Mathematicians have exercised their minds on this one. The advantages of cash include anonymity, untraceability, transferability. These *can* be reproduced using electronic data. I've attended a course where a mathematician explained a scheme which filled two of these requirements - including the third made the problem rather harder, but it had still been solved. Your $X-dollar data packet would fit on a floppy at *this* level of security...
The scheme involved things like a one-way hash like MD5sum, and all merchants using binary codes, and the data packet you give the merchant is dependent on their code - but if you use the same note with another merchant, the difference in their codes means that you've given out both of the random numbers that add up to your identity code, and you'd get caught.
You can have everything in an electronic form - despite the infinite reproducibility of bits! Everything can be designed to be perfectly anonymous, untraceable, etc etc, right up until someone abuses the system, and then they get blown out of the water immediately, without exposing innocents. Isn't maths wonderful?
Well - if you and your funky unix box can log attacks from Nimda-infected servers, and then exploit Nimda's features to run commands on the infected servers that have attacked you, wouldn't you be able to run a set of commands that a) downloaded and ran a disinfection utility (I assume they're available for free download from places that can cope) and b) raised security settings or even told the machine to go update from MS website?
Requires a darn sight more knowhow than *I* have, and perhaps the 'update' bit requires inconvenient things like CD keys, but surely the 'run disinfection program' part is feasible.
If they're going to do something which at least sounds dangerous, I would really like it if they could say, "Nothing can possibly go wrong", not, "Our understanding is incomplete."
As another poster pointed out - if this kind of black hole creation were going to cause any problems, it already would have. If these high-energy particles they will be making will produce black holes, then there are about 100 black holes produced per year as a result of cosmic radiation - and they haven't been detected yet, so obviously they have a pretty small effect, and there's nothing to worry about.
People often worry excessively about Nuclear phenomena. This is, as far as I can tell, because very few people actually know what natural levels are.
There is a natural background level of radiation which varies by 10% from place to place. Nuclear facilities are typically permitted to increase the level by 1%. By contrast, international flights usually involve triple the normal background level of radiation - it's cosmic radiation that doesn't reach the ground.
In one mole of carbon - 12g, about what you might find in a fruit - you get about 100 decays a second; this is from the tiny fraction of naturally produced 14C. How radioactive do you think you are? (grin)
Maybe they should put up a screen at the end of all the questions, showing the their votes and asking the voter if they are correct. Maybe then people will be able to vote the way they want, or at least not be able to claim they made a mistake.
Er... maybe they have done this. I've attended Canberra Linux User Group meetings where the project was discussed and debated. I have been impressed by the level of detail, thoughtfulness, and care that has gone into every facet of this project - every objection that was raised had already been addressed; the electronic voting system is as good as or better than paper voting in every respect. And if you don't like it, you can still vote on paper; an option that isn't likely to disappear any time soon.
Seems to me the American system could do with being easier to vote in. I'm used to it being easy to vote; elections on saturdays, every primary school a polling place, pre-polling centres in all city centres for if you're going to be busy on the day, and postal voting for when even pre-polling isn't practical. When it's compulsory to vote, the constitution makes sure it is easy to vote; no four hour queues for me!
I'm most moved by this poster's comments on the effects of network attacks on depression support groups. Normally lots of people would be annoyed and inconvenienced - some people counting on the system to transmit or recieve important information - but this is a special case; I have just enough experience with depression to know how being deprived of a solace can hurt.
Once those kids grow up, they will learn - most of them. It's part of growing up, really - learning to keep minor set-backs in proportion, rather than making life hell for everyone else; learning to consider others. Learning what the effects of their actions actually are. There are unpleasant and irresponsible adults out there, of course - but a lower proportion of them than of kids. Not knowing the consequences of your own actions is almost part of the definition of childhood, isn't it?
The problem is - when today's kids have grown up and absorbed adult attitudes, there will be a fresh supply of youngsters causing trouble. The individuals involved will change; the tendency to casual maliciousness will not. Even the nicest of people occasionally feels angry or hurt and wants to lash out - whether or not they actually do it.
