Note: this is unrelated to your post. I'm only replying because I don't want to start a new thread, in the vain hope that perhaps we could gather all personal tech support stories in a tree with your post as the root.
Right, anyway. A couple of years ago, when the Internet was still something relatively new, my father was going to buy a new computer, and I had joined him to the store to make sure he didn't do anything stupid. He said to the clerk in the store that he wanted to search the internet with his new computer, and that was about it. The clerk replied that, well, in that case just about any computer they had would do, so he might as well go for the cheapest. My dad knew that the Internet was quite large, and so figured that searching all of it would require a powerful computer. Thus he queried why any piece of junk would do for that purpose. The clerk patiently explained in great detail that it isn't really your computer that does all the searching, but you tell another computer on the Internet that you want to do a search, and then that computer, usually some massive supercomputer or a cluster, will do it for you and return the result. My dad was quiet for a while, thinking, and then replied: "Oh, so it's really those massive supercomputers that do the searching?" Looking at me, confused: "So I need to buy a supercomputer, then?"
I was halfway out of the store by then. Young and easily embarrassed.
Re:If you're a Google H4X0R...
on
Google Hacks
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· Score: 2, Informative
More hacks
on
Google Hacks
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· Score: -1, Redundant
At first I thought this story was a duplicate as usual. Amazingly enough, that wasn't the case, but Slashdot did run another story on Google hacks a week or so ago.
It was Slashdotted to hell back then, so I never got to see what it was about. Maybe this time I should check it out before pressing Submit?
Must be tired. Just noticed who's funding this, and I'm not so sure I would like to be a part of it anymore. But disregarding that you'd essentially be doing work for the US military I still think it's a great idea.
I knew at least one pessimistic bastard would post some nonsense of this sort. Personally I think getting an entry to represent Slashdot is a great idea, and I also happen to think it's quite doable. No need for crappy sarcasm.
I envision something like this:
1. Some dude(s) donate(s) a car and a camcorder. 2. Some hardware hackers wire a computer to interface with the car and the camcorder. 3. Someone starts a sourceforge project. 4. One million Slashdot monkeys do their best to develop some kind of AI. 5. ??? 6. Profit!
Maybe it wouldn't win, but it'd be a damn amusing project, obviously the point of it anyway.
What do you say, Slashdotters? C'mon, it'd be fun. Let's do it!
In my opinion, the movie is even better. PKD had a a bunch of interesting ideas, but questionable literary talent. Scott has a great eye, but seemingly no terribly original ideas of his own. They make a great pair, which is what made the movie so great.
The problem I have here is with accepting "generally trustworthy" as a blanket statement that applies equally to things we know newspapers are usually pretty good at (politics, current issues, scandals, crimes, and the like) and areas where we (or at least I) do not have high confidence in their abilities.
I don't disagree with this. The section about SvD being a decent paper was only in the parent post as a reply to what turned out to be a joke I didn't get.
So it would be easy to see why a non-famous high energy physicist might spend a lot more time on something like RH after the prize money is publicized given that the chances of hitting on this or on any round of funding these days in physics might be the same lottery odds.:-( So a detectable number of physicists entered the field of cognitive neuroscience when the SSC went down, not necessarily for the big bucks, but to try and work on a challenging problem where there was some hope of funding. Results were mixed.
Plus, I can report that a couple of definitely professional mathematicians I have met do (prviately) admit that the Clay Prize money has actually attracted their attention to the prize problems, if only just to take a brief whack at them and see if anything new falls into place.
Sure. But it's a big - no, huge - step from taking a whack at something and actually publishing it. It is just very rare that professionals publish findings if they don't take them seriously themselves. In any of the soft sciencies, that could happen, and one could stand a chance of getting away with it. But there's no fooling the mathematical community. Either you have proof or you don't.
I guess I just don't see what you're saying here. Is it 1) These researchers publish a proof that they believe is incorrect, and hope nobody will notice or 2) These researchers publish a proof that they believe is correct, but they are so incompetent that this is very unlikely to be the case (in fact, so unlikely it makes your BS meter run at 11). To me, neither 1) or 2) seem to obviously be the case here.
