It's a matter of the material used. The process requires certain properties of the material but is not restricted to any particular substance. This one requires a cryostat to attain the required properties, but other materials are quite possible. It's a matter of doping the right crystal with the right ions. The technique has also been done in warm rubidium vapor with nearly as good efficiencies and, I think, longer storage times.
That's incorrect. Remote state preparation absolutely does change the state of a distant particle. For example, consider the case that you have correlated particles such that they will both be measured in the same same state. Each particle is in a superposition of state 1 and state 0 but if one is measured to be a 1 then it prepares the other in state 1 and vice versa. Both particles could be in either state until one is measured, at that point the state of the other is prepared in the state of it's partner. No information is transmitted; however, because the state of the first particle is random anyway.
Read up on Bell's Inequality or the EPR paradox for an explanation of the fact that the state is truly random until it is measured and hence the entangled particle is remotely prepared.
Quite true. Two years retention is longer than most I think, but IP logs are retained in most places. It's not really any different from telephone companies keeping records of calls placed. The filter is, in fact, bat-shit crazy, but isn't law (yet).
Canada, the US and Europe have retention laws. Canada is about to put into law a requirement for ISPs to have intercept-capable equipment, essentially putting internet communications on similar legal grounds as telephone communications. The FBI and NSA do whatever the hell they want regardless of the law; which is much scarier than anything in Australia.
I believe that you are mistaken. The government wants the ISPs to log source and destination IP addresses of communications, but not the content contained in the communication. It's exactly the same as keeping telephone records; which has been done for many decades. The police will be able to subpoena records of who you talked to, but not what was said.
The carrier has a given capacity to be divided between users. If a user uses more of that finite capacity than other users, then that user should be billed more. The pricing model that most accurately reflects the value of the commodity would be to have users pay for the bandwidth that they use, scaled to the demand at that time of day. I don't want to pay for someone else's "unlimited," I want to pay for what I use.
Quebec has a long history of failing to put contracts to tender properly. In particular, the construction industry has long been involved in the corruption of government officials to win contracts on dubious grounds. It's part of the reason that the infrastructure is so bad. I doubt that corruption was involved in this case however; I think it comes more from the fact that a large slice of the public doesn't realize that non-Microsoft operating systems exist.
It's a levy, not a tax. The people that receive the money from the levy would prefer this type of legislation over the levy and the government doesn't get to keep it so I suspect that it may die.
The research is targeted specifically at dedicated audio/video encoding/decoding blocks within the processors of mobile devices and similar error-tolerant applications. The journalist just didn't mention the fact that the idea isn't to expose the entire system to fault-prone components. When considered in the light that the most power-sensitive mainstream devices (cell-phones) spend most of their time doing these error-tolerant tasks, the research becomes quite interesting. They claim to have demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique to encode an h.264 video.
I did some digging and found some material by the researcher, unfiltered by journalists. I don't have any background in processor architecture but I'll present what I understood. The original publications can be found here.
The target of the research is not general computing, but rather low-power "client-side" computing, as the author puts it. I understand this to be decoding application, such as voice or video in mobile devices. Furthermore, the entire architecture would not be stochastic, but rather it would contain some functional blocks that are stochastic. I think the idea is that certain mobile hardware devices devote much of their time to specialized applications that do not require absolute accuracy.
A mobile phone may spend most of it's time being used encode/decode low resolution voice and video and would have significant blocks within the processor devoted to those tasks. Those tasks could be considered error tolerant. The operating system would not be exposed to error-prone hardware, only applications that use hardware acceleration for specialized, error-tolerant tasks. In fact, the researchers specifically mention encoding/decoding voice and video and have demonstrated the technique on encoding h.264 video.
What scientists mean to convey when they present a discovery: We performed experiment A. Result B was obtained. We propose mechanism C to explain the findings.
What the media reports: Scientists prove C!
