Absolutely. I don’t want to minimize the importance of the new discoveries in any way; I’m just saying this isn’t the great surprise the original post seems to think it is.
I took a physics course at a community college over 20 years ago and one of the things that stood out to me was the professor telling us not to overthink or assign too much romanticism to the idea of black holes.
His message was basically “it just means the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light… if you plug the size and mass of the universe into the escape velocity formula, the result you get back is greater than the speed of light, so our entire universe is a black hole.”
If this was being discussed at a community college decades ago then I think the new discoveries aren’t as revelatory as they would at first appear to the general public.
This is already the case in large parts of the world, and it changes almost nothing.
People mostly still dress the same regardless.
The reality is that people don’t need to be forced to wear clothes. That’s almost always their preference.
For example, public nudity is legal in Washington state, but other than at nude beaches or rare public events (such as the Fremont solstice parade), you never see anyone naked. Even toplessness is rare, even with men.
Yes, everything increases in difficulty but the increases in difficulty are asymmetrical.
The difficulty of reversing a computation (e.g. reversing a hash or decrypting an encrypted message) grows much faster than just performing the computation (e.g. hashing a message or encrypting one).
That’s the basis for encryption to begin with.
It’s also why increasing the size of the problem (e.g. the size of the hash or the size of a private key) makes it harder to crack.
The threat posed by quantum computing is that it might be feasible to reverse much larger computations than it previously was. The caveat on that, however is that they have a hard limit of what problems they can solve based on the number of qbits they have.
So for example, let’s say you use RSA for encryption and someone builds a 1024 qbit quantum computer. All you have to do is increase your key size so that it would require 1025 qbits to crack, and then that quantum computer wouldn’t provide an attacker any benefit at all.
(Of course, they’d still be able to read your old messages, but that’s also a fundamental principle of cryptography; it only protects you for a period of time)
I think it’s more likely that the jury will vote to acquit just based on lack of evidence combined with police misconduct (and incompetence).
The evidence they’ve publicly talked about is both itself fishy and has chain of custody issues.
Normally they’d be able to get away with that because most defendants can’t afford good legal representation and most cases don’t get much scrutiny.
In this case, however, I think those issues completely sink the prosecution’s case and he’ll be acquitted just because the jury won’t believe he’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
I got sloppy when it came time to choose the order in which to swap the letters; I mistakenly thought a specific letter only occurred once in the puzzle when it actually occurred twice.
OK, I’ll bite; do we need a concept for a “dual they” or a “ternary they”.
If so, then fine “singular they” deserves to be called out too. If not, then treating “singular they” as a special case just gives bigots space to claim that it’s some sort of deviation from the norm which then gives them cover for falsely claiming that usage is incorrect.
I’m not saying you can’t use “they” when referring to a single person; I’m saying that when you do that you haven’t deviated from the simple usage in any way shape or form.
I’m saying there’s no “singular they” because using “they” in that context is just the same as any other usage of “they”. It isn’t any sort of exception to the base rules and so doesn’t require any special treatment.
Absolutely. I don’t want to minimize the importance of the new discoveries in any way; I’m just saying this isn’t the great surprise the original post seems to think it is.