Intelligent Design is no hypothesis. There is no observation that could be made or experiment that could be performed that would disprove ID. If something appeals to human aesthetics, IDers say "See how logical the Creator is! How clear His motive!" If it does not, IDers say, "The Creator works in mysterious ways! It is not meant for us to understand!" There is no disproof possible in the face of such statements.
Personally, I think that the people are uninformed, and just don't realize how uninformed they are. The political duopoly here in the US has cemented itself in, and they deliberately encourage voter ignorance by trying to polarize debate into "us vs. them". This distracts the voters long enough that they can pull crap like gerrymandering and big-money bribery ^W^W campaign fundraising.
The bipolar doesn't really seem to tie in with these symptoms much, except perhaps that my depressive phases often come from obsessing about something, and my manic phases could easily fit into the ADHD pattern.
Actually, while bipolar sounds a bit counterintuitive, it's part of the same overlapping family, probably for the reason you suggested. I suspect the tree of cause and effect is something like Asperger's > OCD > AD(H)D, Bipolar. I suspect (undiagnosed) that I myself have Bipolar II Disorder (deep depressive valleys, shallow hypomanic-to-normal peaks); I keep myself near the "green zone" by maintaining a strict sleep schedule and deliberately interrupting my thoughts when I start obsessing.
The one caveat I can think of is that, while I was at one point very socially awkward, and am still often very uncomfortable around large groups of people, in the past couple of years I've become very skilled at direct interpersonal interaction, both in reading other people and in conveying emotion myself.
That certainly fits the bill. It's been said that those on the autism spectrum can learn scientifically what most people know instinctively.
The other side of this coin is that I'm apparently a very good actor, both on and off stage. Sometimes when I'm telling a story and trying to communicate, say, that someone was *REALLY ANGRY*, people will be frightened for a moment and think that I'm actually getting really angry - but no, I was just briefly acting the part to convey the emotion I'm talking about.
That actually doesn't surprise me. A common feature of autism spectrum is that there's a disconnect between what the autist/aspie is feeling and the emotions showing through their body language. It's as if the dedicated neural hardware that automates this doesn't exist (or possibly even gets repurposed for other uses). This means that, once an autist/aspie manually learns to convey emotions through body language, they are more aware of the process and (generalizing wildly here) more able to deliberately mime emotions.
What you just wrote there seems a perfectly succinct way of saying what you said - in fact I don't think I could make it any shorter than you did without some effort.
And that would be the problem. The information density is too high; most people have to slow down their reading speed and re-read a couple of times to comprehend it.
How exactly does one go about finding out if they have something like this?
For a formal diagnosis, you'd have to see a trained therapist. However, it's pretty much unnecessary; there's no cure for Asperger's, and treatment mostly involves learning to work around the difficulties it causes. While a good therapist can help, it's not terribly important. This website has a decent overview of the symptoms.
Asperger's overlaps with High-Functioning Autism, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder (with or without hyperactivity), Social Anxiety Disorder, and a few other conditions; it's hard to make a correct diagnosis with overlapping symptoms, so Asperger's is frequently misdiagnosed as e.g. ADHD. Some giveaway symptoms are eye gaze avoidance and anxiety at the idea of unfamiliar social situations. Since most of the anxiety comes from the inability to read body language and other social cues, people with Asperger's tend to be much more relaxed online, commonly expressed as "I wish real life had a backspace key".
Brains and computers are related in the same way that computers and Turing machines are related. If you ever actually read up on a Turing machine, it's so pathetically serial that it makes 8-bit registers seem like a luxury. And, yet, all that parallelism does nothing to change what a computer can actually compute, only the speed which it computes at. The going hypothesis is that the same thing is going on in human brains.
I've read that severely autistic people see other people not as people but as objects, like mechanical toys or furniture.
While that might possibly be the case for the most profoundly affected autists, most people on the autism spectrum don't see the world like that. They have a "theory of mind", as it's known, it's just that their theory is that others' minds are incomprehensible. If autists didn't believe that others had minds, the common autistic trait of averting eye contact wouldn't exist.
People on the Autism spectrum tend to have an extremely large, florid vocabulary. Sometimes, the most difficult part of writing is dumbing it down by using simpler synonyms. If I want to make my writing understood to a general audience (i.e. not Slashdot), I usually have to spend 2 or 3 times longer "debugging" my writing than I actually spend writing it. (I'm deliberately not right now, because A. this is Slashdot, and B. I'm providing an example.)
