All three 'u's are like 'oo' in 'moon'. The pronunciation of 'u' as in 'unique' is pretty much unique to English.
Check out this video of Mandela talking about Ubuntu (the concept, not the distro). He's a Xhosa speaker, so he should know.
They share the first syllable and the words are short so they sound a bit similar, but they are not the same. I heard that during soviet times they emphasized that similarity,
No. 'Krashnoye' does mean 'beautiful'. It's merely an archaic form which is rarely used. Ask a Russian.
It's actually the origin of the name 'Red Square' and place names like "Krasnoye Selo" ('beautiful village', not 'red').
Hmm... how to parse that? If that's a reference to Communism it's a pretty lame joke. If it's a reference to the adjective 'red' also meaning 'beautiful' in Russian, then it's a pretty smart one.
Well, as someone living in Scandinavia I'd have to disagree, at least in part.
Scandinavia is overwhelmingly Protestant, as well as overwhelmingly pro-evolution. This can probably be explained by a bunch of things, but #1 is that they all had state churches, which were always moderate. Evangelical protestantism had a hard time competing. Second factor is that they're overall very un-religious in general, which is possibly a side-effect of their historic compulsory state-religion.
Third factor is that they're all relatively left-wing countries. As such, criticism of church and religion was strong and vocal, especially in the late 19th-early 20th century, before they'd 'broken' the political power of the church. IOW, religion got kicked out of politics and hasn't been allowed to return.
Yet.. Luther was a critical-thinker who rejected the church and declared that people should be allowed to decide themselves how to interpret scripture. It's the great irony of Protestantism that in doing so, he opened the door for Fundamentalism.
Mozilla execs have absolutely no business-saavy or sense. Are they joking? They couldn't have a monopoly considering their business model. Their product is free, and does not prevent competitors from entering the market.
Yet.. Netscape had a virtual monopoly on the web browser market, which was then replaced by the IE monopoly (leveraged by Microsofts OS monopoly).
Both products were more-or-less free (as in beer).
Given that Mozilla Corporation has a bigger revenue than Netscape ever had for their client, and that IE has probably never earned a dime for MS directly, I'd say they have some pretty good business-savvy.
That's what they sued for- antitrust violations. And that's what got thrown out.
What's happened now is that the judge decided they could come back and file a new complaint based on copyright law instead.
That doesn't mean their new counterclaims (Apple sued them) necessarily have any merit. In fact, I don't really see how this is a 'win' at all - if you file a complaint and it gets tossed out, you wouldn't normally be barred from trying again, if your amended complaint is substantially different.
Having looked through some as well, I'd take it a step further.
I don't think there's anything secret in there at ALL. It's just simple, journalistic-style research and analysis, with information entirely from public sources.
I don't think you're going to find any buried scandals here. At all. You'd probably get more from reading a good selection of newspapers. Journalists tend to have inside sources, after all.
The worst I could imagine from what I've seen is stuff like "Congressman so-and-so said he didn't know about X.. but he should have if he'd read Congress' own report on it!"
Chris Rock summed it up nicely. No one will ever cure AIDS, the money isn't in the cure, it's in keeping you alive and helping you live with it. Just get your "fix" and live for one more day.
Yeah, because Chris Rock has a unique level of insight into the realities of drug development
It's bullshit. Utter bullshit of the kind that can only come from the cynicism and arrogance that follows total cluelessness.
Do you think bio-medical researchers are some kind of wizards? Do you think we know so much that we have the luxury of being able to pick and choose between solutions? Bullshit.
Do we know how the human body works? No, we do not.
Do we know how diseases work? In most cases, no.
If we did - Cancer is a good example of an illness known in great detail - does that mean we know what to do about it? It does not.
If you have an idea of what to do - does that mean it'll work? It doesn't.
If it works in lab, does that mean it'll work in a live human? It does not. (see the first point)
Do you know how many drug concepts (that is, ideas) that make it to becoming a finished, FDA-approved drug? It's not even one in ten thousand. With a situation like that, you do not have the luxury of picking and choosing. You go with whatever idea you have, and you take it as far as it'll go. If you're lucky, it might turn into a drug. And it most certainly won't work exactly as imagined from the start.
Do you know how Viagra, that blockbuster bestseller of 'lifestyle' drugs came about? It was a side effect of a drug originally developed for angina and pulmonary hypertension - a heart drug. The main factor in drug development remains: luck.
