Seriously. I mean, if people can think that John Travolta shows 'feelings' when he's acting, surely others could be faking it...how do I know that I'm not the only human being in the world gifted with "feelings" while everyone else is a mindless robot who's just pretending?
Well, if you're going to go all scientifically philosophical on us, how can you be sure that we exist at all? Maybe we're just figments of your imagination?;-)
Just what assumptions you have to make to "prove" that others have feelings would be interesting to discuss though.
You're really going to quibble over a 1% difference by playing math games? Oooo!!!! 2% is 100% greater than 1%!!!!
Well, I wasn't aware I was quibling, but now that you mention it, it's 1% of the GDP. That's one huge chunk of cash. In terms even you could understand, that's one cent out of ever dollar that ever gets arround. And we do consider us parts of "western civilization", and we're still here, despite spending less on defense than you lot.
And whenever you feel the urge to leave for any parallel universe, don't let the rest of us hold you back. Bon voyage!;-)
I wonder where you are getting your information from. The OMB [whitehouse.gov] figures state that only 17% ($368 billion out of total $2.128 Trillion)of the fiscal year 2003 budget is allocated to defense spending.
Well, how about the CIA? The CIA factbook lists the following figures (percent of GDP) Sweden: 2.1%, US: 3.2%, UK: 2.32%, France: 2.57%, and Germany: 1.38%.
Thus, as percentages go you range from 24% to 131% greater expenditure military wise, than some European countries. The actual dollar values are of course a different story.
Just for comparison with Sweden and social spending. Our military cost on the average about as much as our housing interest rebate program (aka rent control). Which is to a large extent responsible for delayed "gettoisation" of our larger cities. (Though we'll see for how much longer, unfortunately.)
How much say a halving of the US military expenditure (to German levels) could bring in the form of social reform to the US, I have no idea. Though it'd be an interesting academic exercise.
It's pretty simple.
As an American, I have the right to criticize my country and my government.
If you are not an American, you do not have that right.
Which would be all good and well, if you weren't so set on critisising the rest of us all the time.
When you go on and on about how you are "the greatest country in the world", the home of freedom and democracy and bla-di-bla. All the rest of us hear is of course: "And the best that any of you other loosers can hope for is a distant second", and "We used to be a bit full of ourselves, but now we're perfect."
If I with the same consistency tried to shove Sweden down your throat, with the same apparent lack of critical thinking, I'd be run out of here, and for good reason. So take it down a notch, will you? Polite company, OK?
I think that the designers of the IBM 4758 [ibm.com] cryptographic coprocessors might disagree. The IBM4732 is supposed to be tampre proof [rutgers.edu].
And yet, an application on the IBM4732 was hacked a little under a year ago. Granted it wasn't the processor as such, but a very important application that is delivered with the processor. Getting the whole system right is hard.
If you want more material on why tamper proofing is difficult; Ross Anderson'steam at Cambridge is a good resource.
(And they have performed a number of nice hacks Markus Kuhn's optical eavesdropping for example).
Personally, I like the fairness of ticketed queuing systems... They won't get in line! They just MILL ABOUT in a huge mass of people. So when you show up, you have no idea where the end of the line is. Plus, dumbfucks use this to basically butt in line in front of you.
I had just that comment from a french girl I met once. She lamented the fact that "You can't cut ahead in lines here, because of the ticket systems...;-)
However, forming a queue comes natural here, we are talking about Sweden; it's not for nothing they call us the Japaneese of the north;-)
Personally, I'm partial to the system I've seen in US post offices. One central line for all tellers, organised with a tape barrier. Simple, cheap, and efficient, with few (if any) of the drawbacks of the fully automated ones.
In the article it describes what has been used in low tech meat counters ever since I can remember.
Not only that but the technology as such is crap. Pardon the pun.
Here in Sweden automated next-in-line ticket machines are everywhere, and having to suffer them one major flaw comes immediately to light; lower efficiency.
You see, what was before a line, with the next person steping up to the counter (or toilet) in all of two seconds, now takes thirty or more. You first have to find the correct teller, then mosy on over there.
Add to that the fact that the people servicing the tellers now can take a brake or fiddle with God knows what (since there is no line of customers eagerly awaiting service). Before the 'improvement' the person behind the counter had to wait for a natural lull, before being able to file here (or his) fingernails, now it can be done with a hundred people waiting in line. Oh progress.
