You Sir are spot on: it is only fair that people should be compensated for their work. However I think you are presenting a false choice. The choice is not 1) the 'incredibly valuable service' of the NYT and 2) 'crappy blogers that can't spell.'
There are plenty of high quality sources of information that are still available for free online, including most major newspapers and media companies. Fortunately there are also quite a few blogs who are a good source of information, opinions, and independent research, and whose authors are quite well versed in their field, and include Nobel prize winners. For example, on economics and finance you have Calculated Risk, Greg Mankiw's blog, Becker and Posner, Zero Hedge. Really, when you think about it, NYT does not have an especially compelling offer.
The elliptic curve primality test, which actually proves that the given number is prime, can be proven to run in O((log n)6), but only if some still unproven (but widely assumed to be true) statements of analytic number theory are used. It is one of the most often used deterministic tests in practice.
The elliptic curve primality test is 1) 'a general-purpose algorithm, meaning it does not depend on the number being a special form' 2) has been able to produce a certificate for 'the 20,562-digit Mills' prime' in about 6 years of single CPU run time 3) as of 1991 'it is now possible to test arbitrary integers up to 400 digits in a few days on a single SUN 3/60 workstation' according to the Atkin and Morain paper Elliptic Curves and Primality Proving.
Lastly, from the AKS primality test page, it would appear that the AKS test is more significant as a theoretical result than as a practical algorithm.
I am not an expert in this field, however it appears to me that you may not be one either.
In practice all this paper achieved is the ability to write the following statement, which you can feel free to check with a program like Mathematica (I did). As the parent suggested, once you have p and q, then you can deduce the private key and decode any message encrypted with this key.
Having just read the wikipedia page on RSA and assuming that it is correct, you are wrong. n = p x q where p and q are large primes, not pseudo-primes. As such the informative mod is not warranted.
Re:Google is the Foundation
on
Less Than Free
·
· Score: 2, Funny
...just like the prophecy was foretold by Saltzman in accounting!
Mathematica suprisingly has a very decent set of formula editing shortcuts, see for example this link. You may be able to export to LATEX or other formats, I cannot remember. Of course, that is one hell of an expensive text editor.
Not sure what you mean by the black man in the White House - what if he was white and the house was black, would that change anything? That being said, that was my exact reaction. People work like slaves entire lives to earn a fraction of a Nobel prize (they're usually shared) in sciences, and then a verbose 40 year old schmuck wins it for writing two autobiographies by age 40. Even worse, if I were a 30 year old up and coming researcher, working on a cutting age theory, and going to bed dreaming of winning one day the Nobel prize, I would quit now, sell out, and go work at a hedge fund to make money. To hell with everyone else.
To anyone with nightmares about metallic Terminator-like machines with eerie red glowing eyes taking over the Earth, I direct you to the current winner of the Loebner Prize, the Elbot. If you still think computers are 'alive,' you may want to consider upgrading your wife/girlfriend/significant other and replacing them with a plastic dildo.
Powershell is another MSFT knock-off of exiting *nix tools, with the usual renaming of common commands, etc. I was excited about it too, then after giving it a try I removed it in anger.
I think that presently Microsoft is more of a risk to Google than Google is to Microsoft. Why? Bing.com has real market share, and they've done a good job of copying most of their algorithms and techniques. Google is nowhere near being the same competitive threat. Chrome (my favorite browser) is a meager 1% market share. Switching browsers is dramatically easier than switching operating systems, and they have not been able to drive users to them even then. Switching search engines is trivial, and as such more liable to fads and more easily influenced. Not to mention that MSFT's earnings are roughly 4 times those of Google, even despite the Vista debacle. MSFT - one of the worst companies in the history of man kind - has massive staying power, and enjoys a heavily entrenched position. The risk that Google is the next has-been is much greater than the same thing happening to MSFT, IMHO. Which is why I am doing my part, diligently sabotaging every MSFT product I encounter, purging them from my life and the life of my friends and family. But I have no illusions and I am still afraid, very afraid.
... based on lawyerly-sounding comments in response to the article. IANAL so I do not have a clue whether the technical argument is correct or not. I still stand by the author of the original article, and agree with him that this practice, whether consistent with the law or not, is idiotic.
