The DRM on Bluray discs, and HDCP in particular, makes the format a real headache for the technically savvy, and a total non-starter for anyone else. Guess what? If people can't play your discs, they won't buy them! Clearly, it's got to go.
DRM is, unfortunately, a part of the bluray format. Due to the complexity of the legal arrangements worked out with Hollywood I'm sure it's not going to be easy to just drop it. So, if Sony had any brains at all, they'd go find some Danish script kiddie and give him all the dirt on how to crack AACS. Get it out in the open DeCSS style. Currently, the only AACS removal tool that works worth a darn is from Slysoft, and it's priced to sodomize. If there were free AACS-cracking tools out there then PC adoption would sky-rocket, and the users of other OS's, like Linux, might buy discs too if they could actually play them!
The same thing goes for leaking ways to easily hack the PS3 to bypass HDCP restrictions. This is just plain smart. If the PS3 were the only easily hackable set-top Bluray player on the market it would sell like hotcakes!
Finally, price the software to move. Good deals could be had during the format war, but they are few and far between these days. Some genius at Sony basically stated that Bluray software prices would be kept high because the sales volume wasn't high enough to justify lowering them. Where in the name of flaming-in-a-manger baby jesus did that guy take economics? Your product isn't selling as well as you hoped, so sit on your thumbs and blame consumers for not buying enough of it? Well played sir. Well played.
IBM was merrily outfitting the Nazis with equipment to help them manage their concentration camps (completely ignorant of their application, naturally) while Bletchley park was breaking Nazi codes. I wouldn't be surprised if, at the time, IBM was viewed as an adversary or, at the very least, completely untrustworthy.
IBM's future would be built on top of key advances made at Bletchley Park, but they probably didn't know BP even existed at the time. BP, on the other hand, probably wouldn't have pissed on IBM to put out a fire. So the upshot is that, now that BP is irrelevant to IBM's future, IBM is offering aid to them, but back when BP was laying the foundation for IBM's future, IBM was completely oblivious to their existence. On top of that, had IBM known what was going on at BP and tried to invest in their own future, BP wouldn't have *wanted* anything to do with IBM!
I think you have to be a little insane to use some Apple hardware. Does anyone remember the puck mice? The ultra-flat desktop keyboards they're selling now are almost as bad. The earbuds that come with iPods are all universally crappy, both in build and sound quality. It's bizarre that, with Jobs exerting such obsessive compulsive control over Apple's output, crap products like these somehow slip through the cracks. It's almost like Jobs is schizoid.
Then again, if Apple just isn't good at designing certain things, what are they supposed to do? Start selling updated IBM Model-M keyboards with their high-end desktops? Grado's with the iPods? Paint microsoft mice white!!? It's almost unimaginable, and I see that as a problem.
This is my main beef with Apple. They're too image conscious. Admittedly, some of their user-base just wants to be fashionable, but is being fashionable really a long-term plan for success? Given how much of an asshole he is, sooner or later Jobs is going to become "uncool". Increased market share and, hence, lessened uniqueness isn't going to help. Normal people will use uncool hardware if it's *good*. This is a lesson I feel Apple needs to learn.
Calgary is one of the sunniest cities in North America in terms of amount of sunshine per year. Southern Alberta is, in large part, a semi-arid region with very low humidity, so the Sun really packs a wallop here due to very low atmospheric extinction. At this time of year the days are also longer the further North you go. Those cars will probably make better time once they cross into Canada than they will in most parts of the U.S..
However, Alberta isn't really a solar energy hot-spot. Wind power is where it's at. Alberta produces more wind power than any other province in Canada. Whichever racers have the foresight to pack a sail will probably make the best time on the last leg of their journey.
Many organizations that try to encourage women to enter the physical sciences and engineering tend to generate a lot of extra work for women who are already in those fields. They expect these women to drop what they're doing and sit on committees, speak to high school crowds, participate in a disproportionate number of peer reviews for other women (to keep panel sex ratios "fair"), etc.. The list goes on.
These women, having "made it" themselves, often don't feel that sexual discrimination is still a significant issue in their field. However, they still feel pressured to participate lest they be labeled "anti-feminist". I wouldn't be surprised if some women who have had success in the physical sciences have, when possible, fled to a less male-dominated field just to lighten their workloads.
While it's certainly a good thing to ensure that there is a level playing field in male dominated fields, some of these organizations really ought to back off and let women in science and engineering concentrate on their work instead of wasting their time and holding them back with nonsense. Make no mistake, if you saddle a woman with 20+ hours/week of extra duties just because she's a woman, you're no better than the "evil oppressing misogynists" you think you're fighting.
One of those nice little features of usenet is that people can *create* groups. If they ban the entire alt.* hierarchy, people are just going to create new groups outside the alt hierarchy for everything, legal or not. This will, of course, be an enormous headache to sort out since there will be *many* new groups being created for each existing group and it will take time for people to agree on which ones to use. Perhaps some of the new names will even make sense...
e.g. startrek.ds9, music.lossless or porn.bigtits.
"The whole idea is to get the same person and to touch them across all different sorts of platforms,"
Spielberg's "Minority Report" might not be a classic, but it was very savvy in it's predictions about technology. In particular, the above quote brings to mind the excessively invasive advertising keyed to individuals via eye-scans. You can tell these NBC bastards have a hard-on for that kind of future.
We're basically in a one-sided war. Advertisers are pulling together intelligence and getting organized for an all-out assault on our senses. They want control of our minds and they're willing to fight for it. What are we willing to do? Buy more ringtones?
Say you have a slow, plodding sequential process. If you reach a point where there are several possibilities and you have an abundance of cores, you can start work on each of the possibilities while you're still deciding which possibility is actually the right one. Many CPU's already incorporate this sort of logic. It is, however, rather wasteful of resources and provides a relatively modest speedup. Applying it at a higher level should work, in principle, although it obviously isn't going to be practical for many problems.
I do see this move by Intel as a direct follow up to their plans to negate the processing advantages of today's video cards. Intel wants people running general purpose code to run it on their general purpose CPU's, not on their video cards using CUDA or the like. If the future of video game rendering is indeed ray-tracing (an embarrassingly parallel algorithm if ever there was one) then this move will also position Intel to compete directly with Nvidia for the raw processing power market.
One thing is for sure, there's a lot of coding to do. Very few programs currently make effective use of even 2 cores. Parallelization of code can be quite tricky, so hopefully tools will evolve that will make it easier for the typical code-monkey who's never written a parallel algorithm in his life.
I use OSX occasionally and don't have a problem with Apple apps running on Apple's OS. Apple apps running on Windows are another matter entirely. From the earliest versions of Quicktime for windows (Why do you think there's Quicktime Alternative?) to the latest version of Safari, I have yet to see one piece of Apple authored Windows software that doesn't make me want to gouge out my eyeballs with a spork. Don't even get me started on iTunes! It isn't just Apple's complete unwillingness to bend the Apple way of doing things to accomodate the standards of other OS's. Their Windows software is just plain bug-riddled crap.
Is Apple really just incompetent at writing apps for other OS's? They've beeing doing it long enough that they really ought to be able to do a decent job by now. Instead, I think Apple trying to make sure that Apple users who migrate to windows and install a familiar Apple app will be scared back into the fold.
That being said, I don't use Safari even when I am using OSX. Firefox may not be the perfect browser, but at least they have decent versions available for OSX, Windows, and Linux. That's something that can't be said for IE or Safari. It's nice to be able to stick to one browser across every OS I use.