As an example of the lowered efficiency I can take the case of returning books at the local library used to be handled by one librarian, now that they've automated it, it takes three! Same amount of work.
About the only institution that has gotten it right is the (state) liqour stores, where the staff presses the button too soon (so to speak) and actually keep a line of two persons at each teller: the customer being serviced, and the next one. That increases throughput considerably. Wouldn't work here though. You'd have to press the button before you were all wiped off and squeaky clean for that to work in an airplane.
Not possible. Paragraph four of the statutes of the Nobel foundation clearly states that a maximum of three people can share a prize.
It's even been mentioned in the television series (where the laureates of the year are interviewed) by some US physicists that they did indeed have that in mind when applying for grants etc. I.e. not to be more than tree eligible researchers not to spoilt their chanses.
I tried Evolution for a while; generally a good app with some serious flaws (at the time I tried it). For example, there's this thing called STARTTLS... or if either of them supports IMAPS
Regarding Evolution: StartTLS for POP/SMTP/LDAP is in Evolution 1.1.1 (beta).
IMAPS is in 1.0.3 (stable), don't know when it was added. Works like a charm for me.
Remember, when mobile phones first came along, "mobile" meant "not fixed to the wall". You could not move while talking. There was no handover. If you went out of reach of your base station, you would lose the call.
Well, that depends on what you mean by "first came." The first radio telephone systems worked that way, but one of the first true mobile phone systems, the venerable NMT 450 in Northern Europe had hand-over specified from the beginning, despite having Motorola sending high level execs to Sweden to try and have the standard changed. Then the microprocessor became available, and all of a sudden, mobility wasn't such of an issue any longer.
Now, to specify a system such as 802.11 today and not think about mobility is borderline criminal IMHO. (And a lesson that should have been learnt with AMPS, that in it's first fielded versions didn't have standardised roaming interface, which lead to all sorts of interop. and roaming problems in the US.)
That's not to say that all is lost however. Look at a system such as HP:s Open Roaming, which works seemelessly (and looks very impressiv in demos) regardless of whether the access points themselves support roaming or not.
Other than reasonably-priced basic internet connectivity at less than the cost of overpriced metered phone service, what interesting new broadband apps have come out of Europe?
Well, that's still a bit of an issue. There hasn't been that much innovation yet.
I'd say that personally, the one service that developped quicker (much quicker in fact) here than in the States is on-line banking. Most of my friends here in Northern Europe did their banking on-line, when most of my Amercian friends still sent chequeues (sp?) through the mail.
There's probably a bit of tradition that helped (if you can call it that) here to. Such as us Europeans having had more of a tradition of treating our banks as semi formal institutions rather than private enterprises. Personal Giros etc was common here a long time ago, at the cost of not using personal chequeues.
But if you don't count the Web, came from CERN after all;-) That's about it, of the top of my head.
However, the cable infrastructure had to be there before switching from dialup could even be an option. Europe's relatively small size and higher population density made wiring the whole country with a modern cable infrastructure a lot easier, relative to the United States.
Well, that's always a factor. Then on the other hand, you cannot run a cable for long trhough Europe without hitting a border, which always means problems EU or not. So, I'm still not convinced that's the problem here. Just look at xDSL and ISDN, you guys were way ahead, not having to fight stoodgy old telecoms branches of government. (And we shouldn't forget that the pop density of Europe varies wildley; parts of Sweden has the same pop. density as Wyoming for instance.)
I'd still say that unmetered access is the key here. Esp. in light of the original article, i.e. there not being an economic incentive.
Any yes, nowadays people may not give our their phone no. to avoid callers;-) but that wasn't the driving force behind the revolution. We never got into pagers for instance, because why would you need one when you had a phone (with SMS). (Differences in coverage between EU and the States aside.)
In Sweden at the moment 71% of the population have a GSM subscription/prepaid! If you subtract the very young, the elderly and the infirm, that menas that "everyone" has a GSM phone. You still have some catching up to do in the states before you reach those figures.
And no, telemarketing is not the plague here that it's in Europe, I'd say to a large extent for the exact reason that you'd have to pay for making all those expensive calls to mobiles, for a small return. (And there'd be an outrage and you'd be legislated into oblivion, and kicked out by the phone co.;-)
Good quality 512kbit link starts at 250$/month. Not whole Europe is ahead US in broadband access.
