Another problem with the monopoly is that not only do you get the monopoly on the software you produce, but you also get a monopoly on third party support. Currently, the two things they keep me away from open office is the lack of compatibility with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the huge deal killer the absence of a viable bibliographic preference system for open office. (Yes I know there is a bibliographic system included in open office but each new document returns to the default bibliographic format. In the absence of swappable bibliographic style sheets it is easier to enter the bibliographic entries by hand than to try to change the default style.) Compatibility with Microsoft Word is also a big problem especially in departments where file sharing is essential. The much claimed compatibility works for 90 percent of the features but not for the 10 percent of the features such as Microsoft graphics that I really need to handle on a regular basis.
And to be honest, I must admit that the monopoly is not the only reason why Microsoft office is so popular. In spite of the monopoly, office is a good, solid, relatively stable, piece of software that actually performs better and uses less memory than open office.
Shifting battlegrounds
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Enigma
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I know that I keep bringing this up but perhaps the best history of military cryptoanalysis in print is The Codebreakers by David Kahn. It devotes about four novel length chapters to World War II cryptography alone and also describes the first cryptographic war for the airwaves during World War I.
it also points out that one of the big revolutions in military cryptography was the coordination of code making and code breaking. The only way to make a good code is to try to break it. Knowledge of practical code breaking was never intended to be distributed outside of military circles, even to the point where the National Security Agency attempted to block publication of The Codebreakers for even revealing obsolete historical details of World War II cryptoanalysis. As a result the comparison between military cryptoanalysts and copyright crackers is a bit overdrawn. Many of the codebreakers were also involved and creating and testing military codes to hide information from the public.
I don't think it would work. But I'm perfectly willing to accept that it might. If it did it would completely turn the concept of matter on its head. And it would probably make the design of quantum computers much simpler.
The amazing thing is that this is old news in terms of theory and not-so-old news in terms of experiment. The NIST research showing superposition of complete atoms was PUBLISHED in 2000 and the theory behind superposition of both electrons and atoms was published in the 1930s. Einstein won the Nobel for treating photons as particles before my parents were born and Feynman took home a Nobel for describing photons as particles before I was born. From what I can tell, QED is pretty much up there with Newton's Second Law and general relativity in terms of a done deal.
Yes, electrons can exist in multiple places at once, but that is limited to very short distances - the planck length. Using a beam splitter you can show that the same photon exists in two positions miles apart from each other simultaneously. This is actually done in the Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave Ovservatory. Let's see you do that with electrons, and I'll concede that they are particles in the same sense.
Well again. The use of the term "particle" to describe photons is well entrenched among physicists in order to describe how light interacts with other particles. Saying that a photon is a particle (and that electrons are particles) is a useful abstraction for some kinds of calculations.
QED, as we shall call it, is generally considered to be synonymous with the interaction of electrons and "photons", and the names most commonly associated with the theory are Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman (see the first two references below) who treated both entities, quite unambiguously, as elementary particles.
QED achieved its most notable success in the period 1947-49, when the Dirac equation was modified to include the interaction of electrons with the vacuum electromagnetic field, thereby explaining, with enormous accuracy, some small effects in the spectrum of atomic hydrogen (Lamb shift) and in the electron's magnetic moment. This was first achieved by Julian Schwinger, who, building on Victor Weisskopf's ideas developed in the 1930s, described the electronic current by means of another field, so that the electron was no longer a point, but an extended object with a diameter of the order of a few picometers (the Compton wavelength). Schwinger's achievement was largely hidden from public view, though, jointly with Feynman and Tomonaga, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for it. Feynman's contribution was to show that Schwinger's very formidable calculations could be "simplified" by reverting to a pointlike description of both electrons and photons....
http://www.keyinnov.demon.co.uk/qed.htm
However, electrons and photons are both waves in the same sense with the primary difference that electron waves are about the size of an atom while photon waves can be many miles in length. In fact, the principle that electrons are also waves is central to the operation of both electron microscopes and our current explanations of molecular structure. (For example, it explains why graphite is planar while diamond is tetrahedral.) In fact, even protons and alpha particles have wave properties which is central to the operation of nuclear power plants.
But I'll even one-up you one. Not only can electrons exist muiltiple places simultaneously, but multiple larger particles can occupy the same space in a Bose-Einstein condensate. But here is a pdf article reporting the quantum superposition of an electron at a distance comparible to that of microcomputer transistor (0.4 micrometres). Also the NIST acheived superposition of atoms simultaneously in two locations at a scale of around 10 atomic diamters. As a result, particle/waves of light and particle/waves of matter don't look so different after all.
I've always been told that it depends on the theory you are using. The particle physicists I know who use Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) use the term "particle" to describe how quantitized ammounts of light interact with particles at specific locations in space and time. On the other hand, at other scales it makes more sense to talk about light as a wave to explain why radio antennas work through resonance.
