Last night, after it had been announced that Barack was President-Elect, Jesse Jackson was bawling his eyes out. I don't think it was because Jackson was thinking "That should have been me!", I think it was because Jackson was thinking "I used to think I would never live to see a day with a black president".
There were a lot of people in the US who still refused to vote for a black man. But now that it's happened and that Obama, who is a lot more mainstream than the Republicans painted him out to be, will show that most of those fears were as much utter rubbish as the Iraqi WMD, those kinds of attacks will be a lot harder to make stick on the next go round. When you repeatedly lie and are shown to have lied, your credibility takes a dive, even with the notoriously easily-distracted US electorate.
Obama would never have made it if Bush/Cheney incompetency and malevolence hadn't been so rampant that it so badly damaged the Republican brand. If you believe in an interventionist god, there were a lot of unusual circumstances (like the credit crisis and stock market crash) that were very timely in helping put him over the top. If fundamentalist Christians actually believe what they claim, they should be doing some heavy soul-searching today about whether the unlikelihood of the timing of those events isn't miraculous.
Not that I believe in some kind of supernatural intervention; the deregulation & supply side economics house of cards was bound to tumble down at some point in time. But I can't hold any respect for people who can't even stay consistent in the fantasies they expound to everyone else.
Ignoring the fact that non-profit groups might have the same reasons for cutting corners
It's less of an issue. For-profit corporations in the US are required by law to maximize profit for shareholders. Non-profits usually have different priorities. Sure there's still a lot of potential for individual greed gumming up the works, but non-profit organization eliminates a whole class of failure modes. For some types of enterprises, society is willing to accept the risk of those failure modes in exchange for the increased efficiency that they can provide in delivering a desired product. However a very strong argument can be made that the production of energy through nuclear fission has sufficiently bad potential consequences (thousands or millions dying and trillions' worth of land and resources unavailable for decades vs. a few thousand people out of work) that the greater efficiencies sometimes available through for-profit organizations are not worth the risk.
I said highly regulated. I didn't say how. Your approach is intriguing. However I think that it has its flaws as well. While trying to get a bounty might work as motivation, in an environment where nuclear operators are afraid of giving up a bounty, you could also get an inspecting organization that hires cheap inexperienced inspectors because they can pay them less and have greater profit margin on the inspections. They would have a competitive advantage so that other private auditors would be forced to adopt similar approaches to avoid being underbid, until the point where all the auditing companies are barely competent and your power producers figure out they can skimp on maintenance without anybody catching on.
Perhaps have one inspection done by the public sector (DoE or equivalent) and one by the private sector? The competition for prestige might help both keep a higher quality of inspection, because you can compare the results and see which one missed more. That can help with promotion/bonus decisions in the public sector and contracting decisions on the private side and reduces the chance of collusion that might exist if there were only private sector companies.
Heh. I remember when my high school senior physics class took a tour of TRIUMF. TRIUMF is synchrotron - a type of particle accelerator. This was a few years after the release of "The China Syndrome" but before "Silkwood". Because we all had to wear visitor badges to measure radiation exposure, one of the people in the group asked (and had to be reassured twice) whether there was any possibility of a meltdown-type nuclear accident.
Joe SixPack and Joe the plumber probably never took any physics in high school beyond lower-level mandatory science classes, so it's no wonder that most Americans completely misunderstand the risks and are so easily manipulated on the subject.
That said, I wouldn't want anywhere close to my home a nuke plant that was run by a for-profit company with incentive to cut inspections and maintenance levels so low that accidents would happen. I don't care that a whole regulatory apparatus might be in place now to monitor and control maintenance levels when they can buy politicians over a 10-20 year time-frame to gut the regulatory apparatus.
I think nuclear power can be safe and needs to be an option in the power generation game, but it needs to be run by highly regulated non-profit corps to limit the biggest risks, which stem from greed and corruption.
I think that if that abuse of terror legislation was more widely known to investors, it would have serious negative impact on foreign investment in the UK.
Let's also not forget that Admiral Yamamoto was one of the few Japanese high-ranking officers who counselled against declaring war on the US because, having visited the US, he (rightly) believed that the US industrial capacity would overwhelm the Japanese through attrition. While in the US he probably didn't see a lot of civilians carrying or owning guns, but he knew that, on its home turf, the US could quickly produce guns, ammo, and other infantry equipment and overwhelm a Japanese force with long supply lines.
