I live within a mile of the ocean, and we have a lot of fixtures in our house which must be made of zinc, because they grow these whiskers just like were described. We have a chandelier in particular which looks like it's brass, but it's always covered with fuzz. Then I have a chin-up bar in a doorway and the same thing happens to it.
I wonder if it has to do with some kind of electrochemical reaction, where maybe there have to be different unlike metals with varying electronegativity, and enough humidity to get a low grade current flowing between them. I never saw this problem, when I lived elsewhere. But if my computers had zinc in them I'm sure it would grow whiskers just like the rest of my house.
nice image showing gravitonal waves in the rings (link)
Not sure what you mean by gravitational waves let alone gravitonal waves, but there does seem to be some interesting structure in the outer ring in that picture. It reminds me of the famous braided ring spotted by the Pioneer 11 fly-by. I don't remember if Voyager saw this kind of thing.
This all goes back to the Steve Jackson Games decision of 1994. The Secret Service had seized a BBS belonging to Steve Jackson Games, and SJG sued because the computer also held some unretrieved private email. However, SJG lost on the same grounds as in this case, that email in storage is not protected by the literal language of the Wiretap Act. It may be a technicality, but it's been the law for over ten years.
The concept that uncountable sets exist is just silly.
The real numbers are an uncountable set. Are you saying that it is just silly to believe that real numbers exist?
How long is the diagonal of a unit square, if sqrt(2) doesn't exist? How long is the circumference of a unit circle, if pi doesn't exist?
The Pythagoreans of ancient Greece believed as you do, and when they found out about the sqrt(2) business, they did their best to hush it up. Unfortunately for them, the truth got out. Ever since, the concept of limiting mathematics to countable sets has been unsuccessful. There are too many inviting pathways into uncountability to put up barriers on all of them.
You will not lose your job. You will not lose your bonus. You might get a raise, and maybe even a promotion. If you're so insecure at your job that going home at 5 loses it for you, you lost it already.
I can say from over 25 years of experience working as a developer, 20 of them with kids, that this is 100% true. It's a cultural thing, maybe even biological. Young guys without kids are expected to take risks and knock themselves out for the benefit of the tribe. Once they get a family going, they automatically become respected elders.
You can't blow off work to head down to the video game parlor, but you can do it to go be with your family. People will respect and admire you for your priorities.
The truth is, this is your best opportunity to move into management, if you have any interest in that area. It's the cycle of life. You're moving into a new phase, and things are going to be different now.
So the movie, while funny, utterly fails to make any commentary that has any real meaning. It's a mockumentary at best. He didn't actually prove anything that anybody wouldn't have known from hearing the premise.
I agree. I'll bet you could eat every meal at McDonalds and remain perfectly healthy. Eat a lot of salads and a variety of protein sources, chicken, fish and beef. That's not so different from my Atkins diet and my triglyceride levels have never been better.
It would be an interesting experiment and you could even make a documentary about it. But you know what? It would be a commercial flop. Good news never sells.
The Wired NextFest issue showed six different conceptual designs for convergence devices, which combine phone, camera, and PC functionality. Click on the thumbnails to pop up images of the various concepts, many of which are similar to the one discussed in this article.
Personally I'm waiting for retinal painter displays, unobtrusive little gadgets that can make windows appear in space in front of us. That way we can have a big screen for gaming or computer work, anywhere we are, without lugging around the hardware. Just put on a lightweight, attractive pair of glasses and it's like you're looking at a 40 inch monitor. The hardware needn't be any more expensive than a Game Boy type screen, and the functionality would be enormously greater.
Let me give a little commentary about what's in the sample cube pic. (BTW, does anybody have a mirror of the animation?)
We have a 3 dimensional cube shown on a 2 dimensional display, so the image can be a little confusing. Every dot represents a connection attempt to a machine at the conference, presumably mostly laptops being used by attendees. Successful connections are shown in "white" supposedly, but on my display they look gray. The colored dots are all unsuccessful connections, connection attempts where the machine did not respond. The presumption is that the vast majority of these are attacks and scans.
