The Chinese sponsor students to come to the U.S. with the express goal sometimes of infiltrating research staffs and supplying tech info back to China.
Over here to learn, you say? And there was i thinking that all those chinese students in our universities were here to get pissed and eat kebabs like the rest of us. The swines!
The lock in is that if your want to start selling music, but don't actually make the music, it is impossible to get the labels to allow you unless the music is DRM'd. As such it is (morally if not legally) anticompetitive against Napster et al.
You can never expect more from business week. I have not seen a business journal that more obviously shill's for whoever happens to be buying adspace at the time. Even when they're not doing that they just take the first opinion they come across. Now I have no problem with business media, the FT and WSJ are fantastic and the Economist is IMO the most insightful and well researched journal I've seen in any non-academic field. But BW is just trash.
Automated systems do not allow for judgement calls
Perhaps not as they are currently implemented, but it may not be too hard to do. If you have an automated system that detects all speeding infringements, then they can be programmed to only trigger (ie send you a fine) after a certain number of infringements has happened (weighted by their seriousness, and perhaps normalized by the average weekly mileage of that vehicle). This has the advantage that it is far less arbitrary than being pulled over by a cop who is randomly pissed off and wants to take it out on someone. It also excludes the usual/. argument of "but what if i'm trying to get someone to hospital quickly".
Yes, speed is a contributing factor to the severity of the accident, but not to whether or not the accident actually occurs.
Suppose someone is driving in a residential area at 40 rather than 30 and a kid walks into the street. Assuming deceleration is linear, the stopping distance increases quadratically, in this case by a factor of almost 1.8. Most likely this means that the probability of hitting him/her doubles.
Whilst the initial probability of colision p is caused by the child (who is being careless but not breaking the law), the remaining 0.8p is caused by the driver breaking the law. As such I would be happy for this kind of device to be used in residential areas.
As another example consider driving on narrow country roads. At low speeds it is theoretically impossible to skid out whereas at higher speeds it is very possible. Of course a good driver would know exactly how fast he can get away with, but at the same time a lesser driver would not, and so we see that speed is indeed a contributory factor, if not the full story.
Yes, I see what you are saying now. Perhaps I'm wrong (I'm glad I put in the disclaimers!), I'll think about it a bit more.
The thought that immediately spring to mind, though, is:
Does the quantum algorithm for factorising arbitrary numbers require a bounded number of qubits? Or does the number of qubits required increase as the size of the input increases? If the number of qubits increases (as I suspect it must do - otherwise where do you store the initial data?), then the state space increases exponentially and so the number of computations you can do in parallel may be expected to increase exponentially, nicely cancelling the exponential number of computations required classically. If this is all true (and I have a hunch that it is) then it would suggest that the advantage of a qc is that it's computational power increases exponentially wrt its storage, in contrast to a standard computer whose power is unchanged wrt its storage. So as a cheezy/. analogy, it's like saying that for every extra digit in the encryption scheme i'll double the number of computers you can use to crack it.
The reason I am skeptical about the idea of determinism playing an explicitly important role in the scheme is that AFAIK the only law that actually gets used is the scrodinger equation, and this is deterministic. If I wasn't so lazy I'd check to see if this fact was true;-). Presumably a measurement is made eventually to extract the actual result, but I'm betting that the system is already in the relevant eigenstate, hence the 'random' event happens with probability 1.
It's all interesting stuff to think about though, so thanks for the comments:)
I feel like i'm getting in above my head here, but what the hell...
Turing machines have no problem factorising large primes. This is because turing machines are theoretical devices that have an infinite storage and can process an infinite number of instructions. Desktop computers are not turing machines, and their finite speed means that whilst they can factorise large numbers or invert the various crypto functions they can't do it quickly enough to be useful.
Now to say that we can precisely reproduce the effects any deterministic law using classical physics is plain wrong. For example a black hole is deterministic (as is all of GR) yet that doesn't mean you can study black holes in Newtonian physics. In the case of quantum computation it is not the lack indeterminism that gets in the way of standard computers, it is the lack of a tensor direct productstate space, along with a dynamical law which acts on all of this state space.
Now this is where I get speculative...
The reason quantum computing can do certain exponential-time calulations in linear time is that it does the calculation on an exponentially large state space, all of these calculations being done at the same time. Consider this analogy...
