The model for investing you describe still exists. However, we now call such high risk/high reward innovation-oriented investing venture capital. It could be that the distinction you are trying to make is one of scale -- small scale investors cannot provide enough VC to get most good ideas off the ground, and as such are restricted to investing in larger, lower risk enterprises. On the other hand, it seems to me that the main change over the past fifty years on this front is the distribution of potential capital, in that many more people now invest in the stock market on a per capita basis. From that observation, I would contend that the narrowing of risk profiles is a natural consequence.
Fortunately, the actual return induced by this behavior reflects the reduced risk. See, e.g., bear.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/PBFJ2005.pdf.
The hemoglobin in your red blood cells is reasonably paramagnetic; under the application of a large magnetic field it will produce a magnetic dipole. I suspect that the effect they are describing arises when two red blood cells get near each other. Then, the magnetic field from the induced dipole in the hemoglobin gets them to line up, much like what happens with pairs of refrigerator magnets when you bring them close. This grows into a longer and longer chain, until brownian motion overcomes the weak binding induced. The resulting chains of hemoglobin flow past each other more easily than individual particles, so long as they maintain their narrow aspect along the flow direction. The benefit claimed in the article thus pertains primarily to flow along the magnetic field's axis, where the external field keeps them oriented along its axis.
It is unclear what the metabolic effects of such chains are in practical settings--for example, how well oxygen exchange will occur with much of the cell membrane locked up against adjacent cells. Also, perpendicular flow may have a lower or higher viscosity as the unmagnetized sample (though the article is not available for reading yet, so I can only infer that it is still a bit lower due to the statements in the news release-ish article that the effect persists for some time after the magnet is turned off).
The key idea is that of inflation: general relativity allows for the distance between points to increase faster than the speed of light. Alan Guth's theory for inflation proposes that this in fact occured in the early universe, and the theory is now backed up by observations of fluctuations in the microwave background radiation (among others), where microscopic fluctuations were "frozen in" due to the rapid expansion. The consequence of this inflation is that much of the current universe is not within our 14 Gyr lightcone.
As a side note, the big hub-bub about dark energy is that it appears (based on current observations) that our universe may be entering a second inflationary period. Fortunately, the timescale for this is on the order 100 Gyr, so it will be unlikely to effect our lives directly.
Actually, quantum cryptography can work with non-secured intermediate repeater stations. In essence, rather than attempting to send the random bits directly, one attempts to build an entangled pair of quantum bits, one at each end of the repeater chain. This is trying to build a specific state, which can be verified before use. The random key is generated using the non-classical correlations of the entangled pair (for more info, one can google "Ekert quantum repeater").
As you might expect, the protocol for this case is very different from that used in classical repeaters: one cannot measure the signal and amplify it, because doing so would negate the security you are attempting to establish. Instead, a quantum repeater focuses on the specific task of creating an entangled state at the either end, which can then be used to generate cryptographically secure random bits. Because one can verify the final state at the ends of the system before it is used, and independently of malicious users in the middle, a quantum repeater is no more susceptible to an intercept attack than a short-distance single fiber approach. Again, both are susceptible to a complete man-in-the-middle replacement / redirect.
I definitely appreciate the comments above; however, if you want to learn the language, there is little point in wasting your time on it. Put up the money, and go to an intensive language school (Middlebury, FALCON, etc.) Then go to Japan. One summer of intensive language is enough to learn how to learn the language. Then going, immediately after, and making a concerted effort to use japanese as much as possible, and you can be passably good in a year. Ideally, find a teacher or class to continue your education and who can answer questions as they occur to you.
After a year, you'll be able to talk about serious things and fun things, hang out, even watch movies, etc. You won't be ready to work in a japanese company speaking japanese, nor will you have a strong understanding of the written language, but it'll be as much as you could hope to do in a year.
Any other approach, and it'll take you MUCH longer to achieve the same.
Based on the QTVR image of the mini, it seems the power unit is a rectangle about a third the size of the computer, but it appears to be on a much longer cord than the cube's was. It seems likely that the unit can live right next to the powerstrip.
Only vaguely relatedly, this mini has all the beauty of the cube but (finally) the right price point. Any word on how noisy it's supposed to be?
I recall researching such "direct imaging" devices back in 1995; they were going to be the next great thing in VR, back when virtual reality was still a meme. What is neat is the idea of wide integration, though safety issues even with low power lasers would, I imagine, remain a problem.
