Your response is incorrect. Habeas corpus applied to all persons detained within the United States (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, as well as previous cases), including (Rasul v. Bush) the detainees of Guantanamo Bay. Citizenship was not required. The Constitution delineates between rights afforded specifically to citizens and those applied generally. The courts have upheld this interpretation multiple times.
The Military Commissions Act essentially removes habeas corpus for aliens detained by the United States who have been determined to be enemy combatants or are awaiting such determination.
Algorithmically, the quantum computer cracking your key is more efficient than you encrypting or decrypting with it; increasing the key size gets you nothing.
What you're hoping for is that increasing the key size outstrips someone's ability to make a quantum computer with more bits. Perhaps it's just a particular level of intuition, or seeing how these sorts of things go, but once a quantum computer with a "reasonable number" of qbits is established (say, enough to crack a 2048-bit key), I would not think it too much more difficult to make one that can crack any reasonable key size.
There aren't any fundamental limitations, only engineering ones, so it will never be "impossible" to build such a quantum computer, only restrictively difficult.
Essentially what you are hoping for is that "you cannot build a useful quantum computer" remains true.
I don't really watch Star Trek, so I'm not really sure what you're talking about. I'm just a physicist.
David Deutsch, like any physicist, knows full well that a theory such as the many-worlds interpretation, which he happens to find plausible, carries a very different meaning and weight than a law. While many-worlds or even the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics may be interesting and may lead to the discovery of new laws, they're not laws, they aren't testable, and hence they don't "mean" anything. But anyone with even a passing knowledge of proper science understands that and treats theories and laws differently.
Empiricism is always needed for laws. I see you failed to address the fact that QM is empirically testable. I can make some guesses as to why you would conveniently avoid that.
Frankly, it only takes an undergraduate-level understanding of physics to be familiar with all the empirical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, including EPR, and this is sufficient to prove to oneself that quantum computers are entirely possible (though the engineering is a pain).
If you had more than a passing knowledge of quantum mechanics, you'd know that superposition is empirically observable.
"they feel qualified to claim (without any evidence to back it up)"
Historically, people didn't feel qualified to claim until there was a lot of evidence to back it up. As rebellious as your ideas may seem to you, believe it or not, lots of scientists thought quantum mechanics was preposterous, including Einstein. It's accepted now because it is empirically testable.
"Physicists have no clue as to why nature is probabilistic"
Perhaps that's true, but a scientific law is completely valid without knowing "why" it's true. (If you want some metaphysical nonsense, base scientific facts have no "why". Why is G or c a particular value and not some other value? Why is space such that fields scale with distance as 1/r^2? It doesn't matter if there even is a why, it's still true.)
No, what quantum computation provides is an entirely different scalability benefit.
With classical computers and current knowledge of mathematics, public-key encryption is a winnable arms race. If you double your key length, the amount of work you need to encrypt and decrypt with it increases, but the amount of work to crack it increases enormously more. If you can guess how much computing power your enemy has and how fast computing power will grow, you can pick a key length so that it'll remain secure for a specified amount of time.
Quantum computation isn't a different tradeoff. It prevents you from playing this computing-power race and always winning. This means that increasing your key size will do nothing for you.
Of course, if we really want to play these games, quantum mechanics may be able to provide better encryption, too. For example, QM can create link-level communication where any interception of the data is (nearly) immediately detectable. (This is actually used in at least one large optical link.)
Factoring a four-bit number on a quantum computer requires quite a lot of qbits. You require 20 qbits just to store a four-bit number, and more just to execute the algorithm. This is a big improvement on the few-qbit machines previously made. At this point, while decoherence is still a large barrier, it's solely an engineering barrier, and one should expect it to last for too long. (Where "too long" is in physics terms. You'll probably be okay for 20 years or so.)
Here's trivial example of how a "truly random" output can also be a fingerprint. Imagine the random outputs are real numbers. Machine A produces a truly random output, evenly distributed between 0 and 1. Machine B produces a truly random output, evenly distributed between 7 and 10. Both are equally-good random numbers, but given the output, it's easy to tell which machine generated it.
"Many people like to claim that lightspeed is a hard-and-fast limit, and that it's impossible to travel faster. 150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air."
