If you wrongly claim to own the copyright or be the agent of someone who does, there is a penalty under the perjury clause.
Which is what has happened here. Microsoft does not possess any copyright regarding the Wikipedia article on Glock pistols. This is very different from the usual case where overreaching DMCA notices are sent against actual usage of copyrighted material, but where the usage is allowed by law (e.g., under fair use). Here, however, we have the interesting case of a Microsoft representative making a false claim under the penalty of perjury.
TFDMCAN: "I swear, under penalty of perjury, that with respect to those notifications, I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
I think the big questions are how "quantum" (i.e., coherent) their devices actually are and whether this makes them more useful than their classical counterparts. And, if quantum optimization is a good idea to begin with.
Two words: Bertlmann's socks.
case WAN_WISHING:
#ifdef WIZARD
if (!wizard) {
#endif
otmp->spe = (rn2(10) ? -1 : 0);
break;
#ifdef WIZARD
}
#endif
[...]
if (oclass == WAND_CLASS) {
if (otmp->otyp == WAN_WISHING
#ifdef WIZARD
&& !wizard
#endif
) rechrg = 1;
otmp->recharged = (unsigned)rechrg;
}
At least you have a 10% chance to retain your wish.
I'm of the opinion adding more qubits to a superposition is going to be an exponentially hard problem.
The interesting difference here is the barrier to entry: The Replicator 2 is a physical object. It needs a supply chain, and shipping arrangements, and a manufacturing base to fork it. (Instead of in pure software where the only thing besides the people you need is some web hosting.) So, it'll take others quite some time to set up a fork of reasonable size and quality, and a fair amount of money.
The funny thing is that a few weeks ago, someone tried to create a fork, but he got slashed pretty badly by the community and his Kickstarter campaign failed. I suppose this guy has a second chance now.
They show relatively clear Rabi oscillations, which are a definite proof of the quantumness of the evolution of their system (which has nothing to do with entanglement). So, yes, this is a genuine qubit, albeit not a perfect one.
Do you have a less-intuitive example of a non-Minkowski space-time that allows FTL but does not have causality issues, that does not fit into one of the counterfactual categories I listed?
Read the first link given in the summary.
Also, as a preference, I tend to ignore metrics like h-indices when evaluating a researcher, as they provide very little evidence for his her her capabilities, let alone the quality of the work.
Suppose you have a position to fill and get several hundred applications. What do you do?
People have used metamaterials to achieve results that seem to violate the laws of physics (such as materials having a negative refractive index [wikipedia.org]). Speculating that such an exotic material could be produced is not hand waving. Just because we don't know how to do something today doesn't mean we'll never figure it out.
Your comparison to metamaterials is interesting. These things work by structuring the medium on scales smaller than the wavelength of the light. On these scales, the laws of geometrical optics break down and one has to use a theory that does not rely on the approximation that all features are larger than the wavelength (e.g., solve Maxwell's equations). If your analogy is valid, this means to find negative masses, we would need to go to a scale where the current laws for the description of matter (i.e., the Standard Model of particle physics) break down. This is generally expected to occur at the Planck scale, which is about 10^16 times larger than what the LHC can probe. So yes, this is pretty much as impossible as things can get.
Here is a relatively understandable explanation of why beating a photon to its destination implies time travel, even if you don't locally travel faster than light: http://www.theculture.org/rich/sharpblue/archives/000089.html [theculture.org].
This reasoning is only valid for flat (Minkowski) space-time, and therefore does not apply to the warp drive proposals, which aim to create particular curved (i.e., non-Minkowski) spacetime configurations.
A very intuitive counterexample: suppose you couple a photon into a very long fiber that is wound many times, with the end being at your neighbors desk. Clearly, you can walk over to him and have a chat with him about everything you like before the photon arrives. No laws of physics were harmed in the making of this experiment.
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin
