I'm ashamed at this site sometimes, especially looking back at many of the high scoring posts from 9/11 that basically said we got what we deserved. Those women and men, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, just trying to mind their own business and go to work did not deserve to die a fiery death that day. Nor do they deserve to have their rememberance used as a launching point for cheap political attacks.
I do feel sorry for the dead, but I'm even sorrier for the ones that lived and simply decided to REVENGE.
Albert Einstein put it well : "It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." I wonder what he would've said about retaliation.
It goes both ways, you know. Don't come here telling me to mourn. I'm currently mourning for Iraqians about to die...
So AFAICT, the trojan would have to identify itself by looking at the structure or semantics of the source file. But that's going to be tricky too.
For a compiler? Really? Get real...
That block of code must be specific enough that the trojan is never triggered when compiling other programs, and non-arbitrary enough that no one will re-write it in a zeal of code clean-up.
You don't think that the GCC source base has enough such blocks that are relatively static as to uniquely identify it's GCC souce? Especially when the identifier is a compiler itself? Many Ansi C features haven't changed and for a grande part won't.
How much do you know about programming to begin with? Did you read the article? Did you understand it? Who the fsck moderated you up?
Desktop usage != web usage. US web usage makes up the largest share by far [statmarket.com] of international web usage: 42.65%,
And again, bollocksed statistics. I bet starmarket only dns queries web traffic as most of the web traffic sites I've seen, and quite falsly claims that all.com,.org and.net sites would be US.
Don't people know that those browser statistics are flawed, for example, a lot of Mozilla (on top of Linux) users have their browsers claim to be IE for web sites.
Your visceral hatred of Microsoft has you defending Java's disgustingly verbose syntactic conventions for properties where yep, they got that wonderful beans model, then proceeded to do absolutely NOTHING with the language syntax to support it.
Couldn't agree more, but the same won't hold for C/C++ which they referred to.
I bet you thought those were direct property accesses, right? I wouldn't expect such a staunch defender of The One True Faith to actually look up the mechanisms of property declarations...
Doh, it being methodized was obvious enough. It just kinda bugged the hell out of me seing: foo.setSize (getSize () + 1); label.getFont().setBold (true);
Labeled as "typical code" in C++.
And the part which you were obviously referring to as it cannot be done in C++ (because one can't overload.):
label.font.bold = true
Well, I for one am quite doubtfull wether that is better than what C++ has now: label.font().bold = true
The article goes on and argues that the.font. syntax won't be mistaken for a field by "However, almost all classes with any real complexity designed in Java (and certainly in C#) do not have public fields anyway.".
Well, I sure don't see the "extra" parentheses harmfull, moreover I'm worried about the complexities of the scoping rules for similarily named fields.
Having read the cursive (italic) parts of the article, I have to say that I don't agree with most of it. And just as my comments here are biased, so is the article. Rants like these don't make good articles. That's why I post my crap here, which would've been a fair idea for that author aswell.
Now, if that isn't biased crap then I must be the guy bending over at goatse.cx. The rest of the article goes on in much the same way.
I just knew it. For C/C++ coders C# is what Windows is to a proper OS users. It may be easier if you're a numwit, but I'm quite sure that the design is rigid and quite quickly you'll wind face to face with some illogicality or utter impracticality. And there you are... not happy as a clam, but happy as a lion with a hedgehog rammed up in it's butt.
If you're now thinking "well, C++ is flawed, too" the you've missed the point or you only think you know C/C++. There's a big difference in knowing and mastering and my guess is that that in particular will be the problem with C#, as with all other Mickeyware.
C# really is a nice language. It is more powerful than other.NET languages (such as VB.NET) because it allows you to write unsafe code (ie, code that doesn't have to go through the garbage collector). Not that most MS programmers will need this capability, but its nice to have if you need the extra performance over maintainability/safety.
Where do these people come from?
C# also gives you the ability to write XML comments in your code that can be parsed by the compiler to generate documentation. There is also an open source project called "NDOC" (hosted on Source Forge) that lets you generate really cool and helpful docs.
Some people really know not just where do we want to go tomorrow, but also where we've been for years now.
Honestly, I believe there are some differences in syntax and power, but I don't know the details (as I am not that experienced with Java) but it would seem this book could help answer that question. I plan on taking a look at this book. Thanks for the review, and again- nice to see this kind of thing on Slashdot!
