sidww2

Sensory deprivation has already been used as a form of torture by the US. See the case of Jose Padilla for instance.

Relativity & Quantum Mechanics were massive paradigm shifts. In contrast, any flaw in the Standard Model, while exciting, will likely be orders of magnitude smaller in terms of impacting how we view the world.

Also we already know the Standard Model is not the complete picture (it cannot integrate QM & General Relativity).

Siri actually makes it rather simple to query map directions

Indeed. And not just those subjects. Computers are still a very long way off from judging the correctness of say a human written proof or solution to a physics problem. Even in technical subjects universities will be impossible to replace without major major leaps in AI.

You do know that's fake, right?

They'll probably do some racial/religious profiling in regards to how extensive a background check they give to a person.

Since my guess is most that most people who apply for this will not fall into the bracket where they do extensive background checks, they'll make plenty of profit off this.

Of course, it's also possible that the check will be a sham for all.

This could work.

To make an analogy, PhD students usually don't have a project to work on when they start and if they do, that usually changes. Yet many of them become excellent researchers and leaders of their field in the future.

> That's a standard technical person bias.

First of all - I wouldn't count being a businessperson as liberal arts.

One way you can look at it is how many people drop out of technical subjects because they find them too hard to move to humanities and liberal arts vs. the opposite. Anecdotally, for me the former number has been much larger. The latter number has been 0.

Similarly, I've had many technical friends who took liberal arts courses and generally did very well in them. I also have many liberal arts friends who took technical courses and did not do well in them. In addition, the technical people I've met have been much much more hard-working than liberal arts people. (An exception I'd make is creative arts - people I've encountered in that field have generally been extremely hard-working. Also no one I've met has moved from say math to music because they found math too hard.)

Now it might just be because liberal arts people just don't like the technical subject matter on average as much as technical people like the liberal arts subject matter. But even if that's true, one is then right to choose technical people over liberal arts people.

Lastly, I also know liberal arts majors who are smarter than many technical folk I've encountered but I'm talking about the general trend here.

> "* Increasing amount of specialization; liberal arts majors can be very smart and have broad understanding, but get shafted because paying for on-the-job training is expensive."

Liberal arts majors can be smart and have broad understanding but so can technical people. In fact, the technical people I've met on average have been smarter than liberal arts people.

While universities have quite a few problems, universities is where most of the world-changing research has been done over the past few centuries. If you kill the university before coming up with an adequate substitute for that function, you kill the future.

Not true. Immigration laws are a huge barrier, an insurmountable one for some.

But he wanted the world to know that there was a Kira. His ambition was to be the God of the world. He could anonymously send instructions to the world to do what he wanted only if people knew there was a Kira.

Don't forget that 46% of the country still voted for John McCain - a person was extremely terrible academically even after the Republican Party had launched two disastrous wars, exploded the deficit and their lack of regulation and oversight had caused the worst recession since the Great Depression. And as others have pointed out, Obama wasn't really elected because of his intellectual ability but because of the state of the economy at the time and because he's a charismatic speaker.

That used to be the case in the past. However with the increased government expenditure on basic science in the wake of the cold war, more of the fundamental science did happen in the US (foundations of CS, foundations of Crypto, lot of AI & ML, string theory, lot of work in Math, etc.). Now with the decreasing focus on the funding of science, fundamental research (especially in high energy physics but in other areas too) is again shifting to other places like Canada, Europe, Israel, China and Australia.

A lot of the learning occurs outside the classroom too. Going to an good university helps facilitate that. Not to mention the possibility of working on research with some of the best minds in the world.

This is a court threatening the block. I'm not sure if the government can just ignore a court decision.

>> If you read a site like Daily Kos and see all the action going on there, it would seem that any successful legislator would have to necessarily build a tolerance to negative emails/letters/calls.

