The physical damage of a dirty bomb is small, but the psychological damage has always been way higher with terrorist attacks than the actual physical loss. I'm well aware that dirty bombs basically just do as much damage as the conventional explosives used in them, but judging by how some people I've met reacted on the west coast of the US to negligible amounts of radioactive iodine from Fukushima, the psychological aspect could cause us to significantly harm ourselves with more useless wars.
Well, the best way would be to get the spent fuel back, and check the amounts. U-238 could be put near the reacting material like with neutron activation testing, but I don't believe that any remotely usable P-239 could be recovered that way (hence why reactors that produce plutonium have to be specially designed). It might be possible (I'm not an expert) to produce dirty bombs by heavily neutron activating a ton of stuff, but a dirty bomb is a far cry from a nuke, and it would be a very slow process. The main problem would be finding a place to keep the spent fuel, as nobody wants to have to keep the stuff.
No. That's not how it works. That is totally incorrect.
"Shor's algorithm will produce a nontrivial factor of n with probability >= 1-(1/2)^(k-1) where k is the number of distinct odd prime factors of n."
Number Theory for Computing By Song Y. Yan
Public key cryptography that is susceptible to Shor's algorithm specifically choose to use two prime numbers, so the probability of success is always theoretically 50%. Verifying the result is trivial. All that's needed is to feed the result into an oracle (easiest to do classically) to see if the result is valid, and loop until the oracle says "true". The loop can stop any time a correct answer is found; which one is correct is not based on statistics but an easy P complexity check. There are many quantum algorithms that only work a certain percentage of the time, and it isn't a problem.
And now, there's a push from the udev group to merge/usr into/. For years,/bin and/lib had everything needed to boot to the first stage, but now, udev is starting to drag in dependencies from/usr in the preliminary boot stage. This means that in order to have a separate/usr partition (such as on an ssd), it will be mandatory to also maintain an initramfs with all the files required for the particular udev configuration. An initramfs shouldn't be required for a basic boot. If a feature isn't mandatory to boot, put it later in the boot process. udev and systemd also merged, so this behemoth could become even more restrictive, especially due to the fact that NetworkManager doesn't save its data in a human readable format; what's next, a Linux version of the Registry? This is the opposite direction to how I want to see Linux going. The Unix philosophy of simple parts that can be chained together is getting completely trashed. If anything, I would like to see some of the ideas from (lan9 implement, like/net, where network connections are done by talking to control files, eg./net/tcp/2/{ctl,data,listen,local,remote,status}. Fancy new features are very nice, but they should always be optional so as to not be restricting.
What's wrong with using 0.0.0.0? It's defined in ipv4 to designate an invalid IP, and unlike 127.0.0.0/8 addresses, it won't hit local web servers or have to wait to time out.
Perhaps some corporation will throw money into making kde-plasma a stable shell to use on Windows. It fully replaces explorer.exe rather than being some sort of dll hack, and allows for a powerful customizable shell and program compatibility. The cost of getting plasma running perfectly in a windows environment could be a lot less than major retraining of huge amounts of employees (theme things to feel like Win7), especially if Microsoft decides to switch things up again in Win9.
It's very hard to measure the efficiency of theoretical science. In rare cases, a discovery can revolutionize the world. In some instances, discoveries can create new products. In others, there may be no practical value to the discovery, merely a stepping stone to something greater or merely a better grasp of the universe. Many things fail to produce any benefit except for knowing what probably doesn't work. All of these things are advancements, but there is a huge amount of variability.
This could still easily be written as a filesystem, or more precisely, two. First, write a filesystem that accesses the online storage. Secondly, get a good union mounting FS. Make a union mount between the directory you want things to be in and the online storage. Configure the union mount to synchronize the bottom layer with the top layer. The union mounting would be useful for other things as well, such as automatically syncing a flash drive with a folder or caching network drive data. A read only base layer with a rw top layer allows for the base system image + configuration image for netboot. Much of this is already working in Linux, though not necessarily feature complete, yet.
Also, does the fact that many phones support voice commands mean that it should be suspected that the microphone is always on? If all the cell providers decide they get remote access to your phone, does that enable all phones to be used as warrant-less bugs? Cell phones aren't exactly voluntary these days. "Required by our civilization" should be the benchmark, not the Amish.
