what are you talking about? here is the entire list of definitions (all 5) that you pointed me to, and not one of them says anything about being finite. all you have are two possible synonyms: number, ammount. what did you think, that i wouldn't even look at your reference?
anyway, i'm not wrong that "infinte quantity" in fact makes sense, but the original point was that everybody knows that
a = inf
b = inf
does not imply a = b. which is also right. alright, that's it for me.
cheers,
A specified or indefinite number or amount.
A considerable amount or number: sells drugs wholesale and in quantity.
An exact amount or number.
The measurable, countable, or comparable property or aspect of a thing.
Mathematics. Something that serves as the object of an operation.
"unbounded quantity" is not an oxymoron. for example, how many natural numbers are there?
a. the question is undefined.
b. infinity, but that's not an unbounded quantity.
c. an unbounded quantity, but not infinity.
d. infinity, an unbounded quantity.
if you don't like 'unbounded quantity' in my previous argument, substitute 'unbounded sequence'
aa, whatever. i just wanted to say that. leave it to slashdotters to comment only on the most trivial of points. anyway, strunk and white agree with me, even if you can find it in the dictionary, so ptttht.
so by your logic, we can just let x go to infinity, then:
1*x = inf
2*x = inf
=>
1 = 2
of course, your conclusion is right, but your logic is wrong. that's because infinity is not a number, but rather the concept of unboundedness. (it's obvious that two unbounded quantities do not have to be equal to each other.)
okay, each poster is more full of shit than the last one (well, not me though).
to the most recent poster: a quantum computer can do some very special things exponentially faster than it would take a classical computer to do the exact same thing which is not necessarily to say exponentially faster than a classical computer could come up with the same answer. in particular, there are plenty of encryption schemes (the previous poster was right) for which a quantum computer can't do it any faster than the classical one.
to the previous poster: private-key cryptography isn't nearly as useful as public-key, since key exchange cannot be done over an insecure medium (such as the internet). also 'obsolete' is not a verb.
to the first poster: there is still at least one public-key encryption system that is unbroken by quantum algorithms. it is the McEliece cryptosystem, based on an error-correcting code. it is not currently used, however, since the key length is O(10^7) bits.
I think we mostly agree, but I can't let a couple of you last points go without answer.
Yes, that's starry-eyed idealism -- but face it, so is the fairy-tale idea of bombing them out of hiding!
Bombing raids are done to knock out military munitions to make it safer to insert and extract small teams to carry out specific seek and destroy missions. Bombing's not the end of the campaign. At least that's what the generals are telling us. Whatever, just details, but it supports my point that the attacks might not be so futile.
Also, in regard to anger, people have found plenty of reasons to hate the U.S. before this, not all of which the U.S. should apologize for. Our affluence and the fact that we're not an Islamic state are two of them. Our support of Israel is one we might consider, but one that's not likely to change at this point. A campaign against the Taliban is small by comparison. The people who won't understand our reasons for doing so are likely to be thouroughly indoctrinated to hate us already.
As you said, thanks for a thoughtful discussion. email me if you like.
On the point of fighting terrorism on fronts other than military ones, I absolutely agree with you. The political response should be far stronger then the military one. I am also afraid that the U.S. won't do enough once the military operation is through, but the real point of the argument right now is whether the U.S. should or should not have acted militarily now.
The Brits, who have better intelligence in Afganistan than we (the U.S) do right now, think that Osama is still in Afganistan, and if the Taliban are quickly disposed, there is a good chance of getting the guy. It would be harder later.
Anyway, you have said repeatedly that these strikes do the terrorists more good than harm. I have tried to make the opposing case. Look, how about this: I think (1) money, and (2) places to operate with impunity are far more important assets to Osama than widespread public anger. Actually, I personally think ignorance is just as good as anger from his perspective. Just convince somebody that you're God's messenger and you've won (him).
Anyway, I agree, we need a lot more diplomacy, and to stick to it longer than we probably have in the past, but I think this is a war that we can win. Anyway, we're going to see..
First, let me say that I agree to a large extent with your reasoning, and I was certainly against the sort of U.S. "retaliation" that I expected in the following week or so. However, at this point, I believe military action is not as futile as you think, and I support the current U.S. military actions.
your points (1) - (3) were certainly objectives of Osama Bin Laden. To this extent, nothing the U.S. can do nothing to revoke that success.
