According to this US News report, X10.com had the 14th highest traffic of any domain in the month of august. Pretty impressive for a site that sells something almost no one wants.
Has anyone else noticed that their special deals are always about to expire in the next day or two, and yet the offer itself doesn't change for weeks on end. Maybe someone should get them on deceptive advertising?
Of course the Matrix doesn't work exactly right. Any decent scientist could come up with dozens of things that can't quite work in the real world, but that's not the point.
IT'S A MOVIE.
As far as I'm concerned all the details of the world outside the matrix are just fantastical psuedo-science to justify the story they want to tell about and inside the matrix. It's a story about preceptions of reality and the nature of intelligence. The details of the technology aren't important to the points they are really trying to make. Get over it.
Well it is written that way on the press release on their website as well.
I thought perhaps it was just a different meaning for "micron" that I had never heard before, but a quick search on google for "micron amps" turns up no relevant references. More than likely, some clueless PR person "corrected" the what the scientists had given him.
Of course, as important as this is you'd think they'd have one of the developers check the final draft of the release, but guess not. Technical illiteracy strikes again.
Unfortunatey, that ability to learn didn't really come from the (US) school system, though the better teachers that I had helped develope it. Part of the concept of the broad spectrum of classes in education is to help develope the critical thinking skills and the ability to learn, but too many teachers and professors forget (or never understood) that concept.
A few years back I attended a lecture by a well-known (in those kind of circles) education professor. The point of his lecture was that it is exactly the ineptitude of the US education system that helps inspire some of the very best minds to strike off on their own. That in fact the creativity envidenced in the US is by some measure the result of the lack of stimulation available in our schools.
I don't know whether I agree with this now, or if it were true that it would make things justifiable, but I do remember it was rather convincing when I was listening to him.
Essentially every major world religion and culture advocates or prescribes chastity: no sexual partners until marriage, and only one after that with the intent to produce children.
While I disagree with your argument, in general, you weren't doing too bad until you hit this statement which is blatantly factually wrong. Other people have commented as to why, but as a amatuer student of religions I thought I would add a few comments.
The view you portray is the dominant view in the Christian world, but using a liberal definition of Christianity, it still encompasses only about 33% of the world.
The next largest group, Islam, is generally interpreted as allowing up to four wives and marriages are comparatively easily dissolvable. Admittedly though there is a good case here for banning pre- and extra-marital sex, as well as some arguments against sex purely for pleasure.
After that we arrive at Hindus. There is considerable variation among groups, but the prevaling view is that sex is a holy act to be enjoyed for its own sake. They gave us the Karmasutra which is a religious text as well as the world's first and most widely read sex manual. Prohibitions against extra-marital sex do exist in some places, but they are often weak, especially when compared to the strong taboo against intercaste marriage. Pre-marital sex is rare because marriage are often arranged at a young age and last for life. One group, the Vaishnavas, are even historically known as an "orgy cult", though they are not a small group.
Buddhists, like Hindus, view marriage as a sacred act in itself and take fulfillment in the pleasure of it aside from any reproductive purpose. Buddhism also preaches that in the later part of life you should renounce your wife and leave your family for the life of a monk. I won't touch extramarital sex cause I don't actually have a good grip on their stance regarding this.
These three groups compose 39% of the world, the non-religious/atheists make up another 19%. Thus 58% of the world does not hold religious views that agree with you, and that's without getting into any of the small religions. There are afterall a number of small but nontrivial groups that hold that sex with a holy man or woman erases sin.
I read through the FAQ on the site you offered, and I would say there are two significant problems with it.
1) All the examples deal with attempts to learn about and cure diseases in people. It neglects the fact that a good amount of research, such as the rat discussed, hopes to learn about a system given any environment because we've never studied it in any context. And, other times scientists really do want to learn about rats or rabbits or monkeys in question.
