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User: geckipede

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Comments · 276

  1. Completely unrelated... on France Considers 'Pirate Tax' For Online Ads · · Score: 2, Funny

    My perpetual motion business is doing very badly. I propose that in order to maintain this valuable source of employment, schools, laboratories, universities and libraries are all taxed. They keep discouraging my investors...

  2. Re:Unstoppable force, immovable object on Full Body Scanners Violate Child Porn Laws · · Score: 1

    Creating incentives for terrorists to bring their kids along for the ride... what a great idea. Mass murder has for too long been considered something that you just don't take the family along to join in with.

  3. Re:not so green, huh? on China Moving To Restrict Neodymium Supply · · Score: 1

    So for those of us who live in cities, where would you like us to install all the extra land for us to subsist on? In this country, if you divided the land out exactly fairly between everybody, there's just enough to give everybody a medium sized garden. More than half of these gardens are going to end up on mountainside that's only really any good for raising sheep.

  4. Re:CD-R? on Phase Change Memory vs. Storage As We Know It · · Score: 1

    This has always bothered me. I like having a seperation of semipermanant starting point and running copy. I don't want the distinction between rebooting and restoring from backups to die.

  5. Re:If it's not broken, why are you fixing it? on Russia Plans To Divert Asteroid · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Exactly so. It doesn't matter if Apophis is going to hit us or not, the point is that this is a perfect opportunity to practise deflection strategies in advance of the real life-or-death event. There are going to be flaws in our thinking, every single asteroid shunting plan we have is untested and will be less than perfect when put into practise. We absolutely need to know whether there are critical mission failure flaws in these plans, or just minor irritations that won't ruin things.

    When it finally comes to the point when an asteroid is on a direct collision course, we might not be lucky, we might not have seen it decades in advance, and so a test run and lots of arguing about methods might not be an option.

  6. Re:You mean Fuck on Verizon Removes Search Choices For BlackBerrys · · Score: 1

    You reserve the right to self censor. We reserve the right to call it ridiculous, pointless and to mock it mercilessly.

  7. Re:Sailing the myriad seas? on Proposed NASA Mission Would Sail the Seas of Titan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The gravity is weak enough and the atmosphere thick enough that you barely even need a parachute. In any case, the only thing rockets could do to the methane there would be to boil some of it - there's no free oxygen out there to react with.

  8. Re:So many extinction level events yet we linger on Yellowstone Supervolcano Larger Than First Thought · · Score: 1

    Erm... ok, gamma ray bursts last for seconds or minutes, not months. I was thinking of supernovae. Oops.

  9. Re:So many extinction level events yet we linger on Yellowstone Supervolcano Larger Than First Thought · · Score: 2, Informative

    Depending on what type of burst you were dealing with, there might be several worlds in our own solar system that could provide enough shielding. All you need is for it to be rotating slowly enough that you can use the ground beneath your feet as shielding. I'm not sure how long the longest duration gamma ray bursts are, I think it's on a timescale of months. If so you could hide on venus, and for a shorter duration burst, mercury too.

  10. Re:Technology to the rescue! on "Loud Commercial" Legislation Proposed In US Congress · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's a rather low standard isn't it? How about making a neutral third party watch the ad for 12 hours on repeat, and only then add the director and a pair of big sticks to the room.

  11. Re:Oink! Oink! on House Outlaws Obama's NASA Intervention · · Score: 1

    It's worth pointing out that the SpaceX Falcon 1, based on the same technologies as the Falcon 9, failed catastrophically on four out of five flights. Ares I is intended to have a safety record of one failure in a thousand launches. Comparing the two is fair, but they're definitely not intended to be equal products.

  12. Re:ATTENTION on How To Build a Quantum Propulsion Machine · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That could only work if the vacuum had a velocity in relation to the craft - a preferred reference frame of its own. The whole point of relativity is that there is no such priviliged reference frame.

    Without that, there's nothing to define how much you have accelerated, nothing the crafts own frame can relate to, so constant power into such a system ought to create constant force. With a fixed mass, that means that you're putting kinetic energy into the system linearly with respect to speed, but gaining kinetic energy proportional to the square. Good old KE=0.5mv^2

  13. Re:Energy consumption hypocrisy. on LHC Reaches Record Energy · · Score: 1

    The world can survive having co2 levels as high as this, and higher. It has happened in the past, just not recently enough for us to be able to get any detailed information on how that related to climate.

