I don't believe there is any "Deep State" but if there is any this is evidence that it is composed primarily of people who care more about the rule of law than partisan politics. I for one welcome our globalist overlords.
Any weapon ban treaty has a problem of detecting violations. If one cannot easily detect violations, one cannot enforce the treaty effectively. For pretty much every nuclear weapons treaty the biggest stumbling block has almost always been verification that people are adhering to it. At least there, there's infrastructure to look at. Trying to determine that governments aren't holding back tiny little files stored away somewhere would be much more difficult. In that context, such a treaty would be unlikely to succeed.
Transit issues are a frequently interesting topic for nerds, and as city growth continues, issues of how historically city growth has been handled (both successfully and not) matter. One can see for example the ongoing housing crisis in the Bay Area as an example of very much not how to handle things. (Hint: the correct answer for how to handle high housing prices is not "stop all almost all new construction and add even tighter zoning rules.") And these issues are definitely stuff that matters; the efficiency and functioning of our cities is a major aspect of economics.
First, of all, elections are won and lost not by single things but by collections. One can have more than one mistake or more than one event leading to an election win or loss. Second, the evidence that serious attempts at hacking Clinton did occur is overwhelming, and saying otherwise is simply ignoring the evidence. We even know the exact phishing attempts that lead to the hacks http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/310234-typo-may-have-caused-podesta-email-hack?. Third of all, if you do want to actually point to other things that had an impact also, the statistical evidence that Comey's actions mattered is an almost complete slamdunk. See https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/. Facts matter.
As a US academic who is deeply concerned about people not willing or wanting to go to US conferences, this is going to make everything much worse. We've had enough trouble as is trying to get people to keep going to conferences here given the current climate. This is going to make it much harder.
Not everyone can afford to buy a new machine with every trip. Even if they can, that's a lot of additional expense. Easier to just wipe the same machine and reinstall an empty operating system when you go through, along with a tiny number of files so the customs people don't get cranky.
Summary is accurate in that regard. The idea of using Boson sampling to do this came from a paper http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/optics.pdf by Scott Aaronson and Alex Arkhipov which showed that if a classical computer can do Boson sampling efficiently then certain widely believed conjectures in classical computational complexity would need to be false. In particular, the polynomial hierarchy would collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_hierarchy.
It is a deep mistake to react to a single event by responding with a massive response unless that event really is genuinely damaging. This is akin to how one idiot tried to light his shoes on fire on an airplane and now we all need to take off our shoes when going through security. This is an overreaction at its most basic. Unfortunately, given PR and politicians grandstanding about how awful this is, this may be Facebook's best option.
You are missing the point: the point is that if many different "mainstream" news sources agree on something *despite* their differing editorial slants, than the sort of claim being made that this is somehow due to them being part of a "ministry of truth" or anything remotely like that is very dodgy.
The WSJ is right-wing and has a wildly different editorial slant than the Washington Post. If you've decided that the problem is with both the WSJ and WaPo, then the problem is most likely on your end, not theirs.
In the very long-run, once we have functionally built in direct brain to computer interfaces, what is going to stop people from sending a lot of half-baked emails and the like? At least with a phone, you can take it away from someone when they are drunk, but frankly given how incoherent my very late night/early morning thoughts are, I'd be more worried about accidental shitposting that way, or sending really stupid emails.
This should lead to people being more concerned about general artificial intelligence rather than less. While it is pretty clear that the methods used in things like Alpha-Go cannot by themselves do much beyond what they are intended to do, it should also be clear that we're in a situation where many rapid improvements in AI are occurring, and some of these are tackling problems that were thought to be decades away. If it turns out that general AI requires only a few additional breakthroughs, or if it turns out that it can be effectively duplicated with a tiny amount of new things and a lot of processing power, then we could be in a situation where general intelligence, with all its accompanying existential risks, arises suddenly. For an excellent, detailed book on the potential gifts and perils of AGI, I recommend Bostrom's book "Superintelligence."
One of the major issues seems to be what happens when a plane comes in too fast. Straight runways handle that well. It is hard to handle that with circular runways. There are a lot of other safety advantages of the standard setup.
Over time batter energy density has improved by approximately 5-10% a year. Do you expect this trend to continue? If not, what do you expect will happen in the long-term? Are there other metrics by which you expect batteries to continue to improve?