2) It presumes that animals are in all ways radically different than people and no results are comparable. This is patently false. Not every animal can be used for everything, but over time we learn what animals are good models for some processes. For instance the recent artificial hearts probably never would have been implanted without numerous practice surgerys on pigs, who have similar heart needs. Rabbit eyes while not perfect are a good predictor of irritation in human eyes. Failure of a drug in one animal model doesn't mean you can't try it in a different animal if you think it will give more accurate resuls.
I have actually protested (seriously!) animal research in the past, but that doesn't mean all animal research is bad. Complaining about a single rat with a microscope on its head isn't worth one's time. For instance one experiment I recently found offensive involved dozens of parakeets that were intentionally maimed, allowed to live for several more weeks and then vivisected. After reading the research reports and other documentation (it dealt with studying language acquisition), I concluded that this treatment was substantially unjustified and went after it. (The experiment is now over, though largely because it reached its natural conclusion before there was enough momentum to close it down preemptively.)
If you really want to stop ALL animal research you basically need to prove one of three points:
1) No animal research produces useful information.
2) The amount of misinformation greatly outweighs the value of any useful infomration.
3) The ethical implications of harming animals are never justifiable.
IMHO, the first two are largely false when dealing with human medicine and entirely false when the point of the research is to learn about the animal in question. The ethical point is hard to justify unless you are opposed to all medicine, or deny that the suffering/death of animals can ever be justified by improvements in the lives of people. (Not all animal experiments lead to improvements in the human condition, but at least some does.)
I am concerned for animals and have taken active stances to defend their rights, but I think blatantly opposing all forms of animal research is unrealistic and counterproductive.
Investors aren't interested in the company or what it does, they are interested in making money. If an investor really cared to support them, he'd bankroll them directly rather than buying common stock that can be dumped whenever it suits him.
People buy into IPOs because they know they can dump the stock 3 hours later and have made a profit. What the price does in that beggining has little reflection on the company at all; the only thing that matters is where the price ends up a week later. Though, even then shareholders are more concerned with making a profit for themselves than whether the company they "own" is any good in the long term.
Don't forget that it's alot easier to bring technology to bear on helping clean up that reforming plant than it is to systematically improve the emissions of every car on the road.
Hydrogen is a lot less dense, though. Any idea how many tanker trucks of hydrogen it would take to be equivalent to one tanker truck of gasoline? Not a flame, an honest question...
Okay, I got curious so, I decided to try and figure this out. I pulled some references and looked online, and the answer really surprised me.
This reference gives the energy content of Gasoline as 115,000 BTUs/Gallon = 32 MJ/liter
This reference says that very cold, highly compressed liquid hydrogen has a density 71 g/liter
Adding to that my reference value of 918 kJ/mol for hydrogen combustion, I arrived at an answer of 130 MJ/liter, or 4 times that of gasoline. We should consider that it takes about 40 MJ/liter to compress and cool the hydrogen down to a liquid form (and more energy if you need to keep it cool for a long time), and also that tanks would likely be smaller in order to accomodate cooling and other apparatus. But that still leaves us with the surprising result that transporting liquid hydrogen is around 2-3 times more efficient than transporting liquid gasoline.
The key of course is that liquid hydrogen is so much more dense than room temperature gaseous hydrogen (by a factor of nearly 1000, 71 g/L vs 0.089 g/L gaseous at 20 C). Consumer uses will probably focus on compressed hydrogen or extraction from fossil fuels, since liqifying hydrogen is hard to do, but there is no reason energy suppliers couldn't ship liquid hydrogen if it really is that much more efficient than shipping gasoline.
Please do check my math since this was only just cobbled together.
But you're not paying attention to how the US airline industry works.
More than once I've set about pricing what is essentially a one-way flight, and discovered that given the day, time and place I want to fly, I can actually get a cheaper ticket if I tell them I want a return trip way in the future. Sure this is a little dishonest since I don't intend to use the return trip, but I also think that making one-way travel more expensive than round trip travel is pretty dishonest as well.
What's even better is that by the time the return trip is scheduled I can usually forsee some other air travel that I'll be needing, and about 50% of the time I can turn the unwanted return flight into a worthwhile discount on a flight I do want.
