You have a valid point. For any classes that had equations, I generally use good old pen and paper, since those are a lot easier (I work on a lot of physics stuff, therefore it becomes a pain to use something like Word).
But for most drab-type lectures, I tend to use my PDA - but oh well, to each his own!:)
Not when you have an external full-keyboard - I have a really light Notebook, but I still prefer carrying my PDA & Foldable keyboard. And you can get one of these off eBay for as little as $40 - see for yourself.
Because it has been predicted by quantum theory. And because experimental results to this effect have been shown to be true. Transfer the same information twice -- first time, read the source and second time read the destination. You would then know if the information is being transferred.
And it's not right to say they cannot read it -- they can read it, it just breaks the entaglement and collapses the states. At which point, you get the net resultant vector, but not the constituent vectors.
Well, I merely meant that while theoretical CS is fairly ahead, adopting it to QC systems would take time and effort. A lot of the development has to be observational, since we know very little about the way these systems behave, and would need to rethink our theories based on the outcome of the experimental results.
I merely meant that the actual development of the technology and theory has to go hand in hand, and consequently the theory can only move as fast as the technology behind it.
When you have approximation for even the simplest of states (a combination of which would make a Qubit), how do you hope to build a system where zillions of such bits interact? Your probability of being accurate would drop exponentially to zero even as you approach the kilobyte range.
So here's the idea - quantum entanglement is when you have two quantum states that have to be given in reference to each other, even though the two states maybe contained in elements spatially separated.
But - no useful information can be transmitted between the two systems. This is because the information in itself is given by probabilistic superposition of the states. For instance, you have a Qubit defined as the superposition of states, given by |psi> = a|0> + b|1> - so you can only find out when they are absolute states (0) or (1), and not in between -- and that will not happen at speeds less than the speed of light. In order to find out what state the system is in (in between 0&1), you will need to be able to copy the state, which is prohibited by the No Cloning Theorem.
So, to answer your question - you *may* be able to achieve instantaneous transmission of information, but you can never observe that information in a causal fashion less than the speed of light. Did that make sense?:)
Charles Babbage came up with the concept of the Difference Engine in 1822. It took almost 114 years until Turing to come up with the formalism of computer science, which is the foundation of CS as we know it.
And today, we have half-decent computers - a good 182 years later. Even assuming that the technology is exponential, and the necessary developments in the other areas are made in the next 25 years -- it would atleast be another 34 years after that for QC to take off bigtime and for us to have the equivalet of today's computers (or better) in QC.
I'm not being pessimistic, just being honest about how I feel, as someone who works in this area.
Yes. They can transmit the data, but they cannot preserve the data without losing information. This is one of the primary ideas behind Quantum Cryptography, which forbids eavesdroppers from creating copies of the transmitted data.
I'm not talking about approximation -- I'm talking of copying the basic qubit as a function of quantum states -- no two quantum states can be copied, and if this were possible it would result in some funny stuff like causality.
And, the best part, we will see it in our lifetimes.
While I appreciate your optimism, I must tell you that the chances of QC taking a giant leap within the next 25 years is quite low.
Sure, people will build preliminary quantum computation elements, and will perform simple operations. But to have a system comparable to existing computers will take a really, really long time.
For one, the resources needed to perform and control such operations is really expensive, and occupy enormous amounts of space. Even technologies used today to achieve the quantum hall effect (one of the primary requirements if you are building a q.c.) is really primitive. For instance, consider MIT's carbon-nanotube technology -- the problem is that while you can achieve q.h.e., not two systems can be duplicated perfectly. Other methods such as building solid state elements to do this (which is what I work on) have been quite unsuccessful.
That, and the fact that we are yet to develop a good enough quantum error correction system. The thing is that in order for QC to take off big time, other areas (material science, nanotech, theoretical CS and information theory, etc) need to progress significantly.
Sure, you may see some primitive QC within the next 40 years or so. But the probability of you seeing a QC capable of, say, solving Primes in P or one that can play you a DVD is quite low. Just my two cents. And yes, IAAQP (I'm a quantum physicist).
You are missing something. This has got nothing to do with faster than light communication, instead it's on how they were able to successfully entangle 5 photons, which is the minimum number needed to implement a universal error correction system in quantum computation.
It's actually fairly simple. In QC, you can perform any quantum operations on the qubits, but you cannot look at the bits without losing some information. Therefore, what you do is use error correcting codes, by superimposing the quantum states onto a set of photons whose states you observe, but do not use. What they have done here is basically taken the unknown quantum state of a photon onto a superposition set of three photons, and you can find the state of any one photon by observing the other two photons.
