Ah, tidal power; completely overlooked that one! What an interesting idea that is, and very elegant itself! After all, it's mechanical.
I suppose maybe we should consider the tapping of the difference in potential between the charge in the upper and lower atmosphere as non-solar too. But I cannot recall if this difference is caused by the earth's own magnetic field or if the charge is the result of solar radiation.
This is a very interesting collision of physical and organic chemistry. Discoveries like this are why I (and I'm sure many others) find myself (themselves) becoming a() bigger and bigger advocate(s) of solar power every day. There is so much power streaming out of the sun. really, every single power source on the planet (save perhaps nuclear) derives from a solar process. Our beloved/lamented fossil fuels wouldn't exist without the creatures that created those fossils -- creatures who ate plants, ate something that ate plants or were actually plants themselves: plants use the sun.
Even hydroelectric power owes its existence to the sun. Perhaps in very ancient times evaporation didn't require a star close by due to the young, heated surface of the planet. But today's surface temperatures just won't cut it without our friendly star.
Wind power...well, I'm not really saying anything new here. Everyone feel free to cringe at the thought of the inefficiency of grain ethanol!
Basically, if you are an advocate of nuclear power as clean power, well then you should probably turn your fandom towards the biggest nuclear power plant in the solar system...of course, I've personally got no problem with some breeder and a couple dozen pebble-bed reactors - just saying;)
So what if we are just consuming its leftovers, with a giant picnic like that we ants can be assured of a bountiful feast of crumbs:)
Which brings me to my point which I had forgotten.
These researchers have taken a hint from nature's own, good-old photosynthesis. So to me, it seems as though we have cut the hydrocarbon out of the solar-food-chain. Rather than waiting a couple million years for plants to convert sunlight into food for themselves and other creatures, die off and then turn into black, sweet, sweet crude; we simply cut out the middle-men/middle-dinosaurs and make direct use of the sun's bounty.
Solar-power is the most elegant power source yet discovered. Now to harness it cleanly.
This makes sense, though dismal that sense be. Holding human lives as so much merchandise, certainly it's nothing new - but that doesn't make is any less reprehensible.
Fight fire with fire, the old adage goes. Though sometimes I wonder why fire can't be fought with water instead.
Entaglement is featured in this experiment, but I do not think the photons are being entangled, per se.
The device being used for this experiment is a Magneto Optical Trap. This cool-ass device uses lasers and magnetism to suspend a cloud of ultra-cold atoms in a bonafide Bose-Einstein condensate. This is a state in which all the particles act together as though they were a single, very large, particle. I believe they are entagled - but of course, I Am Not A Physicist.
Apparently the ultra-cold environment of the condensate is the ideal place to slow some photons down, apparently to a stop. It's very cool (pun intended).
There is good and bad in this. On the good hand I can see how this would be an invaluable historical resource. How awesome would it be if we had a pristine and exhaustive record of the location of all properties from ancient Rome, or even WWII?
On the bad hand one cannot help but wonder what kind of harmful uses this database could be used for.
As we are getting more and more data storage I am starting to wonder how much privacy we are going to have left in a couple decades...in a century? Well, I won't be too worried about things 100 years from now since I'll probably be very dead. But hopefully I'll have a prosthetic brain and will happily be worrying about.
This whole disappearance of privacy reminds me of the book, "The Light of Other Days", in which all privacy disappears with the introduction of a technology which allows you to view anybody at any time present or past. It makes me wonder if the disappearance of privacy would be so bad after all?
After all, the one place I wish there were less privacy is within the government.
Perhaps wikipedia should have peer-reviewed revisions of certain articles.
It would be neat if a group of accredited individuals would be willing to take the time to review certain popular articles and make expert revisions and release a "green" revision of an article. There could be a link on the article page saying, "click here for the peer-reviewed revision from 11-29-06" or something to that nature.
Yea, I felt a bit confused when I read that too. I think it means that public access to materials means that the public can censor the government?...that still doesn't make much sense to me.
Even if this was the implied message, I fail to see how this would be a bad thing.
Who modded the parent "Overratted"? This is a good question, I was wondering if someone was going to ask this. It's common knowledge that blocking Microwaves is a pretty simple endevour. I could see a full body suit easily being made for a suicide bomber in a burka (fully covered). Once the ray is turned on the bomber would be immune to it's effects and could then walk up and destroy himself and the operators - if they didn't shoot him first:)
its also interesting to think that people with a congenital insensitivity to pain would be completely uneffected by this device.
It's interesting to me to think that children of the future may grow up with an AI friend and that this friend may very well follow them throughout life.
I see the AI starting as this article states, a little cute watchdog handing out gentle advice and wisdom. As the child ages I see the AI maturing as well. Offering observations about schoolwork and social interactions - a little personal gossip partner.
