> Web based services won't cut sending intraoffice
> mail because the third party (Hushmail) can read
> it, (see Is hushmail secure?) using PGP is the
> safest bet by all means.
In the case of Hushmail, the third party most definitely _can not_ read your email. You can read the Hushmail faq to see how they do this.
The page at the link you gave just bitches about how Hushmail doesn't encrypt messages sent via Hushmail to non-Hushmail recipients or messages received from non-Hushmail senders via Hushmail. This is true, but I felt that the Hushmail web site very adequately explained this.
Not to mention that Hushmail gives you a confirmation message forcing you to OK the fact that your mail won't be encrypted if you have a non-Hushmail recipient!!
Come to Dallas. Contract. Charge an arm and a leg. I assume it also works in New York and Silicon Valley (only more so), but the cost of living is low here.
Good point; I was inaccurate in my claim. My point was not particularly that I know more about quantum mechanics than the original poster; I suspect that I do, but only slightly so. My point was that his information about quantum mechanics was not accurate, and interested people should read further.
I don't think that I lambasted the original poster. He posted misinformation, I pointed it out. IMO, that's the point of having an open forum: I can post my bit of knowledge on something, and if someone else knows better, they can correct me. As you did.
BTW, I did know that entanglement doesn't give you complete knowledge of the other particle's state. AFAIK, only one part of the state (e.g. phase or angular momentum) will be entangled.
I still don't think my description was as inaccurate as his, but that my just be stubbornness speaking.
Not only doesn't this post have anything to do with the article, it's just plain wrong. I got as far as
"Quantum computers are based on the concept of quantum entanglement, the ability of a quantum state to exist in a superposition of all of its mutually exclusive states"
and stopped reading. What he describes is just called superposition; quantum entanglement is when two particles' quantum states depend on each other in such a way that once you know the state of one, you also know the state of the other. To read more about it, look up the EPR paradox.
Don't spout off BS, and please, moderators, don't moderate it up!
Re:Great idea, you personal own ...
on
Fission in a Box
·
· Score: 1
Um, I have a degree in Nuclear Physics, and you, sir, are full of shit.
There are definite dangers with nuclear power, and, seeing as how I've done nothing with physics since graduating college (I'm a computer programmer), I won't propose that I know whether the dangers outweigh the advantages.
However, I know this much: nuclear reactors may melt down, but without some _extremely_ unlikely events, a nuclear explosion cannot occur.
It doesn't take any knowledge of nuclear physics to realize this. If you could take power plant grade uranium (as opposed to weapons grade) and build a fission bomb, wouldn't the terrorists be doing it right and left? It takes high grade uranium or plutonium and a demolitions expert to compress it to critical density to make a nuclear bomb.
Remember scientific method? Form a hypothesis, plan an experiment to validate or invalidate the hypothesis, perform the experiment, record the results?
Math uses none of these. In math you either make up axioms or you manipulate axioms. Everything you can do in math can be done typographically, otherwise it's not math. If we actually knew the most basic laws of physics in their true form, we could do physics as mathematics. We don't, so we experiment to get better representations of them.
If argument by logic doesn't work, I'll try argument by authority. Richard Feynmann says in his Physics Lectures "Mathematics is not a science." It doesn't get much clearer than that.
Er, don't these guys know the definition of science? If you don't use scientific method, then (from a scientist's point of view, anyway), it's not science.
They said:
"Computer scientists study the branch of mathematics dealing with computation."
Mathematics is not science. What most computer programmers do (write code, run it to see if it works, and edit it until it appears to work) is a lot closer to science than the study of computational mathematics, to which they're referring.
I'm not saying it's better, far from it, but it's more of a science.
Personally, I prefer mathematical proofs that my program is going to work instead of scientific evidence that it did work in some cases, but I'm too damn lazy to ever actually prove correctness in my code.
You can see the real Dagit (i.e. the "man" behind the costume) here.
By the way, I had the good fortune to see Erin Gray up-close and in-person at a sci-fi convention in Sprinfield, MO, just last weekend. She not only was she as hot as you remember in the show, she still looks pretty damned hot to me! She has aged _very_ well.
Someone please moderate this up. There's been all kinds of speculation as to what the benefit is here of using superconductors, and this is the only post I've seen that makes any sense.
