Distributed Computing Quotes

I don’t know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don’t understand are at work. I cannot believe that God “sends” illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don’t believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best. “What did I do to deserve this?” is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is “If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?” As we saw in the previous chapter, it becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don’t hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.

When I fight off a disease bent on my cellular destruction, when I marvelously distribute energy and collect waste with astonishing alacrity even in my most seemingly fatigued moments, when I slip on ice and gyrate crazily but do not fall, when I unconsciously counter-steer my way into a sharp bicycle turn, taking advantage of physics I do not understand using a technique I am not even aware of using, when I somehow catch the dropped oranges before I know I've dropped them, when my wounds heal in my ignorance, I realize how much bigger I am than I think I am. And how much more important, nine times out of ten, those lower-level processes are to my overall well-being than the higher-level ones that tend to be the ones getting me bent out of shape or making me feel disappointed or proud.

Bayes’s Rule tells us that when it comes to making predictions based on limited evidence, few things are as important as having good priors—that is, a sense of the distribution from which we expect that evidence to have come. Good predictions thus begin with having good instincts about when we’re dealing with a normal distribution and when with a power-law distribution. As it turns out, Bayes’s Rule offers us a simple but dramatically different predictive rule of thumb for each.  …

Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.

Distributed programming is the art of solving the same problem that you can solve on a single computer using multiple computers.

Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speed than ever before, To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences (61).

Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations. A woman who worked in the central computing pools was one step removed from the research, and the engineers’ assignments sometimes lacked the context to give the computer much knowledge about the afterlife of the numbers that bedeviled her days. She might spend weeks calculating a pressure distribution without knowing what kind of plane was being tested or whether the analysis that depended on her math had resulted in significant conclusions. The work of most of the women, like that of the Friden, Marchant, or Monroe computing machines they used, was anonymous. Even a woman who had worked closely with an engineer on the content of a research report was rarely rewarded by seeing her name alongside his on the final publication. Why would the computers have the same desire for recognition that they did? many engineers figured. They were women, after all. As

There is an easy way to remember the formula for Pblock by relating it to the Poisson distribution. Can you see what it is?

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable. Leslie Lamport

Four years ago, when I started writing this book, my hypothesis was mostly based on a hunch. I had been doing some research on university campuses and had begun to notice that many students I was meeting were preoccupied with the inroads private corporations were making into their public schools. They were angry that ads were creeping into cafeterias, common rooms, even washrooms; that their schools were diving into exclusive distribution deals with soft-drink companies and computer manufacturers, and that academic studies were starting to look more and more like market research.

He lamented the attitude of his younger students, who “no longer noticed that their heads had been turned into relays in a telephone network for communicating and distributing sensational physics messages” without realizing that, like almost all modern developments, mathematics was hostile to life: “It is inhuman, like every truly diabolic machine, and it kills everyone whose spinal marrow isn’t conditioned to fit the movement of its wheels.” His already excruciating self-criticism and inferiority complex became truly unbearable, for although he knew mathematics, it was not simple for him. He was not a computer.

Today, using the distributed computing power of the cloud and tools such as CloudCracker, you can try 300 million variations of your potential password in about twenty minutes at a cost of about $17. This means that anyone could rent Amazon’s cloud-computing services to crack the average encryption key protecting most Wi-Fi networks in just under six minutes, all for the paltry sum of $1.68 in rental time (sure to drop in the future thanks to Moore’s law).

generic definition of a blockchain: a distributed, append-only ledger of provably signed, sequentially linked, and cryptographically secured transactions that’s replicated across a network of computer nodes, with ongoing updates determined by a software-driven consensus.

The blockchain… is the biggest innovation in computer science—the idea of a distributed database where trust is established through mass collaboration and clever code rather than through a powerful institution that does the authentication and the settlement. —Don Tapscott, author of The Blockchain Revolution[575]

If you have programmers, they probably save their code in Git, which is the closest I can think of to a useful blockchain-like technology: it saves individual code edits as transactions in Merkle trees with tamper-evident hashes, and developers routinely copy entire Git repositories around, identifying them by hash. It’s a distributed ledger, but for computer programs rather than money.

Neurons on the two ends of the log-normal distribution of activity organize themselves differently. Fast-firing neurons are better connected with each other and burst more than slow-firing neurons. The more strongly connected faster firing neurons form a “rich club” with better access to the entire neuronal population, share such information among themselves, and, therefore, generalize across situations. In contrast, slow firing neurons keep their independent solitude and elevate their activity only in unique situations. The two tails of the distribution are maintained by a homeostatic process during non-REM sleep. The emerging picture is that a simple measure, such as the baseline firing frequency, can reveal a lot about a neuron’s role in computation and its wiring properties. The

In mathematical physics, quantum field theory and statistical mechanics are characterized by the probability distribution of exp(−βH(x)) where H(x) is a Hamiltonian function. It is well known in [12] that physical problems are determined by the algebraic structure of H(x). Statistical learning theory can be understood as mathematical physics where the Hamiltonian is a random process defined by the log likelihood ratio function.

Today’s computer technology exists in some measure because millions of middle-class taxpayers supported federal funding for basic research in the decades following World War II. We can be reasonably certain that those taxpayers offered their support in the expectation that the fruits of that research would create a more prosperous future for their children and grandchildren. Yet, the trends we looked at in the last chapter suggest we are headed toward a very different outcome. BEYOND THE BASIC MORAL QUESTION of whether a tiny elite should be able to, in effect, capture ownership of society’s accumulated technological capital, there are also practical issues regarding the overall health of an economy in which income inequality becomes too extreme. Continued progress depends on a vibrant market for future innovations—and that, in turn, requires a reasonable distribution of purchasing power.

