[zgjchpbh] Bin Laden versus Madoff

Which man has caused more direct damage: Osama bin Laden (for 9/11) or Bernard Madoff?

Madoff caused $65 billion in damages (losses).

Osama bin Laden, for the September 11, 2001 attacks, caused about 3000 deaths and very roughly $30 billion in property destruction (I could be off by 10), plus about 6000 injuries. Assuming the cost of the injuries to average a million dollars each (very high), Osama bin Laden would have caused more damage if the value of a human life is greater than (65-30-6)/3 = $9.6 million, which is toward the high end of the usual estimate of somewhere between $1 million and $10 million (based on the amount people or governments or insurance companies are willing to spend to reduce the probability of death).

Of course, each man indirectly caused a great deal of indirect damage: Madoff for causing Americans to lose faith in the financial system, causing a drying up of investment and a big step of the "death spiral" of the recession; Bin Laden for well, terror. But these indirect effects are very hard to quantify and cannot be completely pinned on a single person.

I conclude that both men caused a comparable amount of direct damage, with Madoff somewhat more likely to have caused more.

Sarcastically, we can proudly claim that we Americans are better than foreigners, even when it comes to hurting Americans.

[qmdbbhbd] Bicircular spline

Consider at least 4 ordered points. Points 1, 2, and 3 determine a circle. Points 2, 3, and 4 determine another circle (and so on, taking 3 consecutive points at a time). There are now two different arcs between points 2 and 3, from the first and second circles. Construct a curve which is the average of the two arcs (midpoint of uniform arc-parametrization). This curve is probably an ellipse. In this way, we can construct a spline going through all the control points.

This spline has good behavior when tracing circular curved segments, and also with straight segments (taking care to avoid floating point overflow with circles of nearly infinite radius). It is continuous but not differentiable at the control points.

I had good results with this spline in practice when I implemented it 14 years ago for a T-shirt design.

[rscyachk] Car regret

How much of the lack of public support for public transit motivated not by car owners' rational thinking of not wanting to support (via taxes) a service they do not plan to use, but by a psychological desire to avoid regret for having purchased (sunk cost) a car?

Even if a car owner does not plan to ride public transit, he or she will still benefit from it. But reason cannot counteract base psychology.

[xbxgnvmz] Dead men tell (no) tales

A CSI style show based on the premise of alternate universes: one in which the victim survives to tell a (possibly misleading) tale, and one where the victim dies and forensic pathology tells the tale.

[zcmxgbkq] Public transit loses money, but that's OK

It is all right if public transit does not recover all its costs in fares. Its benefits extend beyond the fare-paying riders; consequently those receiving its benefits should help pay for its costs. This can be done through public funding.

Public transit has better fuel economy, so everyone (not just the public transit riders) benefits by having cleaner air and less global warming.

People taking public transit cause fewer cars on the road. Regular drivers benefit from decreased congestion.

Although some drivers will not regularly take public transit, it serves as a backup mode of transportation if their car should become suddenly unavailable, for example, due to being out for repair. Public transit is a shared risk-reduction mechanism.

If public transit were not available, a business would have to provide a large parking lot to attract car-driving customers. Businesses benefit from public transit by having lower property costs.

A tourist destination becomes more expensive, and therefore less attractive, if the tourist must rent a car there in order to get around. Public transit benefits the local economy via the tourism dollars.

Thus, public transit should not be forced to increase fares to meet its operating budget. Public transit benefits everyone, so it should receive public funding.

Unsolved problems: What is the socially optimal geographical coverage and schedule frequency? What is the socially optimal rider fare (probably not zero)? How can a public transit agency be induced to provide the best service it can for the funding it gets? Public transit usually operates as a monopoly, so the capitalist optimization effect of the competitive market does not occur.

[suuhepvb] Low power OS

Do not refresh unallocated RAM.

Bring back the good old days of computing when conserving RAM was critically important.

[sqcaeypg] Low power GUI

Power off between keystrokes and mouse clicks. Display remains on.

No drag and drop. Moving the mouse only moves the cursor (an independent system that can run even with the rest of the computer turned off).

[tqbnsxjt] Contact bounce and Morse code

Contact bounce prevents reliably counting repeated presses of the same button. Therefore, for a binary encoding, we need at least three buttons.

