Not to mention that the phrase is toe the line.

Government's money is our money. We get to vote on how it's used. If I believe that subsidizing an activity undertaken by someone else is to my benefit, I will vote to do so. This is me choosing how to use my own money.

Oh, wait: you must be a Libertarian, and therefore think that you as an individual have a personal veto over everything the government might decide to do. Never mind.

Because there is a consensus that widespread adoption of solar power is a net good for the society as a whole.

Why do artists expect to be paid at all for recordings of their music? For a very brief period in history, making money off of recordings was made possible by a coincidental combination of technology and artificial scarcity caused by the cumbersome nature of physical media. Before the advent of physical recordings, musicians had to make money by performing. After the advent of digital recordings, musicians will once again have to make money by performing. Anything else will prove to have been historically anomalous.

Making and distributing recordings will still be in artists' interest, because they will serve as a way to generate demand for performances. That is, recordings will become a form of advertising, which will be distributed for all intents and purposes for free, or even at the expense of artists.

Can we quit wringing our hands about this now? Art will survive just fine.

I am convinced that the primary reason Bill Nye thinks that tech people tend to be scientifically illiterate is that he reads
Slashdot.

Only if you don't observe any orthogonal characteristics in the meantime. Consider a two-state system, with eigenstates |a> and |b> (for example, z-spin). Now consider an orthogonal basis |1> and |2> (for example, x-spin) which spans the same Hilbert space, such that

|1> = 1/\srqrt{2} |a> + 1/\sqrt{2} |b>
|2> = 1/\sqrt{2} |a> - 1/\sqrt{2} |b>

Now, suppose we observe the system to be in state |a>. Then if we perform an observation in the orthogonal basis, we will have a 50% probability to be in state |1> and 50% in state |2>. Suppose it's in state |2>. Now if we observe the first basis again, it's not in state |a> with certainty any more, despite the fact that we just measured it. It has a 50% chance to be in |a> and 50% to be in |b>.

There is no necessity to "restore coherence": the system is fully coherent throughout. This behavior does not happen with coins.

How about this?

oO:-|>>

Is that enough to be blasphemy?

This is wrong: the complex amplitude collapses, not just the probability (which is the square of the amplitude, and contains less information). This distinction is the heart of what makes quantum mechanics intrinsically different from classical physics.

Why, for instance, 10 cubic-kilometer voxels? Why not 100, or 1, or 0.1? How about 10^{15} cubic kilometers, which is about the volume of the sun? Adjust this number correctly, and you can match any energy density you want.

This is the problem with the science blogosphere: they'll take any press release whatsoever and echo it around regardless of whether or not it makes any fucking sense at all.

... somebody exploits this to write malware that's truly a bitch to reverse-engineer.

Not to defend Ross Ulbricht, but given what's coming to light, does anybody really doubt that HSBC enabled more drug trafficking than a dozen Silk Roads? And that's not even counting things like the arms trade and tax evasion.

Steal ten thousand dollars and you go to jail for decades. Steal ten billion and you get a slap on the wrist and an engraved invitation to the next campaign fundraising dinner.

Why would you bother to steal it, when you can get one any time you want with an app?

Estrogen replacement therapy in women (about the closest equivalent to testosterone therapy in men) was shown to increase the risk of breast cancer.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. People get old, and there is no magic bullet to stop it.

I for one welcome our testosterone-enhanced geriatric libertarian overlords!