Their view is that the phone/device doesn't really belong to you in any real sense.
You may have bought it, and thus own the physical form, but they only let you use the software, thus it does what they want, not what you want.
Oh, and by the way, they effectively won't let you remove their software and load your own software on it. (Updates that brick hacked devices for example.)
That attitude takes tethering to the level of a steel chain.
This is about a rather specialized type of quantum computer. Or more realistically, a proposed idea for a quantum computer.
One of the problems for quantum computing is the fragility of the quantum states that could be used. Even a tiny disturbance can cause the thing to screw up in a manner called decohering. So, there has been a push to find possible quantum computing elements that are extremely well insulated from the outside world, or that will tolerate a lot of disturbance without decohering.
Certain quantum states of quasi-particles called anyons (no joke. That's what they are called) in 2 dimensions are thought to be extremely stable.
Recently, there have been observations of states similar to these in surfaces of materials called topological insulators. They haven't conclusively shown that the right sort of states (called nonabelian) exist yet.
But, even if these so called "topologically protected" quantum states of the right sort exist, you still need an algorithm for how to compute with them.
What the Texas Advanced Computing Center team did was simulate a proposed algorithm called topological color coding for a specific case. When they did this, they found that it can withstand 10% of the underlying quantum bits screwing up.
So, it's a simulation of a proposed set of rules for computing with a proposed (but not yet demonstrated) set of quantum bits, using special quantum particles (that are composed of more than one normal particles bound together) that have not yet been shown to exist.
Although this is a very interesting area, it's a simulation of a vaporware program to run on a vaporware computer that is based on vaporware physics.
So, to say the least it's a ways off. But for solid state physics geeks it's a very hot topic of research.
I somehow doubt Germany will, as you say, tell the environmentalists to suck it. They'll just import. Note the Nordstream project that's currently being built.
Then they'll buy carbon offsets. Relatively expensive, but not as much as some other options.
They'll just have to live with the geopolitical fallout.
Good to know. must be all these large German oil and gas fields that keep them from having to import gas and oil from all over the world.
Oh, you say they don't have so many of them?
Russia and other oil/gas producers will be happy to fill the gap. But, it will increase their influence on Germany and the rest of Europe. See the food fight between Russia and Ukraine (or any of several others) over gas/oil passing through to Europe for example.
Destruction of such experiments has been pretty standard in parts of Europe for as long as they've been being tested.
In the past, a lot of experiments were moved to the US or other GMO tolerant countries to avoid this. Do a search on "gmo field destruction" if you want lots of examples.
It's an issue that combines opposition from those who genuinely don't like GMOS with other groups that want a ban on foreign produce for competitive reasons. The latter often runs afoul of the WTO when done directly, but it can often be done successfully when it's presented in terms of banning GMOs or in terms of food safety regulations.
I'm hardly a Stallman fan, but this seems a bit blown out of proportion.
As others have said, go to the Israeli universities on another trip.
Of course, he could do the payback thing and get the Israelis to pay for his second trip, schedule appearances in the Palestinian territories and then cancel them.
There is no safe nuclear power. There will never be. It's just physically impossible"
Indeed. The Carrington Event back in the 1859 shows that the biggest nuclear power source in the solar system is fraught with danger for our modern world.
In fact it almost certainly will one day destroy the earth.
We should all lobby the government to immediately start research to extinguish the sun.
The problem is not those with declared stocks. The problem is that someone who isn't declaring it has some stored. Theyd be much more likely to do something untoward with it. And, if they do, then how would destroying small known stocks be anything but symbolism?
We're really early in the game of understanding the genetic basis of disease virulence. It's hard to say what may be useful in the way of organisms to be used in that kind of research.
Some emergent virus that uses some of smallpox's tricks may show up and we'd regret not having it available to study to better understand the new one.
This is hardly data that is soopersekret national security info.
The ftp server is now down on that machine, but who knows. For all I can see, it may have even been open for read only anonymous ftp access and he just didn't know it for what it was.
Otherwise he may have guessed an obscure login like "data" with password "data". Or, if it was running something unpatched from way long ago, used an existing hack. ftp buffer overflows were a dime a dozen at one point.
Not everything is worth heavily securing especially when you want a broad and diverse audience to have access to it.
Depends on what part of the cooling system. The main cooling pumps indeed do take a lot of electric power.
One of the backup systems, the RCIC, uses residual steam pressure to inject cooling water into the reactor. The valves and controls for that system require electric power, but batteries can supply that.
It will revolutionize history research. We all know that data is moving more and more to the net. This will centralize it and provide quality control.
You'll just have to consult the official site to determine what truly happened. No mucking about having to weigh the validity of original sources that might have been mistranslated, be biased, or were authored disengenuously to slander someone. No dealing with the vagaries, subjectivity and bother of gathering statements from witnesses to events before they pass away. The savings in travel and time for history, archeology, anthropology and related departments will be most welcome as they tend to be underfunded anyway. They won't have to waste so much time in futile debate over what really happened.
One source and one truth to be written and taught in classrooms.
What a remarkable idea.