What appears in the abstract: In the last decade, there has been much interest in D. We have done something that relates only tangentially, but will pretend that it's relevant. To investigate D, we performed A with the result B. We propose that the findings can be explained by C, which is a critical step towards understanding D, building a quantum computers and curing cancer.
What the researchers say to each other: Fuck yeah, we got B to agree with C (sort of)! Beers are on me! Now I can defend my thesis and I'll never have to see A again! We can probably put in something about D to try to get into a better journal.
The particular language used by each group is tailored to the audience. The immutable facts are that A was done and B was obtained; that's the science.
I think it even goes beyond general education. Science, more than other disciplines, relies on a great deal of existing knowledge to talk about current work. Other fields also rely on the sum of past works, but usually new stand more freely of previous ones. One can appreciate a Beethoven symphony without being familiar with the works of Bach but it's difficult to describe the relevance of recent developments in physics without referencing earlier works. A full understanding of new results in science very much requires the reader to be able to understand the principles as well as the technical language. I think that general education furthers that goal, but a keen understanding requires a more specialized knowledge.
What would be productive regarding the public's understanding of scientific findings would be to educate people to understand where their background fails them with respect to the discovery being presented. That's what scientists and science journalists often fail to communicate and leave the readers with the impression that they have received the full picture. As you point out, putting scientific terms into more common terms is more a problem than a solution. For one thing, the meaning changes if the terms are not translated very carefully, for another, if someone understands everything presented to them, then they will assume that they understand everything that has been done.
It is a very, very difficult task to convey a general understanding while giving an appreciation of the complexity involved in discoveries but I think that scientists need to avoid over-simplifying their work when talking to the media or they will be mis-understood. Of course, not simplifying at all would result in articles that bear no resemblance to what was actually done; it's a delicate balance. I find that the best tool that I have when reading articles from disciplines other is my understanding of how little I know about the material.
I think that Google might well restore the app if a counter-claim was filed. They work hard to avoid being painted as a big evil corporation and in this case, there's no risk to them if the counter-claim is filed, in fact, there's less risk. All the risk would be assumed by the developer of Falling Blocks, who would have to hope that the EFF would supply lawyers in the event of a law suit.
The first thing I do when I pick up a paper is read the name of the last author to get an idea of the likely quality of the research and writing. I don't know what field you work in, but quantum optics doesn't tend to have a problem with fraud. It's easy to assess whether a particular result looks plausible and easy test if it looks like something was done wrong. If a researcher builds a reputation by performing a series of very well done experiments, they're not going to ruin it by faking relatively uninteresting results.
That's a valid argument for China, Russia and Africa but Canada, on the other hand, is only on the list because US Big Content wants to strong-arm the Canadian government into clarifying the personal use exemptions in a Big Content friendly light. The Canadian economy is structured similarly to that of the US and the laws regarding IP are similar and are strictly enforced.
The differences that anger Big Content are that Canadian ISPs are less likely to give up IP addresses due to issues of civil liberties and that the blank media levy places infringement for personal use in muddier waters. These issues have no real influence on the "knowledge culture."
The work was done by Jian-Wei Pan, one of the leaders in the field and a very impressive researcher. You can bet that the result is accurate if his name is behind it. Furthermore, it's being published in Nature Photonics. Besides, the result is impressive, but not ground breaking. Extending the distance of the protocol requires some fancy techniques and a good deal of skill and expertise, but the results aren't surprising.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a matter of the material used. The process requires certain properties of the material but is not restricted to any particular substance. This one requires a cryostat to attain the required properties, but other materials are quite possible. It's a matter of doping the right crystal with the right ions. The technique has also been done in warm rubidium vapor with nearly as good efficiencies and, I think, longer storage times.
That's incorrect. Remote state preparation absolutely does change the state of a distant particle. For example, consider the case that you have correlated particles such that they will both be measured in the same same state. Each particle is in a superposition of state 1 and state 0 but if one is measured to be a 1 then it prepares the other in state 1 and vice versa. Both particles could be in either state until one is measured, at that point the state of the other is prepared in the state of it's partner. No information is transmitted; however, because the state of the first particle is random anyway.
