okay, so someone has probably pointed it out already, but if so it bears repeating. B/c a lot of effort is being expended on something that's effectively impossible.
As I understand the scheme: the info on the cd -software, music, whatever, is encrypted. And there's a little chip on the disk that decides if a read request is valid. If it is, then it also gives you the key for decrypting the info. But then you've got the key. So you can copy the disc, encryption and all and use the key. Or the decrypted info. All of these schemes are wasted effort, b/c to enable an arbitrary person to use these things you have provide the means for decrypting the whatever-it-is along with the whatever it is. It really is ludicrous.
Is it secure? I don't know much about Bluetooth, so I couldn't say. But I don't want to be transmitting my keystrokes in cleartext over RF.
Somebody probably already mentioned this, but I couldn't find the thread...
Actually, SuperK is in the business of looking at high energy neutrinos as well. The result that is SuperK's major claim to fame is the detection of neutrino osscillations made by looking at atmospheric neutrinos.
Millions of Britons reveal their innermost secrets through their computer passwords, making their office PCs incredibly vulnerable to attack according to a recent study.
If a password is based on your innermost secrets, doesn't that make it hard to guess?
Genetic engineering is no different than the random mutations we're seing here, except for one thing - *its controlled!*. We actually have a clue about what's going to happen, instead of just a random fluctuation.
I think it's more complicated than that. The random mutations are also much less likely to have an effect on anything: maybe an unused gene got modified. Maybe it's just a really small change. At any rate, the random mutation in any one organism has nothing to do with the mutation in any other organism.
Genetic enginering on the other hand is about big (or bigger at any rate) changes on lots of organisms all in the same way.
As far as the dangers are concerned, natrual mutation is like taking baby-steps near a cliff in the middle of the night. Artificial mutations are like jumping around near the same cliff but with only a little light to see by(at least for now).
Of course, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing this. We should. But we need to be very careful.
I also work at a national lab (fermilab, if you care, and before that Brookhaven Lab), and I've seen that very message more times than I can count (it's been up for quite a while now). We mostly ignore it (which prompts are sysadmins to make comments such as, "see the logon notice that we all ignore.").
So maybe we shouldn't ignore it, but what if this sort of intrusiveness does stand up in court (IANAL, but this sort of thing is pretty common to my understanding, so I would assume that it's on reasonably firm legal footing)? In many cases, it's not as though we can go elsewhere to do our research. I'm a high-energy physicist. High energy experiments are very expensive, with prices that reach to the hundreds of millions of dollars. In the US, there are only a handful of labs that do it. And guess what? They're almost much all DOE labs!! What's more, depending in the type of work you do, you are completely limited to DOE labs. Even working in other countries isn't neccessarily an option, depending on what you want to do.
That being said, I'm not too worried. I think this sort of thing is probably restricted by some sort of "probable cause" consideration. I rather suspect that the sysadmins take that particular warning as seriously as the rest of us do. It was imposed from on high, not by the people who do the real work of maintaining the systems.
At the end of the day, many scientists don't have too much choice in the matter. The question is whether this represents a real threat to our privacy, or if it's just a way of placating the federal government. I think it's the latter, although it does perhaps open some doors that are better left closed.
Surely anti-gravity is a repelling force exerted by any body with mass on any other body with mass. Or, put another way, something the stretches the old "rubber sheet" of spacetime in the opposite "direction" to the way gravity stetches it.
Anti-gravity,when talked about by serious scientists (don't I sound pretentious today?) usually refers to some aspect of gravity that causes masses to repel each other instead of attract. There are theories of gravity that do predict this on extremely large (i.e. cosmological) scales.
Quite how you can research anti-gravity when no one understands how gravity works is beyond me.
First let me get the "metoo" crap out of my system:
Metoo! Amen! Yes! Alleluia, praise the source code!
Okay, I'm done with that now. What all this amounts to is a pace of evolution which is much faster than we're used to. Life has been growing and changing, evolving into things new and different for 4.5 billion years or so. Two things are different now: it's happening much faster and we're in control of it. Admittedly, we're not neccessarily smart or wise enough to do a good job at directing evolution, but it's not so far fetched to believe that we can do better than the more or less completely random process that has dominated the history of our planet.