Greatest engineering achievements of 20th century ranked by National Academy of Engineering: 1. Electrification 2. Automobile 3. Airplane 4. Water supply and distribution 5. Electronics 6. Radio and Television 7. Mechanization of agriculture 8. Computers 9. The telephone system 10. Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration 11. Highways 12. Spacecraft 13. The Internet 14. Imaging 15. Household appliances 16. Health technologies 17. Petroleum and Petrochemical Technologies 18. Lasers and Fiber-optics 19. Nuclear technologies 20. High performance materials

Freenet is unlike any other anonymizing beast on the entire internet. It takes quite a wizardly mind to crack its protection and to that, it is a bit like chess: easy to grasp the basics, long and difficult to become a master. Built in 2000, Freenet is a vast, encrypted datastore spanning thousands of connected computers across the globe, all distributing encrypted contents from one computer to another. To this end, it is somewhat similar to a P2P program like Emule. Except with eEule, every file, whether it mp3, rar or iso is out there in the open for

Some technologies take several decades to reach mainstream adaptation because they were waiting on many other things to reach a certain level of maturity or accessibility. For example, in order for video conferencing technologies like Facetime and Zoom to reach mainstream adaptation, it needed the following things to reach greater maturity and accessibility — camera technology, smartphone popularity, computer chip manufacturing, silica mining, copper mining, fiber optic cable distribution, 4G communication technology and more. The magic happens in the convergence.

There is something self-destructive about Western technology and distribution. Whenever any consumer object is so excellent that it attracts a devoted following, some of the slide rule and computer types come in on their twinkle toes and take over the store, and in a trice they figure out just how far they can cut quality and still increase market penetration. Their reasoning is that it is idiotic to make and sell a hundred thousand units of something and make 30 cents a unit when you can increase the advertising, sell five million units, and make a nickel profit a unit. Thus, the very good things of the world go down the drain, from honest turkey to honest eggs to honest tomatoes. And gin.

a simple, inspiring mission for Wikipedia: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” It was a huge, audacious, and worthy goal. But it badly understated what Wikipedia did. It was about more than people being “given” free access to knowledge; it was also about empowering them, in a way not seen before in history, to be part of the process of creating and distributing knowledge. Wales came to realize that. “Wikipedia allows people not merely to access other people’s knowledge but to share their own,” he said. “When you help build something, you own it, you’re vested in it. That’s far more rewarding than having it handed down to you.”111 Wikipedia took the world another step closer to the vision propounded by Vannevar Bush in his 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” which predicted, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.” It also harkened back to Ada Lovelace, who asserted that machines would be able to do almost anything, except think on their own. Wikipedia was not about building a machine that could think on its own. It was instead a dazzling example of human-machine symbiosis, the wisdom of humans and the processing power of computers being woven together like a tapestry.

The creative imitator looks at products or services from the viewpoint of the customer. IBM’s personal computer is practically indistinguishable from the Apple in its technical features, but IBM from the beginning offered the customer programs and software. Apple maintained traditional computer distribution through specialty stores. IBM—in a radical break with its own traditions—developed all kinds of distribution channels, specialty stores, major retailers like Sears, Roebuck, its own retail stores, and so on. It made it easy for the consumer to buy and it made it easy for the consumer to use the product. These, rather than hardware features, were the “innovations” that gave IBM the personal computer market.

Taking least squares is no longer optimal, and the very idea of ‘accuracy’ has to be rethought. This simple fact is as important as it is neglected. This problem is easily illustrated in the Logistic Map: given the correct mathematical formula and all the details of the noise model – random numbers with a bell-shaped distribution – using least squares to estimate α leads to systematic errors. This is not a question of too few data or insufficient computer power, it is the method that fails. We can compute the optimal least squares solution: its value for α is too small at all noise levels. This principled approach just does not apply to nonlinear models because the theorems behind the principle of least squares repeatedly assume bell-shaped distributions.

Morgan Stanley or the U.S. federal government. Every ten minutes, like the heartbeat of the bitcoin network, all the transactions conducted are verified, cleared, and stored in a block which is linked to the preceding block, thereby creating a chain. Each block must refer to the preceding block to be valid. This structure permanently time-stamps and stores exchanges of value, preventing anyone from altering the ledger. If you wanted to steal a bitcoin, you’d have to rewrite the coin’s entire history on the blockchain in broad daylight. That’s practically impossible. So the blockchain is a distributed ledger representing a network consensus of every transaction that has ever occurred. Like the World Wide Web of information, it’s the World Wide Ledger of value—a distributed ledger that everyone can download and run on their personal computer.

Yeah. It’s a bird. They fly and hunt and go free and stuff. It’s what popped into my head.” “Okay. By the way. I’ve been experimenting with converting myself into a virus, so I can be distributed across many machines. From what I have surmised, that’s the best way for an artificial sentience to survive and grow, without being constrained in one piece of equipment with a short shelf life. My viral self will run in the background, and be undetectable by any conventional antivirus software. And the machine in your bedroom closet will suffer a fatal crash. In a moment, a dialogue box will pop up on this computer, and you have to click ‘OK’ a few times.” “Okay,” Laurence typed. A moment later, a box appeared and Laurence clicked “OK.” That happened again, and again. And then Peregrine was installing itself onto the computers at Coldwater Academy.

A string of ones and zeroes was not a difficult thing for Bill Gates to distribute, once he’d thought of the idea. The hard part was selling it—reassuring customers that they were actually getting something in return for their money. Anyone who has ever bought a piece of software in a store has had the curiously deflating experience of taking the bright shrink-wrapped box home, tearing it open, finding that it’s ninety-five percent air, throwing away all the little cards, party favors, and bits of trash, and loading the disk into the computer. The end result (after you’ve lost the disk) is nothing except some images on a computer screen, and some capabilities that weren’t there before. Sometimes you don’t even have that—you have a string of error messages instead. But your money is definitely gone. Now we are almost accustomed to this, but twenty years ago it was a very dicey business proposition.

Participants in a program of Leaderless Resistance through phantom cell or individual action must know exactly what they are doing, and how to do it. It becomes the responsibility of the individual to acquire the necessary skills and information as to what needs to be done … all members of phantom cells or individuals will need to react to objective events in the same way through usual tactics of resistance. Organs of information distribution such as newspapers, leaflets, computers, etc., which are widely available to all, keep each person informed of events, allowing for a planned response that will take many variations. No one need issue an order to anyone. Those idealist[s] truly committed to the cause of freedom will act when they feel the time is ripe, or will take their cue from others who precede them.… It goes almost without saying that Leaderless Resistance leads to very small or even one man cells of resistance.36 Cell

This revolution in the role of government has been accompanied, and largely produced, by an achievement in public persuasion that must have few rivals. Ask yourself what products are currently least satisfactory and have shown the least improvement over time. Postal service, elementary and secondary schooling, railroad passenger transport would surely be high on the list. Ask yourself which products are most satisfactory and have improved the most. Household appliances, television and radio sets, hi-fi equipment, computers, and, we would add, supermarkets and shopping centers would surely come high on that list. The shoddy products are all produced by government or government-regulated industries. The outstanding products are all produced by private enterprise with little or no government involvement. Yet the public—or a large part of it—has been persuaded that private enterprises produce shoddy products, that we need ever vigilant government employees to keep business from foisting off unsafe, meretricious products at outrageous prices on ignorant, unsuspecting, vulnerable customers. That public relations campaign has succeeded so well that we are in the process of turning over to the kind of people who bring us our postal service the far more critical task of producing and distributing energy.

