Riemann discovered a function that reasonably well matches the number of primes found within long intervals of numbers. It can't find primes per se, it just predicts how many you'll find between 'm' and 'n'. And it's no help for factoring a product of two primes, so it won't crack codes.
When I saw this description, I instantly thought ROM!
Isn't one of the ideas behind hard drive and ROM memory seeking that you start by randomly dividing the thing in half or parts, searching systematically through that section, in the hopes you'll find what you want. If it does not work, just divide the remaining space in half again and search.
Over time, the end result would be you reduce the time spent searching, because much of the time you guess right and get the data you need.
Could this be used in a similar way to help locate primes exactly?
It seems to me, that if you could say the number of primes between 'm' and 'n', all you gotta do is keep moving m and n around and keep count of where and how many. Then use statistics to narrow down where the primes are within a small enough area that the brute-force methods of finding them become effective.
It is as safe to push the button as it is not to press the button.
When you are pressing the button, you are not the one going to die. Loot or no loot.
When you are not pressing the button; your chances of being snuffed is the probability of any OTHER person pressing the button, times the chances of being snuffed every time the button is pressed. (Leaving frequency of pressing out of it, pick your own time-frame.)
Pressing the button therefore, has no bearing on your living or dying. But it DOES effect your financial fortune in relation to your ethical ideas of why one shouldnt push the button.
So it is truely an ethical question to push or not to push.
On a side note, the FCC once calculated (TLC or Discovery Channel or some such show..) that the airline industry (despite what they may SAY) on average acts as if human lives are worth 3.4 million each. In that they balanced lawsuits and so on verses the number of people that died when deciding on if they were going to take action or not.
I would go with their guideline and demand 3.4 million to push the button.:)
Yes it is a childish prank. It is much less sophisticated than some of the fine TV programming such as Crank-Yankers or The Daily Show.
It should also be treated as such. If it is such a childish and unimportant event, why is Ford trying to sue the pants off 2600? Since when does ruining the finances of someone with a nasty lawsuit (and refusing to play nice to get a mutually agreeable resolution) an appropriate response to a prank?
It seems to me that the lawsuit is about the same as suing the neighbor kid because he thought it was fun to slap your car with a rolled up newspaper to make the alarm go of. Is THAT worth $100,000 per beep?
This IS a huge victory, something that is rare, but I hope we see more of. The lawyers have pushed people around for no reason too many times and gotten away with it. It is refreshing and a glimmer of hope that maybe they wont take over the planet after all.
In my opinion, this IS something useful to fight about. I hope that someday your financial future is threatened by some dumbass and a pack of lawyers. You deserve it.
A few points about why I think the Wayback Machine is good:
Have an old "emergency pager" (read, customer bugs calls because they cant get spell checker to work right at 3am) which was turned off, and then hidden so it is not carried. We lost the phone number, and then couldnt cancel the pager without it. Wayback had it from an old copy of our support site, and the phone number.
New web hosting client had 50% of the files that went down in the hosting company's servers in WTC. Wayback had them. We got all the verbiage from them.
We also occasionally need to point out to a customer what state their web site was in when we turned it over for maintanance by them. Having a third-party demonstrate that wiggly email gif was not us in the first place helps a lot.
I totally disagree with the original article, the Wayback Machine has some practical uses, and is fun for looking at old cheesy web sites. They also seem to be cooperating with people to take things out that need to be taken out. So I have no problem with it at all.
The first Myst game annoyed the piss out of me, mainly because my computer was too slow and I was too impatient to figure out some of the puzzles. (Really, would all those puzzles be there? Why not some sort of forensic crime fighting theme... peg the bad guy by wandering around crime scenes and labs)
Anyway, on your point two, an online game could be as large as they chose to make it and be continually changed. You just keep going, they keep building.... or have many many variations so that the game has different paths, outcomes and problems from month-to-month. What your buddy played just yesterday wont be what you play today.
The concept is interesting... I just hope they dont build it in 100% flash or something..
