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Actually quantum computing is, by design, probabilistic. Every specifically quantum algorithm (even Shor's infamous factoring algorithm) gives incorrect results by design for the simple reason that it's really not possible to have quantum algorithms which succeed all the time (unless you forgeo their quantum properties). So long as the probability of a correct answer is strictly greater than 0.5, however, one only has to repeat the computation a constant number of times to get the probability of success arbitrarily close to 1.

Nitpick: though this is true for the most familiar quantum algorithms, i.e. the ones in BQP (Bounded-error Quantum Polynomial-time), there are also some quantum algorithms that give exact answers with 100% certainty, such as EQP (Exact Quantum Polynomial-time).

The device they came up with is more like a supercapacitor, but it still pretty good.
I believe that the real breakthrough in electrochemical energy storage technology will not be in greater energy density from new materials, but in cheaper alternatives from organic systems.
When their performance degrades too much we can safely toss them, make compost and start over.

A couple of examples:

http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/Y0NOS1cDbWD509Q0m5Reyw/Symposium2009Poster_Joaquin_Geng.pdf
http://www.nec.co.jp/techrep/en/r_and_d/a05/a05-no3/a262.pdf

Disclaimer: I work in battery research so I firmly believe that batteries, and not fuel cells, will save us. So don't even go there.

That, or you can create your own network by putting up one cell in a remote location like Montana (can't remember the exact place) and do everything else through roaming agreements. You don't think that Virgin Mobile owns their own network in the U.S., do you?

Waaaah! Waaah! Big bad guhv'nmint iz takin' our monieezzz! Dey shoodn't taxez mine, just the lib'rals dat i h8tez!

fix'd

And your true colors shine through. /bullshit or GTFO.

Except that individual neurons have tens of thousands of possible connections to other neurons, and continually morph and change those connections. That's impossible to do on a rigid piece of hardware.

I'm no expert and I've just been reading the second link's project site on Stanford's page but your assertion to continually morph and change those connections seems to be mitigated by this strategy:

Neurogrid simulates six billion synaptic connections by using local analog communication, another choice motivated by cortical studies. Cortical axons synapse profusely in a local area, course along for a while, then do it again. Thus, nearby neurons receive inputs from largely the same axons, as expected from the map-like organization of cortical areas. Local wires running between neighboring silicon neurons emulate these patches, invoking postsynaptic potentials within a programmable radius. Using a patch radius of 6 lets us increase the number of synaptic connections a hundredfold—from 600 million to six billion—without increasing digital communication.

If they connect most (if not all) possible connections that the morphing/changing synaptic channels can take, then they use a sort of addressing technique and RAM strategy to continually morph and change:

Instead of hardwiring the silicon neurons together, as Mead did in his silicon retina, we softwired them by assigning unique addresses. Every time a spike occurs, the chip outputs that neuron’s address. This address points to a memory location (RAM) that holds the synaptic target’s address, or to multiple memory locations if the neuron has multiple synaptic targets. When this address is fed back into the chip, a post-synaptic potential is triggered at the target. An extremely efficient technique, as the same post-synaptic circuit serves all the synapses that neuron receives—virtual synapses! Encoding, translating, and decoding an address happens fast enough to route several million spikes per second, allowing a million connections to be made among a thousand silicon neurons. These softwires may be rerouted simply by overwriting the RAM’s look-up table, making it possible to specify any desired synaptic connectivity.

Although their page is really hard for a lay person like myself to get through, it's very informative. Having read it, I'm considerably more optimistic about the future of biological tissues and nervous systems being translated to hardware. At least people are starting back at the simple components and adding new twists.

Except that individual neurons have tens of thousands of possible connections to other neurons, and continually morph and change those connections. That's impossible to do on a rigid piece of hardware.

I'm no expert and I've just been reading the second link's project site on Stanford's page but your assertion to continually morph and change those connections seems to be mitigated by this strategy:

Neurogrid simulates six billion synaptic connections by using local analog communication, another choice motivated by cortical studies. Cortical axons synapse profusely in a local area, course along for a while, then do it again. Thus, nearby neurons receive inputs from largely the same axons, as expected from the map-like organization of cortical areas. Local wires running between neighboring silicon neurons emulate these patches, invoking postsynaptic potentials within a programmable radius. Using a patch radius of 6 lets us increase the number of synaptic connections a hundredfold—from 600 million to six billion—without increasing digital communication.