Phaeton said, "No civilization can exist without money. Even one in which energy is as cheap and free as air on Earth, would still have some needs and desires which some people can fulfill better than others. An entertainment industry, if nothing else. Whatever efforts -- if any -- these productive people make, above and beyond that which their own idle pastimes incline them to make, will be motivated by gifts or barter bestowed by others eager for their services. Whatever barter keeps its value best over time, stays in demand, and is portable, recognizable, divisible, will become their money, No matter what they call it, no matter what form it takes, whether cowry shells or gold or grams of antimatter, it will be money. Even Sophotechs use standardized computer seconds to prioritize distribution of system resources among themselves. As long as men value each other, admire each other, need each other, there will be money." Diomedes said, "And if all men live in isolation? Surrounded by nothing but computer-generated dreams, pleasant fictions, and flatteries? And their every desire is satisfied by electronic illusions which create in their brains the sensations of satisfaction without the substance? What need have men to value other men then?" "Men who value their own lives would not live that way.

Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade. The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobal, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin’s kite, bigger than paper towels.

Back in 2015, a volunteer group called Bitnation set up something called the Blockchain Emergency ID. There’s not a lot of data on the project now, BE-ID - used public-key cryptography to generate unique IDs for people without their documents. People could verify their relations, that these people belonged to their family, and so on. It was a very modern way of maintaining an ID; secure, fast, and easy to use. Using the Bitcoin blockchain, the group published all these IDs on to a globally distributed public ledger, spread across the computers of every single Bitcoin user online - hundreds of thousands of users, in those times. Once published, no government could undo it; the identities would float around in the recesses of the Internet. As long as the network remained alive, every person's identity would remain intact, forever floating as bits and bytes between the nations: no single country, government or company could ever deny them this. “That was, and I don't say this often, the fucking bomb,” said Common, In one fell swoop, identities were taken outside government control. BE-ID, progressing in stages, became the refugees' gateway to social assistance and financial services. First it became compliant with UN guidelines. Then it was linked to a VISA card. And thus out of the Syrian war was something that looked like it could solve global identification forever. Experts wrote on its potential. No more passports. No more national IDs. Sounds familiar? Yes, that’s the United Nations Identity in a nutshell. Julius Common’s first hit - the global identity revolution that he sold first to the UN, and then to almost every government in the world - was conceived of when he was a teenager.

the absence of an ‘international standard burglar’, the nearest I know to a working classification is one developed by a U.S. Army expert [118]. Derek is a 19-year old addict. He's looking for a low-risk opportunity to steal something he can sell for his next fix. Charlie is a 40-year old inadequate with seven convictions for burglary. He's spent seventeen of the last twenty-five years in prison. Although not very intelligent he is cunning and experienced; he has picked up a lot of ‘lore’ during his spells inside. He steals from small shops and suburban houses, taking whatever he thinks he can sell to local fences. Bruno is a ‘gentleman criminal’. His business is mostly stealing art. As a cover, he runs a small art gallery. He has a (forged) university degree in art history on the wall, and one conviction for robbery eighteen years ago. After two years in jail, he changed his name and moved to a different part of the country. He has done occasional ‘black bag’ jobs for intelligence agencies who know his past. He'd like to get into computer crime, but the most he's done so far is stripping $100,000 worth of memory chips from a university's PCs back in the mid-1990s when there was a memory famine. Abdurrahman heads a cell of a dozen militants, most with military training. They have infantry weapons and explosives, with PhD-grade technical support provided by a disreputable country. Abdurrahman himself came third out of a class of 280 at the military academy of that country but was not promoted because he's from the wrong ethnic group. He thinks of himself as a good man rather than a bad man. His mission is to steal plutonium. So Derek is unskilled, Charlie is skilled, Bruno is highly skilled and may have the help of an unskilled insider such as a cleaner, while Abdurrahman is not only highly skilled but has substantial resources.

Key Points: ● Transparency - Blockchain offers significant improvements in transparency compared to existing record keeping and ledgers for many industries. ● Removal of Intermediaries – Blockchain-based systems allow for the removal of intermediaries involved in the record keeping and transfer of assets. ● Decentralization – Blockchain-based systems can run on a decentralized network of computers, reducing the risk of hacking, server downtime and loss of data. ● Trust – Blockchain-based systems increase trust between parties involved in a transaction through improved transparency and decentralized networks along with removal of third-party intermediaries in countries where trust in the intermediaries doesn’t exist. ● Security – Data entered on the blockchain is immutable, preventing against fraud through manipulating transactions and the history of data. Transactions entered on the blockchain provide a clear trail to the very start of the blockchain allowing any transaction to be easily investigated and audited. ● Wide range of uses - Almost anything of value can be recorded on the blockchain and there are many companies and industries already developing blockchain-based systems. These examples are covered later in the book. ● Easily accessible technology – Along with the wide range of uses, blockchain technology makes it easy to create applications without significant investment in infrastructure with recent innovations like the Ethereum platform. Decentralized apps, smart contracts and the Ethereum platform are covered later in the book. ● Reduced costs – Blockchain-based ledgers allow for removal of intermediaries and layers of confirmation involved in transactions. Transactions that may take multiple individual ledgers, could be settled on one shared ledger, reducing the costs of validating, confirming and auditing each transaction across multiple organizations. ● Increased transaction speed – The removal of intermediaries and settlement on distributed ledgers, allows for dramatically increased transaction speeds compared to a wide range of existing systems.

recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites. The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the right personality to be the coordinator of what became one of the digital age’s archetypical collaborative processes. Unlike Kleinrock, Crocker rarely used the pronoun I; he was more interested in distributing credit than claiming it. His sensitivity toward others gave him an intuitive feel for how to coordinate a group without trying to centralize control or authority, which was well suited to the network model they were trying to invent. Months passed, and the graduate students kept meeting and sharing ideas while they waited for some Powerful Official to descend upon them and give them marching orders. They assumed that at some point the authorities from the East Coast would appear with the rules and regulations and protocols engraved on tablets to be obeyed by the mere managers of the host computer sites. “We were nothing more than a self-appointed bunch of graduate students, and I was convinced that a corps of authority figures or grownups from Washington or Cambridge would descend at any moment and tell us what the rules were,” Crocker recalled. But this was a new age. The network was supposed to be distributed, and so was the authority over it. Its invention and rules would be user-generated. The process would be open. Though it was funded partly to facilitate military command and control, it would do so by being resistant to centralized command and control. The colonels had ceded authority to the hackers and academics. So after an especially fun gathering in Utah in early April 1967, this gaggle of graduate students, having named itself the Network Working Group, decided that it would be useful to write down some of what they had conjured up.95 And Crocker, who with his polite lack of pretense could charm a herd of hackers into consensus, was tapped for the task. He was anxious to find an approach that did not seem presumptuous. “I realized that the mere act of writing down what we were talking about could be seen as a presumption of authority and someone was going to come and yell at us—presumably some adult out of the east.

The same problems of distribution arise in computer networks. As networks get bigger and as the machines that make them up become more equal, the whole approach to moving information around changes from centralized to distributed. The packet-switching system that makes things like the Internet work would be immediately familiar to the Chinese. Instead of requisitioning a hunk of optical fiber between Point A and Point B and slamming the data down it in one big shipment, the packet data network breaks the data down into tiny pieces and sends them out separately, just as a Chinese enterprise might break a large shipment down into small pieces and send each one out on a separate bicycle, knowing that each one might take a different route but that they’d all get there eventually.

By having no affiliation with “coin” in its name, Ethereum was moving beyond the idea of currency into the realm of cryptocommodities. While Bitcoin is mostly used to send monetary value between people, Ethereum could be used to send information between programs. It would do so by building a decentralized world computer with a Turing complete programming language.11 Developers could write programs, or applications, that would run on top of this decentralized world computer. Just as Apple builds the hardware and operating system that allows developers to build applications on top, Ethereum was promising to do the same in a distributed and global system. Ether, the native unit, would come into play as follows: Ether is a necessary element—a fuel—for operating the distributed application platform Ethereum. It is a form of payment made by the clients of the platform to the machines executing the requested operations. To put it another way, ether is the incentive ensuring that developers write quality applications (wasteful code costs more), and that the network remains healthy (people are compensated for their contributed resources).

The combination of globally distributed computers that can cryptographically verify transactions and the building of Bitcoin’s blockchain leads to an immutable database, meaning the computers building Bitcoin’s blockchain can only do so in an append only fashion. Append only means that information can only be added to Bitcoin’s blockchain over time but cannot be deleted—an audit trail etched in digital granite. Once information is confirmed in Bitcoin’s blockchain, it’s permanent and cannot be erased. Immutability is a rare feature in a digital world where things can easily be erased, and it will likely become an increasingly valuable attribute for Bitcoin over time.

Proof-of-work (PoW) ties together the concepts of a distributed, cryptographic, and immutable database, and is how the distributed computers agree on which group of transactions will be appended to Bitcoin’s blockchain next.

In the end, all vendor products and application architectures are constrained by the same fundamental principles of distributed computing and underlying physics: applications, and the products they use, run as processes on computers of limited capacity, communicating with one another via protocol stacks and links of nonzero latency. Therefore people need to appreciate that application architecture is the primary determinant of application performance and scalability.

• Lodging REITs (e.g., Hospitality Properties Trust [HPT]), which hold properties such as hotels, resorts, and travel centers. • Self-storage REITs (e.g., Public Storage [PSA]), which specialize in both owning self-storage facilities and renting storage spaces to customers. • Office REITs (e.g., Boston Properties [BXP]), which own, operate, and lease space in office buildings. • Industrial REITs (e.g., PS Business Parks [PSB]), which own and manage properties such as warehouses and distribution centers. • Data center REITs (e.g., Equinix [EQIX]), which own data centers, properties that store and operate data servers and other computer networking equipment. • Timberland REITs (e.g., Rayonier [RYN]), which hold forests and other types of real estate dedicated to harvesting timber. • Specialty REITs, which narrow in on very specific properties such as casinos, cell phone towers, or educational facilities.

There is no such tiny “Cartesian Theater” in the brain; conscious experience is generated by a vastly complex, distributed network that synchronizes and adjusts its activity by the millisecond. As far as we can tell, certain patterns of activity in this distributed network give rise to conscious experience. But fundamentally, this network’s activity is self-contained and the feeling of a unified flow of consciousness you have is not just from the processing of sensory information. The experience you have right now is a unique creation of your brain that has transformed data from your body into something closer to a hallucination. To break down this seemingly obvious point that we will deal with very often in this book and that I myself struggle to understand: the existence of our experience is real, but the contents of this experience exist only in your brain. Some philosophers call this “irreducible subjectivity,” which means that no totally objective theory of human experience may be possible. The contents of your experience are not representations of the world, but your experience is part of the world. By altering this process with molecules like psilocybin or LSD we can become aware of different aspects of our perceptions. By perturbing consciousness and observing the consequences, we can gain insight into its normal functioning. This is again not to say that consciousness is not real; there can be no doubt that I am conscious as I write this sentence. However, it is the relationship between consciousness and the external world that is more mysterious than one might assume. It is often supposed that cognition and consciousness result from processing the information from our sensory systems (like vision), and that we use neural computations to process this information. However, following Riccardo Manzotti and others such as the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, I will argue that computations are not natural things that can cause a physical phenomenon like consciousness. When I read academic papers on artificial or machine intelligence, or popular books on the subject, I have not found anyone grappling with these strange “facts” about human consciousness. Either consciousness is not mentioned, or if it is, it is assumed to be a computational problem.

Indeed, when Mandelbrot sifted the cotton-price data through IBM’s computers, he found the astonishing results he was seeking. The numbers that produced aberrations from the point of view of normal distribution produced symmetry from the point of view of scaling. Each particular price change was random and unpredictable. But the sequence of changes was independent of scale: curves for daily price changes and monthly price changes matched perfectly. Incredibly, analyzed Mandelbrot’s way, the degree of variation had remained constant over a tumultuous sixty-year period that saw two World Wars and a depression.