But if you still think there are plenty of good, uninvestigated options for AIDS drug development out there, I suggest you go do it yourself. Maybe then you'll gain some real insight into how complicated reality really is.
Are these T cells capable of 'reproducing' and having an unlimited number of descendants?
T cells are produced by the bone marrow. They don't reproduce on their own.
If the treatment works, how long will it last?
The lifespan of an average T cell is on the order of 10-20 weeks. I believe. Shorter in HIV patients.
Do the modified T cells have to come from the patient?
Who knows? But not necessarily. After all, you get plenty of foreign T-cells with a blood transfusion. But I don't think anyone is necessarily viewing this treatment as a 'cure' in itself.
Once you have a bunch of immune T cells, will they be able to eliminate HIV from the body?
That's not known. But they've done it, with positive effects. Note how 'cure' is put in quotes, as it should be.
The answers to these questions are the difference between this being a laboratory curiosity and this being the elimination of HIV in developed countries within 5 years.
With so many people in the developing world suffering from HIV, it would be nice to see something like this fast tracked.
I doubt they view this as a 'cure'. It's research, in both gene therapy and HIV.
If it works, I'd assume the next step would be to try to develop a procedure where they did this to bone marrow cells - the cells that produce T-cells - and thus let the body create its own HIV-resistant T-cells. That might work well enough to be a 'cure' - an HIV patient with leukemia was given an HIV-resistant (CCR5) bone-marrow transplant, and is now effectively 'cured'. (Though they're careful with the word since HIV virus may still be lurking in the body somewhere)
Well that's effing ridiculous, isn't it? Sony-Ericsson has nothing to do with Sony-BMG. For all intents and purposes, they're completely separate companies. Just with (partially) the same owner, and the same brand name.
Why would you 'punish' Sony-Ericsson for a business decision they had nothing to do with at all?
So, universities and schools can monitor what students do on the Internet.
In Sweden, and to a similar extent in Finland, there is no privacy within public institutions - such as universities.
All public documents (meaning those produced by _any_ public institution) are public record unless specifically ruled otherwise (e.g. national security, relations to a foreign power, etc).
As a Swedish university employee, all my email at my university address is a matter of public record. Not only can my boss read it, any member of the public can come in and ask for a copy, no questions asked. (That said, this has never actually happened to me. But there are legal implications for data retention, etc)
Bzzzt! Wrong attitude. Unless your objective is to get into a pointless argument or pissing contest.
Taking into account the opposing POV is hardly 'bootlicking', it's common sense. It also costs nothing. Arrogance OTOH, has no value. What consolation is it to you that you refused to be a 'bootlicker' in your opinion, if it means you fail to achieve your goals?
You take into account the opposing POV to find the course of action most likely to produce the desired result. If Dell had phrased his question differently, he could have gotten the answer he was looking for. Instead, he got some useless nationalistic banter. If it'd been a business negotiation, Dell would have risked losing out on the deal, and both sides would probably lose.
Diplomacy is not a zero-sum game, and it's not pandering or bootlicking. It's the dignified art of getting stuff done without getting sidetracked into pointless discussions. Saying 'my way or the highway' does not tend to get things done, and does not make someone a good leader, if that's what you think. Because leaders, pretty much by definition, are people who get things done.
Not that I agree with him, but I understand Putin's response. Look at it from Putin's POV: Putin is a very strong nationalist. And just about every country, not least Russia, tends to be quite sensitive to American condescension or arrogance, real or perceived.
So when Dell says, in what would be an okay-ish remark between Americans, 'how can we help you', it's easily felt as condescending in foreign eyes. Especially Russian ones and especially Putin's. Add to that the cultural factor of Russian temperament and you get what Putin said.
Dell probably should have phrased it in a more neutral manner. For instance, he could have been more generalized and simply ask "How can the IT sector in Russia be expanded to better utilize the reserves of talent there?" Or something similar. By his response, you'll find out if there's a role for you or not. So simply by dropping the 'How can we help' bit, you avoid the implication that they _need_ help (even if they do, nobody really wants to be told that by someone else) and the further implication that 'we' are the only ones who can do so.
I'd just like to say that I don't think the TV license should be called a tax; even if it's virtually equivalent to one.
Taxes are collected and administered by the Government. TV license fees are not.
There's a good and important reason for that: To keep public television free of governmental/political interference.
