WTF? I can understand unisex "outer" uniforms, but the idea of unisex underwear is plain stupid. Is the British Army trying to pretend that men and women are exactly the same, even "down there"?
From the picture, the underwear look like standard men's boxers, except without the front flap. Why leave out the front flap in men's underwear? Probably because they had to make a concession to these being "unisex", and a flap is clearly a male-only feature. Also, what about guys who prefer briefs?
The end result is that men will have a harder time freeing willie to irrigate the desert, and women will be forced to wear what are essentially men's underwear (and, I would imagine, are less comfortable for women--correct me if I'm wrong).
I agree; Apology offered. Accepted, don't worry about it.
I see 'don't be evil' as more of guideline for acceptable advertising mechanism and protection of private data than as one that mandates a more-than-passive response to foreign regimes with which they do business.
This seems like sweating the small stuff while ignoring the big issues. There are things much worse than obnoxious pop-up ads, and Google's got to stand up to those as well, if it's going to live up to its promise. They could have just said, "we'll treat our customers with respect" if that's all they meant, but they made a bigger promise. BTW, Google does things like turning down ads for guns because they view them as unethical. If guns are unethical, aren't also the oppressive regimes that use them against their own citizens?
This is a very surprising argument, one which I do not see. China is large expanding market, and Google is a large expanding company. What makes you think Google wants to be in China for any reason other than that it is the next big market? I really don't see the "people would be harmed without us" attitude..
What I was getting at is what's going on inside Brin and Page's heads. I think they *know* in their hearts that cooperating with China is wrong, but they've rationalized it--I'm trying to explain how. Some people on Slashdot have said things that echoed portions of this rationalization, but there's no one good post I can point you to. It's more of a vibe.
I think the recent (last week) US offering of Baidu provides the strongest evidence to the contrary; there are indeed organic rivals to Google in China.
There may be rivals, but I doubt they're as good as Google. That's Google's edge. Also, I think it's much less likely that a Chinese company will be able to make the kind of stand a high profile company like Google could. China's military has their fingers in a lot of pies; they run companies that have no reasonable connection to military activities, and have ties to many more. It would also take a lot more balls to stand up to the Chinese government if it meant your family being thrown in jail than if it just meant taking a hit on NASDAQ. There are still people with those kind of guts, but a lot fewer of them.
Speaking for the US economy, growing a backbone is going to be difficult when you have a $161 BILLION trade deficit.
This is getting off-topic, but I think I now understand the trade deficit. The problem isn't that China makes everything and we make nothing, but rather that they use but don't pay for what we make, since we're now primarily in the intellectual property business. If there were a 100 million copies of Windows in China, and Microsoft got $100 in license fees for each, that would take care of a big chunk of the trade deficit. There are lots of excuses to be made for what China is doing with intellectual property, but I think it's the underlying cause of the trade deficit.
My feeling is that it is only a matter of time, as services such as Google become available in China, that the Great Firewall becomes unmaintainable.
Technology cuts both ways. Imagine what something like the Trusted Computing initiative could do for China's repressive government.
Really, your argument is so stupid. Google is a business. Even if they want to change Chinese politics (they don't have to), there is *no way* to do it that doesn't require them to cooperate -- at first
First off, neither your post nor mine was a troll, nor did either deserve a downmod. We just disagree. I wish that was tolerated more by slashdot moderators. That said, you were being a jerk about it.
The reason I expect Google to try to change Chinese politics is (a) because China's government is evil. Really, really evil. Google has an explicit "don't be evil" policy, and, even if they didn't, there is precedent for punishing companies that cooperate with evil regimes.
Part of the problem is Google's arrogance. They think that they're so great that the harm done to the Chinese people by not having access to Google would exceed any potential political benefit. The other argument being made here is the opposite--Google is nothing special and could just as well be replaced by a Chinese government-run search engine. Both of these arguments are wrong. As the best search engine around, Google has some leverage, but it's not like Chinese peasants will die if they can't check their Gmail accounts. If building a Google-quality search engine was easy, then their US competitors would have done so.
US corporations can make a difference in China's policy, by making it clear that they won't cooperate with human rights abuses. It won't always work, but it will help.
The ethical justification for allowing a free trade relationship with a repressive regime is to promote positive change. That will only happen if we grow a backbone.
Just a thought--China actively violates a vast array of US internet and intellectual-property related laws (think spam, widespread commercial piracy, hacking attacks, etc.). Why don't we try to actively subvert their "Great Firewall"? Imagine what the geniuses at Google could do if they put their minds and hearts into it...
If Google is willing to cooperate with China on their "Great Firewall"--an attempt to suppress democracy-related information and control the Chinese people--they can hardly object to this. Google has already demonstrated its willingness to cooperate with totalitarian governments in suppressing peaceful, pro-democracy information. Hard to see how they can draw a line now. If anything, Google's "Don't be evil" motto requires them to actively try to subvert Chinese censorship.
Australia is making a reasonable request that Google voluntarily censor a very small number of images of a nuclear reactor--images that could clearly be used for violent and dangerous terrorist activity. Aside from satisfying idle curiosity, there aren't many important, legitimate uses for those images.
Since Google has long since slid down the slippery slope, why stop now?
You're problems with X have nothing to do with FreeBSD, or even the NVidia driver, as both are identical under Linux. They same things. repeat, they are the same things. You didn't have to get the special driver because Centros included the special driver on the CD.
I'm well aware that both use the same driver, aside from perhaps a little wrapper code.
Some of the problems I encountered have little to do with the FreeBSD and Linux *kernels*, but everything to do with the distributions (i.e. the operating system as a whole). That's what I'm comparing. "Mere configuration" is one of the most important parts of a *nix OS on the desktop--when they all run the same GUIs (KDE, GNOME, etc.), what else do you have to distguish between them?
The difference is merely configuration, not desktop readiness. I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop, so the claim that it isn't ready is patently false. What isn't ready is that FreeBSD doesn't have out of the box autoconfiguration.
I freely admit that, with unlimited time to tinker, or with just the right hardware & network environment, FreeBSD could make an excellent desktop OS. It's also true that, with enough time, you could hack a Pentium into a Mac Cube or make a computer case out of fans. So what? That's not realistic--almost nobody has the time for that. Considering that the user experience on FreeBSD running KDE is so similar to the user experience on Linux running KDE that most of our users won't even notice, I don't see a good reason to waste the time necessary to configure FreeBSD. This is what I mean by "not ready for the desktop". I mean not ready for general desktop use by anyone other than a hardcode BSD hacker. There will always be a few 31337 hax0rs who run [random OS] on [random hardware], and proclaim it to be good, but that's not for most people.
You also had some problems with FreeBSD because you were using the old 4.x branch.
Re-read my post we switched to FreeBSD 5.2.1 early on. Problems still persisted.
Other posters have claimed that my problems must be due to the NFS spec, or KDE, or perhaps because the head Unix guy wasn't 1337 enough. All this misses the point. Instead of assigning blame, the Linux people appear to have slogged ahead and devised work-arounds for the NFS issues, the KDE weirdness, etc. It may not always be pretty, but it works. They also have the "market share" to get commercial developers to release apps for Linux. Yes, you can in principle run, say, Mathematica 5 under FreeBSD's compatibility layer, but there's quite a bit more work involved (we tried), and Wolfram won't help you with it. This is nobody's fault, but it's still a consideration in picking a desktop OS.
Disclaimer I'm not a linux zealot. I don't use Linux at home (I use OS X), and have no ideological reason to prefer Linux. I'm also at UC Berkeley, so, for "patriotic" reasons, I have a slight bias in favor of BSD.
That said, I have to admit Linux is more mature than FreeBSD for desktop use. Before you flame, hear me out.
