Zaak

No. Quantum computers are very specialized devices. They allow massive speedups for certain applications, and no benefit at all for general-purpose computing.

I expect to see a flourishing of quantum programming languages with which to write code for quantum computers, but that's a different subject.

If I remember correctly, it takes a quantum computer with roughly 2N qubits to break N-bit RSA. So we should be ok until thousand-qubit systems are being developed.

Increasing key lengths is a short-term workaround, but the real solution is post-quantum public key encryption, which is currently an area of active research.

Ok, I can see not worrying about permanent forks. How do you deal with double spending in short-term forks that will soon be merged?

Is the problem the poor exposition? Because the answer actually is refraction.

In my experience it doesn't make any difference how many references you include. They either don't read them at all, or they read them but don't address the content. So far I have been unable to get a flat earther to respond to basic information that I provide that contradicts their assertions.

How are you going to merge if you have different spends on the forks you're trying to merge? It's not a matter of whether or not you care about ordering. It's a matter of one branch's spend being invalidated by the spend in the other branch.

If the answer is to stop caring about double spend, how do you anticipate that working?

> In the end these people don't really want to know. They just have a deep discomfort with the current state of things.

This is a very succinct description of the mindset of the flat earthers I have talked with.

No one I know believes flat-earth (fortunately), but for a while I was fascinated by the existence of flat earthers and wanted to understand why they believed they way they do.

The outcome was mostly disappointment for me. They don't have anything like a reflectively consistent worldview. They don't in general have positive statements (other than that the earth is flat). Their beliefs are almost entirely negative, and phrased as arrogant dismissal of mainstream belief and evidence.

The difference between flat earthers and round earthers is that round earthers can correctly predict the outcome of observations using their mathematical models, and flat earthers cannot.

Take the recent total eclipse as an example. It was predicted years (centuries) in advance using round earth mathematics. Is there even a single flat earther who was able to predict the eclipse using their model? If there is, I haven't heard.

I believe that a significant number are true believers, judging from conversations I've had with them in the past.

Are inverters costing more because of increased demand at the current production rate, or is there monopoly / price gouging happening?

> However, in cases where people say that some language is bad, it means that it simply does not fit their tasks.

I disagree. It is possible for a language to simply be a bad language. Intercal is intentionally so. I will refrain from mentioning unintentionally bad languages in order to avoid a flame war.

Thank you for these clarifications of the situation. It helps to hear from someone who has a personal connection to the issue.

How does monotheistic religion differ from other cultural elements/social constructs that allow the formation of organizations that resist accountability?

I would say that all organizations allow concentration of power, so that is beside the point.

Given that other social constructs have this weakness also, wouldn't that mean that the decline of religion would have no effect on the expression of the evils of human nature?

I have similar feelings about its descendant the MD-80. The power to weight ratio on takeoff was a lot of fun.

I don't disagree that those young arab boys are in a destructive environment which is associated with their religion. I'm asking a different question however.

If you removed religion from human experience, would there would be no more beheadings? Or would the elements of human nature which result in beheadings simply find a different cultural element to attach themselves to?

Does religion cause the evils of human nature, or is religion merely a means of expression for the evils of human nature?

I see people glad that religion is decreasing, but is there evidence that the evils of human nature are decreasing, or are they merely taking different forms?

The problem isn't about doing stupid stuff. The problem is about doing very smart stuff when your core values massively conflict with humanity's continued existence.

Have you heard the paperclip maximizer thought experiment? Here is a good video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcdVC4e6EV4

I can clearly imagine how s-exprs can replace html, but I don't understand how s-exprs would replace css. Would you show a toy example?

I wouldn't like to see CSS replaced with lisp. CSS is declarative, lisp is imperative/functional.

> Another also well-known "issue" is that many modern x86 clock up or down depending on core temperate (I think this behavior can at least partly controlled by the firmware (UEFI)).

From what I've read, current Intel processors simply can't be set to run at a single constant frequency.

Yeah, Python's environment/import logic is really convoluted. It evolved organically with little forethought, and only got a minimal pruning with Python 3.

To continue offing the topic: Use of Weapons greatly irritated me. You spend all this time getting to know the guy through flashbacks, then at the end Banks pulls a bait and switch "No it was really the other guy all along!" The book makes no sense with that ending.

The grasshopper flight that flipped sideways then exploded was blown up by the flight termination system. The rest of them are just pressurized tanks of propellant rupturing in the presence of fire and/or red-hot metal.

> There are no natural numbers with infinite digits, so this is not correct.

Exactly. If you allow an infinite number of digits you wind up with the p-adic numbers, which are uncountable just like the reals.

To clarify my comment, I wasn't intending to slight the science behind LIGO, nor the scientists working on the project. Rather, I was trying to mean that the main challenge to detecting gravitational waves was "merely" building a detector sensitive enough to detect signals as faint as gravitational waves were predicted to be.

The original post here is talking about reproducible results and p-values and publishing. Is LIGO a particularly good example of that part of science being done well? I don't know either way.

I was under the impression that gravitational wave detection had more to do with engineering advances than science per se.

I would love to see a space and comment preserving json parser. Being able to programmatically update a config file without losing formatting and such sounds like a big win.

A quick sanity check is that there aren't many solar-powered flying creatures.

A 15W solar panel is about three square feet, and probably weighs several pounds. A 15W quadcoptor is about two square feet and has a takeoff weight of less then three pounds.

You might be able to carry a small solar panel as a backup in case the copter runs out of power in a remote location, but it would have to sit for quite a while before it's ready to fly again.