What do you expect companies to do? Not try to maximize the money they're getting for you?
In reality, if you were to cap the price difference at $10, then i5 prices would move up as well as i7 prices move down. Because even with artificial restrictions on artificial market segmentation, you try to maximize profits, not necessarily minimize consumer prices.
Where are you getting this notion for what things "should" cost? What economic model are you using? In a free market, there's no such thing as what something "should" cost you, the consumer. Everything is worth what its buyer will pay for it, and all that. You appear to be advocating some sort of command economy where everything must cost the least amount you can possibly charge while still turning a profit, which is only the case in an idealized free market after an infinite amount of time with omniscient consumers. But even that doesn't make your statements follow from the premises.
Let's have a thought experiment:
Widgets are a strict superset of gadgets. Widgets can be converted to gadgets for free, but gadgets cannot be converted to widgets.
You can produce either widgets OR gadgets for the following costs (it's no cheaper to produce a gadget):
Fixed costs = $1000 Variable costs = $5 / widget
You can produce 200 widgets, so obviously it takes $10 a widget to recoup your costs. But only 150 people need or want widgets and they only want one widget apiece; while 50 people are willing to buy gadgets but not at $10. So it's unprofitable to ever make widgets or gadgets, and none ever get sold. You make no profit or loss because you don't produce widgets, and nobody has widgets or gadgets even though they want them.
But 100 of those 150 would even be willing to pay $20 for a widget, and the remaining 50 would settle for a gadget that was less than $10. So you sell 100 widgets for $20 apiece, and you sell the 100 widgets as gadgets for $6. Now you're making a net profit of $100 on your $2000 investment, instead of going out of business, and 100 people have widget, and 100 people have gadgets. Everybody involved is much happier with this situation.
But then you come around and say that this proves that widgets "should" cost $6. Now you're losing even more money than before, and if any widget is defective and has to be a gadget, you now likely have a market shortage because the 100 people who are after gadgets will buy widgets at the same price, and then 100 that really wanted widgets (so much so that they would pay $20 for them) can't because only gadgets are left.
What do we learn from this thought experiment?
We learn that it is not necessarily the case that market segmentation makes things worse for *anyone*, let along making it worse for *everyone*. That doesn't mean it's always good, but there's no in-principle reason why it's bad in a market economy. It really doesn't make a difference whether Intel is a poor or profitable company. It doesn't even make a difference whether the i7 is overpriced, although it really isn't overpriced in the common sense of the word unless there's a market glut of them.
There's no reason they have to be created by an algorithm. They could just take line-in noise from a lava lamp or gamma ray readings from a nearby coal mine.
Anyway, reverse-engineering an algorithm from knowledge of a limited number of unlock codes in an unknown sequence and with holes of unknown size in the sequence, is pretty ridiculously difficult in the first place.
So Intel loses $50 on that guy. Big deal. Unless that guy is going to do that for a statistically significant portion of Intel's customer base, for less than $50, then it's basically irrelevant. Intel probably loses more money to errant sneezes.
Intel knows precisely how fast their CPU is, especially when still locked. They can make their code almost arbitrarily long. They could easily stamp a code that would take more than the lifetime of the universe to crack with that CPU, or even crank it down to something like 20 years mean so they won't give a shit anymore that it's cracked. Or they could even just make the machine such that it ceases to function after 100000 failed tries: some high enough number that it basically guarantees you were trying to brute-force it.
This is all true, the problem is that the GGGP said sizeof(bool) > 1 which is false.
What is true is that:
struct nobool {
int a; };
struct hasbool {
int a;
bool b; };
struct hastwobools {
int a;
bool b;
bool c; };
sizeof(hasbool) - sizeof(nobool) > 1. So that is fun. But the GGGP misses that sizeof(hastwobools) - sizeof(hasbool) = 0, generally speaking. Thus, that's not why bool[100000] is a bad idea, since it works out the same as char[100000]. Though it's still probably a bad idea: how often is a 100kB bool array a good idea, especially on the stack as is implied above?
