Well, in Cocoa finding say the "Music" folder in your home directory is [@"~/Music" stringByExpandingTildeInPath].
(Opening square bracket) (object) (messagename) (closing square bracket) sends a message to an object.
A string preceeded by the "at" character is an NSString object.
stringByExpandingTildeInPath converts the tilde character in a string to the user's home directory.
Tilde Slash Music would be the "Music" folder in the home directory before this expansion.
And the whole expression sends the message "stringByExpandingTildeInPath" to the string "~/Music", returning a new object with the correct path.
How about Apple puts in a fix to automatically deny this access, UNLESS the app itself overrides that position?
An application has to actively register to receive clicks on links of a certain type. So Skype is saying "if anyone clicks on a link that looks like skype://xxx.xxx.xxx then tell me". The app doesn't receive any random URLs, only URLs that it said it wants to receive. So what you are suggesting is actually happening already.
That's the point. The drinks in the original post have some nutrition value. Diet Coke and Coke Zero are made to trick your senses, make you feel better about your choice, and not solve the existing problem. That is, they are an chemical concoction that is designed to deceive your taste buds, is passed as the healthy choice, and actually increases your thirst.
Can I just repeat that, except it is not just your taste buds that are deceived, but also bits of your body chemistry that prepare to handle incoming sugar, then find that there was no sugar, and then they seriously _want_ sugar. There is also the danger of developing diabetes which happens when you feed the body too much sugar - fake sugar has exactly the same effect. And twice the effects if you drink diet coke and then eat sweets because your body wants the sugar.
In one office that I used, the thermostat was not _designed_ to do nothing, but there were about three serious bugs in the implementation that kept it from working. Number one was that it wasn't hooked up in one place, number two was that its sense was reported the wrong way round in a different place, number three was that it controlled the wrong heating. So when after long complaints bug #1 was fixed, the temperature in the left half of a large office went down when the guys in the right half turned the temperature up. Just good that the room was too big to create a feedback loop.
Now technically as the movie can not demonstrate the ability to "promote the useful arts and sciences" under law it is not entitled to copyright protection.
Non sequitur. You are talking about the motivation for copyright law. A work can be protected by copyright law without promoting the goals of copyright law.
Also bear in mind in the UK we now have a foaming-at-the-mouth radical neoliberal government, the type who says "Government is terrible! And when we get elected we are going to prove it!". They are intentionally gutting the NHS from the inside in order to make it look bad so they can move in after a few years and say "Socialised healthcare doesn't work" and sell the whole think off to their Eton/Oxbridge mates.
I know someone working at the NHS who at some point had a manager who managed her and nobody else, who in turn had a manager who managed that manager and nobody else, and who in turn had a manager managing that manager and nobody else. So she was outnumbered by management three-to-one and was the only one doing any actual useful work. So I'd say there is quite a bit of cost saving possible without reducing the quality at all.
You're suggesting rich people should be penalised more on the abstract basis that they happen to be more wealthy? Their wealth has no relevance to the act committed nor the damage done.
A fine should be both a punishment and a deterrent, not income for the state. Both punishment and deterrent cannot be measured in absolute money values, but only in the effect on the perpetrator's life. Having to give up one day's income, or one week's income, or one month's income has about the same effect on anybody's life, while an amount like $100, or $1000, is a much harder punishment on a poor person than on a rich person.
In Germany, you will usually get an income related files together with a choice of going to jail instead, like a choice between one month of jail or one month's income. Since you wouldn't make any money while in jail and lose the same amount anyway, that looks entirely reasonable. If people were given a choice between one month's jail and say $10,000 payment, then all poor people would go to jail, some middle income people would pay what they would consider a harsh fine, while your company's CEO just laughs about it. Doesn't seem fair at all.
They're not after settlement money, because that's chump change in comparison to the stream of revenue they would normally get pre-Napster days. No, the goal is to force people into bankruptcy as a message to all.