Your point (4) is also correct. Certainly Bin Laden would use a cruel U.S. retaliation to build support, and to this extent, the U.S. should do what it can to prevent this from happening.
However, Bin Laden would also profit in other ways from a lack of a decisive response. First of all, he would have a much greater chance of surviving. Beyond that, if it is perceived that the U.S. is powerless to defend itself, that the U.S. people and military are cowards, that there is no justice in the world, then terrorists will correctly perceive that they have free reign in the world.
That may be overstating the case, but there has to be the idea of justice, even if the capture of one man does not make up for the recent tragedy. And I am confident that the U.S. can make its case to a pretty broad audience that this is a fight for justice.
Also, I have read other posts of yours where you compare the war on terrorism to the war on drugs. While I completely agree with your ideas about the war on drugs (supply-side dosen't work and has horrible consequences), I don't think the analogy is a good one. In fact, I don't even know how to complete the analogy. I suppose it means "instead of fighting terrorists, just don't piss people off." Is this your idea? please clarify.
but neither you nor Bill Gates... has any right to dictate the terms of somebody else's development.
neither Bill Gates, the previous AC, nor I is trying to dictate the terms of anyone else's license. the point is to appeal to the developer's sense of what's good for the community they care about. I don't contribute to GPL projects because i think the license is suboptimal for the community i care about, which includes joe average consumer, who benefits more from free software than from GPL'ed software. TCP/IP is still the best illustration of this.
the point is also to appeal to those who fund research. they can usually influence licenses and have an interest in the average consumer.
It is even more infantile to complain that the GPL does not allow commercial software companies to come in and incorporate somebody else's work against their wishes and desires.
this is a rebuttal to the argument that the GPL shouldn't be respected, an argument which was never made. in fact, Gates's argument clearly presumes that the GPL is an enforceable license. Gates's is trying to show various people that GPL isn't nice or good.
of course, the people who use GPL are often the very same people who hate microsoft in the first place, so you might think that it's a wasted argument, but then again there are other battlegrounds on which this battle will be fought...
What you say about the salaryman jibes with what i've read in various american media. However, I had a conversation with my friend in Tokyo last year who's working in his second job since graduating from college. Naturally, this sort of thing is possible for him because he is a computer scientist, and talented. However, he told me that it is also becoming possible for people in other professions to expect to land good second jobs after quitting or being fired from their job at their first company.
Ignoring for now the fact that I doubt your predictions... Are you suggesting that we should vote for whoever offers us the most money? Did panem et circenses improve the quality of elected officials in Republican Rome?
are you suggesting that one should not consider his own welfare in chosing a president?
further, are you suggesting that offering a tax cut is tantamount to bribery? what about the important distinction that a tax cut goes to all, not just those people who voted a certain way?
switchable skins? who the hell cares? every time i see a new release of mozilla, it's something increasingly irrelevant--skins or themes or some other kind of customization. what ever happened to fast loading and decoding times and plain old stability? this crap is pointless until something happens on the real software engineering fronts.
some sort of good reasons IE should be allowed to be part of windows:
1. it's pretty successfully integrated as the windows GUI already. 2. there's no good reason to forbid an OS from having a browser. every major OS at least ships with one nowadays. 3. i actually like the fact that my browser loads in ~ 2 seconds. 4. defining an OS is not a power i'd like to see the government have (i'm pretty serious about this one)
some sort of good reasons to divest the two:
1. it would force windows API to be more friendly to the competition. 2. it would weaken the OS company's market power. (this was the jist of aardvark's argument) 3. nobody likes microsoft.
and, finally, one really lousy reason to keep IE with windows:
1. netscape dosen't want competition on other OS'es. screw netscape. antitrust laws are not there to protect netscape, and the DOJ would never consider the argument that mr. Clark would like to make.
