I won't agree that it's nice that they record all my calls, emails, and movements. Their job isn't to be nice...I know my own news site is read on a regular basis by just about every intelligence agency there is...if they monitor everything I do, they're bored out of their minds, but they do know, I'm not a risk. I know if I look through my logs, I get a good glimpse of what they're willing to let me see (the occasional IP from their agency). I know that's not the whole story either. I just think of it as their way of saying "hi".
And how does it make you feel when these intelligence agencies say "hi" to you like this? Do you post about it so they know that you got their message? Or do you just go buy another copy of "Catcher In The Rye"?
And finally, do you find your news site as satisfying to run as a mimeographed newsletter would be?
This guy is a former colleague, and let's just say none of us that know him personally are surprised that he went all the way to the media to satisfy a grudge. The funniest part is that he never even had access on the level implied in this "story".
Wow, in addition to being an atheist Muslim Canadian Joseph McCarthy loving stock analyst who uses SPICE in his circuit design work you're also a mid-to-high ranking spook at the NSA? And yet you still find time to post about it all on/.?
Writer makes the case that Windows 7 is a turning point for Microsoft, and we all might start liking them soon...
Perhaps. I've also heard that Cheney being wheeled around in a wheel chair makes him more likable. And somebody said that Lindsy Lohan's new hairdo made her look smarter.
I guess only time will tell if any of these pan out.
That's what I'm going to be watching for too. There is a distressing tendency for those in power to turn a blind eye to the transgressions of their peers and predecessors. They campaign on high principles and pledge accountability, and then once they're in it's "off the table" and "time to move forward" in a "bipartisan" love fest.
The republicans swept in to congress in the 90's on with all sorts of high minded claims which (it turns out) were a thin mask on their true goals: they just wanted a turn at the trough. So the democrats come charging back a decade later crying about the "culture of corruption" and they proceed to effectively investigate, impeach, and appropriately sanction...no one, so far.
With control of the executive branch, a near super majority in congress, and strong support from the public, the democrats have no excuse now for turning a blind eye to what our "leaders" have been doing to this country. If they don't clean house with a will, it most likely means they too just wanted their turn at the trough.
How about this, run the numbers:
Sell 1 million songs vs 1 million CDs.
If you read up the thread you'd see that:
The fact that the digital downloads grew from 25% and went from 20% of all sales to 25% of all sales says that overall sales remained the same (ie the digital downloads were direct cannibalization of physical purchases). The numbers themselves give that for a fact.
So the issue is $1 million of downloads vs. $1 million of CD sales. The dollar amounts have stayed the same, but their expenses are lower, and yet they whine that it isn't as profitable.
Actually I've seen a report over at highdefforum.com which said, even though digital media has increased, sales of CDs have decreased, thereby giving the record companies a net loss in revenue ($1 songs aren't as profitable as $12 CDs).
Huh? How in the heck could that be? There are costs associated with manufacturing, shipping, distributing and marketing the $12 CD that just aren't there for the $1 downloads. If you're sell a million dollars of $12 CDs vs. the same amount of $1 downloads, how could you possibly make more profit on the CDs?
Well put, but it's hilarious that you misspelled 'matter' in your 'real' comment and then spelled it correctly in the parody.
*laugh* Good catch. I block copied the text and then mangled it in no particular order as opportunities occurred to me. Looks like I bungled the mangling.
Or will simple ASCII text continue to be the most efficient way for us to mingle our thoughts, especially when ASCII text won't generate a classloading error?
If you think plain ASCII text can't cause a system failure on loading, you need to spend some time grading undergraduate essays. Or reading corporate memos. Or, for that mater, some of the more egregious/. article summaries.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If you think plane ASC 2 text can't on loading cause failure off your system, need too spend sometime grading undergraduate written by essays. Ore reading corporate-memos. Ore, four that matter, sum of teh more eggreigious article sumaries on this cite.
Mozilla broke the 20% barrier for the first time in its history
It's been renamed several times, somewhat refactored, had a few parts replaced and a lot more added, but that code base was once the most popular browser on the planet.
The article is basically a troll / blog-frenzy IMHO.
A few points:
1. This study was done over a year ago (it ended in November of 2007), and was just that, a study. Oregon has been studying things like this since the 1990's at least, along with all sorts of other idea.
2. They aren't talking about tracking vehicles with GPS, just using GPS based odometers if manufactureers start offering them:
The concept requires no transmission of vehicle travel locations, either in real time or of travel history," the report said. "Accordingly, no travel location points are stored within the vehicle or transmitted elsewhere. Thus there can be no 'tracking' of vehicle movements."
