We'll replace it with a backup robot and send this one to the front of the line at the robot service center where it will be repaired (by robots).

Just don't ask what happens when the failure rate exceeds the repair rate.

No one with the money to afford one of their machines is stupid enough to buy them as anything other than a research machine. Even if someone hadn't come up with a way to match their speed with a classical computer (which has already happened) a 10,000x speed increase on a very narrow problem set at a cost of more than 100,000x just buying the additional hardware (not to mention the cost in learning how to use this new and exotic machine) makes obvious that it is not yet an economical solution for anyone.

Because if it is quantum it's a generation 0 (barely out of prototype) implementation going up against a generation... oh I don't know... 30+ classical computer. If it's not quantum, if it's basically an ASIC chip designed to solve simulated annealing problems (intentionally or not), it's worthless even as research. What they are selling is a research and training system, so that engineers can learn what kinds of problems can be solved on the hardware that will, presumably, get much more powerful going forward.

Look at it this way, the current D-wave machine has 512 qbits and a modern PC can match it's speed. Double the qbits and you end up with a simulation space several million times larger, the 15x faster is going to seem laughable when the problem you are solving is trillions of times larger and the D-Wave solves in constant time while your PC runs an algorithm that's O(n^2). If, if, what D-wave is selling is using quantum affects.

I'm sure designing a trigger lock that would also prevent the hammer being cocked is beyond all our engineering prowess.

To be fair, why should the necessarily be wrong? I'm not talking about phishing or viruses or key loggers; I'm talking about whole disk encryption, network security, end to end messaging encryption. These things should be commodities by now, there's no reason every PC sold shouldn't have full disk encryption. There's no reason any business grade networking gear should work without encryption. It should be standard. It's really hard to get security perfect, but somewhere along the line the industry forgot that they can get as close to perfect as possible with relatively little effort.

I suspect it would be more accurate to say that innovation was extremely inconsistent pre-history. I haven't any doubt that many, many things were invented dozens or hundreds of times, only to be lost when the guy died, or his son decided not to carry on the tradition, or some disaster fell that made them abandon specialization. Once you start writing stuff down, in a way that can be shared with others and understood generations later, you don't have everyone starting from scratch every time something goes wrong any more. You start to build the hill that becomes the mound that becomes the mountain that is our present knowledge of the world.

Speed doesn't matter, quality matters. One has gone up, while the other had gone down. No one reports on how many lives are saved by vaccination because it isn't "news"; it's normal, it's expected, and it is pleasantly boring. Instead, we get headlines "HPV vaccine causes fainting spells" with the pertinent information (50-60 out of several million, no lasting negative effects) is buried 2 pages in. Because it sells. It sells and it makes money and it causes of culture of fear and worry that leads to kids getting sick when they don't have to. And it wouldn't matter if that headline come out 2 years after the events or 2 minutes, it would have the same effect either way.

HPV was/is incredibly common, now the particular strain that the vaccine was targeted for was quite rare, but it so happens that the vaccine also provides protection against most of the other strains as well. And yeah... if I can protect future generations from not only the pain and shame of genital warts (90% of which are caused by one of the strains the vaccine protects against) but also cut the rate of cervical cancer while I'm at it (admittedly the actual target of the vaccine) at the cost of... well statistically the vaccine is as safe as a saline injection so I would argue a cost of essentially 0.

No. Just no. The 'damage' that vaccines do is barely statistically significant, the benefits they provide are so fundamental that there are core aspects of our culture and society that have changed since their introduction. Your argument that vaccines are going to destroy our immune systems or cause the diseases to mutate shows a lack of understanding to how vaccines works; they train the immune system in the exact same way contracting the virulent disease would. Not only does it not weaken the immune system (in fact it strengthens it) it also prevents a large reservoir of the disease from ever building up in the population. Smaller reservoir means that mutations are less likely simply because the numbers are smaller.

Vaccines have saved more lives than the next 5 medical breakthroughs combined with the possible exception of basic sanitation (if you can call that a medical breakthrough). Trying to argue that "The vaccine debate is a religious one on both sides " is ludicrous, like saying the debate between the theories of relativity and the flying spaghetti monster are on equal ground. They're not, one is backed up by a mountain of evidence so large that people forget that the mountain isn't a natural feature of the world. Before vaccines, parents lived in real fear that their children would catch any one of a half dozen diseases that would maim or kill them, today parents spend hours worrying about a syndrome that has a .05% chance of happening to their newborn.

It's not a quantum computer, it's a quantum annealer. It can't run general purpose quantum computer algorithms like Shor's Algorithm but it can find the optimum values for a specific class of problems, the same ones that are sometimes solved with software simulations of quantum annealing appropriately enough. The latest research shows that it outperforms a regular computer by several orders of magnitude on those problems, but it remains to be seen if it performs better than an ASIC chip designed for the task.

Small towns are even more impressive. I can send stuff to my family members with nothing but a name, city, state, and zip and be confident it will get there. Granted, it's only a town of 1000 people, but I've always found it impressive the few times it's happened.

You're thinking about it in terms of now. What can you do with Google Glass? Well you can take a picture, get directions, view messages, and do searches hands free. It's not really worth it; too geeky, too expensive, too physically wonky to be worth it.

But what can you do with it 10 years from now? User your imagination a bit and I'm sure you can think of some ideas for always on camera/display combo. And in 10 years the geek, hassle, and cost factors will be way down with slimmer designs. Hell, contact displays aren't impossible. Or if you want depth of field retina projection isn't impossible either.

Another thing to keep in mind, he sees the big picture with his charity work. Most rich donors would have looked at polio and said there's only a few thousand lives to save here, lets spend the money somewhere else where the impact will be bigger. But he looks at it and says we have the chance to wipe the disease off the planet and remove the threat forever. Not to say he's the first person to see things that way by any means. I just mean that most people in his position wouldn't think in those terms.

Yes, there are always two scenarios.

1) Bribery, in effect if not in the precise definition. Politicians who would have voted against it or who had no defined position received funds in direct or implied exchange for their vote.
2) Politicians who have a stated position received money from companies who benefit from that position. This is still distasteful in that it gives the people in control of the money a disproportionate say in government but doesn't rise to the same level of immorality.

So you'd think it would be relatively easy to do an analysis as to which is which. Unfortunately you also have politicians shopping for donations by taking positions which they think will bring them in.

It may be true in an idealized sense. As in, if we took all the money we're about to put into carbon capture and alternative energy and instead put it into planting millions of acres of trees, we might be able to maintain atmospheric CO2 at current levels... for a while. Until we ran out of space, or had a drought and large scale fires, or until the trees started dying of old age and rotting on the ground. Unless you're gonna cut down the trees and sink them to the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean... but really, any plan that relies on ongoing expenditure of effort and money is doomed to fail in the long run. Our only realistic plan is to bring the cost of clean energy sources down to the point where the dirty ones aren't economical anymore.