What if some irate technician at the film studio decides to steal the film and release it on the internet before it came out in theatres. Hey, it happens to songs sometimes...
Or what if some guy brings in one of those miniature video cameras to one of those "screening" things and releases that on the internet?
> And yes, I know you're not the real timothy. > All you have to do is look at the source of a > page you've posted on and you'll see the > special character after the 'i'.
Actually, you can see a funny accent on top of the 'i', if you look closely enough. You have even used Timothy's e-mail address. This is dishonest, Timothy impersonator. Shame on you.
Actually, vision doesn't really have much to do with it. Some of us may have done some spectroscopy in high school (or university). The basic idea is that a particular molecule will accept electrons only at very specific energies, and that spectral analysis will show a deficiency of electromagnetic radiation at the specific wavelengths corresponding to those electron energies. These spectra are like fingerprints, which can identify the presence of even trace gasses millions of light years away.
Finding sugar in a gas cloud is as simple as noting missing wavelengths corresponding to the sugar. This identification technique is so accurate that it can be used to detect the doppler effect, by figuring out the amount of red-shift that must occur to turn the spectrum of a known substance into the observed spectrum.
Yeah, haven't you heard of that expression before? Well, in my experience, when you use sarcasm, one of two things happens. Either (1) the person gets it, or (2) they think, "Holy shit, this guy is on crack! What he's saying is full of shit! Wow, I'm going to tell him who's boss so other people will like me! La-la-la-la-la!"
Anyways, if you think Unix naming conventions prevent the general public from adopting it, I would suggest that you take a look in the Windows system directory. My point here is that, alright, to be a power user, you might have to know all sorts of funny shit, but to be a user? You can be oblivious to everything around you and still navigate confidently through both KDE and Windows. (The only difference is that when you do it in Windows, you stand a significant chance of shooting yourself in the foot).
> That's easy. Split the difference -- halfway between 'g' and 'k' is 'i'.
Both KDE and Gnome have made an art form out of silent use of their respective initial letters (K and G). In this spirit, I propose that the ideal solution would be to find another letter which is as versatile as K and G when dealing with not having to be pronounced.
I think that the letter P would be ideal in this context. We can call it pnapster.
Another choice could be the letter M, which would give us mnapster. But M sucks.
But hurry, because these valuable silent letters can be snapped up by some large free(beer) software movement for reasons which are most favourably described as "random", just like K and G were, way back in the early days of having the same initial letter for all of your software package names.
Don't be surprised if someday soon you find the "P Software System" with all sorts of weird utilities that begin with the letter p, like pcc, pedit, plibc, pnote and, of course, pnapster.
Whatever happened to the day when hard-working middle-class American garbagemen used to get rid of our garbage? I think it's unfair to replace these fine souls with these robotic monstrosities. I would much rather see this money used towards finding ways we can send the garbagemen we already have into space to do this job rather than rendering them obsolete as the rest of mankind enters the space age. Nothing this robot does is beyond the capacity of humans.
Garbagemen (and women) of the world, unite against obsolescence! Fight for your right to work in space!
When I put a little tag around an address on my home page, I'm just saying that this would be a neat site for you to visit (or not). Heck, I don't care what you do with it, I certainly don't expect everyone to visit that site! It's really the browser that turns a simple reference into a "hyperlink". I don't send you halfway across the Internet and back - your browser does.
If anyone here is horrifically guilty of doing anything with hyperlinks, is the people who make browsers. What the hell did the ISP's ever do?
Next they'll try to sue encyclopedia publishers for stealing the "print" version of the hyperlink.
Donny
P.S. I wasted way too much time trying to register with whatever that site was to read the article and the damned thing turned out to be two paragraphs. Really, I think we should have a "useless link" warning there so people don't waste time registering.