Well, wherever casual maliciousness is an option, some hurt, angry, or immature adult or some ignorant child is going to cause trouble - sometime, somewhere. The easier it is to be nasty... no, it's not nice, but as far as I can tell it's very human. Niceness is learned.
So what do we do? I'm not one for regulations, or blame; I can't see that it would help here. I think the best thing we can do is make it harder to inflict damage, easier to defend against it; naturally there's a limit to how far one should go before it isn't worth worrying any more, but it's clear that we aren't there yet. The article at grc.com on DDOS attacks gives some thoughts on this...
I'm not so keen on bashing Microsoft, but it sounds like there's a lot they can do that would improve things. That being recognised, it seems to me almost criminal that they don't!
We're little folk. Keep an eye out, folks, for the places you can help; in internet security and elsewhere.
As the previous poster said, Australia is not America. We don't have broadband here (Canberra is the testbed for an optical fibre system, but almost no-one is connected yet.) We have a low population density in country areas. We have essentially one phone company - a government monopoly until a short while ago.
Many posters have raised tech-support issues. I have one suggestion there; make friends with local computer stores. Get one who'll sign people up through their shopfront. I set up my parents-in-law with a connection this way not long ago (they live on the Murray River.) People new to internet connections are often more comfortable with seeing someone face-to-face, and handing papers over.
If you have the computer store onside, some of their sales will bring you new customers, and they'll field some of your tech-support issues. Or most, depending on your users and the deal you set up with them. They'll take care of some of your administration and advertising[1]:-) And some of your customers will buy from them next time... but I imagine you'll be handing them a share of your subscription fees anyway. This works best, of course, if you already run a computer store, and are adding the ISP as a sideline; in which case the accounting is rather less of an issue.
Incidentally, you might be able to get the local council to help, if you pitch things right. Connecting remote communities is fashionable; internet terminals in libraries also; and the latter have a decent chance of attracting volunteer tech support. Part-time work for interested high-schoolers also goes down well.
Of course, if the problems associated with the first ISP really belong to the local phone-lines, you're not going to be able to do much better.
Rachel Butt
Australian National University
[1] I have it from an expert in marketing that the best advertising is to make the local news. Costs little more than your time, and reaches more than normal ads do. And getting an article into the newspaper is relatively easy if you put out a press-release that needs only a headline to become a newspaper article.
Yes, that's exactly right.
If you measure the -| state on one photon, and measure the \/ state on the other photon, the other photon will turn up in \ or / with equal probability, whatever the first result was.
Rachel
The article pointed to by the/. item contains a number of misunderstandings, the most misleading of which is the reference to FTL communication:
In this way, it is possible to communicate at this instant without transmitting a thing.
Believe me, she's wrong on this one. It's an easy mistake to make, but a mistake nonetheless. It's most easily explained if one says 'hidden variables' (the answers were there all along, and deciding what to measure doesn't change anything). Unfortunately this is statistically distinguishable from a genuinely non-local interpretation, and experiments clearly favour the nonlocal theories. Lots of very careful experiments show that we're stuck with a nonlocal theory in which it is still impossible to send information faster than the speed of light.
Several Slashdotters have pounced on her statement. Sorry, guys. She got it wrong.
I spent two years listening to seminars on Quantum Crypto, while studying third and fourth year Quantum Mechanics, and I did a project during my honours year on the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox (and Bell's Inequality), which cover precisely this.
I bet Zeilinger (the researcher) shuddered when he read the FEED article. My impression is that the article author failed to understand Quantum Cryptography, never mind understanding what the new theoretical advancement was. I know I couldn't tell from the article what the advance was; probably the device generating entangled photons, but that was only identified by a TLA.
Quantum Cryptography is all about generating a One-Time-Pad key. It uses two channels; the Quantum one, where the eavesdropper can be detected, and the public one, where we don't care about eavesdroppers. (say an ssh connection? There's no sense advertising that you have something to hide. It can be broken, but nothing useful can be stolen.)
Quantum cryptography uses four polarisation states of a photon. Electrons have spin. Photons have polarisation. (This can be circular polarisation, leading to some confusion. Other confusion can arise from the fact that Quantum discussions might use either. Quantum Crypto is invariably photons, however; electrons, being charged, interact with everything and so can't travel through matter (excepting superconductors) without losing their coherence.)
