how fast, really, would a semi-decent quantum processor be, compared to a semi-decent silicon one? (This may seem like an ignorant or even trolling question, so I apologise in advance)
Yes, it does sound uninformed, and the fact that you're asking it probably means you really know rather little about what quantum computers are really about. The paradox about quantum computers is that they don't need to be faster than their classical counterparts, and in fact, the most of the really promising methods, like the NMR bulk-spin resonance techniques for instance, are far, far slower. These methods based on nuclear spins have clock rates that are measured in kilohertz. Yes, mere thousands of cycles per second. If you use a quantum computer to do the same things a classical computer does, in the same way, you can expect no real improvement. The real advantage in using these computers, which is what makes such a computer "faster" than its classical counterparts is the new paradigm of computing the quantum models of computation allow: that of performing computations on superposed states.
For instance, if you had a register that contained 256 qubits, placed them in an equal superposition of 1 and 0, and performed some calculation on that register, you will have potentially produced 2^256 results, 10^77 or a hundred million million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion results, which is more results than the number of sub-atomic particles in the visible universe! Of course, once you measure your qubits you only get one of these innumerable results, but there are more subtle ways of measuring the qubits that will give you information common to all of the results. That's what all of these algorithms for quantum computers are about.
Essentially, if you had 256 qubits each running at 1 kHz, you would have 10^77 processors running at 1 kHz! Now wouldn't that be faster than any computer in the world if you could use it properly? It's like having a slow computer for every sub-atomic particle in the universe! What's needed now are algorithms that try to find structure in various problems that can exploit this sort of parallelism.
Shor's algorithm, for instance, is able to factor integers and compute discrete logarithms in arbitrary finite fields in O(n^2) time, by using a special technique (the quantum Fourier transform) to cause the results we aren't interested in to interfere destructively and so won't be measured when our superposition collapses. Grover's algorithm, which does unordered searches in O(sqrt(n)) time, leverages quantum parallelism in a similar way.
The real upshot, and a likely SF novel plot that involves quantum computers, comes from the fact that all public-key cryptography in widespread use today depends on the factoring (RSA) and discrete log (El Gamal and elliptic curve techniques) problems. These problems are thought to be intractable using a classical computer, but with Shor's algorithm and a large enough quantum computer, perfectly feasible. Obviously, no one has yet made a quantum computer with more than a handful of qubits (I believe seven qubits is the world record, meaning they could theoretically factor the number 126!), so these schemes are still quite secure. Other practical problems plague implementors. But if someone, somewhere, dreamed up a way to make quantum computing practical (i.e. making a quantum computer with thousands of qubits that could perform calculations stably), all public-key cryptography would fall apart. Whoever invented such a device could potentially break the root certificates of Verisign and other CA's, compute private keys, impersonate every e-commerce site in the world, read all PGP or S/MIME-encrypted email, forge all kinds of digital signatures, create bogus international banking transactions, and so on and so forth. Grover's algorithm would also increase the range of keys that can be feasibly brute forced for symmetric crypto (how much exactly depends on how fast your quantum computer is). Naturally, it would be a device intelligence agencies all over the world would kill to obtain. Ever see Sneakers?
If you're looking for more in-depth information that you can understand without a graduate degree in both physics and computer science (the way most of the preprints on lanl.gov tend to be), you can start by looking here.
decoherence. Quantum dots don't seem to be very promising in this respect, as the minimum time to complete some elementary operation in them is about 10^-6 sec. while the average time to decoherence is about 10^-3 sec. (from Adriano Barenco "Quantum Physics and Computers," Contemp. Phys.37, 375 (1996). (quant-ph/9612014). Meaning you can probably do about a thousand basic operations before decoherence makes any potential answers worthless. So what if you can pack billions of these quantum dots on a single semiconductor wafer if decoherence prevents you from getting any form of useful results because decoherence destroys any superpositions you have of your entangled quantum states before you can do anything useful. More promising so far have been nuclear magnetic resonance systems (which can take as much as several hours before decoherence sets in, only trouble is making basic operations with NMR systems takes a relatively long time too) or ion traps (if only it weren't so difficult to actually create and isolate large numbers of trapped single ions!).
