We simply need FOIA limitations pertaining to dash and body cams such that when no arrest is made, no property is seized, no citation is issued, and no force is used, the footage is not made available. The rules need to be very clearly written with zero ambiguity so that in any case whatsoever where anything more than talking comes of a police encounter, the footage is made available.
I don't like the recent fear-mongering discouragement of continued advancements in space travel development because I understand that human progress in that arena demands brave, bold persistence. I also understand that due to potential liabilities, no space tourism company will take the general public to orbit in unproven technology.
But this makes sense anyway.
Those who can current afford space tourism can afford the additional insurance for whatever interim time before their flight. It's not as if they need to keep it forever, but just long enough to buy a decent policy. This will build a bank of capital for the insurance industry, which will lead to returns on investment and interest yield that drives down the premium. That, combined with an expected low incidence of tourist mortality will establish a framework that can be expanded upon later for the broader public, as space travel becomes more accessible.
That foundation is a necessary step because hopefully we will eventually be reading of first policies for space mining and exploration ventures. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't it true that the vast majority of financial systems have no components in this sector and the finance industry has no stake in it? Get the banks and Wall Street involved, and we'll see a gradually accelerating process toward progress.
The other angle on this is that once traditional business system and services are in place for space industry, it will lower barriers to entry (or reentry, pun intended) for new space ventures. It's a lot easier to convince investors to hire the broad interdisciplinary team of highly skilled personnel needed to create vessels when their end product can be insured like any other asset.
Finally, consider safety. The space shuttle was decommissioned at the onset of a NASA-encouraged drive toward safer space travel. Considering that insurance fraud is simple when there are no standards in place for mandatory safety and reliability measures, it will be necessary to develop those. That's a mission accomplished from the perspective of the new approach to space exploration.
I mean, it's a money grab. It's probably a planned money grab. It's opportunistic. It's vulture-like. But you can't deny that it is a step in the right direction if you really stop and think about it.
Amazon advertises HD movie rentals and purchases, and then waits for customers to actually buy or rent the movies before revealing that they can't be played without buying one of a few devices. They claim that the Hollywood studios impose this, but it's awfully convenient that one of the few devices named is Amazon's Kindle.
So, they advertise a product, accept payment for the product in good faith, and then refuse to deliver the product. Customers have to contact support for a refund.
This product will become analogous to the Kindle in this way, but for music and audio books. Since audio recorded from the environment has to send data to Amazon's cloud for the features to work, this also allows Amazon to data farm directly from conversations in our homes. That's just creepy.
I sincerely hope that you're right about that. But either way, there is a big difference between institutionalized bigotry and trash talking. The sad part is that many of the trolls making up half the cyclic war of words are probably SJW bloggers or journalists just stirring the ant hill because the ants give them ad revenue.
Problem is, Wheeler is not qualified to make those distinctions and as a cable industry lobbyist shoehorned into a position he has clear and obvious conflict of interest with, it is not in his interest to seek out qualified assessment.
Sure, there's a right way to do it, and everybody would win. But instead, Obama sold the world out.
Half of the comments on this page are already misogynistic remarks. I'll call the SJWs on their media whoring baloney in a heartbeat, but I think that as general attitudes toward women with STEM prestige go, the SJWs are correct. I don't think that the bias created by their anecdotal experiences of that attitude is a good thing, but it's clear that a random sample from Western civilization has a good chance of producing somebody with a caveman attitude about this kind of thing.
It's strangely obvious that you're right in this case. Code is simply organization of non-ambiguous instructions and information. People organize both differently.
But I think the article is trying to shrewdly rebut the concept of using the right tool for the job. I can not agree with that underlying point because there are technical limitations that determine which tool is best for a task. A hammer isn't used to tighten a bolt, and Python isn't used for low level memory management. There are two studies that would be much more useful.
A task to language map based upon technical limitations would be very useful if it were well-developed. The key would be to begin by avoiding anything contentious. The map should depict the most obvious observations in a manner useful to those who are interested in learning to program. I would wager that there are very few people in the world who could author that map without assistance, straight from their heads.
The second useful study would investigate whether learning to program with a language that organizes information or instructions differently can train the brain to better communicate with people whose thoughts or knowledge are organized in a manner similar to that language. There's a conceptual level to learning that involves modeling the topic so that it can relate to familiar things. What applies to learning applies to communication.
