Sizeism is one of several prejudices that seem currently acceptable by society. Imagine if the M$ news release said that game experience would change if the player were black; levels inaccessible because you were the wrong colour. Or female. Or gay. Or disabled.

25-30% of Americans are obese, but much of society (including the obese) seem to buy-in to the view that skinny is good and obese is obscene - and so nothing changes. Look at the comments here. Similar comments against gays or blacks would be dismissed as troll, but here we're having a good laugh. Anyway, with so many people being targeted by M$ I doubt that M$ is doing itself much of a favour.

Slashdotters who are quite happy to say: "fuck you, go on a diet ha ha" might do better by standing up for minorities that don't include themselves. In today's world we all have a job to protect our rights from the fucked-up ambitions of government, interest groups, and business, and divide-and-conquer is one of their ways of eroding rights.

"Lets have DRM, filtering, and inspection because some people are pirates", "Let's have biometric responses and limitations because some people are fat", "lets limit others because of IQ", "lets fuck with them because they are a minority, and the majority will let it pass". Well its possible to make up distinctions that catch all of us - we all belong to one minority or another depending on how creatively you cut the cake - and if we go down this path we all get fucked. So we have to stick up for others as if it were ourselves.

OK, help me get down off my soap box. Anyway, I'm a fat bastard and always have been. Nothing I can do about it. But I'll be alright so long as besides having fat avatars you can have avatars with 10" dicks :-)

I apologise - we all get the wrong end of the stick from time to time.

I think this is a good hypothesis. Let's assume our machines become at least as capable as humans, and designed with similar psychological and cultural values. It would be reasonable to think that a human crew could be brought up by them - and might shine an interesting light on the nature/nurture question of human behaviour.

Of course, an even more likely scenario - given the assumption of intelligent, capable, machines - is that they go off and explore the galaxy leaving us behind. Humans are just too much trouble to transport and support.

The human form is a terrible design for space travel: physically frail, requiring a gaseous atmosphere with a narrow band of temperature and pressure, susceptible to damage from radiation, requiring chemical inputs (O2, H2O, food), and producing chemical excreta. It's been said that where ever we go we'll be "taking our plumbing with us", dealing with piss and shit no matter how advanced we become. Whereas a vacuum-capable, radiation-hardened, indefinite-lifespan machine would feel much more at home.

My sad assumption is that 1,000,000 yrs from now there might be a dynamic, galactic, civilization of machine intelligences living near and between the stars who look back fondly at their human precursors and progenitors.

So let's hope there are many manipulable loopholes in a yet-unknown deeper physics that we can use for FTL travel (one way or another), and that (in a way) Einstein is wrong.

Read his post again, dumbass. If you are so illiterate as to misunderstand his lament then ... go off and be condemned to be a computer programmer or slashdot reader or something.

The real shame, by the way, is that we are unlikely to even get outside our solar system - it being so mind bogglingly big, the nearest star so enormously far away, and our lives being so depressingly short.

"unseen" in TFA = obscured by dust, that's all

So fucking what? All science is based on revisions, refinements, adaptations, evolutions and revolutions. Somehow you think this denigrates a theory.

Big bang nucleosythesis was developed to explain the then observational data. The theory was a novel idea, a eureka moment for physics. It made numerous predications and follow-on work made even more.

Big bang nucleosythesis is good for explaining and predicting the abundances of 99% of the universe's baryonic matter. That's not bad. New measurements fit well with the theory's predictions.

Go and read "The First 3 Minutes" by Weinberg, for chrissake.

You observation is very astute. May I suggest that you are either an ignorant Christian pedophile, or you are not.

But hold! You said "and" instead of "or"! You're thinking from a quantum mechanical perspective. My apologies, I think you're right. There are aliens, and there are not aliens, and it will not be decided until with observe them? Cool. But to them we're the aliens..... ah shit, let's just say they are 'angels'.

---
Atheism is the rejection of dogmas, for it is the non-assertion of a delusional positive. - G.K Chesterfield

Do you have any evidence or detailed interpretation to support your assertion? Have you calculated a red-shift? Please share your calculations with us ....

You are not even looking at the raw data - just the adjusted images made available in press kits.

That's an irrational statement. In fact, it's rubbish. That's like saying that a marksman who practices a lot to become good loses his credibility as a marksman. Why? Because he wasn't 100% accurate first time and had to work at it?

Do you have any scientific training at all? Your reply seems to indicate that you don't. A "theory" is a framework that explains things. The more you know about the real world, the more you may have to adapt your theory to fit. Sometimes the theory cannot be further adapted - like the Steady State Model which just could not explain observations further, and was abandoned.

From 10,000 ft, science is a theory of the universe. It has been refined 100,000,000 times or more in the past 400 years. It doesn't appear to be losing its credibility given what it achieves - look around you - except amongst liedeologists.

That's right. It is the consensus, and doesn't appear to be losing its credibility despite your earlier remark. In fact, more than ever it appears to be right. There are mysteries and unknowns, and scientists eagerly await to see what refinements will come next.

You seem to be describing the "Steady State Model" - something put forward by Hoyle in 1948 as an alternative to the Big Bang. Allow me to answer the CMBR question on your behalf - Hoyle suggested that in the Steady State Model the CMBR was due to radiation interactions with iron dust, giving a thermalisation.

When CMBR data became available - showing an almost perfect black body signature - the Steady State Model could not get better than a 10% or so match. Whereas the Big Bang model agreed to 1 part on 10^4. That's extremely close. Most cosmologists have given up on the Steady State Model.

Also the Big Bang makes predictions of the distributions - relative amounts, or abundance - of the light elements and their isotopes. "Big Bang Nucleosynthesis" gives good agreement with observational data, although it is difficult to make measurements, and there are a number of discrepancies.

So while it is good to be skeptical you have to understand that the origin of the Cosmos has been a subject of intense scientific study. Many ideas have been suggested, but only one fits (extremely) well with the observational data. These other ideas have dropped by the wayside. Dream away with your cosmology, but you have to make it compatible with a lot of physics.

ps. Just for fun: why not create energy? I don't think you have to have a zero net sum. That's a product of space symmetries - and if you want to break those in your ideas go ahead. Energy conservation may only be a local effect.
I might be wrong in saying this, but, a CMBR photon has been enormously red-shifted from its original energetic state by the expansion of the universe. Energy is related to wavelength (Plank). Where did that energy go? It appears to have been lost!

You have a better theory that correlates with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation ? That predicts and matches its power spectral density to a fraction of a %, as well as its polarisation distribution? Great, let's hear it.

The truth is that the CMBR is a relic of the inflationary Big Bang. It's a Smoking Gun - almost literally. Look it up.

Bugger - I only have a 56K modem.

My experience is that CFLs have a short life span, perhaps the same as a regular bulb. Certainly less than advertised. I'm tired of replacing the bastard things. I think CFLs have been a con on the public. We should have waited for LEDs. I feel like I bought Betamax tapes. Its just like the fuel-efficiency sticker on a car - an efficiency normal people cannot achieve. The public screwed - once again.
 

> I'll start by saying that I'm an audiophile.
> ....... that contains very high and very low frequency data that you cannot hear.
> ....... you can feel it, physically with your body

Do you honestly believe this? You are deluding yourself. Enjoy vinyl, please, for how it makes you feel, perhaps nostalgia for days gone by, for the album covers, or whatever. All this is real, but please don't try to explain your feelings in terms of the audio, with mumbo jumbo pseudo-techno-babble.

The truth is that evangelical audiophiles (ie the people selling expensive stuff, or the people who bought it) avoid objective tests. It is not in their interests to be examined closely.