Ah, now I get it. Mickeysoft's PR/marketing person making a fake appearance in Slashdot. Thank god, and I thought this was for real...
If the reason for holding these "debates" is to foster intellectual honesty in "both camps," then at least they should admit that there are a great number of reasonable people who hold neither of these publicized views. By limiting the debate to these two views they present the undecided with a false dichotomy, and by golly, with as effective as science is elsewhere, that must mean that there is no God!
Marvellous points indeed, and I fully agree. Most religious people that I know of are far from creationism. Actually I cannot believe that anyone in their right minds would actually believe and promote creationism. You go figure out what meen there with "in their right minds".
BUT I must say that among western scientists outside US the whole god discussion has been dropped aswell. Due to it being unnecessary assumption. It serves no purpose whatsoever, taken, that you don't need the (should I even say childish) comfort a belief to some higher power can bring you.
Just before you go ranting back at me, I must clarify that I'm not denying gods existence, I'm merely stating that as an uncausal entity it's not worth the hypothesis.
Is this the book you're referring to? If so, the author is Eric Temple Bell and it is a fabulous book. I didn't see any books on Amazon written by a Carl Brooks that dealt with math.
No, that's not it. And now that I think about it, Carl Brooks is some one else. It took a bit of googling for me to dig it out. It's Carl (Benjamin) Boyer and the book's actually "The History of Mathematics".
The origian is relatively old, but there are newer editions available and my understanding is that it's still considered to be quite accurate and a classic text book on history of mathematics.
It seems that the finnish translator had been imaginative enough to include a subtle "Queen of Sciences" remark after the actual title. Oddly enough I only remembered that.
The idea is a paradox, always were, always will be
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CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Copy protection is a paradox for one-way media (like CDs/DVDs/TV/Radio/etc... Plain and simple.
As long as the end-user, i.e. the viewer, cannot be trusted in all circumstances, there is no way on earth to protect it, because at some point along the line from the DVD to the TV electron cannon or LCD crystals the signal must be deciphered.
There will always be people that will capture that and put it out as an mp3 or DivX.
It seems to me that if he has "al'Khwarizmi" in his name, he is from central Asia, and not from the Middle East.
Not true, he's from the islamic persian empire, where math took huge steps really, but is mostly forgotten. This was after the fall of the Roman and when the europe lived the dark ages shadowed by the strangulating grab of the new christian religion. It wasn't until about 15th century when europe woke up again. Naturally western civilizations (such where I'm from) sadly neglect this and only highly remark the greeks and then leap forward about one and a half a millenium, from the geometry to calculus, neglecting the huge work that had to be done especially in the field of algebra, which in many ways is the foundation of modern mathematics.
One fabulous book about the history of math is written by Carl Brooks, titled something like queen of sciences or similar.
What nobody knows though is if error is good or bad. If Miller-Rabin says a number is prime, and you use it for an application that requires a prime number, the application will still work.
Not necessarily, and even when it does, incase it indeed is not a prime it may very well be attackable, even significantly. Although, when Miller-Rabin says one in 10^50, it means that the odds really are that low, and as it's way beyond your hardware reliability, who cares if it's actually false or not.
I've speculated that the existance of non-primes that work is one of the things that makes public key encryption hard enough to be useful. I can't prove it though, and offer it only as an interesting (but likely wrong) point to consider.
There are numbers that fool the gaussian test for primes, so called Carmichael numbers. There are also composite numbers (i.e. nonprimes) that pass Miller-Rabin test, therefore for example in Mathematica the Miller-Rabin test is combined with Lucas pseudoprime test. Though, it may still fail, it's sufficiently unlikely.
BUT how the fsck can you say that "the existance of non-primes that work is one of the things that makes public key encryption hard enough to be useful" ??? Public key cryptography IS being used, and a lot! And on top of which, the smallest problem with it is the generation of primes.
There are "problems" with it, the unawareness wether there actually is a P complex factorisation algorithm yet to be discovered. Also from a steganographical point of view, RSA has somewhat detectable bias, although it's usually being used just transmit the key for some symmetric proven-to-be-strong cipher, which inturn is used to encipher the actual message.
The Miller-Rabin test [mit.edu] will tell you if a number is prime with at most 1/4 probability of error. That sounds ridiculous, but the catch is that you can iterate it using a random parameter. Do the test twice and your probability drops to 1/16. Do it fifteen times and your chances of being wrong are about one billionth. If you're truly paranoid, do it 50 times. That'll bring the error rate of the algorithm magnitudes below the error rate of your hardware.