If we don't want people to quit science because they don't think they're smart enough, then why don't we reform our culture so that actually being right is more important than appearing to be right, while convincing people that being smart isn't special instead of convincing them that they're not smart? It's not the parents, teachers, nor curricula. It's the fact that the moment a person opens their mouth, strikes a key, or puts utensil on paper to speak, somebody out there is already primed to have an ego contest with them.
If you do research or develop math or code, then it's almost better to just post your work someplace and invite people to take it than to get massively in debt, engage in a series of ego contests, spend a decade helping professors with their research, work to build a name for yourself, and then finally just contribute whatever little thing you did. If contribution to human knowledge and development didn't require jumping through a quarter of a lifetime of arbitrary hoops then people would stick with it. Those whom elect for an academic life rather than capitalist treadmill want to benefit humanity and get a little recognition, rather than be a tool for somebody else to leverage.
Long story short, just let people flex their smarts and creative muscles, keep what works, and give credit for ideas' origins, and this wouldn't be an issue. Everything about our culture, economy, governance, and institutions of education discourage that. Innovation should be free as expression because that's all it is when you get down to it.
Linux certainly has its own selection of software, and some of it is (in my opinion) far superior to analogs on Windows. On Linux you can install a set of tools in one command line entry and use them in the next. That is simply boss!
But we can't just pretend that there isn't a wealth of software packages people want that run on Windows and not Linux. This is actually an argument as much in favor of Linux as Windows. If MS is so sure their OS is the best, why don't they make DirectX portable? They know they may lose certain markets if they do.
Maybe it's that Windows is made by humans and not omniscient supreme beings, so it can have flaws? I mean, sure, I guess I get your whole conspiracy theorist mentality and it's cool if that's fun for you but the underlying implication is that I'm actually using Windows 8.1 and that speaks louder than my failure to worship the Ballmer.
I appreciate your attempt at help, just like I've appreciated it when people have repeated those exact same steps without reading a post where I said that I've already performed those exact same steps. When I have a technical problem, the first thing I do is apply everything I know of to trace the problem to its source. And then I use Google to find what I don't know of and try that. Then I repeat the process.
I know it may be hard to believe, but maybe, just maybe the same complaints about Windows 8 and 8.1 keep getting posted by people who have already performed the troubleshooting steps because Windows has issues. It's hard to believe, I understand. Anything in the world is possible except that Microsoft is a corporation formed of human employees capable of human mistakes, that releases regular updates thus confirming that those human employees sometimes miss a bug or issue.
Succinctly and accurately put, but we're still waiting for confirmation from Microsoft that the keylogger will be removed from Windows 10 prior to release.
Windows 8.1 sends my every search query to Microsoft if I don't block them by IP at the DNS, router, and hosts file levels. It regularly disables my wireless card so that it can reset it and verify my connection by reestablishing the link with Microsoft's privacy-invading servers. Windows 8.1 has a kind of crash I've never seen in any Windows version until this one: memory management. As in, with Windows 8.1 Microsoft has actually failed to correctly produce a functioning, reliable core operating system component.
I rarely talk bad about Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 because it's nigh on impossible to lament its failures without people popping out of the woodwork to detract from conversation. I bet this post will be marked "troll", but I'm not pretending, I'm not trying to elicit a negative emotional response, I don't want to start an argument, and I'm not just bashing Microsoft. MS has done many great things as well, since Windows 8 was released. Accessibility to assistance in learning Windows programming is better than ever before, as one example, and their support and development communities have grown in quality by leaps and bounds.
Now let's mention the one and only discussion we've seen about Windows 10 having a keylogger embedded in it while overlooking that random forum posters have said that it's because the OS is in beta but Microsoft has never confirmed that the keylogger would be removed.
Windows 7 is still the best operating system for consumers. Linux suffers from inaccessibility to software, though steps are being taken to correct that now. Apple OS represents a culture and not a technical solution. Windows still reigns as king, but Windows 8 and onward thus far remain to potentially dethrone it.
The history of flight itself is a macabre masterpiece of horror. Didn't you know? Before the Wright Brothers' famous flight, people had already died in flight many times. They were just the first to survive it, and if I recall correctly, their legs were broken.
Test pilots were once lauded as the bravest of souls. They climbed into machines never proven in flight to find out the hard way whether engineers overlooked anything or made mistakes on calculations. Every time a new manned flight technology was raced for, parts broke, things went wrong, and often, people died.
