The question I am about to ask may be horribly naive, but I am trying to be serious as this would have weight with me when considering the ethical implications of stem cells.
Is it possible to take stem cells, possibly subject them to some procedure, and then reinsert them into a uterus such that they will function as a new zygote?
Afterall a zygote (fertilized egg) is a type of cell, albeit a rather special one. Typically stem cells are harvested from relatively early in the embryonic development cycle, and hence are not far removed from the zygote. I know the possibility sounds like something out of Brave New World, but if I understand correctly identical twins do something similar. In the formation of identical twins, cells from the original embryo seperate at an early stage but continue developing to form another whole person, or at least that's what I've been told.
Maybe it's a bit much to hope for, but maybe one of Slashdot's readers has enough background in stem cell research to comment on the possiblity I raise.
Re:Can there be a shortage if they reproduce?
on
Human Blood Cells Grown
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Stem cells do have the ability to continue reproducing themselves (for longer than we've ever studied if not indefinitely). The problem is that they don't grow especially fast and they are notoriously fragile. If they don't have the right nutrients, temperature, pH, etc. they will die. If each stem cell line could be coaxed into being a huge vat of cells then we'd have no shortage (except possibly too little genetic diversity amongst lines). More typically it occupies the space equivalent to a few petri dishes.
Regarding federal funding, no researchers have that yet. Bush opened up the process to allow stem cell research to be considered (subject to his restrictions). It won't be until sometime next year when the requisite government bodies start approving projects and handing out money. The process itself typically takes several months to complete.
While I'm not big on encouraging universal identifiers, there is an obvious way to limit the impact of this kind of attack.
Pick a really large domain of potential numbers and then assign them randomly. There are ~6 billion people, so use 16 or 20 digit numbers so only one number in a million or 10 billion is actually active. Alternatively 8 random english characters is enough for 6 billion people, so use 12 character sequences and you are pretty safe from someone randomly hitting one.
Of course this is security be obsurcity which has only limited value when it's your only line of defense, and you pay for it with increasingly more complicated things to remember.
It may have changed some time in the last decade, but the rule regarding use of the SSN used to go something like this:
You must present it when required by approved government organizations.
You may refuse to reveal your SSN to any business or institution which is not an approved government organization (w/ a few exceptions for those that will do direct transactions with approved gov. organization on your behalf; e.g. tax reporting, Medicare).
Any business may, without penalty, decline to provide service to individuals who do not reveal their SSN.
As you might imagine this leads to some fantastic catch-22's where one gets to decide between secrecy or getting served. For instance to the best of my knowledge all credit card companies require SSNs in order to recieve a card.
The basic issue is that SSNs make a fantastic unique identifier in databases and thus everyone wants to use them that way, since they won't be duplicated by any other US citizen. I can only guess that this time around they figure unique identifiers are so useful that they aren't even making the pretense of limiting their use.
I'll admit, I've never used Passport. In choosing to highlight one issue, I picked what seemed most dangerous to me (eg. forgetful people accidently leaving their online lives wide open to attack). It appears that my criticism was greatly overstated due to poor understanding. I'm sorry, and thanks for the explanation. I hope people will go ahead and follow that link since those guys certainly know more about the issues that I do.
Wow, spread your legs a little wider karma whore. I'm going to log back into my real account and mod this down into oblivian.
You may not believe it, and I don't care, but I posted these after I went looking for them, BECAUSE I wanted to know what they said. It's pretty arrogant to sit here and argue about MS privacy and security issues in Passport, if you don't even know what information MS wants from people or how they intend to use it. I could have posted a summary, but I was too busy thinking about other things, and it didn't seem neccesary.
This report provides a decent description of Passport's technical architecture and some of it's potential issues, and links to other referances.
While it does confirm your statement that you can tailor and select what information you send from the "wallet" MS keeps for you, there are still problems. For one thing when you sign into Passport this is noted by use of encrypted (3 DES) cookies stored on your browser. The intent here is that you only need sign in once and all kinds of sites will be able to authenticate you. This part of the procedure happens transparently once you've signed into Passport.