Just consider how fast it's on some of the better known commercial operating systems, because even that 1/4 error probability is magnitudes below the error rate of your platform
FWIW, products like these have been out for some time and still seem to work effectivly. They're *repellants*, not killers.
Show me one study, one reference or one non-hoopla article that shows that high frequency sound can act as mosquito repellant.
Even the mosquito zappers (the ones with the blue light that electrocute mosquitos) are deemed ineffective by the scientific consortium. One study for example showed only 0.13% of the insects killed by the zapper to be female mosquitos (the ones that actually sting us).
And don't come telling me there's a lot of this-and-that-and-grandma-says knowledge out there about mosquitos that science is not aware of. I'd say about the same amount as for curing cancer. Because there's quite a bit of pressure out there for finding proper repellants. Not because of the nasty itch they give you, but for the viral diseases they carry.
"According to reports from the World Health Organization, causes as many as 3 000 000 deaths annually."
For example, I work with some pretty able IT folks in my department. They do web programming and database analysis, and yet they were frankly amazed when I told them I load 10 CDs worth of music on a single disc and play them on my car MP3 player.
You gotta be a flamebait. "able IT folks" not knowing about MP3 players is a paradox. You call web-programmers "able IT folks".
There won't be room over room. At least not within the next 10 years...
Geez, 2D projections to 3D again?
Why was this interesting news item? It's not open source, it's like Doom with enhanced lighting, but not even enhanced enough, since it's vertex based (although fine grained). Just because it's built on top of SDL/OpenGL doesn't count for much, because there are numerous such projects out there, sadly none of them have gotten much wind under their wings. GPL'd 3D engine that gets masses moving is what I'm anxiously waiting for.
So then an Atheist's main occupation must be to run around debunking every instance of evidence that "god" does exist. Even if we assume that many instances of such evidence are indeed false (which seems like a reasonable assumption to me), don't you ever worry that sooner or later there will be proofs that you can't refute?
First off, I don't run around trying to make others believe in something wether it's atheism or some religion. Wish they shared the same respect for me, but no...
Secondly, since you ask I'll answer these briefly.
don't you ever worry that sooner or later there will be proofs that you can't refute?
Not one bit. There's been enough time for such to emerge (in any religion).
Furthermore, since you admit that proof of "Not god" is difficult (logically impossible, I believe) to obtain, then upon what fundamental principles do you base your belief?
The absence of proof for nonexistence is _Not_ an argument for existence.
I could go on back at you with, since there's no proof nor indication of it's existence then why do you make such an assumption that there is some god?
And isn't "belief without proof" a definition of "faith" anyway?
Belief with proof can still be a faith, but let's not get into that. But yes, Atheism can be seen as a faith. Although, practically all religions are almost atheistic, they more or less deny all other gods and assume their own. Atheism, differs in not assuming their own god.
And wouldn't that make your brand of atheism simply another faith-based belief system?
Any religion or such is a faith based belief system. If we go down along that path, my understanding of physics is a faith based belief system.
And please don't bother trying to get technical with me. Trust me, you will not succeed in arguing for god, there isn't enough ground for that. Smarter people have tried that for centuries. As with other equally smart people have tried argue against it.
The source of atheism is quite practical, e.g. in my case it's closer to a "I dont give a fsck wether there is a god or not, because I dont see it anywhere, I dont see effect of it, I see no reason to care about, thus I choose not to make the assumption that there is a god.".
Not that much different from wether there is ET life or not (to which I was referring to in my earlier post). In the absence of all proof, the more practical, the one with least further assumptions, gets my vote. In gods case, it's non existence, since for that I dont have to make a single assumption and pretty much evertything falls into place nice and smoothly. In ET life case it's "yes, there's probably ET life somewhere out there" (not UFOs on earth though), because for that also I dont have to make a single extra assumption.
Although I tend to believe there is intelligent life in the universe outside of Earth, I'm not sure this argument serves as proof or even a good starting point for a proof.
If you're worried about this you wouldn't probably understand any proof ever laid out to you either. It should go without saying that there won't be a proof, ever, until we find an ET or they find us. A lot like us atheists will have a hard time proving there isn't a god.
This may sound trivial, but it really isn't. Proving something nonexisting outside a purely theoretical system is rather difficult. Because any attempt to show a contradiction in it's existence is quite impossible.
