Re:Your Vote Is Already Wasted If You're Uninforme
on
Should You Vote?
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· Score: 2
Have you found any sites that not only list issues and candidate's positions, but also try to give a balanced view of the various arguments surrounding an issue and maybe some historical perspective? It seems to me that that type of resource would be the most useful. It's not easy to give a balanced view of a politically charged issue, of course, because there are issues on which almost everyone has an opinion.
Why would it be desireable if they could have thier names jacked at any time?
I don't understand how that would work. Can I "jack" domains that have already been registered, or just ones that haven't been registered yet?
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Re:A vote for Nader is a vote for.... NADER!
on
Should You Vote?
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· Score: 1
In these five swing states, the Ivins Rule applies most strongly -- check the state polls right before election day, then make your judgment.
So if I want more people to vote for Nader, I should tell newspapers that I'm going to vote for Gore?
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Re:Your Vote Is Already Wasted If You're Uninforme
on
Should You Vote?
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· Score: 1
passive receiving of ads, mailings, and any other major media outlet won't do
Why shouldn't I trust mailings from the League of Women Voters if I know that historically, I have agreed with what they say? How is going to Vote Smart and finding the candidate that best agrees with me better (especially if I already know what the result will be)?
Why wouldn't it be used as a permanent domain? If the second-level domains are "eternal and free from lawsuits", wouldn't it be *desirable* to use a.alt domain if you could get it?
GREY GOO: Self-replicating (von Neumann) nanomachines spreading uncontrolably, building copies of themselves using all available material. This is a commonly mentioned nanotechnology disaster scenario, although it is rather unlikely due to energy constraints and elemental abundances. More probable disaster scenarios are the green goo, golden goo and red goo, khaki goo scenarios. As a protection blue goo has been proposed.
BLUE GOO: Nanomachines used as protection against grey goo and other destructive nanomachines, possibly even used for law-enforcement (nanarchy). According to the entry in the Jargon File, it is sometimes used to denote any form of benign nanotechnology in the environment.
RED GOO: Deliberately designed and released destructive nanotechnology, as opposed to accidentally created grey goo.
KHAKI GOO: Military nanotechnology; see grey goo.
GREEN GOO: Nanomachines or bio-engineered organisms used for population control of humans, either by governments or eco-terrorist groups. Would most probably work by sterilizing people through otherwise harmless infections. See Nick Szabo's essay Green Goo -- Life in the Era of Humane Genocide.
GOLDEN GOO: Another member of the grey goo family of nanotechnology disaster scenarios. The idea is to use nanomachines to filter gold from seawater. If this process got out of control we would get piles of golden goo (the "Wizard's Apprentice Problem"). This scenario demonstrates the need of keeping populations of self-replicating machines under control; it is much more likely than grey goo, but also more manageable. [Originated on sci.nanotech 1996]
PINK GOO (humorous) Humans (in analogy with grey goo). "Pink Goo to refer to Old Testament apes who see their purpose as being fruitful and multiplying, filling up of the cosmos with lots more such apes, unmodified." [Eric Watt Forste August 1997]
But insurance companies will no longer play the "share the risk" game, which is what I though insurance was supposed to be all about.
When easy possible to predict whose house is going to burn down, it's no longer "sharing the risk", but "helping people whose houses burn down". This is something that for-profit corporations don't tend to be good at.
If insurance companies get to use this type of data, then people at risk for certain diseases will have to pay more. Also, people will feel that their insurance companies know too much about them (privacy concerns), and maybe even that they know too much about themselves through the amount the insurance company charges. I think most people agree that this situation would suck.
But what if insurance companies are not allowed to use the data, and we get to the point where individuals are able to find their own data easily? People who decide that they're not at risk for anything will buy less insurance, making insurance rates go up, and the unlucky people with bad genes are financially and psychologically screwed once again.
One possible solution to this problem is for health care to be universal, controlled by the government, and paid for through taxes. This wouldn't eliminate genetic tests, but it would shift the focus of the tests from figuring out which people can be covered cheaply to helping people avoid getting diseases that they're genetically predisposed to.
