... i.e. a He+ ion plus neutral H forming a positive HeH+ ion. That's quite different from neutral HeH.
Also while they found HeH+ in that nebula that's not some remnant from the big bang (as far as i understand), but it's interesting to look at the HeH+ in NGC7027 to compare our modeling of reactions involving HeH+ to the astronomical observations.
Why so angry? If those theories annoy you so much, why don't you just ignore them? Does it impact your life in any way when some theoretical physicists muse about black holes and quantum mechanics?
Also some people did devise new political structures to make everyone happy, only when their concepts met reality they produced a lot of unhappiness and even deaths.
... you do know, that you have a choice of watching those youtube videos or not?
Sure, if you want a storyline that is nicely resolved at the end of the book or film, read or watch some scifi, and i sure do that a lot, currently i'm reading "The Algebraist" by Iain M. Banks. But i also find all kinds of science fascinating, including math, cosmology and theoretical physics. I'm aware, that many don't share that interest, but some do (and on slashdot the quota might be higher than average), and for them i wrote my post.
Also the theoretical concepts Susskind and others discuss are less about science fiction and more about bridging the gap between quantum mechanics and general relativity, and of course they are speculation.
There are a lot of lectures by Leonard Susskind on youtube (just search the name), also on the ER=EPR subject. Some lectures are from Stanford, but there are also other talks by him.
I think he is a really good lecturer, and there are various lectures addressing different audiences from him.
If you are interested in what theoretical physicists are up to in the field of combining gravitation / general relativity with quantum mechanics i'd recommend at least having a look at his lectures / talks.
E.g. an algorithm that is supposed to recognize humans will probably do worse for humans in a Mickey Mouse costume. Should it now be trained to recognize those dressed up as MM equally well, although it is a very rare case? Or should it be trained so it deals best with those situations that it will probably encounter more often, and that are thus more relevant.
I.e. should the algorithm be trained with a representative sample (for the country it is to be used in), or should every ethnicity, every height, every kind of clothing in any combination be equally weighted, including bolivian basketball players in burkas?
But what is the "best data fit"? That depends on the kind of data, the kind of errors one expects and the properties the fit should have.
Linear regression yields a result with some well known properties, e.g. the resulting linear function passes through the center of gravity. Maybe that's a desirable property. In other cases the y_i could be the result of a measuring process with a gaussian error distribution (where larger errors become more unlikely). Due to the central limit theorem that is often the case, or at least a good approximation. AFAIK in that case linear regression is the best fit (for a linear dependency).
Let's look at the 1D case: for a number of x-values one seeks "the best fit" X by minimizing some kind of "error sum".
If the errors are the absolute error so Sum |x_i-X| then the "best" X will be the median (and for an even number of values it'll be somewhat undefined). If you sum the squares: Sum (x_i-X)^2 then the "best X" will be the average of the x_i.
So it might make sense to use a different criterion if there is a good reason to use another kind of "fit", but in many cases linear regression really is what you want, in some others it probably is, and in most of the rest it's still good enough.
When someone vaccinated gets measles it's more likely (compared to unvaccinated cases) to be less severe.
So there are 3 good reasons for vaccination: - most vaccinated people are immune, - even for those who aren't a measles infection will likely be less severe, - "herd immunity" also protects those who aren't vaccinated.
... pilots trained to fly one of these planes with hundreds of passengers are also trained how to handle all kinds of emergency situations. Additionally they have some kind of emergency manual (Quick Reference Handbook = QRH) at hand detailing procedures for all kind of in flight emergencies.
"Less than a minute" (*) is still sufficient time to switch off a system if you're trained to identify the problem and do that in such a situation, it might even be enough time to find the instructions in the QRH and implement them.
AFAIK pilots accused Boeing of being not properly informed about the characteristics of the MCAS-System, that probably means they weren't informed how to identify failure modes and/or how to react to them (i.e. switch the thing off).
That was the first thing i did upon reading about it.