Also, the report said, under the Oregon concept of the program, "ODOT would have no involvement in developing the on-vehicle devices, installing them in vehicles, maintaining them or having any other access to them except, perhaps, in situations involving tampering or similar fee evasion activities.
Whitty said last year it might take about $20 million to establish that the mileage tax is commercially viable. Eventually, GPS devices would have to start being built into cars, and fueling stations would have to be similarly equipped.
3. It's an alternative to the tax, not a replacement.
The gas tax would stay in force -- Kulongoski has proposed that it be raised 2 cents -- for vehicles not equipped to pay the mileage tax.
Loud but not firm? You're just making shit up now.
No, I'm recounting recent history. Check the links. McCain spoke out against torture right and left, but when the time came to do something about it, he caved. Twice. And then continued to make the same damned speeches about how much he opposed it. Check the record.
When politics is nothing but a calculus to you, son, you're doomed to be the bitch to a lucky formula inventor.
And when bananas are nothing but earwax, mom, it's time to wash your bike.
No, seriously. What does your statement even mean?
"Fields and applications that could benefit from their work are numerous, including computational models to solve problems in nuclear medicine, computer graphic design, and finance."
This explains a great deal.
No kidding. Makes you wonder if they're used in Diebold voting machines.
No, not at all. Diebold voting machines are specifically designed to eliminate sources of randomness in order to deliver predictable results.
He recognized that his dissent would do nothing to mollify his rabid colleagues, and so wisely chose not to provoke their ire by continuing to shout at them, knowing that his shouting would have no effect.He recognized that his dissent would do nothing to mollify his rabid colleagues, and so wisely chose not to provoke their ire by continuing to shout at them, knowing that his shouting would have no effect.
No, he loudly and publicly proclaimed his absolute unconditional refusal to endorse torture. Then, when his bill to prohibit it was quietly circumvented, he said and did nothing. Given the opportunity to vote for a revised bill that would have had teeth (by specifically prohibiting the CIA from torturing people, thus closing the loophole) he voted against it.
And then, on the campaign trail, he continued to play up his POW history and his objection to torture.
That isn't wisely refraining from shouting at your colleges, that's showing your true colors and folding like a hypocrite when it counts, and hoping the saps you pander to are too dumb to notice.
Any effort by the State to manipulate or direct economic planning will lead to increasing economic irrationality and inefficiency.
This is undoubtedly true, as long as you define "rational and efficient" in terms of the non-colluding well informed self interested rational agents that make up this hypothetical market. It's the same as saying:
Any effort by the User to manipulate or direct the flow of electrons in the CPU will lead to increasing the operating system's irrationality and inefficiency.
So, obviously, true.
But if the assumptions behind this implicit definition break down--if the market participants are themselves irrational, inefficient, short sighted, gullible, or just too damn busy to read every piece of fine print they are faced with--then your conclusion falls apart. The market will become unstable and result in a few players subjugating all the rest, and the system as a whole will cease to do anything beyond satisfying the whims of its masters.
Unless you are foolish enough to fancy yourself as one of the eventual masters, you should not be rooting for this outcome.
--MarkusQ
P.S. One way to resolve the problem is to impose some sort of progressive dampening on the system which recirculates wealth. But doing it by fiat (e.g. welfare) generally damages the value of the currency (loosely, why work if you can get money for free?) so demanding something in exchange (job creation programs) is much better. Even better is when these programs can produce something of lasting value, and better still if it's something of widely acknowledged long term value that "the market" would never have produced since it wasn't in anybody's short term interest.
Fixing our infrastructure, obtaining energy independence, building a permanent moon base, bringing global CO2 levels back to normal, any of these things would be ideal--no private entity could accomplish them, but collectively we could, and be much better for it.
Umm, McCain was the loudest critic of torture in the Senate. That's one of the reasons a lot of people DIDN'T like him as a candidate for president. He would have let thousands die rather than twist someones arm. Remember he was tortured, that changed his psyche.
He may have been loud, but he wasn't very firm. When Bush effectively nullified the ban on the military using torture with a signing statement, McCain said and did nothing. When congress tried to extend the ban to prevent the CIA from using torture as well, McCain voted against it.
He may have been against torture at some level, but not as much as he was in favor of getting the nomination. When the two goals came into conflict, he caved.
[...]all 6 billion people on Earth were your friends[...]
Can 3 billion of them be "with benefits"?
I'll pass by the obvious "your mama" joke and just note that it's nice to see that someone with your obvious self confidence and ambition is so unpicky.
