quantum teleportation needs a classic channel. So you have a speed limit of c. Also you get *zero* fanout and there are other *theoretical* problems let alone practical ones. Even the big proponents of quantum computing do not claim that quantum computers will be made obsolete by them. Event the few algorithms (we have almost none) we have need a substantial part done on a classic computer. You can't beat causality with a classic computer either... So i don't know what you are on about there. Unless we are talking about a QC from a science fiction novel.
However you need to understand quantum mechanics to build a transistor. So you still use quantum physics to build a classic computer.
Your last statement is falsified by the very history of invention of the xistor, thus fiction of a far more useless sort than the science fiction both I and TFauthors engaged in. They and I both project from the known and theoretical to the possible. You attempt to argue against projected possibilities by quoting the present state of the technology and theory, neither of which are sufficient at present. They and I make no pretense to restrict ourselves here to what has been done. Such an argument is hardly an exploration of possibility.
They happen to focus more on the classical. I say the classical might be necessary to set up such a construct, but at least a disproof of their claims if not a functional device can be developed and run.
QT needs a classical channel to set up through. Once entangled entities are separated in 3space that channel is not necessary until decoding and verification. That would provide the proof of whether it worked, and since those results would be sitting and waiting on the classical signal, it would have predated it. The separation of the entangled entity would be done with predetermination of what sort of computation is to be done, and so the results of which can be planned for and tested using far simpler devices than a classical computer, or even with other quantum entities with which the computational entities interact in pre-tested ways. Futhermore, "zero fanout" is an estimate of the natural outcome of generating entangled entities. A series of them can be generated with different base states and the results tested for completeness. The fanout is in the making, and potentially in the interaction, not the evolution of the quantum states of the individuals/pairs.
TFA makes claims about the speed of computation but base their claims solely on classical devices described in terms of entropy as measured at the quantum level. My claim is only that theirs is wrong as a generalization because computation need not be restricted to the classical. The factoring of the number 16 was done entirely within the quantum realm and only tested for post-hoc with a classical device. That design was a convenience, not a necessity, and the results existed prior to measurement. If a computation can be set up across spacetime and reliably tested for by a system operating at c, the computation must progress/communicate faster than c in order to be available by the spacetime limited testing device. Bell's Theorem (actually Bell's own proven violation of his theorem devised in support of the EPR paradox) makes specific predictions that if true would allow this, and they have been so proven.
As an analogy, TFA is like Cayley's early 1800s theorizing regarding surfaces in a fluid stream resulting in predictions that a device might be constructed that via interaction with the atmospheric environment travel without contact with the ground. My suggestions are akin to Tsiolkovsky's 1903 "equations" and work predicting the possibility of flight not constrained by the environment, disproving Cayley's specific predictions due to his self-enforced limitation. I'm fairly certain both of them were hounded in spirit if not fact by the stolidly 'educated' telling them that it can't possibly work because we've seen balloons fly, we know how they work, and they use bouyancy, not li
"The expanded technology used on millions of motorist could be rolled out across the USA."
But rather "will be". Some states are already requiring that people do not smile for their driver's license photos. They're constraining what the (still fairly crippled; see section 4.2 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_recognition_system ) software has to contend with. Smiles, and the mouth in general, is far more mobile than most other facial components.
It's going to happen and it's going to happen badly. But just like polygraphs and torture, it's not that they work but rather the threat of them work. So they say.
per TFabstract: "errors that appear as a result of the interaction of the information-carrying system with uncontrolled degrees of freedom must be corrected."
Would not quantum teleportation via entanglement provide a means of distributing computation to include massively parallel? Quantum teleportation would provide a constraint that would redefine the problem by redefining the environment (ie. uncontrolled degrees of freedom). Replace Moore's Law with Bell's Theorem.
And does not quantum computing operate on all possible states, with the answer inherent in the wave function? Spew out the entangled qubits as needed and let them fight it out as a quantum form of Swarm.
If a result can be obtained this way, you may still have a problem with simultaneity -- the answer may arrive "before" the question, making it impossible to decode. However the problem then becomes a limitation of spacetime's ability to pass definitive information, and the limit of computation itself if such exists and/or can be measured in this context becomes moot. Being able to error trace via backtrack is similarly hampered but for the same reason and would still be possible post hoc.
But if a computational system is devised that can operate on such principles, and it is to be used for practical calculations, be aware that any defining of arguments will be restricted to the input end and results for comparison and decision making may not yet be available for such decisions (assuming a reasonable latitude of autonomous action). In which case, make sure you teach it phenomenology *before* putting it to work.
Their reticence is somewhat practical when one considers that fewer people watch Canadian football than watch curling, and nobody outside Canada watches that.
I am sorry, but I have to correct. The Japanese female curling team is quite popular in Japan. Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that they are passably nice-looking; and the reason I have never seen male curling in Japan is certainly because men can't use brooms.
For my part, I wouldn't watch it because I have no interest in watching men with huge eyes and breasts battle evil monsters/demons/robots using brooms disguised as something socially acceptable for men (with or without huge etceteras) to wield. But that monkey is a hoot.
