The original patent on quantum cryptography was for a banknote with trapped photons. These could only be read once, so you had to know the polarization axis of the of the photons to read their state. This was a wonderfully batty idea, and a useful explanation of what is known and what isn't known about a quantum state.
However, when you go into actual implementations of quantum communications, you find the hacking techniques are much the same. Here, they are trying to send out a single photon. If a real line is lossy, the system must have some sort of handshaking to resend bad bits. If you hack into their cable, and carefully mess up a few photons, you can tease this system into resending some parts of the signal, or sending a stronger signal with more than one photon; and then the system is no longer secure because more than one person can get a copy of it. It's the quantum physics equivalent of attaching your crocodile clips to the telephone wires without the user hearing the clicks.
My guess is you can get the same level of security from ordinary non-quantum techniques. If you are going to avoid a 'man in the middle' attack, you should meet the person at the other end. Suppose, when you meet, you exchange thumb drives with random data. You can then 'OR' your message with this data, using each bit once only to reduce it to random-looking bits; and the person at the other end can 'OR' it again to get it back again. An extra precaution would be to pad each message to a fixed length, so you don't give away the number of bits in your message. One time pad cryptography makes the communication link secure, but either end is potentially unsafe; which is pretty much what you would have with a perfect quantum encryption scheme.
Yep. First sensible post in this thread. This is what I had imagined. I would want something that I could take on holiday, and read e-mail where there is a connection, some simple word processing and data visualization, not viewing videos or gaming. You could keep a diary when hiking, and stuff like that.
If you have a solid-state hard disk, and don't have a display backlight, or a DVD drive, and the USB ports only supported very tiny current draws such as thumb drives, you can omit the battery and rely on energy in balancing the energy out. You might have some capacitative storage to allow the computer to work for a few seconds if the lights suddenly went out, but that would be it.
The solar panels they are using are transparent, so they can cover the whole display and keypad area. However, artificial lighting is becoming more efficient, which means emitting less IR, so you might find it doesn't work on a plane. But planes should have 12v USB power supplies anyhow.
I have actually used a laptop with solar backlighting. I had one of the IBM Thinkpads, which had the option to detach the backlight so it could be used on an overhead projector. The sun used to shine onto my desk, so I could take off the backlight and slip in a piece of paper, or (better) a square cut from a shower curtain. This all looks Heath Robinson-ish, so I suspect they would probably be better off using some reflective e-ink display.
(I am submitting this for a friend who has trouble with keyboards)
The BBC is bi-ased. The pro-gram shows only the da-leks being de-fea-ted. It never shows the time-lines when the da-leks con-quer and the doc-tor is de-fea-ted. They por-tray the da-leks as mind-less kill-ers. The daleks are nu-anced. The da-leks are complex. The da-leks have had it up to here with this stu-pid pro-gram. Dear 'Points Of View'. Oh why, oh why, oh why can we not have un-bi-ased re-por-ting? Why can't we see the da-leks win and the doc-tor get his ass ex-ter-mi-nated? Why can't the doc-tor stay dead when he dies? It's all so un-fair. Yours, Dis-gus-ted of Ska-ro.
I was wondering how they mananged to come up with the smoothness parameter. After all, we cannot tell how much a bump on the 'surface' of a ball would affect how it spins unless we know the radius of the ball, and how the mass is distributed through the bulk. There are also symmetric configurations of bumps that would give no measureable asymmetry because the effects would balance out. I now think I have figured it out. Suppose the actual 'shape' of the electron was two half-electron point masses at either end of a massless stick. This would give the biggest contrast in moment of inertia between the two spin axes, and this let them convert the experimental measurements into a length. This length does not tell us anything about the 'actual' shape of an electron, and the quotes around 'actual' are there because quantum theory does not necessarily admit to any 'actual' in the normal sense of thing at these dimensions. But it's a useful trick that allows them to express what they have found in familiar units of length. Hope this helps a bit.
Photosynthesis is one of the oldest processes of life. I'm sure that if it could be improved without adverse effects to the plants, it would have happened through evolution.
From the plant's point of view, photosynthesis is fine as it is. They don't necesarily want to bulk up like mad, and get eaten or burnt as quickly as possible. Photosynthesis in blue-green algae is different and a lot faster (but not necessarily 'more efficient' unless you define your terms rather nicely) then in regular plants, so it is certainly possible that the process can be sped up. Probably there are limits to how much we can tinker with the process in a large and rigid plant, because it has other processes that deal with the products of photosynthesisis, and these would have to be sped up too. However, there is probably some slack in the system, and faster photosynthesis will probably mean faster growth. It is certainly worth a go.