Just a matter of looping through all known primes, seeing if x divides by it. That's order 1 since the number of primes is "fixed". If you don't find anything it divides by, it's a new prime (add it to your list) or its smallest factor is larger than your biggest known prime. Otherwise remember that factor, and start working on the dividend.
Check yourself there. It takes longer to perform division on larger numbers (say O(ln(N)^2), though a lot of this depends on the algorithm). If you plan to do the sieve of eratosthenes as you describe (the hard way), that's going to be another O(n*ln(ln(N)) for a total of O(n*ln(N)^2*ln(ln(n))) for each factor.
The sort of numbers you are thinking about when you say that testing via division is O(1) with hardware are 64 bit integers. The sort of semi-primes used in cryptography are on the order of 512 bits, and so (by the formula above) would take roughly 147, 184, 841, 669, 860, 395, 336, 238, 071, 097, 320, 918, 206, 612, 375, 539, 181, 907, 207, 001, 765, 334, 079, 455, 842, 963, 079, 473, 553, 687, 769, 537, 122, 026, 054, 410, 625, 268, 901, 031, 540, 756, 829, 794, 467, 840, 000 times as long.
So if your computer took a nanosecond to solve a 64 bit case (making it faster than the fastest consumer system presently available), and you had a million of them, and all 6 billion people on Earth were your friends, and each of them had a million of these uber boxes as well, and you had a way to collaborate on the problem with no overhead, it would still take you roughly 1, 920, 658, 729, 429, 876, 148, 289, 055, 386, 140, 718, 898, 913, 520, 422, 922, 263, 604, 244, 594, 006, 798, 154, 722, 944, 671, 495, 344, 450, 391, 916, 549, 249, 431, 238 times the age of the universe to factor one such number.
That's why nobody does it that way, and why it's considered a hard problem even though it might sound easy.
When Steve Fossett's plane crashed, nobody speculated that he was killed so he would be unable to break any more world records.
The reason for the Witness Protection Program is that people who have testified or are about to testify against powerful people often unexpectedly die under suspicious circumstances. This is a well documented phenomenon. The reason there isn't a World Record Setter Protection Program is that there are, AFAIK, no incidents of potential world record setters dying under suspicious circumstances.
Just last month Connell testified against some of the most powerful people on the planet, after years of their trying to prevent it, and he had just been called to testify again. The local news channel is also reporting that he recently told people that he thought his plane had been tampered with, and had refused to fly it twice since testifying.
Sorry to go a little grammer nazi on you, but there is no fullstop after Dr. Since the last letter of word to be abbreviated is the last letter of the abbreviation, the fullstop should not be present.
That's been the case in the UK for the last decade or two (longer at Cambridge) but in the U.S. the period is still the norm (as it was pretty much everywhere up until 1950 or so.
Not to go all history nazi on you or anything...
--MarkusQ
P.S. And (switching to spelling Nazi mode) grammar is spelt with an "a."
The flaw in your argument lies in the fact that you assume, because religion causes bad/demented people to do bad things, that religion is dangerous. Those people would be dangerous with or without religion.
No, I'm saying that people who take instructions from voices in their head, imaginary friends, all powerful beings no one can see, dogs, secret messages from space aliens, and so on are dangerous. Religion doesn't cause this, its just another instance of it.
That determination is for the higher court to make. I read it more like a judge saying "That's all you've got, an IP address? You need better evidence in my court. Dismissed."
I might be inclined to make the same judgment if you brought me and IP address from a log in a leaf node and said this was proof without reasonable doubt of a crime. Why didn't the original request ask for a name? I certainly would expect a court to respond more favorably to an accusation of a person, than one against a number.
The IP (and related edits) is evidence that a crime was committed, and where, but not evidence of who committed the crime. As such, it was pretty solid evidence and certainly warrants further investigation. The standard in such a case is probable cause, not reasonable doubt, and is certainly met by the evidence.
Look at it this way: if someone was calling in fake bomb threats to hospitals and they got the persons number from caller ID, don't you think that would be a lead worth investigating? Even if you didn't have the name of the person making the calls yet?
Slashdot Mirror
And how does it make you feel when these intelligence agencies say "hi" to you like this? Do you post about it so they know that you got their message? Or do you just go buy another copy of "Catcher In The Rye"?
And finally, do you find your news site as satisfying to run as a mimeographed newsletter would be?
--MarkusQ
Wow, in addition to being an atheist Muslim Canadian Joseph McCarthy loving stock analyst who uses SPICE in his circuit design work you're also a mid-to-high ranking spook at the NSA? And yet you still find time to post about it all on /.?
