From my anecdotal experience, hackers tend to have a distaste for organized religion. Atheism and Agnosticism seem to run strong among programmers.
546 karma · joined November 14, 2008
If we go to 2^128 or 2^256, we start moving into numbers really large numbers. I and I really large. The number of atoms in our galaxy in near 2^220.
People seem to vastly oversimplify Kurzweil's (and others) stance on the singularity. The truth is that we don't know what will happen. The best one can do is prepare for possible senarios.
Assuming the operating costs are low, this site could bring in a life changing amount of money for one person.
Edit: It's interesting to think about whether he'd make more money with the price going up logarithmically.
Citation?
Yes, but the success of those systems is dependent upon the (semi) free-market health system in the United States.
http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/balldroppings/
Run it on the current stable Chrome, then try the new beta.
C is a non-language. It's a tool used to give developers complete control of the hardware. It's just one step up from Assembler (to make the developers job a little bit easier).
Adding type checking, buffer overflow mitigation, or any other extraneous domain-specific feature is completely outside scope of the language. If you need those features, write a language, dialect, or compiler extension which supports them.
Then don't use C.
People don't seem to understand that C is just a step up from Assembly Language. There are no "types" in the sense that they exist in higher level languages. And thus, there are no ways to check those types (unless you want to write a type checking system yourself). Lets not forget that most modern programming languages with type checking and "rock solid secure" libraries were, in fact, written in C.
http://www38.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281000+choose+12%29+...
The real killer is the allowed capitalization of any letter. If we assume that the average word length will be 6 characters, then we can assume that the average character length of any 12 word string will be 72 (not counting spaces).
With capitalization, the permutations act like a bit string. That is, the capitalization is either on or off. This gives us 2^72.
The resulting hash space is somewhere near (1000 choose 12) * (2^72) * (95 choose 5), or roughly 2^188.
One approach would be to lease a massive cluster of cloud computers to carry out the calculations. However, this option isn't financially viable for a lone developer.
Maybe there's an alternative way of approaching the problem.