Finding messages in pi = old news. I said so!
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Man, the whole 'find any message you want in pi' is like, such old news. I pointed out the relation between randomness of its digits and message encoding a whole week ago!
Of course, this just proves once again that I always get around to replying to stories too late for anyone to notice.
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If pi is truly random, then any arbitrary sequence of digits (of any length) is present in it somewhere, at some position. Choose a suitable encoding for the information you're looking for - any encoding will do, e.g. three digit groupings for ASCII numbers - and then just search through the digits until you find that particular sequence. It will be in there somewhere, but quite possibly at an unbelievably astronomical position. In fact, the longer the sequence, the higher the probability that you find it later in the sequence.
BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Just that it takes all the information in the universe to make it all the way around a circle.
Somewhere, right now, Archimedes is laughing.
DISCLAIMER: the contents of this message are also encoded into the digits of pi. However, the author is not at liberty to discuss the start position.
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Yes, it's nice that Microsoft allows you to configure it now, but what happens if in IE6.5 or IE7 or whatever they decide to...
1. Remove the button that lets the user turn smart-links on/off? Microsoft says: "User feedback has shown that 89% of all users love smart tags, so now they'll be available for every page, all the time!"
2. Change the browser to ignore the META tag. Microsoft says: "Website authors love the extra content that Microsoft provides for them, for free!"
3. When Microsoft directs all smart tags to Microsoft-approved sites, with Microsoft approved content. Microsoft says: "YOU don't want to think anything bad about Microsoft, now do you? Please go read your pro-Microsoft propoganda for today!"
4. When Microsoft changes smart tags to look like ordinary links. Microsoft says: "99% of users don't care whether a link directs them to a Microsoft or non-Microsoft site. Pretty soon, who will be able to tell the difference anyway? And just look at all of the amazing content and services you get for one low, low price (monthly, of course). Look at all the VALUE we're giving you, for free! Who cares what the links look like?"
5. You say "these smart tags are a pain. I want them to disable them." Microsoft says: "What? YOU DON'T AGREE WITH MICROSOFT? YOU ARE THE PAIN! TERMINATOR DROIDS - HOME IN ON THIS PERSON'S IP ADDRESS AND DISABLE THEM!"
It's traditional embrace and extend - but this time they're aiming for people's thoughts. Doesn't that bother you just a little?
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Actually, in many applications, the last byte of those 32 bits is used to store transparency information, and is referred to as the 'alpha channel'.
I can imagine some situations where having each pixel consume exactly one word might give you a slight increase in speed when doing large copies in memory, but that last byte is actually used by some programs to store useful information.
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462mm x 462mm? You want large? There are 25.4 mm per inch. This is saying it is almost 18.2 inches x 18.2 inches (can anyone say 1 1/2 feet by 1 1/2 feet?). I sure hope this is a mistype of the actual size of this beast.
Ummm, I'm pretty sure he meant 462 mm^2, not 462mmx462mm.
That's sqrt(462) per side, or ~21.5mmx21.5mm.
At a little less than an inch a side, that's reasonable.
Well, at least until you figure in how many transistors have to be on the chip for it to have the logic and memory mentioned. But then, this is still vapor, so they're probably counting on a.13u process being readily available by then.
Tsk, tsk... You should have run fdisk/pdisk from the Mac side before wiping your disk. You would have saved yourself a lot of trouble.
DP4 did something very similar to me. The installer rewrites the partition table, adding two (very small) partitions to the beginning of the table, and then does some kind of voodoo magic to keep the remaining filesystems from being corrupted. All I had to do was update my bootloader configuration (yaboot.conf, or similar) to look for my kernel 2 partitions down the line. i.e. pointing to/dev/hdb11 instead of/dev/hdb9. Lo and behold, it booted. Updated fstab and there everything was, back to normal.
However, there is absolutely no warning that it would do this. Apple really should have included a warning for those running alternative operating systems. But then, that isn't really a concern of theirs, I guess.
The purpose of rtmark is to perform acts of corporate sabotage, among other things. It accomplishes this risk-free by, among other things, bribing workers for target corporations with the money it receives from rtmark's members. RTmark's executives are free of liability for any of the actions of the corporation thanks to the limited liability inherent in a corporation.
Some of their past projects include:
The etoy Fund: rtmark helped to organize the massive 'virtual sit-in' against eToys, Inc., when that company sued the tiny art site etoy.com for copyright infringement or some nonsense due to the similarity in the name.
GWBush.com: rtmark helped to set up and also provided content for parody site GWBush.com, which pissed off good old W. enough that he committed one of his (many) vocal blunders, saying that "There ought to be limits to freedom." (Audio at the rtmark site) Well, sure, there should be limits to freedom, but certainly not when it comes to having the freedom to express ones' opinion of a presidential candidate.
