As I said two posts above yours, it's not practically useful because factorising 4-bit numbers on a classical computer is already easy. Factoring larger numbers is hard, but requires more entangled qubits.
Validating the result is cheap on a classical computer. Even for very large values, multiplying two 4096-bit values together and checking the result is incredibly cheap. A quantum computer that could give the right set of divisors for a 4096-bit prime 1% of the time would still let you very quickly find which of the answers that it gave was correct. The limitation is the size, not the reliability.
Free bread would be great. Most bread that people buy is based on quite old recipes. If people stopped creating new bread recipes, few people would complain. Those of us who bake bread at home would probably continue to experiment so you'd have enough new bread recipes being released to satisfy demand even without the profit motive.
In the case of creative works, it's less obvious. Tastes and requirements change. There is not just a demand for music, for example, there is a demand for new music. The same is true of films and software. The problem is that creating new works is both hard and valuable, whereas copying them is increasingly easy, but the economic situation created by copyright means that you have to do the difficult bit for free and charge for the easy bit. As a car analogy, imagine if a car manufacturer decided that they were going to sell unpainted cars for free and then charge $10K for the paint job, then push for legislation that made painting your own car illegal.
As author Charles Stross (meaning he has more gravita on this matter then you) observed it makes no sense to punish people who are your customers.
I only have one data point in this from personal experience, but it supports Stross' view. Someone posted a copy of the PDF of my first book to a mailing list that probably 90% of the people in the target market are subscribed to. I saw a very slight increase in sales in the next royalty statement I got, although small enough to be counted in the noise. I certainly did not see a mass of lost sales because now everyone could get it for free. If I had to prove lost income from the wide illegal distribution, I'd find it very difficult.
And, conversely, I have had people tell me that they bought my books in PDF or ePub editions, but would not have done if they had included DRM. So, in my anecdotal experience, DRM is far more likely to cause you to lose customers than piracy. I have no idea whether I am a special case or whether this is generally true.
We should distinguish between someone who pirated a single copy of a song for personal use vs a person (or organization) who is willfully redistributing for profit.
Why for a profit? From the perspective of someone trying to sell their music, it makes no difference if someone distribute 10,000 copies of their work makes a profit or not.
When did we have left wing authoritarianism? We went from Thatcher (Conservative) to Major (Conservative) to Blair (New Labour - Old Conservative) to Brown (ineffectual) to Cameron (Conservative). The only one of those who could possibly be considered left wing was Brown, and he came in at the peak of the financial crisis and spent his entire term on the defensive.
My US bank gave me my Internet banking password, from a VoIP call from overseas, knowing nothing more than my name, address, and date of birth. Apparently this is roughly the same set of security as iCloud.
Presumably they are not dangerous in themselves, but in the fact that they encourage people to get food and then eat it while driving. Someone with a drink between their legs and a burger in one hand is not going to be nearly as much in control of their car as normal.
Try having a few beer and then playing your favourite fps.
I tried that some years back with Unreal Tournament in instagib mode. I joined a game of sober people after a few beers and sat at the top of the scoreboard for an hour. When we played again the next day, I returned to my more traditional position near the bottom.
Think of it as a science experiment
Science requires more than a single data point, sadly...
For example VirginMobile charges me a mere $5 a month for 30 minutes calltime
I had to read your post a couple of times to be sure, but it sounds like you're actually not being sarcastic and think that's a good deal. You're paying $0.16/minute, and you're on a contract. Is this really a good deal in the USA? You're paying about 35% more than me in the UK per minute, and I'm on a pre-pay plan (i.e. no contract, top up in advance, pay only for what you use).
There's a big difference between cell and power infrastructure. The power, once installed, needs routine maintenance. It's not a question of it not paying for itself, it's a question of it taking 20-40 years to get the return on investment, which private enterprise isn't willing to do because it could invest the same money elsewhere and get a more immediate return. In the case of rural mobile coverage, the equipment often doesn't get a positive ROI before it's obsolete, and then you need to pay again to replace it.
When did advertising suddenly become evil, after 300+ years of being the main revenue source for most media?
It started in the early 20th century, when it began to transition from being about making potential customers aware of your products to creating demand via psychological manipulation (see, for example, smoking adverts from before they were heavily regulated). It accelerated in the last decade when it became about building detailed profiles of individuals.
