Doesn't "the approximately 24 people who worked on the shutdown menu" already tell you everything you need to know?
There's someone's law that says organizations are constrained to make machines that emulate or otherwise reflect the structure of the organization. There is some truth in this, and we are witnessing it here.
So it's a hard sell if you call it a "cell phone with high priced data transfer features". So a new name is in order, with the exclusive purpose of charging more monthly and per-byte fees.
People can now patent ideas that are not feasible yet, without actually contributing to the art. But as soon as someone else does the hard work and makes it possible, that someone can be sued for patent violation when he tries to market his design.
Yeah, the patenting of currently non-workable devices can actually have a depresseve effect on development in the area.
I once had some of my own research killed by a newly-published patent that described in general terms what I had under development. The company that held that patent was an "idea factory" that was claiming all kinds of general ideas, but to make any of them viable required a lot more work (ideas are easy, products are hard.) There was no way my company was going to continue to invest in developing something when there was no way we'd ever own the IP, as owning the IP was part of the business plan at the time.
So far from "promoting the useful arts", patents without prototypes can definitely have the effect of "retarding the useful arts."
Hardware patents require engineering diagrams; software patents should require very specific algorithm and data descriptions that are more easily expressed as code.
"Engineering diagrams" is a big overstatement of what hardware patents require. Most hardware patents contain sketches, but nothing any engineer would be willing to sign and stamp.
The digrams in patents are explantory, and for clarity of explanation they frequently leave out major features that would be required to actually build a device. The assumption is that anyone reading the patent has enough "skill in the art" to know those features are needed. I'm talking about things like bolts to fasten parts together and so on.
This is one of the reasons why workability is not a criterion for patentability, because the hardware does not actually have to be engineered to any reasonable level of detail before a patent can be granted. For example, you might submit a patent that to be built requires materials that are impossibly strong or light. That won't show up anywhere in your patent documents, and anyone who tries to engineer such a device on the basis of your patent will rapdily discover they are wasting their time.
Software and process patents simply should not be granted, anymore than patents should be granted on the plots of novels, and for the same reason. A novel, after all, is nothing more than a machine for inducing a particular state in the reader. But giving patent protection to particular designs of such machines does not "promote the useful arts" any more than giving patent protection to software does.
But if they are spending all their time keeping up with technical stuff, then they aren't spending that time learning how to do their management job.
Management hasn't changed that much in the past few thousand years. Good management always has been and always will be a mixture of logistics and people-skills. It isn't that hard to learn--the most important management lesson I got in cub-scouts, when we played that game where you whisper a message around in a circle and it gets mangled after about three hops. Lesson: clear, consistent, verifiable communciation is key.
Technical stuff, on the other hand, is both hard and keeps changing. To set goals appropriately a manager needs to have sufficient knowledge to know what can be done and what sorts of things need to happen to get it done. They also have to have the maturity to not try to do it themselves. That's another management lesson from scouts: trust your people.
So I'd say good managers benefit enormously from having as much technical knowledge as they can stand. Bad managers are another story, but in that case the problem isn't their technical knowledge or lack therefore.
We are not talking about silencing political speech here
One of the most tired canards of the old left, which I'm betting you are repeating unwittingly, is that "political speech" is somehow special. This argument was used by the old left to argue for various types of artistic and ideological repression because artistic, philosophical, even simply factual speech was deemed to be not "political speech", and therefore not subject to protections.
In this argument, free speech is not a right (that is, a political condition necessary for the life of a moral autonomous being) but a limited grant given to some kinds of speech that are deemed necessary for a particular public good. This justification for free speech is no different from a patent grant: patents are granted to further the useful arts; free speech is granted to further political discussions.
Most modern advocates of free speech, from Orwell on down, are clear that this is not what they mean. Orwell famously wrote, "Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four. Grant that, and all else follows." Conversely, suppress any form of expression and you will find yourself on a slippery slope to the point where some guy in some governement office somewhere is deciding what two plus two equals.
The Canadian solution has been to restrict speech that a) starts to look like action ("where it is likely to result in a breach of the peace") and b) restrict forms of artistic expression that cannot be created legally (child porn.) There are some questionable restrictions even here, as non-photographic child porn has been found to violate the law. However disgusting we find such things, we need to understand that once we start saying that certain types of expression are in and of themselves illegal, we are in a very dangerous place.
Not only that, the summary is approaching the problem all wrong: "There are still people in high positions who seem to think that stuffing a bunch of engineers into a noisy landscaped office is the best way to organize a company."
Best for what purpose?
If you are typical manager whose ego is more important than anything else, open plan offices and cube farms are great. You get to lord it over your suffering minions, and you have an office in which to meet with your peers to discuss the upcoming downsizing in secret.
To approach the problem from the point of view of productivity is to simply miss the point. The point is stroking the sloppy-fat egos of arrogant idiots in management, to whom "it just makes sense" that open plan offices are better. No amount of data on productivity will address this issue because it is no more relevant to the root cause than data on pork production in the Mongolia.
Planets are not a classical category, and will be subject to prototype effects.
The basic premise behind classical categories is in any case nonsensical, so is isn't clear what benefit there would be if planets fell into any of them.
Physics has been steadily eroding the Aristotlian world view for centuries now, and the categories died with Einstein's unified description of space and time. Aristotle was an acute observer of the human condition, and his world view accurately captures a vast amount of folk-epistemology and folk-metaphysics, but it simply does not generalize to the modern scientific world-view at all well. It is useful, but profoundly limiting.
The difficulting of defining "planet" is a consequence of the social pressure to preserve an archaic term, as if we insisted on doing thermodynamics in terms of phlogiston or caloric, despite those being exploded concepts. As others here have pointed out, and I've pointed out on/. in the past, the bodies that qualified as "planets" originally had a collection of unrelated characteristics: they were close enough to be seen from Earth, but too far away to show a disk, and all happened to orbit the sun. If the Earth had a small, distant moon it would have been counted as a planet as well, and if any of the classical planets had naked-eye visible moons perhaps the concept would have evolved differently.
Planet is a concept deeply embedded in the accidents of naked-eye astronomy, and the only reasons anyone wants to retain the word at all are that a) the public is attached to it and b) observers who discover new planets attract the really hot memebers of the complementary sexual orientation.
I suspect we only cling to them in day to day life because of their convenient size and divisors: a pint is a good measure of beer, and a quarter pound of ham will make a generous round of sandwiches.
A litre is an even more convenient size for a beer! And a kilos can be treated as pounds times two, so 150 grams of hame will do not too badly, 200 is lots and 250 is really rather much.
