity happening because of a rise in human intelligence, mainly due to people becoming more and more skilled in using computers. Both Deepness and Marooned depict people as a crucial element in any kind of real intelligence.

I dimly recall an essay at the end of Marooned in which he describes the Singularity, not in terms of any specific technology, but rather as the inevitable result of scientific and technical progress. He argues that if you view this progress as a curve, it resembles an asymptotic curve like

y = 1/(n - x)

I'm sorry. This is pseudoscientific mysticism. You can't reduce all human achievement to a damn curve. Even if you could, its interpretation is hardly obvious. Maybe the Singularity is when the world shrinks to the size of a pea.

That sort of misuse of extrapolation and interpolation seemed to be pretty popular during the 80s. Laffer was only an economist (though obviously not a good one). But Vinge is a mathematician by training! He has no excuse.

__

There is/was a German hacker's convention scheduled for this year, one of the topics for discussion that I haven't seen posted in /. is the 'illegal prime'. A prime number, when written in base 16, that becomes a .gz file with the deccs code imbedded within. Its about 1400 digits long, viewable here How long till a digit place and count to find it in pi becomes available? The smalled deccs code in c is about 430 charachters. Remove the CR/LF, encode as 7 bit, and it should be much easier to find inside pi.

With the predictability of pi digits outlines a couple of days ago, making a program to accept a place and length to output a planned file is very realistic. However, I believe we are far behind in the computing power to actually take an arbitrary file of more than a few bite's in size and find that location/length pair in pi. Let's hoep quantum computing changes that.

On an aside, all of the information on finding digits of pi are base 10. Are there any articles on predictability based on a binary representation?

Toodles

See:
http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/glossary/Illega l.html

Short version:
This guy took gzipped decss code, and found that it could be expressed as a prime number. So there is an illegal prime. Considering that pi is infinate, it also exists in pi, so some part of pi is also illegal.

Doh.

-Dan

The prime number theorem approximates the number of primes < 10^617 as approx. 7*10^612

pi(x) ~ x/(log x - 1) where x = 10^617 and log is the natrual log

See http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/howmany.shtml#1

He must have read Machiavelli. Look like an angel in the public eye, act like a devil in reality.

Perhaps, but does the room really understand Chinese?

Looks like AOL, once again, takes the road to a brick wall. They're not going to get anymore people using their IM client by locking people out. On another thought. How about finding a prime that when converted creates an exact duplicate of the AIM executable. Just like that DECSS prime that was mentioned earlier. Surely this would be legal?

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The formula he used to "find" this prime number can be found here:
http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/glossary/Illega l.html
Basically it says this:

First Carmody took the original anonymous version of the DeCSS C-code and gzip'ed it (a standard UNIX program for making files smaller). Suppose we call the resulting number k. By Dirichlet's theorem on primes in arithmetic progression, we know that for each fixed integer b relatively prime to k, there are infinitely many primes ak+b.

For technical reasons, if we choose a to be a power of 256 larger than b, the resulting number can still be unzipped to get the original file. This means there are infinitely many prime numbers which yield the same code. These include: k*256^2+2083 and k*256^211+99. At the time these were found they both were large enough to fit on the list of largest known primes (because of the method of proof).

Dlugar

There's a good exposition of this topic here.

It makes no sense to me that we might be able to understand something that dolphins know.

I think the answer to this depends on how strictly you mean "understand" or "know". For example, dolphins may well have very different visual systems than humans do. So in a strict sense, we will never understand or know what it is that dolphins really "see". On the other hand, we do possess a wide range of technologies that allow us to simulate or create analogies to many things -- so even though we might not be able to experience sight in the same way that dolphins do, we could perhaps understand or relate to it. Of course, there are some physiological differences that will be really difficult to understand -- what does it feel like to have fins instead of legs? -- but those kind of things are impossible to understand even among humans. Try explaining sight to someone born blind, or how menstruation feels to a man. There's a hardware difference that can't be bridged...

Name me one thing that is fact that does not require any amount of assumption. Just one.

One fact is that, at this moment in time, the entry for "faith" at dictionary.com (2nd meaning) is "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence". It does not require any assumption to state this fact.

If you want to try and validate that fact, you'll need certain pre-requisites like an internet connection, understanding of the english language (which you seem to lack), and you might even need the assumption that the page hasn't changed by the time you read it. I can't help you on that; my brain is being taken out of the jar it's in for cleaning, so I'll cease to exist for a short period of time. In the meantime, you could help yourself by reading up on nihilism and other stuff on epistemology.

Are you familiar with the "tyranny of the majority?" Perhaps a reading of a few Federalist Papers or "On Liberty" by Mill.

If you do any AI or theorem-proving subjects you'll run right into philosophy. Turing's test, Searle's Chinese Room, and so on, are intensely philosophical.

