To win our game, write on a piece of paper the name of the next cashier you believe will be fired. Write their name [the person who will be fired], today’s date, today’s time, and your name. Seal it in an envelope and give it to the manager to put in my envelope.
“Here’s how the game will work: We are doubling our secret-shopper efforts, and your store will be visited during the day and at night several times a week. Secret shoppers will be looking for cashiers wearing a hat, talking on a cell phone, not wearing a QC Mart shirt, having someone hanging around/behind the counter, and/or a personal car parked by the pumps after 7 p.m., among other things.
“If the name in your envelope has the right answer, you will win $10 CASH. Only one winner per firing unless there are multiple right answers with the exact same name, date, and time. Once we fire the person, we will open all the envelopes, award the prize, and start the contest again.
“And no fair picking Mike Miller from (the Rockingham Road store). He was fired at around 11:30 a.m. today for wearing a hat and talking on his cell phone. Good luck!!!!!!!!!!”
Wow. What an asshole. In a better economy I'd hope that he'd have trouble getting workers. Unfortunately, in the current economy it is probably much easier to find desperate people willing to put up with crap.
As far as I can tell, this is just one more example of how turf wars between the different agencies caused severe information gaps before 9/11. That was obviously a problem. However, after the last decade of the Patriot Act, I'm sufficiently worried by the government information sharing as part of a wider pattern, that part of me wants to go back to the silly turf wars as a de facto restraint on various government agencies becoming too powerful or having access to things they shouldn't.
But there's no real evidence of any sort of high-level conspiracy. This is just low-level bureaucratic infighting at its finest. You can see lots of examples of this in the 9/11 Report which details the many intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. Some of them seem like intelligence failures mainly due to hindsight bias where what the evidence meant became obvious only if you knew what happened, but others are genuine failures. There's really not that much new here.
Some of the drawings were very high up so children had to have been lifted by adults to reach them. Moreover, there are clear designs in the patterns, and swirls and the like. They aren't just straight lines at height level. And as discussed at http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/prehistoric-pre-school/, the children's work was mainly confined largely to a single room.
But there's one thing that this sort of thing really shows: science rocks. We can use clever tests and careful measurements to figure out details about the age of children painting on caves. This is exactly why science is awesome. And we're always learning more and more, developing more clever techniques, and finding out more about the universe and ourselves. We are on a long, slow, possibly never-ending journey. But that journey leads closer and closer to truth. And those children and adults long ago who struggled to survive and experimented with different ways to paint are part of that same journey that we are.
(Sorry, something about this story just gets me a bit emotional.)
I don't know if you are serious or joking here, but you could definitely stand to take this course. You seem to be under a lot of misconceptions about what quantum computing can do.
Quantum, or more specifically quantum mechanics will be the next Major human revolution.
Quantum mechanics is used all the time by lots of devices you use. Small transistors work because of quantum mechanics. Lasers work off of lots of quantum mechanics. LEDs work off of quantum mechanics. Etc. Etc. There's nothing new about using quantum mechanics.
and Quantum Transceivers to that all those Optical SFPs in your switches and routers won't need cables anymore
This and almost every other application you mention is complete nonsense. Quantum mechanics does not allow you to transmit information in special ways. Entanglement doesn't let you get away with that. (This is as far as we are aware, ignoring for now certain very interesting results from CERN that are likely to be incorrect and are still being checked over. Even if this is correct, it is unlikely to allow actual FTL or the like but rather be other interesting new physics. And calling that simply quantum mechanics would be misleading.)
You can do things with quantum computers that you can't do with conventional systems. What we mean by quantum computers are not computers that use quantum mechanics in general (since they all do that) but computers that can take advantage of entanglement. This allows certain processes to occur much faster than they can with a conventional computer. For example, operations with Fourier series become a lot easier, and it becomes much easier to find the period of a given function. This translates into being able to do certain classes of problems much faster.
For example, it seems that using something called Shore's algorithm ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithmrel=url2html-18175http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm> you can factor integers faster on a quantum computer than you can on a classical computer. This is a big deal, but even this requires a lot of caveats. First, we can't actually prove that this is better than the best classical factoring algorithms. In most interesting formulations of this claim, it depends on the assumption that factoring is not in P, a claim that is strictly stronger than the claim that P != NP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem (it is possible that factoring lies in P but one gets a large speedup of like Klogn or something like that to the quantum system. This is possible, but fundamentally less interesting and less useful.)
There are other specific similar examples, and even a handful where we can prove that the quantum version is really better than any classical version. The most prominent such example is Grover's algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm. This algorithm allows you to search unsorted databases much faster than you can in a conventional setting. That's a really useful but ultimately high restrictive use.