Remember the Sherlock Holmes story "The Devil's foot"?
Old houses may sport moulds and fungi. Fungi can contain all sorts of head-messing substances. It may be possible to get some altered mental state by inhaling spores. That might explain why reports of ghosts are confined to particular loci, expecially old buildings in stormy weather.
I don't think the eventual aim of this work is to have a talking head of Charles Babbage on your computer. The aim is to understand the nature of subliminal communications, and the first stage of doing that is by direct mimicry using an accurate dummy.
So, what's this got to do with computer interfaces? Well, when most people get annoyed with their computer, they shout at the screen. Why? If the system has locked up, then the error happened in the CPU or the GPU which both sit in the body of the machine unless you have an Apple. Nevertheless, we seem to take the screen of a computer as the 'face' of the machine, and it is the 'natural' target for our gestures and expressions. We are probably making expressions at our computer much of the time. Many laptops have built-in cameras that could pick up these expressions. At the moment, we are doing nothing with this information, but one day we might. The idea that ordinary computers will transmit expressions back at us is a bit more far-fetched, but Japanese companies are looking at using robots for receptionists and ticket sellers, and other jobs where rapid and seamless low-level interaction with a lot of people is needed.
You are right - neutrinos can pass through a lot of matter without the matter affecting the neutrino, or the neutrino affecting the matter. Or so we think. A couple of people noticed that the apparent decay rates were different during a solar flare, which could mean there may be strange circumstances where the neutrinos had more effect than we expect. Or it could have been something other than neutrinos, if our understanding is that far off. I didn't think that was likely, but it doesn't hurt to test your assumptions once in a while.
The trouble with original measurements were that they could not easily be repeated. You could wait for the sun to have another significant outburst, and see whether the same detectors measure the same pulse, but you could never be sure whether that burst happened to put out a 'clump' of neutrinos in a particular direction. However, they designed a much neater experiment. This used a gold isotope that emits neutrinos when it decays. Some of it was made into a foil and some was made into a ball. You could then measure the foil with one detector and the ball with another, and then you could swap the detectors around. If this experiment is done properly then this could cancel out any difference in the detectors or the measuring environment or the background neutrino flux (if that is important).
If you design experiments, you get to appreciate the forms of really good experiments: they have a canon-like symmetry to balance out all the known and unknown effects you can imagine except for the one you are trying to measure. This feels like one of them. So, in the end, science wins. Yay.
Yep. The stress raising properties of the windows lead to the Comet disaster. With a transparent fuselage, you could spot any cracks before they get too large.
I can remember the first spell checkers coming in. I was writing my PhD in the early eighties. Writing a big chunk of text with consistent and if possible 'correct' spelling rooted out a number of very long-term spelling errors. I also became aware of differences such '-ize' versus '-ise', and 'different to or from or than'. It didn't make my spelling perfect. I have recently got a diesel car, and found I could happily read the word, but had probably spelled it wrong. In the old days, I would have looked at 'deisel' or 'diesil', maybe crossed out, maybe left it in.
I type almosty everything. has my handwriting gone to pot? Well, it is pretty illegible, but if I actually get out a fountain pen with the right sort of nib, and get it running nicely, then I can write as I used to. You don't forget stuff like that. But I won't go back to a fountain pen. If I pick up a pen, I want to draw or doodle or write maths, or something. I would write a shopping list, but not an essay.
I do not envy the Chinese. I learned Japanese for six years and the Kanji fell out of my head as fast as I tried to stuff them in. If I had to draw a picture of the monster that ate itself for the word 'greed', or worse try and look up a character in a stroke dictionary, then I would probably read and write much less. These people have now got a useful character checking tool on their mobiles, and I bet they are making less errors because of this. And people still complain.
I remember having to work with Tempest security in the early eighties. Anyone working on secret material had to work inside a Faraday cage room. The worry was that people could read what was on your monitor by picking up the video signal. At the time I had suggested that a better solution, or an additional level of protection would be to have lots of monitors showing unclassified stuff. If the extra monitors didn't fool people into trying to decrypt meaningless data, then the montor signal would at least interfere with any signal from the real terminal.
It was possible to detect all sorts of electrical emissions deep within the USSR. It would be possible to pick out a radar station or a weather station. However, stick a few other things out in the emptiness, pouring out intriguing nonsense, and the job gets harder. Plus, you rope in experts to monitor the thing, possibly taking them off more important projects.
But keeping the thing going for another thirty years just for laffs, though? Unless the Egyptians built the Pyramids just to mess with archaeologists' heads, this has got to be the best prank ever.