The left to right access represents the IP address of the machine at the confernece being attacked. Back to front is the IP address of the machine doing the attacking, from out on the internet. Bottom to top is the port number. To aid in viewing, the unsuccessful connections are shown in a color that represents the port, i.e. their height in the cube. That's all the color means. Red and orange are at the bottom for low numbered ports, then through yellow, green and blue in the middle ports, up to purple and back to red at the top for high number ports.
Now let's take a look at the picture. The main feature that jumps out is that most of the dots are colored; there are a lot more attacks than successful connections. Presumably these laptops are not hosting many legitimate servers. Second, we see that most of the dots are orange, meaning that they are attempts to connect on low numbered ports. That makes sense, as most services listen on standard low numbered ports of 1024 or less, or a bit more. That's why we see so many orange dots. Those are attempts to connect to web servers, mail servers, various Windows services that are known to be vulnerable, etc.
Another feature of the orange dots is that they are largely clustered towards the back, which would mean that the attacks are coming from Internet addresses which are relatively low in the address range. Looking closely, I make it out to be about 1/4 of the way from the back to the front, which would correspond to IP addresses of around 64.X.X.X. If we look at the first field of IPV4 addresses, ARIN (North America) has 24, then 63-70; APNIC (Asia/Pacific) has 60-61; RIPE (Europe) has 62, then 80-84, and all of them go on up from there. I'm not sure of the worldwide distribution of IP addresses but I suspect that accounts for the fact that many of the attacks and scans are coming from the 60-80 range or so, on the graph. There's another cluster of IPV4 address assignments in the 198-222 range, and that corresponds to a weak cluster of orange dots near the front of the cube, at the bottom.
Another feature we can see is some vertical structure in the blue and cyan dots, especially to the left and the right. These represent port scans, where a particular host machine is making connection attempts to a series of port numbers on a particular target machine. Such scans show up as vertical lines. Here we don't have a full line but only aligned dots, so we may be missing some packets, or the scan may be accessing only selected ports.
Well, that's about as far as I can go with my analysis. But you can see that if you had a real-time display of the last N minutes or seconds of activity, it would show you a visual picture of scans into your network. Probably be pretty hypnotic. Of course I'm not sure it makes sense to pay somebody to stare at it all day... you'd probably want to run a sped-up version at the end of the day and see if anything untoward leaped out.
Number one, one could claim that he had his files up for his own personal use and he had them encrypted so that nobody else could access them. Number two, if the RIAA broke the encryption to see that you are sharing files, then *BAM* sue them under the DMCA for circumventing encryption.
The problem is that the DMCA only bans circumventing encryption that protects copyrighted material. If the RIAA represents the copyright holder then it's probably legal for them to circumvent encryption that protects their own copyrights.
Now, you could put some of your own stuff up too, encrypted, and it would in fact be a violation for them to decrypt your stuff. But it would be hard to prove, because they probably wouldn't admit it. At best you could build a circumstantial case that if they caught you sharing your Britney collection, they must have decrypted a lot of your songs, so they would probably also have decrypted your recording of you singing in the shower. But that would be iffy.
And how would your legitimate file-sharing buddies know which songs were Britney and which were you? If you give them distinctive titles then the RIAA can argue that they only decrypted the ones which looked like they owned them. And if you don't, if you put your shower-singing up as a Britney song, then everyone on the net is going to be pissed because there will be all these bogus songs up there under the name of good songs. So you'd be undercutting the effectiveness of the file sharing networks.
And you'd still have only a circumstantial case with no direct evidence of DMCA infringement.
AG Cairns-Smith is famous for his theory that the first forms of life on earth were actually mineral in nature. Only later did they evolve the ability to synthesize, manipulate and control organic molecules. Eventually the organics got so sophisticated that the life forms dropped the mineral part and we got the kind of life we have today.
One of the interesting things about these nanobacteria (or nannobacteria as some people (mis?)spell it) is that they seem to be associated with minerals. In fact part of the controversy over the recent experiments is whether the apparent reproduction of the nanobacteria is possibly just mineral crystal growth. And the nature of the mineral shells associated with the nanobacteria is similar to known non-organic mineral growth.
It's possible that the skeptics are right and there is no life here, just a natural process. But if minerals are growing and replicating as little balls, that really does call to mind Cairns-Smith's theory. If these minerals could then catalyze organic reactions to maintain the chemical state which promotes their growth, we'd essentially have the pre-biotic life forms that Cairns-Smith postulated.