The vulnerability here should be obvious, if you don't at some point logout from Passport, then the next person who opens the browser will be recognized as you anywhere that uses Passport authentication. Furthermore those neatly prefilled out forms will then contain all your information which this imposter could simply read off. Of course, the cookies are set to expire after a while, but certainly that is a matter of hours if not days, since MS doesn't want to interrupt people and force them to relogin.
This is only one of a number of problems and potential attacks outlined in the site I linked above. Good stuff, I suggest you check it out.
So now on, forgetting to logout will be an internet wide catastrophe as opposed to a localized problem? Thank you, MS.
It's not just the central source that needs to be trustworthy. Everyone that gets permission to access that info from the source needs to trustworthy too.
In a perfect world businesses would never sell information about their customers, but we all know it happens occasionally. What if a supposedly legitimate business with access to Passport decides they can make good bucks selling user information to a 3rd party that can't get it legitimately? Not to mention the fact that Passport may give this rude business more info about me than I would normally need to give them during the course of doing business with them.
The fact that businesses, for the most part, only have information that they need about their own clients is a level of security in itself.
Does anyone know more about how MS plans to allow 3rd parties access to Passport authentication?
Does anyone know about the "transparent encryption" that they talk about in the professional edition?
I realize it's not likely to be really strong, but if it's decent (and not critically flawed in implementation), it might be an incentive for me to upgrade eventually. I've never seen a good encryption scheme for Win that wasn't a major hassle. If you know of one I'd like to hear of that too.
I can't escape Windows because I write software for it occasionally, and need the ability to work with Word/Excel/Access file types.
I heard somewhere (but have no idea if its true) that the encryption requires a different file system be implemented (NTFS vs FAT32, IIRC). How would this affect an upgrade?
I don't know anything about detectablity, but reading the specs it would make sense that SETI wouldn't care.
Perhaps aliens would figure a way around, or wouldn't care about the distance restrictions, and would thus use really powerful transmitters with this tech. I suppose they could aim a beam at us, but why do that when carrier beams are easier to direct and if they are listening to us, they know it's what we've been using.
In any case, space is big and the signal would be weakened. Now I ask you, how much time do you want to spend looking for a signal that looks like noise? Looking for a signal in your noise doesn't seem highly profitable when you have a limited budget, no idea where in the noise to look, and hope for an obvious signal somewhere else.
If you are going to use the acronym, at least expand it fully.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
The analogy doesn't work for me either. Car exhaust diffuses over large areas where it can add to the general level of pollution produced by all the other cars in that area. If this is limited in power so that it naturally dissipates after 150 feet, then the potential to build up RF noise would seem rather limited since it's unlikely for there to be too many other transmitters in that area. (I realize the article says you could go to higher power, but that's what the FCC is there for to make sure it doesn't cause too many problems, right?)
Besides are you looking for patterns in the static on your TV or what? It's not like most of us are interested in listening to our Pentium chips. Before you get upset, could you mind showing me why this source of RF noise is going to be especially bad? Afterall if we want new types of RF applications then we have to take spectrum from somewhere. Stuff that isn't being used right now seems a good place to start.
The article doesn't seem to say, but since the system is digital AND operating in the same part of the spectrum currently dominated by electrical noise, wouldn't they have a problem with occasional incorrect bits? Especially as distance increased and the signal strength got closer to background levels.
Anyone know what kind of fault tolerance is built into this thing? How do they deal with the interference that's already there?
Seems we haven't so much short circuited as replaced evolution. If we look at the American ideal of getting ahead through hard work and intelligence, then in some sense we are selecting the most suited of each generation. Now of course I said ideal, it doesn't quite work out in practice, but other things being equal, someone who is more adapted to the modern world is more likely to rise.
Once someone does succeed and gets wealthy (the typical measure of success), then they convey an advantage to their offspring by way of better schooling, plentiful food, good medical care, access to all the right people, and more varied experience, etc. It doesn't really even matter whether it's their offspring, so long as they spend money to benefit skilled well-adapted people.
