You don't need to keep checking whether the bit has flipped. In fact, look at the most "quantum world" example possible: the usual way to define a quantum computer uses reversible computing (because quantum logic gates are reversible).
You're thinking in terms of a storing information the way a normal (irreversible) computer does. Not all computation must be done that way, I was describing a specific way that's not like that. Imagine that in the system of my (dumb, as I said) example the problem being calculated was, conveniently, the equivalent of "in which side of the box the water molecule will be after 3 days". In this case, I have to spend no energy at all to compute that, assuming the box is perfectly isolated from the environment.
Admittedly, that's a contrived (and dumb) example, I'm just showing that you don't have to spend energy to flip bits around as you would in a normal computer. In a real system, to solve real problems, you'd probably want to devise a way to implement a CNOT gate (described in one of the Wikipedia links in my original post) or a Toffoli gate and use that to simulate a "usual" AND gate. Wikipedia shows a toy implementation of a gate like that using billiard balls. In a system like that, the only energy that must be spent (in principle) is the initial velocity of the billiard balls, regardless of how many gates and how long the computation took. That's strictly different from a normal (irreversible) computer, where you must spend energy each time you change a bit.
It's theoretically possible to change the state of a bit without spending energy. Here's a dumb example: think of a closed system (so no energy is being gained or lost) consisting of a box filled with oxygen and only one molecule of water. Divide the box in two halves and say a bit is "0" if the molecule of water is in the left half and "1" if it's in the right half. If you wait a while, eventually the bit will flip with absolutely no change in energy. That's a dumb example, but it shows that there's nothing that requires a "intrinsic state" and energy loss when you move away from it, like you described.
The only time energy dissipation is unavoidable (in theory) is when you erase information. That's a strange concept because, usually, we don't think about "conservation of information" in the same sense of conservation of energy, but there's a relation. A little more discussion with more relevance to computing can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing.
[I'm replying in the hopes of saving someone else from confusion, I mean no offense. What you're describing is exactly the way it was first explained to me -- but it's not only wrong but wrong in a way that leads to endless confusion]
Although for a first-order approximation, it doesn't matter, because people today generally aren't dealing with nondeterministic machines.
No, please don't explain it this way. NP by definition contains P, so no amount of approximation will make it mean "non-polynomial". If it meant anything like "non-polynomial", then P=NP would be trivially false, by definition.
A problem is NP if you can check if a candidate solution is right in polynomial time. Note that this includes any problem that you can solve in polynomial time (i.e., in P). The stuff about "non-deterministic machines" is just a way to formalize that notion (you can think of it as something like: "a nondeterministic machine can check all possible solutions at the same time, so it can solve any NP problem in polynomial time").
The problem of deciding if P=NP is basically asking: is there any problem for which we can, in polynomial time, check if a solution is right but not find a solution?
I don't know why you got that impression I implied this; I said no such thing. The point I am trying to make is that ignoring a DMCA infringement notice is a very bad idea. As I have shown, the courts and people who oppose the DMCA agree. It seems like you, on the other hand, think that everyone should simply ignore all DMCA infringement notices (your words: "If everyone who received a DMCA takedown threw it away, then copyright (And the sites involved) would be better protected than they are now."), while showing no reason why.
At this point, I have used all my arguments, and heard no arguments opposing them. I think we're both wasting our time with this discussion.
The issue with Napster was that they were mostly infringing, so even if they did honor every DMCA takedown request, they'd have lost.
On the appeal of the Napster case, the Ninth Circuit ruled that "Regardless of the number of Napster's infringing versus noninfringing uses", the question could be resolved on the basis of whether "Napster knew or had reason to know of its users' infringement of plaintiffs' copyrights" (taken from Wikipedia, I'm too lazy to rummage through the ruling itself right now).
If you read the "safe harbor" provisions from the text law itself, you'll see clearly that willfully ignoring notices of infringement surely means losing protection:
Sec. 512. Limitations on liability relating to material online [DMCA Safe Harbor provisions]
[...]
(c) Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users. -
(1) In general. - A service provider shall not be liable [...] if the service provider -
[...]; and
(C) upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.