We pay little attention to the moderately common problems(invisible security issues lurking beneath most closed source cyrpto), but both the extremely common issues(buffer overflows) and rare ones(this PGP hack) get lots of press.
i think something's wrong with this analysis. perhaps the reason people aren't covering the invisible security issues lurking beneath most closed source crypto has less to do with the relative commonness of such issues and more to do with the fact that such issues are entirely speculative.
about buffer overflows: i don't know of any more serious security threat than that one. if you do, feel free to enlighten.
about this PGP hack, i don't think the media is playing it up terribly much. surely slashdot gives it as much coverage as it will ever get unless something phenominally bad happens because of it (which i suppose it probably won't).
whatever. this turned out to be more serious than i meant, so don't take it that way.
this bug has absolutely nothing to do with how hard it is to find random data. hell, the solution is to call dev/random. it's just that the buffer happens to get overwritten due to a far more mundane bug. ferchrissakes, did you even read the article? did any of the moderators read the article??
okay, the reason i sound pissed off isn't that nobody's reading the article. it's that people are so eager to hear that the failure is due to some inherent difficulty of the problem. it's not. it's a goddamn bug--the kind everyone predicted would be more absent in magical open-source software. this puts the lye to the claim that "with a million eyes, all bugs are shallow." christ, this bug was incredibly shallow anyway, and managed to live in the code for a year.
according to the comment, Grover's search algorithm "instantly search[es] a massive database and return[s] amazingly precise results...". to be more precise, if there are n entries in the database, Grover's algorithm takes O(sqrt(n)) time to find an entry. that's only an improvement on the time it takes to search an *unsorted* database, O(n). if you're going through the trouble of preparing the database for your, cough, lightning fast quantum algorithm--why not just sort it and then search in O(log(n))?
As an example of this last one, I was thinking of a hypothetical virus in the shower this morning. The virus is non-malicious. It just installs a daemon on your computer. But the daemon is like a distributed.net client. So once it got propagated pretty good, I could submit tasks to these daemons and get answers back.
Slashdot Mirror
what are you talking about? here is the entire list of definitions (all 5) that you pointed me to, and not one of them says anything about being finite. all you have are two possible synonyms: number, ammount. what did you think, that i wouldn't even look at your reference?
anyway, i'm not wrong that "infinte quantity" in fact makes sense, but the original point was that everybody knows that
a = inf
b = inf
does not imply a = b. which is also right. alright, that's it for me.
cheers,
A specified or indefinite number or amount.
A considerable amount or number: sells drugs wholesale and in quantity.
An exact amount or number.
The measurable, countable, or comparable property or aspect of a thing.
Mathematics. Something that serves as the object of an operation.
"unbounded quantity" is not an oxymoron. for example, how many natural numbers are there?
a. the question is undefined.
b. infinity, but that's not an unbounded quantity.
c. an unbounded quantity, but not infinity.
d. infinity, an unbounded quantity.
if you don't like 'unbounded quantity' in my previous argument, substitute 'unbounded sequence'
cheers,
aa, whatever. i just wanted to say that. leave it to slashdotters to comment only on the most trivial of points. anyway, strunk and white agree with me, even if you can find it in the dictionary, so ptttht.
so by your logic, we can just let x go to infinity, then:
1*x = inf
2*x = inf
=>
1 = 2
of course, your conclusion is right, but your logic is wrong. that's because infinity is not a number, but rather the concept of unboundedness. (it's obvious that two unbounded quantities do not have to be equal to each other.)
okay, each poster is more full of shit than the last one (well, not me though).
to the most recent poster: a quantum computer can do some very special things exponentially faster than it would take a classical computer to do the exact same thing which is not necessarily to say exponentially faster than a classical computer could come up with the same answer. in particular, there are plenty of encryption schemes (the previous poster was right) for which a quantum computer can't do it any faster than the classical one.
to the previous poster: private-key cryptography isn't nearly as useful as public-key, since key exchange cannot be done over an insecure medium (such as the internet). also 'obsolete' is not a verb.
to the first poster: there is still at least one public-key encryption system that is unbroken by quantum algorithms. it is the McEliece cryptosystem, based on an error-correcting code. it is not currently used, however, since the key length is O(10^7) bits.
cheers,
jeremy
Get real. This law wouldn't stop kids from playing games.
exactly. because what 6 year old can't just find the image of the latest MK on the web and just burn it to play on his modified Xbox?
come on, you're the one who needs a reality check.
you are free to use this source code as long as you give away whatever you use it to create. it's a fine licence, just don't call it free.
I think we mostly agree, but I can't let a couple of you last points go without answer.
Yes, that's starry-eyed idealism -- but face it, so is the fairy-tale idea of bombing them out of hiding!
