Delta1212

A fusion device is not an actual star. Quantum computers are not actually faster computers. They are significantly faster at solving specific kinds of problems that take current computers a very long time to solve. But if we're talking simple counting, or analyzing every possible solution to a problem rather than just narrowing it down to one specific solution, they're not really going to help.

In this case, that's like a progression of candle > lightbulb > star.

I'm sorry, but it probably will. Just to be able to count that high in 1 year, we would need a computer 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times faster than a modern supercomputer. That's unrealistic to expect to ever happen, frankly.

As amusing as I would find it, I don't see how London supports itself as an independent city-state. Maybe, maybe if it had unfettered access to the sea it could make a go of it, but unless you annex the land around the Thames out to its mouth, you don't even have that. It'd be a blow to England to lose London, but it'd be a blow to London to lose the rest of England as well, even with a gurantee of EU membership but especially without one. I get the emotional response, but I've yet to see a good argument for how it would work logistically without landing everyone in an even bigger mess than they're already in. But that's just my perspective as an outsider looking in. I have no real direct experience with the issue unless you count a couple of vacation trips to London over the years.

Democracy doesn't promise that the right answer will be implemented, just a popular one. It is not and never has been about intelligent or even good government. Democracy's sole positive quality over other forms of government is that it acts as a check on the accumulation and abuse of power by tyrants. That's literally it. And on its own, that is a critically important feature. But if you're anticipating that democracy should otherwise have better outcomes than other forms of government beyond that one thing that it does, you're kidding yourself.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics. That's what politicians do. We have now discovered there is a level beyond that, Trumptalk.

Definitely the one jumping off the cliff.

Currently. I'm assuming the background temp of the universe is going to continue dropping as it expands. Eventually it should, presumably, reach a point where black holes are no longer being fed faster than they can radiate. Granted, that's not going to be happening anytime soon, but it should eventually happen, shouldn't it?

Well, small enough black holes do go out with something of a pop, and over long enough periods, even larger black holes should evaporate, so there could very well be a situation in which the last black hole eventually goes out with a bang. At least as far as I know.

A broken party is hardly going to help him, and I don't think managing to snag the nomination that you have already technically won but that your party is subsequently trying to block you from is going to provide him with momentum. Drspite the saying, what doesn't kill you often makes you weaker. Challenging the presumptive nominee at the convention isn't going to be a win for him and provide him with a bigger push than he'd get if people simply rallied around him.

It is either evidence for local hidden variables or for quantum entanglement being a non-local effect. The evidence points toward it being a non-local effect and not being local hidden variables. We go where the evidence points, not where we think it would have made more sense for the evidence to point.

So despite the evidence that it is impossible for it to be the result of local hidden variables, you think it must be local hidden variables? You're essentially saying that the fact that quantum entanglement isn't affected by distance proves that it can't be non-local, which doesn't make any sense.

Perhaps try looking for it there, then?

I understand the point you're making, but just to point out, it was man-made lake that the child was pulled into.

No death is trivial, but 9,000 deaths out of the 50+ million people who die every year makes for a statistically rare cause of death, which was the original contention.

After thinking about it, that seems likely. Perhaps not fully intentionally, but I think it may be the case that people are more comfortable slipping into informal forms of address with women than with men. You still get women who are addressed by their last name and men who are addressed by their first name, but the balance does seem rather skewed when you look at our political figures.

Singular they has a long tradition in the English language dating back centuries, and using the correct conjugation for 'they' doesn't break agreement between subject and verb anymore than using 'are' for a single person breaks agreement when referring to them as 'you.'

That was my initial reaction, but I still called Bush 'Bush' far more frequently than I call Hillary 'Clinton' despite his father also being prominent. There's even a greater distance between the time that Bill Clinton was president and now than between George Sr leaving office and W being elected.

Some states do have gun licensing. It varies a lot by region. I would personally prefer if gun ownership worked more like car ownership. Get licensed, register them with the state and purchase insurance if you want to use them outside of your own private property. There's a fair degree of resistance to most of that from various quarters, though.

"Spooky action at a distance" is only spooky in light of some other quantum mechanical things. At face value, it would be no different to having one red card and one green card, dropping each in an envelop, handing each envelop to a person that doesn't know which is which and then sending them off to opposite ends of the Earth. As soon as one of them opens their envelop, they instantly know the color of the card in the other envelop on the opposite side of the Earth, faster than the other person could transmit that information to them (or perhaps even before the other person has even checked their envelop). That's not spooky and you certainly wouldn't expect to be able to transmit any messages from one side of the Earth to the other using that method. You could have a preset message included in the envelop or something, but once the two carriers have separated and are at opposite locations, they can't transmit any information from one to the other through their envelops. The reason that the "spooky action at a distance" thing comes in, is that we know through other means that in the quantum realm neither "card" is in a definite state of being green or red until someone opens their envelop and checks the color. That collapses the wave function for the color of the card and also instantly collapses the wave function of the other card, so that if you open your envelop and find a red card, your opposite will find a green card, no matter when they open their envelop in comparison to you. If there is a 50/50 chance of your card turning out red, then if you opened your card, and your opposite opened their card after you, but before any signal traveling at the speed of light could reach from your position to theirs, the results will still be perfectly correlated. You still can't send information from one to the other any more than you could in the classical scenario, but the wave function collapse allowed for the correlation to be maintained without information being sent from one quantum card to the other at subliminal speeds.

The problem is that the first two are things that you can tell at the time of sale. You can find out if someone is a minor before selling to them. You can tell how many drinks you have sold someone as well as how drunk they are acting before selling them another. You cannot tell whether someone is going to eventually use a gun in a crime before selling to them. Sure, if they come in talking about how they're going to kill someone and the person sells them the gun and then they kill someone, I could see the seller having some culpability. But mostly that's not what happens. Now, if there is a way to tell whether someone is going to, or is extremely likely to, use a gun illegally before selling it to them, then sure. But that is what background checks are for. Then you hold the seller liable if they don't conduct a proper background check. But if they do, I'm not sure that there is any fair way to hold someone accountable for actions they had no control over and could not have reasonably foreseen at the point of sale without effectively outlawing the sale of guns all together.

To help politicians get elected, mostly.

There are background checks, though, which this guy passed. He had been on a watchlist at some point, but that doesn't turn up in a background check, and I'm more comfortable with the idea of a total gun ban than I am with the idea of selectively restricting people's rights based on their presence on a list that a person can be added to with no due process. Edit: As far as Obama doing anything about the issue of gun control, well, he tried. The problem there is that the President doesn't really have the power to do anything about it unilaterally. Gun control measures need to come from Congress, and there has been a very hostile Congress to the President since 2010, and one very firmly against any sort of gun control efforts.

Politicians say things like that all the time. It doesn't seem to have fixed everything.

Maybe he means that the current moment is all that exists of time and is finite, but that the every changing present has no beginning and no end and is therefore eternal? That sounded more like a coherent explanation in my head than it does out loud.