There's a pretty huge problem with banning alcoholic beverages containing caffeine. The worst offenders are not drinks that come in a can from Coors, but mixed drinks, like Vodka Red-Bull's. You can make laws telling people not to mix their Vodka and Red Bulls together, but good luck enforcing them! (Honestly, you'd think common sense and a sense of taste would be enough...)

The truly awful thing is that, if this kind of law was enacted, the drinks it would actually kill would be wonderful, rich microbrew espresso stouts and imperial coffee stouts. Outlaw Coors Light if you must, but DO NOT FUCK WITH GOOD BEER.

Finally, the most damning argument against this sort of law of all is that stupid frat boys and girls will still wind up doing stupid things no matter what they're drinking. So what's the point eh?

Depends on the type of network. For plain ol' BB84 systems relying on sending single qubit states, absolutely. You wouldn't use that over a quantum repeater network though. You'd likely use one of several quantum key distribution schemes relying on shared entanglement. (e.g. Ekert 92)

Here's the principle on which quantum repeater networks will operate:

Alice (----- Entangled Photon Pair Source -----) Bell State Measurement (------ Entangled Photon Pair Source -----) Bob

What we want is for Alice and Bob to each wind up holding half of an entangled pair of photons. The two sources create two pairs of entangled photons and send the halves in opposite directions. Alice and Bob initially receive photons that have nothing to do with each other. However, when the other halves of Alice and Bob's pairs are annihilated together in the Bell State Measurement in the middle, the entanglement of the annihilated photons is swapped to Alice and Bob's photons such that they wind up being entangled together. The nice thing about this is that Alice and Bob can verify that they share entangled pairs and there's no way for anyone in the middle to fool them, provided Alice and Bob authenticate each other and there are no real-world deficiencies in their apparatus. In essence, Alice and Bob don't have to trust the man in the middle even though he's handling their photons.

To build a quantum repeater network, you just expand this out in a giant daisy chain with many many steps. Quantum memory is necessary for caching photons at each node in the chain so that you can wait for all nodes to be ready before proceeding with the bell state measurements. Caching is necessary because the probability of photons reaching each of the stations in the network simultaneously is no better than the probability of one photon going from end-to-end. i.e. Not bloody likely over long distances.


P.S. Funny aside: The first BB84 system built by Bennett and Brassard (the first quantum crypto system ever built), had some rather noisy pockel cell's controlling measurement bases such that you could tell what basis Alice was measuring in from the sound of the cell. Additionally, Alice and Bob were on the same lab bench, so an eavesdropper in between them would necessarily be inside the room. It was therefore famously joked that the first quantum crypto system was only secure if any potential eavesdropper was stone deaf! This is an example of a side-channel attack that can occur when reality doesn't quite live up to theory, and is the sort of thing people building any kind of crypto system, quantum or otherwise, have to worry about.

While light can be bounced around, absorbed and re-emitted fairly well in a classical sense, it gets tricky when you start trying to store single photons that have been intentionally "dicked with" to encode quantum information. (i.e. Quantum bits, or qubits) What this paper is talking about is one way of implementing quantum memory for successfully storing and recalling photonic qubits. (i.e. light)

Now, the computer geeks out there probably heard "qubits" and immediately thought "OooOOOooo... Quantum Computers!". Not so fast. Photonic qubits are generally too quick to decohere (even when stored in memory such as this) and difficult to interact with to be good candidates for quantum computing. It's certainly not impossible, and perhaps even probable in the long-run, but atomic qubits are currently more promising and more widely being looked at for quantum computing. What a photonic quantum memory is immediately useful for is communications. i.e. Quantum cryptography. More specifically, building quantum repeater networks.

If you know a little about computer networks, you know that signals traveling over long distances have to be boosted by repeaters every so often or loss humps your data. Optical networks are exactly the same. After a few hundred kilometers of fiber you have a lot of loss. Unfortunately, unlike classical bits, which can simply be copied, qubits cannot be reliably copied. (Google the "no cloning" theorem if you care.) The work around is a little complex to explain (it's essentially a daisy chain of entanglement swapping), but requires quantum memory to work.