Assume we wish to encode each symbol with a unique button sequence.

We need the last button of one sequence to be different from the first button of the next.

For three buttons, this means all sequences must end with the same button or begin with the same button, which is weird.

For four or more buttons (and 3 actually), each sequence must begin in one half partition and end in the other. Building a Huffman tree gets weird.

(Two buttons plus backspace to cancel an accidentally repeated keypress works well in practice.)

[zfneytgi] Train pull or push

We consider the differences between a train in pull formation and push formation in the event of an accident.

In the "normal" pull formation, with the engine at the front, suppose the front car, i.e., the engine, derails, perhaps due to something wrong with, or on, the track. After derailing the engine no longer has a grip on the track so is no longer supplying additional energy into the accident. Of course, the unpowered trailing cars still have momentum which will cause them to collide and pile on top of each other.

In "push" formation, the engine is at the back and pushes unpowered cars in front of it. I've seen the MBTA commuter rail run trains in this formation. Suppose the front car, an unpowered car, derails. The rear engine does not derail immediately so maintains a grip on the track. Until the operator shuts it off (though this could be nearly immediate with a dead man's switch at the front), or the effects of the derailment reaches the back causing the engine to ultimately derail, the engine continues to plow forward, supplying additional energy and destruction into the accident.

[mvvbqceg] Cone of silence

I dislike restaurants which are too loud, preventing conversation across the table. I have yet to see restaurant designed to aggressively reduce sound.

Sound absorbing foam on all surfaces. Sound absorbing barriers scattered all about.

For tables for two place sections of an ellipsoid above and around the table with the foci on the two diners' heads. For tables of more than two, more complicated geometry. Let the ellipsoid sections be movable to adjust for height. Perhaps even automatic head tracking.

[goqgsive] Tax on chewing gum

Have you ever looked at a public sidewalk? There ought to be a tax on chewing gum.

[dumpoeac] Scroll CPU

I am disturbed that the operation that sends my CPU utilization to 100%, and yet I perceive as not fast enough, is scrolling. In Firefox, it doesn't complete scrolling until a while after releasing the Down key. Scrolling up or sideways for images is especially slow.

In the terminal, if a command produces a lot of output, I don't get my typing, e.g., Control-C, back for a while.

Is there a better way to engineer these?

Rapid scrolling only samples a virtual frame buffer, at at most the display refresh rate . The contents of a framebuffer is calculated lazily on demand (on sampling).

Use moving pointers instead of memcopy.

[ekvpxngc] Mutual lies

Courtship among humans (probably other species too) is an imperfect information game, with both sides facing asymmetric information. As predicted by game theory, both sides use signaling mechanisms (fast cars? short skirts?) to appear desirable to the opposite sex. As predicted by game theory again, these signals are often deceptive with men and women looking for entirely different things in each other than who they actually are. Cynically we might describe the situation (is it Nash equilibrium?) as mutual lies.

And yet, almost miraculously, our species manages to successfully breed generation after generation, with no end in sight.

[nbirqgpp] License for recreational drugs

One can legalize yet still control recreational drugs by requiring users and sellers to be licensed. A different license for each drug. Licenses are the way we deal with other things in society where the licensee has potential to harm others or society. Getting a license may require passing an examination demonstrating that the user is knowledgeable about the drug's effects, interaction with other medicinal and recreational drugs, treatments for addiction. It may require a fee which is kind of a down payment against the harm users of this drug are probabilistically expected to cause society. For addictive drugs, one may be required to prove you belong to a support network who are willing and capable (and perhaps even legally required) of providing support, care, and treatment in the event of addiction. The names and sworn statements of the support network are kept on file.

[skonzgrp] Per sender address

Facebook renders your email address in your profile as an image, but it could do better: provide a different unique forwarding e-mail address to each friend who views your profile. This way, if any of your friends is a spammer, or has a compromised account, you know who it was based on which address they used.

[xeftwwfa] Delayed compensation

An employee, or anyone, does something, the effects of which cannot be measured for years, if not decades. Let the employer, or other payer, pay compensation then, possibly to the estate. "You'll get paid when we get paid."

The employee may use standard financial instruments to convert an uncertain future revenue stream into perhaps a constant present salary. The market for such instruments does not seem to be accessible to regular people these days.