What is convenient is what you know, what you're used to. Metric measures are just as convenient as Imperial ones if you know how to use them, and FAR more convenient if you've never been able to remember how many ounces are in a pound, or a pint, or whatever.
Although I think traditional science is a better method of investigating these sorts of incidents I think the idea of tracing back through myths and stories to reach an actual point in time where some group of people actually experienced the event is fascinating. Whether it's just wishful thinking or not and can ever be tied down this precisely is I think questionable.
This article gives an idea of how difficult it is to tie down anything specific from myth and oral history, at least in part due to the very imperfect record we have. European exploerers were not generally very interested in preserving native cultural traditions, and migration, progression and conquest within native cultures before Eurpean contact wiped out information even more thoroughly.
One interesting note in the paper is the remark that it is easy to distinguish between myth and history within the oral accounts based on style alone. Early flood myths are likely to be heavily processed specifically to remove regional detail, to make them more universal. The most obvious case of this is the Biblical flood myth, which to anyone with an unbiased prior appears to be little more than a monotheistic gloss on the Sumerian myth of much earlier date.
On the other hand, it is likely that the Harappan civilization was trading with the Sumerians at the time of this impact, or shortly after it. It would be amusing if the Sumerian flood story, frequently assumed to be the source of the Biblical flood story, in its own turn was found to be derivative of a quite different story from far away.
How many people on Slashdot have said that the gene pool has become watered down due to the protections of civilization?
In the past 200 years (10 generations by conventional reckoning) the human population of Earth has increased more than six-fold.
This huge increase in population has been accompanied by virtually no selective pressure. We know that because "selective pressure" is a nice polite way of saying, "loads of people dying." Evolution operates via differential survival of different bloodlines, and you can't get rapid population expansion if pretty much everyone isn't living to breed.
Ergo, we are all members of the least "fit" (by any pre-industrial evolutionary standard of "fit") population of humans who have ever inhabited this planet.
And if you believe any of that matters, you might want to contemplate the fact that the over the same period of time the population of the United States has increased ten-fold rather than six-fold, faster than virtually any other nation, and most of it has been due to fertility, not immigration. China, in contrast, has had only about a factor of four growth in the same interval.
However, anyone who believes that this rapid population growth means the gene pool is being "watered down" is missing a fundamental aspect of evolution, which is that diversity is the basic currency of genetics. Far from being "watered down" by this expansion, the human gene pool has been enormously enriched by diversification, particularly by our penchant for exogamy: breeding far outside our local genetic group. In constrast, the least "watered down" gene pools on the planet can be found amongst the inbred populations of isolated communities and tribes. These places show great genetic homogeneity, and are therefore far more subject to problems of disease than more diverse populations.
Only people who believe the falsehood that certain evolutionary outcomes are "better" than others by something other than their own parochial standards of morality are going to be concerned about the vast increase in human diversity that has occured in the past 200 years. From an evolutionary standpoint this increase in diversity is only a good thing, and if you are concerned about it, is because either you don't understand this, or you are imposing your own moral standards on the outcome. There is nothing wrong with imposing your own moral standards on the outcome, but do not do so in the name of evolution.
There are ecological concerns regarding human population growth, but from an evolutionist's point of view it is a very good thing.
I'm old enough to remember something very similar to this back when gene splicing first became practical. Recombinant technology had a lot of hype around its promise, while at the same time there was an equal amount of hype about its dangers.
There was actually a voluntary suspension of recombinant DNA research for a short time back in the '70's. Everyone started doing it again when the truth became clear: recombination happens in nature all the time, and the mechanism was such that naturally occuring recombination was doing all the things that scientists wanted to do. Given this, it was felt there was little risk of uncontrolled side-effects. It is worth adding that this is different from believing that there is little risk (social, economic or environmental) from GMOs specifically designed to cause harm to others for the profit of some, like those containing Monsanto's Terminator gene.
The situation with nanoparticles is a little more ambiguous. There was as story on/. today on carbon nanotubes in ancient steel, and of course the first discovery of exotic carbon allotropes was in smoke, which is not exactly a rare substance. This suggests that some forms of nanoparticles have been around in the environment for a long time. However, it does not follow from this that naturally occuring nanoparticles are similar to the ones we are trying to create. Some, like carbon nanotubes and buckyballs, are unlikely to cause harm. But given their ability to infiltrate the body's natural defenses there needs at least to be careful assessment of new nanosubstances before any are allowed to released into the environment.
Nano-materials are nothing more than large molecules, after all, and you wouldn't want people releasing large amounts of potentially deadly substances into the environment in the fond hope that they won't harm anyone with sufficient money to sue.
While you can get portable GUI apps to be very functional, it requires more work to extend the lowest-common-denominator tools.
But once extended, they stay extended. Qt has been there for a while, wxWidgets is there for a vast array of applications. I personally hate dockable floating toolbars, and the apps I write do not require them, so I haven't felt your pain there, but the improvement in cross-platform toolkits in the past five years has been enormous. Even as I write this there is someone thinking about how to better implement dockable floating toolbars in wxWidgets, and my own experience with extending both Qt and wxWidgets has been that it is very easy, particularly due to their open nature.
The "beefing up" here is placing two detectors in different distances (SR intervals) from the source - and check whether the change in corresponding wavefunctions really occur faster than c would allow.
The latter test has already been done, many, many times. There is no doubt whatsoever that quantum entanglement involves genuine nonlocality.
This is only a paradox to those who insist on ascribing a classical ontology to things we cannot know. But as Kant pointed out long ago, we have no warrant for doing that. And in fact, Augustine pointed it out long before Kant.
It's the Windows development tools...Combine this with Microsoft's business need to make portability look as difficult as possible to discourage developers from aiming for it and the results are predictable.
Amen.
I write only portable code (currently very happy with wxWidgets, and have used Qt in the past) but MS fud is so thick that I have at times had to convince clients that using platform-neutral code would be faster than an "all Microsoft solution."
I've also encountered an amazing number of developers who have no real interest in writing good software. They simply want to do things the easiest way possible that requires the least thought, and MS caters to those people and always has.
There is a delightlful ancedote told in a book by one of the guys who was deeply involved in the first Visual C++ release (the old C7.) At the time Borland owned the C++ compiler market on Windows, and MS was playing catch-up big time. The marketing people realized that the technical goodness and standards-conformance of the Borland compiler was only of interest to a small core of die-hard techies. The much larger market was C programmers who wanted to be able to call themselves C++ programmers. Thus were the Visual C wizards born. They made it easy for people who had no clue to create "classes" and pretend to get it (while putting everything into a single procedural method.) I wish I could recall the name of the book--it was one of the most unselfconsiously arrogant memoirs I have ever read.
