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Comment Re:40 MILLION USD (Score 1) 177

Yes, I know, -1 Flamebait here I come.

You have great prediction powers, O Wise One!

When every government balance sheet is dripping red, why are we doing this again ?

You do realize USA spends more money per month, just to fund the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to the entire cost of building the LHC over a decade, right?

Also, the physics/astronomy community benefits greatly from the success of LHC, and the worldwide scientific community as a whole also benefits. Now, who benefits from the wars?

Comment Re:Huge Waste of Taxpayer Dollars (Score 2, Insightful) 177

I wouldn't instantly dismiss spending $20B on studying mating habits of snails. Given that snails are very helpful to farmers, and given that farmers received 10 times that in aid ($258B) in a single year and the total market is about $1.5 trillion, spending a 10% of the given aid on studying how to produce better snails could provide significant returns in the long run.
If the study resulted in just a 0.1% increase in crop production, it would pay for itself in a single year!

Comment Re:Corrupt Complete. (Score 1) 198

No, elitist is a term used to refer to people who think that due to to talent, money, or power, they possess a higher moral value than people without those talents/money/power/&c.

Um, do you mean like Hollywood stars who jet around the globe to tell us to cut down our carbon footprints? Or ex-secretaries like Nancy Pelosi who want to decide what health care options we have, and how our children should be educated? Sounds like the definition of the modern liberal to me "I'm better than you, so I can tell you how to live your life". Feh.

Comment Re:Giving away taxpayer money causes inflation. (Score 1) 594

Notice how the gold kept its value, but the paper did not. By constantly printing more-and-more money the Federal Reserve is erasing people's wealth.

While it's true that the effects of inflation are more apparently obvious when you look at the price of gold, it's ridiculous to say that it's "erasing people's wealth". Most people live relatively paycheck to paycheck, and income inflates just like everything else. If the dollar had remained tied to a fixed price of gold, it's easy to think that you'd be insanely rich--but in reality you'd just be making orders of magnitude less. Even people who actually save money typically don't keep it in dollars under their mattress. They invest it, and the interest rates they make take inflation into account. So that 5% money market account that is nominally in dollars would probably be making 1-2% if there were no inflation.

Today you have $100k. If you invest that money, or if you use it to buy a house, or do pretty much anything with it other than stick it in your mattress (or your checking account, which is basically equivalent), then next year, its value will still be about $100k adjusted for inflation. This nonsense about "erasing wealth" is complete rubbish.

Comment FEMALE Volunteers? On Slashdot? (Score 2, Funny) 158

Christ, is this posted on the wrong site!

Most of the regular girls, Bethanie, Silly Pixie, Queenoftheonering, whoever else... They left (figuratively and literally) to Multiply quite some time ago.

Some of these guys who post journals are married - but for the larger demographic, you have better chances finding a woman in the L.A. Galaxy locker room, trying to get a peek at Beckham's bend.

The rest? Well, I have two words: Joanna Rutkowska.

"I'm a boy, I'm a boy,
But my mom won't admit it
I'm a boy,
But if I say I am,
I get it!"

Comment Re:Where are my superpowers? (Score 1) 97

And surely, that last eclipse on Heroes was the longest, rather than this one - certainly more than a few measly minutes! Not to mention the global coverage!

Obviously the result of an as-yet-undiscovered Hero with Super Solar Eclipse powers. Or maybe even something more powerful, like General Purpose Plot Device powers... though I guess that'd be redundant with just about everyone else.

(And please don't complain about spoilers... after the decline since season 1, you can't possibly complain)

Speaking of spoilers, about the only thing I liked about the dumb season 3 finale (even though I liked the season overall) was that they gave a Season 4 sneak-peak that "spoiled" the twist that Sylar was gonna figure out he was Sylar. Because if they'd even tried to pretend that was a surprise...

Comment Re:Pictures versus digital photos... (Score 1) 345

No, you really, really don't -- and that's very clear from your comments. We are not talking about using a copystand here. You are talking about getting accurate facsimiles of maybe 40 foot high pictures in stairwells lit by mixed light of differing colour temperatures -- and possibly no way of getting light in to cover it and fix the colour temp issues.

It doesn't matter how hard it is because solving a problem is simply not the same thing as creative expression. By your logic, brain surgery would be copyrightable just because it's hard! Do you see how ridiculous your argument is now?

Besides, this sort of thing doesn't qualify as "creative" for a much more basic reason: if you introduce originality into your reproduction, then you've just failed at your job of archiving it!

Comment Re:meh (Score 1) 544

Yeah, of course what happened after that was people started having to resort to bartering for goods using small amounts of Gold, Kinda like what they did TWO-Thousand years ago. So you take an economy and you screw it up so badly that you have to reset it back to the pre-roman levels of commerce.

I've heard lots of news reports of Zimbabweans bartering goods or using foreign currencies, but I've never heard any reports of them using gold. Do you happen to have a citation handy?

Dlugar

The Courts

Microsoft Internal Emails Show Dismay With Vista 662

bfwebster writes "Microsoft is currently facing a class-action suit over its designation of allegedly under-powered hardware as being 'Vista Capable.' The discovery process of that lawsuit has now compelled Microsoft to produce some internal emails discussing those issues. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has published extracts of some of those emails, along with a link to a a PDF file containing a more extensive email exchange. The emails reflect a lot of frustration among senior Microsoft personnel about Vista's performance problems and hardware incompatibilities. They also appear to indicate that Microsoft lowered the hardware requirements for 'Vista Capable' in order to include certain lower-end Intel chipsets, apparently as a favor to Intel: 'In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.' Read the whole PDF; it is informative, interesting, and at times (unintentionally) funny."

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