Background I'm a graduate student, and, with the help of another grad student and the College's head unix support guy, I'm stuck administering a small network of about 15 computers, all of which are vanilla Dell Precision 360s. Some run Windows, some run *nix. Our server is an Xserve G5, and it serves user home directories via NFS and does authentication & directory services via LDAP.
The FreeBSD story We started with FreeBSD 4.9. Out of the box, we were able to get NFS mounting working, but there were a lot of problems. Sound didn't work. To get X working, we had to grab a special Nvidia driver. Even then, we only had VGA support, and not DVI. After much tinkering and kernel recompiling, I got DVI working, sort of (there were a few weird random "twinkly" pixels on each screen that showed up when in BSD DVI mode, but not BSD VGA or Windows DVI). Sound never worked. Then we tried to get LDAP working. No go, pam_ldap and nss_switch require FreeBSD 5.x.
So we upgrade to FreeBSD 5.2.1 (read, reinstall from scratch). That breaks DVI video, and the same kernel options as before don't work. No amount of tinkering can get sound working. Thus, we give up on DVI and sound. LDAP *does* work, after some effort, and so we have a mostly-usable system. There are still problems: KOffice apps crash on saving, and that the default PDF viewer doesn't work.
In an effort to fix KOffice and the PDF issue, we update & upgrade the ports tree. After a great deal of manual intervention to deal with broken dependencies in the pkg database, non-building ports, etc., the upgrade finishes. Now X is broken. It turns out the configuration file format for XFree86 changed when X got upgraded in the ports upgrade. A similar thing happens to KDE. After resolving those problems, the PDF and KOffice issues are resolved. Still no sound or DVI video, but we can live with that.
Then we upgrade our Xserve to Mac OS X 10.4 Server. All of a sudden, logging in via KDE as a "network" user on *some* of the BSD machines doesn't work. KDE complains that it doesn't have write access to the user's NFS-mounted home directories. A quick check on the command-line or with a failsafe session shows that users do, in fact, still have write access. I spend forever on this, and get nowhere. Some users can log in, others can't, on some BSD computers and not others. There are no clear differences, no explanations, and nothing makes sense.
I call in backup. The College's head unix admin comes over and spends a day on the problem. He contacts the KDE developers. I call Apple "Premium" Support. Nobody knows what's going on. In the end, we realize that the issue is that the NFS spec is fairly loose, and it's possible to have two nominally compliant implementations that don't quite talk to each other. Our theory is there's some sort of strange conflict between Apple's OS X 10.4 NFS implementation, the FreeBSD 5.x implementation, and KDE that causes some very subtle race condition with writing some KDE configuration file. At this point, we decide to try installing Linux on one machine as a test to see if it will work any better. Total time about 100 hours.
The Linux Story We install Centros 4.0 (a RedHat Enterprise Linux-derived distribution) on a machine. Everything works out of the box, except LDAP. After an hour or two of futzing around, that works too. Everything works. Sound, DVI video, NFS, KDE, PDFs, you name it. It all works. Total time 3 - 5 hours.
Moral of the story FreeBSD just isn't ready for the desktop. I wish it weren't true, because I like lots of things about FreeBSD, but it is. FreeBSD
I know this is slashdot, and I appreciate all the Beowulf cluster jokes, especially since they're actually appropriate here, but nobody is asking any meaningful questions. By my calculations, the noise-to-signal ratio is illegal div_by_zero.
Where can I get Scout? What is the license? What platforms are supported? I'm working on an open-source scientific computing package for doing quantum simulations, and I'd like to use Scout for visualization, but this article provides no information on where to get Scout or even if the licensing would allow me to use it.
It's also not clear exactly how you'd link Scout up with an existing app. Does Scout produce machine code that you stick into your app somehow? Are there C or C++ wrappers for using Scout?
I'd like to point out that this is a survey only of scientists funded by the NIH (National Institutes of Health). It has no bearing on conduct of scientists in other life sciences or in the physical sciences. I would imagine that given the closer industry ties of human health-related research, there would be different, and perhaps greater, pressure to falsify data. There is also clearly no opportunity to violate human subject research standards when you're studying subatomic particles.
Physics Today has a good story on ethics issues in physics. It seems that data falsification is relatively rare (the few high-profile cases demonstrate that it is generally a career-ending move), but other ethical problems certainly do occur. In particular, Physics Today talks about the abuse of graduate students (a problem that's probably not limited to physics).
As a graduate student myself, I've got things pretty good, but some of my friends are definitely being mistreated. One guy is working 70-hour weeks and is still getting told by his supervisor that he's not working hard enough. I'm sure that if he protested he'd quickly find himself tossed out of the group and having to start his thesis research again from scratch.
It's a non-technological problem, so there may not be a technological solution. (Me, I'd like to see ISPs start throttling infected users, but that's a whole separate can of worms.)
You're absolutely right. Having a computer on the internet has become akin to driving, in that your actions (or inaction) can pose a threat to others, not just yourself.
Having a compromised machine is kind of like having a blown taillight. We should treat it similarly--say, a $150 fine for being 0wn3d (maybe $75 for first offenders), and a requirement that you get the problem fixed within a certain amount of time. I know what you're thinking--this isn't fair to people who get hacked because their OS vendor hasn't yet patched the relevant security hole. Tough. It isn't fair that a rock could break my taillight, and a cop could pull me over 30 seconds later and ticket me, but that's the way it is. To do it any other way (e.g. impose the burden of proving the driver had been negligent on the cop) just wouldn't work.
Plus, once people start getting all these tickets, maybe they'll look into a more secure OS.
Economically, this is a good solution, since it internalizes the externality associated with having a compromised system.
I work for a company that develops products based on RFID and the transponders don't hold that much to begin with. 255 bytes I believe. If you can encode this much info into 255 bytes, I can sure as hell, write to the transponder and change my information, through sheer brute force techniques. Plus, with 255 bytes, I can pretty much guarantee that not everyone can be uniquely identified.
255 bytes isn't enough for a picture, but it is enough for a digitally-signed unique ID number, which could be used to look up a picture from a central database. 1 billion people could have unique IDs with a string just 30 bits long. That leaves about 251 bytes for digital signatures, etc. Perhaps iris scans can produce a "fingerprint" that would fit into a couple hundred bytes.
Of course, RFID isn't a done deal--it's apparently just what Homeland Security likes for passports. Other technologies would allow for digital encoding of photos.
The big issue in U.S. science education is not evolution anyway, it's the lack of competent science teachers. K-12 teaching is simply not an attractive career to most people who have good math and science training, partly because of the low pay.
It's more than that. A friend of mine has a masters in physics, and wants very much to be a science teacher. She's been looking for almost a year, and still hasn't found work. Yet, we constantly hear about how incompetent our K-12 science teachers are, and how poorly our students are doing.
I believe that the teachers' unions play a large roll in keeping out or driving out those who could really do a good job of teaching science. I'm sure the unions aren't trying to do that, but they're having that effect with their seniority-based hiring, and opposition to teacher competency standards.
We're not going to have good schools until teaching makes the transition from what is essentially a unionized blue-collar job to more of a profession. How to get there is damned hard, though. I don't think it will happen from the top down, but rather only if (and "if" is the operative word) parents get concerned enough to actually intervene in school boards and demand real change.
Some changes that need to happen:
1) Screw the focus on small class sizes. The dynamic doesn't automatically change over from "big, impersonal class" to "small, conversational teaching" until you get down to about 15 students, which isn't going to happen. With a good teacher, it can happen with 60 students. Better to spend the money on training and hiring fewer, better teachers than a lot of incompetent ones. Also, give teachers more support staff to deal with equipment, etc., so they can focus on teaching.
2) End one-size-fits-all education. Trying to put all students through the same pace of education bores the top 25% and overwhelms the bottom 25%. This is doubly bad, because the bottom 25% are likely to drop out and become a burden on society, while the top 25% waste their potential. Offer classes at different paces for different ability levels. How do we reconcile this with (1)? In large schools with enough students to fill all the classes, it's easy. In smaller schools, have the slower students take fewer courses, and spend the extra time in group tutoring sessions. Top students can participate in advanced-credit courses, skip ahead, etc.