Four polarisation states; usually described as - | \ / (horizontal, vertical, left, right), although left and right circular could be used. The crucial thing is that we have two orthogonal pairs, and if we make a measurement in one pair, we have no idea what the result of a measurement in the other pair is. Whatever it might have been - it isn't anymore. (The photon entanglement is gone for all subsequent measurements.)
The two people on each end of the link choose randomly which signal to measure from their entangled photons, and compare notes over the insecure link. Alice might measure her photon in \/, and Bob might measure his photon in -|, and when (over the insecure channel) they compare measurement types, they'll ditch that information. When they use the same measurement type, they'll keep that information.
They'll compare some of those measurements over the insecure channel to see if anyone's eavesdropping. They'll get a higher error rate if anyone is, and then they'll panic. Otherwise, they'll exploit some fancy error correction algorithms to eliminate the errors that do get through, without compromising their data. (This involves discarding at least half of it. They can agree on which half over the insecure channel without compromising things.)
In the end, they have a one-time-pad. They use it once to transmit a secure message over an insecure channel. Then they start over.
Sociological implications? I don't know. Except that the method is easy to misunderstand. And this doesn't solve every privacy problem there is; its strength is solely in the detection of eavesdroppers and the generation of One-Time-Pad keys.
Rachel
Nuclear Physics PhD Student
Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
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· Score: 2
One thing I really like about the International Standards; they're prepared to change.
The second *is* now defined in terms of oscillations of a particular isotope of a particular type of atom, instead of being a tiny fraction of the day-length, because we can measure those oscillations more accurately than we can measure the length of a day.
It's nice that this can be measured in any laboratory around the world. If/when gravitational effects become detectable, they are calculable; the correction need not be as precise as the original measurement, because it is such a small effect. And General Relativity *is* verified at that kind of level.
The metre was once defined in terms of a standard bar, but is now defined in terms of the distance light travels in a second, because that's what we can measure most accurately.
The Kilogram - is a lump of metal, because we can preserve and compare the mass of that lump of metal to greater accuracy than we can measure the mass of anything else. When that changes, the standard will be changed. Until then, nothing can be measured more precisely than that, so it doesn't matter.
Incidentally, it has been predicted that the 'lump of metal' will be replaced with a standard based on the mass of a certain number of atoms - in other words, a standard based on Avogadro's Number.
Yes, in some sense the units we use are arbitary. There exist, however, units which are *not* arbitary; units which are defined simply, solely, and entirely on the physics of the universe itself. Using these units, no physical equation requires any constants (apart from simple numbers like 2 and pi).
The problem with these units is that they are so incredibly, unworkably small! People don't want to measure distances in terms of quantities many times smaller than the diameter of an electron. Units like yards and inches came from the length of certain parts of the human body (a fine standard indeed!). The units we use are those convenient to the problem.
Speaking as a woman who is firmly attached to a geek, I would like to say two things: firstly, that I agree with a lot of the points made in ESR's articles, and secondly, that he still misses some of the advantages geeks have from a woman's point of view.
I'll address the second issue first. Most geeks I know are well described by the word 'gentle'. I don't know if they'd be best pleased by that description, but I like it. They'd never knowingly hurt anyone. They're often shy around girls they don't know - which means, once a girl decides she's happy with one, she need not fear his eyes turning elsewhere. The tendency to faithfulness and the rarity of arsehole-hood combine well with the geekly earning potential.
Of course, this perception of mine might be entirely biased by the fact that the geeks I know are my friends; and I wouldn't stay friends with people who I thought were likely to be arseholes. Still, I think it does generalise. Many geeks are fundamentally nice people; perhaps a little vague, often not terribly worldly, but rarely actively nasty.
The most common geekly faults are, as ESR mentioned, an obliviousness to personal appearance, and a tendency to breathe computers. The first is relatively easily addressed; keep clean and wear clothes without holes. The second is a bit harder; you have to go out and acquire another interest, something else to talk about.
The 'additional conversation topic' is important. I spent years listening to geekly conversations. I got throughly bored; never learned enough to participate, often felt left-out. Most intelligent women like to be involved in conversations, oddly enough!