However, the property of being in two places at one time is not limited to photons. Electrons can also exist in multiple places at once which is one of the weird phenomena that make Tunneling Electron Microscopes and semiconductors work.
no, I meant The Codebreakers the several hundred page tome by David Kahn which although written in the late 1960s is still the best history of cryptography and crypto analysis in English. It is probably the seminal work that started freelance programmers and academics on the search for public key cryptography in the 1970s. It is perhaps most important because it treats cryptography as a sociotechnical problem unlike most works that ignore the human element in looking at cryptography.
I strongly feel that The Codebreakers should be required reading for cryptography advocates. Over and over again the weakest link in any cryptographic system, including the one-time pad has been user error. According to Kahn the NSA successfully decrypted Soviet messages encrypted with "one-time" pads that had been reused due to supply difficulties or clerical errors. They were able to accomplish this by collecting thousands of encrypted dispatches, using traffic analysis, and looking for identical cipher text that might indicate common words, names, or phrases.
Kahn credits cryptographic incompetence to a wide variety of historical disasters from the defeat of the Imperial Russian army during World War I because key officers refused to use codes, to the World War II defeat of enigma because the German Navy had their U-boats transmitting trivial messages to headquarters on a daily basis. (In fact, traffic analysis and radio direction finding efforts were probably more critical than the actual capture of an enigma machine.)
The bottom line is that creating cryptographic systems that mathematically cannot be broken using current technology and probably with any future technology is relatively trivial. Creating socio-technical systems that are resistant to cryptographic incompetence is almost impossible. Most of the focus on algorithms is missing the point when there exist a dozen algorithms that are unbreakable, but no algorithms that are not vulnerable to social engineering attacks, traffic analysis, and dictionary attacks.
I feel that this is really the primary focus of government attacks on cryptographic products, the goal is not to attack the algorithms, but to hinder the development of socio-technical systems that use cryptography effectively. Why worry about if Microsoft Office includes strong, probably unbreakable encryption algorithms, if the software uses password XOR by default for compatibility with earlier versions, the strong cryptography is incompatible with export versions, and a dictionary attack will get 50 percent of the information you want? I am less interested in whether they can create yet another unbreakable encryption system, than creating a security system that allows me to send private e-mail to co-workers who don't understand why they should get a pgp plug-in or how to use it.
Re:Doesn't the earth receive more?
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Lunar Power
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· Score: 2, Insightful
1. There is weather here, making a project like that demand huge ongoing costs. Rain/Snow/Wind/Erosion are all very powerful forces.
Certainly, however the fact that there is weather here makes replacing a solar panel almost as easy as replacing the shingles on your house. In contrast, replacing solar pannels in space becomes a very complicated procedure. In addition, there is weather in space also. Both solar wind and cosmic rays put a significant strain on space materials.
2. People don't want 100 miles of solar panels...anywhere, it doesn't matter if we try to stick them in texas/Arizona, they will still be in somebodies backyard. And those people won't want them there.
Why assume a centralized array? In fact, one of the advantages to solar is that it would be decentralized thus reducing dependence on the grid during rolling blackouts. For commercial buildings solar provides three important benefits, utilization of previously useless space on rooftops, reduction of energy bills and a level of independence for "backup" power.
3. Power distribution will kill you, a massive project like this in Arizona will really (at the very most) just help North America. And that wouldn't be exactly great PR would it?
Power distribution is actually the least of the problems because the ability to connect new power sources to the grid is one of the things that makes it work as well as it does.
4. Building Phase. The building of something like this would require enormous amounts of materials to be shipped somewhere. And that somewhere wouldn't like the 20 semi's going by every 20 minutes.
Again, the assumption of centralization. If anything history demonstrates that a lot of small sources is cheaper and more robust than a single large source.
5. If we don't want the world to stay as it is, 1 Super-Power/100 Little Powers/1,000 Crappy Third world nations where people still die of the plague, something like this needs to be built. We need a worldwide energy distribution net so that third world countries don't feel that to succedde they need to cut down all their trees for power plants and strip mine themselves to death.
However, will this proposal provide power to third-world countries? After all, the big powers will be the one building it and charging out the nose for the power. In contrast, a lot of developing nations are finding that decentralized water and solar energy is a more cost effective way to get power to rural areas than building power plants. Even in the U.S. solar is more cost effective than running a power line a half-mile to a rural location. Current solar technology seems to be the perfect solution for developing areas. The start up costs are low ($350 a panel vs. $thousands to run a wire), the system is modular (pay only for what you need), has high redundancy, is not vunerable to military attacks on infrastructure, is not vunerable to central control, and requires minimal education to maintain. This solution just seems to put the superpower in charge of an energy solution that is unnecessary and expensive.
. We have a atmosphere so the efficiency of power per square foot generated would be much lower then it would be on the moon.
The efficiency argument is bullshit because it doesn't look at the entire system, only one aspect of the system (how much light hits the photovotaic.) The fact of the matter is that the problem here on Earth is not enough energy, but an inability to use the megawats of free energy we have available.