Florida is a judicial foreclosure state. Meaning all foreclosures are addressed by the court system. The Florida law requires that the lienholder bringing foreclosure suit against the defaulting borrower.....also include ALL junior lienholders in the suit. Wells fargo also has a junior lien. Hence it names itself as a defendent. A responsibility of the Junior lien holders is to re-affirm their lien....if it still exists. If they don't respond to the complaint...the court assumes the lien is no longer valid. Because a foreclosure can be set aside if the plaintif doesn't follow the letter of the law... Wells names itself as a defendent. Al's article sites a foreclosure attorney...who states this is fairly common in Florida now for banks holding two liens against a property. So how dumb is Wells suing itself?? It is not. It conforms to the letter of the law. And again, Al's article notes it is a frequent event in Florida today. Second...whether Wells loaned 100% of the property's value via its too loans...we do not know!! If this was a "dumb" loan to start with...how do we know without seeing the loan file and application? And this will not be shared by a bank under privacy rules. I looked into this because this article seemed too hard to believe.
Bill gates is (incorrectly) alleged to have said:"If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." To which GM is supposed to have come back with a caustic comeback. Imaginary as this story may be, let's stick with it for a second. What would a Microsoft hurricane look like? Random intermittend freezes? Nagging bogus error messages when in the proximity of Mountain View, California? Would it suck up, slowly, over time, all the humidity from the atmospehere in a huge overengineered barely moving vortex that would come to a grinding halt over time ('time to buy Hurricane 8.0')?
I saw... its thoughts. I saw what they're planning to do. They're like locusts. They're moving from planet to planet... their whole civilization. After they've consumed every natural resource they move on... and we're next. Nuke 'em. Let's nuke the bastards.
Typically Google tends to announce out of the blue a completed new innovative service or product. Google Chrome for example was announced and released in a matter of 1-2 days. I suspect that because of MSFTs heavy investment and advertising of Bing, Google might feel the need to retaliate. They may have been planning a Google OS for a while - I personally have been expecting this move for years - but they may be rushing to get some attention and to curtail MSFTs momentum.
After essentially threatening to quit, I was allowed to upgrade to IE8 from IE6 at work (but I still cannot use a non-IE browser). Although better than IE6, IE8 is nowhere near the alternative browsers in terms of performance of features. Not to mention that it produces all this FUD when you try to use gmail or google maps. IE8 is like the fat dumb mumbling little kid who happens to be the son of the school principal so is always sitting in the front row at all school events, next to all the cool kids who've earned their spot.
From the days of mIRC to today's Web 2.0 (see for example this), the web is as brutal of friendly place as real life is. Is this trivial 'insight' really worth lifetime guaranteed employment, i.e. tenure? It sounds more like dear Prof was trying to expense / justify his online MMO addictions.
"Sorry, I cannot teach the lecture this afternoon, I have an important meeting to attend in the City of Heroes."
... pings usually range from 50 (own country) to 200-400 (some other country near you). If you live in USA, replace country with state, tho interstate connections are probably better than off country. Now imagine moving your mouse in the game to look around. How is that 50-400ms lag working for you now? Sure, bandwidth and speeds can get better, but latency is harder.
I thought about that as well after the fact, and I agree with you. You can add that to the list of issues. It only strengthens my argument that cloud performance 3D gaming is not an option for the foreseeable future (i.e. next 10-20+ years). Now other types of gaming, e.g. Civ-like 2D games might be a different story.
$50.000 ~ 35.000 euros
Tesla model S looks like a luxury sedan. The same money would buy you a low end Mercedes or BMW in Europe, but with nowhere near the performance of 0-60mph in 5 seconds. For that kind of performance you would probably have to go with a turbo-charged compact, but the fuel economy is gone and you won't have the same interior space. If the numbers they advertise are true, it's quite a cheap car to buy, all things considered.
Unfortunately for your math, take any car sold in America and convert its price into Euro, and it will seem dirt cheap. The rule of thumb is that the price tends to be the same in both EUR and USD in the respective markets. I actually looked into arbing the spread by buying cars in the US and shipping them to Europe, but found that car manufacturers go out of their way to make the American and European models incompatible. Specifically servicing an American made car in Europe is very hard and expensive.
