Conspiracy time: Quantum computing may have already been solved and the US gov is keeping it secret so they can harvest encrypted data. Consider this blog post from Scott Aaronson (quantum computing expert / theoretical computer scientist / Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin):

I’m going to close this post with a warning. When Frisch and Peierls wrote their now-famous memo in March 1940, estimating the mass of Uranium-235 that would be needed for a fission bomb, they didn’t publish it in a journal, but communicated the result through military channels only. As recently as February 1939, Frisch and Meitner had published in Nature their theoretical explanation of recent experiments, showing that the uranium nucleus could fission when bombarded by neutrons. But by 1940, Frisch and Peierls realized that the time for open publication of these matters had passed.

Similarly, at some point, the people doing detailed estimates of how many physical qubits and gates it’ll take to break actually deployed cryptosystems using Shor’s algorithm are going to stop publishing those estimates, if for no other reason than the risk of giving too much information to adversaries. Indeed, for all we know, that point may have been passed already. This is the clearest warning that I can offer in public right now about the urgency of migrating to post-quantum cryptosystems, a process that I’m grateful is already underway. (emphais my own)

Link for those interested. I’m not bringing this up because I’m trying to say that the US gov for sure has cracked quantum computers, but there’s no denying that Scott’s statements there do come off as a bit of a wink wink nudge nudge.

Yeah honestly, there’s no replacement for textbooks, paper and pencil when it comes to learning a new language

Bill C-2, a border bill, failed. It had two sections 14 and 15 that basically gave the cops permission to demand any data from any company in the country about any customer. This included lawyers and doctors.

I remember hearing about this bill. I’m glad to hear that it failed

Or Klingon

You might have a point

Would a graph depicting Africa’s population growth also look like comedy to you? Because it would look pretty similar to that graph too

McGill is a high ranking English language university in Montreal

Yeah but the populations in these countries is declining or will be soon. Just look at Japan for example. Whereas population growth in Africa accounts for most of the population growth of humanity as a whole in the coming century. Source: UN population projections

Yeah, sorry. I didn’t come across an English translation. And it’s a PDF which makes machine translation pretty tricky. There is some English language news coverage of the report though. For example here is an article about it from Forbes

The point about economic power makes a lot of sense. I guess it really comes down to how well Africa’s economic development goes. China’s development happened very rapidly, it’s possible that something similar might happen in some regions of Africa. But that’s very hard to predict. But right now China being/becoming the world’s largest economic player seems like a very safe bet

Now that’s the spirit. Thank you. After so many negative comments, reading this was like drinking a nice cold glass of water. I am 100% in favour of francophone Aussies

What was your relationship to this person?

That’s good

je ne comprends pas

We were both happier, at least for a while.

Are you not happier anymore?

I can only get so erect

Lovely. Well, wish me luck

Right. That’s just an implication of the fact that (1) French is very widely spoken in Africa, and (2) the demographic weight of Africa will be increasing throughout this century by a lot (for example look at this graph if you want to see the relative proportions). Its population is shooting up while the population of everywhere else is projected to shoot right down. So even if French doesn’t fully replace English it’s undeniable that its global usage will grow substantially

Edit: here’s another link for you to check out if you’re still don’t believe that French is, indeed, the fasted growing language right now.

The TL;DR:

A study by investment bank Natixis even suggests that by that time, French could be the most-spoken language in the world, ahead of English and even Mandarin.

Already cleaned up what I could get with no PPE. Should I be concerned? I washed my hands pretty good after

Don’t dox me wtf