I don't know what else to say. I quoted the law, previous applications of the DMCA in court, and even some FAQs from Chilling Effects, created by EFF specifically to combat copyright abuse (so, if anything else, they would support your position if it was even remotely viable).
The fact is that DMCA is a law -- arguably a bad one. The best way to change it is to understand how harmful it is, and show that to other people. Ignoring it or pretending it doesn't exist will do nothing to change the situation.
Look, this is silly. Take the example of what happened to Napster: in the end of their court battle, the court found that they didn't qualify for the "safe harbor" provisions of DMCA [which is exactly what would happen if Flickr decided to ignore DMCA notices]. Since they didn't qualify, the court ordered them to "monitor the activities of its network and to block access to infringing material when notified of that material's location" [which seems to be in part what you want Flickr to refuse to do]. They couldn't (or wouldn't) do that, so they had to completely shut down.
So, you can make all the analogies you want, but in the end, if Flickr (or anyone else) doesn't want to comply with DMCA notices to remove (allegedly) infringing material, eventually they will have to be completely shut down. Of course, it's not automatically "take down the picture or completely shut down" -- that would be silly. But the point stands -- without being protected by the "safe harbor" provisions and willingness to "remove infringing material when notified of the material's location", it's impossible to continue to work, as was shown in the Napster case.
Uh, I'm confused. By "it is right" do you mean that Flickr could have chosen to not take down the picture? I don't see how it fits the rest of what you said:
A DCMA takedown notice is a legal document that has to comply with the specific requirements of the act. You can't just write "Yo, doodz, take this off your webs" on a post-it and expect it to have legal weight.
Sure. I was responding to someone who wrote "upon receipt of a properly formatted DMCA takedown notice". I take that to mean that the notice complies to the specific requirements of the DMCA.
Probably most crucially, one of the things the takedown notice must have is: [...]
Yes. The text you quoted is also present in the first page I linked. I just didn't think it was relevant enough to quote it. To be completely honest, I still don't see the relevance.
What would be nice is if a few DAs hungry for media attention started nailing some of these fraudulent claimants to the wall pour encourager les autres.
I agree. I also see no reason why the owner of the picture (and maybe Flickr) shouldn't sue Wasteland Inc. I just don't see how this is relevant to whether Flickr had any choice other than taking down the picture.
The "safe harbor" provisions are the only thing that keeps Flicks from being completely taken down when someone claims it's hosting material that violates copyright (yes, the DMCA sucks).
So, saying that there's no "requirement" in this case is like saying that there's no "requirement" that you comply when someone points a gun at you and asks for your wallet. It's technically true, but irrelevant.
I don't think that's right. If I understand things correctly, if the service provider (Flickr, in this case) wants to stay protected by the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA, it must "expeditiously" take down the (allegedly) infringing material:
Once notice is given to the service provider, or in circumstances where the service provider discovers the infringing material itself, it is required to expeditiously remove, or disable access to, the material. The safe harbor provisions do not require the service provider to notify the individual responsible for the allegedly infringing material before it has been removed, but they do require notification after the material is removed. [my emphasis]
Of course, if the user then says that he can legally use the material, the provider must (if the matter doesn't go to court) put the content back up:
[...] If a subscriber provides a proper "counter-notice" claiming that the material does not infringe copyrights, the service provider must then promptly notify the claiming party of the individual's objection. [512(g)(2)] If the copyright owner does not bring a lawsuit in district court within 14 days, the service provider is then required to restore the material to its location on its network. [512(g)(2)(C)] [again, my emphasis]
I think this description applies to any "computing problem".
It certainly applies to any "quantum computing problem" (i.e., any problem solvable by a quantum computer), because any quantum computer can be simulated by a classical computer. That is, any problem solvable by a quantum computer can also be solved by a classical computer.
The catch is that, as the size of the input grows, it might be the case that the amount of time and/or space needed by the classical computer grows exponentially (that's not proven yet, though -- see here, for example).
[...] but if you could *READ* them without influencing them [...]
