Check out their demonstration videos at http://span.ece.utah.edu/radio-tomographic-imaging.

I was fortunate enough to see the demo at Mobicom last year. It's a really neat application, even if the math is nothing new.

So what? The farmer was just doing what farmer's have done for centuries! Every year farmers would save the seeds from the tastiest/most productive/most robust plants and use them as seeds for the coming years. It is only through thousands of years of this process that we have gotten the crops we have today. Why should a farmer stop using the methods botanical husbandry that have been employed for the entire existence of his profession just because his neighbor decided to stop and use GM crops instead?

The key point of QKD is it makes perfect secrecy (using one-time pads) practical. One-time pads are the most secure form of cipher. The only way anyone can decrypt something encrypted with a one-time pad is if they have the one-time pad--no amount of computing power will EVER be able to break it.

As for using RSA to secure QKD, it actually has significant benefits. Once the QKD is started, any tampering with the optical fiber will be detected at both ends, so a MITM will have to interrupt while the fiber is dark. If the key is switched every time the QKD is started then the MITM would have to break RSA within milliseconds with only a single authentication token. This will be infeasible for a LONG time.

There are also some other things they can do to verify it. They can use clock synchronization to verify that the photons are traveling along the known distance of the fiber optic cable. They can use multiple communication channels after the key is measured to reduce the probability of an undetected MITM attack (i.e. mail the hash of the key, call them using a telephone and compare hashes, post the hash on a website, email the hash, etc). The more they do, the more likely any MITM attack can be detected.

But what if the bill doesn't reference a section of law that it changes. What if you have part of one law that says that "Ice cream can not be sold on Tuesdays", and then part of another law is proposed that says that "Ice cream must be sold on the third Tuesday of the month". Unless the people writing the new law know about the old one, there's no way for them to reference the old law. There is no easy way to detect conflicts like this.

Additionally a logical language for law would have additional benefits. Since it is computer parseable, most lawyers could be replaced by technicians who can translate the real world situation into an equivalent logical query and determine which laws are relevant and what they mean. Of course the legal system would still need judges and juries to decide guilt and whether the law is fair (and submit bug reports to congress).

The key is not encoded -- it is random. Both the "sender" and receiver have no idea what the photon's characteristics are. They both flip coins to see which type of measurement to make. Then they keep the bits where they made the same type of measurement and throw away the others.

Any intermediate party will either receive the photon (so the receiver won't) or not receive the photon (and can't measure it). Further, no intermediate party knows what measurements the sender and receiver will make so they can't make the same measurements. If the intermediary can't make the same measurements then it can't generate the same key, and can't generate a passable photon for the receiver. Assuming the sender and receiver have another channel which is secure against man in the middle attacks (though not necessarily secure against eavesdroppers), they can tell each other which type of measurements they made and know what to keep.

Since the refrigerators have random and uncorrelated cycling they will experience large peaks due to the Central Limit Theorem (see my other post)

Recheck your probability theory please. If you look at the Central Limit Theorem, you'll see that the larger the number of aircons the closer the distribution will be to the Gaussian (normal) distribution. This distribution has an infinitely long tail which means the maximum power spike is theoretically infinite for a Gaussian distribution (but practically limited by the worst case combination of all aircons at once).

Of course the Central Limit Theorem assumes all the distributions are independent. If you add the control system from the article, these become dependent, and the Central Limit Theorem no longer applies.

Actually, in Chinese it's more than that. The words for she is a fairly recent invention that was only added after contact with western civilizations.

I just fail to see how having a slightly corrupt uuencoded file is the same as not having a file. In the case of an encrypted file, you also have a file that appears corrupt. And it is obvious to everyone that there is a message (the file), even if they can't decode it. I'm sorry I just fail to see how the scheme you proposed could be considered stenography.