Right, I was trying to remember this formula after I posted and realized that the savings would not be so great. After you get past 10 digits or so, the distribution of primes is relatively flat/even. This post implys at out at N = 10^1400, primes are still about 1000 apart. So there's no real savings.
So mod this guy up and my original post down..:)
We need "Mathdot", then I wouldn't have gotten a 5 so quickly..:)
Prime numbers are countable. You in theory can be able to reduce this from 1400+ digits by saying it's the 12345...42153th prime (perhaps about 100 digits).
However determining this number would be (ludicrously) computionally expensive. Another quest for distributed.net?
Why work on the CSS code, why not the keys themselves? That would be more interesting.
Thisis getting just dumb. It will be years before any now TLDs come out, and then they'll fill up so quick, it's like we didn't have them.
Here's what I propose: Open up all 3 and 4 letter combination TLD to the highest registrar bidder. Everything:.abc,.biz,.byz, \.[a-z][a-z][a-z][a-z]?
That way, the more popular new TLDs could be scooped up by the big boys,but all the crap would be left to *us*. At this point, I'd be happy to register "trevorb.llq".
Let the market choose which TLDs are cool/needed/useful....
I believe one of the big controversies in the field of cloning at the moment is not the fact that exact genetic duplicates are being made, but rather that the science of cloning at the moment isn't exact. There have been a few reported incidents were clones died shortly after birth. As well, dolly the sheep had tolemeres (DNA counters that specifiy how many times more a cell can devide) as short as her mother, which may imply that if you were to have a clone, the two of you would expect to die about the same year (your clones life expectancy would be shortened by your current life span.) There are several other aspects of the science as yet undetermined.
Would it be ethical for a 50 year old woman to clone herself, only to find out 10 years later that her daughter had a life expectancy of 30?
Read the fg article! This is about one museum in New York that decided to label Pluto as a non-planet in a single display. This isn't the gathering of an astronomical society declaring Pluto a non-planet!
Not that Pluto is a *real* planet anyway, but that's beside the point.:)
A friend of mine and I were discussing how to make Ender's Game into a movie about 9 years ago, at the time, we thought the only way the battle scene could be done was to make the movie in anime. Way too much 3D movement that would be too hard to do with real humans.
Now with the Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, perhaps it would be conceivable to do this in live action, but do you have time to train 6 year old kids to do those kinds of stunts before they grow up?
I'm sure any Ender's Game movie would be a letdown if done with today's tech. Let this one stew for another 20 years. It probably will be worth the wait.
I've been a slackware user for 6 years now, and I love the distribution. The "minimalist" approach, and compiling and configuring your won server appeals to me for reasons that will probably be reiterated many times here.
The thing that utterly frustrates me is that NOTHING COMPILES! I'm not sure which iteration of Slackware I'm using (current circa March 1999), and unless I'm compiling from GNU source I seem to be missing some obscure library that's pre-installed on RedHat and missing from Slackware. I'm not sure if its a libc vs glibc thing, but it's getting extremely frustrating and has made me consider shictching to another distro (likely Debian) the next time I install.
OK, all of this is just Troll unless I can back it up. Let me go pull something from freshmeat and watch it not compile.
OK,I admit it, it took me until my third try to find something that wouldn't compile for me. Must be a good day.
I picked at random "BannerKiller". We've been having problems at work and need a simple dumb web proxy.
phobos:tbradley:~/bannerkiller1.01> make
(cd src; make)
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/tbradley/bannerkiller1.01/src'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c proxy.c -o proxy.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c gestion.c -o gestion.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c connexion.c -o connexion.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c filtre.c -o filtre.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c utilsText.c -o utilsText.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c utils.c -o utils.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
utils.c: In function `startThread':
utils.c:29: `pthread_attr_t' undeclared (first use this function)
utils.c:29: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
utils.c:29: for each function it appears in.)
utils.c:29: parse error before `attr'
utils.c:30: `attr' undeclared (first use this function)
make[1]: *** [utils.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/tbradley/bannerkiller1.01/src'
make: *** [all] Error 2
phobos:tbradley:~/bannerkiller1.01>
OK, now, probably this isn't a good example; someone will be able to point out something I'm doing wrong or that the software I'm trying to compile is crap. Perhaps so. But often I see something cool I want to try out that flops horribly on Slackware.
Should I jump distros, or become more realistic about what constitutes good source, and not try to compile everything I see on freshmeat? Would upgrading to Slackware 7.2 be a good choice for me in the future?
I'm seriously disturbed by the word "bipartisan". It seems to roll off the American tounge as easily as "non-partisan", and I keep hearing the words as if they were interchangable. They're very very different.