The Society for Creative Anachronism might be a good place to start, being (in my experience) inclined to welcome newcomers, encompassing a wide range of activities, most of which are accessible to non-experts, and containing a somewhat higher proportion of young women than of young men.
Is it worth it? Well - if you, like the person to whom I reply, think that spending time away from the computer isn't worth the rewards, then obviously it isn't. What would the 'right person' do for you? Sex in the evenings and fresh coffee (and other meals) during the day? Hmm, I wouldn't want to be that other person; if you'd rather spend your time with your computer than with your lover, you stay right there in front of your computer, and everyone will be happier that way!
My love gets it. I'm a good cook and a good masseur. I can contribute something towards discussions of algorithms, and code in two languages myself. He's a reasonable cook and a good masseur, and will try new things and encourage me to try new things. We do spend quite a bit of time in front of computers (often playing (different) games side by side), but we spend just as much time doing other things together. It doesn't seem to occur to my partner to regret that the time is not spent in front of the computer; we're (usually) having fun.
Which is probably something most geeks should be trying to do: have fun while not using computers. Especially while on a date; enjoy the activity for itself, and the company, and anything else that may come of it is a bonus.
Ah, DSL. I believe there are three major phone companies prepared to provide fast internet connections at high prices, if you're sufficiently close to a suitable telephone exchange. Not so great, huh? As with PayTV, there's a certain amount of infrastructure duplication going on, which makes it all rather unprofitable.
Canberra is the testbed for a different approach. (Canberra is the capital city of Australia, for those foreigners who have only heard of Sydney. It houses only 300,000 people.) In Canberra, there is a company called TransACT which is rolling out optical fibre. They will then sell the fat data pipe to any supplier and any user who wants to be connected; eliminating the infrastructure duplication.
It's early days yet, (the first network activation is rumoured to be happening today) but they've signed on several TV providers and five ISPs, and the lists are expected to grow rapidly as they connect more of Canberra. Local government departments are expected to take the service up immediately. (The company was spun-off from the local Electricity and Water supplier!) There are many eager residential customers.
>The question of what could happen to simply wipe out all technology without wiping everything else brought me to an interesting thought: By slightly altering the physical constants of the universe, you could render most existing technology (all fields) invalid without causing any real significant change to biological systems. The results of specific engineering to that effect could concievably wipe out all electronics and force us to start over. Under those conditions, the books about silicon computers would be useless, and a great deal of our semiconductor physics would have to be revised. The net result would almost a complete start over, since under the new physics, the new semiconductor of choice would need new designs to produce todays reliable results. furthermore, most textbooks regaurding high level languages would be lost before the world would return to a state where they would have some use. Without the use of a simple milling machine its very hard to build any kind of precise machinery, especially if you want the kind of optics it takes to build semiconductors. Forget most of the books on computer hardware you know, you'd have to re-invent the assembly line without so much as a single electric or gasoline motor to aid you, since you'd have to re-invent those too. Net result is it would take you so long to rebuild the base technologies, that computer technologies would be lost before the world was ready for them again.
erm...
The notion of changing the rules by tweaking the physical constants of the universe is not entirely unheard-of. George Gamow wrote a charming book (called, I think, Mr Tompkins) on worlds in which important physical constants were very different. They're wonderful thoughts - and they ignore an important point.
Just how sensitive are your own biological systems to these important physical constants?
Combustion's a pretty good bet. Change the constants somewhat and it should still work the same way. If you want to avoid chemical systems exchanging atoms in order to gain energy, you are *really* going to have to change the *rules*... a living cell is vastly more complex than a flame, and correspondingly more sensitive both to its surroundings and the physical rules and constants that govern it.
Oh, and some of those rules are the same. Getting energy from food, for example. It's a slower, more controlled reaction than a flame - easier to stop. I won't even *think* about what would happen to enzymes, those delicate and carefully structured facilitators of chemical reactions, if (say) the electric field constant (epsilon-nought) changed by a tiny fraction. All the chemical bonds would change in length - by differing amounts!