    The danger is not to life in general, only to species that aren't going to be able to make it through a period of relatively rapid change.

  14. Re:Energy consumption hypocrisy. on LHC Reaches Record Energy · · Score: 2, Informative

    What makes you think that increasing temperatures will help to reverse desertification? Increased evaporation of water isn't going to change the lack of regular pressure changes over the equator that could cause more regular rainfall. What it is far more likely to do is cause heavier intermittent storm rain, of the type that overwhelms the land's ability to retain water and mostly just flows away. Colder regions nearer the poles may gain in agricultural productivity, but at the cost of farmland nearer the equator, and the equator covers far more land area.

    You might also want to look up ocean acidification by increased uptake of CO2, which is causing loss of coral reefs and threatening stability of fish as a food source.

  15. Re:Energy consumption hypocrisy. on LHC Reaches Record Energy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nobody agrees on when the singularity is coming. We're nowhere near producing an innovative AI, let alone anything genuinely intelligent in software, so technological progress is stuck going through human systems for a while yet. I am more inclined to believe the predictions that technological advances will start coming too fast for humans to follow in centuries to come, not decades. Our job is to make sure that civilisation doesn't fall apart in a mess of overpopulation and resource shortage before then. Global warming carries with it a huge risk of reducing food supplies below that that we'll need in order to ever reach the point of singularity.

  16. Re:Is it possible? on Martian Methane May Be Created By Lifeforms · · Score: 1

    Life on Mars would have been at its prime billions of years ago. Whatever is left now would have to be either fossilised and completely inert, or still reproducing.

  17. Re:Whodathunk on Virgin Galactic Unveils SpaceShipTwo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Part of the Augustine Comission report on NASA's future covered guaranteed contracts for private space firms. ISS resupply will be a reliable source of business until the station is scrapped. Past that time it's hard to predict what will happen, but one idea was for NASA to put up an orbital fuel storage depot that would be refilled by private launches, again on a guaranteed contract system.

  18. Re:Dear Slashdot on Ethics of Releasing Non-Malicious Linux Malware? · · Score: 5, Funny

    The day that somebody starts releasing automated face punching machines into the streets, I certainly will be among the first to buy a helmet.

  19. Re:but where on LHC Reaches Over One Trillion Electron Volts · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I didn't say every religion did it, however if you do want an example of the catholic church going against scientific findings, try the arguments over efficacy of condoms.

  20. Re:but where on LHC Reaches Over One Trillion Electron Volts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Religions don't object to research into the unknown because faith gives confidence that the answers are either already known or theologically irrelevant.

    Religions object only to research into topics where they have already been proven wrong.

  21. Re:I mention this on CERN Physicist Warns About Uranium Shortage · · Score: 1

    Erm... that would be "safely down into three years" not "three decades". Oops.

  22. Re:I mention this on CERN Physicist Warns About Uranium Shortage · · Score: 1

    Getting a new nuclear reactor from the "I've got a great idea" phase to the "It's producing power, hooray" phase can take more than a decade. Two decades would not be unheard of. Would you like to suggest how capitalism can squeeze that process safely down into three?

    The problem here is that there are hundreds of competing options for energy generation, all of which are incredibly expensive to set up and it is only obvious which one should be picked when it is too late to start. You can't invest in them all. Capitalism will go for the lowest risk option, which in this case has mostly been to stick with the status quo.

  23. Re:Pirates on MPAA Asks Again For Control Of TV Analog Ports · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think you'll find that it's content distributors that the pirates want to see gone. A world without content producers would be a world without any humans left. People carry on having creative urges and doing something about it whether or not there's money involved.

    The only place where amount of content produced would be genuinely affected by a complete shutdown of payment for media is film and television.

  24. Re:Good luck, Murdoch on Murdoch To Explore Blocking Google Searches · · Score: 1

    If nothing else it will be interesting to find out how many people don't know how to use bookmarks or the url bar, and always just search for what they want from their google.com homepage.

  25. Re:Semi-autonomous being key on Rise of the Robot Squadrons · · Score: 1

    Easy for your own side to reuse would also mean possible for your enemy to steal. It's generally for the best if things you throw at an enemy either come back still able to defend themselves or blow up.