Let's tone down the ad-hominem, please.

I brought forward the period of time the data was published as indication of intent. It does imply that the publication was unintended.

There is a Hebrew proverb, "the law will puncture the mountain". It means strict adherence to the letter of the law, regardless of circumstances (or common sense).

If you say "that's the agreement, and he violated it, however brief and however unintentional", then you still have to account to the 30 other vulnerabilities, for which Groupon is also refusing to pay, for no good reason at all.

Shachar

Well, there are several "kinds" of wormholes. In one, the distance really is 3 ticks, in every way that matters, and the fact that there's also a 10-tick path (which used to be the shortest path before the wormhole) means nothing, as there are an infinity of circuitous paths. But that's not this kind of wormhole.

Me
A1----------A2
B1>>>>>>>>>>B2

To see the problem, imagine 2 wormholes, A and B, each with widely separated endpoints. In my reference frame, the endpoints A1 and A2 are stationary - I'm standing by A1 and can send a message instantly to A2. The endpoints B1 and B2 are stationary relative to one another, but are moving close to c relative to A. In B's reference frame, my message goes back in time.

If my message gets relayed A1-A2-B2-B1 just as the endpoints pass, I'll get it before I send it. In my reference frame, A1-A2 is instant, but B2-B1 goes back in time. In B's reference frame, A1-A2 goes back in time, and B2-B1 is instant. Either way, it's a causal mess.

A simpler example: you can get a straightforward time machine simply by accelerating one end of a wormhole up to relativistic speed for a few years, and then bringing it back, parking it at rest near the other end. Like the twin who visits a distant star and returns, one end will be "younger" than the other. Now the wormhole moves you back (or forward) in time by a few years when you traverse it.

OK, I tried to read your first sentence 3 times, and I still can't parse it, so I'm not sure what you're saying. Naturally, slower-than-light state transfer doesn't introduce paradox. FTL state transfer does allow inversion of cause and effect - the clear examples of this involve two pairs of wormholes, moving quickly relative to one another, which allows you go send a signal out through one pair and back through the other, and get the signal before you sent it.

It's early days for this idea. This is theoretical physics, so it's usual for it to take a while for someone to come up with a proper experiment. Compelling, convincing experiments that have demonstrated the Bell inequalities (the EPR paradox) really started in 1998, decades after the theory was broadly accepted.

This paper was more about black holes than quantum entanglement, and that stuff is harder still to test. It's the implications for QM that are really the exciting bit. It may well be that this is just a different explanation for the same phenomena, and so will remain "just theory" until we find some way to observe black holes closely. But if in fact it works out that this would be a modification to the mechanics of entanglement, someone will devise an experiment for it, as entanglement is still an area of interest for the experimental physicists.

Wow, cool! Time to check out out again. Thanks.

I met someone in a bowler hat just last week. He was also wearing a kilt. And a bright purple shirt. Picture that combination for a moment.

They key to unlocking the fashion mystery? Jury duty. Sure enough, he didn't get picked. Clearly he'd been living here for quite some time (long enough to be a citizen), so I can't hold him as representative of all the UK - I'm sure you don't all wear bright purple shirts.

The really do have an insane amount of cash - billions, years of operating expenses even if cashflow slowly tanked.

I can't explain the mathematics Leonardo is using (best nickname ever), but I can explain the basic idea.

Wormholes can connect two arbitrary points in spacetime - this allows FTL travel, but that means time travel, with raises all sorts of paradoxes. The current understanding of this style (ER bridge) of wormhole is that they're inherently unstable - the math allows them to form, but they'd collapse as soon as anything interacted with them.

Quantum entanglement says that two entangled particles have this oddball relationship that one somehow knows that the other has bean "measured" (any real interaction between two particles is a "measurement" in QM, it's not some special thing), in a way that's seemingly faster than light, but can't be used to send information.

These two ideas dovetail nicely - if quantum entanglement means the two particles are connected by a wormhole, which collapses the moment either is "measured" (i.e., any time they interact with anything new), then you have a way for that communication to happen FTL, an then the two particles are disconnected and no longer have any special relationship. You don't get time travel paradoxes, because it's the nature of entanglement that you can't use it to send data FTL even though the effect is FTL.

It sounds neat, but that almost counts against you in QM. The key is whether the math works. Exciting if true, however.

I use both Ubuntu and Red Hat daily at work. I really don't like the current Ubuntu desktop - it seems inspired by good ideas, but it doesn't deliver them. Red Hat's very old school desktop is straightforward and intuitive, if limited and ugly. But I'll take limited and ugly and can get work done over the alternative! (This is also my argument against systemd, of course).

I haven't seen XFCE in forever, but I remember it being really fast anf lightweight. XFCE with a taskbar would be my dream.

They've been trying(in part by developing, in part by buying, they ate Softlayer and Cloudant fairly recently); but they've been finding it a bit tricky.