3) Make the school environment more like a job and less like a prison or lord of the flies. Uniforms or at least a dress code sound like a good idea, although I have no personal experience with that.
This ID card will NOT make you any safer in any way whatsoever.
Several of the September 11 hijackers had state-issued IDs which they wouldn't have been able to get under this new law (because their visas had expired).
Do you really think that the Terrorists will go to the DMV and say, "Hi, I'm Osama Bin Laden, I'd like my Driver's license today. Thank you?" Do you really think they won't be able to get fake credentials that are as good as these IDs or can be used to get a legitimate ID?
It would be pretty easy to prevent fakes with this system. Since your photo is digitally encoded on the card, it could also be digitally signed by the state. That makes it effectively impossible to forge an ID that will fool a digital scanner (provided that some human makes sure that the digitally-encoded photo matches up with your face). Combine this with much more stringent documentation requirements for getting the ID card (valid visa, etc.), and you've tightened things up considerably. Throw in the "machine-readable passport" requirement the US is pushing on other countries, and the system starts to look fairly hard to break, unless you can get a foreign government to issue you a fake passport (in which case we know who to bomb--er, blame).
And finally, do you really think that the government won't abuse this new power (i.e. knowleged of your every purchase, move, travel, etc.)?
Knowledge of your every purchase? WTF? Nobody is requiring licenses to buy groceries. This bill won't change that.
Can you imagine how much corporations would pay to know your every move, flight, purchase, hotel reservation, rental, etc. etc. etc?
They already know that for everyone who uses credit cards, which is just about everyone except privacy nuts (who are probably not a very desirable target market for anyone except tin-foil manufacturers).
Real ID is about stopping terrorism and illegal immigration. A lot of people disagree with the latter purpose, which is why RealID is tacked on to an emergency spending bill to ram it through. If you're looking for conspiracies, look at its effect on illegal immigration. Specifically, drivers licenses will only be available to those legally in the country, and they will expire at the same time as someone's visa status expires. Thus, they will probably later become required for lawful employment, with stiff fines for employers who don't check. It really doesn't have much to do with collecting personal data on people. Dick Cheney doesn't care how much porn you rent on DVD versus VHS.
And yet it is this way, and not just in humans. If an overall better alternative existed (taking into account all advantages and disadvantages), would we not have evolved differently?
Actually, in pretty much all other animals, the trachea connects in a different spot, making it difficult or impossible to choke to death (although I suppose they could slowly starve if something got wedged in there good). Humans have a unique adaption that enables speech, but also creates a risk of choking.
I think this is a bad example for either side to be using.
Again, I am merely stating that just because we haven't found an exception--or that it seems very unlikely that one exists--still doesn't forgive the idea that we know that it doesn't. Proving a negative of this scope, of course, being quite difficult.
I'd argue that it is very likely that an exception does exist, but also that we know that it won't happen in the world of "everyday" quantum mechanics. We know that more work is needed to give us a quantum theory of gravity, for instance, but we also know that it won't really show up in typical non-relativistic QM.
Physics is not "complete"--there are some very large holes at high energies, etc., but the boundaries of those holes are fairly well-characterized. To paraphrase Rumsfeld, the holes are known unknowns.
I suppose this leaves open the possibilty of breaking quantum key distribution by going to Planck energies, but this is like trying to open a safe with a nuclear weapon, only harder (we have nuclear weapons, but have no idea how we could get even remotely close to the Planck energy). Everyone will know that you did it, it couldn't be done in secret, and would probably destroy the information you're trying to get.
Long version: First, let's clarify what it means to say that "physics" guarantees that your quantum key distribution (QKD) system is unbreakable. Given a perfect implementation of the QKD protocol, or at least an implementation where the errors are within certain bounds and you haven't done anything stupid like reusing your OTP, you are guaranteed security if quantum mechanics is correct.
What do I mean by correct? I mean that quantum mechanics correctly describes the relevant systems--systems to which it is currently considered applicable.
We have many good reasons to believe quantum mechanics is correct. Its relativistic extension, QED, has given us some of the most accurately-verified theoretical predictions ever. Notable objections to the theory (such as the famous paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, or "EPR") have proven false (google the Bell inequality and the Aspect experiment).
More specifically, some of the particular variations in quantum mechanics that one would imagine could be useful for defeating a QKD system, such as nonlinearity, would give rise to highly unphysical effects (superluminal signaling), which we have not observed.
It seems that quantum mechanics is an island in theory space--that is, any perturbation from the accepted theory seems to give something obviously unphysical, or at least something that does not agree with experiment.
In other words, this is as close to proof as it gets in science. Clearly, quantum mechanics isn't the final word on, say, quantum gravity, but we're not going to be throwing out the undergrad quantum mechanics books any time soon.
Yes, it would be nice to have information-theoretic security, but that doesn't seem to be possible for a key distribution protocol. Still, security predicated on the laws of physics is a hell of a lot better than security-based-upon-the-fact-that-we-haven't-heard -of-anyone-breaking-it, which is all RSA and other popular schemes have going for them (RSA isn't even computationally secure).
Yes, I do have a degree in physics. You may wish to check said thesis in light of errors explained above.
And I'm doing a Ph.D in physics on quantum computing. Sorry to be a prick about it, but you were a bit rough on the undergrad who posted above, and what goes around comes around. As long as that guy isn't doing his research on slashdot, he'll probably be OK..
If by "no problems" you mean "severe and most likely insurmountable quantum coherence issues". Any quantum computer big enough to simulate a modern sized classical computer will contain so many qubits as to have problems with interference from the outside world. IIRC the problem of quantum coherence is roughly exponential in the number of qubits in a system
No, the problem is not exponential in nature. It has been shown that if the error rates for storage, gates, etc. can be brought below certain thresholds (typically 10^-3 to 10^-6), then arbitrarily long computations can be performed. There are many papers on the subject, but here is one.
The only way in which decoherence could pose an insurmountable problem is if there is fundamentally new physics that plays a role in the regime between "quantum" and "classical". Nobel Laureate Tony Leggett has talked (in a recent issue of Science, and at the 2005 Gordon Research Conference) about how we might find such new laws of physics if they exist, or otherwise rule out their existence.
It implies no such thing.
You are correct. In the early days of the field, I think there was a little bit of confusion about whether quantum computers could do NP-complete, but it has long since been sorted out.
I recently attended a talk by Ike Chuang about general issues in the field. Chuang feels that quantum simulation and quantum communication will be the important applications, although he emphasized communication. I think quantum simulation is way, WAY underappreciated. Not only is it going to revolutionize protein folding, drug design, and other biomed applications, I have a hunch it may prove to be a prerequisite for advanced nanotech.
The article is not particularly good. The supposed problems that optical lattices will have in addressing qubits in the interior of a 3-D lattice are "solved" by using what is essentially a 2-D lattice on a chip. The same can easily be done with optical lattices.
Of course, addressing atoms inside a lattice of moderate size can be done using a high numerical aperature lens to focus an addressing beam onto a single atom. The addressing beam produces an AC Stark Shift of the appropriate hyperfine sublevels of the atom (in the case of Cesium-133 qubits, it shifts each of the mF sublevels of the F=3 and F=4 states), with the exact shift being different for different sublevels. This allows transitions in that particular atom to be driven by a microwave pulse which is detuned from all the other atoms in the lattice. Just how well can we address one atom while not disturbing atoms in adjacent planes? I'll know in a week or two. I'm currently simulating one and two qubit gates in this exact scheme. The actual experiment is also under construction, at Penn State.
Anyone interested in a distributed computing project to develop quantum computers? I could use help from developers, and later, also regular user input.
