Can someone explain to me when the Wikimedia Foundation suddenly became poverty-stricken? The latest financial statement from the Wikimedia Foundation indicates that in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, they received $1,508,039 and spent $791,907 (leaving them with net assets of $1,004,216); according to the Wikimedia fundraising website they received a further $1,096,299 in the second half of 2006 and have received $275,427 so far in 2007. In order for the Wikimedia Foundation to be in trouble, they must have gone from spending $791,907 last fiscal year to spending over $2,000,000 in the first 8 months of this fiscal year.
Personally, I'm not going to make any donations or support advertising on Wikipedia until someone explains where all the money is going.
You're perfectly allowed to sit at home eating cheese and watching television while I innovate.
Unfortunately, most people aren't wealthy enough to take this option. For most independent inventors, the choice comes down to 1. Spend a year developing an invention, while rapidly going into debt, and hope that at the end of the year it will possible to patent the invention and pay off the year's expenses, or 2. Forget about building a better mousetrap, and get a normal job instead.
Aside from a very small subset of the population (tenured professors and the independently wealthy), financial imperatives limit the ability of people to innovate unless there is some form of payoff available at the end.
Replacing the letter 's' with 'z' is a North American corruption.
No, they got this one right. "Organisation" is a British corruption which never caught on in America -- you'll also find the correct spelling ("organization") used in Oxford and other fora which use Oxford spelling (e.g., Nature, WHO, UNESCO, ISO, ITU).
The point is that any attempt to quickly create a new algorithm is likely to create an insecure one. Shouldn't we be trying to create candidate algorithms for the year 2050...
Competitions like this and the AES competition aren't about inventing new cipher designs; they're about taking the state of the art and creating a standard. The ideas underlying Rijndael are essentially the same as those in Square, which was published back in 1997; while nearly all of the ciphers submitted to the AES competition were "new", the ideas behind them had been studied long before the competition started.
Of course, no competition will ever be able to anticipate future developments: If people had been paying attention to non-constant table lookup timing leaks (as Bernstein and Osvik/Shamir/Tromer demonstrate) it is unlikely that Rijndael would have won the competition. But unless we want to wait until cryptography is a dead field, with no new research being performed, this will occur whenever there is a new standard, and regardless of how long the process is which constructs that standard.
Somehow I'm not surprised to find that materials written for consumption by grade school students (and teachers) get this wrong. A prime element of an integral domain is a non-zero non-unit p such that if p divides ab, p divides either a or b (or both). The integers are an integral domain, and (-5) is a prime.
In France they reprocess the used fuel, which results in about an 80% conversion to new useable nuclear fuel. So rather than having 100 tons of nuclear waste, they have 20 tons that have to be stored indefinitely.
In fact, it's even better than that: Those 20 tons which remain as waste are considerably "hotter" than the useful fuel, and thus degrade faster. Instead of keeping 100 tons of waste for 240,000 years, they need to keep 20 tons of waste for 100 years.
Compared to regular medical diagnoses, it's remarkable that the important boundary between healthy and ill is set at an arbitrarily chosen number of symptoms (3 out of 6 or 4 out of 7)
You seem to be implying that non-psychiatric ailments are clear-cut in their diagnoses; while this is true in some cases (e.g., a viral infection is defined by the presence of the virus), it is not true for all diseases. Type 2 diabetes, for example, is defined as "fasting plasma glucose >= 7.0 mM, OR plasma glucose >= 11 mM two hours after a 75g glucose challenge OR random plasma glucose >= 11.1 mM", while the level of blood pressure which is diagnosed as "high" depends upon the presence of other risk factors for heart disease.
Most psychiatric conditions are just like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol: There's a continuum between very healthy and very sick, and groups of doctors get together to decide how to draw a line.
This isn't really an example of patents working: The idea behind patents is that a guaranteed monopoly will encourage people to do and publish research, not to provide funding to people who have done good research in the hope that they will continue to do more good research.
A better example of patents working would be if CSIRO said "we're doing this because we think we can make money by patenting it".
