I propose 8 times the sampling rate and twice the number of bits as a new audio standard for the high end purist. It will require the space of an HD-DVD to record it, or maybe a DVD with lossless compression such as FLAC. But this is all practical today. Excellent... I agree. A problem, perhaps THE problem with the music industry today is they are not innovating. There hasn't been a major advance since the introduction of the CD. Beyond the above sound quality comparisons, let's review the benefits that the CD has over vinyl. a) no flipping of the disks 1/2 way through your music b) less care and feeding (no "de-dusting" and all that) c) portability (can't put a vinyl LP in your car, but can do that with a CD) d) storage space. CDs are smaller than LPs. When this new format came on the market there may have been grumblings about having to "re-buy" your music collection, but the above features may have made it worth-while for most folks to do that.
MP3 players, in contrast, offered enhancements to some of these same advances but did not require people to re-buy their music. The music industry probably wanted to be able to treat MP3 player music like CD music (requiring a re-buy of your collection) but at this point that's way too late, so they're going through various legal machinations.
Here's a thought... INNOVATE... offer a new format that has NEW features. 44khz sampling rate on HD-DVD players large enough audio files that putting on modern MP3 players will dwarf them and/or be incompatible with them since they may not play that format. Alternatively (or additionally) don't mix the tracks... keep them separate, so that, for example, if I want to listen to the music only (no vocals) I can tune that out. For either or both of these I'd be happy to re-buy my collection.
When I first heard of Colbert's run I thought it was a brilliant way to stage a protest vote. I believe (like apparently Steward and Colbert do) that the majority of Americans are much more in the reasonable middle than either the Democrats or the Republicans. If he were to get a "significant" vote in both the Democratic Primary AND the Republican Primary in South Carolina then hopefully the parties will realize how far on the fringe they BOTH are.
Unfortunately, even if Colbert is successful at this I do not believe the Dems or the Repubs(?) will have any sort of awakening. Regardless though... this seems to be a protest vote. Is there any sort of legal president for protest votes? If so, is it possible that protest votes may run afoul of the FEC?
And furthermore... is the reason because of how our brains are wired or something else? Where's the proof that this sort of response is due to our brain's evolution?
I think at least some of this is due to not having adaquate information. A plane crash makes big news. The daily death toll in automobile accidents does not and very few people bother to go and research this before hopping on an airplane or driving in a car. They just assume from the information they have at hand.
I conjecture that if we had better access to information we'd get a lot more mileage out of how our brains are wired than Schneier is giving us credit for.
and furthermore... what's his point? I've read TFA and previous posters are correct... the article is like a/. summary of his (hopefully more detailed) speech. I'd like to know what more was in that speech. So what if we're wired poorly to assess threats in an IT universe... WHAT IS HE SUGGESTING WE DO? Start an evolution research program to make our brains better? Believe in our algorithms more than we otherwise intuitively would? Schneier's recommendation, if he had any is not in TFA. Hopefully it was in TFSpeech.
What the article said was that "liberals" were more easily able to adapt to changing circumstances. Big deal... in some sense this is not really news, we could guess this already. Politically the question I've heard conservatives lament is "change for change's sake". Sometimes change is good, sometimes the old ways are good. Being able to tell when to change and when not to change is the big question. Something the study didn't address at all. Has it really come down to this black and white a division? Liberals go for any and all change and conservatives go for no change?
Regarding the moral issue... I think every voter wants to believe in their candidate based on a "higher" reason that, ideally is inherent to their personality. It does seem that conservatives hang 100% of their confidence in this area based on moral or religious values, and that is an easy story to pitch. Liberals are lacking a similar sound bite for their "higher" reason. Consider, for example 2 candidates.
Candidate 1 says "vote for me, I believe in God and will use my faith to guide my policies" Candidate 2 says "vote for me, I will diligently assess a variety of opinions and guide my policies by the most popular opinion"
At this stage, I gotta say that Candidate 1 looks like the classical conservative candidate and candidate 2 almost a classical liberal candidate. One can almost feel the tension right there. Even to my sense, candidate 2 has no "higher" reason. Candidate 2 is a follower, not a leader.
What we need is a 3rd type of candidate. One who promises to use the principles of reason, logic, compassion and love-of-their-fellow-man to guide their policies. Unfortunately this is hard to get into a sound-bite and doesn't compete as well as "my faith will guide my policies".
