That's silly. If you can build a supersonic plane that makes a "boom" that's no louder than a car door closing, why put restrictions on where it can fly? We don't put restrictions on where you can close your car door.
Yes. I was involved in teaching a month-long quantum computing course, and the experts in the field were pretty skeptical. Approaches like D-Wave's might turn out to be the winner: build some specialized hardware that works with the limitations and then try to find problems that work on it. The other approach, trying to make a general purpose quantum computer, is a much dicier proposition. Even then, Shor's algorithm isn't quite what the pop science articles paint it as.
Yes yes, we've all heard the propaganda. Non-free software is a trap. I guess my post was the closest thing you could find to repost that wall-o-intellectual-text?
There's nothing preventing you from doing whatever you want with your computer. Want to keep that copy of OS 10.0 on it? Go for it. Linux kernel 1.0? Cool. This thread is about support and updates. There are very few vendors that support versions going back more than three to five years. So if you want someone to provide you with nice updates, you might have to update your OS a bit.
Yes. Quantum supremacy doesn't mean you've got a computer that does something that wasn't possible before. It means you've got a computer that, scaled up, could do something that wasn't possible before.
Properly scaled up is a major caveat, particularly in quantum computing.
Sure, you *can* update Linux to keep your old clunker computer going. There are even a few very specialized areas where that happens, to a limited degree. For the vast majority of people, it's not worth it.
Ubuntu's idea of "long term support" is three years (five for servers). Apple seems to have decreased their length of support for old OSes, but they're still running at three years (three versions back). The same as Ubuntu.
That's not quite what quantum supremacy means. It's not their quantum computer doing a computation faster than a conventional computer. That would be a very slippery benchmark. First question... what conventional computer?
Quantum supremacy means demonstrating that your quantum computer can complete certain computations with less computational complexity than a classical computer. In the typical examples, the classical complexity is exponential and the quantum complexity is theorized to be subexponential.
The quantum computer may very well take much longer than the classical computer in clock time, and any problem Google solves with a 72 qubit chip is going to be a toy example.
I'm not sure I follow. You don't believe quantum computing is possible because the people you've asked about it are hesitant to provide incorrect guesses?
"The cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000"
Yes, that would be a big expense for most of us, but people whose companies decide they should fly first class often spend 10% of that on a single flight. The orbit-to-anywhere part of the trip is substantially cheaper too, so if transport costs really get that low you might well bop around the solar system on business, just not so much down to the surface.
The way the Nobel committee makes decisions has changed over time, and varies by field. Today the science prizes are awarded only after a long time has gone by and the discovery is so well validated that it's nearly impossible there's a mistake.
To say nothing about how dumb it is to try and gauge scientific production by looking at Nobel prizes.
Amazon's site is pretty garbage too, compared to specialty sites. Try searching for some piece of hardware with specific specs. You can't. Yesterday I used the NewEgg search to find something specific I wanted to add to an order from Amazon then looked up the part number on Amazon. Oh, it's 25% cheaper from NewEgg... guess I'm going to order it separately from them.
Half the stuff on Amazon comes from China too, often by the slow boat. And half the rest comes from Joe Random independents.
Web sites are cosmetic. It doesn't take much to change them. Warehouses aren't cosmetic, but for a multi-hundred billion dollar multinational megacorp, opening warehouses in a new market you're expanding into isn't that big a hurdle.
Amazon is far from perfect, and has credible competition both from more specialty e-commerce sites and potential competition in their general market from companies like Alibaba.
Alibaba is an example. They got going five years after Amazon and are now the same ballpark size. If Alibaba is better at figuring out the western market than Amazon is at getting into the Asian market, then Amazon could be in trouble. Alibaba also has a natural advantage in that their home turf is growing faster than Amazon's.
You're too generous. There are a few papers looking at what makes something "art." The answer is, a surprisingly small number of rich dudes. These guys pay ridiculous amounts of money to commission things they like, a small number of artists get rich and famous, and then a bunch of others try to do similar things.
The guy who makes the giant rubber ducks for example. Or that pile of bricks in the Tate.
Blockchain weirdly conflates a bunch of things. Any shared writeable document, whether it's a hash tree or not, needs to have rules to decide when and who is allowed to edit it. For cryptocurrencies, the document is public, and enforcement of the writing policy is done by public agreement.
