The good news though is that this has nothing to do with lifestyle and is a gene. No reason we can't just splice it in to others once we make sure it doesn't have any substantial side effects. Unfortunately, some bioethicists will claim that this is unacceptable and say crap about the "human condition" and "human dignity" while ignoring that there's no dignity in slowly falling apart and dying with every aspect of your body painfully shutting down. Leon Kass and his ilk are a real problem for human progress.
That's a very valid point in this context. My intent was only to address the claim that if it can be built it will be built. I agree that there's a lot more incentive here than with the examples I gave.
Nuclear bombs which are highly cobalt salted to increase fallout have been thought of but the evidence is that no nuclear power has built them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb. Similarly currently, we know how to make a massive number of different types of chemical weapons, but the vast majority of countries have none in their arsenals.
Let's see. Increase tax burden massively for grad students. So what else do we have? Well, we've got a tax break for private jet owners added in http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/360785-senate-tax-bill-includes-tax-break-for-private-jets (Note that The Hill is a general news site related to Washington politics, generally pretty non-partisan). We've got a removal of the tax deduction for state and local taxes https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-local/u-s-towns-cities-fear-taxpayer-revolt-if-republicans-kill-deduction-idUSKBN1DH01D, which is both of quesitonable constitutionality due to the double taxation, screwing over specifically the people in "blue" states which generally have higher state taxes, and harming disproportionately people in middle income brackets. So, yes, please tell Snotnose above or me what sources we should be looking at to see what is wrong about their description. What information that we are not seeing in our echo chamber should change our viewpoint?
Thanks for being so reasonable about this; we all make silly mistakes on occasion. And yes, it did have large Democratic support; my comment was primarily about the claim that "Bill Clinton" had something to do with it. It is true that it also had a lot of Democratic support, so one can't blame the bad effects on the Republicans alone. Although if we're going down this route then I'm also going to have to express that there are a lot of provisions of the 1996 act (some introduced by Republicans and some by Democrats) which had other, positive results. What is under discussion is only one aspect of it.
This is a very confused response. First, just because a similar bad thing has happened in the past, that doesn't mean that other bad things aren't bad, or even worse. Heck, the difference between 90% and 99% is a pretty big and important one. Second, the post you were replying to didn't just mention this specific thing but also the tax plan, repeal of net neutrality, and Trump's attempts to put coal over the environment. Third, the 1996 Telecommunications Act was written when the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. While the Clinton Whitehouse did have some input, at the end of the day, they didn't write it, simply signed a bill that had passed with strong majorities.
There are however good reasons to believe P != NP rather than the opposite. Scott Aaronson discusses a whole bunch of them here https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=122.
Sigh. "Virtue signaling" is something that has real meaning. It doesn't just means "does something that I don't like or don't sympathize with". Your sarcasm is essentially correct regarding nuclear power, and their turning off their nuke plants was a terrible idea, but that doesn't mean the people here weren't sincere.
There's a surprisingly large amount of early internet still being maintained, but a lot of it has gone through so many different owners that it isn't even always clear who is responsible for maintaining it. My father had a very old Prodigy.net email address that stopped working this summer (we had warned him that he should switch to something else well before this). He tried to get in touch but it turned out that multiple different companies had bought what remained of Prodigy and despite the fact that he was paying some of them for various other related services, every single one of them claimed that the email was not their responsibility. About 48 hours after this started the email was functioning again, resuming just as mysteriously as it had started. We did manage at that point to convince him to get a Gmail account.
Simons is one of the most prominent such, but definitely not the only one. This has been a vocal point being made by computer scientists and other security experts since at least the late 2000s.
So, everyone agrees that if one can get enough qubits to work together in a universal computer, then they will be useful. The exact number isn't clear but pretty much everyone agrees that by the time you get to around 200 qubits there will be tasks where it will be very likely to be practically useful.
The D-Wave computers are very far from universal computers. Each qubit is only able to talk to a small number of qubits very close to it. The specific method that D-Wave is using is a variant of quantum annealing and it isn't clear that this provides any speedup over classical approaches https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3192. So for multiple reasons, the IBM approach is very different, and frankly, much more likely to pan out in the long term.