Grow up! The sooner you realize the old adage "if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door" isn't true, the happier you'll be. I loved the Amiga, but a few years after waiting for the rest of the world to realize how wonderful that machine was I got the distinct impression that the powers-that-be at Amiga/Commodore were just waiting for the world to beat a path to their door.
For any significant real-world problem there are at least 2 things that need to be solved. Call it "the core problem" and then "telling people that you've solved it", the technical side and the marketing side. Just to drive the point home even further, consider building a bridge across a river (tech side), but not interfacing that bridge to the existing road system (marketing side). Now imagine a somewhat less functional bridge (say 2 lanes instead of 4) but you don't have to go off-road to get to it. My point is... how many people would make the same complaint about the "demise" of that better bridge in a way that's analogous to the demise of the Amiga? VS how many people would think the bridge designers were idiots for not interfacing it to the existing road system?
No, the things worthy of our pity are the failures that solved both problems and still failed in the marketplace. I don't think there are many examples of this, Beta vs VHS was close.
Yes and no. Astronomers have been wondering about Eta Carinae for awhile. It appears that it can produce "gamma ray bursts" that are powerful enough to wipe out life even here, 7500 light years away, but current thinking is that GRBs are focused events, gamma rays streaming along the magnetic axis of the exploding star and fortunately Eta Carinae's axes are not pointed in our direction.
The comparison to Newtonian gravity is an excellent one. The misgivings with gravity were philosophical, the theory still worked. There were only 2 issues with it, one was that Newtonian gravity acts instanteously and the other is that gravitational mass was exactly the same as inertial mass. Neither of these had any bearing on the results that newtonain gravity produced, but they were red flags to physicists that something could be amiss. One could say the beginning of the end of Newtonian gravity was when the odd orbit of Mercury was detected. This, at least was a result that was at odds with the predictions of Newtonain gravity. (However I believe Einstein was working on GR even w/o this information.)
The case with QM is somewhat similar. The theory provides excellent results, even these inequality violations are not inconsistent with QM, just strange. Another problem with QM involves renormalization. Apparently to do the math for most of these calculations requires some very goofy steps, but again, the results agree with observations, so this oddity doesn't point the way toward a better solution.
To make a real breakthru though requires a result that is at odds with the predictions of QM. The realm where QM and/or GR break down is in the combined super heavy and super small realms... either atomic activity around black holes and/or primordial black holes. Even if someone were to come up with a competing theory to QM/GR that addressed all the issues, it wouldn't gain wide acceptance until it produced a result that both conflicted with the older theories and was confirmed by real-world evidence. (Note, I'm avoiding the phrase "experimental evidence" because in this case I want to allow the case where results to come from astronomical observations of black holes.)
Finally, I'm struck by a pair of quotes: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we CAN imagine." One citation is JBS Haldane and how this is at odds with Einstein "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
Does anyone know where the money the RIAA is collecting is going? (I read one of TFAs and no mention.) If the RIAA is doing its job, then 50% to 80% of it should be going to the actual artists whose files were fileshared (with the remaining 20% to 50% being kept by the RIAA for their effort in collecting it).
Note, I'm not a fan of the RIAA at all. The whole music mafia scene makes me pretty sick, but there are much worse things in the world and so... the RIAA's shenanigans get little attention. However, it strikes me that the RIAA may also be cheating their own members instead of the public at large by not actually distribting the money they're collecting through these antics to the people who were actually harmed by the filesharing... the musicians. Now... if that were true and if that were to make the news... that may garner some attention.
I believe that the guys who put up the lite-brite signs had every right do to so, in line with the same right people have and use to put up letter sized advertisments on telephone poles. Sure, in some places that's illegal, but it's illegal for littering reasons, not for possible terrorist reasons.
I also believe the Boston authorities have the right to react the way they did. Goofy as it may seem, especially in light that they were the only major city to react this way, and goofy that they thought terrorists would go out of their way to draw attention to a bomb, they can react that way if they want to.
The problem is that now that Boston has egg on its face they're looking for someone to take responsibility. And the right people who should take responsibility are the Boston authorities. This incident should be no more unusual than one where a mysterious briefcase is found at an airport and has that place shut down while the authorities deal with it. If/when that case is determined to not be a threat, do you see the authorities going after the absent minded person who left it behind as a possible terrorist? No... you see the authorities realize that sometimes they get it wrong and the only harm done is that a suit case was destroyed and an airport was shutdown for a few hours. No other personal liberties were abused in this hypothetical case, and in the ideal world that I want to live in, it'd be the same way here. These guys could put up those signs fearing only possible littering/vandalism charges and the Boston authorities could react the way they did to the signs, but otherwise not accuse the sign-hangers as terrorit immitators.