Too true. I must confess to using Europe more from the EU perspective than from the geographical Europe perspective. And northern/middle EU at that. Then again, it's not the first time that Sweden's done Poland a great injustice, and you sort of managed to forgive us last time, so, I'm hoping you'll find it in your hearts this time around as well.;-)
BTW, how it GSM in Poland? That's pretty accessible though, isn't it?
It's funny how it's the little things that can mean a big difference. In this case not having unmetered local phone access (in general). Now, it's not that I enjoy having to pay for local phone calls, far from it, but it has driven the cost argument the other way. In my case it's significantly cheaper to pay $30/month for unmetered cable internet access, than staying with metered modem calls.
If I were in the US I honestly couldn't say whether I'd have moved from dial up, with less of an economic incentive. It's not so much the bandwidth, as not feeling you're on the clock when you're on-line.
It's really the same as with mobile phones. Since the US chose to keep the mobile phones within the existing number structure, i.e you cannot tell whether you're calling a mobile or a fixed line, and since customers expect unmetered local calls, then the subscriber had to pay for incoming calls, which lead to less willingness to give out your phone number, which lead to the uncommon situation of Europe getting a lead over the US in a matter of driving technology adaption.
IMHO this is the one difference that has made GSM a success where US mobile solutions have lagged. It's still an open question whether that will stay true, or if by an ironic twist of fate, 3G will do us in, while late adoption in the US will position you guys better in the next 10-20 years.
But the one time pad is theoretically unbreakable.
Here it's fitting to note the words of Steve Bellowin:
"As a practical person, I've observed that one-time pads are theoretically unbreakable, but practically very weak. By contrast, conventional ciphers are theoretically breakable, but practically strong."
In operation, there are many 'gotchas' to watch out for, never reuse a pad for example.
Google for 'Venona' and 'one time pad' for a good example of even the experts (KGB et al) getting one time pads wrong.
So, besides some situations, depending on light orientation, surface reflection, etc... when you place the object it's already affecting it's enviroment.
How, the object dosen't read his own shadow?
Well, if you're going for full "invisibility" with this approach you're going to be disapointed.
But think about a military vehicle in a simpler, say six sided scenario and the obvious benefits of being able to have one side dark (the one pointing away from the heavy forest), and the other one white (pointing away from the snowfield you're currently traversing) and the benefits are pretty clear.
Today in winter you have to decide whether to paint the whole tank white (or rather cammo white) or not. You can't in general have it both ways. Even a tank with very limited capability to adapt the color to the environment (from dark to light) in the winter scenario would increase it's chances of going undetected.
And of course we are only discussing evading the mark one eye ball detector here, but before you discount that, remember that fancier techniqes not withstanding, more armies still rely heavily on it. This is rapidly becoming less and less true, granted, but that's not to say that in the future you will be excempt from ordinary visual spectrum camoflague. Rather you'll have to do that in addition...
I don't think it is that workable for all directions, or even more then a few.
Well, that depends on what you mean by workable.
Just getting the hue and intensity right (and being able to vary those) will go a very long way. It's not for nothing that English fishermen weren't allowed to paint their hulls white in days of yore, or that Mountbatten had his fleet painted pink. (The sky is brigther than the ocean at dusk/night and hence a light hull blends in. And pink works better agains the redder skies of asian waters).
The US Army even conducted trials with lamps on tanks to make them harder to spot as silouettes against the sky on a ridge line for example.
Now, the light trick is unworkable for other reasons (you have to be quick on the switch) should you drive in front of a dark object. So if this process could be automated there's much to be gained.
Now, of course if your main objection that this is far from a cloak of invisibility, that's for certain. But it could be quite useful camouflage.
And kids remember the old adage "A running soldier in a camoflague uniform, looks just like a running soldier in a camoflague uniform." Camouflage is still very much a stationary art. I doubt that tricks like these would change that much.
I haven't read about any chosen-ciphertext attacks during the Enigma crack.
Oh, there were some of those to. When they couldn't find a suitable crib for a particular day, the Bletchley boys sometimes reverted to more devious methods. One method relied on the fact that the german harbour masters on the french coast used a three wheel Enigma with the same day key as everybody else.
