Love his obvious disdain for capitalism vis-a-vis "commercial greed."
Why, pray tell, is OLPC's original mission essentially dead in the water? Because of innovation, competition, and the marketplace mechanism, not because it lead the world to cheap hardware. Platitudinal NGOs started by tenured academics are created in a vacuum, away from market forces or awareness, living in ivory towers of unlimited funding.
OLPC was/is an NGO charity case, relying on the largesse of the white guilt complex for the third world to support it.
Yea, computer hardware is cheap, faster, and more accessible than it's ever been, to the point where it's at disposable pricing even for the third world. Whether it's Android or RPi or Arduino, we're well into an era of a complete computer that costs $20 for all the parts. Tablets are $50-$75 a pop.
And you know what OLPC is selling their "commercial" Android tabs for? $150! Far more than what it really costs to make. One can presume the profits will be used to fund additional tabs for the third world but the more likely scenario is those profits will go into the pockets of guys like Arboleda and "honorariums" for Negroponte and his ilk.
Of course, it's never been just about the price. They are the "One Laptop Per Child" project, not the "$100 laptop" project. As an example of "commercial greed" hindering the project, Intel invested a lot of effort in killing the project, possibly because the XO-1 uses VIA (subsequently AMD) Geode processors. Intel's investments against OLPC include sending their marketing department to meet many of the governments that OLPC met with, immediately after OLPC met them, to try and convince them to use Classmate machines instead. The Classmate machines themselves were an investment against OLPC, both by their existence and because Intel subsidised the cost of each one (since they were way more expensive than the XO-1, despite having terrible screens, poor batteries, toxic backlights, etc.). The arguments in favour of the Classmate essentially boiled down to "this is a real laptop because it can run Office, unlike the XO-1 which is just a toy"; an argument which might appeal to a government worker, who likely uses nothing but Office, but is completely irrelevant to education.
The hand crank is an accessory you can get for it if you want one. I don't think they included it because most remote villages in African already have some way to generate power via hand crank, windmill or whatever so people can charge their now ubiquitous cellphones. So it would be an extra cost without much value.
It turned out that building a crank into the case put tremendous mechanical stresses on it, which would require more heavy-duty construction to prevent it ripping apart. An external accessory, plugged in via a wire, doesn't have this issue.
We need to start outsourcing our problems to Nature. How about we genetically engineer corn which can only be eaten by organisms which excrete efficient batteries, BitCoins and flying cars?
But, no - the Romans (usually) settled for taking a percent as slaves and then proceeding to absorb their culture, religion, and the better parts of what was left. Then they built roads, utilities, entertainment, and a whole shitload of things that were pretty effing amazing - for the time.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
While exploring space is many people's dream. The cost is enormous and the US has so much debt now, should we really be investing in our dreams vs repairing roads and bridges?
Ears are an easy target because their function mainly comes from their shape; you could make them out of wood and they'd still do a semi-decent job. The problems being tackled here are making the right shape (presumably with a scaffold), getting the host body to maintain it (ie. hooking up the blood supply) and preventing rejection (by using the host's own stem cells).
On the other hand, making tissue that reliably synthesises vital chemicals, in the right quantities, is much more difficult. Thankfully, solving the problems listed above will *also* be useful to growing pancreatic tissue.
the Higgs Boson is one of the century's biggest discoveries.
Whilst this discovery is great, I really hope that you're wrong! Roughly 100 years ago Rutherford discovered the nucleus (1911 according to WIkipedia); but in the same century we subsequently discovered the protons and neutrons which make it up, the pions which moderate their interactions, as well as the quarks they're made of and the gluons which moderate their interactions, along with a bunch of other bosons and mesons. We also discovered General Relativity (Special was already known by 1905) and Quantum Mechanics (including the standard model), black holes, neutrinos, W and Z bosons, muon and tau leptons and anti-particles for the above, as well as inferring the Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy and we gave Thermodynamics an information-theoretic renaissance.
That's just in Physics alone!
A century ago there was no heavier-than-air flight, whilst these days we complain that the food on our £30 flight is crappy. Walking on the moon became so routine that the public lost interest and we stopped bothering! A century ago there was no genetics or germ theory. Computers were people that were good at sums. Experimentalists were attempting to transmit sound via radio waves.
I'm very much looking forward to this century's discoveries:)
. For one thing, string theory will probably need to be scrapped.
