I am thinking of tests relating to the Hall effect, and spin/space entanglement. The question is whether electrons are still entangled when separated based on spin until that is broken by blocking one half of the entangled stream or whether the entanglement is broken by the actual act of separation via the magnetic fields.
If the noncommunication theorem holds then you can never know what the spins or polarizations were of the particles you are using for encryption. Hence not only does faster-than-light communication prove to be impossible but so might most obvious forms of quantum encryption as well. If on the other hand it only holds currently because of flaws in our experiments then it opens up all kinds of doors.
The key, it seems to me, is the question of whether the noncommunication theorems hold. If they do, then quantum communication ought to be impossible. But it seems to me that all the experiments which verify the NCT (and thus prove space/spin entanglement of electrons or space/polarization entanglement of photons) seem to be flawed in that they break entanglement rather than merely separate and quarantine the particles through the rest of the experiments.
The simple answer is to live up to our side of the NPT, which includes helping such countries develop peaceful nuclear technologies. Of course every nuclear power technology is dual-use, but that is why we have the IAEA.
North Korea wants a nuke because it is the another level of assurance that we won't eventually invade. Nukes are things you hide behind, not things you use.
Iran wants a nuke because it gives them some bargaining power with Israel. Again, a nice shield to threaten and hide behind but national suicide to use.
This is the major reason why I also oppose Bush's proposals for next generation mini-nukes. By making nuclear, sorry, "new-killer" weapons more usable we erode the firewall which keeps the big nuclear weapons from ever being used.
I have to disagree with you on VIM primarily because I use it so heavily, I wouldn't dream of trying to do the sorts of editing I routinely do with VIM via point-and-click.
However the web browser is a classic example of an application where the density of information from the computer to the user is the limiting factor. Hence it is more efficient to browse the web in a GUI application. Note: mouse clicks are non-dense, but hypertext + graphics is dense. Furthermore, you are interacting with a document which is, for fundamental reasons, encapsulated from the user so the possibility of offering dense input is rather limited.
A far better example would be whether you could create a GUI which could be *more* efficient than using SCP when using more than a tiny subset of the functionality of the program.
I played around with an astrology program for UNIX (astrolog) built around that principle. Worked well except for the fact that the UNIX version was pretty buggy. It was disorienting for a while, but once you got used to it, it was really powerful.
I have generally thought that a lot of high-end 3d graphics and CAD programs could use a system like that.
The big disadvantage is that there is a pretty steep learning curve (steeper than the command-line because input/output is separated in different windows)
Fine, design a GUI for SCP and/or FTP which allows me to download files and rename them as quickly as I can on the command line.
A lot of well-designed command-lines allow for reasonable efficiency in providing information to the computer. GUI's generally allow for reasonable efficiency getting information from the computer. Both could be improved to some extent, but even with GUI apps, I use the keyboard more than the mouse because it is more efficient.
For some things, that may be true. However, you have a fundamental problem:
GUI's take inputs from point/click interfaces generally. This means a mouse click which carries a lot less information than the number of key presses which can be typed in the same period of time. Hence for your time, when you need to convey complex information *to* the computer, a CLI will always beat a GUI.
Of course for other tasks (where the information passed to the computer is small, but the information delivered by the computer is rich) a GUI is far better.
There is more to "it isn't widely used" than is generally pointed out. This isn't just a matter of elitism, but the fact that if you want something to be good at certain things, it will be less good at others. Linux is great for a lot of things because it doesn't fall to the lowest common denominator. If it did, we would need to use a distro that didn't, that was more specialized for what we need it to do.
Imagine Linux with all the tools which say "you should never have to use the command line." Such a distro would be pretty bad for most of us who currently use Linux because a command-line is fundamentally superior to a GUI for a lot of tasks we use it for. I always have at least three terminal windows open in addition to any GUI apps.
Similarly, I find that OS X (which is almost but not entirely unlike BSD) has a number of shortcomigns that make Linux and BSD better choices for me. My sister uses OSX however because it matches what she needs.
