That is true. However, note that unlike Godel's incompleteness theorem, P = NP has direct and obvious connections to the real world. We're not choosing between competing logical theories that exist in a vacuum. P = NP allows us to do certain interesting things on computers. If it turns out we can prove we'll never be able to do those, that is the same thing as saying it is impossible.
That's true. However, P = NP is interesting because it has practical uses. So, while there is obviously a mathematical meaning to it, the part that I am personally interested in is "is it doable on modern computer hardware".
So even if it does turn out to be independent of current accepted axioms, which I will admit I'm skeptical about, I feel that knowing that allows us to immediately add an axiom to make that view of math approach "physical computer hardware". Or, alternatively, to define a subset of all NP problems that include things like Hamiltonian path.
It certainly couldn't ever be proven unprovable, like some things can be, since proving it unprovable would also prove there was no way to implement a conversion P = NP, and, therefore, P != NP.
Just because we can't prove it doesn't mean it's unprovable.
When it's not intense enough to keep the human from killing and eating you, but too intense to keep the human from taking care of you? I think it's a pretty clear negative side-effect.
Does anyone know if this gene has a desired effect besides "make humans allergic to us"? It seems there could, possibly, be side effects from this - there aren't that many species that humans are commonly allergic to, so perhaps there's a reason for this gene to exist.
I don't understand this. In college a while back I managed to figure out a way to combine two final projects into one, turned it into both classes, and got high grades in both (I don't think I ever got a number result for either one, but I remember my grades were >3.0 in both and I certainly hadn't done much homework.) What's the problem with this?
For the curious, it was a visual design class and a Java class. I elected to write a useful Java utility with a good user interface. The Java teacher presumably said something like "This does something useful, and is written well, and as a bonus it has a good GUI", while the UI teacher presumably said "this has a good GUI, and it also does something useful". There wasn't really all that much overlap, just me realizing I could do a neat combo assignment.
I have some compressed files. They're sparse files generated by a program that doesn't actually handle sparse files well. Conveniently, the program is smart enough to write all 0's to them, so I just compress the directory and be done with it. As I write this, I'm saving about 80% of the disk space they would otherwise use.
They're not performance-critical, so in this case, Windows' compression is incredibly handy.
Similarly, I have a few disc images that I keep around solely so I don't have to put DVDs in the drive when I want to play games. These tend to be "CD hack only" images, so the only parts of them that aren't solid 0's are the parts necessary to fool copy protection. One of them is 1gb uncompressed and 700kb compressed. My disc image mounter still mounts it flawlessly.
There is a difference between wanting something and doing it. I would hazard a guess that almost every male on the planet, and a significant fraction of the females too, has been intruiged by the idea of rape or fantasized about it. This doesn't mean 70% of humanity are rapists, because the vast, vast majority of us will never do it.
I will bet that for every pedophile who carries through on his or her desires, there are a thousand or more who share the same desires and would happily jail for life anyone who actually goes through with it.
I did once. I'd forgotten a password for a service, but I remembered the basic form of the password (how I'd constructed it, essentially.) I just didn't know the variables. So I whipped up a program and blitzed the login form with about 200 passwords.
Yes, it worked.
Of course, I did it this way because I didn't want to go through support - force-changing this particular password would, I believe, have taken a few days since it was protecting SSL signatures that only I had. I'd have had to wait several days to push new signatures. Also, said signatures were stored on my own computer anyway, so it's not like they could have enforced "disable logins after ten attempts".
The most dangerous vulnerabilities are the ones people don't know about. Whether that's because they haven't learned yet or because they've forgotten is immaterial.
That's why Step 2 of making a truly secure network is to assume "everything I have done so far is wrong and my server is slightly less airtight than a block of swiss cheese infested by cheese-eating termites".
My web browser has, currently, approximately 170 tabs. If each one of those had a close box that would double the amount of real estate taken up by my tabs, and, in the process, clutter it with a huge amount of redundant graphics and information.
