Outrage at what? I'm not American, and I've no desire to ever go there, but I cannot recall any time when things were any different there. The government spies on its citizens and persecutes them with little or no good reason. Politicians abuse their power for personal gain. Decisions are made based on hatred and fear. Laws are ignored when they are inconvenient to the powerful. This was true last week and it's still true today, this "executive order" hasn't changed anything.
It's hardly the only country in the world like this. The only strange thing about the US is that many of the people there don't seem to realise it, because it rarely happens on a large scale - but it does happen, all the time.
Also like most of the other similar countries, there is little interest in stopping it, and a kind of perverse pride in the misguided belief that it doesn't happen. Everybody likes to talk about how they believe in some code of ethics, but whenever it comes to an important decision, they start talking about the need to compromise instead.
That said, I dont think I've even heard of any end-user of a product, ever, being successfully sued for any kind of patent infringement.
Probably because there's no law that would allow it. The entire concept of patent lawsuits against end-users exists only in the press (and if you were to dig into the origin, it's probably somewhere in Redmond). The patent system is an abomination, but it isn't currently broken in that particular way.
Because someone couldn't make open source work for them?
That is not what has happened here. There is not even a suggestion that they couldn't make it work for them. Instead, there is a bunch of handwaving about not being able to tell what openoffice will cost in the future (you can't tell what MS Office will cost in the future, because they change the prices all the time) and some outright lies about Microsoft providing more information about future plans (what is the next version of MS Office going to involve? I doubt even MS knows; we sure don't).
So there's pretty much nothing that resembles a claim that they couldn't make it work. It sounds rather more like they didn't want to make it work, combined with the old specious nonsense about openoffice requiring training because it's a bit different, when they don't retrain the staff for each new version of MS Office (which is always a lot different).
Why, after all these years Linux has existed, do we have to seek help from Microsoft with its fonts in order to have a desktop that is a pleasure to look at?
Basically because the people who are responsible for the current 'popular' font libraries are determined to emulate Windows. We don't need to do things this way, but they've made it very difficult to do things any other way.
Anything else would effectively be a ban on the creation of new music - there are extremely few places where genuinely new melodies are being created, and most of those are experimenting with bizarre tunings or similar things. The number of possible pleasant-sounding melody themes in the 12-note scale is not so large that we're still capable of finding large numbers of new ones. Most new songs just put existing melodies together in new ways. SCOTUS declined to ban the creation of new music, so there is no such thing as a copyright on a melody, only on the complete song.
Nonetheless, I find his device bizarrely fascinating specifically because I don't see his particular cheat just yet.
We don't see anything of his just yet. This guy's made a lot of noise about how many people have been testing it but nobody seems to know anything about it. We don't even know if it really exists.
On the off-chance that it does exist: from the pseudo-scientific babble that he's been putting out, I'm betting that he's reinvented the magnet engine. People have been mistaking that for perpetual motion for years (it actually turns out to be running on fixed magnets, which become gradually demagnetised by the process, but so slowly that you don't notice in a small lab demonstration that only runs for a few minutes). Magnets are like batteries, just not particularly efficient ones. Magnet-powered engines are sneaky things - all the math looks like you're getting energy for free, because nobody ever remembers to incorporate the energy of the magnet itself into the equation (it's not in any high-school textbooks).
It would be very unlikely that a state (particularly one as large as Massachusetts) would ever completely refuse to accept documents in a format as soon-to-be-common (like it or not) as OOXML.
Massachusetts has never even suggested that they would refuse to accept any Office documents. This is solely about what they are going to run on their own computers, with a presumption that government documents must be archived for extended periods of time and that they would like to do this in digital form.
They aren't in the humanity protecting business; they aren't some sort of superhero company.
And with the words "it's not our problem", the dissenters were shot, the unwanted were burned in their homes, and the world descended into war, again.
The only thing required for all this to happen is for all the people with an opportunity to stop it to do nothing. Nobody is in the business of "protecting humanity" and there aren't any superhero companies, so if those are the only ones who do anything about it, we're all dead.
The United States has an even better medical system...as long as you can pay for it. And your changes of being able to pay for it in the United States are better than your chances of being one of the elite in Cuba.
