I do not want to invest my time into getting familiar with a device whose artificial limitations are guaranteed to make my life miserable at some point in the future, even if it does not present an immediate problem right now. For example, one thing I didn't mention is running an OpenVPN client. That definitely requires root access.
I don't buy this. The earliest court document in USL v. BSDi is dated April 1992. By that time, Linux already had a series of active developers and even the first distributions had been created. In your interview, there is also no mention of the lawsuits. Linus was simply the first one to deliver a free unixoid operating system.
Your model relies on the thermalization of U-238, otherwise your arguments about temperature and heat are bogus. In the event of a major failure, I am not buying that this assumption always holds, especially since nuclear reactions happen on extremely fast timescales. To understand what it really going on, you would have to make scattering calculations involving thousands of channels and many particles. Even with the world's most advanced computers, nobody can do that.
And this is why I don't trust reactor physicists anymore. They tend to claim confidence over results where there are good arguments why their validity might be questionable. And they also claimed that western style reactors where inherently safe because the reactor would automatically shut off in an emergency because water is such an efficient moderator. Unless, of course, the water starts boiling...
I know that in some circles, it is now a sign of success if you can dump hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money down the drain and require government bailout, but I still prefer different measures of success...
I saw the paper when it originally appeared on the arXiv. They claim to randomly prepare a pure state. This is a contradiction in itself, as von Neumann and others have already shown decades ago that random ensembles of states (or local parts of a globally pure state) have to be described by mixed states. If one uses the proper mathematical concepts, their results vanish immediately.
What I meant was that once you accept the notion to describe the state of a physical system as a vector in a complex Hilbert space, you're pretty much done because then all the other stuff people typically wave their hands about (Schrödinger equation, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, discreteness of energy levels,...) follows from it. In the particular case you mentioned, the necessary property is the existence of a norm in any Hilbert space, from which a probability measure can be derived within quantum mechanics.
Actually, the correct term would have been "normalization of probability measures on a Hilbert space" (the sum of all probabilities has to add up to one).
A school cannot simply charge "anything" since the students have to pay off their debt after college. In fact, due to interest payments, every $1 increase in tuition fees comes down to a student effectively paying something like $1.30 (6% interest, 10 years repayment). From the student's point of view, a school charging absurdly high fees cannot simply provide such a superior education justifying this. If students make stupid decisions and choose to go on a credit binge nevertheless, it's not only the schools you have to blame for taking advantage of them.
There has been an exponential increase in the number of qubits under control since the first serious experiments started almost two decades ago. If the current trend continues, we will have usable quantum computers between 2020 and 2023.
While you are right that SN 1987A puts strong constraints on such an effect, there is a huge difference in the energies of the neutrinos involved (~10 MeV vs ~10 GeV). Most models with corrections to Lorentz symmetry predict a linear dependence of the correction with energy, so this would become a matter of a day instead of several years. On the other hand, if one assumes a Planck-scale symmetry breaking as in doubly special relativity models, this would require a ridiculously large prefactor to be observable on these scales.
In the past decade or so, the only situations in which I did BIOS updates was to get on-site support being dispatched to replace some faulty hardware (which the hardware vendor wouldn't do unless you ran the latest BIOS firmware). Hardly something what I would expect the unwashed masses to experience.
In the UK, 6.2% of the general population hack their consumer products in order to improve them. If you adjust that to the part of the population that actually owns a tablet, you will probably get an even larger number.
An important thing to recognize is that most of this experiment was done with a single qubit. Practical quantum computing will need to have this sort of error rate for thousands of qubits.
I'd take any quantum computer with 50 qubits and get a Nobel prize for beating the shit out of all current supercomputers simulating quantum systems like high-temperature superconductors, quark bound states such as proton and neutrons, or quantum magnets. Also, keep in mind that Rainer Blatt's group recently succeeded in demonstrating entanglement between 14 qubits in a similar setup. And for quantum simulations, the error rates probably don't have to be crazily low anyway, it turns out that such errors typically correspond to a nonzero temperature for the simulated system. So if this effective temperature is low enough that you can see interesting quantum physics, you are still in business.