That would be great, but you can't. Once you read them, the entanglement is broken. As mathimus1863 wrote in the original message in this thread,
Typically, your qubit starts in 50% '0' and 50% '1', and thus when you measure it, you get a 50% chance of it being one or the other (and then it assumes that state). [my emphasis]
That means that once you measure a qubit, its state becomes exactly what you measured (this is commonly known as "wave function collapse"), and so it's not entangled anymore.
Just one small nitpick: when you talk about factorization, you use "n" for the number of bits, and when you talk about guessing an encryption key, you use "n" for the number of possible keys, which makes things a little unnecessarily confusing. I'd change the second one to also use number of bits -- so it would be O(2^n) on classical computers and O(2^(n/2)) for quantum computers. This way it's also easier to see that the square root (i.e., the factor of 1/2 in the exponent) doesn't buy a lot.
That's not how quantum computers work, despite of what you might have read in science popularization articles. Quantum algorithms don't work like classical algorithms work, but "doing all possibilities at once". That wouldn't work because of the contradiction you described -- once you measure the result, all the other "possibilities" go away.
Quantum algorithms work by not only solving the problem, but also shifting the probabilities of the qubits in such a way that, when you measure it, you get a very high probability of measuring the "right" answer. For example: in the quantum part of Shor's algorithm, you start with a lot of qubits that have 50% probability of being 0 and 50% of being 1, and after doing the computation, you end up with the qubits with a very high probability of having in the "correct" value. This works because the probability of being right can be as high as you want -- you can set things up so that the probability of being wrong is the same as that of an asteroid hitting the computer while it's calculating, for example.
That's why it's very hard to come up with quantum algorithms. For a lot of problems, it's doubtful that it's even possible to have a quantum algorithm that's much better than classical algorithms. For example, most quantum computer scientists think that quantum computers will never be able to solve NP-complete problems much faster than classical computers.
His bit about "to, from and BCC" in this Boston article is completely bogus. Just see RFC 680 (from 1975) and notice that all of them were completely specified.
I'm not sure what you mean... The obvious difference is that in the case of the "FTL Neutrinos", everything was published.
There's nothing wrong with comparing what you got with what was expected, as long as you publish it. The problem is discarding (and not telling anyone about) what you got just because it's not what you expected, which is what happened in the story of the measurement of the electron charge.
That's a really interesting question. I don't know about Mathematics, but in Physics, its pretty damn important to publish negative results. Feynman used to tell a story to show that (available here). Basically, the story goes something like this:
Robert Millikan, which was already a famous experimental physicist, published a (now famous) experiment that determined the charge of a single electron. This was the first time such a thing had been done, so it was a really big deal. A lot of other physicists replicated the experiment, with lots of papers published all around. The thing about experiments is that the value measured always has an uncertainty, and experimenters make mistakes, so it's very common for later experiments to correct previously-measured values. The strange thing about this case is that, if you plot the "known" value for the electron charge over time, you get a curve that gradually grows from the value measured in the first experiment to the value we now know is correct (because today we have many different ways to measure the value, so we're pretty sure of it).
So, why is the plot a gradual curve and not a straight jump to the correct answer? Why didn't the second experiment get the correct value right away? The answer is embarrassing. Since Millikan was so famous, subsequent experimenters didn't publish their results if the value they got was too far from the "currently accepted" value -- they thought of their results as "negative results", even though they probably had less error than the "currently accepted" value. The ones that got published were the ones with similar errors to the previous ones, or the ones that kept tweaking their setup (introducing all kinds of random errors) until they got a value that was closer to the original.
Nowadays, physicists are very careful not to make mistakes like this. Part of that care means that you don't pay too much attention to the "expected" result, so you really should publish negative results. Of course, that's just the theory -- no one likes to publish negative results, because most of the time, they're just a waste of time.
You can redefine words to mean whatever you want, but that's not what everyone else understand by "right". If what you're saying was true, the expression "violation of rights" would be meaningless: "How can any right be violated? Rights are always enforced, otherwise they're just a fantasy!".
