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User: Intrepid+imaginaut

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  1. Re:I propose a law on Strange Stars Pulse To the Golden Mean · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You presume that their reasons for doing so are benevolent.

    After all, species which have the ability to first of all see these stars and secondly understand their meaning are probably going to head in that direction as soon as they can, meaning they're young and not very scientifically advanced compared to a civilisation that can manipulate stars on an almost unimaginable scale. Scout ships get captured, their source traced, and rival civilisations extinguished in their infancy.

    It could be a megaengineered honey trap.

  2. Re:Go nuclear on Dry-Ice Heat Engines For Martian Colonists · · Score: 1

    As an alternative, JAXA is already working on a microwave solar power satellite.

  3. Re:Energy on Dry-Ice Heat Engines For Martian Colonists · · Score: 1

    By the time we're colonising Mars, microwave solar power from orbit will already be old news. The idea of cutting ice, transporting it from the poles to the equator and then popping it into an engine is cute but really only a scientific curiousity.

  4. Re:We've redefined success! on Mental Health Experts Seek To Block the Paths To Suicide · · Score: 1

    You can't attack the logic or facts, so you attack the person. All that proves is that you know that the facts and logic is against you.

    All I've done is present facts and logic you unrelentingly chinless tit. Which is the exact opposite of what you've managed to disgorge into the conversation.

    All the whiners are. Have some kids, abandon them, rant about your poor life choices, blaming everyone else, especially "that bitch".

    On your bike son, I'm not covering your bus fare home.

  5. Re:We've redefined success! on Mental Health Experts Seek To Block the Paths To Suicide · · Score: 1

    What's confusing? Every divorce I've had intimate knowledge of (mostly family members, including my parents), both parents lost the home.

    Brilliant, you're a one man sociological survey. Everyone clam up and gather round the fire as AK Marc tells his story.

    With it being the largest asset, it's often liquidated to split up the estate. The divorces by the billionaires that make it on news often have one or more homes to each person, so neither is left homeless.

    You've never run for elected office no? Thank christ.

    Nah, I know enough deadbead dads, I don't need to go out and try to hang around more of them. Bitter angry old men. How dare that bitch get treated fairly!

    Indeed, I doubt being a father was ever one of your problems.

    Listen bud, drop the hardman act and educate yourself on the real issues before mouthing off in public and making yourself look like an idiot again.

    Just some friendly advice.

  6. Re:Modded Interesting? More like Totally Made Up on Mental Health Experts Seek To Block the Paths To Suicide · · Score: 1

    Your numbers sound pretty made up, especially anything that's 99% and 100%, or "in no cases." Let me guess, they were "not intended as a factual statement"?

    http://www.irishcentral.com/ne...

    And of course the ratio of male to female suicides locally is higher than even the normal 4:1, it's 5:1.

    In the same article, they make the point that the wife is usually poorer and has a worse employment situation, a correlation that explains most or all of this imbalance. Judges are going to award more financial support to the poorer party, and if you don't correct for that, you're presenting very misleading stats. Though given the totally made-up numbers you scattered throughout your entire post, I guess you don't care.

    Now if only those judgements were accompanied by genuine shared parenting legislation rather than a weekend every fortnight or what have you, and few penalties for making even that much harder. This is often accompanied by something known as "parental alienation", you should look it up.

    And who bitterly and relentlessly opposes shared parenting legislation?

  7. Re:We've redefined success! on Mental Health Experts Seek To Block the Paths To Suicide · · Score: 1

    I live in the UK, and all of the above stands for both sexes.

    99% of men and women lose their homes in UK divorces? What?

    Annulments can be asked for by either party, and if you back it up with enough evidence then the judge will grant it without both parties agreeing.

    And how often would you say that happens?

    If you father a child and you are not in a fit state of mind to do so, the other parent cannot exert their rights on you legally (and no, being drunk does not count as not being in a fit state of mind). Again, a judge will back this up if you present enough evidence.

    If you try to claim that a child was a result of a drunken one night stand and hence you aren't liable for child support payments you'd be laughed out of court. The "best interests of the child" principle is almost uniformly applied throughout the western world.

    "There have been cases in the US where men who donated to sperm banks" - if you use a properly registered doctor and sperm bank, you are protected by state and federal laws against child support claims. If you use a doctor or bank which is not properly registered, then you will be liable. Nothing wrong with that.

