Wait, does Gmail load in 3 seconds for some people?

Unions don't make the decision to automate tasks. The corporations with more unionization (=workers who were treated badly enough, at some point in history, to unionize) are making cost-cutting decisions to replace human employees with automation. (captcha: automata)

Perhaps wouldn't, not couldn't. The "so what" of this article is that they're reproducing a past result, by doing physics experiments with an entangled system -- it's a kind of verification; about all the "proof" you can ever get about an analog computer, by my understanding. It also shows a use beyond just SAT and factoring which looks rather novel to me, but apparently Feynman suggested it.

It's fairly similar to an FPGA, actually. An FPGA can't simulate an FPGA of the same size as itself, but it can simulate a smaller FPGA. They aren't simulating their hardware, they're simulating something significantly smaller.

Yeah, it's underhanded marketing to get people excited about their extremely lame quantum computing efforts. Amusingly transparent, for how quickly people drag D-Wave here.

Most quantum computing efforts are purely electrical in their implementations, so the entangled objects are "massless" (cough cough electrons have mass). Entanglement of photons has been long-since demonstrated. This "massive" entanglement involves moving mass around. I'm not impressed by the technicality but curious about its applications

Nah. But seriously: nah.

That's not on "Linux"—which you seem to describe in monolithic terms and as if this monolithic community could magically sprout an appendage that does everything you want. There's already emulation. Some emulation software isn't terribly difficult to use. Most Linux users are still expected to read the documentation before expecting things to simply work.

Until Microsoft or Apple drop out of the desktop market, there will be no substantial incentive to make it any easier to run software built for those operating systems in a foreign operating system.

That's all true, of course, but the fragility mentioned in the article is a hard barrier to scaling. Wake me up when an independent research group demonstrates a scaling advantage on any problem class

D-Wave recently released its DW2000Q qubits. Where 2000 qubits are guaranteed to be calibrated, the actual device contains 2048 qubits. D-Wave operates its refrigerators around half the temperature, and 48 qubits is their acceptable error margin. So, good job, Intel, your hot quantum computer is dinky and negligibly small

Nah, finding a purpose for a quirk can be an invention too

As somebody who has used a DWave computer... you're asking the wrong question. They cannot run Firefox at any speed. They're analog computers purpose-built to solve extremely specialized optimization problems. But they don't necessarily "solve" problems -- they're likely to find good near-solutions. If you write an LLVM extension for which bitwise operations are computed as a solutions to an Ising spin glass problem, then it'd be waaay faster to run your Firefox port on DWave hardware backend than it would use a simulated annealing backend.

And that would simply be awful.

If you're going to break the fucking library by declaring it insecure trash for life, break the library. Make it crash hard when it's used. The problem software will percolate up to the users' attention.

This!

You're just knocking on doors asking companies to expose themselves to lawsuits for the dubious reward of paying you to sit on your ass and do nothing while they dump buckets of money into turning your patent into a product. Not attractive.

If you want a big company to pay for your idea, start a business. Succeed with your idea. Then get your company bought out. You'll get money for effort. Y'know, money you deserve, for putting in the effort.

Listen to what prostitutes have to say on the topic before you get all righteous about protecting them. Governments have been doing that since time immemorial, and the efforts to "protect" prostitutes tend to harm them. Arresting them is just awful. Arresting their johns is just as bad, because it forces it underground and establishes a black market complete with human trafficking, prevents prostitutes from conducting interviews in a safe way, from establishing brothels and hiring security guards, etc. We've been trying this "ban it 'til it dies" approach. It's never worked, there's no reason to think that it will tomorrow.

Your statement about "most prostitutes" can only be interpreted as factual if it is backed by good science with a significant and representative sample of prostitutes. Since prostitution is illegal, there's major problems in finding people to participate in a poll, so there is heavy sample bias in all of the social science done regarding prostitutes.

For example, such polls are often done when prostitutes are in the middle of an interaction with either the legal system or the health system. If you poll the prostitutes you find in a rape shelter, for example, you'll get very different statistics than you would in a legal brothel in Nevada.

Stop criminalizing sex. Just like pot, it's only sketchy 'cause it's illegal. Sure, there's still potential for abuse and harm... but in our present system, the laws mandate harm done to prostitutes and johns who are, by and large, just consenting adults. Unlike pot, shagging for pay doesn't harm one's ability to drive for the next few hours.