(yes, I know structs can have different alignment rules than stack frame alignment rules, but it seems like the easiest way to make the point).
The unit test doesn't have to exploit. It just has to cause a crash if the root cause bug still exists. The maintenance on this test shouldn't be so bad; the test would probably be much simpler than the exploit and likely never really needed any maintenance to speak of.
And yes, I do expect old security vulnerability test units to be maintained. That's what is done in the proprietary world and in some other big FOSS projects, and until this discussion I simply assumed it was happening in the Linux kernel. I get that total test-driven-development has a scalability problem once you get to something of this size, but elevation of privileges exploits are a narrow enough and important enough subset that they should have tests. So I would second the recommendation that, going forward, that all new Linux security fixes be coupled with a simple unit test that exposes the issue, and that is run before future kernel point releases. Maybe not necessarily on the same day, but if a security patch is submitted there should also be a bug of highest priority to write a matching test, and if it isn't fixed within a relatively short period there should be a good justification (eg. "issue requires 47 days to reproduce -- unit testing is impractical").
For example I can walk up to a KKK guy and say, "You racist bastard," which is probably illegal in Canada [...]
It's not even close to illegal in Canada and the word 'probably' in there reveals that you're talking about something completely different from what the GP is talking about. It's a poor slippery slope argument that starts from the bottom of the slope.
Attempting to mince words about which country is a "tyranny by majority" by Republican Democracy vs. Constitutional Monarchy with Parliamentary Democracy is vastly oversimplified. The fact is, individual rights are enumerated by both countries' central law systems, and calling the USA a Republic doesn't have a lot to do with it. They're both mixed-proportional/geographical representational systems. The US tends toward a two-party system moreso than Canada, which is a tyranny in and of itself. In Canada, some of Jack Chick's works can't be shown because they incite violence so they pass the "fire in the theatre" test from the Canadian perspective, but is always a tricky path to negotiate.
The priorities of your individual rights are a little different, though. The right to privacy is held much more centrally in Canada -- "Life, Liberty, and Security of Person". Right to bear arms is more of an American thing. A lot of Canadian laws are very expansive and have a clause that say (in legalese) "obviously this law doesn't apply at stupid extremes", whereas a lot of American laws are prescriptive and try to scope themselves down to avoid covering stupid extremes in the first place, instead leaving loopholes -- it's arguable which approach is better and really it usually depends on context.
If you look one chart down, the current rate of sales shows the 360 outselling the Wii worldwide and in each sub-market except in Japan. The question is, which is more relevant to the issue of phones, the throughout-history historical worldwide sales chart where Wii outsells the Xbox by ~5:3, or the current chart where the Xbox outsells the Wii by a marginal amount (about 10:9).
I would content that neither are particularly relevant since the markets (and market distortions) are vastly different.
Either way, cars are getting stolen, and that's very bad.
Mapping the analogy back, either way, Canonical is contributing, and that's very good.
Also, that presumes that Canonical is as good at stealing cars from people who have only one car. And anyway, it's more like Canonical stealing the hood ornament from the guy with one car's car, vs. stealing a car from the guy with ten cars.
And what's to stop him from landing his plane anywhere he wants, buying weapons, flying to a public airport and jumping out to supply everyone in the terminal with weapons?
I don't know this airport. To disembarking passengers enter the same secure area as embarking passengers at this airport?
He showed a price drop as well as a speed increase in his anecdote. It's more like getting a 50 pack of DVD-rs for $20 vs. a 10 pack years ago for $30.
That often works great and is of course what you want to do wherever you can, but sometimes you have to deal with events that have nonlinear responses to their inputs. In certain areas of physics too you're likely to have to deal with discrete math in bulk quantities that you could calculate by hand, but it was stupid to do so. Besides, simple $10 calculators are not, realistically, a big problem for post-secondary education.