Why do we have IP laws in the first place? Contrary to what many evidently believe, it's not so that people or companies with good ideas can get rich. It's to foster innovation by ensuring that there is adequate incentive for people to innovate. (Read: Not 100 years of copyright so your great-grandchildren can keep milking it.) Any IP law that impedes innovation should be pruned from the books with prejudice. While it would take a rather extensive amount of pruning to eliminate every IP law that stifles innovation, a simple exemption for innovators might be all that is needed.
Although it would probably be difficult to implement in such a way that the spirit would not be overcome by the letter of the law, I would like to see exemptions to all existing IP laws that apply to those who take copyrighted or patented ideas and produce something original and of merit. If some patent-troll firm amassed a bunch of software patents without producing viable products, real software companies producing actual software could use this exemption and use those ideas without paying ransom or getting sued.
First thing is first, if you really want to bring an even remotely viable standard to the industry, it can't have your brand on it. Not even if your processors didn't suck. So, AMDGame!, AMDGame Ultra, ect.: meet trashbin.
Second, if you base your standard on qualitative metrics today like regular, extreme, venti, extra loco, etc. they're all going to be in the sucks, super-sucks, sucks more dick than an intern at a political convention, range of categories in little over a year. That means you have to keep coming up with new, confusing, and retarded new names every product cycle or, alternatively, redefine the existing names each cycle so that last years Ultra is this years suck. How is this going to reduce confusion?
My suggestion is to slap a number on your standards. e.g. PC Gaming Score: 710 for this years Ultra, and 920 for next years. Every last mouth breather out there knows that higher numbers are usually better and will assume so, even when they aren't.
Now, it's important to note that these numbers aren't quite like a benchmark. Having one really fast component shouldn't quality a system for a number high enough to play a game when it has other components that will make that game unplayable. These numbers can't be mindless metrics that come out of a benchmark. It has to take all components into consideration, especially the bottlenecks. The goal is to provide a single number that a user can look at and say: Okay, the required number on gameX is lower, so I can play it. No worries.
It's that simple. No worrying about whether uber-awesome is greater than mega-extreme, or whether it's last years mega-extreme or this year's mega-extreme. It's, "is the number on the box of this game less than the number on my machine".
Seriously, it's about time companies like AMD realized that the same slice from a bigger pie still equals greater profits. If they want to increase the PC gaming market they really need to put their brand promotion on the back burner.
CUDA is an interesting way to utilize NVIDIA's graphics hardware for tasks it wasn't really designed for, but it's not a solution to parallel computing in and of itself. (more on that momentarily) A few people have gotten their nice high end Quadros to do some pretty cool stuff, but to date it's been limited primarily to relatively minor academic purposes. I don't see CUDA becoming big in gaming circles anytime soon. Let's face it, most gamers buy *one* reasonably good video card and leave it at that. Your video card has better things to do than handle audio or physics when your multi-core CPU is probably being criminally underutilized. Nvidia, of course, wants people to buy wimpy CPU's and then load up on massive SLI rigs and then do all their multi-purpose computation in CUDA. Not gonna happen.
First of all, there are very few general purpose applications that special purpose NVIDIA hardware running CUDA can do significantly better than a real general purpose CPU, and Intel intends to cut even that small gap down within a few product cycles. Second, nobody wants to tie themselves to CUDA when it's built entirely for proprietary hardware. Third, CUDA still has a *lot* of limitations. It's not as easy to develop a physics engine for a GPU using CUDA as it is for a general purpose CPU.
Now, I haven't used CUDA lately, so I could be way off base here. However, multi-threading isn't the real challenge to efficient use of resources in a parallel computing environment. It's designing your algorithms to be able to run in parallel in the first place. Most multi-threaded software out there still has threads that have to run on a single CPU, and the entire package bottlenecks on the single CPU running that thread even if other threads are free to run on other processors. This sort of bottleneck can only be avoided at the algorithm level. This isn't something CUDA is going to fix.
Now, I can certainly see why NVIDIA is playing up CUDA for all they're worth. Video game graphics rendering could be on the cusp of a technological singularity. Namely, ray tracing. Ray tracing is becoming feasible to do in real time. It's a stretch at present, but time will change that. Ray tracing is a significant step forward in terms of visual quality, but it also makes coding a lot of other things relatively easy. Valve's recent "Portal" required some rather convoluted hacks to render the portals with acceptable performance, but in a ray tracing engine those same portals only take a couple lines of code to implement and have no impact on performance. Another advantage of ray tracing is that it's dead simple to parallelize. While current approaches to video game graphics are going to get more and more difficult to work with as parallel processing rises, ray tracing will remain simple.
The real question is whether NVIDIA is poised to do ray-tracing better than Intel in the next few product cycles. Intel is hip to all of the above, and they can smell blood in the water. If they can beef up the floating point performance of their processors then dedicated graphics cards may soon become completely unnecessary. NVIDIA is under the axe and they know it, which might explain all the recent anti-Intel smack-talk. Still, it remains to be seen who can actually walk the walk.
1. Take an interest in what other people are doing. First of all, most people love to talk about what they're doing. (provided you aren't asking at a bad time) Second, what everyone is doing may actually fit together and be motivated towards a common goal. Understanding that goal and how other people are working towards it can help you understand and motivate your own work.
2. Some labs will have extracurricular activities. Show up. Once you have some experience with the group, consider organizing extracurricular activities yourself, even if its just a trip to the bar.
3. Everything takes longer than you think it will. A lot longer. Try not to get frustrated.
4. If you think you are going to need parts that have to be ordered, work your ass off until they're in the mail. Then, while you're waiting for them to arrive, you can catch up on your other work.
5. There are going to be times when you need equipment that others are using. Don't sweat it. If they know you need it, they'll try to free it up for you. It might take a while though. Likewise, try to free up equipment other people need.
6. Don't panic.
Especially in a market dominated by a very small number of giants. When there's no competition, there's no way for consumers to vote with their wallets other than to do without internet access entirely.
I'm fortunate to live in an area where there are *two* competing monolithic ISP's, but if they happened to both engage in these practices I'd be hooped.
The Spanish conquest of the Americas is often overly dramatized. In all instances I am aware of, it was *not* Spanish technology that carried the day.
Takes the Aztec's for example. Many story tellers will spin a glorious yarn about the siege of Tenochtitlan. Most of those will be glad to talk about how Moctezuma revered Cortés as a god. Most will also completely gloss over the fact that the Spaniards were only a small percentage of the force that laid siege to Tenochtitlan. The Aztec's were not very popular amongst their neighbors, so when Cortés marched on Tenochtitlan the Aztec's enemies came in droves to capitalize on a change to take them down. The Inca's were smack in the middle of a civil war over succession when the Spaniards arrived on the scene, and by pure luck, managed to kidnap the heir apparent. (They held him hostage for gold and then executed him.) Their timing was fortuitous, to say the least. However, the capture of Cuzco was the real fall of Peru, and by that time the Spanish had again picked up indigenous allies to fight for them.
Finally, there is the Mayans. If you watched Apocalypto then you probably got the impression that the Maya were living in big cities and making a mess of things when the Spaniards showed up and conqured/saved them. Nope. They had abandoned their cities centuries before. Even with their civilization an echo of its former glory, the Maya put up more resistance against the Europeans than, perhaps, any other indigenous people in the america's. Unlike the Aztec's and Incas, there was no single Mayan center which could be attacked and neutralized. The Maya were spread out in some of the densest, nastiest, most brutal jungle on Earth. The Spaniards would capture one town and move on to the next only to find that they had to recapture the previous town all over again the next time they went past it. It took centuries to subdue just a *portion* of the Mayan population.
