Did anyone else read the "long story"
(at the Village Voice) all the way down to the last paragraph?
This discussion is fairly long already, and I'll confess I didn't read all the postings as attentively as I might have (if I didn't have work to do this morning), but I didn't see anybody replying to the last paragraph or two of the article, which I found redeemed the whole thing. Instead everyone's flaming around, defending or slagging Tolkein and his work --- unless they're doing microanalysis of the proper terms for orcs a.k.a. goblins or digging up JRRT's mythological roots in great detail...
What I (as quasi-geek and LOTR fan since over 25 years now) found fascinating were the twin assertions that:
JRRT's work is about the world(s) he created, and nothing else --- not about WWII or the nature of evil or the human condition or anything else; and
That exactly this activity --- the creation of worlds --- is what makes JRRT's work so incredibly relevant, influential, and enduringly interesting. Or, to quote slashdot, "stuff that matters".
I think it's worthwhile to quote the last sentences of the article at length on this point:
There is in America-and
anywhere else the engines of postmodernity run at full tilt-a growing cultural fascination with
the elasticity of reality, and with it a growing urge to tinker at reality's stretchiest edges.
Literature, as the critics now understand it, doesn't satisfy this urge. But child's play has always
done the trick. Psychedelics too. And now, more and more, our technologies are at it as well.
Already, deep, complex computer games like the Sims and Black and White anticipate an era
when critics locate culture's center of gravity not in books but in elaborate digital simulations.
And when they do, a few may recall that it was Tolkien, lord of the geeks, who announced the
shift.
Now, we could get into a long discussion about whether "literature... doesn't satisfy this urge" or whether "pychedlics [do the trick]", but that's not really the point. The point is that the fascination that Tolkein inspires has to do with the devotion he invested into inventing a world, and that he was, in so doing, a role model for many of us who have --- or who have tried to, or would like to find the time to try to --- do the same. This is the real fascination of Tolkein, and I've never seen it expressed so clearly before.
Indeed. Quite right. Particularly about the "human part" of changing currencies.
I'm an American who's lived in Germany for the last 10 years or so, and am constantly amazed how much resistence the Euro is meeting. Some is well-informed (considering how much the Euro has fallen since introduction), but I believe most of the resistence is simply superstition. People who are completely comfortable with the fact that you can translate pounds into kilograms, meters into yards, liters into pints (etc.), suddenly have all sorts of problems with Euros and Deutsche Mark.
I have a theory about this: Your resistence to change is related to the age you were when you learned about something. If you learned about it in childhood, you don't want it changed. I think this is what makes reforming the schools so hard all over the world (now that I'm old enough to go to Parent's Meetings at the local schools, I'm amazed how the locals cling to the way things were when they went to school).
This would also (to try to get back on-topic) partly explain the reluctance to creative payment plans like this one. The point of which is not to say that people are so dumb they resist these things, but rather that the problems involed in their introduction are perhaps 1% technical and 99% psychological. In other words, the whole trick here is going to be getting the psychology right. The technology will, then, fall in place.
What ever happened to quote marks (and or the blockquote tag)? Most of this posting seems to have been cut-and-pasted directly from the "full story" at www.nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com.
I noticed this because I went and read the "full story" in the hope of getting slightly more readable English than in the posting, only to get the posting all over again, including the charming sentence:
"The browser would not be necessary,
however, for using game software with SSL because such game software itself processes an
amount of money charged with users of networked games through a credit card number
securely."
If you read it three times, with your head on your left shoulder, it eventually kind of makes sense, even if I still don't quite see the connection implied by the use of the word "because". But I kind of like the idea of "...an amount of money charged with users...".
I don't mind this kind of text from sources from the Far East --- it makes it kind of a sport (used as a noun) to decode the stuff --- but straight from slashdot? Really.
(The post I'm replying to suggested we Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and then read Weisenburger's
"A 'Gravity's Rainbow' Companion : Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel", and then get back to him).
Ok, done. (OK, I cheated, I read them both already before you posted -- or rather, I read "Rainbow" and randomly sampled the "Companion").
