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Comment Re:Why Force Your Children to Live in the Past? (Score 1) 734

Sure, the new part of the old-time religion teaches that stuff, but unfortunately the old-time version of it heavily emphasizes brutal repression, and some of the addenda to the new stuff was clearly written to repeal the actually innovations in the new part, to which you are referring. In practice, the old-time religion OP is referring to does not teach peace, love, joy, forbearance, kindness, or any of that stuff. It teaches war, paranoia, retribution and selfishness. It's almost as if the antichrist had taken over large parts of the church in the U.S. Actually, it's just as if that had happened. :(

Comment Re:HTTP isn't why the web is slow (Score 2) 161

Personally I have no opinion about HTTP/2, but I have to say that this anonymous hit piece looks a lot like some IETF participant who didn't like how the process came out trying to create the appearance of consensus against it by pumping up the anger of the interwebs without actually saying what's wrong with the spec. When I see people making statements not supported by explanations as to why we might want to consider them correct, my tendency is to assume that it's hot air trying to bypass the consensus process.

It's also a bit annoying to see the IETF accused of having published a document advocating snooping when in fact someone floated that idea in the IETF and it was shot down in flames, and what we actually published was a document stating that snooping is to be considered an attack and addressed in all new IETF protocol specifications (RFC 7258).

Comment Re:"Expected", "could", and "maybe" (Score 1) 329

If all predictions had indeed not come to pass, you might have a point. But of course that's hyperbole, which is to say: you are making shit up. In the real, fact-based world climate science has an all-too-good track record. Yes, it is not perfectly accurate, but that's really not something with which to comfort yourself. If you get run over by a bus, it doesn't matter whether it hits you from the front or the side: you're still dead. It's best to pay attention and get out of the way when there is a bus bearing down on you. And as for extinction events, it doesn't matter whether they're human-caused or not. What matters is not being taken out by them. Or anyway, so the thinking goes...

Comment Re:"Expected", "could", and "maybe" (Score 1) 329

Expected, could and maybe do not have probabilities assigned. So when you say "with a very low probability," you are putting words in gmustera's mouth. The probability isn't very low. It's likely that this caused the Permian-Triassic extinction event. But I'm sure that you, with your anti-government rhetoric and your bunker in the basement, will survive an extinction event just fine. No doubt you've done the science, and figured out how much stockpiled oxygen you need to stockpile to get through it, and how big your airtight greenhousese need to be to grow the food you won't be able to safely grow outside, and that's why you're not worried.

Remember that uncertainty cuts both ways, Padawan.

Comment Re:Only CO2 matters (Score 1) 329

Methane oxidizes, yielding CO2. You don't even know basic chemistry, and you are making scientific-sounding statements about atmosphere science. Sigh. One of the big problems with society today: idiots are completely sure of themselves, and smart people communicate with equivocation in contexts where equivocation will be understood to correlate with uncertainty. See? I can't even stop myself!

Comment Re:An unidentified drone (Score 1) 325

In addition, had the drone hit the airplane, how do we know that it wouldn't have bounced off? Did it weigh more than a frozen turkey? Mid-air collisions between airplanes are really bad, but mid-air collisions between airplanes and turkeys are generally only bad for the turkey, modulo the occasional fluke where you get enough birds in each engine to cause a real problem.

I frequently see other airplanes from my airplane when I travel. Does that mean that there was a risk of a mid-air? No, they're at a different altitude. So "the pilot saw a drone" is evidence of a near-miss only in the realm of directed reasoning. Someone has an agenda, and that's why this is news.

Comment Re:Dark Matter here (Score 1) 103

Don't worry. You're a fine mixture of baryons and leptons. Any WIMPs or SIMPs are just along for the ride.

This article is a bit frustrating in that they haven't actually discovered a dark matter particle—they've just come up with a new idea for what it might look like. So it's not even a virtual particle. It's a hypothetical particle. But interesting nevertheless...

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