The people PJ exposes fight dirty. They try all sorts of tricks to discredit Groklaw, chief among them is posting awful things anonymously. The idea being they can then smear Groklaw by pointing to these abusive posts as indicative of the Groklaw community. I've seen a bunch of these posts over the years and I've reported them to PJ so she can delete them.
So on one side we have a bunch of lying cheating dastardly bastards who will do anything they can (legal or not) to destroy FOSS. On the other side we have PJ who insists on allowing people to post anonymously on her site which entails the extra burden of throwing out the trash people post that is designed to discredit Groklaw.
And for this she is criticized. Give me a break. PJ is human and like all humans she is both opinionated and imperfect. Like the rest of us, she has flaws and is not always right.
I imagine that while throwing out the trash she has probably deleted some posts that may not have deserved it. But by criticizing her for protecting her reputation and the reputation of Groklaw (while at the same time allowing anonymous posts) you are aiding and abetting the enemies of FOSS.
You sir/madam are implying that PJ lacks integrity because she has been forced to delete terrible posts that make Groklaw look awful. The truth is she has more integrity than almost anyone else I know (of). It is her integrity that makes the Groklaw site shine despite the fact that it is run by imperfect human beings. IMO PJ is a true hero because she maintains her integrity even though her site is constantly bombarded by posts from people who completely lack it.
It is worse than you think. I live in the US and I've bought many copyrighted works from over-seas. Sometimes dvds or books I'm interested in aren't released in the US until months or years after they are released elsewhere. Just take a look at eBay or the Amazon marketplace. This ruling makes such purchases illegal. It doesn't just eliminate the first sale doctrine for importers, it eliminates it for individuals as well.
It's crazy. We clearly have a government that is of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations.
What's even worse is the tortuous logic that led to
this ruling.
The ruling says that the phrase lawfully made under this title actually means lawfully made in the United States. They are saying the US Congress intended the first sale doctrine to only apply to goods manufactured in the US. The obvious intent of the phrase lawfully made under this title was to exclude pirated and bootlegged copies from the protection of the first sale doctrine. It is mind boggling that the US Government would try to twist words around like this in order to so blatantly favor multinational corporations at the expense of US citizens and publishers.
As long as they don't manufacturer copyrighted goods in the US then corporations are allowed to set one price for the US and different prices for the rest of the world. On the other hand, if they do manufacture their goods in the US then the first sale doctrine applies and other people can legally import the cheaper copies of the same goods to the US, thus leveling the prices. This is an overwhelming incentive for all companies to move all their manufacturing of copyrighted goods out of the US ASAP. It's ridiculous to even imagine that this was the intent of Congress when they wrote the law in question. IMO this ruling borders on being treasonous.
Perhaps not strictly to blame but certainly a truckload more hypocritical. Before buying Sun, Oracle was complaining about the very policies it is now trying to enforce. Furthermore, regardless of who started this idiocy (of subverting the TCK, which was by contract (
JSPA) a strictly technical hurdle, into being an excuse to re-write the licensing terms in the JSPA), it is now entirely in Oracle's hands.
If you are implying that Apache has some anti-Oracle grudge, I think the conflict probably started after Oracle launched the first-strike by suing Google over its use of Apache's Harmony in Android (and other stuff. Oracle is being represented by BS&F who mastered the art of being unspecific when they represented SCO vs. the Free world). If Oracle hadn't violated the terms of the JSPA, their law suit against Google would have had no merit because according the JSPA, Apache was supposed to get an irrevocable, license to the very copyrights and patents Oracle is suing over.
If I had to dole out blame I would give 2% to Sun and 98% to Oracle.
The EFL begins with Evas, our canvas library. Because Evas is built on several different selectable engines (Linux FrameBuffer, DirectFB, X11, OpenGL/OpenGL-ES, QTopia, etc) the platform is extremely portable, which translates thru to all of the libraries built on top of it.
Hey, if they were good enough to run a
Brazilian fridge, they should be good enough for you. Seriously though, you should take at look at the EFL. They are flexible, powerful and efficient. There will be a learning curve with whatever libraries you choose to use. You might as well get something wonderful in return for your investment of time and energy. You want the efficiency of OpenGL without the limitations? You got it.