Suppose you wish to calculate the cosine of an angle. What you could do is take a unit length stick, rotate it by said angle, project it back down to the starting orientation and measure that. If you wanted to calculate the cosines of two angles, alpha and beta, and were prepared to build a three dimensional machine then you could take your unit stick lying in the x-axis, rotate it by alpha in the z-axis by beta in the y-axis, then project it down to the xy-plane to find cos(alpha) and project it down to the xz-plane to find cos(beta). But what is the point in doing this, you might ask? Why not just rotate by alpha in x-axis and measure, then reset and rotate by beta in x-axis and measure? The reason is that it is possible to do the two rotations in just one rotation*, so long as you orientate your rotating device appropriately**. What this gives you is two calculations in just one operation. Now you can probably imagine some n-dimensional device that can calculate numerous*** cosines by doing a single rotation of a vector in its higher dimensional space, then reading off the components in each dimension. The problem with this scheme is firstly that there are only three spatial dimensions to play with in the real world, and secondly that even if there were more dimensions, the scaling is only polynomial which might not be worthwhile. You can probably now see how quantum computation is going to work - you find a 2^n state space, set it up in some simple initial condition, do a rotation**** of this huge space, thereby doing 2^n calculations, then read off the answer. The theoretical problem for QC is trying to work out exactly which rotation to do*****. The practical problem is to try not to read off the answer too soon.
** It may seem like i've actually assumed the answer of the question in the method used to calculate it. In practice, it may be that the particular layout of the machine makes it easy to do this composition without actually having to calculate the cosines.
*** In fact, the 'computational power' of this device is quadratic, not just linear as one might think.
**** Actually it's the complex-number version of a rotation, a unitary transformation.
Brain drain from the US? As a scientist in the UK it pains me to admit that the US academic institutions are the best in the world - probably 15 or more of the top 20 are american. This is due to - amongst other things - the fact that you can get paid 50% more to do the same work, but in the US. If you go to some top university in america you'll prob find that the majority of faculty are foreign. So I think you should be a bit more proud of your country than you seem to be.
Now I admit this is from a university perspective, but most of the work on super-speculative research like QC gets done at universities, at least AFAIK.
Disclaimer IAAQP but IANAQCP. Some details may not be right.
I believe that the actual 'computation' part of the dynamics in quantum computers is purely deterministic. You see quantum physics has two (arguably) independent processes: the deterministic 'schrodinger equation' and the non-deterministic 'state reduction' aka 'measurement' aka 'observation' process.
One of the major differences between classical physics and quantum physics is that the size of the state space of classical physics is linear, eg if 1 particle can store 3 real numbers (if you store the number as its x,y,z position) then 10 particles can store 30 real numbers, whereas the size of the state space of quantum physics grows exponentially when you add more particles. To extract information from a quantum system you need to use the non-deterministic measurement process, and it happens that you can't extract all the information from the state space, more or less you can only get at the linearly sized classical portion of it. BUT, what you can do is use the (deterministic) schrodinger equation to manipulate and 'rotate' this huge quantum state space such that the answer appears within the small, classical, linearly-sized window that the measurement process can get at.
When the measurement is done all the 'information' outside of the window is trashed - which is related to the uncertainty principle. AFAIK the biggest stumbling block of QC is that it is extremely difficult to let the schrodinger equation do it's business without accidentally inducing a measurement before the answer has appeared and trashing the information. This is usually called decoherence.
Philosophers' ponderings in their atriums, witch doctors' reasoning from 'first principles,' priest's divine revelations: none of these have yielded any significant and sustained advance in technology EVER.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. The idea of falsification being the central tenet of the scientific method is a new one, first explicitly written down by Popper early this century. Before this, scientific method was seen as making theories that are as correct as possible. Whilst Popper was a scientist, he was much more of a philosopher and for sure he will be remembered for his ideas in the philosophy of science.
If you need a definition of the scientific method, any grade school science textbook will give it to you.
Now I am a scientist, and whilst this might be an artifact of the poor english educational system, I never came across a definition of scientific method at 'grade school' that mentioned falsification.
The scientific method is not up for debate.
Actually, if you survey a large group of scientists and ask them to give a definition of scientific method, the answers will not all be the same. This even extends to the big-shots - SmolincriticisesSusskind for his theory being unscientific, but obsiously if there was no ambiguity in scientific method either Susskind would already know this or Smolin would be an idiot...clearly there is debate about what constitutes science.