And somehow, I don't think the comparison works: neither between Pynchon and Kubrik, nor between Weisenburger and Wheat.
Ah, but you say, you weren't comparing, you were making a point about how much hidden meaning an author can put in a book? But, I reply:
Pynchon telegraphs hidden meaning all over the place. Which is why I bought the Companion, because I was constantly wondering, while reading "Rainbow", not if there was hidden meaning, but rather how much more there was than I had got.
Further, Weisenburger constrains himself mostly to historical facts that provide background (old WWII acronyms and such), and isn't afraid to say "I don't know" when he doesn't. Whereas Wheat, if we can believe the review, is inclined to say things like "it becomes evident" and "once again we see that..." --- a sure sign that somebodies out on a limb and can't find his way back.
Now, does anybody know a good companion to "Vineland"? Don't need a companion to "Mason & Dixon", I need to find a way to get through it (it bores me to death so I've never got more than maybe 40% through).
Ah, but you're assuming we should understand this in a context of real hard disks, operating systems, etc. etc. Franky, it seems quite clear to me that the real context here is silly bets.
An example. Years ago, I'm walking down the street in New Orleans, this dude walks up and wants me to bet him money on some outrageous card game or something of the sort (I forget). I tell him "forget it, you wouldn't be betting if you didn't know you'd win." He looks me up and down, and changes his plan entirely, and says "I'll bet you $5 I can tell you where you got those shoes".
Do I clarify the rules? No, I figure it's worth $5 to learn how the punch line to this joke, so I say (to quote Mr. Goldman) "sure", and the guy says "You got those shoes on yo' feet, in Jackson Square, in the City of New Orleans, in the State of Lousiana."
I gave him the $5. I played by the rules of silly bets. Mr. Goldman should pop up the $5K. He placed a silly bet, and he lost.
Quite right, but it's possible to state the proof in a much more readable form. This is from the compression FAQ, which is one of the first links on the page referenced in the original story:
Theorem:
No program can compress without loss *all* files of size >= N bits, for
any given integer N >= 0.
Proof:
Assume that the program can compress without loss all files of size >= N
bits. Compress with this program all the 2^N files which have exactly N
bits. All compressed files have at most N-1 bits, so there are at most
(2^N)-1 different compressed files [2^(N-1) files of size N-1, 2^(N-2) of
size N-2, and so on, down to 1 file of size 0]. So at least two different
input files must compress to the same output file. Hence the compression
program cannot be lossless.
The proof is called the "counting argument". It uses the so-called pigeon-hole
principle: you can't put 16 pigeons into 15 holes without using one of the
holes twice.
The interesting thing about this whole discussion on/. is how much of it effectively just repeats stuff found in the FAQ --- in the same question, for that matter, where the original challenge appears. I found this stuff just be clicking on the link to the FAQ and then searching for "goldman" and then paging up to the start of the question. Had more/. readers done that, I suspect the raw size of this story could be compressed (with a very lossy algorithm -- by tossing out the nonsense) by, oh, maybe 90%?
This is covered in the compression
FAQ, a few lines above the place where the challenge appears.
I quote:
Another idea also related to primes is to encode each
number as an index into a table of primes and an offset relative to the indexed
prime; this idea doesn't work either because the number of bits required to
encode the index, the offset and the separation between index and offset
is on average not smaller than the number of bits of the original bit stream.
There are several other good arguments in the FAQ concering other numerical tricks and why they won't work --- for the better defined problem
of compressing arbitrary files.
The interesting question is whether one of these clever ideas could be made to work for Mr. Goldman's challenge, which is something quite different, since it involves compressing one and only one file. As someone has already observed, if Mr. Goldman would play along, you would only need to bet lucky one time in 50 to (probably) make money.
However, in this case (using prime numbers and offsets), he would need to choose a file which (when seen as a nunber) is quite close to the nearest prime number,
closer than the size of a decompressor which can do things like calculate the nth prime number and such. Seems unlikely to me, but I'm not inclined to do the math today...
I agree with everything except your "bad ideas", which hardly make sense.