And to be honest i still don't know. There's some google stuff around, like google (search engine), google documents, gmail, and it is connected to youtube too, but it's often hard to see where one thing ends and another begins.
To my current understanding google+ is the google-version of facebook (but most likely i got that wrong or at best only partially correct).
Why would you want to run more than one program at a time anyway? And what moron would want to have more than 640K of memory?
"Maybe the OS should be strictly limited to what absolutely needs to be there."
Nowadays people expect their OS to run on a variety of hardware, support all of it, support all kinds of devices plugged into the USB-port at once, do all that with a GUI that allows an image to be dragged from one piece of software to another one with a mouse movement and hides all the gritty details under the hood. Why wouldn't they? That is not only so for PCs running under Windows, but for Linux-machines as well.
I fully support, that a coffee machine doesn't need to be able to host web pages (although there might be use cases even for that), but a PC/Laptop is a multi-purpose-tool, its value lies in its flexibility, the ability to connect to a variety of periphery and run an even greater variety of software, and the (comparatively) low pricing possible due to not tailoring every PC to the specific needs to its user, but selling everyone the same multi-purpose tool of which most users only use a small subset.
To that end the hysterical reaction to Trump did more for them than Trump himself could have ever done. Also most damaging are identity politics and its polarizing effects. Some of the IRAs (still can't get over that acronym) trolling explicitly took extreme positions in identity politics or used misleading/false information to incite identity subgroups, a good example of this is the expert trolling by "LGBT United":
Note that these actions are not partisan to the "left" or the "right", the intent is to weaken the USA as a whole, to make them less effective in the international arena, to weaken their president and to bog him (or her) down with whatever serves that purpose.
They needn't have bothered though, because others did their work for them. It is highly questionable that this "Troll factory" with its lean funds really made any change to the bigger picture. Most of the hysterical reaction to Trump, the campaigning for his impeachment by whatever means as well as the extremist identity politics were genuine and didn't need any outside "nudging".
IMHO it won't work. For one thing these companies have far too much influence already to let that happen, also the US aren't interested in devalueing their most successful companies.
Another thing is, that they are in a business (especially facebook) where having more customers makes the service more attractive to additional customers. participation in a social network is more interesting the larger that network is.
With amazon the case is slightly different: there it's about convenience (ordering and paying via only one instance) and scaling effects.
With google: As far as i can remember there was always one search engine that people flocked to (at some point that was alta-vista), just because it gave the most useful results. Google became successful because their page-ranking algorithms gave the most useful results. Of course now they are so big, and know how to monetize their services, it'll be hard for any competitor to get a foot in the door. An exception may be niches like the one DuckDuckGo found (better privacy).
So i don't think breaking these companies up will be a realistic goal. I think that they should be regulated though, to hinder them from abusing their power (e.g. censoring or just imagine an amazon embargo).
So they classify/rate political views/standpoints on a "pro-hate" "anti-hate" scale?
And who decides how to define "hate", and decides what falls into which category?
"Hate speech" is just a label, depending on who uses it it means different things and is applied with different intentions. There are laws defining what speech should be restricted, and often it's a difficult task for legal experts to determine how they apply to a specific case. Also this legislation was crafted very carefully to restrict free speech as little as possible. Instead Facebook applies some woolly "hate-spech" category based on statistics, intransparent algorithms and decisions of underpaid workers that probably have to decide several instances a minute, and how they are trained and what qualifies them only facebook knows.
Combine that with the knowledge that facebook is "located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place." to put it in Zuckerbergs own words, and that "hate-speech" is often used to ostracize specific political views (e.g. on immigration), and it should be obvious, that this hate-speech categorization can be abused for political censorship and suspicions of this being the case are not unfounded.
Even if it isn't abused for political censorship now it opens the door wide to do so, and invites future abuse.
"Thankfully, the researchers were able to figure out what was needed to avoid a future of biased self-driving cars: start including more images of dark-skinned pedestrians in the data sets the systems train on and place more weight on accurately detecting those images."