Yeah, soldiers shooting and killing unarmed civilians could never happen in the US. The soldiers would never believe the vilification by the authorities of protesters "that look and speak just like them, in their own country".
Is this one of the human rights? As far as I know, no nation in the world allows you self-defense against the state (also known as cop-killing). There is also no nation in the world that has a law on the books that states: "If we, your government, suddenly turns oppressive (determined by the citizen's opinion), it is hunky dory to kill cops." As I understand it, the 2nd amendment gives you the right to wave your guns around, it doesn't give you the right to use them on people.
Note that this happened in Canada for a probable drug dealer who had his house raided under a bad warrant. It's called jury nullification (and note that the jury didn't even know it was a bad warrant).
I don't know if weapons or drug possession charges would still be valid given the state of the warrant. I figure that what happened is that the jury (rightly so) probably figured, yeah, he looks like he was a bad guy and may deserve to be put in jail for the other offences but given a recent history of home invasions and kidnappings, if I was in a position where people were breaking down my door without identifying themselves as police first, I should have the right to use the means at hand to defend myself and my family.
Pedophilia is not the same thing as women's rights.
True enough, they are actually closer to polar opposites from an ethical standpoint. Pedophilia involves the (sexual) exploitation of a category of humans who are vulnerable due to naturally lower economic and legal standing (i.e. the average earning potential and intellectual development of juveniles is naturally less than that of mature adults due to limited age and experience - a difference which is eliminated given time and education). Fighting for women's rights involves combating the exploitation of a category of humans who are being artificially forced to have lower economic and legal standing (potential physical strength is no longer a significantly defining factor in an industrial or post-industrial society).
Pedophilia is not the same thing as racism.
Well, racism usually singles out an ethnically-identifiable group, claiming it is inherently (genetically) inferior or evil, and argues that group should have lower economic and legal standing. These arguments are usually given as a justification for the subjugation and exploitation of that ethnic subgroup or of the resources under their control. So while racism is not the same thing as pedophilia and they are expressed in different ways, there are definitely some strong parallels.
Try replacing "racism" in your sentence with "woman's rights".
In a sense you are correct that advocating any of the three positions involves challenging and advocating replacement of current locally-accepted social standards with different ones. However, one type of advocacy (defending women's rights) is supported by strong ethical reasoning and documented scientific (biological) evidence, whereas similar types of evidence and argument directly contradict the other two types of advocacy. Generally, Western culture has become economically and militarily dominant because it has either adopted or "lucked into"1 approaches supported by ethical and scientific arguments, even when countered by religious or discriminatory prejudices. Major setbacks have occurred when we have set those principles aside in favour of ideology. So there's good reasons for the choices our society has made and even better reasons to defend them.
However the problem is that we are trying to impose the ethics of a post-industrial society on a primarily agrarian and feudal society. Note that that description still applies to most of the Middle East and south-central Asia (with limited exceptions). A lesser but similar dichotomy also applies to even the USA (more fundamentalist religious ideology in the more agrarian central and southern states as opposed to the more urbanized "blue" states).
Now, religious fundamentalists tend to decry the moral relativism implied by the previous paragraph, even though it's backed up by pretty strong empirical evidence. In the long run, I'll always bet on empirical evidence over ideology. The problem with fundamentalists who rail against moral relativism is that there are many different strains of fundamentalism with varying "moral absolutes", which would inevitably draw them into bloody conflict with each other (i.e. Shiite/Shia and Sunni extremists in Iraq and elsewhere) if they didn't consider ethical/scientific secularism to be even more offencive.
Overall, the best long term way to combat fundamentalism in the third world is to pull them out of a feudal and agrarian economy. In some states, promoting economic and industrial development will suffice. However in other states, the feudal order is supported by petroleum sales, and the status quo will only change with the complete replacement or obsolescence of petroleum as a major world energy source. So one way or another, it's going to happen in the next 100 years, but we can do a lot of damage to ourselves in the meantime.
