This comment isn't accurate. There are problems for which quantum computers are indeed exponentially faster than our best known algorithms running on a standard computer. The most important of these is probably simply quantum simulation - i.e. simulating quantum mechanical systems. This has umpteen applications to physics, chemistry and molecular biology (e.g. drug design).
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How about Hu Jintao, Paramount Leader of China, not to mention hydraulic engineer? I think there may be a few people in China who have heard of him.
Google is your friend. The figures quoted in that article don't completely bear out the original claim (the very rich give a higher percentage of their incomes than the averagely wealthy), but the poorest do indeed seem to give more than anyone else.
The most interesting information they want the database to contain is the audit trail - "particulars of every occasion on which information contained in the individual's entry has been provided to a person". This means that, in principle, it will be possible for anyone who works for the government to track details of every time your ID has been checked. This could include every time you've gone to a bank, bought alcohol, rented a car, etc. Fun, isn't it?
One thing nobody's commented on, and which I think is far more ominous than the camera headsets, is that these traffic wardens are employees of a private company (NCP... only one letter away from OCP;) and yet have the ability to issue fixed penalty £80 fines for things like littering. This seems to be the first (very small) step towards having private security firms enforcing law and order in the UK.
You're referring to the "sense of being stared at". People have actually done experiments to test this; most scientists are skeptical that it exists, but some people claim that they have evidence that it does.
You'll need a biometric passport to get a visa free trip to the US
As I said in my reply, a passport containing a digitised facial image is perfectly acceptable - see the US Embassy's own guidelines. In particular, there is no need to have your fingerprints stored there.
Having an ID which everyone has is common in most countries
As far as I know, no other country has a centralised ID database on the scale of the planned UK National Identity Register. In particular, the database will store an audit trail of every time it's been accessed. If it becomes common (as you suggest) for ID to be checked whenever a credit card is used, this means that the government can track every purchase you make using one.
Regarding your comments on Andrew Gilligan - he appears to provide named and reputable sources in that article. What part of it aren't you convinced about?
I don't have the energy to refute all of the points in Tony Blair's response, but here are a couple of quick comments.
it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport.
This is a red herring that is repeated with annoying frequency. ICAO requirements state that the only required biometric is a digitised photo, which new UK passports already contain. There's no need for fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually.
The majority of fraud reported as "identity fraud" is credit card fraud. ID cards will be no use at stopping this, unless you require people to show their ID when buying anything. In particular, the "£1.7 billion" figure is nonsense.
I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.
Nice to know that the Government has already gone back on its assurance in 2005 that the ID register wouldn't be used for "fishing expeditions" - also nice to know that our details will be shared with some unspecified other countries.
The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan.
In fact, the watchees usually don't feel differently. The majority of people in the UK are quite happy to have CCTV in public places (the emphasis being on the public part). For example, CCTV footage may play a pivotal role in bringing Ipswich's recent serial killer to justice.
I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. While the state of high-speed connectivity in the UK might not be ideal, we're not doing badly and the rate of broadband uptake in this country is higher than pretty much everywhere else. You might have been right a few years ago, but things are much better now.
Computers are faster, yes, but Moore's law is never going to solve this issue....until/unless quantum computers take off, of course. My understanding is that they would revolutionise the study of quantum chemistry.
If you get one of the great phones running Symbian OS, you can buy/download several programs that will do the job (such as BlackBaller). Unlike other phone operating systems, you also have the opportunity to write your own software that has access to the telephony features of the phone.
1) I guess the best comparison is that "exploding the bomb" corresponds to "on", and "not exploding" corresponds to "off". Making the bomb explode (/having the computer switched on) is the outcome that we want to avoid.
2) The experiment is always the same; sometimes (ie. in some universes!) the computer runs, and sometimes it does not.
No problem. The concept of "counterfactual computation" the article refers to is based around the ideas of the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb testing problem. Imagine you have a computer with an on/off switch. If it's a quantum computer, then it's possible to put the switch in a superposition of both "off" and "on". If you try to read the switch, you'll always see "off" or "on"; however, it's possible to run an algorithm on the quantum computer that preserves this combination of "off" and "on". Using clever quantum interference effects, it's possible to end up with a situation where the algorithm gives you the right answer -- and yet, when you measure it, the switch is "off" and so the computer wasn't switched on.
One way of thinking about it (if you believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics) is that you can use the results of the algorithm in the "other universes" in which the computer was switched on, even though in our universe, the computer was always switched off.
The contribution in this paper is that the authors propose a new method for taking better advantage of this effect, and have implemented it in the toy problem of searching an unsorted database of 4 elements -- which can be done with only one database query on a quantum computer. Amazingly, it seems that this approach of "non-running" a computer can help protect against quantum decoherence, which is the big enemy of quantum computation.
