First, adding two bits to the hash won't help; we can just try all four combinations till we get a hit.
Second, the point isn't that they have record of how they voted (which is generally objected to), but that they can check to see that their votes was counted as they intended. The only advantage I can see is that it provides a way to catch people who (falsely) claim their vote was miscounted.
BTW, it's still possible to have a counting/Auditing system that:
A) Correctly tells the voter WHO they voted for based on the records.
B) Intentionally miscounts and schews the election.
Garbage in, Garbage out. The danger of electronic voting AND counting is that it is VERY succeptable to this type of nonsense. How could anyone tell the difference.
This is why the hand-counters probably have it right.
If (as I am proposing):
The entire set of votes is known
Each vote can be verified by the person who cast it
The total number of votes cast is publicly verifiable
How could you skew it? If you add or remove votes, you will be caught out by the total; if you change votes you will (eventually) be caught by the people who cast them; if you lie about the total you will be caught by anyone who independently counts them. So, how are you going to cheat?
I think this is a red herring. Sure, people might be able to influence an election by threat (or bribe) if the voter was allowed to keep a receipt, but they would have to threaten (or bribe) a large number of people, and would eventually get caught.
On the other hand, without a receipt, there is no need to "influence" an election, since they can steal it outright by rigging the counting system.
So, I would favour a system in which every voter got a receipt with a random number on it as they entered the polling place (before they voted) and after the election the results were posted to the public in human and computer readable form (e.g. on the web)--for every receipt number, who they voted for, for all votes cast.
That way, anyone who wanted to could confirm that their vote was recorded correctly, and everyone could see that the totals were correct. With a few tweaks (e.g. a publicaly auditable system to assure that the total number of votes cast was correct) you would have much greater chance of a clean election, even with the posibility of bought/extorted votes.
From looking at the posting, I don't see any demonstration (or even any indication) that this is exploitable. What I see is that, if you put a goobered up CDROM in the drive (or use perl to simulate same)...
...it won't work.
Yes, it might be possible to craft some clever exploit in the usual way, but that is by no means easy and is often impossible (depending mostly on what gets allocated around the buffer).
And if it is exploitable? Will we see a rash of strangers in London Fog coats trying to slip CDs into unsuspecting Macs? We already prevent that, since anyone who could do that could do anything they wanted anyway, up to and including installing an old copy of BeOS over OSX anyway.
Coal and natural gas? In space? Did I miss something about the moon having lush vegitation during the Jurassic period?
No, you just missed noticing that the lush vegitation we had here didn't actually create any new elements by transmutation; the carbon and simple carbon compounds that they left for us were here long before they were.
If it makes you more comfortable, call it amorphous carbon deposits and methane gas. It's the same thing as coal and natural gas though.
There's coal in space? I thought coal came from dead plants and dinosaurs. Even if there was coal just floating around, would we really want to bring it back here and burn it? Don't we have enought air pollution?
I used coal as a shorthand for "chunks of mostly carbon that aren't diamonds or graphite"--which is close enough to the generally accepted meaning that I'm willing to stand by the useage. At any rate, there are such lumps and if you brought some back here most people would agree to call them coal.
But you'd be nuts to bring them back, and even more nuts to burn them; their primary value would be in space for use in making stuff--mostly plastics, medicines, etc., but someday diamondoid materials, buckytubes, etc.
Additionally, I remember being taught in grade school that if there were 100% pure gold bricks just lying on the surface of the moon for the taking, it still wouldn't be fiscally worth it to go there and bring them back. It's just too expensive. Or so I was told.:)
So don't take it back to your old grade school. Gold isn't just pretty, it's useful. It's wonderfully conductive, corrosion resistant, ductile, etc.
Stop thinking like a colonialist, and start thinking like a colonist.
If we develop the resources of space as fast or faster than governments print more money we could have no inflation and the tax rate could fall without...
*sigh* Ok, I guess that sounds like science fiction.
Please, can we stop calling it "nanotechnology" and start calling it what it really is?
CHEMISTRY!
I'm not trying to be funny. That new stain-defender stuff in pants? Apparently it's called nanotechnology. No! Chemistry! It's just chemistry! Stop subjecting your minds to buzzwords.