Depending on your preferences, you might want to have a look at the WeTab. Since it's based on MeeGo you can install basically any PDF viewer you like (xpdf or evince for a slick experience, Okular if you want to make annotations). And no need to hack it, root access is just one sudo away.
Mother: So, Sarah, what did you learn in your computer club today? Little Sarah [6 years old]: Well, Mommy, we played this neat new game
called NetHack and I was an evil wizard who killed a priest with
fireball magic and then sa.. sac.. sacrificed his corpse on an altar
and then came a demon named Yee... Yeeno... Yeenoghu but he was a
friendly demon and didn't hurt my wizard, but these policemen got
angry and I had to kill them too and offer their corpses to my evil
god, and then some more demons came but they were all friendly too,
especially one who was called a suc... suc... it had something to do
with sucking, and she took all my wizard's clothes off but I don't
understand why, but Bobby said that she wanted to make babies with
him and then... Mommy? Mommy? Are you OK?
So we have a case of blatant copyright violation, which is even perpetrated for commercial gain. So I guess the DHS will step in and seize the apple.com domain as they have done before in similar cases, right?
Most science papers are put on free preprint servers such as the arXiv anyway. I think it is safe to say that never before in the history of mankind such a large fraction of the population had access to the latest research results.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for pointing this out, this is the best suggestion I have seen so far.
I do not want to invest my time into getting familiar with a device whose artificial limitations are guaranteed to make my life miserable at some point in the future, even if it does not present an immediate problem right now. For example, one thing I didn't mention is running an OpenVPN client. That definitely requires root access.
I don't buy this. The earliest court document in USL v. BSDi is dated April 1992. By that time, Linux already had a series of active developers and even the first distributions had been created. In your interview, there is also no mention of the lawsuits. Linus was simply the first one to deliver a free unixoid operating system.
Your model relies on the thermalization of U-238, otherwise your arguments about temperature and heat are bogus. In the event of a major failure, I am not buying that this assumption always holds, especially since nuclear reactions happen on extremely fast timescales. To understand what it really going on, you would have to make scattering calculations involving thousands of channels and many particles. Even with the world's most advanced computers, nobody can do that.
And this is why I don't trust reactor physicists anymore. They tend to claim confidence over results where there are good arguments why their validity might be questionable. And they also claimed that western style reactors where inherently safe because the reactor would automatically shut off in an emergency because water is such an efficient moderator. Unless, of course, the water starts boiling ...
In my opinion, Fukushima was a success.
I know that in some circles, it is now a sign of success if you can dump hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money down the drain and require government bailout, but I still prefer different measures of success ...
I saw the paper when it originally appeared on the arXiv. They claim to randomly prepare a pure state. This is a contradiction in itself, as von Neumann and others have already shown decades ago that random ensembles of states (or local parts of a globally pure state) have to be described by mixed states. If one uses the proper mathematical concepts, their results vanish immediately.
What I meant was that once you accept the notion to describe the state of a physical system as a vector in a complex Hilbert space, you're pretty much done because then all the other stuff people typically wave their hands about (Schrödinger equation, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, discreteness of energy levels, ...) follows from it. In the particular case you mentioned, the necessary property is the existence of a norm in any Hilbert space, from which a probability measure can be derived within quantum mechanics.
Actually, the correct term would have been "normalization of probability measures on a Hilbert space" (the sum of all probabilities has to add up to one).
A school cannot simply charge "anything" since the students have to pay off their debt after college. In fact, due to interest payments, every $1 increase in tuition fees comes down to a student effectively paying something like $1.30 (6% interest, 10 years repayment). From the student's point of view, a school charging absurdly high fees cannot simply provide such a superior education justifying this. If students make stupid decisions and choose to go on a credit binge nevertheless, it's not only the schools you have to blame for taking advantage of them.
