A couple of thousands do (about 5 times the lenght of the number you want to factor). But what you really need is the ability to perform multi-billion gate-operations (while the QFT itself is quadratic, Shor also uses modular exponentiation which makes it a cubic O(n^3) algorithm) within the decoherence time (usually measured in milliseconds or seconds) and with a technical accuracy to the tune of 99.9999999% - a quantum computer is, after all, an analogous device: qubits don't "lock in"; a NOT-gate e.g. thus has to be an exact 180 deg; rotation and neither 179.999 nor 180.001 deg (does not matter for a couple of gates in toy problems but those imperfections add up).
Quantum error correction can somewhat mitigate the former problem (at the cost of about one order of magnitude overhead in both space and time) but not the later. So if it's feasible at all (which is by no means certain as there might be hidden constraints on scalability), we probably won't live to see it.
Being part of the free press... doesn't give you cover to work with a person who is illegally stealing and transferring classified documents. Period.
Sure it does. If it doesn't in the US (with may or may not be the case - IANAL), this merely means that you have no free press there and not that a free press cannot work with and publish information obtained by and published by others (criminals or not) or has not the right and obligation to protect their sources.
And btw: stealing is when I take something away from you so that you no longer have it. Copying - by definition - can never be stealing as the term implies that the original is still there. So the term you're looking for is "copyright infringement", "licence violation" or something similar. Not quite as Manichean, I know, but the truth rarely is.
Predicting commute times and keeping the results secrets vs. predicting commute time and putting them in real time on a public website are two completely different problems. The former ist simply about estimating an output parameter from a set of input parameters so it's basically about approximating a function. The latter contains a nasty feedback loop as the output paramter is in itself an input parameter as it influences the behaviour of the system, so you're basically looking for a fixed point where the publication of the forecast exactly repells as many drivers at it attracts - only these values allow for a stable prognosis. In economics this effect is known as Goodhart's law.
This means that the competition is about a completly different (and much simpler) problem to that which they are eventually trying to solve.
Glad to read that, as it was the first solution for this problem which came to my mind also. A more sophisticated variant would be to allow one reseller an exclusive scanner permit to scan the shelves in the final hours or even after the sale is over. If there is more then one prospective reseller, the privilege can be auctioned off to generate extra income for the store.
This way, the reseller won't disturb the regular customers as he can do his work without time-pressure and the shop will get extra income in case of more than one interested reseller.
Without saving, you can't have debt - banks need money before they can loan any out.
While this seems to be a common conception, nothing could be further from the truth. Banks create money out of thin air by loaning it out (bank money creation). What they need (or should need) is not deposits from savers but collateral from the debitor to back up the debt claim. Regulation also requires them, for certain kinds of accounts, to keep a certain amount of reserve, but this applies to both, funds acceped (i.e. deposits) or funds created (against a credit contract backet by collateral).
The bank needs money on days where more cash is withdrawn than deposited but of course, this averages out to zero across the whole system (inluding central bank money), so some banks are bound to have surpluses that day which they are usually willing to lend away to other banks in the interbank market (at the LIBOR rate). If not, the bank can still get funds from the central bank (the the FED rate) against collateral.
Deposits from "savers" are nice to have as (1) they create fees, are (2) usually cheaper than interbank loans and (3) depositors don't ask for collateral whereas central banks do; they are, however, not necessary for a bank to run it business (in which case, the bank would be an inverstment bank as opposed to a commercial bank).
saving drives the economy just as much as consuming.
It is true that you need both, the question is: What is the limiting factor? In a regime of full-employment where the economy runs at full capacity (like in the decades after WW2), you are in a supply-side regime and there are enough "good" investment opportunities so that additional savings can be put to use in the real economy to create future wealth. Alas, most industrial countries have left this regime in the 70s and have now entered a demand-side regime of structural unemployment where the economy runs below capacity. In this regime, you don't have a lack of savings but a lack consumption and thus a lack of profitable "real" (i.e. good or service producing) investment opportunities. As a consequence, additional savings don't fuel the real economy but will merely blow up speculative bubbles in asset markes (stocks, real estate, commodities, "financial innovations" etc.) without creating any additional wealth. Worse, the "surplus" savings are permanently withheld from the real economy and lead to additional bankruptcies as there is more "active" debt than "active" money to pay it down and you get a classic deflationary downward spiral.
While this is the sad state of affairs in almost all western countries, in the US it's even worse as you have moved most of your production overseas and thus have even more unemployment and even less investment opportunities than you would otherwise have - and a huge net-debt on top of it.