Amusingly enough, that's not entirely true. One of Moore's major points was that in the US, even if you have health insurance, they still won't pay for anything if they can find any excuse not to - and they put a lot of effort into finding excuses not to.
You know all those pages and pages of terms and conditions that came with your policy, that you didn't really study carefully? As soon as you want any money, they're going to go over every line with a fine-tooth comb, and if you forgot to dot an 'i' or cross a 't', they won't pay.
The only way to get reliable access to the medical system in the US is if you are so wealthy that you can pay your own medical bills, without relying on an insurance company. That's something in the region of the top 1% of the population. The rest are screwed (this means YOU).
There ARE international laws regarding the broadcasting of TV transmissions.
The irony here is that the BBC's broadcast TV transmissions are the ones without DRM (which you claim is subject to "international laws" and so must have DRM), while this proposal for internet tomfoolery is the one with DRM. It doesn't sound like you have any real point to make.
Are you perhaps a marketing shill? I know they do post here a lot.
So they want to control where it goes so that they can charge for it if they feel it necessary.
The BBC is absolutely and entirely prohibited by charter from charging Britons for access to TV programming. They are also not allowed to spend significant amounts of money on developing products for non-British markets - everything they sell in other countries is just spillover from things they produced for the UK - so you cannot possibly argue that iPlayer is designed for foreign consumers (that's illegal for the BBC to do, they exist only to service the UK and must direct all their money towards that goal). Crippling iPlayer from an intent to charge for its services would definitely not be allowed (which is why you haven't seen the BBC making that argument).
I would suggest that the BBC does have a moral obligation to make profit from its sales of programs overseas although I will agree that it is open to some flexibility of interpretation.
That is absolutely not the intended interpretation. The sections you quote are merely (a) expressing a requirement for the BBC not to profligately waste money like a government bureaucracy, and (b) permitting the BBC's management to carry out normal operations (which have to be carefully enumerated, because the BBC's charter is not a typical "do whatever you want" like random private companies would get).
The BBC is not obliged to make any kind of profit, and they're not allowed to retain any kind of profit (nobody gets rich off the BBC). This has been quite firmly established in the past.
The BBC (or any other broadcaster for that matter) has to comply with its own licence regarding transmissions and intended audience. Although I think that DRM is despicable, they have to use it or something similar to comply with international law.
The bulk of the BBC's content is produced and fully owned by the BBC. They are under no such obligations - this stuff isn't licensed, it's ours. Most of it doesn't even pay "repeat royalties" to the people in front of the camera when it's screened again. The BBC has miles upon miles of shelving in warehouses containing all this content which they are able to deploy in any manner they like.
There are no "international laws" compelling the use of DRM. This is pure corruption.
because they run Windows for the easy installation
I'm sorry, are you using the same Windows as the rest of us? I've spent a lot of time installing all versions of Windows professionally, and while there are many adjectives I might describe the process with, "easy" is most definitely not one of them. The endless hunt for drivers that work, the repeated cycles of patching and rebooting, the subtle minimally-documented changes in the configuration mechanisms with every revision... it's probably the single most complicated and awkward process that has to be undertaken on a regular basis in the life of a sysadmin.
People don't run Windows for the easy installation, they run it because it came preinstalled so they never had to suffer its awful installation process. If every box was shipped bare and every user had to install their own operating system, Windows would be almost unheard of - it's that bad, compared to the competition.
Don't worry, someone will be able to hack a player for Linux/Mac faster than BBC's official one.
Why would anybody even bother? There is already a fully-functional, DRM-free system for distributing the BBC's content, in glorious high-resolution MPEG-2 (of much better quality than the iPlayer proposals), suitable for recording and permanent storage: the British digital terrestrial television broadcasting network that is the reason for the BBC's existence.
Why would anybody want to use this iPlayer fiasco when a far superior alternative already exists? That's the real problem here: they're wasting money on building something that makes no sense at all. This system will be inferior in every way to any of the off-the-shelf PVRs. The only possible advantage of a system like this would be on-demand access to media older than can be readily accessed by a PVR that records everything on every BBC channel in a circular buffer - in other words, a system which allows you access to content more than about a month old (at current disk sizes). And that is precisely what their DRM system is excluding, defeating the entire point.
