Man, I haven't been karting in years!

There used to be a twin-engined kart place near my parents house when I was in college. It was outdoors in Ireland which meant the track was wet roughly 110% of the time.

You could easily hit 100kph (60mph for the imperialists) on the back straight, turn the wheel.... and nothing would change! You would just aqua-plane right into a tyre wall..

good times

Your video, South Park S20E3 Clip: My Opponent is a LIAR, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 110 Badge!

I was hoping for more meat to his presentation, and was disappointed. I feel that he said absolutely nothing to help anyone in the audience understand what quantum computers actually DO or what sort of problems they'll help to solve. They'll absolutely not increase your FPS, as that's not what they're well-suited to do. What they are quite excellent at is taking a problem with many possible solutions and finding the correct (or best) one at an extremely high speed.

One example would be the Traveling Salesman problem. In brief, find the optimum route for traversing a number of points on a map. This is useful for things like scheduling package delivery routes, airline flights, etc. With a classic / current computer we write software that cleverly chugs through the possible solutions, throws out any that prove to be poor, and eventually gets to what appears to be the best or is at least a "good enough" solution. As the number of necessary points to be visited increases this problem scales in complexity quickly, so eventually a current computer would just choke on the problem and at best return an ok-ish solution in a reasonable period of time.

A quantum computer is a totally different beast. If it's "big" enough (IE, is comprised of a sufficient number of qubits), it takes the entire set of all possible solutions to the problem, and rather than iterate through them to find the best one, it checks them all simultaneously and immediately returns the optimum solution. It does this by using properties of quantum mechanics, and I think this is where the speaker was drawing his talk of parallel universes. If there are 3 qubits, they would exist as 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111 simultaneously. The software would then define what the best answer would look like, and the computer returns the answer.

You can hopefully see how this totally breaks encryption. With a current computer and a long enough encryption key, an encoded message would take the fastest machines a huge number of years to decipher. With a quantum computer you hand it a gibberish encrypted message, it loads all possible transformations of that message simultaneously, and it then returns the transformation which looks most like a coherent message.

I'm excited to see what these machines can do for us, but they're going to necessitate some significant structural changes in how we handle sensitive data.

Incense stick:

550/4.99 = ~110 pcoins/dollar 80pcoins/~110 = ~72.5 cents.

Your video, Bohemian Rhapsody played by 110 year old mechanical organ, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

[author flagged as a spammer - redacted]

Congratulations! Your dedication to keeping VideoSift clear of baddies has earned you your "Ban Police" Level 110 Badge!

Sure, Bethesda, why don't you just take my $110 plus tax! *promote

*length=110

*length=110

I read somewhere that he's something like 6'3" 230 and she's 5'4" 110 lbs. Oh and she's handcuffed as well. POS cop.

Japan tries to hide their breast mutilating, savage raping, mindless torturing of Chinese. In all honesty, if the Chinese government invaded, then murdered every politician and news venue that opposed teaching the true savagery of Japan's recent past, that would be 110% justified. In fact, it would be moral--since Japan is trying to sweep it under the rug in some morbid attempt to feel better.

Jalopnik report that all three cars failed to meet the 110% qualifying time and got a penalty, they therefore start at the back of the grid:

http://blackflag.jalopnik.com/all-three-nissan-lmp1s-get-grid-penalties-at-le-mans-fo-1711067361

At least for an endurance race it's not such a big deal starting last. 24 hours is a long time to make it up, although it is hard to make up time if you're the slowest car out there.

Yes, that's one of my problems with police, lax recruitment. They should do a better job screening applicants, far too many bullies make it through the process. The image they present only attracts the wrong kind of people, and even screens out better applicants (allegedly for anyone over 110 IQ for instance). The right kind of person wouldn't be accepted in the current cop culture (as this story illustrates clearly), and the right kind of people also wouldn't want to associate with them.

I think some officers do make that much on salary, but quite true it's not many. When you count the benefits they get though, they are not under paid in most cases. Most get free medical, life insurance, retirement, many other 'freebies', and incredible overtime, so looking at only base salary is not an honest assessment.
Where I live, $200000 is probably more than 5 times the average pay rate...in some areas it may be the average pay rate. In high cost of living areas, I agree, it would be right to pay them better, (but conversely, that means those in Detroit should be paid less for a more dangerous job...how to reconcile that?) but we should DEMAND better performance everywhere, with zero tolerance for abuse.

EDIT: It seems we could retrain ex-military for the job. They've proven they are willing to take MORE dangerous jobs for far less money ($20-30K last I heard). That's a possible win win, vets get a good job program, we get an improving police force...as long as the retraining and testing is thorough.

Wall of text incoming. Again.