The short of it is, this sort of quantum memory will allow us to build longer distance quantum encryption networks than currently exist. (Quantum crypto is currently being used by some European banks.) At first, this might allow banks in North America to jump on the Quantum bandwagon. It's hideously expensive at the moment, naturally, and probably less economical than running volkswagen's full of hard-drives with one-time-pads on them back and forth, but in principle nothing about this tech is any more expensive than the repeaters the internet currently runs on. Economy of scale should eventually kick in, and these quantum crypto networks will be pretty handy if quantum computers manage to toast public key encryption. (Authentication, of course, is another issue entirely...)

Now, I haven't had a chance to read the Nature paper yet. I've read this groups past papers though, and they really are world leaders in experimental CRIB implementation. Last I checked, they still didn't have adequate efficiency to make their tech useable (must be greater than 50% recall to be practical). Still, CRIB is one of the more promising methods out there.

This might initially appear to be an odd move for Apple, because they already operate on the other side of the fence. e.g. iTunes, or Quicktime. The Apple version of quicktime that is released for windows is typically feature deprived (unless you pay for pro), buggy, and horrendously inefficient. (It's always great watching 1080p stutter along on a freakin' quad-core with a $400 video card.) It's reached the point where the deficiencies of Apple quicktime for Windows has spawned "Quicktime Alternative", just like Realvideo spawned "Real Alternative". "Quicktime Alternative", when it's fully caught up in the arms race with Apple, is a entirely superior to Apple Quicktime, offering smooth playback on modest hardware and all the features of pro for free. Naturally, Apple frequently "tweaks" things to break functionality on the open alternatives to their software. (This happened to Palm rather recently, w.r.t. iTunes.)

Now, I would assume that Apple has some agreement with MS to keep them in the loop on the updates to Exchange. The financial entanglement of Apple and MS and their workplace symbiosis is such that MS probably will not benefit as much as one would think from dicking Apple around the way Apple dicks open sourcers around. Also, MS knows they would have no chance in the court of public opinion if they tried to do so, while Apple can make a somewhat believable case against open sourcers reverse engineering Apple software and providing, for free, some of the pro features that are supposed to be paid for.

One thing that I think the article is absolutely wrong about is that Western RPG's or MMO's are in any way behind Eastern ones. From Baldur's Gate to Planescape: Torment to the KOTOR series, single player western RPG's have really pushed the boundaries and given us compelling and unique experiences. While the West churns out fewer RPG's than the East, they tend to be much more varied and innovative, especially in terms of characterization and plot. When a good Western RPG comes out I can look forward to a fresh experience, while most Eastern RPG's feel annoyingly familiar. Playing them, I always experience deluges of deja vu and have to carefully switch off parts of my brain. (e.g. The part that doesn't want to play a bitchy adolescent male prodigy saving the universe... again.) The things that appeal to Eastern audiences, like those fucking chocobo's, aren't what float my boat. Likewise, to say that the West is behind in the MMO department, with WoW absolutely stomping Eastern MMO's in their own bloody markets...

Aion looks like a solid eastern MMORPG, but nothing compelling enough to dethrone WoW. It's artwork also feels distinctly Eastern, which means it will flop in the West. Lots of people in the West love anime, love Kurosawa, love Chan-wook Park, but they're still a very small minority. The majority of people will not go for something that feels too Eastern, just as Eastern audiences flocked to Lineage but not to western MMOs. Cultural barriers definitely do exist between the East and the West and Aion doesn't look like a MMO that transcends them. It really is extraordinary that WoW has somehow managed to appeal to both the East and West, and I'm not sure even Blizzard knows how they managed it.

So, what's going to dethrone WoW? Slap me silly with a mackerel if I have a clue. Probably WoW2. It's not really a terribly interesting question. What is an interesting question is when we're going to see hugely popular MMO's on the scale of WoW in genres other than fantasy. There are a lot of people out there who love sci-fi and not fantasy, or who love historical settings and not sci-fi or fantasy. These are largely untapped markets. There is probably room for several big MMO's to do well at the same time, provided they target different genres. (another reason why Aion is probably doomed.)

