The case hinged on whether Alfred Anaya knew that the compartments were being used to smuggle drugs. In this context, when he was repairing one of the compartments in question he saw that it was full of bundles of cash. The prosecutors argued (and the jury agreed) that this was clear evidence that something illegal was going on, most likely drugs. He could have said no at that point, but he didn't. I'm generally in favor of legalization for most drugs, but this fellow isn't as sympathetic and innocent as the summary makes him out to be.
So I'm not a biologist and am a little confused why discovering these molecules is a big deal, since we've already found amino acids in space. Is this just because it means that amino acids might be really more common than realize?
Petridish is the scientific analog of Kickstarter, devoted specifically to scientific goals , and they've had much less success. Note also that Kickstarter itself has included science related projects that have narrow, specific goals. And they don't show this sort of success. The issue isn't anything to do with any specific systems goals or rules but what people will fund.
On the one hand all these games being funded by Kickstarter are great because it means that they get to know they have a natural audience before they've made it. And it effectively lets people act in some sense like very small time investors but getting a product back as the result of the investment. The same goes for a lot of the other fun Kickstarted projects. But at another level, what ends up being successfully Kickstarted seems to not reflect well on people as a whole. Games, webcomics and other entertainment projects routinely get quickly Kickstarted, sometimes a lot over the funded level. However, at the same time, science projects and other genuinely helpful for humanity research projects struggle with their Kickstarters and almost never have this sort of response. Apparently when it comes to actually seeing where we'll spend money we'd all prefer fun games to actually learning about the universe or fighting disease.
We already have a lot of resources going to dealing with nuclear weapons and bioweapons. Meanwhile, after the fall of the USSR, the chance of a full scale nuclear war went down a lot. And there may even be benefits from many countries having nukes- there's the notion of "nuclear peace" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_peace- once a few countries have nukes, they are less likely to go to war with each other. In contrast, we have very little going to deal with asteroids and other existential risk threats from space, so we might as well put some resources into it, especially given that asteroid tracking telescopes will also give us interesting scientific data.
Your basic point does however have some validity. There's the serious problem of the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. That is, something apparently makes advanced civilizations very rare. It is possible that most of the filtration stopping civilizations occurs before they reach our tech level (e.g. need for life to arise, need for complex life to arise, need for intelligent life to arise, need for civilization to arise, etc.) However, there's a definite possibility that much of the Filter is in front of us and not behind us. If that's the case, Filtration likely needs to occur very soon (next few centuries) since once we're spread out a bit in space, destroying or severely setting back our whole civilization will be much tougher. This narrow window suggests that most of the civilization destroying events we need to worry about are ones that will be created by us, and not natural ones, since natural ones are just so rare. So while we're clearly not putting enough resources into investigating and preventing existential risks, it is possible that almost all the resources we put in should focus on the tech-based ones.
I see. So noting things like how quotes from Anti-Federalists aren't good guides to what the Constitution means makes one unreasonable? That makes so much sense...
Ok. So egregious is probably too strong a wording in this context. But most of your quotes aren't at all relevant to the matter in question. First, you've (again) completely ignored the phrase "well-regulated". Second, the Webster quote, nor the Henry quote, nor the Jefferson mention the word militia. Also, trying to use Patrick Henry as evidence in this sort of situation is particularly strange given that Henry was an anti-Federalist who opposed the Constitution. So generic remarks by him simply don't matter. So let's look at the quotes that do use the word milita"
Melancton Smith isn't arguing that that's the default definition of militia, he's arguing that he wants that to be what a properly formed militia is. The George Mason quote meanwhile is out of context, as you can see from reading http://www.saneguns.org/law/mason_01.html for example.
Yes, and historically definitions were closer to 1 than others. This isn't "shenanigans" but is the consensus of most law professors, linguists and others. The militias were official organizations under the state governors which eventually became what we call today the National Guard. Definition 4 is particularly egregiously modern and not relevant, and 3 just doesn't make sense in context.
