It strikes me that a reasonably likely outcome of the election is that Trump loses but refuses to accept that he's lost.

I appreciate that this doesn't affect the bet, because that's based on the EC decision, and apologies if this potential outcome has already been covered - I've read some of the thread, but not all 21 pages.

Does anyone else think that this might happen? Biden is comfortably ahead in polling. Trump has demonstrated throughout his presidency that truth and laws are inconveniences that can be manipulated, sidestepped or outright ignored. He is already laying the groundwork for a challenge against the result...

His party is complicit in this approach, as we saw with the impeachment acquittal. How far will they be willing to go? What if states where Republicans control the legislature are ordered to refuse to accept Democratic victory?

Has this thread title been abbreviated?
Perhaps the full sentence should read: Trump strips CDC of Control of Coronavirus Data because simple unvarnished facts are an inconvenience and stop him from manipulating the narrative.

How can this ever be a good idea? The concentration of power in the hands of a single individual has some unfortunate historical examples.
If a President takes steps to reduce transparency, then that is because he has something to hide.

I think Biden will win both the race and the popular vote. Polling suggests he's pulling ahead, and I can't see what Trump can do really to change things, other than get on top of Covid-19, which unfortunately seems very unlikely to happen. I don't think he's handled the BLM protests at all well. He is alienating more and more people, and when it's on something as fundamental as race, it's difficult to get these voters back again.

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He definitely deserves a better car, and I'd agree he's one of the few F1 drivers who can challenge Hamilton on talent alone. Alonso will be another when he returns.
I can't see Verstappen getting a Mercedes drive until Hamilton retires though. There's no way they'd risk having Hamilton and Verstappen on the same team after the chaos of the Hamilton/Rosberg years. Bottas is the perfect Merc second driver. He's a good driver, but more importantly he's a committed team player, and the dynamic with Hamilton is very good.

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Fairly active in P&S (e.g. pages 4 and 5 of my posting history, and a decent proportion of my recent merit) - would have been more active on that board, but previous sig campaign didn't accept P&S posts.

No, it's not a misconception, the number of potential classical outcomes that a QC can assess does scale 2^n, it's inherently true based on how QCs work.

Having said that, I absolutely understand and agree with your main point that number of qubits isn't everything, it's merely a headline figure, which can be misleading. 2^n means nothing if there is a high rate of error in the final result. Decoherence - the loss/corruption of information - is the fundamental obstacle to achieving large-scale functioning quantum computers. Adding and entangling additional qubits is not what is stopping QCs today, it is, as you say, the increased noise as number of qubits increases. But it doesn't change the 2^n scaling that makes QCs so efficient at for example integer factorisation and the discrete logarithm problem.

The scaling is an inherent truth due to immutable physical laws. The noise is an engineering problem.

 

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I think a lot of the reason the Ferrari is so poor this year is that private settlement they made about their illegal engine last year.

It takes a long time to design a car, and when they started building this year's, it was based on the expectation that they'd still be able to use last year's engine. Their new design gave them the increased downforce they were missing, and it must have been that the old engine combined with the new design meant that they kept sufficient speed as well. So what happened when the rules forced them to reduce the power of the engine was not only that it meant they would have less power in 2020, but also, and crucially, that their new 'increased downforce' car would now have to work with an engine that wasn't suitable. The whole thing is a mess for Ferrari, and weirdly, if they'd played by the rules in 2019 then the chances are they'd now have a much better car for 2020. This season is already a write-off for them. I certainly wouldn't bet on them being top 3 constructors, which seems an absurd state of affairs for a name as illustrious as Ferrari.

will delete in 24 hrs

I sort of agree with this. The reason we need QCs to be cooled almost to absolute zero is to reduce decoherence. Cooling is a (partial) solution to a problem. There may be other solutions where cooling is not required (or where a smaller amount of cooling is sufficient).

I sort of agree here, too. A system is only as strong as its weakest link. That weakest link often turns out to be human errors or laziness. However we can't really argue that a) people will make errors or be negligent, therefore b) there is no point to implementing secure cryptographic systems.

Because the power of a QC scales exponentially due to superposition and entanglement. Superposition meaning that a qubit can be - to simplify somewhat - both 0 and 1 at the same time. Entanglement meaning that multiple qubits can be combined into a single state. So the number of classical outcomes that can be assessed scales 2^n. The nature of QCs means that they are strong on integer factorisation and the discrete logarithm problem (both normal and ECC). Shor's algorithm can dismantle current asymmetric cryptography.
There are as you know various quantum-resistant approaches to asymmetric cryptography that offer potential defences against a QC, however these do also bring new challenges such as increased key size.

Going beyond bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, one common assumption is that there is no danger until a sufficiently powerful QC appears. This is not the case. Quantum-safe security needs to be implemented as soon as reasonably possible. I am quite sure that people are storing today's encrypted traffic for the future, so that it can be decoded once a QC is available. Anything communicated by public-key today can be deciphered tomorrow.

Ferrari need to get rid of Vettel right now. Unfortunately they can't.
Vettel used to be undisputed lead driver at Ferrari. He has since been outperformed by Leclerc, and has lost that number one status. To make things worse, he was apparently not even offered a new contract. He is driving for a team who have lost faith in him, and I'm sure given what's happened and the extremely poor car they have this year, he has lost faith in them, too.

Vettel is no longer a Ferrari driver, he is simply a driver in a Ferrari car. They don't want him there, he doesn't want to be there.

