I agree with the general sentiment, but then I ask you, as someone criticizing this aspect of the article, how would you write the headline in such a way as to satisfy the length limits and at the same time make the story under it attract attention? I've actually seen major broadsheet newspapers make similar concessions to absolutely full factual accuracy in the main headline for these exact same considerations.
The real story here is in the trends of each version. IE7 and IE6 are in decline. For Internet Explorer, only IE8 is still growing, but its rate of growth is significantly slower than Firefox's. The headline may be misleading, but the the summary is right on the money. If these trends keep up, the headline may well become true a lot sooner than you seem to think.
The squids from Strange Days are essentially the same as the simstim units you see in William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy. Sensory output devices used for passive viewing. This is a crude version of the input system of a cyberspace deck, which is supposed to interact with the user's thoughts.
Yes, extremely high-energy collisions, of the order of 100 million TeV, have been directly observed. Such events involve particles eight orders of magnitude more energetic than any produced by the LHC at its maximum design potential. The first such ultra-high energy event was observed at a cosmic ray observatory at New Mexico in 1962, and there have been a few since, but they are understandably rare. More information here. So no, I don't think there is any other explanation why the LHC appears to be getting hit by so many problems other than the fact that it is among the most complex devices ever built by humankind. Natural processes already make particles with vastly higher energies than the LHC could even dream of reaching, so if a planet-destroying event was possible at the levels of energy it can achieve, then we wouldn't be here to build the LHC to begin with.
This is something that the much simpler Linux-HA environment deals with by using something they call STONITH, which basically means to Shoot The Other Node In The Head. STONITH peripherals are devices that can completely shut down a server physically, e.g. a power strip that can be controlled via a serial port. If you wind up with a partitioned cluster, which they more colorfully call a 'split brain' condition, where each node thinks the other one is dead, each of them uses the STONITH device to make sure, if it is able. One of them will activate the STONITH device before the other, and the one which wins keeps on running, while the one that loses really kicks the bucket if it isn't fully dead. I imagine that Remus must have similar mechanisms to guard against split brain conditions as well. I've had several Linux-HA clusters go split brain on me, and I tell you it's never pretty. The best case is that they only both try to grab the same IP address and get an IP address conflict, in the worst case, they both try to mount and write to the same fiberchannel disk at the same time and bollix the file system. If a Remus-based cluster split brains, I can imagine that you'll get mayhem just as awful unless you have a STONITH-like system to prevent it from happening.
It doesn't work, because it doesn't hinder the real pirates from making unauthorized copies with the DRM removed. If DRM can't do that, then it's worse than useless, because you find yourself in the unenviable position of competing with pirates who are providing a product superior to yours in almost every conceivable way. If DRM makes what would otherwise be legitimate uses of media I have purchased difficult, then obtaining an unauthorized copy with the DRM stripped becomes more and more attractive. Maybe later on, I'll get the unauthorized copy without bothering to get the authorized copy to begin with, or worse yet, I'll find some other alternative product whose producer is not an asshat who thinks his customer is his enemy, for that is the message that DRM sends. The more you tighten your grip, the more customers will slip through your fingers.
The main argument against DRM is that it plain and simple doesn't work. No matter what scheme you come up with, you are doomed to failure because you're going against a natural law of the digital universe. It is the nature of digital information to be copied. Bruce Schneier (here and here) famously explained that "digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet." You're giving away copies of a file, with some protection the expectation that the user's own computer will honor your desires not to have the file's displayable only to some! On the face of it, it's absolutely absurd, but that is exactly what all DRM schemes are trying to do. The fact that you go to all the trouble to do this means that you only inconvenience your real customers, treating them as though they were thieves. The pirates will inevitably break your attempts at DRM, and then they'll be competing against you, offering to the market a product that is superior to the one you are offering in many crucial ways. The so-called "content industry" finds itself on the wrong side of history this time: the combination of general-purpose computers and the digitization of information has led to this pass, and the only way back is to eliminate general-purpose computers entirely (an impossible task, to be sure, but one being attempted in the guise of 'trusted computing'), and/or restrict the digitization of information (definitely impossible).