Not because of this. Supersymmetry and string theory address different problems and are more or less independent.
String theory builds on supersymmetry, so evidence of string theory would imply supersymmetry, but evidence of supersymmetry wouldn't imply string theory. Dually, evidence against string theory wouldn't kill supersymmetry, but evidence against supersymmetry would kill string theory.
Until, of course, some string theorist fudges the numbers to make it unfalsifiable again;)
If a person's age is over 105 years, they're somewhere around 99% likely to die within the next 5 years.
I advise that you never start a life insurance business! If someone has lived to 105, not only have they managed to avoid infant mortality (which accounts for many deaths and pulls average life expectancy down dramatically), but they've shown a remarkable ability to stay alive, ie. they're exactly the people whose deaths you *don't* want to bet on! Unless they already have a life-threatening condition, in which case you're cheating;)
Who will pay you for your time? If the software that I write is free?
Software is not free. It takes time and money to write, so get paid for your time. Once it's written, you've already been paid, so why not give it away for free?
Your model works if you are going to build software for a particular end user, but if you are trying for a group of people, than who is going to be the one that pays the bill.
Do it iteratively, eg. charge for making a basic framework and charge for adding features. Let each customer choose how far they're willing to go.
Organization X, Y, and Z needs a product to do something. I expect other similar organization would want this too. The work will take me 5 months to complete. I have a relationship with X but not with the others. I build for X they pay me for their time.
Sounds sensible.
Now normally for that they own the software and can choose to give it to the others or sell it or just hold onto it.
That's where you're going wrong. If you maintain copyrights over the code you write, you can release it however you want. Make it clear to the customer that they have free, perpetual access to the code, but so does everyone else.
Organization X who had paid me a lot of money to make the product usually doesn't want me to give it away to their competitors. So their competitors get the advantage at companies X expense.
Most software is for internal use (bug/issue tracking, reporting, HR, calendars, server admin, etc.) which don't give a competitive advantage other than allowing the business to operate. If X makes an inferior product to Y but Y fails due to bad internal software, then consumers are left with an inferior product; hence it's in everyone's interest to have mundane, internal software work as well as possible. Companies pay for solutions to their problems; if a company has an issue-tracking problem and they pay someone to fix it, and that person just-so-happens to solve it by writing an issue-tracking application, why would the company care who else uses the application? As long as they get what they paid for, their problem is solved.
If, on the other hand, an organisation like X has built their business model on exclusive access to software, then they're a proprietary software company and should be left to fail. They clearly don't care about sharing or cooperation. This applies to Web/cloud/*aaS stuff too. Although it's more rare, I've found work writing Free Software with a network-use clause (specifically ocPortal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... , which is under the CPAL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... ).
For plumbers you can't duplicate your work at near 0 cost. So your analogy is faulty.
Quite true, but at least it didn't involve a car;)
So how would a 100% GPL developer operate in a small business settings?
The same way most other people in the world do: get paid for your time.
Plumbers don't spend months installing pipework in the hope that someone might pay them at the end of it. They also don't lock the valves away and hold the key to ransom in an attempt to force such payment. They also don't meter your usage of the pipes they installed and cut you off if you don't pay (water utilities charge you for *fresh* water, but they don't charge you for recirculating the same stuff through your pipes).
Why should software developers think any differently?
PS: I get paid for writing Free Software, I have done at several companies. It's not difficult.
The reason that mobile apps have been so popular is that in many ways they offer a better experience to websites.
No, the reason is that Web sites must be heavily promoted for anyone to even realise they exist; this requires either being so useful that word-of-mouth works (difficult) or paying for ads (easy).
Compared to Web sites, apps offered:
* 'Free' advertising space in the app store
* Far fewer competitors
* The opportunity to become the go-to, de-facto standard for whatever mundane crap the app happens to do (eg. Angry Birds)
* An audience consisting entirely of people with too much money who are happy to part with it (ie. iPhone users)
All of the above points except for the last one apply to any new, incompatible platform; eg. Facebook apps, alternative OSes, browser extensions, consoles, etc. The key is the last one: an iPhone-using demographic is far more likely to give you some money than a general Web audience. That's why so many companies threw so much money into the app-making business.
