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Submission + - All HQ2 Applicants Should Sue Amazon/Bezos for Fraud

spiedrazer writes: As can be seen in this article in BisNow published a full 10 months ago, it is likely that Jeff Bezos never had any intention of building the heralded Amazon HQ2 facility anywhere other than where he already lived. The entire search contest/sweepstakes process was pretty much a scam designed to coerce even larger financial concessions out of the cities where he was always going to build it. While that's obviously a problem for the 'winning' cities, what about the man-hours and other expenses all the other communities dedicated to a proposal that never had a chance of winning. These communities should all file a class action lawsuit to recover every penny they spent on their proposals from Amazon. And if I were one of the 'winning' communities, I would sue to invalidate any additional concessions that were added after the "contest" was announced, or just void all the concessions since they were likely based on getting the entire HQ2 capacity, and not just half of it!

Submission + - Bill Nye Botches Deflate-Gate Science 1

spiedrazer writes: It looks like America's favorite non-scientist science authority has weighed in on the physics of the NE Patriots Deflate-Gate "scandal", saying that to change the pressure in a football, you need to have a needle to either let air in our out. This, of course, completely ignores the Ideal Gas Law and the effect that changing temperature would have on the pressure of the gas within the ball. MIT did a "slightly" more scientific look at the physics here and found a pretty significant effect.

I didn't realize that Bill Nye had so little science background, but from his wikipedia page: "Nye began his professional entertainment career as a writer/actor on a local sketch comedy television show in Seattle, Washington, called Almost Live!. The host of the show, Ross Shafer, suggested he do some scientific demonstrations in a six-minute segment, and take on the nickname "The Science Guy".[14] His other main recurring role on Almost Live! was as Speedwalker, a speedwalking Seattle superhero."

Comment I thought we were expanding??? (Score 2) 217

OK, so if all matter came into being 14 Billion years ago in the big bang, and all space and the matter in it has been expanding since then, and new research shows that the universe will likely keep expanding as opposed to collapsing back in upon itself, how are two galaxies with the same approximate mass supposed to collide? Shouldn't we be getting further apart? I guess relatively close bodies of matter will continue to migrate towards each other even as the larger body of matter continues to expand, so matter will eventually be in larger clumps with more open space between them, but it still seems a bit counter-intuitive.

Comment Um... How about the cost of Movies??? (Score 1) 1162

As long as a premium new release Blue Ray movie is $29.95 when I might find the DVD for $15, blue ray will not take hold the way some folks had projected. It really costs no more to produce the BlueRay version. When the technology was brand new there was a business case for a premium price, but that shold be close to level by now. Just another case of greedy studios shooting themselves in the foot.

Comment Why Tower over parabolic trough? (Score 1) 387

I'm sure there are numbers, but from a completely un-informed standpoint it seems to me that the paraboloc trough designs where a slurry tube runs through a mirrored trough would be cheaper to produce and maintain? http://www.powermag.com/renewables/solar/Saguaro-Solar-Power-Plant-Red-Rock-Arizona_468.html

Comment Re:Legit. (Score 1) 138

I'm thinking that the first fold of the 13 total folds created a sheet with 2 layers, so the additional 12 folds would yield 2^12 or 4096 total layers. Not sure where they came up with 6000 in the article. As to length, 15000 feet halved 13 times would be 1.83 feet, but the depth of the folds eats up a lot of length, which is why their bundle really couldn't fold that 13th time.

Comment Re:Apple users... (Score 1) 191

My New Verizon iPhone4 is my first Apple product other than an iPod. I don't upgrade phones until my contract is up, so I couldn't really get a smartphone until about 4 months ago. I could have gotten an Android then, but waited for the iPhone so I could re-use all my music and other stuff in iTunes. No-one has ever really convinced me that an Android or other phone is better than an iPhone, nor do I think the iPhone is better than an Android. It just made more sense to me for convenience sake. My point is that I don't think I have a huge loyalty to Apple. My new phone does not seem to have a death grip issue (where shorting multiple antenna segments kills your signal). It does experience a degradation if you cradle the phone to hide the antenna, but all cell phones have this issue.

Comment No It Isn't...Na Na Na Na Na (Score 1) 191

The point of the article is that ALL phones will experience a signal degredation when the antenna is shielded, including the Verizon iPhone4. The death grip on the original iPhone 4 was a specific legitimate design problem where the antenna could be bridged/shorted between multiple antenna segments to drastically reduce the signal. No real death grip or phone cradling required. The Verizon phone does not have this design flaw.

Comment Re:Cool, but not the same as being there... (Score 1) 103

Please note that I'm not criticizing for inadequacy... I'm just informing the many readers who will check it out that, no matter how high the resolution, it still does not approach the visual impact these works can have in person. I wouldn't want people to think that they no longer need a museum trip because they have seen these works on Google!

BTW, I'm not an art snob, just a guy who happened into the Boston Museum of Fine Arts before a RedSox game one Sunday and found myself in front of some truly breathtaking paintings thinking "Wow, those full color prints in art books don't do this justice!"

I also did not rule out the possibility of improved digital renderings in the future.

Comment Cool, but not the same as being there... (Score 4, Insightful) 103

Having seen several works by the major impressionists in person, I can say that no 2D rendering of a truly great painting can do it justice, no matter how high the resolution. Looking at a Van Gogh, for example, the paint depth in the brush strokes can be up to a centimeter thick, and this depth interactes with the light in person in a way that you can't capture in a 2D image. Which is not to say the whole thing isn't still really cool.

Comment Re:Distant Galaxy Now even Further (Score 1) 225

I'm not an expert on relativity, but I'd love to understand your point if it's accurate. As pointed out by michaelwv, we know that the photons we are seeing now left that galaxy 13.2 billion years ago, so where we see it now is it's position then relative to our current position at this time. We also know that the universe has expanded a great deal since then (especially since the age of the universe is 13.75 billion years old give or take). Hence, from our perspective the actual current physical position of the galaxy should be much further away than it was then (for those of us who don't understand). I'm sure you do need to understand relativity to calulate exacly how far away that is likely to be, but I'd love to hear the justification for how it is curreently just that 13.2 billion miles away at this time, when we know there have been 13.2 billion years of expansion.

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