I don't think lag is the problem per-se. You're already exposed to it when playing games in multiplayer and it is not the end of the world.
Just think of the required bandwidth though. I play my games in 1900x1200, so using 30fps and 3 bytes per pixel (granted an arbitrary assumption) comes out to 205,200,000 bytes/second. I don't know about you guys, but that is slightly faster than my current internet connection. You could use video compression, but the requirements for that both for the cloud and for your local computer will crush the benefits.
On the flipside, there is a compelling argument for figuring out alternative energy sources. The argument is based on strategy security interests and not flower power tree hugging cheerleading, or even well intentioned but somewhat speculative computer models. Read as an example the recent NYT article by Thomas Friedman. For those of you with the courage to read a message that has not been preapproved and prepackaged by the mass media, a much clearer exposition is here.
The absolutely immense cost of the US military (defense spending is the largest category after entitlement programs) is only part of the picture. How do you price in the wars that you loose? How do you put a price on the concessions you end up having to make having to backward medieval rulers - surely they are not satisfied with a bow or romantic stroll? We're arming with one hand, via petrodollars, the same groups and regimes that we end up fighting only a few years later. The Cold War ended when oil prices crashed driving Russia's economy into a tail spin. This was the defining moment of our generation! A
Excellent post (although no need for personal attacks). Your points are spot on. I would add one: this specific bill is a horrible idea for two reasons:
a) It relies on the government allocating out to various industries the initial level of pollution permits. These permits could potentially be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Can you imagine the amount of corruption this will spawn when $90k/year government bureaucrats find themselves in control of said assets? To get a taste just read the Blagojevich wiretap and remember that the only thing that makes him different from thousands of other government employees is that he got caught.
b) It does not offset the increased government revenues in any way. The increased tax revenue will simply get lost in the huge budgetary black hole that we call Government.
To the extent to which reducing CO2 emissions and dependence on non-renewable energy sources is a good idea, the government should instate a flat tax on CO2 emissions, and then take the entirety of that revenue and distribute it uniformly across the population as a yearly rebate check. This way it is budget neutral for the country, and also it does not entirely crush the poor. In fact, it can become a source of revenue for those who are more flexible. If you sell one of your cars and start biking to work, you might become a net beneficiary. And if not, you should still be roughly flat once you adjust for the rebate check. This also dramatically limits opportunities for corruption.
Are doctors truly necessary in most circumstances?
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A lot of problems in driving the industry towards higher rates of adoption of modern technology are the arcane and sacrosant practices of doctors.
In my experience, in most situations, a simple algorithmic deterministic decision tree (with the right medical tests at the nodes) is sufficient to correctly diagnose and treat most diseases. I've seen my highly paid doctors I've been to under my snazzy uber-exclusive insurance plan repeatedly go to a *.nih (I think) page and reading about the various possible conditions. The human doctor is only important when dealing with the exceptions and the hard / rare cases, not with the bulk of minor, commoditized afflictions that affect mankind.
It is purely a matter of personal preference that the current generation of middle aged baby boomers are so attached to the personal touch of another human reading them a website. However your kids, raised in a webcentric era, might feel differently when asked to choose between paying $1,200 for 60 minutes with a reputable doctor (most of which spent filling paperwork and waiting) and $89 for going to a modern clinic where they follow an automated set of tests administered by a nurse, with results feeding into a computer (a doctor is called only if an exception is triggered).
And yes, don't give me the sob story of that one time where sheer human genius saved someone's life. First, there will always be a doctor on standby to deal with exceptions, and complications. Second, you cannot drive policy off exceptions like this. Third, the high price of current practices drive many people away from medical care early in their afflictions, possibly outweighing the benefit of customized care.
Also, customized care means you are relying on your knucklehead doctor to be up to date with all the medical research not only in his field, but in all related fields. Put it this way - who would you rather ask your random general knowledge questions: wikipedia, or a single smart educated professor?
In conclusion, the best thing to do might be to offer people both alternatives (at appropriate price points) and let them choose.
Slashdot Mirror
You Sir are spot on: it is only fair that people should be compensated for their work. However I think you are presenting a false choice. The choice is not 1) the 'incredibly valuable service' of the NYT and 2) 'crappy blogers that can't spell.'