This is a fairly false analogy. You're generalizing both what people are thinking that and why they're claiming it's impossible.
It would be equally fair to claim that today, people believe the universe is only 10,000 years old.
Claiming that routine behavior is "rarely found out" is what is generally called "conspiracy theory", and there is significant research to document the validity of, for example, your claims.
Unlikely to be very helpful. You might as well just put your data on the encrypted volume. Use of respectably secure encryption raises a lot of red flags and is unlikely to be used against something as mundane as legal pornography. Once your volume is decrypted, stenographic analysis will be run against everything.
as represented in most comments. There's a significant difference between actions that are generally useful and can also be used to hide information. There are a ton of those. Even if there is systematic behavior indicating those methods are applied only to a small set of information, that is not significant enough to claim that information is related to illegal activity.
Separate from this is those acts that *are not* generally useful, do not come about unintentionally, and serve to hide information. They are not evidence of illegal activity by themselves, but they do raise the awareness that you are intentionally hiding information under the assumption someone will try to find it, which may be very relevant if that data is later found to be involved in illegal activity. Creating a loop in an NTFS file system is designed to prevent a specific product from analyzing your hard drive. It is not necessarily very useful in, say, preventing a thief from accessing your data (which encryption does). As such, it's one piece (out of many necessary) of evidence that might be useful.
This kind of extra forensic data is particularly useful because, depending on the situation, you can claim in court you are not liable for data found on your hard drive. I had no idea those files contained child porn! But your willful obfuscation suggests otherwise.
They look for a cause for your symptoms. "I have acute appendicitis" isn't a symptom statement, it's a self-diagnosis, and if you told your doctor that, he did tests that were false, then he'd ask you what the symptoms are.
This study is not an attempt to find the cause of headaches, nausea, etc. experienced by people who claim it is caused by cell-tower radiation. It is an attempt to determine if the cell-tower radiation is the cause. In your analogy, it is the test to determine if you have appendicitis.
It is significant that people don't often invent symptoms similar to those of appendicitis, so it warrants further investigation. People often invent these more inspecific symptoms (headache), and they have so many potential causes, finding the root cause is not necessarily a productive endeavor.
I think the heart of the matter is that people who disagree with the results -- having no scientific basis for doing so -- will discredit the process used to obtain the results, even though the process used to obtain their own opinions is much less rigorous.
Interesting physics you've got there, relating power and bandwidth. You know radio is one of the places where the proper definition of bandwidth is applicable?
Sure, the obvious way is to correlate illness incidence to radio source proximity. This, however, deals with subjective illnesses (anxiety, tiredness) and addresses the very problem with simply making this correlation -- the "whether or not you are ill" measurement is not accurate.
Your analogy isn't quite appropriate, though. Suppose you were allergic to a food additive. I find many people who also claim this. I put all of you on separate diets, with nearly-identical food, except that about half of your diets include this food additive. You should be able to accurately tell me, after some time on this diet, whether or not the additive was present based on the presence of allergy symptoms. If reporting of symptoms is unrelated to the presence of the additive, you're inventing your symptoms (probably because all the popular kids say food additives are poisoning you).
Is there particular relevance in "x% of the population is orders of magnitude smaller than the margins of error for most polls". I mean, besides that being false (most polls have small samples sizes and errors of a few percent, some have tenth-percent error), the wrong units (sort of, margin of error is typically in percent, as are the poll figures, whereas 0.05% of the population is a number), this doesn't really seem relevant to your point of "most people disagree that MMOs are addictive, but I'm convinced that it's true".
How and how much you are charged for WoW depends on your region. While those numbers are normal for US and EU accounts (~$15/mo or less for US, depending on how large of blocks of time you buy), WoW players in Asia have very different pricing structures (and account for a huge number of accounts).
Slashdot Mirror
Your response is incorrect. Habeas corpus applied to all persons detained within the United States (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, as well as previous cases), including (Rasul v. Bush) the detainees of Guantanamo Bay. Citizenship was not required. The Constitution delineates between rights afforded specifically to citizens and those applied generally. The courts have upheld this interpretation multiple times.