Maybe the Purdue group will be able to shield their quantum dots from decoherence better than previous research on such objects has done so far. But as far as I know there is no getting around this; the best anyone can do is compute everything and read out your results before decoherence sets in.
This is not such a big breakthrough, folks. Hold onto your hats. If they can show that they can do operations much more quickly than old methods of dealing with quantum dots, or they can keep decoherence at bay longer than anyone expected, that would be the big breakthrough.
I still use the same 102-key keyboard that was once upon a time connected to my first IBM-compatible PC back in 1989. Maybe I'm just nostalgic, but then again I've never found another keyboard in today's market that seems to have the same kind of feel and feedback. Today's keyboards feel so mushy and haven't got the kind of click this keyboard does.
By the way, the article perpetuates the myth that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow typists down. It wasn't. It was designed to prevent the original mechanical typewriters from jamming. You can type as fast as you like on a QUERTY...
What makes these fools think that bin Laden and organizations like Al-Qaida are going to start using their escrowed encryption programs? The only people who are going to be using this escrowed encryption are your people, your law-abiding citizens. Not even terrorists who enter the US are going to use it, obviously. Most of them may be psychos, but they are not stupid of course. If they were, they would have met their end long ago. In the meantime, someone is going to reverse engineer how you do your key escrow, and then everyone in the world who doesn't have a DMCA-like law can read escrowed encryption traffic after they reverse engineer the new chip that provides it. It may require the resources of a large semiconductor corporation to do the reverse engineering, but once that has been done, end of story.
Hopefully the NSA will do everything to make sure that your escrowed encryption is as perfect as it can be, but given the Agency's track record, I would be wary. Besides, the civilian research into key recovery systems (mostly from Silvio Micali's research, to whom the government paid $1,000,000 for use of his patents in the old Fortezza/Clipper chip) has been somewhat unpromising, and there are many complex security problems involved. What if someone cracks the escrow agency's database? The keys are going to start circulating among the rest of the world's intelligence agencies and terrorist organizations by then.
In the meantime your largely ignorant populace is going to start taking active measures to make themselves available for surveillance, in the misguided belief that this will help the security of your nation. It won't, not in any meaningful sense, but makes it far easier for Big Brother to start listening in on everything. Welcome to the American Empire.
Bruce Schneier recently had a bit to say about the security problems of replacing POTS with IP telephony. In short, it's not a good idea. But I see how this sort of system might be useful in a business setting, to replace the PABX systems used in many offices. Heck, it's sure to be an improvement over the PABX we have here in our office!
Of course. I am not saying that we should EVER bow to terrorist demands! That's a sign of weakness and a sign that you can be controlled. What I am calling for is justice and equitable treatment in international relations.
It will not be enough to satisfy everyone, of course. Bin Laden and fanatics like him will not be happy even then. But his recruitment pool will become a lot smaller because the world begins to see that the developed world is really doing its share to promote the well-being of the greatest number. If less and less people feel oppressed and unempowered, unable to control their own destinies, then that will leave the TRUE fanatics out in the cold, and no one will see them as anything other than what they are: desperate madmen.
This is not an approach that is supposed to tame those murderous fanatics. You see, it seems that the typical Afghan recruited by Al-Qaida is not a murderous fanatic when he comes into the fold. He comes in there because he has no hope, and Al-Qaida has been able to offer him that hope for, if not a better life, at least retribution against those who had made him as miserable as he has become. The masses of them are not arch-militants who won't be satisfied until the whole world is under the vicious brand of Islam promoted by the Taliban. They will be satisfied if they can only live reasonably ok. Make these miserables that make up the huddled masses of the world less miserable, and the real fanatics will be left shouting at their own shadows in the dark.
what is it good for?
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2.2 GHz Xeon
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· Score: 3, Funny
For an ordinary PC consumer? And let's not talk about Quake for this. Everyone knows that nobody can really see the difference between 40fps and 100+fps, so 3D gaming really is a shuck. Between today's modern graphics cards and even mid-range CPU's there's enough computing power to do high-quality 3-D rendering at high frame rates. I haven't upgraded my system (AMD K6-2 450) in two years, mainly because I've never found a good reason to do so. It does everything I need to do.