Ok, So I misstated the name. However, the idolization of the Nazis still applies. Here are some reasonable sources:
"In conformity with such notions, LEHI under Yair's inspiration praised the Nazis extravagantly for locking the Polish Jews into the ghettos, contrasting this favorably with the conditions of Jewish life in Poland before the Nazi invasion. As Heller clarifies, this praise was extended on the assumption that "in the Warsaw Ghetto there existed Jewish police, Jewish courts, Jewish tax collection," etc. This looked to LEHI like "a nascent Jewish state," preferable to conditions in Mandatory Palestine."
(http://www.mepc.org/journal_shahak/shahak39.asp). But I suppose we can disregard Mr Shahak as a crazy anti-semite, right? It is not like he actually went through the Holocaust or anything..... I suppose the allegations of celebrating Nazi battlefield victories is still somewhat under dispute, but the clear Nazi and totalitarian sympathies of the organization are not.
Furthermore, LEHI, Irgun, and Haganah were all involved in ethnic clensing of Arabs in the 1948 war, including the incident at Dair Yassin.
I don't think that is it though. The Extreme Right (Effie Eitam and friends) has essentially ceased to remain a force in Israeli politics.
There is a shift to the center-right (Labor -> Likud) but this is from both sides of that center-right. Israeli politics are not exactly what they appear, however, relating to the peace process.
I think that the single most detrimental leader in recent memory to the peace process was Ehud Barak who not only sabotages negotiations repeatedly but also, as reported by Ha'aretz, tried to get rid of the Arab-Israeli problem by giving the Beduin areas to the PA (ethnic clensing again). By comparison, Sharon and Netenyahu both made better progress relating to peace not because of their strong hand, but because they were willing to either admit that they were wrong (Sharon) or work clandestinely towards peace (do some research on the long-standing Sharon-Netenyahu conflict which generally surrounded both sides trying to out the other's clandestine peace negotiations).
As strange as it may sound, I think that Olmert (who makes GWB look competent) and Barak (who was just dishonest about it) are the only PM's in recent memory who have not contributed to a peace process in substantive ways. Hence the rise of the center-right is not that a bad thing, and the fall of the far-right is a good thing.
The other thing to note is that the center-right has also moved away from the expansionist policy to one where the established borders are largely defined by the Green Line. The far-right manifest-destiny arm of the right which had been such an obstacle is dead.
I still think that the largest fundamental problem of Israeli politics has been the vast power that extremists have had within the system. Look at Effie Eitam in Sharon's second major coalition, for example. His party was advocating new ethnic clensing programs to get rid of Arabs both inside the Green Line and in the Territories. An opinion piece in Ha'aretz called his appointment to the cabinet the equivalent of putting a pyromaniac in charge of a propane depot.
The extreme right of Israeli politics, despite representing a small minority of Israelis has largely engineered a campaign to drive Arabs out of the Occupied Territories, expand settlements, and then annex the whole area. Some had called on annexing half of Egypt, all of Jordan, and part of Iraq as well, believing that there was a manifest destiny to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. With people like these largely involved in a lot of the politics relating to settlements, it is no wonder that the Palestinians have responded in kind. However, interestingly the people who turned Israel away from these expansionist policies were often the same people who pushed them for a long time in the first place (Begin, Shamir, and Sharon being great examples).
I think that when you look at Israeli politics, the first lesson one has to take away from it is that people can be good even if the system is entirely screwed up. In fact, people can turn towards goodness even when they have been strong advocates of expansionist, ethnic clensing policies. At the same time, one also has to realize that there are people who appear to be good but are pushing ethnic clensing programs behind the scenes (Ehud Barak comes to mind). Despite appearances, the center-right of Israeli politics has contributed a larger number of fundamental contributions to the peace process than the center-left with the sole exception of Rabin and to a lesser extent Perez.
Funny how one-time attempted Nazi collaborators (Shamir), convicted war criminals (Sharon), former terrorists (Shamir, Begin), etc. can turn around and contribute so much to the possibility of peace... Maybe we should give Hamas the same chance to contribute.
So, if I say--- Geeze, maybe it is time that we give Jews a year to sell their property and get out of Spain before we decide to kill them in reference to the ethnic cleansing which, by most objective accounts did occur by Igrun and other Israeli independence groups, you take that as hatred of the Jews, but I am just repeating Turkish PM Erdogan's point that the Palestinians are today where the Sephardic Jews were in 1493.
