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User: exp(pi*sqrt(163))

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  1. Re:Usenet is dead. on US ISPs Announce Anti-Child-Porn Agreement · · Score: 1
    Well here's a really bad one. Check out what that kid's doing with the elephant:

    Oh, /. doesn't let me drag and drop pictures.

  2. Re:Usenet is dead. on US ISPs Announce Anti-Child-Porn Agreement · · Score: 1
    Ever noticed those posts that look a bit like this:

    TWFuIGlzIGRpc3Rpbmd1aXNoZWQsIG5vdCBvbmx5IGJ5IGhpcyByZWFzb24sIGJ1dCBieSB0aGlz IHNpbmd1bGFyIHBhc3Npb24gZnJvbSBvdGhlciBhbmltYWxzLCB3aGljaCBpcyBhIGx1c3Qgb2Yg dGhlIG1pbmQsIHRoYXQgYnkgYSBwZXJzZXZlcmFuY2Ugb2YgZGVsaWdodCBpbiB0aGUgY29udGlu dWVkIGFuZCBpbmRlZmF0aWdhYmxlIGdlbmVyYXRpb24gb2Yga25vd2xlZGdlLCBleGNlZWRzIHRo ZSBzaG9ydCB2ZWhlbWVuY2Ugb2YgYW55IGNhcm5hbCBwbGVhc3VyZS4=

    Well they're child porn. (Except that example wasn't.)

  3. That's good on NASA Drone's Sensors Battle California Wildfires · · Score: 2, Funny

    That half a degree accuracy really helps when you're trying to decide whether it's a conflagration or just a fire.

  4. Re:One reason: on Steven Hawking Considering Move To Canada · · Score: 1
    > From what I hear, free healthcare in Canada isn't all it's cracked up to be.

    Well instead of going by stuff you hear, why not check out objective facts like Canadian and American life expectancies and infant mortality rates where you'll find that Canada scores significantly higher than the US.

  5. Re:who in their right mind on Steven Hawking Considering Move To Canada · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    You clearly know nothing about Hawking and nothing about people who do research. It beggars belief that someone as ignorant as you thought that your comment was worth putting on display for other people to read. What is this? Youtube?

  6. Quarterstaffs being... on Nintendo Unveils Wii MotionPlus · · Score: 1

    ...ordinary everyday objects that make a suitable reference point when describing your controller. Only D&D players would think to call a stick a quarterstaff. A stick by any other name...

  7. Use the best tool for the job on Should the Linux Desktop Be "Pure?" · · Score: 1

    Anything else is just religion.

  8. Re:I am looking for a physicist here... on New Particle Found, the Bottom-Most Bottomonium · · Score: 1
    I've no idea what you're talking about. The rules for what groups quarks can exist in are simple enough that they could be explained to a child. The weirdest thing about QM is the way people repeat the mantra "QM is weird". There are some weird things about QM, but the rules for combining quarks are straightforward, Unfortunately, because of people like you blathering on with the same old mantra, people feel like they might as well turn off their brains even when the simplest things are explained to them that have nothing to do with the weirdness of QM.

    Quarks come in three flavours, red, green and blue. They aren't actually red, green and blue. Those are just names given to them by analogy with the way you can mix colours. Mix red, green and blue light in equal proportions and you get white light. The idea is that standalone particles made of quarks must be 'white'. (And again, just in case you've really turned your brain off here, this is just an analogy.) So a red, green and blue quark can combine to form a quark, but two reds and a green can't because the corresponding light colour would be reddish, not white. There's an extra complication because you can have antiquarks and their colours combine negatively. So a blue quark and a blue anti-quark cancel out and also give white and so are a legal combination of quarks.

    ANother way to check if a quark combination is legal: count up the number of red quarks with antiquarks contributing -1 instead of 1 to the total. Call the total r. Make similar totals g for the number of green quarks and b for the number of blue quarks. If r, g and b aren't equal then you can't have a particle using that combination.

