What's your point? A wrong calculation giving numbers that match the data but ignoring well-known physics (such as bound states) is still a wrong calculation.

No one has "identified" anything. This is a paper with a proposal, an idea, a hypothesis. Behind it lie a rather gigantic pile of assumptions and parameters to fit the data. It's long been speculated that Dark Matter may not be simple, but rather could be as complicated as the visible spectrum (which contains electrons, photons, atoms, and the entire periodic table). But there's a huge problem with making predictions in a strongly interacting theory: you generally can't. "Strong interactions" mean that most computations do not converge. For instance we cannot, from first principles, calculate the mass of any atomic nuclei.

So this means the "dark matter sector" contains essentially a whole periodic table of stuff, and we're hopelessly unable to compute anything. This paper in particular ignores the possibility of bound states (e.g. atoms, mesons, etc) in the dark matter sector, which IMHO is just silly especially with strong interactions.

And instead you get to wait 4 days for transactions to settle. You'll never know your balance! It's fun!

Bitcoin, people. The answer is bitcoin.

Wikipedia is usually a good reference. These two articles talk about it. It's the oldest evidence for "dark matter". Either that or it's evidence that gravity doesn't behave entirely the way described by Einstein. The latter view has fallen out of favor due to the lack of good theories adopting that viewpoint. The former has fallen into favor due to the copious selection of theories containing a particle with little or no interactions (it's easy to do). Neither of these theory-spaces has been proven to be correct (yet).

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve

Well yes but if I had typed all that in my original post it would not have been as pithy and interesting. I'm not just hearing about this, I've written many academic papers on it, and I have serious reservations about the idea. *sigh* back to work...

Let's have some fun. Also remember that luminiferous aether was an idea that was around for a long time as well. Dark matter is a difficult-to-disprove fad, without any real competing ideas. That will not always be the case.

Hey look, it's $something_we_dont_understand, and ooh, I can claim it's evidence for $todays_fad!

Astrophysics is big, messy, complicated, and difficult to measure. We just can't send probes to other galaxies to see what's really going on. Most of the time these things have more mundane explanations. But, until we figure out why galactic rotation curves are wonky, everyone will claim everything is due to dark matter.

I've been using GPG for more than a decade, but in recent years I've stopped signing my messages because it often trips up poorly-configured spam filters. That, combined with the fact that you can't be certain that the recipient has received or read a message makes using GPG (and potentially losing your email) risky.

While "read receipts" exist in many proprietary formats, we need it to be standardized and deployed globally. Hey, let's use our GPG keys to do it?

I've always wondered whether Bitcoin actually originated with the CIA, NSA, or Federal Reserve (or analogous agencies in other countries), or maybe a major bank.

I mean, it's a brilliant kind of experiment. Let it loose in the wild and see how it behaves, as a prelude to adopting an official, government backed version, using the lessons learned from Bitcoin. It's the kind of thing you want to have in the wild, to see what people do with it, before adopting something in an ad-hoc and flawed way (like credit cards..).

BTRFS and ZFS both do checksumming and can detect bit-rot. If you create a RAID array with them (using their native RAID capabilities) they can automatically correct it too. Using rsync and unison I once found a file with a nice track of modified bytes in it -- spinning rust makes a great cosmic ray or nuclear recoil detector. Or maybe the cosmic ray hit the RAM and it got written to disk. So, use ECC RAM.

But "bit-rot" occurs far less frequently than this: I find is that on a semi-regular basis my entire filesystem gets trashed (about once every year or three). This happened to me just last week...my RAID1 BTRFS partitions (both of them) got trashed because one of my memory modules went bad. In the past I've had power supplies go bad causing this, or brown outs, and in other cases I never identified the cause. I've seen this happen across ext3, jfs, xfs, and btrfs so it's (probably) not the file system's fault. In such cases, fsck will often make the problem worse. (Use LVM and its "snapshot" feature to perform fsck on a snapshot without destroying the original). You'd think these advanced filesystems would have a way to rewind to a working copy (for instance in BTRFS -- mount a previous "generation") but this seems to not be the case.

Anyway, btrfs guys, your recovery tools could be a lot better. The COW enables some pretty fancy recovery techniques that you guys don't seem to be doing yet. If you've got a great btrfs or zfs recovery technique, please reply and tell us.

Brilliant. Every time I've been forced to not pick up poop, it was because I didn't have a bag, not because I wanted to (and where possible I always go back and get it later). I've had my dog shit three times on one walk. I'm really tired of hearing "solutions" to problems created by psychopaths. This "solution" using poop and DNA utterly lacks empathy towards dog owners, and that's what psychopaths do. There are better ways.

You've obviously never owned a dog. Sometimes your dog shits twice and you only have one bag. Sometimes you're rushing to work. Sometimes you can't find the shit.

Don't be a dick. This (and your) response is that of a psychopath.

Because a dick measuring contest is the best way to resolve disputes. Everyone is being a dick here. Take the high road, don't be a dick.

Wow, what a wonderful way to improve the already adversarial relationship between property managers and tenants. No thanks, I'll live elsewhere. If it were my building, I'd quietly have maintenance clean up any poop they found, and verbally remind tenants if they catch them in the act.

It will not take "a generation" to make the shift. It will take a systematic change in the hiring and funding priorities of universities, labs, and grant agencies. A faculty candidate who has chosen to publish only in open access journals (with no articles in Science or Nature or other "prestigious" journals) needs to be able to win the job over another candidate with publications in "prestigious" journals. Likewise, a researcher must be able to win a grant over other researchers under the same circumstances.

Currently, choosing to publish in open-access journals is arguably career suicide.