If you share your music on the internet, you could be found out, get sued, and get bankrupt. If you share music on the internet, you could also get involved in a car accident and get killed, which is worse. I would bet that of all illegal file sharers, more have died in random accidents then gone bankrupt, so the risk isn't very high when you think about it. It adds very little to your life risk. I would even bet that more illegal file sharers have won a million dollars in the lottery than have lost a million dollars in court.
I can't think of a single opensource platform I've used (various Linux distriubtions, BSDs, Solaris etc) where daylight savings failed for me.
It's an application bug. An application added "24 hours" to the previous alarm time. The OS added the 24 hours absolutely fine. The user of the app was then surprised that on this particular day, 24 hours = one day plus one hour. Could have happened on any operating system.
On the surface, an alarm application could register for more periodic events (clock ticks, UI update loop iterations, or just sleep for seconds at a time) and evaluate if it should sound periodically. This would have easily avoided the DST issue.
Not at all. The problem here is that if you want an alarm at 8am every morning, that's always 24 hours after the previous time, except one day where it is 23 hours later, and one day where it is 25 hours later. How you measure the time is irrelevant, as long as you know that on this one day the alarm must come after 23 hours and not 24.
From my standpoint, the *real* bug is that network-connected devices aren't pulling time data from a server often enough. A phone (any phone) should get an updated date/time at least once an hour. I live near a time zone border and it annoys me when I have to think if the time on my phone is really the current time.
Much more likely that the phone produced an alarm exactly 24 hours or 86,400 seconds after the previous alarm. Unfortunately 24 hours after 8am on Sunday is 9am on Monday in this case.
Does Apple's App Store offer the means to download the source code of the app? If not, Apple store is incompatible with the terms of GPLv2.
All apps in MacOS X and iOS are packages. It is trivial to include the source code inside the package. So there wouldn't be any need for download, the source code can be part of the package.
GPLv3 is incompatible because it requires the right that receivers of GPLv3'ed code can not only freely modify it but also run it (this clause was written after TiVo used the Linux kernel in its boxes but had some checksum authentication method to ensure that users don't install modified kernels -- Linus Torvalds, btw, dislikes GPLv3 for that very reason)
The TiVo situation means (if I understand it correct) that you can modify the Linux running on a TiVo box, but that there is no way to actually run it. What if the situation was slightly different: Say the software needs to be installed in some ROM, and the tools to put it into a ROM are quite expensive. TiVo bought these expensive tools, and anyone wanting to install a modified Linux has to buy the same expensive tools. I think that wouldn't be disallowed by the GPL.
And the same thing is the case with the iOS store. Everybody can install software on an iPhone or iPad, it is just not free. You have to pay $99 per year, and for that money you can install any app that you have the source code for on up to 200 devices, or make it again available through the iOS store. Yes, it is not free, but no, Apple doesn't stop anyone.
Actually it's the distributor's rules that are depriving users of useful programs and it's Apple that is committing copyright infringement.
What a nonsense. Apple has a store that allows you to sell software or distribute it for free. When you ask Apple to be able to use their store for selling or giving away your software, somewhere in your contract there is a clause where you have to state that you are the copyright holder or have the copyright holders permission. Someone built a version of VLC that works on an iPad, and claimed that they had the copyright holders permission to give it away through the appstore (probably under the assumption that the GPL allows this). Someone else then told Apple that they held part of the copyrights in VLC, and the software was given away _without_ their permission, because of the way the app store works. In other words, Apple received one of those hated DMCA notices.
And Apple then quite rightfully stops distributing the software, exactly in order _not_ to commit copyright infringement!
Whether that VLC version can be distributed or not is a copright question, which needs to be sorted between that one copyright holder and the developers of the iPad version of the app. Nothing to do with Apple at all.