Yes, I acknowledged that objection to Bostrom in my last paragraph. Please read the whole comment. The primary point here isn't whether their are flaws with Bostrom's argument anyhow; the point is that TFA's objections don't grapple with Bostrom's actual argument.
The objection in question ignores Bostrom's basic argument. Bostrom's primary argument for being in a simulation boils down to the observation that it is very likely that an advanced civilization would have the ability to run very accurate simulations. Moreover, one of the things they'd be obviously interested in would be their own past ancestors; if that's the case, then over the very long period that such civilizations will exist one will expect many more "copies" of people on ancient Earth than any of the originals, unless one expects civilization to die out well before we get to that technology level. If the laws of physics are simulated badly enough that we can notice, then they aren't doing an effective ancestor simulation, so the objection here doesn't make sense.
There are a lot of issues with Bostrom's argument; for example, one might question whether simulations of that level of detail will ever be able to be made on a large scale. But the argument being made here doesn't grapple with the fundamental issues.
Sure, it is possible that these will turn out to be useful and cheap enough to be common devices in the home. My comment was what was likely. And if that does happen, it will be very far off (just as there were about 40 years between that IBM remark and when personal computers were a thing). In order for quantum computers to be common enough for personal use, two things need to happen: first, the computers will need to be small and cheap enough that they can be in fit in the home attached to a classical computer; one might imagine something like a special quantum processor for the processes that take advantage of it. Second, and this is really important: we would need algorithms that the quantum computer can use to do things that are common that a classical computer does slower. Right now, most of the things that a quantum computer can do asymptotically better than a classical computer are highly specialized things like factoring integers that most people don't need. If we found good quantum algorithms to do things like graphical processing that might change.
This is not the D-Wave system being discussed. This is a true universal quantum computer, whereas D-Waves system uses a modified form of quantum annealing and whether it gives any fundamental speedup over classical computers is open.
Because if I understand quantum theory correctly, it both works, and doesn't. There is no measurement for a half binary state in a binary world of absolute on and off.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it" here, but pretty much every interpretation of this is wrong. In fact, measurement of quantum superpositions do return specific classical states, with a probability based on the superpositions.
I think pursuing analogue supercomputers might be a better place to start.
A more reasonable argument would be "We need more money to continue milking this quantum cow that never produces anything."
Quantum computing is still in its infancy and is best thought of as still in the basic research category. But even given that, there's been massive improvement in the last few years, both in terms of physical implementations (how many entangled qubits one can process) and in terms of understanding the broader theory. One major aspect where both the experimental and theoretical ends have seen major improvement is quantum error correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction.
It is unlikely that most people will see quantum computers in their day to day lives. But one will see the many improvements that they give. For example, there's strong reasons to think that quantum computers will make doing chemistry simulations easier, resulting in more new interesting things in different contexts, including medicines. For similar reasons, one expects that quantum computers will make it easier to design better classical computers.
One of the major issues is the need for actual empirical evidence that quantum computers can do things that classical computers cannot with reasonable time constraints. Right now, the general consensus is that if we understand correctly the laws of physics this should be the case, but there are some people who are very prominent holdouts who are convinced that quantum computing will not scale. Gil Kalai is the most prominent https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/why-quantum-computers-cannot-work-the-movie/. It is likely that before any 50 bit quantum computer we'll have already answered this question. The most likely answer will be using boson sampling systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson_sampling which in their simplest form give information about the behavior of photons when scattered in a simple way. Scott Aaronson and Alex Arkhipov showed that if a classical computer could efficiently duplicate boson sampling with only a small increase in time then some already existing conjectures in classical computational complexity had to be false. (In particular, the polynomial hierarchy would have to collapse and we're generally confident that isn't the case.) Boson sampling is much easier to implement than a universal quantum computer, although no one has any practical use of boson sampling at present.
All of that said, the "a few years" in the article is critical- it isn't plausible that a 50 qubit universal system will be sold in 5 years. But 10 or 20 years are plausible. It also isn't completely clear how practically useful a 50 qubit system would be. At a few hundred qubits one is clearly in the realm of having direct practical applications, but 50 is sort of in a fuzzy range.
Slashdot Mirror
None for Obama or for George W. Bush, unless my memory is completely failing me. Is it?
Do you really need to have it explained why this in the stuff that matters category?
I don't believe there is any "Deep State" but if there is any this is evidence that it is composed primarily of people who care more about the rule of law than partisan politics. I for one welcome our globalist overlords.
