Give me an alternative...which doesn't require me to...live in the US/Canada/EU countries...
Eek. I sympathize with your position, but what you're asking is really, really, really hard to do--particularly for a small independent retailer. There's somewhere in the neighbourhood of two hundred countries in the world, most with their own currencies, financial systems, and laws. We can't ask the 'little guy' to handle all of these independent regions. Not only would he be swamped, but the sales from many regions probably wouldn't justify the effort of setting up shop.
Granted, things get a little bit easier when you're distributing mp3s--with no physical product to ship, there are no customs hassles. Nevertheless, just collecting applicable sales taxes--and submitting the appropriate paperwork--would be a nightmare.
Then of course there's the opportunity for fraud. Many companies flatly refuse to process credit card transactions in certain countries because the chargeback rate is too absurdly high.
There are companies (like PayPal) that attempt to provide some services to individuals across national boundaries. They're certainly not perfect--but maybe some folks on Slashdot should put some venture capital where their mouths are and do better.
To be fair to Marconi's detractors, they were wrong for largely the right reasons. Marconi was a stubborn idiot, who got lucky with the existence of the ionosphere. It then once again required (somewhat embarrassed, but now really motivated) scientists to characterize the ionosphere.
Are you implying that none of your upstream ISPs have spammers as their downstream customers?
No, but that isn't exactly on point. Unless those spammers send their mail only to subcribers of the same ISP, then they (the spammers) are deciding that other ISPs--without the express permission of those ISPs--should bear part of their mass mailing costs.
You pay indirectly for the ads which are sent to you on television, as well, through higher product costs. Should we ban that too?
That's a false analogy. I may choose whether or not I purchase those products, and by so doing, I may choose whether or not I contribute to those advertising costs. With spam I do not have that choice--I pay for a company's advertising whether I buy their product or not.
Just because there are alternative methods of communication doesn't mean that your First Amendment rights aren't being abridged.
True--but First Amendment protection does not extend to making other people pay to present your advertising material.
Use your own damn money to push your agenda--don't waste mine.
All the spammers which are spamming legally already are using their own damn money to push their agenda. Email accounts cost money, after all.
Now I'm starting to wonder if you're just trolling. Although in most cases spammers do indeed spend some money (sometimes large chunks of it--for anonymous mailing software, mailing lists, lists of open relays, etc.) in carrying out their trade, that does nothing to reduce the costs that they impose without my permission upon me. Question: Is it right to mug people as long as you spent a lot of money to acquire a handgun? Aside: In most cases, spammers are operating outside of the bounds of their terms of service with their respective ISPs. When caught, they usually have their accounts terminated--but this does nothing to aid all of the other affected parties in cost recovery.
Spam is a problem that should be taken care of by the free market, not government.
What is this mythical "free market" beast, and why is it so often a miraculous panacea? Spam is a consequence of having a free market. It is a form of advertising where the tarket market (not the advertiser) bears the majority of the costs, such that virtually any response rate above zero represents a positive return on investment.
The "free market" does not exist--virtually all commerce is regulated in some way or another...and that includes other modes of advertising.
More important, it is the advertiser that pays for other forms of advertising. I pay for spam: indirectly through my ISP's fees, and directly in terms of the time I waste on it. Unfortunately, the existing legal framework makes it difficult to recover or avoid those costs. Anti-spam legislation would protect my rights, not infringe on them. (Hint to advertisers: your First Amendment would not be abridged. Rent a billboard. Buy a newspaper ad. Set up a website. Use your own damn money to push your agenda--don't waste mine.)
He then ran some numbers and proved that with that, they were open to an exploit of the Martingale system.
What sort of 'exploit' of Martingale is this? Martingale is ultimately always a losing strategy unless 1) there is no house limit and 2) you have an infinite supply of cash.
What they don't say is that this sucker is electrical.....so to make this thing fly 2.6 million light years, you need 2.6 million light years of extension cord.
Oh yeah, you need atmosphere too.
Not strictly true. You could do all your acceleration inside the atmosphere, and coast the rest of the way. Then you only need a hundred miles or so of extension cord.
Of course, the...ah...difficulties that this presents for craft and crew are left as a delightful thought experiment for craft and crew. (Hints: *blam* *squish*)
When John A. Phillips designed an A-Bomb using unclassified info for is dissertation at Princeton.