I don't explicitly block ads, but I do run a plugin that blocks all tracking that it can identify and another that requires user interaction to run flash. I don't want that either tracking or auto-play flash from either things I explicitly visit or from adverts, so if you can show me ads that are in the same technical category as content, then that's fine.
I also add a note in my user CSS file that flags links to certain sites that have adverts that I consider too intrusive. I then evaluate more carefully whether I want to click on links to them when they appear. If, for example, there are two links in a Slashdot summary and one has an obnoxious ads warning next to it, then I'll click on the other. It's a shame that there isn't a plugin that lets you do that a bit more automatically.
If you want mostly data, I'd go for GiffGaff (5p/text, 10p/min) and get one of their data goody bags (£5 for 500MB - £12.50 for 3GB) or if you want to make a lot of calls or don't want tethering then get one of their other goody bags (£10 for 250 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited phone-only Internet). If you want calls and texts, I'd go with with TalkMobile (4p/text, 8p/min).
For the iPad, GiffGaff plus their 3GB goody bag is probably what you want. You need to order the SIM online, but you can usually just get it delivered to your hotel. It usually takes a few days to arrive, so order it before you leave and let the place you're staying know to expect it...
No, the real question is what anything you said had to do with someone farting out of their own asshole. I suspect that the answer is nothing, but enquiring minds want to know...
There is NO moral equivalency between Christianity and Islam. Stop trying to draw a false one.
This doesn't follow. If the same passage is in both holy texts, then there absolutely is the moral equivalency between Christianity and Islam. The difference is that Christians are no longer in charge of any countries and so don't get to write the laws. This seems to be changing in the USA...
But running what? Are you measuring the speed of delivering ethernet frames? Or of IPv4 packets? Or IPv6 packets? Or of payload carried by TCP packets on either?
Perhaps every university should be required to write a letter to each prospective student, informing them of the ratio of graduates from that university with that particular degree in the last 5 years who are employed/unemployed, and the median salary
University league tables have this information. When I was looking at universities over a decade ago they showed both the average salary of graduates and the percentage that had a job within a year of graduating. This information is still published.
A very small amount of Microsoft's revenue comes from selling ads. Almost all of one of their major competitors' revenue comes from selling ads. It's therefore in their best interests to make ad blocking easy...
Comparing as close as possible specs, the 1.8GHz i5 with 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM costs $1,199 for the MacBook Air and $1,499 for the ThinkPad. For the 2GHz i7, the MBA is $1,499, the ThinkPad is $1,849. However, the ThinkPad has a 14" screen instead of 13" (not sure if this is a pro or con in a portability-at-all-costs Ultrabook), integrated 3G (need a USB dongle for the MBA). The ThinkPad lacks Thunderbolt, so USB is the fastest peripheral interface. The ThinkPad is marginally larger in one dimension, marginally smaller in two more, so about the same volume and the weight difference between the two is under 0.1%. The ThinkPad comes with a 3-year warranty, but this costs extra for the MBA (unless you buy from the education store), which brings the cost quite a bit closer. The cost of upgrading to 8GB of RAM for the ThinkPad is not listed - it's not even clear that it's an option, which is a shame because that's something I'd be pretty sure to want.
That's kind of the point. Motorola has NOT been offering patents to Microsoft and Apple at the terms they have offered to other people. (They want literally orders of magnitude more money for the patents.)
If it were that clear-cut, there would be no lawsuit. Motorola is offering these patents under exactly the same terms that they offer to everyone else. These terms are a fixed percentage of the final device cost. This satisfied the Fair and Non-Discriminatory parts of FRAND. Apple is arguing that they are not Reasonable, because the same percentage of a $20 dumb phone and a $600 smartphone is a very significant difference for using the patents in exactly the same way.
A lot of things advertised on Amazon are from third-party sellers, and those third parties often have the same products cheaper on their own web site (where they don't have to give Amazon a cut). I've started searching for things on Amazon and then searching for the seller's official site - it's often 10-20% cheaper.
Slashdot Mirror
As I said two posts above yours, it's not practically useful because factorising 4-bit numbers on a classical computer is already easy. Factoring larger numbers is hard, but requires more entangled qubits.
