We didn't replace Euclid's Elements with atoms. Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann's work notwithstanding, the Elements is still on a perfectly sound mathematical basis... I suppose you meant the classical elements, which concept predates even Socrates.
There is already a large host of naturally-occurring mosquito-borne illnesses out there: malaria is just the most famous. There's dengue fever, yellow fever, filariasis, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis, etc., and most of these diseases are at least as deadly as malaria. Whether or not adding one more will make things any worse than they already are depends on the characteristics of the disease being spread, and the characteristics of the mosquitoes spreading the disease (e.g. if they have wider range, have more resistances, etc.). If these factors are at most equal, you will have only made things worse by doing this only in so far as the new disease requires treatments different from the ones that have been around for ages.
Well, I got the quote (which was originally from Gottfried von Leibniz) from G.J. Chiatin, who misspelled it exactly that way. Thanks for pointing this out.:)
As far as "Go" - that's a tough nut to crack and it's considered even more difficult than chess to write a decent computer player. Nonetheless, that latest programs achieve rankings near the top (dan-3), placing them among the best (human) players in the world.
No. The best computer Go programs have been able to achieve so far amateur 3-dan, which is quite different from professional 3-dan. Amateur 3-dan is a very, very long way from being among the best players in the world. The best results so far have been last year, in tournaments where a program defeated a professional 4-dan with a 6-stone handicap, and a professional 5-dan with a 7-stone handicap, but these only place the programs at the level of perhaps a professional 1-dan or a mid-high amateur dan if the results can be shown consistent. This is still a rather long way from the kind of progress made with chess, where a program was able to defeat the best human player in the world.
Is it reasonable to suspect people of murder just because they have in the past searched for, found, or viewed material, that might relate to methods used by the murderer?
Well, it could be grounds for probable cause for the police to investigate you further, if they already had some reason to suspect you to begin with. It could also be presented as evidence to show you acted with malice aforethought, so you get convicted for Murder One instead of on a lesser charge. But by itself, it means nothing, and no sane prosecution would hang their case on that by itself. In the presence of other pieces of evidence however, it could mean a very great deal indeed.
Would police have made such a deal of simple searches, if they were done by looking up books on the subject at the library? Would a list of books checked out seriously be used to convict an alleged suspect?
Yes. In fact it has been done many times. There have been several cases of this type in the past, most notably poisonings, where one bit of evidence against the murderer was that he/she looked up books on poisons in their local library. I remember watching a show on Discovery Channel where it told how the criminal actually tore out the page from a library book describing the very poison found in the victim's autopsy report. But, as with the case in the TFA, the library checkout list was only one of many pieces of evidence that combined to present a solid case for murder.
Ask Eben Moglen, chief legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation, how the GPL has been enforced all these years.
In approximately a decade of enforcing the GPL, I have never insisted on payment of damages to the Foundation for violation of the license, and I have rarely required public admission of wrongdoing. Our position has always been that compliance with the license, and security for future good behavior, are the most important goals. We have done everything to make it easy for violators to comply, and we have offered oblivion with respect to past faults.
Enforcing the GPL, for the Free Software Foundation anyway, has never been about punishing the violators, as it tends to be with other copyright-related litigation, but more about getting people to comply with the license. In another speech, Moglen explains why there has never been a court test of the GPL, which is what you seem to be looking for:
...In order to defend yourself in a case in which you are infringing the freedom of free software, you have to be prepared to meet a call that I make reasonably often with my colleagues at the Foundation who are here tonight. That telephone call goes like this: "Mr. Potential Defendant, you are distributing my client's copyrighted work without permission. Please stop. And if you want to continue to distribute it, we'll help you to get back your distribution rights, which have terminated by your infringement, but you are going to have to do it the right way."
At the moment that I make that call, the potential defendant's lawyer now has a choice. He can cooperate with us, or he can fight with us. And if he goes to court and fights with us, he will have a second choice before him. We will say to the judge, "Judge, Mr. Defendant has used our copyrighted work, copied it, modified it and distributed it without permission. Please make him stop."