Assuming that the developers of the iPad version make their source code freely available, it is clear that Apple doesn't stop any iPhone / iPad user from gettting a free copy of the program, they stop nobody from getting the source code, they stop nobody from modifying the source code to create a better or different version, or to port it to other devices. In the end, the one depriving users of useful programs is the copyright holder who says "no, I don't allow you to distribute this program".
Yes, the popularity of lotteries proves the lack of understanding around basic statistics.
I think what people buy when they buy a lottery ticket is not a tiny chance to win a lot of money, but a little bit of hope. For one pound you can buy a piece of paper that says "next week you could be a millionaire". (Although being interested in mathematics, I calculated that if you are in the UK and buy 26 lottery tickets, then the chance that you become a millionaire in that week and the chance that you die in a traffic accident within that week are about the same.
live in Europe where (almost) everybody has insurance (civil resposibility) against such things, but only if the parents admit having done something wrong during the supervision of their kids.
If they did everything right and the kid does damages, the victim has to sue the kid.
In Germany, children up to 7 years are in principle not capable of being guilty of anything. So you can't sue them. (Maybe you can sue them, but the case would be very simple: Child under seven, you've lost). In road traffic, children under 10 are never at fault. Parents will be responsible if they were negligent. So if they are insured, and the damaged party was a friend or relative, they will tend to claim to have been negligent (and insurance pays). If they are not insured, they will tend to claim they have not been negligent. And judges know that even properly supervised children are quite capable of causing damage, which then nobody will have to pay for.
So this case wouldn't have a chance in hell. For the woman who was injured and died, that would have been just bad luck. Like tripping over your own feet and hurting yourself.
So, wait. If I continue posting comments that others find offensive on multiple websites... I'll be jailed? Who decides what is offensive and what is not? I certainly don't find what he did offensive in the least. I don't like that other people are deciding this for me.
First, depending on what you post, readers here will conclude that you are a prick, a useless piece of shit, an excuse for postnatal abortion. Insofar you only hurt yourself. This man hurt others, that's why he got jailed. Who decides? Seems that the British law and a British judge did. And if you didn't find what he did offensive in the least, well let's just hope nobody will have a chance to not offend your parents anytime soon.
It's highly unlikely that Google made this mistake; they were well aware of the legal ramifications.
Like it was highly unlikely that Google's cars would be recording unencrypted wireless traffic while driving through Europe and throwing encrypted wireless traffic away. People sometimes do very stupid things when they think they can get away with it.
I seem to remember that the SCO Group used the same arguments against Linux distributors and users. Perhaps Larry should check the performance of SCO stock before he makes another move.
I seem to remember that IBM used the exact same arguments against SCO. Including the argument that SCO had illegally copied 700,000 lines of IBM copyrighted code that was published under the GPL license (obviously with arguments why SCO's copies of the code were made illegally). So just because a gang of crooks lied about their code being illegally copied doesn't mean every accusation of copyright infringement is wrong. And just because code is available under the GPL doesn't mean it cannot be copied illegally.
The travelling salesman problem is the problem of finding the shortest route between a set of points. It doesn't matter HOW you solve it. You could time all possible journey's, you could do a sorting routine or god knows what. But if you solve it, you solved it.
That is what the bee does. And maybe if we can learn HOW the bee does that, we might learn something from it. It might be a smarter way of solving things. Or maybe Bees have an additional variable from an unknown input that helps solve it.
That's not what the bee does. That is what someone _claims_ the bee does. Big, big difference. I imagine they found that the bees visit flowers faster than in random order, or faster than the order in which they were told about the flowers. I think a simple algorithm like "always visit the nearest flower that wasn't visited yet" would probably impress these "scientists" no end.
BTW. Bees shouldn't even try to solve the travelling salesman problem. Assume a single flower very far away - the best solution may not be to figure out the quickest path to visit is, but to ignore it.