Validating the result is cheap on a classical computer. Even for very large values, multiplying two 4096-bit values together and checking the result is incredibly cheap. A quantum computer that could give the right set of divisors for a 4096-bit prime 1% of the time would still let you very quickly find which of the answers that it gave was correct. The limitation is the size, not the reliability.
So, just to clarify, you're in favour of publicly releasing the addresses and identities of everyone currently in witness protection?
Hackers are people who make furniture with an axe. Let's have none of these neological redefinitions!
Free bread would be great. Most bread that people buy is based on quite old recipes. If people stopped creating new bread recipes, few people would complain. Those of us who bake bread at home would probably continue to experiment so you'd have enough new bread recipes being released to satisfy demand even without the profit motive.
In the case of creative works, it's less obvious. Tastes and requirements change. There is not just a demand for music, for example, there is a demand for new music. The same is true of films and software. The problem is that creating new works is both hard and valuable, whereas copying them is increasingly easy, but the economic situation created by copyright means that you have to do the difficult bit for free and charge for the easy bit. As a car analogy, imagine if a car manufacturer decided that they were going to sell unpainted cars for free and then charge $10K for the paint job, then push for legislation that made painting your own car illegal.
As author Charles Stross (meaning he has more gravita on this matter then you) observed it makes no sense to punish people who are your customers.
I only have one data point in this from personal experience, but it supports Stross' view. Someone posted a copy of the PDF of my first book to a mailing list that probably 90% of the people in the target market are subscribed to. I saw a very slight increase in sales in the next royalty statement I got, although small enough to be counted in the noise. I certainly did not see a mass of lost sales because now everyone could get it for free. If I had to prove lost income from the wide illegal distribution, I'd find it very difficult.
And, conversely, I have had people tell me that they bought my books in PDF or ePub editions, but would not have done if they had included DRM. So, in my anecdotal experience, DRM is far more likely to cause you to lose customers than piracy. I have no idea whether I am a special case or whether this is generally true.
We should distinguish between someone who pirated a single copy of a song for personal use vs a person (or organization) who is willfully redistributing for profit.
Why for a profit? From the perspective of someone trying to sell their music, it makes no difference if someone distribute 10,000 copies of their work makes a profit or not.
It does, however, depend a lot on observation and reaction time. Basically, the first person to see the opponent and get a hit wins the engagement.
When did we have left wing authoritarianism? We went from Thatcher (Conservative) to Major (Conservative) to Blair (New Labour - Old Conservative) to Brown (ineffectual) to Cameron (Conservative). The only one of those who could possibly be considered left wing was Brown, and he came in at the peak of the financial crisis and spent his entire term on the defensive.
My US bank gave me my Internet banking password, from a VoIP call from overseas, knowing nothing more than my name, address, and date of birth. Apparently this is roughly the same set of security as iCloud.
Presumably they are not dangerous in themselves, but in the fact that they encourage people to get food and then eat it while driving. Someone with a drink between their legs and a burger in one hand is not going to be nearly as much in control of their car as normal.
Try having a few beer and then playing your favourite fps.
I tried that some years back with Unreal Tournament in instagib mode. I joined a game of sober people after a few beers and sat at the top of the scoreboard for an hour. When we played again the next day, I returned to my more traditional position near the bottom.
Think of it as a science experiment
Science requires more than a single data point, sadly...
For example VirginMobile charges me a mere $5 a month for 30 minutes calltime
I had to read your post a couple of times to be sure, but it sounds like you're actually not being sarcastic and think that's a good deal. You're paying $0.16/minute, and you're on a contract. Is this really a good deal in the USA? You're paying about 35% more than me in the UK per minute, and I'm on a pre-pay plan (i.e. no contract, top up in advance, pay only for what you use).
There's a big difference between cell and power infrastructure. The power, once installed, needs routine maintenance. It's not a question of it not paying for itself, it's a question of it taking 20-40 years to get the return on investment, which private enterprise isn't willing to do because it could invest the same money elsewhere and get a more immediate return. In the case of rural mobile coverage, the equipment often doesn't get a positive ROI before it's obsolete, and then you need to pay again to replace it.
When did advertising suddenly become evil, after 300+ years of being the main revenue source for most media?
