I thought the point of a quantum computer was the superposition with all of the other qbits, not the fact that it's just an atom. What I was trying to understand was whether the "state" (which property of the atoms are you going to interrogate, or entangle with the other atoms) still has the same freedom to vary given you've almost nailed the property "position" to classical certainty (i.e. close to 1).
So am I right in thinking the principle underlying this is to do things that reduce the probability the atom will be "kicked" someplace else? What confuses me here is if you're constraints are that strong in terms of uncertainty, surely you also have the same constraints (i.e. the system is almost "classical" if you're approaching a certainty of 1) in your qbits with respect to the usefulness of the quantum calculation you can perform? Did I miss something important here? (It wouldn't be the first time).
I'm guessing from this that your last experience of Windows was back in 1995. I've been running 7 since RC1 and I've never had a single problem with it. No blue-screen, no hardware incompatibilities, no spyware, malware, no lockups, nothing, NADA. You need to upgrade your diatribe.
Because I like Windows 7 (actually I love it), I had high hopes for mobile 7. I'm an iPhone 3GS owner by the way. The problem with a lot of MS products is that instead of re-developing something from scratch, they tend to take a whole bunch of stuff they developed 20 years ago and try to compile it in to some new product with a few interface changes. I had this experience with Win CE and it has a tendency to produce craptastic products that are neither fully compatible with the desktop (which is the intention), or fully usable on the target (which is obviously nice to have). It's harder to innovate if you're always trying to retain compatibility too. Indeed this is MS's problem in a nutshell: their big selling point is continuity, which plays well in the corporate world, but not so much in the world of consumer goods - where devices are chucked out every two years for the next latest and greatest.
I think there's an alternative line of reasoning: if you don't export these technologies to other countries, they will either get it from your competitors or develop it themselves. So your choice is not between whether they have the technology or whether they don't, it's between whether you control their access to the technology or whether you don't.
Our company used to buy a certain kind of component from the US to put into the products we make. Every single one needed an export licence and an import licence. That is an export licence from the US and an import licence from the UK. If something goes wrong with the component and it needs fixing, we need an export licence from the UK and an import licence to the US to return it for fixing or replacement. Again, that replacement needs another import/export licence. That's just for traffic between the UK and the US. If you're then going to export your product to a third country, you need another export licence and possibly another import licence for that country too. It's so bad we actually hire people just to track what's going on with all of the difference licences!
To cut a long story short, we switched supplier to a European company who make similar components. Now of course we need an import licence for the US if selling to the US, but in general apart from countries like Iran, we can freely export our product without the nightmare stack of licences and yes, it is a factor you talk about when giving sales presentations.
Remember, if the ice melts the conveyor stops, then the jet stream stops
Stop right there. I have visions of Prof Lindzen with his famous phrase, "on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference".
I agree. I look at my iPhone, well designed and with some nifty usability innovations, and then I look at the main application I'm supposed to use with it and I just can't see what Apple think they're trying to achieve. It needs to be completely re-written from the ground up. I imagine Apple can afford to stick a development team onto it, although whether they will or not really depends on whether the competition shapes up. At the moment of course, it doesn't.
Argument from your own inadequacy isn't really argument.
Indeed, that nobody really understands these things is self-evident and is, it seems to me, the very foundation of the argument. Most physicists I've encountered don't concern themselves with understanding; they concern themselves simply with adequately describing. Hawking is misguided in this regard, I believe. After all, it doesn't matter how general or all-encapsulating any given equation is, there will always be something left to explain.
I think what I'm getting at is that the mathematical shorthand we use to describe (model) the regularities of our experience is becoming increasingly complex and decreasingly represents anything we can even actually visualise. I think the divergence between our perception and the objective realities we uncover through experimentation is instructive in this respect. That is to say, knowing how the brain constructs subjective reality (Conscious Experience) is required before the essence of objective reality can be fully understood. Until then, the theories will become ever more complex, obscure and less likely to ever actually be able to describe anything real.
The second most complaint I have with String Theory is how ordinary people can possibly understand the mathematics. I can just about grasp Einstein, Tensors and so forth. Multidimensional manifold's, M-theory and the like leave me feeling intellectually inadequate. Is it all just some obscurantist joke, or is reality really that complicated?
The question isn't whether some warming has occurred, the question is whether that warming is outside of the range of natural variation, and whether the warming will be accelerated at some point in the future by positive feedback. There is evidence that the feedback must be negative (the first of it from intuition, the second from recent papers by people like Spencer). There is evidence that the current warming is not outside of the range of natural variation (I mentioned the Roman Optimum and the MWP previously). In the face of these doubts, the confidence intervals on graphs of those who promote catastrophe are somewhat meaningless.