Maybe authors should learn to stop worrying and love the Bomb so to speak. There are ways of making money even in the face of unrestricted copying. For books, a system that might be workable is patronage, the same way composers made money back in the day. Books on various topics could be commissioned by patrons who would pay authors to write books about topics they need to have references on. Once the book is done, the author has already made all the money he or she can expect from the work, and if dead-tree editions are offered and royalties are received from that in the traditional fashion, so much the better. There are many ways this could work, but it's up to people who have more business sense than I to make viable business plans out of them.
Intelligence agencies have been doing this sort of thing for decades, giving slightly different versions of a sensitive document to suspected spies or places where possible spies might have access to it, with some subtle changes in the words, seeing which one gets leaked or appears elsewhere. Tom Clancy coined the term Canary trap for the technique. Patriot Games was published in 1987, but its real-world use for exposing information leaks most likely predates the novel.
Not that I believe any of this nonsense, but going by their reckoning the end of the last cycle would have been at around 23,800 BC or thereabouts. Back then, what were our ancestors doing? The invention of agriculture would still be about 15,000 years in the future. All humans at the time were living in hunter-gatherer tribes. History itself would not formally begin for another 20,000 years, when the Sumerians invented cuneiform. The time when humans have "managed to advance technology in a roughly exponential trend throughout history" only seems to have begun at around that same time, 6000 years ago, less than a quarter of the supposed length of a cycle. The remaining three quarters of the present cycle, humanity's most advanced technology consisted of stone tools. Humans of the cycles before that were pretty much the same. There are many reasons to disbelieve this nonsense about doomsday, but humanity's supposed progress is not one of them.
I imagine the streets of many major cities may wind up getting traffic jams very frequently, so what happens if the bus gets stuck in such a one, and it takes an hour or more to get moving again (e.g. vehicular accident further down), or however long it takes to discharge the ultracapacitors? I suppose it may be necessary to install a backup engine that runs on conventional fuel, possibly just to run a generator which will charge the ultracapacitors sufficiently to get to the next stop.
The judge can never compel you to release the source code for your infringing app as part of the judgment against you, should you be found in violation of the GPL. If you have been found guilty of violating the GPL in a court of law, all the judge can really do is slap you in the same way Jammie Thomas got slapped: statutory and punitive damages and preventing you from continuing to distribute your infringing work. Violating the GPL amounts to copyright infringement, and would be punished accordingly. Thing is, there has never yet been a case involving the GPL where this point has been reached: all defendants so far settled before judgment could be rendered (in many cases, even before the case even gets to a court of law). Now, the plaintiffs (most notably if they are the Free Software Foundation) may ask you to release the source code, so you are no longer in violation of the license, but only the threats of the continuation of the lawsuit, the negative publicity one will receive, and the likely judgment at the end are what compel you to obey. However, there's no law that says that they should request source code opening as the settlement, and if you're treading on the copyright of someone other than the FSF the plaintiff could very well ask you to do just about anything instead, with compliance similarly enforced with the threat of the continuation of the lawsuits and their consequences.
Exactly right. As the SNAFU principle states, true communication is possible only between equals. If someone has power over another in an organization, the subordinate would rather tell his/her superior pleasant lies rather than the truth, for fear of being shot as the messenger of bad news. There's a famous story that illustrates this quite well:
In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification; And the plan was without form, and the specification was void.
And darkness was on the faces of the implementors thereof; And they spake unto their leader, saying: "It is a crock of shit, and smells as of a sewer."
And the leader took pity on them, and spoke to the project leader: "It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof."
And the project leader spake unto his section head, saying: "It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may abide it."
The section head then hurried to his department manager and informed him thus: "It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."
The department manager carried these words to his general manager, and spoke unto him saying: "It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong."
And so it was that the general manager rejoiced and delivered the good news unto the Vice President. "It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful."