And no, it's not like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. It's more like yelling "hey" in a crowded theater.
I frankly don't see how -information- can be sent via entanglement; once you measure a particle's spin, that tells you what the spin of the -other- particle is
I was wondering the same thing too, but Cramer's a smart guy and the article mentioned that some other experiment gave him insight on how to do this experiment. The SeattlePI article goes on to state that the first detector (a slit) will register the photon as a wave or a particle. Apparently it can do both at the same time... While the other "future" detector needs to be set in either "wave detector" or in "particle detector" mode.
The classic "dual slit" experiment is probably what the "slit" above is referring to. If photons are waves then interference patterns are formed when photons pass through dual slits. If photons are particles then you don't get an interference pattern, the result looks more like shooting a shotgun through a picket fence. If you have a detector that is set to detect photons or waves BEFORE it hits the dual slit then... when it's set to detect waves, you get wave interference patterns, when it's set to particles you get a "shot gun blast interference" pattern.
It sounds like the experiment is set so that the "now" photon gets sent to the dual slits and the "future" photon is sent through a wave/particle detector. Kinda cool as the first detector does not force a change in state.
However, I do not understand how a single photon can be determined to be a particle or wave in the slit side of the experiment... but I do understand how thousands of photons can be so determined... over time an interference pattern will build up, but with only one photon it's not clear if it landed in a place appropriate for a particle or a wave. I assume this is an oversimplification on the part of the Seattle PI.
What I expect will happen is that the particle/wave detector will, if set to particles, detect 1/2 of the photons and the entangled partners of those will act as particles on the earlier part of the experiment. However, the other 1/2 will act as waves, not be detected on the future end and form wave style interference patterns in the past end. The end result, again of *many* photons, is that the interference pattern will be 1/2 way between a pure wave and pure particle interference pattern. Yet this seems sophomoric so I assume I'm missing something.
What would or could customs officials do if you just brought in a hard drive? Without a computer handy to view the contents of the hard drive, would the confiscate it out of hand or would they let you in because it was too burdensome to view the contents right there? If any one knows the answer to this question, I'd love to hear it.
I suppose it's somewhat related to the encryption question... if your data is encrypted, do the custom officials ask for you to unencrypt it so they can see it?
As others have posted, I'm more concerned about loss of data rather than letting others view it. So... encryption is not a solution for me. Backup copies are a solution, but maybe this hard-drive only trick can work.
-- when will the right to bear arms be extended to include a right to bear computers?
No, he doesn't want to do that. He wants to earn a lot of money. How sad.
He doesn't want to be a lawyer to get lots of money. He wants to be a lawyer to have job security. That's the impression I got from reading the article. It seems reasonable to me. In a world/USA where various scientific research projects are started and stopped (for one example, remember the SuperConducting Supercollider project), and consequently careers disrupted, who can blame him. The worst I can say for him is that he's buying into the "US jobs being outsourced" scare a bit more than he should, but then again... lawyers and doctors have been forever... doubt there'll ever be a shortage of them.
Will they make the phasers converge? Never could figure out why the shots of the enterprise firing had the phasers going out at a ~20 degree angle while they managed to converge to a point on the surface of a planet. (as an example think of when they shot Apollo's throne.)
Does anyone know what OS they were using before? I expect they may have been rolling their own rather than using a competing OS. If so, the big news here is: a) that they're using an "off the shelf OS" (as well as off the shelf hardware) and then b) that the OS in question is Linux.
I scanned TFA but saw no mention of what OS (if any) they used before.
While I think you may be closer to the truth than other posts, I hope it's not as bad as the Movie Star - Paparazzi relationship... at least there the public seems to always want to see the stuff the Paparazzi produce. But I'm putting some hope on the belief that the public will generally tire of the terrorist threat because the chance of being harmed by a terrorist still appears to be quite small.
Taking a broader view this may well be proceding as it should. On 9/11 we were stunned by how relatively easy it was for terrorists to bring down the world trade towers and harm the pentagon. But that was one incident, what we didn't know was can the terrorists do this every month? Every year? or merely once a decade? It was right for politicians to hypothesize that such attacks could be a common occurrence unless we better secured our sea ports and air ports, increased "domestic" spying and all that... but now 5 years later we should all be developing a sense that... at the most... the current activities are good enough. We don't need more, we surely don't need to spend more, we may need to spend less.
