Bravo for UC Irvine if they can avoid getting sued for what they're doing, but they are most certainly making a moral judgement.
Er. Sued? UC Irvine is just enforcing the terms and conditions of their student internet use policy. I haven't seen it, but I'm sure they've got one, and I'm nearly positive it looks like the ones any other university has. They're not censoring anything; they're not blocking anything. They're just prioritizing.
You want fast and cheap internet access? You accept their terms. You want to use university resources? Fine. Use them for academic purposes. Shocking. The administration will even wink and nod at some 'personal' use. Sensible. It means that people won't be trying nearly so hard to get around restrictions.
Value judgement? Well, sort of. Some would call it setting priorities. The campus pipe is only so wide. Does first call on that bandwidth go to people who are reading journal articles, sharing experimental results, and--heaven forbid--learning? Or does it go to the guy in the room down the hall who's too lazy and too cheap to go out to rent a copy of The Matrix?
In the majority of workplaces that I have experienced (and most have had an academic slant) as well as my university, network administrators have cared not one little bit about what I did with surplus bandwidth. As long as you don't screw things up for people doing real work--that's all that matters.
Otherwise, you are guilty of barratry, and can be quite easily sued for all you're worth...
Well, close, but not quite. Barratry is the actual instigation of frivolous lawsuits. Since we can fairly safely conclude that our hero has a strong case against the unnamed CEO, if he threatens legal action but does not follow through, then he is guilty of either a) generosity or b) laziness. Barratry doesn't enter into this situation. Frankly, it is rather unusual to sue someone because they failed to sue you (or file a countersuit against you.) I'd be intrigued if someone could present a situation where such a suit might be successful...
There's also another definition of barratry that applies to misappropriation of sea vessels, but I'm pretty sure that that isn't happening here.
Of course, since we have physical access to the machine anyway, we might as well install a keystroke logger as well as record the authentication from the mouse...
I guess it comes back to what we already knew--as soon as someone has unfettered physical access to a machine, it's security is effectively compromised.
You want to limit access to a computer? Put it in an office. And lock the door. Know who has keys. Audit those keys.
Must leave a great print on the reading surface! What an opportunity for capturing palm-prints for forging access.
Actually, that's one improvement that this system has over the easily-fooled fingerprint based systems. Since this system uses reflectance measurements from the palm that are affected by deep structures (veins), the palm print left on the mouse won't do a potential cracker any good.
That said, I suspect that the system really isn't worth the trouble. Other posters have noted that the mouse connects to an ordinary PS2 port, so there's an opportunity for a spoof right there. And the 0.5% error rate sounds good--but only if those are all false negatives. If the system is misidentifying users 0.5% of the time for a database of 700 users, then there will be a truly embarrassing failure rate in a corporation of, say, ten thousand users.
As long as people have two ears, two signals are enough to recreate 3D sound in our brains. As long as I'm sitting on a couch while listening to the soundtrack of a movie while watching the screen, I don't want to move my head to listen to the superfluous speakers.
Okay, that's quite true. You do only need two signals for perfect reproduction of 3D sound--if you never move your head. Unfortunately, you do move. And turn. The extra speakers are to preserve the illusion of a three-dimensional sound environment even for an observer that isn't tied in one place and completely unable to move.
In principle, if a movie viewer had a pair of headphones coupled to a sensor to monitor head position and angle and the movie had encoded information about the precise location of each and every sound source within each scene and the system could adjust the sound fed to your ears fast enough to prevent a disorienting disjoint between sound and visuals...then maybe two speakers would be enough for 3D sound--per audience member.
That said, you're right--there are a lot of movies out there with poorly-recorded/edited/engineered sound, and that can't be fixed no matter how clever your home theatre system is.
As the parent post observes, this is obviously a sham.
I want to know--why has nobody on Slashdot mentioned the most important point?
If the car "can run coast to coast without ever...being charged" and "at the end of the allotted time period the battery bank will still register a FULL CHARGE condition", why does it need a battery bank in the first place?