If they connect most (if not all) possible connections that the morphing/changing synaptic channels can take, then they use a sort of addressing technique and RAM strategy to continually morph and change:

Instead of hardwiring the silicon neurons together, as Mead did in his silicon retina, we softwired them by assigning unique addresses. Every time a spike occurs, the chip outputs that neuron’s address. This address points to a memory location (RAM) that holds the synaptic target’s address, or to multiple memory locations if the neuron has multiple synaptic targets. When this address is fed back into the chip, a post-synaptic potential is triggered at the target. An extremely efficient technique, as the same post-synaptic circuit serves all the synapses that neuron receives—virtual synapses! Encoding, translating, and decoding an address happens fast enough to route several million spikes per second, allowing a million connections to be made among a thousand silicon neurons. These softwires may be rerouted simply by overwriting the RAM’s look-up table, making it possible to specify any desired synaptic connectivity.

Although their page is really hard for a lay person like myself to get through, it's very informative. Having read it, I'm considerably more optimistic about the future of biological tissues and nervous systems being translated to hardware. At least people are starting back at the simple components and adding new twists.

While electromagnetic implants will certainly appear first (they are already used for deep-brain stimulation to staunch epileptic attacks), I believe it will be the non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCI) that really will come into widespread use. One step on the way there is a new technique called "Optogenetics" http://www.stanford.edu/group/dlab/optogenetics/. Another is "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation which has already been used to both induce and suppress brain states. There are a variety of other techniques being investigated, e.g., near-infrared for monitoring oxygen uptake which also promise good resolution imaging of brain structure and activity. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMFRI) is the key tool being used now to map cerebral structure and function. The Koreans have had a 10-year initiative going in reverse-engineering the brain that is now showing very significant progress to the extent that universities such as Seoul National University, Hanyang, and KAIST have actually created multidisciplinary "Brain Engineering" departments. Last week I drove a toy slot car on a track with an external brain sensor ... you'll be able to buy it at Toys R US for Christmas this year. Believe it.

The PPE is almost exactly the same as a single core of the 360's chip. The SPUs are each about the same as well, but their power is limited by insanely small local memory and huge latencies to the main memory (to the point where they can't read it directly, they have to issue DMA transfers).

This gives the PS3's cell theoretically 2.3x the performance of the 360's cpu (1 PPE + 6 SPUs in the PS3 vs essentially 3 PPEs in the 360), but in practice less than 2x. When running games the OS reserves one SPE, and one is disabled to improve manufacturing yield, which is why I say 6 SPUs. I don't know if the 7th is available to use when the PS3 is running Linux, but I doubt it.

Folding's own PS3 FAQ says that "The GPU client is still the fastest", blowing your claim of "a single PS3 outputiing 10x what a GPU based algorythm is kicking out". In fact, the stats page shows GPUs contributing more TFLOPS worth of work units than PS3s, with fewer active clients, suggesting that GPUs are on average 3-4x as powerful as PS3s.

Lastly, I have been a PS3 and 360 developer for a few years now, so I think I might have some clue about their relative performance.

The PPE is almost exactly the same as a single core of the 360's chip. The SPUs are each about the same as well, but their power is limited by insanely small local memory and huge latencies to the main memory (to the point where they can't read it directly, they have to issue DMA transfers).

This gives the PS3's cell theoretically 2.3x the performance of the 360's cpu (1 PPE + 6 SPUs in the PS3 vs essentially 3 PPEs in the 360), but in practice less than 2x. When running games the OS reserves one SPE, and one is disabled to improve manufacturing yield, which is why I say 6 SPUs. I don't know if the 7th is available to use when the PS3 is running Linux, but I doubt it.

Folding's own PS3 FAQ says that "The GPU client is still the fastest", blowing your claim of "a single PS3 outputiing 10x what a GPU based algorythm is kicking out". In fact, the stats page shows GPUs contributing more TFLOPS worth of work units than PS3s, with fewer active clients, suggesting that GPUs are on average 3-4x as powerful as PS3s.