The Vice President rushed to the President's side, and joyously exclaimed: "This powerful new software product
will promote the growth of the company!"
And the President looked upon the product, and saw that it was very good.
If gravity waves didn't exist, you'd have to find some other explanation for PSR B1913+16, which is a pulsar in orbit around another star. The pulsar and its companion are spiraling in together, losing energy in exact agreement with the phenomenon of gravitational radiation predicted by General Relativity. This binary pulsar system has been hailed as sufficiently convincing indirect evidence for the existence of gravity waves that Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for its discovery.
No, it doesn't seem that the existence of gravitational waves is in any question here. The only thing is that there might be much yet we don't understand about gravity that is stifling our ability to observe them directly. It's obvious that General Relativity is far from being the final word on gravitation.
Will probably never happen. Since Linus Torvalds has never insisted on copyright assignments on code contributions to the Linux kernel the way MySQL and the Free Software Foundation, for that matter, does as well, ownership of its copyright is spread over hundreds, maybe thousands of contributors. Linus himself, I hear, can take full credit for only 2% of the actual code in the kernel. Even if you could contact them all, it is quite unlikely that they will all agree to have their contributions re-licensed to a different license, most especially if it's just to accommodate something like ZFS. If you can't get them all to agree, you then have to find the contributions of the dissenters and excise their code from the kernel somehow, and produce a fork that will have to compete with the original kernel for developer mindshare. The GPLv2 fork will have the further advantage of being able to receive all the updates to the code in the less restrictive fork, while the less restrictive fork will be unable to legally integrate updates made to the GPLv2 fork. Such an event would also deal a catastrophic blow to the credibility of the Free/Open Source movement, and Microsoft's FUDsters would have a field day.
Those are some of the finest examples of actual Orwellian doublespeak in the real world. Read 1984 sometime, and perhaps you'll get a glimmer of understanding. The Ministry of Peace is engaged in making war, the Ministry of Truth falsifies history, the Ministry of Love tortures and punishes those who do not love Big Brother, and the Ministry of Plenty oversees poverty and shortages.
The name just seems to show that Mr. Kleissner has a sense of history. One of the old MBR viruses that used to plague systems in the days of MS-DOS was known as the Stoned MBR and from reading the article it seems that Mr. Kleissner's technique operates much the way that virus once did, by gaining . The marijuana references come from the original virus, which contained the phrase 'Your PC is now stoned! Legalise marijuana!'
At around the time the AES contest was ongoing, I was doing work on writing a cryptographic layer for an embedded system based on small microcontrollers. I wrote assembler implementations of Serpent, Twofish, RC6, and Rijndael for the embedded microcontroller (it was an 8-bit 8051-type controller, if I recall correctly), and Rijndael was consistently the most efficient, so it came as no surprise to me that Rijndael was several months later declared the Advanced Encryption Standard. One of the criteria for AES was speed in resource constrained environments such as microcontrollers and smart cards. I believe Bruce Schneier once said something to the effect that any bloke knowing the construction theory of block ciphers can design one that is all but impervious to the publicly known cryptanalytic attacks, but it's quite likely that such a design will be unusably slow. (too lazy to look up the reference, but I believe he said something like this at around the time AES was declared) The real challenge in block cipher design is designing a reasonably secure cipher that is also efficient.
Re:Decent text editor still not included right?
on
Emacs Hits Version 23
·
· Score: 1
78% of what most people perceive as being bloat in Emacs is actually in the form of Emacs Lisp extensions. Emacs has been designed from the ground up to be extensible, so one should not be surprised to see it extended the way its creators intended it to be. The core C code itself is not much to speak of, Emacs 22.3 is only a rather modest 233,130 source lines of C code, whereas the elisp code in the default 22.3 distribution alone is some 822,338 lines: this does not include any third-party extensions which are not part of the default distribution. Compare that to Vim 7.2, 244,082 source lines of C code in its core. Shockingly, Vim actually has slightly more code in its main C core than Emacs does!