Think about it. A major challenge in archetectural design is how to deal with the kilowats of energy that bombard buildings every day. In summer, the problem is what to do with all the solar energy that falls onto rooftops. Currently our solution is to spend even MORE energy to pipe the resulting heat from the inside of buildings to the outside of buildings. Now that is an effeciency problem!
I don't see this as a question of "will we?" I see it as a question of "when will we?". There's only so much oil underneath Texas/Alaska/Saudi Arabia folks. Someday there won't be any left that is economically viable to drill for.
The question is what is the best solution to our energy problems? Again, even with the pesky atmosphere in the way, we still get far more energy from the sun that we can use, even to the point where we spend energy to get rid of unwanted solar energy.
Besides, don't we all think that a city on the moon would be cool? That it would help the sciences leap forward? This is the first step guys, if there an economical reason for us to be there, we better pack our bags and go!
Certainly there are some good reasons to go to the moon. However a pie in the sky porkbarrel project is not one of them.
Re:ABC AND Slashdot get taken in
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Lunar Power
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· Score: 1
>Building codes requiring solar panels on every roof? Not a bad idea, but there are some logistical problems to sort out. First, you need more than just solar panels. You also need some pretty expensive equipment to regulate the energy coming in from those panels and transform it into the "flavor" of energy used by the power grid. The fewer such setups required, the better.>Then there's the fact that every homeowner would now be responsible for maintaining another system. Putting them under the control of Joe Wwfwatcher is an error-prone proposition, and one person's mistakes can cause problems on the whole grid. Example: the electric folk are trying to maintain the power grid, but can't because somebody's faulty equipment is still pumping power into the system.>Finally, your plan shares problems common to any earth-based system. The atmosphere absorbs the majority of the energy before it can even reach the solar panels.>I think a better system would be to require solar installations on buildings exceeding a certain square footage of roofing, with the solar installation taking up about 10-20% of the available area. The average homeowner wouldn't have to get involved, but the local Wal-Marts and Home Depots would. A few relatively large installations are going to be much more effective than millions of tiny ones, and indescribably easier to maintain.>Then give the stores the right to sell the energy to the power companies so they don't feel too put out by the "unfunded government mandate," and things might work out.
I find it interesting that BP is already one of the largest producers of photovoltaic technology. But again, is the fact that some of the power companies find an emerging, possibly superior technology to be a threat a reason to avoid developing that technology or to continue pushing the market so that it favorable to older technologies? (One can draw an analogy between Open Source and Microsoft here.)
One of this sad things about this entire political mess is that people protesting organizations that secretly define world economic policy have somehow managed to find themselves on the "anti-globalization" side of the media label. I don't know of any of the groups protesting the development of international environmental treaties, the existence of the United Nations, or increased trade and information exchange across borders. What is a central issue is that we have a few organizations that are determining the face of global trade policy, and largely doing it in secret, without public comment, and giving themselves the option of eliminating local laws as "trade barriers." Certainly globalization is going to happen, the question is who will be running the show when it does happen.
I just tested the phone thing by pugging the phone into an unused, disconnected second line. No dialtone, no power.
But it amazes me how people are second-guessing how the room was designed. (Not that people are second-guessing but how they are doing it.) How many criminals in history have used gas? My impression of this film was not that the room was designed for a seige, but for your not-so-random acts of urban violence. Most of the criticisms of the technology seem like pie in the sky proposals for how the room should operate. Not only should it be safe from armed robbery, but also cosmic rays, superman's heat vision, adamantium claws, and Casper the friendly ghost! While we are at it, Hamlet should really have expected both the sword and the drink to be poisoned, Bilbo should have know the ring was cursed, and of course Luke should have known that Vader was his father from the moment they saw each other on the Death Star! A lot of design by hindsight going on here.
The problem is that what Jonathan Katz (apparently other readers of slashdot) find to be technically improbable, I find to be actually quite likely given my experience of living in six different locations in less than five years. For example the entire issue of the telephone line. I was very curious about the claim that one is able to dial 911 from any telephone line, so I did the obvious thing to settle the issue, I performed an experiment and pluged my phone into the unused deactivated second phone line of my house. Not only did I not get a dial tone, but most importantly there was no electric power available for my phone into generate keypad tones. The carrier signal for telephone lines requires power, and it is in the best interest of everyone involved to cut the power to unused lines. Not having that active line makes the possibility of a silent alarm also doubtful.
Now then, perhaps Jonathan Katz as a slashdot reader and uber-geek has the foresight to enable all the services when he moves in on the spur of the moment. Perhaps Jonathan Katz as a famous slashdot contributor, has the ear of the telephone company in a way that most of us mere mortals do not, but usually the best one can hope for in reconnecting a utility service is for someone to show up the next day, and it sometimes takes an entire week during busy periods. As a result the failure of the phone line in a recently vacant apartment is actually very probable.
