"When sites ask these retarded questions, I just generate a long random
alphanumeric string (using a little perl script), and save it in my gpg
file."
Well, that's clever, everyone should do that.
I'll have to teach my grandmother to write perl scripts,
then remember what she called it,
where she stored it, and how to run it
everytime she is asked one of these retarded questions. Oh,
and also how to save the output to her gpg file after remembering
what her gpg file was called and where she stored it and
what its password is.
If you (presumably) guard your passwords carefully (in this same
gpg file?), why do you even bother saving the answer to the
"secret question"? Just type a bunch of random keyboard characters
(bang hard, using the opportunity to release the pent-up frustration),
don't save it, and be done with it. Isn't that faster
than going through the perl script rigamarole?
For most things - various user forums, etc.
- I don't give a damn about all this password/secret question
paranoia. If they crack it, so what? I haven't changed my
slashdot password since day one, its easy for me to remember,
and if someone cracks it and "steals" my "identity" here,
well, I would probably find it amusing.
There are a relatively small number of things, such as bank accounts
and trusted access to other people's networks (and yeah, my servers' roots)
whose passwords I protect very carefully. Almost none of those things
involve extra secret questions in case I forget the password,
or if they do I've give a gibberish answer I don't save.
(OK, I have a CISSP cert, and those hyperparanoia-filled meetings
I have to go to to keep it up
sometimes make me want to scream).
1. How can I be sure I'm sending the money to her and not some random Internet chump trying to make a buck?
2. In what form would she prefer to receive the money?
3. Where does she want the money sent?
If I can get an accurate answer to those three, I'm good for a C-note toward this.
4. Does she provide a verifiable accounting of the money received? Once her coffers
overflow, good for her, but then my money might be better spent
on another worthy cause.
From a college freshman point of view, yes, the "depth" of
abstraction for needed both standard and nonstandard are probably the same, i.e.
unapproachably abstract. From a set theorist's point of view,
the axioms of ZF set theory are sufficient to construct real
numbers, whereas you need a conservative extension of ZFC to
be able to model NSA. I mastered the Dedekind construction
of reals without difficulty, but am still struggling with the rigorous
foundations of NSA - although that's my problem, I just need
to get motivated and find the time.:)
As for "rote", it may have been a poor word choice, I just meant
that a typical student doesn't have a rigorous understanding of what's
behind NSA, but the same could be said of reals, too, I suppose. I do agree that
Keisler does a good job of developing an intuitive feel in his book- -
at least it seems so to me, who is not in the shoes of a beginner. But
the post above my GP post is from a former Keisler student who
seemed to indicate
otherwise. It would be useful to understand just what the difficulty
was that the failing or dropped-out students had - was it the teacher, the book, or something
more intrinsic to NSA? One possible problem is that a new number system has to be
mastered instead of just the reals that a beginner is already roughly
familiar with, and the rules for handling mixtures of standard and
nonstandard numbers in the same expression might seem strange
and daunting.
Warning: The Keisler calculus book you mention uses what's called
"nonstandard analysis", involving "hyperreal numbers", and is very
different from what you learn in most calculus courses. This isn't to
say that it is a bad book - in fact it is a very good one. But
nonstandard analysis, while valid, hasn't really caught on since it was
invented by Robinson in the 1960s in spite of some vocal advocates.
Just be aware that after this book, some of the things in the ordinary
high school or college Calculus-I book are going to be unfamiliar. And
while rote manipulations with hyperreal numbers aren't too hard to
learn, to understand them rigorously involves abstract math and set
theory much deeper than that needed for the real numbers and limits of
standard calculus (see the Epilogue of the book).
One other thing, people on lithium tend to gain weight. Sometimes significantly. I was married to a woman who turned out to be bipolar, and after she started the lithium that
finally stabilized her mood swings she gained 65 pounds - after being thin most of her
life prior to that. (Although I'll take the
added weight over a life of sheer hell living with a bipolar person, any day.)
Anyway, if you think the U.S. has an obesity epidemic now, just wait until lithium
is added to the water.
That's $4 a line per month, or over say a 5-year lifetime of the code,
$240 per line. If the production rate is 10 SLOCs per day (I heard 12 SLOCs),
that would be $2400 per day of future revenue. If code "lives" 10, 20, or more years (or even until
the copyright expires, which with continuing extensions will likely be when humanity
self-destructs), well, I'll let you calculate it.:)
When Sun was buying MySQL, there was a lot of FUD how it
was going to ruin it, but looking at
MySQL job trends
it
seems as if MySQL adoption has increased.
