Am I wrong to think that numbers consisting of prime numbers that could be possibly (time-wise) be found using Shor's algorithm would be difficult to factorize using the same algorithm?
Yes.
Without getting too technical, public cryptography relies on the fact that it's astronomically harder to factor these numbers than to come up with them. If you can use the same algorithm to both come up with the keys and break them, this simply can't be the case -- in that case, the best you can get is it being as many times harder as your computers were faster, or as much more time you spent on it, etc. One has to have clever algorithms for coming up with them and a lack of equally clever algorithms for breaking them. The same level of cleverness can't be on both sides or you're sunk. The generating and usage part has to be way, way, way easier. As easy as Shor's algorithm makes breaking them, something astronomically better than it would be required to make keys that are useful against it. (At which point, one has to wonder, how useful would be they be? We'd probably be talking key-lengths so big you run into the same problems that prevent widespread use of one-time pads.)
Ah, you're from that fantasy world where government employees never abuse government power. Alas, most of us live in the world where government employees invariably abuse any power given to them, sooner or later...
It's also interesting how many people who don't care took the time to post flames about how much they don't care.
It's the difference between a mature human being comfortable with his or her place in the universe, and an immature person who thinks he or she is the center of the universe. The mature individuals know some things interest them and some things don't, but that some of those things that don't interest them do interest other people. They simply skip over anything that doesn't interest them. The immature people get upset that something that doesn't interest them was posted. If it doesn't interest them, why did anyone waste the time posting it? If anyone else is interested in it, they must be "losers".
The real problem at the core for them is, every time something is posted that doesn't interest them, it proves that the universe does not revolve around them, and they just can't stand that. So they must complain. Any time the universe does not appear to be specifically tailored for them, they must complain. Obviously something is wrong with the universe if it isn't arranged for their ultimate convenience.
Nobody is forcing people to work there, if the company wants to require employees be tagged with RFID there shouldn't be a problem with that because the potential employee has a choice.
This is known as Hobson's Choice, an apparently free choice that is really no choice at all.
Any time it's with your employer, it's essentially coercion. Your choice is do as they say or lose your livelihood. It's like arguing you have a free choice with a gun to your head. Sure, you can choose to disobey and just get your brains blown out -- that makes it a free-willed choice, right?
Hmm. Yes, "the slippery slope" -- my favorite logical fallacy. "You know, there's actually nothing wrong with what's being proposed, and no harm will come of it, but there's this other thing that would be very bad, so we should oppose *this* because we don't want *that*." It's truly amazing, and a testament to the stupidity of Man, that such arguments have any traction at all... but they are surprisingly common and effective.:(
Every point in the universe today is where the Big Bang occurred. You can see it right now. Just look around you.
Understand that space itself expanded from the starting point. All points of space in the universe today where infinitely closer together 13.7 billion years ago. The Big Bang did not expand outward into a mostly empty universe. The Big Bang occurred in a universe that was entirely full of extremely dense matter. As space expanded, the matter became less packed. You get the idea...
No. Why would it? If you're using a RAM-based medium, any block is read with essentially identical speed. So if you're using a mechanism that's optimized for mechanical storage, or using one that just allocates blocks sequentially, or one that allocates them completely randomly, or one that tries as hard as possible to *slow down* reads from hard disks, it all makes no difference. From a RAM-based system, they'll all work equally well.
I edited a Python script once, and it stopped working. Why did it stop working? Because I added a comment. Apparently this counted as whitespace. I found out whitespace is significant. I laughed my ass off and have never once touched the language since. Still amazes me anyone thought that was a good idea. I thought that kind of idiocy went out the door with Fortran 77...
My apologies. I shouldn't call it idiocy. It's just clearly a toy language, and shouldn't be judged by the standards of real, modern programming languages.
Actually, you were probably seeing meteors associated with the Perseids. The peak will fall around August 12th, but you'll likely see lots of them all week long if you're looking.
For clarification, if you believe in the Christian God, Jehovah or whichever of His names you choose, you *don't* believe in any of the others. If you believe in more than one God, you *don't* believe in a Christian one at all. His words, not mine, read the book.
God wrote a book? Certainly not the Bible, which is known to have been written by other people (it says so right in the book). What book did God write?
Allah has a similar statement.
Really? Sure you don't mean Muhammad? Again, I've not heard of any books written by Allah.
I'm pretty sure Buddha doesn't much care about this God-thing, singular or plural. He has a different agenda.