Maybe nanobacteria are remnants of an earlier stage of life in which organisms were part mineral, part organic. They might not have DNA or RNA in the way life does today, but be some strange symbiosis that we have never seen before.
It's pretty easy to design a network that will at least frustrate attempts to recover identities of sharers. Now if only freenet would stop sucking.
No, it's not that easy. The only way to do it is to forward the data via some intermediate node(s). That's what Freenet does, and it's really hard to make that work right. It makes data transmission tend to be really slow, which is one of the reasons Freenet sucks. I have yet to see a large scale network which forwards data like this that doesn't suck.
Plus, it may not even work legally. If I can request data from node X and it gives it to me, the fact that it forwarded the request to node Y and then forwarded the reply data back to me may not matter. X may still be liable. The legal doctrines of contributory and/or vicarious infringement can make servers liable even when they don't directly provide the data (and in fact you could even argue in this case that they are direct infringers).
People talk about 'common carriers' and such but this is not legally precise. Ironically the best defense may come from the much maligned DMCA, not the part that criminalizes decryption, but the other part, that provides 'safe harbor' loopholes for ISPs so they can't be found liable when their subscribers infringe. It's possible that Freenet-type node operators could find protection there. But it's written very specifically to protect ISPs. Napster (the old Napster) tried to take harbor there but was not successful.
So it is very questionable whether even a system like Freenet which forwards requests and data node-to-node can provide legal protection. And it is further questionable whether it can be made to work technically and can overcome the speed penalties this kind of transmission imposes. My suspicion is that these press announcements are more hype than reality.
openswan and an IP address somewhere is all thats needed to 'bury a filesharing service'.
Well, it's not 'buried' if you have to know the IP address to access it, is it? That information is all that is necessary to subpoena the ISP and find and sue the owner. Or what, is there a secret password to access the system? Then whatever means is used to distribute that password, the RIAA can find it as well.
(If anyone knows of some good VPN's, please share! heh heh...)
See? You're relying on obscurity, not security. Anyone who would share with you will share with the RIAA.
The problem with social networks is that the number of songs is too small. Sharing with 10 million other people is going to give you a lot more choice than sharing with 10 or 100.
On the contrary, MWI type interpretations are the only ones which do not view measurement as magical. If we assume that measurements are ordinary quantum interactions, which obviously we must, then it follows that there is no collapse of the wave function, and all outcomes of measurements occur.
It's not that the universe splits, it's that the result is as if the universe split, because we end up with the wave function representable mathematically as different components that have effectively no causal interaction between them. Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead, but the evolution of the wave function can be decomposed into the sum of the part where it is alive and the part where it is dead, and both parts are going their merry ways without interaction. So we only see one of the two outcomes, but there are other versions of us that see the other outcome.
To disbelieve the MWI it is necessary to invoke magical physics when measurement occurs in order to trim out the undesired and unobserved worlds. Yet as we study decoherence theory and experiment, we see no signs of any such non-physical effect! Why is that, unless the reason is that there is no such effect and the other worlds exist?
(5) It shall not be a violation of this title to manufacture, distribute, or make noninfringing use of a hardware or software product capable of enabling significant noninfringing use of a copyrighted work.
As others have pointed out, this is by far the most important part of the bill. It amends section 1201 of the copyright code, which is better known as the DMCA. This innocent-sounding clause effectively repeals the entire DMCA!
The reason is because any device which is presently illegal under the DMCA because it allows for infringing copyright, would now become legal. Anything which allows for "infringing" copyright uses will also, by its very nature, allow for "non-infringing" uses. For example, DeCSS, which is widely used for infringement, also can be used for fair use purposes.
The net result is that this provision would remove all restrictions on the manufacture, distribution or sale of devices which completely and utterly defeat copyright protection. The only remaining restriction would be on the private usage of the devices for that purpose - technically that would still be illegal, but since it is done in the privacy of the home, this part would be unenforceable.
In short, this provision effectively repeals the DMCA by eliminating all of its enforceable provisions. As a result, its chances of passage in this form are approximately... let's see... carry the 2... divide by 10... oh, yes. It's chances of passage are approximately zero.
This is a good idea, but it doesn't go far enough.
I didn't just block Spain. I set my system to blackhole the whole damn world!