Humanity reached its current state of achievement because people have remained brave throughout the long, difficult journey. If we are to advance farther, then we must not allow tragedy to provoke cowardice. It would be an insult to all those whom brought us to this point through sheer tenacity in the face of overwhelming difficulty.
There were two men on that vessel, and the surviving one intends to push forward. Think about that. He survived the failure of an experimental vessel, witnessed his friend and coworker's death, and was injured yet he still maintains resolve. Did he ask anybody to be afraid on his behalf?
Those who say that space tourism is not worth the cost of development are either looking for an excuse to kill it and using this tragedy opportunistically or they're simply ignorant of history. Obviously, this technology will not be available to access by the public until it is developed to the point that its safety is proven. Competitors in the space industries need to maintain their dignity in the face of this event.
They're on Slashdot too. See how that post is modded "troll" even though it's verifiable and factually accurate that the Kochs are bankrolling a run for Mary Landrieu's seat? See, that's really my only problem with them. They are waging a war against honesty.
Because the Copenhagen Interpretation is the generally accepted, empirically supported conceptual introduction while MWT, for example, is widely considered to be one of the more imaginative but fringe ideas. How exactly does one go about testing MWT experimentally? The Copenhagen Interpretation allows it to be impressed upon people that our intuition does not apply at such small scales. It gives people a framework for interesting, strange science they hear about, and does so with the introduction of tools that they likely do not yet use. Finally, it discourages people from forming conclusions that could spread through pop culture as misinformation.
You are right, I think, that there are other approaches better suited for those with an interest. See Specter's post here and my reply. The awesome weirdness of QM builds interest in the public, so the next step is to build a conceptual framework to help people to understand actual physical phenomena. That more approachable framework can then lead into more serious studies for those who are interested.
It's worth mentioning that I love the wilder ideas about QM. MWT in particular is an amazing catalyst of imagination and creativity, from the conceptual level and on. Even its misinterpretations are interesting. But just because an idea is sexy, that doesn't necessarily make it the best.
I haven't worked with the math of PWT myself, but from what I've read it has problems in cases of quantum non-equilibrium. That is, wherever the wave distribution does not describe the probability distribution for particle states, PWT leads to predictions that contradict current theory. I've only heard of that in regard to extreme conditions such as the Big Bang, and I double checked myself to be sure I remember that much correctly.
PWT is beautifully well-suited to serving as a semi-classical model to introduce laypersons and novices to concepts in QM. We usually teach the most conceptually intuitive ideas and then teach the exceptions and extremes where intuitive concepts do not apply, followed by the problems left to solve and competing theories used to study them. QM can be jarring as it is currently taught, and I think that can be corrected. PWT can be used to derive the Schrodinger Equation, which tells me that there's a path from it to the Standard Model. There may be a way around using PDE in introductory courses, and that leaves room for the classic historical approach to follow a conceptual foundation that's usually lacking when students are thrust into cavity problems and square wells.
I think that history shows, the more accessible a field becomes, the more people learn about it and the more people contribute to it. QM already has the cultural popularity to stoke interest, so if that more accessible curriculum can be developed then it seems to be the next natural step.
Particles are waves until they are observed. They only appear to be particles when they are observed at a single place and time.
Think of two ends of a rope being held by different people. One end of the rope can be lifted and lowered to send a soliton - a kind of wave with only one bump - to the other end of the rope. Suppose that you aim to describe the position of the bump.
Observing the entire rope, it's a wave. But if you measure the position of the bump itself then your measurement only has any meaning while the bump is in a single place on the rope. Before that measurement is pinned down to a single moment in time, the bump is the rope; the wave and bump are one.
That's a very simplified illustration, because at the Planck scale there are many more quantities involved in describing a particle (or "bump" if you're looking at a rope soliton). There's force, spin, momentum, the energy state of the particle, its position, mass, charge... And you may need to measure something other than position, perhaps a quantity not as intuitively non-particular.
It's easy to see how the bump on the rope has no definite position until it's measured. At very tiny scales, many of those other quantities are similarly spread among different states. Mass and charge are particular, so those are used to identify some particles. Velocity isn't, so momentum isn't, nor is position. So, Quantum Mechanics tries to describe the bump on the rope without knowing how fast it's going nor which direction it's moving in. When the bump is measured, we find out, but until then we can only say where it is possible that the bump will be and with what probability.
