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Comment Re:Dark matter and the sniff test (Score 5, Insightful) 85

I'm just a lowly engineer, but for me "dark matter" has never passed the sniff test.

And yet it seems like most physicists - of whom I am not one - seem to think it is the simplest explanation for what we see.

The quote in the summary sums up, for me, the somewhat churlish attitude some people adopt when faced with dark matter:

There seems to be a formula for this very specific extraordinary claim: point your high-energy telescope at the center of a galaxy or cluster of galaxies, discover an X-ray or gamma ray signal that you can't account for through conventional, known astrophysics, and claim you've detected dark matter! Only, these results never pan out;

Of course they have never panned out - so far. If one of them had panned out, we would have stopped looking. Your keys are always in the last place you look.

Photons started out their theoretical life as a kludge factor to solve the ultraviolet catastrophe (great band), and people were appalled by the idea.

Comment Re:What, what? Something's wrong here. (Score 4, Insightful) 66

It's not a bad thing to be extra cautious around buzz words.

Dark matter isn't a buzz word, at least not to the people who are actually trying to discover if it exists, and what it is. It's a hypothesis, or a class of hypotheses.

Dark Matter feels like a fudge factor for our ability to observe the universe or our models of it.

You could say that about anything that was hypothesised before it was confirmed - the atomic nucleus, photons, quantum mechanics.

Hey, these numbers don't add up- just stick in another variable.

And then see if the new model is a better match for observations, work out if there are any other consequences of the new variable, search for experimental evidence of those consequences... AKA science.

Is it more likely that there is a magic unobservable substance that makes our models correct or that our models need tuning?

That the model needs tuning is already given, because we've got observations that the model can't explain, so there's no "or" about it. The "magic unobservable substance" seems to be the best explanation anyone's been able to come up with so far.

Comment Re:BGP? (Score 2) 57

I don't think BGP is simple enough for a non-nerd...

Since when did "nerd" only cover people who understand BGP? I don't remember that on the entrance exam...

Heaven forbid anyone should be allowed to come away from reading a story on Slashdot more informed. Can't be having that!

A simple, painless expansion of an acronym would at least give every reader a fighting chance at a rough guess of what it does, or at least what it relates to.

Comment Wood LED clock doesn't look Photoshopped to me (Score 1) 113

A faux-wood cube clock ($38). This is interesting mostly for looking like a visual impossibility -- how can the digital numbers appear on the side of a block of wood, even fake wood?

Because it's a fairly thin veneer and the LEDs beneath are extremely bright. Same way my PVR makes text appear on what otherwise looks like an opaque brushed metal surface (though why they have to be brighter than my TV is beyond me - I ended taking the thing apart and putting some ND filter in it).

Unfortunately I think the photo is doctored, because this youtube video shows an undoctored shot of the cube clock, and you can easily see the un-illuminated LEDs on the side, which don't quite blend in with the wood.

I can barely see anything in that 360p overly compressed YouTube video.

Comment Re:It won't be long (Score 1) 325

Well, if you can't be bothered to help me understand your point...

Incidentally, the question "does flying a drone inside restricted airspace increase the probability of an incident of any kind?" was rhetorical, and not just because flying a drone into restricted airspace probably counts as an "incident" in itself.

You seem to think it's basically no problem at all to have drones flying around in restricted airspace, based solely on the instinct of the pilots to safeguard their toys. There are plenty of good reasons why this wouldn't be a good idea, even if you could trust a drone pilot to try to keep a "safe" distance.

Comment On the perils of copy/pasting (Score 1) 125

If you have tried the live images of Ubuntu Next you may worry that Canonical is trying to do a Windows 8 with Ubuntu. That's not true.

Oh, good, so no need to worry then.

There is no need to worry though

You just told me there was no need to worry when you said it wasn't true; now I'm worried that you keep telling me not to worry.

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