re: Mmmm, a national database of writing samples collected from everyone in school... that sounds like fun. :>(
A national database of writing samples... it already exists for a large number of high school and for an even larger number of college students. It's called Turnitin.comhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnitin and many students are required to submit their homework essays through their site. Some students have sued to not include/submit their work, and some have sued (with two examples of students from McGill on the wikipedia page, Go Canadians!). .
It does provide a sadly interesting example of where "click-wrap" licenses have been ruled to be valid:
Nearly a year later, Judge Claude M. Hilton granted summary judgment on the students' complaint in favor of iParadigms/Turnitin,[22] because they had accepted the click-wrap agreement on the Turnitin website.
Perhaps clicking on EULAs without reading them can be dangerous after all.
It's just like how drone attacks for suspected terrorists are beyond review even if the targets are US citizens or many civilians could become collateral damage. Once you breach the concept that all executive actions should be subject to judicial review, then you've gone over the levee wall, and (as you said) "the rest flows naturally from there."
M.I.T. (instead of GaTech ) has an affiliated program at the University of Georgia? I would have thought/expected that Georgia Tech would be the affiliate program, rather than Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
The WBC agents act as provocateurs in order to induce lawsuits which they attempt to win for financial gain. That they do so using reprehensible speech which is not illegal is pathetically sad. . But it's also like strange bullies who will come up to your face and shout at you, and if you hit them well now you've committed assault and you've become the bad guy who can be arrested for assault. So in that scenario, you can't meet words (however abhorrent) with physical violence; you can respond with words and free speech against Westboro Baptist Church either by picketing against them wherever they happen to picket or by stating publicly in forums such as/. how reprehensible their speech is. Tit for tat.
re: Dell cow tows to the shrine of MS ;>)
So I'm guessing that perhaps the "cow tow" was a comment about Gateway and their cow-hide black and white patterns, rather than some joke about a repo-company (or AAA towing franchise) run by bovines? Or did you just misremember Dell as being the company with that pattern? .
kÃu tÃu : kow-tow, damn lack of unicode support for K`OU T'OU makes that look wrong.
re:Publicly calling someone out like that without being cleared first is a bad idea: for the poster, it could potentially cost their job, and for the company it could start a defamation lawsuit.
Sorta like what happened for someone at google for speaking outside of the chain of command and the chain of PR (about four articles ago on/.): Google+ Chief Grounded From Twitter By Larry Page
Of course, in just the same way that spammers can game Bayesian spam filters or rule-matching pattern filters by knowing what the rules are, given a known set of rules that attempt to assess credibility of tweet allows someone to tweak their tweets in order to be assessed as having high credibility:
1 -- max out your tweet length
2 -- include an URL [doesn't say whether to use a link shrtnr;>(]
3 -- use a Twitter account with a high number of followers
4 -- use a negative tone
5 -- no question marks or exclamation points
6 -- use 2nd person (same as don't use 1st or 3rd person)
7 -- don't use swear words
8 -- use a sad emoticon .
Example to maximize this:
a - break into / hack a high follower account (e.g. justinbieber) and tweet: cat > finaltweet You should know Mayan Calendar sez: world ending this week. Confirmed@ http://netcraft.calendar.mayan/ you go hug loved 1s now.:>( beebs
wc finaltweet
1 20 139 finaltweet
First iteration was:
gia@sodium$ cat > count2
You should know that Mayan Calendar says : world ending within week. Confirmed by http://netcraft.calendar.mayan/ , you should hug loved ones now.:>( -- beebs
gia@sodium$ wc count2
1 25 159 count2
Please note that the "[netcraft.calendar.mayan]" was inserted by/.'s/-code and is not part of the wc wordcount:>(
Or it would be like saying that "electrons have been found to play a critical role in the transmission of signals in CPUs. It's a true statement, but the neurotransmitters are used in a huge variety of circuits and not limited to just one subset of neurons that subserve just one set of functions.
re: I prefer it was spent on computing, rather than explosions. .
Don't forget that they can use the improved computational power and that improved computational power efficiency to simulate and design better explosions! But look at how much innovation comes about from war and war/defense funding. (It's not hard to search for it). Heck, even canned food had its research and development funded by Napoleon to help the French military.