You don't know sadism until you're given a structure for static analysis, asked to calculate the stress on a beam, and then find out the answer is 0 because another beam exceeds its load-bearing threshold so the structure fails and collapses, and the real question is whether you'd notice that (I did).
By the way, you said a frictionless surface, but I doubt the air is frictionless. You don't have to throw a shoe or blow air from your lungs while twisting your neck, or anything; you can just wait until a breeze blows you to the nearest shore:).
Look, I don't actually have a big stake in this particular bug. It's annoying, and it explains an annoyance I have with Firefox, but it's not a huge deal to me; and I understand that when engineering a product, there are tradeoffs. But your attitude is a fucking prize.
If this bug is important to people, then the solution is to use any of the other browsers, which don't have this problem. It isn't "use my goddamn product and fix it yourself or pay for somebody to fix it, you whiny fuck". Ceteris paribus, I'll also choose the car tires that don't explode unless you patch them up, the TV that doesn't have burn-in problems unless you perform some ritual for the first 50 hours of use*, the digital format that works with my devices without transcoding, and the new car that does not immediately need to be taken to the repairman.
*I'm aware that plasma screens are better now and they have some other advantages to competing technologies; that's why I specify "ceteris paribus".
It would also be faster if you go to Options and disable loading of images and Javascript. Why don't you go and do that?
Because then I don't get images and javascript. I know you knew that, but I don't understand what point you were making. What am I giving up by turning on GPU acceleration? I suppose there's developer time that goes into it that isn't being spent somewhere else, but you spend developer time where it's useful, and this is useful.
I'm skeptical of your claim that by the time it works right the CPU will work faster, given that we have betas now from several vendors that show massive performance increases. And the difference between GPU and CPU hardware isn't simply a matter of degree to be overcome by 1-2 years of work. And I really doubt that many people will have 12 core processors in 2 years. The average age of a computer is more than three years. Not many people have dodecacore processors that are a year old today.
"(it isn't going to cost more in this day and age to protect 4 rich people as it does 1 hobo for foreign invasion)"
Four rich people have more to lose than one hobo. Obviously, they have four lives rather than just one. But they also have a lot more property. Why shouldn't their premiums be higher for a much higher benefit?
Not necessarily. It has to contain a finite amount of matter, and the geometry of the Universe has to satisfy a bunch of mathematical properties that I don't care to look up at the moment:), but to give an example of what I'm thinking of, imagine a one dimensional universe with a finite amount of matter evenly distributed throughout, where travelling in either direction eventually leads you back to where you started (it "loops back" on itself).
Being an atheist who argues on forums who argues that it is immoral and/or illogical to believe in god and does this, that, and the other thing (fill it in as you will): religion.
No more and no less than we have a responsibility to the unvaccinated who get sick with diseases that could have been vaccinated against.
Which, I actually think we as a society do have some responsibility either way to try to help the sick, but I know that's not a particularly universal view around here.
If the adverse reactions are so numerous and costly as to make vaccination unprofitable we should consider withdrawing approval for it's use
We need to weigh the suffering of one choice against the suffering of another. Attaching monetary fees to one and not to the other, which is not inherent in the cost, is arbitrarily shifting the balance. Either you'll get "lucky" and it won't matter, or you are creating greater suffering.
If that were so, youtube wouldn't have pre-roll ads on some of their content. Post-roll, sure, and inline, and banner, and so on and so forth; but the pre-roll ones are very specifically placed between you and your distraction.
Google makes a product for people. The way people are isn't Google's fault, but the way Google caters to those people is its fault or its credit.
I don't have a problem with Google doodles. I generally like them, or sometimes I just don't care. The one exception was the Pacman one, which was bloody obnoxious -- we were all glad when the era of embedded auto-playing midi files on every website ended. Plus the problems with plugins (one firefox plugin in particular was commonly installed) autoplaying the music nonstop was entirely predictable. Yes, 3rd party plugins shouldn't be loading the Google main page invisibly in the background, but they do and it's not a big surprise to anybody. They seemed to turn off the default music autoplay that afternoon, but that morning was an aggravating morning, and I got calls from a lot of relatives about how they thought they had a virus since their computer kept playing pacman music.