What, no +1 Funny mod yet for this? I may have to reset my subscriber options.
I was trying to figure out how to react to the first mod point, +1 insightful. Laugh? Cry? Complain about getting a drive-by moderation despite the fact it was positive? Get scared because I must have accidentally happened upon some apocryphal truth regarding asteroids and curling leading to saving the Earth by hiring Harry Stamper's Janitorial Service? The mind boggles, and the voices are complaining abut all that boggling noise.
The +/- designs are last gen ^ X, not next gen. If The Register followed the history details closely, a good number of computer startups came from a club that met at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Yes, the design is that old and older.
As for the 'obvious question', if the supposedly obligatory SF reference comes out sounding like so much shite, leave it out, OK?
Between these two details, TFA could have predated/. by a decade.
... analysts will tell you all kinds of goofy stuff, particularly if they think they can get you to pay them to tell you more about how to do it, including why it works (miraculously, with no research having been done to support their reasons), as well as what you're doing wrong when it doesn't work ('listening to them' never seems to make the list). In this case they'll turn the long disused and discredited 'dress for success' construct and apply it to the cartoons they say are so important as replacements for people, but which most businesses would usually be embarrased to use when a real person is available.
Apophis had been downgraded to 4 chances in a million from 22 chances in a million. This new figure is clearly wrong, because it has 6 chances to impact between 2036 and 2103 (see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/a99942.html ). Perhaps this means the actual metric is 6 chances per 1.5 million.
Also of note in the upgraded data is the second of the 2068 near misses, having a 0.00 Earth radius distance. This is likely a statistical artifact caused by the fact that a near miss is a hit (a miss is a miss or it isn't; something that comes close but doesn't hit is a near hit).
Since the distance is zero but the impact probability is 1.1e-07, they have almost certainly determined that it will pass by (and/or impact) almost perfectly edge on. Due to its size being equivalent to 2.5 football fields, and a football field being a 2 dimensional rectangle with no thickness, an edge on impact would have little effect, keeping all 510 megatons of impact energy confined within an area of 270 by 0.000... meters, ie. no area at all. Thus, the impact will have absolutely no effect unless you happen to be standing over that 270 by zero meter line when it comes down on you, or worse, up at you after having passed through the Earth (a zero thickness should be able to pass through the planet like a neutrino).
Hopefully we will also get updated figures on 2007 VK184. It has a 340 in 1 million chance of impact. It gets 4 attempts between 2048 and 2057. Four chances in 9 years gives it 2.25 million years to have its one million attempts, in which time it will only hit Earth 340 times, or once every 2417095.5882352941176470588235294 days. This was calculated with due attention paid to leap years, though it is uncertain at the time of publication whether the frequent legislating of time standards by the US will result in the figure being in standard leap years or daylight savings leap years.
Just to add a minor point of confusion, in case it has been so far missed: the question has been raised regarding the actual size of these objects, as 'football field' is ambiguous, there being two different kinds of 'football' using different size fields. The answer is that it doesn't matter. NASA has already proven themselves to be above and beyond the need for conversion factors, and so they need not differentiate between metric and non-metric football. In their usual excessively polite manner, Canada has repeatedly not pointed out that they too have 'football' similar to the US kind, but with yet another differently sized field. Their reticence is somewhat practical when one considers that fewer people watch Canadian football than watch curling, and nobody outside Canada watches that.
These two guys are formidable minds, so ya just might want to think before you blast your mouth off.
Ah. Appeal to authority, the refuge of the science fanboi.
I know Harold Morowitz from our visits to the Santa Fe Institute and from George Mason (my daughter studies there). I quote him here regularly, especially his "Energy Flow In Biology". I've also quoted his story about being the first to try to sell fairy shrimp. It was a miserable failure. If he can tell you he can be wrong, so can I.
I don't know Knight, but I was right -- he's an engineer, not a biologist. And it was his statements I took issue with. Identical strands do not necessarily produce the same result. They are sensitive to environment to an extraordinary degree. An example is the different amounts of coverage and symmetry of coat colors in dogs due to the minute differences in pH from being between litter mates vs. being at the end of the line while in the womb.
If I were the sort to repay appeal to authority with the same, I'd have made a bigger deal about "our" trips to Santa Fe (not he and I together, but more than one each) as well as a few other salient points. But I don't, because I've had some object lessons on that. Such as:
Basil Hiley also has an exceptional mind. He was the physics partner of David Bohm. He'd come to Karl Pribram's lab to work on an update to the latter's book that provided evidence that Gabor's maths describing holography, specifically having to do with 'logons', could be used to describe the interaction of the dynamic electrical fields around neural dendrites, and their possible communication without direct connections. Basil needed to access his email. We had Macs with Netscape in the lab. He wasn't familiar with them and asked me to configure things for him. I did so. He thanked me and added "I could never have done it. I'm just a mathematical physicist." And he was serious.
In any case, I was right, and the non-biologist Knight overstated. I wouldn't have expected many to believe it, and my having been modded down by those who didn't understand what I was talking about bears that out. Why they don't just give us a '-1 Wrong' mod to use, I don't know -- people use other mod keys for that anyway.