Now, it would seem that we're way off topic, but we can draw some pretty interesting parallels actually. RIAA is a centralized body, much like the Inca or Aztecs. All it would take is for one major record label to withdraw their support to RIAA and that would be their end. Likewise, a change to copyright law could doom all the labels overnight. Music pirates, on the other hand, are by their very nature decentralized. You can squash as many individuals with lawsuits as you want, but the P2P network lives on. Finding those individuals and gathering enough evidence to bring a lawsuit that has a chance of winning if they don't cave and settle is also not an easy task. They are like the Maya. Hard to find, difficult to suppress, and resilient. If RIAA and the labels somehow managed to keep going as they are now, it would take centuries to bring piracy to and end at best.
Anyways, I'm at the point where I just want easy access to good music. If the labels brought back Oink in all it's glory at $30/month I'd be their first customer. If they insist that I have to spend $10 an album for lossy DRM'd tracks on iTunes or $15 for a CD, neither of which net the artist more than $0.15, then no deal.
The way I see it, there is an answer to music distribution. Say that somebody created a private torrent tracker site where the members paid a monthly access fee. Artists could seed their music on this torrent site and be paid a percentage of the gross according to how much their stuff is downloaded. No middlemen. No record companies. Just the artists and the torrent site. Potentially, artists could make a lot more money than they are now. However, there are problems. Perhaps the stickiest is that little issue of critical mass. If a handful of independents got together and did this, they'd fail miserably. Such a site would need a *massive* catalog to get off the ground. It would have to include a very large number of artists from day 1. Still, it is a beautiful dream.
I was pretty surprised when Dell finally started putting some effort into their laptop designs. For example, take the XPS m1330 that came out last year. It's actually really nice. I wanted an near-ultra-portable but *powerful* Ubuntu laptop and was within a hair's breadth of getting a macbook pro. (The air is a slick design, but the power just isn't there.) Then I found out I could get something every bit as powerful as a high-end macbook pro in the form-factor of a 13" macbook, only lighter, and for less money. (Caveat to follow.) Then I found out that the design actually looked nice. Nicer than the macbooks to my tastes. (Seriously, it's time for a design update Apple.) On top of that, the m1330's design makes a fair bit of ergonomic sense too. The laptop tapers down towards your wrists, rather than the tendinitis-inducing edge on macbooks.
Even more surprising, the m1330 is really well supported in Ubuntu. (Dell actually sells the m1330 with Ubuntu pre-installed, although the discount is rather pathetic.) More things just work in a default install of Ubuntu on the m1330 than in Vista! (The only thing that doesn't work as well in Ubuntu as it does in Vista is the fingerprint reader, but that's just because biometric password support in Linux, and KDE especially, sucks dingo balls at present.) And yes, if I bought a macbook I probably would have tossed the OSX disks and reformated the drive first thing. I've had to develop under OSX and, while I don't mind it, I definitely prefer Ubuntu.
Caveat time. Dell's customization options are still royally borked. You can pick up a lot of accessories, like bluetooth mice, fairly cheap when buying a laptop, but other components are just insanely expensive. Anyone who maxes out the memory on a Dell while ordering it and then complains about the price is an idiot. Upgrading the memory on a Dell won't void the warranty. You want 4GB? Get 1GB from Dell and, toss it, and buy a couple 2GB sticks yourself. You'll save at least a couple hundred dollars. If Dell would smarten up about that kind of thing I'd have no complaints.
Still, one thing is pretty clear. You can no longer mindlessly slag Dell for epitomizing bland and crappy laptop designs. They do still have ultra-cheap crap and bland bricks built like tanks for the corporate types, but they're also gunning for the sexier end of the market now.
Parallel programming is going to go mainstream, not because people find it interesting, but because that's the way hardware is forcing us to go. First mainframes, then workstations, and now desktops and laptops have moved away from single CPU cores. In every case, it has been a necessary evil due to the inability to pack enough power into a single monolithic processor. Does anyone actually think Intel, if they could, wouldn't happily go back to building single-core CPU's with the same total power as the multi-core CPU's they're making now?
Right now, parallel development techniques, education, and tools are all lagging behind the hardware reality. Relatively few applications currently make even remotely efficient use of multiple cores, and that includes embarrassingly parallel code that would require only minor code changes to run in parallel and no changes to the base algorithm at all.
However, if you look around, the tools are materializing. Parallel programming skills will be in hot demand shortly. It's just a matter of time before the multi-core install base is large enough that software companies can't ignore it.
It's painful watching some of the most fascinating projects ever conceived being raked over the coals of budget cuts in the U.S., but you guys aren't alone.
Some of you may have seen that giant freakin' cool space robot called Dextre that just went up to the ISS. The Canadian company responsible (MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates or MDA) for that coolness is being sold off to a U.S. company.
The important thing to realize about MDA is that it was started over four decades ago and has been carefully nurtured by public funding with the express intention of forwarding Canada's space technology sector. MDA is the backbone of Canada's space program. (as small as it may be) In addition to selling off Canada's space program, this sale also includes RADARSAT-2, which was built with Canadian tax money and is currently used by the government to monitor the arctic. The sale of this satellite to a U.S. company will mean that the Canadian government will be ceding control of the satellite which it paid for to the U.S., a country which disputes Canadian sovereignty in some of the areas RADARSAT-2 monitors. RADARSAT-2 was effectively *given* to MDA to simplify operations, but now it's being sold to the U.S. and the money is going to MDA's shareholders rather than the Canadian government that paid for it!
The only thing standing in the way is a Rubber Stamp from the Industry minister Jim Prentice. Seeing as he's never failed to rubber stamp a sale before, the picture looks grim.
So, the U.S. is not alone in being mismanaged from the very top.
Militant Buddhists have raised a little Hell in Sri Lanka, burning down Christian churches and whatnot, but we don't really hear much about it because it's not white Christians who are dying. Western media does tend to ignore conflicts where the victims aren't lily white. Heck, look at the war coverage in Iraq. Depending on whose numbers you go by, over a hundred Iraqi civilians have died for every American soldier, but who makes the news nine times out of ten? There are, sadly, many more examples in Africa, such as Rwanda. Genocides nearly on the level of the Holocaust go almost completely unreported. But, I digress. My point was that Buddhism can be twisted towards the ends of violence like any other religion, even if it's tenets are somewhat more pacifist. It's the followers that matter, not the religion.
Although Christianity has mellowed out somewhat, it is still used as a tool of intolerance and violence from time to time. The Bible really does contain some rather contemptible passages. The Koran and Torah are no different, since they all come from the same roots. It's strange that religions which share a common root harbor more hatred for each other than for completely alien religions.
Islam, as a religion, is fundamentally no more violent than any other religion out there. At present, however, some of it's followers are. Yes, I did just say that. Jesus can be portrayed as a exhibitionistic homosexual pedophile on prime-time TV (e.g. Family Guy and Stewie's encounter) without too much fuss but, if some Danish cartoonist draws Muhammad, the death threats start flying. This isn't because all Muslims are violent, but rather, because a rather significant subset of them are. In today's society, any organization, religious or otherwise, should be open to public criticism and even satire. Currently, Islam ranks up there with Scientology when it comes to a complete inability to laugh at themselves. That just isn't healthy and needs to change. Those few violent Muslims out there need to learn that they're actually doing Islam a disservice by standing up for it in such disgraceful ways.
As for the West's part, I really don't think we're doing Islam any favors by censoring anti-islam speech. If followers of Islam want to move beyond their current "suspected terrorist" status and find wide acceptance, Muslims *everywhere* have to learn to suck it up and take it when their religion is criticized or satired. If they can show they can shrug off an insult or take a joke then Muslim populations in Western countries might start to find acceptance easier to come by.
