His book "Cycles of Time", ISBN 978-0307278463, covers this theory in more detail and in an accessible manner.

One could write several pages on what's wrong with that introductory sentence.

I shall restrict myself to one point: it is not a tenet of quantum theory (by which I think is meant "quantum mechanics") that "a particle [sic] can be in two places at once"; that is, rather, a tenet of one epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics, albeit the one that is most commonly taught (and therefore learned).

There is at least one other interpretation, in fact in some ways a more powerful one in that it is ontological, that is based on quite a different model of what goes on "under the hood" of QM. I direct the interested reader to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., or the book "The Undivided Universe" by Bohm and Hiley. In Bohmian Mechanics, there is no collapse of the wave function, and particles have well-defined positions; in particular, they are not in a superposition of states. All the standard experimental results are reproduced by Bohmian Mechanics, just as in the interpretation that is most-commonly taught.

I regard it as a travesty of modern pedagogy of physics that students often are never exposed to the fact that while the experimental results are solid, the underlying model of what is going on to cause those results is merely (at best) an hypothesis. QM, in its current state, provides a wonderful set of rules for making the most accurate predictions ever; but it provides no explanation of why those rules are the correct ones or how the way that the universe operates can be the way it appears to be. At this point I resist the temptation to blather on about non-locality, or any of the other things wrong about the summary's introductory sentence.

Note that I am not commenting on the physics of the paper on which the summary is based: that appears to be paywalled.

Not since the invention (discovery?) of Public Key Cryptography in the mid 1970s has that limitation that been true. The more general statement is something like: by design, only the person with the correct decryption key can decrypt something.

To add to the awesomeness, V2's primary receiver failed not long after launch. Essentially the entire time it has been using its backup receiver.

There was even a backup plan in case the spacecraft lost both receivers: to use the Planetary Radio Astronomy experiment (on which I was a Co-I) to receive commands and send them to the other onboard systems. It would have worked only as far as Jupiter or possibly Saturn, but the mere fact that the idea was mooted and tested to the point of confidence that it should work if there were no other options says an awful lot about the engineering team.
 

I love the way my phone company (CenturyLink) gets to charge me $10 per month per line for caller ID... and yet is apparently under no obligation that the strings that show up on my caller ID display bear any relationship to reality. If that isn't a scam in and of itself, I don't know what is.

It's even worse than that (for me, at least). In the past week, google has bounced several of my perfectly ordinary e-mails to family members with gmail accounts. As far as I can tell, there is no way to tell the AI that it's an idiot. I can't even begin to guess what it thinks is spammy about the e-mails that it's blocked. They don't seem to have anything in common except that they came from me.

The bizarre thing is that (so far) if I re-send the exact same e-mail a few minutes later, it doesn't bounce.

I am a writer. It seems to me that Amazon, or anyone else, is welcome to generate as much junk as they like. I don't see that it's going to affect any writer who creates substantive, complex, original works. The two are aimed at quite different markets -- but both are real markets, and if people want to enjoy, and spend money on, let's call it "computer-generated drivel", then it's not obvious why Amazon or someone else shouldn't profitably cater to that market; I don't see why I would care whether some automated system is responsible for "creating" books for the people who enjoy the kind of material that appears on any "top 10 best seller list".

Bzzzt. I hope that the company that makes it can spell better than that.

I haven't looked at the data for 2017, but in the 2016 CQ Worldwide CW contest -- a Morse-only contest held at the end of November annually -- about 2.4 million distinct contacts were made over the course of two days. That doesn't seem to be compatible with the quoted assertion. I also note that that number is roughly 400,000 higher than the number of contacts made over the equivalent weekend dedicated to voice operation.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.043...

https://www.igsoc.org/annals/1... has several interesting papers related to this subject.

The short summary is that we really don't have a good feel for the feasibility of this, so it seems like an experiment worth trying.

I am too-often amazed at how so many VC firms don't really seem to understand the technologies at which they are throwing money.

One case in point (there are plenty of others I know of): a few years ago I watched a presentation of a cybersecurity company that had received a $40m investment from a VC firm. I happened to make a comment to a colleague after the presentation to the effect that the product was snake oil (which was the conclusion he had reached as well), and was immediately asked what I meant by someone who was listening... who was from the VC firm that had made the investment. A couple of weeks later, the VC firm flew me to talk to the company executives in their presence. The company shut down the next day. So the VC firm saved themselves from throwing away more money, but I never understood why they had given $40m to the company without bothering to get any independent input about the technology. It was hard to escape the conclusion that "cyber", "security" and a lot of waffling and some pretty slides were more important than getting answers to hard questions.

We all know by now, or at least strongly suspect, that the answer is likely "never", unless some catastrophe occurs to wake people up. I've given up trying to explain to otherwise-intelligent people what these companies (Facebook, of course, being only the most obvious example) are doing. No "ordinary" person seems to understand.

My personal "shake my head in wonder" issue is the attorneys who happily use gmail for their business. I am honestly surprised that it is legal for attorneys to use any e-mail "service" that is known to scan e-mails for any purported purpose whatsoever. But then, in my naïveté, I wonder why attorneys are not required by law to use encryption for all work-related e-mail anyway.

(Of course, add "health workers" and any other business that deals with confidential information to the above.)

I have similar feelings, although I stuck with KDE4, even though some of its bugs infuriated me more often than was good for my blood pressure. Then debian stable switched to Plasma 5 recently, and after a few days I simply had to find an alternative. I have an old KDE3 machine, and every time I used it, it was like a breath of fresh air, so I switched to Trinity on my main desktop machine. I don't think I'll be switching to anything else for a long time. I do use a lot of the more recent versions of *applications* from the KDE team, as the versions that come with Trinity are a bit antiquated at this point, but the basic desktop operations I find to be vastly more reliable and usable under Trinity than under Plasma 5. YMMV, of course; but that's my experience.

I suggest that people who are really interested in understanding this subject read and understand the papers reprinted in "Maxwell's Demon: Entropy, Information, Computing" (first edition: ISBN: 978-0691605463; second edition: ISBN: 978-0750307598).