Bioware's KOTOR MMO looks promising. It's sci-fi, which hasn't really been done well in a MMO sense except possibly for Eve Online, but the space-sim market is arguably a different genre from what KOTOR targets. Bioware has a long track record of excellent single player RPG's, but it remains to be seen if they have what it takes to put out a MMO, especially now that they have their own sort of "imperial entanglement" predicament now that they're under EA's umbrella. (You can bet there will be pressure to release early coming from EA, no matter how much Bioware claims they are the master of their own domain!) A lot of single player RPG fans are up in arms over KOTOR being turned into a MMO, since KOTOR's strength was it's compelling stories, which are remarkably hard to do in a MMO that is more about player dynamics. Bioware claims they've found the holy grail of MMO's though, a way to bring single player plots to massive online environments. That's a bold claim, if ever there was one. I wish them luck.

If you're just want a convenient backup of your music collection, porn collection, musical pr0n collection, or your pr0n musical collection then RAID is not a horrible thing. However, if you're backing up important files, like the only existing scans of the now-burned dossiers William Mark Felt left you, then you should not stop at RAID. Statistically speaking, if something happens to one HD in your machine, like a massive power surge or being confiscated by tight-lipped men in black suits and black sunglasses, it has a pretty high probability of happening to the other HD. Offsite backups are, therefore, prudent. Leaving a HD in a box at the bank and giving the key to your lawyer is one of the safer things you can do, but not terribly convenient. There are a variety of online backup services available that are decent. I'll leave it to others to speculate on which ones are least likely to be fronts for the NSA. If you feel that your data might actually be interesting to more than one human being on Earth, don't forget to encrypt it. (Be honest with yourself. You are posting to /. after all.) I'm rather fond of emailing moderate risk files to my gmail account. (Stupid, I know, but very low effort and they're available anywhere you feel safe enough to check your email.)

As for Motherboard RAID chipsets... Keep in mind that your motherboard has a non-zero probability of frying, having it's caps go bad, being peed on by irate government agents, etc.. I once had a RAID 0 array that was hooked up to one of those things. After the Mobo died I had to do without letters K through P of my Japanese horror-comedy-porno-game-show collection until I was able to find a used computer with the same RAID chipset. (I don't know if it's changed, but at the time each different RAID chipset made RAID 0 arrays that were not compatible with anything else on this lump of rock.) If data portability rather than performance is a priority for you, my advice would be to avoid hardware RAID entirely.

"Natal does not track players by colour (although we know from Milo commenting on my blue shirt that it can if it wants to); it tracks them by infra-red "

Gah! Willful, unthinking ignorance like this really yanks my chain. When you get things like this wrong it makes me want to ignore you completely, because you're probably an idiot. There are several mistakes like this in that article, and the continual invoking of "magic" is particularly bad. There is quite a fair bit known about how Natal works. If you somehow missed it at E3, look it up slacker! If you really want to persuade people, sound like you were paying attention at E3 for chrissake.

As for addressing the claim that hardcore gamers don't want to jump around in front of their couch rather than sitting on it and twiddling their thumbs...

Fail.

There's something truly awesome about sitting back, taking a piece of clunky plastic in your hands, and gaming the night away with some good ol' fashioned haptic feedback. Maybe Natal is precise enough to read your finger positions without needing a controller, but it still can't give you tactile feedback. Incidentally, spinning your hands in the air to control a car is actually a step further away from total immersion as compared to spinning a steering wheel in the air, because real cars have steering wheels!

Don't get me wrong. Natal is still an epic achievement, but hardcore gamers should probably realize it's more for their mothers than them. Take a look at the Wii. It's sort of a gimmick. A lot of people get one, play it for a couple months, and then pull it out only for parties. Why just parties? For one thing, it has a lot of games that are easy to learn and offer little advantage to the master, meaning almost anyone can win by the end of a session. It's also fundamentally enjoyable watching people spaz out in front of the thing before they realize it's all in the wrist. Given the Wii's relative lack of depth, why has it outsold the PS3 and Xbox360 combined several times over? Broad appeal. Your mom doesn't see the point of yet another game about saving Master Chief's undies from alien zombies, but air-golfing? Score.