We sort of know already that that isn't the case, at least it isn't the case for generic states. We know that because we can construct Bose-Einstein condensates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate which are in a certain sense coherent states of lots of things together. That said, Gil Kalai has made more technical claims and conjectures which seem to follow from a similar intuition https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/why-quantum-computers-cannot-work-the-movie/. Note that this isn't really like the thermodynamic situation of perpetual motion; there's no intrinsic law of physics that appears to be being violated by quantum computers, they just don't match our intuitions well.
We're getting closer and closer to testing quantum supremacy- the hypothesis that quantum computers can practically solve problems that classical computers cannot do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_supremacy. Note that this is a practical statement; anything a quantum computer can do, a classical computer can do, but with potentially exponential slowdown. This follows from the fact that BQP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP the set of problems that a quantum computer can do in polynomial time is within is contained in PSPACE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPACE the set of things that a classical computer can do with polynomial space (since polynomial space calculations live in EXPTIME, the set of things requiring exponential time, the result follows).
It is very likely that before we see genuinely useful quantum computing (e.g. for factoring large numbers or simulating complicated chemical systems) we'll have an answer to the quantum supremacy question. I suspect that it is more likely that we'll have an answer in terms of boson sampling before we have an answer involving a universal quantum computer.
Essentially, boson sampling works by just looking at the distribution of bosons (well for convenience, photons) as they go through very simple optical objects. Boson sampling has two major advantages: first, we know it is actually *hard* in a technical sense for a classical computer to do unless some conjectures that pretty close to everyone believes are false. In particular, Scott Aaronson and Alex Arkipov proved that if a classical computer can do boson sampling efficiently then the polynomial hierarchy will collapse https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/optics.pdf. For those who aren't theoretical compsci people, the polynomial hierarchy not collapsing is a statement which is only marginally stronger than P!=NP and is very widely believed. This is in contrast for example with factoring large numbers where if it turned out that classical computers could efficiently factor the only major conjecture that would turn out to be false would just be the difficulty of factoring itself. Second, boson sampling is much easier in many respects than what IBM is trying to do which requires much fancier systems, supercooled qubits, careful protection from stray particles, careful preservation of entanglement and all sorts of other stuff. Still, what they are doing is important and very necessary if we're going to actually have practical quantum computers ever.
1018 polled is not 320 million, but 1018 polled is a very decent sample size. I'm not going to bother going through the basic math explaining how sample size to get a given margin of error doesn't grow linearly with the population size, so instead I'll just point you to this margin of error calculator http://americanresearchgroup.com/moe.html, where if you put in 320 million and 1018, you'll see you get a margin of error of around 3%. In practice, one should due to issues with polling expect a margin that is about 1% larger, so that's around a 4% error, close enough to get the conclusion in question. So what is your objection?
Only due to edicts from environmentalists, especially those that are indifferent or hostile to those responsible for mining it.
Most environmentalists aren't hostile to such people, and whether they are hostile to miners or not has nothing to do with whether the environmentalists are correct.
most of the world is behind it.
Well, most of the world is behind jumping off a cliff. The US is not.
This is wrong at multiple levels. First, the rest of the world is trying to prevent us from going over the cliff of catastrophic global warming. Second, the only part of the US that is right now vocally against dealing with global warming are certain parts of the Republican Party (but certainly not even all of it), and the Trump administration. Most Americans are concerned about global warming http://news.gallup.com/poll/206030/global-warming-concern-three-decade-high.aspx. Facts matter.
Coal plants are being discontinued. As grids become more efficient, switching to electric cars becomes even better. As for rare earth batteries, rare earths despite their name are not that rare https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-earth-elements-not-rare-just-playing-hard-to-get-38812856/ and the technology to extract them has been getting massively better in the last few years. We've also just barely started recycling rare earth components- until recently there wasn't any economic incentive to do so. If components with them become more common, the amount of recycling will go up. As is usually the case with environmental problems, the solution will not be simply changes in personal behavior, or government regulation, or market incentives but a natural combination of all three. And, with the notable exception of the current US Presidential administration, most of the world is behind it.
This is a really good demonstration that we can handle serious environmental problems if we put in the effort, and we can do so without substantial economic impact. Yes, global warming is a more large scale problem than ozone depletion but the basic point remains. We've now essentially solved both the ozone hole problem and acid rain, through a combination of market forces, better technology, and government incentives. We can do the same for global warming. Let's actually do that. Unfortunately, over the last few years, some aspects of the right in the US have become so against helping the environment that they are blocking any serious attempt to deal with these issues, and we'll all going to suffer as a result.