Any weapon ban treaty has a problem of detecting violations. If one cannot easily detect violations, one cannot enforce the treaty effectively. For pretty much every nuclear weapons treaty the biggest stumbling block has almost always been verification that people are adhering to it. At least there, there's infrastructure to look at. Trying to determine that governments aren't holding back tiny little files stored away somewhere would be much more difficult. In that context, such a treaty would be unlikely to succeed.
Note that this does not allow for any form of FTL signaling. The No Communication Theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem is not violated.
Transit issues are a frequently interesting topic for nerds, and as city growth continues, issues of how historically city growth has been handled (both successfully and not) matter. One can see for example the ongoing housing crisis in the Bay Area as an example of very much not how to handle things. (Hint: the correct answer for how to handle high housing prices is not "stop all almost all new construction and add even tighter zoning rules.") And these issues are definitely stuff that matters; the efficiency and functioning of our cities is a major aspect of economics.
First, of all, elections are won and lost not by single things but by collections. One can have more than one mistake or more than one event leading to an election win or loss. Second, the evidence that serious attempts at hacking Clinton did occur is overwhelming, and saying otherwise is simply ignoring the evidence. We even know the exact phishing attempts that lead to the hacks http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/310234-typo-may-have-caused-podesta-email-hack?. Third of all, if you do want to actually point to other things that had an impact also, the statistical evidence that Comey's actions mattered is an almost complete slamdunk. See https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/. Facts matter.
As a US academic who is deeply concerned about people not willing or wanting to go to US conferences, this is going to make everything much worse. We've had enough trouble as is trying to get people to keep going to conferences here given the current climate. This is going to make it much harder.
Not everyone can afford to buy a new machine with every trip. Even if they can, that's a lot of additional expense. Easier to just wipe the same machine and reinstall an empty operating system when you go through, along with a tiny number of files so the customs people don't get cranky.
Summary is accurate in that regard. The idea of using Boson sampling to do this came from a paper http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/optics.pdf by Scott Aaronson and Alex Arkhipov which showed that if a classical computer can do Boson sampling efficiently then certain widely believed conjectures in classical computational complexity would need to be false. In particular, the polynomial hierarchy would collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynomial_hierarchy.
It is a deep mistake to react to a single event by responding with a massive response unless that event really is genuinely damaging. This is akin to how one idiot tried to light his shoes on fire on an airplane and now we all need to take off our shoes when going through security. This is an overreaction at its most basic. Unfortunately, given PR and politicians grandstanding about how awful this is, this may be Facebook's best option.
You are missing the point: the point is that if many different "mainstream" news sources agree on something *despite* their differing editorial slants, than the sort of claim being made that this is somehow due to them being part of a "ministry of truth" or anything remotely like that is very dodgy.
The WSJ is right-wing and has a wildly different editorial slant than the Washington Post. If you've decided that the problem is with both the WSJ and WaPo, then the problem is most likely on your end, not theirs.
In the very long-run, once we have functionally built in direct brain to computer interfaces, what is going to stop people from sending a lot of half-baked emails and the like? At least with a phone, you can take it away from someone when they are drunk, but frankly given how incoherent my very late night/early morning thoughts are, I'd be more worried about accidental shitposting that way, or sending really stupid emails.
This should lead to people being more concerned about general artificial intelligence rather than less. While it is pretty clear that the methods used in things like Alpha-Go cannot by themselves do much beyond what they are intended to do, it should also be clear that we're in a situation where many rapid improvements in AI are occurring, and some of these are tackling problems that were thought to be decades away. If it turns out that general AI requires only a few additional breakthroughs, or if it turns out that it can be effectively duplicated with a tiny amount of new things and a lot of processing power, then we could be in a situation where general intelligence, with all its accompanying existential risks, arises suddenly. For an excellent, detailed book on the potential gifts and perils of AGI, I recommend Bostrom's book "Superintelligence."
One of the major issues seems to be what happens when a plane comes in too fast. Straight runways handle that well. It is hard to handle that with circular runways. There are a lot of other safety advantages of the standard setup.
Over time batter energy density has improved by approximately 5-10% a year. Do you expect this trend to continue? If not, what do you expect will happen in the long-term? Are there other metrics by which you expect batteries to continue to improve?
