Doom was on the index of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Department_for_Media_Harmful_to_Young_Persons. When something is on the index is can be bought and sold but cannot be sold to a minor and cannot be sold in a shop that frequently has minors. This sort of law was originally intended to apply to porn but as a matter of implementation is a bit more difficult for videogames since minors are likely to go to videogame stores. Similarly, restrictions on how indexed media can be advertised make it difficult to advertise videogames. So the de facto result is that very few copies of games on the index are sold. But saying that the game was banned is incorrect. Prior to this appeal it was legal to buy and sell copies of Doom.
You don't need such low error correction rates though. The key is that if the error rates are low enough you can then use clever error correcting mechanisms. But if the error rate from stray particles and other issues causing you to repeatedly lose quantum entanglement is too high then you can't use clever algorithms to deal with these problems. But if you have an error rate below about 1 in every 10,000 operations then you can use the good stuff. Note that by the entire nature of quantum computers even if we have practical ones it is unlikely that they will have an error rate in the ballpark of 1 in a billion. It would be nice if we could get that rate but it seems to be unlikely.
It isn't at all clear that D-Waves system is using any sort of quantum entanglement at all. D-Wave has had a long history of massive hype. See e.g. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=431. It isn't at all clear that D-Waves commercial system can do any of the things that we expect a quantum computer to do like say factor integers using Shor's algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm. It seems that D-Wave has made a fast computer but there's very little evidence that it actually is using quantum processes any more than a normal computer. You could call your laptop a quantum computer because quantum mechanics is used in determining how the transistors function and you might be close to what D-Wave is claiming. The key is whether there are entangled qubits that we can get info from, and D-Wave has shown little indication of that. They have had a handful of research papers that sort of point in that direction but it is very hard to separate the hype from what they've actually done.
An important thing to recognize is that most of this experiment was done with a single qubit. Practical quantum computing will need to have this sort of error rate for thousands of qubits. The good news is that the methodology they used looks very promising. They used microwave beams rather than lasers to manipulate the ions. This has been I think suggested before but this may be the first successful use of that sort of thing. As TFA discusses, this drastically reduces the error rate as well as the rate of stray ions.
We are starting to move towards the point where quantum computers may be practical. But we're still a long way off. In the first few years of the last decade a few different groups successfully factored 15 as 3*5 using a quantum computer. (15 is the smallest number which is non-trivial to factor using a quantum computer since the fast factoring algorithm for quantum computers- Shore's algorithm- requires an odd composite number that is not a perfect power. It is easy to factor a perfect kth power a bit by looking instead at the kth root. And factoring an even number is easily reduced to factoring an odd number. So 15 is the smallest interesting case where the quantum aspects of the process matter.) Those systems used a classical NMR system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_(NMR)_quantum_computing which has since been seen as too limited. There are now a lot of different ideas of other approaches that will scale better but so far they haven't been that successful.
One important thing to realize is that quantum computers will not magically solve everything. They can do a few things quite quickly such as factor large numbers. But they can't for example solve NP complete problems to the best of our knowledge, and it is widely believed that NP complete problems cannot be solved in polynomial time with a quantum computer. That is, it is believed that BQP is a proper subset of NP. Unfortunately, right now we can't even show that that BQP is a subset of NP, let alone that it is a proper subset. Factoring big integers is useful mainly for a small number of number theorists and a large number of other people who want to break cryptography. There are a few other cryptographic systems that can also be broken more easily by a quantum computer but there's not that much else. However, that is changing and people getting a better and better understanding of what can be done with quantum computers. A lot of the work has involved clever stuff involving using quantum computers to quickly calculate stuff related to Fourier series. Moreover, once we get even the most marginally useful quantum computers there will be a lot more incentive to figure out what sorts of practical things can be done with them.
So the upshot is that these are still a long way off, but they are coming. The way it looked in the late 1990s or early 2000s it was reasonable to think that the technical difficulties would make them never practical. They still are a long way from being practical but right now it doesn't look like there are any fundamental physical barriers and it looks like in the long run the problems that do exist will be solved.
It seems that over the last few years we've had more and more objects which have turned out to be really surprisingly close. Earlier this month, WISE discovered a set of brown dwarfs which are even closer to us http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/24/1520206/NASA-Discovers-7th-Closest-Star. WISE has turned out to be a very good investment. Although it was primarily made for the discovery and tracking of near-Earth asteroids, it has turned out to be very useful for near stellar astronomy. This is a different situation than the brown dwarfs because this was an object which we knew about but didn't realize was so nearby. AP Columbae is both very close, and very young. It is only 40 million years old, which makes it very young. TFA discusses how they used the lithium levels in the star to estimate its age. This is a standard technique that is also used to distinguish between cool stars and brown dwarfs since brown dwarfs don't touch their lithium enough to substantially reduce the quantities (although in this case we already knew that this was a star and not a brown dwarf). One thing to note is that this star is extremely faint. Even though it is so close it has an apparent magnitude of around +13 which means that you can't see it unless you have a very big telescope (With apparent magnitude large numbers are fainter. So for example, Venus has an apparent magnitude of around -5 and Sirius has an apparent magnitude of about -1.4. +13 is really dim.) So we have a very dim, small star right nearby.