The largest exception I can think of is the guys running Verizon's network.
They are continually upset because the bannanas always get stuck in the vending machine.
Re:sabotage through the internet is similar to
on
Byte Wars
·
· Score: 1
Theoretically, internet sabotage could be more subtle. It's also less prominent in the minds of most civillians
Good Point.
However, that is exactly the point I would use to make the case that threats to our infrastructure would not come from terrorists, but disgruntled employees and the usual Internet/computer culprits.
9/11, bus bombings, USS Cole, etc. all share high visibility, pictures or live video that makes it exciting.
How many martyrs are going to be attracted by, "well, we think we cost the phone company several tens of thousands of dollars! God is great!"
To put it simply, I think the motive of the traditional terrorist attacker is going to make attacks on organizations by costing them money unattractive.
It takes a lawyer-infested culture like that of the United States to think a "make them spend/lose money" type attrition attack is a good way to operate. Note, I live in the US, this is just an example.
Better example is DUI laws based on blood alcohol. "Unfair" in the sense that people have different tolerances for alcohol. (I, for one, am not safe to drive after smelling beer.) But that's not the point. The purpose of the law is discourage people from behavior that harms other people.
I do not know about your state, but in Wisconsin there are TWO laws about driving drunk:
Driving while having BAC (blood alcohol concentration) of over.08. (or maybe still.10)
Driving while impaired
You can be convicted of both, one, or the other; depending on your tolerance, BAC, what you were seen doing in the vehicle. After 0.10 everybody is out for the first one. After.03 and you are weaving you can still get convicted of the second one. You might even get convicted of the first one and not the second one, if you are a "good drunk driver". These two laws very effectively give the courts the ability to deal with most drunk drivers.
Now my fat kids dont have to get away from the computer to play "Eye Spy", they can just surf across the country from home!
Seriously though, notice the hick with the pile of crap in the back of the pickup at mile 1284?
How bout the buttcrack on that guy a couple miles earlier. It took me almost 600 miles of searching before he passed the first person I saw. (Granny and Grandpa, of course.)
I can see a whole game of scavanger hunt built around this thing.
One thing that struck me, Jersey looks a lot better than I imagined. Way to go guys!
The 5th amendment appears to only apply to criminal law, such as fraud and so on. Also, in that case well duh, you should know better not to plot crimes in email.
The part where you can really get burned is in civil law, in which case 5th amendment will not give you a way not to provide all your email. Even if you were doing nothing wrong and innocently doing business, some person with an aggressive lawyer can cost you thousands of dollars of time and expense to comply with some bogus lawsuit.
That is a pretty good reason to have aggressive removal policies and to know how not to keep the stuff around.
Ok. Assume the LED has useful information. (Bits, 1 = on, 0 = off and it can turn on and off fast enough for a data line of average speed, i.e. 100meg ethernet)
Based on how much power, minus how much light energy leaves, and the heat generation of the LED (efficiency), how hot would the LED get at 100mhz? 1Ghz? 10Ghz? (or whatever gigabit ethernet bit rate would need to be to cover overhead)
I bet that if someone (not me!) knew the numbers, you'd find that your router would have burned a hole in the floor long ago if they actually modulated at the actual bit rate. Since they have not caught fire yet, I bet you could say that that most devices do not cycle for each bit.
That would make the article interesting but not significant.
Thus, for anything dealing with more modern levels of data transfer (1meg / sec or more) you could assume that the LEDs were not in fact lighting per bit, just because they do not get too hot. However, if the temp is still within reason, then it is still possible. (And back to the speculation in the rest of the responses.)
Making the article interesting and significant.
On a side note, I know that some devices definately do NOT blink per bit. I can watch my cruddy 4 port hub, cable modem, router and LAN card light. Some stuff goes in what appears to be packets or bits (cant tell which, cant see that fast), but the hub blinks along at a steady 3 or 4 blinks per second for data transfer. Definately NOT the same as what shows up on the router lights.