One thing that the defendant can say is, "You're right. I have no license." Defendants do not want to say that, because if they say that they lose. So defendants, when they envision to themselves what they will say in court, realize that what they will say is, "But Judge, I do have a license. It's this here document, the GNU GPL. General Public License," at which point, because I know the license reasonably well, and I'm aware in what respect he is breaking it, I will say, "Well, Judge, he had that license but he violated its terms and under Section 4 of it, when he violated its terms, it stopped working for him."
But notice that in order to survive moment one in a lawsuit over free software, it is the defendant who must wave the GPL. It is his permission, his master key to a lawsuit that lasts longer than a nanosecond. This, quite simply, is the reason...that there has never been a court test of the GPL.
Given this kind of legal bind, most defendants when pressed by competent GPL plaintiffs would rather comply with the license like they are supposed to than fight it out in court under those terms.
I suppose you also have the funds to give Apple, Prudential Insurance, the DoD, HP, Xerox PARC, Ford, GE, and everyone else holding on to one of those class A allocations to perform their internal network migration so that they stop using their IP's? No? They aren't going to spend billions of dollars of their own money to change their internal network infrastructure so that they stop using those blocks of IP's were given at the beginning of Internet time. And if by some miracle you somehow managed to get them to do all that, what does that leave you with? 17/8 blocks. Whoop dee doo. Less than the 19/8's that IANA allocated this year! Congratulations, you've managed to stave off IPv4 address exhaustion for less than a year at the cost of forcing several very large organizations to reconfigure their rather complex internal networks. Tell me again how this is a better strategy than going full-on IPv6 instead.
No. It's just an instance of that old military truism: in the battle between warhead and armor, the warhead always wins. The defender's job is always harder than that of the attacker. The defender needs to plug every possible hole while the attacker just needs to find only one that can be exploited, and once that happens, the game is over. The security professionals may be much smarter than the malware writers and black hats, but sadly, because their job is much harder, they aren't anywhere sufficiently smart enough to beat them at a game where the deck is stacked against them.
1) A person or small company makes a big invention. Patents keep big companies form stealing it from them and profiting off the work of others. Like if a 5 man company invented an amazing new wireless communications device that is cheap to make and effective. However since they are small, they produce them for $50 each. Motorola, being huge, can do it for $20 each. With no patents Motorola just takes their work and goes for it, and they get crushed being unable to compete.
That's generally how it's supposed to work in theory, but in practice what winds up happening is that the big company has a huge patent war chest and can strong-arm the small company into cross-licensing patents that cover other aspects of the invention that has been created. This is almost a certainty given the interdependency between any modern major technological innovation and other innovations of the same kind, and the way patents tend to be worded these days. In your example, once the five-man company has taken Motorola to court for patent infringement, they can then say: "Oh, but we notice that in creating your wireless communication device you are also infringing on OUR patents X, Y, and Z. Why don't we just give you a license to use those patents and you give us a license to your patent, so we can forget the whole thing? Or else we will bring a countersuit on you for YOUR patent infringement of patents X, Y, and Z!" If the company agrees to the cross-licensing deal, then Motorola keeps on making the device for $20, the small company is still stuck producing them for $50 and they get crushed being unable to compete. If they refuse, they get hit with countersuits from Motorola that bury them in legal expenses in addition to their original patent infringement suit. If this gets drawn out long enough it doesn't matter if they eventually win or lose, and they get crushed being unable to compete in court. The only way this can come out good for the five-man team is if they manage to weather all the infringement lawsuits (including the one they started!), and even then they may wind up with a Pyrrhic victory.
One way that they can escape this kind of fate is to stop mass-producing the device altogether and simply license the patent to Motorola, which then must make the device for maybe $25 instead because they need to pay royalties. They may need to take Motorola to court to acknowledge the patent, and negotiate the royalties. If this happens, how different are they from a patent troll outfit?
Spoken like a true Blub programmer. Trying to go from a programming language that has true lexical closures like Ruby to a language like Java which doesn't is extremely painful. You get used to being able to write code that uses higher-order functions (and hence closures) to get stuff done.