It is true that many people have spent a long time trying to make Quantum Mechanics deterministic, and in some cases there has been limited success (such as in this story). But the particle is ultimately still in a superstate until the wave function collapses due to observation. Usually we call such systems or math "semi-classical", that attempt to bring determinism to Quantum Mechanics. There are many great attempts out there, and all (or nearly all) have their specific applications and usefulness. However, there's a big catch...
The catch is until we can simply observe initial conditions and determine a single end state as the result of all possible processes at the Planck Scale, and the theory describing how to do this is used to make predictions that are then observed, Quantum Mechanics remains stochastic. It is a very tall order to attempt to make all of Quantum Mechanics classical, and though many have tried, most eventually give up and simply accept the strangeness of nature at such small lengths. Nature is under no requirement to conform to our intuition, and if ever that realm of nature can be intuitively described then it will require an historic discovery.
...it will be a single 1 Mb/s connection shared by all of them. As a result, more of them will spend the ten to fifteen bucks for a dialup subscription.
The particle (an electron in their experiment) still collapses to only one of those states. I have an analogy that may help.
Suppose that you have a groundhog to catch, and this groundhog has dug a network of tunnels around your property. Every night, he comes out and eats your veggies, and you know that he will come out of only one of his holes. You know as well that he tends to favor some holes more than others. So, you are advised to place a trap at the most likely hole and keep trying until you catch him.
Then, a scientist from Brown University calls you up, and says, "Wait! All of those holes are important! Place one trap at every hole." That's what you do, and instead of waiting however many nights it could take to catch the groundhog by chance, you catch him on the first night. Now you have a groundhog in one trap, and you have all the other traps marking the holes. That makes it easy to deal with the groundhog while keeping the holes marked for landscapers to come.
So, you can study the one groundhog and you can study all the holes, but the groundhog still only got caught in the one trap.
The electron is still only observed in one state because there's only one electron and the wave function still collapses to that one state upon observation. But every state it might have collapsed to is marked, and those states can be observed and studied even though they don't have electrons.
Slashdot Mirror
We simply need FOIA limitations pertaining to dash and body cams such that when no arrest is made, no property is seized, no citation is issued, and no force is used, the footage is not made available. The rules need to be very clearly written with zero ambiguity so that in any case whatsoever where anything more than talking comes of a police encounter, the footage is made available.
Lady Gaga could write a book about this topic. I wonder if she could write a challenge to the mathematical model too.
I don't like the recent fear-mongering discouragement of continued advancements in space travel development because I understand that human progress in that arena demands brave, bold persistence. I also understand that due to potential liabilities, no space tourism company will take the general public to orbit in unproven technology.
But this makes sense anyway.
Those who can current afford space tourism can afford the additional insurance for whatever interim time before their flight. It's not as if they need to keep it forever, but just long enough to buy a decent policy. This will build a bank of capital for the insurance industry, which will lead to returns on investment and interest yield that drives down the premium. That, combined with an expected low incidence of tourist mortality will establish a framework that can be expanded upon later for the broader public, as space travel becomes more accessible.
That foundation is a necessary step because hopefully we will eventually be reading of first policies for space mining and exploration ventures. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't it true that the vast majority of financial systems have no components in this sector and the finance industry has no stake in it? Get the banks and Wall Street involved, and we'll see a gradually accelerating process toward progress.
The other angle on this is that once traditional business system and services are in place for space industry, it will lower barriers to entry (or reentry, pun intended) for new space ventures. It's a lot easier to convince investors to hire the broad interdisciplinary team of highly skilled personnel needed to create vessels when their end product can be insured like any other asset.
Finally, consider safety. The space shuttle was decommissioned at the onset of a NASA-encouraged drive toward safer space travel. Considering that insurance fraud is simple when there are no standards in place for mandatory safety and reliability measures, it will be necessary to develop those. That's a mission accomplished from the perspective of the new approach to space exploration.
I mean, it's a money grab. It's probably a planned money grab. It's opportunistic. It's vulture-like. But you can't deny that it is a step in the right direction if you really stop and think about it.
I thought software patents are the devil and what we all want is software copyrights. So, what is this really?
Amazon advertises HD movie rentals and purchases, and then waits for customers to actually buy or rent the movies before revealing that they can't be played without buying one of a few devices. They claim that the Hollywood studios impose this, but it's awfully convenient that one of the few devices named is Amazon's Kindle.