Many years ago, before Amazon was such a dominant player, they introduced free shipping for orders over $25. This was a very big deal back then. It had been virtually unheard of before. Amazon made a choice to forgo traditional advertising and use their advertising budget to give their customers free shipping.
Amazon refused to charge us the (so far) totally optional advertising tax that the all the other retailers in the article are charging us for. I don't know if Amazon has changed there (low/no) advertising policy since then but I don't remember ever being inundated with Amazon ads. IMO advertising is an unnecessary evil. For me, getting free shipping and fewer ads is a win-win.
Remember, this is the classical example of having let's say a red ball and a black ball. They are each put into a box but we don't know which one is in which box. As soon as we open up one box and see a red ball we instantly know there is a black ball in the other box. There should be nothing spooky or magical about this.
I guess I am having a hard time understanding how something can be spooky action at a distance without transmitting information.
Good. Yes, of course. This is what I've been saying, quantum entanglement defies human intuition. You want to understand QE without understanding the equations. For many things this is possible but not for QE. Likewise, while we can understand a 2-dimensional world, it is hard to have a good intuitive understanding of what goes on when the dimension is greater than 3. For example in a world with a very high number of dimensions, almost the entire volume of a sphere is in a very thin shell near the surface. As the number of dimensions goes to infinity the thickness of the shell goes to zero.
The equations of quantum mechanics correctly predict what happens in QE. These results are highly non-intuitive. So much so that Einstein et al. published a paper saying quantum mechanics must be wrong because of the "crazy" results it predicts in entangled systems. People did the experiment and found that quantum mechanics was right and human intuition was wrong. As my QM teacher told my class: "you have to check your intuition at the door when you enter the world of quantum mechanics".
If QE was a method of communication then you could verify it by sending Bob a "cheat cheat" of what Alice was going to do or transmit. Instead, you need to look at the outcome of a series of measurements taken by Alice's and the outcome of a series of measurments taken by Bob just to see if QE actually happened.
I think this was wrong. I believe that a cheat cheat of Alice's settings combined with Bob's settings and results is sufficient to see that QE occurred. The point is that you need an alternative form of communication between Bob and Alice just to verify QE. The cheat sheet serves as the alternative communications channel.
Entanglement is quite different from that. As you say, the effect you talk about can be seen classically with a pair of dissimilar coins that are hidden in boxes and then separated. As soon as one box is opened, we instantly know the contents of the other box.
There is no classical analogy to entanglement. If there were then it wouldn't seem so mysterious or "spooky". Entanglement has to do with correlations in the statistics of measurements of a series of entangled pairs of particles. Looking that the statistics at just one end of the experiment won't give even a hint of entanglement. It obeys the standard statistics expected of a single particle.
But there is a correlation between the statistics and how the measurements were performed at one end with the statistics at the other end. The correlation is not "strong" enough to let you determine even statistically anything about what was macroscopically happening at the other end. The particles at each end have the standard statistics you would expect of an un-entangled particle.
You can only tell entanglement occurred by comparing the results of the series of experiments from both ends with each other after it is all over.
IMO, all classical analogies are misleading which is why there is so much confusion about entanglement. Journalists and other popularizers insist on explaining quantum entanglement (QE) with classical analogies. These analogies always lead to significant effects (such as superluminal communication) that do not occur in QE.
This is compounded by the problem that people's imaginations are much more classical than quantum. Many quantum effects do have classical analogies. People intuitively want to have a classical "mechanical" underpinning to quantum mechanics. Entanglement proves this is impossible. If you can free your mind from the (perhaps subconscious) insistence that there must be some classical underpinning then entanglement is easier to accept and less confusing.
Quantum mechanics consists of equations and formulas for predicting the outcome of experiments. For entangled systems, it predicts the outcomes much better than human intuition. Our intuition fails miserably here. Giving people classical analogies is supposed to give them an intuitive understanding but it actually gives them an intuitive misunderstanding because there is no classical analogy.
