Look at what you've spawned: another generic "people pirate because its free" thread. Wonderful.
Am I the only one who's noticed that Wired has their heads up their asses? Naruto was licensed for US distribution in February. Naruto is no longer free. Downloading Naruto is no longer legitimate.
Unless you know somethine we don't, selling short on a dying company is a bad idea. Everyone who thinks they're clever would be trying the same idea. People buying stock for this purpose are going to artificially inflate the cost, delaying the descent you're waiting for, thus screwing you out of interest on the stocks you borrowed -- if you even wait it out.
What has been proven is that there are problems for which it is impossible to automatically write a program to solve. Further, this is an NP-hard problem, meaning that you can't even know for sure if you're ever going to get a solution, or how long it will take.
What on earth are you talking about? You seem to be confusing the notions of recursive decidability, recursive enumerability, and NP-hard problems. I'll sort it out for you:
A set of numbers is recursively enumerable if there is a recursive function of the natural numbers that enumerates (or lists) every element of the set. A set is recursively decidable if both it and its complement are recursively enumerable. A decision problem asks whether or not an arbitrary element is contained in a given set or not. If the set is recursively enumerable, all we can do is wait and hope that the element shows up on the list. There is no upper bound on the amount of time it might take for an element to appear on the list, so there is no way to figure out if a particular element isn't on the list. In short, these things correspond to what you called NP-hard problems. If a set is recursively decidable, we say that its corresponding decision problem is soluble or decidable.
But that's just silly. We say that a problem is NP if it is decidable and can be done in polynomial time in a non-deterministic Turing machine. A problem is NP-hard if it is solvable and at least as hard as NP. A problem is NP-complete if it solvable and no problem is more than a polynomial factor (in terms of time) harder. So an NP-hard problem is at least as hard as an NP problem and possibly as hard as an NP-complete problem. All these classes are soluble. And the hierarchy of classes, of which NP-complete is the maximal class, completely exhausts the list of decidable problems.
If I open a diner that's popular with lots of local folks, but a vegan/PETA type decides that shouldn't be a "viable" business because I'm serving meat, they can vote with their wallet - but they can't vote by burning down the restaurant.
Tell that to the charred remains of your "deathstaurant."
I'm glad.:-) If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I recommend reading about Information theory before doing cryptography. The basic mathematical idea behind cryptographic functions is that they represent encodings from one alphabet to another with the property that encoding is far easier than decoding. Moreover, these encodings must be recursive (in the mathematical logic sense) and bijective. (Bijectivity might be too strong in some contexts -- characterizing all cryptographic functions is quite difficult because there are many cryptographic paradigms). In any event, recursiveness and bijectivity make the computation of such a function straightforward if one has complete information. This is why randomness plays such a vital role in cryptography. The name of the game is drawing a slip out of a hat and encoding that well enough so that it can't be reverse-engineered and using the encoded version to help us communicate.
Anyway, I recommend Christopher Adami's Introduction to Artificial Life -- it has a bunch of tangential stuff, and doesn't go in depth in any one topic, but it has about a million great references.
As for a source of random EM radiation, why not aim a small/cheap radio telescope at the sun and use that? That should be random, right?
Unfortunately, I'm a math guy. While using the sun sounds plausible, but I don't know enough of the physics involved (though you'd want to use as high a quality radio reciever as possible, to avoid terrestrial interference). I do know that cosmic rays are random, and I wouldn't be surprised if some government agency put a detector on some satellite and is beaming down a stream of random numbers. Frankly, I'd be surprised if this isn't being done.
You said: How about randomly sorted slices of randomly-chosen radio frequencies?
Then I explained why that was a bad idea. More to the point, we wouldn't need the setup you suggested if we had a source of random electromagnetic radiation! A simple low-noise reciever and analog-to-digital converter would be sufficient. But finding random terrestrial signals is nearly impossible.
