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Comment Re:... How can they even watch the internet? (Score 2) 63

I had occipital lobe epilepsy (i.e. in the visual cortex), and while seizures began with visual hallucinations, I was never susceptible to flashing lights. There was no response to them even on an EEG.

The strangest case of a trigger I ever heard was the woman who had seizures every time she heard the voice of Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight.

Comment Re:Solar *activity* not *output* (Score 3) 249

Can you imagine solar irradiance falling by 60% over 30 years?

Radiance is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. That's a huge dependence, so timothy and sycodon have got that going for them. Even so, we know the temperature of the photosphere is 5777 K. Since 5777 * (1 - sqrt(sqrt(1-0.6))) / (2030 - 2015) = 80, that implies an 80 degree drop every year across the entire sun, which would have been noticed a long time ago.

These two are skeptical that Earth's atmosphere might be several degrees warmer decades from now, and they're ready to back that up with a claim that the sun's entire atmosphere is cooling down 80 degrees every year.

And they cite a paper that didn't imply that at all. What are these guys smoking?

Comment Re:Let me guess. (Score 4, Insightful) 249

OK, I looked into it a bit longer than sycodon and timothy apparently did, and I take that back. It doesn't appear that Valentina Zharkova is being funded by the Koch brothers or anything like that. Rather, these two misinterpreted her work to suggest that a 60% fall in magnetic solar activity means the sun's brightness will fall by 60%. Which is somewhat ironic for the following reasons-
  1. The sun actually gets slightly brighter when solar magnetic activity falls, because of the lack of sunspots.
  2. Carbon dioxide has an atmospheric half-life of about 10,000 years, so a "60% fall in solar output" over a timescale of decades won't mean much for long.
  3. The core isn't powering down (which would take approx. one million years to become evident at the surface, because the radiosphere is fully ionized and doesn't undergo convection, which means photons reach the radiopause via a random walk process). Any variation in solar output will be tempered by the stability of the heat entering the convective zone.
  4. A fall in solar output by 60% would guarantee a following rise afterwards, because of the conservation of energy, and ignoring a rise in CO2 for this reason would eventually backfire.

So this is probably decent research, but unfortunately every right wing nut job out there is going to desperately sink their fingernails into this and deny that rising CO2 is a problem. From reading the comments of the submitter, it doesn't seem that we're dealing with a scientific genius here.

Comment Re:Paranoia (Score 1) 431

It is more stable when wet than when dry, but I observed some going off, all by itself, in the bottom of a beaker of water sitting on my bookshelf.

Water may blunt the physical shocks, but it isn't stable under water- it has to remain under an ammonia solution. I suspect it forms some sort of NI3-NH3 complex. Pure water will abscond with most of the ammonia. When it dries out on a paper towel, I think it's the ammonia evaporating that causes the sensitivity, not the water. (Like I said, good information on this crap is hard to find... most of the research on it is done by teenagers, not chemists.)

Comment Re:Paranoia (Score 2) 431

It seems pretty stable if you keep it under ammonia. In fact I had some in a bottle of ammonia for a few weeks. I uncovered it later and was really surprised- the black powder had undergone some sort of metamorphosis into these large bright orange opaque crystals, kind of pretty looking actually. I still don't know what that stuff was; and never found any information ever since. I guess people don't do much research into nitrogen triiodide.

Comment Re:Paranoia (Score 4, Interesting) 431

Vitamin C is a reducing agent and makes a pretty good explosive if you have an oxidizer, even a mild one like a nitrate salt. It has an electron pair that it's dying to get rid of.
I used to make nitrogen triiodide out of iodine and ammonia. In an excess of ammonia it seemed pretty stable, but once the stuff dries out, a feather can make it detonate. I'd leave a soaked paper towel in front of some other kid's house, run off, and once it dried... kaboom! So of course, I spilled it on my shirt once, and the crystals were already going snap-crackle-pop before I could take it off. I remember my mother asking why my shirt was making such a racket.

Submission + - XKEYSCORE: NSA'S Google for the World's Private Communications (firstlook.org)

Advocatus Diaboli writes: "The NSA’s ability to piggyback off of private companies’ tracking of their own users is a vital instrument that allows the agency to trace the data it collects to individual users. It makes no difference if visitors switch to public Wi-Fi networks or connect to VPNs to change their IP addresses: the tracking cookie will follow them around as long as they are using the same web browser and fail to clear their cookies. Apps that run on tablets and smartphones also use analytics services that uniquely track users. Almost every time a user sees an advertisement (in an app or in a web browser), the ad network is tracking users in the same way. A secret GCHQ and CSE program called BADASS, which is similar to XKEYSCORE but with a much narrower scope, mines as much valuable information from leaky smartphone apps as possible, including unique tracking identifiers that app developers use to track their own users."

also

"Other information gained via XKEYSCORE facilitates the remote exploitation of target computers. By extracting browser fingerprint and operating system versions from Internet traffic, the system allows analysts to quickly assess the exploitability of a target. Brossard, the security researcher, said that “NSA has built an impressively complete set of automated hacking tools for their analysts to use.” Given the breadth of information collected by XKEYSCORE, accessing and exploiting a target’s online activity is a matter of a few mouse clicks. Brossard explains: “The amount of work an analyst has to perform to actually break into remote computers over the Internet seems ridiculously reduced — we are talking minutes, if not seconds. Simple. As easy as typing a few words in Google.”

Comment The worst reviews on Amazon (Score 5, Insightful) 116

"I have to give this book one star because I ordered it and it never arrived on time even though Amazon said it left the facility six days before it was supposed to get here!"

"This book is typical LIBTARD crap and if you buy it you're a stupid egghead."

"I haven't read a book in five years so when this book came out I decided to buy it. This isn't the book I thought I was ordering, this is crap written by a different guy with a similar name! Buyer beware!"

Is it really that hard to get a computer to pick these out?

Comment Re:Two questions need to be asked (Score 1) 546

Because he is the one that arrogantly ignored the democratic process, stole a massive store of intelligence documents, incompetently encrypted them, and made them available for friend and foe alike, and then fled to be among Americas adversaries. Surely you must see some room for assigning culpability to him?

Our own government "ignored the democratic process". Even the author of the Patriot Act says the NSA is abusing the law by collecting (i.e. stealing) such a large amount of their citizens' private information.

The NSA didn't make the documents available to China and Russia. Snowden did.

You're overlooking the fact that the NSA and its allies are the ones who made Snowden available to Russia in the first place.

You mean the copies of the phone records of many, but not all, Americans? That was repeatedly authorized, including by courts.

Once again, I refer you to the author of the Patriot Act, who says: "No public court has ever upheld document collection that is remotely close to the dragnet at issue. . . . The administration therefore admits that its bulk collection is unprecedented."

CONGRESS. Snowden could have gone to CONGRESS. He didn't.

If he was that naive, he'd be spending the rest of his life in solitary confinement, and we'd still be in the dark.

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