Both ID and evolution are theories, or they wouldn't have the words "The theory of" before them.
Can I interest you in The Theory Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster? That has the words "The theory of" before it, too.
There is a specific definition of "theory" in the context of science. It is, approximately, a set of predictions about how the world will behave in certain circumstances (a "hypothesis"), combined with an explanation of why those predictions are expected to hold. Evolution is a theory under this definition. ID is not (it makes no predictions and doesn't explain why anything specific should happen).
Then there's just people throwing words around like "theory" or "terrorist" or "purple" without really caring whether they happen to be applicable under any common definition. That's what happened when you decided to label ID as a theory. Calling it a theory does not magically cause it to start making predictions and giving explanations - and it is the predictions and explanations that are important to science, not the label.
it was my understanding that there are 32 quantum states of electrons
That is almost, but not quite, entirely unrelated to quantum computing (it's got something to do with quantum physics, that's about where the relationship ends - I think it's about the chemistry of atoms). I don't believe it's true except under specific circumstances, anyway.
So, if we now have a quantum NOT gate, doesn't that mean there are 32 possible states of the NOT gate?
Quantum computers operate on qubits, which take on any state along a continuous probability line between 0 and 1 - you can think of it as a floating point number with an arbitrary degree of precision. As such, there are as many possible states as there are real numbers; this quantity is both infinite and uncountable. The actual math operates on the complex plane, but for the purposes of considering the number of possible states, it's equivalent to this description using the real numbers (if I've remembered my transfinite theory correctly - it's been a few years - but it's definitely infinite and uncountable).
Actual quantum computers are likely to have fixed finite limits on their precision, but we're not really far enough along to be sure how that will work out yet. There are a number of competing theories on the subject.
For those wondering why this is important, the first true electronic gates were invented in the early 1920's. This predates point-contact transistors by about 20 years, invented in 1947. 60 years later, here we are with transistor computing in every aspect of our lives.
However, it is important to realise that the theory of computation had been in development since the early 1800s (and the logic underlying that had been around for centuries); by the time the first electronic devices were created, we already had a good understanding of what they could be used for, because we had been doing exactly the same things by hand for over 50 years at that point (the word "computer" originally meant a person who performed such computations, and an "electronic computer" was just a device to replicate the task that person was doing).
We can't do quantum computations by hand, so we have no real experience with the theory, and the underlying statistical methods are relatively recent developments: quantum computers do not use the classical logic that we're all familiar with. This is a massive setback compared to the development of the electronic computer - and advances in theory usually can't be accelerated all that much. It is likely to be between 50 and 100 years before we know enough to build non-trivial applications out of quantum computers. Not because we can't build the hardware, but because we don't know how to write any software to run on them. The entire field of software development will have to be reinvented, and we don't actually know that it will be useful for anything. Unlike the first electronic computers, which had very real and obvious applications performing the tasks that were currently being done by hand, we have only vague theories and ideas about what quantum computers might be useful for. (Even the much-quoted method for breaking certain encryption algorithms is based on various assumptions that aren't proven; we don't know for sure whether quantum computers will actually be able to run it, yet)
We'll get there eventually, but it will probably take a long time and we can't really predict at this stage whether it'll be particularly useful. From what we know so far, these things are going to be incredibly arcane and obtuse to work with, and that is going to make it difficult. We might see it in our lifetimes, but I wouldn't place any bets on it, it might take much longer. The things we're playing with today may turn out to be the Babbage engines of quantum computing.
Any kind of blind search (code cracking, chess, genetic algorithms, you name it) takes the square root of the time it does on a classical computer with the same space available. That's pretty neat.
However, the only kind of problems for which we would use blind search are very hard and take a very long time already, and the square root of a very slow algorithm is usually still a very slow algorithm. While they are "interesting" problems, they are largely esoteric in nature. Any practical applications of quantum computing are probably going to have to be more creative than the method you're referring to. We don't really know much about non-trivial quantum computing algorithms yet.
While I love Rockstar games as much as the next person, I don't see how they possibly thought they could get away with this game. It's almost as if they're are determined to go bust.