Have you ever been to Calgary? I love dense, pedestrian-friendly cities like Vancouver or (so I've heard) New York, but it just wouldn't work in Calgary. It's too effing cold in the winter for people to want to walk much. Thus, they drive, which means they need places to park. Also, the roads must be wider to accomodate snow build-up. It sucks that a high-density solution wouldn't work there, but that's how it is.
This is the problem with one-size-fits-all solutions. Different places & different people need different solutions.
BTW, complaining about a lack of farm land in Alberta sounds pretty silly. The whole goddamn province (and the two to the east of it) are farms.
About a month ago, I got an email from "Prof. Nagib Callaos" inviting me to submit papers to WMSCI. When I first got it, I thought it was another piece of Nigerian Money Fraud spam. It has that blend of apologetic politeness and bad english that is unique to the Nigerian Fraud spams...
Dear Dr. (my name here):
We are sorry to take a bit of your valuable time, but we thought it is good to inform you that we extended up to March 29th the deadline for submitting papers to WMSCI ((http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005). The extended deadlines are as follows:
Paper Submission: March 29th (http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005/website/submi ssion. asp)
Invited Sessions Proposal: March 29th (http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005/invitedsessio n/orga nizer.asp)
Notification of Acceptance: April 19th.
Final Camera Ready Manuscript due: May 3rd.
Consequently, we are sending you again the invitation to participate in WMSCI, as follows.
On behalf of the WMSCI 2005 Organizing Committee, I would like to invite you to participate in the 9th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005), which will take place in Orlando, Florida, USA, on July 10-13, 2005.
You can get the conferences Call for papers in (http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005/website/callfor pape rs.asp).
The best 10% of the papers will be published in Volume 3 of SCI Journal (http://www.iiisci.org/Journal/SCI/Home.a sp ). 12 issues of the volumes 1 and 2 of the Journal have been sent to about 200 university and research libraries. Free subscriptions, for 2 years, are being considered for the organizations of the Journals authors.
We are emphasizing the area of Quantum Information which is related to your specific area.
Also, we would like to invite you to organize an invited session related to a topic of your research interest. If you are interested in organizing an invited session, please, fill the respective form provided in the conference web page, and we will send you a password, so you can include and modify papers in your invited session.
Organizers of the invited sessions with the best performance will be co-editors of the proceeding volume where their sessions' papers were included and of the CD electronic proceedings. They will also be candidate for invited editors, or co-editors of a possible WMSCI Journal issue related to their invited session papers.
You can find information about the suggested steps to organize an invited session in the Call for Papers and in the conference web page: http://www.iiisci.org/sci2005.
If by any reasons you are not able to access the page mentioned above, please, try the following pages: http://www.iiis.org/sci2005.
If you need a detailed Call for Papers, don't hesitate in asking us for it.
If the deadlines are tight and you need more time, let me know about a suitable time and I will inform you if it is feasible for us.
Best regards,
Professor Nagib Callaos SCI 2005 General Chair
My apologies to Professor Callaos if he actually is Nigerian.
...is what we really need. Some sort of device that scans text for common spelling errors--perhaps even grammar errors--and corrects them. A robot that could check spelling. It will never happen...
But imagine if it did... Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these--no word need ever be misspelled again!
But seriously, folks. Plastic.com has a built-in spell-checker. Why doesn't Slashdot, at least for the editors? Or, better yet, why don't we have literate editors?
So... you're comparing your n=1 for industry vs. your n=1 for academia to justify the conclusion?
The university is considered by many independent rankings to be one of the best in the country and perhaps the world. The company (which, incidentally, primarily did software, and reminded me a lot of Dilbert), on the other hand, is barely hanging on, and survived the dot com crash only by way of a fortuitious (for them--not for the investors) influx of money right before everything went south.
In other words, I took one of the best universities around, and compared it to a typical-to-poor software company. The fact that the company wins in many ways tells you something.
Disclosure: I'm a graduate student at a major research university, doing public research that happens to be funded in part by DARPA and the DoD. The research is long-term, but is in a field that will clearly have national security implications.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "research." I've never seen an educational institution that was wasteful about it's funding (Maybe Harvard).
Then you've never seen how research happens at a major university. Waste happens *differently* than at major corporations, but it happens in vast amounts, often in the form of wasted time.
At a private company I used to work at, when there was a minor problem with my working environment (too cold), it took a day or two to fix. At a top-rated university, a more serious problem (lights that turn off by themselves every ten minutes) took seven months to fix.
At the same company, security was taken very seriously. When the door to the server room was being repainted, we had a security guard stand there, literally watching paint dry. At the major university, we had five break-ins to our building last semester and yet it's still possible to break in in 15 seconds with nothing more than a newspaper. (The last of those break-ins cost the university about $10,000 in computer equipment, and it took four months to get the computers replaced and running again).
I haven't even started on the amount of time wasted on pointless administrative tasks (e.g. two weeks telling payroll how to do their jobs).
The professors and grad students are paid wages that nobody in the private sector would accept. They don't have crazy offices or private jets or 100,000 dollar golf club memberships.
Professors don't get crazy bonuses, but the top administrators get pretty hefty salaries and bonuses (like a beautiful house on campus). Compensation for administrators is approaching corporate levels.
Plus, universities find lots of ways to sphon off federal grant money. Any major purchase or salary coming from a federal grant gets a ~50% "overhead" charge tacked on--that money goes to the university.
It literally hurts me to see DARPA cut funding to universities (my group took a hit), but I can understand why it's happening.
I'd always try to get Protoss carriers as fast as possible, but usually I got wiped out first by a zealot rush. Maybe your analogy is more apt than you realize.
First off, let's be realistic: the current US Congress wouldn't let the UN run the internet. After all, our own Al Gore invented it... But seriously, there's a lot of mistrust of the UN, much of it for good reasons.
The lack of accountability and responsibility that led to the Oil-for-Food scandal is hardly encouraging. Can we really expect the UN to be more responsive to internet users' needs than ICANN, as bad as ICANN is?
There are also some really twisted jokes to be made about how effective the UN would be in fighting child porn, considering the actions of some of its employees and peacekeepers in the Congo.
In essence, we're talking about replacing a large, corrupt bureaucracy with an even larger corrupt bureaucracy. Doesn't sound good, does it? I'd much rather see ICANN's functions assumed by a diverse group of private companies, with oversight from democratically-elected governments. In particular, the Chinese government and other repressive regimes can stay the hell away from internet regulation. Even good companies can be pressured into making bad decisions when China gets involved.
I *KNOW* I've just opened the flood gates of Bush jokes, DMCA rants, and PATRIOT Act tirades, but please, before you post, think about whether you're (1) on-topic (this is about the UN replacing ICANN), and (2) saying something new that hasn't been said in the numerous slashdot stories on the DMCA, etc. I'm all for a good joke, but please let it be something more original than "Bush is really stupid, and Americans are fat and stupid for voting for him". I live in one of the bluest areas of a very blue state, and I've heard them all.
A lot of what you're saying is a result of misinformation that's out there (not your fault). I'm a grad student at a UC campus, and I'm pretty damn sure we deserved the multimillion dollar slap we got from the government.
To address things in no particular order (sorry, I'm in a hurry),
1) I believe Lockheed Martin isn't even bidding right now to manage the labs. UC is the only real contender, now that U of Texas dropped out. (Note: LANL, LBL, and LLNL are being bid separately, so perhaps they're waiting for a later bid opportunity, but that's totally speculation).
2) This isn't just about security. There were also safety issues, such as a laser eye injury of a grad student, and backup sprinkler water to a plutonium handling area not being earthquake safe. (The latter was at Livermore, I think).
3) The main incident happened because that LANL's inventory system and classified material control was so screwed up they didn't even know how many drives with classifed info were out there. Apparently, 20 inventory labels were printed, but only 18 were used, and that was the source of the confusion. The drives are used to implement a sneakernet, because they don't even have secure ethernet to the entire facility. Really pathetic...
