The calculate the results of an interaction, and then they measure it. So far, we've got a ton of these prediction/experiment couples accurate to better than one part in a billion, and at least one that is better than one part in a trillion.
Feynman once said that it was like measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles accurately to within the width of a human hair.
General relativity, for comparison, is accurate to about one part in 500 (orbit of Mercury), or one part in 5000 (Cassini). GR is much harder to test, of course, since we can't put the Sun and Mercury in a lab and isolate just the one interaction that we want to measure.
Even better. Now each page he ever touched is going to have a section saying "XXX paid some guy to delete YYY from this page, which they didn't want you to read."
This is a bit like saying that the horse industry must sabotage all of the successful pegasus farms around the world, lest people demand winged horses.
Victor Davis Hanson makes a good argument that the primary cause of WW2 was that Germany was allowed to surrender in France and thus were not forced to accept defeat the way they would have if Germany had been invaded. He isn't convinced by the theory that peace conditions were so onerous that they played much of a role.
I haven't really kept up. Sirius/XM has a more-or-less death metal channel that I sometimes flip to when there is a commercial on another channel. I occasionally hear something I like, but rarely. Even more rare is hearing classic death metal that I'm already familiar with.
P.S. Evisceration Plague sounds, to my ears, a lot like old Deicide.
Ordinarily, the electronics to set the state of a qubit are external to the cryogenic chamber that houses the device, and the state is fed in through coaxial cables. They made a version that can reside inside the cryogenic chamber.
External programming wasn't ever going to scale up. Even if they managed to get it down to 1 cable per qubit, that wasn't going to scale either.
Since I mostly follow the software side of quantum computing, I was expecting something entirely different. There is a quantum algorithm that can "solve" any problem that can be presented as a reversible circuit. What this article is talking about isn't a circuit in that sense, and it isn't a problem in that sense, and it hasn't been solved in that sense.
In my mind, this is more of a "device" which is in line with the terminology we use for other specialized CMOS structures. And it is more like "overcoming an engineering hurdle" than "solving one of QC's biggest problems".
Lurking deep in the bowels of an emulated System 36, buried under layers of middleware, obscured by COBOL, is a faithful RPG reproduction of a stack of punch cards from the 30s or 40s. IBM's unholy integration of Java and PHP has exposed this ancient evil to the world once again. Why, young web developer, would you create a new list of ethnicities when Websphere is happy to provide you with a system defined list? What could possibly go wrong?
Huawei is not a private company. It is a state-run institution. The only private companies in China are small to medium operations. Everything big enough to be strategically important is owned and/or managed by the Chinese army or the Chinese Communist Party.
Americans tend to assume that the rest of the world is like the US, but it isn't. Here, we have private companies. They are usually willing to cooperate to some extent with the government, but they are still mostly privately owned and managed. That is approximately the current situation throughout most of Western Civilization, but it is actually quite rare elsewhere.
Most importantly, China does not run on that model at all. The Chinese Communist Party owns the government and military, which in turn owns almost all of the industry and technology.
Imagine if the NSA got into the business of building cell phone network equipment using chips produced by the Air Force Cyber Command's semiconductor foundry and financed as a joint venture by the CIA and the Pentagon. No big deal, right?
Or rather, watch the damn video before commenting. This is probably among the 10 worst summaries I've read on this site, and I've been here just about every day since nearly the beginning.
This isn't a problem about parents uploading videos of their kids, or of kids uploading their own videos. It isn't about the videos at all.
The problem is that there is a side of youtube that most of us would never find on our own. But if you know it is there, you can get to it with one search and two clicks, and shown in the video.
Most of the videos there have been downloaded from other users and re-uploaded under a different account so that the parents and kids have no idea this is happening. The comments on the re-uploaded videos are full of creepy comments and timestamps to suggestive moments, or to other videos.
Once down the rabbit hole, all of the recommended video links are to other videos of the same type with the same disgusting comments and links.
