This is half completely wrong. Thermodynamics by definition does not apply to small scales, only to bulk systems. Hell, a small system of particles can (and in fact quite often will) easily violate the laws of thermodynamics. They're almost meaningless at small (i.e. a few dozen atoms) scales, because they're purely statistical laws. Even a large system can, in principle, violate the laws of thermodynamics, but only for extremely brief periods of time, and with a likelihood that approaches zero for macroscopic (order of 10^23 particles) systems.

Secondly, the behavior of relativity at very small scales is currently unknown. Reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics requires quantized gravity, and all current attempts to describe that mathematically have failed. This is a problem in either very small scales (i.e. Planck lengths, which to be fair haven't been observed and probably won't for quite some time), or in extremely large gravitational fields, such as that created by black holes, which we have (indirectly) observed. Both relativity and thermodynamics work great in their relative domains, but both of them have known domains where they collapse. For thermodynamics that doesn't really matter (it's constructed to only be true for bulk systems), but it's a pretty big issue for relativity, and suggests there is a significant gap in our knowledge.

In reality, fights using conventional blades don't slam the blades against each other like duels in Star Wars always do. That's a very quick way to ruin a sword (sharp metal on sharp metal quickly ends up with an edge more suitable to a hacksaw). In fact, duels with something like a katana are usually ended in a stroke or two, conventionally. Real sword fighters would usually use a shield, buckler, or some other variety of off-hand blocking device (or the flat of the sword, if absolutely necessary) if the combat style emphasizes blocking.

Star Wars duels are pure Hollywood looks-good-on-screen-but-totally-impractical (mind you, the lightsaber itself is a totally impractical weapon in a world where ranged weapons are common: it's like people in that universe haven't even heard of shotguns). Even then, no less than 3 people end up losing a hand in a duel (Mace Windu, Anakin (twice), and Luke). The fighting style in Star Wars only avoids losing hands during the duel because it's written that way (there are many times when the fighters clash blades inches away from the hilt).

Ahem. Actually, it makes a kind of sense: it always bothered me how Star Wars lightsabers didn't have any kind of hilt/crossguard, which should have made it almost trivially easy for their opponent's to simply slide their lightsaber down the blade and slice off their opponents hand. Maybe someone in the universe finally realized that with a crossguard every lightsaber duel wouldn't end with someone loosing a hand?

Yes, but he didn't fail, because that's not what he said. He said first electronic programmable computer. The Z1 (and successors) were electromechanical. Still impressive in their own right, true, but nothing like the electronic computers that were invented later.

No, it wasn't general purpose. It was designed from the ground up to solve a very specific class of problems. It would have been possible (as the linked article states) to put a bunch of them together to form a Universal Turing computer, but it itself was not general purpose nor Turing complete.

That has *always* been true of computers. That is, in fact, exactly why we built computers in the first place: to do things faster than humans can. Saying that something is "smarter than any human in certain ways" is meaningless. Hell, in a way, rocks are smarter than humans. After all, if I throw a rock, it "knows" exactly what path it should take (minimizing energy, interacting with the air, etc.) Sure, it'll be nearly a parabola, but it will be perturbed from a parabola by tiny air currents, minute fluctuations in the gravitational field, et alia. And it will follow the resulting path perfectly. Humans cannot calculate, and will never be able to calculate, this trajectory with perfect precision. No one would ever say the rock is smarter than a human, however, because obviously, it isn't. It has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever.

Watson is, fundamentally, no different from that rock. Sure, it follows a very complex "path" indeed (though laid down by humans), but the only difference between the rock and Watson is the *kind* of path. In fact, Watson's path is less complex than the path of the rock (which isn't entirely a fair comparison, since the rock's path is practically infinitely complex). There is intelligence in Watson, sure, but it's our intelligence, in the same way a thrown rock can make a deadly weapon if well-aimed. This is not to say that it's impossible for humans to design an intelligence that can supersede our own, but the kind of intelligence required for the "singularity" is entirely and almost completely different from anything we've come up with so far. We might do it one day, but it'll require an invention of an entirely new kind of artificial intelligence, and we don't even know what that kind of intelligence would look like, beyond possibly running a simulation of a human mind (which is, quite possibly, one way of doing it).

I certainly wouldn't listen to the "it's coming in 2040" predictions for the singularity: I mean, people seriously thought we'd have fusion power, flying cars, and regular moon trips by now 50 years ago, and none of that happened. On the other hand, we did get the Internet and ubiquitous wireless communication, which few people predicted. The future of technology that far away is unpredictable, because it relies on new discoveries, and by definition we don't know what we haven't discovered yet.