One response to the false belief that cross-platform code is not cheaper than single-platform code is to make the point that writing cross-platform code is quite different from porting code from one platform to another. Another is to remind people that we are dealing with Turing complete machines, so all functionality is always available on all platforms. This isn't actually relevant, but it will shut people up who don't know what they're taking about, and if we have anything to learn from MS it is that substance and quality mean nothing when put alongside a catchy argument.
The notes always match, but it turns out that the outcomes of the summed experiments are such that you can never extract information from the measurement at Ap about what the guy at Ad did (or is going to do.)
The thing is: there are always FOUR possible outcomes to each experiment at each detector. At Ap the photon can pass through one of two slits, OR it can be part of one of two possible interference patterns. These patterns will always be perfectly out of phase with each other, and will add up to the sum of the two patterns that you would get if the particle passed through one slit or the other. WHICH pattern the particle at Ap partakes in will be perfectly correlated with the outcome of the interference measurement at the other end of the experiment, at Ad. But no matter what happens at Ad, the average outcome at Ap will be identical, UNLESS there is something happening that is totally unexpected.
So the only way you will ever be able to see the interference patterns at Ap is to filter for events that had particular measurements with specific outcomes at Ad.
Does entaglement survive the transmission?
The answer to this is "it depends". If the fibre is (nearly) lossless and smoothly curved you should get at most a small loss of entanglement. But you shouldn't take the word of some random guy on/. for that:-)
Actually the experiment is designed properly. The thing is, they are already going to misinterpret the results. Quantum entaglement means that at the moment of setting wavefunction of one of the particles, the wavefunction of second particle is immediately changed to "second" possible state
I believe they are hypothesizing actual signalling to occur as follows. Call the two detectors Ap (for prompt arm) and Ad (for delayed arm), and the two photons Pp and Pd for the same reasons.
Ap and Ad are not the same. Ap has some capacity to respond to the photon in two different ways. I don't know what they're planning, but conceptually some kind of double-slit apparatus followed by a two-layer detector that has one layer capable of determining which slit the particle passed through, followed by another layer that is sensitive only to photons in interference maxima that have classically very low probabilities. So if you detect the photon in layer 1 it is behaving as a particle, in the layer 2 it is behaving as a wave.
On the other end, at Ad, rather than giving photon Pd a "choice" of what to do, you have two different detector systems: one that is an interferometer, one that is a localized particle detector. One or the other gets switched into the beam "after" the photon has been detected at Ap. With correct placement of the detectors it should be possible to give the term "after" an absolute meaning.
The claim is that the results of the measurement of Pp by Ap will necessarily reflect the choice made by the experimenter at Ad. So if Pp is detected "as a particle" it will be "because" the experimenter has chosen to detect Pd "as a particle" some time "later", and similarly if Pp is detected "as a wave". The heavy use of scare quotes is due to my respect for relativity and disbelief in strong quantum ontologies.
I hope I have made this seem plausible, although it is all wrong.
The perfect linearity of quantum reality ensures that when one gets down to the detailed computations there is an exact balance between terms that wipes out any possibility of transmission of information by this means. This experiment is testing this aspect of reality, and if no one has been able to explain to them "exactly" why it won't work it is because no one has bothered to do the detailed analysis of their apparatus that would be required. When detector efficiencies are folded into the mix the analysis can become quite complex, and you really need to do that if you want to test causality in this manner. If you want to simply demonstrate that the conventional interpretation of QM predicts no knowable information will be transmitted the analysis is much easier.
So this is a pretty ordinary test of the linearity of quantum reality, and as they say, it is virtually certain that no transmission of information will occur. Unfortunately, given the truly terrible standard of communication demonstrated by this article it is likely that that fact will never be clearly understood by the public.
The Hirsch Report is full of gems, including clarification of exactly what "peak oil" means:
"It is important to recognize that oil production peaking is not 'running out.' Peaking is a reservoir's maximum oil production rate, which typically occurs after roughly half of the recoverable oil in a reservoir has been produced. In many ways, what is likely to happen on a world scale is similar to what happens to individual reservoirs, because world production is the sum total of production from many different reservoirs."
And some information on CERA's past record:
"In 2001 Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) stated 'The rebound in North American gas supply has begun and is expected to be maintained at least through 2005. In total, we expect a combination of US lower-48 activity, growth in Canadian supply, and growth in LNG imports to add 8.95 Bcf per day of production by 2005.'"
In 2005 CERA "now finds that 'The North American natural gas market is set for the longest period of sustained high prices in its history, even adjusting for inflation. Disappointing drilling results... have caused CERA to revise the outlook for North American supply downward... The downward revisions represent additional disappointing supply news, painting a more constrained picture for continental supply. Gas production in the United States (excluding Alaska) now appears to be in permanent decline, and modest gains in Canadian supply will not overcome the US downturn.'"
For all the thoughful, deeply informed people who have dismissed peak oil with the claim that "the stupid enviros can never get it right, Club of Rome, blah blah blah...", I strongly suggest looking for the beam in your own eye before complaining about the mote in ours.
Peak oil theory is based on a very simple idea: the best first order measure of future oil supply using any technology at any price is the amount of oil still in the ground, and that amount can be estimated based on the amount already extracted. If this theory is true, then we expect the current production rate (P) divided by the cummulative production (Q) to be a straight line when plotted against the cummulative production.
It is an undisputed although often ignored fact P/Q vs Q is a straight line to a good approximation over the past fifty years, both in the continental United States and worldwide. It does not deviate in war or peace, in recession or oil crisis, by more than a small amount. The deviations are significant, but the undoubted fact remains that to first order we have an exceptionally good model for world oil production that is consistent with the past half century of extraction data.
If you want to deny peak oil, you have to claim either:
a) There is some other factor that dominates the first-order term in world oil production
or
b) The higher-order terms are at some point going to dominate.
Of the two, the latter is clearly the only really plausible move, and it is not really denying peak oil but rather accepting that economies will adapt to the very real fact of peak oil.
Oil sands, coal derviatives and non-geologic sources may both become significant factors at some future price with some additional technologies. My own favourite is algal biodeisel, which seems like just about the perfect source of liquid fuels, as it is essentially solar->liquid hydrocarbon conversion at very high efficiency. But there is very little investment going into it for some reason.
