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Comment Re:Occam's razor. (Score 2) 85

Very interesting but kind of irrelevant since the question I was addressing asked if brown dwarf could be the famous "missing matter". What we have actually observed is the effects of a gravitational field, precisely what is causing that field to manifest itself we don't know, but we have known for a long time it's not an overabundance of brown dwarfs.

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 1) 341

I'm not an American but it seems to me that PACs are elegantly designed to obscure the money trail. I forget who suggested it but I think the idea of making senators more like sports stars is a good one, there would be no obfuscation since we would all be able to read their sponsors names on their jackets. I have nothing against lobbying, that's what grandma is doing when she writes a letter to her local rep. What I think we all have a problem with is that money buys access, by that I mean; unless grandma has a spare $5-50K lying around she will not be sitting at her local rep's table during a fundraiser.

Comment Re:Is this the missing "dark matter"? (Score 4, Interesting) 85

Exactly, we think of Jupiter as being huge but the Sun holds 98% of all the matter in our solar system. If the "missing mass" were normal cold matter, such a great quantity would effectively block the light of the stars we can see, astronomy would not exists because we wouldn't see anything except our own sun and moon.

Similar inane arguments were aimed at Newton, plenty of 15th century scholars thought that the fact a bird can fly disproved the theory of gravity. We still don't know what the hell gravity is (other than a property of matter) but we no longer question it's existence and have developed a very good understanding of how it behaves. Dark matter is harder to wrap one's head around because it's effects can not be observed in everyday human experience. However the effects are real and the tag scientists have given them is "dark matter".

Comment Occam's razor. (Score 3, Insightful) 85

Could it be that there's no dark matter, but that simply the galaxies are full of these things?

Could it be that all the cosmologists and physicist who have been looking at this for a couple of decades somehow missed that blindly obvious "possibility". Or is it more likely you are simply unaware of the evidence that forces these people to dismiss the obvious "common sense" answer?

Comment Australia is a rounding error (Score 1) 120

Publishers treat the entire continent of Australia as a rounding error!

250ms ping to a US/EU server is about average since very few of the major titles have servers in Oz, SE Asia or Hawaii is normally is good as it gets from the arse end of the Earth. You know you have a really clean connection if it's under 200ms.

The lag from Oz to anywhere else on the planet is largely a true physical limit imposed by the speed of light, no amount of bandwidth will fix it. Anything that "tricks the users brain" into not perceiving that lag would be welcome, 4X the data for a game won't be noticed with the average data cap we have here these days. OTOH since the birth of online gaming I've been trained by experience to lead my shots, so it does mean I would have to significantly adjust my playing style to take advantage of a lower ping.

Comment Re:I forced myself to watch it (Score 1) 300

but with censorship we would have that ugly little activity swept away under a rug where we don't have to remember that it happens

Please, people are beheaded or stoned to death every day in the ME and N Africa, nobody gives a flying fuck until it's a westerner's head. The staged execution clip is propaganda, it's clear intent is to divide and conquer through fear and xenophobia, why else would they choose an executioner with a british accent?

There is simply no rational reason to keep circulating enemy propaganda, people who do so are driven by fear and/or myopic ideological priorities. This is a proxy war between the Saudi's (Sunni's) and Iran (Shia), but the Saudi's have now seem to have realised they've created yet another frankenstein puppet. So far the world powers have been using brains to fight ISIS. let's hope that Russia, China, and the West keep using their brains in this conflict, because resuming the indiscriminate bombing of Iraqi cities will do nothing except entrench ISIS' 7th century ideology and governance into the local culture.

While on the subject of propaganda and hypocrisy, it's also convenient to western self-interest that this (and the MH17) story gained huge attention but the repeated bombing of a UN school in Gaza with US munitions is quietly "swept under the carpet". Where's the political outrage toward those acts that was starting to manifest itself as large street protests a couple of weeks ago?

Comment Re:Chokehold (Score 1) 102

don't get any public funding for smoking disease related heath care

Why not? They paid a lot more of the tax that funds it compared to (say) sugar addicts with bad hearts, bacon lovers with clogged ateries, or skateboarders with broken bones. All of those health problems are "self inflicted" and entirely avoidable but for some reason nanny state arseholes like you have a vendetta against smokers, you insist they pay an excessive "sin tax" and then demand they be denied any benifits from that tax. Fuck you and the holier than thou horse you rode in on.

Comment Re:market segmentation (Score 1) 276

My 51yo lady friend has 20K+ battles on WoT (desktop), I think that counts as a mature female gamer. For years she would not have anything to do with FPS games because of the blood and gore, but would play bridge online for hours, which I think also counts as a "gamer". I talked her into WoT because it's only tanks, not people, she was hooked for life in 30 minutes but still plays bridge every now and then.

Comment Re:Thermodynamics (Score 1) 80

How is the required ability to outshine said galaxy NOT a severe constraint?. The only thing this technique could possibly detect would be a Borg style alien civilization that has conquered and then overpopulated an entire galaxy, I'd say that puts a very tight constraint on the kind of aliens it can detect and a huge assumption that such galaxy wide civilizations are even possible in the first place. I think they should rename the project to A-HAT ( Aliens Harbouring Awesome Technology)

Comment Re:Conservatives hate Fred Phelps (Score 1) 130

Nobody liked Fred except the 100 brainwashed family members in his "congregation". I was thoroughly disappointed with the gay community's reaction to his death, I had been looking forward to a Brazilian style Mardi Gras at Fred's funeral. Turns out they have a lot more self respect and common decency than Fred, who knew?

Comment Re:Turn it around: (Score 3, Interesting) 130

The right to free speech does not mean a university has to provide the publishing infrastructure to make that speech. By logical extension of your standards universities must also provide spray cans so that students can spray paint their thoughts onto the campus buildings. Also Fred Phelps is not a defender of free speech , he's a serial pest who harrases people at family funerals, I really wish more of his victims used the "fighting words" defense as an excuse to beat the shit out of the repulsive little turd.

Comment Re:Thoughtcrime (Score 2) 391

Jebus, have none of you actually read Orwell? What you wrote is actually a pretty good example of "circumstantial evidence".

A "thought crime" is where certain thoughts are illegal. My favorite example is from Christopher Hitchens @4:00 - 4:30, worth watching the whole speech.

The defining feature of thought crime is that there is no physical act, no physical manifestation of a crime, just an "illegal thought", accessing a web site or making a speech is an action, it doesn't qualify. Of course in the book, the only way to really find out what Winston was thinking was to torture him with his greatest fear, a live rat chewing on his face.1984 is a precautionary tale about power and control, and there is no more "totalitarian" form of control than the ability to control what people think. You really ought to read it before trying to redefine the terminology. ;)

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