Someone please mod up the comments pointing out the technical flaws (telomeres, not telemorases; more "complex" genome; etc) and mod down the "technical issues of 'human cloning'" post.
I come here hoping to read intelligent comments by knowledgable folks. The last thing we need is some blow-hard, claiming credentials he obviously doesn't have, getting modded up to 5! For goodness sake, my degree is in Physics/Mathematics, no biology since high school, and even I know the difference between telomeres and telomerase, and that human genomes are no more complex than other higher vertebrates!
If you have something to say, by all means say it, but don't claim to be an expert when you don't know a telomere from your ass!
First I was going to tell you how wrong you were, now I think that maybe you're just being unclear.
Certainly the laws of thermodynamics don't prevent the useful collection of waste heat. The universe doesn't separate heat into "waste heat" and "other heat", and (for example) the engine in your car certainly converts heat differences (the difference in temperature between the inside of the engine and the outside) into useful energy.
However, in no case does the transformation of heat differential into useful energy cause heat to go away, which is how I interpreted your "loose (sic) some heat" statement. The heat will be lost to the cooler environment; that's the only way to convert it to useful energy. But the heat just moves from one part of the system to another. And every transformation system must create heat, that's the second law of thermodynamics.
It looks to me as if you know what you're talking about, but it confused me and could be teaching falsehoods to folks.
Matrix had _horrible_ science. I can't offhand think of one thing that made sense scientifically - well, maybe the EMP.
The whole plot hinged around the idea that the evil computer needed humans as big batteries! Firstly, you'd get more energy out of just heaping the people together and burning them as fuel to a heat engine, secondly, all of the chemical energy in the human body (besides that which was there when the computer took over) had to be put in there! That whole ecosystem thing requires external energy to run (that big shiny thing in the sky), and humans aren't even capable of turning that external energy into a usable form. So instead of just burning the bodies and getting maximum energy out of them, it spends generations feeding them to each other, which would dissipate usable energy.
And the whole idea that you can influence a computer program if you just concentrate hard enough is poppycock. Every single thing that the Matrix hinged on was bunk.
And I loved it. Good science in a movie is wonderful. It educates, it gives a sense of consistency, and it satisfies the anal retentives like me. But whether or not a movie is good, to me, depends on three things:
1) can I relate to the characters
2) is there enough internal consistency that I can suspend disbelief
3) is there a build-up and release of dramatic tension
Everything else is gravy.
So tell me whether or not a movie seems to have good science, and tell me whether or not the characters are interesting, but don't tell me that a movie sucks because the screenwriter didn't know of the existence of spectroscopy.
I believe the article said that the black hole was 50 million light years away. If CNN noticed it spewing hundreds of years after it began, someone must have developed a time machine while I wasn't looking.
I have a physics degree, and while I don't remember too much, I do remember this:
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle refers to _momentum_ and position, and states that the product of the uncertainty in the momentum and position has a minimum value ( delta P * delta X >= h, where h is Planck's constant, P is a standard physics variable for momentum (no idea why), and X is the position). If you assume the mass is constant (disregarding Einstein's Special Relativity), then the momentum is proportional to the velocity, and what you said about velocity and position is roughly true.
There are several other pairs of physical properties which are related in this way; energy and time, angular momentum and angular position, etc. I'm not sure whether HUP is used to refer to these other property pairs, or only the momentum/position pair.
I'm sure I'm one of the few who care about such fine points, but I hate to leave misinformation out there unchallenged. I'm sure my fellow anal-retentives will thank me;)
Can Rob or CmdrTaco or someone check into the moderation on this guy?! I know the moderators' tastes are not this consistently bad. It seems like every post slashdot-terminal makes is moderated up to 3 or more, and most are obvious and/or crap.
There must be something hinky going on with his moderation.
There should be no real concern about encryption, except in regard to existing encrypted messages. Quantum computing reduces the number of operations necessary to brute-force crack a public key encrypted message to the square root of the number of operations necessary to brute-force on a standard computer. Doubling the number of bits in the key of a public key encryption squares the number of operations necessary to brute-force crack an encrypted message.