The artice on the otherhand is more about showing a reasonable doubt, if you please, to justify believing in et life. More like showing the reasoning behind such beliefs. I, for one, found few rather interesting points of view there.
How can a scientific article use such a fool multiplier as billion ?
I'm not US and in my native language the billion would indeed be 10^12. But billion is worldwide understood as 10^9, also in various scientific literature.
Besides anyone dumb enough to think they might have meant the 10^12 (i.e. one trillion), shouldn't be reading the article anyway.
For those interested the notation comes from the prefixes mi, bi, tri and so forth representing the common one, two and three, but the US formula is 10^(3+3*X) where as the european formula is 10^(6*X) where X is the prefix number. From there you can see how the million is same for both formulas, but the following quantitys differ quite significantly.
It's not once or twice that I've seen the US budjet (few trillions, i.e. 10^12) been poorly translated to my native language also as our trillions, making the error quite enormous (10^3*6 == 10^18).
I'm deffinitely not a big fan of Spielberg, though I admit that he's had his moments too. It's just that Lucas has now twice fumbled quite miserably with his efforts. I mean Episode 2 had tolerable plot and some pretty good stuff in it, too, but the adventure game and sound of musics scenes (just to name a few) were again a tad too much, as with JarJar and the Boonta eve race (just to name a few) in Episode 1.
Having clearly witnessed how Lucas either has lost all class and style or has been forced to do so by the marketing department, I for one would be pretty much willing to let any director give it a shot.
I for one would be pretty damn anxious to see the later episodes done by likes of Scorsese or Scott.
Thenagain, I do admit that I never mind them making total-crap sequels. Take Highlander II & III for example, the first one hasnt been diminshed by those lame-excuse-for-a-movies.
Ahhhhhh!!!!!! What the heck! It must just be too early in the morning for most of you. More than half the posts already have said basically, "So what, wouldn't you do it too?" or "What's so wrong with that?" How is it that we find it so easy to place a value on a human life? If asked the question, "What is my life worth to you?", can you really respond to me with a dollar amount?
Couldn't agree more, although there's more to it. It should be relatively easy to argue against pressing the button even from a selfish stand. I think the catch here is that people don't think deep enough with this thing. They think about the price tag and think about wether their conscience could handle it, but they stop there and don't consider it the other way around. It does go both ways.
People often don't understand how much sense there really is in the old saying "there's no free lunch". Your ass would also be on the line when someone on the otherside of the planet were to press a similar button.
A little like piracy and other forms of electronic stealing, the same brats that never buy games or software tend to wind up selling such games or software back to similar pirates. (IMHO, a point of view not pointed out often enough)
Re:Brazil & Jeesus - one fan less
on
World Cup Final
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· Score: 1
>> I have been a brazil fan all my life > >Really? Funny you didn't know half of them are Christians, then.
Ofcourse I knew they're mostly catholic and all that. I dont care wether they were sceptics or even satan worshippers, you brat. The point was that it was a world cup final not some hallelujah convention.
>> I mean, they took their national team t-shirts off and put the gold medal on their back just show the jeesus crap more.
> What a paragon of tolerance you are, sir:-)
Lol, are you serious ? Do you not understand the issue involved ?
Brazil & Jeesus -> one fan less
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World Cup Final
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· Score: 1, Troll
I have been a brazil fan all my life, but I was extremely disappointed in seeing all those fantastic bazilian players with "Jeesus loves you T-shirts" and praying. I mean, they took their national team t-shirts off and put the gold medal on their back just show the jeesus crap more.
Mixing politics and sports is worse enough, but mixing religious yada yada with anything is far worse...
(Slayer released 11/9 an album which said it well enough : "God hates us all";))
Slashdot Mirror
I'm ashamed at this site sometimes, especially looking back at many of the high scoring posts from 9/11 that basically said we got what we deserved. Those women and men, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, just trying to mind their own business and go to work did not deserve to die a fiery death that day. Nor do they deserve to have their rememberance used as a launching point for cheap political attacks.
I do feel sorry for the dead, but I'm even sorrier for the ones that lived and simply decided to REVENGE.
Albert Einstein put it well : "It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." I wonder what he would've said about retaliation.
It goes both ways, you know. Don't come here telling me to mourn. I'm currently mourning for Iraqians about to die...
