The Millennium Prizes mostly have different rules for proofs and counterexamples.
That's not the case for P=NP, though; either proving P=NP or P!=NP is sufficient to get the prize (given that the proof is confirmed valid, etc.).
(I'm a CS student, and that was entirely from memory. I might be a bit unusual, though, in that I've worked on relatively large Perl5 applications, for fun, and experimented a bit with Perl6.)
Of course, a Hello, World! is not a very good test of a language (at least one with a relatively sane sort of string constant); it looks much the same in pretty much any scripting language, with only minor syntax differences.
If you're in the UK, you might also want to look at Maplin Electronics; they're generally slightly more expensive than RS or Farnell, but willing to sell in smaller quantities, which is nice if you're a hobbyist. (Last time I went there, several years ago, they were even willing to sell single resistors for 7p each, rather expensive for a resistor, but cheaper overall if you just want a few because you don't have to buy thousands at a time. I assume they're more expensive nowadays.)
I thought the sarcasm mark came after the normal end of a sentence, i.e. you end the sentence as ".~" rather than just ".". That's pretty unambiguous, as opposed to a tilde on its own which can mean all sorts of things.
It seems in the UK there are Critical Thinking classes offered to 16- to 18-year-olds. Although I find it to be too late for many people, it seems a step in the right direction.
I have no idea how well it works, though.
Having been a UK student who's sat through them, not at all. Nobody takes them seriously, not even the teacher; I haven't read the official syllabus, but I suspect from experience that it's very messed up and has little relation to the actual subject (as is usually the case with these things). Mostly, they're just trying to help people pass the exam. (And given that A-levels in the UK are marked to an algorithm with no creativity involved, you can imagine how well the exams actually test critical thinking. Think for yourselves! Just come up with the same answers we've written on the mark scheme!)
Wow, this spam is disguised as a legitimate post so well I actually read the whole thing before realising it was spam.
Clearly Slashdot spambots (or human spammers?) are getting better these days. I don't know whether to be appalled or impressed.
The SCOX case is still going on. SCO had two appeals left (more if the Supremes decide they want to accept a case from them), and they just used one of them. (I haven't seen what their arguments are, and I don't think it's public knowledge yet; they should be hilarious when they come out, though.)
It always amused me that the "hacker safe" logos (do those still exist?) had an anti-right-click script on them, as if it was somehow going to protect them from hackers. (Admittedly, the typical level of Internet scammer probably couldn't get past an anti-right-click script, but there are bound to be some out there with the minimum technological knowledge necessary to defeat one.)
There are, in fact, several organisations that charge ridiculously high amounts of money for (legitimate) copies of OpenOffice.org, in the hope of suckering people into buying it from them rather than just downloading it for free. (Of course, it's legal to charge for GPL software (so long as you obey the other conditions), and it's even sometimes worth buying if you get extra benefits, like a warranty or support, with it. But the scammers don't offer anything you wouldn't get with a simple free download.) Also completely legal, also rather morally dubious.
P=NP cannot be proved undecidable, unless the definition of an algorithm in the first place is vague enough to permit multiple interpetations. Proving it undecidable would mean that no P-time algorithm for solving a given NP-complete algorithm exists, because if a P-time algorithm for solving a given NP-complete algorithm did exist, it would give a proof of P=NP. But if you've proved that no P-time algorithm for solving a given NP-complete algorithm exists, you can use the definition of NP-completeness to show that P!=NP. Thus, proving P=NP undecidable would lead to a contradiction.
I think it's possible for P=NP to be undecidable, but there to be no proof of the fact, though; it does seem to be rather unlikely, however.
My favourite question along these lines (I think also from one of Gardner's books, may have been one of Hofstadter's or even someone else's, I have a bad memory for this sort of thing) is "Given a circle of radius 1, pick a random secant of it. What's the chance that the length of the segment of that secant that's inside the circle is at least sqrt(3)/2?".
There are plausible-seeming mathematical justifications for a whole lot of answers, which contradict each other; you can get "proofs" that the answer is 1/3, 1/2, 1/4, and probably other values. (The true answer is "I don't know. What method are you using to select a random secant, anyway?".)
What you're describing is Hungarian notation, the way it was originally intended. Unfortunately, the original paper describing Hungarian notation used the word "type" to define this sort of metadata, and it was misinterpreted as meaning "type" as in data type, leading to a sort of bastardised Hungarian that isn't much good for anything. What's semi-new, and interesting, here is the compiler automatically enforcing the meanings of the prefixes. (Splint, a static checker for C, has done that sort of thing for a while, and would be very useful if it wasn't so buggy it was almost unusable.)
TAEB developer here. Unfortunately, none of us have been working on TAEB in the last year or so; Real Life keeps getting in the way.
