This is pretty obviously a blatant plug by the parent company of BayGen, LNUX, to sell their hand powered flashlights. Bet tomorrow we'll see their parallel marketing show up on ThinkGeek. This is the same kind of stuff Viacom does with making Destiny's Child show up on MTV eating Popeye's fried chicken.
The corporate leveraging is everywhere. Don't be fooled, and don't let them tell you what to buy.
This article contains many excellent ideas on the future of academic publishing. One idea I haven't seen put forth is the idea of added value: the idea that you can publish a portion of a paper for free, and add value later for a fee.
This model is very farmiliar to anyone who has tried to purchase music online. What about using it for scientific publications? Publish something meatier than a simple abstract, but withhold experimental results and test data for subscribers.
This seems to be a logical compromise between inhibiting peer review and compensating the publishing journals.
All in all I noticed it was a very inclusive article.
30. Is P3P an American technology?
While many of the member companies that worked on P3P are based in the U.S., the specification itself is meant to be international. The P3P vocabulary, for instance, was created with the input of many people both in and outside of the U.S. Nearly half of the members of the working group that worked on the vocabulary were invited experts and staff from international data commissioners' offices, many of which were from Europe. In addition, there has been considerable input from Japan.
Some privacy advocates have argued that P3P distracts from efforts to develop privacy legislation in the U.S.
This initiative is a stake in the heart of the initiative for a Privacy Bill of Rights in the United States. Despite the light coverage of this topic in the FAQ, the widespread adoption and implementation will make it impossible to constrain the access of foreign web sites to the personal information of U.S. citizens. The technological barrier to a citizen's privacy will be in place long before we succeed in guaraunteeing the privassy rights of all Americans.
Don't let Microsoft doom our future. Fight for privacy. Don't use IE6.
This article is not about space blimps. It is about extra-planetary blimps. The distinction, of course, is that an extra-planetary blimp is inflated on a remote planet, and used for exploration. A true space blimp would be inflated in space. This would, of course, cause massive pressure on the hull, and provide no levitation since there is no gravity to push against and no differential air pressure to provide a lifting force.
Space blimps do exist, however. The article just doesn't mention them.
This is the part of the post where I would whine about how the/. editors don't read the stories, if I were that kind of guy.
No legal liability, no large legal fees for the trial lawyers.
I realize that we, the readers of slashdot, have a lot of pent-up cynicism towards lawyers. But I think that it's hard to say that their every move is dictated by financial gain. Look at the Supreme Court's recent decision that mandatory workplace arbitration is legal.
For those of you not familiar with the decision, it basically says that employers can force you to sign a special agreement before you come to work for a company, and that agreement says that you cannot sue them, but instead must enter a binding "arbitration process", where an "arbiter" that they choose decides whether you have a legitimate complaint or not.
Obviously, this is going to cut down on the number of lawsuits by employees against employers, since it will become illegal to do so in a few years after all employers have made "arbitration agreements" part of their hiring procedure. We will be spared those tiresome lawsuits about racial discrimination and sexual harassment - it will be illegal to sue your employer over that crap!
Obviously this decision isn't in the best interest of the lawyers who make their living suing people in civil court. Yet it was fully supported by the American Bar Assosciation! Because they had our best interests at heart. Personally, I hate it when someone sues my company for "gender bias" or whatever, and cuts into my hard earned stock options, and I'm glad that this decision will protect my company's assets from being raided by our legal system.
In short, the ABA isn't always out to make money. Sometimes they're looking out for our best interest! Their press release clearly states that they are interested in preserving "basic rights of consumers". Personally, I am inclined to believe them.
...but this is just a natural consequence of the Hollywood Writer's Strike. Studios are saving what good scripts they have, hedging their bets with old cult classics and stuff like Monty Python. Yes, we all love it, but do you really want to be a pawn for the studios, watching this scab movie while underpaid screen writers strike in solidarity?
