They are at the highest audiovisual-resolution possible.
Haha, hoho, hehe, I almost cracked a rib at that.
They aren't even close to the highest possible. Not remotely. The modern midrange PC graphics card has ~6-8 times the power of the PS3 or Xbox cards, and some games can push even those, not to mention having much newer features (like hardware tesselation). The PS3, in particular, hurts my eyes with the lack of anti-aliasing that seems to be universal to that system. The biggest problem, though, is probably RAM: the 360 only has 512 MB, and the PS3 256MB for the system, which is horribly limiting on map sizes for games (similar for their video RAM and texture sizes). Console games are incredibly limited because of that.
At high speeds, the Sabre engines must cope with 1,000-degree gases entering their intakes... Reaction Engines' breakthrough is a module containing arrays of extremely fine piping that can extract the heat and plunge the intake gases to minus 140C in just 1/100th of a second.
That is... impressive, to say the very least. It sounds from Wikipedia like they are even using the heat energy to power the turbo compressor (wondering if it was possible to convert the heat to useful energy was one of my first thoughts). I'm curious how efficient the jet is at low speeds, though. Typically, most jet engines work well at either low or high speeds, not both.
These kinds of engines are definitely needed to make space travel cheaper. Much cheaper, potentially, than solid-state rockets.
This is often repeated on Slashdot, and yet, it still isn't true. Corporations are most certainly interested in the interests of the public, insofar as the public ultimately represents their biggest customer. Not all corporation sell directly to the public, of course, and therefore they don't act in the public interest (oil companies, government contractors, etc.) but by and large, it is in Microsoft's and many corporations interest to work in the interest of consumers and the public because they are a large portion of their customer base.
OTOH consumers are, as a group, not particularly smart, so they often act against their own interests. Corporations, for their part, often do as well, since they are even more divided than individual consumers (by being, quite literally, divided). The result is that the public often gets screwed over. Keep in mind, though, that in cases like this, people choose to use Hotmail despite having dozens of free (and IMO better) alternatives. So, while Microsoft does share the interests of the public, they often act like they don't (again, because the public itself doesn't act in their own interest, so MS doesn't either, as far as they can get away with it).
I do have a Hotmail account, since I used them a long, long time ago, and it is still useful for sign-ups to sites I don't really care about, but I would never use them for anything serious.
Re:The Founding Fathers ...
on
House Passes CISPA
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No more so than newspapers or television or radio allowed, and look at how bad those are at supplying good information. The Internet is as full, if not more so, of bad information than the world was before it. The reality is no cure for human stupidity and ignorance exists. What is more, the problem has grown much much worse: there is so much information online, it is literally impossible to know even a small fraction of it, much less figure out what of it is important and what is not. Relying on sites like Slashdot or Reddit doesn't work: they are so full of groupthink, actual open discussion (while it does exist) rarely hits the front page.
All the people cannot be well informed on everything. Most people don't even know what "well informed" actually looks like. On some issues, yes, but even then, there are always interests controlling the media (even the Internet, yes even Slashdot) that direct people towards their own point of view. And if you continually only hear one side of the news, you will start to believe it. Everyone does: it's human nature. Or they only listen to one side because they already believe it (happens as often as not too). Either way, the Internet isn't a solution. It's practically part of the problem.
Re:The Founding Fathers ...
on
House Passes CISPA
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.
The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is
wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts
they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions,
it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty....
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure.
--Thomas Jefferson.
The Founding Fathers knew this would inevitably be a problem long before Orwell was born.
If ten pounds of anything can get onto a plane by the simple expedient of bribery, please explain again why adult travelers, but not children, must remove their shoes as they stand massed in an unsecured part of a typical U.S. aiport.
Because the TSA isn't about security, it is about making people feel secure. Well, that and wasting billions of federal dollars on "security" equipment manufactured by private companies run by buddies of TSA directors and/or former TSA directors. I'm not actually sure which one is their main goal, right now.
Kudos to the Terminal 6 guy for actually noticing the 10 pounds of cocaine. I would not want to be a TSA agent who got thrown into Federal prison. That does not sound fun, at all.
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.
It is incredibly intellectually dishonest to quote only part of a paragraph, without noting the limitation that immediately follows. You can still have problems with the terms (the note on "promoting [and] developing new [services]", especially) Materially, Google's terms seem to be in the same vein as Dropbox's: they need to be able to actually, you know, host your data to be able to actually host your data. But if you want to actually discuss their policies, don't quote them partially out of context. That doesn't help.
