> Most people believe that you can learn a skill if you work at it hard enough.

Most people unaffected by a specific limitation believe that you (i.e. someone else) can learn a skill if you work at it hard enough.

This is a very dangerous maxim and as a general policy, it has already ruined the life of millions: Instead of encouraging people to play on their strengths, it pecks on their weaknesses, stigmatizes them as lazy and turns fate into failure and failure into fault.

> it's the attitude of pretty much all of western society.

I would say it's mostly a protestant thing and much less pronounced in the catholic part of the West.

> how many times have we heard of people overcoming their own limits to do something they really wanted to?

Not often, but yes there are exceptions and usually they involve coming up with new ways of doing things to somehow circumvent the original limitation - human creativity is indeed unlimited! However, the thousands of failures for each one beating the odds don't get nearly as much press ...

> Training is exactly the process of making someone good at something!

Well, this is a typical manager attitude - this does not make it any more true, though: Training is the process of systematically (as opposed to implicitly as e.g. by learning on the job) turning talent into skill.

If the talent is there, then training will indeed make you good or better at something. If it lacks, no amount of training will make you "good" in any reasonable sense; basically, you will be reduced to "faking it" with huge effort but very little to show for it. In some rare cases, this is worth it (mobility training for the blind comes to mind), most of the time it is not.

In IT/CS it is even worse, as without enough talent, in a professional environment, you will often end up with not just low but negative productivity i.e. causing more problems than you actually solve (and often make your life miserable in the process).

Most people who are sure that yesterday HAS NOT BEEN the rapture have exactly the same amount of evidence behind them as those who think it HAS BEEN. After all, God might well have been more picky than anticipated ...

Because getting a lunar mining operation up and running will probably take considerably longer than 20 years. Also consider that fusion research is going on for decades while the lunar program is pretty much starting from scratch.
So if 10 years of "talking" (i.e. conceptual research, feasibility studies, evaluation of existing results from other areas etc.) which is very cheap in comparison to the actual engineering and execution stage, will allow the project to finish 5 years sooner than would otherwise have been the case, it makes a lot of sense to shell out a few millions now, just in case.

Thanks for pointing this out. So you say, the payroll tax is not a tax but simply social security payments automatically deducted from the employer (if you have one). While some people might still consider this a tax, it's more like a mandatory insurance and per se not a problem, if the participants get a reasonably good deal (practically this means, that the system will be somewhat subsidized by general tax money, which may or may not be the case in the US).

The point I was trying to make is that it's obviously not a good idea to put extra taxes on wages (as compared to other kinds of income) when your problem is not enough employment. However, if the social security sytem is redistributive (akaif in the US, the permium is flat while the payout is degressive), then it begs the question why other forms of income (e.g. rents, intrest, dividends, or other capital gains etc.) are exempt.

The same argument can be made for the "burden that would otherwise be placed on the U.S." argument, as its not unheard of that even landlords, stock gamblers or heirs can end up broke and homeless.

I mean, really, how stupid can you get? If the problem is 10+% unemployment, you can tax profit, sales, capital, energy usage etc. but the one and only thing you never want to tax in this situation is payroll, esp. as wages are already subject to individual income tax.

Have you - or anyone who modded this up - even bothered to check the article? How old do you rate the guy from the picture? 20 years from now, chances are his grand children will be grown up!

ignatius

... moving from continuous trading to iterated auctions merely replaces one problem by another: While now you want to act first, in the auction, you want to act last. In any case, he who gets to know the bids of the others sooner and can place his own bids faster will have an advantage. The only solution would be to keep the bids secret - but who do you want to entrust with this job? And how would you keep the bids secret before they enter the system? After all, your bank or online broker has to check your orders to verify e.g. if the bid is covered by your account etc.

ignatius

A couple of thousands do (about 5 times the lenght of the number you want to factor). But what you really need is the ability to perform multi-billion gate-operations (while the QFT itself is quadratic, Shor also uses modular exponentiation which makes it a cubic O(n^3) algorithm) within the decoherence time (usually measured in milliseconds or seconds) and with a technical accuracy to the tune of 99.9999999% - a quantum computer is, after all, an analogous device: qubits don't "lock in"; a NOT-gate e.g. thus has to be an exact 180 deg; rotation and neither 179.999 nor 180.001 deg (does not matter for a couple of gates in toy problems but those imperfections add up).

Quantum error correction can somewhat mitigate the former problem (at the cost of about one order of magnitude overhead in both space and time) but not the later. So if it's feasible at all (which is by no means certain as there might be hidden constraints on scalability), we probably won't live to see it.

ignatius

... but people have other means of relating to the world and establishing trust than by keyboard. (hint: posting as AC is not a good start)

Being part of the free press ... doesn't give you cover to work with a person who is illegally stealing and transferring classified documents. Period.

Sure it does. If it doesn't in the US (with may or may not be the case - IANAL), this merely means that you have no free press there and not that a free press cannot work with and publish information obtained by and published by others (criminals or not) or has not the right and obligation to protect their sources.

And btw: stealing is when I take something away from you so that you no longer have it. Copying - by definition - can never be stealing as the term implies that the original is still there. So the term you're looking for is "copyright infringement", "licence violation" or something similar. Not quite as Manichean, I know, but the truth rarely is.

ignatius

This can be trivially fixed by digitally signing the content.

Predicting commute times and keeping the results secrets vs. predicting commute time and putting them in real time on a public website are two completely different problems. The former ist simply about estimating an output parameter from a set of input parameters so it's basically about approximating a function. The latter contains a nasty feedback loop as the output paramter is in itself an input parameter as it influences the behaviour of the system, so you're basically looking for a fixed point where the publication of the forecast exactly repells as many drivers at it attracts - only these values allow for a stable prognosis. In economics this effect is known as Goodhart's law.

This means that the competition is about a completly different (and much simpler) problem to that which they are eventually trying to solve.

ignatius

No, if the System would end up in state 1/sqrt2 * (|A1>+|A2>), then no observation has taken place as

    1/sqrt2 * (|A1>+|A2>) = |A> x 1/sqrt2 * (|1>+|2>)

with "x" being the tensor product. The post measurement state would have to be an entangled state, e.g. something like

    1/sqrt2 * (|A1>+|B2>)

with |B> being the state of the observer after having heard a click on the Geiger counter, while in |A> there has been no click.

Glad to read that, as it was the first solution for this problem which came to my mind also. A more sophisticated variant would be to allow one reseller an exclusive scanner permit to scan the shelves in the final hours or even after the sale is over. If there is more then one prospective reseller, the privilege can be auctioned off to generate extra income for the store.

This way, the reseller won't disturb the regular customers as he can do his work without time-pressure and the shop will get extra income in case of more than one interested reseller.