Really, they should just give up. I still have a P-166 with an S3 'Da Vinci' Virge, and for it's purposes it's worked great. However, they've been out of the graphics market for far too long...so unless they can grab some engineers from Nvidia or ATI, I don't see them rolling out anything better in a performance/cost ratio. If they had a lot of money, I could see them pulling back into serious competition, but it would require some serious investment and the understanding that there wouldn't be much payback. Then again, that's on eof the reasons the ApeXtreme is so cheap, the POS graphics card (and processor...and sound...etc etc). They must be able to churn out their components really cheaply for the entire setup to be $399. (especially because it's a PC game running setup, so no licensing profits, the entire profit is from the console sale itself which is counter-intuitive in that market) I don't think it's going to last, and on their next tax filing, the ApeXtreme development is going to be labeled 'capital loss' or something to that effect.
Personally, I like Windows XP Professional more than other OSes (such as Linux) because it's so much less work, and there's so much software (*cough* games *cough*) for Windows based systems. I will (and do) use Linux when it comes to things like servers, but for day to day operations, I prefer Windows, ever since DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.11 (though I almost murdered my computer when 95 came out, 98 vindicated MS though IMO). My ultimate point is, compared to those other OSes, Windows is aimed at the 'standard' home computer user. The people that don't really understand much about computers, and just want the confounded thing to work. Windows XP is a wonderful OS for people like that. Plug in a printer, and it works...a digital camera, and the pictures transfer easily, a USB key and it instantly installs the driver and the key appears in My Computer...it's that kind of stuff that makes this a good operating system. Sure, the security in it isn't the best in the business, and the interface could use some work (XP cripples the interface intentionally to protect the computer from the user, I don't like it, but I can see how the general public does), but in the end it's a decent line of OSes, and I haven't minded using it for the past decade or so. (except for trying to install a modem in a DOS system in about '93, that memory still haunts me)
Actually, I like MS Office. Even 'back in the day' when there were a lot more alternatives, I still liked Office. Lotus 1-2-3 for the Mac was nice, the first PC spreadsheet programs were quaint, but when MS finally got Excel "finished", I was hooked. The key was that it was easier to install/configure/use (Wordperfect came near to grabbing me a couple of times for a word processor, but ultimately lost out). Now, I've tried Open Office, but I just don't like it. I don't really want to get into the nitty-gritty details about it; the MS one is just more intuitive for me (like a QWERTY keyboard over another one, I guess, it's hard to change, even though they can both be effective). And since I get most of my computers through OEMs (Dell), the MS Office's price is not a big turnoff for me. Now, I can see how a government might not like it, having to license thousands upon thousands of copies to upgrade, but I only have a couple, and I'm perfectly content with Office XP (and will be for at least the next couple years). And I would find it easy to believe that the majority of regular computer users agree with me (conjecture, don't attack me on that last sentence pls).
I also appreciate the air of calm discussion around this and not the 'M$ S|_|XX0RS' '|\|0, MS R0XX0RS!!' that it could have devolved into.
I'm going to say what a lot of other people won't say because they blindly hate Microsoft a little too much. (This is not an insult, please don't lump me in with a stereotype)
Microsoft makes a good product. We all deride their security holes, but why do we know about them? (Linux, OS X, and BSD varients have holes too) Hackers target the OSes that the vast majority of computers use. (Why attack 4%, 8%, or 12% when you can attack the 76%?) Their OSes are relatively simple to use and cheap (remember things like OS/2?). If someone else could design a better product for the majority of users (not just powerusers, like many that read/.), the market would shift, slowly, but surely. Microsoft's 'monopoly' isn't about using it's power to force little guys out of the market, it's using its resources to make a better and cheaper product, which then runs the little guys out of the market. To some people Open Office has a great performance/cost ratio that overrides some features in MS Office. So be it. I personally like Office XP (but not 2003). Everybody has their preference and their willingness for compromise between performance and price. The most important part of things like Open Office is that it's inspiring competition, which means MS will produce a better product in the future. And that's something all consumers benefit from.