I particularly love how people in that article subtly imply that Google is going to sell your data, without actually coming out and saying it (“You have to ask yourself, what’s the business model. If the business model is to make money from a service or money from advertising, that’s one thing. If it’s trying to make money off the sale of data, that’s another thing.” Implying evil behavior is much easier than coming out with an actual accusation: the former requires zero proof.) Google's terms make it pretty clear they can't do that ("You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content"), and even if they change the terms later, they can still be sued for selling the data since it was uploaded under the existing terms. IANAL, of course, but Google is in enough hot water already that it would be practically suicidal (and extremely stupid) to do that.
Oh, and BTW the relevant quote is from their "Terms of Service". Their privacy policies are an entirely different page, so the headline is incorrect: this isn't about their privacy policies, it's about their terms of service. The privacy policies themselves aren't actually discussed in TFA, although they are referenced.
Making forensic copies of remailer disks, seizing remailers, etc. are not going to help them catch the guy who is sending these messages. Look at TFA -- the remailer operator simply reissued the keys. Taking a remailer offline is even more useless -- the FBI misses the opportunity to log messages travelling through the remailer, and to work their way backward through the remailer chain.
If they have copies of emails sent through the remailer prior to the raid, yes it will. It won't help catch future messages, but that isn't the point: the point is to break encryption on emails they already have in their possession. Reissuing the keys won't change the encryption used on those messages.
Also, I don't think they can not make a spectacle: the request to image the disks has to go through official channels or they risk major legal problems later, which means people are going to know about it.
Yeah, a "niche market". It isn't like Steam regularly has ~4 million users on it at any given time. By comparison. Xbox Live has peaked (peaked) at 3 million (Steam regularly breaks 4.5 and has peaked at over 5). Granted, that isn't a completely fair comparison, since a lot of steam users are likely to stay logged in 24 hours a day, but the fact that Skyrim had 350,000+ concurrent players near launch indicates that no, it isn't a "niche" market at all, by any means.
Oh and Valve currently has 2 games in playable beta status (one has 50,000 concurrent players regularly) and just released a game last year.
It's a small fraction now. But once it starts working on Windows, Mac, and Linux, a lot more developers might take a look at it. Plus, Valve's development of Dota 2 means that the tools to make an RTS will be in the engine, in addition to the FPS support it already has. That might make it attractive to quite a few developers who don't have their own engine.
Indeed. Four cases of a disease in cows (in the US), with three humans infected is indeed extremely threatening. Never mind the UK had an actual epidemic, with over 180,000 cases in cows, and still only had 176 people infected (from Wikipedia). In my mind, that makes BSE less dangerous than... well, just about everything. Hell, there have only been 280 reported cases of infected humans from BSE, ever. Tell me again why people should be scared? Yes, health officials should be careful: damned careful. The average person? Don't worry about it.
No one said nothing should be done. They did what needed to be done: euthanized the cow and dispose of the corpse properly.
Quantum mechanics and relativity have nothing to do with one another--that's the whole problem. They violate the others rules by definition in most cases.
Not as I understand it. Well, not exactly, anyways. Quantum mechanics works very well on a micro- and nano-scale level, where observations don't follow general relativity well, whereas relativity works on a macro level where quantum effects are not observed. In other words, neither really "contradicts" the other, they just apply to two totally different scales of physics. This is very unappealing to physicists, since it prevents one single unified theory of physics, but so far no one has creates a system that seems to work on both levels. And no one has discovered how to transmit information through quantum entanglement faster than light.
Did you read the summary? Alice and Bob found a higher degree of correlation between their measurements if Victor chooses to entangle his photons. By firing enough photons, Alice and Bob can accurately guess beforehand what Victor is doing(and going to do apparently). You can transmit a message--indeed any message--using this if it is true. Information theory 101.
Actually, I read TFA:
As always with entanglement, it's important to note that no information is passing between Alice, Bob, and Victor: the settings on the detectors and the BiSA are set independently, and there's no way to communicate faster than the speed of light.
In other words, Alice and Bob didn't compare their results before Victor made his "choice." That's why I said I suspected Alice and Bob [the detectors] were both still in an entangled state with their respective photons before Victor decided whether the photons were entangled with each other. If the communicated before he made the choice, the results might very well (probably will be) different, since their comparing results would collapse the potential wave function before Victor could entangle them together.
