I imagine watching cars travelling 65mph -- even when they're nearly bumper-to-bumper -- will make many logjammed drivers in the human/slow lanes think twice about their insistence on being in "control".

Why "nearly"? If a computer can handle that, it can also handle hooking them up into a car train and traveling at ~100mph. With properly designed physical and software interfaces, a battery truck could sell electricity to such trains, allowing electric vehicles to conserve their own batteries or even recharge as they go.

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

The problem is, the conclusion is not absurd. It's merely unintuitive. For it to be absurd, the Copenhagen interpretation itself would have to require cats to be either alive or dead but not both as its premise. It doesn't, so showing it necessarily leads to living dead cats doesn't disprove it. Neither has any actual observation done so to date.

Common sense is a good thing to have, but it's not reliable when utilized outside everyday experience.

In Quantum Mechanics this is called a wave function, and the cat is in a superposition of wave functions that represent all possible states. The wave function collapses when we make an observation.

Or it doesn't, it simply seems that way because all our instruments of observation - both natural and artificial - are specifically designed to report a cat as either alive or dead but not both. In other words, the cat doesn't stop being in superposition, but rather we enter a superposition of seeing a living cat or a dead cat. We don't notice that, of course, but someone who asked us about the status of the cat couldn't know beforehand what answer they'd get, so they'd describe us in the same terms - superposition - we described the cat. And of course the chain of correlated superpositions (I'm a honest guy, the odds of me lying about the cat are 1/10000, but this other researcher always lies) goes on potentially ad infinitum.

This line of thinking also solves the non-locality problem: no, measuring the polarization of a photon doesn't make it send a superluminal message to another, entangled photon. Rather, the wavefunctions of the measuring devices become correlated with the wavefunctions of the photons (which is the definition of observation), so since the wavefunctions of the photons interfered, so must the wavefunctions of the devices. Which we then interpret as "spooky action at distance", when all that's happening is perfectly local physics (correlating the photons at the source, correlating a measuring device to a photon x 2, summing up the wavefunctions of the devices).

Just a Dora The Explorer is a factual representation of the world of Dora The Explorer.

And would be a perfectly factual source for someone trying to figure out what Dora The Explorer would do. Yes. You're getting it.

By your definition a fact can be literally anything and of any relative value.

No, I'm saying that people usually say "what would Jesus do" as shorthand for "what would Jesus, as depicted in the Bible, do, based on these depictions".

a pointless distinction unless we're talking about a comparison to reality.

And what is that? Was Jesus a real person who's life Evangeliums record or an entirely fictional character? Luckily, we don't need to know this in order to answer the question "what would Jesus do?" We can simply assume a place, called "the world of Bible", and assume everything we know about the guy is true there. The price of this unified treatment for two mutually exclusive worlds is that the concept of "fact" becomes more complex with the addition of context: in which worlds is the fact true?

Not that you can avoid that complexity, since the very concept of imagining is really just a process of making these alternative worlds with different sets of true facts.

They are extras, and on a really good day they get a line and become a glorified extra. They have the talent to be better then most movie stars, but that's really common in LA.

I call bullshit. They can shoot their own show/movie/whatever and upload it to Youtube if they're really that good, or even any good.

It's a golden age of small-studio productions of all kinds, ranging from abridged anime series to original science fiction films to rap battles to My Little Pony rap battles. Saying you didn't get a chance to show your awesome talents is ridiculous.

Maybe it depends on where you are coming from? The prospects of someone who is already a star might be damaged by being remembered for Lucas's lines and direction, while someone who was previously nobody is now somebody, even if they're somebody so-so.

It is a complicated technology

Bicoin is a distributed double-entry bookkeeping ledger where transactions need to be signed by the crediting account's (secret) key. And Bitcoin is also the (imaginary) currency unit used in said ledger.

Seriously, there's nothing there anyone who knows even the basics of accounting wouldn't recognize. It's just wrapped in a high-tech packaging.

There you go, making sense again.

"These snooty scientists, what do they know?"