Taking a page from history... how long did our fear mentality survive during the cold war? 10 years, 15 years? While the cold war can be said to have lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall (35 years?), there was certainly no active fear of a soviet nuclear attack during the 1970s (25 years?) and beyond. The peak of the cold war fear mongering may have been during the McCarthy era (10 years?) and it was all down hill since then. Today we have that lesson from history to draw from and much broader news coverage (I'm including the internet and discussions like this).
I expect that we're near the peak now and our perspective will be much better and our willingness to vote in politicians on the "terror card" will be lessened come 2008 if not this year.
IANAP, but when this came up before the best explanation I heard that Life As We Know It killing black holes would not be produced is because Nature is already doing this. Cosmic rays strike the earth's atmosphere with more energy than the large hadron collider will produce.
So any particles that LHC is liable to produce are already being made in our upper atmosphere right now. The question is what's the difference (if any) between these particles and those the LHC may produce? I can only think of one... momentum... any mini-black holes made by cosmic rays will be on a trajectory that will take them through the earth and out the otherside (if they live long enough), while those produced in the LHC may be essentially motionless. Is this a significant difference?
Alternatively, I do not believe that Hawking radiation has been detected from cosmic ray black-hole creation, lending more support to the belief that the LHC can't produce them either.
IMHO, we're safe, not because theory gives it a very very low probability, but because the reality of cosmic ray energy hasn't killed us yet.
IANAL but I have this belief that patents protect how you do things, not what you do. Can I patent the concept of a car that gets 200 miles per gallon or am I patenting the particular means by which my engine gets 200 mpg? Wouldn't a reasonable patent be one which allows someone else to come up with a different means of accomplishing the same thing?
Why is it that every popular article I read on USPTO missteps seem to indicate that the USPTO is allowing people to patent the sheer concept of doing things? Amazon's one-click patent... if I come up with a differnt way of allowing people to buy things with one click that should be allowed.
Netflix's online dvd rental patent seems to be a similar "concept patent" which seeks to block any and all other means of accomplishing the same thing. This has truly gone too far.
Dr Who (Tom Baker) was here first
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Computer Voodoo?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes/jokes from the Tom Baker era of Dr Who.
He stumbled across an old spacecraft on a very distant planet. As he sat down at the control console he remarked, "this looks like Earth technology". As he began to power it up it slowly came to life then started to fade back out. He kicked the bottom of the console and the rocket resumed slowly coming back to life. The Doctor remarked "Definitely Earth technology".
I just LOVE the implication that this sort of "kick it to keep it working" is a characteristic aspect of our technology that (in the world of this SF TV show at least) sets us apart from other species.
This seems like a lot of work to fix a relatively minor problem with our election system. Sure, sometimes it happens that the winner of the popular vote does not win the electorial college vote, but those are close races anyway. I can only imagine that people think the electorial college is "more unjust" than it is because a slight minority in the popular vote can appear to be a landslide in the electorial college vote.
But let's go back to 2000 for a minute here. The other factor which I believe is a MUCH BIGGER issue was that Ralph Nader ran. I believe that the 2000 race was close enough that had he not run Gore would have been president. And in this case there is a well known and understood fix that would both have allowed Nader to run and Gore to have won. And if we're going to spend time fixing any part of our voting system, I would rather see it spent implementing this fix.
Specifically one would vote for their 1st place, 2nd place and 3rd place (if necessary) candidates. Say 45% vote first for Gore then for Nader. Say another 45% vote first for Bush then for Buchanan. Say a final 10% vote first for Nader then for Gore. All the first place votes are tallied and if there is a 50+% winner you're done. If not, throw out the lower candidates votes (Nader in this case) and move on to those folks 2nd place vote. Under this example, this would give Gore 55% and Bush 45%.
I seem to recall both a Scientific American article on this form of voting that was published near the time of the 2000 election, and I believe that article mentioned that several other countries already use a form of voting like the one I describe above.
no... you're wrong... he's not talking about an error in the 120th decimal place... an incredibly small number but still cool as it's not zero... he's talking about an error 120 decimal places in the OTHER direction... 10 raised to the 120th power. Click on the audio/video quicktime box in the original article and listen for awhile. You'll see... (and for those of you keeping score... the original poster was off by a 240 decimal places)
I'm fuzzy on the details, but I've heard this before... to get the correct solution for quantum mechanics and special relativity for the hydrogen atom you need to include the interaction of virtual particles. But when you ask a follow up question that's like (but here's where I'm fuzzy on the details) "how do these virtual particles interact all by themselves (eg in a vacuum)" you get an explosion that gives an unbelievably large value.