I assume that by "GNU philosophy" you mean pointing how KDE depends on libraries written by Satan (and how gnome is somehow better) and that our entire commerce-based society should come crumbling down around "free information" and that every piece of software should be rewritten under the "GNU" banner, including KDE (Gnome) and even the Linux Kernel (Hurd) so that somehow it will be "freer", yes, I suppose Debian follows the GNU philosophy.
Anyways, the last thing I would want to do is to respect Stallman's wish. I'm not running GNU/Linux anyways, since I use KDE.
Actually, this is a bit outdated. All the standards today use something called "Triple-Rot13", which can be used in both the EDE (encrypt-decrypt-encrypt) and EEE (encrypt-encrypt-encrypt) mode. This provides twice the key length that Rot13 provides.
(Note that Double-Rot13 can be broken in about the same time as Rot13 using a meet-in-the-middle attack if you have enough memory)
Hi there. I'm from Canada. Canada's a country, just like the U.S. In fact, we're not too far from ya.
> The UN is not accountable to The Constitution
Hey hey, I'm not accountable to The Constitution either. Heck, I don't think any of us are up here in Canada. That makes us all *Bad* things. Especially me. I'm Bad.
Being from the United States, I should expect that you have the least to complain about when it comes to the U.N. Security Council. Heck, your country gets permanent representation on that Council, will all the wonderful goodies that come with a position like that.
> people not elected by you that have power over you
Whoa, slow down there. You mean to tell me that you elect each and every person who has any power over you? Do your children elect their schoolteachers? Did you have a hand in electing each and every Representative and Senator in Congress? (Including those from other states?) Well, unless you were shooting up heroin during Civics class, the answer is no. This is the idea of representation. Here's how it works:
I'm responsible for voting for a small number of positions. These people will have power over me. Other people in my country vote for other positions. These people will have power over me too, but I didn't elect them. That's okay, because the people I did elect will have power over all the people who voted for the people who have power over me but that I didn't elect. Still with me? All these people get together and pick other people that have power over me. No-one elect these people at all. Yet I don't hear you complaining about the lack of self-rule in the United States! (Isn't your country run by communists anyways?)
Now, in the world scene, if each nation selects representatives to send to the United Nations, true, there are people not elected by you and have power over you, but hey, you elected some people who selected a guy who has power over all the people who elected people who selected the other people who have power over you but you didn't elect! So it's all good.
With IBM promising to churn out Thinkpads with Linux, I guess we would expect IBM to deal with all the funny laptop issues like power management and strange devices (win-modems, weird-ass sound cards, etc). Customers certainly wouldn't settle for a laptop with a built-in modem that doesn't work.
Now, if I already have an IBM Thinkpad, acquired in the pre-Enlightenment era when win-doze contaminated your hard drive when the laptop arrived, where most things work under Linux, but not quite everything I would like, it seems that if IBM has to solve these issues for future Thinkpads with Linux pre-loaded, these solutions can also be applied retroactively to my little laptop.
Does this seem reasonable, or am I living a pipe dream?
Why does everyone speak about their favourite childhood algorithm as an "omission" from the top ten list? If they added your algorithm, it would be a top eleven list. If there were truly an omission, I would expect to see nine algorithms under the heading "top ten".
"Someone left out error-correcting codes!" "Someone left out crypto!" "Someone left out the following list of algorithms you learn in the third year of a CS program!" "Someone left out LLL!"
Well, whoop-dee-do. If we added all of your "GLARING" omissions, we'd have a top 100 list. The problem here is that there are too many really good, beautiful, poetic algorithms out there, and no objective way to compare them.
Someone pointed out that this list was biased towards numerical computation and someone else defended this, saying that they wanted practical algorithms anyways, which is a bit silly, because different people have different practical needs. Some of us really don't have any use for the Fast Fourier Transform. Some of us think that an O(N^log 7) matrix multiplication algorithm is kinda cute, but don't really give a rat's ass about it.
