Comment Re:"Over there!" (Score 5, Insightful) 173
There's no realistic way of collecting 30-ish countries, most with a distinct language and culture compared to the rest, as a single nation.
You mean like India?
There's no realistic way of collecting 30-ish countries, most with a distinct language and culture compared to the rest, as a single nation.
You mean like India?
That works until you actually want to read something -- keeping in mind that modern IMEs make it no harder to enter kanji than to read them.
if I weigh myself in kilos
You just used the very colloquial definition of weight that you've been rallying against.
I would weigh the same number of kilos no matter where I weighed myself in the universe. It isn't so with pounds, practical or not.
The units aren't the issue. The number of pounds necessary to accelerate me 32 feet per second^2 does not depend on my being on Earth's surface!
And if those fans / heatsinks really made economic sense, then every server room in the world (from little offices up to large datacenters) would be using them.
They don't fit. The giant heatsinks and fans popular among overclockers would not fit in a 1U case, whereas noise in server rooms tends not to be a big deal so cases full of small loud fans are the norm.
Cite? What exactly is the difference between "public" and "kernel"?
If all processes see the same 1G the distinction isn't meaningful, especially in this context.
To some students, it might be. Sadly enough I know someone who chose their undergraduate institution based on the ping times they got to their favorite gaming servers; he actually carried a notebook with him to each school he considered, and wrote down the ping times from each school to his favorite servers.
It's absurd to use it as the only criterion, but quality of internet connection is a perfectly reasonable thing to consider if you're going to be locked in to campus housing.
This is news for nerds. We all know what absolute zero is.
To be clear, I'm perfectly aware that there are issues with AES. I was just taking issue with the assertion that no such functions exist!
Encrypted files have maximum entropy, just like absolutely random files
Not true, unless you have a randomly generated key that is as long as the file. You cannot apply any deterministic process to inputs of limited entropy and expect to get output entropy that is strictly speaking (computational complexity wise) higher than the sum of the entropy of the inputs.
Strictly speaking you're correct, at least until you invoke computational complexity.
Distinguishing a string whose Kolmogorov complexity is 512 bits from one which is genuinely random is not possible, unless you have some sort of magic oracle for the halting problem. Even if you relax "deterministic process" to "deterministic polynomial time process" it's still (almost certainly) exponentially difficult.
You can make general purpose quantum computers if you have a working set of "quantum gates" or similar -- much like you can make a general purpose classical computer if you have a working set of classical gates.
I don't drink. But it's not because I'm a tightwad: I just hate the taste of alcohol. I can taste it in seemingly trace amounts in everything other than drinks with ridiculous amounts of sugar.
Yeah. Ethyl alcohol doesn't exactly taste good. That's one reason I prefer liquor when actually trying to get drunk -- you don't have to drink as much liquid with alcohol in it.
To some extent it is an acquired taste.
There is a smaller reason in that I've seen a lot of people, including friends, do... inadvisable things while drunk. The thought of not being in possession of my faculties and not being able to tell scares me.
In my experience it's not that bad. If you're worried I suggest experiments in a controlled setting until you get a good idea of what the effects of alcohol are on you. By golly, by the time I'm even thinking of doing inadvisable things I know I am not in possession of my faculties!
I also know I have a somewhat addictive personality. So on the whole, I think I'll continue to not drink booze.
That might be a good reason.
This isn't a "barrier" like the "sound barrier". There are no special difficulties that start around 1G/sec! It's just a threshold.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying this isn't impressive, but no "barrier" was broken here!
I'm being thick here I guess, but why do we know the required simulation of Turing machines to be in NP=P (given assumption), and not EXPTIME or at least PSPACE?
The algorithm is: on iteration N, simulate one (more) step on Turing machines 1 through N. Stop when a machine outputs an answer with a formal proof that answer is correct.
If P = NP, then the M'th Turing Machine does this in P(n) steps. It takes P(n)+M iterations before that happens. Each iteration takes M+i steps, so the run time is O(P(n)^2), which is polynomial! (note that M is an "exponentially large" constant, so this approach wouldn't result in a truly usable algorithm.)
If you show P=NP by constructing an algorithm which solves an NP-complete problem in polynomial time, you immediately have a polynomial time algorithm for *any* problem in NP. That's the definition of NP-complete: a language is NP complete if any other language in NP can be reduced to it in polynomial time.
Even if you provide a non-constructive "existence" proof, it turns out you can construct an (incredibly awful!) polynomial time algorithm by, essentially, a brute force simulation of turing machines -- so it's not actually possible to provide a truly non-constructive proof that P=NP.
If this proof holds up, then RSA and ECC become provably secure in a way they weren't before.
Breaking RSA and ECC are very strongly believed to NOT be NP hard. In particular, they are both "easy" enough to be solvable by a quantum computer, but quantum computers are almost certainly not powerful enough to solve NP-hard problems.
The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