Stop and frisk is covered as not ok under the 4th Amendment. It has nothing to do with whether or not I'm scared of guns. As to the second Amendment it specifically starts with the phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State". It is the only Amendment with a preamble explaining its purpose.
You are massively confusing two distinct issues. The Second Amendment is about a well-regulate militia. The Fourth Amendment is for reasonable search and seizure. Objecting to backscatter X-rays is, unlike the gun nuts, defended by classical readings of the Fourth Amendment. That's aside from the serious issue of exposing people to radiation with minimal safety precautions. Moreover, doing this with federal buildings would be a lot worse. You can at least have other alternatives to flying (long car travel, train travel, boat travel). But when one needs to go do something at a federal agency one doesn't have any options.
Don't blame SCOTUS. The Supreme Court has actually said this isn't ok with a similar case involving someone 25 miles from the border. See Almeida Sanchez v. United States: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6933260753627774699 The bottom line is that the Court has already said that DHS can't do this. It doesn't matter how much DHS says they can, when it gets to a court any search based on this sort of thing will be thrown out.
So I don't know what Obamacare has to do with this topic other than at a marginal level. But let's examine your notion of "Pass a failed law: Go to Jail."- How do you decide that a law has failed? Do the people decide? Do the politicians? I'm particularly curious in the context of healthcare reform how you can tell that it "failed" before many parts of it are even implemented. And how do you decide which politicians are responsible for the failure? Very often legislation is a result of compromise, so you can get some people saying that a law failed because it did too much while others claim that it failed at its goals by doing too little. Worse, sometimes it doesn't even matte what direction one goes in as long as one doesn't have too much compromise. For example, a major reason that the space shuttle was such a problem was that they designed it to satisfy everyone.
Not at all accurate. The King pardons people after they've been in jail (since they generally don't get any bail) for weeks or months, and even after convictions he takes time to pardon them, and then gets to be all generous. The King could if he wanted too, tell people that he doesn't like the law and they should get rid of it. He, and his people are together stamping on others basic ability for the most important forms of free speech- the ability to criticize their government. So fuck him, and fuck the monarchy and fuck their laws. Fuck em.
In addition to the problems pointed out by MyLongNickName, it is worth pointing out that problems being in NP don't mean they aren't solvable. Quite the opposite in fact: any fixed problem in NP is solvable. The issue is that some problems in NP (the so-called NP complete problems) are conjecturally difficult to solve. Roughly speaking, P is the set of questions which can be solved in time that is bounded by polynomial of the length of the problem statement. So for example, "Is the number n prime?" can be answered in time which is polynomial in the length of its input (here the input is the digits of n). Problems in NP are problems which when the answer is "yes" a proof exists that is the answer is yes, and the proof size is bounded by a polynomial of the input length, and the proof can be verified in polynomial time. So to solve a problem in NP one essentially needs to just check all the possible proofs of short size. The big conjecture is that P and NP are actually distinct- that is that there are problems where it is easy to prove a solution works but finding a solution is tough.
But there's another problem here. Even saying that chess is in NP isn't accurate. There are multiple generalizations of what one means by chess and since complexity classes require not single problems but sets of problems, what framework you use to call "chess" matters. http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/6563/what-is-the-computational-complexity-of-solving-chess discusses this in some detail. In some frameworks, "chess" is actually in the much larger set of EXP or PSPACE, which are worse than NP in general, but are still finite time solvable.
Generally, the term "mass driver" used to mean electromagnetically accelerated launch systems. Most of these proposals use explosive power. Essentially, this sort of proposal essentially resembles 19th century/early 20th century suggestions for going into space.
One obvious issue is how often these phrases show up in legitimate contexts. For example, "grey area" might be used frequently if one has a legal department. Not to volunteer information could easily be an instruction to an overly talkative employee or executive or the like to not blab about what the company is currently trying to do but hasn't gotten to work quite yet, or even has gotten to work and are industrial secrets. The last is a surprisingly common problem- a relative of my at one point was the COO of a baking company that was owned by someone who knew little to nothing about the industry (having inherited it) and on at least two occasions blabbed to people outside the company secrets about their manufacturing processes in apparent attempts to impress people. And that was in baking. In the circumstance my relative couldn't get the owner to stop (it is a bit hard to tell your boss to shut up) , but similar issues probably show up in a lot of industries.