Please note that my ancestors were victims of Isabella and Ferdinand's ethnic clensing program of 1492. I don't believe that Irgun and other pro-indepnedence groups were right in their ethnic cleansing programs, and I do think that PM Erdogan's comments about the ethnic cleansing from Spain and British Palestine is on the mark.
While the latest settlement plans are troubling and should be abandoned, the approval was not for new plans, but rather to continue with old, disrupted plans. THere is a big difference. Still, in the interest of peace and justice, Israel should abandon all further settlement activity and continue with dismantling various settlements.
Just "We expect you to keep your government's past obligations and will take all necessary steps in the event that you do not." Punish the government for what it does, not whether you like or dislike the party.
1) Israel has finally abandoned the idea of driving the Palestinians out of the territories in order to annex them. That happened under Sharon who for all his faults and corruption has probably contributed most to prospects for peace of any Israeli PM since Rabin. Under Sharon, Israel has shifted an idea of borders back to the Green Line ('67 borders). It is unlikely that a final solution will look much different than those borders.
2) The Israeli far right (Effie Eitam and friends from the NRP/NUP) has been collapsing. The farthest right parties have been absorbed into more mainstream parties since they can't get the votes to win Knesset seats anymore. Note that some of these parties had advocated forced expulsion of arabs both from Israel proper and from the territories, and some had even talked of genocide. While they probably never represented together more than 5-10% of the Israeli people (and are now down to less than 2%), they wielded dispurportionate power due to the structure of Israeli democracy.
I actually think that we will see a peaceful 2-state solution in the next 5-10 years.
One other piece of trivia: Israel recognizes the validity of Sh'ria law for settling disputes between the 10-15% of their citizens which are Muslim and Druze. Jews, of course, use Jewish law instead.
The problem is that a lot of Gaza-residents are employed in Israel. You would shift emphasis from rockets to bus bombs. Not sure that is a good idea.
Hamas is trying to provoke Israel into dispurportionate measures and they are succeeding. Kill 120 Palestinians (mostly civilians) for every 5 Israelis killed? Heck even the Bush Administration is calling for Israel to back off, which is telling.
There is a clear goal to these attacks-- get Israel to respond too heavily. Countries and private individuals in the EU start cancelling orders. Israeli economy starts to sink. Israel abandons current settlement expansion efforts to convince Europeans that they are interested in peace. It worked like this under Operation Defensive Shield, and Hamas is going to try to do it again. They may even succeed. There is a *lot* of international pressure for Israel to back off and to stop the new settlement plans.
The only solution here is through political negotiations. Egypt is working hard to try to get these going again between Haniya and Olmert. Here is to hoping that this succeeds.
Even while we were providing aid to the Fatah-led government under Arafat, they were still blowing up busses in Israel (a blatant crime against humanity at least as bad as these rocket attacks). It boils down to the fact that we are more afraid of Hamas.
Hamas had an oportunity to lay a real foundation for peace and we took that away. Hamas was elected on a promise to get rid of corruption. Had they been able to deliver on that, perhaps there would be a real negotiating partner. Instead our government has sought to undermine Palestinian democracy every step of the way, enhancing the problems which prevent serious negotiations. Sad, really.
Do a search on "Madagascar Plan" sometime. You entirely missed the poster's point which was that ethnic clensing is ethnic clensing regardless of who is doing it.
I think it is still important to negotiate. Should everyone have boycotted Israel when they elected a former Nazi wannabe with strong Nazi ties in the 1980's (Shamir)? Should the Palestinians have been willing to negotiate with Sharon, the convicted war criminal? Yet strange as it may sound, both these leaders contributed much (if sometimes grudgingly) to the prospects for real peace. Remember that it was under the Sharon administration that the dream of annexing the whole of the Occupied Territories died and Gaza settlements were evacuated.
1) Abandon further settlement development. Right now, Abbas won't even negotiate with them because they are taking more land from Palestinains for settlements.
2) Begin negotiating with Haniya. Like it or not, he is the fairly elected representative of the Palestinian Authority. The problem is that, as you point out, Hamas sees its goal as the destruction of Israel, but Haniya has shown that he is more moderate than that, and negotiation is the only way to change the propaganda. Note that good thing can grow in questionable ground-- Shamir was an old wannabe Nazi* and yet he contributed greatly to the peace process. Sharon was a convicted war criminal** and yet his administration began the abandonment of large sections of settlement blocks, paving a possible road to peace. If we judged everyone by the past, Israel's leadership would be disqualified for past affiliations/war crimes/etc.