I worked at Crosfield Electronics back about 1990. We produced equipment for the printing industry. We made scanners that applied digital halftone screens for CMYK halftone printing. A good set of screens would have different angles and different pitches so they would not 'beat' with each other. They also had to have a small enough repeat for the unit cell to fit into a 64K chunk of memory. If you plot out the spatial frequencies and their harmonics, a good set of screens would not have one set of points that lay closer than a certain amount to another. You had to go out quite a way in the harmonics because if 14 repeats of one screen was a close match to 20 repeats of another screen at 45 degrees, then you got a long period beat pattern.
Okay. Each screen vector has about two integer X and Y parameters to define the pitch of the screen. If the screen isn't quite square, you could have a small second vector. For four screens, this gives 8 dimensions to search for square screens. The rest of the search consisted of testing all the conditions that disqualified a set of screens - the screen pitch was too different for the different separations (yellow was an allowed exception); the memory requirements were too big; one of the harmonics was too close, and so on. In Prolog, you could define the space to search, listed the requirements, and then set it going. As it could grind away for days, it had the ability to checkpoint where it had got to, so you could stop it and start it up again. I think it even had some optimization, so it could re-order the tests to put the ones that failed most often first. Nothing you couldn't do with any other language, but it was particularly neat in Prolog at the time. Mind yo, this was about 20 years ago.
I cordially loathe Perl. it is a grotesque collection of shell tools held together with gaffer tape. However, I must admit it is one of only two of the many languages I have used where I learned it from a book from scratch and did a useful medium-sized job in the same day. Most languages are good for something. I have even found a job that Prolog was absolutely perfect for (I have never found a second example, but every dog has its day). And yet...
Have you ever met Haskell programmers? I have met some really creepy ones. The language is not a tool, it is The Way. If you do something useful with it instead of Silently Contemplating Its Perfection In Bliss, then you will never achieve Enlightenment. Or your Computer Science degree. Woo...
The 1.2 zettabytes quoted recently as the sum of the world's memory works out as about 1/8th of a gram-mole of bits. This does give an idea how much memory you might get from a few grammes of material if you get a 3D structure. If you are stuck to a single surface, the density figures won't be as good. Richard Feynmann gave a talk in 1959 called "Plenty of room at the bottom" (see http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html). His figures haven't really aged much: if you can get something to work at the molecular scale, then you can get a lot of them in. The idea of doing this isn't particularly new. Actually doing it would be a lot more exciting.
I expect that someone who is basically honest, but has been laid off for reasons beyond their control, and is seeing their bank account running away day by day, may well look twice at doing something less than honest as a quick fix for their problems. The book's advice would then seem sound and timely. You think you might succeed at being a super-villain? How long have you been in the evil buisness, eh? Oh, you haven't actually done anything, but you're pretty sure you wouldn't get caught? You're upset and you're not thinking straight. Think again, dude: you haven't any prqactical experience. Villains have a lifetime of practice and they still get caught. You wouldn't get away with it. Really. Think of something you can do well, and do that instead.
Sounds to me like a really good book written by people who know their stuff.
The other big thing that comes out of this, if the reasoning isn't circular, is that intertial mass and gravitation mass are equal. This has always been found to be the case as far as can be measured, but gravity is weak and hard to measure in isolation, so there has always been a sneaking suspicion that somewhere there might be other stuff with a different gravitational field for its inertial mass. If you have dark matter, the worry is there might be a lot of funny stuff that we haven't looked at. If inertia and gravity both come from entropy, then there's only one sort of stuff, and one whole dimension of variables has gone. Wooo!
I remember the downdraft proposal. It was all possible on energy terms. However, I think it has to lose out to the convective tower. The really neat bit about the convective tower is that all the turbines and active bits are down at the bottom where they are easily serviced, and the rest of the tower is just a static shape. The convective tower can then start generating power before the tower is topped off. With a very tall tower that can take years to build, this can be a major economic factor.
A smaller scale device was built in Spain in the 1980's: see http://sciencehack.com/videos/view/XCGVTYtJEFk for a video. However, these plants get more energy efficient the bigger they get, so a small one is not that interesting.
Yet another variable: Norway is a long, thin, crinkly country divided by deep fijords. There was no road from one of the country to the other until the mid sixties (I have been trying to find a reference for this, but I can't). If you live in a long, thin ribbon of a country, like the valleys in Switzerland, or Old Kingdom Egypt, you have fewer direct neighbors. Taken to extreme, you would have two nearest neighbors if you were 1D creatures, six if you lived on a close-packed plane, and twelve if you are packed in 3D. We know that some human interactions are modified by the connectivity of the territory: 'the tragedy of the commons', for example, did not happen in Swiss valleys with common high and low pastures, because if you overgrazed your commons, your two neighbors would be much more likely to notice and object. The article suggests that MRSA attacks in Norway usually came from outside, but could be contained. While I support Norway's attitude to antibiotics, I fear their solution may not work as well in a flatter country with more visitors.
