When I read the summary, I couldn't believe that Amazon had lost over six times its revenue. Then I saw that the revenue was in billions and the net loss was in millions. Fine, $19,000 million dollars looks awkward (despite what Randall Munroe thinks), but there has to be a less confusing way to convey that information.

For 18 months you take your infant to a doctor who pumps her full of drugs, which, while curing her of a terrible disease, gives her horrible side-effects. Then the doctors tell you they think she's cured, but that they want to continue the debilitating drug regimen "just to be sure." Is it really so irrational to say, "No, screw that. My daughter's better now. No need to subject my baby to all this continual agony"? Not saying this is what happened, but since you don't know the specifics and circumstances any better than I do, how about we just forego judgement on this woman?

Yeah, but the mother presumably knows that HIV is passed through breastmilk. So it seems unlikely she would continue to breastfeed longer than absolutely necessary (which, given the existence of formula, means the kid was almost certainly never breastfed).

Post 18 months? Possible, but unless the mother was actively trying to reinfect her kid...

After 18 months? Unless the mom is Lysa Arryn...

The Washington Post story states:

Presumably they didn't want to pile the Slashdot Effect on top of their server woes. But a quick google search turns up: http://www.ocearch.org/profile/katharine/

is my go-to source for internet shorthand. Any reason the FBI's too good to just use that?

oblig. FoxTrot

This is wrong. Before one "collapses" a particle's state, it actually *does* exist in all states simultaneously. See the double-slit experiment.

his initials, Paul Ingrisano

See, that's the danger, and why I made my original comment in the first place: Schrodinger's cat (and Quantum Mechanics as a whole) has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness. Here's a great piece explaining in more detail.

Indeed. Parent was talking about Special (simultaneity).

Re: Mercury's precession, I'm still a believer in Vulcan.

Surprised you didn't link to the oblig.

There's no fixed limit--the double-slit experiment has been run on gold particles, I know, I think I heard of it even being performed on DNA molecules. It's not about the size, it's about the act of measurement. However, I've gotten responses in the other place I posted this comment that are basically along the lines of, "there's a certain class of detectors that will entangle with the system rather than collapse it." If that's the case, then the Schrodinger's Cat problem becomes a practical one (it's impossible to truly isolate the cat from the outside world) than the fundamental one I've described.