*nods* Buddha (who actually did write books, unlike any of your previously asserted authors) wasn't terribly interested in those sorts of questions. Buddhists run the gamut from polytheists to atheists, because it's largely irrelevant to Buddhism if there is or isn't a god or gods. Such questions of metaphysical trivia distract people from what's really important.
I don't think it's particularly unreasonable. Immune is possibly too strong a term, but once a species has started colonising other star systems then it takes a lot to wipe them out.
Yes, but what are the odds of that? As our technology advances, is gets easier and easier for small groups or even individuals to do what it once took the resources of nations to do. Honestly, which is likely to happen first, we find or successfully terraform and colonize an extra-solar planet, or some irate group or individual creates a superbug/nanogoo/WMD in their basement and unleashes it on the world?
One of these scenarios requires the advancement of civilization well beyond our current capabilities, and might not even ever be practical. The other is just around the corner. Heck, it could be happening in a basement in your neighborhood right now.
Even then, it seems likely that civilizations do not get harder to wipe out the more advanced they get. Rather, they become more and more capable of wiping themselves out. As they become more and more advanced, it requires fewer and fewer individuals with less and less resources to do the job. I'm skeptical interstellar colonization is ever practical, but for any civilization that manages to achieve that level of advancement, it seems like it's be even more vulnerable to self-destruction than we are. Imagine the resources and technologies such a people must posses. What can these guys brew in their basements?
I know, it's pretty much required that they have gained impressive mastery of their own internal issues to even manage to reach that state. Perhaps some sort of police-state, or mind implants, or super-ethical society, or something has occurred to prevent them from wiping themselves out. But at that level of technology, it only takes one individual to slip through the cracks, and pow, bye-bye planet.
Yes, but ideally that's how it's supposed to work. The best way to make sure something gets done is to make sure someone profits from it. If you can somehow make it profitable to save people's lives, a lot of lives will be saved. Gotta love profit motive...
Not to troll, but MySQL isn't the most diligent ANSI SQL follower either. If you're going to point fingers, make sure you're not in a pot/kettle scenario first.
There exists an open-source application that doesn't follow a standard, therefore, Microsoft should not be criticized for not following the standard?
Also, is the OP a MySQL developer? If not, he/she is neither the pot nor the kettle, but a third party fully justified in calling either one of them black.
One assumes you are trolling, otherwise you're being rather stupid...
Yes, it's hilarious how stupid some people are. They view his track record of outrageous predictions and conclude he's an idiot. Here's a clue, people: no one pays John C. Dvorak to make accurate predictions, so why would you judge his intelligence and success on that standard? It's like concluding your washing machine is a piece of junk because it can't keep your food cold. That's just being stupid. Judge how well your washing machine works by how well it washes things.
Dvorak is paid to generate controversy, outrage, and ultimately readership and page hits. And he's doing exactly what he's trying to do (and gets paid to do) very, very well. The fact that we're having this discussion is proof of just how good he is at his actual job.
I think first we should worry about all the television addicts out there. AFAIK, the number of people addicted to television still dwarfs the number of people addicted to WoW by a couple orders of magnitude.
...especially when any idiot can post whatever drivel they want with precisely zero facts to back up their assertions (not that their assertions are quantifiable, testable statements to begin with) and someone will call it "news".
Wake me up when the author presents even one bit of supporting evidence for his assertions. Oh, and wake me up when/. finds editors with a clue.
...dark energy has fallen into an interdimensional rift in the fabric of space/time, can we shove the astrophysicists who insist on inventing the unobservable to fix their theories in with them, and get on with fixing whatever the error in the models really is? Please?
Err, that's how physics has worked for over a century. No one has ever actually seen an electron, after all. We infer there existence from the effects we can observe. Is there some reason astrophysicists shouldn't do this when other physicists are allowed to?
A eunuch can't teach someone about sex because he can't himself have sex? And a robot can't teach someone about social interaction because it can't be social?
One assumes then you also believe you can't possibly learn anything from a book other than how to sit on a shelf, or fall to the floor?
I can't believe that a bunch of self-proclaimed "engineers" would even debate how to proceed in this matter.
I'm sure the actual engineers don't. It's a question of convincing management to spend the money for a test that's unnecessary and yields no information about practical wing performance (all it would tell you is how the wing would perform in conditions it could not actually experience in the real world, at least not in a survivable state -- knowing the wing will survive a crash that utterly destroys the rest of the plane and turns the passengers into chunky salsa is not practically useful).