If we are into nitpicking, Volt (singular!) is a unit of electric potential (energy/charge); Joule (Volt*Coulomb = Newton*Meter =...) is a unit of (potential and all other forms of) energy.
> one fat finger led to the temporary destruction of nearly 1 trillion dollars of value!
And explosion in a power plant destroys value, a drop in the stock price of the power company doesn't: all the plants, factories and offices you might have aquired a share of are still there and just as well as they have been yesterday. Why is it that people begin to like their stock or even the houses the live in less just because of a different price tag? The dividend doesn't depend on the quotation and the house will still be as big as it has been yesterday, so why should you care what others are currently willing to pay for it? - That is, unless you are trying to make a living as a gambler or hustler for sucker bets (aka trader), in which case you simply made an error of judgement by not correctly considering the fat finger factor when placing your bets and have only yourself to blame.
I might also add that Austria gets almost 2/3 of its electricity by hydropower. If you recharge your car overnight, i.e. well outside peak hours, it's practically zero emmision.
The point you brought up is true also e.g. all Austrian coil plants have desulphurization (and even sell the generated gypsum) and the gas plants are usually located in or near the city to provide community heating instead of waste heat. Neither would be possible with small decentralized units.
No, the 11% max. figure is for just turning sun's energy into hydrocarbons. If you want to generate electricity out of it, like in a bio-mass power plant, the thermodynamic losses would be on top of that so the efficiency would be considerably lower.
Besides being the names of two traditional Asian board games people successully told apart for millenia, if we can handle C, C++ and C#, why should Go and Go! ("Go-bang") be a problem?
If you happen to have a TV around, then your best option would be a cheap Media LAN client like the Zyxel DMA-1000 (100 Euros - not in any way afiliated - just a happy customer). There are also Wireless options and you can play from USB sick oder drive.
Strange that nobody has mentioned it yet, but I guess it's a good bet that there will be hundreds of red balloons rising on Dec 5. Besides the obvious "because we can" motive, if you are after the prize money, it makes sense to launch a few decoys the location of which is only known to yourself. Even a few of those and the contest is no longer about spotting the balloons, but about picking the correct 10 out of the confirmed sightings.
It would have made a lot more sense to launch the balloons before announcing the challenge.
You have it the wrong way around. The only job of those "morons" was and is to provide a pseudo-scientific fig leaf to the decision makers - this is their only purpose. Economics provides a huge repository of established (and often contradictory) theories to choose from and is fuzzy enough, so that the choice of parameters, input data and model relations provide more than enough wiggle room to make a model for any desired outcome while avoiding any "gross negligence" a judge could pinpoint. And it's a job they did very well indeed, as you would think that after having destroyed trillions of wealth form customers and third parties, many Wallstreet executives would be in jail now rather than paying themselves bonuses from the bailout money they received.
This cannot possibly work because "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" and Danielsson's corollary "A risk model breaks down when used for regulatory purposes".
The very moment any model - regardless how cleverly designed - is published and started to be used to make money on a significant scale, peolple will start gaming the system. This will necessarily destroy any information carrying correlation. Why? Because, as it is impossible to generally directly predict economic success except after the fact any more than it is possible generally to predict whether a given program will halt or not w/o running it, you have to use proxies. These proxies are always easier to manipulate on purpose than they are by influencing them as a side effect to a different purpose.
A good example is the number of papers published as a measure for scientific excellence and predictor of future academic success. A good indicator - but only as long a nobody counts them and uses it to direct money flows. The moment you do that, researches will see publication as an end in itself, and not as a byproduct of successful research and the measure will lose most of its predictive power.
In economics, it's even worse, as money made on speculation spends exactly the same as money earned by building value: Charts of stock prices would be an excellent predictor as market prices in theory should aggregate all available information - but only as long nobody uses them to estimate value or predict future prices. With chart analysis used by many market actors and companies being allowed to manipulate their own stock price (vie buy-backs, option programs, etc.) you get so many artificial feedback effects into the system that they dominate the system's dynamics and the actual signal gets lost in the noise.
A 5 to 10 year time frame seems quite reasonable for a project like this - if anything it's a bit on the tight side; technological revolutions in other industries like manufactoring usually take considerably longer. This is not about migrating a couple of office destops and a server or two - this is about migrating the complete IT infratructure of Germany's third largest city and affects pretty much every piece of software that is currently used in the public sector. Already the interal and external interoperabilty issues (with other administrative bodies, contractors and the public) pose a formidable challenge. And you have to do it as an early adopter in the worst possible environment for change - after all, this is not a "dictatoric" private company but a city government with politics, hidden agendas, entreched formal and (even harder to identify as well to change) informal work flows and bureaucratic procedures, subborn tenured civil servents and legal issues behind every corner. It's in many way's the worst case scenario for Linux migration, a really Herculian task! If you can make it there, then anywhere else will seem trivial by comparison.