It's not a case of reading more. I believe any culture that condemns the passage of information is not one worth preserving. I fully support repurposing their protein into something more useful like cattle feed. Also, indoor plumbing should not be underrated. And yes, I mean kill them all and take their land.
I suggest you take a look at those DMCA laws again.
Well, I suppose it could happen in the 22nd century or later after most of the people alive on Sept. 11, 2001 are dead or incapacitated, but I think it's safe to say that that type of attack won't be successful again in the next 50 years. Yeah OK, somebody may be stupid enough to try it again. Maybe the hijackers will think it's smart to hold back a couple of sleepers to identify and gruesomely kill the emerging leaders of a passenger counter-attack to try to cower the rest in spite of the 9/11 effect. Come to think of it, if the average USA passenger has your level of imagination, it just might work. However the odds are some passenger on a targeted plane would have enough brains to think of that too.
Frankly I expect that after that time frame, we'd better have a good handle on how to prevent the root causes of terrorism because biological/nanotech attacks will have become easy enough to make it more worthwhile (i.e. for psychological impact) than plane hijackings. Seriously, this TSA security theatre is a Maginot Line defense,... and it's sad that's it's a Frenchman having to point that out.
Bruce's latest Crypto-gram goes into a little more detail on why you are wrong. Also please keep in mind that you can purchase an airplane ticket over the internet with a credit card number bought from a Russian (or local) mobster a lot more easily than you can get a good fake driver's licence, the latter being physical and having pictures and copy-protection mechanisms, that will stand up to scrutiny. Although there is also an underground market for the latter, it's probably not as widespread as the stolen credit card market since the clientele is much narrower (mainly a small subset of illegal immigrants and underage teenagers trying to buy alcohol) and doesn't necessarily require high-quality forgeries.
There's minimal genetic difference between Palestinians Muslims and Levantine Jews. They came from common racial stock and a few thousand years apart haven't changed that much. So all the Palestinians really need to do to pass off as Jews is to learn how to speak Hebrew, and maybe a little Yiddish, with a convincing accent. Maybe learn a few passages from the Torah (as opposed to their Arabic translations) while they're at it. Shouldn't be that difficult apart for continuing to hate an "enemy" once they understand them better.
Q: Why did the [nation X citizen] sprinkle salt on the road?
A: To keep elephants away.
Q: But there are no elephants in [Nation X].
A: See, it's working!
Maybe instead, the drop in hijacking attempts means that potential hijackers who aren't suicidal terrorists (historically, the bulk of hijackers) have figured out that attempting to hijack a plane these days is effectively suicidal because the non-hijackers in the plane will mob you with no concern for your welfare. A free plane flight to Cuba just isn't worth the risk because the odds of success are so low. Knock over a [place of business] for funds and arrange proper transportation (though Mexico or the Caribbean) instead.
Apparently hijackers have a better feel for the actual risks in hijacking than the sheeple like you. The first thing I remember saying when I found out, after the fact, that planes had been hijacked and crashed into the WTC towers was "That'll never happen again". That was clear no matter what the TSA did.
As far as I know, switching would probably break quantum entanglement. So rather than build some huge infrastructure of point-to-point links, why not use USB one-time padsinstead? The portability of data storage makes that a possibility now.
It would seem that USB one-time pads would be a lot easier to implement, not to mention portable and scalable in a way that quantum crypto is never likely to be.
Yeah, but do you really need quantum crypto? The strongest encryption method is a one-time pad. You've now got easy access to 8GB USB sticks that can hold one heck of a big one-time pad, or 8 slightly smaller 1 time pads. As an individual, who do you really need to communicate very securely with? Your bank? Maybe a few close friends for e-mail?
Create a new type of smart USB device that, given a passphrase, allows you to load up a one-time pad data stream associated with a keyword (say BoA123456789), Given another passphrase, the device releases that info in read-once blocks that it then discards. Once a decade you go into your bank and reload the one-time pad.
If you need to VPN for work and transfer a lot of data, then do the same thing with shared symmetric keys and a seed block to stretch out the data.
The retention requirements on the bank side are quite a bit more stringent. 100,000 customers with 1GB one-time pads mean storing 100TB. Still, that's getting more affordable all the time. By the time quantum computing becomes practical for cracking public key encryption, this approach will be a lot more practical than running direct point-to-point links between business and clients for quantum cryptography.