So while some of these phrases seem obviously problematic (off the books is the most obvious one) I suspect that others could by themselves be often very innocent.
I grew up in Cook County Illinois (Chicago area), and I've had dead relatives "vote". I've seen busloads of people who obviously didn't live in the precinct dumped at my local polling place to "vote".
Yes, ballot stuffing occurs. And yes absentee ballot occurs (all the freaking time, and this is how dead people "vote"). But actual in person voter fraud is vanishing rare. There are literally on the order of under a hundred such cases a year. In person voter fraud is both inefficient (you need actual people to show up) and easy to get caught at (by accidentally being recognized or trying to vote for someone who already exists) and you can't get more than a single extra vote per a person at a single voting location because if one does the risk will go up massively. If you want to do something, deal with actual threats: absentee voter fraud and machine tampering. Claims of in person voter fraud are simply not born out.
Given this situation, claims of in person voter fraud are really just what is being claimed here: excuses for voter suppression.
Language, currency and cultures often divide us, but the internet is one of the things unified in this world.
Unfortunately, the internet in many ways divides us. It used to be that people needed to be geographically proximate to form in-groups that were culturally distinct and had distinct ideologies. Now, people can easily form groups with people from very far away, and then only focus their information sources and ideologically affiliated sources. Thus, you can get conservatives who only read right-wing websites, and similarly for liberals, or anarchists, or monarchist, etc. It is likely that the internet can easily increase division for issues of ideology and religion. And if there's one thing the last few hundred years of history have taught us, it is that people are willing to kill over abstract ideals even when they share culture, currency and language.
This is clearly missing the point. The Earth is well over four billion years old, and almost certainly under five billion years old. Given that this other option as as Rubio is concerned is a range of 5000-10,000 years old, any issues still outstanding simply aren't relevant.
No. If we have institutions where everyone picks and chooses the ones with ideas and beliefs they like the end result is that everyone just goes to their own echo chamber. Universities therefore need to foster free speech of all sorts. Similarly, the statement about public universities is confused: There's a clear difference between saying "university money can't go to religion" and censoring religious speech.
It's pretty obvious from reading old Greek or Roman texts that people are pretty much the same now as they've always been. Shakespeare shows that nothing much has changed in England for over 400 years.
There are two serious issues with this claim. First, most (although not all) of the Flynn effect has occurred on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum. That means that the smartest people may not be that much smarter, but the average intelligence has still gone up by a lot. See for example http://synapse.princeton.edu/~brained/chapter15/colom_andres-pueyo05_intelligence_Spanish-schoolchildren-nutrition-hypothesis.pdf. Second, people today seem to be in some ways smarter than many of the smart people a few thousand years ago. For example, it used to be a big deal that someone was able to read so well that they didn't need to murmur to themselves or move their lips, whereas now we consider reading out loud a sign of stupidity http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html. It is possible that part of this difference was simply cultural, and that silent reading was purely a matter of education and norms. But the fact that some old sources considered silent reading a sign of intelligence suggests otherwise.
It may be that IQ isn't useful as more than a rough approximation. But it isn't "BS". The evidence for some form of general intelligence in the form of a g-factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) is extremely robust. That's why for example the largest consumer and designer of intelligence tests in the world is the US military. They've found that soldiers who perform better on standadized tests learn faster and are less likely to engage in fatal accidents or friendly fire. That's why all soldiers take the ASVAB and they don't let the low scorers enlist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASVAB. Similarly, the Wonderlic test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_Test which emphasizes speed and precision rather than difficult puzzles correlates highly with IQ. The current version is actually designed to do that, but if some form of g-factor wasn't present it really shouldn't be possible to make such a test correlate so strongly with a long test emphasizing different skills.