That said, while I do use Emacs extensively, I don't have any sort of serious attachment to it. I don't edit most of my config files using Emacs but with vim, my $EDITOR is set to/usr/bin/vim, but nearly all of my serious coding is done with Emacs.
Well, I wouldn't be so quick to say that. As a counterexample, people routinely plug away at solitaire card games without any kind of assurance that the game they're playing can even be won. In fact, it seems that empirical results show that a fifth or even more of all Klondike solitaire games are unwinnable, and no true theoretical results on the winnability of Klondike solitaire are available. That hasn't deterred the game from becoming popular.
If I'm not mistaken, the boolean satisfiability problem is NP-complete. In fact, in 1971, Stephen Cook established a direct proof of its NP-completeness, which basically introduced the whole idea of NP-complete problems to theoretical computer science. Well, Sudoku is yet another game that is basically NP-complete as well (PDF link), and as might expected from their both being NP-complete, Sudoku problems are reducible to SAT problems (see here, also a PDF link), and presumably vice-versa. My guess is that perhaps the same people who get kicks out of solving Sudoku puzzles might have almost as much fun with this game as well.
Well, Since both the Hamilton path problem and the traveling salesman problem are NP-complete, there exists a polynomial time reduction of one problem into the other. So if you could solve the Hamilton path problem efficiently, and wanted to solve an instance of the traveling salesman problem (or the satisfiability problem, or the integer programming problem, or the partition problem, or whatever other NP-complete problem you might imagine), all you'd have to do is use the polynomial-time reduction to convert the source problem instance you wanted to solve into the equivalent Hamilton path problem, and apply the reduction in reverse on the answers to get the answers you wanted for the problem you wanted to solve.
Some 100,000 passengers pass through a major airport like Heathrow or JFK every day. If you had a test that was capable of detecting terrorists with 90% accuracy and applied them to every passenger going through such an airport, you'd be flagging ten thousand people a day as possible terrorists, and applying the more expensive test of detaining and investigating them all, according to your logic. I wonder how much it would cost to maintain all of the security personnel to do that. Put another way, it also means that if you flew ten times a year, the test would likely flag you at least once a year. The worthlessness of such a test as applied the way you propose should thus be obvious./p
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the general sentiment, but then I ask you, as someone criticizing this aspect of the article, how would you write the headline in such a way as to satisfy the length limits and at the same time make the story under it attract attention? I've actually seen major broadsheet newspapers make similar concessions to absolutely full factual accuracy in the main headline for these exact same considerations.
The real story here is in the trends of each version. IE7 and IE6 are in decline. For Internet Explorer, only IE8 is still growing, but its rate of growth is significantly slower than Firefox's. The headline may be misleading, but the the summary is right on the money. If these trends keep up, the headline may well become true a lot sooner than you seem to think.
Hello, Mr. Yukamoto, and welcome back to the GAP!
The squids from Strange Days are essentially the same as the simstim units you see in William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy. Sensory output devices used for passive viewing. This is a crude version of the input system of a cyberspace deck, which is supposed to interact with the user's thoughts.
Yes, extremely high-energy collisions, of the order of 100 million TeV, have been directly observed. Such events involve particles eight orders of magnitude more energetic than any produced by the LHC at its maximum design potential. The first such ultra-high energy event was observed at a cosmic ray observatory at New Mexico in 1962, and there have been a few since, but they are understandably rare. More information here. So no, I don't think there is any other explanation why the LHC appears to be getting hit by so many problems other than the fact that it is among the most complex devices ever built by humankind. Natural processes already make particles with vastly higher energies than the LHC could even dream of reaching, so if a planet-destroying event was possible at the levels of energy it can achieve, then we wouldn't be here to build the LHC to begin with.
