I always like to think of gambling in terms of a very high risk investment.
This analogy is not really valid, because gambling generally has a negative expected value (you lose in the long term) while investment has a positive expected value, whether it's bank account or stocks. In fact, investors demand a higher expected profit when the risk is high. If high-risk stocks had identical expected profits to bank accounts, no one would invest in stocks but rather in the lower risk bank accounts.
Are there journals that do pay authors? All the journals I have encountered in the biomedical field require the authors to pay a fee, which ranges from $0 to $2500.
Only 15 Saturn V's were built and only 13 of those were actually launched. They could have had an actual catastrophic failure rate of 10% and we would have never known it given the small number of launches that we did.
True. For rockets having 10% failure rate, there is a 25% chance of having 13 successful launches (0.9^13 = 0.254). We can say with some confidence that Saturn V had a failure rate below 20% (5% chance) and good confidence that the rate was below 30% (1% chance).
Possibly because evolution requires a molecule that is not too stable.
If DNA was too stable for evolution, presumably the cell could produce proteins that randomly mutate the genetic material, simulating the conditions that currently cause DNA mutations. In other words, an error rate too low can easily be fixed, while an error rate too high is more problematic. Some known DNA-changing processes are encoded by the genome. For example, the crossing over of DNA between homologous chromosomes in meiosis is catalyzed by proteins. Crossing over creates genetic variability and speeds up evolution.
I can understand that solving an NP-complete problem in polynomial time could be mathematically/logically impossible, but calling it "violating the laws of physics" should be a misnomer.
From a mathematic point of view, solving an NP-complete problem in polynomial time is not a problem at all. The class NP is defined as the set of problems that a non-deterministic Turing machine can solve in polynomial time.
Over a billion transistors in a Core 2 Quad and very little of its circuitry is changeable after it's shipped.
CPUs are universal Turing machines which means they can be programmed to do anything a Turing machine can do. Changing a CPU wouldn't affect its fundamental expressive power. In this sense, CPUs provide a very flexible platform. Changing a CPU might affect its quality attributes, though, like fix defects and improve performance.
I'm not even convinced that the universe is deterministic, but current computers most definitely are. The brain may well be taking advantage of physics we don't even know about.
If universe would not be deterministic, how could computers be? Are they operating in a deterministic subset of a non-deterministic universe?
In fact, computers are not deterministic, if we define determinism as "we are (easily) able to predict computer behaviour". A bit can flip its state erroneously. This happens more easily when CPU temperature is high, for instance. But this is usually seen as a disadvantage.
About brains using unknown physics. The human brain is evolved from more primitive brains. Mouse, for instance, is quite similar to human on genomic level. Did brains of more primitive life forms, which are hardly intelligent, also use yet-unknown physics or did brain cells dramatically change in evolution to take advantage of new physics?
User interface design is quite easy, actually. No need to read books. Here is a short guide.
Use command line interfaces. Users like the command line because it's the most powerful interaction method and users want to be in control.
Using short command names is user friendly, because then users don't have to type so much. For instance, instead of the horribly long name "list" use "ls". However, if you need to choose a name longer than 5 characters (because, for instance, all shorter names are already taken), consider putting one vowel into the name to make it easier to pronounce.
Use lots of command line options: the more the better. Remember, users love to be in control, and what more control would they need than the ability to tell the computer that you want to sort files according to the MD5 sum of the last modification date in UTC+9 timezone?
Documentation is important so that users can learn how to use your programs: thus, make sure you put comments in your C source.
When installing programs, users want an optimized version for their architecture so you only need to provide a source package and let users compile it themselves. You can include a makefile if you want, but do consider leaving it out because compiling the program by hand is an excellent way for users to get familiar with your program and its source code.
In fact, this would take a very long time. There are 2^64 = 1.84*10^19 64-bit numbers, and if you could test 10^9 of them per second, it would still take 10^10 seconds. Using a large cluster of machines this could be feasible, but even that might not be able to test all common CPUs before a new revision comes out.
