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.
...although I think the writer is a couple years late since I think this was really the case about 4 LinuxWorld's ago;)
Absent an expensive media blitz, it takes the mainstream media a while to catch up. Sure, the fact that the "suits" are trying out Linux is yesterday's news. This kind of article indicates that Linux has reached the next stage. It's here to stay, and there's nothing Microsoft or anyone else can do to keep it out of the mainstream.
Yeah, those wacky liberals. Always worried about silly things like contaminating the environment with Plutonium.
When you consider the risk factors involved, it is silly. The last time radioactive materials were sent up, it was in a form that could not contaminate the environment even if there was a catastrophic accident with the spacecraft. And, even disregarding that fact, the amount of material involved was so small, it would be like spitting in the ocean. Still, the protesters were there trying to stop it. They had a much greater chance of being killed in a car accident on the way to the protest than being affected in any way by the materials they were protesting.
That's what they were saying about PCs 20 years ago.
Even the loweliest, most out of date used Palm could do just about anything you really needed organizer wise.
Funny, I just counted it up, and I have over a meg of productivity applications and data that I use every day. Hardly something the lowliest Palm could handle.
Just because some people use Palms as toys doesn't mean they're just toys. I don't really use mine as a toy. I use it for productivity.
People may not need to play MP3s and Divx movies, but it's certainly plausible that somebody could one day use similar technology to turn their PDA into a Dick Tracy-like hand held videoconference machine. More likely, they'll find some other use that neither one of us has thought of. In the meantime, people who use the PDA for productivity can listen to music as a value-add.
Early adopters are what they are because they think the technology is fun. Just because the technology is just starting to mature beyond that stage doesn't mean there are no serious applications for PDAs.
Near as I can tell, the key to successfully making changes at NSI is being able to send and recieve mail from the address listed in your domain registration. For security purposes, they send email to that address to confirm any requested change you make. You have to respond from the same address. This is true even for domain name transfers away from NSI, so trying to change registrars may not get you out of your mess.
If you no longer have access to the email address on file, I think your only options are fax or postal mail. I don't have any experience with this, but judging from the other comments, it may be painful.
I guess I've been lucky. In the last month, I've done a domain change on one domain, and a transfer to another registry for two others, and not had a problem with NSI. I was somewhat surprised that it went so smoothly (knock on wood). Obviously, others here haven't been so lucky.
Slashdot ate my first response (yesterday), but here are the main points:
The telephone industry was quite competitive from 1894, when the Bell patents expired, until 1913, when the government started getting involved. The more the government got involved, the worse the AT&T monopoly got. In 1984, the government broke up AT&T, but the monopoly remained--it was just spread over several regional companies instead of one national one. The breakup also created an artificial industry called "long distance" which otherwise would have gone away. Witness the cellular industry (which is competetive). I pay no long distance charges at all on my cellular phone, which I find much preferable to being able to choose a long distance company on my landline.
Most cable monopolies are created at the local level, so actions by George H.W. Bush are irrelevant. My own cable company did not improve things until another cable company came into the market and started to take away their customers. Now, service is improved, prices are better, and they now have a guaranteed response policy for sending out technicians.
Waiting two/four/six years until the next election, or spending huge amounts of time and money to win a recall election are not my idea of responsiveness. Being able to immediately take my money to a competing company is. And you can address issues one by one, instead of having to paint with the broad brush of removing an elected official who deals with many issues. Besides, legislative actions come from an entire body of representives, so removing a single one would usually not be effective, anyway.
I don't particularly like huge unresponsive corporations, which is why I oppose big government. Only the huge corporations can afford teams of lawyers and accountants to comply with the dizzying array of regulations out there. The little guy, like me, has to take time away from providing service to customers in order to comply with the regulations. That makes it harder for us to compete with the big guys.
The term "regulation" is largely irrelevant, because it's used (and misused) to mean so many things. In California, the so-called deregulation eliminated not a single regulatory job--and in fact created two entirely new government agencies. It didn't work because it amounted to price controls, ownership limitations, and market restrictions--a far cry from a free market.