And it cuts both ways: any innovation can be put to use in the aid of defense and in the aid of war. Many technologies and concepts created for the war and defense industry also have many civilian and non-military applications.
Re:Crooked cop...
perhaps a tired bored cop who can't discern the truth in 24 seconds per citation? .
The article initially said that the officer reviews 12000 tickets per day, but that seems to have been fixed to say that the reviewing officer sees 1200 tickets per day. For an 8-hour maximum day, that means 150 ticket reviews per hour or 2.5 per minute.
That means the officer views the images/video for 24 seconds for each citation for a continuous 8 hour day if she gets no breaks or lunch time off; if she gets lunch time and break times, then the officer spends less than 24 seconds per ticket. Imagine how boring/laboriouus/teeeedious that must be. So of course some will say that sure one or two or more mistakes will slip through with that kind of assembly-line human amazon turk kind of review process, but that kind of mistake is unacceptable!
I'd recommend GNU Octave at http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/: it can deal with matrices and thus let you build up tables of functions. It also uses radians as the default angular measure for the trigonometric function, just as Xmaxima/Maxima does on Linux. However, you can easily write a function to convert degrees into radians:
For Octave:
function rads=ofdegrees(deg)
rads=deg/180*pi;
and similarly, in XMaxima, you can do the conversion as a function definition also: indegrees(x):= x/180*pi;
Then, in either case, call the trig functions as sin(indegrees(45)) and your $indegree$ function will convert your degrees into radians.
re:Encryption for DRM purposes no longer counts as munitions.
Wait, so I've got this idea for sending encrypted messages without breaking the hardware-encryption-export laws. Have the message said out loud by Alice (or have Alice perform an interpretive dance that encodes/denotes the message) but along with it, have a copyrighted musical performance playing in the background. Now use encryption as DRM to ensure that no unauthorized person gets access to that copyrighted musical performance! We just switch f_{DRM} ((Alice's message A as foreground)+(copyright performance B) ) into
A is background and B is foreground and f(A+B) is now protected by DRM which requires encryption. That should fly, right?;>)
Who's Bing? What's Bing? Where's Bing? Where's Santa bing? . Sounds like a bunch of questions to ask on G'oogle! . (And for the reporters hiding amongst us, also remember to 'oogle the existential question "Why is Bing?" and the temporal question "When is Bing?")
Re:FSM uses Google maps But what kind of tablet does God use? .
Yeah, but I want to find a good high resolution picture of Moses coming down the mountain and zoom in using CSI super-resolution-zoom capabilities and find out what kind of tablet he used to read those ten commandments on. If that brand of tablet was good enough for God, it ought to be good enough for me to give out as presents this year, right?;>)
I'd agree with you except that it's common to look at the bottom right corner of your firefox window to see what the linked url points to (except these days, when the url can show up in either the bottom right or the bottom left corner depending on if you've got a text-search box open or if a no-script button/bar is open on the bottom... I'd like to see a little consistency on that in FF). But it would be nice if the postings of stories followed the rules of postings of comments after the stories: any urls posted in comments automatically have the base-URL-web site listed in brackets after the link, so that you aren't accidentally clicking on a link without realizing where you're going, e.g. pointing back to/. here :>)
So in that respect, I agree with you. The story ought to have bracketed URL-base-link info immediately following the link. That way the naive and stupid and quick-to-click don't complain about where the link leads.
Rightttt..... like kids could never ever be able to stay up late enough to be able to make the purchase during that window!!! No, kids never stay up late or wake up in the middle of the night or do things that their parents or society would not want them to do.../sarcasm .
Seriously, parental restrictions would make more sense. (Though I can say that I've had to undo the parental restriction setting on the DVR for my parents at least twice in the last six months.) Teens often don't want to get out of bed til noon on a weekend, we can stay up til 3 and wake up at 6 or 7 and have a lousy but okay day the next day (well it's still the same day, but it feels likes the next day after sleeping from 3:30 to 6:30)
So finally a judge states the obvious for countries that have constitutional systems that provide for laws restricting the powers of the government: that no one is above the law and that no one is above being reviewed/judged by the judicial system. Note in this country (USA) how often the executive branch pleads/claims executive privilege in attempting (and succeeding in) avoiding judicial review of the president's actions and powers. .