4) UC in general is horrible at security. My building has exterior doors that can be bypassed in 10 seconds using nothing more than a newspaper. Last semester, we got broken into five times. I've been trying to get it fixed for the past year, but nothing has happened.
If I was the feds, I wouldn't trust UC with classified research. We just don't take security seriously.
Also the San Diego and San Fransico airports have approaches over water, so a wacko can sit in a boat and try this.
Good point. I often fly via SFO, so I should consider this further.
So goggles wouldn't be totally effective but is there something that could be added to the window of the cockpit to prevent these sort of attacks? Maybe some coating to deflect the laser or bounce it off like radar (all I know about lasers I learned from watching Real Genius).
No, an attacker can always just tune the laser to a frequency that isn't blocked. If you try to make goggles (or a film) that's effective against several different common laser frequencies, you'll end up with something that doesn't transmit any light at all. The only real option I can see is to eliminate windows, and have cameras on the outside of the plane, coupled to monitors. Of course, then lasers could be used to blind the cameras...
Slashdot Mirror
WTF? I can understand unisex "outer" uniforms, but the idea of unisex underwear is plain stupid. Is the British Army trying to pretend that men and women are exactly the same, even "down there"?
From the picture, the underwear look like standard men's boxers, except without the front flap. Why leave out the front flap in men's underwear? Probably because they had to make a concession to these being "unisex", and a flap is clearly a male-only feature. Also, what about guys who prefer briefs?
The end result is that men will have a harder time freeing willie to irrigate the desert, and women will be forced to wear what are essentially men's underwear (and, I would imagine, are less comfortable for women--correct me if I'm wrong).
I agree; Apology offered.
Accepted, don't worry about it.
I see 'don't be evil' as more of guideline for acceptable advertising mechanism and protection of private data than as one that mandates a more-than-passive response to foreign regimes with which they do business.
This seems like sweating the small stuff while ignoring the big issues. There are things much worse than obnoxious pop-up ads, and Google's got to stand up to those as well, if it's going to live up to its promise. They could have just said, "we'll treat our customers with respect" if that's all they meant, but they made a bigger promise. BTW, Google does things like turning down ads for guns because they view them as unethical. If guns are unethical, aren't also the oppressive regimes that use them against their own citizens?
This is a very surprising argument, one which I do not see. China is large expanding market, and Google is a large expanding company. What makes you think Google wants to be in China for any reason other than that it is the next big market? I really don't see the "people would be harmed without us" attitude..
What I was getting at is what's going on inside Brin and Page's heads. I think they *know* in their hearts that cooperating with China is wrong, but they've rationalized it--I'm trying to explain how. Some people on Slashdot have said things that echoed portions of this rationalization, but there's no one good post I can point you to. It's more of a vibe.
I think the recent (last week) US offering of Baidu provides the strongest evidence to the contrary; there are indeed organic rivals to Google in China.
There may be rivals, but I doubt they're as good as Google. That's Google's edge. Also, I think it's much less likely that a Chinese company will be able to make the kind of stand a high profile company like Google could. China's military has their fingers in a lot of pies; they run companies that have no reasonable connection to military activities, and have ties to many more. It would also take a lot more balls to stand up to the Chinese government if it meant your family being thrown in jail than if it just meant taking a hit on NASDAQ. There are still people with those kind of guts, but a lot fewer of them.
Speaking for the US economy, growing a backbone is going to be difficult when you have a $161 BILLION trade deficit.
This is getting off-topic, but I think I now understand the trade deficit. The problem isn't that China makes everything and we make nothing, but rather that they use but don't pay for what we make, since we're now primarily in the intellectual property business. If there were a 100 million copies of Windows in China, and Microsoft got $100 in license fees for each, that would take care of a big chunk of the trade deficit. There are lots of excuses to be made for what China is doing with intellectual property, but I think it's the underlying cause of the trade deficit.
My feeling is that it is only a matter of time, as services such as Google become available in China, that the Great Firewall becomes unmaintainable.
Technology cuts both ways. Imagine what something like the Trusted Computing initiative could do for China's repressive government.
Really, your argument is so stupid. Google is a business. Even if they want to change Chinese politics (they don't have to), there is *no way* to do it that doesn't require them to cooperate -- at first
First off, neither your post nor mine was a troll, nor did either deserve a downmod. We just disagree. I wish that was tolerated more by slashdot moderators. That said, you were being a jerk about it.
The reason I expect Google to try to change Chinese politics is (a) because China's government is evil. Really, really evil. Google has an explicit "don't be evil" policy, and, even if they didn't, there is precedent for punishing companies that cooperate with evil regimes.
Part of the problem is Google's arrogance. They think that they're so great that the harm done to the Chinese people by not having access to Google would exceed any potential political benefit. The other argument being made here is the opposite--Google is nothing special and could just as well be replaced by a Chinese government-run search engine. Both of these arguments are wrong. As the best search engine around, Google has some leverage, but it's not like Chinese peasants will die if they can't check their Gmail accounts. If building a Google-quality search engine was easy, then their US competitors would have done so.
US corporations can make a difference in China's policy, by making it clear that they won't cooperate with human rights abuses. It won't always work, but it will help.
The ethical justification for allowing a free trade relationship with a repressive regime is to promote positive change. That will only happen if we grow a backbone.
Just a thought--China actively violates a vast array of US internet and intellectual-property related laws (think spam, widespread commercial piracy, hacking attacks, etc.). Why don't we try to actively subvert their "Great Firewall"? Imagine what the geniuses at Google could do if they put their minds and hearts into it...
If Google is willing to cooperate with China on their "Great Firewall"--an attempt to suppress democracy-related information and control the Chinese people--they can hardly object to this. Google has already demonstrated its willingness to cooperate with totalitarian governments in suppressing peaceful, pro-democracy information. Hard to see how they can draw a line now. If anything, Google's "Don't be evil" motto requires them to actively try to subvert Chinese censorship.
Australia is making a reasonable request that Google voluntarily censor a very small number of images of a nuclear reactor--images that could clearly be used for violent and dangerous terrorist activity. Aside from satisfying idle curiosity, there aren't many important, legitimate uses for those images.
Since Google has long since slid down the slippery slope, why stop now?
You're problems with X have nothing to do with FreeBSD, or even the NVidia driver, as both are identical under Linux. They same things. repeat, they are the same things. You didn't have to get the special driver because Centros included the special driver on the CD.
I'm well aware that both use the same driver, aside from perhaps a little wrapper code.
Some of the problems I encountered have little to do with the FreeBSD and Linux *kernels*, but everything to do with the distributions (i.e. the operating system as a whole). That's what I'm comparing. "Mere configuration" is one of the most important parts of a *nix OS on the desktop--when they all run the same GUIs (KDE, GNOME, etc.), what else do you have to distguish between them?
The difference is merely configuration, not desktop readiness. I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop, so the claim that it isn't ready is patently false. What isn't ready is that FreeBSD doesn't have out of the box autoconfiguration.
I freely admit that, with unlimited time to tinker, or with just the right hardware & network environment, FreeBSD could make an excellent desktop OS. It's also true that, with enough time, you could hack a Pentium into a Mac Cube or make a computer case out of fans. So what? That's not realistic--almost nobody has the time for that. Considering that the user experience on FreeBSD running KDE is so similar to the user experience on Linux running KDE that most of our users won't even notice, I don't see a good reason to waste the time necessary to configure FreeBSD. This is what I mean by "not ready for the desktop". I mean not ready for general desktop use by anyone other than a hardcode BSD hacker. There will always be a few 31337 hax0rs who run [random OS] on [random hardware], and proclaim it to be good, but that's not for most people.
You also had some problems with FreeBSD because you were using the old 4.x branch.
