No, this is why we don't want any single country/continent controlling the internet. This proposal would (if it were ever created) only affect emails sent in Europe. However, what would happen if say the US controlled (run under contract from the deparment of commerce) ICANN decided to implement a tax on domain names? One which the entire world was required to pay, without any service guarantees or say into how the moneys used? That would be a disaster, I'm sure you'd agree.
So while I completly agree that we don't want Europe controlling the net, or Asia, or Australia, neither do I belive it should be under the sole juristiction of any single government (this includes America).
Physics tells us that the energy lost from transmitting electricity (as heat) is RI^2, and power is IV (I = Current, V = Voltage, R = Resistance). So to send lots of power without much heating, you use high voltages and low current. This is whats done currently, to the point where the wires can't really take much more voltage (well, not cheaply anyway).
There's only one proposed solution I'm aware of, which is using high temperature superconductors as wires. These have very low resistance (in some cases theoretically 0) so reduce the energy lost by ohmic heating (the RI^2 thing). Plus they can conduct around 10* the voltage of current wires. The only problem is there still very difficult to make at all, let alone into wires, having only been discovered in 1986. The link below has some more info,
Don't know if your just complaining about the buttons in the alpha or wanting drag and drop ordering.. but Search engine ordering plugin lets you do just that.
In a way it has, temporarily. All public key encryption relies on the difficulty of factoring primes (or something very similar). It is not proveably secure (unlike quantum cryptography), and in fact no-one has even proved that factoring primes cannot be done efficiently classically, we just don't have a way yet. One of the main reasons for interest in quantum computing is its ability to factor primes (thus breaking public key encryption). So in a way quantum cryptography is a solution to an anticipated next generation problem. Although people who already use one time pads (military, big banks.. people for who 'difficult-to-break' isn't enough) would almost certainly find using QC better than using secure couriers of some sort.
Yes, you can only send as much data as you have key (well securely anyway), but thats not the reason for only using the quantum channel (fibre) for key distribution. The point is that you need to send a completly random string of data down your channel, and then completly at random discard about 3/4 of this. So your left with a shared random key, which you can use as a one time pad to send your actual message.
The whole thing is slow (at the moment) as all the technology is very experimental and you need to send single photons, which can only be done currently using attenuated lasers. Add to that that you have to change polarisation and measurment settings at both ends of the communication between photons, so its not possible to just use standard fibre transmission equipment.
Current systems use attenuated lasers.. basically you shine a laser onto a pair of very small holes, and theres only a very small chance of any photons getting through. So on average you'll get between 0.05 and 0.5 (determined by the size of the holes) photons passing through in one pulse. This is all on average though, sometimes you'll get 0, sometimes 1, and rarely 2 (or more). Hence "approximatly" one per pulse.
No no and no. I'm not meaning to be harsh but everything you said is misunderstood. The point is not to achieve security by doing things really slowly, the point of quantum cryptograhpy (wikipedias quite good) is that if anyone intercepts your photons/information, you know about it. So you can resend the information, using a differenet channel, whatever. It is very important in crypto to be able to guarantee that no-one else has your key.
If something can be read, and written - it can be copied
Entirely true in the classical, everyday world, and you'd think so on small scales (individual photons/atoms) too.. but actually wrong. Quantum states cannot be coppied (no cloning theorem). This is where the security of quamtum cryptography lies. There's nothing to stop someone from eavesdropping on your fibre, but if they do intercept anything you know about it. The only way they can get information without you knowing is if you accidently send the information twice, ie two photons in a pulse instead of one. Thats where this research is useful, its anything but pointless.
I don't see how transmitting single photons at a time as opposed to the millions used today would give a speed increase, the fastest quantum cryptography demonstrated so far achieved a rate of 500b/s, compared to 500Mb/s for normal fibre communication. It's only real purpose is cryptography.