I have pretty high confidence that the current attempt has basically already joined all of the other failed attempts
In your first post you use as authorative a quote which suggests this proof hasn't received serious attention yet. This is mildly contradictory.
But we're obviously not getting anywhere here, and I'm willing to put this to rest now. You think the chance of this being the real thing to be so low as to be neglectable, while I am skeptical, but think the issue isn't yet settled. I can see how you arrive at your conclusion, I just don't agree. So let's call it the day, shall we?
While I have no doubt that SvD is of singular value to almost everybody (especially for its largest entries on the diagonal), the fact is that it comes from Sweden makes it orthogonal to our concerns. (Sorry about that...)
I don't understand what you mean by this, or if you are even being serious. If a newspaper is respected, generally trustworthy and read by a large amount of people on a daily basis, where is happens to be located should of course be of no relevance.
If you mean to say that the reason that the rest of the media isn't catching on is that the only story so far has been in a Swedish newspaper, I don't object. But if you're saying that being run in a non-US newspaper makes the story less likely to be true, I think you are a little confused.
True enough, but see below, and the fact that if *I* had a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, I probably wouldn't submit it to the high energy physics and "general math" sections of xarchiv.
Recently, as in the last couple of years, the most promising contributions to RH related stuff has come from high energy physics, and many people, both in math and in physics, believe that this is the approach that will eventually bear fruit. If indeed a final proof would be more physics than number theory (perhaps the proof of the RH would only be a corrollary of some completely un-number theoretic line of reasoning) wouldn't it be reasonable to publish it in a physics journal? That it has implications for number theory isn't enough of a reason to publish it in a number theoretical journal, mostly because the readers of it would not be able to determine whether it was correct or not.
In the thread I referenced, a physicist chimed in with the observation that one of the co-authors (Castro) was not taken seriously in his own field of physics, which makes it even less plausible that the math in this paper would be new and inspiriational.
This is serious, agreed. I don't think I read that post.
Unfortunately, the Clay Math Prize has kind of made proving the Riemann Hypothesis a "make-money-fast" scheme.
Only for amateurs. But those have been trying to prove it, as well as Fermat's last theorem, Goldbach's conjecture, the twin prime conjecture etc. for a long time already. Serious researchers, on the other hand, very rarely put their reputation at stake if they don't believe they have something of real value. They know flaws will be detected, and they know that they would never win any prize with an unsound proof.
But, like I said (in the write up, even), there is a clear possibility that this isn't the real thing. I only think you're overstating your case.
Yeah, I found both of those link about half an hour after I submitted the article. Still, I'd like to add some corrections.
1. SvD isn't an "obscure" Swedish newspaper. It's the biggest, counting readers in if not millions so at least hundreds of thousands. They seldom print bogus.
2. That the proof hasn't been verified yet doesn't mean it can't be correct.
3. The sci.math discussion doesn't really say anything about the validity of the proof, only that, as you say, the paper seems to not have been proof-read very well, etc.
But, I agree that in essence you have reasonable complaints. BS meter at 11 is quite high, though. Mine is at about 5. 11 is reserved for make-money-fast schemes and herbal viagra.
Oh, and one more thing. An AI posted a translation of the article that seems to have gone largely unnoticed. (Just in case there is someone in here who isn't fluent in Swedish.)
1. One who is proficient at using or programming a computer; a computer buff. 2. One who uses programming skills to gain illegal access to a computer network or file. 3. One who enthusiastically pursues a game or sport: a weekend tennis hacker.
That's been debated for far too long. And as for the argument that use define word meanings, dictionaries don't, that's basically shooting yourself in the foot, as everyone and his brother using "hacker" as in "cracker" is what prudists are arguing against in the first place.
I have a nagging feeling that all the stuff being debated daily on Slashdot could be easily settled in a day or two if we could just agree on what certain keywords mean.
Re:Hmmm. Can i sign up george bush?
on
A Word a Day
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· Score: 1
Why link to the main site?
on
A Word a Day
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· Score: 2, Informative
The archives of AWAD is located here. What's the point of linking to the main site?
I'll probably buy that book just because I love the service they provide (for free) so much, but really, it's all in the archives if you want to spare a few bucks.