I prefer my close-box-less tabs, thanks. It's all down to preference and usage.
I live in the USA also. I consider gun ownership unnecessary. I do not own a gun. I am a strong, strong believer in the right for people to own guns.
I don't particularly want one, and I don't particularly want the responsibility of owning one, but I do believe that if someone can be shown to be sufficiently responsible, they should be allowed to own pretty much whatever they want - pistols, fully automatic weapons, tanks, or even nuclear reactors. (I suppose I would include "nuclear warheads" too, but my personal "sufficiently responsible" threshold would include "don't store them within several hundred miles of any humans", so that's kind of impractical.)
Note that I'm not friends with many gun owners at all - while I know quite a few online, I actually met the first person I've known in person who owned a gun literally last week. I've believed in this for years.
2. PC Games are Doomed Who the hell ever said that? I can't even fathom where that idea came from.
Actually, a lot of people, including me, believe this in one form or another. I don't think PC games overall are doomed, but I think that big commercial PC games are getting increasingly uninteresting and unimaginative. All the cool new ideas are moving over to the console.
Seriously, take a look at the recent noteworthy PC games. FPSes, RTSes, MMORPGs, Civilization, and Java games. Wheeeee. Now take a look at the recent console games. I've got turn-based strategy games, I've got puzzlers, I don't even know what Katamari Damacy is, I've got adventure games and RPGs and action games and even MMORPGs.
There's no Civilization on consoles. There are few RTSes, but they exist (Pikmin, anyone?). The FPS controls kind of suck but that doesn't stop anyone, and the MMORPGs aren't as varied. In every other category the consoles win.
I don't believe PC games are "doomed". But they're certainly going through a nasty downswing.
(I've been playing games for 20 years and, up until about 5 years ago, had no reason to want a console. Now I do most of my gaming on consoles.)
And for those who don't, that would be their problem. If you play by the rules, your install and uninstall will go smoothly.
You don't remember Windows 3.1, do you?
Many programs would install their own versions of DLLs right over other versions. If their version was newer, things might keep working. If their version was older, things would likely break. If you uninstalled the program, it would often remove the DLL entirely, ignoring the fact that other programs needed it.
Even if that other program played by the rules correctly, it could easily be smacked down by someone who didn't.
(This is why I, for one, didn't bother uninstalling and still rarely do. Okay, I get the occasional DLL clutter, but at least everything keeps working, and my last computer lasted half a decade without flattening and reinstalling.)
Even with modern computers there's still occasional problems with shared resources. I install Cygwin on all my systems. I recently downloaded a PSP video encoding software package which uses programs that require the Cygwin DLL. However, the Cygwin DLL included with that package was of a different version than mine. I don't know exactly what caused it to fail, but it wouldn't work until I deleted the package's DLL and let it fail over to my system's DLL. I can only wonder what it will do if I try to uninstall. With luck, the missing file won't cause problems.
Considering that I'm quitting my job to try starting a game studio, you are entirely right.:D
On the other hand, this leads right back to up "the value of a dollar" - I've got a lot of dollars, so my paycheck is no longer worth as much to me as a game studio would be. I've always wanted to make games. Maybe, if I go broke, I'll reconsider. With luck I'll never reach that point.
('Course, if I pull it off, I'm likely to multiply my net worth many times over, since that's what almost inevitably happens when you found a successful business.)
I agree nearly entirely. The value of a dollar is, of course, the value of the best thing you could get for that dollar. If you make $50/hour, and you can argue with someone for 15 minutes in order to save $10, you are an idiot if you do.
Pinching every monetary penny is an awful idea. Pinching every value is the way to go, and sometimes that involves spending more money than otherwise.
I'm moderately rich (I could retire at 25 if I wanted to move to Wyoming for the rest of my life, which I don't) and I do exactly this. Life is just so fucking easy that it's hilarious, and when I look at my expenses they're actually not much higher than if I didn't do this. I end up spending well under $100/mo on "convenience fees".