Bombing raids are done to knock out military munitions to make it safer to insert and extract small teams to carry out specific seek and destroy missions. Bombing's not the end of the campaign. At least that's what the generals are telling us. Whatever, just details, but it supports my point that the attacks might not be so futile.
Also, in regard to anger, people have found plenty of reasons to hate the U.S. before this, not all of which the U.S. should apologize for. Our affluence and the fact that we're not an Islamic state are two of them. Our support of Israel is one we might consider, but one that's not likely to change at this point. A campaign against the Taliban is small by comparison. The people who won't understand our reasons for doing so are likely to be thouroughly indoctrinated to hate us already.
As you said, thanks for a thoughtful discussion. email me if you like.
On the point of fighting terrorism on fronts other than military ones, I absolutely agree with you. The political response should be far stronger then the military one. I am also afraid that the U.S. won't do enough once the military operation is through, but the real point of the argument right now is whether the U.S. should or should not have acted militarily now.
The Brits, who have better intelligence in Afganistan than we (the U.S) do right now, think that Osama is still in Afganistan, and if the Taliban are quickly disposed, there is a good chance of getting the guy. It would be harder later.
Anyway, you have said repeatedly that these strikes do the terrorists more good than harm. I have tried to make the opposing case. Look, how about this: I think (1) money, and (2) places to operate with impunity are far more important assets to Osama than widespread public anger. Actually, I personally think ignorance is just as good as anger from his perspective. Just convince somebody that you're God's messenger and you've won (him).
Anyway, I agree, we need a lot more diplomacy, and to stick to it longer than we probably have in the past, but I think this is a war that we can win. Anyway, we're going to see..
First, let me say that I agree to a large extent with your reasoning, and I was certainly against the sort of U.S. "retaliation" that I expected in the following week or so. However, at this point, I believe military action is not as futile as you think, and I support the current U.S. military actions.
your points (1) - (3) were certainly objectives of Osama Bin Laden. To this extent, nothing the U.S. can do nothing to revoke that success.
Your point (4) is also correct. Certainly Bin Laden would use a cruel U.S. retaliation to build support, and to this extent, the U.S. should do what it can to prevent this from happening.
However, Bin Laden would also profit in other ways from a lack of a decisive response. First of all, he would have a much greater chance of surviving. Beyond that, if it is perceived that the U.S. is powerless to defend itself, that the U.S. people and military are cowards, that there is no justice in the world, then terrorists will correctly perceive that they have free reign in the world.
That may be overstating the case, but there has to be the idea of justice, even if the capture of one man does not make up for the recent tragedy. And I am confident that the U.S. can make its case to a pretty broad audience that this is a fight for justice.
Also, I have read other posts of yours where you compare the war on terrorism to the war on drugs. While I completely agree with your ideas about the war on drugs (supply-side dosen't work and has horrible consequences), I don't think the analogy is a good one. In fact, I don't even know how to complete the analogy. I suppose it means "instead of fighting terrorists, just don't piss people off." Is this your idea? please clarify.
...I don't even know what you could be referring to...
i think it was probably to dropping A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
but neither you nor Bill Gates ... has any right to dictate the terms of somebody else's development.
neither Bill Gates, the previous AC, nor I is trying to dictate the terms of anyone else's license. the point is to appeal to the developer's sense of what's good for the community they care about. I don't contribute to GPL projects because i think the license is suboptimal for the community i care about, which includes joe average consumer, who benefits more from free software than from GPL'ed software. TCP/IP is still the best illustration of this.
the point is also to appeal to those who fund research. they can usually influence licenses and have an interest in the average consumer.
It is even more infantile to complain that the GPL does not allow commercial software companies to come in and incorporate somebody else's work against their wishes and desires.
this is a rebuttal to the argument that the GPL shouldn't be respected, an argument which was never made. in fact, Gates's argument clearly presumes that the GPL is an enforceable license. Gates's is trying to show various people that GPL isn't nice or good.
of course, the people who use GPL are often the very same people who hate microsoft in the first place, so you might think that it's a wasted argument, but then again there are other battlegrounds on which this battle will be fought...