According to the ideas in
Decoherence, the measurement problem, and interpretations of quantum
mechanics the term "observe" means to strongly interact with a system that is large enough and complicated enough to behave classically. I believe the majority of physicists who think about these things would agree with this definition.
I like to think of it as the particle (or system) being measured becoming classical-like during the measurement before going on its own merry quantum way again.
The Wired article "explains" entanglement by talking about Bob predicting what Alice did even though Alice is far away from Bob. This is the fundamental misunderstanding of quantum entanglement and has led to all sorts of wacky (and false) speculations and "theories".
Non-locality can be exhibited when performing measurements on two or more distant quantum systems – the outcomes can be correlated in way that defies any local classical description. This is why we know that quantum theory will never by superceded by a local classical theory. Nevertheless, even quantum correlations are restricted to some extent – measurement results cannot be correlated so strongly that they would allow signalling between two distant systems.
Quantum entanglement (QE) provides a correlation not a communication. What this means is that not only can't you use QE to pass signals (or any information) between Alice and Bob, you actually need some other form of after-the-fact communication between them to detect the correlation in order to determine if QE happened at all.
If QE was a method of communication then you could verify it by sending Bob a "cheat cheat" of what Alice was going to do or transmit. Instead, you need to look at the outcome of a series of measurements taken by Alice's and the outcome of a series of measurments taken by Bob just to see if QE actually happened.
How fucking dare anyone pick on Microsoft after all she's been through! She loves her Vista. She went through anti-monopoly trials. She's had a bunch of fucking operating systems. She thinks all her users are cheaters and now she's going through a custodial union battle. All you people care about are cell phones and ebook readers, not about making money for her investors! She's inhuman!
What you don't realize is that Microsoft is making all this money with vendor lock-in, anti-competitive tactics, and dirty tricks. Yet all you do is buy a bunch of crap software from her. Her software hasn't performed up to expectations in years. Her company motto is "Give me More!" for a reason because all she wants is more more more more more!
Leave her alone! You're lucky any of her software ever worked for you bastards. Leave Microsoft alone! Please!
The review paper I was thinking of was by Maximilian Schlosshauer. It was called "Decoherence, the measurement problem, and interpretations of quantum
mechanics". He has also written a book about quantum decoherence.
As others have noted, the author's explanation of entanglement is faulty. IMO the key fault (although there are others) is the implication that entanglement can be used for (perhaps super-luminal) communication.
Perhaps only a minority of scientists think building large scale quantum computers is impossible, but I think a majority of physicists think it is impossible, I certainly do. I strongly disagree with the idea that the only way building large scale quantum computers would be impossible is if quantum mechanics does not describe nature.
The key stumbling block is a phenomenon known as quantum decoherence.
Wojciech H. Zurek recently wrote a fairly long review paper summarizing what is known about decoherence. IMO, just as the computing power of a quantum computer increases exponentially with the number of qubits, so does the interference from quantum decoherence.
It is like the old story of how chess was invented to please a king. The king was so pleased he offered the inventor his weight in gold. The inventor asked instead for some rice. He said put a single grain of rice on the first square of the chess board, then two grains of rice on the 2nd square, four grains of rice on the 3rd square, eight grains of rice on the 4th square, etc. At first the king thought this was a paltry reward for such a great game but after trying to fulfill the request, the king got an inkling of exponential growth and had the inventor beheaded.
Finally, the author got the connection between security and factoring large numbers backwards. Banks and internet security depend on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. Large scale quantum computers could easily factor large numbers thus rendering perhaps all of our current encryption systems obsolete. I have no idea what they would be replaced with but it seems at least possible that anyone who wanted to communicate securely would need to use a quantum computer.
Liquid Sodium cooling (which is required for both of your suggestions) looks great on paper. It was even considered for use in a nuclear powered aircraft. One problem is that liquid Sodium ignites on contact with air or water. It also becomes highly radioactive when used to cool a nuclear reactor. What could possibly go wrong?
Or you could actually reform it to be what it was originally intended to be -- a safety net for those who fall on hard times (rather than the "mandated terribly invested retirement fund" that it is currently treated as).