"Inherent" rights are simply rights that don't depend on law or customs to exist. They can be violated just like any other right, and in many places are violated by established laws or customs. A more lengthy discussion can be found in many places, but here's a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights.
For crying out loud, Reddit's statement actually refers to this new rule as a "slippery slope," as if it's somehow more difficult for them not to censor legitimate information if they can't have a subreddit named/r/preeteen_girls devoted to underage photos submitted by creepy Facebook stalkers.
You got it backwards. The "slippery slope" bit is there to reassure everyone that this new rule does not make "more difficult for them not to censor legitimate information". The statement you quoted from goes on to say:
However, child pornography is a toxic and unique case for Internet communities [...] We remain committed to protecting reddit as an open platform. [my emphasis]
So, they're just telling people that Reddit is not going to start censoring based on perceived possible legal problems (e.g. copyright, which is a big issue right now).
The idea is nice but it seems like you're trying to get something for nothing [...]
Can you explain why do you get this impression? I'm asking because I have almost the exact opposite impression; why is it so controversial that it should work?
The reason is this[1]: it's computationally very expensive to simulate quantum physics. For some types of quantum systems, as the system gets large, the amount of work (math) needed to simulate its evolution seems to grows exponentially. So, it's reasonable that it should be possible to use this fact to our advantage: make up quantum systems that, as they evolve, solve some hard math problem we're interested in (like, say, factoring a huge number).
[1] It's not my idea. One of the first persons to propose this was Richard Feynman, a physicist.
[...] will kill you in 3 days [...] All humans on Earth will die within a month [...] Since your only choices are to give me the money or possibly kill mankind [...]
Nah... see, you're trying way too hard. A good troll would be more subtle. The straw man fallacy was a nice choice, though.
The thing that always annoyed be about the global warming fear mongering is that it puts focus on something that, as the article noted, is not ACTUALLY a pollutant.
That would be relevant if the discussion about carbon dioxide had anything to do with pollution. Nice way to muddy the waters, though.
Keeping with GP's line of thought: "Don't pay attention to fear mongering about smoking. You'll be far better of if you focus on your problems with cholesterol and sugar, which cause real harm to your health", say 16 doctors*
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to keep checking whether the bit has flipped. In fact, look at the most "quantum world" example possible: the usual way to define a quantum computer uses reversible computing (because quantum logic gates are reversible).
You're thinking in terms of a storing information the way a normal (irreversible) computer does. Not all computation must be done that way, I was describing a specific way that's not like that. Imagine that in the system of my (dumb, as I said) example the problem being calculated was, conveniently, the equivalent of "in which side of the box the water molecule will be after 3 days". In this case, I have to spend no energy at all to compute that, assuming the box is perfectly isolated from the environment.
Admittedly, that's a contrived (and dumb) example, I'm just showing that you don't have to spend energy to flip bits around as you would in a normal computer. In a real system, to solve real problems, you'd probably want to devise a way to implement a CNOT gate (described in one of the Wikipedia links in my original post) or a Toffoli gate and use that to simulate a "usual" AND gate. Wikipedia shows a toy implementation of a gate like that using billiard balls. In a system like that, the only energy that must be spent (in principle) is the initial velocity of the billiard balls, regardless of how many gates and how long the computation took. That's strictly different from a normal (irreversible) computer, where you must spend energy each time you change a bit.
It's theoretically possible to change the state of a bit without spending energy. Here's a dumb example: think of a closed system (so no energy is being gained or lost) consisting of a box filled with oxygen and only one molecule of water. Divide the box in two halves and say a bit is "0" if the molecule of water is in the left half and "1" if it's in the right half. If you wait a while, eventually the bit will flip with absolutely no change in energy. That's a dumb example, but it shows that there's nothing that requires a "intrinsic state" and energy loss when you move away from it, like you described.
The only time energy dissipation is unavoidable (in theory) is when you erase information. That's a strange concept because, usually, we don't think about "conservation of information" in the same sense of conservation of energy, but there's a relation. A little more discussion with more relevance to computing can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing.
