No, this is not a form of Star Trek's Heisenberg Compensator. The whole point of Heisenberg Uncertainty is that it is fundamental and unavoidable. You can get down to that magic h-bar/2pi, but no further. Period.
If you could get around that uncertainty issue, it would blow away quantum cryptography entirely; the beauty of it from a security standpoint is that any eavesdropping can be detected, because observing the qubits (in this case, photons with particular spin) necessarily disrupts a certain portion of them.
Yes, this means that a determined eavesdropper could mount an effective DoS by reading all the bits, but with that kind of access, there are easier ways. (Uh, how about cutting the fiber?)
And it's not really teleportation. It's still fundamentally limited to the speed of light. "Teleporting" anything more complicated than a hydrogen atom is going to be insane due to (here it comes again) Heisenberg Uncertainty - you have to extract its state, but you can't do that to within that certain magic tolerance...
Knowing the particles are entangled is extra information. If I know bits A and B are either both 0, or both 1 (fully entangled), and I observe bit A to be 0, I know B is 0. No information or state is transferred between the two particles after the initial entanglement.
This can still be performed if, for example, bits A and B are on different HDs, and I ship one across the country. Suddenly, by reading one, I can tell someone across the country what they will read at the address where their bit is on the disk.
Japan had a incident about a year ago...someone mismeasured reactants, and a small explosion and release of material occurred in neighborhood around a processing plant. Hold your nose!!
It wasn't an issue of mismeasured reactants, it was an issue of blatantly ignoring the procedures for performing a procedure. By doing things in a rushed manner, materials came together in a way that yielded a nasty radiation dose for those doing the work, and not much else. (That'll teach you to follow directions...) I don't have a link handy, but I think it was in Physics Today.
Now that Apple are adopting Kerberos, what's to say that it will not be proprietary Microsoft Kerberos? If MS could get Apple to support their fork of Kerberos, it'd make it more likely to win the standards battle. (And official standards mean little in the fast-moving IT game; witness what happened to HTML 3.0.)
The fact that it's specifically stated that they're working with MIT to develop this strongly implies that it'll be about as standard as it gets.
(I think I just posted a blank comment with this subject. Wasn't expecting the return key to map directly to "submit". Being more careful now...)
So. I've done some basic genetics stuff, including just enough "lab" work to say I've messed around with (safe) e. coli to splice in a simple resistance gene (to a specific antibiotic). It looks like the issue here isn't patenting large segments of the genome, but small ones. Not a matter of patenting sequences that have effects (allele-level), but sequences that are used as tools to get at these larger, more complicated parts.
At a certain level, these are also "naturally occurring"; they probably *do* exist in some form in organisms that are heavily resistant to genetic damage (as tools to recover from it). However, they really are tools in the circumstances the patent office is seeing them under. I hesitate to think of the mess if a human gene is brought up for patent as a tool.
I think that this is a step in the right direction (I fit in, as do most here, I would guess, with the purists who don't like the idea of patenting genes much). I hope there is a long hard look taken at each proposed genetic patent, and that there is a relaxing of the rules for the exceptions mentioned at the end of the article.
I think the biggest problem (and this has been noted repeatedly with respect to software as well) is that common law and precedents are being applied to situations never dreamed of, or at least taken into account, when they were derived.
It doesn't have to be a logical contradiction. Your body appears in 1969 to witness the birth of UNIX, despite the fact that you weren't born until, say, 1980, for the sake of argument.
Now, you already were there in 1969. In a way, yes, it does dictate that you can't do anything else but cause the future as it happened, putting you in the time machine on your way back to 1969.
This does not make the universe deterministic, however. It merely means that the determination is being done in a strange order. But then, time travel is all about things happening in strange orders, is it not?
I don't see free will being taken away by this scenario, but I agree that the universe happens to be structured in such a way as to cause a logical contradiction.
From P and not P we can show literally anything. Thus we cannot have both P and not P.
Well then, it's a logical impossibility for you to go back and create a logical contradiction. Let's say I go back in time and try to kill off a previous self. The simplest break to this paradox is for me to fail. (Possibly through bizzare coincidence leading to the discovery of a way to time travel, if you're feeling ironic.)
Basically, anything you go back in time and do, has already been done. You can't edit the future, but you can certainly cause it.