I don't know where the fuck you're getting this MBA, NASA, and Glenn Beck bullshit from. Try being coherent?
You are reducing cgenman's repeated and coherent explanations to a soundbite that confirms your worldview: "Two Minutes Hate". Yet your position seems to be that reducing arguments to a soundbite is a bad argument.
Please be consistent. Or explain how your seemingly-hypocritical position here is consistent.
There's plenty of other reasonable conclusions. NATO forces could do it, or just douchebags on the Internet. Right now you're smearing the CIA, even if your smears are totally correct, but nobody's accusing you of being in the Restored KGB or anything.
What you said is only relevant if you define how fast something falls in terms of the acceleration of the object. I assert that the most intuitive definition of how "fast" something falls is the amount of time between dropping an object with 0 momentum relative to the Earth's surface, at the exact same height, and it striking the surface, regardless of the object's acceleration.
Ignoring quantum mechanics (an article has been pasted here many times), the acceleration *of the dropped object* is dependent on the Earth's mass and not on the object's mass.
But at the same time, the acceleration of the Earth toward the dropped object is dependent on the dropped object's mass, and not the Earth's mass.
Thus, despite identical acceleration, the heavier object strikes first and therefore falls faster. This is imperceptible between a feather and a hammer from a 1.5 metres on the moon. It would be more perceptible if you dropped a feather and a planet on the moon from half the distance between the earth and the moon (and for extra perceptive clarity, drop the feather from the opposite side of the moon).
Word of advice: don't ever be insufferable about physics. It makes you look like a moron when, inevitably, you get something wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
That $12 difference? It's not substantive.
I do not believe for one second that sureshot007 was complaining about losing $5 per year on his $7 per year raise.
What do you expect companies to do? Not try to maximize the money they're getting for you?
In reality, if you were to cap the price difference at $10, then i5 prices would move up as well as i7 prices move down. Because even with artificial restrictions on artificial market segmentation, you try to maximize profits, not necessarily minimize consumer prices.
Where are you getting this notion for what things "should" cost? What economic model are you using? In a free market, there's no such thing as what something "should" cost you, the consumer. Everything is worth what its buyer will pay for it, and all that. You appear to be advocating some sort of command economy where everything must cost the least amount you can possibly charge while still turning a profit, which is only the case in an idealized free market after an infinite amount of time with omniscient consumers. But even that doesn't make your statements follow from the premises.
Let's have a thought experiment:
Widgets are a strict superset of gadgets. Widgets can be converted to gadgets for free, but gadgets cannot be converted to widgets.
You can produce either widgets OR gadgets for the following costs (it's no cheaper to produce a gadget):
Fixed costs = $1000
Variable costs = $5 / widget
You can produce 200 widgets, so obviously it takes $10 a widget to recoup your costs. But only 150 people need or want widgets and they only want one widget apiece; while 50 people are willing to buy gadgets but not at $10. So it's unprofitable to ever make widgets or gadgets, and none ever get sold. You make no profit or loss because you don't produce widgets, and nobody has widgets or gadgets even though they want them.
But 100 of those 150 would even be willing to pay $20 for a widget, and the remaining 50 would settle for a gadget that was less than $10. So you sell 100 widgets for $20 apiece, and you sell the 100 widgets as gadgets for $6. Now you're making a net profit of $100 on your $2000 investment, instead of going out of business, and 100 people have widget, and 100 people have gadgets. Everybody involved is much happier with this situation.
But then you come around and say that this proves that widgets "should" cost $6. Now you're losing even more money than before, and if any widget is defective and has to be a gadget, you now likely have a market shortage because the 100 people who are after gadgets will buy widgets at the same price, and then 100 that really wanted widgets (so much so that they would pay $20 for them) can't because only gadgets are left.