It doesn't matter that people of lesser caliber remain in the gene pool, as it's rare to see mixing among different socio-economic strata anyway. Not to mention that even at the lowest levels people will rise based on merit, as well. The fact that the less well off classes typically reproduce more doesn't matter at current since the US has a much larger middle class than we do poverty class (not the case in many places world wide), and the middle class are historically unlikely to start a revolt or anything similar, to destablize the system we have now.
The real potential of genetic modification isn't for restarting evolution, it's for advancing faster and in ways that no segment of humanity currently has an ability for. Waiting around for evoltion to randomly generate adaptive traits is a slow process, and if we can do better with our intelligence then it might be worth it.
If we assume that the brain and intelligence are just the realization of some physical process, and there is nothing spooky about it, then it's not unreasonable to expect that some form of AI might arrise that's our intellectual equal or better.
Naturally you'd expect it to be far better than humans at the kinds of math and logic that computers were originally designed for. In fact many tasks would be much simplified for it, because we know of ways to design fast functionality for that machine now. Perhaps an intelligence sitting on a desk, processing internet info could be powerful, speak in natural language and monitor video cameras, etc. The problem is that in order to grow in the fashion of humans it would have to have expereinces similar to ours.
This means moving about and interacting with the environment. If we imagine someone like Star Trek's Data then this is feasible but the rate at which it gathers real world information is still limited. You can speed it up over what we achieve and eliminate inefficiency but not a lot faster than humans can do things. Even supposing a network of automatons connecting to a central intelligence, the amount of overhead is large for the gain in information. The fact of the matter is that the real physical world doesn't operate at computer speeds.
This alone wouldn't stop machines from being very powerful. The other important point to make is redunancy and failure tolerance. Simply put very few mechanically constructed systems are good at this. By contrast biological systems are exceptionally good, having simply mechanism to repair themselves. People wear out after about 70 years. It's rare for any machine to operate continuously for even 10 years, and those that do typically have very few moving parts. An android or even a system of cameras and such will have moving parts.
Perhaps infrastructure could be built to provide machine intelligence with regular replacements for parts that suffer from wear and tear. However this would establish (at least in the beggining) a level of symbiosis between man and machine. Perhaps they would strive for complete autonomy but I think we'd notice long before they became a threat of displacing us. There are after all lots and lots of people involved in any process that starts with raw minerals and ends up with advanced machinery. It's hard to compete with the versatility of eating food for power and regeneration.
Any designer of AI has a lot of effort ahead to match the design characteristics of biological organism. Further to duplicate the abilities we possess from experiential learning the machine will still be limited to the native speed of the experience.
The more likely scenario in my mind is that we develop greater integration between man and machine. If you notice, the most competent people in the modern world tend to exhibit a high dependance on computers and gadgets already. Perhaps nueral interfaces or some other merger of silicon and flesh will happen. Or we might end up in a world where everyone carries a pocket size computer that learns and thinks on its own, while doubling as a cell phone, PDA, and everything else. Such an AI would be in a symbiotic relationship with man.
Someday if full AI emerges and it gains the characteristics of emotion and removes the limits of initial programming, then I hope we can learn to be friends. There is no reason they couldn't be our partners in life, especially if we provide what they need and they help us gain the information we desire.
A lot of bacteria that are found in exotic environments, such as hydrothermal vents, aren't horribly happy when moved far away from those environments. (After all if they were competitive in other places, you'd expect them to show up more widely in the ocean).
The article doesn't say, but they may require high temperature, high pressure, or unusual mineral solutions in order to grow and do their thing. This naturally leads to higher costs, at the very least causing you to pump water through some tank designed to keep them happy. Some of the bacteria used in environmental cleanup etc, are actually genetically modified versions meant to survive in environments other than where the trait developed. Of course on the other hand we might get lucky and they do like sitting on the beach churning out gold.