And, perhaps most famously, the B.L.O., where, in 1993, RTMark channeled $8000 from a military veterans' group to the Barbie Liberation Organization, which used the investment to switch the voiceboxes of three hundred BarbieTM and G.I. JoeTM dolls.
Lots of interesting stuff at the site.
---------------
Yes indeed! I saw the parallels to the DVD CCA case right away. Check out this juicy quote from the ruling:
Page 1721: "Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses. The copyright law, however, does not confer such a monopoly."
Replace Sony with MPAA and games with movies, and you can see how this might be applicable.
What I found more interesting was the judge's position towards use of the BIOS. He said that observing the BIOS in action in order to reverse-engineer a compatible product in the name of competition was a fair (and protected) use of the original product, and so any product they developed is OK, and that any 'intermediate' copies of the BIOS they might have made were irrelevant, so long as no code from the original Sony BIOS ended up in the finished product.
Does that mean player keys extracted from a player while it's working or using captured decoded video from a player could also be considered fair use of the player? I think once the courts realize that the real issue here is control of the players, then it'll practically be over. They'll axe the suits and OK competitive players, because it will be seen as a pro-commerce decision. It increases the number of players in the market, which will increase the sale of movies in the market, instead of supplying the DVDCCA and MPAA with an illegal monopoly that is NOT allowable under copyright law.
The fact that the Copyright Office is reviewing the law and its possible impact is also encouraging. Go to Cryptome for links on how to submit comments to the Copyright Office on the impact of the DMCA, if you've got a grasp on the issue and something to say. ----
Opposite sex ban: And what happens if the 'residence hall administrator' is of opposite sex than the resident? Well, they can't very well go in the room, now can they? This is absurd. Unless they plan on marching the local police into the dorms to enforce this (and boy, wouldn't that be a scene?), this law will have no effect. It will be left up to the RA's to enforce, and they just won't care. What this does do is establish the Hon. Ms. McGrath as a hardline, 'moral' conservative. She's probably positioning herself for a run for governor.
Mandatory internet filters: as someone mentioned earlier, there are plenty of ways around filters. Also, that any use of campus facilities for 'non-educational' purposes would be banned. Will the professors be similarly restricted? I think this would be practically unenforcable unless you essentially cut off the campus' connection to the outside world, which would send the professors through the roof.
If any of these bills were enacted as law, I'm pretty sure that the University would happily look the other way while business continued as usual.
Oh yeah, and if I were a student at the U of A, I would be offended at the implication that I'm a sex-crazed porn addict. You should all let your representative know what you think of her.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, the whole 'find any message you want in pi' is like, such old news. I pointed out the relation between randomness of its digits and message encoding a whole week ago!
Of course, this just proves once again that I always get around to replying to stories too late for anyone to notice.
-----
Actually, that's truer than you might think.
If pi is truly random, then any arbitrary sequence of digits (of any length) is present in it somewhere, at some position. Choose a suitable encoding for the information you're looking for - any encoding will do, e.g. three digit groupings for ASCII numbers - and then just search through the digits until you find that particular sequence. It will be in there somewhere, but quite possibly at an unbelievably astronomical position. In fact, the longer the sequence, the higher the probability that you find it later in the sequence.
BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Just that it takes all the information in the universe to make it all the way around a circle.
Somewhere, right now, Archimedes is laughing.
DISCLAIMER: the contents of this message are also encoded into the digits of pi. However, the author is not at liberty to discuss the start position.
-----
Yes, it's nice that Microsoft allows you to configure it now, but what happens if in IE6.5 or IE7 or whatever they decide to...
1. Remove the button that lets the user turn smart-links on/off? Microsoft says: "User feedback has shown that 89% of all users love smart tags, so now they'll be available for every page, all the time!"
2. Change the browser to ignore the META tag. Microsoft says: "Website authors love the extra content that Microsoft provides for them, for free!"
3. When Microsoft directs all smart tags to Microsoft-approved sites, with Microsoft approved content. Microsoft says: "YOU don't want to think anything bad about Microsoft, now do you? Please go read your pro-Microsoft propoganda for today!"
4. When Microsoft changes smart tags to look like ordinary links. Microsoft says: "99% of users don't care whether a link directs them to a Microsoft or non-Microsoft site. Pretty soon, who will be able to tell the difference anyway? And just look at all of the amazing content and services you get for one low, low price (monthly, of course). Look at all the VALUE we're giving you, for free! Who cares what the links look like?"
5. You say "these smart tags are a pain. I want them to disable them." Microsoft says: "What? YOU DON'T AGREE WITH MICROSOFT? YOU ARE THE PAIN! TERMINATOR DROIDS - HOME IN ON THIS PERSON'S IP ADDRESS AND DISABLE THEM!"
It's traditional embrace and extend - but this time they're aiming for people's thoughts. Doesn't that bother you just a little?
----
Actually, in many applications, the last byte of those 32 bits is used to store transparency information, and is referred to as the 'alpha channel'.
