With a quantum computer, you can do one time pad ciphers. Thing is that encryption with normal computers is costly. If you have qbits doing the job, you are no longer forced to rely on some algorithm to produce random numbers, but you also do the job quickly.
So, if the key is then kept secret, you won't break it...
Shesh. I was afraid I would never find an article touching the second law in this discussion. C'mon. In easy terms: You can't win! If you want to use waste heat, you need to cool something else in order to heat it up again with that same waste heat. This costs you energy that you need to take from somewhere. Even if you would use part of that waste heat, efficiency would go by the board. You cannot turn heat completely into mechanical energy (sound) your efficiency drops well below 100%. If you turn sound in turn into electricity, part of the sound energy dissipates (second law here again, in another form: If you disrup something - which you do with pressure waves such as sound, you increase entropy. If you increase entropy - well - it heats up... That is in fact another statement of the second law). So full ACK to the parent you just waste more. Question is not how efficient is it, but how efficient is the process compared to everything else. Seeing that I did not yet read TFA, I shall now do so, in order to maybe find an answer to that question.
I would never spend more than say 300$ on a device that mostly disrupts my life by making me reachable 24/7. However, of course with the iPhone it is different. Apple will have a tough ride but then again, it is an apple product. I can remember the gadget they launched back in 2001, when I did not believe that this would have a big market share. It was called the iPod. And as of today, the term mp3-player is almost synonymous with iPod. Maybe they do it again?
I do not quite agree.
I think there are many MP3 Players around, many of which offer more functionality and more ergonomic designs.
The point is that there are many alike, but there is only one iPod.
That's why it sells and the others are - well - just players. It's just cool to have one.
Ever had a look at this?
Think about what happens if google is offering that service for text processing and spreadsheets? True, it is not nearly as performant but a viable, totally free and legal alternative to buying small business office for lots of dollars...
Google is a massively innovating company that because of its great search technology has a good cash-flow from ads. They invest that money in even more great stuff that tends to scare the shit out of your classical software companies. We will see where this ends or if these services are really used in the future (and I doubt whether corporations will do that), but putting on the MS CEO hat, I would see google as one of the greatest future competitors there are
It's even more subtle. Think about it. If you just produce offspring one more's better basis, you tend to forget that at least for some time, you have to rear your children, until they go out and hunt for themselves. This means that you have to divide your parental investment (P.I.) between your existing children and the ones you are going to have. Incidentially, it could be more profitable then to have no more children, since you are better off helping the ones that are here already to survive, which you probably could not do if you had, say five more hungry mouths to feed, which could lead to a significant number of all of them to starve or die of lack of attention etc. The point is to find the optimum number of offspring. This is why the world population did not explode the way it could have done had we just blindly reproduced for some 10000 years or so. Of course, some events like plague etc. helped a lot in this but it would not have succeeded killing off at an exponential rate (which is the rate at which we could grow).
So, in terms of offspring, natural selection favours the ones that manage to have an optimum amount of children, which in turn ensures longevity of the genes in the gene pool.
I am not a ethologist, so I might just as well quote my source: The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins and its sequel: The extended phenotype. Both are brilliant and understandable even for layman.
All this brings me back to the original question: Who ever said evolution could ever stop? We are the best example as to why it actually hasn't.
Well look at it this way. Evolution is an ongoing process. It is not so long since everybody hat to believe that earth is a flat dish with some water around, and that in fact it's the centre of everything anyway. We know better today, because we have evidence in everyday life.
The paradigm change took us about 1000 years - no big span for evolution and we're still at it. The one important thing is that evolution itself does not really care about what we think or how we feel life the universe and everything should be. It just moves on. This of course also means that in order to survive, a human being more than ever needs to be rational, sharp thinking and not obfuscating anything - IN THE LONG RUN. So in the end, you are better off if you stop clinging to your cherished believes just because it's easier to accept. That's why brains evolved in the end - it is evolutionary more favorably to be able to THINK. Some of us are better - they stay in the gene pool, some of us less so. And in the end this also means we become educated enough to abandon believes that are just comfortable because they do not trouble us. Evolution is still at work and will be until the end.