The point of building/using a quantum channel (the fibre line) is to solve the key distribution problem, it cannot be used to send data. Why? Firstly in the protocol used for checking for eavesdroppers you end up discarding around 3/4 of the photons sent, with no way of predicting which ones, and secondly you really need to be sending random data to make it completly secure. The result is both parties end up with a random key, and you know with absolute certainty that no-one else has it. Compare with your "use a courier and a CD" method (which some places do currently use), where you cannot know if someones managed to make of copy of the CD during transport, and also cannot guarantee CD has been kepy securly (during the year (in your suggestion) its kept).
Once you have your key though, the can use the Vernam cipher (one time pad) which is provably unbreakable, to send the actual data over a standard telco line, copletly securely.
Conversely, if I don't build my own point to point fiber for key transmission then I run the risk of man-in-the-middle stealing my keys since the middle will have repeaters which can regenerate these 'secure photons'
I suggest you read about quantum cryptography more (wikipedias probably good).. pretty much the entire point of it is that you cannot just intercept and resend the photons without being detected. What you can do, if each laser pulse actually contains two identical photons is split one off and keep/measure that, without being detected. Hence the importance of single photon sources (which this research is in).
The article and summary seem to be a bit misleading and vauge about how the speed increase arrises. The great benefit of optical computing is that it allows the signals to get much much closer together than electronic circuits, and as such allow more compact circuits, which as we know generally means faster. Interestingly, electronic signals in wires and optical signals in fibers have roughly identical upper speed limits (light in free-space optical computers is faster, but also almost impossible to do anything useful with), so its the density which is the major factor.
Electrons are charged, so as you squeeze transistors closer together, the wires get thinner and closer together, and you get cross-talk and interference between them. Photons however hardly interact at all, so you can have many beams in the same space, and theres very little heat to be dissipated. Multiplw frequencies can also be used, resulting in massivly parallel computing (another GoodThing).
There are downsides with optical computing still, photons cannot be stopped and stored (easily), meaning any kind of useful computer in the near term is likely to be some sort of electro-optical hybrid, with photons carrying signals and electrons storing them
You appear to be ignoring the data, linked by GP, that China has reduced its CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) emission up untill 2000, on the basis that there is no data available since then? I couldn't find any reports written by McIlvaine, or any other data, dealing with the period since, but its unreasonable to expect such a large trend to suddenly reverse. And, if you want to speculate, the Pew Center for Global Climate Change has published a report stating that China's emissions could reduce by 19% by 2015. By contrast, Western Europe increased its carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion by 4.5 percent from 1995 to 1999 and the United States increased its emissions by 6.3 percent.
Also, you mention the 1998 WHO study, which as well as being in the middle of the study period is irrelevant anyway; everyone acknowledges that China is heaviliy polluted, the point your disputing is that it is attempting to reduce its emissions.The Econimist details the political will to reduce emissions, and the Science study seems to suggest results.
Since you seem to be fond of facts, consider:
America has no emission reduction requirements as it has ignored Kyoto
America is the leading CO2 producer in the world (source: US Dept. of Energy)
America is building at least 94 new coal-fired electricity plants by 2012 (Source, Robert McIlvaine)
If you read the original Science artical you'll also see that China is shutting down many of its old, inefficienct, highly-polluting coal power plants and replacing them with more efficient ones, accounting for some of the new builds.
I'm not in any way trying to say America Bad, China Good, as that is clearly not the case, I'm just suggesting that greenhouse gas reduction can be accomplished without needing the Kyoto protocol, provided there is political will. And indeed, as out of the major polluters only the Europeans and Russians are reducing their emissions under Kyoto, it will require another international agreement in the future to have any serious impact upon global levels.
Nowadays, Cato alumni are everywhere in the Bush administration and in groups advancing the president's Social Security initiative. Former Cato analyst Andrew G. Biggs is an associate commissioner of the Social Security Administration. The director of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, Derrick A. Max, previously worked for Abdnor (when she was at Cato) and for Weaver (when she was at the American Enterprise Institute)...