Fast-forward a few years and all of these points have disappeared. Apps are no longer a small, exclusive club, so 'being an app' is no longer a competitive advantage. Every now and then a new platform will emerge (eg. Google Play), but they either quickly saturate or are ignored as too niche. Also, thanks to years of advertising targetted specifically towards iPhone/iPad owners (since it's seen as the highest-paying demographic) the idea has now emerged that these Apple devices are normal, everyday things, rather than high-end toys. This has eroded away most of the final point, for example this is from 2011 http://gizmodo.com/5871111/wah...
What Jeff seems to be saying is 'enough already'. There was some money to be made by the early land-grabbers, but these days the most reliable ways to monetise are using underhand tactics like encouraging addictive behaviour, making games unplayable without constant micropayments, getting children to spend their parent's money, selling private data, etc. At this point we should consider the experiment over and reasses the balance between usefulness and profitability in our software.
NOTE: I have nothing against those writing useful apps/sites/whatever and trying to make a living from doing so. I am criticising the armies of point-haired-bosses who direct vast resources towards making crap.
everyone has an email addr (not everyone has IM or wants to)
This. If I have to decide whether to agree to some EULA/contract/etc. before I'm allowed to talk to my friends, I will refuse to participate. Not only do I disagree with such false dilemmas, but I certainly don't want my 'contactability' held to ransom to encourage others to participate.
PS: Yes, I do use XMPP, but it's usage is so low that it's only really useful for work contacts (at my last two jobs everyone had a work XMPP account). Also, before anyone mentions it,/. allows anonymous cowards.
While interesting, it doesn't solve the most glaring assumption of Bell's inequality which is that the Universe is non-deterministic.
It's perfectly plausible that the Universe is deterministic, and hence the behaviour of the particles *and the experimenters* is pre-determined, ie. there is no choice in which measurement to take. Taking the determinism of the observers into account tends to be called "superdeterminism", and is necessarily a global property: either the whole Universe is superdeterministic, or nothing is deterministic. Bell's inequalities demonstrate this, since they cannot be explained by a *local* deterministic model, ie. a model which only involves properties of the particles (known as 'local hidden variables').
Note that superdeterminism doesn't necessarily rule out 'free will'. Personally I find the most elegant explanation of free will to be irreducibility: an irreducible process has no 'shortcuts'; the only way to predict its result is to run the process from start to finish. If, say, my mind is a deterministic but irreducible process, then a powerful-enough computer could predict my decisions exactly. However, I can still be said to have 'free will' because the computer can't take any shortcuts in its calculations: the only way it can predict my decisions is to run a perfect simulation of me and see what decisions that simulation makes, but in that case it's still (a perfect simulation of) 'me' making the decisions.
I'm not a fan of "we're being similated in some giant computer" arguments, since it goes against reductionism and Occam's Razor: rather than simplifying our understanding of the world, it adds a whole new "outside" world which we must also factor into our explanations.
However, there is a slight modification which makes this an excellent reductionist argument: get rid of the "outside" world. Rather than assuming the existence of a complex universe/multiverse/whatever with some number of dimensions, physical forces, etc. we can just assume the existence of some computational medium and take everything else to be part of its program. Since universal computers are all equivalent, it doesn't matter what the computational medium "is". It certainly doesn't have to be a physical device in some "outside" world, but even if it is, that outside world wouldn't need to be anywhere near as complex as our Universe. It could be a rule 110 cellular automaton, for example.
Boltzmann posed the question, what if the Universe is just a giant gas cloud, and all the structure we see is just a temporary statistical fluctuation? The refutation is that small fluctuations are far more likely than large ones, so when we look somewhere new, the odds are astronomically high that we would just see chaos; but we don't, we find more and more structure, from quarks and gluons all the way up to the cosmic web, implying a larger and larger fluctuation, which is highly unlikely.
However, we can apply the same argument to a cosmological computer: what if the Universe is just a giant computer, and all the structure we see is just a temporary statistical fluctuation *in the program*? In that case, we would expect small programs to be far more likely than large ones. In that case, it is highly likely that when we look somewhere new, we'll see *similar structure to what we've already seen*, since large differences would imply a larger (and less likely) program.
We can then apply the anthropic principle to both scenarios. The simplest gas fluctuation which allows intelligent observers would be a "Boltzmann brain", ie. a lone brain containing the thoughts you're thinking. The simplest computer program which allows intelligent observers would contain a few simple rules (ie. 'physical laws') and would begin with very little data but would rapidly expand to consume more memory once started. With such a limited set of instructions, the intelligence would have to 'emerge' from the interaction of these rules, which would be very unlikely but compensated for by operating on a vast dataset simultaneously. Sound familiar?;)
If this reduces Mozilla's reliance on Google's money then that can only be a good thing. Especially since Mozilla's main sponsor is now also a competitor:/
This thing runs on JosephsonJunctions, how exactly does that not meet requirement (2)?