The upshot of this is that even if we get production quality quantum computers, just double the length of your encryption key and you have as much protection as you had before.
CmdrTaco says very plainly that the local broadcast issue has been taken care of for larger metroplexes, which is exactly what you're talking about here. Nothing has been done to handle people in the boonies; there's not enough bandwidth to get everyone's local programming on the satellite broadcasts.
What really needs to be done to allow everyone to see their network shows is to go back to allowing satellites to broadcast network programming without local programming, just like CmdrTaco says in the post.
Not that there aren't plenty of times that slashdot articles are unresearched and inaccurate, but let's keep our criticisms focused on the inaccurate articles, rather than making inaccurate criticisms against the good ones.
Can we get some kind of sanity check on the moderation of his comments?
He has to be a script kitty with some other bogus accounts to moderate himself. Could one of the slashdot team look into this and do something about it?
Don't people realize? A pure free market just brings about Darwinean competition - survival of the strongest and most brutal. In a pure free market, Microsoft would have no checks on growth and control of the market. (Of course, they've had few or no checks so far, but that looks as if it's about to be rectified.)
We need regulations so that those with power are obliged to use it for the good of all. This particular legislation is bullshit (an aphorism for "of negative value"), but the idea of legislation is sound.
We need to establish goals (like, reward useful works, promote social and economic progress, etc.) then establish laws and rights to promote those goals. Every law or right should indicate which goal it promotes.
Then we can examine the goals for fitness with the current culture, and re-examine all laws designed to meet those goals if the goals are found wanting. Laws are examined for their fitness to promote their goals, and changed if necessary.
The problem with the laws now is that corporations have gained power and the current legal system and culture allows them to continue and increase that power. One bribed judge or jury in a precedential case can pollute the law for all time.
It is time that we realized that a corporation is a fiction, and any law we make to promote their interests at the expense of human interests is bullshit. Laws and rights should be there to make people's lives better. While those who organize the production of massive amounts of goods (i.e. leaders of corps) should be rewarded well, we should not then allow them to take their rewards and use them as leverage to take wealth needed by the poor or those of modest means.
Also, if the law is wrong, violate it! I am not a history buff, so someone correct me if I'm wrong... I believe Thomas Jefferson himself said that a juror who believed that the law the defendant broke was unsound, that juror is obligated to find the defendant not guilty. Now this is one of the guys responsible for making the US law in the first place! Civil disobedience to bad laws is not evil, it is your obligation! You shouldn't need an argument from authority to confirm this, it should be self-evident. Just because some group of other people tell you to do something bad doesn't mean you should do it. Whether the group calls themselves the government or not is immaterial.
Why don't we see intelligent life everywhere throughout the universe?
(I will use the American definition of billion here: one thousand million or 10^9.)
Even if one assumes that the speed of light is an absolute limit to the rate at which an intelligent life form would propogate itself through the universe, it seems to me that one or more intelligent life form should have already filled most of the universe. With the development of molecular manufacturing techniques imminent, I can see humanity beginning an expansion at near the speed of light within the next 200 years, or 1000 years at the very most. This could be done via spores weighing at most a few milligrams but containing sufficient information and tools to allow building a transciever and molecular manufacuring plant from raw materials at the target. More complex instructions could be beamed continously at the target by laser to allow bootstrapping.
The universe has most likely been forming planets which could be earth prototypes since (this is total guesswork, let me know how far off I am), say, one billion years after the big bang. Give them five billion years to age into having intelligent life, and it seems that for the past six billion years (assuming a twelve billion year old universe) there should have been ETs spreading through the universe!
So where are the ETs? Would the universe require appreciably more time than I have allotted to produce earth prototypes? Is there some strong disincentive to take over the universe? Do most civilizations kill themselves off? Is life and/or intelligence so rare that we are among the first, if not the first?
Is there a reasonable explanation for the universe to be as we observe it, or do we just throw up our hands and say that we are too primitive to even understand the problem and possible solutions to why the universe isn't already taken over by extremely advanced civilizations?
Slashdot Mirror
> mail because the third party (Hushmail) can read
> it, (see Is hushmail secure?) using PGP is the
> safest bet by all means.
In the case of Hushmail, the third party most definitely _can not_ read your email. You can read the Hushmail faq to see how they do this.