So AFAICT, the trojan would have to identify itself by looking at the structure or semantics of the source file. But that's going to be tricky too.
For a compiler? Really? Get real...
That block of code must be specific enough that the trojan is never triggered when compiling other programs, and non-arbitrary enough that no one will re-write it in a zeal of code clean-up.
You don't think that the GCC source base has enough such blocks that are relatively static as to uniquely identify it's GCC souce? Especially when the identifier is a compiler itself? Many Ansi C features haven't changed and for a grande part won't.
How much do you know about programming to begin with? Did you read the article? Did you understand it? Who the fsck moderated you up?
Desktop usage != web usage. US web usage makes up the largest share by far [statmarket.com] of international web usage: 42.65%,
.com, .org and .net sites would be US.
And again, bollocksed statistics. I bet starmarket only dns queries web traffic as most of the web traffic sites I've seen, and quite falsly claims that all
Let's laugh at that together, shall we?
Lets look at some real data...
Geez, and that's a score 5 ?!
Don't people know that those browser statistics are flawed, for example, a lot of Mozilla (on top of Linux) users have their browsers claim to be IE for web sites.
Your visceral hatred of Microsoft has you defending Java's disgustingly verbose syntactic conventions for properties where yep, they got that wonderful beans model, then proceeded to do absolutely NOTHING with the language syntax to support it.
:
.):
:
.font. syntax won't be mistaken for a field by "However, almost all classes with any real complexity designed in Java (and certainly in C#) do not have public fields anyway.".
Couldn't agree more, but the same won't hold for C/C++ which they referred to.
I bet you thought those were direct property accesses, right? I wouldn't expect such a staunch defender of The One True Faith to actually look up the mechanisms of property declarations...
Doh, it being methodized was obvious enough. It just kinda bugged the hell out of me seing
foo.setSize (getSize () + 1);
label.getFont().setBold (true);
Labeled as "typical code" in C++.
And the part which you were obviously referring to as it cannot be done in C++ (because one can't overload
label.font.bold = true
Well, I for one am quite doubtfull wether that is better than what C++ has now
label.font().bold = true
The article goes on and argues that the
Well, I sure don't see the "extra" parentheses harmfull, moreover I'm worried about the complexities of the scoping rules for similarily named fields.
Having read the cursive (italic) parts of the article, I have to say that I don't agree with most of it. And just as my comments here are biased, so is the article. Rants like these don't make good articles. That's why I post my crap here, which would've been a fair idea for that author aswell.
This is a great site.
:
After a first glance I saw
This is typical code you might write in Java or C++:
foo.setSize (getSize () + 1);
label.getFont().setBold (true);
The same code you would write like this in C#:
foo.size++;
label.font.bold = true;
Now, if that isn't biased crap then I must be the guy bending over at goatse.cx. The rest of the article goes on in much the same way.
I just knew it. For C/C++ coders C# is what Windows is to a proper OS users. It may be easier if you're a numwit, but I'm quite sure that the design is rigid and quite quickly you'll wind face to face with some illogicality or utter impracticality. And there you are... not happy as a clam, but happy as a lion with a hedgehog rammed up in it's butt.
If you're now thinking "well, C++ is flawed, too" the you've missed the point or you only think you know C/C++. There's a big difference in knowing and mastering and my guess is that that in particular will be the problem with C#, as with all other Mickeyware.
C# really is a nice language. It is more powerful than other .NET languages (such as VB.NET) because it allows you to write unsafe code (ie, code that doesn't have to go through the garbage collector). Not that most MS programmers will need this capability, but its nice to have if you need the extra performance over maintainability/safety.
Where do these people come from?
C# also gives you the ability to write XML comments in your code that can be parsed by the compiler to generate documentation. There is also an open source project called "NDOC" (hosted on Source Forge) that lets you generate really cool and helpful docs.
Some people really know not just where do we want to go tomorrow, but also where we've been for years now.
Honestly, I believe there are some differences in syntax and power, but I don't know the details (as I am not that experienced with Java) but it would seem this book could help answer that question. I plan on taking a look at this book. Thanks for the review, and again- nice to see this kind of thing on Slashdot!
Ah, now I get it. Mickeysoft's PR/marketing person making a fake appearance in Slashdot. Thank god, and I thought this was for real...
If the reason for holding these "debates" is to foster intellectual honesty in "both camps," then at least they should admit that there are a great number of reasonable people who hold neither of these publicized views. By limiting the debate to these two views they present the undecided with a false dichotomy, and by golly, with as effective as science is elsewhere, that must mean that there is no God!