I did a google search on "120 orders of magnitude wrong" and got some interesting results... the search result of one appears to be a transcript of a "Science Friday" interview, but the link http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4513655 does not show the words.
Slashdot Mirror
a) no flipping of the disks 1/2 way through your music
b) less care and feeding (no "de-dusting" and all that)
c) portability (can't put a vinyl LP in your car, but can do that with a CD)
d) storage space. CDs are smaller than LPs.
When this new format came on the market there may have been grumblings about having to "re-buy" your music collection, but the above features may have made it worth-while for most folks to do that.
MP3 players, in contrast, offered enhancements to some of these same advances but did not require people to re-buy their music. The music industry probably wanted to be able to treat MP3 player music like CD music (requiring a re-buy of your collection) but at this point that's way too late, so they're going through various legal machinations.
Here's a thought... INNOVATE... offer a new format that has NEW features. 44khz sampling rate on HD-DVD players large enough audio files that putting on modern MP3 players will dwarf them and/or be incompatible with them since they may not play that format. Alternatively (or additionally) don't mix the tracks... keep them separate, so that, for example, if I want to listen to the music only (no vocals) I can tune that out. For either or both of these I'd be happy to re-buy my collection.
When I first heard of Colbert's run I thought it was a brilliant way to stage a protest vote. I believe (like apparently Steward and Colbert do) that the majority of Americans are much more in the reasonable middle than either the Democrats or the Republicans. If he were to get a "significant" vote in both the Democratic Primary AND the Republican Primary in South Carolina then hopefully the parties will realize how far on the fringe they BOTH are.
Unfortunately, even if Colbert is successful at this I do not believe the Dems or the Repubs(?) will have any sort of awakening. Regardless though... this seems to be a protest vote. Is there any sort of legal president for protest votes? If so, is it possible that protest votes may run afoul of the FEC?
And furthermore... is the reason because of how our brains are wired or something else? Where's the proof that this sort of response is due to our brain's evolution?
/. summary of his (hopefully more detailed) speech. I'd like to know what more was in that speech. So what if we're wired poorly to assess threats in an IT universe... WHAT IS HE SUGGESTING WE DO? Start an evolution research program to make our brains better? Believe in our algorithms more than we otherwise intuitively would? Schneier's recommendation, if he had any is not in TFA. Hopefully it was in TFSpeech.
I think at least some of this is due to not having adaquate information. A plane crash makes big news. The daily death toll in automobile accidents does not and very few people bother to go and research this before hopping on an airplane or driving in a car. They just assume from the information they have at hand.
I conjecture that if we had better access to information we'd get a lot more mileage out of how our brains are wired than Schneier is giving us credit for.
and furthermore... what's his point?
I've read TFA and previous posters are correct... the article is like a
Cameras have to be better than no cameras, right? I mean it's just plain common sense. I don't care what the data says.
That's why politicians will just plow ahead.
What the article said was that "liberals" were more easily able to adapt to changing circumstances. Big deal... in some sense this is not really news, we could guess this already. Politically the question I've heard conservatives lament is "change for change's sake". Sometimes change is good, sometimes the old ways are good. Being able to tell when to change and when not to change is the big question. Something the study didn't address at all. Has it really come down to this black and white a division? Liberals go for any and all change and conservatives go for no change?
Regarding the moral issue... I think every voter wants to believe in their candidate based on a "higher" reason that, ideally is inherent to their personality. It does seem that conservatives hang 100% of their confidence in this area based on moral or religious values, and that is an easy story to pitch. Liberals are lacking a similar sound bite for their "higher" reason. Consider, for example 2 candidates.
Candidate 1 says "vote for me, I believe in God and will use my faith to guide my policies"
Candidate 2 says "vote for me, I will diligently assess a variety of opinions and guide my policies by the most popular opinion"
At this stage, I gotta say that Candidate 1 looks like the classical conservative candidate and candidate 2 almost a classical liberal candidate. One can almost feel the tension right there. Even to my sense, candidate 2 has no "higher" reason. Candidate 2 is a follower, not a leader.