As a programming exercise: The "Realtime Travelling Salesman" problem: Give the computer a list of places to visit, with a list of travelling times from each place to each other place. Then the computer starts calculating. As soon as it tells you the first destination, you go to that destination. The computer can continue calculating while you travel, but if it doesn't give the next destination when you arrived at the first destination, you have to wait. Obviously the total time from the start of the calculation until all places are visited needs to be optimised. That means optimising the calculation time as well, and picking a goal when further calculations likely waste more time than they could save.
t just shows the difference between the exact science of mathematics, and the heuristics of game theory/statistics, etc.
I think the problem is that no _serious_ mathematics has been applied. This is just two guys running with an idea and a bit of very imprecise computer simulations and then put up an article on the internet. Their model of a runners' speed and accelleration is very imprecise. You'd have to take factors like exhaustion and ability to accelerate running in a curve vs. a straight line into account. Then game theory and statistics (which both fall under the exact science of mathematics) have not been applied at all. The problem isn't that mathematics doesn't work, it works just fine, but you have to do it seriously. These guys haven't.
We pay to develop tons of interesting technology, then file patent applications which get published and which anybody in China can use to implement the technology without paying anything,
Chinese software development will be held back for many years by attempting to implement the technology behind all US software patents:-)
Right, sparse or loosely-coupled systems; that means these concepts can model data that is made up mostly of zeros.
It has to be sparse, because O (s * (ln (s))^2) doesn't even allow you to look at each of the s^2 elements of the matrix when s is large enough.
There must be some dependency on _how_ sparse the matrix is, or something like "O (s * (ln (s))^2) if the number of elements off the diagonal is at most O (s * ln (s))".
Considering any modern OS ships with encryption software by default, it'll be almost impossible to use any computer at all. Any common web browser will support HTTPS, for example. Windows and OS-X boxes will have ssh support. Windows boxes ship with encrypted NTFS support, etc.
I think the most important thing is that the guy shouldn't read Slashdot, because he was told that he must not _knowingly_ use a computer with encryption. As long as he doesn't know any of these, he is fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in Cocoa finding say the "Music" folder in your home directory is [@"~/Music" stringByExpandingTildeInPath].
(Opening square bracket) (object) (messagename) (closing square bracket) sends a message to an object.
A string preceeded by the "at" character is an NSString object.
stringByExpandingTildeInPath converts the tilde character in a string to the user's home directory.
Tilde Slash Music would be the "Music" folder in the home directory before this expansion.
And the whole expression sends the message "stringByExpandingTildeInPath" to the string "~/Music", returning a new object with the correct path.
How about Apple puts in a fix to automatically deny this access, UNLESS the app itself overrides that position?
An application has to actively register to receive clicks on links of a certain type. So Skype is saying "if anyone clicks on a link that looks like skype://xxx.xxx.xxx then tell me". The app doesn't receive any random URLs, only URLs that it said it wants to receive. So what you are suggesting is actually happening already.
That's the point. The drinks in the original post have some nutrition value. Diet Coke and Coke Zero are made to trick your senses, make you feel better about your choice, and not solve the existing problem. That is, they are an chemical concoction that is designed to deceive your taste buds, is passed as the healthy choice, and actually increases your thirst.
Can I just repeat that, except it is not just your taste buds that are deceived, but also bits of your body chemistry that prepare to handle incoming sugar, then find that there was no sugar, and then they seriously _want_ sugar. There is also the danger of developing diabetes which happens when you feed the body too much sugar - fake sugar has exactly the same effect. And twice the effects if you drink diet coke and then eat sweets because your body wants the sugar.
In one office that I used, the thermostat was not _designed_ to do nothing, but there were about three serious bugs in the implementation that kept it from working. Number one was that it wasn't hooked up in one place, number two was that its sense was reported the wrong way round in a different place, number three was that it controlled the wrong heating. So when after long complaints bug #1 was fixed, the temperature in the left half of a large office went down when the guys in the right half turned the temperature up. Just good that the room was too big to create a feedback loop.
Now technically as the movie can not demonstrate the ability to "promote the useful arts and sciences" under law it is not entitled to copyright protection.
