It's a cool experiment, but it's news once you get the result, not "a few years" before.
The possibility that antimatter might fall "up" is news to me.
Do you really think that scientists should work away in their own little worlds and only pop their heads up and bother us regular folk when they have an answer?
Personally I think the questions are often interesting in themselves.
but what is more likely - Someone finds a loophole in the very weird world of quantum mechanics that makes quantum cryptography as we know it obsolite, or someone figures out a way to find prime factors of obsenely large numbers in a reasonable time.
Given that we don't know it makes sense to have both.
Advances in quantum computing may make the factoring problem an easy one.
Of course the commercial applications are rather niche right now and cost is no small part of that, but how many things often start that way, including your commodity PC?
There is only one cryptography scheme with proven secrecy, and that is the one time pad. Even if you assume no errors occur in its implementation, no physicist can guarantee there will never be discovered a way to eavesdrop on transmissions that use Quantum Cryptography. In contrast with the one time pad a Mathematician can more or less prove, at least to the extent you can prove anything at all, that eavesdropping is only possible if the implementation is flawed.
You are comparing apples with oranges. The bit your mathematician can "prove" is only part of the problem quantum encryption aims to solve. Ie quantum encryption also includes key exchange (and in fact typically uses a one time pad for the data transfer).
You can't simply ignore the key exchange problems on the mathematicians side.
Perhaps the laws of physics that are supposed to protect quantum encryption will turn out to be false but based on our current understanding there is no better way to do it.
How is your mathemetician going to distribute his one time pad?
There seems to be a fair few "firefox crashed with SIGSEGV in __kernel_vsyscall()" on the Firefox 3 Launchpad page".
However most of them seem to end up being marked incomplete or invalid because the traces don't seem to be any good. I've subscribed to a few and will see if they go anywhere.
Firefox 3 on Hardy freezes and crashes frequently for me and I have Intel graphics.
Sometimes when it crashes it just disappears. Sometimes it crashes and apport reports that the crash information is corrupted. Sometimes it crashes and apport manages to start adding the bug to launchpad but then launchpad starts having an error.
All in all Firefox 3 isn't anywhere stable enough for me and due to the problems I've had trying to report the bug (including working out how to reenable apport when Hardy was released) I'm not confident the Ubuntu devs are getting the information that would help them fix it.
Science has an issue with proof, since the actual evolution of a species is not specifically observable
Yes it is. Naturally we cannot observe the speciation that occurred before we started observing. We can however observe speciation now.
So, evolution proves millions of years which proves evolution?
If that is your understanding then it is a sad reflection on something. Given the relatively free availability of information these day I think it can only be a sad reflection on you.
By that I mean you would have to be willfully ignorant to suggest science posits any such thing.
A lot of different scientific arenas are used to estimate the earths age but evolution is not one of them.
It is interesting, it's almost as if you are trying define evolution as something we can't obtain evidence for.
Evolution is taking adaptation to it's illogical conclusion, that if enough adaptations happen over a long enough period of time, then suddenly we have two completely different species!
I'm not sure what "completely different species" means, ie what value the word "completely" brings given that different species still share a lot of genetic code. We have examples where evolution (or adaption if you insist) leads to speciation. Again that's just one thing I quickly found, however the examples are abundant.
I would really interested in some speculations here: if all life is wiped-out on earth, I mean no dna left at all anywhere. If the planet, presumably being in just the "right" place in the solar system, could spontaneously repopulate itself in 2-3 billion years?
We are talking about evolution. If you want to talk about biogenesis you might want to find somewhere more relevant.
As I said, there are things you can point to and say "that's evolution" in the same sense that you can point to a falling object and say "that's gravity".
Things that are seen as it happens, not just digging up a few bones and constructing a theory.
Those links are just the first two things I found from a quick internet search. However there is an abundance of such observations where evolution can be said to have been observed as a matter of fact.
Evolution is fact in the same sense that gravity is fact. We know it happens. There are things we can point to and say "look, evolution".
Evolutionary Theory also exists ("The Theory of Evolution" is a misnomer as there isn't really one single theory, rather a lot of complementary and sometimes competing theories for parts of what might be considered, in toto, "evolution") also exists in the same sense the Newton's Theory of Gravity and General Relativity exist.
So yes, a theory exists to explain the facts but that doesn't mean there is no fact.
Joseph translated 116 pages. He gave the pages to Martin Harrison. Martin Harrison lost the pages. Joseph Smith believed that they had been altered so that if he retranslated them the re translation would not match the original. Thus he did not retranslate them.
Was it because he couldn't? Or because he was legitimately avoiding a trap? It seems silly to say "he couldn't" because it makes no sense to say he was somehow less capable of translating non-existent plates the second time than the first time. So this is really not a coherent argument at all, but just a clever bit of slander. Whether or not Joseph Smith was an impostor, the case is not strengthened or harmed by the fact that he refused to retranslate once the original text was out of his control.
I think the implication is that his translation was not a translation and he made those 116 pages up from scratch.
You say "it makes no sense to say he was somehow less capable of translating non-existent plates the second time than the first time" but it makes perfect sense. If he's making it up as he goes along then if he does it again it won't be the same.