Never before has any level of violence, no matter how explicit or gruesome, been reason for an AO rating. Let me repeat that again, in bold and capitals:
BEFORE NOW, VIOLENCE HAS NEVER BEEN A REASON FOR AN AO RATING
The only reasons for AO ratings are sex and politics. This game contains neither (as far as I know), and anyway, it doesn't contain anything that hasn't been in every GTA3 game, and - oh, hey - Manhunt 1. In other words, they already made this game once, and it got rated M, so they had no reason to expect that the sequel would be any different and every reason to think that it would be released in a flurry of free publicity and make a lot of money.
It is not difficult to see that this game has been rated AO for political reasons, probably related to Jack Thompson's campaign against Rockstar, not because of its content (which is nothing new).
it's no surprise if the ESRB were more cautious over a Rockstar product this time, considering what happened over the Hot Coffee issue and how Rockstar lied about it afterwards. Specifically, they said you needed to reverse-engineer the source code, yet you could access it via an Action Replay code on the PS2 version.
Do you realise that "reverse-engineer the source code" is a reasonably accurate layman's description of the process needed to create an Action Replay code? It's not a perfectly accurate statement, but it's approximately correct and about the best you could expect if the guy saying it was not an engineer (precisely what you have to do is to understand or reverse-engineer the object code). The "significant and intentional" part of their statement is entirely correct, and the process of creating these things is indeed complex.
There's no lie here, just a PR spokesman who made an insignificant mistake about terminology, and a lot of anti-PR from Jack Thompson (which you apparently fell for).
"Almost instantaneously" seems to be another way of saying "not instantaneously", which we could have guessed anyway. So why not say how fast it actually is?
It's not measurable (really! to measure it would require a system that can transport information faster than light, and that's not possible so far as we know) and not really important. You teleport an entangled blob of quantum state, which arrives "almost instantaneously". You cannot do anything with it until you receive the companion classical information from the transmitter, which you need to "unpack" that blob of quantum state and extract the teleported information from it. The effective speed of the process is precisely the same as the actual speed of your classical (non-quantum) slower-than-light information channel, and that's the important part.
I've also always wondered what would keep someone from just creating many copies of themselves. A transporter would never truly transport you. It would simply map your makeup here and assemble the same thing somewhere else. But that isn't to say that you'd have to destroy the version at point A from which the map came.
Various fundamental results have already been formally proved about quantum physics. One of them is the no cloning theorem, and one of its many implications is that no duplication is ever possible: copying anything on a quantum level must always involve destroying the original.
Another proven result is the no teleportation theorem. This one indicates that quantum matter teleporters are fundamentally impossible. It just can't be done. It's not a problem with scale or accuracy, you cannot even teleport a single atom.
These two theorems are not based on vague arguments, but on the mathematics underlying quantum physics. As such they are iron-clad.
If either a working duplicator or teleporter is ever built, we already know that it will not be based on quantum physics, but on some lower level of physics that has not yet been discovered. This is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes (it takes roughly 100-200 years to move from one level of physics to the next, based on history).
I was under the impression that quantum entanglement could not transmit information. If these researchers have actually managed superluminal commmunication, then... wow.
It cannot transmit information faster than the speed of light. It can transmit information when combined with a classical, slower-than-light transfer. It cannot transmit any information without having a classical (non-quantum) information transfer also take place, so the speed is limited by the speed of the classical transfer.
As you would expect, the utility of this is somewhat limited.
The way I (carefully) worded it was trying to understand whatever contractual logic they might think they have, the better then to avoid the kind of lockup that seems to be proposed - investigating "So what SHOULD they use?". Big institutions are seldom truly logical, but it helps to understand what they think are their imperatives. I wonder why else they might have got into this hole.
Given how obvious it is that the DRM argument doesn't hold water, I'm pretty sure that it's a red herring, intended to distract us from what is really going on. If you instead ask "Why would Microsoft want the BBC to be doing this?" then it is reasonably obvious what has happened here - they have done this so many times in the past that there's really no question as to whether they might have done it again.
How they conned the BBC into going along with it isn't immediately apparent, but it's not particularly important either.
Seeing a pattern? So why have these people decided to sue the BBC? Probably because the BBC have the biggest profit and the biggest market share so they'll be more inclined to pay the OSC to shut the hell up, and that's even if the OSC even win (which they probably won't).