If it can be made profitable I'm sure someone will do it.
Sorry, I didn't explain that detail well, you start out using the 1 kg mass that's the current standard to figure out how many electrons are needed. Then you define that many electrons to be the kilogram.
From then on if you need a highly precise measurement you can make kilograms my figuring out how much weight will balance when supported by be such and such current under these precise conditions. Alternatively you can find something's weight (and thus its mass after checking local gravity), by figuring what mulitple of the standard number of electrons are needed to balance it against gravity (everything else being the same).
We just start out by picking a number of electrons which is equivalent in this frame work to the standard kg so that we don't have to go through and change all the other things we've measured in the past, but we consider this the standard cause now anyone (with money and time) can go out and build a machine to tell him exactly how much a kg weighs, and you don't have to travel out there to measure a special cylinder.
IIRC the idea is to convert the standard of mass to a number of electrons accelerated by some well known voltage.
The electrons since they are moving, produce a magnetic field which pushes against a well known reference magnetic field (which can be measured without concern for mass). This magnetic repulsion is used to balance a 1 kg reference mass against gravity.
Since gravity produces acceleration independant of mass (ma=F=mg => a=g), it's also possible to measure the local gravity to a high precision by means of the acceleration with needing to know something's mass.
Thus we have a way define mass in terms of a number of electrons (and a geometry of the path they take, technically) and other measured quantities which don't use mass in their standards.
You could say mass is so many atoms of some reference substance, but how do you measure it? Since you can't first weigh it and extrapolate from there. Similarly volume would depend on temperature, structural arrangement, and other things. The people at NIST claim this provides a more easily reproducible method of defining mass. (Of course I'd rather just stick with the electronic scale or balance pan since these tend to be accurate enough for me.)
Block ciphers like DES and AES are much faster to compute than even C-P, since they don't require multiprecision arithmetic. AES, in particular, screams.
The encryption/decrytpion of C-P uses only matrices of integers (all operations are modulo n). Having another encryption method might not be needed, but you're objection doesn't seem accurate.
Or is there some meaning for "multiprecision arithmetic" other than multiprecision floating-point arithmetic?
I don't know a lot about alternative encryption schemes, but the relatively simple math involved suggests that this has the potential to be fast by any standard.
I'm wondering if it might be worthwhile to do a mixed scheme whereby E is returned using RSA or some other technique and the bulk of the message is encrypted using C-P. If I read the comments correctly one has to retrieve the unique E for each message in order to break the system and read the encrypted text of that message.
The table on the end show that a 250k file takes 50 minutes to encrypt/decrypt with RSA on the P 133 under Mathematica (relatively inefficient), and only a little more than 2 mins for C-P. Even given faster computers and optimized code, it would seem that one might see significant gains in speed if you are encrypting multi-megabyte files.
"online piracy", "parasitic computing", "unwittingly work for their remote master"
You'd think they were talking about Code Red.
Re:Department of Defense getting in on the fun?
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 1
Sorry to burst your bubble but it probably is just really people who are interested inthe case. NIPR.mil is just the system DoD created to protect their infrastructure. I have a friend working for the Naval Research Lab, and she visits the site I run. Since I can correlate her hits with actually talking to her on IM I know it's not DoD spooks or anything like that.
It runs primarily on compressed liquid hydrogen and requires an air flow well in excess of the speed of sound to ignite. Hence firing it out of a cannon. Any use you make of this is going to require a rocket engine or really good jet engine to even get it started, but once it gets going the prediction is that it can reach Mach 10 or more which is better than most or all conventional rockets in Earth atmosphere IIRC. For weapons it looks great, perhaps also for launch vehicles. However anything involving people is a little iffy if you can't control the acceleration enough that someone can be semi-comfortable. But who knows, check back in 10 years and see what they've thought up.
I have a friend who works for an online magazine headquartered in MD. When her husband moved out to CA for grad school, they let telecommute from there.