I don't have a touchscreen on my laptop, but I do have an active digitizer (Wacom). It's great for taking notes on things that can't be typed (drawings, math, etc) and I use that functionality all the time. It's great for Defend Your Castle, but a mouse is more efficient for anything else. To me, touch is useful for phones and low end tablets. For good quality tablets and larger, there should be the option of having accurate stylus input. At the laptop and desktop scale, the usefulness of even stylus input is mostly limited to artists and students (laptop). Input in this large form takes way more energy and often time. A lot of people prefer not to move their hands to their mouse when typing/programming and save time by using arrow keys (or taken to the extreme with vi mode, where the hands never even leave the home row). Even a touchpad is better for most things.
Mod this up! The initial investment is higher than hard drives, but when you need tons of storage and don't care about seek times, it's by far the most cost efficient method. They are supposed to last 30 years in archival conditions, but because tape is cheap, it wouldn't be expensive to transfer the data to new tapes. Flash lasts about 3.5x as long, but is significantly more expensive and would become archaic far before then. Tape is one of the oldest digital technologies and I still don't see it going anywhere for archival uses unless optical tape takes off. Tape just allows for so much more surface area than anything else and enables the expensive bits to be separate.
Nokia could have done what's being done now and make Qt a universal toolkit across all phone platforms. Not having to port apps would save developers a lot of time.
Agreed. Win7 has some, but not all of the great window management features of KDE4. There's still things that KDE4 needs to iron out, but I love its window management.
Yes, but it's written distro specifically when it doesn't need to be, which means reimplementing for other distros creates a lot of wasteful redundancy when Canonical could have easily just written it to use multiple backends.
My main problem with this is that it sounds too Ubuntu specific. It seems Canonical is trying to slowly build a separate branded desktop environment rather than contributing programs and patches to existing projects. The same goes for the Ubuntu app store. I wish Canonical would build more open and documented APIs so that other distros could easily plug in to them. Too many of Canonicals improvements seem to benefit just them. Linux is a group project.
Hell, I'll go beyond thinking this should be more than distro specific. Functionality like this should be an actual standard so that developers only have to write for one API for all desktop integration.
As far as tablets go, Metro is only useful for those that use capacitive displays. Anything that uses a stylus is more accurate than a mouse. Capacitive displays are nice for phones and the low end tablets, but for anything for serious use should have something on par with a wacom. I hope Win8 starts making more companies start making high end tablet computers like the Fujitsu convertible tablet series (ie T5010, which I have and love), but Metro still won't be ideal for it
It also only matters if enough people vote with their wallets. The majority of people don't care about other operating systems or even care about having the choice.
Word and LaTeX have very different goals. Word is a word processor, whereas LaTeX is strictly a typesetting program. Word gives good language tools and minimal to adequate control over presentation. LaTeX doesn't care about language, but gives fine control over layout. LaTeX is more akin to InDesign than Word.
The power of LaTeX comes from being able to easily reproduce complex formats using commands and templates. Many scientific journals accept LaTeX, and many more of them provide LaTeX packages for use in pdf submission. Nearly all formatting should be handled using the template, which means switching styles is usually as simple as changing one variable and making sure the image widths work. References are all formatted with Bibtex automatically, so I have no idea where you get the idea that it's manual. I use LaTeX mainly because it provides powerful reference support (most journals provide.bib's to download), accurate formatting, and easy reproduction. \tableofcontents, \listoffigures, \listoftables is automatic, not hard. The main thing that's hard about LaTeX is making tables. It's not for everyone, but it's far more powerful than what you're making out, especially for science and math.
You could also potentially separate the vote tallying and voter tracking by generating unique random IDs. This would allow the public to check the government's results via methods similar to bitcoin.
Electronic doesn't necessarily mean insecure. Public key cryptography with keys in voter cards is a possibility. Encrypt the vote with your public key and the government's public key, then sign. You could then check that your vote was counted and counted correctly either online with a cheap smartcard reader or at a library if you don't have a reader. The keys would be signed to verify identity and could also include a photo.
The reason current electronic voting machines are insecure is that they have no electronic security whatsoever, not inherently because they're electronic.
Slashdot Mirror
The physical damage of a dirty bomb is small, but the psychological damage has always been way higher with terrorist attacks than the actual physical loss. I'm well aware that dirty bombs basically just do as much damage as the conventional explosives used in them, but judging by how some people I've met reacted on the west coast of the US to negligible amounts of radioactive iodine from Fukushima, the psychological aspect could cause us to significantly harm ourselves with more useless wars.
