Liquidmetal mentioned in Discover article
on
Amorphous Steel
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· Score: 2, Interesting
In the Discover article, one of the companies attempting to capitalize on amorphous metals is LiquidMetal. The stuff has been used in Head tennis rackets, golf clubs, hinges in cell phones, etc. A friend of mine has tested the head racket and he said you can really feel it return the energy better than other rackets.
Although the Discover article says that knives can be easily cast (e.g., for surgical purposes, disposable knives can be made much more easily), the metal isn't as hard as hand-made knives. This is sort of surprising given its glassy properties -- the ads by Liquidmetal show a steel ball bouncing for minutes on a slab of the stuff.
See this link http://www.rayrogers.com/lm.htm for one knifemaker's experience in dealing with the stuff (the RC rating is in the mid 50's if I recall). Still very promising technology though. Once the cost comes down I think it will have a very wide range of applications.
The article you referenced is about power lines and EMF, not about cell phones. While the principle behind the article is quite similar, there are nonetheless significant differences. I would argue that the jury is still out regarding cell phones, and that while I feel that power lines do not presently pose a significant threat to human health, we should still be concerned about other sources of EMF.
One of the replies to your post mentioned radiation output from TVs and microwaves, and they are quite a bit higher than cellphones. One recent article from Fortune is by a neurologist who has studied EMF for the last 30 years. Even though we haven't seen an explosion of cancer rates from young children watching 8 hours of TV a day, the human body doesn't always show drastic changes when it has been affected.
Bottom line, true, not everything with the word "radiation" is bad for you, but it shouldn't be necessarily ignored either. The FCC is only in its first year or two of its five year study on the effects of cellphone radiation.
Another problem was that the Chimera virus apparently wasn't airborne either, as evidenced by the two people in the movie who were infected by it -- the Dr. who had been infected for some time, and flew in a commercial plane that recycles its air (and yet these people were not at risk, as the Dr. was apparently not concerned about their health), and of course the one other person who had it for at least 12-14 hours and did not spread the virus to anyone else despite being in the public.
Given that it was spliced from various strains of influenza, Chimera should have caused *real* flu like symptoms, ie sneezing, sniffling, runny nose, & stuffy head that even NyQuil won't fix. The flu needs these symptoms to spread to other people. Neither carriers showed any of these symptoms to any great degree, they just look liked they were not feeling well.
The virus itself supposedly destroyed blood cells, but there's the problem of mechanism. As viruses consist solely of DNA and some protein, they require the hosts' builtin mechanisms of DNA replication and protein production to reproduce. However mature blood cells do not contain any DNA or replicative processes, as their sole function is gas transport (they eject their nucleus at the last stage of development). So it seems highly unlikely that Chimera could reproduce via infecting blood cells, as the blood cells would not have any ability to produce more Chimera. The sole exception is if it infects a different type of cell first, *then* attacks the red blood cells.
Lastly, I think that Ebola works by attacking the connective tissues or something to that effect, not the blood cells, so that the person bleeds to death because their blood vessels disintegrate and their internal organs liquify. Chimera's symptoms should be a rather rapid clotting of the blood, due to the high rate of cell lysis, and the person dying of lack of oxygen. They shouldn't be bleeding out their various body orifices, the breakdown of the blood cells would cause clotting factors to activate beforehand.
Anyhow, the rest of MI:2's plot is so weak I don't think the science behind their plot really even matters, but it would have been nice if they had tried to make it plausible.
The reason why DVD-Rs and DVD-RWs will remain around the $30 range is the same reason that 'music' CD-Rs are still around $10-15. Royalties. The film/music industries aren't stupid, and they have required that all blank media that could be used to illegally copy material should be charged a pre-emptive royalty. Why haven't 'data' CD-Rs and CD-RWs been subject to the same fee? I'm assuming it's because they store data, and thus like floppies and Zips hold personal data. But the probability of people recording their own music is rather slim. While this isn't ideal, I believe this is what is nonetheless happening.
At least, this was true from what I recall a few years ago.
I'm rather surprised nobody has mentioned this before. First off, when people say, "Oh, distributed.net is the fastest computer in the world, and look how long it's taking to crack only 64-bit keys...". We do not know the full extent of NSA's hardware. It is believed that a quantum computer would be able to crack a RSA-encrypted message rather quickly, generally regardless of length. Why? Because a quantum computer will attempt to solve all the possible keys *at once*. Bah, but there is no such thing as a quantum computer (yet), right? Recently (at least 3-6 months ago now) IBM completed testing on a very simple quantum computer capable of adding 2 'qbits' or quantum-bits together. While this might seem elementary, there exists a chance that the NSA already has a fully functioning quantum computer. Considering that they decided not to classify such technology, despite their paranoia in classifying other crypto-related technology, it makes one wonder. Granted, the immediate use for quantum computers is not crypto-cracking I would think.
