Yes, I can.

In fact, I just did.

Of course: denial of the reality you can see for yourself, by yourself, with your own eyes - because it conflicts with some absurd, childish dogma somewhere - is one of the hallmarks of religious people (= liars).

No honest person can possibly be religious.

No, it isn't.

Of course nobody said a thing about "believing" or "proving" anything. Of course constructing and fighting strawmen is very much dishonest. Of course religious people have no conception of honest discourse (or honest anything).

The difference between an "epic fantasy story" and an "epic fantasy story that is claimed to be true" is that the former is entertainment, the latter is merely a lie.

Nobody is claiming that King Kong is real.

Of course the relentless attempt to deny the distinction between fact and fiction is exactly what make religion a) dangerous, b) insulting and c) distasteful to all honest (=non-religious) people.

That strikes me as still-kinda-eigthies-thinking. I guess the question is what your assumption for an unknown segment of network is: If you assume that all parts of the net are congested most of the time, then you'll want to do a fast start up only on those segments that you know can handle it (doesn't have to be an individual IP - If my ISP buffers alright and you can reach it alright then it doesn't matter how many folks are sitting downstream from them - it becomes their problem.) If, on the other hand, you have the expectation that most packets on most of the net are going to be just fine (for whatever reason; even if by sheer brute force buffering and clever back-end algorithms that figure it all out after the fact) then it makes sense to do fast start with unknown clients and omit it only on those found NOT to be able to handle it. Kinda a glass-half-full way of looking at it.

These days I'd wager that the vast (VAST!) majority of packets are part of ongoing streams - streaming Netflix over the net, torrenting the collected porn of the 80ies, that kind of thing. Which means I'm as sure as I can possibly be of something I haven't researched that the performance of the net is only in the most marginal way dependent on startup behaviour around individual connections any more. (Or better when/where it is, it is probably due to the 100 tcp connections that need to be established to view a single web page; fix that and the question of startup behaviour will just go away. Incidently, MS'es CHM concept was a step very much in the right direction...)

ftfy

And what, exactly, makes you call this an "actual" explanation, given that it's composed of just as much thin air as all the other ones?

The video clearly shows a very bright spot at the top of the exhaust trail. Jet engines don't burn bright. They don't burn at all. They're dark. Unless this particular jet was on fire in a rather surprisingly controlled way.

Of course it is possible that sunlight just so happenes to glint off the underside of a plane that just so happenes to be polished the right way and that just so happenes to be oriented such that the "glint" remains "glinting" for many (15?) seconds at a time. Just as it's possible that the contrail of that same jet just so happens to resemble a rocket launch. Lots of things are possible.

But while it's possible that a jet plane might appear like a Polaris rocket, it is of course certain that a Polaris rocket appears like a Polaris rocket.

Quack, quack...

Yes, they did.

Linking to a web-page that has no numbers newer than 2007 (and the latest "news" on which talk about a preliminary plan outlined in February) isn't goingto make reality go away.

No way. Some of these would actually make flying safer. Especially not allowing passengers on flights. The TSA would never implement any policy that actually increases the safety of air travel. They'd be out of a job if they did that.

Ah - my google-fu returned. The thing can indeed be found here: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

Turns out what I posted was more of a paraphrase than a quote - I was connecting this passage:

with this one, that actually occurs a few paragraphs before:

But the one that really encapsulated my thinking (that made me respond in the first place) is this one:

As opposed to advanced moral reasoning:

(M.L King, Letter from a Jail in Birmingham, from the top of my head since I can't seem to find that on the net anywhere. Probably a matter of copyright or some such.)

Yes.

... but I think this is why this is a non-story. ANYBODY with access to your hardware owns you. That's always been a given. If I can touch your bare silicon and metal, then I can put all kinds of things in all kinds of places for all kinds of reasons. Big fat Duh.

Maybe this is news to the public, but I'm not sure it is "news for nerds".

So?

That's how the US was settled.

No, not end of story by a long shot.

Mining gold on the moon makes economic sense exactly if it results in gain in excess of the original investment. How many dollars can you charge for an ounce of, not gold, but gold from the moon? The gold market is already based strictly on what people think is valuable. The price of gold has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the price of mining gold.

Does it even have to be gold? How about a speck of genuine moon rock (in a nice clear plastic cast) - yours for only ... $59.99? How many slashdotters would buy such a thing? What would it cost to get, say, a couple kg of that back to earth? A billion dollars? That's the price of a nice oil rig. In other words: that's the kind of money that is already available and people are already expending it because they expect a decent return on that investment.

You may want to be just a shade more careful with calling things economically infeasable.

It'll be called "Windows X" of course. To capitalize on the value of the letter X in marketing these days.

Not really - there's a surprising number of people who don't get the difference and use the words interchangeably.

Or I shouldn't say "don't get" - more like they never thought about it.

When someone asks "how long will this project take" and I say "about three months" everybody "gets" that I am not very precise here. But my prediction may well be accurate. But when I respond "498.3 work hours", then everybody "gets" that I am giving more precision, but that my prediction is now rather unlikely to be accurate. This is entirely understood by everybody and usually doesn't need to be said.

But yet when you tell your boss "about three months" he will invariably ask you to give him more digits, for reasons not quite fully understood by mere humans.