The latest ruling is another milestone in Dotcom's bid to challenge extradition to the US on copyright infringement charges.
His lawyers have already proved that GCSB's surveillance of the mogul was illegal, and search warrants for the January raid were invalid.
Are we supposed to cheer for the judge for making a reasonable ruling, or are we supposed to cheer that the judge allowed for the review of possible criminal / illegal activities by the law enforcement officers of New Zealand? Any way you look at it, it's sad that it came to this: law enforcement in NZ breaking laws (possibly under the external request / direction of others) and using force to execute searches for evidence of copyright infringement.
Bitcoins have also entered the consciousness of Hollywood Scriptwriters. Bitcoin played a leading role, so to speak, in episode 13 of series 3 of The Good Wife on CBS television: episode title
"Bitcoin for Dummies". Here's the first part of their summary:
Alicia and Lockhart/Gardner face off against the US Treasury Department once again, this time aiding Dylan Stack, a lawyer who represents the creator of Bitcoin - an online currency with mysterious origins. Alicia's client is being pressured to reveal the name of the anonymous Bitcoin creator so that the government can prosecute him for creating what they believe to be a currency in direct competition with the US Dollar.
I had to try to explain to my mom what Bitcoin is and why it was created and how (if rarely) it is actually used for real world purchases. Even though I just have a passing familiarity with it from reading/. I know more than the average watcher of "The Good Wife".;>)
Verizon does not need to have microphones in its set-top boxes to do this. They're a telephone company. If they are your local provider, they they already have access to your telephone calls: the numbers you call and what time of day and which days of the month you make those calls. If they're providing you with TV access, then your phone system has been changed from copper wire analog phone to digital, and then they've got an even easier way to parse the text in your phone calls and keep track of the vocabulary used during the phone calls. .
Once they've got the gist of what you've been communicating about and with whom (and when) you've been communicating, then they can plug in commercials during the fiber feed of your TV shows based on that, or they could even be like google and other dicey internet providers and actually intercept the HTML of pages as the response of http-GET requests and insert HTML snippets as advertisements onto the pages you receive. .
If you have google voice, google already listens to your phone calls for you, and it knows who is calling you and whom you are calling. If you've got a google phone / android phone, they've also got a time-stamped tracking of when and where you go places. (If you don't believe or know about that, check out their new location based game, Ingres which uses the ideas of scoring points by visiting geolocated portals which it decides for you and having you staying there for fixed amounts of time to help populate and validate google's geographic database (and possibly also to volunteer crowdsource how you walk places: footpath data, walking accessibility data). .
Do you really think google does not use all of this vast trove of data which it has about you to help target ads specifically to you and to your interests? Targeting ads by builidng these large databases about you and your interests and your activities is exactly what google does. And ATT or verizon, or any home phone provider, has the ability to abuse your home telephone calls. And ATT or verizon, or any cell phone provider, has the ability to do that and keep track of where you are during the day when you take your cell phone along with you. Wouldn't knowing when you go to which supermarket (even if you don't use the supermarkets frequent shopper id card) by tracking your cellphone going there tell the phone provider a lot about you? (Do you go to Vons or Ralphs, or maybe you have more money and go to Trader Joes or Whole Foods). They would be able to tell when you go to a gas station or when your cell phone goes to a car dealership or how long your phone stays there (are you repairing your car at a mercedes dealer, or going frequently to do-it-yourself autoparts stores?)? Which banks do you frequent? Do you go to movie theaters or bars or nightclubs? Or you frequently in shady parts of town? Are you a college dweller or do you go to high school? Imagine how much info your geolocation info tells your cell phone provider about you!
Well, if we're talking about the category of
large airplanes, then the undisputed winner is the
Antonov An-225 Mriya which was built in the Soviet Union and the Ukraine to be the equivalent of the USA Space Shuttle's
transport aircraft. It tops the categories of:
-- world's heaviest aircraft ever (max. takeoff weight greater than 640 tons)
-- world's largest aircraft ever
-- largest aerodyne (in length and wingspan) ever entering operational service
-- absolute world record for airlifted payload at 189,980 kilogram (418,834 pounds)
;>)
Of course, the largest wingspan ever is owned by Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, the Hughes Aircraft H4-Hercules. It was never really an operational aircraft: it only flew once, and it was really made of birch instead of spruce. But hey, in terms of largest wingspan ever built, USA-ians can chant "We're Number One! We're Number One!"