NASA is committed to quality of service and safety of its employees. If they scan the livers of each personnel with a microscope to detect any liver damage after each party, that's gonna cost a bit.
It is possible to prove this relationship using the finite ring {0, 1, 2, 3, SHA}, which is isomorphic to ring {0, 1, 2, 3, 4}: SHA3 = 3*SHA = 1*SHA + 2*SHA = SHA1 + SHA2. I have submitted this novel result to Journal of Advanced Abstract Algebra (JAAA, or JA^3).
The NSA has approved AES for encrypting secret data (128+ bits) and top secret data (192+ bits). Unless they are playing a very deep denial and deception game, it stands to reason that they can't find a way through it either. By the way, there are side channel attacks for AES, but they only work if the attacker has access to the computer doing encryption. I suppose NSA is not too worried about them, since if someone has access to computers handling top-secret data, there are much bigger problems than encryption algorithms.
What would happen if you wrote a program to randomly create algorithms? Most of them would be rubbish, but occasionally you'd hit gold. It must be possible for computers to create formulas that "add up" - i.e. that work?
Doesn't work. The search space for feasible hash algorithms is astronomically large and if you pick one randomly, chances are it's not very good. Humans are good at pruning out most of the search space and concentrating on algorithms that look promising. Of course, human pruning isn't perfect since otherwise we would already have a perfect hash algorithm - if one exists. Also, designing an algorithm is easy but showing that it's secure is hard. The competition timeline has several years reserved for public analysis of proposed algorithms.
This article is total BS in any case. They asked me during my phone interview what file extension a Outlook email archive file had. WTF!? What does that question have to do with anything at all?
Maybe they wanted to see how you react to that kind of question? They might be completely satisfied if you said "I haven't handled Outlook archive files and thus don't know such details. In general, there are far too many details in the world to remember them all, I simply look them up when I need to. By the way, Google is a very good way to look up details."
It may be cheaper to send robotic missions, but probably not as much fun. For a race serious about exploring a significant fraction of the galaxy, I doubt if the manned vs unmanned costs are an issue driving the choice of exploration method.
It's possible that we eventually develop robots, or artificial intelligence, that are smarter than we are and thus have greater capability to explore space. Similarly, it's reasonable that an alien race does the same and there will be no distinction between "manned" mission and "robotic" mission. An alien race might not be the original biological race but the artificial one. When traveling through space, the A.I. would make it possible for itself to go into hibernation, something that's more difficult for a biological species, although not impossible.
I hate the standard "secret questions" where there is basically only one answer. I like putting in my own secret question, because I can make it cryptic. e.g. What did you eat on your 16th birthday? The answer could be ANYTHING.
Site is dying. Now they're facing the real test: can you use a Bluetooth rifle against a Slashdot attack? There's one Slashdotter... another one... look, over there! But the battle is hopeless, most Slashdotters are secure in their parents' basement.
Python includes some neat new ideas on programming, borrowed from more advanced languages that are still in research stage. generators is the prime example and it helps to learn about it if anything just to keep up with the technology.
I don't quite understand. CLU, which was designed in the 70's, had generators with a very similar syntax to Python's ("yield" keyword, similar for-loop). Python has a somewhat more complex iteration repertoire than CLU with list comprehensions, general iterator protocol and the new generator expressions.
An awful lot of spam has been generated from machines infected by worms. If the spammer controls a thousand zombie machines, he'll have all the CPU power he needs...
Let's do some math. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. Assuming sending a message takes 1 second, one machine working full-time would send 86,400 messages per day. Assume there are 1000 zombie machines working full-time (or 10,000 zombies working 10% of the time). They can send 86 million messages per day - quite plenty.
Now, assume the Internet has a total of N machines, and we can hijack 1% of them and put 10% average CPU load on all hijacked machines. This means, conceptually, that 1 in 1000 machines is working full-time to send spam. This 1 in 1000 machine can send 86,400 messages/day to the rest of 999 (86 per day for each). However, if only 10% of the addresses on spammers' lists are correct, and zombies need to calculate hashes for invalid addresses also, spam load would be reduced to 8 messages per day. This wouldn't be too bad. Of course, the number depends very much on the parameters.