Calling the TV license a tax, as well as referring to the BBC and other (west-)European public TV companies as 'government-owned' and similar gives the inaccurate picture that they're under some kind of direct government control, which they are not.
See, not every country became democratic and fully 'modern' in one swoop like the USA did (well.. not that the USA actually lived up to its ideals initally, but I disgress). Other countries like Sweden and England evolved that way through gradual reform.
In the early 19th century, Sweden had become a democracy, albeit with a monarch. There was freedom of the press insofar that anyone could start a newspaper. But one of the rights the king had retained was the ability to revoke their right to publish. Well, in 1830 the newly created newspaper Aftonbladet ("The evening paper") criticized the king, who then revoked their right to publish.
So, very quickly they resumed publication under the name "Det andra Aftonbladet" ("The second Aftonbladet"), which was also banned fairly soon. So they started the third Aftonbladet, the fourth Aftonbladet, etc. By the time they'd changed their name 26 times, the monarchy gave up. The right to free press has never been seriously contested in Sweden since. (and the privileges of the monarchy were gradually reduced to today's figure-head status - with less rights, I believe, than the Queen of England)
Actually the current Karl XVI Gustav, made a deal with the Government back in the 1970's to never, ever, interfere or even comment on political matters. If he did, the monarchy would risk being abolished completely. -The Social Democrats have ruled Sweden for all but 3 terms in the last century, and their party platform has always included abolishing the monarchy. The monarchy's existence is entirely due to their popularity.
I don't think the word means what GNU thinks it means.
Well, the meaning of the word 'operating system' is subective of course. But the goal of GNU since the start was always to produce a UNIX-like operating system. And the UNIX operating system was always a lot more than just a kernel, it included tools, a shell, a compiler, etc. From the UNIX perspective, the GNU definition of 'operating system' makes perfect sense.
Now if you're coming from the microcomputer persective, where an "operating system" was nothing more than the kernel and possibly a shell, you'd obviously be more inclined to simply label the kernel as an operating system. On the other hand, back when DOS was created, it barely would've been considered an operating system by the folks using UNIX and VMS. Indeed, DOS would barely qualify as an operating system today, especially considering what modern BIOSes can do.
I'm not sure what the article meant by ultra secure "quantum communication". Quantum teleportation *is* a quantum communication *channel* but it's unclear what kind of security they are talking about.
It's the same situation as in 'quantum cryptography'. That is, you can't eavesdrop on it, and while there is information being transferred 'classically' in the open, it gives no help in identifying what's being transferred. I agree it's a bit of a stretch though, because this is a fairly impractical scheme for doing it, if it's your sole purpose.
There's absolutely no superluminal communication going on though.
You're talking about entanglement, not 'teleportation'. This uses entanglement but it is _not_ instantaneous in any way.
It requires having each atom emit a photon, allowing for those photons to become entangled, then performing a measurement on them, and "classically" communicating the results of that measurement so that the 'receiving' end knows what phase to put on a microwave pulse that has the end result of recreating the state that's being transferred.
One more question, about measurement. Is there any way to know that measurement has taken place at the other end and your local qubit has collapsed? Or would determining that constitute a measurement in and of itself, meaning if it hadn't been collapsed it then would be so you wouldn't know what happened?
A good question. Now, determining if the thing has collapsed would require a measurement. Any interaction that could be used determine the state is a measurement of the state. But, that doesn't mean it's impossible to tell the difference, in the sense that we still know that's what happens.
Consider the opposite scenario: One system does not or can not 'know' that the other has been measured. That constitutes what they call a 'local hidden variable theory'. In other words, that the state of the system/particle isn't actually undefined and never was - it had a 'hidden' value, one that you just didn't know about until you measured it. That's the only alternate explanation for how the thing can 'know' which value to assume once it's measured (e.g. clockwise polarization for a photon if it was entangled with a photon that'd been measured as counterclockwise-polarized)
I'm almost hesitant to call it an 'alternative' explanation, because it's really the simpler idea. The states aren't genuinely undetermined, it's jus that we don't know what it is. However, it's also the wrong explanation - because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem. A brilliant bit of work that showed you could in fact test and measure whether there were such local hidden variables. There aren't. Quantum weirdness won the battle.
So you can tell that the states are genuinely undefined, and you can tell that this collapse occurs instantly. But you can't tell whether the collapse has actually occurred in any particular case. Now that I think of it, if you could, it would allow for FTL communication since you could communicate by, say, measuring or not measuring one of the particles at some predetermined points in time.