Now, in fairness to you there are some uses of entanglement and other interesting quantum phenomena which don't rely on quantum computing per se. So you may have been thinking of those. But those don't allow what you seem to think they can do either! The closest to anything like that is quantum encryption, which makes a system of encryption that is essentially unbreakable as long as our understanding of the laws of physics are correct. That's pretty cool but even that has its own limitations, and it turns out can in some specific circumstances be broken http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080508143107.htm. There are other interesting technologies out
This requires separate landing systems for each stage of the rocket. This is a lot more added mass. And the worst thing to add to a rocket is more mass. Simple reusable systems like parachutes (as were used by the shuttle's solid rocket boosters) are one thing, but full-out rocket powered landing will weigh a lot more, will require a lot of additional fuel, and will add all sorts of technical requirements.
At this point, it doesn't seem that chemical rockets will become that more efficient barring major breakthroughs, like much lighter alloys, or totally new chemical reactions for the fuel. Neither of these seem very likely right now, and the second seems to be much less likely. The first also won't do that much. At this point, I have to be wondering if we should be spending a lot more resources on researching non-rocket methods of going to space. It seems like we may have a bad example of technological lockin since we've put so much work into chemical rockets.
But there are a lot of other methods out there and we should be looking at them. Nuclear rockets are an obvious example, and they can be built without having any serious radioactivity (you use a conventional fission reactor to heat steam). The basic reactor can be suprisingly light- in the 1950s the US and the USSR both experimented with nuclear powered aircraft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft and reactor technology has improved a lot since then. Another possibility is a space gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun. They have been successfully used to do suborbital lobs. They are completely reusable. And since they don't require sending most of their own fuel into space they avoid the common problem of needing more fuel to lift fuel (which is why rockets get bigger fast compared to the size of payload). There are more exotic ideas also like launch loops, space elevators, and space fountains but they seem to be much further from practicality at this point. In the case of space elevators, the main technical problem is making enough high quality nanotubes in a supporting resin, and research into that is ongoing because high quality carbon nanotubes will be useful a large number of different much more mundane technologies.
Groupon is not a social media website by most definitions of that term. Zynga is a single one of many companies profiting from Facebook. Pushing back the Facebook IPO is not a reason to think that the bubble is bursting- indeed if they thought that they'd want to go and do the IPO sooner rather than later. The Zynga and Facebook issues are also probably to some extent due to a new player entering the field in terms of Google+. It does seem that the social media sites don't remain on top for very long. Myspace is dying, and who even remembers Friendster? But it does seem that the industry itself is here to stay. We may end up seeing something similar to what happened with search engines- successive stages of different companies until someone got the product well enough to dominate the market (a long with a healthy dose of early mover effect compared to new rivals). Whether that will happen or not is hard to tell. But declaring that there was a bubble in this context when most of the relevant companies aren't even being traded actively is really difficult. Declaring that the bubble has burst makes even less sense.
You don't get information from anything in a quantum computation. The total information is the same. The only substantial difference is that you can process some things faster. This isn't similar to the issue of conservation of energy- in that context there's a mathematical law that you can't break. Here there's just a lot of computation that you can do faster. We already know that this can happen at a small scale, the primary issue is scaling it up which seems to be an engineering problem. We don't know of any fundamental laws of physics that say we can't get away with this. Also, the computation involved is probably not ungodly. For example, it is suspected that you can't use quantum computers to solve NP complete problems in polynomial time. So, the computational result is more in the category of very impressive but definitely mortal. Note also that there's been a definite pattern in the last few years of more and more things turning out to be surprisingly easy to compute. The most prominent example would be the AKS algorithm which showed that one could test for primaity in polynomial time on a classical computer.
According to TFA, the central problem is that the claimed planet seems to have an orbit which goes into the dusk disk around the star. But if this happens regularly, the disk should have been disrupted. The planet is also much brighter than one would expect for a planet in that position. If this isn't a planet it isn't clear what it is. There does seem to be something there. This could be some sort of artifact of the imaging methods but given the fact that it has been imaged with multiple instruments this seems extremely unlikely. So if this turns out not to be a planet we may be looking at some neat astronomical phenomenon not previously seen. Or it could be a bunch of unusually shiny dust. Hard to tell at this point. This is the sort of thing where the James Webb Telescope could be quite helpful. As of the last update it looks like James Webb is back on. But given how the current Congress acts, it could easily move to being canceled again.
The key issue for quantum computing isn't that it will allow fixed increases in performance by some factor. The key is that it allows asymptotic increases. Thus for example, Shor's algorithm allows you to factor integers at a rate which is asymptotically better than classical factoring algorithms (although we can't actually prove that no better classical algorithm exists. This is a statement that is strictly stronger than claiming that P != NP). This is part of a general pattern. So, as computational power and the need for computational power increases, the advantage that quantum computers have will grow larger. It won't be a fixed factor.