This is a bad idea. The summary itself explains a lot of what is wrong with this. But it isn't just spammers who will be a problem. Normal people will be more inclined to then post links they like on their G+ accounts and ask friends to add to them. At that level this may be an a deliberate attempt to get people to use G+ since this way if you have a website or set of websites you care about, this gives you an additional incentive to both be on G+ and get people you know on G+. But, I'd be very worried if I were Google about diluting their very good flagship product to give a boost to G+.
Wow. That's not a tiny issue at all. This isn't just a privacy issue. That's a makes-it-really-easy-for-a jerk-to-fuck-someone-over issue. Take a picture of someone and photoshop in a bong and then do this. See how long it takes to get them fired. Anyone who looks at it will think that the individual is aware of and approves of the photo since they haven't removed the tag. This is a really bad issue. Calling this one a "privacy" issue totally misses the point. This is much more severe.
If that were true then it would require that most people would have to see chiropractics. But lifespan has increased across the board even as only a small fraction of people go get chiropractic treatments.
Here's a better question: When was the last time chiropractice came up with a new treatment that helped heal a disease or problem they couldn't otherwise? Science does this all the time. Small pox and polio, once terrifying diseases, are diseases of the past. Diabetes, once a death sentence, is now manageable. Fifty years ago, childhood leukemia was a death sentence. Now, it is a horrific disease which permanently damages children, but often they live. And the death rates are still declining http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5648a1.htm. A hundred years ago, severe liver disease was a painful way to die. Now, we have liver transplants.
This is what real science and real medicine do. They improve. They work. They develop and test new treatments. And when a treatment doesn't work we throw it out. This process is slow, and comes in fits and starts. But the pattern of progress is clear. So again, what have the chiropracticts or the homeopaths or the Reiki fan done? What diseases have they cured? What insights into the nature of humans have they found? Did they find DNA? Did they unravel the genetic code? Did they discovery the many things RNA does in a cell? Instead they've stuck with hundred year old beliefs and kept parroting them.
All of these fringe beliefs have a variety of things in common: they each claim to be able to cure almost everything. The Reiki practitioner can cure any disease by manipulating the energy fields. The chiropracter can cure and prevent any disease by removing toxins" and subluxations. But that's not how the real world works. In the real world, there is no magic bullet. The human body is a wondrously complicated awesome thing. And so different diseases have different causes, not the same causes. And so different problems require different solutions. There's nothing easier when confronted with a massive collection of hard problems to convince yourself that you can solve all of them with a single trick. But that's not how the world works.
Unfortunately for you Dr. Bob, it is extremely unlikely that you will let any of this sink in. You have spent a massive amount of time and resources preaching your beliefs to the world. Humans have a tremendous amount of time admitting when they are wrong even over little things. In your case, the long amount of effort will likely make the cognitive dissonance much too severe for you to even question whether potentially part of your belief system might be wrong. And that's sad. But, you've put yourself in that position. You are the only one who can take yourself out of it.
According to TFA a major part of this is the use of a polymer that solidifies when heated but dissolves when it cools down. It is striking that we can not only have such weird substances but can have such substances that are also reasonably ok inside humans (that is, not poisonous and not triggering an immune response). The main advantages of this method is that it is faster than the normal method and that it can be applied to much smaller blood vessels. According to TFA, suturing is extremely difficult if not outright impossible for blood vessels that are smaller than 1 milimeter wide. The basic type of polymer has been used in various forms before to deliver drugs, so while this version is a modified version, it is unlikely that any very serious problems will crop up. Overall, this will be helpful in for both planned and emergency surgeries and should help reattach limbs and digits much more effectively. Right now when a finger is removed reattachment is a difficult process that often just fails. This should change that.
SuperPoke is a Facebook application. Why have an application that is tied in with a competitor's product? G+ is obviously a lot more important to Google than SuperPoke is, so SuperPoke is going to die.
Dedekind cuts and Cauchy sequences both give you the same thing. Which one uses is a matter of preference. Dedekind cuts are a slightly more elementary way of doing it (and thus are often pedagogically favored) whereas Cauchy sequences allow a generalization to well behaved metric spaces. Thus for example, if one wants to construct the p-adic numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_numbers then one can't apply Dedekind cuts (because there's no order) but one can apply Cauchy sequences (because there's a metric).
