Post your desktop!

[tgpo]

[pacmania_2001]

Sorry could only post my work desktop.

[SLK001]

Sorry could only post my work desktop.

This one is funny!

[tgpo]

Sorry could only post my work desktop.

And yet notice the Kazza Lite Shortcut.

[pacmania_2001]

And yet notice the Kazza Lite Shortcut

How else do you think we bust all those 13 year old punks? Nothing like some fake file planting. Right now I have 16 people downloading LOTR: Return of the King.TMD.Real!!!.DVD.avi

[mysticgohan17]

you evil, evil man .....cancels download( )


every one knows TMD movies are all fakes anyway.
edit: oops forgot this

[AND1]

I heard about the Carnivore program on Swordfish and saw it again on your desktop so I decided to see what's it about?

The Carnivore device provides the FBI with a "surgical" ability to intercept and collect the communications which are the subject of the lawful order while ignoring those communications which they are not authorized to intercept. This type of tool is necessary to meet the stringent requirements of the federal wiretapping statutes.

The Carnivore device works much like commercial "sniffers" and other network diagnostic tools used by ISPs every day, except that it provides the FBI with a unique ability to distinguish between communications which may be lawfully intercepted and those which may not. For example, if a court order provides for the lawful interception of one type of communication (e.g., e-mail), but excludes all other communications (e.g., online shopping) the Carnivore tool can be configured to intercept only those e-mails being transmitted either to or from the named subject.

[freak_in_cage_10k]

pacmania_2001- hehe, thats harsh man! Buy how come you are able to track/catch all these 13 yr old punks?

hehe

[mysticgohan17]

pacmania_2001- hehe, thats harsh man! Buy how come you are able to track/catch all these 13 yr old punks?

hehe

because they have enough cash to waste bandwidth serving fake files. and besides, who gets movies from kazaa. that's just juvenile.

[pacmania_2001]

Buy how come you are able to track/catch all these 13 yr old punks?

Nanoprobe Technology.

I heard about the Carnivore program on Swordfish and saw it again on your desktop

Was wondering how long it would take for someone to see that.

[tgpo]

But I thought your occupation was a porn star?

[pacmania_2001]

"Hi M'am, I'm from the FBI and I'm hear to clean ze pool"

[pacmania_2001]

But I thought your occupation was a porn star?

I thought the fact that I am Australian would have been more of a give away.

[Faustus]

My desktop = boring. I tend to run a clean ship when able.



hrm...my picture link no worky... odd...

[pacmania_2001]

hrm...my picture link no worky... odd...

The website hosting your image probably doesn't support hotlinking (direct link to the picture). If it is under 50kb just upload it using the 'Upload Image' feature when you go to reply to a post.

Other than that another option is to upload the image to a Geocities account then rename the file (say image.jpg to image.art) Has to be renamed to a .art file though for it too work with hotlinking.

[Faustus]

Likely they do support it, I bet i could make it work if I could get to my Cpanel, but my job has most ports shut down so I can't, oh well.

[hotwings]

Cluttered, like my life right now... . (good topic btw, I wouldn't want to post my mug on here due to my manly sexiness , but desktop is doable..)

[vitualis]

Here's a image of my desktop...



First person who tells me where the background image comes from gets a prize!

...actually, just bragging rights...

Regards.

[hotwings]

beats me, looks nice though, although subliminally I have an impulse to stop heartless masturbators from killing the kitties, hmm... I wonder why. We should have a contest for the first person to sport a netscape logo on their desktop. Man, did netscape die a horrible microsloth death or what?

[vitualis]

If you look closely, Mozilla is there!



I'm currently connected my laptop to the hospital WAN and unfortunately, the firewall only seems to work with IE... hence I'm using IE rather than my (preferred) browser Mozilla...

And the Outlook Express looking icon actually links to Mozilla Mail... One thing that the Mozilla team needs to do is to get some better looking icons!

Regards.