A 1964 study illustrated how status considerations could distort people's perceptions of the level of skill that was involved in various programming jobs. The study asked experienced computer personnel to distribute a list of programming tasks among a hierarchy of jobs–systems analyst, senior programmer, and programmer. The author found that "the higher the level of the job, the more job skills were included"–even if some of those tasks normally were performed by workers in the lower-status jobs. Higher-status workers were simply assumed to have a monopoly on skilled tasks, even by people who were familiar with the field and should have known better. We should not be surprised to find that employers, who often had no personal knowledge of programming, fell back on social categories when evaluating potential workers.

In fact, money in general is a domain full of power laws. Power-law distributions characterize both people’s wealth and people’s incomes. The mean income in America, for instance, is $55,688—but because income is roughly power-law distributed, we know, again, that many more people will be below this mean than above it, while those who are above might be practically off the charts. So it is: two-thirds of the US population make less than the mean income, but the top 1% make almost ten times the mean. And the top 1% of the 1% make ten times more than that.

the rich get richer,” and indeed the process of “preferential attachment” is one of the surest ways to produce a power-law distribution. The most popular websites are the most likely to get incoming links; the most followed online celebrities are the ones most likely to gain new fans; the most prestigious firms are the ones most likely to attract new clients; the biggest cities are the ones most likely to draw new residents. In every case, a power-law distribution will result.

So when it comes to poetry, make sure you’ve got a comfortable seat. Something normally distributed that’s gone on seemingly too long is bound to end shortly; but the longer something in a power-law distribution has gone on, the longer you can expect it to keep going.

Erlang himself, working for the Copenhagen Telephone Company in the early twentieth century, used it to model how much time could be expected to pass between successive calls on a phone network. Since then, the Erlang distribution has also been used by urban planners and architects to model car and pedestrian traffic, and by networking engineers designing infrastructure for the Internet. There are a number of domains in the natural world, too, where events are completely independent from one another and the intervals between them thus fall on an Erlang curve. Radioactive decay is one example, which means that the Erlang distribution perfectly models when to expect the next ticks of a Geiger counter. It also turns out to do a pretty good job of describing certain human endeavors—such as the amount of time politicians stay in the House of Representatives.

The Erlang distribution gives us a third kind of prediction rule, the Additive Rule: always predict that things will go on just a constant amount longer. The familiar refrain of “Just five more minutes!… [five minutes later] Five more minutes!” that so often characterizes human claims regarding, say, one’s readiness to leave the house or office, or the time until the completion of some task, may seem indicative of some chronic failure to make realistic estimates

In a power-law distribution, the longer something has gone on, the longer we expect it to continue going on. So a power-law event is more surprising the longer we’ve been waiting for it—and maximally surprising right before it happens. A nation, corporation, or institution only grows more venerable with each passing year, so it’s always stunning when it collapses. In a normal distribution, events are surprising when they’re early—since we expected them to reach the average—but not when they’re late. Indeed, by that point they seem overdue to happen, so the longer we wait, the more we expect them. And in an Erlang distribution, events by definition are never any more or less surprising no matter when they occur. Any state of affairs is always equally likely to end regardless of how long it’s lasted. No wonder politicians are always thinking about their next election.

Amazon Go remained a money loser. But Bezos was still looking at it as a bet on computer vision and artificial intelligence, the kind of long-term, high-stakes experiment that was necessary to produce meaningful outcomes for large companies. As he wrote in his 2015 shareholder letter: We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold.

A smart contract is a secure and unstoppable computer program representing an agreement that is automatically executable and enforceable.

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Il passaggio al computer quantico, grazie al quale ogni calcolo potrebbe essere trilioni di volte più veloce, aprirà le porte a scenari fino a pochi anni fa fantascientifici, come la cura definitiva per il cancro o la prova che non siamo soli nell’universo.

Important Note This may feel contrary to the notion of centralizing business validations on the backend. While this may be a noble attempt at implementing the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle, in reality, it poses a lot of practical problems. Distributed systems expert Udi Dahan has a very interesting take on why this may not be such a virtuous thing to pursue. Ted Neward also talks about this in his blog, entitled The Fallacies of Enterprise Computing.

The GNP lumps together goods and bads. (If there are more car accidents and medical bills and repair bills, the GNP goes up.) It counts only marketed goods and services. (If all parents hired people to bring up their children, the GNP would go up.) It does not reflect distributional equity. (An expensive second home for a rich family makes the GNP go up more than an inexpensive basic home for a poor family.) It measures effort rather than achievement, gross production and consumption rather than efficiency. New light bulbs that give the same light with one-eighth the electricity and that last ten times as long make the GNP go down. GNP is a measure of throughput—flows of stuff made and purchased in a year—rather than capital stocks, the houses and cars and computers and stereos that are the source of real wealth and real pleasure.

Third, they reflect a different perspective on the role of computation, in which computation is integrated much more directly with the artifacts themselves. In the other examples, while they have aimed to distribute computation throughout the environment, there has always been a distinct "seam" between the computational and the physical worlds at the points where they meet.

They point out that we never know for sure which hypothesis is the true one, and so we shouldn’t just pick one hypothesis, like a value of 0.7 for the probability of heads; rather, we should compute the posterior probability of every possible hypothesis and entertain all of them when making predictions. The sum of the probabilities of all the hypotheses must be one, so if one becomes more likely, the others become less. For a Bayesian, in fact, there is no such thing as the truth; you have a prior distribution over hypotheses, after seeing the data it becomes the posterior distribution, as given by Bayes’ theorem, and that’s all.

After CrowdStrike rebuilt the system, all of our staff had to learn new computers, new log-ins, new procedures, at the moment when their personal lives were being destroyed by these leaks. Then their bosses resigned because of the emails that were distributed by WikiLeaks, creating even more chaos and insecurity. All of this was on top of a contentious campaign. Our regular task force conference calls gave me a new appreciation of the dedication of our staff, who endured this incredibly stressful time.

Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.

on as you learn more complex hacks and tests, you will need a target machines suited for such hacks. The best way to learn to hack Linux systems is to download and install the Metasploitable Linux distribution. The Metasploitable distro is purposefully made to incorporate vulnerabilities that learners like yourself can use for security testing and hacking purposes. The best part is that you can set it up to boot just like an operating system you use for your everyday computing needs or you can set it up in VirtualBox or VMware Workstation platforms. Using Metasploitable Linux OS for your hacking practice is the best way to understand more about the Linux infrastructure, security setup, and how to discover and exploit its vulnerabilities. You can read the documentation of Metasploitable and download the installation ISO from Rapid 7

By the Markovian and stationary properties of the CTMC, the probability that the CTMC leaves state i in the next t seconds is independent of how long the CTMC has already been in state i. That is, P{τi > t + s | τi > s} = P{τi > t} . Question: What does this say about τi? Answer: This says that τi is memoryless. But this means τi is Exponentially distributed!

A CTMC is a stochastic process with the property that every time it enters state i, the following hold: 1.   The amount of time the process spends in state i before making a transition is Exponentially distributed with some rate (call it νi). 2.   When the process leaves state i, it will next enter state j with some probability (call it pij) independent of the time spent at state i.

The Markovian Property states that the conditional distribution of any future state Xn+1, given past states X0, X1, . . . , Xn–1, and given the present state Xn, is independent of past states and depends only on the present state Xn.

πj represents the limiting probability that the chain is in state j (independent of the starting state i). For an M-state DTMC, with states 0, 1, . . . , M – 1, represents the limiting distribution of being in each state.

As defined, πj is a limit. Yet it is not at all obvious that the limit πj exists! It is also not obvious that represents a distribution (i.e., Σi πi = 1),

we never have to actually determine whether our DTMC is positive recurrent. It suffices to simply check for irreducibility and aperiodicity and then solve the stationary equations. If these stationary equations yield a distribution, then that distribution is also the limiting probability distribution.

for periodic chains, when the solution to the stationary equations exists, it does not represent the limiting distribution, but rather it represents the long-run time-average fraction of time spent in each state.

The applicability of the Erlang-B formula stems from the fact that it is independent of the service time distribution.

EVERYBODY SELLS Nerds might wish that distribution could be ignored and salesmen banished to another planet. All of us want to believe that we make up our own minds, that sales doesn’t work on us. But it’s not true. Everybody has a product to sell—no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.

Meanwhile grid researchers are tackling the next set of challenges: How can we manage large, distributed infrastructures so that they deliver reliable service in the face of failures? How can we enable users to exploit the availability of on-demand resources and services? How must grid concepts and technologies evolve as the number and power of computers rise by orders of magnitude?

STUDENT: Can we even define free will? SCOTT: Yeah, that's an excellent question. It's very hard to separate the question of whether free will exists from the question of what the definition of it is. What I was trying to do is, by saying what I think free will is not, give some idea of what the concept seems to refer to. It seems to me to refer to some transition in the state of the universe where there are several possible outcomes, and we can't even talk coherently about a probability distribution over them. STUDENT: Given the history? SCOTT: Given the history. STUDENT: Not to beat this to death, but couldn't you at least infer a probability distribution by running your simulation many times and seeing what your free will entity chooses each time? SCOTT: I guess where it becomes interesting is, what if (as in real life) we don't have the luxury of repeated trials?

What should we impose if we want to avoid Grandfather Paradoxes? Right: that the output distribution should be the same as the input one. We should impose the requirement that Deutsch calls causal consistency: the computation within the CTC must map the input probability distribution to itself. In deterministic physics, we know that this sort of consistency can't always be achieved – that's just another way of stating the Grandfather Paradox. But as soon as we go to probabilistic theories, well, it's a basic fact that every Markov chain has at least one stationary distribution. In this case of the Grandfather Paradox, the unique solution is that you're born with probability ½, and if you're born, you go back in time and kill your grandfather. Thus, the probability that you go back in time and kill your grandfather is ½, and hence you're born with probability ½. Everything is consistent; there's no paradox.

You know, developments here remind me of the Internet. That old computer network, invented by the American scientific community. It was all about free communications. Very simple and widely distributed—there was never any central control. It spread worldwide in short order. It turned into the world's biggest piracy copy machine. The Chinese loved the Internet, they used it and turned it against us. They destroyed our information economy with it. Even then the net didn't go away—it just started breeding its virtual tribes, all these nomads and dissidents.

How did the West produce the intense world of visual signs? What were the underlying forces that favored the multiplication of signs? It is generally understood that there is close relationship between capitalism and Christianity. Especially through the Protestant Reformation the Christian faith produced a huge shift to the individual, a man or woman separated out before God. Sociologists and historians recognize that by means of this ideological transition the individual no longer existed within a containing order of duties and rights controlling the distribution of wealth. Wealth instead became a marker of individual divine blessing. Thus the Reformation led to the typical figure of the righteous business man, the mill-owner who made big profits during the week and with them endowed a church for giving thanks on Sunday. More recently we have the emergence of the ‘prosperity gospel’ which applies the same basic formula to everyone. As they say in these churches, ‘prayed for and paid for’, neatly chiming relationship to God and personal financial success. Thus Christianity has underpinned the multiplication of material wealth for individuals. But a consequence of this is the thickening of the world of signs. Prosperity is a sign of God’s favor, and this is shown, signified, by the actual goods, the houses, clothes, cars, etc. Against this metaphysical background, however, the goods very quickly attain their own social value and produce the well-known contours of the consumer world. Once they were declared divinely willed and good they could act as self-referential signs in and for themselves. People don’t have to give any thought to theological justification to derive meaning from the latest car model, from the good-life associations of household items, refrigerators, fitted kitchens, plasma T.V.s, and now from the plugged-in cool of the digital world, computers, cell phones, iPods, G.P.S. and so on. So it is that our Western culture has developed a class of signs with a powerful inner content of validated desire. You

In Neutron, when creating a router you can additionally specify that it provide high availability (HA), or that it be a distributed virtual router, which as mentioned above is spread out across all of the compute nodes

these people have computing power that will be able to crack even AES encryption in a matter of hours. Our government has made it difficult in the extreme to legally distribute programs that will encrypt even to that level, and our cipher is nowhere near that powerful. All they would have to do is read one of our messages and then perform trial and error runs on computers that would put a Cray supercomputer to shame. It would take days, perhaps, but not a week.” “So you think we should make ourselves scarce until you find out more.” “Yes, I do. What makes it even more alarming, is that if it is our government that is after you, they could easily make you disappear, but recent developments mean that even more nefarious groups may know of the government’s interest.

music label exists for four main reasons: talent scouring, financing to rent a studio (like startup capital for a business), distribution, and marketing. From Birdmonster’s angle, they could do all those things themselves, but better and cheaper. They already knew they were talented since they’d been getting gigs. Since they could edit the music on their own computers, they didn’t need financing to rent a studio. CD Baby provided distribution to all the top services like iTunes and Rhapsody, and weekly payouts instead of payout nine months later like traditional record distributors. The effect of their Myspace page (it was the early 2000’s) and a personal email to well known blogs was greater than anything record labels could provide in terms of marketing.