Are you being disingenuous or was the misunderstanding of the parent post unintentional? The poster probably intended the word "proprietary" to mean something it does not usually mean. As I understand it, (s)he means to say that the OSs should, in binary or source form, not be available to other people than the manufacturers of the cars, by purchase or otherwise. This would certainly prevent viruses from spreading as easily, although it might be a bad idea for other reasons.
PS. It's viruses, plain and simple. There's no such word as "virii."
Everybody knows videogame violence never harmed anyone. It's nonsense like this that prevents highly anticipated titles from being released at their scheduled dates. Slashdotters unite!
There's a difference between saying all are unnecessary and that there's too many of them. I think some are good, but not all. Do you know how to uncheck only the bad ones? If not, I suggest you shut up.
Also, there's no reason to be rude. Especially not when you're wrong.
Perhaps it's the same exploits mentioned in the linked Slashdot article, and in that case pardon my ignorance. If not, I haven't seen these nine security holes talked about at too many places. Why I don't know. They are certainly vicious.
However, I am getting a little tired at all the MS bashing on Slashdot. It has been said before, but do we really need to have a story posted each time an Outlook/Explorer security breach, no matter how insignificant, is made public?
Obviously, you are not very familiar with his work. Escher made huge amounts of paintings, most of them in the beginning of his career. It is true, however, that these particular works happens to be lithographs.
Slashdot Mirror
Note: this is unrelated to your post. I'm only replying because I don't want to start a new thread, in the vain hope that perhaps we could gather all personal tech support stories in a tree with your post as the root.
Right, anyway. A couple of years ago, when the Internet was still something relatively new, my father was going to buy a new computer, and I had joined him to the store to make sure he didn't do anything stupid. He said to the clerk in the store that he wanted to search the internet with his new computer, and that was about it. The clerk replied that, well, in that case just about any computer they had would do, so he might as well go for the cheapest. My dad knew that the Internet was quite large, and so figured that searching all of it would require a powerful computer. Thus he queried why any piece of junk would do for that purpose. The clerk patiently explained in great detail that it isn't really your computer that does all the searching, but you tell another computer on the Internet that you want to do a search, and then that computer, usually some massive supercomputer or a cluster, will do it for you and return the result. My dad was quiet for a while, thinking, and then replied: "Oh, so it's really those massive supercomputers that do the searching?" Looking at me, confused: "So I need to buy a supercomputer, then?"
I was halfway out of the store by then. Young and easily embarrassed.
Is that the way it's gonna be? You have to provide alternative Google logos to get some karma around here? Is that it? Huh? Ok, in that case, there's a whole archive of Google holiday logos over here. And one for fan logos over here.
Take that!
At first I thought this story was a duplicate as usual. Amazingly enough, that wasn't the case, but Slashdot did run another story on Google hacks a week or so ago.
It was Slashdotted to hell back then, so I never got to see what it was about. Maybe this time I should check it out before pressing Submit?
Jeez, he's 50 already? That last pictures I saw of him made him look relatively young.
You're kidding, right? He's looked like 50 for 25 years at least.
Anyways, how about for his birthday, we try to get HURD done sometime before the guy dies? Huh?
After you, Sir.
Btw, RMS, I'm going to pronounce it G N U Linux, not Geenoo Linux, which sounds wierd.
How about making it Gentoo Linux instead? I can't recall anybody starting a flamewar about that.
Must be tired. Just noticed who's funding this, and I'm not so sure I would like to be a part of it anymore. But disregarding that you'd essentially be doing work for the US military I still think it's a great idea.
I knew at least one pessimistic bastard would post some nonsense of this sort. Personally I think getting an entry to represent Slashdot is a great idea, and I also happen to think it's quite doable. No need for crappy sarcasm.
I envision something like this:
1. Some dude(s) donate(s) a car and a camcorder.
2. Some hardware hackers wire a computer to interface with the car and the camcorder.
3. Someone starts a sourceforge project.
4. One million Slashdot monkeys do their best to develop some kind of AI.
5. ???
6. Profit!
Maybe it wouldn't win, but it'd be a damn amusing project, obviously the point of it anyway.