In another case I was wrong. I asked Karl and Basil (and Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasue) why they didn't use tensor calculus to describe the fields. Basil finally said it could work but would take more effort than using Gabor's functions. But it took the mathematical physicist an hour of thinking about it before answering. So consider carefully that while you might be able to provide reference to work by parties not present, you can never be sure in a forum such as this when you'll run across someone who'd feel quite comfortable in their company for some obvious reasons. Then you can kiss my exceptional mind. And same for the guy below who also got modded down for daring to make the point that one should question authority, especially when it's presented by someone other than that authority. Kiss his too.
"I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things.'"
Boy is this guy in for a wake up. No matter how well you replicate a strand, you can't replicate the environment without violating the exclusion principle -- the two can't be in the same place. And with different environments comes different expressions. It says he's a "research scientist". I'm betting the field isn't biology.
Ethically speaking, it's wrong of you to try to tell someone what to do with their property. It's the retailer's web site, they own it, they get to say what is and is not going to be put up on it. You can not like that fact, and that's about the extent of your "rights" in the matter. You might consider it bias due to your bad experience. If 1000 people had good experiences and you had the one bad one, why should they put up a bad review along with 4 good ones? That makes it look like 20% are dissatisfied. One person's bias is another's emphasis.
You have freedom of speech where you have the freedom to speak. You don't have that freedom where ever you choose to want yourself heard. When it's your property, public property, or property where the owners gives you permission to speak from, have your say.
If by chance you think personal wants take priority over ownership rights, then give me your car, because I want it.
They talked to people who spend their days doing very little if anything interesting, and gave them the opportunity to spend a good deal of time being paid attention to, and also by having been seen as cooperative may get good marks in their record leading to reduced sentences. These people have already proven themselves willing to be dishonest, yet these "researchers" put these liars in the position of lying and present their answers as truth. For people with an association with the criminal justice system these two are incredibly naive regrading prison inmates.
These people are already convicted. They can "admit" to almost anything regarding their crime without fear of reprisal. Catch them when they're facing a max sentence and want to plea bargain. Then you'll get some answers that might (!) be useful.
"The act of persistently instigating lawsuits, often groundless ones."
It's a crime. If anyone was seriously threatened by one of these, they could simply file charges. Facebook is already protected by the law per TFA, as Thompson should be well aware. Being aware and persisting makes it all the more likely he'd be convicted of this, and in each case receive greater fines and/or jail time.
WSJ has apparently succumbed to awfulism in reporting. In the absence of any wrong doing they pull in a perpetually cranky group that feeds its own coffers by playing watchdog in order to have a name to attach to the guilt-by-association story line in TFA. All the same details could be easily applied to many of WSJ's favorite corporations and people, but if they were damn sure wouldn't be phrased in such a way that the readers follow their training and assume this to be some sort of expose' of wrong doing.
Unlimited broadband makes piracy possible, therefore it promotes it, so let's get rid of it.
OK, let's put that into a formula so we can reuse it lots of times, changing it enough each time so we don't have to call it a remake every time.
If A is a sufficient condition of B: then A is a causative factor of B, and not A is a sufficient condition of not B. OOOOh, I see Nicholas Cage reading that, you know the way he just saunters down the line until he gets to the main point where he suddenly RAISES-HIS-VOICE-AND-RUNS-STUFF-TOGETHER.
OK. Follow that thinking? Great, then try this.
Unlimited oxygen makes idiocy possible, therefore it promotes it, so let's GET-RID-OF-ALL-THE-FUCKING-AIR-ALRIGHT?
I'm just kidding. We wouldn't want to get rid of idiocy. If we did, who would make all those movies for us to watch?
I'm starting to suspect the reason most movies are fiction is that many of the people who run the entertainment industry are pathological liars.
Alzheimer's suffers have amyloid-beta plaque deposits in their brains. Usually. Not always.
There are people who have amyloid-beta deposits in the brains. Some of them have dementia, including Alzheimer's. Not all.
Amyloid-beta plaque can be cleared from the brain by immunization. The dementia occurs anyway.: AB42 Immunisation Clears Brain Plaques, Does Not Prevent Dementia... http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/225f1e.htm
Thus, this article should read "Amyloid-Beta Plaque Desposition and Clearing Possibly Associated With Sleep", and any implied link to Alzheimer's saved until the discussion section at the end.
There is a family of amyloids associated with Alzheimer's and dementia, of which AÃY42 is only one. While AÃY42 is typically the quickest to aggregate, AÃY40 can cause dementia just as easily (though it takes a lifetime to aggregate enough of it).
"... can cause dementia just as easily..." implies a persistent belief in causation despite the reference providing evidence that one of the two obviously is not causative. What can be taken as adequately supported understanding of causation is the fact that Ab40 accumulation (by far the majority of plaque deposit) is seeded by the earlier accumulation of Ab42 (and 43) that forms tendrils much faster, attracting Ab40 out of 'diffuse plaque', the solution of non-tendrilled amyloid beta proteins with a hydrophobic C-terminal sequence anywhere from the 39 to 42 locus.