They also had the german naval map of the area outside the ports with the "secret" map references. So they'd task coastal command with laying a mine (by airplane) in so and so an area (in plain view of the germans) who would, predictably, proceed to sweep the mine, and then dutifully report back: "We've swept three mines at grid reference so-and-so."
Of course, in doing so they unwitingly provided the allies with a nice crib. Other variations of this game was also played, such as bombing weather bouys, having the servicing submarine report back that "Now the verdamten Engländer... etc".
Now, it may not have been a perfect chosen ciphertext attack, in that the messages couldn't be varied exactly to the specification of the Bletchley park staff, I'd still say we've clearly left the realm of guessed plaintext.
Just like the crypto people assume the NSA is 10+ years ahead of them in codebreaking
That's just it, we don't anymore. While that may have been the case as late as the eighties, it certainly isn't anymore, and hasn't been for quite some time.
Go to any country in the world. Give away a $1, $20 or $100 to whoever wants one. See how many $1 bills you actually give away. See how many $100 bills you actually give away.
If you give away anything but $100 bills, then I'll believe foreigners can't tell American money apart.
Actually, since the US $100 bill is worthless/useless all over the world, even in the US (what's the point of bringing money that you have to go to a bank to exchange for the local currency, such as twenties), I'd be surprised if the $20 wasn't the most popular currency, at least in the parts of the world where that wasn't in itself an outrageous amount.
Oh, and while you're bashing the rest of us for not being able to read numbers, how about the dime, which doesn't even have a number printed on it. It sure as h*ll doesn't say 10 cents anywhere, that's for certain.
Now, let us consider biodiesel - made from peanut oil, canola, corn, hemp, or whatnot.
Well, there was a big drive for BioDiesel here in Sweden a few years ago (two if memory serves) and I've discussed the issue with my wife (who was then working with environmental issues at a large Swedish heavy truck manufacturer) and unfortunately the availability equation just doesn't add up.
I believe the figures were that even if we converted all Swedish farmland to BioDiesel (i.e. RME here) production, we still wouldn't cover more than a fraction (less than 10%) of the necessary transportation needs.
Granted, the US has lower population density, a nice flat bit in between the coasts that is available for agriculture, but you also drive a lot more (almost no public transportation to speak of compared to northern Europe). I'd be surprised if the calculations would be much more favourable for you than for us.
So, no, won't fly, which is a pity for sure. (And then it's not exactly zero emission either, there was a famous test in Sweden with a used heavy truck engine that was worse emission-wise with RME than with mineral diesel. You do get rid of the CO2, but that's about all of it. Don't get me started on the health catastrophy wating to happen that is particulate matter, and how diesel engines and now even direct injection petrol engines have become steadily worse in that respect over the years.
To be sure, I don't want computers flagging people to be arrested. But computers sift through enormous amounts of information, making them ideal for a first pass.
No, not necessarily. That presupposes that bringing
the problem down an order of magnitude or more will
actually help, and that's probably not true by a
long shot. And I don't agree with Bruce to begin with. Even
though it's difficult knowing the density of "terrorists"
whatever that means, the "Bayesian false alarm rate" probably an order of magnitude
or two higher than that.
Even if we do agree with Bruce's estimate all we have is
a system that probably doesn't fare any better than
ordinary human security would. Believe me, there's plenty
of research that shows that people aren't well suited
to dealing with false alarm rates two orders of magnitude
lower than this, one in a thousand, forget it.
And no-one need to worry about being hauled off
to prison over a system such as this, that that wouldn't
work would be plainly evident to even the denses security
official after three days of actual use of such a system.
No the real reason to be critical of such a system is
that given that it won't work, and given that your resources
are finite, the time, effort and funds that were spent
on such a system could have been put to much better use
elsewhere. That you haven't quite figured out on what to
spend them yet doesn't really matter. Buying expensive ineffective hardware wont improve matters.
I have no real constructive help there either, save for
suggesting that you change your name to Canada. Few people
have a problem with the Canadians.
Let me make the american free market counter-argument.
By all means.
American programming is of higher quality because it is ad-supported. You are correct that the progamming can be considered filler between the advertisements but that filler must be of high quality for people to watch it and therefore for advertisements to pay for the programming. If a show is bad, people don't watch, advertisers don't pay for ads on unwatched shows so the show goes away. If a show is good, more people watch it and advertisers pay more to have their ads shown during that program.