Just think of it! All over the world, anybody tries to send me email, and it disappears into a black hole. Eat dirt, spammers!
And of course all the legitimate email disappears as well. But that's the point! When I talk to someone and they complain that I didn't respond to their email, I explain that it's not me - it's their world's policies about spam! Once you get your act together and get spam off the net, then I'll unblock you, I say. Until then, don't come crying to me - talk to your ISP, to your elected representatives, to the UN. That's where the problem is, and until you can solve it with them... you're blocked.
Yup. I figure this spam business is going to get cleaned up PDQ once people realize what it's costing them. We're going to get a nice, spam-free net, and it's all because of me. You're welcome.
I think that basically what you're missing is that 'they' can't tell you what you can and can't do with their products after you purchase them.
Maybe they can't tell you, but what if they ask you to observe certain restrictions in exchange for what they're giving you, and you agree? You don't feel bound by your word? You think it's okay to make a promise and then break it just because you feel like it, and they can't stop you?
Or maybe you think that some President, or Legislature, or King has the power to pass a proclamation and suddenly you are not bound by your promises, you can lie and falsify and break your word, and you have no moral obligation because the King said so? How could some politician or government official acquire this kind of moral authority, that at a stroke he can absolve all his subjects of the ethical necessity to honestly keep their word?
I would think this kind of authority would come only from a Higher Power. Show me where in your moral code it says that it's okay to break your promises as long as you can get away with it?
The part about "forcing users to provide their decryption keys" is supposedly article 19 clause 4, which reads,
Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to empower its competent authorities to order any person who has knowledge about the functioning of the computer system or measures applied to protect the computer data therein to provide, as is reasonable, the necessary information, to enable the undertaking of the measures referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2.
where paragraphs 1 and 2 talk about being able to search computer systems.
I read this as requiring the administrators of a system to be required to aid the authorities in accessing the data. Making someone turn over their personal decryption keys is a much bigger step and has never been tested in U.S. law.
The scientific paper is available from the physics e-Print archive. According to the abstract:
We analyse the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in hyperbolic universes possessing a non-trivial topology with a fundamental cell having an infinitely long horn. The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we show that the horned topology does not lead to a flat spot in the CMB sky maps in the direction of the horn as stated in the literature. On the other hand, we demonstrate that a horned topology having a finite volume does explain the suppression of the lower multipoles in the CMB anisotropy as observed by COBE and WMAP.
And by the way, it's named after Emile Picard from 1884, not Jean-Luc from the 25th century.
"The Intel PXA27x processor family incorporates the Intel® Wireless Trusted Platform that is designed to provide platform trust and robust security services required for today's wireless devices. Built around the concepts developed by the Trusted Computing Group* (TCG) industry forum..."
When you put it all together, what you get is an absolutely secure protocol for transferring secret bits from point A to point B, no matter what attempted eavesdropping takes place in between.... And again, this is something classical cryptography is incapable of delivering by itself.
That's not true, because to get this supposed absolute security you had to assume perfectly secure authentication, based on principles similar to a one time pad. But if you're going to make that assumption, you might as well just use a one time pad with conventional cryptography and throw out the QC. One time pads give you absolute security, contrary to your claim that classical cryptography can't do it. (Of course you have to assume that the endpoints and key distribution are secure, but that is also necessary for your absolutely secure authentication.)
In short, if you make equivalent assumptions, you get equivalent security. And classical crypto has lower costs and many fewer restrictions on usage.
Your description is almost right, but after receiving the photons, Bob can't tell which ones were "good" or "bad". Instead, the two parties have to exchange cleartext information about which bases they used. Then the ones where they matched are the good photons which can encrypt the message.
The problem is with this cleartext message about the bases. How do you stop an intermediary from altering this message, which could hide her attempts to snoop on the photons? This is the problem of sending an authenticated message, and quantum crypto won't help you with this.
To send the authenticated cleartext message, you either need a tamper-proof channel between the parties, which is usually physically impossible, or you have to fall back on regular crypto, either public key or pre-shared key. So ultimately the supposedly unbreakable security of quantum crypto is in fact dependent on conventional cryptography. And if you're relying on conventional crypto anyway, why go to the expense of using quantum crypto?