Thanks! Thanks for taking my question seriously and for giving me a useful explanation and answer. Also, thanks for the pointer to your other/. comment about this.:>)
re: But even make will do things sequentially. Couldn't something like tsort be used to do a topological sort and list the dependencies and branching, and allow for branches that do not share dependencies to be run in parallel?
hmmm, what exactly is the point of finding these "decreased computational complexity" algorithms (such as the matrix multiply coopersmith-winograd you mentioned or the integer multiply schonhage-strassen) if the constant in front of it is so large that the benefit is not seen for polynomial A (naive algorithm) vs polynomial B (lower computational complexity algorithm) until you get very far out on the x-axis (or would it be the n-axis?) ?
Is it purely to find a better algorithm, or is it to show that as the size of the problem increases, there might be a better algorithm that would actually be of use?
re you eventually end up trying to distinguish among 200 unique visitors behind one carrier-grade NAT.
But that's where the browser fingerprinting as described at https://panopticlick.eff.org/ comes in: even if you have javascript disabled, your browser sends along information about your:
-- media types accepted
-- cookies enabled
-- HTTP-accept headers
-- and of course, your user-agent .
Even behind noscript, my browsing leaks 17.96 bits of information, according to the EFF panopticlick survey for me. If we allow javascript, then this other information can also be gathered:
-- fonts available
-- addons available
-- browser plug-in details
-- pixel dimensions of display
-- color depth of display
-- time zone .
Allowing javascript leaks 21.18 bits of identifying information. In fact, just the browser-plug in details alone seem to be enough to allow my visit to eff to be recognized as unique from all other browsers that have gone there before. Of course, if you use a combiation like "IE version X" running on "MSWindows $ident", then you're more lkely to be a bit more anonymous than someone running a debian system with a lot of non-common browser plug-ins on Firefox-cutting-edge-version.
Look at EFF's Panopticlick website to see the breadcrumbs you're leaving behind. And don't forget that if you're coming in from the same IP address, even with all of those different purported browser-agent strings, it's easy enough to collect those data together and make a profile for that IP address and for the various sites hit at the various times of day. If you've got certain niche websites which you visit, the combination of websites visited could also be seen as a fingerprint also. ;>) https://panopticlick.eff.org/
Slashdot Mirror
:>(
A national database of writing samples... it already exists for a large number of high school and for an even larger number of college students. It's called Turnitin.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnitin and many students are required to submit their homework essays through their site. Some students have sued to not include/submit their work, and some have sued (with two examples of students from McGill on the wikipedia page, Go Canadians!).
.
It does provide a sadly interesting example of where "click-wrap" licenses have been ruled to be valid: Nearly a year later, Judge Claude M. Hilton granted summary judgment on the students' complaint in favor of iParadigms/Turnitin,[22] because they had accepted the click-wrap agreement on the Turnitin website.
Perhaps clicking on EULAs without reading them can be dangerous after all.
It's just like how drone attacks for suspected terrorists are beyond review even if the targets are US citizens or many civilians could become collateral damage. Once you breach the concept that all executive actions should be subject to judicial review, then you've gone over the levee wall, and (as you said) "the rest flows naturally from there."
M.I.T. (instead of GaTech ) has an affiliated program at the University of Georgia? I would have thought/expected that Georgia Tech would be the affiliate program, rather than Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
The WBC agents act as provocateurs in order to induce lawsuits which they attempt to win for financial gain. That they do so using reprehensible speech which is not illegal is pathetically sad. /. how reprehensible their speech is. Tit for tat.
.
But it's also like strange bullies who will come up to your face and shout at you, and if you hit them well now you've committed assault and you've become the bad guy who can be arrested for assault. So in that scenario, you can't meet words (however abhorrent) with physical violence; you can respond with words and free speech against Westboro Baptist Church either by picketing against them wherever they happen to picket or by stating publicly in forums such as
re: Dell cow tows to the shrine of MS
;>)
So I'm guessing that perhaps the "cow tow" was a comment about Gateway and their cow-hide black and white patterns, rather than some joke about a repo-company (or AAA towing franchise) run by bovines? Or did you just misremember Dell as being the company with that pattern?