Wikipedia has similar bots and has been using them for a long time. For example there's Bibcode Bot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bibcode_Bot which cleans up citations. That bot is smart enough that it can even extract bibliographic information from a linked website and put it into the citation. The bots used do occasionally go awry but by and large end up saving a lot of time. Of course, Wikipedia has the advantage that one isn't modifying code so if a bot screws up a page will just look a little wonky. They'll need to be careful with this. But it looks like for now it is restricted to readme files and requires approval of the changes by the user, which should help prevent things from going too drastically wrong.
Sounds like it's time for another rethink then. Einstein got his insights from observing things in the real world, a lot of modern theory seems to be based on looking at Math. Maybe it's time to spend some time in the physical world again and to step away from the Platonic realm and see if something sparks some inspiration.
First of all, Einstein was famous for doing very clever thought experiments. Many of his ideas about special relativity came from thinking about how objects should behave if they tried to chase light. Second, the ideas of supersymmetry in fact come from inspiration of what we see in reality. In particular, supersymmetry has been posited to explain a number of different strange results, most importantly the apparent discrepancy of dark matter (that is, that the universe seem to have a lot of mass that we can't see).
I, for one, wonder what we might learn if we try to model things using integer math instead of the often rounded real numbers that seem to be popular. Of course, with the numbers being so large you run into factoring issues pretty quickly but hey, that's what quantum computers are for right?:)
We use the real numbers to model things because they do a really good job. One could try to just model a universe where the base field was the rational numbers (that is, ratios of integers) but that would have a lot of problems. For example, you won't be able to make a square with a diagonal connecting two corners. Moreover, for most purposes, calculations that can be done in the reals can be done with limits of rational numbers (in fact one way of rigorously defining the real numbers defines real numbers as special limits of rationals called Cauchy sequences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_sequence. I'm not at all sure why you think the difficulty of factoring integers is relevant in this context. For most practical calculations, you very rarely need to factor integers. Moreover, while it is true that quantum computers can in theory factor integers quickly using Shor's algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm, for all we know it might be possible for standard computers to factor quickly. Moreover, the models we use to talk about quantum computing rely very heavily on the real numbers which you aren't happy with.
The last one we saw in our galaxy was in 1604 so yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_Nova. They are more common than that. so there probably have been supernova in our galaxy. But given our position in the galaxy there's a large part of our galaxy where if a supernova happens we weren't that likely to see if (because there are so many stars and dust in the way). That's not the case as much since we have much better, larger telescopes. But yeah, they are pretty rare.
Keep your systems separate. If you have important keys and they don't need to be on a network when they aren't in use, don't put them on a network. Don't give people more privileges than they need to do their jobs. That does have the secondary issue that if you go too far in that direction then people will try to get around your security measures and might open up holes in the process, and they won't take security as seriously. So you need to balance that. Also, never open up attachments that you don't know who they are from. This is a really basic point that should be driven into people. And look at the extension of the file, if it looks suspicious don't open it. These are basic points. It is embarrassing that RSA of all companies would apparently have such basic security problems. But it does help drive home a point: if they can be vulnerable to simple phishing and bad attachments so can everyone.
This is close enough that you can see it with a good amateur telescope. The supernova will brighten over time, probably hitting its brightest point sometime in the middle of September. As it brightens it might even be possible to see it with a cheap telescope or a pair of binoculars.
One thing that is important to realize is that this supernova is Type Ia, not Type II. Type II supernovae are what most people are thinking of when they think of a supernova (that is, death of a massive star). A Type Ia supernova instead occurs in a binary system where one of the stars is a white dwarf. The white dwarf slowly steals away mass from the other star until the white dwarf gets too big to be stable, around 1.4 times the mass of the sun. Then it experiences collapse in a way that is essentially similar to that of the Type II supernova.
This supernova was very close to us. One thing that could be very promising is if this left any neutrino signature above the background level. Neutrinos are very hard to detect, the major detectors are things like IceCube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory or Super-K http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande which have very large containers of water or some other substance and you then carefully try to detect the very rare neutrino interactions over all the background radiation (neutrinos are very ghostly and don't interact very much. You have billions of them going through you all the time and you don't even notice). This has only happened with one supernova before SN 1987A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A which was bright enough and close enough to be seen by the naked eye. One really cool thing about this was that we actually recorded the neutrino burst for SN 1987A before the light arrived (three hours before). At this point, most people get shocked because they know that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. What happened was that in a Type II supernova neutrino burst occurs at the very beginning of the supernova process, but the light has to work its way out of the whole star. This actually allows us to potentially detect supernova before they happen, and there's now an early warning network with the major neutrino detectors so astronomers can get a heads-up if a type II is about to happen so they know where to point the telescopes. http://snews.bnl.gov/ Since the neutrino flux drops off quickly (like 1/r^2), supernovae need to be very close to us for to be able to pick out the neutrinos over all the solar neutrinos and general background junk. I don't fully understand the dynamics of Type Ia supernova (and I'm not an astronomer or an astrophysicist) but my impression is that there's also reason to believe that type Ia will produce fewer neutrinos than a Type II supernova. Between that and the distance, this supernova was probably too far away for us to detect any neutrinos.I suspect that the people who run the major detectors are probably looking over their data for the last few days very carefully to see if they can pick up any signal that the regular automated systems missed.