Brief history:
Some people came up with a very interesting idea, and called it "Nanotechnology"
The word got very popular, and so people started calling all sorts of other things "Nanotechnology" in the hopes that some of the coolness would rub off.
People who knew about the original idea got annoyed by this, and people who didn't know about it fell into two groups: the ones who had no clue said "Gee, buzzwords, swell!"; the more cluefull noticed that the word was being applied to stuff that wasn't all that special and got annoyed without realizing that the orginal idea even existed.
Nanotech (in the original sense--what is now being refered to as eutachtic chemistry and/or machine phase chemistry) is to clasical chemistry what semiconductor technology is to leyden jar and cat fur electrical science. We aren't there yet (and may never be) but the idea doesn't deserve the glib dismissal it gets from the hipply cynical.
There is nothing valueable in space within our grasp as far as anyone knows if that changes so does my thesis but untill then the status quo is best left to persist.
Nuts. If we were to exploit the resources space offers us without going into any other major gravity wells (i.e., sticking to free space, asteroids, small moons, etc), there is (just off the top of my head):
Enough energy for everyone alive in the world today to live better than the average American presently does.
More gold, coal, natural gas, nickle, iron, etc. etc. than has ever been mined in the history of mankind.
Enough room, sunlight, water etc. for us to feed many times our present population as well as we feed the richest few now.
Enough room for all of us to spread out and live interesting lives.
Please explain your P.S. I am on cold medication today and my brain is not working.
Well, staying withing the bounds of taste and geometry (and keeping in mind that my wife, my boss, and about half my co-workers read slashdot):
Something is "popular" if many people do it voluntarily, without anyone compilling them to do it and (often) even if others try to compell them not to do it. Something is "cool" if people who do it are admired, and more specifically they are admired for their poised, detached, or unruffled demeanor.
That said, I will give you the clue that the two things that immedeately came to mind as having long been popular but have never cool can both be done by a single person using only one hand, while the thing that is cool but not popular takes a large number of people not using both hands.
If you can't get at least one of them from that you need to have someone check the dosage on your cold meds.
Interesting. Any idea what classes 9 & 16 are? It would seem logical (I know, it's always risky trying to use logic when dealing with governments) for them to be restricted in some way (e.g., some contries will allow a mark in a specific typeface). I suppose they could have granted a mark on a widely used term of art, but I would hope that they didn't.
Also, if you go up a level and search for Windows it also turns up several with no registrant. Any idea what that means?
My Swedish is very rusty, coming mostly from listening to a co-worker's elderly relatives complaining (I infer) about their bodies, reading poorly translated man pages and math papers, second guessing the fish, and watching the muppet show. Did I say rusty? How about "virtually noexistent"?
... has made nerds, and nerdish behaviour, cool."
Uh, you mean it's made it popular.
Nothing can make nerdish behaviour cool. That's one of the fundumental axioms of social psychology.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If you doubt this distinction, spend a few minutes and I'll bet you can easily think of two other things that have allways been popular but have never been cool, and at least one thing (YMMV) that is cool but has never been popular. Do this when there is no one within earshot so you won't have to explain your laughter.
... trademark laws only tend to protect against "similar" marks if they have the potential to create confusion. In continental Europe, they tend to protect where the newer mark attempts to capitalise on the goodwill of the earlier mark,...
Since when does Microsoft have a trademark on "Windows"? IIRC, they have "Microsoft Windows" and perhaps "MS Windows", but the term "Windows" was already in generic use for over a decade before they even attempted to get a trademark in any country.
So, how is it attempting to capitialize on goodwill to use a generic term that aplies to both products equally well?
Here's a template to help understand what they are saying.
Darl: The $FIZZLE isn't $FOO because it is a $BAR and $BARs aren't $WAZZLE.
Linux: It doesn't need to be $WAZZLE to be $FOO, but even if it did your argument doesn't work because it says right $HERE that $BARs are $WAZZLE. By definition.
(Implied: So even if your first assumption were true your conclusion wouldn't hold because your second assumption is demonstrably false)
Yes, even Helium atoms stick together under some conditions. Heck, anything with mass will stick together under some conditions, just due to gravity.
