Hi folks
> Hello, everyone. Wow, there was a lot in the last digest that I thought
> needed commenting on. This prize thread is _almost_ getting as bad, in my
> opinion, as the other, recent, evil thread which I shall not name. I am,
of
> course, replying to many different people in this message.
Just a quick note to praise the 'common-sense' posters on this list - I hope
we all know who they are - it's much appreciated when one of them puts a
stop to a thread which was getting way out of hand. Many thanks to STL for
this one... in particular
>It's amazing what money will do to people. In
>a way, I almost wish that EFF had never come up with their prizes
I'll paraphrase another quote on this as well, "A *person* is intelligent.
*People* are irrational and dangerous". As individual human beings, we're
quite good at distinguishing what is important to us personally. The whole
EFF thing was supposedly to inspire advances in distributed computing - but
instead has encouraged mass mania and reduced the thing to a lottery. I'd
much rather the world factor the meager 200+ digits of 2^727-1, than find a
10M+ digit prime and fight over money. Isn't mathematics, science, human
knowledge in general above things such base and vile as money? Are we all
guilty of knowing the price of everything, but the value of nothing? Is
bigger necessarily better?
I've been good so far, and avoided adding my $0.02 until now. Feel free to
flame me off-list is you disagree. Otherwise, let's get some rationality in
here. We search on - and let's not let our areas of research and individual
interests be controlled by potential financial gain. Let's follow through
with STL's common-sense conclusions.
And above all, let's kill this thread.
Chris
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