Getting off-topic somewhat, but yes, laser diodes and their LED cousins are very efficient. Compare the lifetime of LED bike-lights to halogen bulbs to see just how much more efficient.
For the purposes of pumping a laser the improvement in efficiency over flashlamp pumping is twofold. As well as producing more light per joule of electrical energy, the range of wavelengths emitted is much narrower - a few nanometers rather than spanning the ~200 nm visible spectrum plus well out into the infrared and ultraviolet. Laser crystals, particularly ytterbium, absorb over relatively narrow ranges of wavelengths (hence many crystals appear transparent to the eye), so careful selection of diode emission wavelength can mean that almost all the emitted light can be absorbed and used by the laser crystal.
Even further off-topic, I recall (and this is probably from a very old/. post) that some people are considering switching to an all-LED home lighting system to dramatically reduce electricity bills.
Good question. Growing such a large crystal would be quite a job. Fluorapatite crystals, like many laser crystals, are grown using the Czochralski process, in which a single crystal boule is gradually pulled out of a pool of melted crystal ingredients, at about the same rate at which new material condenses onto the initial seed. It's a slow and difficult process, and to my knowledge Yb:S-FAP boules have not exceeded a few centimetres in length. In order to make a sufficiently large crystal the boule is cut into several thin slabs, which are then "stitched" together by a process called diffusion bonding - again, a difficult process, and which I think only one company (located in Ireland, IIRC) can do well. Obviously, that's not going to get you much closer to the massive dimensions that you could reach with glass hosts. So you have to suffer higher laser intensities within the laser crystal, and pump with multiple stages. LLNL put their S-FAP slabs inside cells which are cooled with He (I think) to prevent the crystals from fracturing from thermal expansion. S-FAP also has the benefit of being slightly athermal (it doesn't start focusing when it gets heated by the laser), and having a high quantum efficiency such that it doesn't absorb much heat in the process of amplifying the incident laser pulse. Of course, the other step that can be taken is to have more, smaller lasers to compensate for a lower power in each individual beam.
I don't work with lasers anymore, but previously I was doing a PhD at Oxford University on Yb:S-FAP lasers.
Presumably the 1% figure you give for the laser is for a flash-lamp pumped laser? That's true enough, but NIF will not be using Nd:glass in the long term.
LLNL has for a long time been looking at alternative materials for its next-generation laser (called Mercury), settling on Yb:S-FAP as the best candidate. Research with diode-pumped Yb:S-FAP has yielded slope efficiencies close to the quantum limit of about 80%. Wall-plug efficiencies (output power vs. electrical input power) are obviously much lower, but still around 50%. That's high for a laser. To my knowledge the Mercury laser has been working, at least in a prototype form, for almost 5 years.
"Please, enough with the reactionary Bush bashing. He's not dropping 'the bomb' on anyone. If he didn't do it post 9/11 it's not coming unless the US faces nuclear attack from an actual state. "
Who, exactly, would he have dropped "the bomb" on post 9/11? You're thinking Osama, perhaps. Fine: where is he? I doubt that anyone could have condoned carpet-bombing Afganistan with nukes on the basis that one might kill a guy who possibly lives there.
North Korea is different. The country is a nuclear power, and the leader of the country makes boasts that the nukes might be used to defend itself from the US. The situation is much simpler than post 9/11, since the "enemy" is known and has a definite location.
Like you, I still don't think the US would be so stupid as to attempt to bomb NK. But your arguments don't make sense.
So tell me which is cheaper/easier to make: 1) a missile to intecept another missile, or 2) a missile to avoid intercepting missiles.
My money's on 2. I can think of so many options without even trying hard: side thrusters to quickly dodge out of the expected path; chaff or decoys to distract the interceptor; a specially hardened casing to shield from the explosion of the missile; some form of EMP device to trigger the interceptor missile before it gets close. You might not think some of those are feasible, but you could say the same more readily about the missile defense programme.
And of course, who says someone is going to deliver a nuke with an ICBM? Other posts have mentioned terrorists driving it up to the target in a truck, which is much cheaper. And if you're thinking that security would spot it, who says the target has to be somewhere important enough to protect? The IRA perfected the terrorism technique of chosing low-risk, high-terror targets such as pubs and hotels; that kind of approach scares the public more than high-profile locations, since it destroys the idea that ordinary people are safe.
