what exactly is your moronic argument?

because people can be framed the pursuit of justice can't proceed?

people have always attempted to pervert justice. that's not an argument against justice itself, it's just another thing that justice needs to be gotten for

The machine doesn't just go ping. It provides information about frequency, phase, polarization, and time of flight between two points.

LOL ... Temba, with his arms open!

OK, this is really big science ... and I just need a few more small words ...

We have two small widgets a known distance apart, these widgets are essentially fixed in place, but will wobble when acted upon by ... well, obviously gravity waves.

Since there's nothing big enough to make two things that far apart wobble at the same time (short of something very kinetic, which we'd measure through several other means) ... .. we infer that we have measured the passage of the only phenomenon which could make out widgets wobble? Shit.

So basically a long baseline widget wobbler which weighs waves of gravity. (Assuming of course the theory is right, the engineering is right, and these events happen often enough to measure.)

That's some wacky science right there. Still not sure I got it even close.

10,000 line functions are shockingly common in industry. Shit grows over time, and is so poorly written that you can't safely refactor it, and management lacks the balls to let you clean it up, so it just festers and festers.

I hear PayPal had 90% of their processing business logic in a single, multi-million-line class! Thankfully, I don't know that one first hand.

fair enough

but it's like pointless overheated arguments about what a "hacker" is

words evolve in meaning

troll has multiple meanings

Government will fuck you sideways for a laugh, then shoot your dog and seize your house. I'll take Google's arbitrary of government's malice any day.

Whatever your perspective on that, someone, somewhere has to rank search results. If Google becomes capricious, people will stop using them (I haven't used them to search in 5+ years). If some government controls search results, it will get worse every year, and never ever get fixed.

you can't get what you ask for

low grade twitter harassment is not going to be dealt with by the police

not all justice rises to the level of police and court involvement. it's not "vigilantism" if the stakes and consequences are low

you have standards which are unrealistic and will never be met, therefore you should read my words again and understand what schilling did is 100% appropriate and responsible

That is generally considered optimizing, not refactoring. By some definitions of refactoring I guess all optimizations are a form of refactoring, but that is almost never what someone means when they say refactoring.

One of the smartest men to ever live (Isaac Newton) was deeply religious, believed in scientific studying of the Bible, alchemy, and plenty of other ridiculous things. I'm as atheist as they come, but I still understand that very smart people can still have very ridiculous beliefs. Being religious in no way means you cannot refactor code properly.

but since all our theory and all our observation says it should be detecting them and only them, it's fairly safe to assume it's actually doing so

So, build me a fucking god detector. And when it goes off, I'm going to call bullshit like I'm calling here.

Look, I'm no physicist ... but surely someone can explain how a machine that goes "ping" is proof positive that it has detected the thing it claims to be detecting, no?

It's clearly something glaringly obvious that I'm too dense to understand ... but the mere fact that a machine goes "ping" doesn't mean it worked, or that it proved anything. It means people invested in saying "see, it went ping, therefore it worked" will be happy ... but the rest of us aren't sure how.

So, a big giant expensive machine goes ping ... and the only plausible explanation, because we have great theories and everybody did their part ... is gravitational waves?

I'm aware I'm not qualified to refute that fancy physics, but it seems like there's a step in there that could use some dumbing down for the rest of us.

Because, let's face it, with a simple light switch, I can build you a bullshit detector. It's demonstrating that it actually worked, instead of just being a light switch, which is the tricky part. ;-)

did you hear that folks?

because someone might get framed for murder, we can't go after real murderers

because someone might get falsely accused of rape, no rapist can ever be punished

because someone might get lynched by a hysterical mob, all acts of actual justice are invalid

genius

we're talking about targeted low grade comeuppance for bad behavior, directed at the actual douchebags who committed the bad behavior

we're not talking about targeting waves of completely innocent teenage girls for hysterical spasms of imagined delusional fantastic crimes, and then murdering them brutally

so no, sorry, your analogy sucks and you don't know what you're talking about

trolls are common pathetic cowards. they're middle school bullies in adult bodies if they aren't in fact actual middle school bullies. any effective defense against their lame efforts immediately chases them away like shining a light on a bunch of cockroaches

you're talking about another kind of douchebag: the stalker

but what gets the kind of person who becomes a celebrity stalker excited isn't avenging trolls

if curt schilling or his daughter attract an actual griefing stalker, it won't be because of this episode

and even then, the proper defense is the response he's already engaged in: a good offense. shut the shitbag down, hard, immediately. schilling sounds like he has his act together. his daughter will be protected and taken care of from the slime out there

So can anybody better versed in the physics fill this in a little: "an ultrasensitive instrument that may soon detect ripples in space and time set off when neutron stars or black holes merge".

If the machine goes ping, we infer the machine is working perfectly, and somewhere a neutron star or black hole has merged? But you have no independent confirmation other than the machine going ping?

So, set the damned thing to go ping, and claim you've found gravitational waves ... profit!!!

Seriously, I'm confused. Surely there has to be some other way to confirm the machine works than having it tell you it worked.

Or, you know ... Factoring-attack on RSA-Export Keys.

Seriously, there's a lot of different ways to do an acronym (or a backronym as this likely is).

My suggestion? Get over it.

Civil disobedience has ALWAYS carried the potential for punishment and if you break the law to make your point that the law is unjust you should stand ready to be arrested, imprisoned and tried in court for what you choose to do.

You assume he'd get a trial which was anything other than a secret kangaroo court, operating under secret laws, and that he'd get a fair trial.

When your government has decided it doesn't give a fuck about your laws and your Constitutional rights ... you don't stick around to "face the music".

The only way we'd have ever learned half as much is by him leaving.

And, curiously, the people who were breaking the fucking law in the first place have had pretty much zero repercussions.

Do you see Cheney up on charges? Or Bush? Or Obama? Or the head of the CIA?

Of course not, because those clowns are operating under a different set of laws than you and I do.

Face it, America is handling this like a banana Republic .. if the only thing the AG is promising is no death penalty, maybe the AG doesn't give a crap about the law, or the truth, just protecting the government when it shits all over the Constitution?

Face it, America is now being ran by people who don't believe the law applies to them. Which means you should be very angry with the people in power, and not enabling them to keep acting like this.