Vaguely similar to incentive stock options.

The government can give awards for great things that benefit the public. This might lessen the pressure and brokenness of the "intellectual property" legal system.

[hgffwpvn] P2P and trust

Agents of the MAFIAA and trojan writers put bad files onto peer-to-peer networks which turn up in a keyword search for a file, making life difficult for legitimate users of the network. (Poisoning)

In response, the network evolves and implements trust mechanisms to filter out the bad users, ultimately resulting in a large robust trust network, which is, among other things, a Holy Grail of public key infrastructure (PKI). This trust network may then be retargeted to help solve so many of the problems of the Internet today: spam, phishing, scams, viruses, denial-of-service attacks...

But alas, this future currently seems not meant to be. Legally, I blame the MGM v. Grokster decision. They could only see short-sightedly the copyright infringement, and not that peer-to-peer networks were the start of something wonderful in how they would affect the internet, and ultimately society. I sincerely hope the decision is reversed someday in court or by law.

[pgtcvswv] Spontaneous Combustion

Radioactivity today has the same mysterious quality as yesterday's spontaneous combustion: only God knows why the quantum wavefunction of the weak nuclear force decided to collapse at precisely a given moment causing the atomic nucleus to undergo radioactive decay.

[aeoxcbfd] CSI censorship

What is omitted from the CSI television show?

Are there real CSI techniques that are censored from the show at the request of law enforcement? Based on the argument that it is better if the public remain ignorant about a certain technique in hopes of catching more criminals with it?

Sometimes the characters on the show encounter a villain who is familiar with CSI and attempts to cover up his or her actions to thwart CSI. Are there real techniques that criminals use to thwart real CSI that are censored from the show?

Similar questions may be asked about other cop shows.

[gquxxkcx] Drawn King Exchange

For simplicity, define the object of the game of chess to be to capture the opponent's king. (In contrast to the conventional rules which define the end of the game at checkmate where king capture is inevitable but hasn't actually happened.)

Modify the rules of chess so that both players are permitted the same number of moves.

By the modification, black is permitted one move after his or her king is captured. White is not, because he or she moved first. If Black's "extra" last move captures White's king, then the game is drawn by king exchange.

White's first move advantage is greatly reduced, perhaps too much. Black may respond to white giving check by protecting the Black king or by attacking (giving check to) the White king.

[kmuphizw] Different "King"

The king is the most important piece in chess: if it is captured, the game is over. What if a different piece has this role? The king becomes just another piece.

This is inspired by capped pawn handicap. In order to mark which, say, knight is the important piece, we may place a cap on it.

Should castling be modified so the important piece is moved to safety instead of the king? What if the important piece is a rook?

Another way to do castling, also applicable to Chess 960 is to always castle with the piece on the a or h files. It might alter the parity of the bishops.

[rkbdjlke] Awesomeness

Should Awesomeness be dosed in large amounts infrequently or small amounts frequently?

[scamycnr] Writing is set in stone

Let the writing system do text compression and error detection.

Frequently used letters should take less space.

If two words differ by one letter, then those two letters ought not look too similar. Or more generally, words which cannot be distinguished by syntactic or semantic context ought to look different. If two words have similar meanings, and differ by one letter, then those two letters ought to look different. Semantic context makes it difficult to computationally optimize a better way of writing the alphabet.

Unfortunately, our writing system, the letterforms, are set in stone, sometimes literally, so cannot evolve to encode our language better.

[zlvyapjr] Image comments

For each binary blob of a hypertext Web page (images are the most common such blob, but video, flash, PDF, embedded objects, and even HTML, Javascript, and CSS could be), calculate a cryptographic hash of the data. Then, at the user's request, do a web search for the hash value. The search results allow for external commentary on the image or blob, external to the site itself, and free (or freer) from any censorship the site imposes.

If you want to comment on an image, you post on your own blog (or something like Usenet) the hash and your comment. A standard format of comments, ratings, thumbs up/down, would be useful for aggregating many search results.

We would like to avoid the privacy leak of the search provider knowing what images you viewed. Use tor.

One might hash the decoded image data, not the compressed original in order to catch different versions of the same thing.

Hashes of Javascript might be useful for collaborative filtering of whether a script may be trusted to run.