(And sorry, but I stopped going down the list at this point.)
That's an implementation detail. My laptop uses semiconductors, but that doesn't make quantum phenomena fundamental to its operation. I could replace my CPU with a marble track and it would not affect its computational class. Can D-Wave's device be replaced by a purely classical implementation? AFAIK the jury's still out.
The transistors in your CPU are most definitely quantum in a meaningful way.
No they're not, by definition, since that is how I defined my use of the word 'meaningful' in that sentence. Specifically, they're not quantum in a 'meaningful' way because I can replace them with wooden see-saws http://digi-compii.com/
There are certainly other uses of the word "meaningful" which cover what you've said, but arguing over the definition of words is fruitless. In particular, disagreeing with my clarification of what I meant by the word is just silly.
D-Wave has Josephson junction qubits on their chip and couple them. Yet, somehow they are supposed to end up with a machine that is a classical annealer? Although the behavior of the box is exactly what you'd expect from a quantum annealer?
The issue isn't really whether it's a quantum annealer or not, it's whether quantum annealing is a classical algorithm (no, having the word 'quantum' in the title doesn't imply that it's impractical for a classical computer to implement). Since their machine can *only* do quantum annealing, they're pretty screwed if classical computers can also do quantum annealing, since classical computers have the benefit of decades of massive R&D budgets.
Slashdot Mirror
Love his obvious disdain for capitalism vis-a-vis "commercial greed."
Why, pray tell, is OLPC's original mission essentially dead in the water? Because of innovation, competition, and the marketplace mechanism, not because it lead the world to cheap hardware. Platitudinal NGOs started by tenured academics are created in a vacuum, away from market forces or awareness, living in ivory towers of unlimited funding.
OLPC was/is an NGO charity case, relying on the largesse of the white guilt complex for the third world to support it.
Yea, computer hardware is cheap, faster, and more accessible than it's ever been, to the point where it's at disposable pricing even for the third world. Whether it's Android or RPi or Arduino, we're well into an era of a complete computer that costs $20 for all the parts. Tablets are $50-$75 a pop.
And you know what OLPC is selling their "commercial" Android tabs for? $150! Far more than what it really costs to make. One can presume the profits will be used to fund additional tabs for the third world but the more likely scenario is those profits will go into the pockets of guys like Arboleda and "honorariums" for Negroponte and his ilk.
Of course, it's never been just about the price. They are the "One Laptop Per Child" project, not the "$100 laptop" project. As an example of "commercial greed" hindering the project, Intel invested a lot of effort in killing the project, possibly because the XO-1 uses VIA (subsequently AMD) Geode processors. Intel's investments against OLPC include sending their marketing department to meet many of the governments that OLPC met with, immediately after OLPC met them, to try and convince them to use Classmate machines instead. The Classmate machines themselves were an investment against OLPC, both by their existence and because Intel subsidised the cost of each one (since they were way more expensive than the XO-1, despite having terrible screens, poor batteries, toxic backlights, etc.). The arguments in favour of the Classmate essentially boiled down to "this is a real laptop because it can run Office, unlike the XO-1 which is just a toy"; an argument which might appeal to a government worker, who likely uses nothing but Office, but is completely irrelevant to education.
Last I checked, Intel are now on OLPC's board.
The hand crank is an accessory you can get for it if you want one. I don't think they included it because most remote villages in African already have some way to generate power via hand crank, windmill or whatever so people can charge their now ubiquitous cellphones. So it would be an extra cost without much value.
It turned out that building a crank into the case put tremendous mechanical stresses on it, which would require more heavy-duty construction to prevent it ripping apart. An external accessory, plugged in via a wire, doesn't have this issue.
We need to start outsourcing our problems to Nature. How about we genetically engineer corn which can only be eaten by organisms which excrete efficient batteries, BitCoins and flying cars?
What are your favorite alternatives that are "libre" free, rather than only gratis?
