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Comment Re:But what if we fed it more power? (Score 1) 299

In the Einstein case, he said "The theory predicts gravitational waves, but they'd be nearly impossible to detect."
In the EM dive case, what's going on is "Here's a theory for radical behavior that we cannot yet reliably detect."

If you're going to blow off Newton, it's more important that you get pretty airtight experimental results that are significantly better than "might not be noise" than you have a theory to explain them.

Comment This is FUD from traditional platform vendors (Score 0) 178

The natural progression of "web as platform" is to (safely) expose your hardware to web-based applications, for your benefit. Vendors who currently enjoy being the gatekeepers of various walled gardens (I'm lookin' at you, AppleSoft) are going to try to stall this progression as long as they possibly can, as it threatens their cash-cow businesses. I very much doubt the handful of web platform vendors integrating WebGL right now are going to allow it to run amok in the same way that ActiveX and Flash have over the last decade.

United States

State Senator Caught Looking At Porn On Senate Floor 574

Everyone knows how boring a debate on a controversial abortion bill can get on the Senate floor. So it's no wonder that Florida State Sen. Mike Bennett took the time to look at a little porn and a video of a dog running out of the water and shaking itself off. From the article: "Ironically, as Bennett is viewing the material, you can hear a Senator Dan Gelber's voice in the background debating a controversial abortion bill. 'I'm against this bill,' said Gelber, 'because it disrespects too many women in the state of Florida.' Bennett defended his actions, telling Sunshine State News it was an email sent to him by a woman 'who happens to be a former court administrator.'"

Comment Re:Is nobody else flashing back (Score 1) 278

She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her return. She's duly grateful – even fervently so – for the details of her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a thirty-years-obsolete starwisp massing less than twenty kilograms including what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into life, she'd be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus's passengers has never actually had a meatspace body ...

Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They're a ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy.

Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form.

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