It is likely that beyond a certain point, IQ scores don't matter. But a 15 or 20 point difference is both statistically robust and relevant to simply put, how intelligent someone is.
The Flynn effect is cross-cultural though, not just the United States, but essentially global. That's not consistent with the US increased emphasis on test taking. See for example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289604000522, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886905000711 for Norway and Australia as two example countries. Moreover, if this were caused by increased emphasis on test-taking you'd expect to see the entire bell-curve move up whereas most of the movement is on the lower end. Moreover, if testing were what mattered then the US military would have seen a decreased usefulness in IQ testing as an estimate for whether people will make good soldiers, and yet they haven't seen any decline in usefulness of the ASVAB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery.
Note that quantum computers have already been used to factor larger numbers. As TFA discusses and this preprint http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3726 from about a year ago reports, there has been success factoring 143. But they didn't use Shore's algorithm but rather used an adiabatic algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_quantum_computation. TFA makes a slightly incorrect claim that the adiabatic quantum algorithm "unlike Shore's algorithm, is not mathematically guaranteed to provide faster performance for larger numbers." This is misleading: Shore's is known to provide a polynomial time solution to factoring, but this is only known to be faster than the best known classical algorithms. In this context, we still can't prove that factoring is hard in the sense of taking more than polynomial time on a classical computer. Such a result is strictly stronger than P != NP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem which is one of the biggest unsolved problems of mathematics today.
Slashdot Mirror
The case hinged on whether Alfred Anaya knew that the compartments were being used to smuggle drugs. In this context, when he was repairing one of the compartments in question he saw that it was full of bundles of cash. The prosecutors argued (and the jury agreed) that this was clear evidence that something illegal was going on, most likely drugs. He could have said no at that point, but he didn't. I'm generally in favor of legalization for most drugs, but this fellow isn't as sympathetic and innocent as the summary makes him out to be.
So I'm not a biologist and am a little confused why discovering these molecules is a big deal, since we've already found amino acids in space. Is this just because it means that amino acids might be really more common than realize?
Petridish is the scientific analog of Kickstarter, devoted specifically to scientific goals , and they've had much less success. Note also that Kickstarter itself has included science related projects that have narrow, specific goals. And they don't show this sort of success. The issue isn't anything to do with any specific systems goals or rules but what people will fund.
On the one hand all these games being funded by Kickstarter are great because it means that they get to know they have a natural audience before they've made it. And it effectively lets people act in some sense like very small time investors but getting a product back as the result of the investment. The same goes for a lot of the other fun Kickstarted projects. But at another level, what ends up being successfully Kickstarted seems to not reflect well on people as a whole. Games, webcomics and other entertainment projects routinely get quickly Kickstarted, sometimes a lot over the funded level. However, at the same time, science projects and other genuinely helpful for humanity research projects struggle with their Kickstarters and almost never have this sort of response. Apparently when it comes to actually seeing where we'll spend money we'd all prefer fun games to actually learning about the universe or fighting disease.
We already have a lot of resources going to dealing with nuclear weapons and bioweapons. Meanwhile, after the fall of the USSR, the chance of a full scale nuclear war went down a lot. And there may even be benefits from many countries having nukes- there's the notion of "nuclear peace" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_peace- once a few countries have nukes, they are less likely to go to war with each other. In contrast, we have very little going to deal with asteroids and other existential risk threats from space, so we might as well put some resources into it, especially given that asteroid tracking telescopes will also give us interesting scientific data.
Your basic point does however have some validity. There's the serious problem of the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter. That is, something apparently makes advanced civilizations very rare. It is possible that most of the filtration stopping civilizations occurs before they reach our tech level (e.g. need for life to arise, need for complex life to arise, need for intelligent life to arise, need for civilization to arise, etc.) However, there's a definite possibility that much of the Filter is in front of us and not behind us. If that's the case, Filtration likely needs to occur very soon (next few centuries) since once we're spread out a bit in space, destroying or severely setting back our whole civilization will be much tougher. This narrow window suggests that most of the civilization destroying events we need to worry about are ones that will be created by us, and not natural ones, since natural ones are just so rare. So while we're clearly not putting enough resources into investigating and preventing existential risks, it is possible that almost all the resources we put in should focus on the tech-based ones.