The following was posted frequently to sci.space for the past 10+ years. I'm uncertain of it's origin. Perhaps it's relevant here...
During the heat of the space race in the 1960's, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it needed a ball point pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of about $1 million U.S. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on Earth.
The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.
OK, a co-worker of mine were talking on the way back from lunch about a month ago on how to make an "electronic voting system" work. Let me first say that I'm Canadian and as FFFish's post states, our hand counted, hand marked ballots scale very well for 30 million, and I see no reason why it wouldn't scale well for 300 million. Whatever. Here's our idea.
The problems with a pure electronic system come with recounting, either due to a close vote, or to questions of tampering, is that there's no true way to do a physical recount. But regular ballots take "too long" to count.
Why not create a hybrid system. Each person comes to their polling station, is checked off a list and is given a "voting card", perhaps like a punchcard, but with no holes. They go back to the voting machine, close the door (or whatever), and insert their blank card into the machine. they vote via touch screen, and the result is printed on the card, which they (perhaps only as a symbolic gesture), insert their card into a box. When the elections end, you use the computers to tally the votes, but have the paper votes available if you need a true recount.
Now of course, all of this is meaningless unless the Americans can standardize their voting procedure. If one county has electronic voting and another punch card or another X'ed by hand, you're back in the same boat.
One thing FFFish may be wrong on is that it "Can't happen in Canada". Sure it can. Effectively, Bush and Gore tied within counting error. The same could happen in our system. Fortunately minority "tied" governments could exist in Canada without causing constitutional gridlock... (Just parlimentary gridlock, after a few weeks of which the government would collapse and we'd get to hold another election!:)
At any rate, I hope you guys can sort this all out by 2004.
I actually don't mind when someone attempt to find open FTP ports on my system. If someone telnets into my box they get a polite message asking them to go away and never try to access my system again.
The the lusers who access 21,22,23,12345,12346,31337 all within 2 seconds, and are probably doing the same to everyone on my B subnet who really really really piss me off. In a rage, I wrote up Stop the portscanners. Yes, it's pretty ragy, and probably over the top. With this ruling I might change my mind a bit.
I also wrote a program called antagonizer. It "teletypes a message", typing a character every 100ms, with a Ctrl-G between each character. It's damn annoying to telnet into, crashes IE's ftp, etc. If they try to access 12345, 31337, it tell them to fuck off and start looking for another ISP. I've actually managed to get ISPs to drop users by informing them that one of their users is portscanning. Works maybe 10% of the time.
In the wake of this ruling, I've been thinking of creating an "eye for an eye" system. If you access port 21 of my system, my machine access port 21 of your system, and sends you back the results. Haxor cracks into their own system, logs at 11... Not sure how well it would work for thinkgs like ssh, but in theory should work.
Also thought about a scanning detection or honeypot network, where the results of portscans could be logged or analysed from a single server.
6,000 Chernobyl plant workers were laid off today. While things were pretty bad at the plant itself, the jobs themselves were one of the most desired in the country. Their families lived a good 40km away from the plant and the wages were FOURTEEN TIMES the national average. Plus their families are much more healthy than you would expect (most likely because they can afford good medical care).
If I was already working at the plant I'd probably say "Well, if I was going to be ill I'd be so already, my family is living far away, let's do what's best for the family"
Yes, somewhat contradictory, nuclear power is probably the second best choice (next to hydroelectricity) for the environment. The greatest problem with hydro power is you need to live in an area with a lot of rivers (like British Columbia). Yes, you're disrupting the environment locally, but it's not like spewing CO2 into the air and altering the weather system of the whole planet.
The death of nuclear fission power may only be temporary. Take a look at California right now. They're having MASSIVE power problems, and are starting to talk about rotating blackouts. They need about 4 or 5 large power stations to begin contruction NOW. They'll probably end up building natural gas, but it may not be enough. Expect to see controversy there in the next couple years.
Good note on the CANDU reactor (Canadian made!) Unlike the American reactors, the CANDU reactors don't require refined (i.e. weapons grade) uranium to function, and in theory are safer to sell to "questionable" nations.
I've worked for 4 months at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, and there's only one thing you can use to cool down to 5K: liquid helium.
We used liquid helium to cool our experiment. Back in '93 in bulk it costs about $10 CDN per litre. And it evaporates instantly on contact with air. You need to use liquid nitrogen to make sure that the surfaces holding the liquid helium are cold enough so that the helium doesn't just completely evaporate on contact.
I saw another post saying $20k to cool the machine. That might be the cost per month of operation. While super fast chips may be feasable, the most cost effective cold you're going to get is just from liquid nitrogen. I'd probably try to start from there as a benchmark.