That seems an unnecessary piece of anti-science paranoia. The people doing the experiment are not the white coated demons of science fiction. Even if they were as amoral as you suggest, it would sdtill be practical of them to get the patient's permission before starting an experiment that took over three years to set up.
On the radio recently, I heard about the difficulties the doctors had with an even more extreme 'locked-in' case that had no eye movement. They got the patient to communicate one bit at a time by imagining tasting milk or lemon juice for minutes at a time. This caused the patient's saliva to change pH. This was not simply "think lemons if it is ok to operate", followed by "oh, bother, best of three?" - they had to establish that the intelligence was present, understanding what was being said, and replying in a reliable manner.
I would not disagree if someone called me an engineer. I have no desire to blow things up. However, having read about a bomb plot, most engineers would wonder how they might have tackled the problem, and whether they might have done it. This is not the same as having the will to do the dirty deed, but it is a start. If there is enough of a trend for engineers to be targeted for indoctrination, then that might be enough in itself. However, let us supposed there is something real there. Suppose you have fundamentalist leanings, and the talent to follow a scientific discipline. What are you likely to study at University?
A mathematician might work out how to get past the searches, and how to get a bomb onto a plane. However, having determined that it is possible, I don't really see them actually doing it: the proof that it is possible might be satisfying in itself.
Good physics often requires serious thinking outside the box. Doesn't really sit with maniacal orthodoxy. Same, I guess for most pure and applied sciences.
People who do medicine often have the fanatical mindset, but it is fanatically pro-life rather than the other way.
People who drop out of science in the UK may go into IP or law, or something completely different. In these cases, they have decided not to use their main talents. This suggests they have some balance between what they are called to do, and what they want to do with their life.
So, if you are still here, then you are a part of the population that may or may not have a pro-bombing mindset. This does not mean you are a bomber, but merely part of a group that may have an above-average portion with a pro-bombing mindset because these people do not feel attracted to the other disciplines. If you are an engineer, you will want to do something with your talents. This may be to build something. However, you do not have the same 'pro-structure' belief you find in medicine. Architects are often keen to clear sites of buildings that they disagree with. The various architects who worked on the new Wembley Stadium could agree on nothing other than the famous Wembley Towers had to be demolished. A large building project may claim tens of lives, and yet people must continue to design, knowing that their project will probably kill.
Goetz argues that there is no principled difference between software and hardware patents. In that respect, he is right. There is no fundamental reason why an invention has to be made of something physical. But that is not really the point.
Patents, like copyrights and trademarks, grant the user rights by taking rights away from the rest of us and granting the inventor or composer a monopoly. In some cases, this may be necessary or desirable to protect the creative individual from the clutches of capitalism, red in tooth an claw. However, monopolies are often unnatural things that have to be maintained by states passing laws to grant the rights, and courts enforcing the rights. This all comes at great cost. This is not something we ought to do unless there are proportional benefits.
If someone makes a piece of music, they might be annoyed if someone else copies and sells it. They would feel entitled to some sort of redress, and rightly so. However, most contemporary music makes almost all its sales in the first seven years or so. This would seem to the the natural scope for a copyright. However, if copyright covers seven years, then why not twenty years; the writer's lifetime, the writer's lifetime plus twenty years, and so on? Suing someone for singing "Happy Birthday To You" is a clear sign that things have gone too far.
The same applies to patents. While software patents may not be harmful per se, we see patents for pieces of coding that are so well-known as to have no known 'inventor' being patented (usually in Texas - not a good sign). This is practically the same as copyrighting a folk tune which has no identified composer. There is also no good way of searching prior art for software just yet, because this was not necessary before. The same sort of argument applies to business practice patents. It surely makes sense to disallow both classes of patents because their presence does not seem to do anyone any good, other than patent trolls and their lawyers. This is surely better than to allow them because we cannot argue "why not?"
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Here's a marvellous 1930's ref. from Wikipedia...
http://books.google.com/books?id=xSgDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA26&dq=Popular+Science+1931+plane&hl=en&ei=5r8JTaa6Ismr8AaNmb2iAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBzgU#v=onepage&q&f=true
So... not exactly new but probably controllable with modern computer avionics.