Well... they don't always ignore it. I had a friend a few years back try to go through security while carrying unfinished chainmail and tools (bolt cutters, pliers, pointed metal rod, lots of metal wire, etc) for making hand crafted chainmail.
I wasn't there, but the reaction he describes is quite funny. Everyone in view of the scanner jumped when they saw it. When they guy went to open it, my friend was explicitly was told not to come within 3 feet of the bag, and not to make any sudden movements. The security guy started pulling stuff out of the bag (I think it was spools of twisted uncut wire first, followed by bolt cutters), and asking what's this for, and my friend just told him to keep going. Eventually he got to unfinished pieces of chain mail and it made sense.
The kicker is that they then allowed him to gather up all his stuff and get on the plane, depsite the fact he could darn well punch a hole in the plane itself with what he was carrying, not to mention what he could do to the people. Of course, I guess that's a symptom of an easier more naive time prior to Sept. 11th.
On one final note, for those wondering about why anyone would make chain mail, my friend used to sell pieces that took 5 or 6 hours to make for $100-200. That's a pretty good supplemental income for doing something you enjoy.
Viruses in nature are developed through evolution and mutation and thus long term survivability makes sense. Computer viruses are intentional creations of people, and it doesn't seem to me that virus writers would neccesarily focus on making them last in the wild for a long time. There are people who just like destroying stuff right? And depending on what you destroy or how you do it, it isn't neccesarily immediately obvious to the user, or going to stop the worm from seeking new hosts.
Also with the IIS worms, they tend to just about saturate all vulneralbe machines within the first few days if not hours. Once you've got 98% of what's available to get, then shutting all those down doesn't cause much loss in total reach. Especially since after a point the infection rate goes down due to patching faster than it increases from finding still uninfected machines.
Some people say they write viruses to demonstrate vulnerabilities, well it doesn't seem like a huge leap, by that logic, to decide to start taking out vulnerable software.
We seen a number of highly infectious viruses in the last year (Sircam, Code Red, Nimda, etc), but none of these were actually very destructive. Sure they are a pain to get rid of, and may spread a little information around, eat up bandwidth, or compel you to reformat just to be sure, but they aren't flattening people's systems.
Whatever happened to the anarchists out to destroy the system? Now admittedly I don't want to encourage people to be more destructive, but it seems almost trivial to think of ways that viruses and worms could easily be made more destructive. For instance, upon infection, delete everything in the "My Documents" folder. Or, change default web page to a share of the whole computer. Or even wait a couple days and then wipe the person's hard drive.
I haven't been vulnerable to anything to come along lately, and I'm glad, but I'm also glad to note that the truly skilled black hats out there seem to have moderated how much damage they actually intend to do. I wonder if they are scared what the law might do to them if their attack truly was evil.
It occurs to me that depending on how you apply the "temporal civil war" you could use this to patch up a lot of continuity errors by simply throwing this series into an alternate timeline.
Personally I'd rather not see things go that way, but it does provide a solution to writers if they feel overburdened by the history of preceeding Treks.
Well a quick search (PDF) actually turns up Methyl Oxide AKA Dimethyl Ether on the US Hazardous Materials list. It's a a clear, sweet-smelling, toxic and highly flammable gas (at room temp).
Nitrogen Sulfide isn't listed but I suspect that Nitrous sulfide might be a possible analog of nitrous oxide given the right conditions (S and O are both period 6 elements).
As strange as it is, it does suggest that they are trying to come up with real compounds. Might they even have competent technical advisers on staff? Time will tell.
Amnesia is a confounding factor because before you can't deal with the loss of memory, you ought to have a good understanding of the process of memory itself.
There are theories about how memory operates, and decent experimental evidence to make a beggining at understanding it. Roughly the expectation is that memory relates to the stregthening or weakening bonds between nuerons, and the tendancy for nerve clusters to repeat firing patterns that have occured previously. If memory can be explained physically then it would probably suggest an answer to psychological amnesia as well.