Well, the best way would be to get the spent fuel back, and check the amounts. U-238 could be put near the reacting material like with neutron activation testing, but I don't believe that any remotely usable P-239 could be recovered that way (hence why reactors that produce plutonium have to be specially designed). It might be possible (I'm not an expert) to produce dirty bombs by heavily neutron activating a ton of stuff, but a dirty bomb is a far cry from a nuke, and it would be a very slow process. The main problem would be finding a place to keep the spent fuel, as nobody wants to have to keep the stuff.
No. That's not how it works. That is totally incorrect.
"Shor's algorithm will produce a nontrivial factor of n with probability >= 1-(1/2)^(k-1) where k is the number of distinct odd prime factors of n."
Number Theory for Computing By Song Y. Yan
Public key cryptography that is susceptible to Shor's algorithm specifically choose to use two prime numbers, so the probability of success is always theoretically 50%. Verifying the result is trivial. All that's needed is to feed the result into an oracle (easiest to do classically) to see if the result is valid, and loop until the oracle says "true". The loop can stop any time a correct answer is found; which one is correct is not based on statistics but an easy P complexity check. There are many quantum algorithms that only work a certain percentage of the time, and it isn't a problem.
So, then, show up in a convoy of cat-filled trucks. That should do the trick.
And now, there's a push from the udev group to merge /usr into /. For years, /bin and /lib had everything needed to boot to the first stage, but now, udev is starting to drag in dependencies from /usr in the preliminary boot stage. This means that in order to have a separate /usr partition (such as on an ssd), it will be mandatory to also maintain an initramfs with all the files required for the particular udev configuration. An initramfs shouldn't be required for a basic boot. If a feature isn't mandatory to boot, put it later in the boot process. udev and systemd also merged, so this behemoth could become even more restrictive, especially due to the fact that NetworkManager doesn't save its data in a human readable format; what's next, a Linux version of the Registry? This is the opposite direction to how I want to see Linux going. The Unix philosophy of simple parts that can be chained together is getting completely trashed. If anything, I would like to see some of the ideas from (lan9 implement, like /net, where network connections are done by talking to control files, eg. /net/tcp/2/{ctl,data,listen,local,remote,status}. Fancy new features are very nice, but they should always be optional so as to not be restricting.
What's wrong with using 0.0.0.0? It's defined in ipv4 to designate an invalid IP, and unlike 127.0.0.0/8 addresses, it won't hit local web servers or have to wait to time out.
Perhaps some corporation will throw money into making kde-plasma a stable shell to use on Windows. It fully replaces explorer.exe rather than being some sort of dll hack, and allows for a powerful customizable shell and program compatibility. The cost of getting plasma running perfectly in a windows environment could be a lot less than major retraining of huge amounts of employees (theme things to feel like Win7), especially if Microsoft decides to switch things up again in Win9.
It's very hard to measure the efficiency of theoretical science. In rare cases, a discovery can revolutionize the world. In some instances, discoveries can create new products. In others, there may be no practical value to the discovery, merely a stepping stone to something greater or merely a better grasp of the universe. Many things fail to produce any benefit except for knowing what probably doesn't work. All of these things are advancements, but there is a huge amount of variability.
This could still easily be written as a filesystem, or more precisely, two. First, write a filesystem that accesses the online storage. Secondly, get a good union mounting FS. Make a union mount between the directory you want things to be in and the online storage. Configure the union mount to synchronize the bottom layer with the top layer. The union mounting would be useful for other things as well, such as automatically syncing a flash drive with a folder or caching network drive data. A read only base layer with a rw top layer allows for the base system image + configuration image for netboot. Much of this is already working in Linux, though not necessarily feature complete, yet.
Also, does the fact that many phones support voice commands mean that it should be suspected that the microphone is always on? If all the cell providers decide they get remote access to your phone, does that enable all phones to be used as warrant-less bugs? Cell phones aren't exactly voluntary these days. "Required by our civilization" should be the benchmark, not the Amish.
Data about your heart is very personal and matters to you a lot more than it does anyone else. The bad searches are the other way around.