Slashdot Mirror
The question I am about to ask may be horribly naive, but I am trying to be serious as this would have weight with me when considering the ethical implications of stem cells.
Is it possible to take stem cells, possibly subject them to some procedure, and then reinsert them into a uterus such that they will function as a new zygote?
Afterall a zygote (fertilized egg) is a type of cell, albeit a rather special one. Typically stem cells are harvested from relatively early in the embryonic development cycle, and hence are not far removed from the zygote. I know the possibility sounds like something out of Brave New World, but if I understand correctly identical twins do something similar. In the formation of identical twins, cells from the original embryo seperate at an early stage but continue developing to form another whole person, or at least that's what I've been told.
Maybe it's a bit much to hope for, but maybe one of Slashdot's readers has enough background in stem cell research to comment on the possiblity I raise.
Stem cells do have the ability to continue reproducing themselves (for longer than we've ever studied if not indefinitely). The problem is that they don't grow especially fast and they are notoriously fragile. If they don't have the right nutrients, temperature, pH, etc. they will die. If each stem cell line could be coaxed into being a huge vat of cells then we'd have no shortage (except possibly too little genetic diversity amongst lines). More typically it occupies the space equivalent to a few petri dishes.
Regarding federal funding, no researchers have that yet. Bush opened up the process to allow stem cell research to be considered (subject to his restrictions). It won't be until sometime next year when the requisite government bodies start approving projects and handing out money. The process itself typically takes several months to complete.
While I'm not big on encouraging universal identifiers, there is an obvious way to limit the impact of this kind of attack.
Pick a really large domain of potential numbers and then assign them randomly. There are ~6 billion people, so use 16 or 20 digit numbers so only one number in a million or 10 billion is actually active. Alternatively 8 random english characters is enough for 6 billion people, so use 12 character sequences and you are pretty safe from someone randomly hitting one.
Of course this is security be obsurcity which has only limited value when it's your only line of defense, and you pay for it with increasingly more complicated things to remember.
- You must present it when required by approved government organizations.
- You may refuse to reveal your SSN to any business or institution which is not an approved government organization (w/ a few exceptions for those that will do direct transactions with approved gov. organization on your behalf; e.g. tax reporting, Medicare).
- Any business may, without penalty, decline to provide service to individuals who do not reveal their SSN.
As you might imagine this leads to some fantastic catch-22's where one gets to decide between secrecy or getting served. For instance to the best of my knowledge all credit card companies require SSNs in order to recieve a card.The basic issue is that SSNs make a fantastic unique identifier in databases and thus everyone wants to use them that way, since they won't be duplicated by any other US citizen. I can only guess that this time around they figure unique identifiers are so useful that they aren't even making the pretense of limiting their use.
I'll admit, I've never used Passport. In choosing to highlight one issue, I picked what seemed most dangerous to me (eg. forgetful people accidently leaving their online lives wide open to attack). It appears that my criticism was greatly overstated due to poor understanding. I'm sorry, and thanks for the explanation. I hope people will go ahead and follow that link since those guys certainly know more about the issues that I do.
For simplicity, I'm restating the link here.
Wow, spread your legs a little wider karma whore. I'm going to log back into my real account and mod this down into oblivian.
You may not believe it, and I don't care, but I posted these after I went looking for them, BECAUSE I wanted to know what they said. It's pretty arrogant to sit here and argue about MS privacy and security issues in Passport, if you don't even know what information MS wants from people or how they intend to use it. I could have posted a summary, but I was too busy thinking about other things, and it didn't seem neccesary.
This report provides a decent description of Passport's technical architecture and some of it's potential issues, and links to other referances.
While it does confirm your statement that you can tailor and select what information you send from the "wallet" MS keeps for you, there are still problems. For one thing when you sign into Passport this is noted by use of encrypted (3 DES) cookies stored on your browser. The intent here is that you only need sign in once and all kinds of sites will be able to authenticate you. This part of the procedure happens transparently once you've signed into Passport.