It seems to me that Bush is entering a technology race, in which his side has to work harder to keep up. And the race seems largely redundant, since the people America needs to protect itself from are unlikely to be launching ICBMs. I firmly believe that money would be better spent on improving international relations, so that America would have fewer enemies in the first place.
If you're applying further afield, the issue of equivalency becomes crucial. I've been reviewing PhD applications from oversees students for an Australian university. Students are required to have obtained the equivalent of an Australian Bachelor's degree with Honours. To assess equivalency some basic rules are applied: 1) Is the university a recognised (accredited) institution - that is, are it's degrees real degrees? 2) How do degrees from that country compare to Australian degrees?
The point is, so long as you have applied from a recognised university it is largly irrelevant how prestigious your university is. What counts most is that you did well there: a good transcript grades/GPA, "honors" courses, and an interesting thesis all contribute to this. As are, of course, decent references from your tutors.
In the case of the CS student who posted the article, I'd say that continuing with the present course, ensuring that they remain visible to tutors who might provide references, and continued diligence in his enrolled courses will help him most. Moving to another institution may be to his disadvantage since he would have to start over with his relationship with his tutors.
All the above doesn't neccessarily apply when applying for non-academic jobs closer to home, but in general I place a limited value on the prestige carried by universities. I received a Masters and PhD from a university placed in the top ten worldwide, and more than anything I have experienced prejudice for it. People view you as more stuck-up, or over qualified.
You know, ITER isn't the only other fusion programme going on. ITER follows on from, in particular, the JET programme based at Culham (near Oxford, England). IIRC the technology is based around a toroidal confinement (tokomak?) design.
ITER was proposed years ago. The problem, for a long time, has been that America didn't want to be involved, especially if ITER was not built in the States. Hence the FIRE programme is partly a case of America going it alone, and in that sense its cancellation is a good thing. ITER needs the involvement of all of the science community, inclusive of Japan, Europe, Canada and the States (forgive me if I've forgotten other major players, these were the ones I remembered without consulting a reference). Such expensive projects will suffer from dividing the funding into separate efforts: look at Fermilab which competes with CERN, and there is evidence that if both continue to go it alone, the next (much larger) accelerators may never be built.
And don't go thinking that that's the end of American innovation in nuclear fusion. There is other research being carried out into alternatives to the toroidal confinement design. At the very least there is the work on Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) being carried out at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL - sorry about all the acronyms). This project involves the compression of tritium pellets using several high-energy lasers. The approach is radically different from the work at ITER/FIRE. Funding of such a project makes a lot more sense than funding FIRE; instead of spending money duplicating research, the money goes towards funding a diversity of research. Evolution of the best technology happens faster that way.
So to me the future still looks promising. Nuclear fusion is a technology that needs to be shared worldwide, and before more countries decide that burning yet more fossil fuels is a more accessible way of generating electricity. More prudent use of the financial resources available to develop Fusion can only be a good thing.
Quit being obtuse. Chinese people could use a Chinese version. English people could use an English version. If an English person needed to read a Chinese document they can add the Chinese support. But packaging Abiword to support everything wastes local computer resources.
A problem that occurs in so much software is that there never seems a good place to stop. Word keeps evolving for the sake of evolving, in the process being less well able to do the things it was initially designed for. But the same is true of so much other software: emacs is huge; so it Mozilla. In the latter case people have tried to trim things down, but I won't be surprised if their efforts become huge too. The extra bloat isn't from bugfixes, it's from too many extras.
Another example, going back to wordprocessors. Take Abiword. It has bidirectional printing. I'm never going to use that. It has internationalization. I'm unlikely to write in another language enough to use that either. Of course it's tricky, since I know that other people will want to use these features. But for me they end up wasting space and loading time.
It's all so far from the Unix way of doing simple individual things well. That principle seems to be dying out, but it doesn't seem any less valid now than 10 years ago.
The thing is, as you point out, the outsourced product is likely to be cheaper - it wouldn't make sense otherwise. On balance, if outsourcing continues to pay off for companies, consumers overall (although perhaps not within the IT sector) will gain a lower cost of living through cheaper products. That's the benefit of competition, and somewhere a balance must be reached.
If you're so desperate to compete with Indian workers maybe you should move to India. Then you'd get the lower cost of living that India has to offer.
Or you could use your more expensive education (presumably funded in part by the higher cost of living in the states) to train for a more competitive job.