For those that are interested, there was a book published about the entire incident. Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid. It's out of print, but you can locate used copies through Amazon or Abebooks.
From this source I located the jacket text. Enjoy.
John Aristotle Phillips is the Princeton student who became world-famous when he designed an atomic bomb both to demonstrate the dangers of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and to fulfil his academic requirements.
Prior to this, John had average grades, played the cowbell in the Princeton Marching Band (before he was fired), auditioned to become the Princeton Tiger Mascot (and got the job?because no one else showed up for the tryouts), rode his unicycle around campus, and started a pizza delivery service.
But once he designed the bomb, it wasn't long before newspapers interviewed him, television filmed him, girls chased him, foreign governments approached him, spies contacted him, the United States Senate congratulated him, Hollywood beckoned with its bent finger, and a Madison Avenue book publisher fought off the competition for the right to publish his story.
This is the story, then, of what happens when an Obscure Individual becomes a Personality. It is the story of instant fame, of idealism, of success at a very young age, of college life today, and of a friendship that has resulted in the writing of this funny, fetching, edifying memoir of a glorious time spent in a marvelous cause.
Here is one kid who set out to make a point and change the world. Here is one kid, triumphant.
That's an awful lot of testing that's been done for a mere $4.2 million! Last winter I was involved with some testing that cost $500,000 and the result was a little 50-page report. Way to go, NASA! Hooray for SRI!
Um. Do you do destructive testing of million-dollar components? No? Maybe that has something to do with why your report was less expensive to produce. Just a thought.
Take the phrase "linguistic concision" for example. To replace that with a simpler vernacular I'd have to say something to the effect of "being really precise with words" - far less elloquent and efficient.
I agree with your point--to a point. The use of "vernacular" is gratuitous; you could have used "phrase" or even "term" to convey the same message. Nevertheless, you are quite right that the real trouble arises when the listener perceives precision as snobbishness.
Describing the irony of making a typo in the word "eloquent" I leave as an exercise for the audience.;)
Is something like this for STD's. Oh come on, admit it --- condoms suck, and not in that fun way. Wouldn't you rather just tricoder her nether-regions?
Cute, and it might be handy for detecting otherwise hard-to-see lesions. Of course, you're still screwed--and not in that fun way--when it comes to AIDS. Detecting the virus or associated antibodies is going to require some wet chemistry--again, not the fun kind--for the foreseeable future.
My father died of cancer at the age of 56 and my mother survived it at the age of 44. I think I might have a high hereditary risk.
Um, yes? (Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, though some of my research work has involved medical physics with oncology applications.)
Your parents may be unfortunate victims of statistics, but if there is any other family history of cancer then you might be strongly inclined to consult a genetic counsellor. Your family physician should be able to refer you.
Many cancers now have excellent long-term survival rates--partly because of some tremendous advances in treatment made over the last decade or two, but often because early detection has improved. Consultation with your family physician and appropriate specialists should help you decide on an appropriate monitoring regimen.
Oh--and get a reasonable amount of exercise, and eat sensibly. This will do wonders for just about anybody's present and future health.
Re:Arnt Microwaves on the body dangerious?
on
Swiping Out Cancer
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· Score: 3, Informative
"We all know that sticking your head in a microwave oven is bad for you... right?" Microwaves induce movement of water molecules (when its in liquid form). so does your stove... why should we fear this without any hard scientific evidence that it is dangerous?
This isn't because microwaves cause cancer--there still is no consistent corpus of evidence to support that hypothesis and there may never be--but rather because they cause heating. There are proteins within our bodies' cells that begin to denature at around forty degrees celsius. At or above this temperature (which actually isn't particularly warm), the proportion of exposed cells that die is a function of temperature and exposure time. (See, for example, James R. Lepock, "Protein Denaturation During Heat Shock" in Advances in Molecular and Cell Biology, Volume 19, pages 223-259, for an excellent survey of current thought on the mechanisms at work.)
So microwaves are dangerous because they cause heating. Not only that, they can cause deep heating in localized hotspots. In other words, you may actually do damage to the brain, eyes, and other organs very quickly without having to burn through the layers on the surface first. (This is what makes microwaves more threatening than the stovetop. The heating elements don't burn unless you come into close contact, and they can't burn deeply without lengthy exposure.)