Many mental illnesses (depression, schizophrenia, OCD, etc.) exhibit detectable physical anomalies in the brain, even in the absence of trauma. Of course causality is hard to establish, but it does support the idea that mental changes might always have accompanying physical changes.
If you are interested in Mind-Body connections, Brainstorms by D. Dennett is excellent. Also, Philosophy of Mind by Georges Rey is not quite so interesting to read but particularly thorough. Rey devotes the last several chapters to the detailing one of the more respected modern theories concerning the principles of human cognition and thought, and how it might come to arrise from a highly ordered but purely physical system.
Re:New laws saying this is "life behind bars" offe
on
Brian West Update
·
· Score: 3, Informative
No. He pled guilty under Title 18, Section 1030(a)(2)(C).
Only 1030(a)(1), (4), (5)(A), and (7) are the computer crimes considered terrorism offenses under the draft of ATA (See Sec. 309)
By hacking the computer he gives up the right to any privacy regarding his actions on and communications with the attacked computer (Sec. 106), but then I wouldn't really expect someone to have privacy regarding what they do with a computer they shouldn't be on in the first place.
Entanglement and Measurement (as defined in Quantum) are mutually exclusive propositions. Measurement deals with wave function collapse to select a particular pure state. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle limits what measured states are allowed to coexist simultaneously. Entanglement deals with the mixing of states across across different particles. Measurement destroys entangled states and entanglement can not exist solely based pure "measured" states.
In other words since we are dealing with entanglement to create teleportation, Heisenberg's principle doesn't apply, as it only deals with measured (ie. not entangled) states.
X-Rays are just an example of a way of measuring the interior without taking the body apart to do it. I fully agree they wouldn't serve for teleportation, but hundreds of years from now there may be ways to selectively interact with the interior without any destructive consequences.
Well if you believe that it's all just electrochemical and/or quantum mechanical processes going on in the brain, then there is no fundemental problem with taking all of that along for the ride.
Judging from your post, I'll assume that you believe memories, knowledge, and "soul" don't result merely from complex physical processes. Fine, then point out where and what the soul is and precisely how it does relate to the brain, and I'll get right to work figuring out whether we can teleport it.
Thus far I've seen no evidence that anything happens in the brain which can't be explained by physical laws and processes.
A) While isolating different parts of a particle's wave function is possible, this is rarely, if ever, what is meant by entanglement. Typically what is meant involves bringing multiple particles together and getting their wavefunctions to operate as a coherent entity, and maintaining this "coherence" after seperating the particles.
B) The measurement doesn't have to be the same (in fact quite often they respond by giving exactly opposite measurements). The only requirement is that they behave in a well defined correlated way predicted by Quantum Mechanics.
C) You are thinking of "fascimile copying" which is different from teleportation. In the first case you exchange information through entangled particles to create a close (but never perfect) duplicate of the original. In teleportation you destroy the state of the original to create an exact duplicate at the other end. This reference provides a good explanation of the ideas behind teleportation.
D) Yes, you would have to entangle your whole body in order to teleport, but there are plenty of nondestructive ways to measure the body (think X-Rays), and it doesn't neccesarily follow that in some distant future there won't be a way to preserve at least one intact copy.
Here is a relatively straight forward discussion of the theory behind teleportation via quantum entanglement.
Whether information transfer is actually instaneous is a hotly debated topic in the relevant circles. General relativity forbids anything (including information) from going faster than the speed of light. The standard formulation of quantum mechanics absolutely requires non-localized information (ie knowing about two spatial seperated points simultaneously). This is just symptomatic of the fact that neither is a complete theory yet, and we still have interesting things left to learn about how the universe truly works.
Slashdot Mirror
According to this US News report, X10.com had the 14th highest traffic of any domain in the month of august. Pretty impressive for a site that sells something almost no one wants.
Has anyone else noticed that their special deals are always about to expire in the next day or two, and yet the offer itself doesn't change for weeks on end. Maybe someone should get them on deceptive advertising?
