jpeterson

However, I believe that the bit about light being a "continuous" signal in the first paragraph invites conflicting thoughts of wave / particle duality, which distracts from and is not at all relevant to your point.

The eye samples light because it connects to a machine with a fixed number of inputs. This setup would also require sampling if the signal were not continuous at all, but instead consisted of a much larger number of discrete parts than the "sensing" equipment could handle.

For any combined system, i.e. a situation where you've combined two systems such as the hot cup of coffee and the cool room, the number of "dispersed" states is far greater than the number of non-dispersed states. So any change of state is far more likely to be in the dispersed direction.

The article didn't make it clear what role entanglement plays in this.

For example, suppose you have two billiard balls, A and B. In our world, A travels from left to right, strikes B, and then B flies off to the right.

We would say A striking B caused it to fly off.

But an observer moving through time in the opposite direction would be no less justified to claim:

B travelled from right to left, struck A, and caused A to fly off to the left!

Nope, you cannot. I think it's highly likely that there are some rather large biases in your process.

This goes for pg too.

If by "had more impact" you mean "changed it into a medium for idle entertainment".

Seriously, what problem does Facebook solve? Does it even do a very good job solving this problem? Does it have any redeeming quality whatsoever?

From where I stand, it's just another dumb fad that was in the right place at the right time. It's the slap bracelet of this generation.

That's good, because you clearly wouldn't have been the star student in English class.

So do sports.

Sports seems to be zero-sum; people don't appreciate a good game, they appreciate one arbitrarily-labelled team beating another.

This couldn't be more wrong. Sports fans absolutely do enjoy good games, independently of which team happens to be their favorite.

Can you give some examples?

But this is another ballgame. What they've done here is effectively hijack a completely unrelated and ubiquitous communication channel — without any action on my part, and without giving any indication of doing so!

I don't even use Facebook, but since I created a Facebook account at some point in the past, they potentially have access to my inbound email traffic. That's just absurd and stupid.

You'll see this when people start recognizing Facebook as the crap it really is, and stop using it.