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with believing in ID, just as there's nothing wrong with believing in any religion. However, if it's going to be taught, it should be taught in a theology or philosophy class. It has no place in a biology classroom beside a scientific theory, the same way that we don't teach students how God makes each electron move in a physics class.
Ask yourself one question about ID. What predictions does ID make? If ID is such a useful theory, then it should make predictions about how the world looks, and we should be able to test those predictions and see how it shapes up against unguided evolution.
The fact is, ID makes no predictions and is therefore irrefutable. It is not a valid theory. If something appeals to human intellect, the Creationist exclaims "How logical the creator is! How clear His motive!" If something does not, the Creationist exclaims "The Creator works in mysterious ways! It is not meant for us to understand!" This leaves no room for ID to be false, which means that ID makes no predictions of what is true.
As evolution doesn't kick in until after abiogenesis, yes, the real world is the same way. There are 64 possible DNA codons, each coding for one of 20 amino acids (and one acting as a "stop" code). Most mutations result in substituting the same amino acid, and no mutation ever results in the equivalent of a SIGILL (where the cell's machinery shuts down and the cell kills itself just because an invalid DNA sequence was encountered).
As far as the abiogenesis part, which is much more a matter of hypothetical guesswork than evolution, it seems likely that chemistry itself is naturally predisposed to standardized "building blocks" that behave similarly or identically when you swap in the wrong one. Just look at the periodic table.
Actually, all the things you describe that "set us apart" from other primates also apply to chimps and gorillas, and some also apply to dolphins and the corvidae (crows and ravens). The only thing that sets humans apart is the development of languages rich enough for meta-discussion.
Thing is, most of the genetic modifications that humans want to add are disadvantages in nature. A few, like pest resistance, might be beneficial, but even those would take quite some time to spread to wild strains. Humans tend to grow their plants and raise their animals in highly unnatural locations and arrangements, which tends to put some distance between wild varieties and the strains cultivated for human use. (If that weren't the case, traits from wild strains would constantly "reinfect" cultivated strains, and cultivated traits would make their way into wild strains, all without even touching genetic engineering.)
Really, the biggest problem with genetic engineering is the fact that it reduces genetic diversity. Since getting a genetic modification to "stick" is so difficult, scientists only do it on a small number individuals, then create a strain out of them. In the case of plants, which are trivial to clone, you can have entire fields that are clones of a single modified ancestor. This means that the entire cultivated strain can be wiped out by a disease or pest that wasn't anticipated, leading to famine and economic disaster. (All cultivated strains face the same problem, since diversity is eliminated by selection, but genetic engineering takes it to the next level.)
Be warned that the Bible claims that insects have four legs and that bats are birds. Relying on the Bible to provide literal truth is like relying on Microsoft to compete fairly in the software market. It has some good stuff, but sometimes you really have to read between the lines, especially when you get into the God-ordered genocides of the Old Testament.
"Gay" means someone who is attracted predominantly to members of their own sex. There's no contradiction in being a gay virgin, or being gay and celibate.
Disclaimer: The following post has a rather disjointed flow. Sorry. I work 3rd shift and am up well past my bedtime...
While both halves of that are technically true, no one sane would assert that the human effects would result in a run away scenario and Earth turning into Venus. Rather the effect of human activity, if any, will be to push the climate into another relatively stable state.
Historically, over the last half-billion years or so, there have been two stable climate states: ice ages, and "heat ages". Ice ages have a global average temperature around 12C, and "heat ages" have a global average temperature around 22C, with very little inbetween. The transitions from one to the other are likely governed by respective self-feeding loops that sequester/release carbon in/from global sinks. The exact climate details are more fickle; whether a heat age means sweltering rainforests or arid deserts, for instance, depends on the current positions of the continents and the ocean currents that flow around them. As a general rule of thumb, though, higher temperatures mean more violent, unpredictable, extreme weather, since the global weather system is nothing more than a very large heat engine.
We're currently in an abnormal warm spell coming out of an ice age, so our climate is already highly unstable without human intervention. On top of that, the formation of the current climate was likely tied to the formation of the very fossil fuels that we're now re-releasing into the atmosphere.
To my unprofessional eye, it looks like a massive climate shift is inevitable at this point, and that humans have sped up the timeline. For humans as a species, it'll likely be no big deal, but one thing we can be damn sure that it'll cause gradual but massive upheaval of the social order.
