Has whoever marked the above post as "Troll" even bothered to take a look at the linked article?

What you are describing are essentially the hallmarks of a successful species. Growth is never sustainable if room is limited but being able to fill a good part of the available ecosystem is a very good - in fact the best possible - indication that the species in question is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Great swings in population are part of the game but even a sudden 99% death toll is a far cry from extinction. And no, of course even a single remote tribe is able - even likely - to refill the planet in a (geological) blink of an eye and will then of course eventually recreate a technological civilization. And the reason will be the same as it has been the first time around: He who gets the good toys first, gets to conquer his backwards neighbors and expand his rule.

I define a velocity to be interstellar when it is considerably greater than the solar escape velocity. For a ballistic trajectory, this means that you are far into hyperbolic territory and your kinetic energy is far greater than the gravitational binding (i.e negative potential) energy to your star.

Solar wind pressure is orders of magnitudes lower than light pressure. But:

- e-sails can be made of thin charged wires.
- the effective size of a sparse e-sail is inversely proportional to the density of the solar wind flow due to shielding effects
- b/c of the above, there are operating regimes (sparse sail, high flow) where the total force on an e-sail decreases with 1/r instead of a light-sail's 1/r^2
- solar wind is slow (most of it below solar escape velocity), so attainable speeds are limited, but
- solar wind in great for breaking from high velocities

So you cannot go interstellar with an e-sail alone but you can use it for deceleration from interstellar (i.e. >> than 3rd cosmic) velocities, which improves the necessary (non relativistic) mass ratio by a square root or allows for reactionless "acceleration-only" proulsion concepts (beam, particle stream). So it can be a game changer but no silver bullet for interstellar travel.

[in good slashdot tradition, all of the above is from memory and w/o reading TFA, so caveat emptor]

ignatius

Yeah right! Just as it took Linux 100 years and a billion of dollars.

4.5 billion light-years in not "relatively close", astronomically or otherwise, considering the universe is less than 14 billion years old.

>the frogs were living in pristine habitats, unharmed by pollution or deforestation

And what's the point, then? If they cannot blame Western society, racism, the patriarchy or at least Donald Trump, the finding is worse than useless but in itself racist, misogynist and islamophobe.

I suggest the responsible scientists should be fired and sentenced to 10 years of compulsory gender sensibility and diversity training.

"The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."

It's not about storing. Storing means that something can be retrieved. In that sense a qubit can store 2 classical bits (using superdense coding), the decoding procedure uses a additional "fresh" qubit and there is afaik no exponential buildup - so nothing to write home about.

Normalization reduces the degrees of freedom by one, the irrelevance of the overall phase also. So total number of real numbers is reduced by two. The state of n qubits can therefor be described by 2*2^n-2 real numbers (instead of 2*2^n). It does not store those numbers. (real numbers make a lousy measure of information capacity anyway, as a real number can be bijectively mapped onto a sequence of real numbers)

Another question is how accurately you can reconstruct a state by repeated measurements of identically prepared states (quantum tomography).

In all cases (as with any analog computer) noise and imperfections and (quantum specific) decoherence are the real limiting factors.

> Quantum computers get their parallelizing power because qubits don't have to be just 0 or 1, like the bits in an ordinary computer.

Not at all. This is a trivial property a quantum computer shares with any analog computer (quantum or not). They get their power from the fact, that the state spaces of interacting quantum subsystems combine with the tensor product (dimensions multiply) and not with the outer product (dimensions add), like classical systems do.

One qubit (ignoring phase and normalization) can be described by 2 complex numbers. 10 isolated qubits which only interact by classical signals form a product state which can be described by 2*10 = 20 complex numbers. But the state of 10 qubits entangled qubits (i.e. qubits which have interacted quantum mechanically in a non trivial way) needs 2^10 = 1024 complex numbers.

A measurement still only gives 10 classical bits of information, however, so the art is to manipulate the state such that interesting values get high and "dull" values get low probability.

ignatius

fixed that for you.

Todays Millennial lifestyle would have made dystopian sci-fi material not too long ago.

I agree that there is Babylonian confusion on the term "left" and "right". I have many older who self define as "left" and have nothing to do with Identity politics or mass immigration.

I, for one, derive my conception of left and right from there actual historic origins which far predate Karl Marx, namely the French revolution. The Jacobins set at the left of the speaker and this is where our political left-right scale comes from. The Terror of Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety was the first "modern" left government.

So "left" my book means totalitarian, etatist, revolutionary, anti-democratic and violent. They stand for total control of the individual, are opposed to personal liberties and want to destroy any cultural and historic identity of their subjects, which they call "progressive". A tell-tale sign of left ideologies is the use of the word "reactionary" for the political opposition.

This definition has served me well, as leftists are the habit of constantly changing and arguing about the ideological fineprint.

> SJWs have all the hallmarks of right-wing extremists

Its the other way around: National socialism is yet another left movement, historically grown out of opposition to Stalin's international (but in reality Russian, i.e. Sowjet-) socialism. The people saw what happened in Russia, considered the right (i.e. the conservatives) as too weak to protect them from the communist mob and turned to the Nazis - and got essentially the same deal. Shit happens.

Torvalds 2.0: Patricia Torvalds on computing, college, feminism, and increasing diversity in tech

https://opensource.com/life/15/8/patricia-torvalds-interview

"stand in a sitting manner"
"shout in a silent manner"

This simply makes no sense, sorry.

Excellent example for Orwellian doublethink, though.

I think my post has been sufficiently clear, so I will not reiterate everything.

The whole leftist concept of "diversity" and "identity politics" is broken. It's just an attempt to rebrand racism, sexism and whole host of other prejudices - and for the same purpose: To gain power over others. It was wrong then and it is wrong now. Altering the victims does not change that. Whoever uses a term like "toxic white male" is a racist and sexist asshole. And yes, labeling someone "toxic" is dehumanizing - and that's exactly how it is intended.

That being said, these are exactly the qualities which in a technical project do not matter at all. You need diversity, yes - in technical skills (esp. in larger projects). And you need homogeneity - in mission and purpose (there has to be a consensus about what the project is about). Race, sex, where you come from matter as much as your eye color, shoe size or blood group. If these random attributes, which can be shared by any dog, is what one considers his "identity", then he is not even acknowledging himself as a human being.

I really thought we would be over this bullshit since the 80ies - but it's coming back with a vengeance. Then it was the KKK, now it is the SJWs.

Another main point of yours: Yes, I consider software, and esp. open source software, which is what the manifesto is about, as free speech, just like art or other forms of human expression. It is a personal right and anyone and any group of people must be free to engage in it on their own terms. No one else has any say about it. No one has the right to pressure them to accept any "code of conduct" or to impose any "rules" on them. If you think you can do it better, then just do it, and otherwise mind your own business.

Obviously, we, as a society, need to relearn to accept each others freedoms again or we will end up in a dystopian totalitarian shithole.