I doubt there will be that many takers for repair kits because dealing with the tiny parts used in modern electronics is not a skill most folks have or want to develop. But maybe there are enough potential customers and independent repair folks to make the repair kits a viable market niche. I'm skeptical. But I hope I'm wrong.
"Besides, if it's inconsistent, doesn't that mean it is true (and also false)?"
Assuming that's a real question and not pure rhetoric, the answer is "No". It's clearly possible for two inconsistent answers to both be false. e.g. "The Earth is flat" and "The Earth is pretzel shaped."
For that matter, since we're talking about Quantum Mechanics, I doubt anyone would be shocked if two inconsistent answers are sometimes both true.
"It would have a small screen and require users to interact mainly using voice commands, in concert with Essential's artificial-intelligence software"
That's terrific. In place of folks wandering aimlessly staring at their cell phones, we can have folks wandering aimlessly staring at their cell phones and mumbling commands at them. I just can't wait.
Sounds like possibly a worthy target for the Magellan array being built in Chile. Ten times the resolution of Hubble.... Assuming that it works of course.
"I've never seen anyone using Linux as a desktop OS who wasn't a programmer by trade."
That's somewhat fair I think. I think the problem is that you have to be a pretty good Unix system administrator to configure a Linux desktop and frankly the whole permission, sudo, etc scheme is borderline demented. It's necessary for a multiuser system, but that doesn't make it any more likable. Really not well suited to a personal computer.
"I've rarely seen any professional programmers working in Python. It's scripting for non programmers doing one off stuff, exactly like the OP describes. Doesn't scale."
I'm told otherwise. Doesn't Google, for example, do a lot of code in Python? I have no idea how one would organize a large Python project. I would think it would be a lot like being handed a shovel and told to dig a canal parallel to the Panama Canal... by Friday.
As opposed to the "Code Once, Screw Up Everywhere" philosophy of the cloud? You'll have to excuse me. I've just wasted a number of hours determining that my simple Javascript that almost worked is never going work right because the API I'm invoking appears to be broken. I'll now revert to the local workaround that I should have used in the first place. And the last three web sites I've tried to use to do different simple stuff are all broken in multiple browsers.
If enough people -- especially in management -- use chromebooks -- corporate IT will eventually find a way to wedge them into their network. Easier to adapt than to try to deal with a constant deluge of questions about why what works at home or in school doesn't work at work. Training people is harder than training chihuahuas. (Our chihuahua flunked puppy school... twice).
And if chromebook based IT eventually turns out to be say $25 per seat cheaper than MS based IT, you can bet management will want to switch.
As far as individual users are concerned, I'm not a big Google fan and I dislike both Chrome and most Google stuff other than the excellent search engine, but I can't see that it makes a lot of difference whether one is being spied on by Google or Microsoft. Assuming roughly equal capability, I'd go with whichever is cheaper.
"I somehow think it is more likely that it's not very good at recognizing serious falls in the first place."
Of course. Interesting that I had to read through almost all of the comments to get to one that points out that likely answer. -- the device, like a lot of digital stuff, just doesn't work very well. How to test?. Strap some of these things on individuals in sports where participants legitimately fall down a lot.-- American/Canadian football for example. Or put them on folks just learning to ski or ice skate.
This is America. We do NOT put our oligarchs in jail. It's in the constitution somewhere. The exception being Bernie Madoff who made the mistake of stealing from the rich rather than from the poor.
Trump may be in a bit of hot water with some states in a year or two once the Democrats take over the house and broadcast his financial indiscretions to the world. It'll be interesting to see if he has the money to pay the assessments for back taxes.
But Trump is a multi-billionaire? Yep. So was Madoff until the feds netted out his assets and locked him up -- ostensibly for 120 years.
Exactly what sort of hardware is Waymo stuffing into their vehicles if a typical 1KWh car battery won't power it? Maybe networked Univac-1s running Excel spreadsheets? Not that there isn't room for one or two additional 12v lead-acid batteries in a typical car.
A bio-engineered car. It's next year's fad. If you move quick, you can catch the wave. Take a naked mole rat. Tinker with a few genes. And you have cheap, autonomous, non-fossil fuel transportation. I'm told experts in the area will be hauling in paychecks in the high six digits.
My opinion also. The early Earth apparently had liquid water although it's unclear quite how since the sun was, in principle, quite dim back then. There are numerous known mechanisms for producing organic compounds if there is nothing around to eat them. Presumably self replicating organic compounds will eventually appear by pure chance if a complex organic soup sits around long enough. And life as we know it eventually evolved.
The details are quite hazy and seem likely to remain hazy for decades or maybe centuries.
Conway's game of life. Yep. That was my first thought also. Not that getting a quantum computer to play CGL wouldn't be a remarkable achievement. But not, I think, one that would provide much insight into the origin of life.
(Why would anyone think that the origin of life has, much less requires, a quantum explanation?)