Non sequitur. You are talking about the motivation for copyright law. A work can be protected by copyright law without promoting the goals of copyright law.
Also bear in mind in the UK we now have a foaming-at-the-mouth radical neoliberal government, the type who says "Government is terrible! And when we get elected we are going to prove it!". They are intentionally gutting the NHS from the inside in order to make it look bad so they can move in after a few years and say "Socialised healthcare doesn't work" and sell the whole think off to their Eton/Oxbridge mates.
I know someone working at the NHS who at some point had a manager who managed her and nobody else, who in turn had a manager who managed that manager and nobody else, and who in turn had a manager managing that manager and nobody else. So she was outnumbered by management three-to-one and was the only one doing any actual useful work. So I'd say there is quite a bit of cost saving possible without reducing the quality at all.
I downloaded Autocad when I needed it, but I never would have bought it. I would need to rob a bank i I wanted to buy it.
In that case you were stealing from someone who produces a cheaper, less powerful, alternative.
You're suggesting rich people should be penalised more on the abstract basis that they happen to be more wealthy? Their wealth has no relevance to the act committed nor the damage done.
A fine should be both a punishment and a deterrent, not income for the state. Both punishment and deterrent cannot be measured in absolute money values, but only in the effect on the perpetrator's life. Having to give up one day's income, or one week's income, or one month's income has about the same effect on anybody's life, while an amount like $100, or $1000, is a much harder punishment on a poor person than on a rich person.
In Germany, you will usually get an income related files together with a choice of going to jail instead, like a choice between one month of jail or one month's income. Since you wouldn't make any money while in jail and lose the same amount anyway, that looks entirely reasonable. If people were given a choice between one month's jail and say $10,000 payment, then all poor people would go to jail, some middle income people would pay what they would consider a harsh fine, while your company's CEO just laughs about it. Doesn't seem fair at all.
They're not after settlement money, because that's chump change in comparison to the stream of revenue they would normally get pre-Napster days. No, the goal is to force people into bankruptcy as a message to all.
If you share your music on the internet, you could be found out, get sued, and get bankrupt. If you share music on the internet, you could also get involved in a car accident and get killed, which is worse. I would bet that of all illegal file sharers, more have died in random accidents then gone bankrupt, so the risk isn't very high when you think about it. It adds very little to your life risk. I would even bet that more illegal file sharers have won a million dollars in the lottery than have lost a million dollars in court.
I can't think of a single opensource platform I've used (various Linux distriubtions, BSDs, Solaris etc) where daylight savings failed for me.
It's an application bug. An application added "24 hours" to the previous alarm time. The OS added the 24 hours absolutely fine. The user of the app was then surprised that on this particular day, 24 hours = one day plus one hour. Could have happened on any operating system.
On the surface, an alarm application could register for more periodic events (clock ticks, UI update loop iterations, or just sleep for seconds at a time) and evaluate if it should sound periodically. This would have easily avoided the DST issue.
Not at all. The problem here is that if you want an alarm at 8am every morning, that's always 24 hours after the previous time, except one day where it is 23 hours later, and one day where it is 25 hours later. How you measure the time is irrelevant, as long as you know that on this one day the alarm must come after 23 hours and not 24.
From my standpoint, the *real* bug is that network-connected devices aren't pulling time data from a server often enough. A phone (any phone) should get an updated date/time at least once an hour. I live near a time zone border and it annoys me when I have to think if the time on my phone is really the current time.
Much more likely that the phone produced an alarm exactly 24 hours or 86,400 seconds after the previous alarm. Unfortunately 24 hours after 8am on Sunday is 9am on Monday in this case.
Does Apple's App Store offer the means to download the source code of the app? If not, Apple store is incompatible with the terms of GPLv2.
All apps in MacOS X and iOS are packages. It is trivial to include the source code inside the package. So there wouldn't be any need for download, the source code can be part of the package.
