Comment Re: All Ages (Score 0) 29
Have you tried getting it to challenge Econ 101 assumptions?
Comment Re: No thanks (Score 0) 180
From whom does the Fed borrow when it does QE?
Comment Re: Hallucinated out of his ass (Score 0) 89
Is that why Linux isn't on the desktop?
Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)
smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.
“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”
Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”
The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.
This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”
Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.
Comment Re: With xAI and Cursor (Score 0) 67
Do you think Musk read Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson?
AI Overview:
The AI in Red Mars: "Paul"Unlike standard science fiction tropes of sentient, rogue androids, the artificial intelligence in Red Mars is depicted with grounded, near-future realism.
The "Paul" System: The primary AI is a ubiquitous, advanced operating system named Paul, run on the colony's wrist-bound computers (vidphones) and lab networks. It is named after the physicist Wolfgang Pauli.
Functional Utility: Paul acts as a highly sophisticated, natural-language personal assistant and analytical engine. It handles complex data filtering, scientific calculations, drone piloting, and habitat system automation.
Comment Did gweihir sign it? (Score -1, Flamebait) 40
How much you wanna bet slashdot's own favorite commenter gweihir wrote the letter?
Comment Re: Title Correction: (Score 0) 161
Does advertising even work? How come they show me meat ads when I'm vegetarian? Why show me tire ads for weeks after I've bought tires? Is the real point just to annoy?
Submission + - Trump's "Made in the USA" Phone is just a reskinned HTC U24 Pro 1
necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA". Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping.
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
Comment Re: Just waiting (Score 1, Interesting) 102
There is a tendency, among both scientists and non-scientists, to assume that our current scientific theories are correct in some fundamental sense ⦠but the history of science suggests otherwise. Almost all of the theories that were at one time viewed as correct have been abandoned.
â" David Merritt, 2020
AI Overview:
David Merritt is an American astrophysicist and prominent scholar in the philosophy of science. He is a Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), having previously taught at Rutgers University.
Comment Re: Congrats to Mr. Musk (Score 0) 315
How come the same capitalism that lifted billions out of poverty made them not want to replace themselves?
Comment Re:NO, you are wrong (Score 1) 43
Well, yes
Comment NO, you are wrong (Score 4, Insightful) 43
It's a crime in the US to "shout fire in a movie theater". Guess Americans live in Soviet times too.
NO. It is a crime to FALSELY shout fire in a theater. Huge difference.
Comment Re:Ah yeah! (Score 0) 72
Did slashdot editors really think they could stop AI by throttling my posts to one per day here?
Comment Re:water is wet (Score -1) 135
So if bitcoin tumbles, sales go up?
Comment Re: That's nice (Score -1) 74
"Insurance companies don't print their own money either. They redistribute the costs of these payouts over their risk pool."
If you ran an insurance company, would you invest premiums to make more from financial returns? Do they turn the popular notion of redistribution of premiums into distribution of financial market profits?
By ignoring the concept of reinsurance, do you contribute to a misinformational myth (whiich benefits insurers because, poor me! I can only pay out what I get in premiums!) that insurance is zero sum when in reality stock market investments make it positive sum?
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