dmarquis

Its not quite as easy as just swapping out schemes. As I understand it a practical quantum computer would break all proposed public key encryption methods except those based on lattice problems. Lattice based cryptography is still in the preliminary stages of research and is at the moment extremely slow compared to the currently popular encryption methods.

The original IBM press release says "a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe." Then the author tries to rewrite the press release but in this case what probably seem like small changes to him like "contains" to "stores" turn the sentence from being an essentially correct simplification to being utterly wrong. Maybe blatant press release rewrites are necessary evil in science journalism but its depressing to me that most publications don't even bother with a fact check.

The discrete and continuous transforms are closely related. DFTs and their properties were known before Gauss and his 1805 paper is about computing them quickly. I wanted to emphasize the difference between the problem of finding ways to quickly compute DFTs and Fourier's discovery of the continuous transform.

Not to detract from Gauss' remarkable discovery but there is no relation between Gauss' FFT algorithm and the continuous Fourier transform that Fourier discovered. It is also worth mentioning that credit for the discrete Fourier transform goes to Vandermode and pre-dates Gauss' FFT algorithm by about 30 years.

The difficulty of the discrete log problem doesn't have anything to do with the modulus being prime, DLP is at least as hard for composite moduli. Its considered a hard problem because after 30 years a fast algorithm hasn't been found and a majority of experts think there isn't one. Also, a prime modulus is used for Diffie Hellman since the set {1,2...,p-1} mod p forms a cyclic group (under multiplication) which makes the method as simple as possible. However, a slightly more complicated variation of DH could be used for a composite modulus (where the group is not usually cyclic).

The method used in that article is just counting flight incidents in some historical data that may possibly have been caused by interference. The evidence that consumer electronics are the cause is just anecdotal:

"In one telling incident, a flight crew stated that a 30-degree navigation error was immediately corrected after a passenger turned off a DVD player and that the error reoccurred when the curious crew asked the passenger to switch the player on again."

You are saying the author should write differently depending on whether black people are reading the comment. Is that really what you meant?

I think the comparison should really be between Quora and the whole Stack Exchange family of sites.

I think there are two main reasons many of the areas in Quora are useless. First, Quora never got commitment from a group of verifiable experts to answer questions in an area before opening. Its a chicken and egg problem, experts won't join if there aren't already experts. SE goes halfway there by ensuring there is a community of people to use each particular area the site before bringing it online.

Second, question askers on Quora are lazy. They don't explain what they have tried to do to learn about the answer already. They often don't know things that could have easily been found on google in a few minutes. Nobody wants to spend more than a fraction of the time on an answer than the asker has spent looking for an answer. So when an expert goes on the site they see a community of people who just want to get their knowledge without putting in any work themselves. QA sites will never replace search (as many of the Quora fans claim) for this reason.

On SO this isn't as much of a problem. First,because its very hard to find answers to programming problems with search . Second, question askers have to explain carefully what they have tried in order to expect answers. However, on some other SE sites this is just as much of a problem as on Quora.

"With rare exceptions, people like Bill Gates and the engineers of Silicon Valley didn’t get their interests from a modern K-12 education."

Yeah, guys like Bill did amazing things compared to those bozos that just took their highschool's computer programming course in the 1970s.

The author is totally unconvincing. Creating tags splits the problem of asking or answering into 2 parts. First, search the space of tags to find the one you need. Second, search the space of questions with that tag. Obviously, its an easier problem if you already know which tags to use but in an extensive taxonomy that won't be true 99% of the time.

I don't think photos are the main attraction anymore. I know lots of people that only add a couple of photos a year to Facebook but still visit the site every day.

Do you know anything about American Apparel? You'd be better if with your money in a mattress than in their stock.

Take home point is that merchant satisfaction is not a priority for Groupon. Their strategy is to try and get customers to stick. How is that going to work? Clever ad copy and ridiculous deals aren't going to keep anyone from checking out the competitor's deals. What they need to be doing is maximizing merchant satisfaction at any cost. Its the only way to win.

Also why does the title have nothing to do with the point he is trying to make?

Its a weak counterargument to Scheiner's. The ability to think logically (one example of which is writing proofs though I think writing good code requires it as much) is no protection against attacks you don't know exist. If we knew exactly how security systems could be broken then building an unbreakable protocol would just require thinking about how to satisfy a bunch of constraints (which mathematicians and computer scientists are trained to do). But, in addition to being resistant to known attacks, a new security protocol should be stress tested by trying to think of new attacks that could break it. Most university courses on security don't emphasize this way of thinking. That's all Scheiner is saying. This guy doesn't mention anywhere how a math degree trains you to do that.

I wouldn't take that as changing the odds of correctness. Collatz stated the conjecture but made no progress towards a solution.

The point was that for Groupon the revenue numbers are meaningless not that the example business plan can't work.

The barrier to entry for Groupon competitors is low and there is no cost for both consumers and local businesses to switch to competitors. Based only on that I don't see much hope for them long term.

Its a good first approximation so to a physicist it might as well be true.