Also, not only is the failure of the telephone lines quite probable in terms of the business logistics of utility services, but it is also quite probable in terms of the psychology of preparing for disaster. Over and over again we find that people just do not prepare for disasters, or place emergency preparedness as a relatively low priority. After all, how many people don't use virus protection software, and don't make regular backups of their home computer data based on the belief that they will probably never need it? Certainly, the probability of a group of criminals breaking into the house on the first day of occupation may be something that Jonathan Katz as a security-minded geek may foresee. But most likely, Jonathan Katz as applying his foresight as a movie reviewer to second-guess the characters by using knowledge that they would not necessarily have.
The only conclusion that I can draw from Katz's review is that Katz lives in the different reality from me in which everyone is paranoid about disaster preparedness, and utility companies send an employee to your door as soon as you call to request new service. From the review Panic Room is closer to my reality than his reality.
From the review, it seems that it's not the producers of the Panic Room that need a technology director. Which is more improbable? The premise that communications utilities are not set up when a person moves into a house on short notice, or the premise that communications utilities magically know when a vacant apartment will be occupied in order to connect the phone lines?
If any part of the premise is improbable it is not the premise that the technology did not work for a very specific type of threat, but the premise that she was able to move in the same day she saw the house!
What never ceases to amaze me about many fellow geeks is how they obsess over trivial details in looking at TV and cinema while the rest of the film goes whooshing over their heads. To paraphrase Gene Roddenbery on techno-fanboys who demanded technical details about the Enterprise. "It's not real, it's just a plot device to get the characters into a different conflict every week. Get over it."
Having tried this route, remote X was a good idea back when processing was too damn expensive. It was a step up from the old VT100 terminals in that it saved plotter time. However, my personal experience was that it is a very bandwidth-intensive application that became unbearably sluggish during the slightest network congestion. In addition, it misses the entire point of using IMAP or POP which is download once and read many times.
It of course assumes that there are any graphical UNIX mail clients that are not mediocre. If I really wanted to do synchronous mail browsing off of a central server, I would just use an ssh shell to check my mail with pine or gnus. So far, I have not seen a graphical mail client that did not come with multiple annoyances, quirks, bugs, and glitches. Choosing a mail client is rather like choosing a life partner. It just happens that Mulberry's quirks and limitations are compatible with the way I do work, while Mozilla's and outlook's drive me up the wall.
If one is married to Mozilla, it still makes more sense (to me at least) to run it as a client, rather than run it remotely through X over ip. I just don't get the appeal of running a graphical user interface remotely when processing speed and disk space are considerably cheaper than bandwidth.
I think that one of the things that come out of this discussion is that there is no such thing as a perfect e-mail application because everybody has different needs and different ways of working. Personally, I like mulberry (in fact, it is the first piece of software I've actually paid for in a while) in spite of the quirky interface because it handles things on the back end better than other mail clients, that makes using mail over 56 K. connection quite a bit easier. One of the better ideas is that it only downloads the most recent 20 mail headers to start with, which gets me into my mail in under five seconds, as opposed to 30 to 60 seconds with outlook that insists on synchronizing the entire inbox before showing me anything. Another big plus is that it only downloads the parts of a message that I choose to download. This is very welcome given that some of my co-workers have a tendency to send 2 MB attachments with messages that I need to read. Its search feature seems to work better than other comparable clients.
One of the big problems with the article is that it focuses on interface features, when the primary reason why outlook stinks has nothing to do with the interface, but with the buggy code underneath. There are many things that I like about the outlook interface, I got tired of having a crash 50 percent of the time I try to open my e-mail.
Another feature that I personally like about mulberry is the one window/one task interface. The default split-screen interface of Mozilla and outlook express drives me up the wall because it provides neither a good view of the message index or the message or the mailboxes. the problem of windows becoming hidden is not a big problem because I can always get to where I need to go through the windows pulldown menu. And granted, the configuration section is a mess, but to 90 percent of the users can get by with the simple version.
Mozilla advocates certainly have no room to talk about extensive pulldown menus with their security section including a nested pulldown menu three levels deep. (Not to mention, Mozilla is one of two programs on my computer that gleefully ignores the fact that I have a Dragon NaturallySpeaking bar at the top of my screen, and places the pulldown menus behind the DragonBar.)
Perhaps this review isn't all that relevant to Slashdot. I actually found that this trilogy covers the same theological ground as many of the D.C. horror comics such as Hellbazer and Preacher in which the God of the Bible is not necessarily the creator of the universe but actually one political faction pushing its own laws, and fighting against another political faction with a different agenda. In other words, what happens if you read the Bible as divine propaganda rather than as divine truth. While The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a revision in Gospels, Dark Materials starts with Milton and touches on Dante. In the process Pullman tackles some of the more difficult problems in theology such as the nature of sin, and what really triggered "the fall from grace."
In a way, the Dark Materials trilogy is related to the Lord of the Rings in that the Lord of the Rings is basically the results of a writer playing with language and history, while the Dark Materials trilogy is the results of a writer playing around with theology. At any rate, it surprises me that Dark Materials has not received the same level of hostility as Harry Potter which never gets political beyond vague mumblings about anti-muggle prejudice.