The way I've always understood nondeterministic Turing machines is that they are an idealized model of computation where you in essence have unbounded parallelism. If you had very large numbers of processing elements, large enough to grow to the scale required for the problem which you're attempting to solve, then arguably you have what almost amounts to a nondeterministic Turing machine, albeit with a very large, but still finite, bound on parallelism. This is, after all, the reason why research is being done into getting very small objects such as bacteria and DNA molecules to perform computation: they offer the promise of far higher levels of parallelism than are possible with conventional computing devices. Quantum computers as I understand them seem to offer something very close, but not quite the kind of unbounded parallelism that should be offered by a hypothetical NTM, but this is a murky area of research (it involves showing that BQP != NP, which seems about as hard as trying to prove P != NP).
. If they can get the bacteria to solve a puzzle in the most general form efficiently, they might be on to something big. I have the feeling though it may turn out to be just as effective as Leonard Adleman's (the A in RSA) attempts at solving Hamiltonian Cycles and other NP-complete problems with DNA-based computing: incredibly promising, but running into practical issues as the problems grow from the trivial to the interesting.
False. The Euclidean traveling salesman problem is just as NP-complete as its more general form. You're not just looking for the shortest path on a fully connected graph, to solve the TSP you're looking for the shortest path on a fully connected graph that links all of the nodes. Big, big difference. Without the latter constraint, Dijkstra's algorithm suffices to give you a solution in O(n^2). Add it in, and you're NP-complete.
It seems his name is Rick Rubin, producer for Metallica's 2008 album Death Magnetic. The album came under fire for its excessive use of dynamic range compression thanks to Rubin's influence, and in fact there's a petition for a remix or a remaster of Death Magnetic without the excessive dynamic range compression.
They did all this... twice... in the span of a single century, with no natural resources to speak of, save one: the Japanese people themselves.
The only problem is they're losing even this edge. Their population has been stagnant at about 100 million since the late 1960's, and the only reason why they haven't seen a massive population decline is that their life expectancy is the highest in the world. They have over 21% of their population over the age of 65. Too many old Japanese, not enough young blood that has the same energy that was able to do everything which you described so eloquently.
It was never a question of nature or the earth managing in spite of what we do. Nothing we can do, except possibly detonating every nuclear weapon in the world's arsenal (and maybe not even then) will be sufficient to completely wipe out all life on the planet. The real question is whether or not whatever we do or fail to do will make the planet uninhabitable for us humans. Nature may be resilient, but the human species, having existed for only 100,000 or so years in its present form, a mere blink of an eye in geological terms, isn't even close.
Steve Jobs already lost to Richard Stallman once, back in the NeXT days. That's why GCC has an Objective-C front-end, and why Apple still distributes a patched version of GCC in full compliance with the GPL. Maybe he wants a rematch.:)
I flew through Narita on my way back home from the USA at the height of the bird flu scare as well. What they were doing was not entirely unexpected, as we were all talking about how it felt like we were living through the first few chapters of Stephen King's The Stand, even before I had left America. Yes, we were detained on the plane for over two hours (there went my chance of puttering around on the Internet in the airport lounge while waiting for my connecting flight to board, and my chances of browsing at the airport bookstores went down greatly) and there were those guys in the hazmat suits scanning everyone and there was that silly health history form, but no, once they allowed us to deplane nothing else was unusual at Narita. There was that security inspection right after you get off before you get back to the boarding gates but they didn't do any further medical inspections. Being a smoker I didn't see those hazmat folks you describe in the smoking lounge at the time when I had a light after the ten-hour flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Narita, and the grueling two-hour "inspection" on the plane.
I fly to Japan and through Japan several times a year as our company's airline of choice uses NRT as a hub, and I've seen more weird shit happen in US airports than at Narita. In any case what seems to have happened to Steve Jobs here is the Japanese complying with TSA inspection rules imposed on all flights entering the United States.
Assuming the smaller asteroid is 6m in diameter and made of somewhat dense rock and moving at 17 km/s (typical for asteroids), the impact would have an explosive yield of approximately 12 kilotons, just a little less than the yield of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The bigger one, assuming it to be 20m in diameter and also made of dense rock and moving at 17 km/s would have an explosive yield of 434 kilotons, roughly equivalent to a warhead of a modern Minuteman or Trident missile (see this site for the calculations). While they're no planet-killers, they could still cause some serious damage were they to smash into some populated region of the earth.