What the hardware industry needs is a new killer app like DOOM was in the early 1990's. DOOM may have made Id software millions, but it made Intel and its cohorts billions in hardware upgrades. If all you want is word processing, spreadsheets, and a few games here and there, nobody in his right mind would use a gigahertz-class processor, unless MS and Intel are in cahoots in making Office XP the bloated monster it is!:)
Disclaimer, I do not live in the United States. I live in a third-world backwater country which has a severe domestic terrorism problem, at least in the southern provinces...
Military action and curtailment of civil liberties as "solutions" to the terrorism problem are all ultimately temporary fixes, designed to treat the symptoms, not the disease. If the United States and its allies in the First World don't attempt to go beyond short-sighted military retaliation, they're going to lose this war even more badly than they lost Vietnam. Military response is a good thing here in the interim, but it must be combined with a wholistic strategy which addresses one of the main roots of the problem:
GLOBAL POVERTY
This is the biggest single reason why terror groups exist. The rest of the world feels disenfranchised and oppressed by what it perceives to be a big bully ramming policies down their throats which are designed to enrich him at their expense. Those of us who live in the third world, know that this accusation is not without basis. I am not justifying their approach to terror; I am giving what I see is the fundamental reason why these groups turn to violence. They feel unempowered, unable to control their own destinies; September 11 was the greatest blow they struck in this mad attempt of theirs to take the power back.
Terrorism has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, and has everything to do with power. Terror groups hide behind the mask of religious fundamentalism, but no major religion in the world countenances the acts of September 11.
Capture Osama bin Laden and they will have chopped one head off the Hydra. Two more will grow back in his place. The only way to defeat the hydra will be to attempt to change US foreign and financial policy to truly attempt to aid the nations of the developing world instead of screwing us over and enriching themselves over us. If the United States and the developed nations can truly be seen to be making a positive difference to the destinies of the developing world, then it will be much harder to motivate people to perpetrate acts of terror.
Attempting to restrict civil liberties within the developed world is another particularly short-sighted response to acts of terror. Such restrictions on civil liberties are probably going to increase not decrease, the incidence of terror, as it will also increase the ranks of the disenfranchised and oppressed within your country as well, and domestic terrorism will probably become all the more serious. But of course, this is exactly what the control freaks in your government want, as it will give them more excuses to further perpetrate their reign of terror.
A real long-term solution to the problem of terrorism will be to revise and rethink your foreign policy. If your foreign policy were not so baldly corporatist, so baldly and arrogantly benefiting the few at the expense of the many, international terrorism would begin to decrease. Naturally, military and police action would be a good thing, but it is ultimately a short-term solution only. That only sows fear, and ultimately all fear can be overcome, as the terrorists who crashed their planes into the WTC proved to us in the most graphic way possible.
The world is still big enough for all of us to live peacefully. But if some nations insist on grabbing the lion's share at the expense of those who have none, then there will be conflict, there will be violence, there will be monstrous acts of terror. They know they can't take on the United States head-on, Iraq proved that, so they will attempt to wage a world-wide guerrila war. World War III is here, but it looks like no other war in all of history. The only way to win it will be to change the rules.
I remember reading A Brief History of Time where Stephen Hawking talks about a "cosmic censorship hypothesis", which in its weak form states that singularities can only occur in places (like black holes) where they're decently hidden from public view. In its strong form, it says that singularities can only occur in the past (such as the Big Bang singularity), or in the future (such as with a singularity in a black hole)...
As everyone knows, gravity is the weakest of all the fundamental forces by a very very long way, something like 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the weakest of the nuclear forces. I remember reading an article here long ago (can't find it and put a link to it because Slashdot search is down...grr) that talked about some speculation that gravity is so weak because the universe has more dimensions than the four that we see (this is also a prediction of superstring theory), and while the other three forces are only capable of propagating there, gravity is able to propagate through these extra dimensions, making it seem weaker. These dimensions are supposed to be curled up small so we don't normally notice them, so one of the implications of this theory is that the value of the universal gravitational "constant" should shoot up dramatically when you try to measure it at smaller scales; the smallest scale at which gravity has been measured so far is on the order of centimeters only. Another implication is that it should be possible to create low mass black holes with less energy than the weakness of gravity as we know it predicts. So if these scientists are successful in making such small black holes, it could go a long way to validating this theory.