Look at how MS operates and you'll figure out what's going on here pretty quick. Natal isn't the next generation of hardcore gaming. It's the Internet explorer of casual gaming come to dethrone Nintendo's Netscape. The Wii showed Sony and MS how monolithically massive the casual gaming market is, and now they want in. Natal is a slash aimed squarely at Nintendo's jugular, and they're going to have to innovate our pants off and then fellate us to stay in business.

So, will Natal ever do anything for hardcore gaming? I don't know. Natal, or something like it, will someday. It really is in the hands of the software developers though. I applaud MS for giving us a whole new bag of tricks, but I honestly don't expect a hardcore gaming Nirvana to come out of the mist like the author of that article does. I expect Wii-type gimmicky crap that will be a whole lot of fun at parties, and for your mom, but not that fantastic for late night fragging. Emotional AI and speech recognition is bloody impressive, but Turing test passing AI is still very bloody hard stuff. They can put this stuff into games, but at some point you'll probably feel like you're trapped in a world full of Dr.Sbaitso's. Scripted dialogue trees (Mass effect is a great example of doing those well) aren't going to go away for quite some time. In reality, the tools MS is giving us will take years or decades to refine on the software side of things. Existing input methods, like mice or gamepads, have been around for several decades and are heavily optimized. They're not going to be replaced in one generation.

1. Get your name added to an opt-out list, such as the Do not Call list.
2. Unscrupulous individual obtains opt-out list with your contact info and sells it to Nigerian spammers or other foreign group.
3. You wind up getting more BS than your friend who didn't sign up for that opt-out list.

Precisely this happened with Canada's do not call registry. I didn't have my name added to it, thankfully. However, in today's information market, opt-out lists would have to be highly secure to have even a remote chance of working as intended. However, unscrupulous spammers have to be able to access the opt-out list to tell if you've opted out! That's a pretty huge gaping security hole built in.

Bottom line, the more opt-out lists you sign up for, the more spam you're opting in for.

Note: For the legally squeamish, I shall be referring to two fictional torrent trackers: "squeak" and "pancakes". The rest of you can just deal.

Once upon a time, I was one of the music industries greatest customers. When I was in highschool I'd make a weekly pilgrimage to the big record-store downtown and spend hours scouring the racks for tunes. I'm old/young enough that, at first, it was tapes, but I later progressed to CD's. My earliest albums are all popular well known artists, but I soon began to branch out into other genres that were, at the time, marginal. Classical. Electronica. You name it.

In the late nineties I started using Napster and a variety of other sharing sites, but sweet, glorious usenet above all else. Sure, you needed luck and a commerical usenet account to find what you wanted but, if you could find it, it would download. (rather than sitting at 32% like so many file sharing networks of the day!) It was like a smorgasboard. You could just download things at random and find yourself on journeys of musical discovery. I was still buying a lot of albums in those days. Primarily albums from groups I discovered through usenet but hadn't been able to find anywhere. (These were often ordered through the mail.)

I always felt a little guilty about hanging onto digital copies of albums I had downloaded without buying, but I figured things balanced out since I was really spending more money than I could afford on music anyways. Then, Metallica started suing people and Napster got shut down. Usenet was still fine, but suddenly the relationship between artists and fans was tainted. I know it's not justifiable. It's illegal, immoral, whatever. But I haven't bought a single album, online or otherwise, since that day. I can't explain it, but suddenly a group I loved was calling me a thief. I realized it was true, and strangely enough, I stopped caring.

For a while I continued downloading music through usenet, but that phase sort of waned. So much was being posted there that it was taking hours a day to sift through just the lossless groups. For every great new track I found, I found hundreds of tracks I loathed. I'd find artists that cut one decent song in their careers and then nothing but crap. My music collection stood still for several years.

Then squeak came along. Instead of passively sipping from the usenet garden-hose, you could actively search for music that interested you. Squeak had almost *everything*. Odds were that, if you could think of it, squeak had it. Unlike open torrent trackers like TPB or the various sharing networks that came before, the closed ratio-enforced nature of squeak ensured that whatever you did find downloaded nearly as fast as if was coming off of usenet. The comments people posted to torrents were frequently a goldmine of information for finding new music too. My collection expanded quite a bit during these years.

