opaque

"it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court"

"In every other country (UK), it’s up to the trial judge to decide whether police misconduct has risen to the level of requiring the exclusion of evidence."

I would regard these as features rather than bugs.

> He has the unqualified right to remain silent and to a jury trial in which illegally gathered evidence is excluded, neither of which he would have in the UK.

Er... go easy on the patriotism, mate. We have those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_silence_in_England_an...

The US system also has flaws not present in our system (at least for now) e.g. Plea Bargains.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/apr/27/traditional-tria...

> working with what I still think is one of, if not the, best language ever.

Really? Mathematica is amazing and uncontested for symbolic algebra, but writing anything more than a notebook/paper is a nightmare. In built stuff is good, but functions you have to define yourself instantly become an incomprehensible mess of parentheses. Leaving aside the fact that it's a propriety language and the many flaws of its eponymous founder.

I long for the day SymPy or similar gets good enough that we can dispense with it.

You seem to be expounding the idea of local realism a la Albert Einstein

> "God does not play dice with the universe."

So you're in good company. However, it's more complicated than it appears and most physicists do not agree.

The randomness in QM is different and deeper than that which appears classically. For example, a coin flip isn't really random: if we can measure the coin's weight and the imparted momentum precisely enough we can predict the result. In QM this is fundamentally impossible, a measurement of a superposition state produces a random outcome. It's not merely and expression of our lack of knowledge of the underlying facts. Experimental violations of Bell's inequality demonstrate that there are no underlying facts in QM (called 'hidden variables'). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

Unless you accept one of:

A) There is no free will: we are all enacting a clockwork fate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

B) Non-locality (faster than light interactions between distant systems)

It sound like you may already accept A, in which case fair enough!

It's a spectrum sure and sound/taste effects would be lot more difficult to deal with.

We all visualise abstractions, but adding fixed, and arbitrary, properties (the number line turning at 20) is different and more akin to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form

Childhood experience is thought to be one of the 'causes' of Synesthesia. For instance people who perceive letters as having colours (a is always red, b is blue), often find that these correspond to the colouring of alphabet fridge magnets or toys they had as children.

True, I should say the author "may" have Synaesthesia. But the spacial appearance of a number line is an absolutely textbook example of it. The interesting thing about his choice of example is that's what he perceives and he assumes everyone else also has a spacial representation of numbers.

Most Synaesthestes don't realise there's anything different about their thinking until they hear about the condition. So, I just wanted to make the author (and others) aware of it for their interest.

> If I ask you something involving “numbers from 1 to 100” you will have your own image of the series in your head, even without realizing it. For example, I imagine it as a line going from me with numbers from 1 to 20, then it turns 90 degrees to the right and continues to the 1000+.

Actually no, perhaps you're not aware of this, but you have a condition called spatial-sequence Synesthesia. It's a harmless and fascinating condition in which the senses have arbitrary connections to each other (numbers have colours, sounds have tastes). Many people are unaware of it. I've only heard of it because a friend at university (and also a Synesthete) researches it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-butterfly/20110...

and this counterfactual America would have responded how to the partly anti-mass-immigration revolt that caused the paper to be be written? History (and hypothetical history) are rarely that simple.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936%E2%80%9339_Arab_revolt_...

> "...their land"

The sentence is unclear if you're referring to it as British land or Jewish land, but either way it's contentious to say the least!

This makes Docker for Mac unusable for rails development (without 3rd party work arounds). The issue and the radio silence has burned a lot of goodwill I and I'm sure others had for the Docker project. It's made worse by the constant stream of "production ready" announcements, while this product is crippled for most common use cases.

Here's the related thread on the docker forums. https://forums.docker.com/t/file-access-in-mounted-volumes-e...

Clearly you have your own unorthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics and you are quite emotionally attached to it. The argument that the universe is really X, but your brain just perceives it as Y because of Z can be made for any X,Y & Z. I don't find it compelling whatever the alleged reason for the disparity (in this case the no cloning theorem). There's also whole host of other issues, if everything is QM why has the brain evolved as a classical information processor, QM is unitary so you need to explain time/thermodynamics ...

