1. The South Park episode this will inspire.
2. The outcry and street marches organised by the conservation group 'RedPeace'.
-----
Re:I'm a Maths Graduate but ...
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
So the statement "A problem is said to be within the classof complexity P if... Otherwise the problem is said to be in complexity class NP." is not strictly accurate.
True. Thanks.
I'm a Maths Graduate but ...
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 5
I can probably remind people of a little stuff.
It's probably easiest to think of this stuff in terms of Turing Machines, any problem can be expressed according to a TM which solves it. Input to a turing machine can be sized according to the number of squares on the tape it takes to represent the input. For an input of size n, the time complexity function of a turing machine (or algorithm which it computes) is defined as the maximum number of steps it takes the TM to halt (if it does) ranging over all inputs of size n. Considering all possible input sizes we end up with a function C(n) which maps positive integers to positive integers.
A problem is said to be within the class of complexity P if there exists a (deterministic) Turing Machine having complexity function C(n) and a polynomial function p(n) such that for all n C(n) < p(n). Otherwise the problem is said to be in complexity class NP.
Factoring integers is an NP problem, note that the Shor's polynomial time algorithm for use on a Quantum Computer is non-deterministic.
An NP-complete problem is one that firstly is in NP, and secondly is one in which for every other problem in NP there is some TM or algorithm which takes a polynomial number of steps to restate it in terms of the NP-complete candidate. (Moreover the solution to this problem provides a solution to the second one.)
So to solve P = NP the author needs to show first of all it's NP-complete. Which may or may not have been shown elsewhere, a lot of these graph partition problems have subtle but important differences, and secondly provide a polynomial time algorithm to solve it.
I am of the opinion that NP = P (or not) is one of the hardest problems in mathematics and really needs some brilliant new theories to be solved, so I'm sceptical but I'll read the paper.
Who's making strawman arguments now? My guns are to protect me when the government comes to take the last of my freedoms away.
Won't you need some anti-tank and anti-aircraft defences too? Perhaps a stealth bomber buried in the backyard.
Actually, to be honest, I'd like a gun because I'm a little skinny and get frightened by big, loud agressive males. A gun would really help.
Nobel Prizes for Mathematics
on
Nobel Prizes
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· Score: 3
Does anyone know why there aren't any? I have heard two plausible explanations. One is that Nobel Prizes are given for achievements with tangible benefit to humankind which is why Einstein got his for his work on the Photoelectic effect rather than for general relativity which is far and away his greatest work. The second I think is much more likely - the mathematician Niels Abel was fooling around with Nobel's wife.
My award goes to Fritz A. Attaway for this little number
"To the contrary, the use of technological measures in general, and of access-control technologies in particular, has already greatly increased the availability of a wide range of copyrighted materials to members of the public."
The thrust of his argument is
(a)access control enables the copyright holders to make available trial versions or restricted versions like those cable movies that cut out 1/2 an hour into it and ask for your credit card number.
(b) Access control is a means of making sure that unauthorized use of material is not possible. This is implemented "in tandem with the hardware."
These don't seem too unreasonable to be honest. I think the reason I have such a hard time relating to the MPAA is that they consider movies, music whatever as product. Most of the crap they put out is, "Mission to Mars" for example has about as much artistic value as Lemon Fresh dishwashing detergent. I could care less about access control on product like this.
What scares me is the idea that access to artistic or intellectual works which have real value to humanity and society will be controlled by a capitalist driven authority like the MPAA. ( milar concerns have cropped up with the human genome project, fortunately all parties agreed to release their data into the public domain. )
And it's the MPAA's movies that reach the wider audience. Shudder
We all have to pay taxes. Imagine there's a fixed amount each year that the government requires to provide and maintain facilities, the more corporations pay the less individuals are required to pay. I don't buy people who own a corporation make money because 90% of the wealth generated by corporations goes to about 5% of the population who have the ability to put it back into more corporations, family trusts and other schemes to avoid paying tax on it again.
I like to think the human race is evolving past the selfishness of pure capitalism.
True, what I'm paying in taxes scares the SHIT out of me, but then again, after all that, I'm still stinkin' filthy rich beyond my wildest dreams ever.
Of course I'll be screwed if they say yes as I'm flat out buying lunch most days. It's probably not a good thing to send these stores a message "The people who want region free DVD are broke and never buy anything."
So look up the latest Sony, Phillips web page and at the last minute pretend you're waiting for the new model with the Elecro-Magnetic Polarization Enhancing Dongle.
I work for a record store in Australia and our Warner rep sent us a copy of the letter last week which I submitted to slashdot. (Note: the best way to get a story on slashdot is to submit it to ZDNet, Wired, or even DVD Debate.)
