It's good to think about security before we deploy rather than after, the old M$ model. If all messages originated by my car are digitally signed by a cert created specifically for my car by the car company and signed by them, I could be held legally responsible for the accuracy of those messages. If I hack my car's electronics to make it send erroneous messages, I could be held liable for any damages that might ensue. Any updates to the in-car software should be digitally signed by the originating manufacturer, and this signature validated by the in-car's BIOS equivalent before being accepted. Yes, there will be errors caused by faulty sensors and (gasp!) program bugs. But our own eyes are not faultless; should we then drive blindfold?
We've been chasing spammers for decades, like a dog chasing a car, with an equal lack of success. Why not skip over the spammers and go for the companies that use them to advertise? They can't be anonymous, else they would gain no benefit from advertising through spam. If we nail enough of them, market demand for spam adverts will dry up and spam merchants will have to find other employment, like handing out pamphlets to passing motorists at street intersections. At least then you can ride over them if they irritate you.
Excuse my ignorance, I don't live in the USA so I'm not involved (yet), but doesn't the underlying problem stem from the fact that US ISPs aren't allowed to bill subscribers per megabyte of bandwidth consumed? If subscribers paid for the bandwidth that they actually use, plus a fixed connection fee, the whole net neutrality debate might become totally irrelevant. Users who want to download gigabytes per day would no longer be a problem, they would be an opportunity. What's wrong with the old-fashioned idea of paying for what you use, rather than getting your neighbour to pay for it? Or is it more complicated than that?
I am aware that the event horizon of a black hole is not in the same place as the central singularity, they are separated by the Schwarzschild radius. I also know that traditionally, charge, mass and spin are the only three properties that a black hole retains. But what I believe is that once excess positive charge enters an event horizon, it, together with all other matter and radiation, falls rapidly into the central singularity. Once there, time dilation is infinite and cause and effect cease to operate. If the black hole accumulates an excess positive charge, this charge would have no effect on anything else inside or outside the singularity, including anything outside the event horizon.
If we look at it another way from the viewpoint of quantum electrodynamics, electrical charges exercise a force on one another by exchanging photons. Consider two electrical charges that are fairly close to one another, but where one is just inside the event horizon of a black hole and the other just outside it. Both charges will emit photons, but the photons emitted by the charge inside the event horizon can never escape from the event horizon and hence can never have any effect on the charge outside the event horizon. If both charges are positive, the charge outside the event horizon will not be repelled by the charge(s) within it.
Now consider any other horizon that is concentric with the event horizon but which has a smaller radius; all charges inside this smaller horizon can have no effect on any charges outside the horizon because photons emitted by charges inside the smaller horizon can never escape from it – all directions lead to the singularity at the center because of the curvature of space induced by the strong gravitational field of the black hole. Quantum electrodynamics predicts that if there is any excess positive charge located anywhere within the event horizon of a black hole, it can exert no force on any charge outside the event horizon. This prediction is implicit in Hawking's arguments in support of Hawking Radiation [URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation]; a particle-antiparticle pair happen to form just outside an event horizon; they would normally recombine shortly after formation, but if one happens to fall through the event horizon, it becomes invisible to the one that remains outside, and they never recombine.
Thanks for a lucid explanation of a complex problem. It was only about 10 years ago that astronomical observation showed that the universe is expanding more rapidly now than it did in the distant past. Before then it was assumed that the force of gravity would slow down the expansion over time. We need a new and so far unidentified force to explain the accelerating expansion that we observe.
I have posted a paper at http://turton.co.za/pubs/electrongas4.html that seeks to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe purely in terms of known physical laws, forces, and particles.