People will tell you "if you want to get rich, you need to learn to pinch every penny". This is massively untrue. If pinching every penny actually gives you a significant amount of cash you're nowhere near being rich. If you want to get rich, you have to have good, useful skills, good money management (get rid of the expensive or recurring things, not the meaningless or quality-decreasing ones), and more than a bit of luck.
They probably don't have dedicated chips, they probably have normal microprocessors, but there's a lot of very low-power microprocessors out there. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it used under ten watts.
Many years ago people believed that heavy things fell faster than light things. They didn't bother testing this theory because they knew it to be true. Then, one day, someone tested that theory and found it was false.
Perhaps it is a simple problem to answer mathematically. And now we've tested it. We have actual data. Does the data match up with the mathematical answer? Maybe, maybe not, I don't pretend to know. But I imagine people out there do - so either we've got another point of verification that our models are good, or it's time to figure out what's wrong with them.
Man, now there's an idea. Set up shop on a public corner and offer to rip people's DVDs for them and burn them unencrypted versions. Make them sign something verifying that their DVDs are legal. Bring a few hundred people along to help.
But that's not because it's a "toy" language, it's because it's an industrial-strength language, designed to force the programmer to program correctly, even if it takes 3 times the code and 10 times the time.
Personally, this is exactly why I'd be tempted to call it a toy language. Real programmers don't need to be forced to write good code - real programmers do it on their own. And a real language lets the programmer code to the best of their ability.
That's kind of like saying "oh, this isn't a toy OS, it's industrial-strength because it forces you to use it in one particular way." So, by that definition, Windows is a real OS and Linux is a toy OS. Personally I think they're *both* real OSes - and I think Java's a real language too - but I feel the point you've made is a point against Java, not a point for it.
(Obviously IMHO. Language preferences are highly subjective.)
Slashdot Mirror
It probably says a lot about me that I just thought "Wow! Only 5 million years! I can hardly wait!"
24 years down, 4,999,976 to go!
That is true. However, note that unlike Godel's incompleteness theorem, P = NP has direct and obvious connections to the real world. We're not choosing between competing logical theories that exist in a vacuum. P = NP allows us to do certain interesting things on computers. If it turns out we can prove we'll never be able to do those, that is the same thing as saying it is impossible.
That's true. However, P = NP is interesting because it has practical uses. So, while there is obviously a mathematical meaning to it, the part that I am personally interested in is "is it doable on modern computer hardware".
So even if it does turn out to be independent of current accepted axioms, which I will admit I'm skeptical about, I feel that knowing that allows us to immediately add an axiom to make that view of math approach "physical computer hardware". Or, alternatively, to define a subset of all NP problems that include things like Hamiltonian path.
How could it be unprovable?
It certainly couldn't ever be proven unprovable, like some things can be, since proving it unprovable would also prove there was no way to implement a conversion P = NP, and, therefore, P != NP.
Just because we can't prove it doesn't mean it's unprovable.
When it's not intense enough to keep the human from killing and eating you, but too intense to keep the human from taking care of you? I think it's a pretty clear negative side-effect.
Does anyone know if this gene has a desired effect besides "make humans allergic to us"? It seems there could, possibly, be side effects from this - there aren't that many species that humans are commonly allergic to, so perhaps there's a reason for this gene to exist.
I don't understand this. In college a while back I managed to figure out a way to combine two final projects into one, turned it into both classes, and got high grades in both (I don't think I ever got a number result for either one, but I remember my grades were >3.0 in both and I certainly hadn't done much homework.) What's the problem with this?
For the curious, it was a visual design class and a Java class. I elected to write a useful Java utility with a good user interface. The Java teacher presumably said something like "This does something useful, and is written well, and as a bonus it has a good GUI", while the UI teacher presumably said "this has a good GUI, and it also does something useful". There wasn't really all that much overlap, just me realizing I could do a neat combo assignment.