Now do this with electromagnetic waves. The real trick is figuring out how not to waste energy pumping it out in all directions. But its about as dangerous as me sitting here 1000 feet from a major radio broadcast station.....
The thing that is going on here is an antenna configuration that does not radiate significantly unless the near-field is distorted by a resonant object embedded in it.
Any conductor subject to an oscillating electric current will have an oscillating electro-magnetic field surrounding it. With the right configuration this field is a standing wave that dies off exponentially outside of the conductor, with a characteristic length comparable to the wavelength, which in the case of 6.4 MHz is getting on for 50 m (could it be 64 MHz?) No radiation is emitted, but the standing wave is still present in the space around the antenna. When another conductor is introduced into the field, it will in general absorb some energy, or at the very least allow some transmission of energy by secondary radiation. If a conductor with the correct configuration is introduced, it will absorb energy without significant re-radiation, allowing relatively efficient wireless transmission of energy.
Tesla reputedly wanted to use the electromagnetic properties of the Earth's atmosphere as a waveguide to extend the reach of the standing wave further than would otherwise be possible.
One issue with all systems of this kind is that, as noted above, any conductor introduced into the field will change the impeadance and therefore result in some energy trasmission, which will either heat the conductor or be lost to EM radiation. This does not make such systems impossble, but it does pose a significant technical barrier, which is perhaps what the current groups working on them have overcome.
From the summary: "the robot does include a speaker that can be used to politely issue a warning before taking the target out."
I wonder where it is taking the target out too? Someplace with really bad food? Is that what the warning is about?
English has a perfectly good word for "killed". It is: "killed". I strongly encourage everyone to use it. It's so much more honest that way, and so much less prone to moronic glamorization. There is nothing beautiful or glorious about killing.
From the comment: The US, for example, could buy these for defending Guantanamo, and remove the land mines we have placed there.
Who is Guantanamo being defended from? Human rights activists? People who understand the laws of probability and the rules of evidence?
I don't know of much free software that is really competitive because truly free software doesn't have the support that it needs to compete with software that does have support.
How much support should software actually need?
Once upon a time everyone who owned a car was an amateur mechanic. Today we have vehicles that don't need much more than regular oil changes and the odd fill-up. There is no reason to expect that software will not follow essentially the same curve, and it is quite likely that the bottom of that curve for software will be zero support.
Enterprise-level software needs significant support because it is being continually reconfigured to keep up with the pointless, ego-driven reorganizations that jackass managers and executives inflict upon their companies on top of the low level of legitimate support needs.
But for the individual user of the average desktop application the level of required support should be nil. How may people reading this have ever made a support call to Microsoft about Word or IE? Or wished they could make a support call about Firefox or OO.o? As these products mature, the need for anything resembling support ought to drop to zero, as feature sets stabalize and bugs get squashed.
Don't know many people who would respond to "Hey Joe, I need your credit card?"
Given the empirically-known reality of human behaviour it is virtually certain that after a period of aclimatization people would happily give each other thier credit cards "for identification purposes only."
If you're familiar with the early Neilsen studies of television-watching behaviour, you'll recall that people with cameras in their living rooms set to record who was watching TV when (in the 1950's) were sometimes filmed having sex, apparently completely oblivious to the camera because it had been there for a while and therefore faded into the background.
In a closed work environment where credit cards were being used for ID people would quickly create a cultural ethic where they'd "forget" the risks, because people hate nothing more than inconvenience. And pretty quickly people would also get low-limit cards strictly for the purposes of ID, and never use them, which would trigger credit-watch calls when they were first used.
From a security point of view, human behaviour can be amazingly perverse.
Recording and replaying the biometric information isn't an issue if there's a trustworthy path from the sensor to the database and a security guard who will challenge anybody who holds a severed finger up to the reader.
And since there is never a trustworthy path from the sensor to the database (anything can be hacked) and since it only takes one failure to permanently leak the data, you've made the GP's point nicely: biometrics are not secure. This does not make them useless, but it does mean that they are not sufficient. The important thing is that while the per-transfer risk of compromise is very small, the cumulative risk of failure approaches unity, and the cost of failure is extremely high because biometrics can't be easily changed.
You've been using biometrics for identification your entire life. You recognize family and coworkers by facial geometry in person and by voice over the phone. There's no need to "revoke" a face if someone takes a photograph of it.
Ignoring for the moment the problem of identical twins, we actually use far more than just biometrics to identify people. We use a lot of contextual information as well. I passed the sensei at my dojo on the street the other day and at first didn't recognize him because I'd never seen him in street clothes. I'm sure there must be an extensive pyschological literature on how we identify people which might be of value to the computer-identity problem, and I'm sure there's a lot more than just biometrics involved. This is something that con-artists are aware of as well. Frequently context over-rides biometrics in gaining people's trust. If you appear to be someone from head office, you will be treated as such even though no one has ever seen you before.
But the deep problem remains: no matter what numerical representation of identity we use, it can always be copied, and once it has been copied it is very difficult to re-secure the system. It is the nature of bits that they can be copied, just as it is the nature of brain-states that they cannot (at least not yet.) So the fact that we use biometrics and other data does not mean that they are sufficient for a digital identity system. They are almost certainly the right starting point, but there remains some serious unsolved issues with the implementation.
Still, I guess one could beat the password out of the poor worker, steal his badge, and then cut off his thumb... Or maybe kidnap his kid and blackmail him.
Or you could say, "Hey Joe, I need your card, can I get it?"
I once maintained a misson-critical database system for a large physics experiment, which used barcode readers to determine who assembled what parts of the detector. On my first visit to the cleanroom where the actual assembly was taking place I found a piece of wood that had stickers with everyone's barcode printed on, so any old assembly worker could become the supervisor, for example. It turned out that the database had some deep issues that made it practically impossible for the workers to actually do the assembly without lying to it. And because it was all hand-rolled C++ spaghetti that was actually trying to get an adequate solution to an NP-hard problem under some severe constraints it wasn't practical to change it. Nor was it actually necessary, because the workers were really trying to do the right thing, they just couldn't.
But the experience made me very aware of how easy it is for co-operative workers to fake reality big-time without the system being at all aware of it, and most password/identity schemes are subject to this. Some kind of deep biometrics really does seem to be required, but unless they are very reliable, fast, easy to use and unobtrusive they won't be used. And some, as others have pointed out regarding optical fingerprint readers, are very easy to game.
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't "the approximately 24 people who worked on the shutdown menu" already tell you everything you need to know?