Let me then make the other side of the argument, namely that this model only produced shows that are bearable enough that most people will watch, and not truly "good" in any real sense of the word.
Comedy for example, would then do its best to try not to be actually funny, but rather to try and not step on anyones toes for fear of offending anyone. Ten million flies can't be wrong... The proof is left as an excercise for the viewer. And while there may not be a direct economic pressure on the public television to take shows of the air, ordinary taxpayer pressure works just as well. There was an attempt to put a Jerry Springer type show on TV here a few years back, and that didn't fly at all. There's enough of that particular crap going around not to have to make more yourself.
Now, we do have commercial TV in Europe these days, but we've sort of tried stemmed the tide by legislating how many commercial break there can be, I believe the European standard to be four times per hour.
Myself, I've all but stopped watching TV in the US whenever I'm there, any show that is watchable and the slightest bit popular is cut by commercials so often it becomes unwatchable. Case in point ST Voyager (OK, OK, I like it) eight commercial breaks last time I was there, at home in Sweden (where it's on publicly funded TV) zero.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you're going to go all scientifically philosophical on us, how can you be sure that we exist at all? Maybe we're just figments of your imagination? ;-)
Just what assumptions you have to make to "prove" that others have feelings would be interesting to discuss though.
Well, I wasn't aware I was quibling, but now that you mention it, it's 1% of the GDP. That's one huge chunk of cash. In terms even you could understand, that's one cent out of ever dollar that ever gets arround. And we do consider us parts of "western civilization", and we're still here, despite spending less on defense than you lot.
And whenever you feel the urge to leave for any parallel universe, don't let the rest of us hold you back. Bon voyage! ;-)
Well, how about the CIA? The CIA factbook lists the following figures (percent of GDP) Sweden: 2.1%, US: 3.2%, UK: 2.32%, France: 2.57%, and Germany: 1.38%.
Thus, as percentages go you range from 24% to 131% greater expenditure military wise, than some European countries. The actual dollar values are of course a different story.
Just for comparison with Sweden and social spending. Our military cost on the average about as much as our housing interest rebate program (aka rent control). Which is to a large extent responsible for delayed "gettoisation" of our larger cities. (Though we'll see for how much longer, unfortunately.)
How much say a halving of the US military expenditure (to German levels) could bring in the form of social reform to the US, I have no idea. Though it'd be an interesting academic exercise.
Which would be all good and well, if you weren't so set on critisising the rest of us all the time.
When you go on and on about how you are "the greatest country in the world", the home of freedom and democracy and bla-di-bla. All the rest of us hear is of course: "And the best that any of you other loosers can hope for is a distant second", and "We used to be a bit full of ourselves, but now we're perfect."
If I with the same consistency tried to shove Sweden down your throat, with the same apparent lack of critical thinking, I'd be run out of here, and for good reason. So take it down a notch, will you? Polite company, OK?
And yet, an application on the IBM4732 was hacked a little under a year ago. Granted it wasn't the processor as such, but a very important application that is delivered with the processor. Getting the whole system right is hard.
If you want more material on why tamper proofing is difficult; Ross Anderson's team at Cambridge is a good resource. (And they have performed a number of nice hacks Markus Kuhn's optical eavesdropping for example).
If the tape barrier won't stop you, a bullet should take care of that problem then! ;-)
I had just that comment from a french girl I met once. She lamented the fact that "You can't cut ahead in lines here, because of the ticket systems... ;-)
However, forming a queue comes natural here, we are talking about Sweden; it's not for nothing they call us the Japaneese of the north ;-)
Personally, I'm partial to the system I've seen in US post offices. One central line for all tellers, organised with a tape barrier. Simple, cheap, and efficient, with few (if any) of the drawbacks of the fully automated ones.
Not only that but the technology as such is crap. Pardon the pun.
Here in Sweden automated next-in-line ticket machines are everywhere, and having to suffer them one major flaw comes immediately to light; lower efficiency.
You see, what was before a line, with the next person steping up to the counter (or toilet) in all of two seconds, now takes thirty or more. You first have to find the correct teller, then mosy on over there.