If, as the Tilley Foundation web site states, "Your battery system will be fully charged at all times while in use", why do we need the batteries at all?
Re:Force due to non-vacuum
on
The Casimir Effect
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
However, you can use the ideal gas equation to get an idea of what is happening:
PV = nRT
Er. Well, not quite. The ideal gas is exactly true only under a certain set of limiting conditions. These conditions include high temperature and low density, among others. For typical gases (oxygen, nitrogen, helium, carbon dioxide--you know, the stuff that comes to mind when we think 'gas') it's not a bad approximation at room temperature and one atmosphere of pressure. Allow a ~10% engineering fudge factor and you're pretty safe.
In the experiment you described, the particle density would become extremely high. A number unplesant (from a calculation standpoint) effects would make themselves known. For example, the volume occupied by gas molecules would have to be accounted for--something neglected by PV=nRT.
Depending on the gas used and the operating temperature used, you might also force a phase change (gas -> liquid or gas -> solid). Again, all bets are off when something weird like that happens.
Because the plates are attracted by the Casimir effect, and the casimir force grows quadratically as the plates draw nearer, eventually, even the pressure will be insignificant compared to the Casimir force. I think that's a pretty good conclusion using rough estimates.
Nope. There are other effects you might see, as well:
chemical interactions between the gas between the plates and the plate surface
physical deformation of the plates by the high-pressure material between them
limits on compression of the 'gas' because its constituent atoms are pretty close to incompressible
Of course, as you mentioned this experiment would be impractical in reality, because gas would escape around the edges of the parallel plates--it's a tough device to seal. (And it's hard to get around this by trying to move the plates together quickly. Gas molecules at room temperature typically move with speeds on the order of hundreds of meters per second--they don't stay in one place very long.)
Oh. Right. Casimir effect. It should go away when there's crud (gas or otherwise) between the states. Establishing standing waves between the plates requires empty space between them. A few gas molecules will weaken the effect--anything near one atmosphere (or worse) will kill it completely.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Gravity only effects marcoscopic objects.
You're absolutely right. It's a good thing our atmosphere is only made up of macroscopic objects.
Re:3500 year old technology
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 2
I'm really astounded by the fact that a perfect game is a draw! 3500 years ago, they created a piece of mathematical perfection... with rocks.
Here's a simpler variation.
Player 1 and Player 2 stand ten yards apart. Adjustments can be made to allow for available space or player skill. Players are not allowed to move from the spot on which they stand.
Each player is provided with a basket of moderately heavy rocks.
When the game begins, both players pick up one of their rocks, and hurl it as hard as they can at the other player. Repeat as necessary. Winner is last player standing. If no player is standing, it is a draw.
Ta-da! A perfect game is a draw (one pair of simultaneous throws, one pair of out-cold players). Or, you might say, a piece of mathematical perfection...with rocks.
I don't, but there are people who do. Including people who should know better. People in law. People in government. People who have secrets to protect. I reiterate that this is not a hypothetical case; there are have been high profile cases where Word documents have gotten out into the wild with their revision history intact.
People should be saving in another format that isn't proprietary, or at least doesn't keep their revision history, or failing that, purge their revisions religiously. But they don't. Or they forget. Or they use someone else's computer and don't realize that revision tracking is turned on. People tend to be lazy--they don't check for these things religiously, and it's unfair to expect them to for every single document.
Software that carries this degree of potential risk, and requires this level of vigilance to use safely in a legal or government setting, has no place in these applications.
Telling someone "it's free like beer" makes no sense.
You're right. I guess "free as in speech, free as in air" just isn't catchy enough as a slogan.
I suppose, though, the issue is, do people understand what is meant? If someone told me, "Dude! Free beer!" then I'd go grab a bottle. I'd drink it. The end. I wouldn't try to duplicate it--I couldn't. 'Free' software is "free as in beer". It's even better, because if you follow the licence conditions, you get free softbeer for you and all your friends. (Okay, the buzz isn't quite the same.)