.
kÃu tÃu : kow-tow, damn lack of unicode support for K`OU T'OU makes that look wrong.
re:Publicly calling someone out like that without being cleared first is a bad idea: for the poster, it could potentially cost their job, and for the company it could start a defamation lawsuit. /.) :
Sorta like what happened for someone at google for speaking outside of the chain of command and the chain of PR (about four articles ago on
Google+ Chief Grounded From Twitter By Larry Page
Of course, in just the same way that spammers can game Bayesian spam filters or rule-matching pattern filters by knowing what the rules are, given a known set of rules that attempt to assess credibility of tweet allows someone to tweak their tweets in order to be assessed as having high credibility: ;>(] :>( beebs
:>( -- beebs
/.'s /-code and is not part of the wc wordcount :>(
1 -- max out your tweet length
2 -- include an URL [doesn't say whether to use a link shrtnr
3 -- use a Twitter account with a high number of followers
4 -- use a negative tone
5 -- no question marks or exclamation points
6 -- use 2nd person (same as don't use 1st or 3rd person)
7 -- don't use swear words
8 -- use a sad emoticon
.
Example to maximize this:
a - break into / hack a high follower account (e.g. justinbieber) and tweet: cat > finaltweet
You should know Mayan Calendar sez: world ending this week. Confirmed@ http://netcraft.calendar.mayan/ you go hug loved 1s now.
wc finaltweet
1 20 139 finaltweet
First iteration was:
gia@sodium$ cat > count2
You should know that Mayan Calendar says : world ending within week. Confirmed by http://netcraft.calendar.mayan/ , you should hug loved ones now.
gia@sodium$ wc count2
1 25 159 count2
Please note that the "[netcraft.calendar.mayan]" was inserted by
Or it would be like saying that "electrons have been found to play a critical role in the transmission of signals in CPUs. It's a true statement, but the neurotransmitters are used in a huge variety of circuits and not limited to just one subset of neurons that subserve just one set of functions.
re: I prefer it was spent on computing, rather than explosions.
.
Don't forget that they can use the improved computational power and that improved computational power efficiency to simulate and design better explosions! But look at how much innovation comes about from war and war/defense funding. (It's not hard to search for it). Heck, even canned food had its research and development funded by Napoleon to help the French military.
And it cuts both ways: any innovation can be put to use in the aid of defense and in the aid of war. Many technologies and concepts created for the war and defense industry also have many civilian and non-military applications.
Re:Crooked cop...
perhaps a tired bored cop who can't discern the truth in 24 seconds per citation?
.
The article initially said that the officer reviews 12000 tickets per day, but that seems to have been fixed to say that the reviewing officer sees 1200 tickets per day. For an 8-hour maximum day, that means 150 ticket reviews per hour or 2.5 per minute.
That means the officer views the images/video for 24 seconds for each citation for a continuous 8 hour day if she gets no breaks or lunch time off; if she gets lunch time and break times, then the officer spends less than 24 seconds per ticket. Imagine how boring/laboriouus/teeeedious that must be. So of course some will say that sure one or two or more mistakes will slip through with that kind of assembly-line human amazon turk kind of review process, but that kind of mistake is unacceptable!
I'd recommend GNU Octave at http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/: it can deal with matrices and thus let you build up tables of functions. It also uses radians as the default angular measure for the trigonometric function, just as Xmaxima/Maxima does on Linux. However, you can easily write a function to convert degrees into radians:
:= x/180*pi;
For Octave:
function rads=ofdegrees(deg)
rads=deg/180*pi;
and similarly, in XMaxima, you can do the conversion as a function definition also:
indegrees(x)
Then, in either case, call the trig functions as sin(indegrees(45)) and your $indegree$ function will convert your degrees into radians.
re:Encryption for DRM purposes no longer counts as munitions. ;>)
Wait, so I've got this idea for sending encrypted messages without breaking the hardware-encryption-export laws. Have the message said out loud by Alice (or have Alice perform an interpretive dance that encodes/denotes the message) but along with it, have a copyrighted musical performance playing in the background. Now use encryption as DRM to ensure that no unauthorized person gets access to that copyrighted musical performance! We just switch
f_{DRM} ((Alice's message A as foreground)+(copyright performance B) ) into
A is background and B is foreground and f(A+B) is now protected by DRM which requires encryption. That should fly, right?