I was raised in a very poor family, one of the poorest in our city, but I have an IQ that's very high, and I always made good grades in school. I don't see the relationship between poverty and smaller brains, nor do I see the relationship between poverty and crime. Of course I was raised in a good family that wasn't trash.

"I'm very smart. I lifted myself up by my bootlaces. Anyone who doesn't is trash. Crime is done by criminals for for the evulz, and is thus not affected by economic circumstances."

Parental involvement makes more of a difference, and unmarried teens are simply not the best parents. Ask any teacher and they can tell you which students have parents who care.

"Teens having sex is bad. Children doing badly at schools is caused by parents not caring rather than working two full-time jobs to make ends meet."

Congratulations, I think you hit almost all popular right-wing talking points. All that's missing is some scaremongering about immigrants. Maybe you could work that into the bit about crime?

I have a serious problem with gay marriage, as marriage is a religious ceremony, so the state should stay out of it. Civil union is the state sponsored joining, and should be the proper avenue for the state to allow something that religion indicates is wrong.

The problem is, the state can't recognize marraige without defining it. If you agree that the religious ceremony has no legal significance (that is, married couples also need to get a civil union if they want the state to respect their union), then fine; but if you want your marriage ot mean anything to the state itself, the state can't avoid deciding what it considers a valid marriage - and then carrying the moral and legal responsibility for that decision, if it would happen to put citizens into different categories based on religious beliefs. Indeed, it would be forced to recognize an official religion that gets to choose.

So, the only way to get the state out of marriage is to go pure civil union route and ignore whatever religious or other ceremony anyone feels fit to add on their own time.

Sincerely I cannot understand how this is modded informative. There is absolutely no factual data that supports what you just said. Sure, the bible implies what you described, but well, it's the bible, and the day we'll start to take the bible as "factual data" in Slashdot will be the day logic gets shattered to pieces.

The Bible gives data about the behaviour of biblical characters that is factual in the context of how these characters, as described in the Bible, would behave in a given situation. The grandparent was modded informative for making one such analysis.

In other words, Bible is a factual description of the World of Bible, which may or may not resemble the World of Average Slashdotter or World of Average American in some important ways. The same is true of all literary descriptions, whether meant as factual in the context of WoAA or not.

Going all Rambo is a good way to threaten to reverse that momentum.

Cue the obvious conspiracy theory.

Chemical rocket engines dump heat into the exhaust gases but in a vacuum radiators have to be huge and heavy to get rid of significant amounts of heat from something like a nuclear reactor.

You could use a nuclear lightbulb style gas core reactor and either ablation or pure photon drive.

You are assuming we have to pander to pilots preferences. Just TELL them, "you will be videoed or alternatively you can choose another profession".

And some percentage of them will, which makes the available pool of pilots at a given price smaller, resulting in either lower quality or higher prices or both.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "alter orbital structure and energy levels"?

I mean part of the electrostatic attraction between atomic nucleus and orbiting electrons should be countered by expansion of space between them, which in turn affects stable electron orbits. In fact all forces should get weaker with distance faster in an expanding space than in flat space.

Electromagnetic force is mediated by virtual photons, who's wavelength gets longer as space expands, thus sapping electromagnetism of some of its native strength and somewhat altering the lowest-energy point of all structures held together by it.

I was a little confused when I saw that wording in the story, and now that I'm hearing this wording is the important part, I'm getting a little concerned. Are we not all citizens? Have we been divided into citizens and ruling class, now?

We've always been divided into serfs and lords. Human spirit simply doesn't have the strength to resist using power to get more. The lords, blinded by the seeming invincibility of their position and the system which grants it then end up draining that very system to the point of collapse and revolution, and the cycle repeats.

Whether it can be broken is anyone's guess. Democracy has slowed and complicated the gravitational collapse of current system somewhat, but it couldn't alter the end result, since all manifestations of power in our societies are not under democratic control, and are thus free to join biggest existing masses of power and make them even bigger.

I'm all for popularizing science among all citizens, but I'd rather we word that as "science for the masses" or something.

That very desire should already answer your question. As our masters keep telling us: if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.