Curiously, PostgreSQL job
trends show an almost identical percentage increase
(if 10x lower in absolute numbers).
If you've been one for 6 years, hopefully by now
you know that "ham" is not an acronym but is a nickname
for "amateur".:) (I was a ham in high school and early college, if that makes any difference
to anyone... I still think in Morse code in my head when I see CQ in print.)
One thing I hate is when the "visited" color on a link is disabled or set to
the same as the "unvisited" color. That way you can't tell at a glance
which links you've visited already. Unfortunately, it's becoming more and
more common to do that, because the designers feel it upsets the color
balance of the page or something; to heck with user friendliness, their
"artistic sensibility" is more important.
I see you've disabled it on
your website, which you made "as clean as I could".
Please read Jacob Nielson's
Change the Color of Visited Links. (OK, his site is not the prettiest,
but pay attention to his ideas.)
Is this a reasonable price for what seems to be an interface between
google maps and the dept's crime database? Somehow it seems to me
that a motivated person could do the basic design and coding in a few days.
Then add in user feedback, layout redesigns,etc., but still, should it really
take even a couple of months for one person? As a crude guestimate,
I would probably feel
a little greedy or overly conservative bidding 6 months, of course I
don't know the spec
or what's really involved. What am I missing that seems to imply
two person-years or more of work?
Kinder Eggs are sold all over the world excluding the United States, where the
1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act prohibits embedding "non-nutritive items" in confections.
1938? I wonder what the real intent of this
law was. I thought
that babies only starting choking on small objects (or rather
that lawyers discovered that they do) in the '60s or '70s.
I was going to post to tell the article author, "You think you have problems?
Try carrying around an OLPC XO." Whether waiting in the drs. office
or riding the subway, it is often impossible to get any work done, what with
everyone commenting on it and asking about it.
The ones who had actually heard of it were the worse - they wanted
to see all the kid stuff demoed. (That option went away, thankfully, when
I wiped it and put XFCE on it.)
"Unfortunately" I already have a GF; if not, I could see it as a
great conversation starter - "they" are the ones who start the conversation!
Thing about though, is that it is the only laptop I know of where
you can read it in bright daylight at the beach, and get many
hours of battery life to boot. Great little machine (except for the
keyboard) for the
programming-type stuff and writing I want to do.
With a centrifuge, the experiment could be done on the Space Station,
rotating at the right speed to emulate the moon's gravity.
Still expensive, but not as much as a lunar surface version.
On the other hand, it might be useful to run a centrifuge on earth and
emulate say 1g + n*0.1g for n = 0 to 10.
We could look at the resulting curve
and extrapolate backwards. That of course assumes the extrapolation
is meaningful, but it might give a rough indication of what to expect
with very little expenditure.
359^3 is not right. Recall spherical coordinates theta, phi, and r. There are 360*180 possible 1-degree increments, for the coordinates theta and phi, since r is fixed. Another way of looking at it is think of the animal inside of a clear plastic ball; a reference point on the ball can only move in 2 dimensions i.e. the surface of a sphere. (Also, 0 through 359 degrees is 360 increments, not 359 increments.)
And even that is not strictly correct, if you want a uniform distribution, since in spherical coordinates, two points separated by 1 degree at the equator are further apart than two points separated by 1 degree near the poles. So 180*180 would probably be a closer answer. The actual solution is more complex, related to the problem of finding the minimum-energy distribution of N electrons on the surface of a sphere.
(To the other poster who said "One, 359^3 leaves out rotations on multiple axes": No, it doesn't. You must be thinking of the sum 360+360+360, with 360 points along each of the x, y, and z axes.)
What wasn't apparent to me is whether these "muscles" are exerting force along the axis of their attachment points; are they pulling against the "bones" to which they're attached as they expand laterally, perpendicular to the axis of attachment?
All three articles are confusing and lacking information needed to make any sort of
meaningful conclusion. It seems the people writing them don't bother to think,
but
just string together random fact snippets that sound cool and generate
hype.
One puzzle is that on the one hand, "carbon nanotubes are highly
conductive", yet on the other hand
need "three to five kilovolts" to contract.