Amazing. Simply amazing. If true.
--MarkusQ
Perhaps. I've also heard that Cheney being wheeled around in a wheel chair makes him more likable. And somebody said that Lindsy Lohan's new hairdo made her look smarter.
I guess only time will tell if any of these pan out.
--MarkusQ
That's what I'm going to be watching for too. There is a distressing tendency for those in power to turn a blind eye to the transgressions of their peers and predecessors. They campaign on high principles and pledge accountability, and then once they're in it's "off the table" and "time to move forward" in a "bipartisan" love fest.
The republicans swept in to congress in the 90's on with all sorts of high minded claims which (it turns out) were a thin mask on their true goals: they just wanted a turn at the trough. So the democrats come charging back a decade later crying about the "culture of corruption" and they proceed to effectively investigate, impeach, and appropriately sanction...no one, so far.
With control of the executive branch, a near super majority in congress, and strong support from the public, the democrats have no excuse now for turning a blind eye to what our "leaders" have been doing to this country. If they don't clean house with a will, it most likely means they too just wanted their turn at the trough.
--MarkusQ
But as has been noted repeatedly, the total $ of sales hasn't changed. That was the whole point of this thread.
--MarkusQ
If you read up the thread you'd see that:
So the issue is $1 million of downloads vs. $1 million of CD sales. The dollar amounts have stayed the same, but their expenses are lower, and yet they whine that it isn't as profitable.
--MarkusQ
Huh? How in the heck could that be? There are costs associated with manufacturing, shipping, distributing and marketing the $12 CD that just aren't there for the $1 downloads. If you're sell a million dollars of $12 CDs vs. the same amount of $1 downloads, how could you possibly make more profit on the CDs?
--MarkusQ
*laugh* Good catch. I block copied the text and then mangled it in no particular order as opportunities occurred to me. Looks like I bungled the mangling.
--MarkusQ
If you think plain ASCII text can't cause a system failure on loading, you need to spend some time grading undergraduate essays. Or reading corporate memos. Or, for that mater, some of the more egregious /. article summaries.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If you think plane ASC 2 text can't on loading cause failure off your system, need too spend sometime grading undergraduate written by essays. Ore reading corporate-memos. Ore, four that matter, sum of teh more eggreigious article sumaries on this cite.
It's been renamed several times, somewhat refactored, had a few parts replaced and a lot more added, but that code base was once the most popular browser on the planet.
--Markus
The article is basically a troll / blog-frenzy IMHO.
A few points:
1. This study was done over a year ago (it ended in November of 2007), and was just that, a study. Oregon has been studying things like this since the 1990's at least, along with all sorts of other idea.
2. They aren't talking about tracking vehicles with GPS, just using GPS based odometers if manufactureers start offering them:
3. It's an alternative to the tax, not a replacement.
--MarkusQ
No, I'm recounting recent history. Check the links. McCain spoke out against torture right and left, but when the time came to do something about it, he caved. Twice. And then continued to make the same damned speeches about how much he opposed it. Check the record.
And when bananas are nothing but earwax, mom, it's time to wash your bike.
No, seriously. What does your statement even mean?
--Markus
No, not at all. Diebold voting machines are specifically designed to eliminate sources of randomness in order to deliver predictable results.
--MarkusQ
No, he loudly and publicly proclaimed his absolute unconditional refusal to endorse torture. Then, when his bill to prohibit it was quietly circumvented, he said and did nothing. Given the opportunity to vote for a revised bill that would have had teeth (by specifically prohibiting the CIA from torturing people, thus closing the loophole) he voted against it.
And then, on the campaign trail, he continued to play up his POW history and his objection to torture.
That isn't wisely refraining from shouting at your colleges, that's showing your true colors and folding like a hypocrite when it counts, and hoping the saps you pander to are too dumb to notice.
--MarkusQ
This is undoubtedly true, as long as you define "rational and efficient" in terms of the non-colluding well informed self interested rational agents that make up this hypothetical market. It's the same as saying:
So, obviously, true.
But if the assumptions behind this implicit definition break down--if the market participants are themselves irrational, inefficient, short sighted, gullible, or just too damn busy to read every piece of fine print they are faced with--then your conclusion falls apart. The market will become unstable and result in a few players subjugating all the rest, and the system as a whole will cease to do anything beyond satisfying the whims of its masters.
Unless you are foolish enough to fancy yourself as one of the eventual masters, you should not be rooting for this outcome.