The original patent on quantum cryptography was for a banknote with trapped photons. These could only be read once, so you had to know the polarization axis of the of the photons to read their state. This was a wonderfully batty idea, and a useful explanation of what is known and what isn't known about a quantum state.
However, when you go into actual implementations of quantum communications, you find the hacking techniques are much the same. Here, they are trying to send out a single photon. If a real line is lossy, the system must have some sort of handshaking to resend bad bits. If you hack into their cable, and carefully mess up a few photons, you can tease this system into resending some parts of the signal, or sending a stronger signal with more than one photon; and then the system is no longer secure because more than one person can get a copy of it. It's the quantum physics equivalent of attaching your crocodile clips to the telephone wires without the user hearing the clicks.
My guess is you can get the same level of security from ordinary non-quantum techniques. If you are going to avoid a 'man in the middle' attack, you should meet the person at the other end. Suppose, when you meet, you exchange thumb drives with random data. You can then 'OR' your message with this data, using each bit once only to reduce it to random-looking bits; and the person at the other end can 'OR' it again to get it back again. An extra precaution would be to pad each message to a fixed length, so you don't give away the number of bits in your message. One time pad cryptography makes the communication link secure, but either end is potentially unsafe; which is pretty much what you would have with a perfect quantum encryption scheme.
Yep. First sensible post in this thread. This is what I had imagined. I would want something that I could take on holiday, and read e-mail where there is a connection, some simple word processing and data visualization, not viewing videos or gaming. You could keep a diary when hiking, and stuff like that.
If you have a solid-state hard disk, and don't have a display backlight, or a DVD drive, and the USB ports only supported very tiny current draws such as thumb drives, you can omit the battery and rely on energy in balancing the energy out. You might have some capacitative storage to allow the computer to work for a few seconds if the lights suddenly went out, but that would be it.
The solar panels they are using are transparent, so they can cover the whole display and keypad area. However, artificial lighting is becoming more efficient, which means emitting less IR, so you might find it doesn't work on a plane. But planes should have 12v USB power supplies anyhow.
I have actually used a laptop with solar backlighting. I had one of the IBM Thinkpads, which had the option to detach the backlight so it could be used on an overhead projector. The sun used to shine onto my desk, so I could take off the backlight and slip in a piece of paper, or (better) a square cut from a shower curtain. This all looks Heath Robinson-ish, so I suspect they would probably be better off using some reflective e-ink display.
Niiice.
(I am submitting this for a friend who has trouble with keyboards)
The BBC is bi-ased. The pro-gram shows only the da-leks being de-fea-ted. It never shows the time-lines when the da-leks con-quer and the doc-tor is de-fea-ted. They por-tray the da-leks as mind-less kill-ers. The daleks are nu-anced. The da-leks are complex. The da-leks have had it up to here with this stu-pid pro-gram. Dear 'Points Of View'. Oh why, oh why, oh why can we not have un-bi-ased re-por-ting? Why can't we see the da-leks win and the doc-tor get his ass ex-ter-mi-nated? Why can't the doc-tor stay dead when he dies? It's all so un-fair. Yours, Dis-gus-ted of Ska-ro.
I was wondering how they mananged to come up with the smoothness parameter. After all, we cannot tell how much a bump on the 'surface' of a ball would affect how it spins unless we know the radius of the ball, and how the mass is distributed through the bulk. There are also symmetric configurations of bumps that would give no measureable asymmetry because the effects would balance out. I now think I have figured it out. Suppose the actual 'shape' of the electron was two half-electron point masses at either end of a massless stick. This would give the biggest contrast in moment of inertia between the two spin axes, and this let them convert the experimental measurements into a length. This length does not tell us anything about the 'actual' shape of an electron, and the quotes around 'actual' are there because quantum theory does not necessarily admit to any 'actual' in the normal sense of thing at these dimensions. But it's a useful trick that allows them to express what they have found in familiar units of length. Hope this helps a bit.
Photosynthesis is one of the oldest processes of life. I'm sure that if it could be improved without adverse effects to the plants, it would have happened through evolution.
From the plant's point of view, photosynthesis is fine as it is. They don't necesarily want to bulk up like mad, and get eaten or burnt as quickly as possible. Photosynthesis in blue-green algae is different and a lot faster (but not necessarily 'more efficient' unless you define your terms rather nicely) then in regular plants, so it is certainly possible that the process can be sped up. Probably there are limits to how much we can tinker with the process in a large and rigid plant, because it has other processes that deal with the products of photosynthesisis, and these would have to be sped up too. However, there is probably some slack in the system, and faster photosynthesis will probably mean faster growth. It is certainly worth a go.