But Smalley isn't claming that all atoms stick together under some conditions; he's claiming that the problem is "unavoidable" -- which, if cogent, must mean that there is no possible combination of atoms that can be formed into stable structures that won't stick together in such a way that it is not possible to work with them -- in short, that all such combinations of atoms will always stick together at that scale.
Even if true, it doesn't mean you can't do sometrhing useful. Here's a sketch:
Take two surfaces: on one, the part being constructed; on the other, some reactive "catalyst + new-bit-to-add" or "catalyst-that-cleaves-something-you-want-to-remov e"
You bring them together, if necessary compensating for the changing forces as they aproach.
They're stuck!
Pull them apart. As you do so, you will have to overcome some attractive forces, but you can do so in all sorts of ways--after all, the forces of stickiness you are contending with are orders of magnitude smaller than bond stringths. If nothing else, use two horses and some rope.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
just imagine that in this post and alternating posts hereafter I point out that you've backpedaled yet again so that you're just describing chemisty as it's been practiced for decades, with all the work required to design specific reactants for each individual addition
You just refuse to accept the point, don't you? No one is proposing magic new uber-chemistry, any more than new electronics was needed to make computers. But there comes a time when quatitative differences (especially in degree of control and overall complexity) warent a new way of looking at things, and that generally involves new terminology.
Do you likewise object to the term "biology," since there's nothing that life forms do that can't be described by chemistry-as-it's-been-practiced-for-decades? (*smile* Although I suppose you might be a vitalist...) For that matter, botany and history are all just (admitedly very complex) chemistry too, right?
with all the work required to design specific reactants for each individual addition...just classic chemistry, requiring design of everything individually.
You're back to the design issue again? Computers have to be designed too. So do cars. And houses, and even clothing. But (in part because we give the designers a starting set of modular parts, and in part because we have standardized production tools and increasingly automated factories) it is still worthwhile to design and build things.
Maybe it will help to think of it this way: nanotechnology aims to be to chemical/materials engineering roughly what the computer was to elecrical engineering.
No where did I see Dr. Smilley claiming to have discovered new physics to do away with van der Waals forces (which are repulsive at that scale).
This is, of course, false- they're attractive at that distance, and don't become repulsive until the atoms are much closer than this. Why are you making this stuff up?
Who's making stuff up? To me it looks like you are. Yes, they are slightly attractive at larger distances, but they are repulsive when you get clos enough to form bonds, and much more repulsive than they are atractive further out.
If you insist on an example of universally repulsive forces, how about like charges?
"Conveyors and positioners" sounds like a not-very-subtle renaming of a "manipulator arm" to me.
I'm starting to suspect that I've been taken in by a very clever troll (dispite the fact that I've had you on my "friends" list for quite a while).
If all "conveyors" and "positioners" are "manipulator arms" and therefore impossible, then Smalley's position is in real trouble. An conveyor could be as simple surface with a regular array of active sites which could be "charged" (or activated) by something as simple exposing them to an excess of the moity to which they bind. A positioner is just something that moves things with respect to each other.
No, neither chemistry nor physics are approximations, the words refer to aspects of reality
The only way in which this makes sense is if you interpret "aspects" to be a near synonym for "aproximation" (something like "situationaly valid aproximation"). But that's a far cry from saying they "are reality," which I gather is your intent.
That's just nuts, especially with regard to chemistry.
The vast majority of the universe by volume is in the intergalactic voids, where atoms are so few and relative velocities are so high that chemistry as we presently know it doesn't apply. Maybe someday we'll have a relativistic chemistry of ultra-hard vacuum, but it isn't what we know as chemistry today.
The vast majority of the universe by mass isn't even normal matter.
The vast majority of normal matter in the universe exists in plasma where chemistry as we know it can't take place (all the orbitals are unoccupied) or in deginerate matter where there aren't any orbitals possible.
The vast majority of what's left, while potentially chemically reactive, never has a chance to do much beyond meeting another likeminded hydrogen atom for a few eons of H2 action.
Chemistry is an aproximation that gives a very useful description of some aspects of reality under a narrow range of conditions that happen to be interesting to us.
It is not "Reality," any more than biology, economics or cartography are "Reality."