I only got a chance to scan the paper, but my impression is this. The difference is that the split electron wavefunction is creating a bubble in the liquid helium. Splitting a quantum wavefunction is rather boring: it's pretty easy, all you need is a finite barrier to produce tunneling, or a double-slit to produce separate paths, or a bunch of other ways. What this experiment does, though (if they're correct about the cause) is show that the split wavefunction actually affects the matter through which it travels (creating a bubble), proportional to the amount of wavefunction that splits off, without counting as a "measurement" which would collapse the wavefunction and place the electron definitely inside one bubble or another.

Or, to put it another way, it shows that matter not only behaves like a wave when traveling (which was very well known in quantum mechanics), but can do so even when interacting with matter. That is fairly novel (AFAIK) in QM, since usually such interactions either cannot be measured or collapse the wavefunction into a particle-like behavior. It's a lot closer to directly measuring the wavefunction (or it's amplitude, anyways) itself than most QM experiments allow.

Reads more like an ad for Matlab (with 2 links to Mathworks and 1 to the Wikipedia Matlab page in TFA) than a job ad. Though I suspect what actually happened was the reporter heard Jonathan Rosenberg mention Matlab (which the reporter hadn't heard of before) and got all excited over his "discovery" when anyone who's likely to get any kind of data analysis/statistics job for, well, anyone, already knows what Matlab is.

Although if anyone does find something dark brown and gooey in that text, I'd advise them not to try eating it, as it's probably not chocolate.

Kant is even older than that, and yet you don't see him being taught in high school either. The age of an idea has little to do with the complexity of the idea, and quantum mechanics is quite complicated, if you want to really understand it. Shakespeare is only widely taught because, due to cultural influences, he is considered something that everyone should know, and his plays aren't really all that hard to understand. Quantum mechanics, orbital dynamics, E&M, etc., not so much. It's not simply because they're hard, either, though those subjects are: it's simply because, unless you're going into a field that requires it, you really don't need to know them, just as the physicist doesn't need to know Kant.

Because giving a bunch of humans a boring,monotonous job doesn't solve the problem of humans making errors, which is what caused this release in the first place.

That's exactly what they are. It's pretty trivial to take, say, GTX 440, and reflash the firmware to report that it's a GTX660. It's extremely difficult to make a fake nvidia card that isn't actually an nvidia card that actually works as a video card and isn't completely obviously a fake. The story was even on slashdot.

IANAL, so I can't say for sure, but it's unlikely. The magistrate didn't rule on a matter of law, only on a matter of procedure (i.e. how to serve a notice). Judges in most cases are typically free to set procedural changes if necessary at their discretion, no precedent required. It's not a formal court decision, it's a discretionary alteration to formal procedure made necessary by the difficulty in contacting the ex-wife. And of course it's a low level judge anyways: their decisions of any kind tend to carry very little weight with other courts.

Of course, other judges who hear about the case may decide on their own judgment to do likewise, but there is nothing legally obligating or even inclining them to do so.

Irony: calling the American Midwest "unpopulated", yet calling someone else (who points out that the Midwest is not, in fact, unpopulated) a "blithering nincompoop."

The word you may have meant to use is underpopulated. I know language is complicated, but despite sharing several letters, "un" and "under" do not, in fact, mean the same thing.

Sincerely - One of the tens of millions of people who live in the Midwest.

I often agree with Randall, but in this case I think he's (mostly) wrong. Yes, ideas are tested by experiment. Properly constructed experiments. That means repetition, controls, statistics, the whole nine yards. If scientists used Mythbusters-style experiments we'd still think light objects inherently fall faster than heavy ones (after all, most lighter objects do fall slower than heavier ones, thanks to air resistance). You don't think people in the "unscientific darkness" didn't actually try out a lot of the things they got wrong? Of course they did. They got it wrong because they ran their experiments improperly. And Mythbuster's often does as well. To be fair, "it didn't work this time, lets try it out 99 more times to make sure" doesn't really make entertaining television, and that's generally all Mythbuster's is: entertainment. They have the seeds of science (experimentation), but science is far more than that alone. The problem is, when people look at what they do as actually being science, they end up thinking you can confirm a scientific theory with a single experiment run with 20 minutes of work. And the conclusion to that thought process is looking at the weather report and dismissing global warming because it's a particularly chilly summer. Or saying "hmm, well [some action] didn't kill me this time, it must be perfectly safe."

Scientifically educated people don't come to that conclusion, of course, but those people aren't the problem.