Of course the Matrix doesn't work exactly right. Any decent scientist could come up with dozens of things that can't quite work in the real world, but that's not the point.
IT'S A MOVIE.
As far as I'm concerned all the details of the world outside the matrix are just fantastical psuedo-science to justify the story they want to tell about and inside the matrix. It's a story about preceptions of reality and the nature of intelligence. The details of the technology aren't important to the points they are really trying to make. Get over it.
Well it is written that way on the press release on their website as well.
I thought perhaps it was just a different meaning for "micron" that I had never heard before, but a quick search on google for "micron amps" turns up no relevant references. More than likely, some clueless PR person "corrected" the what the scientists had given him.
Of course, as important as this is you'd think they'd have one of the developers check the final draft of the release, but guess not. Technical illiteracy strikes again.
Unfortunatey, that ability to learn didn't really come from the (US) school system, though the better teachers that I had helped develope it. Part of the concept of the broad spectrum of classes in education is to help develope the critical thinking skills and the ability to learn, but too many teachers and professors forget (or never understood) that concept.
A few years back I attended a lecture by a well-known (in those kind of circles) education professor. The point of his lecture was that it is exactly the ineptitude of the US education system that helps inspire some of the very best minds to strike off on their own. That in fact the creativity envidenced in the US is by some measure the result of the lack of stimulation available in our schools.
I don't know whether I agree with this now, or if it were true that it would make things justifiable, but I do remember it was rather convincing when I was listening to him.
Something to chew on anyway.
Essentially every major world religion and culture advocates or prescribes chastity: no sexual partners until marriage, and only one after that with the intent to produce children.
While I disagree with your argument, in general, you weren't doing too bad until you hit this statement which is blatantly factually wrong. Other people have commented as to why, but as a amatuer student of religions I thought I would add a few comments.
The view you portray is the dominant view in the Christian world, but using a liberal definition of Christianity, it still encompasses only about 33% of the world.
The next largest group, Islam, is generally interpreted as allowing up to four wives and marriages are comparatively easily dissolvable. Admittedly though there is a good case here for banning pre- and extra-marital sex, as well as some arguments against sex purely for pleasure.
After that we arrive at Hindus. There is considerable variation among groups, but the prevaling view is that sex is a holy act to be enjoyed for its own sake. They gave us the Karmasutra which is a religious text as well as the world's first and most widely read sex manual. Prohibitions against extra-marital sex do exist in some places, but they are often weak, especially when compared to the strong taboo against intercaste marriage. Pre-marital sex is rare because marriage are often arranged at a young age and last for life. One group, the Vaishnavas, are even historically known as an "orgy cult", though they are not a small group.
Buddhists, like Hindus, view marriage as a sacred act in itself and take fulfillment in the pleasure of it aside from any reproductive purpose. Buddhism also preaches that in the later part of life you should renounce your wife and leave your family for the life of a monk. I won't touch extramarital sex cause I don't actually have a good grip on their stance regarding this.
These three groups compose 39% of the world, the non-religious/atheists make up another 19%. Thus 58% of the world does not hold religious views that agree with you, and that's without getting into any of the small religions. There are afterall a number of small but nontrivial groups that hold that sex with a holy man or woman erases sin.
I read through the FAQ on the site you offered, and I would say there are two significant problems with it.
1) All the examples deal with attempts to learn about and cure diseases in people. It neglects the fact that a good amount of research, such as the rat discussed, hopes to learn about a system given any environment because we've never studied it in any context. And, other times scientists really do want to learn about rats or rabbits or monkeys in question.
2) It presumes that animals are in all ways radically different than people and no results are comparable. This is patently false. Not every animal can be used for everything, but over time we learn what animals are good models for some processes. For instance the recent artificial hearts probably never would have been implanted without numerous practice surgerys on pigs, who have similar heart needs. Rabbit eyes while not perfect are a good predictor of irritation in human eyes. Failure of a drug in one animal model doesn't mean you can't try it in a different animal if you think it will give more accurate resuls.