My complaint with almost all of these is that I don't see a difference between on-line course material and off-line course material. For example, since exams will not be on-line, at least not unitl they're old, cheating is not more probable with on-line "OpenCourseWare". Similarly, the comment that "Teachers may slack off on their intensity since students can just go online to learn" doesn't make sense, because currently professors can and do assume that students can "just go to the library and learn".
Continuing this comparison, learning on-line is not inherently easier or harder or better or worse than learning out of an (off-line) book. Further, MIT currently often makes course-material available by publishing it (you've heard of the MIT Press?), so I can't see how MIT would lose students (and they probably still have many more applicants than they accept anyway --- students are not exactly in short supply if you're MIT).
Now, let's take this point-for-point and see if it stands up to careful consideration:
students would be able to view previous
examinations, learn exactly what questions professors ask, and learn only
those questions. This will lead to focused studying instead of the broad studying necessary for a real education.
You seem to assume that Profs have a right to use the same old exam over and over again, and that students wouldn't catch on to this if the exams weren't on the Internet. In my opinion, your first assumption is wrong, and in my experience,
your second assumption is also wrong.
Professors will have extra work to do in keeping the web page up-to-date.
That much more work than keeping their off-line course material up-to-date? I don't see why.
Students would grow mad at professors who do
not keep their site up-to-date, leading to lawsuits pertaining to fair
education, etc.
Again, there are two things here lumped together:
(1) Students will get mad -- about something they have every right to be mad about and (2) this would lead to lawsuits. Now, IANAL, but I can't see how these lawsuits would stand a chance, and I really can't see how putting course material on the web would change the chances those lawsuits might have (apart from making it easier for students to document their claims, but one copy of an obviously out-dated syllabus would already suffice).
Students with computers at home (i.e., financially stable students) will have access at all times, while others
(minorities, etc) will not, leading to an even bigger gap between upper- and middle-class.
This almost makes sense, until we consider that this is actually a much, much bigger problem, having to do with acess to the Internet in general, which quite a lot of people are discussing, and which is hardly worsened by MIT's initiative.
In this case, though, I think that this information should be
confined to the institution where it belongs. Don't destroy glorious MIT just because it's the latest "cool thing".
How a university, especially a prosperous one like MIT, could be "destroyed" by not "confining" information is compeletely beyond me.
If this were not from MIT, an institution I rather respect, I would be inclined to think it was much ado about nothing.
Consider: They've never prevented their Prof's from putting content on the net, and now they're not requiring them to do so either. So perhaps they'll be more social pressure to do so, but there's also a lot of pressure to do research ("publish or perish") and your average prof only has so much time (and so many assistants) he can use for putting OpenCourseWare on the net, so... Why should we believe they'll be that much more than there is now, or at least than there would have been anyway? And all the hype on the fact sheet about this being something really amazing doesn't particularly convince me...
That said, if this establishes a wide-spread belief that Universities should put course ware on the net, and do it for free, then it could lead to a very interesting effect, since prof's would be free to borrow from each other, look over each other's shoulders, take stuff and improve it, etc. Now that could eventually lead to something like real progress, but it'll take time.
Probably the most immediate effect will simply be to smash the hopes of other Univ.'s who were planning on doing the same thing, but charging money for it (what will the market value be now that MIT(!) is doing it for free?).
No, it isn't... exactly. Read the article at theStar.com, it says clearly what/. does not,
namely that, while several other "executioner" genes have been discovered in the last years, the folks in Toronto have discovered a new one. Further, this is not simply YAEG (Yet Another Executioner Gene) but rather (allegedly) something like the MOAEG (Mother Of All Executioner Genes), an astoundingly basic gene found in all life, including both plants and animals!
In other words, while it's not as big a breakthrough as/. would make it seem, it's still interesting, to say the least. Some of the experiments described in the theStar.com article are also of interest (I found).
I have a basic question about this which the article (the one at theStar.com) does not (clearly) answer, but perhaps everyone with a BS in Biology and/or Medicine knows this: How would you administer a medicinal treatment based on (knowledge of) a gene?