We didn't go back to the Moon but we do have hundreds of communication satellites, weather satellites, navigation satellites and others which are doing daily work integrated so much into your daily life that you don't even notice. Just because progress didn't occur in the way it was expected doesn't mean that space technology didn't have a massive impact.
There are very good arguments in favor of more vigorous anti-trust enforcement and this wouldn't be an unreasonable place to start. But this really, really looks like the President trying to use his office to retaliate against media that criticizes him. That should concern everyone. The natural chilling effect should be obvious.
Ok. I'm a mathematician, so I think I have some degree of expertise relevant to comment when someone says that they have a mathematical proof of something. You cannot give a mathematical proof of something in the physical world. At most, you can give a mathematical proof that something is true in some model of the physical world. Your model may or may not match expectations. This occurs all the time; there are all sorts of proofs of security in cryptography (generally assuming certain computational complexity assumptions) and yet the crypto systems are frequently broken by using clever side-channel attacks or other clever tricks that couldn't be done in the context of the model of computation being used. In this case the fact that some other species can live much longer than humans is by itself a pretty big sign that the model is by far from a perfect one. And from glancing at the article in question, it looks like the scientists actually didn't claim nearly as big a deal as the summary suggests.
Their next generation of rocket engine will use methane rather than kerosene for a whole bunch of reasons. The Sabatier process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction allows one to make methane which allows you to make methane from CO2 and hydrogen. This is good because a) it allows one to make carbon neutral rockets if one makes the methane from the air (Musk is really concerned about global warming) and b) It allows one to make fuel on Mars without too much work. Unfortunately, no matter what fuel source you are going to use at the end of the day you are talking about extremely flammable fuels and the risk of problems will always be high. In this case it looks like the rocket landed essentially intact but we'll have to see.
Slashdot Mirror
The good news though is that this has nothing to do with lifestyle and is a gene. No reason we can't just splice it in to others once we make sure it doesn't have any substantial side effects. Unfortunately, some bioethicists will claim that this is unacceptable and say crap about the "human condition" and "human dignity" while ignoring that there's no dignity in slowly falling apart and dying with every aspect of your body painfully shutting down. Leon Kass and his ilk are a real problem for human progress.
That's a very valid point in this context. My intent was only to address the claim that if it can be built it will be built. I agree that there's a lot more incentive here than with the examples I gave.
Nuclear bombs which are highly cobalt salted to increase fallout have been thought of but the evidence is that no nuclear power has built them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb. Similarly currently, we know how to make a massive number of different types of chemical weapons, but the vast majority of countries have none in their arsenals.
Let's see. Increase tax burden massively for grad students. So what else do we have? Well, we've got a tax break for private jet owners added in http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/360785-senate-tax-bill-includes-tax-break-for-private-jets (Note that The Hill is a general news site related to Washington politics, generally pretty non-partisan). We've got a removal of the tax deduction for state and local taxes https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-local/u-s-towns-cities-fear-taxpayer-revolt-if-republicans-kill-deduction-idUSKBN1DH01D, which is both of quesitonable constitutionality due to the double taxation, screwing over specifically the people in "blue" states which generally have higher state taxes, and harming disproportionately people in middle income brackets. So, yes, please tell Snotnose above or me what sources we should be looking at to see what is wrong about their description. What information that we are not seeing in our echo chamber should change our viewpoint?
Thanks for being so reasonable about this; we all make silly mistakes on occasion. And yes, it did have large Democratic support; my comment was primarily about the claim that "Bill Clinton" had something to do with it. It is true that it also had a lot of Democratic support, so one can't blame the bad effects on the Republicans alone. Although if we're going down this route then I'm also going to have to express that there are a lot of provisions of the 1996 act (some introduced by Republicans and some by Democrats) which had other, positive results. What is under discussion is only one aspect of it.
Is Wikipedia wrong here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 where they list it as passing 91-5 in the Senate and 414-16 in the House? If those aren't strong majorities, what possibly are?
