...and I'm very handsome..

Yeah right, brown dwarfs spontaneously arranging themselves so we can conveniently see past them from earth is a very likely scenario. The paradox that you are relying on is that an infinite number of one dimensional points on a number line cannot get you from point A to point B. Stars are not one dimensional points but yes I quite likely exaggerated when I said only the moon and sun would be visible.

Your post was interesting and informative but my reaction to this parting shot is - go fuck yourself you arrogant son of a bitch.

I would have thought "weights and measures" was the appropriate authority, they are quite capable of enforcing fair and transparent measures on non-utility businesses such as petrol stations.

Only if it has already been dried and dressed, it comes off the greenchain at the sawmill as 2X4 (to within 1/16th of an inch), as it dries the dimensions change, dressing the timber takes an 1/8th of an inch off each side. If a lumber yard attempted to sell you undressed timber as 2X4 that was actually 3.75 X 1.75 then the weights and measures people would definitely be interested. Here in Oz dressed timber is now advertised with real dimensions not it's undressed dimensions The practice goes way back to the days when most buildings used undressed timber for structural purposes. These days carpenters don't normally build frames on site, it's all prefab frames and roofs that just bolt together, for that technique to work it needs the more consistent dimensions of dressed timber.

Nobody is scamming you out of useful timber, the industry terminology is well defined and is not hidden from the customer. The point of TFA is that comcast's network metering methods are hidden from customer scrutiny and nobody at weights and measures seems to give a damn.

Mine is a single person (Aussie) household with a 200GB/mo cap. I have a RDC open 8hrs a day to work during weekdays, I watch more YT than I do TV and regularly play WoT in the evenings, often with a friend playing on my second PC. My account rarely exceeds 30GB/mo. 350GB/mo would indicate to me that either someone in your household is downloading a shitload of torrented movies (too many to possibly watch in a month), or more likely you have a malware problem.

I think people are missing the point of TFA, why are the "weights and measures" people not interested? If it was a greengrocer with a rigged scale he would be in handcuffs explaining himself to a judge.

How was my reply "uncivil"? Blunt with just a hint of sarcasm certainly, but there's nothing in there that should offend someone who is genuinely interested in an answer. In fact I deliberately used the word "unaware" because "ignorant" is normally viewed as derogatory (even though it actually isn't).

If you feel a gentler more informative answer can be provided then why not provide it? I'm sure the OP is quite capable of defending himself against my prose if it has unintentionally offended him in some way that I'm unaware of. What I'm not so sure of is why do you feel the need to be offended on his behalf?

Very interesting but kind of irrelevant since the question I was addressing asked if brown dwarf could be the famous "missing matter". What we have actually observed is the effects of a gravitational field, precisely what is causing that field to manifest itself we don't know, but we have known for a long time it's not an overabundance of brown dwarfs.

I'm not an American but it seems to me that PACs are elegantly designed to obscure the money trail. I forget who suggested it but I think the idea of making senators more like sports stars is a good one, there would be no obfuscation since we would all be able to read their sponsors names on their jackets. I have nothing against lobbying, that's what grandma is doing when she writes a letter to her local rep. What I think we all have a problem with is that money buys access, by that I mean; unless grandma has a spare $5-50K lying around she will not be sitting at her local rep's table during a fundraiser.

Exactly, we think of Jupiter as being huge but the Sun holds 98% of all the matter in our solar system. If the "missing mass" were normal cold matter, such a great quantity would effectively block the light of the stars we can see, astronomy would not exists because we wouldn't see anything except our own sun and moon.

Similar inane arguments were aimed at Newton, plenty of 15th century scholars thought that the fact a bird can fly disproved the theory of gravity. We still don't know what the hell gravity is (other than a property of matter) but we no longer question it's existence and have developed a very good understanding of how it behaves. Dark matter is harder to wrap one's head around because it's effects can not be observed in everyday human experience. However the effects are real and the tag scientists have given them is "dark matter".

Could it be that all the cosmologists and physicist who have been looking at this for a couple of decades somehow missed that blindly obvious "possibility". Or is it more likely you are simply unaware of the evidence that forces these people to dismiss the obvious "common sense" answer?

Depends which pyramid we are talking about. Actual evidence like yours shows that they used different techniques at different locations during different times in history.

Publishers treat the entire continent of Australia as a rounding error!

250ms ping to a US/EU server is about average since very few of the major titles have servers in Oz, SE Asia or Hawaii is normally is good as it gets from the arse end of the Earth. You know you have a really clean connection if it's under 200ms.

The lag from Oz to anywhere else on the planet is largely a true physical limit imposed by the speed of light, no amount of bandwidth will fix it. Anything that "tricks the users brain" into not perceiving that lag would be welcome, 4X the data for a game won't be noticed with the average data cap we have here these days. OTOH since the birth of online gaming I've been trained by experience to lead my shots, so it does mean I would have to significantly adjust my playing style to take advantage of a lower ping.

Yep, it puts the "free" in "free market". The alternative is to allow telco's to hold content providers to ransom. OTOH why does it matter that these arseholes keep spewing ther comical propaganda, who's buying their bullshit these days, anyone?

Please, people are beheaded or stoned to death every day in the ME and N Africa, nobody gives a flying fuck until it's a westerner's head. The staged execution clip is propaganda, it's clear intent is to divide and conquer through fear and xenophobia, why else would they choose an executioner with a british accent?

There is simply no rational reason to keep circulating enemy propaganda, people who do so are driven by fear and/or myopic ideological priorities. This is a proxy war between the Saudi's (Sunni's) and Iran (Shia), but the Saudi's have now seem to have realised they've created yet another frankenstein puppet. So far the world powers have been using brains to fight ISIS. let's hope that Russia, China, and the West keep using their brains in this conflict, because resuming the indiscriminate bombing of Iraqi cities will do nothing except entrench ISIS' 7th century ideology and governance into the local culture.

While on the subject of propaganda and hypocrisy, it's also convenient to western self-interest that this (and the MH17) story gained huge attention but the repeated bombing of a UN school in Gaza with US munitions is quietly "swept under the carpet". Where's the political outrage toward those acts that was starting to manifest itself as large street protests a couple of weeks ago?