Even if you knew some person (or some other organism) would be healthier if some gene (be it AIF or one of the other executioner genes discovered in the last few years(!) or some completely other gene discovered tomorrow) were different from how it is now, how do you change it? You can't go in with a scalpel and start changing DNA... Can you?
In the article, the authors write "If scientists could... give a targeted dose of AIF, they might be able to kill the rogue cells in a
cancerous tumour."
But this is a gene, not just a chemical (and there is a difference, isn't there?). Does talk of "a targeted dose of [a gene]" make any sense?
Excuse me if I'm doing y'all an injustice,
but I get the feeling that all you folk talking about immortality (e.g. "who wants to live forever". etc.) could not have read the article(s). I've only read the one at theStar.com (I don't subscribe to Nature), but it is pretty clearly stated there why this cannot be used for immortality (at least not without a few more breakthroughs added to it). I quote:
Still, Penninger and his colleagues did not know how important the gene was.
So, following common scientific practice, they tried to produce genetically
engineered mice lacking AIF to see what would happen.
They couldn't.
When the team sat down to analyse why they couldn't breed the mice, they
discovered the mice never grew beyond the embryonic stage. Cells didn't die
off to make room for the next stage in development.
All living things, plants, animals and humans, must have cell death to develop
beyond an embryo. And fully formed living things must have controlled cell
death to stay healthy. For instance, people lose millions of skin cells every day.
[Emphasis added.]
The rest is also quite interesting. Read it!
Ron Obvious
Re:Why buy a book when a very good online manual i
on
CVS Pocket Reference
·
· Score: 1
Why buy a book when a very good online manual is [on the web]? The answer is fairly obvious, but you have to Read The Review:
The documentation you link to is another copy
of the canonical documentation, in an only slightly different form than that behind the link in the review. Both are based on the gnuinfo-formatted documentation that comes with cvs (and can be easily read off-line with products such as tkinfo). This documentation has proved for me to be quite sufficient for most day-to-day CVS questions.
But, as the review points out, there are some things which are not well explained in the canonical documentation. These basically involve serious repository restructuring and/or repair. You rarely have to do these, but if you do them wrong, your repository will be seriously damanged if not totally kaput.
I haven't got a copy of the Pocket Reference, so we'll have to take the reviewers word for it that these things are well explained in the book. However, it boils down to this: on the one hand, you're right, for the day-to-day stuff, the canonical documentation is quite sufficient (although I suggest reading it off-line to save bandwidth). On the other hand the reviewer did plainly state that the book is interesting because of the extra information it provides.
Speaking as a yankee who lived for some years in the South (in Texas) and has since moved to Germany: "Y'all" is a really good term which should be adopted north of the Mason/Dixon line. It is not a synonym for "you", it's the 2nd person plural which is otherwise missing in English. German makes this distinction (in informal speech) between "Du" and "Ihr" --- "you" is for speaking to one person, "y'all" is for speaking to a group.
We tended to say things like "you guys" back when I lived in Michigan, but I always felt impolite saying that when the group I was addressing contained women (or consisted entirely of women).
My point is simply that "y'all" is not "a weird-ass thing southern people say", but something which helps communicate clearly and precisely --- something that helps you say what you mean...
... and, so that this isn't entirely off-topic, I would suggest that not renaming the SSH protocol was a good decision, simply because it would make efficient, precise communication about the protocol and the programs which use it unnecessarily difficult. Who cares how you set the link, the point is that it's just too late, the term is now part of the vernacular.
... just like "y'all" is, south of the Mason-Dixon line (and in some very small parts of Germany, meanwhile).
As an American living in Germany, and a father whose kids have survived German Kindergarten (where the word "aetsch" is most often to be heard), I would translate "aetsch" not so much as "gotcha" as "nyaah nyaah". In other words, it's simply a fairly all-purpose, generic taunt. Whereas "gotcha" generally implies that something I did previously "got you", and often implies "I tricked you into doing something dumb" (e.g. believing some outrageous lie), "aetsch" can be said without any previous provacation, just totally spontaneously, if you get my drift.
That said, I'll hurry to concede that, in context, "gotcha" is a pretty good translation.