Not exactly. Let me explain: when you observe a property of one of an entangled pair of objects, you automatically know the state of the other. This isn't exactly a problem, until you add Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, which states that the more you know about one property of an object, the less you can know about another (position and velocity of an electron being the classic example, but for entangled objects a better example is spin and velocity).
If observing the spin of one entangled electron lets you know the spin of both (but changes the speed only of the first, since you only observed that electron), then you logically should be able to observe the speed of the other entangled electron (which would alter it's spin... but you already know that) and know both spin and speed of both electrons precisely. This violates the uncertainty principle, so instead what happens is observing the spin of the first electron causes both electrons to change in speed, but they do so randomly: in other words, you can change one of an entangled pair by observing the other, but you cannot do so in a controlled fashion. Again, to do otherwise would be to allow one to know both spin and speed of the electron, which is impossible.
Similar logic holds true for entangled photons: observing one changes the other, but not in a controlled fashion. However, both parties can know the polarity of the other's photon (if they are entangled) just fine, which allows them to share certain secret information, which is why quantum networks are theoretically 100% secure. Anyone trying to eavesdrop will actually change the state of the photons by doing so, which can be detected. The details are, obviously, somewhat complex.
Not true: we can make photons travel much much slower than c (the speed of light in a vacuum), while transmitting the information up to c, which means we could certainly communicate information faster than the photons travel to Victor. In fact, most fiber optic cables IIRC transmit light at ~3/4 the speed of light in a vacuum.
Of course, it still almost certainly wouldn't work. I actually wouldn't be surprised if anyone setting up such a system noticed that Victor entangling the photons didn't correlate Alice/Bob's photons once Alice/Bob started communicating with him before he decided to entangle them. Quantum mechanics tends to work like that: you can't really use the effect to transmit information.
First of all, quantum effects like this don't allow the passage of information (no quantum entanglement effect does, it would violate relativity). Alice and Bob don't know if their photons are entangled simply by examining them. As a rule, quantum effects are worthless for transmitting information of any kind: both parties know what the other's state is if they know the photon's were entangled, but that is insufficient to transmit any kind of information (it is very useful for encrypting information, but not transmitting it), so you cannot build a useful transistor system using this.
Secondly, the Ars article rightly points out that concluding that effect proceeded cause should be rejected without much much better evidence. I can't explain the results, but throwing out causality so rapidly would be foolish.
One thought I had was that the detectors might actually be in a quantum state (basically, entangled with the photon they observe) after making their observation, which isn't collapsed into an entangled (or not) state with the other photon until Victor makes his decision. In other words, these results might not show up if you increase the timescale, because the quantum state of the detectors after they sense the photons (which, if it lasts long enough, can be affected by Victor after they detect the photon polarization without violating causality) might collapse before he decides to entangle the photons or not. I am, of course, not a quantum physicist, so that might not be possible.
Yes, but lower price means more people can afford it, which in turn increases demand. So even if they don't get a trillion dollars for it, they can still make a lot of money.
Yeah, throwing money down a hole for the lulz. Just like space travel always was!
Seriously, are you so short-sighted that you cannot see how useful mining asteroids for water, air, and eventually precious minerals is? I'll give you a hint: absolutely, 100% vital to the continued development of the human race. This has nothing to do with doing something "for the lulz." It is all about advancing the state of the human race. Not for profit, but because humanity can and should expand. Asteroid mining is one step forwards in our expansion towards other planets, and if we intend to not go extinct, we need to do that. We may not need to now. We may not need to in a hundred years, but we will in a thousand, or a million, and we are only going to get there if we start at some point. Might as well do it now.
To quote from the article: "[Planetary Resources] want to make sure there are available resources in place to ensure a permanent future in space." Our future, eventually, is in space. Whether from global warming, resource exhaustion, or nuclear war, Earth will eventually not be enough. When that day comes, we will be glad some billionaires chose to spend their money on space expansion, instead of building/buying shiny new toys, or hookers and blow.
Just don't allow programs in the background to have access to the motion sensors. Is there any actual reason a background program would need such information anyways? It sounds like they just allowed it because developers didn't realize it could give away sensitive details. Now they know, it can be restricted pretty easily, I should think.