What do you say, Slashdotters? C'mon, it'd be fun. Let's do it!
Amen.
In my opinion, the movie is even better. PKD had a a bunch of interesting ideas, but questionable literary talent. Scott has a great eye, but seemingly no terribly original ideas of his own. They make a great pair, which is what made the movie so great.
The problem I have here is with accepting "generally trustworthy" as a blanket statement that applies equally to things we know newspapers are usually pretty good at (politics, current issues, scandals, crimes, and the like) and areas where we (or at least I) do not have high confidence in their abilities.
:-( So a detectable number of physicists entered the field of cognitive neuroscience when the SSC went down, not necessarily for the big bucks, but to try and work on a challenging problem where there was some hope of funding. Results were mixed.
I don't disagree with this. The section about SvD being a decent paper was only in the parent post as a reply to what turned out to be a joke I didn't get.
So it would be easy to see why a non-famous high energy physicist might spend a lot more time on something like RH after the prize money is publicized given that the chances of hitting on this or on any round of funding these days in physics might be the same lottery odds.
Plus, I can report that a couple of definitely professional mathematicians I have met do (prviately) admit that the Clay Prize money has actually attracted their attention to the prize problems, if only just to take a brief whack at them and see if anything new falls into place.
Sure. But it's a big - no, huge - step from taking a whack at something and actually publishing it. It is just very rare that professionals publish findings if they don't take them seriously themselves. In any of the soft sciencies, that could happen, and one could stand a chance of getting away with it. But there's no fooling the mathematical community. Either you have proof or you don't.
I guess I just don't see what you're saying here. Is it 1) These researchers publish a proof that they believe is incorrect, and hope nobody will notice or 2) These researchers publish a proof that they believe is correct, but they are so incompetent that this is very unlikely to be the case (in fact, so unlikely it makes your BS meter run at 11). To me, neither 1) or 2) seem to obviously be the case here.
I have pretty high confidence that the current attempt has basically already joined all of the other failed attempts
In your first post you use as authorative a quote which suggests this proof hasn't received serious attention yet. This is mildly contradictory.
But we're obviously not getting anywhere here, and I'm willing to put this to rest now. You think the chance of this being the real thing to be so low as to be neglectable, while I am skeptical, but think the issue isn't yet settled. I can see how you arrive at your conclusion, I just don't agree. So let's call it the day, shall we?
While I have no doubt that SvD is of singular value to almost everybody (especially for its largest entries on the diagonal), the fact is that it comes from Sweden makes it orthogonal to our concerns. (Sorry about that...)
I don't understand what you mean by this, or if you are even being serious. If a newspaper is respected, generally trustworthy and read by a large amount of people on a daily basis, where is happens to be located should of course be of no relevance.
If you mean to say that the reason that the rest of the media isn't catching on is that the only story so far has been in a Swedish newspaper, I don't object. But if you're saying that being run in a non-US newspaper makes the story less likely to be true, I think you are a little confused.
True enough, but see below, and the fact that if *I* had a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, I probably wouldn't submit it to the high energy physics and "general math" sections of xarchiv.
Recently, as in the last couple of years, the most promising contributions to RH related stuff has come from high energy physics, and many people, both in math and in physics, believe that this is the approach that will eventually bear fruit. If indeed a final proof would be more physics than number theory (perhaps the proof of the RH would only be a corrollary of some completely un-number theoretic line of reasoning) wouldn't it be reasonable to publish it in a physics journal? That it has implications for number theory isn't enough of a reason to publish it in a number theoretical journal, mostly because the readers of it would not be able to determine whether it was correct or not.
In the thread I referenced, a physicist chimed in with the observation that one of the co-authors (Castro) was not taken seriously in his own field of physics, which makes it even less plausible that the math in this paper would be new and inspiriational.
This is serious, agreed. I don't think I read that post.
Unfortunately, the Clay Math Prize has kind of made proving the Riemann Hypothesis a "make-money-fast" scheme.
Only for amateurs. But those have been trying to prove it, as well as Fermat's last theorem, Goldbach's conjecture, the twin prime conjecture etc. for a long time already. Serious researchers, on the other hand, very rarely put their reputation at stake if they don't believe they have something of real value. They know flaws will be detected, and they know that they would never win any prize with an unsound proof.