This seems pretty thorough: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
But, no - the Romans (usually) settled for taking a percent as slaves and then proceeding to absorb their culture, religion, and the better parts of what was left. Then they built roads, utilities, entertainment, and a whole shitload of things that were pretty effing amazing - for the time.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
"There's no need to use <relevant thing I don't know>, we can throw something together in <irrelevant thing I happen to know>"
"We should use <thing nobody knows> because <it's trendy>"
While exploring space is many people's dream. The cost is enormous and the US has so much debt now, should we really be investing in our dreams
vs repairing roads and bridges?
O RLY? http://costsmorethanspace.tumb...
Ears are an easy target because their function mainly comes from their shape; you could make them out of wood and they'd still do a semi-decent job. The problems being tackled here are making the right shape (presumably with a scaffold), getting the host body to maintain it (ie. hooking up the blood supply) and preventing rejection (by using the host's own stem cells).
On the other hand, making tissue that reliably synthesises vital chemicals, in the right quantities, is much more difficult. Thankfully, solving the problems listed above will *also* be useful to growing pancreatic tissue.
the Higgs Boson is one of the century's biggest discoveries.
Whilst this discovery is great, I really hope that you're wrong! Roughly 100 years ago Rutherford discovered the nucleus (1911 according to WIkipedia); but in the same century we subsequently discovered the protons and neutrons which make it up, the pions which moderate their interactions, as well as the quarks they're made of and the gluons which moderate their interactions, along with a bunch of other bosons and mesons. We also discovered General Relativity (Special was already known by 1905) and Quantum Mechanics (including the standard model), black holes, neutrinos, W and Z bosons, muon and tau leptons and anti-particles for the above, as well as inferring the Big Bang, dark matter and dark energy and we gave Thermodynamics an information-theoretic renaissance.
That's just in Physics alone!
A century ago there was no heavier-than-air flight, whilst these days we complain that the food on our £30 flight is crappy. Walking on the moon became so routine that the public lost interest and we stopped bothering! A century ago there was no genetics or germ theory. Computers were people that were good at sums. Experimentalists were attempting to transmit sound via radio waves.
I'm very much looking forward to this century's discoveries :)
. For one thing, string theory will probably need to be scrapped.
Not because of this. Supersymmetry and string theory address different problems and are more or less independent.
String theory builds on supersymmetry, so evidence of string theory would imply supersymmetry, but evidence of supersymmetry wouldn't imply string theory. Dually, evidence against string theory wouldn't kill supersymmetry, but evidence against supersymmetry would kill string theory.
Until, of course, some string theorist fudges the numbers to make it unfalsifiable again ;)
If a person's age is over 105 years, they're somewhere around 99% likely to die within the next 5 years.
I advise that you never start a life insurance business! If someone has lived to 105, not only have they managed to avoid infant mortality (which accounts for many deaths and pulls average life expectancy down dramatically), but they've shown a remarkable ability to stay alive, ie. they're exactly the people whose deaths you *don't* want to bet on! Unless they already have a life-threatening condition, in which case you're cheating ;)
Who will pay you for your time? If the software that I write is free?
Software is not free. It takes time and money to write, so get paid for your time. Once it's written, you've already been paid, so why not give it away for free?
Your model works if you are going to build software for a particular end user, but if you are trying for a group of people, than who is going to be the one that pays the bill.
Do it iteratively, eg. charge for making a basic framework and charge for adding features. Let each customer choose how far they're willing to go.
Organization X, Y, and Z needs a product to do something. I expect other similar organization would want this too. The work will take me 5 months to complete. I have a relationship with X but not with the others. I build for X they pay me for their time.
Sounds sensible.
Now normally for that they own the software and can choose to give it to the others or sell it or just hold onto it.
That's where you're going wrong. If you maintain copyrights over the code you write, you can release it however you want. Make it clear to the customer that they have free, perpetual access to the code, but so does everyone else.
Organization X who had paid me a lot of money to make the product usually doesn't want me to give it away to their competitors. So their competitors get the advantage at companies X expense.
Most software is for internal use (bug/issue tracking, reporting, HR, calendars, server admin, etc.) which don't give a competitive advantage other than allowing the business to operate. If X makes an inferior product to Y but Y fails due to bad internal software, then consumers are left with an inferior product; hence it's in everyone's interest to have mundane, internal software work as well as possible. Companies pay for solutions to their problems; if a company has an issue-tracking problem and they pay someone to fix it, and that person just-so-happens to solve it by writing an issue-tracking application, why would the company care who else uses the application? As long as they get what they paid for, their problem is solved.