It likely takes much more than a lifetime to accumulate the kind of plaque deposition seen in AD from Ab 40 in the absence of tendril forming Ab42 accumulations. And, as stated by the reference above, and implied by the wording of most publications on the subject, there is plenty of evidence associating both Ab40 and 42 to AD, but not supporting causation.
Alzheimer's suffers have amyloid-beta plaque deposits in their brains. Usually. Not always.
There are people who have amyloid-beta deposits in the brains. Some of them have dementia, including Alzheimer's. Not all.
Amyloid-beta plaque can be cleared from the brain by immunization. The dementia occurs anyway.: AB42 Immunisation Clears Brain Plaques, Does Not Prevent Dementia... http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/225f1e.htm
Thus, this article should read "Amyloid-Beta Plaque Desposition and Clearing Possibly Associated With Sleep", and any implied link to Alzheimer's saved until the discussion section at the end.
GM is genetic modification, and can be from anything from mutation to breeding. The results will either breed true or die, and any changes that make it harmful will usually make it die if it can ever germinate. "Junk" DNA is full of linkages between the things that kill the organism and others that consume it if it breeds dominant, but is carried along 'safely' as deactivated recessive genes like bad grades on your permanent record.
GE is selective DNA alteration, genetic engineering, being done by people who can change things so selectively that they can unlink the genes that make it harmful to itself from the ones that make it harmful to others without realizing it, and since nobody tests food in clinical trials just because it's a new 'strain', can kill people sitting at the dinner table.
GE has killed people. Showa Denko engineered some yeast for fermenting the amino acid tryptophan to produce twice as much. They didn't test it for anything other than tryptophan and that was 99%+ pure, and so didn't know it was ranking out the toxin ditryptophan. 37 people died eating it and over 1400 were crippled to various degrees. Showa Denko paid US$4.5BN in damages and rather than announce it the FDA simply warned pharmaceutical makers about "substance X" found in some supplements. To this day US phrama acts as though the it makes perfect sense that top drug testing agency couldn't identify this food stuff adulterant, and will not produce the non-narcotic sedative that the rest of the world still uses with no problems as long as the yeast isn't fucked around with by fumble-fingered and -minded corporations. Obviously FDA is capable of testing down to the molecular level, so any result of "substance X" is false. I'm not sure who detected the ditryptophan, but it certainly wasn't the FDA; they were offered the yeast for testing, and declined.
GE food is not tested rigorously. GE food has injured and killed. The agency responsible for the former and for preventing the latter refuses to do either. And the sheeple call it names and eat it anyway, secure in their self-enforced ignorance, believing that The Government Cares About You And So Do The Corporations It Works For.
Worst that can happen is you die. If it's someone else and the company that makes your corn flakes has to shell out billions, you'll still be around to pay a buck a box more for your breakfast so they can recoup the costs before the next quarterly. And besides, it wasn't you that died. This time.
Somebody named Toe, The pulls a PKB and says: "both awe and hilarity".
Go on and laugh. The Army captain from 117 Space BN will be sitting in Huntsville laughing when you don't notice the laser with which he's painting you. And the Air Force lieutenant sitting in base ops in Pueblo driving the Predator will be laughing when she drops the Hellfire to home in on the reflected laser. And you three can laugh and laugh and laugh until suddenly there's two of them laughing and laughing and a cloud of well done meat flakes settling to the ground that never realized what happened when it when it was visited by silent death from above. Paint it brown and call it The Flying Turd to add to the entertainment if you like, it'll still be an awesome piece of weapons delivery systems.
Here's just a brief search for personal supercomputers of days gone (not too far) by. Most if not all are cheaper than the SGI. Being older they may not stack up spec-wise, and the definition will always be changing anyway. More than one claim to be 'first', and to SGI's credit they only claim it's 'their' first.
Can someone who understands statistics and FDA trial phases explain something to me. . . Is a sample size of 12 really big enough to be a reasonable 'safety' trial? Or do they start with a small trial, just to find out if there's any problems so severe that they would affect almost *anyone*, then in future phases, increase the sample sizes to more and more test subjects, looking for those problems that only affect 1/1000 or 1/100000 patients?
A phase 1 is testing for safety to show it should be allowed to progress to phase 2 trials, not safety nor efficacy with respect to the population. More than you every wanted to know about clinical trials, but you did ask: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial
Slashdot Mirror
quantum teleportation needs a classic channel. So you have a speed limit of c. Also you get *zero* fanout and there are other *theoretical* problems let alone practical ones. Even the big proponents of quantum computing do not claim that quantum computers will be made obsolete by them. Event the few algorithms (we have almost none) we have need a substantial part done on a classic computer. You can't beat causality with a classic computer either... So i don't know what you are on about there. Unless we are talking about a QC from a science fiction novel.
However you need to understand quantum mechanics to build a transistor. So you still use quantum physics to build a classic computer.