As an analogy, consider headphone use vs. speakers. In the headphone case, you can easily damage your ears without even noticing you're doing it by having it a tinsy bit loud, while the speaker output makes it much harder (I imagine due to all that feedback to the rest of your body!) Similarly here, you are probably imaging on a limited part of your retina, which may make your eyes dilate open too much, and develop small damage over time, etc.
As Cringley points out, the possibilities for google are extremely broad, but limited nonetheless by the necessity of playing to the "technology" strength of google management and employees. Presumably the 20% project time (i.e. where employees develop pet projects) will help in the short term and long term. The bazaar model may work, but in terms of making money off of technology, they need to expand their bazaar thinking beyond just new technology, into market creation and the like. Otherwise all that creative R&D time is lost in a sea, like many sourceforge projects. Presumably they allow _all_ their employees the 20% time, not just engineers, in which case this works.
Only vaguely relatedly, it seems that utilization of their distributed computing expertise and power (as per previous slashdot discussions) is an immediate area they can capitalize on. I wonder what a google-backbone based MMORG (with _ultimate bandwidth power_) would be like?
Processing power vs. chip complexity
on
Moore's Law Disputed
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Another factor is the great disparity between actual processing power (often measured in FLOPS etc) and the number of transistors on a chip. For a while, transistors numbers were doubling every 12 months, but computing power was only doubling every 24 months. Why? The need for pipelining and data management meant more and more of the chip had to be dedicated to pre- and post-processing of the actual calculation, along with intelligent caching and the related works of predictive streams.
An alternative approach has been to build specialized hardware to put all those transistors to use, at the expense of turning your general purpose computer into a very special purpose machine. This has been used, sometimes to great effect, in for example N-body calculations (GRAPE 1-6), yielding 50 or more TFlops of performance for the general computer cost of a 500 GFlop machine. It provides yet another example of the misappropriation of Moore's law.
Google as public utility
on
Google vs. Evil
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
There was a curious point in the article, with respect to a lawsuit versus Google. The idea presented was simple: as Google (currently, right now) provides an effective monopoly on a fundamental service of the net, it could be considered a public utility. I can begin to see how this argument could be persuasive, depending on the outcome of the next five years.
Without better understanding of the long-term implications of search engines and the legaly responsibilities such bodies have to their users and corresponding linked pages, it remains unclear whether any one service will ever truly take over for an extended period of time these services. Still, the hardware, software, and more general technical knowhow and intuition required to make Google what it is today is hard to duplicate. Furthermore, the combination of extensive searching, effective sorting, and caching means that Google is rapidly becoming the generalized equivlant of the preprint server xxx.lanl.gov, something the physics community now takes for granted and indeed, treats like a public utility.
When we come to rely upon Google to back up slashdotted servers and find any particular thing on the web, and have no effective alternatives for all of these, then it behoves us to treat it as a utility. There are certain egalitarian principles behind public utilities that are supportive of the general idea of "doing good", e.g. the gas company is required to provide heating service in certain neighborhoods during the winter, even to non-paying clients.
I think we would do well to consider the ways in which the public good can be served through such a company, allowing the effective merger of both the companies money-making prerequistes and the necessity of that company's service. Maybe that could provide an alternative solution to the "either we make money and sell our morals, or vice versa" problem Google seems to be facing.
It seems the real question of relevance rests in the new technology they're using to build these devices. The FinFETs have a nice writeup
here. They can be built just with the defects from plateaus in normal photo-lithographic processes, thus using the nicely developed techniques usually limited to 125 nm structures to build 10 nm structures. This still means the overall transistor size will be on the order of a a few hundred nm, to deal with contacts, etc, but it is a sight better than standard 0.13 micron transistors, and much easier to use in mass production than e-beam lithography. (Just think about those old vector displays -- that's ebeam lithography for you). Seems like a fine idea for nanoscale structure building, and not one of these technologies may have impacts far beyond just standard IC circuit technology; with 10 nm devices, all sorts of quantum coherent processes become accessible, if you work for them.
One advantage to sub-micron device structures (here, what, 125 nm2 devices, right, given 64 bits per square micron) is they are as near-field as you could want. Still, it is hard to see how you can get better stipline performance without going to superconducting materials. That is a long dicussion, better served by someone who knows more about it.