If the resistance were say one ohm, that would be 9 to 25 megawatts
of power! A robot with 50 muscles might consume the entire output
of a power plant, not to mention burn up instantly.
They also confuse the force exerted lengthwise (large) and
the force exerted width wise (possibly very small,
since it seems to be due to electrostatic repulsion - the
videos do not show the width-wise force being measured or
demonstrated).
Possibly the 1% lengthwise contraction could be
amplified, to say 30% by wrapping it around a set of 30 pulleys.
One of the reasons I haven't believed the 9/11 conspiracy stuff
is that is seems to me essentially impossible for
so many people to be involved without a single one having a
twinge of conscience to come forward.
It gives me pause, though, that so many people
have access to the ACTA document without anyone
grasping the bogus nature of the "national security" claim
and the importance of making it public,
and just leaking it anonymously.
The lack of regulation surrounding CDS's is just nuts. As explained in that excellent TAL episode you linked to - the situation amounts to people gambling on the banks to fail, with "insurance policies" (what a CDS basically is) having been issued to the extent they amount to 10x the value of the assets being "insured". It's as if 9 other people bought fire insurance on your home, basically hoping for it to burn down.
Exactly.
One thing that never seems to get mentioned is, who is on the other side
of these naked CDSs? All of the billions that the U.S. govt is pumping
into AIG is going to them, right? I mean, it doesn't just vanish into
thin air. Who is this 1/10 OF A TRILLION dollars going to? Are we
creating a new class of billionaires at taxpayer expense? Why does no
one ever talk about them?
I think it is sickening that the govt has poured over $100 billion of
OUR MONEY into
AIG, and considering pouring more. AIG should have gone bankrupt and
its assets distributed to creditors, over and done with.
The insurance division (for normal insurance like yours and mine) wouldn't close down, it would just become owned
by the creditors as one of the assets. As for the naked CDS holders
who get pennies on the dollar, well tough, that's part of investment
risk. Why do they deserve to be payed any more than any other creditor
of a bankrupt company?
Now I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but I have one simple question
that no one seems to have asked:
do those who made the decision to give AIG $100 billion have any connections
at all to those on the other side of the naked CDSs?
The article says that the snakelike robotic arm is controlled with a
joystick. This sounds like it would require a lot of skill to
operate. It seems to me it would require much less training if the
robot were simply duplicated locally, and the operator manipulated it
with the manipulations replicated at the remote end. The local robot
could replicate any resistance encountered on the remote end. The
remote and local robots could be exactly the same, since both presumably
have motors, position sensors, and stress sensors in each joint. The software would
translate stress on the remote end to resistance on the local end, etc.
The article: "Because it's impossible for a person to simultaneously
control all the joints on the snake, the team developed software to
enable precise control of the robot's movements via a joystick." Well
yes, if you're trying to do everything via a joystick/computer screen.
But if you can just grab onto the physical local robot and move it the
way you want, like a gooseneck lamp, that seems pretty natural, and the
operator can focus on doing the job instead of futzing with computer
cursors and program options. Since this is an emergency, you want it to
be usable by any MD or technician with minimal additional training and
practice. The computer simulation would then just be a luxury since it
doesn't tell you any more than what you can already see (and feel) on the local
robot,
and possibly even an unnecesary distraction; you mainly just need
to hold the local robot and watch the video camera for feedback.
It could even be bidirectional: if someone moved it on the remote end
to help position it, those movements would be replicated on the local
end, and the local and remote personnel could easily cooperate.
Maybe restrict the maximum movement speed for safety so one end doesn't
wop the other (either accidentally or just fooling around for fun).
Here's yet another very simplified high-level explanation. Alice has
a quantum state that is a superposition of 0 and 1, and she wants to
teleport this state to Bob. With the help of an additional "entangled
pair" that Alice and Bob share, Alice combines her state and her
entangled pair half in a certain way, then makes a measurement that
destroys her original quantum state. The measurement results in two
classical bits. She transmits these two classical bits to Bob. Bob
uses the classical bits to reconstruct Alice's original quantum state on
his end.
The speed of teleportation is limited to how fast the classical
bits can be transmitted, which is the speed of light.