I see. So noting things like how quotes from Anti-Federalists aren't good guides to what the Constitution means makes one unreasonable? That makes so much sense...
Ok. So egregious is probably too strong a wording in this context. But most of your quotes aren't at all relevant to the matter in question. First, you've (again) completely ignored the phrase "well-regulated". Second, the Webster quote, nor the Henry quote, nor the Jefferson mention the word militia. Also, trying to use Patrick Henry as evidence in this sort of situation is particularly strange given that Henry was an anti-Federalist who opposed the Constitution. So generic remarks by him simply don't matter. So let's look at the quotes that do use the word milita" Melancton Smith isn't arguing that that's the default definition of militia, he's arguing that he wants that to be what a properly formed militia is. The George Mason quote meanwhile is out of context, as you can see from reading http://www.saneguns.org/law/mason_01.html for example.
Yes, and historically definitions were closer to 1 than others. This isn't "shenanigans" but is the consensus of most law professors, linguists and others. The militias were official organizations under the state governors which eventually became what we call today the National Guard. Definition 4 is particularly egregiously modern and not relevant, and 3 just doesn't make sense in context.
Stop and frisk is covered as not ok under the 4th Amendment. It has nothing to do with whether or not I'm scared of guns. As to the second Amendment it specifically starts with the phrase "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State". It is the only Amendment with a preamble explaining its purpose.
You are massively confusing two distinct issues. The Second Amendment is about a well-regulate militia. The Fourth Amendment is for reasonable search and seizure. Objecting to backscatter X-rays is, unlike the gun nuts, defended by classical readings of the Fourth Amendment. That's aside from the serious issue of exposing people to radiation with minimal safety precautions. Moreover, doing this with federal buildings would be a lot worse. You can at least have other alternatives to flying (long car travel, train travel, boat travel). But when one needs to go do something at a federal agency one doesn't have any options.
Don't blame SCOTUS. The Supreme Court has actually said this isn't ok with a similar case involving someone 25 miles from the border. See Almeida Sanchez v. United States: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6933260753627774699 The bottom line is that the Court has already said that DHS can't do this. It doesn't matter how much DHS says they can, when it gets to a court any search based on this sort of thing will be thrown out.
So I don't know what Obamacare has to do with this topic other than at a marginal level. But let's examine your notion of "Pass a failed law: Go to Jail."- How do you decide that a law has failed? Do the people decide? Do the politicians? I'm particularly curious in the context of healthcare reform how you can tell that it "failed" before many parts of it are even implemented. And how do you decide which politicians are responsible for the failure? Very often legislation is a result of compromise, so you can get some people saying that a law failed because it did too much while others claim that it failed at its goals by doing too little. Worse, sometimes it doesn't even matte what direction one goes in as long as one doesn't have too much compromise. For example, a major reason that the space shuttle was such a problem was that they designed it to satisfy everyone.
Not at all accurate. The King pardons people after they've been in jail (since they generally don't get any bail) for weeks or months, and even after convictions he takes time to pardon them, and then gets to be all generous. The King could if he wanted too, tell people that he doesn't like the law and they should get rid of it. He, and his people are together stamping on others basic ability for the most important forms of free speech- the ability to criticize their government. So fuck him, and fuck the monarchy and fuck their laws. Fuck em.