Re-read my post we switched to FreeBSD 5.2.1 early on. Problems still persisted.
Other posters have claimed that my problems must be due to the NFS spec, or KDE, or perhaps because the head Unix guy wasn't 1337 enough. All this misses the point. Instead of assigning blame, the Linux people appear to have slogged ahead and devised work-arounds for the NFS issues, the KDE weirdness, etc. It may not always be pretty, but it works. They also have the "market share" to get commercial developers to release apps for Linux. Yes, you can in principle run, say, Mathematica 5 under FreeBSD's compatibility layer, but there's quite a bit more work involved (we tried), and Wolfram won't help you with it. This is nobody's fault, but it's still a consideration in picking a desktop OS.
Disclaimer
I'm not a linux zealot. I don't use Linux at home (I use OS X), and have no ideological reason to prefer Linux. I'm also at UC Berkeley, so, for "patriotic" reasons, I have a slight bias in favor of BSD.
That said, I have to admit Linux is more mature than FreeBSD for desktop use. Before you flame, hear me out.
Background
I'm a graduate student, and, with the help of another grad student and the College's head unix support guy, I'm stuck administering a small network of about 15 computers, all of which are vanilla Dell Precision 360s. Some run Windows, some run *nix. Our server is an Xserve G5, and it serves user home directories via NFS and does authentication & directory services via LDAP.
The FreeBSD story
We started with FreeBSD 4.9. Out of the box, we were able to get NFS mounting working, but there were a lot of problems. Sound didn't work. To get X working, we had to grab a special Nvidia driver. Even then, we only had VGA support, and not DVI. After much tinkering and kernel recompiling, I got DVI working, sort of (there were a few weird random "twinkly" pixels on each screen that showed up when in BSD DVI mode, but not BSD VGA or Windows DVI). Sound never worked. Then we tried to get LDAP working. No go, pam_ldap and nss_switch require FreeBSD 5.x.
So we upgrade to FreeBSD 5.2.1 (read, reinstall from scratch). That breaks DVI video, and the same kernel options as before don't work. No amount of tinkering can get sound working. Thus, we give up on DVI and sound. LDAP *does* work, after some effort, and so we have a mostly-usable system. There are still problems: KOffice apps crash on saving, and that the default PDF viewer doesn't work.
In an effort to fix KOffice and the PDF issue, we update & upgrade the ports tree. After a great deal of manual intervention to deal with broken dependencies in the pkg database, non-building ports, etc., the upgrade finishes. Now X is broken. It turns out the configuration file format for XFree86 changed when X got upgraded in the ports upgrade. A similar thing happens to KDE. After resolving those problems, the PDF and KOffice issues are resolved. Still no sound or DVI video, but we can live with that.
Then we upgrade our Xserve to Mac OS X 10.4 Server. All of a sudden, logging in via KDE as a "network" user on *some* of the BSD machines doesn't work. KDE complains that it doesn't have write access to the user's NFS-mounted home directories. A quick check on the command-line or with a failsafe session shows that users do, in fact, still have write access. I spend forever on this, and get nowhere. Some users can log in, others can't, on some BSD computers and not others. There are no clear differences, no explanations, and nothing makes sense.
I call in backup. The College's head unix admin comes over and spends a day on the problem. He contacts the KDE developers. I call Apple "Premium" Support. Nobody knows what's going on. In the end, we realize that the issue is that the NFS spec is fairly loose, and it's possible to have two nominally compliant implementations that don't quite talk to each other. Our theory is there's some sort of strange conflict between Apple's OS X 10.4 NFS implementation, the FreeBSD 5.x implementation, and KDE that causes some very subtle race condition with writing some KDE configuration file. At this point, we decide to try installing Linux on one machine as a test to see if it will work any better.
Total time about 100 hours.
The Linux Story
We install Centros 4.0 (a RedHat Enterprise Linux-derived distribution) on a machine. Everything works out of the box, except LDAP. After an hour or two of futzing around, that works too. Everything works. Sound, DVI video, NFS, KDE, PDFs, you name it. It all works.
Total time 3 - 5 hours.
Moral of the story
FreeBSD just isn't ready for the desktop. I wish it weren't true, because I like lots of things about FreeBSD, but it is. FreeBSD
I know this is slashdot, and I appreciate all the Beowulf cluster jokes, especially since they're actually appropriate here, but nobody is asking any meaningful questions. By my calculations, the noise-to-signal ratio is illegal div_by_zero.
Where can I get Scout? What is the license? What platforms are supported? I'm working on an open-source scientific computing package for doing quantum simulations, and I'd like to use Scout for visualization, but this article provides no information on where to get Scout or even if the licensing would allow me to use it.
It's also not clear exactly how you'd link Scout up with an existing app. Does Scout produce machine code that you stick into your app somehow? Are there C or C++ wrappers for using Scout?
I'd like to point out that this is a survey only of scientists funded by the NIH (National Institutes of Health). It has no bearing on conduct of scientists in other life sciences or in the physical sciences. I would imagine that given the closer industry ties of human health-related research, there would be different, and perhaps greater, pressure to falsify data. There is also clearly no opportunity to violate human subject research standards when you're studying subatomic particles.
Physics Today has a good story on ethics issues in physics. It seems that data falsification is relatively rare (the few high-profile cases demonstrate that it is generally a career-ending move), but other ethical problems certainly do occur. In particular, Physics Today talks about the abuse of graduate students (a problem that's probably not limited to physics).
As a graduate student myself, I've got things pretty good, but some of my friends are definitely being mistreated. One guy is working 70-hour weeks and is still getting told by his supervisor that he's not working hard enough. I'm sure that if he protested he'd quickly find himself tossed out of the group and having to start his thesis research again from scratch.
It's a non-technological problem, so there may not be a technological solution. (Me, I'd like to see ISPs start throttling infected users, but that's a whole separate can of worms.)
You're absolutely right. Having a computer on the internet has become akin to driving, in that your actions (or inaction) can pose a threat to others, not just yourself.
Having a compromised machine is kind of like having a blown taillight. We should treat it similarly--say, a $150 fine for being 0wn3d (maybe $75 for first offenders), and a requirement that you get the problem fixed within a certain amount of time. I know what you're thinking--this isn't fair to people who get hacked because their OS vendor hasn't yet patched the relevant security hole. Tough. It isn't fair that a rock could break my taillight, and a cop could pull me over 30 seconds later and ticket me, but that's the way it is. To do it any other way (e.g. impose the burden of proving the driver had been negligent on the cop) just wouldn't work.
Plus, once people start getting all these tickets, maybe they'll look into a more secure OS.
Economically, this is a good solution, since it internalizes the externality associated with having a compromised system.
I work for a company that develops products based on RFID and the transponders don't hold that much to begin with. 255 bytes I believe. If you can encode this much info into 255 bytes, I can sure as hell, write to the transponder and change my information, through sheer brute force techniques. Plus, with 255 bytes, I can pretty much guarantee that not everyone can be uniquely identified.
255 bytes isn't enough for a picture, but it is enough for a digitally-signed unique ID number, which could be used to look up a picture from a central database. 1 billion people could have unique IDs with a string just 30 bits long. That leaves about 251 bytes for digital signatures, etc. Perhaps iris scans can produce a "fingerprint" that would fit into a couple hundred bytes.
Of course, RFID isn't a done deal--it's apparently just what Homeland Security likes for passports. Other technologies would allow for digital encoding of photos.
The big issue in U.S. science education is not evolution anyway, it's the lack of competent science teachers. K-12 teaching is simply not an attractive career to most people who have good math and science training, partly because of the low pay.
It's more than that. A friend of mine has a masters in physics, and wants very much to be a science teacher. She's been looking for almost a year, and still hasn't found work. Yet, we constantly hear about how incompetent our K-12 science teachers are, and how poorly our students are doing.