Add to that the fact that the people servicing the tellers now can take a brake or fiddle with God knows what (since there is no line of customers eagerly awaiting service). Before the 'improvement' the person behind the counter had to wait for a natural lull, before being able to file here (or his) fingernails, now it can be done with a hundred people waiting in line. Oh progress.
As an example of the lowered efficiency I can take the case of returning books at the local library used to be handled by one librarian, now that they've automated it, it takes three! Same amount of work.
About the only institution that has gotten it right is the (state) liqour stores, where the staff presses the button too soon (so to speak) and actually keep a line of two persons at each teller: the customer being serviced, and the next one. That increases throughput considerably. Wouldn't work here though. You'd have to press the button before you were all wiped off and squeaky clean for that to work in an airplane.
Not possible. Paragraph four of the statutes of the Nobel foundation clearly states that a maximum of three people can share a prize.
It's even been mentioned in the television series (where the laureates of the year are interviewed) by some US physicists that they did indeed have that in mind when applying for grants etc. I.e. not to be more than tree eligible researchers not to spoilt their chanses.
Check out the statues of the Nobel Foundation.
Regarding Evolution: StartTLS for POP/SMTP/LDAP is in Evolution 1.1.1 (beta).
IMAPS is in 1.0.3 (stable), don't know when it was added. Works like a charm for me.
You may want to check it out again.
Well, that depends on what you mean by "first came." The first radio telephone systems worked that way, but one of the first true mobile phone systems, the venerable NMT 450 in Northern Europe had hand-over specified from the beginning, despite having Motorola sending high level execs to Sweden to try and have the standard changed. Then the microprocessor became available, and all of a sudden, mobility wasn't such of an issue any longer.
Now, to specify a system such as 802.11 today and not think about mobility is borderline criminal IMHO. (And a lesson that should have been learnt with AMPS, that in it's first fielded versions didn't have standardised roaming interface, which lead to all sorts of interop. and roaming problems in the US.)
That's not to say that all is lost however. Look at a system such as HP:s Open Roaming, which works seemelessly (and looks very impressiv in demos) regardless of whether the access points themselves support roaming or not.
Well, that's still a bit of an issue. There hasn't been that much innovation yet.
I'd say that personally, the one service that developped quicker (much quicker in fact) here than in the States is on-line banking. Most of my friends here in Northern Europe did their banking on-line, when most of my Amercian friends still sent chequeues (sp?) through the mail.
There's probably a bit of tradition that helped (if you can call it that) here to. Such as us Europeans having had more of a tradition of treating our banks as semi formal institutions rather than private enterprises. Personal Giros etc was common here a long time ago, at the cost of not using personal chequeues.
But if you don't count the Web, came from CERN after all ;-) That's about it, of the top of my head.
Well, that's always a factor. Then on the other hand, you cannot run a cable for long trhough Europe without hitting a border, which always means problems EU or not. So, I'm still not convinced that's the problem here. Just look at xDSL and ISDN, you guys were way ahead, not having to fight stoodgy old telecoms branches of government. (And we shouldn't forget that the pop density of Europe varies wildley; parts of Sweden has the same pop. density as Wyoming for instance.)
I'd still say that unmetered access is the key here. Esp. in light of the original article, i.e. there not being an economic incentive.
Any yes, nowadays people may not give our their phone no. to avoid callers ;-) but that wasn't the driving force behind the revolution. We never got into pagers for instance, because why would you need one when you had a phone (with SMS). (Differences in coverage between EU and the States aside.)
In Sweden at the moment 71% of the population have a GSM subscription/prepaid! If you subtract the very young, the elderly and the infirm, that menas that "everyone" has a GSM phone. You still have some catching up to do in the states before you reach those figures.
And no, telemarketing is not the plague here that it's in Europe, I'd say to a large extent for the exact reason that you'd have to pay for making all those expensive calls to mobiles, for a small return. (And there'd be an outrage and you'd be legislated into oblivion, and kicked out by the phone co. ;-)
Too true. I must confess to using Europe more from the EU perspective than from the geographical Europe perspective. And northern/middle EU at that. Then again, it's not the first time that Sweden's done Poland a great injustice, and you sort of managed to forgive us last time, so, I'm hoping you'll find it in your hearts this time around as well. ;-)
BTW, how it GSM in Poland? That's pretty accessible though, isn't it?
