Snobs *exclude* rather than include (Thanks Ebert!). By refusing to drink anything other than domestics you have proven yourself as much of a snob as the parent poster.

Solution: Get together and swap beer!

But seriously, get out there and try some different brews. You'd be amazed at what's available these days. Beer is undergoing an veritable renaissance right now. Take advantage!

P.S. Serving beer ice cold hides a lot of its taste. For some beers this is a good thing and entirely recommended. There are plenty of beers out there that benefit from being served a little warmer. Not necessarily room temperature, but somewhat above freezing.

Private companies typically do not engage in long-term research that isn't likely to lead to directly commercializable results. I know this flies in the face of red-blooded 'merican "all socialism is evil" doctrine, but public sector research, funded by tax-payer money, is needed to build the foundations for tomorrow's industries. Quantum computing, like many other bleeding edge fields, is too immature, too high-risk, and with pay-offs that are far too distant for the private sector.

Research and education are both investments that can yield fantastic returns, but they are long-term investments that require steady commitment rather than periodic outbursts of zeal punctuating long periods of apathy. A minor cut now might help balance the books today, but the lost opportunities down the road will more than negate that. Top researchers don't hang around after you cut the funding they run their labs and pay their students and post-docs with. They won't wait a few years until times are good again. What they will do is go where the money they need to work is, and if they can't find that in the U.S., they'll likely find it in Canada, China, Australia, etc.. The U.S. is far from the only country doing quality research in QC these days.

Unfortunately, some U.S. politicians are of the opinion that they can make political hay by screwing over those "pinko" scientists. They're smart enough to know what they're sacrificing, but votes for them are a worthier cause! The only way to fight this kind of thinking is to call up your local representative/senator/etc. and let them know you're not buying it. The only way to make them stop this kind of thing is to make them think they'll lose votes today, because that's all they care about.

Sound quality matters, but sometimes small features that one might usually overlook even more.

For example, say that you have a nice speaker setup and a good amp, but an aging pre-amp that can no longer decode the latest audio formats. If you run things with a PC, the pre-amp is basically a very expensive DAC. If you can find a sound-card with good DAC's on it you can, in theory, just toss the old pre-amp and connect your computer directly to your amp.

Problem! When a computer boots up, a large voltage spike goes through its various components including the audio card. With many audio cards or audio chipsets this spike goes right out the line to your amp, which dutifully amplifies it into a very large CRAWHOOMP!!! Besides causing your cat or dog to projectile defecate on whatever it happens to be near at the time, this can also damage your speakers and/or amp!

How do other components like pre-amps get around this problem? Good audio components all have some way of electrically isolating their outputs from the rest of the device so that these power-up CRAWHOOMP's don't happen. This usually means electromechanical relays. This is why your expensive amp or receiver usually makes some clicking noises moments after being powered up. That's the relays clicking into place once voltage levels have normalised.

Good audio cards, like the Asus Xonar series, also have these now. On-board chip-sets usually do not since it would add a few dollars to the price of the board and most people don't plug their computers output directly into an expensive amp and speakers.

Long story short, what audio components you hook up to your computer and how you hook them up both have a large impact on the features you need in your computer's audio card. For a long time, computers had zero chance of replacing pre-amps because almost all audio cards lacked the small features that good audio gear almost universally possesses. That's changing, and about time too!

Name it after some other deliberately mispronounced form of fetish-wear. I'd happily write papers in buttplug (pronounced bootploog).

Margaret Atwood once described civilization as the judicious trading of "freedoms to" for "freedom from". e.g. You trade the freedom to murder anyone you like for freedom from being murdered yourself. While a rather distressingly large percentage of Americans would scream "COMMIE PINKO!!!" at me for daring to suggest this, I feel that the stock markets could stand to be civilized a tad.

What is the purpose of the stock markets? Are they meant to be a video game played by A.I.'s for big cash prizes, or a way of facilitating investment and trade? It's time to find ways of restricting high frequency traders. While cumbersome regulations are one option, perhaps a per-trade tax or user-fee would be better. A tiny one, percentage wise, that will only have a significant impact on high frequency traders. Cuts to other taxes could be made to offset them for average frequency traders and perhaps even benefit low frequency traders.

There are, naturally, many other ways to approach this. All it takes is resolve and, in the U.S. at least, thick skin.

Don't feel bad, this is a pretty common mistake. People read about non-locality and how what happens to one half of an entangled pair affects the other half instantly no matter how far away it is. There does remain some philosophical debate over what entanglement and non-locality really are, but one thing has been supported very well by both theory and experiment: You can't transmit information or power faster than c. In the case of entangled pairs, actions on one half can have a non-local effect that propagates faster than c, but it's not possible to transmit information or power using that effect. In order to make sense of the results and actually observe the effects of non-locality, you typically need to send additional information classically.

So, this will not lead to lag-less communication over vast distances. What it will lead to is quantum crypto networks. Long distance entanglement swapping or quantum teleportation are one of the key ingredients to building a scalable network.

It's not OS's your students need experience with. It's software and programming languages they need experience with. If they're going to go into experimental science, they would also benefit from building hardware and interfacing it with their computers. (i.e. Some basic electronics)

I do experimental quantum physics work in a university. We use everything. OSX, XP, Windows Server (no Windows 7 or Vista installs surprisingly!), and a few distros of Linux. Sometimes we are forced to use a specific OS (usually Windows) because some piece of equipment we're interfacing with only has drivers for one OS. When that isn't the case, it's personal preference. (I gravitate towards Linux distros with decent KDE environments.) Really, you shouldn't worry about what OS your students use. Ideally, give them a chance to try out a variety of OS's.