Then, one day, squeak was shut down. I really felt cut off from music that day. iTunes was going strong, but even they had relatively little compared to squeak and, at the time, the quality of their lossy AAC tracks was poor compared to the lossless that was so easy to find on squeak. I realized that squeak really was something special, and just as I used to pay a monthly fee for usenet I'd have gladly paid a monthly fee for Oink. Why couldn't the record industry find some way to provide that service and take my money? I didn't feel guilty about pirating music, but I did feel weary of moving around trying to find music in the "old ways".

A little while later, while casting about for an oink replacement, I got an early account on "pancakes", but it sucked. There was nothing there. It felt like a refugee camp, except all the cool people had gone to some other, cooler camp and this one was for the rejects. Eventually, I despaired and went through another dark, period of zero-musical discovery. My original pancakes login was soon forgotten.

A while back, somebody sent me an invite to pancakes and I figured it was worth another look. What a difference a year or so had made! The selection was still not up to squeak's standards, but pancakes was doing some new things that were exciting. The front page was filled with well-written articles on obscure genres. Bands were actually releasing albums here! Obscure, unheard of bands, and they were getting their music out to thousands all around the globe. Instead of feeling like I should feel guilty, I felt good when downloading bands that wanted their music out there. I'd pass their stuff around to friends and some of them would wind up really enjoying it.

So what does the future hold? I feel pancakes is on the right track, provided they can avoid being sued into non-existence like squeak. There is definitely an opportunity here for artists. Perhaps not the sort that will generate filthy lucre in the traditional sense... How many bands really wind up doing a lot better than breaking even with the record companies anyways? We're also beginning to see music (e.g. Kleptones) that is flat out illegal due to copyright law, yet of genuine artistic merit. Some artists are learning to live outside the law, and we're all richer for it.

For better or for worse, file-sharing is here to stay. Commercial services like iTunes will probably also thrive, provided they keep their prices realistic. However, does there really have to be two streams of music? One legal, and one not? Can we not find a way to bring services like pancakes into the fold without forcing them to drastically cut their selection by requiring them to work out deals with individual idiotic labels? Like squeak before it, I would gladly pay for pancakes. For me, it's no longer a matter of wanting to go legitimate. I just don't want to find myself cut off again.

Although I have mentioned feeling guilty about not paying for music, I am in Canada, and I have not explicitly broken the law by downloading music. Here, there are levies on blank media, such as CD-Rs, mp3 players, etc. that go to artists, and downloading music is legal here as a direct result. (Something that CRIA is desperately trying to change, since the DMCA worked out so wonderfully in the U.S..) Perhaps it would work if legislation were enacted that would allow sites like pancakes to operate legally by collecting monthly fees from users and distributing the proceeds directly to artists according to download-share, whether those artists have agreed to such a relationship or not. Sort of a, "Fuck you guys, here's your money" relationship. It would be a lot like iTunes, ironically...

I know, I know. I'm reaching here. A lot of people are now so opposed to the record label's legal bullshit that they couldn't stomach a cent of their money going to them. Still, I think we've reached a point where RIAA, CRIA, etc. have demonstrated that they are unwilling or unable to come to terms with market realities and build a mutually respectful relationship with their customers. I'm a canuck, so I believe in the judicious intervention of government in industry. (The same sort of thing that has kept our banks solvent and bail-out free!) Call me dirty names like socialist if you want, but socialism in moderation works.

Where does that leave labels? Artists are still going to need help producing albums and setting up tours. Maybe it really should be harder for up and coming artists to get millions into debt for a fancy first-album. Maybe they should have to do some cheap, basement albums first to get the cash up for a slick and glossy production. It would certainly reduce the number of artists who wind up in debt-for-life to the labels. Instead of controlling the artists, maybe the labels should be providing a service to artists. If the artists get their money directly from pancakes, iTunes, etc., they will be the ones with the power, not the labels. That scares the hell out of the labels, but I like the idea myself.

Then maybe the media levy that is currently distributed amongst artists should also be distributed to truckers too?

Problem solved.

