buo

But I never said it was indistinguishable. What I'm saying is that the definition in the first sentence of the paper is wrong or, at least, incomplete.

I think you missed my point, which is this: the first sentence in the paper's abstract is wrong.

I don't think you're correct. A discrete distribution can be defined for any number of values. Linux, which is the subject of the paper, uses a discrete distribution too.

I know that, but that is what the first sentence in the paper's abstract is claiming. As I said, I think it's wrong.

From the abstract: "A pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) is a deterministic algorithm that produces numbers whose distribution is indistinguishable from uniform."

I think this is incorrect, since it would imply that a program that produces the sequence 1,2,1,2,1,2,1.... is a PRNG.

I didn't compare smartphone addiction to cocaine addiction, which wrecks and ends lives.

I do think, however, that something can be incredibly useful and worthwhile and still have some negative effects. Everything in moderation and all that. I believe that, in time (many years), people will figure out what these effects are and how to avoid them, just like (to oversimplify) one can enjoy wine without any ill effect.

> what event could trigger a reversal to this behavior?

People realising that addiction to stimulus results, over the years, in lower economic power and less overall happiness?

I don't know if today's phone-addicted teens will end up with lower-paying jobs down the line, but it wouldn't surprise me.

> eval(x)

Sort of like the number omega, which contains in each digits proofs to every theorem, but is not computable:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant

I know I'm in the minority here, but my offspring will only have smartphones when they are old enough to buy them and pay for their plans themselves.

Here, actually: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpe...

Search the document for "contraception".

You may be interested in a recent comment on this subject by a professional wildlife photographer: http://www.sansmirror.com/newsviews/on-safari-four-years-lat...

In Julia:

    julia> @time sum(1:1000000000)
    elapsed time: 1.4527e-5 seconds (88 bytes allocated)
    500000000500000000

@time is a macro that prints the code's execution time and memory usage. This is inside a VM running Linux.

Here's part of the saga of the blogger who got into a similar situation when he explained that 0.999... is equal to 1: http://polymathematics.typepad.com/polymath/2006/06/no_im_so...

Sorry -- I didn't mean to be unclear about that. The point I wanted to make is that, while he violated a UN embargo, it was just a chess match, and nevertheless he was relentlessly persecuted and had to seek asylum.

An American that had to seek asylum from the US government was Bobby Fischer, one of the best chess players in history. His offense: playing a chess match against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia (he also owed taxes).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer#1992_Spassky_rema...

I haven't seen mentioned here that Intel is one of the companies mentioned. I find this particularly worrying: if the hardware itself is compromised, it's game over.

I understand a frame of reference doesn't have to be physical. However, if you're in an apparently empty and dark universe, and you're interested in knowing whether you're accelerating or not, postulating a frame of reference is not going to be of much help.

I may have missed the point of dropping an object, though. I thought the idea was to create a physical point we could anchor the coordinate system to, and in that way be able to measure acceleration.

Yes, but when you drop something, you're creating a reference frame, aren't you?

Without a reference frame, what experiment can you perform that would tell you that you're accelerating?

About the cool literary feat: I'm wondering if there are languages other than English in which it'd be possible to write something like this. I speak Spanish and French and I'm sure it's impossible in both -- they just don't have enough short words.

I have to say, I'd rather have a 20-foot crocodile in my back yard, than a 1-foot spider.

At least we still have sane threading here at HN.

Indenting and maybe vertical lines to help the reader figure out the threading would be an improvement. However, I don't think this is good enough in a long email chain. The way traditional email readers solve this is, of course, is with two views, one of threaded email subject and another for contents (http://www.davep.org/mutt/screenshots/). I don't think gmail will ever adopt this interface, though.

What bothers me most about gmail is the flat conversations, where you can't see that a message was a reply to an email in the middle of a thread.

It seems I'm almost alone thinking this way, though -- it's not a complaint I often hear from other people.

> The idea that they'll "still work" in non-optimized browsers doesn't seem too convincing

The BananaBread demo ran very smoothly at fullscreen, 1920x1200, on Firefox 19. I was very impressed. I'm running on old hardware: a 3GHz Core2 Duo and NVidia Quadro 1700. I know it's not a full game, but it's awesome anyway.

You can also plot with Gaston, which is a frontend for gnuplot.

https://github.com/mbaz/Gaston.jl

Docs: https://bitbucket.org/mbaz/gaston/downloads/gastondoc-0.5.5....

I don't use AdBlock for this reason. However, I do use Ghostery and Flashblock.

You'll probably be interested in Light Table: http://www.chris-granger.com/2012/04/12/light-table---a-new-...

Here: http://maf.mozdev.org/

MAFF is a single-file format that contains one or more web pages.

    * Save disk space, since MAFF is based on ZIP
    * Include video and audio, WebM, Vorbis, Theora and more
    * Be universal, compatible with Linux and other platforms
    * Use an open format, with no risk of vendor lock-in

See Julia (http://julialang.org) for an example of a dynamic language that uses LLVM rather successfully (IMO).