I wonder if this is really good press in america: a politician showing that his interests lie where his funds come from. At least that's what this whole story looks like to me.
Sorry, but when i have to use MS-DOS (look in your BIOS as what Windows 9X identifies) to get to use most applications and play all that nifty games then it's not really a choice. The point here is, that MS products (like DOS) won over competing products (like DR-DOS) by dubious marketing strategies (having windows 3.x check if the 'right' DOS is running) and not because it's a superior product. This means MS is using it's monopoly to bully competitors out of the market, harming competitors and consumers. MS then proceeds to grab other markets with help of that monopoly (establishing IE as major browser when Netscape really was the better choice), leaving customers fewer and fewer choices. Also the notion of 'choice' is questionable if i have to buy my computer at a special place when i don't want to have Windows preinstalled on it and then have to take IE with it because MS chose it to be an 'essential' part of the OS.
At first i thought: wow now Microsoft is going to get some (justified) really bad press after that ruling. But now it seems we're going to see something more substantial soon.
Anyway, i think this is only the start of it, since this sets a precedent for many other cases where Jacksons ruling will be cited. Also microsoft will get the heat for their business methods in other countries too (wasn't there some case in France?).
We probably all agree, that the university acted correctly on a perfectly legal request of the RIAA. On the other hand most consumers are not happy to be ripped off by the music industry which in the meantime defines what is 'good' and what is 'bad' music, serving more and more mainstream garbage barely worth listening more than once.
Obviously the internet in combination with mp3 can be used to distribute music free of charge (most expenses can be covered by advertising) very fast, there are probably also a lot of small bands which would never be considered for promotion by the major labels but make very fine music nevertheless. (Just recently i stumbled over an excellent demo tape, and was very sad to hear that this will never be pressed to CD.) So why not combine these two, creating a network of mirrorsites distributing really independant and free music across the internet.
I think there would be a lot of bands grabbing the opportunity to have their music published this way, either out of idealism, or maybe just to become known. If the distributing sites could cover their costs with advertising the whole thing might work very well.
To avoid legal catfights some sort of 'GPL for music' (e.g. freely distributable as long as the artists are credited) would be a good thing. The distributing sites should also cover reviews, so you know what you get before downloading 20 MB of mp3.
I wouldn't wonder if such a thing already existed, anybody care to provide some pointers?
Well, it's about nerve signals and hooking up nerves to chips has quite some interesting applications. A very simple one is anesthetisation which is already used in dental medicine. Electric stimulation of lims can be applied to people tied to the bed to keep muscular tissue from reducing. Artificial lims is another one. Controling limbs with electric signals could help in cases of damages to nerves. And that's just very basic applications.
This is not entirely true, for at least two reasons: Commercial Piracy is dealt with by diferent means, you can target either the pirate or at least some distributor with lawsuits. This makes sense since you can target few people and can expect that taking one out has some effect.
With consumers burning/distributing copies the problem is, that if every consumer makes (on the average) two copies (or at least more than one) copies spread exponentially. The other problem is, that if you expect about ten copies per sold DVD reaching someone who would have bought it otherwise your income from that cds is reduced by a factor of ten.
Exponential distribution won't work if each copy is a little worse than the previous one. But generally the industry wants to make it hard to make copies, so noone bothers and only a percentage of sold media gets copied. So the thing the industry really doesn't want is Joe normal putting their DVD in his computer, running DeCSS over it and handing the copy to his friend in a matter of minutes.
For now the impact of the decryption program is small only because the resulting huge amount of data still makes copying hard. (I think this is also one reason why nearly every game on the PC market is bloated with films etc. so you need at least 3 CDs for it"). But with storage densities becoming ever higher this might not hold long.
This is mainly a forum to pose questions, the answers entering a database. Apart from the difficulties of evaluating answers ($5000000 for an answer to "How do i cast a long to a string?") there will also be a need of categorizing and evaluating questions (where to put "I'm thinking about joining a pyramid scheme. How can I tell which Ponzi scam is right for me?"). Often the problem begins with posing the right questions.
Also much of what this site has to offer is already present: the huge, admittedly unorganized, pool of information represented in the WWW can be accessed via searchengines, newsgroups present a forum for posing questions, and sites such as Slashdot where people with common interests can exchange information/opinions.
