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Comment Re:Nobel? (Score 3, Interesting) 288

I think Seth Rogen and James Franco should make dictator-mocking their shtick- they're way more likely to succeed with that strategy than anything they'll dream up by themselves. The jokes practically write themselves; in fact KJU is the only interesting character in this movie. So here are some ideas for sequels:
  • Benjamin Netanyahu: While on a trip to congratulate Netanyahu for winning a beauty pageant, Rogen and Franco realize that he won by launching missiles at all the other contestants.
  • Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi: Rogen and Franco are held hostage by the ISIS leader until he realizes that nobody in the U.S. cares if their heads get chopped off.
  • Vladimir Putin: Rogen and Franco score an interview with the shirtless ruthless dictator. Unfortunately Franco enters the country with a dollar bill in his pocket and inadvertently causes a currency crisis. Then one day Rogen drinks tea laced with polonium 210 and things get wild.

Comment Re:Didn't they announce it? (Score 1) 206

Once the Trans Pacific Partnership goes through, the North Korean government can be sued by Comcast for failing to honor the company's right to throttle bandwidth across the North Korean border. There will be a "fast lane", but also an "extra fast lane" which will allow Kim Jong Un to watch The Interview through a gateway that uses TWO 56K modems instead of just one. If North Korea does opt for a fast lane, the NSA will have only half the time to flag his tweets as Inappropriate before they finish uploading.

Comment Re:Read the update (Score 1) 73

Google uses multiple container systems and a lot of their infrastructure isn't Linux but Docker is a key component of their containerization strategy. If it were even 10+% Docker you talking well in excess of 100m Docker containers in production.

Submission + - New Paper Claims Neutrino Is Likely A Faster-Than-Light Particle 1

HughPickens.com writes: Phys.org reports that in a new paper accepted by the journal Astroparticle Physics, Robert Ehrlich, a recently retired physicist from George Mason University, claims that the neutrino is very likely a tachyon or faster-than-light particle. Ehrlich's new claim of faster-than-light neutrinos is based on a much more sensitive method than measuring their speed, namely by finding their mass. The result relies on tachyons having an imaginary mass, or a negative mass squared. Imaginary mass particles have the weird property that they speed up as they lose energy – the value of their imaginary mass being defined by the rate at which this occurs. According to Ehrlich, the magnitude of the neutrino's imaginary mass is 0.33 electronvolts, or 2/3 of a millionth that of an electron. He deduces this value by showing that six different observations from cosmic rays, cosmology, and particle physics all yield this same value within their margin of error. One check on Ehrlich's claim could come from the experiment known as KATRIN, which should start taking data in 2015. In this experiment the mass of the neutrino could be revealed by looking at the shape of the spectrum in the beta decay of tritium, the heaviest isotope of hydrogen.p

But be careful. There have been many such claims, the last being in 2011 when the "OPERA" experiment measured the speed of neutrinos and claimed they travelled a tiny amount faster than light. When their speed was measured again the original result was found to be in error – the result of a loose cable no less. "Before you try designing a "tachyon telephone" to send messages back in time to your earlier self it might be prudent to see if Ehrlich's claim is corroborated by others."

Comment Re:I think the bigger issue (Score 4, Informative) 32

See link: http://sunlightfoundation.com/... Half of the petitions were anti-NN, and mostly came from a Koch-backed organization's form letter:

Dear Mr. Wheeler, As an American citizen, I wanted to voice my opposition to the FCC's crippling new regulations that would put federal bureaucrats in charge of internet freedom, and urge you to stop these regulations before they're enacted. If the federal government goes through these plans to regulate the internet, I know that the internet will change -- and not for the better. [ INSERT VARIANT PARAGRAPH COMMENT HERE ] Like many Americans, I believe that the internet should remain free of government control and unnecessary regulation -- just as it has for the last twenty years of unprecedented growth. Please stop the FCC's dangerous new regulations, and protect the future of internet freedom here in America. Sincerely, [APPLICANT NAME] [APPLICANT HOME ADDRESS]

As for the "VARIANT PARAGRAPH COMMENT", apparently you were given several selections to choose from, including the following:

The Internet is the biggest economic, intellectual, and artistic success story of the century, and it rose up because of free people, not stifling government. The federal government needs to keep its hands off the Internet. It is not broken, and it does not need to be fixed. It is the federal government, not the Internet, that is broken, and in need of fixing.