Lastly, I have been a PS3 and 360 developer for a few years now, so I think I might have some clue about their relative performance.

Way to troll, but I'll bite.

First, have a look at Folding @Home on the PS3 for some numbers on its computational abilities.

Now, have a quick glance at the exlusives, some of which are simply incredible games. If you want to believe the hype though, just ignore it and miss out.

Consider how little funding the Plasma Cosmologists have gotten, in comparison to the huge amount of money that has gone to astrophysicists who tell us that the universe is almost entirely invisible and virtually undetectable.

You mean except for the fact that dark matter was observed 8 years ago? Oh yeah and here too. Yeah other than these examples and others that can be shown that it's invisible and undetectable. *yawn*

This is like the medieval Catholic church funding mathematicians to produce increasingly elegant papers on epicycles while ignoring the research of heliocentrists. I, for one, would like to see the government out of science and Natural Philosophy returned to the realm of dilettantes and other assorted rabble who actually base their theories on observed data instead of mathematical conjecture.

Except for those people you berate against have their mathematical "conjecture" backed up by observed data.

Bah. Focusing on current uranium production ignores the large number of uranium mines which were closed in the past years due to cheaper uranium from decommissioned nuclear weapons being used, making the before mentioned mines uneconomic. Uranium got so cheap it put a damper into fuel reprocessing into plutonium and similar research. You need so little uranium to generate electricity (check the energy density of uranium compared to coal for e.g.) that even if the price increased several times it would have next to no impact on electricity prices. This is all old hat and well known.

The problem is that plutonium is a man-made material. We make it from uranium by bombarding it with high energy particles. So if you run out of uranium, you also run out of plutonium. This is of course dependant on us not discovering alchemy in the next 10 years. To be honest, that would be pretty awesome, if watching TV has taught me anything.

You're right, but also wrong. Plutonium is made from U238 (emphasis on 238). The nuclear fuel that we're using right now is U235. There is one hundred and fifty times more U238 in the ground than U235. So, by switching to plutonium, we expand the available supply of uranium by a factor of 150.

The whole debate about uranium fuel reserves is totally ludicrous. An utterly simple back of the envelope calculation demonstrates that the Earth contains sufficient uranium to supply fission power for billions of years. Uranium fuel will last literally longer than solar power (since the sun's remaining lifetime is only 5 billion years). Yet periodically we see attention whores showing up in Slashdot articles and crying that we will run out of uranium, a statement which is so obviously wrong that it is hard to explain by incompetence and bordering on the realm of malice.

Peak Oil was really just the beginning. If nuclear energy were to take off, we would be out of uranium before the first year was over.

From here:

Here are the basic facts.

In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of years. Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered including a very big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium contributes about 0.2 cents per kwh to the cost of electricity. (Electricity retails between 5 cents and 10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)

Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as the current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can be used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At that price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half a cent per gallon.

How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?

There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.

In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at $400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil $5.70, natural gas $3-4.)

How much uranium is there in seawater?

Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium, so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium. All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.

However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.

Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present electricity usage and twice the world's present total energy consumption. He argues that given the geological cycles of erosion, subduction and uplift, the supply would last for 5 billion years with a withdrawal rate of 6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains 6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.

He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource.

Here's a Japanese site discussing extracting uranium from seawater.

Comments:

Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his postulated 5 billion years.

He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium. There's less thorium in seawater than there is uranium.

He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet. He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.

And all programming is constructing proofs for whatever theorems our bosses throw at us.

That's my point of view.

Question: how can you tell GPL code is GPL code unless you know that it's GPL code? My point is that code reviews are cool, but they cannot catch things that the reviewers don't know to look for. And it's impossible for anyone to be familiar with every piece of GPL'd code out there, and it's impossible to build a database of such code. The best way to handle it was the way that they handled it. Someone found the error, told MS, and MS became compliant by releasing the code.

It's called MOSS. Free for educational use, though a company like Microsoft would need a site license, but it would probably pay for itself when you factor in the money paid to PR firms to compensate for blunders like this.

I mean, I don't think anyone seriously thinks MS intended to steal GPL code. But if you have subcontractors writing shitty code, and you're forced to acknowledge this publicly, that have a very real cost - it undermimes your image as a respectable software company.