In order for a body of knowledge to count as a scientific theory, it must be falsifiable. Wherever I write about AGW, nobody is prepared to propose a fact that would falsify AGW. This should be somewhat concerning for anyone who's interested in the integrity of the scientific method, as it implies a lack of rigour.
If you have some evidence that something else is causing most of the warming, please don't keep it a secret!
This is the God of the Gaps argument in scientific terms. Is there a satisfactory explanation for the medieval warm period, or the Roman Optimum? If not, does that mean it was AGW? It seems to me that for you any explanation, no-matter how implausible, is better than saying "we don't know".
So "natural variation", explaining as it does all climate fluctuations for the entire history of the planet, is not in your view remotely plausible? I find that view quite astounding.
The essence of the problem can be summed up by asking the question: do we choose our careers, or do they choose us? For example, I am a good developer [citation needed], but would I be a good manager? It seems to me it's necessary to transplant a completely new cognitive tool-set in order to thrive in one environment over the other. I am simply asking the question; I have no firm conclusions to promote one way or the other.
Good point, but I would say burn-out is kind-of similar to the experience of the man on the shirt button production line who's just made his 1000,000th button. It's more about the feeling of impotence with respect to raising yourself up, than it is about actually writing code. That is to say, in order to raise yourself up you need to change career. There's not much you can do as a producer of buttons otherwise. But this experience is not unique to developers. It's true pretty much across the board when you hit your late 30's or early 40's and your earning potential appears to have peaked or flat-lined. You no longer experience the vision of the light at the end of the tunnel as you did when you were an under-graduate or fresh out of college. For example, I earn around £40,000 per annum as a developer but lack the required knowledge to earn £100,000. That is even if I could convince someone I was worth £100,000, I wouldn't know where to go to meet him to explore the opportunity. I look at the job ads and they're all similar to my current employment. There seems to be no way up or out.
A superfluous invention. Why not just rely on Alcanivorax to clean up the mess? It's already there, it replicates itself in direct proportion to the amount of oil, it self-destructs when there's no oil left to clean up, is 100% bio-degradable and it costs nothing, doing the job in half the time.
I hate to skewer this research quite so comprehensively, but if I was about to die I would certainly want to have a little sit-down. Did they control for that?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah ok. Thanks for the clarification.
I thought the point of a quantum computer was the superposition with all of the other qbits, not the fact that it's just an atom. What I was trying to understand was whether the "state" (which property of the atoms are you going to interrogate, or entangle with the other atoms) still has the same freedom to vary given you've almost nailed the property "position" to classical certainty (i.e. close to 1).
So am I right in thinking the principle underlying this is to do things that reduce the probability the atom will be "kicked" someplace else? What confuses me here is if you're constraints are that strong in terms of uncertainty, surely you also have the same constraints (i.e. the system is almost "classical" if you're approaching a certainty of 1) in your qbits with respect to the usefulness of the quantum calculation you can perform? Did I miss something important here? (It wouldn't be the first time).
404. Did you put it on old hardware? I think that's the difference isn't it. Linux works on pretty much anything.
I'm guessing from this that your last experience of Windows was back in 1995. I've been running 7 since RC1 and I've never had a single problem with it. No blue-screen, no hardware incompatibilities, no spyware, malware, no lockups, nothing, NADA. You need to upgrade your diatribe.
I would hope you could switch it off with the bios and use a real video card. If not, then this board is pretty useless.
Because I like Windows 7 (actually I love it), I had high hopes for mobile 7. I'm an iPhone 3GS owner by the way. The problem with a lot of MS products is that instead of re-developing something from scratch, they tend to take a whole bunch of stuff they developed 20 years ago and try to compile it in to some new product with a few interface changes. I had this experience with Win CE and it has a tendency to produce craptastic products that are neither fully compatible with the desktop (which is the intention), or fully usable on the target (which is obviously nice to have). It's harder to innovate if you're always trying to retain compatibility too. Indeed this is MS's problem in a nutshell: their big selling point is continuity, which plays well in the corporate world, but not so much in the world of consumer goods - where devices are chucked out every two years for the next latest and greatest.
I think there's an alternative line of reasoning: if you don't export these technologies to other countries, they will either get it from your competitors or develop it themselves. So your choice is not between whether they have the technology or whether they don't, it's between whether you control their access to the technology or whether you don't.
Come to think of it, I haven't seen Peter for a while.....
Our company used to buy a certain kind of component from the US to put into the products we make. Every single one needed an export licence and an import licence. That is an export licence from the US and an import licence from the UK. If something goes wrong with the component and it needs fixing, we need an export licence from the UK and an import licence to the US to return it for fixing or replacement. Again, that replacement needs another import/export licence. That's just for traffic between the UK and the US. If you're then going to export your product to a third country, you need another export licence and possibly another import licence for that country too. It's so bad we actually hire people just to track what's going on with all of the difference licences!