Okay...the hotel is paying for it...now, I live in Las Vegas, and the hotels in the area that now offer WiFi have not increased their room rates to compensate (all that gambling revenue eats cancels it out easily). So, to the consumer, it is free. The hotels are just trying to cater for business to their hotels (like CES goers this week). I realize that this isn't true for all hotels, but it doesn't matter, I was generalizing, and that wasn't even my point.
I'm a bit confused...is he saying that people should just share the broadband connections that we have now? Ignoring all the large things like ISP trouble, upload/download caps, contract violations, etc-Wouldn't the vast majority of these be in residential neighborhoods? How is this going to benefit people? I can see a couple scenarios (getting lost, so using it to find directions and get "unlost"), but not enough. The only places I would want to use WiFi would be someplace like a fast-food restaurant, or maybe along an interstate (when I'm not the one driving, of course),in a hotel, or in an airport/train station/subway station. But under his plan, most of these places wouldn't have it. A lot of hotels are already offering this service (a lot for free), fast-food restaurants wouldn't want to spend all that money for extra bandwidth (the McDonald's by my house uses a 56k conn, I know that much, and before anyone jumps on me, being a business, they would have to negotiate a contract allowing sharing of the conn, and that would cost more than your standard hook-up). The "best" way to spread wifi in the places people will use it, as I see it, would be a federally-supported monopoly...and even then, we'd be losing money until people wanted to use wifi. I'm content using the internet at home and hotels at the moment. If you build it, they probably still won't come
What indications are there that everything's going to be 64-bit? It's been 32-bit for a while now, and if Intel doesn't go 64-bit the rest of the world might wait until they do. Intel controls the majority of the market, and they have enough power keep trends suppressed for a while (or try to start new trends, and keep them much more alive than they need to be, *cough* RDRAM *cough*). There's rumors that there will be 64-bit instructions that one could somehow add-on to the prescott, but I don't know how it would work, as Intel is keeping everything tight-lipped.
Heck, if they wanted, they could create their own 64-bit instructions and pull the rug out from under the AMD64's feet. But I don't see that happening, as everyone would not like that (not just/.ers, but companies like Microsoft which is making a 64-bit version of XP for AMD64).
I can see them trying, but I don't really see it. Hyperthreading as it is generates a lot of extra heat that isn't exactly proportional to the performance gain (I've noticed this on my own 2.8C). I know there are some dual Xeon systems that have hyperthreading enabled, so they must have partially addressed the problem the inquirer put as...
"An instruction thread might well favour one kind of execution unit, but who's to say the other threads, the ones that are running in parallel with the 'troublesome' one, won't be favouring the same execution units? Assume you've got two cores per die, and that's two threads running simultaneously. Chuck in Intel's much-touted HyperThreading technology and you'll have four threads being processed in parallel, two per core, all being 'hopped'. Chances are that at least two of them will be using the same execution units, so swapping them round isn't going to change anything."
But in a dual core system, heat is a much bigger problem, so it would make more sense to up the clock speed over enabling hyperthreading whereas the heat on a dual Xeon would be easier to eliminate because there are 2 processors with their own cooling solutions. There's also the issue that stardard operating systems don't support 4-way systems for residential computing. There's also the fact that Intel COO Paul Otellini said "We'll go from putting HyperThreading in our products to putting dual-core capability in our mainstream client processors over time." That implies that hyperthreading is used as a stepping stone for the consumer, as some programmers optimize their code to be run on hyperthreaded systems, it will also boost performance on future dual core systems. Anyone else have any ideas?
Well, maybe, there have been problems with heat at the 90nm mark, though there are rumors that Tejas might use dual cores However, the hyperthreading thing would be a bad idea. It would mean that you have 4 logical processors, instead of 2. And with 4 threads running in parallel, there's a good chance that a lot of the time, 2 of those 4 will be identical. All hyperthreading would generate is too much heat.
If the sun's gravity were to disappear, after about 8 minutes, earth would go hurtling through space tangent to it's orbit, we would probably be fine...that is until we freeze to death from the lack of the suns heat.