The vulnerability here should be obvious, if you don't at some point logout from Passport, then the next person who opens the browser will be recognized as you anywhere that uses Passport authentication. Furthermore those neatly prefilled out forms will then contain all your information which this imposter could simply read off. Of course, the cookies are set to expire after a while, but certainly that is a matter of hours if not days, since MS doesn't want to interrupt people and force them to relogin.
This is only one of a number of problems and potential attacks outlined in the site I linked above. Good stuff, I suggest you check it out.
So now on, forgetting to logout will be an internet wide catastrophe as opposed to a localized problem? Thank you, MS.
For those that are interested here are links to the:
Passport EULA
Passport Privacy Policy
It's not just the central source that needs to be trustworthy. Everyone that gets permission to access that info from the source needs to trustworthy too.
In a perfect world businesses would never sell information about their customers, but we all know it happens occasionally. What if a supposedly legitimate business with access to Passport decides they can make good bucks selling user information to a 3rd party that can't get it legitimately? Not to mention the fact that Passport may give this rude business more info about me than I would normally need to give them during the course of doing business with them.
The fact that businesses, for the most part, only have information that they need about their own clients is a level of security in itself.
Does anyone know more about how MS plans to allow 3rd parties access to Passport authentication?
Does anyone know about the "transparent encryption" that they talk about in the professional edition?
I realize it's not likely to be really strong, but if it's decent (and not critically flawed in implementation), it might be an incentive for me to upgrade eventually. I've never seen a good encryption scheme for Win that wasn't a major hassle. If you know of one I'd like to hear of that too.
I can't escape Windows because I write software for it occasionally, and need the ability to work with Word/Excel/Access file types.
I heard somewhere (but have no idea if its true) that the encryption requires a different file system be implemented (NTFS vs FAT32, IIRC). How would this affect an upgrade?
I don't know anything about detectablity, but reading the specs it would make sense that SETI wouldn't care.
Perhaps aliens would figure a way around, or wouldn't care about the distance restrictions, and would thus use really powerful transmitters with this tech. I suppose they could aim a beam at us, but why do that when carrier beams are easier to direct and if they are listening to us, they know it's what we've been using.
In any case, space is big and the signal would be weakened. Now I ask you, how much time do you want to spend looking for a signal that looks like noise? Looking for a signal in your noise doesn't seem highly profitable when you have a limited budget, no idea where in the noise to look, and hope for an obvious signal somewhere else.
If you are going to use the acronym, at least expand it fully.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
The analogy doesn't work for me either. Car exhaust diffuses over large areas where it can add to the general level of pollution produced by all the other cars in that area. If this is limited in power so that it naturally dissipates after 150 feet, then the potential to build up RF noise would seem rather limited since it's unlikely for there to be too many other transmitters in that area. (I realize the article says you could go to higher power, but that's what the FCC is there for to make sure it doesn't cause too many problems, right?)
Besides are you looking for patterns in the static on your TV or what? It's not like most of us are interested in listening to our Pentium chips. Before you get upset, could you mind showing me why this source of RF noise is going to be especially bad? Afterall if we want new types of RF applications then we have to take spectrum from somewhere. Stuff that isn't being used right now seems a good place to start.
The article doesn't seem to say, but since the system is digital AND operating in the same part of the spectrum currently dominated by electrical noise, wouldn't they have a problem with occasional incorrect bits? Especially as distance increased and the signal strength got closer to background levels.
Anyone know what kind of fault tolerance is built into this thing? How do they deal with the interference that's already there?
Have we?
Seems we haven't so much short circuited as replaced evolution. If we look at the American ideal of getting ahead through hard work and intelligence, then in some sense we are selecting the most suited of each generation. Now of course I said ideal, it doesn't quite work out in practice, but other things being equal, someone who is more adapted to the modern world is more likely to rise.
Once someone does succeed and gets wealthy (the typical measure of success), then they convey an advantage to their offspring by way of better schooling, plentiful food, good medical care, access to all the right people, and more varied experience, etc. It doesn't really even matter whether it's their offspring, so long as they spend money to benefit skilled well-adapted people.