In short, there is a great deal of hype here. When closely examined, the physical and computational requirements of quantum crypto don't make sense for the real world. You either need an unrealistic tamper-proof channel, or you rely on regular crypto and get no more security than conventional crypto gives you.
Slashdot Mirror
I live within a mile of the ocean, and we have a lot of fixtures in our house which must be made of zinc, because they grow these whiskers just like were described. We have a chandelier in particular which looks like it's brass, but it's always covered with fuzz. Then I have a chin-up bar in a doorway and the same thing happens to it.
I wonder if it has to do with some kind of electrochemical reaction, where maybe there have to be different unlike metals with varying electronegativity, and enough humidity to get a low grade current flowing between them. I never saw this problem, when I lived elsewhere. But if my computers had zinc in them I'm sure it would grow whiskers just like the rest of my house.
nice image showing gravitonal waves in the rings (link)
Not sure what you mean by gravitational waves let alone gravitonal waves, but there does seem to be some interesting structure in the outer ring in that picture. It reminds me of the famous braided ring spotted by the Pioneer 11 fly-by. I don't remember if Voyager saw this kind of thing.
This all goes back to the Steve Jackson Games decision of 1994. The Secret Service had seized a BBS belonging to Steve Jackson Games, and SJG sued because the computer also held some unretrieved private email. However, SJG lost on the same grounds as in this case, that email in storage is not protected by the literal language of the Wiretap Act. It may be a technicality, but it's been the law for over ten years.
The concept that uncountable sets exist is just silly.
The real numbers are an uncountable set. Are you saying that it is just silly to believe that real numbers exist?
How long is the diagonal of a unit square, if sqrt(2) doesn't exist? How long is the circumference of a unit circle, if pi doesn't exist?
The Pythagoreans of ancient Greece believed as you do, and when they found out about the sqrt(2) business, they did their best to hush it up. Unfortunately for them, the truth got out. Ever since, the concept of limiting mathematics to countable sets has been unsuccessful. There are too many inviting pathways into uncountability to put up barriers on all of them.
You will not lose your job. You will not lose your bonus. You might get a raise, and maybe even a promotion. If you're so insecure at your job that going home at 5 loses it for you, you lost it already.
I can say from over 25 years of experience working as a developer, 20 of them with kids, that this is 100% true. It's a cultural thing, maybe even biological. Young guys without kids are expected to take risks and knock themselves out for the benefit of the tribe. Once they get a family going, they automatically become respected elders.
You can't blow off work to head down to the video game parlor, but you can do it to go be with your family. People will respect and admire you for your priorities.
The truth is, this is your best opportunity to move into management, if you have any interest in that area. It's the cycle of life. You're moving into a new phase, and things are going to be different now.
So the movie, while funny, utterly fails to make any commentary that has any real meaning. It's a mockumentary at best. He didn't actually prove anything that anybody wouldn't have known from hearing the premise.
I agree. I'll bet you could eat every meal at McDonalds and remain perfectly healthy. Eat a lot of salads and a variety of protein sources, chicken, fish and beef. That's not so different from my Atkins diet and my triglyceride levels have never been better.
It would be an interesting experiment and you could even make a documentary about it. But you know what? It would be a commercial flop. Good news never sells.
The Wired NextFest issue showed six different conceptual designs for convergence devices, which combine phone, camera, and PC functionality. Click on the thumbnails to pop up images of the various concepts, many of which are similar to the one discussed in this article.
Personally I'm waiting for retinal painter displays, unobtrusive little gadgets that can make windows appear in space in front of us. That way we can have a big screen for gaming or computer work, anywhere we are, without lugging around the hardware. Just put on a lightweight, attractive pair of glasses and it's like you're looking at a 40 inch monitor. The hardware needn't be any more expensive than a Game Boy type screen, and the functionality would be enormously greater.
Let me give a little commentary about what's in the sample cube pic. (BTW, does anybody have a mirror of the animation?)
We have a 3 dimensional cube shown on a 2 dimensional display, so the image can be a little confusing. Every dot represents a connection attempt to a machine at the conference, presumably mostly laptops being used by attendees. Successful connections are shown in "white" supposedly, but on my display they look gray. The colored dots are all unsuccessful connections, connection attempts where the machine did not respond. The presumption is that the vast majority of these are attacks and scans.