(This is the kind of thing I expect to read about some drunk New Zealanders doing in their basement. LHe is just a bit too expensive, I guess...)
How is one suppsed to prove that they "attempted to register" an expired domain name? I know I was looking at an expired name, noted that it wasn't released by doing a whois query. None of the registrars I know of allows you to register an expired domain name held by NSI. Is intent to register an expired domain name enough by itself?
Perhaps I shouldn't speak up. The registrant renewed their domain 6 weeks after expiry. It might go toward NSI's argument to hold on to expired domains.
I better just sit quietly in the corner and lurk for a few more months before I can think of something intelligent to say..
Would I have been modded down if I didn't add the last line? I have visions of moderators scanning all postings for the B**w**f word and modding it down...
Which is why a solar sail would work really poorly outside the solar system, and perhaps even outside the orbit, of, say, Mars.
Plus, there's no concept of a "keel" with a solar sail, so there's no "tacking" and you can really only go downwind. Not overly useful, unless you want to pick up some speed on the way out of the solar system.
The article seems to imply that no force is exerted on the metallic object. It would be interesting to let the magnetic object sit free and see what happens to it. If it stays motionless and the magnet goes nuts, cool, but otherwise this may just become another weird property of superconducting magnets.
Need... more... detail...
Not sure if it's relevant, but does anyone have links to the (theoretical) behaviours of magnetic monopoles? Are there any quirks of nature we would expect to see if these beasties came up?
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, B.Sc in Math makes the math lingo flow freely. The Primes (and the rationals, naturals, integers, evens, odds) are countably infinite.
Things like the reals (decimal numbers) are NOT countably infinite.
Right, I was trying to remember this formula after I posted and realized that the savings would not be so great. After you get past 10 digits or so, the distribution of primes is relatively flat/even. This post implys at out at N = 10^1400, primes are still about 1000 apart. So there's no real savings.
:)
:)
So mod this guy up and my original post down..
We need "Mathdot", then I wouldn't have gotten a 5 so quickly..
Prime numbers are countable. You in theory can be able to reduce this from 1400+ digits by saying it's the 12345...42153th prime (perhaps about 100 digits).
However determining this number would be (ludicrously) computionally expensive. Another quest for distributed.net?
Why work on the CSS code, why not the keys themselves? That would be more interesting.
I remember the Black & White website being a lot more informative, with screenshots and a game description.
Now it's got this weird celtic/native picture, and a bunch of guys chanting like it's a frat party and they're chugging beer... what gives?
I don't even want to think what that gnome is doing under the screen...
I can see the bumper sticker now:
Save the baby salmon, don't drive electric cars in BC!
Thisis getting just dumb. It will be years before any now TLDs come out, and then they'll fill up so quick, it's like we didn't have them.
.abc, .biz, .byz, \.[a-z][a-z][a-z][a-z]?
Here's what I propose: Open up all 3 and 4 letter combination TLD to the highest registrar bidder. Everything:
That way, the more popular new TLDs could be scooped up by the big boys,but all the crap would be left to *us*. At this point, I'd be happy to register "trevorb.llq".
Let the market choose which TLDs are cool/needed/useful....
<obfunny>Well I guess hardassed is going to have an all new meaning...</obfunny>
(The above is an advertisement for the "Add 'Tasteless' to the Slashdot moderation system" organization)
Just get the same crew who did Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to do the special effects. Or at least the intro.
I can see Chen Kenichi flying through mid air attacking Morimoto holding his blowtorch...
Nuclear war is a perfect non zero-sum game. EVERYBODY LOSES!
Oh, you wanted a GREATER than zero sum game!
Beware of asking for !=... You may receive it...
I believe one of the big controversies in the field of cloning at the moment is not the fact that exact genetic duplicates are being made, but rather that the science of cloning at the moment isn't exact. There have been a few reported incidents were clones died shortly after birth. As well, dolly the sheep had tolemeres (DNA counters that specifiy how many times more a cell can devide) as short as her mother, which may imply that if you were to have a clone, the two of you would expect to die about the same year (your clones life expectancy would be shortened by your current life span.) There are several other aspects of the science as yet undetermined.
Would it be ethical for a 50 year old woman to clone herself, only to find out 10 years later that her daughter had a life expectancy of 30?
Read the fg article! This is about one museum in New York that decided to label Pluto as a non-planet in a single display. This isn't the gathering of an astronomical society declaring Pluto a non-planet!
:)
Not that Pluto is a *real* planet anyway, but that's beside the point.
A friend of mine and I were discussing how to make Ender's Game into a movie about 9 years ago, at the time, we thought the only way the battle scene could be done was to make the movie in anime. Way too much 3D movement that would be too hard to do with real humans.