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Re:Traveling Salesman
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 1
In other words, to apply it to crypto like many here are, what good is an algorithm that gives you a key that's "moderately close" to the actual key?
Actually, pretty good, if "moderately close" means "off by 3 or less fewer bitflips". It's probably not too hard to try every combination that's "close" to a given key-with-noise.
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Re:Implications to Cryptography
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 1
an
oracle giving us an O(n^6) solution to a particular NP complete
graph-theoretic problem might yield an O(n^12) factorisation
algorithm (since numbers of size n might map onto graphs of size n^2).
The use of the word "transformation" here is misleading. In some cases, we might solve an NP-c problem with input size n as "the result returned by this other NP-c problem with input size n^2", but more often, we'll use the NP-c with the known solution n or n^2 times with input size n. This still increases the time, but not by as much (+1 or +2 vs. *2 in the exponent, I think).
"I don't want any information relative to anything I do shared with anyone. Our business is our business. I don't want anyone to know what equipment I use, when I use it and how I use it," said Silverman, whose company uses the radios to dispatch trucks.
Wow, Motorola two-way radios support High 128-bit Encryption now?
How do you get around that? My guess would be to do some kind of key exchange beforehand so you're sure you're talking to the computer you think you're talking to, and then use https or stunnel or something on a different port.
Ever since DNA was discovered, it's been obvious that as long as you had DNA from a species, you could re-create individuals from that species.
I don't think having DNA is sufficient. Not only do you need enzymes that can read the DNA, but you also need a cell sufficiently similar to an embryo of the organism that the DNA will know what it's supposed to be doing (creating a new organism). And don't forget to give the embryo a good environment to grow in (egg for reptiles, artificial or real uterus for most mammals, etc.)
IE favourites importing is not fixed in this version, bug 47961, reported it myself:)
Hey, I think I reported a dup of your bug! I'll mark it as a dup within the next few hours if I decide it's a dup.
It would have been nice if you had used a more descriptive summary. You just said "ie bookmarks not imported properly", which could mean that specific bookmarks/favorites are corrupted or could mean that some of them aren't imported.
Microsoft preloads IE to make it load faster (and also "integrates" it with the OS). Many slashdot users claim that MS is cheating by using their control over the operating system to get ahead of Netscape. But Mozilla doesn't preload on any operating system, and so people who want fast-loading browsers will keep using Windows and IE.
Microsoft sets up their web server to run closer to the Windows kernel. Many slashdot users note, less accusationally, that Microsoft has made technical decisions that hurt more users than they help. But not many suggest that Apache add an option to behave similarly -- with huge warning labels around it, of course. PHB's who (often incorrectly) put speed as a higher priority than security and stability choose NT/IIS because it's faster.
Here's an interesting set of webpages hosted by the USPTO that attempt to address "a marked increase in public attention to the operations of the United Sates Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and specifically, the workgroup responsible for examining patent applications in automated business data processing technologies [business methods]".
(Mods: I am a lazy karma whore. I have not read the entire site that I linked to. Read enough of the link to decide whether it's interesting, and moderate accordingly.)
Slashdot Mirror
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I don't understand how that would work. Can I "jack" domains that have already been registered, or just ones that haven't been registered yet?
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So if I want more people to vote for Nader, I should tell newspapers that I'm going to vote for Gore?
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Why shouldn't I trust mailings from the League of Women Voters if I know that historically, I have agreed with what they say? How is going to Vote Smart and finding the candidate that best agrees with me better (especially if I already know what the result will be)?
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BLUE GOO: Nanomachines used as protection against grey goo and other destructive nanomachines, possibly even used for law-enforcement (nanarchy). According to the entry in the Jargon File, it is sometimes used to denote any form of benign nanotechnology in the environment.
RED GOO: Deliberately designed and released destructive nanotechnology, as opposed to accidentally created grey goo.
KHAKI GOO: Military nanotechnology; see grey goo.