You could say "free as in books" to clarify. You can use the book, you can give the book to another person, but you can't photocopy the book and give away copies with the copyright notice in the front ripped out. You can't hijack chapters from the original work and put them in your own book without attribution. It's an idea people understand.
The neophyte immediately understands free to be free beer. GNU is exploiting that, since 6 pages of legalese in the GPL doesn't add up to free beer OR free speech.
But it is free like beer. You can take it, and you can use it yourself, and it doesn't cost you a penny. Actually, it's better than beer, because you can redistribute GPL'ed code as long as you follow the modest licensing provisions. Most people prefer it if you don't give them your recycled beer.
As far as 'legalese' goes, the GPL certainly isn't a painful read, and it's pretty unambiguous in its meaning. I honestly cannot think of any other licensing terms -- or any sort of contract in general -- that is as clearly stated.
Lastly, you're welcome to ignore the GPL if you want to. You fall back on the regular protections afforded by copyright law, which most people are familiar with. (They may not pay attention, but they understand the concept.) You can have this software, you can use it for free, but you can't then make copies and give them away. Replace 'software' with 'book' in the preceding sentence to see what I mean.
Yep. You're right (regarding the negative-negative construction). I'm just a bit sleepy this morning, so I'm having trouble parsing sentences that are more complicated than subject-verb-object.
FWIW, the post is indeed intended to be taken as ironic.
Naturally, identifying double negatives doesn't mean that you're smart as a whip.
Nope. I base my estimation of my own intelligence solely on my karma. How else should it be judged?
Proof positive that just because you have a big degree from a fancy institution doesn't mean you're still not a complete moron.
I mean, I can't possibly be the only one to graduate high school with semi-literate honor roll students...
Gee, that's kind of ironic, considering the rather awkward double negative construction in the first sentence...
...and graduate college with business and engineering majors who literally did not know how to use a library, can I?
Point taken. This is sad, and rather frightening. But why would anyone ever need to know how to use a library? All the information we could possibly need is available on the Internet. Duh. That's why we have Google, after all.
Note that 5 nanometers is way smaller than the wavelength of visible light (roughly 750 to 350 nm), so those laser turntables everyone is talking about don't work very well either, unless they've got x-ray lasers in them.
Ha! Mine does have an x-ray laser. Not only do I not have to take the records out of their sleeve--avoiding dust and scratches--I can also listen to whatever music the guy downstairs has on his turntable.
The best solution would be to have clear polarisers on normal-looking glasses, but add a mechanism to rotate the filters.
Such sunglasses do exist, and are sold over-the-counter already. Light specularly reflected from water (or any medium with an index of refraction greater than air) will come back at least partially polarized. Sailors like to eliminate the glare off water for comfort; fishers like to be able to see the trout. In both cases, polarizing sunglasses are a simple solution.
Unfortunately, by their nature, linear polarizers are always going to look 'dark' under normal illumination, because by default they automatically soak up 1/2 of the unpolarized light that passes through them. So they wouldn't be nearly so inconspicuous as polarizing contact lenses.
Unfortunately, I think that polarised contacts would make you ill... I don't wear contacts, but I imagine that they rotate on your eyes when worn. This would make the angle of polarisation different for each eye--you would see different stuff in your left eye than in your right, and our brains don't like that a whole lot.
Believe it or not, it's actually pretty amazing what they eye can get used to. My mother knows people who have eyesight bad enough to require bifocals, but their vanity demands contact lenses. The solution? Lens for left eye is calibrated for close work; right lens is focused for distance vision. The brain 'learns' how to deal with the arrangement in a few days, and thereafter can handle the switch between 'mismatch' contact lenses and bifocals very rapidly. Some people do get headaches with the odd lens pairing, but apparently most people don't have any trouble.