    Now, what the hell is so weird about that? Your head must explode whenever you contemplate the idea that traffic stops on a red light and moves on a green light?

  9. Re:Huh? on New Particle Found, the Bottom-Most Bottomonium · · Score: 1
    By your argument, no particle could ever annihilate its own antiparticle, and yet particle-antiparticle annihilation is a well observed phenomenon.

    The lowest bound state of a particle-antiparticle pair is not, as you claim, stable, but depending on what happens when you run the numbers for any particular type of particle, it may be live for long enough to be observed in the lab. Ultimately it's going to decay from the lowest bound state to a pair of photons. No such decay is going to happen with protons and electrons because even when they do 'crash' nothing comes of it.

  10. Re:Since when was there a requirement for truth... on Mother Sues After Bebo Story Hits Press · · Score: 1

    You can hope, but precedents set in American courts have a habit of occasionally creeping over the Atlantic.

  11. Since when was there a requirement for truth... on Mother Sues After Bebo Story Hits Press · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...in reporting? Maybe they do things differently in the UK, but certainly in the US, as Fox News demonstrated, there's no such legal requirement.

  12. Re:You mean... on Louisiana Passes Intelligent Design Law · · Score: 1

    Both of these creeds play an important part in their respective religions. Judaism has the Shemah but it really doesn't play the same role because there's nothing like Romans 3:28 in Judaism, or many other religions for that matter.

  13. Re:You mean... on Louisiana Passes Intelligent Design Law · · Score: 2, Insightful

    More generally, it's a quirk of fate that the two religions that make a big deal of belief happen to be the ones that dominate the news (Christianity and Islam) giving the warped view that belief, and especially *correct* belief, is a necessary part of religion. But it's not true of Buddhism, or Judaism, or most brands of pre-Christian polytheism or many other religions.

  14. Re:what does it all mean, Basil? on Prominent Mathematicians Rebuke Recent Riemann Hypothesis Proof · · Score: 1

    And you're mixing your tenets and your tenants which makes for entertaining reading.

  15. Malfunction! on A Grand Day Out For British Rocketman · · Score: 1
    > so that travellers can be safely landed even in the unlikely event of a major rocket malfunction.

    Well the obvious malfunction that comes to my mind requires the ejection system to be able to eject passengers faster than the shockwave of an exploding fireball. Out of curiosity - how many astronauts have been saved by the ejection systems on their vehicles?

  16. Re:Algorithms... bah! on Algorithm Names Powell 'Ideal' Vice President Candidate · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Using a technique that is rational can be a perfectly good way to predict behavior that is irrational. You're falling for an elementary fallacy, that if an adjective applies to something then the adjective must apply to a study of it. But just as there's no need for a simulation of a fast car to be fast, or for a book on color to be written in color, there's no necessary reason for a prediction of irrational behavior to be rational. If you can detect trends in the actions of irrational people then there are trends. It's that simple. In fact, the take home message from studies of irrational behavior that economists have been making lately is that even though people may seem to act irrationally (ie. fail to maximise what you think should be their utility) their behavior is nonetheless still often predictable (once you take into account irrational factors such as envy or short term influences like the phrasing of questions).

  17. Re:Ever tried writing Palm applications? on What Happened To Palm? · · Score: 1
    In the old days of Atari and Amiga programming you felt like you were doing 32-bit programming (compared to the 6502, where I came from) but people would get annoyed if you said that and point out that the data bus was 16-bit and that therefore the CPU was 16-bit. It was definitely blurry.

    Anyway, check out the mess you have to deal with when mixing CPUs. "There are a couple of different ways to get it [ARM code] into a .prc file" it says, because you quite simply can't make a mixed CPU executable and you have to hack the ARM part in as raw binary data. "Include the ARM code directly in your application's source as integer arrays." Just like how we used to store assembly language routines in BASIC code.

  18. Re:Ever tried writing Palm applications? on What Happened To Palm? · · Score: 1

    I was talking about the transition from 68000 (commonly, but maybe misleadingly, described as 16-bit) to ARM, a transition that I think still isn't complete, and that leaves developers having to cobble together fragments of code for different processors with little support from the OS.

