Uhm. You can't have a low 'grade' fundamental element. You can have a lower purity level (which may be what you mean by grade) which can then be refined into a more pure 'higher grade'. Since there is a worldwide shortage outside of the US' apparent cache of helium, though, doesn't it make us look like we are metaphorically wiping our asses with our extra helium because we have so much when we throw it into balloons instead of treating is as a valuable resource?

I like balloons and I don't want to ruin a child's birthday, but I don't think it is necessarily a good use of the resource to have a floaty thing on a string that makes your voice sound funny and I don't think that the lack of floating balloons at parties will ruin anyone's day. Also, IANAScientist but I'm pretty sure that the 'low grade' helium is still suitable for experimentation and, with minimal refinement, can be used for medical purposes as well:

Ultimately it isn't like balloon helium is somehow a different thing than medical helium...in my opinion we are simply wasting an important resource for something frivolous. Balloons can be put on sticks...actually I think that might be more fun so that the children can beat one another with the balloons. But then one of them loses the balloon and stabs another child and....wait...ALL BALLOONS SHOULD BE ON STICKS.

I think this is less about mistrusting the mathematicians involved and moreso about mistrusting what happened to these algorithms after submittal. As you say, they were weakened by intentionally bad choices for parameters and due to the close relationship between NIST and the NSA, how can you trust that the original submissions actually do achieve the same level of security (and moreover, how can you trust that the submissions were not specifically selected due to the fact that the NSA is already able to reverse engineer them)? It isn't that the mathematicians and cryptographers are tainted - it is that the NSA has herpe-ghonno-syphil-aids coupled with incurable smallpox, H1N1, and the plague and therefore anything that they MAY have touched is likely infested.

It sucks that there is an 'guilt by association' element to it but in my mind it is justifiable to be suspicious so that the disease isn't spread, especially where something like standardized cipher suites (which are supposed to be secure) are concerned.

Sounds about right to me.

Its result is simultaneously all possible results for all possible sets of input data. It doesn't solve the problem...it solves all problems.

Artifacts, documents, buildings, references to individuals who were known to exist and who through a variety of other sources can be tied to direct events or circumstances that we have historical records for, laws, correlations between histories of cultures who traded with the roman empire or were absorbed by the roman empire, wars with historical references between multiple cultures...I don't think I need to go on.

The fact of the matter is that we have overwhelming repositories of evidence that support the existence of the Roman Empire and we can correlate tens of thousands of different evidential examples from multiple cultures of the same events and people across thousands of years. That is a solid chain of evidence. Most religions on the other hand rely on books or teachings that have been lost repeatedly and regurgitated from memory (without bias of COOURSE), theoretical figures who cannot be proven to have existed, mythical deities who cannot be proven to have existed, and zero tangible evidence of events attributed to these mythical deities having taken place for any reason other than a scientifically understood one (or at least science provides a relatively feasible theory rather than 'just believe!'). There are some religions that do have some of the basic examples I identified above as 'proof' of the Roman Empire, however in almost every example they are completely contradicted by other fundamental tenets of those religions anyway so....what were you saying again?

They are spying by circumventing the technical foundations of the Internet thus there is a direct correlation to an impact on the services delivered across the internet. Also, just because they are only "reviewing" that data does not mean that they cannot also take action against a perceived threat no matter whether or not there is an ACTUAL threat.

The injection mold for a $1 tiny plastic part does not cost $15k.

For examples of items and the associated cost of mold and subsequently produced item, go here.

The bottom example is probably the most applicable to a tiny windshield wiper sprayer and even accounting for some sort of additional complexity and doubling the cost of the mold for the lens caps, you're still around ~$1800. Let's say that 200 units require replacement each year at $10/ea. You are already over the initial cost of the mold in one year and production runs on vehicles typically last 4-5 years. Total profit minus the original cost of the mold on a run of 4 years (assuming that they never ever use this part on any vehicle ever again which NEVER happens) is $6200 on REPLACEMENT PARTS ONLY. This is not even mentioning that the cost of the production of the mold is ALREADY SUBSIDIZED by the cost of the vehicles produced requiring these parts AND the fact that however many hundreds of thousands of these vehicles are sold MUST include this component.

Even if the cost of producing the part is $1 and they mark up the part by $0.10, 100,000 cars gives a profit of $10,000 on a $1 part and AGAIN has covered the cost of the original mold and a profit of $8200 is achieved just on units sold and not on replacement parts. This again assumes that this part will never be used for any other vehicle ever, only 100,000 vehicles were sold over 4 years, and a negligible amount of replacement units are required each year. And there is still a massive profit.

Even including warehousing, distribution, and inventory tracking, there is zero justifiable reason to charge $109 to replace a $1 piece of plastic.