Also, seeing a different linear polarization in each eye shouldn't bother you at all. Some techniques for displaying colour 3D movies rely on viewers wearing a polarizer over each eye--one polarizer's pass axis is perpendicular to the other. The camera projects the image for (say) your left eye vertically polarized, and the image for the right horizontally polarized.
If something like the "Andromeda Strain" did occur, how would we combat it?
Okay, it's an interesting post. But I must nitpick. The Andromeda Strain (in its namesake science fiction novel) was not the product of nanotechnology. Rather, it was a rapidly mutating organism returned from space aboard an unmanned military spacecraft.
That said, I haven't the damndest idea how we would deal with it if it happened--that is, if a virus as deadly as ebola appeared, was highly communicable (airborne spread) and it looked like nothing medical science had ever seen before. I'm thinking that panic, inappropriate and clumsy use of military force, followed by the collapse of civilization would all be part of a likely scenario.
Except that it's not really that obvious, particularly to a physicist.
The linked article provides discussion of all the nanomanipulation being performed using extremely large tools. The Advanced Light Source (ALS), for instance, has a storage ring about 200 meters in circumference. It can be used for advanced microscopy and nanolithography, among other atom-scale tasks.
If you want to study something smaller--say, quarks--then you need even bigger tools. CERN, for example. It is 27 kilometers around and straddles the border between two countries.
How do you keep a contact lens from rotating in place? Seems to me you'd have a hard time controling the polarization axis and end up tilting your head anyway.
Relatively recently, toric contact lenses have come on the market. They're designed for people with astigmatism, and to maintain lens orientation they're slightly weighted towards one edge.
And of course the polarization axis doesn't have to be bang on anyway to see something on one of these screens. If you'll settle for light gray rather than really black text, then you can have the polarization axis off by quite a bit.
Smiley or not, that's actually a brilliant idea, that would render all of those sixteen hundred dollar and up monitors (for just 15"--sheesh) useless from a security standpoint.
Wearing polarizing sunglasses and tilting your head would be very conspicuous, to say the least. But polarizing contact lenses would work perfectly in this application. (This 'application' being the misappropriation of sensitive information.) It's not a trivial task to prepare them, but it's certainly not out of reach of a person of above average competence. If a person has naturally dark-coloured eyes, the added shading from the polarizers wouldn't even be apparent.
Need a quick and dirty solution? Look at the reflection of the monitor in a piece of plate glass. A blank acetate sheet will do in a pinch. Reflection off of a clear material will separate the two orthogonal polarization states of light if you adjust your viewing angle correctly. Sure, the information will be backwards, but if you're just feeling a bit nosy, it's no problem. And it doesn't look like you're looking at the screen in that case.
You want to protect sensitive information? Put it behind a wall.
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem here is that anybody is paying for a Britney CD.
Understand, in this case I'm most definitely not advocating piracy.
Er. Sued? UC Irvine is just enforcing the terms and conditions of their student internet use policy. I haven't seen it, but I'm sure they've got one, and I'm nearly positive it looks like the ones any other university has. They're not censoring anything; they're not blocking anything. They're just prioritizing.
You want fast and cheap internet access? You accept their terms. You want to use university resources? Fine. Use them for academic purposes. Shocking. The administration will even wink and nod at some 'personal' use. Sensible. It means that people won't be trying nearly so hard to get around restrictions.
Value judgement? Well, sort of. Some would call it setting priorities. The campus pipe is only so wide. Does first call on that bandwidth go to people who are reading journal articles, sharing experimental results, and--heaven forbid--learning? Or does it go to the guy in the room down the hall who's too lazy and too cheap to go out to rent a copy of The Matrix?
In the majority of workplaces that I have experienced (and most have had an academic slant) as well as my university, network administrators have cared not one little bit about what I did with surplus bandwidth. As long as you don't screw things up for people doing real work--that's all that matters.