And if you do have a program that actually needs the motion sensor information while not in the foreground, just have it ask for special permission.
I think it might not in Russia (some AC below posted a link to a bug report that said they disabled the first-run search selector screen for Russian builds). However, it should be noted this is not a monopolistic practice. Yandex has 62% share in Russia, while Google only has a 25% share, so they can't really be "shutting out" Yandex: Yandex is by far the biggest player already. You can argue about what Google should do, but not offering a selection screen is hardly illegal, because Google isn't even close to the majority player.
Also, Segalovich claims that "If you download an application [on Android] it does not work if it's not Android marketplace." Which is wrong, at face value (I've sideloaded apps all the time), so either a) this is just FUD or b) he isn't conveying his point very well (actually, b is certain, I read what he is claiming and I still don't know what he is trying to say).
This is the current system Valve are more or less using in the beta. Players who get reported often or who leave games early (team game, so that ruins it for the other players) get shoved into the "low priority queue." Basically, that is where the ragers, jerks, and assholes end up. It isn't perfect yet, but it does help some. And of course it really is low-priority, so it takes a while to find a game (creating the incentive not to end up there).
This might actually help solve the obesity problem. If American's can't afford to eat out because they are spending too much money on tech, maybe they will eat healthier homemade food. One can hope.
Oh, and technology doesn't make it more "difficult" to save money, it just makes it easier to spend a lot of money. I can save my money just as well with technology as after. More, actually, since technology gives you lots of cheap or free entertainment, which is less money spent in bars or going out to movies or on gas.
Also helps that I don't own a smartphone or iPad. Don't need one, either. I do have a wifi-equiped MP3 player: no monthly contract, and works for 90% of the things I would need a smartphone for. A messenger phone works for the rest.
Because a gas furnace that blows up might leave the house uninhabitable for a few days. A nuclear reactor that melts down might leave a few square miles uninhabitable for a century. I love nuclear power, but unless we can produce some sort of pebble-bed like system where the probability of radioactive contamination is nearly zero, putting them under the control of the average citizen is a terrible idea.
Plus, nuclear proliferation is still a very real problem.
Slashdot Mirror
They are at the highest audiovisual-resolution possible.
Haha, hoho, hehe, I almost cracked a rib at that.
They aren't even close to the highest possible. Not remotely. The modern midrange PC graphics card has ~6-8 times the power of the PS3 or Xbox cards, and some games can push even those, not to mention having much newer features (like hardware tesselation). The PS3, in particular, hurts my eyes with the lack of anti-aliasing that seems to be universal to that system. The biggest problem, though, is probably RAM: the 360 only has 512 MB, and the PS3 256MB for the system, which is horribly limiting on map sizes for games (similar for their video RAM and texture sizes). Console games are incredibly limited because of that.
At high speeds, the Sabre engines must cope with 1,000-degree gases entering their intakes... Reaction Engines' breakthrough is a module containing arrays of extremely fine piping that can extract the heat and plunge the intake gases to minus 140C in just 1/100th of a second.
That is... impressive, to say the very least. It sounds from Wikipedia like they are even using the heat energy to power the turbo compressor (wondering if it was possible to convert the heat to useful energy was one of my first thoughts). I'm curious how efficient the jet is at low speeds, though. Typically, most jet engines work well at either low or high speeds, not both.
These kinds of engines are definitely needed to make space travel cheaper. Much cheaper, potentially, than solid-state rockets.
This is often repeated on Slashdot, and yet, it still isn't true. Corporations are most certainly interested in the interests of the public, insofar as the public ultimately represents their biggest customer. Not all corporation sell directly to the public, of course, and therefore they don't act in the public interest (oil companies, government contractors, etc.) but by and large, it is in Microsoft's and many corporations interest to work in the interest of consumers and the public because they are a large portion of their customer base.
OTOH consumers are, as a group, not particularly smart, so they often act against their own interests. Corporations, for their part, often do as well, since they are even more divided than individual consumers (by being, quite literally, divided). The result is that the public often gets screwed over. Keep in mind, though, that in cases like this, people choose to use Hotmail despite having dozens of free (and IMO better) alternatives. So, while Microsoft does share the interests of the public, they often act like they don't (again, because the public itself doesn't act in their own interest, so MS doesn't either, as far as they can get away with it).
I do have a Hotmail account, since I used them a long, long time ago, and it is still useful for sign-ups to sites I don't really care about, but I would never use them for anything serious.