Another possible solution would've been to randomly hit people with light skin color that the AI recognized with a small probability, so that it evens out.
A lecturer asks students to learn the phone book by heart. The physics students ask: "Why?" The medicine students ask: "Until when?"
There's a longer version, but you get the point. Apparently some of these "hard interviews" are just testing how fast you can cram irrelevant knowledge into your head every sane person would look up when they need it. That someone knows how to write down a quick sort algorithm in c with every semicolon in the right place doesn't mean they know when best to use it.
Basically it's mainly a quantum effect that makes larger nuclei unstable, specifically the Pauli-Exclusion-Principle. It's the same thing that hinders the electrons of an atom to all go to the lowest possible energetic state. They have to occupy different "orbitals", which pushes electrons to successively higher energy levels if they'd be added one at a time to a nucleus to form an atom.
The same happens to neutrons and protons in an atom core, and it's the reason why it isn't possible to just add an arbitrary number of neutrons to any atom core (they wouldn't be repelled due to electric forces and just "bond" with strong forces to other nucleons, so their contribution to the binding energy should be positive).
This formula works quite well, and the asymmetry term (penalizing different numbers of protons and neutrons) is what hinders nuclei with arbitrary numbers of added neutrons to be stable. Without this contribution the model can't (approximately) reproduce what we find in nature, and any model of the nucleus needs some explanation for this. Somehow there must be some reason why that is so, and the best reason we found so far is the Pauli-Exclusion-Principle applied to nucleons, which is basically quantum mechanical.
It doesn't work like that. The problem is, that public key algorithms rely on "trap door algorithms" that are "easy" to do in one direction (e.g. multiplying two prime numbers) but "very hard" in the other direction. "Easy" usually means "requires a number of operations that is polynomial in "N" (N=number of digits), "hard" means "requires a number of operations that goes exponential with N. E.g. counting up to the product (or its square root) and testing each number if it divides it is "hard". Public key cryptography relies on this, an attacker has to solve a "hard" problem to crack the key. What compromised some key length previously was not that "hard" became "easy", but that with better and more hardware and improved algorithms the "hard" problem became doable. This can be easily fixed by using a higher key length. (one problem with all that is, that AFAIK we don't have mathematical proof that "hard" problems are really "hard", see P=NP, but that's another subject entirely)
Now some problems that (we think) are "hard" to do in classical computing are "easy" in quantum computing, prime factoring is one example of this. With that the basic premise falls, and that can't be helped by adjusting the key length. Maybe there are trap door algorithms out there that can't be made "easy" by quantum computing, or maybe we'll find that some problems we previously thought to be hard really aren't.
But quantum key distribution could solve that problem, since it provides a way of generating a common one time pad and check if anyone eavesdropped. That one-time-pad can then be used to transmit a key for the symmetric encryption e.g. in place of RSA.
The OP is right, that that doesn't solve the problem of authentication. Still a secure (in the sense that eavesdropping can be detected) distribution of exactly two instances of a one-time pad on the basis that authentication has happened certainly has its uses.
Quantum theory is the best theory we have to explain many experimental results, e.g. why light "behaves like particles" (i.e. photoelectric effect) or electrons show diffraction effects you'd expect from waves. QT is used successfully to model all kinds of physics, e.g. properties of atoms, or even strange properties of the vacuum like the Casimir effect, and in that sense QT is a working product. It was noticed early on (EPR-"paradoxon"), that QT predicts some strange things including what we call "entanglement". The strangeness lies in the nonlocality that it implies for QT, which is at odds with a "classical" (in the sense of non-QT) world view and manifests itself in "entanglement" i.e. some strange "connection" between particles in different locations. But the strange behavior predicted by QT was tested, specifically by testing the Bell-inequality. The result of these tests is not only, that the strange predictions of QT are indeed what we measure experimentally, but also that it will be impossible to explain these results with a "classic" theory that is based on locality and causality, even any (finite) number of "hidden" variables don't help. Another test of entanglement are "Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser" experiments which also confirm the strange predictions of QT.