Re:Contained?
on
SARS Contained
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How can they say they have the disease contained if they say, in their next breath, that they expect it to come back again?
It's easy. The disease is contained (probably) in the human population. We know (probably) who all the infected individuals are, and they are being treated with appropriate precautions.
SARS, however, is not a disease limited to humans. The original hosts are thought to be animals. Candidates include several mammalian species, as well as a number of birds. Right now, dozens of different species are being exposed to the SARS virus in labs on several continents, in an attempt to determine which animals may act as a reservoir for the virus.
So, SARS is contained--but there is the potential for future outbreaks as long as the virus still exists in animal populations. Similarly, Ebola is usually readily contained when there is a human outbreak, but it keeps coming back because wild primates act as a natural reservoir.
I know I would consider using nuclear weapons to destroy the British Isles and cauterize the remenants of the disease. I don't think I'd do it, but I'd have the option down on the table.
I would be really careful with this option. The English Channel just isn't that wide a body of water. In addition to the radioactive fallout, there is also the risk of picking up infectious material. Some viruses are very hardy, and remain viable for quite a while outside the body. The prevailing winds would carry all of those nasties right over on to Western Europe--then you're screwed.
Whenever a slashdotter refers to "suspension of disbelief", usually what they really mean is "I enjoyed that movie/novel/manga, and it isn't fair of you to destroy my enjoyment by picking scientific nits." Come on, people. When you tell a story, you can't just ignore the real world. If somebody made a movie in which Julius Caesar and Daniel Boone got together to battle Nazis from the Bermuda dimension, nobody would "suspend disbelief".
Curiously enough, you can get away with this in a book. In John Barnes' Patton's Spaceship, and in its sequels Washington's Dirigible and Caesar's Bicycle there exist a large number of parallel timelines. Loosely, the last book involves a twentieth-century bodyguard who has been sent to recruit Caesar (and the rest of Rome) to fight time-travelling universe-hopping Nazis. Sounds silly, but it's a fun read.
Actually, I bet you could get away with it in a movie, too--it would just have to be extremely well executed.
Re:it's not like this is really news...
on
Science Faction
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· Score: 2, Informative
Even if they did accurately predict some gizmos, they were incredibly funny with completely false expectations on how people will use them. Take computers and networking - as far as I know, nobody - NOBODY! - guessed that the network will be used to distribute pr0n. What were they thinking? It was so easy to guess.
Actually, I would guess that any new communications technology will be quickly adapted for pornography. It started with the Gutenberg press and movable type, things have continued that way to this day. One of the first authors to use the press was Pietro Aretino, who in 1534 published the first editions of his Ragionamenti--dialogues about "brothel affairs". Ahem. See also Lynn Hunt's The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800.
New technology will--if at all possible--be first used for pornography and sex, followed by gambling, then crime. Hint: it is always possible. There will then be media condemnations, cynically moralizing editorials, government overreaction attempting to regulate the technology, and finally public adoption.
Re:Since when is sci-fi defined by films?
on
Science Faction
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· Score: 1
So three cheers for Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, Pournelle, Robinson, Bear, and the dozens of other great writers who have produced the body of works that I think of when I hear "sci-fi".
Don't forget Clarke. The first popular treatment of a space elevator (with a carbon-based cable, no less!) was Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise, published in 1978.
Granted, he got the idea from Y.N. Artsutanov (Komsomalskaya Pravda, 31 July, 1968), but nobody but Russian (er, Soviet) scientists would have read that paper.
By your explanation, light passing by a mass should actually blue shift during approach and red shift again as it retreats. Does it not actually change direction?
Light does indeed do both. As it drops deeper into a gravitational potential, it blueshifts; as it emerges, it redshifts. Its path will also appear to be bent by the gravitational field. (I could introduce you to a number of physicists who will adamantly insist that the light follows a straight path along curved space, but that's getting awfully picky.)
Light cannot emerge from a blackhole because any photons emitted inside the event horizon get redshifted down to nothing on their journey out. They may indeed follow a curved path while they do so, but this is not essential to the process. Some physicists speculate that this bending has an interesting consequence right near the event horizon. In principle, photons on the right trajectories could orbit the black hole--kind of a neat thought experiment. Of course, any speculation about what goes on inside a black hole is merely that, since actual observations are rather difficult to come by.