I suggest that this list does not achieve its goal. Perhaps it publicizes a couple of numerical methods that people might not have heard of (except LLL), but it certainly doesn't live up to the title "Top Ten Algorithms of the Century". I don't think such a list could really exist. If it could, perhaps Donald Knuth wouldn't be spending so much time on that series of books he's so passionate about...
If you look at the list given by Microsoft, there is an hour's discrepency between the time that they give and the time of the actual post. (The difference is still there after accounting for timezone differences and daylight savings time).
That notwithstanding, the number given to the post identifies it as the post that Microsoft was referring to. This means that under penalty of perjury, Microsoft has stated that the following three questions posted by smartin (referred to by the phrase, "the above-referenced comments"):
> What happens to the people that implement it (ie. the Samba guys) even if they obtain the information without intentionally breaking the license.
> Are they exposing themselves to expensive litigation?
> Are they endangering the project?
constitute Microsoft's "proprietary material".
Also, not to start a grammar flame-war, but there's an incorrect verb tense in Microsoft's letter. (I only say this because letters written by lawyers are supposed to have impeccable clarity, precision and grammar to avoid misinterpretation (or reinterpretation).)
If Congress (through the delagation of powers to the Patent Office) allows patents to be granted that promote neither science nor useful arts, wouldn't this be unconstitutional? (i.e., a case of the Patent Office abusing its powers)
If a corporation uses its patents solely for the purposes of bullying other people and corporations around, wouldn't that be evidence of the non-positive nature of the patent?
I'm sure that LZW compression (of GIF fame) would have been invented whether or not the incentive of temporary monolopy was present. (The remainder of the GIF spec cannot possibly be considered innovative by even the daftest of morons. If anything, animated GIFs are the scourge of the bandwidth-challenged.)
Hmmm... The product "features" list mention wireless (I assume radio) networking, active-matrix display, USB slot, IR port, 206 MHz processor, and speakers. How many batteries do we have to use to get 8 hours out of this thing? 20?
It would be okay if it charged itself overnight like the Palm V does (I kinda like that), but that idea hasn't really caught on. I suppose it's not that useful for long trips away from the cradle, though if the trip were long enough you could just bring the cradle...
Personally, I prefer the RIM two-way pager for e-mail. I never open Word/Excel attachments anyways (for fear of funny macro viruses?). I'd rather borrow a good book from the library, and one CD contains more than enough music to last me through a whole day. I can only assume that the Pocket PC people are targetting new-age yuppies who have a need for 65000 colours on 76800 pixels while reading a pirated copy of Stephen King's lastest novella and listening to "The Complete Works of Metallica" courtesy of Napster. (For those who are counting, the Pocket PC allows about 5 billion possible different screenshots, compared to 6.5 million for the Palm IIIc. Whoops, was that a useless statistic??!)
I am one of the University of Waterloo team members.
It's nice that the Contest people are trying to make amends for the troubles they had in judging Problem F ("Page Hopping"), but the problem isn't so easily solved. The contest organizers can take into account whether or not a team had really solved Problem F or not, but they cannot take into account (nor did they say that they would) any of a dozen other factors that result from a problem like this (lost time, psychological factors, etc...). These factors make it nearly impossible to predict what the final standings would have been in a contest without mishap, and so I think that the effort on the part of the ACM contest judges may be misplaced.
Anyways, the guarantee given about no team's ranking decreasing is much like the compression algorithm that never increases the size of the input...
As it stands, I think that it is interesting that of the top six teams (those that got six or more questions), only Melbourne and Waterloo would have performed differently had the contest been run in an alternate universe without judging errors. A smuggled copy of the standings partway during the contest reveal that of these top six, only Melbourne and Waterloo did not get Problem F on the first try, although our team did eventually deduce the nature of the error with Problem F and submit a correct solution a little over halfway into the contest.