Another blob might be the FEN string describing a chess position.

This mechanism actually frees the site operator from having to run a forum comment board, with all its political difficulties of spammers, trolls, and obscenity. Essentially PageRank is used to filter or rank bad comments. I'm not sure how good it will be.

Like UUID.

[pmbmcnvi] Merging wikipedia

The problem with forking Wikipedia, to get away from its questionable censorship practices, is one needs to merge back in new changes from the main Wikipedia back into the forked version. I used to think this was not possible, but here is a simple idea.

Additional facts can only be added between "large chunks" of Wikipedia text. "Large chunks" are large enough that they can be reidentified between Wikipedia revisions, and the additional facts reinserted between them.

A large chunks is probably a paragraph, though if your natural language processing is good enough to identify topics, paragraphs can be broken. Sentences are probably too fine a granularity to generally survive identification between edits.

In the event of a complete article rewrite in Wikipedia, all the additional facts get appended to the bottom and human assistance is requested to put the facts in the relevant places.

Additional facts can reference, annotate, or even patch text in Wikipedia by having a mechanism to refer to text. Of course, it is encouraged just to edit the original Wikipedia.

Lists of facts unorganized into prose goes against Wikipedia's style guidelines, but actually goes better for verifiability: each fact is presented in two columns. The second column is the (optional) source.

Mechanisms to keep the crap out of your forked Wikipedia is left up to you the forker.

With discretized facts, I'm imagining an ecosystem of cryptographic signatures and webs of trust, combined with two-column verifiability above.

[lfscnbrl] Real estate Veblen good

Some people don't want to live near poor people. A legal way to do this (amidst the many illegal housing discrimination practices) is to choose to live in an area where property values are high. This might lead to a curious scenario where the market demand for a property becomes greater if the price goes up, all other things remaining the same.

It's even more curious because it's not the price of the property in question that the potential buyer cares about, but the other properties in the neighborhood. I suspect game theory. How can neighbors conspire to raise the price of a house?

[rsoysbwe] High latency command line interface

A command-line interface is a classic powerful low-bandwidth method of interacting with a remote server, perhaps logging in with SSH.

But with a high latency connection, frequently present with low bandwidth, things go wrong. Sometimes even the byte-wasteful, graphics intensive, Web is more efficient than a command line interface, for example Webmail versus Pine. Except the web sucks because it's not extendable.

For starters, high latency character echo makes it annoying to type. It should be line echo, but with completion.

"screen" helps recover from unreliable dropped connections. It makes curses acceptable, though not ideal.

Commands which (unexpectedly) produce a lot of spew (output) are bad: it may be a while before Control-C reaches the server. Things should be piped implicitly through "less" unless the produce less than a page of output. Or, simply don't autoscroll.

Some pasting a large amount of text through the connection causes data to be dropped due to exceeding flow control. File transfer is a better way to transfer large chunks of text.

Running a text editor remotely is painful. It would be nice if sshfs played more nicely with dropped connections, perhaps automatically trying to reconnect. Emacsclient might be what I want.

We need a utility or terminal which incorporates all these features.

[mcbpsush] Lifetime long slide show

Imagine a digital picture frame that has enough pictures on it to last a lifetime without repeating. Assuming 60 seconds per slide, there are 36,816,444 minutes in 70 years. Cheap frames these days have 320 by 240 pixel resolution. JPEG 2000 does acceptable compression at 1 bpp (bits per pixel), or about 96% compression, yielding about 10000 bytes per image. All the pictures together will total 354 GB, which is possible using today's technology. Multiply by appropriate constants for higher resolution or more rapid frame rate.

The early adopter for this technology will probably be the same early adopter for any media technology, and fortunately there probably are 36 million pictures in that genre.

It will be a challenge to build a digital picture frame that will remain functional for decades.

[bpxqlqhs] Gravity simulation

Naive gravity simulations of point masses, even with adaptive step size, do not maintain conservation of energy. Build one that does. I think Numerical Recipes has second-order conservative numerical differential equations.  Verlet integration.

[dcwusjbb] Skill difference can be quantified

Chess is an interesting game because if you practice at it, you get better, a lot better.

How levels exist between the top and beginner?

Define two players to have a "one class difference" if the better player has an expected score of 2/3 of a point per game. How many class boundaries exist between the average complete beginner and the world's best?

