True, but mouths of major rivers already tend to be quite seriously industrialised, what with major ports and petrochemical industry and all. That's what the mouth of the Rhine and Meuse looks like anyway (Rotterdam). I'm more worried about whether such plants would be an obstacle to big ships.

> As it turns out, doing the experiment 15 times and taking the
> majority (plugging 7 into S(n)) will give you the correct answer
> 99.4% of the time. Doing things 35 times gets you to five nines
> of accuracy... completely reasonable in my books.

If it were a standard electronic computer, you'd return it for a refund and never buy anything from that manufacturer again.

Five nines sounds good, because for an *uptime* figure, it is good.

But for computational accuracy, that's abysmal. At a speed of only 1 GHz, which isn't exactly a screaming speed demon these days, your computer would be making ten thousand mistakes per second. For traditional computing applications, that makes it so much useless scrap. If our computers make one computational error per *hour*, we complain about how horribly buggy the software is, because we have come to expect that our hardware won't do that to us.

The other poster's suggestion, of using the quantum computer to suggest candidate answers and a traditional electronic computer to check them, makes much better sense. There are whole categories of computing problems where checking the answers is trivial, if you can in the first place get a candidate answer that's at all likely to be correct.

That, and obviously this is a research prototype and the accuracy could potentially be improved in the future, just as we expect that the performance level will be improved by further research.

I don't mean to be nasty, but in what universe do "people crave the power of a programmer" but alas, do not possess the attention to detail ?

Ask your average lawyer, military officer, brain surgeon, business person or artist whether they decided against a career in programming because they simply didn't crave the attention to detail?

If many people craved this "power", many more people would be taking programming classes. Programming is considered a very menial job, on a similar level as the tech support guy who comes to install your new office PC. There is a good reason why it is work largely done by kids and immigrants. The pay is poor compared to others with a college degree, the hours are poor, and on a first date you have be 'vague' about what you do for a living (my own favorite is 'engineer', my apologies to real engineers).

seriously, people. lern 2 spele. its a 'poll' not a 'pole' - i guess this is what we get out of 'no child left behind' :(

HE never made Parliament sadly. At least this one entered it with honest intentions... http://order-order.com/

There's so much fear in our culture, people are scared of health care, scared of a black president, scared of terrorists, scared of oil prices, scared of cell phone companies, scared of pirates (the Somalian kind), scared of pirates (the MPAA kind), scared of the RIAA and MPAA, scared of swine flu, scared of unemployment, scared of having a job that doesn't pay a living wage, scared of peanuts, scared of global warming, scared of pollution, scared of home invasions, scared of floods, earthquakes and fires, scared of nuts with guns, scared of the government taking away everyone's guns.

Great.... now you have me scared of people who are scared.

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You talk nonsense. The PPE is about the same as the 360 tri-core, and the 7 usable SPEs are each capable of some stupidly high single precision maths numbers. A quick looking on folding@home shows a single PS3 outputiing 10x what a GPU based algorythm is kicking out.

You tripe sounds like the usual copy and paste nonsense that all Xbox owners seem to be programmed with.

Oh, there's an even worse example than 2012 Reverse Mortgages. Someone came up with a Rapture Petcare business. The employees are all atheists (sure to be left behind on Rapture Day), and for the low low price of a hundred-odd dollars today they guarantee to come to your home, collect your pets, and feed and care for them after you've been taken up into heaven. (Apparently pets don't Rapture I guess.) The head of the business was vague on how many people have signed up for the service, but he said it was a "double digit" number of subscriptions. So somewhere between 10 and 99 people have signed up.

I'm an atheist, however living in suburban New York I sadly don't think many of my neighbors are quite "Rapture Ready". Sucks, I'd have loved to have gotten in on this sort of business.

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1287 seems to work.

One of the most useful things I ever learnt in school was problems involving "casting out 9s", and it struck me immediately the pattern you used ... 1 + 8 = 9, 2 + 7 = 9

Pretty simple, actually. They navigate using the moon as a reference point, since it's essentially a directional light. In order to fly straight, they keep the moon at a particular point in their field of vision. Sadly, when the brightest object in their field of view is a light bulb, keeping it in the same position in their field of view results in them spiralling madly around and towards it.

So moths don't really like bright lights, candle flames etc. Lights just screw with their navigation system.

Better class OS will have better class Trojans written for it

And with this kind of competition, quality improves, and everyone benefits! Win-win!

Oh, wait...

Sadly they don't know - the people in question hardly kept accurate records, and Tmobile obviously ener audited their systems correctly. Beside I don't want to sue them. I cannot easily quantify the monetary loss, and I dont want to substitute my time for money, which is ultmatley what it's about. The ICO and DPP are the people to go after them to stop them in future. You could say that keeping my acocunt with them is the safest of all since they will be uber hot on being secure now, but I dont like to reward mediocrity and ineptness. I just hope that the company that gets my business pays attention and realises if they are not careful they will be next.

Let me see - millions of records stolen. I'm sure that they didnt need access to all of them and the mechanism to stop them is not exactly difficult. Sorry you find it so. To use the waiter analogy, I dont expect them after taking my order to tell me whate veryone else has ordered now do I? As for some cracker getting in yes I would blame them. The same way I'd expect to be blamed if someone get in my systems. But then again I'm in the security and storing information securely business myself, so I have somewhat high standards. I'm sorry you have lower ones.