There are plenty of high quality sources of information that are still available for free online, including most major newspapers and media companies. Fortunately there are also quite a few blogs who are a good source of information, opinions, and independent research, and whose authors are quite well versed in their field, and include Nobel prize winners. For example, on economics and finance you have Calculated Risk, Greg Mankiw's blog, Becker and Posner, Zero Hedge. Really, when you think about it, NYT does not have an especially compelling offer.
Expert or no expert, let's stick to the facts. Here's what wikipedia's page on fast deterministic tests for primality says:
The elliptic curve primality test, which actually proves that the given number is prime, can be proven to run in O((log n)6), but only if some still unproven (but widely assumed to be true) statements of analytic number theory are used. It is one of the most often used deterministic tests in practice.
The elliptic curve primality test is 1) 'a general-purpose algorithm, meaning it does not depend on the number being a special form' 2) has been able to produce a certificate for 'the 20,562-digit Mills' prime' in about 6 years of single CPU run time 3) as of 1991 'it is now possible to test arbitrary integers up to 400 digits in a few days on a single SUN 3/60 workstation' according to the Atkin and Morain paper Elliptic Curves and Primality Proving.
Lastly, from the AKS primality test page, it would appear that the AKS test is more significant as a theoretical result than as a practical algorithm.
I am not an expert in this field, however it appears to me that you may not be one either.
In practice all this paper achieved is the ability to write the following statement, which you can feel free to check with a program like Mathematica (I did). As the parent suggested, once you have p and q, then you can deduce the private key and decode any message encrypted with this key.
1230186684530117755130494958384962720772853569595 3347921973224521517264005072636575187452021997864 6938995647494277406384592519255732630345373154826 8507917026122142913461670429214311602221240479274 737794080665351419597459856902143413
= 3347807169895689878604416984821269081770479498371 3768568912431388982883793878002287614711652531743 087737814467999489
x
3674604366679959042824463379962795263227915816434 3087642676032283815739666511279233373417143396810 270092798736308917
Having just read the wikipedia page on RSA and assuming that it is correct, you are wrong. n = p x q where p and q are large primes, not pseudo-primes. As such the informative mod is not warranted.
...just like the prophecy was foretold by Saltzman in accounting!
Mathematica suprisingly has a very decent set of formula editing shortcuts, see for example this link. You may be able to export to LATEX or other formats, I cannot remember. Of course, that is one hell of an expensive text editor.
Not sure what you mean by the black man in the White House - what if he was white and the house was black, would that change anything? That being said, that was my exact reaction. People work like slaves entire lives to earn a fraction of a Nobel prize (they're usually shared) in sciences, and then a verbose 40 year old schmuck wins it for writing two autobiographies by age 40. Even worse, if I were a 30 year old up and coming researcher, working on a cutting age theory, and going to bed dreaming of winning one day the Nobel prize, I would quit now, sell out, and go work at a hedge fund to make money. To hell with everyone else.
no comment
To anyone with nightmares about metallic Terminator-like machines with eerie red glowing eyes taking over the Earth, I direct you to the current winner of the Loebner Prize, the Elbot. If you still think computers are 'alive,' you may want to consider upgrading your wife/girlfriend/significant other and replacing them with a plastic dildo.
Does it shoot organic missiles while sipping wine and complaining about SUV drivers?
Powershell is another MSFT knock-off of exiting *nix tools, with the usual renaming of common commands, etc. I was excited about it too, then after giving it a try I removed it in anger.
I think that presently Microsoft is more of a risk to Google than Google is to Microsoft. Why? Bing.com has real market share, and they've done a good job of copying most of their algorithms and techniques. Google is nowhere near being the same competitive threat. Chrome (my favorite browser) is a meager 1% market share. Switching browsers is dramatically easier than switching operating systems, and they have not been able to drive users to them even then. Switching search engines is trivial, and as such more liable to fads and more easily influenced. Not to mention that MSFT's earnings are roughly 4 times those of Google, even despite the Vista debacle. MSFT - one of the worst companies in the history of man kind - has massive staying power, and enjoys a heavily entrenched position. The risk that Google is the next has-been is much greater than the same thing happening to MSFT, IMHO. Which is why I am doing my part, diligently sabotaging every MSFT product I encounter, purging them from my life and the life of my friends and family. But I have no illusions and I am still afraid, very afraid.