In short, I disagree with your starting premise; that changes to physical constants could render machinery unusable without making biology suffer.
But the properties that make silicon precious to the computer industry are also fairly sensitive. How much do we need to change the rules to make some other elements the semi-conductors? Can *this* be done without making the present form of life impossible? All we need to do is shift an atomic orbital or two...
Probably too much, in my opinion. Frankly, the biological sciences exploit the most amazing physical happenstances; if you straightened the water molecule, we would all fall apart. (No, seriously; the polar nature of water is crucial to the formation of the bilayers that are cell walls.) Come to that, we owe our carbon to a nuclear happenstance; Carbon would never form from three helium nuclei in the furnace of an old star if there weren't an energy level in just the right place.
I'm being all pedantic and unreasonable about the hypothesis, aren't I?:-)
--
Rachel Butt
Nuclear Physics PhD student, Australian National University.
Slashdot Mirror
Mathematicians have exercised their minds on this one. The advantages of cash include anonymity, untraceability, transferability. These *can* be reproduced using electronic data. I've attended a course where a mathematician explained a scheme which filled two of these requirements - including the third made the problem rather harder, but it had still been solved. Your $X-dollar data packet would fit on a floppy at *this* level of security ...
The scheme involved things like a one-way hash like MD5sum, and all merchants using binary codes, and the data packet you give the merchant is dependent on their code - but if you use the same note with another merchant, the difference in their codes means that you've given out both of the random numbers that add up to your identity code, and you'd get caught.
You can have everything in an electronic form - despite the infinite reproducibility of bits! Everything can be designed to be perfectly anonymous, untraceable, etc etc, right up until someone abuses the system, and then they get blown out of the water immediately, without exposing innocents. Isn't maths wonderful?
Rachel
Well - if you and your funky unix box can log attacks from Nimda-infected servers, and then exploit Nimda's features to run commands on the infected servers that have attacked you, wouldn't you be able to run a set of commands that a) downloaded and ran a disinfection utility (I assume they're available for free download from places that can cope) and b) raised security settings or even told the machine to go update from MS website?
Requires a darn sight more knowhow than *I* have, and perhaps the 'update' bit requires inconvenient things like CD keys, but surely the 'run disinfection program' part is feasible.
DragonSister
As another poster pointed out - if this kind of black hole creation were going to cause any problems, it already would have. If these high-energy particles they will be making will produce black holes, then there are about 100 black holes produced per year as a result of cosmic radiation - and they haven't been detected yet, so obviously they have a pretty small effect, and there's nothing to worry about.
People often worry excessively about Nuclear phenomena. This is, as far as I can tell, because very few people actually know what natural levels are.
There is a natural background level of radiation which varies by 10% from place to place. Nuclear facilities are typically permitted to increase the level by 1%. By contrast, international flights usually involve triple the normal background level of radiation - it's cosmic radiation that doesn't reach the ground.
In one mole of carbon - 12g, about what you might find in a fruit - you get about 100 decays a second; this is from the tiny fraction of naturally produced 14C. How radioactive do you think you are? (grin)
Rachel Butt
Nuclear Physics PhD student.
Seems to me the American system could do with being easier to vote in. I'm used to it being easy to vote; elections on saturdays, every primary school a polling place, pre-polling centres in all city centres for if you're going to be busy on the day, and postal voting for when even pre-polling isn't practical. When it's compulsory to vote, the constitution makes sure it is easy to vote; no four hour queues for me!
Rachel
Once those kids grow up, they will learn - most of them. It's part of growing up, really - learning to keep minor set-backs in proportion, rather than making life hell for everyone else; learning to consider others. Learning what the effects of their actions actually are. There are unpleasant and irresponsible adults out there, of course - but a lower proportion of them than of kids. Not knowing the consequences of your own actions is almost part of the definition of childhood, isn't it?
The problem is - when today's kids have grown up and absorbed adult attitudes, there will be a fresh supply of youngsters causing trouble. The individuals involved will change; the tendency to casual maliciousness will not. Even the nicest of people occasionally feels angry or hurt and wants to lash out - whether or not they actually do it.