[Baldrick]

[hotwings]

Mozilla huh? I'll have to look into it. Hospital WAN? that's what I'm talkin' bout. I hope our hospital has wan up and running soon with feasible access points ... lucky sod. later..

edited to add: what's with you moderators and mozilla? And it seems like Powerdvd is winning in the "it came with my dvd drive" department .

[Baldrick]

and no, I did not read hotwings post before I posted.......but I'm not using netcrap...i'm just using it testing the site.

[vitualis]

WAN = wide-area network (rather than "wireless" if that was what you were thinking... if not, then ignore... )

I've just plugged my laptop to a spare ethernet jack...

I think we have one the largest hospital/area health service networks around... It was built around/for the electronic radiology service which has a centralised server. It allows every hospital from Coledale to Shoalhaven hospital in Nowra to view xrays on computer -- and that must be a distance of around ??150-200 km.

Regards.

[hotwings]

DING, DING, DING, show him what he's won Johnny... A lifetime of fixing code optimized for IE...

Haha, you would think they would just give netscape/crap away these days, I can't believe they are still in business?

Baldrick - nice puke brown background.. , j/k

[hotwings]

WAN = wide-area network (rather than "wireless" if that was what you were thinking... if not, then ignore... )

I've just plugged my laptop to a spare ethernet jack...

I think we have one the largest hospital/area health service networks around... It was built around/for the electronic radiology service which has a centralised server. It allows every hospital from Coledale to Shoalhaven hospital in Nowra to view xrays on computer -- and that must be a distance of around ??150-200 km.

Regards.

ahh, makes sense, I think I was thinking of wlan - is that the right abbreviation for wireless? Nyway I was wondering how that would work in a hospital setting anyway with all the restrictions on cell phones, pagers, and such, not to mention wireless security, thanks for clearing that up ...

[vitualis]

Haha, you would think they would just give netscape/crap away these days, I can't believe they are still in business?

Netscape IS free (I think)... and AOL bought it BTW.

IMHO, there is no reason to use Netscape 6 over Mozilla (since Netscape 6 is based on the Mozilla code anyway -- and a slightly older version at that) unless you particularly like the AOL branding...

Regards.

[rhegedus]

First person who tells me where the background image comes from gets a prize!

...actually, just bragging rights...

Regards.

Any chance of an answer and a dl link? My girlfriend would love it!

[vitualis]

First person who tells me where the background image comes from gets a prize!

...actually, just bragging rights...

Regards.

Any chance of an answer and a dl link? My girlfriend would love it!

I've put a jpeg of the image here: http://www.geocities.com/medinotes/Image1.jpg

Actually, the answer is decidedly nerdy... It is the cover image from New Scientist magazine, vol 173 issue 2333, 9/3/2002. The original article is as follows:

---------------------------------------

Cat-in-the-box [features]
09 Mar 02
From New Scientist magazine, vol 173 issue 2333, 09/03/2002, page 27

Are you fed up with absurd notions of quantum weirdness? Don't worry, you're in good company, says Ivan Semeniuk

THE Universe is full of things that are difficult to locate: car keys, umbrellas, matching socks. Some eventually turn up unaided, others have a way of resisting even the most determined search. But everything we lose track of in everyday life is united by one solid physical fact: wherever it is, it can only be in one place at a time.

Until you bring quantum mechanics into the picture, that is. Weird as it seems, your car keys could be hiding in your coat pocket and under a pile of newspapers at the same time, while not fully existing in either place. It may run counter to intuition, but that's what standard quantum theory says. And because the theory does such a good job of describing how the Universe's most fundamental building blocks behave, most physicists feel they have no choice but to go along with it.

"It's one of these things you learn when you're an undergraduate," says Oxford University's Roger Penrose. "Initially students will say 'What the hell's going on?'. Then they find that the lecturer seems to know what he's talking about and so, after a while, they get used to it."

But some people, he says, still worry about it-and he counts himself among them. Penrose accepts that electrons, atoms and other particles on that tiny scale can be in more than one place at a time; there's simply too much evidence to believe otherwise. But he won't accept that this means a bunch of keys behaves the same way.