..and theres several more. So I'd think this is at least likely to be noticed by politicians and the media, if they take any notice or not is a different matter though..
1) Refuse China's request, therefore reducing the average Chinese citizen's access to information on the internet greatly.
Google is a search engine helping you find information (and displaying ads at the same time). It is NOT the internet, or information in itself. The average Chinese citizen has access to exactly the same information whether Google is there or not, the same portions of the internet are avilable (or not available as it may be) to them through Google or Yahoo or MSN.
There are atleast two other major search engines (Yahoo and MSN) operating in China, and undoubtably many more local ones. I find it difficult to believe that google is such a better service that it is going to make much difference to the information available there.
Also, the "message notifying them of sites being blocked for politcal reasons" is, I think, a small disclaimer that appears at the bottom of every page, stating that search results may not be shown in accordance with local laws.
As for the food analogy, a closer idea would probabably be refusing to sell (google isn't a charity remember, its in it for the money) food distrubtion technology to North Korea, knowing that they already have several food distrubtion system. They arn't doing this, as with most companies the case is they will do buisness with repressive regimes provided they pay correctly.
You seem to be mistaking Europe for one country with a single education policy. I believe the only country in Europe with a full universal voucher system is Sweden, with the Netherlands also having a more limited system. I'm not an expert though, I may be wrong.
Also, using Sweden as an example for policy is a bit tricky, as the center left goverment there has managed to create a comprehensive social welfare system and a rapidly developing economy, seemingly at the same time. It has many unusual policy features that work together, and probably would not be easily transposable elsewhere.
The Telegraph has an opinion piece with Swedens system and US Charter schools, although as it seems to concetrate more on the US side it might not be what your after.
There is actually an intristing quantum corollary to Moores law..
If you simulate a quatum system on a classical computer (which is possible, if inefficient), then add a single new degree of freedom (qubit). This requires doubling the (classical) memory to hold the state of the entire sytem. A quantum computer, obviously, only requires a single qubit added.
So if a single quibit is added to a quantum computer every two years, then it will keep up with classical computing doubling its power (Moores law), atleast for quantum problems (which is all anyone is proposing running on them).
The problem is that there are only a very limited number of quantum algorithms which give a significant increase in performance over classical computing. Infact, there's only really two main classes; those based on Shors quantum fourier transform and those based on Grovers quantum search. So the possibility for exponential (Shor) or quadratic (Grover) performance gains, at the moment, is only available for a very limited number of problems. Not to say that in the future someone wont develope an algorithm which allows doom to be run faster, just at the moment its not known.
For the first replier, qubits do NOT have three states of 1, 0 and 1&0. They are a superposition of 1 and 0. Think of it like a globe with 1 at the north pole and 0 at the south, the value of the qubit can be any point on the surface of the globe. This gives an infinte number of values, not just 3.
There is actually an intristing quantum corollary to Moores law..
If you simulate a quatum system on a classical computer (which is possible, if inefficient), then add a single new degree of freedom (qubit). This requires doubling the (classical) memory to hold the state of the entire sytem. A quantum computer, obviously, only requires a single qubit added.
So if a single quibit is added to a quantum computer every two years, then it will keep up with classical computing doubling its power (Moores law), atleast for quantum problems (which is all anyone is proposing running on them).
The massive parrallel computation with a single element means you can solve *certain* problems in, for example, 2n instead of 2^n steps. But yes, then you get a bit matrix of answers, and reading them all out takes the same amount of steps as classical computing. But, your only usually intristed in some of the answers, so you can then use another algorithm (eg Deutsch-Jozsa) to read those out, again faster than classically.
So you get a substantial decrease (ofton exponential) in the time taken to solve *cetain* problems. Some of these problems would simply be impossible to solve in any reasonable timescales (eg milennia) using classical algorithms.