  19. Ever tried writing Palm applications? on What Happened To Palm? · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Worse development platform ever. 16 bit CPU. Segmented memory model. Eventually a 32 bit CPU but the OS is still emulated 16 bit and you essentially have to hack in 32 bit routines (with endianness swapping) like the way you used to make USR() calls from BASIC to your assembly language routines. Want to write an application that adapts to any (possibly dynamically sized) sized screen on any Palm device? Keep working at it, maybe you'll get there eventually. Want to multitask? More or less impossible. Want to access Palm files and databases like a regular file system? Sorry, no can do. So don't even think of using the libraries you thought were portable that you'd developed elsewhere.

    When Palm started they had these piddly little 68000 CPUs and less than a meg of RAM. They did the right thing - they followed the Zen of OS design and produced a minimal OS that performed amazingly on such a machine. But recent Palm machines are way more powerful than the workstations I used to have on my desktop. You can't control a beast like that with a toy OS. The MS strategy was correct after all - write a slow bloated OS because one day, in the not too distant future, it will cease to seem slow and bloated on fast new devices without anyone having to change a line of code. Maybe there's a message there: take into account what's available today, but make sure you're writing code in such a way that it'll last as long as you expect your business to last.

    And after countless years, did Palm *ever* write a tool that allowed you to find out what was actually stored on your Palm? None of the Palms I ever owned had such a feature.

  20. Re:Government should not be involved at all on Where To Draw the Line With Embryo Selection? · · Score: 1

    After they've had a few spliffs there's no telling what font your kids might use.

  21. Re:Minsky's Emotion Machine on "Wisdom of Crowds" Works For Individuals Too · · Score: 1
    > That is why there is a difference between blitz chess and tournament chess

    You needed the pseudoscientific research of a charlatan like Minsky to figure out why blitz chess and tournament chess are different? Minsky so has you in the palm of his hand that he's convinced you that you need his help to understand something that you already know and understand and have understood since childhood. As long as people like Minsky can convince intelligent people like you that you are ignorant, as he's clearly done so here, he'll continue getting away with his charlatanry.

  22. How meaningless can you get? on Firefox 3 Already Rules the Roost · · Score: -1, Troll
    Open source zealots are such a bunch of losers. The attempt to show these spurious statistics in a positive light is like something I'd expect from Fox 'News'.

    > one site is seeing 55% of its Firefox-using visitors

    One site? Big f***ing deal. Does anyone give a sh*t about some obscure UK PC magazine? And the next line compares the usage of IE7 vs. older versions of itself against Firefox 3.0 vs. itself. What kind of cack-handed contortion of a statistic is that? If Firefox were an MS product, and IE were OSS, this would be reported as evidence that IE achieved stability long ago and that users were desperate to get to Firefox 3.0 because of the persistent bugs seen in previous versions.

    Does anyone with an IQ of higher than 17, and without an ax the size of an elephant to grind, work on these stories?

  23. Re:Here's what I believe on Supreme Court Holds Right to Bear Arms Applies to Individuals · · Score: 1

    Nobody has ever taken money off me at gunpoint to pay for healthcare. Where do you live? North Korea?

  24. Re:Good; Gun "Control" is bad on Supreme Court Holds Right to Bear Arms Applies to Individuals · · Score: 1
    > Police aren't there to defend you

    Well that's pretty crap. Frankly, I have a life to live and a job to do. I pay people to collect the trash, fix my plumbing, deliver the mail and produce my food. I can't spend my life doing these things myself. And I don't see why I should have to take on the onerous task of defending myself as well when you can have a trained force of people who can become expert in such things and do it better for you. No, I'm happy to leave my weapons at the door when I enter the part of the world known as civilisation knowing that most other people have done so as well.

  25. Oh for God's sake... on Google Begat the End of the Scientific Method? · · Score: 1

    ...it's a Wired article. What more could there possibly be to discuss?