No. The issue here is not the latency. Latency is a problem (it is a major issue with the rovers. Trying to direct them where to go and then waiting to see if they run into problems is a big nuisance). But here the total problem is bandwith. The total bandwith is low, so it takes a very long time to send data from Mars to Earth. We get far more data on Mars than we can even send back to the Earth. Even with this new system that will still be the case but if it works it won't be nearly as bad. This will improve the total bandwith a lot.
One obvious question to ask for this sort of thing is if it is worth it. If the time increase to lifespan was less than the time necessary to spend exercising then this would be worth it. Assume a normal life span of 80 years. And assume that the exercise takes 120 minutes (showering off, changing clothes etc. pushes one above 92 minutes. I'm assuming 120 here because that makes it exactly two hours which makes the arithmetic easier). Then with 52 weeks a year, one gets that this takes up a total of 80*52*2/24, which is slightly under a year. So even if you are completely neutral to exercise and can't get any nice thinking done during it, the total delta is 2 years. So this does look like it makes sense. There's a slight argument that using time up when one is younger isn't good if the later years aren't as high quality. I'm not sure how much validity that argument has but there's some evidence that exercising keeps one healthier for the last few decades of life, so this probably increases the quality. Overall verdict: Exercising seems to make sense.
Things are not looking good for the Russian space program right now. This is the second loss they've had in a week. On August 18, rocket failure resulted in a new communication satellite going into an essentially useless orbit. The real worry about this sort of thing is what it will do to the human space program. The US may not be as willing to hire the Russians to go into space when things are running this badly. I can't imagine a PR disaster much worse than American astronauts getting killed on a Russian spacecraft. On the other hand, I'm very happy that this problem occurred on an unmanned supply vehicle rather than anything with people on it. It is also a bit scary to note that even a very well-understood set of systems like the Soyuz still sometimes runs into such severe problems. Hopefully they will be able to identify what precisely caused this problem.
This meme is a good enough approximation for most useful purposes. Yes, Hubble is more on the visual spectrum and JWSB is for the infrared spectrum. But Webb will be used to extend a lot of the stuff that Hubble did. It is in that regard the next logical thing to have after Hubble. Hubble showed us that large telescopes in space could work. Much of what Hubble could do is stuff that we can do or almost can do with large ground telescopes. JWSB will however do a lot of stuff in wavelengths that ground telescopes cannot use. But Webb would be nearly impossible without the experience and knowledge we got from Hubble. And a lot of the planned missions for Webb will consist of looking at stuff that Hubble already looked at. Calling this the Hubble successor pretty well captures the spirit and purpose even if it doesn't quite satisfy the nitpicker in all of us.
There are scenes where people physically hand someone else a PADD (although I'm not actually sure I remember if there are such scenes in TNG. There are certainly are in TOS, and there's a scene in DS9 where they go back in time to TOS and that episode has a bit where Sisko gets an excuse to hand a pad to Kirk because he wants an excuse to meet Kirk.)
Yes, but the PADDs were separate for each document or sets of documents. There are scenes where people will have a pile of PADDs on their desks. So that seems to be a bit different technology. (And yes, this does show that our technology has surpassed that of Star Trek. Yes, we live in the future, and yes, that's awesome.)
On the one hand, I'm worried about the environmental damage that such an endeavor would do. On the other hand, in the long run if done properly this could save on a lot of shipping that would be more environmentally damaging. Also there are serious issues with lack of infrastructure in the US. This isn't within the US itself but would help solve some of the same problems that such infrastructural collapse is causing. The system will link into the larger North American rail system which is in decent shape as far as moving freight is concerned (I'd like more investment in it in directly in the US but that seems unlikely right now). The price tag on this project is massive, TFA says $65 billion for the whole project with around $10 billion for the main tunnel. That's a lot of money, and I can't help wonder if there aren't a lot of small projects that would have a better return. In general small projects have a very high rate of marginal return, but that may be more true in the sciences than other areas. I don't know how true that is for something like this. And TFA correctly points out that this could give a lot of economic stimulus in terms of jobs, which is something that both the US and Russia sorely need right now. TFA doesn't address what American permits are needed for this. I would imagine that state and federal approval would be necessary but the article doesn't discuss that at all. Overall, I'm skeptical that this will end up going through successfully anytime soon. But the idea of being able to take a train from Boston to Moscow certainly sounds appealing.