    It is completely insane to claim that there is nothing wrong with that.

    "men who were raped by women when they were underaged" - evidence please.

    http://www.businessinsider.com...

    "men who weren't even related to the child have been forced to pay child support" - evidence please.

    http://www.truthrevolt.org/new...

    And it's being codified into law in many places, in Ireland for example there's a new amendment to the Chikdren and Family Relationships bill which states in no uncertain terms that anyone the child considers a "father figure" is on the hook for child support.

    None of your comments address the actual grisly outcomes for men in the family courts and the resultant suicidal ideation. When a father is reduced to a walking cash machine, torn away from his own children, it's no wonder that the majority of suicides, locally at least, are among men in the 30-50 age group.

    I suggest you contact Fathers4Justice (you know, the guys who've been camping out on the roofs of government buildings trying to get attention) and educate yourself on these issues.

    Fix the disease, not the symptom.

  8. Re:We've redefined success! on Mental Health Experts Seek To Block the Paths To Suicide · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you are not in a fit state of mind when you get married, you can get an annulment. If you are not in a fit state of mind when you have the child, you can let the child be adopted or temporarily fostered.

    I'm not sure which country you're living in but it's not one I've ever heard of.

    Suicide is a problem which overwhelmingly affects men. If you get married the only usual out is divorce, which means that men in 99% of cases are on the hook for support for the rest of their lives. If you're identified as the father of the child, the situation is the same. There have been cases in the US where men who donated to sperm banks, men who were raped by women when they were underaged, men who weren't even related to the child have been forced to pay child support.

    This is the situation locally:

    - 99 percent of husbands lose their homes during divorces
    - Judges frequently make child maintenance orders against men on state benefits whose marriages have broken down - leaving many living below national insolvency guidelines, below subsistence levels
    - In seven out of ten cases the judge ordered a transfer of the property into the wife’s name
    - During 160 contested cases when an order was made to sell the home the wife received more than half of the proceeds in 25 percent of the cases, during the other 75 percent the proceeds were split
    - Joint custody does not mean shared parenting, with children in more than nine out of 10 cases living with their mothers- the "standard access" for married dads to their children after separation is "a couple of hours" every second week, with a few hours once or twice during the week
    - In no cases were the views of any child heard directly by a judge
    - A significant number of divorce cases take eight years or more to be concluded
    - 100% of maintenance orders, both child and spousal maintenance, are made in favour of the wife

    It absolutely is reflected in most western countries.

    If we're going to deal with the problem, let's deal with the problem. This article seems like political power grabbing and grandstanding on the backs of the dead, which is beyond reprehensible and shows the vile moral character of those proposing it.

  9. Re:Not at all surprising on China's Arthur C. Clarke · · Score: 4, Informative

    Marx believed firmly in the labor theory of value, and as such all economic power derived from human labour, not from mechanical power. Communism was about combating the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few people who owned the means of production, at the expense of the masses who provided the labour and hence the real value.

    His view was misguided in many ways, not least in that it almost completely ignores the value of intellectual work; the guy who figures out the right way to apply labour to raw materials is fantastically more effective than the one who does it the wrong way, and in fact this applies at all levels of the chain, up to and including the allocation of capital.

    Marxism and all of its derivations are inherently horrible at effectively allocating resources since they lack the price signals that bundle cost and relative value and communicate them in a way that enables efficient allocation of resources to maximise what people collectively perceive as good, which is why communist economies always fail, and will always fail, even in the presence of automated systems that produce and distribute all of the essentials of life to everyone equally, even if said essentials include what we'd call luxuries. Those essentials will become the baseline expectation, much like oxygen, and economic competition will be around something else.

    Marxism which is based upon class divisions, has failed as a predictive model of economic and social revolution. This is demonstrated in pure Marxist terms by the continued existence of bourgeois capitalism. In terms of a scientific method based on Popperian logical positivism, do you think these theories should now be rejected as null hypotheses?

  10. Re:Not at all surprising on China's Arthur C. Clarke · · Score: 1

    Feel free to move to North Korea friend, you'll find out about slavery under that marxist regime.

    Communism, we can all lounge around navel gazing our way through coffee table philosophy books as equals. Oh wait, no, someone has to make the coffee table and write the book, and if they don't feel like doing that, hey, looks like power does flow from the barrel of a gun after all.