This was predicted a while ago by Alexei Kitaev, and Anton Zeilinger had a preliminary demonstration of a basic q.t. system a while ago. I would imagine that this is just an extension of their works.
Not in the quantum world. You can transport the data, but you cannot copy the data. This is one of the primary premises of Quantum Computation, covered by the No Cloning Theorem.
Ofcourse, if you are talking about the inherent parallelism in q.c., you are right.
Well, look at the bright side. The fact that a lot of the news sources had denounced this as bullshit for the most part, and even made fun of it - is something positive.
A while ago, something like this would have been treated a whole lot more seriously - the fact that people (especially some of the media) are realizing not all of the stuff that comes on the net needs to make sense is a slight silver lining:)
Re:Many projects don't fail, they rust in place
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Agreed - but blaming it entirely on the developers is wrong, too.
If the customer anticipates any future modifications and upgrades, I think that ought to be mentioned in the inital functional specifications, so that the developers can make sufficient room for such accomodations.
And before you say that any good developer should be able to anticipate all this and the like, it's ridiculous - just how much can you anticipate? When you do anticipate and write modular code, it takes more time - and the boss is down on your neck demanding that you wrap things up as soon as you can. So what do you do? You write sphagetti code.
The unfortunate thing here is that the customer himself is unsure of what is needed, so that uncertainty filters down to the developers, who code it up to the best of their abilities - into what they construe are the requirements.
The scar runs deep, unfortunately.
Re:Outsourcing
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hmm, outsourcing works depending on what is it that you do, and who is it that you outsource to.
Often times, the outsourcing decisions are last minute spur of the moment decisions, and the management does not go into the pains of choosing a good company to do the work for you.
However, there have been several instances where outsourcing has been proven to be good, and effective -- and these are the cases when the managers have taken the pains of going to the offshore development centres and talked to the people.
And ofcourse, there have been several more instances where this has NOT been the case, but this is once again a bad management decision or a poor choice. Besides, there are several areas where outsourcing does make a lot of sense, too.
Hence, I would not blindly write off outsourcing, however I would say that there are situations and circumstances where it does not make sense.
>Drugs like heroin can kill. >It's a good thing that heroin is illegal.
Sure, drink enough Alchohol and you would die. Hell, drink lots of water and you could die.
Guns can kill, somehow they do not seem to be illegal.
My point is that anything and everything can kill, just because the people using it aren't smart enough to take decisions about their life and misuse it should not make it illegal.
Sure, Heroin is harmful. On the other hand, I know several people who do Heroin once in a while, have a great time and are not hooked onto it. The girl who lives across my dorm does Cocaine that way. She is smart enough not to fuck things up, and has fun while she is at it.
Give people the choice, making it illegal is not the solution. If they fuck it up, they're stupid and will pay the price.
Ah, completely offtopic, but that just reminded me of this quote that I'd once come across --
-- --- ---
You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and 'Colon'. Need I say more?"
-Chris Rock
--- --- ---
Somewhere in there, the Slashdotter admitting to not having facts could fit in;-)
"...India will now have a Christian Prime Minister to go with a Muslim President (a widow and a bachelor to boot). The bastion of democracy, religious freedom and human rights -- the mostly white Christian United States, to paraphrase the description of India by western correspondents -- is set to elect its 44th President -- another Christian white male."
As an Indian in the US, I kinda find that ironic:)
Pray, one does not call being elected to scientific societies a trapping. No matter how influential one is, you do not get elected to multitudes of scientific societies purely as a function of your power or position.
I think we can at the very least grant scientists across the world that much of credit.
And oh, ISRO is the Indian Space Research Organization, with quite a lot of successful space launches under it's belt. I do not think such an organization would lightly make anyone a distinguished professor, no matter what the other credentials.
I guess you would make a sad scientist, because when someone is credited with good accomplishments, all you can think of is how they might have gotten it through the wrong kind way.
Please do not be so prejudiced, especially when what you know is so completely wrong. It helps to be broad minded.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a valid point. For any classes that had equations, I generally use good old pen and paper, since those are a lot easier (I work on a lot of physics stuff, therefore it becomes a pain to use something like Word).
:)
But for most drab-type lectures, I tend to use my PDA - but oh well, to each his own!
Not when you have an external full-keyboard - I have a really light Notebook, but I still prefer carrying my PDA & Foldable keyboard. And you can get one of these off eBay for as little as $40 - see for yourself.