I give you $150 and you give me an hour of labor. We've both benefited by the trade. If we are really acting freely, we've both benefited (or we wouldn't have engaged in the trade), so we are both wealthier than we were before.

I know that stuff is a standard economics axiom, but this is one of the canards that people trot out to defend the unthinking application of free-market policies: that whatever trades "free" people do are necessarily good and beneficial, because otherwise they would not have chosen to make those trades. That, of course, can be stretched to justify any outcome the market produces whatsoever. People drink toxic sludge? Well, we know that they chose it in order to maximize their utility, because, um, everything people choose maximizes their utility, because otherwise they wouldn't choose it.

Not to mention that this sort of thinking dismisses offhand the whole problem of weakness of will. The psychological drug addict who keeps doing drugs despite judging that it's destroying his life clearly is lying to himself about the latter. He is truly better off losing his job because of his crack addiction, because otherwise he wouldn't have chosen to buy crack.

I think there are at least two arguments that show that free will is not a trivial matter of definition as Landsburg apparently claims.

(1) Psychologists and neurologists have shown that people's explanations for their own actions can be wrong. E.g., you can have situations (with split-brain patients, for example) where they perform some voluntary action that they don't know the reasons for, and when you ask them why they did it, they give a made-up explanation that they themselves believe. To me, this suggests that it may be useful to consider free will as a psychological sensation similar to color or musical pitch, in which case it's a nontrivial phenomenon with a scientific explanation -- not a "yes/no" question that is a trivial matter of definition.

(2) Another argument is that the structure of Einstein's theory of general relativity is such that you have perfectly valid solutions to the field equations in which there are closed timelike curves (CTCs). A CTC means that you can have events A, B, and C, where A causes B, B causes C, and C causes A. We don't know if there are any realistic conditions in our universe under which they would exist (hence the chronology protection conjecture), but they're not logically or mathematically impossible. If a human being passes around such a CTC, you can get all kinds of paradoxes, e.g., older-me warns younger-me to avoid going around the CTC. Here is a nice summary of this kind of stuff: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-travel-phys/ . Basically you have a situation where there is a physics question (are CTCs possible, and if so, how would they work?), where one of the strongest arguments available is based on the assumption of free will (the feeling that older-me can *choose* freely to warn younger-me away from the CTC). Again, there is no clearcut, trivial answer; free will comes up as one aspect of a more general, unsolved problem of how causality works. Some physical calculations suggest that there is nothing paradoxical about CTCs; see the stuff about the billiard balls in the link above.

That and laughing at all the kiddies playing their games on consoles!

No really though, once you get spoiled to the high fidelity of a well built gaming PC, it's hard to go back to consoles.

Once you get used to a keyboard and mouse you can't go back to a console. I had trouble adapting. Not to mention the number of other things you can do with a high powered computer. I donate my spare cycles to Folding@Home.

I found a link:

Converting classic paintings to 3D geometry

They even converted a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey

Make3D from Stanford University.

Something was niggling at me while composing that last post. I must have imprinted on Bernie, our nine year old fart king impresario: he's always been my archetype of the human condition. I think I imprinted at too young an age, before our pre-pubescent stagecraft kicked into high gear.

Edge: A Bozo of a Baboon

Our frontal lobes are great accouterments, but really, in most of us they function with the consistency of a light bulb in Africa during a lightening storm. I've never once fallen for the suit and tie edition of human magnificence.

"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god -- the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!"

Somehow I don't think he's talking about his uncle Bernie. A mite unresolved?

Funny how something niggles, decide maybe Sapolsky has something to say on the matter, and stumble over this, never having seen it before. (Fascinating for those with a bug for writing, but a tough read due to a rough, stuttering, stammering transcription.)

From How I Write

"The trouble is, the thing that's the core here, is Paul doesn't want to grow up and be you, and you know that and it hurts you." This is like, I almost burst into tears. It was like I was having these therapy sessions. And he was right. Paul had betrayed me because he didn't want to grow up and be like me. And I like immediately had to call up Paul and, like, relate this to him, and this was the case, that in fact he had no desire to ever be, like, this narrow. And, it immediately cleared up this one sentence. And this was like the only I've ever had the agonizing over, the editor keeping me from becoming an alcoholic by telling me the unresolved issue. So like that one time, and I've been scared of this guy ever since and never have dealt with him again.