GPL ensures that derivative works are free to the same degree that the origial work was free to begin with. \irony
Ohayou gozaimasu, our Nihonjin friends.
good morning to you too =)
What you say about the salaryman jibes with what i've read in various american media. However, I had a conversation with my friend in Tokyo last year who's working in his second job since graduating from college. Naturally, this sort of thing is possible for him because he is a computer scientist, and talented. However, he told me that it is also becoming possible for people in other professions to expect to land good second jobs after quitting or being fired from their job at their first company.
Just a data point for you.
... are probably fun to program, i guess.
Ignoring for now the fact that I doubt your predictions... Are you suggesting that we should vote for whoever offers us the most money? Did panem et circenses improve the quality of elected officials in Republican Rome?
are you suggesting that one should not consider his own welfare in chosing a president?
further, are you suggesting that offering a tax cut is tantamount to bribery? what about the important distinction that a tax cut goes to all, not just those people who voted a certain way?
ur lame.
switchable skins? who the hell cares? every time i see a new release of mozilla, it's something increasingly irrelevant--skins or themes or some other kind of customization. what ever happened to fast loading and decoding times and plain old stability? this crap is pointless until something happens on the real software engineering fronts.
some sort of good reasons IE should be allowed to be part of windows:
1. it's pretty successfully integrated as the windows GUI already.
2. there's no good reason to forbid an OS from having a browser. every major OS at least ships with one nowadays.
3. i actually like the fact that my browser loads in ~ 2 seconds.
4. defining an OS is not a power i'd like to see the government have (i'm pretty serious about this one)
some sort of good reasons to divest the two:
1. it would force windows API to be more friendly to the competition.
2. it would weaken the OS company's market power. (this was the jist of aardvark's argument)
3. nobody likes microsoft.
and, finally, one really lousy reason to keep IE with windows:
1. netscape dosen't want competition on other OS'es. screw netscape. antitrust laws are not there to protect netscape, and the DOJ would never consider the argument that mr. Clark would like to make.
cheers,
sh_mmer
We pay little attention to the moderately common problems(invisible security issues lurking beneath most closed source cyrpto), but both the extremely common issues(buffer overflows) and rare ones(this PGP hack) get lots of press.
i think something's wrong with this analysis. perhaps the reason people aren't covering the invisible security issues lurking beneath most closed source crypto has less to do with the relative commonness of such issues and more to do with the fact that such issues are entirely speculative.
about buffer overflows: i don't know of any more serious security threat than that one. if you do, feel free to enlighten.
about this PGP hack, i don't think the media is playing it up terribly much. surely slashdot gives it as much coverage as it will ever get unless something phenominally bad happens because of it (which i suppose it probably won't).
whatever. this turned out to be more serious than i meant, so don't take it that way.
laters,
sh_
this bug has absolutely nothing to do with how hard it is to find random data. hell, the solution is to call dev/random. it's just that the buffer happens to get overwritten due to a far more mundane bug. ferchrissakes, did you even read the article? did any of the moderators read the article??
okay, the reason i sound pissed off isn't that nobody's reading the article. it's that people are so eager to hear that the failure is due to some inherent difficulty of the problem. it's not. it's a goddamn bug--the kind everyone predicted would be more absent in magical open-source software. this puts the lye to the claim that "with a million eyes, all bugs are shallow." christ, this bug was incredibly shallow anyway, and managed to live in the code for a year.
sh_
Goldbach's conjecture is a first-order statement...
come on: Goldbach obviously is *not* first order. let me slightly rephrase Goldbach, and you will see:
"for every integer n > 2, there exist positive primes p and q such that p+q = 2*n."
that's the proper formulation, and hence the conjecture is apparently *not* first order!
d'accord?
sh_
according to the comment, Grover's search algorithm "instantly search[es] a massive database and return[s] amazingly precise results...". to be more precise, if there are n entries in the database, Grover's algorithm takes O(sqrt(n)) time to find an entry. that's only an improvement on the time it takes to search an *unsorted* database, O(n). if you're going through the trouble of preparing the database for your, cough, lightning fast quantum algorithm--why not just sort it and then search in O(log(n))?
cheers,
sh_
As an example of this last one, I was thinking of a hypothetical virus in the shower this morning. The virus is non-malicious. It just installs a daemon on your computer. But the daemon is like a distributed.net client. So once it got propagated pretty good, I could submit tasks to these daemons and get answers back.
[...]
Hey! I've re-implemented FreeNet!
Sounds more like you've re-implemented DDoS.