So we've created machines that are doubling in power every 18 months. But for now, they still need us, and if not, so what? And will they truly replace us or merge with us to form something different? And whatever the answer: so what?
But Bill Joy seems also to neglect the point of genetic engineering: once it becomes a truly mature science, maybe we will start increasing in capacity as fast as our computers are now. Let's face it: the reason this hasn't already happened is that our understanding of transistors is so far ahead of our understanding of DNA (ethics, sadly, do not matter: have we ever created a weapon that we did not at least try to use?). But that's changing. In any case, we're going to become something else. But again: so, what?
If anyone thinks that the human race is going to survive unchanged till the end of the universe, or even the end of the sun, they're wrong (unless, the end happens in the very near future). Someday, we will be replaced. It may happen slowly and impercetibly, or swiftly and dramatically, but it will happen. It may happen in the 21st century, it may happen in the 12th millenium. As long as we have a legacy, does it matter what form it takes?
The point you're ignoring is that big corporations are the product of big government; without government subsidies in their various forms (e.g. copyright law, cops, courts, military action against competing nations etc) most of the big corporations today would not exist.
I beg to differ. Mega-corps are a natural outgrowth of a capitalist system. In capitalism, smaller businesses continually reinvest their revenues into expansion. Small firms get bigger, and more efficient. They start gobbling up the their competitors, or forcing them out of business. Once the corporations get big enough, they have the money to exert a massive influence on the government. and the cycle continues. It's positive feedback meets Economic Darwinism.
Eliminating subsidies for the corportaions is an absolutely neccessary step, but it's not sufficient, unless you do something about the capitalist enviornment in which this all happens (No, I'm not a socialist: to be frank, I don't know what I am).
A Geek Jihad? As appealing as that might be, it's not the answer (are you even advocating it?). As geeks, we are in many ways fringe members of society. Any real and lasting solution to the problem has to have wider support. If we think of this solely as a geek movement, we're screwed.
But this raises an important point: What do we do about this? Complaining about it is a good first step, but if that's all we do, then complaining and worrying is pointless.
On a related issue, to what extent is the wider culture aware of what the DMCA is and what it threatens? The vast majority of the news I hear about it comes from slashdot. I hear almost nothing about these issues on the more popular news media (admittedly, I get most of my news from NPR, which is hardly the news source of the masses). Is the next step to get the word out to the mainstream?
Uh...try "rpm --U *" without quotes. Set it up as a cron job. Still works, methinks.
Good base idea, but you also have to supply the "get by ftp" option as well (I don't remeber what it is right now). But upgrading all of your software blindly like that is a bad idea. You want to spend some effort verifying that the downloads are uncorrupted and uncracked.
Is this posting so late that it is now irrelevant?
Doing precise calculations and predictions with quantum mechanics requires no understanding about it.
Yes and no. If someone gives you the rules for doing the calculations you can turn the crank and churn out results without understanding what you're doing. But to interpret and test the predictions in terms of real experiments requires a certain level of understanding. And Schrodinger didn't come down off of the mountain with the Commandments of Quantum Mechanics inscribed in stone. A lot of smart people spent a lot of time wrestling with the conceptual problems in QM (though as you pointed out, the view of the majority does not constitute proof). And it didn't stop in the twenties. The development of Quantum Field Theory (which merges Quantum Mech with Special Relativity) into a mature science went on into the 70's.
You say that in a double-split experiment, which is essentially a demonstration of single-particle interference, the electron goes "both ways in some sense". That "some sense" screams for explanation.
You're right, it does. I ommitted the explanation in the interest of brevity -I thought my post was already getting longish. So here I go with my orthodox expalnation:
The basic idea is that the really fundamental description of an electron (or any other particle for that matter) is contained in its wave function. The wave function contains all of the physical info you want about an electron (e.g. it's position, momentum, charge and spin). If you want to know the odds that you'll find the electron at some point in space, you just take value of the wavefunction at that point and square it (there's a slight complication b/c the wavefunction is normally a complex function, but for our purposes it's a technicality).