QT is far from perfect, as it doesn't go well together with general relativity, but for nonrelativistic phenomena on the scale where quantum effects are of relevance it's the best we have. It can also be shown how "classical" Newtonian physics emerges for large (many particle) objects from QT.
Some people think that QT must be wrong because it clashes with their "classical" picture of the world, a picture humans grow accustoms to since their life usually doesn't confront them with phenomena on the scale of single atoms, electrons and photons, but why should the universe conform to our personal world view or preferences?
But anyone claiming that QT is wrong (apart from known limitations i.e. incompatibility with GR) should point out where it makes wrong predictions, and anyone presenting a "better" theory should make that theory specific and detailed enough so it can be tested experimentally, and of course that theory should also explain all that experimental findings that are perfectly well explained by QT. As it stands QT is the best explanation of all the stuff we find experimentally, but also the nature of atoms as we know them.
Specific to light we have QED (quantum electrodynamics), see also the book "QED: the strange theory of light and matter" by R:P: Feynman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The point is: While we can't ultimately prove of any physical theory if it is "correct" under all circumstances (because we don't know and can't monitor all circumstances), we can test if the predictions of a theory match experimental results and is consistent with what we "know" about the world (i.e. all those other theories, observations etc.). In that sense QT is the best theory we currently have, and we do know that classical theories that preserve "locality" and "causality" are in contradiction with at least some experimental findings (e.g. bell inequality tests).
... intelligent thinking apparently wasn't involved in the planing of this:
"The two robot luggage carriers are out of use because they can reach only about two dozen of the more than 100 rooms in the hotel. They can travel only on flat surfaces and could malfunction if they get wet going outside to annex buildings,"
Either wrong robots or wrong location, but it's a problem that should be obvious.
Also they should've given their voice recognition "bot" a name it has to be addressed with, and maybe not "krrrchhrr".
... players wouldn't care about historical inaccuracies if it's due to an oversight or to benefit the game in some way. But if there is an inaccuracy willfully introduced in the game, then one may ask why. The answer in this case is: to take up the cause for diversity politics.
And that's (in my opinion) what at least some gamers dislike: buying a product that force feeds you thinly disguised political propaganda. It's like in game advertising, only with politics: If you want to get away with it at least make it unobtrusive.
But maybe the EA developers didn't want to be unobtrusive, maybe they wanted to make a blatant statement. In that case they should expect some opposition, especially on a subject as polarizing as the diversity agenda is.
So it sparked a debate and probably factored in buying decisions for those undecided after considering more important aspects, like gameplay, pricing etc.
If the game is as mediocre as seems to be the case, then maybe the developers should have put more effort in the game itself and less in the "correct" political message though.
Just asking because the linked list of "fake news" is not "fake news" in general, but "fake news in support of Trump", while the "Real story"s are mostly pro Hillary opinion pieces. The problem then is, that the "fake" vs. "true" contrast in the selection is also a "Trump" vs. "Hillary" contrast, i.e. you can't distinguish if you select for "fake news believers" or for "trump supporters". In proper research you'd want to distinguish those by multivariate correlation analysis.
As it is their main result seems to be that trump supporters are conservatives and on average older than Hillary supporters.
I.e. it might be not about bad working conditions, or that something changed that makes more people want to leave, but that people go to Facebook, gain a few years of experience and then maybe launch a business on their own or with a few others or else switch to a somewhat more specialized posting.
I read an interview where someone stated that about google, that for most it's a goal to get there, but after a few years a stepping stone elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
... i.e. a He+ ion plus neutral H forming a positive HeH+ ion. That's quite different from neutral HeH.
Also while they found HeH+ in that nebula that's not some remnant from the big bang (as far as i understand), but it's interesting to look at the HeH+ in NGC7027 to compare our modeling of reactions involving HeH+ to the astronomical observations.
