T minus 12

Our new target departure date is September 7. The breathing room is kind of nice.

T minus 13

Less than two weeks remaining before we leave. Wow!

Today we need to find luggage, go grocery shopping, make pens, schedule a few dinners, find a hotel for my parent's visit this weekend, maybe go out for pizza with my classmates, potentially hear a talk on the past year of Supreme Court cases, clean the apartment, find a glucagon emergency kit, make a list of things to pack, and ... maybe eat breakfast.

Status Report

Oh yeah, I took the California Bar Exam two weeks ago. The process went very well. The results will be out in three and a half months, on November 21st.

DefCon's Network

The most actively hostile network in the world is set up each year at DefCon in Las Vegas. The level of hostility is summarized in this post on Slashdot very well.

T minus 15

We're moving to China in 15 days.

In the mean time, we need to pack clothes, fill a year's worth of prescriptions, find out how to buy insulin and pump supplies in China, put our cars in storage, get traveler's insurance, pack up our apartment, graduate from Law School, finish filling an order for pens, get TESL training, take one final session of marriage counseling, plan a graduation/going away party, spend time with my parents, meet with a seamstress about reconstructing our wedding dress (it got ruined by the dry cleaner), register to vote absentee, figure out what to do with our mail while we're gone, and a bunch of other miscellany.

The days are just packed.

A UK perspective on American Energy Conservation

From Slashdot.

Speculative Schemers, a.k.a. Patent Trolls

"The design of the patent laws is to regard those who make some substantial discovery or invention, which adds to our knowledge and make a step in advance in the useful arts. Such inventors are worthy of all favor. It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the courtry, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith."

Opinion of the Supreme Court of the United States
Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 at 200, 1883

Sunrise in Oklahoma City

This morning I tried out a few new photography techniques - specifically, adjusting the Color Saturation, A/V sensitivity (?), White Balance, and ... timing.

Quantum Computing

ZDNET Australia reported yesterday that

"Researchers from the University of Queensland have taken a significant step in the quest to build a quantum computer, creating a light-based quantum circuit capable of basic calculations and moving quantum computing closer to a becoming a reality."

(link to original article)

This big stuff. A "quantum computer" can factor numbers linearly. What does this mean? Consider the following Slashdot post, written by "swilver":

"What a lot of people fail to realise is that encryption can be made unbreakable even by brute force by simply choosing a large enough encryption key. What people also fail to realise is that 256 bit encryption doesn't take twice as long to crack as 128 bit encryption. It in fact takes 2^128 times as long to crack.

Let's for a second assume that 128 bit encryption is crackable by your own personal home computer in a period of 1 hour.

136 bit encryption would take 2^8 times as long (250 times as long)... so we use 250 computers, and crack it in 1 hour still.

144 bit encryption takes again 250 times as long, so instead we use 250 superpowerful server computers and crack it in 1 hour.

156 bit encryption takes another 250 times longer, so we use a top-secret government super computer the size of the Pentagon and still crack it in 1 hour.

164 bit encryption takes.. you guess it, 250 times longer to crack. All the governments in the world pool their top-secret super computers and crack your content in.. 1 hour.

172 bit encryption takes 250 times longer to crack. We use all the computers on the entire planet and manage to crack it in 1 hour.

180 bit encryption takes 250 times longer to crack. We use all those computers, but let them run 250 hours (10 days) instead.

188 bit encryption takes 250 times longer to crack. We let those computers run 6 years to crack your password.

192 bit encryption takes 250 times longer to crack... never mind, we're not THAT interested in your personal photo album.

( Link to original post)

Very well said. The linear addition of bits to a cipher causes an exponential increase in processing time - if your processing power is running on a traditional bit of computer hardware. If you're using a quantum- based computer, however, a linear increase in bits only results in a linear increase in processing time.

So if it takes you 1 hour to crack a 128 bit cipher with your quantum home PC, a doubling of the nuimber of bits would only double the time it takes to crack.

Big stuff, indeed.

Crunch Time!!!

I've noticed a rather alarming trend in my scholastic life. Crunch time (invariable related to writing assignments) leads to great epiphanies in visionary concepts. Unfortunately for me, the concepts are far afield from what I'm supposed to be studying.

This week crunch time has hit in a big way. My Senior Paper is many month behind schedule, and is going to be due very soon. Consequently, I'm experiencing amazing visions of how currently available technology has the potential to generate a massive paradigm shift.

In past semesters, I've grasped the concepts of automated (computer assisted) legal research, global news reporting that's customizable for your particular bias, and something vaguely internet related. This time around, though, it's a bit more disruptive:

Software Defined Radio

I've been reading bits and peices about SDR for a few years, but never really undrstood it - the radio spectrum is completely analog, and methods of tuning (that I could understand) require an analog adjustment to a resonance cycle. I didn't understand how you could replace the analog method for tuning to a particular frequency until I came across the GNU Radio Project - http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio.

A "conventional" radio tuner works by taking the electrical current induced in an antenna and selectively filtering out that particular frequency, and amplifying it. The amplified signal is then fed into a signal processor. For AM/FM radio, this converts the analog signal to sound, for TV it converts the analog signal to a CRT scanning signal, for HDTV it processes the digital signal as an MPEG stream.

An SDR does the same thing. Intead of selectively filtering out right frequency via an analog amplifier, it converts the entire spectrum to a digital stream with a (relatively) basic Analog-to-Digital converter, then separates out the desired analog frequency from the digital stream.

There's a couple of pretty heady implications with this. First of all, because the entire spectrum has already been digitized, multiple analog signals can be separated simultaneously with the same set of hardware (Just like TiVo!). Secondly (this is where it gets really cool), since the digital stream covers the entire spectrum, you could theoretically use one radio reciever to access any radio signal. With one device, you could recieve and transmit AM, FM, Shortwave, Ham, TV, HDTV, Satellite TV/Radio, Walkie Talkies, Cell phone, cordless phone, Emergency Services, Police/Fire bands, GPS, and wifi. And garage door openers, car remotes, and that wireless thermometer thingamabob.

With one unit, you could recieve and transmit on multiple channels. Simultaneously. In any portion of the spectrum. This is NCC 1701-D deflector dish type stuff, in real life.

I'm picturing a universal communications transceiver card that I could put in my laptop to get access 802.11a/b/g wireless networks, watch TV, place and recieve phone calls, and get GPS info. When a new wireless standard comes out (WiMAX?), I can already access it without needing any new hardware - all I need to do is get the frequency/format data (publically available) and plug it into the SDR, and I'm connected. Without even missing a commercial break.

Oh, did I mention that the whole shebang, start to finish, from the software source code to the hardware schematics to the PCB layouts, are available for free under an open-source license?

Aaaaaand.... back to the crunch.