IBM wants to sell you some sort of unique, value-added, hardware and/or software feature that makes going with them worth it over going with the commodity product(presumably, this is why they sold of PCs and low-end servers). Some customers do want this; but it's a very, very, different offering from the more commodified cloud providers(Amazon, Google, and Microsoft all differ a bit in where they are on the spectrum from 'what you do with them is your problem; but our VMs are cheaper than you can believe' to 'we can provide automagic email accounts and SQL server instances abstracted from the host OS'; but all of them are very much on the 'we aren't going to hold your hand; but look at how cheap this stuff is' side, an area where IBM has no obvious advantages.)

The one other element in the cycle you identify is arguably 'management/administration'.

This can work both for and against both local and remote/cloud options: Back when anything that touched the mainframe needed 6 signatures and a blessing; but you could classify an IBM-compatible as an 'office supply' and just have it on your desk and doing stuff, part of the virtue was in cutting through red tape, not in enjoying DOS on a slow machine with virtually no RAM. These days, especially for individuals or small outfits, without technical expertise available, 'the cloud' wins not so much because local computers are expensive(since they aren't, they've never been cheaper, either absolutely or per unit power); but because 'the cloud' is something you can use just by plugging in a URL and following directions. IT geeks are correct to point out that 'the cloud' is neither impregnable nor as well-backed-up as it likes to pretend to be; but for a non-techie user who will lose all their data as soon as their HDD dies or they lose their phone, it's still a step up.

For larger outfits, who have technical expertise available(and whose needs are complex enough that they will need IT and/or developers whether they go 'cloud', local, or some combination of the two), it is much more a straight battle on cost, security, and reliability; but ease of use and ease(or nonexistence) of management is huge for the consumer side.

I think any company can do the same, as long as they convince their large investors they have some sort of long-term plan that justifies it. While stock prices are batted about by people chasing quarterly results, those speculators aren't going to evict the board of directors, they'll just sell and move on. It's the large, long-term investors, the pension funds and mutual funds and so on, who will make the effort to cut the head off a company if they think the current board/CEO are fools. As long as they believe your plan will work, you can take short-term losses if you have the cashflow, or can borrow.

Microsoft is in a unique position that that have an insane amount of cash, can run at a loss for a decade without going under, and the long-term investors just cut the head off the company in favor of a long-term plan. They really have no excuse at all here.

AWS includes far more services than I've ever heard of. "Cloud computing" is EC2, which you could use for web hosting once you grow large enough to need a full VM (or 1000). I'm sure theyalso have some web hosting product somewhere for personal-sized sites too. All of that, plus the storage and so on - everything "cloud" - is AWS (I know of their queueing service and their load balancer service, but I've only looked for the obvious stuff).

The fact that it's collectively profitable despite the price wars should be a real wake-up call for anyone using "cloud" as a loss leader.

Amazon is a bit tepid when they try anything too novel(their phone went from flagship pricing to free-after-contract how fast?); but they have three basic virtues that make them a terrifying force to be reckoned with:

1. Cultural disinhibition: They started selling books; but never seemed to have fossilized into the 'We are a bookstore. I can see maybe expanding into selling some bookmarks, or paperweights; but hand tools? How absurd!' model. 'Books' was merely a special case of more or less rectangular objects that are legal to send through the mail. They've since expanded into an ever larger collection of more or less rectangular objects that are legal to send through the mail, without much concern about what they are.

2. Adequately competent implementation: Remember 'Microsoft PlaysForSure', the killer ecosystem of hardware, software, and a competitive marketplace of music sellers(almost always cheaper than iTunes)? No? That's not very surprising, they don't really deserve to be remembered. How about 'Ultraviolet', the 'cloud-based digital rights library' that is somehow associated with blu-ray, some media players and streamers, and various retailers; but is so dysfunctional that I can't actually summarize exactly what the hell it is? No? I can't imagine why.

Amazon, though, while they don't lead the pack, knows how to get the job done well enough (their Kindle e-readers and 'FireOS' tablets all have at least adequate industrial design and build quality, and 'FireOS' is arguably nicer than some Google-blessed-but-vendor-skinned versions of Android, despite being a hostile fork; and their media-streamer hardware and software are both more or less painless). You don't necessarily go to them for the premium gear; but they are definitely good enough that they don't actively sabotage the appeal of the low prices.

3. Logistics. I don't know how they do it(if I did, I'd probably be a whole hell of a lot wealthier); but when they decide to sell something, they know how to make it impressively cheap compared to the competition, whether it be books or VM time.

You do realize the real contribution from these companies are many millions, right? Except to the Clinton "charity" and a $300k speaker fees for Hillary, instead of on the books? (And it's not like the Clintons are especially corrupt here, compared to the rest, though they're more brazen than most about it.)