Now with the Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, perhaps it would be conceivable to do this in live action, but do you have time to train 6 year old kids to do those kinds of stunts before they grow up?
I'm sure any Ender's Game movie would be a letdown if done with today's tech. Let this one stew for another 20 years. It probably will be worth the wait.
I've been a slackware user for 6 years now, and I love the distribution. The "minimalist" approach, and compiling and configuring your won server appeals to me for reasons that will probably be reiterated many times here.
The thing that utterly frustrates me is that NOTHING COMPILES! I'm not sure which iteration of Slackware I'm using (current circa March 1999), and unless I'm compiling from GNU source I seem to be missing some obscure library that's pre-installed on RedHat and missing from Slackware. I'm not sure if its a libc vs glibc thing, but it's getting extremely frustrating and has made me consider shictching to another distro (likely Debian) the next time I install.
OK, all of this is just Troll unless I can back it up. Let me go pull something from freshmeat and watch it not compile.
OK,I admit it, it took me until my third try to find something that wouldn't compile for me. Must be a good day.
I picked at random "BannerKiller". We've been having problems at work and need a simple dumb web proxy.
phobos:tbradley:~/bannerkiller1.01> make
(cd src; make)
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/tbradley/bannerkiller1.01/src'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c proxy.c -o proxy.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c gestion.c -o gestion.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c connexion.c -o connexion.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c filtre.c -o filtre.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c utilsText.c -o utilsText.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
cc -pthread -D_REENTRANT -DDEBUG -c utils.c -o utils.o
cc: unrecognized option `-pthread'
utils.c: In function `startThread':
utils.c:29: `pthread_attr_t' undeclared (first use this function)
utils.c:29: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
utils.c:29: for each function it appears in.)
utils.c:29: parse error before `attr'
utils.c:30: `attr' undeclared (first use this function)
make[1]: *** [utils.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/tbradley/bannerkiller1.01/src'
make: *** [all] Error 2
phobos:tbradley:~/bannerkiller1.01>
OK, now, probably this isn't a good example; someone will be able to point out something I'm doing wrong or that the software I'm trying to compile is crap. Perhaps so. But often I see something cool I want to try out that flops horribly on Slackware.
Should I jump distros, or become more realistic about what constitutes good source, and not try to compile everything I see on freshmeat? Would upgrading to Slackware 7.2 be a good choice for me in the future?
I'm seriously disturbed by the word "bipartisan". It seems to roll off the American tounge as easily as "non-partisan", and I keep hearing the words as if they were interchangable. They're very very different.
Speaking of space...
The following was posted frequently to sci.space for the past 10+ years. I'm uncertain of it's origin. Perhaps it's relevant here...
During the heat of the space race in the 1960's, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided it needed a ball point pen to write in the zero gravity confines of its space capsules. After considerable research and development, the Astronaut Pen was developed at a cost of about $1 million U.S. The pen worked and also enjoyed some modest success as a novelty item back here on Earth.
The Soviet Union, faced with the same problem, used a pencil.
OK, a co-worker of mine were talking on the way back from lunch about a month ago on how to make an "electronic voting system" work. Let me first say that I'm Canadian and as FFFish's post states, our hand counted, hand marked ballots scale very well for 30 million, and I see no reason why it wouldn't scale well for 300 million. Whatever. Here's our idea.
:)
The problems with a pure electronic system come with recounting, either due to a close vote, or to questions of tampering, is that there's no true way to do a physical recount. But regular ballots take "too long" to count.
Why not create a hybrid system. Each person comes to their polling station, is checked off a list and is given a "voting card", perhaps like a punchcard, but with no holes. They go back to the voting machine, close the door (or whatever), and insert their blank card into the machine. they vote via touch screen, and the result is printed on the card, which they (perhaps only as a symbolic gesture), insert their card into a box. When the elections end, you use the computers to tally the votes, but have the paper votes available if you need a true recount.
Now of course, all of this is meaningless unless the Americans can standardize their voting procedure. If one county has electronic voting and another punch card or another X'ed by hand, you're back in the same boat.
One thing FFFish may be wrong on is that it "Can't happen in Canada". Sure it can. Effectively, Bush and Gore tied within counting error. The same could happen in our system. Fortunately minority "tied" governments could exist in Canada without causing constitutional gridlock... (Just parlimentary gridlock, after a few weeks of which the government would collapse and we'd get to hold another election!
At any rate, I hope you guys can sort this all out by 2004.
I actually don't mind when someone attempt to find open FTP ports on my system. If someone telnets into my box they get a polite message asking them to go away and never try to access my system again.