The longer the studios can pull stuff like this, the more time they have to organize a flood of illegal Mexican writers to take the place of hard working American script writers. If we continue to allow the studios to recycle old movies while the Writers Guild withers, the lower the chances that the sequel to Battlefield Earth will ever be made.
Don't pawn our future for a few cheap laughs. Rent it on video instead.
Dark matter accretes. This means that when it comes into contact with normal matter, it transforms it into dark matter too. This is unstoppable.
Um, are you really majoring in physics? Are you just spouting off the top of your head? I'm not sure you know what you're talking about when it comes to dark matter.
First off, the story which/. failed to directly link to (as I have just done!) clearly states that dark matter is at the core of the experiment! They have used lasers to compress dark matter to the point where it creates an anti-matter star. While there would certainly be disastrous consequences if this ball of anti-matter were to come into contact with real matter (my first rough sketch comes out to a 350 Megaton yield for each square foot of compressed anti-matter, but feel free to double check) it is made very clear that this pseudo-star (is that what we should call christina aguilera?) is safely contained by the laser containment field.
The benefits of this research, namely determing the mass density of the Universe (from the Berkley dark matter paper: "A parameter known as the "mass density" - that is, how much matter per unit volume is contained in the Universe") is far more important than any possible laser containment field leak. Not that any such leak is likely.
Quit with your babbling and stick to the facts. If you want, you can learn more about laser containment fields here.
If the only reason you like your management job is so you can fire passionate employees, I either say you can have your damn management job, or I hope to God I can get a management position to keep another guy like you from taking charge.
Absolutely not! Firing employees is far from being the best part of managing a development group. The actual process of firing someone is horrendous, they're always very emotional, and the paperwork that can ensue is dreadful. However, the upside comes slowly over the next couple of months. Unlike many professions, it is possible for engineers to have negative productivity. I refer, of course, to the Bible of technical management: The Mythical Man Month. The title of the book, summarized quickly, refers to the fact that 30 men working for a day can't do the work of one man working for a month. This effect is particularly true in software engineering, where a superb engineer can not only do the work of 10 bad engineers, but sometimes, the work can only be done by a superb engineer! Conversely, bad engineers can hinder the work. This is why firing people with negative productivity can be so rewarding - a single bad cog in the machine can slow everyone down. "This wouldn't have happened if we had just used Apache" -BLAH BLAH BLAH! That doesn't get PRODUCT to the CUSTOMER! And it's bad for morale.
The things I enjoy in my job are delivering solutions that work to customers that have cash. Anything that gets in the way of that I destroy.
It's just part of being a manager. More money means more responsibility and a lot more stress. But when you do it right - more credit, and success and financial security for everyone in the company.
Sorry if my original post gave you the wrong impression.
I started out writing code with a four year degree, and while it was a good living, I had one problem with that career path: lack of control. My projects could be scrapped without warning, or sent in directions by Marketing that were totally without technological merit. That's why I went back to school - I got my MBA from Johns Hopkins through their three-year night school program. I was able to work my way through the experience, and I feel that it was totally the right way to go for me personally.
It's not the right path for everyone. If you have bad social skills, don't like to make command decisions, or don't feel that you're a pro-active person, you should probably just keep on writing code. But if you feel that you can combine your technical expertise with leadership abilites, an MBA is a great stepping stone.
Managing a technical project is very stressful work (I've heard the task of managing developers compared to "herding cats") but it can be very rewarding. Last year I finally had the opportunity to fire the office "Open Source Zealot" - the guy who wasted everyone's time complaining how "Outlook is insecure" and "I only use Linux on my notebook computer". The things you can do as a good manager:
- Refining your working unit only to productive, focused people,
- Refining your product definition to a technologically innovative, easy-to-use product
- Keeping your team in touch with the latest advancements in the marketplace
... can be part of the most rewarding career experience you will ever undergo.
For more information, Sharon is the man (so to speak).