I replied with a selection from the original Social Security Act of 1935 showing that you were completely wrong about the original intent of Social Security. It was originally intended as a retirement program for all (or the vast majority of) workers, not just for those who fell on hard times.
Your claims about Social Security being a bad investment are equally inaccurate. The only reason stock market investments have not lost half their value or more over the last three years is because American taxpayers have spent over a trillion dollars in bailouts and a stimulus. Social Security has had no need for a similar helping hand. It's been rock solid compared to all other major forms of investment.
Of course, rock solid, safe, sure investments will give you a lower return than riskier investments. That's the way it is supposed to be. The purpose of Social Security is not maximum return on investment. The purpose is security. It has been far and away the most stable of all the large financial institutions.
Deregulation caused the Savings and Loan disaster in the '80's that required a huge publicly funded bailout. Deregulation again caused the recent financial meltdown that required an even larger publicly funded bailout. Social Security is the only thing that has weathered the financial storms unscathed, and now it seems that you want to deregulate that too so once again a few asshole can become billionaires while the American public picks up the tab once again after things fall to pieces.
Since you seemed unclear on the concept, here is an actual snide comment:
Weren't you even a little embarrassed by being caught red-handed trying to rewrite history with your false claims about the original intent of Social Security? Have you no shame?
An Act to provide for the General Welfare by Establishing a System of Federal Old-Age Benefits, and by Enabling the Several States to Make More Adequate Provision for Aged Persons, Blind Persons, Dependent and Crippled Children, Maternal and Child Welfare, Public Health, and the Administration of their Unemployment Compensation Laws; to Establish a Social Security Board; to Raise Revenue; and for Other Purposes."
Notice that "old age benefits" are not just included, they are the first thing listed. Just in case you want to weasel on the word "retirement", the actual act of 1935 includes these words:
Sec. 202. (a) Every qualified individual (as defined in section 210) shall be entitled to receive, with respect to the period beginning on the date he attains the age of sixty-five, [...], and ending on the date of his death, an old-age benefit...
Section 210 about qualified individuals specifies people who work for a wage, not people who have fallen on hard times.
I'll try to resist the urge to say something snide about revising history.
Social Security will eat the entire GDP in the not too distant future if the age threshold is not raised. Check out the numbers, they are as bad as the military (and rising significantly faster).
Bull. Shit. You seem to have fallen for the pro-corporate propaganda.
There are many other ways to "fix" Social Security. For example, if people making over $100,000 per year contributed at the same rate as poorer people then the problems would be solved for the foreseeable future. In fact, this is what Obama promised to do before he got elected.
Health care is becoming too expensive; lots of reasons for this, including a ton of protectionism, lawyerism, and corruption, but the one that cannot be fixed is this: Our technological ability to keep people alive is advancing faster than the GDP growth rate can keep up with. At some point, we will have to stop paying for everyone's maximum possible life extension (either by choice or by collapse).
More of the same. The problem with our health care system is simple. We can basically do three things with our health care system:
Provide affordable health care
Provide effective health care
Fund obscene corporate profits
Pick any two. Unfortunately, both the Dems and the Repubs keep picking option (3) making it impossible for us to have the first two options together.
If insurance companies are trying to maximize shareholder value then their job is to minimize the health care that is provided while maximizing the cost of that care. They are very good at their job.
The idea of fixing the economy by increasing the income gap between the rich and the poor makes about as much sense as dousing a fire with gasoline.
I will agree with you that creating transducers that can take the heat might require new engineering. ISTM almost everything inside their probe is going to require new engineering.
And even if you could figure that out, the sonic environment within the magma lake has got to be terrible - weird thermal gradients, high background noise, the multipath effects you mention... it's a very hard problem.
As I said before, even though this is a hard problem, it has already been solved. I've conducted experiments doing real-time high speed underwater acoustic communication in extremely hostile shallow-water sonic environments filled with high background noise (ships), thermal gradients, and multipath. Actually, the distortion caused by thermal gradients is included in the multipath.