So, they advertise a product, accept payment for the product in good faith, and then refuse to deliver the product. Customers have to contact support for a refund.
This product will become analogous to the Kindle in this way, but for music and audio books. Since audio recorded from the environment has to send data to Amazon's cloud for the features to work, this also allows Amazon to data farm directly from conversations in our homes. That's just creepy.
I sincerely hope that you're right about that. But either way, there is a big difference between institutionalized bigotry and trash talking. The sad part is that many of the trolls making up half the cyclic war of words are probably SJW bloggers or journalists just stirring the ant hill because the ants give them ad revenue.
Problem is, Wheeler is not qualified to make those distinctions and as a cable industry lobbyist shoehorned into a position he has clear and obvious conflict of interest with, it is not in his interest to seek out qualified assessment.
Sure, there's a right way to do it, and everybody would win. But instead, Obama sold the world out.
Half of the comments on this page are already misogynistic remarks. I'll call the SJWs on their media whoring baloney in a heartbeat, but I think that as general attitudes toward women with STEM prestige go, the SJWs are correct. I don't think that the bias created by their anecdotal experiences of that attitude is a good thing, but it's clear that a random sample from Western civilization has a good chance of producing somebody with a caveman attitude about this kind of thing.
It's strangely obvious that you're right in this case. Code is simply organization of non-ambiguous instructions and information. People organize both differently.
But I think the article is trying to shrewdly rebut the concept of using the right tool for the job. I can not agree with that underlying point because there are technical limitations that determine which tool is best for a task. A hammer isn't used to tighten a bolt, and Python isn't used for low level memory management. There are two studies that would be much more useful.
A task to language map based upon technical limitations would be very useful if it were well-developed. The key would be to begin by avoiding anything contentious. The map should depict the most obvious observations in a manner useful to those who are interested in learning to program. I would wager that there are very few people in the world who could author that map without assistance, straight from their heads.
The second useful study would investigate whether learning to program with a language that organizes information or instructions differently can train the brain to better communicate with people whose thoughts or knowledge are organized in a manner similar to that language. There's a conceptual level to learning that involves modeling the topic so that it can relate to familiar things. What applies to learning applies to communication.
If we don't want people to quit science because they don't think they're smart enough, then why don't we reform our culture so that actually being right is more important than appearing to be right, while convincing people that being smart isn't special instead of convincing them that they're not smart? It's not the parents, teachers, nor curricula. It's the fact that the moment a person opens their mouth, strikes a key, or puts utensil on paper to speak, somebody out there is already primed to have an ego contest with them.
If you do research or develop math or code, then it's almost better to just post your work someplace and invite people to take it than to get massively in debt, engage in a series of ego contests, spend a decade helping professors with their research, work to build a name for yourself, and then finally just contribute whatever little thing you did. If contribution to human knowledge and development didn't require jumping through a quarter of a lifetime of arbitrary hoops then people would stick with it. Those whom elect for an academic life rather than capitalist treadmill want to benefit humanity and get a little recognition, rather than be a tool for somebody else to leverage.
Long story short, just let people flex their smarts and creative muscles, keep what works, and give credit for ideas' origins, and this wouldn't be an issue. Everything about our culture, economy, governance, and institutions of education discourage that. Innovation should be free as expression because that's all it is when you get down to it.
I'd explain, but for some reason I forgot on the morning of 4 November.
Linux certainly has its own selection of software, and some of it is (in my opinion) far superior to analogs on Windows. On Linux you can install a set of tools in one command line entry and use them in the next. That is simply boss!
But we can't just pretend that there isn't a wealth of software packages people want that run on Windows and not Linux. This is actually an argument as much in favor of Linux as Windows. If MS is so sure their OS is the best, why don't they make DirectX portable? They know they may lose certain markets if they do.
Maybe it's that Windows is made by humans and not omniscient supreme beings, so it can have flaws? I mean, sure, I guess I get your whole conspiracy theorist mentality and it's cool if that's fun for you but the underlying implication is that I'm actually using Windows 8.1 and that speaks louder than my failure to worship the Ballmer.
I appreciate your attempt at help, just like I've appreciated it when people have repeated those exact same steps without reading a post where I said that I've already performed those exact same steps. When I have a technical problem, the first thing I do is apply everything I know of to trace the problem to its source. And then I use Google to find what I don't know of and try that. Then I repeat the process.