I read the "article," what there was of it. No where did I see Dr. Smilley claiming to have discovered new physics to do away with van der Waals forces (which are repulsive at that scale). Nor do I see an explanation of why, if all repulsive forces between atoms have been abolished at any given scale we don't see a universe holding a single blob of atoms that are stuck together by this unaviodable stickiness of yours.
What I did see is the same old strawman claim that Drexler is suggesting a manipulator arm to control each atom (which is idiodic on the face of it) rather than the actual proposal to mechanically bring a series of carefully designed tools (surfaces with the desired catalytic effect) into play as needed. This is neither impossible nor just "a fancy name for catalytic chemistry" which does not offer any where near the control.
No one is intending to change the fundemental properties of atomic interactions for engineering. Quite the contrary, the claim is that these properties can be used.
'Fat' is a matter of scale; anything is 'fat' at a small enough scale.
Not all combinations of atoms are sticky under all conditions, and not all combinations of atoms that are sticky are equally sticky.
There is nothing magical about "generic" vs. "specific" devices. A computer is a generic device, each part of which is designed to do a specific task. You can make something that is very generally useful by combining a finite number of parts of limited usefulness.
Generic/specific is a matter of degree. While there is no catalyst that promotes all reactions (if such a concept is even cogent) there certainly are catalyst that are more or less specific, in terms of the range of reactants that they work with.
While the fact that something exists in nature proves that it is possible, the converse is not true. There would be little evolutionary reason for the formation of "generic" enzymes, and I can think of good reasons for not evolving them.
That said:
We both claim the other is missing the other's point. I think your point is that it would not be a simple undertaking, and may well be beyond our capibility for the foreseeable future. My point is that this does not mean that it is impossinble, which is what Smalley appears to be claiming.
Re-ordering things a bit (but I hope not changing the meaning in any way):
Me:Drop down a level in your thinking. From a physics perspective, "the chemistry at the site" disapears. It is, after all, just an aproximate way of describing the forces, charge distribution, etc.
You:Chemistry is reality...Methods used to describe chemistry are approximations, as are methods used to describe physics... To even get things very roughly approximate you're going to be calculating wavefunctions!
It sounds like you are meaning the same thing that I am, though we disagree on the exact terms. When I talk about "Chemistry" as a field of study I mean what you appear to mean by "methods used to describe chemistry." I would not say that "chemistry is reality" since it is clearly (to me) an aproximation that is only valid over a certain range of physical conditions (in fact, I would go so far as to say that 99% of the universe (by mass) is in a state where "chemistry" doesn't apply for one reason or another).
But we would both agree that physics provides a more generaly aplicable aproximation. Correct?
simulate this dynamically at finite temperature for, say, a nanosecond? I'd estimate current computers are at least 50 orders of magnitude too slow to do that...but these are not easy problems and throwing more computational speed at them only gets you so far.
I'm not claiming it would be easy, or that we know how to do it now. But that is a far cry from Smalley's claim that it is impossible in principle.
Me: It's a known art. Build huge tables of interactions and all the data you can get on them, and let the designers pick and choose the combination that works best for them. Rinse, lather, and repeat.
You:That's combinatorial chemistry, and it's useful, but it's been around for a while and no one claimed it was a 'nanofactory'. That description is nothing like the nanomachines alleged to be possible.
You're confusing the means with the end. Using something very much like combinatorial chemistry (though much more difficult) it may someday be possible to design and build Drexler's dodads. This does not mean that the dodads are combinatorial chemistry, any more than dog poop is a dog, simply by virtue of being produced by a dog.
Or to choose a more dignified analogy, consider a computer. It is the product of an enormous amount of electrical engineering, and yet no one would say that it is "just another name for electrical engineering". I would not dream of speculating if computers or ellectrical engineers are more useful in general (esp. since my wife is a EE and reads/.) but I would claim that they are different things that are both very useful in very different ways.
Well, the claims made as to the abilities are grandiose- he's postulating general use machines.
Yes. In the same way that computers are general use machines. They don't do everything (e.g., computers don't wash windows), but they are still very, very handy.