There has been an exponential increase in the number of qubits under control since the first serious experiments started almost two decades ago. If the current trend continues, we will have usable quantum computers between 2020 and 2023.
Better yet, put it on a preprint server such as the arXiv. That way, you also get a Linus-style backup of your thesis for free.
While you are right that SN 1987A puts strong constraints on such an effect, there is a huge difference in the energies of the neutrinos involved (~10 MeV vs ~10 GeV). Most models with corrections to Lorentz symmetry predict a linear dependence of the correction with energy, so this would become a matter of a day instead of several years. On the other hand, if one assumes a Planck-scale symmetry breaking as in doubly special relativity models,
this would require a ridiculously large prefactor to be observable on these scales.
People feeling comfortable spend more money in overpriced shopping areas.
In the past decade or so, the only situations in which I did BIOS updates was to get on-site support being dispatched to replace some faulty hardware (which the hardware vendor wouldn't do unless you ran the latest BIOS firmware). Hardly something what I would expect the unwashed masses to experience.
You know, not every publicly traded company is run by sociopaths. You are free to invest your retirement money accordingly.
What is this something productive that the stock market does?
It allows people like you and me to participate in economic growth.
In the UK, 6.2% of the general population hack their consumer products in order to improve them. If you adjust that to the part of the population that actually owns a tablet, you will probably get an even larger number.
An important thing to recognize is that most of this experiment was done with a single qubit. Practical quantum computing will need to have this sort of error rate for thousands of qubits.
I'd take any quantum computer with 50 qubits and get a Nobel prize for beating the shit out of all current supercomputers simulating quantum systems like high-temperature superconductors, quark bound states such as proton and neutrons, or quantum magnets. Also, keep in mind that Rainer Blatt's group recently succeeded in demonstrating entanglement between 14 qubits in a similar setup. And for quantum simulations, the error rates probably don't have to be crazily low anyway, it turns out that such errors typically correspond to a nonzero temperature for the simulated system. So if this effective temperature is low enough that you can see interesting quantum physics, you are still in business.
Feel free to join your favorite Diaspora pod if you don't like the privacy implications of Facebook or Google+.
Depending on your preferences, you might want to have a look at the WeTab. Since it's based on MeeGo you can install basically any PDF viewer you like (xpdf or evince for a slick experience, Okular if you want to make annotations). And no need to hack it, root access is just one sudo away.
Mother: So, Sarah, what did you learn in your computer club today?
Little Sarah [6 years old]: Well, Mommy, we played this neat new game
called NetHack and I was an evil wizard who killed a priest with
fireball magic and then sa.. sac.. sacrificed his corpse on an altar
and then came a demon named Yee... Yeeno... Yeenoghu but he was a
friendly demon and didn't hurt my wizard, but these policemen got
angry and I had to kill them too and offer their corpses to my evil
god, and then some more demons came but they were all friendly too,
especially one who was called a suc... suc... it had something to do
with sucking, and she took all my wizard's clothes off but I don't
understand why, but Bobby said that she wanted to make babies with
him and then... Mommy? Mommy? Are you OK?
[Blatantly stolen from this usenet posting]
So, Microsoft will essientially provide a way to port legacy apps to Linux and Mac OS X? They really want to reduce their precious vendor lock-in?
So we have a case of blatant copyright violation, which is even perpetrated for commercial gain. So I guess the DHS will step in and seize the apple.com domain as they have done before in similar cases, right?
What we need is legislation saying that writing, distributing, selling, and using software cannot constitute a patent violation.
Unfortunately, this is not allowed under TRIPS. The only way to prevent software patents is by not granting them to start with.
Most science papers are put on free preprint servers such as the arXiv anyway. I think it is safe to say that never before in the history of mankind such a large fraction of the population had access to the latest research results.