I believe that the teachers' unions play a large roll in keeping out or driving out those who could really do a good job of teaching science. I'm sure the unions aren't trying to do that, but they're having that effect with their seniority-based hiring, and opposition to teacher competency standards.
We're not going to have good schools until teaching makes the transition from what is essentially a unionized blue-collar job to more of a profession. How to get there is damned hard, though. I don't think it will happen from the top down, but rather only if (and "if" is the operative word) parents get concerned enough to actually intervene in school boards and demand real change.
Some changes that need to happen:
1) Screw the focus on small class sizes. The dynamic doesn't automatically change over from "big, impersonal class" to "small, conversational teaching" until you get down to about 15 students, which isn't going to happen. With a good teacher, it can happen with 60 students. Better to spend the money on training and hiring fewer, better teachers than a lot of incompetent ones. Also, give teachers more support staff to deal with equipment, etc., so they can focus on teaching.
2) End one-size-fits-all education. Trying to put all students through the same pace of education bores the top 25% and overwhelms the bottom 25%. This is doubly bad, because the bottom 25% are likely to drop out and become a burden on society, while the top 25% waste their potential. Offer classes at different paces for different ability levels. How do we reconcile this with (1)? In large schools with enough students to fill all the classes, it's easy. In smaller schools, have the slower students take fewer courses, and spend the extra time in group tutoring sessions. Top students can participate in advanced-credit courses, skip ahead, etc.
3) Make the school environment more like a job and less like a prison or lord of the flies. Uniforms or at least a dress code sound like a good idea, although I have no personal experience with that.
This ID card will NOT make you any safer in any way whatsoever.
Several of the September 11 hijackers had state-issued IDs which they wouldn't have been able to get under this new law (because their visas had expired).
Do you really think that the Terrorists will go to the DMV and say, "Hi, I'm Osama Bin Laden, I'd like my Driver's license today. Thank you?" Do you really think they won't be able to get fake credentials that are as good as these IDs or can be used to get a legitimate ID?
It would be pretty easy to prevent fakes with this system. Since your photo is digitally encoded on the card, it could also be digitally signed by the state. That makes it effectively impossible to forge an ID that will fool a digital scanner (provided that some human makes sure that the digitally-encoded photo matches up with your face). Combine this with much more stringent documentation requirements for getting the ID card (valid visa, etc.), and you've tightened things up considerably. Throw in the "machine-readable passport" requirement the US is pushing on other countries, and the system starts to look fairly hard to break, unless you can get a foreign government to issue you a fake passport (in which case we know who to bomb--er, blame).
And finally, do you really think that the government won't abuse this new power (i.e. knowleged of your every purchase, move, travel, etc.)?
Knowledge of your every purchase? WTF? Nobody is requiring licenses to buy groceries. This bill won't change that.
Can you imagine how much corporations would pay to know your every move, flight, purchase, hotel reservation, rental, etc. etc. etc?
They already know that for everyone who uses credit cards, which is just about everyone except privacy nuts (who are probably not a very desirable target market for anyone except tin-foil manufacturers).
Real ID is about stopping terrorism and illegal immigration. A lot of people disagree with the latter purpose, which is why RealID is tacked on to an emergency spending bill to ram it through. If you're looking for conspiracies, look at its effect on illegal immigration. Specifically, drivers licenses will only be available to those legally in the country, and they will expire at the same time as someone's visa status expires. Thus, they will probably later become required for lawful employment, with stiff fines for employers who don't check. It really doesn't have much to do with collecting personal data on people. Dick Cheney doesn't care how much porn you rent on DVD versus VHS.
And yet it is this way, and not just in humans. If an overall better alternative existed (taking into account all advantages and disadvantages), would we not have evolved differently?
Actually, in pretty much all other animals, the trachea connects in a different spot, making it difficult or impossible to choke to death (although I suppose they could slowly starve if something got wedged in there good). Humans have a unique adaption that enables speech, but also creates a risk of choking.
I think this is a bad example for either side to be using.
Again, I am merely stating that just because we haven't found an exception--or that it seems very unlikely that one exists--still doesn't forgive the idea that we know that it doesn't. Proving a negative of this scope, of course, being quite difficult.
I'd argue that it is very likely that an exception does exist, but also that we know that it won't happen in the world of "everyday" quantum mechanics. We know that more work is needed to give us a quantum theory of gravity, for instance, but we also know that it won't really show up in typical non-relativistic QM.
Physics is not "complete"--there are some very large holes at high energies, etc., but the boundaries of those holes are fairly well-characterized. To paraphrase Rumsfeld, the holes are known unknowns.
I suppose this leaves open the possibilty of breaking quantum key distribution by going to Planck energies, but this is like trying to open a safe with a nuclear weapon, only harder (we have nuclear weapons, but have no idea how we could get even remotely close to the Planck energy). Everyone will know that you did it, it couldn't be done in secret, and would probably destroy the information you're trying to get.
Summary: parent poster is being a twit.
d -of-anyone-breaking-it, which is all RSA and other popular schemes have going for them (RSA isn't even computationally secure).
Long version:
First, let's clarify what it means to say that "physics" guarantees that your quantum key distribution (QKD) system is unbreakable. Given a perfect implementation of the QKD protocol, or at least an implementation where the errors are within certain bounds and you haven't done anything stupid like reusing your OTP, you are guaranteed security if quantum mechanics is correct.
What do I mean by correct? I mean that quantum mechanics correctly describes the relevant systems--systems to which it is currently considered applicable.
We have many good reasons to believe quantum mechanics is correct. Its relativistic extension, QED, has given us some of the most accurately-verified theoretical predictions ever. Notable objections to the theory (such as the famous paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, or "EPR") have proven false (google the Bell inequality and the Aspect experiment).
More specifically, some of the particular variations in quantum mechanics that one would imagine could be useful for defeating a QKD system, such as nonlinearity, would give rise to highly unphysical effects (superluminal signaling), which we have not observed.
It seems that quantum mechanics is an island in theory space--that is, any perturbation from the accepted theory seems to give something obviously unphysical, or at least something that does not agree with experiment.
In other words, this is as close to proof as it gets in science. Clearly, quantum mechanics isn't the final word on, say, quantum gravity, but we're not going to be throwing out the undergrad quantum mechanics books any time soon.
Yes, it would be nice to have information-theoretic security, but that doesn't seem to be possible for a key distribution protocol. Still, security predicated on the laws of physics is a hell of a lot better than security-based-upon-the-fact-that-we-haven't-hear
Yes, I do have a degree in physics. You may wish to check said thesis in light of errors explained above.
And I'm doing a Ph.D in physics on quantum computing. Sorry to be a prick about it, but you were a bit rough on the undergrad who posted above, and what goes around comes around. As long as that guy isn't doing his research on slashdot, he'll probably be OK..
If by "no problems" you mean "severe and most likely insurmountable quantum coherence issues". Any quantum computer big enough to simulate a modern sized classical computer will contain so many qubits as to have problems with interference from the outside world. IIRC the problem of quantum coherence is roughly exponential in the number of qubits in a system
No, the problem is not exponential in nature. It has been shown that if the error rates for storage, gates, etc. can be brought below certain thresholds (typically 10^-3 to 10^-6), then arbitrarily long computations can be performed. There are many papers on the subject, but here is one.
The only way in which decoherence could pose an insurmountable problem is if there is fundamentally new physics that plays a role in the regime between "quantum" and "classical". Nobel Laureate Tony Leggett has talked (in a recent issue of Science, and at the 2005 Gordon Research Conference) about how we might find such new laws of physics if they exist, or otherwise rule out their existence.
It implies no such thing.
You are correct. In the early days of the field, I think there was a little bit of confusion about whether quantum computers could do NP-complete, but it has long since been sorted out.
