ccpaxton - Slashdot User

Ray Kurzweil Responds To PZ Myers 238

Posted by Soulskill on Friday August 20, 2010 @11:27AM from the dem's-fightin'-woids dept.

On Tuesday we discussed a scathing critique of Ray Kurzweil's understanding of the brain written by PZ Myers. Reader Amara notes that Kurzweil has now responded on his blog. Quoting: "Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn't at my talk), [claims] that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain."

Wii 2 Delay Is Hurting Nintendo 310

Posted by Soulskill on Friday May 07, 2010 @12:58AM from the hurting-all-the-way-to-the-bank dept.

BanjoTed writes "Michael Pachter's ongoing spat with Nintendo regarding the Wii 2 is well documented. Pachter is sure it's coming, Nintendo says it's not. Now the analyst has gone one further by claiming that the declining sales of the Wii documented in the platform holder's recent financial statements will only get worse unless it speeds up attempts to get its successor to market. He said, 'The reason for this is clear: the software being created is just not interesting enough or compelling enough to drive Wii owners to buy more than two [games] per year, and most of those purchases are first party software. We can blame the third party publishers for making shovelware, or for misjudging the Wii market, but the simple fact is that the publishers have to develop completely separate games for the Wii because its CPU is not powerful.'"

Apple Just Says Yes To iPhone Smoking Game 192

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday April 27, 2010 @09:20PM from the thought-they-were-banning-e-cigs dept.

ZosX sends along a puff piece from Wired's Brian X. Chen: "Apple on Monday approved Puff Puff Pass, a $2 game whose objective is to pass a cigarette or pipe around and puff it as many times as you can within a set duration. So much for taking the high road, Apple. The game allows you to choose between smoking a cigarette, a cigar, and a pipe. Then you select the number of people you'd like to light up with (up to five), the amount of time, and a place to smoke (outdoors or indoors). And you're ready to get right on puffing."

Man Put On "No-Fly List" While In Air To NYC 300

Posted by samzenpus on Friday April 23, 2010 @03:24PM from the beware-the-list-refresh dept.

An unnamed man flying from Nigeria to New York City found out he was added to a no-fly list somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean, when the plane stopped to refuel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Officials won't say what he did or why he was added to the list after he had already boarded a flight. He was not immediately charged with a crime and Customs and Border Protection will only say that he is a "potential person of interest." From the article: "The man, a citizen of Gambia, was not on the no-fly list when he boarded the aircraft in Dakar, Senegal, said a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly."

How To Find Bad Programmers 359

Posted by samzenpus on Friday April 09, 2010 @12:16PM from the how-little-work-can-you-do-in-a-day dept.

AmberShah writes "The job post is your potential programmer's first impression of your company, so make it count with these offputting features. There are plenty of articles about recruiting great developers, but what if you are only interested in the crappy ones?" I think much of the industry is already following these guidelines.

NHS Should Stop Funding Homeopathy, Says Parliamentary Committee 507

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday February 23, 2010 @02:57PM from the how-am-I-going-to-align-my-chakras-now dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Homeopathic remedies work no better than placebos, and so should no longer be paid for by the UK National Health Service, a committee of British members of parliament has concluded. In preparing its report, the committee, which scrutinizes the evidence behind government policies, took evidence from scientists and homeopaths, and reviewed numerous reports and scientific investigations into homeopathy. It found no evidence that such treatments work beyond providing a placebo effect." Updated 201025 19:40 GMT by timothy: This recommendation has some people up in arms.

Comment Seriously? (Score -1, Offtopic) 510

by ccpaxton on Friday December 14, 2007 @12:18PM (#21698216) Attached to: The Future of Love and Sex - Robots

Slashdot has fallen to this?

Comment FACTS about quantum and public-key crypto (Score 4, Informative) 300

by cpeikert on Thursday September 13, 2007 @10:16PM (#20598391) Attached to: Time Running Out for Public Key Encryption

I am a professional research cryptographer. There are many misstatements in the comments so far (what else should one expect, it's Slashdot.....)

Here are some facts to fix the clutter:

1. Shor's algorithm works on quantum computers and can factor integers in polynomial time. This breaks all public-key systems that depend on the hardness of factoring, including RSA, Rabin, Paillier, and XTR.

2. A different version of Shor's algorithm also computes discrete logarithms (again, in poly time). This breaks all public-key systems that depend on the hardness of discrete log, over *any* cyclic group. This includes ElGamal, even over "exotic" groups like those associated with elliptic curves.

3. Nevertheless, factoring and discrete log are different beasts and are not known to be equivalent to each other. Still, Shor's algorithm (in different versions) solves them both.

4. Shor's algorithm does not yet break all known public-key cryptosystems. Systems based on lattices, for example, do not appear to be affected as of yet. These include Ajtai-Dwork and a couple systems by Regev. NTRU is based on lattices, but is based on some not-so-natural assumptions (i.e, the assumption that "NTRU is secure").

5. Public key encryption is (probably) *not* equivalent to trapdoor permutations (or even trapdoor one-way functions). TDPs are a much stronger notion and are not strictly needed to do secure public-key encryption. For example, ElGamal and lattice-based systems are not based on trapdoor primitives per se.

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