physicists measure speed of Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’: At least 10k x speed of light
Chinese physicists measure speed of Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a distance’: At least 10,000 times faster than light
A team of Chinese physicists have clocked the speed of spooky action at a distance — the seemingly instantaneous interaction between entangled quantum particles — at more than four orders of magnitude faster than light. Their equipment and methodology doesn’t allow for an exact speed, but four orders of magnitude puts the figure at around 3 trillion meters per second.
Spooky action at a distance was a term coined by Einstein to describe how entangled quantum particles seem to interact with each other instantaneously, over any distance, breaking the speed of light and thus relativity. As of our current understanding of quantum mechanics, though, it is impossible to send data using quantum entanglement, preserving the theory of relativity. A lot of work is being done in this area, though, and some physicists believe that faster-than-light communication might be possible with some clever manipulation of entangled particles.
Now, thanks to these Chinese physicists — the same ones who broke the quantum teleportation distance record last year — we know that spooky action at a distance has a lower bound of four orders of magnitude faster than light, or around 3 trillion meters per second. We say “at least,” because the physicists do not rule out that spooky action is actually instantaneous — but their testing equipment and methodology simply doesn’t allow them to get any more accurate.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/150207-chinese-physicists-measure-speed-of-einsteins-spooky-action-at-a-distance-at-least-10000-times-faster-than-light
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You're not the boss of me. 
And that consequence, red or blue, is entirely random, not because we can't see some hidden state, but because that state simply does not exist until the state is determined. When one particle or the other is forced to declare a state, and the other takes on the opposite state, these forced declarations are entirely random in the same way that the disintegration of the nucleus of a radioactive element is random, or more basically, how the behavior of photons or electrons in a a single and double slit experiment is inexplicable using classical mechanics.
If you are a photon, electron, or some other elementary particle you are neither heads or tails until somebody asks. When they do ask you take a coin out of your pocket, flip it fairly, and take on the state of whatever the coin shows, heads or tails. Meanwhile, your partner, who could be halfway across the galaxy, instantaneously takes on the other state. Since this determined state is entirely random from the perspective of everyone, no information can be transmitted by this means.
Wikipedia's got this on the single/ double slit experiment and the same sort of explanation applies to quantum entanglement:
The observer can decide whether or not to put detectors into the interfering path. That way, by deciding whether or not to determine the path through the two-slit experiment, s/he can decide which property can become reality. If s/he chooses not to put the detectors there, then the interference pattern will become reality; if s/he does put the detectors there, then the beam path will become reality. Yet, most importantly, the observer has no influence on the specific element of the world that becomes reality. Specifically, if s/he chooses to determine the path, then s/he has no influence whatsoever over which of the two paths, the left one or the right one, nature will tell h/er/im is the one in which the particle is found. Likewise, if s/he chooses to observe the interference pattern, then s/he has no influence whatsoever over where in the observation plane he/she will observe a specific particle. Both outcomes are completely random.
Once you've played around a bit with the particle/wave nature of electrons and photons, the weirdness of quantum mechanics isn't any more explicable, but you do realize quantum mechanics is weird and unrelated to everyday experience.
I can spend hours playing with laser pointers. If you shine a laser through something like a window screen or a kitchen strainer onto a white wall you get a pattern like this:
You think you can explain it, but then if you move the screen or the laser, it's
because the shadows and reflections you thought you were seeing move the wrong way.
This sort of quantum mechanics is real in a practical sense, engineers and scientists have to deal with it in the chips and hard drives of the computers we are using, but nothing is going to make it not weird, because weird quantum things simply don't happen on the scale of our ordinary lives. We see the cats without a grin, but not the grins without a cat.
The entanglement of two particles is answered with "Red or Blue" in your analogy. Other experiments at this scale do not have simple "Red or Blue" answers. For example, the behavior of individual electrons passing through a double slit.
Here's how electrons sort out if they are launched one at a time through a double slit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
You end up with the same interference pattern you get with light.
It's a bit much to ask that all these electrons are impressed with some invisible state that predetermines their behavior if an experimenter should happen to place a double slit in their path. The more elegant explanation is that each electron is interfering with itself as it passes through both slits as a wave.
In a similar fashion it is the more elegant to say the state of each particle in an entangled pair is undetermined. Occam's razor isn't always the best tool to use, but in this case should you decide this state is already determined but hidden at the instant of entanglement you end up with an explanation of the cosmos where "it's turtles all the way down" or my favorite, that we live in a one electron universe, which makes it a very, very busy electron.
People are intuitively comfortable with light as waves, which is how we ended up with ether theory and such, but we are less comfortable with massive "particles" such as electrons, entire buckyball molecules, or even "solid" beings such as ourselves as waves. We don't want to see ourselves as tiny ripples of energy on the surface of an unimaginably large and highly energetic universe.
I'm a fan of John Cramer's work because it makes me think. Unlike myself, who can only spin analogies, he can do the math. If we are lucky his lines of experimentation will break some of the commonly accepted theories of everything.
http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/NLS/NL_signal.htm
Personally I don't think time travel or faster than light travel is possible simply because time itself does not exist except as an artifact of our own perception and physical state. We can say to ourselves, "Look, I won't sleep there because a bear might eat me" but we never say, "Look, I won't sleep there because a bear ate me." But it's possible those two statements have the same meaning. It seems likely to me the past isn't pinned down in place any more than the future is. If the past is as fluid as the future appears to be, how would we know? We only exist in the present.
