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Comment What the hell is this guy smoking (Score 5, Insightful) 235

not gonna bother clicking any of the links. This guy is either incredibly ignorant and been living under a rock for the past few years, or his 401k is heavily vested in defense contractors. SpaceX is shaking the space launch industry to the very foundations and turning everything upside down. SpaceX is already cheaper than them (by a lot), but if the R program succeeds (we'll know in a few days), basically Elon will wipe out ULA and Ariannespace and there will be nothing left of them except for a few crumbs thrown at them by their buddies in government.

Comment Re:This tired old saw again. (Score 2) 755

Not saying I agree with the WSJ editorial (which I haven't even bothered to read). However, there is one way for science to prove God exists. Holograms.

Scientists (real ones with physics degrees from prestigious universities, not the Christian science kind) are pretty close to proving that the universe is a simulation. Well if it's a simulation, who's doing the simulating, and who's watching it? Must be some entity that existed prior to the beginning of this universe and is outside it. Might as well call it God.

If this pans out, then the Copenhagen interpretation in quantum physics wins out over the many-worlds theory. Matter in this universe does not exist -- it remains a probability wave -- until it has been observed. Kind of like how in FPS games, pixels outside your monitor aren't rendered (to save GPU cycles) until you observe it.

Comment lol what? Anita who? (Score 2) 299

Anita Sarkeesian, for helping draw attention to undue harassment faced by women in the video game world?

Career feminist looking for social injustice and finding it in _______? How does that deserve special recognition? It's what they do. It would be shocking if she looked somewhere and *didn't* find any injustice... that might actually deserve some kind of an honesty award.

Yes she did receive rape and death threats and I do not think she deserved it, but guess what, they were just threats. There was no way in hell she was going to actually be raped or killed by these juvenile gamers (juvenile either literally or the 30 year old virgins who never moved out of their parents basement and are juvenile in all but age)

But if instead of taking on relatively harmless gaming nerdz, had she had taken on, oh let's say Islam -- in the name of whose religion millions of women are sexually maimed and sometimes outright killed each year -- I would say she deserved a big award. Because getting your vagina mutilated and your head bashed in with stones is so much worse than being objectified as a sex object in some video game. And because whereas gaming nerdz post rape and death threats on Twitter but have never actually carried one out to date (because they're virgins and wouldn't actually know how to rape a woman), Islam does actually rape and kill and behead women. Frequently.

Comment Re:They said that about cell phones (Score 2) 386

They did say that about cell phones, and they were right. Very few units were sold and they pretty much sucked for decades after being invented in the 1970's. Cell phones didn't become a mass-market success until the late 90's.

Google's problem isn't making great products that no one buys. If they were great then people will buy them. Their problem is making new stuff that has the potential to become great, but currently aren't because Google keeps underestimating the amount of development time needed.

Kudos to them for the pioneering effort, but please get a better grip on reality and please reign in your PR department. True driverless automated cars won't be ready this decade, if ever. Sergei and Larry will most likely be on Social Security when driverless cars dominate the road. As for Glass, it's pretty close to prime time except for one massive flaw which is battery life. New battery tech with 10x current battery life will be required, and who knows when that will be. Maybe this decade, maybe the next one.

Comment Yes brown fat will help you (Score 0) 234

if you're an obese American gulping down double cheeseburgers and driving a car to everywhere. However, the "obese American" phase of human evolution has only been going on for about 60 years or so.

What about the previous 2,000,000 years, how did these brown fats help the primitive man whose main problem was finding enough calories to eat?

Comment Re: who cares how many children (Score 1) 275

Now, when they say WOMEN, that's where there's an obvious sexist bias. Women's lives AREN'T worth more than men's.

History and evolution would say you're wrong.

After a disaster where a large percentage of your tribe/village are wiped out, who is more valuable among the survivors? Women capable of childbearing would be the most valuable, because you need to replace the dead people with new babies.

You can still see this in action today in endangered species management. Ask the wildlife experts which is more valuable, the male or female Siberian white tiger. Kill the male and you're killing one white tiger. Kill the female and you might be killing 5 or 6 (not only the cubs that won't be born in the future, but also existing cubs that depend on the mother for survival might die)

Comment Re:lol sure (Score 2) 166

I just can't help but imagine a bunch of Norks gathered around a Tandy 1000 hooked up to an acoustic modem with an egg timer. Every 10 minutes they switch off. "Ok, now you a hacker."

Smug sense of superiority. Are you an American by any chance?

Yes N. Korea is poor, but do not underestimate your enemies. Look at what they've actually done instead of making fun blindly.

Training people in C and Linux and Windows exploits is not all that hard or expensive compared to, say, building your own nuclear warheads and ICBMs. Former can be done for a few million bucks. The latter costs billions and the engineering is orders of magnitude harder than teaching coding.

In case you didn't know, the Norks managed to build their own nukes and also put a satellite in orbit using their own rocket recently.

Comment Re:Races are different (Score 2, Insightful) 53

Blacks from stable middle class homes seem to do about as well as their white counterparts.

Exactly. Blacks with 100 IQ do about as well as whites with 100 IQ. I've known a black colleague whose IQ I'd estimate to be around 120. He was definitely one of the better workers at the company.

Now the elephant in the room is, do all the races have exactly the same IQ distribution amongst their population? Test results say no. Need citation? Just look up anything, SAT, GRE, MCAT, police dept entrance exams, fireman exams, military exams, straight IQ tests, anything. The body of evidence is overwhelming.

Comment Re:Occam's Razor (Score 2) 282

I do not think you know what Occam's razor is. It does not mean you need conclusive evidence to believe in something. It means the simplest explanation tends to be the best one, other things being equal.

In order to say CIA hacked Sony, you would have to invent all sorts of motives and cover-up to explain it. The simpler explanation is that N. Korea did it, because the circumstances and evidence so far all point to it.

Comment No, and the people suggesting this are retarded (Score 1) 232

You can look back at the 1950 olympic games and see people running and jumping and doing other things that we still do today.

Now imagine that video games were included, and you look back at the 1980 olympic games. Overweight geeks with mullets and bowl cuts competing intensely over.... Pong and Breakout.

50 years from now, watching old footage of overweight geeks with lip piercings competing in Counter Strike and Call of Duty will seem just as lame and outdated.

Comment Hyperbole (Score 1) 237

Wasn't too long ago... 1990's... that everyone still bought a cassette tape based answering machine for their homes. (and if you had a dual cassette one with a separate tape for the greeting and the voicemail recording, that was da bomb)

Well into the 2000's, people still bought flash memory-based answering machines for their homes.

You'd have to be awfully young to not have used voicemail. Maybe the kids just starting college today.

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