We have good reason to believe that there are huge black holes at the centers of most galaxies, and that gas and dust spiral into these black holes, forming accretion disks. Friction heats up the infalling material to very high temperatures, and it radiates heat, light, and even X-rays. These will ionize the infalling gas, releasing electrons. The equipartition of energy theorem, which is based on the second law of thermodynamics, states that in a gas containing a mixture of particle sizes, the lighter particles will have higher velocities than the heavier ones. That's why free Hydrogen molecules escape from the Earth's atmosphere – they move faster than the other molecules and some achieve escape velocity and escape into space. In the same way, the free electrons in the accretion disk around a black star will gain greater velocities than the other material, and large numbers of electrons will escape from the black hole's gravitational field. The material that falls into the black hole's event horizon will be a net positive charge. It will keep on falling and within minutes fall into the singularity at the center of the black hole. You might think that a steady accumulation of excess positive charge in the singularity would eventually repel positive charge from the area surrounding the black hole, but inside the singularity the curvature of space is infinite. Time stops, and physical laws based on cause and effect cease to operate. The excess positive charge within the singularity can have no effect on anything outside the singularity, so more and more positive charge keeps falling in.
The electrons that escape from an accretion disk will gradually disperse through the galaxy that contains it, but their escape will be slowed by the gas, dust, and magnetic fields within the galaxy. Galaxies will thus appear to have a net negative charge, and repel one another. Over time this repulsive force may grow to exceed the attractive force of gravity, giving rise to the observed accelerating expansion of our universe. This may sound unlikely, but electrostatic forces are immensely more powerful than are gravitational forces. If we consider two galaxies the size of our Milky Way and calculate how many excess electrons each would need to contain in order for the electrostatic repulsion of the excess electrons to exceed the gravitational attraction of the galaxies, it works out to about half a ton of excess electrons each. The corresponding protons, locked away in the singularities in black holes within the galaxies, would weigh about 1,000 tons. Given the mass of the Milky Way (about 10^42 kilograms), that's peanuts.
Putting a web app front-end on Open Office makes good sense, especially if the application server is already in your pocket. We currently tote around several electronic gadgets, and yet can only access "serious" applications through stationary desktops and bulky laptops. As electronics shrink, all of this must converge to a single platform. Since pretty much all applications require comms, and mobile phones provide this, they will probably end up being the platform that we converge onto. They will carry the files we're currently working with, like a level 1 cache, and swap out the ones we haven't touched for some time to server farms. They will give us dinky interfaces into their apps while we're on the move. When we need the big screen experience, they will deliver their apps to ubiquitous, big screen docking stations (a.k.a. browsers) via local wireless. So we will need to web-enable most of our important apps over time. See http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/02/after -desktop-what.html and http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/03/mobil izing-mobiles.html for how.
If corporates host boxes that pump out spam, sue them! Their firewalls shouldn't allow emails to flow out of their networks except from one of their approved mail gateways, which should require user authentication before accepting mail, and which should apply reasonable limits like 300 emails sent per source IP address per day, except for the corporate's own spam machine (a.k.a. marketing). Corporates should be held accountable for choosing cheesy software that allows viruses to take over their boxes, and for failing to protect them with their own firewalls, to the extent that this is possible with cheesy software. Let's share the pain, and over time it will percolate back to the prime source of cheesy software.
Cell phones already play music. Who wants to lug two bulky gadgets around when one will hack it? Cell phones will replace laptops and desktops too. The phone's biggest drawback is its dinky screen and keyboard size, but public generic (read browser) docking stations at work, home, cyber cafes, cars and 'planes will give us big screen access to the apps on our phones when we need it. See my blog http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/03/mobil izing-mobiles.html
The big advantage of biofuels is that while they are growing, they absorb all the CO2 that they will emit when burned some months later. The more biofuel feedstock we grow, the more CO2 it will absorb while growing. We pay our CO2 debts in advance, and there's no net addition to atmospheric CO2. Here's a link to a paper that suggests the cultivation of agae in salt pools to make biodiesel which can be burned in unmodified diesel-from-oil engines.