I'm sorry, are you from another planet? The BBC is not a business, it's a public service operating under special charter from the UK government. They don't make disposable profits, because they don't have any owners to pay them to: every penny they make is spent directly on producing more media for the British public, and they aren't allowed to spend it on anything else. As a result, they have no real profit margins, so they have the least money available. Suing them for money is a waste of time - they are not the ones with "deep pockets", they are the ones who, by law and charter, have no pockets at all.
The OSC are not asking for money, they're asking for them to stop. No money is likely to change hands as a result of this (except to the lawyers, obviously); if the OSC win, all they will get is the injunction that they ask for.
There is a tiny, tiny problem called file sharing. These DRM-free files will fly away across the P2P networks and spread
You clearly did not read the post that you were replying to. The BBC already publishes all their content DRM-free, and it's already all available on "P2P" networks. Nobody is even so much as suggesting that this should change. This is clearly not about file sharing. It's pretty obviously about Microsoft trying to generate more lock-in to their platform, and that's a breach of anti-trust laws (and the BBC's charter, they are explicitly not allowed to promote any company or product, even if it is otherwise legal for them to do so).
Besides which, there is absolutely nothing wrong with BBC-produced content being put on P2P networks. It may not even be illegal in many cases (the BBC could certainly never justify suing any British citizen for it): much of that content has already been fully paid for by UK citizens, and nobody gets paid when the BBC screens it again, in any medium (actors get paid again for repeats on a few things, but not most of the stuff the BBC has in its archives).
Slashdot Mirror
Outrage at what? I'm not American, and I've no desire to ever go there, but I cannot recall any time when things were any different there. The government spies on its citizens and persecutes them with little or no good reason. Politicians abuse their power for personal gain. Decisions are made based on hatred and fear. Laws are ignored when they are inconvenient to the powerful. This was true last week and it's still true today, this "executive order" hasn't changed anything.
It's hardly the only country in the world like this. The only strange thing about the US is that many of the people there don't seem to realise it, because it rarely happens on a large scale - but it does happen, all the time.
Also like most of the other similar countries, there is little interest in stopping it, and a kind of perverse pride in the misguided belief that it doesn't happen. Everybody likes to talk about how they believe in some code of ethics, but whenever it comes to an important decision, they start talking about the need to compromise instead.
Probably because there's no law that would allow it. The entire concept of patent lawsuits against end-users exists only in the press (and if you were to dig into the origin, it's probably somewhere in Redmond). The patent system is an abomination, but it isn't currently broken in that particular way.
That is not what has happened here. There is not even a suggestion that they couldn't make it work for them. Instead, there is a bunch of handwaving about not being able to tell what openoffice will cost in the future (you can't tell what MS Office will cost in the future, because they change the prices all the time) and some outright lies about Microsoft providing more information about future plans (what is the next version of MS Office going to involve? I doubt even MS knows; we sure don't).
So there's pretty much nothing that resembles a claim that they couldn't make it work. It sounds rather more like they didn't want to make it work, combined with the old specious nonsense about openoffice requiring training because it's a bit different, when they don't retrain the staff for each new version of MS Office (which is always a lot different).
Basically because the people who are responsible for the current 'popular' font libraries are determined to emulate Windows. We don't need to do things this way, but they've made it very difficult to do things any other way.
Actually, no. In 1994, SCOTUS found that using a melody from another song is legal fair use, if the new version is genuinely a new song, even if the entire song is noticeably similar to the orignal.
Anything else would effectively be a ban on the creation of new music - there are extremely few places where genuinely new melodies are being created, and most of those are experimenting with bizarre tunings or similar things. The number of possible pleasant-sounding melody themes in the 12-note scale is not so large that we're still capable of finding large numbers of new ones. Most new songs just put existing melodies together in new ways. SCOTUS declined to ban the creation of new music, so there is no such thing as a copyright on a melody, only on the complete song.
We don't see anything of his just yet. This guy's made a lot of noise about how many people have been testing it but nobody seems to know anything about it. We don't even know if it really exists.