Into adulthood the AI might serve as a trusted advisor and assistant.
Just as my nieces and nephews never knew a world without the internet I imagine that someday soon children will know only a world with prevelant AI. Perhaps, one day, having a personal AI will be as common as having a cell phone.
I find this interesting. Since these are apparently, "life long" bilinguals, they must have learned the second language at an early age.
I would seem that having two languages one's whole life would somehow affect a brain. However, I think research shows that life-long bilinguals actually use the same region of their brain when speaking either language. As shown by this article - google cache - the real site barely worked. just google "bilingual brocas"
Perhaps bilingualism gives the brain some kind of extra strength - or flexibility. Maybe more than just the broca's area gets an extra workout, and that effort pays off in the long marathon of dementia.
By your argument we shouldn't have to pay police officers or indeed any public servants. It sounds to me that you are saying that doing anything helpful for payment is doing it for the wrong reason.
Well, if you need to eat, then you need to do something to get money. If there is no money in helping, then time you would spend helping will have to be spent making money instead - thus less help occurs.
But if you can get payed for helping, then you are getting money for food AND helping at the same time. This equates to more time spent helping since there is financial and real compensation involved.
Admitted, 8k is not much money. But if you find 10 vulnerabilities per year, well heck, that's not a terrible way to supplement an income. Let it be seen, too, that by making the 8k you have cost a harmer $50k by not allowing him to sell the exploit - thus you could see yourself as having made 8k and cost the competition $50k. That's good satisfaction - since you have helped even more by eliminating so much harm.
Of course, we have now run into the connundrum of harming the harmers - is this allowed? Is denying something to someone considered harm if the harm they would wreak by having this thing is greater?
Are we talking the lesser of two evils?
In this case, "do no harm" will actually allow more harm to occur. So should we instead live by a, "allow none to harm" philosophy?
Why should I sell my findings to them for a much smaller amount?
If you can help someone and get payed 8 dollars, or hurt someone and get 50 dollars, what would you do?
I think it's good that there is any compensation at all for white hats who would otherwise recieve no compensation at all for doing the least harmful thing. It would be nice if the rewards for help were on par with harm, but helping is reward in itself for some - and a bit extra reward helps the motivation.
I'm betting that no robot is ever put together in such a way that this will be an issue.
I apologize if this sounds wildly futurist-ic, but I would venture to guess that one day we will actually be the robots - or they will be us. When you are left with no "natural" parts of yourself left then the question will come up.
Already we have very much become our technology. I think it's likely you didn't walk to work (though you should if you can), you probably used tranportation. And look how we communicate right now - we aren't talking or signing. We are typing over fibers and copper. Slowly, inexorably, we move to becoming one with our technology.
I think that eventually we will be indistinguishable from our creations, at that time our creations will need rights.
Isn't that a bit like having ownership of a poem format, Or a literary format?
I can understand owning the rights to the software or mechanism which generates the format - but if another, novel, software or mechanism can be created which generates this same format, is that not legal?
In other words, it makes sense to me to be able to copyright a haiku, but not the format of haiku itself.
I must be missing something vital (and maybe obvious).
This is a timely article, seeing as I have just returned to work after performing a complete reinstall of our companies XServe last evening.
This is the second catastrophic failure we've experienced within a year. The first involved our XServe Raid array passing-on. Yes, a RAID 5 array loses a disk and suddenly cannot rebuild and cannot be accessed. How is this possible? It's RAID 5 with parity. Parity people!
The best part is, this was not a physical disk failure either. I tested the physical disk and it was, and continues to be, absolutely fine. The data just died! The array FAILED!
Then, last night, the system volume which resides on a little RAID 1 mirror becomes corrupted. Once again, not physical issue - the disk is healthy. The array simply FAILED!
And all this happens despite routine maintenance.
Let's not get started on the weekly running of Applejack because of font cache corruption issues, or the fact that my brother's Mac mini suddenly wouldn't recognize any logon information (until we could run magical Applejack on it again).
If you ask me, OS X is Windows 98 dressed in XPs clothing.
I wonder, since the article states that the tester was - within seconds - able to sniff passwords and usernames, that if the bank had employed biometric security devices would this sniffing have been so easy?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed!
Personally, not really looking forward to that.
Ah, tidal power; completely overlooked that one! What an interesting idea that is, and very elegant itself! After all, it's mechanical.
I suppose maybe we should consider the tapping of the difference in potential between the charge in the upper and lower atmosphere as non-solar too. But I cannot recall if this difference is caused by the earth's own magnetic field or if the charge is the result of solar radiation.
It's probably solar radiation.
Boy, it's tricky to not use the sun, eh?
