AH, I get it. As long as you consume the proper flavor of slop, then bootlicking is approved.

Thanks for explaining!

Someone should ask media/technology studies professor Torin Monahan at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill how much a college degree is today.

Oh wait, anyone can look that up.... $47k/yr.

Perhaps that isn't the (chapel) hill Mr Monahan wants to die on?

"Humanism] tends to appeal to people who are skeptical of a god or other supernatural power yet still seek a scientific and moral framework to ground themselves in. "

St Athanasius, St Augustine, & Erasmus would all be somewhat surprised to hear that they were skeptical of God.

Lol at the atheists conveniently forgetting that the entire basis of Western Humanism came from the Catholic Church and ultimately Protestantism.

While such bootlicking is repellent, some of us would note with irony the attacks here from people who - with the same craven, lickspittle reasoning - cheerfully spent 2020-2024 (and some until today) insisting we disregard things like penises when determining "what is a woman" eh?

While I'd love imaginary propulsion tech to be our saviour here, you know that Hubble exists outside a lab, right?

"Peer Review and Scrutiny: While showcased at venues like the Electrostatics Society of America, APEC, and technical discussions, the claims sit well outside conventional physics consensus, and full peer-reviewed validation is pending"

Yeah, why would you post something as ridiculous at "computer tech put in orbit" on Slashdot? Absurd.

It's not like this is a TECH site anymore. This is a "we fucking hate MUSK" site.

Get with the program.

Thanks for confirming.
Always nice to be validated.

It is peak irony that - honestly - the whinge about how miserable the "internet" (as a broad synonym for social media, I guess) is, is followed by one of the most authentic, non-political*, most Old-Slashdot-Flavored engaging discussion I've seen here in at least the last 5, maybe 10 years?
Thanks, this was a nice post & engaging discussion. Even the people I disagree with on balance were making persuasive points.

*so far. It's 2026, I don't hold much hope it'll remain pristine.
Even my simple posting here, I may have tainted it. I have a lovely anon-stalker (I am pretty sure I know who) that follows any post I make with political bile, regardless of the subject.

I'm surprised that Reddit, of all places, is emulating twitter?
As far as I can tell "for you" is just a firehose of shitty people that disagree with me politically.
On the other hand "following" is (I guess?) derived from the posts I've actually followed, and that's a firehose of shitty people that I ostensibly agree with, politically, but clearly don't in nearly every other respect.

I think the intent is that one feed will engage me angrily, while the other will engage me affirmatively.

In fact, together they've made it astonishingly easy to never check twitter, ever. Kinda like facebook and reddit.

1) the IAU manipulated what they knew would be an unpopular discussion and the vote they wanted was pushed quietly to the "cleaning up junk" phase of the conference when the majority of attendees had LEFT. Does that sound like a kosher way to handle an IAU issue that the general public might actually, for once, care about? Sounds like a deliberate coverup to me, maybe you have a different view.

2) Nobody yet has explained why the list of planets had to arbitrarily be constrained. Why not expanded? "Eris is more massive, if we included Pluto, we'd have to include Eris" yeah, and? What would be wrong with ADDING Eris? Or if we found larger objects, why not add them? The "must clear their orbit" is vague handwavy bullshit. Depending on your definition, EARTH hasn't 'cleared' its orbit, either. And what happens if planet 9 turns out to be a Neptune-sized gas giant in the Kuiper belt? Would the IAU say that's NOT a planet?
In fact, EVERY SINGLE PLANET has other bodies in its orbit - Jupiter has tens of thousands.
The fact that later in the ruling the IAU simply decreed "(these) are the 8 planets" shows that even they recognize their definition is functionally worthless.

Yes, I continue to object to arbitrary, unjustified rules passed en camera by a small body of elitists. No matter how long ago, ESPECIALLY when they're so stupid that they set themselves up to be almost inevitably self-contradicted and need revision...again.

(I could bring up some other issues that are "done" that we continue to debate, if you'd like examples? But I think as a disingenuous AC you're already aware of them.)

TSIA

If you're upset about "everything":
a) take your ritalin or prozac or whatever cocktail of anxiety meds you're on; you missed a dose.
b) you control you. Nobody MAKES you addicted to the social media feeds; yes, absolutely they are CRAFTED to be the visual-cortex version of heroin. I get that, they are meant to be addictive as fuck. NEVERTHELESS you are (supposedly) a human with agency. Just. Put. The. Fucking. Thing. Down. Go for a walk. Read a book. Turn off your router for a while, if that helps.

Otherwise you're just a herd mammal bleating that you don't like the pasture YOU put yourself in.

You're the one who politicized this, not me.
Or did you forget that you asserted ex nihilo that Trump was going to get it from Putin and then throw Zelensky in the conversation?
You just used those names what, coincidentally? Having a seizure?

Precisely what "stupid shit" re Helium is happening today, that's not just in your hate-Trump fevered imagination? Looks like the US designated helium as a critical resource - that's not "stupid shit", that's sensible.

I don't see any point in your post BUT the political, thus my point that if we're picking sides, it was democrat that put us here.

There's growing evidence for a ninth planet.* https://www.skyatnightmagazine... (real stuff at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.172...)

I've seen some vastly speculative bullshit (including still today "what if it's a micro black hole!?!!??!!?" which is fantastically unlikely, but the evidence does seem to be accumulating about a substantial TNO 500-700 au out.

*assuming the IAU doesn't again set up a bullshit scam-vote after nearly everyone left the conference to deprecate this one too.

Sad to hear about Brave. I like the idea.

The enshittening proceeds.

This puerile crap passes as +5 insightful on slashdot now.
Great.

Instead of just calling you a politically-motivated retard, I'll quote Mr Bill Clinton, who lobbied aggressively for and then signed the Helium Privatization Act in 1995:
"...We propose to cut $130 billion in spending by shrinking departments, extending our freeze on domestic spending, cutting 60 public housing programs down to 3, getting rid of over 100 programs we do not need, like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Helium Reserve Program...."
(https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-joint-session-the-congress-the-state-the-union-11)