But what if we invited you in for an interview about a product that your company is making which is saving millions of lives every year? Would you agree to drink it then if that was the bait that was used for the ambush?
It is totally unreasonable for you to decline to drink a liquid that we say is your product, even if it is an industrial chemical produced and bottled on an assembly line that wasn't designed, cleaned or inspected for producing products intended for human consumption.
You are looking at lifetime, and his numbers are annual. They are pretty much the same data presented in different ways. There is just enough difference that I think you are also using estimates from different annual reports.
No, it is a couple of miles inland from the border.
And it really isn't like anyone was planning to build the wall through the launchpad either. The article says that they've been contacted about letting people in to do a site survey but haven't yet.
Getting into orbit involves more than just going up. You need lateral momentum too. Gravity is always pointed straight down towards the earth, but if you are moving sideways fast enough, you'll "miss" as you plummet towards your doom, and if you always miss, we call that "orbit".
That's the anyone-can-understand-it version. The more mathy types will understand that adding two perpendicular vectors gives a diagonal. If you know a kid at about the right stage of learning this sort of thing, and who is interested in rockets, you can sneak a preview of calculus into his education four or five years early by showing that adding the vectors of smaller and smaller time increments yields a curve - the limit as delta-t approaches zero.
So that's why we launch most things to the east. The equatorial thing is for a different reason. Orbits are planar and that plane goes through the center of the earth (really the mutual center of mass of the system, but close enough). That plane also includes your launch site, so your initial orbit is inclined by the same amount as your starting latitude.
Changing the orbital plane's inclination is the most expensive maneuver that a spacecraft might have to do, so we try to launch as close to the intended orbit as we can. For equatorial satellites, that is as close to the equator as possible. Add the desire to launch eastward, and the desire that the flight path not be over population (for safety) and you get Cape Canaveral.
If you want a polar orbit, for example so that the earth's rotation will (eventually and repeatedly) bring the whole world under the lens of your spy satellite, you want a more northerly launch site so you get Vandenberg Air Force Base. It is only about 6 degrees further north, but it helps. The launch path is towards the south pole, over the ocean, again for safety.
In reality, things are a little bit more complicated. Boost vehicles generally have a little bit more than the absolute bare minimum amount of fuel needed to reach the starting orbit. This capacity is used to buy the spacecraft a little bit more initial altitude, or to buy a slightly more desirable initial plane inclination, or to buy a little bit more initial circularity, or some combination of those.
Regarding the wall, eventually the whole thing will need to be done. A while back, we built walls on the "easy" areas, but over time that traffic just diverted to more difficult and dangerous sections of the border. To illustrate this, at least one of the two kids who died recently crossed in an area that did not have a barrier because during the previous round of barrier construction, that section of border was considered to be too dangerous to cross on foot.
Fashion integrates the past. The 2020 design incorporates the 2019 design, the 2018 design, the 2017 design, etc...
If we get the 2030` design in 2020, then we will get the 2040` design in 2021, etc. By the time 2030 gets here, no one would ever actually design the 2030` design because the 2029 design, the 2028 design, etc were changed. The actual 2030 design will bear no resemblance to the old 2030` design.
(Those ticks should represent "prime", which I don't think I can do properly here on slashdot.)
You may be surprised to hear this, but we already know how to create synthetic motor fuels literally from air. We don't do it because with high electricity costs, it isn't economically feasible. With cheap electricity, it is very practical.
We are currently in the transition to a middle state, where the TCO of an electrochemical storage system is approaching the TCO of the petroleum-derived internal combustion fuel system. It is not currently known whether or not this middle state will ever be stable.
And no, he didn't think that the damage to Saddan's regime would have happened as quickly as it did because of the war, and he may have been expressing a bit of hyperbole about the magnitude. But the point was that for the same amount of money, we could have set ourselves on a course to eventually withdraw our funding from the various evil despots in that region.