This is a very interesting collision of physical and organic chemistry. Discoveries like this are why I (and I'm sure many others) find myself (themselves) becoming a() bigger and bigger advocate(s) of solar power every day. There is so much power streaming out of the sun. really, every single power source on the planet (save perhaps nuclear) derives from a solar process. Our beloved/lamented fossil fuels wouldn't exist without the creatures that created those fossils -- creatures who ate plants, ate something that ate plants or were actually plants themselves: plants use the sun.
;)
:)
Even hydroelectric power owes its existence to the sun. Perhaps in very ancient times evaporation didn't require a star close by due to the young, heated surface of the planet. But today's surface temperatures just won't cut it without our friendly star.
Wind power...well, I'm not really saying anything new here. Everyone feel free to cringe at the thought of the inefficiency of grain ethanol!
Basically, if you are an advocate of nuclear power as clean power, well then you should probably turn your fandom towards the biggest nuclear power plant in the solar system...of course, I've personally got no problem with some breeder and a couple dozen pebble-bed reactors - just saying
So what if we are just consuming its leftovers, with a giant picnic like that we ants can be assured of a bountiful feast of crumbs
Which brings me to my point which I had forgotten.
These researchers have taken a hint from nature's own, good-old photosynthesis. So to me, it seems as though we have cut the hydrocarbon out of the solar-food-chain. Rather than waiting a couple million years for plants to convert sunlight into food for themselves and other creatures, die off and then turn into black, sweet, sweet crude; we simply cut out the middle-men/middle-dinosaurs and make direct use of the sun's bounty.
Solar-power is the most elegant power source yet discovered. Now to harness it cleanly.
To better illustrate the point.
So if I couple the above article with this one then I can only assume that I am supposed to exercise and smoke a whole lot of pot while I do it.
This makes sense, though dismal that sense be. Holding human lives as so much merchandise, certainly it's nothing new - but that doesn't make is any less reprehensible.
Fight fire with fire, the old adage goes. Though sometimes I wonder why fire can't be fought with water instead.
Entaglement is featured in this experiment, but I do not think the photons are being entangled, per se.
The device being used for this experiment is a Magneto Optical Trap. This cool-ass device uses lasers and magnetism to suspend a cloud of ultra-cold atoms in a bonafide Bose-Einstein condensate. This is a state in which all the particles act together as though they were a single, very large, particle. I believe they are entagled - but of course, I Am Not A Physicist.
Apparently the ultra-cold environment of the condensate is the ideal place to slow some photons down, apparently to a stop. It's very cool (pun intended).
There is good and bad in this. On the good hand I can see how this would be an invaluable historical resource. How awesome would it be if we had a pristine and exhaustive record of the location of all properties from ancient Rome, or even WWII?
On the bad hand one cannot help but wonder what kind of harmful uses this database could be used for.
As we are getting more and more data storage I am starting to wonder how much privacy we are going to have left in a couple decades...in a century? Well, I won't be too worried about things 100 years from now since I'll probably be very dead. But hopefully I'll have a prosthetic brain and will happily be worrying about.
This whole disappearance of privacy reminds me of the book, "The Light of Other Days", in which all privacy disappears with the introduction of a technology which allows you to view anybody at any time present or past. It makes me wonder if the disappearance of privacy would be so bad after all?
After all, the one place I wish there were less privacy is within the government.
Perhaps wikipedia should have peer-reviewed revisions of certain articles.
It would be neat if a group of accredited individuals would be willing to take the time to review certain popular articles and make expert revisions and release a "green" revision of an article. There could be a link on the article page saying, "click here for the peer-reviewed revision from 11-29-06" or something to that nature.
Yea, I felt a bit confused when I read that too. I think it means that public access to materials means that the public can censor the government?...that still doesn't make much sense to me.
Even if this was the implied message, I fail to see how this would be a bad thing.
Who modded the parent "Overratted"? This is a good question, I was wondering if someone was going to ask this. It's common knowledge that blocking Microwaves is a pretty simple endevour. I could see a full body suit easily being made for a suicide bomber in a burka (fully covered). Once the ray is turned on the bomber would be immune to it's effects and could then walk up and destroy himself and the operators - if they didn't shoot him first :)
its also interesting to think that people with a congenital insensitivity to pain would be completely uneffected by this device.
People spend more time with lots of things than with their SO. I would argue that this can be healthy.
After all, if you want to get sick of someone there is no better way than spending every waking moment with them.
I know it's all down to personal preference, but I find that time apart is every bit as important as time together.
The trick is to balance the two - too much of one or the other is bad, you need just the right amount of together and seperate time.
It's interesting to me to think that children of the future may grow up with an AI friend and that this friend may very well follow them throughout life.