This is something that the much simpler Linux-HA environment deals with by using something they call STONITH, which basically means to Shoot The Other Node In The Head. STONITH peripherals are devices that can completely shut down a server physically, e.g. a power strip that can be controlled via a serial port. If you wind up with a partitioned cluster, which they more colorfully call a 'split brain' condition, where each node thinks the other one is dead, each of them uses the STONITH device to make sure, if it is able. One of them will activate the STONITH device before the other, and the one which wins keeps on running, while the one that loses really kicks the bucket if it isn't fully dead. I imagine that Remus must have similar mechanisms to guard against split brain conditions as well. I've had several Linux-HA clusters go split brain on me, and I tell you it's never pretty. The best case is that they only both try to grab the same IP address and get an IP address conflict, in the worst case, they both try to mount and write to the same fiberchannel disk at the same time and bollix the file system. If a Remus-based cluster split brains, I can imagine that you'll get mayhem just as awful unless you have a STONITH-like system to prevent it from happening.
From LOST, Hurley's mom says "Why is there a dead Pakistani on my couch?" when Hurley brings an injured Sayid to their home.
It doesn't work, because it doesn't hinder the real pirates from making unauthorized copies with the DRM removed. If DRM can't do that, then it's worse than useless, because you find yourself in the unenviable position of competing with pirates who are providing a product superior to yours in almost every conceivable way. If DRM makes what would otherwise be legitimate uses of media I have purchased difficult, then obtaining an unauthorized copy with the DRM stripped becomes more and more attractive. Maybe later on, I'll get the unauthorized copy without bothering to get the authorized copy to begin with, or worse yet, I'll find some other alternative product whose producer is not an asshat who thinks his customer is his enemy, for that is the message that DRM sends. The more you tighten your grip, the more customers will slip through your fingers.
The main argument against DRM is that it plain and simple doesn't work. No matter what scheme you come up with, you are doomed to failure because you're going against a natural law of the digital universe. It is the nature of digital information to be copied. Bruce Schneier (here and here) famously explained that "digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet." You're giving away copies of a file, with some protection the expectation that the user's own computer will honor your desires not to have the file's displayable only to some! On the face of it, it's absolutely absurd, but that is exactly what all DRM schemes are trying to do. The fact that you go to all the trouble to do this means that you only inconvenience your real customers, treating them as though they were thieves. The pirates will inevitably break your attempts at DRM, and then they'll be competing against you, offering to the market a product that is superior to the one you are offering in many crucial ways. The so-called "content industry" finds itself on the wrong side of history this time: the combination of general-purpose computers and the digitization of information has led to this pass, and the only way back is to eliminate general-purpose computers entirely (an impossible task, to be sure, but one being attempted in the guise of 'trusted computing'), and/or restrict the digitization of information (definitely impossible).
Maybe authors should learn to stop worrying and love the Bomb so to speak. There are ways of making money even in the face of unrestricted copying. For books, a system that might be workable is patronage, the same way composers made money back in the day. Books on various topics could be commissioned by patrons who would pay authors to write books about topics they need to have references on. Once the book is done, the author has already made all the money he or she can expect from the work, and if dead-tree editions are offered and royalties are received from that in the traditional fashion, so much the better. There are many ways this could work, but it's up to people who have more business sense than I to make viable business plans out of them.
Intelligence agencies have been doing this sort of thing for decades, giving slightly different versions of a sensitive document to suspected spies or places where possible spies might have access to it, with some subtle changes in the words, seeing which one gets leaked or appears elsewhere. Tom Clancy coined the term Canary trap for the technique. Patriot Games was published in 1987, but its real-world use for exposing information leaks most likely predates the novel.
Not that I believe any of this nonsense, but going by their reckoning the end of the last cycle would have been at around 23,800 BC or thereabouts. Back then, what were our ancestors doing? The invention of agriculture would still be about 15,000 years in the future. All humans at the time were living in hunter-gatherer tribes. History itself would not formally begin for another 20,000 years, when the Sumerians invented cuneiform. The time when humans have "managed to advance technology in a roughly exponential trend throughout history" only seems to have begun at around that same time, 6000 years ago, less than a quarter of the supposed length of a cycle. The remaining three quarters of the present cycle, humanity's most advanced technology consisted of stone tools. Humans of the cycles before that were pretty much the same. There are many reasons to disbelieve this nonsense about doomsday, but humanity's supposed progress is not one of them.