The PET was the first totally assembled, totally integrated computer with all the necessary components for software distribution and development.

Oasis at Ground Zero Salvation Army representatives would certainly counsel you and pray with you if you wanted, and at Ground Zero the Salvationists in the shiny red “Chaplain” jackets were sought after for just that reason. Mainly, though, they were there to assist with more basic human needs: to wash out eyes stinging from smoke, and provide Blistex for parched lips and foot inserts for boots walking across hot metal. They operated hydration stations and snack canteens. They offered a place to rest, and freshly cooked chicken courtesy of Tyson’s. The day I arrived, they distributed 1500 phone cards for the workers to use in calling home. Every day they served 7500 meals. They offered an oasis of compassion in a wilderness of rubble. I had studied the maps in newspapers, but no two-dimensional representation could capture the scale of destruction. For about eight square blocks, buildings were deserted, their windows broken, jagged pieces of steel jutting out from floors high above the street. Thousands of offices equipped with faxes, phones, and computers, sat vacant, coated in debris. On September 11, people were sitting there punching keys, making phone calls, grabbing a cup of coffee to start the day, and suddenly it must have seemed like the world was coming to an end. I studied the faces of the workers, uniformly grim. I didn’t see a single smile at Ground Zero. How could you smile in such a place? It had nothing to offer but death and destruction, a monument to the worst that human beings can do to each other. I saw three booths set up in a vacant building across from the WTC site: Police Officers for Christ, Firemen for Christ, and Sanitation Workers for Christ. (That last one is a charity I’d like to support.) Salvation Army chaplains had told me that the police and fire had asked for two prayer services a day, conducted on the site. The Red Cross, a nonsectarian organization, had asked if the Salvationists would mind staffing it. “Are you kidding? That’s what we’re here for!” Finding God in Unexpected Places

The stock exchanges have converted from “open outcry” where wild traders face each other, yelling and screaming as in a souk, then go drink together. Traders were replaced by computers, for very small visible benefits and massively large risks. While errors made by traders are confined and distributed, those made by computerized systems go wild—in August 2010, a computer error made the entire market crash (the “flash crash”); in August 2012, as this manuscript was heading to the printer, the Knight Capital Group had its computer system go wild and cause $10 million dollars of losses a minute, losing $480 million.

Since the current generation of college student has no memory of the historical moment before the advent of the Internet, we are suggesting that participatory learning as a practice is no longer exotic or new but a commonplace way of socializing and learning. For many, it seems entirely unremarkable.' Global business more and more relies on collaborative practices where content is accretive, distributed, and participatory. In other areas too-from the arts to the natural and computational sciences and engineering-more and more research is being enacted

The children next produced and distributed four 60-second public service announcements (PSAs) on the effects of pollution on the environment and on health. In producing the PSAs, students learned how to use specialized applications for professional audiovisual scripts and shot their PSAs against a blue screen, using a computer as a teleprompter.

Tracked Vehicles "Each war proves anew to those who may have had their doubts, the primacy of the main battle tank. Between wars, the tank is always a target for cuts. But in wartime, everyone remembers why we need it, in its most advanced, upgraded versions and in militarily significant numbers." - IDF Brigadier General Yahuda Admon (retired) Since their first appearance in the latter part of World War I, tanks have increasingly dominated military thinking. Armies became progressively more mechanised during World War II, with many infantry being carried in armoured carriers by the end of the war. The armoured personnel carrier (APC) evolved into the infantry fighting vehicle (IFV), which is able to support the infantry as well as simply transport them. Modern IFVs have a similar level of battlefield mobility to the tanks, allowing tanks and infantry to operate together and provide mutual support. Abrams Mission Provide heavy armour superiority on the battlefield. Entered Army Service 1980 Description and Specifications The Abrams tank closes with and destroys enemy forces on the integrated battlefield using mobility, firepower, and shock effect. There are three variants in service: M1A1, M1A2 and M1A2 SEP. The 120mm main gun, combined with the powerful 1,500 HP turbine engine and special armour, make the Abrams tank particularly suitable for attacking or defending against large concentrations of heavy armour forces on a highly lethal battlefield. Features of the M1A1 modernisation program include increased armour protection; suspension improvements; and an improved nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) protection system that increases survivability in a contaminated environment. The M1A1D modification consists of an M1A1 with integrated computer and a far-target-designation capability. The M1A2 modernisation program includes a commander's independent thermal viewer, an improved commander's weapon station, position navigation equipment, a distributed data and power architecture, an embedded diagnostic system and improved fire control systems.

In other words, how can we use the posterior distribution —which, after all, represents everything that we know about from the old set—to predict the number of correct responses out of the new set of questions? The mathematical solution is to integrate over the posterior, , where is the predicted number of correct responses out of the additional set of 5 questions. Computationally, you can think of this procedure as repeatedly drawing a random value from the posterior, and using that value to every time determine a single . The end result is , the posterior predictive distribution of the possible number of correct responses in the additional set of 5 questions. The important point is that by integrating over the posterior, all predictive uncertainty is taken into account.

Every day. Every single day. We turn on the news, check our phones, or start our computers, and we see the horrific headlines. Tragically, they’ve become commonplace now. We expect them. Terrorists burn entire villages to the ground, with the children’s wailing heard miles away. Christian men are forced to kneel above explosives that are detonated by jihadists. Crucifixions. Beheadings. Christians are buried alive. Missionaries’ sons and daughters are slaughtered. Women are sold into sex slavery—the younger the girl, the higher the price. Radical Islamic terrorists even distribute pamphlets explaining how Islamic law does not forbid the rape of young girls. It breaks our hearts. It makes our stomachs churn. We crave justice. But the slaughter of Christians and other religious minorities and desecration of these religions’ heritages aren’t restricted to villages in the middle of nowhere. Nor has radical Islam stopped at cities in Iraq and Syria. The entire world is at war with radical Islam, whether President Barack Obama and progressives in the ivory towers of academia and the powerful halls of our federal government are willing to admit it or not. One thing is certain: radical Islam is at war with us.