When I'm writing (books, articles, whatever) I tend to write in plain text (kedit, gedit, kwrite) and only bother with 'professional' formating when the text is completed.
LaTeX might be suitable for that kind of work. Basically, you enter plain text with a few structuring commands and let (La)TeX render a nicely formatted document. The learning curve is probably steeper than with Word, because you have to learn some of the TeX language to do anything, but it works quite well after you've learned it.
"GNU" might be best, because doesn't bash also run under Windows?
Confirmed. I'm running bash-2.05 on Windows 2000/Cygwin. I used to run 4NT/4DOS (for 10 years or so), but I switched, and after a bit (well, quite a bit) configuration it felt just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I always like to think of gambling in terms of a very high risk investment.
This analogy is not really valid, because gambling generally has a negative expected value (you lose in the long term) while investment has a positive expected value, whether it's bank account or stocks. In fact, investors demand a higher expected profit when the risk is high. If high-risk stocks had identical expected profits to bank accounts, no one would invest in stocks but rather in the lower risk bank accounts.
Are there journals that do pay authors? All the journals I have encountered in the biomedical field require the authors to pay a fee, which ranges from $0 to $2500.
Only 15 Saturn V's were built and only 13 of those were actually launched. They could have had an actual catastrophic failure rate of 10% and we would have never known it given the small number of launches that we did.
True. For rockets having 10% failure rate, there is a 25% chance of having 13 successful launches (0.9^13 = 0.254). We can say with some confidence that Saturn V had a failure rate below 20% (5% chance) and good confidence that the rate was below 30% (1% chance).
Possibly because evolution requires a molecule that is not too stable.
If DNA was too stable for evolution, presumably the cell could produce proteins that randomly mutate the genetic material, simulating the conditions that currently cause DNA mutations. In other words, an error rate too low can easily be fixed, while an error rate too high is more problematic. Some known DNA-changing processes are encoded by the genome. For example, the crossing over of DNA between homologous chromosomes in meiosis is catalyzed by proteins. Crossing over creates genetic variability and speeds up evolution.
From a mathematic point of view, solving an NP-complete problem in polynomial time is not a problem at all. The class NP is defined as the set of problems that a non-deterministic Turing machine can solve in polynomial time.
CPUs are universal Turing machines which means they can be programmed to do anything a Turing machine can do. Changing a CPU wouldn't affect its fundamental expressive power. In this sense, CPUs provide a very flexible platform. Changing a CPU might affect its quality attributes, though, like fix defects and improve performance.
If universe would not be deterministic, how could computers be? Are they operating in a deterministic subset of a non-deterministic universe?
In fact, computers are not deterministic, if we define determinism as "we are (easily) able to predict computer behaviour". A bit can flip its state erroneously. This happens more easily when CPU temperature is high, for instance. But this is usually seen as a disadvantage.
About brains using unknown physics. The human brain is evolved from more primitive brains. Mouse, for instance, is quite similar to human on genomic level. Did brains of more primitive life forms, which are hardly intelligent, also use yet-unknown physics or did brain cells dramatically change in evolution to take advantage of new physics?
User interface design is quite easy, actually. No need to read books. Here is a short guide.
Use command line interfaces. Users like the command line because it's the most powerful interaction method and users want to be in control.
Using short command names is user friendly, because then users don't have to type so much. For instance, instead of the horribly long name "list" use "ls". However, if you need to choose a name longer than 5 characters (because, for instance, all shorter names are already taken), consider putting one vowel into the name to make it easier to pronounce.
Use lots of command line options: the more the better. Remember, users love to be in control, and what more control would they need than the ability to tell the computer that you want to sort files according to the MD5 sum of the last modification date in UTC+9 timezone?
Documentation is important so that users can learn how to use your programs: thus, make sure you put comments in your C source.