In addition to the problems pointed out by MyLongNickName, it is worth pointing out that problems being in NP don't mean they aren't solvable. Quite the opposite in fact: any fixed problem in NP is solvable. The issue is that some problems in NP (the so-called NP complete problems) are conjecturally difficult to solve. Roughly speaking, P is the set of questions which can be solved in time that is bounded by polynomial of the length of the problem statement. So for example, "Is the number n prime?" can be answered in time which is polynomial in the length of its input (here the input is the digits of n). Problems in NP are problems which when the answer is "yes" a proof exists that is the answer is yes, and the proof size is bounded by a polynomial of the input length, and the proof can be verified in polynomial time. So to solve a problem in NP one essentially needs to just check all the possible proofs of short size. The big conjecture is that P and NP are actually distinct- that is that there are problems where it is easy to prove a solution works but finding a solution is tough.
But there's another problem here. Even saying that chess is in NP isn't accurate. There are multiple generalizations of what one means by chess and since complexity classes require not single problems but sets of problems, what framework you use to call "chess" matters. http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/6563/what-is-the-computational-complexity-of-solving-chess discusses this in some detail. In some frameworks, "chess" is actually in the much larger set of EXP or PSPACE, which are worse than NP in general, but are still finite time solvable.
Generally, the term "mass driver" used to mean electromagnetically accelerated launch systems. Most of these proposals use explosive power. Essentially, this sort of proposal essentially resembles 19th century/early 20th century suggestions for going into space.
One obvious issue is how often these phrases show up in legitimate contexts. For example, "grey area" might be used frequently if one has a legal department. Not to volunteer information could easily be an instruction to an overly talkative employee or executive or the like to not blab about what the company is currently trying to do but hasn't gotten to work quite yet, or even has gotten to work and are industrial secrets. The last is a surprisingly common problem- a relative of my at one point was the COO of a baking company that was owned by someone who knew little to nothing about the industry (having inherited it) and on at least two occasions blabbed to people outside the company secrets about their manufacturing processes in apparent attempts to impress people. And that was in baking. In the circumstance my relative couldn't get the owner to stop (it is a bit hard to tell your boss to shut up) , but similar issues probably show up in a lot of industries.
So while some of these phrases seem obviously problematic (off the books is the most obvious one) I suspect that others could by themselves be often very innocent.
I grew up in Cook County Illinois (Chicago area), and I've had dead relatives "vote". I've seen busloads of people who obviously didn't live in the precinct dumped at my local polling place to "vote".
Obama voted in Chicago and even he had to show an ID. http://www.mediaite.com/online/why-president-obama-had-to-show-photo-i-d-while-voting-early/. Meanwhile claims of people being bussed into precincts have never been confirmed. Almost every single claim of them has involved people simply not realizing how large or diverse their local area is.
Yes, ballot stuffing occurs. And yes absentee ballot occurs (all the freaking time, and this is how dead people "vote"). But actual in person voter fraud is vanishing rare. There are literally on the order of under a hundred such cases a year. In person voter fraud is both inefficient (you need actual people to show up) and easy to get caught at (by accidentally being recognized or trying to vote for someone who already exists) and you can't get more than a single extra vote per a person at a single voting location because if one does the risk will go up massively. If you want to do something, deal with actual threats: absentee voter fraud and machine tampering. Claims of in person voter fraud are simply not born out.
Given this situation, claims of in person voter fraud are really just what is being claimed here: excuses for voter suppression.
Language, currency and cultures often divide us, but the internet is one of the things unified in this world.
Unfortunately, the internet in many ways divides us. It used to be that people needed to be geographically proximate to form in-groups that were culturally distinct and had distinct ideologies. Now, people can easily form groups with people from very far away, and then only focus their information sources and ideologically affiliated sources. Thus, you can get conservatives who only read right-wing websites, and similarly for liberals, or anarchists, or monarchist, etc. It is likely that the internet can easily increase division for issues of ideology and religion. And if there's one thing the last few hundred years of history have taught us, it is that people are willing to kill over abstract ideals even when they share culture, currency and language.
This is clearly missing the point. The Earth is well over four billion years old, and almost certainly under five billion years old. Given that this other option as as Rubio is concerned is a range of 5000-10,000 years old, any issues still outstanding simply aren't relevant.