Say you create a polarized single photon. Any measurement of that photon will destroy it, and no single measurement will allow you to fully characterize it's polarization state. This is the foundation of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). If somebody were to try to eavesdrop, she would have to intercept single photons and measure them, thereby destroying them. She could send new photons to replace the ones she measured, but enough would differ from what was originally being sent that the people trying to create a secure key would know there was an eavesdropper.
The experiment in the linked article operates by sending pulses containing on the order of 10^16 photons, all in the same state. An eavesdropper could simply intercept some of those photons and pick up the key without anyone knowing. In order for this setup to work with QKD, they would have to *send* single photons from the very beginning.
They claim 4.6 clicks per second in this experiment. If they sent single photons, that would come out to around 4.6 * 10^-16 clicks per second. This would be nigh undetectable with the dark counts they have, but let's assume dark counts weren't an issue. Pulsing at 17KHz would mean they could get 7.82 * 10^-11 bits of key per second. That translates to around 500 000 years to exchange a 128-bit key. That's not very practical.
Now, I really don't mean to bash them. Just aligning a satellite and getting any results at all is impressive. While what they have is not practical for actual QKD, the seed of innovation is there. Exciting stuff!
"Quantum Key Distribution" (QKD for short) is the term you're looking for, and it does exactly what it says. There are already commercial QKD systems on the market and their primary application is in closely spaced bank networks. QKD isn't sci-fi. It's being used right now. And yes, key distribution *is* encryption. In it's simplest, most secure, and most inefficient form, encryption involves simply XOR'ing the message with a key of the same bit length. (i.e. A One time PAD) Very few encryption systems utilize a one-time PAD though, since it's obviously very wasteful. Still, you *could* use quantum key in that manner if you really wanted to.
One of the biggest strengths, and weaknesses, of QKD is that it is impossible to deterministically measure and replicate a photon. (Google the "no cloning theorem" if you're interested.) This means that an eavesdropper can't cut into a QKD line and listen in without changing it's content in a way that those using it can detect. The detection of an eavesdropper, however, is not random. It's a certainty that arises from the statistics. The downside to all this is that QKD currently only works when the two parties involved are close enough to send photons to each other directly. This limits current QKD systems to a practical distance of approximately 100 km. (This is primarily due to loss in fibre.)
There is, of course, a workaround: Quantum repeater stations. These are somewhat deceptively named because they don't actually repeat a quantum state. What they do is create a chain of entanglement that ultimately winds up with two widely separated parties (and noone else, including the repeaters) sharing entangled photon pairs that can be used to set up a key. Secure QKD can take place even if the repeaters aren't trusted. I won't bore you with the specifics. In fact, I'm going to wave my hands at you and just make a claim, because explaining it would take a very long time. To wit, quantum repeaters will never allow for communication over longer distances than current QKD schemes unless they incorporate some form of quantum memory. Quantum memory is one of the key ingredients for quantum encryption over distances long enough to be really useful.
The research mentioned in this article is interesting, but it doesn't appear to be at a stage that is practically useful. For quantum memory to be useful, it has to store light (vacuum states) on an order of milliseconds or longer and have a storage/recall rate of better than 50%, and it doesn't look like they're there yet. Still, quantum memory is *the* critical stumbling block in a lot of applications, so it's very exciting to see work being done on it. I fully expect that the first practical quantum memory units are going to win their makers a big fat Nobel prize.
The probability of this satellite landing on Osama bin Laden is probably higher than the probability of him being caught within the next couple of months. It's good to see the U.S. finally cracking down on that slimeball!
Here's an extremely simplified version of how Quantum Teleportation works. This model *will* break down if you push it too far, but it's a better model of the real physics than a Star Trek transporter.
1. Go out and buy two identical rubik's cubes.
2. Put them into identical configurations.
3. Send one to the other side of the planet.
4. Now, create any new configuration you want, but record the steps you take. (e.g. Rotate top 90 degrees left, etc.)
5. A person on the other side of the planet with the other cube can now recreate your cube precisely if you call them up and tell them the steps you took.
In quantum-land, there are some rather huge differences, which I'll talk about in a moment. However, the crucial thing to get out of this necessarily imperfect macroscopic example is that this kind of teleportation relies on preparing identical rubik's cubes in advance, classically transporting one of them to the receiver, and communicating via classical channels when actually performing the teleportation. At NO point can information travel faster than light (FTL). i.e. Quantum teleportation does *not* break causality. However, you will note that you can, potentially, communicate a very complex rubik's cube configuration with a very small ammount of classical data, provided you choose your initial state and operations intelligently.
The reality of Quantum Land (This will most likely confuse you. For that, I apologize.)
The pair of identically configured rubik's cubes are meant to be an analogy for an entangled pair, which is the most crucial thing to have in any quantum teleportation scheme. (You can make entangled pairs out of many things, such as photons or electrons. However, these things are typically tiny and simple. Complex Atoms, molecules, etc. don't work so well.) Where the analogy breaks down is entanglement, which is something we just don't see in macroscopic objects. The key idea behind entanglement is that you can place two things into a state that is not separable (i.e. You cannot describe one things state without also describing the other simultaneously), and any operation on one of them will have an effect on the other no matter how far separated the two things are. (NOTE: This does NOT allow FTL communication.) The problem is that quantum operations on entangled states are probabilistic rather than deterministic. If the sender performs operations, measurements really, on her half of the entangled pair and a new particle that is to be teleported, the receiver needs the results of those measurements to do anything useful, such as reconstruct the particle the sender had. Those results *must* be communicated from the sender to the receiver via classical channels.
Another big thing to note about quantum teleportation is that it, currently, is applied to indistinguishable particles. When you copy a rubik's cube, the copy is made up of complex molecules in a configuration that is unique. If you can magically examine the structure of any two real world rubik's cube you can tell them apart. They are distinguishable. A pair of photons in the same state, on the other hand, are indistinguishable. When you perform quantum teleportation, the copy that comes out at the sender's end is an absolutely perfect copy of the original because it has the exact state of the original and the particles themselves are not distinguishable. The state of the original, however, is changed when it is measured in the teleportation process, and there's no way to recover it. Effectively, the original is destroyed and a perfect copy comes out at the other end.
So there you have it. Quantum teleportation isn't really like a Star Trek transporter at all. It actually a lot stranger than that, and much more difficult to grok. (especially the entanglment part) Again, I apologize for not being able to come up with a way to explain entanglement without throwing a lot of math at you. (I'm not sure you can really understand it without the math.)
Blogs, google-bombing advertisers, dead sites taken over by domain squatters, broken links, inaccurate wiki's... It's becoming increasingly more difficult to find good information online. Perhaps this is why the tolerance for delay and reliance on search engines is increasing across the board. (not just in them whipper-snappers!) With a lower signal to noise ratio you have to churn through more material to get what you want. That means investing less time in avenues that don't pay off fast and using search engines to avoid tedious mucking about with links that are broken as often as not. The evolution of search engines is about the only thing that is helping to combat the decreasing SNR of the web. Try searching for something specific and imagine what it would be like if you had to go back to using Lycos circa 1998!
That being said, ease of searching is just one of the many reasons why libraries should be digitizing their collections. How many times have you found a book that looked absolutely perfect for what you're doing, only to find that it's loaned out, damaged or defaced, returned but not reshelved, lost, etc.. Also, it's just plain more convenient to be able to pull up some text from the comfort of your couch rather than trekking into the library. That convenience adds up if it's something you access regularly. e.g. Who goes to the library to read paper journals these days?