  11. Re:Not at all surprising on China's Arthur C. Clarke · · Score: 1

    Really? Because movie franchises like Aliens and Bladerunner, most sci-fi movies that deal with these issues in fact, revolve around a terror of corporate dystopias. I've yet to see the corporate dystopia that comes within a million miles of actual real life marxist government dystopias of the sort which claimed the lives of over 100 million innocents in the 20th century. China, in particular, should be aware of the horrors inflicted by those who dreamed themselves philosopher princes leading the way for the proles to seize power.

    Star Trek is a good example of a favourable view of socialist goverrnments; possibly you meant the Borg when you refer to extreme socialists, which says all it needs to say.

    When Chinese people express ideals that run along the same lines as the government ones they do so because they'll be locked up otherwise.

    Westerners don't do the same, unless I missed the bit where the "west" had a single government. Why yes, you did just make an equivalency between one country and a vast selection of different countries with different values, ideals, languages, laws and cultures.

  12. Re:Not at all surprising on China's Arthur C. Clarke · · Score: 1

    Exactly. Much of this stuff looks like communist agitprop. Capitalism will destroy civilisation, woo! Except everywhere (regulated) capitalism breaks out, wealth and prosperity follow.

    He reminds me of Machiavelli writing The Prince to flatter Lorenzo de Medici, a proven and trusted means of accumulating wealth but worthy of little respect.

  13. Re:Well, I guess I've got to watch it now. on Indian Gov't Wants Worldwide Ban On Rape Documentary, Including Online · · Score: 0

    You're the one who used a random psycho to paint all the little brown people who tuk yer jerrrrb as misogynistic rapists-in-waiting, chucklehead.

    If speaking truth to power offends you, find a site better suited to your intellectual capabilities, like say jezebel.

  14. The Singlularity! on Why It's Almost Impossible To Teach a Robot To Do Your Laundry · · Score: 1

    The Singularity is near!

  15. Re:Well, I guess I've got to watch it now. on Indian Gov't Wants Worldwide Ban On Rape Documentary, Including Online · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I would agree with much of your post, and yet multiply it by ten and it's still less than the US. However you slice it, hysterical media hyperbole claiming an epidemic of rape isn't helping anyone. In the case of the man mentioned, it was actively harmful - he was pulled out of a jail cell and torn apart by an angry mob without ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.

    The one thing India doesn't need is the greasy hand of the feminist pulling strings - after all, who has more to gain from rape than them? The more rape they can come up with the more they can demand power, legislation and money from governments. Feminists love rape, they couldn't exist without it.

    If it hasn't happened already I expect a survey in the near future telling us that one in four Indian women have been raped (where rape includes harsh language and being looked at crosswise, buried in the fine print in the middle of the windiest section of the technical report).

    Sober analysis and intelligent research are the only efforts that will make a difference here.

    One correction to your post incidentally, women (not men) do have recourse to civil remedies in the case of marital rape, including but not limited to financial compensation for emotional abuse, under the auspices of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005. Some of the penalties are quite extreme, and they don't require the same burden of evidence as a criminal case would.

    Indian men have complained for years that the act has been mercilessly abused by malicious partners, but who cares what men have to say, right?

  16. Re:Well, I guess I've got to watch it now. on Indian Gov't Wants Worldwide Ban On Rape Documentary, Including Online · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Did you know that over 90% of those in prison for violent crimes are men? Men are evil! But wait - 99% of men have never had and will never have a conviction for a violent crime, so saying men are evil is flat out bigotry as bad as any Klanner roaming the backwoods with a length of rope and a shotgun.

    When you project the crimes of a miniscule minority onto much larger groups, you're a bigot.

    A similar principle applies here. Let's take for example this article which claims a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes. While it goes without saying that any rape is too much rape, this makes it sound like India is the world's rape capital. Once every 20 minutes, my god!

    Except the population of India is 1.25 billion, so counting the number of 20 minutes in the year we get around 26297. Divide 1.25 billion into that and look, we get 0.00002, or two per hundred thousand, which is considerably lower than most western countries. A very different picture emerges. Yes, scumbags and psychos exist in India the same as everywhere else. No that's not an indictment of Indian society, and what they're trying to do is protect their national reputation in the same way they're prioritising a space programme over indoor plumbing.