What's the net result? Probably superconducting interconnects will be necessary to take advantage of this type of memory. Conductors with highly desirable LC characteristics (read nanotubes) may be another way to accomplish this without going to low temperature.
Alternatively, asyncronous memory access / processing may be useful, though I know nothing about those ideas.
I would have to give this a strong second; mine just arrived in the mail, and it is every bit as cute as you could hope from the pictures.
Too bad it won't arrive until after the 14th:( Apparently the last day to order for a guaranteed deliverly was the 6th. I suppose a little Fedex can go a long way here, though, as that date was based upon priority mail.
You bring up a key point; how improving technology leads to the greater possibility of a totalitarian dystopia. The PRC already has so much propaganda running through its education and news organs that I have had a friend relate to me the following conversation:
Beijing University student: "Tell me, do they have McDonalds in America?"
Friend: "Of course!"
Student: "Well, I know it was started here and all, so I thought maybe it hadn't gotten over there yet."
And he believed it, just as hundreds of millions believe what is fed to them through the thousand small swords of the propaganda tools of a powerful few. This is one more extension of that, but we best not forget that all needs come down if freedom is to return.
You have to imagine that in the quantum regime these things are waves. What happens when you confine a light wave to a box? The boundary conditions make the light turn into a standing wave; the lowest energy one of these is essentially an unmoving half-wave of light. In a similar way, in the quantum states in question the lowest energy has no vertical velocity expectation value; the next has a 1.7 cm/sec one, etc. A quantum jump from one to the other would lead to that Wile E. Coyote behavior, so familiar in the quantum world and so foreign to the classical one we seem to inhabit.
Going back to the boundard conditions issue, this is how the experiment works. There is an absorption plate which essential determines the width of the channel. Classically a few neutrons will get through even the narrowest of channels, but quantum mechanically it has to be wider than the wavelength of the relevant particle. The curious thing about this experiment is that the channel is much wider (15 microns) than the neutron wavelength (0.01 micron) and visible light (0.6 micron) but the visible light gets through while the neutron does not! A straighforward explaination is to include the gravitational interaction quantum mechanically; then you get a neutron-graviton quasiparticle with a much longer wavelength that cannot fit through the slit. However, as the mass of light is darn small it couples very weakly and goes through essentially unchanged. The neutron, on the other hand, is sufficiently massive to cause a "strong" coupling and thus doesn't get through.
(1) Before we can even discuss basic science research, we need to agree that such fundamentals are important and thus deserve tax dollars. I find it irrelevant that the money comes from NASA for this discussion.
(2) As mentioned in the article, this experiment hopes to measure to unprecedented accuracy the rate of change of the distance between the Earth and the moon. Why is this useful? If it can be done accurately (the conditions of which I will discuss in a moment) it would allow a determination of the self-interaction of gravity, e.g. graviton-graviton interaction. This is fundamentally different than Newtonian gravity, and, as mentioned elsewhere, the simplest way to explain in our nascent theory of quantum gravity the Einstein field equations without solving the actual math. On a much larger scale, the determination of the Hubble constant and how it changes with time also measures this. Finding the argument that it is preferable to do such measurements in one's backyard when possible I leave as an exercise to the reader.
With respect to the potential accuracy (vs. precision) of such measurements I will note the following. First, current gravity meters based upon atomic fountains are accurate enough to find Cave complexes in Afghanistan and see people moving around in them. (c.f. Steve Chu's recent work at Stanford with atom interferometers); we have a very detailed picture of our local gravitational field available to us. Second, considerations such as chaos theory and effects of the other planets are relatively straightforward to deal with. Back at the beginning of the 20th century they had already done it for Mercury and still had a discrepancy, at 43 arcseconds per century in its orbit(c.f. this explanation). That's over 10 times smaller all the other planets' influence, and that was calculated before computers. It seems to me the greatest unknown is the tectonic structure of the moon and the associated vibrations in the mirror. I suppose that radar rangefinding, given the scale of these variations, would be sufficient for most purposes.
Finally, some of the past results of this experiment, from the Nasa site
From the ranging experiments, scientists know that the average distance between the centers of the Earth and the Moon is 385,000 kilometers with an accuracy of better than one part in 10 billion. Laser ranging has also made possible a wealth of new information about the dynamics and structure of the Moon. Among many new observations, scientists now believe that the Moon may harbor a liquid core. The theory has been proposed from data on the Moon's rate of rotation and very slight bobbing motions caused by gravitational forces from the Sun and Earth.
