"breaking the RSA algorithm itself" -- in fact, they want to break a single RSA key by factorizing the modulus. They are not proposing to break the RSA scheme. Since their "integer factorization" reference is a note by a crackpot I don't think they'll get very far...
The weak point to me is where they "map A to a quantum-mechanical operator". They completely ignore the timing of this step, which amounts to assuming assuming that multiplication by A takes time O(1). With that assumption I'm sure you can do linear algebra blazingly fast.
This French law is stupid, but to what extent should the badly-run shady organization in Brussels overturn by fiat laws made by the National Assembly?
The European Union executive runs roughshod over the European Parliament; there is much backroom dealing and invisible lobbying. Under such conditions I don't think the laws passed have much legitimacy, even if they achieve good results (they rarely do). Depending on the dictators from Brussels to enforce freedom in France is a contradiction in terms.
Why does the government regulate the business of a utility? In principle you could say that if the utility tried to shaft its customers, they would switch to the competition. In practice, there are three main issues.
In many cases this utility has a government-granted monopoly, or is a monopoly anyway. In most of the US and essentially in all of Canada, the cable companies are local monopolies. Bell is essentially has a monopoly on the infrastructure in Canada.
Even when there is more than one, utility companies tend to act in unison like a cartel. Not so easy to get away from them.
Finally, a communication vendor should be thought of as a common carrier -- they promise to deliver your signals. They don't promise any particular speed, but that doesn't mean that they should be able to discriminate between customers without good reason. If the terms-of-service included terms such as "every GB per month after the first 60 costs more" or "if you shift more than 2GB in eight hours we will throttle your connection" then there's nothing wrong with them. But when the terms of service are "we will provide you an internet connection" and nothing more, then you have the right to assume that the ISP and the backbone will treat you like every other customer: they will route all the packets you give them to the best of their ability.
Of course, the ISP & the backbone has to prioritize traffic when they are using much of the bandwidth of a pipe. And then traffic shaping might even make customers happy (prioritizing VoIP over eDonkey makes sense, right?) But whatever they do, they should do it in the open.
Employers generally refuse to pay workers for the time between walking in the door of the factory and reaching the production floor on the theory that they are only going to pay for actual production time. Because of regulations on hourly wages and minimum wage laws this is a big issue. This dispute is partly resolved by the "Portal-to-Portal Act", which generally says (IANAL) that employees have to be paid for tasks which are related to their job (expansively defined). This means that you don't get paid for travelling to work, or for extra hours just because you arrive early, but once the workday starts they can't decline to pay you for the time it takes to put on your safety gear for example, even though putting on safety gear isn't literally your job on the production floor (the Supreme Court has opined on this several times).
In this case the employers are claiming that you don't start doing your job until the computer boots up. Now if you weren't required to show up until the boot process is over they may have a case, but otherwise it's rather odd: booting the computer looks (to me) clearly related to using the computer to do stuff.
If you read the rules, you'll see that for a carpool to be a "public vehicle" and fall under the regulation at all, the driver must be paid. If you and your neighbour exchange the driving but no money then you're fine. If you pay your neighbour to drive then your neighbour becomes a "public vehicle" (I know it's stupid) and subject to regulation.
Note that if you advertise your car on this website and charge for the transportation, then you are in the business of driving people for money, so it's not unreasonable to say that you fall under the rules regulating such service (buses/taxis/whatever). I don't believe that there should be such laws at all, but that's a different issue altogether.
In fact, Godel proved the exact opposite: that you can make a list of all true statements of mathematics. Godel's completeness theorem states that every statement that follows from the axioms is in fact deducible from the axioms in finitely many logical steps. It is thus possible to enumerate all true statements by enumerating all deductions.
Godel also has proved an "incompleteness" theorem. That more famous (and less important) result is that there are statements that are true in specific models yet not provable from the axioms. It implies that there is no algorithm to decide whether a given statement is true -- but this has nothing to do with enumerating all true statements.
(Yes, I am a mathematician)
So, a paper claiming that small sample sizes lead to wrong conclusions is based on analysing a sample of only 49 other papers? The mind boggles with the self-applicability...