However, here is the amazing thing. Alice's state can be represented
mathematically by a complex number, and this complex number is
reproduced in Bob's reconstruction of her original state at his end. In
principle, a complex number holds an infinite amount of information
(since its real components hold an infinite number of decimal
places). So, in effect Alice is transmitting to Bob an infinite amount
of information with the assistance of 2 classical bits. There is a
sense in which the quantum entanglement has already transmitted this
infinite amount of information to Bob instantaneously - the moment Alice
makes her measurement, actually - but Bob needs the two classical bits
to make use of this instantaneously transmitted infinite information to
reconstruct a quantum state holding the hidden complex number at his
end.
There is a further subtlety here. Even though the transmitted
quantum information is infinite, it resides in its own "world" hidden
from humans. We can't measure this hidden complex number directly. The
hidden complex number determines a probability of measuring a 0 or 1,
and we can only estimate this probability with repeated experiments of the
same setup over and over (each time destroying the hidden complex number
i.e. the teleported state).
But - and this is important - as long as we don't do a measurement
that destroys the hidden complex number, we can play with the quantum
state, in combination with other such quantum states. These "other"
things can be truly amazing and are the whole point of quantum
computers. The challenge is to manipulate and coax the hidden quantum
world into interacting in useful ways, so that at the very end of such
manipulations we can measure a set of 0 or 1 answers that gives us, for
example, a factor of a huge number.
One other thing. If Alice doesn't transmit the classical bits, Bob
has still received one of four possible quantum states (instantaneously
in fact), each with an infinite amount of information. Unfortunately,
there is nothing that Bob can do to try to determine any of this
infinite information - it is all hidden, and the mathematics conspires
to forbid its discovery. This is why "real" (human observable)
information can't be transmitted faster than light.
This doesn't cure the problem, but seemed to help alot for me (at least
subjectively; I don't have hard data, sorry). In about:config, reduce
browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo from 10 to 1. I use the History's Recently
Closed Tabs for the last closed tab quite often, when I notice
something interesting just as I close the tab, but it is
very rare that I've wanted to undo more than one tab, and certainly
not 10.
An article that provides a little more technical detail
is
Chemists edge closer to recreating early life.
In particular, it mentions that the complexity of the
system is only about 140 nucleotides, which I find quite amazing.
By contrast, the simplest known independently self-reproducing
organism (i.e. not a virus, etc. dependent on a host and using the
host's reproduction machinery) is
the
Mycoplasma genitalium with 582970 base pairs of DNA.
So this new system shows that independent self-reproduction is possible with
dramatically reduced complexity.
You can use
Livestation.com for
a continuous Al Jazeera (English) feed that you won't get on your cable.
I won't claim it's objective, but I don't think you'll hear
an unfiltered viewpoint from the
"other side" in the U.S. media. Also, they have the only
reporters inside of Gaza, since Israel has apparently banned the mainstream
media.
Moreover,
is there evidence that potential terrorists (on a
suicide mission in particular) even
exhibit nervousness?
Could it be that an Islamic martyr on a suicide mission, who
truly believed in the cause and the religious brainwashing, might
actually be overcome with a sense of great peace and calm, believing that
he'd soon be rewarded in paradise with 72 adoring virgins at his beck
and call? I mean once you're at that point, your brain just
isn't working normally. Did the 9/11 hijackers exhibit any
of the signs of stress or anxiety that this system is supposed to
detect?
At the end I faced the decision of asking for donations to keep the site
running, or letting it die, and it became clear to me that I'd feel
better if it would just die.
Hosting services with essentially unlimited bandwidth
can cost as little as $5 per month.
I use ixwebhosting myself for a hobby site, but
I don't feel the need to ask for donations from my
audience to support it, since it barely costs me more than
a couple of cups of coffee a month.
I assume he needs no staff, and since the code is
written the site would be essentially self-maintaining.
And if the traffic became too much for a cheap hosting service,
then it would be high enough for ad support.
I'm sure he has his perfectly valid reasons for shutting it down.
Maybe he doesn't want to spend time moderating a site he is
no longer interested in, for example.
But it seems odd to imply that one of them is that
he is unable to afford to run it as
a hobby
without donations.
(BTW I was a technocrat subscriber, although I posted very rarely.
There were certain seemingly self-important posters, who I'll
leave nameless, whose
long rambles I just ignored. Other topics were often interesting,
though, somewhat like/. but a little broader in scope,
and I monitored the RSS feed every day or two.)
This is almost certainly a joke.
Hint: He is supposedly the
John Chapman Professor of Biochemistry at
FSU.