* This is not meant to invoke Godwin's law. Shamir was a top leader during WWII of a group which was fighting for Israeli independance against the UK. This group (ELHI, aka the Stern Gang) was a terrorist organization which openly idolized the Nazis, celebrated Nazi field victories praised the rounding up of the Jews by the Nazis (on the basis that this way at least they were effectively self-governing), and even in 1942 attempted to form a military alliance with Hitler. Funny-- celebrate Nazi victories, try to enter into an alliance with Hitler,..., get elected PM of Israel. Yes, the world has gone mad.
** Sharon was convicted of an Israeli military tribunal of being in part responsible for the massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebannon in the 1980's.
My own suspicion is that we are going to see yet another "Operation Defensive Shield" which will force the government to once again consider abandoning settlement blocks. No, Israeli politics is far from rational. It would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. In the end, though, the civilians on both sides are the losers.
Slashdot Mirror
If the noncommunication theorem holds then you can never know what the spins or polarizations were of the particles you are using for encryption. Hence not only does faster-than-light communication prove to be impossible but so might most obvious forms of quantum encryption as well. If on the other hand it only holds currently because of flaws in our experiments then it opens up all kinds of doors.
I will continue to follow this with interest.
North Korea wants a nuke because it is the another level of assurance that we won't eventually invade. Nukes are things you hide behind, not things you use.
Iran wants a nuke because it gives them some bargaining power with Israel. Again, a nice shield to threaten and hide behind but national suicide to use.
This is the major reason why I also oppose Bush's proposals for next generation mini-nukes. By making nuclear, sorry, "new-killer" weapons more usable we erode the firewall which keeps the big nuclear weapons from ever being used.
However the web browser is a classic example of an application where the density of information from the computer to the user is the limiting factor. Hence it is more efficient to browse the web in a GUI application. Note: mouse clicks are non-dense, but hypertext + graphics is dense. Furthermore, you are interacting with a document which is, for fundamental reasons, encapsulated from the user so the possibility of offering dense input is rather limited.
A far better example would be whether you could create a GUI which could be *more* efficient than using SCP when using more than a tiny subset of the functionality of the program.
For that matter, a GUI tool can't *really* replace command-line scp and ftp either.
I have generally thought that a lot of high-end 3d graphics and CAD programs could use a system like that.
The big disadvantage is that there is a pretty steep learning curve (steeper than the command-line because input/output is separated in different windows)
A lot of well-designed command-lines allow for reasonable efficiency in providing information to the computer. GUI's generally allow for reasonable efficiency getting information from the computer. Both could be improved to some extent, but even with GUI apps, I use the keyboard more than the mouse because it is more efficient.
GUI's take inputs from point/click interfaces generally. This means a mouse click which carries a lot less information than the number of key presses which can be typed in the same period of time. Hence for your time, when you need to convey complex information *to* the computer, a CLI will always beat a GUI.
Of course for other tasks (where the information passed to the computer is small, but the information delivered by the computer is rich) a GUI is far better.
Imagine Linux with all the tools which say "you should never have to use the command line." Such a distro would be pretty bad for most of us who currently use Linux because a command-line is fundamentally superior to a GUI for a lot of tasks we use it for. I always have at least three terminal windows open in addition to any GUI apps.
Similarly, I find that OS X (which is almost but not entirely unlike BSD) has a number of shortcomigns that make Linux and BSD better choices for me. My sister uses OSX however because it matches what she needs.
Ok, So I misstated the name. However, the idolization of the Nazis still applies. Here are some reasonable sources:
"In conformity with such notions, LEHI under Yair's inspiration praised the Nazis extravagantly for locking the Polish Jews into the ghettos, contrasting this favorably with the conditions of Jewish life in Poland before the Nazi invasion. As Heller clarifies, this praise was extended on the assumption that "in the Warsaw Ghetto there existed Jewish police, Jewish courts, Jewish tax collection," etc. This looked to LEHI like "a nascent Jewish state," preferable to conditions in Mandatory Palestine."