I imagine the streets of many major cities may wind up getting traffic jams very frequently, so what happens if the bus gets stuck in such a one, and it takes an hour or more to get moving again (e.g. vehicular accident further down), or however long it takes to discharge the ultracapacitors? I suppose it may be necessary to install a backup engine that runs on conventional fuel, possibly just to run a generator which will charge the ultracapacitors sufficiently to get to the next stop.
The judge can never compel you to release the source code for your infringing app as part of the judgment against you, should you be found in violation of the GPL. If you have been found guilty of violating the GPL in a court of law, all the judge can really do is slap you in the same way Jammie Thomas got slapped: statutory and punitive damages and preventing you from continuing to distribute your infringing work. Violating the GPL amounts to copyright infringement, and would be punished accordingly. Thing is, there has never yet been a case involving the GPL where this point has been reached: all defendants so far settled before judgment could be rendered (in many cases, even before the case even gets to a court of law). Now, the plaintiffs (most notably if they are the Free Software Foundation) may ask you to release the source code, so you are no longer in violation of the license, but only the threats of the continuation of the lawsuit, the negative publicity one will receive, and the likely judgment at the end are what compel you to obey. However, there's no law that says that they should request source code opening as the settlement, and if you're treading on the copyright of someone other than the FSF the plaintiff could very well ask you to do just about anything instead, with compliance similarly enforced with the threat of the continuation of the lawsuits and their consequences.
Exactly right. As the SNAFU principle states, true communication is possible only between equals. If someone has power over another in an organization, the subordinate would rather tell his/her superior pleasant lies rather than the truth, for fear of being shot as the messenger of bad news. There's a famous story that illustrates this quite well:
If gravity waves didn't exist, you'd have to find some other explanation for PSR B1913+16, which is a pulsar in orbit around another star. The pulsar and its companion are spiraling in together, losing energy in exact agreement with the phenomenon of gravitational radiation predicted by General Relativity. This binary pulsar system has been hailed as sufficiently convincing indirect evidence for the existence of gravity waves that Russell Alan Hulse and Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for its discovery.
No, it doesn't seem that the existence of gravitational waves is in any question here. The only thing is that there might be much yet we don't understand about gravity that is stifling our ability to observe them directly. It's obvious that General Relativity is far from being the final word on gravitation.
Will probably never happen. Since Linus Torvalds has never insisted on copyright assignments on code contributions to the Linux kernel the way MySQL and the Free Software Foundation, for that matter, does as well, ownership of its copyright is spread over hundreds, maybe thousands of contributors. Linus himself, I hear, can take full credit for only 2% of the actual code in the kernel. Even if you could contact them all, it is quite unlikely that they will all agree to have their contributions re-licensed to a different license, most especially if it's just to accommodate something like ZFS. If you can't get them all to agree, you then have to find the contributions of the dissenters and excise their code from the kernel somehow, and produce a fork that will have to compete with the original kernel for developer mindshare. The GPLv2 fork will have the further advantage of being able to receive all the updates to the code in the less restrictive fork, while the less restrictive fork will be unable to legally integrate updates made to the GPLv2 fork. Such an event would also deal a catastrophic blow to the credibility of the Free/Open Source movement, and Microsoft's FUDsters would have a field day.
Those are some of the finest examples of actual Orwellian doublespeak in the real world. Read 1984 sometime, and perhaps you'll get a glimmer of understanding. The Ministry of Peace is engaged in making war, the Ministry of Truth falsifies history, the Ministry of Love tortures and punishes those who do not love Big Brother, and the Ministry of Plenty oversees poverty and shortages.