If, on the other hand, an organisation like X has built their business model on exclusive access to software, then they're a proprietary software company and should be left to fail. They clearly don't care about sharing or cooperation. This applies to Web/cloud/*aaS stuff too. Although it's more rare, I've found work writing Free Software with a network-use clause (specifically ocPortal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O... , which is under the CPAL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... ).
For plumbers you can't duplicate your work at near 0 cost. So your analogy is faulty.
Quite true, but at least it didn't involve a car ;)
So how would a 100% GPL developer operate in a small business settings?
The same way most other people in the world do: get paid for your time.
Plumbers don't spend months installing pipework in the hope that someone might pay them at the end of it. They also don't lock the valves away and hold the key to ransom in an attempt to force such payment. They also don't meter your usage of the pipes they installed and cut you off if you don't pay (water utilities charge you for *fresh* water, but they don't charge you for recirculating the same stuff through your pipes).
Why should software developers think any differently?
PS: I get paid for writing Free Software, I have done at several companies. It's not difficult.
The reason that mobile apps have been so popular is that in many ways they offer a better experience to websites.
No, the reason is that Web sites must be heavily promoted for anyone to even realise they exist; this requires either being so useful that word-of-mouth works (difficult) or paying for ads (easy).
Compared to Web sites, apps offered:
* 'Free' advertising space in the app store
* Far fewer competitors
* The opportunity to become the go-to, de-facto standard for whatever mundane crap the app happens to do (eg. Angry Birds)
* An audience consisting entirely of people with too much money who are happy to part with it (ie. iPhone users)
All of the above points except for the last one apply to any new, incompatible platform; eg. Facebook apps, alternative OSes, browser extensions, consoles, etc. The key is the last one: an iPhone-using demographic is far more likely to give you some money than a general Web audience. That's why so many companies threw so much money into the app-making business.
Fast-forward a few years and all of these points have disappeared. Apps are no longer a small, exclusive club, so 'being an app' is no longer a competitive advantage. Every now and then a new platform will emerge (eg. Google Play), but they either quickly saturate or are ignored as too niche. Also, thanks to years of advertising targetted specifically towards iPhone/iPad owners (since it's seen as the highest-paying demographic) the idea has now emerged that these Apple devices are normal, everyday things, rather than high-end toys. This has eroded away most of the final point, for example this is from 2011 http://gizmodo.com/5871111/wah...
What Jeff seems to be saying is 'enough already'. There was some money to be made by the early land-grabbers, but these days the most reliable ways to monetise are using underhand tactics like encouraging addictive behaviour, making games unplayable without constant micropayments, getting children to spend their parent's money, selling private data, etc. At this point we should consider the experiment over and reasses the balance between usefulness and profitability in our software.
NOTE: I have nothing against those writing useful apps/sites/whatever and trying to make a living from doing so. I am criticising the armies of point-haired-bosses who direct vast resources towards making crap.
Didn't the episode on Muhammed get censored?
AFAIK there's been no specific episode 'about Muhammad', but he's appeared in a few: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
You can criticize any religion except Islam or Judaism.
Because South Park never pokes fun at Judaism....
Are they asking for proposals for the scanner from Total Recall?
No, they're asking for proposals for the scanner from Airplane ;)
everyone has an email addr (not everyone has IM or wants to)
This. If I have to decide whether to agree to some EULA/contract/etc. before I'm allowed to talk to my friends, I will refuse to participate. Not only do I disagree with such false dilemmas, but I certainly don't want my 'contactability' held to ransom to encourage others to participate.
PS: Yes, I do use XMPP, but it's usage is so low that it's only really useful for work contacts (at my last two jobs everyone had a work XMPP account). Also, before anyone mentions it, /. allows anonymous cowards.
I use email.
I really like that, man.
I'm not peer-reviewed, so it doesn't matter, but I like your idea
I didn't come up with it BTW ;)
Superdeterminism is a widely-known term in Physics, eg. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... ./ article from last year http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Irreducibility isn't as common, and it seems to go under various different names ("irreducibility" is the term used by Wolfram, eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... ) and it seems to get 'discovered' over and over, eg. this
While interesting, it doesn't solve the most glaring assumption of Bell's inequality which is that the Universe is non-deterministic.
