A rigorous proof of a theorem will never fall apart unless the basic axioms of logic fall apart. A proof is basically saying "assuming these things, this must be true."
The application (the "theory" part) may fall apart, but once proved, the theorem will essentially last forever. That's one of the draws of mathematics.
You're right, I had actually forgotten about Silicon Spin and Internet Tonight. Man, they had a good little niche going.
But like one of the other posters said, instead of their supposed audience, G4/TTV caters to the people that want to beat them up and take their lunch money.
Jack Emmert: "The problem is that most player created generated content isn't very good."
Realistic Dragon: "Most is dross but a significant minority is OUTSTANDING"
Nice to see that you guys agree. Now, take a deep breath, and think about how long it took them to come out with NWN, which, in the end, has a sub-par editor that requires a lot of hacks and workarounds. Think about combining that with an MMORPG, where the technological dilemma is compounded by fifty times.
Think about the legal issues with copyright and trademark that CoH is facing even now -- Marvel is suing just because some character creation options look sorta similar to its characters. If you gave players the freedom that would be required to make this worthwhile, it would be legal hell.
While an MMO with user-generated content sounds great in concept, I doubt there exists a company right now that could pull it off.
Believe it or not, getting a cape does make a pretty big difference in the tedium of levelling. The most exciting content in CoH are called Trials, and they're
The Cape mission isn't a trial, but it is still very neat. The storyline (originally used very creatively to cover up the absence of capes in a superhero game) is that Paragon City issued a moratorium on cape-wearing in honor of the sacrifice of its premier heroes in stemming the tides of the first alien invasion, which is the major plotline in the game. The city is now lifting the moratorium, but wants the new generation of heroes to gain a little respect for the fallen heroes, so they send you to a vault in which the heroes made a time capsule before they left so you can pay your respects. Of course, it's under attack, you have to save it, etc.
The point is that it's at those moments that you feel like you're really part of the city, and that you've earned your right to wear a cape.
So, I think the cape mission in CoH is a very good example of the kind of content MMOs need more of. First, it's very immersive, and fits in with the global storyline. Second, it's a reward that you have to pass a test for, not just go forth and slaughter the weenie hordes. Finally, the reward itself is very nice, even though it's not directly combat related.
I think you're still not understanding. This isn't the result of an oversight OR an "egg broken on the 'frying pan of progress,'" it's pretty clearly the result of VU and Valve's competing interests.
It would be in the interest of Valve to have turned on the auth server before the release of physical copies to spur Steam purchases, it's in the interest of VU to wait until official release day when all the stores have it. It's VU's call to make in this case, so VU wins. Then again, the reason we have an auth server at all is probably in large part due to Valve wanting its Steam preloads to be secure.
So yes, it's the fault of Valve, Steam, AND Best Buy (for selling before release date and landing consumers in this awkward position). All we're trying to do is explain WHY this situation came about, and it has nothing to do with an unintentional oversight or a necessary stumbling block.
That's utter crap, and anyone saying I Robot had only superficial connection to the books is missing the forest for the trees.
Asimov had great ideas, but, forgive me, he was a terrible writer. The Robot series literally put me to sleep several times while I was reading it. The books have about four plot points a piece, connected with enormous lengths of empty dialogue about embracing the future. I had better luck with the Foundation series, because it doesn't read like a brochure on robot acceptance, and the ideas were much more compelling. Furthermore, the Robot series (in particular I, Robot) aren't really one coherent plotline, but rather a series of thematically related short stories.
Anyway, the point is that the best you can hope for from a movie based on Asimov's books is complete thematic agreement, which I believe that I Robot accomplished very successfully. We have someone reluctant to accept technology open his mind to it in the end, the three robot laws leading to the development of the zeroth calling into question the logical flaws of humanity, and the idea of robotic sentience and how close they can come to approximating a human (and how close we WANT them to come).
We also have the interspersed action sequences, which may not have been your particular cup of tea, but certainly didn't detract from the main message of the movie. Notice that the casualty rate is very, very low, in agreement with the goals of the robots.