John Chapman was the real name of Johnny Appleseed.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's clever, everyone should do that. I'll have to teach my grandmother to write perl scripts, then remember what she called it, where she stored it, and how to run it everytime she is asked one of these retarded questions. Oh, and also how to save the output to her gpg file after remembering what her gpg file was called and where she stored it and what its password is.
If you (presumably) guard your passwords carefully (in this same gpg file?), why do you even bother saving the answer to the "secret question"? Just type a bunch of random keyboard characters (bang hard, using the opportunity to release the pent-up frustration), don't save it, and be done with it. Isn't that faster than going through the perl script rigamarole?
For most things - various user forums, etc. - I don't give a damn about all this password/secret question paranoia. If they crack it, so what? I haven't changed my slashdot password since day one, its easy for me to remember, and if someone cracks it and "steals" my "identity" here, well, I would probably find it amusing.
There are a relatively small number of things, such as bank accounts and trusted access to other people's networks (and yeah, my servers' roots) whose passwords I protect very carefully. Almost none of those things involve extra secret questions in case I forget the password, or if they do I've give a gibberish answer I don't save.
(OK, I have a CISSP cert, and those hyperparanoia-filled meetings I have to go to to keep it up sometimes make me want to scream).
4. Does she provide a verifiable accounting of the money received? Once her coffers overflow, good for her, but then my money might be better spent on another worthy cause.
As for "rote", it may have been a poor word choice, I just meant that a typical student doesn't have a rigorous understanding of what's behind NSA, but the same could be said of reals, too, I suppose. I do agree that Keisler does a good job of developing an intuitive feel in his book- - at least it seems so to me, who is not in the shoes of a beginner. But the post above my GP post is from a former Keisler student who seemed to indicate otherwise. It would be useful to understand just what the difficulty was that the failing or dropped-out students had - was it the teacher, the book, or something more intrinsic to NSA? One possible problem is that a new number system has to be mastered instead of just the reals that a beginner is already roughly familiar with, and the rules for handling mixtures of standard and nonstandard numbers in the same expression might seem strange and daunting.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_non-standard_analysis
Warning: The Keisler calculus book you mention uses what's called "nonstandard analysis", involving "hyperreal numbers", and is very different from what you learn in most calculus courses. This isn't to say that it is a bad book - in fact it is a very good one. But nonstandard analysis, while valid, hasn't really caught on since it was invented by Robinson in the 1960s in spite of some vocal advocates. Just be aware that after this book, some of the things in the ordinary high school or college Calculus-I book are going to be unfamiliar. And while rote manipulations with hyperreal numbers aren't too hard to learn, to understand them rigorously involves abstract math and set theory much deeper than that needed for the real numbers and limits of standard calculus (see the Epilogue of the book).
One other thing, people on lithium tend to gain weight. Sometimes significantly. I was married to a woman who turned out to be bipolar, and after she started the lithium that finally stabilized her mood swings she gained 65 pounds - after being thin most of her life prior to that. (Although I'll take the added weight over a life of sheer hell living with a bipolar person, any day.) Anyway, if you think the U.S. has an obesity epidemic now, just wait until lithium is added to the water.
That's $4 a line per month, or over say a 5-year lifetime of the code, $240 per line. If the production rate is 10 SLOCs per day (I heard 12 SLOCs), that would be $2400 per day of future revenue. If code "lives" 10, 20, or more years (or even until the copyright expires, which with continuing extensions will likely be when humanity self-destructs), well, I'll let you calculate it. :)
Curiously, PostgreSQL job trends show an almost identical percentage increase (if 10x lower in absolute numbers).
If you've been one for 6 years, hopefully by now you know that "ham" is not an acronym but is a nickname for "amateur". :) (I was a ham in high school and early college, if that makes any difference
to anyone... I still think in Morse code in my head when I see CQ in print.)
I see you've disabled it on your website, which you made "as clean as I could". Please read Jacob Nielson's Change the Color of Visited Links. (OK, his site is not the prettiest, but pay attention to his ideas.)
Is this a reasonable price for what seems to be an interface between google maps and the dept's crime database? Somehow it seems to me that a motivated person could do the basic design and coding in a few days. Then add in user feedback, layout redesigns ,etc., but still, should it really
take even a couple of months for one person? As a crude guestimate,
I would probably feel
a little greedy or overly conservative bidding 6 months, of course I
don't know the spec
or what's really involved. What am I missing that seems to imply
two person-years or more of work?