Now between the times that you observe an electron, it behaves like a wave. But when you actually observe it, it behaves like a particle (i.e. there's no such thing as half or a third of an electron). So in a standard intereference experiment, but done with electrons instead of a light source, the wavefunction goes through both slits and interferes with itself, giving the classic result. In "that sense," the electron has gone through both slits -because the wavefunction did. But the wavefunction isn't the electron. The question as too which slit the thing went through has no meaning in this context. You can't tell! Question answered?
But, suppose you did try and tell which slit the electron went through (I'm getting off-topic here, but as long as we're discussing it). Then you have to make an observation at the slits. You know that the electron is at one slit or the other. That means that the probability is 1 that it was at one of the slits, and zero that it was at the other. That resets (collapses) the wavefunction so it can be consistent with your observations. So now the wavefunction starts out from just a single slit and the interference pattern dissapears!! And this has been verified experimentally. As a side note, this also happens with light, if you start counting individual photons instead of intensities.
The multiverse interpretation has indeed been disfavored by physicists, although this is rapidly changing.
It is? This is news to me. As a physicist, I'm suprised that I haven't heard about this change of heart.
In any case arguments of that kind do nothing to refute the theory of the multiverse itself, and reminds me of the troubles of Galilei. In the end, majority has no real authority in scientific reasoning, but explanatory power has.
No, on a rigorous level, they do not. But please remember that noone's putting Fred Hoyle under house arrest for advocating the multiverse theory, nor demanding that he revoke it. I did make the point that this theory has not been disproven (I said "not discredited", which was a poor choice of words). And if you don't have the time to go through and personally verify and disprove every theory around (I certainly don't), you have to take someone's word. And in this case the most reliable source is the physics community at large. And I did give a reason for it's deisfavor: it's not a theory that can be proven or disproven over the Copenhagen interpretation. Since that is the simpler theory, it wins by virtue of Ockam's Razor.
I am a quantum physicist (truth be told, most physicists do study quantum mechanics at one level or another), so let me make a few points:
1) The real world (whatever that is) is, as far as anyone knows, governed by the laws of Quantum Mechanics. Period. So the question is not the applicability of QM, but of Classical Physics which is an approximation of QM in some circumstances (very large distances scales, energies, quantum numbers etc.). So QM could be used to describe buckyballs -if you could do the calculations- and yield a more accurate answer than CM.
2) Getting closer to the topic, this article smells kind of fishy. McFadden doesn't seem to understand Quantum Mechanics. I know, I know. He claims noone does, and on some fundamental level, that may be true. But we do know how to make some pretty damn precise calculations and predictions with it. Which requires at least some understanding.
For example the claims about an electron going in two (or more)different directions: true, but it's somewhat more complicated than that. If you try to observe an electron doing that, you never will. But if you don't check which way the electron went it can look like it went two ways (you can do a double slit intereference experiment with electrons, to invoke Physics 102- depending on how you do the experiment, you get an intereference pattern or not. With the interefence pattern, that means that the electron went both ways in some sense).
Another example: a particle is always in one and only one state at a time, never billions. However one state (say a state of definite energy) can be thought of -for some purposes- as a combination (superposition) of many other states (say states with definite position). But it is really only in one state.
3) The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is strongly disfavored (though not discredited) by physicists. Primarily because there is no real way of testing or disproving it. It predicts exactly the same things as the "orthodox" (aka Copenhagen) interpretation, which is simpler.
In all likelihood, we'll see the widescreen edition come out a year after the Pan-and-scan version too. He did this with the last release of the original version of the trilogy. And dammit, it worked on me.
It seems to me that we're thinking about this in the wrong way. The danger is that some corporation will not only take a piece of GPL'd software and try to co-opt it, but actually sue various geeks and users who are "violating" the corporation's "copyright."
IMHO, the right way to think about this is in terms of defense against lawsuits by corporations, not in terms of going after corporations that violate GPL. If a corp violates GPL on some project but doesn't bother to enforce it, I would imagine there's a good chance that the project would fork into commercial and non-commercial branches.
If the corp sues the developers and/or users of the open-sourced branch, it will not have a leg to stand on since both branches derive from GPL'd code (of course, IANL).
"In reality the entire scientific community is bunch of argumentative ego-maniacs."
Okay, as I scientist (or one in training, at any rate), I can't let that slip.