Bitcoin bases the right to write on computing power. Write opportunities are assigned in a weighted random way, where the weighting is determined by the relative amount of compute power you're willing to dedicate to the competition. So if lots of people want to write to that document....
You can imagine other schemes. Many of the crypto currencies are considering or use a "proof-of-stake" where the weighting is based on how much of the currency you own.
You must have a way of assigning authority. Every method has downsides.
Nah, the statisticians in question are actuaries. They're too busy driving fancy cars and smoking $1000 bills to read Slashdot. If one did, he'd just laugh and high five his high end hooker, knowing his job is secure.
How could you possibly have lost money with a decent index fund? Did you sell and then buy again? All the indices are up considerably over pre-whatever-crash-you-want-to-talk-about.
LCDs use energy to twist the crystals and change the polarization. It's pretty arbitrary what the rest state is, but when I looked previously it seemed like most LCDs were set up for a default light blocking state. Might have changed of course, but it would seem to make sense to orient the polarizer so the rest state was whatever used the least energy on average.
LCD screens yes. Google is talking about their phone with an OLED screen. In OLED screens each pixel actually emits light, so turning it off (or down) saves energy.
The rates of famine and war have decreased exponentially (literally exponentially) over the last 500 years or so. The population is currently fairly high, but the rate of increase is tapering off and all reasonable forecasts predict topping out then a decrease. The first world is already in the decrease phase.
Famine is caused by unreliable food production or distribution. War is caused by economic forces. Educating females (by having a high enough standard of living that lets everyone get an education) is the best method of population control. All these are enabled by technology.
Slashdot Mirror
That's silly. If you can build a supersonic plane that makes a "boom" that's no louder than a car door closing, why put restrictions on where it can fly? We don't put restrictions on where you can close your car door.
Yes. I was involved in teaching a month-long quantum computing course, and the experts in the field were pretty skeptical. Approaches like D-Wave's might turn out to be the winner: build some specialized hardware that works with the limitations and then try to find problems that work on it. The other approach, trying to make a general purpose quantum computer, is a much dicier proposition. Even then, Shor's algorithm isn't quite what the pop science articles paint it as.
Yes yes, we've all heard the propaganda. Non-free software is a trap. I guess my post was the closest thing you could find to repost that wall-o-intellectual-text?
There's nothing preventing you from doing whatever you want with your computer. Want to keep that copy of OS 10.0 on it? Go for it. Linux kernel 1.0? Cool. This thread is about support and updates. There are very few vendors that support versions going back more than three to five years. So if you want someone to provide you with nice updates, you might have to update your OS a bit.
Yes. Quantum supremacy doesn't mean you've got a computer that does something that wasn't possible before. It means you've got a computer that, scaled up, could do something that wasn't possible before.
Properly scaled up is a major caveat, particularly in quantum computing.
Same way you install software on any other computer that doesn't boot I guess?
You know you can boot a Mac off a USB stick right? If you're concerned about destroying your hard drive, OS X will be happy to make one for you.
It's similar to most other computer manufacturers who give you a recovery partition on your hard drive instead of physical media.
Sure, you *can* update Linux to keep your old clunker computer going. There are even a few very specialized areas where that happens, to a limited degree. For the vast majority of people, it's not worth it.
Ubuntu's idea of "long term support" is three years (five for servers). Apple seems to have decreased their length of support for old OSes, but they're still running at three years (three versions back). The same as Ubuntu.
Not the heart monitor. That wouldn't be good for your insurance.
That's not quite what quantum supremacy means. It's not their quantum computer doing a computation faster than a conventional computer. That would be a very slippery benchmark. First question... what conventional computer?
Quantum supremacy means demonstrating that your quantum computer can complete certain computations with less computational complexity than a classical computer. In the typical examples, the classical complexity is exponential and the quantum complexity is theorized to be subexponential.
The quantum computer may very well take much longer than the classical computer in clock time, and any problem Google solves with a 72 qubit chip is going to be a toy example.
I'm not sure I follow. You don't believe quantum computing is possible because the people you've asked about it are hesitant to provide incorrect guesses?