I thik that everyone is over reacting. This is not what everyone is saying, it is not so you can kill people in U.S. and use some Lichenstein Law to say "I didn't kill him". This treaty is so that all those countries will stopstealingoursoftware.
Now that the e-everything bubble has crashed and world has come to it's senses, software vendors are feeling the hurt.
"Vietnam has the world's highest piracy rate at 97 per cent, China has 95 per cent"
With numbers like that, can you blame the software business for wanting people to start paying for their products? Red China's idea of "buy the people, for the people" is great and all, but in America we have decided that you must pay for a product. And that is what this treaty is intended to do: help lawmakers get people to pay for a product.
If they have failed to word this clearly, that is their fault, and if Stallman has blown it out of proportion - well, that is his fault. But please keep in mind that this treaty is intended to combat piracy, not create a illuminating conspiracy.
If you don't think that Felten set up the RIAA, go to his web page, check out his smirking picture, and follow the link that says "Freedom of Speech". He links to the page at RIAA.com that talks about music and freedom of expression. He's a total smartass.
And this lawsuit is pretty much the kind of thing a smartass would dream up. He reminds me of the kid who grew up sitting in the front of class with his hand in the air all the time, trying to outsmart the teacher. It's not about who's right, it's all about attention.
The RIAA has been very clear in communicating to everyone that they have no intention to sue Professor Felten.
The Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation (SDMI) does not - nor did it ever - intend to bring any legal action against Professor Felten or his co-authors.
So why is this case happening? Because Felten is suing the Attorney General of the United States! He is suing the plaintiffs using a legal construct known as a "Declaratory Judgment suit", which basically allows you to sue someone first so they can't sue you. Since the RIAA has already stated in public that they have no intention of suing Felten, it's pretty obvious to everyone that he is just picking a fight. Which, considering the people who are risking their entire professional careers to decide a real DMCA issue, paints a very accurate picture of Felten: still the annoying kid trying to get attention. If he ever got in a real fight, with real risks, like Eric Corley has - he'd run.
Don't let Felten distract you from the real DMCA issue. Newspaper headlines translate directly into departmental funding at major universities. This isn't about freedom of speech, it's about grant money.
It's perl. Is it a protest statement, or is it a device? Can a judge tell me?
I agree, the dramatic readings and DeCSS as poetry are too long. We need a computer program that you can read as a sound bite, that executes, and still gets the point across. Here's my lame attempt. One up me!
No disrespect intended, but I'm not sure you know what you're dealing with. As an R/C modeler, I can tell you that the incredibe tensile strength of stretched, bonded mylar that we coat our planes in combines very well with the compressive and torsional strength of balsa to create some really sturdy aircraft. I've flown balsa gliders into precision landings in winds gusting up to 50mph.
Lindbergh's plane was cloth over wood!
As far as mounting telemetry in these suckers... yawn? Yes, they make a perfect delivery system for a terrorist. Zero cross section on radar, silent, incredibly hard to see, and they can carry a decent payload.
The big holdup has always been the telemetry, which is quite different than a robotic aircraft. Robotic R/C planes, if perfected and made cheap, would be... a law enforcement nightmare.
My guess is that they (law encforcement) have already thought about this for a while.
The link that specifically mentions Windows, for those of you wondering, is here.
Now what do you guys make of this?
"Used the startup disk in the onboard software suite, but could not find a particular file while hunting around with DOS. This would have been much easier with some bootable media (CD-ROM?) that could run Windows. (Or if Shep was not indoctrinated by that "other" operating system). We may need an emergency boot capability again. After 5+ attempts, finally got the hard drive to take an image off the ghost CD. One of the Autoloader floppies went down, but SSC 2 is now running normally. ( 3+ hours troubleshooting). "
"How is this useful in transporting a message? Could someone either explain what I'm missing"
You're not missing anything, that was my first thought as well. The current analysis of "spooky action at a distance" implies that while there is a statistical correlation, it is insufficient for transmitting data. That fact is something sorely lacking from this Science, and I would like to have it addressed. Spooky interaction of electron spin is not sufficient for communicating a message, though it may be useful for verifying a message. What gives?
