While this new technique may improve security, it seems to lack one important property of pseudo-random numbers that is required by many applications: reproducibility.
Good luck finding the bug in your program with a stream of randoms you'll never be able to reconstruct again.
The Flash mobile user experience may or may not be optimal... either way, I'm willing to bet that it beats a picture of a blue lego with a question mark on it.
The first is most likely going to give you some automata theory for computers but unless you're going into theoretical research, the second is the obvious answer.
Wow, this is about as far from the truth as I can imagine. Although someone in another comment mentions the travelling salesman problem, there are at least dozens of other incredibly important problems in graph theory and combinatorics that are worth millions of dollars to companies you may have heard of (e.g., Google, IBM, etc.). Hypergraph partitioning (for VLSI placement and boolean satisfiability) is one; constraint-based reasoning is another.
Vectors and differentials are likely to come up in graphics, so I won't purport that they are less important than discrete math. But, to assert that one of these is hands-down more useful than the other is nonsense.
... [Democrats] use race as one of their election platforms."
That's quite a claim. Can you back up your claim with any substantial evidence? I don't recall Obama EVER saying that you should vote for him because of his race.
I do, however, know of scads of republicans who think Obama should be cast out of office for being "not of this country.". THAT, sir, is racism.
I am - like many other Slashdot'ers, I expect - just now looking at what FastMail.fm has to offer. (Note that I am an extremely happy user of Gmail, a FREE e-mail service.) Let's take a look:
Free Account: 10MB email, IMAP
So, I've already lost interest. FastMail.fm does not have the capacity to handle 4 of the past 10 e-mails I've received today, unless I give them my credit card.
With regards to uptime, I concede that GMail had some issues a few weeks ago. But, look - Google is good at one thing, and that's redundancy. It's build into everything they do. With greater volume comes greater visibility and responsibility, and I'm honestly not sure I'm willing to trust "FastMail.fm" with my precious data. (What is this "fm" extension anyway? It's not that I care, it's that millions of other people do - and that's the problem).
It seems that the designers of the game are attempting to harness a form of "human computation" that has been popularized in other areas of computer science (e.g., the ESP game for image labeling, Amazon's Mechanical Turk for various tasks, etc.)
Regrettably, this particular application of the concept is (IMHO) flawed. It is hard to argue that humans are more adept than machines for solving a problem like SAT (at least manually) and as many have pointed out, the dimensionality of the space is too grand for a suitable visualization.
In the space of VLSI design, higher-level problems grounded in physical space (such as macro floorplanning and large-block placement) would be much more amenable to this type of game.
Agreed... in fact, I observed this same pattern back in 1998 (no kidding) in a report I wrote for my High School AP Statistics class (titled "On patterns in the distribution of prime numbers"). I submitted it for extra credit, and I got a B+.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and they were cleared of all charges.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/19/school_webcam_spying_no_crime/
Using the camera to take pictures of the user ... assessing GPS to determine location ... remotely disabling device.
Apple, you've finally lived down to my expectations (and then some).
You bend a bar of steel into a triangle, and blast it with a blue laser until the atomic structure changes to an unsynthesizable element.
If you round the division down then do the multiplication, you get 136.
Well, sure ... if you do it wrong, you can derive almost any number that you want!
Infinite Solutions broke this story over two years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9SK_M_nVWA
Once you get past the easter egg, it's great!
While this new technique may improve security, it seems to lack one important property of pseudo-random numbers that is required by many applications: reproducibility.
Good luck finding the bug in your program with a stream of randoms you'll never be able to reconstruct again.
It so happens that there is a "simple English" version of that wikipedia entry:
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model
The Flash mobile user experience may or may not be optimal ... either way, I'm willing to bet that it beats a picture of a blue lego with a question mark on it.
The first is most likely going to give you some automata theory for computers but unless you're going into theoretical research, the second is the obvious answer.
Wow, this is about as far from the truth as I can imagine. Although someone in another comment mentions the travelling salesman problem, there are at least dozens of other incredibly important problems in graph theory and combinatorics that are worth millions of dollars to companies you may have heard of (e.g., Google, IBM, etc.). Hypergraph partitioning (for VLSI placement and boolean satisfiability) is one; constraint-based reasoning is another.
Vectors and differentials are likely to come up in graphics, so I won't purport that they are less important than discrete math. But, to assert that one of these is hands-down more useful than the other is nonsense.
... [Democrats] use race as one of their election platforms."
That's quite a claim. Can you back up your claim with any substantial evidence? I don't recall Obama EVER saying that you should vote for him because of his race.
I do, however, know of scads of republicans who think Obama should be cast out of office for being "not of this country.". THAT, sir, is racism.
It is obvious to the most simple minded that Loki is of an inferior breed.
I am black on the right side. Loki is WHITE on the right side, all of his people are white on the right side!
Is the "particular gene" a second X chromosome?
I kid, I kid!
It took me a few minutes to realize that we were't talking about memory leaks.
I've been spending too much time with Valgrind lately...
Free Account: 10MB email, IMAP
So, I've already lost interest. FastMail.fm does not have the capacity to handle 4 of the past 10 e-mails I've received today, unless I give them my credit card.
With regards to uptime, I concede that GMail had some issues a few weeks ago. But, look - Google is good at one thing, and that's redundancy. It's build into everything they do. With greater volume comes greater visibility and responsibility, and I'm honestly not sure I'm willing to trust "FastMail.fm" with my precious data. (What is this "fm" extension anyway? It's not that I care, it's that millions of other people do - and that's the problem).
Regrettably, this particular application of the concept is (IMHO) flawed. It is hard to argue that humans are more adept than machines for solving a problem like SAT (at least manually) and as many have pointed out, the dimensionality of the space is too grand for a suitable visualization.
In the space of VLSI design, higher-level problems grounded in physical space (such as macro floorplanning and large-block placement) would be much more amenable to this type of game.
Agreed... in fact, I observed this same pattern back in 1998 (no kidding) in a report I wrote for my High School AP Statistics class (titled "On patterns in the distribution of prime numbers"). I submitted it for extra credit, and I got a B+.
Guess I should have published that guy!
x = x xor y
y = x xor y
x = x xor y
Now you know!
I think this was simply a failed attempt at a joke. It's a shame... they missed an excellent pun opportunity involving the phrase "getting it up".