I wonder if calling/sending letters to media outlets like WashPost and NY times might be more effective than doing the same for legislators. Right now, coverage of SOPA/PIPA is completely lacking among big media outlets. Negative coverage of the bills could go a long way towards defeating the bills. The tricky thing is that a lot of the big media outlets are owned by companies who are few of the major supporters of SOPA/PIPA in the first place.

They still support PIPA though which is almost as bad.

I don't mean to imply that the number of letters has decreased. But if the majority of the community chatter is about boycotting GoDaddy, then that will decrease the focus on other (much much much more important) parts of the campaign which could have a negative effect. For instance, people may think that they've done their part by boycotting GoDaddy.

It also focusses attention only on SOPA when PIPA is almost as bad.

While boycotting companies supporting SOPA is important, I feel the excessive focus on GoDaddy is distracting the community from the important issue of actually defeating SOPA/PIPA. The tech community really does not have the size and influence to be able to force even a fifth of the companies to withdraw their support of SOPA.

The overwhelming majority of the effort should be going to calling/sending (physical) letters to one's respective representatives, maybe setting up some sort of a fund to oppose SOPA/PIPA, urging tech companies like Google to spend more on lobbying (They can and should be spending more to lobby against the act), etc.

Edit: I was under the incorrect impression that OPEN act would end nonsense like SOPA/PIPA. Edited comment to reflect that.

That is the purpose of the government but you do agree that certain policies can make accomplishing that purpose much much harder, maybe even impossible?

A nice car is not a good analogy since 1) buying one is a matter of choice and 2) kidnapping someone for a nice car is not likely to get someone seriously injured or killed (as long as one agrees to the kidnapper's demands) whereas kidnapping for organ donation is completely different.

The difference is that currently the amount a kidnapper could extract from an average person is not very high. If selling organs is allowed, suddenly the body of every person walking in the street is a worth a lot of money. It will drastically increase the probability of getting kidnapped for one's organs.

A good autosave mechanism seems to be a much better solution than this. While that would mean the loss of a little bit of data, it seems better than saving a potentially corrupt file or incorrectly inferring that a loop is infinite.

Are the number of votes for a posts available? It could be interesting to use the metrics given to compare posts with high vs low number of votes and could also help validate the use of given metrics.

If P=NP, then conventional cryptography would be impossible. In particular you would have no public key cryptography so it would not be possible to transmit information securely over an unsecure channel without sharing a some sort of key beforehand. Think of what this will do to online transactions which rely on information like credit card numbers being transmitted securely. I'm sure other areas of the economy would be vastly affected too.

The one form of cryptography that would still be possible is quantum cryptography. But if I recall correctly, that requires that two parties already hold some shared secret before communicating.

Edit: In addition although it would be possible to detect if someone is eavesdropping over your communication, you still wouldn't have the privilege of being able to communicate securely regardless of whether your message is being recorded. This of course presumes that not only P=NP, but an efficient polynomial time algorithm exists for NP problems i.e. one which is say linear or quadratic or even cubic time.

I think the stance taken by MathOverflow is correct. It would be one thing if that were the only venue to have a discussion about the proof validity possible but there exist much better discussion mediums. The linked blog is a case in point. MathOverflow is geared towards being a Q&A site.

P!=NP is a big deal in computational complexity as

1) It would solve one of the most important problems in computer science and mathematics 2) Understanding of the proof and the methods it uses could very likely lead to solving other problems in computational complexity. 3) Furthermore, the proof would shed light on why certain problems are hard. Such an understanding could lead to better heuristics to solve those problems.

Yeah - I updated the post title to make that a bit more clear.

The reason I posted a link regarding the same topic again is because this is a link to a blog post by a respected complexity theorist which actually discusses the proof albeit cursorily.

If the proof works, he would easily get the Millenium prize and the Fields medal.

Edit: Also the Goedel prize

His personal home page http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/ seems to have been updated.

"Manuscript sent on 6th August to several leading researchers in various areas. Confirmations began arriving 8th August early morning. Final version of the paper to be posted here shortly. Stay tuned. "