The way it works is that you can model all the multipath (including effects due to thermal gradients) in the channel as a FIR filter. This is how most modems work. But for most modems (like DSL modems) the channel changes very slowly over time. This is an easy problem to solve. The tricky part comes in when the acoustic channel you are trying to communicate over changes rapidly. In that case you need to update your model of the channel rapidly. This is done with a recursive prediction/correction algorithm similar to a Kalman Filter. As I said before, all the heavy processing is done on the receiver end so the only new technical challenge is the transducer on the transmitter. If they don't have the technical know-how to keep their receiving electronics from falling into the magma then I doubt they will be able to get any wireless scheme to work.
Yes, they backported HDCP to DVI but not all DVI devices support HDCP therefore ISTM there is still an extremely legitimate use for a box that cracks HDCP. A newer bluray player will not work with some existing (older) monitors that have a DVI input. This is very nasty.
It will be interesting to see what happens if a DMCA case over HDCP makes it to the US Supreme Court. I really wonder if big media wants to air its dirty little HDCP nastiness in public. I guess it depends on whether their ownership of Congress and the White House extends to ownership of the Supreme Court as well.
Slashdot Mirror
So on one side we have a bunch of lying cheating dastardly bastards who will do anything they can (legal or not) to destroy FOSS. On the other side we have PJ who insists on allowing people to post anonymously on her site which entails the extra burden of throwing out the trash people post that is designed to discredit Groklaw.
And for this she is criticized. Give me a break. PJ is human and like all humans she is both opinionated and imperfect. Like the rest of us, she has flaws and is not always right. I imagine that while throwing out the trash she has probably deleted some posts that may not have deserved it. But by criticizing her for protecting her reputation and the reputation of Groklaw (while at the same time allowing anonymous posts) you are aiding and abetting the enemies of FOSS.
You sir/madam are implying that PJ lacks integrity because she has been forced to delete terrible posts that make Groklaw look awful. The truth is she has more integrity than almost anyone else I know (of). It is her integrity that makes the Groklaw site shine despite the fact that it is run by imperfect human beings. IMO PJ is a true hero because she maintains her integrity even though her site is constantly bombarded by posts from people who completely lack it.
Remember ... down, not across.
I think you may have meant asymmetric, not asynchronous.
What's even worse is the tortuous logic that led to this ruling. The ruling says that the phrase lawfully made under this title actually means lawfully made in the United States. They are saying the US Congress intended the first sale doctrine to only apply to goods manufactured in the US. The obvious intent of the phrase lawfully made under this title was to exclude pirated and bootlegged copies from the protection of the first sale doctrine. It is mind boggling that the US Government would try to twist words around like this in order to so blatantly favor multinational corporations at the expense of US citizens and publishers.
As long as they don't manufacturer copyrighted goods in the US then corporations are allowed to set one price for the US and different prices for the rest of the world. On the other hand, if they do manufacture their goods in the US then the first sale doctrine applies and other people can legally import the cheaper copies of the same goods to the US, thus leveling the prices. This is an overwhelming incentive for all companies to move all their manufacturing of copyrighted goods out of the US ASAP. It's ridiculous to even imagine that this was the intent of Congress when they wrote the law in question. IMO this ruling borders on being treasonous.
If you are implying that Apache has some anti-Oracle grudge, I think the conflict probably started after Oracle launched the first-strike by suing Google over its use of Apache's Harmony in Android (and other stuff. Oracle is being represented by BS&F who mastered the art of being unspecific when they represented SCO vs. the Free world). If Oracle hadn't violated the terms of the JSPA, their law suit against Google would have had no merit because according the JSPA, Apache was supposed to get an irrevocable, license to the very copyrights and patents Oracle is suing over.
If I had to dole out blame I would give 2% to Sun and 98% to Oracle.
The EFL begins with Evas, our canvas library. Because Evas is built on several different selectable engines (Linux FrameBuffer, DirectFB, X11, OpenGL/OpenGL-ES, QTopia, etc) the platform is extremely portable, which translates thru to all of the libraries built on top of it.
Hey, if they were good enough to run a Brazilian fridge, they should be good enough for you. Seriously though, you should take at look at the EFL. They are flexible, powerful and efficient. There will be a learning curve with whatever libraries you choose to use. You might as well get something wonderful in return for your investment of time and energy. You want the efficiency of OpenGL without the limitations? You got it.