How does the number of class boundaries in chess compare to the number in other popular games, for example go 囲碁?

The number of classes reflects the degree to which you can improve with practice. It represents how good the game is for humans.

This measure penalizes games for which draws are possible.

[zcwhxtne] Modern Polaroid camera

Prints immediately

Create the modern equivalent of the Polaroid instant camera. The camera does Wi-fi and instantly queues taken photographs to a networked printer. This is probably easy to do with a smartphone.

Sit by the printer while sending someone out with a camera (or multiple people and cameras).

[qdosyjvs] PSA prescription

Public Service Announcement: my pharmacy (and probably others too), writes a description of the pill (shape, color, markings) on the bottle of prescription medicine. You the patient are not powerless to avoid medication errors which I've heard are a leading cause of death. Check that the pill matches its description.

The two major human links in the chain before you ingest a drug are the doctor who prescribed it and the pharmacist who filled the prescription. You can check the pharmacist as described above. Because the name of the drug is also printed on the bottle, you can also do a limited amount of checking of the doctor: check that the drug actually is used to treat the illness or condition you've been diagnosed with. Can't easily check the diagnosis itself, though.

Can't easily check IV medications.

Where do the fatal medication errors occur?

[zwsvhxuu] Kevorkian gag order

Jack Kevorkian is prohibited from speaking about procedures of assisted suicide as a condition of his parole. Insofar as parole is a substitute for imprisonment for less-dangerous criminals, Kevorkian's imprisonment has three-fold purpose: as punishment for homicides he's committed (negative incentive), to immobilize him from committing homicides during his prison term, and to silence him, thwarting the dissemination of information judged disruptive to society.

The Burmese government imprisons Aung San Suu Kyi for the purpose of silencing her.

[ricezrqm] Tribbles

On Star Trek, tribbles are "born pregnant". Assuming sexual reproduction, it must be possible for a male tribble to impregnate a yet unborn female fetus tribble. Conversely, it might be possible for a mother of a male fetus tribble to use the sperm of her unborn son to impregnate another female. That's some weird sex. The reproductive system of the tribble embryo/fetus develops before birth (in contrast to humans, whose reproductive system is not even fully developed until years after birth. )

Why not? Are there real animals on Earth that do this? If resources such as food suddenly become plentiful, it might be advantageous to breed extremely quickly. The evolutionary disadvantage is the offspring is passing on its genes before it is known whether the offspring will be viable outside the womb.

[tnakhcda] Wide paragraphs

When a webpage consists mainly of text, or when the important part is so, for example a news article, the web browser may aggressively reformat the webpage to make it more pleasant to read. This aggressive reformating may include removal of navigation, branding, and advertising elements. It may also include adjusting the font, font size, color, letter spacing, line spacing, and (importantly) number of columns, because wide paragraphs are hard to read.

The user hits a button saying, "Reformat This Page For Reading", and rules, heuristics, artificial intelligence, or external resources are used to extract the "textual" segment of the page. As a first attempt, extremely simple rules such as View Source deleting all HTML markup tags works all right.

The user may highlight a section of the page indicating part of the important text, to give the artificial intelligence a hint of where the text is.

[xalwdrwy] RSA onion

A more interesting way to have structured the RSA challenges would have been to embed them one inside another like Russian dolls, with the most difficult in the center.

[ezwedjku] RAM persists

Thwarting Halderman el al., "Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys"

The data in RAM is stored encrypted with the key held in a register on the RAM chip, RAM module, or CPU. In the event of power loss, a small amount of power storage, perhaps a capacitor, is used to wipe the key register. Alternatively, the entire RAM may be wiped on power loss, but that seems hard.

The RAM must be mounted so it cannot be removed without cutting power. Connections are underneath.

[hflfggqh] Multiple identities

Why not?

The government permits you only one driver's license and passport under only one name, and goes through considerable measures (providing multiple forms of ID when applying for one) to make sure you only get one. I'm guessing the reason is so the government can track you (as a criminal) and prevent you from getting multiple shares of a government service (maybe so you can only vote once?), for example only one social security number.

But in this age of identity theft, once an identity thief gets a hold of your one and only legal identity, they have access to your entire life.