(http://www.mepc.org/journal_shahak/shahak39.asp). But I suppose we can disregard Mr Shahak as a crazy anti-semite, right? It is not like he actually went through the Holocaust or anything..... I suppose the allegations of celebrating Nazi battlefield victories is still somewhat under dispute, but the clear Nazi and totalitarian sympathies of the organization are not.
Furthermore, LEHI, Irgun, and Haganah were all involved in ethnic clensing of Arabs in the 1948 war, including the incident at Dair Yassin.
There is a shift to the center-right (Labor -> Likud) but this is from both sides of that center-right. Israeli politics are not exactly what they appear, however, relating to the peace process.
I think that the single most detrimental leader in recent memory to the peace process was Ehud Barak who not only sabotages negotiations repeatedly but also, as reported by Ha'aretz, tried to get rid of the Arab-Israeli problem by giving the Beduin areas to the PA (ethnic clensing again). By comparison, Sharon and Netenyahu both made better progress relating to peace not because of their strong hand, but because they were willing to either admit that they were wrong (Sharon) or work clandestinely towards peace (do some research on the long-standing Sharon-Netenyahu conflict which generally surrounded both sides trying to out the other's clandestine peace negotiations).
As strange as it may sound, I think that Olmert (who makes GWB look competent) and Barak (who was just dishonest about it) are the only PM's in recent memory who have not contributed to a peace process in substantive ways. Hence the rise of the center-right is not that a bad thing, and the fall of the far-right is a good thing.
The other thing to note is that the center-right has also moved away from the expansionist policy to one where the established borders are largely defined by the Green Line. The far-right manifest-destiny arm of the right which had been such an obstacle is dead.
Only problem is... in 10 years.... Arabs would outnumber Jews in Israel.....
Of course even within the Green Line, that is happening but it will take 50 years at current rates, not 10....
The extreme right of Israeli politics, despite representing a small minority of Israelis has largely engineered a campaign to drive Arabs out of the Occupied Territories, expand settlements, and then annex the whole area. Some had called on annexing half of Egypt, all of Jordan, and part of Iraq as well, believing that there was a manifest destiny to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. With people like these largely involved in a lot of the politics relating to settlements, it is no wonder that the Palestinians have responded in kind. However, interestingly the people who turned Israel away from these expansionist policies were often the same people who pushed them for a long time in the first place (Begin, Shamir, and Sharon being great examples).
I think that when you look at Israeli politics, the first lesson one has to take away from it is that people can be good even if the system is entirely screwed up. In fact, people can turn towards goodness even when they have been strong advocates of expansionist, ethnic clensing policies. At the same time, one also has to realize that there are people who appear to be good but are pushing ethnic clensing programs behind the scenes (Ehud Barak comes to mind). Despite appearances, the center-right of Israeli politics has contributed a larger number of fundamental contributions to the peace process than the center-left with the sole exception of Rabin and to a lesser extent Perez.
Funny how one-time attempted Nazi collaborators (Shamir), convicted war criminals (Sharon), former terrorists (Shamir, Begin), etc. can turn around and contribute so much to the possibility of peace... Maybe we should give Hamas the same chance to contribute.
Please note that my ancestors were victims of Isabella and Ferdinand's ethnic clensing program of 1492. I don't believe that Irgun and other pro-indepnedence groups were right in their ethnic cleansing programs, and I do think that PM Erdogan's comments about the ethnic cleansing from Spain and British Palestine is on the mark.
While the latest settlement plans are troubling and should be abandoned, the approval was not for new plans, but rather to continue with old, disrupted plans. THere is a big difference. Still, in the interest of peace and justice, Israel should abandon all further settlement activity and continue with dismantling various settlements.
Just "We expect you to keep your government's past obligations and will take all necessary steps in the event that you do not." Punish the government for what it does, not whether you like or dislike the party.
There are two other points of hope too:
1) Israel has finally abandoned the idea of driving the Palestinians out of the territories in order to annex them. That happened under Sharon who for all his faults and corruption has probably contributed most to prospects for peace of any Israeli PM since Rabin. Under Sharon, Israel has shifted an idea of borders back to the Green Line ('67 borders). It is unlikely that a final solution will look much different than those borders.