Seems like a black body surface treatment would be better.
The little radiometers work because there is not a good vacuum inside the bulb. The external light source heats one side of each vane to a higher temperature (than on the other, white, face). The expansion of the adjacent air pushes the vane and turns the little 'turnstile'.
In the (near-perfect) vacuum of space, the solar sail is accelerated only by a direct transfer of momentum. If a photon is absorbed, its momentum is transferred to the solar sail, and it imparts a small acceleration (okay, impulse).
But...if you have a reflective surface, then you get roughly twice as much momentum out of each photon. One kick comes from the incident photon, and one more from the departing reflected photon. (Conservation of momentum at work--if the sail sends a photon sunward with its associated packet of momentum, the sail itself must acquire momentum in the opposite direction.)
benhaha says: Light is red-shifted climbing out of the gravity well.
Can you expand on this? I've never heard of this, and I can't think of anything in my 40+ years of layman's reading on physics that could be expressed this way.
Here's a few links. Google for "gravitational redshift" and you'll get lots more.
To summarize, the gravitational redshift (or blueshift, for light falling into a gravitational potential well) is a real effect. It was demonstrated by Pound and Rebka at Harvard University in 1960. They used essentially monochromatic gamma ray photon sources at the top and bottom of an elevator shaft, and measured the shift in frequency for photons traversing the shaft each direction. Kudos to Einstein--General Relativity gets another check mark.
Re:That's why English is a "living" language.
on
Isn't It Ironic?
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· Score: 1
English is still a living language, which means that the definition and scope of words will change. So perhaps someday in the dictionary under the entry for irony or ironic, it will include what people commonly mean it to be.
The problem now--aside from the fact that the word is being misused in the first place--is that the misapplication of the word ironic is by no means consistent from one instance to the next. We could try to change the meaning, but in order to encompass all of the new uses we would have to dilute the definition to utter uselessness.
Slashdot Mirror
Eek. I sympathize with your position, but what you're asking is really, really, really hard to do--particularly for a small independent retailer. There's somewhere in the neighbourhood of two hundred countries in the world, most with their own currencies, financial systems, and laws. We can't ask the 'little guy' to handle all of these independent regions. Not only would he be swamped, but the sales from many regions probably wouldn't justify the effort of setting up shop.
Granted, things get a little bit easier when you're distributing mp3s--with no physical product to ship, there are no customs hassles. Nevertheless, just collecting applicable sales taxes--and submitting the appropriate paperwork--would be a nightmare.
Then of course there's the opportunity for fraud. Many companies flatly refuse to process credit card transactions in certain countries because the chargeback rate is too absurdly high.
There are companies (like PayPal) that attempt to provide some services to individuals across national boundaries. They're certainly not perfect--but maybe some folks on Slashdot should put some venture capital where their mouths are and do better.
To be fair to Marconi's detractors, they were wrong for largely the right reasons. Marconi was a stubborn idiot, who got lucky with the existence of the ionosphere. It then once again required (somewhat embarrassed, but now really motivated) scientists to characterize the ionosphere.
Project Gutenberg has the classic Brothers Grimm tales here.
Are you implying that none of your upstream ISPs have spammers as their downstream customers?
No, but that isn't exactly on point. Unless those spammers send their mail only to subcribers of the same ISP, then they (the spammers) are deciding that other ISPs--without the express permission of those ISPs--should bear part of their mass mailing costs.
You pay indirectly for the ads which are sent to you on television, as well, through higher product costs. Should we ban that too?
That's a false analogy. I may choose whether or not I purchase those products, and by so doing, I may choose whether or not I contribute to those advertising costs. With spam I do not have that choice--I pay for a company's advertising whether I buy their product or not.
Just because there are alternative methods of communication doesn't mean that your First Amendment rights aren't being abridged.
True--but First Amendment protection does not extend to making other people pay to present your advertising material.
All the spammers which are spamming legally already are using their own damn money to push their agenda. Email accounts cost money, after all.
Now I'm starting to wonder if you're just trolling. Although in most cases spammers do indeed spend some money (sometimes large chunks of it--for anonymous mailing software, mailing lists, lists of open relays, etc.) in carrying out their trade, that does nothing to reduce the costs that they impose without my permission upon me. Question: Is it right to mug people as long as you spent a lot of money to acquire a handgun? Aside: In most cases, spammers are operating outside of the bounds of their terms of service with their respective ISPs. When caught, they usually have their accounts terminated--but this does nothing to aid all of the other affected parties in cost recovery.