As far as I can see, one class of problems where quantum computers can be useful, if they can be gotten to work, is in cracking encryption. Encryption can be, and is, crafted such that conventional deterministic solutions take impractical amounts of time. In principle, quantum computers can crack such encryption quite quickly. Testing to see if the quantum solution is correct -- it won't always be due to "leakage" of the correct answer out of the system -- is trivial. If you don't get a good answer, you just try again.
There is little doubt that many governments are interested in quantum computing. Are they likely to tell us if their efforts are successful?
Probably not.
Other than that, I agree with you. It's mostly nonsensical. The utility of a "computer" that randomly fails to generate a correct answer is likely to be limited.
Nonsense! We Unix users universally believe that Windows doesn't run well enough nowadays to put any information into the Documents folder. Nothing in, no possibility of loss.
1 milligram per milliliter is 1 gram per liter = 0.1% by weight. If I haven't misplaced a decimal, that looks to be roughly the equivalent to 7 or 8 packets of aspartame based artificial sweetener (35mg each) in a glass of water (about 250ml). Pretty sweet. I'm not sure that "only" is the right adverb.
"There's a reason Google and others want to charge for maps, and that's because having properly maintained maps is a valuable service."
And one that involves significant costs if it isn't produced by volunteer labor. Realistically, for commercial products, either someone is going to be charged money for the map or the maps are going to come with ads, or both.
I have it on good authority -- talk radio -- that the missing antimatter is buried under an end-zone in Giants Stadium. Jimmie Hoffa is buried under the other end-zone.
Note: Some folks claim that the fact that Giants Stadium was torn down a decade ago disproves this theory. But come on folks. Buried is buried.
"Imagine a photo and a bunch of comments, likes, etc on it (their example), and the photo or random comments disappear."
That's what happens now if you have a website and try to include links to your references. The links rot constantly and often just go away. Unless the Internet Archive has saved the linked material and you take the trouble to fix the link, the stuff is gone forever from your POV. AFAICS, the only solution is to ignore copyright and make copies of any external material you actually care about.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt there will be that many takers for repair kits because dealing with the tiny parts used in modern electronics is not a skill most folks have or want to develop. But maybe there are enough potential customers and independent repair folks to make the repair kits a viable market niche. I'm skeptical. But I hope I'm wrong.
"Besides, if it's inconsistent, doesn't that mean it is true (and also false)?"
Assuming that's a real question and not pure rhetoric, the answer is "No". It's clearly possible for two inconsistent answers to both be false. e.g. "The Earth is flat" and "The Earth is pretzel shaped."
For that matter, since we're talking about Quantum Mechanics, I doubt anyone would be shocked if two inconsistent answers are sometimes both true.
"It would have a small screen and require users to interact mainly using voice commands, in concert with Essential's artificial-intelligence software"
That's terrific. In place of folks wandering aimlessly staring at their cell phones, we can have folks wandering aimlessly staring at their cell phones and mumbling commands at them. I just can't wait.
Sounds like possibly a worthy target for the Magellan array being built in Chile. Ten times the resolution of Hubble. ... Assuming that it works of course.
"I've never seen anyone using Linux as a desktop OS who wasn't a programmer by trade."
That's somewhat fair I think. I think the problem is that you have to be a pretty good Unix system administrator to configure a Linux desktop and frankly the whole permission, sudo, etc scheme is borderline demented. It's necessary for a multiuser system, but that doesn't make it any more likable. Really not well suited to a personal computer.
"I've rarely seen any professional programmers working in Python. It's scripting for non programmers doing one off stuff, exactly like the OP describes. Doesn't scale."
I'm told otherwise. Doesn't Google, for example, do a lot of code in Python? I have no idea how one would organize a large Python project. I would think it would be a lot like being handed a shovel and told to dig a canal parallel to the Panama Canal ... by Friday.
"Economists routinely publish papers based on results calculated in Excel. "
Excel, eh? Possibly goes a long way toward explaining why no one has had much faith in economic modeling since the 1970s.
As opposed to the "Code Once, Screw Up Everywhere" philosophy of the cloud? You'll have to excuse me. I've just wasted a number of hours determining that my simple Javascript that almost worked is never going work right because the API I'm invoking appears to be broken. I'll now revert to the local workaround that I should have used in the first place. And the last three web sites I've tried to use to do different simple stuff are all broken in multiple browsers.
I'm not in an especially good mood.
If enough people -- especially in management -- use chromebooks -- corporate IT will eventually find a way to wedge them into their network. Easier to adapt than to try to deal with a constant deluge of questions about why what works at home or in school doesn't work at work. Training people is harder than training chihuahuas. (Our chihuahua flunked puppy school ... twice).
And if chromebook based IT eventually turns out to be say $25 per seat cheaper than MS based IT, you can bet management will want to switch.