I am certain that both teams suffered heavily due to the error in terms of lost time and added stress, but I feel that the Melbourne team (or perhaps just the one member) is unnecessarily bitter about it (perhaps due, in part, to a conversation the team had with Dr. Poucher afterwards, where he assured the team that, to the best of his knowledge, there were no problems with question F). For example, the Waterloo team (which was justifiable angry halfway during the contest when we discovered the nature of the error with Problem F) decided to get on with the business of doing the other problems. Afterwards, we decided to refrain from speculating on what we could have done with an extra hour or so of time during the contest, and we are still very happy about the entire contest and the things we learned on the way.
I have less sympathy for people that gripe about spending all their time on problem F during the contest and getting nowhere, when there were 7 other problems that they could have tried their hand at. In particular, Problem E ("Internet Bandwidth") was a textbook network-flow problem, which didn't even require knowledge of any network flow theory. (Dynamic programming could have solved the problem within the time limits, although I didn't find anyone who did it this way.)
Anyways, my point is that the problem of "fixing" the results is not as simple as rejudging F and giving an extra question to everyone who didn't get it during the contest, but did have a correct solution.
In my defense (so that my fellow geeks will not think that I turned down that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hang out with a "cool hacker chick" for a while...) The Mystery Fun House sounded very LAME, from the first time I read about it in the AAA guide. Donny (I should say something legalistic here so that the Mystery Fun House doesn't sue my pants off! Please don't sue my pants off, Mystery Fun House, it's the only pair I'm wearing right now!)
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you're referring to a digital reproduction of the contents of the Library of Congress.
I sure hope you aren't transferring the books, or (heaven forbid) the actual Library! That would take at least a couple months.
Donny
C'mon, if there were a large moth inside YOUR computer, do you seriously think that anything would work, let alone a compiler?
Donny
What if some irate technician at the film studio decides to steal the film and release it on the internet before it came out in theatres. Hey, it happens to songs sometimes...
Or what if some guy brings in one of those miniature video cameras to one of those "screening" things and releases that on the internet?
Donny
I think the women at the AMPAS should be ashamed of themselves too.
Donny
> And yes, I know you're not the real timothy.
> All you have to do is look at the source of a
> page you've posted on and you'll see the
> special character after the 'i'.
Actually, you can see a funny accent on top of the 'i', if you look closely enough. You have even used Timothy's e-mail address. This is dishonest, Timothy impersonator. Shame on you.
Donny
Actually, vision doesn't really have much to do with it. Some of us may have done some spectroscopy in high school (or university). The basic idea is that a particular molecule will accept electrons only at very specific energies, and that spectral analysis will show a deficiency of electromagnetic radiation at the specific wavelengths corresponding to those electron energies. These spectra are like fingerprints, which can identify the presence of even trace gasses millions of light years away.
Finding sugar in a gas cloud is as simple as noting missing wavelengths corresponding to the sugar. This identification technique is so accurate that it can be used to detect the doppler effect, by figuring out the amount of red-shift that must occur to turn the spectrum of a known substance into the observed spectrum.
Donny
Of course, the weight-conscious alien species will have gas clouds full of aspartame.
Donny
I don't think I've ever entered real information into one of those things. (Like I'm going to tell the RealPlayer people who I am, let alone Sun!)
Donny
> An art form?
Yeah, haven't you heard of that expression before? Well, in my experience, when you use sarcasm, one of two things happens. Either (1) the person gets it, or (2) they think, "Holy shit, this guy is on crack! What he's saying is full of shit! Wow, I'm going to tell him who's boss so other people will like me! La-la-la-la-la!"
Anyways, if you think Unix naming conventions prevent the general public from adopting it, I would suggest that you take a look in the Windows system directory. My point here is that, alright, to be a power user, you might have to know all sorts of funny shit, but to be a user? You can be oblivious to everything around you and still navigate confidently through both KDE and Windows. (The only difference is that when you do it in Windows, you stand a significant chance of shooting yourself in the foot).
Donny
> That's easy. Split the difference -- halfway between 'g' and 'k' is 'i'.