If a stalker learns enough of your one and only legal identity, in today's information society, perhaps entering your name in a search engine, is enough to learn an uncomfortably large amount about your entire life.

Perhaps the government should permit multiple unconnected legal identities, or, get out of the unique identity business all together.

"If having multiple identities is made criminal, only criminals will have multiple identities."

[qafzgoag] Letters in the presence of noise

Design a font optimized for maximum human readability in the presence of Gaussian blur.

Or of Gaussian noise.

Or of overexposure, where the "ink" of the letters bleed out.

Or of underexposure, where the exterior bleeds in.

One begins to notice the duality of the inside and outside of a letter form, and how both are important.

Letter spacing is important as well, as too close letters may bleed into each other.

Peephole crop: only a certain section of a letterform is visible. Some parts of a letter are more important than others. Which parts? Maximize entropy over the area over all letters.

[vmjbwmxu] Annoying names to telephone type

Typing names into (say) your cell phone, using the numeric keypad. One or multiple key presses per letter (Multi-tap). If two or more consecutive letters are on the same key, we assess a somewhat arbitrarily chosen penalty of 3.14159 key presses to let the first letter "time out" before the next letter may be entered. Calculate the average number of keypresses per letter to determine the "annoyingness" of typing that name.

ABC DEF GHI JKL MNO PQRS TUV WXYZ

The least annoying names according to this metric are:

1.00	ada
1.00	adam
1.00	jada
1.00	mat
1.00	pam
1.00	pat
1.00	tad
1.00	wat
1.17	agatha
1.17	amanda
1.20	madge
1.20	paget
1.20	panda
1.20	wanda
1.25	dana
1.25	dawn
1.25	gage
1.25	maud
1.25	page
1.25	peta
1.25	tate
1.25	thad

ABC DEF GHI JKL MNO PQRS TUV WXYZ

The most annoying names to type are:

4.03	cissy
4.04	russ
4.04	suzy
4.05	norris
4.05	prissy
4.06	conor
4.06	solomon
4.06	sonny
4.07	gill
4.07	konnor
4.08	keefe
4.23	sissy
4.24	carson
4.24	connor
4.26	issac
4.26	orson
4.29	issy
4.29	ross
4.30	jefferson
4.46	kizzy
4.57	cass
4.57	moss
4.66	lizzy
5.07	izzy
5.07	ozzy

ABC DEF GHI JKL MNO PQRS TUV WXYZ

The full list is here: yjbtwugy. The list of names were take from Behind the Name: English Names.

It's a modern numerology or gematria.

#! perl -lw
@t=qw/abc def ghi jkl mno pqrs tuv wxyz/; for(@t){ @F=split//; for($i=0;$i<@F;++$i){ $s{$F[$i]}=$i+1; $button{$F[$i]}=$_; } } $penalty=3.14159; while(<>){ chomp; $_=lc; @F=split//; $x=0; $prevbutton=""; for(@F){ die "bad $_" unless defined($n=$s{$_}); $x+=$n; die "bb $_" unless defined($n=$button{$_}); if ($n eq $prevbutton){ $x+=$penalty; } $prevbutton=$n; } $avg=$x/(scalar@F); printf"%.2f %s\n",$avg,$_; }

[qvrersni] Noscript adware backdoors

Noscript is subtly adware, and the developer has previously included backdoors (disabling AdBlock) to perpetuate its adware-ness, and at least one backdoor (default whitelisting noscript.net) is still in place. Here is how to avoid having your privacy violated.