Ah yes, my bad. Thanks for pointing it out! :)
I've even read a paper on this, called Primes is in P.
Because it has been predicted by quantum theory. And because experimental results to this effect have been shown to be true. Transfer the same information twice -- first time, read the source and second time read the destination. You would then know if the information is being transferred.
And it's not right to say they cannot read it -- they can read it, it just breaks the entaglement and collapses the states. At which point, you get the net resultant vector, but not the constituent vectors.
Oh it does. It's just that upon observation, the state collapses and is no longer useful.
It can have any state, in between 0 & 1 -- just that you are not permitted to know what state it is in.
Well, I merely meant that while theoretical CS is fairly ahead, adopting it to QC systems would take time and effort. A lot of the development has to be observational, since we know very little about the way these systems behave, and would need to rethink our theories based on the outcome of the experimental results.
I merely meant that the actual development of the technology and theory has to go hand in hand, and consequently the theory can only move as fast as the technology behind it.
When you have approximation for even the simplest of states (a combination of which would make a Qubit), how do you hope to build a system where zillions of such bits interact? Your probability of being accurate would drop exponentially to zero even as you approach the kilobyte range.
So here's the idea - quantum entanglement is when you have two quantum states that have to be given in reference to each other, even though the two states maybe contained in elements spatially separated.
:)
But - no useful information can be transmitted between the two systems. This is because the information in itself is given by probabilistic superposition of the states. For instance, you have a Qubit defined as the superposition of states, given by |psi> = a|0> + b|1> - so you can only find out when they are absolute states (0) or (1), and not in between -- and that will not happen at speeds less than the speed of light. In order to find out what state the system is in (in between 0&1), you will need to be able to copy the state, which is prohibited by the No Cloning Theorem.
So, to answer your question - you *may* be able to achieve instantaneous transmission of information, but you can never observe that information in a causal fashion less than the speed of light. Did that make sense?
Charles Babbage came up with the concept of the Difference Engine in 1822. It took almost 114 years until Turing to come up with the formalism of computer science, which is the foundation of CS as we know it.
And today, we have half-decent computers - a good 182 years later. Even assuming that the technology is exponential, and the necessary developments in the other areas are made in the next 25 years -- it would atleast be another 34 years after that for QC to take off bigtime and for us to have the equivalet of today's computers (or better) in QC.
I'm not being pessimistic, just being honest about how I feel, as someone who works in this area.
(Disclaimer: IAAQP)
Yes. They can transmit the data, but they cannot preserve the data without losing information. This is one of the primary ideas behind Quantum Cryptography, which forbids eavesdroppers from creating copies of the transmitted data.
I'm not talking about approximation -- I'm talking of copying the basic qubit as a function of quantum states -- no two quantum states can be copied, and if this were possible it would result in some funny stuff like causality.
You don't have to believe me, see for yourself - No Cloning Theorem.
And, the best part, we will see it in our lifetimes.
While I appreciate your optimism, I must tell you that the chances of QC taking a giant leap within the next 25 years is quite low.
Sure, people will build preliminary quantum computation elements, and will perform simple operations. But to have a system comparable to existing computers will take a really, really long time.
For one, the resources needed to perform and control such operations is really expensive, and occupy enormous amounts of space. Even technologies used today to achieve the quantum hall effect (one of the primary requirements if you are building a q.c.) is really primitive. For instance, consider MIT's carbon-nanotube technology -- the problem is that while you can achieve q.h.e., not two systems can be duplicated perfectly. Other methods such as building solid state elements to do this (which is what I work on) have been quite unsuccessful.
That, and the fact that we are yet to develop a good enough quantum error correction system. The thing is that in order for QC to take off big time, other areas (material science, nanotech, theoretical CS and information theory, etc) need to progress significantly.
Sure, you may see some primitive QC within the next 40 years or so. But the probability of you seeing a QC capable of, say, solving Primes in P or one that can play you a DVD is quite low. Just my two cents. And yes, IAAQP (I'm a quantum physicist).
You are missing something. This has got nothing to do with faster than light communication, instead it's on how they were able to successfully entangle 5 photons, which is the minimum number needed to implement a universal error correction system in quantum computation.
Teleportation was achieved a long time ago by a bunch of folks at Innsbruck, led by Prof Anton Zeilinger.
It's actually fairly simple. In QC, you can perform any quantum operations on the qubits, but you cannot look at the bits without losing some information. Therefore, what you do is use error correcting codes, by superimposing the quantum states onto a set of photons whose states you observe, but do not use. What they have done here is basically taken the unknown quantum state of a photon onto a superposition set of three photons, and you can find the state of any one photon by observing the other two photons.