There is a certain truth to the statement: scientists tend to be egotistical. On the other hand, as a community, I think we've earned the right to a ceratin amount of pride. We've accomplished a helluva lot, esp. in the last century or so. Sometimes the justified pride just gets out of control...
We are also very definitely argumentitive. But that's a Good Thing. That's how we get at the truth: if I propose some new theory of gravity, I fully expect every scientist who's able to try and beat the crap out of it, and try and prove it's garbage. If I'm right, the theory will survive and maybe I'll win a Nobel Prize. If I'm completely off base, then all those arguments will show it. And if I'm partly right (which is the most likely possibility), then the process will weed out the garbage and preserve the good parts.
I don't thing using power lines for data lines is such a smart idea. We're talking 120 Volts AC at 60 Hz. Yes the bandwidth would suck, but the voltage is the real issue. Rapid transitions on that magnitude are not something you want to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
if so it bears repeating. B/c a lot of effort is
being expended on something that's effectively impossible.
As I understand the scheme: the info on the cd -software, music,
whatever, is encrypted. And there's a little chip on the disk that
decides if a read request is valid. If it is, then it also gives
you the key for decrypting the info. But then you've got the key. So you can copy the disc, encryption and all and use the
key. Or the decrypted info. All of these schemes are wasted effort,
b/c to enable an arbitrary person to use these things you have provide the means for decrypting the whatever-it-is along with the whatever it is. It really is ludicrous.
Is it secure? I don't know much about Bluetooth, so I couldn't say. But I don't want to be transmitting my keystrokes in cleartext over RF. Somebody probably already mentioned this, but I couldn't find the thread...
Actually, SuperK is in the business of looking at high energy neutrinos as well. The result that is SuperK's major claim to fame is the detection of neutrino osscillations made by looking at atmospheric neutrinos.
If a password is based on your innermost secrets, doesn't that make it hard to guess?
I think it's more complicated than that. The random mutations are also much less likely to have an effect on anything: maybe an unused gene got modified. Maybe it's just a really small change. At any rate, the random mutation in any one organism has nothing to do with the mutation in any other organism.
Genetic enginering on the other hand is about big (or bigger at any rate) changes on lots of organisms all in the same way.
As far as the dangers are concerned, natrual mutation is like taking baby-steps near a cliff in the middle of the night. Artificial mutations are like jumping around near the same cliff but with only a little light to see by(at least for now).
Of course, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing this. We should. But we need to be very careful.
So maybe we shouldn't ignore it, but what if this sort of intrusiveness does stand up in court (IANAL, but this sort of thing is pretty common to my understanding, so I would assume that it's on reasonably firm legal footing)? In many cases, it's not as though we can go elsewhere to do our research. I'm a high-energy physicist. High energy experiments are very expensive, with prices that reach to the hundreds of millions of dollars. In the US, there are only a handful of labs that do it. And guess what? They're almost much all DOE labs!! What's more, depending in the type of work you do, you are completely limited to DOE labs. Even working in other countries isn't neccessarily an option, depending on what you want to do.
That being said, I'm not too worried. I think this sort of thing is probably restricted by some sort of "probable cause" consideration. I rather suspect that the sysadmins take that particular warning as seriously as the rest of us do. It was imposed from on high, not by the people who do the real work of maintaining the systems.
At the end of the day, many scientists don't have too much choice in the matter. The question is whether this represents a real threat to our privacy, or if it's just a way of placating the federal government. I think it's the latter, although it does perhaps open some doors that are better left closed.
Anti-gravity,when talked about by serious scientists (don't I sound pretentious today?) usually refers to some aspect of gravity that causes masses to repel each other instead of attract. There are theories of gravity that do predict this on extremely large (i.e. cosmological) scales.
Quite how you can research anti-gravity when no one understands how gravity works is beyond me.
Maybe as part of research into how gravity works?
Metoo! Amen! Yes! Alleluia, praise the source code!
Okay, I'm done with that now. What all this amounts to is a pace of evolution which is much faster than we're used to. Life has been growing and changing, evolving into things new and different for 4.5 billion years or so. Two things are different now: it's happening much faster and we're in control of it. Admittedly, we're not neccessarily smart or wise enough to do a good job at directing evolution, but it's not so far fetched to believe that we can do better than the more or less completely random process that has dominated the history of our planet.
