I think he is referring to the F-35 only here. On military discussion forums it is the consensus that the F-35 is superior to everything else out there with the only exception being that the F-22 has superior air to air combat capabilities.
I worked on online casino software for several years and we had a number of bugs like this. They would usually involve someone writing a client to hit our API directly and fiddling with the xml messages. The operators would usually catch the issues within hours, turn off the game and often deny the players their winnings, if it was a legitimate win. Several people wound up in jail for exploits.
In the early days of the company it was a fairly significant problem with incidents pretty frequently. The lack of QA and a release process really bit them a few times as well. A game was put into production with the result hard coded to a win. Goes to show that just because a company makes software that deals with money and is financially successful it does not mean they are at all competent. It took 9 years for them to turn things around and transform the company into a highly effective dev shop, at least by industry standards. I am proud I was part of that. Unfortunately the industry had some major problems in 2009-2010 and they ended up having to find a buyer who even more unfortunately does not appreciate or understand developers or software development.
We did integrations with many other gambling software companies and not a single organization was what I consider competent. I would love to see a new company with serious technical chops break into the world of online gambling and school the crusty behemoths. Hard to do however because of the network effects and importance of reputation and deal making.
I agree there is a lot of fraud and greed in the cryptocoin community which makes it risky for people new to it or the naive. For people who have done some reading or hung around for a while it's usually pretty easy to spot most scams. In cases like Monero it was probably a something the developers missed. The important thing to note is that the community fixed that oversight within a month or two.
Premining and instamining (where they just start the coin with x coins in the devs wallet) are fairly common practices among new cryptocoins. They are usually frowned upon by the community but not always as the coin developers will sometimes keep a 1-2% for use promoting and developing the coin. Which most people consider fair. An 80% premine like bytecoin is ridiculous.
It is very easy to tell if a coin has been premined by checking the state of the block chain for the number of outstanding coins. The coins with large premines are usually outed withing an hour of their release.
Love the story, reminds me of the early days of Primecoin where I had my first exposure to cryptocurrency code. I spent the first two months of it fighting to stay ahead of the curve as well and had a blast. Not nearly as successfully as Dave however and my wife wasn't too happy about me spending every waking hour when home from my full time job on it.
It looks like they may have added some growing possibly linear function to the unemployment rate instead of a constant starting in 2009. All the better to push their fear mongering agenda/sales tactic I guess.
She doesn't mention what methodology and practices she used to reach her conclusions. Did she study the same type of bugs in the same type of environment and climate in an area that was not close to Chernobyl or a nuclear plant? Did she take steps to avoid confirmation bias, such as double blind sampling? How did she gather and analyse her statistics? Without reasonable explanations for those and more her data is not sound.
The issue is that by providing housing subsidies more money would be put into the demand side of the rental market. This would most likely cause rents to rise as there is now more money to spend.
In this situation the only way out that makes sense to me is to add more supply by removing some artificial barriers to building.
Houses typically appreciate at better than 4% a year over 20 year time frames, although this is very location dependent. If they had bought in almost any city in the US with a population over a million they could have done much better.
I'm not trying to be snide but imo hoping the economy will improve by someone finding a growth engine is wishful thinking. I would like to see tax policy and government spending formulated for sustainability based on domestic consumption and have any potential innovation income as windfalls.
Hinging the economy on the creation of new grown engines is a risky strategy and I don't think the government should be in the business of making bets, at least at the macro economic scale (hell yeah on research spending).
I agree with your points, I have seen people use similar justifications for why they have not improved their lives. Which is unfortunate but I think it's the wrong battle.
Many more times I have seen people from middle class or better backgrounds talk about how they got where they were because of hard work or drive or whatever. And then use that as justification for why some social program should be cut, like food stamps. The way I look at it, the "might as well not try" argument harms a few people who have the least influence in society. The "I worked hard and made it so we don't need social programs" argument is made by some of the most influential people and the programs they cut effect millions.
When I worked at Thoughworks there were several people who were terrible for this. Many of them senior. It significantly reduced my respect for the company and I left as soon as I found a good replacement.
What made it particularly irksome was that they heavily market themselves both internally and externally as being above such things. The cognitive dissonance really grated on me.
I don't have any issue with the fact that it is special purpose, I have a hard time calling it a success before it can be shown to be better than any known classical approaches at something.
I love the fact that they are trying and are spreading awareness of quantum computing but I take issue with some of their claims. They have a long history of making unsubstantiated and sensationalized claims. They also have a portfolio of patents many of which were arguably discovered by someone else or are overly broad.
My biggest problem with these results is that they are comparing the D-Wave machine against classical simulations that are built to solve the same problems the D-Wave is best at solving. The gold standard in the quantum algorithms world is to show that you can solve a given problem faster than any possible classical approach in the O(n) sense. This has been done for many problems, notably search, which can be done in sqrt(n) vs n/2. Factoring is faster but has not been proven to be faster than all possible classical approaches.
Another way to put this is that what this post is saying is that problem x can be solved y times faster on the D-Wave machine when compared to classical systems designed to act like the D-Wave machine. There are many other classical approaches that could be use to solve x. If the problem was significant enough a best know classical algorithm could be devised and implemented on an asic. Could the D-Wave machine beat this approach?
Or for less significant problems, could the cost of the D-Wave machine compare to paying someone to devise an special purpose algorithm per problem and implement it in C, Java, C#, Haskell / other fast languages. How much does it cost to pay someone to do this one something like top coder?