Come to think of it, Meyer took over as president in July. I don't think it's a coincidence that somebody from the design side took over from someone from operations/process (Ruiz). I think what happened is that Ruiz couldn't swing financing for the next round of fabs and this strategy was adopted as an alternative. At that point it didn't make sense to have someone from operations running the company, they needed someone from design and Meyer was the obvious candidate. That handover makes sense now.
My guess is that this is a fallout of the credit crunch. It's come to a head on Wall Street now, but I wouldn't be surprised if, given the kind of capital that funding a new fab costs, that AMD realized months ago that they wouldn't be able to borrow for the next round of fab upgrades. So a new strategy was necessary, one that didn't involve a large debt overhead from fabrication plant upgrades.
Or maybe, since AMD have been using IBM's process technology for a while now, but there's been a delay in integrating that process into their own fabs, they think they can come to an agreement with IBM to use IBM's leading edge fabs.
It would make a lot of sense. IBM gets to run their high end fabs at higher capacity with a product that doesn't really compete with IBM's Power-based products, but which competes with one of IBM's biggest potential competitors (Intel). They also won't have to risk more anti-trust suits by buying out AMD to keep Intel in check on the low end. Otherwise, with a free rein on the low end, Intel could raise its margins to fund an attack against IBM on the high end. AMD gets access to leading edge fabs without needing to find the capital investment, something particularly important given the credit crunch.
Given Dirk Meyer's background in chip design, as opposed to process, this doesn't surprise me too much. However I think the credit crunch and the ability to get credit for the next round of fab upgrades is the big factor that left AMD with little choice. This kind of deal must have been brewing for months, but the credit crunch is what made it imperative. Intel and IBM have the cash reserves to self-finance fab upgrades but AMD would have had to go to the capital markets and pay too much interest, if they could anything at all. AMD is taking a bit of a chance that IBM would continue to give them continued access to their fabs, but Intel isn't going away any time soon and "the enemy of my enemy"... should keep them friendly for the next decade, or at least until the financial markets stabilize and credit becomes more easily available again.
So yeah, I expect the announcement of a big fabbing agreement between Intel and AMD sometime in the next 6 months.
Slashdot Mirror
Last night, after it had been announced that Barack was President-Elect, Jesse Jackson was bawling his eyes out. I don't think it was because Jackson was thinking "That should have been me!", I think it was because Jackson was thinking "I used to think I would never live to see a day with a black president".
There were a lot of people in the US who still refused to vote for a black man. But now that it's happened and that Obama, who is a lot more mainstream than the Republicans painted him out to be, will show that most of those fears were as much utter rubbish as the Iraqi WMD, those kinds of attacks will be a lot harder to make stick on the next go round. When you repeatedly lie and are shown to have lied, your credibility takes a dive, even with the notoriously easily-distracted US electorate.
Obama would never have made it if Bush/Cheney incompetency and malevolence hadn't been so rampant that it so badly damaged the Republican brand. If you believe in an interventionist god, there were a lot of unusual circumstances (like the credit crisis and stock market crash) that were very timely in helping put him over the top. If fundamentalist Christians actually believe what they claim, they should be doing some heavy soul-searching today about whether the unlikelihood of the timing of those events isn't miraculous.
Not that I believe in some kind of supernatural intervention; the deregulation & supply side economics house of cards was bound to tumble down at some point in time. But I can't hold any respect for people who can't even stay consistent in the fantasies they expound to everyone else.
It's less of an issue. For-profit corporations in the US are required by law to maximize profit for shareholders. Non-profits usually have different priorities. Sure there's still a lot of potential for individual greed gumming up the works, but non-profit organization eliminates a whole class of failure modes. For some types of enterprises, society is willing to accept the risk of those failure modes in exchange for the increased efficiency that they can provide in delivering a desired product. However a very strong argument can be made that the production of energy through nuclear fission has sufficiently bad potential consequences (thousands or millions dying and trillions' worth of land and resources unavailable for decades vs. a few thousand people out of work) that the greater efficiencies sometimes available through for-profit organizations are not worth the risk.
