Slashdot Mirror

This weeks New Scientist has some interesting statistics that will be relevant here. (The article isn't online, unfortunately.)

"researchers have documented how soldiers will often go to great lengths to avoid firing directly at enemy soldiers, especially if they can seem them - and the distress they suffer when they do kill.

A famous example is the Battle of Gettysburg, where thousands of soldiers on both sides loaded their weapons over and over to avoid having to fire them. Similarly, during the second world war, S.L.A. Marshall, a US army historian, found that on average only 15 to 20 per cent of American infantry troops actually fired at the enemy when they had the oportunity to do so."

The article goes on to talk about how the US army managed to increase the firing rate in later wars by de-humanising the enemy and training soldiers to shoot on impulse.

The main articles are about the Post-Traumatic Stress suffered later by the soldiers as a result of this.

If you like that try New Scientist - weekly and more topical than SA but also with feature articles link here

Read the article about obstetric forceps in the April 21 edition of New Scientist. How many women and children died because the inventors of forceps kept them secret for over a century rather than lose the family business by revealing the design? For all its faults, just getting rid of the patent system could make things worse than they are now.

You do not know what you are talking about. Climate change due to human activities absolutely HAS been proven, for any reasonable standard of 'proof'.

Some random links. Yes I know these aren't authoratitive primary sources but you can't deep link into the `Nature' site :(
BBC News
BBC News
paper in `Science'
Crowley in `Science'
(UN) IPCC
more U.N.
NASA
NASA
NASA
Nature
BBC News
New Scientist's excellent overview, ideal for clueless know-nothing^W^W getting a basic grounding in the major issues

Next time, try to avoid talking nonsense on a subject you know nothing about.
--
If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles

New Scientist also reports that flash floods may be occuring on Mars, scarring its terrain.

Well it may not rain (sorry, my bad) But one for the geophysicists and definitely an article which poses some questions Discovery Channel would sure love to be able to answer, *Exclusive* :-)

• The one-time pad cipher is so called because each key used to be written on a separate sheet of a pad of paper. After being used once, the sheet was torn off and destroyed, leaving the new key on the next sheet ready to encrypt the next message. Despite being theoretically perfect, the one-time pad cipher suffers from several practical flaws, which have prevented its widespread use. Making random keys is a difficult task, and making a new one for each message is time-consuming. The real killer, though, is distributing the keys. After Alice has manufactured a random key, encrypted her message, and sent the encrypted text, she somehow has to get the key to Bob so that he can decrypt the message. She cannot send the key unencrypted because Eve will steal it, and she cannot encrypt it because she then has to tell Bob the key she used to encrypt the key that she used to encrypt the message.

• The key-distribution problem was traditionally solved by employing trusted couriers to deliver the keys by hand, but this solution doesn't have much appeal in the age of satellite communications and e-mail. It is here that quantum physics comes to the rescue. In the early 1980s, Charles Bennett, an IBM researcher, and Gilles Brassard, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal, proposed that Alice and Bob should use individual photons to exchange their key. By operating at the quantum level, they argued, Alice and Bob could exploit the laws of quantum physics to protect the key.

• Bennett and Brassard proposed using photons polarised in different directions to represent 1 or 0. If Eve tried to intercept the key, she would have to measure the photons, which would effectively mean absorbing them. To avoid being spotted, Eve would have to retransmit the photon to Bob. However, because of the strange way that quantum particles work, Eve does not always measure the same polarisation that Alice sent. That in turn means that she cannot be sure that she is retransmitting the correct orientation. Thus Eve's interception will inevitably affect the transmission of the key, and Alice and Bob should be able to spot this, discard the key, and try again with a new one.

Why climate change ? Woo, big question; there's lots of evidence, and various contrarian theories (eg: observed temperature change is due to solar oputput variations) have been knocked down one by ne. Latest doom-watch for us Euro-weenies : tghe Gulf Stream (well the upstream end of it, off Greenland) is being severely disrupted. Shut down the gulf stream and suddenly central/southern Europe regains the climate of other areas on our latitude: Siberia, northern Canada ....

There's too much to give precise URLs, but for starters search these for 'climate change' :

• BBC
• New Scientist
• Nature,
• Science,
• IPCC
• UN Environmental Program
• hell, even CNN ...

I first read about quantum encryption in some long lost article about three or four years ago. The basic premise involves polarizing photons as they travel down a strand of fibre optic cable.

Okay, I just did a quick search on Google and turned up a recent article in New Scientist describing the process and the issues facing practical, widespread implementation. Still, it looks quite promising.

Cheers.

While you can not transmit information with entangled particles, you can use them to create one-time-pads with a little add on to the method described here (was an old Slashdot article), basically by having one side transmit if a photon was polarized along or perpendicular to a filter, but not which position the filter was in.

Since the quantum method ensures, that only sender and recipient of a message know this one-time-pad, and 'sniffing' (=measurement) of the transmitted photons leads to errors and thus notification of a compromised (quantum-) line, you can then use the one-time-pad to transmit your message via any regular line you choose.

Quantum encryption was covered on slashdot and the link refered to one pretty comprehensive article how it could work.

The problem of laser transmissions around the curvature of the earth was solved with satellites, though i would be interested about the design of switches that preserve the quantum nature of the transmitted bits, yet allow for routing.

It also essentially stated, that errors during transmission are to be expected but a constant monitoring of a middle man would result in an error rate of 25%, so as long as the transmission errors are in the percent range, a middleman can either be detected or can only glance at a very small percentage of the transmitted bits which shouldn't result in usable information for compressed data transmissions.

Another problem altogether would be a middleman attack, where the middleman can actively intervene in the link, posing as the recipient for the sender, decode, encode again thus posing as sender for the true recipient.

Since quantum transmission relies on multiple transmission paths (a one directional quantum path and two directional transmission of reference data) routing this data along physically distinct lines and maybe even changing the routing during transmission could prevent such attacks.

My plan exactly. Walk. The US is trying to protect its monopoly on a.) the dollar supreme and b.) a hairball tax code, revenue stream. Are less violent trading routes imaginable?

Bit trading brains-r-us are close to implementing alternative mediums of exchange (see saxas), other possibilities for paying the piper (see taxes) and disciplines that might increase the velocity and value (and reduce the ecological cost) of "money".

Encryption is how currency "borders" are enforced on the Net, thus cryptography is the only way any trading system can protect its turf. Personally, I'd like to see 7 or 8 billion traders exercize that right, using an abundance of free space quantum cryptography :)

This is from a New Scientist article from May '99. It's a 'SkyCar' developed by Paul Moller, and it's going to be in the air RSN (so they say), and is not manually controlled i.e. requires ATC (not air training corps -- for U.K. readers) above and beyond the current state of the art. This should mean no chance of crashing, (help! it's not running *NIX I hear you shriek...) or shunting your neighbour (not sp, there may be others, but I can spell neighbour (unlike Win 9n UK english edition grumble grumble)). It looks like I won't even need a driving license at this rate - well at least I've got my bike!

http://www.newscientist.c o.uk/ns/19990717/newsstory7.html
Sorry I cut out the frames it was in :p