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Comment Re:WWJD? (Score 1) 1168

Just a Dora The Explorer is a factual representation of the world of Dora The Explorer.

And would be a perfectly factual source for someone trying to figure out what Dora The Explorer would do. Yes. You're getting it.

By your definition a fact can be literally anything and of any relative value.

No, I'm saying that people usually say "what would Jesus do" as shorthand for "what would Jesus, as depicted in the Bible, do, based on these depictions".

a pointless distinction unless we're talking about a comparison to reality.

And what is that? Was Jesus a real person who's life Evangeliums record or an entirely fictional character? Luckily, we don't need to know this in order to answer the question "what would Jesus do?" We can simply assume a place, called "the world of Bible", and assume everything we know about the guy is true there. The price of this unified treatment for two mutually exclusive worlds is that the concept of "fact" becomes more complex with the addition of context: in which worlds is the fact true?

Not that you can avoid that complexity, since the very concept of imagining is really just a process of making these alternative worlds with different sets of true facts.

Comment Re:Contradiction in article summary (Score 1) 360

They are extras, and on a really good day they get a line and become a glorified extra. They have the talent to be better then most movie stars, but that's really common in LA.

I call bullshit. They can shoot their own show/movie/whatever and upload it to Youtube if they're really that good, or even any good.

It's a golden age of small-studio productions of all kinds, ranging from abridged anime series to original science fiction films to rap battles to My Little Pony rap battles. Saying you didn't get a chance to show your awesome talents is ridiculous.

Comment Re:AND they stole Halo from the PC world.... (Score 1) 85

The Games division is net -300-400M over the last 12 years, up significantly since Q4 2012 where they were net -3B and the XBox One's losses are significantly smaller than the previous two generations at the same point in the cycle despite the recent price cuts. I'm not sure how much knowledge sharing there's been between the gaming division and the Azure division, but if the MS marketing is anywhere near the truth then it's likely that at least some of that groups significant profitability was gained through experience in the gaming division (kind of like how GE can lose money on the generating part of a power plant but make money on the financing or vice versa depending on how they want to structure the deal).

Comment Re:Cannot regulate bitcoin in the traditional sens (Score 2) 31

It is a complicated technology

Bicoin is a distributed double-entry bookkeeping ledger where transactions need to be signed by the crediting account's (secret) key. And Bitcoin is also the (imaginary) currency unit used in said ledger.

Seriously, there's nothing there anyone who knows even the basics of accounting wouldn't recognize. It's just wrapped in a high-tech packaging.

Comment Re:Cause, or effect? (Score 1) 324

There you go, making sense again.

"These snooty scientists, what do they know?"

I was raised in a very poor family, one of the poorest in our city, but I have an IQ that's very high, and I always made good grades in school. I don't see the relationship between poverty and smaller brains, nor do I see the relationship between poverty and crime. Of course I was raised in a good family that wasn't trash.

"I'm very smart. I lifted myself up by my bootlaces. Anyone who doesn't is trash. Crime is done by criminals for for the evulz, and is thus not affected by economic circumstances."

Parental involvement makes more of a difference, and unmarried teens are simply not the best parents. Ask any teacher and they can tell you which students have parents who care.

"Teens having sex is bad. Children doing badly at schools is caused by parents not caring rather than working two full-time jobs to make ends meet."

Congratulations, I think you hit almost all popular right-wing talking points. All that's missing is some scaremongering about immigrants. Maybe you could work that into the bit about crime?

Comment Re:WWJD? (Score 5, Insightful) 1168

I have a serious problem with gay marriage, as marriage is a religious ceremony, so the state should stay out of it. Civil union is the state sponsored joining, and should be the proper avenue for the state to allow something that religion indicates is wrong.

The problem is, the state can't recognize marraige without defining it. If you agree that the religious ceremony has no legal significance (that is, married couples also need to get a civil union if they want the state to respect their union), then fine; but if you want your marriage ot mean anything to the state itself, the state can't avoid deciding what it considers a valid marriage - and then carrying the moral and legal responsibility for that decision, if it would happen to put citizens into different categories based on religious beliefs. Indeed, it would be forced to recognize an official religion that gets to choose.

So, the only way to get the state out of marriage is to go pure civil union route and ignore whatever religious or other ceremony anyone feels fit to add on their own time.

Comment Re:WWJD? (Score 1) 1168

Sincerely I cannot understand how this is modded informative. There is absolutely no factual data that supports what you just said. Sure, the bible implies what you described, but well, it's the bible, and the day we'll start to take the bible as "factual data" in Slashdot will be the day logic gets shattered to pieces.

The Bible gives data about the behaviour of biblical characters that is factual in the context of how these characters, as described in the Bible, would behave in a given situation. The grandparent was modded informative for making one such analysis.

In other words, Bible is a factual description of the World of Bible, which may or may not resemble the World of Average Slashdotter or World of Average American in some important ways. The same is true of all literary descriptions, whether meant as factual in the context of WoAA or not.

Comment Re:Wrong Focus (Score 0) 132

Chemical rocket engines dump heat into the exhaust gases but in a vacuum radiators have to be huge and heavy to get rid of significant amounts of heat from something like a nuclear reactor.

You could use a nuclear lightbulb style gas core reactor and either ablation or pure photon drive.

Comment Re:WIMPs (Score 1) 236

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "alter orbital structure and energy levels"?

I mean part of the electrostatic attraction between atomic nucleus and orbiting electrons should be countered by expansion of space between them, which in turn affects stable electron orbits. In fact all forces should get weaker with distance faster in an expanding space than in flat space.

Electromagnetic force is mediated by virtual photons, who's wavelength gets longer as space expands, thus sapping electromagnetism of some of its native strength and somewhat altering the lowest-energy point of all structures held together by it.

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