I wish I had mod points. That obviously wasn't a troll.
At risk of damaging my karma: guys, just because you disagree with it doesn't mean it's trolling. There is no -1 Disagree mod. The poster is pretty obviously arguing a genuinely held opinion and coming back to support it, and yet even their reply post later on has been modded Troll.
I also don't think it's that contentious to claim that parts of our economy are dependent on copyright law. I'd take issue with the insane lengths of copyright periods, not with its mere existence. But that's beside the point!
No, unfortunately. You can't use entanglement to transmit information faster than the speed of light. It's true that under some interpretations you might think of entanglement as meaning that some cause & effect is happening faster than the speed of light, but you can prove that you can't use this to transmit information (you can't control the 'cause').
which means I can tell that I wouldn't have understood it from reading that article.
It's not one of those nonsense articles; the author clearly has some idea what she's talking about, but don't feel like you should be able to get some basic understanding of quantum computing from reading this. The information really isn't there. It starts with 'what is quantum physics' and very quickly moves on to 'what are quantum computers used for'. How they actually work is I think glossed over in the sentence "This shared state means that a change applied to one entangled object is instantly reflected by its correlated fellows - hence the massive parallel potential of a quantum computer. ", and if that was enough explanation for you, you're psychic.
David Mermin's lecture notes in an earlier comment though look great! Thanks for the link.
Also if anyone can explain to me what the article means by:
One more thing, there is a minority of scientists who believe that building a quantum computer will turn out to be out-and-out impossible.
However, if those scientists are right, the implication of not being able to build such a machine is that quantum mechanics itself, as a description of nature, is wrong. Either way, the stakes could not be higher.
let me know. I'm guessing that this is a simplistic reference to something real, but I have no idea what, and I can't understand how it's consistent with the fact mentioned earlier in the article that 'toy' (i.e. few-bit) quantum computers have been demonstrated to work in the lab.
I'm not convinced it's unchangeable, even though I'm in a very similar situation to you. My hours are naturally "late" and gravitate back there every time they're allowed, then stay stable. The only reason I'm not convinced is that several different friends with the same thing have told me they did genuinely and apparently permanently switch to early hours, some years back. In each case the thing which made it happen was having a baby! Maybe baby = early hours + oxytocin = brain reprogramming?
I agree that's wheat's not necessary for its flavour, even in bread. Other grains might not taste identical but who cares, unless they taste worse? Amaranth for instance is much more delicious than wheat.
In reply to some posts below, it's also not necessary to use barley in beer. Other grains work and there are a couple of companies making gluten-free beer. Barley's just traditional.
However we don't have any substitute for wheat in terms of the texture of bread. In this case it's kind of a catch-22 as it's the gluten specifically (not just the wheat) that achieves the soft, springy effect you want. I have tried a lot of recipes and honestly think that nothing else works as well. So yes, I want gluten that is more tolerable to people with Coeliac disease, please.
I have Coeliac and I find this "gluten-free fad" thing cuts both ways. On the one hand, I'm sure it makes gluten-free products more available and so I know I should be happy about it. But I can't help finding it annoying to have people say "oh yes, I have that too!" when it's perfectly obvious they don't because they only avoid gluten when they feel like it, and they've never got themselves tested. The other annoyance is staff at some restaurants & cafes have encountered this fad and assume me asking for gluten-free is just some kind of lifestyle choice, and they are accordingly unhelpful.
What I want this discovery to lead to is not a test but a fix! Maybe a "cure", but that's very ambitious. Or maybe a gluten-like substance that I can use to make "real bread" but which doesn't contain the trigger protein fragments. Gluten makes bread springy and soft. Plenty of other grains taste just as good, but none of the gluten subsitutes (xanthan gum etc) give you the texture of bread. If I could get something that worked like gluten and didn't trigger the autoimmune reaction, I would be very happy.
When I google for "Chocomize", my top three results are the source chocolate-making company - not spam. The fourth, the only thing remotely resembling pollution, is this searchengineland article itself.
Also, if this is an issue, I really don't think the right solution is to hide the information.
Seriously though, I actually find this a fairly depressing theory as it suggests two states for the galaxy - either galactic civilisation, or very low chances of contact. And it doesn't really seem like we're in the former.
That paper doesn't look like a published paper btw, just an arxiv post.
This really just looks like Chevrolet going through the motions companies go through when they want a "sciency" press release... commission a meaningless study. I don't think it should have made it to slashdot. Is there any depth to this?
I'm confused by this argument. Wasn't the whole concern the idea of technology that would let people pay to improve their genes? That sounds more like the "American dream" you describe, not less. We already have a situation where one person can be born with less genetic advantages than another. Currently, however hard they work, they are not going to be able to change this. I'm not sure why you say "anyone could be smart" - right now that simply isn't true. With genetic technologies it could be. I'm not saying I'm convinced this is going to be a good thing but it does sound like the ability to buy better genes would be aligned with the ideal you describe, not opposed to it.