This unwillingness to follow the party line has led Penrose into proposing some new physics that will, he hopes, make our Universe a saner place. Penrose's theory imposes a cutoff on quantum weirdness at a certain size, and he's even helped to devise an experiment to test the idea. If it works, it could pave the way for a unification of quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of relativity, something physicists are desperate to achieve. A more immediate payoff could be the resolution of a well-known paradox of quantum theory. Thanks to Penrose, SchrÖdinger's cat might finally get out of its box.

Erwin SchrÖdinger's famous feline, the innocent victim of a strange quantum thought experiment, has been alive and dead for nearly 70 years now. Its problems begin when it climbs into a box where a loaded gun is pointed at its head. A photon of light is then fired at a half-reflecting mirror called a beam splitter. If the photon passes through the mirror, it automatically triggers a light-sensing device, which fires the gun and shoots the cat dead. If, on the other hand, the mirror reflects the photon away, the cat lives on.

The trouble is, in the quantum world both possibilities occur simultaneously. Physicists refer to this as a "superposition of states". According to orthodox quantum theory, the superposition endures until someone looks into the box to see what has happened. The observation doesn't have to be direct. The photon might be seen to have arrived at one place or another, for example, allowing someone to infer the state of the cat. But whatever form it takes, this act of observation plays a critical role: it is the physical transmission of information during an observation that causes the superposition to collapse and seal the cat's fate. Physicists call this leakage of information "decoherence".

But what if there is no decoherence? What if the photon and the mirror and the gun and the cat remain completely isolated from the outside world? According to quantum mechanics, that can only mean that the cat is in a superposition of states. It is both alive and dead, and neither alive nor dead, and it remains in this peculiar condition indefinitely, until someone opens the box.

You may find all this hard to swallow-but then it's meant to be. SchrÖdinger only came up with it as a way of demonstrating that there must be something wrong with quantum theory. But instead of trying to pin down where the flaw might lie, physicists have developed a number of interpretations of quantum mechanics to explain how superpositions and their consequences might work.

The most popular amounts to little more than blind faith: an acceptance that this is just the way it is. Penrose dismisses this view. "It's a kind of defeatist attitude because then we don't ask questions about what's really there," he says. Another long-standing approach is the "many-worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the entire Universe splits in two at the instant a photon hits a half-reflecting mirror. In one universe the photon passes through and the cat dies; in the other the photon is reflected and the cat is reprieved.

Penrose balks at the idea that the Universe has to cleave in two every time a particle is observed to be in one place or another. "You're led to this absolutely enormous, horrendous superposition of all these alternatives," he says. It would mean a staggering array of multiple universes springing into being at every moment. Does it really take the creation of an entire universe to kill one cat?

Yet, whatever the explanation, it's an experimental fact that these superpositions do indeed occur-at least at the quantum scale. "There's no doubt in my mind that superpositions are real," says physicist Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna. "This is one of the essential properties of matter." And Zeilinger is equally convinced that they can exist-in principle, at least-right up to the scale of car keys. His research group has managed to fire a fullerene molecule, which contains sixty carbon atoms, through two separate apertures at once, demonstrating quantum superposition at a surprisingly large scale. Zeilinger is confident that as his experimental skills improve he'll be able to put even larger things-like bacteria-into superpositions. And if it can happen to bacteria, why should cats be any different?

But Penrose thinks Zeilinger is wrong. He reckons SchrÖdinger's cat is safe-and that what comes to its rescue is plain old gravity. "If you don't accept that the SchrÖdinger scenario holds at all levels, then there must be a stage at which it changes," says Penrose. "And the best place to expect that is when gravitational effects become important."

Einstein described what we call gravity as curves in space and time, created by matter and energy. The Earth's mass, for example, creates a bowl-like depression in space-time which forces the Moon to roll around us like a racing car on a banked track (see Graphic). On the quantum scale these effects are too tiny to be observed directly. The tiny bowl in space-time created by a single atom has no measurable effect on other atoms whizzing by, but the effect is there nonetheless. Even a massless photon can distort space-time a tiny bit thanks to the pure energy it carries.