How much physics do you know? Dark matter is not a "cheap cop-out". It is a simple model that accounts for observations on many, many scales: from the rotation curves of galaxies, through lensing in galaxy clusters, via cosmic flows, the distance to high-redshift supernovae and all the way up to the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Why do you believe that all matter must be barionic? Or luminous?
For an example of a real cop-outs consider the various "MOND" proposals: in order to account for the rotation curves of galaxies, you change Newtonian gravity at the right length scale. This is easy to do -- and obviuosly by making the right modification you can get the rotation curve exactly on the nose -- but then you'd need a different epicycle for the lensing, yet another one for the fluctuations in the CMB, etc.
In case you are still sceptical, consider the neutrino. Much like today's dark matter, this particle was proposed because laws of mechanics (conservation of momentum in neutron decay) seemed to be violated. Since they are so weakly interacting, it was only much later that neutrinos were observed directly. So was the neutrino a "cheap cop-out"? Should physicists instead have assumed that the laws of mechanics are wrong?
Knot theory is a significant and active branch of topology. It is certainly not "under-researched" in any sense in which the expression can be applied to mathematics. In other words, it is not like there are obvious results left undiscovered because people don't care about the field. While knot theorists would certainly think that we should work on it more, in that they are no different than other mathematicians: most people think the problems in their field are the most interesting ones -- otherwise they wouldn't be working on them!
Defending a lawsuit is never innocent. Even if you don't owe them anything, you actually have to prove it. The RIAA will trot our "experts" who will testify that their "evidence" shows you are likely to have infringed copyright. To fight this you at the very least need to pay a good lawyer, and will probably need some experts of your own. Even if you have the skills to represent yourself, you can't recover the cost of your own time spent on this [IANAL but I think that the lawyer's guild got a law passed so that people who represent themselves can't collect attorney's fees if they win]. Now add to this the emotional stress of fighting a deep-pocketed corporation and dealing with the judicial system, and you'll see that there's nothing "easy" about being sued.
Several years ago a New Mexico Judge (IIRC) instructed the RIAA to bring further suits against individual defendants rather than join several in one action. For example, there is no accusation here that the various students acted in concert to infringe copyrights -- whatever each of them allegedly did, it was done on an individual basis. Did the University raise this issue with the judge? Does the ruling address it?
This is from Terry Prachett's "The light fantastic". I cannot find strong enough words to encourage you to read the whole Discworld series, starting with "The Colour of Magic".
While I agree that government should not use "expert testimony" that can't be reproduced, I don't buy the following logic (from the story, haven't read the opinion yet):
[the] Judge... ruled that the source code is not a trade secret.... the president of... the company that manufactures the machine, testified that the [machine] is not patented, and neither is its copyright on the source code [sic].
So: if it's not patented and not under copyright then it's not a trade secret? Usually a company gets a choice: copyright/patent (publish but get protection) or trade secret (can't publish). No patent or copyright holds in favour of trade secret protection.
The real ruling should be that while the company should be free to keep the workings of their device secret, the government should not be allowed to rely on evidence produced via devices whose inner workings are secret.
I think this tell us a lot more about the potential power of distributed computing than about prime numbers. While Mersenne primes are interesting to number theorists, we'll never find enough to do statistics on -- they are mostly of interests to pure mathematicians for reasons of curiosity. Random prime numbers of about 1024 bits are much more useful (and easier to find).
On the other hand, if these was ever a problem we really needed to solve (protein-folding screensavers come to mind) then we now know how much computation power we can harness.
Seems I missed Article 8 clause 3(c), which does oblige the UK to provide evidence but not the US. However, Article 10 allows the UK to asks for this exact same information if it wanted to.
Before posting such blatant falsehoods, read the treaty.
All the relevant language is 100% symmetrical between the US and the UK, and both sides have the same obligations: to provide some minimal amount of information by default, and to provide any further information the other side asks for if asked. The US has made it known that it needs further information: prima facie evidence of guilt. Nothing in the treaty forbids the UK from insisting on having the same information before making decisions. For whatever reasons, the UK has decided not to ask for this (this choice is codified in the Extradition Act of 2003) -- but this is a choice made by the UK which is not compelled by the treaty.