Well, wherever casual maliciousness is an option, some hurt, angry, or immature adult or some ignorant child is going to cause trouble - sometime, somewhere. The easier it is to be nasty ... no, it's not nice, but as far as I can tell it's very human. Niceness is learned.
So what do we do? I'm not one for regulations, or blame; I can't see that it would help here. I think the best thing we can do is make it harder to inflict damage, easier to defend against it; naturally there's a limit to how far one should go before it isn't worth worrying any more, but it's clear that we aren't there yet. The article at grc.com on DDOS attacks gives some thoughts on this ...
I'm not so keen on bashing Microsoft, but it sounds like there's a lot they can do that would improve things. That being recognised, it seems to me almost criminal that they don't!
We're little folk. Keep an eye out, folks, for the places you can help; in internet security and elsewhere.
Rachel
Many posters have raised tech-support issues. I have one suggestion there; make friends with local computer stores. Get one who'll sign people up through their shopfront. I set up my parents-in-law with a connection this way not long ago (they live on the Murray River.) People new to internet connections are often more comfortable with seeing someone face-to-face, and handing papers over.
If you have the computer store onside, some of their sales will bring you new customers, and they'll field some of your tech-support issues. Or most, depending on your users and the deal you set up with them. They'll take care of some of your administration and advertising[1] :-) And some of your customers will buy from them next time ... but I imagine you'll be handing them a share of your subscription fees anyway. This works best, of course, if you already run a computer store, and are adding the ISP as a sideline; in which case the accounting is rather less of an issue.
Incidentally, you might be able to get the local council to help, if you pitch things right. Connecting remote communities is fashionable; internet terminals in libraries also; and the latter have a decent chance of attracting volunteer tech support. Part-time work for interested high-schoolers also goes down well.
Of course, if the problems associated with the first ISP really belong to the local phone-lines, you're not going to be able to do much better.
Rachel Butt
Australian National University
[1] I have it from an expert in marketing that the best advertising is to make the local news. Costs little more than your time, and reaches more than normal ads do. And getting an article into the newspaper is relatively easy if you put out a press-release that needs only a headline to become a newspaper article.
Yes, that's exactly right. If you measure the -| state on one photon, and measure the \/ state on the other photon, the other photon will turn up in \ or / with equal probability, whatever the first result was. Rachel
Believe me, she's wrong on this one. It's an easy mistake to make, but a mistake nonetheless. It's most easily explained if one says 'hidden variables' (the answers were there all along, and deciding what to measure doesn't change anything). Unfortunately this is statistically distinguishable from a genuinely non-local interpretation, and experiments clearly favour the nonlocal theories. Lots of very careful experiments show that we're stuck with a nonlocal theory in which it is still impossible to send information faster than the speed of light.
Several Slashdotters have pounced on her statement. Sorry, guys. She got it wrong. I spent two years listening to seminars on Quantum Crypto, while studying third and fourth year Quantum Mechanics, and I did a project during my honours year on the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox (and Bell's Inequality), which cover precisely this.
I bet Zeilinger (the researcher) shuddered when he read the FEED article. My impression is that the article author failed to understand Quantum Cryptography, never mind understanding what the new theoretical advancement was. I know I couldn't tell from the article what the advance was; probably the device generating entangled photons, but that was only identified by a TLA.
Quantum Cryptography is all about generating a One-Time-Pad key. It uses two channels; the Quantum one, where the eavesdropper can be detected, and the public one, where we don't care about eavesdroppers. (say an ssh connection? There's no sense advertising that you have something to hide. It can be broken, but nothing useful can be stolen.)
Quantum cryptography uses four polarisation states of a photon. Electrons have spin. Photons have polarisation. (This can be circular polarisation, leading to some confusion. Other confusion can arise from the fact that Quantum discussions might use either. Quantum Crypto is invariably photons, however; electrons, being charged, interact with everything and so can't travel through matter (excepting superconductors) without losing their coherence.)
Four polarisation states; usually described as - | \ / (horizontal, vertical, left, right), although left and right circular could be used. The crucial thing is that we have two orthogonal pairs, and if we make a measurement in one pair, we have no idea what the result of a measurement in the other pair is. Whatever it might have been - it isn't anymore. (The photon entanglement is gone for all subsequent measurements.)