Slashdot Mirror
It's good to think about security before we deploy rather than after, the old M$ model. If all messages originated by my car are digitally signed by a cert created specifically for my car by the car company and signed by them, I could be held legally responsible for the accuracy of those messages. If I hack my car's electronics to make it send erroneous messages, I could be held liable for any damages that might ensue. Any updates to the in-car software should be digitally signed by the originating manufacturer, and this signature validated by the in-car's BIOS equivalent before being accepted. Yes, there will be errors caused by faulty sensors and (gasp!) program bugs. But our own eyes are not faultless; should we then drive blindfold?
We've been chasing spammers for decades, like a dog chasing a car, with an equal lack of success. Why not skip over the spammers and go for the companies that use them to advertise? They can't be anonymous, else they would gain no benefit from advertising through spam. If we nail enough of them, market demand for spam adverts will dry up and spam merchants will have to find other employment, like handing out pamphlets to passing motorists at street intersections. At least then you can ride over them if they irritate you.
Excuse my ignorance, I don't live in the USA so I'm not involved (yet), but doesn't the underlying problem stem from the fact that US ISPs aren't allowed to bill subscribers per megabyte of bandwidth consumed? If subscribers paid for the bandwidth that they actually use, plus a fixed connection fee, the whole net neutrality debate might become totally irrelevant. Users who want to download gigabytes per day would no longer be a problem, they would be an opportunity. What's wrong with the old-fashioned idea of paying for what you use, rather than getting your neighbour to pay for it? Or is it more complicated than that?
6) Leap tall buildings with a single bound
7) Fly faster than a speeding bullet
It's just pity that there are so few great programmers around. We need to learn to get by with what we have, slow-stream plodders like me.
I am aware that the event horizon of a black hole is not in the same place as the central singularity, they are separated by the Schwarzschild radius. I also know that traditionally, charge, mass and spin are the only three properties that a black hole retains. But what I believe is that once excess positive charge enters an event horizon, it, together with all other matter and radiation, falls rapidly into the central singularity. Once there, time dilation is infinite and cause and effect cease to operate. If the black hole accumulates an excess positive charge, this charge would have no effect on anything else inside or outside the singularity, including anything outside the event horizon.
If we look at it another way from the viewpoint of quantum electrodynamics, electrical charges exercise a force on one another by exchanging photons. Consider two electrical charges that are fairly close to one another, but where one is just inside the event horizon of a black hole and the other just outside it. Both charges will emit photons, but the photons emitted by the charge inside the event horizon can never escape from the event horizon and hence can never have any effect on the charge outside the event horizon. If both charges are positive, the charge outside the event horizon will not be repelled by the charge(s) within it.
Now consider any other horizon that is concentric with the event horizon but which has a smaller radius; all charges inside this smaller horizon can have no effect on any charges outside the horizon because photons emitted by charges inside the smaller horizon can never escape from it – all directions lead to the singularity at the center because of the curvature of space induced by the strong gravitational field of the black hole. Quantum electrodynamics predicts that if there is any excess positive charge located anywhere within the event horizon of a black hole, it can exert no force on any charge outside the event horizon. This prediction is implicit in Hawking's arguments in support of Hawking Radiation [URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation]; a particle-antiparticle pair happen to form just outside an event horizon; they would normally recombine shortly after formation, but if one happens to fall through the event horizon, it becomes invisible to the one that remains outside, and they never recombine.
Thanks for a lucid explanation of a complex problem. It was only about 10 years ago that astronomical observation showed that the universe is expanding more rapidly now than it did in the distant past. Before then it was assumed that the force of gravity would slow down the expansion over time. We need a new and so far unidentified force to explain the accelerating expansion that we observe.
I have posted a paper at http://turton.co.za/pubs/electrongas4.html that seeks to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe purely in terms of known physical laws, forces, and particles.