At the moment there is more likely an excess of information and a need to organize and evaluate what's present. This will become apparent for infomarkets very soon, when the number of questions becomes larger and the answers have to be handpicked from the garbage.
Hence I think, what is needed are programs evaluating/categorizing information. In the future probably everybody will have a personalized knowledgebase to match and evaluate newsitems against and maybe there are moderation systems like on Slashdot. (I think David Brin described such a system in "Earth".) So everyone may get his personalized "paper" with his "preferred" news.
Archieving and categorizing this news will soon accumulate a huge knowledge base, where the main problem is probably to find that item of interest matching a specific question. Matches against knowledgebases and advanced patternsearching are solutions already present.
So i think the infomarkets forum is at the moment, if not superfluous, used for the wrong kind of questions, questions for which answers are already present and can easily be found.
The most 'expensive' questions on the other hand are probably to be handled confidentially, i.e. the question might be already a giveaway of a new technology to be investigated/exploited, or an answer might only be accessible by illegal means (corporate secrets). Obviously there is a market for 'private investigators', but that cannot be realized on infomarkets.
There's a much easier, more legal way to do get people of 'their' land: when somebody starts to build infrastructure on the moon they probably may charge owners of 'developped' properties with development costs. Now that's a bill i don't want to pay...
One huge problem is the abuse of the system. Someone could simply set up the knowledge base to go fishing for some secret industrial data, well someone already did.
The story of the german energy company Enercon is a good example here. In short it describes how a german company finds their own invention already patented in the US, by the US competitor Kennentech, with papers bearing even Enercon logos! It sounds funny until you realize that Enercon lost 100 million DM and 300 people lost their jobs, as Enercon was not allowed to sell their products in the US.
So if you are looking for some adversely affected 'decent citizens' (though not US citizens) throw the words 'Enercon' and 'NSA' at your preferred Searchengine. I did so and got some coverage of the case here or a little down the page from heise. German readers might want to look at a script for the "plusminus" show or a "Spiegel" or "Zeit" article. While digging up the case i also stumbled over this nice collection of slides concerning the NSA.
I also found sending wordlists over the internet a little too naive an approach, sure a system capable of word recognition will have enough speech recognition or even a match against a simple knowledge base to sort this out. They even had enough time to test these features, since some people always appended an echelon trailer.
Also the system probably looks out for context patterns (e.g. sender recipient relation/distance), so if you send your spouse the trailer appended to the shopping list, the message will probably not even be looked at. If you really want to bring the system to a grinding halt, i think you shouldn't try to exhaust machines (though 'encrypting' (aka gzip, uuencode) enough stuff might slow things down a while but in the end will only be an argument for dedicating more computing power to echelon) but humans. Thus one should make up messages that must be read by humans, even better engage in longer email conversations.
Maybe the best and most fun way to do so would be playing 'conspiracy games'. Maybe you know the games where you can 'poison' other players by attaching some post-it note to the bottom of their coffeecup saying 'poisoned'. I heard after a week of this you become really paranoid. Now play this thing in teams, do the coordination via emails (best by forwarding around ca. 3-4 email accounts), discuss tactics with other players etc. etc. And hey it's fun, so you don't do it on one 'Echelon day' (well know by the NSA) but in your own 'paranoia week' (or whatever). Even the context pattern will look more 'catching'.
If you get humans pondering over a lot of these messages, needing at least some seconds to figure out if that's a real bomb or just an empty cokecan you want to attach to that car and if there's enough people having fun with this then one might see some effect... even if not, at least it's fun with spy vs. spy games.
Thus i think it would be a good idea of the defense to consult some well reputated experts on the field, (maybe they should look out in the open source community), and have him explain what is standard usage of http protocol and browser/server features and what was originally developped by amazon. Also the impact of such patents covering 'one-click-anything-via-the-web' could be addressed. This also has the advantage of making the subject of ridiculous patents more public.
While you can not transmit information with entangled particles, you can use them to create one-time-pads with a little add on to the method described here (was an old Slashdot article), basically by having one side transmit if a photon was polarized along or perpendicular to a filter, but not which position the filter was in.
Since the quantum method ensures, that only sender and recipient of a message know this one-time-pad, and 'sniffing' (=measurement) of the transmitted photons leads to errors and thus notification of a compromised (quantum-) line, you can then use the one-time-pad to transmit your message via any regular line you choose.
