Apotsy - Slashdot User

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1814035 comment

Comment Re:This means 82% can (Score 1) 603

by Apotsy on Friday November 28, 2008 @03:53AM (#25914235) Attached to: 18% of Consumers Can't Tell HD From SD

No shit, that's pretty low. If people are suggesting that we should stick with SD because of that 18% who can't tell, then the next step is to go back to black-and-white photographs since a little over 1% of the population has some form of colorblindness.

1908369 comment

Comment Re:Only sane conclusion (Score 1) 422

by Apotsy on Saturday November 15, 2008 @04:39PM (#25772299) Attached to: Independent Dev Reports Over 80% Piracy Rate On DRM-Free Game

"There are three types of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics" --Mark Twain

Obviously this quote means that the science of statistics is invalid and that nothing can ever be measured!

1934397 comment

Comment Re:construction of the enterprise (Score 1) 320

by Apotsy on Wednesday November 12, 2008 @06:15PM (#25739587) Attached to: First Trek Film Footage Unveiled

Oh and about the sonar: If you bounce a laser of a window any singal you put on the beam will be dopper modulated by the vibrations on the glass. You can listen to sounds inside from miles away. This would actually work better in space then in air and it's not "science fiction" Microwaves work too. there have been cases where this was done 20+ years ago.

I was about to post that. But then I thought "aw, let's not ruin the armchair skeptic's fun". :-)

99% of the time when people try to pick apart the physics of a movie they just end up making themselves look dumb.

353533 submission

Submission + - Wolfram awards $25,000 for flawed proof

Submitted by on Monday October 29, 2007 @04:29PM

An anonymous reader writes: Slashdot readers will have seen an announcement by Stephen Wolfram offering a $25,000 prize for a proof or a disproof that a certain 2-state, 3-color Turing machine is universal. The prize was awarded on October 24th, 2007 to Alex Smith of Birmingham, UK.

However, according to discussion in the Foundation of Mathematics e-mail list, archives of which are available here, the members of the prize committee were "informed but not polled" as to the validity of the proof. The prize committee members were Lenore Blum, Greg Chaitin, Martin Davis, Ron Graham, Yuri Matiyasevich, Marvin Minsky, Dana Scott and Stephen Wolfram. On October 26, Martin Davis wrote to the FOM list that "The determination that Smith's proof is correct seems to have been made entirely by the Wolfram organization. My understanding is that the I/O involves complex encodings."

On October 29th, Stanford computer scientist Vaughan Pratt wrote to the Foundations of Mathematics list that the universality proof of the (2,3) Turing machine was flawed, asking "How did an argument containing such an elementary fallacy get through the filter?" Pratt points out that the fallacy of the proof could be used to "prove" the erroneous statement that a linear bounded automaton is universal. The text of Pratt's email is available here.

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