What is this mythical "free market" beast, and why is it so often a miraculous panacea? Spam is a consequence of having a free market. It is a form of advertising where the tarket market (not the advertiser) bears the majority of the costs, such that virtually any response rate above zero represents a positive return on investment.
The "free market" does not exist--virtually all commerce is regulated in some way or another...and that includes other modes of advertising.
More important, it is the advertiser that pays for other forms of advertising. I pay for spam: indirectly through my ISP's fees, and directly in terms of the time I waste on it. Unfortunately, the existing legal framework makes it difficult to recover or avoid those costs. Anti-spam legislation would protect my rights, not infringe on them. (Hint to advertisers: your First Amendment would not be abridged. Rent a billboard. Buy a newspaper ad. Set up a website. Use your own damn money to push your agenda--don't waste mine.)
What sort of 'exploit' of Martingale is this? Martingale is ultimately always a losing strategy unless 1) there is no house limit and 2) you have an infinite supply of cash.
At the University of Toronto. Link.
Did anyone else have an image like this come to mind?
Oh yeah, you need atmosphere too.
Not strictly true. You could do all your acceleration inside the atmosphere, and coast the rest of the way. Then you only need a hundred miles or so of extension cord.
Of course, the...ah...difficulties that this presents for craft and crew are left as a delightful thought experiment for craft and crew. (Hints: *blam* *squish*)
For those that are interested, there was a book published about the entire incident. Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid. It's out of print, but you can locate used copies through Amazon or Abebooks.
From this source I located the jacket text. Enjoy.
Um. Do you do destructive testing of million-dollar components? No? Maybe that has something to do with why your report was less expensive to produce. Just a thought.
I agree with your point--to a point. The use of "vernacular" is gratuitous; you could have used "phrase" or even "term" to convey the same message. Nevertheless, you are quite right that the real trouble arises when the listener perceives precision as snobbishness.
Describing the irony of making a typo in the word "eloquent" I leave as an exercise for the audience. ;)
Cute, and it might be handy for detecting otherwise hard-to-see lesions. Of course, you're still screwed--and not in that fun way--when it comes to AIDS. Detecting the virus or associated antibodies is going to require some wet chemistry--again, not the fun kind--for the foreseeable future.
Um, yes? (Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, though some of my research work has involved medical physics with oncology applications.)
Your parents may be unfortunate victims of statistics, but if there is any other family history of cancer then you might be strongly inclined to consult a genetic counsellor. Your family physician should be able to refer you.
Many cancers now have excellent long-term survival rates--partly because of some tremendous advances in treatment made over the last decade or two, but often because early detection has improved. Consultation with your family physician and appropriate specialists should help you decide on an appropriate monitoring regimen.
Oh--and get a reasonable amount of exercise, and eat sensibly. This will do wonders for just about anybody's present and future health.
This isn't because microwaves cause cancer--there still is no consistent corpus of evidence to support that hypothesis and there may never be--but rather because they cause heating. There are proteins within our bodies' cells that begin to denature at around forty degrees celsius. At or above this temperature (which actually isn't particularly warm), the proportion of exposed cells that die is a function of temperature and exposure time. (See, for example, James R. Lepock, "Protein Denaturation During Heat Shock" in Advances in Molecular and Cell Biology, Volume 19, pages 223-259, for an excellent survey of current thought on the mechanisms at work.)
So microwaves are dangerous because they cause heating. Not only that, they can cause deep heating in localized hotspots. In other words, you may actually do damage to the brain, eyes, and other organs very quickly without having to burn through the layers on the surface first. (This is what makes microwaves more threatening than the stovetop. The heating elements don't burn unless you come into close contact, and they can't burn deeply without lengthy exposure.)
It's easy. The disease is contained (probably) in the human population. We know (probably) who all the infected individuals are, and they are being treated with appropriate precautions.
SARS, however, is not a disease limited to humans. The original hosts are thought to be animals. Candidates include several mammalian species, as well as a number of birds. Right now, dozens of different species are being exposed to the SARS virus in labs on several continents, in an attempt to determine which animals may act as a reservoir for the virus.