One company that could win big if HP were to make such a switch would be Linux vendor Red Hat (RHAT). Although it probably wouldn't win any license revenue from such a move, the adoption of Linux would be a big boon to Red Hat's overall goal of making Linux a top choice for corporate customers. (emphasis mine)
Duh. Last I heard Red Hat's business model precluded any sort of "license revenue"! They went into the Linux business primarily to provide service and support. The GPL won't allow any Linux company to make money selling Linux licenses!
I remember reading an old Peanuts comic strip (bless Charles Schulz's memory), where Charlie Brown and Lucy meet a kid whose name is '5'. He explains that his parents gave him and his sisters ('3' and '4') names as numbers as a protest of sorts. Then Charlie Brown muses that what if everyone had numbers for names, and thinks that he'd have 3.1416 as his name...
Just a silly thought...looks like your government is insisting that everyone have numbers for names.:)
Why is the topic 'patents'?
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ACM vs. RIAA
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· Score: 1
Just wondering why we have the "patent pending" icon for this article. I would think that the right topic would be YRO or something like that, as that's what the DMCA is all about. The DMCA doesn't really have anything to do with patents, which with software are a whole other evil thing.
Well, Sistina can relicense it if they want to, and as I understand it, the new license is absolutely incompatible with the GPL. A major part of their software is a patch to the Linux kernel, which is of course GPL. While they are free to relicense their software, I think they have some serious problems. People would be allowed to privately patch their kernels, producing a private modification to a GPLed codebase, which is explicitly allowed by the GPL. Nobody could redistribute a completely patched kernel, though, or distribute precompiled kernels, such as that installed by distributions, without being in total violation of the GPL, as the SPL is not GPL-compatible.
But they have a far serious problem, as many people have already pointed out. The previous versions that have already been released cannot be retroactively relicensed, so all we need to do is take that already existing codebase and use it with all the inalienable rights that the GPL grants.
We don't need to sue them. We can easily make them irrelevant anyway.
The trouble is, "effective copy protection" as you call it, is largely a myth. The world's best cryptographers have said that the threat model that digital copy protection is trying to address is impossible one. A good article that explains why this is so is here. In that article, Bruce Schneier even goes so far as to say that copying is a natural law of the digital world.
While I agree with you on most points, what you're saying sounds an awful lot like blaming the victim. "He shouldn't have gone down that dark alley last night, that's why he was mugged." "She should never have dressed so provocatively, that's why she was raped." "They should never have connected that system to the Internet, that's why they got hacked."
The problem is not really incompetent system administrators per se. Most of them know their own lack of knowledge and are happy to have their shortcomings pointed out to them so they can do something about it. It's incompetent system administrators who are bent onstayingincompetent. It's these kinds of people who prosecute helpful souls who point out their incompetence. They shoot the messenger who points out to them their own failings and calls for them to do something about it.
A very interesting distribution that was recently developed at the Ateneo de Manila University called AdmuLinuxGO seems to be a very good distribution for newbies who aren't really sure they want to go the Linux way. It's the only distribution I know about that you can run completely from the CD, no on hard disk installation is needed. It's a great distribution for newbies to try, as it doesn't really require any installation at all, you simply boot from the CD and you get a complete graphical Linux development system.
Traditionally Sony has asked for NDA's for people who would try to develop on their platform. This is what stopped Crystal Space from porting to the original PS a year back or so (IIRC). Has Sony changed its mind and is now giving out it's SDK's royalty-free? They have to be, if all this is legal, because an NDA is anathema to a LGPL project like SDL.