I said highly regulated. I didn't say how. Your approach is intriguing. However I think that it has its flaws as well. While trying to get a bounty might work as motivation, in an environment where nuclear operators are afraid of giving up a bounty, you could also get an inspecting organization that hires cheap inexperienced inspectors because they can pay them less and have greater profit margin on the inspections. They would have a competitive advantage so that other private auditors would be forced to adopt similar approaches to avoid being underbid, until the point where all the auditing companies are barely competent and your power producers figure out they can skimp on maintenance without anybody catching on.
Perhaps have one inspection done by the public sector (DoE or equivalent) and one by the private sector? The competition for prestige might help both keep a higher quality of inspection, because you can compare the results and see which one missed more. That can help with promotion/bonus decisions in the public sector and contracting decisions on the private side and reduces the chance of collusion that might exist if there were only private sector companies.
Heh. I remember when my high school senior physics class took a tour of TRIUMF. TRIUMF is synchrotron - a type of particle accelerator. This was a few years after the release of "The China Syndrome" but before "Silkwood". Because we all had to wear visitor badges to measure radiation exposure, one of the people in the group asked (and had to be reassured twice) whether there was any possibility of a meltdown-type nuclear accident.
Joe SixPack and Joe the plumber probably never took any physics in high school beyond lower-level mandatory science classes, so it's no wonder that most Americans completely misunderstand the risks and are so easily manipulated on the subject.
That said, I wouldn't want anywhere close to my home a nuke plant that was run by a for-profit company with incentive to cut inspections and maintenance levels so low that accidents would happen. I don't care that a whole regulatory apparatus might be in place now to monitor and control maintenance levels when they can buy politicians over a 10-20 year time-frame to gut the regulatory apparatus.
I think nuclear power can be safe and needs to be an option in the power generation game, but it needs to be run by highly regulated non-profit corps to limit the biggest risks, which stem from greed and corruption.
I think that if that abuse of terror legislation was more widely known to investors, it would have serious negative impact on foreign investment in the UK.
No, R. Daneel. We assure you that all prisoners at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo facilities are being treated fairly and not subjected to any harm.
Let's also not forget that Admiral Yamamoto was one of the few Japanese high-ranking officers who counselled against declaring war on the US because, having visited the US, he (rightly) believed that the US industrial capacity would overwhelm the Japanese through attrition. While in the US he probably didn't see a lot of civilians carrying or owning guns, but he knew that, on its home turf, the US could quickly produce guns, ammo, and other infantry equipment and overwhelm a Japanese force with long supply lines.
Yeah, soldiers shooting and killing unarmed civilians could never happen in the US. The soldiers would never believe the vilification by the authorities of protesters "that look and speak just like them, in their own country".
Note that this happened in Canada for a probable drug dealer who had his house raided under a bad warrant. It's called jury nullification (and note that the jury didn't even know it was a bad warrant).
I don't know if weapons or drug possession charges would still be valid given the state of the warrant. I figure that what happened is that the jury (rightly so) probably figured, yeah, he looks like he was a bad guy and may deserve to be put in jail for the other offences but given a recent history of home invasions and kidnappings, if I was in a position where people were breaking down my door without identifying themselves as police first, I should have the right to use the means at hand to defend myself and my family.
True enough, they are actually closer to polar opposites from an ethical standpoint. Pedophilia involves the (sexual) exploitation of a category of humans who are vulnerable due to naturally lower economic and legal standing (i.e. the average earning potential and intellectual development of juveniles is naturally less than that of mature adults due to limited age and experience - a difference which is eliminated given time and education). Fighting for women's rights involves combating the exploitation of a category of humans who are being artificially forced to have lower economic and legal standing (potential physical strength is no longer a significantly defining factor in an industrial or post-industrial society).
Well, racism usually singles out an ethnically-identifiable group, claiming it is inherently (genetically) inferior or evil, and argues that group should have lower economic and legal standing. These arguments are usually given as a justification for the subjugation and exploitation of that ethnic subgroup or of the resources under their control. So while racism is not the same thing as pedophilia and they are expressed in different ways, there are definitely some strong parallels.
