Two atoms make quantum memory, processing gate, and test of entanglement

Entangling atoms from different elements does it all, quantum-wise.

Quantum systems are inherently fragile as any interactions with the outside world can change their state. That makes creating things like quantum memories rather challenging, since it can be hard to know if it actually preserves the information you put into it. To get around this, researchers have been looking into ways of creating error-correcting quantum memory.

Now, researchers have come up with a rather simple scheme for providing quantum error controls: entangle atoms from two different elements so that manipulating won't affect the second. Not only is this highly effective, the researchers show that they can construct quantum logic gates with the setup. And while they were at it, they demonstrate the quantum nature of entanglement with a precision that's 40 standard deviations away from classic physical behavior.

People have managed to entangle different types of particles previously. For example, you can entangle an atom and a photon, which allows the photon to transfer information elsewhere—something that's undoubtedly necessary for a quantum computer.

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Busted by online package tracking, drug dealer gets more than 8 years in prison

Even after getting arrested, Harold Bates still received drugs from China.

(credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D.)

A Massachusetts man who bought methylone (also known as "molly") online from China was sentenced Monday to eight years and four months in prison.

Harold Bates pleaded guilty in September 2015 to importing methylone and one count of possession by an inmate in prison of a prohibited object. Curiously, the man was busted by the digital trail he left on the USPS tracking website, according to the United States Postal Inspection Service.

The judge’s memorandum and order from April 2015 explains that in October 2013, postal investigators found 500 grams of a substance that turned out to be methylone in a package to be delivered in Hollywood, Florida. That statement may suggest investigators found the suspicious package first and then manually checked IP logs to see if anyone had been searching for tracking information. Once they located Bates’ IP address, they could then check to see if it had been used to search for other packages.

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Copyright tribunal slaps Pandora with 20 percent rate increase

A little-known panel of judges determines what Internet radio must pay.

Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora Media, speaks during an interview in October 2015. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg (credit: Bloomberg / Getty Images)

Internet radio services like Pandora will have to pay more to artists and their representative groups, according to a decision released today by the Copyright Royalty (CRB). The basic per-song rates paid by Pandora will go from $.0014 per song, or 14 cents per 100 songs played, to $.0017. That's a nearly 20 percent increase.

The $.0017 rate will remain in effect for all of 2016 and then may increase according to the Consumer Price Index, a common measure of inflation, through 2020. At that point, the CRB will make another rate decision.

Today's decision resolves a long legal fight in which Pandora was asking to pay a lower rate of $.0011. SoundExchange, which distributes money to record labels and artists, wanted the rate to nearly double to $.0025 per stream.

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Qualcomm Snapdragon 620 and 618 renamed to 652 and 650

Qualcomm Snapdragon 620 and 618 renamed to 652 and 650

Qualcomm is renaming two of its upcoming processors for mid-range phones. The previously announced Snapdragon 618 hexa-core and Snapdragon 620 octa-core processors will now be called the Snapdragon 650 and Snapdragon 652. Why the new names? To help set them apart from all the other Snapdragon 600-series chips. The problem is that when Qualcomm first […]

Qualcomm Snapdragon 620 and 618 renamed to 652 and 650 is a post from: Liliputing

Qualcomm Snapdragon 620 and 618 renamed to 652 and 650

Qualcomm is renaming two of its upcoming processors for mid-range phones. The previously announced Snapdragon 618 hexa-core and Snapdragon 620 octa-core processors will now be called the Snapdragon 650 and Snapdragon 652. Why the new names? To help set them apart from all the other Snapdragon 600-series chips. The problem is that when Qualcomm first […]

Qualcomm Snapdragon 620 and 618 renamed to 652 and 650 is a post from: Liliputing

Congress: NASA must not only go to Europa, it must land

Agency’s new budget includes $175 million and a requirement to include a lander.

Plumes of water vapor on Europa? We may find out in about a decade. (credit: NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI)

In November Ars revealed exclusive details about a daring mission to land on Jupiter’s moon Europa, and now it has become the law of the land. The Congressional budget deal to fund NASA for the fiscal year 2016 includes $1.63 billion for planetary science, of which $175 million is designated for the “Jupiter Europa clipper mission.” It has a target launch date of 2022.

But the new budget legislation does not stop there. It further stipulates, “This mission shall include an orbiter with a lander that will include competitively selected instruments and that funds shall be used to finalize the mission design concept.” In other words, it's against the law to fly the mission to Europa without a lander.

The overall budget for NASA provides $19.2 billion for NASA in fiscal year 2016, about $700 million more than President Obama requested. “This number, this year, is the largest vote of confidence that Congress has ever given NASA,” Texas Congressman John Culberson, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the space agency, told Ars. “There’s enough money to do everything on their plate.”

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SyFy’s The Magicians and the dangers of adapting “adult Harry Potter”

Brooding magic-haters, crushing repetition, mystical sex: A formula for TV success?

High fantasy is having something of a moment on television. Game of Thrones is the biggest and most obvious example, but shows like Vampire Diaries, its Originals spin-off, Once Upon a Time, Grimm, and the somehow-still-running Supernatural have made the genre increasingly visible. SyFy’s current bid for a conversation-worthy bite of this apple is its adaptation of The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s New York Times bestselling novel about a young man who attends a magical school and struggles to defeat a world-threatening Big Bad.