It's funny how it's the little things that can mean a big difference. In this case not having unmetered local phone access (in general). Now, it's not that I enjoy having to pay for local phone calls, far from it, but it has driven the cost argument the other way. In my case it's significantly cheaper to pay $30/month for unmetered cable internet access, than staying with metered modem calls.
If I were in the US I honestly couldn't say whether I'd have moved from dial up, with less of an economic incentive. It's not so much the bandwidth, as not feeling you're on the clock when you're on-line.
It's really the same as with mobile phones. Since the US chose to keep the mobile phones within the existing number structure, i.e you cannot tell whether you're calling a mobile or a fixed line, and since customers expect unmetered local calls, then the subscriber had to pay for incoming calls, which lead to less willingness to give out your phone number, which lead to the uncommon situation of Europe getting a lead over the US in a matter of driving technology adaption.
IMHO this is the one difference that has made GSM a success where US mobile solutions have lagged. It's still an open question whether that will stay true, or if by an ironic twist of fate, 3G will do us in, while late adoption in the US will position you guys better in the next 10-20 years.
Here it's fitting to note the words of Steve Bellowin:
In operation, there are many 'gotchas' to watch out for, never reuse a pad for example.
Google for 'Venona' and 'one time pad' for a good example of even the experts (KGB et al) getting one time pads wrong.
He should at least; the N/m^2, also known as the Pascal (Pa) is the SI unit for pressure.
Since it is often impractially small, engineers will often talk about Mega Pascals instead (MPa) which translates nicely into N/mm^2.
I still remember some of the values from school; plastic yield strength (don't know proper English term) of lowly 1311/1312 steel, 220 MPa...
Well, if you're going for full "invisibility" with this approach you're going to be disapointed.
But think about a military vehicle in a simpler, say six sided scenario and the obvious benefits of being able to have one side dark (the one pointing away from the heavy forest), and the other one white (pointing away from the snowfield you're currently traversing) and the benefits are pretty clear.
Today in winter you have to decide whether to paint the whole tank white (or rather cammo white) or not. You can't in general have it both ways. Even a tank with very limited capability to adapt the color to the environment (from dark to light) in the winter scenario would increase it's chances of going undetected.
And of course we are only discussing evading the mark one eye ball detector here, but before you discount that, remember that fancier techniqes not withstanding, more armies still rely heavily on it. This is rapidly becoming less and less true, granted, but that's not to say that in the future you will be excempt from ordinary visual spectrum camoflague. Rather you'll have to do that in addition...
Well, that depends on what you mean by workable.
Just getting the hue and intensity right (and being able to vary those) will go a very long way. It's not for nothing that English fishermen weren't allowed to paint their hulls white in days of yore, or that Mountbatten had his fleet painted pink. (The sky is brigther than the ocean at dusk/night and hence a light hull blends in. And pink works better agains the redder skies of asian waters).
The US Army even conducted trials with lamps on tanks to make them harder to spot as silouettes against the sky on a ridge line for example.
Now, the light trick is unworkable for other reasons (you have to be quick on the switch) should you drive in front of a dark object. So if this process could be automated there's much to be gained.
Now, of course if your main objection that this is far from a cloak of invisibility, that's for certain. But it could be quite useful camouflage.
And kids remember the old adage "A running soldier in a camoflague uniform, looks just like a running soldier in a camoflague uniform." Camouflage is still very much a stationary art. I doubt that tricks like these would change that much.
Oh, there were some of those to. When they couldn't find a suitable crib for a particular day, the Bletchley boys sometimes reverted to more devious methods. One method relied on the fact that the german harbour masters on the french coast used a three wheel Enigma with the same day key as everybody else.
They also had the german naval map of the area outside the ports with the "secret" map references. So they'd task coastal command with laying a mine (by airplane) in so and so an area (in plain view of the germans) who would, predictably, proceed to sweep the mine, and then dutifully report back: "We've swept three mines at grid reference so-and-so."
Of course, in doing so they unwitingly provided the allies with a nice crib. Other variations of this game was also played, such as bombing weather bouys, having the servicing submarine report back that "Now the verdamten Engländer... etc".
Now, it may not have been a perfect chosen ciphertext attack, in that the messages couldn't be varied exactly to the specification of the Bletchley park staff, I'd still say we've clearly left the realm of guessed plaintext.