So we're left with a very enjoyable summer action movie with a plot that could've easily fit in as another story in I, Robot. It's probably not the script that Asimov would've written, thank god, but it is faithful to its namesake.
No, he was responding to your post. What he's saying is that since BB seems to be the only option for purchasing it at this point, if the authentication servers were turned on, many people who either don't have a BB near them, don't like BB, or had their BB sell out of HL2 would choose to buy it on Steam immediately rather than wait the three days.
His theory is that since VU doesn't make money on Steam purchases, they're holding off on allowing authentication until the 19th, when almost every store in creation will be selling HL2, and thus more consumers will purchase the boxed copy rather than a Steam copy.
In that case, your inability to authenticate is simply an unfortunate side effect of VU's business strategy.
More robust only in the sense of increasing the publisher's profit. Everyone who has ordered Half-Life 2 on the Internet had the option to download it in increments and pre-load it on their computers, which almost everyone took advantage of. The only thing standing between them and HL2 is the same with customers who purchased it at BB, which is the go-ahead from Vivendi to turn on the authentication servers.
If customers who purchased online lose a hard drive in the future, they can just DL it again on Steam. If CD-purchasers lose their CD -- tough shit, they have to buy another copy of the game.
Internet distribution is simply better for the consumer and the developer, whereas traditional hard-copy distribution methods are better for the publisher.
Trust me, the humor in having mobs warp into trees or you getting stuck in a column is going to wear off REEEEEEEAL fast:D
Re:Misguided article
on
Humor in Games?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
That's... not true at all.
First, there's always going to be a market for more traditional games. They are still releasing new entries in the Myst series, a new (good) graphic adventure slips out once a year or so, etc. Hell, even side-scrolling shoot-em-ups still get made.
Secondly, comedy is possible even if a game's primary goal is not comedy. I would use GTA as an example of this. Sure, you have your main mission arcs where the more serious events happen, but in between you're listening to hillarious sound bytes on radio stations and getting missions from the most absurd caricatures of cops/drug dealers/gangsters/lawyers/etc (and let's not forget Love Fist) to do things like steal combines from a hippy commune to help fund a spaced out pothead called The Truth. Hell, half the comedy in the game is just the ridiculous violent overkill that is possible (i.e., running over hippies with a combine).
So yes, you can have "cool driving" with funny comedy, and there is a point to having both - just as the best movies aren't usually straight-up drama or gags every second.
1) City of Heroes is the only major MMORPG, to my knowledge, that puts out expansive updates on a regular basis that add tremendous content into the game. EQ, for example, releases a bunch of small changes bundled together in expansion packs (some of which have been less "expansive" than the free content updates), and SWG has been playing catch-up with content promised at the beginning.
What enables CoH to pump out large updates relatively bug-free using only the subscription fee, while other MMORPGs charge an extra fee by releasing them as expansion packs?
2) I just completed the Cavern of Transcendence trial and found it to be one of the most fulfilling gaming experiences in recent history. Even though we failed due to the time limit, the change of pace of getting players organized into the right positions on a time deadline was really neat. What made it even better was that due to the less "hardcore" nature of the CoH fanbase, none of us had any idea what was coming up on the way in.
Do you have plans to add more Trials such as these (for example, the Dam defense trial that was hinted at previously)?
Mileage definitely varies greatly with the challenge of JTL. Personally, I found the AI very lacking and the combat an absolute snoozefest. Sure, the upgrade system is neat and gives you something to do, but for what? There's nothing there. And I'm not going to sit through hours upon hours of trivial gameplay to work up to something that I've been told might be challenging. No thanks, I've already had enough of that with the ground game.
So, while there are a lot of people that can and do enjoy JTL, I have to caution that it's not all roses, and certainly was not to the level I've been waiting for since launch (although, that's nothing new).
Honestly, I don't think Google really *needs* to get any better than it is now. I use it because (a) it has a vast index of websites, (b) it works extremely quickly, (c) the interface is minimalist and easy to read, (d) the cache rocks, and (e) if I google for a topic, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it brings me to exactly the site I'm looking for within the first ten entries, with no technical errors.
