BAD NEWS :( Government amendments reinforce Big Browser

[Paul Leyland]

> From: David Hansen [mailto:davidh@spidacom.co.uk]
..
> > On Thu, 8 Jun 2000 12:03:25 +0200, Adam Atkinson (ETL) wrote:
> > 
> > >> "telecommunication system" means any system (including the
> > >> apparatus comprised in it) which exists (whether wholly or partly
> > >> in the United Kingdom or elsewhere) for the purpose of facilitating
> > >> the transmission of communications by any means involving the use
> > >> of electrical or electro-magnetic energy.
> > >
> > >This would appear to include drums, church bells,
> >
> > Drums and church bells rely on sound waves, which are not
> > electro-magnetic. Classified ads are public already aren't they?
> 
> In order to operate a church bell one needs to pull the bell rope and 
> catch the sally (the fluffy bit) at the appropriate time. 
> This catching 
> involves looking at it as it flashes past and looking 
> involves electro-
> magnetic waves.
> 
> One could argue drums, but it is less convincing.

Very well, I'll argue it.  Of course, this is only the five minute argument.
If you want the full half hour you'll have to pay extra.

Sound waves, by definition, are pressure waves or, equivalently, density
waves in an elastic medium.  All elastic media of interest, and certainly
all those from which drums have been manufactured (AFAIK) are composed of
particles which interact with each other almost entirely by the
electromagnetic interaction, itself admirably described by quantum
electrodynamics.

Anyone who insists on bringing in the electroweak theory and/or GUTS to the
theoretical treatment of communication by drums are nit-picking pedants and
should not be taken seriously.  Quantum geometrodynamics is right out!


About the only terrestial communication mechanism I've ever seen seriously
proposed which is *not* electromagnetic uses pulsed neutrino beams.  The
transmitter would be an accelerator with a steerable beam which generates
neutrinos via a weak interaction with a target.  The beam is pointed at a
nuclear submarine buried safely a few hundred metres deep in an ocean
anywhere in the world.  The submarine then uses photomultipliers to pick up
the Cerenkov radiation emitted by the occasional proton in seawater which
undergoes an inelastic collision with an incoming neutrino.   Although the
accelerator and PMT each use electromagnetically operated apparatus, the
communication link uses only the weak interaction.  This proposal is a
really cool idea, but faces some dificult engineering challenges.

Gravity wave comms is well beyond current technology.

Paul