I also don't see why you sant to avoid "patterns" in the signal. All this does is lower entropy. Say we each flip a perfect coin five times. You end up with HTTHT and I end up with HHHHH. Both are random. To wit, say we make a rule that there can't be three consecutive heads in a row. Then we have more information about the pool than when we started.
If you think money is freedom, you don't know what freedom is. Note that the Swedes aren't forcing anyone to live there. People choose to live there because the quality of life is very high. Note, moreover, that nearly everyone in the US aspires to be -- ostensively -- in the 35% tax bracket.
Notice that you require a random sorting of frequencies and samples. You'd need a random number generator to come up with one of those.
Even if you had one of those, this wouldn't increase the entropy of your data set. The problem is that in slicing and dicing your recording, you'd be creating discontinuities in the function that describes the original wave form. Fourier analysis tells us that this would shift the spectrum upwards, reducing entropy since there's limited bandwidth in our channel.
If don't believe me, record a cd of white noise and put a couple of scratches in it. It should be immediately apparent where the scratches are when you listen to it.:-)
That's a good idea, but getting good high entropy white noise is as difficult as coming up with good random number generator. Of course, this depends on the context -- this might be an effective source of entropy if one were just generating a few numbers, but it would be completely inappropriate for, say, a bank.
Of course, that the OP doesn't seem to want to make very many numbers.:-)
Neither. They're supposed to describe the bits of language that are actually used by large populations. Slang and jargon are covered in slang and jargon dictionaries unless they reach critical mass and enter the popular lexicon. Most dictionaries screen for historicity also, so that if a word newly coined word is incredibly popular for a week but fades into oblivion, it doesn't enter. This is a good reference -- note the menu on the right of the page.
Uhhhh... dictionaries are historical records of words that have entered the lexicon. A word is added to the dictionary when it has shown its importance in the development of the lexicon. Of course slang should get into the dictionary -- at least once a slang word has shown its importance in culture. Slang is how the English language has developed through the centuries. Pick any English word you'd like -- it was slang at some point in history.
So yes -- the dictionary is subject to trends. Because it records them.
I'm not sure what your goals are, but I've spent my share of time wandering. The amount of preparation required depends on your plans after you're done. If you don't give a shit about the square world, you can pick up and go right now. The more about your present life you care about, the more you need to do to ensure it'll be there for you when you get back.
If you plan on travelling around the US, I suggest being very friendly and getting a gun. Really. Hell, this is a good idea everywhere outside of Europe. I don't want to scare you. Chances are that you'll never need it. But feeling safe in nearly any circumstance is a good thing.
And I hope you don't have a problem with going hungry for days at a time. Unless you're rich to start with, you won't be eating much. But if you have any personality at all, you'll be giving it to hot girls all over the world. I think that's a good trade off.
PLEASE keep wasting your mod points on me. [sarcasm]I swear to god I'll learn to keep my mouth shut about abuses of the moderation system.[/sarcasm] After all, I have excellent karma. The more mod points prudish moderators waste on obvious jokes, the more dissenting opinions actually make an impact on slashdot. For the interested, here's what I wrote, in chronological order:
Anyone got a torrent?
Who are the pricks who modded me -1 Troll? Asking for a torrent was obviously a joke. Christ on a cracker, go fuck yourselves, you humorless right wing son of a bitch bloggers.
Modding the first to -1 Troll is just silly. Although the second one is inflammatory, one should only be inflamed if he was its target -- one of the two humorless douche bag moderators who modded me down the first time. The second post was modded down too.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at what you've spawned: another generic "people pirate because its free" thread. Wonderful.
Am I the only one who's noticed that Wired has their heads up their asses? Naruto was licensed for US distribution in February. Naruto is no longer free. Downloading Naruto is no longer legitimate.
Unless you know somethine we don't, selling short on a dying company is a bad idea. Everyone who thinks they're clever would be trying the same idea. People buying stock for this purpose are going to artificially inflate the cost, delaying the descent you're waiting for, thus screwing you out of interest on the stocks you borrowed -- if you even wait it out.