The page at the link you gave just bitches about how Hushmail doesn't encrypt messages sent via Hushmail to non-Hushmail recipients or messages received from non-Hushmail senders via Hushmail. This is true, but I felt that the Hushmail web site very adequately explained this.
Not to mention that Hushmail gives you a confirmation message forcing you to OK the fact that your mail won't be encrypted if you have a non-Hushmail recipient!!
Someone please mod this up! Great idea!
Probably true.
Entropy is only a statistical certainty. It is possible for unordered information to become ordered by random fluctuation.
It sucks to be a pedant, but is sucks more to be the target of a pedant.
Come to Dallas. Contract. Charge an arm and a leg. I assume it also works in New York and Silicon Valley (only more so), but the cost of living is low here.
Good point; I was inaccurate in my claim. My point was not particularly that I know more about quantum mechanics than the original poster; I suspect that I do, but only slightly so. My point was that his information about quantum mechanics was not accurate, and interested people should read further.
I don't think that I lambasted the original poster. He posted misinformation, I pointed it out. IMO, that's the point of having an open forum: I can post my bit of knowledge on something, and if someone else knows better, they can correct me. As you did.
BTW, I did know that entanglement doesn't give you complete knowledge of the other particle's state. AFAIK, only one part of the state (e.g. phase or angular momentum) will be entangled.
I still don't think my description was as inaccurate as his, but that my just be stubbornness speaking.
Not only doesn't this post have anything to do with the article, it's just plain wrong. I got as far as
"Quantum computers are based on the concept of quantum entanglement, the ability of a quantum state to exist in a superposition of all of its mutually exclusive states"
and stopped reading. What he describes is just called superposition; quantum entanglement is when two particles' quantum states depend on each other in such a way that once you know the state of one, you also know the state of the other. To read more about it, look up the EPR paradox.
Don't spout off BS, and please, moderators, don't moderate it up!
Um, I have a degree in Nuclear Physics, and you, sir, are full of shit.
There are definite dangers with nuclear power, and, seeing as how I've done nothing with physics since graduating college (I'm a computer programmer), I won't propose that I know whether the dangers outweigh the advantages.
However, I know this much: nuclear reactors may melt down, but without some _extremely_ unlikely events, a nuclear explosion cannot occur.
It doesn't take any knowledge of nuclear physics to realize this. If you could take power plant grade uranium (as opposed to weapons grade) and build a fission bomb, wouldn't the terrorists be doing it right and left? It takes high grade uranium or plutonium and a demolitions expert to compress it to critical density to make a nuclear bomb.
Argh!! You're both wrong. Math is not science.
Remember scientific method? Form a hypothesis, plan an experiment to validate or invalidate the hypothesis, perform the experiment, record the results?
Math uses none of these. In math you either make up axioms or you manipulate axioms. Everything you can do in math can be done typographically, otherwise it's not math. If we actually knew the most basic laws of physics in their true form, we could do physics as mathematics. We don't, so we experiment to get better representations of them.
If argument by logic doesn't work, I'll try argument by authority. Richard Feynmann says in his Physics Lectures "Mathematics is not a science." It doesn't get much clearer than that.
Er, don't these guys know the definition of science? If you don't use scientific method, then (from a scientist's point of view, anyway), it's not science.
They said:
"Computer scientists study the branch of mathematics dealing with computation."
Mathematics is not science. What most computer programmers do (write code, run it to see if it works, and edit it until it appears to work) is a lot closer to science than the study of computational mathematics, to which they're referring.
I'm not saying it's better, far from it, but it's more of a science.
Personally, I prefer mathematical proofs that my program is going to work instead of scientific evidence that it did work in some cases, but I'm too damn lazy to ever actually prove correctness in my code.
Just picking nits.
By the way, I had the good fortune to see Erin Gray up-close and in-person at a sci-fi convention in Sprinfield, MO, just last weekend. She not only was she as hot as you remember in the show, she still looks pretty damned hot to me! She has aged _very_ well.
<Insert witty .sig here>
Someone please moderate this up. There's been all kinds of speculation as to what the benefit is here of using superconductors, and this is the only post I've seen that makes any sense.