Now, I'm curious whether any real Germans will want to correct me on this...
Polynomial. The correct spelling (since you asked) is "polynomial".
Oh, and by the way, when complexity is of the order of a constant raised to the power of n, where n is variable, it's not polynomial, it's exponential. Polynomial is when n is raised to a constant power. I'm sure that's what you meant to say...
Please excuse me if you think I'm picking nits, but if you run the numbers, you'll see it makes a gigantic difference: So large a difference, in fact, that even quantum computers would (seemingly, I'm not at all up-to-speed on this subject) need more quanta than the universe contains just to calculate a travelling-salesman problem for, say, the major European cities.
Two comments, one trivial, the other perhaps a bit more serious:
(0) The story about the patent office in 1900 is apocryphal i.e. an urban myth i.e. it never happened. See "The End of Science" by John Horgan (1997) for a detailed description of what really happened.
(1) While the results on computatbility are really nothing new, they aren't something you can easily dismiss with a lot of emotive rumbling. They're mathematically provable results. Things like the halting problem are simply uncomputable. Period. It doesn't matter how large or advanced your computer is, a proposed solution to any of these problems shares the same status as a proposed perpertual motion machine: so much daydreaming.
The point is, computers are not (only) "limited by human capabilities and resources". They're also limited by mathematical truth.
As such, a useful discussion would begin with "given that this-or-that problem is not computable" and go on to ask "which easier problem can we tackle instead?". For example, the halting problem for all given input programs is uncomputable, but that doesn't rule out programs which would tell you if an input program terminates or not --- for a very large class of input programs. Working with computability theory leads thus to the question "How large can we make the class of halting-testable programs?", which would not be an entire waste of time to work on.
Moral of the story. Get an education, read the basic literature, learn to live with the basic theory.
Slashdot Mirror
This discussion is fairly long already, and I'll confess I didn't read all the postings as attentively as I might have (if I didn't have work to do this morning), but I didn't see anybody replying to the last paragraph or two of the article, which I found redeemed the whole thing. Instead everyone's flaming around, defending or slagging Tolkein and his work --- unless they're doing microanalysis of the proper terms for orcs a.k.a. goblins or digging up JRRT's mythological roots in great detail...
What I (as quasi-geek and LOTR fan since over 25 years now) found fascinating were the twin assertions that:
- JRRT's work is about the world(s) he created, and nothing else --- not about WWII or the nature of evil or the human condition or anything else; and
- That exactly this activity --- the creation of worlds --- is what makes JRRT's work so incredibly relevant, influential, and enduringly interesting. Or, to quote slashdot, "stuff that matters".
I think it's worthwhile to quote the last sentences of the article at length on this point:Now, we could get into a long discussion about whether "literature... doesn't satisfy this urge" or whether "pychedlics [do the trick]", but that's not really the point. The point is that the fascination that Tolkein inspires has to do with the devotion he invested into inventing a world, and that he was, in so doing, a role model for many of us who have --- or who have tried to, or would like to find the time to try to --- do the same. This is the real fascination of Tolkein, and I've never seen it expressed so clearly before.
Ron Obvious
I'm an American who's lived in Germany for the last 10 years or so, and am constantly amazed how much resistence the Euro is meeting. Some is well-informed (considering how much the Euro has fallen since introduction), but I believe most of the resistence is simply superstition. People who are completely comfortable with the fact that you can translate pounds into kilograms, meters into yards, liters into pints (etc.), suddenly have all sorts of problems with Euros and Deutsche Mark.
I have a theory about this: Your resistence to change is related to the age you were when you learned about something. If you learned about it in childhood, you don't want it changed. I think this is what makes reforming the schools so hard all over the world (now that I'm old enough to go to Parent's Meetings at the local schools, I'm amazed how the locals cling to the way things were when they went to school).
This would also (to try to get back on-topic) partly explain the reluctance to creative payment plans like this one. The point of which is not to say that people are so dumb they resist these things, but rather that the problems involed in their introduction are perhaps 1% technical and 99% psychological. In other words, the whole trick here is going to be getting the psychology right. The technology will, then, fall in place.