I'm an aerospace engineer, so I know just a little bit about physics, but what we're talking about here is metaphysics. It's the unknown, we really don't know how everything works, but it's fun to dream about it. It's what makes it exciting. Do gravity waves even exist? We don't know! How do they react to things, are there negative gravity waves, are they this "dark energy" causing the universe to expand at a faster rate? Does negative energy exist? Can you have less than nothing? We don't know the answers! There are theories, but do we really know how everything works? Absolutely not! Metaphysics allows us to dream of warp drive and faster than light travel, inertial dampeners and flux capacitors (back to the future reference)...that our future is full of gigantic possibilities. So don't mod me down for some off the cuff remark about the wonderous possibilities ahead of us because you can't prove that I'm wrong. Some parts of modern theory may disagree with me, and I could have stated my ideas better, but in the end, we will be long dead before either of us are vindicated...
And my universe "OS" is a string theory, of which there are dozens and I've chosed parts of many of them for my own theory. On my computer, I run Windows XP Professional.
No, the graviton can very well have an anti-graviton and a photon an anti-photon. The argument against it would be that both things don't have a charge...well neutrinos don't have charges either, but they have anti-particles. If particle A has a charge of 0, then Anti-A has a charge of 0 as well. However, the graviton is special...it produces 'gravity waves'. Photons and gravitons are more dissimilar though, gravitons cause gravity waves. If an anti-graviton were to exist, and we could convert photons to gravitons/anti-gravitons (though with some energy loss) you could cancel out the effects of gravity..hence warp travel. Gravitons in the back, anti-gravitons in the front, and then you have faster than light travel. That would be a great big leap in technology, don'cha think? NASA thinks it might exist (along with negative energy)
It's for the LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). Space.com did a story on it a little while back, and it was in a Scientific American, but I'm not sure which, I have too many lying around. Unfortunantly, it doesn't launch until 2009.
No, the point here is to observe the waves, and then find the graviton (if it even exists). The graviton should exist, much in the same way that the photon exists, in a strange particle/wave form. However, we barely know anything about gravity. We know it bends space-time and that the amount is directly related to the mass of the objec...and that's about it.
We have determined that it is at least 2x10^8 m/s, however, it may be as much as 3.6x10^8 (faster than light). We honestly don't know. I'm pretty sure I heard my quantum mecanics professor at the University of Arizona mention something about Einstein's theories requiring light and gravity to equal in speed, but I'm an aerospace engineer, not a quantum physicist. If they do equal...if the sun were to disappear, we would see the light of the sun and still be fine orbit wise for about 8 minutes. Kinda funny to think about.
As for the faster-than-light communications, we could do that with tangled photons. Einstein was troubled by the fact that quantum entanglment causes an instantaneous change across a large distance. It's been used in a large number of sci-fi novels, including Orson Scott Cards Ender's Game series of books.
I would be very suprised if they could actually "prove" the existance of such waves. Gravity is such a weak force compared to the other three (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) that pulsars light-years upon light-years away would be washed out by the gravitational effects of, well, the rest of the universe! There's been conjecture about this for years, and entire theories to try and resolve this problem of no detection (several string theories have been developed around this problem) We've even built miles long observation "tools" (like this one in Livingston, LA). However, if we can solve the background noise radiation, and the pulsars are close enough to earth, and have a large enough gravity, they just might do it! Einstein's theory of general relativity states that two orbiting stars (two orbiting anythings, but stars have a lot of mass and therefore gravity, so it would be pronounced) will 'shed' some of their momentum through gravity waves. The detection of these waves could revolutionize physics! It would allow us to determine the existance of the graviton, and if we ever did that, the world as we know it would change. Because once we pin it down, we can start converting energy to it, and probably start research on a feasible "anti-graviton" of sorts. Warp Drives, here we come! (well, not likely, but a guy can hope)
Re:Encryption ain't it all tapped out to be...
on
Feds Want to Tap VoIP
·
· Score: 0, Troll
He doesn't have any points that I haven't already discussed throughout the rest of the thread. This discussion is over because you can't bring anything new to the table.