... you do the flight unmanned, don't mind several decades in transit and are able to mothball the station in a way that you can reliably unfreeze and reactivate it after many years in space. That way, you might be able to use low thrust, low energy, solar or nuclear powered high specific impulse ion or plasma drives to haul the station there.
A pioneer mission can then try to reactivate the station and if successful, you already have habitat, life support and scientific equipment in place for subsequent missions. This would be especially useful if fuel production in situ is planned (as with the "Mars Direct" mission plans) so the station can be at least partly resupplied there.
> The US wasn't the aggressor in the Korean or Vietnam Wars
There are exceptions, but generally, in my book, unless having been directly attacked first, whoever is fighting farther away from home is the aggressor by default.
Make perfect sense from the US POV: No other country has more space assets to lose and less foreign space targets to shoot down than the US. Also, no other military is more dependent on an operational space infrastructure to wage war. And of course: reconnaissance favors the attacker - and the US has been the agressor in all military conflicts since Pearl Harbour.
If Obama gets away with this proposal, it would be a major strategic coup - if Russia, China, etc. are stupid enough to fall for the trap (the EU probably is). Otherwise it still makes for a good diplomacy stunt.
As long as Moore's law is in place, there _never_ will be a "proven" long time storage technology which can handle today's data amounts. If you want a proven method for 300+ years, you restrict yourself to 17th century tech.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of thousands do (about 5 times the lenght of the number you want to factor). But what you really need is the ability to perform multi-billion gate-operations (while the QFT itself is quadratic, Shor also uses modular exponentiation which makes it a cubic O(n^3) algorithm) within the decoherence time (usually measured in milliseconds or seconds) and with a technical accuracy to the tune of 99.9999999% - a quantum computer is, after all, an analogous device: qubits don't "lock in"; a NOT-gate e.g. thus has to be an exact 180 deg; rotation and neither 179.999 nor 180.001 deg (does not matter for a couple of gates in toy problems but those imperfections add up).
Quantum error correction can somewhat mitigate the former problem (at the cost of about one order of magnitude overhead in both space and time) but not the later. So if it's feasible at all (which is by no means certain as there might be hidden constraints on scalability), we probably won't live to see it.
ignatius
... but people have other means of relating to the world and establishing trust than by keyboard. (hint: posting as AC is not a good start)
Being part of the free press ... doesn't give you cover to work with a person who is illegally stealing and transferring classified documents. Period.
Sure it does. If it doesn't in the US (with may or may not be the case - IANAL), this merely means that you have no free press there and not that a free press cannot work with and publish information obtained by and published by others (criminals or not) or has not the right and obligation to protect their sources.
And btw: stealing is when I take something away from you so that you no longer have it. Copying - by definition - can never be stealing as the term implies that the original is still there. So the term you're looking for is "copyright infringement", "licence violation" or something similar. Not quite as Manichean, I know, but the truth rarely is.
ignatius
This can be trivially fixed by digitally signing the content.
Predicting commute times and keeping the results secrets vs. predicting commute time and putting them in real time on a public website are two completely different problems. The former ist simply about estimating an output parameter from a set of input parameters so it's basically about approximating a function. The latter contains a nasty feedback loop as the output paramter is in itself an input parameter as it influences the behaviour of the system, so you're basically looking for a fixed point where the publication of the forecast exactly repells as many drivers at it attracts - only these values allow for a stable prognosis. In economics this effect is known as Goodhart's law.
This means that the competition is about a completly different (and much simpler) problem to that which they are eventually trying to solve.
ignatius
No, if the System would end up in state 1/sqrt2 * (|A1>+|A2>), then no observation has taken place as
1/sqrt2 * (|A1>+|A2>) = |A> x 1/sqrt2 * (|1>+|2>)
with "x" being the tensor product. The post measurement state would have to be an entangled state, e.g. something like
1/sqrt2 * (|A1>+|B2>)
with |B> being the state of the observer after having heard a click on the Geiger counter, while in |A> there has been no click.
Glad to read that, as it was the first solution for this problem which came to my mind also. A more sophisticated variant would be to allow one reseller an exclusive scanner permit to scan the shelves in the final hours or even after the sale is over. If there is more then one prospective reseller, the privilege can be auctioned off to generate extra income for the store.