But, like I said (in the write up, even), there is a clear possibility that this isn't the real thing. I only think you're overstating your case.
Yeah, I found both of those link about half an hour after I submitted the article. Still, I'd like to add some corrections.
1. SvD isn't an "obscure" Swedish newspaper. It's the biggest, counting readers in if not millions so at least hundreds of thousands. They seldom print bogus.
2. That the proof hasn't been verified yet doesn't mean it can't be correct.
3. The sci.math discussion doesn't really say anything about the validity of the proof, only that, as you say, the paper seems to not have been proof-read very well, etc.
But, I agree that in essence you have reasonable complaints. BS meter at 11 is quite high, though. Mine is at about 5. 11 is reserved for make-money-fast schemes and herbal viagra.
Oh, and one more thing. An AI posted a translation of the article that seems to have gone largely unnoticed. (Just in case there is someone in here who isn't fluent in Swedish.)
America's oldest man died on Monday.
No, no, he's still alive. But he has only been America's oldest since Monday, when a guy who was even older than him passed away.
Dude, I'm sure it's a great book and that there's a bunch of excellent words in there, but GROYNE is the
Worst.
Fucking.
Example.
of an interesting word. EVER.
Uhm. Yeah. Just thought you should know.
I think AWAD on Slashdot is a great idea. As the first word, I suggest:
hacker n.
1. One who is proficient at using or programming a computer; a computer buff.
2. One who uses programming skills to gain illegal access to a computer network or file.
3. One who enthusiastically pursues a game or sport: a weekend tennis hacker.
That's been debated for far too long. And as for the argument that use define word meanings, dictionaries don't, that's basically shooting yourself in the foot, as everyone and his brother using "hacker" as in "cracker" is what prudists are arguing against in the first place.
Runner-ups: computer science, operating system, free, theft, intellectual property.
I have a nagging feeling that all the stuff being debated daily on Slashdot could be easily settled in a day or two if we could just agree on what certain keywords mean.
Actually, Bush already has his own book.
The archives of AWAD is located here. What's the point of linking to the main site?
I'll probably buy that book just because I love the service they provide (for free) so much, but really, it's all in the archives if you want to spare a few bucks.
Are you being disingenuous or was the misunderstanding of the parent post unintentional? The poster probably intended the word "proprietary" to mean something it does not usually mean. As I understand it, (s)he means to say that the OSs should, in binary or source form, not be available to other people than the manufacturers of the cars, by purchase or otherwise. This would certainly prevent viruses from spreading as easily, although it might be a bad idea for other reasons.
PS. It's viruses , plain and simple. There's no such word as "virii."
I thought you were referring to the parent comment, which says the exact same thing as the write up. CTRL-C, CTRL-V indeed.
Everybody knows videogame violence never harmed anyone. It's nonsense like this that prevents highly anticipated titles from being released at their scheduled dates. Slashdotters unite!
Who was it that said "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"?
Djikstra.
Tintin is attractive for two reasons. The gourgeous art, and the european feel.
Actually, there are some tintin mags that are attractive for quite different reasons. Oh, would I love to see Spielberg do that movie!
There's a difference between saying all are unnecessary and that there's too many of them. I think some are good, but not all. Do you know how to uncheck only the bad ones? If not, I suggest you shut up.
Also, there's no reason to be rude. Especially not when you're wrong.
There has been one hour and 46 minutes since the last MS critical article was posted. You need to wait at least two hours.
Perhaps it's the same exploits mentioned in the linked Slashdot article, and in that case pardon my ignorance. If not, I haven't seen these nine security holes talked about at too many places. Why I don't know. They are certainly vicious.
However, I am getting a little tired at all the MS bashing on Slashdot. It has been said before, but do we really need to have a story posted each time an Outlook/Explorer security breach, no matter how insignificant, is made public?
I didn't know Escher did any painting.
Obviously, you are not very familiar with his work. Escher made huge amounts of paintings, most of them in the beginning of his career. It is true, however, that these particular works happens to be lithographs.
And more information about Xtreme Karma Whoring can be found here.