From: Linux
Subject: Install this OS for better security
This is the latest version of Linux kernel, the
"September 2003, Cumulative Patch update" which
resolves all known security vulnerabilities affecting
MS Internet Explorer, MS Outlook and MS Outlook Express
as well as four newly discovered vulnerabilities.
Install now to help protect your computer
from these vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could
allow an malicious user to run executable on your computer.
Recommendation: Customers should install the OS at the earliest opportunity.
How to install: Run attached file. Choose Yes on displayed dialog box.
How to use: You don't need to do anything after installing this item.
Thank you for using Linux products.
Please do not reply to this message.
It was sent from an unmonitored e-mail address and we are unable to respond to any replies.
The names of the actual companies and products mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
Copyright 2003 Linux International.
Take for example the current thread. Use Google and try and find the *original* reference to the 'Second Superpower'. No cheating and using the Register article as a hint for search terms. If you can do it at all, you'll have wade through pages of chaff. By definition, that's a bad search engine.
OK. I tried, pretending that I knew nothing about the original meaning of the term other than that it was different from, and more "radical" than, the one in Jim Moore's blog.
It took me about five minutes to get to an article by David Edwards that says: "American dissident, Phyllis Bennis, writes of how the US superpower has been joined on the world stage by a second superpower - global public opinion.". It's clear that the article is referring to the original meaning, not to Jim Moore's watered-down one.
I don't think that's unreasonable.
I don't think we can reasonably expect Google, or any other search engine, to hand over the pages I'm interested in without any work, as long as there's variation in what people are interested in.
A proof of the Riemann Hypothesis wouldn't make a bit
of difference to public-key cryptography.
A little more precisely: Since so far there is no
known proof (the one this article's about certainly
doesn't seem to be one), we can't say for sure what
insights might happen to come along from the details
of a proof; but there's no reason to expect that a
proof of RH would make any difference to cryptography,
and the mere fact of knowing that RH was true certainly
wouldn't make any difference.
Think about it: in crypto applications you don't
even bother to prove your primes are prime;
you just run them through a few rounds of Miller-Rabin
and carelessly ignore the 1-in-10^80 chance that you
might be unlucky.:-) In that context, what difference
is a change from "almost every mathematician believes this
but we don't have a proof" to "hooray, now we have a
proof" likely to make?
I do industrial R&D, and get to call myself a
mathematician. The main commercial package I use
is Mathcad; not because I'm particularly fond of it,
but because other people I work with use it.
I find Mathcad strange. At first glance, it sounds as if
its user interface ought to be just about perfect: you
have an infinite canvas on which you can put text and
formulae and so on, and it will leave the text alone and
do what you ask it to with the mathematics. Cool. But...
somehow it doesn't work out so well.
Its symbolic capabilities are really rather weak.
There are allegedly bits of Maple inside, but Mathcad
is much less capable than Maple is. Any non-trivial
symbolic operation is likely to (1) be slow and (2) report
its results in some horribly anti-simplified form.
There are some programming facilities. They are
truly awful. There's no way to include comments: the
best you can do is to scatter bits of text around in
the vicinity of the program and hope you always remember
to move them when the program moves. The programming
facilities themselves are woeful: if/then/else, loop
over a predefined set of values, and, um, actually not
much beyond that. Debugging is agonizing. At night,
weasels come and eat your keyboard.
Editing hurts. The formula editor is better than
Microsoft's, but that's not much of an accomplishment.
There are a bunch of little redraw bugs -- these
do get better from release to release, though. The sort
of thing I mean is: you display a big array, and it
shows it in a little box with scrollbars, and then
when you scroll some things change in width and suddenly
you're not dragging the scrollbar any more because it's
moved. Yow.
The only data structure is the array. Arrays have
0, 1 or 2 dimensions. The end. (Well: there are strings.
And you can nest arrays inside other arrays. But nothing
like C's structs; no associative arrays; nothing, in
short, that really takes you out of the realm of big
piles of numbers.)
All that said, Mathcad is actually quite neat;
when I have something to do that's basically about
manipulating fairly small arrays, it's my tool of
choice.
I don't do enough symbolic work to need Mathematica
or Maple; my prejudices favour Maple over Mathematica,
but they were formed quite a long time ago now and
probably Mathematica has improved a lot since then.
For the rest: C++ and Python, with occasional smatterings
of Common Lisp when my boss isn't watching. (One free
Common Lisp implementation, CLISP, offers
arbitrary-precision floating-point numbers. This is
useful for diagnosing precision-loss problems.)
Slashdot Mirror
"DIMMMM / DIE / DIE / DIE / D_IE" ... You aren't an employee of Rambus Inc. by any chance?
From: Linux
Subject: Install this OS for better security
This is the latest version of Linux kernel, the "September 2003, Cumulative Patch update" which resolves all known security vulnerabilities affecting MS Internet Explorer, MS Outlook and MS Outlook Express as well as four newly discovered vulnerabilities.
Install now to help protect your computer from these vulnerabilities, the most serious of which could allow an malicious user to run executable on your computer.
Recommendation: Customers should install the OS at the earliest opportunity.
How to install: Run attached file. Choose Yes on displayed dialog box.
How to use: You don't need to do anything after installing this item.
Thank you for using Linux products.
Please do not reply to this message. It was sent from an unmonitored e-mail address and we are unable to respond to any replies.
The names of the actual companies and products mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.
Copyright 2003 Linux International.
<<<attachment: qmdywb.exe>>>
OK. I tried, pretending that I knew nothing about the original meaning of the term other than that it was different from, and more "radical" than, the one in Jim Moore's blog. It took me about five minutes to get to an article by David Edwards that says: "American dissident, Phyllis Bennis, writes of how the US superpower has been joined on the world stage by a second superpower - global public opinion.". It's clear that the article is referring to the original meaning, not to Jim Moore's watered-down one.
I don't think that's unreasonable.
I don't think we can reasonably expect Google, or any other search engine, to hand over the pages I'm interested in without any work, as long as there's variation in what people are interested in.
A proof of the Riemann Hypothesis wouldn't make a bit of difference to public-key cryptography.
A little more precisely: Since so far there is no known proof (the one this article's about certainly doesn't seem to be one), we can't say for sure what insights might happen to come along from the details of a proof; but there's no reason to expect that a proof of RH would make any difference to cryptography, and the mere fact of knowing that RH was true certainly wouldn't make any difference.
Think about it: in crypto applications you don't even bother to prove your primes are prime; you just run them through a few rounds of Miller-Rabin and carelessly ignore the 1-in-10^80 chance that you might be unlucky. :-) In that context, what difference
is a change from "almost every mathematician believes this
but we don't have a proof" to "hooray, now we have a
proof" likely to make?
I do industrial R&D, and get to call myself a mathematician. The main commercial package I use is Mathcad; not because I'm particularly fond of it, but because other people I work with use it.
I find Mathcad strange. At first glance, it sounds as if its user interface ought to be just about perfect: you have an infinite canvas on which you can put text and formulae and so on, and it will leave the text alone and do what you ask it to with the mathematics. Cool. But ...
somehow it doesn't work out so well.
All that said, Mathcad is actually quite neat; when I have something to do that's basically about manipulating fairly small arrays, it's my tool of choice.
I don't do enough symbolic work to need Mathematica or Maple; my prejudices favour Maple over Mathematica, but they were formed quite a long time ago now and probably Mathematica has improved a lot since then.
For the rest: C++ and Python, with occasional smatterings of Common Lisp when my boss isn't watching. (One free Common Lisp implementation, CLISP, offers arbitrary-precision floating-point numbers. This is useful for diagnosing precision-loss problems.)