What do we learn from this thought experiment?
We learn that it is not necessarily the case that market segmentation makes things worse for *anyone*, let along making it worse for *everyone*. That doesn't mean it's always good, but there's no in-principle reason why it's bad in a market economy. It really doesn't make a difference whether Intel is a poor or profitable company. It doesn't even make a difference whether the i7 is overpriced, although it really isn't overpriced in the common sense of the word unless there's a market glut of them.
There's no reason they have to be created by an algorithm. They could just take line-in noise from a lava lamp or gamma ray readings from a nearby coal mine.
Anyway, reverse-engineering an algorithm from knowledge of a limited number of unlock codes in an unknown sequence and with holes of unknown size in the sequence, is pretty ridiculously difficult in the first place.
So Intel loses $50 on that guy. Big deal. Unless that guy is going to do that for a statistically significant portion of Intel's customer base, for less than $50, then it's basically irrelevant. Intel probably loses more money to errant sneezes.
Intel knows precisely how fast their CPU is, especially when still locked. They can make their code almost arbitrarily long. They could easily stamp a code that would take more than the lifetime of the universe to crack with that CPU, or even crank it down to something like 20 years mean so they won't give a shit anymore that it's cracked. Or they could even just make the machine such that it ceases to function after 100000 failed tries: some high enough number that it basically guarantees you were trying to brute-force it.
This is all true, the problem is that the GGGP said sizeof(bool) > 1 which is false.
What is true is that:
struct nobool
{
int a;
};
struct hasbool
{
int a;
bool b;
};
struct hastwobools
{
int a;
bool b;
bool c;
};
sizeof(hasbool) - sizeof(nobool) > 1. So that is fun. But the GGGP misses that sizeof(hastwobools) - sizeof(hasbool) = 0, generally speaking. Thus, that's not why bool[100000] is a bad idea, since it works out the same as char[100000]. Though it's still probably a bad idea: how often is a 100kB bool array a good idea, especially on the stack as is implied above?
(yes, I know structs can have different alignment rules than stack frame alignment rules, but it seems like the easiest way to make the point).
The unit test doesn't have to exploit. It just has to cause a crash if the root cause bug still exists. The maintenance on this test shouldn't be so bad; the test would probably be much simpler than the exploit and likely never really needed any maintenance to speak of.
And yes, I do expect old security vulnerability test units to be maintained. That's what is done in the proprietary world and in some other big FOSS projects, and until this discussion I simply assumed it was happening in the Linux kernel. I get that total test-driven-development has a scalability problem once you get to something of this size, but elevation of privileges exploits are a narrow enough and important enough subset that they should have tests. So I would second the recommendation that, going forward, that all new Linux security fixes be coupled with a simple unit test that exposes the issue, and that is run before future kernel point releases. Maybe not necessarily on the same day, but if a security patch is submitted there should also be a bug of highest priority to write a matching test, and if it isn't fixed within a relatively short period there should be a good justification (eg. "issue requires 47 days to reproduce -- unit testing is impractical").
For example I can walk up to a KKK guy and say, "You racist bastard," which is probably illegal in Canada [...]
It's not even close to illegal in Canada and the word 'probably' in there reveals that you're talking about something completely different from what the GP is talking about. It's a poor slippery slope argument that starts from the bottom of the slope.
Attempting to mince words about which country is a "tyranny by majority" by Republican Democracy vs. Constitutional Monarchy with Parliamentary Democracy is vastly oversimplified. The fact is, individual rights are enumerated by both countries' central law systems, and calling the USA a Republic doesn't have a lot to do with it. They're both mixed-proportional/geographical representational systems. The US tends toward a two-party system moreso than Canada, which is a tyranny in and of itself. In Canada, some of Jack Chick's works can't be shown because they incite violence so they pass the "fire in the theatre" test from the Canadian perspective, but is always a tricky path to negotiate.
