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Comment Re:A quick overview (Score 1) 224

You are a quantum system. You can be sent through a double slit a zillion times and you will start forming interference patterns on the screen. But when interviewed, you will report that not once did you go through both slits at once.

This is not possible. In order to be able to answer the question to the interviewer, you have to store the information about which way you went somewhere (e.g., in your spin). This creates entanglement between your position and your spin and destroys the interference pattern.

Comment Re:you know (Score 1) 426

I'm an old fart, but I really don't like the recent trend in colleges - and now high schools - where we're apparently moving towards a completely utilitarian education and away from attempting to develop well-rounded individuals and citizens.

I totally agree with your statement in general; but in today's society being a well-rounded individual mandates some sort of programming skills. For instance, how can you possibly understand what the free software movement is about when you have never written a single line of code in your life?

Comment Re:...but if you want free software to improve... (Score 1) 1098

Why is LLVM replacing GCC?

Is it? Is anyone besides Apple switching from GCC to LLVM as their default compiler? Are more people having trouble to compile stuff using GCC because developers use LLVM extensions than vice versa? Is there any other sign that LLVM is actually replacing GCC?

Comment Re:For a noted pragmatist, Linus is dead wrong... (Score 3, Insightful) 279

Yeah, explain that to me in 10 years when some court rules that contributions under the GPL are illegal to distribute due to some legal deficiency in the license.

Actually, it is much more likely that a CLA will be found to be unenforcable than the text of a well-established software license. In fact, CLAs requiring copyright assignment are probably void in large parts of the world, meaning you are back to square one.

Comment It's politics, not technology (Score 3, Insightful) 732

I don't buy that the demise of the median worker has anything to do with technological progress. If the average income increases steadily and the median declines, it simply means that a society has problems to fairly allocate its resources. Since people making less than the median typically also make up 50% of the electorate, it looks like these people are voting against their own interests (or do not vote at all). One also has to keep in mind that the events that hurt the median worker the most (deregulation of banks, Bush-style tax cuts, and the whole war on terror) were all political descisions that were completely unrelated to technology.

Comment Re:People don't upgrade (Score 1) 432

We know the security is inferior. We know the stability is often questionable. We know it costs money in purchase and/or ongoing licensing fees. BUT: you pretty much get a guarantee that any code written today will continue to run for at least 10 years (due to specific OS version support for that long) and likely a lot longer than that; due to API support normally extending even further. Re-writing shit just because the platform changed costs real world time and money.

Red Hat offers support for their distribution for up to 13 years. If you want, you can still get support for Python 2.2, which was released in 2001.

Comment Re:Instagram didn't replace Kodak (Score 1) 674

I think you might be missing the point. He's saying that the new information/digital economy requires less people to run it and is therefore reducing the overall number of jobs.

The emprical evidence for this claim is extremely weak, to say the least. The total number of hours worked is pretty much on par with population growth, so despite the enormous increase in automatization in recent decades, the workforce as a whole appears to be able to adapt to it quite well.

Comment Re:Redhat/CentOS is no substitute for Ubuntu deskt (Score 2) 186

I suspect few desktop users run an OS targeted for "servers" where stability is the number one goal?

Actually, I used to be working on a CentOS workstation for quite some time and it was a very pleasant experience. The only issue I remember is that I had to manually compile some applications to be able to watch soccer streams during EURO 2012, but I'm pretty sure people at the IT department saw this as a feature rather than a bug ...

Comment Re:Some background facts (Score 2) 221

The key words you used are "most likely" and at least you're honest enough to use them. There is no mathematical proof that any cipher (other than the one-time pad) is resistant to all as-yet-unknown quantum algorithms. That doesn't mean that they are actually vulnerable - only that we cannot know with certainty whether they are.

That's the usual situation in complexity theory and it applies to classical algorithms as well. There is also no proof that quantum computers are actually superior to classical computers when it comes to cryptanalysis. Still, most people believe this to be true.

People seem to under-estimate the NSA's capabilities here when I talk to them. They employ a lot of really smart people, and they have the benefits of reading all the public literature as well as all the classified stuff that their academic peers cannot read.

Remember that we're talking about actual physical devices that need to be built and being really smart only helps you somewhat when you need to solder electronics or align a laser. And so far, the NSA employs hardly any physicists which you can also tell from the fact that they've outsourced the research mentioned in the documents to a public university. This is very different than in mathematics or computer science, where it is well known that the NSA is a large employer. That being said, I still think that the NSA might possess some interesting knowledge on quantum computing. I wouldn't be too surprised if they were sitting on an efficient quantum algorithm breaking AES, for instance.

Comment Some background facts (Score 4, Informative) 221

These are hardly shocking revelations. The document mentions to achieve control over two semiconductor qubits, whereas factoring 2048 bit numbers requires at least that many qubits, and probably several orders of magnitude more. The current record stands at control of 14 qubits, achieved in 2010 in Rainer Blatt's group at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, using trapped ions.

Some time ago, I wrote something on the history and possible future of quantum computing. Moreover, one also has to keep in mind that there are public key cryptosystems that most likely cannot be cracked even with quantum computers.

Submission + - NSA quantum compute effort disclosed 2

sumoinsanity writes: Schrödinger's cat is "probably" still in the bag as disclosed by the Washington Post. Perhaps it is both disturbing and reassuring as discussed here. The reassuring part is that PKI is still OK when done properly as the NSA desires to break it with Quantum Crypto. The disturbing bit is that it is perhaps just a matter of time before PKI succumbs and our private parts are out there for all to see :-|

Comment Re:How did they do it? (Score 1) 547

All the campus networks I've seen remotely recently do some sort of access control, if only to avoid being a free wifi provider for every porn-torrent enthusiast in the neighborhood.

To the contrary, Harvard operates another wireless network called "Harvard Guest" that does not require a Harvard ID for accessing the internet.

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