--MarkusQ
P.S. One way to resolve the problem is to impose some sort of progressive dampening on the system which recirculates wealth. But doing it by fiat (e.g. welfare) generally damages the value of the currency (loosely, why work if you can get money for free?) so demanding something in exchange (job creation programs) is much better. Even better is when these programs can produce something of lasting value, and better still if it's something of widely acknowledged long term value that "the market" would never have produced since it wasn't in anybody's short term interest.
Fixing our infrastructure, obtaining energy independence, building a permanent moon base, bringing global CO2 levels back to normal, any of these things would be ideal--no private entity could accomplish them, but collectively we could, and be much better for it.
He may have been loud, but he wasn't very firm. When Bush effectively nullified the ban on the military using torture with a signing statement, McCain said and did nothing. When congress tried to extend the ban to prevent the CIA from using torture as well, McCain voted against it.
He may have been against torture at some level, but not as much as he was in favor of getting the nomination. When the two goals came into conflict, he caved.
--MarkusQ
I'll pass by the obvious "your mama" joke and just note that it's nice to see that someone with your obvious self confidence and ambition is so unpicky.
Or, I suppose, desperate.
--MarkusQ
Check yourself there. It takes longer to perform division on larger numbers (say O(ln(N)^2), though a lot of this depends on the algorithm). If you plan to do the sieve of eratosthenes as you describe (the hard way), that's going to be another O(n*ln(ln(N)) for a total of O(n*ln(N)^2*ln(ln(n))) for each factor.
The sort of numbers you are thinking about when you say that testing via division is O(1) with hardware are 64 bit integers. The sort of semi-primes used in cryptography are on the order of 512 bits, and so (by the formula above) would take roughly 147, 184, 841, 669, 860, 395, 336, 238, 071, 097, 320, 918, 206, 612, 375, 539, 181, 907, 207, 001, 765, 334, 079, 455, 842, 963, 079, 473, 553, 687, 769, 537, 122, 026, 054, 410, 625, 268, 901, 031, 540, 756, 829, 794, 467, 840, 000 times as long.
So if your computer took a nanosecond to solve a 64 bit case (making it faster than the fastest consumer system presently available), and you had a million of them, and all 6 billion people on Earth were your friends, and each of them had a million of these uber boxes as well, and you had a way to collaborate on the problem with no overhead, it would still take you roughly 1, 920, 658, 729, 429, 876, 148, 289, 055, 386, 140, 718, 898, 913, 520, 422, 922, 263, 604, 244, 594, 006, 798, 154, 722, 944, 671, 495, 344, 450, 391, 916, 549, 249, 431, 238 times the age of the universe to factor one such number.
That's why nobody does it that way, and why it's considered a hard problem even though it might sound easy.
-- MarkusQ
It's called tying up loose ends.
--MarkusQ
The reason for the Witness Protection Program is that people who have testified or are about to testify against powerful people often unexpectedly die under suspicious circumstances. This is a well documented phenomenon. The reason there isn't a World Record Setter Protection Program is that there are, AFAIK, no incidents of potential world record setters dying under suspicious circumstances.
Just last month Connell testified against some of the most powerful people on the planet, after years of their trying to prevent it, and he had just been called to testify again. The local news channel is also reporting that he recently told people that he thought his plane had been tampered with, and had refused to fly it twice since testifying.
-- MarkusQ
Dijkstra's "A Discipline of Programming" is high on my list, as well as "Programing Pearls" and "Perceptions".
Oh, and "Smalltalk-80: The Language and It's Implementation"
--MarkusQ
That's been the case in the UK for the last decade or two (longer at Cambridge) but in the U.S. the period is still the norm (as it was pretty much everywhere up until 1950 or so.
Not to go all history nazi on you or anything...
--MarkusQ
P.S. And (switching to spelling Nazi mode) grammar is spelt with an "a."
Liechtenstein?
How is that a threat?
Oh wait, you meant Lieberman, didn't you?
--MarkusQ
No, I'm saying that people who take instructions from voices in their head, imaginary friends, all powerful beings no one can see, dogs, secret messages from space aliens, and so on are dangerous. Religion doesn't cause this, its just another instance of it.
--MarkusQ
The IP (and related edits) is evidence that a crime was committed, and where, but not evidence of who committed the crime. As such, it was pretty solid evidence and certainly warrants further investigation. The standard in such a case is probable cause, not reasonable doubt, and is certainly met by the evidence.
Look at it this way: if someone was calling in fake bomb threats to hospitals and they got the persons number from caller ID, don't you think that would be a lead worth investigating? Even if you didn't have the name of the person making the calls yet?
--MarkusQ