I often find that, when I leave Firefox (Windows) running overnight, it'll be using 100% of CPU time when I return in the morning. However, killing Acrobat Reader normally seems to sort this out. In fact, almost every time I've seen Firefox lock up, killing AcroRd32.exe will fix it. Not sure if this happens to anyone else, but might be useful...
Please, please tell me the submission queue system isn't really based on sorting by username... then again, it might explain how this story made it (there's even a typo in the title!).
Quantum computers are not known to be very good at solving NP-complete problems, and in fact it is considered very unlikely that they will be able to solve such problems efficiently. Grover's algorithm provides a square-root speed-up in solving any problem in NP; however, this is not enough to make an unfeasible problem feasible, and for any given NP-complete problem, there is likely to be a classical algorithm that outperforms this "brute force" approach.
Grover's algorithm is only the provably best implementation in a "black box" setting, which is unrealistic for many problems.
Finally, quantum computers are not known to be able to do anything useful for protein folding - this would be an application of an efficient quantum algorithm for the graph isomorphism problem, which nobody has come up with yet...
I won't comment on any of your post other than the statement:
Mobile 5 blows the doors off of all business class phones today with the exception of RIM's
This is simply untrue. Symbian OS is the leading smartphone OS with 61% of smartphones using it. In terms of features etc., I'd be interested to see you post some areas in which Windows Mobile 5 outperforms Symbian OS.
This is nonsense. Only certain types of encryption schemes (those based on problems like factoring and discrete logarithms) are broken by quantum computers. Other schemes, eg. lattice-based crypto (as mentioned in another comment here) are not known to be breakable by quantum computers. In any case, symmetric encryption schemes like DES are probably not vulnerable (well, quantum computers can get a square-root speed-up, but you can easily make your key longer to counter this).
And what does "combinatorial based encryption schemes" mean, anyway?
And let's not forget that now the UK police have the power to arrest you for any offence. So they can arrest you on some trumped-up excuse, take your DNA (forcibly if necessary), then release you a few hours later without charge. But at least you don't have to worry about your privacy if they shoot you dead on the Tube:)
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This comment isn't accurate. There are problems for which quantum computers are indeed exponentially faster than our best known algorithms running on a standard computer. The most important of these is probably simply quantum simulation - i.e. simulating quantum mechanical systems. This has umpteen applications to physics, chemistry and molecular biology (e.g. drug design).
How about Hu Jintao, Paramount Leader of China, not to mention hydraulic engineer? I think there may be a few people in China who have heard of him.
Google is your friend. The figures quoted in that article don't completely bear out the original claim (the very rich give a higher percentage of their incomes than the averagely wealthy), but the poorest do indeed seem to give more than anyone else.
A woman who joins the Air Force has over a 99% chance of being raped by a fellow member of the service sometime during their career.
Do you have a source for that rather surprising fact?
The most interesting information they want the database to contain is the audit trail - "particulars of every occasion on which information contained in the individual's entry has been provided to a person". This means that, in principle, it will be possible for anyone who works for the government to track details of every time your ID has been checked. This could include every time you've gone to a bank, bought alcohol, rented a car, etc. Fun, isn't it?
How about this? Obama favoured by a four-to-one margin across 22,500 people polled in 22 countries.
One thing nobody's commented on, and which I think is far more ominous than the camera headsets, is that these traffic wardens are employees of a private company (NCP... only one letter away from OCP ;) and yet have the ability to issue fixed penalty £80 fines for things like littering. This seems to be the first (very small) step towards having private security firms enforcing law and order in the UK.
You're referring to the "sense of being stared at". People have actually done experiments to test this; most scientists are skeptical that it exists, but some people claim that they have evidence that it does.
You'll need a biometric passport to get a visa free trip to the US
As I said in my reply, a passport containing a digitised facial image is perfectly acceptable - see the US Embassy's own guidelines. In particular, there is no need to have your fingerprints stored there.
Having an ID which everyone has is common in most countries
As far as I know, no other country has a centralised ID database on the scale of the planned UK National Identity Register. In particular, the database will store an audit trail of every time it's been accessed. If it becomes common (as you suggest) for ID to be checked whenever a credit card is used, this means that the government can track every purchase you make using one.
Regarding your comments on Andrew Gilligan - he appears to provide named and reputable sources in that article. What part of it aren't you convinced about?
I don't have the energy to refute all of the points in Tony Blair's response, but here are a couple of quick comments.
it is clear that if we want to travel abroad, we will soon have no choice but to have a biometric passport.
This is a red herring that is repeated with annoying frequency. ICAO requirements state that the only required biometric is a digitised photo, which new UK passports already contain. There's no need for fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.
Secure identities will also help us counter the fast-growing problem of identity fraud. This already costs £1.7 billion annually.
The majority of fraud reported as "identity fraud" is credit card fraud. ID cards will be no use at stopping this, unless you require people to show their ID when buying anything. In particular, the "£1.7 billion" figure is nonsense.