Back in the mid 2000s, Jerry Pournelle was saying that we should have spent the Iraq War money on nuclear power instead. The first year cost something like $100 billion. We could have spent the first 20 billion (or whatever) of that developing a better nuclear power plant and refining the design to the point where subsequent plants would cost $1 billion each.
The financial hit to Saddam's oil revenue would have done about the same damage to him as the war did, and we' have somewhere between 50 and 80 brand new, state of the art, top of the line nuclear plants generating cheap power until 2050.
Personally, I prefer government small and would rather private industry tackle a project like this. But since we seem to be committed to tossing a few trillion dollars into the bonfire every year with no end in sight, why not push for something like this and at least have a chance to get something useful out of the deal?
While we are at it, we should return (federal) Congressional districts back to their original size - about 30,000 citizens per Representative.
Yes, that is about 10,000 members. Impossible to do now while they all have to meet physically in a single room in DC, but trivial when their office is in the district they purport to represent.
Well, it is 6 below zero (F), but the skies were perfectly clear for me. I was worried because the forecast for tonight has been saying "overcast" for days.
It wasn't nearly as impressive as the solar eclipse of 2017, but still pretty neat.
We've got snow cover here, so it is surprisingly bright with a full moon - enough light to read a book by, or drive without your headlights. As the penumbra moved in, I couldn't tell any difference looking at the moon, but I did notice that it was getting dark out. As the umbra moved in, it was plainly visible, and kinda screwy-looking. Many years ago, I got in the habit of reading partial phases of the moon as a pointer towards the present position of the sun, so it was odd that to me, the moon looked like it was pointing to a sun just under the northwest horizon.
Also, we've had a virtual fence before. Janet Napolitano decided that it wasn't working, and turned it off. A physical wall can't be turned off on a whim.
The process you describe isn't quite right. It is mostly right for small clinics, but misses the part where the medical finance companies are generally playing a similar game in reverse. "They billed us $300 for this. We'll send them a check for $120 and see if they take it." etc.
What really happens on a larger scale is that the hospital makes a budget that they think they are going to spend next year, and they estimate how many of each billing line item they will generate next year. Each medical finance company does similar calculations based on the number of subscribers they expect to have, and what their demographics suggest they are going to consume in services.
Then, the hospital's accountants sit down with the accountants from the other side, and they negotiate a flat global price change, for example a 2% increase on everything. They also negotiate specific line items, which is where the medical finance company tries to get a better deal on things they expect their subscribers to be using a lot of, and where hospitals try to cover unusual increases in supply costs or staff time.
Actually, it is one step more complicated, in that groups of hospitals and groups of medical finance companies negotiate together, which is what is meant by "in-network" On the lower end (smaller clinics), the "network" is generally a take-it-or-leave-it choice to accept a published price list.
In addition to the one root idea, schools of though developed spelling out corollary ideas - things that were thought to be either necessary for the core idea to be realized, or consequences that they expected to develop after the implementation. Outside of serious academic discussions, the term "socialism" refers to the whole cloud of ideas, or occasionally to the entire philosophy and mindset. Ditto the term "communism".
Incidentally, it has long been known that "the goal of socialism is communism". The quote is normally attributed to Lenin, almost certainly incorrectly, but the idea goes back at least as far as Marx. Marx didn't invent socialism, he devised a new strain of it because he didn't feel that the then-existing versions would be capable of transforming the existing order (aka western civilization) into something completely different.
To address your other main point, there isn't any part of the socialist cloud of ideas that does not require economic command. It requires slightly less command than the full communist idea cloud, but command none the less.
But remember, this is a hybrid world where pure absolutes don't exist. A country can decide to implement a dozen planks of a socialist platform and keep their economy reasonably free. But adding one more plank necessarily means adding a little more command authority somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
The calculate the results of an interaction, and then they measure it. So far, we've got a ton of these prediction/experiment couples accurate to better than one part in a billion, and at least one that is better than one part in a trillion.
Feynman once said that it was like measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles accurately to within the width of a human hair.