On the off-chance that it does exist: from the pseudo-scientific babble that he's been putting out, I'm betting that he's reinvented the magnet engine. People have been mistaking that for perpetual motion for years (it actually turns out to be running on fixed magnets, which become gradually demagnetised by the process, but so slowly that you don't notice in a small lab demonstration that only runs for a few minutes). Magnets are like batteries, just not particularly efficient ones. Magnet-powered engines are sneaky things - all the math looks like you're getting energy for free, because nobody ever remembers to incorporate the energy of the magnet itself into the equation (it's not in any high-school textbooks).
Massachusetts has never even suggested that they would refuse to accept any Office documents. This is solely about what they are going to run on their own computers, with a presumption that government documents must be archived for extended periods of time and that they would like to do this in digital form.
And with the words "it's not our problem", the dissenters were shot, the unwanted were burned in their homes, and the world descended into war, again.
The only thing required for all this to happen is for all the people with an opportunity to stop it to do nothing. Nobody is in the business of "protecting humanity" and there aren't any superhero companies, so if those are the only ones who do anything about it, we're all dead.
That is not a good excuse for doing nothing.
Amusingly enough, that's not entirely true. One of Moore's major points was that in the US, even if you have health insurance, they still won't pay for anything if they can find any excuse not to - and they put a lot of effort into finding excuses not to.
You know all those pages and pages of terms and conditions that came with your policy, that you didn't really study carefully? As soon as you want any money, they're going to go over every line with a fine-tooth comb, and if you forgot to dot an 'i' or cross a 't', they won't pay.
The only way to get reliable access to the medical system in the US is if you are so wealthy that you can pay your own medical bills, without relying on an insurance company. That's something in the region of the top 1% of the population. The rest are screwed (this means YOU).
The irony here is that the BBC's broadcast TV transmissions are the ones without DRM (which you claim is subject to "international laws" and so must have DRM), while this proposal for internet tomfoolery is the one with DRM. It doesn't sound like you have any real point to make.
Are you perhaps a marketing shill? I know they do post here a lot.
The BBC is absolutely and entirely prohibited by charter from charging Britons for access to TV programming. They are also not allowed to spend significant amounts of money on developing products for non-British markets - everything they sell in other countries is just spillover from things they produced for the UK - so you cannot possibly argue that iPlayer is designed for foreign consumers (that's illegal for the BBC to do, they exist only to service the UK and must direct all their money towards that goal). Crippling iPlayer from an intent to charge for its services would definitely not be allowed (which is why you haven't seen the BBC making that argument).
That is absolutely not the intended interpretation. The sections you quote are merely (a) expressing a requirement for the BBC not to profligately waste money like a government bureaucracy, and (b) permitting the BBC's management to carry out normal operations (which have to be carefully enumerated, because the BBC's charter is not a typical "do whatever you want" like random private companies would get).
The BBC is not obliged to make any kind of profit, and they're not allowed to retain any kind of profit (nobody gets rich off the BBC). This has been quite firmly established in the past.
The bulk of the BBC's content is produced and fully owned by the BBC. They are under no such obligations - this stuff isn't licensed, it's ours. Most of it doesn't even pay "repeat royalties" to the people in front of the camera when it's screened again. The BBC has miles upon miles of shelving in warehouses containing all this content which they are able to deploy in any manner they like.
There are no "international laws" compelling the use of DRM. This is pure corruption.
I'm sorry, are you using the same Windows as the rest of us? I've spent a lot of time installing all versions of Windows professionally, and while there are many adjectives I might describe the process with, "easy" is most definitely not one of them. The endless hunt for drivers that work, the repeated cycles of patching and rebooting, the subtle minimally-documented changes in the configuration mechanisms with every revision... it's probably the single most complicated and awkward process that has to be undertaken on a regular basis in the life of a sysadmin.
People don't run Windows for the easy installation, they run it because it came preinstalled so they never had to suffer its awful installation process. If every box was shipped bare and every user had to install their own operating system, Windows would be almost unheard of - it's that bad, compared to the competition.
Why would anybody even bother? There is already a fully-functional, DRM-free system for distributing the BBC's content, in glorious high-resolution MPEG-2 (of much better quality than the iPlayer proposals), suitable for recording and permanent storage: the British digital terrestrial television broadcasting network that is the reason for the BBC's existence.
