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Comment Re:Of course! (Score 5, Insightful) 264

*sigh* It's even worse than that. IAAP and I was very excited to see this ... at first. The article by the way is very well written (serious science - not a crank). The problem is that the data (figure 2 in the arxiv paper - everyone should check this out btw) on which the author hangs all his hopes is seriously noisy (compared to the size of the "kink" that he superposes on the graph). In other words, if you imagine erasing the drawn-in kink, such artifacts occur several places in the data and are generally not above the noise level.

Not necessarily. When analysing experimental data, keep in mind that it's not only the ~5 points of the kink that carry relevant information, it's *all* the points! Thus, the proper way to look at the graph would be to focus first the lower half (up to the kink), and then on the upper half, and see what's changed. If, for example, linear fits to the separate data regions give separate straight lines, this could mean that there is something in the data.

That having been said: although IAAS (I am a scientist), I'm not a transport measurements guy and I'm not familiar with the state-of-the-art methods in this particular experimental technique... The guys improving their experimental technique would certainly not hurt at all, but for now, I'd leave it to the peer reviewers to estimate the relevance of *this* particular graph ;-)

Comment Re:"Unbiased" can mean "evil" sometimes. (Score 1) 973

I understand your point, but that's no excuse for blowing up civilians.

"With great power comes great responsibility" is a pretty chewed-out phrase, but that's what it boils down to in this kind of "but-they-could-have-been-enemies"-arguments.

Somebody wants to handle guns? Fine. Then find a way to handle them without harming civilians, or GTFO.

You cannot treat military by the same standarts you treat a random person. Whoever has the power to do great damage (e.g. because he's flying an Apache with a 30mm gun on board) cannot afford to proceed with the same carelessnes like you & me would, without that power!
 

Comment "Unbiased" can mean "evil" sometimes. (Score 1) 973

Sorry, but no.

I think there's too many "unbiased" people out there. People shouldn't be unbiased. They should be biased towards justice, fairness, and doing TheRightThing(tm). Killing unarmerd civilians is not TheRightThing(tm), so I'm actually damned glad that WikiLeaks isn't biased, but rather -- for a change -- biased towards the right thing.

In other words: being good is biased, just aswell as being evil is biased. Being unbiased it's not the same as being good, it's being indifferent. And that can be evil, too, given the right circumstances.

Comment Re:conundrum (Score 1) 464

Sorry, but you fail to explain one point: where to draw the line between legitimate "police helping" and "show me the warrant"-attitude?

Being asked for help by the police as in in "sir, you're the man next door, have you seen anything suspicious yesterday at the time of shooting", or being a company holding private (as opposed to *public*) information on civil persons and happily handing it out to law enforcement beas a huge difference.

To put it more clearly: would you like your telecommunications company "help out" the police by politely providing any information they might want on *you*? Like persons you talked to, invoices, message transcripstions? No? Thought so. As a matter of facts, there are laws against that (or used to be, at least).

Police, if supposed to be able to access information about you from 3rd-party, has specific devices to do so (i.e. subpoenas etc). For exactly this reason you, as a company holding sensitive information about a person, should not "help" the police unless they have the device to legally force you to!

This is in no way different in the case of a supposedly drug dealer... you don't know the man, you haven't heard his lawyers and his side of the story, and you are by no means a judge. You are a random company, and he is a random customer, and unless law enforcement has specific reasons to gather informations about him (and "specific reasons" are documented by warrants, subpoenas etc), you have no business divulging them private information.

Comment Re:Simple... if "Y" chromosome found = male (Score 1) 1091

It's Not That Simple.

Besides, you're ignoring the point. The real issue here is highlighted by this passage:

But now the IAAF claim that they want to conduct further tests to see if 'she may have a rare medical condition that gives her an unfair advantage.'

Yes, it is. If it's a female (i.e. has the corresponding genitals from birth), then... she is a female. Period.

What's an "unfair advantage"? How about being a 300 pound, 7foot tall hariy-back in heavy-weight boxing? Is that "unfair"? Tough luck. How about being so incredibly fast, that you make the 100m in 9 seconds flat? How about... well, just being a "natural" in whatever sports you're doing? How about having this thing called "talent"? Is that an "unfair advantage", too, if the wrong people win?

The whole point of world championships and olympics is for the best of the best to measure with each other, not for the best of the average. Somebody has an advantage from birth? Well, as long as that's whote Mother Nature gave him (as opposed to 'was engineerd by man, in any way') that advantage... congratulations to him/her/it and good luck with it. And to all the others: get over it. It's not about who trains the hardest, it's about who's the best.

Comment Re:I have to wonder... (Score 1) 144

They think something along the lines of "The internet must not become a law-free space! We must not allow for villains to be able to do their deeds unhindered in this 'internet'!", and, tragically, they actually believe it.

You see, up until recently, "free speech" was only "free as in law permits". If police was to read your snail mail, they did it -- all it took was tearing the envelope apart. If they wanted to listen to your phone conversation, they did it -- all it took was tapto your line. All they had to do is justify it in front of the law one way or the other...

Now, thanks to advanced digital encryption, if you choose to have a private conversation, it is *truly* private. Simply "ripping the envelope" and justifying it afterwards won't do it anymore... What we have now is truly FreeSpeechByTechnology, not FreeSpeechByLaw.

Now. From your point of view, the change is small: You previously thought you could communicate freely (because law guaranteed you to), now you still think you can communicate freely (because technology guarantees you to).

But from the legislative/executive point of view, the scenario changed dramatically: previously, they could, if they chose to, listen to your conversations. Because laws can be broken, bent, or re-designed, in case that it seems fit. However, now, whatever happens, law enforcement cannot listen to your conversations, because proper encryption cannot be broken.

That's what governments are thinking... But that's not the interesting question.

The interesting question is: You understand why even the most liberal western governemnts react as they do at the perspective of not being able to snoop on your communications. Now, what do you learn from this fact about the way the used to be able to snoop on you prior to you being able to properly defend against that? What does it tell you, that, in whatever extent they used to snoop your communications, it makes them this scary to loose that ability, that they feel the need to pass the legislation they do?

Comment Bunch of new problems with quantum cryptography (Score 3, Informative) 51

From what I've been told (I am a physics major, but I don't work in quantum cryptography as my main activity), there's a bunch of other weaknesses inherent to quantum encryption methods.

For example, qubits are mostly transfered through some optical medium. At the receiving end, at some point, they are detected in one way or the other. "Detecting" means they alter the state of the detector in a measurable way. And there are some ideas (maybe even implementations?) of attacks that try to measure the alteration of the detector immediately after the detection, for example by probing with a laser pulse that follows the qubit pulse.

Now due to some limitations of the physics of light pulses, this is something that, if implemented, is very difficult to defend against, since the light always goes both ways. It is also a kind of attack that could not be implemented against "classic" information transmission channels...
 
...I really find it interesting that every new technology seems to have its inherent weaknisses at one spot or the other -- kinda feels comfortable to know that "There is no silver bullet" still holds... :-)

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