A qubit is a superposition of two states, a 1 and a 0 if you like. So it containes some 0 and some 1, or written as a|0> + b|1>, where a and b describe "how much" (more accuratly the probability) of 0 and 1 in the state. a and b are in general complex numbers.
One qubit has then 2d hilbert space, 2 quibits 4d and 3 quibts 8d etc. So 8 qubits has a 256 dimensional space for its complex amplitudes (a and b etc) to inhabit.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is why we don't want any single country/continent controlling the internet. This proposal would (if it were ever created) only affect emails sent in Europe. However, what would happen if say the US controlled (run under contract from the deparment of commerce) ICANN decided to implement a tax on domain names? One which the entire world was required to pay, without any service guarantees or say into how the moneys used? That would be a disaster, I'm sure you'd agree.
Except it already has. Twice. This affects everyone.
So while I completly agree that we don't want Europe controlling the net, or Asia, or Australia, neither do I belive it should be under the sole juristiction of any single government (this includes America).
Physics tells us that the energy lost from transmitting electricity (as heat) is RI^2, and power is IV (I = Current, V = Voltage, R = Resistance). So to send lots of power without much heating, you use high voltages and low current. This is whats done currently, to the point where the wires can't really take much more voltage (well, not cheaply anyway).
There's only one proposed solution I'm aware of, which is using high temperature superconductors as wires. These have very low resistance (in some cases theoretically 0) so reduce the energy lost by ohmic heating (the RI^2 thing). Plus they can conduct around 10* the voltage of current wires. The only problem is there still very difficult to make at all, let alone into wires, having only been discovered in 1986. The link below has some more info,
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/electricity/publicatioDon't know if your just complaining about the buttons in the alpha or wanting drag and drop ordering.. but Search engine ordering plugin lets you do just that.
In a way it has, temporarily. All public key encryption relies on the difficulty of factoring primes (or something very similar). It is not proveably secure (unlike quantum cryptography), and in fact no-one has even proved that factoring primes cannot be done efficiently classically, we just don't have a way yet. One of the main reasons for interest in quantum computing is its ability to factor primes (thus breaking public key encryption). So in a way quantum cryptography is a solution to an anticipated next generation problem. Although people who already use one time pads (military, big banks.. people for who 'difficult-to-break' isn't enough) would almost certainly find using QC better than using secure couriers of some sort.
Yes, you can only send as much data as you have key (well securely anyway), but thats not the reason for only using the quantum channel (fibre) for key distribution. The point is that you need to send a completly random string of data down your channel, and then completly at random discard about 3/4 of this. So your left with a shared random key, which you can use as a one time pad to send your actual message.
The whole thing is slow (at the moment) as all the technology is very experimental and you need to send single photons, which can only be done currently using attenuated lasers. Add to that that you have to change polarisation and measurment settings at both ends of the communication between photons, so its not possible to just use standard fibre transmission equipment.
Current systems use attenuated lasers.. basically you shine a laser onto a pair of very small holes, and theres only a very small chance of any photons getting through. So on average you'll get between 0.05 and 0.5 (determined by the size of the holes) photons passing through in one pulse. This is all on average though, sometimes you'll get 0, sometimes 1, and rarely 2 (or more). Hence "approximatly" one per pulse.
No no and no. I'm not meaning to be harsh but everything you said is misunderstood. The point is not to achieve security by doing things really slowly, the point of quantum cryptograhpy (wikipedias quite good) is that if anyone intercepts your photons/information, you know about it. So you can resend the information, using a differenet channel, whatever. It is very important in crypto to be able to guarantee that no-one else has your key.
Entirely true in the classical, everyday world, and you'd think so on small scales (individual photons/atoms) too.. but actually wrong. Quantum states cannot be coppied (no cloning theorem). This is where the security of quamtum cryptography lies. There's nothing to stop someone from eavesdropping on your fibre, but if they do intercept anything you know about it. The only way they can get information without you knowing is if you accidently send the information twice, ie two photons in a pulse instead of one. Thats where this research is useful, its anything but pointless.