1938? I wonder what the real intent of this law was. I thought that babies only starting choking on small objects (or rather that lawyers discovered that they do) in the '60s or '70s.
"Unfortunately" I already have a GF; if not, I could see it as a great conversation starter - "they" are the ones who start the conversation!
Thing about though, is that it is the only laptop I know of where you can read it in bright daylight at the beach, and get many hours of battery life to boot. Great little machine (except for the keyboard) for the programming-type stuff and writing I want to do.
Oh, and it runs Linux (which you know of course).
On the other hand, it might be useful to run a centrifuge on earth and emulate say 1g + n*0.1g for n = 0 to 10. We could look at the resulting curve and extrapolate backwards. That of course assumes the extrapolation is meaningful, but it might give a rough indication of what to expect with very little expenditure.
And even that is not strictly correct, if you want a uniform distribution, since in spherical coordinates, two points separated by 1 degree at the equator are further apart than two points separated by 1 degree near the poles. So 180*180 would probably be a closer answer. The actual solution is more complex, related to the problem of finding the minimum-energy distribution of N electrons on the surface of a sphere.
(To the other poster who said "One, 359^3 leaves out rotations on multiple axes": No, it doesn't. You must be thinking of the sum 360+360+360, with 360 points along each of the x, y, and z axes.)
All three articles are confusing and lacking information needed to make any sort of meaningful conclusion. It seems the people writing them don't bother to think, but just string together random fact snippets that sound cool and generate hype.
One puzzle is that on the one hand, "carbon nanotubes are highly conductive", yet on the other hand need "three to five kilovolts" to contract. If the resistance were say one ohm, that would be 9 to 25 megawatts of power! A robot with 50 muscles might consume the entire output of a power plant, not to mention burn up instantly.
They also confuse the force exerted lengthwise (large) and the force exerted width wise (possibly very small, since it seems to be due to electrostatic repulsion - the videos do not show the width-wise force being measured or demonstrated).
Possibly the 1% lengthwise contraction could be amplified, to say 30% by wrapping it around a set of 30 pulleys.
One of the reasons I haven't believed the 9/11 conspiracy stuff is that is seems to me essentially impossible for so many people to be involved without a single one having a twinge of conscience to come forward. It gives me pause, though, that so many people have access to the ACTA document without anyone grasping the bogus nature of the "national security" claim and the importance of making it public, and just leaking it anonymously.
Exactly.
One thing that never seems to get mentioned is, who is on the other side of these naked CDSs? All of the billions that the U.S. govt is pumping into AIG is going to them, right? I mean, it doesn't just vanish into thin air. Who is this 1/10 OF A TRILLION dollars going to? Are we creating a new class of billionaires at taxpayer expense? Why does no one ever talk about them?
I think it is sickening that the govt has poured over $100 billion of OUR MONEY into AIG, and considering pouring more. AIG should have gone bankrupt and its assets distributed to creditors, over and done with. The insurance division (for normal insurance like yours and mine) wouldn't close down, it would just become owned by the creditors as one of the assets. As for the naked CDS holders who get pennies on the dollar, well tough, that's part of investment risk. Why do they deserve to be payed any more than any other creditor of a bankrupt company?
Now I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but I have one simple question that no one seems to have asked: do those who made the decision to give AIG $100 billion have any connections at all to those on the other side of the naked CDSs?
The article: "Because it's impossible for a person to simultaneously control all the joints on the snake, the team developed software to enable precise control of the robot's movements via a joystick." Well yes, if you're trying to do everything via a joystick/computer screen. But if you can just grab onto the physical local robot and move it the way you want, like a gooseneck lamp, that seems pretty natural, and the operator can focus on doing the job instead of futzing with computer cursors and program options. Since this is an emergency, you want it to be usable by any MD or technician with minimal additional training and practice. The computer simulation would then just be a luxury since it doesn't tell you any more than what you can already see (and feel) on the local robot, and possibly even an unnecesary distraction; you mainly just need to hold the local robot and watch the video camera for feedback.
It could even be bidirectional: if someone moved it on the remote end to help position it, those movements would be replicated on the local end, and the local and remote personnel could easily cooperate. Maybe restrict the maximum movement speed for safety so one end doesn't wop the other (either accidentally or just fooling around for fun).