Slashdot Mirror
All three 'u's are like 'oo' in 'moon'. The pronunciation of 'u' as in 'unique' is pretty much unique to English.
Check out this video of Mandela talking about Ubuntu (the concept, not the distro). He's a Xhosa speaker, so he should know.
No. 'Krashnoye' does mean 'beautiful'. It's merely an archaic form which is rarely used. Ask a Russian. It's actually the origin of the name 'Red Square' and place names like "Krasnoye Selo" ('beautiful village', not 'red').
Hmm... how to parse that?
If that's a reference to Communism it's a pretty lame joke.
If it's a reference to the adjective 'red' also meaning 'beautiful' in Russian, then it's a pretty smart one.
Scandinavia is overwhelmingly Protestant, as well as overwhelmingly pro-evolution. This can probably be explained by a bunch of things, but #1 is that they all had state churches, which were always moderate. Evangelical protestantism had a hard time competing. Second factor is that they're overall very un-religious in general, which is possibly a side-effect of their historic compulsory state-religion.
Third factor is that they're all relatively left-wing countries. As such, criticism of church and religion was strong and vocal, especially in the late 19th-early 20th century, before they'd 'broken' the political power of the church. IOW, religion got kicked out of politics and hasn't been allowed to return.
Yet.. Luther was a critical-thinker who rejected the church and declared that people should be allowed to decide themselves how to interpret scripture. It's the great irony of Protestantism that in doing so, he opened the door for Fundamentalism.
Yet.. Netscape had a virtual monopoly on the web browser market, which was then replaced by the IE monopoly (leveraged by Microsofts OS monopoly).
Both products were more-or-less free (as in beer).
Given that Mozilla Corporation has a bigger revenue than Netscape ever had for their client, and that IE has probably never earned a dime for MS directly, I'd say they have some pretty good business-savvy.
That's what they sued for- antitrust violations. And that's what got thrown out.
What's happened now is that the judge decided they could come back and
file a new complaint based on copyright law instead.
That doesn't mean their new counterclaims (Apple sued them) necessarily have any merit.
In fact, I don't really see how this is a 'win' at all - if you file a complaint and it gets tossed out,
you wouldn't normally be barred from trying again, if your amended complaint is substantially different.
Having looked through some as well, I'd take it a step further.
I don't think there's anything secret in there at ALL.
It's just simple, journalistic-style research and analysis, with information entirely from public sources.
I don't think you're going to find any buried scandals here. At all. You'd probably get more from reading a
good selection of newspapers. Journalists tend to have inside sources, after all.
The worst I could imagine from what I've seen is stuff like "Congressman so-and-so said he didn't know about X..
but he should have if he'd read Congress' own report on it!"
Yeah, because Chris Rock has a unique level of insight into the realities of drug development
It's bullshit. Utter bullshit of the kind that can only come from the cynicism and arrogance that follows total cluelessness.
Do you think bio-medical researchers are some kind of wizards? Do you think we know so much that we have the luxury of being able to pick and choose between solutions? Bullshit.
Do we know how the human body works? No, we do not.
Do we know how diseases work? In most cases, no.
If we did - Cancer is a good example of an illness known in great detail - does that mean we know what to do about it? It does not.
If you have an idea of what to do - does that mean it'll work? It doesn't.
If it works in lab, does that mean it'll work in a live human? It does not. (see the first point)
Do you know how many drug concepts (that is, ideas) that make it to becoming a finished, FDA-approved drug? It's not even one in ten thousand. With a situation like that, you do not have the luxury of picking and choosing. You go with whatever idea you have, and you take it as far as it'll go. If you're lucky, it might turn into a drug. And it most certainly won't work exactly as imagined from the start.
Do you know how Viagra, that blockbuster bestseller of 'lifestyle' drugs came about? It was a side effect of a drug originally developed for angina and pulmonary hypertension - a heart drug. The main factor in drug development remains: luck.
But if you still think there are plenty of good, uninvestigated options for AIDS drug development out there, I suggest you go do it yourself. Maybe then you'll gain some real insight into how complicated reality really is.
T cells are produced by the bone marrow. They don't reproduce on their own.
The lifespan of an average T cell is on the order of 10-20 weeks. I believe. Shorter in HIV patients.
Who knows? But not necessarily. After all, you get plenty of foreign T-cells with a blood transfusion. But I don't think anyone is necessarily viewing this treatment as a 'cure' in itself.