Old houses may sport moulds and fungi. Fungi can contain all sorts of head-messing substances. It may be possible to get some altered mental state by inhaling spores. That might explain why reports of ghosts are confined to particular loci, expecially old buildings in stormy weather.
You can't see it! Looking at it is forbidden!
I don't think the eventual aim of this work is to have a talking head of Charles Babbage on your computer. The aim is to understand the nature of subliminal communications, and the first stage of doing that is by direct mimicry using an accurate dummy.
So, what's this got to do with computer interfaces? Well, when most people get annoyed with their computer, they shout at the screen. Why? If the system has locked up, then the error happened in the CPU or the GPU which both sit in the body of the machine unless you have an Apple. Nevertheless, we seem to take the screen of a computer as the 'face' of the machine, and it is the 'natural' target for our gestures and expressions. We are probably making expressions at our computer much of the time. Many laptops have built-in cameras that could pick up these expressions. At the moment, we are doing nothing with this information, but one day we might. The idea that ordinary computers will transmit expressions back at us is a bit more far-fetched, but Japanese companies are looking at using robots for receptionists and ticket sellers, and other jobs where rapid and seamless low-level interaction with a lot of people is needed.
You are right - neutrinos can pass through a lot of matter without the matter affecting the neutrino, or the neutrino affecting the matter. Or so we think. A couple of people noticed that the apparent decay rates were different during a solar flare, which could mean there may be strange circumstances where the neutrinos had more effect than we expect. Or it could have been something other than neutrinos, if our understanding is that far off. I didn't think that was likely, but it doesn't hurt to test your assumptions once in a while.
The trouble with original measurements were that they could not easily be repeated. You could wait for the sun to have another significant outburst, and see whether the same detectors measure the same pulse, but you could never be sure whether that burst happened to put out a 'clump' of neutrinos in a particular direction. However, they designed a much neater experiment. This used a gold isotope that emits neutrinos when it decays. Some of it was made into a foil and some was made into a ball. You could then measure the foil with one detector and the ball with another, and then you could swap the detectors around. If this experiment is done properly then this could cancel out any difference in the detectors or the measuring environment or the background neutrino flux (if that is important).
If you design experiments, you get to appreciate the forms of really good experiments: they have a canon-like symmetry to balance out all the known and unknown effects you can imagine except for the one you are trying to measure. This feels like one of them. So, in the end, science wins. Yay.
Yep. The stress raising properties of the windows lead to the Comet disaster. With a transparent fuselage, you could spot any cracks before they get too large.
I can remember the first spell checkers coming in. I was writing my PhD in the early eighties. Writing a big chunk of text with consistent and if possible 'correct' spelling rooted out a number of very long-term spelling errors. I also became aware of differences such '-ize' versus '-ise', and 'different to or from or than'. It didn't make my spelling perfect. I have recently got a diesel car, and found I could happily read the word, but had probably spelled it wrong. In the old days, I would have looked at 'deisel' or 'diesil', maybe crossed out, maybe left it in.
I type almosty everything. has my handwriting gone to pot? Well, it is pretty illegible, but if I actually get out a fountain pen with the right sort of nib, and get it running nicely, then I can write as I used to. You don't forget stuff like that. But I won't go back to a fountain pen. If I pick up a pen, I want to draw or doodle or write maths, or something. I would write a shopping list, but not an essay.
I do not envy the Chinese. I learned Japanese for six years and the Kanji fell out of my head as fast as I tried to stuff them in. If I had to draw a picture of the monster that ate itself for the word 'greed', or worse try and look up a character in a stroke dictionary, then I would probably read and write much less. These people have now got a useful character checking tool on their mobiles, and I bet they are making less errors because of this. And people still complain.
I remember having to work with Tempest security in the early eighties. Anyone working on secret material had to work inside a Faraday cage room. The worry was that people could read what was on your monitor by picking up the video signal. At the time I had suggested that a better solution, or an additional level of protection would be to have lots of monitors showing unclassified stuff. If the extra monitors didn't fool people into trying to decrypt meaningless data, then the montor signal would at least interfere with any signal from the real terminal.
It was possible to detect all sorts of electrical emissions deep within the USSR. It would be possible to pick out a radar station or a weather station. However, stick a few other things out in the emptiness, pouring out intriguing nonsense, and the job gets harder. Plus, you rope in experts to monitor the thing, possibly taking them off more important projects.
But keeping the thing going for another thirty years just for laffs, though? Unless the Egyptians built the Pyramids just to mess with archaeologists' heads, this has got to be the best prank ever.