Hope I didn't miss anything. I'd be happy to address anything I did miss, if you're still reading this thread.
Thanks for the laugh. Remember AT&T? Well they were a monopoly, and they were certainly NOT a government monopoly.
In fact... it's the government that took their monopoly away.
Before the government "took away" the AT&T monopoly, it created the AT&T monopoly. The telephone industry was highly competetive from 1893/4, when the original Bell patents expired, until 1913, when the government got involved. It went downhill from there. This paper provides a good history of the telephone industry and concludes "[t]he actions of legislators and regulators, both deliberate and accidental, led to the creation of the Bell monopoly."
Far from getting in the way, the truth backs up what you call "good libertarian propaganda."
What do people think about government run broadband solutions?
It might stay around, but it will probably only be as fast and reliable as the United States Postal Service delivers mail or Amtrak delivers people.
Broadband as an industry is here to stay, regardless of what happens to any one company. So in the long run, government broadband is not really more stable than the private broadband industry as a whole.
In a truly competitive market, other companies would come in to fill the gap left by the departing ones. The problem is, the companies that currently dominate broadband come from industries that are used to having government imposed monopoly status: cable and telephone. The monopoly status is starting to go away in the cable industry, but is persisting for telephone, especially in regards to the "final mile."
The first wave of DSL providers had tremendous problems getting the incumbent carriers (ILECs) to give them support when there were line problems. The ILECs didn't want them to succeed because they wanted to offer their own DSL but hadn't managed to get their act together yet. They had no incentive to provide good service and every incentive to provide bad service. Result: bad service. Now that the first wave of DSL providers has gone bankrupt, the ILECs are moving in to dominate DSL. A typical consequence of government interfering in markets.
So what you're really talking about is a government "solution" to a problem that was created by government in the first place. No thanks.
No, not entirely. The beginnings of UNIX and ATT's first editions were private, but the company had no clue on what to do with its new toy.
I stand corrected. Perhaps if I had said "the initial development of Unix"? In any event, not all universities are publicly funded. Even though Berkeley is, the development of Unix by a private+university collaboration still serves to reinforce the point that government funding isn't necessary to drive technological innovation.
It isn't even likely to drive technological innovation. When you have a government funded technology project end-to-end, you're much more likely to end up with something like Ada than something like TCP/IP.
hmmmm, the government did come up with something that was pretty useful, damn what was...inter something...oh ya the internet, but thats no biggy and probably was a waste of tax dollars anyways...
Certainly, the technology driving the Internet was initially developed under government contract, but it was largely limited to schools and military organizations for 20 years. It didn't evolve into the ubiquitous communications medium it is today until private service providers began getting involved in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
And I would submit that the thing that makes the Internet noteworthy, i.e. it connects everybody, would have evolved in pretty much the same timeframe even if the government project had never occurred. When the Internet explosion occurred, CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL all had over a million members, and FidoNet had tens of thousands of nodes. It was just a matter of connecting all of them, and the Internet provided a convenient conduit for all that.
There was an immense amount of private funding that supported the explosive expansion of the Internet. The government wisely got out of the way, or we might still not be there.
First off, the money issue with NASA is a joke, they are just a touch over a half-penny of the tax dollar.
If the amount is so small, then it should be trivial to raise that amount in the private sector. The truth is, considering the amount the federal government spends, it's not really a small amount. A whole city full of people could work their entire lives just to support one year of NASA's budget.
The return on the high technology investment is easily 10x, if not closer to 100x, as a positive benefit to the nation's economy. Very few people realize how much we would not have if not for the space program.