Secondly, if one looks at the top 10 supercomputers in the world, they will notice that around 3 of them are of the "classified" category. Combined, these three supercomputers provide more power than the top computer which is at Sandia. Some of these have been in operation for at least 2-3 years. It has also been acknowledged that dedicated systems with custom-designed chips are able to crack DES, etc, at much higher rates than conventional technology - DeepCrack or whatever by EFF is a good example, and that only cost them $100k-200k. Imagine what an intelligence agency with a multi-billion dollar budget can do. So I wouldn't rely on distributed.net to be the benchmark in crypto cracking.
Finally, there is the matter of limited manpower. Yes, the NSA's weak point would probably have to be their inability to focus on *everybody* cause they just don't have the resources to do so, however, the nature of Echelon lends itself to more economic interests as well as national security ones. Thus, there has been concern that corporations which donate mucho $$ to the current administration might be slipped occasional interceptions of their competition. Given the willingness of our current administration to cater to the Chinese government, I'm not sure they wouldn't hold back against our own national companies. But unless you're some major multinational corp w/ some big competitors sitting around, I wouldn't be too worried.
So for the most part, I must agree with the rest of the posts that one need not be too concerned with NSA intercepting their transmissions - even if they did, the odds of it being used for malaligned purposes is very slim. While the NSA might possess the technology (and the money), there are many other factors which appear to work in our favor.
If I'm not mistaken, I read in a Wired article that l0pht industries runs OpenBSD as their webserver. Granted, as mentioned earlier, a poorly configured server can be cracked, regardless of OS.
A friend of mine got to watch it at a screening as well, and he put up a brief review/critique of the movie - he's not a 'professional' movie critic (which I generally distrust anyhow), just a guy who lived through the SW era, and had some connections to see the movie... I can only presume his review is somewhat like the ones out there - since aint-it-cool-news is already slashdotted, at least there's cold water being splashed out there before everyone starts rioting in the theater when it finally comes out. There aren't any spoilers that I can see in the review, just a general critique of the overall movie. Just stuff about the high amount of humor (well the original SW was pretty cheesy anyhow), and the seemingly young target audience the movie is aiming for, and a surprisingly linear plot. Perhaps, as the review mentions, Lucas is aiming for a younger audience in order to build a following for the remaining prequels. The review is on a messageboard, at http://www.netbabbler.com/message/?forumid=16186&m essageid=925940735 -- please be kind to it.
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In the Discover article, one of the companies attempting to capitalize on amorphous metals is LiquidMetal. The stuff has been used in Head tennis rackets, golf clubs, hinges in cell phones, etc. A friend of mine has tested the head racket and he said you can really feel it return the energy better than other rackets.
Although the Discover article says that knives can be easily cast (e.g., for surgical purposes, disposable knives can be made much more easily), the metal isn't as hard as hand-made knives. This is sort of surprising given its glassy properties -- the ads by Liquidmetal show a steel ball bouncing for minutes on a slab of the stuff.
See this link http://www.rayrogers.com/lm.htm for one knifemaker's experience in dealing with the stuff (the RC rating is in the mid 50's if I recall). Still very promising technology though. Once the cost comes down I think it will have a very wide range of applications.
The article you referenced is about power lines and EMF, not about cell phones. While the principle behind the article is quite similar, there are nonetheless significant differences. I would argue that the jury is still out regarding cell phones, and that while I feel that power lines do not presently pose a significant threat to human health, we should still be concerned about other sources of EMF.
One of the replies to your post mentioned radiation output from TVs and microwaves, and they are quite a bit higher than cellphones. One recent article from Fortune is by a neurologist who has studied EMF for the last 30 years. Even though we haven't seen an explosion of cancer rates from young children watching 8 hours of TV a day, the human body doesn't always show drastic changes when it has been affected.
Bottom line, true, not everything with the word "radiation" is bad for you, but it shouldn't be necessarily ignored either. The FCC is only in its first year or two of its five year study on the effects of cellphone radiation.
Given that it was spliced from various strains of influenza, Chimera should have caused *real* flu like symptoms, ie sneezing, sniffling, runny nose, & stuffy head that even NyQuil won't fix. The flu needs these symptoms to spread to other people. Neither carriers showed any of these symptoms to any great degree, they just look liked they were not feeling well.