I also believe that the National Identity Register will help police bring those guilty of serious crimes to justice. They will be able, for example, to compare the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes against the information held on the register. Another benefit from biometric technology will be to improve the flow of information between countries on the identity of offenders.
Nice to know that the Government has already gone back on its assurance in 2005 that the ID register wouldn't be used for "fishing expeditions" - also nice to know that our details will be shared with some unspecified other countries.
The additional cost of the ID cards is expected to be less than £30 or £3 a year for their 10-year lifespan.
Not according to an independent report.
In fact, the watchees usually don't feel differently. The majority of people in the UK are quite happy to have CCTV in public places (the emphasis being on the public part). For example, CCTV footage may play a pivotal role in bringing Ipswich's recent serial killer to justice.
Actually, your "red and blue" example isn't quite right. Look up Bell's inequality and Bertlmann's socks...
I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. While the state of high-speed connectivity in the UK might not be ideal, we're not doing badly and the rate of broadband uptake in this country is higher than pretty much everywhere else. You might have been right a few years ago, but things are much better now.
Shame - I'd been thinking that the world really was run by Boss Smiley...
The article states that they informed BA about the security hole in March, and BA fixed their website, so that may explain what you noticed.
Computers are faster, yes, but Moore's law is never going to solve this issue. ...until/unless quantum computers take off, of course. My understanding is that they would revolutionise the study of quantum chemistry.
If you get one of the great phones running Symbian OS, you can buy/download several programs that will do the job (such as BlackBaller). Unlike other phone operating systems, you also have the opportunity to write your own software that has access to the telephony features of the phone.
1) I guess the best comparison is that "exploding the bomb" corresponds to "on", and "not exploding" corresponds to "off". Making the bomb explode (/having the computer switched on) is the outcome that we want to avoid.
2) The experiment is always the same; sometimes (ie. in some universes!) the computer runs, and sometimes it does not.
No problem. The concept of "counterfactual computation" the article refers to is based around the ideas of the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb testing problem. Imagine you have a computer with an on/off switch. If it's a quantum computer, then it's possible to put the switch in a superposition of both "off" and "on". If you try to read the switch, you'll always see "off" or "on"; however, it's possible to run an algorithm on the quantum computer that preserves this combination of "off" and "on". Using clever quantum interference effects, it's possible to end up with a situation where the algorithm gives you the right answer -- and yet, when you measure it, the switch is "off" and so the computer wasn't switched on.
One way of thinking about it (if you believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics) is that you can use the results of the algorithm in the "other universes" in which the computer was switched on, even though in our universe, the computer was always switched off.
The contribution in this paper is that the authors propose a new method for taking better advantage of this effect, and have implemented it in the toy problem of searching an unsorted database of 4 elements -- which can be done with only one database query on a quantum computer. Amazingly, it seems that this approach of "non-running" a computer can help protect against quantum decoherence, which is the big enemy of quantum computation.
I often find that, when I leave Firefox (Windows) running overnight, it'll be using 100% of CPU time when I return in the morning. However, killing Acrobat Reader normally seems to sort this out. In fact, almost every time I've seen Firefox lock up, killing AcroRd32.exe will fix it. Not sure if this happens to anyone else, but might be useful...
Please, please tell me the submission queue system isn't really based on sorting by username... then again, it might explain how this story made it (there's even a typo in the title!).
Quantum computers are not known to be very good at solving NP-complete problems, and in fact it is considered very unlikely that they will be able to solve such problems efficiently. Grover's algorithm provides a square-root speed-up in solving any problem in NP; however, this is not enough to make an unfeasible problem feasible, and for any given NP-complete problem, there is likely to be a classical algorithm that outperforms this "brute force" approach.
Grover's algorithm is only the provably best implementation in a "black box" setting, which is unrealistic for many problems.
Finally, quantum computers are not known to be able to do anything useful for protein folding - this would be an application of an efficient quantum algorithm for the graph isomorphism problem, which nobody has come up with yet...
I won't comment on any of your post other than the statement:
Mobile 5 blows the doors off of all business class phones today with the exception of RIM's
This is simply untrue. Symbian OS is the leading smartphone OS with 61% of smartphones using it. In terms of features etc., I'd be interested to see you post some areas in which Windows Mobile 5 outperforms Symbian OS.
This is nonsense. Only certain types of encryption schemes (those based on problems like factoring and discrete logarithms) are broken by quantum computers. Other schemes, eg. lattice-based crypto (as mentioned in another comment here) are not known to be breakable by quantum computers. In any case, symmetric encryption schemes like DES are probably not vulnerable (well, quantum computers can get a square-root speed-up, but you can easily make your key longer to counter this).
And what does "combinatorial based encryption schemes" mean, anyway?
And let's not forget that now the UK police have the power to arrest you for any offence. So they can arrest you on some trumped-up excuse, take your DNA (forcibly if necessary), then release you a few hours later without charge. But at least you don't have to worry about your privacy if they shoot you dead on the Tube :)