In my view a computer a million times more performant is very useful however in the end even while this may seem impressive these sorts of advancements do not hold a candle to the origional promise of QC.
I'm not sure what you were expecting quantum computers to be able to do. There's a lot of media hype which is made worse by people who just don't understand stuff. For example, there's no known way to solve any NP complete problem in polynomial time on a quantum computer. Similarly, while quantum computers can break many public key crypto systems (such as those based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers or on the closely connected problem of the discrete log), they can't break every public key cryptosystem. Quantum computers aren't magic and the people working with them haven't said otherwise.
The current state of the field is advancing. The real problem as discussed in TFA is scaling quantum computers in a useful way that can still do error correction. Shore's algorithm which allows you to quickly factor numbers using a quantum computer requires on the order of n qbits to factor an n bit number. So if one wants to factor say a 300 digit number used in some public key crypto system you would need to control around 300 qbits. The technology for that is clearly very far. There's been recent work using superconducting systems and using quantum dots for qbits both of which look more promising than previous systems. (The first experiments were done with NMR systems which are clearly not very scalable).
From a strictly theoretical compsci perspective, the set of things it seems that quantum computers can do seems to be growing larger. Recent work by Scott Aaronson and others suggest that BQP (the set of problems which can be easily solved by a quantum computer with a low probability of error) may not lie in the polynomial hierarchy at all. http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.4698. This is a much stronger claim then the claim that BQP doesn't lie in NP. This raises the hope that there may be some problems thought of as extremely difficult that lie in NP. However, trying to actually prove any strong results at this point is likely going to be really tough. At this point although many suspect that BPP (the classical analog of BQP) is equal to P, at this point we can't even prove that BPP lies in NP. In many ways theoretical comp sci is still very much in its infancy.
Correct. The neutrinos traveled through solid rock. Neutrinos don't interact with much so as far as they are concerned solid rock isn't a big deal. And you actually want to have the solid rock there. You wouldn't want an open tunnel- the process that creates the neutrinos creates a lot of other particles of all sorts of different types. But all of those get blocked by the rock. The experimental setup in particular needs to block both the muons and tauons. These particles can normally penetrate a lot o the point where stray muons from cosmic ray collisions are a major nuisance for sensitive neutrino detectors even when the detectors are deep underground. The Japanese big neutrino detector Kamiokande has a lot of special equipment to deal with just this. So in this case, having many kilometers of rock is necessary to let the whole thing work otherwise the stray particles would make it impossible to detect neutrino interactions with all the noise.
The word used in the Italian is "tunnel". At first I thought that this might be an example of how one shouldn't always translate a word as the closest sounding word in the target language, since the most closely etymologically related word may not be the most semantically close. This is how we get Dante's Inferno rather than just calling it "Hell" which would be a more accurate English translation. At least once in science this has created a real problem in the past, about a hundred years ago. The canals of Mars were started by the translation of the Italian word "canali" as canals even though "canali" didn't have the same connotation of artificial construction.
However, in this case it looks accurate. I checked with multiple online dictionaries and Google translate to see how they would translate "tunnel" from Italian to English. Everyone gave the obvious one. Just in case, I picked likely possible semantically related words (path, connection, link, beam, bridge) and asked Google for the Italian words. In none of those cases did it hit on tunnel. So it looks like the translation is accurate.
The entire design for the anaytical engine was extremely impressive. The main thing to realize is that the Analytical Engine was Turing Complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness. This means essentially that given enough time and memory it could emulate any program you want to. There's an idea called the Church-Turing thesis which says roughly that the set of things which a Turing machine can do are precisely the things which humans can algorithmically simulate. To appreciate how highly this speaks of the actual design of the Engine one should realize that many early computers like the Harvard Mark I were not Turing complete (although all the early Zuse machines were.)
It seems that Canada is a falling satellite magnet. In 1977, a Soviet satellite fell in Canada also- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954.although that one was probably much worse in terms of damage because Kosmos 954 had a nuclear reactor and some of that debris was radioactive. The only other really major fall where something fell on land was Skylab which fell over Australia. So Canada has managed to get 2/3 major falls that have hit land. That's pretty impressive. I think that Canada and the US are both members of the Space Liability Convention, which has provisions for fallen satellites, so if there's any actual damage from this, the US will need to pay Canada.
Reports seem to indicate they used GPS not lasers. They don''t a straight line of sight (the neutrinos go through solid rock. It isn't a problem since neutrinos generally don't interact with normal matter much.)