I might be inclined to dispute your assertion (at least the amount), but the real question is not whether there is benefit from the space program (there certainly is), but whether the maximum benefit is to be achieved through a government run monopoly called NASA or by opening up the space program to private organizations. This was done somewhat after the Challenger disaster, but it's time we finished the job. Before Challenger, the United States used basically one launch vehicle: the Shuttle. Now, we have several vehicles for land launching satellites, and at least one sea launcher and one air launcher. Space exploration wouldn't go away if we got rid of (or privatized) NASA, it would flourish.
There are certain endeavors that will necessarily have to be government programs. The military is an obvious example. I would submit that space exploration is another. The reason for this is that there is little about space exploration that is profitable.
Three areas that may prove profitable to private for-profit businesses: space tourism, microgravity manufacturing, and mineral mining. Others will doubtless arise as we actually get private organizations into space and they begin to discover what can be done. Oh, one more that's really ancillary to space: two-hour point-to-point Earth travel (valuable for both humans and packages). Don't be so quick to discount satellite launches, either. By developing more efficient ways to accomplish the boring things, and by increasing launch volumes, you can reduce the costs associated with the other activities, which brings more and more projects down to the affordable range.
Also, don't forget that not all private activity is for-profit. A tremendous amount of valuable research is funded by private not-for-profit organizations. And less wastefully than the public sector projects that are often funded for political reasons instead of scientific ones.
Well, speaking as a private contractor that works very closely with NASA, I can assure you that there is plenty of incentive to "make the thing work right." Beyond the ordinary professional pride, there's also this whole issue about bungling contractors having little chance to get future contracts.:-)
As someone who has myself worked on government contracts, I can say I've seen companies screw up royally and then turn around and get the next contract to fix it. In the space business, this is especially a problem because there are so few companies with the necessary qualifications to perform the work.
But it goes even further than that. There are indeed incentives within a government contract situation to do the job "right." There are also disincentives and waste (most of them motivated by politics.) The question is, with those incentives and disincentives, does the federal government on balance do a better job than the private sector does (or would). Look at the astounding successes of the private development of early airplane technology and the relative lack of success of government funded space technology for your answer. The government had the ability to send an airplane into suborbital space over thirty-five years ago (X-15), and now can't duplicate that even with a multi-billion dollar budget.
At any rate, it just irks me when people (not you) try to portray NASA as some sort of Cash Black Hole where the taxpayers' money is sucked in, never to be seen again. The majority of that money is pumped right back out into the private sector.
And if the program were cancelled and taxes reduced accordingly, all of the money would be in the private sector, not just "a majority" of it.
What does that mean when the *rich* fight against getting a tax cut?
It means they already have the ability to shelter themselves from the taxes, and don't want to have wasted all that money they spent on their expensive lawyers and accountants.
Most of those hit hardest by the estate tax are small farmers and mom-and-pop businesses that have to be sold when the primary owner dies. Guess who gets to go in and snarf them up at bargain basement prices when the family is forced to liquidate by the federal government.
If those millionaires are so determined to have the federal government take their money, they should go ahead and send it in. I'm sure Uncle Sam would cash their checks. And if they want to keep the money while they're still alive, it would only take a simple change to their will to make sure the government gets its fair share of their estates.
Some think Celera data worth paying for
on
Genetic Stone Soup
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· Score: 1
According to this WSJ article, some are still signing up to pay for the Celera data even with the free availability of the Human Genome Project data.
It's clear from the article that both projects finished sooner because of the presence of the other. So the question of "which is better" is really not the right question, because both of them together is better than either of them alone. Competition is good.
Still, if it takes nearly ten years longer for the public project to finish and a patent is only good for ten years, it seems like "public availability of the data" is really about the same. And the data is privately available in the interim. All other things being equal, that is, which they never are.
If you must make the public vs. private argument, don't ignore the fact that public projects invariably take longer and private patents invariably expire.
If the founders weren't allowed to sell it, then who sold that stock at $326 the first day?