I find it interesting that they explicity mention that the CSS licensing agreement requiresa DVD player to be region specific. Everyone except Judge Kaplan knew CSS was primarily an access control mechanism, this announcement demonstrates the importance the MPAA members attatch to it.
What the judge is proposing is a statute of limitations of 6 months on such data. So even if it is backed up somewhere it won't be admissible as evidence.
Of course, inadmissible evidence is extremely useful in persuading jurors from time to time.
I'm sure most people would find it easier to intuitively comprehend integrating a(t) = m(t) / F where m(t) = -86400t + M(0) over a few months, but there's always a few.
Well, not that I ever hear about them. Sometimes I get a little jealous while reading about Linux Expo X at Y so it's nice to finally see some in Australia. Now I need to convince mu employer that I need to got to Melbourne.
I'm not much of a gamer either (although I like to play lots of Quake 3) but I think the market they're aiming at is the Playstation and like game consoles. These people aren't really noted for anti MS sentiments and would probably go for anything as long as the rendering looks nice. I like nice 3D stuff, MS platforms currently kick Linux's butt in this department, and I have a Win98 partition solely for 3D studio and Quake 3.
Even the purpose of this software is cunningly disguised.
Masquerading as a set of utilities for mounting an ext2 partition from MS-DOS, Ltools is guaranteed to make your linux filesystems completely inaccessible to anybody.
One of the most glaring insecurities in most disk encryption systems is the user themselves. They may simply be threatened with hot lubricating jelly and will reveal the all important encryption keys. Not so with Ltools - even the user is unable to retrieve the information once it is encrypted.
Simply install the Ltools package on your windows partition and then type 'lmkdir etc'. I did this yesterday and believe me, there's no way anybody's accessing my root filesystem!
Can anyone imagine a musician who wants to make music as an end in itself? I mean, suppose that N Sync and the Back Street Boys had decided that there was no money in music and had become lawyers or accountants instead. The world would be a damn sight better place. Name one musician whose music has actually got better after they became a millionaire, and if half of the morons in the top ten at the moment could actually play an instrument or sing they could make money from live performances.
Slashdot Mirror
1. The South Park episode this will inspire.
2. The outcry and street marches organised by the conservation group 'RedPeace'.
-----
So the statement "A problem is said to be within the classof complexity P if ... Otherwise the problem is said to be in complexity class NP." is not strictly accurate.
True. Thanks.
I can probably remind people of a little stuff.
It's probably easiest to think of this stuff in terms of Turing Machines, any problem can be expressed according to a TM which solves it. Input to a turing machine can be sized according to the number of squares on the tape it takes to represent the input. For an input of size n, the time complexity function of a turing machine (or algorithm which it computes) is defined as the maximum number of steps it takes the TM to halt (if it does) ranging over all inputs of size n. Considering all possible input sizes we end up with a function C(n) which maps positive integers to positive integers.
A problem is said to be within the class of complexity P if there exists a (deterministic) Turing Machine having complexity function C(n) and a polynomial function p(n) such that for all n C(n) < p(n). Otherwise the problem is said to be in complexity class NP.
Factoring integers is an NP problem, note that the Shor's polynomial time algorithm for use on a Quantum Computer is non-deterministic.
An NP-complete problem is one that firstly is in NP, and secondly is one in which for every other problem in NP there is some TM or algorithm which takes a polynomial number of steps to restate it in terms of the NP-complete candidate. (Moreover the solution to this problem provides a solution to the second one.)
So to solve P = NP the author needs to show first of all it's NP-complete. Which may or may not have been shown elsewhere, a lot of these graph partition problems have subtle but important differences, and secondly provide a polynomial time algorithm to solve it.
I am of the opinion that NP = P (or not) is one of the hardest problems in mathematics and really needs some brilliant new theories to be solved, so I'm sceptical but I'll read the paper.
Who's making strawman arguments now? My guns are to protect me when the government comes to take the last of my freedoms away.
Won't you need some anti-tank and anti-aircraft defences too? Perhaps a stealth bomber buried in the backyard.
Actually, to be honest, I'd like a gun because I'm a little skinny and get frightened by big, loud agressive males. A gun would really help.
Does anyone know why there aren't any? I have heard two plausible explanations. One is that Nobel Prizes are given for achievements with tangible benefit to humankind which is why Einstein got his for his work on the Photoelectic effect rather than for general relativity which is far and away his greatest work. The second I think is much more likely - the mathematician Niels Abel was fooling around with Nobel's wife.
My award goes to Fritz A. Attaway for this little number
"To the contrary, the use of technological measures in general, and of access-control technologies in particular, has already greatly increased the availability of a wide range of copyrighted materials to members of the public."