There's someone's law that says organizations are constrained to make machines that emulate or otherwise reflect the structure of the organization. There is some truth in this, and we are witnessing it here.
Big, bloated, needlessly complex organizations produce big, bloated, needlessly complex software.
So it's a hard sell if you call it a "cell phone with high priced data transfer features". So a new name is in order, with the exclusive purpose of charging more monthly and per-byte fees.
Blackberry?
People can now patent ideas that are not feasible yet, without actually contributing to the art. But as soon as someone else does the hard work and makes it possible, that someone can be sued for patent violation when he tries to market his design.
Yeah, the patenting of currently non-workable devices can actually have a depresseve effect on development in the area.
I once had some of my own research killed by a newly-published patent that described in general terms what I had under development. The company that held that patent was an "idea factory" that was claiming all kinds of general ideas, but to make any of them viable required a lot more work (ideas are easy, products are hard.) There was no way my company was going to continue to invest in developing something when there was no way we'd ever own the IP, as owning the IP was part of the business plan at the time.
So far from "promoting the useful arts", patents without prototypes can definitely have the effect of "retarding the useful arts."
Hardware patents require engineering diagrams; software patents should require very specific algorithm and data descriptions that are more easily expressed as code.
"Engineering diagrams" is a big overstatement of what hardware patents require. Most hardware patents contain sketches, but nothing any engineer would be willing to sign and stamp.
The digrams in patents are explantory, and for clarity of explanation they frequently leave out major features that would be required to actually build a device. The assumption is that anyone reading the patent has enough "skill in the art" to know those features are needed. I'm talking about things like bolts to fasten parts together and so on.
This is one of the reasons why workability is not a criterion for patentability, because the hardware does not actually have to be engineered to any reasonable level of detail before a patent can be granted. For example, you might submit a patent that to be built requires materials that are impossibly strong or light. That won't show up anywhere in your patent documents, and anyone who tries to engineer such a device on the basis of your patent will rapdily discover they are wasting their time.
Software and process patents simply should not be granted, anymore than patents should be granted on the plots of novels, and for the same reason. A novel, after all, is nothing more than a machine for inducing a particular state in the reader. But giving patent protection to particular designs of such machines does not "promote the useful arts" any more than giving patent protection to software does.
But if they are spending all their time keeping up with technical stuff, then they aren't spending that time learning how to do their management job.
Management hasn't changed that much in the past few thousand years. Good management always has been and always will be a mixture of logistics and people-skills. It isn't that hard to learn--the most important management lesson I got in cub-scouts, when we played that game where you whisper a message around in a circle and it gets mangled after about three hops. Lesson: clear, consistent, verifiable communciation is key.
Technical stuff, on the other hand, is both hard and keeps changing. To set goals appropriately a manager needs to have sufficient knowledge to know what can be done and what sorts of things need to happen to get it done. They also have to have the maturity to not try to do it themselves. That's another management lesson from scouts: trust your people.
So I'd say good managers benefit enormously from having as much technical knowledge as they can stand. Bad managers are another story, but in that case the problem isn't their technical knowledge or lack therefore.
We are not talking about silencing political speech here
One of the most tired canards of the old left, which I'm betting you are repeating unwittingly, is that "political speech" is somehow special. This argument was used by the old left to argue for various types of artistic and ideological repression because artistic, philosophical, even simply factual speech was deemed to be not "political speech", and therefore not subject to protections.
In this argument, free speech is not a right (that is, a political condition necessary for the life of a moral autonomous being) but a limited grant given to some kinds of speech that are deemed necessary for a particular public good. This justification for free speech is no different from a patent grant: patents are granted to further the useful arts; free speech is granted to further political discussions.
Most modern advocates of free speech, from Orwell on down, are clear that this is not what they mean. Orwell famously wrote, "Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four. Grant that, and all else follows." Conversely, suppress any form of expression and you will find yourself on a slippery slope to the point where some guy in some governement office somewhere is deciding what two plus two equals.
The Canadian solution has been to restrict speech that a) starts to look like action ("where it is likely to result in a breach of the peace") and b) restrict forms of artistic expression that cannot be created legally (child porn.) There are some questionable restrictions even here, as non-photographic child porn has been found to violate the law. However disgusting we find such things, we need to understand that once we start saying that certain types of expression are in and of themselves illegal, we are in a very dangerous place.
Not only that, the summary is approaching the problem all wrong: "There are still people in high positions who seem to think that stuffing a bunch of engineers into a noisy landscaped office is the best way to organize a company."
Best for what purpose?
If you are typical manager whose ego is more important than anything else, open plan offices and cube farms are great. You get to lord it over your suffering minions, and you have an office in which to meet with your peers to discuss the upcoming downsizing in secret.
To approach the problem from the point of view of productivity is to simply miss the point. The point is stroking the sloppy-fat egos of arrogant idiots in management, to whom "it just makes sense" that open plan offices are better. No amount of data on productivity will address this issue because it is no more relevant to the root cause than data on pork production in the Mongolia.
Planets are not a classical category, and will be subject to prototype effects.
/. in the past, the bodies that qualified as "planets" originally had a collection of unrelated characteristics: they were close enough to be seen from Earth, but too far away to show a disk, and all happened to orbit the sun. If the Earth had a small, distant moon it would have been counted as a planet as well, and if any of the classical planets had naked-eye visible moons perhaps the concept would have evolved differently.
The basic premise behind classical categories is in any case nonsensical, so is isn't clear what benefit there would be if planets fell into any of them.
Physics has been steadily eroding the Aristotlian world view for centuries now, and the categories died with Einstein's unified description of space and time. Aristotle was an acute observer of the human condition, and his world view accurately captures a vast amount of folk-epistemology and folk-metaphysics, but it simply does not generalize to the modern scientific world-view at all well. It is useful, but profoundly limiting.
The difficulting of defining "planet" is a consequence of the social pressure to preserve an archaic term, as if we insisted on doing thermodynamics in terms of phlogiston or caloric, despite those being exploded concepts. As others here have pointed out, and I've pointed out on
Planet is a concept deeply embedded in the accidents of naked-eye astronomy, and the only reasons anyone wants to retain the word at all are that a) the public is attached to it and b) observers who discover new planets attract the really hot memebers of the complementary sexual orientation.
I suspect we only cling to them in day to day life because of their convenient size and divisors: a pint is a good measure of beer, and a quarter pound of ham will make a generous round of sandwiches.
A litre is an even more convenient size for a beer! And a kilos can be treated as pounds times two, so 150 grams of hame will do not too badly, 200 is lots and 250 is really rather much.