This hardly a new phenomenon. In Japan it was noted ever since Japanese-language word processors began to be widely used, so much so that a term: 'waapuro-baka' was coined for them. Literally meaning 'word processor-stupid', it refers to someone whose kanji-writing ability has suffered due to over-reliance on the kanji conversion systems used to input Japanese text in a word processor or computer. I can imagine that waapuro-baka can only have gotten more prevalent in recent days, and perhaps might be a driver for orthographic reform in the countries that use the Han characters. The Koreans have all but abandoned the use of the Han characters (Hanja) in favor of their phonetic Hangul script and their use is now very much limited (and in North Korea has been completely forbidden). The Japanese have more inertia, from the looks of things, as it seems they have even recently increased the number of general-use kanji taught in their schools, rather than reducing their use in favor of the kana syllabaries instead. The Chinese don't have any native alternatives, and so what direction their orthographic reform will take is unclear.
Such a mass transit system exists. There's a country in Eastern Asia whose rail system has managed to do all those things and more. Trains that are off the timetable by more than a minute in Japan are extremely rare. Their rail system is so extensive that very few destinations, at least in urban areas, aren't reachable within fifteen minutes to half an hour of walking from the nearest train station. Getting around in a major urban area like Tokyo or Osaka boils down to finding the closest train station to wherever it is you're going, and finding out when the train to where you're headed leaves and arrives.
No one has a proof that the Riemann Hypothesis is true either, but practically everyone in analytical number theory seems to go around assuming that it's true anyway. There are similar efforts to calculate all of the non-trivial zeroes of the Riemann Zeta Function that are equally futile in making headway to proving the Hypothesis true. Would you also consider such efforts pointless? Well, they could succeed in proving the Hypothesis false by finding a zero away from the critical line, but nobody wants that...
One other thing that may come out from statistical analysis of the five trillion digits would be that the digits begin to show a decided statistical bias away from what is to be expected were Pi normal. And then we'd have very strong evidence for believing that Pi is not normal, maybe almost enough to make a proof by counterexample. Frankly, I don't think this is likely, but it would be just as interesting if it were true.
If you want to prove that all the digits are correct, you only have to check a few things:
1. There is a sound mathematical proof that the algorithm used in fact does generate the digits of pi, and
2. The algorithm was coded correctly. This should be even easier to check, though likely more tedious.
Now, what it's good for is a little harder. There is no physical application for such a highly accurate value of pi (39 digits should be sufficient to calculate the circumference of the known universe given its radius to within the diameter of a hydrogen atom). However, large numbers of digits of pi are useful as arguments in number theory, statistics, and information theory. For instance, there is no real proof that pi is a normal number, but as more digits of pi are found and the statistical properties of the digits are analyzed and shown to be consistent with the definition of normal numbers, that makes the conjecture that pi is actually normal a little closer to being true (see experimental mathematics).
I remember a silent movie actress named Mary Pickford once said that adding sound to movies would be like adding lipstick to the Venus de Milo. You seem similarly dismissive of an immature technology whose artistic possibilities have only barely been explored. You seem to be betting, just like Ms. Pickford did before you, that it'll never see artistic application in the hands of an imaginative filmmaker who would find a way to make it break out of its gimmicky underpinnings. I hope you don't put down a significant sum on that bet.
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We didn't replace Euclid's Elements with atoms. Lobachevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann's work notwithstanding, the Elements is still on a perfectly sound mathematical basis... I suppose you meant the classical elements, which concept predates even Socrates.
Multiple personality disorder anyone?
There is already a large host of naturally-occurring mosquito-borne illnesses out there: malaria is just the most famous. There's dengue fever, yellow fever, filariasis, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis, etc., and most of these diseases are at least as deadly as malaria. Whether or not adding one more will make things any worse than they already are depends on the characteristics of the disease being spread, and the characteristics of the mosquitoes spreading the disease (e.g. if they have wider range, have more resistances, etc.). If these factors are at most equal, you will have only made things worse by doing this only in so far as the new disease requires treatments different from the ones that have been around for ages.