Your last statement is falsified by the very history of invention of the xistor, thus fiction of a far more useless sort than the science fiction both I and TFauthors engaged in. They and I both project from the known and theoretical to the possible. You attempt to argue against projected possibilities by quoting the present state of the technology and theory, neither of which are sufficient at present. They and I make no pretense to restrict ourselves here to what has been done. Such an argument is hardly an exploration of possibility.
They happen to focus more on the classical. I say the classical might be necessary to set up such a construct, but at least a disproof of their claims if not a functional device can be developed and run.
QT needs a classical channel to set up through. Once entangled entities are separated in 3space that channel is not necessary until decoding and verification. That would provide the proof of whether it worked, and since those results would be sitting and waiting on the classical signal, it would have predated it. The separation of the entangled entity would be done with predetermination of what sort of computation is to be done, and so the results of which can be planned for and tested using far simpler devices than a classical computer, or even with other quantum entities with which the computational entities interact in pre-tested ways. Futhermore, "zero fanout" is an estimate of the natural outcome of generating entangled entities. A series of them can be generated with different base states and the results tested for completeness. The fanout is in the making, and potentially in the interaction, not the evolution of the quantum states of the individuals/pairs.
TFA makes claims about the speed of computation but base their claims solely on classical devices described in terms of entropy as measured at the quantum level. My claim is only that theirs is wrong as a generalization because computation need not be restricted to the classical. The factoring of the number 16 was done entirely within the quantum realm and only tested for post-hoc with a classical device. That design was a convenience, not a necessity, and the results existed prior to measurement. If a computation can be set up across spacetime and reliably tested for by a system operating at c, the computation must progress/communicate faster than c in order to be available by the spacetime limited testing device. Bell's Theorem (actually Bell's own proven violation of his theorem devised in support of the EPR paradox) makes specific predictions that if true would allow this, and they have been so proven.
As an analogy, TFA is like Cayley's early 1800s theorizing regarding surfaces in a fluid stream resulting in predictions that a device might be constructed that via interaction with the atmospheric environment travel without contact with the ground. My suggestions are akin to Tsiolkovsky's 1903 "equations" and work predicting the possibility of flight not constrained by the environment, disproving Cayley's specific predictions due to his self-enforced limitation. I'm fairly certain both of them were hounded in spirit if not fact by the stolidly 'educated' telling them that it can't possibly work because we've seen balloons fly, we know how they work, and they use bouyancy, not li
"The expanded technology used on millions of motorist could be rolled out across the USA."
But rather "will be". Some states are already requiring that people do not smile for their driver's license photos. They're constraining what the (still fairly crippled; see section 4.2 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_recognition_system ) software has to contend with. Smiles, and the mouth in general, is far more mobile than most other facial components.
It's going to happen and it's going to happen badly. But just like polygraphs and torture, it's not that they work but rather the threat of them work. So they say.
per TFabstract: "errors that appear as a result of the interaction of the information-carrying system with uncontrolled degrees of freedom must be corrected."
Would not quantum teleportation via entanglement provide a means of distributing computation to include massively parallel? Quantum teleportation would provide a constraint that would redefine the problem by redefining the environment (ie. uncontrolled degrees of freedom). Replace Moore's Law with Bell's Theorem.
And does not quantum computing operate on all possible states, with the answer inherent in the wave function? Spew out the entangled qubits as needed and let them fight it out as a quantum form of Swarm.
If a result can be obtained this way, you may still have a problem with simultaneity -- the answer may arrive "before" the question, making it impossible to decode. However the problem then becomes a limitation of spacetime's ability to pass definitive information, and the limit of computation itself if such exists and/or can be measured in this context becomes moot. Being able to error trace via backtrack is similarly hampered but for the same reason and would still be possible post hoc.
But if a computational system is devised that can operate on such principles, and it is to be used for practical calculations, be aware that any defining of arguments will be restricted to the input end and results for comparison and decision making may not yet be available for such decisions (assuming a reasonable latitude of autonomous action). In which case, make sure you teach it phenomenology *before* putting it to work.
Any chance this will also fix lost/ignored submissions? Like some pending since September 23?
Their reticence is somewhat practical when one considers that fewer people watch Canadian football than watch curling, and nobody outside Canada watches that.
I am sorry, but I have to correct. The Japanese female curling team is quite popular in Japan. Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that they are passably nice-looking; and the reason I have never seen male curling in Japan is certainly because men can't use brooms.
For my part, I wouldn't watch it because I have no interest in watching men with huge eyes and breasts battle evil monsters/demons/robots using brooms disguised as something socially acceptable for men (with or without huge etceteras) to wield. But that monkey is a hoot.
What, no +1 Funny mod yet for this? I may have to reset my subscriber options.
I was trying to figure out how to react to the first mod point, +1 insightful. Laugh? Cry? Complain about getting a drive-by moderation despite the fact it was positive? Get scared because I must have accidentally happened upon some apocryphal truth regarding asteroids and curling leading to saving the Earth by hiring Harry Stamper's Janitorial Service? The mind boggles, and the voices are complaining abut all that boggling noise.
The +/- designs are last gen ^ X, not next gen. If The Register followed the history details closely, a good number of computer startups came from a club that met at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Yes, the design is that old and older.