Let's see, how the music industry, being ever so eager to squeeze money out of everything, will handle this one.
As i understand it, the program can learn to copy a 'style' of a musician. But there's no such thing yet like a 'copyright on style'. While with a piece of music you know pretty well who composed it, recognizing it's style, let alone proving an instrument was programmed to the style of a certain artist, might be next to impossible. I wonder if there are any precedents for such a copyright. I expect some pretty interesting lawsuits out of this.
The problem is, that only the true and final recipient of the message should employ the filters to determine the photons polarisation.
One possible scenario is, to have an encrypted link to the satellite, decrypt there, encrypt anew and send the information elsewhere. This would mean that anyone using the satellite has to trust it's makers.
Ideally you want only the true recipient to decrypt the message, thus you have to pass the Photons without determining their polarisation. A simple mirror would do the job but that would (apart from the problem that the photons now have to travel through the atmosphere twice) only link a few points on the earth's surface and give no 'switching' capabilities.
The next problem is the path between your satellite uplink and the sender/recipient. Ideally the photon should travel from the sender to the recipient without it's polarisation being determined so it has to go from a satellite dish to optical fibre still without being measured.
If there are devices accomplishing this feat i'd really like to see them.
Other ways might employ interference between two photons and sending a 'translation' matrix to sender and recipient (so anyone may know the 'relation' between their photons, but only sender and recipient know the actual photons they sent), or devices sending two photons of unknown (but related) polarisation to two recipients (the measurement by one recipient would determine the state of the other photon).
I wonder how they will treat sensitive sites? When i tried to get some information about Fort Knox (for some riddle) i got to see some of the paranoia still in effect on that subject. Essentially there was no map to be found with more than a general location of the bullion depot. (The exception being a James Bond movie:-)
Now will one be able to purchase space shots of such sites? What about pictures concerning other countries security or privately owned sites? Who will have a say in this, and how will a right for privacy/security be evaluated ("Hey we won't compromise any 'good guys'!")? Consider the case when such photos are used in a terrorists attack, maybe on an airport.
For example it states that "many parents will leap at the chance to make their children smarter, fitter and prettier". Apart from the question how many superinteligent supermodels we really need and who will do the "real" work there is also the question if the majority of parents really wants a child more intelligent than them, asking them questions they aren't able to understand, let alone answer.
We don't need the event of genetic engineering to find theese people, just look at schools where some parents are actually preventing their children getting the best possible education, forbidding them to work with computers or with the internet.
Also prenatal preventing of illnesses raises the question how a raised life expectancy will affect our economy. Following this line of thought leads to some very inhuman concepts indeed.
I don't even want to think what a "Mail Order Babies" company might produce in terms of screwup. Imagine the scandal of "Implemented Government Control" (the discission about censoring shows that there is ambition) maybe starting as an attempt to weed out criminals (for the best of society) then altering the definitions of "crime" (are undemocratic actions a crime? Undemocratic thoughts? What is 'undemocratic' anyway?).
Or maybe regard what happened when intel's newest generation of CPUs where found to have some minor flaws... now transfer the picture to genetics. Now for a CPU i could reclaim my money, or at least throw it away for another one.
Genetic engineering is being done, even with human genetic material. So the development to genetically engineered children is probably inevitable. But this will not only change the look of the genetically engineered, but also our view of morals and the value of life.
Re:A quick observation regarding quantum encryptio
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Quantum encryption was covered on slashdot and the link refered to one pretty comprehensive article how it could work.
The problem of laser transmissions around the curvature of the earth was solved with satellites, though i would be interested about the design of switches that preserve the quantum nature of the transmitted bits, yet allow for routing.
It also essentially stated, that errors during transmission are to be expected but a constant monitoring of a middle man would result in an error rate of 25%, so as long as the transmission errors are in the percent range, a middleman can either be detected or can only glance at a very small percentage of the transmitted bits which shouldn't result in usable information for compressed data transmissions.
Another problem altogether would be a middleman attack, where the middleman can actively intervene in the link, posing as the recipient for the sender, decode, encode again thus posing as sender for the true recipient.
Since quantum transmission relies on multiple transmission paths (a one directional quantum path and two directional transmission of reference data) routing this data along physically distinct lines and maybe even changing the routing during transmission could prevent such attacks.
