Anything that goes slow enough to be captured into an orbit will eventually spiral inwards.

Well, most of it (when we're talking matter not already in another black hole). Ordinary stuff orbiting near a black hole gets torn apart by the enormous tides and forms a disk-like structure similar to a gas giant's rings. Interactions among it and with the black hole's magnetic and gravitic fields can eject a bit of it in a pair of jets out along the axis of the disk, powered apparently by the rest of the stuff falling in.

These two black holes wouldn't stick to each other, but start swirling around each other and eventually merge together.

This is partly because of friction with and among other stuff in orbit around the black holes in their "accretion disks". (Black holes experience friction by eating the stuff in the other hole's disk of debris, with the momentum of the black-hole-plus-dinner thus being different from the black-hole-before-dinner.)

It's also partly because the rapid acceleration of things passing near a black hole or orbiting it causes the emission of gravity waves to be strong enough that it carries off substantial energy. (In less extreme environments, like suns and planets, the waves are not detectable by current instruments. In the case of two black holes,orbiting each other, they're detectable from across pretty much the whole universe.) This loss of energy amounts to "friction" that eventually causes co-orbiting pairs of black holes to spiral in and combine.

For all of my adult life, I've thought that software patents were evil, that they provided no benefit to the world.

I was wrong. Some patents can be incredibly valuable to the world. For example, this patent means that I'll have about 20 years before anyone else tries this garbage, lest they incur the wrath of Roku's patent lawyers.

I was curious about that price tag too. I have very fuzzy memories of watching a commentary track, probably from the DVD, and probably from ~20 years ago. If I'm remembering it right, the version we know today was expanded from a short student film, which could explain why it cost more than a student film normally would have cost. Now that I'm thinking about it more, I seem to remember that when watching it, it is fairly obvious which parts were added later. I need to re-watch it to be sure.

Also, the version on my file server is 70 minutes long, which would be very long for a student film.

Primer is said to have cost about $7,000 to make, around the year 2001, and is 74 minutes long.

You are quoting the clean version, the 1983 version from Gary Shilling.

Since this is a meme stonk, it would be more appropriate to use the meme version of the quote from 2021. As seen on r/wallstreetbets, "We Can Stay Retarded Longer Than You Can Stay Solvent"

Just one percent of the people who voted for Trump could spend their entertainment money for the week and crush some Wall Street douchbags. I voted for Trump, and I think the valuation on this is insane, er, retarded. I think that the shorts will win this in the long run. But you couldn't pay me enough to put my own finances at risk by gambling on how long it will take for the long run to get here.

No, that's the whole movie. Three minute tops. Charge full price for tickets. Rake in billions.

They could do the same thing with Indiana Jones. Have him wake up at 90, on his deathbed, with Marion at his side and let him spend a few minutes telling her about his silly nightmare with aliens and ballistas before he dies.

I'm telling you, people would line up around the block to see their beloved characters and stories restored after decades of abuse. They don't want a new story, that don't need a new story, they don't trust anyone to make a new story. But they'd chip in just to help clean up the damage so that they could go back to enjoying the old movies. And sales would grow as word of mouth got around that the classics had finally been restored.

Ivermectin will diffuse readily through skin. The animal drench version of the product might not be safe for a human to drink (I've never looked up the MSDS to see what else is in it), but it would probably work just fine if used according to the instructions, aka applied to skin.

Suffering? Really?

The problem fundamentally is that the LLM doesn't "know" anything. It strings words together in a way that is statistically similar to the way a human would do it, according to training data.

But they don't know what the words mean. They don't know what the sentences mean. They don't know the difference between true and false, right and wrong, real and fake.

They are fluid bullshit machines.

Oh look, you linked to a wikipedia page showing wild swings in the top tax rate, but also totally flat revenue, and you can't figure out what that means.

which certainly supports the "the rich are trying to turn us all into peasants" narrative of the person I'm replying to (although I strongly doubt their intentional narrative).