Strontium-90, the primary dangerous isotope of strontium has a half-life of 29 years. That means that in 200 years you have about one 70th as much left. Moreover, these isotopes spread around over time. So in practice most areas with these isotopes become less dangerous faster than their half-lives suggest. This is less true for plutonium because it isn't that easily metabolically active, but lots of living things will pick strontium and use it where they would use calcium. So it might suck to be them but it will make the area a lot safer in the long-run.
This isn't a reason to be worried about nuclear power. This shows that bad things can happen when political decisions override science engineering or when bad engineers don't do a good job.. At the end of the day, what you want can't override nature. Nature doesn't care about politics. This is true with many different technologies
At this point, more people die from coal related problems every year than nuclear power. One interesting metric to compare power types is to look at deaths per a terawatt hour. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html. By this metric, nuclear power is one of the safest forms of power out there. The primary reasons that nuclear power stands out to people is because a) it associated with nuclear weapons which makes it scary b) it is a more advanced technology which makes it seem more risky and unnatural c) when something does go wrong is goes wrong in a spectacular fashion. This last is probably the most important- humans react to how much they hear about disasters not how likely they are to impact them. This is why people are afraid of airplane crashes and shark attacks more than car crashes and heart attacks.
Unfortunately, few people are likely to pay attention to this. We are already seeing the fallout as Germany and other European countries turn away from nuclear power. France right now is being surprisingly calm in continuing to use it. Unfortunately, there's some indications that this issue is also making people more worried about fusion power. There's been a long-running problem with scientifically ignorant environmentalists who don't understand the difference between fission and fusion. A lot of them have tried to protest fusion research in the past and Greenpeace has an anti-fusion stance. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/22/fusion_greenpeace_no/. The whole situation sucks.
For example, did you know the flu shots are ineffective and even dangerous? If you start to show the signs of a flu there are simple things you can do. A homeopathic remedy of Oscillococcinum along with Chiropractic adjustments form a two-pronged attack on the flu virus. The Oscillococcinum attacks the young viruses while the adjustments to the spine help the body's innate healing capabilities destroy the mature virus. It's a 100% painless and safe way to heal yourself from within with the human body's most powerful weapon: innate intelligence.
Bob, are you trying to troll at this point? We've got homeopathy involved now too? Ok. Let's spell this out very explicitly: There's no such thing as a young virus or a mature virus. Viruses don't have any metabolism. That means they are either fully assembled or they are being assembled or they are being disassembled while infecting something. There are no young viruses. If you know this little about basic biology you might want to consider what else you don't know. Maybe, just maybe you are wrong about chiropractice being the be all and end all. It takes a lot of effort to admit you are wrong. Many humans can't do it for things they've spent a lot of time believing. But, maybe you can.
However, I suspect you won't. You'll just keep spamming your misguided ideas all over Slashdot and the rest of the internet. In which case, kindly go practice chiropracticory on yourself.
We don't know the exact orbit. If this had been from only a few years ago this would be a small range. But after 40 years this means that the module has a massive range. We don't know where it is. Although we should have a better idea how fast it should be moving which helps slightly. Also, this sort of thing has been done before. Since the late 1700s there's been attempts to track down objects based on some observations. This started off in some sense with Halley's Comet, but that was more about realizing that a large set of observations were the same thing (Halley also had the advantage of realizing that Jupiter and Saturn had a major impact on comets and also had Newton's previous work to guide him). The next time this would be used would be in the early 1800s when Gauss (yes, that Gauss as in Gauss's law and lots of other math and physics stuff. He was very productive.) calculated the orbit of Ceres based on a few months of observations. Since then we've refined these sorts of techniques a lot, and in this case we aren't limited to ground based observations since we have a pretty good idea where and when Snoopy was sent out.
The main problem is going to probably be that Snoopy is tiny. Something this small is very hard to see even with very good telescopes. Most asteroids that are detected with telescopes are much larger than the lunar lander. Spotting something of that size even with the (fairly large) telescopes that they are using will be tough.
You've managed to touch briefly on actually interesting, real science. Humans automatically compensate for increased CO2 by adjusting their breathing and their metabolic levels. Curiously, humans can only detect the presence of carbon dioxide in the blood but not the absence of oxygen. This has lead to deaths in high nitrogen environments or other environments where there's very little oxygen, since people have no warning sign that they aren't getting enough oxygen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_asphyxiation. Death due to lack of oxygen is pleasant compared to suffocation because the body does not go into the normal panic that occurs from too much carbon dioxide. So things just shut down.
Slashdot Mirror
To win our game, write on a piece of paper the name of the next cashier you believe will be fired. Write their name [the person who will be fired], today’s date, today’s time, and your name. Seal it in an envelope and give it to the manager to put in my envelope.