The real problems with building a NetHack bot are dealing with all the special cases; even parsing the screen is nontrivial. You can come up with a few simple rules that handle a lot of situations in the game, but there are always going to be hundreds of exceptions that need handling of their own. In my TAEB AI, TAEB::AI::Planar, I try to handle this to some extent by noticing that actions are failing and not repeating them, but there's only so much you can do before you have to specialcase everything by hand.
You can read more about TAEB development, and some other things related to NetHack automation on the TAEB blog: http://taeb-blog.sartak.org/. Unfortunately, it could probably do with a few more posts. Hopefully I'll get back to TAEBing some time later, or maybe someone else will take up the slack.
I see it often enough that I actually use a FireFox browser plugin (LeetKey, which is intended to decode leet, but more useful to decode things like rot13, binary and base64) for it. Perhaps you're hanging out with the wrong sort of people?
According to Dungeons & Dragons mythology, your reward or punishment in the afterlife is to be blessed/cursed with being with/having to put up with a bunch of like-minded people. That's actually a pretty clever concept.
Even when I get an intermittent bug that I can't repeat myself reliably, I normally file it anyway (together with a note that I apologise for being unable to reproduce it and understand if the developer's can't fix it, or even go about starting to fix it). Often when you do that, someone else with the same bug, together with an idea of what's causing it, posts to the same issue, making what's going on clearer for both both of you, and the developers. (Of course, this only works on projects with public bug trackers, but most major open source projects have one.) Still, I try to make them as detailed as possible given the circumstances.
Wow, 14 plus another 14 is the sanest time limit for copyright law I've heard mentioned in a while (should be plenty of time to make money on whatever you've done...)
Also, your sig, despite being a quote from an entirely different context, seems to describe copyright law pretty accurately. (I misread it as being part of your comment to start with...)
I'm one of the few people who actually does read EULAs (except in the case where I've seen the license agreement in question before, such as when someone decides to put the GPL up as an "EULA" when creating an installer), and have even refused to accept them on the basis of their contents before. (I remember before now asking my boss to accept an EULA rather than doing it myself; I didn't want liability for half the stuff in there.)
It's actually pretty interesting to see the contents of many EULAs; for instance, it's how I learnt that one particular expensive piece of software came with a free licence for Crossover Office in case you wanted to run it on Linux. Strangely, the vast majority of the time, most of the terms in an EULA are entirely reasonable; normally there's just one or two ludicrously ridiculous ones.
Arguably, another method is to ask a young child to install software for you; being too young to be legally able to agree to contracts, if they claim to agree to the EULA, that isn't enforceable. There may be other legal problems with this method, though (are you agreeing by proxy when you ask them to install for you, for instance? Do you technically have a licence to use the software at all in that case?)
I'm offended by your statement that it's impossible to write valid Perl in Latin, and offer this counterexample. Arguably, a Latinised syntax fits it even better than an English-like one; in both Perl and Latin, there's often enough context to put things in a (relatively) arbitrary order.
Of course, I'm someone whose signature is an INTERCAL statement, so you may want to take what I've said with that in mind.
At least in the UK there's a theoretical third possibility; the Liberal Democrats have a sufficiently high positive number of seats that even though there's little chance they'll actually win, they could certainly force a tie or "hung government" in which two of the parties need to agree to force legislation through (any two). This is one of the big differences between the UK and US systems, I think; in the US, you basically only have Democrats and Republicans making a hung government almost impossible without a rebellion from one or more individual senators. Unfortunately, it's looking rather like the Conservatives will win outright at the moment.
In the first case, spoiling the ballot paper is a much better option; I'm currently wondering about doing that myself. Much the same effect as not voting, except it shows up on the official statistics, so people know you're taking a stand rather than just being lazy.
Novell countersued SCO for slander of title, for more or less exactly the same reason as SCO sued Novell; that case failed on the basis that Novell didn't try to prove that they suffered "special damages" (basically, lost sales) as a result, which is one of the things you have to prove to show slander of title. (IANAL)
SCOXQ shares are tracked paperlessly nowadays. It's tempting to say it's because they aren't worth the paper they used to be written on, but it's more likely due to an initiative by the stock exchange they were listed on to make all shares paperless.
Yes, they can. In fact, in elliptic geometry (Euclidean - parallel postulate + assumption that parallel lines don't exist), all non-degenerate triangles have angles adding up to more than 180 degrees (depending on their area); in hyperbolic geometry (Euclidean - parallel postulate + assumption that two lines parallel to a third can cross each other), all non-degenerate triangles have angles adding up to less than 180 degrees. You need the parallel postulate (the one that makes Euclidean geometry Euclidean rather than just geometry) in order to prove that triangles have angles adding up to 180 degrees.