Think about how many people believed in evolution 100 years ago. It's a rapid change and I can understand people who refuse to believe that some millions of years ago, we started to leave our beloved trees. In terms of evolution, this is yet a smaller amount of time than the flat earth - ball shaped earth within a galaxy amongst galaxies shift.
While this is a truly sad decision, nature essentially remains untouched by it. Whether politicians aim for higher votes, or people cannot cope with the idea of our ancestors being just apes and carbon based lifeforms as such, rather than a designed species of their own does not really matter in the big picture. Also, science or not science is a question best addressed in the academic community, which spreads all over the world, where in some sane places discussions of that kind are safely locked away in lunatic asylums.
Have a little confidence guys. The upshot is just that in Kansas, there won't be any great science for the next few years.
You can tell a good tool from a bad only if you saw the person handling it. Some are good on vi, some on joe, some on emacs. Whatever you use, you must feel comfortable about it, I think. If one editor is cool just because it features a column-editing mode, then if you can achieve the same with just a few keystrokes in the same time, then what is the difference?. Its personal taste, really, so we can now go on discussing the best personal taste...
No, read Einstein again. I any one system, relativistic addition of speeds apply according to his formula. Follows directly from Lorentz transformation of the others' speed to your system. And if one of the two speeds added is c, the formula pops out c and nothing more. OK, so it is still just a formula, but since in relativity nothing will be faster than light, it's what you expect to happen.
It is of course an interesting question what would happen if relativity where somehow wrong. Then, technically it could be possible. But relativity (special theory, that is) stands for exactly 100 years now, and has not been greatly modified, rather, it is one of the best confirmed theories nowadays, so you better stick to the formula.
Actually, every code is screwed if you know nothing about the other side. That's what the article states. There is nothing to prevent you from betrayal. Deal with it. But once you agreed with an authenticated person (say you talk to her via a normal phone line), it is impossible for Eve to tap in without being noticed, because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Once you agreed to a one-time pad cipher, every single photon you detect that is not measured correctly is sure to having been corrupted by someone else, again because of fundamental laws of quantum mechanics.
I think in fact science rules out religion in the whole. If you are to believe things, then you are not investigating them, and if you are to investigate, you are striving for an understanding of things, not just for some other sort of belief. The assymetry here is that science nowadays never uses god or whatever spiritual being you believe in as an ultimate reason or authority, whereas religion and its institutions are trying to control science for more than one millenium. Let me state it like this. To science (and evolution for that matter), it does not really matter whether Eve was carved out from Adam or vice versa. The two sexes just *are*. To religion, as a philosophic/ideologic framework, things like that matter, and don't give me the stuff about symbolisms and images in the Holy Bible. At the time it was written, people seemed to believe in babys being born from a virgin, or humans turning to stone and whatnot. So I don't think there was a symbolic meaning behind this.
The problem is that there is no such thing and that's it. Women were designed to bear *after* having sex, because that is how nature works, and she did so for ages and will continue to do so. Yet religion states one instance where nature must have been on holidays. I am a scientist and like accurate numbers, but even for those of us more comfortable with estimates: How small, given a population of roughly 6000B People (today, not taken into account all those being born since the first Christmae) do you think the probability for such a thing to happen is? Come on. Let's get real. Science will never be able to provide us with all the answers, but religion states things just plain out wrong.
I guess, as in the case with SETI@home, people could be found to do it, although it is not as sexy. I don't understand the workings of BOINC, so my question is how would you coordinate computers over the net, with a massively parallel algorithm such as quantum MC?
Ok, maybe I was not clear enough. Apple was the first to make MP3 Players a lifestyle product, just as it was with computers. I am sitting in front of a reasonably nice Windows Box right now, but in design, there is no company anywhere close to Apple. So it is with the iPod. I see that some features have to be added (my favourite would be an FM radio, for instance) but I think music industry will keep all producers busy when they allow dragging and dropping to their players, inhibiting development. So by not showing this feature, Apple could have some advantages. And as for recording, the iPod can do so as well. If you want something close to drag and drop for iPod, try slurp(MAC OS).
