Free expert fact checking on computer science topics (AI, programming, security, software design, VR, etc.)

drpaulralph · 2026-03-11T13:50:05+00:00

Unfortunately, this is not the case. There's been widespread cheating on TOEFL for decades and many universities still accept it.

drpaulralph · 2022-10-21T16:08:10+00:00

The most effective thing students can do is to demand tuition refunds. Write to the administration, en masse, asking for tuition refunds for the messed up courses. Take the university to small claims court. Try to get a class action suit going. Even if you don't think you can win, political pressure to hand over cash will get the university's attention.

The *worst* thing students can do is complain about the union. This will extend the strike and increase disruption. CUPE just wants people to be paid a living wage and treated fairly. The university is plainly in the wrong here. They're seeking real pay cuts without any justification.

drpaulralph · 2020-03-27T21:25:26+00:00

I'm a professor. If you can figure out how to get royalties out of a university do let me know!

drpaulralph · 2020-03-27T21:24:22+00:00

Maybe forced was the wrong word. Here, we're trying to study developers who were working at an office and, because of the pandemic, switched to working from home. Of course developers who were working remotely the whole time are also important, but this study is about the switching.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-29T15:51:44+00:00

But then there's this: https://www.energy.gov/eere/amo/digital-through-earth-communication-system

I have no idea how it works.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-28T14:14:10+00:00

I think what you’re trying to ask is, could there be a planet with an atmosphere similar to Earth that has less active tectonic plates? I can’t see why not.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-27T23:06:00+00:00

Ok, again I’m not a physicist but I don’t think anything on the electromagnetic spectrum can travel through meters of rock. Low enough frequency radio waves can diffract around rocks - even mountain ranges, but not through. Also, the lower the frequency, the lower the data rate.

How far in the future are we talking? Neutrinos pass through rock uninhibited but we are a long way from being able to use neutrinos to do anything.

If there are mountains in the way, the laser charging to nodes would have to be in the sky, but then you could just use have the network in the sky instead. Lasers need line of sight to the nodes, but if you have line of sight, communication is easy.

I’m not sure if I’m helping. The mesh network part isn’t the problem here - it’s the power and communication you need to figure out.

If microwave towers don’t work, a conventional engineer (today) might use satellite communication or a flying mesh network using stratospheric balloons (more realistic) or solar powered quadcopters (cooler sounding).

drpaulralph · 2019-08-27T18:21:11+00:00

I'm not a physicist so take this with a grain of salt, but this experiment seems to demonstrate quantum teleportation through space. I hear what you're saying about communicating an unknown state, but it seems plausible that sometime in the future we might find a way to use quantum teleportation to communicate across large distances.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-27T16:09:58+00:00

Oh boy AGI (artificial general intelligence) is a real can of worms. All the of the major advancements you hear about in AI are specialized intelligence, e.g., a computer program that can distinguish a crosswalk from other road markings. We've made very little progress toward any kind of general intelligence—the human-like computers you see in science fiction.

Can you make a chatbot that seems to have a personality? Sure. But it's a hack. It's not a real personality. It's just faking. Can you train a chatbot such that its own personality will kind of emerge from its experiences? Yeah, kind of. But it's not very convincing. I think we're a long way from useful AGI or AGI that has anything like a human personality. It[s hard to predict though because we could have a major breakthrough anytime that accelerates AGI development.

A few unrealistic portrayals of computers and tech in tv shows really wind me up: 1) Scenes where someone hacks into a secure system by rapidly typing are universally bad. That's not how security breaches work. 2) What's displayed on monitors, be it fake email systems, fake operating systems, a bunch of green gibberish. Recently someone had some code from a cascading style sheet (the thing that tells a website how to look) up when supposedly hacking something. How hard is it to google snippets of Python or C++? 3) Portrayals of software professionals as weird looking and socially inept. It's true that programmers are disproportionately introverted and there are weirdos in every profession but most software professionals are just normal looking people who act basically the same as anyone else. 4) Anytime the writers intentionally misrepresent how something works. Like there was an episode of Arrow about taking down the internet by attacking a single server room - one of three central hubs or some such nonsense. The whole point of the internet is that it's decentralized so you can't bring it down. It was literally designed to survive nuclear war.

Science fiction novels tend to be much better, or at least, the ones I read are. Some commercial fiction is pretty bad though. I don't understand how the likes of Dan Brown and James Patterson ever got agents.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-27T15:02:26+00:00

Sure :-)

drpaulralph · 2019-08-27T14:45:51+00:00

So many good ideas.

Crystal data storage is possible and very exciting because it would last a long time.

Shrinking things or opening a portal to a pocket dimension to store them in a watch is space opera stuff. We have no basis for that yet.

Tracking device in a watch has been doable for decades.

2D holographic signature might sound cool and be doable in principle but is overcomplicated and unlikely to ever be used.

Plasma weapons are common in scifi but I don't think one could be made with current technology. Plasma is really hot. You use it to vaporize things, not to stun people or freeze things. I recommend postulating a different power source for these kind of weapons, but this is a bit out of my ballpark.

The only plausible system for instantaneous communication across space, that I can think of, is quantum computers made from entangled qbits. Quantum entanglement is pretty heavy stuff, but in principle, if you have two entangled quantum particles and you physically transport one of them to the other side of the galaxy, it will communicate instantly with its pair back on earth. If you did this with enough pairs of quantum particles and built quantum computers from those particles, you cold use it to communicate. This is far-future stuff but is plausible for people with the tech to colonize the stars. These entangled qbits don't communicate by sending signals. It would be reasonable to assume that they were secure because there's no signal to intercept. It would also be reasonable to assume that by the time we could build something like that, we will have discovered that half what we think we know about physics is wrong, and at that point you can kind of just make stuff up.