As for the 'obvious question', if the supposedly obligatory SF reference comes out sounding like so much shite, leave it out, OK?
Between these two details, TFA could have predated /. by a decade.
... analysts will tell you all kinds of goofy stuff, particularly if they think they can get you to pay them to tell you more about how to do it, including why it works (miraculously, with no research having been done to support their reasons), as well as what you're doing wrong when it doesn't work ('listening to them' never seems to make the list). In this case they'll turn the long disused and discredited 'dress for success' construct and apply it to the cartoons they say are so important as replacements for people, but which most businesses would usually be embarrased to use when a real person is available.
Apophis had been downgraded to 4 chances in a million from 22 chances in a million. This new figure is clearly wrong, because it has 6 chances to impact between 2036 and 2103 (see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/a99942.html ). Perhaps this means the actual metric is 6 chances per 1.5 million.
Also of note in the upgraded data is the second of the 2068 near misses, having a 0.00 Earth radius distance. This is likely a statistical artifact caused by the fact that a near miss is a hit (a miss is a miss or it isn't; something that comes close but doesn't hit is a near hit).
Since the distance is zero but the impact probability is 1.1e-07, they have almost certainly determined that it will pass by (and/or impact) almost perfectly edge on. Due to its size being equivalent to 2.5 football fields, and a football field being a 2 dimensional rectangle with no thickness, an edge on impact would have little effect, keeping all 510 megatons of impact energy confined within an area of 270 by 0.000... meters, ie. no area at all. Thus, the impact will have absolutely no effect unless you happen to be standing over that 270 by zero meter line when it comes down on you, or worse, up at you after having passed through the Earth (a zero thickness should be able to pass through the planet like a neutrino).
Hopefully we will also get updated figures on 2007 VK184. It has a 340 in 1 million chance of impact. It gets 4 attempts between 2048 and 2057. Four chances in 9 years gives it 2.25 million years to have its one million attempts, in which time it will only hit Earth 340 times, or once every 2417095.5882352941176470588235294 days. This was calculated with due attention paid to leap years, though it is uncertain at the time of publication whether the frequent legislating of time standards by the US will result in the figure being in standard leap years or daylight savings leap years.
Just to add a minor point of confusion, in case it has been so far missed: the question has been raised regarding the actual size of these objects, as 'football field' is ambiguous, there being two different kinds of 'football' using different size fields. The answer is that it doesn't matter. NASA has already proven themselves to be above and beyond the need for conversion factors, and so they need not differentiate between metric and non-metric football. In their usual excessively polite manner, Canada has repeatedly not pointed out that they too have 'football' similar to the US kind, but with yet another differently sized field. Their reticence is somewhat practical when one considers that fewer people watch Canadian football than watch curling, and nobody outside Canada watches that.
Obigitory - "didn't look very hard before spouting off did ya."
You might want to give a read here.
Ohhh and maybe heretoo.
Or here.
These two guys are formidable minds, so ya just might want to think before you blast your mouth off.
Ah. Appeal to authority, the refuge of the science fanboi.
I know Harold Morowitz from our visits to the Santa Fe Institute and from George Mason (my daughter studies there). I quote him here regularly, especially his "Energy Flow In Biology". I've also quoted his story about being the first to try to sell fairy shrimp. It was a miserable failure. If he can tell you he can be wrong, so can I.
I don't know Knight, but I was right -- he's an engineer, not a biologist. And it was his statements I took issue with. Identical strands do not necessarily produce the same result. They are sensitive to environment to an extraordinary degree. An example is the different amounts of coverage and symmetry of coat colors in dogs due to the minute differences in pH from being between litter mates vs. being at the end of the line while in the womb.
If I were the sort to repay appeal to authority with the same, I'd have made a bigger deal about "our" trips to Santa Fe (not he and I together, but more than one each) as well as a few other salient points. But I don't, because I've had some object lessons on that. Such as:
Basil Hiley also has an exceptional mind. He was the physics partner of David Bohm. He'd come to Karl Pribram's lab to work on an update to the latter's book that provided evidence that Gabor's maths describing holography, specifically having to do with 'logons', could be used to describe the interaction of the dynamic electrical fields around neural dendrites, and their possible communication without direct connections. Basil needed to access his email. We had Macs with Netscape in the lab. He wasn't familiar with them and asked me to configure things for him. I did so. He thanked me and added "I could never have done it. I'm just a mathematical physicist." And he was serious.
In any case, I was right, and the non-biologist Knight overstated. I wouldn't have expected many to believe it, and my having been modded down by those who didn't understand what I was talking about bears that out. Why they don't just give us a '-1 Wrong' mod to use, I don't know -- people use other mod keys for that anyway.
In another case I was wrong. I asked Karl and Basil (and Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasue) why they didn't use tensor calculus to describe the fields. Basil finally said it could work but would take more effort than using Gabor's functions. But it took the mathematical physicist an hour of thinking about it before answering. So consider carefully that while you might be able to provide reference to work by parties not present, you can never be sure in a forum such as this when you'll run across someone who'd feel quite comfortable in their company for some obvious reasons. Then you can kiss my exceptional mind. And same for the guy below who also got modded down for daring to make the point that one should question authority, especially when it's presented by someone other than that authority. Kiss his too.