Well, close, but not quite. Barratry is the actual instigation of frivolous lawsuits. Since we can fairly safely conclude that our hero has a strong case against the unnamed CEO, if he threatens legal action but does not follow through, then he is guilty of either a) generosity or b) laziness. Barratry doesn't enter into this situation. Frankly, it is rather unusual to sue someone because they failed to sue you (or file a countersuit against you.) I'd be intrigued if someone could present a situation where such a suit might be successful...
There's also another definition of barratry that applies to misappropriation of sea vessels, but I'm pretty sure that that isn't happening here.
Damn damn damn.
I wasn't paying attention; the 'it's' should be an 'its'.
Twenty lashes with the wet grammar noodle for me.
I guess it comes back to what we already knew--as soon as someone has unfettered physical access to a machine, it's security is effectively compromised.
You want to limit access to a computer? Put it in an office. And lock the door. Know who has keys. Audit those keys.
Actually, that's one improvement that this system has over the easily-fooled fingerprint based systems. Since this system uses reflectance measurements from the palm that are affected by deep structures (veins), the palm print left on the mouse won't do a potential cracker any good.
That said, I suspect that the system really isn't worth the trouble. Other posters have noted that the mouse connects to an ordinary PS2 port, so there's an opportunity for a spoof right there. And the 0.5% error rate sounds good--but only if those are all false negatives. If the system is misidentifying users 0.5% of the time for a database of 700 users, then there will be a truly embarrassing failure rate in a corporation of, say, ten thousand users.
Okay, that's quite true. You do only need two signals for perfect reproduction of 3D sound--if you never move your head. Unfortunately, you do move. And turn. The extra speakers are to preserve the illusion of a three-dimensional sound environment even for an observer that isn't tied in one place and completely unable to move.
In principle, if a movie viewer had a pair of headphones coupled to a sensor to monitor head position and angle and the movie had encoded information about the precise location of each and every sound source within each scene and the system could adjust the sound fed to your ears fast enough to prevent a disorienting disjoint between sound and visuals...then maybe two speakers would be enough for 3D sound--per audience member.
That said, you're right--there are a lot of movies out there with poorly-recorded/edited/engineered sound, and that can't be fixed no matter how clever your home theatre system is.
The articles says two months.
It's a relativistic effect. Data moves really fast over the internet, so there is a time dilation.
Obviously.
It just means that they'll be really enthusiastic at their jobs.
Though to be on the safe side, it might be best to limit their caffeine intake.
I want to know--why has nobody on Slashdot mentioned the most important point?
If the car "can run coast to coast without ever...being charged" and "at the end of the allotted time period the battery bank will still register a FULL CHARGE condition", why does it need a battery bank in the first place?
If, as the Tilley Foundation web site states, "Your battery system will be fully charged at all times while in use", why do we need the batteries at all?
PV = nRT
Er. Well, not quite. The ideal gas is exactly true only under a certain set of limiting conditions. These conditions include high temperature and low density, among others. For typical gases (oxygen, nitrogen, helium, carbon dioxide--you know, the stuff that comes to mind when we think 'gas') it's not a bad approximation at room temperature and one atmosphere of pressure. Allow a ~10% engineering fudge factor and you're pretty safe.
In the experiment you described, the particle density would become extremely high. A number unplesant (from a calculation standpoint) effects would make themselves known. For example, the volume occupied by gas molecules would have to be accounted for--something neglected by PV=nRT.
Depending on the gas used and the operating temperature used, you might also force a phase change (gas -> liquid or gas -> solid). Again, all bets are off when something weird like that happens.
Because the plates are attracted by the Casimir effect, and the casimir force grows quadratically as the plates draw nearer, eventually, even the pressure will be insignificant compared to the Casimir force. I think that's a pretty good conclusion using rough estimates.