No more so than newspapers or television or radio allowed, and look at how bad those are at supplying good information. The Internet is as full, if not more so, of bad information than the world was before it. The reality is no cure for human stupidity and ignorance exists. What is more, the problem has grown much much worse: there is so much information online, it is literally impossible to know even a small fraction of it, much less figure out what of it is important and what is not. Relying on sites like Slashdot or Reddit doesn't work: they are so full of groupthink, actual open discussion (while it does exist) rarely hits the front page.
All the people cannot be well informed on everything. Most people don't even know what "well informed" actually looks like. On some issues, yes, but even then, there are always interests controlling the media (even the Internet, yes even Slashdot) that direct people towards their own point of view. And if you continually only hear one side of the news, you will start to believe it. Everyone does: it's human nature. Or they only listen to one side because they already believe it (happens as often as not too). Either way, the Internet isn't a solution. It's practically part of the problem.
God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not
warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as
to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost
in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure.
--Thomas Jefferson.
The Founding Fathers knew this would inevitably be a problem long before Orwell was born.
If ten pounds of anything can get onto a plane by the simple expedient of bribery, please explain again why adult travelers, but not children, must remove their shoes as they stand massed in an unsecured part of a typical U.S. aiport.
Because the TSA isn't about security, it is about making people feel secure. Well, that and wasting billions of federal dollars on "security" equipment manufactured by private companies run by buddies of TSA directors and/or former TSA directors. I'm not actually sure which one is their main goal, right now.
Kudos to the Terminal 6 guy for actually noticing the 10 pounds of cocaine. I would not want to be a TSA agent who got thrown into Federal prison. That does not sound fun, at all.
When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.
It is incredibly intellectually dishonest to quote only part of a paragraph, without noting the limitation that immediately follows. You can still have problems with the terms (the note on "promoting [and] developing new [services]", especially) Materially, Google's terms seem to be in the same vein as Dropbox's: they need to be able to actually, you know, host your data to be able to actually host your data. But if you want to actually discuss their policies, don't quote them partially out of context. That doesn't help.
I particularly love how people in that article subtly imply that Google is going to sell your data, without actually coming out and saying it (“You have to ask yourself, what’s the business model. If the business model is to make money from a service or money from advertising, that’s one thing. If it’s trying to make money off the sale of data, that’s another thing.” Implying evil behavior is much easier than coming out with an actual accusation: the former requires zero proof.) Google's terms make it pretty clear they can't do that ("You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content"), and even if they change the terms later, they can still be sued for selling the data since it was uploaded under the existing terms. IANAL, of course, but Google is in enough hot water already that it would be practically suicidal (and extremely stupid) to do that.
Oh, and BTW the relevant quote is from their "Terms of Service". Their privacy policies are an entirely different page, so the headline is incorrect: this isn't about their privacy policies, it's about their terms of service. The privacy policies themselves aren't actually discussed in TFA, although they are referenced.
You mean before and after the LG Prada, right? Which came out before the iPhone and was the first phone ever with a capacitive touchscreen.
Making forensic copies of remailer disks, seizing remailers, etc. are not going to help them catch the guy who is sending these messages. Look at TFA -- the remailer operator simply reissued the keys. Taking a remailer offline is even more useless -- the FBI misses the opportunity to log messages travelling through the remailer, and to work their way backward through the remailer chain.
If they have copies of emails sent through the remailer prior to the raid, yes it will. It won't help catch future messages, but that isn't the point: the point is to break encryption on emails they already have in their possession. Reissuing the keys won't change the encryption used on those messages.
Also, I don't think they can not make a spectacle: the request to image the disks has to go through official channels or they risk major legal problems later, which means people are going to know about it.
Yeah, a "niche market". It isn't like Steam regularly has ~4 million users on it at any given time. By comparison. Xbox Live has peaked (peaked) at 3 million (Steam regularly breaks 4.5 and has peaked at over 5). Granted, that isn't a completely fair comparison, since a lot of steam users are likely to stay logged in 24 hours a day, but the fact that Skyrim had 350,000+ concurrent players near launch indicates that no, it isn't a "niche" market at all, by any means.
Oh and Valve currently has 2 games in playable beta status (one has 50,000 concurrent players regularly) and just released a game last year.