Ranging has also determined that the length of an Earth day has distinct small-scale variations of about one thousandth of a second over the course of a year, caused by the atmosphere, tides, and Earth's core. In addition, precise positions of the laser ranging observatories on Earth are slowly drifting as the crustal plates on Earth drift. The observatory on Maui is seen to be drifting away from the observatory in Texas.
Slashdot Mirror
The model for investing you describe still exists. However, we now call such high risk/high reward innovation-oriented investing venture capital. It could be that the distinction you are trying to make is one of scale -- small scale investors cannot provide enough VC to get most good ideas off the ground, and as such are restricted to investing in larger, lower risk enterprises. On the other hand, it seems to me that the main change over the past fifty years on this front is the distribution of potential capital, in that many more people now invest in the stock market on a per capita basis. From that observation, I would contend that the narrowing of risk profiles is a natural consequence.
Fortunately, the actual return induced by this behavior reflects the reduced risk. See, e.g., bear.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/PBFJ2005.pdf.
The hemoglobin in your red blood cells is reasonably paramagnetic; under the application of a large magnetic field it will produce a magnetic dipole. I suspect that the effect they are describing arises when two red blood cells get near each other. Then, the magnetic field from the induced dipole in the hemoglobin gets them to line up, much like what happens with pairs of refrigerator magnets when you bring them close. This grows into a longer and longer chain, until brownian motion overcomes the weak binding induced. The resulting chains of hemoglobin flow past each other more easily than individual particles, so long as they maintain their narrow aspect along the flow direction. The benefit claimed in the article thus pertains primarily to flow along the magnetic field's axis, where the external field keeps them oriented along its axis.
It is unclear what the metabolic effects of such chains are in practical settings--for example, how well oxygen exchange will occur with much of the cell membrane locked up against adjacent cells. Also, perpendicular flow may have a lower or higher viscosity as the unmagnetized sample (though the article is not available for reading yet, so I can only infer that it is still a bit lower due to the statements in the news release-ish article that the effect persists for some time after the magnet is turned off).
The key idea is that of inflation: general relativity allows for the distance between points to increase faster than the speed of light. Alan Guth's theory for inflation proposes that this in fact occured in the early universe, and the theory is now backed up by observations of fluctuations in the microwave background radiation (among others), where microscopic fluctuations were "frozen in" due to the rapid expansion. The consequence of this inflation is that much of the current universe is not within our 14 Gyr lightcone.
As a side note, the big hub-bub about dark energy is that it appears (based on current observations) that our universe may be entering a second inflationary period. Fortunately, the timescale for this is on the order 100 Gyr, so it will be unlikely to effect our lives directly.
Actually, quantum cryptography can work with non-secured intermediate repeater stations. In essence, rather than attempting to send the random bits directly, one attempts to build an entangled pair of quantum bits, one at each end of the repeater chain. This is trying to build a specific state, which can be verified before use. The random key is generated using the non-classical correlations of the entangled pair (for more info, one can google "Ekert quantum repeater").
As you might expect, the protocol for this case is very different from that used in classical repeaters: one cannot measure the signal and amplify it, because doing so would negate the security you are attempting to establish. Instead, a quantum repeater focuses on the specific task of creating an entangled state at the either end, which can then be used to generate cryptographically secure random bits. Because one can verify the final state at the ends of the system before it is used, and independently of malicious users in the middle, a quantum repeater is no more susceptible to an intercept attack than a short-distance single fiber approach. Again, both are susceptible to a complete man-in-the-middle replacement / redirect.
I definitely appreciate the comments above; however, if you want to learn the language, there is little point in wasting your time on it. Put up the money, and go to an intensive language school (Middlebury, FALCON, etc.) Then go to Japan. One summer of intensive language is enough to learn how to learn the language. Then going, immediately after, and making a concerted effort to use japanese as much as possible, and you can be passably good in a year. Ideally, find a teacher or class to continue your education and who can answer questions as they occur to you.
After a year, you'll be able to talk about serious things and fun things, hang out, even watch movies, etc. You won't be ready to work in a japanese company speaking japanese, nor will you have a strong understanding of the written language, but it'll be as much as you could hope to do in a year.
Any other approach, and it'll take you MUCH longer to achieve the same.
Just my 0.02.