;)
Thanks, Elvis
Bobby
Someone please mod up the comments pointing out the technical flaws (telomeres, not telemorases; more "complex" genome; etc) and mod down the "technical issues of 'human cloning'" post.
I come here hoping to read intelligent comments by knowledgable folks. The last thing we need is some blow-hard, claiming credentials he obviously doesn't have, getting modded up to 5! For goodness sake, my degree is in Physics/Mathematics, no biology since high school, and even I know the difference between telomeres and telomerase, and that human genomes are no more complex than other higher vertebrates!
If you have something to say, by all means say it, but don't claim to be an expert when you don't know a telomere from your ass!
Bobby
First I was going to tell you how wrong you were, now I think that maybe you're just being unclear.
Certainly the laws of thermodynamics don't prevent the useful collection of waste heat. The universe doesn't separate heat into "waste heat" and "other heat", and (for example) the engine in your car certainly converts heat differences (the difference in temperature between the inside of the engine and the outside) into useful energy.
However, in no case does the transformation of heat differential into useful energy cause heat to go away, which is how I interpreted your "loose (sic) some heat" statement. The heat will be lost to the cooler environment; that's the only way to convert it to useful energy. But the heat just moves from one part of the system to another. And every transformation system must create heat, that's the second law of thermodynamics.
It looks to me as if you know what you're talking about, but it confused me and could be teaching falsehoods to folks.
Bobby
Matrix had _horrible_ science. I can't offhand think of one thing that made sense scientifically - well, maybe the EMP.
The whole plot hinged around the idea that the evil computer needed humans as big batteries! Firstly, you'd get more energy out of just heaping the people together and burning them as fuel to a heat engine, secondly, all of the chemical energy in the human body (besides that which was there when the computer took over) had to be put in there! That whole ecosystem thing requires external energy to run (that big shiny thing in the sky), and humans aren't even capable of turning that external energy into a usable form. So instead of just burning the bodies and getting maximum energy out of them, it spends generations feeding them to each other, which would dissipate usable energy.
And the whole idea that you can influence a computer program if you just concentrate hard enough is poppycock. Every single thing that the Matrix hinged on was bunk.
And I loved it. Good science in a movie is wonderful. It educates, it gives a sense of consistency, and it satisfies the anal retentives like me. But whether or not a movie is good, to me, depends on three things:
1) can I relate to the characters
2) is there enough internal consistency that I can suspend disbelief
3) is there a build-up and release of dramatic tension
Everything else is gravy.
So tell me whether or not a movie seems to have good science, and tell me whether or not the characters are interesting, but don't tell me that a movie sucks because the screenwriter didn't know of the existence of spectroscopy.
I believe the article said that the black hole was 50 million light years away. If CNN noticed it spewing hundreds of years after it began, someone must have developed a time machine while I wasn't looking.
I have a physics degree, and while I don't remember too much, I do remember this:
;)
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle refers to _momentum_ and position, and states that the product of the uncertainty in the momentum and position has a minimum value ( delta P * delta X >= h, where h is Planck's constant, P is a standard physics variable for momentum (no idea why), and X is the position). If you assume the mass is constant (disregarding Einstein's Special Relativity), then the momentum is proportional to the velocity, and what you said about velocity and position is roughly true.
There are several other pairs of physical properties which are related in this way; energy and time, angular momentum and angular position, etc. I'm not sure whether HUP is used to refer to these other property pairs, or only the momentum/position pair.
I'm sure I'm one of the few who care about such fine points, but I hate to leave misinformation out there unchallenged. I'm sure my fellow anal-retentives will thank me
Argh!
Can Rob or CmdrTaco or someone check into the moderation on this guy?! I know the moderators' tastes are not this consistently bad. It seems like every post slashdot-terminal makes is moderated up to 3 or more, and most are obvious and/or crap.
There must be something hinky going on with his moderation.
I have my threshhold set to +2 for a reason!
I think you mean superconductor.
There should be no real concern about encryption, except in regard to existing encrypted messages. Quantum computing reduces the number of operations necessary to brute-force crack a public key encrypted message to the square root of the number of operations necessary to brute-force on a standard computer. Doubling the number of bits in the key of a public key encryption squares the number of operations necessary to brute-force crack an encrypted message.