Penrose suggests that whenever a particle is in a superposition of states, then space-time must also be in a superposition. "You have two separate distortions of space-time," he says. But the particle would have slightly different amounts of gravitational energy, with respect to the objects around it, in each of these two states. So the superposition introduces an uncertainty-a kind of cosmic ambiguity-in the energy of the whole system. "You can't make a consistent notion of what its energy is," Penrose says.

This, he says, creates an "uncertainty" in the energy. That's not a big problem in itself: Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is now a familiar and proven cornerstone of physics. And one of its consequences is that if you want to allow a large uncertainty in a system's energy, then that energy uncertainty can only exist for a very short time.

Which is exactly Penrose's point. He says the energy uncertainty between two superposed states means that all superpositions are inherently unstable and limited to a certain lifetime. The bigger the object in superposition, the more energy difference between the individual states that make up the superposition, and thus the bigger its energy uncertainty. And the bigger the uncertainty, the faster it decays into one state or the other.

Penrose estimates that for an object the size and mass of a proton, a superposition of states can last for millions of years. Atoms and molecules would not last as long in superposition, but still far too long for the collapse to be measured. So far this agrees with Zeilinger's experimental observations.

But long before an object contains enough atoms to span the thickness of a cat's whisker, its large gravitational energy prevents a superposition from lasting longer than a millionth of a second. And so gravity explains why, much as you'd sometimes like to, you've never found yourself in two states or places at once-and neither would SchrÖdinger's cat.

Penrose calls this process "objective state reduction", meaning that the superposition collapse happens on its own schedule whether we observe it or not. Such objectivity is anathema to traditional quantum physicists so, not surprisingly, the idea has earned some sceptical reactions. Zeilinger rejects it utterly. "I think there will not be a breakdown of quantum superposition anywhere," he says. "Not at the scale Roger predicts and not at other scales."

But Penrose is quick to point out that he hasn't just pulled his idea out of a hat. The Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once made a tentative suggestion that a theory uniting quantum mechanics and relativity might lead to an objective state reduction, and others have taken up and built on this idea. Penrose says he is simply continuing the work of this free-thinking minority.

And he has the support of some other leading theoretical physicists, including Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. "It rings true to me that quantum mechanics is an approximation to a more fundamental theory," he says. "And it rings true to me that this might have something to do with gravity." As yet, physicists can't say much more. As Penrose readily admits, his approach is not a fully developed mathematical theory, more a rough guess as to where and how quantum mechanics breaks down. "It just deals with general principles," he says. It doesn't provide an equation for how a superposition evolves into one or other of its possible states.

Penrose knows the surest way to gain acceptance for his idea is to confirm it with an experiment. To that end Penrose has enlisted the help of Dik Bouwmeester and William Marshall at Oxford's Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC). Bouwmeester heads the optics group at the centre, and together with Marshall he has begun to develop an apparatus that will reproduce the key elements of the SchrÖdinger thought experiment and look for signs of Penrose's objective state reduction in action.

Bouwmeester and Marshall plan to put a microscopic crystal, less than a micrometre across and containing about 10 15 atoms, into a superposition of being in two different places at once. Tiny though this crystal is, by quantum standards it is huge-well within the realm of the macroscopic world. Penrose estimates the crystal's mass will force any superposition to decay within 1/100th to 1/10th of a second. That's slow enough to measure the change, and fast enough to distinguish the result from standard quantum mechanics, which decrees the superposition should last indefinitely.

The experiment will begin with a laser firing a photon at a beam splitter (see Graphic), which sends the photon along two paths at once in classic quantum fashion. Along one path the photon heads towards a mirror, which reflects it back to the beam splitter. On the other path, the photon hits a crystal suspended on a carbon filament in such a way that it will recoil slightly when hit by the photon. The superposition of the two photon paths forces the crystal into its own superposition of two locations at once: one where it has recoiled and the other where it remained stationary because the photon took the other path.