I don't think this is really fair to her. It would be more accurate to say when you hand your information over to other people, it is no longer private. True, but not very useful - are you going to never tell your address to anyone in case they pass it on to the wrong person? Never communicate it by any channel in case that channel is compromised?
In this case she shared information over a channel she'd been led to believe she controlled access to, and then it was unexpectedly opened up. That's not cool at all.
I'm pretty sure this is untrue. In my case I appear to have Buzz followers and followees, and I have never opted in to ANY part of it - not created a public profile, not clicked any Yes buttons, nothing!
Maybe she should have to explicitly add her abusive ex-husband to her list of contacts before anything is made visible to him. I hate opt-out stuff. Give me a list of "possible contacts", sorted by likelihood, blocked by default, and let me unblock them. Don't start them off unblocked!
And let's not forget - a lot of research is done not with researcher-written code, but with standard bought software packages which are proprietary and not available for review.
I work in "IT for research". I see a lot of researchers from different disciplines who write code, or in some cases hire developers. In my experience there are a few things that can make a big difference:
Appropriate Methods journals - scientists are MUCH more likely to go to the effort of releasing their code if they will get cited by scientists who re-use it, and cited in a journal with some respectability. In fields with these kinds of respected journals there is much more code publication. And if they're going to release it, they will look harder at the quality.
Pressure on instrument manufacturers to release standards - proprietary standards can be a major barrier in developing open code, not to mention a huge waste of time. These instruments are very expensive and bought with public money. Funding bodies which fund hardware purchases could apply a LOT of pressure here.
Research IT support from universities (not just IT support for the educational branch of the university). The quality of this can be wildly variable.
Yes, running the code against a test suite is a no-brainer - if you've got a test suite.
There can be problems with scientific code which a software engineer without an understanding of the science would not find. These are to do with the accurate formulation of the scientific model you're implementing. If a software engineer is given a test data set for validation with broad enough applicability, of course they will find ANY bug, but if the researchers have such a test data set they will probably notice the existence of bugs themselves! In many cases such data sets, with results that are known to be correct under the model, are difficult to generate.
I do however think that a software engineer can find a lot of bugs that are simply bugs, without having domain knowledge.
In my experience the more common reason people hide their code is that they see it as their competitive research advantage. The ethics of this are open to debate.
That would probably make you and me happier. It wouldn't make, for instance, my mother happier and it would mean my grandmother would not contact them at all./. is a biased sample - a lot of people prefer to talk to a human. And I have to to admit that as moronic as first level support can be in some cases, computers can be more so and can get hung up on even stupider conversational details.
Slashdot Mirror
Have a look at Scripting Layer for Andriod (SL4A).
I can see the T-shirt now: /
User-agent: *
Disallow:
I wish I had mod points. That obviously wasn't a troll.
At risk of damaging my karma: guys, just because you disagree with it doesn't mean it's trolling. There is no -1 Disagree mod. The poster is pretty obviously arguing a genuinely held opinion and coming back to support it, and yet even their reply post later on has been modded Troll.
I also don't think it's that contentious to claim that parts of our economy are dependent on copyright law. I'd take issue with the insane lengths of copyright periods, not with its mere existence. But that's beside the point!
Seconded! Mod both parents up! Those notes look awesome, enough that I will probably go for the book instead. Thanks for posting.
No, unfortunately. You can't use entanglement to transmit information faster than the speed of light. It's true that under some interpretations you might think of entanglement as meaning that some cause & effect is happening faster than the speed of light, but you can prove that you can't use this to transmit information (you can't control the 'cause').
which means I can tell that I wouldn't have understood it from reading that article.
It's not one of those nonsense articles; the author clearly has some idea what she's talking about, but don't feel like you should be able to get some basic understanding of quantum computing from reading this. The information really isn't there. It starts with 'what is quantum physics' and very quickly moves on to 'what are quantum computers used for'. How they actually work is I think glossed over in the sentence "This shared state means that a change applied to one entangled object is instantly reflected by its correlated fellows - hence the massive parallel potential of a quantum computer. ", and if that was enough explanation for you, you're psychic.
David Mermin's lecture notes in an earlier comment though look great! Thanks for the link.
Also if anyone can explain to me what the article means by:
let me know. I'm guessing that this is a simplistic reference to something real, but I have no idea what, and I can't understand how it's consistent with the fact mentioned earlier in the article that 'toy' (i.e. few-bit) quantum computers have been demonstrated to work in the lab.
I'm serious:
I'm not convinced it's unchangeable, even though I'm in a very similar situation to you. My hours are naturally "late" and gravitate back there every time they're allowed, then stay stable. The only reason I'm not convinced is that several different friends with the same thing have told me they did genuinely and apparently permanently switch to early hours, some years back. In each case the thing which made it happen was having a baby! Maybe baby = early hours + oxytocin = brain reprogramming?