I don't get where their critics are coming from. All you need to use are quotation marks and there's your result. For example, your friend could search for: "penetration mechanics" hull armor. You just have to think for a second before mindlessly typing in searches and saying "olo penatration brought me to a porn site y didnt it correct my spelling 4 me haha".
Mathematically interesting? It depends on who you ask. There are people who spend much of their free time just analyzing the number Pi for patterns, sequences, large primes, etc. These are dependent on the base as well. Doesn't really float my boat, personally, but it doesn't mean it's a trivial exercise using any method other than brute computation.
Also, the second puzzle is, most definitely, not real mathematics. There are, literally, uncountably infinitely many non-trivial functions (i.e., not scalar multiples of each other) that satisfy those criterion, and any similar ones that you could come up with. It might be a test of being able to divine what your boss wants without them actually giving you any sort of directive, but it's not mathematics.
The guy that fronts the cash gets to put stipulations on the projects you undertake with the money. That's just the way it is. From a logistical standpoint, it's certainly not bad for job placement to have a connection to Gates.
And also, maybe I'm not reading deeply enough between the lines, but every article I've read thus far says that Kildall was killed in some biker bar brawl that got out of control, and wasn't that great of a guy apart from being an excellent computer scientist. Searching "Gary Kildall" + suicide returns pretty much nothing on Kildall besides one or two people referencing Gates as the cause of Kildall's suicide.
I don't know if this is necessarily a deceptive move or not (I think it might have been just to keep people from going crazy when "fatal error" or something popped up), but I can confirm that my OEM XP CD as of last month and a Win 2000 version from last year or so both came with a "Reboot upon system error" option checked.
Removing it involved delving into the registry in 2000, but there's a simple checkbox in XP.
Either way, it was a royal pain the first time I discovered this "feature" when my Win2K box got a virus and began crashing on boot to windows, thus ending up in an infinite reboot cycle with no real way of understanding what was happening. It took me a while just to get it to stop rebooting, and THEN I had to repair the virus.
The writeup is a little unclear, but to the layperson (and, I wager, most mathematicians), a solution to an n-th degree polynomial is either an explicit function in the coefficients of the polynomial that returns a root as its value, or a sequence that converges to such a root. "Let x be such that P(x) = 0" is no stronger than the fact that a root exists, and doesn't tell you anything about what such a root will be (is it real, complex, rational, integral, algebraic, prime, etc, etc).
Secondly, the distinction between sin(x) and a good algorithm approximating sin(x) is vast. In practicality, I'll give you that it makes sense to equip our engineers and scientists with numerical methods, and there's a rich field of mathematics devoted entirely to it. In fact, almost every decent engineering or science program requires an upper level course in differential equations and numerical methods that should cover a lot of this ground.
However, proving things with some semblance of rigor would take a whole lot more work with a numerical approximation, and I'm guessing some theorems would prove impossible without having the actual value of a function, rather than being in some epsilon neighborhood of the value.
Let's put it this way: we have a rigorous definition for exactly what it means to be the sine of an angle (several congruent definitions, in fact), and it doesn't make sense to spread the nonsense that a numerical approximation for sin(3) is exactly the same thing as sin(3). However, it does make sense to spread the word that when it comes down to crunching numbers, numerical approximations are the name of the game.
This kid is in what I'm guessing is the equivalent of a really good technical high school, so he deserves praise for just being at the level of messing around with this kind of stuff, let alone attempting to publish a paper. I'm sure some of his paper is lost in translation, but, commenting on the paper itself, it would never get accepted into a reputable journal for publication.
First, he never gives any clear indication whatsoever of what he intends to prove that his method will do. What does it mean to provide a method for "solving the roots" of a general polynomial equation (determine one root, determine all roots, determine all real roots, etc)? Is the polynomial expressed over an arbitrary field, the real numbers, or the complex numbers? What is a "powerseries of s"? The power series of a function is defined as an infinite polynomial that converges over a certain interval to the value of the original function. S, as far as I can tell, is a constant, so thus a power series of s would be s itself.
It might seem like nitpicking, but it's ambiguities like these that make it nearly impossible to read this paper and determine its correctness.