What we need is a 3rd type of candidate. One who promises to use the principles of reason, logic, compassion and love-of-their-fellow-man to guide their policies. Unfortunately this is hard to get into a sound-bite and doesn't compete as well as "my faith will guide my policies".
Grow up! The sooner you realize the old adage "if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path to your door" isn't true, the happier you'll be. I loved the Amiga, but a few years after waiting for the rest of the world to realize how wonderful that machine was I got the distinct impression that the powers-that-be at Amiga/Commodore were just waiting for the world to beat a path to their door.
For any significant real-world problem there are at least 2 things that need to be solved. Call it "the core problem" and then "telling people that you've solved it", the technical side and the marketing side. Just to drive the point home even further, consider building a bridge across a river (tech side), but not interfacing that bridge to the existing road system (marketing side). Now imagine a somewhat less functional bridge (say 2 lanes instead of 4) but you don't have to go off-road to get to it. My point is... how many people would make the same complaint about the "demise" of that better bridge in a way that's analogous to the demise of the Amiga? VS how many people would think the bridge designers were idiots for not interfacing it to the existing road system?
No, the things worthy of our pity are the failures that solved both problems and still failed in the marketplace. I don't think there are many examples of this, Beta vs VHS was close.
Yes and no. Astronomers have been wondering about Eta Carinae for awhile. It appears that it can produce "gamma ray bursts" that are powerful enough to wipe out life even here, 7500 light years away, but current thinking is that GRBs are focused events, gamma rays streaming along the magnetic axis of the exploding star and fortunately Eta Carinae's axes are not pointed in our direction.
I'm not endorsing this link http://people.roma2.infn.it/~aldo/dar01.pdf but it does corroborate what I've heard on TV science shows.
The case with QM is somewhat similar. The theory provides excellent results, even these inequality violations are not inconsistent with QM, just strange. Another problem with QM involves renormalization. Apparently to do the math for most of these calculations requires some very goofy steps, but again, the results agree with observations, so this oddity doesn't point the way toward a better solution.
To make a real breakthru though requires a result that is at odds with the predictions of QM. The realm where QM and/or GR break down is in the combined super heavy and super small realms... either atomic activity around black holes and/or primordial black holes. Even if someone were to come up with a competing theory to QM/GR that addressed all the issues, it wouldn't gain wide acceptance until it produced a result that both conflicted with the older theories and was confirmed by real-world evidence. (Note, I'm avoiding the phrase "experimental evidence" because in this case I want to allow the case where results to come from astronomical observations of black holes.)
Finally, I'm struck by a pair of quotes: "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we CAN imagine." One citation is JBS Haldane and how this is at odds with Einstein "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
Does anyone know where the money the RIAA is collecting is going? (I read one of TFAs and no mention.) If the RIAA is doing its job, then 50% to 80% of it should be going to the actual artists whose files were fileshared (with the remaining 20% to 50% being kept by the RIAA for their effort in collecting it).
Note, I'm not a fan of the RIAA at all. The whole music mafia scene makes me pretty sick, but there are much worse things in the world and so... the RIAA's shenanigans get little attention. However, it strikes me that the RIAA may also be cheating their own members instead of the public at large by not actually distribting the money they're collecting through these antics to the people who were actually harmed by the filesharing... the musicians. Now... if that were true and if that were to make the news... that may garner some attention.
I also believe the Boston authorities have the right to react the way they did. Goofy as it may seem, especially in light that they were the only major city to react this way, and goofy that they thought terrorists would go out of their way to draw attention to a bomb, they can react that way if they want to.
The problem is that now that Boston has egg on its face they're looking for someone to take responsibility. And the right people who should take responsibility are the Boston authorities. This incident should be no more unusual than one where a mysterious briefcase is found at an airport and has that place shut down while the authorities deal with it. If/when that case is determined to not be a threat, do you see the authorities going after the absent minded person who left it behind as a possible terrorist? No... you see the authorities realize that sometimes they get it wrong and the only harm done is that a suit case was destroyed and an airport was shutdown for a few hours. No other personal liberties were abused in this hypothetical case, and in the ideal world that I want to live in, it'd be the same way here. These guys could put up those signs fearing only possible littering/vandalism charges and the Boston authorities could react the way they did to the signs, but otherwise not accuse the sign-hangers as terrorit immitators.
And no, it's not like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. It's more like yelling "hey" in a crowded theater.