We have good reason to believe that there are huge black holes at the centers of most galaxies, and that gas and dust spiral into these black holes, forming accretion disks. Friction heats up the infalling material to very high temperatures, and it radiates heat, light, and even X-rays. These will ionize the infalling gas, releasing electrons. The equipartition of energy theorem, which is based on the second law of thermodynamics, states that in a gas containing a mixture of particle sizes, the lighter particles will have higher velocities than the heavier ones. That's why free Hydrogen molecules escape from the Earth's atmosphere – they move faster than the other molecules and some achieve escape velocity and escape into space. In the same way, the free electrons in the accretion disk around a black star will gain greater velocities than the other material, and large numbers of electrons will escape from the black hole's gravitational field. The material that falls into the black hole's event horizon will be a net positive charge. It will keep on falling and within minutes fall into the singularity at the center of the black hole. You might think that a steady accumulation of excess positive charge in the singularity would eventually repel positive charge from the area surrounding the black hole, but inside the singularity the curvature of space is infinite. Time stops, and physical laws based on cause and effect cease to operate. The excess positive charge within the singularity can have no effect on anything outside the singularity, so more and more positive charge keeps falling in.
The electrons that escape from an accretion disk will gradually disperse through the galaxy that contains it, but their escape will be slowed by the gas, dust, and magnetic fields within the galaxy. Galaxies will thus appear to have a net negative charge, and repel one another. Over time this repulsive force may grow to exceed the attractive force of gravity, giving rise to the observed accelerating expansion of our universe. This may sound unlikely, but electrostatic forces are immensely more powerful than are gravitational forces. If we consider two galaxies the size of our Milky Way and calculate how many excess electrons each would need to contain in order for the electrostatic repulsion of the excess electrons to exceed the gravitational attraction of the galaxies, it works out to about half a ton of excess electrons each. The corresponding protons, locked away in the singularities in black holes within the galaxies, would weigh about 1,000 tons. Given the mass of the Milky Way (about 10^42 kilograms), that's peanuts.
Putting a web app front-end on Open Office makes good sense, especially if the application server is already in your pocket. We currently tote around several electronic gadgets, and yet can only access "serious" applications through stationary desktops and bulky laptops. As electronics shrink, all of this must converge to a single platform. Since pretty much all applications require comms, and mobile phones provide this, they will probably end up being the platform that we converge onto. They will carry the files we're currently working with, like a level 1 cache, and swap out the ones we haven't touched for some time to server farms. They will give us dinky interfaces into their apps while we're on the move. When we need the big screen experience, they will deliver their apps to ubiquitous, big screen docking stations (a.k.a. browsers) via local wireless. So we will need to web-enable most of our important apps over time. See http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/02/after -desktop-what.html and http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/03/mobil izing-mobiles.html for how.
If corporates host boxes that pump out spam, sue them! Their firewalls shouldn't allow emails to flow out of their networks except from one of their approved mail gateways, which should require user authentication before accepting mail, and which should apply reasonable limits like 300 emails sent per source IP address per day, except for the corporate's own spam machine (a.k.a. marketing). Corporates should be held accountable for choosing cheesy software that allows viruses to take over their boxes, and for failing to protect them with their own firewalls, to the extent that this is possible with cheesy software. Let's share the pain, and over time it will percolate back to the prime source of cheesy software.
Cell phones already play music. Who wants to lug two bulky gadgets around when one will hack it? Cell phones will replace laptops and desktops too. The phone's biggest drawback is its dinky screen and keyboard size, but public generic (read browser) docking stations at work, home, cyber cafes, cars and 'planes will give us big screen access to the apps on our phones when we need it. See my blog http://trevors-trinkets.blogspot.com/2007/03/mobil izing-mobiles.html
It looks like investors have come up with a new gambling strategy - bubble or quits.
The big advantage of biofuels is that while they are growing, they absorb all the CO2 that they will emit when burned some months later. The more biofuel feedstock we grow, the more CO2 it will absorb while growing. We pay our CO2 debts in advance, and there's no net addition to atmospheric CO2. Here's a link to a paper that suggests the cultivation of agae in salt pools to make biodiesel which can be burned in unmodified diesel-from-oil engines.