That's John Stuart Mill, the same guy who supported the Marketplace of Ideas -- everyone has the right to promote their own "propaganda" (whether it's guinness-rules.com or guinness-sucks.com), because the only way to decide which opinions are correct is to allow all opinions to be expressed, and then decide on the most reasonable ones. I'm sure that no one at Guinness was severely traumatized by any anti-Guinness comments; therefore, there's no reason to censor anti-Guinness speech.

Domain names might be a little more complicated -- domain names are not just forms of expression, they're also navigation tools and site identifiers. Although I vehemently oppose rejecting domain names based on supposed intent, I do think that Guinness might have a valid point when it complains about language-based confusion. Though "sucks," to me, seems to be one of the core words of the English language ;), maybe it would be confusing to foreign visitors -- I really don't know.

But just how valuable is the free speech embodied in a domain name? Domain names are powerful, but not supremely so. If you've got a massive site proving Guinness to be of inferior quality, it doesn't really matter if your site is at http://www.guinness-sucks.com/ or http://members.nbci.com/guinness-sucks/ -- as long as you have an audience, your message gets across.

We definitely shouldn't allow domain names to be rejected for silly reasons like intent for their creation, but at the same time, we shouldn't attach too much importance to the minimal amount of free expression embodied in a URL.

webpagesthatsuck might be a different matter, though :)

- Illya

Sigh... I usually don't bother responding to ACs... but... do you even know what social contract is? You live by it, I live by it, we all live by it... read http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/s/so c-cont.htm to learn more about what, exactly, a social contract is...

The idea was good, it filled a niche, but is in no way technically advanced. It was *easy*.

any modern business strategy course will teach you the now golden lesson of Microsoft: 1st to Market = High Barrier to Entry.

bugs? who cares. see the rule.

technologically advanced? who cares. see the rule.

now, sheep? that's simply some self-righteous label you'll use to make yourself feel better.

everyone is sheep, unless you live in some utopia where opinion doesn't matter.

my guess - you follow opinion same as everyone else. maybe just /. opinion, but it's still opinion.

i could be wrong. maybe you're Diogenes.

I just hunted down the Chinese Room Argument -- thanks for the reference. This is fascinating.

-Waldo

Sounds like a quantum twist on the philosophy of George Berkeley. (His idea was a sort of idealism that stated, "Something must be perceived in order to exist." If God ever closed His eyes, the whole universe would disappear.)

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(chromatic studied a bit of philosophy as an undergraduate)

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Primes are definitely not random. In fact it can be proven that they have a distribution such that the number of primes less than x is about
x/log(x). Read more at http://www.utm.edu/research/ primes/howmany.shtml
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That's sequence A000396 in the database, one of the oldest
(1 is not normally regarded as a perfect number)
Here is the beginning of that entry:
%S A000396 6,28,496,8128,33550336,8589869056,137438691328,
%T A000396 2305843008139952128,265845599156983174465469261595 3842176,
%U A000396 19156194260823610729479337808430363813099732154816 9216
%N A000396 Perfect numbers.
%D A000396 Uhler, Horace S.; On the 16th and 17th perfect numbers. Scripta Math. 19 (1953), 128-131.
%D A000396 B. Tuckerman, The 24th Mersenne prime, Notices Amer. Math. Soc., 18 (June, 1971), Abstract 684-A15, p. 608.
%D A000396 B. Tuckerman, The 24th Mersenne prime, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, 68 (1971), 2319-2320.
%D A000396 J. Brillhart et al., Factorizations of b^n +- 1. Contemporary Mathematics, Vol. 22, Amer. Math. Soc., Providence, RI, 2nd edition, 1985; and later supplements.
%D A000396 A. H. Beiler, Recreations in the Theory of Numbers, Dover, NY, 1964, p. 19.
%H A000396 Cunningham project
%H A000396 Perfect numbers
%H A000396 J. S. McCranie, A study of hyperperfect numbers, J. Int. Seqs. Vol 3 (2000) #P00.1.3
%F A000396 The numbers 2^(p-1)(2^p - 1) are perfect, where p is a prime such that 2^p - 1 is also prime (see A000043, the Mersenne primes), and it is believed that there are no other perfect numbers.
Extending this sequence is equivalent to computing Mersenne primes.
Neil Sloane (njas@research.att.com)

Another worthy distributed math project is GIMPS (Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search).

More on Mersenne primes here.

I believe that the number of primes grows logarithmically. Fortunately, I found a link, too! :)

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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

Offtopic: Hey /.! What's with the space in the text of the A tag? I didn't put it there.

What you consider substantive, the next person may consider trivial. It's all relative to one's own beliefs and way of thinking.

Ahrm. I understood perfectly well what you meant, and I have a very low opinion of post-modern, quasi-intellectual relativism. The whole philosophy of, "it's like all about perspective man" is the reason our country (United States of Artless Letters, or U.S.A) is morally bankrupt. It is the same philosophy that allows the President of our country to rationalizethat oral sex, is indeed not sex. Well it isn't, is it, if you operate under relativism? I mean he didn't think it was sex, so it isn't sex "according to him."