Elsewhere in the Edge article, he comments that after the Bronx, the baboons were a welcome change.

Personal responsibility is a pure fiction in a deterministic universe.

Many philosophers would disagree with you. It may be elucidative to look into the literature on compatibilism. It takes the position that you seem to just sweep under the rug, namely that normative question of moral responsibility is independent of the metaphysical question of determinism vs. free will. Check out P.F. Strawson's paper "Freedom and Resentment."

Also, there's been a lot of talk here about how a quantum mechanical universe isn't deterministic. I just want to go ahead and set the record straight: given a set of initial conditions (boundary conditions + initial wavefunction), the Schrodinger equation (or Dirac or any other variation you like) will evolve the wavefunction in time exactly the same way every time you use it. Quantum mechanics is completely deterministic with respect to the behavior of the wavefunction. Just because the square modulus of the wavefunction represents a probability density doesn't mean determinism doesn't hold. Determinism is a statement about causality, not predictability. Simply because we don't know exactly where a particle is at any given moment doesn't mean its influence isn't dictated by its exact position.

Oh c'mon... they never heard of photoshop? Either they don't have the document, or they figure it's not worth their time to make the watermark illegible.

Robust watermarks are difficult to get rid of. small example based on decade old research

Indeed, if you'd like a citation that agrees with you, http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/packets001954.shtml is a good place to start.

Do you think creationists are rally driven by something as sophisticated as mysticism:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mysticism/

OK, I know what you mean, but every time creationism is discussed it gives a bad name to people who have nothing to do with it. No religion should be blamed for every heresy spun off from it - you would not blame Aum Shinrikyo's whacko ideas on Buddhism, would you?

and not a pile on nonsensical garbage, the wang group page has a good description of the project.

Essentially they're using magnetic nanoparticles covered with antibodies to detect the binding of some tumor biomarkers. While the idea is interesting, there's no indication (yet) that its more sensitive than other biomarker assays, although it very well may be. Fluorescence techniques can get down to the tens of molecules level of sensitivity (which is insanely impressive). If they can get even lower, I'd be extremely impressed, but I can't find any published data on their immunoassays. Their comments about capturing and sorting out cancer cells is a bit odd. If you're looking to isolate whole cells based on recognizing protein biomarkers, I can't see any advantages of their tech over standard fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS), unless their assays are really more sensitive.

Really, the only thing of interest in this work is using the magnetic properties of their nanoparticles to detect binding. I would be really curious to see if this could supplant technologies like quartz crystal microbalances that look for changes in the vibrational modes of a crystal to detect surface binding events as being simpler and less prone to disruption by temperature fluctuations, doors opening or people walking by. The biomarker assay is interesting but by no means genuinely new technology- only the detection method is truly novel. Not bashing the work done here, the binding assay is really cool, the application looks like it was mostly thought of to get grant money.

lets not for get who is actually behind the MPAA - RIAA, these are the companies that need to be targeted and boycotted into changing their ways, purchase only 2nd hand media and do not purchase anything branded sony, why allow the fecktards to dictate Orwellian hardware DRM designed to take away rights not to stop piracy anymore.

Its not so simple... this is defiantly not just the *AAs that are behind the push to enforce Orwellian DRM, IP etc.. your also fighting the US Gov and associated traditional political power bases. See:The Political Economy of Intellectual Property For a little more on that, but the attitude was summed up by Alan Greenspan in his speech to congress back in 2004:

"Unlike physical property, which can be defended by armed enforcement, intellectual property can be stolen by an act 'as simple as broadcasting an idea without the permission of the originator.'" Alan Greenspan

You don't have to dig far to see that the US Gov considers IP to almost be a matter of National Security ("Safeguarding the Nation’s economic infrastructure") PTO is cognizant of its responsibility for providing effective management and stewardship of the Nation’s intellectual property resources by administering the laws related to patents and trademarks, and providing customers with the highest level of quality and services. In doing this, PTO emphasizes timeliness in processing applications and the quality of issued patents and registered trademarks. These high levels of quality and service can be provided only through enhancing our human resources, leveraging information technology, employing better processes and effectively managing resources

Going to have to boycott the two major political parties while your at it, it would seem... but there is no Pirate Party here and unlikely to ever be one.

