Absolutely not. There are, unfortunately, very good reasons to be skeptical. A lot of well-meaning dumbasses have ruined it for legitimate victims.

The original post wasn't just skeptical though, it was accusatory. Even worse, it used the "just asking questions" style of accusation, which (personal judgment here) is a very trollish style of debate.

Me? I'm neurotic. I'd play on my phone and idly click the "Screenshot" button every few seconds until I was sure there wouldn't be more, then post the first one with all the posts. Maybe that's why I don't treat it as a smoking gun.

I'm a bit sad to say I'm sitting at about 50/50 on this. That said, I definitely wouldn't state anything one way or the other until all the facts are in....and probably not afterwards either - I'm just not that invested :)

That doesn't in fact answer the questions raised in the image

• * The account was created just to make the offensive tweets - granted.
• * Screencap taken 12 seconds after the last tweet - The image gives no indication how many tweets were made in total. If this were in the middle of a stream of tweets, then any screenshot would have been taken soon after the "last tweet".
• * No Search, no login - the url could be typed, instant messaged, or searched from Google. As another poster said, somone could see the tweet on their phone, want a screencap, and type the URL into a computer
• * Who screencapped this??? - I don't know???
• * Perfect spelling/capitalization - I didn't address this because I didn't think it needed to be addressed. If I were to go rogue, it would definitely be at this quality and pace. Just because someone's a troll doesn't mean they lack typing/thinking skills.

Did I miss anything?

Or almost as if someone was tweeting constantly (if the screenshot were taken 30 seconds earlier, it *also* would have been 12 seconds after the last tweet).

Almost as if someone were sent a link while they weren't logged in to twitter, and took a screenshot.

Now, nothing's impossible, but you'll need a hell of a lot more evidence to show this was staged. And speaking with such certainty based on such flimsy evidence just makes you look like another troll.

I think you're reading the wrong message. With a bit more context:

If nothing else, that very fact should give one pause. Fundamental changes in the structure of most Linux distributions should not be met with such fervent opposition.

I read that as an argument against systemd. Something like "Fundamental changes will happen in any complex system, but when those changes are positive, they will not be met with such fervent opposition".

I know, how could anyone make a statement as ridiculously inconsistent as "I don't like this one system administered by this group over here, and would like a very different system to be put in place by that group over there"?

Morons.

What would you say if you got that much prison for drinking out of a puddle after a rain instead of the tap you pay for

I don't think I'd be particularly concerned, assuming:

• He was also charging people for that same puddle of water
• The puddle of water was created by the water industry at great expense
• The industry had a legal right to the puddle of water, with precedents going back centuries.
• Drinking the water was purely for entertainment, and not a requirement for continued living

I'm not saying 33 months isn't an excessive sentence, but you just sound dumb when you make these comparisons.

If that's true, show your work.

If the exact same energy is converted from mass->light->mass again, in the exact same form (same electron spins, etc), then at what point was it destroyed? E=mc^2, which tells us that light and matter are just two different forms of the same phenomenon (or, at least, *might*, which is good enough for a hypothetical argument).

What about the simple replacement of atoms in your body from year to year. If 50% of the atoms in your body have been replaced, have "you" been destroyed and recreated?

If you remember the good old days of a non-political slashdot, why not log in and show us your single-digit ID?

That's your problem with teleportation?

What if the original isn't destroyed, but converted to light (or some FTL substance, as long as we're talking sci-fi) and reconstituted at the endpoint?

Dear Sir,

I apologize for the oversight in my previous correspondence. The description of the patent should have concluded with the phrase "...on the internet".

Sincerely,
Mr Troll, Esq.

In order for a Northern European to evolve fair skin and hair, there has to be something that will kill a human of dark skin and hair. Since people with dark skin can survive in Northern Europe, it is not through evolution.

Doesn't it hurt your brain to write that?

• X can survive under condition Y
• ...therefore there is no evolutionary pressure on X under condition Y

I think my biggest problem was the phrase "ISTM your question is meaningless". It reinforced my general impression that a lot of physicists treat the math as the be-all-and-end-all of physics, without trying to develop an overarching (for lack of a better word) "narrative".

You end up with statements like "going faster than c makes you travel backwards in time" or "an electron doesn't have a position until it's measured". Both fit the math, but are probably simplifying things greatly. I suspect the physics of the future will provide intuitive explanations, with new underlying rules that will seem inscrutable. Dismissing the importance of the ACTUAL reality shuts down avenues of investigation and harms discourse.

That said, your last paragraph makes me think I was just overreacting. You've made it clear that intuition is an important aspect of theoretical physics, and people aren't blindly following the math.

I like to think of an electrons a droplet of water (well, droplet of EM-field) with some very exotic properties.

• 
  It tends to stick together, but can be pulled apart.
• 
  When an electron is pulled apart (forced through a double-slit, for instance), it's strongly self-attracted, and tries to spring back into an electron-sized droplet very quickly

I think there's a very good reason electrons bound to an atom act like an "electron cloud". It's not that the electron appears and jumps randomly, it's actually everywhere.

I hate this point of view - the one that says our math is everything, and there's no objective reality underneath driving it all. The math absolutely has to match observations, but describing physics without trying to understand what's ACTUALLY happening is like describing a baseball game purely in terms of Newtonian interactions. You'll understand individual phenomena very well, but you'll never understand the model well enough to make accurate predictions.