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User: PvtVoid

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Comments · 1,142

  1. Dear Intel on Intel Drops Gamasutra Sponsorship Over Controversial Editorials · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Read this article five times, and then promptly fire the brain-dead fuckwit who decided to pull your ads because of complaints from a mob of psychos.

    "These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers -- they are not my audience. They don’t have to be yours. There is no ‘side’ to be on, there is no ‘debate’ to be had. "

  2. Re:That's one way to summarize it... on Intel Drops Gamasutra Sponsorship Over Controversial Editorials · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Another would be that video game players(intel's customer) are kind of sick of feminist extremists posting articles about about how all gamers are a bunch of basement dwelling woman haters.

    Way to conform to the stereotype there, bro.

  3. Re:Time to... on Ebola Has Made It To the United States · · Score: 1

    Also, somebody on this thread ignored the word from. Banning flights from infected countries still allows personnel to get there.

    You're going to end up with a fuck of a lot of doctors and airliners in Liberia then.

  4. Re:Time to... on Ebola Has Made It To the United States · · Score: 1

    You stop the unsecured flights from coming out.
    You allow secured flights going into and coming out of secured areas.
    You then transfer supplies to the workers securing and treating other areas.


    You forgot a step: you budget and pay the many tens of billions of dollars that this will cost. Good luck.

  5. Re:Time to... on Ebola Has Made It To the United States · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, but definitely the time to enact common sense, and if anybody says, "but that's offensive to..." give them a good punch in the mouth. Good common sense, like not allowing people to fly from those countries.

    Except that if you cancel all the flights, medical personnel and drugs and equipment have no way to get there. Which means that the disease can't be contained. Which means that it spread to places that there are still flights allowed, before you are aware of it, or have countermeasures. What do you do then? Cut off all flights to that country, rinse and repeat?

    The people who actually do disease control are warning, based on science, that the douchebag reactionary approach to this is going to kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people, and put even First World countries at risk. Sorry, America isn't going to shoot its way out of this one.

  6. And the problem is? on Energy Utilities Trying To Stifle Growth of Solar Power · · Score: 1

    Studies suggest that if solar adoption continues growing at its current rate, incumbents will be forced to raise their prices, which will only persuade more people to switch to solar.

    Which means the subsidies are effective and successful, and we should have more of them.

    Oh, wait. I thought I lived in a sane country for a second there.

  7. Gratuitous LIGO Slam on Astrophysicists Use Apollo Seismic Array To Hunt For Gravitational Waves · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The work shows that good science on gravitational waves can be done without spending the hundreds of millions of dollars for bespoke gravitational wave detectors, such as LIGO, which have yet to find any evidence of the waves either.

    Do you mean aside from the cost of putting seismometers on the moon in the first place?

    The experiment referenced is a fabulously clever re-use of existing data, but it has nothing whatsoever to say about the funding case for LIGO. LIGO, like many cutting-edge experiments, requires very long-term technology development before it can produce a positive result. Some science requires long-term thinking, not just until the next quarter or the next election cycle.

  8. Re:Emma Watson is full of it on Emma Watson Leaked Photo Threat Was a Plot To Attack 4chan · · Score: 0, Troll

    .... rant rant ...

    Wow. It took six minutes for the first angry, misogynistic douchebag to start venting bile.

    Slashdot, you can do better. It should be no more than two minutes thirty.

  9. Re:Why did he lose tenure? on Anonymous Peer-review Comments May Spark Legal Battle · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There are two possibilities: He lost his tenure because there was an anonymous, incorrect peer review negative towards him. His work was actually good. In that case he should sue the university to make decisions based on anonymous, incorrect peer reviews.

    There's a third, more mundane possibility: he lost his tenure because he quit. When he lost his new job offer, he went back to Wayne State asking for his old job back, and they said no. The devil is in the details here. If he had a written employment and tenure agreement with Mississippi all signed and finalized, he would have a damn good case against Mississippi. TFA is not clear on this point, but I would hazard a guess that he got an informal notice that Mississippi intended to hire him, quit at Wayne State before the offer was official, and then Miss yanked the offer before they were legally committed. This kind of shit happens all the time. So sorry.

    Moral: never, ever, quit your current job until the ink is dry on the legal papers for your new one.

  10. Please... on Do Specs Matter Anymore For the Average Smartphone User? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ... get over your fucking phone. It's a convenient electronic bauble, not the center of your fucking existence.

  11. Re:Still some wiggle room on "Big Bang Signal" Could All Be Dust · · Score: 1

    I'd like to bet somebody a dollar that we go to a steady-state universe in our lifetime.

    As several other posters have pointed out, whether BICEP2 is seeing gravity waves or dust has very little to do with whether or not the Big Bang is right. Even if BICEP2 is entirely explained by dust, the Big Bang is still just fine as a theory. Sorry to disappoint you.

  12. Re:Cue "All we are is dust in the wind" on "Big Bang Signal" Could All Be Dust · · Score: 1

    The first is not specifically wrong. Thermodynamics implies that the big bang's energy had to some from somewhere.

    No. This is specifically wrong. Thermodynamics implies no such thing.

    The Big Bang does have thermodynamic issues, but the primary problem is entropy, not energy. And the problem is that the entropy of the early universe is too low, not too high. (Inflation, BTW, is one way to explain the initial low-entropy state of the universe, but even that is an incomplete explanation.)

  13. Re:Cue "All we are is dust in the wind" on "Big Bang Signal" Could All Be Dust · · Score: 2

    - The universe did not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this.
    - The universe did not create itself. Thermodynamics prevents this.
    - The universe was created by an intelligent Creator is the sole, logical conclusion.