I know it may be hard to believe, but maybe, just maybe the same complaints about Windows 8 and 8.1 keep getting posted by people who have already performed the troubleshooting steps because Windows has issues. It's hard to believe, I understand. Anything in the world is possible except that Microsoft is a corporation formed of human employees capable of human mistakes, that releases regular updates thus confirming that those human employees sometimes miss a bug or issue.
Succinctly and accurately put, but we're still waiting for confirmation from Microsoft that the keylogger will be removed from Windows 10 prior to release.
Windows 8.1 sends my every search query to Microsoft if I don't block them by IP at the DNS, router, and hosts file levels. It regularly disables my wireless card so that it can reset it and verify my connection by reestablishing the link with Microsoft's privacy-invading servers. Windows 8.1 has a kind of crash I've never seen in any Windows version until this one: memory management. As in, with Windows 8.1 Microsoft has actually failed to correctly produce a functioning, reliable core operating system component.
I rarely talk bad about Windows 8 or Windows 8.1 because it's nigh on impossible to lament its failures without people popping out of the woodwork to detract from conversation. I bet this post will be marked "troll", but I'm not pretending, I'm not trying to elicit a negative emotional response, I don't want to start an argument, and I'm not just bashing Microsoft. MS has done many great things as well, since Windows 8 was released. Accessibility to assistance in learning Windows programming is better than ever before, as one example, and their support and development communities have grown in quality by leaps and bounds.
Now let's mention the one and only discussion we've seen about Windows 10 having a keylogger embedded in it while overlooking that random forum posters have said that it's because the OS is in beta but Microsoft has never confirmed that the keylogger would be removed.
Windows 7 is still the best operating system for consumers. Linux suffers from inaccessibility to software, though steps are being taken to correct that now. Apple OS represents a culture and not a technical solution. Windows still reigns as king, but Windows 8 and onward thus far remain to potentially dethrone it.
The history of flight itself is a macabre masterpiece of horror. Didn't you know? Before the Wright Brothers' famous flight, people had already died in flight many times. They were just the first to survive it, and if I recall correctly, their legs were broken.
Test pilots were once lauded as the bravest of souls. They climbed into machines never proven in flight to find out the hard way whether engineers overlooked anything or made mistakes on calculations. Every time a new manned flight technology was raced for, parts broke, things went wrong, and often, people died.
Humanity reached its current state of achievement because people have remained brave throughout the long, difficult journey. If we are to advance farther, then we must not allow tragedy to provoke cowardice. It would be an insult to all those whom brought us to this point through sheer tenacity in the face of overwhelming difficulty.
There were two men on that vessel, and the surviving one intends to push forward. Think about that. He survived the failure of an experimental vessel, witnessed his friend and coworker's death, and was injured yet he still maintains resolve. Did he ask anybody to be afraid on his behalf?
Those who say that space tourism is not worth the cost of development are either looking for an excuse to kill it and using this tragedy opportunistically or they're simply ignorant of history. Obviously, this technology will not be available to access by the public until it is developed to the point that its safety is proven. Competitors in the space industries need to maintain their dignity in the face of this event.
They're on Slashdot too. See how that post is modded "troll" even though it's verifiable and factually accurate that the Kochs are bankrolling a run for Mary Landrieu's seat? See, that's really my only problem with them. They are waging a war against honesty.
Yeah, it's their campaign to buy Landrieu's seat for some Kochbots.
Because the Copenhagen Interpretation is the generally accepted, empirically supported conceptual introduction while MWT, for example, is widely considered to be one of the more imaginative but fringe ideas. How exactly does one go about testing MWT experimentally? The Copenhagen Interpretation allows it to be impressed upon people that our intuition does not apply at such small scales. It gives people a framework for interesting, strange science they hear about, and does so with the introduction of tools that they likely do not yet use. Finally, it discourages people from forming conclusions that could spread through pop culture as misinformation.
You are right, I think, that there are other approaches better suited for those with an interest. See Specter's post here and my reply. The awesome weirdness of QM builds interest in the public, so the next step is to build a conceptual framework to help people to understand actual physical phenomena. That more approachable framework can then lead into more serious studies for those who are interested.
It's worth mentioning that I love the wilder ideas about QM. MWT in particular is an amazing catalyst of imagination and creativity, from the conceptual level and on. Even its misinterpretations are interesting. But just because an idea is sexy, that doesn't necessarily make it the best.