Both KDE and Gnome have made an art form out of silent use of their respective initial letters (K and G). In this spirit, I propose that the ideal solution would be to find another letter which is as versatile as K and G when dealing with not having to be pronounced.
I think that the letter P would be ideal in this context. We can call it pnapster.
Another choice could be the letter M, which would give us mnapster. But M sucks.
But hurry, because these valuable silent letters can be snapped up by some large free(beer) software movement for reasons which are most favourably described as "random", just like K and G were, way back in the early days of having the same initial letter for all of your software package names.
Don't be surprised if someday soon you find the "P Software System" with all sorts of weird utilities that begin with the letter p, like pcc, pedit, plibc, pnote and, of course, pnapster.
Donny
Whatever happened to the day when hard-working middle-class American garbagemen used to get rid of our garbage? I think it's unfair to replace these fine souls with these robotic monstrosities. I would much rather see this money used towards finding ways we can send the garbagemen we already have into space to do this job rather than rendering them obsolete as the rest of mankind enters the space age. Nothing this robot does is beyond the capacity of humans.
Garbagemen (and women) of the world, unite against obsolescence! Fight for your right to work in space!
Donny
Well, it's all well and good when space trash in the same orbit as you goes at the same speed as you, but when it's going in the opposite direction...
Hey, it could ruin your moon vacation!
Donny
When I put a little tag around an address on my home page, I'm just saying that this would be a neat site for you to visit (or not). Heck, I don't care what you do with it, I certainly don't expect everyone to visit that site! It's really the browser that turns a simple reference into a "hyperlink". I don't send you halfway across the Internet and back - your browser does.
If anyone here is horrifically guilty of doing anything with hyperlinks, is the people who make browsers. What the hell did the ISP's ever do?
Next they'll try to sue encyclopedia publishers for stealing the "print" version of the hyperlink.
Donny
P.S. I wasted way too much time trying to register with whatever that site was to read the article and the damned thing turned out to be two paragraphs. Really, I think we should have a "useless link" warning there so people don't waste time registering.
I assume that by "GNU philosophy" you mean pointing how KDE depends on libraries written by Satan (and how gnome is somehow better) and that our entire commerce-based society should come crumbling down around "free information" and that every piece of software should be rewritten under the "GNU" banner, including KDE (Gnome) and even the Linux Kernel (Hurd) so that somehow it will be "freer", yes, I suppose Debian follows the GNU philosophy.
Anyways, the last thing I would want to do is to respect Stallman's wish. I'm not running GNU/Linux anyways, since I use KDE.
Donny
> I would suggest Rot13.
Actually, this is a bit outdated. All the standards today use something called "Triple-Rot13", which can be used in both the EDE (encrypt-decrypt-encrypt) and EEE (encrypt-encrypt-encrypt) mode. This provides twice the key length that Rot13 provides.
(Note that Double-Rot13 can be broken in about the same time as Rot13 using a meet-in-the-middle attack if you have enough memory)
Donny
Hi there. I'm from Canada. Canada's a country, just like the U.S. In fact, we're not too far from ya.
> The UN is not accountable to The Constitution
Hey hey, I'm not accountable to The Constitution either. Heck, I don't think any of us are up here in Canada. That makes us all *Bad* things. Especially me. I'm Bad.
Being from the United States, I should expect that you have the least to complain about when it comes to the U.N. Security Council. Heck, your country gets permanent representation on that Council, will all the wonderful goodies that come with a position like that.
> people not elected by you that have power over you
Whoa, slow down there. You mean to tell me that you elect each and every person who has any power over you? Do your children elect their schoolteachers? Did you have a hand in electing each and every Representative and Senator in Congress? (Including those from other states?) Well, unless you were shooting up heroin during Civics class, the answer is no. This is the idea of representation. Here's how it works:
I'm responsible for voting for a small number of positions. These people will have power over me. Other people in my country vote for other positions. These people will have power over me too, but I didn't elect them. That's okay, because the people I did elect will have power over all the people who voted for the people who have power over me but that I didn't elect. Still with me? All these people get together and pick other people that have power over me. No-one elect these people at all. Yet I don't hear you complaining about the lack of self-rule in the United States! (Isn't your country run by communists anyways?)
