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Because they aren't starving? They're white bread overfed yuppies...

I'd say homicide is part of the natural order of humanity. Does that make it good? The natural order is not necessarily moral...

Compared to the experts at the EPA, FDA, and USDA regulating GMO crops and the scientists conducting the actual research, we are all laymen. Can you link to a peer reviewed paper which supports any of your claims? So you're saying just let them starve? Could these things even be done with genetic engineering? I think you're running into inherent limitations of the cellular platform there... I think your attitude towards GMO crops would be altered dramatically if they were the only thing that could save you from starvation. Bottom line, all I'm seeing out of you is a lot of unsubstantiated FUD about GMO crops... which in my mind puts you in the same league as people who spend their lives trying to prove that high voltage power lines cause cancer, ignoring all the science that shows that non-ionizing radiation can't harm DNA, and therefore can't cause cancer...

Sounds like Symbiotic Crystal Resonance Transmission from Stephen Donaldson's The Gap Cycle...

My response (after I posted on this thread and was doing a little digging) was that I found a book which seems to cover this exact setup and explains why it doesn't work.

Well, I found this: http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/2004-11/1099321986.Ph.r.html Perhaps I'll take a look at that "Superluminal Loopholes in Physics" book to see what it says...

You might want to see my thread on this issue... so far no one has managed to tell me what the problem is. Of course, this method still requires you wait for photons travelling c to get from a midpoint to your communication endpoints... and it seems to be theoretically impossible because it could lead to causality violations...

I'm certainly for letting science take whatever risks it needs to in order to save the lives of millions, knowing that the scientists and the powers that be have a much better grasp of the situation than I do. When laymen try to tell science what it can and can't do, problems arise...

Let me add to this that memes/intelligence can easily trump "superior" genetics... A bear has considerable strength and a powerful bite, but thanks to the meme of leverage (and opposable thumbs), we are able to comprehend that we can pick up a large branch and utilize it as a class three lever. We also have a meme which has informed us the control center of the bear is located in its cranium, so we can combine these two to daze the bear by clubbing it over the head. And thus we can turn the environment against the attacker. Likewise, an alligator has considerable strength and an enormously powerful bite, but thanks to a meme which has informed us that the muscles which open the crocodile's jaw are considerably weak (especially in comparison to those which snap it shut) we know we can render the crocodile's powerful jaws useless by holding them shut. And if either of those fail, we can call for help, and bottom line, we are the most effective pack hunters on the planet. And if those memes didn't apply to you before, they do now. Congratulations, you've been infected with virulent information.

We have the ability to make such technology because we can evolve memetically. Other species are limited to what their genes provide. That's the difference, all other animals rely solely on genetic evolution, whereas our evolution is both genetic and memetic.

It's Moretti, my favorite Italian beer...

There is no "pinnacle" of evolution because humans are still evolving memetically at an exponentially increasing rate. I'd say the "pinnacle of evolution" view means that natural selection came up with a platform upon which continuing memetic evolution can take place, whereas the memetic evolution of all other species is at essentially a standstill. Yes, the beneficial traits like, oh, sentience carried over some deleterious ones like relatively poor eyesight, poor sense of smell, etc. but the obvious conclusion we can draw is that the beneficial traits more than made up for the deleterious ones. Thanks to our memetic evolution, we can kick any other animals ass a few thousand times over, thanks to memes like... the gun. Thanks to memes like space telescopes we have better vision than any other creature on the planet by several orders of magnitude. So the deleterious traits are irrelevant because we can more than make up for them with memes.

Here I am now... entertain me...

In the above setup, if we observe the "which path" information for the entangled particle then we know which path its partner took, and consequently the probability waves for both particles are collapsed and the interference pattern is destroyed. The twist of the quantum eraser experiments is that if the which path information is "erased", that is to say that other quantum events are used to destroy the which path information, the interference pattern reappears.

It's possible. Step one: Admit that we are all fundamentally working on the same problem. We'll never get there. People will have to discard the pathological memes with which they are infected first. Short of memetic genocide, I don't see this happening... ever. Step two: Figure out what that problem is. If you though step one was hard...

Because you're depending on random variations to accomplish the genetic manipulations you desire, so it could take dozens of generations of selective breeding before you accomplish your desired goal. And chances are, you won't live that long... People have dedicated lifetimes to using selective breeding to improve the hardiness and yield of crops, most notably Dr. Norman Borlog, who was given the Nobel Prize for his work in food science. His efforts are estimated to have saved the lives of one billion people, and he is a staunch advocate of using GMO crops to accomplish now what would take a century of selective breeding. The bottom line: tens of thousands die from starvation every day. We need to produce food to save these people now, not in a century. GMO can accomplish this. Why are you irrationally denying these people the food they need to eat to survive?