Amazon refused to charge us the (so far) totally optional advertising tax that the all the other retailers in the article are charging us for. I don't know if Amazon has changed there (low/no) advertising policy since then but I don't remember ever being inundated with Amazon ads. IMO advertising is an unnecessary evil. For me, getting free shipping and fewer ads is a win-win.
I guess I am having a hard time understanding how something can be spooky action at a distance without transmitting information.
Good. Yes, of course. This is what I've been saying, quantum entanglement defies human intuition. You want to understand QE without understanding the equations. For many things this is possible but not for QE. Likewise, while we can understand a 2-dimensional world, it is hard to have a good intuitive understanding of what goes on when the dimension is greater than 3. For example in a world with a very high number of dimensions, almost the entire volume of a sphere is in a very thin shell near the surface. As the number of dimensions goes to infinity the thickness of the shell goes to zero.
The equations of quantum mechanics correctly predict what happens in QE. These results are highly non-intuitive. So much so that Einstein et al. published a paper saying quantum mechanics must be wrong because of the "crazy" results it predicts in entangled systems. People did the experiment and found that quantum mechanics was right and human intuition was wrong. As my QM teacher told my class: "you have to check your intuition at the door when you enter the world of quantum mechanics".
If QE was a method of communication then you could verify it by sending Bob a "cheat cheat" of what Alice was going to do or transmit. Instead, you need to look at the outcome of a series of measurements taken by Alice's and the outcome of a series of measurments taken by Bob just to see if QE actually happened.
I think this was wrong. I believe that a cheat cheat of Alice's settings combined with Bob's settings and results is sufficient to see that QE occurred. The point is that you need an alternative form of communication between Bob and Alice just to verify QE. The cheat sheet serves as the alternative communications channel.
There is no classical analogy to entanglement. If there were then it wouldn't seem so mysterious or "spooky". Entanglement has to do with correlations in the statistics of measurements of a series of entangled pairs of particles. Looking that the statistics at just one end of the experiment won't give even a hint of entanglement. It obeys the standard statistics expected of a single particle.
But there is a correlation between the statistics and how the measurements were performed at one end with the statistics at the other end. The correlation is not "strong" enough to let you determine even statistically anything about what was macroscopically happening at the other end. The particles at each end have the standard statistics you would expect of an un-entangled particle.
You can only tell entanglement occurred by comparing the results of the series of experiments from both ends with each other after it is all over.
IMO, all classical analogies are misleading which is why there is so much confusion about entanglement. Journalists and other popularizers insist on explaining quantum entanglement (QE) with classical analogies. These analogies always lead to significant effects (such as superluminal communication) that do not occur in QE.
This is compounded by the problem that people's imaginations are much more classical than quantum. Many quantum effects do have classical analogies. People intuitively want to have a classical "mechanical" underpinning to quantum mechanics. Entanglement proves this is impossible. If you can free your mind from the (perhaps subconscious) insistence that there must be some classical underpinning then entanglement is easier to accept and less confusing.
Quantum mechanics consists of equations and formulas for predicting the outcome of experiments. For entangled systems, it predicts the outcomes much better than human intuition. Our intuition fails miserably here. Giving people classical analogies is supposed to give them an intuitive understanding but it actually gives them an intuitive misunderstanding because there is no classical analogy.
I like to think of it as the particle (or system) being measured becoming classical-like during the measurement before going on its own merry quantum way again.
The actual paper correctly says:
Non-locality can be exhibited when performing measurements on two or more distant quantum systems – the outcomes can be correlated in way that defies any local classical description. This is why we know that quantum theory will never by superceded by a local classical theory. Nevertheless, even quantum correlations are restricted to some extent – measurement results cannot be correlated so strongly that they would allow signalling between two distant systems.
Quantum entanglement (QE) provides a correlation not a communication. What this means is that not only can't you use QE to pass signals (or any information) between Alice and Bob, you actually need some other form of after-the-fact communication between them to detect the correlation in order to determine if QE happened at all. If QE was a method of communication then you could verify it by sending Bob a "cheat cheat" of what Alice was going to do or transmit. Instead, you need to look at the outcome of a series of measurements taken by Alice's and the outcome of a series of measurments taken by Bob just to see if QE actually happened.