(The following is a post I wrote a month ago to a different forum.)
I don't really see Quantum Cryptography being wildly popular. The big downer is that you need a continuous, clear point-to-point transmission between the two people talking. If Alice is in Los Angeles and Bob is in Tokyo, then you need a trans-Pacific undersea QC fiber-optic channel temporarily dedicated to just Alice and Bob (no packet switching) AND you can't have any classic repeaters to boost signal strength. That second requirement pretty much kills it for distances greater than 50 miles or so.
You could add repeaters, and have each repeater decrypt/re-encrypt, but then an attacker can tap into a repeater undetected and the biggest benefit of QC is lost.
There's a technique for building a quantum repeater. Basically, the gist is something like this:
A # x _ y # B (INSERT QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT HERE) ___ x # y ___ A ######### B
A = Alice B = Bob x = Randy's incoming interface y = Randy's outgoing interface (Randy is the quantum repeater.)
That is, you can entangle entangled particles to "transmit" the entanglement. If I'm getting this correctly, Alice would transmit half a pair to Randy, Randy would transmit half a different pair to Bob, then Randy would entangle his two halves so that Alice and Bob would have a direct pair. However, since you can't tell if two particles are still entangled without measuring them (and thus losing entanglement), the odds of an A:B pair staying coherent would be (A:R)*(R:B), or (A:R)^2 if all things are equal. Each repeater would add its own factor, so n hops (n-1 repeaters plus final delivery) means p^n chance of a good end-to-end entanglement. Since p<1, the channel bandwidth drops VERY rapidly with an increase in the number of hops. If you have 2Mparticle/s optic links (after accounting for the fact that you throw away every other photon), and 50% decohere on each link, that means 1Mbit/s bandwidth for a direct link, 500kbit/s bandwidth if you add one repeater, and continuing to drop in half for each extra repeater. My gut says there's a tradeoff between inter-repeater distance (big distance = less coherence) and hops (more repeaters = faster drop), and that you have to optimize for the local maxima depending on the exact link parameters. Ugh. That means if you upgrade to better link cables, you potentially need to re-locate all the repeaters in the world.
This might be bearable if you just use the QC link as a key exchange medium, then switch to classic secret-key crypto (e.g. AES) over the Internet once you've agreed on a key. Sending even a huge 512-bit AES key over 20 hops (same link parameters as above) would take just under 5 minutes, which is a pretty decent re-keying interval. 20 hops would get you 1000 miles with near-future tech. (Although 20 DS1-size links would be dedicated just to your re-keying channel, so it'd be hideously expensive. A single non-Internet-connected DS1 runs about $500/month in my area. But I could see it happening between e.g. universities or military bases.)
So, with all those problems in mind, don't expect QC to take over anytime in the next half-century or so. Until a working quantum computer is built (and quantum computers are actually harder than quantum crypto), public-key crypto like RSA and DSA (the stuff that SSL runs on) is still safe and doesn't have as much hassle. And, thankfully, quantum computers don't do jack shit against secret-key crypto. (They can shave 1 bit off your secret key, but that's trivial. They aren't magic wands.)
DAMN! Whoops, now that's one hell of a memory slip. Thanks to both of you for correcting me.
As far as Inferno goes, it was required reading for AP English. We actually had to keep sort of a "reaction diary". The book itself was actually not that bad, except that (A) the Greek influence was so ridiculously thick, you had to keep checking the cover to make sure you were indeed reading a book about the Christian version of hell, and (B) some of the math and science "facts" were uproariously funny, most notably that given Dante's stats on the place, you can only presume that the mouth of hell is approx. the size of Australia (and also some pi confusion regarding circumference/diameter).
Is there something wrong with enjoying *both* Farscape *and* SG-1? Totally different shows, but they're both pretty darn good. (SG-1 moreso in the glory days of mid-S1 to mid-S3 or thereabouts, but still...)
Get a grip. Where in the 1st amendment does it says that we have the right to GPS?
As I mentioned at the start, the rant wanders offtopic. I was referring to the people arrested ^W "detained" and held at Guantanamo Bay for associating with terrorists ^W^W^W "posessing vital intelligence (that magically isn't stale after 3 years)".