Why? Ipod was the first, and will always be...
Industry is trying to copy Apple, instead of bringing in some device of their own. The header of the article says it clearly: "IPod slayer". So the goal would be to outperform the IPod. When Apple entered the market, they did not try to compete with some existing product. Instead, they made a device that was very expensive, yet hat that stylish Apple look upon it. And it became a success all over the world. Now, by trying to compete with the IPod, Rio gives away the chance to be unique. Whether or not their sales rise above those of apple. Their device will always be "like the IPod". Just look how it is shipped and whate goodies you get.
Hubble is one of the most fruitful scientific projects ever. Since the nineties, it has continuously shaped our view of the universe, think, e.g. of the Hubble deep field. Besides, it is still the only way astronomers can take a peek into space (in the visible part of the spectrum) without having to accept athmospheric disturbances. That is, it is still our sharpest eye out there and will surely help in bringing us some great science. Thanks a lot, NASA!
Well it goes without saying that there is quite a ssmall probability for a card to get nailed somewhere. And do you really wonder why SM and xD did survive sledgehammering? Come on, they are by far the flattest out there (apart from SD/MMD ). Sledgehammers cannot strike them as hard as CF cards for example.
Still, those two cards are a bit out of style, since SM is REALLY old, and xDs are only used by digital cameras made by Fuji and Olympus, so I dont think they will find a great audience.
People write the name of the person they are voting for on a piece of paper. Some poor bastards have to sort the pieces of paper (they do it voluntarily, yet can be forced to do it), and afterwards each pile (of unique names) is weighted. As one exactly knows the weight of one leaf, one can easily estimate the number of papers there are. This system works so well that we do so for many many years. Of course, where I come from is Switzerland so we have it double checked by counting manually if somehow the result is ambiguous. This is not short of still banging the rocks together, but hell it works. Besides, I do not believe that voting with touch screens does make it easier or safer for people to vote.
Ummm. Let's say C# is like C. Your comp sci teacher misses the point that virtually all relevant OSes are somehow coded in C or a dialect thereof. So there is not only an academic value to it, it is a real world language, and it is NOT OO. For computational science, I would use C++ though, which is closely linked to C but has OO features.
All the previous posts have been about hacking or not hacking a DVD. Come on, we know that!!! Nothing is ever secure from hacking, so why the fuss about it.
I thin this is the beginning of a new stratagem: In principle one could sell DVD players with individual signatures that can somehow burn a tag on an individual DVD, which makes it impossible to be read and played by any other player. Now THAT's DRM for you.
I highly disagree. When air travel was invented, it was the military that developped it further and thereby made it accessable to the public. Veterans of war, who fought in the air force became the first private pilots flight instructors etc. It was a rapid change to civil aviation at very low cost. The difference is not artificial expensiveness (I mean, come on, my wristwatch and my laptop both have titanium on them and neither cost a fortune). Spaceflight is expensive because you cannot use familiar technologies. For example, you have to come up with new engines that work in the vacuum of space AS WELL as on earth. But the production of the whole thing involves separating Hydrogen from Oxygen in one or the other way, a process that is very (and I mean very, as opposed to normal fossile fuels) expensive.
Then, space is an environment not designed for humans to live in. So you must provide special vessels. Aircraft just lift you off the ground and press you a bit so that you feel at home, but this does not do in a spacecraft. You have to be trained and you have to regrow your muscles after spending several days in space etc. All this is going to cost a lot. And these factors will never get cheaper, exept when we find a means (such as aircraft) to assure the average person can suvive a spacetrip. Then, cost will sink inevitably.
As for non-manned spaceflight, several companies are doing that. Perhaps not with shuttles, perhaps not very spectacularly, but all those communication satellites have to come into orbit somehow, don't they? I mean a reasonably funded University could easily do a project involving a satellite. And hadn't NASA messed up inches and centimetres, I would know at least one project carried out in this way. So spaceflight is in fact accessible.