If you have to craft a designer molecule to do each reaction, you're just doing classic chemistry. We've been doing that for decades, if not centuries. Calling it 'nanotechnology' is just confusing the issue. (There have been interesting things on a nanometer scale coming out of the Chemistry community- but they're called macromolecules, and they don't require nonexistant materials to make 'positional controls' out of.)
You're missing the point. You have to design each part of the general purpose machine (just as all the parts of a computer have to be designed), but then you have your general purpose machine.
Suppose I said "computers aren't worth developing because they can't do everything imaginable, and to make them work right you'd have to design every part--which is just electrical engineering and doesn't justify the grandiose claims Turing is making for his so-called computer. It's still just electronics, and calling it 'computer science' is just confusing the issue."
As late as 1950 or so I might not have gotten laughed out of the room, but today almost anyone would say I was a nut.
Slashdot Mirror
but why (aside from geekiness)
For godsake dude, where are your priorities?!?!
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I am serious as I ever get.
Nuts.
First, adding two bits to the hash won't help; we can just try all four combinations till we get a hit.
Second, the point isn't that they have record of how they voted (which is generally objected to), but that they can check to see that their votes was counted as they intended. The only advantage I can see is that it provides a way to catch people who (falsely) claim their vote was miscounted.
-- MarkusQ
If (as I am proposing):
- The entire set of votes is known
- Each vote can be verified by the person who cast it
- The total number of votes cast is publicly verifiable
How could you skew it? If you add or remove votes, you will be caught out by the total; if you change votes you will (eventually) be caught by the people who cast them; if you lie about the total you will be caught by anyone who independently counts them. So, how are you going to cheat?-- MarkusQ
I think this is a red herring. Sure, people might be able to influence an election by threat (or bribe) if the voter was allowed to keep a receipt, but they would have to threaten (or bribe) a large number of people, and would eventually get caught.
On the other hand, without a receipt, there is no need to "influence" an election, since they can steal it outright by rigging the counting system.
So, I would favour a system in which every voter got a receipt with a random number on it as they entered the polling place (before they voted) and after the election the results were posted to the public in human and computer readable form (e.g. on the web)--for every receipt number, who they voted for, for all votes cast.
That way, anyone who wanted to could confirm that their vote was recorded correctly, and everyone could see that the totals were correct. With a few tweaks (e.g. a publicaly auditable system to assure that the total number of votes cast was correct) you would have much greater chance of a clean election, even with the posibility of bought/extorted votes.
-- MarkusQ
From looking at the posting, I don't see any demonstration (or even any indication) that this is exploitable. What I see is that, if you put a goobered up CDROM in the drive (or use perl to simulate same)...
Yes, it might be possible to craft some clever exploit in the usual way, but that is by no means easy and is often impossible (depending mostly on what gets allocated around the buffer).
And if it is exploitable? Will we see a rash of strangers in London Fog coats trying to slip CDs into unsuspecting Macs? We already prevent that, since anyone who could do that could do anything they wanted anyway, up to and including installing an old copy of BeOS over OSX anyway.
-- MarkusQ
Ooohh...I love the "Pretty Graph" game!
Here's mine!
-- MarkusQ
Coal and natural gas? In space? Did I miss something about the moon having lush vegitation during the Jurassic period?
No, you just missed noticing that the lush vegitation we had here didn't actually create any new elements by transmutation; the carbon and simple carbon compounds that they left for us were here long before they were.
If it makes you more comfortable, call it amorphous carbon deposits and methane gas. It's the same thing as coal and natural gas though.
-- MarkusQ
There's coal in space? I thought coal came from dead plants and dinosaurs. Even if there was coal just floating around, would we really want to bring it back here and burn it? Don't we have enought air pollution?
I used coal as a shorthand for "chunks of mostly carbon that aren't diamonds or graphite"--which is close enough to the generally accepted meaning that I'm willing to stand by the useage. At any rate, there are such lumps and if you brought some back here most people would agree to call them coal.
But you'd be nuts to bring them back, and even more nuts to burn them; their primary value would be in space for use in making stuff--mostly plastics, medicines, etc., but someday diamondoid materials, buckytubes, etc.