I think that shoving this trilogy into the "young adults" category is rather a misnomer. In fact, I find a disappointing that the best works of fantasy writing including the Earthsea series and a fair number of works by Ray Bradbury get shoved into the "young adults" shelves and never get taken seriously. Granted there are some serious flaws. The entire talking companion animal idea has become a personal pet peeve of mine, but Pullman does manage to do something different with it.
At this point, I've pretty much lost my faith in the ability of OSS development to create usable software. The problem with the "scratch the itch" model is that the primary groups that get their itches scratched are the power users and not the every-day appliance users. Granted, it took Microsoft a few years to pick up on usability testing, but once they did so, they did so with a vengance.
Microsoft spends almost as much money on the very difficult problem of how human beings think, as they to telling computers what to think. The Open Source model currently does not support collaborative work between programmers, designers, psychologists and sociologists that leads to good interface design. The Open Source model doesn't have good mechanisms for paying a dozen users to sit down in front of a camera for a usability test. The Open Source movement doesn't have good mechanisms for paying technical writers and instructional designers to create clear and concise help and training systems.
If he were to play again, it would require the current world champion to offer a match entirely on Fischer's terms. That would mean probably random piece starting placement (FischerRandom) and a closed playing hall (if not a virtual one).
Which World Champion? The FIDE stripped Fischer of his title 25 years ago after he refused to defend it. For that matter, they stripped Kasparov of his title for the same reason which didn't stop Kasparov from staging his own world championship.
I suspect that Fischer's secrecy is about the only thing that is keeping him famous.
Slashdot Mirror
Another problem with the monopoly is that not only do you get the monopoly on the software you produce, but you also get a monopoly on third party support. Currently, the two things they keep me away from open office is the lack of compatibility with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the huge deal killer the absence of a viable bibliographic preference system for open office. (Yes I know there is a bibliographic system included in open office but each new document returns to the default bibliographic format. In the absence of swappable bibliographic style sheets it is easier to enter the bibliographic entries by hand than to try to change the default style.) Compatibility with Microsoft Word is also a big problem especially in departments where file sharing is essential. The much claimed compatibility works for 90 percent of the features but not for the 10 percent of the features such as Microsoft graphics that I really need to handle on a regular basis.
And to be honest, I must admit that the monopoly is not the only reason why Microsoft office is so popular. In spite of the monopoly, office is a good, solid, relatively stable, piece of software that actually performs better and uses less memory than open office.
I know that I keep bringing this up but perhaps the best history of military cryptoanalysis in print is The Codebreakers by David Kahn. It devotes about four novel length chapters to World War II cryptography alone and also describes the first cryptographic war for the airwaves during World War I.
it also points out that one of the big revolutions in military cryptography was the coordination of code making and code breaking. The only way to make a good code is to try to break it. Knowledge of practical code breaking was never intended to be distributed outside of military circles, even to the point where the National Security Agency attempted to block publication of The Codebreakers for even revealing obsolete historical details of World War II cryptoanalysis. As a result the comparison between military cryptoanalysts and copyright crackers is a bit overdrawn. Many of the codebreakers were also involved and creating and testing military codes to hide information from the public.
The amazing thing is that this is old news in terms of theory and not-so-old news in terms of experiment. The NIST research showing superposition of complete atoms was PUBLISHED in 2000 and the theory behind superposition of both electrons and atoms was published in the 1930s. Einstein won the Nobel for treating photons as particles before my parents were born and Feynman took home a Nobel for describing photons as particles before I was born. From what I can tell, QED is pretty much up there with Newton's Second Law and general relativity in terms of a done deal.
Well again. The use of the term "particle" to describe photons is well entrenched among physicists in order to describe how light interacts with other particles. Saying that a photon is a particle (and that electrons are particles) is a useful abstraction for some kinds of calculations.
However, electrons and photons are both waves in the same sense with the primary difference that electron waves are about the size of an atom while photon waves can be many miles in length. In fact, the principle that electrons are also waves is central to the operation of both electron microscopes and our current explanations of molecular structure. (For example, it explains why graphite is planar while diamond is tetrahedral.) In fact, even protons and alpha particles have wave properties which is central to the operation of nuclear power plants.
But I'll even one-up you one. Not only can electrons exist muiltiple places simultaneously, but multiple larger particles can occupy the same space in a Bose-Einstein condensate. But here is a pdf article reporting the quantum superposition of an electron at a distance comparible to that of microcomputer transistor (0.4 micrometres). Also the NIST acheived superposition of atoms simultaneously in two locations at a scale of around 10 atomic diamters. As a result, particle/waves of light and particle/waves of matter don't look so different after all.
I've always been told that it depends on the theory you are using. The particle physicists I know who use Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) use the term "particle" to describe how quantitized ammounts of light interact with particles at specific locations in space and time. On the other hand, at other scales it makes more sense to talk about light as a wave to explain why radio antennas work through resonance.