The priorities of your individual rights are a little different, though. The right to privacy is held much more centrally in Canada -- "Life, Liberty, and Security of Person". Right to bear arms is more of an American thing. A lot of Canadian laws are very expansive and have a clause that say (in legalese) "obviously this law doesn't apply at stupid extremes", whereas a lot of American laws are prescriptive and try to scope themselves down to avoid covering stupid extremes in the first place, instead leaving loopholes -- it's arguable which approach is better and really it usually depends on context.
If you look one chart down, the current rate of sales shows the 360 outselling the Wii worldwide and in each sub-market except in Japan. The question is, which is more relevant to the issue of phones, the throughout-history historical worldwide sales chart where Wii outsells the Xbox by ~5:3, or the current chart where the Xbox outsells the Wii by a marginal amount (about 10:9).
I would content that neither are particularly relevant since the markets (and market distortions) are vastly different.
Either way, cars are getting stolen, and that's very bad.
Mapping the analogy back, either way, Canonical is contributing, and that's very good.
Also, that presumes that Canonical is as good at stealing cars from people who have only one car. And anyway, it's more like Canonical stealing the hood ornament from the guy with one car's car, vs. stealing a car from the guy with ten cars.
And what's to stop him from landing his plane anywhere he wants, buying weapons, flying to a public airport and jumping out to supply everyone in the terminal with weapons?
I don't know this airport. To disembarking passengers enter the same secure area as embarking passengers at this airport?
He showed a price drop as well as a speed increase in his anecdote. It's more like getting a 50 pack of DVD-rs for $20 vs. a 10 pack years ago for $30.
That often works great and is of course what you want to do wherever you can, but sometimes you have to deal with events that have nonlinear responses to their inputs. In certain areas of physics too you're likely to have to deal with discrete math in bulk quantities that you could calculate by hand, but it was stupid to do so. Besides, simple $10 calculators are not, realistically, a big problem for post-secondary education.
You don't know sadism until you're given a structure for static analysis, asked to calculate the stress on a beam, and then find out the answer is 0 because another beam exceeds its load-bearing threshold so the structure fails and collapses, and the real question is whether you'd notice that (I did).
By the way, you said a frictionless surface, but I doubt the air is frictionless. You don't have to throw a shoe or blow air from your lungs while twisting your neck, or anything; you can just wait until a breeze blows you to the nearest shore :).
No.
Look, I don't actually have a big stake in this particular bug. It's annoying, and it explains an annoyance I have with Firefox, but it's not a huge deal to me; and I understand that when engineering a product, there are tradeoffs. But your attitude is a fucking prize.
If this bug is important to people, then the solution is to use any of the other browsers, which don't have this problem. It isn't "use my goddamn product and fix it yourself or pay for somebody to fix it, you whiny fuck". Ceteris paribus, I'll also choose the car tires that don't explode unless you patch them up, the TV that doesn't have burn-in problems unless you perform some ritual for the first 50 hours of use*, the digital format that works with my devices without transcoding, and the new car that does not immediately need to be taken to the repairman.
*I'm aware that plasma screens are better now and they have some other advantages to competing technologies; that's why I specify "ceteris paribus".
It would also be faster if you go to Options and disable loading of images and Javascript. Why don't you go and do that?
Because then I don't get images and javascript. I know you knew that, but I don't understand what point you were making. What am I giving up by turning on GPU acceleration? I suppose there's developer time that goes into it that isn't being spent somewhere else, but you spend developer time where it's useful, and this is useful.
I'm skeptical of your claim that by the time it works right the CPU will work faster, given that we have betas now from several vendors that show massive performance increases. And the difference between GPU and CPU hardware isn't simply a matter of degree to be overcome by 1-2 years of work. And I really doubt that many people will have 12 core processors in 2 years. The average age of a computer is more than three years. Not many people have dodecacore processors that are a year old today.