Re:Encryption ain't it all tapped out to be...
on
Feds Want to Tap VoIP
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Tin foil hat? I never said anything about being afraid of the government doing this.
Dude, stop trolling.
Re:Encryption ain't it all tapped out to be...
on
Feds Want to Tap VoIP
·
· Score: 1
How is the dice weighted? Is it a 20 or a 6 sided die? If it lands on an edge, what number does that count as? The list goes on...
Re:I don't believe that you understand encryption.
on
Feds Want to Tap VoIP
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Open source software is more secure because it has fewer holes/bugs. My point is that through flaws in software, or by the nature of the software itself, being able to deduce the generated keys. Maybe with a certain one you can't get the key that was created but you can get yourself down to a few thousand keys (in which case you can use the supercomputers to crack it), or use a reverse engineered version to crack an existing document/VoIP/whatever. Any program can be turned around to fatally wound the encryption of something. This is the government-lots of money, lots of smart people. They'll find ways around encryption, not because the idea of the encryption, but because of the execution. Generally this means finding the basics, narrowing the field down, and then using brute force. It's what's been happening since the dawn of encryption.
If you're saying that PGP (which uses public key encryption) hasn't been broken by the government, you're dreamin'
Re:Encryption ain't it all tapped out to be...
on
Feds Want to Tap VoIP
·
· Score: 1
I don't think you understand how encryption works. Open source software is more secure because it has fewer holes/bugs. My point is that through flaws in software, or by the nature of the software itself, being able to deduce the generated keys. Maybe with a certain one you can't get the key that was created but you can get yourself down to a few thousand keys (in which case you can use the supercomputers to crack it), or use a reverse engineered version to crack an existing document/VoIP/whatever. Any program can be turned around to fatally wound the encryption of something. This is the government-lots of money, lots of smart people. They'll find ways around encryption, not because the idea of how the encryption happened, but because of the execution. Generally this means, finding the basics, narrowing the field down, and then using brute force. It's what's been happening since the dawn of encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't burning all of my music to CD and then ripping it really annoying? I think so.
Really, they should just give up. I still have a P-166 with an S3 'Da Vinci' Virge, and for it's purposes it's worked great. However, they've been out of the graphics market for far too long...so unless they can grab some engineers from Nvidia or ATI, I don't see them rolling out anything better in a performance/cost ratio. If they had a lot of money, I could see them pulling back into serious competition, but it would require some serious investment and the understanding that there wouldn't be much payback. Then again, that's on eof the reasons the ApeXtreme is so cheap, the POS graphics card (and processor...and sound...etc etc). They must be able to churn out their components really cheaply for the entire setup to be $399. (especially because it's a PC game running setup, so no licensing profits, the entire profit is from the console sale itself which is counter-intuitive in that market) I don't think it's going to last, and on their next tax filing, the ApeXtreme development is going to be labeled 'capital loss' or something to that effect.
Personally, I like Windows XP Professional more than other OSes (such as Linux) because it's so much less work, and there's so much software (*cough* games *cough*) for Windows based systems. I will (and do) use Linux when it comes to things like servers, but for day to day operations, I prefer Windows, ever since DOS 6.1 and Windows 3.11 (though I almost murdered my computer when 95 came out, 98 vindicated MS though IMO). My ultimate point is, compared to those other OSes, Windows is aimed at the 'standard' home computer user. The people that don't really understand much about computers, and just want the confounded thing to work. Windows XP is a wonderful OS for people like that. Plug in a printer, and it works...a digital camera, and the pictures transfer easily, a USB key and it instantly installs the driver and the key appears in My Computer...it's that kind of stuff that makes this a good operating system. Sure, the security in it isn't the best in the business, and the interface could use some work (XP cripples the interface intentionally to protect the computer from the user, I don't like it, but I can see how the general public does), but in the end it's a decent line of OSes, and I haven't minded using it for the past decade or so. (except for trying to install a modem in a DOS system in about '93, that memory still haunts me)
Actually, I like MS Office. Even 'back in the day' when there were a lot more alternatives, I still liked Office. Lotus 1-2-3 for the Mac was nice, the first PC spreadsheet programs were quaint, but when MS finally got Excel "finished", I was hooked. The key was that it was easier to install/configure/use (Wordperfect came near to grabbing me a couple of times for a word processor, but ultimately lost out). Now, I've tried Open Office, but I just don't like it. I don't really want to get into the nitty-gritty details about it; the MS one is just more intuitive for me (like a QWERTY keyboard over another one, I guess, it's hard to change, even though they can both be effective). And since I get most of my computers through OEMs (Dell), the MS Office's price is not a big turnoff for me. Now, I can see how a government might not like it, having to license thousands upon thousands of copies to upgrade, but I only have a couple, and I'm perfectly content with Office XP (and will be for at least the next couple years). And I would find it easy to believe that the majority of regular computer users agree with me (conjecture, don't attack me on that last sentence pls).