2) The Israeli far right (Effie Eitam and friends from the NRP/NUP) has been collapsing. The farthest right parties have been absorbed into more mainstream parties since they can't get the votes to win Knesset seats anymore. Note that some of these parties had advocated forced expulsion of arabs both from Israel proper and from the territories, and some had even talked of genocide. While they probably never represented together more than 5-10% of the Israeli people (and are now down to less than 2%), they wielded dispurportionate power due to the structure of Israeli democracy.
I actually think that we will see a peaceful 2-state solution in the next 5-10 years.
One other piece of trivia: Israel recognizes the validity of Sh'ria law for settling disputes between the 10-15% of their citizens which are Muslim and Druze. Jews, of course, use Jewish law instead.
The problem is that a lot of Gaza-residents are employed in Israel. You would shift emphasis from rockets to bus bombs. Not sure that is a good idea.
Hamas is trying to provoke Israel into dispurportionate measures and they are succeeding. Kill 120 Palestinians (mostly civilians) for every 5 Israelis killed? Heck even the Bush Administration is calling for Israel to back off, which is telling.
There is a clear goal to these attacks-- get Israel to respond too heavily. Countries and private individuals in the EU start cancelling orders. Israeli economy starts to sink. Israel abandons current settlement expansion efforts to convince Europeans that they are interested in peace. It worked like this under Operation Defensive Shield, and Hamas is going to try to do it again. They may even succeed. There is a *lot* of international pressure for Israel to back off and to stop the new settlement plans.
The only solution here is through political negotiations. Egypt is working hard to try to get these going again between Haniya and Olmert. Here is to hoping that this succeeds.
Hamas had an oportunity to lay a real foundation for peace and we took that away. Hamas was elected on a promise to get rid of corruption. Had they been able to deliver on that, perhaps there would be a real negotiating partner. Instead our government has sought to undermine Palestinian democracy every step of the way, enhancing the problems which prevent serious negotiations. Sad, really.
We should simply have continued the aid we were providing instead of trying to stand up for the right of the Palestinians to elect leaders we like.
Do a search on "Madagascar Plan" sometime. You entirely missed the poster's point which was that ethnic clensing is ethnic clensing regardless of who is doing it.
I think it is still important to negotiate. Should everyone have boycotted Israel when they elected a former Nazi wannabe with strong Nazi ties in the 1980's (Shamir)? Should the Palestinians have been willing to negotiate with Sharon, the convicted war criminal? Yet strange as it may sound, both these leaders contributed much (if sometimes grudgingly) to the prospects for real peace. Remember that it was under the Sharon administration that the dream of annexing the whole of the Occupied Territories died and Gaza settlements were evacuated.
Tiptoeing around Godwin's Law, are we?
1) Abandon further settlement development. Right now, Abbas won't even negotiate with them because they are taking more land from Palestinains for settlements.
..., get elected PM of Israel. Yes, the world has gone mad.
2) Begin negotiating with Haniya. Like it or not, he is the fairly elected representative of the Palestinian Authority. The problem is that, as you point out, Hamas sees its goal as the destruction of Israel, but Haniya has shown that he is more moderate than that, and negotiation is the only way to change the propaganda. Note that good thing can grow in questionable ground-- Shamir was an old wannabe Nazi* and yet he contributed greatly to the peace process. Sharon was a convicted war criminal** and yet his administration began the abandonment of large sections of settlement blocks, paving a possible road to peace. If we judged everyone by the past, Israel's leadership would be disqualified for past affiliations/war crimes/etc.
* This is not meant to invoke Godwin's law. Shamir was a top leader during WWII of a group which was fighting for Israeli independance against the UK. This group (ELHI, aka the Stern Gang) was a terrorist organization which openly idolized the Nazis, celebrated Nazi field victories praised the rounding up of the Jews by the Nazis (on the basis that this way at least they were effectively self-governing), and even in 1942 attempted to form a military alliance with Hitler. Funny-- celebrate Nazi victories, try to enter into an alliance with Hitler,
** Sharon was convicted of an Israeli military tribunal of being in part responsible for the massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebannon in the 1980's.
My own suspicion is that we are going to see yet another "Operation Defensive Shield" which will force the government to once again consider abandoning settlement blocks. No, Israeli politics is far from rational. It would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. In the end, though, the civilians on both sides are the losers.
Mutant sea bass.