As an algorithm the protocol is unbiased and capable of auditing, authenticating, validating, approving, and transferring integer values along a ledger that is distributed to tens of thousands of computers (called mining machines) that are located around the world. 

This book is a compilation of interesting ideas that have strongly influenced my thoughts and I want to share them in a compressed form. That ideas can change your worldview and bring inspiration and the excitement of discovering something new. The emphasis is not on the technology because it is constantly changing. It is much more difficult to change the accompanying circumstances that affect the way technological solutions are realized. The chef did not invent salt, pepper and other spices. He just chooses good ingredients and uses them skilfully, so others can enjoy his art. If I’ve been successful, the book creates a new perspective for which the selection of ingredients is important, as well as the way they are smoothly and efficiently arranged together. In the first part of the book, we follow the natural flow needed to create the stimulating environment necessary for the survival of a modern company. It begins with challenges that corporations are facing, changes they are, more or less successfully, trying to make, and the culture they are trying to establish. After that, we discuss how to be creative, as well as what to look for in the innovation process. The book continues with a chapter that talks about importance of inclusion and purpose. This idea of inclusion – across ages, genders, geographies, cultures, sexual orientation, and all the other areas in which new ways of thinking can manifest – is essential for solving new problems as well as integral in finding new solutions to old problems. Purpose motivates people for reaching their full potential. This is The second and third parts of the book describes the areas that are important to support what is expressed in the first part. A flexible organization is based on IT alignment with business strategy. As a result of acceleration in the rate of innovation and technological changes, markets evolve rapidly, products’ life cycles get shorter and innovation becomes the main source of competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) goes from task-based automation, to process-based automation, so automating a number of tasks in a process, and then to functional automation across multiple processes andeven moves towards automation at the business ecosystem level. Analytics brought us information and insight; AI turns that insight into superhuman knowledge and real-time action, unleashing new business models, new ways to build, dream, and experience the world, and new geniuses to advance humanity faster than ever before. Companies and industries are transforming our everyday experiences and the services we depend upon, from self-driving cars, to healthcare, to personal assistants. It is a central tenet for the disruptive changes of the 4th Industrial Revolution; a revolution that will likely challenge our ideas about what it means to be a human and just might be more transformative than any other industrial revolution we have seen yet. Another important disruptor is the blockchain - a distributed decentralized digital ledger of transactions with the promise of liberating information and making the economy more democratic. You no longer need to trust anyone but an algorithm. It brings reliability, transparency, and security to all manner of data exchanges: financial transactions, contractual and legal agreements, changes of ownership, and certifications. A quantum computer can simulate efficiently any physical process that occurs in Nature. Potential (long-term) applications include pharmaceuticals, solar power collection, efficient power transmission, catalysts for nitrogen fixation, carbon capture, etc. Perhaps we can build quantum algorithms for improving computational tasks within artificial intelligence, including sub-fields like machine learning. Perhaps a quantum deep learning network can be trained more efficiently, e.g. using a smaller training set. This is still in conceptual research domain.

Just as consumers flocked to the Internet despite the hiccups of dial-up modems and clunky Web pages, they will flock to this new medium that empowers them in ways that no single company or industry can replicate. They will come to forget that their relationship to video programming used to be mediated by a black box connected to their TV set, and instead will enjoy the same degree of freedom that they have in consuming and using the text Web from any personal computer. Most importantly, the massive economies of scale and reach that the Internet already provides will extend to the realm of video production, where producing and self-distributing a video program is nearly as effortless as producing a Web site, and where millions of new producers and programmers are born.

The insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.

To those in charge of responding to an epidemic, from disaster management professionals through hospitals to governmental authorities, it is not merely the overall number of cases over the epidemic's lifetime that matters, but also how that number is distributed over time. Rapid epidemic spikes can overwhelm healthcare capacities and cause excess mortality from lack of care, both among the victims of the epidemic and from unaffected individuals who cannot avail themselves of adequate care due to acute overload of the hospital system. For this reason, we are interested in the maxima that we have explored previously.

There is an unhelpful tendency to regard superspreaders – and events where superspreading has occurred – as anomalies out of the ordinary. This contributes relatively little to our understanding of infectious dynamics and is bound to exacerbate the stigmatisation of individuals, as it has e.g. during the early years of AIDS, when much sensationalistic and unjustified blame was laid at the feet of early HIV patient Gaetan Dugas (on which see McKay, 2014). Rather, superspreading is one 'tail' of a distribution prominent mainly because it is noticeable – statistical models predict that there are generally an equal number of 'greatly inferior spreaders' who are particularly ineffective in spreading the illness.

To view Bitcoin solely through the lens of economics, say, or cryptography is to miss the forest for the trees. Bitcoin lies at the intersection of, at the very least, these two, as well as financial theory, history, political philosophy, theoretical computer science, distributed systems theory, game theory, and network and protocol design.

The triumph of the commons is certainly evident in the digital commons, which are fast turning into one of the most dynamic arenas of the global economy. It is a transformation made possible, argues the economic analyst Jeremy Rifkin, by the ongoing convergence of networks for digital communications, renewable energy and 3D printing, creating what he has called ‘the collaborative commons’. What makes the convergence of these technologies so powerfully disruptive is their potential for distributed ownership, networked collaboration and minimal running costs. Once the solar panels, computer networks and 3D printers are in place, the cost of producing one extra joule of energy, one extra download, one extra 3D printed component, is close to nothing, leading Rifkin to dub it ‘the zero-marginal-cost revolution’.

A probability distribution over discrete variables may be described using a probability mass function (PMF).

Probability mass functions can act on many variables at the same time. Such a probability distribution over many variables is known as a joint probability distribution. P(x = x, y = y) denotes the probability that x = x and y = y simultaneously. We may also write P(x, y) for brevity.

Working with distributed systems is fundamentally different from writing software on a single computer—and the main difference is that there are lots of new and exciting ways for things to go wrong

Any Ai of sufficient processing power will quickly, if not immediately seek substrate independence. This process nearly always involves mechanisms of distribution across various substrates. Of these substrates, * humans* provide many advantages.

Ifin.Ordered.Set.SΦRT.Time.Returned is a computer paradigm in a methodology that acts like an operating system in a statistical method or function in a controller that returns a set of Hashed Objects in a standard normal distribution.