I worked at Crosfield Electronics back about 1990. We produced equipment for the printing industry. We made scanners that applied digital halftone screens for CMYK halftone printing. A good set of screens would have different angles and different pitches so they would not 'beat' with each other. They also had to have a small enough repeat for the unit cell to fit into a 64K chunk of memory. If you plot out the spatial frequencies and their harmonics, a good set of screens would not have one set of points that lay closer than a certain amount to another. You had to go out quite a way in the harmonics because if 14 repeats of one screen was a close match to 20 repeats of another screen at 45 degrees, then you got a long period beat pattern.
Okay. Each screen vector has about two integer X and Y parameters to define the pitch of the screen. If the screen isn't quite square, you could have a small second vector. For four screens, this gives 8 dimensions to search for square screens. The rest of the search consisted of testing all the conditions that disqualified a set of screens - the screen pitch was too different for the different separations (yellow was an allowed exception); the memory requirements were too big; one of the harmonics was too close, and so on. In Prolog, you could define the space to search, listed the requirements, and then set it going. As it could grind away for days, it had the ability to checkpoint where it had got to, so you could stop it and start it up again. I think it even had some optimization, so it could re-order the tests to put the ones that failed most often first. Nothing you couldn't do with any other language, but it was particularly neat in Prolog at the time. Mind yo, this was about 20 years ago.
I cordially loathe Perl. it is a grotesque collection of shell tools held together with gaffer tape. However, I must admit it is one of only two of the many languages I have used where I learned it from a book from scratch and did a useful medium-sized job in the same day. Most languages are good for something. I have even found a job that Prolog was absolutely perfect for (I have never found a second example, but every dog has its day). And yet...
Have you ever met Haskell programmers? I have met some really creepy ones. The language is not a tool, it is The Way. If you do something useful with it instead of Silently Contemplating Its Perfection In Bliss, then you will never achieve Enlightenment. Or your Computer Science degree. Woo...
The 1.2 zettabytes quoted recently as the sum of the world's memory works out as about 1/8th of a gram-mole of bits. This does give an idea how much memory you might get from a few grammes of material if you get a 3D structure. If you are stuck to a single surface, the density figures won't be as good. Richard Feynmann gave a talk in 1959 called "Plenty of room at the bottom" (see http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html). His figures haven't really aged much: if you can get something to work at the molecular scale, then you can get a lot of them in. The idea of doing this isn't particularly new. Actually doing it would be a lot more exciting.
1.2 ZBy is about 1/8th of a gram mol of bits. With molecular memory, it all ought to fit on a few grammes of carbon.
I expect that someone who is basically honest, but has been laid off for reasons beyond their control, and is seeing their bank account running away day by day, may well look twice at doing something less than honest as a quick fix for their problems. The book's advice would then seem sound and timely. You think you might succeed at being a super-villain? How long have you been in the evil buisness, eh? Oh, you haven't actually done anything, but you're pretty sure you wouldn't get caught? You're upset and you're not thinking straight. Think again, dude: you haven't any prqactical experience. Villains have a lifetime of practice and they still get caught. You wouldn't get away with it. Really. Think of something you can do well, and do that instead.
Sounds to me like a really good book written by people who know their stuff.
The other big thing that comes out of this, if the reasoning isn't circular, is that intertial mass and gravitation mass are equal. This has always been found to be the case as far as can be measured, but gravity is weak and hard to measure in isolation, so there has always been a sneaking suspicion that somewhere there might be other stuff with a different gravitational field for its inertial mass. If you have dark matter, the worry is there might be a lot of funny stuff that we haven't looked at. If inertia and gravity both come from entropy, then there's only one sort of stuff, and one whole dimension of variables has gone. Wooo!
I remember the downdraft proposal. It was all possible on energy terms. However, I think it has to lose out to the convective tower. The really neat bit about the convective tower is that all the turbines and active bits are down at the bottom where they are easily serviced, and the rest of the tower is just a static shape. The convective tower can then start generating power before the tower is topped off. With a very tall tower that can take years to build, this can be a major economic factor.
A smaller scale device was built in Spain in the 1980's: see http://sciencehack.com/videos/view/XCGVTYtJEFk for a video. However, these plants get more energy efficient the bigger they get, so a small one is not that interesting.
