Actually, he's very much the classic style of crank. Instead of giving us a formal proof, his proof is a proof by example consisting of a great deal of code that has to be scrutinized by hand for conceptual errors. It works fine on his test cases of course; so therefore to him his "proof" is "correct."

> How does the solving of problems like these really help the world? I would like a sincere 'down-to-earth' answer that my 89 year old grandfather can understand and therefore be in position to donate to the effort of solving such problems.

Here's one for your grandfather then. When you bank online, you go onto a secure web site. The information you send to your bank is digitally encrypted. A bunch of mathematicians have demonstrated that the 3SAT problem is just as hard, or harder, as breaking the encryption that keeps your grandfather's bank info secure. So, if Romanov turned out to be right somehow, it wouldn't be safe for your granddad to bank using computers anymore, because Romanov would have indirectly created an algorithm that could be used to crack the encryption in a reasonable amount of time.

Other Slashdotters will come up with plenty of other examples why 3SAT is important.

Don't get me started on abuse of the word "cloud". internet != cloud. server array != cloud.

With the major advent of apps, there exists several tracking apps that lets you manage all your apps that don't manage themselves. (hereinafter referred to as "app apps")

I have created an app that manages apps that manage other apps that do not manage themselves. (hereinafter referred to as my "app app app")

Kurt Godel is currently investigating whether my app app app manages itself. If not, this feature will be added by Q3.

Oh look, someone on Slashdot is flaming Internet Explorer and gets +5 for it. How novel and refreshing.

Romanov's algorithm strongly resembles an algorithm from a debunked paper published around 2004.

Sergey Gubin wrote a series of similarly designed proofs around 2004. Instead of Romanov's notion of "concretization," Gubin used the term "depletion." Gubin's paper was debunked by some students at the University of Rochester.

Both reduction algorithms throw out key information about the original truth tables that cause the final solutions to be incorrect.

Constructive and exhaustive proofs that P != NP should never be trusted. I'm not a huge fan of formality in proofs, but sometimes you really need it.

I am trying to parse the article now. There's very likely a fish in there somewhere.

Note that the Cornell library has hosted at least one other "proof" by a Russian researcher that 3SAT != NP (and that TSP != NP as well).

"Computer Science has nothing to do with computers" gets modded +4 Insightful? Slashdot has truly jumped the shark.

Truth, not flamebait.

That's OK because I have already patented the process of patent patenting. Therefore, any patent patenters who attempt to patent their patent patenting process will need to first license my patent patent patent.

Older, stabler, supports all those platforms, and it's cheaper.

Basically, it presents an Amazon S3 bucket as a network drive on your local PC.

http://www.jungledisk.com/

Lucas is a smart, smart man. Right now, the Uncanny Valley makes these depictions and representations of actors cheap. Nobody wants to buy them. But it's a damn fine bet to assume that the tech for making them look much more real will improve vastly over the next ten or twenty years. It's a smarter business plan than a lot of valley startups I've seen. You can't have Brando in your movie right now, but someday soon you will. Buy the rights now while you can.

Or Ogg Vorbis, or any modern mdct-based audio codec. All of the newer ones have psychoacoustic models built in that reject frequencies that you probably can't hear, in favor of ones that you can.

"Psychoacoustic simulations are my synthetic creation of that series of sounds which best expresses the way I believe a particular melody should be heard as a live performance." Total audio engineering bullsht, but entertaining bullsht nonetheless.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/bluebeat-claims-to-own-new-copyrights-to-old-beatles-songs/

IBM has a history of inadvertently making terrible PR for themselves with these man-vs-machine stunts. Everyone here should remember Kasparov vs. Deep Blue. Expect IBM to win Jeopardy, and expect there to be a hailstorm of "IBM cheats" controversy after the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK0YOGJ58a0

http://www.npr.org/programs/waitwait/