Despite its undoubted success in the last two decades, requirements engineering needs a better alignment between its research focus and its grounding in practical needs as these needs have changed significantly. We identify and explore changes in the environment, targets, and the process of requirements engineering (RE) that influence the nature of fundamental RE questions. Based on these explo...

Saul Kripke's lecture " Identity and Necessity " [1971] begins with a short discussion of a formal derivation of a law of necessity of identity. The derivation has become rather well known, but perhaps not so well understood. The present commentary attempts to improve understanding of it by enlarging on four remarks of Kripke's: 1 (A) This is an argument which has been stated many times in rece...

Largely because of an attempt at conciseness, but also be cause of the compactness of KeyKOS and the mutual re liance of the abstractions from which it is developed, certain words and phrases appear, of necessity, earlier in this publi cation than the principle discussions explaining them. The information in this publication is ordered with the intent that a reader will need to assume as lit...

The overwhelming majority of primary lung malignancies are secondary to smoke inhalation and occur in the older adult population in the presence of symptoms that are usually suspicious for an underlying malignancy. A chest radiograph is the initial imaging modality of choice to diagnose a lung cancer. However, a small percentage of lung cancer occurs despite a lack of smoking history whatsoever...

Necessity abounds. There are the necessary truths of logic, mathematics and metaphysics, the necessary connections among events in the natural world, the necessary or unconditional principles of ethics, and many other forms of necessary truth or connection. But how much diversity is there to this abundance? Are all necessary truths and connections reducible to a single common form of necessity?...

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have grown to such a massive scale that performing an efficient search in the network is non-trivial. Systems such as Gnutella [1] were initially plagued with scalability problems as the number of users grew into the tens of thousands. As the number of users has now climbed into the millions, system designers have resorted to the use of supernodes to address scalabil...

Quantum discord is the minimal bipartite resource which is needed for a secure quantum key distribution, being a cryptographic primitive equivalent to non-orthogonality. Its role becomes crucial in device-dependent quantum cryptography, where the presence of preparation and detection noise (inaccessible to all parties) may be so strong to prevent the distribution and distillation of entanglemen...