In an IPO (Initial Public Offering) a certain number of shares of a formerly private company are made available to the public. The rest are restricted for a certain period of time. It's the public traders who bought into the IPO that sold them on the open market. In a high-profile offering, usually it's institutional investors (such as mutual funds) that buy most of the IPO shares, then sell them for a tidy profit. If it's a really hyped IPO, the same shares may be traded several times on the first day. Generally, the more hype there is surrounding an IPO, the more risky it is to buy in early.
For those who think that the US elections should change to this method, it doesn't really matter very much because we operate under a two party system for the most part (with some notable exceptions) and different voting methods only take effect with more than two candidates (otherwise a simple majority is guaranteed, except for a tie).
As a minor party candidate in a three way race, I have to say that this is not true. A majority of races for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House this year are contested by minor party candidates. And there are well over a thousand minor party candidates in state and local races. We're constantly faced with the "wasted vote" issue.
There are four minor parties running at least a hundred candidates this year: Libertarian (1,420), Green (244), Natural Law (165), and Reform (151). Hardly a two party system.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
Absent an expensive media blitz, it takes the mainstream media a while to catch up. Sure, the fact that the "suits" are trying out Linux is yesterday's news. This kind of article indicates that Linux has reached the next stage. It's here to stay, and there's nothing Microsoft or anyone else can do to keep it out of the mainstream.
Yeah, those wacky liberals. Always worried about silly things like contaminating the environment with Plutonium.
When you consider the risk factors involved, it is silly. The last time radioactive materials were sent up, it was in a form that could not contaminate the environment even if there was a catastrophic accident with the spacecraft. And, even disregarding that fact, the amount of material involved was so small, it would be like spitting in the ocean. Still, the protesters were there trying to stop it. They had a much greater chance of being killed in a car accident on the way to the protest than being affected in any way by the materials they were protesting.
PDAs are toys.
That's what they were saying about PCs 20 years ago.
Even the loweliest, most out of date used Palm could do just about anything you really needed organizer wise.
Funny, I just counted it up, and I have over a meg of productivity applications and data that I use every day. Hardly something the lowliest Palm could handle.
Just because some people use Palms as toys doesn't mean they're just toys. I don't really use mine as a toy. I use it for productivity.
People may not need to play MP3s and Divx movies, but it's certainly plausible that somebody could one day use similar technology to turn their PDA into a Dick Tracy-like hand held videoconference machine. More likely, they'll find some other use that neither one of us has thought of. In the meantime, people who use the PDA for productivity can listen to music as a value-add.
Early adopters are what they are because they think the technology is fun. Just because the technology is just starting to mature beyond that stage doesn't mean there are no serious applications for PDAs.
If you no longer have access to the email address on file, I think your only options are fax or postal mail. I don't have any experience with this, but judging from the other comments, it may be painful.
I guess I've been lucky. In the last month, I've done a domain change on one domain, and a transfer to another registry for two others, and not had a problem with NSI. I was somewhat surprised that it went so smoothly (knock on wood). Obviously, others here haven't been so lucky.
Good luck.
The telephone industry was quite competitive from 1894, when the Bell patents expired, until 1913, when the government started getting involved. The more the government got involved, the worse the AT&T monopoly got. In 1984, the government broke up AT&T, but the monopoly remained--it was just spread over several regional companies instead of one national one. The breakup also created an artificial industry called "long distance" which otherwise would have gone away. Witness the cellular industry (which is competetive). I pay no long distance charges at all on my cellular phone, which I find much preferable to being able to choose a long distance company on my landline.
Most cable monopolies are created at the local level, so actions by George H.W. Bush are irrelevant. My own cable company did not improve things until another cable company came into the market and started to take away their customers. Now, service is improved, prices are better, and they now have a guaranteed response policy for sending out technicians.
Waiting two/four/six years until the next election, or spending huge amounts of time and money to win a recall election are not my idea of responsiveness. Being able to immediately take my money to a competing company is. And you can address issues one by one, instead of having to paint with the broad brush of removing an elected official who deals with many issues. Besides, legislative actions come from an entire body of representives, so removing a single one would usually not be effective, anyway.