Slashdot Mirror
The Millennium Prizes mostly have different rules for proofs and counterexamples. That's not the case for P=NP, though; either proving P=NP or P!=NP is sufficient to get the prize (given that the proof is confirmed valid, etc.).
(I'm a CS student, and that was entirely from memory. I might be a bit unusual, though, in that I've worked on relatively large Perl5 applications, for fun, and experimented a bit with Perl6.)
Of course, a Hello, World! is not a very good test of a language (at least one with a relatively sane sort of string constant); it looks much the same in pretty much any scripting language, with only minor syntax differences.
If you're in the UK, you might also want to look at Maplin Electronics; they're generally slightly more expensive than RS or Farnell, but willing to sell in smaller quantities, which is nice if you're a hobbyist. (Last time I went there, several years ago, they were even willing to sell single resistors for 7p each, rather expensive for a resistor, but cheaper overall if you just want a few because you don't have to buy thousands at a time. I assume they're more expensive nowadays.)
I thought the sarcasm mark came after the normal end of a sentence, i.e. you end the sentence as ".~" rather than just ".". That's pretty unambiguous, as opposed to a tilde on its own which can mean all sorts of things.
The linked article contains another link containing the actual story. Unfortunately, that secondary link is broken.
Having been a UK student who's sat through them, not at all. Nobody takes them seriously, not even the teacher; I haven't read the official syllabus, but I suspect from experience that it's very messed up and has little relation to the actual subject (as is usually the case with these things). Mostly, they're just trying to help people pass the exam. (And given that A-levels in the UK are marked to an algorithm with no creativity involved, you can imagine how well the exams actually test critical thinking. Think for yourselves! Just come up with the same answers we've written on the mark scheme!)
Good idea, awful execution.
Wow, this spam is disguised as a legitimate post so well I actually read the whole thing before realising it was spam. Clearly Slashdot spambots (or human spammers?) are getting better these days. I don't know whether to be appalled or impressed.
The SCOX case is still going on. SCO had two appeals left (more if the Supremes decide they want to accept a case from them), and they just used one of them. (I haven't seen what their arguments are, and I don't think it's public knowledge yet; they should be hilarious when they come out, though.)
It always amused me that the "hacker safe" logos (do those still exist?) had an anti-right-click script on them, as if it was somehow going to protect them from hackers. (Admittedly, the typical level of Internet scammer probably couldn't get past an anti-right-click script, but there are bound to be some out there with the minimum technological knowledge necessary to defeat one.)
There are, in fact, several organisations that charge ridiculously high amounts of money for (legitimate) copies of OpenOffice.org, in the hope of suckering people into buying it from them rather than just downloading it for free. (Of course, it's legal to charge for GPL software (so long as you obey the other conditions), and it's even sometimes worth buying if you get extra benefits, like a warranty or support, with it. But the scammers don't offer anything you wouldn't get with a simple free download.) Also completely legal, also rather morally dubious.
P=NP cannot be proved undecidable, unless the definition of an algorithm in the first place is vague enough to permit multiple interpetations. Proving it undecidable would mean that no P-time algorithm for solving a given NP-complete algorithm exists, because if a P-time algorithm for solving a given NP-complete algorithm did exist, it would give a proof of P=NP. But if you've proved that no P-time algorithm for solving a given NP-complete algorithm exists, you can use the definition of NP-completeness to show that P!=NP. Thus, proving P=NP undecidable would lead to a contradiction. I think it's possible for P=NP to be undecidable, but there to be no proof of the fact, though; it does seem to be rather unlikely, however.
My favourite question along these lines (I think also from one of Gardner's books, may have been one of Hofstadter's or even someone else's, I have a bad memory for this sort of thing) is "Given a circle of radius 1, pick a random secant of it. What's the chance that the length of the segment of that secant that's inside the circle is at least sqrt(3)/2?". There are plausible-seeming mathematical justifications for a whole lot of answers, which contradict each other; you can get "proofs" that the answer is 1/3, 1/2, 1/4, and probably other values. (The true answer is "I don't know. What method are you using to select a random secant, anyway?".)
What you're describing is Hungarian notation, the way it was originally intended. Unfortunately, the original paper describing Hungarian notation used the word "type" to define this sort of metadata, and it was misinterpreted as meaning "type" as in data type, leading to a sort of bastardised Hungarian that isn't much good for anything. What's semi-new, and interesting, here is the compiler automatically enforcing the meanings of the prefixes. (Splint, a static checker for C, has done that sort of thing for a while, and would be very useful if it wasn't so buggy it was almost unusable.)
TAEB developer here. Unfortunately, none of us have been working on TAEB in the last year or so; Real Life keeps getting in the way.