    What happens when hysterias like the feminists and other carrion creatures manufacture for fun and billions in profit take hold is people suffer and die, torn to death by mobs without trial or due process. Trying to spin this call for a ban into the government protecting rapists is just more of the same - the government is acting in a confused and not terribly intelligent manner, but it doesn't want the country painted in a bad light.

    And that's before we start talking about dowry law abuses, domestic violence law abuses, and maintenance law abuses, of which there are a great many. A quarter of all male suicides in India are directly attributed to family problems.

    So, we have well provisioned westerners sitting behind their screens, tut tutting at the dastardly H1-B dudes roaming the halls scaring off all teh wimminz, suckling at the teat of hyped up outrage, squinting myopically through their little electronic rectangles at a world they've never experienced and have little understanding of, proudly touting the merits of skepticism in their signatures while massive human suffering goes unnoticed.

    Still, that outrage feels good though eh?

  17. Re:When in Rome on Facebook Rant Lands US Man In UAE Jail · · Score: 1

    One must wonder therefore why we need lawyers.

  18. Re:Not completely self-driving on Would You Need a License To Drive a Self-Driving Car? · · Score: 2

    Well I'd hope that the car on autopilot would have slowed to a halt until I was past whether or not the driver was on the phone. That raises another interesting possibility, people deliberately driving aggressively to make cars on autopilot get out of their way...

  19. Re:If "yes," then it's not self-driving on Would You Need a License To Drive a Self-Driving Car? · · Score: 1

    I'd say it'll happen alright but it won't be as useful as it might seem on the face of it. You won't, for example, be able to read a book while your car drives you to work. Likewise you won't be able to stumble out of a bar blind drunk and have your car drive you home, it's not going to replace taxis. It'll be required that a licensed driver in full possession of their faculties must be able to take control of the car at any time, and probably for very good reasons.

    What self driving cars will do, I expect, is reduce accident rates on the roads and possibly impact on traffic jams. There are a lot of unsafe drivers out there, only last week I nearly t-boned a car that sped out of a side road while the driver was yapping away on her phone, I'd be much happier if the majority of the time driving was automated.

  20. Re:Idiotic on Former MLB Pitcher Doxes Internet Trolls, Delivers Real-World Consequences · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is itself a fairly sociopathic post. If someone is ignorant, educate them. If they refuse to be educated, others will still learn from what you're saying. The clowns in this story weren't ignorant, they were just assholes.

  21. Re:Zombies versus Predators on Statistical Mechanics Finds Best Places To Hide During Zombie Apocalypse · · Score: 1

    Yes this is why the next evolution of the zombie genre is going to be collaboration with most of the Hammer portfolio. Zombies by themselves? Guffaw. Zombies and werewolves? Chortle. Zombies, werewolves and vampires? Errrm... Zombies, werewolves, vampires, poltergeists, invisible demons from the Exorcist, and those dudes from Pulse? Hold on there just a minute now!

    Rec had it right. Open the black gates!

  22. Re: Found the perfect way on Researcher Developing Tattoo Removal Cream · · Score: 1

    No tattooist worth their ink will give a tattoo to a drunk person, not least because alcohol is a reasonably effective anticoagulant.

    I dunno they can work really well on some people, others meh. Somehow the hipster beardo tats don't resonate as much with me as the Asatru biker chick tats. Living the lifestyle matters to an extent, as does personality.

  23. Re:What it means: on What Intel's $300 Million Diversity Pledge Really Means · · Score: 2

    A group of people rigs the game to the where where they have a stranglehold, to the detriment of ALL others.

    By all means provide evidence for this rigging.

  24. Re:"GRR Martin is not your bitch" on George R. R. Martin's "The Winds of Winter" Wiill Not Be Published In 2015 · · Score: 1

    His format is interesting even if his prose is weak though. 70 chapters in his first book, distributed amongst approximately 7 characters, none of whom have died so far. Another heavily promoted book I've recently read was called Leviathan Wakes, and it followed the exact same format. Not until I read the interview with the author at the end did I learn that he was one of Martin's protégés.

  25. Yeah on Spider Spins Electrically Charged Silk · · Score: 3, Funny

    My D&D group will be encountering electrified spiderwebs shortly.

    Thanks nature!