export DISPLAY=someterminal.cs.edu:0.0
xkill &

Or:

$ yes > /dev/tty32 # Where tty32 corresponds to someone’s shell

*Finally* I will be able to customize my keyboard with an "any" key.

So humanity has 1500 more years to live before the aliens come and destroy us.

I think it might be time to bring back the flying toasters.

Hopefully there will be robots writing better manuals for products; given the ones I have seen coming out of China, this would be a fairly low bar for AI to reach.

Thanks for clarifying. Seems like entanglement is much less useful feature of the universe than I had expected. Is it good for anything?

Super-intelligent alien engineers love a challenge and presumably they've had a head start :)

Yes, I understand. But I used the limited twin example as a lead in to my more fantastic scenario of a highly advanced alien race that wanted to keep tabs on Earth. They would do so by entangling all the particles on Earth and then traveling back to their home star with the sister particles. In such a scenario, there would be no source of randomness available to us that they could not observe from afar. We would have free will because our actions could still be random and unpredictable, but those actions, which are somehow derived from quantum states, could be observed by the alien race using the sister particles back home.

It's sort of an extension on the question on whether the universe is amenable to simulation. If there are random quantum states that prevent simulation on deterministic hardware, the hypothetical alien race could get around this by entangling all the particles in our part of the universe and using those particles to feed the correct random parameters into their simulation of Earth.

Okay. It wasn't clear from the article that once you measure the particle the entanglement goes away. I had assumed that you could keep measuring the particle over and over again for different outcomes. I had read it as being like a pseudo-random number generator that was set to the same seed when the particles were entangled.

I think my general idea still works, though. I did not say that a twin had any ability to influence what the other saw when he measured his particle. All I assumed is that he could tell what random value his twin had measured by consulting his own particle. If you have an infinite number of particles and an agreed upon sequence of checking them, you could still implement first scenario. You could get the exact same result more easily with the pseudo-random number generator, however, rather than having an infinite bag of entangled particles.

According to the Forbes article, if you read the quantum state of a particle here, you can learn the corresponding state of the remote particle, no matter the distance. It would seem like this could allow you to gain knowledge about distant events, provided you knew the particle on the other end was being used to influence those events. For example, suppose you had a particle here on Earth and your twin had another entangled particle on Alpha Centauri. Suppose the two of you had worked out a system where each of you would consult the particle as an Oracle for major life decisions. If this was the case, you and your twin would know what life choices the other was making instantly, without having to communicate.

So the upshot of this is that a sufficiently advanced alien race could be keeping tabs on Earth from very far away by having seeded entangled particles throughout our planet eons ago. Since our actions are based on random events (the weather, the stock market, random number generators, synaptic activity in our brains, etc) such an alien race could know an incredible amount of information about how we operate by consulting their entangled particles.

So, think about it. We are being watched. Each random occurrence on Earth gives our alien overlords the ability to spy on us, while themselves being so far away that we could never see them. I bet you'll never look at a Magic-8 Ball or a coin flip the same way again.

US debates plan to hand out ice cubes in case of global warming.

It costs an arm and a leg to get a head in this world.

If you RTFF (Read the F'ing FAQ), you'll learn the Honour and Glory was the name of the clock from the Grand Staircase.

Question - Why not use “Honour”, the British spelling, instead of “Honor”?
Answer - While we are aware that Titanic was a British Ship and the “Honour and Glory” name for the clock from the Grand Staircase was spelled as such, we had our reasons for using a different spelling. There’s already something Titanic-related called “Titanic - Honour and Glory”, In addition to that, “Glory” refers to the ship itself, but “Honor” refers to the story, and the project is being developed by a mostly North American team.

Obviously someone whose software license has expired.

This could be solved by two factor authentication. Not only would the key fob transmit a radio signal, but you would also need a metallic dongle with uniquely coded grooves that when inserted into a specialized slot would engage a mechanical door release mechanism.