OK, I guess I never had a feeling for why there haven't been more MS competitors out there when writing a good OS is not such a big deal. As an outsider, it always seemed like writing linux must have been a bigger deal than maybe it was.

ps: A long long time ago I somehow obtained terrible karma during a period when I never posted (I've never figured out why), and I guess I don't post enough to raise it back up.

Can someone explain, or point to a discussion, of how it is argued that Git could be more important in the long term than Linux? Isn't Git small fish compared to Linux?

Except in this case (despite the fact that the plants endured the quake rather well, considering) "design for 7.9" seems pretty non-conservative. Seems like a textbook example of a Fat Tail risk-assessment fallacy.

It is basic selection bias, plain and simple, and it should be accounted for by any competent researcher. (basically the p-value must be multiplied by the number of places where an effect could have been found). Unfortunately, in the field of medical research, researchers do not appear to be competent.

Think about it like this: particles get mass (ie inertia, a difficulty accelerating) because they are like a person in a crowd being knocked around by other people (Higgs). But the Higgs have the same problem -- they are also getting knocked around and themselves have difficulty accelerating. If you think about it this way there really isn't necessarily anything 'recursive' about the idea. The reason why some particles don't have mass or don't get knocked around (like the photon) is simply because they don't interact with the Higgs.

It makes sense. It 'gives' mass to other particles by interacting with them, 'knocking them back' when they start to move (simplified, but that's the basic idea). It also interacts with itself, giving itself mass in the exact same way it gives mass to other particles.

From wikipedia: ...under nominal operating conditions (2,808 bunches per beam, 1.15×10E11 protons per bunch)

And the X TeV is the energy of a single proton in the beam. So we are talking about something like (5 TeV in Joules) x (10E14) = about 100 million joules

Why can't they use a battery-operated GPS-based measure of airspeed as a backup and as a check against the pitot tube-based measurements? Surely it would not be very accurate, but I would think it could be accurate enough for the pilots to know the plane was going too fast and not too slow.

Your assessment is overly harsh. First of all, 'multiverse' theory is often misconstrued and misunderstood. I think you are a victim of this. Second of all, while I agree it is not science, it is certainly not 'just another religion made up by people who want to avoid using that word'.

Sure, the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics can sound kind of arbitrary I guess to someone who doesn't understand it, but it is just a sober, logical interpretation of a mathematical restatement of the evolution of the schrodinger equation of quantum mechanics (it is actually less arbitrary than the standard form of quantum mechanics, which is 'schrodinger equation' plus 'observation', which no one understands).

The other solution is:
rm ./-rf