The name just seems to show that Mr. Kleissner has a sense of history. One of the old MBR viruses that used to plague systems in the days of MS-DOS was known as the Stoned MBR and from reading the article it seems that Mr. Kleissner's technique operates much the way that virus once did, by gaining . The marijuana references come from the original virus, which contained the phrase 'Your PC is now stoned! Legalise marijuana!'
At around the time the AES contest was ongoing, I was doing work on writing a cryptographic layer for an embedded system based on small microcontrollers. I wrote assembler implementations of Serpent, Twofish, RC6, and Rijndael for the embedded microcontroller (it was an 8-bit 8051-type controller, if I recall correctly), and Rijndael was consistently the most efficient, so it came as no surprise to me that Rijndael was several months later declared the Advanced Encryption Standard. One of the criteria for AES was speed in resource constrained environments such as microcontrollers and smart cards. I believe Bruce Schneier once said something to the effect that any bloke knowing the construction theory of block ciphers can design one that is all but impervious to the publicly known cryptanalytic attacks, but it's quite likely that such a design will be unusably slow. (too lazy to look up the reference, but I believe he said something like this at around the time AES was declared) The real challenge in block cipher design is designing a reasonably secure cipher that is also efficient.
78% of what most people perceive as being bloat in Emacs is actually in the form of Emacs Lisp extensions. Emacs has been designed from the ground up to be extensible, so one should not be surprised to see it extended the way its creators intended it to be. The core C code itself is not much to speak of, Emacs 22.3 is only a rather modest 233,130 source lines of C code, whereas the elisp code in the default 22.3 distribution alone is some 822,338 lines: this does not include any third-party extensions which are not part of the default distribution. Compare that to Vim 7.2, 244,082 source lines of C code in its core. Shockingly, Vim actually has slightly more code in its main C core than Emacs does!
That said, while I do use Emacs extensively, I don't have any sort of serious attachment to it. I don't edit most of my config files using Emacs but with vim, my $EDITOR is set to /usr/bin/vim, but nearly all of my serious coding is done with Emacs.
Well, I wouldn't be so quick to say that. As a counterexample, people routinely plug away at solitaire card games without any kind of assurance that the game they're playing can even be won. In fact, it seems that empirical results show that a fifth or even more of all Klondike solitaire games are unwinnable, and no true theoretical results on the winnability of Klondike solitaire are available. That hasn't deterred the game from becoming popular.
If I'm not mistaken, the boolean satisfiability problem is NP-complete. In fact, in 1971, Stephen Cook established a direct proof of its NP-completeness, which basically introduced the whole idea of NP-complete problems to theoretical computer science. Well, Sudoku is yet another game that is basically NP-complete as well (PDF link), and as might expected from their both being NP-complete, Sudoku problems are reducible to SAT problems (see here, also a PDF link), and presumably vice-versa. My guess is that perhaps the same people who get kicks out of solving Sudoku puzzles might have almost as much fun with this game as well.
Und morgen die ganze Welt!
(Sorry, couldn't resist. Unfortunately that sounds like a Godwin...)
Well, Since both the Hamilton path problem and the traveling salesman problem are NP-complete, there exists a polynomial time reduction of one problem into the other. So if you could solve the Hamilton path problem efficiently, and wanted to solve an instance of the traveling salesman problem (or the satisfiability problem, or the integer programming problem, or the partition problem, or whatever other NP-complete problem you might imagine), all you'd have to do is use the polynomial-time reduction to convert the source problem instance you wanted to solve into the equivalent Hamilton path problem, and apply the reduction in reverse on the answers to get the answers you wanted for the problem you wanted to solve.
Some 100,000 passengers pass through a major airport like Heathrow or JFK every day. If you had a test that was capable of detecting terrorists with 90% accuracy and applied them to every passenger going through such an airport, you'd be flagging ten thousand people a day as possible terrorists, and applying the more expensive test of detaining and investigating them all, according to your logic. I wonder how much it would cost to maintain all of the security personnel to do that. Put another way, it also means that if you flew ten times a year, the test would likely flag you at least once a year. The worthlessness of such a test as applied the way you propose should thus be obvious./p