“Here’s how the game will work: We are doubling our secret-shopper efforts, and your store will be visited during the day and at night several times a week. Secret shoppers will be looking for cashiers wearing a hat, talking on a cell phone, not wearing a QC Mart shirt, having someone hanging around/behind the counter, and/or a personal car parked by the pumps after 7 p.m., among other things.
“If the name in your envelope has the right answer, you will win $10 CASH. Only one winner per firing unless there are multiple right answers with the exact same name, date, and time. Once we fire the person, we will open all the envelopes, award the prize, and start the contest again.
“And no fair picking Mike Miller from (the Rockingham Road store). He was fired at around 11:30 a.m. today for wearing a hat and talking on his cell phone. Good luck!!!!!!!!!!”
Wow. What an asshole. In a better economy I'd hope that he'd have trouble getting workers. Unfortunately, in the current economy it is probably much easier to find desperate people willing to put up with crap.
As far as I can tell, this is just one more example of how turf wars between the different agencies caused severe information gaps before 9/11. That was obviously a problem. However, after the last decade of the Patriot Act, I'm sufficiently worried by the government information sharing as part of a wider pattern, that part of me wants to go back to the silly turf wars as a de facto restraint on various government agencies becoming too powerful or having access to things they shouldn't.
But there's no real evidence of any sort of high-level conspiracy. This is just low-level bureaucratic infighting at its finest. You can see lots of examples of this in the 9/11 Report which details the many intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. Some of them seem like intelligence failures mainly due to hindsight bias where what the evidence meant became obvious only if you knew what happened, but others are genuine failures. There's really not that much new here.
You may be thinking of an incident that occurred a few years ago where kids volunteering to help clean up graffiti cleaned up cave paintings that they thought were graffiti. http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/22/world/french-youths-clean-a-cave-and-damage-prehistoric-art.html.
Some of the drawings were very high up so children had to have been lifted by adults to reach them. Moreover, there are clear designs in the patterns, and swirls and the like. They aren't just straight lines at height level. And as discussed at http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/prehistoric-pre-school/, the children's work was mainly confined largely to a single room.
Unfortunately, the presentation in question doesn't seem to be online. There was a presentation on this subject at a conference at Cambridge http://www.sscip.org.uk/files/SSCIP%20Annual%20Conference%202011/Programme%20Autumn%202011a.pdf which apparently includes a lot of other examples of artifacts made by children in cultures throughout human history. Can someone find the relevant papers online? The author of the work is Jess Cooney from Cambridge. There's a page http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/prehistoric-pre-school/ with more details but I can't find actual preprints or the like.
But there's one thing that this sort of thing really shows: science rocks. We can use clever tests and careful measurements to figure out details about the age of children painting on caves. This is exactly why science is awesome. And we're always learning more and more, developing more clever techniques, and finding out more about the universe and ourselves. We are on a long, slow, possibly never-ending journey. But that journey leads closer and closer to truth. And those children and adults long ago who struggled to survive and experimented with different ways to paint are part of that same journey that we are.
(Sorry, something about this story just gets me a bit emotional.)
I can't use it anymore though. Every time I've tried to read from it, my cat dies.
Something must be wrong with your drive. Your cat should only die half the time.
I don't know if you are serious or joking here, but you could definitely stand to take this course. You seem to be under a lot of misconceptions about what quantum computing can do.
Quantum, or more specifically quantum mechanics will be the next Major human revolution.
Quantum mechanics is used all the time by lots of devices you use. Small transistors work because of quantum mechanics. Lasers work off of lots of quantum mechanics. LEDs work off of quantum mechanics. Etc. Etc. There's nothing new about using quantum mechanics.
and Quantum Transceivers to that all those Optical SFPs in your switches and routers won't need cables anymore
This and almost every other application you mention is complete nonsense. Quantum mechanics does not allow you to transmit information in special ways. Entanglement doesn't let you get away with that. (This is as far as we are aware, ignoring for now certain very interesting results from CERN that are likely to be incorrect and are still being checked over. Even if this is correct, it is unlikely to allow actual FTL or the like but rather be other interesting new physics. And calling that simply quantum mechanics would be misleading.)
You can do things with quantum computers that you can't do with conventional systems. What we mean by quantum computers are not computers that use quantum mechanics in general (since they all do that) but computers that can take advantage of entanglement. This allows certain processes to occur much faster than they can with a conventional computer. For example, operations with Fourier series become a lot easier, and it becomes much easier to find the period of a given function. This translates into being able to do certain classes of problems much faster.
For example, it seems that using something called Shore's algorithm ahref=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithmrel=url2html-18175http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm> you can factor integers faster on a quantum computer than you can on a classical computer. This is a big deal, but even this requires a lot of caveats. First, we can't actually prove that this is better than the best classical factoring algorithms. In most interesting formulations of this claim, it depends on the assumption that factoring is not in P, a claim that is strictly stronger than the claim that P != NP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem (it is possible that factoring lies in P but one gets a large speedup of like Klogn or something like that to the quantum system. This is possible, but fundamentally less interesting and less useful.)