Even better than "Fermat's Enigma"?
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I was very happy with Singh's book about Fermats theorem. He managed to gather a lot of historical and bibliographical background and presented it in a fascinating way that had me read the whole book in one stretch. What i saw at amazon and the excerpt from bookstore cool made me real curious about this one.
Hey wouldn't it be nice if for once the computer i bought one year isn't an overdimensioned paperweight in the next? I dare not hope so, but not because i think that molecular switches could do the wonder by 2005.
I think it will take the industry quite some time to build CPUs based on some new kind of switches. I don't expect more than prototypes or ridiculously overpriced units in less than twenty years. (Makes me think about fusion reactors, people have been saying "they will work in 50 years" since 1950 i believe.)
While it is now possible to manipulate individual atoms and we have even seen some molecular switches already at work, new and economic ways of assembling them on a chip need to be found, a whole lot of experimenting has to be done, we don't even know yet, how long it'd take such a switch to degenerate... chips containing (then) maybe a hundred million transistors wouldn't survive a week if such a switch breaks about every million years. ("Oops some cosmic rays came along and knocked an atom out of place, sorry thats not in the warranty.").
Anyhow, the industry expects that they can at least work till 0.1 micron with 'conventional' semiconductors, some conductivity problems of such small barriers might be addressed by just the right surface/interlayer coating, synchroton sources could be the tool for higher resolution. Ways are found so a broken or temporarily malfunctioning transistor can be worked around (which will come in handy later), so the odd stray electron doesn't hurt. Transistors suddenly can handle more than one bit, new concepts of building CPUs will free all those transistors from their specialized niches in FPU's and elswhere , and thus stop idling 70% of the time, microparallism is on it's way... (maybe Linus knows more about that). So even with a constant number of transistors more functionality can be achieved.
Hey i didn't even begin to think about more efficient software and faster memory access (but that isn't what Moore's Law is about anyway).
So i think we'll be able to hold up Moore's Law, maybe even twenty years, if not in numbers of transistors per chip then at least in the realized functionality. That's just fine, because we'll need that time as i said before.
I think the article might be used by some to advance efforts to control the internet, like:
- banishment of cryptography - censorship - giving government agencies special access to computers on the internet
just to name a few. Apart from the problems specific to these schemes (cryptography is a necessity for e-commerce in the long run, who is held responsible for content, backdoors can also be accessed by the wrong groups) they also make the internet a more unfree place and almost always hinder development of the internet or limit its use.
In the mentioned cases the cure is worse than what it's meant to cure, mostly because determined groups will work around or ignore such laws, so only it's negative sides come to effect. Thus regulations of the internet should be carefully crafted, with much thought given to their proposed implementation and the resulting effects.
These dangers of cyberterrorism, namely its mentioning being used as an argument to hastily impose new rules on the internet, should at least be mentioned, to avoid that the article itself is used that way.
The basic reasons are: - maintaining two systems is costly and an unnecessary source of errors - working together on international projects is easier if people use one system and you won't see the whole world go to 'imperial' units.
So assuming this, the argument for the US to switch to the metric system as soon as possible is: it saves money, since switching won't become cheaper, and at the moment the US are maintaining an obsolete measurement system.
The whole point of this seems to be that it's pointless and thus harmless. It's probably a good thing that these messages, 99.9% of which will be moronic garbage, will never reach a soul. Now if we could convince spammers to try and reach a broader audience, we could even get something out of this:
Think about it: In the infinity of space Pyramid Schemes *must* work, also there will be an infinite supply of aliens interested in human anatomy (for those "see nice grrrrls at www.XXX.com" spammers), ways of avoiding taxes in the US, or the ultimate tools to spam other aliens. And since the signal "does go on forever" you don't even need to handle this complicated bulk emailer: one message is sufficient to spam an infinite number of aliens !!!
Well, wasn't Scientology well known for their very 'determined' ways of stopping anyone spreading information about their organisation, be it with lawyers or by other means? I'm not to happy about the message that the people with the most money and hence the most 'determined' lawyers can control the flow of information, but i'm also not too surprised about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this is really good press in america: a politician showing that his interests lie where his funds come from. At least that's what this whole story looks like to me.
Sorry, but when i have to use MS-DOS (look in your BIOS as what Windows 9X identifies) to get to use most applications and play all that nifty games then it's not really a choice.