Additionally, I remember being taught in grade school that if there were 100% pure gold bricks just lying on the surface of the moon for the taking, it still wouldn't be fiscally worth it to go there and bring them back. It's just too expensive. Or so I was told.:)
So don't take it back to your old grade school. Gold isn't just pretty, it's useful. It's wonderfully conductive, corrosion resistant, ductile, etc.
Stop thinking like a colonialist, and start thinking like a colonist.
-- MarkusQ
What more do you want exactly?
low inflation?
If we develop the resources of space as fast or faster than governments print more money we could have no inflation and the tax rate could fall without...
*sigh* Ok, I guess that sounds like science fiction.
-- MarkusQ
Brief history:
- Some people came up with a very interesting idea, and called it "Nanotechnology"
- The word got very popular, and so people started calling all sorts of other things "Nanotechnology" in the hopes that some of the coolness would rub off.
- People who knew about the original idea got annoyed by this, and people who didn't know about it fell into two groups: the ones who had no clue said "Gee, buzzwords, swell!"; the more cluefull noticed that the word was being applied to stuff that wasn't all that special and got annoyed without realizing that the orginal idea even existed.
Nanotech (in the original sense--what is now being refered to as eutachtic chemistry and/or machine phase chemistry) is to clasical chemistry what semiconductor technology is to leyden jar and cat fur electrical science. We aren't there yet (and may never be) but the idea doesn't deserve the glib dismissal it gets from the hipply cynical.-- MarkusQ
There is nothing valueable in space within our grasp as far as anyone knows if that changes so does my thesis but untill then the status quo is best left to persist.
Nuts. If we were to exploit the resources space offers us without going into any other major gravity wells (i.e., sticking to free space, asteroids, small moons, etc), there is (just off the top of my head):
- Enough energy for everyone alive in the world today to live better than the average American presently does.
- More gold, coal, natural gas, nickle, iron, etc. etc. than has ever been mined in the history of mankind.
- Enough room, sunlight, water etc. for us to feed many times our present population as well as we feed the richest few now.
- Enough room for all of us to spread out and live interesting lives.
What more do you want exactly?-- MarkusQ
Please explain your P.S. I am on cold medication today and my brain is not working.
Well, staying withing the bounds of taste and geometry (and keeping in mind that my wife, my boss, and about half my co-workers read slashdot):
Something is "popular" if many people do it voluntarily, without anyone compilling them to do it and (often) even if others try to compell them not to do it. Something is "cool" if people who do it are admired, and more specifically they are admired for their poised, detached, or unruffled demeanor.
That said, I will give you the clue that the two things that immedeately came to mind as having long been popular but have never cool can both be done by a single person using only one hand, while the thing that is cool but not popular takes a large number of people not using both hands.
If you can't get at least one of them from that you need to have someone check the dosage on your cold meds.
-- MarkusQ
Interesting. Any idea what classes 9 & 16 are? It would seem logical (I know, it's always risky trying to use logic when dealing with governments) for them to be restricted in some way (e.g., some contries will allow a mark in a specific typeface). I suppose they could have granted a mark on a widely used term of art, but I would hope that they didn't.
Also, if you go up a level and search for Windows it also turns up several with no registrant. Any idea what that means?
My Swedish is very rusty, coming mostly from listening to a co-worker's elderly relatives complaining (I infer) about their bodies, reading poorly translated man pages and math papers, second guessing the fish, and watching the muppet show. Did I say rusty? How about "virtually noexistent"?
-- MarkusQ
Nothing can make nerdish behaviour cool. That's one of the fundumental axioms of social psychology.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. If you doubt this distinction, spend a few minutes and I'll bet you can easily think of two other things that have allways been popular but have never been cool, and at least one thing (YMMV) that is cool but has never been popular. Do this when there is no one within earshot so you won't have to explain your laughter.
Since when does Microsoft have a trademark on "Windows"? IIRC, they have "Microsoft Windows" and perhaps "MS Windows", but the term "Windows" was already in generic use for over a decade before they even attempted to get a trademark in any country.
So, how is it attempting to capitialize on goodwill to use a generic term that aplies to both products equally well?
-- MarkusQ
the line would melt after I would dial up to my ISP.
Forget rewireing until you get your modem looked at. It shouldn't by pumping out nearly enough amps to do that.