I could pore through it, guessing at the meaning of unorthodox terminology and then proving everything that he hasn't proven to the level of mathematical rigor. But that's his job, and the job of his mentors/advisors and the referee at whatever journal he tries to submit this to.
Furthermore, issuing a press release hyping this as the solution to a long-sought-after open problem is irresponsible. The only problem this has the potential to solve is finding a faster algorithm for computing roots (real, complex, I'm not sure, he didn't say), but the paper does not address whether this is, in fact, any better at all than current root-finding methods. Even if so, it certainly wouldn't make mathematical waves except in some very select circles, were it not that he was in high school.
So, I apologize if this sounds harsh. I certainly couldn't have done this in high school, and it has the potential to shave some overhead off finding the roots of certain polynomials, which would be a nice little result. But I felt it necessary to explain why this paper isn't yet real mathematics.
I think the answer is to find some way to get off the traditional ad revenue. Neither I nor anyone I know have purchased products because of web advertising (I'm almost tempted to say have never bought any products advertised on the web, but then again I glaze over them now so I never even know what they are - usually a webcam or something).
The key is to either have content people are willing to subscribe for with a decent subscription model, or to have "ads" that tie in with the content - a la referral links to amazon, etc. The days of impression-based or click-through advertising have been growing numbered for a long time.
I read through the report and didn't see anything to suggest one way or the other. I'm not a construction expert or anything, but I think that given structural damage from the collapse of two ginormous buildings in close proximity (one in VERY close proximity), plus an entire day for something to go wrong due to the decision by the NYFD not to fight the fire in the building after making sure everyone was out due to too much structural damage (i.e., risk of collapse)... I'd have to say I lean against the conspiracy until proven otherwise.
And honestly, ATM I'd rather we work on investigating more important things than a vacated building collapsing, like our commander-in-chief.
Slashdot Mirror
Eight years, damn. That's one persistent troll. I didn't realize it'd been that long, hehe, I only check up on math.sci every once in a while.
A rigorous proof of a theorem will never fall apart unless the basic axioms of logic fall apart. A proof is basically saying "assuming these things, this must be true."
The application (the "theory" part) may fall apart, but once proved, the theorem will essentially last forever. That's one of the draws of mathematics.
Oh yes, please. JSH is hillarious.
Errm, they're still making Myst games. Myst IV came out last year, as did Uru, a 3D Myst game.
Big fan of the virtual boy?
You're right, I had actually forgotten about Silicon Spin and Internet Tonight. Man, they had a good little niche going.
But like one of the other posters said, instead of their supposed audience, G4/TTV caters to the people that want to beat them up and take their lunch money.
Jack Emmert: "The problem is that most player created generated content isn't very good."
Realistic Dragon: "Most is dross but a significant minority is OUTSTANDING"
Nice to see that you guys agree. Now, take a deep breath, and think about how long it took them to come out with NWN, which, in the end, has a sub-par editor that requires a lot of hacks and workarounds. Think about combining that with an MMORPG, where the technological dilemma is compounded by fifty times.
Think about the legal issues with copyright and trademark that CoH is facing even now -- Marvel is suing just because some character creation options look sorta similar to its characters. If you gave players the freedom that would be required to make this worthwhile, it would be legal hell.
While an MMO with user-generated content sounds great in concept, I doubt there exists a company right now that could pull it off.
Believe it or not, getting a cape does make a pretty big difference in the tedium of levelling. The most exciting content in CoH are called Trials, and they're The Cape mission isn't a trial, but it is still very neat. The storyline (originally used very creatively to cover up the absence of capes in a superhero game) is that Paragon City issued a moratorium on cape-wearing in honor of the sacrifice of its premier heroes in stemming the tides of the first alien invasion, which is the major plotline in the game. The city is now lifting the moratorium, but wants the new generation of heroes to gain a little respect for the fallen heroes, so they send you to a vault in which the heroes made a time capsule before they left so you can pay your respects. Of course, it's under attack, you have to save it, etc. The point is that it's at those moments that you feel like you're really part of the city, and that you've earned your right to wear a cape. So, I think the cape mission in CoH is a very good example of the kind of content MMOs need more of. First, it's very immersive, and fits in with the global storyline. Second, it's a reward that you have to pass a test for, not just go forth and slaughter the weenie hordes. Finally, the reward itself is very nice, even though it's not directly combat related.