What is convenient is what you know, what you're used to. Metric measures are just as convenient as Imperial ones if you know how to use them, and FAR more convenient if you've never been able to remember how many ounces are in a pound, or a pint, or whatever.
Although I think traditional science is a better method of investigating these sorts of incidents I think the idea of tracing back through myths and stories to reach an actual point in time where some group of people actually experienced the event is fascinating. Whether it's just wishful thinking or not and can ever be tied down this precisely is I think questionable.
This article gives an idea of how difficult it is to tie down anything specific from myth and oral history, at least in part due to the very imperfect record we have. European exploerers were not generally very interested in preserving native cultural traditions, and migration, progression and conquest within native cultures before Eurpean contact wiped out information even more thoroughly.
One interesting note in the paper is the remark that it is easy to distinguish between myth and history within the oral accounts based on style alone. Early flood myths are likely to be heavily processed specifically to remove regional detail, to make them more universal. The most obvious case of this is the Biblical flood myth, which to anyone with an unbiased prior appears to be little more than a monotheistic gloss on the Sumerian myth of much earlier date.
On the other hand, it is likely that the Harappan civilization was trading with the Sumerians at the time of this impact, or shortly after it. It would be amusing if the Sumerian flood story, frequently assumed to be the source of the Biblical flood story, in its own turn was found to be derivative of a quite different story from far away.
How many people on Slashdot have said that the gene pool has become watered down due to the protections of civilization?
In the past 200 years (10 generations by conventional reckoning) the human population of Earth has increased more than six-fold.
This huge increase in population has been accompanied by virtually no selective pressure. We know that because "selective pressure" is a nice polite way of saying, "loads of people dying." Evolution operates via differential survival of different bloodlines, and you can't get rapid population expansion if pretty much everyone isn't living to breed.
Ergo, we are all members of the least "fit" (by any pre-industrial evolutionary standard of "fit") population of humans who have ever inhabited this planet.
And if you believe any of that matters, you might want to contemplate the fact that the over the same period of time the population of the United States has increased ten-fold rather than six-fold, faster than virtually any other nation, and most of it has been due to fertility, not immigration. China, in contrast, has had only about a factor of four growth in the same interval.
However, anyone who believes that this rapid population growth means the gene pool is being "watered down" is missing a fundamental aspect of evolution, which is that diversity is the basic currency of genetics. Far from being "watered down" by this expansion, the human gene pool has been enormously enriched by diversification, particularly by our penchant for exogamy: breeding far outside our local genetic group. In constrast, the least "watered down" gene pools on the planet can be found amongst the inbred populations of isolated communities and tribes. These places show great genetic homogeneity, and are therefore far more subject to problems of disease than more diverse populations.
Only people who believe the falsehood that certain evolutionary outcomes are "better" than others by something other than their own parochial standards of morality are going to be concerned about the vast increase in human diversity that has occured in the past 200 years. From an evolutionary standpoint this increase in diversity is only a good thing, and if you are concerned about it, is because either you don't understand this, or you are imposing your own moral standards on the outcome. There is nothing wrong with imposing your own moral standards on the outcome, but do not do so in the name of evolution.
There are ecological concerns regarding human population growth, but from an evolutionist's point of view it is a very good thing.
I'm old enough to remember something very similar to this back when gene splicing first became practical. Recombinant technology had a lot of hype around its promise, while at the same time there was an equal amount of hype about its dangers.
/. today on carbon nanotubes in ancient steel, and of course the first discovery of exotic carbon allotropes was in smoke, which is not exactly a rare substance. This suggests that some forms of nanoparticles have been around in the environment for a long time. However, it does not follow from this that naturally occuring nanoparticles are similar to the ones we are trying to create. Some, like carbon nanotubes and buckyballs, are unlikely to cause harm. But given their ability to infiltrate the body's natural defenses there needs at least to be careful assessment of new nanosubstances before any are allowed to released into the environment.
There was actually a voluntary suspension of recombinant DNA research for a short time back in the '70's. Everyone started doing it again when the truth became clear: recombination happens in nature all the time, and the mechanism was such that naturally occuring recombination was doing all the things that scientists wanted to do. Given this, it was felt there was little risk of uncontrolled side-effects. It is worth adding that this is different from believing that there is little risk (social, economic or environmental) from GMOs specifically designed to cause harm to others for the profit of some, like those containing Monsanto's Terminator gene.
The situation with nanoparticles is a little more ambiguous. There was as story on
Nano-materials are nothing more than large molecules, after all, and you wouldn't want people releasing large amounts of potentially deadly substances into the environment in the fond hope that they won't harm anyone with sufficient money to sue.
While you can get portable GUI apps to be very functional, it requires more work to extend the lowest-common-denominator tools.
But once extended, they stay extended. Qt has been there for a while, wxWidgets is there for a vast array of applications. I personally hate dockable floating toolbars, and the apps I write do not require them, so I haven't felt your pain there, but the improvement in cross-platform toolkits in the past five years has been enormous. Even as I write this there is someone thinking about how to better implement dockable floating toolbars in wxWidgets, and my own experience with extending both Qt and wxWidgets has been that it is very easy, particularly due to their open nature.
The "beefing up" here is placing two detectors in different distances (SR intervals) from the source - and check whether the change in corresponding wavefunctions really occur faster than c would allow.
The latter test has already been done, many, many times. There is no doubt whatsoever that quantum entanglement involves genuine nonlocality.
This is only a paradox to those who insist on ascribing a classical ontology to things we cannot know. But as Kant pointed out long ago, we have no warrant for doing that. And in fact, Augustine pointed it out long before Kant.
It's the Windows development tools...Combine this with Microsoft's business need to make portability look as difficult as possible to discourage developers from aiming for it and the results are predictable.
Amen.
I write only portable code (currently very happy with wxWidgets, and have used Qt in the past) but MS fud is so thick that I have at times had to convince clients that using platform-neutral code would be faster than an "all Microsoft solution."
I've also encountered an amazing number of developers who have no real interest in writing good software. They simply want to do things the easiest way possible that requires the least thought, and MS caters to those people and always has.
There is a delightlful ancedote told in a book by one of the guys who was deeply involved in the first Visual C++ release (the old C7.) At the time Borland owned the C++ compiler market on Windows, and MS was playing catch-up big time. The marketing people realized that the technical goodness and standards-conformance of the Borland compiler was only of interest to a small core of die-hard techies. The much larger market was C programmers who wanted to be able to call themselves C++ programmers. Thus were the Visual C wizards born. They made it easy for people who had no clue to create "classes" and pretend to get it (while putting everything into a single procedural method.) I wish I could recall the name of the book--it was one of the most unselfconsiously arrogant memoirs I have ever read.