I also appreciate the air of calm discussion around this and not the 'M$ S|_|XX0RS' '|\|0, MS R0XX0RS!!' that it could have devolved into.
I'm going to say what a lot of other people won't say because they blindly hate Microsoft a little too much. (This is not an insult, please don't lump me in with a stereotype)
/.), the market would shift, slowly, but surely. Microsoft's 'monopoly' isn't about using it's power to force little guys out of the market, it's using its resources to make a better and cheaper product, which then runs the little guys out of the market. To some people Open Office has a great performance/cost ratio that overrides some features in MS Office. So be it. I personally like Office XP (but not 2003). Everybody has their preference and their willingness for compromise between performance and price. The most important part of things like Open Office is that it's inspiring competition, which means MS will produce a better product in the future. And that's something all consumers benefit from.
Microsoft makes a good product. We all deride their security holes, but why do we know about them? (Linux, OS X, and BSD varients have holes too) Hackers target the OSes that the vast majority of computers use. (Why attack 4%, 8%, or 12% when you can attack the 76%?) Their OSes are relatively simple to use and cheap (remember things like OS/2?). If someone else could design a better product for the majority of users (not just powerusers, like many that read
Computing at home-the average user that buys the preconfiged DELL, HP, Gateway, Apple, and Sony boxes
Okay...the hotel is paying for it...now, I live in Las Vegas, and the hotels in the area that now offer WiFi have not increased their room rates to compensate (all that gambling revenue eats cancels it out easily). So, to the consumer, it is free. The hotels are just trying to cater for business to their hotels (like CES goers this week). I realize that this isn't true for all hotels, but it doesn't matter, I was generalizing, and that wasn't even my point.
I'm a bit confused...is he saying that people should just share the broadband connections that we have now? Ignoring all the large things like ISP trouble, upload/download caps, contract violations, etc-Wouldn't the vast majority of these be in residential neighborhoods? How is this going to benefit people? I can see a couple scenarios (getting lost, so using it to find directions and get "unlost"), but not enough. The only places I would want to use WiFi would be someplace like a fast-food restaurant, or maybe along an interstate (when I'm not the one driving, of course),in a hotel, or in an airport/train station/subway station. But under his plan, most of these places wouldn't have it. A lot of hotels are already offering this service (a lot for free), fast-food restaurants wouldn't want to spend all that money for extra bandwidth (the McDonald's by my house uses a 56k conn, I know that much, and before anyone jumps on me, being a business, they would have to negotiate a contract allowing sharing of the conn, and that would cost more than your standard hook-up). The "best" way to spread wifi in the places people will use it, as I see it, would be a federally-supported monopoly...and even then, we'd be losing money until people wanted to use wifi. I'm content using the internet at home and hotels at the moment.
If you build it, they probably still won't come
What indications are there that everything's going to be 64-bit? It's been 32-bit for a while now, and if Intel doesn't go 64-bit the rest of the world might wait until they do. Intel controls the majority of the market, and they have enough power keep trends suppressed for a while (or try to start new trends, and keep them much more alive than they need to be, *cough* RDRAM *cough*). There's rumors that there will be 64-bit instructions that one could somehow add-on to the prescott, but I don't know how it would work, as Intel is keeping everything tight-lipped.