I don't have a touchscreen on my laptop, but I do have an active digitizer (Wacom). It's great for taking notes on things that can't be typed (drawings, math, etc) and I use that functionality all the time. It's great for Defend Your Castle, but a mouse is more efficient for anything else. To me, touch is useful for phones and low end tablets. For good quality tablets and larger, there should be the option of having accurate stylus input. At the laptop and desktop scale, the usefulness of even stylus input is mostly limited to artists and students (laptop). Input in this large form takes way more energy and often time. A lot of people prefer not to move their hands to their mouse when typing/programming and save time by using arrow keys (or taken to the extreme with vi mode, where the hands never even leave the home row). Even a touchpad is better for most things.
Holy linguini! that's even more braindead than I feared. What happens with multiple monitors!
I wish KDE Plasma was fully functional on Windows. I'd just replace the explorer.exe shell entirely.
That sounds exactly like UnionFS or union mounts: http://lwn.net/Articles/312641/, http://lwn.net/Articles/217084/. UnionFS is used in some LiveCDs to allow saving to a ramdisk (which you could dump to a file if you want).
Mod this up! The initial investment is higher than hard drives, but when you need tons of storage and don't care about seek times, it's by far the most cost efficient method. They are supposed to last 30 years in archival conditions, but because tape is cheap, it wouldn't be expensive to transfer the data to new tapes. Flash lasts about 3.5x as long, but is significantly more expensive and would become archaic far before then. Tape is one of the oldest digital technologies and I still don't see it going anywhere for archival uses unless optical tape takes off. Tape just allows for so much more surface area than anything else and enables the expensive bits to be separate.
Nokia could have done what's being done now and make Qt a universal toolkit across all phone platforms. Not having to port apps would save developers a lot of time.
Agreed. Win7 has some, but not all of the great window management features of KDE4. There's still things that KDE4 needs to iron out, but I love its window management.
non-debian package managers.
Yes, but it's written distro specifically when it doesn't need to be, which means reimplementing for other distros creates a lot of wasteful redundancy when Canonical could have easily just written it to use multiple backends.
My main problem with this is that it sounds too Ubuntu specific. It seems Canonical is trying to slowly build a separate branded desktop environment rather than contributing programs and patches to existing projects. The same goes for the Ubuntu app store. I wish Canonical would build more open and documented APIs so that other distros could easily plug in to them. Too many of Canonicals improvements seem to benefit just them. Linux is a group project.
Hell, I'll go beyond thinking this should be more than distro specific. Functionality like this should be an actual standard so that developers only have to write for one API for all desktop integration.
As far as tablets go, Metro is only useful for those that use capacitive displays. Anything that uses a stylus is more accurate than a mouse. Capacitive displays are nice for phones and the low end tablets, but for anything for serious use should have something on par with a wacom. I hope Win8 starts making more companies start making high end tablet computers like the Fujitsu convertible tablet series (ie T5010, which I have and love), but Metro still won't be ideal for it
It also only matters if enough people vote with their wallets. The majority of people don't care about other operating systems or even care about having the choice.
Word and LaTeX have very different goals. Word is a word processor, whereas LaTeX is strictly a typesetting program. Word gives good language tools and minimal to adequate control over presentation. LaTeX doesn't care about language, but gives fine control over layout. LaTeX is more akin to InDesign than Word. The power of LaTeX comes from being able to easily reproduce complex formats using commands and templates. Many scientific journals accept LaTeX, and many more of them provide LaTeX packages for use in pdf submission. Nearly all formatting should be handled using the template, which means switching styles is usually as simple as changing one variable and making sure the image widths work. References are all formatted with Bibtex automatically, so I have no idea where you get the idea that it's manual. I use LaTeX mainly because it provides powerful reference support (most journals provide .bib's to download), accurate formatting, and easy reproduction. \tableofcontents, \listoffigures, \listoftables is automatic, not hard. The main thing that's hard about LaTeX is making tables. It's not for everyone, but it's far more powerful than what you're making out, especially for science and math.
You could also potentially separate the vote tallying and voter tracking by generating unique random IDs. This would allow the public to check the government's results via methods similar to bitcoin.
Electronic doesn't necessarily mean insecure. Public key cryptography with keys in voter cards is a possibility. Encrypt the vote with your public key and the government's public key, then sign. You could then check that your vote was counted and counted correctly either online with a cheap smartcard reader or at a library if you don't have a reader. The keys would be signed to verify identity and could also include a photo.
The reason current electronic voting machines are insecure is that they have no electronic security whatsoever, not inherently because they're electronic.