It doesn't matter that people of lesser caliber remain in the gene pool, as it's rare to see mixing among different socio-economic strata anyway. Not to mention that even at the lowest levels people will rise based on merit, as well. The fact that the less well off classes typically reproduce more doesn't matter at current since the US has a much larger middle class than we do poverty class (not the case in many places world wide), and the middle class are historically unlikely to start a revolt or anything similar, to destablize the system we have now.
The real potential of genetic modification isn't for restarting evolution, it's for advancing faster and in ways that no segment of humanity currently has an ability for. Waiting around for evoltion to randomly generate adaptive traits is a slow process, and if we can do better with our intelligence then it might be worth it.
If we assume that the brain and intelligence are just the realization of some physical process, and there is nothing spooky about it, then it's not unreasonable to expect that some form of AI might arrise that's our intellectual equal or better.
Naturally you'd expect it to be far better than humans at the kinds of math and logic that computers were originally designed for. In fact many tasks would be much simplified for it, because we know of ways to design fast functionality for that machine now. Perhaps an intelligence sitting on a desk, processing internet info could be powerful, speak in natural language and monitor video cameras, etc. The problem is that in order to grow in the fashion of humans it would have to have expereinces similar to ours.
This means moving about and interacting with the environment. If we imagine someone like Star Trek's Data then this is feasible but the rate at which it gathers real world information is still limited. You can speed it up over what we achieve and eliminate inefficiency but not a lot faster than humans can do things. Even supposing a network of automatons connecting to a central intelligence, the amount of overhead is large for the gain in information. The fact of the matter is that the real physical world doesn't operate at computer speeds.
This alone wouldn't stop machines from being very powerful. The other important point to make is redunancy and failure tolerance. Simply put very few mechanically constructed systems are good at this. By contrast biological systems are exceptionally good, having simply mechanism to repair themselves. People wear out after about 70 years. It's rare for any machine to operate continuously for even 10 years, and those that do typically have very few moving parts. An android or even a system of cameras and such will have moving parts.
Perhaps infrastructure could be built to provide machine intelligence with regular replacements for parts that suffer from wear and tear. However this would establish (at least in the beggining) a level of symbiosis between man and machine. Perhaps they would strive for complete autonomy but I think we'd notice long before they became a threat of displacing us. There are after all lots and lots of people involved in any process that starts with raw minerals and ends up with advanced machinery. It's hard to compete with the versatility of eating food for power and regeneration.
Any designer of AI has a lot of effort ahead to match the design characteristics of biological organism. Further to duplicate the abilities we possess from experiential learning the machine will still be limited to the native speed of the experience.
The more likely scenario in my mind is that we develop greater integration between man and machine. If you notice, the most competent people in the modern world tend to exhibit a high dependance on computers and gadgets already. Perhaps nueral interfaces or some other merger of silicon and flesh will happen. Or we might end up in a world where everyone carries a pocket size computer that learns and thinks on its own, while doubling as a cell phone, PDA, and everything else. Such an AI would be in a symbiotic relationship with man.
Someday if full AI emerges and it gains the characteristics of emotion and removes the limits of initial programming, then I hope we can learn to be friends. There is no reason they couldn't be our partners in life, especially if we provide what they need and they help us gain the information we desire.
A lot of bacteria that are found in exotic environments, such as hydrothermal vents, aren't horribly happy when moved far away from those environments. (After all if they were competitive in other places, you'd expect them to show up more widely in the ocean).
The article doesn't say, but they may require high temperature, high pressure, or unusual mineral solutions in order to grow and do their thing. This naturally leads to higher costs, at the very least causing you to pump water through some tank designed to keep them happy. Some of the bacteria used in environmental cleanup etc, are actually genetically modified versions meant to survive in environments other than where the trait developed. Of course on the other hand we might get lucky and they do like sitting on the beach churning out gold.
If it can be made profitable I'm sure someone will do it.