Slashdot Mirror
Doom was on the index of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Department_for_Media_Harmful_to_Young_Persons. When something is on the index is can be bought and sold but cannot be sold to a minor and cannot be sold in a shop that frequently has minors. This sort of law was originally intended to apply to porn but as a matter of implementation is a bit more difficult for videogames since minors are likely to go to videogame stores. Similarly, restrictions on how indexed media can be advertised make it difficult to advertise videogames. So the de facto result is that very few copies of games on the index are sold. But saying that the game was banned is incorrect. Prior to this appeal it was legal to buy and sell copies of Doom.
You don't need such low error correction rates though. The key is that if the error rates are low enough you can then use clever error correcting mechanisms. But if the error rate from stray particles and other issues causing you to repeatedly lose quantum entanglement is too high then you can't use clever algorithms to deal with these problems. But if you have an error rate below about 1 in every 10,000 operations then you can use the good stuff. Note that by the entire nature of quantum computers even if we have practical ones it is unlikely that they will have an error rate in the ballpark of 1 in a billion. It would be nice if we could get that rate but it seems to be unlikely.
It isn't at all clear that D-Waves system is using any sort of quantum entanglement at all. D-Wave has had a long history of massive hype. See e.g. http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=431. It isn't at all clear that D-Waves commercial system can do any of the things that we expect a quantum computer to do like say factor integers using Shor's algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm. It seems that D-Wave has made a fast computer but there's very little evidence that it actually is using quantum processes any more than a normal computer. You could call your laptop a quantum computer because quantum mechanics is used in determining how the transistors function and you might be close to what D-Wave is claiming. The key is whether there are entangled qubits that we can get info from, and D-Wave has shown little indication of that. They have had a handful of research papers that sort of point in that direction but it is very hard to separate the hype from what they've actually done.
An important thing to recognize is that most of this experiment was done with a single qubit. Practical quantum computing will need to have this sort of error rate for thousands of qubits. The good news is that the methodology they used looks very promising. They used microwave beams rather than lasers to manipulate the ions. This has been I think suggested before but this may be the first successful use of that sort of thing. As TFA discusses, this drastically reduces the error rate as well as the rate of stray ions.
We are starting to move towards the point where quantum computers may be practical. But we're still a long way off. In the first few years of the last decade a few different groups successfully factored 15 as 3*5 using a quantum computer. (15 is the smallest number which is non-trivial to factor using a quantum computer since the fast factoring algorithm for quantum computers- Shore's algorithm- requires an odd composite number that is not a perfect power. It is easy to factor a perfect kth power a bit by looking instead at the kth root. And factoring an even number is easily reduced to factoring an odd number. So 15 is the smallest interesting case where the quantum aspects of the process matter.) Those systems used a classical NMR system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_magnetic_resonance_(NMR)_quantum_computing which has since been seen as too limited. There are now a lot of different ideas of other approaches that will scale better but so far they haven't been that successful.
One important thing to realize is that quantum computers will not magically solve everything. They can do a few things quite quickly such as factor large numbers. But they can't for example solve NP complete problems to the best of our knowledge, and it is widely believed that NP complete problems cannot be solved in polynomial time with a quantum computer. That is, it is believed that BQP is a proper subset of NP. Unfortunately, right now we can't even show that that BQP is a subset of NP, let alone that it is a proper subset. Factoring big integers is useful mainly for a small number of number theorists and a large number of other people who want to break cryptography. There are a few other cryptographic systems that can also be broken more easily by a quantum computer but there's not that much else. However, that is changing and people getting a better and better understanding of what can be done with quantum computers. A lot of the work has involved clever stuff involving using quantum computers to quickly calculate stuff related to Fourier series. Moreover, once we get even the most marginally useful quantum computers there will be a lot more incentive to figure out what sorts of practical things can be done with them.
So the upshot is that these are still a long way off, but they are coming. The way it looked in the late 1990s or early 2000s it was reasonable to think that the technical difficulties would make them never practical. They still are a long way from being practical but right now it doesn't look like there are any fundamental physical barriers and it looks like in the long run the problems that do exist will be solved.
It seems that over the last few years we've had more and more objects which have turned out to be really surprisingly close. Earlier this month, WISE discovered a set of brown dwarfs which are even closer to us http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/08/24/1520206/NASA-Discovers-7th-Closest-Star. WISE has turned out to be a very good investment. Although it was primarily made for the discovery and tracking of near-Earth asteroids, it has turned out to be very useful for near stellar astronomy. This is a different situation than the brown dwarfs because this was an object which we knew about but didn't realize was so nearby. AP Columbae is both very close, and very young. It is only 40 million years old, which makes it very young. TFA discusses how they used the lithium levels in the star to estimate its age. This is a standard technique that is also used to distinguish between cool stars and brown dwarfs since brown dwarfs don't touch their lithium enough to substantially reduce the quantities (although in this case we already knew that this was a star and not a brown dwarf). One thing to note is that this star is extremely faint. Even though it is so close it has an apparent magnitude of around +13 which means that you can't see it unless you have a very big telescope (With apparent magnitude large numbers are fainter. So for example, Venus has an apparent magnitude of around -5 and Sirius has an apparent magnitude of about -1.4. +13 is really dim.) So we have a very dim, small star right nearby.