The applications are what's really important and the big ones tend to be mostly the same across platforms. If you're doing basic (or not-so-basic) simulations or analysis, you're probably going to use Matlab or Mathematica. Something requiring higher performance will probably be written in a low level language like Fortran. (Yes, Fortran. It's surprisingly good for Physics work. Try doing linear algebra in Java or C and you'll just waste a lot of time writing tools.) If you're running an experiment you might do a little driver work in C or C++, but odds are you'll tie things together with something like Labview. Origin also gets used a fair bit for plotting and curve fitting even though it has a pretty horrible interface. Excel, gnumeric, etc. just aren't as good at fitting. For writing papers it's Latex and nothing else. Many people use Latex add-ons like beemer to make presentations as well instead of powerpoint. I'm sure other people can suggest software to get, but it's going to get expensive fast unless you can get some free educational samples, which you should probably try asking for. You might be surprised by what you get!

Here's my ideal environment for your students:

-Not one OS, but many. They should be exposed to something they don't use at home. This will help them become adaptable.
-These OS's should not be locked down. Locking them down will stifle your students ability to learn. Heck, encourage them to try breaking and fixing things. You should probably, however, create disk images so you can easily restore the machines to a useable state if they are wratched. Your sysadmin will hate this idea and would probably prefer to lock things down tightly. Just remember that if sysadmins had their way nobody would ever use their systems.
-Get as much far-out scientific software as you can. Let your students play with it. Encourage them to try checking their Calculus assignments with Mathematica or Matlab, or perhaps write them up in Latex.
-Get some hardware to hook up to the computers. Find basic sensors like thermocouples or photo-diodes. Get some USB-interface chips, prototyping breadboards, and misc components and put your students to work interfacing those sensors with a computer. They might find it impossible, or they might surprise you. Being able to tackle tasks they're not prepared for with minimal guidance is one of the most useful skills you can teach them.
-Don't make boring lessons like, "Today we're going to learn how to print, "Hello World" in Java!". Give your students projects. Ambitious projects. The sort you don't know how to do. Give them lots of class time to work on it. Even if they're doing stuff you don't know anything about, talk to them about it. Ask them what they've done, what their current problems are, and what they plan to do. It's their problem to solve, but you're the coach who helps keep them on track.

If you do even a fraction of the above, your students will be well ahead of 99% of the students coming into University.

There's a pretty huge problem with banning alcoholic beverages containing caffeine. The worst offenders are not drinks that come in a can from Coors, but mixed drinks, like Vodka Red-Bull's. You can make laws telling people not to mix their Vodka and Red Bulls together, but good luck enforcing them! (Honestly, you'd think common sense and a sense of taste would be enough...)

The truly awful thing is that, if this kind of law was enacted, the drinks it would actually kill would be wonderful, rich microbrew espresso stouts and imperial coffee stouts. Outlaw Coors Light if you must, but DO NOT FUCK WITH GOOD BEER.

Finally, the most damning argument against this sort of law of all is that stupid frat boys and girls will still wind up doing stupid things no matter what they're drinking. So what's the point eh?

Depends on the type of network. For plain ol' BB84 systems relying on sending single qubit states, absolutely. You wouldn't use that over a quantum repeater network though. You'd likely use one of several quantum key distribution schemes relying on shared entanglement. (e.g. Ekert 92)

Here's the principle on which quantum repeater networks will operate:

Alice (----- Entangled Photon Pair Source -----) Bell State Measurement (------ Entangled Photon Pair Source -----) Bob

What we want is for Alice and Bob to each wind up holding half of an entangled pair of photons. The two sources create two pairs of entangled photons and send the halves in opposite directions. Alice and Bob initially receive photons that have nothing to do with each other. However, when the other halves of Alice and Bob's pairs are annihilated together in the Bell State Measurement in the middle, the entanglement of the annihilated photons is swapped to Alice and Bob's photons such that they wind up being entangled together. The nice thing about this is that Alice and Bob can verify that they share entangled pairs and there's no way for anyone in the middle to fool them, provided Alice and Bob authenticate each other and there are no real-world deficiencies in their apparatus. In essence, Alice and Bob don't have to trust the man in the middle even though he's handling their photons.

To build a quantum repeater network, you just expand this out in a giant daisy chain with many many steps. Quantum memory is necessary for caching photons at each node in the chain so that you can wait for all nodes to be ready before proceeding with the bell state measurements. Caching is necessary because the probability of photons reaching each of the stations in the network simultaneously is no better than the probability of one photon going from end-to-end. i.e. Not bloody likely over long distances.


P.S. Funny aside: The first BB84 system built by Bennett and Brassard (the first quantum crypto system ever built), had some rather noisy pockel cell's controlling measurement bases such that you could tell what basis Alice was measuring in from the sound of the cell. Additionally, Alice and Bob were on the same lab bench, so an eavesdropper in between them would necessarily be inside the room. It was therefore famously joked that the first quantum crypto system was only secure if any potential eavesdropper was stone deaf! This is an example of a side-channel attack that can occur when reality doesn't quite live up to theory, and is the sort of thing people building any kind of crypto system, quantum or otherwise, have to worry about.