No. If we have institutions where everyone picks and chooses the ones with ideas and beliefs they like the end result is that everyone just goes to their own echo chamber. Universities therefore need to foster free speech of all sorts. Similarly, the statement about public universities is confused: There's a clear difference between saying "university money can't go to religion" and censoring religious speech.
It's pretty obvious from reading old Greek or Roman texts that people are pretty much the same now as they've always been. Shakespeare shows that nothing much has changed in England for over 400 years.
There are two serious issues with this claim. First, most (although not all) of the Flynn effect has occurred on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum. That means that the smartest people may not be that much smarter, but the average intelligence has still gone up by a lot. See for example http://synapse.princeton.edu/~brained/chapter15/colom_andres-pueyo05_intelligence_Spanish-schoolchildren-nutrition-hypothesis.pdf. Second, people today seem to be in some ways smarter than many of the smart people a few thousand years ago. For example, it used to be a big deal that someone was able to read so well that they didn't need to murmur to themselves or move their lips, whereas now we consider reading out loud a sign of stupidity http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html. It is possible that part of this difference was simply cultural, and that silent reading was purely a matter of education and norms. But the fact that some old sources considered silent reading a sign of intelligence suggests otherwise.
It may be that IQ isn't useful as more than a rough approximation. But it isn't "BS". The evidence for some form of general intelligence in the form of a g-factor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) is extremely robust. That's why for example the largest consumer and designer of intelligence tests in the world is the US military. They've found that soldiers who perform better on standadized tests learn faster and are less likely to engage in fatal accidents or friendly fire. That's why all soldiers take the ASVAB and they don't let the low scorers enlist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASVAB. Similarly, the Wonderlic test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_Test which emphasizes speed and precision rather than difficult puzzles correlates highly with IQ. The current version is actually designed to do that, but if some form of g-factor wasn't present it really shouldn't be possible to make such a test correlate so strongly with a long test emphasizing different skills.
It is likely that beyond a certain point, IQ scores don't matter. But a 15 or 20 point difference is both statistically robust and relevant to simply put, how intelligent someone is.
The Flynn effect is cross-cultural though, not just the United States, but essentially global. That's not consistent with the US increased emphasis on test taking. See for example http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289604000522, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886905000711 for Norway and Australia as two example countries. Moreover, if this were caused by increased emphasis on test-taking you'd expect to see the entire bell-curve move up whereas most of the movement is on the lower end. Moreover, if testing were what mattered then the US military would have seen a decreased usefulness in IQ testing as an estimate for whether people will make good soldiers, and yet they haven't seen any decline in usefulness of the ASVAB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Vocational_Aptitude_Battery.
Many researchers disagree with Flynn about the cause of the Flynn effect. Two other common hypotheses are that lower parasite load in children leads to better functioning brains and older people will have bodies under less stress. Better nutrition does essentially the same thing. There's a fair bit of evidence for these hypotheses. For example, if nutrition levels matter then one would expect a lot more movement on the low end of IQ than on the high end and that's exactly what we see. http://synapse.princeton.edu/~brained/chapter15/colom_andres-pueyo05_intelligence_Spanish-schoolchildren-nutrition-hypothesis.pdf. Meanwhile, a good case for the parasite load hypothesis can be found http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289611000286.
Note that quantum computers have already been used to factor larger numbers. As TFA discusses and this preprint http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3726 from about a year ago reports, there has been success factoring 143. But they didn't use Shore's algorithm but rather used an adiabatic algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_quantum_computation. TFA makes a slightly incorrect claim that the adiabatic quantum algorithm "unlike Shore's algorithm, is not mathematically guaranteed to provide faster performance for larger numbers." This is misleading: Shore's is known to provide a polynomial time solution to factoring, but this is only known to be faster than the best known classical algorithms. In this context, we still can't prove that factoring is hard in the sense of taking more than polynomial time on a classical computer. Such a result is strictly stronger than P != NP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem which is one of the biggest unsolved problems of mathematics today.