I can imagine some situations where having each pixel consume exactly one word might give you a slight increase in speed when doing large copies in memory, but that last byte is actually used by some programs to store useful information.
-----
Hey BenH - if you know and can tell us, why did Apple yank the ppclinux.apple.com site, and your page along with it?
just curious... and a big thanks for all the great work on linux-ppc!
----
Ummm, I'm pretty sure he meant 462 mm^2, not 462mmx462mm.
That's sqrt(462) per side, or ~21.5mmx21.5mm. At a little less than an inch a side, that's reasonable.
Well, at least until you figure in how many transistors have to be on the chip for it to have the logic and memory mentioned. But then, this is still vapor, so they're probably counting on a
-----
Tsk, tsk... You should have run fdisk/pdisk from the Mac side before wiping your disk. You would have saved yourself a lot of trouble.
/dev/hdb11 instead of /dev/hdb9. Lo and behold, it booted. Updated fstab and there everything was, back to normal.
DP4 did something very similar to me. The installer rewrites the partition table, adding two (very small) partitions to the beginning of the table, and then does some kind of voodoo magic to keep the remaining filesystems from being corrupted. All I had to do was update my bootloader configuration (yaboot.conf, or similar) to look for my kernel 2 partitions down the line. i.e. pointing to
However, there is absolutely no warning that it would do this. Apple really should have included a warning for those running alternative operating systems. But then, that isn't really a concern of theirs, I guess.
http://www.rtmark.com
The purpose of rtmark is to perform acts of corporate sabotage, among other things. It accomplishes this risk-free by, among other things, bribing workers for target corporations with the money it receives from rtmark's members. RTmark's executives are free of liability for any of the actions of the corporation thanks to the limited liability inherent in a corporation.
Some of their past projects include:
The etoy Fund: rtmark helped to organize the massive 'virtual sit-in' against eToys, Inc., when that company sued the tiny art site etoy.com for copyright infringement or some nonsense due to the similarity in the name.
GWBush.com: rtmark helped to set up and also provided content for parody site GWBush.com, which pissed off good old W. enough that he committed one of his (many) vocal blunders, saying that "There ought to be limits to freedom." (Audio at the rtmark site) Well, sure, there should be limits to freedom, but certainly not when it comes to having the freedom to express ones' opinion of a presidential candidate.
And, perhaps most famously, the B.L.O., where, in 1993, RTMark channeled $8000 from a military veterans' group to the Barbie Liberation Organization, which used the investment to switch the voiceboxes of three hundred BarbieTM and G.I. JoeTM dolls.
Lots of interesting stuff at the site.
---------------
Yes indeed! I saw the parallels to the DVD CCA case right away. Check out this juicy quote from the ruling:
Page 1721: "Sony understandably seeks control over the market for devices that play games Sony produces or licenses. The copyright law, however, does not confer such a monopoly."
Replace Sony with MPAA and games with movies, and you can see how this might be applicable.
What I found more interesting was the judge's position towards use of the BIOS. He said that observing the BIOS in action in order to reverse-engineer a compatible product in the name of competition was a fair (and protected) use of the original product, and so any product they developed is OK, and that any 'intermediate' copies of the BIOS they might have made were irrelevant, so long as no code from the original Sony BIOS ended up in the finished product.
Does that mean player keys extracted from a player while it's working or using captured decoded video from a player could also be considered fair use of the player? I think once the courts realize that the real issue here is control of the players, then it'll practically be over. They'll axe the suits and OK competitive players, because it will be seen as a pro-commerce decision. It increases the number of players in the market, which will increase the sale of movies in the market, instead of supplying the DVDCCA and MPAA with an illegal monopoly that is NOT allowable under copyright law.
The fact that the Copyright Office is reviewing the law and its possible impact is also encouraging. Go to Cryptome for links on how to submit comments to the Copyright Office on the impact of the DMCA, if you've got a grasp on the issue and something to say. ----
Opposite sex ban: And what happens if the 'residence hall administrator' is of opposite sex than the resident? Well, they can't very well go in the room, now can they? This is absurd. Unless they plan on marching the local police into the dorms to enforce this (and boy, wouldn't that be a scene?), this law will have no effect. It will be left up to the RA's to enforce, and they just won't care. What this does do is establish the Hon. Ms. McGrath as a hardline, 'moral' conservative. She's probably positioning herself for a run for governor.
Mandatory internet filters: as someone mentioned earlier, there are plenty of ways around filters. Also, that any use of campus facilities for 'non-educational' purposes would be banned. Will the professors be similarly restricted? I think this would be practically unenforcable unless you essentially cut off the campus' connection to the outside world, which would send the professors through the roof.
If any of these bills were enacted as law, I'm pretty sure that the University would happily look the other way while business continued as usual.
Oh yeah, and if I were a student at the U of A, I would be offended at the implication that I'm a sex-crazed porn addict. You should all let your representative know what you think of her.