Why would anybody want to use this iPlayer fiasco when a far superior alternative already exists? That's the real problem here: they're wasting money on building something that makes no sense at all. This system will be inferior in every way to any of the off-the-shelf PVRs. The only possible advantage of a system like this would be on-demand access to media older than can be readily accessed by a PVR that records everything on every BBC channel in a circular buffer - in other words, a system which allows you access to content more than about a month old (at current disk sizes). And that is precisely what their DRM system is excluding, defeating the entire point.
Can I interest you in The Theory Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster? That has the words "The theory of" before it, too.
There is a specific definition of "theory" in the context of science. It is, approximately, a set of predictions about how the world will behave in certain circumstances (a "hypothesis"), combined with an explanation of why those predictions are expected to hold. Evolution is a theory under this definition. ID is not (it makes no predictions and doesn't explain why anything specific should happen).
Then there's just people throwing words around like "theory" or "terrorist" or "purple" without really caring whether they happen to be applicable under any common definition. That's what happened when you decided to label ID as a theory. Calling it a theory does not magically cause it to start making predictions and giving explanations - and it is the predictions and explanations that are important to science, not the label.
That is almost, but not quite, entirely unrelated to quantum computing (it's got something to do with quantum physics, that's about where the relationship ends - I think it's about the chemistry of atoms). I don't believe it's true except under specific circumstances, anyway.
Quantum computers operate on qubits, which take on any state along a continuous probability line between 0 and 1 - you can think of it as a floating point number with an arbitrary degree of precision. As such, there are as many possible states as there are real numbers; this quantity is both infinite and uncountable. The actual math operates on the complex plane, but for the purposes of considering the number of possible states, it's equivalent to this description using the real numbers (if I've remembered my transfinite theory correctly - it's been a few years - but it's definitely infinite and uncountable).
Actual quantum computers are likely to have fixed finite limits on their precision, but we're not really far enough along to be sure how that will work out yet. There are a number of competing theories on the subject.
However, it is important to realise that the theory of computation had been in development since the early 1800s (and the logic underlying that had been around for centuries); by the time the first electronic devices were created, we already had a good understanding of what they could be used for, because we had been doing exactly the same things by hand for over 50 years at that point (the word "computer" originally meant a person who performed such computations, and an "electronic computer" was just a device to replicate the task that person was doing).
We can't do quantum computations by hand, so we have no real experience with the theory, and the underlying statistical methods are relatively recent developments: quantum computers do not use the classical logic that we're all familiar with. This is a massive setback compared to the development of the electronic computer - and advances in theory usually can't be accelerated all that much. It is likely to be between 50 and 100 years before we know enough to build non-trivial applications out of quantum computers. Not because we can't build the hardware, but because we don't know how to write any software to run on them. The entire field of software development will have to be reinvented, and we don't actually know that it will be useful for anything. Unlike the first electronic computers, which had very real and obvious applications performing the tasks that were currently being done by hand, we have only vague theories and ideas about what quantum computers might be useful for. (Even the much-quoted method for breaking certain encryption algorithms is based on various assumptions that aren't proven; we don't know for sure whether quantum computers will actually be able to run it, yet)
We'll get there eventually, but it will probably take a long time and we can't really predict at this stage whether it'll be particularly useful. From what we know so far, these things are going to be incredibly arcane and obtuse to work with, and that is going to make it difficult. We might see it in our lifetimes, but I wouldn't place any bets on it, it might take much longer. The things we're playing with today may turn out to be the Babbage engines of quantum computing.
However, the only kind of problems for which we would use blind search are very hard and take a very long time already, and the square root of a very slow algorithm is usually still a very slow algorithm. While they are "interesting" problems, they are largely esoteric in nature. Any practical applications of quantum computing are probably going to have to be more creative than the method you're referring to. We don't really know much about non-trivial quantum computing algorithms yet.
Never before has any level of violence, no matter how explicit or gruesome, been reason for an AO rating. Let me repeat that again, in bold and capitals:
BEFORE NOW, VIOLENCE HAS NEVER BEEN A REASON FOR AN AO RATING
The only reasons for AO ratings are sex and politics. This game contains neither (as far as I know), and anyway, it doesn't contain anything that hasn't been in every GTA3 game, and - oh, hey - Manhunt 1. In other words, they already made this game once, and it got rated M, so they had no reason to expect that the sequel would be any different and every reason to think that it would be released in a flurry of free publicity and make a lot of money.