    At least the first point above is just plain wrong, and the second is either wrong or meaningless, depending on exactly what you mean by "create itself".

  14. Still some wiggle room on "Big Bang Signal" Could All Be Dust · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Planck dust measurement in pretty damning, but it is not the final word.

    (1) Planck measured the dust contamination with greatest sensitivity at 353 GHz. It was not sensitive enough to measure the dust signal at 150 GHz, where BICEP was observing. They had to extrapolate the dust contribution from the higher frequency to the lower. This is actually a pretty big extrapolation, since the dust emission at 150 GHz is less than 1% of the dust emission at 353 GHz.

    (2) The uncertainty in the dust emission amplitude is still pretty high, so the Planck measurement is consistent with an "all dust" model, or with a "mostly dust" model, or with a "mostly primordial, with some dust" model. It does pretty conclusively rule out a "no dust" model.

    (3) They have not released the results of a joint analysis of Planck and BICEP2, which is what is necessary to actually shed some light on exactly how much of the BICEP2 signal is likely to be dust.

    But it's clear that the BICEP team was being over-optimistic in their assumptions about galactic dust, which is a bummer.

  15. Re:A few hundred extrasolar planets on Astrophysicists Identify the Habitable Regions of the Entire Universe · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I really don't like how they do this extrapolation stuff. Like the universe is currently expanding, and based on the current rate of expansion (or the rate of change of that expansion) we assume it has always been expanding and that 14 billion years ago everything was crammed into something the size of a golf ball. I'm not anti-science, but that seems to be making a pretty big leap.

    This is mostly because you apparently don't understand the theory (or the data) very accurately, which is fine. But to take a layman's understanding of something and concluded that "all teh scientists are idiots" is really, really not a good idea.

    The evidence that cosmological expansion occurred in the distant past, not just today, is compelling, and direct. We can actually see light that has been traveling unimpeded since the universe was only 300,000 years old, which means that we can directly observe the conditions in the universe at that time. And it was hot, and dense.

  16. Re:A few hundred extrasolar planets on Astrophysicists Identify the Habitable Regions of the Entire Universe · · Score: 2

    This is another thing that bothers me. If we can see stars as far away as the universe is old, then we (or the matter we are composed of) must be moving away from them at very close to the speed of light, since we were once very close to them.

    Things as (almost) far away as the universe is old are moving away from us at (close to) the speed of light. Things farther away from us than the universe is old are moving away from us faster than the speed of light. This is perfectly consistent with General Relativity: it seem to contradict Special relativity, but it actually doesn't.

  17. The Drone Wars on Star Wars Producers Want a 'DroneShield' To Prevent Leaks On Set · · Score: 5, Funny

    Begun they have.

  18. Re: No surprise on Study: Chimpanzees Have Evolved To Kill Each Other · · Score: 3, Informative

    There is no such thing as "right" or "wrong" in nature and no delusions of morality can change that.

    Don't be silly. Traits such as altruism, empathy, and a sense of justice are also evolutionarily advantageous, and have just as much of a Darwinian origin as dominance and brute force.

  19. Re:Algebra on ISIS Bans Math and Social Studies For Children · · Score: 1

    The Arabic numerals are actually Hindi.

    Don't try to confuse the issue. As far as most Americans are concerned, brown people in turbans are brown people in turbans.

  20. Re:they will defeat themselves on ISIS Bans Math and Social Studies For Children · · Score: 2, Informative

    Has Israel ever resorted to actual genocide/mass expulsions of the population?

    Um.

    Yes?

  21. Re:they will defeat themselves on ISIS Bans Math and Social Studies For Children · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For every one you kill two will take their place. Your philosophy breeds terrorism instead of extinguishing it.

    Which is a total win-win:

    - We'll have a thriving Defense Industry in the US, and lots of corporate fat-cats will get rich.
    - We'll have lots of military employment opportunities for young impoverished rural Americans. The ones that survive can be shunted off into sub-standard medical and psychiatric care, and will end up homeless or dead in a cost-effective way.
    - We'll make sure the corrupt, dissolute fucktards in charge of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and Kuwait are so scared of the creations of their own madrassas that they don't dare interrupt our oil supply.
    - There will be a cheap and easy path to election for bigoted, paranoid demagogues to get elected with rancid Islamophobic propaganda.

    I mean, what's not to like?

  22. Re:Algebra on ISIS Bans Math and Social Studies For Children · · Score: 4, Funny

    Guess it's time to rename Algebra (al-jebr in Arabic) since they don't seem to want to be associated with that anymore.

    I know: Freedom Numbers!

    In fact, I think we should all boycott Arabic numerals, including the zero. Go back to good old Roman numerals, like we had before the creeping influence of Islam and Sharia Law. That'll show 'em.

  23. Re:Successful troll is successful on WSJ Reports Boeing To Beat SpaceX For Manned Taxi To ISS · · Score: 1

    Still, it would be awesome if both SpaceX and SNC got fully funded.

    Watching the press conference now. Looks like they are in fact awarding the contract to both Boeing and SpaceX.

  24. Re:Unfortunately on Say Goodbye To That Unwanted U2 Album · · Score: 1

    The tool looks at the rest of your music collection while it's deleting the U2 album and judges you accordingly. "Oh, the Justin Beiber gets to stay but you're deleting the U2 album? OK I see how it is!"

    Wait until Apple starts pushing Justin Bieber albums to people's iphones.

  25. Not good enough on Say Goodbye To That Unwanted U2 Album · · Score: 5, Funny

    I will not be satisfied until Apple provides a tool to remove Bono entirely.