> The people of RI were stupid in giving this company so much (or any) money with no collateral
> except Aeron chairs, and were stupid to be in the business of angel investing.

That's a problem if you are one of the people in Rhode Island, or one of the people who Schilling employed (now holding a rubber check), or somebody that extended credit or resources to a (now broke) startup, or even one of the people who bought a great computer game that now has no support or upgrade path. Being stupid is not some kind of big flag that says "come exploit me, I deserve to have bad things happen to me". It's not a game, its people's money and livelihoods.

Maybe what you instead mean to say is "I fail to see the problem -- for me." Or maybe "I have no empathy for anybody that does anything I wouldn't, in hindsight, do."

See that's the problem. He took, how much, $75 million, of the state of Rhode Island's money (as a loan.) And spent it. It's gone. If you seize the company and put it up at auction, all you're going to get is a bunch of scratched-up aeron chairs and three-year-old computers. The state is out the money.

Gah - there's so much wrong with this post I don't know where to start.

Yes, the voting on this bill happened quite quickly after it was finalized. But A.) it's not like it wasn't being debated for six months prior, and B.) it's largely what Massachusetts has had for years prior (oh, and was originally created and promulgated by Republican think-tanks) and C.) it's not some massive dumping of cash into Obama's offshore account. Its transparent, you can read it, its complicated BECAUSE THE U.S. HEALTH SYSTEM IS COMPLICATED, it's a sincere effort to solve a big, complicated, longstanding problem.

Yes, Ben Nelson got a bribe. Congress took it back from him later, look at the Congressional Quarterly if you want the details. People have been trying to get similar legislation passed in America for nearly a hundred years, they were supposed to call the whole thing off because of one last-minute hold out? Is it not clear that Congressman Nelson simply wanted a bribe, rather than him having substantial issues with the legislation?

Yes the bottom-line price of this legislation and the system it creates kinda-sorta is an estimate. Given the size of the system, the vagaries of predicting medical advances, etc, there's absolutely no way to write laws for any system where the bottom-line cost were absolutely known in advance.

The Tea Party. Basically everybody slept through George W. Bush's two terms as he blew through tremendous chunks of taxpayer money - giving tax breaks up the wazoo, laying out a huge new medicare benefit, created the largest new bureaucracy in fifty years, entering us into a war just on his own whim, apparently. I didn't see a single tea party person throughout all of that. Suddenly a Democrat comes to office, and every dime his administration spends is an affront to LIBERTY! TO THE BARRICADES! BUT WAIT WHILE I STAPLE THESE TEA BAGS TO MY HAT!

Um. Those commercials were funny.

Nobody hates John Hodgman - he's an ACTOR, not an operating system, in those commercials. Maybe that wasn't obvious enough? John was teh funny in those commercials. Mac guy was just this bemused observer.

Geez I'm sincerely sorry, I don't mean to pepper you with questions, I should just go ahead and hire on optical physicist to explain this to me, but here goes -

Is there a way for Alice to discern that a specific entangled photon, sent from Alice (or Charlie) was received by Bob? Alice gets an entangled photon, assumes that Bob has the entangled twin for it, and does her joint Bell-state measurement. Now, Bob's entangle photon is instantaneously altered, right? But Alice doesn't really know whether that photon is in Bob's possession, or Max's (the adversary), does she? She knows that she sent some amount of entangled photons in Bob's direction, and that maybe Bob received X% of them. Max can intentionally scoop up (100-X) percent of the photons, and, Alice not being able to discern which actually reached Bob or not, she will encode her message using all of her entangled photons. Presumably she and Bob will implement some kind of error correction scheme to make up for losses.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's leakage inherent in any system that's sending photons through free-space, and neither Bob nor Alice has a realistic way of discerning natural losses from intentional third-party interceptions. I can't imagine Bob sending back through a classical channel "Hey Alice I got photon #12 go ahead and do your BSM now!", but again that could be spoofed because it would be on a classical channel. Max is probably sending back variants of that same message with the numbers of all the photons he received.

The third party then would have to intercept the classical channel (but that should be easier, because it's classical) and somehow match bits of information from that to the bits he'd intercepted or eavesdropped on. There's nothing in even the ideal system that prevents this. The only way to really prevent this is to make sure every entangled photon is accounted for.

But the other aspect of this is that it sounds like a supremely fragile system. It's a great step forward for security (maybe) but not reliable or robust in the kinds of ways that you might wish for in a system meant to convey strategic communications.

Ah, but the abstract of the paper itself says "Over a 35-53 dB high-loss quantum channel, an average fidelity of 80.4(9) % is achieved for six distinct initial states." That sounds like a lossy channel to me. Plus, I simply don't believe it's possible to send a laser beam over X kilometers, including an atmosphere, and have them ALL reach their destination - it's a limitation of the medium.