After bouncing off the face of the crystal, the photon then heads towards a second mirror. This portion of the photon's flight is timed precisely so that the photon is reflected back to arrive at the crystal at the very moment this has returned to its original position. The crystal then reflects the photon back to the beam splitter, where it recombines with its parallel state as if they had never been apart.

"If quantum mechanics with all of its superpositions remains true, then it will always go back out the way it came," says Penrose. In this case, everything about the original photon is preserved. It passes through the beam splitter the way it came, and goes straight back into the laser. The photon detector placed in the alternate path from the beam splitter will detect nothing. If the detector does register nothing every time the experiment is run, it will confirm that each photon is indeed "aware" of both paths.

But the researchers will arrange the experiment so that the photon's flight through the apparatus takes more than one-tenth of a second. In this case, Penrose says the crystal's superposition should decay while the photon is still in the apparatus. That means the two possible paths will have reverted to one, and the photon's superposition will also have to decay. In this scenario, the photon comes to the beam splitter having been forced to choose one path or another. At the beam splitter it might be sent back into the laser, but half of the time it will be reflected another way and end up in the waiting detector.

As elegant as it looks on paper, the experiment contains a formidable array of technical challenges. Everything will have to be arranged to ensure that the two parallel states of the photon are undisturbed by the world outside the experiment. But there are many ways to upset things and bring about decoherence, such as thermal energy jiggling the atoms in the crystal. The key to the experiment will be minimising such thermal noise and then seeing if the results change when parameters such as the size of the crystal are varied slightly.

The challenge in designing the experiment is compounded by the fact that only an X-ray photon has enough punch to give the crystal the required kick, and X-rays are notoriously difficult to reflect. And the fact that the photon must be in flight for at least 1/10th of a second means the experiment has to take place over distances on a par with the diameter of the Earth. One solution to this problem will be to place the experiment in space, on two co-orbiting platforms. In deference to SchrÖdinger and his cat, Penrose has contrived to call this arrangement of his experiment the Free-orbit Experiment with Laser-Interferometry X-rays, or FELIX.

It is too early to know if the experiment will work with available technology, but no one doubts the possibility is worth investigating. "Anything that tests the foundations of quantum mechanics experimentally is an important thing to do and they should be encouraged to do it," says Smolin. Artur Ekert, head of the CQC, agrees that this kind of experiment should be performed, regardless of the arguments surrounding the idea. "It's likely quantum mechanics as we know it today is not the ultimate theory of quantum reality," he says. "Many physicists are satisfied with producing beautiful experiments that are just bound to confirm things. What Roger's trying to do is really push the limits. It's really exciting."

Bouwmeester is equally enthusiastic but, ironically, he thinks the experiment will ultimately prove Penrose wrong. "Personally, I think the effect will not be there," he says. "Quantum mechanics is so simple and beautiful-although bizarre to the human mind-I think that what we will learn is that we should accept it as it is."

But Penrose is confident he's onto something. It may or may not lead to a theory of quantum gravity, but he is convinced that this will expose the incompleteness of quantum theory as it stands today. SchrÖdinger's cat might finally escape its box.

But a stranger mystery remains. Why, asks Penrose, are so many of his fellow physicists, including his chief collaborator, so willing to sit back and accept the strange implications of quantum mechanics? "What puzzles me isn't the mystery of SchrÖdinger's cat, but the mystery of human beings."

Ivan Semeniuk
Ivan Semeniuk is a science journalist and producer with Discovery Channel Canada

From New Scientist magazine, vol 173 issue 2333, 09/03/2002, page 27

---------------------------------------

Regards.

[rhegedus]

Thanks for the picture and the truely mindbending read I think the sense it makes is directly proportional to the amount of alcohol consumed whilst reading it

Those of you familiar with Douglas Adams' 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' will be aware of a third possibilty regarding the cat's fate - when the box was opened, the cat was not in it! It had got wind of the experiment and decided to leg it before the lid of the box was sealed.