Before the 20th century, such a rhetorical tactic was referred to as sophistry, today individuals unpolluted by so called, "higher education" would accurately describe the president's argument as "a load of bullshit."

To step back a moment. Let's look at the "logical" structure of your claim. That what is substantive is "relative to one's own beliefs and way of thinking"

according to the postmodern "science" of Semiotics,the world is broken into three distinct variables:

sign -------> signifier ---------> signified

Essentially, Semiotics reduces language to a naming process only. We see a tree, we name it a tree - the word tree is essentially a tag, which becomes psychologically united with the object in our brains by an associative bond. In this case, we become the Signifier and the tree becomes the signified and the word "tree" becomes the sign. Semiologists argue that knowing the word tree in no way brings us closer to understanding the nature of the tree, and therefore they argue that the linguistic sign is arbitraryor that we, the signifiers "artificially" create meaning.

So up springs the word, relativism. It's all relative man! Well it's not... The classical definition of sanity is:

• sane \Sane\, a. [L. sanus; cf. Gr. ?, ?, safe, sound. Cf. Sound, a.] possessing a rational mind; having the mental faculties in such condition as to be able to anticipate and judge of the effect of one's actions in an ordinary manner.

On a societal level, this requires that there be some collective understanding of what is acceptable, and what is unacceptable, what is good and what is evil. Civility is impossible without some collective basis or belief system that governs our social interactions. The same can be true about determining the quality of an idea/object/whatever. For example, a BMW 750il is a quality car. This is something most people can agree on, due to the superior engineering in its fabrication, etc. The same can be true of the written word. Regardless of your point of view, it is sane to assert that a book such as War and Peaceis more substantive than a Dick and Jane story. Were one to assert a contrary view, it would generally be perceived as ironic,as the meaning of the statement is contrary to the literal sense of the words. So depending on your audience, after making such a statement, you'll either be perceived as (a) funny; or (b) a moron.

You see it's all about meaning. Yes, language is an artificial system, but it serves a purpose, which is to facilitate communication through creating commonalties of understanding. An exchange of ideas can either be poor, as in lacking in substance, or rich, as in substantive.

As adults, we may not enjoy a particular subject, but we can generally agree as to the degree of depth a particular subject potentially has: we can weigh the worth of Dick & Jane and Tolstoy on the basis of their complexities. That we like or dislike either book is irrelevant and correctly termed value judgements. Without any logical framework, then no intelligent exchange of ideas is possible, and without an exchange of ideas, society begins to deteriorate, as we're seeing in America today.

And, oh by the way, I do not watch TV, therefore I would hardly be the person to gauge whether MTV is substantive or not, for myself. I do read SF voraciously, but I do not personally consider Bruce Sterling "major", as you put it.

Bruce Sterling is Major, as in best-selling, yes (as I meant it in my post), but as a talent, no. I do not personally enjoy his writing, however I do think he is an intelligent writer, and thou I do not agree with him, I was interested in the opportunity to debate with him. Unfortunately, the forum was drowned out by the bleating of sycophants whose posts were artificially elevated by equally fawning moderators.

You see, I don't let others make that determination for me. I have the feeling that you do, on the other hand. If you believe you are an intellectual because you find participating in a Bruce Sterling ask-athon stimulating, I have a Nobel Prize to sell you.

I believe I'm an intellectual primarily because I can, and do think for myself. If you have trouble believing this after a cursory examination of my 48 posts on slashdot, then I really don't care :)

Oh, and for those of you interested in a more thorough definition of relativism, this is a good place to start.

The Libertarians have many interesting points, but they can't be described as being in favour of strict enforcement of the (actual, American) Bill of Rights, since this is fundamentally a statist document which provides for e.g. conscription in time of war.

Libertarians would also be no help to you in the face of "self-regulation" by the Bertelsmann Group, or in protecting your privacy from those who would spam you mercilessly. A Libertarian Internet would quite likely become a corporate monster, with no tolerance of opposing views. But since the censorship was imposed by the cable companies and ISPs, it wouldn't be "censorship", right?

Seriously, if you believe that only government censorship is bad (which is a defensible position; governments have amonopoly on legal use of force), then go for your life; be a Libertarian on this.

If, on the other hand, you think that making it unreasonably costly for opposing views to be heard is also a form of de facto censorship, then the EFF or ACLU are likely to be more to your text.

Me? I take the position of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty on this;

(relevant extract below)


In respect to all persons but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the good will of other people, opinion, on this subject, is as efficacious as law; men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread. Those whose bread is already secured, and who desire no favors from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from the open avowal of any opinions, but to be ill-thought of and illspoken of, and this it ought not to require a very heroic mould to enable them to bear. There is no room for any appeal ad misericordiam in behalf of such persons. But though we do not now inflict so much evil on those who think differently from us, as it was formerly our custom to do, it may be that we do ourselves as much evil as ever by our treatment of them.

jsm