Sure he's a spammer, but I think we're ignoring the larger issue here, which is: What the hell is this guy smoking and how can I get some?

Wow, I've never really thought to compare my rates to those of the rest of the country, but it looks like I have it pretty good. $.04748-$.05578 per kWh (according to FPL) plus about $6 in delivery fees.

I suppose it's because the grid where I live is mostly nuclear. Most months my bill is under $110 even though I have to run the AC year round (it's mandated by the lease to prevent mold). My wife and I don't use too much power besides the AC, but cooling 1,500 sq feet uses a lot of power no matter how well insulated.

Take a step back, take a deep breath, and get a little perspective. You're complaining about a lack of expertise on a website that allows anonymous posting, where the standard is semi-anonymous posting. No experts to be found there. You are commenting in a thread about dark matter, which is called dark because very little is known about it. No experts on that either. You are also commenting in a sub-thread which only purpose is to call into question whether the author of the article is confused by the terminology "dark matter" and "antimatter". There isn't a shred of expertise anywhere in sight.

And that's all ok. The idea is to have a discussion, there is nothing to prove here. Discussion like this is the beginning of problem solving, not the final step. No one is going to write an article about the significant advances in particle physics made by geekoid (135745) or anyone else posting on Slashdot.

Oops, I meant: ...why not to go into details... also "meth" shouldn't be corrected to "meh".

Not ether generally, but there are a lot of highly flammable ketones used to extract the psuedo-ephedrine from the tablets.

I don't see why now to go into details, it's not like the recipe for making meh isn't one Google search away. Rockstar Games even included a basic recipe in GTA4 (the lounge singer sings it).

You're right, I was using the term "strongly interactive" incorrectly.

Just think about the amount of energy that would be present in such a system. If two (nebulously defined) particles of dark matter can annihilate (probably the wrong word) each other to produce a particle of antimatter and a particle of matter, it follows that the dark matter particles must be as massive as regular matter/antimatter. So they wouldn't be very weakly interactive. And that's even assuming that absolutely no mass is converted to energy when the particles "annihilate" one another, which is unlikely.

If that statement were true dark matter would be anything but dark. You would haver massive strongly interactive particles dumping a huge amount of matter, antimatter, and energy (not to be confused with dark energy) into the universe. Then the matter and antimatter reacts, releasing still more energy. Such a reaction would be pretty easily observed. By comparison, WIMPs should be near massless, but abundant, and hence dark.

"Theorists generally believe that when two dark matter particles collide, they should annihilate each other to produce ordinary particles, such as an electron and its antimatter twin, a positron. Thanks to Einstein's iconic equivalence between energy and mass, E=mc2, each of those particles should emerge with an energy essentially equal to the mass of the original dark matter particle."

I suspect that the author doesn't know that "dark matter" isn't a synonym for "antimatter". The above paragraph, if true, would make the universe a very explode-y place.

I grew up in Baltimore city during the race riots of the early 1990s, which (on a national level) cumulated with the LA riots in 1992. So it's completely possible that my standard for "isolated violence" is colored by that time period:

-Two kids I grew up with --I wouldn't call them friends-- were stabbed in in 1991.

-Worse, a 13 year old that I would call a friend was almost killed in 1991, when his throat was slit. I was was walking about 5-10 feet behind him at the time, and though luckily he survived it had a pretty devastating impact on me (and more-so him of course, but it could have very well have been me if I'd been walking faster).

-Between 1989 and 2001 I've stared down the barrel of exactly 7 handguns, 4 of which were wielded by police, one that was fired. Missed, thankfully.

So I've been pretty amazed by the amount of restraint on both sides of OWS. The police could be doing far worse (and get away with it) and the protestors could be "putting up a gallows in front of Federal Hall" as commenters have suggested, but I think those sort of comments can be dismissed as hyperbole or standard ITG-ing.

Shouldn't, but must. On the bright side, if OWS happened a century ago, protesters would almost certainly have been shot by now. So the fact no one has been deliberately gunned down is a type of progress (I'm aware of the veteran disabled by a tear gas canister, but I'm giving the cops the benefit of the doubt that that was an isolated incident).

I find OWS lacking in many ways, and the protestors that make their way into the media tend to be a little embarrassing to listen to because they are generally painfully naive. Still, income disparity is an issue that desperately needs to be addressed, so I'm glad that so many people are fighting to make sure it can't be ignored.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but there is another reason that unauthorized access and trespassing shouldn't be treated the same: physical presence and intent. In order to trespass I believe you have to know you are doing so and be physically present, hence the need for no trespassing signs. But it's completely possible to access a website by accident.

One of my old coworkers once got our office IP address banned by Google. He had decided to *ahem* automate his porn collection by writing a recursive spider to collect .jpg files from porn thumbnail sites based on certain keywords. Unfortunately one of the links lead back to Google, the spider was multithreaded and went nuts, and it started querying Google so fast that it violated Google's ToS. It was never his intention for his porn spider to pound Google, but thanks to a little stupidity it did, and under this he'd be a criminal (instead of just a moron).

It strikes me that they are trying to equate "unauthorized access" of a computer to trespassing. The hitch is that the two don't equate very well, as unauthorized access will vary from situation to situation whereas trespassing is strictly defined. For instance trespassing:

I invite someone over for dinner.
I tell them I have a no shoes in the house rule.
They refuse to take off their shoes.
I tell them to leave, but they refuse. They are trespassing because they refuse to leave, not taking off their shoes isn't relevant.

Unauthorized access:

I invite someone over for dinner.
I tell them I have a no shoes in the house rule.
They refuse to take off their shoes.
They would now be in criminal violation, just because they didn't follow my rules.

I have a feeling this won't hold up in court, no matter what the DOJ wants. If nothing else, treating ToS as legal documents would be a jurisdictional nightmare. For instance: Would you have to abide by Facebook's ToS on every site with a "Like" button and a FB tracking cookie? If I write in my site's ToS that all spam is unauthorized access, can I get Jeff Bezos thrown in jail every time Amazon sends me another coupon I didn't ask for?

Yes they do, they're called phones.

Disabling SSID is clunky too. Both approaches effect the user's experience.

But really what expectation of privacy do you really have when you are broadcasting a radio signal? It's not as if Google is decrypting your data. In the US I believe that would be illegal, and generally not something they would be interested in doing anyway. But recording a signal you are broadcasting I believe is still a-ok.

As far as security goes, I ran an experiment last year and I was really surprised just how bad wireless security really is. I just downloaded KissMac and set it to work on all the wireless networks reaching my computer (about 25 or so usually). I didn't use packet insertion, and I just used the Apple Airport card that came with the computer. Within a week it had cracked every single one that wasn't using WPA2 (nearly none of them were), and filled a hard drive with their network activity. I know that won't surprise a lot of /. users, but I was surprised at just how easy it was, any kid can do it.