I have no strong opinion about the DWave machine. It might be doing quantum computing or it might be doing classical computing. I don't have the correct background to judge, and there is still a lot of controversy among those who do know this stuff.

However, if you read the article (which I did), they are doing real engineering. They are building very sophisticated superconducting quantum circuits. Their second generation machine has four times the qubits and cycles much more quickly. This is very difficult and advanced work, and they are making it happen.

So why is DWave getting so much flack on Slashdot? Somehow I doubt it's because there are vast number of quantum physics types just waiting to display their deep knowledge whenever the subject comes up. What I see are Slashdot Pundits: hoards of pseudotechnical wanna-be's who pile on with meaningless criticism. The motivation is not to have a useful debate but to pretend to be smart by talking trash. Maybe they impress each other, but from my vantage point it looks like a lot of eight year olds shouting curse words they don't understand and giggling over how cool they are.

Doesn't someone have COBOL running in a browser now? :-)

It's been true for hotels. Although this at first seems counterintuitive, for awhile, newer hotels, which had been built with Cat 5 to the room, had wired internet but no wireless, while older hotels, who couldn't retrofit wired but *could* put in access points, had wireless but no wired. Now pretty much everyone has wireless. In the near future, you may be able to guess within a few years when a hotel was built by whether or not there's a RJ45 socket in the wall.

And supposedly it is no faster than a real computer. What gives?

It's hard to say because it's all "secret sauce" (so everybody just plunks their heels down on some position rather than admit "I don't know") but one thing that's interesting to me is that a handful of blokes out of Canada appear to have built a computer that's about as fast as a Xeon that Intel needed a few billion dollars, thousands of people, and forty years experience to create.

And that was their first commercial version. Maybe somebody will rip one apart and find out it says "Xeon 2650" on the inside, but until that happens I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because they seem to have at least one fairly remarkable accomplishment under their belts.

If the Google guys buy the upgrade, I'd be willing to bet five bucks that it's real, just very early in the development cycle still.

So, assuming he wasn't already dead, technically he didn't die in the Tesla.

Musk can still say, "no Tesla owner has ever died driving one of our vehicles," too, because he wasn't an owner, he was a thief.

Every bureaucracy tries to expand itself, you know that. Rather than actually get the bandwidth to schools that they need (200Kbps per student or so, ballpark) to support real telelearning, which is hard to do (but arguably within FCC purview), especially given the extensive number of rural schools, they lean towards something easy - buying access points, to hook up to their too-slow Internet link because every agency has to be seen "doing something".

There is no question it is an amazing technology. As an engineer I can only say, wow!.

But as a taxpayer ...

And each bullet costs just two times the GDP of the entire village the terrorist is hailing from! And we will make up for it in volume too!

Some times I wonder if it would be cheaper to feed, cloth, provide healthcare and house all the Afghans than what we spent on military over there. Afghanistan hardly has 30 million people. Per capita income is 500$ a year. Just 15 billion dollars total. We spent 1 trillion dollars in the war over there. Our government is borrowing at historically low rate, 10 year t-bills go at 2.5%, the interest charges on that debt alone is 25 billion dollars a year!

I don't know if it would have worked. But the idea goes like, take a large well defended perimeter. Free food, clothing, hospitals and homes inside. Let people in after disarming them. Expand the area as more and more people move in. We might be able to take in 90% of the population inside, standing obediently at the breadline and the hospital waiting rooms. I don't know. May be an idiot slashdot keyboard warrior.

The OP is missing the point. Of *course* you can automate updates. You don't even need an automation system. It can be as simple as writing a bash script.

The point is... what happens when something goes wrong? If all goes well, then there's no problem. But if something does go wrong, you no longer have anyone able to respond because nobody's paying attention. So you come in the next morning with a down server and a clusterf__k on your hands.

I think the title is actually a bit inaccurate. It seems that it's not 80% of calls in the US are stored, it's 80% of all calls globally are stored in the US. The remainder is likely because there are some pipes they don't have reliable enough taps for.

This has nothing to to with the Tesla; wouldn't matter what was being driven.

Or is it that 80% are actual audio calls and the rest are just meta-data?

This was an educational experience for me, learning the difference between colour temperature, which is really only valid for continuum sources, and colour rendering index, more applicable to spectral line sources. Low CRIs don't necessarily have a low colour temperature, but they definitely distort perceived colour, whether they're too blue, or the weird orange of sodium vapour lights.

The most stringent CRI requirement in my home is my makeup mirror. Which is the last incandescent bulb...

...laura

Unfortunately, we didn't have any openings for reactionless engine technicians or 4th order energy engineers.

At the time of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution [wikipedia.org], 90% of American's supported deeper involvement.

At the time, the American people were being lied into supporting a war, so it's hard to take that number seriously as an indication of truth.

The Maddox fired on ghost ships (RADAR errors) and the Johnson administration explained it as "another attack", insisted the NVA fired first, and sold this as evidence of a pattern of aggressive behavior that had to be dealt with.

50,000 Americans died fighting a boogey man, and killed many more innocents than that. But the MIC profited handsomely, just as Eisenhower had predicted.

The NSA's report was only declassified after the Bush Administration lied Americans into war in 2003, but now we have two documented examples of being lied into war by the USG. It's no wonder that they didn't bother seeking any authorizations for any of the subsequent wars in the Middle East or Africa.

If dead people can vote, they can go to war also.

It certainly cuts out the expensive, wasteful, inhumane middle part of the usual arrangement.