As far as individual users are concerned, I'm not a big Google fan and I dislike both Chrome and most Google stuff other than the excellent search engine, but I can't see that it makes a lot of difference whether one is being spied on by Google or Microsoft. Assuming roughly equal capability, I'd go with whichever is cheaper.
"I somehow think it is more likely that it's not very good at recognizing serious falls in the first place."
Of course. Interesting that I had to read through almost all of the comments to get to one that points out that likely answer. -- the device, like a lot of digital stuff, just doesn't work very well. How to test?. Strap some of these things on individuals in sports where participants legitimately fall down a lot.-- American/Canadian football for example. Or put them on folks just learning to ski or ice skate.
This is America. We do NOT put our oligarchs in jail. It's in the constitution somewhere. The exception being Bernie Madoff who made the mistake of stealing from the rich rather than from the poor.
Trump may be in a bit of hot water with some states in a year or two once the Democrats take over the house and broadcast his financial indiscretions to the world. It'll be interesting to see if he has the money to pay the assessments for back taxes.
But Trump is a multi-billionaire? Yep. So was Madoff until the feds netted out his assets and locked him up -- ostensibly for 120 years.
Exactly what sort of hardware is Waymo stuffing into their vehicles if a typical 1KWh car battery won't power it? Maybe networked Univac-1s running Excel spreadsheets? Not that there isn't room for one or two additional 12v lead-acid batteries in a typical car.
"A mechanical car? As opposed to??"
A bio-engineered car. It's next year's fad. If you move quick, you can catch the wave. Take a naked mole rat. Tinker with a few genes. And you have cheap, autonomous, non-fossil fuel transportation. I'm told experts in the area will be hauling in paychecks in the high six digits.
60K lines in Excel? Isn't that a bit slow at times?
My opinion also. The early Earth apparently had liquid water although it's unclear quite how since the sun was, in principle, quite dim back then. There are numerous known mechanisms for producing organic compounds if there is nothing around to eat them. Presumably self replicating organic compounds will eventually appear by pure chance if a complex organic soup sits around long enough. And life as we know it eventually evolved.
The details are quite hazy and seem likely to remain hazy for decades or maybe centuries.
Conway's game of life. Yep. That was my first thought also. Not that getting a quantum computer to play CGL wouldn't be a remarkable achievement. But not, I think, one that would provide much insight into the origin of life.
(Why would anyone think that the origin of life has, much less requires, a quantum explanation?)
"Snake oil was a patent medicine, but so were aspirin, Vicks ..." ... and don't forget Coca-Cola with real cocaine
As far as I can see, one class of problems where quantum computers can be useful, if they can be gotten to work, is in cracking encryption. Encryption can be, and is, crafted such that conventional deterministic solutions take impractical amounts of time. In principle, quantum computers can crack such encryption quite quickly. Testing to see if the quantum solution is correct -- it won't always be due to "leakage" of the correct answer out of the system -- is trivial. If you don't get a good answer, you just try again.
There is little doubt that many governments are interested in quantum computing. Are they likely to tell us if their efforts are successful?
Probably not.
Other than that, I agree with you. It's mostly nonsensical. The utility of a "computer" that randomly fails to generate a correct answer is likely to be limited.
Nonsense! We Unix users universally believe that Windows doesn't run well enough nowadays to put any information into the Documents folder. Nothing in, no possibility of loss.
Are you suggesting that for just 0.001 Bitcoin (roughly $6.40US) Microsoft will restore your Documents folder?
1 milligram per milliliter is 1 gram per liter = 0.1% by weight. If I haven't misplaced a decimal, that looks to be roughly the equivalent to 7 or 8 packets of aspartame based artificial sweetener (35mg each) in a glass of water (about 250ml). Pretty sweet. I'm not sure that "only" is the right adverb.
"Who do you sue when a driverless car runs you over?"
Very clever.
This is a trick question. The answer is that you don't sue anyone. You're dead.
"There's a reason Google and others want to charge for maps, and that's because having properly maintained maps is a valuable service."
And one that involves significant costs if it isn't produced by volunteer labor. Realistically, for commercial products, either someone is going to be charged money for the map or the maps are going to come with ads, or both.
" the antimatter has to be *somewhere*."
I have it on good authority -- talk radio -- that the missing antimatter is buried under an end-zone in Giants Stadium. Jimmie Hoffa is buried under the other end-zone.
Note: Some folks claim that the fact that Giants Stadium was torn down a decade ago disproves this theory. But come on folks. Buried is buried.
"Built in javascript runnnig node.js and distributed over npm."
Insecure by design.
"Imagine a photo and a bunch of comments, likes, etc on it (their example), and the photo or random comments disappear."
That's what happens now if you have a website and try to include links to your references. The links rot constantly and often just go away. Unless the Internet Archive has saved the linked material and you take the trouble to fix the link, the stuff is gone forever from your POV. AFAICS, the only solution is to ignore copyright and make copies of any external material you actually care about.