The thrust of his argument is
(a)access control enables the copyright holders to make available trial versions or restricted versions like those cable movies that cut out 1/2 an hour into it and ask for your credit card number.
(b) Access control is a means of making sure that unauthorized use of material is not possible. This is implemented "in tandem with the hardware."
These don't seem too unreasonable to be honest. I think the reason I have such a hard time relating to the MPAA is that they consider movies, music whatever as product. Most of the crap they put out is, "Mission to Mars" for example has about as much artistic value as Lemon Fresh dishwashing detergent. I could care less about access control on product like this.
What scares me is the idea that access to artistic or intellectual works which have real value to humanity and society will be controlled by a capitalist driven authority like the MPAA. ( milar concerns have cropped up with the human genome project, fortunately all parties agreed to release their data into the public domain. )
And it's the MPAA's movies that reach the wider audience. Shudder
We all have to pay taxes. Imagine there's a fixed amount each year that the government requires to provide and maintain facilities, the more corporations pay the less individuals are required to pay. I don't buy people who own a corporation make money because 90% of the wealth generated by corporations goes to about 5% of the population who have the ability to put it back into more corporations, family trusts and other schemes to avoid paying tax on it again.
I like to think the human race is evolving past the selfishness of pure capitalism.
True, what I'm paying in taxes scares the SHIT out of me, but then again, after all that, I'm still stinkin' filthy rich beyond my wildest dreams ever.
You bastard.
ROFL :)
Of course I'll be screwed if they say yes as I'm flat out buying lunch most days. It's probably not a good thing to send these stores a message "The people who want region free DVD are broke and never buy anything."
So look up the latest Sony, Phillips web page and at the last minute pretend you're waiting for the new model with the Elecro-Magnetic Polarization Enhancing Dongle.
United States dollars work only in the United States. You could say that they're "region coded" too.
Actually they work in Argentina, Guatemala, and possibly a few other South American countries.
I work for a record store in Australia and our Warner rep sent us a copy of the letter last week which I submitted to slashdot. (Note: the best way to get a story on slashdot is to submit it to ZDNet, Wired, or even DVD Debate.)
I find it interesting that they explicity mention that the CSS licensing agreement requiresa DVD player to be region specific. Everyone except Judge Kaplan knew CSS was primarily an access control mechanism, this announcement demonstrates the importance the MPAA members attatch to it.
Do Red Hat users every actually compile anything anyway?
(boy is this going to ruin my karma)
What the judge is proposing is a statute of limitations of 6 months on such data. So even if it is backed up somewhere it won't be admissible as evidence.
Of course, inadmissible evidence is extremely useful in persuading jurors from time to time.
Usually with a watch.
I'm sure most people would find it easier to intuitively comprehend integrating a(t) = m(t) / F where m(t) = -86400t + M(0) over a few months, but there's always a few.
Well, not that I ever hear about them. Sometimes I get a little jealous while reading about Linux Expo X at Y so it's nice to finally see some in Australia. Now I need to convince mu employer that I need to got to Melbourne.
I have a TNT2 : every few months I try to get it to work but end up with a little box moving around my monitor saying "Horizontal Sync Out of Range."
:(
The refresh rates are all fine, I really don't understand what's going on.
I'm not much of a gamer either (although I like to play lots of Quake 3) but I think the market they're aiming at is the Playstation and like game consoles. These people aren't really noted for anti MS sentiments and would probably go for anything as long as the rendering looks nice. I like nice 3D stuff, MS platforms currently kick Linux's butt in this department, and I have a Win98 partition solely for 3D studio and Quake 3.
Shoot all the natives whilst gradually moving westwards. It worked last time didn't it?
let that Jeri Lyan Ryan woman be involved. Though it be to the detriment of my life.
Why don't you pour some into a fish tank and then ask the fish?
Even the purpose of this software is cunningly disguised.
Masquerading as a set of utilities for mounting an ext2 partition from MS-DOS, Ltools is guaranteed to make your linux filesystems completely inaccessible to anybody.
One of the most glaring insecurities in most disk encryption systems is the user themselves. They may simply be threatened with hot lubricating jelly and will reveal the all important encryption keys. Not so with Ltools - even the user is unable to retrieve the information once it is encrypted.
Simply install the Ltools package on your windows partition and then type 'lmkdir etc'. I did this yesterday and believe me, there's no way anybody's accessing my root filesystem!
Can anyone imagine a musician who wants to make music as an end in itself? I mean, suppose that N Sync and the Back Street Boys had decided that there was no money in music and had become lawyers or accountants instead. The world would be a damn sight better place. Name one musician whose music has actually got better after they became a millionaire, and if half of the morons in the top ten at the moment could actually play an instrument or sing they could make money from live performances.
Try the fish. And if you can figure out what language the article was written in please let me know.