Who's Bing? What's Bing? Where's Bing? Where's Santa bing?
.
Sounds like a bunch of questions to ask on G'oogle!
.
(And for the reporters hiding amongst us, also remember to 'oogle the existential question "Why is Bing?" and the temporal question "When is Bing?")
Re:FSM uses Google maps ;>)
But what kind of tablet does God use?
.
Yeah, but I want to find a good high resolution picture of Moses coming down the mountain and zoom in using CSI super-resolution-zoom capabilities and find out what kind of tablet he used to read those ten commandments on. If that brand of tablet was good enough for God, it ought to be good enough for me to give out as presents this year, right?
I'd agree with you except that it's common to look at the bottom right corner of your firefox window to see what the linked url points to (except these days, when the url can show up in either the bottom right or the bottom left corner depending on if you've got a text-search box open or if a no-script button/bar is open on the bottom... I'd like to see a little consistency on that in FF). But it would be nice if the postings of stories followed the rules of postings of comments after the stories: any urls posted in comments automatically have the base-URL-web site listed in brackets after the link, so that you aren't accidentally clicking on a link without realizing where you're going, e.g. pointing back to /. here
:>)
So in that respect, I agree with you. The story ought to have bracketed URL-base-link info immediately following the link. That way the naive and stupid and quick-to-click don't complain about where the link leads.
Rightttt..... like kids could never ever be able to stay up late enough to be able to make the purchase during that window!!! No, kids never stay up late or wake up in the middle of the night or do things that their parents or society would not want them to do... /sarcasm
.
Seriously, parental restrictions would make more sense. (Though I can say that I've had to undo the parental restriction setting on the DVR for my parents at least twice in the last six months.) Teens often don't want to get out of bed til noon on a weekend, we can stay up til 3 and wake up at 6 or 7 and have a lousy but okay day the next day (well it's still the same day, but it feels likes the next day after sleeping from 3:30 to 6:30)
. The latest ruling is another milestone in Dotcom's bid to challenge extradition to the US on copyright infringement charges.
His lawyers have already proved that GCSB's surveillance of the mogul was illegal, and search warrants for the January raid were invalid.
Are we supposed to cheer for the judge for making a reasonable ruling, or are we supposed to cheer that the judge allowed for the review of possible criminal / illegal activities by the law enforcement officers of New Zealand? Any way you look at it, it's sad that it came to this: law enforcement in NZ breaking laws (possibly under the external request / direction of others) and using force to execute searches for evidence of copyright infringement.
I had to try to explain to my mom what Bitcoin is and why it was created and how (if rarely) it is actually used for real world purchases. Even though I just have a passing familiarity with it from reading /. I know more than the average watcher of "The Good Wife". ;>)
Verizon does not need to have microphones in its set-top boxes to do this. They're a telephone company. If they are your local provider, they they already have access to your telephone calls: the numbers you call and what time of day and which days of the month you make those calls. If they're providing you with TV access, then your phone system has been changed from copper wire analog phone to digital, and then they've got an even easier way to parse the text in your phone calls and keep track of the vocabulary used during the phone calls.
.
Once they've got the gist of what you've been communicating about and with whom (and when) you've been communicating, then they can plug in commercials during the fiber feed of your TV shows based on that, or they could even be like google and other dicey internet providers and actually intercept the HTML of pages as the response of http-GET requests and insert HTML snippets as advertisements onto the pages you receive.
.
If you have google voice, google already listens to your phone calls for you, and it knows who is calling you and whom you are calling. If you've got a google phone / android phone, they've also got a time-stamped tracking of when and where you go places. (If you don't believe or know about that, check out their new location based game, Ingres which uses the ideas of scoring points by visiting geolocated portals which it decides for you and having you staying there for fixed amounts of time to help populate and validate google's geographic database (and possibly also to volunteer crowdsource how you walk places: footpath data, walking accessibility data).