One can make an appeal to justice for persecuted cable companies:

Before our government can handcuff a citizen, it must have some reasonable evidence that they have done something wrong. Before the FCC places regulatory handcuffs on Internet providers, shouldn't the government present evidence that they have actually done something wrong?

Or maybe this is your style:

The ideological leader of the angry liberals calling for you to reduce the Internet to a public utility is Robert McChesney, the avowed Marxist founder of the socialist group Free Press. In an interview with SocialistProject.ca, McChesney said: âoeWhat we want to have in the U.S. and in every society is an Internet that is not private property, but a public utility...At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.â In a country of over 300 million people, even an extremist like McChesney can find, perhaps, millions of followers. But you should know better than to listen to them.

Comment Re:My sockets are made of high quality steel (Score 1) 152

Dude, sockets are positive-locking. They're not "the finer part of the tool"; they distribute stress among an entire surface, which is distributed to a round barrel. This is why you can shatter a socket that's slightly wrong (e.g. an 8mm socket on a 5/16 bolt) relatively easily: you have six contact points prying at the weakest part of the socket, instead of a fitted socket providing full contact.

Comment Re:This is not the problem (Score 1) 688

Again: you are quantifying death such that that lead poisoning is not fatal, cigarettes do not kill people, diabeetus doesn't kill people, lack of access to food doesn't kill people, etc. You are supposing that if someone is getting 70% as much food as they need, becomes chronically ill because of it, and dies after 10-15 years of this due to kidney failure, that it's because of kidney failure and not because of starvation (i.e. malnutrition causing degradation of the health of vital organs until they fail).

That is bullshit.

I know you want to cover your eyes and pretend the plight of the poor doesn't exist, and that people are just greedy and lazy assholes who can't even be bothered to get their EBT set up; but the real world doesn't work that way, it's not all roses and butterflies, and it's not cut and dried into geometrically perfect tessellations. The Just World Hypothesis is a piece of shit: people don't get what they deserve, and karma is as real as Santa Clause. Outcomes are the result of a myriad of factors, and sometimes the root cause of a problem is obscured. VERY obscured. That this conveniently allows you to not see it doesn't mean it isn't there.

Some of us are just far more intelligent than you, and able to see the whole picture.

Comment Re:The Navy sucks at negotiating (Score 3, Interesting) 118

Hell, one Ohio class submarine has more destructive capacity than the entire Navy from 1945.

Which means absolutely nothing because you can't actually use any of that firepower in any conflict short of "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end." That's not to dispute the rest of your points, which are mostly valid, but let us leave the SSBN out of the calculation of modern naval firepower. They have a specific mission: deterrence. The day they are called upon to loft their birds is the day that mission has failed.

Why would you want more men when the ships have become more efficient and have so much more firepower?

There is an argument to be made that we need more ships, particularly attack submarines and surface combatants. The former will prove decisive in any conflict with the PRC and the latter are needed for missile defense, amongst other missions. Unfortunately most of the shipbuilding budget is going to the Gerald Ford CVNs while the looming Ohio replacement is going to consume billions more. Both are needed at the end of the day, so unless we're going to throw more money at the Navy I'm not sure what the solution is. I'd opt for throwing more money at them, since it takes decades to build a modern Navy, and it can't be used (as easily) for interventionist adventures in the same manner as a standing army....

User Journal

Journal Journal: Merry Christmas! 1

For the first time in nine years I got to see my youngest daughter on Christmas; this is the first Christmas in nine years she didn't have to work. Great Christmas present!

And the second to last pre-publication copies came Christmas eve eve. I finished going through it this morning, and the book itself is ready. What wasn't was the cover; I fixed it and ordered another copy, so Mars, Ho! should be online in a couple of weeks.

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