I have actually protested (seriously!) animal research in the past, but that doesn't mean all animal research is bad. Complaining about a single rat with a microscope on its head isn't worth one's time. For instance one experiment I recently found offensive involved dozens of parakeets that were intentionally maimed, allowed to live for several more weeks and then vivisected. After reading the research reports and other documentation (it dealt with studying language acquisition), I concluded that this treatment was substantially unjustified and went after it. (The experiment is now over, though largely because it reached its natural conclusion before there was enough momentum to close it down preemptively.)
If you really want to stop ALL animal research you basically need to prove one of three points:
1) No animal research produces useful information.
2) The amount of misinformation greatly outweighs the value of any useful infomration.
3) The ethical implications of harming animals are never justifiable.
IMHO, the first two are largely false when dealing with human medicine and entirely false when the point of the research is to learn about the animal in question. The ethical point is hard to justify unless you are opposed to all medicine, or deny that the suffering/death of animals can ever be justified by improvements in the lives of people. (Not all animal experiments lead to improvements in the human condition, but at least some does.)
I am concerned for animals and have taken active stances to defend their rights, but I think blatantly opposing all forms of animal research is unrealistic and counterproductive.
HAHA
Investors aren't interested in the company or what it does, they are interested in making money. If an investor really cared to support them, he'd bankroll them directly rather than buying common stock that can be dumped whenever it suits him.
People buy into IPOs because they know they can dump the stock 3 hours later and have made a profit. What the price does in that beggining has little reflection on the company at all; the only thing that matters is where the price ends up a week later. Though, even then shareholders are more concerned with making a profit for themselves than whether the company they "own" is any good in the long term.
I don't know to much about PayPal's operations, but I thought their technology and all worked just fine.
The point of an IPO is to get a huge infusion on cash, so I can't help but wonder what they hope to do with that money that they aren't doing now?
Unless of course it's just some greedy execs that are hoping to make a small fortune and then abandon the company.
Don't forget that it's alot easier to bring technology to bear on helping clean up that reforming plant than it is to systematically improve the emissions of every car on the road.
Hydrogen is a lot less dense, though. Any idea how many tanker trucks of hydrogen it would take to be equivalent to one tanker truck of gasoline? Not a flame, an honest question...
Okay, I got curious so, I decided to try and figure this out. I pulled some references and looked online, and the answer really surprised me.
This reference gives the energy content of Gasoline as 115,000 BTUs/Gallon = 32 MJ/liter
This reference says that very cold, highly compressed liquid hydrogen has a density 71 g/liter
Adding to that my reference value of 918 kJ/mol for hydrogen combustion, I arrived at an answer of 130 MJ/liter, or 4 times that of gasoline. We should consider that it takes about 40 MJ/liter to compress and cool the hydrogen down to a liquid form (and more energy if you need to keep it cool for a long time), and also that tanks would likely be smaller in order to accomodate cooling and other apparatus. But that still leaves us with the surprising result that transporting liquid hydrogen is around 2-3 times more efficient than transporting liquid gasoline.
The key of course is that liquid hydrogen is so much more dense than room temperature gaseous hydrogen (by a factor of nearly 1000, 71 g/L vs 0.089 g/L gaseous at 20 C). Consumer uses will probably focus on compressed hydrogen or extraction from fossil fuels, since liqifying hydrogen is hard to do, but there is no reason energy suppliers couldn't ship liquid hydrogen if it really is that much more efficient than shipping gasoline.
Please do check my math since this was only just cobbled together.
But you're not paying attention to how the US airline industry works.
More than once I've set about pricing what is essentially a one-way flight, and discovered that given the day, time and place I want to fly, I can actually get a cheaper ticket if I tell them I want a return trip way in the future. Sure this is a little dishonest since I don't intend to use the return trip, but I also think that making one-way travel more expensive than round trip travel is pretty dishonest as well.