It is not difficult to see that this game has been rated AO for political reasons, probably related to Jack Thompson's campaign against Rockstar, not because of its content (which is nothing new).
Do you realise that "reverse-engineer the source code" is a reasonably accurate layman's description of the process needed to create an Action Replay code? It's not a perfectly accurate statement, but it's approximately correct and about the best you could expect if the guy saying it was not an engineer (precisely what you have to do is to understand or reverse-engineer the object code). The "significant and intentional" part of their statement is entirely correct, and the process of creating these things is indeed complex.
There's no lie here, just a PR spokesman who made an insignificant mistake about terminology, and a lot of anti-PR from Jack Thompson (which you apparently fell for).
It's not measurable (really! to measure it would require a system that can transport information faster than light, and that's not possible so far as we know) and not really important. You teleport an entangled blob of quantum state, which arrives "almost instantaneously". You cannot do anything with it until you receive the companion classical information from the transmitter, which you need to "unpack" that blob of quantum state and extract the teleported information from it. The effective speed of the process is precisely the same as the actual speed of your classical (non-quantum) slower-than-light information channel, and that's the important part.
Various fundamental results have already been formally proved about quantum physics. One of them is the no cloning theorem, and one of its many implications is that no duplication is ever possible: copying anything on a quantum level must always involve destroying the original.
Another proven result is the no teleportation theorem. This one indicates that quantum matter teleporters are fundamentally impossible. It just can't be done. It's not a problem with scale or accuracy, you cannot even teleport a single atom.
These two theorems are not based on vague arguments, but on the mathematics underlying quantum physics. As such they are iron-clad.
If either a working duplicator or teleporter is ever built, we already know that it will not be based on quantum physics, but on some lower level of physics that has not yet been discovered. This is unlikely to happen in our lifetimes (it takes roughly 100-200 years to move from one level of physics to the next, based on history).
It cannot transmit information faster than the speed of light. It can transmit information when combined with a classical, slower-than-light transfer. It cannot transmit any information without having a classical (non-quantum) information transfer also take place, so the speed is limited by the speed of the classical transfer.
As you would expect, the utility of this is somewhat limited.
Given how obvious it is that the DRM argument doesn't hold water, I'm pretty sure that it's a red herring, intended to distract us from what is really going on. If you instead ask "Why would Microsoft want the BBC to be doing this?" then it is reasonably obvious what has happened here - they have done this so many times in the past that there's really no question as to whether they might have done it again.
How they conned the BBC into going along with it isn't immediately apparent, but it's not particularly important either.
I'm sorry, are you from another planet? The BBC is not a business, it's a public service operating under special charter from the UK government. They don't make disposable profits, because they don't have any owners to pay them to: every penny they make is spent directly on producing more media for the British public, and they aren't allowed to spend it on anything else. As a result, they have no real profit margins, so they have the least money available. Suing them for money is a waste of time - they are not the ones with "deep pockets", they are the ones who, by law and charter, have no pockets at all.
The OSC are not asking for money, they're asking for them to stop. No money is likely to change hands as a result of this (except to the lawyers, obviously); if the OSC win, all they will get is the injunction that they ask for.
You clearly did not read the post that you were replying to. The BBC already publishes all their content DRM-free, and it's already all available on "P2P" networks. Nobody is even so much as suggesting that this should change. This is clearly not about file sharing. It's pretty obviously about Microsoft trying to generate more lock-in to their platform, and that's a breach of anti-trust laws (and the BBC's charter, they are explicitly not allowed to promote any company or product, even if it is otherwise legal for them to do so).
Besides which, there is absolutely nothing wrong with BBC-produced content being put on P2P networks. It may not even be illegal in many cases (the BBC could certainly never justify suing any British citizen for it): much of that content has already been fully paid for by UK citizens, and nobody gets paid when the BBC screens it again, in any medium (actors get paid again for repeats on a few things, but not most of the stuff the BBC has in its archives).