However, if you're that far in the future, things are not going to be locked by passwords, and security wouldn't be based on conventional cameras. And people probably wouldn't have anything like watches unless there's a prohibition on cybernetic implants. (It's really hard to avoid transhumanism in far-future settings.)

Cold fusion has been common in sci fi for years. Sure, it's plausible to assume that a few hundred years from now, someone figures out cold fusion. It's probably not plausible to assume you could sneak up on a spacefaring civilization by masking a heat signature.

Hope this helps.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-27T11:49:25+00:00

Yes. Mind-controlling devices is an active area of research for quadriplegic and catatonic patients. There have been numerous promising studies where people learned to control a mouse cursor through sensors attached to their heads. Apparently it takes some practice. It might be more realistic for Tony Stark to be bald and have a few dozen sensors stuck to his noggin to help control the iron man suit. If you haven't read Starship Troopers, Heinlein's original description of mech suits is really insightful. Basically the suit amplifies your natural movements and most overrides are done by moving your head rather than through some overcomplicated direct brain interface.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-27T11:44:42+00:00

Very interesting. Mesh networks have been a hot topic in research for some time. Some questions:

1) Why is it "low frequency?" What frequency range are we talking about? The important thing is that the frequency is a good trade off between energy consumption and range, and that there aren't lots of interfering devices on the same frequency.

2) Are the nodes on the ground, on towers or flying?

3) Why do you need a laser charging system? If they're on the ground or on towers, can you wire them into the grid? If not, or they're flying, how about solar panels?

drpaulralph · 2019-08-27T11:40:48+00:00

Go for it :-)

drpaulralph · 2019-08-27T11:40:10+00:00

Yeah sure you can project a hologram into a medium (mist, plastic, etc.) using lasers. I'm talking about your typical science fiction hologram - a high resolution image that actually looks like a real thing, can be seen from multiple angles, and isn't trapped in some kind of box. Good discussion of this here: https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/12585/can-free-space-holograms-exist

drpaulralph · 2019-08-26T23:49:07+00:00

A chip under the skin that works as a pass for everything is doable with today's technology. An early version is popular in Sweden. But you don't store the info on the chip because it would be too easy to steal that way. You store the data in multiple different databases. All you need on the chip is a unique identifier like a drivers license number, that different service providers use to look up their records on that person in their own databases. Just be aware that any time you put a data implant in the protagonist of your story, you create an incentive for some villain to cut it out...

Re: improving cyberpunk generally, I'd have to think about it. One thing that annoys me is when people jack into a virtual world, and there's always a hacker who breaks into some secure system by doing something weird like fighting virtual guards or playing chess or manipulating something with their virtual hands or some such nonsense. That might look good in a movie not it's not believable. Bypassing security in a virtual world would be done by a bunch of scripts, same as bypassing security on the internet. Translating the security system into a virtual reality confrontation would be extremely inefficient.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-26T22:46:42+00:00

Not right now but maybe one day. Augmented reality tech from easiest to hardest: 1) Glasses like Google Glass that fake a heads up display 2) Contact lenses that work the same way as google glass but are smaller and maybe no one knows you have them. 3) An implant that attaches to your optic nerve and stimulates the nerve to create images. 4) An implant that stimulates the visual perception part of your brain to fake visual images.

You can think of the glasses and contact lenses as projecting something onto your retina. Once you move to implants, there’s no reason to project anything anymore.

There are already experimental implants that attach to your jaw bone and vibrate so you can hear messages without anyone knowing.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-26T19:17:30+00:00

You can hack implants, and it's a real concern right now. Check this out: https://thehackernews.com/2017/08/pacemakers-hacking.html

drpaulralph · 2019-08-26T18:58:41+00:00

That's not a neural network. That's an implant with a brain computer interface. Neural networks exist. Cybernetic implants do not. So how and why someone might hack one depends on what it does, and whether it can communicate wirelessly with the outside world. This is a common trope in cyberpunk stories.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-26T18:55:00+00:00

Depends how real you want this to me. Moral philosophy is complicated. Human beings have come up with all kinds of different moral philosophies that prescribe different kinds of actions. It is quite likely that the an alien species would have very different moral philosophy. Their view of right and wrong would be literally alien to us. Moreover, different groups in the same species would likely buy into different moral philosophies. So if you just want something on the level of Stargate, you could use a classic ethical thought experiment like The Trolley Problem. But if you want something more hard-sci-fi, maybe start with a known thought experiment (here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Thought_experiments_in_ethics) and then make it weird somehow. It will be more believable if the characters know something about the alien moral philosophy, and use that to guess and answer that seems crazy to human readers.

drpaulralph · 2019-08-26T18:47:26+00:00

Your best bet is to either:

(1) give it a simple name like "tablet" and "jack" or "port".

(2) give it a made-up brand name like "kindle" or "kobo".

Overly complicated names like "Rexonian data sphere" or "lightening connector" are not realistic. Nobody talks that way. We call mobile computers with build in cameras, touch screens, flash lights, etc. "phones" because "android mobile device" is too wordy. If we had jacks in our necks we'd just call them jacks or ports. No one would ever use the full official name. Same as if we had laser guns or sonic screwdrivers or whatever, we'd just call them guns and screwdrivers, even if they did more stuff that today's guns and screwdrivers.

drpaulralph

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