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Comment Re:This explains it! (Score 1) 356

You can distill helium out of the air. There's some left. The cost would be around 10x the cost of neon, though. And if you have to ask what neon costs...

Actually, people do distill some helium out of the air. It comes out with the neon as "noncondensing gases" in the column. Those gases get sold to some buyers of neon, who don't mind some extra helium in the gas. Neon signs aren't too picky, iirc.

Comment Re:when these genius people are 100% (Score 1) 226

Suppose you believe that to be the case, and then you observe such a coin landing on edge? In other words, what do you do when certain knowledge encounters an absurd event (unity prior vs impossible evidence)? There is no recovery from that, any more than you can say that infinity minus infinity is 5. The numbers one and zero do not behave like probabilities. In order to conclude that an even has certainty 1, you must observe infinitely strong evidence about it. Even in a math journal, a carefully reviewed published paper does not come close to infinite evidence.

Comment Re:when these genius people are 100% (Score 2) 226

For 100% certainty you need religion

Or math, the queen of all sciences (ducks from flames)

Really? I don't think 100% certainty means what you think it does. Have you ever made a mistake proving a theorem? Has a peer-reviewed published theorem ever later been found to have a mistake? Is it even remotely possible that it will happen in the future? If so, you need to assign a level of certainty to any given theorem: a probability that it has a mistake. As it gets used more a scrutinized more, that probability declines dramatically, but it can't reach zero. Zero and one are not probabilities. There's a big difference between 0.99999999, or any other finite number of nines, and infinite nines. For the same reasons that infinity is not a real number, zero and one are not probabilities or certainties.

Comment Re:What a surprise! (Score 4, Interesting) 214

EVERY HOUSE should have the option for affordable or free internet, its that important.

Free internet service? How does that happen? Oh, you mean "paid for by someone else". Is it really that important?

It's really hard to get a job without an Internet connection. Sure, it can be done, but it's harder. It's almost as important as having a phone number and address. Would it be cheaper to subsidize Internet access than to pay unemployment benefits? Or to forgo the taxes that get collected from people who are employed?

Comment Re:Fails in Chrome - works in Firefox (Score -1, Troll) 114

Works fine in Chrome. As I tell my users on a regular basis, there's a significant difference between "it doesn't work" and "it didn't work one time".

You are part of the reason that software sucks so badly.

"The software has errors" is still "the software has errors", even if some errors make their presence felt less frequently.

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