Check out the heading "Putting Entangled Photons to Work" here for more info. There's a lot missing in this quantum encryption proposal mentioned in the article...
Did you guys catch the really cool part about this proposal? Entangled photon pairs react in such a way that when the state of one photon is changed, the other is changed instantly. Therefore this is not just quantum encrypted communication, but quantum encrypted communication faster than the speed of light.
If you want to read a to read a far less pseudo-science description of this phenomenon, may I suggest the unisci article. There's a good article on the whole entanglement phenomenon at Daily Insight here.
p.s. "spooky action at a distance" was Einstein's phrase for it...
While we're dropping cool terms in the story header, let's pretend for a moment that no one knows what MEMS based storage is, and give them the link to the MEMS Research Unit at CMU, where they are prototyping and developing this stuff right now.
The short story is that it's a very small sled containing magnetic data (on a substrate) that is pushed by very small actuators of an assembly over read/write heads. It fits on the price/speed/storage curve somewhere in between hard drives and Flash. If you want to know more from people who actually know what they're talking about, read the intro and then click on their research papers.
I sure wish you could buy the stuff, but it's still a few years from primetime.
Slashdot Mirror
While you're busy fighting the RIAA in France, could you also fight the Evil Empire in my pants?
Or maybe you meant the DMCA and the MPAA in America as applied by the Hague Treaty, but then, that would require a clue.
This is pretty obviously a blatant plug by the parent company of BayGen, LNUX, to sell their hand powered flashlights. Bet tomorrow we'll see their parallel marketing show up on ThinkGeek. This is the same kind of stuff Viacom does with making Destiny's Child show up on MTV eating Popeye's fried chicken.
The corporate leveraging is everywhere. Don't be fooled, and don't let them tell you what to buy.
This article contains many excellent ideas on the future of academic publishing. One idea I haven't seen put forth is the idea of added value: the idea that you can publish a portion of a paper for free, and add value later for a fee.
This model is very farmiliar to anyone who has tried to purchase music online. What about using it for scientific publications? Publish something meatier than a simple abstract, but withhold experimental results and test data for subscribers.
This seems to be a logical compromise between inhibiting peer review and compensating the publishing journals.
All in all I noticed it was a very inclusive article.
From the p3p FAQ:
30. Is P3P an American technology?
While many of the member companies that worked on P3P are based in the U.S., the specification itself is meant to be international. The P3P vocabulary, for instance, was created with the input of many people both in and outside of the U.S. Nearly half of the members of the working group that worked on the vocabulary were invited experts and staff from international data commissioners' offices, many of which were from Europe. In addition, there has been considerable input from Japan.
Some privacy advocates have argued that P3P distracts from efforts to develop privacy legislation in the U.S.
This initiative is a stake in the heart of the initiative for a Privacy Bill of Rights in the United States. Despite the light coverage of this topic in the FAQ, the widespread adoption and implementation will make it impossible to constrain the access of foreign web sites to the personal information of U.S. citizens. The technological barrier to a citizen's privacy will be in place long before we succeed in guaraunteeing the privassy rights of all Americans.
Don't let Microsoft doom our future. Fight for privacy. Don't use IE6.
This article is not about space blimps. It is about extra-planetary blimps. The distinction, of course, is that an extra-planetary blimp is inflated on a remote planet, and used for exploration. A true space blimp would be inflated in space. This would, of course, cause massive pressure on the hull, and provide no levitation since there is no gravity to push against and no differential air pressure to provide a lifting force.
/. editors don't read the stories, if I were that kind of guy.
Space blimps do exist, however. The article just doesn't mention them.
This is the part of the post where I would whine about how the
No legal liability, no large legal fees for the trial lawyers.