In a sense you are correct that advocating any of the three positions involves challenging and advocating replacement of current locally-accepted social standards with different ones. However, one type of advocacy (defending women's rights) is supported by strong ethical reasoning and documented scientific (biological) evidence, whereas similar types of evidence and argument directly contradict the other two types of advocacy. Generally, Western culture has become economically and militarily dominant because it has either adopted or "lucked into"1 approaches supported by ethical and scientific arguments, even when countered by religious or discriminatory prejudices. Major setbacks have occurred when we have set those principles aside in favour of ideology. So there's good reasons for the choices our society has made and even better reasons to defend them.
However the problem is that we are trying to impose the ethics of a post-industrial society on a primarily agrarian and feudal society. Note that that description still applies to most of the Middle East and south-central Asia (with limited exceptions). A lesser but similar dichotomy also applies to even the USA (more fundamentalist religious ideology in the more agrarian central and southern states as opposed to the more urbanized "blue" states).
Now, religious fundamentalists tend to decry the moral relativism implied by the previous paragraph, even though it's backed up by pretty strong empirical evidence. In the long run, I'll always bet on empirical evidence over ideology. The problem with fundamentalists who rail against moral relativism is that there are many different strains of fundamentalism with varying "moral absolutes", which would inevitably draw them into bloody conflict with each other (i.e. Shiite/Shia and Sunni extremists in Iraq and elsewhere) if they didn't consider ethical/scientific secularism to be even more offencive.
Overall, the best long term way to combat fundamentalism in the third world is to pull them out of a feudal and agrarian economy. In some states, promoting economic and industrial development will suffice. However in other states, the feudal order is supported by petroleum sales, and the status quo will only change with the complete replacement or obsolescence of petroleum as a major world energy source. So one way or another, it's going to happen in the next 100 years, but we can do a lot of damage to ourselves in the meantime.
1. Yeah using "lucky" is a bit of a
I suggest you take a look at those DMCA laws again.
When Gears support 64-bit Linux, I may give it a shot. Until then...
Well, I suppose it could happen in the 22nd century or later after most of the people alive on Sept. 11, 2001 are dead or incapacitated, but I think it's safe to say that that type of attack won't be successful again in the next 50 years. Yeah OK, somebody may be stupid enough to try it again. Maybe the hijackers will think it's smart to hold back a couple of sleepers to identify and gruesomely kill the emerging leaders of a passenger counter-attack to try to cower the rest in spite of the 9/11 effect. Come to think of it, if the average USA passenger has your level of imagination, it just might work. However the odds are some passenger on a targeted plane would have enough brains to think of that too.
Frankly I expect that after that time frame, we'd better have a good handle on how to prevent the root causes of terrorism because biological/nanotech attacks will have become easy enough to make it more worthwhile (i.e. for psychological impact) than plane hijackings. Seriously, this TSA security theatre is a Maginot Line defense,... and it's sad that's it's a Frenchman having to point that out.
We Gotcha!
Wait, wasn't that DataSoft? It's close admittedly.
Bruce's latest Crypto-gram goes into a little more detail on why you are wrong. Also please keep in mind that you can purchase an airplane ticket over the internet with a credit card number bought from a Russian (or local) mobster a lot more easily than you can get a good fake driver's licence, the latter being physical and having pictures and copy-protection mechanisms, that will stand up to scrutiny. Although there is also an underground market for the latter, it's probably not as widespread as the stolen credit card market since the clientele is much narrower (mainly a small subset of illegal immigrants and underage teenagers trying to buy alcohol) and doesn't necessarily require high-quality forgeries.
There's minimal genetic difference between Palestinians Muslims and Levantine Jews. They came from common racial stock and a few thousand years apart haven't changed that much. So all the Palestinians really need to do to pass off as Jews is to learn how to speak Hebrew, and maybe a little Yiddish, with a convincing accent. Maybe learn a few passages from the Torah (as opposed to their Arabic translations) while they're at it. Shouldn't be that difficult apart for continuing to hate an "enemy" once they understand them better.
Who's logic is flawed?
Q: Why did the [nation X citizen] sprinkle salt on the road?
A: To keep elephants away.
Q: But there are no elephants in [Nation X].
A: See, it's working!