Marvellous points indeed, and I fully agree. Most religious people that I know of are far from creationism. Actually I cannot believe that anyone in their right minds would actually believe and promote creationism. You go figure out what meen there with "in their right minds".
BUT I must say that among western scientists outside US the whole god discussion has been dropped aswell. Due to it being unnecessary assumption. It serves no purpose whatsoever, taken, that you don't need the (should I even say childish) comfort a belief to some higher power can bring you.
Just before you go ranting back at me, I must clarify that I'm not denying gods existence, I'm merely stating that as an uncausal entity it's not worth the hypothesis.
Is this the book you're referring to? If so, the author is Eric Temple Bell and it is a fabulous book. I didn't see any books on Amazon written by a Carl Brooks that dealt with math.
No, that's not it. And now that I think about it, Carl Brooks is some one else. It took a bit of googling for me to dig it out. It's Carl (Benjamin) Boyer and the book's actually "The History of Mathematics".
The origian is relatively old, but there are newer editions available and my understanding is that it's still considered to be quite accurate and a classic text book on history of mathematics.
It seems that the finnish translator had been imaginative enough to include a subtle "Queen of Sciences" remark after the actual title. Oddly enough I only remembered that.
Copy protection is a paradox for one-way media (like CDs/DVDs/TV/Radio/etc... Plain and simple.
As long as the end-user, i.e. the viewer, cannot be trusted in all circumstances, there is no way on earth to protect it, because at some point along the line from the DVD to the TV electron cannon or LCD crystals the signal must be deciphered.
There will always be people that will capture that and put it out as an mp3 or DivX.
It seems to me that if he has "al'Khwarizmi" in his name, he is from central Asia, and not from the Middle East.
Not true, he's from the islamic persian empire, where math took huge steps really, but is mostly forgotten. This was after the fall of the Roman and when the europe lived the dark ages shadowed by the strangulating grab of the new christian religion. It wasn't until about 15th century when europe woke up again. Naturally western civilizations (such where I'm from) sadly neglect this and only highly remark the greeks and then leap forward about one and a half a millenium, from the geometry to calculus, neglecting the huge work that had to be done especially in the field of algebra, which in many ways is the foundation of modern mathematics.
One fabulous book about the history of math is written by Carl Brooks, titled something like queen of sciences or similar.
What a load of crap...
What nobody knows though is if error is good or bad. If Miller-Rabin says a number is prime, and you use it for an application that requires a prime number, the application will still work.
Not necessarily, and even when it does, incase it indeed is not a prime it may very well be attackable, even significantly. Although, when Miller-Rabin says one in 10^50, it means that the odds really are that low, and as it's way beyond your hardware reliability, who cares if it's actually false or not.
I've speculated that the existance of non-primes that work is one of the things that makes public key encryption hard enough to be useful. I can't prove it though, and offer it only as an interesting (but likely wrong) point to consider.
There are numbers that fool the gaussian test for primes, so called Carmichael numbers. There are also composite numbers (i.e. nonprimes) that pass Miller-Rabin test, therefore for example in Mathematica the Miller-Rabin test is combined with Lucas pseudoprime test. Though, it may still fail, it's sufficiently unlikely.
BUT how the fsck can you say that "the existance of non-primes that work is one of the things that makes public key encryption hard enough to be useful" ???
Public key cryptography IS being used, and a lot! And on top of which, the smallest problem with it is the generation of primes.
There are "problems" with it, the unawareness wether there actually is a P complex factorisation algorithm yet to be discovered. Also from a steganographical point of view, RSA has somewhat detectable bias, although it's usually being used just transmit the key for some symmetric proven-to-be-strong cipher, which inturn is used to encipher the actual message.
The Miller-Rabin test [mit.edu] will tell you if a number is prime with at most 1/4 probability of error. That sounds ridiculous, but the catch is that you can iterate it using a random parameter. Do the test twice and your probability drops to 1/16. Do it fifteen times and your chances of being wrong are about one billionth. If you're truly paranoid, do it 50 times. That'll bring the error rate of the algorithm magnitudes below the error rate of your hardware.
Just consider how fast it's on some of the better known commercial operating systems, because even that 1/4 error probability is magnitudes below the error rate of your platform
FWIW, products like these have been out for some time and still seem to work effectivly. They're *repellants*, not killers.