This way, the reseller won't disturb the regular customers as he can do his work without time-pressure and the shop will get extra income in case of more than one interested reseller.
Without saving, you can't have debt - banks need money before they can loan any out.
While this seems to be a common conception, nothing could be further from the truth. Banks create money out of thin air by loaning it out (bank money creation). What they need (or should need) is not deposits from savers but collateral from the debitor to back up the debt claim. Regulation also requires them, for certain kinds of accounts, to keep a certain amount of reserve, but this applies to both, funds acceped (i.e. deposits) or funds created (against a credit contract backet by collateral).
The bank needs money on days where more cash is withdrawn than deposited but of course, this averages out to zero across the whole system (inluding central bank money), so some banks are bound to have surpluses that day which they are usually willing to lend away to other banks in the interbank market (at the LIBOR rate). If not, the bank can still get funds from the central bank (the the FED rate) against collateral.
Deposits from "savers" are nice to have as (1) they create fees, are (2) usually cheaper than interbank loans and (3) depositors don't ask for collateral whereas central banks do; they are, however, not necessary for a bank to run it business (in which case, the bank would be an inverstment bank as opposed to a commercial bank).
saving drives the economy just as much as consuming.
It is true that you need both, the question is: What is the limiting factor? In a regime of full-employment where the economy runs at full capacity (like in the decades after WW2), you are in a supply-side regime and there are enough "good" investment opportunities so that additional savings can be put to use in the real economy to create future wealth. Alas, most industrial countries have left this regime in the 70s and have now entered a demand-side regime of structural unemployment where the economy runs below capacity. In this regime, you don't have a lack of savings but a lack consumption and thus a lack of profitable "real" (i.e. good or service producing) investment opportunities. As a consequence, additional savings don't fuel the real economy but will merely blow up speculative bubbles in asset markes (stocks, real estate, commodities, "financial innovations" etc.) without creating any additional wealth. Worse, the "surplus" savings are permanently withheld from the real economy and lead to additional bankruptcies as there is more "active" debt than "active" money to pay it down and you get a classic deflationary downward spiral.
While this is the sad state of affairs in almost all western countries, in the US it's even worse as you have moved most of your production overseas and thus have even more unemployment and even less investment opportunities than you would otherwise have - and a huge net-debt on top of it.
ignatius
If we are into nitpicking, Volt (singular!) is a unit of electric potential (energy/charge); Joule (Volt*Coulomb = Newton*Meter = ...) is a unit of (potential and all other forms of) energy.
> one fat finger led to the temporary destruction of nearly 1 trillion dollars of value!
And explosion in a power plant destroys value, a drop in the stock price of the power company doesn't: all the plants, factories and offices you might have aquired a share of are still there and just as well as they have been yesterday. Why is it that people begin to like their stock or even the houses the live in less just because of a different price tag? The dividend doesn't depend on the quotation and the house will still be as big as it has been yesterday, so why should you care what others are currently willing to pay for it? - That is, unless you are trying to make a living as a gambler or hustler for sucker bets (aka trader), in which case you simply made an error of judgement by not correctly considering the fat finger factor when placing your bets and have only yourself to blame.
I might also add that Austria gets almost 2/3 of its electricity by hydropower. If you recharge your car overnight, i.e. well outside peak hours, it's practically zero emmision.
The point you brought up is true also e.g. all Austrian coil plants have desulphurization (and even sell the generated gypsum) and the gas plants are usually located in or near the city to provide community heating instead of waste heat. Neither would be possible with small decentralized units.
0) Fixed that for you; 1)Linux; 2)Car analogy; 3)Insensitive clod; 4)A Beowulf cluster 5)In Soviet Russia; 6)??? [citation needed]; 7)Profit!
No, the 11% max. figure is for just turning sun's energy into hydrocarbons. If you want to generate electricity out of it, like in a bio-mass power plant, the thermodynamic losses would be on top of that so the efficiency would be considerably lower.
Besides being the names of two traditional Asian board games people successully told apart for millenia, if we can handle C, C++ and C#, why should Go and Go! ("Go-bang") be a problem?
ignatius
If you happen to have a TV around, then your best option would be a cheap Media LAN client like the Zyxel DMA-1000 (100 Euros - not in any way afiliated - just a happy customer). There are also Wireless options and you can play from USB sick oder drive.
sort of
t_planck = sqrt( hbar * G / c^5 ) = 5.3912e-44 s
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units for details.