I don't particularly like huge unresponsive corporations, which is why I oppose big government. Only the huge corporations can afford teams of lawyers and accountants to comply with the dizzying array of regulations out there. The little guy, like me, has to take time away from providing service to customers in order to comply with the regulations. That makes it harder for us to compete with the big guys.
The term "regulation" is largely irrelevant, because it's used (and misused) to mean so many things. In California, the so-called deregulation eliminated not a single regulatory job--and in fact created two entirely new government agencies. It didn't work because it amounted to price controls, ownership limitations, and market restrictions--a far cry from a free market.
Hope I didn't miss anything. I'd be happy to address anything I did miss, if you're still reading this thread.
In fact
Before the government "took away" the AT&T monopoly, it created the AT&T monopoly. The telephone industry was highly competetive from 1893/4, when the original Bell patents expired, until 1913, when the government got involved. It went downhill from there. This paper provides a good history of the telephone industry and concludes "[t]he actions of legislators and regulators, both deliberate and accidental, led to the creation of the Bell monopoly."
Far from getting in the way, the truth backs up what you call "good libertarian propaganda."
It might stay around, but it will probably only be as fast and reliable as the United States Postal Service delivers mail or Amtrak delivers people.
Broadband as an industry is here to stay, regardless of what happens to any one company. So in the long run, government broadband is not really more stable than the private broadband industry as a whole.
In a truly competitive market, other companies would come in to fill the gap left by the departing ones. The problem is, the companies that currently dominate broadband come from industries that are used to having government imposed monopoly status: cable and telephone. The monopoly status is starting to go away in the cable industry, but is persisting for telephone, especially in regards to the "final mile."
The first wave of DSL providers had tremendous problems getting the incumbent carriers (ILECs) to give them support when there were line problems. The ILECs didn't want them to succeed because they wanted to offer their own DSL but hadn't managed to get their act together yet. They had no incentive to provide good service and every incentive to provide bad service. Result: bad service. Now that the first wave of DSL providers has gone bankrupt, the ILECs are moving in to dominate DSL. A typical consequence of government interfering in markets.
So what you're really talking about is a government "solution" to a problem that was created by government in the first place. No thanks.
Bell Labs went with Lucent Technologies when it spun off from AT&T in 1996.
I stand corrected. Perhaps if I had said "the initial development of Unix"? In any event, not all universities are publicly funded. Even though Berkeley is, the development of Unix by a private+university collaboration still serves to reinforce the point that government funding isn't necessary to drive technological innovation.
It isn't even likely to drive technological innovation. When you have a government funded technology project end-to-end, you're much more likely to end up with something like Ada than something like TCP/IP.
Certainly, the technology driving the Internet was initially developed under government contract, but it was largely limited to schools and military organizations for 20 years. It didn't evolve into the ubiquitous communications medium it is today until private service providers began getting involved in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
And I would submit that the thing that makes the Internet noteworthy, i.e. it connects everybody, would have evolved in pretty much the same timeframe even if the government project had never occurred. When the Internet explosion occurred, CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL all had over a million members, and FidoNet had tens of thousands of nodes. It was just a matter of connecting all of them, and the Internet provided a convenient conduit for all that.
There was an immense amount of private funding that supported the explosive expansion of the Internet. The government wisely got out of the way, or we might still not be there.
If the amount is so small, then it should be trivial to raise that amount in the private sector. The truth is, considering the amount the federal government spends, it's not really a small amount. A whole city full of people could work their entire lives just to support one year of NASA's budget.
The return on the high technology investment is easily 10x, if not closer to 100x, as a positive benefit to the nation's economy. Very few people realize how much we would not have if not for the space program.