Fuck, that was dumb. Tor is here.
Tor is an Onion Routing network too. Quite nice.
What has been proven is that there are problems for which it is impossible to automatically write a program to solve. Further, this is an NP-hard problem, meaning that you can't even know for sure if you're ever going to get a solution, or how long it will take.
What on earth are you talking about? You seem to be confusing the notions of recursive decidability, recursive enumerability, and NP-hard problems. I'll sort it out for you:
A set of numbers is recursively enumerable if there is a recursive function of the natural numbers that enumerates (or lists) every element of the set. A set is recursively decidable if both it and its complement are recursively enumerable. A decision problem asks whether or not an arbitrary element is contained in a given set or not. If the set is recursively enumerable, all we can do is wait and hope that the element shows up on the list. There is no upper bound on the amount of time it might take for an element to appear on the list, so there is no way to figure out if a particular element isn't on the list. In short, these things correspond to what you called NP-hard problems. If a set is recursively decidable, we say that its corresponding decision problem is soluble or decidable.
But that's just silly. We say that a problem is NP if it is decidable and can be done in polynomial time in a non-deterministic Turing machine. A problem is NP-hard if it is solvable and at least as hard as NP. A problem is NP-complete if it solvable and no problem is more than a polynomial factor (in terms of time) harder. So an NP-hard problem is at least as hard as an NP problem and possibly as hard as an NP-complete problem. All these classes are soluble. And the hierarchy of classes, of which NP-complete is the maximal class, completely exhausts the list of decidable problems.
Get a clue, dude. And look up "humor" in a dictionary.
Maybe geeks really are autistic.
If I open a diner that's popular with lots of local folks, but a vegan/PETA type decides that shouldn't be a "viable" business because I'm serving meat, they can vote with their wallet - but they can't vote by burning down the restaurant.
Tell that to the charred remains of your "deathstaurant."
Does this have built-in trusted computing/DRM technology like the newest Intel chips?
Greasy and patronizing. You're almost a triple threat.
Hint: don't just tell some one they're wrong. Tell them why they're wrong.
[click] NOW I get it! That does make sense.
:-) If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I recommend reading about Information theory before doing cryptography. The basic mathematical idea behind cryptographic functions is that they represent encodings from one alphabet to another with the property that encoding is far easier than decoding. Moreover, these encodings must be recursive (in the mathematical logic sense) and bijective. (Bijectivity might be too strong in some contexts -- characterizing all cryptographic functions is quite difficult because there are many cryptographic paradigms). In any event, recursiveness and bijectivity make the computation of such a function straightforward if one has complete information. This is why randomness plays such a vital role in cryptography. The name of the game is drawing a slip out of a hat and encoding that well enough so that it can't be reverse-engineered and using the encoded version to help us communicate.
I'm glad.
Anyway, I recommend Christopher Adami's Introduction to Artificial Life -- it has a bunch of tangential stuff, and doesn't go in depth in any one topic, but it has about a million great references.
As for a source of random EM radiation, why not aim a small/cheap radio telescope at the sun and use that? That should be random, right?
Unfortunately, I'm a math guy. While using the sun sounds plausible, but I don't know enough of the physics involved (though you'd want to use as high a quality radio reciever as possible, to avoid terrestrial interference). I do know that cosmic rays are random, and I wouldn't be surprised if some government agency put a detector on some satellite and is beaming down a stream of random numbers. Frankly, I'd be surprised if this isn't being done.
You said:
How about randomly sorted slices of randomly-chosen radio frequencies?
Then I explained why that was a bad idea. More to the point, we wouldn't need the setup you suggested if we had a source of random electromagnetic radiation! A simple low-noise reciever and analog-to-digital converter would be sufficient. But finding random terrestrial signals is nearly impossible.