It's a small fraction now. But once it starts working on Windows, Mac, and Linux, a lot more developers might take a look at it. Plus, Valve's development of Dota 2 means that the tools to make an RTS will be in the engine, in addition to the FPS support it already has. That might make it attractive to quite a few developers who don't have their own engine.
Indeed. Four cases of a disease in cows (in the US), with three humans infected is indeed extremely threatening. Never mind the UK had an actual epidemic, with over 180,000 cases in cows, and still only had 176 people infected (from Wikipedia). In my mind, that makes BSE less dangerous than... well, just about everything. Hell, there have only been 280 reported cases of infected humans from BSE, ever. Tell me again why people should be scared? Yes, health officials should be careful: damned careful. The average person? Don't worry about it.
No one said nothing should be done. They did what needed to be done: euthanized the cow and dispose of the corpse properly.
Quantum mechanics and relativity have nothing to do with one another--that's the whole problem. They violate the others rules by definition in most cases.
Not as I understand it. Well, not exactly, anyways. Quantum mechanics works very well on a micro- and nano-scale level, where observations don't follow general relativity well, whereas relativity works on a macro level where quantum effects are not observed. In other words, neither really "contradicts" the other, they just apply to two totally different scales of physics. This is very unappealing to physicists, since it prevents one single unified theory of physics, but so far no one has creates a system that seems to work on both levels. And no one has discovered how to transmit information through quantum entanglement faster than light.
Did you read the summary? Alice and Bob found a higher degree of correlation between their measurements if Victor chooses to entangle his photons. By firing enough photons, Alice and Bob can accurately guess beforehand what Victor is doing(and going to do apparently). You can transmit a message--indeed any message--using this if it is true. Information theory 101.
Actually, I read TFA:
As always with entanglement, it's important to note that no information is passing between Alice, Bob, and Victor: the settings on the detectors and the BiSA are set independently, and there's no way to communicate faster than the speed of light.
In other words, Alice and Bob didn't compare their results before Victor made his "choice." That's why I said I suspected Alice and Bob [the detectors] were both still in an entangled state with their respective photons before Victor decided whether the photons were entangled with each other. If the communicated before he made the choice, the results might very well (probably will be) different, since their comparing results would collapse the potential wave function before Victor could entangle them together.
Not exactly. Let me explain: when you observe a property of one of an entangled pair of objects, you automatically know the state of the other. This isn't exactly a problem, until you add Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, which states that the more you know about one property of an object, the less you can know about another (position and velocity of an electron being the classic example, but for entangled objects a better example is spin and velocity).
If observing the spin of one entangled electron lets you know the spin of both (but changes the speed only of the first, since you only observed that electron), then you logically should be able to observe the speed of the other entangled electron (which would alter it's spin... but you already know that) and know both spin and speed of both electrons precisely. This violates the uncertainty principle, so instead what happens is observing the spin of the first electron causes both electrons to change in speed, but they do so randomly: in other words, you can change one of an entangled pair by observing the other, but you cannot do so in a controlled fashion. Again, to do otherwise would be to allow one to know both spin and speed of the electron, which is impossible.
Similar logic holds true for entangled photons: observing one changes the other, but not in a controlled fashion. However, both parties can know the polarity of the other's photon (if they are entangled) just fine, which allows them to share certain secret information, which is why quantum networks are theoretically 100% secure. Anyone trying to eavesdrop will actually change the state of the photons by doing so, which can be detected. The details are, obviously, somewhat complex.
Not true: we can make photons travel much much slower than c (the speed of light in a vacuum), while transmitting the information up to c, which means we could certainly communicate information faster than the photons travel to Victor. In fact, most fiber optic cables IIRC transmit light at ~3/4 the speed of light in a vacuum.
Of course, it still almost certainly wouldn't work. I actually wouldn't be surprised if anyone setting up such a system noticed that Victor entangling the photons didn't correlate Alice/Bob's photons once Alice/Bob started communicating with him before he decided to entangle them. Quantum mechanics tends to work like that: you can't really use the effect to transmit information.
First of all, quantum effects like this don't allow the passage of information (no quantum entanglement effect does, it would violate relativity). Alice and Bob don't know if their photons are entangled simply by examining them. As a rule, quantum effects are worthless for transmitting information of any kind: both parties know what the other's state is if they know the photon's were entangled, but that is insufficient to transmit any kind of information (it is very useful for encrypting information, but not transmitting it), so you cannot build a useful transistor system using this.
