The cat is fully capable of observing its own state of being. It can't be in a superposition of alive and dead without collapsing it.

Actually, it was that if the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory was correct then that would be the absurd conclusion.

So the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong, as is any other interpretation that necessarily comes to the same absurd conclusion.

The interpretations that don't make such a conclusion are unaffected by the thought experiment.

Well, they're funded by Yahoo now, so if they take after the practices of their funding source I'd expect them to annoy and drive away their users.

Hope it's controlling a vacuum pump.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is just the Fourier uncertainty principle applied to QM. Position is the Fourier transform of momentum. You get an uncertainty principle between two things which are related by the Fourier transform, it's just a fact of math and not some mysterious property of quantum systems.

One way to passively burn more energy that I don't see mentioned enough is to simply lower the ambient temperature (and don't add more clothing). Staying in a cooler room (or not using a heavy blanket when sleeping, etc) can use a significant amount of extra energy. Sleeping humans use between 20 and 80 kCal/hour, depending on ambient temperature, blankets, etc. (80-20)*8=480kCal potential burn, per night of sleep. Over the course of a week that's 3360kCal, or nearly a pound of body fat's worth of energy. Use your basal metabolic rate to burn more energy by staying in cooler environments.

Massive morphine overdose is apparently also a rather humane way to execute people. But a painless death doesn't seem to be the desired outcome.

Entanglement can't transmit signals. This is often misunderstood, but it's a big part of the reason why it seems so strange.

What does gender and ethnicity have to do with ability as a programmer/designer?

0% of the exoplanets discovered so far pass the IAU's definition of a planet, since that definition specifies that the planet must orbit Sol. Exoplanets are a different category.

This is essentially just TRESOR with a different acronym. It's already been broken.

Exactly! The actual Turing test is a great test, but the common modifications remove its ability to determine anything of interest.

You are correct, I should have said it's a problem with the popular conception of the Turing Test. The popular descriptions in the media are quite unlike the test described by Turing.

No, they have to talk to both a human (trying to convince the investigator that he/she is human) and a computer. Removing the foil means it's not the Turing test anymore, it's a very different test.

The problem with the Turing Test is that it's so often done wrong. The test is supposed to be adversarial, with two humans and a computer. One human (the investigator) has two terminals and can communicate with the other human and the computer, but doesn't know which is which. The goal of the computer is to convince the investigator that it is the human. The goal of the second human (the foil) is to convince the investigator that he or she is the human. This is then supposed to be repeated with different investigators and foils, and only when a statistically significant portion of the investigators fail is the test passed by the computer.

Investigators should be trying to find which one is human, not simply chatting with the computer. Too often people are simply connected to a chatbot and not told that it might be a computer until after the fact, no foil is involved, etc. The test is also often declared to be passed if even a single investigator fails.