General relativity, for comparison, is accurate to about one part in 500 (orbit of Mercury), or one part in 5000 (Cassini). GR is much harder to test, of course, since we can't put the Sun and Mercury in a lab and isolate just the one interaction that we want to measure.
Even better. Now each page he ever touched is going to have a section saying "XXX paid some guy to delete YYY from this page, which they didn't want you to read."
This is a bit like saying that the horse industry must sabotage all of the successful pegasus farms around the world, lest people demand winged horses.
Victor Davis Hanson makes a good argument that the primary cause of WW2 was that Germany was allowed to surrender in France and thus were not forced to accept defeat the way they would have if Germany had been invaded. He isn't convinced by the theory that peace conditions were so onerous that they played much of a role.
When I was a kid, we didn't have any of these newfangled muons. We had to make do with our old mu mesons, and we liked it just fine that way.
Zero the Hero - not technically a Cannibal Corpse song, but a Black Sabbath cover found on the Hammer Smashed Face EP. ( Ace Ventura cameo)
I haven't really kept up. Sirius/XM has a more-or-less death metal channel that I sometimes flip to when there is a commercial on another channel. I occasionally hear something I like, but rarely. Even more rare is hearing classic death metal that I'm already familiar with.
P.S. Evisceration Plague sounds, to my ears, a lot like old Deicide.
Ordinarily, the electronics to set the state of a qubit are external to the cryogenic chamber that houses the device, and the state is fed in through coaxial cables. They made a version that can reside inside the cryogenic chamber.
External programming wasn't ever going to scale up. Even if they managed to get it down to 1 cable per qubit, that wasn't going to scale either.
Since I mostly follow the software side of quantum computing, I was expecting something entirely different. There is a quantum algorithm that can "solve" any problem that can be presented as a reversible circuit. What this article is talking about isn't a circuit in that sense, and it isn't a problem in that sense, and it hasn't been solved in that sense.
In my mind, this is more of a "device" which is in line with the terminology we use for other specialized CMOS structures. And it is more like "overcoming an engineering hurdle" than "solving one of QC's biggest problems".
But still quite impressive.
Lurking deep in the bowels of an emulated System 36, buried under layers of middleware, obscured by COBOL, is a faithful RPG reproduction of a stack of punch cards from the 30s or 40s. IBM's unholy integration of Java and PHP has exposed this ancient evil to the world once again. Why, young web developer, would you create a new list of ethnicities when Websphere is happy to provide you with a system defined list? What could possibly go wrong?
Huawei is not a private company. It is a state-run institution. The only private companies in China are small to medium operations. Everything big enough to be strategically important is owned and/or managed by the Chinese army or the Chinese Communist Party.
Americans tend to assume that the rest of the world is like the US, but it isn't. Here, we have private companies. They are usually willing to cooperate to some extent with the government, but they are still mostly privately owned and managed. That is approximately the current situation throughout most of Western Civilization, but it is actually quite rare elsewhere.
Most importantly, China does not run on that model at all. The Chinese Communist Party owns the government and military, which in turn owns almost all of the industry and technology.
Imagine if the NSA got into the business of building cell phone network equipment using chips produced by the Air Force Cyber Command's semiconductor foundry and financed as a joint venture by the CIA and the Pentagon. No big deal, right?
Or rather, watch the damn video before commenting. This is probably among the 10 worst summaries I've read on this site, and I've been here just about every day since nearly the beginning.
This isn't a problem about parents uploading videos of their kids, or of kids uploading their own videos. It isn't about the videos at all.
The problem is that there is a side of youtube that most of us would never find on our own. But if you know it is there, you can get to it with one search and two clicks, and shown in the video.
Most of the videos there have been downloaded from other users and re-uploaded under a different account so that the parents and kids have no idea this is happening. The comments on the re-uploaded videos are full of creepy comments and timestamps to suggestive moments, or to other videos.
Once down the rabbit hole, all of the recommended video links are to other videos of the same type with the same disgusting comments and links.