The left to right access represents the IP address of the machine at the confernece being attacked. Back to front is the IP address of the machine doing the attacking, from out on the internet. Bottom to top is the port number. To aid in viewing, the unsuccessful connections are shown in a color that represents the port, i.e. their height in the cube. That's all the color means. Red and orange are at the bottom for low numbered ports, then through yellow, green and blue in the middle ports, up to purple and back to red at the top for high number ports.
Now let's take a look at the picture. The main feature that jumps out is that most of the dots are colored; there are a lot more attacks than successful connections. Presumably these laptops are not hosting many legitimate servers. Second, we see that most of the dots are orange, meaning that they are attempts to connect on low numbered ports. That makes sense, as most services listen on standard low numbered ports of 1024 or less, or a bit more. That's why we see so many orange dots. Those are attempts to connect to web servers, mail servers, various Windows services that are known to be vulnerable, etc.
Another feature of the orange dots is that they are largely clustered towards the back, which would mean that the attacks are coming from Internet addresses which are relatively low in the address range. Looking closely, I make it out to be about 1/4 of the way from the back to the front, which would correspond to IP addresses of around 64.X.X.X. If we look at the first field of IPV4 addresses, ARIN (North America) has 24, then 63-70; APNIC (Asia/Pacific) has 60-61; RIPE (Europe) has 62, then 80-84, and all of them go on up from there. I'm not sure of the worldwide distribution of IP addresses but I suspect that accounts for the fact that many of the attacks and scans are coming from the 60-80 range or so, on the graph. There's another cluster of IPV4 address assignments in the 198-222 range, and that corresponds to a weak cluster of orange dots near the front of the cube, at the bottom.
Another feature we can see is some vertical structure in the blue and cyan dots, especially to the left and the right. These represent port scans, where a particular host machine is making connection attempts to a series of port numbers on a particular target machine. Such scans show up as vertical lines. Here we don't have a full line but only aligned dots, so we may be missing some packets, or the scan may be accessing only selected ports.
Well, that's about as far as I can go with my analysis. But you can see that if you had a real-time display of the last N minutes or seconds of activity, it would show you a visual picture of scans into your network. Probably be pretty hypnotic. Of course I'm not sure it makes sense to pay somebody to stare at it all day... you'd probably want to run a sped-up version at the end of the day and see if anything untoward leaped out.
There are funny jokes hidden behind the pictures. Run with images off to see them.
Number one, one could claim that he had his files up for his own personal use and he had them encrypted so that nobody else could access them. Number two, if the RIAA broke the encryption to see that you are sharing files, then *BAM* sue them under the DMCA for circumventing encryption.
The problem is that the DMCA only bans circumventing encryption that protects copyrighted material. If the RIAA represents the copyright holder then it's probably legal for them to circumvent encryption that protects their own copyrights.
Now, you could put some of your own stuff up too, encrypted, and it would in fact be a violation for them to decrypt your stuff. But it would be hard to prove, because they probably wouldn't admit it. At best you could build a circumstantial case that if they caught you sharing your Britney collection, they must have decrypted a lot of your songs, so they would probably also have decrypted your recording of you singing in the shower. But that would be iffy.
And how would your legitimate file-sharing buddies know which songs were Britney and which were you? If you give them distinctive titles then the RIAA can argue that they only decrypted the ones which looked like they owned them. And if you don't, if you put your shower-singing up as a Britney song, then everyone on the net is going to be pissed because there will be all these bogus songs up there under the name of good songs. So you'd be undercutting the effectiveness of the file sharing networks.
And you'd still have only a circumstantial case with no direct evidence of DMCA infringement.
AG Cairns-Smith is famous for his theory that the first forms of life on earth were actually mineral in nature. Only later did they evolve the ability to synthesize, manipulate and control organic molecules. Eventually the organics got so sophisticated that the life forms dropped the mineral part and we got the kind of life we have today.
One of the interesting things about these nanobacteria (or nannobacteria as some people (mis?)spell it) is that they seem to be associated with minerals. In fact part of the controversy over the recent experiments is whether the apparent reproduction of the nanobacteria is possibly just mineral crystal growth. And the nature of the mineral shells associated with the nanobacteria is similar to known non-organic mineral growth.