-- MarkusQ
Here's a template to help understand what they are saying. Where (roughly): -- MarkusQ
"Windows forks every couple of years, so what's the problem?"
God you're dumb. Maybe without that your rant would have been passable, but you got greedy asshead.
-- MarkusQ
*sigh*
We just aren't communicating here.
Yes, even Helium atoms stick together under some conditions. Heck, anything with mass will stick together under some conditions, just due to gravity.
But Smalley isn't claming that all atoms stick together under some conditions; he's claiming that the problem is "unavoidable" -- which, if cogent, must mean that there is no possible combination of atoms that can be formed into stable structures that won't stick together in such a way that it is not possible to work with them -- in short, that all such combinations of atoms will always stick together at that scale.
Even if true, it doesn't mean you can't do sometrhing useful. Here's a sketch:
just imagine that in this post and alternating posts hereafter I point out that you've backpedaled yet again so that you're just describing chemisty as it's been practiced for decades, with all the work required to design specific reactants for each individual addition
You just refuse to accept the point, don't you? No one is proposing magic new uber-chemistry, any more than new electronics was needed to make computers. But there comes a time when quatitative differences (especially in degree of control and overall complexity) warent a new way of looking at things, and that generally involves new terminology.
Do you likewise object to the term "biology," since there's nothing that life forms do that can't be described by chemistry-as-it's-been-practiced-for-decades? (*smile* Although I suppose you might be a vitalist...) For that matter, botany and history are all just (admitedly very complex) chemistry too, right?
with all the work required to design specific reactants for each individual addition...just classic chemistry, requiring design of everything individually.
You're back to the design issue again? Computers have to be designed too. So do cars. And houses, and even clothing. But (in part because we give the designers a starting set of modular parts, and in part because we have standardized production tools and increasingly automated factories) it is still worthwhile to design and build things.
Maybe it will help to think of it this way: nanotechnology aims to be to chemical/materials engineering roughly what the computer was to elecrical engineering.
-- MarkusQ
If you insist on an example of universally repulsive forces, how about like charges?
I'm starting to suspect that I've been taken in by a very clever troll (dispite the fact that I've had you on my "friends" list for quite a while).If all "conveyors" and "positioners" are "manipulator arms" and therefore impossible, then Smalley's position is in real trouble. An conveyor could be as simple surface with a regular array of active sites which could be "charged" (or activated) by something as simple exposing them to an excess of the moity to which they bind. A positioner is just something that moves things with respect to each other.
So are you claiming that Smalley thinks:
- Surfaces are impossible?
- Adsorbtion is impossible?
- Catalytic surfaces are impossible?
- Moving things is impossible?
-- MarkusQNo, neither chemistry nor physics are approximations, the words refer to aspects of reality
The only way in which this makes sense is if you interpret "aspects" to be a near synonym for "aproximation" (something like "situationaly valid aproximation"). But that's a far cry from saying they "are reality," which I gather is your intent.
That's just nuts, especially with regard to chemistry.
- The vast majority of the universe by volume is in the intergalactic voids, where atoms are so few and relative velocities are so high that chemistry as we presently know it doesn't apply. Maybe someday we'll have a relativistic chemistry of ultra-hard vacuum, but it isn't what we know as chemistry today.
- The vast majority of the universe by mass isn't even normal matter.
- The vast majority of normal matter in the universe exists in plasma where chemistry as we know it can't take place (all the orbitals are unoccupied) or in deginerate matter where there aren't any orbitals possible.
- The vast majority of what's left, while potentially chemically reactive, never has a chance to do much beyond meeting another likeminded hydrogen atom for a few eons of H2 action.
Chemistry is an aproximation that gives a very useful description of some aspects of reality under a narrow range of conditions that happen to be interesting to us.It is not "Reality," any more than biology, economics or cartography are "Reality."
-- MarkusQ
I read the "article," what there was of it. No where did I see Dr. Smilley claiming to have discovered new physics to do away with van der Waals forces (which are repulsive at that scale). Nor do I see an explanation of why, if all repulsive forces between atoms have been abolished at any given scale we don't see a universe holding a single blob of atoms that are stuck together by this unaviodable stickiness of yours.
