Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:probably not (Score 1) 34

""Mistreats minorities", what you mean like the way that non-white people in the USA still statistically are more likely to not be"

No, I mean, "We have no problem with Gays in Iran like you do in the West."

In the US, we are not perfect - but we largely acknowledge the problems, and are trying to work to resolve them. The US doesn't have to be perfect, in order for us to acknowledge that it is basically a good actor. Whereas Iran is a whole different story.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Do you really want to see the Ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad with Nukes? I would say that Iran's "reserved foreign policy" right now is a direct result of them not having nukes. As soon as they get Nukes, I expect there is a high probability that they become more belligerent and aggressive towards neighbors.

Comment Re:probably not (Score 2) 34

"The same status is not enjoyed by Iran, whom if the US had their way would be tracking roentgens in the colon of every persian on earth."

Ahh, the old "double standard/hypocrisy" argument. You know what, I've got absolutely no problem with that argument, because the United States and Iran are not the same thing.

The United States is a Republic where the people can vote and change government. No, it's not perfect, but it basically respects human rights, free speech, freedom of religion, equal protection under the law (yes, you can find abuses and scandals where the US hasn't perfectly upheld its ideals, but overall, it's been pretty good).

Iran is a religious and military dictatorship which routinely ignores elections, suppresses free speech, imprisons and kills dissenters, kidnaps foreign nationals near (but not within) their borders, mistreats minorities, etc.

I like that the police/military have different rules than criminals, and at an international level, I like that strong Republics and Democracies have nuclear weapons to defend themselves, and have no problem with having a double standard of not letting dictators and the like have nuclear weapons. Got no problem with that at all.

Comment Re:Wait... what?? (Score 1) 34

I'm not so sure that nuclear weapons lead to long, drawn out wars. We already have enough nukes to basically nuke every square inch of the planet. Do we need to have the ability to make more in a hurry, for some reason?

I mean, with airplanes, and bullets, you expect a lot of attrition - planes get shot down pretty easily, and need to be replaced constantly throughout the war, because each side is basically "picking at the edges" of the enemy's territory.

I wouldn't expect global nuclear war to last more than a couple hours (and that is just while we all watch the radar of the ICBM's crossing 4000 mile distances). . .

If nuclear war breaks out, the best you can do is what they used to teach kids in school - crawl under the desk, bend over, and kiss your ass goodbye.

Comment Re:This old tale again? (Score 1) 203

But it's all just trying to make IPv4 work, and in the end, it won't add up - there's 7 billion people on earth and 4 billion IPv4 addresses.

They are not wrong that those /16 won't (ultimately) make much of a difference.

Now what *would* make a difference is a 128-bit address space. . .

Numbers are free, why should people jump through so many hoops to try to save IPv4?

Comment If it's completely private, couldn't they release? (Score 1) 399

If it's a completely private network, couldn't they release the public block and use a private block (like 10.*)?

The point of *unique* addresses is to allow global routing. But if you never intend to do global routing of traffic to/from endpoints in the private network, well, isn't that what the private network blocks are for - non-globally unique, but locally unique, use?

Comment Re:How can it go "really wrong"? (Score 1) 214

Just because the government *did* order an evacuation doesn't mean that was the right decision. You could go back there *today*. The evacuation only needed to last about a month - long enough for the radioactive Iodine to decay. That happened a year and a half ago.

Make no mistake - the evacuation zone is about politics, no actual public health.

Comment How can it go "really wrong"? (Score 3, Interesting) 214

If anything, Fukushima has re-assured me. It kind of seems like it went "really wrong" - but nobody died, and according to the scientific evidence, no one *will* die from Fukushima radiation. What am I missing - how can it go "really wrong"?

It appears to me that the biggest threat to public health if something goes wrong at a nuclear plant, is people panicking and causing harm to themselves or others - self medicating on Potassium Iodide and overdosing themsevles or their children; getting into traffic accidents while trying to evacuate, etc.

Those are potentially real harms, but can be minimized by honest reporting by the media and sustained public education. Instead, the public is convinced that any release of radioactive isotopes from a nuclear plants is an end-of-the-world scenario, which it clearly is not.

Comment So what happens if. . . (Score 2) 333

So what happens if two particles or photos are entangled, and are seperated by enough distance that there is human-scale lag (say 1/2 second to one second), and both ends of the link attempt to transmit at about the same time?

Would that break the entanglement? Or would the information "pass each other" on the way, and each particle takes on the state that the other particle used to have - now they are still both entangled, but aren't in sync? Would a change to one without changing the other re-establish the synchronization? Would the changes oscillate back and forth in a sort of "standing wave"?

Comment Re:Quantum Network Enabled (Score 1) 333

You're thinking too small. Do a grep of the patent database and replace every instance of "Internet", "Online", "Wireless Communications", etc with "Quantum Teleportation".

Just, the time isn't right yet - patents have a shelf life. The trick is to file the patents just before the products hit the market. Timing is everything if you're going to troll.

Comment Leaving money on the table (Score 1) 274

If I were an EA Shareholder, I'd be looking at changing the board of directors - there is a market for single player only. offline playable games, and if you are completely ignoring that market, you are leaving money on the table.

Just ask Bethesda. Last I checked, Skyrim made in the neighborhood of a Billion dollars (exact figures don't seem to be available, but there were reports that they had made at least $650 Million in the first week of sales - and I don't think that included sales from Steam, which I don't think were ever released publically - so $1 Bn total seems a reasonable estimate).

That's just *one* game. Granted, probably the most successful single-player game so far, but still, if you factor in all the single player console and PC games, it's probably 2 to 3 Billion a year for the whole industry.

So, we have a corporate executive proud that he's ignoring a market. Way to go, EA! #winning

Comment Re:Why the Canaries of all places? (Score 1) 333

Physicist 1: I'm writing a grant for our quantum teleportation experiment. Where should we do it? We could go from MIT to Columbia Univ in NYC?

Physicist 2: Maybe we can convince the public that this research needs to be done somewhere isolated. . . and tropical. I know - let's write up the grant to include a budget to go to some islands.

Physicist 1: Puerto Rico? Dominican Republic?

Physicist 2: Too many tourists. . . I know - the Canaries!

Comment Why satellites? (Score 1) 333

The reason for using satellites is that many frequencies of electromagnetic radiation require line-of-sight for communication. Putting a satellite in space gives it line-of-sight to many points one the earth's surface which lack line-of-sight, otherwise I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that quantum teleportation does not have the same requirement of line of sight?

If it does not require line of sight, doesn't it completely obsolete satellites? Well, I suppose you might use quantum communications for the uplink, say from a newsroom or telecom center, but use EMR for a broadcast to satellite receivers. For a one-to-many transmission, that's still a good model, but for direct site-to-site communications, couldn't you use quantum communication directly (I hate the term quantum teleportation - if it's information, let's call it communication, not teleportation, less confusion).

This is a great step, but I think the next steps are to keep increasing the distance, so we can do tran-continental and trans-global communications directly with no satellites and no wires. How awesome would that be?

Slashdot Top Deals

Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.

Working...