/ m osquito.htm) I'd say the whole post is just a big hooopla.
Show me one study, one reference or one non-hoopla article that shows that high frequency sound can act as mosquito repellant.
Even the mosquito zappers (the ones with the blue light that electrocute mosquitos) are deemed ineffective by the scientific consortium. One study for example showed only 0.13% of the insects killed by the zapper to be female mosquitos (the ones that actually sting us).
And don't come telling me there's a lot of this-and-that-and-grandma-says knowledge out there about mosquitos that science is not aware of. I'd say about the same amount as for curing cancer.
Because there's quite a bit of pressure out there for finding proper repellants. Not because of the nasty itch they give you, but for the viral diseases they carry.
"According to reports from the World Health Organization, causes as many as 3 000 000 deaths annually."
Having read the article mention in an earlier post (http://www.acponline.org/journals/annals/01jun98
For example, I work with some pretty able IT folks in my department. They do web programming and database analysis, and yet they were frankly amazed when I told them I load 10 CDs worth of music on a single disc and play them on my car MP3 player.
You gotta be a flamebait. "able IT folks" not knowing about MP3 players is a paradox. You call web-programmers "able IT folks".
You gotta be kidding us...
You are seriously missing the point, anyway. Cube doesn't want to be the ultimate, perfect engine with a ton of features.
And you haven't played loads of 1st person games either if that's what you think about no room over room.
Doom was 2D world projected into 3D (meaning it was only DRAWN as if it were 3D), it had no actual height in it.
Writing any "3D engine" these without 3D space in the world that it shows is pointless. 3D cards and processors are fast enough.
Yes, I do give credit to what he's accomplished with the lighting and all, but 2D world does not cut it.
It's not about the visual looks, it's about the manouverability inside the world that 3D engine tries to represent!
There won't be room over room. At least not within the next 10 years...
Geez, 2D projections to 3D again?
Why was this interesting news item? It's not open source, it's like Doom with enhanced lighting, but not even enhanced enough, since it's vertex based (although fine grained). Just because it's built on top of SDL/OpenGL doesn't count for much, because there are numerous such projects out there, sadly none of them have gotten much wind under their wings. GPL'd 3D engine that gets masses moving is what I'm anxiously waiting for.
So then an Atheist's main occupation must be to run around debunking every instance of evidence that "god" does exist. Even if we assume that many instances of such evidence are indeed false (which seems like a reasonable assumption to me), don't you ever worry that sooner or later there will be proofs that you can't refute?
First off, I don't run around trying to make others believe in something wether it's atheism or some religion. Wish they shared the same respect for me, but no...
Secondly, since you ask I'll answer these briefly.
don't you ever worry that sooner or later there will be proofs that you can't refute?
Not one bit. There's been enough time for such to emerge (in any religion).
Furthermore, since you admit that proof of "Not god" is difficult (logically impossible, I believe) to obtain, then upon what fundamental principles do you base your belief?
The absence of proof for nonexistence is _Not_ an argument for existence.
I could go on back at you with, since there's no proof nor indication of it's existence then why do you make such an assumption that there is some god?
And isn't "belief without proof" a definition of "faith" anyway?
Belief with proof can still be a faith, but let's not get into that. But yes, Atheism can be seen as a faith. Although, practically all religions are almost atheistic, they more or less deny all other gods and assume their own. Atheism, differs in not assuming their own god.
And wouldn't that make your brand of atheism simply another faith-based belief system?
Any religion or such is a faith based belief system. If we go down along that path, my understanding of physics is a faith based belief system.
And please don't bother trying to get technical with me. Trust me, you will not succeed in arguing for god, there isn't enough ground for that. Smarter people have tried that for centuries. As with other equally smart people have tried argue against it.
The source of atheism is quite practical, e.g. in my case it's closer to a "I dont give a fsck wether there is a god or not, because I dont see it anywhere, I dont see effect of it, I see no reason to care about, thus I choose not to make the assumption that there is a god.".
Not that much different from wether there is ET life or not (to which I was referring to in my earlier post). In the absence of all proof, the more practical, the one with least further assumptions, gets my vote. In gods case, it's non existence, since for that I dont have to make a single assumption and pretty much evertything falls into place nice and smoothly. In ET life case it's "yes, there's probably ET life somewhere out there" (not UFOs on earth though), because for that also I dont have to make a single extra assumption.