The treaty is clearly Constitutional in both the US and the UK. It's possible that the Extradition Act of 2003 isn't Constitutional, but that's a different kind of problem.
Then why isn't Delta cutting the middleman and engaging in its own speculation?
Answer: because speculators are giving us all a valuable service: they are allowing us to better allocate oil resources over time. Assume that oil next year will be more expensive. Should we then use less oil today, so that we have more next year? Also, if we use less oil today we can learn how to reduce our consumption, reducing the damage of the coming high prices. Now each of us can't predict oil prices -- but the speculators do. If they think oil will be expensive next year, they buy some now. This raises today's prices, but will have the effect of reducing consumption and lowering next year's prices. Essentially, they moved part of next year's shortage into this year -- without any central planning authority. Conversely, if speculators thought oil was about to become cheap, they would sell oil today (moving towards the present the future benefit of lower prices) and also invest in oil-using industries, giving these industries the capital to prepare for the upcoming cheap oil.
In fact, the airlines themselves speculate heavily on oil. If the speculators are adding $30-$60 to the price per barrel, this means that they are expecting the price to go up at least this much. If they are right, then the speculation may have staved off this future. If they are wrong, cheaper oil is just around the corner and they will lose a lot of money. Seems to me like the airlines should be happy.
Any groups attempting to stop piracy by going after individual infringers--exactly what Slashdotters were saying they should do back during the Napster lawsuit--is evil harassment of innocent people.
In fact, evil (suing a woman with multiple sclerosis who didn't use a computer) harassment (suing a woman on disability benefits who didn't use file-sharing software) of innocent people is what's going on.
And that is without noting that their damages are about $0.20/song (at retail prices, $0.99/song) but they are asking for the statutory $150K per, that they aren't actually proving their cases (have you looked at what they pretend is "evidence"?), that they are abusing the Federal Process (illegal joinder, failure to cite adverse opinions, citing opinions that have been reconsidered).
I guess her lawyer's barker was worse than her biter?
I guess proceedings dragged on until she couldn't afford to pay the legal bills so she was forced to cut her losses. For your lawyer to bite you have to be able to pay them.
And when the defense brings up Atlantic v. Howell, we can hope that even the 'making available' bit goes away.
It's too late for the defense to raise new sources: the court has already ruled on this dispute. If they wanted to cite Atlantic v. Howell they should have done it already.
Now the judge says that since it was agreed that files were "made available", infringement has already been established and all that remains is to decide on the damages. This is really serious -- the problem is the reverse of what you claim. Now whenever a defendants will cite Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA will cite Maverick v. Harper in return.
It seems comments don't carry over from the firehose posting?
In any case, in addition to the (partial) win on the damages, the girl lost an argument with much wider implications. Her laywer tried to argue that only for the files the RIAA's investigator actually downloaded was there actual evidence for infringement (these were 6 among 39 song she's being sued over). Oddly the lawyer didn't argue that downloading by the RIAA can't be infringement by definition. The court instead agreed with the RIAA that merely making a file available was sufficient to establish infringement. This will now give the RIAA further ammunition when the continue using the argument.
The person sitting next to you on a flight may have paid $500 more or less than you did, for no reason [emph. added]
In fact, they are paying a different price because they were willing to pay that price. That should be reason enough, but the situation is more fundamental. Imagine everyone on the plane had to pay the same price. Are you sure that there would be any price point which was profitable? Set it too low, and the plane would be full but the fares wouldn't cover costs. Too high, and you wouldn't have enough passengers. But a mix of passengers some paying more than others can be profitable.
People who book early want to be sure of the flight, and will probably pay a bit more. People who book last-minute must travel and will pay more. People who search on priceline probably care more about prices than people who go to the airline's website and book the most convenient itinerary. This mix increases the airline of maximizing their profits, by charging each customer as much as they will pay. It also increases the chances that there will be a way for me to buy a ticket at a price I like. I don't think it's unfair that other people are willing to pay more than I am for a similar service -- it's their problem. I also don't care that some people will not pay the price I'm willing to pay. They are willing to put in more effort into finding a cheaper flight.
Aggregator sites help reduce prices by facilitating comparisons. However, this has nothing to do with price discrimination, which the aggregators facilitate by giving the airlines another way to subdivide the market: people who search through the aggregator are quoted different prices than people who search on the airline's website, and both are quoted different prices than travel agents.