Re:Mr. Lo is not smart enough to teach at MIT
on
Stock-Picking Computers
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
[ Yes, I am joking. I'm quite sure Mr. Lo is brilliant -- just maybe a touch too honest.:-) ]
You're assuming that he cares about earning lots of money. More likely, he has enough money, and he wants to do work which he finds interesting -- in other words, he's not turning down the offer because he's honest; he's turning down the offer because he doesn't want to waste 20 years of his life.
For students who just want to get a job as a programmer. ..
I'd recommend a different major.
I'd go further than that, and suggest that they don't attend a university at all. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the vast majority of students in undergraduate "computer science" programs have no interest in computer science and merely want to get jobs as programmers.
If there were fewer such students polluting undergraduate CS programs, it might be possible for get a good undergraduate CS education as part of a CS degree instead of a mathematics degree.
Personally, I found a great deal of education in my oenology courses. [...] The most applicable mathy CS thing I learned was covered in an hour regarding big O notation.
Is there a connection between oenology and O(n)-ology?
(For the benefit of members of institutions with other sizes of courses: When I write "one course" below, I mean "1/40th of a standard Bachelor's degree".)
For students who just want to get a job as a programmer, I'd say that a first year course in discrete mathematics should be enough; it won't actually teach them anything by itself, but it will increase the odds of them understanding what the smart guy on their team is talking about when he says "this is a standard graph theory problem...".
For students who want to be that guy who tells the rest of the team how to solve problems, I'd suggest two discrete math courses, two calculus courses, a linear algebra course, and either a number theory course or a statistics course.
For students who want to actually do research in computer science: They're in the wrong department. The best preparation for graduate work in computer science is an undergraduate degree in mathematics. If they insist on getting their undergraduate degree in computer science, I'd recommend as an absolute minimum three calculus courses, two general discrete math courses, one linear algebra course, one course in number theory, two courses in statistics, one course in real analysis, one course in complex analysis, two courses in numerical analysis, one course in linear programming, one course in formal languages and automata, one course in graph theory, and one course in combinatorics. Depending upon the student's interests, I'd also recommend courses in group theory, galois theory, and coding theory.
Code re-use is a great idea. Free software is a great idea. Taken together, and to an extreme, they can cause problems, particularly where security is concerned. What happens when someone finds a security flaw? How can you contact the people who are reusing your code if you have no idea who they are?
To take a personal example, my delta compression code, which I wrote for FreeBSD, is now being used by Apple and Mozilla to distribute updates; I've talked to their developers, and if I find a security flaw in this code (very unlikely, considering how simple it is), I'll be able to inform them and make sure they get the fix. On the other hand, I know developers from several Linux distributions have been looking at using my code, but I'm not sure if they're actually using it; and searching on Google reveals dozens of other people who are using (or at very least talking about using) this code.
Putting together software by scavenging code from all over the Internet is like eating out of a garbage dump: Some of what you get is good and some of what you get is bad; but when there's a nation-wide recall of contaminated spinach, you'll have no idea if what you're eating is going to kill you.
I remember Stephen Hawking saying something about global warming [...] can somebody find the direct quote for me?
It was probably something along the lines of "Why are you asking me about global warming? I'm a physicist. If you have questions about global warming, go ask an atmospheric scientist."
HTML doesn't serve its purpose, because it doesn't mandate a lack of separation between content and style.
Maybe HTML doesn't serve your purposes, but it certainly serves my purposes.
Personally, I couldn't care less about fuzzy concepts like the separation of content and style; I just want to be able to write webpages in nano which look decent to most visitors.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone explain to me when the Wikimedia Foundation suddenly became poverty-stricken? The latest financial statement from the Wikimedia Foundation indicates that in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2006, they received $1,508,039 and spent $791,907 (leaving them with net assets of $1,004,216); according to the Wikimedia fundraising website they received a further $1,096,299 in the second half of 2006 and have received $275,427 so far in 2007. In order for the Wikimedia Foundation to be in trouble, they must have gone from spending $791,907 last fiscal year to spending over $2,000,000 in the first 8 months of this fiscal year.
Personally, I'm not going to make any donations or support advertising on Wikipedia until someone explains where all the money is going.
You're perfectly allowed to sit at home eating cheese and watching television while I innovate.