The upshot of this is that even if we get production quality quantum computers, just double the length of your encryption key and you have as much protection as you had before.
No, you need to read the post.
CmdrTaco says very plainly that the local broadcast issue has been taken care of for larger metroplexes, which is exactly what you're talking about here. Nothing has been done to handle people in the boonies; there's not enough bandwidth to get everyone's local programming on the satellite broadcasts.
What really needs to be done to allow everyone to see their network shows is to go back to allowing satellites to broadcast network programming without local programming, just like CmdrTaco says in the post.
Not that there aren't plenty of times that slashdot articles are unresearched and inaccurate, but let's keep our criticisms focused on the inaccurate articles, rather than making inaccurate criticisms against the good ones.
Can we get some kind of sanity check on the moderation of his comments?
He has to be a script kitty with some other bogus accounts to moderate himself. Could one of the slashdot team look into this and do something about it?
Thanks,
Bobby
No, zero is neither positive nor negative.
Zero is definitely even, as indicated here multiple times.
Don't people realize? A pure free market just brings about Darwinean competition - survival of the strongest and most brutal. In a pure free market, Microsoft would have no checks on growth and control of the market. (Of course, they've had few or no checks so far, but that looks as if it's about to be rectified.)
We need regulations so that those with power are obliged to use it for the good of all. This particular legislation is bullshit (an aphorism for "of negative value"), but the idea of legislation is sound.
We need to establish goals (like, reward useful works, promote social and economic progress, etc.) then establish laws and rights to promote those goals. Every law or right should indicate which goal it promotes.
Then we can examine the goals for fitness with the current culture, and re-examine all laws designed to meet those goals if the goals are found wanting. Laws are examined for their fitness to promote their goals, and changed if necessary.
The problem with the laws now is that corporations have gained power and the current legal system and culture allows them to continue and increase that power. One bribed judge or jury in a precedential case can pollute the law for all time.
It is time that we realized that a corporation is a fiction, and any law we make to promote their interests at the expense of human interests is bullshit. Laws and rights should be there to make people's lives better. While those who organize the production of massive amounts of goods (i.e. leaders of corps) should be rewarded well, we should not then allow them to take their rewards and use them as leverage to take wealth needed by the poor or those of modest means.
Also, if the law is wrong, violate it! I am not a history buff, so someone correct me if I'm wrong... I believe Thomas Jefferson himself said that a juror who believed that the law the defendant broke was unsound, that juror is obligated to find the defendant not guilty. Now this is one of the guys responsible for making the US law in the first place! Civil disobedience to bad laws is not evil, it is your obligation! You shouldn't need an argument from authority to confirm this, it should be self-evident. Just because some group of other people tell you to do something bad doesn't mean you should do it. Whether the group calls themselves the government or not is immaterial.
I guess my rant is over now. Ran out of steam.
Why don't we see intelligent life everywhere throughout the universe?
(I will use the American definition of billion here: one thousand million or 10^9.)
Even if one assumes that the speed of light is an absolute limit to the rate at which an intelligent life form would propogate itself through the universe, it seems to me that one or more intelligent life form should have already filled most of the universe. With the development of molecular manufacturing techniques imminent, I can see humanity beginning an expansion at near the speed of light within the next 200 years, or 1000 years at the very most. This could be done via spores weighing at most a few milligrams but containing sufficient information and tools to allow building a transciever and molecular manufacuring plant from raw materials at the target. More complex instructions could be beamed continously at the target by laser to allow bootstrapping.
The universe has most likely been forming planets which could be earth prototypes since (this is total guesswork, let me know how far off I am), say, one billion years after the big bang. Give them five billion years to age into having intelligent life, and it seems that for the past six billion years (assuming a twelve billion year old universe) there should have been ETs spreading through the universe!
So where are the ETs? Would the universe require appreciably more time than I have allotted to produce earth prototypes? Is there some strong disincentive to take over the universe? Do most civilizations kill themselves off? Is life and/or intelligence so rare that we are among the first, if not the first?
Is there a reasonable explanation for the universe to be as we observe it, or do we just throw up our hands and say that we are too primitive to even understand the problem and possible solutions to why the universe isn't already taken over by extremely advanced civilizations?