Strange that nobody has mentioned it yet, but I guess it's a good bet that there will be hundreds of red balloons rising on Dec 5. Besides the obvious "because we can" motive, if you are after the prize money, it makes sense to launch a few decoys the location of which is only known to yourself. Even a few of those and the contest is no longer about spotting the balloons, but about picking the correct 10 out of the confirmed sightings.
It would have made a lot more sense to launch the balloons before announcing the challenge.
You have it the wrong way around. The only job of those "morons" was and is to provide a pseudo-scientific fig leaf to the decision makers - this is their only purpose. Economics provides a huge repository of established (and often contradictory) theories to choose from and is fuzzy enough, so that the choice of parameters, input data and model relations provide more than enough wiggle room to make a model for any desired outcome while avoiding any "gross negligence" a judge could pinpoint. And it's a job they did very well indeed, as you would think that after having destroyed trillions of wealth form customers and third parties, many Wallstreet executives would be in jail now rather than paying themselves bonuses from the bailout money they received.
This cannot possibly work because "any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes" and Danielsson's corollary "A risk model breaks down when used for regulatory purposes".
The very moment any model - regardless how cleverly designed - is published and started to be used to make money on a significant scale, peolple will start gaming the system. This will necessarily destroy any information carrying correlation. Why? Because, as it is impossible to generally directly predict economic success except after the fact any more than it is possible generally to predict whether a given program will halt or not w/o running it, you have to use proxies. These proxies are always easier to manipulate on purpose than they are by influencing them as a side effect to a different purpose.
A good example is the number of papers published as a measure for scientific excellence and predictor of future academic success. A good indicator - but only as long a nobody counts them and uses it to direct money flows. The moment you do that, researches will see publication as an end in itself, and not as a byproduct of successful research and the measure will lose most of its predictive power.
In economics, it's even worse, as money made on speculation spends exactly the same as money earned by building value: Charts of stock prices would be an excellent predictor as market prices in theory should aggregate all available information - but only as long nobody uses them to estimate value or predict future prices. With chart analysis used by many market actors and companies being allowed to manipulate their own stock price (vie buy-backs, option programs, etc.) you get so many artificial feedback effects into the system that they dominate the system's dynamics and the actual signal gets lost in the noise.
A 5 to 10 year time frame seems quite reasonable for a project like this - if anything it's a bit on the tight side; technological revolutions in other industries like manufactoring usually take considerably longer. This is not about migrating a couple of office destops and a server or two - this is about migrating the complete IT infratructure of Germany's third largest city and affects pretty much every piece of software that is currently used in the public sector. Already the interal and external interoperabilty issues (with other administrative bodies, contractors and the public) pose a formidable challenge. And you have to do it as an early adopter in the worst possible environment for change - after all, this is not a "dictatoric" private company but a city government with politics, hidden agendas, entreched formal and (even harder to identify as well to change) informal work flows and bureaucratic procedures, subborn tenured civil servents and legal issues behind every corner. It's in many way's the worst case scenario for Linux migration, a really Herculian task! If you can make it there, then anywhere else will seem trivial by comparison.
... you do the flight unmanned, don't mind several decades in transit and are able to mothball the station in a way that you can reliably unfreeze and reactivate it after many years in space. That way, you might be able to use low thrust, low energy, solar or nuclear powered high specific impulse ion or plasma drives to haul the station there.
A pioneer mission can then try to reactivate the station and if successful, you already have habitat, life support and scientific equipment in place for subsequent missions. This would be especially useful if fuel production in situ is planned (as with the "Mars Direct" mission plans) so the station can be at least partly resupplied there.
ignatius
> The US wasn't the aggressor in the Korean or Vietnam Wars
There are exceptions, but generally, in my book, unless having been directly attacked first, whoever is fighting farther away from home is the aggressor by default.
ignatius
Make perfect sense from the US POV: No other country has more space assets to lose and less foreign space targets to shoot down than the US. Also, no other military is more dependent on an operational space infrastructure to wage war. And of course: reconnaissance favors the attacker - and the US has been the agressor in all military conflicts since Pearl Harbour.
If Obama gets away with this proposal, it would be a major strategic coup - if Russia, China, etc. are stupid enough to fall for the trap (the EU probably is). Otherwise it still makes for a good diplomacy stunt.
As long as Moore's law is in place, there _never_ will be a "proven" long time storage technology which can handle today's data amounts. If you want a proven method for 300+ years, you restrict yourself to 17th century tech.
$ man 1 perl | grep -1 virtues
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience,
and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.