Unfortunately, most people aren't wealthy enough to take this option. For most independent inventors, the choice comes down to
1. Spend a year developing an invention, while rapidly going into debt, and hope that at the end of the year it will possible to patent the invention and pay off the year's expenses, or
2. Forget about building a better mousetrap, and get a normal job instead.
Aside from a very small subset of the population (tenured professors and the independently wealthy), financial imperatives limit the ability of people to innovate unless there is some form of payoff available at the end.
Replacing the letter 's' with 'z' is a North American corruption.
No, they got this one right. "Organisation" is a British corruption which never caught on in America -- you'll also find the correct spelling ("organization") used in Oxford and other fora which use Oxford spelling (e.g., Nature, WHO, UNESCO, ISO, ITU).
The point is that any attempt to quickly create a new algorithm is likely to create an insecure one. Shouldn't we be trying to create candidate algorithms for the year 2050...
Competitions like this and the AES competition aren't about inventing new cipher designs; they're about taking the state of the art and creating a standard. The ideas underlying Rijndael are essentially the same as those in Square, which was published back in 1997; while nearly all of the ciphers submitted to the AES competition were "new", the ideas behind them had been studied long before the competition started.
Of course, no competition will ever be able to anticipate future developments: If people had been paying attention to non-constant table lookup timing leaks (as Bernstein and Osvik/Shamir/Tromer demonstrate) it is unlikely that Rijndael would have won the competition. But unless we want to wait until cryptography is a dead field, with no new research being performed, this will occur whenever there is a new standard, and regardless of how long the process is which constructs that standard.
Nice try.
Somehow I'm not surprised to find that materials written for consumption by grade school students (and teachers) get this wrong. A prime element of an integral domain is a non-zero non-unit p such that if p divides ab, p divides either a or b (or both). The integers are an integral domain, and (-5) is a prime.
Now try finding two primes whose difference is 7.
How about 5 and (-2)?
most prime numbers are odd.
Only on slashdot would the parent get moderated as "informative"...
From the release announcement:
FreeBSD 6.2 has now been announced.
The release announcement will not be available for a couple of hours. Slashdot jumped the gun as usual.
Torrents are available.
A script for upgrading FreeBSD 6.1 systems is available.
In France they reprocess the used fuel, which results in about an 80% conversion to new useable nuclear fuel. So rather than having 100 tons of nuclear waste, they have 20 tons that have to be stored indefinitely.
In fact, it's even better than that: Those 20 tons which remain as waste are considerably "hotter" than the useful fuel, and thus degrade faster. Instead of keeping 100 tons of waste for 240,000 years, they need to keep 20 tons of waste for 100 years.
Having a driver for Linux 2.6.y doesn't necessarily imply you have a driver for Linux 2.6.z, let alone Linux 2.8 or 2.4.
This sounds like an incredibly good reason to not use Linux.
I resolved to eat less (than an elephant) and exercise more (than a sloth).
So far I'm succeeding.
Impeachment isn't good enough. If Bush gets impeached, Cheney will become president and pardon Bush.
I want Bush to go on trial and be sent to jail for his crimes.
Compared to regular medical diagnoses, it's remarkable that the important boundary between healthy and ill is set at an arbitrarily chosen number of symptoms (3 out of 6 or 4 out of 7)
You seem to be implying that non-psychiatric ailments are clear-cut in their diagnoses; while this is true in some cases (e.g., a viral infection is defined by the presence of the virus), it is not true for all diseases. Type 2 diabetes, for example, is defined as "fasting plasma glucose >= 7.0 mM, OR plasma glucose >= 11 mM two hours after a 75g glucose challenge OR random plasma glucose >= 11.1 mM", while the level of blood pressure which is diagnosed as "high" depends upon the presence of other risk factors for heart disease.
Most psychiatric conditions are just like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol: There's a continuum between very healthy and very sick, and groups of doctors get together to decide how to draw a line.
This isn't really an example of patents working: The idea behind patents is that a guaranteed monopoly will encourage people to do and publish research, not to provide funding to people who have done good research in the hope that they will continue to do more good research.