So, anybody know power/efficency/heat of LEDs well enough to ballpark the heat output on a port on a 100megabit router?
Job Board sites seem to have a problem of quantity over quality that makes people use the "shotgun method" of scattering things everywhere but not spending much time on it.
(Example that guy that spammed to get a job... I dont recall the name.)
Recently my organization wanted to get two database/web programmers and found that the people that applied would not move from their locations. We clearly stated that the person must move and be in the office every day. Those applications were automatically thrown in the trash.
Something about the model of the "large job clearing-house on the web" is not complete yet... or people just ignore things and engage in what is little more than spam.
We went back to friends, family and cruzing the bars near campus. We got both the new people that way. Both of them quite good, and they already lived in the area.
Re:Those trailers were terrible
on
Review: Kung Pow
·
· Score: 3, Informative
A guy being distracted by a woman with big breasts?
A guy being distracted by a woman with one big breast.
I can see it now, the line of cool kids waiting to beat up the pencilnecks as they step off the digital short-bus.
If I were them, I'd just pack it all in boxes, make em learn how to put the computers together, install an OS, and then decide which one they like. My next IT hire is going to build his/her own computer, if it cant, it doesnt get hired.
Dont forget, high traffic could be caused by piggybacking on the other high traffic web sites they advertise with; for example weather.com probably contributed 1,000's of hits for x-10 just from my own usage alone...but I never once clicked on anything they were offering.
Every time you visit one and download the images in the ad, you are creating traffic on the domain.
So high traffic does not equal high interest or success, just that they shoved their ads on that many users.
What would happen if I have prior art and someone else registers a patent on what I was doing?
If they got more money, they could essentially blackmail me out of the patent by simply challenging my ability to do the prior art to the point I either give up, or go broke in lawyer fees.
Having prior art does not automatically void the patent, that just makes it so once it goes to court. Going to court in the first place already costs to much. So it works like a big ol financial club that can be used to whack the little guys to death.
I think the solution to the patent issues is to get the Patent Office to pull it's collective head out of it's butt and figure out how to get them right in the first place, and throw out the crud that doesnt make sense.
Out of the three retailers (Is PayPal considered a retailer?) The only one that matches up with the same fraudlent charge on my credit card is Egghead. I used a number of other retailers online, including CDW and a couple of small software makers.
[Let me guess, 415 Rubles (about $15) in Moscow Russia, from a company called "Global Telecom", right?]
So, despite what Egghead says about their break in, database theft, or however it was classified, it DID happen. My CC Company was smart enough to send a letter just in case I missed the charge on the bill. (I am in the process of contesting the charge at the moment.)
The problem with this type of thing and having the retailer pay for it, is that there is no real connection between the fraudulent charges and the one from Russia. I dont know if the company in Russia will get the money, but if they do, it wont necessarily be Egghead that takes the loss. It will likely be my CC company.
The "single use" number would work to combat this, and I see that more and more credit card companies will start using them. (Assuming there is not some overly restrictive patent on the concept.) But better than that, would be a "single retailer" number. One that works only if a certain retailer makes the charge. Then you know exactly who the culprit is, and you could turn it "on and off".
The single retailer number (I'd only need 5 or 6 of them, so they would be easy to manage) could then help the customer by allowing retailers to much more safely use the "single click" shopping method without overly jepordizing the consumer's credit card if a hole were found and exploited. In the event that the company is purchased or reorganized as in the case of OnSale and Egghead, there would be less for the consumer to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
Riemann discovered a function that reasonably well matches the number of primes found within long intervals of numbers. It can't find primes per se, it just predicts how many you'll find between 'm' and 'n'. And it's no help for factoring a product of two primes, so it won't crack codes.
When I saw this description, I instantly thought ROM!
Isn't one of the ideas behind hard drive and ROM memory seeking that you start by randomly dividing the thing in half or parts, searching systematically through that section, in the hopes you'll find what you want. If it does not work, just divide the remaining space in half again and search.