However, the property of being in two places at one time is not limited to photons. Electrons can also exist in multiple places at once which is one of the weird phenomena that make Tunneling Electron Microscopes and semiconductors work.
no, I meant The Codebreakers the several hundred page tome by David Kahn which although written in the late 1960s is still the best history of cryptography and crypto analysis in English. It is probably the seminal work that started freelance programmers and academics on the search for public key cryptography in the 1970s. It is perhaps most important because it treats cryptography as a sociotechnical problem unlike most works that ignore the human element in looking at cryptography.
I strongly feel that The Codebreakers should be required reading for cryptography advocates. Over and over again the weakest link in any cryptographic system, including the one-time pad has been user error. According to Kahn the NSA successfully decrypted Soviet messages encrypted with "one-time" pads that had been reused due to supply difficulties or clerical errors. They were able to accomplish this by collecting thousands of encrypted dispatches, using traffic analysis, and looking for identical cipher text that might indicate common words, names, or phrases.
Kahn credits cryptographic incompetence to a wide variety of historical disasters from the defeat of the Imperial Russian army during World War I because key officers refused to use codes, to the World War II defeat of enigma because the German Navy had their U-boats transmitting trivial messages to headquarters on a daily basis. (In fact, traffic analysis and radio direction finding efforts were probably more critical than the actual capture of an enigma machine.)
The bottom line is that creating cryptographic systems that mathematically cannot be broken using current technology and probably with any future technology is relatively trivial. Creating socio-technical systems that are resistant to cryptographic incompetence is almost impossible. Most of the focus on algorithms is missing the point when there exist a dozen algorithms that are unbreakable, but no algorithms that are not vulnerable to social engineering attacks, traffic analysis, and dictionary attacks.
I feel that this is really the primary focus of government attacks on cryptographic products, the goal is not to attack the algorithms, but to hinder the development of socio-technical systems that use cryptography effectively. Why worry about if Microsoft Office includes strong, probably unbreakable encryption algorithms, if the software uses password XOR by default for compatibility with earlier versions, the strong cryptography is incompatible with export versions, and a dictionary attack will get 50 percent of the information you want? I am less interested in whether they can create yet another unbreakable encryption system, than creating a security system that allows me to send private e-mail to co-workers who don't understand why they should get a pgp plug-in or how to use it.
Certainly, however the fact that there is weather here makes replacing a solar panel almost as easy as replacing the shingles on your house. In contrast, replacing solar pannels in space becomes a very complicated procedure. In addition, there is weather in space also. Both solar wind and cosmic rays put a significant strain on space materials.
Why assume a centralized array? In fact, one of the advantages to solar is that it would be decentralized thus reducing dependence on the grid during rolling blackouts. For commercial buildings solar provides three important benefits, utilization of previously useless space on rooftops, reduction of energy bills and a level of independence for "backup" power.
Power distribution is actually the least of the problems because the ability to connect new power sources to the grid is one of the things that makes it work as well as it does.
Again, the assumption of centralization. If anything history demonstrates that a lot of small sources is cheaper and more robust than a single large source.
However, will this proposal provide power to third-world countries? After all, the big powers will be the one building it and charging out the nose for the power. In contrast, a lot of developing nations are finding that decentralized water and solar energy is a more cost effective way to get power to rural areas than building power plants. Even in the U.S. solar is more cost effective than running a power line a half-mile to a rural location. Current solar technology seems to be the perfect solution for developing areas. The start up costs are low ($350 a panel vs. $thousands to run a wire), the system is modular (pay only for what you need), has high redundancy, is not vunerable to military attacks on infrastructure, is not vunerable to central control, and requires minimal education to maintain. This solution just seems to put the superpower in charge of an energy solution that is unnecessary and expensive.
The efficiency argument is bullshit because it doesn't look at the entire system, only one aspect of the system (how much light hits the photovotaic.) The fact of the matter is that the problem here on Earth is not enough energy, but an inability to use the megawats of free energy we have available.
Think about it. A major challenge in archetectural design is how to deal with the kilowats of energy that bombard buildings every day. In summer, the problem is what to do with all the solar energy that falls onto rooftops. Currently our solution is to spend even MORE energy to pipe the resulting heat from the inside of buildings to the outside of buildings. Now that is an effeciency problem!
The question is what is the best solution to our energy problems? Again, even with the pesky atmosphere in the way, we still get far more energy from the sun that we can use, even to the point where we spend energy to get rid of unwanted solar energy.
Certainly there are some good reasons to go to the moon. However a pie in the sky porkbarrel project is not one of them.