Based on the QTVR image of the mini, it seems the power unit is a rectangle about a third the size of the computer, but it appears to be on a much longer cord than the cube's was. It seems likely that the unit can live right next to the powerstrip.
Only vaguely relatedly, this mini has all the beauty of the cube but (finally) the right price point. Any word on how noisy it's supposed to be?
I recall researching such "direct imaging" devices back in 1995; they were going to be the next great thing in VR, back when virtual reality was still a meme. What is neat is the idea of wide integration, though safety issues even with low power lasers would, I imagine, remain a problem.
As an analogy, consider headphone use vs. speakers. In the headphone case, you can easily damage your ears without even noticing you're doing it by having it a tinsy bit loud, while the speaker output makes it much harder (I imagine due to all that feedback to the rest of your body!) Similarly here, you are probably imaging on a limited part of your retina, which may make your eyes dilate open too much, and develop small damage over time, etc.
As Cringley points out, the possibilities for google are extremely broad, but limited nonetheless by the necessity of playing to the "technology" strength of google management and employees. Presumably the 20% project time (i.e. where employees develop pet projects) will help in the short term and long term. The bazaar model may work, but in terms of making money off of technology, they need to expand their bazaar thinking beyond just new technology, into market creation and the like. Otherwise all that creative R&D time is lost in a sea, like many sourceforge projects. Presumably they allow _all_ their employees the 20% time, not just engineers, in which case this works.
Only vaguely relatedly, it seems that utilization of their distributed computing expertise and power (as per previous slashdot discussions) is an immediate area they can capitalize on. I wonder what a google-backbone based MMORG (with _ultimate bandwidth power_) would be like?
Another factor is the great disparity between actual processing power (often measured in FLOPS etc) and the number of transistors on a chip. For a while, transistors numbers were doubling every 12 months, but computing power was only doubling every 24 months. Why? The need for pipelining and data management meant more and more of the chip had to be dedicated to pre- and post-processing of the actual calculation, along with intelligent caching and the related works of predictive streams.
An alternative approach has been to build specialized hardware to put all those transistors to use, at the expense of turning your general purpose computer into a very special purpose machine. This has been used, sometimes to great effect, in for example N-body calculations (GRAPE 1-6), yielding 50 or more TFlops of performance for the general computer cost of a 500 GFlop machine. It provides yet another example of the misappropriation of Moore's law.
There was a curious point in the article, with respect to a lawsuit versus Google. The idea presented was simple: as Google (currently, right now) provides an effective monopoly on a fundamental service of the net, it could be considered a public utility. I can begin to see how this argument could be persuasive, depending on the outcome of the next five years.
Without better understanding of the long-term implications of search engines and the legaly responsibilities such bodies have to their users and corresponding linked pages, it remains unclear whether any one service will ever truly take over for an extended period of time these services. Still, the hardware, software, and more general technical knowhow and intuition required to make Google what it is today is hard to duplicate. Furthermore, the combination of extensive searching, effective sorting, and caching means that Google is rapidly becoming the generalized equivlant of the preprint server xxx.lanl.gov, something the physics community now takes for granted and indeed, treats like a public utility.
When we come to rely upon Google to back up slashdotted servers and find any particular thing on the web, and have no effective alternatives for all of these, then it behoves us to treat it as a utility. There are certain egalitarian principles behind public utilities that are supportive of the general idea of "doing good", e.g. the gas company is required to provide heating service in certain neighborhoods during the winter, even to non-paying clients.
I think we would do well to consider the ways in which the public good can be served through such a company, allowing the effective merger of both the companies money-making prerequistes and the necessity of that company's service. Maybe that could provide an alternative solution to the "either we make money and sell our morals, or vice versa" problem Google seems to be facing.
It seems the real question of relevance rests in the new technology they're using to build these devices. The FinFETs have a nice writeup here. They can be built just with the defects from plateaus in normal photo-lithographic processes, thus using the nicely developed techniques usually limited to 125 nm structures to build 10 nm structures. This still means the overall transistor size will be on the order of a a few hundred nm, to deal with contacts, etc, but it is a sight better than standard 0.13 micron transistors, and much easier to use in mass production than e-beam lithography. (Just think about those old vector displays -- that's ebeam lithography for you). Seems like a fine idea for nanoscale structure building, and not one of these technologies may have impacts far beyond just standard IC circuit technology; with 10 nm devices, all sorts of quantum coherent processes become accessible, if you work for them.