The point here is, that MS products (like DOS) won over competing products (like DR-DOS) by dubious marketing strategies (having windows 3.x check if the 'right' DOS is running) and not because it's a superior product.
This means MS is using it's monopoly to bully competitors out of the market, harming competitors and consumers. MS then proceeds to grab other markets with help of that monopoly (establishing IE as major browser when Netscape really was the better choice), leaving customers fewer and fewer choices.
Also the notion of 'choice' is questionable if i have to buy my computer at a special place when i don't want to have Windows preinstalled on it and then have to take IE with it because MS chose it to be an 'essential' part of the OS.
At first i thought: wow now Microsoft is going to get some (justified) really bad press after that ruling. But now it seems we're going to see something more substantial soon.
Anyway, i think this is only the start of it, since this sets a precedent for many other cases where Jacksons ruling will be cited. Also microsoft will get the heat for their business methods in other countries too (wasn't there some case in France?).
We probably all agree, that the university acted correctly on a perfectly legal request of the RIAA. On the other hand most consumers are not happy to be ripped off by the music industry which in the meantime defines what is 'good' and what is 'bad' music, serving more and more mainstream garbage barely worth listening more than once.
Obviously the internet in combination with mp3 can be used to distribute music free of charge (most expenses can be covered by advertising) very fast, there are probably also a lot of small bands which would never be considered for promotion by the major labels but make very fine music nevertheless. (Just recently i stumbled over an excellent demo tape, and was very sad to hear that this will never be pressed to CD.) So why not combine these two, creating a network of mirrorsites distributing really independant and free music across the internet.
I think there would be a lot of bands grabbing the opportunity to have their music published this way, either out of idealism, or maybe just to become known. If the distributing sites could cover their costs with advertising the whole thing might work very well.
To avoid legal catfights some sort of 'GPL for music' (e.g. freely distributable as long as the artists are credited) would be a good thing. The distributing sites should also cover reviews, so you know what you get before downloading 20 MB of mp3.
I wouldn't wonder if such a thing already existed, anybody care to provide some pointers?
Well, it's about nerve signals and hooking up nerves to chips has quite some interesting applications. A very simple one is anesthetisation which is already used in dental medicine. Electric stimulation of lims can be applied to people tied to the bed to keep muscular tissue from reducing. Artificial lims is another one. Controling limbs with electric signals could help in cases of damages to nerves.
And that's just very basic applications.
This is not entirely true, for at least two reasons:
Commercial Piracy is dealt with by diferent means, you can target either the pirate or at least some distributor with lawsuits. This makes sense since you can target few people and can expect that taking one out has some effect.
With consumers burning/distributing copies the problem is, that if every consumer makes (on the average) two copies (or at least more than one) copies spread exponentially. The other problem is, that if you expect about ten copies per sold DVD reaching someone who would have bought it otherwise your income from that cds is reduced by a factor of ten.
Exponential distribution won't work if each copy is a little worse than the previous one. But generally the industry wants to make it hard to make copies, so noone bothers and only a percentage of sold media gets copied. So the thing the industry really doesn't want is Joe normal putting their DVD in his computer, running DeCSS over it and handing the copy to his friend in a matter of minutes.
For now the impact of the decryption program is small only because the resulting huge amount of data still makes copying hard. (I think this is also one reason why nearly every game on the PC market is bloated with films etc. so you need at least 3 CDs for it"). But with storage densities becoming ever higher this might not hold long.
This is mainly a forum to pose questions, the answers entering a database. Apart from the difficulties of evaluating answers ($5000000 for an answer to "How do i cast a long to a string?") there will also be a need of categorizing and evaluating questions (where to put "I'm thinking about joining a pyramid scheme. How can I tell which Ponzi scam is right for me?"). Often the problem begins with posing the right questions.
Also much of what this site has to offer is already present: the huge, admittedly unorganized, pool of information represented in the WWW can be accessed via searchengines, newsgroups present a forum for posing questions, and sites such as Slashdot where people with common interests can exchange information/opinions.
At the moment there is more likely an excess of information and a need to organize and evaluate what's present. This will become apparent for infomarkets very soon, when the number of questions becomes larger and the answers have to be handpicked from the garbage.