Now, in the world scene, if each nation selects representatives to send to the United Nations, true, there are people not elected by you and have power over you, but hey, you elected some people who selected a guy who has power over all the people who elected people who selected the other people who have power over you but you didn't elect! So it's all good.
Hope this helps.
Donny
I'm sure Tycho Brahe would have had use for NASA's E-Nose. Fitting, since he made so many contributions to astronomy.
Donny
With IBM promising to churn out Thinkpads with Linux, I guess we would expect IBM to deal with all the funny laptop issues like power management and strange devices (win-modems, weird-ass sound cards, etc). Customers certainly wouldn't settle for a laptop with a built-in modem that doesn't work.
Now, if I already have an IBM Thinkpad, acquired in the pre-Enlightenment era when win-doze contaminated your hard drive when the laptop arrived, where most things work under Linux, but not quite everything I would like, it seems that if IBM has to solve these issues for future Thinkpads with Linux pre-loaded, these solutions can also be applied retroactively to my little laptop.
Does this seem reasonable, or am I living a pipe dream?
Donny
Why does everyone speak about their favourite childhood algorithm as an "omission" from the top ten list? If they added your algorithm, it would be a top eleven list. If there were truly an omission, I would expect to see nine algorithms under the heading "top ten".
"Someone left out error-correcting codes!"
"Someone left out crypto!"
"Someone left out the following list of algorithms you learn in the third year of a CS program!"
"Someone left out LLL!"
Well, whoop-dee-do. If we added all of your "GLARING" omissions, we'd have a top 100 list. The problem here is that there are too many really good, beautiful, poetic algorithms out there, and no objective way to compare them.
Someone pointed out that this list was biased towards numerical computation and someone else defended this, saying that they wanted practical algorithms anyways, which is a bit silly, because different people have different practical needs. Some of us really don't have any use for the Fast Fourier Transform. Some of us think that an O(N^log 7) matrix multiplication algorithm is kinda cute, but don't really give a rat's ass about it.
I suggest that this list does not achieve its goal. Perhaps it publicizes a couple of numerical methods that people might not have heard of (except LLL), but it certainly doesn't live up to the title "Top Ten Algorithms of the Century". I don't think such a list could really exist. If it could, perhaps Donald Knuth wouldn't be spending so much time on that series of books he's so passionate about...
Donny
If you look at the list given by Microsoft, there is an hour's discrepency between the time that they give and the time of the actual post. (The difference is still there after accounting for timezone differences and daylight savings time).
That notwithstanding, the number given to the post identifies it as the post that Microsoft was referring to. This means that under penalty of perjury, Microsoft has stated that the following three questions posted by smartin (referred to by the phrase, "the above-referenced comments"):
> What happens to the people that implement it (ie. the Samba guys) even if they obtain the information without intentionally breaking the license.
> Are they exposing themselves to expensive litigation?
> Are they endangering the project?
constitute Microsoft's "proprietary material".
Also, not to start a grammar flame-war, but there's an incorrect verb tense in Microsoft's letter. (I only say this because letters written by lawyers are supposed to have impeccable clarity, precision and grammar to avoid misinterpretation (or reinterpretation).)
Donny
If Congress (through the delagation of powers to the Patent Office) allows patents to be granted that promote neither science nor useful arts, wouldn't this be unconstitutional? (i.e., a case of the Patent Office abusing its powers)
If a corporation uses its patents solely for the purposes of bullying other people and corporations around, wouldn't that be evidence of the non-positive nature of the patent?