I see the AI starting as this article states, a little cute watchdog handing out gentle advice and wisdom. As the child ages I see the AI maturing as well. Offering observations about schoolwork and social interactions - a little personal gossip partner.
Into adulthood the AI might serve as a trusted advisor and assistant.
Just as my nieces and nephews never knew a world without the internet I imagine that someday soon children will know only a world with prevelant AI. Perhaps, one day, having a personal AI will be as common as having a cell phone.
I think that wireless power would be the source of choice for an internally operating surgical robot.
I find this interesting. Since these are apparently, "life long" bilinguals, they must have learned the second language at an early age.
I would seem that having two languages one's whole life would somehow affect a brain. However, I think research shows that life-long bilinguals actually use the same region of their brain when speaking either language.
As shown by this article - google cache - the real site barely worked. just google "bilingual brocas"
Perhaps bilingualism gives the brain some kind of extra strength - or flexibility. Maybe more than just the broca's area gets an extra workout, and that effort pays off in the long marathon of dementia.
We're different people, you and me. You see, I'm ok with a bad script and over-use of special effects, if it has Han Solo to enhance it.
By your argument we shouldn't have to pay police officers or indeed any public servants. It sounds to me that you are saying that doing anything helpful for payment is doing it for the wrong reason.
Well, if you need to eat, then you need to do something to get money. If there is no money in helping, then time you would spend helping will have to be spent making money instead - thus less help occurs.
But if you can get payed for helping, then you are getting money for food AND helping at the same time. This equates to more time spent helping since there is financial and real compensation involved.
Admitted, 8k is not much money. But if you find 10 vulnerabilities per year, well heck, that's not a terrible way to supplement an income. Let it be seen, too, that by making the 8k you have cost a harmer $50k by not allowing him to sell the exploit - thus you could see yourself as having made 8k and cost the competition $50k. That's good satisfaction - since you have helped even more by eliminating so much harm.
Of course, we have now run into the connundrum of harming the harmers - is this allowed? Is denying something to someone considered harm if the harm they would wreak by having this thing is greater?
Are we talking the lesser of two evils?
In this case, "do no harm" will actually allow more harm to occur. So should we instead live by a, "allow none to harm" philosophy?
Here the slope doth become slippery.
If you can help someone and get payed 8 dollars, or hurt someone and get 50 dollars, what would you do?
I think it's good that there is any compensation at all for white hats who would otherwise recieve no compensation at all for doing the least harmful thing. It would be nice if the rewards for help were on par with harm, but helping is reward in itself for some - and a bit extra reward helps the motivation.
Then perhaps the simply righteous will step up.
I apologize if this sounds wildly futurist-ic, but I would venture to guess that one day we will actually be the robots - or they will be us. When you are left with no "natural" parts of yourself left then the question will come up.
Already we have very much become our technology. I think it's likely you didn't walk to work (though you should if you can), you probably used tranportation. And look how we communicate right now - we aren't talking or signing. We are typing over fibers and copper. Slowly, inexorably, we move to becoming one with our technology.
I think that eventually we will be indistinguishable from our creations, at that time our creations will need rights.
Everything I need to know I learned from Star Trek.
Like how you should accept people, whether they be black, white, Klingon or even female.
How can there be ownership of a file format?
Isn't that a bit like having ownership of a poem format, Or a literary format?
I can understand owning the rights to the software or mechanism which generates the format - but if another, novel, software or mechanism can be created which generates this same format, is that not legal?
In other words, it makes sense to me to be able to copyright a haiku, but not the format of haiku itself.
I must be missing something vital (and maybe obvious).
This statement seems a bit ironic in light of this discussion.
This is a timely article, seeing as I have just returned to work after performing a complete reinstall of our companies XServe last evening.
This is the second catastrophic failure we've experienced within a year. The first involved our XServe Raid array passing-on. Yes, a RAID 5 array loses a disk and suddenly cannot rebuild and cannot be accessed. How is this possible? It's RAID 5 with parity. Parity people!
The best part is, this was not a physical disk failure either. I tested the physical disk and it was, and continues to be, absolutely fine. The data just died! The array FAILED!
Then, last night, the system volume which resides on a little RAID 1 mirror becomes corrupted. Once again, not physical issue - the disk is healthy. The array simply FAILED!
And all this happens despite routine maintenance.
Let's not get started on the weekly running of Applejack because of font cache corruption issues, or the fact that my brother's Mac mini suddenly wouldn't recognize any logon information (until we could run magical Applejack on it again).
If you ask me, OS X is Windows 98 dressed in XPs clothing.
I wonder, since the article states that the tester was - within seconds - able to sniff passwords and usernames, that if the bank had employed biometric security devices would this sniffing have been so easy?