GPLv3 is incompatible because it requires the right that receivers of GPLv3'ed code can not only freely modify it but also run it (this clause was written after TiVo used the Linux kernel in its boxes but had some checksum authentication method to ensure that users don't install modified kernels -- Linus Torvalds, btw, dislikes GPLv3 for that very reason)
The TiVo situation means (if I understand it correct) that you can modify the Linux running on a TiVo box, but that there is no way to actually run it. What if the situation was slightly different: Say the software needs to be installed in some ROM, and the tools to put it into a ROM are quite expensive. TiVo bought these expensive tools, and anyone wanting to install a modified Linux has to buy the same expensive tools. I think that wouldn't be disallowed by the GPL.
And the same thing is the case with the iOS store. Everybody can install software on an iPhone or iPad, it is just not free. You have to pay $99 per year, and for that money you can install any app that you have the source code for on up to 200 devices, or make it again available through the iOS store. Yes, it is not free, but no, Apple doesn't stop anyone.
Actually it's the distributor's rules that are depriving users of useful programs and it's Apple that is committing copyright infringement.
What a nonsense. Apple has a store that allows you to sell software or distribute it for free. When you ask Apple to be able to use their store for selling or giving away your software, somewhere in your contract there is a clause where you have to state that you are the copyright holder or have the copyright holders permission. Someone built a version of VLC that works on an iPad, and claimed that they had the copyright holders permission to give it away through the appstore (probably under the assumption that the GPL allows this). Someone else then told Apple that they held part of the copyrights in VLC, and the software was given away _without_ their permission, because of the way the app store works. In other words, Apple received one of those hated DMCA notices.
And Apple then quite rightfully stops distributing the software, exactly in order _not_ to commit copyright infringement!
Whether that VLC version can be distributed or not is a copright question, which needs to be sorted between that one copyright holder and the developers of the iPad version of the app. Nothing to do with Apple at all.
Assuming that the developers of the iPad version make their source code freely available, it is clear that Apple doesn't stop any iPhone / iPad user from gettting a free copy of the program, they stop nobody from getting the source code, they stop nobody from modifying the source code to create a better or different version, or to port it to other devices. In the end, the one depriving users of useful programs is the copyright holder who says "no, I don't allow you to distribute this program".
Yes, the popularity of lotteries proves the lack of understanding around basic statistics.
I think what people buy when they buy a lottery ticket is not a tiny chance to win a lot of money, but a little bit of hope. For one pound you can buy a piece of paper that says "next week you could be a millionaire". (Although being interested in mathematics, I calculated that if you are in the UK and buy 26 lottery tickets, then the chance that you become a millionaire in that week and the chance that you die in a traffic accident within that week are about the same.
live in Europe where (almost) everybody has insurance (civil resposibility) against such things, but only if the parents admit having done something wrong during the supervision of their kids.
If they did everything right and the kid does damages, the victim has to sue the kid.
In Germany, children up to 7 years are in principle not capable of being guilty of anything. So you can't sue them. (Maybe you can sue them, but the case would be very simple: Child under seven, you've lost). In road traffic, children under 10 are never at fault. Parents will be responsible if they were negligent. So if they are insured, and the damaged party was a friend or relative, they will tend to claim to have been negligent (and insurance pays). If they are not insured, they will tend to claim they have not been negligent. And judges know that even properly supervised children are quite capable of causing damage, which then nobody will have to pay for.
So this case wouldn't have a chance in hell. For the woman who was injured and died, that would have been just bad luck. Like tripping over your own feet and hurting yourself.
So, wait. If I continue posting comments that others find offensive on multiple websites... I'll be jailed? Who decides what is offensive and what is not? I certainly don't find what he did offensive in the least. I don't like that other people are deciding this for me.