For the rest of this season he is driving purely for himself, which absolutely destroys any remaining team dynamic.

I'm sure they will, too. This year is a write-off for them already. In Austria they struggled even to get into the final round of qualifying. They are currently - almost unbelievably - fifth in the constructor's championship. Vettel is over-rated, he is a 4x champion only because of a car that was so much better than the rest, and his (lack of) performance since then has been revealing, particularly his mental state when under pressure. The fact that he's leaving and is no longer the team's single lead driver will mean he is for the rest of the year driving for himself rather than the team. Leclerc is talented but raw, and hampered by both his team mate and what is undeniably - and admitted by Ferrari - a poor car.

They need to do a huge amount of work just to get back level with Red Bull, let alone Mercedes. Given that all teams will now have an eye on the big regulation changes coming up, if Ferrari focus too much on their current car, they may find themselves left behind once again when the new cars come in in 2022.

It's a difficult position, and there is huge pressure on the team.

Yes.
See the post above from Hhampuz.
Also note that the thread title has changed from [OPEN] to [CFNP], which indicates that applications are now closed... otherwise we'd all be re-applying!

The problem isn't the US or China, it's the imbalance of power. Big/rich countries bully and exploit small/poor countries. Before the US and China were superpowers, we had the British Empire robbing, killing and enslaving across the globe. India/Pakistan tensions are largely due to the bungled partition when Britain left. Similar in Africa with Belgian withdrawal, most infamously Rwanda. Look at the behaviour of Russia towards smaller East European nations. Also we had Britain and France carving up the Middle-East between them - much of the instability in that region can be traced back to the infamous Skyes-Picot Agreement between these two powers. Go back further and we have the Spanish conquest of South America. And on and on through history.
The US and China are the most belligerent actors on the world stage at the moment, but this is not due to anything intrinsic to their natures or their societies, it's simply a disparity of power between them and everyone else.

India/China is notable and making headlines primarily because India is a big and highly populated country. Both antagonists would take a lot of damage in an all-out conflict, which is why I think it will be avoided, and outright hostilities will remain limited to brief skirmishes. However one issue that may become more prominent in the Himalayan region, and may lead to escalation, as I've mentioned before, is that of water...

One thing that has become apparent during this pandemic is just how eager a lot of countries are to claim that they are 'world leaders' in fighting it. Probably the closest we have to an impartial source is the Draft landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines from the World Health Organisation (today, PDF available from the linked page), which suggests that Sinovac (China) and Oxford/AstraZeneca (UK) are leading the way, and are the only candidates that are currently at Phase 3 of development. Moderna/NIAID are also about to start Phase 3, but haven't done so yet. Specific details of the Phase 3 trials here (Sinovac) and here (AstraZeneca).

Summary and visualisation (from the Guardian) below:



https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2020/jul/15/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker-how-close-are-we-to-a-vaccine

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I think it's more likely to increase tensions than anything else. In contrast with a lot of the bluster and posturing we see between these two superpowers, this is actually a legitimate warning given what is happening in Hong Kong. But it is still a part of the mental war and an attempt to position China as 'the enemy' in the eyes of western audiences. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has become used to being the sole superpower in the world, and the de facto arbiter of 'truth'. US influence is embedded in many cultures, particularly the other anglophone nations. Because of this, and augmented of course by historic alliances,  the US has huge control over who is seen as 'good' and who is seen as 'bad'.

Given how in the modern world nations are economically inextricably intertwined, we can expect that any 'war' between the US and China will take place largely in the realms of trade and public opinion, with some emphasis given to how these relate to one another. Consider the UK, a US vassal state ally, newly cast adrift from Europe and in much need of strong trade links to the wider world, being pressured into banning Huawei and so conflict with China.

This is very true. When advances in quantum computing are reported, the focus is often solely on the number of qubits involved. Whilst a degree of simplification is understandable when reporting what is certainly a complex and technical subject, this can mislead people into thinking it's the only important metric. Information loss through decoherence is a huge issue and the major barrier to production of large-scale QCs, and maintaining that near-absolute-zero temperature is a key requirement in minimising that decoherence.

However, whilst this is important and, as you say, expensive, the problem is perhaps not insurmountable. These are after all engineering challenges rather than absolute, universal constraints. My post above links to recent experimental verification of a process whereby the minimal viable temperature is increased by a factor of 15, resulting in an orders-of-magnitude cost reduction for cooling. But it is not necessarily all about cooling or the space required. Development is continuing at pace across the field, with advances being made all the time. Techniques are being refined, and new approaches adopted. Noise is being reduced and coherence is improving. Indeed, just last week Trinity College Dublin released a paper detailing a new technique in qubit-creation that may make the process both more powerful and much more controllable. Traditionally the quantum-dot-based approach to qubit emission involves affixing a metal point near to the dot... but the new approach involves controlled optical excitation of the point, which can then be scanned over the surface. Not only is this simpler than the current method, the new optical approach also generates greater quantities of single photon outputs and can force entanglement of dot pairs. The whole process is becoming more controllable all the time, and with increased control comes less noise, and so greater coherence.

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Edited for clarity; seems my sentence construction also suffers from coherence issues.

Exactly. Bitcoin is an improvement over the corruptions of fiat. We all saw 2008, we saw that with fiat, reward is for the elites but risk is socialised. If you make money with bitcoin but then try to evade paying taxes, then you are saying that your problem with the fiat system is not the unfairness, but rather that you actually welcome the unfairness so long as it is unfair in your favour.