At least, that's how I view it. This is leaning towards Philosophy, not Physics, and only one of those is my major.
We're at the center. All points are the center. Think about it this way; all expansion starts out from a point. Tha point is the center, but that point is also the universe. It seems a bit odd at first, but it makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is not a form of Star Trek's Heisenberg Compensator. The whole point of Heisenberg Uncertainty is that it is fundamental and unavoidable. You can get down to that magic h-bar/2pi, but no further. Period.
...
If you could get around that uncertainty issue, it would blow away quantum cryptography entirely; the beauty of it from a security standpoint is that any eavesdropping can be detected, because observing the qubits (in this case, photons with particular spin) necessarily disrupts a certain portion of them.
Yes, this means that a determined eavesdropper could mount an effective DoS by reading all the bits, but with that kind of access, there are easier ways. (Uh, how about cutting the fiber?)
And it's not really teleportation. It's still fundamentally limited to the speed of light. "Teleporting" anything more complicated than a hydrogen atom is going to be insane due to (here it comes again) Heisenberg Uncertainty - you have to extract its state, but you can't do that to within that certain magic tolerance
Knowing the particles are entangled is extra information. If I know bits A and B are either both 0, or both 1 (fully entangled), and I observe bit A to be 0, I know B is 0. No information or state is transferred between the two particles after the initial entanglement.
This can still be performed if, for example, bits A and B are on different HDs, and I ship one across the country. Suddenly, by reading one, I can tell someone across the country what they will read at the address where their bit is on the disk.
It wasn't an issue of mismeasured reactants, it was an issue of blatantly ignoring the procedures for performing a procedure. By doing things in a rushed manner, materials came together in a way that yielded a nasty radiation dose for those doing the work, and not much else. (That'll teach you to follow directions ...) I don't have a link handy, but I think it was in Physics Today.
The fact that it's specifically stated that they're working with MIT to develop this strongly implies that it'll be about as standard as it gets.
So. I've done some basic genetics stuff, including just enough "lab" work to say I've messed around with (safe) e. coli to splice in a simple resistance gene (to a specific antibiotic). It looks like the issue here isn't patenting large segments of the genome, but small ones. Not a matter of patenting sequences that have effects (allele-level), but sequences that are used as tools to get at these larger, more complicated parts.
At a certain level, these are also "naturally occurring"; they probably *do* exist in some form in organisms that are heavily resistant to genetic damage (as tools to recover from it). However, they really are tools in the circumstances the patent office is seeing them under. I hesitate to think of the mess if a human gene is brought up for patent as a tool.
I think that this is a step in the right direction (I fit in, as do most here, I would guess, with the purists who don't like the idea of patenting genes much). I hope there is a long hard look taken at each proposed genetic patent, and that there is a relaxing of the rules for the exceptions mentioned at the end of the article.
I think the biggest problem (and this has been noted repeatedly with respect to software as well) is that common law and precedents are being applied to situations never dreamed of, or at least taken into account, when they were derived.
It doesn't have to be a logical contradiction. Your body appears in 1969 to witness the birth of UNIX, despite the fact that you weren't born until, say, 1980, for the sake of argument.
Now, you already were there in 1969. In a way, yes, it does dictate that you can't do anything else but cause the future as it happened, putting you in the time machine on your way back to 1969.
This does not make the universe deterministic, however. It merely means that the determination is being done in a strange order. But then, time travel is all about things happening in strange orders, is it not?
I don't see free will being taken away by this scenario, but I agree that the universe happens to be structured in such a way as to cause a logical contradiction.
From P and not P we can show literally anything. Thus we cannot have both P and not P.
Well then, it's a logical impossibility for you to go back and create a logical contradiction. Let's say I go back in time and try to kill off a previous self. The simplest break to this paradox is for me to fail. (Possibly through bizzare coincidence leading to the discovery of a way to time travel, if you're feeling ironic.)
Basically, anything you go back in time and do, has already been done. You can't edit the future, but you can certainly cause it.
At least, that's how I view it. This is leaning towards Philosophy, not Physics, and only one of those is my major.
We're at the center. All points are the center. Think about it this way; all expansion starts out from a point. Tha point is the center, but that point is also the universe. It seems a bit odd at first, but it makes sense.