Slashdot Mirror
The DRM on Bluray discs, and HDCP in particular, makes the format a real headache for the technically savvy, and a total non-starter for anyone else. Guess what? If people can't play your discs, they won't buy them! Clearly, it's got to go.
DRM is, unfortunately, a part of the bluray format. Due to the complexity of the legal arrangements worked out with Hollywood I'm sure it's not going to be easy to just drop it. So, if Sony had any brains at all, they'd go find some Danish script kiddie and give him all the dirt on how to crack AACS. Get it out in the open DeCSS style. Currently, the only AACS removal tool that works worth a darn is from Slysoft, and it's priced to sodomize. If there were free AACS-cracking tools out there then PC adoption would sky-rocket, and the users of other OS's, like Linux, might buy discs too if they could actually play them!
The same thing goes for leaking ways to easily hack the PS3 to bypass HDCP restrictions. This is just plain smart. If the PS3 were the only easily hackable set-top Bluray player on the market it would sell like hotcakes!
Finally, price the software to move. Good deals could be had during the format war, but they are few and far between these days. Some genius at Sony basically stated that Bluray software prices would be kept high because the sales volume wasn't high enough to justify lowering them. Where in the name of flaming-in-a-manger baby jesus did that guy take economics? Your product isn't selling as well as you hoped, so sit on your thumbs and blame consumers for not buying enough of it? Well played sir. Well played.
IBM was merrily outfitting the Nazis with equipment to help them manage their concentration camps (completely ignorant of their application, naturally) while Bletchley park was breaking Nazi codes. I wouldn't be surprised if, at the time, IBM was viewed as an adversary or, at the very least, completely untrustworthy.
IBM's future would be built on top of key advances made at Bletchley Park, but they probably didn't know BP even existed at the time. BP, on the other hand, probably wouldn't have pissed on IBM to put out a fire. So the upshot is that, now that BP is irrelevant to IBM's future, IBM is offering aid to them, but back when BP was laying the foundation for IBM's future, IBM was completely oblivious to their existence. On top of that, had IBM known what was going on at BP and tried to invest in their own future, BP wouldn't have *wanted* anything to do with IBM!
Somebody at IBM really appreciates irony.
I think you have to be a little insane to use some Apple hardware. Does anyone remember the puck mice? The ultra-flat desktop keyboards they're selling now are almost as bad. The earbuds that come with iPods are all universally crappy, both in build and sound quality. It's bizarre that, with Jobs exerting such obsessive compulsive control over Apple's output, crap products like these somehow slip through the cracks. It's almost like Jobs is schizoid.
Then again, if Apple just isn't good at designing certain things, what are they supposed to do? Start selling updated IBM Model-M keyboards with their high-end desktops? Grado's with the iPods? Paint microsoft mice white!!? It's almost unimaginable, and I see that as a problem.
This is my main beef with Apple. They're too image conscious. Admittedly, some of their user-base just wants to be fashionable, but is being fashionable really a long-term plan for success? Given how much of an asshole he is, sooner or later Jobs is going to become "uncool". Increased market share and, hence, lessened uniqueness isn't going to help. Normal people will use uncool hardware if it's *good*. This is a lesson I feel Apple needs to learn.
Calgary is one of the sunniest cities in North America in terms of amount of sunshine per year. Southern Alberta is, in large part, a semi-arid region with very low humidity, so the Sun really packs a wallop here due to very low atmospheric extinction. At this time of year the days are also longer the further North you go. Those cars will probably make better time once they cross into Canada than they will in most parts of the U.S..
However, Alberta isn't really a solar energy hot-spot. Wind power is where it's at. Alberta produces more wind power than any other province in Canada. Whichever racers have the foresight to pack a sail will probably make the best time on the last leg of their journey.
Many organizations that try to encourage women to enter the physical sciences and engineering tend to generate a lot of extra work for women who are already in those fields. They expect these women to drop what they're doing and sit on committees, speak to high school crowds, participate in a disproportionate number of peer reviews for other women (to keep panel sex ratios "fair"), etc.. The list goes on.
These women, having "made it" themselves, often don't feel that sexual discrimination is still a significant issue in their field. However, they still feel pressured to participate lest they be labeled "anti-feminist". I wouldn't be surprised if some women who have had success in the physical sciences have, when possible, fled to a less male-dominated field just to lighten their workloads.
While it's certainly a good thing to ensure that there is a level playing field in male dominated fields, some of these organizations really ought to back off and let women in science and engineering concentrate on their work instead of wasting their time and holding them back with nonsense. Make no mistake, if you saddle a woman with 20+ hours/week of extra duties just because she's a woman, you're no better than the "evil oppressing misogynists" you think you're fighting.
One of those nice little features of usenet is that people can *create* groups. If they ban the entire alt.* hierarchy, people are just going to create new groups outside the alt hierarchy for everything, legal or not. This will, of course, be an enormous headache to sort out since there will be *many* new groups being created for each existing group and it will take time for people to agree on which ones to use. Perhaps some of the new names will even make sense...
e.g. startrek.ds9, music.lossless or porn.bigtits.
"The whole idea is to get the same person and to touch them across all different sorts of platforms,"
Spielberg's "Minority Report" might not be a classic, but it was very savvy in it's predictions about technology. In particular, the above quote brings to mind the excessively invasive advertising keyed to individuals via eye-scans. You can tell these NBC bastards have a hard-on for that kind of future.
We're basically in a one-sided war. Advertisers are pulling together intelligence and getting organized for an all-out assault on our senses. They want control of our minds and they're willing to fight for it. What are we willing to do? Buy more ringtones?
Say you have a slow, plodding sequential process. If you reach a point where there are several possibilities and you have an abundance of cores, you can start work on each of the possibilities while you're still deciding which possibility is actually the right one. Many CPU's already incorporate this sort of logic. It is, however, rather wasteful of resources and provides a relatively modest speedup. Applying it at a higher level should work, in principle, although it obviously isn't going to be practical for many problems.
I do see this move by Intel as a direct follow up to their plans to negate the processing advantages of today's video cards. Intel wants people running general purpose code to run it on their general purpose CPU's, not on their video cards using CUDA or the like. If the future of video game rendering is indeed ray-tracing (an embarrassingly parallel algorithm if ever there was one) then this move will also position Intel to compete directly with Nvidia for the raw processing power market.
One thing is for sure, there's a lot of coding to do. Very few programs currently make effective use of even 2 cores. Parallelization of code can be quite tricky, so hopefully tools will evolve that will make it easier for the typical code-monkey who's never written a parallel algorithm in his life.
I use OSX occasionally and don't have a problem with Apple apps running on Apple's OS. Apple apps running on Windows are another matter entirely. From the earliest versions of Quicktime for windows (Why do you think there's Quicktime Alternative?) to the latest version of Safari, I have yet to see one piece of Apple authored Windows software that doesn't make me want to gouge out my eyeballs with a spork. Don't even get me started on iTunes! It isn't just Apple's complete unwillingness to bend the Apple way of doing things to accomodate the standards of other OS's. Their Windows software is just plain bug-riddled crap.
Is Apple really just incompetent at writing apps for other OS's? They've beeing doing it long enough that they really ought to be able to do a decent job by now. Instead, I think Apple trying to make sure that Apple users who migrate to windows and install a familiar Apple app will be scared back into the fold.
That being said, I don't use Safari even when I am using OSX. Firefox may not be the perfect browser, but at least they have decent versions available for OSX, Windows, and Linux. That's something that can't be said for IE or Safari. It's nice to be able to stick to one browser across every OS I use.