I don't see how transmitting single photons at a time as opposed to the millions used today would give a speed increase, the fastest quantum cryptography demonstrated so far achieved a rate of 500b/s, compared to 500Mb/s for normal fibre communication. It's only real purpose is cryptography.
The point of building/using a quantum channel (the fibre line) is to solve the key distribution problem, it cannot be used to send data. Why? Firstly in the protocol used for checking for eavesdroppers you end up discarding around 3/4 of the photons sent, with no way of predicting which ones, and secondly you really need to be sending random data to make it completly secure. The result is both parties end up with a random key, and you know with absolute certainty that no-one else has it. Compare with your "use a courier and a CD" method (which some places do currently use), where you cannot know if someones managed to make of copy of the CD during transport, and also cannot guarantee CD has been kepy securly (during the year (in your suggestion) its kept).
Once you have your key though, the can use the Vernam cipher (one time pad) which is provably unbreakable, to send the actual data over a standard telco line, copletly securely.
I suggest you read about quantum cryptography more (wikipedias probably good).. pretty much the entire point of it is that you cannot just intercept and resend the photons without being detected. What you can do, if each laser pulse actually contains two identical photons is split one off and keep/measure that, without being detected. Hence the importance of single photon sources (which this research is in).
The article and summary seem to be a bit misleading and vauge about how the speed increase arrises. The great benefit of optical computing is that it allows the signals to get much much closer together than electronic circuits, and as such allow more compact circuits, which as we know generally means faster. Interestingly, electronic signals in wires and optical signals in fibers have roughly identical upper speed limits (light in free-space optical computers is faster, but also almost impossible to do anything useful with), so its the density which is the major factor.
Electrons are charged, so as you squeeze transistors closer together, the wires get thinner and closer together, and you get cross-talk and interference between them. Photons however hardly interact at all, so you can have many beams in the same space, and theres very little heat to be dissipated. Multiplw frequencies can also be used, resulting in massivly parallel computing (another GoodThing).
There are downsides with optical computing still, photons cannot be stopped and stored (easily), meaning any kind of useful computer in the near term is likely to be some sort of electro-optical hybrid, with photons carrying signals and electrons storing them
You appear to be ignoring the data, linked by GP, that China has reduced its CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) emission up untill 2000, on the basis that there is no data available since then? I couldn't find any reports written by McIlvaine, or any other data, dealing with the period since, but its unreasonable to expect such a large trend to suddenly reverse. And, if you want to speculate, the Pew Center for Global Climate Change has published a report stating that China's emissions could reduce by 19% by 2015. By contrast, Western Europe increased its carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion by 4.5 percent from 1995 to 1999 and the United States increased its emissions by 6.3 percent.
Also, you mention the 1998 WHO study, which as well as being in the middle of the study period is irrelevant anyway; everyone acknowledges that China is heaviliy polluted, the point your disputing is that it is attempting to reduce its emissions.The Econimist details the political will to reduce emissions, and the Science study seems to suggest results.
Since you seem to be fond of facts, consider:
America has no emission reduction requirements as it has ignored Kyoto
America is the leading CO2 producer in the world (source: US Dept. of Energy)
America is building at least 94 new coal-fired electricity plants by 2012 (Source, Robert McIlvaine)
If you read the original Science artical you'll also see that China is shutting down many of its old, inefficienct, highly-polluting coal power plants and replacing them with more efficient ones, accounting for some of the new builds.
I'm not in any way trying to say America Bad, China Good, as that is clearly not the case, I'm just suggesting that greenhouse gas reduction can be accomplished without needing the Kyoto protocol, provided there is political will. And indeed, as out of the major polluters only the Europeans and Russians are reducing their emissions under Kyoto, it will require another international agreement in the future to have any serious impact upon global levels.