It's perfectly plausible that the Universe is deterministic, and hence the behaviour of the particles *and the experimenters* is pre-determined, ie. there is no choice in which measurement to take. Taking the determinism of the observers into account tends to be called "superdeterminism", and is necessarily a global property: either the whole Universe is superdeterministic, or nothing is deterministic. Bell's inequalities demonstrate this, since they cannot be explained by a *local* deterministic model, ie. a model which only involves properties of the particles (known as 'local hidden variables').
Note that superdeterminism doesn't necessarily rule out 'free will'. Personally I find the most elegant explanation of free will to be irreducibility: an irreducible process has no 'shortcuts'; the only way to predict its result is to run the process from start to finish. If, say, my mind is a deterministic but irreducible process, then a powerful-enough computer could predict my decisions exactly. However, I can still be said to have 'free will' because the computer can't take any shortcuts in its calculations: the only way it can predict my decisions is to run a perfect simulation of me and see what decisions that simulation makes, but in that case it's still (a perfect simulation of) 'me' making the decisions.
I'm not a fan of "we're being similated in some giant computer" arguments, since it goes against reductionism and Occam's Razor: rather than simplifying our understanding of the world, it adds a whole new "outside" world which we must also factor into our explanations.
However, there is a slight modification which makes this an excellent reductionist argument: get rid of the "outside" world. Rather than assuming the existence of a complex universe/multiverse/whatever with some number of dimensions, physical forces, etc. we can just assume the existence of some computational medium and take everything else to be part of its program. Since universal computers are all equivalent, it doesn't matter what the computational medium "is". It certainly doesn't have to be a physical device in some "outside" world, but even if it is, that outside world wouldn't need to be anywhere near as complex as our Universe. It could be a rule 110 cellular automaton, for example.
Boltzmann posed the question, what if the Universe is just a giant gas cloud, and all the structure we see is just a temporary statistical fluctuation? The refutation is that small fluctuations are far more likely than large ones, so when we look somewhere new, the odds are astronomically high that we would just see chaos; but we don't, we find more and more structure, from quarks and gluons all the way up to the cosmic web, implying a larger and larger fluctuation, which is highly unlikely.
However, we can apply the same argument to a cosmological computer: what if the Universe is just a giant computer, and all the structure we see is just a temporary statistical fluctuation *in the program*? In that case, we would expect small programs to be far more likely than large ones. In that case, it is highly likely that when we look somewhere new, we'll see *similar structure to what we've already seen*, since large differences would imply a larger (and less likely) program.
We can then apply the anthropic principle to both scenarios. The simplest gas fluctuation which allows intelligent observers would be a "Boltzmann brain", ie. a lone brain containing the thoughts you're thinking. The simplest computer program which allows intelligent observers would contain a few simple rules (ie. 'physical laws') and would begin with very little data but would rapidly expand to consume more memory once started. With such a limited set of instructions, the intelligence would have to 'emerge' from the interaction of these rules, which would be very unlikely but compensated for by operating on a vast dataset simultaneously. Sound familiar? ;)
If this reduces Mozilla's reliance on Google's money then that can only be a good thing. Especially since Mozilla's main sponsor is now also a competitor :/
This thing runs on Josephson Junctions, how exactly does that not meet requirement (2)?
(And sorry, but I stopped going down the list at this point.)
That's an implementation detail. My laptop uses semiconductors, but that doesn't make quantum phenomena fundamental to its operation. I could replace my CPU with a marble track and it would not affect its computational class. Can D-Wave's device be replaced by a purely classical implementation? AFAIK the jury's still out.
The transistors in your CPU are most definitely quantum in a meaningful way.
No they're not, by definition, since that is how I defined my use of the word 'meaningful' in that sentence. Specifically, they're not quantum in a 'meaningful' way because I can replace them with wooden see-saws http://digi-compii.com/
There are certainly other uses of the word "meaningful" which cover what you've said, but arguing over the definition of words is fruitless. In particular, disagreeing with my clarification of what I meant by the word is just silly.
D-Wave has Josephson junction qubits on their chip and couple them. Yet, somehow they are supposed to end up with a machine that is a classical annealer? Although the behavior of the box is exactly what you'd expect from a quantum annealer?
The issue isn't really whether it's a quantum annealer or not, it's whether quantum annealing is a classical algorithm (no, having the word 'quantum' in the title doesn't imply that it's impractical for a classical computer to implement). Since their machine can *only* do quantum annealing, they're pretty screwed if classical computers can also do quantum annealing, since classical computers have the benefit of decades of massive R&D budgets.