TFA gets it goofy.
"Universe Has More Entropy Than Thought"
Certainly more than the amount of thought that went into that title.
"I'm interested in transitioning biology from being sort of a craft, where every time you do something it's done slightly differently, often in ad hoc ways, to an engineering discipline with standardized methods of arranging information and standardized sets of parts that you can assemble to do things.'"
Boy is this guy in for a wake up. No matter how well you replicate a strand, you can't replicate the environment without violating the exclusion principle -- the two can't be in the same place. And with different environments comes different expressions. It says he's a "research scientist". I'm betting the field isn't biology.
"...she is focused on making DHS a "world-class cyberorganization."'"
Because heaven forbid a US federal government agency should be satisfied with being only US class. After all, we have a world to protect from itself.
"Ethically speaking, it's wrong..."
Ethically speaking, it's wrong of you to try to tell someone what to do with their property. It's the retailer's web site, they own it, they get to say what is and is not going to be put up on it. You can not like that fact, and that's about the extent of your "rights" in the matter. You might consider it bias due to your bad experience. If 1000 people had good experiences and you had the one bad one, why should they put up a bad review along with 4 good ones? That makes it look like 20% are dissatisfied. One person's bias is another's emphasis.
You have freedom of speech where you have the freedom to speak. You don't have that freedom where ever you choose to want yourself heard. When it's your property, public property, or property where the owners gives you permission to speak from, have your say.
If by chance you think personal wants take priority over ownership rights, then give me your car, because I want it.
They didn't just talk to people who got caught.
They talked to people who spend their days doing very little if anything interesting, and gave them the opportunity to spend a good deal of time being paid attention to, and also by having been seen as cooperative may get good marks in their record leading to reduced sentences. These people have already proven themselves willing to be dishonest, yet these "researchers" put these liars in the position of lying and present their answers as truth. For people with an association with the criminal justice system these two are incredibly naive regrading prison inmates.
These people are already convicted. They can "admit" to almost anything regarding their crime without fear of reprisal. Catch them when they're facing a max sentence and want to plea bargain. Then you'll get some answers that might (!) be useful.
Barratry:
"The act of persistently instigating lawsuits, often groundless ones."
It's a crime. If anyone was seriously threatened by one of these, they could simply file charges. Facebook is already protected by the law per TFA, as Thompson should be well aware. Being aware and persisting makes it all the more likely he'd be convicted of this, and in each case receive greater fines and/or jail time.
WSJ has apparently succumbed to awfulism in reporting. In the absence of any wrong doing they pull in a perpetually cranky group that feeds its own coffers by playing watchdog in order to have a name to attach to the guilt-by-association story line in TFA. All the same details could be easily applied to many of WSJ's favorite corporations and people, but if they were damn sure wouldn't be phrased in such a way that the readers follow their training and assume this to be some sort of expose' of wrong doing.
"Can computers now understand all the subtle nuances of language...?"
Exactly what part of "The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed" did you not understand?
Huttup pikpok zoop zoop en putt wi.....um, I mean
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racter
Unlimited broadband makes piracy possible, therefore it promotes it, so let's get rid of it.
OK, let's put that into a formula so we can reuse it lots of times, changing it enough each time so we don't have to call it a remake every time.
If A is a sufficient condition of B: then A is a causative factor of B, and not A is a sufficient condition of not B. OOOOh, I see Nicholas Cage reading that, you know the way he just saunters down the line until he gets to the main point where he suddenly RAISES-HIS-VOICE-AND-RUNS-STUFF-TOGETHER.
OK. Follow that thinking? Great, then try this.
Unlimited oxygen makes idiocy possible, therefore it promotes it, so let's GET-RID-OF-ALL-THE-FUCKING-AIR-ALRIGHT?
I'm just kidding. We wouldn't want to get rid of idiocy. If we did, who would make all those movies for us to watch?
I'm starting to suspect the reason most movies are fiction is that many of the people who run the entertainment industry are pathological liars.
Alzheimer's suffers have amyloid-beta plaque deposits in their brains. Usually. Not always.
There are people who have amyloid-beta deposits in the brains. Some of them have dementia, including Alzheimer's. Not all.
Amyloid-beta plaque can be cleared from the brain by immunization. The dementia occurs anyway.: ...
AB42 Immunisation Clears Brain Plaques, Does Not Prevent Dementia
http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/225f1e.htm
Thus, this article should read "Amyloid-Beta Plaque Desposition and Clearing Possibly Associated With Sleep", and any implied link to Alzheimer's saved until the discussion section at the end.
There is a family of amyloids associated with Alzheimer's and dementia, of which AÃY42 is only one. While AÃY42 is typically the quickest to aggregate, AÃY40 can cause dementia just as easily (though it takes a lifetime to aggregate enough of it).