The speed of teleportation is limited to how fast the classical bits can be transmitted, which is the speed of light.
However, here is the amazing thing. Alice's state can be represented mathematically by a complex number, and this complex number is reproduced in Bob's reconstruction of her original state at his end. In principle, a complex number holds an infinite amount of information (since its real components hold an infinite number of decimal places). So, in effect Alice is transmitting to Bob an infinite amount of information with the assistance of 2 classical bits. There is a sense in which the quantum entanglement has already transmitted this infinite amount of information to Bob instantaneously - the moment Alice makes her measurement, actually - but Bob needs the two classical bits to make use of this instantaneously transmitted infinite information to reconstruct a quantum state holding the hidden complex number at his end.
There is a further subtlety here. Even though the transmitted quantum information is infinite, it resides in its own "world" hidden from humans. We can't measure this hidden complex number directly. The hidden complex number determines a probability of measuring a 0 or 1, and we can only estimate this probability with repeated experiments of the same setup over and over (each time destroying the hidden complex number i.e. the teleported state).
But - and this is important - as long as we don't do a measurement that destroys the hidden complex number, we can play with the quantum state, in combination with other such quantum states. These "other" things can be truly amazing and are the whole point of quantum computers. The challenge is to manipulate and coax the hidden quantum world into interacting in useful ways, so that at the very end of such manipulations we can measure a set of 0 or 1 answers that gives us, for example, a factor of a huge number.
One other thing. If Alice doesn't transmit the classical bits, Bob has still received one of four possible quantum states (instantaneously in fact), each with an infinite amount of information. Unfortunately, there is nothing that Bob can do to try to determine any of this infinite information - it is all hidden, and the mathematics conspires to forbid its discovery. This is why "real" (human observable) information can't be transmitted faster than light.
This doesn't cure the problem, but seemed to help alot for me (at least subjectively; I don't have hard data, sorry). In about:config, reduce browser.sessionstore.max_tabs_undo from 10 to 1. I use the History's Recently Closed Tabs for the last closed tab quite often, when I notice something interesting just as I close the tab, but it is very rare that I've wanted to undo more than one tab, and certainly not 10.
An article that provides a little more technical detail is Chemists edge closer to recreating early life. In particular, it mentions that the complexity of the system is only about 140 nucleotides, which I find quite amazing. By contrast, the simplest known independently self-reproducing organism (i.e. not a virus, etc. dependent on a host and using the host's reproduction machinery) is the Mycoplasma genitalium with 582970 base pairs of DNA. So this new system shows that independent self-reproduction is possible with dramatically reduced complexity.
You can use Livestation.com for a continuous Al Jazeera (English) feed that you won't get on your cable. I won't claim it's objective, but I don't think you'll hear an unfiltered viewpoint from the "other side" in the U.S. media. Also, they have the only reporters inside of Gaza, since Israel has apparently banned the mainstream media.
Moreover, is there evidence that potential terrorists (on a suicide mission in particular) even exhibit nervousness? Could it be that an Islamic martyr on a suicide mission, who truly believed in the cause and the religious brainwashing, might actually be overcome with a sense of great peace and calm, believing that he'd soon be rewarded in paradise with 72 adoring virgins at his beck and call? I mean once you're at that point, your brain just isn't working normally. Did the 9/11 hijackers exhibit any of the signs of stress or anxiety that this system is supposed to detect?
Hosting services with essentially unlimited bandwidth can cost as little as $5 per month. I use ixwebhosting myself for a hobby site, but I don't feel the need to ask for donations from my audience to support it, since it barely costs me more than a couple of cups of coffee a month. I assume he needs no staff, and since the code is written the site would be essentially self-maintaining. And if the traffic became too much for a cheap hosting service, then it would be high enough for ad support. I'm sure he has his perfectly valid reasons for shutting it down. Maybe he doesn't want to spend time moderating a site he is no longer interested in, for example. But it seems odd to imply that one of them is that he is unable to afford to run it as a hobby without donations.
(BTW I was a technocrat subscriber, although I posted very rarely. There were certain seemingly self-important posters, who I'll leave nameless, whose long rambles I just ignored. Other topics were often interesting, though, somewhat like /. but a little broader in scope,
and I monitored the RSS feed every day or two.)
This is almost certainly a joke. Hint: He is supposedly the John Chapman Professor of Biochemistry at FSU. John Chapman was the real name of Johnny Appleseed.