The original creator will then shut them down (perhaps even instead of demanding royalties) and it seems like the public will dance around the flames of the demolished industry as we celebrate some kind of a victory for IP, all the while dying of cancer and killing one another over dwindling fossil fuels. Our cultural priorities seem truly and heinously misplaced whenever IP is involved.

It seems (to me at least) that a lot of the socially destructive behavior associated with Intellectual Property that your noting, has longer, deeper roots into human physique...

Envy - Resentment and Justice

Just add a dash of Entitlement and your all to see apparently rational people do very unhonorable things out of spite.

Also there was SLAC http://www.slac.stanford.edu/ and LEP http://hepwww.rl.ac.uk/public/bigbang/file9.html which were electron-positron colliders

If you distribute the work at all, published, etc. and do not put a RESTRICTION notice on that work, then you just entered it into the public domain and anyone can take it and do what they want with it.

No, that's not right. It's still protected by copyright; it's only in the public domain if it explicitly contains a declaration to that effect. The presence of a copyright notice may affect the damages you can claim, but it doesn't fundamentally change whether or not a work is copyright.

Since multi-taskers do poorly on both tasks, those who grow up thinking heavy multitasking is the way to go will wonder why the old farts seem so smart.

No. No, they won't. People who know how to dip into a rich world of simultaneous communication and then extract themselves from it for contemplation will make our generation seem extremely slow and addled. Sure, the average schmo will have a hard time because that kind of discipline is hard, but those who manage it well will be able to accomplish far more than we ever did.

The generation that grows up with heavily multitasking-oriented tools will make us seem rather sad.

Nope. Since multi-taskers do poorly on both tasks, those who grow up thinking heavy multitasking is the way to go will wonder why the old farts seem so smart.

Multitasking is great for creating the illusion that things are getting done, sure. But for real results, it seems one thing at a time is still the best way to go.

The Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) solves all 3 of these requirements by proving that the server and client both agree that the other one is in possession of a shared secret without ever revealing that secret.

Support in SSL/TLS was standardized as part of RFC 5054.

• Wikipedia entry
• White paper, source code

http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=63480b48-8819-4efd-8412-263f1a472f5a

One of the main benefits of copyright, is that it allows someone creating a product to spread cost of creation onto many consumers, rather than having to find one customer willing to pay e.g. $300 million upfront to see "Lord of the rings" as the first viewer.

Slave labor built the great pyramids in Giza. I'm not too sad that such projects are no longer common. Instead I am glad to have billions of dwellings that suit single (living) families, and glad that people are not forced to serve a centralized master with grand, but stupidly inefficient visions.

At any rate, Assurance Contracts have nothing to do with finding "one" customer. They have everything to do with finding a finite number of customers interested enough in banding together to fund your work however, while the rest of society is left (rightly) out of your transaction.

The good thing about your suggestion, is that everyone who supports it can do it today.

No, not precisely. Today the funds are dry because of the money average people pay to have themselves hogtied by Big Media. On top of that, I cannot produce independent content without the exponential expense of sufficiently obscuring my sources as to prevent the liability of third parties demanding a slice of all possible revenue.. or just squashing my production if that is the level of control they desire.

Feel free to make your 100% genuinely original magnum opus. When someone sues you claiming it's too similar to their work you have never heard of, you'll see where I am coming from. And don't go thinking you can just rely on public domain fables as a backbone for your work, as there no longer is such a thing.

Aside from the cost of connecting with your audience without using any trace of material they have ever actually heard of before, you have the expense of retaining legal counsel for the inevitable lawsuits as you grow.

No wonder a body cannot find sufficient grass-roots funding for projects anything like I am recommending. Well screw it then, we'll just buy the LOTR book. and Pay to watch the movie in theaters. Pay again to have it on DVD, oops forgot the extended edition, oops now we need it in Blu Ray. How much again for the ringtone?