There are other specific similar examples, and even a handful where we can prove that the quantum version is really better than any classical version. The most prominent such example is Grover's algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm. This algorithm allows you to search unsorted databases much faster than you can in a conventional setting. That's a really useful but ultimately high restrictive use.
Now, in fairness to you there are some uses of entanglement and other interesting quantum phenomena which don't rely on quantum computing per se. So you may have been thinking of those. But those don't allow what you seem to think they can do either! The closest to anything like that is quantum encryption, which makes a system of encryption that is essentially unbreakable as long as our understanding of the laws of physics are correct. That's pretty cool but even that has its own limitations, and it turns out can in some specific circumstances be broken http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080508143107.htm. There are other interesting technologies out
This requires separate landing systems for each stage of the rocket. This is a lot more added mass. And the worst thing to add to a rocket is more mass. Simple reusable systems like parachutes (as were used by the shuttle's solid rocket boosters) are one thing, but full-out rocket powered landing will weigh a lot more, will require a lot of additional fuel, and will add all sorts of technical requirements.
At this point, it doesn't seem that chemical rockets will become that more efficient barring major breakthroughs, like much lighter alloys, or totally new chemical reactions for the fuel. Neither of these seem very likely right now, and the second seems to be much less likely. The first also won't do that much. At this point, I have to be wondering if we should be spending a lot more resources on researching non-rocket methods of going to space. It seems like we may have a bad example of technological lockin since we've put so much work into chemical rockets.
But there are a lot of other methods out there and we should be looking at them. Nuclear rockets are an obvious example, and they can be built without having any serious radioactivity (you use a conventional fission reactor to heat steam). The basic reactor can be suprisingly light- in the 1950s the US and the USSR both experimented with nuclear powered aircraft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft and reactor technology has improved a lot since then. Another possibility is a space gun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_gun. They have been successfully used to do suborbital lobs. They are completely reusable. And since they don't require sending most of their own fuel into space they avoid the common problem of needing more fuel to lift fuel (which is why rockets get bigger fast compared to the size of payload). There are more exotic ideas also like launch loops, space elevators, and space fountains but they seem to be much further from practicality at this point. In the case of space elevators, the main technical problem is making enough high quality nanotubes in a supporting resin, and research into that is ongoing because high quality carbon nanotubes will be useful a large number of different much more mundane technologies.
Parent is correct. The US is one of the best places for free speech. The general situation is just that much worse.
Groupon is not a social media website by most definitions of that term. Zynga is a single one of many companies profiting from Facebook. Pushing back the Facebook IPO is not a reason to think that the bubble is bursting- indeed if they thought that they'd want to go and do the IPO sooner rather than later. The Zynga and Facebook issues are also probably to some extent due to a new player entering the field in terms of Google+. It does seem that the social media sites don't remain on top for very long. Myspace is dying, and who even remembers Friendster? But it does seem that the industry itself is here to stay. We may end up seeing something similar to what happened with search engines- successive stages of different companies until someone got the product well enough to dominate the market (a long with a healthy dose of early mover effect compared to new rivals). Whether that will happen or not is hard to tell. But declaring that there was a bubble in this context when most of the relevant companies aren't even being traded actively is really difficult. Declaring that the bubble has burst makes even less sense.
You don't get information from anything in a quantum computation. The total information is the same. The only substantial difference is that you can process some things faster. This isn't similar to the issue of conservation of energy- in that context there's a mathematical law that you can't break. Here there's just a lot of computation that you can do faster. We already know that this can happen at a small scale, the primary issue is scaling it up which seems to be an engineering problem. We don't know of any fundamental laws of physics that say we can't get away with this. Also, the computation involved is probably not ungodly. For example, it is suspected that you can't use quantum computers to solve NP complete problems in polynomial time. So, the computational result is more in the category of very impressive but definitely mortal. Note also that there's been a definite pattern in the last few years of more and more things turning out to be surprisingly easy to compute. The most prominent example would be the AKS algorithm which showed that one could test for primaity in polynomial time on a classical computer.
According to TFA, the central problem is that the claimed planet seems to have an orbit which goes into the dusk disk around the star. But if this happens regularly, the disk should have been disrupted. The planet is also much brighter than one would expect for a planet in that position. If this isn't a planet it isn't clear what it is. There does seem to be something there. This could be some sort of artifact of the imaging methods but given the fact that it has been imaged with multiple instruments this seems extremely unlikely. So if this turns out not to be a planet we may be looking at some neat astronomical phenomenon not previously seen. Or it could be a bunch of unusually shiny dust. Hard to tell at this point. This is the sort of thing where the James Webb Telescope could be quite helpful. As of the last update it looks like James Webb is back on. But given how the current Congress acts, it could easily move to being canceled again.