Why so angry? If those theories annoy you so much, why don't you just ignore them? Does it impact your life in any way when some theoretical physicists muse about black holes and quantum mechanics?
Also some people did devise new political structures to make everyone happy, only when their concepts met reality they produced a lot of unhappiness and even deaths.
... you do know, that you have a choice of watching those youtube videos or not?
Sure, if you want a storyline that is nicely resolved at the end of the book or film, read or watch some scifi, and i sure do that a lot, currently i'm reading "The Algebraist" by Iain M. Banks. But i also find all kinds of science fascinating, including math, cosmology and theoretical physics. I'm aware, that many don't share that interest, but some do (and on slashdot the quota might be higher than average), and for them i wrote my post.
Also the theoretical concepts Susskind and others discuss are less about science fiction and more about bridging the gap between quantum mechanics and general relativity, and of course they are speculation.
There are a lot of lectures by Leonard Susskind on youtube (just search the name), also on the ER=EPR subject. Some lectures are from Stanford, but there are also other talks by him.
I think he is a really good lecturer, and there are various lectures addressing different audiences from him.
If you are interested in what theoretical physicists are up to in the field of combining gravitation / general relativity with quantum mechanics i'd recommend at least having a look at his lectures / talks.
Big problem!
... is it biased?
E.g. an algorithm that is supposed to recognize humans will probably do worse for humans in a Mickey Mouse costume. Should it now be trained to recognize those dressed up as MM equally well, although it is a very rare case? Or should it be trained so it deals best with those situations that it will probably encounter more often, and that are thus more relevant.
I.e. should the algorithm be trained with a representative sample (for the country it is to be used in), or should every ethnicity, every height, every kind of clothing in any combination be equally weighted, including bolivian basketball players in burkas?
But what is the "best data fit"?
That depends on the kind of data, the kind of errors one expects and the properties the fit should have.
Linear regression yields a result with some well known properties, e.g. the resulting linear function passes through the center of gravity. Maybe that's a desirable property. In other cases the y_i could be the result of a measuring process with a gaussian error distribution (where larger errors become more unlikely). Due to the central limit theorem that is often the case, or at least a good approximation. AFAIK in that case linear regression is the best fit (for a linear dependency).
Let's look at the 1D case: for a number of x-values one seeks "the best fit" X by minimizing some kind of "error sum".
If the errors are the absolute error so Sum |x_i-X| then the "best" X will be the median (and for an even number of values it'll be somewhat undefined).
If you sum the squares: Sum (x_i-X)^2 then the "best X" will be the average of the x_i.
So it might make sense to use a different criterion if there is a good reason to use another kind of "fit", but in many cases linear regression really is what you want, in some others it probably is, and in most of the rest it's still good enough.
When someone vaccinated gets measles it's more likely (compared to unvaccinated cases) to be less severe.
So there are 3 good reasons for vaccination:
- most vaccinated people are immune,
- even for those who aren't a measles infection will likely be less severe,
- "herd immunity" also protects those who aren't vaccinated.
... pilots trained to fly one of these planes with hundreds of passengers are also trained how to handle all kinds of emergency situations. Additionally they have some kind of emergency manual (Quick Reference Handbook = QRH) at hand detailing procedures for all kind of in flight emergencies.
"Less than a minute" (*) is still sufficient time to switch off a system if you're trained to identify the problem and do that in such a situation, it might even be enough time to find the instructions in the QRH and implement them.
AFAIK pilots accused Boeing of being not properly informed about the characteristics of the MCAS-System, that probably means they weren't informed how to identify failure modes and/or how to react to them (i.e. switch the thing off).
(*)
According to this it's less than 40 seconds:
https://interestingengineering...
That was the first thing i did upon reading about it.
And to be honest i still don't know. There's some google stuff around, like google (search engine), google documents, gmail, and it is connected to youtube too, but it's often hard to see where one thing ends and another begins.
To my current understanding google+ is the google-version of facebook (but most likely i got that wrong or at best only partially correct).
