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Comment Re:So, a haiku, then? (Score 1) 66

It's just enough to alert people to the fact that something is happening, allowing them to go dig up details themselves.

Without any link to in-depth stories or sources, it is not going to be used by those who want more information than what amounts to a tweet.
This is for Generation ADHD.

I'm just surprised they won't drop the text altogether and use a 5 second video snippet.

Comment Re:More flaws (Score 3, Interesting) 546

It smells of domestic propaganda when the US has upcoming elections.

I'm not sure it has anything to do with the elections, but it sure has a putrid smell of wanting to justify condemning Snowden as a traitor, pointing to "evidence" that he did harm.
Which, coming from organizations that have been proven to lie to us by the same Snowden doesn't seem all that credible without anything to back it up except their word. I know just how much value I put on their word.

It's also rather unclear how they can say that the intel came from Snowden, and not, say, someone hacking into a system, or a real mole turning info over. How could they possibly know the source, given that the intel likely is duplicated in hundreds of places?

Comment Re: Harvard law school ... (Score 1) 348

Everyone doesn't hate Harvard. We hate being screwed over by people whose parents paid for them to go to Harvard and who think that manipulating markets to their own advantage and ruining the economy fur their own gain is a God-given right.

Yeah, those damn engineers screwing people over...

I don't blame people for their parents being rich. I do blame parents who send their kids to expensive schools.

If the overall level of engineering education rises as a result of this gift, great!
We don't get to decide what others donate to. Bitch too much about their giving, and they'll just stop giving, and that's not an improvement.
Have you willingly donated to a poorer engineering school lately?

Comment Re:This is why France doesn't do startups (Score 1) 422

News flash. The Dems controlled until last election both the U S Senate and presidency.

This might be news to you, but to most of the world, US democrats are republicans. They may not be Republicans with a capital R, but they certainly are republicans, and far to the right of what's considered the center in most countries.

Comment Re:Might Be Snake Oil (Score 1) 82

There are only two double-blind studies with results in that list, and one of them only had 9 participants, leaving only one result:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2...

It's not large scale, though - 331 participants.

And that one is for treating a problem that exists in the brain, not the body. And worse, it has no fewer than 35(!) secondary outcome measures. This is p-hunting at its worst. With that many outcomes, there's a statistical near-certainty that there will be one or more "significant" findings. You could test people for drinking 35 different sodas and find a statistical significant result for one of them versus a disease.

Color me not convinced. This smells of snake oil and bad science. That there are that many studies, most of them for ailments that are especially prone to natural variations, and yet not a single focused one that show positive results says all you need to know.
This is zone therapy and chiropracty for the new millennium.

Comment Re:Puzzled (Score 1) 73

I should have said that the mass of an attracted object is irrelevant if the attractor is stationary. Like, one presumes, said McD station was thought to be.

When the relative difference in mass between two objects go towards infinity, the amount of influence the mass of the lighter object has goes towards zero. The pull a car has on earth, an astronaut on the moon, or a star on a galactic center black hole is so small that for all purposes they can be disregarded, and the greater objects be considered stationary.

Comment Re:Puzzled (Score 2, Informative) 73

it does seem to work like this, with bodies of larger mass being attracted to it with greater force!

Jokes aside, you're perpetuating a false belief.
It should be well known by now that gravity does not accelerate heavier objects any faster than lighter objects. The mass of the bodies is irrelevant if non-zero.
Ref Gallileo's alleged demonstration at the tower of Pisa.

Comment Re:older generation is totally clueless about tech (Score 1) 135

The people who designed the SR-71 are at the top end of their generation's technological bell curve. The people who sponsored it are at the bottom end.

So what you're saying is that those who designed the SR-71 were mediocre and those who sponsored it were a mix of geniuses, idiots and anything in-between?

If you're on the top end of a bell curve, your possible deviation is as low as it can be. You are mediocre, belonging to the largest segment of the population.

If you're at the bottom end of a bell curve, your possible deviation is as high as it can be. There's no telling. You may be a genius or you might be an idiot.

Anyhow, what's pretty clear is that most of those who designed and sponsored the SR-71 are dead.

Comment Re:Ruining it for the rest of us (Score 1, Insightful) 95

What makes me mad in this case is that the pilot is ruining it for everyone else. Every time an idiot does something like this, it's going to contribute to locking down the ability for everyone else to fly them.

I'm good with that. I don't want have to build an opaque dome over my property to keep privacy. And I don't want to become collateral damage of a drone strike either.

Comment Re:questions (Score 1) 408

Again, you fail to understand how statistics work, trying to address the single items, instead of the problem, which is that there is any fucking numbers of unforeseen things that can happen.

No matter how unlikely any single instance is to happen, or how easily it can be solved, there as such an enormous number of them, that they cannot be addressed due to the sheer scale.

Even if there's only 0.01% chance for an unexpected event happening any given minute, multiply that with the number of minutes and number of cars, and you'll end up with a huge number.

You can't solve that problem from the bottom up, addressing specifics.

Comment Re:Well duh (Score 2) 44

No shit. I'd expect a world class physicist who was involved in the top-secret development of the nuclear bomb would attract a bit more scrutiny than a vocal anti-religious advocate and author. One of these things is not like the other things...

True. A few hundred years down the road, I am sure that Hitchens will be remembered as one of the great pioneers for mankind to throw off its yoke.

Comment Re:Back seats have windows in the door (Score 1) 435

Many of us have adjusted our side mirrors correctly, to point far more outwards than what most people do. Or even attach dead angle mirrors.
The rear view mirror is for a rear view - the side mirrors are for watching what's diagonally to the side. If you can see the side of your own car in the side mirrors, you're doing it wrong.

Never depend on being able to watch out the rear side window. That's a bad habit you need to stop. It may be blocked or not even there (pickup trucks). And by turning your head, you lose sight of what's even more dangerous - what's ahead of you.

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