[I'm replying in the hopes of saving someone else from confusion, I mean no offense. What you're describing is exactly the way it was first explained to me -- but it's not only wrong but wrong in a way that leads to endless confusion]
Although for a first-order approximation, it doesn't matter, because people today generally aren't dealing with nondeterministic machines.
No, please don't explain it this way. NP by definition contains P, so no amount of approximation will make it mean "non-polynomial". If it meant anything like "non-polynomial", then P=NP would be trivially false, by definition.
A problem is NP if you can check if a candidate solution is right in polynomial time. Note that this includes any problem that you can solve in polynomial time (i.e., in P). The stuff about "non-deterministic machines" is just a way to formalize that notion (you can think of it as something like: "a nondeterministic machine can check all possible solutions at the same time, so it can solve any NP problem in polynomial time").
The problem of deciding if P=NP is basically asking: is there any problem for which we can, in polynomial time, check if a solution is right but not find a solution?
I don't know why you got that impression I implied this; I said no such thing. The point I am trying to make is that ignoring a DMCA infringement notice is a very bad idea. As I have shown, the courts and people who oppose the DMCA agree. It seems like you, on the other hand, think that everyone should simply ignore all DMCA infringement notices (your words: "If everyone who received a DMCA takedown threw it away, then copyright (And the sites involved) would be better protected than they are now."), while showing no reason why.
At this point, I have used all my arguments, and heard no arguments opposing them. I think we're both wasting our time with this discussion.
The issue with Napster was that they were mostly infringing, so even if they did honor every DMCA takedown request, they'd have lost.
On the appeal of the Napster case, the Ninth Circuit ruled that "Regardless of the number of Napster's infringing versus noninfringing uses", the question could be resolved on the basis of whether "Napster knew or had reason to know of its users' infringement of plaintiffs' copyrights" (taken from Wikipedia, I'm too lazy to rummage through the ruling itself right now).
If you read the "safe harbor" provisions from the text law itself, you'll see clearly that willfully ignoring notices of infringement surely means losing protection:
Sec. 512. Limitations on liability relating to material online [DMCA Safe Harbor provisions]
[...]
From http://images.chillingeffects.org/512.html
I don't know what else to say. I quoted the law, previous applications of the DMCA in court, and even some FAQs from Chilling Effects, created by EFF specifically to combat copyright abuse (so, if anything else, they would support your position if it was even remotely viable).
The fact is that DMCA is a law -- arguably a bad one. The best way to change it is to understand how harmful it is, and show that to other people. Ignoring it or pretending it doesn't exist will do nothing to change the situation.
Look, this is silly. Take the example of what happened to Napster: in the end of their court battle, the court found that they didn't qualify for the "safe harbor" provisions of DMCA [which is exactly what would happen if Flickr decided to ignore DMCA notices]. Since they didn't qualify, the court ordered them to "monitor the activities of its network and to block access to infringing material when notified of that material's location" [which seems to be in part what you want Flickr to refuse to do]. They couldn't (or wouldn't) do that, so they had to completely shut down.
So, you can make all the analogies you want, but in the end, if Flickr (or anyone else) doesn't want to comply with DMCA notices to remove (allegedly) infringing material, eventually they will have to be completely shut down. Of course, it's not automatically "take down the picture or completely shut down" -- that would be silly. But the point stands -- without being protected by the "safe harbor" provisions and willingness to "remove infringing material when notified of the material's location", it's impossible to continue to work, as was shown in the Napster case.
I don't think that's right.
It is right.
Uh, I'm confused. By "it is right" do you mean that Flickr could have chosen to not take down the picture? I don't see how it fits the rest of what you said:
A DCMA takedown notice is a legal document that has to comply with the specific requirements of the act. You can't just write "Yo, doodz, take this off your webs" on a post-it and expect it to have legal weight.
Sure. I was responding to someone who wrote "upon receipt of a properly formatted DMCA takedown notice". I take that to mean that the notice complies to the specific requirements of the DMCA.
Probably most crucially, one of the things the takedown notice must have is: [...]
Yes. The text you quoted is also present in the first page I linked. I just didn't think it was relevant enough to quote it. To be completely honest, I still don't see the relevance.
