Indeed. Just imagine the computer guy going around to the astrobiology people claiming they were all incompetent and that they could learn why by watching a DVD and subscribing to his newsletter.

And another thing that may justify NASA firing his ass all in itself: some guy going around refering to himself as a NASA team leader and, under that authority, making all sorts of bold claims regarding intelligent design.

In other words, the people behind that claim are desperately trying to put some pressure on politicians to get their hands on more money for their pet project, and shift the blame to politicians for not succeeding at their objective.

For the now-closed Tevatron, a demonstration of sensitivity to the Higgs can be seen as a kind of moral victory, says theorist Gordon Kane of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In 2011, researchers at Fermilab argued for an extension to the machine's run, on the grounds that they might be able to obtain evidence for the Higgs if they had more time, but their proposal was turned down by the US Department of Energy.
This proves they could have found the Higgs themselves, if they'd had full funding,” says Kane.

And, yeah, it also sounds like they want to take the credit for LHC's future discoveries. Not nice.

Yeah, but in both cases there are certain odds that you will get fucked in the ass and all shaken up when you least expect it.

Seriously, man. Don't you think there could be a problem with a house that is not actually attached to its foundations?

There is absolutely no problem with "a house that is not actually attached to its foundations". In fact, it's one of the main principles behind a set of technologies employed in retrofitting important structures and also in recent structures whose integrity is fundamental to society. I could point you out to wikipedia on this one, but wikipedia's article on this subject is rather poor and useless. But to just give you a headsup, the principle behind this technique is to separate the superstructure (a frame, bridge deck, etc...) from the infrastructure (foundations, piers, frames, etc...) and then, depending on the technology, either prevent the earthquake energy to be transmitted to the superstructure, transfer it through a flexible connection or even transfer it through dynamic dampeners.

By the look of this article, it appears this technology fits in the 2nd category (transfer earthquake energy through a flexible connection). Yet, I really doubt it will go anywhere, as it is much simpler to resort to passive systems which are already widely deployed, tested in the real world and proven to work incredibly well, such as base isolation through neoprene bearings. So, probably this was the first and last time anyone will ever hear of this.

\\me is a structural engineer

I just logged on to say exactly that. Claiming that Interpol arrested anyone is like claiming that the local police administrative clerk who happened to send/receive cooperation requests from/to any other police force is the one responsible for doing any of the arrests.

So, the question which must be asked is who exactly is behind these arrest warrants? And why did anyone tried to pass the idea that there is an international police body with global jurisdiction that is dedicated to attacking this elusive anonymous group?

The average user isn't the only one who doesn't have the slightest idea of what hardware he really needs to get the job done. If "us geeks" also knew better then any synthetic benchmark would be automatically dismissed as being irrelevant and useless, and the most important property of a computing rig would be its cost/performance ratio, with cost reflecting not only the hardware price, direct and indirect, but also operational cost. After all, it's irrelevant if a certain game runs at 100fps or 10000fps, and for regular use stuff, such as web browsing, office stuff and whatnot, any 6 year old system is overkill.

Yet, geeks salivate with stuff such as cores, MHz, a string of irrelevant benchmark numbers and even statistics on HPC usage, and this for systems which the closest they come to HPC is calculating the n-th digit of pi.

So, cluelessness isn't exclusive of non-geeks. The e-penis factor is always influencing purchasing decisions. The only difference is that some are more knowledgeable about useless numbers and factoids than others.

If you compare some carjacker punk with a Bernard Madoff, who is the biggest thief?

It really depends on what's your definition of "friendly". For example, I see BibTeX as the friendliest bibliography system there is, mainly due to the fact that when you use it you don't even need to be aware you are using it. You just pick your bibliography file and simply reference what you wish to reference. What's unfriendly about the following command?

Managing a BibTeX bibliography is also quite simple and straight-forward. A user only needs to open a text file with a text editor and add an entry to a book. What's unfriendly about the following entry?

If we compare using BibTeX with the god-awful way Microsoft Word handles bibliographies we lose any reason to claim that word processors are somehow better at its job than LaTeX. So, why do some people keep parrotting that word processors such as Microsoft Word are somehow better at producing documents than LaTeX? This sort of claim simply goes against reality.

The last time I used Microsoft Word 2007 to input equations was a couple of months ago, and although it is able to represent simple equations, like the ones involving index notation, fractions and other basic notation elements, the only way it was possible to enumerate them was if the user relied on a couple of obscure nasty hacks which fail to be even adequate.