Or you could quit your whining and get on with it
on
Train Your Own Replacement
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So your boss has decided that you either suck at your job or you cost too much for what they get out of you. But you've accumulated plenty of experience. What do you expect from your employers? They need to transfer the knowledge to the new guy, and you're still an employee. Why not get on with it, train the guy up and do a good job of it to get a decent reference for your next job?
Books are so much more material. They stay around for ages. The content on the web is forever changing, and I never trust the information I want access to to be still be there in a few years.
But there's also something slightly insidious about the web. It requires so little brain power to use. You can immerse yourself and end up staring at a screen for hours. It has answers to many of the things I need to know, but I often find out about things I just don't need to know as well.
In the process of doing research I often need to sit and think in order to make progress. It's very easy to not get to that point when there's a computer to hand. I keep looking things up, following the occasional tangential link, and even though I feel that I'm doing something productive I'm actually getting no further.
And here I am again, having just checked/. out of curiosity, and now I'm typing away and still now getting any further. You see?!
Optical fibres can be used as couplers between two lasers (the second laser amplifies the signal from the first). We use such a system in our lab, where average powers of 40-100W can be sent down a single fibre (multimode in our case). If the surface of the end of the fibre gets scratched, or if dust lands on it, the tip can explode. With each pulse (it's a 25kHz pulsed laser) another piece of fibre is destoyed, and it acts like a fuse. If you don't turn the laser off quickly you can soon lose kilometres of fibre. All that's left is a ringing in your ears and a few bits of scorched plastic.
I'm not convinved by your reasoning on the effective range of these lasers. I'm guessing the beam must be focused to a spot in order to achieve the high intensities required to damage the shell. The further away you bring something to focus, the larger the focal point. The extent of this varies upon the initial quality of the beam - but obviously atmospheric disturbances will decrease the quality with range.
While I'm sure that Gribbin has written very accessible books, I would be careful of reading too much into his material. I've read "Schrodinger's Kittens", and as a physicist I found that some of the things he wrote were misleading. If his work gives you a taste for physics then great, but if you are going to start discussing physics afterwards you may do well to work through a real text-book.
Having a bunch of satelites whizzing round, broadcasting near to scientifically very interesting regions of the microwave region never made any sense. We pollute the sky with enough radiation that astronomy is difficult enough as it is. If an alien were looking at our planet they would most likely think our atmosphere predominantly contained sodium, since so much of the planet is lit with it.
Strictly speaking, a particle with zero mass/must/ travel at the speed of light.
The interesting thing is that if a particle had imaginary mass (as in i, the square root of -1) it would be constrained to travel backwards in time. Such a hypothetical particle is called a tachyon, and is often mentioned in SF books an TV shows. For instance, tachyons are used in Babylon 5 for long-distance communication.
Also, it's worth mentioning that real objects can travel faster than light, albeit not in a vacuum. The principle of Cherenkov(sp?) detectors is that particles move at speeds close to c, but in a material where the speed of light is less than c. The resulting "wake" of light, which is similar to a sonic boom, produces a blueish halo which can be detected in order to calculate the particle's speed.
I concur. Using terms like "extra sub-atomic particles" is just obfuscating the fact that it's just a relatively rare isotope of helium, with one neutron less than normal. The nature of the helium is far less interesting than the way it was contained. It doesn't sound far from idea (in Elite Frontier?) of containing anti-matter within organic molecules as a way of storing fuel. Not that it's in the least bit practical, but it's interesting to yet again see the overlap of science and science fiction.
You may like to check out the issue regarding forking (or lack of) in Linux compared to BSD Unix discussed in the infamous Halloween I paper, at http://www.opensource.org/hallo ween/halloween1.html, at the "Code Forking" sub-header.
Utter rubbish, and you clearly didn't think things through before posting that (perhaps too eager to get first post?:)
Open Source, if anything, lets those in the know (I'm not) see just how secure a product is. Since the vast majority of those are into developing rather than destroying the product, it can only get more secure. With closed source, you only have the company's word that it's secure. How do you know it's not chock-full of trapdoors for them, or >>Insert least fovourite government agency here to hack in easily. That may not be especially likely, but you don't know, do you? Why? Because the source is _closed_.
Slashdot Mirror
"While on top of our steel computer case, we could not get the keyboard or mouse to communicate with the receiver."
Why were the reviewers standing on the steel computer case? Surely most people will sit at their desk.
