Oh gosh no. First, this does not mean that quantum bits state can be known "in advance" (whatever that means, if you detect the state before collapse, does that mean they could later collapse into a different state? If so, that's pointless. If not, then its already collapsed). The way I read the article, it doesn't mean they can observe state without collapsing, but rather can gain some information about it before collapsing by effectively stretching out the collapse into a series of gradual collapses about different axis, collapsing different parts and gaining information about them as you go. So that doesn't follow. Furthermore, even if you COULD observe a quantum entanglement without collapsing it, how does that help you with remote communications? Merely transmitting quantum information doesn't enable you to communicate in any meaningful way other than random data. You simply cannot transmit classical information (a message) via quantum information. Lets say two qubits are entangled, you still have to send one of those qubits to the other person at sub-c, so what good is having entangled qubits at that point? There's no way to entangle two qubits, send one to someone, and then control the collapse, which is what would be necessary for FTL comms. Even if you could observe it, that isn't good enough. Sorry, as cool as FTL comms are.

This is my interpretation, people are blowing this out of proportion for sensationalist news (bad newscientist!)

That said, IANA Physicist

Jeeze, I'm really starting to think that most people just shouldn't ever talk about Quantum, there's so many misconceptions and misunderstandings that trying to give people a little bit of information, since its so wildly out of context, even in the wrong context (misconceptions), that it only drives them further away from the truth, from reality. People latch onto the wrong points.

I barely understand Quantum Physics myself and I can tell that TFA makes all kinds of wild leaps in logic. Most of these things aren't true, and the way they explain the Schrodinger's Cat experiment makes the classic misunderstandings.

The reality is far less sensational: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v490/n7418/full/nature11505.html

Skip the version control, and just say you need a Repository. (Both software and hardware). You need a server to save backups to (manager should be familiar with the idea of backups and why they're valuable) combined with a way to manage changes over time in case you went the wrong way on something and need to back up. Tell them its software to keep multiple, automated backups just in case. Also explain that code is very complicated, and you cannot work on the code simultaneously, so explain that multiple developers working together gives you different versions of the code that have to then be merged / blended together. To make sure that merge didn't mess anything up, you want to keep backups of all the different versions. Pretty simple.

Haven't you heard all those annoying Bing ads? They have to try so desperately to get us to remember it exists.

Plus there have been Bing product placements in movies all over the place lately.

And Google doesn't even have to advertise.

The discussion about contractors working on the 2nd death star blew my mind.

Okay, okay, so call it opportunity cost then. We're just arguing semantics.

I guess Clerks was shot for like ~$23,000 and it was pretty professional cinematography. They had to shoot in B&W and most of the actors volunteered as well, though.

I think for a fan film made on a shoestring budget they looked very professional and well-done. Better than movies like The Gamers, which I hold up as pretty well done.

Do you know what goes into making a movie? I don't think you're being realistic at all. You want TV-show closed-set professionalism for $82,000?

No, he has a good point. The actual budget is far in excess of $82,000. $82,000 is just how much liquid cash they spent. The opportunity cost of the entire film is, as he stated, somewhere around $1 million or something.

Consider this. What if the people who volunteered their time instead just donated money?

If those people gave $1 million, which was then spent to hire other people to do what those people volunteered to do, the end result would be the exact same.
You'd have $82,000 left over to spend on the set, etc, having spent that $1 million dollars on acting, labor, etc.
Would the cost of THAT film be $82,000? No, it cost $1,082,000.

So because this money was donated, you're not counting it?
Or because the volunteers immideately "spent" the money on themselves, it doesn't count?
Its economics.

Wrong, actually, be careful. The product from MS is "Microsoft SQL Server"

"SQL Server" is just a generic name of which there are many, many implementations. Parent was spot on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Server

Quote Wikipedia:
SQL Server may refer to:
Microsoft SQL Server, a relational database server from Microsoft
Sybase SQL Server, a relational database server developed by Sybase
SQL Server (magazine), a trade publication and web site owned by Penton Media
Any database server that implements the Structured Query Language

You want him to treat it like an old car engine, be willing to look inside instead of treating it like an ipod?

Then build one with him!

Its really not that hard. Computers are like Lego, you just learn this plugs into that. Learning which components are compatible (DDR2 vs DDR3 etc) can be a little complicated, but that's the only hard part. As long as you help him pick the components so they work together (or get a store employee to help you) and then you don't push on the components too hard, you really can't go wrong.

I got into computers at a really young age myself.

Buy an old motherboard, get a CPU that matches, and a basic videocard, a small cheap harddrive, and some RAM. Blammo, you're in business.

Now you can also have fun building the computer, and teach him what the components mean in the first place. Understanding the hardware makes understanding the software much easier.

They're in an awkward position.

They can continue to make bigger and better games for PC, and people want bigger and better games.

But the consoles are getting REALLY old now. Longer than any console lifetime before. But nobody wants to buy a new $500 PS4, so we'll hang on to PS3s for awhile longer. But that means accepting that your box just can't handle what the PC can.

So you get really crappy sub-par ports.

Or, alternatively, you can have a game that runs okay on console, and looks disappointing on PC.

NOPE. Its not the static development target at ALL that makes the difference. You're right that those games looked poop and they run better on the same hardware now, but you've completely failed to recognize the reason.

Those differences in quality from when X1800 was out? Those are differences in RENDERING ALGORITMS. Improvements to bump mapping, then parallax mapping, then displacement normal mapping, have progressively allowed more detail without costing more polygons. This is purely software, math, not hardware changes. Notice how people have gone back and modded Oblivion to add bloom and HDR and normal mapping, and it looks 100x better? That's not because of a "static target", you can change your hardware and Oblivion still looks and runs good with bloom and HDR.

What does help the consoles run better than an equivalent PC is that they don't have a big-ass OS running in the background to split resources with, and they don't let you run torrentz or whatever in the background. If you ran a PC on a slim, console OS, you'd get the same improvements.

You've just demonstrated a large ignorance of games, consoles, and hardware.

If gfx, storage, cpu, mem were the issue, we wouldn't be seeing Skyrim on PS3 at all.

Skyrim is already on PS3. This is purely adding a small DLC. There's no way that its memory or gfx or cpu limitations.

Maybe, MAAAAAYBE I could see an argument for RAM limitation being the limiting factor here, but I still feel like there'd be tons of workarounds. Most of the new content isn't stitched into the existing world, and I don't think they're that maxed out on RAM budget all the time, they could just cache to disk more, and the game already has to have to cache to disk. Most of the new areas are separated from the overworld, and so allow you to unload the overworld from memory to load the new areas.