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White House Correspondent Tweets His Heart Attack 77

Posted by samzenpus from the dedication-to-the-job dept.
Tommy Christopher, who writes for mediate.com, has reporting in his blood, so much so that he livetweeted every part of his recent heart attack. "I gotta be me. Livetweeting my heart attack. Beat that!" and "This is not like the movies. Most deadpan heart attack evar. Still hurts even after the morphine," were among his updates as he was rushed to the hospital. Christopher is now in stable condition after recovering from emergency surgery.
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Woman Tells State Judiciary Committee, "DoD Implanted A Microchip Inside Me" 222

Posted by samzenpus from the out-of-the-woodwork dept.
The Georgia House Judiciary Committee took up a bill that would "prohibit requiring a person to be implanted with a microchip," and would make violating the ban a misdemeanor. Things started to get weird at the hearing when a woman who described herself as a resident of DeKalb County told the committee, "I'm also one of the people in Georgia who has a microchip." Not sure of what she was trying to say, she was allowed to continue and added, "Microchips are like little beepers. Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission." Further prodding revealed that the woman's co-workers would torture her by activating the chips with their cell phones and that the chips were implanted by "researchers with the federal government." The committee thanked the woman for her input, and later approved the bill.
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eBay Urges Rethink On EU Plan's "Brick and Mortar" Vendor Requirement 139

Posted by timothy from the them-as-has-gits dept.
mernil writes with this snippet from Reuters: "According to a draft regulation drawn up by the European Commission and seen by Reuters, suppliers may be allowed to require that distributors have a 'brick-and-mortar' shop before they can sell online. The proposed rules would replace existing guidelines exempting companies from strict EU competition rules under certain circumstances. Those rules expire at the end of May."
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Seinfeld's Good Samaritan Law Now Reality? 735

Posted by samzenpus from the not-that-there-is-anything-wrong-with-that dept.
e3m4n writes "The fictitious 'good samaritan' law from the final episode of Seinfeld (the one that landed them in jail for a year) appears to be headed toward reality for California residents after the house passed this bill. There are some differences, such as direct action is not required, but the concept of guilt by association for not doing the right thing is still on the face of the bill."
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US Grants Home Schooling German Family Political Asylum 1324

Posted by samzenpus from the come-get-you-some-learnin dept.
A US judge has granted political asylum to a family who said they fled Germany to avoid persecution for home schooling their children. Uwe Romeike and his wife, Hannelore, moved to Tennessee after German authorities fined them for keeping their children out of school and sent police to escort them to classes. Mike Connelly, attorney for the Home School Legal Defence Association, argued the case. He says, "Home schoolers in Germany are a particular social group, which is one of the protected grounds under the asylum law. This judge looked at the evidence, he heard their testimony, and he felt that the way Germany is treating home schoolers is wrong. The rights being violated here are basic human rights."

Comment We already knew that... (Score 5, Informative) 444

by FalafelXXX (#4023367) Attached to: Turns out, Primes are in P
The famous result by Miller 1976 (and indepdently rediscovered(?) by Rabin 1980) already did that. The only difference is that their algorithm was in RP (randomized polynomial). Namely, if the algorithm says it is prime it might be wrong (with probablity half, say), and if it says that the number is not prime, then it is not prime for sure.

Now, if you have a number n, you run this algorithm, say 20*log(n) times. If the algorithm says it is prime on all executions that it is prime, you know damn sure it is. If it says it isn't, you are sure it isn't. There is a rediclously tiny probablity that if the algorithm claims that it is prime in all executions, that it is still not prime. This probablity is so small, that it can be essentially ignored. Now, random bits are cheap nowadays, so this is quite satisfactory. This is in fact the algorithm that turned the RSA crypto system into a practical and useful algorithm, because suddently finding primes became easy.

To break RSA, and become really famous, one has to come up with a polynomial time algorithm for factoring. It might even be that RSA can be broken without factoring, but this is still an open question (I think).

Ahh, and BTW. Polynomial time means polynomial time in the size of the input. So if the number is n, the size of the input is O(log(n)), and the running time needs to be O( (log(n))^(O(1)) ).

Ok. End of boredom.

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