Getting off-topic somewhat, but yes, laser diodes and their LED cousins are very efficient. Compare the lifetime of LED bike-lights to halogen bulbs to see just how much more efficient.
/. post) that some people are considering switching to an all-LED home lighting system to dramatically reduce electricity bills.
For the purposes of pumping a laser the improvement in efficiency over flashlamp pumping is twofold. As well as producing more light per joule of electrical energy, the range of wavelengths emitted is much narrower - a few nanometers rather than spanning the ~200 nm visible spectrum plus well out into the infrared and ultraviolet. Laser crystals, particularly ytterbium, absorb over relatively narrow ranges of wavelengths (hence many crystals appear transparent to the eye), so careful selection of diode emission wavelength can mean that almost all the emitted light can be absorbed and used by the laser crystal.
Even further off-topic, I recall (and this is probably from a very old
Good question. Growing such a large crystal would be quite a job. Fluorapatite crystals, like many laser crystals, are grown using the Czochralski process, in which a single crystal boule is gradually pulled out of a pool of melted crystal ingredients, at about the same rate at which new material condenses onto the initial seed. It's a slow and difficult process, and to my knowledge Yb:S-FAP boules have not exceeded a few centimetres in length. In order to make a sufficiently large crystal the boule is cut into several thin slabs, which are then "stitched" together by a process called diffusion bonding - again, a difficult process, and which I think only one company (located in Ireland, IIRC) can do well. Obviously, that's not going to get you much closer to the massive dimensions that you could reach with glass hosts. So you have to suffer higher laser intensities within the laser crystal, and pump with multiple stages. LLNL put their S-FAP slabs inside cells which are cooled with He (I think) to prevent the crystals from fracturing from thermal expansion. S-FAP also has the benefit of being slightly athermal (it doesn't start focusing when it gets heated by the laser), and having a high quantum efficiency such that it doesn't absorb much heat in the process of amplifying the incident laser pulse. Of course, the other step that can be taken is to have more, smaller lasers to compensate for a lower power in each individual beam.
I don't work with lasers anymore, but previously I was doing a PhD at Oxford University on Yb:S-FAP lasers.
Presumably the 1% figure you give for the laser is for a flash-lamp pumped laser? That's true enough, but NIF will not be using Nd:glass in the long term.
LLNL has for a long time been looking at alternative materials for its next-generation laser (called Mercury), settling on Yb:S-FAP as the best candidate. Research with diode-pumped Yb:S-FAP has yielded slope efficiencies close to the quantum limit of about 80%. Wall-plug efficiencies (output power vs. electrical input power) are obviously much lower, but still around 50%. That's high for a laser. To my knowledge the Mercury laser has been working, at least in a prototype form, for almost 5 years.
"Please, enough with the reactionary Bush bashing. He's not dropping 'the bomb' on anyone. If he didn't do it post 9/11 it's not coming unless the US faces nuclear attack from an actual state. "
Who, exactly, would he have dropped "the bomb" on post 9/11? You're thinking Osama, perhaps. Fine: where is he? I doubt that anyone could have condoned carpet-bombing Afganistan with nukes on the basis that one might kill a guy who possibly lives there.
North Korea is different. The country is a nuclear power, and the leader of the country makes boasts that the nukes might be used to defend itself from the US. The situation is much simpler than post 9/11, since the "enemy" is known and has a definite location.
Like you, I still don't think the US would be so stupid as to attempt to bomb NK. But your arguments don't make sense.
So tell me which is cheaper/easier to make:
1) a missile to intecept another missile, or
2) a missile to avoid intercepting missiles.
My money's on 2. I can think of so many options without even trying hard: side thrusters to quickly dodge out of the expected path; chaff or decoys to distract the interceptor; a specially hardened casing to shield from the explosion of the missile; some form of EMP device to trigger the interceptor missile before it gets close. You might not think some of those are feasible, but you could say the same more readily about the missile defense programme.
And of course, who says someone is going to deliver a nuke with an ICBM? Other posts have mentioned terrorists driving it up to the target in a truck, which is much cheaper. And if you're thinking that security would spot it, who says the target has to be somewhere important enough to protect? The IRA perfected the terrorism technique of chosing low-risk, high-terror targets such as pubs and hotels; that kind of approach scares the public more than high-profile locations, since it destroys the idea that ordinary people are safe.