In my view a computer a million times more performant is very useful however in the end even while this may seem impressive these sorts of advancements do not hold a candle to the origional promise of QC.
I'm not sure what you were expecting quantum computers to be able to do. There's a lot of media hype which is made worse by people who just don't understand stuff. For example, there's no known way to solve any NP complete problem in polynomial time on a quantum computer. Similarly, while quantum computers can break many public key crypto systems (such as those based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers or on the closely connected problem of the discrete log), they can't break every public key cryptosystem. Quantum computers aren't magic and the people working with them haven't said otherwise.
The current state of the field is advancing. The real problem as discussed in TFA is scaling quantum computers in a useful way that can still do error correction. Shore's algorithm which allows you to quickly factor numbers using a quantum computer requires on the order of n qbits to factor an n bit number. So if one wants to factor say a 300 digit number used in some public key crypto system you would need to control around 300 qbits. The technology for that is clearly very far. There's been recent work using superconducting systems and using quantum dots for qbits both of which look more promising than previous systems. (The first experiments were done with NMR systems which are clearly not very scalable).
From a strictly theoretical compsci perspective, the set of things it seems that quantum computers can do seems to be growing larger. Recent work by Scott Aaronson and others suggest that BQP (the set of problems which can be easily solved by a quantum computer with a low probability of error) may not lie in the polynomial hierarchy at all. http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.4698. This is a much stronger claim then the claim that BQP doesn't lie in NP. This raises the hope that there may be some problems thought of as extremely difficult that lie in NP. However, trying to actually prove any strong results at this point is likely going to be really tough. At this point although many suspect that BPP (the classical analog of BQP) is equal to P, at this point we can't even prove that BPP lies in NP. In many ways theoretical comp sci is still very much in its infancy.
Correct. The neutrinos traveled through solid rock. Neutrinos don't interact with much so as far as they are concerned solid rock isn't a big deal. And you actually want to have the solid rock there. You wouldn't want an open tunnel- the process that creates the neutrinos creates a lot of other particles of all sorts of different types. But all of those get blocked by the rock. The experimental setup in particular needs to block both the muons and tauons. These particles can normally penetrate a lot o the point where stray muons from cosmic ray collisions are a major nuisance for sensitive neutrino detectors even when the detectors are deep underground. The Japanese big neutrino detector Kamiokande has a lot of special equipment to deal with just this. So in this case, having many kilometers of rock is necessary to let the whole thing work otherwise the stray particles would make it impossible to detect neutrino interactions with all the noise.
(Disclaimer: I don't speak Italian)
The word used in the Italian is "tunnel". At first I thought that this might be an example of how one shouldn't always translate a word as the closest sounding word in the target language, since the most closely etymologically related word may not be the most semantically close. This is how we get Dante's Inferno rather than just calling it "Hell" which would be a more accurate English translation. At least once in science this has created a real problem in the past, about a hundred years ago. The canals of Mars were started by the translation of the Italian word "canali" as canals even though "canali" didn't have the same connotation of artificial construction.
However, in this case it looks accurate. I checked with multiple online dictionaries and Google translate to see how they would translate "tunnel" from Italian to English. Everyone gave the obvious one. Just in case, I picked likely possible semantically related words (path, connection, link, beam, bridge) and asked Google for the Italian words. In none of those cases did it hit on tunnel. So it looks like the translation is accurate.
The entire design for the anaytical engine was extremely impressive. The main thing to realize is that the Analytical Engine was Turing Complete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness. This means essentially that given enough time and memory it could emulate any program you want to. There's an idea called the Church-Turing thesis which says roughly that the set of things which a Turing machine can do are precisely the things which humans can algorithmically simulate. To appreciate how highly this speaks of the actual design of the Engine one should realize that many early computers like the Harvard Mark I were not Turing complete (although all the early Zuse machines were.)
It seems that Canada is a falling satellite magnet. In 1977, a Soviet satellite fell in Canada also- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954.although that one was probably much worse in terms of damage because Kosmos 954 had a nuclear reactor and some of that debris was radioactive. The only other really major fall where something fell on land was Skylab which fell over Australia. So Canada has managed to get 2/3 major falls that have hit land. That's pretty impressive. I think that Canada and the US are both members of the Space Liability Convention, which has provisions for fallen satellites, so if there's any actual damage from this, the US will need to pay Canada.
Reports seem to indicate they used GPS not lasers. They don''t a straight line of sight (the neutrinos go through solid rock. It isn't a problem since neutrinos generally don't interact with normal matter much.)
