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Comment Re:Teleportation remains elusive (Score 5, Funny) 207

Indeed.

When I was a kid I used to fantasize about a future where the would be teleportation booths on every street corner.

You'd walk in, pop some coins in the slot, dial your destination then whoooooooo.....

I live in the UK so the teleportation booths would be run by BT, Vodafone, O2 or possibly Virgin. I imagine that you could get an off-peak tariff to be able to teleport anywhere in the world after 6pm.

Trouble is, your head would arrive at the intended destination but your limbless and bloody torso would arrive somewhere in Cairo and your assorted arms and legs would be buffered indefinitely, only to ve lost for all time once they reboot their server.

Comment Re:Teleportation remains elusive (Score 3, Insightful) 207

Once we are able to?

We would need to record the quantum state (spin, polarization, momentum, position) of every particle of matter in the thing being 'teleported' and then reproduce that state at the other end.

As we all know from Quantum Mechanics 101, it is impossible to to measure the state of a particle without affecting it (the Uncertainty principle).

Teleportation experiments to date have involved the reproduction of state between a particle pair (quantum entanglement). This is an impressive feat but the amount of information need to convey the particle states of say, a bacterium, and encode and transmit it to some notional receiver would take more time than the universe has existed for.

Comment Re:Minor suggestions (Score 1, Interesting) 1154

Hmmm. So reading between the lines here (and I'm just wildly guessing) I think you are saying that the Linux desktop should be OS X.

I use OS X every single working day and although it is pretty good and pretty much gets out of my way, it is not ideal in many respects. Finder, for example, is a pile of steaming junk, but I live with it, rather than installing some 3rd-party solution - because if I did, I'd soon become dependent on it and would be lost if I had to use a Mac that wasn't mine (which I do often).

The OS X desktop also has many usability and consitency issue. The fact you can only resize a window by dragging the bottom-righthand corner is just one example. It's just lame. When I use Windows for a while (and I have to) then it just annoys the fuck out of me when I get back to OS X that I have to locate and reach the bottom-right corner to resize the window - this should have been fixed YEARS ago.

As far as Linux desktops go, KDE and Gnome are not brilliant, and not as good as the Windows/OS X experience, but they are certainly more than usable.

Blaming the desktop software for Linux not being able to run MS Office or Photoshop is just plain silly.

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