Sorry, I didn't explain that detail well, you start out using the 1 kg mass that's the current standard to figure out how many electrons are needed. Then you define that many electrons to be the kilogram.
From then on if you need a highly precise measurement you can make kilograms my figuring out how much weight will balance when supported by be such and such current under these precise conditions. Alternatively you can find something's weight (and thus its mass after checking local gravity), by figuring what mulitple of the standard number of electrons are needed to balance it against gravity (everything else being the same).
We just start out by picking a number of electrons which is equivalent in this frame work to the standard kg so that we don't have to go through and change all the other things we've measured in the past, but we consider this the standard cause now anyone (with money and time) can go out and build a machine to tell him exactly how much a kg weighs, and you don't have to travel out there to measure a special cylinder.
IIRC the idea is to convert the standard of mass to a number of electrons accelerated by some well known voltage.
The electrons since they are moving, produce a magnetic field which pushes against a well known reference magnetic field (which can be measured without concern for mass). This magnetic repulsion is used to balance a 1 kg reference mass against gravity.
Since gravity produces acceleration independant of mass (ma=F=mg => a=g), it's also possible to measure the local gravity to a high precision by means of the acceleration with needing to know something's mass.
Thus we have a way define mass in terms of a number of electrons (and a geometry of the path they take, technically) and other measured quantities which don't use mass in their standards.
You could say mass is so many atoms of some reference substance, but how do you measure it? Since you can't first weigh it and extrapolate from there. Similarly volume would depend on temperature, structural arrangement, and other things. The people at NIST claim this provides a more easily reproducible method of defining mass. (Of course I'd rather just stick with the electronic scale or balance pan since these tend to be accurate enough for me.)
Block ciphers like DES and AES are much faster to compute than even C-P, since they don't require multiprecision arithmetic. AES, in particular, screams.
The encryption/decrytpion of C-P uses only matrices of integers (all operations are modulo n). Having another encryption method might not be needed, but you're objection doesn't seem accurate.
Or is there some meaning for "multiprecision arithmetic" other than multiprecision floating-point arithmetic?
I don't know a lot about alternative encryption schemes, but the relatively simple math involved suggests that this has the potential to be fast by any standard.
I'm wondering if it might be worthwhile to do a mixed scheme whereby E is returned using RSA or some other technique and the bulk of the message is encrypted using C-P. If I read the comments correctly one has to retrieve the unique E for each message in order to break the system and read the encrypted text of that message.
The table on the end show that a 250k file takes 50 minutes to encrypt/decrypt with RSA on the P 133 under Mathematica (relatively inefficient), and only a little more than 2 mins for C-P. Even given faster computers and optimized code, it would seem that one might see significant gains in speed if you are encrypting multi-megabyte files.
Any thoughts?
If you liked that, you might also want to check out the physics demonstration archive at my old school (UMD).
IIRC It's the largest in the country.
Oh yeah, the Question of the Week is also very good.
"online piracy", "parasitic computing", "unwittingly work for their remote master"
You'd think they were talking about Code Red.
Sorry to burst your bubble but it probably is just really people who are interested inthe case. NIPR.mil is just the system DoD created to protect their infrastructure. I have a friend working for the Naval Research Lab, and she visits the site I run. Since I can correlate her hits with actually talking to her on IM I know it's not DoD spooks or anything like that.
It runs primarily on compressed liquid hydrogen and requires an air flow well in excess of the speed of sound to ignite. Hence firing it out of a cannon. Any use you make of this is going to require a rocket engine or really good jet engine to even get it started, but once it gets going the prediction is that it can reach Mach 10 or more which is better than most or all conventional rockets in Earth atmosphere IIRC. For weapons it looks great, perhaps also for launch vehicles. However anything involving people is a little iffy if you can't control the acceleration enough that someone can be semi-comfortable. But who knows, check back in 10 years and see what they've thought up.
I have a friend who works for an online magazine headquartered in MD. When her husband moved out to CA for grad school, they let telecommute from there.