The virus itself supposedly destroyed blood cells, but there's the problem of mechanism. As viruses consist solely of DNA and some protein, they require the hosts' builtin mechanisms of DNA replication and protein production to reproduce. However mature blood cells do not contain any DNA or replicative processes, as their sole function is gas transport (they eject their nucleus at the last stage of development). So it seems highly unlikely that Chimera could reproduce via infecting blood cells, as the blood cells would not have any ability to produce more Chimera. The sole exception is if it infects a different type of cell first, *then* attacks the red blood cells.
Lastly, I think that Ebola works by attacking the connective tissues or something to that effect, not the blood cells, so that the person bleeds to death because their blood vessels disintegrate and their internal organs liquify. Chimera's symptoms should be a rather rapid clotting of the blood, due to the high rate of cell lysis, and the person dying of lack of oxygen. They shouldn't be bleeding out their various body orifices, the breakdown of the blood cells would cause clotting factors to activate beforehand.
Anyhow, the rest of MI:2's plot is so weak I don't think the science behind their plot really even matters, but it would have been nice if they had tried to make it plausible.
At least, this was true from what I recall a few years ago.
I'm rather surprised nobody has mentioned this before. First off, when people say, "Oh, distributed.net is the fastest computer in the world, and look how long it's taking to crack only 64-bit keys...". We do not know the full extent of NSA's hardware. It is believed that a quantum computer would be able to crack a RSA-encrypted message rather quickly, generally regardless of length. Why? Because a quantum computer will attempt to solve all the possible keys *at once*. Bah, but there is no such thing as a quantum computer (yet), right? Recently (at least 3-6 months ago now) IBM completed testing on a very simple quantum computer capable of adding 2 'qbits' or quantum-bits together. While this might seem elementary, there exists a chance that the NSA already has a fully functioning quantum computer. Considering that they decided not to classify such technology, despite their paranoia in classifying other crypto-related technology, it makes one wonder. Granted, the immediate use for quantum computers is not crypto-cracking I would think.
Secondly, if one looks at the top 10 supercomputers in the world, they will notice that around 3 of them are of the "classified" category. Combined, these three supercomputers provide more power than the top computer which is at Sandia. Some of these have been in operation for at least 2-3 years. It has also been acknowledged that dedicated systems with custom-designed chips are able to crack DES, etc, at much higher rates than conventional technology - DeepCrack or whatever by EFF is a good example, and that only cost them $100k-200k. Imagine what an intelligence agency with a multi-billion dollar budget can do. So I wouldn't rely on distributed.net to be the benchmark in crypto cracking.
Finally, there is the matter of limited manpower. Yes, the NSA's weak point would probably have to be their inability to focus on *everybody* cause they just don't have the resources to do so, however, the nature of Echelon lends itself to more economic interests as well as national security ones. Thus, there has been concern that corporations which donate mucho $$ to the current administration might be slipped occasional interceptions of their competition. Given the willingness of our current administration to cater to the Chinese government, I'm not sure they wouldn't hold back against our own national companies. But unless you're some major multinational corp w/ some big competitors sitting around, I wouldn't be too worried.
So for the most part, I must agree with the rest of the posts that one need not be too concerned with NSA intercepting their transmissions - even if they did, the odds of it being used for malaligned purposes is very slim. While the NSA might possess the technology (and the money), there are many other factors which appear to work in our favor.
If I'm not mistaken, I read in a Wired article that l0pht industries runs OpenBSD as their webserver. Granted, as mentioned earlier, a poorly configured server can be cracked, regardless of OS.
A friend of mine got to watch it at a screening as well, and he put up a brief review/critique of the movie - he's not a 'professional' movie critic (which I generally distrust anyhow), just a guy who lived through the SW era, and had some connections to see the movie... I can only presume his review is somewhat like the ones out there - since aint-it-cool-news is already slashdotted, at least there's cold water being splashed out there before everyone starts rioting in the theater when it finally comes out. There aren't any spoilers that I can see in the review, just a general critique of the overall movie. Just stuff about the high amount of humor (well the original SW was pretty cheesy anyhow), and the seemingly young target audience the movie is aiming for, and a surprisingly linear plot. Perhaps, as the review mentions, Lucas is aiming for a younger audience in order to build a following for the remaining prequels. The review is on a messageboard, at http://www.netbabbler.com/message/?forumid=16186&m essageid=925940735 -- please be kind to it.