No, we don't have a right to GPS signals, but it's yet another example of Bush's 9/11 madness. Should Bush restrict pens and paper next, since terrorists might use them to write letters to each other? Just because terrorists would be inconvenienced doesn't mean it's a worthwhile tradeoff. In particular, killing GPS in an emergency will make the emergency worse, because civilians and emergency services use GPS to coordinate rescue attempts. Killing GPS is doing the terrorists' work for them.
Somehow I doubt that they poked their heads out of the window to see where NYC was. They probably just used the pretty screen with the blinking lights and maps in front of them.
If you think aviators rely exclusively on GPS, you're nuts. There are other navigation systems in place as a fallback, and killing all those navigational systems along with GPS will result in additional dead civilians (because of mid-air collisions, planes running out of fuel and crashing looking for an airport, etc.) on top of whatever the terrorists do.
Yeah, this is perfectly logical. Everyone knows that only terrorists would be using GPS during a terrorist attack, and not, say, emergency workers, the FBI, etc. God forbid that a single terrorist be allowed to use the GPS network, regardless of the fact that he's probably already (a) planned for that contingency (esp. since the Bush administration has helpfully announced the fact that the GPS system might be killed at will) or (b) already done all the legwork with GPS while picking his targets and coordinating the attack (so that he can execute the attack without it).
In fact, I also applaud the Bush administration for restricting our freedoms to eliminate the risk that any of the pesky terrorists might receive some. Freedom is a limited resource and must be hoarded and parceled out accordingly, and we can't afford to waste our freedoms (e.g. 1st amendment freedom of assembly, 5th and 6th amendment right to a fair trial) on even a single terrorist. I commend Bush for indefinitely detaining even suspected terrorists at our luxurious Guantanamo Bay facility (which is far nicer than they deserve, let me tell you), because we can't risk a terrorist experiencing our freedoms. God forbid, we might actually have to let one go due to lack of evidence. Terrorists eat babies! We can't let baby-eaters go free! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?
The two-party system has destroyed this country and made the more intelligent succumb to groupthink and a willingness to abandon truth in favor of getting a quick bash in on those with whom you disagree.
Sounds like an opening to plug Condorcet and Approval voting and ask everyone who agrees to write their state legislators about it. The two-party system will never collapse if we don't do something about it -- too many politicians have made their careers out of playing the duopoly, and they need a fire lit under their ass before they'll upset it. (Oh, and please try not to spook the horses, so to speak. Don't say the "d" word, even if you might be thinking it -- phrase it in positive terms like voter expressiveness, legislative teamwork, and the like. You should also butter them up with some examples specific to their party, like Libertarians and Perot for the Republicans, or Greens and Nader for the Democrats. Think of your target audience. And if you send an e-mail, follow up with a written letter if you don't get a reply in a reasonable amount of time.)
I consider myself little-l libertarian on social issues (even moreso than the usual lefty issues, e.g. I'm in favor of responsible gun ownership and slightly in favor of concealed carry), but center-left on economics (favor antitrust law and progressive taxes).
Slashdot Mirror
Intelligent Design is no hypothesis. There is no observation that could be made or experiment that could be performed that would disprove ID. If something appeals to human aesthetics, IDers say "See how logical the Creator is! How clear His motive!" If it does not, IDers say, "The Creator works in mysterious ways! It is not meant for us to understand!" There is no disproof possible in the face of such statements.
Personally, I think that the people are uninformed, and just don't realize how uninformed they are. The political duopoly here in the US has cemented itself in, and they deliberately encourage voter ignorance by trying to polarize debate into "us vs. them". This distracts the voters long enough that they can pull crap like gerrymandering and big-money bribery ^W^W campaign fundraising.
Actually, while bipolar sounds a bit counterintuitive, it's part of the same overlapping family, probably for the reason you suggested. I suspect the tree of cause and effect is something like Asperger's > OCD > AD(H)D, Bipolar. I suspect (undiagnosed) that I myself have Bipolar II Disorder (deep depressive valleys, shallow hypomanic-to-normal peaks); I keep myself near the "green zone" by maintaining a strict sleep schedule and deliberately interrupting my thoughts when I start obsessing.
That certainly fits the bill. It's been said that those on the autism spectrum can learn scientifically what most people know instinctively.
That actually doesn't surprise me. A common feature of autism spectrum is that there's a disconnect between what the autist/aspie is feeling and the emotions showing through their body language. It's as if the dedicated neural hardware that automates this doesn't exist (or possibly even gets repurposed for other uses). This means that, once an autist/aspie manually learns to convey emotions through body language, they are more aware of the process and (generalizing wildly here) more able to deliberately mime emotions.
