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Comment Re:Foolish (Score 4, Informative) 46

>we don't have any other means of recognising who is allowed to work and who is not.

Yes we do. It's called a share code. Get a visa and you no longer get a big sticker in your passport. You get status on a government computer. When someone asks you to prove that you are legit to work, you log in, get a share code and give to the person asking. They can log in, enter the share code and it will confirm or deny that you are legit to work based on you visa.

I'm British. My wife is American. That is how I know.

Comment Re:Can someone help explain "perfect" randomness? (Score 1) 140

You are heading down the right path.

A book that made things more clear for me is "Non uniform random variate generation" by Luc Devroye (https://www.cs.fsu.edu/~mascagni/Devroye.pdf).

The generation of different distributions can be done algorithmically, but the algorithms get to the core of the processes making the noise. E.G. 1/f noise can be made from summing many exponential decaying functions. Electrons falling in holes in silicon - same thing. So we have 1/f noise in silicon. The type of process determines the type of noise whether quantum electron events or rain or insects chirping.

While noise does emerge from quantum things, it also can emerge from higher level processes.

Comment Not True (Score 2) 140

Claims of perfect randomness from quantum physicists are always wrong.

1) The claims rely on some detector being 50/50 (they never are), always detecting individual events (they often see multiple or none) .
2) Randomness amplification is a subfield of entropy extraction and it cannot give you full entropy (aka perfect randomness).

Comment Re:Outsourcing (Score 2) 38

Yes. lf they need to do is hire a team of crack programmers and system architects and have them start work on replacing the systems. Keep them hired as a key department of the post office and they will maintain the system. If it's good they could even license it out to others.

I've seen this happen in other contexts. E.G. in a semiconductor firm, they designed their own tools. Then they made that a whole department and spun it out as one of the chip design tool vendors which is still around today.

If you just outsource it, you will get a product that serves the needs of the vendor, not the customer.

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