Why would you want to run more than one program at a time anyway?
And what moron would want to have more than 640K of memory?
"Maybe the OS should be strictly limited to what absolutely needs to be there."
Nowadays people expect their OS to run on a variety of hardware, support all of it, support all kinds of devices plugged into the USB-port at once, do all that with a GUI that allows an image to be dragged from one piece of software to another one with a mouse movement and hides all the gritty details under the hood. Why wouldn't they? That is not only so for PCs running under Windows, but for Linux-machines as well.
I fully support, that a coffee machine doesn't need to be able to host web pages (although there might be use cases even for that), but a PC/Laptop is a multi-purpose-tool, its value lies in its flexibility, the ability to connect to a variety of periphery and run an even greater variety of software, and the (comparatively) low pricing possible due to not tailoring every PC to the specific needs to its user, but selling everyone the same multi-purpose tool of which most users only use a small subset.
(Note: IRA = "Internet Research Agency")
To that end the hysterical reaction to Trump did more for them than Trump himself could have ever done. Also most damaging are identity politics and its polarizing effects. Some of the IRAs (still can't get over that acronym) trolling explicitly took extreme positions in identity politics or used misleading/false information to incite identity subgroups, a good example of this is the expert trolling by "LGBT United":
https://medium.com/@sue.donym1...
Note that these actions are not partisan to the "left" or the "right", the intent is to weaken the USA as a whole, to make them less effective in the international arena, to weaken their president and to bog him (or her) down with whatever serves that purpose.
They needn't have bothered though, because others did their work for them. It is highly questionable that this "Troll factory" with its lean funds really made any change to the bigger picture. Most of the hysterical reaction to Trump, the campaigning for his impeachment by whatever means as well as the extremist identity politics were genuine and didn't need any outside "nudging".
... it didn't happen.
IMHO it won't work. For one thing these companies have far too much influence already to let that happen, also the US aren't interested in devalueing their most successful companies.
Another thing is, that they are in a business (especially facebook) where having more customers makes the service more attractive to additional customers. participation in a social network is more interesting the larger that network is.
With amazon the case is slightly different: there it's about convenience (ordering and paying via only one instance) and scaling effects.
With google: As far as i can remember there was always one search engine that people flocked to (at some point that was alta-vista), just because it gave the most useful results. Google became successful because their page-ranking algorithms gave the most useful results. Of course now they are so big, and know how to monetize their services, it'll be hard for any competitor to get a foot in the door. An exception may be niches like the one DuckDuckGo found (better privacy).
So i don't think breaking these companies up will be a realistic goal. I think that they should be regulated though, to hinder them from abusing their power (e.g. censoring or just imagine an amazon embargo).
So they classify/rate political views/standpoints on a "pro-hate" "anti-hate" scale?
And who decides how to define "hate", and decides what falls into which category?
"Hate speech" is just a label, depending on who uses it it means different things and is applied with different intentions. There are laws defining what speech should be restricted, and often it's a difficult task for legal experts to determine how they apply to a specific case. Also this legislation was crafted very carefully to restrict free speech as little as possible. Instead Facebook applies some woolly "hate-spech" category based on statistics, intransparent algorithms and decisions of underpaid workers that probably have to decide several instances a minute, and how they are trained and what qualifies them only facebook knows.
Combine that with the knowledge that facebook is "located in Silicon Valley, which is an extremely left-leaning place." to put it in Zuckerbergs own words, and that "hate-speech" is often used to ostracize specific political views (e.g. on immigration), and it should be obvious, that this hate-speech categorization can be abused for political censorship and suspicions of this being the case are not unfounded.
Even if it isn't abused for political censorship now it opens the door wide to do so, and invites future abuse.
The problem is, that the label "hate speech" may be (and in many cases is) also misleading.
"Thankfully, the researchers were able to figure out what was needed to avoid a future of biased self-driving cars: start including more images of dark-skinned pedestrians in the data sets the systems train on and place more weight on accurately detecting those images."