I was wondering the same thing too, but Cramer's a smart guy and the article mentioned that some other experiment gave him insight on how to do this experiment. The SeattlePI article goes on to state that the first detector (a slit) will register the photon as a wave or a particle. Apparently it can do both at the same time... While the other "future" detector needs to be set in either "wave detector" or in "particle detector" mode.
The classic "dual slit" experiment is probably what the "slit" above is referring to. If photons are waves then interference patterns are formed when photons pass through dual slits. If photons are particles then you don't get an interference pattern, the result looks more like shooting a shotgun through a picket fence. If you have a detector that is set to detect photons or waves BEFORE it hits the dual slit then
It sounds like the experiment is set so that the "now" photon gets sent to the dual slits and the "future" photon is sent through a wave/particle detector. Kinda cool as the first detector does not force a change in state.
However, I do not understand how a single photon can be determined to be a particle or wave in the slit side of the experiment... but I do understand how thousands of photons can be so determined... over time an interference pattern will build up, but with only one photon it's not clear if it landed in a place appropriate for a particle or a wave. I assume this is an oversimplification on the part of the Seattle PI.
What I expect will happen is that the particle/wave detector will, if set to particles, detect 1/2 of the photons and the entangled partners of those will act as particles on the earlier part of the experiment. However, the other 1/2 will act as waves, not be detected on the future end and form wave style interference patterns in the past end. The end result, again of *many* photons, is that the interference pattern will be 1/2 way between a pure wave and pure particle interference pattern. Yet this seems sophomoric so I assume I'm missing something.
What would or could customs officials do if you just brought in a hard drive? Without a computer handy to view the contents of the hard drive, would the confiscate it out of hand or would they let you in because it was too burdensome to view the contents right there? If any one knows the answer to this question, I'd love to hear it.
I suppose it's somewhat related to the encryption question... if your data is encrypted, do the custom officials ask for you to unencrypt it so they can see it?
As others have posted, I'm more concerned about loss of data rather than letting others view it. So... encryption is not a solution for me. Backup copies are a solution, but maybe this hard-drive only trick can work.
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when will the right to bear arms be extended to include a right to bear computers?
NO NO NO... I imagine the 2000g's is coming from moving at nearly constant speed but in a CIRCLE!
Good point, but couldn't they use a faraday cage to shield the interior of the shell from the magnetic field lines?
No, he doesn't want to do that. He wants to earn a lot of money. How sad.
He doesn't want to be a lawyer to get lots of money. He wants to be a lawyer to have job security. That's the impression I got from reading the article. It seems reasonable to me. In a world/USA where various scientific research projects are started and stopped (for one example, remember the SuperConducting Supercollider project), and consequently careers disrupted, who can blame him. The worst I can say for him is that he's buying into the "US jobs being outsourced" scare a bit more than he should, but then again... lawyers and doctors have been forever... doubt there'll ever be a shortage of them.
Will they make the phasers converge? Never could figure out why the shots of the enterprise firing had the phasers going out at a ~20 degree angle while they managed to converge to a point on the surface of a planet. (as an example think of when they shot Apollo's throne.)
Does anyone know what OS they were using before? I expect they may have been rolling their own rather than using a competing OS. If so, the big news here is:
a) that they're using an "off the shelf OS" (as well as off the shelf hardware)
and then
b) that the OS in question is Linux.
I scanned TFA but saw no mention of what OS (if any) they used before.
Still cool though!
While I think you may be closer to the truth than other posts, I hope it's not as bad as the Movie Star - Paparazzi relationship... at least there the public seems to always want to see the stuff the Paparazzi produce. But I'm putting some hope on the belief that the public will generally tire of the terrorist threat because the chance of being harmed by a terrorist still appears to be quite small.
... at the most... the current activities are good enough. We don't need more, we surely don't need to spend more, we may need to spend less.
Taking a broader view this may well be proceding as it should. On 9/11 we were stunned by how relatively easy it was for terrorists to bring down the world trade towers and harm the pentagon. But that was one incident, what we didn't know was can the terrorists do this every month? Every year? or merely once a decade? It was right for politicians to hypothesize that such attacks could be a common occurrence unless we better secured our sea ports and air ports, increased "domestic" spying and all that... but now 5 years later we should all be developing a sense that
Taking a page from history... how long did our fear mentality survive during the cold war? 10 years, 15 years? While the cold war can be said to have lasted until the fall of the Berlin Wall (35 years?), there was certainly no active fear of a soviet nuclear attack during the 1970s (25 years?) and beyond. The peak of the cold war fear mongering may have been during the McCarthy era (10 years?) and it was all down hill since then. Today we have that lesson from history to draw from and much broader news coverage (I'm including the internet and discussions like this).