1. Print or locally save these directions, because for many of the steps you will not be connected to the internet.
2. Get Noscript by searching google for noscript, and going to addons.mozilla.org site. DO NOT go directly to noscript.net. Or follow this link: https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/722
3. Click on "Add to Firefox", and install the extension. Do not click on "Restart Firefox". Do NOT allow firefox to automatically restart itself. DO NOT ALLOW FIREFOX TO AUTOMATICALLY RESTART ITSELF!!!
4. Instead, close the installation window.
5. Go to the File menu, and choose "Work Offline". (Alternatively, pull your network cable).
6. Quit firefox manually.
7. If you are extremely diligent, you should review the source code of the noscript that just got installed.
8. Start firefox. You will see that firefox will attempt to to open up the page "http://noscript.net", but because you are working offline, it will fail.
   Who knows what lurks on that page? Especially since noscript.net is by default WHITELISTED by noscript itself. These days, the page serves advertisements (the developer claims these advertisements help pay for development of noscript). These advertisements, as well as noscript.net are likely violating your privacy in many ways: logging your IP address, browser version, operating system, time and date of installing noscript, installing cookies, possibly exploiting browser and flash vulnerabilities. If your DNS gets hacked, "noscript.net" might not even be the developer's website.
9. Click on the "S" in the lower right hand corner, and choose Options.
10. Under the Whitelist tab, remove all of the websites. This can be done by selecting the first one, scrolling down, and shift clicking the last one, then clicking "Remove Selected Sites". The grayed out sites cannot be removed, but that's OK (I think).
11. Under the Notifications tab, uncheck "Display release notes on updates". (This is the second insidious adware aspect of Noscript: every time there's an update, which is quite frequently, the extension will send you to noscript.net, triggering the advertising privacy violations as liste above.) I have not tested whether unchecking this works; there has not been an update yet since I created this document.
12. (Optional) Under the Plugins tab, check "Apply these restrictions to trusted sites too". Because you deleted the default whitelist, you will need re-enable them manually (if you wish). It is better to enable javascript and plugins, especially flash, separately.
13. Close the Options window, by clicking "OK"
14. Go to the "about:config" webpage
15. You will notice some additional noscript backdoors: noscript.clearClick.exceptions, noscript.clearClick.subexceptions, noscript.forbidJarDocumentsExceptions. Clear the values of these configuration variables. I haven't tested whether this breaks things.
16. File menu, uncheck "Work Offline".
17. Finally, reflect upon yourself whether you should actually trust a developer who includes such backdoors in his software. Noscript is GPL, so I would appreciate a fork with the adware and backdoors removed.

[ysledtmn] Small factors 210

A large power of two minus 1, 1645504557321206042154969182557350504982735865633579863348609023 , factors into surprisingly small numbers.

2²¹⁰ - 1 = 2^2*3*5*7 - 1 = 3² * 7² * 11 * 31 * 43 * 71 * 127 * 151 * 211 * 281 * 331 * 337 * 5419 * 29191 * 86171 * 106681 * 122921 * 152041 * 664441 * 1564921
= 11 * 11 * 111 * 111 * 1011 * 11111 * 101011 * 1000111 * 1111111 * 10010111 * 11010011 * 100011001 * 101001011 * 101010001 * 1010100101011 * 111001000000111 * 10101000010011011 * 11010000010111001 * 11110000000101001 * 100101000111101001 * 10100010001101111001 * 101111110000011111001 (binary)

[ekacpfan] Crib sheet for Mersenne factoring

Factoring all 2ⁿ-1 up to 400.

addprimes([ 26986333437777017 , 61676882198695257501367 , 1155685395246619182673033 , 120226360536848498024035943 , 31133636305610209482201109050392404721 , 40122362455616221971122353 , 2647649373910205158468946067671 , 3857194764289141165278097 , 4868122671322098041565641 , 14143189112952632419639 , 34720396273212657799920861294559 , 2927455476800301964116805545194017 , 370906580744492785430299503112990447 , 301311116540899114446723859201 , 503823044204581129045587727 , 15174923558680812616818436353130417 , 814132872808522587940886856743 , 1234904213576000272542841146073 ])
addprimes([ 179058312604392742511009 , 36450568206770608791178096385783 ])
addprimes([ 51441563151591093599 , 365505823711978039310711 , 1953272766780718501831 , 39044358788825633753 , 33157029794959983067039 , 126901141805369975317583 , 6834040335349578249140287 , 25806248225716242845491832244899635927231330561 , 5560125493425335999 ])
for(q=1 , 200 , i=q ; f=factorint(2^i+1) ; print(i , " " , gettime , " " , f) ; d=matsize(f) ; for(j=1 , d[1] , if(f[j , 1]>10^15 , addprimes(f[j , 1]))))
for(q=1 , 400 , i=q ; f=factorint(2^i-1) ; print(i , " " , gettime , " " , f) ; d=matsize(f) ; for(j=1 , d[1] , if(f[j , 1]>10^15 , addprimes(f[j , 1]))))