Read up on Bell's Inequality or the EPR paradox for an explanation of the fact that the state is truly random until it is measured and hence the entangled particle is remotely prepared.
Quite true. Two years retention is longer than most I think, but IP logs are retained in most places. It's not really any different from telephone companies keeping records of calls placed. The filter is, in fact, bat-shit crazy, but isn't law (yet).
Canada, the US and Europe have retention laws. Canada is about to put into law a requirement for ISPs to have intercept-capable equipment, essentially putting internet communications on similar legal grounds as telephone communications. The FBI and NSA do whatever the hell they want regardless of the law; which is much scarier than anything in Australia.
I believe that you are mistaken. The government wants the ISPs to log source and destination IP addresses of communications, but not the content contained in the communication. It's exactly the same as keeping telephone records; which has been done for many decades. The police will be able to subpoena records of who you talked to, but not what was said.
Reminds me of this.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The government can regain money through taxation. The violation of a civil liberty is a loss that cannot be regained.
The carrier has a given capacity to be divided between users. If a user uses more of that finite capacity than other users, then that user should be billed more. The pricing model that most accurately reflects the value of the commodity would be to have users pay for the bandwidth that they use, scaled to the demand at that time of day. I don't want to pay for someone else's "unlimited," I want to pay for what I use.
Quebec has a long history of failing to put contracts to tender properly. In particular, the construction industry has long been involved in the corruption of government officials to win contracts on dubious grounds. It's part of the reason that the infrastructure is so bad. I doubt that corruption was involved in this case however; I think it comes more from the fact that a large slice of the public doesn't realize that non-Microsoft operating systems exist.
Here is some English reporting on the subject.
It's a levy, not a tax. The people that receive the money from the levy would prefer this type of legislation over the levy and the government doesn't get to keep it so I suspect that it may die.
Looks to me like it's RIM's fault.
Rosenberg claims that she accessed the Maps function on her Blackberry mobile device, where it did not include the warning.
I'd say it's time to fire the lawyers who forgot to sue RIM and then use new lawyers to sue the lawyers whose mistake it was.
The research is targeted specifically at dedicated audio/video encoding/decoding blocks within the processors of mobile devices and similar error-tolerant applications. The journalist just didn't mention the fact that the idea isn't to expose the entire system to fault-prone components. When considered in the light that the most power-sensitive mainstream devices (cell-phones) spend most of their time doing these error-tolerant tasks, the research becomes quite interesting. They claim to have demonstrated the effectiveness of the technique to encode an h.264 video.
I did some digging and found some material by the researcher, unfiltered by journalists. I don't have any background in processor architecture but I'll present what I understood. The original publications can be found here.
The target of the research is not general computing, but rather low-power "client-side" computing, as the author puts it. I understand this to be decoding application, such as voice or video in mobile devices. Furthermore, the entire architecture would not be stochastic, but rather it would contain some functional blocks that are stochastic. I think the idea is that certain mobile hardware devices devote much of their time to specialized applications that do not require absolute accuracy.
A mobile phone may spend most of it's time being used encode/decode low resolution voice and video and would have significant blocks within the processor devoted to those tasks. Those tasks could be considered error tolerant. The operating system would not be exposed to error-prone hardware, only applications that use hardware acceleration for specialized, error-tolerant tasks. In fact, the researchers specifically mention encoding/decoding voice and video and have demonstrated the technique on encoding h.264 video.
What scientists mean to convey when they present a discovery :
We performed experiment A. Result B was obtained. We propose mechanism C to explain the findings.
What the media reports:
Scientists prove C!