They'll try again in a year.
And again a year after that.
And again a year after that.
I have some compressed files. They're sparse files generated by a program that doesn't actually handle sparse files well. Conveniently, the program is smart enough to write all 0's to them, so I just compress the directory and be done with it. As I write this, I'm saving about 80% of the disk space they would otherwise use.
They're not performance-critical, so in this case, Windows' compression is incredibly handy.
Similarly, I have a few disc images that I keep around solely so I don't have to put DVDs in the drive when I want to play games. These tend to be "CD hack only" images, so the only parts of them that aren't solid 0's are the parts necessary to fool copy protection. One of them is 1gb uncompressed and 700kb compressed. My disc image mounter still mounts it flawlessly.
Compression can be very, very useful sometimes.
There is a difference between wanting something and doing it. I would hazard a guess that almost every male on the planet, and a significant fraction of the females too, has been intruiged by the idea of rape or fantasized about it. This doesn't mean 70% of humanity are rapists, because the vast, vast majority of us will never do it.
I will bet that for every pedophile who carries through on his or her desires, there are a thousand or more who share the same desires and would happily jail for life anyone who actually goes through with it.
I did once. I'd forgotten a password for a service, but I remembered the basic form of the password (how I'd constructed it, essentially.) I just didn't know the variables. So I whipped up a program and blitzed the login form with about 200 passwords.
Yes, it worked.
Of course, I did it this way because I didn't want to go through support - force-changing this particular password would, I believe, have taken a few days since it was protecting SSL signatures that only I had. I'd have had to wait several days to push new signatures. Also, said signatures were stored on my own computer anyway, so it's not like they could have enforced "disable logins after ten attempts".
Step 1 would be to secure everything as well as you can. :)
(Within reasonable limits based on cost and accessibility, of course.)
The most dangerous vulnerabilities are the ones people don't know about. Whether that's because they haven't learned yet or because they've forgotten is immaterial.
That's why Step 2 of making a truly secure network is to assume "everything I have done so far is wrong and my server is slightly less airtight than a block of swiss cheese infested by cheese-eating termites".
My web browser has, currently, approximately 170 tabs. If each one of those had a close box that would double the amount of real estate taken up by my tabs, and, in the process, clutter it with a huge amount of redundant graphics and information.
I prefer my close-box-less tabs, thanks. It's all down to preference and usage.
I live in the USA also. I consider gun ownership unnecessary. I do not own a gun. I am a strong, strong believer in the right for people to own guns.
I don't particularly want one, and I don't particularly want the responsibility of owning one, but I do believe that if someone can be shown to be sufficiently responsible, they should be allowed to own pretty much whatever they want - pistols, fully automatic weapons, tanks, or even nuclear reactors. (I suppose I would include "nuclear warheads" too, but my personal "sufficiently responsible" threshold would include "don't store them within several hundred miles of any humans", so that's kind of impractical.)
Note that I'm not friends with many gun owners at all - while I know quite a few online, I actually met the first person I've known in person who owned a gun literally last week. I've believed in this for years.
Seriously, take a look at the recent noteworthy PC games. FPSes, RTSes, MMORPGs, Civilization, and Java games. Wheeeee. Now take a look at the recent console games. I've got turn-based strategy games, I've got puzzlers, I don't even know what Katamari Damacy is, I've got adventure games and RPGs and action games and even MMORPGs.
There's no Civilization on consoles. There are few RTSes, but they exist (Pikmin, anyone?). The FPS controls kind of suck but that doesn't stop anyone, and the MMORPGs aren't as varied. In every other category the consoles win.
I don't believe PC games are "doomed". But they're certainly going through a nasty downswing.
(I've been playing games for 20 years and, up until about 5 years ago, had no reason to want a console. Now I do most of my gaming on consoles.)