Anyway, if you truly believe you have nailed both the measurement problem and consciousness in one fell swoop. Then I suggest you seek some like minded collaborators and a peer reviewed outlet for your ideas.

Returning to your original comment.

> It is astonishing to me that the physics community still bifurcates into two camps: those who think this is common knowledge, and those who are completely unaware of it (or think it's a crazy idea).

As a former member of the physics community I can tell you this is completely false. Everyone is aware of decoherence, it's covered toward the end most of undergrad courses in QM where the density matrix is introduced. I've never met anyone who thinks it solves the measurement problem.

Decoherence is an extremely useful and elegant mechanism for understanding quantum systems, but unfortunately it doesn't solve the measurement problem. At least not to the satisfaction of most practising physicists. The entanglement and trace operation does produce classical probabilities in the observed sub-system. However, it requires you to make a pretty arbitrary division between the observed system and the wider environment. Why is everything not just entangled with everything else up and up the chain until the entire universe is in superposition? The problem of where the quantum world ends and the classical world begins is still unanswered. This is one of the greatest open questions in physics, likely requiring a unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics before it's resolved.

A lot of the mining happens there in quite big operations e.g. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/chinas-biggest-secret-bitco... (2015), which could conceivably be shutdown. But they could easily move on to other countries or just bribe the requisite officials.

> "Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life."

Wow, don't do this. Getting to know your team is extremely important. But, this is a pretty gross pseudo-psychological way to go about it. Also people should be aware some cultures will react extremely negatively to being asked a question like this.

American's tend to have a canned response, what I call an 'origin myth' e.g. "I'm a doctor because as child my relative had (disease X) ... then later ...". They dispense these quite readily at parties and interviews. Try it out.

Ask a European why they do what they do and you'll likely get a glazed expression as they consider nature vs nurture, the class system & the deeply invasive nature of the question itself.

Fun trivia from Flash Boys they originally were going to use the full name Investor's Exchange, but the url was unfortunate:

www.investorsexchange.com

Hence they use the short form IEX.

Care to elaborate? TAO (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tailored_Access_Operations) seems fine to me.

Interesting article. Pretty terrible writing/editing though.

"Contracting is big business, too. In the 2014 fiscal year, the Pentagon obligated $285 billion to federal contracts—more money than all other government agencies received, combined. That’s equal to 8 percent of federal spending, and three and a half times Britain’s entire defense budget. About 45 percent of those contracts were for services, including private military contractors."

Without knowing what percentage of "services" are PMCs this doesn't tell us anything and the comparison to Britain's spending is therefore meaningless.

The entire phrase "were linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery, and anti-Coalition activities" is repeated twice in different paragraphs...

I expect better of the Atlantic.

Agreed. They should probably have held off till they can demonstrate the set of gates required for universal quantum computation. These are well known and have been the target of experimentalists for decades now. In fact, what has held back a quantum computer from being made thus far is that no single hardware implementation has achieved the required accuracy across the full set of gates. If single qubit operations were all that was needed we'd be done by now :)

The tone of the article also seems to imply that the quantum information community is remiss for assuming that P != NP. Everyone is aware that this is a open question: it's probably the largest open question in all mathematics. So if this new approach does yield a way to find new efficient solutions to NP hard problems, that would be amazing and prize worthy.

At the more serious end; the quantum optics toolbox in python (QuTip) http://qutip.org/index.html is what I used for my PhD research. Combined with Jupiter notebook http://jupyter.org/ it gives you a great sandbox to quickly setup Hamiltonians and plot their dynamics. It also has extensive docs and examples too. You can simulate simple systems in just a few lines of python.

In the words of Phineas Fisher:

"NoSQL, or rather NoAuthentication, has been a huge gift to the hacker community. Just when I was worried that they'd finally patched all of the authentication bypass bugs in MySQL, new databases came into style that lack authentication by design."

From his account of the Hacking Team Hack, worth a read if you missed it.

http://pastebin.com/raw/0SNSvyjJ

A good read. Having never heard of the man he seems like an extraordinarily successful variant of the self-aggrandising “arm-chair general” found in pubs throughout the world. Right down to the highly questionable claims to have seen military action. This and other of the claims could certainly have been fact checked here. It comes across as though the journalist didn’t want to offend him by showing up the obvious lies.