When installing programs, users want an optimized version for their architecture so you only need to provide a source package and let users compile it themselves. You can include a makefile if you want, but do consider leaving it out because compiling the program by hand is an excellent way for users to get familiar with your program and its source code.
In fact, this would take a very long time. There are 2^64 = 1.84*10^19 64-bit numbers, and if you could test 10^9 of them per second, it would still take 10^10 seconds. Using a large cluster of machines this could be feasible, but even that might not be able to test all common CPUs before a new revision comes out.
NASA is committed to quality of service and safety of its employees. If they scan the livers of each personnel with a microscope to detect any liver damage after each party, that's gonna cost a bit.
It is possible to prove this relationship using the finite ring {0, 1, 2, 3, SHA}, which is isomorphic to ring {0, 1, 2, 3, 4}: SHA3 = 3*SHA = 1*SHA + 2*SHA = SHA1 + SHA2. I have submitted this novel result to Journal of Advanced Abstract Algebra (JAAA, or JA^3).
Doesn't work. The search space for feasible hash algorithms is astronomically large and if you pick one randomly, chances are it's not very good. Humans are good at pruning out most of the search space and concentrating on algorithms that look promising. Of course, human pruning isn't perfect since otherwise we would already have a perfect hash algorithm - if one exists. Also, designing an algorithm is easy but showing that it's secure is hard. The competition timeline has several years reserved for public analysis of proposed algorithms.
No. They are registered in Antigua which doesn't have DMCA-like legislation.
Maybe they wanted to see how you react to that kind of question? They might be completely satisfied if you said "I haven't handled Outlook archive files and thus don't know such details. In general, there are far too many details in the world to remember them all, I simply look them up when I need to. By the way, Google is a very good way to look up details."
It's possible that we eventually develop robots, or artificial intelligence, that are smarter than we are and thus have greater capability to explore space. Similarly, it's reasonable that an alien race does the same and there will be no distinction between "manned" mission and "robotic" mission. An alien race might not be the original biological race but the artificial one. When traveling through space, the A.I. would make it possible for itself to go into hibernation, something that's more difficult for a biological species, although not impossible.
Indy shot first!
Yeah, like "pussy".
On a related note, this guy has the best webcam ever.
Site is dying. Now they're facing the real test: can you use a Bluetooth rifle against a Slashdot attack? There's one Slashdotter... another one... look, over there! But the battle is hopeless, most Slashdotters are secure in their parents' basement.
I don't quite understand. CLU, which was designed in the 70's, had generators with a very similar syntax to Python's ("yield" keyword, similar for-loop). Python has a somewhat more complex iteration repertoire than CLU with list comprehensions, general iterator protocol and the new generator expressions.
Let's do some math. There are 86,400 seconds in a day. Assuming sending a message takes 1 second, one machine working full-time would send 86,400 messages per day. Assume there are 1000 zombie machines working full-time (or 10,000 zombies working 10% of the time). They can send 86 million messages per day - quite plenty.
Now, assume the Internet has a total of N machines, and we can hijack 1% of them and put 10% average CPU load on all hijacked machines. This means, conceptually, that 1 in 1000 machines is working full-time to send spam. This 1 in 1000 machine can send 86,400 messages/day to the rest of 999 (86 per day for each). However, if only 10% of the addresses on spammers' lists are correct, and zombies need to calculate hashes for invalid addresses also, spam load would be reduced to 8 messages per day. This wouldn't be too bad. Of course, the number depends very much on the parameters.
<Obligatory out-of-context Microsoft-bashing joke>
Great, now viruses can spread and relay spam at 6.63Gbps.
LaTeX might be suitable for that kind of work. Basically, you enter plain text with a few structuring commands and let (La)TeX render a nicely formatted document. The learning curve is probably steeper than with Word, because you have to learn some of the TeX language to do anything, but it works quite well after you've learned it.
Confirmed. I'm running bash-2.05 on Windows 2000/Cygwin. I used to run 4NT/4DOS (for 10 years or so), but I switched, and after a bit (well, quite a bit) configuration it felt just fine.