And for those who don't, that would be their problem. If you play by the rules, your install and uninstall will go smoothly.
You don't remember Windows 3.1, do you?
Many programs would install their own versions of DLLs right over other versions. If their version was newer, things might keep working. If their version was older, things would likely break. If you uninstalled the program, it would often remove the DLL entirely, ignoring the fact that other programs needed it.
Even if that other program played by the rules correctly, it could easily be smacked down by someone who didn't.
(This is why I, for one, didn't bother uninstalling and still rarely do. Okay, I get the occasional DLL clutter, but at least everything keeps working, and my last computer lasted half a decade without flattening and reinstalling.)
Even with modern computers there's still occasional problems with shared resources. I install Cygwin on all my systems. I recently downloaded a PSP video encoding software package which uses programs that require the Cygwin DLL. However, the Cygwin DLL included with that package was of a different version than mine. I don't know exactly what caused it to fail, but it wouldn't work until I deleted the package's DLL and let it fail over to my system's DLL. I can only wonder what it will do if I try to uninstall. With luck, the missing file won't cause problems.
Considering that I'm quitting my job to try starting a game studio, you are entirely right. :D
On the other hand, this leads right back to up "the value of a dollar" - I've got a lot of dollars, so my paycheck is no longer worth as much to me as a game studio would be. I've always wanted to make games. Maybe, if I go broke, I'll reconsider. With luck I'll never reach that point.
('Course, if I pull it off, I'm likely to multiply my net worth many times over, since that's what almost inevitably happens when you found a successful business.)
I agree nearly entirely. The value of a dollar is, of course, the value of the best thing you could get for that dollar. If you make $50/hour, and you can argue with someone for 15 minutes in order to save $10, you are an idiot if you do.
Pinching every monetary penny is an awful idea. Pinching every value is the way to go, and sometimes that involves spending more money than otherwise.
I'm moderately rich (I could retire at 25 if I wanted to move to Wyoming for the rest of my life, which I don't) and I do exactly this. Life is just so fucking easy that it's hilarious, and when I look at my expenses they're actually not much higher than if I didn't do this. I end up spending well under $100/mo on "convenience fees".
People will tell you "if you want to get rich, you need to learn to pinch every penny". This is massively untrue. If pinching every penny actually gives you a significant amount of cash you're nowhere near being rich. If you want to get rich, you have to have good, useful skills, good money management (get rid of the expensive or recurring things, not the meaningless or quality-decreasing ones), and more than a bit of luck.
They probably don't have dedicated chips, they probably have normal microprocessors, but there's a lot of very low-power microprocessors out there. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it used under ten watts.
And now, you've slashdotted your own website.
:)
Please get it back up? I want to check out your music.
Many years ago people believed that heavy things fell faster than light things. They didn't bother testing this theory because they knew it to be true. Then, one day, someone tested that theory and found it was false.
Perhaps it is a simple problem to answer mathematically. And now we've tested it. We have actual data. Does the data match up with the mathematical answer? Maybe, maybe not, I don't pretend to know. But I imagine people out there do - so either we've got another point of verification that our models are good, or it's time to figure out what's wrong with them.
Either way, this is what's called Science.
Man, now there's an idea. Set up shop on a public corner and offer to rip people's DVDs for them and burn them unencrypted versions. Make them sign something verifying that their DVDs are legal. Bring a few hundred people along to help.
You'd want to publicize it, of course.
Personally, this is exactly why I'd be tempted to call it a toy language. Real programmers don't need to be forced to write good code - real programmers do it on their own. And a real language lets the programmer code to the best of their ability.
That's kind of like saying "oh, this isn't a toy OS, it's industrial-strength because it forces you to use it in one particular way." So, by that definition, Windows is a real OS and Linux is a toy OS. Personally I think they're *both* real OSes - and I think Java's a real language too - but I feel the point you've made is a point against Java, not a point for it.
(Obviously IMHO. Language preferences are highly subjective.)