Well, I got the quote (which was originally from Gottfried von Leibniz) from G.J. Chiatin, who misspelled it exactly that way. Thanks for pointing this out. :)
No. The best computer Go programs have been able to achieve so far amateur 3-dan, which is quite different from professional 3-dan. Amateur 3-dan is a very, very long way from being among the best players in the world. The best results so far have been last year, in tournaments where a program defeated a professional 4-dan with a 6-stone handicap, and a professional 5-dan with a 7-stone handicap, but these only place the programs at the level of perhaps a professional 1-dan or a mid-high amateur dan if the results can be shown consistent. This is still a rather long way from the kind of progress made with chess, where a program was able to defeat the best human player in the world.
Well, it could be grounds for probable cause for the police to investigate you further, if they already had some reason to suspect you to begin with. It could also be presented as evidence to show you acted with malice aforethought, so you get convicted for Murder One instead of on a lesser charge. But by itself, it means nothing, and no sane prosecution would hang their case on that by itself. In the presence of other pieces of evidence however, it could mean a very great deal indeed.
Yes. In fact it has been done many times. There have been several cases of this type in the past, most notably poisonings, where one bit of evidence against the murderer was that he/she looked up books on poisons in their local library. I remember watching a show on Discovery Channel where it told how the criminal actually tore out the page from a library book describing the very poison found in the victim's autopsy report. But, as with the case in the TFA, the library checkout list was only one of many pieces of evidence that combined to present a solid case for murder.
Ask Eben Moglen, chief legal counsel for the Free Software Foundation, how the GPL has been enforced all these years.
Enforcing the GPL, for the Free Software Foundation anyway, has never been about punishing the violators, as it tends to be with other copyright-related litigation, but more about getting people to comply with the license. In another speech, Moglen explains why there has never been a court test of the GPL, which is what you seem to be looking for:
Given this kind of legal bind, most defendants when pressed by competent GPL plaintiffs would rather comply with the license like they are supposed to than fight it out in court under those terms.
I suppose you also have the funds to give Apple, Prudential Insurance, the DoD, HP, Xerox PARC, Ford, GE, and everyone else holding on to one of those class A allocations to perform their internal network migration so that they stop using their IP's? No? They aren't going to spend billions of dollars of their own money to change their internal network infrastructure so that they stop using those blocks of IP's were given at the beginning of Internet time. And if by some miracle you somehow managed to get them to do all that, what does that leave you with? 17 /8 blocks. Whoop dee doo. Less than the 19 /8's that IANA allocated this year! Congratulations, you've managed to stave off IPv4 address exhaustion for less than a year at the cost of forcing several very large organizations to reconfigure their rather complex internal networks. Tell me again how this is a better strategy than going full-on IPv6 instead.
No. It's just an instance of that old military truism: in the battle between warhead and armor, the warhead always wins. The defender's job is always harder than that of the attacker. The defender needs to plug every possible hole while the attacker just needs to find only one that can be exploited, and once that happens, the game is over. The security professionals may be much smarter than the malware writers and black hats, but sadly, because their job is much harder, they aren't anywhere sufficiently smart enough to beat them at a game where the deck is stacked against them.
That's generally how it's supposed to work in theory, but in practice what winds up happening is that the big company has a huge patent war chest and can strong-arm the small company into cross-licensing patents that cover other aspects of the invention that has been created. This is almost a certainty given the interdependency between any modern major technological innovation and other innovations of the same kind, and the way patents tend to be worded these days. In your example, once the five-man company has taken Motorola to court for patent infringement, they can then say: "Oh, but we notice that in creating your wireless communication device you are also infringing on OUR patents X, Y, and Z. Why don't we just give you a license to use those patents and you give us a license to your patent, so we can forget the whole thing? Or else we will bring a countersuit on you for YOUR patent infringement of patents X, Y, and Z!" If the company agrees to the cross-licensing deal, then Motorola keeps on making the device for $20, the small company is still stuck producing them for $50 and they get crushed being unable to compete. If they refuse, they get hit with countersuits from Motorola that bury them in legal expenses in addition to their original patent infringement suit. If this gets drawn out long enough it doesn't matter if they eventually win or lose, and they get crushed being unable to compete in court. The only way this can come out good for the five-man team is if they manage to weather all the infringement lawsuits (including the one they started!), and even then they may wind up with a Pyrrhic victory.