... based on lawyerly-sounding comments in response to the article. IANAL so I do not have a clue whether the technical argument is correct or not. I still stand by the author of the original article, and agree with him that this practice, whether consistent with the law or not, is idiotic.
Florida is a judicial foreclosure state. Meaning all foreclosures are addressed by the court system. The Florida law requires that the lienholder bringing foreclosure suit against the defaulting borrower.....also include ALL junior lienholders in the suit. Wells fargo also has a junior lien. Hence it names itself as a defendent. A responsibility of the Junior lien holders is to re-affirm their lien....if it still exists. If they don't respond to the complaint...the court assumes the lien is no longer valid. Because a foreclosure can be set aside if the plaintif doesn't follow the letter of the law... Wells names itself as a defendent. Al's article sites a foreclosure attorney...who states this is fairly common in Florida now for banks holding two liens against a property. So how dumb is Wells suing itself?? It is not. It conforms to the letter of the law. And again, Al's article notes it is a frequent event in Florida today. Second...whether Wells loaned 100% of the property's value via its too loans...we do not know!! If this was a "dumb" loan to start with...how do we know without seeing the loan file and application? And this will not be shared by a bank under privacy rules. I looked into this because this article seemed too hard to believe.
Bill gates is (incorrectly) alleged to have said: "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon." To which GM is supposed to have come back with a caustic comeback. Imaginary as this story may be, let's stick with it for a second. What would a Microsoft hurricane look like? Random intermittend freezes? Nagging bogus error messages when in the proximity of Mountain View, California? Would it suck up, slowly, over time, all the humidity from the atmospehere in a huge overengineered barely moving vortex that would come to a grinding halt over time ('time to buy Hurricane 8.0')?
I saw... its thoughts. I saw what they're planning to do. They're like locusts. They're moving from planet to planet... their whole civilization. After they've consumed every natural resource they move on... and we're next. Nuke 'em. Let's nuke the bastards.
Typically Google tends to announce out of the blue a completed new innovative service or product. Google Chrome for example was announced and released in a matter of 1-2 days. I suspect that because of MSFTs heavy investment and advertising of Bing, Google might feel the need to retaliate. They may have been planning a Google OS for a while - I personally have been expecting this move for years - but they may be rushing to get some attention and to curtail MSFTs momentum.
After essentially threatening to quit, I was allowed to upgrade to IE8 from IE6 at work (but I still cannot use a non-IE browser). Although better than IE6, IE8 is nowhere near the alternative browsers in terms of performance of features. Not to mention that it produces all this FUD when you try to use gmail or google maps. IE8 is like the fat dumb mumbling little kid who happens to be the son of the school principal so is always sitting in the front row at all school events, next to all the cool kids who've earned their spot.
From the days of mIRC to today's Web 2.0 (see for example this), the web is as brutal of friendly place as real life is. Is this trivial 'insight' really worth lifetime guaranteed employment, i.e. tenure? It sounds more like dear Prof was trying to expense / justify his online MMO addictions.
"Sorry, I cannot teach the lecture this afternoon, I have an important meeting to attend in the City of Heroes."
I thought about that as well after the fact, and I agree with you. You can add that to the list of issues. It only strengthens my argument that cloud performance 3D gaming is not an option for the foreseeable future (i.e. next 10-20+ years). Now other types of gaming, e.g. Civ-like 2D games might be a different story.
$50.000 ~ 35.000 euros Tesla model S looks like a luxury sedan. The same money would buy you a low end Mercedes or BMW in Europe, but with nowhere near the performance of 0-60mph in 5 seconds. For that kind of performance you would probably have to go with a turbo-charged compact, but the fuel economy is gone and you won't have the same interior space. If the numbers they advertise are true, it's quite a cheap car to buy, all things considered.
Unfortunately for your math, take any car sold in America and convert its price into Euro, and it will seem dirt cheap. The rule of thumb is that the price tends to be the same in both EUR and USD in the respective markets. I actually looked into arbing the spread by buying cars in the US and shipping them to Europe, but found that car manufacturers go out of their way to make the American and European models incompatible. Specifically servicing an American made car in Europe is very hard and expensive.