This is a bad idea. The summary itself explains a lot of what is wrong with this. But it isn't just spammers who will be a problem. Normal people will be more inclined to then post links they like on their G+ accounts and ask friends to add to them. At that level this may be an a deliberate attempt to get people to use G+ since this way if you have a website or set of websites you care about, this gives you an additional incentive to both be on G+ and get people you know on G+. But, I'd be very worried if I were Google about diluting their very good flagship product to give a boost to G+.
Wow. That's not a tiny issue at all. This isn't just a privacy issue. That's a makes-it-really-easy-for-a jerk-to-fuck-someone-over issue. Take a picture of someone and photoshop in a bong and then do this. See how long it takes to get them fired. Anyone who looks at it will think that the individual is aware of and approves of the photo since they haven't removed the tag. This is a really bad issue. Calling this one a "privacy" issue totally misses the point. This is much more severe.
If that were true then it would require that most people would have to see chiropractics. But lifespan has increased across the board even as only a small fraction of people go get chiropractic treatments.
Here's a better question: When was the last time chiropractice came up with a new treatment that helped heal a disease or problem they couldn't otherwise? Science does this all the time. Small pox and polio, once terrifying diseases, are diseases of the past. Diabetes, once a death sentence, is now manageable. Fifty years ago, childhood leukemia was a death sentence. Now, it is a horrific disease which permanently damages children, but often they live. And the death rates are still declining http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5648a1.htm. A hundred years ago, severe liver disease was a painful way to die. Now, we have liver transplants.
This is what real science and real medicine do. They improve. They work. They develop and test new treatments. And when a treatment doesn't work we throw it out. This process is slow, and comes in fits and starts. But the pattern of progress is clear. So again, what have the chiropracticts or the homeopaths or the Reiki fan done? What diseases have they cured? What insights into the nature of humans have they found? Did they find DNA? Did they unravel the genetic code? Did they discovery the many things RNA does in a cell? Instead they've stuck with hundred year old beliefs and kept parroting them.
All of these fringe beliefs have a variety of things in common: they each claim to be able to cure almost everything. The Reiki practitioner can cure any disease by manipulating the energy fields. The chiropracter can cure and prevent any disease by removing toxins" and subluxations. But that's not how the real world works. In the real world, there is no magic bullet. The human body is a wondrously complicated awesome thing. And so different diseases have different causes, not the same causes. And so different problems require different solutions. There's nothing easier when confronted with a massive collection of hard problems to convince yourself that you can solve all of them with a single trick. But that's not how the world works.
Unfortunately for you Dr. Bob, it is extremely unlikely that you will let any of this sink in. You have spent a massive amount of time and resources preaching your beliefs to the world. Humans have a tremendous amount of time admitting when they are wrong even over little things. In your case, the long amount of effort will likely make the cognitive dissonance much too severe for you to even question whether potentially part of your belief system might be wrong. And that's sad. But, you've put yourself in that position. You are the only one who can take yourself out of it.
According to TFA a major part of this is the use of a polymer that solidifies when heated but dissolves when it cools down. It is striking that we can not only have such weird substances but can have such substances that are also reasonably ok inside humans (that is, not poisonous and not triggering an immune response). The main advantages of this method is that it is faster than the normal method and that it can be applied to much smaller blood vessels. According to TFA, suturing is extremely difficult if not outright impossible for blood vessels that are smaller than 1 milimeter wide. The basic type of polymer has been used in various forms before to deliver drugs, so while this version is a modified version, it is unlikely that any very serious problems will crop up. Overall, this will be helpful in for both planned and emergency surgeries and should help reattach limbs and digits much more effectively. Right now when a finger is removed reattachment is a difficult process that often just fails. This should change that.
SuperPoke is a Facebook application. Why have an application that is tied in with a competitor's product? G+ is obviously a lot more important to Google than SuperPoke is, so SuperPoke is going to die.
Dedekind cuts and Cauchy sequences both give you the same thing. Which one uses is a matter of preference. Dedekind cuts are a slightly more elementary way of doing it (and thus are often pedagogically favored) whereas Cauchy sequences allow a generalization to well behaved metric spaces. Thus for example, if one wants to construct the p-adic numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-adic_numbers then one can't apply Dedekind cuts (because there's no order) but one can apply Cauchy sequences (because there's a metric).