What I did see is the same old strawman claim that Drexler is suggesting a manipulator arm to control each atom (which is idiodic on the face of it) rather than the actual proposal to mechanically bring a series of carefully designed tools (surfaces with the desired catalytic effect) into play as needed. This is neither impossible nor just "a fancy name for catalytic chemistry" which does not offer any where near the control.
-- MarkusQ
First off:
- No one is suggesting developing new atoms.
- No one is intending to change the fundemental properties of atomic interactions for engineering. Quite the contrary, the claim is that these properties can be used.
- 'Fat' is a matter of scale; anything is 'fat' at a small enough scale.
- Not all combinations of atoms are sticky under all conditions, and not all combinations of atoms that are sticky are equally sticky.
- There is nothing magical about "generic" vs. "specific" devices. A computer is a generic device, each part of which is designed to do a specific task. You can make something that is very generally useful by combining a finite number of parts of limited usefulness.
- Generic/specific is a matter of degree. While there is no catalyst that promotes all reactions (if such a concept is even cogent) there certainly are catalyst that are more or less specific, in terms of the range of reactants that they work with.
- While the fact that something exists in nature proves that it is possible, the converse is not true. There would be little evolutionary reason for the formation of "generic" enzymes, and I can think of good reasons for not evolving them.
That said:We both claim the other is missing the other's point. I think your point is that it would not be a simple undertaking, and may well be beyond our capibility for the foreseeable future. My point is that this does not mean that it is impossinble, which is what Smalley appears to be claiming.
-- MarkusQ
Re-ordering things a bit (but I hope not changing the meaning in any way):
You:Chemistry is reality...Methods used to describe chemistry are approximations, as are methods used to describe physics... To even get things very roughly approximate you're going to be calculating wavefunctions!
It sounds like you are meaning the same thing that I am, though we disagree on the exact terms. When I talk about "Chemistry" as a field of study I mean what you appear to mean by "methods used to describe chemistry." I would not say that "chemistry is reality" since it is clearly (to me) an aproximation that is only valid over a certain range of physical conditions (in fact, I would go so far as to say that 99% of the universe (by mass) is in a state where "chemistry" doesn't apply for one reason or another).
But we would both agree that physics provides a more generaly aplicable aproximation. Correct?
I'm not claiming it would be easy, or that we know how to do it now. But that is a far cry from Smalley's claim that it is impossible in principle.
You:That's combinatorial chemistry, and it's useful, but it's been around for a while and no one claimed it was a 'nanofactory'. That description is nothing like the nanomachines alleged to be possible.
You're confusing the means with the end. Using something very much like combinatorial chemistry (though much more difficult) it may someday be possible to design and build Drexler's dodads. This does not mean that the dodads are combinatorial chemistry, any more than dog poop is a dog, simply by virtue of being produced by a dog.
Or to choose a more dignified analogy, consider a computer. It is the product of an enormous amount of electrical engineering, and yet no one would say that it is "just another name for electrical engineering". I would not dream of speculating if computers or ellectrical engineers are more useful in general (esp. since my wife is a EE and reads /.) but I would claim that they are different things that are both very useful in very different ways.
-- MarkusQ
Well, the claims made as to the abilities are grandiose- he's postulating general use machines.
Yes. In the same way that computers are general use machines. They don't do everything (e.g., computers don't wash windows), but they are still very, very handy.
If you have to craft a designer molecule to do each reaction, you're just doing classic chemistry. We've been doing that for decades, if not centuries. Calling it 'nanotechnology' is just confusing the issue. (There have been interesting things on a nanometer scale coming out of the Chemistry community- but they're called macromolecules, and they don't require nonexistant materials to make 'positional controls' out of.)
You're missing the point. You have to design each part of the general purpose machine (just as all the parts of a computer have to be designed), but then you have your general purpose machine.
Suppose I said "computers aren't worth developing because they can't do everything imaginable, and to make them work right you'd have to design every part--which is just electrical engineering and doesn't justify the grandiose claims Turing is making for his so-called computer. It's still just electronics, and calling it 'computer science' is just confusing the issue."
As late as 1950 or so I might not have gotten laughed out of the room, but today almost anyone would say I was a nut.
-- MarkusQ