>Building codes requiring solar panels on every roof? Not a bad idea, but there are some logistical problems to sort out. First, you need more than just solar panels. You also need some pretty expensive equipment to regulate the energy coming in from those panels and transform it into the "flavor" of energy used by the power grid. The fewer such setups required, the better.>Then there's the fact that every homeowner would now be responsible for maintaining another system. Putting them under the control of Joe Wwfwatcher is an error-prone proposition, and one person's mistakes can cause problems on the whole grid. Example: the electric folk are trying to maintain the power grid, but can't because somebody's faulty equipment is still pumping power into the system.>Finally, your plan shares problems common to any earth-based system. The atmosphere absorbs the majority of the energy before it can even reach the solar panels.>I think a better system would be to require solar installations on buildings exceeding a certain square footage of roofing, with the solar installation taking up about 10-20% of the available area. The average homeowner wouldn't have to get involved, but the local Wal-Marts and Home Depots would. A few relatively large installations are going to be much more effective than millions of tiny ones, and indescribably easier to maintain.>Then give the stores the right to sell the energy to the power companies so they don't feel too put out by the "unfunded government mandate," and things might work out.
I find it interesting that BP is already one of the largest producers of photovoltaic technology. But again, is the fact that some of the power companies find an emerging, possibly superior technology to be a threat a reason to avoid developing that technology or to continue pushing the market so that it favorable to older technologies? (One can draw an analogy between Open Source and Microsoft here.)
One of this sad things about this entire political mess is that people protesting organizations that secretly define world economic policy have somehow managed to find themselves on the "anti-globalization" side of the media label. I don't know of any of the groups protesting the development of international environmental treaties, the existence of the United Nations, or increased trade and information exchange across borders. What is a central issue is that we have a few organizations that are determining the face of global trade policy, and largely doing it in secret, without public comment, and giving themselves the option of eliminating local laws as "trade barriers." Certainly globalization is going to happen, the question is who will be running the show when it does happen.
I just tested the phone thing by pugging the phone into an unused, disconnected second line. No dialtone, no power.
But it amazes me how people are second-guessing how the room was designed. (Not that people are second-guessing but how they are doing it.) How many criminals in history have used gas? My impression of this film was not that the room was designed for a seige, but for your not-so-random acts of urban violence. Most of the criticisms of the technology seem like pie in the sky proposals for how the room should operate. Not only should it be safe from armed robbery, but also cosmic rays, superman's heat vision, adamantium claws, and Casper the friendly ghost! While we are at it, Hamlet should really have expected both the sword and the drink to be poisoned, Bilbo should have know the ring was cursed, and of course Luke should have known that Vader was his father from the moment they saw each other on the Death Star! A lot of design by hindsight going on here.
The problem is that what Jonathan Katz (apparently other readers of slashdot) find to be technically improbable, I find to be actually quite likely given my experience of living in six different locations in less than five years. For example the entire issue of the telephone line. I was very curious about the claim that one is able to dial 911 from any telephone line, so I did the obvious thing to settle the issue, I performed an experiment and pluged my phone into the unused deactivated second phone line of my house. Not only did I not get a dial tone, but most importantly there was no electric power available for my phone into generate keypad tones. The carrier signal for telephone lines requires power, and it is in the best interest of everyone involved to cut the power to unused lines. Not having that active line makes the possibility of a silent alarm also doubtful.
Now then, perhaps Jonathan Katz as a slashdot reader and uber-geek has the foresight to enable all the services when he moves in on the spur of the moment. Perhaps Jonathan Katz as a famous slashdot contributor, has the ear of the telephone company in a way that most of us mere mortals do not, but usually the best one can hope for in reconnecting a utility service is for someone to show up the next day, and it sometimes takes an entire week during busy periods. As a result the failure of the phone line in a recently vacant apartment is actually very probable.
Also, not only is the failure of the telephone lines quite probable in terms of the business logistics of utility services, but it is also quite probable in terms of the psychology of preparing for disaster. Over and over again we find that people just do not prepare for disasters, or place emergency preparedness as a relatively low priority. After all, how many people don't use virus protection software, and don't make regular backups of their home computer data based on the belief that they will probably never need it? Certainly, the probability of a group of criminals breaking into the house on the first day of occupation may be something that Jonathan Katz as a security-minded geek may foresee. But most likely, Jonathan Katz as applying his foresight as a movie reviewer to second-guess the characters by using knowledge that they would not necessarily have.
The only conclusion that I can draw from Katz's review is that Katz lives in the different reality from me in which everyone is paranoid about disaster preparedness, and utility companies send an employee to your door as soon as you call to request new service. From the review Panic Room is closer to my reality than his reality.
From the review, it seems that it's not the producers of the Panic Room that need a technology director. Which is more improbable? The premise that communications utilities are not set up when a person moves into a house on short notice, or the premise that communications utilities magically know when a vacant apartment will be occupied in order to connect the phone lines?
If any part of the premise is improbable it is not the premise that the technology did not work for a very specific type of threat, but the premise that she was able to move in the same day she saw the house!
What never ceases to amaze me about many fellow geeks is how they obsess over trivial details in looking at TV and cinema while the rest of the film goes whooshing over their heads. To paraphrase Gene Roddenbery on techno-fanboys who demanded technical details about the Enterprise. "It's not real, it's just a plot device to get the characters into a different conflict every week. Get over it."