"(it isn't going to cost more in this day and age to protect 4 rich people as it does 1 hobo for foreign invasion)"
Four rich people have more to lose than one hobo. Obviously, they have four lives rather than just one. But they also have a lot more property. Why shouldn't their premiums be higher for a much higher benefit?
Not necessarily. It has to contain a finite amount of matter, and the geometry of the Universe has to satisfy a bunch of mathematical properties that I don't care to look up at the moment :), but to give an example of what I'm thinking of, imagine a one dimensional universe with a finite amount of matter evenly distributed throughout, where travelling in either direction eventually leads you back to where you started (it "loops back" on itself).
Is this an accurate description of your opinion?
Atheism: not a religion.
Being an atheist who argues on forums who argues that it is immoral and/or illogical to believe in god and does this, that, and the other thing (fill it in as you will): religion.
No more and no less than we have a responsibility to the unvaccinated who get sick with diseases that could have been vaccinated against.
Which, I actually think we as a society do have some responsibility either way to try to help the sick, but I know that's not a particularly universal view around here.
If the adverse reactions are so numerous and costly as to make vaccination unprofitable we should consider withdrawing approval for it's use
We need to weigh the suffering of one choice against the suffering of another. Attaching monetary fees to one and not to the other, which is not inherent in the cost, is arbitrarily shifting the balance. Either you'll get "lucky" and it won't matter, or you are creating greater suffering.
If that were so, youtube wouldn't have pre-roll ads on some of their content. Post-roll, sure, and inline, and banner, and so on and so forth; but the pre-roll ones are very specifically placed between you and your distraction.
I don't think you know how products work.
Google makes a product for people. The way people are isn't Google's fault, but the way Google caters to those people is its fault or its credit.
I don't have a problem with Google doodles. I generally like them, or sometimes I just don't care. The one exception was the Pacman one, which was bloody obnoxious -- we were all glad when the era of embedded auto-playing midi files on every website ended. Plus the problems with plugins (one firefox plugin in particular was commonly installed) autoplaying the music nonstop was entirely predictable. Yes, 3rd party plugins shouldn't be loading the Google main page invisibly in the background, but they do and it's not a big surprise to anybody. They seemed to turn off the default music autoplay that afternoon, but that morning was an aggravating morning, and I got calls from a lot of relatives about how they thought they had a virus since their computer kept playing pacman music.
I don't know where the fuck you're getting this MBA, NASA, and Glenn Beck bullshit from. Try being coherent?
You are reducing cgenman's repeated and coherent explanations to a soundbite that confirms your worldview: "Two Minutes Hate". Yet your position seems to be that reducing arguments to a soundbite is a bad argument.
Please be consistent. Or explain how your seemingly-hypocritical position here is consistent.
There's plenty of other reasonable conclusions. NATO forces could do it, or just douchebags on the Internet. Right now you're smearing the CIA, even if your smears are totally correct, but nobody's accusing you of being in the Restored KGB or anything.
What you said is only relevant if you define how fast something falls in terms of the acceleration of the object. I assert that the most intuitive definition of how "fast" something falls is the amount of time between dropping an object with 0 momentum relative to the Earth's surface, at the exact same height, and it striking the surface, regardless of the object's acceleration.
Ignoring quantum mechanics (an article has been pasted here many times), the acceleration *of the dropped object* is dependent on the Earth's mass and not on the object's mass.
But at the same time, the acceleration of the Earth toward the dropped object is dependent on the dropped object's mass, and not the Earth's mass.
Thus, despite identical acceleration, the heavier object strikes first and therefore falls faster. This is imperceptible between a feather and a hammer from a 1.5 metres on the moon. It would be more perceptible if you dropped a feather and a planet on the moon from half the distance between the earth and the moon (and for extra perceptive clarity, drop the feather from the opposite side of the moon).
Word of advice: don't ever be insufferable about physics. It makes you look like a moron when, inevitably, you get something wrong.