Now I'm not saying that any of these ID people are talking anything other than BS, but you are incorrect to say that scientific method is a solved problem.
AFAIK gravitons have not been shown to exist, and there is no consistent theory which predicts them. Currently mainstream science is still at the level of 'gravity is geometry' a la Einstein.
You should check out the Economist too. The articles are written by people who are truly intelligent and clued in on what they are writing about, and there is generally a very high content level.
The average salary for a programmer in california is $73000. How can you claim the industry doesn't want them? To me $73,000 sounds like a huge salary, and the UK isn't exactly 3rd world itself.
And don't say there isn't enough oil/gold/... it's just that it's too expensive. But I suppose everyone already knows this.
When you realise that tech companies ask for more students to go through american universities and for more people in general to take up programming, it is for the same reason that the US tries to persuade OPEC nations to pump more oil. When seen in this light none of this seems particularly surprising (or evil, for that matter).
Does US law protect the freedom of speech of foreigners? Is there anything in the constitution that says that a french person has the right to register any domain name? This question isn't rhetorical - I'd quite like to know.
And who's to say they (or you) have the authority to dictate how language is used?
Most people, quite reasonably, couldn't give a toss what a 'real hacker' thinks the word shoud mean - to them it conjures up a nice image of someone with a machete cutting through the internals of your software to get at what they want to - more power to them.
If you were a 'real hacker' and didn't want to be confused with a normal hacker then perhaps you should remove your head from your ass and call yourself something unambiguous.
Lets suppose there's 1 bad hacker to 100 good hackers. Now lets suppose that 1 motivated bad guy can hack 1000 users, whereas the good hacker sticks to proof-of-concept. Suddenly the number of bad hackers appears to outnumber the good by 10:1.
Whilst non-US customers of US websites may have difficulty resolving the names, I'm sure the spammers are astute enough to just use a public nameserver in US teritory.
The big question is whether there remains enough of a spark of Freedom...
Why don't you take a holiday in western Europe some day to see what it is actually like here. Personally I recommend Paris, but there are lovelycities in everycountry.
The issue is, that your beloved USA would never be allowed to join if it tried.
Nice point...the USA would not be allowed in because of the death penalty. And that can clearly be seen as some sort of right - the right to life.
Additionally, it is often said that if you aren't given an explicit right to something then your chances of having it are negligible. If it happens that domain names aren't covered by freedom of speech (I know little of US law but it seems likely) then you're very much on your own. The UK is the complete opposite; we have very few explicit rights, and yet it is still one of the most open countries in the world (along with most other 'western' countries). And so my point is that constitutional rights are not always a good indicator of actual freedoms.
Slashdot Mirror
Next he'll be telling us they even go to the prof's office hours and laugh at the crap jokes....oh shit!
Over here to learn, you say? And there was i thinking that all those chinese students in our universities were here to get pissed and eat kebabs like the rest of us. The swines!
The lock in is that if your want to start selling music, but don't actually make the music, it is impossible to get the labels to allow you unless the music is DRM'd. As such it is (morally if not legally) anticompetitive against Napster et al.
You can never expect more from business week. I have not seen a business journal that more obviously shill's for whoever happens to be buying adspace at the time. Even when they're not doing that they just take the first opinion they come across. Now I have no problem with business media, the FT and WSJ are fantastic and the Economist is IMO the most insightful and well researched journal I've seen in any non-academic field. But BW is just trash.
Just wondering, if we don't see regulations on blogs, will this prove you wrong about your politicians and monkeys theory?
Perhaps not as they are currently implemented, but it may not be too hard to do. If you have an automated system that detects all speeding infringements, then they can be programmed to only trigger (ie send you a fine) after a certain number of infringements has happened (weighted by their seriousness, and perhaps normalized by the average weekly mileage of that vehicle). This has the advantage that it is far less arbitrary than being pulled over by a cop who is randomly pissed off and wants to take it out on someone. It also excludes the usual /. argument of "but what if i'm trying to get someone to hospital quickly".
Suppose someone is driving in a residential area at 40 rather than 30 and a kid walks into the street. Assuming deceleration is linear, the stopping distance increases quadratically, in this case by a factor of almost 1.8. Most likely this means that the probability of hitting him/her doubles.
Whilst the initial probability of colision p is caused by the child (who is being careless but not breaking the law), the remaining 0.8p is caused by the driver breaking the law. As such I would be happy for this kind of device to be used in residential areas.