So we've created machines that are doubling in power every 18 months. But for now, they still need us, and if not, so what? And will they truly replace us or merge with us to form something different? And whatever the answer: so what?
But Bill Joy seems also to neglect the point of genetic engineering: once it becomes a truly mature science, maybe we will start increasing in capacity as fast as our computers are now. Let's face it: the reason this hasn't already happened is that our understanding of transistors is so far ahead of our understanding of DNA (ethics, sadly, do not matter: have we ever created a weapon that we did not at least try to use?). But that's changing. In any case, we're going to become something else. But again: so, what?
If anyone thinks that the human race is going to survive unchanged till the end of the universe, or even the end of the sun, they're wrong (unless, the end happens in the very near future). Someday, we will be replaced. It may happen slowly and impercetibly, or swiftly and dramatically, but it will happen. It may happen in the 21st century, it may happen in the 12th millenium. As long as we have a legacy, does it matter what form it takes?
I beg to differ. Mega-corps are a natural outgrowth of a capitalist system. In capitalism, smaller businesses continually reinvest their revenues into expansion. Small firms get bigger, and more efficient. They start gobbling up the their competitors, or forcing them out of business. Once the corporations get big enough, they have the money to exert a massive influence on the government. and the cycle continues. It's positive feedback meets Economic Darwinism.
Eliminating subsidies for the corportaions is an absolutely neccessary step, but it's not sufficient, unless you do something about the capitalist enviornment in which this all happens (No, I'm not a socialist: to be frank, I don't know what I am).
But this raises an important point: What do we do about this? Complaining about it is a good first step, but if that's all we do, then complaining and worrying is pointless.
On a related issue, to what extent is the wider culture aware of what the DMCA is and what it threatens? The vast majority of the news I hear about it comes from slashdot. I hear almost nothing about these issues on the more popular news media (admittedly, I get most of my news from NPR, which is hardly the news source of the masses). Is the next step to get the word out to the mainstream?
Good base idea, but you also have to supply the "get by ftp" option as well (I don't remeber what it is right now). But upgrading all of your software blindly like that is a bad idea. You want to spend some effort verifying that the downloads are uncorrupted and uncracked.
But doesn't autorpm do this for you?
Doing precise calculations and predictions with quantum mechanics requires no understanding about it.
Yes and no. If someone gives you the rules for doing the calculations you can turn the crank and churn out results without understanding what you're doing. But to interpret and test the predictions in terms of real experiments requires a certain level of understanding. And Schrodinger didn't come down off of the mountain with the Commandments of Quantum Mechanics inscribed in stone. A lot of smart people spent a lot of time wrestling with the conceptual problems in QM (though as you pointed out, the view of the majority does not constitute proof). And it didn't stop in the twenties. The development of Quantum Field Theory (which merges Quantum Mech with Special Relativity) into a mature science went on into the 70's.
You say that in a double-split experiment, which is essentially a demonstration of single-particle interference, the electron goes "both ways in some sense". That "some sense" screams for explanation.
You're right, it does. I ommitted the explanation in the interest of brevity -I thought my post was already getting longish. So here I go with my orthodox expalnation:
The basic idea is that the really fundamental description of an electron (or any other particle for that matter) is contained in its wave function. The wave function contains all of the physical info you want about an electron (e.g. it's position, momentum, charge and spin). If you want to know the odds that you'll find the electron at some point in space, you just take value of the wavefunction at that point and square it (there's a slight complication b/c the wavefunction is normally a complex function, but for our purposes it's a technicality).
Now between the times that you observe an electron, it behaves like a wave. But when you actually observe it, it behaves like a particle (i.e. there's no such thing as half or a third of an electron). So in a standard intereference experiment, but done with electrons instead of a light source, the wavefunction goes through both slits and interferes with itself, giving the classic result. In "that sense," the electron has gone through both slits -because the wavefunction did. But the wavefunction isn't the electron. The question as too which slit the thing went through has no meaning in this context. You can't tell! Question answered?