GREEN GOO: Nanomachines or bio-engineered organisms used for population control of humans, either by governments or eco-terrorist groups. Would most probably work by sterilizing people through otherwise harmless infections. See Nick Szabo's essay Green Goo -- Life in the Era of Humane Genocide.
GOLDEN GOO: Another member of the grey goo family of nanotechnology disaster scenarios. The idea is to use nanomachines to filter gold from seawater. If this process got out of control we would get piles of golden goo (the "Wizard's Apprentice Problem"). This scenario demonstrates the need of keeping populations of self-replicating machines under control; it is much more likely than grey goo, but also more manageable. [Originated on sci.nanotech 1996]
PINK GOO (humorous) Humans (in analogy with grey goo). "Pink Goo to refer to Old Testament apes who see their purpose as being fruitful and multiplying, filling up of the cosmos with lots more such apes, unmodified." [Eric Watt Forste August 1997]
http://www.transhumanism.com/lexicon/
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When easy possible to predict whose house is going to burn down, it's no longer "sharing the risk", but "helping people whose houses burn down". This is something that for-profit corporations don't tend to be good at.
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Would you rather that they stopped charging different rates for different age groups, or that they took more things into account?
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Nah. User-defined keyboard shortcuts and context menus would provide the ultimate browsing experience.
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Is it wrong because it increases the unfairness that comes with getting semi-random genes, or is there a deeper reason that it's wrong?
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But what if insurance companies are not allowed to use the data, and we get to the point where individuals are able to find their own data easily? People who decide that they're not at risk for anything will buy less insurance, making insurance rates go up, and the unlucky people with bad genes are financially and psychologically screwed once again.
One possible solution to this problem is for health care to be universal, controlled by the government, and paid for through taxes. This wouldn't eliminate genetic tests, but it would shift the focus of the tests from figuring out which people can be covered cheaply to helping people avoid getting diseases that they're genetically predisposed to.
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Actually, pretty good, if "moderately close" means "off by 3 or less fewer bitflips". It's probably not too hard to try every combination that's "close" to a given key-with-noise.
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oracle giving us an O(n^6) solution to a particular NP complete
graph-theoretic problem might yield an O(n^12) factorisation
algorithm (since numbers of size n might map onto graphs of size n^2).
The use of the word "transformation" here is misleading. In some cases, we might solve an NP-c problem with input size n as "the result returned by this other NP-c problem with input size n^2", but more often, we'll use the NP-c with the known solution n or n^2 times with input size n. This still increases the time, but not by as much (+1 or +2 vs. *2 in the exponent, I think).
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"The human brain thinks it's non-determininstic for small n". Something like that.
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Wow, Motorola two-way radios support High 128-bit Encryption now?
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I don't think having DNA is sufficient. Not only do you need enzymes that can read the DNA, but you also need a cell sufficiently similar to an embryo of the organism that the DNA will know what it's supposed to be doing (creating a new organism). And don't forget to give the embryo a good environment to grow in (egg for reptiles, artificial or real uterus for most mammals, etc.)
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Hey, I think I reported a dup of your bug! I'll mark it as a dup within the next few hours if I decide it's a dup.
It would have been nice if you had used a more descriptive summary. You just said "ie bookmarks not imported properly", which could mean that specific bookmarks/favorites are corrupted or could mean that some of them aren't imported.
OTOH, my summary looks bogus too ("Not all imported IE favorites shown" should probably by "Not all IE favorites are imported/shown").
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Microsoft sets up their web server to run closer to the Windows kernel. Many slashdot users note, less accusationally, that Microsoft has made technical decisions that hurt more users than they help. But not many suggest that Apache add an option to behave similarly -- with huge warning labels around it, of course. PHB's who (often incorrectly) put speed as a higher priority than security and stability choose NT/IIS because it's faster.
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Of course it's down, it was linked to on the slashdot front page!
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(Mods: I am a lazy karma whore. I have not read the entire site that I linked to. Read enough of the link to decide whether it's interesting, and moderate accordingly.)
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