One way that they can escape this kind of fate is to stop mass-producing the device altogether and simply license the patent to Motorola, which then must make the device for maybe $25 instead because they need to pay royalties. They may need to take Motorola to court to acknowledge the patent, and negotiate the royalties. If this happens, how different are they from a patent troll outfit?
Spoken like a true Blub programmer. Trying to go from a programming language that has true lexical closures like Ruby to a language like Java which doesn't is extremely painful. You get used to being able to write code that uses higher-order functions (and hence closures) to get stuff done.
The way I've always understood nondeterministic Turing machines is that they are an idealized model of computation where you in essence have unbounded parallelism. If you had very large numbers of processing elements, large enough to grow to the scale required for the problem which you're attempting to solve, then arguably you have what almost amounts to a nondeterministic Turing machine, albeit with a very large, but still finite, bound on parallelism. This is, after all, the reason why research is being done into getting very small objects such as bacteria and DNA molecules to perform computation: they offer the promise of far higher levels of parallelism than are possible with conventional computing devices. Quantum computers as I understand them seem to offer something very close, but not quite the kind of unbounded parallelism that should be offered by a hypothetical NTM, but this is a murky area of research (it involves showing that BQP != NP, which seems about as hard as trying to prove P != NP).
The Sudoku problem is in general NP-complete
. If they can get the bacteria to solve a puzzle in the most general form efficiently, they might be on to something big. I have the feeling though it may turn out to be just as effective as Leonard Adleman's (the A in RSA) attempts at solving Hamiltonian Cycles and other NP-complete problems with DNA-based computing: incredibly promising, but running into practical issues as the problems grow from the trivial to the interesting.
False. The Euclidean traveling salesman problem is just as NP-complete as its more general form. You're not just looking for the shortest path on a fully connected graph, to solve the TSP you're looking for the shortest path on a fully connected graph that links all of the nodes. Big, big difference. Without the latter constraint, Dijkstra's algorithm suffices to give you a solution in O(n^2). Add it in, and you're NP-complete.
It seems his name is Rick Rubin, producer for Metallica's 2008 album Death Magnetic. The album came under fire for its excessive use of dynamic range compression thanks to Rubin's influence, and in fact there's a petition for a remix or a remaster of Death Magnetic without the excessive dynamic range compression.
The only problem is they're losing even this edge. Their population has been stagnant at about 100 million since the late 1960's, and the only reason why they haven't seen a massive population decline is that their life expectancy is the highest in the world. They have over 21% of their population over the age of 65. Too many old Japanese, not enough young blood that has the same energy that was able to do everything which you described so eloquently.
It was never a question of nature or the earth managing in spite of what we do. Nothing we can do, except possibly detonating every nuclear weapon in the world's arsenal (and maybe not even then) will be sufficient to completely wipe out all life on the planet. The real question is whether or not whatever we do or fail to do will make the planet uninhabitable for us humans. Nature may be resilient, but the human species, having existed for only 100,000 or so years in its present form, a mere blink of an eye in geological terms, isn't even close.
Steve Jobs already lost to Richard Stallman once, back in the NeXT days. That's why GCC has an Objective-C front-end, and why Apple still distributes a patched version of GCC in full compliance with the GPL. Maybe he wants a rematch. :)
I flew through Narita on my way back home from the USA at the height of the bird flu scare as well. What they were doing was not entirely unexpected, as we were all talking about how it felt like we were living through the first few chapters of Stephen King's The Stand, even before I had left America. Yes, we were detained on the plane for over two hours (there went my chance of puttering around on the Internet in the airport lounge while waiting for my connecting flight to board, and my chances of browsing at the airport bookstores went down greatly) and there were those guys in the hazmat suits scanning everyone and there was that silly health history form, but no, once they allowed us to deplane nothing else was unusual at Narita. There was that security inspection right after you get off before you get back to the boarding gates but they didn't do any further medical inspections. Being a smoker I didn't see those hazmat folks you describe in the smoking lounge at the time when I had a light after the ten-hour flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Narita, and the grueling two-hour "inspection" on the plane.
