Mod Parent Down. Mixed up NP and NP-complete
on
The End of Encryption?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As many of his other repliers already pointed out, parent mixed up the NP and NPC (NP-complete) classes. Factoring is in NP. On the other hand, it is very-very unlikely that it is NP-complete (more precisely NP-hard), because this would imply that NP=co-NP.
What does NP=co-NP mean, you ask? You can consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-NP for the details. But the important point is that it is just as unlikely as P=NP.
I built my own chain mail some time ago. It was written in Hungarian, and this is a poor and partial translation, but here it is:
This mail is forwarded to you as part of a sociology experiment / game. The name of the game is: "Who is the lamest?" If you would like to participate, all you have to do is to
forward this letter to your three lamest acquaintances.
(This is how you got this letter.) We leave it to your own judgement to decide what makes someone lame. But please participate only if you play by the spirit of the game. Please try to pick people much lamer than you. Of course, if you are very lame yourself, you can make some compromises.
This was very funny indeed. There was another variation on this theme on Slashdot once. I couldn't find the link, but it went on like this:
One funny slashdotter:
"REAL VAGINAL SHRINKING CREAM!
Men! Do your wives complain that your manhood just doesn't measure up? Slip your woman some VSC and in two to three weeks your woman will be wondering what she was complaining about!
SIZE DOES MATTER!"
One even funnier slashdotter:
"It's like buying penis enlargements for all you friends and family."
I would love to mod you down, but I have to reply to this. It's like saying "Why does everyone cry about this AT&T monopoly? Bell invented the phone in a garage. Surely you can do that too, if you're clever enough."
No. This is the case where the total (my inbox and outbox) is more than the sum of its parts (my individual mails). As a mathematician, I'm not very concerned about someone reading any specific mail of mine. But I'm very concerned about someone building a profile about me, based on all of my mails. I'd like to see services that guarantee that such thing will not happen. But Google seems to promise that it will happen. Everyone subscribing should fully understand this and all of its implications.
Google is getting ready to know everything about you. They have the Orkut social network, GMail, Personalized Google, Blogger, Froogle. They can link these various facets of your online indentity via cookies or other methods.
These give enough data about you to reconstruct even your smallest habits. Maybe they will sell it in aggregated, anonimized form. Or use it themselves to target ads even better.
"All of the people I know using these sites are totally not geeky and are mostly somewhat trendy if a bit on the counter culture side of it believe it or not."
You are right. When my friends started their Hungarian-language online social network (wiw.hu) in April 2002, the first 1000 users were those "we know the best parties around" kind of people. They found it fashionable to be on the network. We are now at 51,000 members, trendiness is no longer a topic. But there are still more women on the network than men, 52% to 48%. (And these are not men with female names.) I met many hardcore wiw.hu users personally, and most of the girls are beautiful.
(Note that wiw.hu is not a friendster-like dating site. It doesn't have any matchmaking functionality. Not even photos. So it only maps offline, real-life connections. Currently, about 450,000 of them.)
"One of the driving forces behind Java's evolution was the fragmentation of the C++ camp."
And the reason for this fragmentation was the many competing closed-source compiler implementations, many of them platform-specific. Having a reference open-source implementation helps against fragmentation.
The Firefox Session Saver is very nice indeed. But if the browser crashes, it does not work. It only saves at (proper) shutdowns. Firefox only crashed on me once in the last months, but still, this makes a Session Saver less useful.
I work at a small company. Without the open source Sphinx speech recognition library, the company wouldn't even attempt doing speech recognition. But thanks to Sphinx, they do attempt, and they hired me for the job. So I thank free software for my job.
He says that you will not get a job because already there is an open source solution for the task you would do. But the software business is not like this. Tasks are plenty.
No, imaginary humans with infinite time and dedication are 100%. But real humans are not. The percent goes down with time and dedication continuously, so I really don't understand what this 99.84% means.
This classification perfectly shows the limits of his thinking.
Pros are those who use only technical arguments. Priests are those who use ethical arguments, too. The problem is, Enderle is unable to comprehend ethical arguments. Zealots are those who get too annoyed by this fact.
MS has a strict executable-only policy for non-MS source in general, and GPL'd source in particular.
This makes the competition so much fairer. We can't look into their code, they can't look into ours. I always thought that they take the best open source ideas and reimplement them.
Slashdot Mirror
As many of his other repliers already pointed out, parent mixed up the NP and NPC (NP-complete) classes. Factoring is in NP. On the other hand, it is very-very unlikely that it is NP-complete (more precisely NP-hard), because this would imply that NP=co-NP.
What does NP=co-NP mean, you ask? You can consult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-NP for the details. But the important point is that it is just as unlikely as P=NP.
I use it on Windows 98. It works. But it crashes without warning at about the 20th minute of calls.
I guess they fixed it:
27.07.2004 Skype for Windows 1.0.0.10
* bugfix: fixed crash on Windows 98/ME
But doesn't work on Windows 98/ME
I use it on Windows 98. It works. But it crashes without warning at about the 20th minute of calls.