As another example consider driving on narrow country roads. At low speeds it is theoretically impossible to skid out whereas at higher speeds it is very possible. Of course a good driver would know exactly how fast he can get away with, but at the same time a lesser driver would not, and so we see that speed is indeed a contributory factor, if not the full story.
The thought that immediately spring to mind, though, is:
Does the quantum algorithm for factorising arbitrary numbers require a bounded number of qubits? Or does the number of qubits required increase as the size of the input increases? If the number of qubits increases (as I suspect it must do - otherwise where do you store the initial data?), then the state space increases exponentially and so the number of computations you can do in parallel may be expected to increase exponentially, nicely cancelling the exponential number of computations required classically. If this is all true (and I have a hunch that it is) then it would suggest that the advantage of a qc is that it's computational power increases exponentially wrt its storage, in contrast to a standard computer whose power is unchanged wrt its storage. So as a cheezy /. analogy, it's like saying that for every extra digit in the encryption scheme i'll double the number of computers you can use to crack it.
The reason I am skeptical about the idea of determinism playing an explicitly important role in the scheme is that AFAIK the only law that actually gets used is the scrodinger equation, and this is deterministic. If I wasn't so lazy I'd check to see if this fact was true ;-). Presumably a measurement is made eventually to extract the actual result, but I'm betting that the system is already in the relevant eigenstate, hence the 'random' event happens with probability 1.
It's all interesting stuff to think about though, so thanks for the comments :)
Turing machines have no problem factorising large primes. This is because turing machines are theoretical devices that have an infinite storage and can process an infinite number of instructions. Desktop computers are not turing machines, and their finite speed means that whilst they can factorise large numbers or invert the various crypto functions they can't do it quickly enough to be useful.
Now to say that we can precisely reproduce the effects any deterministic law using classical physics is plain wrong. For example a black hole is deterministic (as is all of GR) yet that doesn't mean you can study black holes in Newtonian physics. In the case of quantum computation it is not the lack indeterminism that gets in the way of standard computers, it is the lack of a tensor direct product state space, along with a dynamical law which acts on all of this state space.
Now this is where I get speculative...
The reason quantum computing can do certain exponential-time calulations in linear time is that it does the calculation on an exponentially large state space, all of these calculations being done at the same time. Consider this analogy...
Suppose you wish to calculate the cosine of an angle. What you could do is take a unit length stick, rotate it by said angle, project it back down to the starting orientation and measure that. If you wanted to calculate the cosines of two angles, alpha and beta, and were prepared to build a three dimensional machine then you could take your unit stick lying in the x-axis, rotate it by alpha in the z-axis by beta in the y-axis, then project it down to the xy-plane to find cos(alpha) and project it down to the xz-plane to find cos(beta). But what is the point in doing this, you might ask? Why not just rotate by alpha in x-axis and measure, then reset and rotate by beta in x-axis and measure? The reason is that it is possible to do the two rotations in just one rotation*, so long as you orientate your rotating device appropriately**. What this gives you is two calculations in just one operation. Now you can probably imagine some n-dimensional device that can calculate numerous*** cosines by doing a single rotation of a vector in its higher dimensional space, then reading off the components in each dimension. The problem with this scheme is firstly that there are only three spatial dimensions to play with in the real world, and secondly that even if there were more dimensions, the scaling is only polynomial which might not be worthwhile. You can probably now see how quantum computation is going to work - you find a 2^n state space, set it up in some simple initial condition, do a rotation**** of this huge space, thereby doing 2^n calculations, then read off the answer. The theoretical problem for QC is trying to work out exactly which rotation to do*****. The practical problem is to try not to read off the answer too soon.
* This is because 3D rotations form a group.
** It may seem like i've actually assumed the answer of the question in the method used to calculate it. In practice, it may be that the particular layout of the machine makes it easy to do this composition without actually having to calculate the cosines.
*** In fact, the 'computational power' of this device is quadratic, not just linear as one might think.
**** Actually it's the complex-number version of a rotation, a unitary transformation.
***** Deutsch, Grover, etc.
Now I admit this is from a university perspective, but most of the work on super-speculative research like QC gets done at universities, at least AFAIK.
I believe that the actual 'computation' part of the dynamics in quantum computers is purely deterministic. You see quantum physics has two (arguably) independent processes: the deterministic 'schrodinger equation' and the non-deterministic 'state reduction' aka 'measurement' aka 'observation' process.
