I believe that you think narcc's post is stupid.

Actually, I get the strong impression that you yourself believed that narcc actually meant what he posted. (I don't believe, though, that either of these are examples of something believed "in the face of evidence to the contrary". That kind of belief is more displayed by, for example, battered partners and their ilk, and is rarer. One could make a case that since our beliefs shape the way our mind builds our reality from our sensory input, it's probably quite common that "evidence to the contrary" just gets rejected by the individual until it reaches some kind of critical threshold, whereas others seeing the same evidence see it as "evidence to the contrary" long before.)

Most, if not all, reasoning we make about others' "state of mind" is mere belief. (Maybe in the far future we'll be able to MRI the brains of the people we interact with, in real time --- flash of memory of L. Frank Baum(?) story which included a similar plot device...)

I believe what you just posted. Enjoy!

> it just makes things that are not water soluble, soluble in the water-soap solution

Like... cell membranes? Lots of surfactants have antiseptic properties: for example, cocamidopropyl betaine. In fact, I'd guess that most surfactants are at least mild antiseptics.

> bet my life on no-one with a six-shooter

You missed the parent poster's

>> (and no one will rat on the shooter)

or just ignored it. My understanding of his point was that alienating the majority of your human contacts, then, was dangerous, if not fatal. You changed it into alienating anyone. Not the same thing. I'd guess that in his model of those times, if a particular enemy murdered you, assuming you weren't alienated from society as a whole, your murder would be likely to be avenged.

Uh, no. The containment is only going to rupture from the excess pressure long before the pressure is even close enough to, itself, produce fusion (no material known to man, or likely to exist at room temperature and pressure, is strong enough to contain the pressures necessary to produce fusion).

I'm certain you'd be better off just using the electical power from your Mr. Fusion to produce chemical explosives (see my other post).

> at least for a fraction of a second you get conditions for fusing a large amount of deuterium

You didn't read, or understand, my post. It could very well be possible that the amount of fuel the reactor can fuse is proportional to the size of the reactor --- just because you have a tiny amount of very hot plasma doesn't mean you can use it to fuse more fuel than that. If it were that simple, we'd have had viable fusion power long ago.

> it is explosive in the same way as classical explosives

Yes, with a bit of knowledge, you could (slowly) store the energy generated by the fusion in chemical explosives. But this isn't much scarier than the availability of chemical explosives today.

> If you WANT to control it.

If you were right, we'd have had fusion power long ago. It's much more difficult than you are claiming.

> Google apologists will deny (2), but Google is a business.

Except for the name-calling, this is an interesting point. Like almost anything, using Google has both risks and advantages.

Another poster has already pointed out that their business model is built around exclusive access to private information. Another cogent business reason why Google would prefer not to sell or reveal private information is that some people will stop using its services if they believe they have less privacy. For example, you seem to be someone who has already been lost to Google as an endpoint for its targeted advertising, even at the current level of its protection of privacy. The less privacy people think they have, the less likely they will use the service, at least in a way which is beneficial to Google (I, for example, encrypt most personal files which I store in my Google Drive).

> The initial release of energy and burst of gamma rays

If we manage to get to aneutronic fusion (much more difficult than most of the fusion reactions being examined currently), then the reactor theoretically could run for a very long time without having to have parts replaced. Lawrenceville Plasma Physics is trying to attain proton-boron fusion in a dense plasma focus machine, but most people think they're being a bit optimistic. I'm rooting for them, nevertheless.

My impression was that the major problem with fusion which produces neutrons isn't the radioactive waste products themselves (at least compared with fission), it's that the nuclear reactions with the neutrons undermines the structural integrity of the reactor, requiring frequent part replacement.

> Let's just hope that fusion turns out to be really, really hard to achive (meaning ITER), not a table-top experiment.
> Or else we are doomed.

I'm not sure what fallacy you've invoked, but certainly you should be able to imagine that the amount of substance fused per unit time could be proportional to the volume of the device used to produced said fusion, with a small-enough proportionality constant that we'd all still be safe, no?

Or were you still joking? Sorry if my detector got confused...

Penn and Teller put it pretty well in their first episode of Bullshit. To call someone a moron or an idiot is slander and you're open to lawsuits. To call someone an asshole or a motherf***er is expressing an opinion, and you're pretty much in the clear.

Did they claim to have consulted a legal expert on these issues? Because this sounds pretty strange to me. AFAIK, slander and libel are based on the actual intended meaning of the allegedly infringing communication. This was a key issue in the Simon Singh libel trial. P&T's statement strikes me as more like "the legal doctrine is to take the worst possible meaning" (i.e., "moron" and "idiot" being factual statements about a person's IQ, rather than being oblique commentary on what they stated), but even that doesn't fit, since under that standard, "motherfucker" should then be interpreted as a factual statement about incestuous sexual relations.

Teachers, for example, may have a cause to start a lawsuit since along with the label "faggot" (homosexual) is an implied "pedophile".

First of all, in an age where sitcoms dealing with homosexuality have become "old hat", I would disagree that there is any extra implication of pedophilia. This, of course, depends on the cultural context (which is my point). Secondly, for the reasons I state above, I rather doubt that calling someone a "faggot" would be actionable as libel/slander (because in all likelihood, the intended meaning was not a factual statement about homosexuality). Thirdly, even if the statement was meant to "out" a teacher as a homosexual and to cause him to lose his job, I think he'd have a better case for tortious interference than libel/slander. (IANAL)

It's interesting that as homosexuality becomes more and more accepted by society, falsely accusing someone of being homosexual becomes less and less actionable. Never thought about that...

See Grimmelmann's post about the real situation at his blog, The Laboratorium.

I am sorry that I commented based on a reporter’s description of the filing rather than asking to see it myself.

I always thought that he should have made it a $5.38 wrench, instead...

> I switched away when they made the up and down arrow keys...

Didn't notice that yet. What's putting me on the verge of switching is Google's phasing out (or appearance thereof) of any kind of "hard" searching. Unfortunately, I haven't found any good alternatives with better "hard" search capability.

"issue | Snowden" ? What does the "issue" command output to stdout, Polonium-210?

> Who fucking cares?

I agree with the title but for a totally different reason, namely, that no official connected with the NSA who would have reviewed any such "concerns", who has also commented about the affair (and there have been several, already), has said that they would have done anything whatsoever (possibly except, of course, something about that suspicious/PIA Snowden character).