/.ers, but companies like Microsoft which is making a 64-bit version of XP for AMD64).
Heck, if they wanted, they could create their own 64-bit instructions and pull the rug out from under the AMD64's feet. But I don't see that happening, as everyone would not like that (not just
I take back this last post, my other post in this thread is better.
I can see them trying, but I don't really see it. Hyperthreading as it is generates a lot of extra heat that isn't exactly proportional to the performance gain (I've noticed this on my own 2.8C). I know there are some dual Xeon systems that have hyperthreading enabled, so they must have partially addressed the problem the inquirer put as...
"An instruction thread might well favour one kind of execution unit, but who's to say the other threads, the ones that are running in parallel with the 'troublesome' one, won't be favouring the same execution units? Assume you've got two cores per die, and that's two threads running simultaneously. Chuck in Intel's much-touted HyperThreading technology and you'll have four threads being processed in parallel, two per core, all being 'hopped'. Chances are that at least two of them will be using the same execution units, so swapping them round isn't going to change anything."
But in a dual core system, heat is a much bigger problem, so it would make more sense to up the clock speed over enabling hyperthreading whereas the heat on a dual Xeon would be easier to eliminate because there are 2 processors with their own cooling solutions. There's also the issue that stardard operating systems don't support 4-way systems for residential computing. There's also the fact that Intel COO Paul Otellini said "We'll go from putting HyperThreading in our products to putting dual-core capability in our mainstream client processors over time." That implies that hyperthreading is used as a stepping stone for the consumer, as some programmers optimize their code to be run on hyperthreaded systems, it will also boost performance on future dual core systems. Anyone else have any ideas?
Well, maybe, there have been problems with heat at the 90nm mark, though there are rumors that Tejas might use dual cores However, the hyperthreading thing would be a bad idea. It would mean that you have 4 logical processors, instead of 2. And with 4 threads running in parallel, there's a good chance that a lot of the time, 2 of those 4 will be identical. All hyperthreading would generate is too much heat.
I have a +1 set for suscribers and a +1 Karma bonus, so the +1 given shouldn't be revoked IMO.
If the sun's gravity were to disappear, after about 8 minutes, earth would go hurtling through space tangent to it's orbit, we would probably be fine...that is until we freeze to death from the lack of the suns heat.
I'm an aerospace engineer, so I know just a little bit about physics, but what we're talking about here is metaphysics. It's the unknown, we really don't know how everything works, but it's fun to dream about it. It's what makes it exciting. Do gravity waves even exist? We don't know! How do they react to things, are there negative gravity waves, are they this "dark energy" causing the universe to expand at a faster rate? Does negative energy exist? Can you have less than nothing? We don't know the answers! There are theories, but do we really know how everything works? Absolutely not! Metaphysics allows us to dream of warp drive and faster than light travel, inertial dampeners and flux capacitors (back to the future reference)...that our future is full of gigantic possibilities. So don't mod me down for some off the cuff remark about the wonderous possibilities ahead of us because you can't prove that I'm wrong. Some parts of modern theory may disagree with me, and I could have stated my ideas better, but in the end, we will be long dead before either of us are vindicated...
And my universe "OS" is a string theory, of which there are dozens and I've chosed parts of many of them for my own theory. On my computer, I run Windows XP Professional.
Well, seeing as how in college I was taught that the standard model was wrong, and that the anti-graviton does in fact exist, then I'm still okay.
disclaimer: I'm an aerospace engineer, not a particle physicist.
No, the graviton can very well have an anti-graviton and a photon an anti-photon. The argument against it would be that both things don't have a charge...well neutrinos don't have charges either, but they have anti-particles. If particle A has a charge of 0, then Anti-A has a charge of 0 as well. However, the graviton is special...it produces 'gravity waves'. Photons and gravitons are more dissimilar though, gravitons cause gravity waves. If an anti-graviton were to exist, and we could convert photons to gravitons/anti-gravitons (though with some energy loss) you could cancel out the effects of gravity..hence warp travel. Gravitons in the back, anti-gravitons in the front, and then you have faster than light travel. That would be a great big leap in technology, don'cha think? NASA thinks it might exist (along with negative energy)
Here's a cool kid's site that has some animations
It's for the LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna). Space.com did a story on it a little while back, and it was in a Scientific American, but I'm not sure which, I have too many lying around. Unfortunantly, it doesn't launch until 2009.