I expect that we're near the peak now and our perspective will be much better and our willingness to vote in politicians on the "terror card" will be lessened come 2008 if not this year.
IANAP, but when this came up before the best explanation I heard that Life As We Know It killing black holes would not be produced is because Nature is already doing this. Cosmic rays strike the earth's atmosphere with more energy than the large hadron collider will produce.
r / This is indeed mentioned in the LHC article on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider #Safety_concerns/
Examining wikipedia I see that cosmic rays have energies up to 10^20 ev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray/ while the large hadron collider will have energies up to 10^14 ev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collide
So any particles that LHC is liable to produce are already being made in our upper atmosphere right now. The question is what's the difference (if any) between these particles and those the LHC may produce? I can only think of one... momentum... any mini-black holes made by cosmic rays will be on a trajectory that will take them through the earth and out the otherside (if they live long enough), while those produced in the LHC may be essentially motionless. Is this a significant difference?
Alternatively, I do not believe that Hawking radiation has been detected from cosmic ray black-hole creation, lending more support to the belief that the LHC can't produce them either.
IMHO, we're safe, not because theory gives it a very very low probability, but because the reality of cosmic ray energy hasn't killed us yet.
Thanks! Great response. Clears up a lot of things I was confused about.
IANAL but I have this belief that patents protect how you do things, not what you do. Can I patent the concept of a car that gets 200 miles per gallon or am I patenting the particular means by which my engine gets 200 mpg? Wouldn't a reasonable patent be one which allows someone else to come up with a different means of accomplishing the same thing?
Why is it that every popular article I read on USPTO missteps seem to indicate that the USPTO is allowing people to patent the sheer concept of doing things? Amazon's one-click patent... if I come up with a differnt way of allowing people to buy things with one click that should be allowed.
Netflix's online dvd rental patent seems to be a similar "concept patent" which seeks to block any and all other means of accomplishing the same thing. This has truly gone too far.
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes/jokes from the Tom Baker era of Dr Who.
He stumbled across an old spacecraft on a very distant planet. As he sat down at the control console he remarked, "this looks like Earth technology". As he began to power it up it slowly came to life then started to fade back out. He kicked the bottom of the console and the rocket resumed slowly coming back to life. The Doctor remarked "Definitely Earth technology".
I just LOVE the implication that this sort of "kick it to keep it working" is a characteristic aspect of our technology that (in the world of this SF TV show at least) sets us apart from other species.
This seems like a lot of work to fix a relatively minor problem with our election system. Sure, sometimes it happens that the winner of the popular vote does not win the electorial college vote, but those are close races anyway. I can only imagine that people think the electorial college is "more unjust" than it is because a slight minority in the popular vote can appear to be a landslide in the electorial college vote.
But let's go back to 2000 for a minute here. The other factor which I believe is a MUCH BIGGER issue was that Ralph Nader ran. I believe that the 2000 race was close enough that had he not run Gore would have been president. And in this case there is a well known and understood fix that would both have allowed Nader to run and Gore to have won. And if we're going to spend time fixing any part of our voting system, I would rather see it spent implementing this fix.
Specifically one would vote for their 1st place, 2nd place and 3rd place (if necessary) candidates. Say 45% vote first for Gore then for Nader. Say another 45% vote first for Bush then for Buchanan. Say a final 10% vote first for Nader then for Gore. All the first place votes are tallied and if there is a 50+% winner you're done. If not, throw out the lower candidates votes (Nader in this case) and move on to those folks 2nd place vote. Under this example, this would give Gore 55% and Bush 45%.
I seem to recall both a Scientific American article on this form of voting that was published near the time of the 2000 election, and I believe that article mentioned that several other countries already use a form of voting like the one I describe above.
I'm fuzzy on the details, but I've heard this before... to get the correct solution for quantum mechanics and special relativity for the hydrogen atom you need to include the interaction of virtual particles. But when you ask a follow up question that's like (but here's where I'm fuzzy on the details) "how do these virtual particles interact all by themselves (eg in a vacuum)" you get an explosion that gives an unbelievably large value.
I did a google search on "120 orders of magnitude wrong" and got some interesting results... the search result of one appears to be a transcript of a "Science Friday" interview, but the link http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=4513655 does not show the words.