Why do we have IP laws in the first place? Contrary to what many evidently believe, it's not so that people or companies with good ideas can get rich. It's to foster innovation by ensuring that there is adequate incentive for people to innovate. (Read: Not 100 years of copyright so your great-grandchildren can keep milking it.) Any IP law that impedes innovation should be pruned from the books with prejudice. While it would take a rather extensive amount of pruning to eliminate every IP law that stifles innovation, a simple exemption for innovators might be all that is needed.
Although it would probably be difficult to implement in such a way that the spirit would not be overcome by the letter of the law, I would like to see exemptions to all existing IP laws that apply to those who take copyrighted or patented ideas and produce something original and of merit. If some patent-troll firm amassed a bunch of software patents without producing viable products, real software companies producing actual software could use this exemption and use those ideas without paying ransom or getting sued.
Of course, it might be better to just prune away.
First thing is first, if you really want to bring an even remotely viable standard to the industry, it can't have your brand on it. Not even if your processors didn't suck. So, AMDGame!, AMDGame Ultra, ect.: meet trashbin.
Second, if you base your standard on qualitative metrics today like regular, extreme, venti, extra loco, etc. they're all going to be in the sucks, super-sucks, sucks more dick than an intern at a political convention, range of categories in little over a year. That means you have to keep coming up with new, confusing, and retarded new names every product cycle or, alternatively, redefine the existing names each cycle so that last years Ultra is this years suck. How is this going to reduce confusion?
My suggestion is to slap a number on your standards. e.g. PC Gaming Score: 710 for this years Ultra, and 920 for next years. Every last mouth breather out there knows that higher numbers are usually better and will assume so, even when they aren't.
Now, it's important to note that these numbers aren't quite like a benchmark. Having one really fast component shouldn't quality a system for a number high enough to play a game when it has other components that will make that game unplayable. These numbers can't be mindless metrics that come out of a benchmark. It has to take all components into consideration, especially the bottlenecks. The goal is to provide a single number that a user can look at and say: Okay, the required number on gameX is lower, so I can play it. No worries.
It's that simple. No worrying about whether uber-awesome is greater than mega-extreme, or whether it's last years mega-extreme or this year's mega-extreme. It's, "is the number on the box of this game less than the number on my machine".
Seriously, it's about time companies like AMD realized that the same slice from a bigger pie still equals greater profits. If they want to increase the PC gaming market they really need to put their brand promotion on the back burner.
CUDA is an interesting way to utilize NVIDIA's graphics hardware for tasks it wasn't really designed for, but it's not a solution to parallel computing in and of itself. (more on that momentarily) A few people have gotten their nice high end Quadros to do some pretty cool stuff, but to date it's been limited primarily to relatively minor academic purposes. I don't see CUDA becoming big in gaming circles anytime soon. Let's face it, most gamers buy *one* reasonably good video card and leave it at that. Your video card has better things to do than handle audio or physics when your multi-core CPU is probably being criminally underutilized. Nvidia, of course, wants people to buy wimpy CPU's and then load up on massive SLI rigs and then do all their multi-purpose computation in CUDA. Not gonna happen.
First of all, there are very few general purpose applications that special purpose NVIDIA hardware running CUDA can do significantly better than a real general purpose CPU, and Intel intends to cut even that small gap down within a few product cycles. Second, nobody wants to tie themselves to CUDA when it's built entirely for proprietary hardware. Third, CUDA still has a *lot* of limitations. It's not as easy to develop a physics engine for a GPU using CUDA as it is for a general purpose CPU.
Now, I haven't used CUDA lately, so I could be way off base here. However, multi-threading isn't the real challenge to efficient use of resources in a parallel computing environment. It's designing your algorithms to be able to run in parallel in the first place. Most multi-threaded software out there still has threads that have to run on a single CPU, and the entire package bottlenecks on the single CPU running that thread even if other threads are free to run on other processors. This sort of bottleneck can only be avoided at the algorithm level. This isn't something CUDA is going to fix.
Now, I can certainly see why NVIDIA is playing up CUDA for all they're worth. Video game graphics rendering could be on the cusp of a technological singularity. Namely, ray tracing. Ray tracing is becoming feasible to do in real time. It's a stretch at present, but time will change that. Ray tracing is a significant step forward in terms of visual quality, but it also makes coding a lot of other things relatively easy. Valve's recent "Portal" required some rather convoluted hacks to render the portals with acceptable performance, but in a ray tracing engine those same portals only take a couple lines of code to implement and have no impact on performance. Another advantage of ray tracing is that it's dead simple to parallelize. While current approaches to video game graphics are going to get more and more difficult to work with as parallel processing rises, ray tracing will remain simple.
The real question is whether NVIDIA is poised to do ray-tracing better than Intel in the next few product cycles. Intel is hip to all of the above, and they can smell blood in the water. If they can beef up the floating point performance of their processors then dedicated graphics cards may soon become completely unnecessary. NVIDIA is under the axe and they know it, which might explain all the recent anti-Intel smack-talk. Still, it remains to be seen who can actually walk the walk.
1. Take an interest in what other people are doing. First of all, most people love to talk about what they're doing. (provided you aren't asking at a bad time) Second, what everyone is doing may actually fit together and be motivated towards a common goal. Understanding that goal and how other people are working towards it can help you understand and motivate your own work. 2. Some labs will have extracurricular activities. Show up. Once you have some experience with the group, consider organizing extracurricular activities yourself, even if its just a trip to the bar. 3. Everything takes longer than you think it will. A lot longer. Try not to get frustrated. 4. If you think you are going to need parts that have to be ordered, work your ass off until they're in the mail. Then, while you're waiting for them to arrive, you can catch up on your other work. 5. There are going to be times when you need equipment that others are using. Don't sweat it. If they know you need it, they'll try to free it up for you. It might take a while though. Likewise, try to free up equipment other people need. 6. Don't panic.
Especially in a market dominated by a very small number of giants. When there's no competition, there's no way for consumers to vote with their wallets other than to do without internet access entirely.
I'm fortunate to live in an area where there are *two* competing monolithic ISP's, but if they happened to both engage in these practices I'd be hooped.
The Spanish conquest of the Americas is often overly dramatized. In all instances I am aware of, it was *not* Spanish technology that carried the day.
Takes the Aztec's for example. Many story tellers will spin a glorious yarn about the siege of Tenochtitlan. Most of those will be glad to talk about how Moctezuma revered Cortés as a god. Most will also completely gloss over the fact that the Spaniards were only a small percentage of the force that laid siege to Tenochtitlan. The Aztec's were not very popular amongst their neighbors, so when Cortés marched on Tenochtitlan the Aztec's enemies came in droves to capitalize on a change to take them down. The Inca's were smack in the middle of a civil war over succession when the Spaniards arrived on the scene, and by pure luck, managed to kidnap the heir apparent. (They held him hostage for gold and then executed him.) Their timing was fortuitous, to say the least. However, the capture of Cuzco was the real fall of Peru, and by that time the Spanish had again picked up indigenous allies to fight for them.
Finally, there is the Mayans. If you watched Apocalypto then you probably got the impression that the Maya were living in big cities and making a mess of things when the Spaniards showed up and conqured/saved them. Nope. They had abandoned their cities centuries before. Even with their civilization an echo of its former glory, the Maya put up more resistance against the Europeans than, perhaps, any other indigenous people in the america's. Unlike the Aztec's and Incas, there was no single Mayan center which could be attacked and neutralized. The Maya were spread out in some of the densest, nastiest, most brutal jungle on Earth. The Spaniards would capture one town and move on to the next only to find that they had to recapture the previous town all over again the next time they went past it. It took centuries to subdue just a *portion* of the Mayan population.