It's possible that the skeptics are right and there is no life here, just a natural process. But if minerals are growing and replicating as little balls, that really does call to mind Cairns-Smith's theory. If these minerals could then catalyze organic reactions to maintain the chemical state which promotes their growth, we'd essentially have the pre-biotic life forms that Cairns-Smith postulated.
Maybe nanobacteria are remnants of an earlier stage of life in which organisms were part mineral, part organic. They might not have DNA or RNA in the way life does today, but be some strange symbiosis that we have never seen before.
It's pretty easy to design a network that will at least frustrate attempts to recover identities of sharers. Now if only freenet would stop sucking.
No, it's not that easy. The only way to do it is to forward the data via some intermediate node(s). That's what Freenet does, and it's really hard to make that work right. It makes data transmission tend to be really slow, which is one of the reasons Freenet sucks. I have yet to see a large scale network which forwards data like this that doesn't suck.
Plus, it may not even work legally. If I can request data from node X and it gives it to me, the fact that it forwarded the request to node Y and then forwarded the reply data back to me may not matter. X may still be liable. The legal doctrines of contributory and/or vicarious infringement can make servers liable even when they don't directly provide the data (and in fact you could even argue in this case that they are direct infringers).
People talk about 'common carriers' and such but this is not legally precise. Ironically the best defense may come from the much maligned DMCA, not the part that criminalizes decryption, but the other part, that provides 'safe harbor' loopholes for ISPs so they can't be found liable when their subscribers infringe. It's possible that Freenet-type node operators could find protection there. But it's written very specifically to protect ISPs. Napster (the old Napster) tried to take harbor there but was not successful.
So it is very questionable whether even a system like Freenet which forwards requests and data node-to-node can provide legal protection. And it is further questionable whether it can be made to work technically and can overcome the speed penalties this kind of transmission imposes. My suspicion is that these press announcements are more hype than reality.
openswan and an IP address somewhere is all thats needed to 'bury a filesharing service'.
Well, it's not 'buried' if you have to know the IP address to access it, is it? That information is all that is necessary to subpoena the ISP and find and sue the owner. Or what, is there a secret password to access the system? Then whatever means is used to distribute that password, the RIAA can find it as well.
(If anyone knows of some good VPN's, please share! heh heh...)
See? You're relying on obscurity, not security. Anyone who would share with you will share with the RIAA.
The problem with social networks is that the number of songs is too small. Sharing with 10 million other people is going to give you a lot more choice than sharing with 10 or 100.
Price went down for CD manufacturing. Did the price at Best Buy drop any? No.
That's because most of the retail price of the CD is not manufacturing cost.
On the contrary, MWI type interpretations are the only ones which do not view measurement as magical. If we assume that measurements are ordinary quantum interactions, which obviously we must, then it follows that there is no collapse of the wave function, and all outcomes of measurements occur.
It's not that the universe splits, it's that the result is as if the universe split, because we end up with the wave function representable mathematically as different components that have effectively no causal interaction between them. Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead, but the evolution of the wave function can be decomposed into the sum of the part where it is alive and the part where it is dead, and both parts are going their merry ways without interaction. So we only see one of the two outcomes, but there are other versions of us that see the other outcome.
To disbelieve the MWI it is necessary to invoke magical physics when measurement occurs in order to trim out the undesired and unobserved worlds. Yet as we study decoherence theory and experiment, we see no signs of any such non-physical effect! Why is that, unless the reason is that there is no such effect and the other worlds exist?
(5) It shall not be a violation of this title to manufacture, distribute, or make noninfringing use of a hardware or software product capable of enabling significant noninfringing use of a copyrighted work.
As others have pointed out, this is by far the most important part of the bill. It amends section 1201 of the copyright code, which is better known as the DMCA. This innocent-sounding clause effectively repeals the entire DMCA!
The reason is because any device which is presently illegal under the DMCA because it allows for infringing copyright, would now become legal. Anything which allows for "infringing" copyright uses will also, by its very nature, allow for "non-infringing" uses. For example, DeCSS, which is widely used for infringement, also can be used for fair use purposes.
The net result is that this provision would remove all restrictions on the manufacture, distribution or sale of devices which completely and utterly defeat copyright protection. The only remaining restriction would be on the private usage of the devices for that purpose - technically that would still be illegal, but since it is done in the privacy of the home, this part would be unenforceable.