Another thing is the fact that, sorry to say this, you have to have some knowledge prior to do spaceflight. Even if the computer can do a lot for you, you have to know what you're doing. This involves planetary motion (satellites) or even general relativity (GPS). So it's going to be highly trained employees, and of course human resources is the most costly cost of all... It's just not feasible nowadays to just set up a rocked in your backyard and shooting it up. It's more complicated.
As a final example for accessibility of military knowledge is the atomic bomb. See, any physisist can tell you how it works, you can get recipes from the web etc. Shortly after it was invented, the information was available, because scientists around the world were proceeding along the same lines and would have told you unless the government told them to shut up. I believe there were scientists who knew how to do it but chose to remain silent because of the devastation the weapon could produce. Then, Plutonium was not a thing you could just get around the corner, but for may years afterwards, it was relatively cheap and nowadays, terrorists can buy plutonium, uranium and all the rest of it if they chose to. Given that they have rather more limited financial mean than governments, the atomic bomb is cheap. And military cannot hold it back.
Slashdot Mirror
With a quantum computer, you can do one time pad ciphers. Thing is that encryption with normal computers is costly. If you have qbits doing the job, you are no longer forced to rely on some algorithm to produce random numbers, but you also do the job quickly. So, if the key is then kept secret, you won't break it...
Shesh. I was afraid I would never find an article touching the second law in this discussion. C'mon. In easy terms: You can't win! If you want to use waste heat, you need to cool something else in order to heat it up again with that same waste heat. This costs you energy that you need to take from somewhere. Even if you would use part of that waste heat, efficiency would go by the board. You cannot turn heat completely into mechanical energy (sound) your efficiency drops well below 100%. If you turn sound in turn into electricity, part of the sound energy dissipates (second law here again, in another form: If you disrup something - which you do with pressure waves such as sound, you increase entropy. If you increase entropy - well - it heats up... That is in fact another statement of the second law). So full ACK to the parent you just waste more. Question is not how efficient is it, but how efficient is the process compared to everything else. Seeing that I did not yet read TFA, I shall now do so, in order to maybe find an answer to that question.
I would never spend more than say 300$ on a device that mostly disrupts my life by making me reachable 24/7. However, of course with the iPhone it is different. Apple will have a tough ride but then again, it is an apple product. I can remember the gadget they launched back in 2001, when I did not believe that this would have a big market share. It was called the iPod. And as of today, the term mp3-player is almost synonymous with iPod. Maybe they do it again?
I do not quite agree. I think there are many MP3 Players around, many of which offer more functionality and more ergonomic designs.
The point is that there are many alike, but there is only one iPod. That's why it sells and the others are - well - just players. It's just cool to have one.
Or you could just buy a mac mini.
Ever had a look at this? Think about what happens if google is offering that service for text processing and spreadsheets? True, it is not nearly as performant but a viable, totally free and legal alternative to buying small business office for lots of dollars... Google is a massively innovating company that because of its great search technology has a good cash-flow from ads. They invest that money in even more great stuff that tends to scare the shit out of your classical software companies. We will see where this ends or if these services are really used in the future (and I doubt whether corporations will do that), but putting on the MS CEO hat, I would see google as one of the greatest future competitors there are
...not funny, all right, now get on with it. GET ON WITH IT
So, in terms of offspring, natural selection favours the ones that manage to have an optimum amount of children, which in turn ensures longevity of the genes in the gene pool.
I am not a ethologist, so I might just as well quote my source: The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins and its sequel: The extended phenotype. Both are brilliant and understandable even for layman.
All this brings me back to the original question: Who ever said evolution could ever stop? We are the best example as to why it actually hasn't.
The paradigm change took us about 1000 years - no big span for evolution and we're still at it. The one important thing is that evolution itself does not really care about what we think or how we feel life the universe and everything should be. It just moves on. This of course also means that in order to survive, a human being more than ever needs to be rational, sharp thinking and not obfuscating anything - IN THE LONG RUN. So in the end, you are better off if you stop clinging to your cherished believes just because it's easier to accept. That's why brains evolved in the end - it is evolutionary more favorably to be able to THINK. Some of us are better - they stay in the gene pool, some of us less so. And in the end this also means we become educated enough to abandon believes that are just comfortable because they do not trouble us. Evolution is still at work and will be until the end.