One of the major differences between classical physics and quantum physics is that the size of the state space of classical physics is linear, eg if 1 particle can store 3 real numbers (if you store the number as its x,y,z position) then 10 particles can store 30 real numbers, whereas the size of the state space of quantum physics grows exponentially when you add more particles. To extract information from a quantum system you need to use the non-deterministic measurement process, and it happens that you can't extract all the information from the state space, more or less you can only get at the linearly sized classical portion of it. BUT, what you can do is use the (deterministic) schrodinger equation to manipulate and 'rotate' this huge quantum state space such that the answer appears within the small, classical, linearly-sized window that the measurement process can get at.
When the measurement is done all the 'information' outside of the window is trashed - which is related to the uncertainty principle. AFAIK the biggest stumbling block of QC is that it is extremely difficult to let the schrodinger equation do it's business without accidentally inducing a measurement before the answer has appeared and trashing the information. This is usually called decoherence.
Sorry, but this is nonsense. The idea of falsification being the central tenet of the scientific method is a new one, first explicitly written down by Popper early this century. Before this, scientific method was seen as making theories that are as correct as possible. Whilst Popper was a scientist, he was much more of a philosopher and for sure he will be remembered for his ideas in the philosophy of science.
If you need a definition of the scientific method, any grade school science textbook will give it to you.
Now I am a scientist, and whilst this might be an artifact of the poor english educational system, I never came across a definition of scientific method at 'grade school' that mentioned falsification.
The scientific method is not up for debate.Actually, if you survey a large group of scientists and ask them to give a definition of scientific method, the answers will not all be the same. This even extends to the big-shots - Smolin criticises Susskind for his theory being unscientific, but obsiously if there was no ambiguity in scientific method either Susskind would already know this or Smolin would be an idiot...clearly there is debate about what constitutes science.
Now I'm not saying that any of these ID people are talking anything other than BS, but you are incorrect to say that scientific method is a solved problem.
AFAIK gravitons have not been shown to exist, and there is no consistent theory which predicts them. Currently mainstream science is still at the level of 'gravity is geometry' a la Einstein.
You should check out the Economist too. The articles are written by people who are truly intelligent and clued in on what they are writing about, and there is generally a very high content level.
The average salary for a programmer in california is $73000. How can you claim the industry doesn't want them? To me $73,000 sounds like a huge salary, and the UK isn't exactly 3rd world itself.
When you realise that tech companies ask for more students to go through american universities and for more people in general to take up programming, it is for the same reason that the US tries to persuade OPEC nations to pump more oil. When seen in this light none of this seems particularly surprising (or evil, for that matter).
Does US law protect the freedom of speech of foreigners? Is there anything in the constitution that says that a french person has the right to register any domain name? This question isn't rhetorical - I'd quite like to know.
There is a fire. You can't use the stairs or elevators.
A)You break the glass, step out and walk away.
B)You don't break the glass and suffocated because of the smoke.
Yes, except if
Most people, quite reasonably, couldn't give a toss what a 'real hacker' thinks the word shoud mean - to them it conjures up a nice image of someone with a machete cutting through the internals of your software to get at what they want to - more power to them.
If you were a 'real hacker' and didn't want to be confused with a normal hacker then perhaps you should remove your head from your ass and call yourself something unambiguous.
Lets suppose there's 1 bad hacker to 100 good hackers. Now lets suppose that 1 motivated bad guy can hack 1000 users, whereas the good hacker sticks to proof-of-concept. Suddenly the number of bad hackers appears to outnumber the good by 10:1.
Whilst non-US customers of US websites may have difficulty resolving the names, I'm sure the spammers are astute enough to just use a public nameserver in US teritory.
The big question is whether there remains enough of a spark of Freedom...
Why don't you take a holiday in western Europe some day to see what it is actually like here. Personally I recommend Paris, but there are lovely cities in every country.
Oh no! That's entirely different matter...
Nice point...the USA would not be allowed in because of the death penalty. And that can clearly be seen as some sort of right - the right to life.
Additionally, it is often said that if you aren't given an explicit right to something then your chances of having it are negligible. If it happens that domain names aren't covered by freedom of speech (I know little of US law but it seems likely) then you're very much on your own. The UK is the complete opposite; we have very few explicit rights, and yet it is still one of the most open countries in the world (along with most other 'western' countries). And so my point is that constitutional rights are not always a good indicator of actual freedoms.