I realize that we, the readers of slashdot, have a lot of pent-up cynicism towards lawyers. But I think that it's hard to say that their every move is dictated by financial gain. Look at the Supreme Court's recent decision that mandatory workplace arbitration is legal.
For those of you not familiar with the decision, it basically says that employers can force you to sign a special agreement before you come to work for a company, and that agreement says that you cannot sue them, but instead must enter a binding "arbitration process", where an "arbiter" that they choose decides whether you have a legitimate complaint or not.
Obviously, this is going to cut down on the number of lawsuits by employees against employers, since it will become illegal to do so in a few years after all employers have made "arbitration agreements" part of their hiring procedure. We will be spared those tiresome lawsuits about racial discrimination and sexual harassment - it will be illegal to sue your employer over that crap!
Obviously this decision isn't in the best interest of the lawyers who make their living suing people in civil court. Yet it was fully supported by the American Bar Assosciation! Because they had our best interests at heart. Personally, I hate it when someone sues my company for "gender bias" or whatever, and cuts into my hard earned stock options, and I'm glad that this decision will protect my company's assets from being raided by our legal system.
In short, the ABA isn't always out to make money. Sometimes they're looking out for our best interest! Their press release clearly states that they are interested in preserving "basic rights of consumers". Personally, I am inclined to believe them.
...but this is just a natural consequence of the Hollywood Writer's Strike. Studios are saving what good scripts they have, hedging their bets with old cult classics and stuff like Monty Python. Yes, we all love it, but do you really want to be a pawn for the studios, watching this scab movie while underpaid screen writers strike in solidarity?
The longer the studios can pull stuff like this, the more time they have to organize a flood of illegal Mexican writers to take the place of hard working American script writers. If we continue to allow the studios to recycle old movies while the Writers Guild withers, the lower the chances that the sequel to Battlefield Earth will ever be made.
Don't pawn our future for a few cheap laughs. Rent it on video instead.
Dark matter accretes. This means that when it comes into contact with normal matter, it transforms it into dark matter too. This is unstoppable.
/. failed to directly link to (as I have just done!) clearly states that dark matter is at the core of the experiment! They have used lasers to compress dark matter to the point where it creates an anti-matter star. While there would certainly be disastrous consequences if this ball of anti-matter were to come into contact with real matter (my first rough sketch comes out to a 350 Megaton yield for each square foot of compressed anti-matter, but feel free to double check) it is made very clear that this pseudo-star (is that what we should call christina aguilera?) is safely contained by the laser containment field.
Um, are you really majoring in physics? Are you just spouting off the top of your head? I'm not sure you know what you're talking about when it comes to dark matter.
First off, the story which
The benefits of this research, namely determing the mass density of the Universe (from the Berkley dark matter paper: "A parameter known as the "mass density" - that is, how much matter per unit volume is contained in the Universe") is far more important than any possible laser containment field leak. Not that any such leak is likely.
Quit with your babbling and stick to the facts. If you want, you can learn more about laser containment fields here.
If I were you I wouldn't bother.
If the only reason you like your management job is so you can fire passionate employees, I either say you can have your damn management job, or I hope to God I can get a management position to keep another guy like you from taking charge.
Absolutely not! Firing employees is far from being the best part of managing a development group. The actual process of firing someone is horrendous, they're always very emotional, and the paperwork that can ensue is dreadful. However, the upside comes slowly over the next couple of months. Unlike many professions, it is possible for engineers to have negative productivity. I refer, of course, to the Bible of technical management: The Mythical Man Month. The title of the book, summarized quickly, refers to the fact that 30 men working for a day can't do the work of one man working for a month. This effect is particularly true in software engineering, where a superb engineer can not only do the work of 10 bad engineers, but sometimes, the work can only be done by a superb engineer! Conversely, bad engineers can hinder the work. This is why firing people with negative productivity can be so rewarding - a single bad cog in the machine can slow everyone down. "This wouldn't have happened if we had just used Apache" -BLAH BLAH BLAH! That doesn't get PRODUCT to the CUSTOMER! And it's bad for morale.