So, SARS is contained--but there is the potential for future outbreaks as long as the virus still exists in animal populations. Similarly, Ebola is usually readily contained when there is a human outbreak, but it keeps coming back because wild primates act as a natural reservoir.
I would be really careful with this option. The English Channel just isn't that wide a body of water. In addition to the radioactive fallout, there is also the risk of picking up infectious material. Some viruses are very hardy, and remain viable for quite a while outside the body. The prevailing winds would carry all of those nasties right over on to Western Europe--then you're screwed.
Curiously enough, you can get away with this in a book. In John Barnes' Patton's Spaceship, and in its sequels Washington's Dirigible and Caesar's Bicycle there exist a large number of parallel timelines. Loosely, the last book involves a twentieth-century bodyguard who has been sent to recruit Caesar (and the rest of Rome) to fight time-travelling universe-hopping Nazis. Sounds silly, but it's a fun read.
Actually, I bet you could get away with it in a movie, too--it would just have to be extremely well executed.
Actually, I would guess that any new communications technology will be quickly adapted for pornography. It started with the Gutenberg press and movable type, things have continued that way to this day. One of the first authors to use the press was Pietro Aretino, who in 1534 published the first editions of his Ragionamenti--dialogues about "brothel affairs". Ahem. See also Lynn Hunt's The Invention of Pornography, 1500-1800.
New technology will--if at all possible--be first used for pornography and sex, followed by gambling, then crime. Hint: it is always possible. There will then be media condemnations, cynically moralizing editorials, government overreaction attempting to regulate the technology, and finally public adoption.
Don't forget Clarke. The first popular treatment of a space elevator (with a carbon-based cable, no less!) was Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains of Paradise, published in 1978.
Granted, he got the idea from Y.N. Artsutanov (Komsomalskaya Pravda, 31 July, 1968), but nobody but Russian (er, Soviet) scientists would have read that paper.
When in doubt, look to George Bernard Shaw. I don't always agree with his politics, but he has generated some damn fine quotations.
Enjoy.
Light does indeed do both. As it drops deeper into a gravitational potential, it blueshifts; as it emerges, it redshifts. Its path will also appear to be bent by the gravitational field. (I could introduce you to a number of physicists who will adamantly insist that the light follows a straight path along curved space, but that's getting awfully picky.)
Light cannot emerge from a blackhole because any photons emitted inside the event horizon get redshifted down to nothing on their journey out. They may indeed follow a curved path while they do so, but this is not essential to the process. Some physicists speculate that this bending has an interesting consequence right near the event horizon. In principle, photons on the right trajectories could orbit the black hole--kind of a neat thought experiment. Of course, any speculation about what goes on inside a black hole is merely that, since actual observations are rather difficult to come by.
The little radiometers work because there is not a good vacuum inside the bulb. The external light source heats one side of each vane to a higher temperature (than on the other, white, face). The expansion of the adjacent air pushes the vane and turns the little 'turnstile'.
In the (near-perfect) vacuum of space, the solar sail is accelerated only by a direct transfer of momentum. If a photon is absorbed, its momentum is transferred to the solar sail, and it imparts a small acceleration (okay, impulse).
But...if you have a reflective surface, then you get roughly twice as much momentum out of each photon. One kick comes from the incident photon, and one more from the departing reflected photon. (Conservation of momentum at work--if the sail sends a photon sunward with its associated packet of momentum, the sail itself must acquire momentum in the opposite direction.)
Can you expand on this? I've never heard of this, and I can't think of anything in my 40+ years of layman's reading on physics that could be expressed this way.
Here's a few links. Google for "gravitational redshift" and you'll get lots more.
Link.
Link.
To summarize, the gravitational redshift (or blueshift, for light falling into a gravitational potential well) is a real effect. It was demonstrated by Pound and Rebka at Harvard University in 1960. They used essentially monochromatic gamma ray photon sources at the top and bottom of an elevator shaft, and measured the shift in frequency for photons traversing the shaft each direction. Kudos to Einstein--General Relativity gets another check mark.
The problem now--aside from the fact that the word is being misused in the first place--is that the misapplication of the word ironic is by no means consistent from one instance to the next. We could try to change the meaning, but in order to encompass all of the new uses we would have to dilute the definition to utter uselessness.