That's not known. But they've done it, with positive effects. Note how 'cure' is put in quotes, as it should be.
That is ridiculous. It's neither.
I doubt they view this as a 'cure'. It's research, in both gene therapy and HIV.
If it works, I'd assume the next step would be to try to develop a procedure where they did this to bone marrow cells - the cells that produce T-cells - and thus let the body create its own HIV-resistant T-cells. That might work well enough to be a 'cure' - an HIV patient with leukemia was given an HIV-resistant (CCR5) bone-marrow transplant, and is now effectively 'cured'.
(Though they're careful with the word since HIV virus may still be lurking in the body somewhere)
Well that's effing ridiculous, isn't it? Sony-Ericsson has nothing to do with Sony-BMG.
For all intents and purposes, they're completely separate companies. Just with (partially) the same owner, and the same brand name.
Why would you 'punish' Sony-Ericsson for a business decision they had nothing to do with at all?
In Sweden, and to a similar extent in Finland, there is no privacy within public institutions - such as universities. All public documents (meaning those produced by _any_ public institution) are public record unless specifically ruled otherwise (e.g. national security, relations to a foreign power, etc).
As a Swedish university employee, all my email at my university address is a matter of public record. Not only can my boss read it, any member of the public can come in and ask for a copy, no questions asked. (That said, this has never actually happened to me. But there are legal implications for data retention, etc)
Supposedly this happened in Russia.
Where did he find a raccoon in Russia? Raccoons are indigenous to North America?
A problem has been detected and the Super Bowl has been shut down to protect your audience.
The problem seems to be caused by the following module: WARDROBE.DLL
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NIPPLE_AREA
If this is the first time you have seen this error screen, restart the show.
If this screen appears again, follow these instructions:
Check to make sure this is not a dress rehearsal. If so, give the producers hell and consider firing the artists.
If problems continue, you may be fined by the FCC.
Technical information:
*** STOP: 0x0000B00B
Bzzzt! Wrong attitude. Unless your objective is to get into a pointless argument or pissing contest.
Taking into account the opposing POV is hardly 'bootlicking', it's common sense. It also costs nothing. Arrogance OTOH, has no value. What consolation is it to you that you refused to be a 'bootlicker' in your opinion, if it means you fail to achieve your goals?
You take into account the opposing POV to find the course of action most likely to produce the desired result. If Dell had phrased his question differently, he could have gotten the answer he was looking for. Instead, he got some useless nationalistic banter. If it'd been a business negotiation, Dell would have risked losing out on the deal, and both sides would probably lose.
Diplomacy is not a zero-sum game, and it's not pandering or bootlicking. It's the dignified art of getting stuff done without getting sidetracked into pointless discussions. Saying 'my way or the highway' does not tend to get things done, and does not make someone a good leader, if that's what you think. Because leaders, pretty much by definition, are people who get things done.
Actually Fermi's Linux is their build of Scientific Linux, which is a distro they have in collaboration with CERN and others.
It's originally based off Redhat/Fedora IIRC. Or department uses it.
Not that I agree with him, but I understand Putin's response. Look at it from Putin's POV: Putin is a very strong nationalist. And just about every country, not least Russia, tends to be quite sensitive to American condescension or arrogance, real or perceived. So when Dell says, in what would be an okay-ish remark between Americans, 'how can we help you', it's easily felt as condescending in foreign eyes. Especially Russian ones and especially Putin's. Add to that the cultural factor of Russian temperament and you get what Putin said. Dell probably should have phrased it in a more neutral manner. For instance, he could have been more generalized and simply ask "How can the IT sector in Russia be expanded to better utilize the reserves of talent there?" Or something similar. By his response, you'll find out if there's a role for you or not. So simply by dropping the 'How can we help' bit, you avoid the implication that they _need_ help (even if they do, nobody really wants to be told that by someone else) and the further implication that 'we' are the only ones who can do so.
I'd just like to say that I don't think the TV license should be called a tax; even if it's virtually equivalent to one.
Taxes are collected and administered by the Government. TV license fees are not.
There's a good and important reason for that: To keep public television free of governmental/political interference.
Calling the TV license a tax, as well as referring to the BBC and other (west-)European public TV companies as 'government-owned' and similar gives the inaccurate picture that they're under some kind of direct government control, which they are not.
