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Comment Re:Penalty for obvious false claims (Score 1) 97

Please reply if you think eternity getting their guts ripped out by demons and being force-fed their own excrement and piles of flaming coals, while being skull-fucked by enraged hell-bears (or whatever it is, I never paid much attention to mythology,) is inadequate for copyright trolls, and write-in what YOU believe would be a more appropriate comeuppance. Thanks!

No -- copyright trolls are doing us a very important service. The people who need to have their guts ripped out by demons etc are the assholes who wrote the laws that have these horrible abusive provisions which the intellectual property trolls are so elegantly demonstrating.

Comment Volkswagen Factory Worker Killed By a Manager (Score 1) 342

Of course you should follow all the standard safety rules, like switching off the heavy machinery and putting a lock on the switch, or running the machine at 1/10th speed when testing. But (wink wink nudge nudge) probably nobody would notice if you didn't. And (wink wink nudge nudge) we're losing a lot of money with this machine out of commission, you wouldn't want us to lose a bunch of money would you?

I suppose it could also have been plain human error. I've known some pretty dumb people with a total disregard for their own safety and/or the safety of others.

Comment Re:Incredibly farfetched (Score 3, Interesting) 256

The ISS has a mass of approximately 417,000 kg and it's made of comparatively light materials when you are talking about building something out of 1" steel.

Just for fun, I calculated what the weight would be for a balloon of the same size of the article (78,000 m^3) but coated with 1 inch of steel. The best you can get is spherical, radius 26.5 m, which would have a surface area of 8,800 m^2 and with 1 inch of steel weigh 1,800,000 kg. And that is just the outer surface -- though to be fair, the weight of air contained within wouldn't be that much. Also, at those numbers you'd need 31 atmospheres of pressure or so worth of (hot) Venusian atmosphere to equal the weight of the outer hull, so I have my doubts about being able to be at 1 atmosphere.

The main problem I see is that you have seconds to live if your air conditioner dies, followed by where will you get raw materials? Seems to me that if your hull weighs this much you're better off building where you can mine metal and just import air, rather than the other way around. Like, say, on Mars, where you can also get as much nitrogen and oxygen as you want from the atmosphere, and metal from the ground, and only need to import some hydrogen.

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