I might be inclined to dispute your assertion (at least the amount), but the real question is not whether there is benefit from the space program (there certainly is), but whether the maximum benefit is to be achieved through a government run monopoly called NASA or by opening up the space program to private organizations. This was done somewhat after the Challenger disaster, but it's time we finished the job. Before Challenger, the United States used basically one launch vehicle: the Shuttle. Now, we have several vehicles for land launching satellites, and at least one sea launcher and one air launcher. Space exploration wouldn't go away if we got rid of (or privatized) NASA, it would flourish.
Three areas that may prove profitable to private for-profit businesses: space tourism, microgravity manufacturing, and mineral mining. Others will doubtless arise as we actually get private organizations into space and they begin to discover what can be done. Oh, one more that's really ancillary to space: two-hour point-to-point Earth travel (valuable for both humans and packages). Don't be so quick to discount satellite launches, either. By developing more efficient ways to accomplish the boring things, and by increasing launch volumes, you can reduce the costs associated with the other activities, which brings more and more projects down to the affordable range.
Also, don't forget that not all private activity is for-profit. A tremendous amount of valuable research is funded by private not-for-profit organizations. And less wastefully than the public sector projects that are often funded for political reasons instead of scientific ones.
As someone who has myself worked on government contracts, I can say I've seen companies screw up royally and then turn around and get the next contract to fix it. In the space business, this is especially a problem because there are so few companies with the necessary qualifications to perform the work.
But it goes even further than that. There are indeed incentives within a government contract situation to do the job "right." There are also disincentives and waste (most of them motivated by politics.) The question is, with those incentives and disincentives, does the federal government on balance do a better job than the private sector does (or would). Look at the astounding successes of the private development of early airplane technology and the relative lack of success of government funded space technology for your answer. The government had the ability to send an airplane into suborbital space over thirty-five years ago (X-15), and now can't duplicate that even with a multi-billion dollar budget.
At any rate, it just irks me when people (not you) try to portray NASA as some sort of Cash Black Hole where the taxpayers' money is sucked in, never to be seen again. The majority of that money is pumped right back out into the private sector.
And if the program were cancelled and taxes reduced accordingly, all of the money would be in the private sector, not just "a majority" of it.
It means they already have the ability to shelter themselves from the taxes, and don't want to have wasted all that money they spent on their expensive lawyers and accountants.
Most of those hit hardest by the estate tax are small farmers and mom-and-pop businesses that have to be sold when the primary owner dies. Guess who gets to go in and snarf them up at bargain basement prices when the family is forced to liquidate by the federal government.
If those millionaires are so determined to have the federal government take their money, they should go ahead and send it in. I'm sure Uncle Sam would cash their checks. And if they want to keep the money while they're still alive, it would only take a simple change to their will to make sure the government gets its fair share of their estates.
It's clear from the article that both projects finished sooner because of the presence of the other. So the question of "which is better" is really not the right question, because both of them together is better than either of them alone. Competition is good.
Still, if it takes nearly ten years longer for the public project to finish and a patent is only good for ten years, it seems like "public availability of the data" is really about the same. And the data is privately available in the interim. All other things being equal, that is, which they never are.
If you must make the public vs. private argument, don't ignore the fact that public projects invariably take longer and private patents invariably expire.
A constitutional monarchy is much closer to a republic than to a democracy.
In an IPO (Initial Public Offering) a certain number of shares of a formerly private company are made available to the public. The rest are restricted for a certain period of time. It's the public traders who bought into the IPO that sold them on the open market. In a high-profile offering, usually it's institutional investors (such as mutual funds) that buy most of the IPO shares, then sell them for a tidy profit. If it's a really hyped IPO, the same shares may be traded several times on the first day. Generally, the more hype there is surrounding an IPO, the more risky it is to buy in early.
As a minor party candidate in a three way race, I have to say that this is not true. A majority of races for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House this year are contested by minor party candidates. And there are well over a thousand minor party candidates in state and local races. We're constantly faced with the "wasted vote" issue.
There are four minor parties running at least a hundred candidates this year: Libertarian (1,420), Green (244), Natural Law (165), and Reform (151). Hardly a two party system.
Jeff Wolfe