You're probably talking about egress filtering of packets that don't belong to our network and ingress filtering of packets that do. The latter can be done (I believe our routers already do this), but most ISP's (including my employer) have complications about doing the former. The main problem is multi-homed hosts. Not only do these things increase the size of our routers' BGP tables, they also complicate egress filtering of forged packets (some supposedly "forged" packets could have come from a multi-homed host). We are currently in the process of identifying these multi-homed hosts to see which ones are valid, and see what we can do about them.
b) coherence (which is needed for spatial localization) is not as instable (sic) as initially thought
Now, if this is true, then I guess quantum computation must have higher hopes then. The biggest problem with building a practical quantum computer is that in most physical quantum systems decoherence phenomena will randomize the state of your qubits before you can make any kind of useful calculation. Present research in quantum computing has focused on attempting to find physical systems where you can compute and read out the result of your computation before decoherence sets in. If a coherent quantum superposition is really more stable than initially thought (and as Zewail suggests), then a practical quantum computer might not be as hard as everyone thinks.
Slashdot Mirror
Another page on weird languages is here.
Actually, deCSS HAS been written in Brainfuck. See this link on David Touretzky's home page.
Yes, it does sound uninformed, and the fact that you're asking it probably means you really know rather little about what quantum computers are really about. The paradox about quantum computers is that they don't need to be faster than their classical counterparts, and in fact, the most of the really promising methods, like the NMR bulk-spin resonance techniques for instance, are far, far slower. These methods based on nuclear spins have clock rates that are measured in kilohertz. Yes, mere thousands of cycles per second. If you use a quantum computer to do the same things a classical computer does, in the same way, you can expect no real improvement. The real advantage in using these computers, which is what makes such a computer "faster" than its classical counterparts is the new paradigm of computing the quantum models of computation allow: that of performing computations on superposed states.
For instance, if you had a register that contained 256 qubits, placed them in an equal superposition of 1 and 0, and performed some calculation on that register, you will have potentially produced 2^256 results, 10^77 or a hundred million million billion billion billion billion billion billion billion results, which is more results than the number of sub-atomic particles in the visible universe! Of course, once you measure your qubits you only get one of these innumerable results, but there are more subtle ways of measuring the qubits that will give you information common to all of the results. That's what all of these algorithms for quantum computers are about.
Essentially, if you had 256 qubits each running at 1 kHz, you would have 10^77 processors running at 1 kHz! Now wouldn't that be faster than any computer in the world if you could use it properly? It's like having a slow computer for every sub-atomic particle in the universe! What's needed now are algorithms that try to find structure in various problems that can exploit this sort of parallelism.
Shor's algorithm, for instance, is able to factor integers and compute discrete logarithms in arbitrary finite fields in O(n^2) time, by using a special technique (the quantum Fourier transform) to cause the results we aren't interested in to interfere destructively and so won't be measured when our superposition collapses. Grover's algorithm, which does unordered searches in O(sqrt(n)) time, leverages quantum parallelism in a similar way.
The real upshot, and a likely SF novel plot that involves quantum computers, comes from the fact that all public-key cryptography in widespread use today depends on the factoring (RSA) and discrete log (El Gamal and elliptic curve techniques) problems. These problems are thought to be intractable using a classical computer, but with Shor's algorithm and a large enough quantum computer, perfectly feasible. Obviously, no one has yet made a quantum computer with more than a handful of qubits (I believe seven qubits is the world record, meaning they could theoretically factor the number 126!), so these schemes are still quite secure. Other practical problems plague implementors. But if someone, somewhere, dreamed up a way to make quantum computing practical (i.e. making a quantum computer with thousands of qubits that could perform calculations stably), all public-key cryptography would fall apart. Whoever invented such a device could potentially break the root certificates of Verisign and other CA's, compute private keys, impersonate every e-commerce site in the world, read all PGP or S/MIME-encrypted email, forge all kinds of digital signatures, create bogus international banking transactions, and so on and so forth. Grover's algorithm would also increase the range of keys that can be feasibly brute forced for symmetric crypto (how much exactly depends on how fast your quantum computer is). Naturally, it would be a device intelligence agencies all over the world would kill to obtain. Ever see Sneakers?
If you're looking for more in-depth information that you can understand without a graduate degree in both physics and computer science (the way most of the preprints on lanl.gov tend to be), you can start by looking here.
Maybe the Purdue group will be able to shield their quantum dots from decoherence better than previous research on such objects has done so far. But as far as I know there is no getting around this; the best anyone can do is compute everything and read out your results before decoherence sets in.