The things I enjoy in my job are delivering solutions that work to customers that have cash. Anything that gets in the way of that I destroy.
It's just part of being a manager. More money means more responsibility and a lot more stress. But when you do it right - more credit, and success and financial security for everyone in the company.
Sorry if my original post gave you the wrong impression.
I started out writing code with a four year degree, and while it was a good living, I had one problem with that career path: lack of control. My projects could be scrapped without warning, or sent in directions by Marketing that were totally without technological merit. That's why I went back to school - I got my MBA from Johns Hopkins through their three-year night school program. I was able to work my way through the experience, and I feel that it was totally the right way to go for me personally.
It's not the right path for everyone. If you have bad social skills, don't like to make command decisions, or don't feel that you're a pro-active person, you should probably just keep on writing code. But if you feel that you can combine your technical expertise with leadership abilites, an MBA is a great stepping stone.
Managing a technical project is very stressful work (I've heard the task of managing developers compared to "herding cats") but it can be very rewarding. Last year I finally had the opportunity to fire the office "Open Source Zealot" - the guy who wasted everyone's time complaining how "Outlook is insecure" and "I only use Linux on my notebook computer". The things you can do as a good manager:
- Refining your working unit only to productive, focused people,
- Refining your product definition to a technologically innovative, easy-to-use product
- Keeping your team in touch with the latest advancements in the marketplace
... can be part of the most rewarding career experience you will ever undergo.
For more information, Sharon is the man (so to speak).
Good luck!
I thik that everyone is over reacting. This is not what everyone is saying, it is not so you can kill people in U.S. and use some Lichenstein Law to say "I didn't kill him". This treaty is so that all those countries will stop stealing our software.
Now that the e-everything bubble has crashed and world has come to it's senses, software vendors are feeling the hurt.
"Vietnam has the world's highest piracy rate at 97 per cent, China has 95 per cent"
With numbers like that, can you blame the software business for wanting people to start paying for their products? Red China's idea of "buy the people, for the people" is great and all, but in America we have decided that you must pay for a product. And that is what this treaty is intended to do: help lawmakers get people to pay for a product.
If they have failed to word this clearly, that is their fault, and if Stallman has blown it out of proportion - well, that is his fault. But please keep in mind that this treaty is intended to combat piracy, not create a illuminating conspiracy.
Let's not Rush to judgement?
If you don't think that Felten set up the RIAA, go to his web page, check out his smirking picture, and follow the link that says "Freedom of Speech". He links to the page at RIAA.com that talks about music and freedom of expression. He's a total smartass.
And this lawsuit is pretty much the kind of thing a smartass would dream up. He reminds me of the kid who grew up sitting in the front of class with his hand in the air all the time, trying to outsmart the teacher. It's not about who's right, it's all about attention.
The RIAA has been very clear in communicating to everyone that they have no intention to sue Professor Felten.
The Secure Digital Music Initiative Foundation (SDMI) does not - nor did it ever - intend to bring any legal action against Professor Felten or his co-authors.
So why is this case happening? Because Felten is suing the Attorney General of the United States! He is suing the plaintiffs using a legal construct known as a "Declaratory Judgment suit", which basically allows you to sue someone first so they can't sue you. Since the RIAA has already stated in public that they have no intention of suing Felten, it's pretty obvious to everyone that he is just picking a fight. Which, considering the people who are risking their entire professional careers to decide a real DMCA issue, paints a very accurate picture of Felten: still the annoying kid trying to get attention. If he ever got in a real fight, with real risks, like Eric Corley has - he'd run.
Don't let Felten distract you from the real DMCA issue. Newspaper headlines translate directly into departmental funding at major universities. This isn't about freedom of speech, it's about grant money.
hmmm, let me think.
$Disney = Money + Mouse;
It's perl. Is it a protest statement, or is it a device? Can a judge tell me?