In reply to some posts below, it's also not necessary to use barley in beer. Other grains work and there are a couple of companies making gluten-free beer. Barley's just traditional.
However we don't have any substitute for wheat in terms of the texture of bread. In this case it's kind of a catch-22 as it's the gluten specifically (not just the wheat) that achieves the soft, springy effect you want. I have tried a lot of recipes and honestly think that nothing else works as well. So yes, I want gluten that is more tolerable to people with Coeliac disease, please.
I have Coeliac and I find this "gluten-free fad" thing cuts both ways. On the one hand, I'm sure it makes gluten-free products more available and so I know I should be happy about it. But I can't help finding it annoying to have people say "oh yes, I have that too!" when it's perfectly obvious they don't because they only avoid gluten when they feel like it, and they've never got themselves tested. The other annoyance is staff at some restaurants & cafes have encountered this fad and assume me asking for gluten-free is just some kind of lifestyle choice, and they are accordingly unhelpful.
What I want this discovery to lead to is not a test but a fix! Maybe a "cure", but that's very ambitious. Or maybe a gluten-like substance that I can use to make "real bread" but which doesn't contain the trigger protein fragments. Gluten makes bread springy and soft. Plenty of other grains taste just as good, but none of the gluten subsitutes (xanthan gum etc) give you the texture of bread. If I could get something that worked like gluten and didn't trigger the autoimmune reaction, I would be very happy.
When I google for "Chocomize", my top three results are the source chocolate-making company - not spam. The fourth, the only thing remotely resembling pollution, is this searchengineland article itself.
Also, if this is an issue, I really don't think the right solution is to hide the information.
http://xkcd.com/638/
Seriously though, I actually find this a fairly depressing theory as it suggests two states for the galaxy - either galactic civilisation, or very low chances of contact. And it doesn't really seem like we're in the former.
That paper doesn't look like a published paper btw, just an arxiv post.
This really just looks like Chevrolet going through the motions companies go through when they want a "sciency" press release... commission a meaningless study. I don't think it should have made it to slashdot. Is there any depth to this?
It's as if a journalist is trying to make nerdy white-collar crime sound cool.
Stop it journalists! You're making it worse! Ooh, and now they're using crimeware!
Brilliant. And the logical extension to this is that if you want an ice cream shop on your street all you need to do is get it into Google maps.
A moon base built by robots, for robots!
I'm confused by this argument. Wasn't the whole concern the idea of technology that would let people pay to improve their genes? That sounds more like the "American dream" you describe, not less. We already have a situation where one person can be born with less genetic advantages than another. Currently, however hard they work, they are not going to be able to change this. I'm not sure why you say "anyone could be smart" - right now that simply isn't true. With genetic technologies it could be. I'm not saying I'm convinced this is going to be a good thing but it does sound like the ability to buy better genes would be aligned with the ideal you describe, not opposed to it.
I don't think this is really fair to her. It would be more accurate to say when you hand your information over to other people, it is no longer private. True, but not very useful - are you going to never tell your address to anyone in case they pass it on to the wrong person? Never communicate it by any channel in case that channel is compromised?
In this case she shared information over a channel she'd been led to believe she controlled access to, and then it was unexpectedly opened up. That's not cool at all.
I'm pretty sure this is untrue. In my case I appear to have Buzz followers and followees, and I have never opted in to ANY part of it - not created a public profile, not clicked any Yes buttons, nothing!
Maybe she should have to explicitly add her abusive ex-husband to her list of contacts before anything is made visible to him. I hate opt-out stuff. Give me a list of "possible contacts", sorted by likelihood, blocked by default, and let me unblock them. Don't start them off unblocked!
And let's not forget - a lot of research is done not with researcher-written code, but with standard bought software packages which are proprietary and not available for review.
Yes, running the code against a test suite is a no-brainer - if you've got a test suite.
There can be problems with scientific code which a software engineer without an understanding of the science would not find. These are to do with the accurate formulation of the scientific model you're implementing. If a software engineer is given a test data set for validation with broad enough applicability, of course they will find ANY bug, but if the researchers have such a test data set they will probably notice the existence of bugs themselves! In many cases such data sets, with results that are known to be correct under the model, are difficult to generate.
I do however think that a software engineer can find a lot of bugs that are simply bugs, without having domain knowledge.
In my experience the more common reason people hide their code is that they see it as their competitive research advantage. The ethics of this are open to debate.
That would probably make you and me happier. It wouldn't make, for instance, my mother happier and it would mean my grandmother would not contact them at all. /. is a biased sample - a lot of people prefer to talk to a human. And I have to to admit that as moronic as first level support can be in some cases, computers can be more so and can get hung up on even stupider conversational details.
I think you meant "they're" instead of "their".