This is not such a big breakthrough, folks. Hold onto your hats. If they can show that they can do operations much more quickly than old methods of dealing with quantum dots, or they can keep decoherence at bay longer than anyone expected, that would be the big breakthrough.
I still use the same 102-key keyboard that was once upon a time connected to my first IBM-compatible PC back in 1989. Maybe I'm just nostalgic, but then again I've never found another keyboard in today's market that seems to have the same kind of feel and feedback. Today's keyboards feel so mushy and haven't got the kind of click this keyboard does.
By the way, the article perpetuates the myth that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to slow typists down. It wasn't. It was designed to prevent the original mechanical typewriters from jamming. You can type as fast as you like on a QUERTY...
What makes these fools think that bin Laden and organizations like Al-Qaida are going to start using their escrowed encryption programs? The only people who are going to be using this escrowed encryption are your people, your law-abiding citizens. Not even terrorists who enter the US are going to use it, obviously. Most of them may be psychos, but they are not stupid of course. If they were, they would have met their end long ago. In the meantime, someone is going to reverse engineer how you do your key escrow, and then everyone in the world who doesn't have a DMCA-like law can read escrowed encryption traffic after they reverse engineer the new chip that provides it. It may require the resources of a large semiconductor corporation to do the reverse engineering, but once that has been done, end of story.
Hopefully the NSA will do everything to make sure that your escrowed encryption is as perfect as it can be, but given the Agency's track record, I would be wary. Besides, the civilian research into key recovery systems (mostly from Silvio Micali's research, to whom the government paid $1,000,000 for use of his patents in the old Fortezza/Clipper chip) has been somewhat unpromising, and there are many complex security problems involved. What if someone cracks the escrow agency's database? The keys are going to start circulating among the rest of the world's intelligence agencies and terrorist organizations by then.
In the meantime your largely ignorant populace is going to start taking active measures to make themselves available for surveillance, in the misguided belief that this will help the security of your nation. It won't, not in any meaningful sense, but makes it far easier for Big Brother to start listening in on everything. Welcome to the American Empire.
Bruce Schneier recently had a bit to say about the security problems of replacing POTS with IP telephony. In short, it's not a good idea. But I see how this sort of system might be useful in a business setting, to replace the PABX systems used in many offices. Heck, it's sure to be an improvement over the PABX we have here in our office!
Of course. I am not saying that we should EVER bow to terrorist demands! That's a sign of weakness and a sign that you can be controlled. What I am calling for is justice and equitable treatment in international relations.
It will not be enough to satisfy everyone, of course. Bin Laden and fanatics like him will not be happy even then. But his recruitment pool will become a lot smaller because the world begins to see that the developed world is really doing its share to promote the well-being of the greatest number. If less and less people feel oppressed and unempowered, unable to control their own destinies, then that will leave the TRUE fanatics out in the cold, and no one will see them as anything other than what they are: desperate madmen.
This is not an approach that is supposed to tame those murderous fanatics. You see, it seems that the typical Afghan recruited by Al-Qaida is not a murderous fanatic when he comes into the fold. He comes in there because he has no hope, and Al-Qaida has been able to offer him that hope for, if not a better life, at least retribution against those who had made him as miserable as he has become. The masses of them are not arch-militants who won't be satisfied until the whole world is under the vicious brand of Islam promoted by the Taliban. They will be satisfied if they can only live reasonably ok. Make these miserables that make up the huddled masses of the world less miserable, and the real fanatics will be left shouting at their own shadows in the dark.
For an ordinary PC consumer? And let's not talk about Quake for this. Everyone knows that nobody can really see the difference between 40fps and 100+fps, so 3D gaming really is a shuck. Between today's modern graphics cards and even mid-range CPU's there's enough computing power to do high-quality 3-D rendering at high frame rates. I haven't upgraded my system (AMD K6-2 450) in two years, mainly because I've never found a good reason to do so. It does everything I need to do.
What the hardware industry needs is a new killer app like DOOM was in the early 1990's. DOOM may have made Id software millions, but it made Intel and its cohorts billions in hardware upgrades. If all you want is word processing, spreadsheets, and a few games here and there, nobody in his right mind would use a gigahertz-class processor, unless MS and Intel are in cahoots in making Office XP the bloated monster it is! :)
Disclaimer, I do not live in the United States. I live in a third-world backwater country which has a severe domestic terrorism problem, at least in the southern provinces...