What would be nice is if a few DAs hungry for media attention started nailing some of these fraudulent claimants to the wall pour encourager les autres.
I agree. I also see no reason why the owner of the picture (and maybe Flickr) shouldn't sue Wasteland Inc. I just don't see how this is relevant to whether Flickr had any choice other than taking down the picture.
The "safe harbor" provisions are the only thing that keeps Flicks from being completely taken down when someone claims it's hosting material that violates copyright (yes, the DMCA sucks).
So, saying that there's no "requirement" in this case is like saying that there's no "requirement" that you comply when someone points a gun at you and asks for your wallet. It's technically true, but irrelevant.
I don't think that's right. If I understand things correctly, if the service provider (Flickr, in this case) wants to stay protected by the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA, it must "expeditiously" take down the (allegedly) infringing material:
From http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/question.cgi?QuestionID=130.
Of course, if the user then says that he can legally use the material, the provider must (if the matter doesn't go to court) put the content back up:
From http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/question.cgi?QuestionID=713.
That's the origin of the term. Language evolves, though:
- http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/luddite
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite#In_contemporary_thought
I think this description applies to any "computing problem".
It certainly applies to any "quantum computing problem" (i.e., any problem solvable by a quantum computer), because any quantum computer can be simulated by a classical computer. That is, any problem solvable by a quantum computer can also be solved by a classical computer.
The catch is that, as the size of the input grows, it might be the case that the amount of time and/or space needed by the classical computer grows exponentially (that's not proven yet, though -- see here, for example).
[...] but if you could *READ* them without influencing them [...]
That would be great, but you can't. Once you read them, the entanglement is broken. As mathimus1863 wrote in the original message in this thread,
Typically, your qubit starts in 50% '0' and 50% '1', and thus when you measure it, you get a 50% chance of it being one or the other (and then it assumes that state). [my emphasis]
That means that once you measure a qubit, its state becomes exactly what you measured (this is commonly known as "wave function collapse"), and so it's not entangled anymore.
That was a great explanation.
Just one small nitpick: when you talk about factorization, you use "n" for the number of bits, and when you talk about guessing an encryption key, you use "n" for the number of possible keys, which makes things a little unnecessarily confusing. I'd change the second one to also use number of bits -- so it would be O(2^n) on classical computers and O(2^(n/2)) for quantum computers. This way it's also easier to see that the square root (i.e., the factor of 1/2 in the exponent) doesn't buy a lot.
That's not how quantum computers work, despite of what you might have read in science popularization articles. Quantum algorithms don't work like classical algorithms work, but "doing all possibilities at once". That wouldn't work because of the contradiction you described -- once you measure the result, all the other "possibilities" go away.
Quantum algorithms work by not only solving the problem, but also shifting the probabilities of the qubits in such a way that, when you measure it, you get a very high probability of measuring the "right" answer. For example: in the quantum part of Shor's algorithm, you start with a lot of qubits that have 50% probability of being 0 and 50% of being 1, and after doing the computation, you end up with the qubits with a very high probability of having in the "correct" value. This works because the probability of being right can be as high as you want -- you can set things up so that the probability of being wrong is the same as that of an asteroid hitting the computer while it's calculating, for example.
That's why it's very hard to come up with quantum algorithms. For a lot of problems, it's doubtful that it's even possible to have a quantum algorithm that's much better than classical algorithms. For example, most quantum computer scientists think that quantum computers will never be able to solve NP-complete problems much faster than classical computers.
His bit about "to, from and BCC" in this Boston article is completely bogus. Just see RFC 680 (from 1975) and notice that all of them were completely specified.
I'm not sure what you mean... The obvious difference is that in the case of the "FTL Neutrinos", everything was published.
There's nothing wrong with comparing what you got with what was expected, as long as you publish it. The problem is discarding (and not telling anyone about) what you got just because it's not what you expected, which is what happened in the story of the measurement of the electron charge.