A better example of patents working would be if CSIRO said "we're doing this because we think we can make money by patenting it".
[ Yes, I am joking. I'm quite sure Mr. Lo is brilliant -- just maybe a touch too honest. :-) ]
You're assuming that he cares about earning lots of money. More likely, he has enough money, and he wants to do work which he finds interesting -- in other words, he's not turning down the offer because he's honest; he's turning down the offer because he doesn't want to waste 20 years of his life.
I'd go further than that, and suggest that they don't attend a university at all. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the vast majority of students in undergraduate "computer science" programs have no interest in computer science and merely want to get jobs as programmers.
If there were fewer such students polluting undergraduate CS programs, it might be possible for get a good undergraduate CS education as part of a CS degree instead of a mathematics degree.
Personally, I found a great deal of education in my oenology courses. [...] The most applicable mathy CS thing I learned was covered in an hour regarding big O notation.
Is there a connection between oenology and O(n)-ology?
(For the benefit of members of institutions with other sizes of courses: When I write "one course" below, I mean "1/40th of a standard Bachelor's degree".)
For students who just want to get a job as a programmer, I'd say that a first year course in discrete mathematics should be enough; it won't actually teach them anything by itself, but it will increase the odds of them understanding what the smart guy on their team is talking about when he says "this is a standard graph theory problem...".
For students who want to be that guy who tells the rest of the team how to solve problems, I'd suggest two discrete math courses, two calculus courses, a linear algebra course, and either a number theory course or a statistics course.
For students who want to actually do research in computer science: They're in the wrong department. The best preparation for graduate work in computer science is an undergraduate degree in mathematics. If they insist on getting their undergraduate degree in computer science, I'd recommend as an absolute minimum three calculus courses, two general discrete math courses, one linear algebra course, one course in number theory, two courses in statistics, one course in real analysis, one course in complex analysis, two courses in numerical analysis, one course in linear programming, one course in formal languages and automata, one course in graph theory, and one course in combinatorics. Depending upon the student's interests, I'd also recommend courses in group theory, galois theory, and coding theory.
Code re-use is a great idea. Free software is a great idea. Taken together, and to an extreme, they can cause problems, particularly where security is concerned. What happens when someone finds a security flaw? How can you contact the people who are reusing your code if you have no idea who they are?
To take a personal example, my delta compression code, which I wrote for FreeBSD, is now being used by Apple and Mozilla to distribute updates; I've talked to their developers, and if I find a security flaw in this code (very unlikely, considering how simple it is), I'll be able to inform them and make sure they get the fix. On the other hand, I know developers from several Linux distributions have been looking at using my code, but I'm not sure if they're actually using it; and searching on Google reveals dozens of other people who are using (or at very least talking about using) this code.
Putting together software by scavenging code from all over the Internet is like eating out of a garbage dump: Some of what you get is good and some of what you get is bad; but when there's a nation-wide recall of contaminated spinach, you'll have no idea if what you're eating is going to kill you.
It used to be that if one an application crashed and it was called just that: it crashed. Today its a DOS attack!
Not necessarily. Application-crashing bugs are Denial of Service bugs if they can be triggered remotely.
There's a fundamental difference between "I can make my copy of FireFox crash" and "I can make your copy of FireFox crash".
I remember Stephen Hawking saying something about global warming [...] can somebody find the direct quote for me?
It was probably something along the lines of "Why are you asking me about global warming? I'm a physicist. If you have questions about global warming, go ask an atmospheric scientist."
Note: "smart guy" != "expert in everything".
Ignoring problems is the new American Way. We're doing the same thing with [...] solving the root cause of global terrorism.
Nonsense. George Bush was very clear after 9/11 in saying that "terrorists hate the USA because it is a land of freedom".
Assuming that George Bush was correct in this assessment, he has done far more to combat terrorism than any other US President in recent history.
HTML doesn't serve its purpose, because it doesn't mandate a lack of separation between content and style.
Maybe HTML doesn't serve your purposes, but it certainly serves my purposes.
Personally, I couldn't care less about fuzzy concepts like the separation of content and style; I just want to be able to write webpages in nano which look decent to most visitors.