In short, this provision effectively repeals the DMCA by eliminating all of its enforceable provisions. As a result, its chances of passage in this form are approximately... let's see... carry the 2... divide by 10... oh, yes. It's chances of passage are approximately zero.
This is a good idea, but it doesn't go far enough.
I didn't just block Spain. I set my system to blackhole the whole damn world!
Just think of it! All over the world, anybody tries to send me email, and it disappears into a black hole. Eat dirt, spammers!
And of course all the legitimate email disappears as well. But that's the point! When I talk to someone and they complain that I didn't respond to their email, I explain that it's not me - it's their world's policies about spam! Once you get your act together and get spam off the net, then I'll unblock you, I say. Until then, don't come crying to me - talk to your ISP, to your elected representatives, to the UN. That's where the problem is, and until you can solve it with them... you're blocked.
Yup. I figure this spam business is going to get cleaned up PDQ once people realize what it's costing them. We're going to get a nice, spam-free net, and it's all because of me. You're welcome.
I think that basically what you're missing is that 'they' can't tell you what you can and can't do with their products after you purchase them.
Maybe they can't tell you, but what if they ask you to observe certain restrictions in exchange for what they're giving you, and you agree? You don't feel bound by your word? You think it's okay to make a promise and then break it just because you feel like it, and they can't stop you?
Or maybe you think that some President, or Legislature, or King has the power to pass a proclamation and suddenly you are not bound by your promises, you can lie and falsify and break your word, and you have no moral obligation because the King said so? How could some politician or government official acquire this kind of moral authority, that at a stroke he can absolve all his subjects of the ethical necessity to honestly keep their word?
I would think this kind of authority would come only from a Higher Power. Show me where in your moral code it says that it's okay to break your promises as long as you can get away with it?
I read this as requiring the administrators of a system to be required to aid the authorities in accessing the data. Making someone turn over their personal decryption keys is a much bigger step and has never been tested in U.S. law.
And by the way, it's named after Emile Picard from 1884, not Jean-Luc from the 25th century.
The DRM + security features are those of the Group formerly known as the TCPA. TCPA has frequently been discussed on Slashdot.
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From http://www.intel.com/design/pca/prodbref/253820.h
"The Intel PXA27x processor family incorporates the Intel® Wireless Trusted Platform that is designed to provide platform trust and robust security services required for today's wireless devices. Built around the concepts developed by the Trusted Computing Group* (TCG) industry forum..."
When you put it all together, what you get is an absolutely secure protocol for transferring secret bits from point A to point B, no matter what attempted eavesdropping takes place in between.... And again, this is something classical cryptography is incapable of delivering by itself.
That's not true, because to get this supposed absolute security you had to assume perfectly secure authentication, based on principles similar to a one time pad. But if you're going to make that assumption, you might as well just use a one time pad with conventional cryptography and throw out the QC. One time pads give you absolute security, contrary to your claim that classical cryptography can't do it. (Of course you have to assume that the endpoints and key distribution are secure, but that is also necessary for your absolutely secure authentication.)
In short, if you make equivalent assumptions, you get equivalent security. And classical crypto has lower costs and many fewer restrictions on usage.
Anybody know where we can find any of these stories for download?
Your description is almost right, but after receiving the photons, Bob can't tell which ones were "good" or "bad". Instead, the two parties have to exchange cleartext information about which bases they used. Then the ones where they matched are the good photons which can encrypt the message.
The problem is with this cleartext message about the bases. How do you stop an intermediary from altering this message, which could hide her attempts to snoop on the photons? This is the problem of sending an authenticated message, and quantum crypto won't help you with this.
To send the authenticated cleartext message, you either need a tamper-proof channel between the parties, which is usually physically impossible, or you have to fall back on regular crypto, either public key or pre-shared key. So ultimately the supposedly unbreakable security of quantum crypto is in fact dependent on conventional cryptography. And if you're relying on conventional crypto anyway, why go to the expense of using quantum crypto?
In short, there is a great deal of hype here. When closely examined, the physical and computational requirements of quantum crypto don't make sense for the real world. You either need an unrealistic tamper-proof channel, or you rely on regular crypto and get no more security than conventional crypto gives you.