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.

I know they used the word 'invisibility' which implies visual, but they do identify it as being invisible to radar.

A person's religion is what they say it is, there is no other reasonable way of labeling someone with a religion.

Actually I think this is pretty cool. It's always bothered me how repetitive sounds can get in games, it would be a neat trick if you could model object's for sound the way you model them for graphics. Each door, window, rock, etc, could have a subtly different sound from the one next to it. I'm sure they're not to that point now, but they are spelling out the possibilities.

A) This is for targeting smaller missile (non-balistic). Smaller missiles are... well smaller. They take less heat to damage and cause failures and they have less surface area to spread the heat out over.
B) That was 30 years ago. Laser power and tracking has improved just a bit since then.
C) This is more about defending against the kind of dumb rockets that Hezbollah fires into Israel every so often as it is about an engagement with a highly funded modern military.

The "fake" flag, as you put it can be stored on a separate server and since it is storing such a small, tiny fraction of your user data (a map of usernames to an integer indicating the correct hash to look for) it can be much more tightly restricted.

The whole purpose of this system is to detect "actual hack attempts". No one is going to brute force a good password directly on the service, they're going to get a leaked/stolen copy of the password database and try to crack the passwords locally. With this system, the attacker doesn't know which hash is the one that will actually grant access. You could have 100 hashes for each user; enter the correct password and access is granted, enter a random password and access is denied, enter a password that generates any of the other 99 hashes and warnings are instantly sent to the admins of the system telling them that their password DB has been compromised allowing them to respond appropriately.

The advantage of adding multiple fake passwords for each user rather than seeding fake username/password combinations is that it can detect the attack even if it is directed at a single user as opposed to the entire user base.

It's not "duh" though, adults grossly underestimate the amount of sleep kids need, starting at about age 1 all way through age 25. I tell people my 2 year old goes to be at 7:30PM and wakes up at 7:00AM, then has a 2 hours nap. I've gotten everything from incredulous stares to accusations that I'm somehow a bad parent for letting my kid sleep that much. Very, very rarely do people say anything positive about it. Never mind the fact that all the research points to kids 1-3 years old needing 12-14 hours of sleep per day. That number starts to gradually drop at age 3 until it hits about 8-9 hours, then puberty hits and the recommended sleep goes back up (and the circadian rhythm shifts to a sleep late wake up late schedule that our schools ignore).

The take away shouldn't be kids that sleep more do better, it should be that sleep is fucking important and as parents it's up to you to make sure your kid gets it.

I'm can't disagree with the U.S. Government's position on this one. If your voice is sent via the phone network, the world's public voice network, and isn't encrypted, then why should anybody need anything to listen in on it? Unreasonable search and seizure doesn't apply when one person is talking to another person on a street corner...or on the world's biggest voice network.

Our transportation, communication, and power function 'well enough' for everything else to operate effectively already. Not to say they are perfect or good or even decent, just that you can have good education and research, good healthcare, a fair justice system, a reasonably sized military, and address environmental concerns with the infrastructure we have today.