And that would be the problem. The information density is too high; most people have to slow down their reading speed and re-read a couple of times to comprehend it.
For a formal diagnosis, you'd have to see a trained therapist. However, it's pretty much unnecessary; there's no cure for Asperger's, and treatment mostly involves learning to work around the difficulties it causes. While a good therapist can help, it's not terribly important. This website has a decent overview of the symptoms.
Asperger's overlaps with High-Functioning Autism, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder (with or without hyperactivity), Social Anxiety Disorder, and a few other conditions; it's hard to make a correct diagnosis with overlapping symptoms, so Asperger's is frequently misdiagnosed as e.g. ADHD. Some giveaway symptoms are eye gaze avoidance and anxiety at the idea of unfamiliar social situations. Since most of the anxiety comes from the inability to read body language and other social cues, people with Asperger's tend to be much more relaxed online, commonly expressed as "I wish real life had a backspace key".
Brains and computers are related in the same way that computers and Turing machines are related. If you ever actually read up on a Turing machine, it's so pathetically serial that it makes 8-bit registers seem like a luxury. And, yet, all that parallelism does nothing to change what a computer can actually compute, only the speed which it computes at. The going hypothesis is that the same thing is going on in human brains.
While that might possibly be the case for the most profoundly affected autists, most people on the autism spectrum don't see the world like that. They have a "theory of mind", as it's known, it's just that their theory is that others' minds are incomprehensible. If autists didn't believe that others had minds, the common autistic trait of averting eye contact wouldn't exist.
People on the Autism spectrum tend to have an extremely large, florid vocabulary. Sometimes, the most difficult part of writing is dumbing it down by using simpler synonyms. If I want to make my writing understood to a general audience (i.e. not Slashdot), I usually have to spend 2 or 3 times longer "debugging" my writing than I actually spend writing it. (I'm deliberately not right now, because A. this is Slashdot, and B. I'm providing an example.)
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with believing in ID, just as there's nothing wrong with believing in any religion. However, if it's going to be taught, it should be taught in a theology or philosophy class. It has no place in a biology classroom beside a scientific theory, the same way that we don't teach students how God makes each electron move in a physics class.
Ask yourself one question about ID. What predictions does ID make? If ID is such a useful theory, then it should make predictions about how the world looks, and we should be able to test those predictions and see how it shapes up against unguided evolution.
The fact is, ID makes no predictions and is therefore irrefutable. It is not a valid theory. If something appeals to human intellect, the Creationist exclaims "How logical the creator is! How clear His motive!" If something does not, the Creationist exclaims "The Creator works in mysterious ways! It is not meant for us to understand!" This leaves no room for ID to be false, which means that ID makes no predictions of what is true.
As evolution doesn't kick in until after abiogenesis, yes, the real world is the same way. There are 64 possible DNA codons, each coding for one of 20 amino acids (and one acting as a "stop" code). Most mutations result in substituting the same amino acid, and no mutation ever results in the equivalent of a SIGILL (where the cell's machinery shuts down and the cell kills itself just because an invalid DNA sequence was encountered).
As far as the abiogenesis part, which is much more a matter of hypothetical guesswork than evolution, it seems likely that chemistry itself is naturally predisposed to standardized "building blocks" that behave similarly or identically when you swap in the wrong one. Just look at the periodic table.
Actually, all the things you describe that "set us apart" from other primates also apply to chimps and gorillas, and some also apply to dolphins and the corvidae (crows and ravens). The only thing that sets humans apart is the development of languages rich enough for meta-discussion.
Thing is, most of the genetic modifications that humans want to add are disadvantages in nature. A few, like pest resistance, might be beneficial, but even those would take quite some time to spread to wild strains. Humans tend to grow their plants and raise their animals in highly unnatural locations and arrangements, which tends to put some distance between wild varieties and the strains cultivated for human use. (If that weren't the case, traits from wild strains would constantly "reinfect" cultivated strains, and cultivated traits would make their way into wild strains, all without even touching genetic engineering.)
Really, the biggest problem with genetic engineering is the fact that it reduces genetic diversity. Since getting a genetic modification to "stick" is so difficult, scientists only do it on a small number individuals, then create a strain out of them. In the case of plants, which are trivial to clone, you can have entire fields that are clones of a single modified ancestor. This means that the entire cultivated strain can be wiped out by a disease or pest that wasn't anticipated, leading to famine and economic disaster. (All cultivated strains face the same problem, since diversity is eliminated by selection, but genetic engineering takes it to the next level.)