I built my own chain mail some time ago. It was written in Hungarian, and this is a poor and partial translation, but here it is:
This mail is forwarded to you as part of a sociology experiment / game. The name of the game is: "Who is the lamest?" If you would like to participate, all you have to do is to
forward this letter to your three lamest acquaintances.
(This is how you got this letter.) We leave it to your own judgement to decide what makes someone lame. But please participate only if you play by the spirit of the game. Please try to pick people much lamer than you. Of course, if you are very lame yourself, you can make some compromises.
Thank you for your participation.
"What will happen when low-cost labor in China is combined with Microsoft technologies?"
X-Box, that's what. They build the most of them in China.
Nice, you just managed to enrage the two biggest groups of Linux zealots in one go. :-)
And was stomped into the ground accordingly:
Moderation -2
50% Flamebait
50% Overrated
Nice combo.
This was very funny indeed. There was another variation on this theme on Slashdot once. I couldn't find the link, but it went on like this:
One funny slashdotter:
"REAL VAGINAL SHRINKING CREAM!
Men! Do your wives complain that your manhood just doesn't measure up? Slip
your woman some VSC and in two to three weeks your woman will be wondering
what she was complaining about!
SIZE DOES MATTER!"
One even funnier slashdotter:
"It's like buying penis enlargements for all you friends and family."
Mod me down if you wish
I would love to mod you down, but I have to reply to this. It's like saying "Why does everyone cry about this AT&T monopoly? Bell invented the phone in a garage. Surely you can do that too, if you're clever enough."
No. This is the case where the total (my inbox and outbox) is more than the sum of its parts (my individual mails). As a mathematician, I'm not very concerned about someone reading any specific mail of mine. But I'm very concerned about someone building a profile about me, based on all of my mails. I'd like to see services that guarantee that such thing will not happen. But Google seems to promise that it will happen. Everyone subscribing should fully understand this and all of its implications.
Google is getting ready to know everything about you. They have the Orkut social network, GMail, Personalized Google, Blogger, Froogle. They can link these various facets of your online indentity via cookies or other methods.
These give enough data about you to reconstruct even your smallest habits. Maybe they will sell it in aggregated, anonimized form. Or use it themselves to target ads even better.
"All of the people I know using these sites are totally not geeky and are mostly somewhat trendy if a bit on the counter culture side of it believe it or not."
You are right. When my friends started their Hungarian-language online social network (wiw.hu) in April 2002, the first 1000 users were those "we know the best parties around" kind of people. They found it fashionable to be on the network. We are now at 51,000 members, trendiness is no longer a topic. But there are still more women on the network than men, 52% to 48%. (And these are not men with female names.) I met many hardcore wiw.hu users personally, and most of the girls are beautiful.
(Note that wiw.hu is not a friendster-like dating site. It doesn't have any matchmaking functionality. Not even photos. So it only maps offline, real-life connections. Currently, about 450,000 of them.)
"One of the driving forces behind Java's evolution was the fragmentation of the C++ camp."
And the reason for this fragmentation was the many competing closed-source compiler implementations, many of them platform-specific. Having a reference open-source implementation helps against fragmentation.
The Firefox Session Saver is very nice indeed. But if the browser crashes, it does not work. It only saves at (proper) shutdowns. Firefox only crashed on me once in the last months, but still, this makes a Session Saver less useful.
My programmer friends started a small but already popular website. If it weren't for
Linux, FreeBSD, GNU, gcc, gdb, Apache, PHP, PostGres, Squid, Horde, SquirrelMail, QMail, Perl, Ruby, fetchmail, CVS,
most possibly they could not start it at all.
I work at a small company. Without the open source Sphinx speech recognition library, the company wouldn't even attempt doing speech recognition. But thanks to Sphinx, they do attempt, and they hired me for the job. So I thank free software for my job.
He says that you will not get a job because already there is an open source solution for the task you would do. But the software business is not like this. Tasks are plenty.
No, imaginary humans with infinite time and dedication are 100%. But real humans are not. The percent goes down with time and dedication continuously, so I really don't understand what this 99.84% means.
"--Generic filenames"
They have a preference menu with a
"Preferred file-naming convention:"
Options are:
Autechre - Flutter.mp3
03 - Autechre - Flutter.mp3
WAP54-03.mp3
I work for such a site (wiw.hu). The parent gives a perfect description of our situation.
If you are interested in theory of computation, you should read Lance Fortnow's
My favorite ten complexity theorems of the past decade.
It's a survey, but it has all the references if you want to know more about a result.
This classification perfectly shows the limits of his thinking.
Pros are those who use only technical arguments.
Priests are those who use ethical arguments, too.
The problem is, Enderle is unable to comprehend ethical arguments.
Zealots are those who get too annoyed by this fact.
This makes the competition so much fairer. We can't look into their code, they can't look into ours. I always thought that they take the best open source ideas and reimplement them.
This guy has really big balls. I guess he uses his real name.
9 8-06-2 0/m15.jpg
Are here FreeBSD or XBox Linux people who know some celebrity gossip about Stefan Esser?
I googled the guy, and found some pics of him:
http://www.de.freebsd.org/de/gif/hamburg-19
(He is on the right.)