Long story short, Canada doesn't have a copyright problem. Tweak the levies if you want, but don't blow a good thing. DMCA style laws haven't worked anywhere else they've been implemented. The Canadian levy system shows far more promise. Heck, maybe the U.S. should be adopting our levy system instead of trying to make us adopt their horribly broken and ineffectual laws!

While there are lots of little things in this article that indicate the author has never used anything that didn't come out of Cupertino, the one thing that bugged me the most was his willful ignorance of preemptive multi-tasking.

In preemptive multitasking, the OS gives each application running a time-slice to do their thing and then, typically, takes control and gives the next app it's turn. This means you can put any program you want in the background and it will keep on running. We take this for granted today, but prior to 1995, most users never had this luxury. Amiga was probably the earliest OS to go sort of mainstream that had preemptive multitasking.

The article says:

"It wasn't until the late 1990s that Windows NT, OS/2 and the Mac OS were able to multitask as well -- and they required vast hardware resources to do it."

Wrong. Windows95 had full preemptive multitasking. It didn't have protected memory. That feature would stay in the NT stream until XP. However, mainstream MS users enjoyed preemptive multitasking from 1995 on.

MacOS, on the other hand, never had preemptive multitasking. Later versions had cooperative multitasking which relied on programs being specially written to support it. However, just one app running without that support was all it took to bring your Mac to a screeching halt. The late 90's were a horrible time to be a Mac user, and Apple's market share declined sharply during this period because of how primitive the last versions of MacOS were compared to everything else on the market. After the return of Jobs in the late 90's, Apple started to turn around by making flashy hardware, colored iMac's, those god-awful puck-mice, etc.. It wasn't until OSX came along that Apple was able to attract (at least some) users more interested in working on their macs than in how they looked.

The problem with the big auto companies, like GM, is that for every dollar they pay in salary to workers, they pay two for benefits and pension plans. Their labor costs are absolutely horrendous. The rest of their operations are similarly inefficient. They're going to have a real tough time competing no matter what they make.

Personally, I say let the big auto companies die. It's going to be a clusterfuck, but we can't just keep bailing them out year after year. Remember, the current dire state of affairs has come about after a decade of prosperity, and this isn't the first bunch of government cash they've asked for and gotten(in Canada at least)! The important thing is to find a way to keep workers employed and parts companies in business.

What is needed is not more of the same incompetence from the big 3. What is needed is for proven companies who know what they're doing in their respective industries to take over the auto plants. It's not very enticing though. These plants have the wrong equipment and the auto unions will probably make all sorts of trouble for them. This is where the money saved not bailing out the big 3 again and again can be used to offer incentives to lure these companies in. Likewise, parts companies that are run competently should receive short-term loans to help them transition to working with these new industries. Government intervention should be used like a surgeon's scalpel. Cut out the cancer and reroute blood to the healthy tissue.

Master of Orion 2 differed from MOO1 in several fundamental ways. Most of those ways involved added minutiae to the game that didn't really add to the strategic depth of the game.

Take buildings for example. In MOO2 (and every bloody civ-in-space game since) you can erect specialized buildings on your planets that focus the planets production. There is a tiny amount of strategy in the order of building things, but once you figure out an optimal build order for different types of planets it's just an annoying game mechanic that gets in the way of expanding your empire, saying "Nice doggy!" to your would-be enemies while you research a bigger stick, etc..

Really, this sort of thing ammounts to shoe-horning an inferior version of sim-city into a game that doesn't need it. However, it's in every bloody 4X game people make these days, with Stardock's own Galactic Civilizations being one of the worst offenders. In MOO1, you could just set a slider telling each of your planets how much to devote to industry, research, ship production, etc..

This is the philosophy I would like to see the MOO franchise return to:

Create simple, intuitive, direct ways to manipulate a deep and complex system with cleverly balanced AI.

e.g. To allow players to focus production, give them a simple control, such as a set of sliders, instead of a sim-city clone mini-game.

Now, I know a lot of people love MOO2 and building buildings. It's a good game, and the mechanic is now utterly ubiquitous. However, if you liked MOO2 you can go play GalCiv or any of dozens of games that have all the same mechanics. If, however, the MOO franchise were to go back to it's MOO1 roots and try to find other ways for players to interact with the universe, we might finally see the ossified 4X genre evolve a little!