"The cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000"
Yes, that would be a big expense for most of us, but people whose companies decide they should fly first class often spend 10% of that on a single flight. The orbit-to-anywhere part of the trip is substantially cheaper too, so if transport costs really get that low you might well bop around the solar system on business, just not so much down to the surface.
The way the Nobel committee makes decisions has changed over time, and varies by field. Today the science prizes are awarded only after a long time has gone by and the discovery is so well validated that it's nearly impossible there's a mistake.
To say nothing about how dumb it is to try and gauge scientific production by looking at Nobel prizes.
Amazon's site is pretty garbage too, compared to specialty sites. Try searching for some piece of hardware with specific specs. You can't. Yesterday I used the NewEgg search to find something specific I wanted to add to an order from Amazon then looked up the part number on Amazon. Oh, it's 25% cheaper from NewEgg... guess I'm going to order it separately from them.
Half the stuff on Amazon comes from China too, often by the slow boat. And half the rest comes from Joe Random independents.
Web sites are cosmetic. It doesn't take much to change them. Warehouses aren't cosmetic, but for a multi-hundred billion dollar multinational megacorp, opening warehouses in a new market you're expanding into isn't that big a hurdle.
Amazon is far from perfect, and has credible competition both from more specialty e-commerce sites and potential competition in their general market from companies like Alibaba.
Alibaba is an example. They got going five years after Amazon and are now the same ballpark size. If Alibaba is better at figuring out the western market than Amazon is at getting into the Asian market, then Amazon could be in trouble. Alibaba also has a natural advantage in that their home turf is growing faster than Amazon's.
It seems unlikely that you'd demonstrate your super stealth breaking radar at an air show.
It is not. In fact, they're required by law to be able to do so.
You're too generous. There are a few papers looking at what makes something "art." The answer is, a surprisingly small number of rich dudes. These guys pay ridiculous amounts of money to commission things they like, a small number of artists get rich and famous, and then a bunch of others try to do similar things.
The guy who makes the giant rubber ducks for example. Or that pile of bricks in the Tate.
Sounds like it means "created by a human." In which case the answer to the question is trivially, "no."
Sounds like conceit and hubris to me, but then it is the art establishment, so I guess that's only natural.
I like the part about "given the AI is trained by humans...." Human artists are not?
Blockchain weirdly conflates a bunch of things. Any shared writeable document, whether it's a hash tree or not, needs to have rules to decide when and who is allowed to edit it. For cryptocurrencies, the document is public, and enforcement of the writing policy is done by public agreement.
Bitcoin bases the right to write on computing power. Write opportunities are assigned in a weighted random way, where the weighting is determined by the relative amount of compute power you're willing to dedicate to the competition. So if lots of people want to write to that document....
You can imagine other schemes. Many of the crypto currencies are considering or use a "proof-of-stake" where the weighting is based on how much of the currency you own.
You must have a way of assigning authority. Every method has downsides.
Nah, the statisticians in question are actuaries. They're too busy driving fancy cars and smoking $1000 bills to read Slashdot. If one did, he'd just laugh and high five his high end hooker, knowing his job is secure.
How could you possibly have lost money with a decent index fund? Did you sell and then buy again? All the indices are up considerably over pre-whatever-crash-you-want-to-talk-about.
LCDs use energy to twist the crystals and change the polarization. It's pretty arbitrary what the rest state is, but when I looked previously it seemed like most LCDs were set up for a default light blocking state. Might have changed of course, but it would seem to make sense to orient the polarizer so the rest state was whatever used the least energy on average.
It's amazing the stupid things that drive technological progress.
Oh well. New tech is new tech.
LCD screens yes. Google is talking about their phone with an OLED screen. In OLED screens each pixel actually emits light, so turning it off (or down) saves energy.
Yup, there's always more catastrophe that technology can save us from.
The 1970s wants its alarmism back.
The rates of famine and war have decreased exponentially (literally exponentially) over the last 500 years or so. The population is currently fairly high, but the rate of increase is tapering off and all reasonable forecasts predict topping out then a decrease. The first world is already in the decrease phase.
Famine is caused by unreliable food production or distribution. War is caused by economic forces. Educating females (by having a high enough standard of living that lets everyone get an education) is the best method of population control. All these are enabled by technology.