Just because translations exist doesn't mean English is losing its edge. Virtually all top journals in pure sciences require publication in English. The one exception I've seen is French. Quite a few top math journals still allow French.

In the soft sciences there are also things like: small sample sizes, ill-defined terms, and using overly complex statistical methodology to extract meaningless conclusions. And there is no remediation via stupidity: large swaths of the social sciences are just breeding grounds for career-hungry paper pushers whose motivation has nothing to do with the furthering of human knowledge.

The good news is that there is still good research going on. We could weed out the bad if we changed the promotional model of researchers, but that won't happen easily because those at the top are there because of the current methodology.

Electron may be a resource hog, but with it Microsoft produced Visual Studio Code. It's free, available on Linux, and the first text editor that I have actually been able to use aside from Vim. Aside from Vim keybindings, it's just pure fun to use, and wouldn't exist on Linux without Electron.

I may be a grumpy old man, but now that we've come up with a truckload of technology to improve our lives a lot, can we please step back from this technology buzz and get back to regular old life?

This is interesting because although something like Schor's algorithm for finding the order of an element in the multiplicative group of a field (and hence factoring) is faster than the best traditional algorithms, no one has actually proved that there isn't a faster method of factoring that would beat Schor.

The lack of the ability to repair is a tragedy of the commons. People are willing to pay more for a sealed phone at the expense of the environment when they throw it away. The commons is the environment that nobody owns but everyone benefits from. This is exactly the sort of thing that regulation is for.

You're right, Libre Office is probably better.

But otherwise you should stop blaming other people for your poor decisions. If you can't afford rent/housing with your day job you made a poor decision *somewhere*.

This isn't about a job not offering enough money. It's about intellectual satisfaction. Even as a STEM researcher which in itself is fun, I still like to pursue other more artistic activities that make money just because I have the drive and curiosity to do so.

There are people in North America who have the theoretical means to live a comfortable life but instead go hungry because of a lack of education.

There is a lot more to improving the living conditions of a country than just a few hundred billion dollars. If that's all it took, someone would have done it by now because the benefits from having a prosperous ally for trade would be enormous.

Thunderbird still has RSS support and seems like a far better interface for them than Firefox. RSS news items are like email messages: you can use filters and parsing on them in Thunderbird, which is far more useful than the limited features available in Firefox.

What about people who can't digest beans easily? As far as I know there are quite a lot of them. I would think that a far more sensible solution is lab-grown meat, which wouldn't contain the fibrous material in beans that is indigestible to many.

The solutions that ISARA says are in their suite are not new solutions developed by them. For example, two systems they use are the McEliece PKE and NewHope. The former is based on coding theory and the latter is based on ring learning with errors. You can put those terms into Google/Google scholar and find a bunch of papers on them.

Typically so-called quantum resistant algorithms are just based on a different class of problems related to lattice problems, like finding the nearest lattice vector close to some point. Such algorithms are believed to be quantum resistant because they are typically in a class of problems that are supposed to be hard, like NP-complete for instance or some other related class.

Some of them are quite old. The reason why they were not used before is because they are worse in some ways compared to RSA or discrete log. Worse for example in having a large plaintext to ciphertext expansion, or needing huge key lengths. Of course with the possible coming of quantum computing, we would be better off accepting some of these trade-offs now.

Several years ago I had a thinkpad that had become infested with ants. I used a blow dryer to heat up the computer a little (while it was off) to make the ants want to leave. I left the blow dryer over the keyboard too long and melted the keys off.

Bought a keyboard online for 30 dollars and replaced the old one in five minutes. This wouldn't have been possible with this new MacBook. Sad.

Thirdly: for funk sake, it is not YOUR money. You payed the taxes, yes. And now the money belongs to someone else. If you want to have influence on it, join DARPA, or any other research institute where you can decide where the money goes.

It's not even my taxes as I'm not American. I'm just putting out an informed opinion from someone inside research. It's called an opinion, get over it. It is also the right and dare I say the duty of the public to have an opinion about these decisions so that through lobbying and letter-writing, they actually can make a small difference should they wish to.

It's not labeled pseudoscience because it disagrees with current science. It's called that because it is poorly formulated and does not make precise predictions. If you actually look at the arXiv papers, the derivations are a mess and the figures are blurry. There is very little careful examination of anything in them at all.

It is also easy to derive consequences and new ideas from well-formed theories, even theoretical ones. If you actually write something that makes sense, other scientists will usually jump all over it and write more theoretical papers. This guy's papers have been cited very few times by anyone but himself. That's another sign he's a crank.

That doesn't mean everything in them is nonsense, but for pete's sakes if you're going to present a radically new theory, make sure you pay extreme care to the derivations and details. That is, make it understandable to others in similar fields.

Speaking for the public, it is a huge waste of money to invest in testing papers like this, especially at this level of funding. I have seen hundreds of them, and none of them has ever turned out to be correct.