To cut a long story short, we switched supplier to a European company who make similar components. Now of course we need an import licence for the US if selling to the US, but in general apart from countries like Iran, we can freely export our product without the nightmare stack of licences and yes, it is a factor you talk about when giving sales presentations.
Stop right there. I have visions of Prof Lindzen with his famous phrase, "on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference".
I agree. I look at my iPhone, well designed and with some nifty usability innovations, and then I look at the main application I'm supposed to use with it and I just can't see what Apple think they're trying to achieve. It needs to be completely re-written from the ground up. I imagine Apple can afford to stick a development team onto it, although whether they will or not really depends on whether the competition shapes up. At the moment of course, it doesn't.
Indeed, that nobody really understands these things is self-evident and is, it seems to me, the very foundation of the argument. Most physicists I've encountered don't concern themselves with understanding; they concern themselves simply with adequately describing. Hawking is misguided in this regard, I believe. After all, it doesn't matter how general or all-encapsulating any given equation is, there will always be something left to explain.
I think what I'm getting at is that the mathematical shorthand we use to describe (model) the regularities of our experience is becoming increasingly complex and decreasingly represents anything we can even actually visualise. I think the divergence between our perception and the objective realities we uncover through experimentation is instructive in this respect. That is to say, knowing how the brain constructs subjective reality (Conscious Experience) is required before the essence of objective reality can be fully understood. Until then, the theories will become ever more complex, obscure and less likely to ever actually be able to describe anything real.
Did that make sense? Hmmmmmmm.
The second most complaint I have with String Theory is how ordinary people can possibly understand the mathematics. I can just about grasp Einstein, Tensors and so forth. Multidimensional manifold's, M-theory and the like leave me feeling intellectually inadequate. Is it all just some obscurantist joke, or is reality really that complicated?
The question isn't whether some warming has occurred, the question is whether that warming is outside of the range of natural variation, and whether the warming will be accelerated at some point in the future by positive feedback. There is evidence that the feedback must be negative (the first of it from intuition, the second from recent papers by people like Spencer). There is evidence that the current warming is not outside of the range of natural variation (I mentioned the Roman Optimum and the MWP previously). In the face of these doubts, the confidence intervals on graphs of those who promote catastrophe are somewhat meaningless.
In order for a body of knowledge to count as a scientific theory, it must be falsifiable. Wherever I write about AGW, nobody is prepared to propose a fact that would falsify AGW. This should be somewhat concerning for anyone who's interested in the integrity of the scientific method, as it implies a lack of rigour.
This is the God of the Gaps argument in scientific terms. Is there a satisfactory explanation for the medieval warm period, or the Roman Optimum? If not, does that mean it was AGW? It seems to me that for you any explanation, no-matter how implausible, is better than saying "we don't know".
So "natural variation", explaining as it does all climate fluctuations for the entire history of the planet, is not in your view remotely plausible? I find that view quite astounding.
If you deny an alternate explanation for climate fluctuations in the 20th century is possible, what does that make you?
The essence of the problem can be summed up by asking the question: do we choose our careers, or do they choose us? For example, I am a good developer [citation needed], but would I be a good manager? It seems to me it's necessary to transplant a completely new cognitive tool-set in order to thrive in one environment over the other. I am simply asking the question; I have no firm conclusions to promote one way or the other.
Good point, but I would say burn-out is kind-of similar to the experience of the man on the shirt button production line who's just made his 1000,000th button. It's more about the feeling of impotence with respect to raising yourself up, than it is about actually writing code. That is to say, in order to raise yourself up you need to change career. There's not much you can do as a producer of buttons otherwise. But this experience is not unique to developers. It's true pretty much across the board when you hit your late 30's or early 40's and your earning potential appears to have peaked or flat-lined. You no longer experience the vision of the light at the end of the tunnel as you did when you were an under-graduate or fresh out of college. For example, I earn around £40,000 per annum as a developer but lack the required knowledge to earn £100,000. That is even if I could convince someone I was worth £100,000, I wouldn't know where to go to meet him to explore the opportunity. I look at the job ads and they're all similar to my current employment. There seems to be no way up or out.
Don't promote your hypothesis too widely. There are real-world observations in the Gulf of Mexico that falsify it.
A superfluous invention. Why not just rely on Alcanivorax to clean up the mess? It's already there, it replicates itself in direct proportion to the amount of oil, it self-destructs when there's no oil left to clean up, is 100% bio-degradable and it costs nothing, doing the job in half the time.
I hate to skewer this research quite so comprehensively, but if I was about to die I would certainly want to have a little sit-down. Did they control for that?
I think this is the key, isn't it? Whenever I use DRM it always feels like I'm actually renting and that I don't own the game.