I also don't see why you sant to avoid "patterns" in the signal. All this does is lower entropy. Say we each flip a perfect coin five times. You end up with HTTHT and I end up with HHHHH. Both are random. To wit, say we make a rule that there can't be three consecutive heads in a row. Then we have more information about the pool than when we started.
How good for you. I never claimed you did. I'm sure you're very sincere in your support of freedom.
If you think money is freedom, you don't know what freedom is. Note that the Swedes aren't forcing anyone to live there. People choose to live there because the quality of life is very high. Note, moreover, that nearly everyone in the US aspires to be -- ostensively -- in the 35% tax bracket.
Notice that you require a random sorting of frequencies and samples. You'd need a random number generator to come up with one of those.
:-)
Even if you had one of those, this wouldn't increase the entropy of your data set. The problem is that in slicing and dicing your recording, you'd be creating discontinuities in the function that describes the original wave form. Fourier analysis tells us that this would shift the spectrum upwards, reducing entropy since there's limited bandwidth in our channel.
If don't believe me, record a cd of white noise and put a couple of scratches in it. It should be immediately apparent where the scratches are when you listen to it.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the acronym was designed to sound like the "cheering woo." Makes sense, considering that it's a rallying call.
Random.org.
That's a good idea, but getting good high entropy white noise is as difficult as coming up with good random number generator. Of course, this depends on the context -- this might be an effective source of entropy if one were just generating a few numbers, but it would be completely inappropriate for, say, a bank.
:-)
Of course, that the OP doesn't seem to want to make very many numbers.
Team based deathmatch. "We pwn3d the other team."
Neither. They're supposed to describe the bits of language that are actually used by large populations. Slang and jargon are covered in slang and jargon dictionaries unless they reach critical mass and enter the popular lexicon. Most dictionaries screen for historicity also, so that if a word newly coined word is incredibly popular for a week but fades into oblivion, it doesn't enter. This is a good reference -- note the menu on the right of the page.
Uhhhh... dictionaries are historical records of words that have entered the lexicon. A word is added to the dictionary when it has shown its importance in the development of the lexicon. Of course slang should get into the dictionary -- at least once a slang word has shown its importance in culture. Slang is how the English language has developed through the centuries. Pick any English word you'd like -- it was slang at some point in history.
So yes -- the dictionary is subject to trends. Because it records them.
I'm not sure what your goals are, but I've spent my share of time wandering. The amount of preparation required depends on your plans after you're done. If you don't give a shit about the square world, you can pick up and go right now. The more about your present life you care about, the more you need to do to ensure it'll be there for you when you get back.
If you plan on travelling around the US, I suggest being very friendly and getting a gun. Really. Hell, this is a good idea everywhere outside of Europe. I don't want to scare you. Chances are that you'll never need it. But feeling safe in nearly any circumstance is a good thing.
And I hope you don't have a problem with going hungry for days at a time. Unless you're rich to start with, you won't be eating much. But if you have any personality at all, you'll be giving it to hot girls all over the world. I think that's a good trade off.
MMMMMMMMM.... Caaaaake.
Yeah! This is why India is undercutting US programmers instead of farmers. ...Oh, wait!
PLEASE keep wasting your mod points on me. [sarcasm]I swear to god I'll learn to keep my mouth shut about abuses of the moderation system.[/sarcasm] After all, I have excellent karma. The more mod points prudish moderators waste on obvious jokes, the more dissenting opinions actually make an impact on slashdot. For the interested, here's what I wrote, in chronological order:
Anyone got a torrent?
Who are the pricks who modded me -1 Troll? Asking for a torrent was obviously a joke. Christ on a cracker, go fuck yourselves, you humorless right wing son of a bitch bloggers.
Modding the first to -1 Troll is just silly. Although the second one is inflammatory, one should only be inflamed if he was its target -- one of the two humorless douche bag moderators who modded me down the first time. The second post was modded down too.
I fully expect this post to be modded down too.