I think you're still not understanding. This isn't the result of an oversight OR an "egg broken on the 'frying pan of progress,'" it's pretty clearly the result of VU and Valve's competing interests.
It would be in the interest of Valve to have turned on the auth server before the release of physical copies to spur Steam purchases, it's in the interest of VU to wait until official release day when all the stores have it. It's VU's call to make in this case, so VU wins. Then again, the reason we have an auth server at all is probably in large part due to Valve wanting its Steam preloads to be secure.
So yes, it's the fault of Valve, Steam, AND Best Buy (for selling before release date and landing consumers in this awkward position). All we're trying to do is explain WHY this situation came about, and it has nothing to do with an unintentional oversight or a necessary stumbling block.
That's utter crap, and anyone saying I Robot had only superficial connection to the books is missing the forest for the trees.
Asimov had great ideas, but, forgive me, he was a terrible writer. The Robot series literally put me to sleep several times while I was reading it. The books have about four plot points a piece, connected with enormous lengths of empty dialogue about embracing the future. I had better luck with the Foundation series, because it doesn't read like a brochure on robot acceptance, and the ideas were much more compelling. Furthermore, the Robot series (in particular I, Robot) aren't really one coherent plotline, but rather a series of thematically related short stories.
Anyway, the point is that the best you can hope for from a movie based on Asimov's books is complete thematic agreement, which I believe that I Robot accomplished very successfully. We have someone reluctant to accept technology open his mind to it in the end, the three robot laws leading to the development of the zeroth calling into question the logical flaws of humanity, and the idea of robotic sentience and how close they can come to approximating a human (and how close we WANT them to come).
We also have the interspersed action sequences, which may not have been your particular cup of tea, but certainly didn't detract from the main message of the movie. Notice that the casualty rate is very, very low, in agreement with the goals of the robots.
So we're left with a very enjoyable summer action movie with a plot that could've easily fit in as another story in I, Robot. It's probably not the script that Asimov would've written, thank god, but it is faithful to its namesake.
No, he was responding to your post. What he's saying is that since BB seems to be the only option for purchasing it at this point, if the authentication servers were turned on, many people who either don't have a BB near them, don't like BB, or had their BB sell out of HL2 would choose to buy it on Steam immediately rather than wait the three days.
His theory is that since VU doesn't make money on Steam purchases, they're holding off on allowing authentication until the 19th, when almost every store in creation will be selling HL2, and thus more consumers will purchase the boxed copy rather than a Steam copy.
In that case, your inability to authenticate is simply an unfortunate side effect of VU's business strategy.
More robust only in the sense of increasing the publisher's profit. Everyone who has ordered Half-Life 2 on the Internet had the option to download it in increments and pre-load it on their computers, which almost everyone took advantage of. The only thing standing between them and HL2 is the same with customers who purchased it at BB, which is the go-ahead from Vivendi to turn on the authentication servers.
If customers who purchased online lose a hard drive in the future, they can just DL it again on Steam. If CD-purchasers lose their CD -- tough shit, they have to buy another copy of the game.
Internet distribution is simply better for the consumer and the developer, whereas traditional hard-copy distribution methods are better for the publisher.
EDAG. Oh no, wait, was that the one that opens a dimensional void in your chest cavity? My bad.
Trust me, the humor in having mobs warp into trees or you getting stuck in a column is going to wear off REEEEEEEAL fast :D
That's... not true at all.
First, there's always going to be a market for more traditional games. They are still releasing new entries in the Myst series, a new (good) graphic adventure slips out once a year or so, etc. Hell, even side-scrolling shoot-em-ups still get made.