Military action and curtailment of civil liberties as "solutions" to the terrorism problem are all ultimately temporary fixes, designed to treat the symptoms, not the disease. If the United States and its allies in the First World don't attempt to go beyond short-sighted military retaliation, they're going to lose this war even more badly than they lost Vietnam. Military response is a good thing here in the interim, but it must be combined with a wholistic strategy which addresses one of the main roots of the problem:
GLOBAL POVERTY
This is the biggest single reason why terror groups exist. The rest of the world feels disenfranchised and oppressed by what it perceives to be a big bully ramming policies down their throats which are designed to enrich him at their expense. Those of us who live in the third world, know that this accusation is not without basis. I am not justifying their approach to terror; I am giving what I see is the fundamental reason why these groups turn to violence. They feel unempowered, unable to control their own destinies; September 11 was the greatest blow they struck in this mad attempt of theirs to take the power back.
Terrorism has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, and has everything to do with power. Terror groups hide behind the mask of religious fundamentalism, but no major religion in the world countenances the acts of September 11.
Capture Osama bin Laden and they will have chopped one head off the Hydra. Two more will grow back in his place. The only way to defeat the hydra will be to attempt to change US foreign and financial policy to truly attempt to aid the nations of the developing world instead of screwing us over and enriching themselves over us. If the United States and the developed nations can truly be seen to be making a positive difference to the destinies of the developing world, then it will be much harder to motivate people to perpetrate acts of terror.
Attempting to restrict civil liberties within the developed world is another particularly short-sighted response to acts of terror. Such restrictions on civil liberties are probably going to increase not decrease, the incidence of terror, as it will also increase the ranks of the disenfranchised and oppressed within your country as well, and domestic terrorism will probably become all the more serious. But of course, this is exactly what the control freaks in your government want, as it will give them more excuses to further perpetrate their reign of terror.
A real long-term solution to the problem of terrorism will be to revise and rethink your foreign policy. If your foreign policy were not so baldly corporatist, so baldly and arrogantly benefiting the few at the expense of the many, international terrorism would begin to decrease. Naturally, military and police action would be a good thing, but it is ultimately a short-term solution only. That only sows fear, and ultimately all fear can be overcome, as the terrorists who crashed their planes into the WTC proved to us in the most graphic way possible.
The world is still big enough for all of us to live peacefully. But if some nations insist on grabbing the lion's share at the expense of those who have none, then there will be conflict, there will be violence, there will be monstrous acts of terror. They know they can't take on the United States head-on, Iraq proved that, so they will attempt to wage a world-wide guerrila war. World War III is here, but it looks like no other war in all of history. The only way to win it will be to change the rules.
I remember reading A Brief History of Time where Stephen Hawking talks about a "cosmic censorship hypothesis", which in its weak form states that singularities can only occur in places (like black holes) where they're decently hidden from public view. In its strong form, it says that singularities can only occur in the past (such as the Big Bang singularity), or in the future (such as with a singularity in a black hole)...
That the OpenStep logo actually looks like a stealth bomber?
As everyone knows, gravity is the weakest of all the fundamental forces by a very very long way, something like 40 orders of magnitude weaker than the weakest of the nuclear forces. I remember reading an article here long ago (can't find it and put a link to it because Slashdot search is down...grr) that talked about some speculation that gravity is so weak because the universe has more dimensions than the four that we see (this is also a prediction of superstring theory), and while the other three forces are only capable of propagating there, gravity is able to propagate through these extra dimensions, making it seem weaker. These dimensions are supposed to be curled up small so we don't normally notice them, so one of the implications of this theory is that the value of the universal gravitational "constant" should shoot up dramatically when you try to measure it at smaller scales; the smallest scale at which gravity has been measured so far is on the order of centimeters only. Another implication is that it should be possible to create low mass black holes with less energy than the weakness of gravity as we know it predicts. So if these scientists are successful in making such small black holes, it could go a long way to validating this theory.
Then I think ICANN will start to understand what the words: "slashdot effect" really mean!