Correlation is not communication.
How fucking dare anyone pick on Microsoft after all she's been through! She loves her Vista. She went through anti-monopoly trials. She's had a bunch of fucking operating systems. She thinks all her users are cheaters and now she's going through a custodial union battle. All you people care about are cell phones and ebook readers, not about making money for her investors! She's inhuman!
What you don't realize is that Microsoft is making all this money with vendor lock-in, anti-competitive tactics, and dirty tricks. Yet all you do is buy a bunch of crap software from her. Her software hasn't performed up to expectations in years. Her company motto is "Give me More!" for a reason because all she wants is more more more more more!
Leave her alone! You're lucky any of her software ever worked for you bastards. Leave Microsoft alone! Please!
Thanks for the info. As I said, I had no idea what would replace current encryption schemes.
Returning to my original critique of the article, do you see any reason why banks would need quantum computers while bank customers would not?
The review paper I was thinking of was by Maximilian Schlosshauer. It was called "Decoherence, the measurement problem, and interpretations of quantum mechanics". He has also written a book about quantum decoherence.
As others have noted, the author's explanation of entanglement is faulty. IMO the key fault (although there are others) is the implication that entanglement can be used for (perhaps super-luminal) communication.
Perhaps only a minority of scientists think building large scale quantum computers is impossible, but I think a majority of physicists think it is impossible, I certainly do. I strongly disagree with the idea that the only way building large scale quantum computers would be impossible is if quantum mechanics does not describe nature. The key stumbling block is a phenomenon known as quantum decoherence. Wojciech H. Zurek recently wrote a fairly long review paper summarizing what is known about decoherence. IMO, just as the computing power of a quantum computer increases exponentially with the number of qubits, so does the interference from quantum decoherence.
It is like the old story of how chess was invented to please a king. The king was so pleased he offered the inventor his weight in gold. The inventor asked instead for some rice. He said put a single grain of rice on the first square of the chess board, then two grains of rice on the 2nd square, four grains of rice on the 3rd square, eight grains of rice on the 4th square, etc. At first the king thought this was a paltry reward for such a great game but after trying to fulfill the request, the king got an inkling of exponential growth and had the inventor beheaded.
Finally, the author got the connection between security and factoring large numbers backwards. Banks and internet security depend on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. Large scale quantum computers could easily factor large numbers thus rendering perhaps all of our current encryption systems obsolete. I have no idea what they would be replaced with but it seems at least possible that anyone who wanted to communicate securely would need to use a quantum computer.
Was your's the Collie, the Husky, the Chihuaua, or the Great Dane?
My dog has been optimistic about the everything ever since he got laid.
Liquid Sodium cooling (which is required for both of your suggestions) looks great on paper. It was even considered for use in a nuclear powered aircraft. One problem is that liquid Sodium ignites on contact with air or water. It also becomes highly radioactive when used to cool a nuclear reactor. What could possibly go wrong?
Or you could actually reform it to be what it was originally intended to be -- a safety net for those who fall on hard times (rather than the "mandated terribly invested retirement fund" that it is currently treated as).
I replied with a selection from the original Social Security Act of 1935 showing that you were completely wrong about the original intent of Social Security. It was originally intended as a retirement program for all (or the vast majority of) workers, not just for those who fell on hard times.
Your claims about Social Security being a bad investment are equally inaccurate. The only reason stock market investments have not lost half their value or more over the last three years is because American taxpayers have spent over a trillion dollars in bailouts and a stimulus. Social Security has had no need for a similar helping hand. It's been rock solid compared to all other major forms of investment.
Of course, rock solid, safe, sure investments will give you a lower return than riskier investments. That's the way it is supposed to be. The purpose of Social Security is not maximum return on investment. The purpose is security. It has been far and away the most stable of all the large financial institutions.