Nope. There are other effects you might see, as well:
chemical interactions between the gas between the plates and the plate surface
physical deformation of the plates by the high-pressure material between them
limits on compression of the 'gas' because its constituent atoms are pretty close to incompressible
Of course, as you mentioned this experiment would be impractical in reality, because gas would escape around the edges of the parallel plates--it's a tough device to seal. (And it's hard to get around this by trying to move the plates together quickly. Gas molecules at room temperature typically move with speeds on the order of hundreds of meters per second--they don't stay in one place very long.)
Oh. Right. Casimir effect. It should go away when there's crud (gas or otherwise) between the states. Establishing standing waves between the plates requires empty space between them. A few gas molecules will weaken the effect--anything near one atmosphere (or worse) will kill it completely.
You're absolutely right. It's a good thing our atmosphere is only made up of macroscopic objects.
Here's a simpler variation.
Player 1 and Player 2 stand ten yards apart. Adjustments can be made to allow for available space or player skill. Players are not allowed to move from the spot on which they stand.
Each player is provided with a basket of moderately heavy rocks.
When the game begins, both players pick up one of their rocks, and hurl it as hard as they can at the other player. Repeat as necessary. Winner is last player standing. If no player is standing, it is a draw.
Ta-da! A perfect game is a draw (one pair of simultaneous throws, one pair of out-cold players). Or, you might say, a piece of mathematical perfection...with rocks.
I don't, but there are people who do. Including people who should know better. People in law. People in government. People who have secrets to protect. I reiterate that this is not a hypothetical case; there are have been high profile cases where Word documents have gotten out into the wild with their revision history intact.
People should be saving in another format that isn't proprietary, or at least doesn't keep their revision history, or failing that, purge their revisions religiously. But they don't. Or they forget. Or they use someone else's computer and don't realize that revision tracking is turned on. People tend to be lazy--they don't check for these things religiously, and it's unfair to expect them to for every single document.
Software that carries this degree of potential risk, and requires this level of vigilance to use safely in a legal or government setting, has no place in these applications.
Telling someone "it's free like beer" makes no sense.
You're right. I guess "free as in speech, free as in air" just isn't catchy enough as a slogan.
I suppose, though, the issue is, do people understand what is meant? If someone told me, "Dude! Free beer!" then I'd go grab a bottle. I'd drink it. The end. I wouldn't try to duplicate it--I couldn't. 'Free' software is "free as in beer". It's even better, because if you follow the licence conditions, you get free softbeer for you and all your friends. (Okay, the buzz isn't quite the same.)
You could say "free as in books" to clarify. You can use the book, you can give the book to another person, but you can't photocopy the book and give away copies with the copyright notice in the front ripped out. You can't hijack chapters from the original work and put them in your own book without attribution. It's an idea people understand.
But it is free like beer. You can take it, and you can use it yourself, and it doesn't cost you a penny. Actually, it's better than beer, because you can redistribute GPL'ed code as long as you follow the modest licensing provisions. Most people prefer it if you don't give them your recycled beer.
As far as 'legalese' goes, the GPL certainly isn't a painful read, and it's pretty unambiguous in its meaning. I honestly cannot think of any other licensing terms -- or any sort of contract in general -- that is as clearly stated.
Lastly, you're welcome to ignore the GPL if you want to. You fall back on the regular protections afforded by copyright law, which most people are familiar with. (They may not pay attention, but they understand the concept.) You can have this software, you can use it for free, but you can't then make copies and give them away. Replace 'software' with 'book' in the preceding sentence to see what I mean.
FWIW, the post is indeed intended to be taken as ironic.
Naturally, identifying double negatives doesn't mean that you're smart as a whip.
Nope. I base my estimation of my own intelligence solely on my karma. How else should it be judged?
Cheers.
I mean, I can't possibly be the only one to graduate high school with semi-literate honor roll students...
Gee, that's kind of ironic, considering the rather awkward double negative construction in the first sentence...
Point taken. This is sad, and rather frightening. But why would anyone ever need to know how to use a library? All the information we could possibly need is available on the Internet. Duh. That's why we have Google, after all.