Over time, the end result would be you reduce the time spent searching, because much of the time you guess right and get the data you need.
Could this be used in a similar way to help locate primes exactly?
It seems to me, that if you could say the number of primes between 'm' and 'n', all you gotta do is keep moving m and n around and keep count of where and how many. Then use statistics to narrow down where the primes are within a small enough area that the brute-force methods of finding them become effective.
Or did I eat too much beef jerky again.
It is as safe to push the button as it is not to press the button.
:)
When you are pressing the button, you are not the one going to die. Loot or no loot.
When you are not pressing the button; your chances of being snuffed is the probability of any OTHER person pressing the button, times the chances of being snuffed every time the button is pressed. (Leaving frequency of pressing out of it, pick your own time-frame.)
Pressing the button therefore, has no bearing on your living or dying. But it DOES effect your financial fortune in relation to your ethical ideas of why one shouldnt push the button.
So it is truely an ethical question to push or not to push.
On a side note, the FCC once calculated (TLC or Discovery Channel or some such show..) that the airline industry (despite what they may SAY) on average acts as if human lives are worth 3.4 million each. In that they balanced lawsuits and so on verses the number of people that died when deciding on if they were going to take action or not.
I would go with their guideline and demand 3.4 million to push the button.
Here is another one for this list:
Web Pages that Suck Sort of a "dont do this or you'll end up on my web site" site.
Yes it is a childish prank. It is much less sophisticated than some of the fine TV programming such as Crank-Yankers or The Daily Show.
It should also be treated as such. If it is such a childish and unimportant event, why is Ford trying to sue the pants off 2600? Since when does ruining the finances of someone with a nasty lawsuit (and refusing to play nice to get a mutually agreeable resolution) an appropriate response to a prank?
It seems to me that the lawsuit is about the same as suing the neighbor kid because he thought it was fun to slap your car with a rolled up newspaper to make the alarm go of. Is THAT worth $100,000 per beep?
This IS a huge victory, something that is rare, but I hope we see more of. The lawyers have pushed people around for no reason too many times and gotten away with it. It is refreshing and a glimmer of hope that maybe they wont take over the planet after all.
In my opinion, this IS something useful to fight about. I hope that someday your financial future is threatened by some dumbass and a pack of lawyers. You deserve it.
A few points about why I think the Wayback Machine is good:
Have an old "emergency pager" (read, customer bugs calls because they cant get spell checker to work right at 3am) which was turned off, and then hidden so it is not carried. We lost the phone number, and then couldnt cancel the pager without it. Wayback had it from an old copy of our support site, and the phone number.
New web hosting client had 50% of the files that went down in the hosting company's servers in WTC. Wayback had them. We got all the verbiage from them.
We also occasionally need to point out to a customer what state their web site was in when we turned it over for maintanance by them. Having a third-party demonstrate that wiggly email gif was not us in the first place helps a lot.
I totally disagree with the original article, the Wayback Machine has some practical uses, and is fun for looking at old cheesy web sites. They also seem to be cooperating with people to take things out that need to be taken out. So I have no problem with it at all.
The first Myst game annoyed the piss out of me, mainly because my computer was too slow and I was too impatient to figure out some of the puzzles. (Really, would all those puzzles be there? Why not some sort of forensic crime fighting theme... peg the bad guy by wandering around crime scenes and labs)
Anyway, on your point two, an online game could be as large as they chose to make it and be continually changed. You just keep going, they keep building.... or have many many variations so that the game has different paths, outcomes and problems from month-to-month. What your buddy played just yesterday wont be what you play today.
The concept is interesting... I just hope they dont build it in 100% flash or something..
The largest exception I can think of is the guys running Verizon's network.
They are continually upset because the bannanas always get stuck in the vending machine.
Theoretically, internet sabotage could be more subtle. It's also less prominent in the minds of most civillians
Good Point.