It started in the early 20th century, when it began to transition from being about making potential customers aware of your products to creating demand via psychological manipulation (see, for example, smoking adverts from before they were heavily regulated). It accelerated in the last decade when it became about building detailed profiles of individuals.
I don't explicitly block ads, but I do run a plugin that blocks all tracking that it can identify and another that requires user interaction to run flash. I don't want that either tracking or auto-play flash from either things I explicitly visit or from adverts, so if you can show me ads that are in the same technical category as content, then that's fine.
I also add a note in my user CSS file that flags links to certain sites that have adverts that I consider too intrusive. I then evaluate more carefully whether I want to click on links to them when they appear. If, for example, there are two links in a Slashdot summary and one has an obnoxious ads warning next to it, then I'll click on the other. It's a shame that there isn't a plugin that lets you do that a bit more automatically.
If you want mostly data, I'd go for GiffGaff (5p/text, 10p/min) and get one of their data goody bags (£5 for 500MB - £12.50 for 3GB) or if you want to make a lot of calls or don't want tethering then get one of their other goody bags (£10 for 250 minutes, unlimited texts, unlimited phone-only Internet). If you want calls and texts, I'd go with with TalkMobile (4p/text, 8p/min).
For the iPad, GiffGaff plus their 3GB goody bag is probably what you want. You need to order the SIM online, but you can usually just get it delivered to your hotel. It usually takes a few days to arrive, so order it before you leave and let the place you're staying know to expect it...
No, the real question is what anything you said had to do with someone farting out of their own asshole. I suspect that the answer is nothing, but enquiring minds want to know...
There is NO moral equivalency between Christianity and Islam. Stop trying to draw a false one.
This doesn't follow. If the same passage is in both holy texts, then there absolutely is the moral equivalency between Christianity and Islam. The difference is that Christians are no longer in charge of any countries and so don't get to write the laws. This seems to be changing in the USA...
But running what? Are you measuring the speed of delivering ethernet frames? Or of IPv4 packets? Or IPv6 packets? Or of payload carried by TCP packets on either?
Perhaps every university should be required to write a letter to each prospective student, informing them of the ratio of graduates from that university with that particular degree in the last 5 years who are employed/unemployed, and the median salary
University league tables have this information. When I was looking at universities over a decade ago they showed both the average salary of graduates and the percentage that had a job within a year of graduating. This information is still published.
A very small amount of Microsoft's revenue comes from selling ads. Almost all of one of their major competitors' revenue comes from selling ads. It's therefore in their best interests to make ad blocking easy...
Comparing as close as possible specs, the 1.8GHz i5 with 128GB SSD and 4GB of RAM costs $1,199 for the MacBook Air and $1,499 for the ThinkPad. For the 2GHz i7, the MBA is $1,499, the ThinkPad is $1,849. However, the ThinkPad has a 14" screen instead of 13" (not sure if this is a pro or con in a portability-at-all-costs Ultrabook), integrated 3G (need a USB dongle for the MBA). The ThinkPad lacks Thunderbolt, so USB is the fastest peripheral interface. The ThinkPad is marginally larger in one dimension, marginally smaller in two more, so about the same volume and the weight difference between the two is under 0.1%. The ThinkPad comes with a 3-year warranty, but this costs extra for the MBA (unless you buy from the education store), which brings the cost quite a bit closer. The cost of upgrading to 8GB of RAM for the ThinkPad is not listed - it's not even clear that it's an option, which is a shame because that's something I'd be pretty sure to want.
That's kind of the point. Motorola has NOT been offering patents to Microsoft and Apple at the terms they have offered to other people. (They want literally orders of magnitude more money for the patents.)
If it were that clear-cut, there would be no lawsuit. Motorola is offering these patents under exactly the same terms that they offer to everyone else. These terms are a fixed percentage of the final device cost. This satisfied the Fair and Non-Discriminatory parts of FRAND. Apple is arguing that they are not Reasonable, because the same percentage of a $20 dumb phone and a $600 smartphone is a very significant difference for using the patents in exactly the same way.
A lot of things advertised on Amazon are from third-party sellers, and those third parties often have the same products cheaper on their own web site (where they don't have to give Amazon a cut). I've started searching for things on Amazon and then searching for the seller's official site - it's often 10-20% cheaper.