If this premise sounds familiar, you wouldn’t be the first person to feel a sense of wizardly déjà vu. The books, especially the first in the trilogy, have been frequently described as “adult Harry Potter,” an assessment that is both understandable and catchy. While that meme-ified judgment of Grossman’s books is seriously reductionist, it’s also a useful way of thinking about just how tricky it’s going to be to get this adaptation right. So before the pilot’s launch on Wednesday night—and ahead of the series’ official January 2016 premiere—we got to the bottom of our “the book is always better” bias one kind of question in mind. What kind of magic are we in for?

The un-Harry Potter

The Magicians is less “adult Harry Potter” than it is an “un-Harry.” In his protagonist Quentin Coldwater, in the magical education Quentin receives, and in the foundational structure of the series, Grossman carefully and meticulously smashes the lovely, sparkly romanticism of the Harry Potter story to pieces. Brakebills, the Magicians universe’s Hogwarts equivalent, is a frustrating and demanding place. Quentin is stuck for endless, mind-numbling hours working on rote memorization in order to master the fickle language of magic in his universe. The book is full of passages like this: “The room was the same, and the days were always, always, always the same: empty, relentless, interminable wastelands of repetition.”

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Netflix Socks will pause your video if you fall asleep

Netflix Socks will pause your video if you fall asleep

It never fails: you settle in for a marathon Futurama or Kimmy Schmidt marathon, but you doze off halfway through the second episode. Netflix is here to help. The company has released plans for a DY project that will automatically pause your video when you fall asleep. How does it work? Simple: you just need […]

Netflix Socks will pause your video if you fall asleep is a post from: Liliputing

Netflix Socks will pause your video if you fall asleep

It never fails: you settle in for a marathon Futurama or Kimmy Schmidt marathon, but you doze off halfway through the second episode. Netflix is here to help. The company has released plans for a DY project that will automatically pause your video when you fall asleep. How does it work? Simple: you just need […]

Netflix Socks will pause your video if you fall asleep is a post from: Liliputing

Alcatel-Lucent: IP/MPLS- und optisches Netz für Schweizerische Bundesbahn

Eine der pünktlichsten Bahnen der Welt braucht ein neues Netz. Die neue Netzinfrastruktur bringt DWDM- und IP/MPLS-Systeme und verbessert auch die Internetzugänge in Bahnhöfen für Fahrgäste. (Optisches Netzwerk, Netzwerk)

Eine der pünktlichsten Bahnen der Welt braucht ein neues Netz. Die neue Netzinfrastruktur bringt DWDM- und IP/MPLS-Systeme und verbessert auch die Internetzugänge in Bahnhöfen für Fahrgäste. (Optisches Netzwerk, Netzwerk)

Popcorn Time Fork Goes Dark After MPAA Hounds Developers

The MPAA has not yet given up its fight against Popcorn Time. The movie industry group is reportedly going after a group of developers who launched a “Community Edition” of the popular application. While the new fork has yet to throw in the towel, they’ve taken down their website and GitHub repository for the time being.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

popcorntLast month the MPAA took credit for shutting down the main Popcorn Time fork, which operated from the PopcornTime.io domain name.

The Hollywood group had filed a lawsuit against several of the developers in Canada which caused other key developers to back out.

While the MPAA’s actions had a profound impact, it didn’t stop others from continuing with their own Popcorn Time spin-offs. The popular Popcorn-time.se fork was unharmed and most recently a new group of developers launched a Popcorn Time Community Edition (PTCE).

The people behind PTCE began their work with a fully operational fix for the .io fork which was circulated on Reddit. Later they also added their own fork and a dedicated website at Popcorntime.ml.

“Popcorn Time will probably never go away, despite the efforts made by organizations such as BREIN, the MPAA and others. Instead of fighting this great software they should embrace it,” the PTCE team told TF at the time.

PTCE

The new fork was welcomed by many estranged Popcorn Time users and quickly gained a healthy userbase. However, two days ago the project’s official website and GitHub repository went dark.

At first it was unclear what had happened but an insider informs TF that several people involved with the PTCE project are “getting bugged” by the MPAA.

“The people behind the official CE sites have been contacted by MPAA for some time now,” says Luretrix2k, who’s a moderator at the Popcorn Time subreddit.

“They decided to take everything down and start all over again with a new strategy/game plan for the official site and GitHub repository to avoid this problem in the future,” he adds.

The PTCE team doesn’t want anyone to get in trouble with the law and are figuring out what steps they can take to avoid this. They hope to get the site back up again in the future and will continue to work on the application behind the scenes.

The MPAA pressure shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the lawsuit against the developers of the popular .io fork. Also, two PTCE developers had to quit the project last month after they were targeted by Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN.

Even if the Community Edition doesn’t come back, others may jump in to take its place. Rinse and repeat.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

OneDrive for Business to get unlimited storage for enterprise customers

But only for some.

Amid the brouhaha surrounding Microsoft's decision to backtrack on its offer of unlimited OneDrive storage for home Office 365 subscribers, one issue remained unaddressed: what about the related OneDrive for Business storage that's offered to enterprise Office 365 subscribers?

The company has finally laid out its plans for these users, and unlimited storage is back for at least some. Enterprise and government customers on the E3, E4, and E5 plans, education customers, and OneDrive for Business Plan 2 and SharePoint Online Plan 2 customers will all see their storage allocation increased provided that the organization has at least five subscribers.

This move to unlimited storage will be phased in two parts. The first part will be an automatic increase from the current 1TB to a new 5TB per user, expected to complete by the end of March 2016. Subsequently, customers will be able to request additional storage.

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