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Category: computing – Page 720

Public Internet Access: Brief history

Reader, Tamia Boyden asks this question:

In the 90s, how could we access the internet without WiFi?

This post began as an answer to that question at Quora. In the process of answering, I compiled this history of public, residential Internet access. Whether you lived through this fascinating social and technical upheaval or simply want to explore the roots of a booming social phenomenon, I hope you will find the timeline and evolution as interesting as I do.

I have included my answer to Tamia’s question, below. But first, let’s get a quick snapshot of the highlights. This short bullet-list focuses on technical milestones, but the history below, explains the context, social phenomenon and implications.

Continue reading “Public Internet Access: Brief history” | >

Google scientists say they’ve achieved ‘quantum supremacy’ breakthrough over classical computers

The achievement has been compared to the Wright brothers’ 12-second first flight at Kitty Hawk — an early, aspirational glimpse at a revolution to come. By providing exponentially greater calculation power than the machines we use today, quantum computers could one day transform the way we communicate ideas, conceal data and comprehend the universe.

Quantum leap in computing as scientists claim ‘supremacy’

Paris (AFP) — Scientists claimed Wednesday to have achieved a near-mythical state of computing in which a new generation of machine vastly outperforms the world’s fastest super-computer, known as “quantum supremacy”.

A team of experts working on Google’s Sycamore machine said their quantum system had executed a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken a classic computer 10,000 years to complete.

A rival team at IBM has already expressed scepticism about their claim.

Did Google Just Achieve ‘Quantum Supremacy’?

Is Google moving past the rest of the competition.

Quantum computers’ potential and the advantages they promise over classical computers all remain largely theoretical, and hypothetically speaking, it is predicted that quantum computers will be able to solve problems that are beyond the reach of the classical computers we use today. Passing such a threshold will be considered proof of what we call “quantum supremacy.”

A leaked research paper revealed that Google has reached this level of quantum supremacy but the leak was quickly taken down leaving more questions than answers.

So where do we go from here? What does a world with quantum supremacy look like?

The transhumanists ‘upgrading’ their bodies

Dr Neal also said there were safety risks with people buying the equipment from online sites and doing the procedures from home.

The Scottish government told BBC Scotland’s The Nine it intended to regulate procedures carried out by non-healthcare professionals and it was consulting on how this could be done.

Meet the people seeking to improve their bodies by implanting technology such as microchips.

Without encryption we will lose all privacy. This is our new battleground

And yet, in the midst of the greatest computer security crisis in history, the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine encryption, our public infrastructure and private lives will be rendered permanently unsafe.

The US, UK and Australia are taking on Facebook in a bid to undermine the only method that protects our personal information.

• Edward Snowden is a US surveillance whistleblower.

Pushing quantum photonics

Quantum computers use the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to potentially speed up the process of solving complex computations. Suppose you need to perform the task of searching for a specific number in a phone book. A classical computer will search each line of the phone book until it finds a match. A quantum computer could search the entire phone book at the same time by assessing each line simultaneously and return a result much faster.

Becoming Immortal: The Future of Brain Augmentation and Uploaded Consciousness

If you’ve ever worked with a virtualized computer, or played a video game ROM from a long-defunct console on your new PC, you understand the concept already: a mind is simply software, and the brain, the hardware it runs on. Imagine a day when your neurons, the matter that forms your mind, are transferred to a machine and their counterparts in your skull are disabled.

Are you still you? Imagine a future of mind uploading, whole-brain emulation, and the full understanding of the connectome. Now, imagine neuroscientists even discover a way to resurrect the dead, to upload the mind of those who have gone before, our ancestors, Socrates, Einstein?

In a paper published in Plos One in early December, scientists detailed how they were able to elicit a pattern similar to the living condition of the brain when exposing dead brain tissue to chemical and electrical probes. Authors Nicolas Rouleau, Nirosha J. Murugan, Lucas W. E. Tessaro, Justin N. Costa, and Michael A. Persinger (the same Persinger of the God-Helmet studies) wrote about this breakthrough.

Blanket of light may give better quantum computers

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories of natural science, and although its predictions are often counterintuitive, not a single experiment has been conducted to date of which the theory has not been able to give an adequate description.

Along with colleagues at bigQ (Center for Macroscopic Quantum States—a Danish National Research Foundation Center of Excellence), center leader Prof. Ulrik Lund Andersen is working on understanding and utilizing .

“The prevailing view among researchers is that is a universally valid theory and therefore also applicable in the macroscopic day-to-day world we normally live in. This also means that it should be possible to observe quantum phenomena on a large scale, and this is precisely what we strive to do in the Danish National Research Foundation Center of Excellence bigQ,” says Lund Andersen.

Can scientists reverse time with a quantum computer?

The universe is getting messy. Like a glass shattering to pieces or a single wave crashing onto the shore, the universe’s messiness can only move in one direction – toward more chaos and disorder. But scientists think that, at least for a single electron or the simplest quantum computer, they may be able to turn back time, and restore order to chaos. This doesn’t mean we’ll be visiting with dinosaurs or Napoleon any time soon, but for physicists, the idea that time can run backward at all is still a pretty big deal.

Normally, the universe’s trend toward disorder is a fundamental law: the second law of thermodynamics. It says more formally that any system can only move from more to less ordered, and that the chaos or disorder of a system – its entropy – can never decrease. But an international team of scientists led by researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology think they may have discovered a loophole.

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