Wikipedia has similar bots and has been using them for a long time. For example there's Bibcode Bot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bibcode_Bot which cleans up citations. That bot is smart enough that it can even extract bibliographic information from a linked website and put it into the citation. The bots used do occasionally go awry but by and large end up saving a lot of time. Of course, Wikipedia has the advantage that one isn't modifying code so if a bot screws up a page will just look a little wonky. They'll need to be careful with this. But it looks like for now it is restricted to readme files and requires approval of the changes by the user, which should help prevent things from going too drastically wrong.
Sounds like it's time for another rethink then. Einstein got his insights from observing things in the real world, a lot of modern theory seems to be based on looking at Math. Maybe it's time to spend some time in the physical world again and to step away from the Platonic realm and see if something sparks some inspiration.
First of all, Einstein was famous for doing very clever thought experiments. Many of his ideas about special relativity came from thinking about how objects should behave if they tried to chase light. Second, the ideas of supersymmetry in fact come from inspiration of what we see in reality. In particular, supersymmetry has been posited to explain a number of different strange results, most importantly the apparent discrepancy of dark matter (that is, that the universe seem to have a lot of mass that we can't see).
I, for one, wonder what we might learn if we try to model things using integer math instead of the often rounded real numbers that seem to be popular. Of course, with the numbers being so large you run into factoring issues pretty quickly but hey, that's what quantum computers are for right? :)
We use the real numbers to model things because they do a really good job. One could try to just model a universe where the base field was the rational numbers (that is, ratios of integers) but that would have a lot of problems. For example, you won't be able to make a square with a diagonal connecting two corners. Moreover, for most purposes, calculations that can be done in the reals can be done with limits of rational numbers (in fact one way of rigorously defining the real numbers defines real numbers as special limits of rationals called Cauchy sequences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cauchy_sequence. I'm not at all sure why you think the difficulty of factoring integers is relevant in this context. For most practical calculations, you very rarely need to factor integers. Moreover, while it is true that quantum computers can in theory factor integers quickly using Shor's algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm, for all we know it might be possible for standard computers to factor quickly. Moreover, the models we use to talk about quantum computing rely very heavily on the real numbers which you aren't happy with.
Thanks. That helps clarify things a lot.
The last one we saw in our galaxy was in 1604 so yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler's_Nova. They are more common than that. so there probably have been supernova in our galaxy. But given our position in the galaxy there's a large part of our galaxy where if a supernova happens we weren't that likely to see if (because there are so many stars and dust in the way). That's not the case as much since we have much better, larger telescopes. But yeah, they are pretty rare.
Keep your systems separate. If you have important keys and they don't need to be on a network when they aren't in use, don't put them on a network. Don't give people more privileges than they need to do their jobs. That does have the secondary issue that if you go too far in that direction then people will try to get around your security measures and might open up holes in the process, and they won't take security as seriously. So you need to balance that. Also, never open up attachments that you don't know who they are from. This is a really basic point that should be driven into people. And look at the extension of the file, if it looks suspicious don't open it. These are basic points. It is embarrassing that RSA of all companies would apparently have such basic security problems. But it does help drive home a point: if they can be vulnerable to simple phishing and bad attachments so can everyone.
This is close enough that you can see it with a good amateur telescope. The supernova will brighten over time, probably hitting its brightest point sometime in the middle of September. As it brightens it might even be possible to see it with a cheap telescope or a pair of binoculars.
One thing that is important to realize is that this supernova is Type Ia, not Type II. Type II supernovae are what most people are thinking of when they think of a supernova (that is, death of a massive star). A Type Ia supernova instead occurs in a binary system where one of the stars is a white dwarf. The white dwarf slowly steals away mass from the other star until the white dwarf gets too big to be stable, around 1.4 times the mass of the sun. Then it experiences collapse in a way that is essentially similar to that of the Type II supernova.
This supernova was very close to us. One thing that could be very promising is if this left any neutrino signature above the background level. Neutrinos are very hard to detect, the major detectors are things like IceCube http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory or Super-K http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande which have very large containers of water or some other substance and you then carefully try to detect the very rare neutrino interactions over all the background radiation (neutrinos are very ghostly and don't interact very much. You have billions of them going through you all the time and you don't even notice). This has only happened with one supernova before SN 1987A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A which was bright enough and close enough to be seen by the naked eye. One really cool thing about this was that we actually recorded the neutrino burst for SN 1987A before the light arrived (three hours before). At this point, most people get shocked because they know that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. What happened was that in a Type II supernova neutrino burst occurs at the very beginning of the supernova process, but the light has to work its way out of the whole star. This actually allows us to potentially detect supernova before they happen, and there's now an early warning network with the major neutrino detectors so astronomers can get a heads-up if a type II is about to happen so they know where to point the telescopes. http://snews.bnl.gov/ Since the neutrino flux drops off quickly (like 1/r^2), supernovae need to be very close to us for to be able to pick out the neutrinos over all the solar neutrinos and general background junk. I don't fully understand the dynamics of Type Ia supernova (and I'm not an astronomer or an astrophysicist) but my impression is that there's also reason to believe that type Ia will produce fewer neutrinos than a Type II supernova. Between that and the distance, this supernova was probably too far away for us to detect any neutrinos.I suspect that the people who run the major detectors are probably looking over their data for the last few days very carefully to see if they can pick up any signal that the regular automated systems missed.
