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Comment Re:Drug test the final standard? (Score 0) 482

I hope Gregg Lamond does the right thing and turns his in too in support, same with Mercx and Indurain.

Congrats, you spelt "Indurain" correctly. Greg Lemond. Eddy Merckx. Jesus.

Cycling has never been lower since Tom Simpson died on the side of the road from an overdose.

He died of dehydration.

The evidence consists of not one hard fact or test.

It's not a criminal trial. There's plenty of credible witnesses at this stage, and the retro-testing from the 99 Tour is a hard fact (although in-admissible)

This whole thing goes back to a kerfuffle of three International sports groups and a urine test for EPO in 1999 that came positive, then could not be duplicated in later tests.

The 1999 test was thrown out at the time because of an independent panel set up by the UCI (Cycling Federation) at the demands of the WADA (World Anti-Doping) and the IOC (Olympics) finding a lack of scientific rigor on the part of the French Lab.

The WADA, the International parent of the US-ADA, threw that panels findings out because it did not like the results.

The IOC censured the WADA, and WADA is still butt-hurt. They could not touch him, so they sent the USADA after him.

Cool story bro

It is all eye witnesses. Eye witnesses that are getting a break on their own charges, or people who wrote books and made money on the deal.

He was tested randomly year round. He was tested after every stage win, or top 10 placement. He was tested every day he wore the Yellow in the TDF. He wears freaking makeup on his arms to cover the tracks he has from being stuck so many times.

Not one positive.

Not one.

Cool. Ullrich's clean too, and Riis, Millar, Zabel. Those guys must be lying when they said they were doping. Btw, Lance did fail a test for cortisone in '99.

Armstrong’s secret is that he trained harder and more effectively than anyone else. He and his trainer Chris Carmichael re-wrote the book on training and nutrition.

The trainer he dropped once he started winning Tours? Did he write the foreword for the new edition of the training and nutrition book?

This in a time that his primary rival, Jan Ulrich still drank heavy cream to put on fat in the off season and then trained to get rid of it, thinking it turned into muscle!

"Ullrich". Jesus. Citation needed.

They refined the “dancing on the pedals” style of 6 time champion Indurian and perfected it, allowing him to beat the more powerful Ulirch and the superlight weight Marco Pantini in the hills.

Are you talking about Micheál Indurian, six time Ballygobackwards Egg And Spoon Champion, who famously used to dance on his effects pedals when he was performing Rattlin' Bog? The only cyclist I can think of is "Indurain" but he only won the Tour five times, and he probably stood on the pedals a similar number of times

Comment Re:I don't know who to believe (Score 1) 482

- How wasn't he caught in the act for so long?

Why wasn't Millar, Ullrich, Riis etc.?

How can all the technological innovation that went into his cycling be ignored? The wind-tunnel testing, the water-tank-in-frame, the unique bike designs, those all were serious efforts that AFAIK were unique, why spend that effort if you're already doping?

The reality is that most of that stuff is pure gimmick. There might have been some placebo effect, but I'm not aware of anything Lance brought to cycling that's made a big impact (c.f. Lemond and his aero helmet, Hinault and clipless pedals)

- How were others not able to cheat as well as he did?

No big reason to believe they weren't. Just because he was doping doesn't mean he wasn't naturally a stronger rider than his rivals. Although I find it hard to believe that Lance had anything less than the best possible chemical help for the Tour (note that he's one of the few top Tour riders from the 2000s who has never failed a test/had a bag of his blood found in a Spanish fridge. What does that imply?)

- How can the fact that he trained for only 1 race each year, the Tour de France, be ignored as explaining his stellar performance? Most other competition would do more racing per year, Lance focused like a laser beam on the Tour de France. How can this not help explain his insane performances?

Ullrich & Beloki followed a similar programme

- Lance packed his team with certifiably world-class climbers to set pace for him and run strategy on the large parts of big climbs. Other squads did not. Can't this help explain it?

What's to explain? He did have a great team most years, but they complemented his ability to attack on the last mountain and gain 1 - 3 mins, and similar time in the tts. They didn't win the race for him.

Comment Re:Drug test the final standard? (Score 1) 482

So in the end, he was perhaps better at hiding the cheating, but he was still massively better at actual cycling than any other cyclist at the time who was also very likely cheating as well.

Ugh... the guy was probably the most anal cyclist in the pro peloton - his diet, training, equipment, skin-suits, racing program was all micromanaged to the extreme. Of course his drug programme would have been better, and less detectable, than his rivals.