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee104/shannonpaper.pdf

"The Transmitter: This operates on the message in some way and produces a signal suitable for transmission to the receiving point over the channel. In telephony, this operation consists of merely changing sound pressure into a proportional electrical current."

Won't change your stance that LP is inherently better than CD, but that is your problem. Just remember that almost[1] all mathematics is against that belief.

[1] High quality LP can have somewhat better frequency response.

Yes, but the point remains - you get an interference pattern, even though there was only ever one electron going through at a time.

You seem to have not followed the discussion. Read through the other comments. The Stanford Encyclopedia puts it pretty clearly here: "While each trajectory [ie, each particle] passes through but one of the slits, the wave passes through both; the interference profile that therefore develops in the wave generates a similar pattern in the trajectories guided by this wave." So whereas traditional quantum theory claims that the particle itself somehow passes through both slits, Bohmian mechanics states that the particle is riding a wave, and only ever passes through one or the other slits - depending on its initial conditions -, but once the particle and its wave hit the slit, the wave indeed passes through both slits and interferes with itself, and ultimately modifies the particle path accordingly. So the difference may seem trivial, but it is quite huge - one is possible, the other is not; one leads to contradictions, the other does not.

I mean, the current accepted philosophical basis of science is Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion, which is not a monotonic logic... yet we don't have anything like a universally accepted formalisation of nonmonotonic logic to deal with this kind of situation (where something believed 'true'at time A becomes 'false' at time B when new facts emerge). There's no standard way of dealing with this in logic - much foundational work was only *started* in the 1980s and the results are still very unclear. So the formal philosophical foundations of our current scientific paradigm are a massive pile of confusion. Yet we're charging ahead using science to make sweeping technological and social changes without properly thinking them through - without even the guarantee that we CAN think them through consistently. Shouldn't that worry us a lot more than it does?

What does "that's simply because the electrons follow wave trajectories" mean?

Well, in classical motion, trajectories are straight lines. Add in gravity, and the lines become curves. At the quantum level, though, that doesn't apply (or rather, isn't dominant), but neither does the notion that particles *become* waves. Instead, they follow wave trajectories, rather than straight lines. Check out this article in arXiv: Understanding Bohmian mechanics: A dialogue, good for newcomers asking these sorts of questions. This site has some good illustrations of the trajectories, which were copied from an illustration on the site I first linked you to. Here's a paper from Physics Letters A will a better illustration of the trajectories (page 209).

That's precisely what "collapsing the wave function" means mathematically. We don't have a handle on what it means physically.

That arXiv article covers exactly that. Check it out.

I cannot speak to the polarizing label experiments. I'd be interested in Prof. Norsen's take on it. I'll send him a question and see if he answers. He's been quick with responses before, so I'm hopeful.

In the case of the double-slit experiment, this makes much more sense: an electron goes through one or the other slit, depending on where it happens to be in its wave trajectory. The apparent interference pattern on the phosphor screen is simply the result of many electrons having their own initial wave trajectories. The pictures are identical, but one is conceivable (ie, conceptual), while the other is not.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here and I might be misinterpreting but it's explicitly not many electrons. You can turn down the beam current in the two slit experiment until you're talking about orders of magnitude less than one electron in the apparatus at any one time on average and you still get the diffraction pattern.

I've skimmed http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/ and it seems to say that you've got non-local hidden variables instead. I don't know why it's any more conceptually obvious that a "variable" should be smeared out than an "electron" should be smeared out. I'll just define the electron as my variable and we're talking about the same thing (no, I still don't know what it _means_, I can just churn the numbers and get some results that agree with experiment)

Tim.

It's wrong to think of the electron as a particle when it's "orbiting" in an atom.

It's only wrong in the sense that it doesn't follow a traditional trajectory. As with the double-slit experiment, if one conceives of it following a wave trajectory, the results are the same. So you've got a physical particle the entire time, but it follows the path of a wave. In the case of the double-slit experiment, this makes much more sense: an electron goes through one or the other slit, depending on where it happens to be in its wave trajectory. The apparent interference pattern on the phosphor screen is simply the result of many electrons having their own initial wave trajectories. The pictures are identical, but one is conceivable (ie, conceptual), while the other is not.