Well yes, it is high for most purposes. It is very low compared to how much data is being produced.
No. The issue here is not the latency. Latency is a problem (it is a major issue with the rovers. Trying to direct them where to go and then waiting to see if they run into problems is a big nuisance). But here the total problem is bandwith. The total bandwith is low, so it takes a very long time to send data from Mars to Earth. We get far more data on Mars than we can even send back to the Earth. Even with this new system that will still be the case but if it works it won't be nearly as bad. This will improve the total bandwith a lot.
One obvious question to ask for this sort of thing is if it is worth it. If the time increase to lifespan was less than the time necessary to spend exercising then this would be worth it. Assume a normal life span of 80 years. And assume that the exercise takes 120 minutes (showering off, changing clothes etc. pushes one above 92 minutes. I'm assuming 120 here because that makes it exactly two hours which makes the arithmetic easier). Then with 52 weeks a year, one gets that this takes up a total of 80*52*2/24, which is slightly under a year. So even if you are completely neutral to exercise and can't get any nice thinking done during it, the total delta is 2 years. So this does look like it makes sense. There's a slight argument that using time up when one is younger isn't good if the later years aren't as high quality. I'm not sure how much validity that argument has but there's some evidence that exercising keeps one healthier for the last few decades of life, so this probably increases the quality. Overall verdict: Exercising seems to make sense.
Things are not looking good for the Russian space program right now. This is the second loss they've had in a week. On August 18, rocket failure resulted in a new communication satellite going into an essentially useless orbit. The real worry about this sort of thing is what it will do to the human space program. The US may not be as willing to hire the Russians to go into space when things are running this badly. I can't imagine a PR disaster much worse than American astronauts getting killed on a Russian spacecraft. On the other hand, I'm very happy that this problem occurred on an unmanned supply vehicle rather than anything with people on it. It is also a bit scary to note that even a very well-understood set of systems like the Soyuz still sometimes runs into such severe problems. Hopefully they will be able to identify what precisely caused this problem.
This meme is a good enough approximation for most useful purposes. Yes, Hubble is more on the visual spectrum and JWSB is for the infrared spectrum. But Webb will be used to extend a lot of the stuff that Hubble did. It is in that regard the next logical thing to have after Hubble. Hubble showed us that large telescopes in space could work. Much of what Hubble could do is stuff that we can do or almost can do with large ground telescopes. JWSB will however do a lot of stuff in wavelengths that ground telescopes cannot use. But Webb would be nearly impossible without the experience and knowledge we got from Hubble. And a lot of the planned missions for Webb will consist of looking at stuff that Hubble already looked at. Calling this the Hubble successor pretty well captures the spirit and purpose even if it doesn't quite satisfy the nitpicker in all of us.
There are scenes where people physically hand someone else a PADD (although I'm not actually sure I remember if there are such scenes in TNG. There are certainly are in TOS, and there's a scene in DS9 where they go back in time to TOS and that episode has a bit where Sisko gets an excuse to hand a pad to Kirk because he wants an excuse to meet Kirk.)
Yes, but the PADDs were separate for each document or sets of documents. There are scenes where people will have a pile of PADDs on their desks. So that seems to be a bit different technology. (And yes, this does show that our technology has surpassed that of Star Trek. Yes, we live in the future, and yes, that's awesome.)
On the one hand, I'm worried about the environmental damage that such an endeavor would do. On the other hand, in the long run if done properly this could save on a lot of shipping that would be more environmentally damaging. Also there are serious issues with lack of infrastructure in the US. This isn't within the US itself but would help solve some of the same problems that such infrastructural collapse is causing. The system will link into the larger North American rail system which is in decent shape as far as moving freight is concerned (I'd like more investment in it in directly in the US but that seems unlikely right now). The price tag on this project is massive, TFA says $65 billion for the whole project with around $10 billion for the main tunnel. That's a lot of money, and I can't help wonder if there aren't a lot of small projects that would have a better return. In general small projects have a very high rate of marginal return, but that may be more true in the sciences than other areas. I don't know how true that is for something like this. And TFA correctly points out that this could give a lot of economic stimulus in terms of jobs, which is something that both the US and Russia sorely need right now. TFA doesn't address what American permits are needed for this. I would imagine that state and federal approval would be necessary but the article doesn't discuss that at all. Overall, I'm skeptical that this will end up going through successfully anytime soon. But the idea of being able to take a train from Boston to Moscow certainly sounds appealing.