Sorry. Again.

tl;dr:

Debt relief right away was proposed, was neccessary, and was skipped to protect the European financial system.



You are 100% correct, we both are as convinced as one can be that a disorderly collapse would have been much worse for Greece. Might have turned it into a failed state, if things went really bad.

But the situation in Greece at the time the Troika got involved suggested a textbook approach would work just fine. Greece was insolvent, no two ways about it. A debt restructuring, including a haircut, was required to stabilise the system. Yet it was decided against it, thereby creating an enormous debt bubble that keeps growing to this day, destabilising everything.

Why?

People in Brussels, Frankfurt and Berlin knew in May of 2010 that Greece cannot service its current debt, nevermind pay it back. I remember rather vividly how it was presented to us, as it stirred up a lot of dust in Germany. They pretended as if the problem was a shortage of liquidity, even though they knew it was in fact an insolvency. And to provide an insolvent nation with the largest credit in history (€110-130b) is... well, we can all pick our favorite in accordance to our own bias: madness, idiocy, incompetence, a mistake, intent. They threw Greece into permanent indebtedness(?), and also played one people against another. People in Germany were pissed, still are. Not at the decision makers, but the Greek people.

Again, why?

Every European government, pre-crisis, drank the Cool Aid of deregulation, particularly with regards to the financial sector. When the crisis hit, they had to bail out the banks, a very unpopular decision in Germany, given the scandalous way it was done (different story). Like I pointed out before, when Greece was done for, German banks were on the hook for €17b+, and the French for €20b+. So no haircut for Greek debt.

It gets even better. The entity most experienced in these matters is, of course, the IMF. But IMF couldn't get involved. Its own regulations demand debt to be sustainable for it to become involved in any debt restructuring. Strauss-Kahn had the rules changed in a very hush-hush manner (hidden in a 146 page document) to allow the IMF to lend vast sums to Greece, even though they knew it would not be payed back. Former EC members are on record saying the Strauss-Kahn decided to protect French banks this way as a part of his race for President in France. So they changed IMF rules and ignored European law to bail out German and French banks, using the insolvent Greek government as a proxy.

Several members of the IMF's board were in open opposition. The representatives of India, Russia, Brazil and Switzerland are on record, saying this would merely replace private with public financing, that it would be a rescue package for the private creditors rather than the Greek state. They spoke out in favor of negotiations of a debt relief.

And if that wasn't bad enough, there's an IMF email, dated March 25th, 2010, that was published by Roumeliotis, formerly IMF. They put it very bluntly:

"Greece is a relatively closed economy, and the fiscal contraction implied by this adjustment path, will cause a sharp contraction in domestic demand and an attendant deep recession, severely stretching the social fabric."

Even the IMF, who chose parameters according to their own ideology, thought the European program to be too severe. That's saying something.

All that is just about the initial decision. The implementation is another story entirely, with unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats telling a democratically elected government what to do. There are former Greek ministers on record, telling how Troika officials basically wrote legislation for them. Blackmail was common, bailout money held as leverage. The Memorandum of Understanding was to be followed to the letter, and the Troika program was as detailed as a government program, so they really had their hand in just about everything.

The specifics of the program are a discussion of their own, with all the corruption going on. The Lagarde list (2000+ Greek tax dodgers) was held in secret by order of an IMF official – that alone should trigger major investigations. The nationalisation and sell-off of the four largest Greek banks, or the no-bid sale of the Hellenikon area to a Greek oligarch – all enforced by Troika officials.

The haircut of 2012, ~€110b wiped out, came two years late. As a result, it didn't hit any German or French institutions in a serious way. Most of the debt was in the hands of these four largest Greek banks -- NBG, Piraeus, Euro, Alpha – who subsequently had to be recapitalised by Greece to the tune of €50b. Cut by 110, up by 50 right away. Banks were nationalised and shares later sold again, at 2/3 the price. Lost another €15b, because the Troika demanded the sale to appease the markets.

The legal aspects of all this are nightmare-inducing as well. They violated numerous European laws, side-tracked parliaments, used governmental decrees, etc.

Let me just say this: when they forced Cyprus to give away two banks' branches in Greece for a fraction of their worth, Cyprus lost €3.5b, at a GDP of €17b, and those two banks went belly-up. It was pure blackmail, do it or you're out. Piraeus Bank received those €3.5b, and its head honcho had €150m of personal bad credit wiped clean right then and there, all at the command of the Troika. Those €3.5b had to be taken from ordinary folks by "suspending" the deposit insurance, perhaps the most stupid decision they had made so far.

Why did they do it? Because Greece was more important than Cyprus, and Cypriot banks were involved in shady deals with Russian oligarchs. Still illegal, and massively so.

Edit: I cut my post in half and it's still too long.