One advantage to sub-micron device structures (here, what, 125 nm2 devices, right, given 64 bits per square micron) is they are as near-field as you could want. Still, it is hard to see how you can get better stipline performance without going to superconducting materials. That is a long dicussion, better served by someone who knows more about it.
What's the net result? Probably superconducting interconnects will be necessary to take advantage of this type of memory. Conductors with highly desirable LC characteristics (read nanotubes) may be another way to accomplish this without going to low temperature.
Alternatively, asyncronous memory access / processing may be useful, though I know nothing about those ideas.
I would have to give this a strong second; mine just arrived in the mail, and it is every bit as cute as you could hope from the pictures.
:( Apparently the last day to order for a guaranteed deliverly was the 6th. I suppose a little Fedex can go a long way here, though, as that date was based upon priority mail.
Too bad it won't arrive until after the 14th
Cheers!
You bring up a key point; how improving technology leads to the greater possibility of a totalitarian dystopia. The PRC already has so much propaganda running through its education and news organs that I have had a friend relate to me the following conversation:
Beijing University student: "Tell me, do they have McDonalds in America?"
Friend: "Of course!"
Student: "Well, I know it was started here and all, so I thought maybe it hadn't gotten over there yet."
And he believed it, just as hundreds of millions believe what is fed to them through the thousand small swords of the propaganda tools of a powerful few. This is one more extension of that, but we best not forget that all needs come down if freedom is to return.
You have to imagine that in the quantum regime these things are waves. What happens when you confine a light wave to a box? The boundary conditions make the light turn into a standing wave; the lowest energy one of these is essentially an unmoving half-wave of light. In a similar way, in the quantum states in question the lowest energy has no vertical velocity expectation value; the next has a 1.7 cm/sec one, etc. A quantum jump from one to the other would lead to that Wile E. Coyote behavior, so familiar in the quantum world and so foreign to the classical one we seem to inhabit.
Going back to the boundard conditions issue, this is how the experiment works. There is an absorption plate which essential determines the width of the channel. Classically a few neutrons will get through even the narrowest of channels, but quantum mechanically it has to be wider than the wavelength of the relevant particle. The curious thing about this experiment is that the channel is much wider (15 microns) than the neutron wavelength (0.01 micron) and visible light (0.6 micron) but the visible light gets through while the neutron does not! A straighforward explaination is to include the gravitational interaction quantum mechanically; then you get a neutron-graviton quasiparticle with a much longer wavelength that cannot fit through the slit. However, as the mass of light is darn small it couples very weakly and goes through essentially unchanged. The neutron, on the other hand, is sufficiently massive to cause a "strong" coupling and thus doesn't get through.
(1) Before we can even discuss basic science research, we need to agree that such fundamentals are important and thus deserve tax dollars. I find it irrelevant that the money comes from NASA for this discussion.
(2) As mentioned in the article, this experiment hopes to measure to unprecedented accuracy the rate of change of the distance between the Earth and the moon. Why is this useful? If it can be done accurately (the conditions of which I will discuss in a moment) it would allow a determination of the self-interaction of gravity, e.g. graviton-graviton interaction. This is fundamentally different than Newtonian gravity, and, as mentioned elsewhere, the simplest way to explain in our nascent theory of quantum gravity the Einstein field equations without solving the actual math. On a much larger scale, the determination of the Hubble constant and how it changes with time also measures this. Finding the argument that it is preferable to do such measurements in one's backyard when possible I leave as an exercise to the reader.
With respect to the potential accuracy (vs. precision) of such measurements I will note the following. First, current gravity meters based upon atomic fountains are accurate enough to find Cave complexes in Afghanistan and see people moving around in them. (c.f. Steve Chu's recent work at Stanford with atom interferometers); we have a very detailed picture of our local gravitational field available to us. Second, considerations such as chaos theory and effects of the other planets are relatively straightforward to deal with. Back at the beginning of the 20th century they had already done it for Mercury and still had a discrepancy, at 43 arcseconds per century in its orbit(c.f. this explanation). That's over 10 times smaller all the other planets' influence, and that was calculated before computers. It seems to me the greatest unknown is the tectonic structure of the moon and the associated vibrations in the mirror. I suppose that radar rangefinding, given the scale of these variations, would be sufficient for most purposes.
Finally, some of the past results of this experiment, from the Nasa site