One response to the false belief that cross-platform code is not cheaper than single-platform code is to make the point that writing cross-platform code is quite different from porting code from one platform to another. Another is to remind people that we are dealing with Turing complete machines, so all functionality is always available on all platforms. This isn't actually relevant, but it will shut people up who don't know what they're taking about, and if we have anything to learn from MS it is that substance and quality mean nothing when put alongside a catchy argument.
So, do the notes match?
/. for that :-)
The notes always match, but it turns out that the outcomes of the summed experiments are such that you can never extract information from the measurement at Ap about what the guy at Ad did (or is going to do.)
The thing is: there are always FOUR possible outcomes to each experiment at each detector. At Ap the photon can pass through one of two slits, OR it can be part of one of two possible interference patterns. These patterns will always be perfectly out of phase with each other, and will add up to the sum of the two patterns that you would get if the particle passed through one slit or the other. WHICH pattern the particle at Ap partakes in will be perfectly correlated with the outcome of the interference measurement at the other end of the experiment, at Ad. But no matter what happens at Ad, the average outcome at Ap will be identical, UNLESS there is something happening that is totally unexpected.
So the only way you will ever be able to see the interference patterns at Ap is to filter for events that had particular measurements with specific outcomes at Ad.
Does entaglement survive the transmission?
The answer to this is "it depends". If the fibre is (nearly) lossless and smoothly curved you should get at most a small loss of entanglement. But you shouldn't take the word of some random guy on
Actually the experiment is designed properly. The thing is, they are already going to misinterpret the results. Quantum entaglement means that at the moment of setting wavefunction of one of the particles, the wavefunction of second particle is immediately changed to "second" possible state
I believe they are hypothesizing actual signalling to occur as follows. Call the two detectors Ap (for prompt arm) and Ad (for delayed arm), and the two photons Pp and Pd for the same reasons.
Ap and Ad are not the same. Ap has some capacity to respond to the photon in two different ways. I don't know what they're planning, but conceptually some kind of double-slit apparatus followed by a two-layer detector that has one layer capable of determining which slit the particle passed through, followed by another layer that is sensitive only to photons in interference maxima that have classically very low probabilities. So if you detect the photon in layer 1 it is behaving as a particle, in the layer 2 it is behaving as a wave.
On the other end, at Ad, rather than giving photon Pd a "choice" of what to do, you have two different detector systems: one that is an interferometer, one that is a localized particle detector. One or the other gets switched into the beam "after" the photon has been detected at Ap. With correct placement of the detectors it should be possible to give the term "after" an absolute meaning.
The claim is that the results of the measurement of Pp by Ap will necessarily reflect the choice made by the experimenter at Ad. So if Pp is detected "as a particle" it will be "because" the experimenter has chosen to detect Pd "as a particle" some time "later", and similarly if Pp is detected "as a wave". The heavy use of scare quotes is due to my respect for relativity and disbelief in strong quantum ontologies.
I hope I have made this seem plausible, although it is all wrong.
The perfect linearity of quantum reality ensures that when one gets down to the detailed computations there is an exact balance between terms that wipes out any possibility of transmission of information by this means. This experiment is testing this aspect of reality, and if no one has been able to explain to them "exactly" why it won't work it is because no one has bothered to do the detailed analysis of their apparatus that would be required. When detector efficiencies are folded into the mix the analysis can become quite complex, and you really need to do that if you want to test causality in this manner. If you want to simply demonstrate that the conventional interpretation of QM predicts no knowable information will be transmitted the analysis is much easier.
So this is a pretty ordinary test of the linearity of quantum reality, and as they say, it is virtually certain that no transmission of information will occur. Unfortunately, given the truly terrible standard of communication demonstrated by this article it is likely that that fact will never be clearly understood by the public.
...inside a cargo container filled with water...
Made out of transparent aluminum?
The Hirsch Report is full of gems, including clarification of exactly what "peak oil" means:
... have caused CERA to revise the ... The downward revisions
"It is important to recognize that oil production peaking is not 'running
out.' Peaking is a reservoir's maximum oil production rate, which typically occurs
after roughly half of the recoverable oil in a reservoir has been produced. In
many ways, what is likely to happen on a world scale is similar to what happens
to individual reservoirs, because world production is the sum total of production
from many different reservoirs."
And some information on CERA's past record:
"In 2001 Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) stated 'The
rebound in North American gas supply has begun and is expected to be
maintained at least through 2005. In total, we expect a combination of US
lower-48 activity, growth in Canadian supply, and growth in LNG imports to
add 8.95 Bcf per day of production by 2005.'"
In 2005 CERA "now finds that 'The North American natural gas market is set for the
longest period of sustained high prices in its history, even adjusting for
inflation. Disappointing drilling results
outlook for North American supply downward
represent additional disappointing supply news, painting a more constrained
picture for continental supply. Gas production in the United States (excluding
Alaska) now appears to be in permanent decline, and modest gains in
Canadian supply will not overcome the US downturn.'"
For all the thoughful, deeply informed people who have dismissed peak oil with the claim that "the stupid enviros can never get it right, Club of Rome, blah blah blah...", I strongly suggest looking for the beam in your own eye before complaining about the mote in ours.
Peak oil theory is based on a very simple idea: the best first order measure of future oil supply using any technology at any price is the amount of oil still in the ground, and that amount can be estimated based on the amount already extracted. If this theory is true, then we expect the current production rate (P) divided by the cummulative production (Q) to be a straight line when plotted against the cummulative production.
It is an undisputed although often ignored fact P/Q vs Q is a straight line to a good approximation over the past fifty years, both in the continental United States and worldwide. It does not deviate in war or peace, in recession or oil crisis, by more than a small amount. The deviations are significant, but the undoubted fact remains that to first order we have an exceptionally good model for world oil production that is consistent with the past half century of extraction data.
If you want to deny peak oil, you have to claim either:
a) There is some other factor that dominates the first-order term in world oil production
or
b) The higher-order terms are at some point going to dominate.
Of the two, the latter is clearly the only really plausible move, and it is not really denying peak oil but rather accepting that economies will adapt to the very real fact of peak oil.
Oil sands, coal derviatives and non-geologic sources may both become significant factors at some future price with some additional technologies. My own favourite is algal biodeisel, which seems like just about the perfect source of liquid fuels, as it is essentially solar->liquid hydrocarbon conversion at very high efficiency. But there is very little investment going into it for some reason.