The only thing to see in sports coverage is who won.
I take it you have no interest in actually watching sporting events? Well, many people do. If an event broadcast in the PRC but not in Canada, then Canadian viewers would love to watch "pirated" PRC signal. DRM is essential to supporting the IOC's (mistaken, IMO) policy of licensing exclusive broadcast rights separately for each country. This simply doesn't make sense with internet broadcasting. To be honest, locality-based restrictions also help advertizers -- paying per viewer makes little sense when some of the viewers may not be in the right country to buy your product...
Personaly I think the IOC should license "online distribution" non-exclusively, and separately from the TV and Radio rights (which, being broadcasts, can be meaninfully limited territorially). Online distributors can then specialize by language, by locality, but also by sport or in other ways -- it should be up to them.
Slashdot Mirror
"breaking the RSA algorithm itself" -- in fact, they want to break a single RSA key by factorizing the modulus. They are not proposing to break the RSA scheme. Since their "integer factorization" reference is a note by a crackpot I don't think they'll get very far ...
The weak point to me is where they "map A to a quantum-mechanical operator". They completely ignore the timing of this step, which amounts to assuming assuming that multiplication by A takes time O(1). With that assumption I'm sure you can do linear algebra blazingly fast.
This French law is stupid, but to what extent should the badly-run shady organization in Brussels overturn by fiat laws made by the National Assembly?
The European Union executive runs roughshod over the European Parliament; there is much backroom dealing and invisible lobbying. Under such conditions I don't think the laws passed have much legitimacy, even if they achieve good results (they rarely do). Depending on the dictators from Brussels to enforce freedom in France is a contradiction in terms.
\end{rant}
Why does the government regulate the business of a utility? In principle you could say that if the utility tried to shaft its customers, they would switch to the competition. In practice, there are three main issues.
Of course, the ISP & the backbone has to prioritize traffic when they are using much of the bandwidth of a pipe. And then traffic shaping might even make customers happy (prioritizing VoIP over eDonkey makes sense, right?) But whatever they do, they should do it in the open.
Employers generally refuse to pay workers for the time between walking in the door of the factory and reaching the production floor on the theory that they are only going to pay for actual production time. Because of regulations on hourly wages and minimum wage laws this is a big issue. This dispute is partly resolved by the "Portal-to-Portal Act", which generally says (IANAL) that employees have to be paid for tasks which are related to their job (expansively defined). This means that you don't get paid for travelling to work, or for extra hours just because you arrive early, but once the workday starts they can't decline to pay you for the time it takes to put on your safety gear for example, even though putting on safety gear isn't literally your job on the production floor (the Supreme Court has opined on this several times). In this case the employers are claiming that you don't start doing your job until the computer boots up. Now if you weren't required to show up until the boot process is over they may have a case, but otherwise it's rather odd: booting the computer looks (to me) clearly related to using the computer to do stuff.
If you read the rules, you'll see that for a carpool to be a "public vehicle" and fall under the regulation at all, the driver must be paid. If you and your neighbour exchange the driving but no money then you're fine. If you pay your neighbour to drive then your neighbour becomes a "public vehicle" (I know it's stupid) and subject to regulation. Note that if you advertise your car on this website and charge for the transportation, then you are in the business of driving people for money, so it's not unreasonable to say that you fall under the rules regulating such service (buses/taxis/whatever). I don't believe that there should be such laws at all, but that's a different issue altogether.
In fact, Godel proved the exact opposite: that you can make a list of all true statements of mathematics. Godel's completeness theorem states that every statement that follows from the axioms is in fact deducible from the axioms in finitely many logical steps. It is thus possible to enumerate all true statements by enumerating all deductions. Godel also has proved an "incompleteness" theorem. That more famous (and less important) result is that there are statements that are true in specific models yet not provable from the axioms. It implies that there is no algorithm to decide whether a given statement is true -- but this has nothing to do with enumerating all true statements. (Yes, I am a mathematician)
So, a paper claiming that small sample sizes lead to wrong conclusions is based on analysing a sample of only 49 other papers? The mind boggles with the self-applicability ...