"... can cause dementia just as easily ..." implies a persistent belief in causation despite the reference providing evidence that one of the two obviously is not causative. What can be taken as adequately supported understanding of causation is the fact that Ab40 accumulation (by far the majority of plaque deposit) is seeded by the earlier accumulation of Ab42 (and 43) that forms tendrils much faster, attracting Ab40 out of 'diffuse plaque', the solution of non-tendrilled amyloid beta proteins with a hydrophobic C-terminal sequence anywhere from the 39 to 42 locus.
It likely takes much more than a lifetime to accumulate the kind of plaque deposition seen in AD from Ab 40 in the absence of tendril forming Ab42 accumulations. And, as stated by the reference above, and implied by the wording of most publications on the subject, there is plenty of evidence associating both Ab40 and 42 to AD, but not supporting causation.
Ref for my reply: http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/11/1/19
Thanks for challenging me, I enjoyed it.
Alzheimer's suffers have amyloid-beta plaque deposits in their brains. Usually. Not always.
There are people who have amyloid-beta deposits in the brains. Some of them have dementia, including Alzheimer's. Not all.
Amyloid-beta plaque can be cleared from the brain by immunization. The dementia occurs anyway.: ...
AB42 Immunisation Clears Brain Plaques, Does Not Prevent Dementia
http://www.pslgroup.com/dg/225f1e.htm
Thus, this article should read "Amyloid-Beta Plaque Desposition and Clearing Possibly Associated With Sleep", and any implied link to Alzheimer's saved until the discussion section at the end.
GM is genetic modification, and can be from anything from mutation to breeding. The results will either breed true or die, and any changes that make it harmful will usually make it die if it can ever germinate. "Junk" DNA is full of linkages between the things that kill the organism and others that consume it if it breeds dominant, but is carried along 'safely' as deactivated recessive genes like bad grades on your permanent record.
GE is selective DNA alteration, genetic engineering, being done by people who can change things so selectively that they can unlink the genes that make it harmful to itself from the ones that make it harmful to others without realizing it, and since nobody tests food in clinical trials just because it's a new 'strain', can kill people sitting at the dinner table.
GE has killed people. Showa Denko engineered some yeast for fermenting the amino acid tryptophan to produce twice as much. They didn't test it for anything other than tryptophan and that was 99%+ pure, and so didn't know it was ranking out the toxin ditryptophan. 37 people died eating it and over 1400 were crippled to various degrees. Showa Denko paid US$4.5BN in damages and rather than announce it the FDA simply warned pharmaceutical makers about "substance X" found in some supplements. To this day US phrama acts as though the it makes perfect sense that top drug testing agency couldn't identify this food stuff adulterant, and will not produce the non-narcotic sedative that the rest of the world still uses with no problems as long as the yeast isn't fucked around with by fumble-fingered and -minded corporations. Obviously FDA is capable of testing down to the molecular level, so any result of "substance X" is false. I'm not sure who detected the ditryptophan, but it certainly wasn't the FDA; they were offered the yeast for testing, and declined.
GE food is not tested rigorously.
GE food has injured and killed.
The agency responsible for the former and for preventing the latter refuses to do either.
And the sheeple call it names and eat it anyway, secure in their self-enforced ignorance, believing that The Government Cares About You And So Do The Corporations It Works For.
Worst that can happen is you die. If it's someone else and the company that makes your corn flakes has to shell out billions, you'll still be around to pay a buck a box more for your breakfast so they can recoup the costs before the next quarterly. And besides, it wasn't you that died. This time.
Somebody named Toe, The pulls a PKB and says: "both awe and hilarity".
Go on and laugh. The Army captain from 117 Space BN will be sitting in Huntsville laughing when you don't notice the laser with which he's painting you. And the Air Force lieutenant sitting in base ops in Pueblo driving the Predator will be laughing when she drops the Hellfire to home in on the reflected laser. And you three can laugh and laugh and laugh until suddenly there's two of them laughing and laughing and a cloud of well done meat flakes settling to the ground that never realized what happened when it when it was visited by silent death from above. Paint it brown and call it The Flying Turd to add to the entertainment if you like, it'll still be an awesome piece of weapons delivery systems.
Here's just a brief search for personal supercomputers of days gone (not too far) by. Most if not all are cheaper than the SGI. Being older they may not stack up spec-wise, and the definition will always be changing anyway. More than one claim to be 'first', and to SGI's credit they only claim it's 'their' first.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/23/068234
http://www.researchchannel.org/prog/displayevent.aspx?fID=569&rID=4263
http://aslab.com/products/workstations/marquisk942.html
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/06/07/tyan_unveils_typhoon/
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Cray_Unveils_Personal_Supercomputer.html
Can someone who understands statistics and FDA trial phases explain something to me. . . Is a sample size of 12 really big enough to be a reasonable 'safety' trial? Or do they start with a small trial, just to find out if there's any problems so severe that they would affect almost *anyone*, then in future phases, increase the sample sizes to more and more test subjects, looking for those problems that only affect 1/1000 or 1/100000 patients?
A phase 1 is testing for safety to show it should be allowed to progress to phase 2 trials, not safety nor efficacy with respect to the population. More than you every wanted to know about clinical trials, but you did ask: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trial