Also, please don't say "Lance was the bestest cycler ever!1111". It makes me want to cry. He was probably the best Tour rider ever, but acomplished very little outside of that. Was he the best cyclist of the last 20 years? Probably. Could he have competed with Boonen, Museeuw in the Northern classics? Zabel, Freire, Cippo in the sprints, flat classics etc.? I don't think so

Comment Re:plain-text OS? (Score 1) 433

That wouldn't be good enough if the requirement is that you hand over the original password to the authorities. Working backwards from the hash will give you /a/ password that hashes to that hash, but not necessarily the same password the user entered. Of course it's an absolutely ridiculous law, and I can't imagine it lasting very long

Comment Re:Bluffing? (Score 1) 693

It was an obvious bluff. The waffle at the start: "statistically blah blah blah". Looking at the overall results you may be able to tell if students cheated, saying whether or not a single student cheated is unpossible. Also, great quote: "I can give the dean a list, and I can guarantee with a 95% certainty that everyone who cheated on the exam was on the list". So can I, give him a list of 95% or more of the class, just a ruse to scare the students. Other signs: the deadline, "tell your instructors by Friday or else". This is classic social engineering and should send off alarm bells in anyone. Good cop, bad cop: "The Dean and College Affairs want to persue this and do unspeakable things to you, I went to them and made a deal for you...". Again, when you hear this, does it not send off immediate alarm bells that he's bullshitting? The deal breaker: a girl near the end asks "do even the people who didn't cheat have to do the exam again?". His answer: "yes, and ...". If he was really going to produce a list of cheaters, he would surely only have them sit the exam again. Or, maybe to be fair, scrap the worst of the old/new exam for non-cheaters.
Moon

NASA Strikes Gold and Water On the Moon 421

tcd004 writes "The PBS NewsHour reports: there is water on the moon — along with a long list of other compounds, including mercury, gold and silver. That's according to a more detailed analysis of the cold lunar soil near the moon's South Pole. The results were released as six papers by a large team of scientists in the journal, Science Thursday. [Note: Nature's papers are behind a paywall; for a few more details, reader coondoggie points out a a story at Network World.] The data comes from the October 2009 mission, when NASA slammed a booster rocket traveling nearly 6,000 miles per hour into the moon and blasted out a hole. Trailing close behind it was a second spacecraft, rigged with a spectrometer to study the lunar plume released by the blast. The mission is called LCROSS, for Lunar Crater Observer and Sensing Satellite."
Games

Why Warhammer Online Failed — an Insider Story 235

sinij writes "An EA insider has aired dirty laundry over what went wrong with Warhammer and what could this mean for the upcoming Bioware Star Wars MMORPG. Quoting: 'We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out. We sold more than a million boxes, and only had 300k subs a month later. Going down ever since. It's 'stable' now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade [old] make more money than our biggest project." The (unverified) insider, who calls himself EA Louse (named after the EA Spouse who brought to light the company's excessive crunchtime practices) says similar trouble is ahead for the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA has not commented yet. God of War creator David Jaffe has criticized the insider for having unrealistic expectations of working in the games industry.

Comment Re:Yes, the flapping is keeping it in the air (Score 1) 250

I looked at all the videos available for the flight. It is obvious that the flapping is maintaining flight - if he just started gliding at the release point, there is no way the flight would have been as long. This is probably the best view, and it also lets you hear what this thing sounds like when it flaps.

I'm not an aerospace engineer but from that video it looks like he's not getting any lift from the flapping. The center of mass of bird/ornithopter/thing seems to be falling to the ground at a roughly constant rate, with the flapping just moving the cockpit/wings up/down.

Comment Re:Um. (Score 1) 699

Who's fault is it when you're walking on a highway?

The driver's fault, assuming she didn't jump out in front of the traffic. Whatever about her decision to walk down a major road, it's still the responsibility of drivers not to travel too fast for the conditions. Looking at the google streetview for the road in question - it looks like a busy road (2 lanes each direction and a middle passing lane?) but it doesn't look so busy or dangerous that a driver would be unable to react if he saw someone walking.

Comment Re:In fact, 50% suggests a strong genetic link.. (Score 1) 617

OK, that's fair enough. In summary though, it's saying "there's not enough data" or "we don't know". Personally, having known, ugh, approximately one pair of identical twins (when they were around 8-9) my impression was that they had a very similar childhood. Much more so than I'd expect for non-identical twins.

Comment Re:In fact, 50% suggests a strong genetic link.. (Score 1) 617

"Assume that 5% of males have a homosexual orientation as adults. Consider two identical newborn twin boys who were separated at birth and raised in different homes without any contact with each other. If homosexuality were caused by something in the environment, then, if twin #1 turned out to be gay, the chances of the other twin becoming a gay adults would only be about 5%. That is because the second twin would have been exposed to a totally different environment during his upbringing. So his chances of being gay would be the same as for any other male -- about 5%. But, studies have reliably shown that if one twin is gay, there is about a 55% chance that the other twin will be gay."

And how many identical twin boys are separated at birth and raised in different homes without any contact with each other? And what percentage of those have the same sexuality? That's the real data you need. Your article doesn't seem to say if they pulled their numbers from these cases but presumably not because The Internet tells me that around 60% of identical twins have the same sexuality as their twin, which I assume is the 55% in this article. Now, if sexuality is environmental, wouldn't you expect identical twins (who, to a good approximation, will have a very similar first five years) to have the same sexuality?

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