But what if we invited you in for an interview about a product that your company is making which is saving millions of lives every year? Would you agree to drink it then if that was the bait that was used for the ambush?
It is totally unreasonable for you to decline to drink a liquid that we say is your product, even if it is an industrial chemical produced and bottled on an assembly line that wasn't designed, cleaned or inspected for producing products intended for human consumption.
You are looking at lifetime, and his numbers are annual. They are pretty much the same data presented in different ways. There is just enough difference that I think you are also using estimates from different annual reports.
When you say "hard science", do you mean IQ?
I'm astonished that we are still paying good money for researchers to confirm this very simple fact over and over again.
No, it is a couple of miles inland from the border.
And it really isn't like anyone was planning to build the wall through the launchpad either. The article says that they've been contacted about letting people in to do a site survey but haven't yet.
Getting into orbit involves more than just going up. You need lateral momentum too. Gravity is always pointed straight down towards the earth, but if you are moving sideways fast enough, you'll "miss" as you plummet towards your doom, and if you always miss, we call that "orbit".
That's the anyone-can-understand-it version. The more mathy types will understand that adding two perpendicular vectors gives a diagonal. If you know a kid at about the right stage of learning this sort of thing, and who is interested in rockets, you can sneak a preview of calculus into his education four or five years early by showing that adding the vectors of smaller and smaller time increments yields a curve - the limit as delta-t approaches zero.
So that's why we launch most things to the east. The equatorial thing is for a different reason. Orbits are planar and that plane goes through the center of the earth (really the mutual center of mass of the system, but close enough). That plane also includes your launch site, so your initial orbit is inclined by the same amount as your starting latitude.
Changing the orbital plane's inclination is the most expensive maneuver that a spacecraft might have to do, so we try to launch as close to the intended orbit as we can. For equatorial satellites, that is as close to the equator as possible. Add the desire to launch eastward, and the desire that the flight path not be over population (for safety) and you get Cape Canaveral.
If you want a polar orbit, for example so that the earth's rotation will (eventually and repeatedly) bring the whole world under the lens of your spy satellite, you want a more northerly launch site so you get Vandenberg Air Force Base. It is only about 6 degrees further north, but it helps. The launch path is towards the south pole, over the ocean, again for safety.
In reality, things are a little bit more complicated. Boost vehicles generally have a little bit more than the absolute bare minimum amount of fuel needed to reach the starting orbit. This capacity is used to buy the spacecraft a little bit more initial altitude, or to buy a slightly more desirable initial plane inclination, or to buy a little bit more initial circularity, or some combination of those.
Regarding the wall, eventually the whole thing will need to be done. A while back, we built walls on the "easy" areas, but over time that traffic just diverted to more difficult and dangerous sections of the border. To illustrate this, at least one of the two kids who died recently crossed in an area that did not have a barrier because during the previous round of barrier construction, that section of border was considered to be too dangerous to cross on foot.
Fashion integrates the past. The 2020 design incorporates the 2019 design, the 2018 design, the 2017 design, etc...
If we get the 2030` design in 2020, then we will get the 2040` design in 2021, etc. By the time 2030 gets here, no one would ever actually design the 2030` design because the 2029 design, the 2028 design, etc were changed. The actual 2030 design will bear no resemblance to the old 2030` design.
(Those ticks should represent "prime", which I don't think I can do properly here on slashdot.)
You may be surprised to hear this, but we already know how to create synthetic motor fuels literally from air. We don't do it because with high electricity costs, it isn't economically feasible. With cheap electricity, it is very practical.
We are currently in the transition to a middle state, where the TCO of an electrochemical storage system is approaching the TCO of the petroleum-derived internal combustion fuel system. It is not currently known whether or not this middle state will ever be stable.
And no, he didn't think that the damage to Saddan's regime would have happened as quickly as it did because of the war, and he may have been expressing a bit of hyperbole about the magnitude. But the point was that for the same amount of money, we could have set ourselves on a course to eventually withdraw our funding from the various evil despots in that region.