I recently attended a talk by Ike Chuang about general issues in the field. Chuang feels that quantum simulation and quantum communication will be the important applications, although he emphasized communication. I think quantum simulation is way, WAY underappreciated. Not only is it going to revolutionize protein folding, drug design, and other biomed applications, I have a hunch it may prove to be a prerequisite for advanced nanotech.
The article is not particularly good. The supposed problems that optical lattices will have in addressing qubits in the interior of a 3-D lattice are "solved" by using what is essentially a 2-D lattice on a chip. The same can easily be done with optical lattices.
Of course, addressing atoms inside a lattice of moderate size can be done using a high numerical aperature lens to focus an addressing beam onto a single atom. The addressing beam produces an AC Stark Shift of the appropriate hyperfine sublevels of the atom (in the case of Cesium-133 qubits, it shifts each of the mF sublevels of the F=3 and F=4 states), with the exact shift being different for different sublevels. This allows transitions in that particular atom to be driven by a microwave pulse which is detuned from all the other atoms in the lattice. Just how well can we address one atom while not disturbing atoms in adjacent planes? I'll know in a week or two. I'm currently simulating one and two qubit gates in this exact scheme. The actual experiment is also under construction, at Penn State.
Anyone interested in a distributed computing project to develop quantum computers? I could use help from developers, and later, also regular user input.
Have you ever been to Calgary? I love dense, pedestrian-friendly cities like Vancouver or (so I've heard) New York, but it just wouldn't work in Calgary. It's too effing cold in the winter for people to want to walk much. Thus, they drive, which means they need places to park. Also, the roads must be wider to accomodate snow build-up. It sucks that a high-density solution wouldn't work there, but that's how it is.
This is the problem with one-size-fits-all solutions. Different places & different people need different solutions.
BTW, complaining about a lack of farm land in Alberta sounds pretty silly. The whole goddamn province (and the two to the east of it) are farms.
My apologies to Professor Callaos if he actually is Nigerian.
...is what we really need. Some sort of device that scans text for common spelling errors--perhaps even grammar errors--and corrects them. A robot that could check spelling. It will never happen...
But imagine if it did... Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these--no word need ever be misspelled again!
But seriously, folks. Plastic.com has a built-in spell-checker. Why doesn't Slashdot, at least for the editors? Or, better yet, why don't we have literate editors?
So... you're comparing your n=1 for industry vs. your n=1 for academia to justify the conclusion?
The university is considered by many independent rankings to be one of the best in the country and perhaps the world. The company (which, incidentally, primarily did software, and reminded me a lot of Dilbert), on the other hand, is barely hanging on, and survived the dot com crash only by way of a fortuitious (for them--not for the investors) influx of money right before everything went south.
In other words, I took one of the best universities around, and compared it to a typical-to-poor software company. The fact that the company wins in many ways tells you something.
Disclosure: I'm a graduate student at a major research university, doing public research that happens to be funded in part by DARPA and the DoD. The research is long-term, but is in a field that will clearly have national security implications.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "research." I've never seen an educational institution that was wasteful about it's funding (Maybe Harvard).
Then you've never seen how research happens at a major university. Waste happens *differently* than at major corporations, but it happens in vast amounts, often in the form of wasted time.
At a private company I used to work at, when there was a minor problem with my working environment (too cold), it took a day or two to fix. At a top-rated university, a more serious problem (lights that turn off by themselves every ten minutes) took seven months to fix.
At the same company, security was taken very seriously. When the door to the server room was being repainted, we had a security guard stand there, literally watching paint dry. At the major university, we had five break-ins to our building last semester and yet it's still possible to break in in 15 seconds with nothing more than a newspaper. (The last of those break-ins cost the university about $10,000 in computer equipment, and it took four months to get the computers replaced and running again).
I haven't even started on the amount of time wasted on pointless administrative tasks (e.g. two weeks telling payroll how to do their jobs).
The professors and grad students are paid wages that nobody in the private sector would accept. They don't have crazy offices or private jets or 100,000 dollar golf club memberships.
Professors don't get crazy bonuses, but the top administrators get pretty hefty salaries and bonuses (like a beautiful house on campus). Compensation for administrators is approaching corporate levels.
Plus, universities find lots of ways to sphon off federal grant money. Any major purchase or salary coming from a federal grant gets a ~50% "overhead" charge tacked on--that money goes to the university.
It literally hurts me to see DARPA cut funding to universities (my group took a hit), but I can understand why it's happening.
I'd always try to get Protoss carriers as fast as possible, but usually I got wiped out first by a zealot rush. Maybe your analogy is more apt than you realize.
First off, let's be realistic: the current US Congress wouldn't let the UN run the internet. After all, our own Al Gore invented it... But seriously, there's a lot of mistrust of the UN, much of it for good reasons.
The lack of accountability and responsibility that led to the Oil-for-Food scandal is hardly encouraging. Can we really expect the UN to be more responsive to internet users' needs than ICANN, as bad as ICANN is?
There are also some really twisted jokes to be made about how effective the UN would be in fighting child porn, considering the actions of some of its employees and peacekeepers in the Congo.
In essence, we're talking about replacing a large, corrupt bureaucracy with an even larger corrupt bureaucracy. Doesn't sound good, does it? I'd much rather see ICANN's functions assumed by a diverse group of private companies, with oversight from democratically-elected governments. In particular, the Chinese government and other repressive regimes can stay the hell away from internet regulation. Even good companies can be pressured into making bad decisions when China gets involved.
I *KNOW* I've just opened the flood gates of Bush jokes, DMCA rants, and PATRIOT Act tirades, but please, before you post, think about whether you're (1) on-topic (this is about the UN replacing ICANN), and (2) saying something new that hasn't been said in the numerous slashdot stories on the DMCA, etc. I'm all for a good joke, but please let it be something more original than "Bush is really stupid, and Americans are fat and stupid for voting for him". I live in one of the bluest areas of a very blue state, and I've heard them all.
A lot of what you're saying is a result of misinformation that's out there (not your fault). I'm a grad student at a UC campus, and I'm pretty damn sure we deserved the multimillion dollar slap we got from the government.
To address things in no particular order (sorry, I'm in a hurry),
1) I believe Lockheed Martin isn't even bidding right now to manage the labs. UC is the only real contender, now that U of Texas dropped out. (Note: LANL, LBL, and LLNL are being bid separately, so perhaps they're waiting for a later bid opportunity, but that's totally speculation).
2) This isn't just about security. There were also safety issues, such as a laser eye injury of a grad student, and backup sprinkler water to a plutonium handling area not being earthquake safe. (The latter was at Livermore, I think).
3) The main incident happened because that LANL's inventory system and classified material control was so screwed up they didn't even know how many drives with classifed info were out there. Apparently, 20 inventory labels were printed, but only 18 were used, and that was the source of the confusion. The drives are used to implement a sneakernet, because they don't even have secure ethernet to the entire facility. Really pathetic...
4) UC in general is horrible at security. My building has exterior doors that can be bypassed in 10 seconds using nothing more than a newspaper. Last semester, we got broken into five times. I've been trying to get it fixed for the past year, but nothing has happened.
If I was the feds, I wouldn't trust UC with classified research. We just don't take security seriously.
Also the San Diego and San Fransico airports have approaches over water, so a wacko can sit in a boat and try this.
Good point. I often fly via SFO, so I should consider this further.
So goggles wouldn't be totally effective but is there something that could be added to the window of the cockpit to prevent these sort of attacks? Maybe some coating to deflect the laser or bounce it off like radar (all I know about lasers I learned from watching Real Genius).
No, an attacker can always just tune the laser to a frequency that isn't blocked. If you try to make goggles (or a film) that's effective against several different common laser frequencies, you'll end up with something that doesn't transmit any light at all. The only real option I can see is to eliminate windows, and have cameras on the outside of the plane, coupled to monitors. Of course, then lasers could be used to blind the cameras...