Secondly, comedy is possible even if a game's primary goal is not comedy. I would use GTA as an example of this. Sure, you have your main mission arcs where the more serious events happen, but in between you're listening to hillarious sound bytes on radio stations and getting missions from the most absurd caricatures of cops/drug dealers/gangsters/lawyers/etc (and let's not forget Love Fist) to do things like steal combines from a hippy commune to help fund a spaced out pothead called The Truth. Hell, half the comedy in the game is just the ridiculous violent overkill that is possible (i.e., running over hippies with a combine).
So yes, you can have "cool driving" with funny comedy, and there is a point to having both - just as the best movies aren't usually straight-up drama or gags every second.
1) City of Heroes is the only major MMORPG, to my knowledge, that puts out expansive updates on a regular basis that add tremendous content into the game. EQ, for example, releases a bunch of small changes bundled together in expansion packs (some of which have been less "expansive" than the free content updates), and SWG has been playing catch-up with content promised at the beginning. What enables CoH to pump out large updates relatively bug-free using only the subscription fee, while other MMORPGs charge an extra fee by releasing them as expansion packs? 2) I just completed the Cavern of Transcendence trial and found it to be one of the most fulfilling gaming experiences in recent history. Even though we failed due to the time limit, the change of pace of getting players organized into the right positions on a time deadline was really neat. What made it even better was that due to the less "hardcore" nature of the CoH fanbase, none of us had any idea what was coming up on the way in. Do you have plans to add more Trials such as these (for example, the Dam defense trial that was hinted at previously)?
Mileage definitely varies greatly with the challenge of JTL. Personally, I found the AI very lacking and the combat an absolute snoozefest. Sure, the upgrade system is neat and gives you something to do, but for what? There's nothing there. And I'm not going to sit through hours upon hours of trivial gameplay to work up to something that I've been told might be challenging. No thanks, I've already had enough of that with the ground game.
So, while there are a lot of people that can and do enjoy JTL, I have to caution that it's not all roses, and certainly was not to the level I've been waiting for since launch (although, that's nothing new).
Honestly, I don't think Google really *needs* to get any better than it is now. I use it because (a) it has a vast index of websites, (b) it works extremely quickly, (c) the interface is minimalist and easy to read, (d) the cache rocks, and (e) if I google for a topic, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it brings me to exactly the site I'm looking for within the first ten entries, with no technical errors.
I don't get where their critics are coming from. All you need to use are quotation marks and there's your result. For example, your friend could search for: "penetration mechanics" hull armor. You just have to think for a second before mindlessly typing in searches and saying "olo penatration brought me to a porn site y didnt it correct my spelling 4 me haha".
Mathematically interesting? It depends on who you ask. There are people who spend much of their free time just analyzing the number Pi for patterns, sequences, large primes, etc. These are dependent on the base as well. Doesn't really float my boat, personally, but it doesn't mean it's a trivial exercise using any method other than brute computation.
Also, the second puzzle is, most definitely, not real mathematics. There are, literally, uncountably infinitely many non-trivial functions (i.e., not scalar multiples of each other) that satisfy those criterion, and any similar ones that you could come up with. It might be a test of being able to divine what your boss wants without them actually giving you any sort of directive, but it's not mathematics.
The guy that fronts the cash gets to put stipulations on the projects you undertake with the money. That's just the way it is. From a logistical standpoint, it's certainly not bad for job placement to have a connection to Gates.
And also, maybe I'm not reading deeply enough between the lines, but every article I've read thus far says that Kildall was killed in some biker bar brawl that got out of control, and wasn't that great of a guy apart from being an excellent computer scientist. Searching "Gary Kildall" + suicide returns pretty much nothing on Kildall besides one or two people referencing Gates as the cause of Kildall's suicide.
I don't know if this is necessarily a deceptive move or not (I think it might have been just to keep people from going crazy when "fatal error" or something popped up), but I can confirm that my OEM XP CD as of last month and a Win 2000 version from last year or so both came with a "Reboot upon system error" option checked.
Removing it involved delving into the registry in 2000, but there's a simple checkbox in XP.
Either way, it was a royal pain the first time I discovered this "feature" when my Win2K box got a virus and began crashing on boot to windows, thus ending up in an infinite reboot cycle with no real way of understanding what was happening. It took me a while just to get it to stop rebooting, and THEN I had to repair the virus.