The two people on each end of the link choose randomly which signal to measure from their entangled photons, and compare notes over the insecure link. Alice might measure her photon in \/, and Bob might measure his photon in -|, and when (over the insecure channel) they compare measurement types, they'll ditch that information. When they use the same measurement type, they'll keep that information.
They'll compare some of those measurements over the insecure channel to see if anyone's eavesdropping. They'll get a higher error rate if anyone is, and then they'll panic. Otherwise, they'll exploit some fancy error correction algorithms to eliminate the errors that do get through, without compromising their data. (This involves discarding at least half of it. They can agree on which half over the insecure channel without compromising things.)
In the end, they have a one-time-pad. They use it once to transmit a secure message over an insecure channel. Then they start over.
Sociological implications? I don't know. Except that the method is easy to misunderstand. And this doesn't solve every privacy problem there is; its strength is solely in the detection of eavesdroppers and the generation of One-Time-Pad keys.
Rachel
Nuclear Physics PhD Student
One thing I really like about the International Standards; they're prepared to change.
The second *is* now defined in terms of oscillations of a particular isotope of a particular type of atom, instead of being a tiny fraction of the day-length, because we can measure those oscillations more accurately than we can measure the length of a day.
It's nice that this can be measured in any laboratory around the world. If/when gravitational effects become detectable, they are calculable; the correction need not be as precise as the original measurement, because it is such a small effect. And General Relativity *is* verified at that kind of level.
The metre was once defined in terms of a standard bar, but is now defined in terms of the distance light travels in a second, because that's what we can measure most accurately.
The Kilogram - is a lump of metal, because we can preserve and compare the mass of that lump of metal to greater accuracy than we can measure the mass of anything else. When that changes, the standard will be changed. Until then, nothing can be measured more precisely than that, so it doesn't matter.
Incidentally, it has been predicted that the 'lump of metal' will be replaced with a standard based on the mass of a certain number of atoms - in other words, a standard based on Avogadro's Number.
Yes, in some sense the units we use are arbitary. There exist, however, units which are *not* arbitary; units which are defined simply, solely, and entirely on the physics of the universe itself. Using these units, no physical equation requires any constants (apart from simple numbers like 2 and pi).
The problem with these units is that they are so incredibly, unworkably small! People don't want to measure distances in terms of quantities many times smaller than the diameter of an electron. Units like yards and inches came from the length of certain parts of the human body (a fine standard indeed!). The units we use are those convenient to the problem.
Rachel
Nuclear Physics PhD Student
I'll address the second issue first. Most geeks I know are well described by the word 'gentle'. I don't know if they'd be best pleased by that description, but I like it. They'd never knowingly hurt anyone. They're often shy around girls they don't know - which means, once a girl decides she's happy with one, she need not fear his eyes turning elsewhere. The tendency to faithfulness and the rarity of arsehole-hood combine well with the geekly earning potential.
Of course, this perception of mine might be entirely biased by the fact that the geeks I know are my friends; and I wouldn't stay friends with people who I thought were likely to be arseholes. Still, I think it does generalise. Many geeks are fundamentally nice people; perhaps a little vague, often not terribly worldly, but rarely actively nasty.
The most common geekly faults are, as ESR mentioned, an obliviousness to personal appearance, and a tendency to breathe computers. The first is relatively easily addressed; keep clean and wear clothes without holes. The second is a bit harder; you have to go out and acquire another interest, something else to talk about.
The 'additional conversation topic' is important. I spent years listening to geekly conversations. I got throughly bored; never learned enough to participate, often felt left-out. Most intelligent women like to be involved in conversations, oddly enough!
The Society for Creative Anachronism might be a good place to start, being (in my experience) inclined to welcome newcomers, encompassing a wide range of activities, most of which are accessible to non-experts, and containing a somewhat higher proportion of young women than of young men.
Is it worth it? Well - if you, like the person to whom I reply, think that spending time away from the computer isn't worth the rewards, then obviously it isn't. What would the 'right person' do for you? Sex in the evenings and fresh coffee (and other meals) during the day? Hmm, I wouldn't want to be that other person; if you'd rather spend your time with your computer than with your lover, you stay right there in front of your computer, and everyone will be happier that way!