Be warned that the Bible claims that insects have four legs and that bats are birds. Relying on the Bible to provide literal truth is like relying on Microsoft to compete fairly in the software market. It has some good stuff, but sometimes you really have to read between the lines, especially when you get into the God-ordered genocides of the Old Testament.
"Gay" means someone who is attracted predominantly to members of their own sex. There's no contradiction in being a gay virgin, or being gay and celibate.
Are you insane? Big corporate behemoths merging together never results in competition. The elephants are mating, and customers are the grass.
Disclaimer: The following post has a rather disjointed flow. Sorry. I work 3rd shift and am up well past my bedtime...
Historically, over the last half-billion years or so, there have been two stable climate states: ice ages, and "heat ages". Ice ages have a global average temperature around 12C, and "heat ages" have a global average temperature around 22C, with very little inbetween. The transitions from one to the other are likely governed by respective self-feeding loops that sequester/release carbon in/from global sinks. The exact climate details are more fickle; whether a heat age means sweltering rainforests or arid deserts, for instance, depends on the current positions of the continents and the ocean currents that flow around them. As a general rule of thumb, though, higher temperatures mean more violent, unpredictable, extreme weather, since the global weather system is nothing more than a very large heat engine.
We're currently in an abnormal warm spell coming out of an ice age, so our climate is already highly unstable without human intervention. On top of that, the formation of the current climate was likely tied to the formation of the very fossil fuels that we're now re-releasing into the atmosphere.
To my unprofessional eye, it looks like a massive climate shift is inevitable at this point, and that humans have sped up the timeline. For humans as a species, it'll likely be no big deal, but one thing we can be damn sure that it'll cause gradual but massive upheaval of the social order.
(The following is a post I wrote a month ago to a different forum.)
I don't really see Quantum Cryptography being wildly popular. The big downer is that you need a continuous, clear point-to-point transmission between the two people talking. If Alice is in Los Angeles and Bob is in Tokyo, then you need a trans-Pacific undersea QC fiber-optic channel temporarily dedicated to just Alice and Bob (no packet switching) AND you can't have any classic repeaters to boost signal strength. That second requirement pretty much kills it for distances greater than 50 miles or so.
You could add repeaters, and have each repeater decrypt/re-encrypt, but then an attacker can tap into a repeater undetected and the biggest benefit of QC is lost.
There's a technique for building a quantum repeater. Basically, the gist is something like this:
That is, you can entangle entangled particles to "transmit" the entanglement. If I'm getting this correctly, Alice would transmit half a pair to Randy, Randy would transmit half a different pair to Bob, then Randy would entangle his two halves so that Alice and Bob would have a direct pair. However, since you can't tell if two particles are still entangled without measuring them (and thus losing entanglement), the odds of an A:B pair staying coherent would be (A:R)*(R:B), or (A:R)^2 if all things are equal. Each repeater would add its own factor, so n hops (n-1 repeaters plus final delivery) means p^n chance of a good end-to-end entanglement. Since p<1, the channel bandwidth drops VERY rapidly with an increase in the number of hops. If you have 2Mparticle/s optic links (after accounting for the fact that you throw away every other photon), and 50% decohere on each link, that means 1Mbit/s bandwidth for a direct link, 500kbit/s bandwidth if you add one repeater, and continuing to drop in half for each extra repeater. My gut says there's a tradeoff between inter-repeater distance (big distance = less coherence) and hops (more repeaters = faster drop), and that you have to optimize for the local maxima depending on the exact link parameters. Ugh. That means if you upgrade to better link cables, you potentially need to re-locate all the repeaters in the world.
This might be bearable if you just use the QC link as a key exchange medium, then switch to classic secret-key crypto (e.g. AES) over the Internet once you've agreed on a key. Sending even a huge 512-bit AES key over 20 hops (same link parameters as above) would take just under 5 minutes, which is a pretty decent re-keying interval. 20 hops would get you 1000 miles with near-future tech. (Although 20 DS1-size links would be dedicated just to your re-keying channel, so it'd be hideously expensive. A single non-Internet-connected DS1 runs about $500/month in my area. But I could see it happening between e.g. universities or military bases.)