Ha! Mine does have an x-ray laser. Not only do I not have to take the records out of their sleeve--avoiding dust and scratches--I can also listen to whatever music the guy downstairs has on his turntable.
Such sunglasses do exist, and are sold over-the-counter already. Light specularly reflected from water (or any medium with an index of refraction greater than air) will come back at least partially polarized. Sailors like to eliminate the glare off water for comfort; fishers like to be able to see the trout. In both cases, polarizing sunglasses are a simple solution.
Unfortunately, by their nature, linear polarizers are always going to look 'dark' under normal illumination, because by default they automatically soak up 1/2 of the unpolarized light that passes through them. So they wouldn't be nearly so inconspicuous as polarizing contact lenses.
Unfortunately, I think that polarised contacts would make you ill... I don't wear contacts, but I imagine that they rotate on your eyes when worn. This would make the angle of polarisation different for each eye--you would see different stuff in your left eye than in your right, and our brains don't like that a whole lot.
Believe it or not, it's actually pretty amazing what they eye can get used to. My mother knows people who have eyesight bad enough to require bifocals, but their vanity demands contact lenses. The solution? Lens for left eye is calibrated for close work; right lens is focused for distance vision. The brain 'learns' how to deal with the arrangement in a few days, and thereafter can handle the switch between 'mismatch' contact lenses and bifocals very rapidly. Some people do get headaches with the odd lens pairing, but apparently most people don't have any trouble.
Also, seeing a different linear polarization in each eye shouldn't bother you at all. Some techniques for displaying colour 3D movies rely on viewers wearing a polarizer over each eye--one polarizer's pass axis is perpendicular to the other. The camera projects the image for (say) your left eye vertically polarized, and the image for the right horizontally polarized.
Okay, it's an interesting post. But I must nitpick. The Andromeda Strain (in its namesake science fiction novel) was not the product of nanotechnology. Rather, it was a rapidly mutating organism returned from space aboard an unmanned military spacecraft.
That said, I haven't the damndest idea how we would deal with it if it happened--that is, if a virus as deadly as ebola appeared, was highly communicable (airborne spread) and it looked like nothing medical science had ever seen before. I'm thinking that panic, inappropriate and clumsy use of military force, followed by the collapse of civilization would all be part of a likely scenario.
The linked article provides discussion of all the nanomanipulation being performed using extremely large tools. The Advanced Light Source (ALS), for instance, has a storage ring about 200 meters in circumference. It can be used for advanced microscopy and nanolithography, among other atom-scale tasks.
If you want to study something smaller--say, quarks--then you need even bigger tools. CERN, for example. It is 27 kilometers around and straddles the border between two countries.
Relatively recently, toric contact lenses have come on the market. They're designed for people with astigmatism, and to maintain lens orientation they're slightly weighted towards one edge.
And of course the polarization axis doesn't have to be bang on anyway to see something on one of these screens. If you'll settle for light gray rather than really black text, then you can have the polarization axis off by quite a bit.
Smiley or not, that's actually a brilliant idea, that would render all of those sixteen hundred dollar and up monitors (for just 15"--sheesh) useless from a security standpoint.
Wearing polarizing sunglasses and tilting your head would be very conspicuous, to say the least. But polarizing contact lenses would work perfectly in this application. (This 'application' being the misappropriation of sensitive information.) It's not a trivial task to prepare them, but it's certainly not out of reach of a person of above average competence. If a person has naturally dark-coloured eyes, the added shading from the polarizers wouldn't even be apparent.
Need a quick and dirty solution? Look at the reflection of the monitor in a piece of plate glass. A blank acetate sheet will do in a pinch. Reflection off of a clear material will separate the two orthogonal polarization states of light if you adjust your viewing angle correctly. Sure, the information will be backwards, but if you're just feeling a bit nosy, it's no problem. And it doesn't look like you're looking at the screen in that case.
You want to protect sensitive information? Put it behind a wall.
We're fortunate that posters to Slashdot are such staunch defenders of the Queen's English.