But, suppose you did try and tell which slit the electron went through (I'm getting off-topic here, but as long as we're discussing it). Then you have to make an observation at the slits. You know that the electron is at one slit or the other. That means that the probability is 1 that it was at one of the slits, and zero that it was at the other. That resets (collapses) the wavefunction so it can be consistent with your observations. So now the wavefunction starts out from just a single slit and the interference pattern dissapears!! And this has been verified experimentally. As a side note, this also happens with light, if you start counting individual photons instead of intensities.
The multiverse interpretation has indeed been disfavored by physicists, although this is rapidly changing.
It is? This is news to me. As a physicist, I'm suprised that I haven't heard about this change of heart.
In any case arguments of that kind do nothing to refute the theory of the multiverse itself, and reminds me of the troubles of Galilei. In the end, majority has no real authority in scientific reasoning, but explanatory power has.
No, on a rigorous level, they do not. But please remember that noone's putting Fred Hoyle under house arrest for advocating the multiverse theory, nor demanding that he revoke it. I did make the point that this theory has not been disproven (I said "not discredited", which was a poor choice of words). And if you don't have the time to go through and personally verify and disprove every theory around (I certainly don't), you have to take someone's word. And in this case the most reliable source is the physics community at large. And I did give a reason for it's deisfavor: it's not a theory that can be proven or disproven over the Copenhagen interpretation. Since that is the simpler theory, it wins by virtue of Ockam's Razor.
Well, I'm done blithering on for now. Adios!
1) The real world (whatever that is) is, as far as anyone knows, governed by the laws of Quantum Mechanics. Period. So the question is not the applicability of QM, but of Classical Physics which is an approximation of QM in some circumstances (very large distances scales, energies, quantum numbers etc.). So QM could be used to describe buckyballs -if you could do the calculations- and yield a more accurate answer than CM.
2) Getting closer to the topic, this article smells kind of fishy. McFadden doesn't seem to understand Quantum Mechanics. I know, I know. He claims noone does, and on some fundamental level, that may be true. But we do know how to make some pretty damn precise calculations and predictions with it. Which requires at least some understanding.
For example the claims about an electron going in two (or more)different directions: true, but it's somewhat more complicated than that. If you try to observe an electron doing that, you never will. But if you don't check which way the electron went it can look like it went two ways (you can do a double slit intereference experiment with electrons, to invoke Physics 102- depending on how you do the experiment, you get an intereference pattern or not. With the interefence pattern, that means that the electron went both ways in some sense).
Another example: a particle is always in one and only one state at a time, never billions. However one state (say a state of definite energy) can be thought of -for some purposes- as a combination (superposition) of many other states (say states with definite position). But it is really only in one state.
3) The multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics is strongly disfavored (though not discredited) by physicists. Primarily because there is no real way of testing or disproving it. It predicts exactly the same things as the "orthodox" (aka Copenhagen) interpretation, which is simpler.
Ok, that's all I have to say for now.
In all likelihood, we'll see the widescreen edition come out a year after the Pan-and-scan version too. He did this with the last release of
the original version of the trilogy. And dammit, it worked on me.
IMHO, the right way to think about this is in terms of defense against lawsuits by corporations, not in terms of going after corporations that violate GPL. If a corp violates GPL on some project but doesn't bother to enforce it, I would imagine there's a good chance that the project would fork into commercial and non-commercial branches.
If the corp sues the developers and/or users of the open-sourced branch, it will not have a leg to stand on since both branches derive from GPL'd code (of course, IANL).
Okay, as I scientist (or one in training, at any rate), I can't let that slip.
There is a certain truth to the statement: scientists tend to be egotistical. On the other hand, as a community, I think we've earned the right to a ceratin amount of pride. We've accomplished a helluva lot, esp. in the last century or so. Sometimes the justified pride just gets out of control...
We are also very definitely argumentitive. But that's a Good Thing. That's how we get at the truth: if I propose some new theory of gravity, I fully expect every scientist who's able to try and beat the crap out of it, and try and prove it's garbage. If I'm right, the theory will survive and maybe I'll win a Nobel Prize. If I'm completely off base, then all those arguments will show it. And if I'm partly right (which is the most likely possibility), then the process will weed out the garbage and preserve the good parts.
I don't thing using power lines for data lines is such a smart idea. We're talking 120 Volts AC at 60 Hz. Yes the bandwidth would suck, but the voltage is the real issue. Rapid transitions on that magnitude are not something you want to deal with.