That's a really interesting question. I don't know about Mathematics, but in Physics, its pretty damn important to publish negative results. Feynman used to tell a story to show that (available here). Basically, the story goes something like this:
Robert Millikan, which was already a famous experimental physicist, published a (now famous) experiment that determined the charge of a single electron. This was the first time such a thing had been done, so it was a really big deal. A lot of other physicists replicated the experiment, with lots of papers published all around. The thing about experiments is that the value measured always has an uncertainty, and experimenters make mistakes, so it's very common for later experiments to correct previously-measured values. The strange thing about this case is that, if you plot the "known" value for the electron charge over time, you get a curve that gradually grows from the value measured in the first experiment to the value we now know is correct (because today we have many different ways to measure the value, so we're pretty sure of it).
So, why is the plot a gradual curve and not a straight jump to the correct answer? Why didn't the second experiment get the correct value right away? The answer is embarrassing. Since Millikan was so famous, subsequent experimenters didn't publish their results if the value they got was too far from the "currently accepted" value -- they thought of their results as "negative results", even though they probably had less error than the "currently accepted" value. The ones that got published were the ones with similar errors to the previous ones, or the ones that kept tweaking their setup (introducing all kinds of random errors) until they got a value that was closer to the original.
Nowadays, physicists are very careful not to make mistakes like this. Part of that care means that you don't pay too much attention to the "expected" result, so you really should publish negative results. Of course, that's just the theory -- no one likes to publish negative results, because most of the time, they're just a waste of time.
I think you mean "change in high-school physics".
This kind of "out of proportion change" is present in so many well-studies systems that it even has its own name: "nonlinearity".
You can redefine words to mean whatever you want, but that's not what everyone else understand by "right". If what you're saying was true, the expression "violation of rights" would be meaningless: "How can any right be violated? Rights are always enforced, otherwise they're just a fantasy!".
That is utter nonsense.
Calling this "utter nonsense" is utter nonsense.
"Inherent" rights are simply rights that don't depend on law or customs to exist. They can be violated just like any other right, and in many places are violated by established laws or customs. A more lengthy discussion can be found in many places, but here's a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights.
For crying out loud, Reddit's statement actually refers to this new rule as a "slippery slope," as if it's somehow more difficult for them not to censor legitimate information if they can't have a subreddit named /r/preeteen_girls devoted to underage photos submitted by creepy Facebook stalkers.
You got it backwards. The "slippery slope" bit is there to reassure everyone that this new rule does not make "more difficult for them not to censor legitimate information". The statement you quoted from goes on to say:
However, child pornography is a toxic and unique case for Internet communities [...] We remain committed to protecting reddit as an open platform. [my emphasis]
So, they're just telling people that Reddit is not going to start censoring based on perceived possible legal problems (e.g. copyright, which is a big issue right now).
The idea is nice but it seems like you're trying to get something for nothing [...]
Can you explain why do you get this impression? I'm asking because I have almost the exact opposite impression; why is it so controversial that it should work?
The reason is this[1]: it's computationally very expensive to simulate quantum physics. For some types of quantum systems, as the system gets large, the amount of work (math) needed to simulate its evolution seems to grows exponentially. So, it's reasonable that it should be possible to use this fact to our advantage: make up quantum systems that, as they evolve, solve some hard math problem we're interested in (like, say, factoring a huge number).
[1] It's not my idea. One of the first persons to propose this was Richard Feynman, a physicist.
[...] will kill you in 3 days [...]
All humans on Earth will die within a month [...]
Since your only choices are to give me the money or possibly kill mankind [...]
Nah... see, you're trying way too hard. A good troll would be more subtle. The straw man fallacy was a nice choice, though.
The thing that always annoyed be about the global warming fear mongering is that it puts focus on something that, as the article noted, is not ACTUALLY a pollutant.
That would be relevant if the discussion about carbon dioxide had anything to do with pollution. Nice way to muddy the waters, though.
Keeping with GP's line of thought: "Don't pay attention to fear mongering about smoking. You'll be far better of if you focus on your problems with cholesterol and sugar, which cause real harm to your health", say 16 doctors*
* not necessarily medical doctors