Now, it would seem that we're way off topic, but we can draw some pretty interesting parallels actually. RIAA is a centralized body, much like the Inca or Aztecs. All it would take is for one major record label to withdraw their support to RIAA and that would be their end. Likewise, a change to copyright law could doom all the labels overnight. Music pirates, on the other hand, are by their very nature decentralized. You can squash as many individuals with lawsuits as you want, but the P2P network lives on. Finding those individuals and gathering enough evidence to bring a lawsuit that has a chance of winning if they don't cave and settle is also not an easy task. They are like the Maya. Hard to find, difficult to suppress, and resilient. If RIAA and the labels somehow managed to keep going as they are now, it would take centuries to bring piracy to and end at best.
Anyways, I'm at the point where I just want easy access to good music. If the labels brought back Oink in all it's glory at $30/month I'd be their first customer. If they insist that I have to spend $10 an album for lossy DRM'd tracks on iTunes or $15 for a CD, neither of which net the artist more than $0.15, then no deal.
The way I see it, there is an answer to music distribution. Say that somebody created a private torrent tracker site where the members paid a monthly access fee. Artists could seed their music on this torrent site and be paid a percentage of the gross according to how much their stuff is downloaded. No middlemen. No record companies. Just the artists and the torrent site. Potentially, artists could make a lot more money than they are now. However, there are problems. Perhaps the stickiest is that little issue of critical mass. If a handful of independents got together and did this, they'd fail miserably. Such a site would need a *massive* catalog to get off the ground. It would have to include a very large number of artists from day 1. Still, it is a beautiful dream.
I was pretty surprised when Dell finally started putting some effort into their laptop designs. For example, take the XPS m1330 that came out last year. It's actually really nice. I wanted an near-ultra-portable but *powerful* Ubuntu laptop and was within a hair's breadth of getting a macbook pro. (The air is a slick design, but the power just isn't there.) Then I found out I could get something every bit as powerful as a high-end macbook pro in the form-factor of a 13" macbook, only lighter, and for less money. (Caveat to follow.) Then I found out that the design actually looked nice. Nicer than the macbooks to my tastes. (Seriously, it's time for a design update Apple.) On top of that, the m1330's design makes a fair bit of ergonomic sense too. The laptop tapers down towards your wrists, rather than the tendinitis-inducing edge on macbooks.
Even more surprising, the m1330 is really well supported in Ubuntu. (Dell actually sells the m1330 with Ubuntu pre-installed, although the discount is rather pathetic.) More things just work in a default install of Ubuntu on the m1330 than in Vista! (The only thing that doesn't work as well in Ubuntu as it does in Vista is the fingerprint reader, but that's just because biometric password support in Linux, and KDE especially, sucks dingo balls at present.) And yes, if I bought a macbook I probably would have tossed the OSX disks and reformated the drive first thing. I've had to develop under OSX and, while I don't mind it, I definitely prefer Ubuntu.
Caveat time. Dell's customization options are still royally borked. You can pick up a lot of accessories, like bluetooth mice, fairly cheap when buying a laptop, but other components are just insanely expensive. Anyone who maxes out the memory on a Dell while ordering it and then complains about the price is an idiot. Upgrading the memory on a Dell won't void the warranty. You want 4GB? Get 1GB from Dell and, toss it, and buy a couple 2GB sticks yourself. You'll save at least a couple hundred dollars. If Dell would smarten up about that kind of thing I'd have no complaints.
Still, one thing is pretty clear. You can no longer mindlessly slag Dell for epitomizing bland and crappy laptop designs. They do still have ultra-cheap crap and bland bricks built like tanks for the corporate types, but they're also gunning for the sexier end of the market now.
Parallel programming is going to go mainstream, not because people find it interesting, but because that's the way hardware is forcing us to go. First mainframes, then workstations, and now desktops and laptops have moved away from single CPU cores. In every case, it has been a necessary evil due to the inability to pack enough power into a single monolithic processor. Does anyone actually think Intel, if they could, wouldn't happily go back to building single-core CPU's with the same total power as the multi-core CPU's they're making now?
Right now, parallel development techniques, education, and tools are all lagging behind the hardware reality. Relatively few applications currently make even remotely efficient use of multiple cores, and that includes embarrassingly parallel code that would require only minor code changes to run in parallel and no changes to the base algorithm at all.
However, if you look around, the tools are materializing. Parallel programming skills will be in hot demand shortly. It's just a matter of time before the multi-core install base is large enough that software companies can't ignore it.
It's painful watching some of the most fascinating projects ever conceived being raked over the coals of budget cuts in the U.S., but you guys aren't alone.
Some of you may have seen that giant freakin' cool space robot called Dextre that just went up to the ISS. The Canadian company responsible (MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates or MDA) for that coolness is being sold off to a U.S. company.
The important thing to realize about MDA is that it was started over four decades ago and has been carefully nurtured by public funding with the express intention of forwarding Canada's space technology sector. MDA is the backbone of Canada's space program. (as small as it may be) In addition to selling off Canada's space program, this sale also includes RADARSAT-2, which was built with Canadian tax money and is currently used by the government to monitor the arctic. The sale of this satellite to a U.S. company will mean that the Canadian government will be ceding control of the satellite which it paid for to the U.S., a country which disputes Canadian sovereignty in some of the areas RADARSAT-2 monitors. RADARSAT-2 was effectively *given* to MDA to simplify operations, but now it's being sold to the U.S. and the money is going to MDA's shareholders rather than the Canadian government that paid for it!
The only thing standing in the way is a Rubber Stamp from the Industry minister Jim Prentice. Seeing as he's never failed to rubber stamp a sale before, the picture looks grim.
So, the U.S. is not alone in being mismanaged from the very top.
Militant Buddhists have raised a little Hell in Sri Lanka, burning down Christian churches and whatnot, but we don't really hear much about it because it's not white Christians who are dying. Western media does tend to ignore conflicts where the victims aren't lily white. Heck, look at the war coverage in Iraq. Depending on whose numbers you go by, over a hundred Iraqi civilians have died for every American soldier, but who makes the news nine times out of ten? There are, sadly, many more examples in Africa, such as Rwanda. Genocides nearly on the level of the Holocaust go almost completely unreported. But, I digress. My point was that Buddhism can be twisted towards the ends of violence like any other religion, even if it's tenets are somewhat more pacifist. It's the followers that matter, not the religion.
Although Christianity has mellowed out somewhat, it is still used as a tool of intolerance and violence from time to time. The Bible really does contain some rather contemptible passages. The Koran and Torah are no different, since they all come from the same roots. It's strange that religions which share a common root harbor more hatred for each other than for completely alien religions.
Islam, as a religion, is fundamentally no more violent than any other religion out there. At present, however, some of it's followers are. Yes, I did just say that. Jesus can be portrayed as a exhibitionistic homosexual pedophile on prime-time TV (e.g. Family Guy and Stewie's encounter) without too much fuss but, if some Danish cartoonist draws Muhammad, the death threats start flying. This isn't because all Muslims are violent, but rather, because a rather significant subset of them are. In today's society, any organization, religious or otherwise, should be open to public criticism and even satire. Currently, Islam ranks up there with Scientology when it comes to a complete inability to laugh at themselves. That just isn't healthy and needs to change. Those few violent Muslims out there need to learn that they're actually doing Islam a disservice by standing up for it in such disgraceful ways.
As for the West's part, I really don't think we're doing Islam any favors by censoring anti-islam speech. If followers of Islam want to move beyond their current "suspected terrorist" status and find wide acceptance, Muslims *everywhere* have to learn to suck it up and take it when their religion is criticized or satired. If they can show they can shrug off an insult or take a joke then Muslim populations in Western countries might start to find acceptance easier to come by.
