News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 8

Tue Oct 08 2002 08:43: I realized yesterday why I don't trust NewsBruiser item delete: when it moves back subsequent entries from the same day it doesn't change their entries in the index. I'm pretty sure that was what was bothering me subconsciously; right now I feel that once I fix that I'll be fine with entry delete.

Tue Oct 08 2002 10:52 The Partly Cloudy Expatriate: In keeping with what appears to be a forming family tradition of going to foreign countries for American holidays, my mother and I will be spending Thanksgiving in London, with Rachel, who's already there. I've applied for a passport, I've arranged for time off, we have plane tickets and a place to stay; I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is actually going to happen. I'll be in England for about a week, with only slight constraints on my time, so if anyone wants to drop in on me (or vice versa), let me know.

Tue Oct 08 2002 15:01: Don't know how I missed this, but a polynomial-time algorithm for determining primality was recently discovered. This throws a wrench into my plans to sell at a ludicrous markup the Richardson Constant-Time Probabilistic Primality Test (motto: "Correctly indicates primality infinitely often!"), so I'll release it here into the public domain:

def probablyPrime(n):
    if n > 1 and n <= 7:
        return 1
    else:
        return 0