Errm... not exactly.
The writeup is a little unclear, but to the layperson (and, I wager, most mathematicians), a solution to an n-th degree polynomial is either an explicit function in the coefficients of the polynomial that returns a root as its value, or a sequence that converges to such a root. "Let x be such that P(x) = 0" is no stronger than the fact that a root exists, and doesn't tell you anything about what such a root will be (is it real, complex, rational, integral, algebraic, prime, etc, etc).
Secondly, the distinction between sin(x) and a good algorithm approximating sin(x) is vast. In practicality, I'll give you that it makes sense to equip our engineers and scientists with numerical methods, and there's a rich field of mathematics devoted entirely to it. In fact, almost every decent engineering or science program requires an upper level course in differential equations and numerical methods that should cover a lot of this ground.
However, proving things with some semblance of rigor would take a whole lot more work with a numerical approximation, and I'm guessing some theorems would prove impossible without having the actual value of a function, rather than being in some epsilon neighborhood of the value.
Let's put it this way: we have a rigorous definition for exactly what it means to be the sine of an angle (several congruent definitions, in fact), and it doesn't make sense to spread the nonsense that a numerical approximation for sin(3) is exactly the same thing as sin(3). However, it does make sense to spread the word that when it comes down to crunching numbers, numerical approximations are the name of the game.
This kid is in what I'm guessing is the equivalent of a really good technical high school, so he deserves praise for just being at the level of messing around with this kind of stuff, let alone attempting to publish a paper. I'm sure some of his paper is lost in translation, but, commenting on the paper itself, it would never get accepted into a reputable journal for publication.
First, he never gives any clear indication whatsoever of what he intends to prove that his method will do. What does it mean to provide a method for "solving the roots" of a general polynomial equation (determine one root, determine all roots, determine all real roots, etc)? Is the polynomial expressed over an arbitrary field, the real numbers, or the complex numbers? What is a "powerseries of s"? The power series of a function is defined as an infinite polynomial that converges over a certain interval to the value of the original function. S, as far as I can tell, is a constant, so thus a power series of s would be s itself.
It might seem like nitpicking, but it's ambiguities like these that make it nearly impossible to read this paper and determine its correctness.
I could pore through it, guessing at the meaning of unorthodox terminology and then proving everything that he hasn't proven to the level of mathematical rigor. But that's his job, and the job of his mentors/advisors and the referee at whatever journal he tries to submit this to.
Furthermore, issuing a press release hyping this as the solution to a long-sought-after open problem is irresponsible. The only problem this has the potential to solve is finding a faster algorithm for computing roots (real, complex, I'm not sure, he didn't say), but the paper does not address whether this is, in fact, any better at all than current root-finding methods. Even if so, it certainly wouldn't make mathematical waves except in some very select circles, were it not that he was in high school.
So, I apologize if this sounds harsh. I certainly couldn't have done this in high school, and it has the potential to shave some overhead off finding the roots of certain polynomials, which would be a nice little result. But I felt it necessary to explain why this paper isn't yet real mathematics.
I think the answer is to find some way to get off the traditional ad revenue. Neither I nor anyone I know have purchased products because of web advertising (I'm almost tempted to say have never bought any products advertised on the web, but then again I glaze over them now so I never even know what they are - usually a webcam or something).
The key is to either have content people are willing to subscribe for with a decent subscription model, or to have "ads" that tie in with the content - a la referral links to amazon, etc. The days of impression-based or click-through advertising have been growing numbered for a long time.
I read through the report and didn't see anything to suggest one way or the other. I'm not a construction expert or anything, but I think that given structural damage from the collapse of two ginormous buildings in close proximity (one in VERY close proximity), plus an entire day for something to go wrong due to the decision by the NYFD not to fight the fire in the building after making sure everyone was out due to too much structural damage (i.e., risk of collapse)... I'd have to say I lean against the conspiracy until proven otherwise.
And honestly, ATM I'd rather we work on investigating more important things than a vacated building collapsing, like our commander-in-chief.