Think about how many people believed in evolution 100 years ago. It's a rapid change and I can understand people who refuse to believe that some millions of years ago, we started to leave our beloved trees. In terms of evolution, this is yet a smaller amount of time than the flat earth - ball shaped earth within a galaxy amongst galaxies shift.
While this is a truly sad decision, nature essentially remains untouched by it. Whether politicians aim for higher votes, or people cannot cope with the idea of our ancestors being just apes and carbon based lifeforms as such, rather than a designed species of their own does not really matter in the big picture. Also, science or not science is a question best addressed in the academic community, which spreads all over the world, where in some sane places discussions of that kind are safely locked away in lunatic asylums. Have a little confidence guys. The upshot is just that in Kansas, there won't be any great science for the next few years.
You can tell a good tool from a bad only if you saw the person handling it. Some are good on vi, some on joe, some on emacs. Whatever you use, you must feel comfortable about it, I think. If one editor is cool just because it features a column-editing mode, then if you can achieve the same with just a few keystrokes in the same time, then what is the difference?. Its personal taste, really, so we can now go on discussing the best personal taste...
No, read Einstein again. I any one system, relativistic addition of speeds apply according to his formula. Follows directly from Lorentz transformation of the others' speed to your system. And if one of the two speeds added is c, the formula pops out c and nothing more. OK, so it is still just a formula, but since in relativity nothing will be faster than light, it's what you expect to happen. It is of course an interesting question what would happen if relativity where somehow wrong. Then, technically it could be possible. But relativity (special theory, that is) stands for exactly 100 years now, and has not been greatly modified, rather, it is one of the best confirmed theories nowadays, so you better stick to the formula.
Actually, every code is screwed if you know nothing about the other side. That's what the article states. There is nothing to prevent you from betrayal. Deal with it. But once you agreed with an authenticated person (say you talk to her via a normal phone line), it is impossible for Eve to tap in without being noticed, because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Once you agreed to a one-time pad cipher, every single photon you detect that is not measured correctly is sure to having been corrupted by someone else, again because of fundamental laws of quantum mechanics.
I think in fact science rules out religion in the whole. If you are to believe things, then you are not investigating them, and if you are to investigate, you are striving for an understanding of things, not just for some other sort of belief. The assymetry here is that science nowadays never uses god or whatever spiritual being you believe in as an ultimate reason or authority, whereas religion and its institutions are trying to control science for more than one millenium. Let me state it like this. To science (and evolution for that matter), it does not really matter whether Eve was carved out from Adam or vice versa. The two sexes just *are*. To religion, as a philosophic/ideologic framework, things like that matter, and don't give me the stuff about symbolisms and images in the Holy Bible. At the time it was written, people seemed to believe in babys being born from a virgin, or humans turning to stone and whatnot. So I don't think there was a symbolic meaning behind this. The problem is that there is no such thing and that's it. Women were designed to bear *after* having sex, because that is how nature works, and she did so for ages and will continue to do so. Yet religion states one instance where nature must have been on holidays. I am a scientist and like accurate numbers, but even for those of us more comfortable with estimates: How small, given a population of roughly 6000B People (today, not taken into account all those being born since the first Christmae) do you think the probability for such a thing to happen is? Come on. Let's get real. Science will never be able to provide us with all the answers, but religion states things just plain out wrong.
I guess, as in the case with SETI@home, people could be found to do it, although it is not as sexy. I don't understand the workings of BOINC, so my question is how would you coordinate computers over the net, with a massively parallel algorithm such as quantum MC?
Ok, maybe I was not clear enough. Apple was the first to make MP3 Players a lifestyle product, just as it was with computers. I am sitting in front of a reasonably nice Windows Box right now, but in design, there is no company anywhere close to Apple.
So it is with the iPod. I see that some features have to be added (my favourite would be an FM radio, for instance) but I think music industry will keep all producers busy when they allow dragging and dropping to their players, inhibiting development. So by not showing this feature, Apple could have some advantages. And as for recording, the iPod can do so as well.
If you want something close to drag and drop for iPod, try slurp(MAC OS).