What's even better is that by the time the return trip is scheduled I can usually forsee some other air travel that I'll be needing, and about 50% of the time I can turn the unwanted return flight into a worthwhile discount on a flight I do want.
Well... they don't always ignore it. I had a friend a few years back try to go through security while carrying unfinished chainmail and tools (bolt cutters, pliers, pointed metal rod, lots of metal wire, etc) for making hand crafted chainmail.
I wasn't there, but the reaction he describes is quite funny. Everyone in view of the scanner jumped when they saw it. When they guy went to open it, my friend was explicitly was told not to come within 3 feet of the bag, and not to make any sudden movements. The security guy started pulling stuff out of the bag (I think it was spools of twisted uncut wire first, followed by bolt cutters), and asking what's this for, and my friend just told him to keep going. Eventually he got to unfinished pieces of chain mail and it made sense.
The kicker is that they then allowed him to gather up all his stuff and get on the plane, depsite the fact he could darn well punch a hole in the plane itself with what he was carrying, not to mention what he could do to the people. Of course, I guess that's a symptom of an easier more naive time prior to Sept. 11th.
On one final note, for those wondering about why anyone would make chain mail, my friend used to sell pieces that took 5 or 6 hours to make for $100-200. That's a pretty good supplemental income for doing something you enjoy.
I don't buy it.
Viruses in nature are developed through evolution and mutation and thus long term survivability makes sense. Computer viruses are intentional creations of people, and it doesn't seem to me that virus writers would neccesarily focus on making them last in the wild for a long time. There are people who just like destroying stuff right? And depending on what you destroy or how you do it, it isn't neccesarily immediately obvious to the user, or going to stop the worm from seeking new hosts.
Also with the IIS worms, they tend to just about saturate all vulneralbe machines within the first few days if not hours. Once you've got 98% of what's available to get, then shutting all those down doesn't cause much loss in total reach. Especially since after a point the infection rate goes down due to patching faster than it increases from finding still uninfected machines.
Some people say they write viruses to demonstrate vulnerabilities, well it doesn't seem like a huge leap, by that logic, to decide to start taking out vulnerable software.
Whatever happened to all the "3v1|_ h4x0r5"(TM)??
We seen a number of highly infectious viruses in the last year (Sircam, Code Red, Nimda, etc), but none of these were actually very destructive. Sure they are a pain to get rid of, and may spread a little information around, eat up bandwidth, or compel you to reformat just to be sure, but they aren't flattening people's systems.
Whatever happened to the anarchists out to destroy the system? Now admittedly I don't want to encourage people to be more destructive, but it seems almost trivial to think of ways that viruses and worms could easily be made more destructive. For instance, upon infection, delete everything in the "My Documents" folder. Or, change default web page to a share of the whole computer. Or even wait a couple days and then wipe the person's hard drive.
I haven't been vulnerable to anything to come along lately, and I'm glad, but I'm also glad to note that the truly skilled black hats out there seem to have moderated how much damage they actually intend to do. I wonder if they are scared what the law might do to them if their attack truly was evil.
Yeah, group. Oops.
We have a time traveling bad guy providing tech (some reports say 29th century alternate universe), and you expect time line consistency?
Oh, come now.
It occurs to me that depending on how you apply the "temporal civil war" you could use this to patch up a lot of continuity errors by simply throwing this series into an alternate timeline.
Personally I'd rather not see things go that way, but it does provide a solution to writers if they feel overburdened by the history of preceeding Treks.
Well a quick search (PDF) actually turns up Methyl Oxide AKA Dimethyl Ether on the US Hazardous Materials list. It's a a clear, sweet-smelling, toxic and highly flammable gas (at room temp).
Nitrogen Sulfide isn't listed but I suspect that Nitrous sulfide might be a possible analog of nitrous oxide given the right conditions (S and O are both period 6 elements).
As strange as it is, it does suggest that they are trying to come up with real compounds. Might they even have competent technical advisers on staff? Time will tell.