Back in the mid 2000s, Jerry Pournelle was saying that we should have spent the Iraq War money on nuclear power instead. The first year cost something like $100 billion. We could have spent the first 20 billion (or whatever) of that developing a better nuclear power plant and refining the design to the point where subsequent plants would cost $1 billion each.
The financial hit to Saddam's oil revenue would have done about the same damage to him as the war did, and we' have somewhere between 50 and 80 brand new, state of the art, top of the line nuclear plants generating cheap power until 2050.
Personally, I prefer government small and would rather private industry tackle a project like this. But since we seem to be committed to tossing a few trillion dollars into the bonfire every year with no end in sight, why not push for something like this and at least have a chance to get something useful out of the deal?
While we are at it, we should return (federal) Congressional districts back to their original size - about 30,000 citizens per Representative.
Yes, that is about 10,000 members. Impossible to do now while they all have to meet physically in a single room in DC, but trivial when their office is in the district they purport to represent.
Well, it is 6 below zero (F), but the skies were perfectly clear for me. I was worried because the forecast for tonight has been saying "overcast" for days.
It wasn't nearly as impressive as the solar eclipse of 2017, but still pretty neat.
We've got snow cover here, so it is surprisingly bright with a full moon - enough light to read a book by, or drive without your headlights. As the penumbra moved in, I couldn't tell any difference looking at the moon, but I did notice that it was getting dark out. As the umbra moved in, it was plainly visible, and kinda screwy-looking. Many years ago, I got in the habit of reading partial phases of the moon as a pointer towards the present position of the sun, so it was odd that to me, the moon looked like it was pointing to a sun just under the northwest horizon.
Also, we've had a virtual fence before. Janet Napolitano decided that it wasn't working, and turned it off. A physical wall can't be turned off on a whim.
Can you cite the statute you are referring to here?
The process you describe isn't quite right. It is mostly right for small clinics, but misses the part where the medical finance companies are generally playing a similar game in reverse. "They billed us $300 for this. We'll send them a check for $120 and see if they take it." etc.
What really happens on a larger scale is that the hospital makes a budget that they think they are going to spend next year, and they estimate how many of each billing line item they will generate next year. Each medical finance company does similar calculations based on the number of subscribers they expect to have, and what their demographics suggest they are going to consume in services.
Then, the hospital's accountants sit down with the accountants from the other side, and they negotiate a flat global price change, for example a 2% increase on everything. They also negotiate specific line items, which is where the medical finance company tries to get a better deal on things they expect their subscribers to be using a lot of, and where hospitals try to cover unusual increases in supply costs or staff time.
Actually, it is one step more complicated, in that groups of hospitals and groups of medical finance companies negotiate together, which is what is meant by "in-network" On the lower end (smaller clinics), the "network" is generally a take-it-or-leave-it choice to accept a published price list.
In addition to the one root idea, schools of though developed spelling out corollary ideas - things that were thought to be either necessary for the core idea to be realized, or consequences that they expected to develop after the implementation. Outside of serious academic discussions, the term "socialism" refers to the whole cloud of ideas, or occasionally to the entire philosophy and mindset. Ditto the term "communism".
Incidentally, it has long been known that "the goal of socialism is communism". The quote is normally attributed to Lenin, almost certainly incorrectly, but the idea goes back at least as far as Marx. Marx didn't invent socialism, he devised a new strain of it because he didn't feel that the then-existing versions would be capable of transforming the existing order (aka western civilization) into something completely different.
To address your other main point, there isn't any part of the socialist cloud of ideas that does not require economic command. It requires slightly less command than the full communist idea cloud, but command none the less.
But remember, this is a hybrid world where pure absolutes don't exist. A country can decide to implement a dozen planks of a socialist platform and keep their economy reasonably free. But adding one more plank necessarily means adding a little more command authority somewhere.