Not convinced that there will soon be a slayer...
Why? Ipod was the first, and will always be... Industry is trying to copy Apple, instead of bringing in some device of their own. The header of the article says it clearly: "IPod slayer". So the goal would be to outperform the IPod. When Apple entered the market, they did not try to compete with some existing product. Instead, they made a device that was very expensive, yet hat that stylish Apple look upon it. And it became a success all over the world. Now, by trying to compete with the IPod, Rio gives away the chance to be unique. Whether or not their sales rise above those of apple. Their device will always be "like the IPod". Just look how it is shipped and whate goodies you get.
Hubble is one of the most fruitful scientific projects ever. Since the nineties, it has continuously shaped our view of the universe, think, e.g. of the Hubble deep field. Besides, it is still the only way astronomers can take a peek into space (in the visible part of the spectrum) without having to accept athmospheric disturbances. That is, it is still our sharpest eye out there and will surely help in bringing us some great science. Thanks a lot, NASA!
Still, those two cards are a bit out of style, since SM is REALLY old, and xDs are only used by digital cameras made by Fuji and Olympus, so I dont think they will find a great audience.
People write the name of the person they are voting for on a piece of paper. Some poor bastards have to sort the pieces of paper (they do it voluntarily, yet can be forced to do it), and afterwards each pile (of unique names) is weighted. As one exactly knows the weight of one leaf, one can easily estimate the number of papers there are. This system works so well that we do so for many many years. Of course, where I come from is Switzerland so we have it double checked by counting manually if somehow the result is ambiguous. This is not short of still banging the rocks together, but hell it works. Besides, I do not believe that voting with touch screens does make it easier or safer for people to vote.
Yep and with a catastrophic orthography, but come on, there are programming languages which are worth fighting for...
Ummm. Let's say C# is like C. Your comp sci teacher misses the point that virtually all relevant OSes are somehow coded in C or a dialect thereof. So there is not only an academic value to it, it is a real world language, and it is NOT OO. For computational science, I would use C++ though, which is closely linked to C but has OO features.
It will only be possible to identify the member if the rip has any sign of it left.
I thin this is the beginning of a new stratagem: In principle one could sell DVD players with individual signatures that can somehow burn a tag on an individual DVD, which makes it impossible to be read and played by any other player. Now THAT's DRM for you.
Then, space is an environment not designed for humans to live in. So you must provide special vessels. Aircraft just lift you off the ground and press you a bit so that you feel at home, but this does not do in a spacecraft. You have to be trained and you have to regrow your muscles after spending several days in space etc. All this is going to cost a lot. And these factors will never get cheaper, exept when we find a means (such as aircraft) to assure the average person can suvive a spacetrip. Then, cost will sink inevitably.
As for non-manned spaceflight, several companies are doing that. Perhaps not with shuttles, perhaps not very spectacularly, but all those communication satellites have to come into orbit somehow, don't they? I mean a reasonably funded University could easily do a project involving a satellite. And hadn't NASA messed up inches and centimetres, I would know at least one project carried out in this way. So spaceflight is in fact accessible.
Another thing is the fact that, sorry to say this, you have to have some knowledge prior to do spaceflight. Even if the computer can do a lot for you, you have to know what you're doing. This involves planetary motion (satellites) or even general relativity (GPS). So it's going to be highly trained employees, and of course human resources is the most costly cost of all... It's just not feasible nowadays to just set up a rocked in your backyard and shooting it up. It's more complicated.
As a final example for accessibility of military knowledge is the atomic bomb. See, any physisist can tell you how it works, you can get recipes from the web etc. Shortly after it was invented, the information was available, because scientists around the world were proceeding along the same lines and would have told you unless the government told them to shut up. I believe there were scientists who knew how to do it but chose to remain silent because of the devastation the weapon could produce. Then, Plutonium was not a thing you could just get around the corner, but for may years afterwards, it was relatively cheap and nowadays, terrorists can buy plutonium, uranium and all the rest of it if they chose to. Given that they have rather more limited financial mean than governments, the atomic bomb is cheap. And military cannot hold it back.