However, that is exactly the point I would use to make the case that threats to our infrastructure would not come from terrorists, but disgruntled employees and the usual Internet/computer culprits.
9/11, bus bombings, USS Cole, etc. all share high visibility, pictures or live video that makes it exciting.
How many martyrs are going to be attracted by, "well, we think we cost the phone company several tens of thousands of dollars! God is great!"
To put it simply, I think the motive of the traditional terrorist attacker is going to make attacks on organizations by costing them money unattractive.
It takes a lawyer-infested culture like that of the United States to think a "make them spend/lose money" type attrition attack is a good way to operate. Note, I live in the US, this is just an example.
That makes him:
"Having a good birth-day"
Now only if my wedding aniversaries were like that.
Better example is DUI laws based on blood alcohol. "Unfair" in the sense that people have different tolerances for alcohol. (I, for one, am not safe to drive after smelling beer.) But that's not the point. The purpose of the law is discourage people from behavior that harms other people.
I do not know about your state, but in Wisconsin there are TWO laws about driving drunk:
You can be convicted of both, one, or the other; depending on your tolerance, BAC, what you were seen doing in the vehicle. After 0.10 everybody is out for the first one. After .03 and you are weaving you can still get convicted of the second one. You might even get convicted of the first one and not the second one, if you are a "good drunk driver". These two laws very effectively give the courts the ability to deal with most drunk drivers.
I run some web servers. Not big, but bigger than anything else I have ever seen.
Does anybody have any numbers on how big the Slashdot effect really is? Or have some specs on servers/connections that lasted and those that did not?
I am just curious, either it is real big, or there are a lot of Mickey Mouse web servers out there.
Thanks!
Now my fat kids dont have to get away from the computer to play "Eye Spy", they can just surf across the country from home!
Seriously though, notice the hick with the pile of crap in the back of the pickup at mile 1284?
How bout the buttcrack on that guy a couple miles earlier. It took me almost 600 miles of searching before he passed the first person I saw. (Granny and Grandpa, of course.)
I can see a whole game of scavanger hunt built around this thing.
One thing that struck me, Jersey looks a lot better than I imagined. Way to go guys!
YANAL IANAL but...
The 5th amendment appears to only apply to criminal law, such as fraud and so on. Also, in that case well duh, you should know better not to plot crimes in email.
The part where you can really get burned is in civil law, in which case 5th amendment will not give you a way not to provide all your email. Even if you were doing nothing wrong and innocently doing business, some person with an aggressive lawyer can cost you thousands of dollars of time and expense to comply with some bogus lawsuit.
That is a pretty good reason to have aggressive removal policies and to know how not to keep the stuff around.
Ok. Assume the LED has useful information. (Bits, 1 = on, 0 = off and it can turn on and off fast enough for a data line of average speed, i.e. 100meg ethernet)
Based on how much power, minus how much light energy leaves, and the heat generation of the LED (efficiency), how hot would the LED get at 100mhz? 1Ghz? 10Ghz? (or whatever gigabit ethernet bit rate would need to be to cover overhead)
I bet that if someone (not me!) knew the numbers, you'd find that your router would have burned a hole in the floor long ago if they actually modulated at the actual bit rate. Since they have not caught fire yet, I bet you could say that that most devices do not cycle for each bit.
That would make the article interesting but not significant.
Thus, for anything dealing with more modern levels of data transfer (1meg / sec or more) you could assume that the LEDs were not in fact lighting per bit, just because they do not get too hot. However, if the temp is still within reason, then it is still possible. (And back to the speculation in the rest of the responses.)
Making the article interesting and significant.
On a side note, I know that some devices definately do NOT blink per bit. I can watch my cruddy 4 port hub, cable modem, router and LAN card light. Some stuff goes in what appears to be packets or bits (cant tell which, cant see that fast), but the hub blinks along at a steady 3 or 4 blinks per second for data transfer. Definately NOT the same as what shows up on the router lights.
So, anybody know power/efficency/heat of LEDs well enough to ballpark the heat output on a port on a 100megabit router?