I'm sure that LZW compression (of GIF fame) would have been invented whether or not the incentive of temporary monolopy was present. (The remainder of the GIF spec cannot possibly be considered innovative by even the daftest of morons. If anything, animated GIFs are the scourge of the bandwidth-challenged.)
Donny
Hmmm... The product "features" list mention wireless (I assume radio) networking, active-matrix display, USB slot, IR port, 206 MHz processor, and speakers. How many batteries do we have to use to get 8 hours out of this thing? 20?
It would be okay if it charged itself overnight like the Palm V does (I kinda like that), but that idea hasn't really caught on. I suppose it's not that useful for long trips away from the cradle, though if the trip were long enough you could just bring the cradle...
Personally, I prefer the RIM two-way pager for e-mail. I never open Word/Excel attachments anyways (for fear of funny macro viruses?). I'd rather borrow a good book from the library, and one CD contains more than enough music to last me through a whole day. I can only assume that the Pocket PC people are targetting new-age yuppies who have a need for 65000 colours on 76800 pixels while reading a pirated copy of Stephen King's lastest novella and listening to "The Complete Works of Metallica" courtesy of Napster. (For those who are counting, the Pocket PC allows about 5 billion possible different screenshots, compared to 6.5 million for the Palm IIIc. Whoops, was that a useless statistic??!)
Donny
Lending your PDA so that your friend can read an "e-book"? Isn't that like lending your friend your car for a week so he/she can listen to the radio?
Donny
I am one of the University of Waterloo team members.
It's nice that the Contest people are trying to make amends for the troubles they had in judging Problem F ("Page Hopping"), but the problem isn't so easily solved. The contest organizers can take into account whether or not a team had really solved Problem F or not, but they cannot take into account (nor did they say that they would) any of a dozen other factors that result from a problem like this (lost time, psychological factors, etc...). These factors make it nearly impossible to predict what the final standings would have been in a contest without mishap, and so I think that the effort on the part of the ACM contest judges may be misplaced.
Anyways, the guarantee given about no team's ranking decreasing is much like the compression algorithm that never increases the size of the input...
As it stands, I think that it is interesting that of the top six teams (those that got six or more questions), only Melbourne and Waterloo would have performed differently had the contest been run in an alternate universe without judging errors. A smuggled copy of the standings partway during the contest reveal that of these top six, only Melbourne and Waterloo did not get Problem F on the first try, although our team did eventually deduce the nature of the error with Problem F and submit a correct solution a little over halfway into the contest.
I am certain that both teams suffered heavily due to the error in terms of lost time and added stress, but I feel that the Melbourne team (or perhaps just the one member) is unnecessarily bitter about it (perhaps due, in part, to a conversation the team had with Dr. Poucher afterwards, where he assured the team that, to the best of his knowledge, there were no problems with question F). For example, the Waterloo team (which was justifiable angry halfway during the contest when we discovered the nature of the error with Problem F) decided to get on with the business of doing the other problems. Afterwards, we decided to refrain from speculating on what we could have done with an extra hour or so of time during the contest, and we are still very happy about the entire contest and the things we learned on the way.
I have less sympathy for people that gripe about spending all their time on problem F during the contest and getting nowhere, when there were 7 other problems that they could have tried their hand at. In particular, Problem E ("Internet Bandwidth") was a textbook network-flow problem, which didn't even require knowledge of any network flow theory. (Dynamic programming could have solved the problem within the time limits, although I didn't find anyone who did it this way.)
Anyways, my point is that the problem of "fixing" the results is not as simple as rejudging F and giving an extra question to everyone who didn't get it during the contest, but did have a correct solution.
Donny
In my defense (so that my fellow geeks will not think that I turned down that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hang out with a "cool hacker chick" for a while...) The Mystery Fun House sounded very LAME, from the first time I read about it in the AAA guide. Donny (I should say something legalistic here so that the Mystery Fun House doesn't sue my pants off! Please don't sue my pants off, Mystery Fun House, it's the only pair I'm wearing right now!)