Ron Obvious
I noticed this because I went and read the "full story" in the hope of getting slightly more readable English than in the posting, only to get the posting all over again, including the charming sentence:
If you read it three times, with your head on your left shoulder, it eventually kind of makes sense, even if I still don't quite see the connection implied by the use of the word "because". But I kind of like the idea of "...an amount of money charged with users...".
I don't mind this kind of text from sources from the Far East --- it makes it kind of a sport (used as a noun) to decode the stuff --- but straight from slashdot? Really.
Ron Obvious
Ok, done. (OK, I cheated, I read them both already before you posted -- or rather, I read "Rainbow" and randomly sampled the "Companion").
And somehow, I don't think the comparison works: neither between Pynchon and Kubrik, nor between Weisenburger and Wheat.
Ah, but you say, you weren't comparing, you were making a point about how much hidden meaning an author can put in a book? But, I reply:
Now, does anybody know a good companion to "Vineland"? Don't need a companion to "Mason & Dixon", I need to find a way to get through it (it bores me to death so I've never got more than maybe 40% through).
Ron Obvious
An example. Years ago, I'm walking down the street in New Orleans, this dude walks up and wants me to bet him money on some outrageous card game or something of the sort (I forget). I tell him "forget it, you wouldn't be betting if you didn't know you'd win." He looks me up and down, and changes his plan entirely, and says "I'll bet you $5 I can tell you where you got those shoes".
Do I clarify the rules? No, I figure it's worth $5 to learn how the punch line to this joke, so I say (to quote Mr. Goldman) "sure", and the guy says "You got those shoes on yo' feet, in Jackson Square, in the City of New Orleans, in the State of Lousiana."
I gave him the $5. I played by the rules of silly bets. Mr. Goldman should pop up the $5K. He placed a silly bet, and he lost.
Ron Obvious
Ron Obvious
However, in this case (using prime numbers and offsets), he would need to choose a file which (when seen as a nunber) is quite close to the nearest prime number, closer than the size of a decompressor which can do things like calculate the nth prime number and such. Seems unlikely to me, but I'm not inclined to do the math today...
Ron Obvious
My complaint with almost all of these is that I don't see a difference between on-line course material and off-line course material. For example, since exams will not be on-line, at least not unitl they're old, cheating is not more probable with on-line "OpenCourseWare". Similarly, the comment that "Teachers may slack off on their intensity since students can just go online to learn" doesn't make sense, because currently professors can and do assume that students can "just go to the library and learn". Continuing this comparison, learning on-line is not inherently easier or harder or better or worse than learning out of an (off-line) book. Further, MIT currently often makes course-material available by publishing it (you've heard of the MIT Press?), so I can't see how MIT would lose students (and they probably still have many more applicants than they accept anyway --- students are not exactly in short supply if you're MIT).
This almost makes sense, until we consider that this is actually a much, much bigger problem, having to do with acess to the Internet in general, which quite a lot of people are discussing, and which is hardly worsened by MIT's initiative.
How a university, especially a prosperous one like MIT, could be "destroyed" by not "confining" information is compeletely beyond me.
Ron Obvious
Consider: They've never prevented their Prof's from putting content on the net, and now they're not requiring them to do so either. So perhaps they'll be more social pressure to do so, but there's also a lot of pressure to do research ("publish or perish") and your average prof only has so much time (and so many assistants) he can use for putting OpenCourseWare on the net, so... Why should we believe they'll be that much more than there is now, or at least than there would have been anyway? And all the hype on the fact sheet about this being something really amazing doesn't particularly convince me...
That said, if this establishes a wide-spread belief that Universities should put course ware on the net, and do it for free, then it could lead to a very interesting effect, since prof's would be free to borrow from each other, look over each other's shoulders, take stuff and improve it, etc. Now that could eventually lead to something like real progress, but it'll take time.
Probably the most immediate effect will simply be to smash the hopes of other Univ.'s who were planning on doing the same thing, but charging money for it (what will the market value be now that MIT(!) is doing it for free?).