Having tried this route, remote X was a good idea back when processing was too damn expensive. It was a step up from the old VT100 terminals in that it saved plotter time. However, my personal experience was that it is a very bandwidth-intensive application that became unbearably sluggish during the slightest network congestion. In addition, it misses the entire point of using IMAP or POP which is download once and read many times.
It of course assumes that there are any graphical UNIX mail clients that are not mediocre. If I really wanted to do synchronous mail browsing off of a central server, I would just use an ssh shell to check my mail with pine or gnus. So far, I have not seen a graphical mail client that did not come with multiple annoyances, quirks, bugs, and glitches. Choosing a mail client is rather like choosing a life partner. It just happens that Mulberry's quirks and limitations are compatible with the way I do work, while Mozilla's and outlook's drive me up the wall.
If one is married to Mozilla, it still makes more sense (to me at least) to run it as a client, rather than run it remotely through X over ip. I just don't get the appeal of running a graphical user interface remotely when processing speed and disk space are considerably cheaper than bandwidth.
I think that one of the things that come out of this discussion is that there is no such thing as a perfect e-mail application because everybody has different needs and different ways of working. Personally, I like mulberry (in fact, it is the first piece of software I've actually paid for in a while) in spite of the quirky interface because it handles things on the back end better than other mail clients, that makes using mail over 56 K. connection quite a bit easier. One of the better ideas is that it only downloads the most recent 20 mail headers to start with, which gets me into my mail in under five seconds, as opposed to 30 to 60 seconds with outlook that insists on synchronizing the entire inbox before showing me anything. Another big plus is that it only downloads the parts of a message that I choose to download. This is very welcome given that some of my co-workers have a tendency to send 2 MB attachments with messages that I need to read. Its search feature seems to work better than other comparable clients.
One of the big problems with the article is that it focuses on interface features, when the primary reason why outlook stinks has nothing to do with the interface, but with the buggy code underneath. There are many things that I like about the outlook interface, I got tired of having a crash 50 percent of the time I try to open my e-mail.
Another feature that I personally like about mulberry is the one window/one task interface. The default split-screen interface of Mozilla and outlook express drives me up the wall because it provides neither a good view of the message index or the message or the mailboxes. the problem of windows becoming hidden is not a big problem because I can always get to where I need to go through the windows pulldown menu. And granted, the configuration section is a mess, but to 90 percent of the users can get by with the simple version.
Mozilla advocates certainly have no room to talk about extensive pulldown menus with their security section including a nested pulldown menu three levels deep. (Not to mention, Mozilla is one of two programs on my computer that gleefully ignores the fact that I have a Dragon NaturallySpeaking bar at the top of my screen, and places the pulldown menus behind the DragonBar.)
Perhaps this review isn't all that relevant to Slashdot. I actually found that this trilogy covers the same theological ground as many of the D.C. horror comics such as Hellbazer and Preacher in which the God of the Bible is not necessarily the creator of the universe but actually one political faction pushing its own laws, and fighting against another political faction with a different agenda. In other words, what happens if you read the Bible as divine propaganda rather than as divine truth. While The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a revision in Gospels, Dark Materials starts with Milton and touches on Dante. In the process Pullman tackles some of the more difficult problems in theology such as the nature of sin, and what really triggered "the fall from grace."
In a way, the Dark Materials trilogy is related to the Lord of the Rings in that the Lord of the Rings is basically the results of a writer playing with language and history, while the Dark Materials trilogy is the results of a writer playing around with theology. At any rate, it surprises me that Dark Materials has not received the same level of hostility as Harry Potter which never gets political beyond vague mumblings about anti-muggle prejudice.
I think that shoving this trilogy into the "young adults" category is rather a misnomer. In fact, I find a disappointing that the best works of fantasy writing including the Earthsea series and a fair number of works by Ray Bradbury get shoved into the "young adults" shelves and never get taken seriously. Granted there are some serious flaws. The entire talking companion animal idea has become a personal pet peeve of mine, but Pullman does manage to do something different with it.
At this point, I've pretty much lost my faith in the ability of OSS development to create usable software. The problem with the "scratch the itch" model is that the primary groups that get their itches scratched are the power users and not the every-day appliance users. Granted, it took Microsoft a few years to pick up on usability testing, but once they did so, they did so with a vengance. Microsoft spends almost as much money on the very difficult problem of how human beings think, as they to telling computers what to think. The Open Source model currently does not support collaborative work between programmers, designers, psychologists and sociologists that leads to good interface design. The Open Source model doesn't have good mechanisms for paying a dozen users to sit down in front of a camera for a usability test. The Open Source movement doesn't have good mechanisms for paying technical writers and instructional designers to create clear and concise help and training systems.
Which World Champion? The FIDE stripped Fischer of his title 25 years ago after he refused to defend it. For that matter, they stripped Kasparov of his title for the same reason which didn't stop Kasparov from staging his own world championship.
I suspect that Fischer's secrecy is about the only thing that is keeping him famous.