This was predicted a while ago by Alexei Kitaev, and Anton Zeilinger had a preliminary demonstration of a basic q.t. system a while ago. I would imagine that this is just an extension of their works.
Not in the quantum world. You can transport the data, but you cannot copy the data. This is one of the primary premises of Quantum Computation, covered by the No Cloning Theorem.
Ofcourse, if you are talking about the inherent parallelism in q.c., you are right.
Hats off. Brilliant comment, thank you.
Well, look at the bright side. The fact that a lot of the news sources had denounced this as bullshit for the most part, and even made fun of it - is something positive.
:)
A while ago, something like this would have been treated a whole lot more seriously - the fact that people (especially some of the media) are realizing not all of the stuff that comes on the net needs to make sense is a slight silver lining
Agreed - but blaming it entirely on the developers is wrong, too.
If the customer anticipates any future modifications and upgrades, I think that ought to be mentioned in the inital functional specifications, so that the developers can make sufficient room for such accomodations.
And before you say that any good developer should be able to anticipate all this and the like, it's ridiculous - just how much can you anticipate? When you do anticipate and write modular code, it takes more time - and the boss is down on your neck demanding that you wrap things up as soon as you can. So what do you do? You write sphagetti code.
The unfortunate thing here is that the customer himself is unsure of what is needed, so that uncertainty filters down to the developers, who code it up to the best of their abilities - into what they construe are the requirements.
The scar runs deep, unfortunately.
Hmm, outsourcing works depending on what is it that you do, and who is it that you outsource to.
Often times, the outsourcing decisions are last minute spur of the moment decisions, and the management does not go into the pains of choosing a good company to do the work for you.
However, there have been several instances where outsourcing has been proven to be good, and effective -- and these are the cases when the managers have taken the pains of going to the offshore development centres and talked to the people.
And ofcourse, there have been several more instances where this has NOT been the case, but this is once again a bad management decision or a poor choice. Besides, there are several areas where outsourcing does make a lot of sense, too.
Hence, I would not blindly write off outsourcing, however I would say that there are situations and circumstances where it does not make sense.
>So far no car has shown up. I'm not holding my breath.
;-)
You mean, you *are* holding your breath
>Drugs like heroin can kill.
>It's a good thing that heroin is illegal.
Sure, drink enough Alchohol and you would die. Hell, drink lots of water and you could die.
Guns can kill, somehow they do not seem to be illegal.
My point is that anything and everything can kill, just because the people using it aren't smart enough to take decisions about their life and misuse it should not make it illegal.
Sure, Heroin is harmful. On the other hand, I know several people who do Heroin once in a while, have a great time and are not hooked onto it. The girl who lives across my dorm does Cocaine that way. She is smart enough not to fuck things up, and has fun while she is at it.
Give people the choice, making it illegal is not the solution. If they fuck it up, they're stupid and will pay the price.
Ah, completely offtopic, but that just reminded me of this quote that I'd once come across --
;-)
-- --- ---
You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and 'Colon'. Need I say more?"
-Chris Rock
--- --- ---
Somewhere in there, the Slashdotter admitting to not having facts could fit in
UNC had done some work sometime back on using Haptic Models for helping paintings --
dAb: Interactive Haptic Painting with 3D Virtual Brushes.
This project reminds me of that, extended to 3D with a few more features and capabilities thrown in.
EMP guns, baby. Fry that stereo system of the badass gansta, and watch the sparks fly - literally! ;-)
I mentioned in this in my journal before, but here I go again.
:)
I'll paraphrase from a Times of India article --
"...India will now have a Christian Prime Minister to go with a Muslim President (a widow and a bachelor to boot). The bastion of democracy, religious freedom and human rights -- the mostly white Christian United States, to paraphrase the description of India by western correspondents -- is set to elect its 44th President -- another Christian white male."
As an Indian in the US, I kinda find that ironic
Pray, one does not call being elected to scientific societies a trapping. No matter how influential one is, you do not get elected to multitudes of scientific societies purely as a function of your power or position.
I think we can at the very least grant scientists across the world that much of credit.
And oh, ISRO is the Indian Space Research Organization, with quite a lot of successful space launches under it's belt. I do not think such an organization would lightly make anyone a distinguished professor, no matter what the other credentials.
I guess you would make a sad scientist, because when someone is credited with good accomplishments, all you can think of is how they might have gotten it through the wrong kind way.
Please do not be so prejudiced, especially when what you know is so completely wrong. It helps to be broad minded.