You're not necessarily oddball, you're just not old school. If you've been using OSX since back when it was called Nextstep, you're probably more used to having it vertically on the side. Likewise if you come from the Unix/Linux/BSD camp and used Afterstep/Openstep/whatever.
If you're one of those oddballs who actually came from the Mac community, it's probably not unusual to leave it on the bottom.;) But I and everyone I know has it on the right side.
Re:Emphasis on the light, please.
on
Vertical Farming
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· Score: 1
Also I don't understand the exclusive-use mentality.
Have you ever driven by a farm before?
It's bad enough having to drive by them. I can only imagine what being inside the same building as one would be like.
There are some cases where this true (the Corvette being the classic example), but in general today's cars look a hell of a lot better than 60's cars. You're pointing out the classic good designs that of course everyone remembers because they were outstanding designs, while forgetting the general mass of crap. With a few notable exceptions, today's cars look a hell of a lot better.
Your conclusion is not supported by your premises. You start with the statement about "accident rate" and draw a conclusion about "safe". It's trivial to demonstrate your conclusion doesn't follow by a simple counterexample: suppose the rate was set to 2mph. According to your premise, this would result in a higher accident rate, but even if we take that as given, it's also pretty clear that it would be safer. A lower speed limit may indeed result in a higher accident rate, but that doesn't support the conclusion that it is less safe -- it may still be safer. The amount of damage done by a crashing vehicle is a matter of the energy involved. So if a highway with a 55mph speed limit and one with a 70mph speed limit have identical accident rates, the one with the lower speed limit will be safer. If the 70mph road has a lower accident rate, it might still be more dangerous, depending on how much lower vs. how injurious the accidents tend to be.
This doesn't mean you're wrong, either, it just means you have yet to present any evidence for your conclusion. Is there any research that actually supports the conclusion that that the lower limit makes things less safe, or just that it results in higher accident rates?
If someone decides to not eat any meat because it's just wrong for something to die for food, that's stupid, and potentially hazardous to his health, if he doesn't find a way of getting at protein.
Potentially? Protein? If they insist that nothing dies for food, they're going to have bigger problems than just getting protein. Plants are alive, too...
For real fun, watch one of them try to reconcile a belief that eating other animals is bad with a belief that the extinction of any large carnivore (say, cheetahs) would be bad.:p
Slashdot Mirror
Am I wrong to think that numbers consisting of prime numbers that could be possibly (time-wise) be found using Shor's algorithm would be difficult to factorize using the same algorithm?
Yes.
Without getting too technical, public cryptography relies on the fact that it's astronomically harder to factor these numbers than to come up with them. If you can use the same algorithm to both come up with the keys and break them, this simply can't be the case -- in that case, the best you can get is it being as many times harder as your computers were faster, or as much more time you spent on it, etc. One has to have clever algorithms for coming up with them and a lack of equally clever algorithms for breaking them. The same level of cleverness can't be on both sides or you're sunk. The generating and usage part has to be way, way, way easier. As easy as Shor's algorithm makes breaking them, something astronomically better than it would be required to make keys that are useful against it. (At which point, one has to wonder, how useful would be they be? We'd probably be talking key-lengths so big you run into the same problems that prevent widespread use of one-time pads.)
Ah, you're from that fantasy world where government employees never abuse government power. Alas, most of us live in the world where government employees invariably abuse any power given to them, sooner or later...
It's also interesting how many people who don't care took the time to post flames about how much they don't care.
It's the difference between a mature human being comfortable with his or her place in the universe, and an immature person who thinks he or she is the center of the universe. The mature individuals know some things interest them and some things don't, but that some of those things that don't interest them do interest other people. They simply skip over anything that doesn't interest them. The immature people get upset that something that doesn't interest them was posted. If it doesn't interest them, why did anyone waste the time posting it? If anyone else is interested in it, they must be "losers".
The real problem at the core for them is, every time something is posted that doesn't interest them, it proves that the universe does not revolve around them, and they just can't stand that. So they must complain. Any time the universe does not appear to be specifically tailored for them, they must complain. Obviously something is wrong with the universe if it isn't arranged for their ultimate convenience.
Nobody is forcing people to work there, if the company wants to require employees be tagged with RFID there shouldn't be a problem with that because the potential employee has a choice.
This is known as Hobson's Choice, an apparently free choice that is really no choice at all.