How much physics do you know? Dark matter is not a "cheap cop-out". It is a simple model that accounts for observations on many, many scales: from the rotation curves of galaxies, through lensing in galaxy clusters, via cosmic flows, the distance to high-redshift supernovae and all the way up to the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Why do you believe that all matter must be barionic? Or luminous?
For an example of a real cop-outs consider the various "MOND" proposals: in order to account for the rotation curves of galaxies, you change Newtonian gravity at the right length scale. This is easy to do -- and obviuosly by making the right modification you can get the rotation curve exactly on the nose -- but then you'd need a different epicycle for the lensing, yet another one for the fluctuations in the CMB, etc.
In case you are still sceptical, consider the neutrino. Much like today's dark matter, this particle was proposed because laws of mechanics (conservation of momentum in neutron decay) seemed to be violated. Since they are so weakly interacting, it was only much later that neutrinos were observed directly. So was the neutrino a "cheap cop-out"? Should physicists instead have assumed that the laws of mechanics are wrong?
Knot theory is a significant and active branch of topology. It is certainly not "under-researched" in any sense in which the expression can be applied to mathematics. In other words, it is not like there are obvious results left undiscovered because people don't care about the field. While knot theorists would certainly think that we should work on it more, in that they are no different than other mathematicians: most people think the problems in their field are the most interesting ones -- otherwise they wouldn't be working on them!
In that case, did any of the students also file independently of the university to get their interests considered?
Defending a lawsuit is never innocent. Even if you don't owe them anything, you actually have to prove it. The RIAA will trot our "experts" who will testify that their "evidence" shows you are likely to have infringed copyright. To fight this you at the very least need to pay a good lawyer, and will probably need some experts of your own. Even if you have the skills to represent yourself, you can't recover the cost of your own time spent on this [IANAL but I think that the lawyer's guild got a law passed so that people who represent themselves can't collect attorney's fees if they win]. Now add to this the emotional stress of fighting a deep-pocketed corporation and dealing with the judicial system, and you'll see that there's nothing "easy" about being sued.
Several years ago a New Mexico Judge (IIRC) instructed the RIAA to bring further suits against individual defendants rather than join several in one action. For example, there is no accusation here that the various students acted in concert to infringe copyrights -- whatever each of them allegedly did, it was done on an individual basis. Did the University raise this issue with the judge? Does the ruling address it?
This is from Terry Prachett's "The light fantastic". I cannot find strong enough words to encourage you to read the whole Discworld series, starting with "The Colour of Magic".
While I agree that government should not use "expert testimony" that can't be reproduced, I don't buy the following logic (from the story, haven't read the opinion yet):
So: if it's not patented and not under copyright then it's not a trade secret? Usually a company gets a choice: copyright/patent (publish but get protection) or trade secret (can't publish). No patent or copyright holds in favour of trade secret protection.
The real ruling should be that while the company should be free to keep the workings of their device secret, the government should not be allowed to rely on evidence produced via devices whose inner workings are secret.
I think this tell us a lot more about the potential power of distributed computing than about prime numbers. While Mersenne primes are interesting to number theorists, we'll never find enough to do statistics on -- they are mostly of interests to pure mathematicians for reasons of curiosity. Random prime numbers of about 1024 bits are much more useful (and easier to find). On the other hand, if these was ever a problem we really needed to solve (protein-folding screensavers come to mind) then we now know how much computation power we can harness.
Seems I missed Article 8 clause 3(c), which does oblige the UK to provide evidence but not the US. However, Article 10 allows the UK to asks for this exact same information if it wanted to.
Before posting such blatant falsehoods, read the treaty. All the relevant language is 100% symmetrical between the US and the UK, and both sides have the same obligations: to provide some minimal amount of information by default, and to provide any further information the other side asks for if asked. The US has made it known that it needs further information: prima facie evidence of guilt. Nothing in the treaty forbids the UK from insisting on having the same information before making decisions. For whatever reasons, the UK has decided not to ask for this (this choice is codified in the Extradition Act of 2003) -- but this is a choice made by the UK which is not compelled by the treaty. The treaty is clearly Constitutional in both the US and the UK. It's possible that the Extradition Act of 2003 isn't Constitutional, but that's a different kind of problem.