I agree, the dramatic readings and DeCSS as poetry are too long. We need a computer program that you can read as a sound bite, that executes, and still gets the point across. Here's my lame attempt. One up me!
"take a picture of the screen with a digital camera."
Digital cameras are circumvention devices! MPAA sues Kodak! News at 11!
Best Buy is the world's largest distributor of circumvention devices...
No disrespect intended, but I'm not sure you know what you're dealing with. As an R/C modeler, I can tell you that the incredibe tensile strength of stretched, bonded mylar that we coat our planes in combines very well with the compressive and torsional strength of balsa to create some really sturdy aircraft. I've flown balsa gliders into precision landings in winds gusting up to 50mph.
Lindbergh's plane was cloth over wood!
As far as mounting telemetry in these suckers... yawn? Yes, they make a perfect delivery system for a terrorist. Zero cross section on radar, silent, incredibly hard to see, and they can carry a decent payload.
The big holdup has always been the telemetry, which is quite different than a robotic aircraft. Robotic R/C planes, if perfected and made cheap, would be... a law enforcement nightmare.
My guess is that they (law encforcement) have already thought about this for a while.
The link that specifically mentions Windows, for those of you wondering, is here.
Now what do you guys make of this?
"Used the startup disk in the onboard software suite, but could not find a particular file while hunting around with DOS. This would have been much easier with some bootable media (CD-ROM?) that could run Windows. (Or if Shep was not indoctrinated by that "other" operating system). We may need an emergency boot capability again. After 5+ attempts, finally got the hard drive to take an image off the ghost CD. One of the Autoloader floppies went down, but SSC 2 is now running normally. ( 3+ hours troubleshooting). "
Guesses? Bets?
"How is this useful in transporting a message? Could someone either explain what I'm missing"
You're not missing anything, that was my first thought as well. The current analysis of "spooky action at a distance" implies that while there is a statistical correlation, it is insufficient for transmitting data. That fact is something sorely lacking from this Science, and I would like to have it addressed. Spooky interaction of electron spin is not sufficient for communicating a message, though it may be useful for verifying a message. What gives?
Check out the heading "Putting Entangled Photons to Work" here for more info. There's a lot missing in this quantum encryption proposal mentioned in the article...
Did you guys catch the really cool part about this proposal? Entangled photon pairs react in such a way that when the state of one photon is changed, the other is changed instantly. Therefore this is not just quantum encrypted communication, but quantum encrypted communication faster than the speed of light.
If you want to read a to read a far less pseudo-science description of this phenomenon, may I suggest the unisci article. There's a good article on the whole entanglement phenomenon at Daily Insight here.
p.s. "spooky action at a distance" was Einstein's phrase for it...
...may it never reach my house.
Convergence usually implies corporate control
No thanks. Keep my meat well cooked and my hardware open and free.
since we just /.ed the RFC editor site to hell, have a mirror of both
sigh.
Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you receieve.
While we're dropping cool terms in the story header, let's pretend for a moment that no one knows what MEMS based storage is, and give them the link to the MEMS Research Unit at CMU, where they are prototyping and developing this stuff right now.
The short story is that it's a very small sled containing magnetic data (on a substrate) that is pushed by very small actuators of an assembly over read/write heads. It fits on the price/speed/storage curve somewhere in between hard drives and Flash. If you want to know more from people who actually know what they're talking about, read the intro and then click on their research papers.
I sure wish you could buy the stuff, but it's still a few years from primetime.
/.ed means : Windows NT error number 2 occurred.
heh.
here's a mirror.
"of course, a starved, feral orangutan with razor-sharp claws and a taste for blood let loose in a daycare would be better than light mode."
It's called prozac, jamie.
Check it out the FBI defaced the hacker's web site.
Now that's just cold.
Here's how the FBI hacks:
1) They fly you to America
2) They pay you to log into your computer
3) They sniff the traffic
4) They log into your computer
It's a brilliant plan!!