My love gets it. I'm a good cook and a good masseur. I can contribute something towards discussions of algorithms, and code in two languages myself. He's a reasonable cook and a good masseur, and will try new things and encourage me to try new things. We do spend quite a bit of time in front of computers (often playing (different) games side by side), but we spend just as much time doing other things together. It doesn't seem to occur to my partner to regret that the time is not spent in front of the computer; we're (usually) having fun.
Which is probably something most geeks should be trying to do: have fun while not using computers. Especially while on a date; enjoy the activity for itself, and the company, and anything else that may come of it is a bonus.
Rachel
Canberra is the testbed for a different approach. (Canberra is the capital city of Australia, for those foreigners who have only heard of Sydney. It houses only 300,000 people.) In Canberra, there is a company called TransACT which is rolling out optical fibre. They will then sell the fat data pipe to any supplier and any user who wants to be connected; eliminating the infrastructure duplication.
It's early days yet, (the first network activation is rumoured to be happening today) but they've signed on several TV providers and five ISPs, and the lists are expected to grow rapidly as they connect more of Canberra. Local government departments are expected to take the service up immediately. (The company was spun-off from the local Electricity and Water supplier!) There are many eager residential customers.
Rachel
>The question of what could happen to simply wipe out all technology without wiping everything else brought me to an interesting thought: By slightly altering the physical constants of the universe, you could render most existing technology (all fields) invalid without causing any real significant change to biological systems. The results of specific engineering to that effect could concievably wipe out all electronics and force us to start over. Under those conditions, the books about silicon computers would be useless, and a great deal of our semiconductor physics would have to be revised. The net result would almost a complete start over, since under the new physics, the new semiconductor of choice would need new designs to produce todays reliable results. furthermore, most textbooks regaurding high level languages would be lost before the world would return to a state where they would have some use. Without the use of a simple milling machine its very hard to build any kind of precise machinery, especially if you want the kind of optics it takes to build semiconductors. Forget most of the books on computer hardware you know, you'd have to re-invent the assembly line without so much as a single electric or gasoline motor to aid you, since you'd have to re-invent those too. Net result is it would take you so long to rebuild the base technologies, that computer technologies would be lost before the world was ready for them again.
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The notion of changing the rules by tweaking the physical constants of the universe is not entirely unheard-of. George Gamow wrote a charming book (called, I think, Mr Tompkins) on worlds in which important physical constants were very different. They're wonderful thoughts - and they ignore an important point.
Just how sensitive are your own biological systems to these important physical constants?
Combustion's a pretty good bet. Change the constants somewhat and it should still work the same way. If you want to avoid chemical systems exchanging atoms in order to gain energy, you are *really* going to have to change the *rules*... a living cell is vastly more complex than a flame, and correspondingly more sensitive both to its surroundings and the physical rules and constants that govern it.
Oh, and some of those rules are the same. Getting energy from food, for example. It's a slower, more controlled reaction than a flame - easier to stop. I won't even *think* about what would happen to enzymes, those delicate and carefully structured facilitators of chemical reactions, if (say) the electric field constant (epsilon-nought) changed by a tiny fraction. All the chemical bonds would change in length - by differing amounts!
In short, I disagree with your starting premise; that changes to physical constants could render machinery unusable without making biology suffer.
But the properties that make silicon precious to the computer industry are also fairly sensitive. How much do we need to change the rules to make some other elements the semi-conductors? Can *this* be done without making the present form of life impossible? All we need to do is shift an atomic orbital or two
Probably too much, in my opinion. Frankly, the biological sciences exploit the most amazing physical happenstances; if you straightened the water molecule, we would all fall apart. (No, seriously; the polar nature of water is crucial to the formation of the bilayers that are cell walls.) Come to that, we owe our carbon to a nuclear happenstance; Carbon would never form from three helium nuclei in the furnace of an old star if there weren't an energy level in just the right place.
I'm being all pedantic and unreasonable about the hypothesis, aren't I?
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Rachel Butt
Nuclear Physics PhD student, Australian National University.