I fly to Japan and through Japan several times a year as our company's airline of choice uses NRT as a hub, and I've seen more weird shit happen in US airports than at Narita. In any case what seems to have happened to Steve Jobs here is the Japanese complying with TSA inspection rules imposed on all flights entering the United States.
Assuming the smaller asteroid is 6m in diameter and made of somewhat dense rock and moving at 17 km/s (typical for asteroids), the impact would have an explosive yield of approximately 12 kilotons, just a little less than the yield of the Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The bigger one, assuming it to be 20m in diameter and also made of dense rock and moving at 17 km/s would have an explosive yield of 434 kilotons, roughly equivalent to a warhead of a modern Minuteman or Trident missile (see this site for the calculations). While they're no planet-killers, they could still cause some serious damage were they to smash into some populated region of the earth.
This hardly a new phenomenon. In Japan it was noted ever since Japanese-language word processors began to be widely used, so much so that a term: 'waapuro-baka' was coined for them. Literally meaning 'word processor-stupid', it refers to someone whose kanji-writing ability has suffered due to over-reliance on the kanji conversion systems used to input Japanese text in a word processor or computer. I can imagine that waapuro-baka can only have gotten more prevalent in recent days, and perhaps might be a driver for orthographic reform in the countries that use the Han characters. The Koreans have all but abandoned the use of the Han characters (Hanja) in favor of their phonetic Hangul script and their use is now very much limited (and in North Korea has been completely forbidden). The Japanese have more inertia, from the looks of things, as it seems they have even recently increased the number of general-use kanji taught in their schools, rather than reducing their use in favor of the kana syllabaries instead. The Chinese don't have any native alternatives, and so what direction their orthographic reform will take is unclear.
Such a mass transit system exists. There's a country in Eastern Asia whose rail system has managed to do all those things and more. Trains that are off the timetable by more than a minute in Japan are extremely rare. Their rail system is so extensive that very few destinations, at least in urban areas, aren't reachable within fifteen minutes to half an hour of walking from the nearest train station. Getting around in a major urban area like Tokyo or Osaka boils down to finding the closest train station to wherever it is you're going, and finding out when the train to where you're headed leaves and arrives.
No one has a proof that the Riemann Hypothesis is true either, but practically everyone in analytical number theory seems to go around assuming that it's true anyway. There are similar efforts to calculate all of the non-trivial zeroes of the Riemann Zeta Function that are equally futile in making headway to proving the Hypothesis true. Would you also consider such efforts pointless? Well, they could succeed in proving the Hypothesis false by finding a zero away from the critical line, but nobody wants that...
One other thing that may come out from statistical analysis of the five trillion digits would be that the digits begin to show a decided statistical bias away from what is to be expected were Pi normal. And then we'd have very strong evidence for believing that Pi is not normal, maybe almost enough to make a proof by counterexample. Frankly, I don't think this is likely, but it would be just as interesting if it were true.
If you want to prove that all the digits are correct, you only have to check a few things:
1. There is a sound mathematical proof that the algorithm used in fact does generate the digits of pi, and
2. The algorithm was coded correctly. This should be even easier to check, though likely more tedious.
Now, what it's good for is a little harder. There is no physical application for such a highly accurate value of pi (39 digits should be sufficient to calculate the circumference of the known universe given its radius to within the diameter of a hydrogen atom). However, large numbers of digits of pi are useful as arguments in number theory, statistics, and information theory. For instance, there is no real proof that pi is a normal number, but as more digits of pi are found and the statistical properties of the digits are analyzed and shown to be consistent with the definition of normal numbers, that makes the conjecture that pi is actually normal a little closer to being true (see experimental mathematics).
I remember a silent movie actress named Mary Pickford once said that adding sound to movies would be like adding lipstick to the Venus de Milo. You seem similarly dismissive of an immature technology whose artistic possibilities have only barely been explored. You seem to be betting, just like Ms. Pickford did before you, that it'll never see artistic application in the hands of an imaginative filmmaker who would find a way to make it break out of its gimmicky underpinnings. I hope you don't put down a significant sum on that bet.