I love how every negative thing even other governments do is all our fault. I guess GCHQ is full of retards who can't wipe their ass without being told to by America. What a crock of shit.

There may be connections and there may have been discussion between GCHQ and NSA as we are allies but I'm tired of hearing how we're assholes for things that other people do. If our government agencies can order your government agencies around, you might as well call yourselves Americans, too.

Ultimately a cost has been shouldered by the productive citizenry in middle income households and that money comes directly out of their pockets. How many people do you know in a middle income household that can afford the loss of any pay without a catastrophic upset to the balance of their daily lives much less a 47% increase in the cost of their power?

There may be jobs added for those unemployed and there may eventually be a benefit to all Germans...for now, though, it is causing serious damage to their middle income households and therefore to their economy. Two German families I know have had to sell the houses they have lived in for 15+ years specifically because the cost of power is so much higher...their 5+ member families live in two bedroom apartments now. But hey, there is a benefit to it right? Somewhere....

Babies is the correct unit of measure, actually. Babies provides a unique unit of measure in that it is minimally variable but, when averaged and used as a constant, can provide a standard unit of measure for determining length, width, speed, time, weight, etc...the possibilities are endless! Almost anything that can be measured can be measured in babies. Imagine - no more confusion between metric or standard...Babies is the answer!

All units below are based off an average newborn baby:
B = Baby (Avg. Length) = 20in. = 50.8cm
Bt = Baby Time = 273.75 days (9 months x 30.4166 days) = 23,652,000 seconds
Bw = Baby Weight = 7.75lbs = 3.515kg
(While there are individual units of measure listed above, all should be referred to simply as 'babies' for scientific documentation purposes as the applicable unit of babies is implied by the circumstance.)

Taking the .04 furlongs across example and converting to babies (assuming this is a square apartment building with a standard 10ft ceiling, .04 furlongs by .04 furlongs by 10ft.), we get a volume of about 1,505.43 babies cubed. Imagining then that this is an asteroid traveling at the fastest speed currently listed on JPL's Current Impact Risks page, 19.14km/s, we can also extrapolate that it would be traveling at a rate of 37,677.15 babies/second. Therefore, this would be an object with a volume of roughly 1,505.43 B traveling at a rate of 891,139,951,800 B/Bt.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Do NOT measure in DEAD BABIES. Dead babies is a wildly variable measurement and heavily dependent upon the circumstance of baby death, lifespan, birth defects, and missing parts.

A very, very large bag. Ziploc would be the way to go...you know that you didn't lose any CO2 because you can hear and feel the bag close with their patented SmartZip seal!

I completely agree...reasoned discussion is hard to come by and most people disregard ACs based upon the fact that 99.9999% of ACs are trolls or are users who have an ID and are posting AC so that they can troll. I don't like that this is the case because I'm an advocate of privacy (and I actively try to read AC posts, especially when moderating because of this) but it definitely is the norm and limits the exposure of the discussion.

If even have two or three people racing toward some sort of invention, I also think it should be thrown out but not necessarily on obviousness criteria. Ultimately there are multiple people working on the same thing and if they are not directly inspired by one another, how do you decide who gets to patent the idea and who has completely wasted their time?

There should be no patent available in circumstances where it can be proven that multiple people or organizations simultaneously developed similar methods to accomplish the same goal in my opinion. Otherwise whoever has the most money for research and can finish first becomes teh winnar and competition is spoiled by a monopoly on the technology in question.

I've never understood why people have a problem with griefers. People who spawn-camp repeatedly and the like, sure, but unless the game is shitty enough that you are forced to contend with the same asshole over and over, so-called griefers are easy to get away from. Most commonly I hear people say 'griefer' but what they really mean is 'PK' or 'PVPer'. Personally, I could give 2 shits about PKs or even griefers...IMO they make the game more interesting.

Some of the best games I've ever played have been rife with assholes just waiting to take advantage. Is it frustrating dealing with them or losing to them? For sure. Does it make your heart beat and give you more excitement in 2 minutes than any raid or encounter possibly could? Hell yes. It makes you better and makes you want to overcome and when you do, the experience is that much sweeter. I am personally more offended by carebears who don't want anything unexpected happening in their perfect little craft world. THOSE are the lowest form of gamer because they are fair-weather fans and they clutter forums and overwhelm GMs with incessant complaints about people who bother them. Ultimately these people play for 6 months, do all the crafting they can, and get bored and quit after fucking up whatever game they are playing. They are more vocal than ANY other group and they invade games which are clearly built with PVP in mind and systematically destroy the PVP element of those games.

The concept of an outbreak of some unknown agent that creates zombies is obviously fictitious but represents a worst-case scenario and also accurately represents some of the easiest modes of re-transmission. How is that not comparable to a flu pandemic, at least from a modeling perspective?