crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

  why?

The answer is really, really, really simple.

Have you ever gotten locked out of your house? Might you not keep one more key in a secret place, just in case? Have you ever forgotten a password, and needed to reset it? Have you ever trashed a file allocation table, or lost access to an encrypted disk? Didn't you wish there was a back up for destroyed data? Have you ever left for work without an umbrella, but luckily keep one at your desk (or wish you had), because it suddenly rains unexpectedly? Don't car dealerships provide two copies of keys with each new car by default?

Now, here you are, the guy who finds out something incredible and needs to send a message fast. But you left your wallet in your other pants and it went through the wash. Luckily, you stashed your extra pad in a convenient place, and you can still send the message. No one dies, and you don't get fired or thrown in jail for being a negligent drunk! Thank god the printers knew your plight!

This was probably a baker's dozen favor, that the printers did with a wink and a nod, because they had been caught in sticky situations, where they had to work with that one guy who couldn't get it together.

Instictively, nerd indignance says incompetent idiots deserve to get locked out and thus weeded out by their own bumbling errors, because costing the lives of those weak links is better than risking the lives of everyone.

Sure sounds great, but it doesn't always work that way in practice. The truth is that power vests itself where it can, and each officer getting a spare back-up probably noticibly saved face for higher ups, and saved enough people's actual bacon, without ever revealing the hellish risk being taken in any obvious way, that it became the norm to flout the geek's recommended rules for best practice.

crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

Fortunately for Gabe Newell, it's extremely difficult to fire him for running his own company this way, and indeed, this methodology likely only serves to cement his authority to remain relevant and in control of anything that truly matters.

crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

Ha ha ha! Oh wow! This is the defining HN comment for all time. This tells ou everything you need to know about what your participation is worth on this site.

crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

It's just an expression of the conservation of energy. Much in the same way the double slit experiment conflates a particle transporting itself through two windows at once, so too, do these experiments conflate the polarizers as causing the effect.

Ask yourself: if you construct a gun, with two diametrically opposed barrels, with exactly opposed rifling twists, and you aim the gun at two opposing (but identical) abrasive knurled metal rasp targets, such that if the bullet spins one way, the ricochet off rasp target will send it to a blue target, but if the bullet spins the other way, the grain of the rasp target is such that the bullet is sent to an orange target, will you be surprised to find that the behavior of the projectiles remains consistent?

Fire those bullets out of that gun, and as the bullets leave the opposing twists of the barrel, and the spin of the bullets encounters the friction of the knurled surface, they will consistently be sent in whichever direction the spin of the barrels rifling puts them. When one side sends spins the bullet to hit the blue target, the other barrel's twist always puts the other corresponding bullet onto the orange target, by bouncing it off the polarizer rasp.

So, now, to shrink downward to the realm of particle physics, what we find is that the ballistic particle guns are such that the emitter source is an array of many guns with varying rifling twists, but like pulling a lever on a slot machine, we cannot know which of the guns embedded in the radiation source will fire next.

We won't know the turn of the rifling of the gun's barrel prior to whichever one happens to go off. We stick out our rasp target to have it send the bullet to a colored target, and we declare that the polarizer rasp directed the bullet particle, but not really. The emitting source's gun barrel imparted the spin. The polarizers induced behavior on particles that would have behaved as reciprocals anyway.

crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

The quantum state of interest is induced when plucking the conjoined "guitars". (analog for particles)

That state is induced at the moment the guitars share "locality" because entanglement requires locality for initialization of polarization.

So then, we say we are as yet unaware of the qualities of the polarization we, ourselves, induced. Very mysterious.

So spooky, yes? We do not measure, because we choose not to, so we do not yet know.

Even if we prevent ourselves from having the capacity to measure, the results hold true, but so what? And so what, if we ask others to do the same. Imagine that we ask two waiters to tape two coins together in the kitchen, flip the linked coins, peel the coins apart while preserving the outcome of the coin flip, then take one coin to your table, and one to mine. Now I know which side of the coin you are looking at, without walking over to your table. So what. Nothing about this claims transmit information superluminously.

In reality, with instrumentation, carrier signals relay an electromagnetic transmission in such a way that one cannot peek or tamper (the waiters can't change the coin flip, we cannot hear the ringing guitar), but this does not invalidate the premise of the analog. For the purposes of the analogous guitar example, we say that our couriers (electromagnetism itself) are prevented from touching or listening to the ringing guitars, or disclosing what they might sense.

With the guitars, we say the guitars move away from the place where they were entangled. We'll say that our instrumentation rang the guitars at the grand canyon. Our couriers then transported the guitars to you, at the top of the Empire State Building in New York, and me on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I receive the guitar, and discover that the LOW E string is ringing, it can only mean that you guitar's HIGH E string in ringing in New York.

There are no local hidden variables in this example. The premise of polarity as a corollary for guitar strings is modeled in the exact same manner. Six strings on a guitar maps to the same essential parameters of each of two directions for all three axes of spin.

crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

These links are intended to suggest something contrary to what I've said, but they do not suggest any contradiction.

crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

Big deal. There's nothing shocking or spooky about two billiard balls being made to spin in arbitrarily opposing directions, selecting only one (omg! without discovering which way it spins, you guys), then separating them, and then noticing the spin of one, in order to reliably grasp that the other is the reversal.

I have two guitars. I place the guitars facing one another, such that plucking the HIGH E string on one, also plucks the LOW E string on the other. We put ear plugs in our ears, such that I can separate the two guitars, without us ever hearing them. I pluck the guitars, give you one, and take the other one and travel far away. I then listen to my guitar. It is the HIGH E guitar. Now I know you have the LOW E guitar. Wow. Incredibly unspooky. Not teleportration.

crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

Apple's latest laptops mostly require dongles now...

crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

The concept that photons are massless entities is founded in obsolete information. It has long since been determined that photons do in fact carry mass.

When photons were initially conceptualized, the capacity to estimate their mass was too small to measure and thus prove to experimentalists. Theorists, therefore, focused on other concepts and problems.

Taking a look at the link you've provided actually reaffirms this fact. Mote that it is a question from a novice, and the very first answer refutes the idea that photons lack mass.

  In other words, a photon does have 
  relativistic mass proportional to its 
  momentum.

  And here we have it: photons have 'mass' 
  inversely proportional to their wavelength! 
  Then simply by Newton's theory of gravity, 
  they have gravitational influence.

Keep in mind that the top google results for stack overflow style Q & A forums aren't always going to line up in favor of your search queries.

You should read the top answer, since it's more likely to contain reliable facts, and not presume that the ideas expressed by the question are essentially correct.

crumpington

8 yıl öncediscuss

Actually, Apple does have LTE modems. It's just that they insist on referring to them as iPhones or iPads.

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