This is a very confused response. First, just because a similar bad thing has happened in the past, that doesn't mean that other bad things aren't bad, or even worse. Heck, the difference between 90% and 99% is a pretty big and important one. Second, the post you were replying to didn't just mention this specific thing but also the tax plan, repeal of net neutrality, and Trump's attempts to put coal over the environment. Third, the 1996 Telecommunications Act was written when the Republicans controlled both the House and Senate. While the Clinton Whitehouse did have some input, at the end of the day, they didn't write it, simply signed a bill that had passed with strong majorities.
There are however good reasons to believe P != NP rather than the opposite. Scott Aaronson discusses a whole bunch of them here https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=122.
Sigh. "Virtue signaling" is something that has real meaning. It doesn't just means "does something that I don't like or don't sympathize with". Your sarcasm is essentially correct regarding nuclear power, and their turning off their nuke plants was a terrible idea, but that doesn't mean the people here weren't sincere.
There's a surprisingly large amount of early internet still being maintained, but a lot of it has gone through so many different owners that it isn't even always clear who is responsible for maintaining it. My father had a very old Prodigy.net email address that stopped working this summer (we had warned him that he should switch to something else well before this). He tried to get in touch but it turned out that multiple different companies had bought what remained of Prodigy and despite the fact that he was paying some of them for various other related services, every single one of them claimed that the email was not their responsibility. About 48 hours after this started the email was functioning again, resuming just as mysteriously as it had started. We did manage at that point to convince him to get a Gmail account.
Simons is one of the most prominent such, but definitely not the only one. This has been a vocal point being made by computer scientists and other security experts since at least the late 2000s.
So, everyone agrees that if one can get enough qubits to work together in a universal computer, then they will be useful. The exact number isn't clear but pretty much everyone agrees that by the time you get to around 200 qubits there will be tasks where it will be very likely to be practically useful.
The D-Wave computers are very far from universal computers. Each qubit is only able to talk to a small number of qubits very close to it. The specific method that D-Wave is using is a variant of quantum annealing and it isn't clear that this provides any speedup over classical approaches https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3192. So for multiple reasons, the IBM approach is very different, and frankly, much more likely to pan out in the long term.
We sort of know already that that isn't the case, at least it isn't the case for generic states. We know that because we can construct Bose-Einstein condensates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Einstein_condensate which are in a certain sense coherent states of lots of things together. That said, Gil Kalai has made more technical claims and conjectures which seem to follow from a similar intuition https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/why-quantum-computers-cannot-work-the-movie/. Note that this isn't really like the thermodynamic situation of perpetual motion; there's no intrinsic law of physics that appears to be being violated by quantum computers, they just don't match our intuitions well.
We're getting closer and closer to testing quantum supremacy- the hypothesis that quantum computers can practically solve problems that classical computers cannot do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_supremacy. Note that this is a practical statement; anything a quantum computer can do, a classical computer can do, but with potentially exponential slowdown. This follows from the fact that BQP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BQP the set of problems that a quantum computer can do in polynomial time is within is contained in PSPACE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSPACE the set of things that a classical computer can do with polynomial space (since polynomial space calculations live in EXPTIME, the set of things requiring exponential time, the result follows).
It is very likely that before we see genuinely useful quantum computing (e.g. for factoring large numbers or simulating complicated chemical systems) we'll have an answer to the quantum supremacy question. I suspect that it is more likely that we'll have an answer in terms of boson sampling before we have an answer involving a universal quantum computer.
Essentially, boson sampling works by just looking at the distribution of bosons (well for convenience, photons) as they go through very simple optical objects. Boson sampling has two major advantages: first, we know it is actually *hard* in a technical sense for a classical computer to do unless some conjectures that pretty close to everyone believes are false. In particular, Scott Aaronson and Alex Arkipov proved that if a classical computer can do boson sampling efficiently then the polynomial hierarchy will collapse https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/optics.pdf. For those who aren't theoretical compsci people, the polynomial hierarchy not collapsing is a statement which is only marginally stronger than P!=NP and is very widely believed. This is in contrast for example with factoring large numbers where if it turned out that classical computers could efficiently factor the only major conjecture that would turn out to be false would just be the difficulty of factoring itself. Second, boson sampling is much easier in many respects than what IBM is trying to do which requires much fancier systems, supercooled qubits, careful protection from stray particles, careful preservation of entanglement and all sorts of other stuff. Still, what they are doing is important and very necessary if we're going to actually have practical quantum computers ever.