Think how easy it makes journalism as well. Why, they'll be able to cut even more of those expensive foreign correspondents that sit around waiting for news to happen.
It certainly will help end the terrible partisanship we have in this country. People will all start from the same set of facts. Why, if we unify the deductive methods applied to them, we can avoid this terrible inefficiency of having people look at the same circumstances and come to different conclusions about it.
Finally, the nation will have clarity rather than this messy confusion.
Yeah, there is that. But even there you can limit things.
My hunch (it'd need to be thought out more) is that there's not much chance of lots of life in the ice layer. Activate the reactor when it gets to the surface. The ice itself is a shield that limits radiation propagation. Melt through the ice until you are almost to the liquid, then have the undersea probe burrow the rest of the way. Leave the reactor shut down and entombed in the ice.
You'd need some kind of communications relay near the ice/liquid interface anyway. You could use electronics on the reactor body for that. Send the info up a trailed cable to a surface relay and use the residual heat in the reactor to power them for a long time.
The submarine probe can then explore without an unshielded reactor interfering with the instruments.
(Just a thought. Like I said, it'd need to be fleshed out. I keep being amazed at the range of places on earth that life shows up. Some of those microbes are tough little beasties.)
The Russians have been flying nuclear reactors for quite a long while (since the 60s). They needed that level of power for some of their ocean scanning radar satellites (RORSAT). NASA flew the SNAP 10A which was a fission reactor in 1965.
As to shielding, don't start the reactor until it's way out in space. With no humans around, you only have to have enough shielding to protect the spacecraft electronics.
Slashdot Mirror
Their view is that the phone/device doesn't really belong to you in any real sense.
You may have bought it, and thus own the physical form, but they only let you use the software, thus it does what they want, not what you want.
Oh, and by the way, they effectively won't let you remove their software and load your own software on it. (Updates that brick hacked devices for example.)
That attitude takes tethering to the level of a steel chain.
Same Sony. Different Day.
This is about a rather specialized type of quantum computer. Or more realistically, a proposed idea for a quantum computer.
One of the problems for quantum computing is the fragility of the quantum states that could be used. Even a tiny disturbance can cause the thing to screw up in a manner called decohering. So, there has been a push to find possible quantum computing elements that are extremely well insulated from the outside world, or that will tolerate a lot of disturbance without decohering.
Certain quantum states of quasi-particles called anyons (no joke. That's what they are called) in 2 dimensions are thought to be extremely stable.
Recently, there have been observations of states similar to these in surfaces of materials called topological insulators. They haven't conclusively shown that the right sort of states (called nonabelian) exist yet.
But, even if these so called "topologically protected" quantum states of the right sort exist, you still need an algorithm for how to compute with them.
What the Texas Advanced Computing Center team did was simulate a proposed algorithm called topological color coding for a specific case. When they did this, they found that it can withstand 10% of the underlying quantum bits screwing up.
So, it's a simulation of a proposed set of rules for computing with a proposed (but not yet demonstrated) set of quantum bits, using special quantum particles (that are composed of more than one normal particles bound together) that have not yet been shown to exist.
Although this is a very interesting area, it's a simulation of a vaporware program to run on a vaporware computer that is based on vaporware physics.
So, to say the least it's a ways off. But for solid state physics geeks it's a very hot topic of research.
Obligatory non-goatse links with useful info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_quantum_computer
Original paper abstract: http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0573 with links to full paper.
This work was done by the computational physics group at Texas A&M: http://comp-phys.tamu.edu/ among others.
This is your brain on Twitter.
Any questions?
In Iranian Slashdot content blocks you!
Did anybody expect much else?
Attributing noble (or for that matter focused evil) motives to anonymous is a bit silly.
They'd be about as happy if it was the neo-nazis or Mother Theresa that they'd hit as long as someone has their panties in a knot due to them.
You can likely sum up their reaction to some slashdotters being in a tizzy because they hit PBS Frontline as "Mission accomplished!"
I somehow doubt Germany will, as you say, tell the environmentalists to suck it. They'll just import. Note the Nordstream project that's currently being built.
Then they'll buy carbon offsets. Relatively expensive, but not as much as some other options.
They'll just have to live with the geopolitical fallout.
"independence from energy imports."
Good to know. must be all these large German oil and gas fields that keep them from having to import gas and oil from all over the world.
Oh, you say they don't have so many of them?
Russia and other oil/gas producers will be happy to fill the gap. But, it will increase their influence on Germany and the rest of Europe. See the food fight between Russia and Ukraine (or any of several others) over gas/oil passing through to Europe for example.
"we don't export as much as before"
You'll just import more Russian oil and gas to make up for it. And then buy carbon credits to offset it.
Nice when you have the money to do that.
Doesn't do much for energy independence, though.
Hardly unexpected or new.
Destruction of such experiments has been pretty standard in parts of Europe for as long as they've been being tested.
In the past, a lot of experiments were moved to the US or other GMO tolerant countries to avoid this. Do a search on "gmo field destruction" if you want lots of examples.
It's an issue that combines opposition from those who genuinely don't like GMOS with other groups that want a ban on foreign produce for competitive reasons. The latter often runs afoul of the WTO when done directly, but it can often be done successfully when it's presented in terms of banning GMOs or in terms of food safety regulations.