Don't forget that the melting point of water *decreases* as pressure increases. The liquid core may well be damned cold!
Say you create a polarized single photon. Any measurement of that photon will destroy it, and no single measurement will allow you to fully characterize it's polarization state. This is the foundation of Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). If somebody were to try to eavesdrop, she would have to intercept single photons and measure them, thereby destroying them. She could send new photons to replace the ones she measured, but enough would differ from what was originally being sent that the people trying to create a secure key would know there was an eavesdropper.
The experiment in the linked article operates by sending pulses containing on the order of 10^16 photons, all in the same state. An eavesdropper could simply intercept some of those photons and pick up the key without anyone knowing. In order for this setup to work with QKD, they would have to *send* single photons from the very beginning.
They claim 4.6 clicks per second in this experiment. If they sent single photons, that would come out to around 4.6 * 10^-16 clicks per second. This would be nigh undetectable with the dark counts they have, but let's assume dark counts weren't an issue. Pulsing at 17KHz would mean they could get 7.82 * 10^-11 bits of key per second. That translates to around 500 000 years to exchange a 128-bit key. That's not very practical.
Now, I really don't mean to bash them. Just aligning a satellite and getting any results at all is impressive. While what they have is not practical for actual QKD, the seed of innovation is there. Exciting stuff!
"Quantum Key Distribution" (QKD for short) is the term you're looking for, and it does exactly what it says. There are already commercial QKD systems on the market and their primary application is in closely spaced bank networks. QKD isn't sci-fi. It's being used right now. And yes, key distribution *is* encryption. In it's simplest, most secure, and most inefficient form, encryption involves simply XOR'ing the message with a key of the same bit length. (i.e. A One time PAD) Very few encryption systems utilize a one-time PAD though, since it's obviously very wasteful. Still, you *could* use quantum key in that manner if you really wanted to.
One of the biggest strengths, and weaknesses, of QKD is that it is impossible to deterministically measure and replicate a photon. (Google the "no cloning theorem" if you're interested.) This means that an eavesdropper can't cut into a QKD line and listen in without changing it's content in a way that those using it can detect. The detection of an eavesdropper, however, is not random. It's a certainty that arises from the statistics. The downside to all this is that QKD currently only works when the two parties involved are close enough to send photons to each other directly. This limits current QKD systems to a practical distance of approximately 100 km. (This is primarily due to loss in fibre.)
There is, of course, a workaround: Quantum repeater stations. These are somewhat deceptively named because they don't actually repeat a quantum state. What they do is create a chain of entanglement that ultimately winds up with two widely separated parties (and noone else, including the repeaters) sharing entangled photon pairs that can be used to set up a key. Secure QKD can take place even if the repeaters aren't trusted. I won't bore you with the specifics. In fact, I'm going to wave my hands at you and just make a claim, because explaining it would take a very long time. To wit, quantum repeaters will never allow for communication over longer distances than current QKD schemes unless they incorporate some form of quantum memory. Quantum memory is one of the key ingredients for quantum encryption over distances long enough to be really useful.
The research mentioned in this article is interesting, but it doesn't appear to be at a stage that is practically useful. For quantum memory to be useful, it has to store light (vacuum states) on an order of milliseconds or longer and have a storage/recall rate of better than 50%, and it doesn't look like they're there yet. Still, quantum memory is *the* critical stumbling block in a lot of applications, so it's very exciting to see work being done on it. I fully expect that the first practical quantum memory units are going to win their makers a big fat Nobel prize.
The probability of this satellite landing on Osama bin Laden is probably higher than the probability of him being caught within the next couple of months. It's good to see the U.S. finally cracking down on that slimeball!
Here's an extremely simplified version of how Quantum Teleportation works. This model *will* break down if you push it too far, but it's a better model of the real physics than a Star Trek transporter.
1. Go out and buy two identical rubik's cubes.
2. Put them into identical configurations.
3. Send one to the other side of the planet.
4. Now, create any new configuration you want, but record the steps you take. (e.g. Rotate top 90 degrees left, etc.)
5. A person on the other side of the planet with the other cube can now recreate your cube precisely if you call them up and tell them the steps you took.
In quantum-land, there are some rather huge differences, which I'll talk about in a moment. However, the crucial thing to get out of this necessarily imperfect macroscopic example is that this kind of teleportation relies on preparing identical rubik's cubes in advance, classically transporting one of them to the receiver, and communicating via classical channels when actually performing the teleportation. At NO point can information travel faster than light (FTL). i.e. Quantum teleportation does *not* break causality. However, you will note that you can, potentially, communicate a very complex rubik's cube configuration with a very small ammount of classical data, provided you choose your initial state and operations intelligently.
The reality of Quantum Land (This will most likely confuse you. For that, I apologize.)
The pair of identically configured rubik's cubes are meant to be an analogy for an entangled pair, which is the most crucial thing to have in any quantum teleportation scheme. (You can make entangled pairs out of many things, such as photons or electrons. However, these things are typically tiny and simple. Complex Atoms, molecules, etc. don't work so well.) Where the analogy breaks down is entanglement, which is something we just don't see in macroscopic objects. The key idea behind entanglement is that you can place two things into a state that is not separable (i.e. You cannot describe one things state without also describing the other simultaneously), and any operation on one of them will have an effect on the other no matter how far separated the two things are. (NOTE: This does NOT allow FTL communication.) The problem is that quantum operations on entangled states are probabilistic rather than deterministic. If the sender performs operations, measurements really, on her half of the entangled pair and a new particle that is to be teleported, the receiver needs the results of those measurements to do anything useful, such as reconstruct the particle the sender had. Those results *must* be communicated from the sender to the receiver via classical channels.
Another big thing to note about quantum teleportation is that it, currently, is applied to indistinguishable particles. When you copy a rubik's cube, the copy is made up of complex molecules in a configuration that is unique. If you can magically examine the structure of any two real world rubik's cube you can tell them apart. They are distinguishable. A pair of photons in the same state, on the other hand, are indistinguishable. When you perform quantum teleportation, the copy that comes out at the sender's end is an absolutely perfect copy of the original because it has the exact state of the original and the particles themselves are not distinguishable. The state of the original, however, is changed when it is measured in the teleportation process, and there's no way to recover it. Effectively, the original is destroyed and a perfect copy comes out at the other end.
So there you have it. Quantum teleportation isn't really like a Star Trek transporter at all. It actually a lot stranger than that, and much more difficult to grok. (especially the entanglment part) Again, I apologize for not being able to come up with a way to explain entanglement without throwing a lot of math at you. (I'm not sure you can really understand it without the math.)
Blogs, google-bombing advertisers, dead sites taken over by domain squatters, broken links, inaccurate wiki's... It's becoming increasingly more difficult to find good information online. Perhaps this is why the tolerance for delay and reliance on search engines is increasing across the board. (not just in them whipper-snappers!) With a lower signal to noise ratio you have to churn through more material to get what you want. That means investing less time in avenues that don't pay off fast and using search engines to avoid tedious mucking about with links that are broken as often as not. The evolution of search engines is about the only thing that is helping to combat the decreasing SNR of the web. Try searching for something specific and imagine what it would be like if you had to go back to using Lycos circa 1998!
That being said, ease of searching is just one of the many reasons why libraries should be digitizing their collections. How many times have you found a book that looked absolutely perfect for what you're doing, only to find that it's loaned out, damaged or defaced, returned but not reshelved, lost, etc.. Also, it's just plain more convenient to be able to pull up some text from the comfort of your couch rather than trekking into the library. That convenience adds up if it's something you access regularly. e.g. Who goes to the library to read paper journals these days?