Ron Obvious
In other words, while it's not as big a breakthrough as /. would make it seem, it's still interesting, to say the least. Some of the experiments described in the theStar.com article are also of interest (I found).
Ron Obvious
Even if you knew some person (or some other organism) would be healthier if some gene (be it AIF or one of the other executioner genes discovered in the last few years(!) or some completely other gene discovered tomorrow) were different from how it is now, how do you change it? You can't go in with a scalpel and start changing DNA... Can you?
In the article, the authors write "If scientists could ... give a targeted dose of AIF, they might be able to kill the rogue cells in a
cancerous tumour."
But this is a gene, not just a chemical (and there is a difference, isn't there?). Does talk of "a targeted dose of [a gene]" make any sense?
Ron Obvious
The rest is also quite interesting. Read it!
Ron Obvious
- The documentation you link to is another copy
of the canonical documentation, in an only slightly different form than that behind the link in the review. Both are based on the gnuinfo-formatted documentation that comes with cvs (and can be easily read off-line with products such as tkinfo). This documentation has proved for me to be quite sufficient for most day-to-day CVS questions.
- But, as the review points out, there are some things which are not well explained in the canonical documentation. These basically involve serious repository restructuring and/or repair. You rarely have to do these, but if you do them wrong, your repository will be seriously damanged if not totally kaput.
I haven't got a copy of the Pocket Reference, so we'll have to take the reviewers word for it that these things are well explained in the book. However, it boils down to this: on the one hand, you're right, for the day-to-day stuff, the canonical documentation is quite sufficient (although I suggest reading it off-line to save bandwidth). On the other hand the reviewer did plainly state that the book is interesting because of the extra information it provides.Ron Obvious
We tended to say things like "you guys" back when I lived in Michigan, but I always felt impolite saying that when the group I was addressing contained women (or consisted entirely of women).
My point is simply that "y'all" is not "a weird-ass thing southern people say", but something which helps communicate clearly and precisely --- something that helps you say what you mean...
... and, so that this isn't entirely off-topic, I would suggest that not renaming the SSH protocol was a good decision, simply because it would make efficient, precise communication about the protocol and the programs which use it unnecessarily difficult. Who cares how you set the link, the point is that it's just too late, the term is now part of the vernacular.
... just like "y'all" is, south of the Mason-Dixon line (and in some very small parts of Germany, meanwhile).
That said, I'll hurry to concede that, in context, "gotcha" is a pretty good translation.
Now, I'm curious whether any real Germans will want to correct me on this...
Oh, and by the way, when complexity is of the order of a constant raised to the power of n, where n is variable, it's not polynomial, it's exponential. Polynomial is when n is raised to a constant power. I'm sure that's what you meant to say...
Please excuse me if you think I'm picking nits, but if you run the numbers, you'll see it makes a gigantic difference: So large a difference, in fact, that even quantum computers would (seemingly, I'm not at all up-to-speed on this subject) need more quanta than the universe contains just to calculate a travelling-salesman problem for, say, the major European cities.
Ron Obvious
(0) The story about the patent office in 1900 is apocryphal i.e. an urban myth i.e. it never happened. See "The End of Science" by John Horgan (1997) for a detailed description of what really happened.
(1) While the results on computatbility are really nothing new, they aren't something you can easily dismiss with a lot of emotive rumbling. They're mathematically provable results. Things like the halting problem are simply uncomputable. Period. It doesn't matter how large or advanced your computer is, a proposed solution to any of these problems shares the same status as a proposed perpertual motion machine: so much daydreaming.
The point is, computers are not (only) "limited by human capabilities and resources". They're also limited by mathematical truth.
As such, a useful discussion would begin with "given that this-or-that problem is not computable" and go on to ask "which easier problem can we tackle instead?". For example, the halting problem for all given input programs is uncomputable, but that doesn't rule out programs which would tell you if an input program terminates or not --- for a very large class of input programs. Working with computability theory leads thus to the question "How large can we make the class of halting-testable programs?", which would not be an entire waste of time to work on.
Moral of the story. Get an education, read the basic literature, learn to live with the basic theory.
Ron Obvious