The the lusers who access 21,22,23,12345,12346,31337 all within 2 seconds, and are probably doing the same to everyone on my B subnet who really really really piss me off. In a rage, I wrote up Stop the portscanners. Yes, it's pretty ragy, and probably over the top. With this ruling I might change my mind a bit.
I also wrote a program called antagonizer. It "teletypes a message", typing a character every 100ms, with a Ctrl-G between each character. It's damn annoying to telnet into, crashes IE's ftp, etc. If they try to access 12345, 31337, it tell them to fuck off and start looking for another ISP. I've actually managed to get ISPs to drop users by informing them that one of their users is portscanning. Works maybe 10% of the time.
In the wake of this ruling, I've been thinking of creating an "eye for an eye" system. If you access port 21 of my system, my machine access port 21 of your system, and sends you back the results. Haxor cracks into their own system, logs at 11... Not sure how well it would work for thinkgs like ssh, but in theory should work.
Also thought about a scanning detection or honeypot network, where the results of portscans could be logged or analysed from a single server.
6,000 Chernobyl plant workers were laid off today. While things were pretty bad at the plant itself, the jobs themselves were one of the most desired in the country. Their families lived a good 40km away from the plant and the wages were FOURTEEN TIMES the national average. Plus their families are much more healthy than you would expect (most likely because they can afford good medical care).
If I was already working at the plant I'd probably say "Well, if I was going to be ill I'd be so already, my family is living far away, let's do what's best for the family"
Yes, somewhat contradictory, nuclear power is probably the second best choice (next to hydroelectricity) for the environment. The greatest problem with hydro power is you need to live in an area with a lot of rivers (like British Columbia). Yes, you're disrupting the environment locally, but it's not like spewing CO2 into the air and altering the weather system of the whole planet.
The death of nuclear fission power may only be temporary. Take a look at California right now. They're having MASSIVE power problems, and are starting to talk about rotating blackouts. They need about 4 or 5 large power stations to begin contruction NOW. They'll probably end up building natural gas, but it may not be enough. Expect to see controversy there in the next couple years.
Good note on the CANDU reactor (Canadian made!) Unlike the American reactors, the CANDU reactors don't require refined (i.e. weapons grade) uranium to function, and in theory are safer to sell to "questionable" nations.
I've worked for 4 months at the National Research Council in Ottawa, Canada, and there's only one thing you can use to cool down to 5K: liquid helium.
We used liquid helium to cool our experiment. Back in '93 in bulk it costs about $10 CDN per litre. And it evaporates instantly on contact with air. You need to use liquid nitrogen to make sure that the surfaces holding the liquid helium are cold enough so that the helium doesn't just completely evaporate on contact.
I saw another post saying $20k to cool the machine. That might be the cost per month of operation. While super fast chips may be feasable, the most cost effective cold you're going to get is just from liquid nitrogen. I'd probably try to start from there as a benchmark.
(This is the kind of thing I expect to read about some drunk New Zealanders doing in their basement. LHe is just a bit too expensive, I guess...)
How is one suppsed to prove that they "attempted to register" an expired domain name? I know I was looking at an expired name, noted that it wasn't released by doing a whois query. None of the registrars I know of allows you to register an expired domain name held by NSI. Is intent to register an expired domain name enough by itself?
Perhaps I shouldn't speak up. The registrant renewed their domain 6 weeks after expiry. It might go toward NSI's argument to hold on to expired domains.
Man, I'm just burning off my karma, aren't I... :(
:)
I better just sit quietly in the corner and lurk for a few more months before I can think of something intelligent to say..
Would I have been modded down if I didn't add the last line? I have visions of moderators scanning all postings for the B**w**f word and modding it down...
I'll try to post no +1 score more often..
When I first read this, I thought:
2*10^100 bits, whoa, that's a lot!
No jokes about Googlebit bandwidth or Googlehertz beowulf clusters, please... We've had enough.
Which is why a solar sail would work really poorly outside the solar system, and perhaps even outside the orbit, of, say, Mars.
Plus, there's no concept of a "keel" with a solar sail, so there's no "tacking" and you can really only go downwind. Not overly useful, unless you want to pick up some speed on the way out of the solar system.
The article seems to imply that no force is exerted on the metallic object. It would be interesting to let the magnetic object sit free and see what happens to it. If it stays motionless and the magnet goes nuts, cool, but otherwise this may just become another weird property of superconducting magnets.
Need... more... detail...
Not sure if it's relevant, but does anyone have links to the (theoretical) behaviours of magnetic monopoles? Are there any quirks of nature we would expect to see if these beasties came up?