Hence I think, what is needed are programs evaluating/categorizing information. In the future probably everybody will have a personalized knowledgebase to match and evaluate newsitems against and maybe there are moderation systems like on Slashdot. (I think David Brin described such a system in "Earth".) So everyone may get his personalized "paper" with his "preferred" news.
Archieving and categorizing this news will soon accumulate a huge knowledge base, where the main problem is probably to find that item of interest matching a specific question. Matches against knowledgebases and advanced patternsearching are solutions already present.
So i think the infomarkets forum is at the moment, if not superfluous, used for the wrong kind of questions, questions for which answers are already present and can easily be found.
The most 'expensive' questions on the other hand are probably to be handled confidentially, i.e. the question might be already a giveaway of a new technology to be investigated/exploited, or an answer might only be accessible by illegal means (corporate secrets). Obviously there is a market for 'private investigators', but that cannot be realized on infomarkets.
There's a much easier, more legal way to do get people of 'their' land: when somebody starts to build infrastructure on the moon they probably may charge owners of 'developped' properties with development costs. Now that's a bill i don't want to pay ...
Sorry, i do Physics, not Biology,
...), forces (electromagnetic, strong, weak, gravitation), relativistic spacetime and Quantum mechanics.
I'd like to patent particles (electrons, quarks, photons
Where do i have to go with this?
I'd prefer to see Evolution sue Celera Genomics.
One huge problem is the abuse of the system. Someone could simply set up the knowledge base to go fishing for some secret industrial data, well someone already did.
The story of the german energy company Enercon is a good example here. In short it describes how a german company finds their own invention already patented in the US, by the US competitor Kennentech, with papers bearing even Enercon logos! It sounds funny until you realize that Enercon lost 100 million DM and 300 people lost their jobs, as Enercon was not allowed to sell their products in the US.
So if you are looking for some adversely affected 'decent citizens' (though not US citizens) throw the words 'Enercon' and 'NSA' at your preferred Searchengine. I did so and got some coverage of the case here or a little down the page from heise. German readers might want to look at a script for the "plusminus" show or a "Spiegel" or "Zeit" article. While digging up the case i also stumbled over this nice collection of slides concerning the NSA.
I also found sending wordlists over the internet a little too naive an approach, sure a system capable of word recognition will have enough speech recognition or even a match against a simple knowledge base to sort this out. They even had enough time to test these features, since some people always appended an echelon trailer.
... even if not, at least it's fun with spy vs. spy games.
Also the system probably looks out for context patterns (e.g. sender recipient relation/distance), so if you send your spouse the trailer appended to the shopping list, the message will probably not even be looked at. If you really want to bring the system to a grinding halt, i think you shouldn't try to exhaust machines (though 'encrypting' (aka gzip, uuencode) enough stuff might slow things down a while but in the end will only be an argument for dedicating more computing power to echelon) but humans. Thus one should make up messages that must be read by humans, even better engage in longer email conversations.
Maybe the best and most fun way to do so would be playing 'conspiracy games'. Maybe you know the games where you can 'poison' other players by attaching some post-it note to the bottom of their coffeecup saying 'poisoned'. I heard after a week of this you become really paranoid. Now play this thing in teams, do the coordination via emails (best by forwarding around ca. 3-4 email accounts), discuss tactics with other players etc. etc. And hey it's fun, so you don't do it on one 'Echelon day' (well know by the NSA) but in your own 'paranoia week' (or whatever). Even the context pattern will look more 'catching'.
If you get humans pondering over a lot of these messages, needing at least some seconds to figure out if that's a real bomb or just an empty cokecan you want to attach to that car and if there's enough people having fun with this then one might see some effect
That is probably true,
Thus i think it would be a good idea of the defense to consult some well reputated experts on the field, (maybe they should look out in the open source community), and have him explain what is standard usage of http protocol and browser/server features and what was originally developped by amazon.
Also the impact of such patents covering 'one-click-anything-via-the-web' could be addressed. This also has the advantage of making the subject of ridiculous patents more public.
While you can not transmit information with entangled particles, you can use them to create one-time-pads with a little add on to the method described here (was an old Slashdot article), basically by having one side transmit if a photon was polarized along or perpendicular to a filter, but not which position the filter was in.