First, depending on what you post, readers here will conclude that you are a prick, a useless piece of shit, an excuse for postnatal abortion. Insofar you only hurt yourself. This man hurt others, that's why he got jailed. Who decides? Seems that the British law and a British judge did. And if you didn't find what he did offensive in the least, well let's just hope nobody will have a chance to not offend your parents anytime soon.
It's highly unlikely that Google made this mistake; they were well aware of the legal ramifications.
Like it was highly unlikely that Google's cars would be recording unencrypted wireless traffic while driving through Europe and throwing encrypted wireless traffic away. People sometimes do very stupid things when they think they can get away with it.
I seem to remember that the SCO Group used the same arguments against Linux distributors and users. Perhaps Larry should check the performance of SCO stock before he makes another move.
I seem to remember that IBM used the exact same arguments against SCO. Including the argument that SCO had illegally copied 700,000 lines of IBM copyrighted code that was published under the GPL license (obviously with arguments why SCO's copies of the code were made illegally). So just because a gang of crooks lied about their code being illegally copied doesn't mean every accusation of copyright infringement is wrong. And just because code is available under the GPL doesn't mean it cannot be copied illegally.
The travelling salesman problem is the problem of finding the shortest route between a set of points. It doesn't matter HOW you solve it. You could time all possible journey's, you could do a sorting routine or god knows what. But if you solve it, you solved it.
That is what the bee does. And maybe if we can learn HOW the bee does that, we might learn something from it. It might be a smarter way of solving things. Or maybe Bees have an additional variable from an unknown input that helps solve it.
That's not what the bee does. That is what someone _claims_ the bee does. Big, big difference. I imagine they found that the bees visit flowers faster than in random order, or faster than the order in which they were told about the flowers. I think a simple algorithm like "always visit the nearest flower that wasn't visited yet" would probably impress these "scientists" no end.
BTW. Bees shouldn't even try to solve the travelling salesman problem. Assume a single flower very far away - the best solution may not be to figure out the quickest path to visit is, but to ignore it.
As a programming exercise: The "Realtime Travelling Salesman" problem: Give the computer a list of places to visit, with a list of travelling times from each place to each other place. Then the computer starts calculating. As soon as it tells you the first destination, you go to that destination. The computer can continue calculating while you travel, but if it doesn't give the next destination when you arrived at the first destination, you have to wait. Obviously the total time from the start of the calculation until all places are visited needs to be optimised. That means optimising the calculation time as well, and picking a goal when further calculations likely waste more time than they could save.
t just shows the difference between the exact science of mathematics, and the heuristics of game theory/statistics, etc.
I think the problem is that no _serious_ mathematics has been applied. This is just two guys running with an idea and a bit of very imprecise computer simulations and then put up an article on the internet. Their model of a runners' speed and accelleration is very imprecise. You'd have to take factors like exhaustion and ability to accelerate running in a curve vs. a straight line into account. Then game theory and statistics (which both fall under the exact science of mathematics) have not been applied at all. The problem isn't that mathematics doesn't work, it works just fine, but you have to do it seriously. These guys haven't.
We pay to develop tons of interesting technology, then file patent applications which get published and which anybody in China can use to implement the technology without paying anything,
Chinese software development will be held back for many years by attempting to implement the technology behind all US software patents :-)
Right, sparse or loosely-coupled systems; that means these concepts can model data that is made up mostly of zeros.
It has to be sparse, because O (s * (ln (s))^2) doesn't even allow you to look at each of the s^2 elements of the matrix when s is large enough.
There must be some dependency on _how_ sparse the matrix is, or something like "O (s * (ln (s))^2) if the number of elements off the diagonal is at most O (s * ln (s))".
Considering any modern OS ships with encryption software by default, it'll be almost impossible to use any computer at all. Any common web browser will support HTTPS, for example. Windows and OS-X boxes will have ssh support. Windows boxes ship with encrypted NTFS support, etc.
I think the most important thing is that the guy shouldn't read Slashdot, because he was told that he must not _knowingly_ use a computer with encryption. As long as he doesn't know any of these, he is fine.