Job Board sites seem to have a problem of quantity over quality that makes people use the "shotgun method" of scattering things everywhere but not spending much time on it.
(Example that guy that spammed to get a job... I dont recall the name.)
Recently my organization wanted to get two database/web programmers and found that the people that applied would not move from their locations. We clearly stated that the person must move and be in the office every day. Those applications were automatically thrown in the trash.
Something about the model of the "large job clearing-house on the web" is not complete yet... or people just ignore things and engage in what is little more than spam.
We went back to friends, family and cruzing the bars near campus. We got both the new people that way. Both of them quite good, and they already lived in the area.
A guy being distracted by a woman with big breasts?
A guy being distracted by a woman with one big breast.
I can see it now, the line of cool kids waiting to beat up the pencilnecks as they step off the digital short-bus.
If I were them, I'd just pack it all in boxes, make em learn how to put the computers together, install an OS, and then decide which one they like. My next IT hire is going to build his/her own computer, if it cant, it doesnt get hired.
Holy Enemma Batman!
I found an example of why:
Check out this building
Who do they think they are? Microsoft? Why is this not a warehouse full of servers and a cube farm?
... so then in 1997 it was a massive buildup of "Push" technology.
...and in 1999 it was simply "Freedom to Innovate?"
Dont forget, high traffic could be caused by piggybacking on the other high traffic web sites they advertise with; for example weather.com probably contributed 1,000's of hits for x-10 just from my own usage alone...but I never once clicked on anything they were offering.
Every time you visit one and download the images in the ad, you are creating traffic on the domain.
So high traffic does not equal high interest or success, just that they shoved their ads on that many users.
Unreasonable...
... in which case there are a bunch of these things sitting around my building called "NT Server" and "Windows ME" and so on...
Of course, they aren't CREATIVE about being unreasonable, sticking to hard-lockups and blue screens and so on.
What would happen if I have prior art and someone else registers a patent on what I was doing?
If they got more money, they could essentially blackmail me out of the patent by simply challenging my ability to do the prior art to the point I either give up, or go broke in lawyer fees.
Having prior art does not automatically void the patent, that just makes it so once it goes to court. Going to court in the first place already costs to much. So it works like a big ol financial club that can be used to whack the little guys to death.
I think the solution to the patent issues is to get the Patent Office to pull it's collective head out of it's butt and figure out how to get them right in the first place, and throw out the crud that doesnt make sense.
Dude,
Anybody that puts their mouth on Clarance Thomas before Natalie Portman deserves to be eaten themselves first.
- jafiwam
Out of the three retailers (Is PayPal considered a retailer?) The only one that matches up with the same fraudlent charge on my credit card is Egghead. I used a number of other retailers online, including CDW and a couple of small software makers.
[Let me guess, 415 Rubles (about $15) in Moscow Russia, from a company called "Global Telecom", right?]
So, despite what Egghead says about their break in, database theft, or however it was classified, it DID happen. My CC Company was smart enough to send a letter just in case I missed the charge on the bill. (I am in the process of contesting the charge at the moment.)
The problem with this type of thing and having the retailer pay for it, is that there is no real connection between the fraudulent charges and the one from Russia. I dont know if the company in Russia will get the money, but if they do, it wont necessarily be Egghead that takes the loss. It will likely be my CC company.
The "single use" number would work to combat this, and I see that more and more credit card companies will start using them. (Assuming there is not some overly restrictive patent on the concept.) But better than that, would be a "single retailer" number. One that works only if a certain retailer makes the charge. Then you know exactly who the culprit is, and you could turn it "on and off".
The single retailer number (I'd only need 5 or 6 of them, so they would be easy to manage) could then help the customer by allowing retailers to much more safely use the "single click" shopping method without overly jepordizing the consumer's credit card if a hole were found and exploited. In the event that the company is purchased or reorganized as in the case of OnSale and Egghead, there would be less for the consumer to worry about.
jafiwam