No, the point here is to observe the waves, and then find the graviton (if it even exists). The graviton should exist, much in the same way that the photon exists, in a strange particle/wave form. However, we barely know anything about gravity. We know it bends space-time and that the amount is directly related to the mass of the objec...and that's about it.
The answer is a resounding...we dunno!
We have determined that it is at least 2x10^8 m/s, however, it may be as much as 3.6x10^8 (faster than light). We honestly don't know. I'm pretty sure I heard my quantum mecanics professor at the University of Arizona mention something about Einstein's theories requiring light and gravity to equal in speed, but I'm an aerospace engineer, not a quantum physicist. If they do equal...if the sun were to disappear, we would see the light of the sun and still be fine orbit wise for about 8 minutes. Kinda funny to think about.
As for the faster-than-light communications, we could do that with tangled photons. Einstein was troubled by the fact that quantum entanglment causes an instantaneous change across a large distance. It's been used in a large number of sci-fi novels, including Orson Scott Cards Ender's Game series of books.
I would be very suprised if they could actually "prove" the existance of such waves. Gravity is such a weak force compared to the other three (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) that pulsars light-years upon light-years away would be washed out by the gravitational effects of, well, the rest of the universe! There's been conjecture about this for years, and entire theories to try and resolve this problem of no detection (several string theories have been developed around this problem) We've even built miles long observation "tools" (like this one in Livingston, LA). However, if we can solve the background noise radiation, and the pulsars are close enough to earth, and have a large enough gravity, they just might do it! Einstein's theory of general relativity states that two orbiting stars (two orbiting anythings, but stars have a lot of mass and therefore gravity, so it would be pronounced) will 'shed' some of their momentum through gravity waves. The detection of these waves could revolutionize physics! It would allow us to determine the existance of the graviton, and if we ever did that, the world as we know it would change. Because once we pin it down, we can start converting energy to it, and probably start research on a feasible "anti-graviton" of sorts. Warp Drives, here we come! (well, not likely, but a guy can hope)
He doesn't have any points that I haven't already discussed throughout the rest of the thread. This discussion is over because you can't bring anything new to the table.
Tin foil hat? I never said anything about being afraid of the government doing this.
Dude, stop trolling.
How is the dice weighted? Is it a 20 or a 6 sided die? If it lands on an edge, what number does that count as? The list goes on...
Open source software is more secure because it has fewer holes/bugs. My point is that through flaws in software, or by the nature of the software itself, being able to deduce the generated keys. Maybe with a certain one you can't get the key that was created but you can get yourself down to a few thousand keys (in which case you can use the supercomputers to crack it), or use a reverse engineered version to crack an existing document/VoIP/whatever. Any program can be turned around to fatally wound the encryption of something. This is the government-lots of money, lots of smart people. They'll find ways around encryption, not because the idea of the encryption, but because of the execution. Generally this means finding the basics, narrowing the field down, and then using brute force. It's what's been happening since the dawn of encryption.
If you're saying that PGP (which uses public key encryption) hasn't been broken by the government, you're dreamin'
I don't think you understand how encryption works. Open source software is more secure because it has fewer holes/bugs. My point is that through flaws in software, or by the nature of the software itself, being able to deduce the generated keys. Maybe with a certain one you can't get the key that was created but you can get yourself down to a few thousand keys (in which case you can use the supercomputers to crack it), or use a reverse engineered version to crack an existing document/VoIP/whatever. Any program can be turned around to fatally wound the encryption of something. This is the government-lots of money, lots of smart people. They'll find ways around encryption, not because the idea of how the encryption happened, but because of the execution. Generally this means, finding the basics, narrowing the field down, and then using brute force. It's what's been happening since the dawn of encryption.