So, with all those problems in mind, don't expect QC to take over anytime in the next half-century or so. Until a working quantum computer is built (and quantum computers are actually harder than quantum crypto), public-key crypto like RSA and DSA (the stuff that SSL runs on) is still safe and doesn't have as much hassle. And, thankfully, quantum computers don't do jack shit against secret-key crypto. (They can shave 1 bit off your secret key, but that's trivial. They aren't magic wands.)
DAMN! Whoops, now that's one hell of a memory slip. Thanks to both of you for correcting me.
As far as Inferno goes, it was required reading for AP English. We actually had to keep sort of a "reaction diary". The book itself was actually not that bad, except that (A) the Greek influence was so ridiculously thick, you had to keep checking the cover to make sure you were indeed reading a book about the Christian version of hell, and (B) some of the math and science "facts" were uproariously funny, most notably that given Dante's stats on the place, you can only presume that the mouth of hell is approx. the size of Australia (and also some pi confusion regarding circumference/diameter).
It's been a few years since I read it, but IIRC Pius IX was one of the more memorable Popes damned in Dante's Inferno.
Is there something wrong with enjoying *both* Farscape *and* SG-1? Totally different shows, but they're both pretty darn good. (SG-1 moreso in the glory days of mid-S1 to mid-S3 or thereabouts, but still...)
As well as a few select men. *waves hand*
As I mentioned at the start, the rant wanders offtopic. I was referring to the people arrested ^W "detained" and held at Guantanamo Bay for associating with terrorists ^W^W^W "posessing vital intelligence (that magically isn't stale after 3 years)".
No, we don't have a right to GPS signals, but it's yet another example of Bush's 9/11 madness. Should Bush restrict pens and paper next, since terrorists might use them to write letters to each other? Just because terrorists would be inconvenienced doesn't mean it's a worthwhile tradeoff. In particular, killing GPS in an emergency will make the emergency worse, because civilians and emergency services use GPS to coordinate rescue attempts. Killing GPS is doing the terrorists' work for them.
If you think aviators rely exclusively on GPS, you're nuts. There are other navigation systems in place as a fallback, and killing all those navigational systems along with GPS will result in additional dead civilians (because of mid-air collisions, planes running out of fuel and crashing looking for an airport, etc.) on top of whatever the terrorists do.
<rant delivery="sarcastic" offtopic="slightly">
Yeah, this is perfectly logical. Everyone knows that only terrorists would be using GPS during a terrorist attack, and not, say, emergency workers, the FBI, etc. God forbid that a single terrorist be allowed to use the GPS network, regardless of the fact that he's probably already (a) planned for that contingency (esp. since the Bush administration has helpfully announced the fact that the GPS system might be killed at will) or (b) already done all the legwork with GPS while picking his targets and coordinating the attack (so that he can execute the attack without it).
In fact, I also applaud the Bush administration for restricting our freedoms to eliminate the risk that any of the pesky terrorists might receive some. Freedom is a limited resource and must be hoarded and parceled out accordingly, and we can't afford to waste our freedoms (e.g. 1st amendment freedom of assembly, 5th and 6th amendment right to a fair trial) on even a single terrorist. I commend Bush for indefinitely detaining even suspected terrorists at our luxurious Guantanamo Bay facility (which is far nicer than they deserve, let me tell you), because we can't risk a terrorist experiencing our freedoms. God forbid, we might actually have to let one go due to lack of evidence. Terrorists eat babies! We can't let baby-eaters go free! WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?
</rant>
Sounds like an opening to plug Condorcet and Approval voting and ask everyone who agrees to write their state legislators about it. The two-party system will never collapse if we don't do something about it -- too many politicians have made their careers out of playing the duopoly, and they need a fire lit under their ass before they'll upset it. (Oh, and please try not to spook the horses, so to speak. Don't say the "d" word, even if you might be thinking it -- phrase it in positive terms like voter expressiveness, legislative teamwork, and the like. You should also butter them up with some examples specific to their party, like Libertarians and Perot for the Republicans, or Greens and Nader for the Democrats. Think of your target audience. And if you send an e-mail, follow up with a written letter if you don't get a reply in a reasonable amount of time.)
I consider myself little-l libertarian on social issues (even moreso than the usual lefty issues, e.g. I'm in favor of responsible gun ownership and slightly in favor of concealed carry), but center-left on economics (favor antitrust law and progressive taxes).