That's just it, we don't anymore. While that may have been the case as late as the eighties, it certainly isn't anymore, and hasn't been for quite some time.
Actually, since the US $100 bill is worthless/useless all over the world, even in the US (what's the point of bringing money that you have to go to a bank to exchange for the local currency, such as twenties), I'd be surprised if the $20 wasn't the most popular currency, at least in the parts of the world where that wasn't in itself an outrageous amount.
Oh, and while you're bashing the rest of us for not being able to read numbers, how about the dime, which doesn't even have a number printed on it. It sure as h*ll doesn't say 10 cents anywhere, that's for certain.
Well, there was a big drive for BioDiesel here in Sweden a few years ago (two if memory serves) and I've discussed the issue with my wife (who was then working with environmental issues at a large Swedish heavy truck manufacturer) and unfortunately the availability equation just doesn't add up.
I believe the figures were that even if we converted all Swedish farmland to BioDiesel (i.e. RME here) production, we still wouldn't cover more than a fraction (less than 10%) of the necessary transportation needs.
Granted, the US has lower population density, a nice flat bit in between the coasts that is available for agriculture, but you also drive a lot more (almost no public transportation to speak of compared to northern Europe). I'd be surprised if the calculations would be much more favourable for you than for us.
So, no, won't fly, which is a pity for sure. (And then it's not exactly zero emission either, there was a famous test in Sweden with a used heavy truck engine that was worse emission-wise with RME than with mineral diesel. You do get rid of the CO2, but that's about all of it. Don't get me started on the health catastrophy wating to happen that is particulate matter, and how diesel engines and now even direct injection petrol engines have become steadily worse in that respect over the years.
No, not necessarily. That presupposes that bringing the problem down an order of magnitude or more will actually help, and that's probably not true by a long shot. And I don't agree with Bruce to begin with. Even though it's difficult knowing the density of "terrorists" whatever that means, the "Bayesian false alarm rate" probably an order of magnitude or two higher than that.
Even if we do agree with Bruce's estimate all we have is a system that probably doesn't fare any better than ordinary human security would. Believe me, there's plenty of research that shows that people aren't well suited to dealing with false alarm rates two orders of magnitude lower than this, one in a thousand, forget it.
And no-one need to worry about being hauled off to prison over a system such as this, that that wouldn't work would be plainly evident to even the denses security official after three days of actual use of such a system.
No the real reason to be critical of such a system is that given that it won't work, and given that your resources are finite, the time, effort and funds that were spent on such a system could have been put to much better use elsewhere. That you haven't quite figured out on what to spend them yet doesn't really matter. Buying expensive ineffective hardware wont improve matters.
I have no real constructive help there either, save for suggesting that you change your name to Canada. Few people have a problem with the Canadians.
Let me make the american free market counter-argument.
By all means.
American programming is of higher quality because it is ad-supported. You are correct that the progamming can be considered filler between the advertisements but that filler must be of high quality for people to watch it and therefore for advertisements to pay for the programming. If a show is bad, people don't watch, advertisers don't pay for ads on unwatched shows so the show goes away. If a show is good, more people watch it and advertisers pay more to have their ads shown during that program.
Let me then make the other side of the argument, namely that this model only produced shows that are bearable enough that most people will watch, and not truly "good" in any real sense of the word.
Comedy for example, would then do its best to try not to be actually funny, but rather to try and not step on anyones toes for fear of offending anyone. Ten million flies can't be wrong... The proof is left as an excercise for the viewer. And while there may not be a direct economic pressure on the public television to take shows of the air, ordinary taxpayer pressure works just as well. There was an attempt to put a Jerry Springer type show on TV here a few years back, and that didn't fly at all. There's enough of that particular crap going around not to have to make more yourself.
Now, we do have commercial TV in Europe these days, but we've sort of tried stemmed the tide by legislating how many commercial break there can be, I believe the European standard to be four times per hour.
Myself, I've all but stopped watching TV in the US whenever I'm there, any show that is watchable and the slightest bit popular is cut by commercials so often it becomes unwatchable. Case in point ST Voyager (OK, OK, I like it) eight commercial breaks last time I was there, at home in Sweden (where it's on publicly funded TV) zero.