Since the quantum method ensures, that only sender and recipient of a message know this one-time-pad, and 'sniffing' (=measurement) of the transmitted photons leads to errors and thus notification of a compromised (quantum-) line, you can then use the one-time-pad to transmit your message via any regular line you choose.
Let's see, how the music industry, being ever so eager to squeeze money out of everything, will handle this one.
As i understand it, the program can learn to copy a 'style' of a musician. But there's no such thing yet like a 'copyright on style'. While with a piece of music you know pretty well who composed it, recognizing it's style, let alone proving an instrument was programmed to the style of a certain artist, might be next to impossible.
I wonder if there are any precedents for such a copyright. I expect some pretty interesting lawsuits out of this.
whatishappening.com
whats-happening.com
or as someone already pointed out
whatzhappening.com?
The problem is, that only the true and final recipient of the message should employ the filters to determine the photons polarisation.
One possible scenario is, to have an encrypted link to the satellite, decrypt there, encrypt anew and send the information elsewhere. This would mean that anyone using the satellite has to trust it's makers.
Ideally you want only the true recipient to decrypt the message, thus you have to pass the Photons without determining their polarisation. A simple mirror would do the job but that would (apart from the problem that the photons now have to travel through the atmosphere twice) only link a few points on the earth's surface and give no 'switching' capabilities.
The next problem is the path between your satellite uplink and the sender/recipient. Ideally the photon should travel from the sender to the recipient without it's polarisation being determined so it has to go from a satellite dish to optical fibre still without being measured.
If there are devices accomplishing this feat i'd really like to see them.
Other ways might employ interference between two photons and sending a 'translation' matrix to sender and recipient (so anyone may know the 'relation' between their photons, but only sender and recipient know the actual photons they sent), or devices sending two photons of unknown (but related) polarisation to two recipients (the measurement by one recipient would determine the state of the other photon).
I wonder how they will treat sensitive sites? :-)
When i tried to get some information about Fort Knox (for some riddle) i got to see some of the paranoia still in effect on that subject. Essentially there was no map to be found with more than a general location of the bullion depot.
(The exception being a James Bond movie
Now will one be able to purchase space shots of such sites? What about pictures concerning other countries security or privately owned sites? Who will have a say in this, and how will a right for privacy/security be evaluated ("Hey we won't compromise any 'good guys'!")?
Consider the case when such photos are used in a terrorists attack, maybe on an airport.
For example it states that "many parents will leap at the chance to make their children smarter, fitter and prettier". Apart from the question how many superinteligent supermodels we really need and who will do the "real" work there is also the question if the majority of parents really wants a child more intelligent than them, asking them questions they aren't able to understand, let alone answer.
... now transfer the picture to genetics. Now for a CPU i could reclaim my money, or at least throw it away for another one.
We don't need the event of genetic engineering to find theese people, just look at schools where some parents are actually preventing their children getting the best possible education, forbidding them to work with computers or with the internet.
Also prenatal preventing of illnesses raises the question how a raised life expectancy will affect our economy. Following this line of thought leads to some very inhuman concepts indeed.
I don't even want to think what a "Mail Order Babies" company might produce in terms of screwup. Imagine the scandal of "Implemented Government Control" (the discission about censoring shows that there is ambition) maybe starting as an attempt to weed out criminals (for the best of society) then altering the definitions of "crime" (are undemocratic actions a crime? Undemocratic thoughts? What is 'undemocratic' anyway?).
Or maybe regard what happened when intel's newest generation of CPUs where found to have some minor flaws
Genetic engineering is being done, even with human genetic material. So the development to genetically engineered children is probably inevitable. But this will not only change the look of the genetically engineered, but also our view of morals and the value of life.
Quantum encryption was covered on slashdot and the link refered to one pretty comprehensive article how it could work.
The problem of laser transmissions around the curvature of the earth was solved with satellites, though i would be interested about the design of switches that preserve the quantum nature of the transmitted bits, yet allow for routing.
It also essentially stated, that errors during transmission are to be expected but a constant monitoring of a middle man would result in an error rate of 25%, so as long as the transmission errors are in the percent range, a middleman can either be detected or can only glance at a very small percentage of the transmitted bits which shouldn't result in usable information for compressed data transmissions.
Another problem altogether would be a middleman attack, where the middleman can actively intervene in the link, posing as the recipient for the sender, decode, encode again thus posing as sender for the true recipient.