Maybe instead, the drop in hijacking attempts means that potential hijackers who aren't suicidal terrorists (historically, the bulk of hijackers) have figured out that attempting to hijack a plane these days is effectively suicidal because the non-hijackers in the plane will mob you with no concern for your welfare. A free plane flight to Cuba just isn't worth the risk because the odds of success are so low. Knock over a [place of business] for funds and arrange proper transportation (though Mexico or the Caribbean) instead.
Apparently hijackers have a better feel for the actual risks in hijacking than the sheeple like you. The first thing I remember saying when I found out, after the fact, that planes had been hijacked and crashed into the WTC towers was "That'll never happen again". That was clear no matter what the TSA did.
As far as I know, switching would probably break quantum entanglement. So rather than build some huge infrastructure of point-to-point links, why not use USB one-time padsinstead? The portability of data storage makes that a possibility now.
It would seem that USB one-time pads would be a lot easier to implement, not to mention portable and scalable in a way that quantum crypto is never likely to be.
Yeah, but do you really need quantum crypto? The strongest encryption method is a one-time pad. You've now got easy access to 8GB USB sticks that can hold one heck of a big one-time pad, or 8 slightly smaller 1 time pads. As an individual, who do you really need to communicate very securely with? Your bank? Maybe a few close friends for e-mail?
Create a new type of smart USB device that, given a passphrase, allows you to load up a one-time pad data stream associated with a keyword (say BoA123456789), Given another passphrase, the device releases that info in read-once blocks that it then discards. Once a decade you go into your bank and reload the one-time pad.
If you need to VPN for work and transfer a lot of data, then do the same thing with shared symmetric keys and a seed block to stretch out the data.
The retention requirements on the bank side are quite a bit more stringent. 100,000 customers with 1GB one-time pads mean storing 100TB. Still, that's getting more affordable all the time. By the time quantum computing becomes practical for cracking public key encryption, this approach will be a lot more practical than running direct point-to-point links between business and clients for quantum cryptography.
Come to think of it, Meyer took over as president in July. I don't think it's a coincidence that somebody from the design side took over from someone from operations/process (Ruiz). I think what happened is that Ruiz couldn't swing financing for the next round of fabs and this strategy was adopted as an alternative. At that point it didn't make sense to have someone from operations running the company, they needed someone from design and Meyer was the obvious candidate. That handover makes sense now.
My guess is that this is a fallout of the credit crunch. It's come to a head on Wall Street now, but I wouldn't be surprised if, given the kind of capital that funding a new fab costs, that AMD realized months ago that they wouldn't be able to borrow for the next round of fab upgrades. So a new strategy was necessary, one that didn't involve a large debt overhead from fabrication plant upgrades.
Or maybe, since AMD have been using IBM's process technology for a while now, but there's been a delay in integrating that process into their own fabs, they think they can come to an agreement with IBM to use IBM's leading edge fabs.
It would make a lot of sense. IBM gets to run their high end fabs at higher capacity with a product that doesn't really compete with IBM's Power-based products, but which competes with one of IBM's biggest potential competitors (Intel). They also won't have to risk more anti-trust suits by buying out AMD to keep Intel in check on the low end. Otherwise, with a free rein on the low end, Intel could raise its margins to fund an attack against IBM on the high end. AMD gets access to leading edge fabs without needing to find the capital investment, something particularly important given the credit crunch.
Given Dirk Meyer's background in chip design, as opposed to process, this doesn't surprise me too much. However I think the credit crunch and the ability to get credit for the next round of fab upgrades is the big factor that left AMD with little choice. This kind of deal must have been brewing for months, but the credit crunch is what made it imperative. Intel and IBM have the cash reserves to self-finance fab upgrades but AMD would have had to go to the capital markets and pay too much interest, if they could anything at all. AMD is taking a bit of a chance that IBM would continue to give them continued access to their fabs, but Intel isn't going away any time soon and "the enemy of my enemy"... should keep them friendly for the next decade, or at least until the financial markets stabilize and credit becomes more easily available again.
So yeah, I expect the announcement of a big fabbing agreement between Intel and AMD sometime in the next 6 months.
Don't blame me. I voted for kudos.
You're right. It should have been: New "World's oldest rocks" found!