The Military Commissions Act essentially removes habeas corpus for aliens detained by the United States who have been determined to be enemy combatants or are awaiting such determination.
Algorithmically, the quantum computer cracking your key is more efficient than you encrypting or decrypting with it; increasing the key size gets you nothing.
What you're hoping for is that increasing the key size outstrips someone's ability to make a quantum computer with more bits. Perhaps it's just a particular level of intuition, or seeing how these sorts of things go, but once a quantum computer with a "reasonable number" of qbits is established (say, enough to crack a 2048-bit key), I would not think it too much more difficult to make one that can crack any reasonable key size.
There aren't any fundamental limitations, only engineering ones, so it will never be "impossible" to build such a quantum computer, only restrictively difficult.
Essentially what you are hoping for is that "you cannot build a useful quantum computer" remains true.
I don't really watch Star Trek, so I'm not really sure what you're talking about. I'm just a physicist.
David Deutsch, like any physicist, knows full well that a theory such as the many-worlds interpretation, which he happens to find plausible, carries a very different meaning and weight than a law. While many-worlds or even the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics may be interesting and may lead to the discovery of new laws, they're not laws, they aren't testable, and hence they don't "mean" anything. But anyone with even a passing knowledge of proper science understands that and treats theories and laws differently.
Empiricism is always needed for laws. I see you failed to address the fact that QM is empirically testable. I can make some guesses as to why you would conveniently avoid that.
Frankly, it only takes an undergraduate-level understanding of physics to be familiar with all the empirical underpinnings of quantum mechanics, including EPR, and this is sufficient to prove to oneself that quantum computers are entirely possible (though the engineering is a pain).
I recall a shortcut algorithm, if not Shor's, that does not require building any such modular exponentiator.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're familiar neither with quantum computation nor with Shor's factoring algorithm.
If you had more than a passing knowledge of quantum mechanics, you'd know that superposition is empirically observable.
"they feel qualified to claim (without any evidence to back it up)"
Historically, people didn't feel qualified to claim until there was a lot of evidence to back it up. As rebellious as your ideas may seem to you, believe it or not, lots of scientists thought quantum mechanics was preposterous, including Einstein. It's accepted now because it is empirically testable.
"Physicists have no clue as to why nature is probabilistic"
Perhaps that's true, but a scientific law is completely valid without knowing "why" it's true. (If you want some metaphysical nonsense, base scientific facts have no "why". Why is G or c a particular value and not some other value? Why is space such that fields scale with distance as 1/r^2? It doesn't matter if there even is a why, it's still true.)
No, what quantum computation provides is an entirely different scalability benefit.
With classical computers and current knowledge of mathematics, public-key encryption is a winnable arms race. If you double your key length, the amount of work you need to encrypt and decrypt with it increases, but the amount of work to crack it increases enormously more. If you can guess how much computing power your enemy has and how fast computing power will grow, you can pick a key length so that it'll remain secure for a specified amount of time.
Quantum computation isn't a different tradeoff. It prevents you from playing this computing-power race and always winning. This means that increasing your key size will do nothing for you.
Of course, if we really want to play these games, quantum mechanics may be able to provide better encryption, too. For example, QM can create link-level communication where any interception of the data is (nearly) immediately detectable. (This is actually used in at least one large optical link.)
Factoring a four-bit number on a quantum computer requires quite a lot of qbits. You require 20 qbits just to store a four-bit number, and more just to execute the algorithm. This is a big improvement on the few-qbit machines previously made. At this point, while decoherence is still a large barrier, it's solely an engineering barrier, and one should expect it to last for too long. (Where "too long" is in physics terms. You'll probably be okay for 20 years or so.)
In the same way deadly nightshade (belladonna) is used to cure nerve gas poisoning.
Here's trivial example of how a "truly random" output can also be a fingerprint. Imagine the random outputs are real numbers. Machine A produces a truly random output, evenly distributed between 0 and 1. Machine B produces a truly random output, evenly distributed between 7 and 10. Both are equally-good random numbers, but given the output, it's easy to tell which machine generated it.
Not any current scientific models I'm familiar with, and I'm a physicist.
"Many people like to claim that lightspeed is a hard-and-fast limit, and that it's impossible to travel faster. 150 years ago people thought it was impossible to fly in a machine that was heavier than air."