See, not every country became democratic and fully 'modern' in one swoop like the USA did (well.. not that the USA actually lived up to its ideals initally, but I disgress). Other countries like Sweden and England evolved that way through gradual reform.
In the early 19th century, Sweden had become a democracy, albeit with a monarch. There was freedom of the press insofar that anyone could start a newspaper. But one of the rights the king had retained was the ability to revoke their right to publish. Well, in 1830 the newly created newspaper Aftonbladet ("The evening paper") criticized the king, who then revoked their right to publish.
So, very quickly they resumed publication under the name "Det andra Aftonbladet" ("The second Aftonbladet"), which was also banned fairly soon. So they started the third Aftonbladet, the fourth Aftonbladet, etc. By the time they'd changed their name 26 times, the monarchy gave up. The right to free press has never been seriously contested in Sweden since. (and the privileges of the monarchy were gradually reduced to today's figure-head status - with less rights, I believe, than the Queen of England)
Actually the current Karl XVI Gustav, made a deal with the Government back in the 1970's to never, ever, interfere or even comment on political matters. If he did, the monarchy would risk being abolished completely. -The Social Democrats have ruled Sweden for all but 3 terms in the last century, and their party platform has always included abolishing the monarchy. The monarchy's existence is entirely due to their popularity.
By over seven orders of magnitude?! Yeah or MAYBE all cartographers have been wrong and the USA is actually only 19 inches across.
That's not a definition of a word, that's a standard. A standard which did not exist in 1983.
Well, the meaning of the word 'operating system' is subective of course. But the goal of GNU since the start was always to produce a UNIX-like operating system. And the UNIX operating system was always a lot more than just a kernel, it included tools, a shell, a compiler, etc. From the UNIX perspective, the GNU definition of 'operating system' makes perfect sense. Now if you're coming from the microcomputer persective, where an "operating system" was nothing more than the kernel and possibly a shell, you'd obviously be more inclined to simply label the kernel as an operating system. On the other hand, back when DOS was created, it barely would've been considered an operating system by the folks using UNIX and VMS. Indeed, DOS would barely qualify as an operating system today, especially considering what modern BIOSes can do.
I'm not sure what the article meant by ultra secure "quantum communication". Quantum teleportation *is* a quantum communication *channel* but it's unclear what kind of security they are talking about.
It's the same situation as in 'quantum cryptography'. That is, you can't eavesdrop on it, and while there is information being transferred 'classically' in the open, it gives no help in identifying what's being transferred. I agree it's a bit of a stretch though, because this is a fairly impractical scheme for doing it, if it's your sole purpose.
There's absolutely no superluminal communication going on though.
You're talking about entanglement, not 'teleportation'. This uses entanglement but it is _not_ instantaneous in any way. It requires having each atom emit a photon, allowing for those photons to become entangled, then performing a measurement on them, and "classically" communicating the results of that measurement so that the 'receiving' end knows what phase to put on a microwave pulse that has the end result of recreating the state that's being transferred.
One more question, about measurement. Is there any way to know that measurement has taken place at the other end and your local qubit has collapsed? Or would determining that constitute a measurement in and of itself, meaning if it hadn't been collapsed it then would be so you wouldn't know what happened?
A good question. Now, determining if the thing has collapsed would require a measurement. Any interaction that could be used determine the state is a measurement of the state. But, that doesn't mean it's impossible to tell the difference, in the sense that we still know that's what happens.
Consider the opposite scenario: One system does not or can not 'know' that the other has been measured. That constitutes what they call a 'local hidden variable theory'. In other words, that the state of the system/particle isn't actually undefined and never was - it had a 'hidden' value, one that you just didn't know about until you measured it. That's the only alternate explanation for how the thing can 'know' which value to assume once it's measured (e.g. clockwise polarization for a photon if it was entangled with a photon that'd been measured as counterclockwise-polarized)
I'm almost hesitant to call it an 'alternative' explanation, because it's really the simpler idea. The states aren't genuinely undetermined, it's jus that we don't know what it is. However, it's also the wrong explanation - because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem. A brilliant bit of work that showed you could in fact test and measure whether there were such local hidden variables. There aren't. Quantum weirdness won the battle.
So you can tell that the states are genuinely undefined, and you can tell that this collapse occurs instantly. But you can't tell whether the collapse has actually occurred in any particular case. Now that I think of it, if you could, it would allow for FTL communication since you could communicate by, say, measuring or not measuring one of the particles at some predetermined points in time.