It seems to me that Bush is entering a technology race, in which his side has to work harder to keep up. And the race seems largely redundant, since the people America needs to protect itself from are unlikely to be launching ICBMs. I firmly believe that money would be better spent on improving international relations, so that America would have fewer enemies in the first place.
If you're applying further afield, the issue of equivalency becomes crucial. I've been reviewing PhD applications from oversees students for an Australian university. Students are required to have obtained the equivalent of an Australian Bachelor's degree with Honours. To assess equivalency some basic rules are applied:
1) Is the university a recognised (accredited) institution - that is, are it's degrees real degrees?
2) How do degrees from that country compare to Australian degrees?
The point is, so long as you have applied from a recognised university it is largly irrelevant how prestigious your university is. What counts most is that you did well there: a good transcript grades/GPA, "honors" courses, and an interesting thesis all contribute to this. As are, of course, decent references from your tutors.
In the case of the CS student who posted the article, I'd say that continuing with the present course, ensuring that they remain visible to tutors who might provide references, and continued diligence in his enrolled courses will help him most. Moving to another institution may be to his disadvantage since he would have to start over with his relationship with his tutors.
All the above doesn't neccessarily apply when applying for non-academic jobs closer to home, but in general I place a limited value on the prestige carried by universities. I received a Masters and PhD from a university placed in the top ten worldwide, and more than anything I have experienced prejudice for it. People view you as more stuck-up, or over qualified.
You know, ITER isn't the only other fusion programme going on. ITER follows on from, in particular, the JET programme based at Culham (near Oxford, England). IIRC the technology is based around a toroidal confinement (tokomak?) design.
ITER was proposed years ago. The problem, for a long time, has been that America didn't want to be involved, especially if ITER was not built in the States. Hence the FIRE programme is partly a case of America going it alone, and in that sense its cancellation is a good thing. ITER needs the involvement of all of the science community, inclusive of Japan, Europe, Canada and the States (forgive me if I've forgotten other major players, these were the ones I remembered without consulting a reference). Such expensive projects will suffer from dividing the funding into separate efforts: look at Fermilab which competes with CERN, and there is evidence that if both continue to go it alone, the next (much larger) accelerators may never be built.
And don't go thinking that that's the end of American innovation in nuclear fusion. There is other research being carried out into alternatives to the toroidal confinement design. At the very least there is the work on Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) being carried out at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL - sorry about all the acronyms). This project involves the compression of tritium pellets using several high-energy lasers. The approach is radically different from the work at ITER/FIRE. Funding of such a project makes a lot more sense than funding FIRE; instead of spending money duplicating research, the money goes towards funding a diversity of research. Evolution of the best technology happens faster that way.
So to me the future still looks promising. Nuclear fusion is a technology that needs to be shared worldwide, and before more countries decide that burning yet more fossil fuels is a more accessible way of generating electricity. More prudent use of the financial resources available to develop Fusion can only be a good thing.
Quit being obtuse. Chinese people could use a Chinese version. English people could use an English version. If an English person needed to read a Chinese document they can add the Chinese support. But packaging Abiword to support everything wastes local computer resources.
A problem that occurs in so much software is that there never seems a good place to stop. Word keeps evolving for the sake of evolving, in the process being less well able to do the things it was initially designed for. But the same is true of so much other software: emacs is huge; so it Mozilla. In the latter case people have tried to trim things down, but I won't be surprised if their efforts become huge too. The extra bloat isn't from bugfixes, it's from too many extras.
Another example, going back to wordprocessors. Take Abiword. It has bidirectional printing. I'm never going to use that. It has internationalization. I'm unlikely to write in another language enough to use that either. Of course it's tricky, since I know that other people will want to use these features. But for me they end up wasting space and loading time.
It's all so far from the Unix way of doing simple individual things well. That principle seems to be dying out, but it doesn't seem any less valid now than 10 years ago.
The thing is, as you point out, the outsourced product is likely to be cheaper - it wouldn't make sense otherwise. On balance, if outsourcing continues to pay off for companies, consumers overall (although perhaps not within the IT sector) will gain a lower cost of living through cheaper products. That's the benefit of competition, and somewhere a balance must be reached.
If you're so desperate to compete with Indian workers maybe you should move to India. Then you'd get the lower cost of living that India has to offer.
Or you could use your more expensive education (presumably funded in part by the higher cost of living in the states) to train for a more competitive job.