And even then, equations in Microsoft Word 2007 are still represented in a crude and unpretty way when compared to the much simpler and straight-forward TeX way of doing things.

I don't see why normal people wouldn't be able to write a LaTeX document. Setting up a new document may be tricky for a absolute newbie, but that's nothing that can't be taken care by a template with a half dozen lines, and learned in a couple of minutes. From there, basically the only thing a user needs to know is to use commands such as \chapter, \section, \subsection and the like, and know how to write. How is that hard?

I would like to know where do you find any word processor, such as Microsoft Word or even Libre Office Writer, to be superior to LaTeX in any aspect. It obviously isn't on the support for math notation, and it isn't on reference management, on colaborative work, on revision control, or on system requirements. It is also not in productivity, both by "advanced" users and specially in newbies.

The only aspect where I see that word processors may appear to be superior is in table formatting and in managing figures. Yet, that apparent superiority doesn't go beyond the discovery that pictures can be dragged and dropped to a document. Once the user is forced to format those objects then all hell breaks loose.

So, exactly where do you see word processors as being always superior to writing LaTeX documents through a text editor?

A fellow slashdotter directed my attention to this post. This sort of persecution made by these people has started a couple of weeks ago, when I read this post and this post and this post outing the bonch and overly critical guy accounts as accounts used to astroturf slashdot by posting the same marketing drivel, copied almost verbatim from the same PR script.

Then, after stumbling on a post where the bonch account was being used to post messages trying to discredit the astroturfing going on in slashdot here, I've posted this message in reply to bonch, outing that account as being one of a set of shill accounts employed to astroturf discussions here on slashdot.

Due to this, I started to receive personal attacks from anonymous posts. I've posted this message, and a couple of followups such as this reply.

As further retaliation, I had all the posts listed in my comments section suddenly modded as -1 troll, and a wave of messages posted anonymously with conspiracy theories and attacking me personally, such as this one, started to be posted in multiple discussions. This particular version has been repeatedly posted, often in the same discussion and as the first post, as can be seen here

So, thank the people behind accounts such as bonch, Overly Critical Guy, TechGuys and others for this spam and astroturfing campaign. It appears that their astroturfing operation isn't working smoothly anymore, as bonch complains here. So, to stave off some of the flak they have been receiving, they now waste their time with online stalking, personal attacks and creating absurd conspiracies regarding people who posted messages outing them as corporate shills. They quite often throw accusations like this through anonymous posts. For example, after MrHanky pointed bonch as a shill, the overly critical guy and SharkLaser accounts start attacking the user who outed bonch, and start to throw the shill and conspiracy accusations with the followups to this thread. In this post the Overly Critical Guy account is used to post the exact same accusations, but as they precede the post where I out these shill accounts, they only mention users such as Galestar, NicknameOne and flurp.

So, keep up with your conspiracies to try to save your ass. And while you keep blabbering how posts outing the people behind shill accounts, such as bonch, overly critical guy, sharklaser, jo_ham, and others, are posted by conspiracy theory loons, maybe you can spend a minute arguing why those affected by these shill outings actually take the time to compile and publish all this personal information on a single user who happened to post a message reiterating their outing.

If you copy media you didn't purchase AND you make a profit off of it, you're a thief.

No, you are a copyright infringer. Stealing is based on the subtraction of property, and you don't subtract anything by copying something.

To put it in perspective, some people took video cameras to cinemas to record movies, and then sell the video recording of the movie for some change. Others took photografs of every page in a book, and sold copies of their photos. Do you believe that recording something with your video camera or taking photographs corresponds to stealing? Of course not.

So, don't be an idiot. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. It isn't stealing, no matter how you try to distort it.

Before you feel entitled to accuse someone of being wrong, let alone "helplessly wrong", you should make sure you don't make yourself look likea fool by pulling a Rotsky. The matter of fact is that a sale price only increases if and only if some person decides to increase it. An increase in demand does not cause, as you tried to put it, "price inflation". The only case that you can make for that is if you assert that the supply and demand model is actually infalible, which notoriously is not, and that this price increase is tied to some form of scarcity, which obviously is not when talking about media sales, including the so called digital sales.

Don't put words in my mouth. If you are unable to refute or even face what has been said then you cannot simply lie and commit libel to try to put yourself in a position which is less hypocritical and sociopathic.