This is a fairly false analogy. You're generalizing both what people are thinking that and why they're claiming it's impossible.
It would be equally fair to claim that today, people believe the universe is only 10,000 years old.
"They don't even really understand how gravity works, and that's the most important force which affects us humans in our daily lives."
Not the most influential force, but the most easily-observed.
Unless you know anything of the base mathematics, in which case you can come up with it yourself readily.
Claiming that routine behavior is "rarely found out" is what is generally called "conspiracy theory", and there is significant research to document the validity of, for example, your claims.
Unlikely to be very helpful. You might as well just put your data on the encrypted volume. Use of respectably secure encryption raises a lot of red flags and is unlikely to be used against something as mundane as legal pornography. Once your volume is decrypted, stenographic analysis will be run against everything.
as represented in most comments. There's a significant difference between actions that are generally useful and can also be used to hide information. There are a ton of those. Even if there is systematic behavior indicating those methods are applied only to a small set of information, that is not significant enough to claim that information is related to illegal activity.
Separate from this is those acts that *are not* generally useful, do not come about unintentionally, and serve to hide information. They are not evidence of illegal activity by themselves, but they do raise the awareness that you are intentionally hiding information under the assumption someone will try to find it, which may be very relevant if that data is later found to be involved in illegal activity. Creating a loop in an NTFS file system is designed to prevent a specific product from analyzing your hard drive. It is not necessarily very useful in, say, preventing a thief from accessing your data (which encryption does). As such, it's one piece (out of many necessary) of evidence that might be useful.
This kind of extra forensic data is particularly useful because, depending on the situation, you can claim in court you are not liable for data found on your hard drive. I had no idea those files contained child porn! But your willful obfuscation suggests otherwise.
Because rare behavior -- which is found out and very widely challenged -- is normal behavior, right?
They look for a cause for your symptoms. "I have acute appendicitis" isn't a symptom statement, it's a self-diagnosis, and if you told your doctor that, he did tests that were false, then he'd ask you what the symptoms are.
This study is not an attempt to find the cause of headaches, nausea, etc. experienced by people who claim it is caused by cell-tower radiation. It is an attempt to determine if the cell-tower radiation is the cause. In your analogy, it is the test to determine if you have appendicitis.
It is significant that people don't often invent symptoms similar to those of appendicitis, so it warrants further investigation. People often invent these more inspecific symptoms (headache), and they have so many potential causes, finding the root cause is not necessarily a productive endeavor.
I think the heart of the matter is that people who disagree with the results -- having no scientific basis for doing so -- will discredit the process used to obtain the results, even though the process used to obtain their own opinions is much less rigorous.
Interesting physics you've got there, relating power and bandwidth. You know radio is one of the places where the proper definition of bandwidth is applicable?
Sure, the obvious way is to correlate illness incidence to radio source proximity. This, however, deals with subjective illnesses (anxiety, tiredness) and addresses the very problem with simply making this correlation -- the "whether or not you are ill" measurement is not accurate.
Your analogy isn't quite appropriate, though. Suppose you were allergic to a food additive. I find many people who also claim this. I put all of you on separate diets, with nearly-identical food, except that about half of your diets include this food additive. You should be able to accurately tell me, after some time on this diet, whether or not the additive was present based on the presence of allergy symptoms. If reporting of symptoms is unrelated to the presence of the additive, you're inventing your symptoms (probably because all the popular kids say food additives are poisoning you).
Is there particular relevance in "x% of the population is orders of magnitude smaller than the margins of error for most polls". I mean, besides that being false (most polls have small samples sizes and errors of a few percent, some have tenth-percent error), the wrong units (sort of, margin of error is typically in percent, as are the poll figures, whereas 0.05% of the population is a number), this doesn't really seem relevant to your point of "most people disagree that MMOs are addictive, but I'm convinced that it's true".
* is a huge MMO
How and how much you are charged for WoW depends on your region. While those numbers are normal for US and EU accounts (~$15/mo or less for US, depending on how large of blocks of time you buy), WoW players in Asia have very different pricing structures (and account for a huge number of accounts).
Now we know the real reason there is less malware for the Macintosh.