Amnesia is a confounding factor because before you can't deal with the loss of memory, you ought to have a good understanding of the process of memory itself.
There are theories about how memory operates, and decent experimental evidence to make a beggining at understanding it. Roughly the expectation is that memory relates to the stregthening or weakening bonds between nuerons, and the tendancy for nerve clusters to repeat firing patterns that have occured previously. If memory can be explained physically then it would probably suggest an answer to psychological amnesia as well.
Many mental illnesses (depression, schizophrenia, OCD, etc.) exhibit detectable physical anomalies in the brain, even in the absence of trauma. Of course causality is hard to establish, but it does support the idea that mental changes might always have accompanying physical changes.
If you are interested in Mind-Body connections, Brainstorms by D. Dennett is excellent. Also, Philosophy of Mind by Georges Rey is not quite so interesting to read but particularly thorough. Rey devotes the last several chapters to the detailing one of the more respected modern theories concerning the principles of human cognition and thought, and how it might come to arrise from a highly ordered but purely physical system.
No. He pled guilty under Title 18, Section 1030(a)(2)(C).
Only 1030(a)(1), (4), (5)(A), and (7) are the computer crimes considered terrorism offenses under the draft of ATA (See Sec. 309)
By hacking the computer he gives up the right to any privacy regarding his actions on and communications with the attacked computer (Sec. 106), but then I wouldn't really expect someone to have privacy regarding what they do with a computer they shouldn't be on in the first place.
No.
Entanglement and Measurement (as defined in Quantum) are mutually exclusive propositions. Measurement deals with wave function collapse to select a particular pure state. Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle limits what measured states are allowed to coexist simultaneously. Entanglement deals with the mixing of states across across different particles. Measurement destroys entangled states and entanglement can not exist solely based pure "measured" states.
In other words since we are dealing with entanglement to create teleportation, Heisenberg's principle doesn't apply, as it only deals with measured (ie. not entangled) states.
X-Rays are just an example of a way of measuring the interior without taking the body apart to do it. I fully agree they wouldn't serve for teleportation, but hundreds of years from now there may be ways to selectively interact with the interior without any destructive consequences.
Well if you believe that it's all just electrochemical and/or quantum mechanical processes going on in the brain, then there is no fundemental problem with taking all of that along for the ride.
Judging from your post, I'll assume that you believe memories, knowledge, and "soul" don't result merely from complex physical processes. Fine, then point out where and what the soul is and precisely how it does relate to the brain, and I'll get right to work figuring out whether we can teleport it.
Thus far I've seen no evidence that anything happens in the brain which can't be explained by physical laws and processes.
A) While isolating different parts of a particle's wave function is possible, this is rarely, if ever, what is meant by entanglement. Typically what is meant involves bringing multiple particles together and getting their wavefunctions to operate as a coherent entity, and maintaining this "coherence" after seperating the particles.
B) The measurement doesn't have to be the same (in fact quite often they respond by giving exactly opposite measurements). The only requirement is that they behave in a well defined correlated way predicted by Quantum Mechanics.
C) You are thinking of "fascimile copying" which is different from teleportation. In the first case you exchange information through entangled particles to create a close (but never perfect) duplicate of the original. In teleportation you destroy the state of the original to create an exact duplicate at the other end. This reference provides a good explanation of the ideas behind teleportation.
D) Yes, you would have to entangle your whole body in order to teleport, but there are plenty of nondestructive ways to measure the body (think X-Rays), and it doesn't neccesarily follow that in some distant future there won't be a way to preserve at least one intact copy.
Here is a relatively straight forward discussion of the theory behind teleportation via quantum entanglement.
Whether information transfer is actually instaneous is a hotly debated topic in the relevant circles. General relativity forbids anything (including information) from going faster than the speed of light. The standard formulation of quantum mechanics absolutely requires non-localized information (ie knowing about two spatial seperated points simultaneously). This is just symptomatic of the fact that neither is a complete theory yet, and we still have interesting things left to learn about how the universe truly works.