Flickr: DC stole the cookie from the cookie jar issued the takedown notice *Flickr has been kicked by DC(fuck you, i didn't touch the mother fucking cookie, bitch)

Wow, a decent summary of quantum computing on the internet. It's so weird not having to pull out the baseball bat and perform some facial readjustment in a qc thread. Just a little added information. When we refer to qubits as being "both" 0 and 1 at the same time, it's not necessarily a 50/50 split. It is in the form (a+bi)|0> + (c + di)|1>, where |0> refers to the 0 state and |1> to the 1 state. |a+bi| = sqrt(a*a + b*b) is the probability that, if measured in the 0/1 basis, it will result in 0, and |c + di| the probability it will result in 1.

The presence of i (the imaginary number, in case that wasn't clear), is important. Also, you can measure a qubit in any basis, not just 0/1, which is actually vital to the way some quantum algorithms work. (Notably quantum key exchange, which relies on the fact that a potential eavesdropper doesn't know what basis he should be measuring the qubit in.) A good way to imagine a single qubit is a bloch sphere. Imagine a sphere, where straight up is 0, and straight down is 1. Anything on the equator is a 50/50 superposition of 0 and 1.
Also, to say that quantum computers are more "efficient" than classical computers isn't quite precise enough for my tastes. It's not that they're capable of doing the same things as a classical computer can, just faster. It's that they're able to do things classical computers simply cannot do due to the way superposition works. And those things allow it to solve a number of problems more efficiently.

To clarify, quantum cryptography (which _should_ be called quantum key exchange) is just a method of exchanging a private key securely. This private key can then be used on an insecure channel. It is also ridiculously overhyped, particularly by people who don't fully understand it. Current implementations require a direct fiber-optic line between Alice and Bob, and is still vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, presuming that the man in the middle is able to compromise both the direct quantum line as well as the insecure channel over which the measurement orientations are exchanged and later communication is established.

How exactly does Grover's Algorithm help in this situation? With Grover's, you have an unsorted list and want to look up the position of an arbitrary element in the list. This takes O(n) sequentially, but O(sqrt(n)) with Grover's. It has absolutely nothing to do with guessing. In brute-forcing a block cipher, you have a large number of keys and you need to try each one sequentially. There's no lookup involved at all. I'm afraid I'm gonna have to call bullshit, something I need to do all too much in QC related topics.

Shadowbane's group v group combat was very interesting. Unfortunately it was about the only thing worthwhile about the game. The completely open nature of pvp did make running around solo or in small groups a pain in the ass, and there was massive class disparity. But there was just something about 10 v 10 group combat that no other game has seemed to get the same. One of my fondest memories of the game was when my guild was defending a mine. We had one priest, one bard, and 8 crossbow warriors. One guy would call out a target and all the crossbowmen would skewer the target. We held off three consecutive groups that way.

The only other thing that I liked was the extremely flexible nature of character classes. A single class could have many different viable builds, each one drastically different. The same class could be a super-high defense low damage tank, a high-damage decent defense melee dps, or a decent ranged nuker. Some of the builds were in fact completely unintentional and only came about due to experimentation.

To be even more precise, it's not even about cost per transistor. It's saying that the amount of transistors for which a chip will be most cost-efficient will double every two years. Moore's law could be satisfied even if transistors never shrunk in size and never decreased in marginal price if we were able to double the size of chips every two years without decreases in yield. Remember, transistors is cheap, packaging and verification is expensive.

The problem is that GPUs are terrible for single threaded performance, resulting in massive slowdowns for everything but those tasks which can take advantage of the parallelism.

There's actually a large number of task based programming models out there. Intel's TBB, Cilk, recent versions of OpenMP, A CUDA block is effectively a task (albeit one further composed of multiple threads). There are even proposals for hardware support for task queues. The problem however, is the chicken-and-the-egg problem. We need better tools to encourage task queue parallelism, but few people want to develop those tools because there isn't a lot of support for them at the moment.

4) Sane alt-tab systems 5) The use of words instead of cryptic heiroglyphics in menu shortcuts 6) The relative distance between alt-tab (most used shortcut) and force-quite (most dangerous if you accidentally press it) 7) Fancy, frilly special effects which slow down opening dialog boxes and minimizing windows significantly 8) Sane minimzation mechanisms. 9) Kernel panics that actually give you _some_ idea of why your system is crashing. Aaaaand I could go on.

How about the thugs who gave $200B of our money away for nothing substantial in return?