Any time it's with your employer, it's essentially coercion. Your choice is do as they say or lose your livelihood. It's like arguing you have a free choice with a gun to your head. Sure, you can choose to disobey and just get your brains blown out -- that makes it a free-willed choice, right?
Hmm. Yes, "the slippery slope" -- my favorite logical fallacy. "You know, there's actually nothing wrong with what's being proposed, and no harm will come of it, but there's this other thing that would be very bad, so we should oppose *this* because we don't want *that*." It's truly amazing, and a testament to the stupidity of Man, that such arguments have any traction at all... but they are surprisingly common and effective. :(
No, it's completely wrong.
Every point in the universe today is where the Big Bang occurred. You can see it right now. Just look around you.
Understand that space itself expanded from the starting point. All points of space in the universe today where infinitely closer together 13.7 billion years ago. The Big Bang did not expand outward into a mostly empty universe. The Big Bang occurred in a universe that was entirely full of extremely dense matter. As space expanded, the matter became less packed. You get the idea...
No. Why would it? If you're using a RAM-based medium, any block is read with essentially identical speed. So if you're using a mechanism that's optimized for mechanical storage, or using one that just allocates blocks sequentially, or one that allocates them completely randomly, or one that tries as hard as possible to *slow down* reads from hard disks, it all makes no difference. From a RAM-based system, they'll all work equally well.
In that case: OMGWTFBBQ
:)
I edited a Python script once, and it stopped working. Why did it stop working? Because I added a comment. Apparently this counted as whitespace. I found out whitespace is significant. I laughed my ass off and have never once touched the language since. Still amazes me anyone thought that was a good idea. I thought that kind of idiocy went out the door with Fortran 77...
My apologies. I shouldn't call it idiocy. It's just clearly a toy language, and shouldn't be judged by the standards of real, modern programming languages.
Actually, you were probably seeing meteors associated with the Perseids. The peak will fall around August 12th, but you'll likely see lots of them all week long if you're looking.
For clarification, if you believe in the Christian God, Jehovah or whichever of His names you choose, you *don't* believe in any of the others. If you believe in more than one God, you *don't* believe in a Christian one at all. His words, not mine, read the book.
God wrote a book? Certainly not the Bible, which is known to have been written by other people (it says so right in the book). What book did God write?
Allah has a similar statement.
Really? Sure you don't mean Muhammad? Again, I've not heard of any books written by Allah.
I'm pretty sure Buddha doesn't much care about this God-thing, singular or plural. He has a different agenda.
*nods* Buddha (who actually did write books, unlike any of your previously asserted authors) wasn't terribly interested in those sorts of questions. Buddhists run the gamut from polytheists to atheists, because it's largely irrelevant to Buddhism if there is or isn't a god or gods. Such questions of metaphysical trivia distract people from what's really important.
I don't think it's particularly unreasonable. Immune is possibly too strong a term, but once a species has started colonising other star systems then it takes a lot to wipe them out.
Yes, but what are the odds of that? As our technology advances, is gets easier and easier for small groups or even individuals to do what it once took the resources of nations to do. Honestly, which is likely to happen first, we find or successfully terraform and colonize an extra-solar planet, or some irate group or individual creates a superbug/nanogoo/WMD in their basement and unleashes it on the world?
One of these scenarios requires the advancement of civilization well beyond our current capabilities, and might not even ever be practical. The other is just around the corner. Heck, it could be happening in a basement in your neighborhood right now.
Even then, it seems likely that civilizations do not get harder to wipe out the more advanced they get. Rather, they become more and more capable of wiping themselves out. As they become more and more advanced, it requires fewer and fewer individuals with less and less resources to do the job. I'm skeptical interstellar colonization is ever practical, but for any civilization that manages to achieve that level of advancement, it seems like it's be even more vulnerable to self-destruction than we are. Imagine the resources and technologies such a people must posses. What can these guys brew in their basements?
I know, it's pretty much required that they have gained impressive mastery of their own internal issues to even manage to reach that state. Perhaps some sort of police-state, or mind implants, or super-ethical society, or something has occurred to prevent them from wiping themselves out. But at that level of technology, it only takes one individual to slip through the cracks, and pow, bye-bye planet.
Yes, but ideally that's how it's supposed to work. The best way to make sure something gets done is to make sure someone profits from it. If you can somehow make it profitable to save people's lives, a lot of lives will be saved. Gotta love profit motive...
Not to troll, but MySQL isn't the most diligent ANSI SQL follower either. If you're going to point fingers, make sure you're not in a pot/kettle scenario first.
There exists an open-source application that doesn't follow a standard, therefore, Microsoft should not be criticized for not following the standard?
Also, is the OP a MySQL developer? If not, he/she is neither the pot nor the kettle, but a third party fully justified in calling either one of them black.
One assumes you are trolling, otherwise you're being rather stupid...
Yes, it's hilarious how stupid some people are. They view his track record of outrageous predictions and conclude he's an idiot. Here's a clue, people: no one pays John C. Dvorak to make accurate predictions, so why would you judge his intelligence and success on that standard? It's like concluding your washing machine is a piece of junk because it can't keep your food cold. That's just being stupid. Judge how well your washing machine works by how well it washes things.
Dvorak is paid to generate controversy, outrage, and ultimately readership and page hits. And he's doing exactly what he's trying to do (and gets paid to do) very, very well. The fact that we're having this discussion is proof of just how good he is at his actual job.
Your use of the word 'entymology' really bugs me...
I think first we should worry about all the television addicts out there. AFAIK, the number of people addicted to television still dwarfs the number of people addicted to WoW by a couple orders of magnitude.
...especially when any idiot can post whatever drivel they want with precisely zero facts to back up their assertions (not that their assertions are quantifiable, testable statements to begin with) and someone will call it "news".
Wake me up when the author presents even one bit of supporting evidence for his assertions. Oh, and wake me up when /. finds editors with a clue.
Err, that's how physics has worked for over a century. No one has ever actually seen an electron, after all. We infer there existence from the effects we can observe. Is there some reason astrophysicists shouldn't do this when other physicists are allowed to?
A eunuch can't teach someone about sex because he can't himself have sex? And a robot can't teach someone about social interaction because it can't be social?
One assumes then you also believe you can't possibly learn anything from a book other than how to sit on a shelf, or fall to the floor?
I can't believe that a bunch of self-proclaimed "engineers" would even debate how to proceed in this matter.
I'm sure the actual engineers don't. It's a question of convincing management to spend the money for a test that's unnecessary and yields no information about practical wing performance (all it would tell you is how the wing would perform in conditions it could not actually experience in the real world, at least not in a survivable state -- knowing the wing will survive a crash that utterly destroys the rest of the plane and turns the passengers into chunky salsa is not practically useful).
You're not necessarily oddball, you're just not old school. If you've been using OSX since back when it was called Nextstep, you're probably more used to having it vertically on the side. Likewise if you come from the Unix/Linux/BSD camp and used Afterstep/Openstep/whatever.
If you're one of those oddballs who actually came from the Mac community, it's probably not unusual to leave it on the bottom. ;) But I and everyone I know has it on the right side.
Also I don't understand the exclusive-use mentality.
Have you ever driven by a farm before?
It's bad enough having to drive by them. I can only imagine what being inside the same building as one would be like.
There are some cases where this true (the Corvette being the classic example), but in general today's cars look a hell of a lot better than 60's cars. You're pointing out the classic good designs that of course everyone remembers because they were outstanding designs, while forgetting the general mass of crap. With a few notable exceptions, today's cars look a hell of a lot better.
Your conclusion is not supported by your premises. You start with the statement about "accident rate" and draw a conclusion about "safe". It's trivial to demonstrate your conclusion doesn't follow by a simple counterexample: suppose the rate was set to 2mph. According to your premise, this would result in a higher accident rate, but even if we take that as given, it's also pretty clear that it would be safer. A lower speed limit may indeed result in a higher accident rate, but that doesn't support the conclusion that it is less safe -- it may still be safer. The amount of damage done by a crashing vehicle is a matter of the energy involved. So if a highway with a 55mph speed limit and one with a 70mph speed limit have identical accident rates, the one with the lower speed limit will be safer. If the 70mph road has a lower accident rate, it might still be more dangerous, depending on how much lower vs. how injurious the accidents tend to be.
This doesn't mean you're wrong, either, it just means you have yet to present any evidence for your conclusion. Is there any research that actually supports the conclusion that that the lower limit makes things less safe, or just that it results in higher accident rates?
If someone decides to not eat any meat because it's just wrong for something to die for food, that's stupid, and potentially hazardous to his health, if he doesn't find a way of getting at protein.
Potentially? Protein? If they insist that nothing dies for food, they're going to have bigger problems than just getting protein. Plants are alive, too...
For real fun, watch one of them try to reconcile a belief that eating other animals is bad with a belief that the extinction of any large carnivore (say, cheetahs) would be bad. :p