I'm hardly a Stallman fan, but this seems a bit blown out of proportion.
As others have said, go to the Israeli universities on another trip.
Of course, he could do the payback thing and get the Israelis to pay for his second trip, schedule appearances in the Palestinian territories and then cancel them.
Would be a nice symmetry to that.
There were several very cute female astrophysics grad students at UNM when I went there in 1993. Likely even more of them now.
"Bullshit !
There is no safe nuclear power. There will never be.
It's just physically impossible"
Indeed. The Carrington Event back in the 1859 shows that the biggest nuclear power source in the solar system is fraught with danger for our modern world.
In fact it almost certainly will one day destroy the earth.
We should all lobby the government to immediately start research to extinguish the sun.
The problem is not those with declared stocks. The problem is that someone who isn't declaring it has some stored. Theyd be much more likely to do something untoward with it. And, if they do, then how would destroying small known stocks be anything but symbolism?
We're really early in the game of understanding the genetic basis of disease virulence. It's hard to say what may be useful in the way of organisms to be used in that kind of research.
Some emergent virus that uses some of smallpox's tricks may show up and we'd regret not having it available to study to better understand the new one.
Well, BFD.
This is hardly data that is soopersekret national security info.
The ftp server is now down on that machine, but who knows. For all I can see, it may have even been open for read only anonymous ftp access and he just didn't know it for what it was.
Otherwise he may have guessed an obscure login like "data" with password "data". Or, if it was running something unpatched from way long ago, used an existing hack. ftp buffer overflows were a dime a dozen at one point.
Not everything is worth heavily securing especially when you want a broad and diverse audience to have access to it.
Depends on what part of the cooling system. The main cooling pumps indeed do take a lot of electric power.
One of the backup systems, the RCIC, uses residual steam pressure to inject cooling water into the reactor. The valves and controls for that system require electric power, but batteries can supply that.
Beware the terrible simplifiers.
I thought I'd made this blatant enough that people would understand it as irony and satire.
Apparently not everyone.
The old usenet axiom that there is no irony so blatant that someone won't take it seriously still applies.
Boring is good.
Try living in extremely interesting times.
This is wonderful.
It will revolutionize history research. We all know that data is moving more and more to the net. This will centralize it and provide quality control.
You'll just have to consult the official site to determine what truly happened. No mucking about having to weigh the validity of original sources that might have been mistranslated, be biased, or were authored disengenuously to slander someone. No dealing with the vagaries, subjectivity and bother of gathering statements from witnesses to events before they pass away. The savings in travel and time for history, archeology, anthropology and related departments will be most welcome as they tend to be underfunded anyway. They won't have to waste so much time in futile debate over what really happened.
One source and one truth to be written and taught in classrooms.
What a remarkable idea.
Think how easy it makes journalism as well. Why, they'll be able to cut even more of those expensive foreign correspondents that sit around waiting for news to happen.
It certainly will help end the terrible partisanship we have in this country. People will all start from the same set of facts. Why, if we unify the deductive methods applied to them, we can avoid this terrible inefficiency of having people look at the same circumstances and come to different conclusions about it.
Finally, the nation will have clarity rather than this messy confusion.
Is this cribbed from Lyndon Larouche?
Yeah, there is that. But even there you can limit things.
My hunch (it'd need to be thought out more) is that there's not much chance of lots of life in the ice layer. Activate the reactor when it gets to the surface. The ice itself is a shield that limits radiation propagation. Melt through the ice until you are almost to the liquid, then have the undersea probe burrow the rest of the way. Leave the reactor shut down and entombed in the ice.
You'd need some kind of communications relay near the ice/liquid interface anyway. You could use electronics on the reactor body for that. Send the info up a trailed cable to a surface relay and use the residual heat in the reactor to power them for a long time.
The submarine probe can then explore without an unshielded reactor interfering with the instruments.
(Just a thought. Like I said, it'd need to be fleshed out. I keep being amazed at the range of places on earth that life shows up. Some of those microbes are tough little beasties.)
The Russians have been flying nuclear reactors for quite a long while (since the 60s). They needed that level of power for some of their ocean scanning radar satellites (RORSAT). NASA flew the SNAP 10A which was a fission reactor in 1965.
As to shielding, don't start the reactor until it's way out in space. With no humans around, you only have to have enough shielding to protect the spacecraft electronics.
Amazing what slashdot ACs know before anyone else does. Maybe he can tell us what New Horizons will find when it gets to Pluto and save us the wait.
I think some of the people confidently commenting on this article have a geology knowledge level akin to "I think it's made of rock."
I thought it was a pretty interesting result. They'd been guessing beforehand. Now they have actual evidence of a global magma layer.
There may be a nimby reaction where people don't want their home state to be the first area to allow driverless cars.
My neighbors might disagree, but I'd be happy to have them tried out near me.
They can't be worse than the 2 am crowd trying to drive home from the local tavern when it closes.
Besides, Google is one of the few entities with the huge cash reserves and legal department to let them do this without risking the whole company.