I don't think lag is the problem per-se. You're already exposed to it when playing games in multiplayer and it is not the end of the world.
Just think of the required bandwidth though. I play my games in 1900x1200, so using 30fps and 3 bytes per pixel (granted an arbitrary assumption) comes out to 205,200,000 bytes/second. I don't know about you guys, but that is slightly faster than my current internet connection. You could use video compression, but the requirements for that both for the cloud and for your local computer will crush the benefits.
New Jersey... culture? As someone who lived there for 4 years, I call bullcrap. Screw you guys, I'm going home.
On the flipside, there is a compelling argument for figuring out alternative energy sources. The argument is based on strategy security interests and not flower power tree hugging cheerleading, or even well intentioned but somewhat speculative computer models. Read as an example the recent NYT article by Thomas Friedman. For those of you with the courage to read a message that has not been preapproved and prepackaged by the mass media, a much clearer exposition is here.
The absolutely immense cost of the US military (defense spending is the largest category after entitlement programs) is only part of the picture. How do you price in the wars that you loose? How do you put a price on the concessions you end up having to make having to backward medieval rulers - surely they are not satisfied with a bow or romantic stroll? We're arming with one hand, via petrodollars, the same groups and regimes that we end up fighting only a few years later. The Cold War ended when oil prices crashed driving Russia's economy into a tail spin. This was the defining moment of our generation! A
Excellent post (although no need for personal attacks). Your points are spot on. I would add one: this specific bill is a horrible idea for two reasons:
a) It relies on the government allocating out to various industries the initial level of pollution permits. These permits could potentially be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Can you imagine the amount of corruption this will spawn when $90k/year government bureaucrats find themselves in control of said assets? To get a taste just read the Blagojevich wiretap and remember that the only thing that makes him different from thousands of other government employees is that he got caught.
b) It does not offset the increased government revenues in any way. The increased tax revenue will simply get lost in the huge budgetary black hole that we call Government.
To the extent to which reducing CO2 emissions and dependence on non-renewable energy sources is a good idea, the government should instate a flat tax on CO2 emissions, and then take the entirety of that revenue and distribute it uniformly across the population as a yearly rebate check. This way it is budget neutral for the country, and also it does not entirely crush the poor. In fact, it can become a source of revenue for those who are more flexible. If you sell one of your cars and start biking to work, you might become a net beneficiary. And if not, you should still be roughly flat once you adjust for the rebate check. This also dramatically limits opportunities for corruption.
A lot of problems in driving the industry towards higher rates of adoption of modern technology are the arcane and sacrosant practices of doctors.
In my experience, in most situations, a simple algorithmic deterministic decision tree (with the right medical tests at the nodes) is sufficient to correctly diagnose and treat most diseases. I've seen my highly paid doctors I've been to under my snazzy uber-exclusive insurance plan repeatedly go to a *.nih (I think) page and reading about the various possible conditions. The human doctor is only important when dealing with the exceptions and the hard / rare cases, not with the bulk of minor, commoditized afflictions that affect mankind.
It is purely a matter of personal preference that the current generation of middle aged baby boomers are so attached to the personal touch of another human reading them a website. However your kids, raised in a webcentric era, might feel differently when asked to choose between paying $1,200 for 60 minutes with a reputable doctor (most of which spent filling paperwork and waiting) and $89 for going to a modern clinic where they follow an automated set of tests administered by a nurse, with results feeding into a computer (a doctor is called only if an exception is triggered).
And yes, don't give me the sob story of that one time where sheer human genius saved someone's life. First, there will always be a doctor on standby to deal with exceptions, and complications. Second, you cannot drive policy off exceptions like this. Third, the high price of current practices drive many people away from medical care early in their afflictions, possibly outweighing the benefit of customized care.
Also, customized care means you are relying on your knucklehead doctor to be up to date with all the medical research not only in his field, but in all related fields. Put it this way - who would you rather ask your random general knowledge questions: wikipedia, or a single smart educated professor?
In conclusion, the best thing to do might be to offer people both alternatives (at appropriate price points) and let them choose.