Another possible solution would've been to randomly hit people with light skin color that the AI recognized with a small probability, so that it evens out.
... there may just not be enough people that are qualified and willing to do the job, so they make do with what they get.
Maybe there are no "right" people for the job, or at least not enough that are also willing to do it.
A lecturer asks students to learn the phone book by heart.
The physics students ask: "Why?"
The medicine students ask: "Until when?"
There's a longer version, but you get the point. Apparently some of these "hard interviews" are just testing how fast you can cram irrelevant knowledge into your head every sane person would look up when they need it. That someone knows how to write down a quick sort algorithm in c with every semicolon in the right place doesn't mean they know when best to use it.
And now for something completely different:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Basically it's mainly a quantum effect that makes larger nuclei unstable, specifically the Pauli-Exclusion-Principle. It's the same thing that hinders the electrons of an atom to all go to the lowest possible energetic state. They have to occupy different "orbitals", which pushes electrons to successively higher energy levels if they'd be added one at a time to a nucleus to form an atom.
The same happens to neutrons and protons in an atom core, and it's the reason why it isn't possible to just add an arbitrary number of neutrons to any atom core (they wouldn't be repelled due to electric forces and just "bond" with strong forces to other nucleons, so their contribution to the binding energy should be positive).
In the "Semi-Empirical Mass Formula" this contribution is called (a)symmetry term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This formula works quite well, and the asymmetry term (penalizing different numbers of protons and neutrons) is what hinders nuclei with arbitrary numbers of added neutrons to be stable. Without this contribution the model can't (approximately) reproduce what we find in nature, and any model of the nucleus needs some explanation for this. Somehow there must be some reason why that is so, and the best reason we found so far is the Pauli-Exclusion-Principle applied to nucleons, which is basically quantum mechanical.
It doesn't work like that. The problem is, that public key algorithms rely on "trap door algorithms" that are "easy" to do in one direction (e.g. multiplying two prime numbers) but "very hard" in the other direction. "Easy" usually means "requires a number of operations that is polynomial in "N" (N=number of digits), "hard" means "requires a number of operations that goes exponential with N. E.g. counting up to the product (or its square root) and testing each number if it divides it is "hard". Public key cryptography relies on this, an attacker has to solve a "hard" problem to crack the key. What compromised some key length previously was not that "hard" became "easy", but that with better and more hardware and improved algorithms the "hard" problem became doable. This can be easily fixed by using a higher key length. (one problem with all that is, that AFAIK we don't have mathematical proof that "hard" problems are really "hard", see P=NP, but that's another subject entirely)
Now some problems that (we think) are "hard" to do in classical computing are "easy" in quantum computing, prime factoring is one example of this. With that the basic premise falls, and that can't be helped by adjusting the key length. Maybe there are trap door algorithms out there that can't be made "easy" by quantum computing, or maybe we'll find that some problems we previously thought to be hard really aren't.
But quantum key distribution could solve that problem, since it provides a way of generating a common one time pad and check if anyone eavesdropped. That one-time-pad can then be used to transmit a key for the symmetric encryption e.g. in place of RSA.
The OP is right, that that doesn't solve the problem of authentication. Still a secure (in the sense that eavesdropping can be detected) distribution of exactly two instances of a one-time pad on the basis that authentication has happened certainly has its uses.
Quantum theory is the best theory we have to explain many experimental results, e.g. why light "behaves like particles" (i.e. photoelectric effect) or electrons show diffraction effects you'd expect from waves. QT is used successfully to model all kinds of physics, e.g. properties of atoms, or even strange properties of the vacuum like the Casimir effect, and in that sense QT is a working product. It was noticed early on (EPR-"paradoxon"), that QT predicts some strange things including what we call "entanglement". The strangeness lies in the nonlocality that it implies for QT, which is at odds with a "classical" (in the sense of non-QT) world view and manifests itself in "entanglement" i.e. some strange "connection" between particles in different locations. But the strange behavior predicted by QT was tested, specifically by testing the Bell-inequality. The result of these tests is not only, that the strange predictions of QT are indeed what we measure experimentally, but also that it will be impossible to explain these results with a "classic" theory that is based on locality and causality, even any (finite) number of "hidden" variables don't help. Another test of entanglement are "Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser" experiments which also confirm the strange predictions of QT.