Then why isn't Delta cutting the middleman and engaging in its own speculation?
Answer: because speculators are giving us all a valuable service: they are allowing us to better allocate oil resources over time. Assume that oil next year will be more expensive. Should we then use less oil today, so that we have more next year? Also, if we use less oil today we can learn how to reduce our consumption, reducing the damage of the coming high prices. Now each of us can't predict oil prices -- but the speculators do. If they think oil will be expensive next year, they buy some now. This raises today's prices, but will have the effect of reducing consumption and lowering next year's prices. Essentially, they moved part of next year's shortage into this year -- without any central planning authority. Conversely, if speculators thought oil was about to become cheap, they would sell oil today (moving towards the present the future benefit of lower prices) and also invest in oil-using industries, giving these industries the capital to prepare for the upcoming cheap oil. In fact, the airlines themselves speculate heavily on oil. If the speculators are adding $30-$60 to the price per barrel, this means that they are expecting the price to go up at least this much. If they are right, then the speculation may have staved off this future. If they are wrong, cheaper oil is just around the corner and they will lose a lot of money. Seems to me like the airlines should be happy.
In fact, evil (suing a woman with multiple sclerosis who didn't use a computer) harassment (suing a woman on disability benefits who didn't use file-sharing software) of innocent people is what's going on. And that is without noting that their damages are about $0.20/song (at retail prices, $0.99/song) but they are asking for the statutory $150K per, that they aren't actually proving their cases (have you looked at what they pretend is "evidence"?), that they are abusing the Federal Process (illegal joinder, failure to cite adverse opinions, citing opinions that have been reconsidered).
I guess proceedings dragged on until she couldn't afford to pay the legal bills so she was forced to cut her losses. For your lawyer to bite you have to be able to pay them.
It seems comments don't carry over from the firehose posting?
In any case, in addition to the (partial) win on the damages, the girl lost an argument with much wider implications. Her laywer tried to argue that only for the files the RIAA's investigator actually downloaded was there actual evidence for infringement (these were 6 among 39 song she's being sued over). Oddly the lawyer didn't argue that downloading by the RIAA can't be infringement by definition. The court instead agreed with the RIAA that merely making a file available was sufficient to establish infringement. This will now give the RIAA further ammunition when the continue using the argument.
In fact, they are paying a different price because they were willing to pay that price. That should be reason enough, but the situation is more fundamental. Imagine everyone on the plane had to pay the same price. Are you sure that there would be any price point which was profitable? Set it too low, and the plane would be full but the fares wouldn't cover costs. Too high, and you wouldn't have enough passengers. But a mix of passengers some paying more than others can be profitable.
People who book early want to be sure of the flight, and will probably pay a bit more. People who book last-minute must travel and will pay more. People who search on priceline probably care more about prices than people who go to the airline's website and book the most convenient itinerary. This mix increases the airline of maximizing their profits, by charging each customer as much as they will pay. It also increases the chances that there will be a way for me to buy a ticket at a price I like. I don't think it's unfair that other people are willing to pay more than I am for a similar service -- it's their problem. I also don't care that some people will not pay the price I'm willing to pay. They are willing to put in more effort into finding a cheaper flight.
Aggregator sites help reduce prices by facilitating comparisons. However, this has nothing to do with price discrimination, which the aggregators facilitate by giving the airlines another way to subdivide the market: people who search through the aggregator are quoted different prices than people who search on the airline's website, and both are quoted different prices than travel agents.
I take it you have no interest in actually watching sporting events? Well, many people do. If an event broadcast in the PRC but not in Canada, then Canadian viewers would love to watch "pirated" PRC signal. DRM is essential to supporting the IOC's (mistaken, IMO) policy of licensing exclusive broadcast rights separately for each country. This simply doesn't make sense with internet broadcasting. To be honest, locality-based restrictions also help advertizers -- paying per viewer makes little sense when some of the viewers may not be in the right country to buy your product ...
Personaly I think the IOC should license "online distribution" non-exclusively, and separately from the TV and Radio rights (which, being broadcasts, can be meaninfully limited territorially). Online distributors can then specialize by language, by locality, but also by sport or in other ways -- it should be up to them.