Yet another variable: Norway is a long, thin, crinkly country divided by deep fijords. There was no road from one of the country to the other until the mid sixties (I have been trying to find a reference for this, but I can't). If you live in a long, thin ribbon of a country, like the valleys in Switzerland, or Old Kingdom Egypt, you have fewer direct neighbors. Taken to extreme, you would have two nearest neighbors if you were 1D creatures, six if you lived on a close-packed plane, and twelve if you are packed in 3D. We know that some human interactions are modified by the connectivity of the territory: 'the tragedy of the commons', for example, did not happen in Swiss valleys with common high and low pastures, because if you overgrazed your commons, your two neighbors would be much more likely to notice and object. The article suggests that MRSA attacks in Norway usually came from outside, but could be contained. While I support Norway's attitude to antibiotics, I fear their solution may not work as well in a flatter country with more visitors.
That seems an unnecessary piece of anti-science paranoia. The people doing the experiment are not the white coated demons of science fiction. Even if they were as amoral as you suggest, it would sdtill be practical of them to get the patient's permission before starting an experiment that took over three years to set up.
On the radio recently, I heard about the difficulties the doctors had with an even more extreme 'locked-in' case that had no eye movement. They got the patient to communicate one bit at a time by imagining tasting milk or lemon juice for minutes at a time. This caused the patient's saliva to change pH. This was not simply "think lemons if it is ok to operate", followed by "oh, bother, best of three?" - they had to establish that the intelligence was present, understanding what was being said, and replying in a reliable manner.
There is a bit about milk-or-lemons and other attempts to communicate in... http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526171.500-humans-can-adapt-to-almost-anything-even-paralysis.html?full=true
I would not disagree if someone called me an engineer. I have no desire to blow things up. However, having read about a bomb plot, most engineers would wonder how they might have tackled the problem, and whether they might have done it. This is not the same as having the will to do the dirty deed, but it is a start. If there is enough of a trend for engineers to be targeted for indoctrination, then that might be enough in itself. However, let us supposed there is something real there. Suppose you have fundamentalist leanings, and the talent to follow a scientific discipline. What are you likely to study at University?
A mathematician might work out how to get past the searches, and how to get a bomb onto a plane. However, having determined that it is possible, I don't really see them actually doing it: the proof that it is possible might be satisfying in itself.
Good physics often requires serious thinking outside the box. Doesn't really sit with maniacal orthodoxy. Same, I guess for most pure and applied sciences.
People who do medicine often have the fanatical mindset, but it is fanatically pro-life rather than the other way.
People who drop out of science in the UK may go into IP or law, or something completely different. In these cases, they have decided not to use their main talents. This suggests they have some balance between what they are called to do, and what they want to do with their life.
So, if you are still here, then you are a part of the population that may or may not have a pro-bombing mindset. This does not mean you are a bomber, but merely part of a group that may have an above-average portion with a pro-bombing mindset because these people do not feel attracted to the other disciplines. If you are an engineer, you will want to do something with your talents. This may be to build something. However, you do not have the same 'pro-structure' belief you find in medicine. Architects are often keen to clear sites of buildings that they disagree with. The various architects who worked on the new Wembley Stadium could agree on nothing other than the famous Wembley Towers had to be demolished. A large building project may claim tens of lives, and yet people must continue to design, knowing that their project will probably kill.
Not proved. But I can think it might work.
Goetz argues that there is no principled difference between software and hardware patents. In that respect, he is right. There is no fundamental reason why an invention has to be made of something physical. But that is not really the point.
Patents, like copyrights and trademarks, grant the user rights by taking rights away from the rest of us and granting the inventor or composer a monopoly. In some cases, this may be necessary or desirable to protect the creative individual from the clutches of capitalism, red in tooth an claw. However, monopolies are often unnatural things that have to be maintained by states passing laws to grant the rights, and courts enforcing the rights. This all comes at great cost. This is not something we ought to do unless there are proportional benefits.
If someone makes a piece of music, they might be annoyed if someone else copies and sells it. They would feel entitled to some sort of redress, and rightly so. However, most contemporary music makes almost all its sales in the first seven years or so. This would seem to the the natural scope for a copyright. However, if copyright covers seven years, then why not twenty years; the writer's lifetime, the writer's lifetime plus twenty years, and so on? Suing someone for singing "Happy Birthday To You" is a clear sign that things have gone too far.
The same applies to patents. While software patents may not be harmful per se, we see patents for pieces of coding that are so well-known as to have no known 'inventor' being patented (usually in Texas - not a good sign). This is practically the same as copyrighting a folk tune which has no identified composer. There is also no good way of searching prior art for software just yet, because this was not necessary before. The same sort of argument applies to business practice patents. It surely makes sense to disallow both classes of patents because their presence does not seem to do anyone any good, other than patent trolls and their lawyers. This is surely better than to allow them because we cannot argue "why not?"