Duh. Last I heard Red Hat's business model precluded any sort of "license revenue"! They went into the Linux business primarily to provide service and support. The GPL won't allow any Linux company to make money selling Linux licenses!
I remember reading an old Peanuts comic strip (bless Charles Schulz's memory), where Charlie Brown and Lucy meet a kid whose name is '5'. He explains that his parents gave him and his sisters ('3' and '4') names as numbers as a protest of sorts. Then Charlie Brown muses that what if everyone had numbers for names, and thinks that he'd have 3.1416 as his name...
Just a silly thought...looks like your government is insisting that everyone have numbers for names. :)
Just wondering why we have the "patent pending" icon for this article. I would think that the right topic would be YRO or something like that, as that's what the DMCA is all about. The DMCA doesn't really have anything to do with patents, which with software are a whole other evil thing.
Well, Sistina can relicense it if they want to, and as I understand it, the new license is absolutely incompatible with the GPL. A major part of their software is a patch to the Linux kernel, which is of course GPL. While they are free to relicense their software, I think they have some serious problems. People would be allowed to privately patch their kernels, producing a private modification to a GPLed codebase, which is explicitly allowed by the GPL. Nobody could redistribute a completely patched kernel, though, or distribute precompiled kernels, such as that installed by distributions, without being in total violation of the GPL, as the SPL is not GPL-compatible.
But they have a far serious problem, as many people have already pointed out. The previous versions that have already been released cannot be retroactively relicensed, so all we need to do is take that already existing codebase and use it with all the inalienable rights that the GPL grants.
We don't need to sue them. We can easily make them irrelevant anyway.
The trouble is, "effective copy protection" as you call it, is largely a myth. The world's best cryptographers have said that the threat model that digital copy protection is trying to address is impossible one. A good article that explains why this is so is here. In that article, Bruce Schneier even goes so far as to say that copying is a natural law of the digital world.
While I agree with you on most points, what you're saying sounds an awful lot like blaming the victim. "He shouldn't have gone down that dark alley last night, that's why he was mugged." "She should never have dressed so provocatively, that's why she was raped." "They should never have connected that system to the Internet, that's why they got hacked."
The problem is not really incompetent system administrators per se. Most of them know their own lack of knowledge and are happy to have their shortcomings pointed out to them so they can do something about it. It's incompetent system administrators who are bent on staying incompetent. It's these kinds of people who prosecute helpful souls who point out their incompetence. They shoot the messenger who points out to them their own failings and calls for them to do something about it.
A very interesting distribution that was recently developed at the Ateneo de Manila University called AdmuLinuxGO seems to be a very good distribution for newbies who aren't really sure they want to go the Linux way. It's the only distribution I know about that you can run completely from the CD, no on hard disk installation is needed. It's a great distribution for newbies to try, as it doesn't really require any installation at all, you simply boot from the CD and you get a complete graphical Linux development system.
Traditionally Sony has asked for NDA's for people who would try to develop on their platform. This is what stopped Crystal Space from porting to the original PS a year back or so (IIRC). Has Sony changed its mind and is now giving out it's SDK's royalty-free? They have to be, if all this is legal, because an NDA is anathema to a LGPL project like SDL.
You're probably talking about egress filtering of packets that don't belong to our network and ingress filtering of packets that do. The latter can be done (I believe our routers already do this), but most ISP's (including my employer) have complications about doing the former. The main problem is multi-homed hosts. Not only do these things increase the size of our routers' BGP tables, they also complicate egress filtering of forged packets (some supposedly "forged" packets could have come from a multi-homed host). We are currently in the process of identifying these multi-homed hosts to see which ones are valid, and see what we can do about them.
Every now and then the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood, sweat, and tears of system administrators.
Now, if this is true, then I guess quantum computation must have higher hopes then. The biggest problem with building a practical quantum computer is that in most physical quantum systems decoherence phenomena will randomize the state of your qubits before you can make any kind of useful calculation. Present research in quantum computing has focused on attempting to find physical systems where you can compute and read out the result of your computation before decoherence sets in. If a coherent quantum superposition is really more stable than initially thought (and as Zewail suggests), then a practical quantum computer might not be as hard as everyone thinks.