The reason Solyndra failed is that it was competing against Chinese solar manufacturers who received even greater production subsidies. Should we give up on any industry that is a priority for the Chinese government? Or should we try to compete?
There is much more to it. Grad students have their tuition paid out of their supervisors' grants. Additionally, there is a 50 to 60% overhead on the grant, including this tuition payment as well as grad student salary and benefits. A university certainly makes more money from hiring a grad student than the student does.
From TFA:
In addition, the physicists of the University of Innsbruck have found out that the decay rate of the atoms is not linear, as usually expected, but is proportional to the square of the number of the qubits. When several particles are entangled, the sensitivity of the system increases significantly.
This is somewhat troubling, isn't it? If the decay rate is quadratic in the number of qubits, and this turns out to be due to some fundamental physical law as opposed to limitations of the current technology, does that mean we can never have quantum computers with any significant amount of memory?
Not really. The researchers trapped and entangled 14 ions in a single ion trap. Quantum computers based on ion traps will have thousands of traps, with never more than one or two ions per trap. (Machines with hundreds of traps have been tested, ions moved between traps, etc.; see, e.g., [1]) It has been known since at least 1997 [2] that you can't have a scalable system with only a single ion trap (that would be true even were the decay rate quadratic in the number of ions per trap).
[1] Home, J. P. et al. Complete methods set for scalable ion trap quantum information
processing. Science 325, 1227–1230 (2009). arXiv:0907.1865 [quant-ph]
[2] Wineland, D.J. et al. Experimental issues in coherent quantum state manipulation
of trapped atomic ions. J. Res. Natl. Inst. Stand. Technol. 103, 259–328 (1998). arXiv:quant-ph/9710025
By the way, an arXiv link for this article is arXiv:1009.6126 [quant-ph].
It really is *not* widely known as the Nobel prize of computing. The Wikipedia citation is to an ACM press release---and ACM is the organization that gives out the award! In general, the Turing award has had a very poor history of recipients. It is better than the Nobel peace prize but worse than the economics prize (and therefore far worse than physics, etc.).
It can't be cleaned up. The technology doesn't exist. $270 billion wouldn't get it, any more than it would give us an anti-gravity machine.
This is a classic example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. If you don't sell your technology to China, then your competitors will, so you should too. Government export restrictions should be imposed for everybody's benefit.
Why would a tenured MIT professor give it up to switch departments? The same author has 129 papers on the quant-ph section of the arXiv, going back to 1996. He's been working in this field for quite a while.
Formal peer review is itself an appeal to authority.
Appeal to authority may be a fallacy in a logical argument. In a fully logical argument, there are no shortcuts. You can't outsource logic, either to reviewers or moderators. But for most of what we do, we need to judge the credibility of sources and can tolerate some mistakes. There is a sliding scale of credibility.
Anyway, this paper is simple enough to read for anybody with high school-level quantum mechanics background.
It may be more clear to say gallons per miles, but it is for the social good to say miles per gallon. Measuring in miles per gallon perceptually exaggerates the benefits of getting cars with marginally improved mileage, leading people to buy more efficient cars than they would be a more clear measurement standard. Measuring in gallons per mile shows much more clearly the quickly diminishing returns of buying more efficient cars.
More generally, mathematics is an excellent field for amateurs, with tons and tons of accessible problems that can be solved with persistence. Check out some of Martin Gardner's books.
Brian Hayes has some similar explorations (http://bit-player.org/).
Google voice will call out to Canada for free, but will not forward to Canada (for free or pay).
No, that isn't the problem at all. There are plenty of people in the US with PhDs who want to be scientists. Most of them can't find jobs. There isn't funding for 90% of them. Unless there are research jobs available, there is no point trying to draw more young students into PhD programs.
"If you lived today as if it were your last, you'd buy up a box of rockets and fire them all off, wouldn't you?" -- Garrison Keillor