1018 polled is not 320 million, but 1018 polled is a very decent sample size. I'm not going to bother going through the basic math explaining how sample size to get a given margin of error doesn't grow linearly with the population size, so instead I'll just point you to this margin of error calculator http://americanresearchgroup.com/moe.html, where if you put in 320 million and 1018, you'll see you get a margin of error of around 3%. In practice, one should due to issues with polling expect a margin that is about 1% larger, so that's around a 4% error, close enough to get the conclusion in question. So what is your objection?
Only due to edicts from environmentalists, especially those that are indifferent or hostile to those responsible for mining it.
Most environmentalists aren't hostile to such people, and whether they are hostile to miners or not has nothing to do with whether the environmentalists are correct.
most of the world is behind it.
Well, most of the world is behind jumping off a cliff. The US is not.
This is wrong at multiple levels. First, the rest of the world is trying to prevent us from going over the cliff of catastrophic global warming. Second, the only part of the US that is right now vocally against dealing with global warming are certain parts of the Republican Party (but certainly not even all of it), and the Trump administration. Most Americans are concerned about global warming http://news.gallup.com/poll/206030/global-warming-concern-three-decade-high.aspx. Facts matter.
Coal plants are being discontinued. As grids become more efficient, switching to electric cars becomes even better. As for rare earth batteries, rare earths despite their name are not that rare https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/rare-earth-elements-not-rare-just-playing-hard-to-get-38812856/ and the technology to extract them has been getting massively better in the last few years. We've also just barely started recycling rare earth components- until recently there wasn't any economic incentive to do so. If components with them become more common, the amount of recycling will go up. As is usually the case with environmental problems, the solution will not be simply changes in personal behavior, or government regulation, or market incentives but a natural combination of all three. And, with the notable exception of the current US Presidential administration, most of the world is behind it.
This is a really good demonstration that we can handle serious environmental problems if we put in the effort, and we can do so without substantial economic impact. Yes, global warming is a more large scale problem than ozone depletion but the basic point remains. We've now essentially solved both the ozone hole problem and acid rain, through a combination of market forces, better technology, and government incentives. We can do the same for global warming. Let's actually do that. Unfortunately, over the last few years, some aspects of the right in the US have become so against helping the environment that they are blocking any serious attempt to deal with these issues, and we'll all going to suffer as a result.
We didn't go back to the Moon but we do have hundreds of communication satellites, weather satellites, navigation satellites and others which are doing daily work integrated so much into your daily life that you don't even notice. Just because progress didn't occur in the way it was expected doesn't mean that space technology didn't have a massive impact.
There are very good arguments in favor of more vigorous anti-trust enforcement and this wouldn't be an unreasonable place to start. But this really, really looks like the President trying to use his office to retaliate against media that criticizes him. That should concern everyone. The natural chilling effect should be obvious.
There is certainly evidence for that. See https://medium.com/dfrlab/electionwatch-russia-and-referendums-in-catalonia-192743efcd76.
Ok. I'm a mathematician, so I think I have some degree of expertise relevant to comment when someone says that they have a mathematical proof of something. You cannot give a mathematical proof of something in the physical world. At most, you can give a mathematical proof that something is true in some model of the physical world. Your model may or may not match expectations. This occurs all the time; there are all sorts of proofs of security in cryptography (generally assuming certain computational complexity assumptions) and yet the crypto systems are frequently broken by using clever side-channel attacks or other clever tricks that couldn't be done in the context of the model of computation being used. In this case the fact that some other species can live much longer than humans is by itself a pretty big sign that the model is by far from a perfect one. And from glancing at the article in question, it looks like the scientists actually didn't claim nearly as big a deal as the summary suggests.
Yes, I get that. My point was that they are already switching to methane for other reasons.
Their next generation of rocket engine will use methane rather than kerosene for a whole bunch of reasons. The Sabatier process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction allows one to make methane which allows you to make methane from CO2 and hydrogen. This is good because a) it allows one to make carbon neutral rockets if one makes the methane from the air (Musk is really concerned about global warming) and b) It allows one to make fuel on Mars without too much work. Unfortunately, no matter what fuel source you are going to use at the end of the day you are talking about extremely flammable fuels and the risk of problems will always be high. In this case it looks like the rocket landed essentially intact but we'll have to see.