This just in: this morning a FLAMING BALL OF GAS OVER 1 MILLION TIMES THE SIZE OF THE EARTH APPEARED OVER THE HORIZON! IT IS ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN THAT IT WILL ENGULF THE EARTH IN FLAMES AND DESTROY THE ENTIRE PLANET.*

*this is technically true.

Better still might be to build flash memory chips with a built-in fuse that cannot be reset. Wipe the data (just in case) and then have some command that physically blows the fuse on every actual flash memory chip onboard. Then someone would have to dissolve the chip and somehow repair the fuse just to get to the data, which would have been erased anyway.

That could make one hell of a virus though if expensive SSD's could be destroyed from software alone. Maybe have it be a (clearly labeled!) jumper on the drive that does the fuse blowing.
-Taylor

Actually as someone pointed out above, the wear leveling algorithms in SSD's can cause problems for effective encryption.

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=wear-leveling

So as always, the answer is "Physically completely destroy the drive".
-Taylor

That's always been my problem. My trust was accidentally configured as a floating input.

Well... its a little more complicated than that, on the ratings system. The rating impacts money - for example no one wants to have an NC-17 movie because it won't even get distribution - and the ratings board has this arbitrary system with no transparency. Its not censorship outright, but it amounts to a very similar thing. If you're genuinely curious, you really should watch This Film is Not Yet Rated. Its really interesting.

Thirded. Never read a comic book in my life. Loved Watchmen. So did my girlfriend, and she's picky.

Well, while they both technically are capable, I don't think we're currently able to sense the one electron that came off of the CCD, are we? Don't we need many electrons before we can sense them?

Yeah I was wondering about that. Some of the other replies cleared that up earlier.

I still imagine that investing in those sensors would have a great payoff.

Ah. Yeah, I was wondering about optics.

Well, it would still allow much smaller mirrors to be used, right? So something like a (relatively cheap) 30" mirror with an S-CAM sensor would be able to outperform a much larger telescope with a CCD?

Even if there are optics involved, making the sensor 18000 times more sensitive seems like it would be immensely more helpful than just making bigger optics.

The real future of telescopes will have no mirrors.

I'm not sure why no one has made a big deal out of this, but superconducting cameras have the potential to completely replace mirrors in telescopes, making them more robust and essentially eliminating complex alignment.

Why do I say this? Well, I reasoned this out myself, so maybe I'm wrong, but basically superconducting cameras are able to register every photon that sees them, sending off ~18000 electrons per photon hit. CCDs, on the other hand, send off 1 electron for every photon hit (I read that a while ago but I think those are the numbers).

Since CCD sensors are so much less sensitive, we use massive mirrors to magnify the amount of light hitting the sensor.

Well, it seems to me that if we had high resolution functional S-CAM sensors, we wouldn't need mirrors. We could just point them straight to the sky, and even if 18000 times fewer photons hit them, they'd have roughly the same or better output as a CCD.

Or, you could just lay out a giant array of S-CAM pixels, say, 10 meters in diameter. Then you'd basically have a ten meter telescope without the mirrors, *and* it would be vastly more sensitive.

I understand that using superconductors is currently an enormous pain in the ass, and I'm not expecting us to find a room-temp one any time soon, but even with the complexities of keeping the sensor cool, wouldn't that have enough advantages over a traditional system that it might be worth it? Maybe not yet, as the sensors currently have to be 0.3K, which seems to me to make it extremely challenging. But if we could make them with something warmer - say, liquid nitrogen cooled - then they might be viable.

Is there any flaw in my basic reasoning? I mean, maybe it would be more expensive than I imagine, but I feel like we should be looking into it. Imagine a football-field sized array of S-CAM sensors. I feel like we could pretty much see license plates on alien worlds at that point. And it wouldn't be nearly as fragile as something with a mirror.

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=36685

That is the third generation superconducting camera sensor that the ESA is working on. It only has 120 pixels, but I really believe we should be putting way more money into researching these...
-Taylor

Yeah, I noticed this. Not a good coincidence for the guy, heh. He really should get a picture that doesn't look like it was taken in a basement.

Wow, you really don't get it. Apple tests iOS with every device they release it for, because, uh, there's only like 10 of them, and they created them all.

And actually, I checked and what you said isn't even fucking true. iOS 4 came out last summer for phones and ipod touches, but not until fall for iPads. And it wasn't compatible with anything made before the iPhone 3GS - so, half of the iPhone models got left behind. So you're full of shit.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/iphone-os-4-0-unveiled-shipping-this-summer/

And yes, the nice thing about apple controlling every piece of hardware is that they can release for many devices at once, but that's not how Android works and I hardly consider that broken. If you want to work with multiple manufacturers using open source code, you have to accept that not everyone will jump on a release immediately. I'd much rather have many manufacturers than one, so like I said, I hardly consider it broken.
-Taylor

This is such a stupid fucking argument.

"Oh my god they released in December and it takes months for manufacturers to port to their devices! Android is broken!"

You don't realize it, but this is the right way to do it. How would you expect it to work? Embedded development takes time, there's no way to avoid that. Even on full PCs there is a delay. Take Windows - they come out with new releases only once in many years, so they can easily delay the release 6 months to allow manufacturers to port their drivers - and thats what they do. Microsoft has a Release Candidate of windows ready many months before they "release", but no one complains about that. If google told us "Yup, the next version is done, so we're releasing to manufacturers and you'll see it in 6 months." people would get just as upset. And it wouldn't make sense to do - some people port faster and can use the new features sooner - so just release all the source and let the OEMs sort it out.

You could look at Ubuntu - it releases all at once to everything - but then, thats where computers differ from phones. Computers have enough extra space and resources that PC operating systems like Windows and Ubuntu just include drivers for every piece of hardware they can - windows has many hundreds of megabytes of *extra* stuff on the disk just to make sure whatever network card you happen to have will work. Phones don't have all that extra space. Computers are also all built with certain things being constant. Phones have to be highly optimized though, so everything about them varies. The notification lights are hooked up to different pins on the microcontroller, different features on a bluetooth chip are enabled depending on space requirements, etc. All the code for every component has to be ported to exactly how that device is laid out. So far NO ONE has come up with a good solution for building a mobile phone OS that can be universally upgraded without issue. Thats something google is trying to do with Android, but thats one hell of an undertaking. They say Gingerbread includes some features that will help, but dude, this stuff is all new, it takes time.

So chill out and think about what you say.
-Taylor

While I also am using CM7 on my N1 and wish Google would release a damn stable version already, I imagine they're pretty busy. I'd *much* rather they spend all of their energy on making Honeycomb kick ass than releasing Gingerbread for more phones. Gingerbread is a nice update, but Honeycomb tablets will be shipping soon (supposedly) and they really want to ship them with the best possible software they can. Not only am I much more interested in a honeycomb tablet than stable Gingerbread on my phone, I also want regular people to choose honeycomb over the ipad.

Also, the Nexus one (and maybe the older dev phones) and the only ones google has any ability to "release" updates for. For the rest of the phones out there, its up to the manufacturer. Clearly cyanogen/koush et al have been working their asses off and they aren't done, I don't see any reason why the manufacturers would be any farther.
-Taylor

Jesus, I didn't know that!

I still wish they would die, I hate what they do. They're not trying to be helpful first and make money second, its the other way around with them. Or being helpful might be 3rd or 4th on their list.