The real problems with building a NetHack bot are dealing with all the special cases; even parsing the screen is nontrivial. You can come up with a few simple rules that handle a lot of situations in the game, but there are always going to be hundreds of exceptions that need handling of their own. In my TAEB AI, TAEB::AI::Planar, I try to handle this to some extent by noticing that actions are failing and not repeating them, but there's only so much you can do before you have to specialcase everything by hand.
You can read more about TAEB development, and some other things related to NetHack automation on the TAEB blog: http://taeb-blog.sartak.org/. Unfortunately, it could probably do with a few more posts. Hopefully I'll get back to TAEBing some time later, or maybe someone else will take up the slack.
I see it often enough that I actually use a FireFox browser plugin (LeetKey, which is intended to decode leet, but more useful to decode things like rot13, binary and base64) for it. Perhaps you're hanging out with the wrong sort of people?
According to Dungeons & Dragons mythology, your reward or punishment in the afterlife is to be blessed/cursed with being with/having to put up with a bunch of like-minded people. That's actually a pretty clever concept.
Even when I get an intermittent bug that I can't repeat myself reliably, I normally file it anyway (together with a note that I apologise for being unable to reproduce it and understand if the developer's can't fix it, or even go about starting to fix it). Often when you do that, someone else with the same bug, together with an idea of what's causing it, posts to the same issue, making what's going on clearer for both both of you, and the developers. (Of course, this only works on projects with public bug trackers, but most major open source projects have one.) Still, I try to make them as detailed as possible given the circumstances.
Wow, 14 plus another 14 is the sanest time limit for copyright law I've heard mentioned in a while (should be plenty of time to make money on whatever you've done...) Also, your sig, despite being a quote from an entirely different context, seems to describe copyright law pretty accurately. (I misread it as being part of your comment to start with...)
I'm one of the few people who actually does read EULAs (except in the case where I've seen the license agreement in question before, such as when someone decides to put the GPL up as an "EULA" when creating an installer), and have even refused to accept them on the basis of their contents before. (I remember before now asking my boss to accept an EULA rather than doing it myself; I didn't want liability for half the stuff in there.)
It's actually pretty interesting to see the contents of many EULAs; for instance, it's how I learnt that one particular expensive piece of software came with a free licence for Crossover Office in case you wanted to run it on Linux. Strangely, the vast majority of the time, most of the terms in an EULA are entirely reasonable; normally there's just one or two ludicrously ridiculous ones.
Arguably, another method is to ask a young child to install software for you; being too young to be legally able to agree to contracts, if they claim to agree to the EULA, that isn't enforceable. There may be other legal problems with this method, though (are you agreeing by proxy when you ask them to install for you, for instance? Do you technically have a licence to use the software at all in that case?)
I'm offended by your statement that it's impossible to write valid Perl in Latin, and offer this counterexample. Arguably, a Latinised syntax fits it even better than an English-like one; in both Perl and Latin, there's often enough context to put things in a (relatively) arbitrary order. Of course, I'm someone whose signature is an INTERCAL statement, so you may want to take what I've said with that in mind.
At least in the UK there's a theoretical third possibility; the Liberal Democrats have a sufficiently high positive number of seats that even though there's little chance they'll actually win, they could certainly force a tie or "hung government" in which two of the parties need to agree to force legislation through (any two). This is one of the big differences between the UK and US systems, I think; in the US, you basically only have Democrats and Republicans making a hung government almost impossible without a rebellion from one or more individual senators. Unfortunately, it's looking rather like the Conservatives will win outright at the moment.
In the first case, spoiling the ballot paper is a much better option; I'm currently wondering about doing that myself. Much the same effect as not voting, except it shows up on the official statistics, so people know you're taking a stand rather than just being lazy.
Novell countersued SCO for slander of title, for more or less exactly the same reason as SCO sued Novell; that case failed on the basis that Novell didn't try to prove that they suffered "special damages" (basically, lost sales) as a result, which is one of the things you have to prove to show slander of title. (IANAL)
SCOXQ shares are tracked paperlessly nowadays. It's tempting to say it's because they aren't worth the paper they used to be written on, but it's more likely due to an initiative by the stock exchange they were listed on to make all shares paperless.
Yes, they can. In fact, in elliptic geometry (Euclidean - parallel postulate + assumption that parallel lines don't exist), all non-degenerate triangles have angles adding up to more than 180 degrees (depending on their area); in hyperbolic geometry (Euclidean - parallel postulate + assumption that two lines parallel to a third can cross each other), all non-degenerate triangles have angles adding up to less than 180 degrees. You need the parallel postulate (the one that makes Euclidean geometry Euclidean rather than just geometry) in order to prove that triangles have angles adding up to 180 degrees.