Secondly, the Ars article rightly points out that concluding that effect proceeded cause should be rejected without much much better evidence. I can't explain the results, but throwing out causality so rapidly would be foolish.
One thought I had was that the detectors might actually be in a quantum state (basically, entangled with the photon they observe) after making their observation, which isn't collapsed into an entangled (or not) state with the other photon until Victor makes his decision. In other words, these results might not show up if you increase the timescale, because the quantum state of the detectors after they sense the photons (which, if it lasts long enough, can be affected by Victor after they detect the photon polarization without violating causality) might collapse before he decides to entangle the photons or not. I am, of course, not a quantum physicist, so that might not be possible.
Yes, but lower price means more people can afford it, which in turn increases demand. So even if they don't get a trillion dollars for it, they can still make a lot of money.
Yeah, throwing money down a hole for the lulz. Just like space travel always was!
Seriously, are you so short-sighted that you cannot see how useful mining asteroids for water, air, and eventually precious minerals is? I'll give you a hint: absolutely, 100% vital to the continued development of the human race. This has nothing to do with doing something "for the lulz." It is all about advancing the state of the human race. Not for profit, but because humanity can and should expand. Asteroid mining is one step forwards in our expansion towards other planets, and if we intend to not go extinct, we need to do that. We may not need to now. We may not need to in a hundred years, but we will in a thousand, or a million, and we are only going to get there if we start at some point. Might as well do it now.
To quote from the article: "[Planetary Resources] want to make sure there are available resources in place to ensure a permanent future in space." Our future, eventually, is in space. Whether from global warming, resource exhaustion, or nuclear war, Earth will eventually not be enough. When that day comes, we will be glad some billionaires chose to spend their money on space expansion, instead of building/buying shiny new toys, or hookers and blow.
Where would be the profit in doing that?
For the submitter, I mean. Obviously, it would profit Reuters.
Just don't allow programs in the background to have access to the motion sensors. Is there any actual reason a background program would need such information anyways? It sounds like they just allowed it because developers didn't realize it could give away sensitive details. Now they know, it can be restricted pretty easily, I should think.
And if you do have a program that actually needs the motion sensor information while not in the foreground, just have it ask for special permission.
I was worried for a minute that the Windows Phone owner wouldn't be able to make calls with his smartphone. Crisis averted!
I think it might not in Russia (some AC below posted a link to a bug report that said they disabled the first-run search selector screen for Russian builds). However, it should be noted this is not a monopolistic practice. Yandex has 62% share in Russia, while Google only has a 25% share, so they can't really be "shutting out" Yandex: Yandex is by far the biggest player already. You can argue about what Google should do, but not offering a selection screen is hardly illegal, because Google isn't even close to the majority player.
Also, Segalovich claims that "If you download an application [on Android] it does not work if it's not Android marketplace." Which is wrong, at face value (I've sideloaded apps all the time), so either a) this is just FUD or b) he isn't conveying his point very well (actually, b is certain, I read what he is claiming and I still don't know what he is trying to say).
This is the current system Valve are more or less using in the beta. Players who get reported often or who leave games early (team game, so that ruins it for the other players) get shoved into the "low priority queue." Basically, that is where the ragers, jerks, and assholes end up. It isn't perfect yet, but it does help some. And of course it really is low-priority, so it takes a while to find a game (creating the incentive not to end up there).
This might actually help solve the obesity problem. If American's can't afford to eat out because they are spending too much money on tech, maybe they will eat healthier homemade food. One can hope.
Oh, and technology doesn't make it more "difficult" to save money, it just makes it easier to spend a lot of money. I can save my money just as well with technology as after. More, actually, since technology gives you lots of cheap or free entertainment, which is less money spent in bars or going out to movies or on gas.
Also helps that I don't own a smartphone or iPad. Don't need one, either. I do have a wifi-equiped MP3 player: no monthly contract, and works for 90% of the things I would need a smartphone for. A messenger phone works for the rest.
Because a gas furnace that blows up might leave the house uninhabitable for a few days. A nuclear reactor that melts down might leave a few square miles uninhabitable for a century. I love nuclear power, but unless we can produce some sort of pebble-bed like system where the probability of radioactive contamination is nearly zero, putting them under the control of the average citizen is a terrible idea.
Plus, nuclear proliferation is still a very real problem.