Although I tend to believe there is intelligent life in the universe outside of Earth, I'm not sure this argument serves as proof or even a good starting point for a proof.
If you're worried about this you wouldn't probably understand any proof ever laid out to you either. It should go without saying that there won't be a proof, ever, until we find an ET or they find us. A lot like us atheists will have a hard time proving there isn't a god.
This may sound trivial, but it really isn't.
Proving something nonexisting outside a purely theoretical system is rather difficult. Because any attempt to show a contradiction in it's existence is quite impossible.
The artice on the otherhand is more about showing a reasonable doubt, if you please, to justify believing in et life. More like showing the reasoning behind such beliefs. I, for one, found few rather interesting points of view there.
How can a scientific article use such a fool multiplier as billion ?
I'm not US and in my native language the billion would indeed be 10^12. But billion is worldwide understood as 10^9, also in various scientific literature.
Besides anyone dumb enough to think they might have meant the 10^12 (i.e. one trillion), shouldn't be reading the article anyway.
For those interested the notation comes from the prefixes mi, bi, tri and so forth representing the common one, two and three, but the US formula is 10^(3+3*X) where as the european formula is 10^(6*X) where X is the prefix number. From there you can see how the million is same for both formulas, but the following quantitys differ quite significantly.
It's not once or twice that I've seen the US budjet (few trillions, i.e. 10^12) been poorly translated to my native language also as our trillions, making the error quite enormous (10^3*6 == 10^18).
I'm deffinitely not a big fan of Spielberg, though I admit that he's had his moments too. It's just that Lucas has now twice fumbled quite miserably with his efforts. I mean Episode 2 had tolerable plot and some pretty good stuff in it, too, but the adventure game and sound of musics scenes (just to name a few) were again a tad too much, as with JarJar and the Boonta eve race (just to name a few) in Episode 1.
Having clearly witnessed how Lucas either has lost all class and style or has been forced to do so by the marketing department, I for one would be pretty much willing to let any director give it a shot.
I for one would be pretty damn anxious to see the later episodes done by likes of Scorsese or Scott.
Thenagain, I do admit that I never mind them making total-crap sequels. Take Highlander II & III for example, the first one hasnt been diminshed by those lame-excuse-for-a-movies.
Ahhhhhh!!!!!! What the heck! It must just be too early in the morning for most of you. More than half the posts already have said basically, "So what, wouldn't you do it too?" or "What's so wrong with that?" How is it that we find it so easy to place a value on a human life? If asked the question, "What is my life worth to you?", can you really respond to me with a dollar amount?
Couldn't agree more, although there's more to it. It should be relatively easy to argue against pressing the button even from a selfish stand. I think the catch here is that people don't think deep enough with this thing. They think about the price tag and think about wether their conscience could handle it, but they stop there and don't consider it the other way around. It does go both ways.
People often don't understand how much sense there really is in the old saying "there's no free lunch". Your ass would also be on the line when someone on the otherside of the planet were to press a similar button.
A little like piracy and other forms of electronic stealing, the same brats that never buy games or software tend to wind up selling such games or software back to similar pirates.
(IMHO, a point of view not pointed out often enough)
>> I have been a brazil fan all my life
:-)
>
>Really? Funny you didn't know half of them are Christians, then.
Ofcourse I knew they're mostly catholic and all that. I dont care wether they were sceptics or even satan worshippers, you brat. The point was that it was a world cup final not some hallelujah convention.
>> I mean, they took their national team t-shirts off and put the gold medal on their back just show the jeesus crap more.
> What a paragon of tolerance you are, sir
Lol, are you serious ? Do you not understand the issue involved ?
I have been a brazil fan all my life, but I was extremely disappointed in seeing all those fantastic bazilian players with "Jeesus loves you T-shirts" and praying. I mean, they took their national team t-shirts off and put the gold medal on their back just show the jeesus crap more.
;))
Mixing politics and sports is worse enough, but mixing religious yada yada with anything is far worse...
(Slayer released 11/9 an album which said it well enough : "God hates us all"
In cases like this where it's not immediately clear *who* is doing the "speaking", isn't the concept of "freedom of speech" clouded?
I am not american, but I still have to say NO.
Freedom of speech, wether it's from anonymous sources or not in this case, should not be conditional.
In this case Ford could've said that they're not behind the www.fuckgeneralmotors.com and that should've been the end of discussion.