I haven't worked with the math of PWT myself, but from what I've read it has problems in cases of quantum non-equilibrium. That is, wherever the wave distribution does not describe the probability distribution for particle states, PWT leads to predictions that contradict current theory. I've only heard of that in regard to extreme conditions such as the Big Bang, and I double checked myself to be sure I remember that much correctly.
PWT is beautifully well-suited to serving as a semi-classical model to introduce laypersons and novices to concepts in QM. We usually teach the most conceptually intuitive ideas and then teach the exceptions and extremes where intuitive concepts do not apply, followed by the problems left to solve and competing theories used to study them. QM can be jarring as it is currently taught, and I think that can be corrected. PWT can be used to derive the Schrodinger Equation, which tells me that there's a path from it to the Standard Model. There may be a way around using PDE in introductory courses, and that leaves room for the classic historical approach to follow a conceptual foundation that's usually lacking when students are thrust into cavity problems and square wells.
I think that history shows, the more accessible a field becomes, the more people learn about it and the more people contribute to it. QM already has the cultural popularity to stoke interest, so if that more accessible curriculum can be developed then it seems to be the next natural step.
Particles are waves until they are observed. They only appear to be particles when they are observed at a single place and time.
Think of two ends of a rope being held by different people. One end of the rope can be lifted and lowered to send a soliton - a kind of wave with only one bump - to the other end of the rope. Suppose that you aim to describe the position of the bump.
Observing the entire rope, it's a wave. But if you measure the position of the bump itself then your measurement only has any meaning while the bump is in a single place on the rope. Before that measurement is pinned down to a single moment in time, the bump is the rope; the wave and bump are one.
That's a very simplified illustration, because at the Planck scale there are many more quantities involved in describing a particle (or "bump" if you're looking at a rope soliton). There's force, spin, momentum, the energy state of the particle, its position, mass, charge... And you may need to measure something other than position, perhaps a quantity not as intuitively non-particular.
It's easy to see how the bump on the rope has no definite position until it's measured. At very tiny scales, many of those other quantities are similarly spread among different states. Mass and charge are particular, so those are used to identify some particles. Velocity isn't, so momentum isn't, nor is position. So, Quantum Mechanics tries to describe the bump on the rope without knowing how fast it's going nor which direction it's moving in. When the bump is measured, we find out, but until then we can only say where it is possible that the bump will be and with what probability.
It is true that many people have spent a long time trying to make Quantum Mechanics deterministic, and in some cases there has been limited success (such as in this story). But the particle is ultimately still in a superstate until the wave function collapses due to observation. Usually we call such systems or math "semi-classical", that attempt to bring determinism to Quantum Mechanics. There are many great attempts out there, and all (or nearly all) have their specific applications and usefulness. However, there's a big catch...
The catch is until we can simply observe initial conditions and determine a single end state as the result of all possible processes at the Planck Scale, and the theory describing how to do this is used to make predictions that are then observed, Quantum Mechanics remains stochastic. It is a very tall order to attempt to make all of Quantum Mechanics classical, and though many have tried, most eventually give up and simply accept the strangeness of nature at such small lengths. Nature is under no requirement to conform to our intuition, and if ever that realm of nature can be intuitively described then it will require an historic discovery.
...it will be a single 1 Mb/s connection shared by all of them. As a result, more of them will spend the ten to fifteen bucks for a dialup subscription.
The particle (an electron in their experiment) still collapses to only one of those states. I have an analogy that may help.
Suppose that you have a groundhog to catch, and this groundhog has dug a network of tunnels around your property. Every night, he comes out and eats your veggies, and you know that he will come out of only one of his holes. You know as well that he tends to favor some holes more than others. So, you are advised to place a trap at the most likely hole and keep trying until you catch him.
Then, a scientist from Brown University calls you up, and says, "Wait! All of those holes are important! Place one trap at every hole." That's what you do, and instead of waiting however many nights it could take to catch the groundhog by chance, you catch him on the first night. Now you have a groundhog in one trap, and you have all the other traps marking the holes. That makes it easy to deal with the groundhog while keeping the holes marked for landscapers to come.
So, you can study the one groundhog and you can study all the holes, but the groundhog still only got caught in the one trap.
The electron is still only observed in one state because there's only one electron and the wave function still collapses to that one state upon observation. But every state it might have collapsed to is marked, and those states can be observed and studied even though they don't have electrons.