Google is a search engine helping you find information (and displaying ads at the same time). It is NOT the internet, or information in itself. The average Chinese citizen has access to exactly the same information whether Google is there or not, the same portions of the internet are avilable (or not available as it may be) to them through Google or Yahoo or MSN.
There are atleast two other major search engines (Yahoo and MSN) operating in China, and undoubtably many more local ones. I find it difficult to believe that google is such a better service that it is going to make much difference to the information available there.
Also, the "message notifying them of sites being blocked for politcal reasons" is, I think, a small disclaimer that appears at the bottom of every page, stating that search results may not be shown in accordance with local laws.
As for the food analogy, a closer idea would probabably be refusing to sell (google isn't a charity remember, its in it for the money) food distrubtion technology to North Korea, knowing that they already have several food distrubtion system. They arn't doing this, as with most companies the case is they will do buisness with repressive regimes provided they pay correctly.
You seem to be mistaking Europe for one country with a single education policy. I believe the only country in Europe with a full universal voucher system is Sweden, with the Netherlands also having a more limited system. I'm not an expert though, I may be wrong.
Also, using Sweden as an example for policy is a bit tricky, as the center left goverment there has managed to create a comprehensive social welfare system and a rapidly developing economy, seemingly at the same time. It has many unusual policy features that work together, and probably would not be easily transposable elsewhere.
The Telegraph has an opinion piece with Swedens system and US Charter schools, although as it seems to concetrate more on the US side it might not be what your after.
There is actually an intristing quantum corollary to Moores law..
If you simulate a quatum system on a classical computer (which is possible, if inefficient), then add a single new degree of freedom (qubit). This requires doubling the (classical) memory to hold the state of the entire sytem. A quantum computer, obviously, only requires a single qubit added.
So if a single quibit is added to a quantum computer every two years, then it will keep up with classical computing doubling its power (Moores law), atleast for quantum problems (which is all anyone is proposing running on them).
The problem is that there are only a very limited number of quantum algorithms which give a significant increase in performance over classical computing. Infact, there's only really two main classes; those based on Shors quantum fourier transform and those based on Grovers quantum search. So the possibility for exponential (Shor) or quadratic (Grover) performance gains, at the moment, is only available for a very limited number of problems. Not to say that in the future someone wont develope an algorithm which allows doom to be run faster, just at the moment its not known.
For the first replier, qubits do NOT have three states of 1, 0 and 1&0. They are a superposition of 1 and 0. Think of it like a globe with 1 at the north pole and 0 at the south, the value of the qubit can be any point on the surface of the globe. This gives an infinte number of values, not just 3.
There is actually an intristing quantum corollary to Moores law..
If you simulate a quatum system on a classical computer (which is possible, if inefficient), then add a single new degree of freedom (qubit). This requires doubling the (classical) memory to hold the state of the entire sytem. A quantum computer, obviously, only requires a single qubit added.
So if a single quibit is added to a quantum computer every two years, then it will keep up with classical computing doubling its power (Moores law), atleast for quantum problems (which is all anyone is proposing running on them).
You've kind of answered your own question..
The massive parrallel computation with a single element means you can solve *certain* problems in, for example, 2n instead of 2^n steps. But yes, then you get a bit matrix of answers, and reading them all out takes the same amount of steps as classical computing. But, your only usually intristed in some of the answers, so you can then use another algorithm (eg Deutsch-Jozsa) to read those out, again faster than classically.
So you get a substantial decrease (ofton exponential) in the time taken to solve *cetain* problems. Some of these problems would simply be impossible to solve in any reasonable timescales (eg milennia) using classical algorithms.
A qubit is a superposition of two states, a 1 and a 0 if you like. So it containes some 0 and some 1, or written as a|0> + b|1>, where a and b describe "how much" (more accuratly the probability) of 0 and 1 in the state. a and b are in general complex numbers. One qubit has then 2d hilbert space, 2 quibits 4d and 3 quibts 8d etc. So 8 qubits has a 256 dimensional space for its complex amplitudes (a and b etc) to inhabit.