Yes, I acknowledged that objection to Bostrom in my last paragraph. Please read the whole comment. The primary point here isn't whether their are flaws with Bostrom's argument anyhow; the point is that TFA's objections don't grapple with Bostrom's actual argument.
The objection in question ignores Bostrom's basic argument. Bostrom's primary argument for being in a simulation boils down to the observation that it is very likely that an advanced civilization would have the ability to run very accurate simulations. Moreover, one of the things they'd be obviously interested in would be their own past ancestors; if that's the case, then over the very long period that such civilizations will exist one will expect many more "copies" of people on ancient Earth than any of the originals, unless one expects civilization to die out well before we get to that technology level. If the laws of physics are simulated badly enough that we can notice, then they aren't doing an effective ancestor simulation, so the objection here doesn't make sense.
There are a lot of issues with Bostrom's argument; for example, one might question whether simulations of that level of detail will ever be able to be made on a large scale. But the argument being made here doesn't grapple with the fundamental issues.
Sure, it is possible that these will turn out to be useful and cheap enough to be common devices in the home. My comment was what was likely. And if that does happen, it will be very far off (just as there were about 40 years between that IBM remark and when personal computers were a thing). In order for quantum computers to be common enough for personal use, two things need to happen: first, the computers will need to be small and cheap enough that they can be in fit in the home attached to a classical computer; one might imagine something like a special quantum processor for the processes that take advantage of it. Second, and this is really important: we would need algorithms that the quantum computer can use to do things that are common that a classical computer does slower. Right now, most of the things that a quantum computer can do asymptotically better than a classical computer are highly specialized things like factoring integers that most people don't need. If we found good quantum algorithms to do things like graphical processing that might change.
This is not the D-Wave system being discussed. This is a true universal quantum computer, whereas D-Waves system uses a modified form of quantum annealing and whether it gives any fundamental speedup over classical computers is open.
Because if I understand quantum theory correctly, it both works, and doesn't. There is no measurement for a half binary state in a binary world of absolute on and off.
I'm not sure what you mean by "it" here, but pretty much every interpretation of this is wrong. In fact, measurement of quantum superpositions do return specific classical states, with a probability based on the superpositions.
I think pursuing analogue supercomputers might be a better place to start.
We have specific theorems about what analogue classical computers can do. See for example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0196885888900048 and https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0502072. In general, analog computers cannot do error correction and can when used to do optimization get easily stuck in local minima.
A more reasonable argument would be "We need more money to continue milking this quantum cow that never produces anything."
Quantum computing is still in its infancy and is best thought of as still in the basic research category. But even given that, there's been massive improvement in the last few years, both in terms of physical implementations (how many entangled qubits one can process) and in terms of understanding the broader theory. One major aspect where both the experimental and theoretical ends have seen major improvement is quantum error correction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction.
It is unlikely that most people will see quantum computers in their day to day lives. But one will see the many improvements that they give. For example, there's strong reasons to think that quantum computers will make doing chemistry simulations easier, resulting in more new interesting things in different contexts, including medicines. For similar reasons, one expects that quantum computers will make it easier to design better classical computers.
One of the major issues is the need for actual empirical evidence that quantum computers can do things that classical computers cannot with reasonable time constraints. Right now, the general consensus is that if we understand correctly the laws of physics this should be the case, but there are some people who are very prominent holdouts who are convinced that quantum computing will not scale. Gil Kalai is the most prominent https://gilkalai.wordpress.com/2014/03/18/why-quantum-computers-cannot-work-the-movie/. It is likely that before any 50 bit quantum computer we'll have already answered this question. The most likely answer will be using boson sampling systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boson_sampling which in their simplest form give information about the behavior of photons when scattered in a simple way. Scott Aaronson and Alex Arkhipov showed that if a classical computer could efficiently duplicate boson sampling with only a small increase in time then some already existing conjectures in classical computational complexity had to be false. (In particular, the polynomial hierarchy would have to collapse and we're generally confident that isn't the case.) Boson sampling is much easier to implement than a universal quantum computer, although no one has any practical use of boson sampling at present.
All of that said, the "a few years" in the article is critical- it isn't plausible that a 50 qubit universal system will be sold in 5 years. But 10 or 20 years are plausible. It also isn't completely clear how practically useful a 50 qubit system would be. At a few hundred qubits one is clearly in the realm of having direct practical applications, but 50 is sort of in a fuzzy range.
How are you getting that less people liked Hillary? She has more than 3 million more votes than Trump did.