Strontium-90, the primary dangerous isotope of strontium has a half-life of 29 years. That means that in 200 years you have about one 70th as much left. Moreover, these isotopes spread around over time. So in practice most areas with these isotopes become less dangerous faster than their half-lives suggest. This is less true for plutonium because it isn't that easily metabolically active, but lots of living things will pick strontium and use it where they would use calcium. So it might suck to be them but it will make the area a lot safer in the long-run.
This isn't a reason to be worried about nuclear power. This shows that bad things can happen when political decisions override science engineering or when bad engineers don't do a good job.. At the end of the day, what you want can't override nature. Nature doesn't care about politics. This is true with many different technologies
At this point, more people die from coal related problems every year than nuclear power. One interesting metric to compare power types is to look at deaths per a terawatt hour. http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html. By this metric, nuclear power is one of the safest forms of power out there. The primary reasons that nuclear power stands out to people is because a) it associated with nuclear weapons which makes it scary b) it is a more advanced technology which makes it seem more risky and unnatural c) when something does go wrong is goes wrong in a spectacular fashion. This last is probably the most important- humans react to how much they hear about disasters not how likely they are to impact them. This is why people are afraid of airplane crashes and shark attacks more than car crashes and heart attacks.
Unfortunately, few people are likely to pay attention to this. We are already seeing the fallout as Germany and other European countries turn away from nuclear power. France right now is being surprisingly calm in continuing to use it. Unfortunately, there's some indications that this issue is also making people more worried about fusion power. There's been a long-running problem with scientifically ignorant environmentalists who don't understand the difference between fission and fusion. A lot of them have tried to protest fusion research in the past and Greenpeace has an anti-fusion stance. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/22/fusion_greenpeace_no/. The whole situation sucks.
For example, did you know the flu shots are ineffective and even dangerous? If you start to show the signs of a flu there are simple things you can do. A homeopathic remedy of Oscillococcinum along with Chiropractic adjustments form a two-pronged attack on the flu virus. The Oscillococcinum attacks the young viruses while the adjustments to the spine help the body's innate healing capabilities destroy the mature virus. It's a 100% painless and safe way to heal yourself from within with the human body's most powerful weapon: innate intelligence.
Bob, are you trying to troll at this point? We've got homeopathy involved now too? Ok. Let's spell this out very explicitly: There's no such thing as a young virus or a mature virus. Viruses don't have any metabolism. That means they are either fully assembled or they are being assembled or they are being disassembled while infecting something. There are no young viruses. If you know this little about basic biology you might want to consider what else you don't know. Maybe, just maybe you are wrong about chiropractice being the be all and end all. It takes a lot of effort to admit you are wrong. Many humans can't do it for things they've spent a lot of time believing. But, maybe you can.
However, I suspect you won't. You'll just keep spamming your misguided ideas all over Slashdot and the rest of the internet. In which case, kindly go practice chiropracticory on yourself.
We don't know the exact orbit. If this had been from only a few years ago this would be a small range. But after 40 years this means that the module has a massive range. We don't know where it is. Although we should have a better idea how fast it should be moving which helps slightly. Also, this sort of thing has been done before. Since the late 1700s there's been attempts to track down objects based on some observations. This started off in some sense with Halley's Comet, but that was more about realizing that a large set of observations were the same thing (Halley also had the advantage of realizing that Jupiter and Saturn had a major impact on comets and also had Newton's previous work to guide him). The next time this would be used would be in the early 1800s when Gauss (yes, that Gauss as in Gauss's law and lots of other math and physics stuff. He was very productive.) calculated the orbit of Ceres based on a few months of observations. Since then we've refined these sorts of techniques a lot, and in this case we aren't limited to ground based observations since we have a pretty good idea where and when Snoopy was sent out.
The main problem is going to probably be that Snoopy is tiny. Something this small is very hard to see even with very good telescopes. Most asteroids that are detected with telescopes are much larger than the lunar lander. Spotting something of that size even with the (fairly large) telescopes that they are using will be tough.
You've managed to touch briefly on actually interesting, real science. Humans automatically compensate for increased CO2 by adjusting their breathing and their metabolic levels. Curiously, humans can only detect the presence of carbon dioxide in the blood but not the absence of oxygen. This has lead to deaths in high nitrogen environments or other environments where there's very little oxygen, since people have no warning sign that they aren't getting enough oxygen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_asphyxiation. Death due to lack of oxygen is pleasant compared to suffocation because the body does not go into the normal panic that occurs from too much carbon dioxide. So things just shut down.
There are allegations that the US did just that to the Soviet Union during the cold war. See http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2004/03/01/us-software-blew-up-russian-gas-pipeline-39147917/.