Yes, you go through the offspring and find which one produces the most of the particular vitamin you're interested in, and kill off all the other offspring. Then, produce another generation of offspring, take the one that produces the most of the vitamin again, and breed another generation from that. Continue until you reach your desired goal. Yes, expose several plants to cold and breed the ones that do the best. Expose the next generation to cold again and continue until you reach your desired goal (I hope you get the idea now) Wrong. Evolution is the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators, whereas 100 monkeys pounding on 100 typewriters is simply pure randomness. Imagine how long it would take the same number of monkeys to write Shakespeare if for every letter they managed to hit correctly (through randomness) those letters stayed fixed and they need only type the ones that are incorrect. You'd get a lot closer to Shakespeare a lot faster that way. But selective breeding involves what the breeders want. Random variations in gene transcription alter the genetic code all the time. The only difference with GMO crops is that the alterations to the DNA are intelligent rather than random. But we do. Do you think you've magically forseen a disaster scenario with GMO crops that the scientists actually trained in the field have not? Do you think you've seen one that the top scientists at the EPA, FDA, and USDA have not forseen? And even if such a scenario hasn't been forseen by scientists in any of these groups, do you think there's a disaster scenario which could occur in the wild which wouldn't crop up in the extensive testing processes laid out by the EPA, FDA, and USDA? That's exactly what we are doing. That's why these crops go through years of extensive testing by three different agencies and must get all three stamps of approval before they are put into production. The bottom line is... I trust the opinions of the scientists at the EPA, FDA, USDA, and the scientists at the institutions performing the research. You can either accept these opinions or attempt to second guess them. And that's not to say that there aren't GMO alarmists with PhDs in biochemistry/genetics/molecular biology, but these people are in the minority and their claims, at least as far as I have ever seen, are essentially baseless speculation, much like yours. When it comes right down to it, I'd say feeding the starving children in Africa is worth risking whatever unlikely doomsday scenario you feel GMO crops could pose. And if such a doomsday scenario were to occur, I'm confident science would find a solution. Second guessing science puts you in the same category as creationists... the sad thing is GMO alarmists managed to convince many African governments not to accept GMO crops and are thus forcing hundreds of thousands to starve. That is real, quantifiable harm to humanity... so consider the people your alarmist stance on GMO crops are hurting

I'd like to think that "empty space" is an artifact of our perception of an underlying structure in which everything is interconnected.

Here's a highly technical writeup on the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment: http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/kim-scully/kim-scully-web.htm Of course quantum erasure doesn't come into play in this, merely the delayed choice aspect. Hopefully one of the real physics people here can give you a layman's description, as I wouldn't want to try to explain it incorrectly (obviously I'm misunderstanding something here, or I wouldn't be asking this question) They don't have to. Guess I need to bring out my diagram again: Okay, here we have a device at B involving a laser (which is magically spitting out single photons at a fixed interval) whose beam is passing through a beam splitter (BS), both outputs of which are passing through down converters (DC) which generate entangled photons. These entangled photons travel along until they arrive at destinations A and C. At A, we have "which path detector" (WPD). At C, we have optics which cause the two beams to cross back over each other. Now, (assuming the WPD is off) we know from the traditional double slit experiment that the probability waves of the two paths will interfere. Thus if the little blue bar at C is a CCD hooked to a computer which registers where each photon hits and builds a composite image, the photons will eventually trace out a pattern that looks somewhat like this: (note: This image assumes that the probability wave will collapse due to outside interference about 50% of the time) Now, if we were to switch on the WPD, the interference pattern would be destroyed, and we'd get a picture more like this: Is this correct? Am I misunderstanding something? Because if so, it would seem that we could use these two very different looking pictures to differentiate between two different types of signals. Would this not be an example of using delayed choice to send information?

I'm not sure why everyone is focusing on spin... that would be the Aspect experiment as opposed to the delayed choice quantum eraser... I guess I didn't make it clear enough that I was talking in using delayed choice to send information, not spin... In a delayed choice experiment, the interference pattern is selectively destroyed depending on whether or not the other side observes the entangled particle (and thus collapses the probability wave), no? Why can't this be used to send information?

Okay back up for a second here... is this statement incorrect? "Collapsing the probability wave of an entangled particle simultaneously collapses the probability wave of the particle it's entangled with."

Okay, getting back to the actual setup I was trying to detail: You have a down converter which spits out a pair of entangled photon beams (a photon at a time at very small intervals), and you cause these to "self-interfere" ala the double slit experiment by providing two possible paths for the photons to take and making the two paths cross. Let's call one of the two entangled photon beams A and the other B. At B we have a CCD or some other device that registers the locations where individual photons land. When the wave function for A is not collapsed, the photons at B trace out the expected interference pattern on the CCD. However, if the wave function is collapsed before the corresponding entangled photon strikes the CCD at B, the wave function collapses and the interference pattern is destroyed. So if you use a few trillion photons to send each "bit", couldn't you tell if beam A's probability wave was collapsed by whether or not it traces out a corresponding interference pattern at B? Wouldn't the presence or absence of an interference pattern at B let you know if the probability wave was being collapsed at A?

The surprising thing is the patent number looks legit and matches atomchip.com's whois info:

Yes, perhaps if it weren't total BULLSHIT they would have a better web site. Yes, I call bullshit. These are such horrible photoshops it's ridiculous. Yes folks, they claim this little doodad that looks halfway between a Toslink connector and a miniplug stores a whopping 24GB. Oh look, this is supposed to store 1 TB! So why is the label horribly photoshopped? Hey look, it's a QuantumTM brand component! Oh wait, it's just BULLSHIT! The sad thing is this detracts from real companies making molecular computing breakthroughs