Given that contracts can call other contracts and, presumably, set up new contracts, I wonder if it's possible to set up self-referential loops of never-ending contracts. Denial of service?

Interestingly, in hexadecimal there end up being three largest numbers of length 39:

  0x34e4a468166cd8604ec0f8106ab4326098286cf
  0xaa44ce207c78fc30003c3cc0d8382e2078d07ef
  0xfae06678c2e884607eb8b4e0b0a0f0603420342

You'd expect longer numbers in larger bases. The estimate at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polydivisible_number#How_many_...) can be generalized: let F_k(n) be the number of n-digit polydivisible numbers in base k. Then F_k(n) ~ (k-1) * k^(n-1) / n!. This gets bigger as n increases up to n = k, then it gets smaller. If I'm doing the asymptotics right you have F_k(ek) approximately equal to 1 - so in base k the largest polydivisible number should have about ek digits.

The length of the longest polydivisible number in base k is in the OEIS (http://oeis.org/A109783) along with this conjecture.

Pablum? Really? I found the article to be quite fascinating, particularly the statistical methods they used.

On that note, I highly recommend The Time Ships, by Stephen Baxter. He picks up where The Time Machine leaves off and takes the story into some amazing directions.

I think recipes are another example of something where it's considered acceptable to copy.

Towards the end of the article he discusses how a project falls under copyright law if no license is provided. Furthermore, he points out that by making a project public it will fall under the hosting site's terms of service; in particular he notes that GitHub allows forking of public projects, which wouldn't normally be the case under default copyright.

That still shouldn't give the forker any other permissions not already granted by copyright law.

Forking is copying, and by making a project public on a platform where the ToS mean that includes permitting forkng, there is a good argument that there us an implied-in-fact license; the question then becomes what the bound are of that license. One of the reasons you probably want an explicit license is to avoid that issue. There are lots of things you can do without an explicit license that can give rise to implied license.

The Rhesus Chart...the latest Laundry novel by Charles Stross.

fixed link: http://progmofo.com/

thanks!

What does anonymity have to do with anarchy? I realize that they often go hand in hand, but that's a sad generalization.

I was just following a train of thought and making a comparison, not a real correlative relationship.