If he made another set and the first "translation" was found again then he'd have been exposed as a fraudster because the two would be different, thus he made up a fairly ridiculous excuse.
This is the word of god that has been given to me but I'm not going to translate it again because someone's out to get me? He obviously didn't think that 116 pages of the word of god was worth much.
Slashdot Mirror
The possibility that antimatter might fall "up" is news to me.
Do you really think that scientists should work away in their own little worlds and only pop their heads up and bother us regular folk when they have an answer?
Personally I think the questions are often interesting in themselves.
Given that we don't know it makes sense to have both.
Advances in quantum computing may make the factoring problem an easy one.
Of course the commercial applications are rather niche right now and cost is no small part of that, but how many things often start that way, including your commodity PC?
You are comparing apples with oranges. The bit your mathematician can "prove" is only part of the problem quantum encryption aims to solve. Ie quantum encryption also includes key exchange (and in fact typically uses a one time pad for the data transfer).
You can't simply ignore the key exchange problems on the mathematicians side.
Perhaps the laws of physics that are supposed to protect quantum encryption will turn out to be false but based on our current understanding there is no better way to do it.
How is your mathemetician going to distribute his one time pad?
CC stands for closed circuit.
I think it's supposed to be relaxing, not "challenging".
Indeed, any male streakers should expect a torrent of penis enlargement emails.
Since next year!
If it's all countries I expect there are in fact quite a few in front of the UK in the "1984" stakes.
Not that that is anything to be proud of.
Perhaps $36 USD of the profit in the US could be apportioned to profit on the Wii Sports game which sells separately in Japan.
In any case it's difficult to imagine why such a thing would be illegal.
Apple's white plastic is of a superior quality.
No, I removed that a while ago.
There seems to be a fair few "firefox crashed with SIGSEGV in __kernel_vsyscall()" on the Firefox 3 Launchpad page".
However most of them seem to end up being marked incomplete or invalid because the traces don't seem to be any good. I've subscribed to a few and will see if they go anywhere.
It isn't reproducable, it just happens fairly frequently.
I've put an image of the stack trace that Apport generates here.
I don't think it's terribly revealing, well, it isn't to me at least!
Firefox 3 on Hardy freezes and crashes frequently for me and I have Intel graphics.
Sometimes when it crashes it just disappears.
Sometimes it crashes and apport reports that the crash information is corrupted.
Sometimes it crashes and apport manages to start adding the bug to launchpad but then launchpad starts having an error.
All in all Firefox 3 isn't anywhere stable enough for me and due to the problems I've had trying to report the bug (including working out how to reenable apport when Hardy was released) I'm not confident the Ubuntu devs are getting the information that would help them fix it.
If that is your understanding then it is a sad reflection on something. Given the relatively free availability of information these day I think it can only be a sad reflection on you.
By that I mean you would have to be willfully ignorant to suggest science posits any such thing.
A lot of different scientific arenas are used to estimate the earths age but evolution is not one of them.
Perhaps you should read what I wrote again.
We are talking about evolution.
If you want to talk about biogenesis you might want to find somewhere more relevant.
As I said, there are things you can point to and say "that's evolution" in the same sense that you can point to a falling object and say "that's gravity".
Things that are seen as it happens, not just digging up a few bones and constructing a theory.
Those links are just the first two things I found from a quick internet search. However there is an abundance of such observations where evolution can be said to have been observed as a matter of fact.
I suppose that depends on how credulous you are.
If you are willing to believe anything on no real evidence then I suppose you might believe that anything is true.
That doesn't mean it is actually true though.
Who comes up with this stuff, whoever comes up with it clearly have too much time on their hands.
If only Slashdot had existed earlier they'd have had somewhere else to waste their time and would be nowhere near as intrusive into peoples lives.
Because people like you can't explain it?
Evolution is fact in the same sense that gravity is fact. We know it happens. There are things we can point to and say "look, evolution".
Evolutionary Theory also exists ("The Theory of Evolution" is a misnomer as there isn't really one single theory, rather a lot of complementary and sometimes competing theories for parts of what might be considered, in toto, "evolution") also exists in the same sense the Newton's Theory of Gravity and General Relativity exist.
So yes, a theory exists to explain the facts but that doesn't mean there is no fact.
I think the implication is that his translation was not a translation and he made those 116 pages up from scratch.
You say "it makes no sense to say he was somehow less capable of translating non-existent plates the second time than the first time" but it makes perfect sense. If he's making it up as he goes along then if he does it again it won't be the same.
If he made another set and the first "translation" was found again then he'd have been exposed as a fraudster because the two would be different, thus he made up a fairly ridiculous excuse.
This is the word of god that has been given to me but I'm not going to translate it again because someone's out to get me? He obviously didn't think that 116 pages of the word of god was worth much.
Verisign
Considering how much they charge for certificates it's not hard to imagine them making millions out of people buying new certificates.
And praise be for that. When I looked at Slashdot this morning I thought was going to have a very crappy day today.
I administer at least 8 multi-year wildcard certificates.
If we hadn't gone with the LTS a lot of my time (and thousands of dollars) would have been wasted.