The probability distribution is real

It is only "real" in the sense that when we make many observations, they fit that distribution. What's actually real are the electrons themselves. The rest is our analysis of their motion. To say that a probability distribution or probability density is a real thing is to assert that electrons and the universe in general were made with observers in mind. After all, a probability in this context is the chance of an observer finding an object in a given location.

What I have been hinting at this whole time is the deBroglie-Bohm alternative (aka "Bohmian mechanics") to the traditional QM interpretation, which was furthered by JS Bell. This professor has some good intro material online and in arXiv on this subject.

1. Those are reserves, not resources. (Look up the difference sometime).
2. Breeder reactors extend this 20-fold.
3. Thorium extends this further 5 times so that now we're looking at 5000 years of *reserves* (e.g. the amount that can be economically mined at present day price)
4. There are billions of tons of uranium in seawater.
5. Finally, advances in nuclear fission based power generation technology are a prerequisite for nuclear fusion.

Some more information:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html

Why stop-gap? When using breeder reactors, the uranium in seawater will last for about as long as the Sun will shine.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html

There are a lot of things you might want out of a game, of which immersion is only one. You might also want engagement, fun, thought-provokingness (okay, maybe less from an FPS), and lots of other qualities. There even some research showing that perfect immersion might harm some of these other properties, and may not be the sweet spot--- playing games on some perfectly immersive, like the Star Trek Holodeck, might not actually be what a lot of people want. I know I personally enjoy some mediation between myself and the virtual world; I like to feel that I'm playing a game, not actually in the world. But then i like turn-based and 2d games, too.

"Advanced AI doesn't require a flying car."

No. But it might be even less practical.

They may hold a small handful of valid patents - like, keyboard and mouse, maybe?

WTF are you talking about? Engelbart gave Xerox PARC their start.
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/Archive/patent/Mouse.html

Stop passing judgment about the patents companies may or may not validly hold, and focus your rage productively on the USPTO. A 200 year old organization that still includes the rule: "If the inventor is insane, the application for patent may be made by a guardian."
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=uspto+overhaul

Nobody uses the PS3 for supercomputing these days. The ugly secret of the PS3 is that its 'extreme performance' was mostly marketing.

Folding@Home maintains a popular PS3 client that is currently used by 31,933 PS3s. The PS3s provide about 26% of the total x86 equivalent TFLOPS available to F@H, although PS3s represent just 9% of the total F@H CPU population.

Let me emphasize that: thirty one thousand, nine hundred thirty three PS3s actively contribute to Folding@Home. That's a long way from zero, my friend.

That guy is a relic of another age, and certainly not a coder; he's purely an academic in theoretical computer science.
He's good at making algorithms, but certainly not at coding.

You're ignorant. Have you ever used TeX or METAFONT? Knuth wrote them. The CWEB compiler? Knuth again. How about the MMIX simulator and assembler for MMIX architecture that Knuth designed to go along with TAOCP? Yep, Knuth. Want some more? See:

http://www-cs-staff.stanford.edu/~uno/programs.html

Yeah, the term dates back at least to the 1990s. The classic survey paper (over 1000 citations!) on the subject is "Ensemble Methods in Machine Learning" [pdf] by Tom Dietterich (2000), for those who want to glance through a survey. Though be warned that some of its specific conclusions are now dated--- e.g. there's been a *lot* written in both statistics and machine learning since then on what boosting "really" is and why it works.

Dietterich presents the more machine-learning view of it, focused on algorithms, combination of predictions, iterative refinement, etc. The best survey from a statistical approach is probably Ch. 16 of this book by three Stanford profs, which you can probably read some of on Google Books.

Yeah, the term dates back at least to the 1990s. The classic survey paper (over 1000 citations!) on the subject is "Ensemble Methods in Machine Learning" [pdf] by Tom Dietterich (2000), for those who want to glance through a survey. Though be warned that some of its specific conclusions are now dated--- e.g. there's been a *lot* written in both statistics and machine learning since then on what boosting "really" is and why it works.

Dietterich presents the more machine-learning view of it, focused on algorithms, combination of predictions, iterative refinement, etc. The best survey from a statistical approach is probably Ch. 16 of this book by three Stanford profs, which you can probably read some of on Google Books.