Your second box isn't the best analogy of quantum entanglement as it's actually misleading you to the wrong conclusion. To extend the analogy, let's say the contents you see inside this enchanted box also depends on which side of the box you open up: if you open the top, it'll be either a red ball or a blue ball as you describe, but if you open the bottom, it'll be cubes, red or blue. What the other person with their "entangled" box will see when they open it will also depend on which side they open, as well as what you saw: they will always see a ball if they open the top and a cube if they open the bottom, and the colour will be opposite if they opened the same side as you - but the colour will be random if they open a different side than you did.

Now, the outcome each of you see is random in all cases. But how does each box know that you will open one side of your box and the other person will open another side of theirs? How can the boxes know beforehand if neither of you have disclosed, or even made, that decision before the boxes were even built?

This is why these "Bell" tests of quantum entanglement are so interesting: their results imply that the universe either *does* have some kind of faster-than-light communication - which we are unable to control - to communicate what kind of measurement was performed, and/or that these quantum properties don't even have well-defined values until the measurements take place. Either result defies ingrained intuitions about the mechanics of physical reality. And yet, this is what the experiments are now telling us is true.

As if GIF was immune to patent troubles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Arguably if it weren't for that, we wouldn't have PNG now.

That article is pretty poor. "A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe." That's why you encode those "continuous parameters" as qubits, dumbass. You think they plan to encode each parameter in a double or something? It's like saying that because 640kB of RAM can encode more than 10^197000 different discrete "basic" states - a brain meltingly huge number - that it will be impossible to write algorithms which can deal with all those possible conditions.

The rest of the article seems to be argumentum ad ignorantiam - that this guy personally hasn't heard any discussion about some of the fine details means that for sure nobody in the field has thought about them. Though his points about people becoming sick of the hype may be valid, there's hardly any substance here - basically amounts to "sounds pretty hard, must be impossible".

Superdeterminism is a cop-out. It's basically equivocating the entire universe to following a script. Sure, perhaps, but there's zero predictive or intuitive power in that.

Publishers rarely even do much formatting, putting a lot of that burden also on the authors by way of thorough (and strict) submission format requirements. And after jumping through those hoops, you have to check closely to ensure that the copy editor hasn't ballsed something important up (pro-tip: they have).

I'm a published scientist. It's a racket. There are two reasons why these "high-tier" journals are sought after: because it's hard to get accepted (thereby attributing renown by proxy), and because funding and promotion is predicated on publishing in them (based on the assumption of renown by proxy). They provide no real value.

Anyone paying attention lately can clearly see how disinterested certain parties are at entertaining any good-faith discussion. Open and intelligent debate only has any kind of usefulness if both parties engage honestly and with intent to understand and learn from each other. Fascists and charlatains don't. (And judging by this comments section, neither do many Slashdotters.)

I'm not a fan of silencing in general, but keeping things open can backfire: open discussion of extreme ideas has the effect of lending them normalcy and legitimacy. Plenty of ideas still floating around the public sphere are batshit insane and a waste of time and energy to even ridicule, while others (religious extremism/cults comes to mind) lead directly to ways of thinking and actions that are significantly detrimental to society. These things should not be legitimized.

Funnily enough, "quantum key distribution" is what it's actually generally referred to in the field.

Just the meter; the second is defined in terms of the rate of atomic energy level transitions.

You misunderstand qubits. A qubit can hold 0, 1, or a linear combination of 0 and 1, and with complex parameters (as in, real and imaginary). These are not discrete like digital information, they are continuous. While two bits can hold two dimensions of discrete information (amounting to 2^2 = 4 combinations), two qubits can hold four dimensions (2 times 2, because the parameters are complex) of continuous information (amounting to an infinity of combinations).

Discretization of qubits only happens when they are measured.

What about homophones? To, two, too? They're, their, there? The meaning of these words* in written English is well defined because they are spelled differently, yet in spoken English their meaning can only be inferred from context as they sound the same. There are also words spelled the same but with different pronunciations (e.g. desert, bow).

*I realise they're is a contraction, not a word, but you get the idea.

What about abbreviations? How do you pronounce Mr., for example?

What about dollar values? If I gave you $2, would you give me "dollars two"?

"You are coming to a sad realization, Cancel or Allow?"

I know I've heard that somewhere, but for the life of me I just can't remember where...

Oh come now, Legalese is to English as Pig Latin is to Latin.

As a scientist who has a fair bit of coding experience, including LabVIEW, ++ this.

What particularly annoys me about visual code like LabVIEW is that you can't diff. So change tracking is a pain in the arse, and forget distributed development.

LabVIEW itself is good for setting up a quick UI and connecting things to it, but any serious processing? ...No, thanks. If I could get my hands on something else that had the UI prototyping ease, connectivity to experimental devices (motion controllers, for example), but based on a textual language, I'd be a happy camper. (There are some things that come close, I'm sure, though I've not had the time to properly search. Busy scientist is busy...)

Nice idea, but it's circular. Energy is defined in terms of mass (and distance and time). You need Plank's constant to convert from photon frequency to energy, and unless you already have a definition for the mass unit (kg), Plank's constant becomes essentially arbitrary.

No, he's just wrong, or at the very least severely dumbing down the real picture for the sake of placating the lay audience (which Slashdot is, generally speaking, not). There's a few examples of this already on the first page - I didn't even make it to the second...

That seems to be a problem with a lot of modern science: correct, brief, understandable to the layman. Pick two.