In terms of the slashdot comment system, I'm the person you are replying to. But you aren't responding to what I wrote, but instead to a hallucination. The nice thing about Slashdot is that what I actually wrote will always be there unchanged. You are free at any time to go look at my actual words, and meditate on why you substituted your own prejudices instead.

If I had to guess, I'd say you probably went to a government-run school and to the extent they taught you anything, they taught you envy, jealousy and class warfare. They certainly didn't teach you to consider how and why the government might be killing the middle class.

I can barely imagine what kind of education you must have had if you consider tax cuts to be a form of "shoveling money at" someone.

There are two ways to get really rich. One way involves creating something that many people want so badly that they are willing to give you their money to get it. The other way is by using government for plunder. It looks like your proposal is to empower the second group, under the theory that they will plunder the first group and not plunder you. Historically speaking, this has never worked. It is always easier to plunder you than it is to plunder the rich.

The goal is to reduce you to serfdom, peasants bought and sold by the rich. Cheap energy means everything else is cheap too, which gives you independence, so that has to go.

Some of the watermelons agree with this plan, others are in denial.

It does apply, in the sense that there has never been any suggestion that he would, should or could be charged with publishing secret documents. Nor, really, any suggestion that he should have offered the documents up for review to some censorship body before publishing them.

The US charges involve conspiracy to steal secret documents, and accessory to stealing secret documents. If he had sat back and waited for the documents to come to him, and then published them, as the New York Times did, he'd probably still be a free man today.

You can argue that the law is wrong, or that there should be a whistleblower exception, or whatever else. Personally, I think that Trump should have pardoned him. But the law is pretty clear, and the facts, as alleged in the indictment and assuming that they stand up under the scrutiny of a trial, seem to apply.

This reminds me of the sentencing of the "January 6 insurrection" guilty pleas. As I (a non-lawyer) understand it...

Regardless of whether you consider it an insurrection or a protest march petitioning the government for redress of grievances...

In the wake of the events, the fed busted a bunch of the participants and left them rotting in prison for months (over a year), with no end in sight. In many cases this left families with no breadwinner, enormous legal costs, and expectations of losing all their property as part of some eventual conviction.

Then the prosecutors offered some of the defendants a plea deal; Plead guilty to a misdemeanor or short-sentence felony and we'll drop any other charges.

Rule of thumb: a misdemeanor generally is a crime with a max sentence of no more than a year in prison, a felony more than a year - which is why you see "year and a day" max sentences on some crimes. An accused person already in prison for over the max sentence would expect that accepting the deal would result in immediate release with "credit for time served" (and others near the max might expect release much sooner). So some of them went for it.

Came the sentencing some judges applied a two-year sentence enhancements for "substantial interference with the 'administration of justice.'" OOPS! No release for you.

I'd expect them to pull the same sort of thing on Assange if he were foolish enough to plead guilty to anything, no matter how minor.

(By the way: This particular form of the practice, as used on the Jan6 participants, was just recently struck down. But the decision was based on Congress' certification of the presidential election not qualifying as "administration of justice.'" So this wouldn't apply to whatever enhancement trick they might pull on Julian.

I don't know what you heard, but baby cells can only stay baby cells, they can't become mommy cells,

Sez who?

There's been evidence for some time that post-pregnancy mothers often have clones of stem cells derived from the previous foetus. Sure such a clone would likely start out with its epigenitc programming set for whatever function it had in the baby's development (unless, say, some error in its differentiation is what led to it migrating to the woman's body to set up shop). But once established on the mother's side of the placental barrier, and especially after the birth, the stem cell clone can be expected to continue to run its program under direction of the growth factors in the mother's blood.

That amounts to a transplant of younger stem cells which could be expected to produce differentiated cells for tissue growth and replacemtnt,, with the aging clock set farther back and with some genes from the father to provide "hybrid vigor", filling in for defective genes in the mother's genome or adding variant versions of molecular pathways.