.
Do you really think google does not use all of this vast trove of data which it has about you to help target ads specifically to you and to your interests? Targeting ads by builidng these large databases about you and your interests and your activities is exactly what google does. And ATT or verizon, or any home phone provider, has the ability to abuse your home telephone calls. And ATT or verizon, or any cell phone provider, has the ability to do that and keep track of where you are during the day when you take your cell phone along with you. Wouldn't knowing when you go to which supermarket (even if you don't use the supermarkets frequent shopper id card) by tracking your cellphone going there tell the phone provider a lot about you? (Do you go to Vons or Ralphs, or maybe you have more money and go to Trader Joes or Whole Foods). They would be able to tell when you go to a gas station or when your cell phone goes to a car dealership or how long your phone stays there (are you repairing your car at a mercedes dealer, or going frequently to do-it-yourself autoparts stores?)? Which banks do you frequent? Do you go to movie theaters or bars or nightclubs? Or you frequently in shady parts of town? Are you a college dweller or do you go to high school? Imagine how much info your geolocation info tells your cell phone provider about you!
Well, if we're talking about the category of large airplanes, then the undisputed winner is the Antonov An-225 Mriya which was built in the Soviet Union and the Ukraine to be the equivalent of the USA Space Shuttle's transport aircraft. It tops the categories of :
-- world's heaviest aircraft ever (max. takeoff weight greater than 640 tons)
-- world's largest aircraft ever
-- largest aerodyne (in length and wingspan) ever entering operational service
-- absolute world record for airlifted payload at 189,980 kilogram (418,834 pounds)
;>)
Of course, the largest wingspan ever is owned by Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, the Hughes Aircraft H4-Hercules. It was never really an operational aircraft: it only flew once, and it was really made of birch instead of spruce. But hey, in terms of largest wingspan ever built, USA-ians can chant "We're Number One! We're Number One!"
Thanks! Thanks for taking my question seriously and for giving me a useful explanation and answer. Also, thanks for the pointer to your other /. comment about this. :>)
re: But even make will do things sequentially. Couldn't something like tsort be used to do a topological sort and list the dependencies and branching, and allow for branches that do not share dependencies to be run in parallel?
hmmm, what exactly is the point of finding these "decreased computational complexity" algorithms (such as the matrix multiply coopersmith-winograd you mentioned or the integer multiply schonhage-strassen) if the constant in front of it is so large that the benefit is not seen for polynomial A (naive algorithm) vs polynomial B (lower computational complexity algorithm) until you get very far out on the x-axis (or would it be the n-axis?) ?
Is it purely to find a better algorithm, or is it to show that as the size of the problem increases, there might be a better algorithm that would actually be of use?
re you eventually end up trying to distinguish among 200 unique visitors behind one carrier-grade NAT. But that's where the browser fingerprinting as described at https://panopticlick.eff.org/ comes in: even if you have javascript disabled, your browser sends along information about your:
.
.
-- media types accepted
-- cookies enabled
-- HTTP-accept headers
-- and of course, your user-agent
Even behind noscript, my browsing leaks 17.96 bits of information, according to the EFF panopticlick survey for me. If we allow javascript, then this other information can also be gathered:
-- fonts available
-- addons available
-- browser plug-in details
-- pixel dimensions of display
-- color depth of display
-- time zone
Allowing javascript leaks 21.18 bits of identifying information. In fact, just the browser-plug in details alone seem to be enough to allow my visit to eff to be recognized as unique from all other browsers that have gone there before. Of course, if you use a combiation like "IE version X" running on "MSWindows $ident", then you're more lkely to be a bit more anonymous than someone running a debian system with a lot of non-common browser plug-ins on Firefox-cutting-edge-version.
Look at EFF's Panopticlick website to see the breadcrumbs you're leaving behind. And don't forget that if you're coming in from the same IP address, even with all of those different purported browser-agent strings, it's easy enough to collect those data together and make a profile for that IP address and for the various sites hit at the various times of day. If you've got certain niche websites which you visit, the combination of websites visited could also be seen as a fingerprint also.
;>)
https://panopticlick.eff.org/