Since quantum transmission relies on multiple transmission paths (a one directional quantum path and two directional transmission of reference data) routing this data along physically distinct lines and maybe even changing the routing during transmission could prevent such attacks.
I was very happy with Singh's book about Fermats theorem. He managed to gather a lot of historical and bibliographical background and presented it in a fascinating way that had me read the whole book in one stretch.
What i saw at amazon and the excerpt from bookstore cool made me real curious about this one.
Hey wouldn't it be nice if for once the computer i bought one year isn't an overdimensioned paperweight in the next? I dare not hope so, but not because i think that molecular switches could do the wonder by 2005.
... chips containing (then) maybe a hundred million transistors wouldn't survive a week if such a switch breaks about every million years. ("Oops some cosmic rays came along and knocked an atom out of place, sorry thats not in the warranty.").
... (maybe Linus knows more about that). So even with a constant number of transistors more functionality can be achieved.
I think it will take the industry quite some time to build CPUs based on some new kind of switches. I don't expect more than prototypes or ridiculously overpriced units in less than twenty years. (Makes me think about fusion reactors, people have been saying "they will work in 50 years" since 1950 i believe.)
While it is now possible to manipulate individual atoms and we have even seen some molecular switches already at work, new and economic ways of assembling them on a chip need to be found, a whole lot of experimenting has to be done, we don't even know yet, how long it'd take such a switch to degenerate
Anyhow, the industry expects that they can at least work till 0.1 micron with 'conventional' semiconductors, some conductivity problems of such small barriers might be addressed by just the right surface/interlayer coating, synchroton sources could be the tool for higher resolution. Ways are found so a broken or temporarily malfunctioning transistor can be worked around (which will come in handy later), so the odd stray electron doesn't hurt.
Transistors suddenly can handle more than one bit, new concepts of building CPUs will free all those transistors from their specialized niches in FPU's and elswhere , and thus stop idling 70% of the time, microparallism is on it's way
Hey i didn't even begin to think about more efficient software and faster memory access (but that isn't what Moore's Law is about anyway).
So i think we'll be able to hold up Moore's Law, maybe even twenty years, if not in numbers of transistors per chip then at least in the realized functionality. That's just fine, because we'll need that time as i said before.
R.
I think the article might be used by some to advance efforts to control the internet, like:
- banishment of cryptography
- censorship
- giving government agencies special access to computers on the internet
just to name a few.
Apart from the problems specific to these schemes (cryptography is a necessity for e-commerce in the long run, who is held responsible for content, backdoors can also be accessed by the wrong groups) they also make the internet a more unfree place and almost always hinder development of the internet or limit its use.
In the mentioned cases the cure is worse than what it's meant to cure, mostly because determined groups will work around or ignore such laws, so only it's negative sides come to effect.
Thus regulations of the internet should be carefully crafted, with much thought given to their proposed implementation and the resulting effects.
These dangers of cyberterrorism, namely its mentioning being used as an argument to hastily impose new rules on the internet, should at least be mentioned, to avoid that the article itself is used that way.
The basic reasons are:
- maintaining two systems is costly and an unnecessary source of errors
- working together on international projects is easier if people use one system
and you won't see the whole world go to 'imperial' units.
So assuming this, the argument for the US to switch to the metric system as soon as possible is:
it saves money, since switching won't become cheaper, and at the moment the US are maintaining an obsolete measurement system.
The whole point of this seems to be that it's pointless and thus harmless.
It's probably a good thing that these messages, 99.9% of which will be moronic garbage, will never reach a soul. Now if we could convince spammers to try and reach a broader audience, we could even get something out of this:
Think about it:
In the infinity of space Pyramid Schemes *must* work, also there will be an infinite supply of aliens interested in human anatomy (for those "see nice grrrrls at www.XXX.com" spammers), ways of avoiding taxes in the US, or the ultimate tools to spam other aliens.
And since the signal "does go on forever" you don't even need to handle this complicated bulk emailer: one message is sufficient to spam an infinite number of aliens !!!
Well, wasn't Scientology well known for their very 'determined' ways of stopping anyone spreading information about their organisation, be it with lawyers or by other means?
I'm not to happy about the message that the people with the most money and hence the most 'determined' lawyers can control the flow of information, but i'm also not too surprised about it.
R.