Deregulation caused the Savings and Loan disaster in the '80's that required a huge publicly funded bailout. Deregulation again caused the recent financial meltdown that required an even larger publicly funded bailout. Social Security is the only thing that has weathered the financial storms unscathed, and now it seems that you want to deregulate that too so once again a few asshole can become billionaires while the American public picks up the tab once again after things fall to pieces.
Since you seemed unclear on the concept, here is an actual snide comment: Weren't you even a little embarrassed by being caught red-handed trying to rewrite history with your false claims about the original intent of Social Security? Have you no shame?
The original Social Security Act of 1935 was officially called:
An Act to provide for the General Welfare by Establishing a System of Federal Old-Age Benefits, and by Enabling the Several States to Make More Adequate Provision for Aged Persons, Blind Persons, Dependent and Crippled Children, Maternal and Child Welfare, Public Health, and the Administration of their Unemployment Compensation Laws; to Establish a Social Security Board; to Raise Revenue; and for Other Purposes."
Notice that "old age benefits" are not just included, they are the first thing listed. Just in case you want to weasel on the word "retirement", the actual act of 1935 includes these words:
Sec. 202. (a) Every qualified individual (as defined in section 210) shall be entitled to receive, with respect to the period beginning on the date he attains the age of sixty-five, [...], and ending on the date of his death, an old-age benefit ...
Section 210 about qualified individuals specifies people who work for a wage, not people who have fallen on hard times.
I'll try to resist the urge to say something snide about revising history.
Mod parent up please.
Social Security will eat the entire GDP in the not too distant future if the age threshold is not raised. Check out the numbers, they are as bad as the military (and rising significantly faster).
Bull. Shit. You seem to have fallen for the pro-corporate propaganda. There are many other ways to "fix" Social Security. For example, if people making over $100,000 per year contributed at the same rate as poorer people then the problems would be solved for the foreseeable future. In fact, this is what Obama promised to do before he got elected.
Health care is becoming too expensive; lots of reasons for this, including a ton of protectionism, lawyerism, and corruption, but the one that cannot be fixed is this: Our technological ability to keep people alive is advancing faster than the GDP growth rate can keep up with. At some point, we will have to stop paying for everyone's maximum possible life extension (either by choice or by collapse).
More of the same. The problem with our health care system is simple. We can basically do three things with our health care system:
Pick any two. Unfortunately, both the Dems and the Repubs keep picking option (3) making it impossible for us to have the first two options together. If insurance companies are trying to maximize shareholder value then their job is to minimize the health care that is provided while maximizing the cost of that care. They are very good at their job.
The idea of fixing the economy by increasing the income gap between the rich and the poor makes about as much sense as dousing a fire with gasoline.
And even if you could figure that out, the sonic environment within the magma lake has got to be terrible - weird thermal gradients, high background noise, the multipath effects you mention... it's a very hard problem.
As I said before, even though this is a hard problem, it has already been solved. I've conducted experiments doing real-time high speed underwater acoustic communication in extremely hostile shallow-water sonic environments filled with high background noise (ships), thermal gradients, and multipath. Actually, the distortion caused by thermal gradients is included in the multipath.
The way it works is that you can model all the multipath (including effects due to thermal gradients) in the channel as a FIR filter. This is how most modems work. But for most modems (like DSL modems) the channel changes very slowly over time. This is an easy problem to solve. The tricky part comes in when the acoustic channel you are trying to communicate over changes rapidly. In that case you need to update your model of the channel rapidly. This is done with a recursive prediction/correction algorithm similar to a Kalman Filter. As I said before, all the heavy processing is done on the receiver end so the only new technical challenge is the transducer on the transmitter. If they don't have the technical know-how to keep their receiving electronics from falling into the magma then I doubt they will be able to get any wireless scheme to work.
Yes, they backported HDCP to DVI but not all DVI devices support HDCP therefore ISTM there is still an extremely legitimate use for a box that cracks HDCP. A newer bluray player will not work with some existing (older) monitors that have a DVI input. This is very nasty.
It will be interesting to see what happens if a DMCA case over HDCP makes it to the US Supreme Court. I really wonder if big media wants to air its dirty little HDCP nastiness in public. I guess it depends on whether their ownership of Congress and the White House extends to ownership of the Supreme Court as well.