Also, the Physics ArXiv blog post for this paper includes this;
"Inevitably photons get lost and entanglement is destroyed in such a process. Imperfections in the optics and air turbulence account for some of these losses but the biggest problem is beam widening (they did the experiment at an altitude of about 4000 metres). Since the beam spreads out as it travels, many of the photons simply miss the target altogether. "

and

"That's interesting because it's the same channel attenuation that you'd have to cope with when beaming photons to a satellite with, say, 20 centimetre optics orbiting at about 500 kilometres. "The successful quantum teleportation over such channel losses in combination with our high-frequency and high-accuracy [aiming] technique show the feasibility of satellite-based ultra-long-distance quantum teleportation," say Juan and co."

So it looks to me as though even the paper's author is admitting some "channel losses". The question I still have is, how is it possible to distinguish channel losses from adversarial interception of photons?

I'm not sure I get why this method is thought to be any more secure than a conventional line-of-sight laser link.

It seems as though a line of sight laser that had conventionally encoded data in it would be pretty secure. Well, you'd have to get close to the laser light to observe it, and maybe use some super-fancy optics to couple to it and make a copy of the data. Highly unlikely but possible. But if the (assumed full-duplex) beams were obstructed, the link would be assumed compromised and sending could be halted.

In the case of the quantum version, it is said that the photons are entangled, so if an adversary inspected them, he'd "collapse the wave function" and it would be obvious to both the receiver and the sender, is that right? But, because its an optical beam, some amount of those entangled photons diverge, go astray, and are not ever received (at the receiver.) How does the sender distinguish between those that are legitimately received and those that go astray? Between those that are intercepted by an adversary and those that go astray? Could not then an adversary just choose to inspect those photons that weren't going to make it to the receiver anyway? And then, by 'collapsing the wavefunction' him or herself, be privy to (some portion of) the message?

I'd like to overlook all of the political arguments on this thread, but this statement "About the only thing NASA can do now is put a satellite in low orbit" is simply false, either intentionally so or misinformed. I don't know why such sentiment keeps appearing here at Slashdot of all places. Let's take a look at the recent record;

Kepler - increases by something like an order of magnitude the number of known exoplanets. Way into extended mission time now.
Spirit and Opportunity rovers - nominal thirty day mission, they've now been operating on Mars' service for over eight years.
New Horizons - on its way to be the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and (potentially) other Kuiper Belt objects
MESSENGER - first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, been there for over a year now.
NEAR Shoemaker - orbits and lands on asteroid 433 Eros (a first?)
Cassini - discovers open liquid lakes and oceans on Titan, cryovolcanoes on Enceladus, new dynamics in Saturn's rings, and on and on. A freaking awesome mission.
Hubble - still working, still doing real science. 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics (dark energy, expansion of the universe is accelerating) largely done using Hubble data.
STEREO - just captured incidental images of a new Nova. Returning new data on the Sun every day.
JUNO - on it's way to Jupiter, first solar powered mission to that planet.
Mars Science Laboratory - over budget, yes, but on its way to Mars, and by far the most sophisticated robot ever to be sent to another planet.

Keep in mind that space is hard. Let's take a look at what other space programs have been up to lately -

    - JAXA's Akatsuki-Venus mission failed to enter orbit around Venus last year
    - Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Martian satellites failed to even escape Earth's orbit
    - Russia's resupply mission to ISS exploded less than six minutes after takeoff (August 2011)
    - ESA's Mars Express mission lost it's Beagle-2 lander (crashed? nobody knows)
    - Cassini's Huygens probe (ESA) had a fair number of problems, including, at one point, its spinning in the opposite to intended direction during descent
    - India's Chandrayaan lunar probe operated for 312 days before failing, rather than its nominal 2-year mission (probably for thermal reasons)

For the record, other current NASA missions up for extensions include EPOXI, GRAIL, MRO, Mars Odyssey Orbiter, and LRO.

Yes I'm cherry-picking a bit here, but overlooking dozens of other functioning programs also. It's not my job to document all this - but before posting snide little "NASA's not good for anything anymore" comments, maybe do a minimal amount of search.

This, a million times this. The authors here are not some group of crunchy, kumbayaa-strumming hemp-skirt wearing lefties; they are straight out of right-wing "think-tanks" so one would assume their opinions would have some degree of relevance to the workings of the Republican party.

The price of the bulb is, unsurprisingly, like just about everything else, related to the number of bulbs produced and sold. If you bought a one-off handmade automobile, it would cost a lot more, even if it performed exactly the same as a stock car that rolled off a manufacturing line.

Over time, as more of these bulbs are produced, the price per item is going to come down. Phillips doesn't want to subsidize the price of the early bulbs (to take the risk that they'll never sell enough of them to back out the cost of the subsidy), so they're pricing them to cost, apparently. I'm sure its dawned on Phillips that a $30 light bulb is not going to be an easy sell. I'd bet that the pricing also indicates that they don't expect a consumer with a house full of these would need to replace them very often.

It's not some kind of socialist plot. It's business.