So your boss has decided that you either suck at your job or you cost too much for what they get out of you. But you've accumulated plenty of experience. What do you expect from your employers? They need to transfer the knowledge to the new guy, and you're still an employee. Why not get on with it, train the guy up and do a good job of it to get a decent reference for your next job?
Which meter is that? A water meter? A distance meter? Or perhaps you meant a "metre". ;)
Books are so much more material. They stay around for ages. The content on the web is forever changing, and I never trust the information I want access to to be still be there in a few years.
/. out of curiosity, and now I'm typing away and still now getting any further. You see?!
But there's also something slightly insidious about the web. It requires so little brain power to use. You can immerse yourself and end up staring at a screen for hours. It has answers to many of the things I need to know, but I often find out about things I just don't need to know as well.
In the process of doing research I often need to sit and think in order to make progress. It's very easy to not get to that point when there's a computer to hand. I keep looking things up, following the occasional tangential link, and even though I feel that I'm doing something productive I'm actually getting no further.
And here I am again, having just checked
Optical fibres can be used as couplers between two lasers (the second laser amplifies the signal from the first). We use such a system in our lab, where average powers of 40-100W can be sent down a single fibre (multimode in our case). If the surface of the end of the fibre gets scratched, or if dust lands on it, the tip can explode. With each pulse (it's a 25kHz pulsed laser) another piece of fibre is destoyed, and it acts like a fuse. If you don't turn the laser off quickly you can soon lose kilometres of fibre. All that's left is a ringing in your ears and a few bits of scorched plastic.
Would the lawyers be able to do much if you said "it's the ascii equivalent of the numbers between the xth and yth digits of pi"?
I'm not convinved by your reasoning on the effective range of these lasers. I'm guessing the beam must be focused to a spot in order to achieve the high intensities required to damage the shell. The further away you bring something to focus, the larger the focal point. The extent of this varies upon the initial quality of the beam - but obviously atmospheric disturbances will decrease the quality with range.
Surely a failure of a security system could also be regarded as a failure of the humans who designed it.
While I'm sure that Gribbin has written very accessible books, I would be careful of reading too much into his material. I've read "Schrodinger's Kittens", and as a physicist I found that some of the things he wrote were misleading.
If his work gives you a taste for physics then great, but if you are going to start discussing physics afterwards you may do well to work through a real text-book.
Having a bunch of satelites whizzing round, broadcasting near to scientifically very interesting regions of the microwave region never made any sense. We pollute the sky with enough radiation that astronomy is difficult enough as it is. If an alien were looking at our planet they would most likely think our atmosphere predominantly contained sodium, since so much of the planet is lit with it.
Strictly speaking, a particle with zero mass /must/ travel at the speed of light.
The interesting thing is that if a particle had imaginary mass (as in i, the square root of -1) it would be constrained to travel backwards in time. Such a hypothetical particle is called a tachyon, and is often mentioned in SF books an TV shows. For instance, tachyons are used in Babylon 5 for long-distance communication.
Also, it's worth mentioning that real objects can travel faster than light, albeit not in a vacuum. The principle of Cherenkov(sp?) detectors is that particles move at speeds close to c, but in a material where the speed of light is less than c. The resulting "wake" of light, which is similar to a sonic boom, produces a blueish halo which can be detected in order to calculate the particle's speed.
I concur. Using terms like "extra sub-atomic particles" is just obfuscating the fact that it's just a relatively rare isotope of helium, with one neutron less than normal. The nature of the helium is far less interesting than the way it was contained. It doesn't sound far from idea (in Elite Frontier?) of containing anti-matter within organic molecules as a way of storing fuel. Not that it's in the least bit practical, but it's interesting to yet again see the overlap of science and science fiction.
You may like to check out the issue regarding forking (or lack of) in Linux compared to BSD Unix discussed in the infamous Halloween I paper, at http://www.opensource.org/hallo ween/halloween1.html, at the "Code Forking" sub-header.
Utter rubbish, and you clearly didn't think things through before posting that (perhaps too eager to get first post? :)
Open Source, if anything, lets those in the know (I'm not) see just how secure a product is. Since the vast majority of those are into developing rather than destroying the product, it can only get more secure.
With closed source, you only have the company's word that it's secure. How do you know it's not chock-full of trapdoors for them, or >>Insert least fovourite government agency here to hack in easily. That may not be especially likely, but you don't know, do you? Why? Because the source is _closed_.