Now do this with electromagnetic waves. The real trick is figuring out how not to waste energy pumping it out in all directions. But its about as dangerous as me sitting here 1000 feet from a major radio broadcast station.....
The thing that is going on here is an antenna configuration that does not radiate significantly unless the near-field is distorted by a resonant object embedded in it.
Any conductor subject to an oscillating electric current will have an oscillating electro-magnetic field surrounding it. With the right configuration this field is a standing wave that dies off exponentially outside of the conductor, with a characteristic length comparable to the wavelength, which in the case of 6.4 MHz is getting on for 50 m (could it be 64 MHz?) No radiation is emitted, but the standing wave is still present in the space around the antenna. When another conductor is introduced into the field, it will in general absorb some energy, or at the very least allow some transmission of energy by secondary radiation. If a conductor with the correct configuration is introduced, it will absorb energy without significant re-radiation, allowing relatively efficient wireless transmission of energy.
Tesla reputedly wanted to use the electromagnetic properties of the Earth's atmosphere as a waveguide to extend the reach of the standing wave further than would otherwise be possible.
One issue with all systems of this kind is that, as noted above, any conductor introduced into the field will change the impeadance and therefore result in some energy trasmission, which will either heat the conductor or be lost to EM radiation. This does not make such systems impossble, but it does pose a significant technical barrier, which is perhaps what the current groups working on them have overcome.
From the summary: "the robot does include a speaker that can be used to politely issue a warning before taking the target out."
I wonder where it is taking the target out too? Someplace with really bad food? Is that what the warning is about?
English has a perfectly good word for "killed". It is: "killed". I strongly encourage everyone to use it. It's so much more honest that way, and so much less prone to moronic glamorization. There is nothing beautiful or glorious about killing.
From the comment: The US, for example, could buy these for defending Guantanamo, and remove the land mines we have placed there.
Who is Guantanamo being defended from? Human rights activists? People who understand the laws of probability and the rules of evidence?
I don't know of much free software that is really competitive because truly free software doesn't have the support that it needs to compete with software that does have support.
How much support should software actually need?
Once upon a time everyone who owned a car was an amateur mechanic. Today we have vehicles that don't need much more than regular oil changes and the odd fill-up. There is no reason to expect that software will not follow essentially the same curve, and it is quite likely that the bottom of that curve for software will be zero support.
Enterprise-level software needs significant support because it is being continually reconfigured to keep up with the pointless, ego-driven reorganizations that jackass managers and executives inflict upon their companies on top of the low level of legitimate support needs.
But for the individual user of the average desktop application the level of required support should be nil. How may people reading this have ever made a support call to Microsoft about Word or IE? Or wished they could make a support call about Firefox or OO.o? As these products mature, the need for anything resembling support ought to drop to zero, as feature sets stabalize and bugs get squashed.
Don't know many people who would respond to "Hey Joe, I need your credit card?"
Given the empirically-known reality of human behaviour it is virtually certain that after a period of aclimatization people would happily give each other thier credit cards "for identification purposes only."
If you're familiar with the early Neilsen studies of television-watching behaviour, you'll recall that people with cameras in their living rooms set to record who was watching TV when (in the 1950's) were sometimes filmed having sex, apparently completely oblivious to the camera because it had been there for a while and therefore faded into the background.
In a closed work environment where credit cards were being used for ID people would quickly create a cultural ethic where they'd "forget" the risks, because people hate nothing more than inconvenience. And pretty quickly people would also get low-limit cards strictly for the purposes of ID, and never use them, which would trigger credit-watch calls when they were first used.
From a security point of view, human behaviour can be amazingly perverse.
Recording and replaying the biometric information isn't an issue if there's a trustworthy path from the sensor to the database and a security guard who will challenge anybody who holds a severed finger up to the reader.
And since there is never a trustworthy path from the sensor to the database (anything can be hacked) and since it only takes one failure to permanently leak the data, you've made the GP's point nicely: biometrics are not secure. This does not make them useless, but it does mean that they are not sufficient. The important thing is that while the per-transfer risk of compromise is very small, the cumulative risk of failure approaches unity, and the cost of failure is extremely high because biometrics can't be easily changed.
You've been using biometrics for identification your entire life. You recognize family and coworkers by facial geometry in person and by voice over the phone. There's no need to "revoke" a face if someone takes a photograph of it.
Ignoring for the moment the problem of identical twins, we actually use far more than just biometrics to identify people. We use a lot of contextual information as well. I passed the sensei at my dojo on the street the other day and at first didn't recognize him because I'd never seen him in street clothes. I'm sure there must be an extensive pyschological literature on how we identify people which might be of value to the computer-identity problem, and I'm sure there's a lot more than just biometrics involved. This is something that con-artists are aware of as well. Frequently context over-rides biometrics in gaining people's trust. If you appear to be someone from head office, you will be treated as such even though no one has ever seen you before.
But the deep problem remains: no matter what numerical representation of identity we use, it can always be copied, and once it has been copied it is very difficult to re-secure the system. It is the nature of bits that they can be copied, just as it is the nature of brain-states that they cannot (at least not yet.) So the fact that we use biometrics and other data does not mean that they are sufficient for a digital identity system. They are almost certainly the right starting point, but there remains some serious unsolved issues with the implementation.
Still, I guess one could beat the password out of the poor worker, steal his badge, and then cut off his thumb... Or maybe kidnap his kid and blackmail him.
Or you could say, "Hey Joe, I need your card, can I get it?"
I once maintained a misson-critical database system for a large physics experiment, which used barcode readers to determine who assembled what parts of the detector. On my first visit to the cleanroom where the actual assembly was taking place I found a piece of wood that had stickers with everyone's barcode printed on, so any old assembly worker could become the supervisor, for example. It turned out that the database had some deep issues that made it practically impossible for the workers to actually do the assembly without lying to it. And because it was all hand-rolled C++ spaghetti that was actually trying to get an adequate solution to an NP-hard problem under some severe constraints it wasn't practical to change it. Nor was it actually necessary, because the workers were really trying to do the right thing, they just couldn't.
But the experience made me very aware of how easy it is for co-operative workers to fake reality big-time without the system being at all aware of it, and most password/identity schemes are subject to this. Some kind of deep biometrics really does seem to be required, but unless they are very reliable, fast, easy to use and unobtrusive they won't be used. And some, as others have pointed out regarding optical fingerprint readers, are very easy to game.