What appears in the abstract:
In the last decade, there has been much interest in D. We have done something that relates only tangentially, but will pretend that it's relevant. To investigate D, we performed A with the result B. We propose that the findings can be explained by C, which is a critical step towards understanding D, building a quantum computers and curing cancer.
What the researchers say to each other:
Fuck yeah, we got B to agree with C (sort of)! Beers are on me! Now I can defend my thesis and I'll never have to see A again! We can probably put in something about D to try to get into a better journal.
The particular language used by each group is tailored to the audience. The immutable facts are that A was done and B was obtained; that's the science.
I think it even goes beyond general education. Science, more than other disciplines, relies on a great deal of existing knowledge to talk about current work. Other fields also rely on the sum of past works, but usually new stand more freely of previous ones. One can appreciate a Beethoven symphony without being familiar with the works of Bach but it's difficult to describe the relevance of recent developments in physics without referencing earlier works. A full understanding of new results in science very much requires the reader to be able to understand the principles as well as the technical language. I think that general education furthers that goal, but a keen understanding requires a more specialized knowledge.
What would be productive regarding the public's understanding of scientific findings would be to educate people to understand where their background fails them with respect to the discovery being presented. That's what scientists and science journalists often fail to communicate and leave the readers with the impression that they have received the full picture. As you point out, putting scientific terms into more common terms is more a problem than a solution. For one thing, the meaning changes if the terms are not translated very carefully, for another, if someone understands everything presented to them, then they will assume that they understand everything that has been done.
It is a very, very difficult task to convey a general understanding while giving an appreciation of the complexity involved in discoveries but I think that scientists need to avoid over-simplifying their work when talking to the media or they will be mis-understood. Of course, not simplifying at all would result in articles that bear no resemblance to what was actually done; it's a delicate balance. I find that the best tool that I have when reading articles from disciplines other is my understanding of how little I know about the material.
I think that Google might well restore the app if a counter-claim was filed. They work hard to avoid being painted as a big evil corporation and in this case, there's no risk to them if the counter-claim is filed, in fact, there's less risk. All the risk would be assumed by the developer of Falling Blocks, who would have to hope that the EFF would supply lawyers in the event of a law suit.
Excuse me but isn't that exactly what I said?
Oh, you expect me to read the entire post before complaining about it? I don't think so, I mean, this is the internet after all.
...for stealing a loaf of bread when they were starving.
Yes, not wanting to pay $20 for a CD is exactly the same thing as starving.
...CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY...
Having to file for personal bankruptcy does qualify as having a crime against humanity committed against you.
The first thing I do when I pick up a paper is read the name of the last author to get an idea of the likely quality of the research and writing. I don't know what field you work in, but quantum optics doesn't tend to have a problem with fraud. It's easy to assess whether a particular result looks plausible and easy test if it looks like something was done wrong. If a researcher builds a reputation by performing a series of very well done experiments, they're not going to ruin it by faking relatively uninteresting results.
That's a valid argument for China, Russia and Africa but Canada, on the other hand, is only on the list because US Big Content wants to strong-arm the Canadian government into clarifying the personal use exemptions in a Big Content friendly light. The Canadian economy is structured similarly to that of the US and the laws regarding IP are similar and are strictly enforced.
The differences that anger Big Content are that Canadian ISPs are less likely to give up IP addresses due to issues of civil liberties and that the blank media levy places infringement for personal use in muddier waters. These issues have no real influence on the "knowledge culture."
This research group happens to be very well respected and is a leader in the field. They are, without question, some very good scientists.
The work was done by Jian-Wei Pan, one of the leaders in the field and a very impressive researcher. You can bet that the result is accurate if his name is behind it. Furthermore, it's being published in Nature Photonics. Besides, the result is impressive, but not ground breaking. Extending the distance of the protocol requires some fancy techniques and a good deal of skill and expertise, but the results aren't surprising.
That's one way to keep people from using the wireless for lewd things. London will be able to associate a face with every packet sent.
I find your sig ironic given the content of your post ;-)