QT is far from perfect, as it doesn't go well together with general relativity, but for nonrelativistic phenomena on the scale where quantum effects are of relevance it's the best we have. It can also be shown how "classical" Newtonian physics emerges for large (many particle) objects from QT.
Some people think that QT must be wrong because it clashes with their "classical" picture of the world, a picture humans grow accustoms to since their life usually doesn't confront them with phenomena on the scale of single atoms, electrons and photons, but why should the universe conform to our personal world view or preferences?
But anyone claiming that QT is wrong (apart from known limitations i.e. incompatibility with GR) should point out where it makes wrong predictions, and anyone presenting a "better" theory should make that theory specific and detailed enough so it can be tested experimentally, and of course that theory should also explain all that experimental findings that are perfectly well explained by QT. As it stands QT is the best explanation of all the stuff we find experimentally, but also the nature of atoms as we know them.
Specific to light we have QED (quantum electrodynamics), see also the book "QED: the strange theory of light and matter" by R:P: Feynman:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The point is: While we can't ultimately prove of any physical theory if it is "correct" under all circumstances (because we don't know and can't monitor all circumstances), we can test if the predictions of a theory match experimental results and is consistent with what we "know" about the world (i.e. all those other theories, observations etc.). In that sense QT is the best theory we currently have, and we do know that classical theories that preserve "locality" and "causality" are in contradiction with at least some experimental findings (e.g. bell inequality tests).
... intelligent thinking apparently wasn't involved in the planing of this:
"The two robot luggage carriers are out of use because they can reach only about two dozen of the more than 100 rooms in the hotel. They can travel only on flat surfaces and could malfunction if they get wet going outside to annex buildings,"
Either wrong robots or wrong location, but it's a problem that should be obvious.
Also they should've given their voice recognition "bot" a name it has to be addressed with, and maybe not "krrrchhrr".
... players wouldn't care about historical inaccuracies if it's due to an oversight or to benefit the game in some way. But if there is an inaccuracy willfully introduced in the game, then one may ask why. The answer in this case is: to take up the cause for diversity politics.
And that's (in my opinion) what at least some gamers dislike: buying a product that force feeds you thinly disguised political propaganda. It's like in game advertising, only with politics: If you want to get away with it at least make it unobtrusive.
But maybe the EA developers didn't want to be unobtrusive, maybe they wanted to make a blatant statement. In that case they should expect some opposition, especially on a subject as polarizing as the diversity agenda is.
So it sparked a debate and probably factored in buying decisions for those undecided after considering more important aspects, like gameplay, pricing etc.
If the game is as mediocre as seems to be the case, then maybe the developers should have put more effort in the game itself and less in the "correct" political message though.
... also make it into the "fake news" list?
https://medium.com/@micheleand...
Just asking because the linked list of "fake news" is not "fake news" in general, but "fake news in support of Trump", while the "Real story"s are mostly pro Hillary opinion pieces. The problem then is, that the "fake" vs. "true" contrast in the selection is also a "Trump" vs. "Hillary" contrast, i.e. you can't distinguish if you select for "fake news believers" or for "trump supporters". In proper research you'd want to distinguish those by multivariate correlation analysis.
As it is their main result seems to be that trump supporters are conservatives and on average older than Hillary supporters.
Hardly surprising.
I.e. it might be not about bad working conditions, or that something changed that makes more people want to leave, but that people go to Facebook, gain a few years of experience and then maybe launch a business on their own or with a few others or else switch to a somewhat more specialized posting.
I read an interview where someone stated that about google, that for most it's a goal to get there, but after a few years a stepping stone elsewhere.