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Comment Fuck the parties. Fuck em. (Score 1) 312

by TiggertheMad (#45778131) Attached to: Snowden Says His Mission Is Accomplished
Here is the problem though. Lets say that you vote republican, because they field a intelligent, conservative who believes in rational conservative fiscal policy (BWHAAHAHAAAAA, I know, right?) and you vote him in to congress or the senate. The next time a abortion ban or a tax on filth poor people comes up, the house wip comes marching up and threatens to cut party support unless he/she votes the party line.

The party is as much a lobbyist with immense fiscal power as any special interest. Unless party power is broken, you are going to be voting the party into an office, and not as much an individual.

Comment Lasers vs ceramic final score: 0-1 (Score 1) 173

by TiggertheMad (#45711343) Attached to: Army Laser Passes Drone-Killing Test
Other simple solution: Make outer mortar case out of ceramic. Mirrors and reflective materials don't work, so rather than reflect the laser, just absorb the energy. Ceramic can be made hard, cheap, and is a wonderful heat sink. Common formulas will work, but if needed, you can make ceramic shells out of the same stuff that they put on the space shuttle as reentry tiles.

Comment Lasers vs smoke screen final score: 0-1 (Score 1) 173

by TiggertheMad (#45711319) Attached to: Army Laser Passes Drone-Killing Test
Simpler solution: Formulate your explosive to produce a lot of smoke on ignition, so that if a single mortar is destroyed mid flight, you have just deployed a smoke screen that is more difficult for the laser to cut through. Then when you call in a mortar fire mission, the first three rounds are destroyed mid flight, and the laser is then useless to target anything on the flight path until the smoke dissipates.

Comment My sky bully could kick your sky bully's ass... (Score 1) 674

by TiggertheMad (#45656535) Attached to: New Documentary Chronicles Road Tripping Scientists Promoting Reason
Science hasn't "disproven" the existence of *any* supernatural being, just as it hasn't "proven" the existence either.

Science doesn't have to disprove their existence. The basic idea behind science is pretty simple: prove it or it isn't real. As soon as your system of though allows any claim to be made with out verification, sanity goes out the window. In science, were I to claim that PI = 3, I would be laughed at as a quack and an idiot, and yet people can claim that there is an ancient jewish zombie and an invisible sky bully that rule the universe and nobody will call them out for being bald faced liars.

Comment Doing our best to keep suicide #1 (Score 3, Informative) 462

by TiggertheMad (#45622923) Attached to: U.S. Measles Cases Triple In 2013
The numbers are low, because herd immunity is still strong. The reason for concern is that the infection rate curve probably isn't linear. At some point on the curve there is going to be an inflection point where a lot of people will start getting sick. So, while there are probably things that are currently causing a lot more child deaths now, this is could change quickly.

Comment OFF TO THE GULAG WITH YOU! (Score 1) 462

by TiggertheMad (#45622879) Attached to: U.S. Measles Cases Triple In 2013
I would tell you that your friend isn't very well educated, because he clearly sucks at basic math and statistics. Please tell him to go get a job that he is actually qualified for.

Anti vaccination people should be shipped off somewhere where they can all be together and stop endangering the rest of the population. These people are doing the biological equivalent of firing guns in the air in the middle of a crowded city. Yeah, the chance of someone getting killed is low, but eventually if enough people do it, people will start dying. You want your kids to risk death or permanent disability? Fine, be a shitty parent, that's your choice. But your rights stop at the end of your nose. You don't have the right to put the rest of society at risk.

Ship em to fucking north Alaska.

Comment Honest politicians hard at work (Score 1) 214

by TiggertheMad (#45585701) Attached to: Tesla Faces Off Against Car Dealers In Another State: Ohio
Why aren't there penalties for attempts to introduce legislation that is blatantly illegal? Tesla should request that criminal conspiracy and racketeering charges be brought against the Ohio Dealers Association. Or at the very lease, the companies behind this should get a nice ass probing with the Sherman anti-trust act...

Comment virtual deflation? (Score 1) 371

by TiggertheMad (#45543621) Attached to: Bitcoin Tops $1,000 For the First Time

The deflationary nature of Bitcoin and the fact that transactions can't be reversed pretty much guarantees that it will never be used as a currency, but those two features could be strengths if you think of Bitcoin as virtual gold.

BC is deflationary in the sense that there are a fixed number of BC that can exist, and as time passes more are revealed. They are used by humans, who have been growing at an (low,and variable, but) exponential rate, causing an increasing demand for them. I am going to say that the growing number of humans interested in BC will exceed the 'production' of new BC, so I am not sure that calling the currency 'deflationary' is quite accurate. Technically any currency is only inflationary or deflationary if the production of it is out of skew with the units of man hours of work that are being added or subtracted from the work pool at any given time.

Comment while (Boys Girls) Girls++; (Score 0) 445

by TiggertheMad (#45532871) Attached to: Female Software Engineers May Be Even Scarcer Than We Thought

But... Are there any social inequalities when it comes to female software engineers? Is the man somehow keeping chicks out of coding classes? Is the ol' boys club not allowing cooties to spoil their source?

yeah, kinda. It is documented that girls lose interest in STEM subject matter in elementary school, presumably because they pick up on society clues that 'women aren't supposed to like math'. We aren't spitting at them or threatening them for showing up to flip bits, but it isn't easy to swim against societies expectations. The (few) girls that I have meet that write code have been fairly unconventional individuals that didn't fit any traditional female archetype. It seems to me that the girls that are becoming coders are the types willing to fly in the face of society's traditional gender perceptions. So, yeah, there are.

Or to put it another way: if it was a 54/46% gender split, I could write it off and say that there isn't anything wrong. 90/10% split? Yeah, something is going on.

Comment Fuck the pope and the god he rode in on. (Score 1) 961

by TiggertheMad (#45528637) Attached to: Why Scott Adams Wished Death On His Dad

For the record, I believe euthanasia laws need modernized. But wishing mass deaths on people who don't share your views is just wrong.

But isn't that what euthanasia laws do? Aren't they wishing mass torture and agony on people who believe that it is ok to choose when to stop living? I think that you could make an excellent case that these laws are based on religious values ('suicide is a sin', thank you, all you Catholic assholes), and as such it violates the separation of church and state by outlawing it. This is no less than religious tyranny, dictating to people how they must die in order to appease some fictitious sky bully.

Comment Chess: stagnant and dull, AND full of assholes (Score 1) 284

by TiggertheMad (#45430517) Attached to: Why There Shouldn't Be a Chess World Champion
Oh yeah, there was that other thing about competitive chess that I found annoying that I forgot to mention: Pretty much all the serious players are total assholes.

this is a really wonderfully complicated game that most people can't handle, so they try to put it down as "memoization" (sic) or "a solved game".....you shouldn't try to comment on things you don't understand.

I put it down as stale, so that means that I am not 'good enough' to understand it? Your comments call out anyone who disagrees with your opinion as to stupid to have a valid opinion. That is some amazing logic there, poindexter....

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